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Life Despite Capitalism - Workshops
Moments of Excess
Notes on Moments of Excess 4.30 pm - 6.30 pm 16 Oct. 2004
source: esf2004.net
This is the workshop on Moments Of Excess. Introduced by David from the Leeds Mayday Group. Keir will talk briefly on what we mean by moments of excess. Four people will then talk autobiographically – Jamie King on software, Ana Dinerstein on Argentina, Dermot on the No M11 Campaign, Alan from P2P Fightsharing. Each will speak for about ten minutes then the discussion will be opened up.
Keir:
This is about MOMENTS of excess – about temporality. When we talk about commons, we're not talking about a static thing, but about dynamic, changing entities. They can stagnate, freeze, collapse or grow. Sometimes it's the best thing for them to collapse! Moments of excess are a good way of talking about how to relate the everyday to the exceptional. Capital rests on top of the commons, on top of the co-operation we create every day. Sometimes our creativity exceeds what capital can marshall and control though, allowing us to ask questions like 'how do we want to live our lives'. Examples: Argentina, anti-Poll Tax. But also 'cultural' stuff like punk and the free party scene, social centres, etc. Our speakers aren't 'experts' but are going to be talking biographically – we'd like other participants to do so as well – with a particular interest in how these moments become normalised.
Jamie:
I work with a magazine called 'Mute', media, culture and arts. I'm going to talk about people who work with media, and are passionate about ideas of piracy – distributing media by any means necessary. How people can swap and exchange things that they've stolen. We have ongoing arguments about the status of these things – are they propaganda or something else? For me the importance of these networks is that they inform our everyday understandings of EXTREME CONSUMPTION – the rules for what we should desire and buy. One of the key technologies developed around extreme consumption is simultaneously the possibility of disrupting the channel for delivering on these desires, these promises. Now when you're consuming, following these desires, you go online, use a P2P program, and are automatically also sharing with others. Suddenly this excessive consumption is funnelled into a sharing, necessarily and not necessarily deliberately or consciously. The network and digitality make it difficult for these sharing experiences to be restricted – the infrastructure to satisfy the desires of 'consumers' simultaneously challenges the media producers it is meant to serve. People in the industry have obviously noticed this problem. They, however, have no choice but to pursue individuals – it can be YOU, not a gang of pirates or anything of that sort. This has a political status – it's a challenge to the industry but one that lacks an explicit political intention on the part of file sharers. We don't have to make a political argument – the network itself facililtates file sharing, and the industry is forced to fall back on a moral argument about property that goes against everything it's been doing for decades. The industry talk about this is war talk – they'd like to arrest and prosecute every one of us – to come after us all. This isn't workable, of course, and so the industry has realised there is something in the works. To me, right now, this is a fascinating place to think about excessive desires that are irrecuperable – that can push the system to the brink of collapse. Suddenly millions of people acting in the ways they've been told to ask have brought the system into an interesting point of disequilibrium.
Ana:
When people start doing things in particular ways we have a crisis or moment of excess. I want to talk about the Argentinian experience – in December 2001 Argentina underwent financial collapse and popular insurrection. I want to talk about the experience of this for Argentinians. (Ana reads from the MOMENTS OF EXCESS pamphlet). This is what happened in Argentina, or at least in Buenos Aries. Financially what happened was a disaster, but because of the power, damage, of money, it forced the population to challenge everyday life in a way that hadn't previously been necessary. E.P. Thompson would have called this a moment of becoming, I would call it a moment of subjectivity. People on the streets were trying to define themselves. For the first time, the reconciliation with politics after a period of individualism and neoliberatlism was achieved through an anti-institutional politics. A rejection of power, completely. This was different – about dignity, solidarity, democracy. It also brought about self-reflection and debates – about revolution, change, power and anti-power – and was a rhizomatic, open process rather than an institutionalised or mediated one. Some people ask what went wrong here – I don't think anything did. This moment was a site of conjunction of many aspects of life – corruption, political, social problems – which touch subjectivity, which touch us and change something in us. For a moment it was looking like a total crisis – Parliament was empty for two days because no one wanted to take power – until the elites returned. Not a revolution in traditional terms but revolutionary nonetheless. People were brought out onto the streets by people banging on pans. (Account from participant read out by Ana:) I was drawn out by the sound, a feeling of happiness with the noise, a realisation that there was a massive sound – I was walking on the street and I thought 'this is history'. A collective feeling of happiness, surprise, amazing noise. One wanted to be on the streets and to confront power in all forms. (Account ends.) More energy went into things that already existed. Battles with the police notwithstanding, the movement and participation grew for six months. The old divisions have now come back, somehow, and the government has its expectations back again. But for those who are disappointed by this, we can still get something from this experience – just what that might be we don't know yet.
