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…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.— Victor Serge
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