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

7 The death of collective
identity?
Global movement as a
parallelogram of forces
A force is applied to another force: They form a parallelogram of forces.
They do not cancel one another; they are composed, according to a law. The
play among forces is reformist: it produces compromises. But the game is
never between two forces, it is among countless forces; the parallelogram
gives rise to far more complex multidimensional figures.
(Eco 1986)
Introduction
In this chapter we argue that plateaux facilitate the multiplication of forces
through artisanal production in subjective, material and symbolic domains
with the resultant vectors expressing both force and flight, thereby exposing
the axiomatic of neo-liberalism to challenges that cannot be met by the
application of equal and opposite forces within the fashion of a hegemonic
struggle. This ‘asymmetric’ terrain of struggle is frequently addressed by
political elites through the application of ‘simple’ solutions, including violent
intervention by the state, such as the pre-emptive attacks against protesters
in Genoa (Chapter 4) or populist attempts at assimilation through global
governance structures. 1 This chapter explores the force relations within this
field of struggle by developing the account of the antagonistic orientation
of the AGM (Chapter 5) and further distinguishing the composition of
relations and forces constituting the AGM (Chapter 6), by explaining how
collective identity approaches to social movements are problematised by the
emergence of a global movement milieu animated through plateaux.
We argue that through reflexive framing and plateaux global movements
are able to hold in dynamic tension the expressive and transformative
potential of a number of ideological and discursive traditions. Not as an
integrated collective identity but as a parallelogram of forces that enables
the realisation and multiplication of force relations through the exploration
and actualisation by the AGM of the virtual singularities (Protevi 2001:
6–10) present within global civil society (GCS). Hybridity, diversity and difference
combine here in forms of antagonistic collective action rendering
identity and cultural politics material in a proximate sense and highly