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

Beyond resistance to global nexus 117
an increasingly difficult task out of necessity, feedback through PGA email
lists and during conferences focussed on its lack of transparency, accountability
and the susceptibility of the network, in security and leadership
terms, to the exigencies of an informal and mostly unknown group of individuals,
the so-called ‘tyranny of structurelessness’ familiar to generations of
activists (Freeman 1970). This led to the reformulation of the support group
after the 2002 European PGA conference in Leiden in an attempt to make
participation transparent and to encourage broader involvement by movement
actors – groups or individuals who had recently engaged for the first
time with the network. This initiative involved additional ‘communication
tools’ including email lists dedicated to ‘process’, ‘strategy’, ‘resistance’ and
‘discussion’ and the development of local ‘info-points’ – awareness raising
groups who could act to promote the scaling up of PGA-inspired activity.
Although PGA has been cited as an important actor within global civil
society (Keane 2003: 61), excepting our own work (Chesters and Welsh
2004, Chesters 2004b, Welsh 2004) and work by Routledge (2004), little
attempt has been made to either describe or analyse its form and structure.
This is because understanding PGA’s role and influence within the AGM is
difficult due to the self-organising traits it manifests, including its evolving
capacity to adapt its internal structure in order to cope with and manipulate
its environment. In this sense PGA is a ‘smoothing force’ (Deleuze and
Guattari 2002: 474–475) a space of intensive processes and assemblages
constructed from individual contacts and the flows of information enabled
by its ‘communication tools’. As a network it puts out ‘calls’ for action yet
is frequently invisible within those actions, its constituent actors forming
new links and co-creating temporally or place specific initiatives (DAN in
Seattle, INPEG in Prague) before re-emerging after a period of reflexive
analysis to undergo a further iteration in the next plateaux. This fluidity is
accentuated by its reluctance to be named or represented and its emphasis
upon processes of symbiosis through encounter rather than the espousal of
a political cause or goal against which its ‘successes’ could be measured.
Melucci’s (1996a) definition of movements in complex societies
corresponds closely to the pattern of relationships and activities that typify
those movements that constitute and recursively structurate PGA as a
mechanism of co-ordination. PGA activity is, in effect, an attempt to grapple
with the paradoxical relationship between collective action and the
expression of individual demands and needs which exceed the capacity of
existing political systems to accommodate systemic change. The PGA is
thus a material expression of the social movement form envisaged by
Melucci within complex societies. As Lash and Urry argue, Melucci’s stance
represents the ‘birth of political culture’ rather than the ‘transformation of
[existing] political culture’ (Lash and Urry 1994: 50). That is to say, social
movements in complex societies bring to bear a conflictual pressure upon
the symbolic logic of the system of social and economic relations that does
not operate through politics alone. Whilst many movement claims are