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Review of Organisation of the Organisationless

By Dave Mesing, 2 October 2014

Dave Mesing reviews Rodrigo Nunes' Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action after Networks, part of the PML Books series, a collaboration between Mute and Post-Media Lab

 

October 1st, 2014

Reposted from The Los Angeles Review of Books

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ALAIN BADIOU’S provocative The Rebirth of History poses some interesting challenges for anyone wishing to weigh in on the revolutionary wagers taking place around the world since at least late 2010. One of the central assumptions driving Badiou’s metaphors and argumentative shifts is that these wagers be categorized under the general heading of riots. This move allows him the neat distinctions between immediate riots (characterized by unrest and state violence, but ambivalent in terms of progressive potential), latent riots (the potentiality for an immediate riot within affluent Western countries), and historical riots (an immediate riot that has undergone a transformation from nihilistic and chaotic outbursts of violence to a pre-political riot capable of undergoing progressive organization, expressing the general will, and finally enacting real changes within what exists in the world). Badiou centers his attention around the task of organization, which he rightly defines as “the problem of politics par excellence.” However, Badiou’s characterization of these revolutionary wagers as riots also allows him a heuristic around which he is able to play out some of his central concerns regarding the relationship of philosophy, politics, and truth, sometimes to the detriment of obscuring actual commonalities or real differences within the organization of revolutionary events. This includes the fact that in Spain and the United States, protests and riots have been generative of new networks of collaboration, whereas in Egypt and Brazil, new protests and riots have been subsumed as nodes into already-existing networks.

Badiou is doing more here than simply using the recent revolutionary uprisings as an occasion for promulgating his particular philosophy. But he runs the risk of setting himself up as the explanatory vanguard, which obscures the efficacy of an otherwise insightful book. We are thus not surprised to learn, in the “doctrinal summary” toward the end, that riots are “a still indistinct language,” one that apparently only the philosopher is capable of arranging into a coherent order with emancipatory potential — what Badiou refers to as “the power of the generic” animating progressive organization. Badiou’s arguments ultimately have the effect of turning the riots into material to be formed into something unified. Again, he does not entirely impose his own theoretical frameworks on the riots, claiming,

We must carry out [...] a patient, meticulous inquiry with people in search of what [...] will be affirmed by the movement’s irreducible fraction — namely, some statements. Statements that cannot be dissolved into Western inclusion. When they exist, these statements are easily recognizable. And these new statements are a precondition for conceiving a process of organization of figures of collective action, which will signal their political becoming.

Although Badiou wards off the type of analysis that would suffocate the global uprisings into Western categories, he does finally insist that in order to be efficacious, any uprising must be shaped and disciplined into a political truth that keeps fidelity to the event that instantiated it. Such a line of argument occludes the ways in which these global movements already contain elements of organization. By praising organization, Badiou misses the in-flux and in-between real developments within organization already taking place.

Such a weak point in left theory is what Rodrigo Nunes addresses well in his short essay Organisation of the Organisationless: Collective Action after Networks. As the title indicates, Nunes’s point of entry into present debates is a rejection of the simple narrative that the chaotic uprisings would only benefit from organization. “First and foremost among the things that will have been so obscured is precisely the fact that what is characteristic about today’s movements is not the absence of organization, but a mode of organization that can be described in its own right.” Nunes’s book, available as part of the new collaboration between Mute Magazine and Post-Media Lab, introduces a concise and accessible grammar of these recent movements.

Much like Badiou, Nunes is critical of the fixation on certain elements of these recent movements, such as horizontality, the notion that hierarchical leadership structures can be completely abandoned, and prefiguration, the idea that post-revolutionary organization will mirror the configuration of protest and resistance in the present. However, unlike Badiou, Nunes is critical of these ideas because their concrete function in the movements themselves have been as regulative ideas rather than goals in themselves, or more importantly, descriptions of the organization of the organizationless. The point of providing such descriptions, according to Nunes, is that the organizational and strategic solutions to current problems will come from within already existing modes of organization. The point of introducing a grammar concerning the recent movements is thus — prior to any attempt to amplify them or codify them into further emancipatory ends — to actually comprehend them so that the space for further questioning and strategizing can be opened up. Rather than start from the presumption that prefiguration or horizontality are antidotes to outdated modes of organization, or that recent movements are a promising but muddled mess of ideas, Nunes explores the manner in which these events fall outside of binary oppositions, and argues strongly against the notion that to criticize or relativize one side of this binary scheme is not to fall into the opposite. In short, by understanding the already-existing mixed states of organization within contemporary politics, we can begin to negotiate them and balance issues such as openness and closure.

