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

The map is not the territory 157
hood for several days whilst pulling an African American Marine around
on a leash ‘treating him as a slave’ (Wright 2005: 24). The same artefacts
and relations of subservience were subsequently used in the field as part of
the increasingly normalised control and constraint repertoires of democratic
states. Insulating national politics from the cultural impacts of such acts
is ultimately a futile task.
It is worth recalling the comparison of social movements and tectonic
plates within the complexity literature. Political ruptures occur when tensions
accumulate as an old order seeks to replicate itself bureaucratically in
the context of consumer individualism and social activism within knowledge
economies. To many the ruptured institutional trust that became a
prominent feature of the 2005 UK General Election campaign was sedimented
in February 2003 with the massive street presence demonstrating
against military action in Iraq, between one and two million people having
participated in becoming links in complex webs of communication and
meaning throughout the United Kingdom.
The subsequent exercise of autonomous executive power by Tony Blair
in aligning the United Kingdom with a US action headed by key members
of the Project for a New American Century could only be taken in the full
knowledge that such moves have become culturally contested and
Politically dangerous. Cultural politics defines the tides within which politicians
must swim: treading water whilst chanting mantras of ‘traditional
values’ is not a viable option when a global rip tide is running. A further
example is the referendum defeats on the European Constitution suffered
by the French and Dutch political elites in 2005. The desire for ‘another
Europe’ articulated by ATTAC and la Confédération paysanne striking a
deeper cord than a bureaucratic exercise in harmonisation of structures and
processes within the context of a neo-liberal axiomatic.
For us the desire for permanence underlying the third of Melucci’s
‘accommodations’ stems from the need for standing forms of cultural politics
not the institutionalisation of particular movement actors. We are arguing
that the AGM has the potential to become one of the first global
expressions of such a standing form with implications for the constituent
empires aligned with the prevailing neo-liberal axiomatic. Whilst the institutional
networks constituting the current Imperium remain dominated by
habits of mind consolidated throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
the threat to life will intensify. Capital can continue to realise profit
even during its own demise and so long as interest representation continues
to be expressed in terms of a price, this will remain the case.
The environmental and the human individual represents the impact points
of these multiple acts of profit maximisation rendering us all singularities
and underpinning the relationship between personal and planetary ‘health’
introduced by Melucci (1996a,b). We regard Melucci’s notion of a ‘planetary
action system’ as an initial attempt to incorporate the complexity inherent in
the person planet relationship within both social theory and new social