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

Prefiguration and emergence 35
social movement organisations or a consolidated political ideology
(see Chapter 3). The free radical is committed to the promulgation of inclusionary
processes optimising consensus decision making not the clearer
articulation of an already formalised interest. The resultant interest representations
are the product of the process resulting in a temporary formalisation
open to further refinement. This sediments a process of ‘becoming’
within the AGM which is one reason why the work of Deleuze and
Guatarri (2002) is so central here.
There is an explicit foregrounding of ‘civilisation’ in the work of Deleuze
and Guatarri, derived in part from engagement with psychoanalytic theory
where the term assumes analytical significance, rather than society. Here,
Deleuze and Guattari’s prioritisation of difference diverges from the
Freudian emphasis on the achievement of a sound gendered identity
through the resolution of the underlying tensions of polymorphous sexuality.
Desire for Deleuze and Guattari is thus not centred on a pervasive sense of
‘lack’ as in the work of Lacan but as an active affirmation of life, embracing
and producing difference. The celebration of difference and libratory
potential of desire were prominent features of the Situationist International
(Jappe 1999), and were linked to practices of détournement and the construction
of ‘situations’ intended to destabilise the dominant coding of
signs. Such practices raise issues of subjectivity, the conscious and unconscious
mind which we acknowledge but have no intention of engaging with
here. Notions of the conscious/sub/unconscious mind are of course present
in the classical sociological cannon – ‘conscience collective’, ‘false
consciousness’ and a plethora of other terms evoke this domain resulting in
the centrality of contemporary debates about identity (see Chapter 7).
For present purposes, the important point is that the enactment of
carnivalesque repertoires as public protest enables acts of re and de territorialisation
through symbolically coding wider social stakes. Embodying and
performing the death of the planet as a consequence of the prevailing capitalist
axiomatic produces laminar flows of meaning. Following Appadurai’s
notion of ‘scapes’ (1990) the notion of flows have been central to discussions
of globalisation (Lash and Urry 1994, Urry 2000) despite its tendency to
subsume agency. Whilst laminar flows appear smooth, they are composed of
multiple layers which interact at a molecular level. Changes in these interactions
can precipitate significant ‘phase shifts’ in the anatomy of a flow
introducing turbulence, for example. Throughout this work we approach the
agency of particular collective and individual actors as analogous to these
molecular prompts. This is particularly important in relation to flows of
meaning which are collectively constituted and enacted whilst containing the
residues of other minoritarian meanings subsumed through the process of
consensus formation. When such flows encounter obstacles their laminar
nature can lead to the re-emergence of residual meanings which become
appropriate in changed circumstances. 2 Paying attention to the resultant
discourses and discursive contestation in terms of repetitions and iteration
between global, national and local levels is a key genealogical task.