Chapter 1: Subjective Figures of the Crisis ... - Negri in English

or even ideas but rather through the construction of political
affects, which requires a physical proximity.
The encampments and occupations of 2011 have
rediscovered this truth of communication. Facebook, Twitter, the
Internet, and other kinds of communications mechanisms are
useful, but nothing can replace the being together of bodies and
the corporeal communication that is the basis of collective
political intelligence and action. In all the occupations
throughout the United States and around the world, from Rio de
Janeiro to Ljubljana, from Oakland to Amsterdam, even in cases
when they lasted only a short time, the participants experienced
the power of creating new political affects through being
together. Perhaps it is significant in this regard that the call to
occupy Wall Street that appeared in Adbusters in the summer of
2011 was cast in artistic terms and was indeed heeded by, among
others, artist collectives in New York. An occupation is a kind of
happening, a performance piece that generates political affects.
The middle classes and the traditional Left also recognize
how much we are integrated in media systems and how much we
are impoverished by them, but the only response they can
manage is a combination of nostalgia and old-fashioned Left
moralism. They know that as media move ever deeper into our
lives, from print and broadcast to electronic media, they create
experiences that are increasingly superficial. The slow act of
composing a personal letter to mail in the post has been almost
entirely eclipsed by the rapidity and brevity of e-mail messages.
Complex narratives of your life situation, longings, and desires
have been reduced to the typical questions of social media:
Where are you right now What are you doing The habits and
practices of friendship have been diluted in the online procedure
of "friending." Perhaps the extraordinarily widespread support
for the occupations can be explained in part by the fact that the
middle classes and the traditional Left recognize that the
movements are attacking problems from which they also suffer
but are incapable of addressing.
The Securitized
It's dizzying to think about all the information constantly