FREELY ASSOCIATING

On the move!

2008-01-10T17:25:00.000Z

For several years now, the Free Association (née Leeds May Day Group) has been writing about movement, and other subjects, in various publications and more recently on our blog. During that period it seems we’ve accumulated quite a few words, on at least two sites. So, to make more room for our expanding output and allow a little consolidation, we’ve decided to do some moving ourselves. We’ve relocated all our stuff (including this blog) to larger, more suitable premises, in a more reputable neighbourhood. We’re still settling in at the moment, unpacking boxes and experimenting with colour schemes, but come and visit us at our new address: freelyassociating.org.

Dark matter and the social factory

2007-08-29T11:13:00.000+01:00

I know I’m a bit late with this (I’ve been searching for the missing mass of the universe) but I stumbled across an interesting snippet about the response to Tony Wilson’s death. Apparently someone went down to Whitworth Street and chucked a load of yellow and black paint over the posh flats where the Hacienda used to stand. OK, it’s not big, and it’s not clever but it makes a lot more sense than some of the shite that I’ve come across.

As ever it’s more interesting to pan out a little and look at the wider context. Here’s something we wrote last year:

Let’s look at the refrain of the ‘entrepreneur’. For the left this is a dirty word, and with good reason: it conjures up images of Richard Branson, of creativity channelled into money-making. But it also contains a certain dynamism, an air of initiative, in fact an imaginary of a kind of activist attitude to life. Indeed we might be putting on free parties, gigs, or film showings, rather than launching perfumes, but we still act in ways somewhat similar to entrepreneurs: we organise events and try to focus social cooperation and attention on certain points. We’re always looking for areas where innovation might arise. The DIY culture of punk is a great example of how a moment of excess caused a massive explosion of creativity and social wealth. There is a difference in perspective though. A capitalist entrepreneur is looking for potential moments of excess in order to enclose it, to privatise it, and ultimately feed off it. Our angle is to keep it open, in order to let others in, and to find out how it might resonate with others and hurl us into other worlds and ways of being.

Seems a pretty accurate description of Tony Wilson. He was never too bothered about being correct; he was interested in making things happen. Or rather, he was interested in making conditions for the creation of new truths. In that sense he didn’t exist outside of his context (and over the last few years his pronouncements had started to sound more and more twattish – independence for the North West!?! – precisely because they weren’t resonating in the same way they once had). And I think there might be a connection here to ideas we’ve been tossing about on affinity and identity.

Crudely put, identity politics tends to operate on the basis of changing a world, which is ‘out there’, without any impact on ourselves. It suggests that battles are lost and won by shuffling pieces on a chess board: ‘OK, we need to link up with organised workers here, build a coalition with feminists from the global South here, and then maybe move in a gay and lesbian battalion here. But that still leaves our left flank exposed to counter-attack by native struggles here…’

From this perspective, Tony Wilson was a pain in the arse, a loose cannon, someone who got up everyone’s nose. But if we think about affinity, then there’s a little more method in his madness. It’s less about ideology or fixed categories, and more about shared affect. People moving together. Of course it’s messy and inchoate (this is dark matter, and dark energy after all), and for every ‘success’ there are a dozen fuck-ups. But each success itself only creates further openings, further problematics. So it goes… This is how it was with punk. Which is why the least interesting thing about punk was the squabbles between ‘first’ and ‘second’ generation punks: once punk hit the headlines, any attempt to restrict it to those in the know was doomed to failure. The tension between punk-as-hip-minority and punk-as-mass-movement was just that, a tension rather than a divide. There was the same tension in the Madchester scene, with the usual scramble to claim authenticity. And it also relates to the tension between audience and public. The audience are the paying punters, but at some stages they can become the public who are inextricably part of the performance. Think Woodstock or Spike Island…

Once the public/audience/performer thing breaks down, who knows what can happen… I’ve just finished reading a book which tries to link today’s globalisation struggles to the working class battles which raged over the past two centuries. It’s more micro-level reportage than analysis, but I came across two fantastic passages which are worth noting.The first relates to the wave of factory occupations in France in 1936 (emphasis added):

Contagion, imitation, certainly played a decisive role in a large number of cases. The very novelty of the undertaking was a source of attraction – with its creation of a whole new set of situations – the feeling of escape from the routine of everyday life, the breaking down of the barrier between private lives and the world of work, the transformation of the workplace into a place of residence, fulfilment of the desire for action, of the need to ‘do something’ at a time when everyone felt that important changes were coming. All these elements played a part in the spread of the occupations and helped to account for participants’ universal enthusiasm and cheerfulness.

And here’s an account of the end of a sit-in in Flint, Michigan in 1937:

As the exhilaration of our first union victory wore off, the gang was occupied with thoughts of leaving the silent factory… One found himself wondering what home life would be like again. Nothing that happened before the strike began seemed to register in the mind any more. It is as if time itself started with this strike. What will it be like to go home and to come back tomorrow with motors running and the long-silenced machines roaring again? But that is for the future… Now the door is opening.

Open with Tony Wilson. Close with factory. Exit stage left.

All at C: climate change, crisis, catastrophe, capital, class, commons, communism…

2007-08-15T17:35:00.000+01:00

These are some notes/a rough draft for an op-ed piece we thought the Guardian might publish to coincide with climate camp. As it turned out, the Guardian lost interest. In Keir’s words: “It didn’t fit the narrative the media were building up on the climate camp which had a ridiculous amount of publicity when BAA tried to take out an injunction against Prince Charles amongst others. And also the story got too big, the press were only interested in their old reliable liberals (Mombiot) or new Swampys (Joss from Plane Stupid) who are, of course, also liberals.”

Capital likes a good crisis. Crisis provides it with an opportunity to restructure, to sweep away existing barriers to its expansion and to realise new profits. An opportunigy to re-order social life according to its own logic of profit and waged labour, money and markets, to produce and reproduce hierarchies. In the words of Austrian economist Joseph Schumpeter, capitalism develops through “waves of creative destruction”.

Global warming is such a crisis. Let’s have no doubt: the threat of climate change is as real as it is terrifying. But climate change is not a threat facing all of humanity. The problem for capital is one of security of the state and security of investment – always top of the agenda at any high level leaders’ summit whether the context is Africa or global warming. The problem for the rest of us is different. We are more concerned about things like the security of our drinking water supply as rising flood waters threaten the security of our homes.

It’s become common to compare the climate crisis to Britain “at war” and to invoke the “Blitz spirit” to describe our apparently all-in-it-together situation. This war analogy is more apt than commentators imagine. While millions lost their lives in two world wars, the few invested and made millions, both in financing the wars and in post-war reconstruction. In fact just as each year we continue to remember the dead, the British government continue to pay dividends on war bonds issued a century ago. War is always a catastrophe for humanity. For capital it’s not only a profit-making opportunity but an opportunity to extend its logic. Just think of Iraq.

Global warming will only reinforce existing hierarchies. The world’s poor are more likely to live in areas at risk from flooding or drought, or both. or even to live in areas at risk of total submersion or desertification. Poor people are less likely to have insurance or the ability to migrate. With so many millions already lacking access to adequate food or healthcare, or the means to live in the catchment area of a good school, climate change will strengthen these inequalities and for many increase the precariousness of existence.

But climate change is a double whammy for the vast majority of the world’s population. For not only are we more likely to suffer from its effects, we will also suffer more from capital’s solutions to the problem. Carbon trading is, in effect, a privatisation or enclosure of the atmospheric commons with a market mechanism used to limit emissions. It’s the mobility of the poor which will be constrained. Travel will once again become the preserve of the rich.

And here’s the rub. As our lives become more precarious, and as travel and other goods and services become luxuries, we will be forced to work harder, and this is really what’s in it for capital. Because capitalism is a mode of production which organises life through work. We mostly work 35-40 hours a week for most of the year for most of our adult lives. So of course we must organise our lives around that work. Capitalist value is created through work, through waged labour. But capitalist value is not the same as wealth, and sometimes the two stand in direct opposition. A good example of this is those mega-dam projects which destroy the livelihoods of thousands (destruction of wealth) in order to power the factories in some export-processing zone (creation of capitalist value). Certainly any link between increased value and increased wealth is tenuous. Victoria Beckham is only an absurd instance of this. With the almost immeasurable growth in productivity since the Industrial Revolution, we could easily satisfy all our most basic needs and much more, by working just a few hours each week. And so to keep us setting the alarm for seven every morning, capital produces scarcity. Marketing and brands. Built-in obsolescence. Intellectual property rights which may actually hinder the development of new drugs and software besides denying them to those who can’t afford to pay. In extreme circumstances it imposes scarcity through the physical destruction of war. And it will try to impose scarcity through climate crisis.

But a crisis is not only an opportunity, it’s a threat too. Capitalist solutions to climate change are not the only solutions. In fact capital itself is the source of the problem. Waged labour, and all that goes with it, pollutes. All the business flights, the miles we commute daily, the energy used to heat and light all those office blocks and out-of-town shopping centres. Why don’t we convert them into houses, instead of developing greenbelt or yet more flood plains? If we only worked six months in the year, or four or three – and it’s entirely possible - imagine what else we could do. No need to easyjet to Malaga or Prague. Who’d worry about taking a day to travel across Europe if we could stay for a month?

So, what are we gonna do now? The problem is capital and capitalist work and we need to recognise that. Climate change activists – and I include here the thousands of scientists who’ve been forcing the issue – have been successful in raising awareness, forcing the issue into the mainstream. And since the Stern Report, the various IPCC reports, etc., the issue has become mainstream. But the movement hasn’t moved. Now we need to construct a clear antagonism, to identify capital as the enemy. But this leaves us with at least two problems.

First, yes, we have to destroy capital. But we no longer have the luxury of time. With the climate “tipping point” possibly little more than a decade away, we can’t afford to patient. Kay and Harry make this point in “The end of the world as we know it”. And somewhere or other John Holloway has also attacked the orthodox Left’s “be patient” exhortations.

Second, if we are guided by an anti-capitalist ethic, then we must treat all market-based “solutions” with extreme scepticism, if not outright opposition. In fact we may have to consider adopting some apparently paradoxical positions, such as opposing congestion charging or new taxes on aviation (I admit, this makes me uncomfortable), as these will limit our autonomy and reinforce existing hierarchies. An alliance with Jeremy Clarkson? Opposing airport expansion or new road building is different, as this “rations” in a different way.

And that’s where I’ll leave it…

Are We Not Men? We Are Dada.

2007-08-01T15:04:00.000+01:00

Ok, seeing as we’re posting quotes about punk this one from “Rip It Up and Start Again” needs flagging up and reflecting on:

“Devo had been hippies, of a sort. Gerald V. Casale and Mark Mothersbaugh, the group's conceptual core, were among the anti-war students protesting at Kent State University, Ohio, on 4 May 1970 when the National Guard opened fire. Two of the four slain students - Alison Krauss and Jeffrey Miller - were friends of Casale. 'They were just really smart liberal kids, eighteen and nineteen, doing what we all did back then,' he says. 'They weren't crazy sociopaths.' He recalls the dazed, slow-motion sensation when the guns started firing, 'like being in a car accident'; the blood streaming down the sidewalk; the eerie sound of moaning from the crowd, 'like a kennel of hurt puppies'. At first, even the National Guard was frozen, freaked out. Then they marched us off campus and the university was shut down for three months.' That date in May 1970 is one of several contenders for 'the day the sixties died'. 'For me, it was the turning point,' says Casale bitterly. Suddenly I saw it all clearly: all these kids with their idealism, it was very naive.' Participants in SDS - Students for a Democratic Society - like Casale reached a crossroads. 'After Kent, it seemed like you could either join a guerrilla group like The Weather Underground, actually try assassinating some of these evil people, the way they'd murdered anybody in the sixties who'd tried to make a difference. Or you could just make some kind of whacked-out creative Dada art response. Which is what Devo did.'”

Of course this is great for several reasons. Firstly, as we’ve argued before punk's a continuation of hippie. In fact it was both a reaction to hippie's failed revolution and its renewal.

Secondly, it helps us to reflect on the relation between excess and exception by bringing up Kent State again. We have to remember that Dada was a reaction to the horrors of WW1. Is the resort to Dada a retreat into art caused by the closure of the space for politics or is it best to see it as a sidestepping of a problematic that had become saturated by the states excessive violence. Punk as well as Dada ultimately reopened the space for politics, at least for a time.

A word of warning, you can't keep that space open for ever you know.

Curiosity vs. fear

2007-07-23T00:35:00.001+01:00

It must be at least three months since anyone’s mentioned punk on this blog, so...

I’ve been reading Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain’s ‘oral history of punk’. This quote from Legs, one of Punk magazine’s founders back in 1975 expresses perfectly several ideas dear to our hearts, to do with the critique of identity politics, the majority/minority/minoritarian distinction and the importance of openness.

Gay liberation had really exploded. Homosexual culture had really taken over -- Donna Summer, disco, it was so boring. Suddenly in New York, it was cool to be gay, but it just seemed to be about suburbanites who sucked cock and went to discos. I mean, come on, ‘Disco, Disco Duck’? I don’t think so.

