When lost alone in vast expanses of space, it is somehow easier to speculate on the future, and potential social imaginaries. Dartmoor is a particularly appropriate place as it is full of anomalies. Although much of the moorlands is privately owned, we can roam across the seemingly empty desolation with few restrictions thanks to the Dartmoor Commons Act of 1985. The rugged landscape of Dartmoor is itself the result of tragic ecological apocalypse. Once it was densely forested, but over-farming upset the balance as turning forestry into fields progressively eroded the natural cover of oak trees.  Disaster awaited. Without the trees to hold together the fragile soil, the nutrients were washed away. Crops failed, livestock died and Dartmoor became the soggy barren moorlands we know today.

But the seeming emptiness holds other surprising lessons for us, amongst them the  institution of the Tinners Parliament. Here in the wide open, tinners from the tin mines in Devon set up a parliament -  to assemble once a year amongst a few craggy rocks spaced about 5 metres apart atop one of Dartmoor’s tors or hills. Rulings made by the Tinners Parliament or the Stannary Parliament, had the power to ignore some of the rulings of the Parliament in London and Stannary Law at times took precedence over Common Law. Whilst dating back to the 11th century, Stannary Law powers remain to this day at least on paper as they were never rescinded by the government at Westminster. The idea of a state holding multiple parliaments in place whose laws take gravitate over each others’ without contradiction alludes to the notion of complementarity, a way of conceptualising reality from two different standpoints simultaneously.
The idea of complementarity comes from modern physics. The physicist Niels Bohr put it simply as the complementarity principle which states that some objects have multiple properties that appear to be contradictory, so that it is possible to switch back and forth between different views of an object to observe these properties. However in principle, it is impossible to view both at the same time, despite their simultaneous coexistence in reality. With the complementarity principle Bohr brought about a crisis in Western science; whilst scientists understood that their methods were reductive, complementarity was all together too unwieldy a concept to work with. The conflict became narrativised in the Bohr v Einstein debate, Bohr’s complementarity v Einstein’s grand theory of everything, the one system fits all. The universe does not play by 2 sets of rules said Einstein. Bohm argued that we need to change what we mean by science.
The physicist David Peat through his studies of the science of native Americans would identify in this the unresolved tension between non-enlightenment traditions and the mechanistic world view of Enlightenment science. Complementarity suddenly stood between us and a solid understanding of the universe, its cultural foundations; naturally this has political ramifications. The form of modern politics is equally reductive like that of modern science, both are products of Enlightenment rationality. What complementarity holds for science, it also holds for politics; to paraphrase Bohr, thus we need to change what we mean by politics.

The political challenge of complementarity lies in how it translates into social processes, between a central state and local laws, between the national and the parochial. This is to mediate on what forms  complementarity can assume in future places of assembly for new political forms. Politics depends on the creation of an ‘agonising’ space – Agon, the space to mediate conflict as equals as the Athenians envisaged. The agonising space is what Chantal Mouffe regards as the core basis out of which a democratic political process emerges. A future conception of society based on complementarity is not about privileging the local over the central, the Individual over the State, nor a matter in the belief of ‘small is beautiful’ or that ‘big is best’. Complementarity is not to be understood in terms of the dialectical opposition that modernist ideology is built upon. Rather complementarity is a dynamic state of being, and that requires a greater shift in perspective from current modes of thinking about social possibilities.

Thankfully if we need inspiration the moors offer us enough examples to draw from nature whereby forms of life from entirely different evolutionary phases and ways of reproducing co-exist through symbiosis. If we poke into the tiny spaces of moss, lichens and fungi that cover much of the vast expanse of the moorlands, we find not only that different life forms co-exist and, that they would be unable exist here without the presence of the other but also that different historical phases of evolution coexist. Symbiosis can be seen as a way of increasing the ecological range of each, converting historical monoculture to multi coordinates of existence: the fungus which lacks chlorophyll uses the algae or bacteria to produce energy through photo-synthesis; the algae or bacteria enjoys the protection the fungus provides. The lichen is a composite organism based a symbiotic relationship between fungus and algae, whilst the moss on the top of lichen is a plant.

Like complementarity the symbiotic nature of lichen was not fully understood until the 19th century, when the idea of symbiosis was first proposed. To fully understand such realities, David Peat would say that we need to get beyond the ‘exclusionary reflex’ of western science to inclusive capacity which requires more than one framework.
In as much, to poke too deeply into this desolate ensemble is to overturn the uni-directional notions of causality and of relations and of history.

With the student protests and the TUC’s ‘March for the Alternative’, coinciding with the Arab Spring uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, protest is very much in air. Amongst activists the language has shifted from Protest to increasing use of the word ‘Revolution’. The call to Revolution in the streets invariably recalls May 68 in the political imaginary but we know that what emerged from 68 was not what the revolt supposedly aspired to. Rather than political change, 68 was primarily a cultural revolution that broke down the barriers to modernisation by overturning the traditional plinths of bourgeois culture, the nuclear family and Church, so ushering in the liberal society along with the age of atomised consumerism.

In a sense the past decade we have seen a similar scale of social de-structuring with neoliberalism, with unrelenting assaults on formerly stable social ensembles that emerged from the 68 uprising. The intensity of social fragmentation makes commentators and activists question the use of existing strategies of protest that continue almost unchanged from the 68 era. The French group Tiqqun in Occupied London#4 would go so far as to declare “existing forms of activism as not only irrelevant, but reactionary as well” . The significance of 68 however lies in the spirit of 68, in its symbol as an unified call to revolution by a coalition of workers and students. But Frederic Jameson in The Political Unconscious also questioned its value in relation to contemporary social formations given the ‘totalisation’ that enabled the strategies employed in May 68 – totalisation referring to the centralism of the French State along with coming together of usually divided spheres of resistance. In comparison today though we may be living under neoliberal totalisation, we can articulate resistance only in fragmented ways given the way forms of counterculture evolved since 68. The state of contemporary counterculture is now subsumed into multiple disconnected lifestyles or subcultures each with its particular modes of practice and of resistance. The consequence is the lack of any cultural continuity between them. Thus, for instance, its difficult to connect contemporary socialist movements like the Socialist Workers Party with sustainable farming campaigns or the latter with rights for undocumented migrants and so forth. Potential alliances are weak in practice because they are weak culturally so any dialogue or alliance is based on tactical chains of the ‘my enemy’s enemy is my friend’ paradigm. What remains as default is the defacto uncontested neoliberal playing field, as it remains impossible to link the oppositional practices to unified ends, and so convert tactics to strategy and vice versa. Thus it is conceptually difficult to declare a revolutionary counterculture and remain ideologically consistent as that would privilege the avant-garde of any one particular movement.

