Contentious Conversation - )

Social Research, Fall, 1998 by Charles Tilly

As in less contentious forms of conversation, contentious conversation produces order by means of improvisation within constraints. At demonstration's end, marchers go off to their daily affairs, police take down their barricades, street-cleaners sweep up debris, merchants unshutter their shops, reporters file their stories, officials deliberate on how, if at all, they will respond to the day's events, and politicians chat about what it all means for their causes. In the meantime, participants have broadcast messages to their various audiences: the regime is rotten, we deserve better treatment, proposal X is an abomination, everyone should adopt proposal Y, or something else along these lines. Members of audiences, furthermore, have started to form judgments about how effectively participants performed, and how credible were their contentious claims.

We can capture the theatrical side of contention by speaking of contentious repertoires (Tarrow, 1998, chap. 2; Traugott 1995). Any pair of interlocutors has available to it a limited number of previously created performances within which the people involved can make claims. That array of performances constitutes their repertoire. Seen from a distance, the same citizen-official pair that figures in demonstrations chiefly as claimant and object of claims also has available as claim-making vehicles petitions, elections, public meetings, lobbying delegations, bureaucratic letters, and other well-established performances; those vehicles form the big clumps within their repertoire. Seen from closer at hand, the demonstration itself displays the finer grain of deploying barricades, shouting slogans, making speeches from balconies struggling for control of public spaces, and a dozen other variable elements. Just as a company of actors deploys both a set of Moliere dramas and a hard-earned stock of two-line jokes, sword battles, pratfalls, gestures, embraces, double takes, and curtain calls, both the big claim-making routines and their fine, variable elements belong to their participants' contentious repertoire. The elements, after all, frequently recur from one kind of contentious performance to another, as when people voice the same slogans in demonstrations, pamphlets, petitions, and public meetings.

Like any other sorts of conversational forms, contentious repertoires embody history and culture. Participants and observers draw on previous experiences, incorporate readily available symbols, make selective references to shared memories, strategize as a function of what happened last time, notice the impact (if any) of their improvisations, compare notes after the fact. Repertoires matter to the course and outcome of contention for several reasons. First, they incorporate scripts that participants know to be performable, in which they know the parts and collaborative routines required, and of whose requisites and possible outcomes they share at least some awareness; all these features facilitate mobilization of participants for a new performance. Second, they draw meaning and effectiveness in part from their connection with previous iterations of the same performances--our opponents' recent meetings or our own, the received history (however mythical) of previous demonstrations, and so on. Third, they eliminate from consideration, and often from consciousness, a vast range of claim-making performances of which participants are technically capable, indeed may even undertake in other circumstances; thus demonstrators besieging their city hall leave behind the prayers, confessions, rituals, and offerings by which they regularly ask their gods for favors elsewhere. Finally, participants in contentious politics learn to grade, value, and contest the quality of performances, disputing how many people actually took part in a demonstration, arguing about how well the message got across, second-guessing the plans and strategies of the police, the mayor, or local leaders.