Complexity and Social Movements: Multitudes at the Edge of Chaos ...

102 Ecologies of action
occurred within the AGM is that its affinity with participatory and
democratic means and its adoption of a decentralised praxis have encouraged
organisational forms with emergent properties that are politically and
culturally efficacious within a network society. Thus, we have seen the
emergence of durable networks that are highly effective at information
management, communications, material and symbolic contestation and
mobilisation at the local and global levels. This has been coupled with a
recognition amongst certain actors of the primacy of process in catalysing
these effects and a prioritisation of process as a means to maximise these
emergent outcomes.
Emergence in plateaux
In order to analyse these processes of network interaction and emergent
outcomes we are suggesting a conceptual framework that allows descriptive
and analytical purchase over two key processes in the emergence of global
social movements. The process of encounter and interaction and the process
of constructing shared understandings within and between movements. So
far, we have described the construction and iteration of sense-making
processes (reflexive framing) and we now move to consider the spaces of
intensive networking (plateaux), both rooted in a ‘minor literature’ that
begins with Gregory Bateson (1973).
One of the most interesting yet under-theorised concepts to arise from
within this minor literature is the concept of plateau(x), originated by
Bateson (1973) and subsequently developed by Deleuze and Guattari in
their second volume on Capitalism and Schizophrenia (2002). Plateau has
geological, mathematical and figurative meanings but was used by Bateson
to differentiate a preference within Balinese culture for the continuation of
intensity over the transcendence of culmination or climax, an orientation
that he noted as extending from sexuality to aggression. Deleuze and
Guattari (2002) developed this concept as an extension of their distinction
between arborescent culture (linear, binary, hierarchized) and rhizomatic
culture (multiplicitous, heterogeneous, non-linear): ‘We call a “plateau”
any multiplicity connected to other multiplicities by superficial underground
stems in such a way as to form or extend a rhizome’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2002: 22).
In our formulation we use plateau(x) as a descriptor for the process of
intensive networking in material and immaterial spaces that occurs around
nodal points of contestation or deliberation, such as protest events or social
fora. This allows us to focus upon processes of territorialisation – the manifestation
of networks within physically and temporally bounded spaces
and lines of flight between territories – the reconfiguration of networks
through processes of encounter, the proliferation of weak links, the
exchange of knowledge and the construction of affective relationships
through face-work and co-presence. These processes of physical interaction