If there are gaping holes between countercultures, Chantal Mouffe in On the Political would describe the political state the other way in that there is “no gap left between the forms of state and the state of social relations.” “Democratic confrontation is replaced by confrontation between essentialist forms of identification or non-negotiable moral values”
The primary non-negotiable moral value in the contemporary Western political mindset, or at least Liberal Democracy as differences between main parties become narrower, has become Democracy itself with two transparent symptoms: firstly the increasing resort to by the State to use undemocratic means to uphold democracy, democracy as a self-justifying entity, and secondly in parallel, diminishing public participation in the democratic process, the so-called democratic deficit. Raoul Vaneigem writes from the 60s in The Revolution of Everyday Life that “when a (mythical) system enters into contradiction with economic and social reality a gulf opens between the way people live and the prevailing explanation of the world… traditional values are sucked into the abyss and destroyed. Once myth no longer justifies the ways of Power …. the real possibilities of social action and experiment appear”. The gulf is precisely what the instruments of contemporary Democracy are busy closing down. Compared to complex means of control and policing today with electronic surveillance, byelaws, virtual tracking, the streets of May 68 seem invitingly open, virginal, feral.
But if there is ‘no gap left between the forms of state and the state of social relations’ this degrades what Mouffe declares to be one of main tasks for democratic politics, that of “defusing potential antagonism that exists in social relations”.

If political agency is to break out of this, it has to conceptualise new spaces and new modalities of resistance, visualising power from different perspectives to conceive the new spaces and the political value of the gulf. Deleuze and Guattari for instance would articulate our state of dispersed counterculture in terms of ‘molecular’ lines of flight or escape rather than ‘molar‘, the dominant lines that colonise our consciousness (as for example, the financial regime of neoliberalism and its political supplement a form of democracy to sustain the status quo). The molecular acts within flows; considering political agency within flows, activists as subjects channel their energies as ‘desiring machines’. The idea of desiring-machines that Deleuze and Guattari introduced in Anti-Oedipus, describes machines or systems that work by not working, by breaking-down; the desiring machine is ‘a system of interruptions or coupures (breaks).’ Guattari points out that for a desiring machine to be emancipatory, not recuperative or affirmative of the structures of domination, it must be collective. Perhaps this coincides with Tiqqun’s vision phrased in terms of a global “civil war” amongst forms-of-life. “How is it to be done? poetically marks the ethical necessity of becoming-anonymous, of dis-identifiying with all received and all possible forms of political classification. To realize this en masse, we must pass through the unchartered waters of the Human Strike, that form of action in which inoperativity becomes synonymous with possibility….
Once this is accomplished, the desertion of activism can begin, in which living (meaning civil not state) communism and spreading anarchy constitute the dual sides of the same structure of revolt.”

But how do we conceive the desiring machine through flows within the actuality of live encounters in real space; how does the desiring machine contribute to the repertoire of tools already available to the contemporary activist engaged in forms of civil disobedience, from non-violent protest to direct action each of which involves very specific forms of social organisation and collective action. How does the desiring machine as a system relate to forms of engagement such as the situationist detournements, or nineties Temporary Autonomous Zones, the creating of temporary spaces based on non-hierarchical systems of social relationships that elude formal structures of control.
The desiring machine reformulates the geometries and fault-lines of activism as faults and breaks in flows but it does so by adding new dimensions to political space, extruding the Temporary Autonomous Zone into Spatially Autonomous Time – so its no longer bounded by time. In the context of the flow, desiring machines allude to something that connects avant-gardist intervention to the vanguard’s desire to merge with everyday life, incorporate the trenches as well as the frontline, to connect the interventionist frontline to localised hegemonies, individualised consumer desires, the sites of the realpolitics of the everyday. This creates a renewed factory for political production in our era of networked yet autonomous molecular countercultures.
The present model is that of revolutionary subjectivity located in the vanguardist activist when and where resistance is potentially available (to mobilise politically) rather like Leninist cadres tapping the alienation in the apolitical masses. But the collective that Guattari suggests is a different form of collectivisation for the networked counterculture society. Instead of the inert mass, we should see multipolar forms of counterculture already contesting the totality represented by avatars of the State but unable to confront it effectively given the diffuse molecular nature of the resistance. The potential of the molecular political then perhaps depends more on how the flows connect and reinforce rather than the internal dynamics of each molecular?

Slavoj Zizek suggests that “with the dynamics of contemporary capitalism, the opposition between rigid State control and carnivalesque liberation is no longer functional.” But we should not interpret this to imply that Protest should abandon the frontline along with the modes of active political organisation that enable us to confront the State directly and unmask its power. However the revolutionary frontline deterritorialised long ago. Thus it is necessary to re-conceptualise the coordinates that lead up to the frontline. Without this understanding, our protests will never break through the rhetoric or the wall of batons and shields of well-trained robocops to get to a purposeful frontline. The result may be endless replays of the same geometries that reinforce the relationship between power and resistance: people v police / individual v state / spontaneous v organised / playing v fighting and so on.
Paul Goodman had a fable: “Tom says to Jerry: ‘Do you want to fight? Cross that line!’ and Jerry does. ‘Now’, cries Tom, ‘you’re on my side!” We draw our line in their conditions (set up the frontline temporarily as we best can) but we proceed on our own conditions.”

soundtrack: interview with Abdel Karim Boucham, Maison Radieuse 2008

In this continued post I look at two initiatives at the downstream end of the food chain, the consumer end, through the different approaches in two community projects I have engaged with in the past few years. Both are in high density public sector housing, one at Maison Radieuse in Nantes, one of Le Corbusier’s celebrated Unité D’Habitation buildings and the other at Broadwater Farm, the sprawling prefabricated 60s Modernist housing estate in Tottenham, London N17

Broadwater Farm is still remembered for the violent riots that took place here in 1985. But 25 years on it is a hub of community activity including a community kitchen and a food coop run by volunteers. The coop inventively uses surplus produce from local allotment holders thus providing an incentive for them to engage in the local food economy to add to the coop’s stock. Monies from this is put back into coop funds to ‘stretch the local food chain’. This raises multiple possibilities for the future of food in cities creating a space for ordinary people to participate in the food market, a way of envisaging an economic adaptation of the Cuban organopónicos model for the western urban context.

