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

Such engagement is central in discerning both specific repetitions and
innovations and the patterning of systemic responses both within the
movement domain and the public domain. The public domain responds
most promptly through front line police operations, formal political
debate and legislation which tends to structure dominant public discourses
(see Chapter 4). At the local level the sites of concrete contestation, particularly
those associated with longstanding environmental camps, attracted
significant support within local communities divided over the contested
development. In the United Kingdom road protests achieved iconic prominence
through activists constructing tunnel complexes to avoid eviction
akin to those of the Vietcong underground systems.
Carnivalesque street parties and other playful forms of protest featured
in a period of prominent innovation in repertoires of action. In Seattle, the
dramaturgical presence on the streets played a significant role in terms of
public sphere registers with much emphasis being given to the slogan
‘Teamsters and Turtles Unite’ reflecting the presence of union contingents
and activists dressed as turtles. Such carnivalesque performances reflect
complex relations of trust and the ontological positioning of actors towards
prevailing authority structures. Public performances parodying, caricaturing
and lampooning ‘the system’ have to be understood as historically persistent
forms of protest during phase shifts in public quiescence.
Entering such spaces is a step into another world, a world where symbolic
coding inverts the meaning and sign value of the familiar (see Chapter 4). The
genealogical engagement with this domain requires some sense of these
sedimented historical states and the associated street dynamics.
Culture, carnival and critique
Prefiguration and emergence 33
that the campaign should not be open to this kind of groups, due to
previous experiences of instrumentalisation from their side.
● Finally there are groups which, being directly affected by
globalisation, have not yet achieved the level of analysis and organisation
that similar groups in the South have achieved. We refer to
the unemployed and to small producers (both agricultural producers
and small firms). These groups have the potential of creating something
similar to the Southern people’s movements. But we believe
that this potential can only be developed by an internal process which
will probably last quite a long time.
6 ....
To be loosely caught up in festival is to be ambivalently (dis)positioned at the
borderlines of a given social order and its ritual (re)construction. It is to be at
the crossroads between order and chaos
(Pfohl 1992: 214)