Dermot:
I'm going to talk about the anti-road building movement of the early-mid 1990s. This was a 19-billion pound programme. An early part of this would have meant cutting down an area of the South Downs, through Twyford Down, where a protest camp was formed. Activists visited the camp which lasted for over a year. Others would stay for longer and get involved in the direct action itself. For five or six years these camps were appearing at road schemes all over the country. I would like to talk about Claremont Road, part of the anti-M11 link road campaign. This was about a 6 km link road that would have joined inner London to the motorway, which would have meant the demolition of hundreds of houses, and would have cut the travelling time of cars by seven minutes! The plans had been going on since the 1960s, but the programme itself began in 1993. Protests took a variety of forms from house occupations, tree dwellings, invading the building site, disruption, invasion, etc., over a period of about 18 months, ending in Claremont Road in Leyton where the last protestor was cut down from a scaffold built up through one of the roofs of the houses on the street. For me this campaign exploded my previous ideas of what politics was about – it gave one a sense of one's own subjectivity, having the upper hand for the first time in your life. Of course, some of the campaign slogans were 'respectable', representative, moral, but more interestingly for me other, nobler traditions, are more relevant. (1) Sabotage or 'pixie-work' on site especially at night. Sand in the engine blocks, site invasions during cement pours which would halt work adn have huge logistical and financial implications. Such ambushes were routine – many a day. (2) Subversion or 'seduction' – regular parties on site with live music. Toward the end of the campaign four houses were lost and a building site with security guards replaced them. People would go down and talk to the guards, mostly good-naturedly, humourously, and so on. This was done without expectations, but very occasionally it produced surprising consequences – some of the less experienced guards came to believe we would no longer invade their site, for instance. Amazingly, in a couple of instances, guards left their jobs to join the campaign and provided us with information! (3) Acts of self-reduction or refusal. 100 or so of us travelled down to support an office occupation at the Department of Transport, charging through and refusing to pay the fare. For some people this became a matter of principle – something that had to be done. (4) Self-valorisation. Liberating materials for our own uses – the things destined to be used to build the road were used to prevent it from being built. (5) Reclaiming and communalising the space itself. Claremont Road moved from being a quiet Victorian terrace to a communal, decorated, social space. In two houses the ground floors were turned into cafes. Tree houses were built opposite, linked to the houses with cargo netting, breaking the barrier between inside and outside – open living rooms. The spatial relationship was redefined. People behaved in nicer ways. It wasn't a utopia – there were tensions between people on the basis of drinking, commitment, hedonism versus hard work – and frustrations sometimes led to people being asked to leave the street. Nevertheless the experience was instructional because it allows us to think about our own possibilities, and what we must do if we want to live and work autonomously from the state. Dolly Watson, a 93-year old resident who had always lived on Claremont Road, welcomed everyone to the street, and told a journalist that the occupiers weren't 'dirty squatters' but 'the grandchildren I never had'. Another resident jumped from a roof onto a crane, shouting obscenities at the bailiffs. A queer activist who was attacked by security got all the male occupiers to dress as women for an evening as a provocation.
Alan:
I want to talk about free software and piracy, and pick up on a couple of things in the pamphlet. Free software (FS) and piracy take place over networks, require communication which is cheap or free. These networks are productive insofar as they generate alternatives to commercial manufactured and marketed alternatives. It may be frustrating that by downloading pirate materials and talking about them we may unwittingly be promoting and marketing the 'legitimate' alternative – the product itself. Capital, however, requires these millions of tiny moments of co-operation – finding out when the bus is, getting the time off someone, etc. Call centre jobs, for instance, require continual interchange to solve problems in order to get the work done – this can't be captured in rules and scripts. Again, this co-operation is productive for capital. Identity is important here too – this doesn't occur on the web because if people piss you off in a virtual community you just leave, you go away. Much harder in non-virtual relationships. Something interesting about free software is that people do it in their spare time – it's a hobby. Importantly it depends on a sense of trust. When people are afraid of being ripped off, the General Public Licence (GPL) has a dual role. Firstly, it's a legal document. Secondly, it's a means of allowing collaboration – of building a community of developers and users who know they will always have access to the products of their creativity. Because the code remains open, projects can split and develop separately without a breach in the community leading to what has already been donw being lost for the future. The pressure to agree on everything or split is reduced in networked groups, though. There is a third type of value: RELATIONAL value (as well as use- and exchange-value), which is most important in such networked relationships, where trust is central to production and gift/distribution. Sharing a film uses bandwidth, but within a community of people there is an infinite horizon of knowledge and access to information – trust allows people to contribute that in ways that are phenomenally productive and creative. The term 'exodus' has been used to describe this – at what point does the construction of a new world become something more important than resistance to the old? People sharing things are being prosecuted – a moment of creativity, of escape, is now becoming a moment of resistance. Just like Claremont Road, people who didn't see themselves as political are becoming politicised by the industry reaction to their creative uses of networks. The conflicts will find us.
