The body politic of dissent: the paperless and the indignant

This article seeks to consider the recent popular protests by the indignant in light of an ongoing history of paperless immigration. By taking Spain as a case in point, I shall explore the emergence of a common ground of dispossession and discontent between citizens devoid of political and economic assurances and immigrants who are non-citizens. I shall analyse the ways in which, in both cases, the presence of bodies of the disenfranchised in public space and the physical occupation of the latter reinvents the public sphere through bodily performance. If the paperless were precursors of the indignant, then today they are joined by a substantial economic underclass of subjects deprived of the privileges of citizenship through the failures of the prevailing economic system. Interestingly, the latter have incorporated the former's struggle for rights and recognition into their claims for justice and socioeconomic reform. The means for achieving these ends have, in both cases, been through physical presence in public and especially urban spaces. In this way, the bodies of the disenfranchised weave their way through and against the mainstream, thereby ensuring that marginality remains not on geosocial peripheries but rather as a visible feature of the everyday run. The fundamentally non-violent nature both of recent protests and the non-violent movements of non-citizens coalesce to reinvent the public sphere in terms of a democratic praxis that is performative in its appropriation and refiguring of civic belonging.