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

156 The map is not the territory
order on the edge of chaos necessary to avoid the replication of habits of
mind. How then can this cultural politics achieve the kinds of systemic
impacts that Melucci was seeking in his accommodations? Our short
answer is: by remaining cultural in order to impact upon the political and
the Political.
The network of networks we have engaged with here has not assumed
that it must be listened to but started instead from the position that the
movement of movements must make itself heard. By embracing direct
action as a preferred modus operandi rather than a tactic of desperation
and last resort, key elements of the movement entered a nomadic war of
manoeuvre. By engaging in successive sieges, high profile global summits
were effectively driven from prominent public venues into walled citadels.
Analytically there are significant differences between movements that seek
to violently overthrow a social system and movements that seek to challenge
a social system using direct action. The AGM falls firmly within the
latter category something that explains continuing levels of public support
for and adoption of direct action stances despite the attempt to demonise
protestors. In order to be heard a ‘radical flank’ is sometimes necessary.
Despite a massive asymmetry in discursive resources, the AGM has been
central to the placing of question marks over the neo-liberal axiomatic at
the global level in a way that resonates with the experience of people(s)
worldwide. As we have shown, in contemporary fractured states it is elements
of the finance state and advocates of turbo-capitalism who have most
rapidly recognised the challenges posed by this movement(s) whilst the
security state has reacted along predictable lines, frequently leading to an
increase in public support for direct action. The liminality of network
actors is necessary for the cultural and political creativity that enables the
declaration of stakes that is crucial to the prophetic role of movement identified
by Melucci. Permanence, grievance and interest representation are the
concerns of Social Movement Organisations and NGOs and must not be
conflated with social movement. In our view, any organisation with a pension
fund is not a social movement. Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth,
Oxfam, WWF and so on are not social movements. They are however,
Social Movement Organisations, which now have somewhere to turn when
their limit for manoeuvre within the formal systems of interest representation
is reached. This is the arena of cultural politics that declares and defines
stakes and implicitly sets thresholds of ethical and moral acceptability.
As Halliday (1998) argues ethical and moral issues now extend to the
sphere of international relations. This leaves the actions of national leaders
on world stages open to moral judgement and the incremental extension of
international law at a time when images of immoral acts such as those from
inside detention camps in Iraq achieve rapid prominence. A Western journalist
embedded with a front line unit in the assault on Iraq relates the experience
of one platoon member during US Survival, Evasion, Resistance and
Escape training. The Texan in question was forced to wear a Ku Klux Klan