Spontaneity and the Incalculable “Spanish Revolution”

In Spain as elsewhere the word “spontaneous” is often used to describe the sudden, unexpected appearance of mass demonstrations after 15 May 2011, which inaugurated the 15-M movement. “Nobody Expects the Spanish Revolution” reads a sign from a widely circulated photograph of the first 15-M protests. In it, a demonstrator masked as Guy Fawkes from the film V for Vendetta offers a political twist to the Monty Python sketch, for a movement characterized by its seriousness of action and occasional irony of forms. Though the magnitude of events was unforeseen, May 2011 marked a tipping point in which tens and then hundreds of thousands of residents across Spain took to the streets in active protests one week before local and regional elections. Public outrage and the slogan “We’re not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers!” were understood as the common denominators among protesters, called the indignados. But their reasons were many, none of which fall neatly into an overarching narrative of the events and causes that brought people together or how.

Demonstrating against partisan politics, unemployment, corruption scandals, copyright laws, among many other reasons, spontaneous cores of protesters communicating through social networks and the Internet established self-managed camps in urban centers across Spain, which through passive resistance endured confrontations with the police and the National Election Board’s verdict that declared the protests illegal. And as protesters, sympathizers, and donors of provisions grew in masses, the camps lasted several weeks more and were mirrored by similar demonstrations around the world. By mid-June, protesters in Madrid’s kilometer zero La Puerta del Sol, lifted the camp voluntarily, for the movement had transformed into a network of neighborhood assemblies, which have coordinated sustained actions ever since. Across Spain to date, the movement has stopped evictions and the deportation of immigrants, has rallied against privatization and cutbacks to public education and healthcare, and has organized debates, textbook exchanges, and neighborhood film screenings, to name a few of its lines of action. May 2011 marked an event, however surprising or unexpected, in the re-politicization of direct democratic participation in public affairs, in which an estimated 6 to 8.5 million residents in Spain had participated to some degree in a matter of four months.

In protests and other coordinated efforts, demonstrators have used the term “spontaneous” to describe their actions when interviewed by the media, as have commentators, journalists, sociologists. Its usage, however, implicitly skirts the difficulties that arise in any attempt to describe an overwhelming field of contingencies, actions, and chance from which mass mobilizations emerge seemingly overnight, gain supporters, lose them, disappear from public view, and remain latent yet active, until the next public demonstration appears visibly in the streets. Spontaneity and its many synonyms have become the shorthand to describe the temporality with which the multitude makes itself visible with demands and force, in an unexpected tempo of “sudden” emergence.

However, I find that in some sense-making narratives on the spontaneous character of 15-M, the search to pinpoint the movement’s origins contributes indirectly to portraying the multitude as an anomaly—unusual, out of the blue, and destined to either disappear or assimilate into the status quo—thereby taming it through prediction. In others, readings rely on the operative concepts in liberal democracy and class struggle to explain a movement that problematizes these analytical frameworks. And for many protesters, spontaneity is a powerful choice of words to express the incalculability of the multitude’s actions against the speech of politicians who attempt to criminalize the movement in the public eye. In all cases, however, the use of spontaneous grazes over the field of contingencies from which the multitude emerges, an investigation into which could provide a useful tool for demonstrators to approach collective decision-making as the multitude is constituted.

Here I set out to address how certain news media, writings, and official state discourse about the 15-M phenomenon have reported, commented on, or analyzed the movement by performing similar operations that tend to assimilate its undeniable force and sudden emergence within specific logics that somehow fail to explain it. The shortcomings of these narratives may speak more to the methodological displacements required to analyze mobilizations or the conventions of class struggle and liberal democracy, than to the authors’ own responsibility for them. In this regard, reading them against their moment of production one may begin to articulate a critical narrative over time of how the movement has been interpreted from diverse perspectives (the media, the university, the state), to arrive at a discussion of what critical tools are available to understand its emergence. 15-M is, after all, a critical moment that questions operative notions of the public, the media and Internet, and democratic participation in ways that exceed institutional knowledge of the kind deployed in State decision-making. It is an “event” in medias res, as the movement continues to develop with incalculability. Then, turning to my own attempt to narrate a partial conjecture of the critical decision-making and contingencies in the events that have perhaps contributed to sustaining 15-M, in the following section I arrive at some questions on the role of affective intensity in the mobilizations and the temporality of a narrative that aims to make sense of the movement’s development. My hope is that this account and its own shortcomings can contribute to analyzing the emergence of the movement, and identify some of its strengths and weaknesses, as a potential tool for further action and critique.

