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

Global movement as a parallelogram of forces 143
democracy and antagonistic conflict overflow borders and are iterated
through various scales from the local to the global.
This leads us to suggest that the AGM derives as much of its antagonistic
quality from its capacity for cultural intervention and experimentation as it
does from its acts of political and economic contestation many of which are
already culturally rendered through laying siege to the signs of informationalised
capital flows, wherein the capitalist axiomatic of free markets; corporate
power; brand identities and so forth is creatively disrupted, re-presented
and re-appropriated by a ‘hacker class’ (Wark 2004) of activists. Their
ability to conjugate the virtual singularities inhering in communications
technologies and the desire for co-presence creates new categories and uses
for interactive domains – Indymedia, wikis, pod-casts etc. In this and many
other ways the AGM works with the raw material of subjectivity and symbol,
preferring poetic utterances to political rhetoric and deploying carnival
rather than collectivism as its modus operandi, in celebration of the (eternal)
return of forceful bodies-politic (Protevi 2001: 3):
In carnival the body is always changing, constantly becoming, eternally
unfinished. Inseparable from nature and fused to other bodies around
it, the body remembers that it is not a detached, atomised being, as it
allows its erotic impulse to jump from body to body, sound to sound,
mask to mask, to swirl across the streets, filling every nook and cranny,
every fold of flesh. During carnival the body with its pleasures and
desires, can be found everywhere, luxuriating in its freedom and inverting
the everyday.
(Notes From Nowhere 2003: 175–176)
The self-conscious adoption by the AGM of artistic modes of expression,
seeking space for ritornellos of the subject, movement refrains and
‘rhythms of resistance’, 6 helps constitute a complex ontology of signification
(Chapter 3). Therefore, as we have repeatedly argued it remains inaccessible
to social movement models of political exchange that operate within
the conceptual confines of the nation state and frame analyses focussing on
collective identity as a mechanism of expressing political claims or grievances.
This dwelling in the cultural and the manipulation of codes and
behaviours is a well-worn line of flight for network actors in social movement
networks, it marks an exodus from the ‘political’, from institutionalised
assimilation and mechanisms of capture and reaffirms the importance
of factors otherwise downplayed in ‘politics as usual’ (Stephens 1998).
The AGM thus proceeds through a cultural politics (Jordan and Weedon
1995, Osterweil 2004b) that questions the reification of the political as the
preserve of structures, institutions and frameworks that are separate
from, or exclude the everyday. This is a familiar trajectory in the ‘south’
where Alvarez argues ‘all social movements enact a cultural politics’
(Alvarez et al. 1998: 6), thus supporting De Sousa Santos (2003) who
suggests that plateaux such as the WSF, constitute an ‘epistemology of the