@book{bergman2017joyful,
title={Joyful Militancy: Building Thriving Resistance in Toxic Times},
author={Bergman, C. and Montgomery, N. and Alluri, H.},
isbn={9781849352895},
url={https://books.google.co.cr/books?id=ZH8yDwAAQBAJ},
year={2017},
publisher={AK Press}
}
In openlibrary.
My highlights:
What makes radical spaces and movements feel transformative and creative, rather than dogmatic, rule-bound, or stifling? What sustains struggles, spaces, and forms of life where we become capable of living and fighting in new ways? What supports people’s capacities to challenge each other and undo deeply ingrained habits, rather than just saying the “right” thing or avoiding the “wrong” thing? How are people carving out relationships based in trust, love, and responsibility amid the violence that permeates daily life? What sustains these worlds—what makes them thrive?
Durable bonds and new complicities are not a reprieve or an escape; they are the very means of undoing Empire.
We use “Empire” to name the organized destruction under which we live. Through its attempt to render everything profitable and controllable, Empire administers a war with other forms of life. The rhythms it imposes are at once absorptive and isolating. Even when this war takes the apparently subtle forms of assimilation and control, it is backed by brutal violence. Prisons and cops lurk alongside discourses of inclusion and tolerance. Empire works to monopolize the whole field of life, crushing autonomy and inducing dependence.
There are cracks everywhere. Resistance and transformation are always in the making at the margins, while Empire is always adapting and reacting. This is a struggle not only against external domination, but also against Empire’s control over identities, desires, and relationships. Undoing Empire also means undoing oneself. What is needed is an activation and affirmation of other ways of being.
The capacity to treat each other well is connected, we think, to movements that nurture autonomy, trust, responsibility, and the collective power that is palpable when people are able to participate more fully in life.
Theory can also explore connections and ask open-ended questions. It can affirm and elaborate on something people already intuit or sense. It can celebrate and inspire; it can move.
Transformative potentials are always already present and emergent. Not a new direction for movements but the process of movement itself and the growth of creativity, struggle, experimentation, and collective power.
Spinoza conceptualized a world in which everything is interconnected and in process. Processes through which people become more alive, more capable, and more powerful together. For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. His name for this process is joy.
Joy rarely feels comfortable or easy, because it transforms and reorients people and relationships. It’s not an emotion at all but an increase in one’s power to affect and be affected. The capacity to do and feel more. The space of emergent orders, values, and forms of life.
Militancy means combativeness and a willingness to fight. It might mean the struggle against internalized shame and oppression; fierce support for a friend or loved one; the courage to sit with trauma; a quiet act of sabotage; the persistence to recover subjugated traditions; drawing lines in the sand; or simply the willingness to risk. The connections between fierceness and love, resistance and care, combativeness and nurturance. The most widespread, long-lasting, and fierce struggles are animated by strong relationships of love, care, and trust.
To have a common notion is to be able to participate more fully in the web of relations and affections in which we are enmeshed. Common notions are inherently experimental and collective.
We are not interested in sacrificing the present for a revolution in the distance, nor are we confident that things will get better. They may get worse, for many of us, in many ways. Optimism and pessimism can provide a sense of comfort at the expense of openness and the capacity to hang onto complexity. They can drain away our capacity to care, to try, and to fight for things to be otherwise without knowing how it will turn out. Uncertainty is where we need to begin, because experimentation and curiosity is part of what has been stolen from us.
Anarchism is not an ideology but a creative rejection of the ideologies of the state, capitalism, and the Left. Anarchism can support a trust in people’s capacities to figure out for themselves how to live and fight together rather than constructing a model or blueprint for resistance. Anarchism often nurtures autonomy, decentralization, and difference. Anarchism can help us inhabit spaces by trusting our own capacities and relating in ways that are emergent and responsive to change.
