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<nettime> Maurizio Lazzarato: The Political Form of Coordination


The Political Form of Coordination
Maurizio Lazzarato, translated by Mary O'Neill

http://eipcp.net/transversal/0707/lazzarato/en

Based on the model of "coordination", the struggle of the
"intermittents et précaires d'Ile de France" * is a veritable
laboratory that could well highlight the demise of the political
schema born of the socialist and communist tradition. Where this
tradition places the emphasis on a logic of contradiction, of the
political representation of an injustice that brings remarkable
identities into play, the political form termed "coordination" is
meant to be resolutely expressive, transformist, attentive to the
unstable dynamics of post-identitarian identities, of which the
reality of our world is woven. Coordination is aimed less at the
formation of a common collective that seeks its members' equality, at
all costs, than it is at the becoming of the singularities comprising
it within an unstable, networked, patchwork-loving multiplicity â??
defying all theoretical definition as well as trade-union or state
identification. It is a politics of experimentation that lays aside
prior knowledge and opens up to the unknown, without which no new life
can be envisaged.

Contemporary political movements are breaking radically with socialist
and communist tradition. They are deployed not according to the logic
of contradiction but rather to that of difference, which does not mean
that there is no conflict, opposition or struggle. Rather, these are
radically altered and deployed on two asymmetric levels. Political
movements and individualities are formed according to a logic of
"refusal", of being "against", of division. They seem, at first sight,
to reproduce the separation between "them and us", between friend and
enemy, which characterizes the workers' movement or indeed politics
itself. But this "no", this assertion of division, is expressed in
two different ways. On the one hand, it is directed against politics,
and it expresses a radical break with the rules of representation or
of the staging of a division within the same world. On the other, it
is the precondition for opening up to a becoming, to a bifurcation of
worlds and to the way these are created, in a confrontational manner,
not a unifying one.

On the first level, the struggle is represented as a flight away from
institutions and the rules of politics. People quite simply escape
â?? they walk away as the "peoples of the East" walked away from
real socialism, crossing the borders or staying in situ to recite
Bartleby's formula: "I would prefer not to". On the second level, the
individual and collective singularities that make up the movement
deploy a process of subjectivation, which involves both a composition
of common platforms (collective rights) and the differential assertion
of a multiplicity of practices for expression and for living. Flight,
politically elusive practices on the one hand; creation, strategies of
"empowerment" on the other. This new process renders the behaviours of
movements and singularities opaque and incomprehensible to political
scientists, sociologists, political parties and trade unions.

In France, one of the most interesting devices that movements
employ to hold both levels together is that of "coordination". The
coordination of the "intermittents et précaires d'Ile de France" is
the latest and most accomplished of the coordinations that, since
the beginning of the 90s, have organized all forms of struggle of a
certain scale (coordinations of nurses, students, railway workers,
the unemployed, teachers, etc). The refusal, the "no" ("we're not
playing any more") is what has pushed the intermittent workers from
an ambiguous yet always individual relationship to the organization
of the culture and communications industry into a new relationship
to themselves and to the power that comes through the "power of
us". Instead of being subjected to appropriation and exploitation
by industry, all the characteristics of the intermittent workers'
cooperation operate as drivers of the struggle.

Coordination is what the event of the struggle has made possible.
In this event, we see what is intolerable about an era and at
the same time the new possibilities for living that it enfolds.
The destructuring of what is intolerable and the articulation
of new possibilities for living have a very real existence, but
they are first expressed as a transformation of subjectivity, as
a mutation of the mode of sensibility, as a new distribution of
desires in the "souls" of the intermittent workers engaged in the
struggle. This new distribution of what is possible opens up to a
process of experimentation and creation: experimenting with what
the transformation of subjectivity involves, and creating the
devices, institutions and conditions capable of deploying these new
possibilities for living.

Speaking about 1968, Deleuze and Guattari said: "Society must be
capable of forming collective agencies of enunciation that match the
new subjectivity, in such a way that it desires its own mutation."1
When we consider political action in the light of the event, we are
faced with a twofold creation, a twofold individuation, a twofold
becoming (creating a possibility and bringing it about) that is
confronted with the dominant values. This is the point where the
"conflict" with what exists manifests itself. These new possibilities
for living come up against the organization of governments in power
and the manner in which these actualize this same constituent opening.

Coordination has developed the struggle on the two asymmetric levels
in an exemplary fashion: refusal and constitution, destructuring what
is intolerable and deploying new possibilities. Destructuring what is
intolerable, by taking a step alongside the codified and conventional
forms of the unions' struggle (the meeting, the demonstration),
will find expression in the invention of new forms of action, whose
intensity and reach will increasingly open up towards harassing and
unmasking the command networks of society-as-business. Deregulation
of the labour market and social rights is being countered by a
deregulation of the conflict that is following the organization of
power right into the communications networks, into the expression
machines (interruptions in television programmes, recovery of
advertising spaces, interventions in press editorial offices, etc.),
something which those involved in the conventional union struggles
ought not to ignore.

