An extended ‘we’

Here’s a thought that occurred to me after Sunday’s meeting (Keir will be posting notes from that later). It’s not very well articulated but it might prompt something more coherent...

At the meeting a few people talked about ‘an extended we’ as one of the signs that we’re winning. What does that mean? I think it’s to do with feeling connected – not emotionally, figuratively or psychologically, but really connected – to other people, so that when things were kicking off in Seattle, say, we felt as one with those who were there. Or rather we were as one with them – this isn’t a subjective thing.

All this seems airy-fairy (or just plain bollocks) because it’s hard to avoid talking about it in subjective, individualist or idealist terms, even though we’re trying to get away from all those dualisms. Maybe another way into this is to think again about social movements as processes not things. It’s counter-intuitive because it means thinking about ourselves not as ourselves (individuals bound up in revolutionary politics) but as a collection of processes. The moments when we’re winning are those when we can see social relations moving. At those times our movement isn’t a movement of us (activists vs others) but a moving of social relations, an unfreezing of all that is fixed.

Maybe there’s a link here to Marx’s idea of the proletariat being the class that abolishes itself as a class (as opposed to those who worship & defend the most fixed and static notions of what class is, as a thing). We felt we were winning because we weren’t ‘we’ any more (sorry, this makes a bit more sense if you read it out loud); maybe we’d even abolished any idea of a ‘we’, because there was no outside, no ‘they’ (this relates to a comment made the other night which questioned the whole idea of winning because the way we’d framed it suggested someone else would be losing). This moving of social relations is like the breaking of an ice-floe: it has no edges or boundaries (“this group are in our movement, this group aren’t” etc), or else the boundaries are always in motion; the moving ripples through everywhere – absolutely everywhere.

Of course when this happens, the ‘equilibrium’ of everyday life is shattered. Capital likes to present itself as fixed, immutable or natural (it depends on an endless production of novelty, but it is the same old same old). So maybe that’s one of the things about winning: it’s when we (an extended ‘we’) reveal the social relations of capital as partial, temporary.

Bash the Rich

I’m half-way through a new book by one of the founders of Class War. It’s pretty un-fucking-putdownable (see, it’s already having an impact on the way I write), mainly cos it captures that whole sense of potential that existed in the mid to late 1980s. Some of this might be pure nostalgia, but it was a pretty mad time. And one of the things that was mad about it was the seamless way struggles flitted back and forth without any of the sniping or prejudice that set in later. There didn’t seem to be any outright contradiction between any of these struggles – anarcho-punk squatters, anarcha-feminist peace campers, animal rights activists, striking miners, wannabe rioters etc. Sure there was loads of tension, some of it pretty aggressive and intense, but all of it was productive. Resonance produced movement: we seemed to be going somewhere (probably related to the fact that we were often literally going somewhere: demos, marches, Stonehenge, Henley…).

OK, one of the simplistic counter-arguments to this is that we were young, and everything seemed possible – it’s that feeling you get as you lie in the grass on a summer’s day and stare up into the sky. A slightly more sophisticated response points to the importance of dole culture. Both points are pretty valid. And there’s also a sense that getting older is, as much as anything, a process of accretion – things stick to you (jobs, homes, families…). We slow down.

But I’m trying to fit this in with the stuff we’ve been thinking about recently, especially the relation between the intensive and the extensive. It seems to make sense. Part of the madness about Class War then was that it was immeasurable. Literally. Groups were springing up all over the place calling themselves ‘Xxxx Class War’. And this whirlwind was making the intensive field visible. A bit like throwing flour onto a kitchen surface so you can see where the mice are going. The process is nothing new. It’s exactly the same as punk, or the Paris Commune or blah blah blah. I like to think that the ‘Behold Your Future Executioners’ banner had some small print somewhere which read ‘Behold the Unruhe’. Compare that to the bureaucratic machine of the Class War Federation with its delegate meetings and conference proposals...

Of course it’s easy to drift into thinking that intensive=good and extensive=bad, or that it should be a one-way relationship. Cold water in the face brings you back to this awful place… But this awful place is where we are. The intensive might be the realm of change but that change happens in the real, which involves the extensive. So Bone’s book has made me think again about ‘stuntism’, as way of trying to direct the movement from extensive to intensive, i.e. trying to use the normal mechanisms of capture (especially the media) to re-open the field of possibilities. Which was a pretty fucking cute tactic – just so long as you don’t call it a dialectic, OK?

And if you really want to get down-and-dirty philosophical, this caught my eye:

‘Thesis of Ontological Excess’: Being is more than one and prior to one. The preindividual is in excess of its actual individual expressions. Being is ‘problematic’ (or differential) and individuals are only ever temporary resolutions of these tensions; tensions that continue to subsist even after actualization. This thesis of excess is thus counter to any ontology based on lack.

I don’t claim to understand the finer points of it, does it fit in with relation between extensive and intensive?

I’ll stop here cos I’m rambling (something else to do with age).

Apple of my desire

Notes from 20 November 2006

Some questions and problems.

First, measure. How do we *know* when we're winning? We can set targets, but what sort of targets? How can we measure achievements within social movements? How *do* we measure achievements within social movements? Because we do always measure. We say: “Oh, that was a good meeting." Or: “That thing we did wasn’t very effective [whatever ‘effective’ means], let’s try something else next time.” At Gleneagles, we celebrated the fact that we tied up the police for ages and prevented the Canadian delegation from reaching the summit at all on its opening day. This was an index of our success. This was measure.

But how useful is this type of measure? Measure must always take place in the *extensive* realm, the realm of the *actual*, the realm of what *exists* (De Landa). The extensive realm isn’t unimportant and it isn’t ‘bad’, but it isn’t the whole story; there’s more! How do we ‘measure’ the pleasure of eating apples, for example? In the extensive realm, all we can do is the count the number of apples. But living a life is not simply about calories and nutrition. It’s about freedom and potential. Our freedom and potential to produce, regardless of whether we do, in fact, produce. It may not be apples we actually desire. In terms of exploring out potential, transforming our subjectivities, developing our collectivity… well, these processes are immeasurable.


Here, when we are thinking about subjectivities and desire and potential, we have moved into the realms of the *intensive* and the *virtual*. It’s processes in the intensive realm – the movement of our desires and subjectivities -- which constitute or produce the extensive. And the virtual realm is the field of potential, the field of what is possible or what might be possible.

A major problem for us (the second problem or question) is that it’s hard to see these intensive processes which constitute the extensive realm. In other words, we can observe the ‘actual’ world quite easily, but not the underlying movements. We can easily see poverty. We can look at statistics on life expectancy. We can even trace these back to ownership of the ‘means of production’ or the ‘division of labour’. But it’s more difficult to work out what’s going on underneath. This is certainly the case in ‘normal’ situations, when the world is in ‘equilibrium’. However…

… the intensive realm is far more apparent in far-from-equilibrium situations. At summit protests, for example, we can see more easily what social movements are made of. We can see commodities for what they are: dead. We get a sense that this is *real*, this is *life*. ‘Reality’ itself is punctured. Can also be punctured or ruptured by various other means. Not only ‘political’ or ‘cultural’ moments of excess, but also drugs or meditation perhaps. Sometimes, in these situations, things, the ‘way the world is’ – e.g., class inequality – just become blindingly obvious. *But*. Does this mean that ‘reality’, the extensive, is simply a shell? A shell which hides (and protects us from?) the intensive which lies beneath?

Third problem or question. The relation between the extensive and the intensive. Causality is not all one way, from intensive to extensive. Outcomes in the extensive realm do impact on the intensive realm and the field of possibilities. Victory of the Democrats in the US Congressional elections changes things for us. It alters the field in which we operate. E.g. there is no longer any point in organising around a "don't invade Iran" position. Similarly, now the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are all in crisis, struggles against these institutions seem to make less sense.

And this brings us back to the question of winning. For the crisis of the WTO and its cousins is our victory. (Remember Seattle in 1999 was a mobilisation against the WTO.) But it’s a victory in the extensive realm. And is this really what we mean by winning? Is it ‘our’ sort of winning? In 1999, these institutions appeared hegemonic, unquestionable, impossible to challenge. (‘There Is No Alternative.’) But we did challenge them. The very act of questioning the unquestionable, of practically imagining another world, is a victory in the intensive realm.

And we have to remember that the WTO is itself only a husk. It is less a ‘thing’, then a rigidified set of social relations. Its crisis means a certain web of social relationships are more fragile. But maybe those social relationships 'moved on', to organise the Olympics, for example. Which reminds us that capital also has an intensive realm – which it shares with us; they’re not separate; we are not separate from capital. More generally, the state is one of capital's extensive faces. States attempt to harness or service capital’s movement. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of social movements versus the state (or state actors, such as the police). But the state just a moment of class struggle (Bonefeld and Holloway). And when capitalist organisations/states are in crisis, it is also more possible to observe capital's intensive realm. (Really all we are doing here is observing the ‘same’ far-from-equilibrium situation from two perspectives: our own and that of capital.)

