RE: AUT: RE: Re: imaginary communities

[".: s0metim3s :." <s0metim3s@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

: Ange, what I'm most curious about is
: the ways in which cycles of social
: conflict seem to generate layers of
: people who want to challenge (some,
: but rarely all) the hierarchies that
: characterise a given class
: composition. Some identify as 'active',
: and then seek to carve out a
: space for themselves as specialists
: (usually by 'representing' others);
: a few want to challenge that division
: of labour as well. I wonder if we
: can then talk about a single political
: stratum (ceto evokes stratum more
: than class to my mind) that stretches
: across all classes and political
: formations, and that unites the great
: majority of politicos of whatever
: stripe in the shared role (or
: aspiration) to speak on behalf of others
: ...

No, I don't think there's one, shared space among
activists ('older' and 'newer'). But there is a
stratification that similarly arises in the
ascription to oneself of a revolutionary
consciousness and claims for recognition, however
remodulated by given and newer forms of
labour/industry, and at whichever precise point
those claims for recognition might be located
along the political-juridical line: the state /
emergent state forms / state-in-waiting.

There are the obvious versions: the correlation
between 'global justice' discourses and
supra-national or global state formation.  Or
those which are more heavily mediated through some
notion of 'nature' or 'the planet' as probably the
most emphatically transcendental of the
placeholders of representation.

But less obvious ones, esp among those who tend to
overtly position themselves as part of 'a new way
of doing things.' One of the earliest
manifestations of the latter (on the eve of the
s11/anti-WEF protests) was the expression of
frustration at the 'lack' of recognition that
arises in decentralised protests.  Blithely
erasing the concrete debates that occured at the
time about the connection between police violence
and mediation, the only thing that seemed to be at
stake was whether or not certain people and groups
had manged to accrue their sufficient
remunerations of social-political capital. Now,
it's pretty obvious that people wanted recognition
beyond simply their own activities -- they wanted
'positioning.'  This is a 'frustration' that
various people have tried to scratch, in numerous
ways, for the last four years. And it's a
'frustration' (or desire) that's hardly ever
linked to particular forms of labour/industry:
academic, cultural, media, etc.  This is the bit
that I'm pretty sure will go unexplored -- too
close for comfort.

That said, the strict demarcations between
so-called older and newer political strata can be
overstated: the re-integration of sections of
post-summit protest milieux into the Left (Trades
Hall, Greens, NUS) -- or at least a kind of
reconciliation and 'bridge-building' -- was
deliberate and undertaken with far less antagonism
than I would have expected given the critiques of
those which were aired prior to and during those
protests.

Moreover (and here is the predominant version),
while there was something of a heamorraghing from
older-styled political groupings (eg: trots) into
so-called autonome politics, that was generally
marked by a bifurcation between content and form.

Autonome-related politics went off, but for the
most part as content, as the assertion of a better
form of revolutionary consciousness, distinction,
a better brand name; not as something that might
critically engage with forms of current or
emerging political practice, let alone the
correlation between, for instance, marketting and
the cultural-academic industries.  Here, people
read Negri for a newer version of a revolutionary
subject (a pat on the back), Agamben for a better
theory on the academic circuit, class
compositional analysis for a way to compose
factions by derogating others as 'in the past,'
noborder stuff sans the reformulation of
'movement' that this implied -- which it is not at
all that difficult to do.  But those analyses,
where they escaped those readings, were rendered
toothless in the process.

But the most distinctive instance of the above
that I recall was the very day after the escapes
at Woomera, with someone saying to me, "Wow, it's
been amazing. Think of all the films, books,
articles we can do!"  Now, there's absolutely
nothing wrong with producing any of those things,
but I have to say I was taken aback at the speed
of the claim.  And this is so rarely accompanied
by a reflection on the pressure to be visible, to
circulate, to innovate and so forth that shapes
cultural-academic production (as an industry), and
what this might mean for how, what and why one
produces any given bit of media, let alone how to
try and navigate it's pitfalls.  It's okay to talk
about capitalism, about the dull compulsion of
money (or at least cultural capital), but it
apparently only happens to other people.  Defining
oneself as an 'activist' is a form of levitation.

Angela
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