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).