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

process which the Czech legal support organisation OPH also participated
in (Interview British Activists [4 and 5]). Police forces appear to have been
concentrated upon the Blue and Yellow marches associated with the highest
probability of violent confrontation. This combined with the view that
the Pink March lacked cohesion and direction created a significant freedom
of manoeuvre which was accentuated by the hybrid communication strategy
developed in the immediate pre-event phase. The apparent ‘chaos’ or
‘flow’ of Pink was in fact a form of deliberative and dialogical action based
on observation, communication and reflection upon events in more or less
real time within which individual free acts played crucial roles. In Kenney’s
words: ‘The actors are not the famous dissident intellectuals [and the ruthless
communists], but hundreds of lesser-known individuals’ (Kenney 2002:
16). We have been able to relate this account through the use of multiple
qualitative and textual techniques predicated upon presence on the ground
during the event, reinforcing the importance of Touraine’s commitment to
direct engagement with and within movements. The themes and analytical
concerns presented here are simply not available to accounts derived from
mainstream media coverage of the event and are only present in a fragmentary
form in movement media. The fusion of sources and interpretation
is ours and we acknowledge that this is an inescapable part of the process
of sense making involved in the interpretation of qualitative data. This
process requires time, immersion and interaction. 15 In particular, we take
responsibility for locating the data within the theoretical debates addressed
throughout this book.
Theory and praxis
Identities, protest dynamics and technology 65
Theoretical accounts of the global movement contestation (Hardt and
Negri 2000, 2004) emphasising the ascendancy and autonomy of capital
over state forms stress the importance of ‘smooth space’, with deregulated
global neo-liberalism representing this over-arching axiomatic. Smooth
space enables network actors to sort circuit forms of interest representation
associated with state forms delivering direct challenges to Empire. In this
process technological mediation plays a central role in both the exercise of
disciplinary effects within divisions of labour through the associated techniques
and practices. These same techniques and practices are central to the
radical uses of bio-power by the multitude operating as a network actor
constitutive of unity in diversity. In this constitutive process multiple small
world networks coalesce.
Our account of the Prague plateau has emphasised the importance of
both cutting edge and mundane technologies within this process. As Urry
(2004) argues face-to face interactions remain central in maintaining and
renewing network connections necessitating travel and a range of techniques
of self. Urry differentiates between ‘aristocratic’ and ‘egalitarian’
network forms contrasting the World Wide Web with social networks to