One of the earliest substantial attempts to make sense of the spontaneity of the 15-M movement is that of journalist and director of Informe Semanal (TVE) Alicia G. Montano, in her presentation “Los indignados: causas y estela de un fenómeno” (29 Aug 2011). Delivered less than four months after the first demonstrations in Madrid, Montano’s exposition is a necessary interpretation of the movement’s origins and consequences for partisan politics. For the events of 15-M proved powerful enough to require politicians to address a multitude that had “spoken” first with the cry “They don’t represent us!” and then with specific claims, and in great numbers, to elected officials. Montano’s analysis cites footage from Informe Semanal dating to April of the same year in order to explain the economic conditions that laid the foundations for the protests in May, as well as the organization and literature that influenced protesters. Moving through the backdrop of the financial crisis, she traces the first appearance of the 15-M movement in part to the unemployed university-educated founders of Democracia Real Ya! (DRY), one of many platforms participating in 15-M, and the great influence of Stéphane Hessel’s bestseller ¡Indignaos! published in Spanish translation in 2010. In his timely reflection, Hessel speaks to his readers as the surviving author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, calling for peaceful, public indignation against human rights violations today, on the discriminatory laws of European states against immigrants and military offenses against civilians in the Middle East. Reading 15-M through Hessel’s influence then, Montano’s analysis and dual attribution—on the one hand, to a university-educated leadership core, and on the other, to the battle cry of a human rights guru—is spoken from specific coordinates in time. At the end of summer 2011, when the movement had not yet demonstrated its endurance with sustained actions over the year, when public speculation wondered if it would turn into a party, and when its members were likewise faced with a potential reinsertion into “normality” and everyday routine in the fall. In this sense, my reading of Montano’s analysis takes into account both the operation that must identify the materialization of a movement with definitive leaders and a specific literature, and the time of her reading the movement against its potential disappearance or transformation.

However involuntarily, to assign the movement leaders and locatable origins recasts 15-M as a replicated extension of class struggles and positions within civil society. For, although it is clear that the indignados share their name with the title of Hessel’s manifesto on indignation, it is not certain that demonstrators in late May 2011 found in Hessel their very reason to join the protests, or if a significant number had read his work before flocking to Sol. At the root of this operation is a direct relationality of cause and effect, which shuttles from circumstance to production, from Hessel’s bestseller to direct action, as a form of suture to explain the multitude’s sudden mobilization. As does the necessity of locating a specific origin for the movement in a leadership core, which we know with greater clarity, in hindsight, was dispersed among multiple platforms with different causes. Today as then, the governing norms of debate and organizational structures of 15-M rely on mechanisms that actively disable the concentration of power within a specific leadership, as its popular assemblies and working groups are open to all participants whose administrative responsibilities rotate among volunteers, a point I will return to in the following section. It would seem as though a first analysis, spoken from a specific time inflected by the movement’s potential reinsertion into normality or transformation into a party, would find in 15-M a microscale reproduction of civil society’s hierarchies engaged in class struggle—a cohesion of the stratified masses, an educated elite at the helm, an influential text. To stretch this comparison in terms translatable to the state, the movement is seen through a lens that likens its components to a class alliance, a party, an ideology, all of which constitute the analytical tools of institutional hegemony and political strategy, for a movement that resists both institutionalism and partisan politics. Montano’s important analysis, in my view, is inflected by the circumstance from which it was produced and the operative procedures required to assimilate its inexplicable spontaneity and direction. For, a reading on the “normalization” of the movement as class struggle as usual, is spoken from the time of its possible disappearance or institutionalization as its members again assimilated into the “normality” of everyday routine.