So we said, ‘No, being gay doesn’t make you cool. Being cool makes you cool, whether you’re gay or straight.’ People didn’t like that too much. So they called us homophobic. And of course, being the obnoxious people we were, we said, ‘Fuck you, you faggots.’

Mass movements are always so un-hip. That’s what was great about punk. It was an antimovement, because there was knowledge there from the very beginning that with mass appeal comes all those tedious folks who need to be told what to think. Hip can never be a mass movement. And culturally, the gay liberation movement and all the rest of the movements were the beginning of political correctness, which was just fascism to us. Real fascism. More rules.

But as far as us being homophobic, that was ludicrous, because everyone we hung out with was gay. No one had a problem with that, you know, fine, fuck whoever you want. I mean Arturo would regale me with these great sex stories. I’d be going, ‘Wow, what happened then?’

What was great about the scene was that people’s curiosity seemed stronger than their fear. The time was rife with genuine exploration, but not in a trendy mass-movement way. And was always fascinated by how anyone made it through the day, what they really did when the lights were out, to keep their sanity, or lose it.

Heiligendamning the G8

2007-06-20T12:21:00.000+01:00

Most of the Free Association crew have just returned from Heiligendamm and the counter-mobilisation against the G8 summit and it’s worth jotting down a few thoughts whilst the memories are still fresh. (When I say most of us have returned, I don’t mean some are still on German soil, languishing in some prison cell; just not all of us went in the first place.)

First, the overall assessment. One of us has a 4-year old son who ranks good things as follows: cool, wicked, awesome, bring it on, kerchow. On this scale we agreed the Heiligendamm summit protest was awesome. The front-page headline in the left-of-centre Die Tageszeitung -- reporting on the summit’s opening day -- was ‘G8 successfully blockaded’. According to the Financial Times our ‘protests tipped the G8 summit into logistical chaos’. The FT reported ‘overwhelmed police forces’ and ‘lines of exhausted riot police streaming out of the area in the early evening, some of them with stitches and black eyes, as formations of helicopters roared overhead. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” said one officer.’ (‘Marauding clowns and squabbles embarrass organisers’)

In a great piece, which hopefully Red Pepper will publish, our friend and comrade Ben, of the FelS (the Sha La La Communists), describes every road into the Red Zone being blockaded for the better part of 48 hours, from 11am on Wednesday 6 June, the summit’s opening day, until 11am on Friday, when blockaders voluntarily began to disperse (en masse) in order to reassemble for a massive demonstration in Rostock. Summit organisers were forced to resort to plan B, which involved using helicopters to airlift many delegates, whilst journalists and others had no choice but to travel by sea, facing huge delays. We heard reports that even this plan was disrupted by blockades of ports/ferry terminals in Rostock; apparently on the first day of the summit many delegates were advised to remain in their hotels. And according to some reports, only four journalists made it to the opening ceremony. Oh yes, and the Japanese PM was delayed at the airport as he arrived. (By yet another blockade-cum-demonstration; not because he was hanging about by the carousel waiting for his baggage.)

This was certainly a victory and the most successful protest against a major summit ever. In fact, I wonder whether the Heiligendamm summit protest is to the G8 what Seattle was to the WTO. Seven years after that crazy November day in 1999, the latest round of trade negotiations -- the Doha round -- faltered and collapsed. The WTO now seems to be defunct. The Seattle protest and the social movements which formed around it and of which it was a part played a vital role in that. My guess is that the G8 leaders and political strategists are desperately looking for a way out of their annual shenanigans. Probably, there’s been a gnawing anxiety about their summit for a few years now, but our almost victory this month will have made them even more desperate. Because, the G8 summit is about legitimising neoliberal globalisation. An overriding message from Heiligendamm was that the G8 and neoliberalism is illegitimate. No doubt they’ll meet as planned next year in Japan. Probably they’ll meet in Italy in 2009 too, though that one will be tricky, being both the 10th anniversary of Seattle and the first Italy-hosted summit since Genoa. (That venue has already been decided: a small island in the Mediterranean Sea; not Elba, where the French emperor Napoleon I was exiled in 1814, but maybe the effect will not be so different.) But then... who knows, but I doubt very much that the G8 will exist in its current form.

Of course, they’ll spin it. They’ll talk of making their meetings more effective, perhaps they’ll have biannual meetings but on a much smaller scale with little publicity. They’ll use the comments of Helmut Schmidt, cofounder of the G6 (as it then was) in 1975, who’s criticised the current summits as a ‘media circus’ or something similar. But whatever they say, we should remember: it was us that done it. Or, as we wrote in ‘Worlds in Motion’: ‘sometimes it’s hard to see the social history buried within the latest government announcement.’

So, no doubt about it, Heiligendamm was a victory for us. It really is important to stress this. Many reports, particularly in the UK, adopt a top-down approach. The mainstream media tends to focus on what happened or did not happen inside the Red Zone -- that piece in the FT was something of an exception. Indymedia seemed to more interested in reporting on repression and decentralised actions than the mass blockades. The following response to my comment that Heiligendamm was a victory to us is interesting.

i find this a bit offensive. how was it a victory?
maybe you enjoyed yourself, but i don't think the kids of bangladesh were cheering. nothing changed; ergo, no victory.

Let’s leave aside the implicit racism of the comment -- it homogenises the ‘kids of Bangladesh’ and assumes that ‘they’ are less politically sophisticated than ‘us’ (if I can cheer the victories of others, recognising them as part of my struggle, then why can’t they cheer my victories? -- and the author’s quickness to take offence. It nevertheless raises at least two important questions.
First, did anything change? If so, what and how? Second, how does the mobilisation against the G8 in Heiligendamm relate to struggles elsewhere, e.g. in Bangladesh. I.e. how do antagonisms articulated locally become global? Or, perhaps these local antagonisms are immediately global. If so, then how do we understand them as such? Third, in exactly what sense was Heiligendamm a victory? (That hoary chestnut again: what does it mean to win?)

There are probably several reasons why it was a victory and why something changed.

1. Our mobilisation was a massive demonstration that the G8 and neoliberal globalisation is illegitimate. With neoliberalism already struggling for legitimacy, this is important. Though, as Rodrigo points out, it’s probably true that global capital can continue to reproduce itself without legitimacy for some time.

2. We produced the affect of victory. Of course I enjoyed myself! How could I experience those feelings of collective power and not enjoy myself? And I'm sure thousands of others did too. This is great. These feelings will remain with us and give us the confidence and optimism to continue acting. Whcih increases our power. So the ‘affect of victory’ isn’t just about ‘feelings’; it’s about material forces.
(And conversely (tho’ arguably) our enemies probably returned home without any affect of victory. Yes, they were reasonably successful in producing a spectacle of victory -- more successful in some countries than others -- but journalists were pissed off at having to spend so long on boats and queuing for boats, delegates’ helicopters had no proper landing places (and it’s undignified for a dignitary to have to wade through long grass) and the food and wine ran short! To top it off, delegates fought a lot amongst themselves. I’m not sure how important this all is. I think it’s probably less important whether Bush or Merkel experienced an affect of victory or not. But perhaps it matters when we’re talking about journalists and others essential for producing the summit as its organisers would wish. In Heiligendamm, it was very clear that the real energy was located with us. And energy is attractive! I’m sure journalists reporting on our blockades enjoyed a far richer experience and I think that’s important.)

3. We demonstrated very clearly -- both to ourselves and people observing around the world -- that mass actions can be effective. Again, this confidence in our own power is enormously important.The question of the relationship between local and global antagonism is harder. Tadzio (in his letter) makes a great point about this:

we failed to construct a clear antagonism because we were playing on different laying fields. concretely: while our protests were a mere police matter (a clear antagonism certainly existed between cops and demonstrators, as all of us who were beaten, arrested, tear-gassed, water-cannonned can surely attest to), the legitimation of the summit occurred on the discursive field of talking about climate change. now, the german radical left almost completely lacks a good political story about climate change, one that goes beyond individual appeals to fly less, raises the question of property and capital, while at the same time giving suggestions for how to act (the latter being a crucial component of every good political story).

7-8 years ago, when summits' headline issues were still very much trade, privatisation, 'the neoliberal agenda', we had an excellent counter-story. our militant actions were embedded in this counter-story, so that our actions could rise beyond being mere policing matters, to being explicitly political, because they directly interfered in the construction of the discursive field that was being built to legitimate global authority. today, we have no story to counter theirs, so this production can go on undisturbed, no matter how effective our blockades are. it may be responded at this point that issue-engagement with the summit's headline issues would add to the legitimation of an institution we try to delegitimate, but i think it's fairly obvious that this year's refusal to really construct a counterstory didn't lead to a greater delegitimation of the G8.

thus the action point of this particular political story: we in the german radical, autonomous, anticapitalist left (whatever you want to call it) need to work to come up with a good story about climate change, to break through the relegitimation strategies so effectively deployed by merkel. more generally, at summits, we need to work in advance to develop a punchy story that relates to the summit's headline issues, within which we can embed our actions. otherwise the latter remain mere public order problems, and cannot interfere with the production of global authority as legitimate.

The Heiligendamm mobilisation was also notable for two other important questions.

First, violence. (Not really a novel question, I know.) In some ways, I wonder whether the movement has gone backwards here. One of the exciting aspects of Heiligendamm (and what made it different from and more successful than Gleneagles in 2005) was the hard-won coalition of 120-odd groups that was the Block G8 campaign. But this coalition threatened to implode after the mini-riot in Rostock on Saturday 2 June. Simon makes some good points about this, talking of media (both corporate and IMC) hyperbole and of people reverting ‘to type’. Dorothea also said something really good. She said she’d learned long ago that denouncing certain protesters as ‘violent’ is never helpful. This links to Simon’s point, of course. Denunciation is about definition, it’s about closure, it’s about limiting our movement. Reverting to type is about stasis. But changing the world requires movement.

But, as Simon goes on to say, between Saturday and Wednesday, ‘the turnaround was amazing -- because of the success of the blockades -- and their fluidity and diversity. If you wanted a ruck, find the blockade where it was happening and contribute. If you wanted to keep a more tranquil blockade going overnight, you could find out where to go. Diversity and working together was again OK.’

Second, the tension between different modes of decision-making. The success of the Block G8 blockades depended on a closed group with a secret plan. This group did a brilliant job in getting thousands of people from the Rostock camp to the North gate and thousands more from the Reddelich camp to the East gate (by Bad Doberan). Our departure time, our route, our exact destination all had to be kept secret. How else could our objective of getting onto the key roads into Heilgendamm have been achieved otherwise?

Some people were very dismissive of Block G8 for this: ‘I’m an anarchist, I’ll not follow anyone, I’ll do my own thing. Fuck Block G8’. One person wrote on Indymedia: ‘Block G8 was a very hierarchical organisation. In the meetings I went to, all the details of the action were being organised by “action councils” and seemed very unaccountable and inaccessible unless you were prepared to go along and be cannon fodder for a central organising committee.’ As somebody responds on Indymedia, this is ‘quite disrespectful of those who had put huge effort and time into organising things (which are usually illegal, and enormously stressful, and done at great potential personal cost). I was really happy that some people had thought beforehand extremely carefully about to get us from camp to blockade in a coordinated way.’

But, getting thousands of people from camp to road is one thing. Maintaining a successful blockade once there is something else. The Block G8 secret ‘action committees’ did a great job getting us all onto the road and I was happy to follow them there. But sustaining the blockades required participation by all the blockaders and consensus decision-making, and Block G8 were reluctant to give up their power. So at the East gate we suffered a number of highly frustrating meetings on Wednesday evening, as the Block G8 action committee dominated discussions -- taking full advantage of their ‘ownership’ of megaphones and the sound system and of the authority they’d won through their successful leadership in getting us onto the road. In short, they behaved like arseholes, accusing anyone who disagreed with them of attempting to destroy the ‘action consensus’ and of being intent only on ‘escalation’. At one point, they suggested that if they didn’t get their way, the blockade would no longer be under the auspices of Block G8 -- this was a despicable attempt on their part to delegitimatise our action, which would have made it easier for the state to repress and criminalise. In fact, the blockade was in danger of falling apart altogether as Block G8 claimed that we’d achieved our objective and ordered a retreat. This retreat was halted only when two people sat down in the road in front of the sound system to prevent it leaving: blockading the blockaders!

Tensions within the blockade. Frustration with Block G8 and their tactics. The unsettling experiences of giving up a location we’d become familiar with to retreat 200m down the road and of watching many groups of people drift away altogether. Nervousness as darkness fell: the fear we’d be rudely awakened at 3am by water cannon and, possibly, tooled-up riot cops (combined with the more prosaic worry that tarmac doesn’t make for the best of beds). Wednesday night was somewhat tense! (It was important to bear in mind that although darkness presented uncertainties for us, it did so for the police too. They were exhausted too. They had no idea what we or some of us would do in the night -- we were, after all, literally metres from the fence encircling the Red Zone. If they attacked, how would be react -- and not only were we near the fence, we were right next to a railway line, with its plentiful supply of fist-size ammunition. Much safer for them to hold off. But this is exactly why we needed to maintain our collective identity and this is why the behaviour of Block G8 was so dangerous.) In the event, the night passed uneventfully, though some of our fears were realised: our numbers seemed to have dwindled from several thousand to fewer than one thousand. Thursday morning brought some great coffee -- artisan-brewed latte from a wonderful man in a van operating two tiny expresso pots and a saucepan on a tiny stove -- and more frustration courtesy of Block G8, who again suggested we’d done enough and that it was time to leave. But this time, we’d really had enough: a couple of organised and collective-minded affinity groups with experience of consensus decision-making challenged their leadership and we enjoyed a couple of fantastic blockade-wide spokes-meetings. As a result, our collectivity was reestablished and the blockades at that gate lasted for another 24 hours.

