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

messages spread virallv through the neighborhoods and a variety
of metropolitan circuits.
Second, media become tools for our collective
self-production. We are able to create new truths only when we
cease to be individual and constitute ourselves in our
relationships to others, opening ourselves to a common
language. Making the truth is a collective linguistic act of
creativity. Sometimes the creation and diffusion of political
slogans in demonstrations constitute an act of truth making. The
discourse of the 99 percent versus the 1 percent that emerged
from the Occupy movements, for example, illuminated the reality
of social inequality and dramatically shifted the terms of public
debate. A more complex example is the truth created by the 2001
Argentine slogan, "Que se vayan todos" ("Throw them all out").
The slogan expressed in condensed form not only the corruption
of politicians, political parties, and the constitutional system
itself, but also the potential for a new, participator}' democracy.
Such productions of truth also involve the creation of political
affects by negotiating the terms of our being together in relation
to each other. Expressing these political affects in being together
embodies a new truth.
Real communication among singularities in networks thus
requires an encampment. This is the kind of self-learning
experience and knowledge production that takes place, for
example, in student occupations. The moment feels magical and
enlightening because in being together a collective intelligence
and a new kind of communication are constructed. In the
occupied squares of 2011, from Tahrir to Puerta del Sol to
Zuccotti Park, new truths were produced through discussion,
conflict, and consensus in assemblies. Working groups and
commissions on topics from housing rights and mortgage
foreclosures to gender relations and violence function as both
self-learning experiences and means to spread knowledge
production. Anyone who has lived through such an encampment
recognizes how new knowledges and new political affects are
created in the corporeal and intellectual intensity of the
interactions.
The clearest contemporary' example of the communicative
capacity of an encampment is perhaps the decades-long