I stumbled over this and can’t get it out of my head, so I’m posting it here as an act of exorcism.

Kottke says this Gaussian goat “is perhaps what the world would look like if human vision could perceive all of an object’s possible quantum mechanical states at the same time.”

It’s much the same with social movements. Once we give them a name (anarchist, anti-crisis, libertarian Marxist etc), we reduce our ability to see the ways in which they can be other. Rather than being static, clearly defined, encompassing a contiguous range of activity, they’re all vibrating, literally buzzing with potential. It’s that vibration that makes resonance possible.

There’s this interesting tension within The Free Association. Our name has two or three connotations. One reflects Marx’s idea of communism as a ‘free association of producers’. This suggests quite an open group, receptive to new members as well as new ideas, a group with a fluid membership. We have, in the past, collaborated with others under The Free Association moniker. Perhaps we will again.

But in another way, we’re quite a closed group. It’s not that we’re not open to new ideas and new experiences. We are. It’s not that we’re not open to the potentials of working with other people. That’s exactly what we’ve done with the Turbulence project. But we’re quite a tight-knit group. We share a gang mentality. And that’s precious. It’s the result of more than 15 years’ friendship (the course of which, like true love, has not always run smooth). We break bread together, so we’re compagni. And we’ve shared all manner of accommodation — not literally barracks, but ferry cabins, beds in plush hotel rooms, tents, sodden forest floors, even tarmac roads — and so we’re comrades. We’re definitely comrades. We’re cracked more smutty jokes than you could shake your stick at and been in more than a few dicey situations together. We’ve been on the receiving end of no end of abuse and we’ve usually given as good as we’ve got. The name Leeds May Day Group perhaps better reflected this hard-edgedness.

One of this year’s collective projects — very much in keeping with the gang identity of the group — is to all get tattoos. Brian had been on about getting an Omnia sunt communia tat for several years, but kept prevaricating over the design. Then back in April Keir suggested all four of us do it.

Brian finally sorted his out a couple of months ago. Nette and Keir are still working on their designs. I went under the needle yesterday.

The design is Brian’s of course. The font is William Morris’s ‘golden type’. William Morris was a revolutionary as well as an ‘arts and craftsman’ and some of his thoughts have popped up in our writings. The lion is there for that verse in Percy Shelley’s poem The Mask of Anarchy, written in response to the British government’s Peterloo (Manchester) massacre of 1819:

Rise like Lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you
Ye are many, they are few

Fast forward a century and a half. We’re still in Manchester and it’s 1975. Peter McNeish reinvented himself as Pete Shelley. With Howard Devoto he formed Buzzcocks, one of the ‘first wave’ of punk groups. Punk is, as is well known, a recurring motif in LMDG/TFA musings. Pete Shelley went onto to become one of England’s finest songsmiths and his words too have graced our writings.

Everything is connected!
Everything is common!

La la la
La la la la la
La la la
La la la la la…

We’ve been vaguely considering doing some sort of anthology of our work so far, and it’s made me think about the different ways of reading (and by extension of writing). My first reaction was that it would only be worth collecting up our various texts if we could somehow make them cohere, so that they stand up to scrutiny. But there’s a tension here (one that’s not necessarily productive). On a superficial level, there’s the whole academic trip where you attempt to pre-empt every criticism, shore up every argument and tie up any loose ends. But at a deeper level you can see this as the work of some molar perspective which seeks to totalise, to impose some sort of unity-in-identity, and to capture energy. “We have to relate this argument here to that one there… And how does this fit in?” But the end result might well be stasis or death. All the i’s are dotted, the t’s crossed. You know the feeling when you finish reading a book or article – it’s all clear, you agree with almost everything (how could you not?) but your response is “Yeah, and…?” It’s done to death. It has a trajectory that’s entirely predictable: the authors think A and B, therefore they’ll almost certainly think C.

Another example: there’s a critique of Move into the Light? (a text we had a hand in) on the grounds that it’s easy to read, so you think “that’s nice, that’s interesting…” and then 5 minutes later you think “what does that mean?” From one perspective, the incoherence/confusion over the metaphor of light is a weakness of the text. Just when you think you’ve got a grip of the metaphor, it shifts again and unbuckles the understanding you’ve carefully assembled. I’ve been watching Carnivale and I have exactly the same problem.

But in another way, that’s one of the more productive ways to read a book/watch a film/listen to a song. It makes sense, but only sort of – it’s always hinting at something else and keeps sliding away towards it (obviously I’m not talking about sloppy writing which is just annoying). It’s much harder to extrapolate from, because it’s always threatening to become something else, to fall off the charts. And I think there might be a connection here to the way the Turbulence tabloid for Heiligendamm ‘worked’, I think. Individually the articles had weaknesses, but the whole more than made up for it.