So, two points here.

First, how can we learn to shift between these two modes of decision-making -- on the one hand, having a secret plan put into action by a closed group, and on the other, open, horizontal consensus decision-making -- more smoothly, without rupture and discord?

Second, our experience on that blockade shows again the importance of affinity groups. Not only for dealing with the state, but, as there, for having the ability to override Block G8’s action committee which had outlived its usefulness.

That’s enough criticism of Block G8 and I want to end on a more positive note. Their advice as we headed for the road on Wednesday morning was spot-on and expresses our politics perfectly:

Don’t run straight at the cops; aim for the gaps!

To affinity and beyond...

2007-05-17T11:16:00.000+01:00

As hinted at by Brian I've been wanting to post on the tension between identity politics and politics based on affinity.

In " No Logo ” Naomi Klein (not someone regularly cited here) critiques the identity politics of her college days. She tells a familiar story of fracturing micro-struggles around representation of identities within both institutions and language. And how these were fundamentally outflanked by capital. As she puts it: “The need for greater diversity - the rallying cry of my university years - is now not only accepted by the culture industries, it is the mantra of global capital. And identity politics, as they were practiced in the nineties, weren't a threat, they were a gold mine.“ If it’s an identity you’re after then capital is always selling.

Although identity politics had valid, minoritarian moments they also fitted too neatly with the rise of neo-liberalism in the 1980’s and its tendency to separate politics from economics. Another angle on this can be seen in New Social Movement theory. It was also tied to the identity politics of the 1980’s and early 90’s with its "post-material" concerns. I had to read some recently and it seemed so hilariously out of date I kept imagining it on one of these list programs alongside leg warmers and Spangles. For Klein, escape from the inward looking paralysis of those politics was one of the achievements of the anti-globalisation cycle of struggles.

Not that I’m saying identity politics are no more, I'm not even sure that it's something that can be totally escaped but I present a couple of stories to illustrate potential problems. A couple of years ago I went to a talk by Jane Flax, a Freudian, Foucauldian, feminist psychoanalyst (don't ask how she squares that circle). A big point she made was that you shouldn’t say either race or gender. The two oppressions overlapped so much that you had to say race/gender. I asked her why you didn’t have to say race/gender/class or (to stop the list growing and making page long sentences the norm) just power relations. She replied that she hadn’t come across a good analysis of class. Yeh, well whatever but she then went on to psychoanalyse the film “Monster’s Ball” and the failings of the race/gender category became uncomfortably apparent. Her analysis gave the impression that the problems of the world were caused by redneck men whose relationships with their fathers made them all psychologically abnormal. Now I’m not a shit-kicking country music type myself but it was so easy to see how this all worked out. By keeping class out of the analysis everyone in the room could declare themselves normal/healthy/pure but definitely not part of the problem. It fitted right into that wider liberal idea, we’re already saved and all we need to do is turn the rest of the world into us. Change the world without changing ourselves.

I should say though that simply (re)introducing class, as a category, doesn’t necessarily solve the problem. It can be easily subsumed into the identity game. Class has always had a very culturally based definition in the UK and class as identity was one of the central strands of the 1980’s – 90’s class struggle anarchist scene that we were part of. At it’s worst this tendency fell into deeply reactionary and fucked up positions, denying that there was a ruling class or even such an abstract thing as capital. Instead it declared that “the enemy is the middle class” because they denied a voice to the working class. One of the names the tendency gave itself was “openly classist” putting class alongside a list of isms, racism, sexism, speciesism. It was pure liberal identity politics. It’s funny to think back on that now and recognise it as an offshoot of the politics of woolly jumper wearing, middle class feminists (sic) but of course that was one of the political environments it emerged from and in reaction to.

Another strand that fed into the “enemy is the middle class” tendency was the quite necessary critique of the power held by experts. Unfortunately neo-liberals (or public choice as it was known in this context) were also attacking professionals seeking to replace their power with, the more easily manipulable, judgement of the market.

In fact the parallels get even worse. I was reading Thomas Franks book "What's the matter with Kansas?" which charts the rise of the US conservative movement. In a way that story is more of a straight out ideological trick where the re-assertion of class power and a huge increase in inequality is achieved through the misdirection of attention on to cultural issues. It’s based on class as cultural identity although, of course, class can never be mentioned in the US of stateside. Still “the enemy is the liberal elite” is the US version of a disturbingly familiar world-view. It should act as a marker of just how fucked up identity politics crossed with ‘class as identity’ can get.

That doesn’t mean that there is an easy outside to identity politics. The whole counter-globalisation cycle of struggles can be partly seen as an attempt to escape liberal politics, trace out the links between the economic and the political and escape the paralysis of identity politics. There was a shift towards identifying a common enemy in neo-liberalism or even capitalism and an emphasis on working through problems by acting together. It’s a politics based on affinity, with movements grouping together through shared affect rather than shared ideology. What was important is what you do, not what you say. The priority became moving, taking risks, acknowledging the messiness of politics. Not worrying about shoring up behind you meant you could move faster and take more audacious leaps. I think that’s what the Zapatista slogan “walking we ask questions” means, we sort things out on the road, work out the destination as we go.

Identity politics can be seen as a compensatory power move that ends conversation in a certain direction. The aim is to deny a voice to certain people in order to allow the usually silent to speak, to let the sub-altern speak. That's how it’s in tension with affinity politics. Identity politics is anti-affinity, its logic is to isolate and cut off conversation along ever deepening gradations of power imbalances. Until you have battles over who is the most oppressed. Which oppression counts most becomes important to work out because it determines who has the right to speak at all.

But it’s been pointed out in an article in Turbulence there are no shortcuts, that a politics based on affinity can’t sidestep the problems identity politics tries to address. Unless we address the material and structural basis of the old hierarchies they will just reassert themselves.

Of course striation is necessary and at certain points you need rupture to get things moving again. We can’t just all get along, as Rodney King put it. But rupture is a dangerous thing involving destruction. There is a smell of corruption that hangs over identity politics; it is an assertion of power that stops potentially productive encounters. Perhaps the way to avoid that corruption solidifying into paralysis is to recognize that there is no pure outside. We have to all change ourselves as we change the world.

Worlds in motion

2007-05-08T09:26:00.000+01:00

Just a quick note to let y’all know that Worlds in Motion, our article for Turbulence, has finally been approved. All i’s dotted and t’s crossed and it’s here. That’s me with the Engels beard by the way...
The whole Turbulence experience has been a bit, well, turbulent. We wrote the bulk of the article at the back end of last year so it seems a bit stale now, altho it will improve with age, like a fine whine. But one of the tensions that’s become apparent right at the end has been the one between identity and affinity. I’ve just had a look round the back and seen that Keir’s brewing up a blog post on this very subject (“Two sugars, mate! You got any biscuits?”), so I don’t want to steal his thunder. But on the day that this happens, it does raise a lot of questions about the whole identity/affinity thing. Strange things can happen very quickly, and sometimes we find ourselves without the tools to deal with new situations. Which can itself be brilliant.
One of the oddest moments at the recent global meeting in Venice was the session on the Middle East. When Musthapha Barghouti finished speaking, the hall erupted into a massive standing ovation. We were sat at the front and it was weird to turn round and see 700 people on their feet applauding & cheering a government minister. It’s the same with Sinn Fein: one minute we all seem to be moving in the same circles, the next their preferred channels of communication are with Labour ministers. Some of this relates to sovereignty and governance. But part is also to do with how identity politics exploded in the mid-1980s. At its worst, there was an unofficial scorecard operating, a hierarchy of oppressions. Where did this come from? From below, from that drive towards autonomy and self-determination. But also from above, as parties struggled to construct a new constituency: the Labour Party with the GLC, the left with Marxism Today. Of course the miners’ strike fucked a lot of this up, as old-fashioned class war returned to the streets. And it also helped draw a line, behind which another constituency could develop: ‘You want identity politics? What about class, the biggest identity of all?’ But it’s daft to see one as good, and one as bad. Some of the most productive moments come when identity rubs up against affinity. And that was what was interesting about the Barghouti ovation. Right, I can see you’re getting bored, so we can return to this when Keir’s done his post. Class dismissed.

They can't kill us all.

2007-05-02T15:12:00.001+01:00

In the news today is the discovery of a tape recording of the 1970 Kent State Massacre. It reveals that the National Guard troopers who shot four students dead were ordered to open fire. This is important because it shows a degree of deliberation in the massacre. The story kept to at the time was of spontaneous shooting triggered by panicking soldiers. The event had a huge effect, triggering a national student strike in the US involving university and high school students. The slogan of the protests was: They can't kill us all.

I’m not reporting this naively believing that revealing the violence of the state, the iron fist in the velvet glove, is enough to save us but it does make me wonder about the mechanism that triggers this sort of phase shift into new levels of violence and how they relate to wider shifts in regimes of power. This relates to a debate we’ve been having in the Turbulence collective on the idea that this century has seen a strategic deployment of generalised war as a means of overcoming the failings of neo-liberalism.

Of course the Kent State shootings make you think of the turn of the century shootings of demonstrators, first in Gothenburg and then in Genoa. I remember thinking about Kent State on first hearing about the Gothenburg shootings. I was reading a newspaper report flying back from a Football tournament in Germany. I turned to a friend (little Matt) and said "Christ they've moved to bullets so quickly." I wasn't so much shocked at the level of violence but how early in the cycle of struggles the police had escalate to that level and were soon to tip over to a murderous one.

Apart from the speed of the escalation the other shocking thing over the next few months was that this new hyper-violent attitude towards protests appeared to be imposed right across Europe and North America at the same time. It was like a globalised race to the bottom in power relations, with Third World policing exported to the west. This wasn't just the use of guns but the early and undiscriminating use of violence against protests seen most comprehensively at Genoa. Over the next few years it begged the question of the relation that this militarization had with the Neo-conservatives’ open strategy of imposing war - not as a continuation of politics by other means but as a means of managing society.

That last phrase is a bastardisation of Foucault in “Society must be Defended” and perhaps the problem might make a little more sense if we conceptualise it with the dispositifs of power he examines. The exemplary violence against the protests and then the imposition of war both show a movement towards sovereign forms of power. Of course Guantanamo bay fits with this and taken together might explain the popularity over the last few years of the concepts of sovereignty, and exception as the foundational outside of sovereignty, that Agamben has reintroduced.

I’m interested in the idea that there is a link between exception and excess. Negri criticises Agamben by saying his lack of social movement experience leads him to start with the structures of power over, constituted power. This makes him unable to make the leap downwards to connect it with the animating constituent power. I agree but think that Negri (who started life as a constitutional theorist) also starts with Empire and not with Multitude.

I’d argue that the state of exception could be produced out of a moment of excess. That the fear and uncertainty caused by moments of excess can provoke recourse to sovereignty from above and political sadness from below. The latter is a term that Collectivo Situationes use to describe the drawing back and closing of off potential experienced after the high point of struggle in Argentina. It refers to the temptation to allow the re-establishment of sovereign power because of an inability to cope productively with uncertainty. Then again, of course, neo-liberalism contains it’s own precarity and so carries its own potential to resort to sovereignty. Perhaps the narrative runs like this:

The first ‘heroic phase’ of the movement of movements is an attempt to escape the dispositifs of neo-liberal governmentality. The moment of excess within the movement runs into a sovereign response which is then reinforced by the excessive counter-sovereign violence on 9/11, which provides the neo-conservatives with the big opening they take advantage of to escape neo-liberalism's gathering problems. This raises the idea that exception is produced by the challenge of either a constitutive moment of excess or sovereign violent excess. Perhaps it doesn't matter which one of these it is from the sovereign's point of view.

Of course all concrete assemblages are mixed. There are many different strategies being followed at any one time. They may just exist with a small circle of cranks until their time arrives, just look at the history of neo-liberal ideas. It’s important to resist a conspiracy view of power, where great men sit in a room and decide the time is now right for 10% more sovereignty in the mix. From the angle outlined above the mechanisms of power still seem obscured and slightly mystified, we can't make the leap up, but the important thing is to retain the point of view of the movements. The problematic from this perspective becomes: how can we defend our moments of excess from sovereign violence without ourselves finding recourse in the sadness of sovereignty?

Right said Fred

2007-04-13T13:01:00.000+01:00

A lot of us running around talking about politics don't even know what politics is. Did you ever see something and pull it and you take it as far as you can and it almost outstretches itself and it goes into something else? If you take it so far that it is two things? As a matter of fact, some things if you stretch it so far, it’ll be another thing. Did you ever cook something so long that it turns into something else? Ain’t that right? That’s what we’re talking about with politics.