Fourth problem/question: strategy. Can you place yourself to even a small degree in the future to think strategically. That is, can we immanently strategise? One example is the climate camp. Can we think about its possibilities, its potential, even if we don't quite know what those possibilities or potential are? Or can we only think about strategy in the extensive realm?

In moments of excess -- when everything is open, when we ask "how do we want to live?" -- we just *be*: this is also when we *can* think strategically but don't have to. This is where strategy becomes just *be*. Ineffability. Vocalising freezes and drags us back into realm of politics. Teleology. Strategy closes off. Victory in the intensive realm opens up possibilities. Burrowing... want more and more, wider and wider, without any sense of direction... different subjectivities experiment in different areas.

Fifth problem (restating the second). If the intensive is the realm of change, with the extensive the realm of stasis, how do we access it? Because when the intensive becomes visible, so does the virtual. And when we glimpse the intensive, we also 'see' (sense) connections to other processes/events. Resonance! But resonance is independent of consciousness. So struggles don't have to be ‘aware’ of one another in order to resonate.

So how can we create right materials -- tools or techniques -- to facilitate intensity? We have to strategise because we can't do everything. It's about what seems possible. And that’s why strategy is different in intensive moments. But intensive states are quite fragile. At Gleneagles, there was resonance and consensus decision-making helped maintain consistency. Political animosity vanished (Zolberg: ‘Moments of Madness'). The bombing of July 7 shattered this state. How can we make intensive moments less fragile? Use refrains. Could argue that consensus decision-making is part of the extensive realm? But using it as a refrain means we can change it, use it, drop it. A tool. It doesn't need to be formalised. Don't need to use this tool for meeting with just four people, say. Unless it's extensive, doesn't exist for some people.

Final question/problem. How do we stay on the productive edge, which lies on boundary between the void and the extensive realm?

Intensive and extensive realms

Movements are things that become visible and thus amenable to capture. When they take a form, they crystallise, they get hard, and the State can capture them. But things that are formless have to take on some kind of form. Collaborative sociability fits in to this. But is there a way of making social movements invisible? How would this happen, and what would it look like?

Moments of emergence are mediated and so expanded. But it’s impossible to avoid these movements. This might have something to do with velocity – riots and ossified ultra-left groups could be the limiting cases on either side of this, the first very fast and without demands, the second very slow and nothing but (unachievable) demands. You can’t mediate a riot. Anti-political moments (Arianna) fit in here – things that aren’t reducible to demands.

All the old forms of social movements broke down, and so you can read American politics as atomised in the North and traditional and Church-based in the South. This means the South can mobilise through mass politics. Social centres aren’t about somewhere from which to move out and mobilise, but are about forming a certain form of sociality, matched to contemporary social formations. We talked a bit here about home-schooling in the States, and the ways in which social movements (e.g., civil rights) changed their forms as they moved from the South to the North. These are, in however fucked up ways (teaching creationism instead of evolution), constitutive politics.

Anti-political phenomena like riots have no durability. They can’t avoid taking a form – to think they can is just spontaneism. Can you learn any transferrable skills in a riot? Is there something you can take with you (apart from the booty)? How can events in summit mobilisations, etc., be taken with you in the rest of your lives? If riots are just ephemeral, they don’t give you anything that could be taken away. If these are on a continuum, though, we shouldn’t get too bogged down with considering ‘riots’ or ‘parties’ as if they were separable or unusual phenomena. Underneath demands (‘No Poll Tax’) there can be lots of other things going on that manifest themselves in riots, etc. People get drawn into riots. Riots depend on something else – some commonality that might just have been formed, but which has to be there. The same people show up again and again. These are emergent, moments of excess.

Complexity theory is important here – self-organisation is like being on the edge of chaos all the time. It evolves because it’s precarious, creative and always on the verge of dropping down into the unknown. The unknown is the ‘structured’ part: we can’t have strategy because we have no certainty – but we need to know where the chaotic edges are, to be able to be in the right place at the right time. We don’t have a strategy, we think strategically. It would be great to be able to link up our airy-fairy stuff with these kinds of ‘strategic’ issues.

A bit of a discussion here about strategy: everything we do involves some kind of strategy, however tacit or ephemeral. The architect and the artisan in Deleuze and Guattari. Avoiding slipping over the edge is our strategy.

Moving into the extensive realm doesn’t mean the intensive is bad and the extensive is good. Even riots are representational – they’re not durable or capturable in an extensive form – but you get a horde of experts coming out after them trying to say what they’re ‘really’ about. George Monbiot and Bono. Nothing evades capture entirely. That’s why the Italian movements were so important – recognising that mediation always happens, and negotiation (however implicit) is an essential part of what we do.

Anti-politics is interesting but it can fall into ultra-leftist or spontaneist traps. Things always have mucky edges, and these edges are where interesting and productive things happen.

How do we relate this back to the question of winning? We don’t have to give an answer, but we should engage with some of the ideas current in the movement.

Mediation is productive for capital and for us. The ‘edges’ can also be on a huge macro scale, like Venezuela, or small, like wage labour in the Common Place. Sometimes we just  organise something to mix elements together in order to see if something interesting or productive will emerge – we do this all the time as people, but do it really consciously as participants in the movement. We are, however, in the experiment. We don’t know what’s going to happen – and a ‘strategic’ perspective would presuppose we could see things from the outside. As soon as you start to talk at a ‘strategic’ level we run the risk of becoming too prescriptive – another rough edge.

The Common Place could change week by week, and that’s okay – it is currently self-organising and self-running, which is fine. The thing to do is to keep it moving and not stick to a ‘formula’ that ‘works’. User-created content. The Common Place 2.0. You can’t ever stop experimenting. Chucking money at it (buying a PA, buying tools) sometimes helps – but this is one of the messy edges. The ethos was against money, even if that meant that ridiculous amounts of effort were required to get something small done. If you’re trying to raise money there are good ways, if you’re trying to raise awareness there are others – but trying to do both with one action (e.g., a jumble sale) is pointless.

You don’t ‘achieve’ a future state of affairs by living as if it were already there – pretending that wage-labour and the State don’t exist. That’s like the economic strategy of workers buying the world, to buy out capitalism: mistaking capital for power. Capital will suspend itself at any time, if it has to, and we should know that. We fetishise money and capital when we make it (or avoiding it) the basis of our activities.

Tactics and strategy aren’t qualitatively different things – they blend into each other. Tactics are their best when they adapt what is to hand (e.g., Rosa Parks) but if they’re used at the wrong time they just fail – you get beaten up. Reducing the importance of power and money is important, though – minimising this allows us to maximise our power and creativity, which is the point.

Relationship to pornography: is society now pornographied? Porn chic. The Playboy bunny is ubiquitous. Commodity logic has invaded more and more of life – porn is a form of it – but isn’t more or less worse than anything else. We want the social relations embodied in the commodity, so buy it, and never get to the social relations behind it – the free shop as a case in point. You don’t break the logic of commodities, but just get it cheaper or for nothing: just because something is a bonny bargain doesn’t mean it’s not a commodity. Fetishism: imbuing something dead with the characteristics of something alive.

Supermarkets without checkouts. We shouldn’t talk about ‘what it’s going to be like’, or ‘what we want’ ‘after the revolution’. Some talk here about distribution systems and shops, the logic of capitalist exchange as instantiated by Asda, etc. You start where you are, not where you want to go (Class War), or else you lose the flows around you. But the world isn’t linear – we can wander down a dead end, but this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. The more strategic you are, the less grounded in where you are, the more you end up disengaged from where you are. This isn’t about a means–ends relationship, but co-ordinating things doesn’t mean orientating to an ‘end’ but to putting people and possibilities together.

Excavating capital means digging and digging – communism is here already. We’re not trying to herd everyone into one direction. You can be certain that you don’t know, but that’s about it. The ‘struggle’ shouldn’t be confused with the thing that’s moving at a different, faster, velocity to what you’re a part of. It’s like evolution: the organism develops, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. Darwin says it’s random, complexity theory says it’s not. Here it’s not random, but it’s also not teleological. Or is it? I can’t work out what on earth’s being argued about here. Gentle reader, any suggestions?

We’re talking about creating worlds, though. What’s the status of our work, of our interventions? Things that have been done successfully in the past aren’t productive now – our activities are contingent on the circumstances in which we act. Just because something’s always worked doesn’t mean it’ll work now. Is this random? Are we trying to change our own reality as individuals or is clash consciousness a way of looking at the world more generally and systematically? You can have a capitalist consciousness and push it beyond capital’s current limits but that’s not necessarily going to be anything to do with what we want (exchange dealers in the 1980s). It’s a bit random. No it’s not. It’s not conscious. Yes it is. Ringing in sick as another example – is this either random or class conscious?