The Broadwater Farm coop buys from coop wholesalers and sells at wholesale prices; there is no profit and for labour it is dependent on each customer giving 2 hours a month to the coop.
The perennial question, as ever, is how volunteer time is accounted for. This is not an argument for free market practices but for sustainability; volunteer labour in community sector should be considered an externality, that is something not reflected in the price. Community initiatives are too often top heavy in terms of such externalities just as supermarkets are laden with invisibles – food miles, widespread use of precarious labour, etc. Certainly a lot has to do with identity and affiliation; many food coops do not want an association with market practices. But the upshot is the building up of invisible ‘community’ externalities that in effect limit interaction with broader sections of the community. The methods of getting food out from field to the dining table have been radically reshaped by the retailers through vertical integration and without learning the lessons of contemporary inventory management and new forms of social networking, many advantages of community sited practices, like assets in the form of free volunteer labour, may turn out to be liabilities. Thus how new forms of social interrelations and information management find their way into construction of the community food chain to the benefit of both the consumer and producer may present the key challenges.

The Maison Radieuse marché (market) evolved through a series of experiments with how best to source ethically produced vegetables. At first the residents used a system known as amap whereby 60 to 70 families would have an annual contract with a local farmer thus securing the farmer the income to continue farming; a form of contemporary patronage system to protect the local farmer. But this limits the freedom that modern consumer has become accustomed to and will not easily give up and thus amap is likely to be limited in scale.
Equally the Maison Radieuse marché also first started with a close association with residents’ own allotments or potager, but this involved ‘heavy organisation’, with volunteers having to get up at 7.30am and so forth.
Out of these experiments came the present simpler form of the Maison Radieuse marché: the small producers set up their own stalls in the entrance hall of the building estate one evening a week on the Wednesday.
The strategic location at the common entrance for all inhabitants is decisive – and this is something that most hi-rise buildings benefit from. The vegetables confront everyone coming home from work Wednesday evening. The result – 80 families out of 300 in the building buy their weekly vegetables from the marché in just the space of a few hours.
This amounts to a significant engagement with the real economy of food supply into the estate. The marché achieves this by cutting out the number of actors involved to a bare minimum but then that allows the running of the marché to create the links between people, between people and the producer. The intention is that the horse comes before the cart so that things can go forward.

Both these examples provide possibilities and critical lessons in different situations. There is a lot to be done to inculcate a thinking about the food chain into the culture of a community. Hi-density estates are the right places to undertake such experiments. And there is an appetite for affordable locally-sourced ethically produced food even in poor households. If this appetite can be met, the social spin-offs are more than just food.
Tim Lang, Professor of Food Policy at City University, London has spoken about getting away from the consumerism of food to the citizenship of food. We have been trained by advertising to think of ourselves as consumers (our power at the point of sale or purchase), rather than as citizens who have leverage in the food economy. As a consequence the food chain is both distorted and misrepresented. But the only way to revise it is to enter the food economy decisively at the ground level.

soundtrack: interview with Anne Gray, Broadwater Farm Coop 2008

The past 20 years have seen massive increases in the corporate share at both ends of our food chain – downstream at the supply end with a few supermarkets and upstream the domination of food production by agribusiness cartels. Thus today just five companies control over three quarters of the world market in cereals with one, Cargill, controlling more than than 60%; three companies control 85% of the world’s tea market; three in cocoa have 84%; and with agrochemicals, the top 10 companies own 90% of the market. So why this wholesale takeover at a time of relentless environmental campaigning and anti-capitalist activism; is it down to the power imbalances of neoliberalism, or the lack of protective legislation, or subsidies  skewed heavily in favour of the large, or are the progressive messages not getting through to the masses? Perhaps that given the complex cultural dynamics of food, the corporate marketing men are better placed to exploit mass culture whilst the sustainable and ethical food industry remains contained by its own values or is simply too disorganised at present?
Whatever, the message is that one may get things environmentally and ethically right but be culturally wrongfooted. That said anyone who has tried to set up a community food coop will know that the difficulties. It’s almost impossible to compete with the free market, even with volunteer labour. So we have underestimated the achievements of the supermarkets with their synergies of vertical integration and outsourcing, well developed logistics of inventory management, synchronisation of supply and demand to reduce costs and maximise profits. So why not learn from them and create new markets that address the contemporary problems with contemporary means. This may mean that we don’t always revert to ‘default’ positions when thinking about concepts of  ‘local’ or ‘community’. Otherwise we will miss out on the useful innovations within the food industry and, with the new tools of social communication. If the idea of community implies looking backwards rather than forward,  the result may be lots of good feeling and possibly good press, but low market penetration, small turnover and little effect on the eating habits of mass society.

As fossil fuel reserves dwindle, the era of cheap food may well come to an end. The corporate food chain is entirely fossil fuel dependent – multiple calories of energy input for every calorie of food output. This won’t necessarily last; the future  potentially belongs to the low input farming methods. Further as the economist Amartya Sen and many others have pointed out, ‘There is an inverse relationship between the size of farms and the amount of crops they produce per hectare. The smaller they are, the greater the yield’. Small farms are far more productive than those of large agribusiness often by a factor of 10 but the image of efficiency the public have is the opposite. We wonder who is to blame for this.  But with small farmers beholden to the demands of the retail monopolies, its a loose-loose situation as it stands.