Affinity is a helpful concept for us because it speaks to emergent relationships and forms of organizing that are decentralized and flexible but not flimsy. Shared values, commitments, and passions, without trying to impose those on everyone else. Centering things like kindness, love, trust, and flourishing—especially when it comes from white people like us—can erase power relations. It can end up pathologizing so-called “negative” emotions like fear, mistrust, resentment, and anger. It can legitimize tone policing and a reactionary defense of comfort. It can fall into simplistic commandments to “be nice” or “get over” oppression and violence. Similarly, pointing to the importance of trust and openness can be dangerous and irresponsible in a world of so much betrayal and violence. Trust and vulnerability are powerful and irreducibly risky; they require boundaries. They can never be obligations or duties.
With joyful militancy we are trying to get at a multiplicity of transformations and worlds in motion, but there is a danger of implying that we are all in the same situation, and erasing difference and antagonisms. BIPOC women, trans, queer, and Two-Spirit people, in particular, have worked hard to show the specificities of the oppression they face and the specificity of their resistance and the worlds they are making. Can joyful militancy affirm and explore a multiplicity of struggles and forms of life without homogenizing them?
We want to return to the dynamic space beyond fixed norms on the one hand, and “anything goes” relativism on the other. Outside this false dichotomy is the domain of relationships that are alive, responsive, and make people capable of new things together, without imposing this on everyone else. It is in this space where values like openness, curiosity, trust, and responsibility can really flourish, not as fixed ways of being to be applied everywhere but as ways of relating that can only be kept alive by cultivating careful, selective, and fierce boundaries. For joy to flourish, it needs sharp edges.
This sense of collective power—the sense that things are different, that we are different, that a more capable “we” is forming that didn’t exist before—is what we mean by joyful transformation. Being attuned to situations or relationships and learning how to participate in and support the transformation rather than directing or controlling it. The web of control that exploits and administers life—ranging from the most brutal forms of domination to the subtlest inculcation of anxiety and isolation—is what we call Empire. These processes separate people from their power, their creativity, and their ability to connect with each other and their worlds.
Part of Empire’s power is to bring us all into the same world, with one morality, one history, and one direction, and to convert differences into hierarchical, violent divisions. Empire’s precarity is being revealed everywhere, even if it continues to be pervasive and devastating. It is resistance, struggle, and lived transformation that make it possible to feel collective power and carve out new paths.
Empire’s hold is increasingly affective: it suffuses our emotions, relationships, and desires, propagating feelings of shame, impotence, fear, and dependence. It makes capitalist relations feel inevitable and (to some) even desirable. These forms of violence and control are ultimately toxic for everyone.
Empire reacts to resistance by entrenching and accumulating what Spinoza called sadness: the reduction of our capacity to affect and be affected. All things wax, wane, and die eventually, and the process can provoke thought, resistance, and action. The established powers need our sadness to make us slaves. The tyrant, the priest, the captors of souls need to persuade us that life is hard and a burden. Stultifying, depleting, disempowering, individualizing, and isolating. But this entrenchment might not feel agonizing or even unpleasant: it might feel like comfort, boredom, or safety.
Some of us are steered into forms of life that are compatible and complicit with ongoing exploitation and violence, while other populations are selected for slow death. Whereas joyful transformation undoes the stultifying effects of Empire, happiness has become a tool of subjection. Under Empire, happiness is seen as a duty and unhappiness as a disorder. Neoliberal capitalism encourages its subjects to base their lives on this search for happiness, promising pleasure, bliss, fulfillment, arousal, exhilaration, or contentment, depending on your tastes and proclivities (and your budget). And consumerism as another form of placid containment: the individual realizes that what really makes one happy is a life in a small town where everyone knows your name, or a humble nuclear family, or kinky polyamory, or travel, or witty banter, or cooking fancy food, or awesome dance parties.
Empire empties these and other activities of their transformative potential, inviting us to shape our lives in pursuit of happiness as the ultimate goal of life. The search for happiness closes off other possibilities, other textures, other affections. Empire is designed to secure white male happiness in particular, while the feelings of women, genderqueer and trans folks, and people of color are intensely policed. Being perceived as a threat to the happiness of others—especially white men—can be lethal.