The question ‘what is it to win’ is badly phrased. It can’t be answered, but we can use it to talk about some interesting things, particularly the intensive and extensive realms. How do we keep ourselves tingling, to recognise the patterns we’re a part of when we’re not in an open state? The big, expansive, moments kick off structures like parties, etc. They’re arborial in the classic sense, like the Trots and 1917 or liberalism and the American Revolution. Because they all grow from a single root they can never properly engage or communicate with others. By connecting the expansive moments, by making the rhizome explicit, we can show something that they can’t. Like the Moments of Excess talk – there are real connections, which we can show, not make. We might be able to make those kinds of situations, like summit mobilisations, by setting up the preconditions for self-organisation (like Stirling). We create spaces for things to happen – mobilisations, social centres, etc. We should think of some examples that we weren’t involved in. It’s never spontaneous but it’s not pre-planned either. Co-operation and commonality come first. You make a difference unobtrusively (like the four little ones dressed in black in Geneva).

Rhizome again: the couch grass movement going on underneath, invisible from the outside, but where the real production is going on. Things become ritualistic after a while, because the visible form gets mistaken for the productive content and relationships. You’ve got to keep moving, even within the form (if you don’t keep moving in a mobilisation you get physically enclosed). The Common Place is successful because it’s on the margins of lots of movements – it’s been able to escape just being a small hub for a fixed group of people. Because it engages more people more arguments and messy edges are produced – making for a more successful intervention.

Negri: we operate in a small stretch that runs into the future. The further forward we push our perspective the less successful we are. In a ‘pure’ society things might be different, but it’s unhelpful for us to try to think about that now.

So what doesn’t it mean to lose? Winning takes place in at least two registers: the intensive and the extensive realms. It’s not a zero-sum game. Our wins aren’t necessarily capital’s losses and vice-versa, because what’s at stake isn’t measurable in that way. These things aren’t commensurable in that way. Perhaps this is where the commons/enclosures discourse breaks down – open/closed is more useful. Some of our victories strengthen capital as well. Badiou says Negri always argues that capital’s strength is our strength. Rupture and emergence – a radical break. Once something is open to question everything can be questioned – e.g., the perspective of gays/lesbians before legalisation, the experience of the anti-war movement as a site of politicisation. Rupture is one point of emergence. You create a new world, things fall into place in ways that they can’t under capital.

Using fences to enclose protesters and create ‘legalised protest zones’ – once you’re enclosed your identity is fixed and your potential limited.

Win when we’re singing…

Notes from 6 November
How do we know when we’re winning? Maybe it’s the sense of openness when we return from these events, the traces they leave in us.

Dave’s science interlude on quantum mechanics: whether light is photon or wave depends entirely on how it's measured. What you observe takes every possible path and you don't know what that is until you observe it. Quantum effects also take place on large scale: universe we observe depends on who we are and where we’re standing. And one of the things about winning is the sense of possibility. Expanding possibilities and changing perspectives on history are two of the key effects of counter-summit mobilisations – and that in itself changes history.

Relates to this idea of worlding. There’s a break with existing reality and we then create a new world around us. But what makes winning for us different from winning as a survivalist or as a fascist or as an arch-capitalist? Do they have the same measure for winning as us? Winning is not a state – the fat lady never sings. We can track movements of victories by looking at the extensive effects of movements (=moving of social relations): eg at any time over last 30 years, look where the SWP are, then go back another year or so and there you'll find social movements.

Demands are always put to others (the state, corporations etc), so the only way to measure victory is in the actions of the state etc. So even if those demands are met, it never feels like a victory: they claim it’s on their terms (so it’s part of their counter-attack) but also our affects of victory only emerge at moments of excess when new worlds emerge. Of course some people get stuck on those demands (cf single issues), and getting that victory (a new law, a concession from the state etc) is all that matters.

Everything seems to come back to moving: we win when we’re moving. But we only realise we’re moving when we look at static objects. While we’re all travelling at the same speed, we’re just not aware of movement: it has become imperceptible (cf Deleuze & Guattari or the turtles in Finding Nemo). Yet our movements always seem to throw up demands: how do we avoid getting stuck on them? Maybe we should think about the problematics of the anti-globalisation movement rather than the demands. In fact, even thinking about the anti-globalisation movement in terms of a ‘democratic deficit’ might be a rationalisation after the fact: maybe there’s something inarticulate (ineffable) about social movements. Holloway says in the beginning was the scream. This is too functionalist and also too negative. In the beginning was the worlding (altho that can't happen without some sort of rupture, which might be the scream).

But at the same time we can't avoid throwing up demands. And they're part of the way we shape those movements. Maybe demands are what happen when our minor languages get put into a major language (i.e. we ‘talk’ to the state, we do ‘politics’).

Another science interlude: our moments of excess are singularities like the Big Bang. When we’re out of them, all we can see of them are the traces they've left; and those traces go out in all dimensions. Royal science takes away the dimension of time and attempts a cross-section which misses everything. It’s a fiction. It's those multiple dimensions which allow us to link up with different movements across time and space (cf Dustin Hoffman's blanket trick in I Heart Huckabees, or A Wrinkle in Time)

Notion of becoming molecular, being able to become anything — breaking down limits on what a body can do.

One of the (ultra-leftist) criticisms of our ideas is that they’re idealist, subjective and not materially grounded: we go to summits, experience moments of excess & intensity and come back ‘changed’. Yet materially, our lives are as before (we still reproduce capitalist social relations), so how real is this ‘change’? Most of that criticism is misplaced: eg affect of victory at Seattle led to a whole series of struggles which have ended in effect of victory (virtual collapse of WTO – Olivier’s piece). What frames possibility is partly our ability to organise and make connections but also the effect we have on representational politics (how it has to move to accommodate us). That can lead to ‘defeat’ as in Make Poverty History or explosion of Fairtrade etc, but you could see both as ‘victories’.

Ultra-leftist critique is a mirror of the socialist one: both avoid movement and are bound up with certainty (ultra-leftists also occupy a fictional place outside of capital).

Movement throws up its own problematics all the time, but they appear in different dimensions and some might not be visible to us – battles between feminists and autonomists in 1970s Italy. But not all problematics are productive, we have to make a judgment call: BNP’s problematic is definitely a part of the ‘moving of social relations’ but that doesn’t mean it’s productive. How do we ward off closure? It’s easy to imagine that our enemies are static but they move as we move: Empire’s arguments were quickly taken up by capital.

It’s hard to be aware that we’re moving: only way is to refer to something fixed, and immediately part of the movement ceases. In same way, it’s hard to know we’re winning: only way is to refer to ‘victories’ which are effects of struggles that have since moved on eg WTO (maybe this is less true as time speeds up). Victory only takes place in realm of representation (cf owl of Minerva?). How does this relate to poll tax struggle or CPE? Much more focused struggles, and ‘victories’ were less delayed. A question of scale? CPE and poll tax were less strategic, less self-consciously global? How does this relate to struggle for basic income which is more clearly aimed at the representational sphere?

Relation between (a) our autonomous movements, inventing new forms, throwing up new problematics etc and (b) the effects those movements have on capital & state and their mechanisms of capture. And we’re always trying to break out of (b) to get back to (a). Need to stress that (b) isn’t ‘bad’: those movements themselves can throw up new problematics for us and can be productive (eg Criminal Justice Bill brought loads of people together in a way we could never achieve). But there isn't a position outside of (a) or (b), and that's one of the problems with the basic income strategy – it seems to have been theorised at a very strategic level (“as struggles break out around precarity, we can get capital to adopt these measures, maybe in a mutant way, and that will widen the field of possibility for us”). But that strategic point of perspective, way above any movements, doesn’t exist. (NB similar to editorial arguments in Turbulence). We should start ‘in the middle’ (D&G).

How can we talk about revolution without talking about heaven on earth? How to ward off re-emergence of capital or state? (capital now = the warding off communism). Can we relate this to the question of durability, even our own stubborn persistence as a group? Emergence of reading groups, self-improvement groups (Bowling Alone thesis). We fit that model better than the model of a political group or an activist group – we have made a conscious attempt to move, rather than cling to Aims & Principles. Free Association is not a fixed point (we move and we’re elastic) but we still serve as an essential reference point for each other (cf deterritorialisation). Does this relate to Badiou’s notion of immanent discipline (Keir will expand on this). How can you have discipline without having firm foundations on which to stand? This isn’t just a problem for us: it’s a massive problem for autonomist politics – how do we act without certainty?

Leeds, London, Rome, Berlin; we shall fight and we shall win.

