“The revolution will be embodied,” Hannah Arendt famously wrote. When speech no longer works, bodies begin to speak. Drawing on TalkGreen fieldwork from a mass climate action in Finland, Magnusson shows how activists use sound, rhythm, and collective presence to generate new forms of meaning. What emerges is what Freud once feared most of all: the oceanic state, where the boundaries of the self dissolve. Through sensory semiotics, interactional rituals, and a feminist-psychoanalytic understanding of intersubjectivity, the essay explores how voices, drums, and bodies fuse into shared intensity — in the sense Judith Butler describes as bodies signifying before and beyond language.
The sounds of tents being torn apart, bodies dragged by police, and the rhythmic pulse of chants and drums trace the contours of what Ernst Bloch called concrete utopia — fleeting moments where a possible and better future is embodied and felt in the now. Here, hope is written not in words but in vibration, touch, and sound — and perhaps, in these complex semiotic–oceanic states, language’s weakened power to change the world can find healing.
Published in Meaning in Motion: Studies in the Semiotics of Social Life, a Festschrift for Per Ledin. Read the Swedish essay here: link
Magnusson, Simon. (2025). Performativer, plakat och piketbussar: Klimataktivismens sensoriska eskalering på apokalypsens rand. In Gustav Westberg (Ed.), Betydelse i rörelse: Studier av det sociala livets semiotik. Per Ledins är denna festskrift (pp. 112–126). Örebro University. https://oru.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva2:1993685