Beyond representation? A rejoinder

Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 60 No. 1, 2007, 127– 137 Advance Access Publication 19 December 2006 Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder BY ANDREW ROBINSON AND SIMON TORMEY LASSE Thomassen offers a robust repudiation of post-representative politics, one that serves at the same time to highlight a key faultline between two approaches to the development of left radical thought and practice in recent years, one that might otherwise be elided by the insistence that they are both species of ‘post-structuralism’. His analysis highlights clearly what is at stake in this debate, and thus merits a rejoinder on the terms he sets out. For Thomassen the kind of approach we have adopted in our work (of which the article ‘Not in my Name’ published in Parliamentary Affairs is one example) is absurd, utopian and ‘vain’ for the following reasons: (1) Representation is ‘constitutive’, which seems to mean here that it is constitutive both in terms of language and thus the ontological condition in which we find ourselves; and also that it is constitutive of any form of political community. (2) Representation is thus a feature of all societies and all political movements—even nominally stateless or ‘horizontal’ ones such as the Zapatistas or the World Social Forum. (3) It is better to openly embrace the need for representation for that way we avoid the trap of utopianism that afflicts left radicalism and emits either of totalitarian populism or political ineffectuality. ‘Representation is constitutive’ From the discussion of the materials that Thomassen deploys (notably Derrida and Spivak) we can discern that representation is constitutive of language. Our view of the world is incomplete, partial and replete with ‘violence’ caused by the non-availability of a view of the world that is not mediated by language. Similarly (so it seems) needs, interests and wishes have to be articulated, which in turn presupposes the necessity for representation and for those who represent. Representation must occur not only in language, but also politically, in order to constitute political subjectivities. The social field is dependent on Parliamentary Affairs Vol. 60 No. 1 # The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Hansard Society for Parliamentary Government; all rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org doi: 10.1093/pa/gsl052 128 Parliamentary Affairs such political representation, without which it would be unable to constitute itself. Logically this implies that some kind of centralised power (a state or similar entity) is necessary for human society as such. This of course is an empirical claim that emits of empirical testing—are there, or have there ever been, societies and movements that were organised on a non-representative basis, that is without recourse to a constitutive separation between leaders and led, hierarchy and subordination, and the operation of a master or hegemonic signifier identified with a social particularity which adopts a leadership role? Whilst the matter is contentious, it seems clear enough that all manner of societies have and do subsist without recourse to political representation. Peter Kropotkin, Harold Barclay, Marshall Sahlins, Richard B. Lee and Pierre Clastres famously document numerous such cases, and there are many indigenous communities today such as the Mbuti, !Kung, the Bushmen, Andaman Islanders that are able to function without political or intellectual leadership. It is ironic that Thomassen, while drawing on Spivak, repeats the gesture for which she rebukes Kant. For he turns a characteristic of western society into an absolute of the ‘human condition’ and thus implicitly suggests that those indigenous peoples who fail to conform to it are not fully human—hardly a promising start for a Spivakian-informed critique. Similarly, there are all manner of horizontal movements in which identities are negotiated within the movement and without necessitating leadership in some overt or even tacit manner. A number of authors have carried out detailed ethnographic studies of the formation of meaning in everyday life, and have confirmed that such meaningformation has little relationship to elite or state political forms. James Scott for instance has revealed the existence of a distinct ‘little tradition’ among the peasantry, constructed through everyday communication, primarily in the medium of ‘hidden transcripts’ that are concealed from political and intellectual ‘leaders’ in the wider society. There is a vast literature which documents ways in which the ‘powerless’, the ‘deviant’, peasants, indigenous peoples, the subaltern and so forth have elaborated mechanisms of mobilisation (or non-participation) that avoid leadership or representative structures and which retain control over collective objectives.1 Far from requiring leadership to formulate what it is that such societies or movements ‘really are’ they are characterised by the development of goals, objectives and meanings immanently or between members on a dialogical, reciprocal or horizontal basis. In insisting that there is no outside of representation what we are left with is a rather world weary discourse that insists on the necessity for the imposition of ‘state-like’ violence and exclusion. Thus, even in contexts where in order to understand the nature of the struggles being undertaken by participants one would need to be open to the suggestion that it is indeed legitimate to think the outside of hierarchy and subordination. This is particularly the case in seeking to analyse Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder 