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?