Happiness can also be subversive and dangerous, as part of a process through which one becomes more alive and capable. But when happiness becomes something to be gripped or chased after as the meaning of life, it tends to lose its transformative potential. The challenge is not to reject happiness in favor of duty or self-sacrifice but to initiate processes of thinking, feeling, and acting that undo subjection, starting from everyday life. How are people made to desire their own stifling forms of subjection? Joy remakes people through combat with forces of subjection.
The intensity of sensual experience; it means perceptive, sharp in the senses. Sentipensar still carries this meaning in Spanish: the conviction that you cannot think without feeling or feel without thinking. You understand the situation, and you’re active in a way that you feel that you are comprehending and moving along in accordance to what is required in that moment. Somatics’s all about being present, being awake inside your real life in real time.
One spark of refusal can lead to an upwelling of collective rage and insurrection. Joy can erupt from despair, rage, hopelessness, resentment, or other so-called “negative” emotions. Supporting joy cannot be achieved through a detached rationality but only through attunement to relationships, feelings, and forces—a practical wisdom that supports flourishing and experimentation. We are interested in the ways that putting joy into contact with militancy helps link fierce struggle with intense affect: rebellions and movements are not only about determined resistance but also about opening up collective capacities.
The specter of the “militant extremist” helps justify further militarization, surveillance, imperialism, and Islamophobia. The suspected presence of one militant is enough to turn a whole area into a strike zone in which all military-aged men are conceived as enemy combatants and everyone else as collateral damage. Within this discourse, the militant is increasingly the ultimate Other, to be targeted for death or indefinite detention. Militancy has the capacity “to transform people and ‘fundamentally alter’ their being by emboldening them, removing their passivity and cleansing them of the ‘core of despair’ crystallized in their bodies. An “emergent radicalism” that destabilizes relations of domination.
Empire represents Indigenous peoples’ oppression as a constellation of personal failings and “issues” to be addressed through colonial recognition and reconciliation. Militancy, in the context of Indigenous resurgence, is about the capacity to break down colonial structures of control, including the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of force; it is a break with the colonial state’s attempt to subjugate Indigenous people and ensure continued exploitation of Indigenous lands. This emergent militancy isn’t based on a single program or ideology but comes out of relationships. Those relationships to place are not new. They’ve always been there and are always re-emerging. It comes in cycles. It’s this resurgent Indigenous subjectivity that the state is constantly trying to quell or subdue. It’s successful but never totally successful. We’ve never gone away, and we’ve been articulating alternatives in words and deeds.
Indigenous struggles do not implicate everyone in the same way. Indigenous resurgence implicates us, as settlers, in complicated ways: it unsettles us and our relationship to land and place, and it throws into question received ideas about who we are, our responsibilities and complicities, what it means to live here, and our received ideas about what “here” is. It compels us to learn, together, how to support Indigenous resurgence and resist settler colonial violence.
We have to pay attention to the situation, to the encounters that take place in it, to how meaning is elaborated there, to the subjectivities that arise as a result of those encounters. An attempt to intervene effectively in the here and now, based on a capacity to be attuned to relationships. New forms of militancy tend to provoke new strategies of containment and absorption by the state, leading to the invention of new forms of struggle. oyful transformation sometimes ebbs and flows, becomes captured or crushed, grows subtler or percolates into everyday life, but always re-emerges and renews itself.
Joyful militancy also lives in art and poetry that opens people’s capacities for thinking and feeling in new ways. It is expressed in quiet forms of subversion and sabotage, as well as all the forms of care, connection, and support that defy the isolation and violence of Empire.
Kinship has been enclosed within the nuclear family, freedom within the individual, and values within morality. These enclosures sap relationships of their intensity and their transformative potential. Interdependent relationships as a source of collective power. Relational freedom. The capacity for interconnectedness and attachment, mutual support and care, shared gratitude and openness to an uncertain world, a new capacity to fight alongside others.
Under capitalism, freedom is especially associated with free markets and the free agent who chooses based on individual preferences. I am free because I have ties, because I am linked to a reality greater than me.