129 the nature of the debates between the so-called ‘horizontals’ and ‘verticals’ within the alter-globalisation movement. As we analyse it, horizontalism is a stance in opposition to the implicit statism of vertical movements and parties. It is one that insists that the network form in particular can subsist without the need for leadership, bureaucracy and state-like representation. Yet if the necessity for representation thesis is correct, then networks are either impossible or they must be representative. If the former, then Thomassen’s claim appears absurd: networks do exist without leadership or representation. If the latter, then it is not clear how the argument proceeds. If networks are ‘representational’, then clearly they are not representational in the same way as hierarchical bodies like political parties where there is a formal separation between leaders and led. So the necessity for the hierarchical form of representation is not shown. The claim that people require vertical attachments, fixed identities, vanguards or leadership founders on the fact that networked social relations can and do exist—as Thomassen himself admits. The above illustrates that Thomassen establishes an overly rigid binary: either constitutive lack and radical democracy, or essentialised fullness and self-presence. However, to say that Andaman Islanders, Malaysian peasants or rebellious ‘delinquents’ have types of meaning and identity which are formed immanently is not to say that they are self-present—still less that they express any kind of human essence or nature. Their social forms are constructed; they involve assemblages of desire and constructions of intentionality that arise from their particular (limited and partial) frames of viewing and their interactions both ‘within’ their societies and with other forces (ranging from other societies, and the impact of economic and state dominance, to their relationship to forces of ‘nature’ and to ecological issues). Yet this construction is immanent. It does not rely on a ‘political’ moment, and it does not require a moment of master-signification or of transcendence. Indeed, when transcendent moments come into existence, their existence must itself be constructed within the field of immanence, as an apparatus of capture and as a channelling of particular desires. The crucial point in the terms articulated by Deleuze and Guattari is immanence, not self-presence. Moments of flight, molecular assemblages and experiences of intensity are fluid and non-identitarian; they are not moments of self-presence. Zapatistas as represented/representatives The assertion of the impossibility of representation forms the backdrop to Thomassen’s objection to the use of Marcos and the Zapatistas as a case study in the elaboration of a post-representative politics. That representation is constitutive means that our claim that they seek in some ways to escape representation is of course absurd. His task thus becomes one of over-coding the self-declared ambition of the 130 Parliamentary Affairs Zapatistas to nurture horizontal or ‘autonomous zones’ with a vertical analysis that demonstrates, perversely, the impossibility and undesirability of such an ambition. There is a reductiveness to this reading which denies structural heterogeneity—every movement must for Thomassen be an instance of the Laclauian schema. Hence, the Zapatista ‘exclusion’ of neoliberals and right-wing paramilitaries renders them structurally equivalent to Peronists, Bolsheviks, liberal democrats and so on. Hence ‘the role of political and intellectual leadership in formulating what we, or the peoples of Chiapas, really are’ ( pp. 20–1). The meanings and identities of the peoples of Chiapas are thus constructed retrospectively by the Zapatistas; they do not for Thomassen arise immanently within their own life-world, nor are they constructed horizontally, through dialogue or through everyday micropolitics. They need a statist political moment to be constituted. To begin with the position of Marcos, Thomassen’s objection is that the former cannot escape being a representative even if he actually wanted to, which Thomassen doubts (it does not fit the analysis). Some of the analogies Marcos uses do indeed invoke the idea that he must in some sense be a representative when he ‘echoes’ what he hears, seeks to ‘give voice’ to those who cannot speak for themselves and to ‘translate’ particular grievances into political demands. Key to Thomassen’s critique is the role of Marcos as a spokesperson. One can almost hear the exasperation behind the analysis: how can a spokesperson avoid being a representative? However, it is precisely the ‘seeking to avoid’ that is interesting in Marcos’s case. Thomassen notes that the representative is constitutive yet this is precisely what Marcos is repudiating. In seeking to give voice to those who do not have it, the implication is that there are people and communities who have political demands, but who lack the means of articulating them. The role of the spokesperson here is not ‘constitutive’ of the voice, the means by which the voice coalesces, but rather the means by which voices can be heard, which is quite different. The point is that someone who ‘speaks with’ or ‘learns with’ another is not ‘representing’ in the relevant way, which is to say, asymmetrically, as a ‘representative’. Even in horizontal communication there is ‘translation’—people make sense of each other’s frames of reference through their own. However, if the translation is mutual and horizontal, if it takes place in a context of dialogue and listening rather than of seeking to entrap and fix meaning, this does not lead to a ‘representative’ social relationship. It establishes a relation to alterity, but this does not mean it is ‘alienating’ or ‘substitutive’ in an objectionable sense. There is a world of difference between this kind of dialogical ‘translation’ and a properly ‘representational’ politics. Thomassen seeks to elide this difference by conflating the two, thus reducing the former to the latter—a manoeuvre which means losing something crucial in radical politics and in the phenomenology of everyday life. Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder 131 Moving to the more general point about the failure of the Zapatista example as a case study, he notes that we make the error of positing the ‘myth of presence’ which as a good Derridean he knows is a bankrupt starting point. Thomassen also calls upon Spivak, who famously posits the assertion of presence and voice as complicit in a kind of fiction that insists that people are aware of and able to articulate their own grievances without the necessity for representatives to do it for them (as if!). But what does all this amount to? The claim relates yet again to the starting point: representation is constitutive, which means here that without representation there are no needs, interests, positions or demands. The point of a politics of singularity as opposed to a politics of identity is that singularity is posited as an active process of becoming-something as opposed to being something, as in identitarian politics. Identity is something passive which can be represented (white, Irish male). Singularity, on the other hand, is an active process of differentiation in which the becoming-something is itself constitutive. It is for this reason that it cannot be represented without doing violence to its singularity. So representation is at this level a mark of entrapment, itself a classic tactic of identitarian politics with its self-appointed ‘community leaders’ and suchlike. It is precisely the perils of this kind of representation as silencing that animates Marcos and ensure that virtually everything he says is couched within a vocabulary that makes clear he is not leading, showing the way, representing in this passive identitarian fashion. Rather he sees himself as part of an active and self-constituting movement that in turn exercises control (as ‘governing-obeying’) over the Zapatistas. As a politics this commits one to a position that puts one at odds with those whose values or actions represent a threat to it. Thus whilst Thomassen asserts that we are unable to articulate a politics of opposition to paramilitaries, neoliberals and the rest, we would assert the opposite. A post-representative politics puts one on a collision course with those who would, as in these cases, seek to represent and thereby undermine the capacity of self-constituted autonomous communities to function. Marcos is very explicit about avoiding a constitutive exclusion even of neoliberalism and avoiding imposing a Zapatista model in the same way that the government imposes its model. ‘We are’, he says, ‘proposing a space, an equilibrium between the different political forces in order that each position has the same opportunity to influence the political direction of this country . . . If there is a neoliberal proposal for the country, we shouldn’t try to eliminate it but confront it’.2 Underlying Thomassen’s objections is a basic closure of perspective. He claims that ‘Tormey’s refusal to substitute one representational structure for another means that he has nothing to say about the articulation of a collective agency that will form an alternative to the present’ ( p. 14). ‘[W]ithout some political leadership—without someone representing and articulating the collective identity which 132 Parliamentary Affairs does not emerge of its own—there would be no collective agency to counter the persons and institutions that currently rule the world’ ( p. 16). However, why must the ‘articulation of a collective agency’ occur through ‘substitut[ing] one representational structure for another’? Our point is precisely that other kinds of articulation are possible—the reference to the Zapatistas and the social forums being instances of such other forms. Thus, we have plenty to say about forms of collective agency—we just happen to be saying things Thomassen does not like. We do not accept the claim that political representation is necessary to produce collective agency; we believe, based on extensive evidence, that social movements can also arise horizontally, out of articulations which avoid arborescence and which occur immanently in everyday life, and which take the form of networks rather than hierarchic ‘hegemonies’. As for failing to explain how the Zapatistas arose, this was not the point of the paper in question, so its absence is hardly a failing. Crucial to such an account would be the immanent meanings constructed in everyday life in Chiapas, and the ways these relate to forces of social domination. Our claim is not that the Zapatistas ‘just happened’, but that their emergence was a result of immanent social forces which find expression in a particular social movement, as opposed to being constructed from above by a moment of political decision. A large secondary literature on the Zapatistas subsists, much of it written by anthropologists seeking to understand the roots of the conflict, Marxists and other political economists looking at its structural context and origins, and radical political theorists seeking to articulate a new politics based on the Zapatista experience.3 Most of this literature confirms our perspective that