We are…outcasts in this city. O there is no conspiracy against us, no pressures are brought to bear on us, we are free to come and go, to congregate, to hatch plots even, if we wish; we are - he shrugged - free. But what does it signify, this objectless freedom? Only that we are not feared.
John Banville, Doctor Copernicus
From depoliticisation to experimentation (militant research)
The problem we identify is the pervasive absence of any meaningful alternatives to the general consensus.
What is the general consensus?
On one side the steadfast and willing defenders of capitalism and liberal democracy, the twin pillars of the enduring modern project. More worrying is the lack of an inspiring alternative beyond a radical activism and its “campaigns”, cursing a world understood as nothing but spectacle and relying on a heritage of political concepts and models of organization that are no longer effective and no longer feared.
Class politics increasingly appears as an empty idealization; identitarian movements are thoroughly incorporated into a political order that thrives off the proliferation of identities, lifestyles and desires. The consensus describes the limitations of what we can imagine tomorrow can be, constantly narrating the singularity of our time and place, reducing all life to moments in a continuum, to an unending aesthetic competition while multiplying inequalities.
We ask,
How, despite the cynicism, can we explore new political possibilities amongst those generated by the collective itself, possibilities capable of articulating will/desire (against necessity), generosity (against vanguardism) and equality (against the power of wealth)?
* * *
While accepting that experience is more pervasive than ever there is a need to distinguish between experience as en-joyment and experience as joy-ful.
We have never lived in a time more saturated with the possibility of experience. Everything we do must be experienced- our bodies, nature, holidays, work. This form of experience revels in moments, the fragmentation of continuous experience into an array of brackets offered as so many options to the individual consumer. Experience as mere novelty is experience within the world framed by the consensus, a moment within the ongoing continuity of the state. In short, it is never allowed to take flight.
Transformative experience, in contrast, is continuous, is about making this flight. While accepting that novelty is a beginning, new experience, experience as enduring and different, is always more than this.
Transformative experience is always excessive and collective. It cannot be reduced to the possession of an identity/subject (man/woman, consumer, worker, job-seeker). Experiences overflow these categories, opening up the possibility of dis-identification, of escaping subjectification and regulatory norms.
This excess is literally ‘full of joy’ not of suffering, the cry of the victim. Bearing witness to experience as always a becoming affirms our equality in difference, taking us beyond static categories of culture or psychology.
* * *
Today, one can not be a militant without also being a researcher. This research prompts us to ask better questions by and through honing new perceptions. Rather than a tool for explaining away the world, asking better questions can be a way of deepening our understanding of the possibilities immanent in the existing situation: the absolute contingency of the present and thus the infinitely uplifting possibility that something might happen that is as yet unknown.
Caminamos preguntando (we walk asking) is the attitude of generic forms of subjectivity rejecting both party-style vanguardism and bureaucratic management. While the politics of asking might bring new affinities and alternative forms of organization, endurance is the ground from which a new politics can grow.
This means recognizing that a long term political strategy is required in the present conditions; a strategy that prevents the solidification of hostile temporalities: the consensus that forges the ‘commonsense’ understanding that we all inhabit a single world in a single present moving into a single future. We need to avoid ‘their crisis’; the construction of the problem defines the terrain of the solution. But we also need to avoid the temporality of ‘the protest’: a coming-together defined by a simple denunciation of ‘their’ actions. This means giving priority to the subjective processes that might develop within the movement – more than its effectiveness against power. A strategy that is, to a certain extent, imperceptible.
While antagonism and opposition are always the starting point for movement these too often become breeding grounds for fear, resentment and victimhood. Instead they can be thought and grasped as the opening for spontaneity, commitment, togetherness and belief…
This strategy at once undoes the ‘commonsense’ that supports the general consensus while forging from collective situations the possibility of different sensibilities.
We ask,
How can militant questioning and the immanent possibilities of transformative experience become the ground for a political subjectivation in conflict with the ‘society of control’, but also constructive of its own world?
Better Questions
We are…outcasts in this city. O there is no conspiracy against us, no pressures are brought to bear on us, we are free to come and go, to congregate, to hatch plots even, if we wish; we are - he shrugged - free. But what does it signify, this objectless freedom? Only that we are not feared.