The question is how to scale up to the mass market, link the small to the mass – to do this requires strategies of engaging mass culture, the heartland of industrial food consumption. In this respect hi-density urban environments provide the perfect site for experimenting with potential up-scalable forms of sustainable food supply because of their built-in economies of scale – a lot of consumers within the same infrastructure. One can be sure that most people in an urban hi-rise estate for example would be relying on a lot of pretty much the same staple foods. At present this advantage is being wasted through normal consumer buying patterns. Community activists and environmentalists speak about externalities of the agri-food industrial machine. But food ecology is not only about the food. For example, most people now travel 50% farther to get their food than they did 15 years ago. Few do their weekly food shopping on foot – most use a car to go to the supermarket. What is unreflected in the price of food is the cost of consumers’ time and their use of cars.
Thus its entirely logical that food markets should come to estates, rather than the other way round. The challenge is how to make it work economically to the advantage of both the consumer and the producer. This requires experimentation with different forms of sourcing but not all experiments may be sustainable.
continued in following post

Dave Winer the American software developer and entrepreneur noted that one weblogger is worth ten non-weblogging voters. This was a few years ago; what price today for our Tweeters and facebook mobilisers in the climate of social unrest with the return of street politics. The Labour Party has not been slow to recognise the possibilities; with netroots UK and the slogan ‘building the progressive grassroots online’ the Party brought hundreds of  young e-activists off the streets to spend a Saturday indoors at the Trade Union Congress House. We know why. Whilst formal politics seems unable to answer the questions that contemporary society is asking, the e-activist has paradoxically acquired high currency in contemporary electoral politics. Arguably the national political consciousness is no longer being shaped by the traditional media but by self-produced social media and the blogosphere.

Political valorisation of new media is not new and neither is its assimilation into formal political process. However most of the activists attending came uninitiated or unaware of the roots of netroots, an import from mid-nineties US electoral campaigns. ‘Netroots’ was coined by a former environmental activist Jerome Armstrong to challenge  “old-school politics with a new kind of popular political movement that combines the grassroots, labour unions and big donors to effect a broad change in the political landscape, returning power to the edges” through using a lot of new web-based tools. In 2003 Armstrong used his myDD platform (my Direct Democracy) for the now notorious Howard Dean campaign for the DNC (Democratic National Congress) Chair. Language games were a key part of myDD, with phrases such as deploying a ‘map changer attitude’ to contest the  ‘battleground mentality’ of orthodox politics.
“The battleground mentality plays to the Republican strong hand. The Republicans realise exactly which races are the battlegrounds, and focus all of their resources in kind, on the same races… they invested hundreds of millions of dollars into new media, machine politics and database inventories that give them superior voter targeting capabilities.
In contrast, the mapchanger attitude utilizes the tens of thousands of grassroots activists in every state and congressional district. The power of people becomes the strongest resource and gives the national Party the ability to pour resources into those states or districts that become surprisingly contested.”
But map-changing was never about game-changing; not only was it firmly rooted in electoral politics in its current state but moreover its thinking (articulated through books like Crashing the Gate: Netroots, Grassroots, and the Rise of People Powered Politics) eschewed any association with other forms of political agency. Colin Greer in opendemocracy.org described all this as the being the ‘politics of calm’, not about political ideals but purely about winning elections, gaining power. As a consequence “rather than risk being marginalised for taking a strong stance against the right, progressives now espouse “safe” positions in order to appease what they believe (in the face of evidence) to be the majority of Americans. They define this imaginary mainstream public by its disdain for radical views and direct action, and retreat from both in the vain hope that such caution will bring political reward.”

All this is a far cry from the manifestations of protest culture we are witnessing in London and across Europe – street protest, police kettling, university occupations, the storming of Millbank.  But if there was an underlying awareness of such contradictions at netroots – with a new generational divide based on the funky new things like twitter, and the usual networks versus institutions… the response was to try to talk up the sexiness of ‘traditional’ politics.  At the same time this came with an element of apology for bringing the e-activists off the streets through a series of open invitations.
“Come in and take over” said Simon Weller, the National Organiser for ASLEF the train drivers union, explaining how most union meetings were extremely open to participation and horizontally run. Another Labour unionist asked how he could appeal to people who don’t vote, and are scared by the word ‘comrade’.  With such broad based appeasement, the apprehensions of appropriation within the twitter camp were not so much misplaced but too predictably defined.
@PennyRed Laurie Penny We’re listening politely whilst appointed arbiters of the centre-left mow the grassroots into a neat, acceptable bourgeois lawn.

Outside of the plenary sessions, the drive of the Labour party machine mellowed; the workshops did a different kind of talking through insight into practicalities. Simon Collister of wearesocial.net led the way in the workshop on working with social media with the decisive observation that in order to self-organise to achieve change we no longer needed large infrastructures. Why? Because the social web is built around individuals, not organisations.  All one needed to start a campaign was shared visions, shared goals to work together online. The way is simple:
1 establish your presence in online space and tap into networks with pre-existing ‘ad-value’ to what you want to achieve
2 embrace disruption
Ad-value is a strange choice of words but it is regrettably close to the truth, Collister suggested. “The social media consisted of  pseudo-public spaces where our presence is tolerated as long as we are not interfering with the creation of ad value”. Its not as in your face as in the streets but its ubiquitous as in Facebook, google, so forth.
So the recipe: use tools that that people are already using and embrace disruption.  Yet there are contradictions in this often lost in the activism but it is something we are resigned to: by using platforms like Facebook, google, Twitter, that is the tools that people are already using, we not only reinforce our dependence on such platforms, we co-produce them and yet hand over the intimate details of our private lives to private monopolies.
Andrew Walker of tweetminster prefaced with a confession – tweetminster merely aggregates political data. Of the 93 Labour MPs on Twitter, for example, 60 tweeted during the last labour conference and you can download the data here. tweetminster argues that whilst corporations like Samsung, nike are tuned in to mining social media, politics is still on the broadcast model. With politics, traditional models of campaigning are shoehorned into new media as an extension of the broadcast model. An alternative approach would be the ongoing mining of opinion, through online activity, twitter surges, and then to build the politics around what people are thinking. “If you have mined the data, then so you can say I have 10,000 who… to back up your own gut feelings”.
tweetminster advocates a move away from top-down but confesses “we havent got the new politics as yet but, when it arrives the new politics means engaging with real people.  The public will tell you what we need, so mine the data and traffic and resonate with their own values!”
There are 2 possible visions here, one of the social web as making of a new quasi-service sector, endlessly interpretive, the other of the new politics, a conceptually consensual invisible hand of political process.  The problem is that both seek to mine and manipulate the status quo, not change it. “Tap into the networks and the political solutions will appear as low hanging fruit”. But somehow this points to a dangerous seamlessness between e-commerce, e-democracy and e-activism.
Activist Chris Coltrane of @UKuncut enthused about the organisational possibilities of social media. Confessing to several hundred tweets and re-tweets a day, he explained how with twitter, he could harness 400 followers within an hour. Recounting his memories of activism before social media, of 50 person demos all waving placards with a lingering sense of futility, he asked “what was the point?”
But along came the game-changer: social media. “Now if you have an interesting protest, its 50 people PLUS the internet PLUS the media. All this meant @UKuncut could shut down 3 vodafone offices at the same time. And its all non-hierarchical, we just set a time, set a date, gave infrastructure… its all horizontal people can unite thanks to social media its that empowerment that gets people excited”. @Ukuncut has cut deep into public consciousness with very little resources and worked across the generation gap; even Polly Toynbee of the Guardian who went far into detailing the effects of the proposed budget cuts on the average working family, tapped into the energy of unrest and discord with her experiences at Topshop with UKuncut. Her New Years resolution? Start using twitter.
The problem in all this is what is being disguised by the hype; nascent media always feels horizontal but the pyramidal structures either lurk below or return.