Departing from Montano’s analysis then, one can begin to approximate a concept of the “multitude” that has since proven resilient to class definition and institutional hierarchy. In their work Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire, Hardt and Negri argue that the accelerated distribution of labor in advanced capitalism and its deterritorializing effects have contributed to new forms of transversal solidarity across workers in different sectors and classes. Such a solidarity among socioeconomic segments and labor sectors certainly describes the composite picture of the multitude of protesters and participants in 15-M, who come from diverse socioeconomic backgrounds and labor markets. Ultimately, Hardt and Negri explain, this newfound potential for solidarity stems from the regime of productivity in late capitalism in which all workers participate, whether by providing services or manual labor, for an economy no longer bound uniquely to surplus value and the production of material goods. Whereas in the past, notions of class difference and class alliance may have been fundamental concepts to explain mobilizations in class struggles, today the lack of political priority for forms of labor renders difference a secondary consideration to all workers’ productivity. That is, despite class difference workers share in common their proletarian condition as laborers and producers. Thereby, “the multitude is an open and expansive concept. The multitude gives the concept of the proletariat its fullest definition as all those who labor and produce under the rule of capital” (107). This is not to say that the social production of class difference is erased entirely in the multitude, a notion touched on in the following section, but that one point of transversal solidarity binding its multiplicity together lies in the common recognition of a shared exploitation (one source of indignation) and productivity (creative potential). As such, the camp in Sol had achieved a creative accomplishment for common production: it suspended the rhythms of the everyday within the open plaza, reassigning its functionality as a space for the movement’s own self-expression and protest.

Perhaps it is this creative potential of the demonstrations, together with the movement’s aims, which has led some academic criticism to construe a form of humanist ethos from 15-M. In this vein, another critical contribution on the movement comes from architect Cristina García-Rosales and professor of philosophy Manuel Penella Heller in their coauthored work Palabras para indignados. Hacia una nueva revolución humanista (Madrid: Mandala Ediciones, 2011), which projects 15-M’s potential as a revitalizing project for liberal humanism. As such, the spontaneity of the movement is erased through a procedure that grafts it within a homogenous, historical time. As the title implies, the text is addressed to both those interested in learning about the movement and those already participating in it, as a dual form of appellation to readers who might join or sympathize with its aims, on the one hand, and of education on the movement’s humanist precedents, on the other. Constructing a “history of humanism” that originates in Greek stoicism and continues in Christianity, the Enlightenment, and anti-fascist resistance in the twentieth century, the authors build a philosophical and moral tradition for the movement through an astonishing act of imagining the community for the community, the very task upon which nation-building has historically depended. Their project is borne from “the historical need to save the noble part of liberalism” for the common good (66).

Nevertheless, to describe 15-M as a phenomenon arising from a historical tradition of humanism—and to inscribe the movement within a revitalized liberal project rooted in “where we came from”—performs however unintentionally a sleight of hand that reintroduces the movement within the logical schematics of modernity’s most exclusionary machinery: liberal notions of the “common good” and humanist universalisms that slip dangerously into moral judgment. The myth-making that ensues in Palabras para indignados finds its justification in the sutured, homogenous narrative of a timeless humanist history across millennia. The text in this sense proposes a return to projects past, without a critical take on their violent, exclusionary results in history. Stated otherwise, any proposal to return to the falsely universal axioms of humanism confronts its greatest critique in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. García-Rosales and Penella Heller’s work, however, is also written from a specific moment, published within six months of the first protests in May 2011 and released in the Ateneo shortly thereafter, and as such proves important for its attempt to foster the movement’s expansion through interpretation, in which sympathizers will find reasons to participate through identification, in this case, with a sense of timeless humanism. Yet, even as the development of 15-M breaks away from conventions of liberal democracy, the authors’ critical lens recaptures it as a new imagined community of the People, as a historically determined product.

As Hardt and Negri argue in their work Empire, the multitude differs from the concept of the People imagined historically in nation-states:

The multitude is a multiplicity, a plane of singularities, an open set of relations, which is not homogenous or identical with itself and bears an indistinct, inclusive relation to those outside of it. The people, in contrast, tends toward identity and homogeneity internally while posing its difference from and excluding what remains outside of it. Whereas the multitude is an inconclusive constituent relation, the people is a constituted synthesis that is prepared for sovereignty. The people provides a single will and action that is independent of and often in conflict with the various wills and actions of the multitude. Every nation must make the multitude into a people.

