Every time an act of injustice occurs, we are absorbed by a centrifugal force that throws us to the edge of the world. From there, it's impossible to act and speak, because before indignation and anger, there is stupefaction. From the Latin stupere, which means to be paralyzed by stupidity, stupor is a condition in which we become speechless and numb, a deep state of unresponsiveness. Stupor is a combination of helplessness and shock, in which an affected body without grammar is stunned by unfathomable verdicts and actions. During stupor, words cannot be articulated immediately, so it's common for the first responses to an act of injustice to be abrupt performativities—for language to be substituted by Molotov cocktails crashed against walls, graffiti that lacerate surfaces, decapitated monuments and burned flags; actions that contradictorily are sometimes condemned as violent acts of civil disobedience, and at others, deemed symbolic speech protected under the law. It's also common after stupor to recycle words that are already part of a fabric of meaning: songs, slogans, and hymns as radicalized forms of language and protest. However, collective and reactionary protests tend to be merely defensive, and incapable of producing a micropolitics from invention and desire, as Felix Guattari would assert.¹ Acts of resistance are thus crucial to break off stupor, but they do not generate other immediate forms of agency beyond the protest. For this to happen, alternate microlanguages and actions that can resonate and make variations in the public sphere must be created.

            What does it mean to be human right now? was asked by Marxist cultural geographer David Harvey over two decades agoduring an INSITE conference² in the context of describing, first, how biological technologies open a possibility for evolutionary intervention and, second, how globalization is conceived as so abstract and unattainable that we think we cannot intercede on a personal level. These scenarios are still relevant, but the question remains, even more so, because it fiercely confronts us with our own scale and potentiality as human beings. In his text, Harvey emphasizes that it is possible to participate in the great phenomena of the world, and that in order to do this, it is not enough to oppose, but rather we must create alternatives from our own backyard. This question was a catalyst for writing and developing the play Speech Acts in 2021, and this special edition of the INSITE Journal.

            The philosopher Hanna Arendt states that “a life without speech and action is literally dead to the world.”³ That is to say that being human—answering Harvey's question—would mean being able to speak and act. However, both speech and the body are elastic, and through their plasticity it is possible not only to repeat words, but also to reinvent them and put them into action. In his posthumous book, How to Do Things with Words (1962)⁴, the philosopher John L. Austin coined the term speech acts to frame statements that are executed as they are enunciated (illocutionary) or that have consequences when vocalized (perlocutionary). Thus, a speech act is simultaneously language and action, and its intent and effect depend on the context in which it is promulgated, including promises, warnings, apologies, and requests, among other performative forms of speech. At the heart of speech act theory is the tension between what statements disguise in their own performativity and their execution.

            Speech is thus a microscopic way to intervene in the world; we could say that it is almost an invisible microorganism that infiltrates every aspect of public life, which also has the ability to metabolize, propagate and survive any scenario. Words in turn form complex entities, in this case speech acts, which are what activate a network of collective processes. In essence, speech acts are minor linguistic frameworks that regenerate and articulate social life, in the same way that microorganisms regenerate biological tissues. These entities are often constituted in forms of assembly that use language as an intrinsic mechanism to mobilize the public sphere. Félix Guattari clarifies that “the function of autonomy in a group corresponds to the ability to operate its own work of semiotization and cartography” and that to carry out a “molecular revolution” it is necessary to produce conditions from subjectivity.⁵ Therefore, micropolitics is not only a form of organization in the immediacy of the social and the local, but also in the projection of an internal desire that is capable of reverberating elsewhere.

            Autonomy is achieved, however, only when language is liberated from its own historicity. In the preface to her famous book Excitable Speech, A Politics of the Performative (1997) philosopher Judith Butler states that “we emerge as speakers by entering languages we never chose” and that sometimes “we have to work with harmful legacies to drain them of their power to hurt.”⁶ In turn, philosopher Rae Langton takes Austin's main question and proposes to do the opposite: “How to ‘undo’ things with words.”⁷ How, then, can speech that is harmful be dismantled, rather than simply refuted? Langton calls this possibility blocking, a counter-discourse through which the recipient can retroactively disable his force. So, undoing for her is not a return to the origin of expression, but an action to strip language of the harmful power it has acquired over time.

            The logic, then, of personally intervening in the great phenomena of the world begins first with minute acts of erasure, of undoing, draining, and unlearning as ways of splintering history from the micropolitics of language—strategies to escape from stupor and potentialize other forms of autonomy. If we imagine utterances, texts, and writings as microorganisms capable of generating a “molecular revolution,” then we can think of speech acts—that disguise intention in their own performativity—as capable of camouflaging and infiltrating the broader public sphere. In the words of Guattari: “All contents, before being structured by language, or ‘like a language,’ are structured at a multitude of micro-political levels.”⁸