Collective Jamais Vu: The Effects of Counter-Narratives in the Puppetry of Monuments

When protestors enact violence with or against lifelike monuments they animate and manipulate these heritage objects in ways that mimic puppetry. My interest is in how such action shifts the relationship between publics and monuments. This article constitutes a conceptual musing that firstly connects monument interventions to puppetry and its audiences, and secondly uses that connection to postulate about relational affects—that is, what interventions do to the “audience.” I introduce the terms puppet/monument, audience/publics, and orders of puppeteers (with a focus on second order puppeteers), drawing from the ontology of puppetry, to make sense of the relationship between monuments (puppets), social actors projecting their voices through monuments (puppeteers), and their publics (audiences). I argue that counter-narratives and alternative stories foregrounded through protest action catalyses for the audience/public a collective jamais vu. This shared experience of the familiar made strangely unfamiliar influences large groups to lean into the familiar to avoid destabilisation, or to explore the unfamiliar thereby opening possibilities for new perspectives and futures. These outcomes are illustrated by the puppetry of monuments during the 2019–2020 Social Outburst in Chile. Evidently, reasserting the familiar in order to avoid destabilisation or leaning into the novelty of the destabilised familiar are not mutually exclusive phenomena, rather they exist side-by-side in complex social webs. Understanding this reflex is key to understanding potentialities for change beyond moments of rupture.