Coordination has coupled (not opposed) a diversifying of actions
(by the number of participants, by the variations in objectives),
using the "just-in-time" method (by the frequency and speed of their
planning and execution), to the unions' monumental mobilization
tactics (strikes), which are concentrated in time and space.
This gives some indication of what effective actions can be in
an organization of mobile, flexible capitalist production, where
the expression machines (television, advertising, press, cinema,
festivals) are constituent elements of "production".

If destructuring what is intolerable has to invent its modes of
action, the transformation of modes of sensibility implied by
refusal is only the precondition for opening up to another process,
a "problematic" one, of creation and actualization in relation to
multiplicity. "Problems" are what characterize the life and the
organization of coordination. The subjectivities engaged in the
struggle are caught between the old distribution of the sensible,
already defunct, and the new, which is not yet in existence other
than as methods for transforming sensibility and changing modes
of perceiving the world. Coordination is not a collective but a
mapping of singularities, composed of a multiplicity of committees,
initiatives, forums for discussion and planning, political and union
activists, a multiplicity of trades and professions, friendship
networks, "cultural and artistic" affinities, which form and break
up at different rates and with different aims. The process of
constituting multiplicity that is initiated here is not organic; it
is, rather, polemical and confrontational. There are, engaged in this
process, individuals as well as groups clinging desperately to the
identities, roles and functions modulated for them by the organization
of industry, and also individuals and groups involved in a radical
process of desubjectivation from these same modulations. There are
conservative forms of behaviour and expression and other, innovative,
forms distributed among various individuals and groups, or coming
through a single individual or group.

The word "precarious", added to the name "intermittent workers" of the
coordination d'Ile de France, is the word that has caused passions
to run highest and provoked the most vocal reactions. There are
those for whom the term "precarious" denotes a fact, an assessment
(there are as many non-indemnified intermittent workers as there are
indemnified ones, if not more; at any rate, 35% of indemnified workers
are transformed into precarious workers by the new draft agreement).
Others happily embrace it, seeing it as a reversal of the terms under
which power is assigned (like "unemployed person", "errèmiste"**,
"immigrant", etc.), and as a rejection of the categories into which
they are forced. Still others, paralysed by the vague, negative terms
of this attribution, demand the reassuring identity of "artist" or
"live-performance professional", which are also categories but, in
their minds, "positive" ones. One can identify with the artist or the
professional whereas "precarious worker" is a form of identification
by default. There are those too for whom the word "precarious"
is sufficiently ambiguous and polysemous to open up to multiple
situations that go beyond "live performance" and [for whom] it allows
enough possibilities for becomings that elude the categories assigned
by power. And there are yet others who demand "existential precarity"
and denounce "economic precarity". There are those for whom the term
"precarious" denotes the point where categories, attributions and
identities become blurred (artist and at the same time precarious
worker, professional and at the same time unemployed, alternatively
within and outside, on the edges, at the limits): the point where
relations, since they are not sufficiently codified, are â?? at the
same time and in a contradictory manner â?? sources of political
subjection, of economic exploitation and of opportunities to be
grasped.

 "Precarious" is the very model of "problematic" naming, which poses
new questions and seeks new replies. Lacking the universal impact of
names like "worker" or "proletarian", it plays the role â?? as these
once did â?? of that which defies, and it can only be named negatively
by power as a result. All are in favour of neutralizing precarity as
a weapon of political subjection and economic exploitation. Where
division occurs is on the means by which to bring it about and on the
significance of this achievement. Do we take the unknown aspects of
problematic situations conjured up by precarity back to what is known
in established institutions and their forms of representation: wage
earning, the right to work (employment), the right to state benefits
indexed to employment, the joint democracy of employers' and trade
union organizations? Or do we invent and impose new rights encouraging
a new relationship to activity, time, wealth, democracy, which exist
only virtually and often in a negative way, in conditions of precarity
?

We see that the economic questions, those affecting insurance and
representation schemes, immediately pose problems of political
categorization, which relate back to different processes of
subjectivation. Fitting into the pre-fabricated mould of the
capital-labour relationship, by viewing art and culture as their
"exception", or analysing the transformation of the concept of work
and the concept of art, and opening up to the becomings these very
questions imply, by defining the "artist" and the "professional" in
different terms. Or else bringing the "precarious", that which has not
yet been codified, back into the institutionalized conflict, which
has already been standardized (and also includes the revolution of a
great many revolutionaries !), or seizing the opportunity to develop
struggles for identities still in the making.