From a 1969 speech by Black Panther Fred Hampton, lifted from here. It seemed right to move it to a post in its own right, not just because it’s ineffably cool, but also because it’s right about so many things.

From where I’m standing

2007-04-12T12:24:00.000+01:00

Keir’s great blog about be(ar)s, rupture and the ‘Thou shalt not kill’ song has really got me thinking... about what's radical, what’s revolutionary and what is not, about rupture and even about ‘directional demands’. And about context or perspective. And about all that non-linear stuff about small actions potentially have very large effects.

I’ve been reading Massimo De Angelis’s new book, The Beginning of History. Massimo talks about value practices:

those actions and processes, as well as correspondent webs of relations, that are both predicated on a given value system and in turn (re)produce it. These are, in other words, social practices and correspondent relations that articulate individual bodies and the wholes of social bodies in particular ways. This articulation is produced by individual singularities discursively selecting what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ within a value system and actually acting upon this selection. This action in turn goes through feedback mechanisms across the social body in such a way as to articulate social practices and constitute anew these ‘goods’ and ‘bads’ or, given the nature of feedback mechanisms, to set a limit to these ‘goods’ and ‘bads’. To talk about value practices is therefore to talk about how social form, organsiational reach, mode of doing, modes of co-producing and relating, forms of articulation of powers, are constituted through social processes.

I'm thinking that actions which appear to be within a capitalist logic, the value practices of the market, may in fact take us outside it, if only marginally. This tiny crevice, this little fissure or rupture, may then give us a foothold to step further outside, it may be a crack large enough to ease a crowbar into, it may spread and join with other such fissures, as John Holloway writes in his ‘Breaking Time’ piece.

So ‘Thou shalt not kill’ may be just another song for sale on the market, but the references to Crass and Minor Threat perhaps take us fleetingly outside market relations. And this is perhaps the potential of the ‘fair trade’: money, commodities, etc. are all produced/circulated, but participants are stepping outside the market logic which values only lowest cost of production as a ‘good’. But I think that how one views (or values) these, depends on one’s perspective. Compare the social centre in Venice which offers a three-course meal (doubt very much if it’s vegetarian), let alone vegan, for 10 euros (or a kebab, if you’re in a hurry) with the Common Place in Leeds, where such a menu would be considered a ‘bad’.

So, from where I’m standing it looks like Keir’s lying on the left side of the bed -- along with David Essex, Bryan Ferry, et al. -- but, no doubt, from where he’s lying, it all looks very different.

What side of the beard you've been lying on

2007-04-10T12:15:00.000+01:00

Back in 1974 Malcolm McLaren, Vivienne Westwood and Bernie Rhodes collaborated on their famous T-shirt: “You’re going to wake up one morning and know what side of the bed you’ve been lying on!” It carried a list of hates on the left side and loves on the right. It's a ranting manifesto dispatching the likes of David Essex/Bryan Ferry/Salvador Dali/Sir Keith Joseph and his sensational speeches and embracing the likes of Valerie Solanis/Jamaican Rude Boys/Coffee bars that sell whisky under the counter/Kutie Jones and his SEX PISTOLS/

1974 was a moment that cried out for rupture and polarisation. The possibilities of the movements of 1960’s had already began to close up, solidifying into a new orthodoxy just as stifling as the dreary post-war world 1960’s veterans thought they were leaving behind. Social movements aren’t distinct entities but selections from a continuous dynamic. They are like waves in a continually changing substance. Human subjectivities, that were fluid in times of great motion can suddenly solidify into clag unable to struggle free of itself. It’s at times like this that new ruptures can take hold, a moment of hard stratification to break free of the clag and light out into new territory.

One of the mechanisms used in these moments is a dip into the past to pull out some new antecedents but is all this still possible within the ever re-devoured remains of pop culture? In fact we need to rework that for it to even begin to make sense. Seeing as pop will eat itself as a means of things staying the same, as a means of homestatic reproduction, can it eat itself unhealthy? Are there any antecedents that when eaten will make pop feel a little queasy? That might break pop out of its self-referential reproduction and reconnect with wider social movement.

Fucked if I know, but perhaps we can detect signs in the latest incarnation of the “side of the bed” T-shirt –Thou shalt always kill The song by Dan Le Sac Vs. Scroobius Pip currently getting airplay and column inches and scraping into the top 40.

Here’s the lyrics, print your own shirt:

Thou shalt not steal if there is direct victim.
Thou shalt not worship pop idols or follow lost prophets.
Thou shalt not take the names of Johnny Cash, Joe Strummer, Johnny Hartman, Desmond Decker, Jim Morrison, Jimi Hendrix or Syd Barret in vain.
Thou shalt not think that any male over the age of 30 that plays with a child that is not their own is a peadophile… Some people are just nice. 
Thou shalt not read NME.
Thall shalt not stop liking a band just because they’ve become popular.
Thou shalt not question Stephen Fry.
Thou shalt not judge a book by it’s cover.
Thou shalt not judge Lethal Weapon by Danny Glover.
Thall shalt not buy Coca-Cola products.
Thou shalt not buy Nestle products.
Thou shalt not go into the woods with your boyfriend’s best friend, take drugs and cheat on him.
Thou shalt not fall in love so easily.
Thou shalt not use poetry, art or music to get into girls’ pants. Use it to get into their heads.
Thou shalt not watch Hollyoakes.
Thou shalt not attend an open mic and leave as soon as you're done just because you’ve finished your shitty little poem or song you self-righteous prick.
Thou shalt not return to the same club or bar week in, week out just ’cause you once saw a girl there that you fancied but you’re never gonna fucking talk to.
Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were.
 The Beatles - Were just a band. Led Zepplin - Just a band.
The Beach Boys - Just a band.
The Sex Pistols - Just a band.
The Clash - Just a band.
Crass - Just a band. Minor Threat - Just a band.
The Cure - Just a band.
The Smiths - Just a band. Nirvana - Just a band.
The Pixies - Just a band. Oasis - Just a band.
Radiohead - Just a band. Bloc Party - Just a band.
The Arctic Monkeys - Just a band.
The next big thing - JUST A BAND.

Thou shalt give equal worth to tragedies that occur in non-English speaking countries as to those that occur in English speaking countries.
Thou shalt remember that guns, bitches and bling were never part of the four elements and never will be. 
Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not make repetitive generic music

Thou shalt not pimp my ride.
Thou shalt not scream if you wanna go faster.
Thou shalt not move to the sound of the wickedness.
Thou shalt not make some noise for Detroit.
When I say “Hey” thou shalt not say “Ho”.
When I say “Hip” thou shalt not say “Hop”.
When I say "he say, she say, we say, make some noise" - kill me.
Thou shalt not quote me happy.
Thou shalt not shake it like a polaroid picture.
Thou shalt not wish your girlfriend was a freak like me.
Thou shalt spell the word “Pheonix” P-H-E-O-N-I-X not P-H-O-E-N-I-X, regardless of what the Oxford English Dictionary tells you.
Thou shalt not express your shock at the fact that Sharon got off with Bradley at the club last night by saying “Is it”.
Thou shalt think for yourselves.
And
Thou shalt always kill.

Of course some of these are not objectively, revolutionary more in the nature of directional demands but it was the mention of Crass as ‘just a band’ that peeked my interest. Clips of the songs video on youtube have kids asking “who are Crass?” “who are Minor Threat?” on the coments.

I suppose the Crass brand is ripe for re-discovery as an authentic outside to commodification (pay no more than £3.50) but it’s only when you check out the facial hair on the video that you discover what’s really radical about Scroobius Pip.

If there is hope it lies with the beards.

Spring cleaning

2007-02-09T16:16:00.001Z

Sorry about this, but we’re trying to tidy this blog up so it’s a bit more useful to the random passer-by (we get loads of those). In the past we’ve used this space as a way of composing our collective thoughts. And when it works, it works really well. But for the last couple of months we’ve been working on an article which we’ve just submitted to Turbulence (as soon as it’s finalised we’ll post it here) and this blog has become a little too introspective. So we’re now setting up a private room, round the back, where we can tinker with ideas without imposing on you lot too much.
And then hopefully this space can become a little more productive, a little more interactive, and maybe a tad less painful.

An extended ‘we’

2006-12-05T10:47:00.000Z

Here’s a thought that occurred to me after Sunday’s meeting (Keir will be posting notes from that later). It’s not very well articulated but it might prompt something more coherent...

At the meeting a few people talked about ‘an extended we’ as one of the signs that we’re winning. What does that mean? I think it’s to do with feeling connected – not emotionally, figuratively or psychologically, but really connected – to other people, so that when things were kicking off in Seattle, say, we felt as one with those who were there. Or rather we were as one with them – this isn’t a subjective thing.

All this seems airy-fairy (or just plain bollocks) because it’s hard to avoid talking about it in subjective, individualist or idealist terms, even though we’re trying to get away from all those dualisms. Maybe another way into this is to think again about social movements as processes not things. It’s counter-intuitive because it means thinking about ourselves not as ourselves (individuals bound up in revolutionary politics) but as a collection of processes. The moments when we’re winning are those when we can see social relations moving. At those times our movement isn’t a movement of us (activists vs others) but a moving of social relations, an unfreezing of all that is fixed.

Maybe there’s a link here to Marx’s idea of the proletariat being the class that abolishes itself as a class (as opposed to those who worship & defend the most fixed and static notions of what class is, as a thing). We felt we were winning because we weren’t ‘we’ any more (sorry, this makes a bit more sense if you read it out loud); maybe we’d even abolished any idea of a ‘we’, because there was no outside, no ‘they’ (this relates to a comment made the other night which questioned the whole idea of winning because the way we’d framed it suggested someone else would be losing). This moving of social relations is like the breaking of an ice-floe: it has no edges or boundaries (“this group are in our movement, this group aren’t” etc), or else the boundaries are always in motion; the moving ripples through everywhere – absolutely everywhere.

Of course when this happens, the ‘equilibrium’ of everyday life is shattered. Capital likes to present itself as fixed, immutable or natural (it depends on an endless production of novelty, but it is the same old same old). So maybe that’s one of the things about winning: it’s when we (an extended ‘we’) reveal the social relations of capital as partial, temporary.

Bash the Rich

2006-12-01T09:53:00.000Z

I’m half-way through a new book by one of the founders of Class War. It’s pretty un-fucking-putdownable (see, it’s already having an impact on the way I write), mainly cos it captures that whole sense of potential that existed in the mid to late 1980s. Some of this might be pure nostalgia, but it was a pretty mad time. And one of the things that was mad about it was the seamless way struggles flitted back and forth without any of the sniping or prejudice that set in later. There didn’t seem to be any outright contradiction between any of these struggles – anarcho-punk squatters, anarcha-feminist peace campers, animal rights activists, striking miners, wannabe rioters etc. Sure there was loads of tension, some of it pretty aggressive and intense, but all of it was productive. Resonance produced movement: we seemed to be going somewhere (probably related to the fact that we were often literally going somewhere: demos, marches, Stonehenge, Henley…).

OK, one of the simplistic counter-arguments to this is that we were young, and everything seemed possible – it’s that feeling you get as you lie in the grass on a summer’s day and stare up into the sky. A slightly more sophisticated response points to the importance of dole culture. Both points are pretty valid. And there’s also a sense that getting older is, as much as anything, a process of accretion – things stick to you (jobs, homes, families…). We slow down.

But I’m trying to fit this in with the stuff we’ve been thinking about recently, especially the relation between the intensive and the extensive. It seems to make sense. Part of the madness about Class War then was that it was immeasurable. Literally. Groups were springing up all over the place calling themselves ‘Xxxx Class War’. And this whirlwind was making the intensive field visible. A bit like throwing flour onto a kitchen surface so you can see where the mice are going. The process is nothing new. It’s exactly the same as punk, or the Paris Commune or blah blah blah. I like to think that the ‘Behold Your Future Executioners’ banner had some small print somewhere which read ‘Behold the Unruhe’. Compare that to the bureaucratic machine of the Class War Federation with its delegate meetings and conference proposals...

Of course it’s easy to drift into thinking that intensive=good and extensive=bad, or that it should be a one-way relationship. Cold water in the face brings you back to this awful place… But this awful place is where we are. The intensive might be the realm of change but that change happens in the real, which involves the extensive. So Bone’s book has made me think again about ‘stuntism’, as way of trying to direct the movement from extensive to intensive, i.e. trying to use the normal mechanisms of capture (especially the media) to re-open the field of possibilities. Which was a pretty fucking cute tactic – just so long as you don’t call it a dialectic, OK?

And if you really want to get down-and-dirty philosophical, this caught my eye:

‘Thesis of Ontological Excess’: Being is more than one and prior to one. The preindividual is in excess of its actual individual expressions. Being is ‘problematic’ (or differential) and individuals are only ever temporary resolutions of these tensions; tensions that continue to subsist even after actualization. This thesis of excess is thus counter to any ontology based on lack.

I don’t claim to understand the finer points of it, does it fit in with relation between extensive and intensive?

I’ll stop here cos I’m rambling (something else to do with age).

Apple of my desire

2006-11-28T17:01:00.000Z

Notes from 20 November 2006

Some questions and problems.