(Hardt and Negri, Empire 103)

The concept of the People in liberal democracy is inherently imagined from an exclusionary principle, required historically to define a nation, that constructs categories of difference to Others—with both interiority to its marginalized and with exteriority to “foreign” peoples and nations. Conceived as a singular entity united by will, the People is constituted for and by the nation-state as a collective subject of governance. As every nation-state must mold the multitude into a People it can govern, the very conditions of its subjecthood for rule are legitimized and reinforced within a biopolitical field of social production. The indignados, after all, call themselves the indignant, thereby naming a shared condition produced from the biopolitical effects (i.e., outrage) of a subjecthood usurped from democratic participation in state affairs. Specifically, in state decision-making that has made the burden of the financial crisis come to bear upon Spanish residents through higher taxation and greater cutbacks to social programs, healthcare, and education, denounced in the slogan: “We won’t pay for your crisis!” Perhaps an inheritance from national projects past, today the state must govern the multitude as a collective subject, as the People. In contrast, however, the multitude is irreducible to a singular identity, subjectivity, or homogenizing principle, thereby bearing the possibility of constituting itself within a multiplicity of social relations by refusing collectively the sovereign “We” of the People. In doing so, the multitude deploys this “we” in a collective refusal of its condition as a subject (in this case, reduced to an object), “We are not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers!”

Symptomatic of the need to make sense of the multitude’s composite character, the media offered countless portraits—photo reports, televised interviews, news columns—of both an artistic and informative bent, of the individuals participating in the events of spring and summer 2011. “Citizens demand rebuilding democracy,” reads the title to one article in which protesters young and old, employed and seeking work, lawyers and executives, teachers and students of different socioeconomic backgrounds, list their wishes to change the present and construct a different future. The El País photo report released during the first camp in Sol and, one year later, in the country-wide march to Madrid may be read as evidence of a certain investigative necessity to describe not only the diversity of profiles and causes comprising the indignant multitude, but their accumulative desires for change, written on notes, categorized by theme, and released for publication in the mainstream press. The chance for readers and viewers to identify with specific profiles and faces, diverse backgrounds, and reasons for joining the protests may have benefitted the 15-M movement to mobilize others, as much as it also speaks to a certain necessity to conceive of the multitude as a composite of desiring individuals, rather than an amorphous mass.

Desire for social change and affective responses to the demonstrations are conveyed in some media and news coverage from the initial protests. In one remarkable example, the opening sequence of Informe Semanal’s first report on the indignados (broadcast 21 May 2011, cited in Alicia G. Montano’s analysis) displays a series of close-up shots of the faces of protesters, who open their eyes in a gesture of “political awakening” as the camera zooms into focus to show the outward appearance of diversity of its participants. The narrator’s voiceover is reinforced by sound clips from interviews with the indignados (in the words of one protester, “it’s a spontaneous movement without any political party,” and another, “all of us learned about it on Internet”), as the crescendo of the protest song “Victor Jara’s Hands” by Calexico is marked by accelerated camera shots of different faces, jumping to a fast-paced sequence and slow panorama of the massive concentrations in Sol. As a document to its time, the news clip is extraordinary for having portrayed in this crescendo of song and image, the affective intensity with which the demonstrations took place. In this sense, the magnitude of the protests, the creative productivity among strangers desiring change, and the suspension of disbelief in the first mobilizations are conveyed to viewers in the audiovisual sequence, through a portrait of its most immeasurable feature: the intensity of its affect, of its ability to move and trigger movement in others. The temporality of the plural multitude’s emergence is aptly characterized in this sequence by affective potential and a common creative productivity.

Now in stark contrast to the affective intensity of the multitudinous demonstrations and the camps, there also exists a patent fear of the masses, evident in political discourse. For government officials, particularly among the political right, the unpredictable appearance of mass demonstrations has stirred significant anxiety for its incalculable potential for action. This anxiety is made clear in the apocalyptic discourse of politicians who attempt to criminalize protesters as “radicals” and anti-system, violent types who desire “urban guerrilla warfare” and “terrorism.” This cataclysmic picture arising from an authoritarian discourse not only infringes on the democratic right to demonstrate peacefully, but has materialized in the proposed reforms to the Penal Code under consideration for 2013. If passed into law, the reforms would introduce language to interpret passive resistance as a crime punishable by prison and fines, as well as the distribution of information about protests via social networks and the Internet. The infallible democratic appearance of this reform resides in embedding new language within clauses that define strict punishments for “hate groups,” which inarguably should indeed be severe. But the judicial interpretation of charges against “groups motivated by ideology” and other clauses have stirred speculation in the press and from Judges for Democracy (JpD), whose spokesperson Joaquim Bosch denounced that the proposed reforms “criminalize certain forms of protest” thereby turning “a social state to a penal state.”