The problem before us comrades is winning. I’m not telling you to go back to your constituencies and prepare for power rather the Free Association has undertaken to write an article for the new journal Turbulence which takes the slogan “We Are Winning” — famously sprayed on a wall in Seattle during the 1999 WTO protests — and ask, “What, actually, would it mean to win?”

In fact more than just the article, several of us are involved in the editorial team and so are each editing a couple of other articles on the same theme.

Anyway this means we need to start using this blog to help us think through the topic. So here’s some thoughts and links. Firstly there’s an article by our good friend Olivier de Marcellus which interestingly suggests that the cycle of anti-summit protests of the turn of the century and beyond has actually won. Stating that: ”it's a strange but frequent phenomenon - when movements finally win them, they often go unnoticed.” Which leads me to think that perhaps all movements ever get from “winning” is movement. Or perhaps what we get is movement from one problematic to another. Perhaps, at best, ”winning” results in us having new expanded fields of problematics through escaping previous, artificial, limits.

So I suppose what I’m putting forward here is the idea that social movements form around problems. Not in a simple functionalist fashion, as though there is a pre-existent problem that then produces a social movement that, in turn, forces the state or capital to respond which solves the problem. Rather social movements produce their own problematic at the same time as they are formed by them. I think this works in a couple of different ways.

Firstly there has to be a moment of rupture that creates a new problem, one that didn’t fit into the ‘sense’ of contemporary society. Social movements create their own sense, they create their own worlds, they world. That process of worlding is accompanied by an affect which is experienced as close to victory. The “we are winning” of Seattle was a victory full of potential, where the possibilities seem unlimited. "Another world is possible". This is winning in the intensive register.

But the winning of the demands that accompanied the formation of the movement happens at a different time. Demands are met in the realm of extensity and representation, which is enemy territory. It only really charts counter attacks from the movement’s enemies. A counter attack that sets up new constraints and therefore new problematics. This is winning in the extensive register or the realm of representation.

This introduces the need to distinguish the difference between demands and problematics and to clarify the role demands play. Laclau in his book “Populist Reason” sees demands as the foundation of politics but he also sees populism fulfilling that role. Both of these, of course inscribe the state at the centre of politics. The thing is Negri and the basic income advocates also seem to put demands at the centre of politics or as the basis of movements. I think the do see a different role for demands to Laclau but I’m still not sure what that is.

The point, for me, is that problematics move faster than demands because they are based on how a movement acts. So by the time we have victory on the level of demands the movement problematics have moved on. At that time there isn’t an affect of emergence within the movement but a cramped affect struggling for a new moment of emergence or excess.

Another thing to think about here is that the movements problematics change as the movement moves. So the experience and subjectivities created within the movement provoke a movement of problematics. I haven’t put that very well but think about how second wave feminism emerges out of the experience within the new left. This creates expanded problematics that are a remove away from dialectical struggle where the movement and the state dance around each other.

I think you could argue that there is an autonomous tendency to all social movements, or perhaps a tendency towards exodus, which tries to break with the dialectical relationship within which they are initially actualised. We might think here of how social movements are constantly moving to avoid capture by the state and they way we need to continually insert new moments of rupture to escape the twin apparatuses of capture the state deploys. The first way the state captures is through incorporation into the states logic of sense. Here we can think of how the police tried to incorporate the land squatted climate camp into its own logic of legality by offering to be helpful and just wanting to walk around the camp once. However when you are nice and legal you are within their sense not ours and so we can’t possibly refuse constant patrols. A new rupture was forced by the tension between the two logics. Accompanying this machine of incorporation is one of repression. Both strategies force us to move in response to them and these responding moves can sometimes be productive for us and sometimes not. However our moves need to tend towards exodus away from this dual embrace that the state forces on to us. Sometimes this means that social movements need fresh ruptures and new starts

To finish lets go back to the idea of extended problematics. This might even translate to winning on the level of scale needed to think through such unfashionable words as revolution or even liberation. After all we’re not religious we’re anti-capitalists. Even if we could imagine a post-capitalist society we would still need to constantly ward off capital as an apparatus of capture as well as deal with a whole series of new and old problems unrelated to capitalism or at least not articulated through capital. In fact one of the good things about the question “What does it mean to win is that it operates on several levels of scale.

The Thing is… (again)

(Note to self: must use this blog more often)

We’ve recently re-worked our piece on anti-capitalist movements for inclusion in a book scheduled to come out next year (we’ll post it, along with the book details, once it’s been finally accepted). The original article was written some five years ago, and it was strange coming back to it after such a gap. For one thing, some of it was awfully clunky – reflecting our own lack of confidence, I think, and the fact that we had yet to develop a style of our own. But I was surprised how well some of the ideas still stood up, especially the whole movement-as-thing which we’re always banging on about. We’d already gone back to the piece for What is a life?, so maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. All the same, I find this sort of ‘consistency’ (continuity?) quite reassuring: we might be barking up the wrong tree, but at least it’s the same damn tree and we haven’t (yet) started chasing cars or howling at the moon…

There’s some link here to that notion of durability which we’ve been mulling over, altho’ I’m not really sure what that link is. How do you stay working together as a group without blood-letting or clinging to some doctrinal purity, and yet still remain open? I don’t think we’ve cracked it, although we’ve had our moments.

Finally I stumbled across this which has some smart things to say on the ‘identity politics of class’ and the thing-like nature of, well, things… I got really giddy until I saw that Nate had already been there, marking his territory. Arf, arf!

Encounters

I recently finished the new Althusser collection, the Philosophy of the Encounter. In it Althusser sketches what he calls “aleatory materialism” or “materialism of the encounter.”

Althusser draws upon ancient atomist philosophy as a metaphor for what he means. In atomism there are two initial components before the world existed, atoms and the void. Atoms fall through the void, empty space, parallel to each other. They never touch each other and they have no relationships with each other. These two components do not suffice to form a world. A third component is needed, which will bring about relations between atoms. At least some atoms must encounter each other for a world to exist. That means at least one atom had to deviate from its path parallel to all the others, in order to run into another atom or atoms. The name of this swerving off of the parallel line is “clinamen.” It means “swerve,” and that’s the term I’m going to use. The swerve of one atom is what makes encounter between atoms possible.

Encounter alone is not enough to form a world. The atom which swerves might bounce off the atom it encounters, and get bumped back into its original path or some other path parallel to all other atoms. To form a world, there must be a relationship established during the encounter. The encounter or its effects must last.

There is no guarantee that an encounter will happen or that it or its effects will last. Even if they do last, there is no guarantee that the effects will continue to last. There is a world, so swerve must have happened, which means encounters must be possible, and lasting encounters or encounters with lasting effects must be possible. Still, none of this had to happen. The world could have not come into existence at all, or it could have come into existence with different traits. Its current make up may change. It may cease to last, that is, cease to last.

None of this is intended as a claim about actual atoms and void. The point is one about possibility and guarantees. There are no guarantees.

Althusser uses ancient atomism to think his way out of some bad habits of thought within the Marxist tradition and within philosophy. The habits basically consist of being too sure and thinking there are guarantees. One such habit is taking the accomplished fact of something’s existence - say, the world - as if to mean it had to exist this way, or that it had to exist. Another version is a certainty as to outcomes - what will and will not, can and can not, happen next.

In atomism, under Althusser’s discussion of it, in a sense the world already contains everything it needs. The pieces need rearranging, certainly, but such a rearranging is possible. Aatoms are capable of swerve. They are capable of encounters, and they are capable of making encounters last. They are, of course, also capable of continuing to fall parallel to each other such that encounter do not occur and they are capable of disentangling themselves from encounters such that the effects do not last.) The point is that there are capabilities. Capabilities do not determine outcomes, and outcomes do not indicate the absence of capabilities. To think otherwise is a mistake.

A former student of Althusser’s provides something that can serve as an example of this point, although it wasn’t intended as such an example, as far as I know. Jacques Ranciere discusses intelligence in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster. (I recommend this book very highly. If I can recommend only one book to you, I recommend Marx’s Capital in all three volumes. If I can recommend one additional book, it is this book by Ranciere.)

Imagine a pair of twins, taking all the same classes in school, with all the same teachers. One twin gets better grades than the other. Someone could point to these twins and say “one twin is more intelligent than the other.” One can easily agree to this, as long as one takes it as an assertion of synonymy: “intelligent” means “gets good grades”, and vice versa, so “more intelligent” means “gets more good grades” or something like that. Using a synonym doesn’t really tell us much more than the original term does, but one is free to use synonyms.

The problem comes when it is forgotten that the terms are synonyms, and someone says “this twin gets better grades because this twin is more intelligent.” This doesn’t make sense, because a synonym can not be the cause of another of its synonyms. (”Why is it so cold outside?” “Because it’s chilly.” That doesn’t explain anything.)