First, measure. How do we *know* when we're winning? We can set targets, but what sort of targets? How can we measure achievements within social movements? How *do* we measure achievements within social movements? Because we do always measure. We say: “Oh, that was a good meeting." Or: “That thing we did wasn’t very effective [whatever ‘effective’ means], let’s try something else next time.” At Gleneagles, we celebrated the fact that we tied up the police for ages and prevented the Canadian delegation from reaching the summit at all on its opening day. This was an index of our success. This was measure.

But how useful is this type of measure? Measure must always take place in the *extensive* realm, the realm of the *actual*, the realm of what *exists* (De Landa). The extensive realm isn’t unimportant and it isn’t ‘bad’, but it isn’t the whole story; there’s more! How do we ‘measure’ the pleasure of eating apples, for example? In the extensive realm, all we can do is the count the number of apples. But living a life is not simply about calories and nutrition. It’s about freedom and potential. Our freedom and potential to produce, regardless of whether we do, in fact, produce. It may not be apples we actually desire. In terms of exploring out potential, transforming our subjectivities, developing our collectivity… well, these processes are immeasurable.

Here, when we are thinking about subjectivities and desire and potential, we have moved into the realms of the *intensive* and the *virtual*. It’s processes in the intensive realm – the movement of our desires and subjectivities -- which constitute or produce the extensive. And the virtual realm is the field of potential, the field of what is possible or what might be possible.

A major problem for us (the second problem or question) is that it’s hard to see these intensive processes which constitute the extensive realm. In other words, we can observe the ‘actual’ world quite easily, but not the underlying movements. We can easily see poverty. We can look at statistics on life expectancy. We can even trace these back to ownership of the ‘means of production’ or the ‘division of labour’. But it’s more difficult to work out what’s going on underneath. This is certainly the case in ‘normal’ situations, when the world is in ‘equilibrium’. However…

… the intensive realm is far more apparent in far-from-equilibrium situations. At summit protests, for example, we can see more easily what social movements are made of. We can see commodities for what they are: dead. We get a sense that this is *real*, this is *life*. ‘Reality’ itself is punctured. Can also be punctured or ruptured by various other means. Not only ‘political’ or ‘cultural’ moments of excess, but also drugs or meditation perhaps. Sometimes, in these situations, things, the ‘way the world is’ – e.g., class inequality – just become blindingly obvious. *But*. Does this mean that ‘reality’, the extensive, is simply a shell? A shell which hides (and protects us from?) the intensive which lies beneath?

Third problem or question. The relation between the extensive and the intensive. Causality is not all one way, from intensive to extensive. Outcomes in the extensive realm do impact on the intensive realm and the field of possibilities. Victory of the Democrats in the US Congressional elections changes things for us. It alters the field in which we operate. E.g. there is no longer any point in organising around a "don't invade Iran" position. Similarly, now the WTO, the IMF and the World Bank are all in crisis, struggles against these institutions seem to make less sense.

And this brings us back to the question of winning. For the crisis of the WTO and its cousins is our victory. (Remember Seattle in 1999 was a mobilisation against the WTO.) But it’s a victory in the extensive realm. And is this really what we mean by winning? Is it ‘our’ sort of winning? In 1999, these institutions appeared hegemonic, unquestionable, impossible to challenge. (‘There Is No Alternative.’) But we did challenge them. The very act of questioning the unquestionable, of practically imagining another world, is a victory in the intensive realm.

And we have to remember that the WTO is itself only a husk. It is less a ‘thing’, then a rigidified set of social relations. Its crisis means a certain web of social relationships are more fragile. But maybe those social relationships 'moved on', to organise the Olympics, for example. Which reminds us that capital also has an intensive realm – which it shares with us; they’re not separate; we are not separate from capital. More generally, the state is one of capital's extensive faces. States attempt to harness or service capital’s movement. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking of social movements versus the state (or state actors, such as the police). But the state just a moment of class struggle (Bonefeld and Holloway). And when capitalist organisations/states are in crisis, it is also more possible to observe capital's intensive realm. (Really all we are doing here is observing the ‘same’ far-from-equilibrium situation from two perspectives: our own and that of capital.)

Fourth problem/question: strategy. Can you place yourself to even a small degree in the future to think strategically. That is, can we immanently strategise? One example is the climate camp. Can we think about its possibilities, its potential, even if we don't quite know what those possibilities or potential are? Or can we only think about strategy in the extensive realm?

In moments of excess -- when everything is open, when we ask "how do we want to live?" -- we just *be*: this is also when we *can* think strategically but don't have to. This is where strategy becomes just *be*. Ineffability. Vocalising freezes and drags us back into realm of politics. Teleology. Strategy closes off. Victory in the intensive realm opens up possibilities. Burrowing... want more and more, wider and wider, without any sense of direction... different subjectivities experiment in different areas.

Fifth problem (restating the second). If the intensive is the realm of change, with the extensive the realm of stasis, how do we access it? Because when the intensive becomes visible, so does the virtual. And when we glimpse the intensive, we also 'see' (sense) connections to other processes/events. Resonance! But resonance is independent of consciousness. So struggles don't have to be ‘aware’ of one another in order to resonate.

So how can we create right materials -- tools or techniques -- to facilitate intensity? We have to strategise because we can't do everything. It's about what seems possible. And that’s why strategy is different in intensive moments. But intensive states are quite fragile. At Gleneagles, there was resonance and consensus decision-making helped maintain consistency. Political animosity vanished (Zolberg: ‘Moments of Madness'). The bombing of July 7 shattered this state. How can we make intensive moments less fragile? Use refrains. Could argue that consensus decision-making is part of the extensive realm? But using it as a refrain means we can change it, use it, drop it. A tool. It doesn't need to be formalised. Don't need to use this tool for meeting with just four people, say. Unless it's extensive, doesn't exist for some people.

Final question/problem. How do we stay on the productive edge, which lies on boundary between the void and the extensive realm?

Intensive and extensive realms

2006-11-16T16:18:00.000Z

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.

Win when we’re singing…

2006-11-10T15:22:00.000Z

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?

Leeds, London, Rome, Berlin; we shall fight and we shall win.

2006-11-01T20:49:00.000Z

The problem before us comrades is winning. I’m not telling you to go back to your constituencies and prepare for power rather the Free Association has undertaken to write an article for the new journal Turbulence which takes the slogan “We Are Winning” — famously sprayed on a wall in Seattle during the 1999 WTO protests — and ask, “What, actually, would it mean to win?”

In fact more than just the article, several of us are involved in the editorial team and so are each editing a couple of other articles on the same theme.

Anyway this means we need to start using this blog to help us think through the topic. So here’s some thoughts and links. Firstly there’s an article by our good friend Olivier de Marcellus which interestingly suggests that the cycle of anti-summit protests of the turn of the century and beyond has actually won. Stating that: ”it's a strange but frequent phenomenon - when movements finally win them, they often go unnoticed.” Which leads me to think that perhaps all movements ever get from “winning” is movement. Or perhaps what we get is movement from one problematic to another. Perhaps, at best, ”winning” results in us having new expanded fields of problematics through escaping previous, artificial, limits.

So I suppose what I’m putting forward here is the idea that social movements form around problems. Not in a simple functionalist fashion, as though there is a pre-existent problem that then produces a social movement that, in turn, forces the state or capital to respond which solves the problem. Rather social movements produce their own problematic at the same time as they are formed by them. I think this works in a couple of different ways.

Firstly there has to be a moment of rupture that creates a new problem, one that didn’t fit into the ‘sense’ of contemporary society. Social movements create their own sense, they create their own worlds, they world. That process of worlding is accompanied by an affect which is experienced as close to victory. The “we are winning” of Seattle was a victory full of potential, where the possibilities seem unlimited. "Another world is possible". This is winning in the intensive register.

But the winning of the demands that accompanied the formation of the movement happens at a different time. Demands are met in the realm of extensity and representation, which is enemy territory. It only really charts counter attacks from the movement’s enemies. A counter attack that sets up new constraints and therefore new problematics. This is winning in the extensive register or the realm of representation.

This introduces the need to distinguish the difference between demands and problematics and to clarify the role demands play. Laclau in his book “Populist Reason” sees demands as the foundation of politics but he also sees populism fulfilling that role. Both of these, of course inscribe the state at the centre of politics. The thing is Negri and the basic income advocates also seem to put demands at the centre of politics or as the basis of movements. I think the do see a different role for demands to Laclau but I’m still not sure what that is.

The point, for me, is that problematics move faster than demands because they are based on how a movement acts. So by the time we have victory on the level of demands the movement problematics have moved on. At that time there isn’t an affect of emergence within the movement but a cramped affect struggling for a new moment of emergence or excess.

Another thing to think about here is that the movements problematics change as the movement moves. So the experience and subjectivities created within the movement provoke a movement of problematics. I haven’t put that very well but think about how second wave feminism emerges out of the experience within the new left. This creates expanded problematics that are a remove away from dialectical struggle where the movement and the state dance around each other.

I think you could argue that there is an autonomous tendency to all social movements, or perhaps a tendency towards exodus, which tries to break with the dialectical relationship within which they are initially actualised. We might think here of how social movements are constantly moving to avoid capture by the state and they way we need to continually insert new moments of rupture to escape the twin apparatuses of capture the state deploys. The first way the state captures is through incorporation into the states logic of sense. Here we can think of how the police tried to incorporate the land squatted climate camp into its own logic of legality by offering to be helpful and just wanting to walk around the camp once. However when you are nice and legal you are within their sense not ours and so we can’t possibly refuse constant patrols. A new rupture was forced by the tension between the two logics. Accompanying this machine of incorporation is one of repression. Both strategies force us to move in response to them and these responding moves can sometimes be productive for us and sometimes not. However our moves need to tend towards exodus away from this dual embrace that the state forces on to us. Sometimes this means that social movements need fresh ruptures and new starts

To finish lets go back to the idea of extended problematics. This might even translate to winning on the level of scale needed to think through such unfashionable words as revolution or even liberation. After all we’re not religious we’re anti-capitalists. Even if we could imagine a post-capitalist society we would still need to constantly ward off capital as an apparatus of capture as well as deal with a whole series of new and old problems unrelated to capitalism or at least not articulated through capital. In fact one of the good things about the question “What does it mean to win is that it operates on several levels of scale.

The Thing is… (again)

2006-09-12T11:37:00.000+01:00

(Note to self: must use this blog more often)

We’ve recently re-worked our piece on anti-capitalist movements for inclusion in a book scheduled to come out next year (we’ll post it, along with the book details, once it’s been finally accepted). The original article was written some five years ago, and it was strange coming back to it after such a gap. For one thing, some of it was awfully clunky – reflecting our own lack of confidence, I think, and the fact that we had yet to develop a style of our own. But I was surprised how well some of the ideas still stood up, especially the whole movement-as-thing which we’re always banging on about. We’d already gone back to the piece for What is a life?, so maybe it shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. All the same, I find this sort of ‘consistency’ (continuity?) quite reassuring: we might be barking up the wrong tree, but at least it’s the same damn tree and we haven’t (yet) started chasing cars or howling at the moon…

There’s some link here to that notion of durability which we’ve been mulling over, altho’ I’m not really sure what that link is. How do you stay working together as a group without blood-letting or clinging to some doctrinal purity, and yet still remain open? I don’t think we’ve cracked it, although we’ve had our moments.

Finally I stumbled across this which has some smart things to say on the ‘identity politics of class’ and the thing-like nature of, well, things… I got really giddy until I saw that Nate had already been there, marking his territory. Arf, arf!

Encounters

2006-08-05T18:28:00.000+01:00

I recently finished the new Althusser collection, the Philosophy of the Encounter. In it Althusser sketches what he calls “aleatory materialism” or “materialism of the encounter.”

Althusser draws upon ancient atomist philosophy as a metaphor for what he means. In atomism there are two initial components before the world existed, atoms and the void. Atoms fall through the void, empty space, parallel to each other. They never touch each other and they have no relationships with each other. These two components do not suffice to form a world. A third component is needed, which will bring about relations between atoms. At least some atoms must encounter each other for a world to exist. That means at least one atom had to deviate from its path parallel to all the others, in order to run into another atom or atoms. The name of this swerving off of the parallel line is “clinamen.” It means “swerve,” and that’s the term I’m going to use. The swerve of one atom is what makes encounter between atoms possible.

Encounter alone is not enough to form a world. The atom which swerves might bounce off the atom it encounters, and get bumped back into its original path or some other path parallel to all other atoms. To form a world, there must be a relationship established during the encounter. The encounter or its effects must last.

There is no guarantee that an encounter will happen or that it or its effects will last. Even if they do last, there is no guarantee that the effects will continue to last. There is a world, so swerve must have happened, which means encounters must be possible, and lasting encounters or encounters with lasting effects must be possible. Still, none of this had to happen. The world could have not come into existence at all, or it could have come into existence with different traits. Its current make up may change. It may cease to last, that is, cease to last.

None of this is intended as a claim about actual atoms and void. The point is one about possibility and guarantees. There are no guarantees.

Althusser uses ancient atomism to think his way out of some bad habits of thought within the Marxist tradition and within philosophy. The habits basically consist of being too sure and thinking there are guarantees. One such habit is taking the accomplished fact of something’s existence - say, the world - as if to mean it had to exist this way, or that it had to exist. Another version is a certainty as to outcomes - what will and will not, can and can not, happen next.

