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

144 Global movement as a parallelogram of forces
south’ simultaneously averse to the techno-scientific rationality of western
modernity but conducive to a ‘sociology of emergences’.
Complimenting this ‘southern epistemology’ is the return in the ‘north’ of
the aesthetic and the affective through multiple repertoires of creative action
and autonomous cultural production. Such an aesthetic has deep roots in
radical art practices, such as Dada, the surrealists and the Situationist
International (SI 2003, Jappe 1999) and was a strong feature of the 1960s
movements. Jerry Rubin, a US activist/author of that period described it in the
following terms, ‘Life is a theatre and we are the guerrillas attacking the shrines
of authority...The street is the stage. You are the star of the show and everything
we’re taught is up for grabs’ (cited in Stephens 1998: 97). The end of post
Second World War bi-polar geo-politics has been accompanied by a resurgence
in the performative appropriation of public spaces for the enactment of critical
messages. Such repertoires were part of the transition to globalisation.
Poland’s ‘Orange Alternative’, a colour distinct from both socialist red and
Papal yellow, engaged in an extended communal party deploying street theatre
and iconic acts such as banner drops. Orange Alternative became a focal point
of conversation across Poland. In Wroclaw there were no factory occupations
mirroring Solidarity actions because ‘We had the streets, so we didn’t need to
strike’. (Kenny 2002: 224). These forms of action erupted across Europe, the
Americas and Australia as the global south burned GM crops, resisted
deforestation and occupied factories and; the AGM is the network of networks
capable of holding these vectors in tension as a parallelogram of forces.
Elsewhere as we described earlier (Chapter 3), Tactical Frivolity (TF), radical
cheerleaders, the Yes Men, the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination
and countless other imaginative, aesthetic, affective and self-organising groups
have proliferated. The apparently marginal, defiantly subversive and profoundly
internationalist character of such practices enables them to escape
easy assimilation. Consequently, the play of these lines as vectors of force and
flight allows questions about the boundaries of art, politics and culture under
neo-liberal globalisation to be re-thought and reframed. The planeterisation of
these tendencies, the epistemology of thinking-through action and the return
of a radical aesthetic within the AGM expressed through the parallelogram of
forces marks a return to desire as becoming, to the affective, to rhythms of
speech, music, and modes of movement as important political terrain. This
extends movement repertoires of connectivity into new assemblages that strive
to maintain open boundary conditions and thus continue to find different and
other registers of antagonistic expression leading the Zapatistas to argue that:
The revolution in general is no longer imagined according to socialist
patterns of realism, that is, as men and women stoically marching
behind a red, waving flag towards a luminous future: rather it has
become a sort of carnival.
(Subcommandante Marcos cited in Rachenburg E.
and Heau-Lambert C. 1998)