Spinoza remained a product of his time and place: he used the geometric method to create proofs for his philosophical claims, he couldn’t overcome patriarchal divisions, and he remained wedded to the state as a vehicle for security. Spinoza’s philosophy is grounded in affect. Things are not defined by what they are but by what they do: how they affect and are affected by the forces of the world. His worldview was at odds with any notion of an ultimate ground of right and wrong that was uniform for everyone, abstracted from the lively flux of relationships and situations. For Spinoza, life was an exploration of the forces of the world, not conformity to a fixed ideal. Recognizing our interconnectedness means becoming capable of more fidelity to our web of relations and our situations, not less. This fidelity is not moral; it is ethical. He never asks what we must do, he always asks what we are capable of, what’s in our power, ethics is a problem of power, never a problem of duty. Good encounters, bad encounters, increases and diminutions of power. The body’s capacities can only be discovered through attunement and experimentation, starting right where you are.
Relational ethics: the willingness to nurture and defend relationships. Our desires and choices are the product of everything that affects us attuned to the singularity and openness of each situation. What are we capable of here and now, together, at this time, in this place, amid the relations in which we are embedded? Freedom can mean nothing other than the ethical expansion of what we’re capable of—what we’re able to feel and do together.
Under neoliberalism, friendship is a banal affair of private preferences: we hang out, we share hobbies, we make small talk. We become friends with those who are already like us, and we keep each other comfortable rather than becoming different and more capable together. It’s the alternative to hetero- and homonormative coupling. "Just friends” implies a much weaker and insignificant bond than a lover could ever be. Under neoliberal friendship, we don’t have each other’s backs, and our lives aren’t tangled up together.
In these times, feelings of despair, rage, and hatred make sense. Maybe they even indicate a healthy receptivity to what is taking place, a refusal to numb ourselves to the pain and violence of Empire.
Ethics and relational freedom might entail supporting each other to become more present with despair, guilt, resentment, fear, or grief. Freedom, gentleness, and militancy always come from—and feed back into—the web of relationships and affections in which everyone is immersed. By creating relational webs that reinforce the values we aspire to, relationships can help undo patterns that Empire has ingrained.
Relationships of mutual love and support can enable us to see and feel the toxicity of some of our attachments. Friendships can be the source of our capacity to take risks and get in the way of violence and exploitation. Not just someone to hang out with, but also someone whose existence is inseparable from one’s own. A relationship crucial to life, worth fighting for.
The nuclear family—where one generation of parents lives with one generation of children, separated from everyone else—is a recent invention of Empire. A crucial institution for the privatization and enclosure of life, central to the maintenance of a culture of authoritarianism, abuse, and neglect that underpins heteropatriarchy and white supremacy. It evolved as a way of reproducing wage-laboring men through the unpaid labor of women. It makes other forms of intimacy difficult or unthinkable for many of us. The nuclear family is even coded into the built environment.
Queer chosen families have created intimate, intergenerational webs of support, and these radical ties remain alive in spite of new forms of homonormative capture. Non-nuclear family and kinship networks are at the heart of Latin America’s most transformative and militant movements, including those of Indigenous peoples, peasant farmers, landless and homeless movements, piqueteros, and women’s and youth movements. Based in new forms of dwelling, subsistence, and resistance. People renew intergenerational relationships and bring their whole lives into struggle, new forms of politics emerge, creating a certain social fabric and forms of co-operative reproduction that can give continuity and strength to our struggles, and a more solid base to our solidarity. We need to put our lives in common with the lives of other people to have movements that are solid and do not rise up and then dissipate.
Friendship, kinship, and communalization have also been at the heart of working across the hierarchical divides of heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, colonization, ableism, ecocide, and other systems that have taught us to enact violence on each other and internalize oppressive ways of relating. To make kin across these divisions is a precarious and radical act. Putting relationships before abstract political commitments and ideologies.
The state’s power lies not only with armies or police but also in its capacity to get us to govern ourselves and each other and to re-create its hierarchical and divisive relationships through our conduct. The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.
Other people and cultures would have different answers to the question of how to live. Different cultures exist next to each other and that the dream that all should be the same cannot be sustained – in fact, it is not even a beautiful dream.
Like the state, the self-enclosed individual is a fiction of Empire. “I” am already a crowd, enmeshed in others.