The thought process goes something like this. The person first says, at least implicitly, “I will say ‘is intelligent’ about someone who gets good grades.” They then say, “this one gets good grades, therefore this is intelligent.”Then they say “Because this one is intelligent, this one gets good grades.” The presence of good grades is asserted as evidence for the quality called intelligence (and more good grades or means more of the quality called intelligence), and the quality called intelligence is taken as the cause for the good grades.

The function of this argument is to say two things. First, “this one gets good grades because of a capacity to get good grades.” This partially right. The presence of something means there must be a possibility for that something. That can not be argued against. (To say something is actual but impossible is to contradict oneself.) But this is also partially wrong. Capacity does not cause something. That there is a possible outcome does not mean that outcome will occur. Something has to happen to make a result, and this happening is not and was not guaranteed to take place. Much of the time, possibility is noted after the fact.

The second thing this argument says is more pernicious. It say “That one did not get good grades because that one was not capable of getting good grades.” This is false. There is often very little way to identify genuine incapacity and impossibility, if there is such a thing at all. That good grades are not gotten says nothing about whether good grades could have been gotten. “Not gotten” does not mean “could not have been gotten.” This argument is essentially a claim and justification of inequality and hierarchy. It is thus politically to be opposed. It also, happily, does not hold philosophically. Similarly, that atoms do not or did not swerve does not mean swerve is or was impossible.

What is shut out in the assertion of incapacity is the aleatory, the openness of possibility, the prospect for swerve, encounter, maintaining of encounter or its effects, and dissolution of encounter or its effects. The world has (the atoms have) all the capacities they need. They can swerve, encounter, maintain encounters, and construct worlds. And dissolve them.

To say the world has all the capacities it needs does not, of course, mean the world is fine. The world needs a lot of different actualities, and a lot of actualities in the world need to be dissolved. The point is that the path from this world - a far cry from the best of all possible worlds - to better worlds starts here. To get from point A to point C starts at point A. That is to say, what is valuable in this perspective is to orient us toward what is as our starting point. The problem is not one of impossibility - inability to pierce ideology, incapacity to free ourselves from consumerism, and any of a number of despairing lamentations. The problem is that the current actuality must be abolished and - which is to say the same thing - a new actuality is to be produced using our capacities. Asserting impossibility is simply to state that one hasn’t started.

Again, though, there are no guarantees. Encounters may well not happen or not last last. Encounters that last for a time may cease to last. The point is that one must try. “Keep going” is what, Alain Badiou, another former associate of Althusser, takes as the primary ethical injunction. Of course, one must also try better and try to learn from experience as best one can. Part of keeping going is to never mistake “did not happen” or “has not happened” for “could not have happened” or, even worse “can not happen.”

The swerve of the atoms essentially serves for Althusser to distance himself from a certain of causality as centrally important. The point is not so much why something did or did not happen, and certainly not that something must have happened or could not have happened, but rather simply that it did happen or did not happen, or does happen or does not happen. Actuality, the material world as it is, that’s the starting point.

Along these same lines, it’s important not to read the swerve of the atom as an external occurrence, a hand which reaches down and knocks the atom out of its parallel course. That reintroduces a causal perspective, a “must be” or “can not be,” the logic - or rather, the fantasy - of the guarantee. The emphasis is simply that atoms swerve sometimes. If we can identify conditions when swerve seems to happen more often, then we can seek to replicate those conditions, remembering, of course, that outcomes are not guaranteed of pre-determined.

I want to read the atoms and their encounters rather simplistically as an analogy for people and encounters between people. There is a partial truth to despairing pictures of society, where people are alienated, isolated, atomized, falling along parallel lines with no relation to each other. Many people do not encounter others, do not talk to others very much, develop new connections. But this does not mean it has never happened, that it can’t happen, that it doesn’t sometimes happen.

People have a power like that of atoms to swerve (and to encounter, maintain encounters, continue to maintain encounters). This doesn’t mean people will swerve and so on, but they can. Badiou calls this a power of thought, as a power to disrupt established orders, and he vigorously asserts that people have this power. Ranciere similarly asserts that people have a power which can be read as akin to swerve, which is to say encounters may happen and orders can be disrupted, parallel lines can be deviated from. This power is not a conclusion or something deduced, something to convince anyone of, so much as is the starting point for meaningful activity.

When any outcome occurs, it’s reasonable to ask why it happened. Despite my earlier remarks downplaying causality, there is a value to asking why. It can help suggest better ways to act next time. It can help suggest responses in the present. It can help preserve a sense things could have gone differently, and things can be made different.

I find all of this resonant with my involvement in organizing. The basic unit of organizing as I see it is the one-on-one meeting. This is akin to the encounter between atoms. The goal is for the encounter to last. For an encounter to last, there must be an encounter. For there to be an encounter there must be a swerve, an atom must deviate from its trajectory falling parallel to all other atoms. A person or people must deviate from the lines along which people fall in relative non-relation to each other - lines including the grooves along which capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other systems of power-over flow, as well as lines which are more mundane and more of an immediate obstacle: lack of confidence, lack of ideas on how to start or what to do, and various habits. These lines can be addressed by encouragement, training, success stories, invitation to first-hand experiences of actions and meetings, and so on, but as noted repeatedly there is no guarantee.

Swerve sometimes does not occur. (I want to note here as well that swerve is something atoms do. The swerve, they do not get swerved.) Absence of swerve may later be replaced by swerve, but it may not. We should neither despair nor think we can automatically condition swerve. It is a general safe working assumption that swerve occurs around other occurrences of swerve. Action occurs more around action, and the answer to inaction is action. The answer to falling in parallel lines is swerve.

When swerve does occur, it only leads to encounter when another atom is present. Otherwise the swerving atom just follows a different course through empty space. Concretely, in organizing, this means one must be able to talk to workers. Not as in “have the capacity” but as in “be in the presence of.” A site and a time to talk is required. This can be at work sometimes, but mechanisms exist to prevent or attack encounters at work, and early on - when encounters are fewer and the number of swerving atoms are fewer - we are more vulnerable.

Some means of getting workers’ contact information include going through dumpsters at the workplace to find information, following workers carefully, being given contact information, and looking in the phonebook. Other methods exist and should be documented, discussed, and experimented with. All of them take time. This is part of why I find ideology uncompelling as an explanation for problems in the world. It’s largely not needed. Capitalism steals our time. Attacking capitalism takes a lot of time, which many of us are hard pressed to come up with or don’t want to use for those purposes. If we worked half as much we would have more time to fight the bosses, among other things. Hence the extension of worktime not only can boost profits but can serve to make organizing harder.

When an encounter does happen, what happens? On the one hand, every encounter is absolutely unique. Every atom is unique, which means every encounter is also unique. There are more possibilities for encounters and combinations than there are atoms. (If one starts with a group of just four items with no qualities but their names, A, B, C, and D, the combinations of them exceed the number of items: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD, ABC, ABD, ACD, BCD, ABCD. In a similar sense, possibility exceed actuality, or in another sense, thought exceeds being.) That uniqueness is very important. Still, we can identify general procedures for the conduct of some encounters. This does not make encounters identical, it just provides us with some points of orientation, a framework with which we can try to act in ways to generate the encounters that produce actually existing differences. One of the values of aleatory materialism is that it orients toward practice. It looks what happens (this is the materialism part), tries to identify consistencies, qualities, things in common and different, things resonant and things opposed, across the range of what happens. It also tries to propose conducts (this is the aleatory part, the part about encounters) or experimentation with conducts, the generation of procedures. Another term for this is to say it is praxiological, it takes the study and production of practices as its object.

Every one-on-one meeting is unique, singular. But these singularities, these encounters, can still interact with others. They can last and in their lasting be part of forming bodies which can encounter others and form other bodies. This means they are not absolutely singular, atomic in the sense of unable to relate to each other. They have relationships with each other, or they can. The elements composing an encounter - the atoms, the people - are themselves unique, singular, but they can still encounter. The goal is for that encounter to form something which can itself swerve, encounter, and have encounters last.

I would like to suggest that swerve should be thought of as a power or a likelihood, the ability to actualize the possibilty of swerve. This power can be increased by exercise, and can be excited or encouraged by being in the presence of the exercise of this power. For this reason, after more people are swerving and encountering as individuals, in one on one meetings, the next step is a group meeting. This facilitates the composition of larger bodies, multiple encounters, and an increased rate of individual encounters. All of these are small steps toward confrontations which are themselves small steps toward replacing the world as it is, replacing it at least in part with actualities generated during the process of composition already described.

Althusser takes primitive accumulation, as the logic and the moment of the beginning of capitalism as well as the logic and the occurrences of the reproduction of capitalism, as an example of one form of encounter, of aleatory processes. Capitalism could well have not happened, or happened in different places and times, and it could well cease to be. I have in these notes tried to suggest another place to view the type of aleatory processes Althusser discussed, and I would like to suggest this is a site which could be productive if attended to more directly, the site of production of the encounters with which capitalism will be overturned. The goal is an accumulation of power direct against capital.

