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.

The Endless Night of the Living Dead.

In an article “On the New Philosophers” Deleuze sticks the boot into Bernard-Henri Levy , et al, saying:

“We’ve been trying to uncover creative functions which would no longer require an author-function for them to be active (in music, painting, audio-visual arts, film, and even philosophy). This wholesale return to the author, to an empty and vain subject, as well as to gross conceptual stereotypes, represents a troubling reactionary development… That's how things go: precisely when writing and thought were beginning to abandon the author-function, when creations no longer require an author-function for them to be active, the author-function was co-opted by radio and television, and by journalism. Journalists have become the new authors, and those writer who wanted to become authors had to go through journalists or become journalists themselves.”

Well this immediately made me think of some of the YBA’s (Young British Artists) Tracy Emin, Sam Taylor-Wood, et al. Just as contemporary art practice and theory does away with the author-function then it’s re-imposed in an emptied out and corrupted form as a subsection of journalism.

Interestingly the artist as producer has been proposed by some as a paradigmatic figure of immaterial labour and precarious work, just look at this snippet from a larger interview

"Atelier Europa Team: One of your theses is that conceptual artists are "the blueprint's for today's "affective labourer". Why do you focus explicitly on the conceptual artists?

Marina Vishmidt: To be quite concise and general, conceptual art heralded the de-materialisation of the art object, focusing instead on the symbolic mediations that instantiate art as an event and mode of communication. The object has also been displaced from contemporary capitalist production as it concentrates on branding, differentiation, lifestyle marketing, attention management and so forth. Both share the feature of valorising information, and some conceptual artists practices were in many ways prototypes of today's standard IP regulations. In fact, it could be argued that the de-materialised object is actually information, as it is subject to the same forms of proprietary relations."

Perhaps this opens out more widely onto the role of the celebrity in our culture. Just as immaterial labour and the dissolving of the object reveals all production to be collective and all of life to be creative then the author-function or even the genius-function is killed but comes back to haunt us, zombie like, through the figure of the celebrity. I mean, what is the celebrity but the hollowed out genius-function, famous for being famous, for being empty, for being non-productive or rather corruptive of the collectivity of production.

The celebrity and ‘intellectual property rights’ are partners in crime. Our regulatory and juridical systems but also our political imaginaries haven’t escaped the outdated figure of the abstract, autonomous liberal individual. But let’s not underestimate the unholy power of Paris Hilton’s rotting corpse. Just because these forms are corrupt and are, to some extent, based on an illusion, doesn’t mean they aren’t concrete. There’s no easy way out. Zombies can be brought down with a bullet to the head but don’t take this too literally, tempting though it may seem to Dando a few celebs, the only real answer is to separate our heads from their bodies and dissolve them into the living flesh of the multitude, something much more monstrous. In fact perhaps we’re living a B-movie, fuck ‘Aliens versus Predator’ this is ‘Zombies versus the Blob.’

History's new road

Such comment as there has been in the mainstream UK press has uniformly cast the current French anti-CPE struggles as wrong headed and conservative. As the editorial in the Independent puts it:

“This is not the expansive internationalism of 1968. Rather this modern leftism is inward-looking; it wants state intervention to preserve a jobs-for life system.”

Lets ignore the revisionism in how such a paper would really have covered 1968, what’s important here is the ever-familiar voice of TINA. Neo-liberal capitalism is the only future that is even thinkable let alone possible. All struggles against it are merely anachronistic, last man spasms.

The trouble is history refuses to end. “History isn’t a straight line. It moves in a series of uncontrolled breaks, jolts and ruptures.” And it’s precisely events like this French movement, such ‘Moments of Excess’ that can snap history in half and force it to re-organise. The starkness of the Independent’s editorial shows that a little glimpse of this has crept into the journalist’s peripheral vision. During such moments all subtlety and ambiguity is dropped, all pretence at objectivity vanishes and they openly state that they are neo-liberals and that there is no alternative. Like Simon Bates smashing a Sex Pistol’s record, such starkness is partly born of the unsteady wooziness brought on by history moving.

I’m getting that feeling full in the face, a vertiginous exhilaration that’s being held in check because I can’t find a way to concretise it in my habitual life. But I can still feel it re-casting recent history. It’s hard to look at last November’s riots in the banlieue as a clash of civilisations any more because there is an obvious potential for commonality between them and the present anti-CPE struggles. And even more directly the whole cycle of Counter-globalisation struggles really comes into focus. Owl of Minerva flies at dusk, sort of thing. To paraphrase an abstract I wrote last week for an unwritten paper:

“In recent years the counter-globalisation movement has been able to constitute itself by finding, in international summits, a figure that could stand in for the abstraction of neo-liberal global capital. While this provided the moment of focus through which the common of the movement could emerge, it also imposed a particular form on the movement, namely that of existing through a series of events. The problematic then becomes: how do such events relate to the experience of daily life? How can the common of the movement be concretised outside of those events to find resonances in wider society? How can the movement overcome the limits of its form?”

A series of social movements in Europe proposed precarity as a concept to solve this problematic and now the anti-CPE struggles have pushed that on to a whole other level. We can now see that the Anti-war movement couldn’t find a way out of the counter-globalisation movement’s problematic because it also moved from event to event. Struggles have to resonate into habitual life if foundational rupture is to occur. Increased precariousness in habitual life is how the global north experiences neo-liberalism and what provides the potential of a commonality with struggles in the global south.

Let's be clear on this, precarity isn’t a sociological category. It’s a political concept; it deals with the potential for resonance of struggles. It isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about an already existing common condition in the world around which a unified struggle can be created. Rather it’s a sense that different struggles, starting from the particular circumstances people find themselves in, might have the chance of entering a relationship of resonant amplification.

And this brings me to the main point about Moments of Excess and the reason they can re-cast history – They are moments of intense creativity and generation. It’s only the cauldrons of social movements that can give birth to the new social forms that can provide an exit from the binary of Neo-liberalism or post-war Fordism.

Vive la (place) commune!

I know I risk becoming trop français here, but I couldn't let this one slip through… Spotted this on the libcom forums yesterday, which is proving a great place for first hand reports as much as analysis & debate. Anyway, this comes from someone who'd just spent five days in Rennes and picks up as they're leaving a demo/march/riot:

As I left with the militants I had come with, yesterday afternoon, we saw a manif (=demo) of 1000 lycées (=schoolkids) The militants didn't have a clue what it was about. It seemed to be heading to the centre comerciale (=shopping centre), where a blockade had been organised for the next day. But it was a day early. When people refuse to wait for organised days of action but just begin; when militants don't know every demo's time and place; when the cry of 'vive la commune' goes up from 2000 on a spontaneous demo in Paris against the propagation of the CPE – we live in interesting times.

Again, if we see movements as things, then we need to know who's 'in' and who's 'out'. But when we see movements as a verb, as the moving of social relations, then of course they have no boundary, no inside and no outside – which is precisely why they are social movements, not discrete lifestyle pockets (hmm, sounds like a fashion tip). And also why social centres is something of a misnomer: when things really start to happen, then those centres will be outflanked and outmoded (which is great). And finally, this reminds me of a discussion about Gleneagles/Stirling last week where someone complained that meetings made (at the camp) on the Monday evening "weren't implemented" (on the roads) on the Wednesday morning – as if it's some sort of conference where policy is discussed, ratified and set in stone. I can just see this fellow in Rennes trying to turn back a mob of schoolkids with the anguished cry of "No, no, no, I thought we had consensus on this – this isn't planned for today, please go home…"