Freedom, in this sense, is not the absence of Empire, secured through a glorious future revolution or the triumph of an anarchist blueprint. Freedom is the capacity to grapple with some of the toxic habits and relationships fostered by Empire and to recover other ways of relating. This anarchism can only be an action or a process.
Bridging is the work of opening the gate to the stranger, within and without. To bridge is to attempt community, and for that we must risk being open to personal, political, and spiritual intimacy, to risk being wounded. Effective bridging comes from knowing when to close ranks to those outside our home, group, community, nation—and when to keep the gates open. These notions of affinity and bridging turn connection into an open-ended ethical question rather than an assumption, a goal, or a moral imperative. How do we relate? Who is this “we”? How do we affect each other? How and when to be open selectively?
All over Turtle Island, Indigenous peoples are reasserting their ties and responsibilities to their lands, refusing the racist and heteropatriarchal divisions imposed by Empire, and recovering relationships based in care and consent. This is an intensification of what has been happening since colonization began. For European-descended settlers who live on Indigenous land, specifically—this can be profoundly unsettling. Many non-Indigenous people are beginning to see themselves as settlers, complicit in ongoing dispossession and colonization of Indigenous forms of life. Indigenous self-determination must become the foundation for all our broader social justice mobilizing. Indigenous people have forged alliances with ranchers and farmers resisting pipelines, with migrants resisting border imperialism, and with Black communities resisting criminalization and the prison industrial complex. They have linked up with anarchists while challenging them to rethink colonial conceptions of nation, territory, tradition, and authority. Some settlers are learning to take responsibility for developing relationships with the people whose land they are on, and learning to support Indigenous leadership. Indigenous resurgence has pushed non-Indigenous people to learn the histories and protocols of the lands where they live, to ask what it means to honor treaties and what it means to live on land where treaties were never signed. There’s a lot within non-Indigenous settler traditions that have suffered their own erasure that might be brought back to the fore. And that’s way better than the alternative, which is stealing what we’ve got. Showing up in meaningful ways, and decentering themselves and staying on the sidelines when it is appropriate. Hanging on to these as ethical questions, we think, helps get beyond the shame and guilt of moralism that can be so immobilizing (and counterproductive) for settlers—especially white settlers.
Some relationships are just bullshit, and we shouldn’t be in them. Others might suck. We shouldn’t be relating to them; we should be fighting them; we should be seeking to destroy them in some circumstances. Because their whole identity, their whole form of life is predicated on our negation. Freedom is the capacity to make friends and enemies, to be open and to have firm boundaries. For settlers, getting out of the way might be more important than seeking connection. Entitlement to others’ time, energy, and love can be an unconscious strategy that reproduces domination through intimacy. Freedom always needs to retain the potential of refusal, negation, and resistance.
Maintaining transformative relationships is not easy in a world full of violence, in which Empire continually induces us (especially white, cis-male settlers) to construct flimsy relationships based in leisure and to abandon them if they are no longer pleasurable. We can’t all be friends, and some forms of life will never be compatible. Some differences might mean that people cannot work together. Maybe. Differences might also signal potential for practices, orientations, and priorities that are resonant and complementary without becoming the same. Differences might then become starting points for new complicities and the growth of shared power. If relationships are what compose the world—and what shape our desires, values, and capacities—then freedom is the capacity to participate more actively in this process of composition. Friendship and affinity are not things but processes and open questions, which produce partial responses, further questions, flashes of certainty and confidence, but never definitive answers.
Cynicism and disillusionment do not necessarily lead to revolt or struggle. We do not have to believe capitalism is good for us or that the state will help and protect us, so long as we remain enmeshed in Empire’s radical monopoly over life, from schooling to law to the built environment that surrounds us.
To create intergenerational spaces where kids can thrive means holding space for play and emergence by warding off the twin pitfalls of individualism and conformity. This requires nurturing a baseline of trust, responsibility, and autonomy. The passage from passivity to activity happens through the formation of common notions: people figuring out together what sustains transformation in their situations and how to move with it and participate in its unfolding. Common notions are formed in the local and concrete terrain of affects that emerge in the encounter between bodies.