Fabian:
Networks and collectives – are networks actually able to produce in a way that collectives produce cars or cities in a co-operative way? Are networks restricted to leisure time? Could a film be produced by a network before a network shares it?
Alan:
Yes! Virtuous co-operation is always part of the productive process – a major union battle in the 1930s and 1940s over crediting screenwriters illustrates this. We need to discuss freely that our ideas are produced collectively, regardless of citation and/or the star system.
Jamie:
The software that is created under the GNU/Linux rubric has demonstrated that such production can take place. It's not just exchange. It's not just coincidental that it's software – these are the tools that are used – but this is expanding out to film- and music-making. Rendering, for instance, could be a distributed technology for special effects production.
Greg:
Capital has three choices with respect to sharing. (1) It's like the drugs trade. (2) Prevent information about the possibilities for sharing being distributed. (3) Get hold of the ownership of network providers, e.g., AOL/Time Warner's buying into ISPs and the like. Have Sky and other similar companies tried to oligopalise these networks, and is there a movement to legitimate that through the juridicial process?
Christina:
I don't know much about computers and software. Does the fact that there is this sharing going on presuppose the existence of information, etc., as something that is already centralised, filtered and monitored. Nodes in the network are often controlled by people who are technically savvy rather than anything else, opening up the possibilities of abuse. Sometimes exclusions and barriers exist because people lack the understanding of how to use the technology – e.g., sending attachments in Word versus using open formats.
Jamie:
There is an internal logic to both positions, but often the technical people don't present their side of the position very well.
Neil:
Opening up, expanding possibilities, is grounded in the body. It appears in riot situations, in street parties, it's a physical thing with a change in consciousness, like through trance, yoga, drugs, etc. It's difficult to live at such a pitch without damaging yourself in some way over a period of time. How those moments can be managed in the rest of your life is very important here, and can sustain you through more difficult times. But nostalgia here is a problem – something where people live in the era they were empowered in rather than in the present.
Susannah:
Before this group spoke I was going to protest because I thought Linux etc. had little to do with moments of excess, but I'm glad I came now!
Jeff:
A big moment of excess has been through Seattle, Genoa, etc. The fact that these aren't sustainable leads to these kinds of social fora which make them more manageable but which wipe out and institutionalise the excess. Could the GNU/Linux model be a way of transcending this?
Joel:
Do Linux, etc., push to resistance and struggle?
Keir:
These things can freeze you into a state where you fail to recognise the revolutionary potential of moments of excess that come after. They freeze into identities that are much more rigid anc close.
Laura:
I appreciate the dialectic relationships we've been talking about, and I'm interested that moments of excess aren't just things that are reactions to something we don't like. BUT these things come to an end – e.g., Claremont Road eventually finished – and collapse. How can these great things be maintained or produced without them having to be under threat all the time? Connection with one another doesn't necessarily indicate an anti-capitalist perspective – are these actually separate kinds of things – the grand and the personal?
Christina:
The link or the difference is about action. Claremont Road wasn't just about feeling good – it was about transforming or changing the world in some way. Pathologies emerge when the feeling doesn't have a clear end in sight.
Dave:
What is action? Resisting a bulldozer is, but is typing code not action? Is there a way of distinguishing between action and non-action?
Christina:
If something is meaningful and productive it's action. Dissolving into naval-gazing isn't the same thing as WINNING – things that are meaningful are actions.
Laura:
I wouldn't agree. The emotional and affective on the one hand and the political on the other can be brought together in the face of a threat. These things can be brought together, groups can empower one another, but this is the basis of so much of capital's logic too (team building, etc.). That's what I think needs integrating and analysing.
Keir:
Moments that appear around demands, which can be met. Be careful what you ask for, because you might get it and something better and interesting in its own right can disappear.
