At the risk of sounding Hegelian, antagonism seems to have two sides to it. Dave’s mentioned how we are sometimes much closer to the most progressive wings of capital than to dickheads like Monbiot. If we’re about ‘production of the new’, how do we avoid that new being ‘captured’ by (or rather, becoming part of) capitalist development? One of the ways might be that antagonism draws a line in the sand, and says ‘this world is different from that one’. Of course we’re not separate from capital (it’s in here, not out there), and no amount of lines or fences will stop encroachment by capital. But antagonism can slow it down enough that we can make good our escape. Maybe antagonism can offer us time and space to become that-which-we-are-not.There’s also a positive side. ‘Positive’ and ‘negative’ are misleading, maybe it’s more like looking in and looking out. Whatever, this second aspect is the same as when you’re swimming. It’s really difficult to just start swimming in open water. It’s much easier to push off against something. Becoming is about movement. But it has to begin with some sort of ‘No’. Holloway might call it the scream. Massumi calls it an inhibition. However we figure it, it represents a rupture. A break with the world-as-it-is, an “unhinging of habit”. That’s how some people saw the riot in Rostock, as a way of saying No to enable us to develop our Yeses.

Is there a double articulation here, in the looking out/looking in? Maybe we need a rearguard to allow exodus to take place, but that rearguard also acts as an ultra-left lighthouse to enable us to see how far we have travelled. That’s one way of thinking of the black bloc, for example.

And here’s the tricky thing. Once you’ve pushed off against the wall, you need to start swimming. Movements need to develop their own autonomous dynamic. If we fail to do that, we’ll be clinging to the side of the pool forever, and we’ll never make it to open water. This is the danger of ‘micro-fascisms’, the risk that antagonism (on its own) will makes us become the inverse of what we want to escape. That’s why the transversal shift (aka the sideways step, the Cruyff turn) is so crucial.

Finally we should think about this not as the politics of affect, but as the politics of movement. Of becoming-other. Which is exactly why all those hegemonic visions or Ten-Point-Plans fall to pieces, because they depend on stasis. They assume that we will be the same as we are now, when want precisely to be other than we are now. As Massumi puts it, “To achieve the goal that has no end means ceasing to be what you are in order to become what you cannot be: supermolecular forever.”

Supermolecular forever? Now that’s a fucking great song title.