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.