In order to signal the ambiguity at the heart of referring to the uprisings, riots, or wagers of the last few years as “movements,” Nunes invokes the simple question “what is the movement?” that The Free Association posed during the height of the alter-globalization movement. According to Nunes, the simultaneous rise (and later fall) in popularity of the term “multitude,” taken from Hardt and Negri, to describe the subject of the movements, owed its evocative power to its oscillation between the singular and plural. The term “multitude” seems to provide a unified way to speak about such movements without doing violence to the diversity amongst them (singular) or moving so far in the direction of generalization as to be of any use (plural). However, the gains in evocative power also mark weaknesses in explanatory power. “Anyone who, when asked about the agency behind any political event of the last decade, replied only ‘the multitude’, though perhaps not wrong, would be ultimately not saying much.” Nunes links this weakness to Hardt and Negri’s complete distaste for mediation, which comes through especially in Commonwealth. They link mediation to sovereign transcendence, which deprives them of the means to address the formation of the multitude at intermediary levels. As Nunes perceptively notes, the completely negative connotations of mediation signal a major problem with employing a singular-plural conception such as multitude or even movement to categorize events of the present: “by blurring the internal differentiation of what it describes, it blurs the interactions among its components, which is where coordination and decision making take place.” As the subtitle of the book indicates, Nunes will shift the prospects for strategy and collective action to the language of networks, but simply turning from “movement” to “network” does little to address this problem.

In order to move beyond the perpetual oscillation between the one and the many, Nunes introduces two terms at the heart of his book: network-system and network-movement. A network-system is a system of different networks, encompassing individuals, groupings, social media accounts, physical spaces, etc., “which constitute so many interacting layers that can neither be reduced to nor superposed on each other.” Since the layers themselves as well as the interactions between layers are dynamic, the validity of any description of a network-system is subject to time. The advantage of speaking of network-systems is that it allows us to look beyond whether those in a movement explicitly share political self-understandings in order to be able to picture a broader “moving” of social relations. According to Nunes, what justifies labeling something as part of a network-system is a reference to an event. Events do not create network-systems ex nihilo, but rather transform previous network-systems by creating or destroying various ties, reconfiguring interactions, and so on.

If the network-system provides a broad conceptualization for the spread of mass contemporary movements, a network-movement serves as a tool for a more fine-grained analysis of the present conjuncture. Nunes defines a network-movement as simultaneously an act of self-recognition that takes place when people begin to refer to a “movement,” as well as the layers of relations referred to as a movement. This nesting of expanded self-awareness helps differentiate those within a network-system who demonstrate more conscious political efforts and expressions without biasing the entire discussion of the present in favor of members of a movement with a more explicit self-understanding. By beginning the conversation with a network-system rather than simply a movement (or we might add, a riot), we are able to gain traction in understanding movements within the network-system as well as the interactions between them without searching in vain for pure models of organization.

Nunes’s model provides several key advantages. First, the network-system still maintains the emphasis present in Badiou and others on the central importance of an event for delineating the trajectories of various movements. Since his account presumes a substantial amount of dynamic interaction within the movements making up a network-system, Nunes’s theorization of the event offers some room for the presence of varying degrees of more quotidian events rather than the magisterial, theological overtones sometimes plaguing Badiou’s accounts. Due to the “clearing ground” nature of his text, Nunes does not elaborate much on what makes an event that creates a new network-system, which makes such a discussion fruitful ground for follow-up work.

In addition, Nunes’s analysis opens up an understanding of organization as a continuum of degrees of stabilization, formalization, and consistency. Stabilization denotes the tacit sedimentation of rules and structures ranging anywhere from an influential Facebook page serving as a hub, to defined membership processes for the network-movement. Formalization registers the development of explicitly stated rules and structures for decision-making or leadership, and consistency accounts for the increasing discipline of the movement, or its ordered growth and capacity to produce binding decisions. This continuum of organization leads Nunes to the characterization of the vanguard-function of hubs. Nunes offers the term “vanguard-function” in order to describe a hub or cluster of hubs within a network that outpaces its “normal” functioning and/or the functioning of other “normally” highly connected hubs. Since the vanguard-function is subject to time, it is usefully differentiated from the teleological notion of vanguardism present in much of the Marxist tradition, where the vanguard represents an elite group able to anticipate the goals of revolution in advance, and guide the revolution to these goals through privileged knowledge of a determined future. Nunes’s notion of the vanguard-function of a hub or cluster of hubs still helps to explain the leading cause behind a set of effects, but it is not determined by reference to historical laws.

Finally, Nunes’s book crucially identifies the task of a continuous creation and organization of the commons that is at the heart of contemporary resistances to capitalism. As Gigi Roggero’s recent and essential book The Production of Living Knowledge does with respect to contemporary Western universities, Nunes’s work on networks tarries with the actuality of the present “against the conservative nostalgia for the past, the utopian awaiting of the future, and the postmodern apologia for the status quo.” It is only by occupying and acting within such a present that spaces autonomous from capitalist capture can be created. Since network-movements take place within a dynamic system, the forms of this resistance as well as the forms of created commons are not given in advance. They are not subject to guarantees and require further unification and organization in order to be developed and defended. As Nunes summarizes,

how broad one’s conception of the network-movement is determines how comprehensive a picture one has of the overall field of struggle, the direct and indirect interactions within it, the impacts that actions might have, latent connections to be developed, ties to be strengthened, differences to be taken into account, struggles and objectives to be prioritized, points of leverage, areas in which intervention is called for.

With a deft knowledge of contemporary movements and the acumen to describe developments in organization with neither normative hand-wringing nor overtheorization, Nunes has helpfully cleared ground for further discussion. In this short, well-crafted essay, Nunes delivers a grammar adequate to contemporary movements, and vital for the continuing importance of careful reflection for the flourishing of contemporary radical politics.

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Dave Mesing is a PhD student in philosophy at Villanova University in Philadelphia.