An extended ‘we’
Here’s a thought that occurred to me after Sunday’s meeting (Keir will be posting notes from that later). It’s not very well articulated but it might prompt something more coherent…
At the meeting a few people talked about ‘an extended we’ as one of the signs that we’re winning. What does that mean? I think it’s to do with feeling connected – not emotionally, figuratively or psychologically, but really connected – to other people, so that when things were kicking off in Seattle, say, we felt as one with those who were there. Or rather we were as one with them – this isn’t a subjective thing.
All this seems airy-fairy (or just plain bollocks) because it’s hard to avoid talking about it in subjective, individualist or idealist terms, even though we’re trying to get away from all those dualisms. Maybe another way into this is to think again about social movements as processes not things. It’s counter-intuitive because it means thinking about ourselves not as ourselves (individuals bound up in revolutionary politics) but as a collection of processes. The moments when we’re winning are those when we can see social relations moving. At those times our movement isn’t a movement of us (activists vs others) but a moving of social relations, an unfreezing of all that is fixed.
Maybe there’s a link here to Marx’s idea of the proletariat being the class that abolishes itself as a class (as opposed to those who worship & defend the most fixed and static notions of what class is, as a thing). We felt we were winning because we weren’t ‘we’ any more (sorry, this makes a bit more sense if you read it out loud); maybe we’d even abolished any idea of a ‘we’, because there was no outside, no ‘they’ (this relates to a comment made the other night which questioned the whole idea of winning because the way we’d framed it suggested someone else would be losing). This moving of social relations is like the breaking of an ice-floe: it has no edges or boundaries (“this group are in our movement, this group aren’t” etc), or else the boundaries are always in motion; the moving ripples through everywhere – absolutely everywhere.
Of course when this happens, the ‘equilibrium’ of everyday life is shattered. Capital likes to present itself as fixed, immutable or natural (it depends on an endless production of novelty, but it is the same old same old). So maybe that’s one of the things about winning: it’s when we (an extended ‘we’) reveal the social relations of capital as partial, temporary.
brian
8 Comments, Comment or Ping
brian
(I know it’s bad form to comment on your own post but I just can’t silence the voices in my head…)
So how do this ‘extended we’ come about? I think a lot of this is to do with alliances. And this is where counter-summit mobilisations can come into play. Seattle is the example usually quoted, but at Gleneagles Dissent! made a brave attempt to break out of its straitjacket, even if it was ultimately out-manoeuvred by Make Poverty History. Or you could look at the fight over the CPE in France in Spring of this year. Alliances proceed by contagion, viral propagation. They’re temporary and uncontrollable, which is why they can be so richly productive. People get drawn in from all over. The ‘we’ that emerges is different from the ‘we’ that starts. New problematics are thrown up: look at the shift in approach to G8 summits from Genoa to Evian to Gleneagles. All of this shows that Keir’s notion of an alliance with Jeremy Clarkson over road-tax cameras is not quite as crazy as it seems. It’s a way of mixing it up… and then seeing what happens. It’s the same cry that goes out to the midfield war machine at Elland Road: “Get into ’em!” “FUCK’EM UP!” “Get into ’em!” “FUCK’EM UP!”
Dec 6th, 2006
David
I don’t think this is airy-fairy at all. But it is hard to express. I think this stuff makes sense to us — I know what I mean and I half-know what Brian means — it’s sometimes difficult to put into words. Anyway, the struggle to express ourselves is productive, I think.
I love the ‘ripples’ metaphor. Perhaps simpilar to Harry Cleaver’s ‘ocean currents’, in his piece entitled
‘Deep Currents Rising’. And I keep returning to other scientific concepts and metaphors: fractals, fields, nonlinearity, emergent properities of systems and, even more interesting, the way some scientists are starting to think about possibility of what we might call immanent human spirit (or should that be Spirit?). [Post-it note to self: develop these ideas so they make sense.]
Finally, re. link to Marx’s idea of proletariat as class that abolishes itself, can link too to Holloway’s of anti-working anti-class.
Dec 6th, 2006
Nate
Great stuff.
This:
“At those times our movement isn’t a movement of us (activists vs others) but a moving of social relations, an unfreezing of all that is fixed.”
plus this:
“All that is solid melts into air.”
suggests that we thinkg of solidity as a function of temperature which I think is really just and index of motion. Yeah it is, I just checked wikipedia.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Temperature
temperature “is related to the average energy of microscopic motions in the system. For a solid, these microscopic motions are principally the vibrations of the constituent atoms about their sites in the solid.”
Communism = hot. I want to try to work centripetal and centrifugal force in here but I’m too tired and Minnesota’s cold…
Dec 11th, 2006
Keir
That’s spot on Nate.
And it relates to the difference between intensity and extensity that we’ve been grappling with. Temperature is what Deleuze would call an intensive quantity in that it is indivisible. Whereas extensive quantities are divisible. So if you have 2 litres of water and divided it you get 2 lots of 1 litre measures of water. Add them back together and you get two litres again. If you have some water at 50% centigrade amd divided it then both parts would still be 50%. Add them together and you don’t get water at 100% centigrade.