Brian:
In Argentina all of a sudden things became possible, people realised they make history. Being in a riot, realising FUCK THIS IS REALLY HAPPENING, these are moments that stay with you forever. What's fascinating about illegal downloading is that it opens up questions about why we have to pay for anything. What's exciting is the sense of contagion. I get the feeling that social fora are on the decline, they represent a gradual institutionalisation – I don't want the world I just want to talk to a few people. That's why excess is such a relevant concept now.
Neil:
Is this a youth thing, a generational thing, something that you grow out of and settle down from? It would be nice if they weren't. Art that's revolutionary can become institutionalised into formal aesthetic schools.
Fabian:
Looting – generally people don't have a bad conscience when doing this. Turning down the commercials during the advert break is a small-scale version of this.
Ana:
When I think of the Argentinian case I think these go together. There's always a moment of negativity but we create a new identity, new subjectivities, through these acts of resistance and refusal. It wasn't just a reaction to a state of emergency, but something that grew out of other creative things that were happening before. What happened was an expansion of the 'being physically there', embodiment and haecceity. When things calm down rationality comes back, but it's when things are calming down that we need to think through what's been happening and what can happen in the future. I think of that in terms of physicality – unite body and mind.
Keir:
Going back to Neil's comments about youth. Youth is a recent invention, something that emerged through categories of teenager and 'gap year', etc. Perhaps precarity has moved beyond simple chronological age though.
Susanne:
I have had a chance to live many moments of excess, and by conceiving of them as a moment of energy, ideas and creativity – you are just part of humanity which is going to change things – very important things emerge that stay with us longer and connect to other moments. A political philosophy for long distance struggles.
Joel:
Vic Turner and others would see these in conservative, functionalist, safety-valve ways. Can moments of excess transcend that?
Greg:
It's about class struggle.
Christina:
A negative crisis can throw up possibilities and openings no one ever expected would be there.
Fabian:
You were proposing the network production mode. Have changes in production pushed to a state where moments of excess are constantly diffused and normalised?
Alan:
Modern economy is a regime of excess, about the supersaturation of our lives with products – which transcends the properties of those products themselves. I have continual creative moments in production, but not the kinds of visceral excess you can get on the streets. The former aren't as extreme, but they're more sustainable, manageable. Us and them – us versus the police – is fine for a bit, but when things go mad and instinctive co-operation emerges, trust exists and develops quickly, affinities appear and the original splits are forgotten, something TRULY TRANSCENDENTAL is going on. We couldn't live like that once a year forever – but that's not enough. People went to Genoa for a riot – it was a honeypot – but that's not enough either for us or for our struggles. It's not network production, it's social co-operation. I don't want to fetishise software, but I do want to talk about a form of self-defence that allows me to be open with people and isn't just a line of least resistance.
Jamie:
Ecstatic experience and networked co-operation are seductive, sure. Music can transport you. Music can be made over a network, recorded over a network, distributed P2P, etc., etc. There's no way this could be done except through software. It sounds dull – I can understand that – but there are going to be many ways in which network co-operation will allow us to have transforming experiences in the future. It's not 'this is cyberspace', it's a way of changing how you can receive what we make and give to one another. The possibilities of music are a perfect example of this. But it is also what capital is doing – it's neither JUST sharpening others' desires OR undermining the industry. It's always both together, we're working for ourselves and for them at the same time.
Greg:
Changing the messages in movies and redistributing them.
Joel:
Vic Turner again. All statuses levelled and hierarchies overcome. The idea of the crowd. The blurring of boundaries. A cultural affinity between these ideas – riots and being together symbolically.
POSSIBLE QUESTIONS FOR TOMORROW (CAN NO LONGER BE ARSED REMEMBERING NAMES)
What is the value of excess?
Jeff:
Will new forms of resistance be contributions to the movement or will they split us apart. Will more forms alienate more people?
The two branches are quite related. The Zapatistas furthered links through the internet – sharing information very fast furthers the existing movement, it doesn't produce an alternative or replacement for it?
How are these senses of excess linked?
Is the internet something radically different to every new media? We're not going to reject it but does it change the essence of what's already there?
Is there something that connects the self and transformation of society that the concept of excess can facilitate?
Nostalgia and waiting for the next moment to come around.
How do we mobilise and sustain excess?
Protagonism and antagonism. What causes excessive moments? What stimulates them and how can we keep them going?
THAT'S THE QUESTION!
Created by: AlexDennis last modification: Monday 18 of October, 2004 [12:57:18 UTC] by Alex Dennis
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