"I’m in love with the real world"

April 18, 2006

We’ve all experienced those moments of excess, moments – such as Seattle, Genoa, Evian, Gleneagles – when we’ve put our lives on the line, or felt like we have. Felt the vulnerability of our tender human flesh. This feeling is real. Demonstrators in the global South have always risked bullets. Since the repression of anti-EU summit protests in Gothenburg in June 2001 and the murder of Carlo Giuliano in Genoa a few weeks later, this risk has become real for us in the North too. And even without ‘live’ ammunition, police batons, boots, tear gas, water cannon can still do mortal damage to our bodies… the risks may be low, but our lives could be snuffed out in an instant.

We’ve all experienced those moments of excess during which we feel that total connection with our fellow human beings, when everything becomes possible, when absolutely anything could happen! Those moments when our energy threatens – or rather promises – to spark a cascade of changes which sweep through society, opening up a whole new range of possibilities. When we rupture capital’s fabric of domination: breaking time. Rapture!

But these events – these moments of excess – don’t last forever. It’s simply not possible for our bodies and minds to survive that level of intensity indefinitely. And indefinite ‘events’ probably aren’t even desirable. We frequently leave lovers and/or loved-ones behind to travel to such gatherings. And we miss them! Or we know our allotment or garden needs tending. Or there’s a favourite cycle ride or view or cityscape we need to enjoy again. ‘There is a rose and I should be with her. There is a town unlike any other.’

So what happens when we ‘return’ to the ‘real world’? Counter-summit mobilisations (say) allow this immensely productive focusing of our energies, but how can we sustain this movement in our ‘habitual lives’. How can we ‘do politics’ in the ‘real world’? How can we live a life? And we don’t mean simply survive, hanging on in there until the next event… or our fortnight’s holiday in the sun, or our Friday-night bender, or our Sunday-afternoon walk in the park, or our ‘adventure weekend’ – none of which are any real escape from capitalism at all, but simply another form of capitalist (re)production, recreation of ourselves as workers. We mean live: life despite capitalism.

We don’t really have too many answers to these questions. But we believe that thinking about them can help us to better understand the function of social centres, say, and the way we conceive the borders between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’, between what is ‘pure’ and what is not. Thinking about these questions can help us understand the potential of various issues and struggles – urban development and ‘regeneration’, climate change, precarity and so on – perhaps help us recognise our own power in a productive way, that is, in a way which allows it to resonate and become amplified. It involves recognising that we always live in the real world, that there are no ‘pure spaces’, there is no ‘pure politics’, and that we should welcome this. Because purity is also sterility. It’s the messiness of our ‘habitual’ lives which gives them their potential. This messiness, this ‘impurity’, the contaminations of different ideas, values and modes of being (and becoming) are the conditions which allow mutations, some of which will be productive. It’s from this primordial soup of the ‘real world’ that new life will spring. ‘Only in the real world do things happen like they do in my dreams.’

5 Comments

brian April 20, 2006 at 8:50 am

Nice post. Here are some more thoughts on time & motion that occurred to me (appropriately enough) as I was weaving between a thousand potholes on my 30-minute ride to work.

Maybe we could expand a little on time, without getting all metaphysical. The stuff in France underlined that the ‘tug of history’ is a real thing, not a lazy metaphor. By contrast, the idea that there’s an inside and an outside fits in well with a linear, sequential notion of time. Which is why some of the stuff that comes out of social centres sounds like a poor man’s Leninism: set up a social centre, and then go out into the community and establish hegemony… There’s a clear division between the inside (social centre activists) and the outside. Given time, the latter can get to come inside (on its own the outside is only capable of a modern-day trade union consciousness — as someone memorably blurted out, “Ooh, they’re not like us (sic), they haven’t had the benefit of a good (sic) education…”). OK, I’m being a bit harsh here, but you know what I mean. There’s always an Other, and we’re not it…

Secondly, motion: the way to stop anything resonating is to hold it tight. Maybe resurrect that lovely definition here: theory is what you have, ideology is what has you. Many communists & class struggle anarchists are dismissive of stuff around Gleneagles & summits in general because it means engaging with “middle class liberal ex-student” politics. Reminds me of Class War and the anti-roads stuff, where we were more interested in defending what we were rather than what we could become.

We should also work in some gags on communion + flesh + communism. Not sure about the punchlines, but they’ll write themselves…
David April 20, 2006 at 4:47 pm

Here’s a lovely way of expressing the problematic, and uses ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ in a way which makes sense:

‘What is at stake, for those like us who are outside of discourse and inside the word, outside of categories but inside linguistic acts, for us who refuse to be reduced to objects and demand the power to produce ourselves as subjects, maybe is this: to what extent can the exodus from a world we don’t recognise as ours be not only resistance but also production? To what extent can refusal and critique also be moments of invention for everyone? How to speak a different language and still be understood? This is ‘communication’ but we might call it politics, or we might call it life.’ (Judith Revel, ‘Idee, Parole, Linguaggio’)

From http://www.generation-online.org/p/prevel.htm.
brian April 24, 2006 at 9:02 pm

A linear notion of time also means that it’s hard to appreciate how this stuff (social centres) only makes sense intermittently. So there’s a typical trajectory of heavy involvement, growing frustration and then a ‘principled’ withdrawal when you find out your fellow humans aren‘t sufficiently vegan/communist/proletarian (delete as appropriate). If we could work out a different articulation of these experiences of time, it’d be easier for people to ‘take a break’, fade in and out etc, which would at a stroke solve all those niggling problems of rotation as well as burn-out.
myka April 27, 2006 at 6:38 am

Please pardon me in advance for sullying your pure, communist blog with eastern philosophy.

It involves recognising that we always live in the real world, that there are no ‘pure spaces’, there is no ‘pure politics’, and that we should welcome this.

Like that guy Brad said in Hardcore Zen, not only do we dwell in the real world, but it is the best of all possible worlds because it is the only possible world, it is the ony one that is really happening. Uh, in a sense, I guess this means Another World Is Impossible, as long as you are thinking of That Other World as located elsewhere in space or time.

…purity is also sterility …It’s from this primordial soup of the ‘real world’ that new life will spring.

Taoist representation of a bubbling cauldron of primordial soup … but is it vegetarian?
David May 1, 2006 at 1:40 pm

Yes, another world is impossible if we think of that world as existing elswhere in time or space. But we can also think of many — an infinite number of — possible universes or worlds existing simultaneously, each with its own history. The one we perceive depends upon our perspective, or our subjectivity. Flipping from ‘this’ world to ‘another’ — which already exists here and now — then depends on altering our (collective) subjectivity. (And, of course, I don’t mean that revolution is something private which happens inside our heads.)