University of Leicester From the SelectedWorks of Athina Karatzogianni 2010 Power, Conflict and Resistance: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies Athina Karatzogianni, University of Hull Andrew Robinson Available at: https://works.bepress.com/athina_karatzogianni/3/ Power, Conflict and Resistance in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies [this is the manuscript in pre-publication form] Athina Karatzogianni and Andrew Robinson Introduction This is a book which has been a long time in the making. Like many of its kind, it has taken on an energy of its own since its beginnings in what was then an article project seven years ago. It started out rather smaller, as an attempt to explain what was then the major event of world politics: the American lurch to global empire under the Bush regime. We noticed, first of all, the parallels of Bush’s actions with ongoing patterns in the world-system, and secondly, the ways in which the dominant discourse articulated a network-hierarchy binary in a manner reminiscent of Deleuze turned upside-down. From this we constructed an initial argument that the world-system is an arborescent assemblage, that networks and flows are therefore likely to constantly slip away from it, and that imperial violence can be understood in terms of attempts to trap these escaping flows. Add in the question of sociopolitical and ethnoreligious movements, already raised in the previous work of one of us (Karatzogianni, 2006) and here extended into the concepts of affinity-networks and reactive networks, and we had the beginnings of something exciting. But the project grew as we engaged with the world-systems and Marxist scholarship, and new concepts and issues found a place in the scenario: global cities, bifurcations, hegemonic transitions, the relationship between capitalism and the state, the position of East Asia, the ‘shadow state’ and more besides. Soon we found we had the framework for a comprehensive new theorization of the forces at work in global politics, a framework which crosses the boundaries between international relations, international political economy, comparative politics, conflict studies, social movement studies and critical theory to produce a study of a scope uncommon in this age of disciplinary separations, and perhaps better placed alongside the broader scholarship of a bygone age (or of the far side of a short channel). Power, Conflict and Resistance in the Contemporary World: Social Movements, Networks and Hierarchies aims at exploring centrifugal tendencies from a more political perspective, and relating these tendencies more explicitly to the world system and to global power-relations. It is also seeking to integrate specific issues of resistance into a wider perspective based on an overarching theoretical approach by stressing the specifically networked (rather than simply decentred) structure of the kinds of resistances and survival strategies. We are viewing resistance in terms of decentring rather than a centralising ‘democratic’ project. While drawing on the insights of several theoretically diverse authors, we aim to apply them in areas these authors do not address, in particular in relation to global war, system integration and disintegration, and the possibility of a non-striated world beyond the nation-state. 1 In this sense, theoretically we hold a perspectival position. Our view is that many diverse perspectives all have partial contributions to make. Actuality is in excess over any way of interpreting it; therefore, one comes closest to understanding by attempting to see from many different perspectives and directions, each giving a partial truth. We also attempt to fit these together as best we can. Hence the contrasting social ontologies of the theorists we use are not so much barriers as different points of view to be appreciated. This is not to downplay the reality of these differences, but to emphasise the possibility of interweaving the theories in any case. The great strength of continental theorists is to produce massive elaborate architectures of theory based on tendential lines and telling examples. Their great weakness is that as a result, each theory ends up with a partial picture which overreaches – they draw as an entire map something which is only part of the picture. Hence the totalitarian endo- colonial logic of Virilio, the simulacra world of Baudrillard, the network capitalism of Hardt and Negri, the proliferating transversal connections of Bhabha or Mbembe are all part of the picture of what is going on – the task of analysis is to locate each of these in the whole picture, in relation to one another and to different social forces. So the rhizomes of resistance include the transversal connections, but are opposed by state and capitalist logics, which they contradict. Endo-colonialism controls entire spaces in the core and the global cities in an attempt to suppress these flows by pure repression. Network capitalism, a different strategy to recuperate the flows, emerges as a more vital alternative which is beginning to form, and may be longer-lasting