„Тази стара политическа въжеиграчка, нашата столица“: градът на трафика, градът на протеста
“This Old Trickster, Our Sofia”: The City of Traffi c, the City of Protest

Summary/Abstract: How politics was swallowed up by policies, both conceptually and as an orientation of practical social action, how policies in turn appeared to be just another name for administrative governance: Sofi a’s general public had the rare chance to learn that by experience. On 14 June 2013, several thousand people fl ooded the “Independence” square, named “Lenin” before 1989, to recapture it from what public spaces turn into under the predominance of everyday modality of social being together: that is, veins of traffi c. Totalization of everydayness renders traffi c and garbage to be the chief references of shared social living. Since 14 June 2013, however, a scandalous appointment of a suspicious person on a high-ranking state offi cial’s position subsumed the fractured role performances of a signifi cant number of Sofi a dwellers under the totalizing force of their civic identifi cation and threw them into protests against the current governance. This interrupted the totalization of everydayness and allowed for the re-appropriation of the public character of the obscured public spaces. This ecstatic mode of re-appropriation however cannot resist the forces of mundanization for long. The everydayness unavoidably strikes back.

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