In atomism, under Althusser’s discussion of it, in a sense the world already contains everything it needs. The pieces need rearranging, certainly, but such a rearranging is possible. Aatoms are capable of swerve. They are capable of encounters, and they are capable of making encounters last. They are, of course, also capable of continuing to fall parallel to each other such that encounter do not occur and they are capable of disentangling themselves from encounters such that the effects do not last.) The point is that there are capabilities. Capabilities do not determine outcomes, and outcomes do not indicate the absence of capabilities. To think otherwise is a mistake.

A former student of Althusser’s provides something that can serve as an example of this point, although it wasn’t intended as such an example, as far as I know. Jacques Ranciere discusses intelligence in his book The Ignorant Schoolmaster. (I recommend this book very highly. If I can recommend only one book to you, I recommend Marx’s Capital in all three volumes. If I can recommend one additional book, it is this book by Ranciere.)

Imagine a pair of twins, taking all the same classes in school, with all the same teachers. One twin gets better grades than the other. Someone could point to these twins and say “one twin is more intelligent than the other.” One can easily agree to this, as long as one takes it as an assertion of synonymy: “intelligent” means “gets good grades”, and vice versa, so “more intelligent” means “gets more good grades” or something like that. Using a synonym doesn’t really tell us much more than the original term does, but one is free to use synonyms.

The problem comes when it is forgotten that the terms are synonyms, and someone says “this twin gets better grades because this twin is more intelligent.” This doesn’t make sense, because a synonym can not be the cause of another of its synonyms. (”Why is it so cold outside?” “Because it’s chilly.” That doesn’t explain anything.)

The thought process goes something like this. The person first says, at least implicitly, “I will say ‘is intelligent’ about someone who gets good grades.” They then say, “this one gets good grades, therefore this is intelligent.”Then they say “Because this one is intelligent, this one gets good grades.” The presence of good grades is asserted as evidence for the quality called intelligence (and more good grades or means more of the quality called intelligence), and the quality called intelligence is taken as the cause for the good grades.

The function of this argument is to say two things. First, “this one gets good grades because of a capacity to get good grades.” This partially right. The presence of something means there must be a possibility for that something. That can not be argued against. (To say something is actual but impossible is to contradict oneself.) But this is also partially wrong. Capacity does not cause something. That there is a possible outcome does not mean that outcome will occur. Something has to happen to make a result, and this happening is not and was not guaranteed to take place. Much of the time, possibility is noted after the fact.

The second thing this argument says is more pernicious. It say “That one did not get good grades because that one was not capable of getting good grades.” This is false. There is often very little way to identify genuine incapacity and impossibility, if there is such a thing at all. That good grades are not gotten says nothing about whether good grades could have been gotten. “Not gotten” does not mean “could not have been gotten.” This argument is essentially a claim and justification of inequality and hierarchy. It is thus politically to be opposed. It also, happily, does not hold philosophically. Similarly, that atoms do not or did not swerve does not mean swerve is or was impossible.

What is shut out in the assertion of incapacity is the aleatory, the openness of possibility, the prospect for swerve, encounter, maintaining of encounter or its effects, and dissolution of encounter or its effects. The world has (the atoms have) all the capacities they need. They can swerve, encounter, maintain encounters, and construct worlds. And dissolve them.

To say the world has all the capacities it needs does not, of course, mean the world is fine. The world needs a lot of different actualities, and a lot of actualities in the world need to be dissolved. The point is that the path from this world - a far cry from the best of all possible worlds - to better worlds starts here. To get from point A to point C starts at point A. That is to say, what is valuable in this perspective is to orient us toward what is as our starting point. The problem is not one of impossibility - inability to pierce ideology, incapacity to free ourselves from consumerism, and any of a number of despairing lamentations. The problem is that the current actuality must be abolished and - which is to say the same thing - a new actuality is to be produced using our capacities. Asserting impossibility is simply to state that one hasn’t started.

Again, though, there are no guarantees. Encounters may well not happen or not last last. Encounters that last for a time may cease to last. The point is that one must try. “Keep going” is what, Alain Badiou, another former associate of Althusser, takes as the primary ethical injunction. Of course, one must also try better and try to learn from experience as best one can. Part of keeping going is to never mistake “did not happen” or “has not happened” for “could not have happened” or, even worse “can not happen.”

The swerve of the atoms essentially serves for Althusser to distance himself from a certain of causality as centrally important. The point is not so much why something did or did not happen, and certainly not that something must have happened or could not have happened, but rather simply that it did happen or did not happen, or does happen or does not happen. Actuality, the material world as it is, that’s the starting point.

Along these same lines, it’s important not to read the swerve of the atom as an external occurrence, a hand which reaches down and knocks the atom out of its parallel course. That reintroduces a causal perspective, a “must be” or “can not be,” the logic - or rather, the fantasy - of the guarantee. The emphasis is simply that atoms swerve sometimes. If we can identify conditions when swerve seems to happen more often, then we can seek to replicate those conditions, remembering, of course, that outcomes are not guaranteed of pre-determined.

I want to read the atoms and their encounters rather simplistically as an analogy for people and encounters between people. There is a partial truth to despairing pictures of society, where people are alienated, isolated, atomized, falling along parallel lines with no relation to each other. Many people do not encounter others, do not talk to others very much, develop new connections. But this does not mean it has never happened, that it can’t happen, that it doesn’t sometimes happen.

People have a power like that of atoms to swerve (and to encounter, maintain encounters, continue to maintain encounters). This doesn’t mean people will swerve and so on, but they can. Badiou calls this a power of thought, as a power to disrupt established orders, and he vigorously asserts that people have this power. Ranciere similarly asserts that people have a power which can be read as akin to swerve, which is to say encounters may happen and orders can be disrupted, parallel lines can be deviated from. This power is not a conclusion or something deduced, something to convince anyone of, so much as is the starting point for meaningful activity.

When any outcome occurs, it’s reasonable to ask why it happened. Despite my earlier remarks downplaying causality, there is a value to asking why. It can help suggest better ways to act next time. It can help suggest responses in the present. It can help preserve a sense things could have gone differently, and things can be made different.

I find all of this resonant with my involvement in organizing. The basic unit of organizing as I see it is the one-on-one meeting. This is akin to the encounter between atoms. The goal is for the encounter to last. For an encounter to last, there must be an encounter. For there to be an encounter there must be a swerve, an atom must deviate from its trajectory falling parallel to all other atoms. A person or people must deviate from the lines along which people fall in relative non-relation to each other - lines including the grooves along which capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and other systems of power-over flow, as well as lines which are more mundane and more of an immediate obstacle: lack of confidence, lack of ideas on how to start or what to do, and various habits. These lines can be addressed by encouragement, training, success stories, invitation to first-hand experiences of actions and meetings, and so on, but as noted repeatedly there is no guarantee.

Swerve sometimes does not occur. (I want to note here as well that swerve is something atoms do. The swerve, they do not get swerved.) Absence of swerve may later be replaced by swerve, but it may not. We should neither despair nor think we can automatically condition swerve. It is a general safe working assumption that swerve occurs around other occurrences of swerve. Action occurs more around action, and the answer to inaction is action. The answer to falling in parallel lines is swerve.

When swerve does occur, it only leads to encounter when another atom is present. Otherwise the swerving atom just follows a different course through empty space. Concretely, in organizing, this means one must be able to talk to workers. Not as in “have the capacity” but as in “be in the presence of.” A site and a time to talk is required. This can be at work sometimes, but mechanisms exist to prevent or attack encounters at work, and early on - when encounters are fewer and the number of swerving atoms are fewer - we are more vulnerable.

Some means of getting workers’ contact information include going through dumpsters at the workplace to find information, following workers carefully, being given contact information, and looking in the phonebook. Other methods exist and should be documented, discussed, and experimented with. All of them take time. This is part of why I find ideology uncompelling as an explanation for problems in the world. It’s largely not needed. Capitalism steals our time. Attacking capitalism takes a lot of time, which many of us are hard pressed to come up with or don’t want to use for those purposes. If we worked half as much we would have more time to fight the bosses, among other things. Hence the extension of worktime not only can boost profits but can serve to make organizing harder.

When an encounter does happen, what happens? On the one hand, every encounter is absolutely unique. Every atom is unique, which means every encounter is also unique. There are more possibilities for encounters and combinations than there are atoms. (If one starts with a group of just four items with no qualities but their names, A, B, C, and D, the combinations of them exceed the number of items: AB, AC, AD, BC, BD, CD, ABC, ABD, ACD, BCD, ABCD. In a similar sense, possibility exceed actuality, or in another sense, thought exceeds being.) That uniqueness is very important. Still, we can identify general procedures for the conduct of some encounters. This does not make encounters identical, it just provides us with some points of orientation, a framework with which we can try to act in ways to generate the encounters that produce actually existing differences. One of the values of aleatory materialism is that it orients toward practice. It looks what happens (this is the materialism part), tries to identify consistencies, qualities, things in common and different, things resonant and things opposed, across the range of what happens. It also tries to propose conducts (this is the aleatory part, the part about encounters) or experimentation with conducts, the generation of procedures. Another term for this is to say it is praxiological, it takes the study and production of practices as its object.

Every one-on-one meeting is unique, singular. But these singularities, these encounters, can still interact with others. They can last and in their lasting be part of forming bodies which can encounter others and form other bodies. This means they are not absolutely singular, atomic in the sense of unable to relate to each other. They have relationships with each other, or they can. The elements composing an encounter - the atoms, the people - are themselves unique, singular, but they can still encounter. The goal is for that encounter to form something which can itself swerve, encounter, and have encounters last.

I would like to suggest that swerve should be thought of as a power or a likelihood, the ability to actualize the possibilty of swerve. This power can be increased by exercise, and can be excited or encouraged by being in the presence of the exercise of this power. For this reason, after more people are swerving and encountering as individuals, in one on one meetings, the next step is a group meeting. This facilitates the composition of larger bodies, multiple encounters, and an increased rate of individual encounters. All of these are small steps toward confrontations which are themselves small steps toward replacing the world as it is, replacing it at least in part with actualities generated during the process of composition already described.

Althusser takes primitive accumulation, as the logic and the moment of the beginning of capitalism as well as the logic and the occurrences of the reproduction of capitalism, as an example of one form of encounter, of aleatory processes. Capitalism could well have not happened, or happened in different places and times, and it could well cease to be. I have in these notes tried to suggest another place to view the type of aleatory processes Althusser discussed, and I would like to suggest this is a site which could be productive if attended to more directly, the site of production of the encounters with which capitalism will be overturned. The goal is an accumulation of power direct against capital.

I don’t claim that the idiom used here is required for the carrying out of any of the proposals and practices suggested here. I think the theoretical idiom of aleatory materialism lends itself to the practical suggestions and practical idiom I favor, but the practices and practical idiom do no require the theoretical idiom and the theoretical idiom could also encounter and relate to other perspectives than mine. One could well ask, why use this theoretical idiom? This is fair question and one I don’t have a satisfactory answer for. I use it, and sometimes it’s useful to me. If anything, my view is that aleatory materialism should orient itself toward addressing and trying to practice the self-subjectification of the working class, more than the working class requires aleatory materialism.

There are two additional things that make aleatory materialism attractive to me. First, it does not assess people as atoms, as object, but as active, in motion, dynamic. People as actors of swerve. The emphasis is not class consciousness or proclivity to this or that position or ideological beliefs (all of which suggest not starting, staying in a position of incapacity), but rather on encounters and their outcomes and additional encounters. The second strength is that the focus is internal - the criteria are based on what happens in the encounter, inside the world or body formed, rather than external, subject to the dictates of leadership or the need to harm an enemy in combat - but not absolutely internal, because the encounter can produce bodies which then can encounter and produce (with) others.

A refrain? A routine? A mechanism?

2006-07-25T03:43:00.000+01:00

I just got the copies of What is a Life? in the mail. Thanks for sending them. It looks good and as always I'm happy to be part of it and wish I had more to contribute than "fuck yeah!"

I was looking over a hardcopy of the thing today (it's great how a hold-able object is different than a computer screen), then read the stuff on refrains in the earlier post. I'm curious if what I'm about to describe counts as a refrain.

I'm rather shy by inclination. I've worked a long time in different affective labor and in these - in particular my time working for one of the business unions - I got a lot better at managing socializing, and coming off as confident even if I don't feel it. Partly this is because I had to mix in with lots of different folks than I had before and do so successfully (as measured by rather draconian bosses) and I got to feeling a lot more confident as a result. But also because I had a framework: there's an agenda to the conversations. Figuratively (a goal, usually to get the person to convince themselves to sign a union card) and literally (broken up into five sections). Successfully navigating the agenda means asking lots of questions, getting the person to talk, knowing when to ask a follow up question ("I haven't had any major run ins with the boss." "It sounds like you have had some minor ones, though. What are some of those?"), etc.

