Collectivism after Modernism - autonomous learning - Blogs

276 Brian Holmes
with no importance given to race or colors, the power of money humiliates dignities,
insults honesties and assassinates hopes.
On the signal follow your color / Let the Carnival begin. 7
The music was supposed to come from speakers carried in backpacks.
But no one could hear it above the roar. Four groups divided anyway,
not exactly according to color; one went off track and ended up at London
Bridge, to hold a party of its own. The others took separate paths through
the medieval labyrinth of Europe’s largest Wnancial district, converging toward
a point that had been announced only by word of mouth and kept secret
from all but a few: the London International Financial Futures & Options
Exchange, or LIFFE building, the largest derivatives market in Europe—the
pulsing, computerized, hypercompetitive brain of the beast. The trick was
to parade anarchically through the winding streets, swaying to the samba
bands, inviting passing traders and bank employees to take off their ties or
heels and join the party, while a few smaller groups rushed ahead, to dodge
tremblingly into alleyways and await that precise moment when a number
of cars would inexplicably stop and begin blocking a stretch of Lower Thames
Street. The sound system, of course, was already there. As protestors shooed
straggling motorists out of the area, larger groups began weaving in, hoisting
puppets to the rhythm of the music and waving red, black, and green Reclaim
the Streets (RTS) Xags in the air. The Carnival had begun, inside the “Square
Mile” of London’s prestigious Wnancial district—and the police, taken entirely
by surprise, could do nothing about it.
Banners went up: “our resistance is as global as capital,”
“the earth is a common treasury for all,” “revolution is the only
option.” Posters by the French graphic arts group Ne Pas Plier (“do not
fold”) were glued directly on the walls of banks, denouncing “money world,”
proclaiming “resistance-existence,” or portraying the earth as a giant burger
waiting to be consumed. The site had also been chosen for its underground
ecology: a long-buried stream runs below Dowgate Hill Street and Cousin
Lane, right in front of the LIFFE building. A wall of cement and breeze
blocks was built before the entrance to the exchange, while a Wre hydrant
was opened out in the street, projecting a spout of water thirty feet into the
air and symbolically releasing the buried river from the historical sedimentations
of capital. The protestors danced beneath the torrent. In a historical
center of bourgeois discipline, inhibitions became very hard to Wnd. This
was a political party: a riotous event, in the Dionysian sense of the word.
The quality of such urban uprisings is spontaneous, unpredictable,
because everything depends on the cooperative expression of a multitude
of groups and individuals. Still these events can be nourished, charged
in advance with logical and imaginary resources. The six months preceding