So, I guess the question is this: does this have any bearing on how we understand affinity? And becoming? Is there something ineffable about it, something that resists scrutiny and yet – or maybe because of that – is still enormously productive? More crudely, what makes us hang around the anti-globalisation movement when we know all the arguments against it, when many of the critiques of it make sense?

I just can’t get you out of my head
Boy it’s more than I dare to think about

As ever it’s more interesting to pan out a little and look at the wider context. Here’s something we wrote last year:

Let’s look at the refrain of the ‘entrepreneur’. For the left this is a dirty word, and with good reason: it conjures up images of Richard Branson, of creativity channelled into money-making. But it also contains a certain dynamism, an air of initiative, in fact an imaginary of a kind of activist attitude to life. Indeed we might be putting on free parties, gigs, or film showings, rather than launching perfumes, but we still act in ways somewhat similar to entrepreneurs: we organise events and try to focus social cooperation and attention on certain points. We’re always looking for areas where innovation might arise. The DIY culture of punk is a great example of how a moment of excess caused a massive explosion of creativity and social wealth. There is a difference in perspective though. A capitalist entrepreneur is looking for potential moments of excess in order to enclose it, to privatise it, and ultimately feed off it. Our angle is to keep it open, in order to let others in, and to find out how it might resonate with others and hurl us into other worlds and ways of being.

Seems a pretty accurate description of Tony Wilson. He was never too bothered about being correct; he was interested in making things happen. Or rather, he was interested in making conditions for the creation of new truths. In that sense he didn’t exist outside of his context (and over the last few years his pronouncements had started to sound more and more twattish – independence for the North West!?! – precisely because they weren’t resonating in the same way they once had). And I think there might be a connection here to ideas we’ve been tossing about on affinity and identity.

Crudely put, identity politics tends to operate on the basis of changing a world, which is ‘out there’, without any impact on ourselves. It suggests that battles are lost and won by shuffling pieces on a chess board: ‘OK, we need to link up with organised workers here, build a coalition with feminists from the global South here, and then maybe move in a gay and lesbian battalion here. But that still leaves our left flank exposed to counter-attack by native struggles here…’

From this perspective, Tony Wilson was a pain in the arse, a loose cannon, someone who got up everyone’s nose. But if we think about affinity, then there’s a little more method in his madness. It’s less about ideology or fixed categories, and more about shared affect. People moving together. Of course it’s messy and inchoate (this is dark matter, and dark energy after all), and for every ‘success’ there are a dozen fuck-ups. But each success itself only creates further openings, further problematics. So it goes… This is how it was with punk. Which is why the least interesting thing about punk was the squabbles between ‘first’ and ‘second’ generation punks: once punk hit the headlines, any attempt to restrict it to those in the know was doomed to failure. The tension between punk-as-hip-minority and punk-as-mass-movement was just that, a tension rather than a divide. There was the same tension in the Madchester scene, with the usual scramble to claim authenticity. And it also relates to the tension between audience and public. The audience are the paying punters, but at some stages they can become the public who are inextricably part of the performance. Think Woodstock or Spike Island…

Once the public/audience/performer thing breaks down, who knows what can happen… I’ve just finished reading a book which tries to link today’s globalisation struggles to the working class battles which raged over the past two centuries. It’s more micro-level reportage than analysis, but I came across two fantastic passages which are worth noting.The first relates to the wave of factory occupations in France in 1936 (emphasis added):

Contagion, imitation, certainly played a decisive role in a large number of cases. The very novelty of the undertaking was a source of attraction – with its creation of a whole new set of situations – the feeling of escape from the routine of everyday life, the breaking down of the barrier between private lives and the world of work, the transformation of the workplace into a place of residence, fulfilment of the desire for action, of the need to ‘do something’ at a time when everyone felt that important changes were coming. All these elements played a part in the spread of the occupations and helped to account for participants’ universal enthusiasm and cheerfulness.

And here’s an account of the end of a sit-in in Flint, Michigan in 1937:

As the exhilaration of our first union victory wore off, the gang was occupied with thoughts of leaving the silent factory… One found himself wondering what home life would be like again. Nothing that happened before the strike began seemed to register in the mind any more. It is as if time itself started with this strike. What will it be like to go home and to come back tomorrow with motors running and the long-silenced machines roaring again? But that is for the future… Now the door is opening.

Open with Tony Wilson. Close with factory. Exit stage left.