After I did this for a while I got a lot better at situations, like being at parties and so on. "Where are you from? Where do you live? How long have you lived there? Where do you work? How long have you worked there?" Etc. Folk generally like the attention, and begin to feel like "this guy's listening to me, he's interested in me." It made social interaction way easier for me. Not quite a refrain, I think, so much as a key or a scale or a chord - a few things one can do instinctively. The goal is to get people to tell stories, and to elaborate on those stories, and when appropriate tell corresponding stories, and if one does it enough one establishes a few techniques (which form an ensemble) one can use with some measure of success and confidence. It's a way to provide one of the shapes required for a flow to happen in a social setting, since without any form or channel there can be no flow (just dissipation at infinite speed). It's also ambivalent, something functional for positive as well as for negative ends, like the business unions' instrumentalization of this mechanism.

There's also a particular enjoyment of interacting with folk in a visit, sharing a refrain - the same feeling as in playing music with people, being in synch in time together, someone makes a change and it just fits and you make a change with them or in response. It's complicated in this model, though, because the organizer has the agenda consciously and the other person doesn't.

Space of Flows

2006-07-19T13:29:00.000+01:00

I really like this photo. A friend who suggested it illustrated smooth space sent it to me. If you look at desert part though it's not smooth like a pool table but is marked by the flow of sand. It's a space of flows but unlike the striated space on the right which has a transcendent grid imposed on it, the deserts dunes are self organised according to an immanent logic. It's the flow of energy, transmitted as wind and gravity, through a substance whose cohering traits lead to the formation of dunes.

The overlaying of the body of the earth with a grid relates to a wider hylomorphism and paying attention to the self-organising traits of matter is the difference between an architect and an artisan for Deleuze and Guatarri. Sometimes when you're flying on bright days you can be really struck by the gridding that marks the body of the earth. Flying over towns and villages is the only times that you get an architects eye view of town plans, the viewpoint (and judgement) of God. I remember flying over Spain on a clear day and seeing a wind farm on a mountain range. It looked quite unlike a man made design, a very odd shape. Then I realised that it was about harnessing flow and it had to take the dynamics of that flow into account in its design. So the wind turbines were positioned at highpoints that had uninterrupted wind flow and this dictated the shape of the roads servicing them. Of course all assemblages are mixed and the wind farm still had an architect who was bound up by wider flows of capital and indeed the flows of our struggles and desires. Anyway nothing ground breaking but a couple of pretty pictures none the less.

Collective Writing

2006-07-06T16:52:00.000+01:00

This post is in the spirit of tidying up the blog and making it intelligible to any poor bastard who happened to stumble across it.

The Free Association is, amongst other things, a collective writing project. The way of working that we’ve settled on is to decide on a vague area for a project and then blog on topics that seem related. We then have a discussion meeting on the general area. We record that discussion and then transcribe the recording, précising it a little as we go. The last few entries on the blog have been such transcriptions, which is why they don't make much sense.

What we’re aiming for is a boiling down process where we discuss the previous transcript, transcribe that discussion and then discuss that. This goes on until it gets to the stage when someone has to go away and write a first draft, but when they do they have a lot to draw on. It always seems to be that we’re struggling to grasp the problem we’re approaching and it’s only during the actual writing process that it starts to become clear. For many years we were a reading group. The book we were reading was the object around which we transformed ourselves but making the move to collective writing makes the transformation much more active. Although, the turn to collective writing was bound up with a more interventionist, re-engagement with social movements on our part, so I suppose that inevitably would be more active.

Anyway the piece that we produced is here; it’s sort of the final installment of a trilogy. We’ll now return to occasional posts on things that come up.

The Refrain

2006-06-01T17:55:00.000+01:00

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).

From the bottom up…

2006-04-26T23:20:00.000+01:00

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"

2006-04-19T00:47:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-14T12:44:00.000+01:00

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.

2006-04-07T15:56:00.000+01:00

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

2006-04-06T15:46:00.000+01:00

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!

2006-04-04T09:25:00.000+01:00

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…"

Keep on moving

2006-03-30T09:55:00.000+01:00

Good meeting last night at the CommonPlace about recent events in France. Made me return to some nagging questions about identity, definition and movement. One person (old anarcho-type) made a strong intervention denouncing the 'statist trade unions' and their stewards who'd pointed out troublemakers to the riot cops. He insisted that the key point now was for the movement to define itself in opposition to all those who would 'recuperate' it or sell it out.

Fair enough, in some ways. But in other ways what's been exciting about France has been how the movement has kept exploding outwards, jumping over all definitions imposed on it (from within & without). So while it's nominally over a change to labour law, it's quickly blowing up into something more general, a questioning of widespread 'precarity' etc etc. And so (jumping back on a hobby horse) we return to the idea of 'movement' as a moving of social relations, not a thing, but a process – and a process that has no end. One of the great pieces of graffiti from France is 'I don't know what I want but I know how to get it'. Apart from being punk as fuck, it's also a great take on 'many yeses, one no' and 'walking we ask questions'.

Of course part of that moving (walking?) will involve setting limits, defining ourselves etc. In D&G terms these are moments of territorialisation. These are inevitable and can be really productive. They can be pretty big & therefore more 'permanent' (setting up a social centre) or small & more 'negotiable' (eg a social centre refusing to become an 'employer'). In Paris, for example, that process of definition would enable people to defend themselves against CRS attack or those anti-social elements that the the press have seized upon – literally creating safe spaces. Or here in Leeds, setting up a social centre has involved real moments of constraint (jumping through bureaucratic and legal hoops, never mind integrating ourselves into the money economy). But it shouldn't stop there. As soon as we draw lines in the sand they should immediately become outdated, irrelevant or obstructive. Or to put it another way, these moments of constraint are themselves productive, creating the space for us to push through them and move on again (de-territorialisation).

This is the 'rhythm of the multitude' (© DJ Milburn), an alternating process of contraction and expansion that's going on all the time. Or a (non-dialectical) pulsing. We set limits but then immediately try to overcome them. The danger is that we get stuck within those definitions and stop moving. Some people from the 1 in 12 were at the meeting and they talked about how the 1 in 12 has got stuck in a very fixed identity, and is inward-looking and energy-sapping (I'm paraphrasing here). I suspect this is a common social centre problem: the building gets established and then builds its own momentum, becoming something to be defended at all costs. The CP seems to be still on an upward/outward move, but already you can see the first traces of institutionalised thinking: 'We must have a cafe', 'We must have gigs', 'We must open during the week' instead of asking 'Why?'

Anyhoo, I'll end on an upbeat note. This is from a blog from Montpellier (emphasis added). It speaks loads about what the moving of social relations can mean:

The road to the station is blocked by a line of CRS police vans, in front of which is a small pro-CPE demo of about 10 – 15 people, in front of them there's a line of CRS on foot, and in front of them a double line of demonstration stewards preventing a confrontation. Most of the demonstrators are not up for a confrontation, but some chuck eggs, cans, fairly light things at the pro-CPE demo. The stewards, who are mainly students, are urging demonstrators to continue quickly past – they're really enthusiastic about giving orders. Someone ironically shouts ''Be submissive! Do as you're told!'' One of the stewards I know personally - he's the son of anarchist friends: I shout angrily at him, ''Have you got no shame? How can you protect your enemies?'' He looks upset. Lycee and technical college students hold a sit-down meeting in the big square in the centre of town, lots of different youths getting up to speak, though nothing beyond youth precarity is talked about. A cry goes out – ''To the station!'', echoed by a 16 year old girl from my village, who says she wants to occupy the railway tracks. Having given her a few English lessons a year or so before, I had no idea she was rebellious. Funny how you don't know people until there's a situation like this – and perhaps people don't really begin to know themselves until there's a situation like this …People return to the main square, where already people are drifting off towards the Corum Theatre in order to occupy it. Some think the call to go to the station was a manipulation so as to have time for the cops to get to the Corum … I see the guy I knew who'd been a demo steward protecting the pro-CPE demonstrators three hours earlier, the son of anarchist friends, and he waves me over, saying, ''What I did earlier back there was stupid, really stupid, but I was the first to get truncheoned by the cops here, trying to get into the Corum''. If I was religious, I'd call it 'redemption', but let's just call it 'radicalisation': sometimes radicalisation only takes a few hours.

This Life

2006-02-27T10:36:00.000Z

These are a couple of random thoughts that have been buzzing around my head. Part of this is the idea to maybe finish the Event Horizon trilogy – Event Horizon is the pre-event attempt to set a mood, On The Road is an analysis of how things turned out and this new piece tries to look at how we live after the event. This is tied up with the role of social centres, but tackles wider themes. Maybe we could aim to get it out for the consulta?

Anyway, the thing that started me off was Vernon God Little's refrain of "what kind of fucken life is this?" In the book it's almost wholly negative, but we can split this up two ways: 1) What sort of life do we want? 2) How do we live this life? They're intimately related of course: how do we live this life in terms of survival and how do we live it in terms of the life we desire? Or to recycle a recent book, how can we take those worlds we glimpsed at Gleneagles and generalise them so that they make sense in the rest of our lives?

In the run-up to big events (like Gleneagles) there's a real rush of energy, a coming-together. Obviously that's all gone after the event, and too often we see recrimination and a general coming-apart. But it's not simply how we cope with the come-down. It's more how we do live this life and still retain all that stuff we've gained at the Hori-Zone for example? After the high point of Autonomia in Italy, thousands turned to drugs or cracked up, not just because of State repression but because the forms of life they had been living were no longer sustainable. The (expansive) experiments seemed to have broken down irrevocably. More, the collective body had been decomposed, so attempts to live this life reverted to the level of the individual where contradictions were, for many, too intense to handle.

This sounds like I'm suggesting a survival guide, and I guess I am, but by survival I don't mean settling for less than life. Life and living now seem to be at the heart of political struggle. We're constantly creating multiple forms of life, zooming off in different trajectories, in the same way that we don't each produce a single subjectivity, but collectively produce and re-produce multiple ones, often in conflict with each other.

Something else I've been thinking about is the entreprenurial spirit. Before you reach for your guns, hear me out. What set me off was the final programme in the Lefties series which looked at the rise and fall of News on Sunday, a spectacularly failed attempt to have a 'far left' national Sunday tabloid (with a lot of the drive coming from ex-Big Flame members). They raised over £6m and one of them commented that they smashed the idea that the Left had to be poverty-stricken - they proved they were the real entrepreneurs. Obviously it's a very loaded term but it'd be great to reclaim it. We produce wealth; and there's nothing more 'entreprenuerial' than starting a band with your mates. The problem is that we find it hard to sustain this without it being expressed as money, channelled into capital's circuits. Again we can learn from Italy and the explosion of small businesses after the collapse of Autonomia: http://www.generation-online.org/c/cmassentrepreneurship.htm

Of course this brings in the whole issue of 'compromise', and the lines we can and can't cross. We keep stumbling across these issues at the CommonPlace in Leeds. Can we have rented social centres? Can we allow money-making events? We frown on 'profit-making' entreprises, but making money for charities is apparently OK (including charities who have paid workers?), as is making money to pay our landlord. What about CCTV on door? The balance of 'political' vs 'social' events?

And all that brings us back round to how we live this life. Look, I didn't promise this post would offer any way out...

... the second time as farce

2006-02-14T04:58:00.000Z

Hey brits-
Have any of you lot ever read the novel A Wrinkle In Time, by Madeleine L'Engle?

That book popped into my head on my busride the other morning as I was thinking about Brian's calling 70s squatting a nascent biopolitics and my calling it a resurgent biopolitics. What follows is a reconstruction of my train of thought, only I've replaced all the "I remember this one thing I read once where it said something like, no wait, it was - oh fuck! this is my stop!" parts with quotes I googled for.

So, my first thought was of this Midnight Notes quote, which is from Toward The New Commons:

"[C]apital cannot be society.

We might envision capital as a power grid overlaid on a vast nebula, with the working class as that nebula.(15) Workers are captured by and in some ways defined by the grid. That is the sphere of exploitation. However, the nebula is life: capital must draw on it and cannot survive without it, but the workers have life and can survive without the grid. As others have discussed it, this is the sphere of everyday life, however corrupted and influenced by capital, which seeks to control it and tap its energy and creativity -- but no matter how controlling, capital cannot be everyday life, which thus remains a great reservoir of energy against capital. This is in some ways more visible when, as with the Zapatistas, everyday life incorporates social structures and relations that pre-date capital and have visible anti-capitalist potential. But such potential is everywhere -- though being everywhere is no guarantee it will be mobilized against capital.

Let us put this just a bit more formally (c.f., Caffentzis, in press). Capital creates identity via work and commodities. Workers sell their labor power and purchase consumer products, thereby creating identities as workers and consumers. Refusal and resistance move in all these circuits. More, it is only because workers can resist and refuse that they have the ability to negotiate to sell their labor power. If they have no autonomous space, if they are fully capital, they cannot negotiate and therefore cannot sell their labor power.

This is another way of saying that capital depends on the life energy of the working class -- but that life energy cannot be reduced to capital nor fully possessed by capital. This harkens back to our earlier discussion of homogeneity and diversity: capital must have access to diversity, but must reduce that diversity to a usable homogeneity to control it, while maintaining the diversity in a capitalist, hierarchical form in order to have productive energy.

As capital attempts to control all aspects of life, the logical end of capital is pure machine (as science fiction writers often suggest). Ironically, the total triumph of capital would be the end of capitalism.