“The intersection of political analysis and Internet theory is a busy crossroad of cliché, where familiar rhetorical vehicles – decentralized authority, emergent leadership, empowered grass roots – create a ceaseless buzz,” wrote Gary Wolf in Wired.  It’s the continuous buzz that’s integral to Twitter culture. Follow it over time and a certain typology of communication emerges; there is the blurring of the private with the public along with a volume of echoing through RTs (retweeting) – self-affirmations within tribal formations. Ukuncut has 14,376 followers, whilst individual participants of @Ukuncut may have over a thousand.  All this can be used to heighten focus at particular time and place through a twitter surge but it can be a hard job keeping the flow going when not much is happening. However one can stitch together a narrative from the flow, the buzz.
rosebiggin: If you don’t eat enough meat to get into heaven, you go to Burgatory.
chris_coltrane Chris Coltrane  Avoiding a few million quid in tax. #Jerseying
aaronjohnpeters Aaron Peters  In a global village a leak is a tidal wave.
But the key to Chris Coltrane’s presentation lay in the conjunction of the words  ‘if’ and ‘interesting’. And what if you are not? And what if what you are interested in is not interesting to the media? How does one configure a political space in such situations?
Not surprisingly mentions of facebook and twitter quietly disappear in the workshops on the ‘hyperlocal’.  Luke Bozier, the Managing Director of MyCllr.com who worked for Tony Blair, rolled out the stats. 69%of households broadband access, 50%of those less than 44 years old replied to a blog, 16% of web users contacted a politician directly through the web,  20% admitted signing a petition. Bozier proclaimed MyCllr.com could “revolutionise the relationship between us and our political representatives”. We wonder how this fits with a Blairite doctrine of leadership..
Nick Micinski from the Migrant and Refugee Communities Forum (MRCF) in West London coordinating their Digital Activism Project, suggested at a local day-to- day level, social media instead of augmenting real life was perceived to be replacing real life. ‘Alchemy comes from the one to one, having a coffee’. His blog report on netroots is insightful.
But nonetheless the truism that emerges is apparent:  in the age of austerity the only surplus left to the people is information, the so-called cognitive surplus.  We have an abundance of it and we now have the tools to utilise the surplus to allow it to allow us to self organise. There is no other choice.

Over the course of netrootsUK two things emerge: firstly, that the intense processes of assimilation of such tools into current political processes is well advanced and, yet at the same time there is a widening gulf in language and potentialities for the practice of politics through such tools. Together the contradiction is that of being able to see the other but an inability to move for fear of losing power. Critically the trend is that the gulf between the two is widening but there isn’t the tipping point as yet to force a different way of thinking onto the political structures. If that was the case we might have had a different range of workshops, one perhaps a working group for new political structures or systems – the new grassroots.  Progressive political change is a 2 way street but netroots had a one way plan, speed-dating incompatible currents. As a consequence it could never dive far from the surface, always keeping in touching range with old sureties. To conclude MP Stella Creasy kept the focus on formal politics with a compelling appeal to ‘be part of the process’ as it’s the only way to exercise political power. She acknowledged that a third of the most active community campaigners did not exercise their vote but asserted “the only way to make a difference is through party activism”.  It’s a belief, an assertion which is true yet blind to the reality of things. The stats states 75% of those below the age of 21 do not vote, and that only 1.8% of the population influences the vote outcome. For the majority, voting as a way of engaging the political process has become pointless or, as one questioner put it “the engaged have disengaged”. Thus a more pointed question would be to ask what are possibilities, here and now, for political agency for such people, who now are the majority. If the answer is none, in a later conversation, tweeter and student activist with UKuncut, Aaron Peters touched on what technology can offer: “Democratic representation in the future is about co-production; having your interests represented may no longer be the issue”. If that’s the case do we need party politics? I asked. “Parties fail because of their internal structure. Technology now makes it too easy to create self-produce political representation”. Treading past the low-lying fruit, these are debates we plan to continue elsewhere, over, above and outside of these walls.

Those whose work involves connecting the lives of ordinary communities with ecological awareness, know full well the problematic in the social encounters involved – questioning private habits, or critically engaging the space of anyone’s home invariably implies a measure of invasion of who they are. A previous generation of environmental artists and cultural activists saw the connection between ecology and culture as a way to move the present conditions of society to another beyond capitalism, debt, consumerism and individualism. But it has been a reactive process, with phrases such as ‘ecofascist’ becoming part of our language in the process.
So to mediate on the space between cultural work and the intervention needed into the basic everyday material conditions of life inside what we each call ‘home’ we have to tread carefully. We have to examine the way the social spaces of exchange operate within domestic space and what directions they have moved towards in the digital age.