The post-feminist movements have already wrestled with the knotty
issue of becoming, the problem of the relationship between difference
and repetition, through the "aporetic" concept of post-identitarian
identity: shifting identities, fractured identities, eccentric
identities, nomadic subjects, where identity is both asserted and
stolen, where repetition (identity) is in favour of difference, where
the assertion of rights is not an assignment or an integration but,
rather, a precondition for becoming. Here this same question takes
over the more traditional field of law and of the institutional forms
regulating social issues.

Different modes of behaviour and expression are represented in
coordination, as they become widespread like skills or "collective
bodies of expertise" (as the intermittent workers put it when
referring to their activities), each time revealing the political
"objects" and "subjects". These skills and expertise, as soon as they
are in operation, trigger a proliferation of problems and responses.

The production of an alternative model to the one proposed by the
government is one of these skills that questions the organization
of our societies generally, using the specific practices of
live-performance professions as a basis. By analysing the legitimacy
of the division between experts and non-experts, the modes whereby the
new model is constructed also put the division between representatives
and represented to the test. The action of coordination may be
extended to experimentation with devices for being together and being
against, which repeat codified political procedures and, at the same
time, invent new ones but which, all of them, also take great care to
encourage the meeting of singularities, the arrangement of different
worlds and universes.

The general form of the organization is not the vertical and
hierarchical structure of political parties or trade unions, but that
of the network in which different organizational and decision-making
methods operate, which co-exist and are coordinated more or less
felicitously. The general assembly operates on the principle of
the majority vote without, however, selecting elites and vertical,
directive or permanent structures. But the life of the coordination
and the committees is based on the model of patchwork that allows an
individual or a group to launch initiatives and new forms of action
in a more flexible and responsible way. Organization in the form of
networks is more open to learning and the appropriation of political
action by all. The network favours the development of minority
politics and decision-making.

The coordination has adopted a strategy that operates transversally
within the divisions instituted by politics and the majoritarian
models (representatives / represented, private / public, individual
/ collective, expert / non-expert, social / political, audience /
spectator, employee / precarious worker, etc.). The opening of this
instituting space fuels a tension between the assertion of equality
proclaimed by politics (we all have equal rights), and the power
relations between singularities which are always asymmetric: (in a
meeting, a discussion, a decision-making process, the circulation of
speech, of places and roles is never based on equality).

 "Collective" rights are what define the conditions for equality;
rights are for everyone. But this equality is not for itself; it
is not in itself a goal. It is for difference, for everyone's
becoming; otherwise, it is nothing more than a levelling out of
multiplicity, an averaging out of subjectivities and an average
(majority) subjectivity. The differences imposed by power are
rejected, but the differences between singularities are arranged (on
this second level, equality can only be the possibility for everyone
not to be separated from what he/she is capable of, [for everyone]
to be able to fully realize his/her potential). The hierarchy of the
cultural industries is rejected and there is an arrangement of the
asymmetric relationships between singularities that cannot be measured
one against the other, "as it is in the worlds of artists, where there
are no ranks but a variety of sites".

Coordination makes it possible to cross borders, to blur the
divisions, categories and assignments into which intermittent
workers, all of us in fact, are forced. The space of coordination is
located transversally vis-à-vis the logic of equality and that of
difference (freedom) by constructing their relationship as a problem,
by trying to analyse the limits within which socialism and liberalism
had separately considered and practised them. Coordination is the
contentious site for transforming multiplicity: from the subjected
and enslaved multiplicity to a new multiplicity the outlines of which
cannot be measured in advance.

More generally, we can say this: the form of political organization
of coordination relates back to invention, experimentation and
to their modes of action, not to a new form of warfare. We are
currently living in conditions of "planetary civil war" and a
permanent "state of emergency", but I think that the response to this
organization of power is only possible if the logic of war is turned
back (invaginated) into a logic of co-creation and co-implementation.
The logic of war is the logic of conquest or of the distribution of
one sole possible world. The logic of invention is one of creating
and bringing different worlds into being in the same world; it
hollows out power and at same time makes it possible for us to stop
being obedient. This deployment and proliferation means extending
singularities within the vicinity of other singularities, drawing
a line of force between them, rendering them temporarily the same
and making them cooperate for a time towards a common goal, without
necessarily denying their autonomy and independence, without reducing
them in a process of totalization. And this action is, in turn, an
invention, a new individuation.

Coordination is set up according to modes that relate back to the
unpredictability of propagation and distribution of the invention
(by reciprocal capture, based on trust and affinity), rather than
to the realization of an ideal plan or of a political line aimed
at raising awareness. It succeeds only if it expresses a power in
which singularities exist "one by one, each one for itself". It takes
shape only if it expresses a "sum that is not reduced to a total
of its own elements". The transition from micro to macro levels,
from the local to the global, must not take place in a process of
abstracting, universalizing or totalizing, but through the ability to
hold together, to coordinate networks and patchworks gradually.

