Forms of alienation in conflict: Protestor bodies as a medium of police performance art

On November 18, 2011, a group of student protestors who were part of the larger Occupy protest movement were pepper-sprayed by police on the University of California, Davis campus.  Police, dispatched to enforce campus rules, were caught on video in a series of postures that suggest the bodies of the students functioned as the medium for police performance art .  This paper attempts to deconstruct the meaning of those postures.  The various forms of alienation embedded both in the actions of the protestors and of the police will be juxtaposed against each other.  In doing so, it will be shown that forms of alienation can come into conflict, that the unitary idea of alienation originating out of Marx as the mass response to industrialization and dehumanization, needs amendment.  This episode raises some  perennial issues not only concerning  the nature of alienation, but the nature of policing in a state choked by corporate power and the meaning and possibilities of protest.  The high ironies of Baudrillard will be utilized to further explicate the nature of these phenomena.