There are many approaches to this but one critical pathway is through the reality of  our culture, how that has changed as a ‘market’ and the way it relates to the environment. Certainly we have witnessed an exponential explosion in choice and potential permutations in the way we both produce and access cultural material. Through access to new channels via satellite and the internet, we have a vastly greater choice in what we listen to, what we watch, what we read, thus what we buy, what we consume. Our cultural market environment has been transformed by the virtual economies with their ‘long tail’ markets as described by Chris Anderson enabling ‘fringe’ culture to operate successfully in the marketplace though perhaps not to contest the mainstream. Ecologically-aware cultural material, symbolised in the Green consumer movement, would belong to the fringe yet like other cultural identifications, how it reaches the consumer at home, in particular in mass urban housing,  is more likely through vast new monopolies with questionable green credentials – like Amazon, ebay, google, Sky…. These new-media monopolies are different to those who supply the more fundamental provisions of life like the utilities we need in our homes, the energy to boil a kettle for some tea. The utility conglomerates created through deregulation are the so-called ‘natural monopolies’. The market reality with the natural monopolies is the opposite of the new-media monopolies; theirs’  is a ‘short tail’ economy with little flexibility and choice. For most part it is a captive market environment controlled by a small number of cartels where the long tail market model simply doesn’t apply. Thus culturally we now live in long-tail economic environments; materially we are still short-tailed with few choices, in-effect we are nothing more than old-fashioned subsistence workers albeit in the information age.

Another pathway is through the introduction of new tools of measure like Wackernagel and Rees’ concept of the ecological footprint (1990), and then the adoption of carbon footprint to measure greenhouse gas emissions. With Kyoto in 1997, both the public and private sectors entered the foray in the war on climate change. This has now habituated a literacy about ecology and environment in most people’s minds so much so that today it is considered culturally vulgar to not recycle paper, plastic and bottles, to own a large car without justification, etc. Indeed household energy consumption according to the National Audit Office has been decreasing at the rate of 1.4 per cent a year since 1990. Sadly this won’t by itself address even the compromised targets set in Kyoto though, if maintained, though perhaps the recent EU’s own 20/20/20 programme policy, which aims to cut greenhouse gas emissions to 20 per cent below 1990 levels by 2020 (and keeps our ecological footprint well above 3 planets to put things in perspective).
The National Audit Office states that UK households spend £20 billion on energy each year, mostly on electricity and gas, and account for just under 30 per cent of all energy consumed in the UK. Programmes to improve energy efficiency and reduce energy consumption cost some £2.6 billion a year: a mixture of direct expenditure and compliance costs borne by business and households. However, the value of the possible energy savings is thought to outweigh these costs many times over – at current prices the typical household could save at least £280, or roughly 30 per cent of their energy bills, if they adopted the cost-effective measures already available to them. In addition to its financial importance, household energy consumption is responsible for 27 per cent of all carbon emissions, and is central to efforts to mitigate climate change.
Thus the reality is that the household remains the largest user of energy through fossil fuel use, marginally more than industry, which is more than transport. Homes are the biggest polluters but it’s a hard constituency to attack; its you, me, the ‘people’ – ordinary consumers just getting by. But if that is the reality of mass culture, in response contemporary cultural practices have withdrawn from mass housing to focus on forms of self-defined autonomy. These cultural experiments may lead to new social reconfiguration but there is a sense of abdication, which valorises retreat and a sense of failure to create working practices that bridge the contradictions insitu.

In this context, innovation is needed to dovetail new media with the social factors that determine consumption at the domestic level. This is why I am at Hackney Town Hall to participate in the workshops devised by ecoteams.org who have developed a participatory methodology to help reduce energy consumption at home. Their approach is to break down the main constituents of domestic energy consumption into a series of workshop games. The subject of their games are such things as the electric kettle, the lcd flatscreen TV, the fridge-freezer, the tumble dryer, the washing machine, home PC, the toaster, the oven,.. all staple amenities of modern life plus others – composting, roof insulation, mending clothing, eating local food, solar panels, saving water….
With neat labels for each of these, the workshops consist of a series of games in which relating energy consumption is turned into a form of experience; participants place themselves in order of increasing or decreasing energy footprint of different amenities, then reshuffle for a different order for the gross average likely daily energy footprint of each – e.g. kettles aren’t on all the time though a fridge freezer is. Then another game explores the likely chances of actually implementing any of these energy saving exercises. And so forth.

The pace of the workshops involves trial and error, mistakes which is how participants familiarise with each other and a sense of exchange and support emerges as people get to know what are otherwise pretty mundane facts … so a fridge on all day may consume less than a kettle used sparingly 6 times a day if its empty spaces are filled up with containers…. It hardly sounds revolutionary but the paradox of the present age and state of our civilisation is that such little details may yet hold the key to our future. So its critical that we apply creative thought at this level. Paradoxically though the problem is that its difficult to contest the ‘good’ in this. It’s almost too good. This is in fact the social domain of what Alex Steffen described as the Light Greens that he contrasted with the Bright Greens, who believe that science and innovation hold the key to a green future, and then the Dark Greens identified by their total rejection of globalisation, consumer culture and retreat to pre-industrial localism.
“Light greens strongly advocate change at the individual level. The thinking is that if you can get people to take small, pleasant steps (by shopping differently, or making changes around the home), they will not only make changes that can begin to make a difference in aggregate, but also begin to clamour for larger transformations. Light green environmentalism, as a call for individuals to change, has helped spread the idea that concern for sustainability is cool. On the other hand, it is the target of much of the “green fatigue” we’re now seeing.”

Log on to ecoteams website to download their neighbourhood workshop tools and the Light Green ethos comes alive with informational snap bites – far easier to swallow than the carbon footprint manuals we had in recent years.
In the UK we throw away enough carrier bags to carpet the entire planet every 6 months.
The average person uses 3,500 litres of embedded water per day – it is in everything we consume.
It takes 120 litres of water to produce one glass of wine.
Then,
A fluorescent tube generally uses 500 times more energy if left on for 15 minutes than the energy needed to restart it.