I don’t claim that the idiom used here is required for the carrying out of any of the proposals and practices suggested here. I think the theoretical idiom of aleatory materialism lends itself to the practical suggestions and practical idiom I favor, but the practices and practical idiom do no require the theoretical idiom and the theoretical idiom could also encounter and relate to other perspectives than mine. One could well ask, why use this theoretical idiom? This is fair question and one I don’t have a satisfactory answer for. I use it, and sometimes it’s useful to me. If anything, my view is that aleatory materialism should orient itself toward addressing and trying to practice the self-subjectification of the working class, more than the working class requires aleatory materialism.

There are two additional things that make aleatory materialism attractive to me. First, it does not assess people as atoms, as object, but as active, in motion, dynamic. People as actors of swerve. The emphasis is not class consciousness or proclivity to this or that position or ideological beliefs (all of which suggest not starting, staying in a position of incapacity), but rather on encounters and their outcomes and additional encounters. The second strength is that the focus is internal - the criteria are based on what happens in the encounter, inside the world or body formed, rather than external, subject to the dictates of leadership or the need to harm an enemy in combat - but not absolutely internal, because the encounter can produce bodies which then can encounter and produce (with) others.

A refrain? A routine? A mechanism?

I just got the copies of What is a Life? in the mail. Thanks for sending them. It looks good and as always I'm happy to be part of it and wish I had more to contribute than "fuck yeah!"

I was looking over a hardcopy of the thing today (it's great how a hold-able object is different than a computer screen), then read the stuff on refrains in the earlier post. I'm curious if what I'm about to describe counts as a refrain.

I'm rather shy by inclination. I've worked a long time in different affective labor and in these - in particular my time working for one of the business unions - I got a lot better at managing socializing, and coming off as confident even if I don't feel it. Partly this is because I had to mix in with lots of different folks than I had before and do so successfully (as measured by rather draconian bosses) and I got to feeling a lot more confident as a result. But also because I had a framework: there's an agenda to the conversations. Figuratively (a goal, usually to get the person to convince themselves to sign a union card) and literally (broken up into five sections). Successfully navigating the agenda means asking lots of questions, getting the person to talk, knowing when to ask a follow up question ("I haven't had any major run ins with the boss." "It sounds like you have had some minor ones, though. What are some of those?"), etc.

After I did this for a while I got a lot better at situations, like being at parties and so on. "Where are you from? Where do you live? How long have you lived there? Where do you work? How long have you worked there?" Etc. Folk generally like the attention, and begin to feel like "this guy's listening to me, he's interested in me." It made social interaction way easier for me. Not quite a refrain, I think, so much as a key or a scale or a chord - a few things one can do instinctively. The goal is to get people to tell stories, and to elaborate on those stories, and when appropriate tell corresponding stories, and if one does it enough one establishes a few techniques (which form an ensemble) one can use with some measure of success and confidence. It's a way to provide one of the shapes required for a flow to happen in a social setting, since without any form or channel there can be no flow (just dissipation at infinite speed). It's also ambivalent, something functional for positive as well as for negative ends, like the business unions' instrumentalization of this mechanism.

There's also a particular enjoyment of interacting with folk in a visit, sharing a refrain - the same feeling as in playing music with people, being in synch in time together, someone makes a change and it just fits and you make a change with them or in response. It's complicated in this model, though, because the organizer has the agenda consciously and the other person doesn't.

Space of Flows

I really like this photo. A friend who suggested it illustrated smooth space sent it to me. If you look at desert part though it's not smooth like a pool table but is marked by the flow of sand. It's a space of flows but unlike the striated space on the right which has a transcendent grid imposed on it, the deserts dunes are self organised according to an immanent logic. It's the flow of energy, transmitted as wind and gravity, through a substance whose cohering traits lead to the formation of dunes.

The overlaying of the body of the earth with a grid relates to a wider hylomorphism and paying attention to the self-organising traits of matter is the difference between an architect and an artisan for Deleuze and Guatarri. Sometimes when you're flying on bright days you can be really struck by the gridding that marks the body of the earth. Flying over towns and villages is the only times that you get an architects eye view of town plans, the viewpoint (and judgement) of God. I remember flying over Spain on a clear day and seeing a wind farm on a mountain range. It looked quite unlike a man made design, a very odd shape. Then I realised that it was about harnessing flow and it had to take the dynamics of that flow into account in its design. So the wind turbines were positioned at highpoints that had uninterrupted wind flow and this dictated the shape of the roads servicing them. Of course all assemblages are mixed and the wind farm still had an architect who was bound up by wider flows of capital and indeed the flows of our struggles and desires. Anyway nothing ground breaking but a couple of pretty pictures none the less.

Collective Writing

This post is in the spirit of tidying up the blog and making it intelligible to any poor bastard who happened to stumble across it.

The Free Association is, amongst other things, a collective writing project. The way of working that we’ve settled on is to decide on a vague area for a project and then blog on topics that seem related. We then have a discussion meeting on the general area. We record that discussion and then transcribe the recording, précising it a little as we go. The last few entries on the blog have been such transcriptions, which is why they don't make much sense.

What we’re aiming for is a boiling down process where we discuss the previous transcript, transcribe that discussion and then discuss that. This goes on until it gets to the stage when someone has to go away and write a first draft, but when they do they have a lot to draw on. It always seems to be that we’re struggling to grasp the problem we’re approaching and it’s only during the actual writing process that it starts to become clear. For many years we were a reading group. The book we were reading was the object around which we transformed ourselves but making the move to collective writing makes the transformation much more active. Although, the turn to collective writing was bound up with a more interventionist, re-engagement with social movements on our part, so I suppose that inevitably would be more active.

Anyway the piece that we produced is here; it’s sort of the final installment of a trilogy. We’ll now return to occasional posts on things that come up.

The Refrain

Guattari’s concept of moments of excess is based on an interview between Foucault and a Maoist. The Maoist argued that there needed to be a sovereign to manage these moments—in the first stage there might be some excesses as people’s desires swell and burst, but in the second discipline has to be reimposed. This means a State apparatus. A moment of excess for us isn’t necessarily the same as a moment of excess for them.

For Agamben sovereignty is hard to evade: looking at moments of excess from the top down will make this seem inescapable.

Moments of excess, for Guattari, can’t be trusted—they’re not necessarily going to end up all right. You need an immanent analytical war machine, to analyse what’s going on from a non-transcendent perspective. There has to be something other than sovereign power and anarchy. Massimo’s idea of communists as people with mirrors relates to this, as does Guattari’s desire to get rid of the role of the analyst in psychoanalysis. The analyst/theorist who works from a predetermined script is incapable of being transformed by the experience of excess (although this isn’t to say that the analyst and the sovereign are necessarily ‘the same’). ‘Safe spaces’ are important here, but we shouldn’t get into the idea of ‘liberation of desire’ versus ‘habitual life’ as if either were possible or desirable. De- and re-territorialisation are both necessary: they aren’t states of affairs but directions of travel.

The refrain gets us past this separation: in the here and now (e.g., post-Gleneagles) what do we do or what are we doing? The refrain is a better way of thinking about this than the idea of a safe space: tranformation is possible but isn’t fetishised as a ‘thing’. Refrains can be like coded languages, like those people use at work (or like Polari…). They help you survive—they give you some kind of humanity or connection, like winking at people at work. They bridge the gap between moments of excess and safe spaces: instead of opposing Gleneagles with ‘working in the community’ a connection between the two can be recognised. The refrain can also be an in-language—a shortcut to avoid having to spell everything out. Doing theory doesn’t mean having to start with a blank slate or just reapply the same formula to each event: the refrain gives a way of finding continuity and difference between and within experiences.

But refrains can also be defensive things, as with ultra-left jargon and attitudes. Seeing them as ‘either’ defensive or useful isn’t that helpful a distinction though. To the extent that we are precarious, on the verge of tipping into chaos, the refrain can serve as something we can return to to make sense of things and regroup (as in jazz improvisation or defensive triangles in football). This is exactly how we can understand the reterritorialising tactics employed at Gleneagles. The refrain provides a fulcrum or anchor: a way of dealing with and using precarity.

The development of refrains might be useful in certain situations, but not necessarily—finding out what works is something that leaves more flexibility in the system. The criteria for ‘success’ are unclear as well: finishing at the same time or just getting through isn’t necessarily the point. There isn’t an instrumental criterion for success that we can determine in advance, and the refrain is both a comfort blanket and a launching pad.