In fact water at 100% is at an intensive threashold beyond which it gets fliped into a new state of being, with new traits.
He also links energy flow with maintaining high intensity situations: “In a nutshell, while equilibrium thermodynamics focusses on what happens once the intensive differences have been cancelled, far-from-equilibrium thermodynamics studies systems that are continuously traversed by a strong flow of energy or matter, a flow which does not allow the differences in intensity to be cancelled, that is, a flow that maintains these differences and keeps them from cancelling themselves out.”
Dec 12th, 2006
Nate
And one way to heat up water (I think) is to send soundwaves through it – sound being just another level of vibration. Resonance is when sounds reinforce each other, amplify the peaks of the soundwaves, instead of cancel each other out (though I think really some stuff always canceled and some stuff gets amplified). To mix the metaphor a bit, it’s like that old thing about soldiers marching in rhythm with each other across a bridge, the vibrations can start to shake the bridge apart. The stuff on speeds and so on, livability and sustainability of our movements, is about the speed of vibration – wanting resonances and wanting the volume/temperature to increase in order to liquify certain solid forms, but not to melt everything (or rather, to try to shape what does and does not get melted, without burning up and out).
Dec 15th, 2006
Nate
sorry, I wasn’t done yet – I think the extended we is a feeling or an awareness of that increase of heat. I think it occurs at the points of transition between states (in the sense of physical states). There’s a word for this but I can’t remember it. Like when the ice starts to melt but before it’s all melted, or when water starts to boil but before it’s all steam. The expanded we is like awareness of melting/boiling off via collectively generated heat/resonance, along the lines of movements crystalizing around a problem. Once the transition is completed it can be harder to maintain the collective sense, and also when there’s a need to move back a bit – for the steam to condense, for the water to freeze (to return to a safe striated space).
Dec 15th, 2006
David
OMG, all this science! I’m not quite sure of the word Nate’s searching for either, that process whereby H2O in the form of water becomes H20 in the form of steam, say, is called a phase transition. And the ‘point’ at which this occurs is called the threshold. A few other points from the science of all which might be relevant.
1. Sticking with the H2O example, impurities alter the temperature at which water becomes steam (or 100 degrees colder ice). Add salt, say, and it boils at a higher temperature. And as subjects, we’re not pure! Also, other conditions, e.g. pressure, have an effect too. (Sorry, really don’t know what the relevance of this is. Maybe I’m just showing off my A-level physics.)
2. We tend to focus on those transitions, at 100 degrees C, say, when ‘water’ turns into ’steam’. But remember, that H2O at 100 degrees is an extensive quality of the molar aggegrate. Looking at the molecular level, H2O molecules are switching between water and steam states all the time, evaporating and condensing. Boiling is just when lots of molecules evaporate at the same time. The relevance of this: we can all change at any time. It’s just during moments of excess, when things are at boiling point, it’s more likely that more of us will change and change together.
3. For H2O, the phase transitions occurs at the same threshold regardless of ‘direction’: water boils at 100 degrees C, and steam turns back into water at the same temperature as it cools. But some processes are more nonlinear: the threshold can be different depending on the direction of movement. Which is why once we alter our subjectivities, thru’ a moment of excess, say, we don’t necessarily change ‘back’, even when we ‘return’ to a ‘material reality’ which is no different from that we left.
Dec 15th, 2006
Nate
Absolutely, as the earlier pamphlets talked about – coming down and going back to the routine world isn’t really a return to the same old, things are different because _we_ are different.
I like the phase transition thing a lot. What I should have said then was that I think the extended we is an affect of or at a phase transition, where/when there’s a set of new subjectifications occuring, both individually and collectively. I think this means there’s at least three moments in time – before the phase transition, during it (which is the time of the extended we), and after it. The next time a cycle like this occurs it will be different of course, because we are different. Some of the difficulties that can take place in the come down afterward is wanting to preserve the extended we in the exact same way it was experienced, only to stretch it over time. That can’t work, though.
The extended we as a motion is like a sound signal. If you take the sound then extend the time it occurs for you stretch it out, slow it down, break it up. That can be productive and new sounds can emerge (a friend and I used to do this on her computer), but the new sounds are precisely not the old sound repeated. That can be painful if people are hung up on preserving the experience just as it was. I think this is also part of some people’s hyperactivism sometimes, trying to repeat events over and over.
This can also occur in relationships – one wants to have the falling-in-love-for-the-first-time part last and last and last. That doesn’t really work, and it isn’t really a loss that it doesn’t, just a difference (another phase transition). Desire to repeat that is part of some people’s need to break up and date again after a certain point has reach – “we’re done falling in love so I’ve got to find someone new to be falling in love with.” I remember this also happening sometimes in forming bands – learning and writing songs together was the falling in love part, doing the stuff to get and play gigs etc was the moving in together and talking about whose going to do what parts of the housework. The bands I was in weren’t able to make those transitions.
Dec 16th, 2006
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