The Light Green approach performs a sort of shift in focus from ‘over-consumption’ to ‘save waste, save money’. Light Green implies that ‘Making good with consuming less’ is a painless way of achieving what is in effect a dose of economic degrowth, or décroissance. The philosophy of décroissance began as an environmental movement based on anti-consumerist ideas that set out to contract the economy. But décroissance is a collectivist vision, based on community cooperation to supplant individual consumerism, thereby producing savings. The Light Green, on the other hand, is based on the privatization of responsibility, ‘laissez faire ecologies’ devolved to consumer culture that are arguably amenable enough to be co-opted into green capitalism. Perhaps the apotheosis of such a model is the 10:10 campaign based entirely on long tail contemporary marketing, setting pre-emptive targets through crowd sourcing online: deep-trawling for a diversity of human subjects in its interests just as amazon.com would trawl cultural material. Whilst 10:10 unwittingly fitted the Rightwing ‘climate alarmist’ tag with its viral video, its more deep-seated problem lies in its methodology. Suggesting that individual commitment made by clicking on a mouse translates into the long term is deeply problematic. Voluntaristic commitment, if made through an institutional scale may be viable (e.g a school, a workplace) but at the individual consumer level it’s suspect. Dovetailing the long tail and short tail at the individual consumer level is a different undertaking, as it has to deal with the insitu relations that actually determine energy consumption. The ecoteams methodology point to that possibility, of evolving by embedding into more engaged community practices without pre-determining them through marketing parlance.

The reality is that energy consumption is simply another means to express social capital – people have and use the flat screens, the washer dryers, the sports cars to consolidate and circulate their social capital. Sigrid Stagl and Tania Briceno, in their various studies on sustainable societies state that consumers  constantly strive to ‘consume the same (or better) goods and services as friends, neighbours. The consumption of ‘cultural goods’ is key to maintaining integration in a social environment.’ Consumption is thus for most part firstly cultural and secondly material. Energy in the market place is always bundled with other things and is just one of the many forms of ‘cultural goods’ available for maintaining or advancing one’s social capital. Whilst we have seen that they depend on fundamentally different economic models, cultural bundling is part and parcel of life and the exercising of social capital in mass culture largely through consumption. “Those who do not engage in culture consumption are therefore more likely to be disconnected from others and forgo all of the benefits that come from network relations and that have been glossed under the banner of social capital”
The “doing with less” mantra has limited social currency if ecological footprint is extracted from the complexities it is woven into at a domestic and community level. Saving an amount in the order of £200 a year through conscientious eco-practices hardly constitutes an incentive for the average household. Thus if the ecological footprint remains largely unsocialised in communities in ‘mass housing’, it is because it remains associated with another class base and lifestyle where social capital is exercised with a fundamentally different set of metrics. To address this requires new strategies of ‘cultural bundling’, in other words, new ways of tying the long tail with the short tail, syncing the cultural with the environmental.  But possibilities are too often short-circuited by pre-determined factors, for example, the demand for pre-determined goals or statistically defined outputs, or by being aligned to other priorities – such as PR exercises bundled as part of environmental improvements usually linked to capital investments. Both leave the cultural base and the social relations that underwrite consumption untouched.
This is a deadly serious loss: to socialise the footprint entails both an appraisal of the cultural practices within community and new social tools which differentiate the way the economic and cultural environments now intersect in domestic space in the digital age. To not articulate these through the insitu cultural practices is to perpetuate the current situation through uneven trade-offs, assigning responsibility for saving the planet to the wrong actors.

soundtrack interview with Robert  Shaw

Our workshops for Urban growers take place at Prinzessinnengarten just off the busy traffic hub of Moritzplatz in Kreutzberg, below the drone of cranes engaged in new build.  Its Berlin’s real estate land alright. By its looks, Prinzessinnengarten is certainly strange; there is an enormous amount of formal aesthetic innovation in this ‘urban garden’ which combines an economic pragmatism with a rampant grow in any way and every way you can approach:  white vinyl bags strewn around with vegetables growing out, herbs popping out of tetrapacks, stackable red plastic containers, a ‘grow or be damned’ attitude. The colours combinations aren’t too bad either, red, white, then the clean minimal lines of the café and kitchen in shipping containers. Everything here is mobile; if push comes to shove this community garden or farm can pack and go, all of which contradicts conventional notions of both community and food growing. So what brings about a phenomenon such as Prinzessinnengarten?

The urban geographer David Harvey in a seminal essay described the ‘widespread erosion of the economic and fiscal base of large cities in the advanced capitalist world, and the shift from a culture of managerialism to the culture of entrepreneurialism in governance of cities’ since the late eighties. With this change, the economic environment of neoliberalism sought to create a level playing field for all our urban spaces. What were outside the economic equations of profit – our parks, public spaces, educational resources, odd bits of empty spaces in the city where informal exchanges with improvised uses could take place – are now part of the real estate market with its ‘level playing field’.
Whilst we can’t be certain that the urban ecosystem under such a financial regime, largely of debt-financed development, is sustainable, economically, environmentally or socially, it is nonetheless how the cities are being shaped at the start of this century, the defining process that invariably will force a new urban metabolism to emerge. The notion of an urban metabolism, the way we humans use the city to define its relationship to nature, was introduced by urbanists like Ernest Burgess who suggested that the way the modern city lives as a process, as part of nature is actually separate from its physical structure: ‘the metabolic processes of the city were (now) distinct from the formal rationale of its design, a split heightened as the modern city’s metabolic functions were increasingly handled by technologically complex infrastructures.’ How the ecological processes of the city through necessity overcome this split under predatory mobile capitalism to arrive at some conception of a ‘sustainable’ city invariably requires new forms of urban-ecological entities. The question is how we identify them. In this context an useful way we can categorise Prinzessinnengarten is as a form of an ‘urban-ecological assemblage’ to use the idea of the ‘assemblage’ from Deleuze and Gauttari. An assemblage is not a ‘pre-fixed object or entity, but consists of open relations among dispersed heterogeneous elements whose only unity derives from the fact that they operate together. Every assemblage is a multiplicity composed of other assemblages that are also multiplicities that together form a functional, ever-changing ensemble’. Such a constitution is open to new realities and relationships for a new metabolism of cities: the connections between new markets and the natural environment through the social.
The innovation in Prinzessinnengarten as an urban-ecological assemblage is its  ‘co-adaptation of space’ under the nose of capital. The assemblage enters the space of neoliberal capital and recovers it for community use; of course the relationship is uneven but the political message is that this urban assemblage-cum-garden can be capital friendly on its own terms, yes in order to deny the potential of the polar opposite:  that capitalism can be ever be nature friendly on its own terms.
This is a far cry from the  ‘old school community garden’ activists’ rejection of consumer culture and their defining of autonomy from market forces but Prinzessinnengarten is an engagement with the social consequences of the neoliberal ethic – pervasive possessive individualism being the norm for human socialisation and its corollary, the political withdrawal from any collective forms of action. If the ‘old school’ community garden requires affiliation and commitment, the assemblage draws on other states of socialisation, prevalent and therefore contextually enabling of a diversity of participation.
To quote Robert Shaw who co-founded Prinzessinnengarten with Marco Clausen after returning from Cuba, “…the structure of a ‘verein’ (association) is much more open to people who want to go in to it and take part in a responsible position, but on the other hand it kind of excludes people who just want to help and don’t want responsibility for it, they just want to come by for two hours and not be responsible for what they do..”