The state response to the multitude further demonstrates that institutional political strategy continues to operate within and from the dualities of hegemonic power by treating the multitude as a singular subject that must be forged into a People. In the words of Minister of Interior Fernández Díaz, “We have to strengthen the legitimate authority of those who legitimately have the exclusive [right to] action by force, who are the National Police, the Civil Guard, and local police, because you can’t be passive before the actions of some people who despise, harm, and disobey Security Forces.” The Minister’s insistence on the legitimacy of state power and its policing apparatus is indeed at the very heart of this anxiety produced by the spontaneous appearance of the multitude, which it views—and attempts to recast—with antagonism as a disobedient “enemy” to civil society. The multitude, in other words, is a project for the state. It must be constructed in speech and law as the state’s adversary, according to a binary logic in which the People is a friend of the state insofar as it concedes to its subjecthood for state rule. Stated otherwise, the legitimacy of rule hinges upon shaping the multitude into a willing subject of state sovereignty, the People. This duality is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the words of Head Chief of Police in Valencia Antonio Moreno, who refused to disclose to the press the number of police dispatched to disperse, by force, the secondary school students and teachers protesting cutbacks to education, since one should not “provide this information for the enemy.” Yet, as the state aims to legitimize its authority through the bellicose friend-enemy distinction in speech, force, and law, paradoxically, it undermines the very legitimacy of democracy in the state. In this sense, when peaceful protesters use “spontaneous” to describe their actions sincerely, it proves to be an empowering gesture on the incalculability of the multitude’s actions. For, although this is not the protesters’ aim, the unpredictable time of the multitude’s spontaneity destabilizes the state’s potential to police effectively, which as Police Chief Moreno exposes in his bellicose statement, is required for the state’s own administrative time-cycle to produce a calculated response with political and policing strategy.

Moving towards a conclusion then, it seems that different narrative logics aiming to make sense of the 15-M movement and its spontaneous character have tended to analyze the phenomenon through the lens of liberal democracy, class struggle, and hegemonic power, assuming that the movement operates within a certain conceptual domain that it tends to resist. Surely, the political strategy deployed by the state to forge the multitude into an enemy and thereby reconstitute its legitimacy of rule for the People, demonstrates that its operative knowledge-power rests on engaging the multitude from a hegemonic institutional position. However, the transversal solidarity that characterizes the composite multitude (i.e., understood as a cross-sector and -class proletariat) and the production of its temporal and affective incalculability, foil the conventions of analytical frameworks required to explain it. The multitude’s emergence and crystallization into an operative telos for mobilization constitutes an event that exceeds institutional knowledge.

What escapes these analytical procedures is a critique of how a given mobilization first crystallizes and manifests itself visibly, undeniably present, with force. Here the force to which I refer is specifically bound to an action (protest) and subsequent demand: summarized as that of the multitude’s collective grievance against the Spanish State for its protection of neoliberal projects and the elite who benefit from them. Articulated with increasing complexity in the wake of 15-M, the movement’s proposals and actions call for significant reforms to both the structure of the state and its positions, which constructively question directly or indirectly, democratic sovereignty itself. Furthermore, although the proposals of the 15-M movement have been articulated with particularity to the Spanish State, they are in direct response to the increasingly damaging consequences of privatization, social marginalization, and widening class difference as a systemic crisis, which strengthens the movement’s potential for solidarity within a network of international groups that make likeminded claims, articulated from the local and regional.