Empire conceives its Others as untrustworthy and lacking maturity, health, morality, knowledge, civilization, and rationality, and so they have all been targets for education, confinement, and control—or for total eradication and genocide. Moving, and modern building codes and bylaws make it impossible and illegal for people to build their own dwellings or even to live together at all if they cannot pass as a nuclear family. Modern medicine does not just create a new way of understanding the body: its scientific understanding is premised on a radical monopoly over health and the subjugation (or commodification) of other healing traditions. To be healthy under Empire is to be a properly functioning, able-bodied, neurotypical individual capable of work, and to be sick often means becoming medicalized: isolated, confined, and dependent on strangers and experts. Law, policing, and prisons monopolize the field of justice by enforcing cycles of punishment and incarceration, forcing out the capacity of people to protect each other and resolve conflicts themselves. The rise of industrial agriculture has been accompanied by a loss of the convivial relations surrounding subsistence: the connection to the growing and processing of food, the intimacy with ecosystems and seasons it entails, and the collective rituals, celebrations, and practices that have accompanied these traditions. Empire’s infrastructure induces dependence on forms of production, specialized knowledge, expertise, and tools that detach people from their capacities to learn, grow, build, produce, and take care of each other. Surveillance is ubiquitous, continuous, and increasingly participatory. There is little room for silence, nuance, listening, exploration, or the rich subtleties of tone and body language. Anything too intense or subversive is either incorporated or surgically removed by security, police, or emergency personnel.
To be constantly mistrusted and controlled is also to be detached from one’s own capacity to experiment, make mistakes, and learn without instruction or coercion. The responsible economic subject owns her own property, pays her own debts, invests in her future, and meets her needs and desires through consumption. She is individually responsible for her health, her economic situation, her life prospects, and even her emotional states. Empire’s subjects are “free” to be mistrustful and resentful of the system under which they live. One can hate Empire as much as one wants, as long as one continues to work, pay rent, and consume.
Challenging Empire’s radical monopoly over life means interrupting its affective and infrastructural hold, undoing some of our existing attachments and desires, and creating new ones. Conviviality is the name that Illich gives to ways of life that promote flourishing, the opposite of industrial productivity. I intend it to mean autonomous and creative intercourse among persons, and the intercourse of persons with their environment. The creative relationships that emerge between people and their material surroundings, sustained by grassroots trust and responsibility.
Workers have taken over factories and learned to run them collectively, without bosses, through a process of autogestion, or worker self-management. This is not merely a transition from top-down factory production to cooperative production but also a process of transformative struggle in which whole neighborhoods defended factories against police and capitalists. Similarly, the neighborhood assemblies that formed through the uprising have created new ways for people to resolve conflicts and support each other without relying on the state. In the wake of disaster it is mainly elites who panic and resort to violence. Bureaucratic disaster relief tends to entrench misery and despair. Large numbers of people engage in mutual aid and solidarity. Why is there joy in disaster? Solnit suggests that it is because Empire’s debilitating monopolies on life are suspended: we are free to live and act in another way. The bubbling up of decentralized, convivial forms of life must be crushed as quickly as possible, and “order” must be restored. People go back to their jobs, their houses, their smartphones, and control returns.
The alternative is deep reciprocity. It’s respect, it’s relationship, it’s responsibility, and it’s local. The more distance and the more globalization then the more shielded I am from the negative impacts of extractivist behavior. There are overwhelming and heartbreaking changes taking place, and being connected to communities of plants and animals makes it as painful as it is nourishing.
Transformative justice has emerged as an alternative to “restorative justice” models. Its emphasis on transformation is based on the insight that—especially among Black and Indigenous communities—violence is structural and institutional, without a baseline that could be restored. It works pragmatically from existing relationships to interrupt institutional and interpersonal cycles of violence, disposability, and punishment. By enacting alternatives to cops and courts, these initiatives nurture autonomy in place of racist, heteropatriarchal institutions, undoing the culture in which both survivors and perpetrators are made disposable and institutional violence is obscured. veryone we know who is involved in these efforts to end cycles of violence can attest to how fraught, messy, and difficult they can be. They do not always go well. Nonetheless, this is the kind of “freedom” discussed in the last chapter: the capacity to work on relationships, to become more active in undoing oppressive patterns, and to nurture and deepen trust and collective responsibility.
