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

The map is not the territory 151
signals of growing planetary imbalances, elements of the AGM declare
global collective stakes within a philosophy based on the recognition of
difference as generative and creative, and expressed simply through the
slogan ‘unity in diversity’, where diversity is the becoming of a plane of
immanence, catalysed by difference:
Difference is not diversity. Diversity is given, but difference is that by
which the given is given, that by which the given is given as diverse.
(Deleuze 1994: 280)
Conceptually then the slogan ‘unity in diversity’ resonates with the concept
of the multitude defined by Negri (2004 http://www.makeworlds.org/
comment/reply/104) as a ‘whole of singularities’; an outcome and effect of
the interplay of difference within open systems that are maintained by the
dynamic iteration of practices, procedures and structures devised to facilitate
consensual outcomes through encounter and deliberation. As Didek
(2004) points out, iteration is correlative with a Deleuzian emphasis upon
becoming thus highlighting the ‘proper’ Deleuzian paradox that ‘something
truly new can only emerge through repetition’ (Didek 2004: 12).
Melucci (1989, 1996a) makes similar points about the ‘epistemological
limitation’ of both sides in the debate about the ‘novelty’ of the ‘new’ social
movements where contemporary movement phenomena are perceived as
‘unified empirical objects’ – ‘living characters moving and acting upon a
stage of history’, rather than as combinatory effects of forms of action
impacting upon different levels of a social system, containing diverse goals
and belonging to different phases of the development of particular historical
systems (1989: 43). In both instances process comes to the fore, allowing us
to pay attention to the diachronic and synchronic elements of movements
and to acknowledge how the process of iteration can re-configure the
relationship between the virtual (as the quality of potential immanent to an
event) and the actual (as the degree to which that potential was realised).
Therefore, as Didek argues, ‘what repetition repeats is the not the way the
past “effectively was” but the virtuality inherent to the past and betrayed
by its past actualisation’ (2004: 12).
The iteration amongst movement milieu of practices that ostensibly
reside within the ‘cultural’, affective gestures, performances, encounters
with and articulations of difference indicate a cultural politics here which
decisively breaks the limits of the system of ‘politics’ opening up multiple
lines of f(l)ight for all parties. In emphasising these multiple lines of f(l)ight
we depart from Hardt and Hegri’s emphasis upon the use of smooth space
to strike directly at Empire. We have characterised these differences
graphically in terms of the institutional anatomy of the prevailing global
axiomatic, key power relations and avenues through which cultural
perturbation is constituted through reflexive framing, plateaux and resultant
parallelograms of force (see Figures 8.1 and 8.2).