Çiğdem Çidam’s recent book, In the Street, takes on one of the most challenging problems of modern political theory: the relationship between political action and political outcomes. Specifically, the book’s central puzzle is how to account for political failures of popular movements and their efforts to change existing conditions of inequality and injustice. Çidam’s investigation strikes at the heart of contemporary theories of political judgment and asks whether extant criteria for assessing the success of a political movement are legitimate. But more than this, the book asks whether our expectations of success in outcomes are not, in themselves, part of the problem that contemporary political theory must take on. As I understand and interpret her work, Çidam is centrally concerned with the relationship between political judgment and concrete change. In this respect the book is situated within the modernist, avant-garde strain of radical democratic thought and action that treats change in existing conditions as the apotheosis of political and aesthetic life.

Çidam’s book positions the reader in the midst of some recent popular political uprisings: the 2013 Gezi protests in Turkey, Occupy Wall Street, Tahrir Square, the month-long protests in the United States after George Floyd’s execution by police in 2020, and the January 19, 2017, Women’s March. Each shares certain characteristics that become important themes of theoretical and political reflection throughout Çidam’s study: these were events that poured bodies into the street (hence the title of the book), they were spontaneous, and they were all deemed ineffective spectacles that offered no real path to political change. Therein lies Çidam’s concern, which structures the theoretical crux of the book: Do we—must we—expect spontaneous forms of political action to produce verifiable outcomes? And is political change only articulable in terms of a strategic rationality that establishes a measurable trajectory of effects that leads from protest to policy outcome? In short, is there only one way to judge political action?

To address these questions Çidam outlines what she finds to be the problematic view of political judgment that the book wishes to redress; namely, the Rousseauvian ideal of unmediated (and immediate) communion of wills as the basis of popular sovereignty. Her discussion of Rousseau’s “dream of immediacy” is the central focus of the second chapter, which provides a close reading of the interrelationship between aesthetics and politics in Rousseau’s ideal. Çidam’s analysis brings to light the importance of the shift in Rousseau’s aesthetics from the theatrical to the plastic arts that, as we also know from Joshua Foa Dienstag’s work, is central to Rousseau’s commitment to moral, political, and aesthetic authenticity. If I were to fault the research in this chapter, I would say that Çidam missed an opportunity to engage Dienstag’s defense of Rousseau in his critique of Stanley Cavell’s work on film (see Cinema, Democracy and Perfectionism, 2016). The reason why I think such an engagement might have proved fruitful to Çidam’s analysis is her insistence throughout the book that there is a difference in thinking about collective formations and their political value in terms of immediacy (and thus authenticity of will; that is, Rousseau) and a political ethos of spontaneity. That difference is in the account Çidam gives of theatricality as a practice of participation, rather than as an effect of spectatorship (Rousseau/Dienstag). For Çidam (and here she is closest to Rancière), the theatricality of spontaneity does not present the threat that Rousseau claims for political reciprocity and equality. The spontaneous theatricality of emergent collectivities, on her argument, generates intermediating practices of radical democratic participation in and through which strangers become political friends (in the Aristotelian sense of the term that she elaborates in the last chapter of her book).

Among many other things, Çidam’s book is an intricate and intelligent study on the political metaphysics of spontaneity, which is the central temporal thematic that structures her readings of Antonio Negri, Jürgen Habermas, and Jacques Rancière. Needless to say, these are diverse and distinct authors that the inattentive hermeneut would be challenged to imagine as keeping company with one another. But Çidam’s elegant readings explicate the unforeseen intellectual mutualities of seemingly disparate thinkers and texts with clarity and sophistication.

I will not detail each of the three chapters that deal with these three thinkers other than to reiterate that Çidam’s analyses are compelling and invigorating. They show us not only how and why it makes sense to read these thinkers in company with one another but also how and why each of these thinkers contributes to our rethinking of the relationship between theatricality and spontaneity (and thus a rethinking of the relationship between democratic action and political outcomes) for radical democratic politics.

One thread that ties these authors together is that each writes in response to the 1968 revolts that took place throughout Europe, which have been considered political failures by standard liberal political histories. Part of the thrust of Çidam’s arguments and readings is to show how each of the post-Marxist thinkers of her study refuses a political historiography of victors and thus the easy judgment of political failure. In addition, Çidam wants to show how the discourse of victory as the basis of political effectivity and change available in liberal accounts of popular revolt, as well as contemporary Marxist-Leninist accounts of party formation, rely too comfortably on an ideal of heroic political action, one whose strategic task is to overcome conditions of domination so as not to be deemed a political failure. To be sure, Çidam argues that such analyses are not to be overlooked or dismissed. But, she argues further, one must take stock of the teleological idealism inherent in a dialectics of overcoming whose focus takes attention away from an analysis of the actually existing forms and practices of political action on the ground, as these moments of radical democratic spontaneity concretize. To reduce the judgment of political action to the successful overcoming of domination, where anything otherwise is deemed a political failure, risks “ignoring the lived experiences and varied and innovative practices of ordinary people who brought those events into being at all costs” (p. 17)

The book’s coda comprises both a chapter that theorizes political friendship as emerging from participation in intermediate practices of radical democratic action and an epilogue on the need to rethink political hope in light of “the messiness and impurity of democratic moments” (p. 193). It is in these final pages of the book that the reader is rewarded with Çidam’s nuanced and compelling theorization and empirical studies of political action. The preceding chapters had noted the virtues of each of Negri’s, Habermas’s, and Rancière’s analyses of radical democratic events, but they also note the limit in each thinker’s “surprisingly thin and flattened accounts which lose sight of the on-the-ground efforts of the political actors” (p. 192).

Chapter 6 (especially) redresses this flattening via an analysis not only of the 2013 Gezi Park uprising but also of the critical commentary that emerged out of these events. Here Çidam’s work as a redoubtable theorist of political participation shows its strength and its acumen. She relies on Aristotle to help her theorize a politics of friendship in the moment of spontaneity, but she moves well beyond that philosopher’s articulations by elaborating, describing, and theorizing diverse moments of “forcing oneself onto the realm of meaning by making visible what had no business to be seen” (p. 179.) This part of the book is both exhilarating and intellectually compelling. Though Çidam’s expository style is consistently clear throughout the book, she makes the smart choice to alter her writerly style in these concluding pages of her study. Part journalism, part critical analysis, part political theorizing, and at every step of the way masterful storytelling, her writing places the reader in the conceptual fuzziness of the moment of spontaneity where we really do discover a bevy of diverse forms of participation that recall comparative histories of past struggles, past actions, and future hopes nested in the activities of political participation she recounts.

Most significantly, however, the closing pages of the book pose a challenge that I will continue to ponder in my own work. It is the challenge of letting go of the pictures of political emancipation that have held us theoretically and politically captive. The book begins with a reflection of a Gezi protest poster (figured in the cover image) and its invocation of May ’68. As Çidam shows us, it is wholly anachronistic, and the relationship between the image and the caption requires a great deal of the imagination to be able to coordinate the relations of Gezi and May ’68, and indeed to reconstruct the political imaginary of the artist(s) who designed the poster. But this, as it turns out, is the task of Çidam’s political theorizing in In the Street: to investigate and reflect on the intermediating practices of participation in contemporary theaters of political emancipation and to ask whether the political theory pictures that hold us captive are adequate to the tasks of thinking, theorizing, and judging political action in the street. In this regard, the book is an achievement not only in its effort to theorize aesthetic and political judgment but also in rethinking the relation between political action and the catharsis of successful outcomes.