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

126 Beyond resistance to global nexus
Conclusions
What is new about contemporary movements is first of all that information
resources are at the centre of collective conflicts. Conflicts shift to the codes,
to the formal frameworks of knowledge, and this shift is made possible by the
self-reflexive capacities of complex systems. The self-reflexive form of action
is thus another specific characteristic of recent movements. The decline of
movements as ‘characters’ signifies the dissolution of the ‘subject’, and an
increase in the formal capacity for self-reflection. Finally the ‘global interdependence’
or ‘planetarization’ of action profoundly alters the environmental
conditions in which actors are formed and act; the field of opportunities
and constraints of action is redefined within a multipolar and transnational
system.
(Melucci 1989: 74)
The emergence of self-organised, participatory spaces of encounter,
deliberation and co-ordination amongst social movements at the global
level constitutes the shadow realm of Melucci’s planetary action system.
A militantly redefined global civil society that can create spaces that are
autonomous from formal and institutionalised processes of global governance,
whilst maintaining links to means of political representation and
exerting social force through the cultural expression of singularity and difference.
This presents unique challenges to social theorists and social movement
theory, requiring analysis of material and immaterial flows, including
people, mobilities, technologies and knowledge practices as they unfold
synchronically in intensive encounters and diachronically through the
diffusion of weak links that reconfigure virtual networks.
Using complexity theory as a means of describing nested systems and
posing conceptual categories in order to differentiate the field of relations
between networks, actors and spaces, we suggest that the WSF is a system
that instantiates the phase space of global civil society composed of competing
attractors that maintain the system at a point of self-organised criticality,
where collective action at the edge of chaos becomes possible. Thus,
we are arguing that the ‘open space’ metaphor that has proven so popular
amongst those who seek to defend the forum from processes of political
capture and stratification has resonance because of its common sense formulation
of an immanent field of potential revealed by processes of selforganisation
at the planetary level. In this context PGA instantiates the
antagonist attractor of the AGM (Chesters 2004a), a ‘pure’ space of antagonism
that perturbates GCS through its ‘co-ordination’ of conflictual
actors, thereby maintaining the centrality of systemic challenge to neo-liberal
axioms, without necessitating those actors lose contact with other means of
political or social mediation.
One conclusion we draw from these observations is that the AGM as an
antagonistic attractor has played a pivotal role in creating and maintaining
an open and adaptive system of relations in GCS through its insistence upon