‘This Old Trickster, Our Sofia’: The City of Traffic, the City of Protest
‘This Old Trickster, Our Sofia’: The City of Traffic, 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, thousands of looded Sofia’s Nezavisimost (Independence) Square, called Lenin Square before 1989, to reclaim it from what public spaces turn into when they are dominated by the everyday mode of social being together: that is, traffic intersections. The total domination of the everyday had made traffic and garbage the main reference points in shared social living. After 14 June 2013, however, the outrageous appointment of a highly controversial public figure to a top government position subsumed the fractured role-performances of a signifi cant number of Sofia residents under the totalizing force of their civic identifi cation and drove them to protest against the current way of governance. This disrupted the totalization of everydayness and enabled the reappropriation of former public spaces. This ecstatic mode of reappropriation, however, cannot resist the forces of routinization for long. The everydayinevitably strikes back.

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