Extinction Representation: Carnivalesque Protests and the More-Than-Human

Carnival is the… theater in which… animal-like beings take over the power and become the masters (Eco 1984: 3). From dead bees to dinosaurs, from green frogs to corporate zombies - political protests have frequently featured comic, ironic, grotesque and profane moments of the carnivalesque. Carnivalesque activities are said to open heterotopic spaces in which dominant values are subverted, conventions and rules are transgressed, civil disobedience is catalysed and alternative identifications flourish (Lewis and Pile 1996; Godet 2020; Hammond 2020; Tancons 2014). The carnivalesque is interesting for scholars of democracy and participation, for it entails the production of the common (Hardt and Negri 2004) and the active cultivation of difference (Norval 1999). For Bakhtin, carnival suspends established hierarchies and “builds its own world in opposition to the official world” (1984: 88). But carnivalesque protests can also be of interest for scholars of political representation and environmental politics, because the performances in which activists parade as fantasy figures, absurd halflings or extinct species, can also be read as representative claims (Saward 2010) of the more-than-human. To participate in the carnivalesque is not only to witness otherness but to make a claim to represent otherness. And yet, since carnivals are restricted to certain times and places, they might not constitute real transgression but, on the contrary reinforce the existing order (Eco 1984: 6) and remind us "who we really are". Carnivals are not innocent spaces, they are “riddled with multiple power relations” (Lewis and Pile 1996: 24). Does the carnivalesque protest function as a stage for more-than-human representation? Is it merely frivolous masquerade that undermines the seriousness of environmental concerns? Or does it provide the possibility for speaking for those who cannot speak for themselves (Tanasescu 2016)? This paper engages with these questions. It considers the appearance of the carnivalesque in protests, and its capacity to represent the more-than-human.