Compared to these dynamics of coordination, the instruments and forms
of organization of the workers' movement are largely inadequate since,
on the one hand, they refer to the cooperation of the Marx and Smith
factory and, on the other, political action is not conceived of as
an invention but merely as a revelation of something already there,
the main operator of which is awareness and representation. Turning
what is potential into something present, current, is an entirely
different matter from representing a conflict. The political action
of what remains of the workers' movement (in its institutional or
left-wing form) is dominated as ever by the logic of representation
and reductive totalization, which means exercising hegemony in
one sole possible world (whether it is a question of taking power
or sharing it), whereas coordination is a politics of expression.
The deployment of the political form of coordination calls first
of all for the neutralization of these methods of operating and
expressing politics. Where there is a hegemony of the organizational
forms of the workers' movement, there can be no coordination. Where
there is coordination, these organizations can be a part of it,
but only by abandoning their claims to hegemony and by adapting to
the constitutive rules of multiplicity â?? (we can also see this
co-existence at work in the forms of organization mobilizing against
neo-liberal globalization !) Coordination alone represents a public
space that includes differences.

The activist in a coordination is someone who is committed and at
the same time elusive. Contemporary political movements do not
develop according to the "mystical" modes of the transition from the
individual to the collective. All creative activity stems originally,
from singular initiatives (by a group or individuals) that are more or
less small in scale, more or less anonymous. These initiatives cause
an interruption, introducing a discontinuity not only in the exercise
of power on subjectivity, but also and especially in the reproduction
of the mental habits and the corporeal habits of multiplicity.
The act of resistance introduces discontinuities that represent
new beginnings, and these beginnings are multiple, disparate,
heterogeneous (there are always multiple foci of resistance).

Rather than relating back to the position of warrior or to religious
commitment, the activist in contemporary movements takes on the
attributes of the inventor, the experimenter. The activist is
committed and elusive as these are, since he/she too must escape
for his/her action to be effective in the chain of "prevailing
habits and imitations" codifying the space of political action. The
fascination that the figure of Subcomandante Marcos exercises is
the result of all the elements present in his way of conducting and
expressing himself. In a situation that is restrictive in a different
way from our own, he asserts himself as a warrior, as a political
and military commander; at the same time, using the same gestures
and the same words, he immediately eludes the warrior identity, rids
himself of the assigned role of commander, of military and political
leadership. The situation that is appropriate for the action of
beginning something new is expressed in the aporetic definition of
"subcommandant": subjectivation and at the same time desubjectivation,
each presupposing and relaunching the other reciprocally.

In contemporary militancy, the warrior dimension must be turned into
an inventive force, into the power to create and realize arrangements
and ways of living. The activist is not the one in possession of the
movement's intelligence, who sums up its strength, who anticipates its
choices, who derives his/her legitimacy from an ability to read and
interpret the movements of power; rather, he/she is the one who, by
introducing a discontinuity into what exists, facilitates an increase
in the power of arrangement and connection of cooperation, the flows,
the networks and the singularities that comprise it, according to
modes of disjunction and coordination that are non-totalizing,
non-homogenizing, non-hierarchical.

The intermittent workers say: we do not know what it is "to be
together" and "to be against" in conditions where different
worlds proliferate within a single world; we do not know what the
institutions of becoming are, but we raise these questions by means
of devices, techniques, arrangements, statements, and in this way we
analyse them and we experiment. The traditional modes of political
action are not on the way out, but are dependent on the deployment
of this power of coordination. The constitution of the self as
multiplicity is not sacrificed to the struggle against the imperatives
of power. The activist continues to put forward initiatives, to be
the originator of new beginnings, but not according to the logic
of realizing an ideal plan, of a political line that sees what is
possible as a readily available image of the real. [He/she does so]
according to an actual understanding of the situation, which obliges
him/her to put his/her very identity, his/her world view and methods
of action at stake. In fact, he/she has no other option since all
attempts at totalization, at homogenizing generalization, at creating
a relationship of force exclusively oriented towards representation,
at instituting modes of hierarchical organization, lead to flight and
the breakdown of coordination (of multiplicity).

* Translator's Note: intermittent and precarious workers of the Ile de
France

** Translator's Note: person living on RMI = Revenu minimum
d'insertion, a form of income support.

1 Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "May 68 Did Not Take Place",
http://illogicaloperation.com/textz/deleuze_gilles_guattari_felix_may_
68.htm, title in french : Mai 68 n'a pas eu lieu , in: Les nouvelles,
3 mai 1984 - page 75 et 76.








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