Organisation-of-the-Organisationless

Organisation of the Organisationless
Network-System and Network-Movement
At the height of the alterglobalisation moment,
activist collective The Free Association posed the
anything but straightforward question: ‘what is the
movement?’ Appropriately, the answer was anything but
straightforward: ‘We do not think we can conceive of
“the movement” as a thing, as an entity [a noun] which
can be defined. Instead, we are thinking of the movement
in terms of the moving [verb] of social relations.’ 13
There are obvious difficulties in employing the
concept of ‘movement’ to describe moments such as
the present one. 14 The word inevitably suggests some
degree of cohesion or community regarding goals,
identity, practices and self-awareness – all of which
would seem to be lacking, or present only in the vaguest
sense, in the cases at hand. On the contrary, these cases
seem to subsume several different movements – their
goals, identities and practices – acting in greater or
lesser synergy, with more or less coherence, in a single
conjuncture. This is a first problem, cognitive as well
as political, faced by attempts to apply the concept of
movement to these phenomena: the risk of either doing
violence to their overall diversity, by making one part
stand in for the whole, or being capable of grasping them
only in terms too generic to be of much use.
That Hardt and Negri’s concept of ‘multitude’
gained as much traction as it did around the turn of this
century was no doubt related to its seeming capacity
to solve this problem. At once one and many, deployed
in the singular but denoting a plurality, the multitude
is ‘a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of
relations, which is not homogeneous or identical with
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