Passing then from the first demonstration of general outrage and indignation in massive mobilizations, to the articulation of demands and operative working groups in Spain, 15-M can be described loosely within a conjecture from the biopolitical field of social production (affect), to a mass demonstration (enunciation). However, its political transcendence and survival lies in the crystallization of operative horizontal governance (structure), sustained by the inclusive debates of popular assemblies, commissions, and working groups that articulate specific demands and proposals (enunciations and actions) on a local level. The movement’s capability to mobilize with creative productivity, in this sense, is perhaps one of its strengths to reactivate participation in its initiatives (to affect into action), in coordinated time-cycles during the calendar year and of relevance to the everyday (e.g., back to school events for parents and students, outdoor cultural events during the summer, specific one-time actions and protests, etc.). It is this particularity of the local that is the movement’s greatest motor for continued action and community involvement in which a sense of common ownership of the public (e.g., public space, services, education, healthcare, etc.) constitutes its transversal solidarity with similar actions in defense of shared, inclusive public ownership and rights on a regional and international scale. Its nonhierarchical, networked structure endows the movement with its possibility to reenact mobilization with new initiatives, proposals, and demands. This has been achieved with remarkably great speed as the movement transforms continuously, and as such, so do its trajectories of proposed actions and the locations of its enunciations. They emerge from a diverse range of collectives and individuals within the so-called movement, from platforms, neighborhood associations, parents and teachers, state employees, etc. It is, after all, organized within a networked social field in constant flux, in motion, in contradiction, which sociologist Manuel Castells has aptly suggested in Deleuzian terms as bearing a rhizomatic form.

In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze and Guattari theorize some of the organic properties of the rhizome, its interconnectivity, and the seemingly unlimited maneuvers provided by its distribution. The rhizome is conceived as a multidimensional space in which any point may be connected to any other with networked, heterogeneous multiplicity; thus, unlike the roots of a tree, the rhizome grows horizontally in lines and curves, and is resilient to rigid hierarchy. Resisting specific coordinates, its properties are never static or total, but bear the possibility of transformation through motion and contact, a moving-through with no specific beginning or end. For, the rhizome is always both a middle and in medias res, from which it grows and exceeds the conjecture from which it grew. When a line within the rhizome comes into contact with a separate plane, its properties transform to become something else but not wholly other, in a trajectory of constant metamorphosis. Organically speaking, it cannot be reduced to a single element within it, nor can its multiplicity be traced to a single origin. “It is not a multiple derived from the one, or to which one is added (n+1). It is comprised not of units but of dimensions, or rather directions in motion. … It constitutes linear multiplicities with n dimensions having neither subject nor object, which can be laid out on a plane of consistency, and from which the one is always subtracted (n-1)” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 21). Abstracted in mathematical terms, n-1 is the formula of multiplicity and difference in the rhizome, in contrast to a purely accumulative principle (n+1).

Following Deleuze and Guattari, the rhizomatic form of 15-M’s organization is indeed cited within some of the communication platforms for the movement, notably the self-managed N-1 network. Named after Deleuze and Guattari’s principle of subtraction that gives way to multiplicity in the rhizome, N-1 is an open-source platform for registered users (called “inhabitants”) to share documents, audiovisuals, and archived resources, establish self-managed working groups, and disseminate information among inhabitants. Its subtraction consists in its parallel structure to, and removal from, other social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Tuenti, etc.), allowing for specific organizational initiatives to develop in communication within it and in dissemination to other public sites, social networks, and webs. N-1 is developed in tandem with the movement’s other public domains: the documentation center maintained in conjunction with MediaLab ElPrado, the launching of the 15M-pedia, and the development of WikiLibro; the Movimiento 15-M blog to denounce, organize, and act; and the operative network of popular assemblies across Spain and their activities on the TomaLaPlaza web. Within this networked fabric, the “spontaneity” with which initiatives may be articulated and enacted in any given local node of activity, with any precise quantification of its total magnitude within and among these domains, are incalculable to administrative logics that require temporal precision and specific measure.

Hereafter I describe a brief, incomplete account of 15-M in a conjecture from the “force” of indignation arising from the circumstance of the crisis, to the movement’s crystallization as a structure of horizontal governance. On a precautionary note, however, all contemporary activism in Spain should not be attributed to the organizational structures of the 15-M movement as if the notion of the multitude were to only have one voice and site of activity, rather than a plurality of enunciations; nor should the heterogeneous, composite character of the 15-M movement be reduced to one unified platform or entity, or a static structure. It would be an impossible task to grasp a totality of the movement for its multiple particularities in the local and its diverse actions coordinated within its virtual and physical assemblage of networks. These points are ultimately what make the 15-M phenomenon difficult to describe, as it slips into a transformative field of social relations. For this reason, here I focus exclusively, at the risk of reductionism, on Madrid as one networked node of activity, itself an intensely plural site of networked activity, which should not be collapsed into the entirety of the movement per se. Nevertheless, the local and regional interconnectivity of platforms, commissions, and working groups has become a sort of channel for an operative plurality of demands that productively revitalize democratic participation today.

To be continued in the following post...