New Meanings - A Demonstration

Title: New Meanings - A Demonstration
Description: The recognition that in times of social crisis words often change their meanings and new terms are invented goes back to Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian Wars and his account of the Fall of Corcra in Book III. For Thucydides, as for THomas Hobbes whose first book was a translation of Thucydides, this was understood as the breakdown of order involving the breakdown of mutual understanding and its medium, communication. But innovation is also a feature of such periods.

One change in the British context is the use of the term 'demonstration' to convey a form of protest - rather than its use as a 'scientific demonstration' or a show of military force. In the 1830s the term came to encompass forms of public march or rally expressing an opinion about a political or other issue.

The emergence of the term with this reference raises a number of questions: how did people know that they were making a demonstration? What were its parameters and rules? How did those to whom it was directed first understand it as somethng different from a riot or a form of menace? How was it understood in relatio to the occupation of certain spaces - for example, did a demonstration have to be in public space, or could it be in mill yeards, or private areas of ports? Was it (is it now) tied to an idea of a public statement from a public space about a matter that may have private elements but addresses also a larger public matter? Linguistic innovation is also conceptual innovation and is tied to tactical and practical innvation.

Similar transformations occur with the term 'protest - which by 1850 had taken on the following sense: The expression of social, political, or cultural dissent from a policy or course of action, typically by means of a public demonstration; also, as an instance of this, a protest march, a public demonstration. And both follow an earlier evolution of the idea of agitation to introduce the idea that it could involve 'the arousing of public concern about a political or other issue, by appeals, discussion, propaganda etc., in order to bring about action.'

Britain is far from alone in such innovations: Bullunga is similarly an innovtive term: From 1837, the word 'bullanga' was used repeatedly to portray uproar, mutiny, or revolt in a pejorative sense. Joaquín del Castillo y Mayone, journalist and Romantic liberal writer, in his work Las bullangas de Barcelona (1837), was the first to use it to describe the seven revolts that took place in Barcelona between 25 July 1835 and 4 May 1837. In using this word, the liberal reform process was dissociated from popular violence. The success of the term was unprecedented and it was quickly used disparagingly to describe the popular riots as a violent and uncontrolled action of the populace, in which there were no traces of liberalism. In the following decades the concept was popularised through different literary genres (theatre, novel, poetry, and history) and to a lesser extent journalistic genres (press or brochures).

Item sets: A European Perspective on protest and contention 1815-1850

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New Meanings - A Demonstration