It is the space outside of capital, the space of human life not defined by capital, that is the fundamental source of power against capital as well as the basic source of capital itself. That is, working class struggles necessarily come also from outside the working class' existence as working class and move not only within the circuits of capital but also extend or create spaces outside of capitalist circuits. "

It's the part about life as a nebula over which capital is a net that I had in my head. To my mind, if we agree with this then I think it is the case that struggle against capitalism can potentially always take a biopolitical form, in the sense that Brian used the term biopolitics about the 70s squatters in the documentary you all watched.

From there, I started to think about what the Event Horizon pamphlet called composition, as opposed to opposition:

"Reclaim The Streets is an excellent example of a shift towards a more compositional approach. But what do we mean by composition? Maybe it’s as simple as acting as though we already exist in a different reality – we reclaim a street and recompose it according to a logic different to that of cars and capital. Without exception, every political organisation in the UK has been left flat-footed by this switch, as the dreamers out on the streets suddenly became the realists. From here on in, compositional tactics are the only ones worth having. "

My friend and translation buddy Sebastian Touza has also used the term composition, he gets it from some Argentine sources and/or Deleuze... he used it for instance in a discussion on Virno:

"Horizontal" relations among the many (what I would call 'composition') In one sense, this dimension refers to the types of bonds between the many. A fundamental question is when those horizontal relations define a bond that does not lead to the formation of a One separate from the many, to which the many delegate their power. Another aspect to consider is the “structure” of those bonds and the subjectivity they relate to. For instance, linguistic communication (including Virno’s “common places”), common notions, money, commodities, etc. Which compositions make the many powerful as many and why? Another question arises regarding the universality of what connects between the many and how it relates to the formation of a political subject, i.e. to emancipatory struggles. For instance, does the formation of a political subject originate in the search for communication with other the members of the multitude? Or does it originate in the concrete forms of life a group within the multitude build in their locale (e.g. Zapatistas, autonomous piquetero groups in Argentina, etc.)?

I think there something in common between what we mean by the squatters and related stuff as biopolitics and compositional politics. I think it'd be worth exploring this further.

Thinking about it now (digressing a bit from my reconstructing my train of thought...) it seems to me that some aspects of at least some presentations of class composition analysis present the working class at given points in time as having limited abilities to practice composition, which is a flawed way to talk about history. There's questions to ask as to why politcs takes the forms it does at different places and times, but I think it's important not to say that people at certain times didn't have the ability to practice composition (to compose?). Not composing doesn't mean inability to compose... There's a sort ambiguity in Event Horizon about this too - it says that composition is the best idea from here on out, when it was probably a better idea from the beginning. End digression...

From composition and all this past-present-future stuff I thought about this section in Event Horizon:

" in 1955, in Montgomery, when Rosa Parks refused to obey a public bus driver’s orders to move to the back of the bus to make extra seats for whites, she wasn’t ‘making a protest’. She wasn’t even in ‘opposition’. She was in a different reality. It’s a reality that can be traced back to the Diggers and the Paris Communards. We can trace it across the world to Buenos Aires or Chiapas. It’s the reality underlying the slogan ‘Don’t Strike, Occupy!’ of May 1968 and the auto-reduction practices of 1970s Italy. And this reality re-emerges here at Gleneagles"

And this is also linked to the bits with the Smiths quote and about the bodily feelings of these moments - hair standing on end and all that. It's all connected, I think, in moments of time that connect different moments in time together. That's where the book A Wrinkle In Time comes in. In the book they use a form of space and time travel called a "tesseract", the verb form is "to tesser".

I found a brief explanation of the idea here, which summarizes a conversation in the book:

"Imagine holding up a string with two hands, stretching that string so it is a straight line.

A hypothetical ant on your left hand (point A) could reach your right hand (point B) by walking on that straight-line string.

But is there a quicker route? Yes there is. Bring your two hands together so that the string's tips touch each other, and there you have the shortest route from point A to point B... and it isn't a straight line.

It's a wrinkle.

That is a tesseract.

The theory is that one may tesser through the fabric of time-space in order to get to places quicker. "

Some googling turned up a bunch of science stuff related to this that is way beyond me... Among that was this from some blog which compared the tesseract to time travel stuff involving worm holes (burrows dug by moles/tribes of moles?) and black holes -
like I said the science is all beyond me, but I found it a nice piece of resonance that, from what I remember from science back when I used to know a bit about it, black holes are also called singularities, and they have a part called an event horizon. Nifty.

Anyway, I think the tesseract is a nice metaphor for the type of relationship between past and present, history and politics that I'm keen to see more of and to try and develop both as an idea and practice... instead of just slagging off stuff that doesn't do this, like the periodizing impulse in Negri and others. It's like, you know, instead of complaining about what's on the radio you can just go start a punk band instead, to compose rather than just oppose. (Do I get a point for that? It's a bit of a thin punk reference but a reference none the less...)

Lastly, I found a long quote from the book here, which if my memory serves follows directly after the conversation quoted above:

"Oh, dear, " Meg sighed. "I guess I am a moron. I just don't get it."

"That is because you think of space only in three dimensions," Mrs. Whatsit told her. "We travel in the fifth dimension. This is something you can understand, Meg. Don't be afraid to try. Was your mother able to explain a tesseract to you?"

"Well, she never did," Meg said. "She got so upset about it. Why, Mrs. Whatsit? She said it had something to do with her and Father."

"It was a concept they were playing with" Mrs. Whatsit said, "going beyond the fourth dimension to the fifth. Did your mother explain it to you, Charles?"

"Well, yes." Charles looked a little embarrassed. "Please don't be hurt, Meg. I just kept at her while you were at school til I got it out of her."

Meg sighed. "Just explain it to me."

"Okay," Charles said. "What is the first dimension?"

"Well—a line:—— "

"Okay. And the second dimension?"

"Well, you'd square the line. A flat square would be in the second dimension."

"And the third?"

"Well, you'd square the second dimension. Then the square wouldn't be flat anymore. It would have a bottom, and sides, and a top."

"And the fourth?"

"Well, I guess if you want to put it into mathematical terms you'd square the square. But you can't take a pencil and draw it the way you can the first three. I know it's got something to do with Einstein and time. I guess maybe you could call the fourth dimension Time."

"That's right," Charles said. "Good girl. Okay, then, for the fifth dimension you'd square the fourth, wouldn't you?"

"I guess so."

"Well, the fifth dimension's a tesseract. You add that to the other four dimensions and you can travel through space without having to go the long way around. In other words, to put it into Euclid, or old-fashioned plane geometry, a straight line is not the shortest distance between two points."

For a brief, illuminating second Meg's face had the listening, probing expression that was so often seen on Charles's. "I see!" she cried. "I got it! For just a moment I got it! I can't possibly explain it now, but there for a second I saw it!" "

So I figure, I'm going to start telling people I'm a commonist, an otherworldist, and a tesseractivist.

Them's my thoughts. Hope this doesn't you regret inviting me into the blog. (David was worried about nutters from outside the group, I assume this means nutters who are already in the group are allowed to say, right?)

take care,
Nate

Event management?

2006-02-13T09:22:00.000Z

The reason that 'Lefties' appealed to me (apart from the obvious nostalgia) was that it made me think about the question of how we do politics in the absence of events like Gleneagles or Evian. What is 'politics'? What is 'do'? I re-read our piece for Derive Approdi and it suggested loads of avenues for us to wander down. I also remember reading on the back of some book about "how can we take those worlds we glimpse in such moments and generalise them so that they make sense in the rest of our lives?"

Of course, it's easy to fall into the trap of seeing Big Events as separate from the rest of our lives. But in a way they are separate: part of the dream-like unreality of GE was that I was cut loose from my normal day-to-day life (home, kids, work). I (we) could really act fast and be open to all possibilities because we were stripped bare (insert Carry On joke here). That's why summits have the potential they have: we can be catapulted into a different way of being far quicker than would be possible if we had to take all our 'baggage' with us. But it's also why the high wears off: because (all other things being equal) it's unsustainable in the face of 'normality'. So how do we make it sustainable? Do we even want to? 'Lefties' made me think about things the other way round: not how to prepare for summits (as we did in Event Horizon) but how to normalise summit politics, so that GE comes home with us. Does this make sense? For all the talk of not being absolute or 'having a line', it's actually possible to go to places like GE with a 'line' and stick to it. But it's obviously much harder to have a strict line when we've crashed back down to earth: no-one's been able to really sustain the argument against rented social centres, for example. That's why the 1970s squat scene or punk (score!) were in a different league to the alter-globalisation movement/social centre scene: they appeared to be sustainable if only for a few months/years (or until whichever moment of punk betrayal is your favourite). Dole culture obviously had a lot to do with it, and that's a space that's diminished enormously: but the fact that most of us have got 'jobs' must also reduce the space for purism.

The whole question of 'negotiation'/'compromise' (or whatever term you like) is worth digging into. The best (only?) political discussions at the CommonPlace often seem to circle around these themes. Maybe this is what politics is, that constant experimentation, a (random) chipping away at all that surrounds us. Not in a coherent way (like sinister Trots and transitional demands - "now we must expose the weakness of local government"), but more the way kids will absent-mindedly finger a hole in their clothes. How does this fit in with 'biopolitics'? Or living a life? And if we ever wrote something on it, could we get an 'I walk the line' reference into it?

Old punks never die...they just become incredibly senile social workers

2006-02-11T02:27:00.000Z

So something that's got to be interesting is age/experience in and after the movement. With all the efforts at recruitment no one seems to have looked that seriously at why people drift off or leave, and what happens to them afterwards. The party line is that they get burnt out and tired -- charitably: lots of people say they just get too old -- but is that right? Does participation in these kinds of moments have to lead to that kind of career path, or are we missing something?

I didn't see the show but I'm interested that no one disavowed their past. Even the most boring and reactionary ex-punks (cough Lydon cough) still seem to recognise that their moment was something special, where their activities multiplied possibilities. I'm wondering how many of the people who subverted the media line on the summit (surprising journalists by not acting their age) have an affectionate, unnoticed, political/cultural biography of their own.

From Lefties to Punks

2006-02-10T21:34:00.000Z

FREELY ASSOCIATING
The difference between the squatters in that lefties program and Autonomia was that the former were mostly members of the International Marxist Group. So their theory didn’t help them much when they tried to conceptualise their practice. At one point someone mentions that many people in the IMG thought of squatting as very peripheral, the ‘workers’ (very narrowly defined) were going to lead the revolution and the IMG were going to lead the workers. To be fair there were some valiant attempts to work out the relationship between the struggles. There was a great anecdote about the squatters road having a representative in the local T&G union branch. And in practice they seemed to be much more flexibility, there were symbolic crossings of the road between the lefty houses and the primal scream therapy house. Where they really fell down was with their mechanical views of what a revolution looks like. So when they are interviewed at the end they’re more or less all anti-capitalist but some say: “well that’s not really on the agenda anymore”. Which means you can look back and see their lives then as failures or as youthful folly. It is great though that none of them disavowed their past. They pretty much all seemed proud of it.

What the Italian Autonomia movement realised was that what seemed peripheral experiences and struggles at the time were actually moving to the centre. So that when we watch Lefties the most anachronistic thing is their faith in the labour movement. It’s the only thing out of time. Just like when you watch the Sex pistol’s film ‘Filth and the fury’ the punks are from our historical period and the conservative councillors aren’t. Which leads me to something else missing from the program. Without that large squatting scene you don’t get punk.

Like Brian say’s the true value of moments like the seventies squatting scene and other such cracks in capital’s edifice is that they provide space for experimenting with the future and that’s a much more productive way to think of revolution. When you look at it like that their revolution really did change the world. The problem is that capital keeps presenting itself as the ultimate limit to those experiments and that’s where the tension lies; between how to live a life and the very real and actually existing need for fundamental systemic change.

Lefties

2006-02-09T13:31:00.000Z

BBC4 documentary about (duh) lefties, esp the 30,000 or so squatters in Lambeth in the mid to late 1970s. Took me rushing back to growing up in London ("Lambeth wreckers!"). But if you look at the timeframe, this was all happening at the same time as the emergence of autonomia in Italy: a nascent biopolitics? Struggles around living rather than wage demands or Keynesianism etc. It was amazing to see and hear so many people talking about how they wanted to live, and experimenting with different forms. Of course, altho squats were in heart of Brixton, squatters were overwhelmingly white and middle class (well, at least the ones interviewed were: an inevitable consequence of m/c people being easier to track down by profession). And it's easy to laugh at the naivety of some of it, the 'pick & mix' approach to 'issues', and how in the end they failed to do this or that. But that misses the point: as they said, there was a feeling in the air that 'this was it', it was really happening. Revolution is a process of experimentation and fucking up, of struggling to ask more and more questions. They weren't making demands; this was a visible process of people working out how to 'live a life'. It was heartening to see people in their mid-60s being asked now if they still felt the same way about capitalism and replying 'yes!' It all reminded me of the old Casey quote about how all questions are redundant except 'what sort of world do we want to live in?'

A new dawn

2006-02-09T10:48:00.000Z

A technological fix to a political problem? Hmm, we'll see... But for now, let's hope it helps us compose our thoughts and jottings into something a little more coherent.