should the former stagnate from its own deathliness. Most theorists either focus exclusively on or claim as determinant a single dominant social logic. This leads to perspectives, which are useful, but overstated and very partial. For example, Baudrillard may be right about the structure of massified thought, but errs in expanding it too far afield, assuming it to be universal and failing to see the pockets of de-massification. Negri’s early work may be accurate in theorising resistance in the core and semi-core, but inadequate in relation to the mediations, which persist in more peripheral regions. Autonomists and Situationists may be right about the pervasive importance of what they call “capitalism” (in fact, alienation), but fail because of this to draw important distinctions – between capital, state, tribute systems, patronage, inclusion and exclusion – which differentiate distinct social forces. In contrast, Gramscians see the distinctions, but at the expense of the centrality of alienation. In some cases, we are selective in what we use from an author’s work. For instance, in Zizek we reject most of his political/strategic perspective – the idea of scarcity and lack as existentially basic, the assumption that Lacanian theory provides a complete structural picture, the insistence on the party or state as totaliser, the hostility to horizontalism and the “right to narrate” and to inclusiveness towards others; but take on board aspects of his analysis of the current dominant social logics – which do sometimes reveal features similar to those of Lacanian theory. What world system theory calls chaos, breakdown, or in Chew’s (2006) case dark age, may well be the progressive – decentring, rhizomatic, rewilding, transversalising – option, whereas the alternative of a new hegemon is a form of recuperation and crisis management. It may be most productive, therefore, to combine all the perspectives as if they were analyses of particular social logics, while adding to them theories of the 2 relations between these logics. Eventually, one may have to come back to the epistemo- ontological disputes; but this may be done more productively once the empirical reach of the social logics theorised by different perspectives is established. There are several groups of thinkers we use. We mainly draw on: phenomenology/everyday life, empirical scholarship mainly in anthropology and politics, poststructuralism, structural Marxism, open Marxism, anarchism, Baudrillard, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari and postcolonial theory. Deleuze and Guattari have a special status as our theoretical ancestors, whose perspective guides our research. In addition to Deleuze and Guattari themselves, there is a group of theorists who use similar ideas of politics of desire or critique of representation, authors such as Lefebvre, Barthes, Reich, Baudrillard, Virilio, the Situationists, Hakim Bey, and various anarchist and autonomist authors; these authors resonate strongly with Deleuze and are simply inserted at the relevant points. We could term these people the compadres or fictive kin of Deleuze and Guattari and of our own work. There are of course subtle differences between all these authors and our own approach, but differences which are small enough to leave out of a study of this scale. This is a work of interpretation of the structures of the contemporary world, focused on putting theorists to work in understanding empirical and situational phenomena; such matters would be out of place here – we shall leave them for ‘pure’ theorists (or address them ourselves later, in the modality of ‘pure’ theory). Then there are thinkers with considerable relevance but a different ontological framework, usually within Marxism, postcolonial theory and/or world systems analysis – figures such as Harvey, Gramsci, Cox, Arrighi, Wallerstein, Spivak and Bhabha. These people belong, so to speak, to different ‘bands’ from ours, and are connected to us by weaker affinities than the first group. In these cases we take their structure and findings and attempt to reinterpret them in Deleuzian terms. Finally, there are authors with whom we have substantial disagreements on points of principle, but who have given us important insights into the contemporary world – authors such as Zizek, Hardt and Negri, and the various ‘Essex School’ authors. (Given their paradigmatic differences, we treat the early and current Negri as separate ‘figures’ in our theoretical world). These authors belong to a rival, often antagonistic ‘band’, but one to which we still share some affinities in spite of our frequent conflicts. In these cases we have used the authors’ works like a toolbox, taking what we like and criticizing what we don’t. Some of these authors would doubtless hate to be used in this way, but we hope that our actions are ‘predation’ in the Amazonian sense, absorbing their vital energies in an antagonistic way, rather than in Appadurai’s sense of simply excluding the Other. This approach may give the impression to some of incoherence, theoretical overweighting, or unnecessary syncretism.