I think we cannot have any kind of trust in a mass of 100 million individuals, they will produce the horror. But if we bring everything to the human scale, to the communities, to small groups of people, then we can really trust that the people will have the wisdom to discuss and to generate consensus. What they call hospitality—a radical openness, generosity, and trust in others—is common among many traditions that have not been lost to bureaucratic institutions, industrial dependence, and other trappings of “development". The notion of hospitality is not just about welcoming guests; it connotes a sensibility of trust based on people’s sense of their capacity to face the world together. Being held in this way also enables people to be open to strangers: not simply “tolerant” but capable of open-ended encounters, generosity, and curiosity. Hospitality starts not from rights-bearing individuals but from a sensuous and lively world, composed through common notions that have evolved to sustain joy or conviviality. It is not individuals who are trusting; there is no self-enclosed individual who “chooses” to trust but bundles of relationships in which the capacity for trust is activated and drawn out of people.
Like all common notions, trust and responsibility are not guarantees that things will go well or that oppression and violence will not happen. Trust, hospitality, and openness are precious and important precisely because they entail incredible courage and risk, especially in the context of Empire, with its many layers of violence and control.
Rigid radicalism is both a fixed way of being and a way of fixing. To fix is to see lack everywhere and treat struggles and projects as broken and insufficient. We think that rigidity is undone by activating, stoking, and intensifying joy, and defending it with militancy and gentleness; in other words, figuring out how to transform our own situations, treat each other well, listen to each other, experiment, and fight together.
In the paradigm of government, being a militant implies always being angry with what happens, because it is not what should happen; always chastising others, because they are not aware of what they should be aware of; always frustrated, because what exists is lacking in this or that; always anxious, because the real is permanently headed in the wrong direction and you have to subdue it, direct it, straighten it. All of this implies not enjoying, never letting yourself be carried away by the situation, not trusting in the forces of the world. This gets in the way of being present with what is always already happening and the capacity to be attuned to the transformative potentials in one’s own situation. Because rigid radicalism induces a sense of duty and obligation everywhere, there is a constant sense that one is never doing enough.
Burnout in radical spaces is not just about being worn out by hard work; it is often code for being wounded, depleted, and frayed: not just long hours but also the tendencies of shame, anxiety, mistrust, competition, and perfectionism. It can activate a feeling that people around us are too flawed, too complacent, or that our own worlds are lacking something. One is encouraged to make calculations about political commitments based on how they will be seen and by whom. A spectacle to be performed.
An ethical approach asks questions about how we affect each other, what new encounters become possible, and what we can do together. None of the answers to these questions can be known in advance. To ward off ideology is not finally to see clearly but to be disoriented, allowing things to emerge in their murkiness and complexity.
The real enemy is the dominant order, but it gets mixed into this big soup, so the enemy becomes each other. It becomes oneself.
Surprise and curiosity are often infantilized by Empire. They are treated as foolish or “childish”—that is, lacking the educated, rational, civilized, adult capacities of detached evaluation. Paranoid reading and its association with adulthood and rational detachment are transmitted through schooling, founded on patriarchal white supremacy.
The revolutionary alternative to control consists in “learning to fully inhabit, instead of governing, a process of change. Letting yourself be affected by reality, to be able to affect it in turn. Taking time to grasp the possibles that open up in this or that moment. What most matters is discovering and re-creating the collective memory of past struggles.
Our political involvement often is born of suffering. But the joy is knowing and deciding that we can do something about it; it is recognizing that we share our pain with other people, is feeling the solidarity of those around us. I don’t believe in the concept of “self-sacrifice,” where self-sacrifice means that we do things that go against our needs, our desires, our potentials, and for the sake of political work we have to repress ourselves.
More highlights: https://archive.org/download/elopio-highlights/2024-08-24-11-36-16-Joyful%20Militancy.md