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

68 States fight back
when trust in political, economic and scientific institutions is withdrawn or
severely attenuated through the day-to-day experience of neo-liberal
‘progress’. The extension of terrorist tropes to AGM actors creates ‘enemies
within’ implicitly linked to generic network evils associated with stateless
terrorist actors, both of which are constructed as enemies of progress as
conceived within Western ‘advanced barbarism’. 1 In the United Kingdom
these themes are particularly prominent in relation to animal rights campaigns
against the rearing and use of animals for laboratory experiments.
The attribution of ‘anti-science’ stances threatening future economic prosperity
arising from sunrise genetic industries emphasises issues relating to
substantive rationalities associated with modernity. 2 This highlights the
disparity between these and activist attempts to extend ‘rights’ based arguments
to animals, reflecting ethical arguments formalised by Singer (1979)
and developed from a range of philosophical stances (O’Neill 2002).
O’Neill’s (2002) recognition that the human animal is the only one able
to formalise the interests of other species and exercise choice over quality
of life issues and species existence adds a critical dimension to human
choice in the constitution of sustainable futures. Societal choices in such
areas are reflections of the moral and ethical worth attributed to the organic
realm with implications for intergenerational equity associated with sustainable
development and bio-diversity. These debates are currently in a
state of further extension as the mapping of the human genome raises issues
of human diversity when confronted by the prospect of ‘neo-liberal eugenics’
(Habermas 2003).
Other forms of extension accompany the security states’ attempts to police
the ‘siege of the signs’. Policing and surveillance operations increasingly
ensnare ‘ordinary citizens’ as measures conceived in relation to an imagined
enemy reveal the heavy hand of the security state in more and more sites.
The actions of the security state are complemented by the asymmetrical use
of the legal system by corporate actors attempting to silence concerns
expressed by movement actors and ‘ordinary’ citizens. The prosecution of
two London Greenpeace activists by McDonalds, the McLibel case, is a
particularly prominent example of this wider process of ‘legal intimidation’
(Donson 2000). 3 The United States’ unilateral disregard for human rights in
the context of stateless terrorist networks adds a further dimension to these
concerns, threatening to contaminate and erode progressive rights based
discourses within the international community.
In the context of Empire these developments represent the enactment of
a US orchestrated imperium modelled upon Rome intersecting with and
eliding a number of key discourses through terror tropes. Once constituted,
such discursive forms result in multiple readings constituting both discursive
and material contestation that is outside the security state’s control.
The attempt to create an hegemony of terror tropes encounters numerous
obstacles including the historically sedimented memories of previous security
state attempts to suppress the exercise of popular democratic will.