immanence, not ‘the political’, accounts for the Zapatista uprising. Ethnographic accounts confirm the importance of immanent systems of meaning-formation, emphasising local traditions, knowledges, customs and so on. Economic studies stress the local impact of energy policy, changes in land ownership and a history of marginalisation and exclusion of indigenous peasants, while political examinations of Zapatista discourse confirm our account of its immanentist aspects. Crucially, the one piece of situated research to which Thomassen refers—Harvey and Halverson’s essay on women’s activism in Chiapas—confirms our position regarding immanence and goes against the position he ascribes to the political moment. It is true that they affirm Laclau’s view on the need for the political, but only once and as an afterthought, two pages from the end of their article. Their concrete empirical discussions confirm our argument, not Thomassen’s. They stress that the Zapatistas call on ordinary people to democratise society from the bottom up instead of seeking to take power ( pp. 151–2), emphasise the role of direct participation in community assemblies as the driving force of gender inclusion ( p. 159) and focus on the Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder 133 emergence of ‘decentralized networks’ (p. 163).4 The significance of the Zapatista movement is thus as much in the capacities for everyday appropriation of its discourse as in its broader anti-government agenda ( p. 163). Even when the actions discussed are regulative or reactive, Harvey and Halverson show how they arise from within everyday life, as grassroots initiatives, rather than as top-down gestures. Based on such empirical material, they call for the replacement of ‘transcendental’ signifiers with ‘floating’ signifiers, which, in a reading which cuts against the grain of Laclau’s work, they take to mean signifiers constructed immanently in everyday life ( p. 159). They also call for a ‘politics of difference rather than universality’ ( p. 154) and aim to ‘highlight the importance of singular experience for developing more inclusive and open forms of political discourse’ ( p. 153). They urge that struggles ‘remain open’—hence presumably, avoiding Laclauian hegemony—so that singularities can reinterpret their meanings and find expression through them (p. 158). They read the Derridean ‘secret’ as an excess of singular lived experience over identity narratives ( pp. 156–7) and argue that ‘[i]t is neither feasible nor desirable that each of these experiences be brought within a permanently unified space, language or politics’ ( p. 163). When even authors cited in support by Thomassen confirm our claims overwhelmingly against his, it becomes clear which claims are borne out on the ground in Chiapas. The politics of post-representation The above point leads us to query Thomassen’s more general complaint that there is a contradiction in our position that leads us to abandoning the oppositional politics that we seem otherwise to laud. In particular the politics of spaces that we posit as an alternative to a traditional vertical politics of parties and collective mobilisation around a manifesto or doctrine leads to a denial of the necessity for choosing between alternatives, and thus to the exclusion of certain demands, plans and visions—neoliberalism being the obvious one. We have it seems opted for a ‘soft’ inclusivity which is likely to be its own downfall because we lack the means of resisting those who are hostile to the kinds of demands associated with alter-globalisation. As is implied above, a politics of singularity or difference is a politics in favour of singularity and difference as opposed to an identitarian politics in which the needs, interests or wishes of the majority are merely asserted—as is the case in traditional ideological politics, as well as the hegemonic politics associated with Laclau and his followers. Horizontal movements and spaces may well have to defend themselves—as in the case of the Zapatistas—but this is not part of the condition of their possibility. Exclusion is not structurally necessary to the relational complex of horizontal networks in the way it is for hierarchies and ideologies constituted by reference to some identity that has to be suppressed or overcome. Thus when Marcos offers his view that 134 Parliamentary Affairs Zapatismo seeks ‘a world of many worlds, a world where all worlds may fit’ we do not take this to imply (as Thomassen does) that this must of necessity exclude neoliberalism (for example). There is no contradiction between the demand that all visions have validity and the necessity to defend oneself against attacks by those bent on undermining a given political project. The point is that in concrete terms neoliberalism is perceived to be at the root of the powerlessness of indigenous peasants. Should neoliberals desist from seeking to overcome peasant demands for a share of the land then presumably neoliberalism would cease to be the object of Marcos’s critique. This would not of course alter the nature of Zapatismo which is posited on the basis of a positive demand for autonomy and self-constitution as well as the negative demand to overcome Power/Neoliberalism. The absence of the latter does not obviate the former, and nor does the former rely upon the existence of the latter to make it substantive. The outside is not constitutive and a positive demand does not necessarily require an excluded supplement and the necessity for violence to be realised. Thomassen promises at the start of his essay to demonstrate that post-representational politics is not only wrong, but ‘dangerous’ ( p. 3)—the implicit reference here being to previous claims made by Mouffe, Stavrakakis and others that the affirmation of social fullness leads to totalitarianism. In fact he never really attempts any such demonstration; the broader critique he alludes to would seem to apply only if we advocate a politics of self-present fullness. Of course we do not—a Deleuzian approach goes further than Laclau in embracing contingency and opposing fixed power. ‘Totalitarian’ (Stalinist, fascist, fundamentalist) regimes are the object of the critique developed by Deleuze and Guattari in their analysis of political forms. For post-representational theorists, however, it is representational politics which itself poses the danger of authoritarian and totalitarian social forms—a point Thomassen only reinforces with his insistence on ‘vanguardism’ and instrumentalism (‘breaking eggs’). Like Zizek, Thomassen appears to endorse a ‘robust radicalism’ of ‘us against them’ that echoes the genocidal lunacy of previous revolutionary ‘realists’ from Lenin and Trotsky to Mao and Pol Pot. Our view is that such examples serve as a warning of this political logic, one that can be fruitfully contrasted with other movements and phenomena that have at least attempted to get beyond it. Some have gone as far as to reject violence completely—examples being the Satyagraha movement in India, the Velvet Revolution in Czechoslovakia, the Civil Rights movements in the United States and various theories of anarcho-pacifism and ‘nonviolent revolution’. This has been the approach taken by the CIPO-RFM, a Zapatista sister group in neighbouring Oaxaca. In other cases, such as the Zapatistas themselves, the violence is that of the war machine described in Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder 135 Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. In either case, the crucial point is that sanctions are structured immanently, as diffuse sanctions; there is no moment of centralised, concentrated power. What the latter have in common is a refusal of the political reality that Thomassen thinks is intrinsic to successful or effective political change, which is to say the necessity for violence, exclusion, formalised representative processes, and leadership of anything other than an exemplary kind. On the contrary, by developing bonds of affinity and solidarity, trust in ‘ordinary rebelliousness’ and a suspicion of programmatic demands arising out of abstract theorising as opposed to the concrete experience of oppression, these movements were able to challenge much more powerful agents in a way that demonstrates the potential of horizontal or network forms of mobilisation to effect far-reaching change. For Thomassen, ‘the spaces of horizontality are only possible as spaces of horizontality through a relation of verticality, where someone take it upon themselves to secure and defend these spaces’; ‘the spaces rely on a relation of representation where someone stands in for and thereby constitutes the space, for instance by interpreting what horizontality means’ ( p. 13). The crucial point for Thomassen’s position is not whether this self-defence involves interpersonal violence, but whether it involves structural violence—the arborescence, the trunk, the despotic signification he takes as necessary. Clearly it does not. Similarly, Thomassen claims that there is ‘an ineliminable tension between the singularity of the various demands and voices included within the counter hegemonic bloc and their representation within an ‘overarching’ ideology or programme’ ( p. 15). This tension can be easily eliminated—by not representing the demands and voices as an integrated entity, instead interrelating them rhizomatically and immanently, so that their articulation does not require their subordination. The point about horizontal activism is precisely to refuse arborescence. Thomassen’s discussion of exclusion and violence in Zapatismo seems, we think, to be an attempt to deny structural heterogeneity in social forms. For him, there is no difference between the defence of a smooth space from repression and the establishment of a repressive order based on a constitutive exclusion. The latter must be another instance of the necessary structural logic assigned by Laclauian theory to all political movements. However, the two are not alike. Whereas negativity is constitutive for the latter, the former is first of all affirmative. Their structures are thus distinct; “exclusion” and “violence” play a different role in each. They channel and generate different kinds of emotions and they are productive of different kinds of sociality. The choice of Zapatismo or anti-capitalism over neoliberalism is thus not a Schmittian ‘decision’ or an act of constitutive exclusion; it is not like choosing Democrat or Republican, Pepsi or Coke. There is a radical heterogeneity here, which Thomassen’s reading elides by means of reduction—an elision which points to a deeper hostility to the opening 136 Parliamentary Affairs dimension of Deleuzian theory, to its broadening of the conceptual horizon. Beyond representation? In view of Thomassen’s equivocal position on contemporary horizontal politics (the affirmation of the ‘values’ but not the practice of horizontal movements; a recognition of its having ‘interesting effects’, that it has ‘a place’), why does he nonetheless stick heroically to a view that such a politics has to be opposed?5 This is on the face of it curious: ‘I am happy to recognise the values and effects of X but I am going to attack it as if these values and effects were not positive’. What becomes obvious in the course of the