There is a danger that this will make the State seem to be the enemy, rather than capital. Consumption also works in the same way, and material production might as well. Brands are refrains, e.g., Macdonalds. The horizontality of capital is something we need to keep in mind. We can learn from Lenin here (this was Dave!): he was serious about revolution, and genuinely thought for years about how to achieve it (Caffentzis): the correct slogan was vital to him. Slogans are reductive. But they can be appropriated by different groups for different reasons. The Black Panthers use of style and slogans could be seen as a reductive refrain. The openness of a slogan like ‘Off the pigs’ contrasts with the questions that something like ‘Can’t pay, won’t pay’ begs. Management techniques are refrains.

Rhythm (Deleuze and Guattari) contrasts with time signatures: the latter are monotonous, the beat of the factory. The former are always just off the beat: they work around the time signature rather than reproduce it. Capital is cadence, the serialness of consumption and production: the same thing over and over. There’s always the next comedian, the next catchphrase. (Or capital just seems to have a rhythm, sometimes we experience it as new, sometimes as just the same thing again). Finitude is something capital can’t cope with (e.g., Jeremy Clarkson on climate change) perhaps for this kind of reason. Work-discipline and leisure-discipline are time signatures—the beat is laid down for us. But we have capacities to introduce our own rhythms and human interruptions to these forms of discipline: ‘livening it up’ may be a more ubiquitous thing.

Permanence: the disavowed keeps coming back (the return of the repressed?) like scares and panics, bird ’flu for instance. Part of the reason novelty appeals is that it breaks the monotony of work. The seriality of capital is mirrored by our having been an immanent analytical war machine for a long time—this is permanence. Being creative is hard work, and not hedonistic. Capital’s time isn’t different to ours, though—different logics have different articulations of time. But capitalism is a limit on possibility—it has to go back to its metronomic beat even if it does manifest as rhythmic in different ways. When things become looser the beat is attenuated—things (magazines) seem much more samey and dull now than they did fifteen or so years ago. Why? What is different now? When and why are things looser? ‘It’s not an easy life for capital’: it is constantly pulled and pushed around by us. That’s the biggest danger of the moments of excess concept: to reify this pulling and pushing.

Should we try to classify moments of excess?

The refrain is harder to get across than the concept of moments of excess.

We should stop letting people off easily—stop writing for other people, but write for ourselves. Stop thinking so much about how the reader will understand what we’re trying to do. People will take it how they take it, and it might resonate with their own ideas: we can’t force or predict that.

We shouldn’t lose interest with the stuff on France and precarity, etc., that we were talking about before—although this is the same problematic expressed differently. The ways that social centres have been fetishised—we must set them up, but we don’t know what for—is also important. We can talk about barrios, the Common Place, etc., pushing the concept of safe spaces as far as it will go, and then show how the concept of the refrain will let us do all the same things and more.

Some discussion about change and permanence in the revolutionary movement: ‘changing the world’ shouldn’t mean that we treat ‘the world’ as a molar concept rather than a collection of heterogeneous subjectivities. Having changed the world we would want to keep it changed, while recognising that there will be other possible limits on our lives beyond capital’s. We have changed as a group and as individuals over the years. ‘Durable’ might be a better term than ‘permanent’.

The Common Place’s ongoing debates about how/whether to carry on act as a refrain: they introduce an element of transience into durability and vice-versa. ‘You can only rent your way out of a social relationship’: neither squatted (temporary) nor owned (permanent) and so without the pitfalls of either of those statuses. Both squatted and owned social centres are less problematic for some people than rented ones, because their status is known in advance.

Some ideas about subject groups and dispersal—flirting with dissolution and precarity is a positive thing, as with the 1 in 12 Club’s debate about whether to dissolve or not, the end of Class War, etc.

We have to retain precarity, etc., as part of the piece: we shouldn’t just slip off into a new vocabulary for the same thing. The idea of limit points and tolerances of concepts could hold this together. Means and ends logic pervades a lot of what we do, and what other people think.

Refrains are used as consistency and not as strata: they hold diverse elements together, and aren’t despotic in form. They become part of your life, like brands. Adverts in New Scientist normalise products against a background of articles confirming climate change, etc. That’s how brands work. The refrain can be contrasted with the delimited pathways of capital’s inscription on the body of the world: new connections and resonances become possible. Struggles don’t have to be manually connected, and ideas don’t have to fit into predetermined templates (e.g., precarity about migration rather than all the other things the concept could be used for).

From the bottom up…

Notes from a living room II. Usual disclaimer applies…

Multitude written in depth of anti-war movement so everything comes down to war. Seems very dated now and doesn't make sense. Movements close to Hardt & Negri’s politics emerging that have tried to push notion of precarity, in response to the big problem of anti-globalisation movement — the ‘movement’ only materialises at big events (summits, ESF etc), so what happens in between? Social movements in Spain, France & Italy all pushing precarity which seems a much more central idea (but are we repeating Hardt & Negri’s mistake of being too caught up in the moment?).

Is France about precarity? Could we see it as an old-fashioned labour struggle? Different because it raises question of future, finitude, potential — law was not an assault on existing workers, but on workers-to-be. Struggle was far from defensive, very forward-looking, and immediately opened up other issues. People don’t go out on to the streets to keep things the way they are, they go out because they sense that things could be different. Beyond scrapping the law, what were the demands? Same as Argentina, a massive creation of precarity, which ended up with ‘Que se vayan todos’. Easy to imagine in the UK, say, with a collapse in the housing market.

Precarity is not a reductive tool, not a way of flattening all struggles into one category. Should be a tool that opens up. The Wombles’ attempt to organise precariat on MayDay is a step: we do need to look at how we materially reproduce ourselves. But precarity is much more than a sociological category. Precarity relates to moments of excess. MoE are so excessively productive because we end up in ‘precarious’ situations where decisions carry real weight. When we’re outside habitual life (on the edge of the void), that’s what makes MoE so productive. But there’s a danger of losing it in black holes, and we run up against our bodies’ physical limits, so we need to draw back etc. These ideas make sense in terms of movements based around precarity — eg social centres can function as safe spaces but also run the risk of calcification.

[huge discussion about the 'fascistic' nature of extreme sports, most of which was off-topic, but did chance on a couple of things: the team spirit of rock climbers & pot-holers etc equates to strength of miners and sailors etc. Intoxicating buzz of making decisions that affect your own lives. Also undermines individual notion of body — one person’s mistake can put everyone’s lives on the line. Becoming one body. Similarity to drugs (apparently). This is why the Futurists were so successful — appeal to those looking for thrills & buzz. Relates to black hole, entropy, loss of self, carcinogenic nature of Body without Organs. Clearly we need boundaries, but maybe it’s less a matter of where we draw the line (eg Disobeddienti standing for elections?) and more how we draw it.

Relates to zealousness of new activists, where energy and desire can quickly solidify, via repetition, into a fixed & defensive ‘identity’ (“what we need now is more activists”); in fact, a more likely outcome of this trajectory is an ultra-left cynicism. Both represent some sort of accommodation to the world, and both are pretty much unavoidable (ie it’s not about good or bad, we all do these things). What was liberating about Gleneagles — depending on how open our approach was — was how it liquefied our identities (both ‘activist’ and ‘cynic’), made us feel connected to other bodies. But that’s also why it’s quite hard to be open to these precarious moments: it’s much more risky to be enthusiastic at the time or even after the event.

Symmetry about activist approach: enthusiastic about what they do as activists, but cynical about what non-activists do (work, shop, watch TV — ie habitual life). Is this true? Isn’t it more the case that hardcore activists are actually the least enthusiastic and the most detached, not least because all struggles are elsewhere? Whatever, the activist and the cynic both occupy fucked-up safe spaces.

It’s often unpleasant and difficult to keep these moments open — the closure around a safe space isn’t a conscious thing, it’s just a process of calcification. But when things start to move (as in France), then it ripples through everyone and even the hardened ultra-leftists can start to think and act in more open ways (see some of the best blogs from France). Barriers drop down and a real movement takes over.

At the time of setting up the CommonPlace in Leeds, it felt like big things were are stake (ie, we were in a ‘precarious’ situation where decisions carried real weight), so destructive influences had to be confronted and contained before they jeopardised the project. Boundaries were set (& people physically expelled…). But this was also productive, allowing people who had never worked together to immediately find common ground. And it then enabled us to hold one of the most exciting meetings which was a completely open one where people outlined what they wanted in a social centre, irrespective of cost or practicality (eg a 50 metre swimming pool!).

How do we measure success? In a social centre, is it measured by the bank balance, number of events, size of membership? And if a social centre is ‘stable’, doesn’t this then mean that it’s less productive. Often we act as if the centre is in ‘crisis’ which we can only solve by bringing in new people who will bring new ideas — behind this there is an unspoken assumption that we should be aiming for self-sufficiency (so the centre is a complete model in a contiguous space, rather than an experiment which ripples through Leeds with no real boundary).