The workshops brought together a variety of European practitioners from the squatted autonomous spaces of Spain and Portugal to the publicly funded urban growing spaces of Scandinavia to the NGO-run growing spaces in civil war ravaged Bosnia.  The purpose was to conjecture an European green metropolis for 2030 and the types of practice that would enable this. Claudio Cattaneo of Can Masdeu spoke about optimisation of urban spaces for growing organically and creating network of social gardens within cities – rurbanism, Roger Dircon of kitchengardeners.org on the potential of food as a tool of change to re-structure society by utilising domestic spaces for growing – back-gardens, front patios etc.  Vesna Malenica from Sarajevo spoke about the use of community gardens as a means of healing aside from its economically valuable crop yield. The connecting link between all the workshop participants was the formulation of forms of collective praxis – this is doing, not only theorising, yet the doing together with…  it’s a bottom-up remaking of the urban imaginary.
Pim Bendt in his study of the urban gardens of Berlin described them with the phrase ‘communities of practice’ that create resilience. Resilience as means of countering the erosion of community by the market. “Resilience is the capacity to deal with change and to continue to develop, and that depends on diversity, experimentation and continuous learning rather efficiency, optimisation and ‘blue-print’ solutions. The current uncertainty of future requires organisations and cities which learn continuously. Therefore it is also important that we understand how learning actually takes place, learning collectively”. It’s this process that leads to the evolution of nascent social structures, Pim outlined in his study of Berlin’s community gardens. The urban gardens so provide a performative space for learning through doing, learning through the friction. Vesna pointed out that in Sarajevo  people from different ethnic groups become friends by spending an entire growing season together aside from the value of food they co-produced. The growing season comes from nature not from market relations. Berlin has 77,000 allotment gardens, and 25 to 55 community gardens. Pim argues that allotment gardeners as a community-of-practice, form a human reservoir storing knowledge of local ecosystems to counter the ongoing ‘extinction-of-experience’ (of nature) in urban environments.

It was useful that Dr. Franz Schulz, Mayor of Kreutzberg generously participated in the workshops if only to convey the marginality of civic vision in the new neoliberal landscape. He addressed us one evening in a packed hi-rise apartment at Kottbusser Tor (the nearest thing I have experienced in Berlin to an inner-city sink estate with occasionally dysfunctional lifts). The Mayor, a Green Party official, sketched out a picture of a ‘difficult financial situation with no future perspective’, and a resignation to loosing public space to individual interests. Civic governance was further handicapped by the separation of different pots of responsibility lying with different bodies – the bind of decision-making merry-go-rounds with no-one in charge. In the discussion Christian Damgaard from Copenhagen pointed out that loneliness was such a big problem in his city of Copenhagen as in all European cities –that community gardens contribute considerably to savings for the health sector and municipal budget. But these are unaccounted economic benefits that never appear on spreadsheets. So its an uneven contest in the dynamic of the making of the green metropolis but through the dialogue we get a picture of the contestation.

Frauke Hehl’s presentation showed up the experience of some of the more grassrootsy community growing spaces. Bürgergarten Laskerwiese run totally by citizens, without help from the Green Party was thriving. However at the Rosa Rosa in Friedrichshain, after 10 years of fighting off developers or justifying its existence on economic terms, many people left because of a lack of legal status. We also visited Angela Animal Farm Adalbertstrasse nearby in Kreutzberg.  I saw these gardens in 2006 as part of the social-mental-environmental workshops but they had regressed considerably since. It was dispiriting to see bureaucracy’s reluctance to support autonomous community initiatives meant their slowly nurtured collective energy drains away, exposing the spaces to petty vandalism. Whilst the gardens that Frauke spoke about operated with the ethos of minimal consultation – ‘let people do what they want to do’ – we got a glimpse of the other end of the spectrum with the visit to Neukölln and the vast disused Tempelhof Airport now ready for development: a total administrative annexation of every avenue of social energy with a curatorial placement of the proposed community garden in its designated plot. How it will materialise I must return with bated breath to find out in the coming years. So a confused picture but with only one certainty to make the future as Frauke put it: plant a tree as a protest, create a fact on the ground.
“Gardening is not the revolution, nor does gardening turn every gardener into a cultural radical…” said Peter Lamborn Wilson aka Hakim Bey in 1999. “Gardening produces good food and other benefits outside the complex of exchange… It can function as an important part of “everyday life” in the radical sense of that term.”
In 2010 he is only partially right. The space of revolution has been re-located and like everything else it’s also for sale.  In  capital defined landscapes, nature perversely mimics the market like a performing animal in a circus. Its not meant to and the show won’t last. So the devising of forms of social assemblages which are radically different in nature in terms of organisation and the means through which humans can interact in the city environment is ever more critical for a sustainable urban metabolism. This requires strategies to invent and invert social power geometries through aesthetic means, through material resources and through innovation to generate new engagement: the participatory spaces for the present social condition. As our ecosystems are now entirely dominated by capital and if capital is value in motion, then it’s appropriate that we are gathered to work on the future in a mobile garden to envision a way to get through a current  state of being that’s living on borrowed time.  Prinzessinnengarten is a nomadic entity transposed onto space that’s equally living on borrowed time; this is land for sale as the city of Berlin quarries whatever it can lay its hands on. But this urban assemblage is barely an year old though in that short space of time the experiment has created manifold means of social participation. So who can guess what will be here at Moritzplatz in 2030 and what its colour will be? Green? Grey?