article is that he is moved to write because the politics that we see gaining ground does not fit the model to which he is, as a political theorist, wedded. The model is however tendentially conservative, and plays out in the following ways. Firstly, the assertion of the necessity for representation means that many of the more interesting political phenomena of the past few decades have to be treated as political deviations or irruptions from the normal order of things. This includes, we would argue, the proliferation of network and horizontal forms of political interaction; the emergence of social forums as explicitly anti-representational spaces; the withdrawal of many ordinary citizens from representative processes such as electioneering and party politics in favour of unmediated forms of political intervention such as direct-action, protests, grassroots campaigning, hacktivism, subvertising, political consumerism and so forth. Instead of recognising that such phenomena problematise representation at a variety of different levels (as incidentally many political scientists do), they have to be cajoled back into the very theoretical and political framework that is often identified by those taking part in them as part of the ‘reality’ to be overcome.6 Secondly, if the assertion of the constitutive character of present problems is wrong, then its function is to reproduce social repression by placing it beyond criticism. If we are wrong then the worse we can be accused of is ‘political ineffectuality’. If post-Lacanians like Thomassen are wrong, they are building bulwarks around social oppression (as the necessity for among other things ‘violence’ and ‘exclusion’) that makes them complicit in its reproduction. We think this is odd for a ‘radical’ position and is more nearly characterised as, in Marcuse’s words, the submission of critical thought to the present. Theory can perform at least two distinct roles—it can be an opening of thought to new possibilities, or an affirmation of the present through the elevation of observed facts to ontological necessities. Deleuze and Guattari come down on the side of the former approach, emphasising the creativity of theory in producing new concepts and thus new ways of seeing.7 A similar openness is implicit in Spivak’s concept of critical literacy, and in Derrida’s ethics of Beyond Representation? A Rejoinder 137 hospitality. Where is the equivalent gesture in Thomassen’s dogged defence of representation? Finally, if representation is constitutive then of course one kind of representation becomes at some basic level much like another with deleterious political and ethical consequences. How in particular can we identify ‘good’ or ‘progressive’ representation from ‘bad’ or ‘reactionary’ representation? Not evidently by resort to mechanisms of exclusion, violence or subordination, because on Thomassen’s definition these are all built into the constitutive definition of representation. The potential for ethical and moral slippage here is impressive, allowing him to ridicule the suggestion that singularity be nurtured on the back of a robust statism that insists that power be deployed against enemies and outsiders. As Thomassen himself confirms, the logic of Trotsky’s dictum that ‘eggs’ have to be smashed to make an omelette is far from objectionable—it is the sine qua non of politics, progressive or otherwise. Our view is that the task of a radical philosophy is not to endorse the brutal and dehumanising logic of representative politics, but to offer a critique of this logic and thus the hope for a better world—or better worlds. Interestingly Derrida himself shared this hope—or rather the view that it is the task of philosophy to nourish and generate hope where it was lacking. Derrida was in his latter days given to a kind of Messianism in which the democracy-to-come appears as a form of distant horizon, a utopian limit point that nevertheless had some ‘reality’, if only of a fleeting or virtual kind. That Derrida recognised the link between critique and utopia is we think salutary and something that others who share his outlook could usefully learn from. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 See for example the work of Hecht and Simone, D. Matza, D.C. Galvan, L. Lomnitz, P. Chatterjee, R. Fantasia and S. Kotkin. Workers’ Solidarity, ‘Interview with Subcomandante Marcos, 11.5.94; archived at http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/mexico/ezln/anmarin.html This includes recent work by John Holloway, Jose Rabasa, Susan Mcmanus, Midnight Notes, Adam D. Morton, G. Otero, John Holloway and Eloina Palaez, H. Veltmeyer, J. Nash, D. Earle and G. A. Collier. References in brackets are to N. Harvey and C. Halverson, ‘The Secret and the Promise: Women’s Struggles in Chiapas’, in D. Howarth, A.J. Norval and Y. Stavrakakis (eds), Discourse Theory and Political Analysis: Identities, Hegemonies and Social Change, Manchester University Press, 2000. Thomassen insists he is ‘not arguing against horizontality or equality’ ( p. 13), but subsequently argues that verticality and inequality (leadership) are necessary—in other words, he is arguing against them. Similarly, he claims not to be arguing against ‘the disorganised strategies and tactics of the antiglobalisation movement or the Social Forums’ ( p. 13). Yet he rejects our advocacy of these approaches as ‘dangerous’, ‘vain’, and so on, in press. See for example the vignettes from activists collected in We are Everywhere: The Irresistible Rise of Global Anticapitalism, Verso, 2003. See especially G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What is Philosophy?, Verso, 1994.