"I'm in love with the real world"

We’ve all experienced those moments of excess, moments – such as Seattle, Genoa, Evian, Gleneagles – when we’ve put our lives on the line, or felt like we have. Felt the vulnerability of our tender human flesh. This feeling is real. Demonstrators in the global South have always risked bullets. Since the repression of anti-EU summit protests in Gothenburg in June 2001 and the murder of Carlo Giuliano in Genoa a few weeks later, this risk has become real for us in the North too. And even without ‘live’ ammunition, police batons, boots, tear gas, water cannon can still do mortal damage to our bodies… the risks may be low, but our lives could be snuffed out in an instant.

We’ve all experienced those moments of excess during which we feel that total connection with our fellow human beings, when everything becomes possible, when absolutely anything could happen! Those moments when our energy threatens – or rather promises – to spark a cascade of changes which sweep through society, opening up a whole new range of possibilities. When we rupture capital’s fabric of domination: breaking time. Rapture!

But these events – these moments of excess – don’t last forever. It’s simply not possible for our bodies and minds to survive that level of intensity indefinitely. And indefinite ‘events’ probably aren’t even desirable. We frequently leave lovers and/or loved-ones behind to travel to such gatherings. And we miss them! Or we know our allotment or garden needs tending. Or there’s a favourite cycle ride or view or cityscape we need to enjoy again. ‘There is a rose and I should be with her. There is a town unlike any other.’

So what happens when we ‘return’ to the ‘real world’? Counter-summit mobilisations (say) allow this immensely productive focusing of our energies, but how can we sustain this movement in our ‘habitual lives’. How can we ‘do politics’ in the ‘real world’? How can we live a life? And we don’t mean simply survive, hanging on in there until the next event… or our fortnight’s holiday in the sun, or our Friday-night bender, or our Sunday-afternoon walk in the park, or our ‘adventure weekend’ – none of which are any real escape from capitalism at all, but simply another form of capitalist (re)production, recreation of ourselves as workers. We mean live: life despite capitalism.

We don’t really have too many answers to these questions. But we believe that thinking about them can help us to better understand the function of social centres, say, and the way we conceive the borders between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between what is ‘pure’ and what is not. Thinking about these questions can help us understand the potential of various issues and struggles – urban development and ‘regeneration’, climate change, precarity and so on – perhaps help us recognise our own power in a productive way, that is, in a way which allows it to resonate and become amplified. It involves recognising that we always live in the real world, that there are no ‘pure spaces’, there is no ‘pure politics’, and that we should welcome this. Because purity is also sterility. It’s the messiness of our ‘habitual’ lives which gives them their potential. This messiness, this ‘impurity’, the contaminations of different ideas, values and modes of being (and becoming) are the conditions which allow mutations, some of which will be productive. It’s from this primordial soup of the ‘real world’ that new life will spring. ‘Only in the real world do things happen like they do in my dreams.’

Notes from a living room

Here are some nuggets from the discussion we had last week round at Keir’s. Of course, I can only claim responsibility for the good ideas outlined below; the bad ones come from someone else.

How do we live a life? “We’ve had our fun up in Scotland, now let’s get back to real political work in local communities etc.” Part of this is that people came together for a purpose, our paths crossed, now there might be divergence. But also partly relates to an idea of what social centres are or can be: an underlying notion of hegemony (eg suggestion that the CommonPlace should issue press releases about gentrification to the local media).

Centres have a potential for amplification and/or resonance, but so do many other things. Social centres are not the centre, nor are they separate from the rest of life. If movements are a moving of social relations, it doesn’t make sense to talk of boundaries or limits (“These people are involved at the social centre, and these people aren’t…”).

Question of finitude. ‘Politics’ (esp activism) as a young person’s game. We strive for an infinity of possibilities, yet our lives are finite. ‘Becoming youth’ as a category. The idea of precarity, especially recent explosion in France, has re-cast previous six or seven years. The ‘summitism’ of the anti-globalisation movements has real problems relating to everyday life, and precarity is a useful tool here: it’s how we all experience neo-liberalism. And it’s intimately bound up with questions of pensions, age, finitude… Important to remember that precarity isn’t something that happens to us, something we receive passively: it’s an active condition (open-ness, possibility, limitlessness, becoming). Precarity is individualised and privatised (“the pension shortfall will affect me and my family”) but it’s a collective experience.

Precarity/openness as a result of our struggles in the 1960s/1970s. We’re allowed to do anything we want as long as it’s not productive or resistant to capture. Self-consciously marginal activity (squatting, lifestylism etc) is OK — fits in nicely with precarity. Which is why rented social centres have the possibility to do more than squatted ones (?). But it’s problematic.

Relates to how we accommodate desire and energy. DIY culture of punk caused an explosion of creativity. But at the CommonPlace (& elsewhere) we often find ourselves hemmed in by our ‘principles’ — e.g. ‘no-one can make money’. The Right see entrepreneurs from the point of view of the market: i.e. seeing a gap in the market (rather than gap in provision) and exploiting it for money. The Left see entrepreneurs as people who commodify something that should be common, selling back to us something that’s ours. But both perspectives miss something out. Negri’s concept of bio-political militants: see a niche, get in and open it up, rather than close it down as traditional entrepreneurs would do.

Of course we do need these territorialisations because it’s impossible to have a life without limits. Yet we become embedded in habitual life, & tend to avoid making decisions that are open (is this related to our own ages or the world we live in?). We hold on to these territorialisations because, even though we know they make no sense, they provide a boundary. As soon as we get rid of them, we feel boundary-less, which is scary (however exhilarating). It opens us up completely — which is great but you can’t sustain it all the time. So we draw lines, and set limits. The problem is that the lines we draw tend to be out date. They’re often ideological (i.e. the outcome of previous struggles) rather than pragmatic (i.e. productive). Principles as end-points rather than jumping off points.

Example of News on Sunday: refusal to see ourselves in terms of poverty. “OK, let’s get £6m together…” — a conscious rejection of the idea that we have to be marginal (or better, maybe a rejection of the idea that there is a centre at all — everyone is marginal). Similar to how people in ACT-UP became world class experts. Or Helen Steel & Dave Morris taking on McDonalds. Setting the agenda. This contradicts traditional view of social centres as safe spaces (ghettos?), places to withdraw from the outside world. Compare this with Lotta Continua’s “Take Over The City” slogan from the 1970s.

Many people see the CommonPlace in terms of exemplary practice. “This is a model of how the world could be run, without bosses, money. hierarchy, milk…” Equates to a strategy of hegemony. But this is a really static view. Let’s look at it another way, one that sees the CP as an experiment rather than a model: why do we have a cafe & bar? They’re not the aim of the building. They are the preconditions for interesting things to happen. Having a bar/cafe is one of the quickest ways to do this, but it might just as well be poetry readings or sculpture classes. And if, along the way, the bar or cafe makes money for someone else, it doesn’t matter: we’re more interested in the stuff that could happen from here. Seeing CP as experiment means accepting that it’s dynamic – involves danger, chaos, risks. It’s a gamble.

Relates to wider question: ‘How do we live a life?’ There is no certainty. Principles, model communities etc are all attempts to introduce stability and certainty. At certain times having a no money stance can be really productive. But at other times, it comes at a price – it deadens. ‘Principles’ happen in a definite time & space, but usually they’re seen as timeless.

Codification kills everything, stops the flow of desire (e.g. look at the fight to get Aims and Principles established in Class War; bureaucracy; platformism). This also relates to our experience of writing as a process of contraction — ideas are set in stone, freeze, become immobile. But can also look at this the other way round: we tend to write at the end of discussion, so it provides a summary of where we’ve got to (again, not a question of right or wrong, just a question of whether the process is useful). And then from a reader’s point of view, our writing is a jumping-off point, another moment of expansion.

Having boundaries does enable you to go off and do other things. For some, having firm ‘principles’ is way of developing their own politics, part of their own process of definition. People are moving at different velocities. And that is one of the crucial roles of social centres — allowing a combination of different subjectivities. Which is why the anti-rented social centre line didn’t become so fractious, didn’t become a battle — there was a concerted attempt to keep things open, to keep things moving. Relates to the idea of occupying (social) space: on the one hand ‘squatters’, and on the other ‘renters’ — there was space in between and that had to be occupied. In fact, there are no pure, discrete areas, there are no boundaries (no inside, no outside). Where does the social centre end? Nowhere! But if we don’t keep transgressing, crossing all the lines and limits (whether self-imposed or not), then boundaries will emerge.

Postscript
Just stumbled across this great quote which seems appropriate here:

…that paradoxical feeling… of living in a world without any possible escape, in which there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape…

— Victor Serge

What’s particularly impossible about our escape is that we want to leave no-one behind. We’re not leaving their world; we’re leaving ours.