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

56 Identities, protest dynamics and technology
to face that, I want to see what happens, I want to go there. Do you
know what I mean? I want to go and stand up against the faceless man
and just see what happens, you know. But we all got dressed up in our
pink and silver and we went on the subway and we were all dressed up
and whooping and excited. We get to the park and there’s just pink and
silver everywhere at the park and that’s all really exciting. And yeah, I
mean, the whole day, I did enter a space where there wasn’t time to be
fearful, there wasn’t time to think, it was just a time when you were getting
on with it and you’re reacting and you’re doing and I very much
wanted to be there at the front. I had a few like close shaves where I
should have got whacked and I didn’t and I did feel blessed on the day
and there’s footage on the video where this coppers throwing bits of
wood at me and I’m just like dancing away like this and they just sort
of like bounce in front of me and go over my head. We’re looking at it
afterwards and going that’s amazing.
(Interview with British Activist [3])
TF’s frustration applied symmetrically to both police and security
personnel and protestors, particularly those engaged in ‘black bloc’ tactics
that include the use of violence. Such set piece encounters oppose groups of
young men dressed in black, their bodies representing the ‘front line’ of a
conflict situation stimulating the release of fight and flight hormones. There
is thus an active rejection of violence in the Pink approach which regards
this as a problem for both ‘sides’ engaged in conflict. Visually this symmetry
was best captured in images early in the Prague action where police clad
in black confronted demonstrators holding placards declaring the assembly
illegal whilst the black clad demonstrators lofted their own placards bearing
a range of slogans (see Figure 3.1).
To TF this contact zone was precisely the field of action where their
selected repertoires of intervention had to be targeted as it was here that the
contravention of the prevailing norms of interaction carried most meaning.
By inserting playfulness into the front line TF achieved both personal and
collective aims by simultaneously perturbating the dominant media discourses
associated with anti-globalisation actions by using means that
embodied the desired, non-violent, ends. A group of women dressed as
‘pink fairies’ (see Figure 3.2) thus sought to insert themselves into the contact
zone between the opposing black clad men in the midst of an event that
local and international press coverage predicted would be typified by
extreme violence and destruction of property – ‘war’.
The apparent vulnerability of TF evoked a ‘masculine’ impulse to protect
the group which was related by their spokesperson detailing the efforts
being taken to shield them from police lines eliciting the response ‘we don’t
want to be protected. We’re not princesses in distress, we really don’t want
protecting, we don’t need people protecting us, in fact we want to be at the
front...we’re here to be front line’ (Interview British Activist 3: 185–189).
Emerging from behind a huge pink banner, bearing the slogan ‘SAMBA!’,