Scoring political movement and its exhaustion

This paper examined a revolutionary event and its temporality through the concept of a movement score. The score stresses the complex relation with time, history, and the body. It “demands this de- and re-materialization of time, in that it always anticipates itself through its enactment, exists within that present moment, and looks back at itself” (Hendrik Folkerts). Departing from the documents (texts and movement notations) on or of socialist mass celebrations, this research develops a definition of a movement score as any graphic notation of movement (including text) that intersects multiple temporalities of its enactment. It address political movement and its exhaustion, unsettling the linear temporality of the revolutionary event. It refers to the 2020 anti-governmental uprising in Belarus and its suppression, followed by Russia's invasion in Ukraine, supported by Belarusian government, as well as to the current anti-war resistance. These political movements could be approached through the notion of presentism, where revolutionary practices break the linearity of time in a stretched-out and intensive present, opening a space of possibility that is not postponed into the future (Isabell Lorey). David Scott, in contrast, views political action through “the temporality of the aftermaths of political catastrophe, the temporal disjunctures involved in living on in the wake of past political time, amid the ruins.” This paper echoes the perspective on post-socialism as directed to the past (of a failed political project), whereas in socialism political action was intertwined with its collective imagination and thus with the future. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, however, rethink post-socialism through the notion of queer time, which “complements the past conditional temporality of what could have been,” being non-unified, and propelled by multiple political desires and uncertainties. These complex temporalities of the above mentioned political events and movements are studies through the notion of score.