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

58 Identities, protest dynamics and technology
TF danced their ‘way down to the police’ emphasising that their dress code
combined with rhythmic drumming ‘takes you into a different space’
enabling them to take ‘a different energy to the front line.’ Armed with
nothing more than a ‘presentation of self’ expressed through costume, song,
dance and pink feather dusters they ‘spring cleaned’ police armoured
personnel carriers oblivious to the rain of projectiles directed towards them.
The desire to be at the front left TF occupying the ‘in-between’
spaces twixt police and protestors lines ‘And this sort of like stage space
appears, like a performance space seemed to appear between the rows of
policemen and the rows of people like blockading . . . we found ourselves
like going into this gap and tickling policemen’s’ toes [using] your feather
duster on the side of their face and just like performing’ (Interview British
Activist [3]).
In this account the theatrical dynamic was tipped into another modality
when from behind the SAMBA! banner male protestors produced pieces of
timber and started beating the police. ‘I was disgusted that they’d got those
sticks out because they set the whole agenda.... I was really angry because
they didn’t even use the violence productively (i.e. to break through to
the conference centre) . . . as soon as they started getting a beating they
were off...and we were left like dancing in our pink and silver and the
water canon comes out’ (Interview British Activist [3]).
The onset of violent confrontation quickly eroded the cohesion of the
Pink march as communication became difficult to sustain and the limits of
pre-event strategising were reached. Transcripts describe the rapid transition
in police personnel from ‘ordinary’, through ‘normal riot police’ to
‘these other police who looked like storm troopers . . . like something out of
Star Wars’. One officer raised ‘a thing like a sword in the air . . . and they all
start charging down the hill’. The absence of a collectively agreed set of
strategies to respond to a police charge and the fragmentation of a march
of ‘hundreds’ in the face of a charge by 20–30 Darth Vaders’ left no option
(see Figure 3.3). ‘I was expecting to go there and get hurt, you know, and I
just did not want to run away from them but standing on my own was
pretty pointless anyway...But in the end I had to [run] and then there’s this
bit on the video where this storm trooper is like wrestling me for like possession
of my pink feather duster and like whacking me across the arse’
(Interview British Activist [3]). The interviewee’s reflection upon this was
‘Well, its like that’s my stick isn’t it . . . so he’s got to take my stick (laughter)
in case I hit him with it . . . It’s like sticks and stones . . . it’s just like that’s the
thing that I’ve got that is like a gun or a truncheon, it’s my feather duster
so he’s got to have it’ (Interview British Activist [3]).
In terms of complexity theory this account renders visible the potency of
free acts in terms of emergence and the heterogenesis of a strange attractor
with the potential to strip legitimacy from the institutions of law and order.
Personal understanding of and engagement with the fear associated with