The Rhizome: Mapping 15-M (Part II of III)

[A]ffect is not a personal feeling, nor is it a characteristic; it is the effectuation of a power of the pack that throws the self into upheaval and makes it reel.

Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 265

Any map of 15-M will always be incomplete as the movement develops from multiple social encounters, enunciations, and practices that transform over time. It is not an activist organization or much less a conceptual category, but many networked movements of activity, some intensely interconnected, others disparate, and many unknown to its other operative parts. Its practices have no specific object of analysis, and as in any expansive social phenomena, its participants presume no total knowledge of its activities. If one reads the allusion to the rhizome mentioned previously in the communication network N-1—and does so literally as Deleuze and Guattari propose in A Thousand Plateaus by affirming that this activity is a rhizome—then the movement unfolds as a shifting configuration of performative bodies in motion, of affects, statements, and circuits that map the movement and are themselves, quite literally, its map. Following Deleuze and Guattari, this performance is not theater of representation, but is a concert of multiplicities among demonstrators, police batons, indignation, love, chants, Twitter, mobile phones, the media, elected officials, and bankers, to name a few. Unlike the flat tracings of a drawing hand or coherent speech, “the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight” (23). In the rhizome’s contingent space of networks and social relations, when circuits and the bodies moving through them come into contact, by chance or habit, they may transform or give rise to others. It is an open space of becoming in which bodies affected into motion bear the possibility of spinning off forcefully into lines of flight or slowing to stasis. I follow this conceptual model when mapping the movement as a rhizome, the fabric from which multitudes emerged from the practices of demonstrating bodies in the public square, from affective mobilizing forces, protest statements, and networks of social, mediated, and technological communication.

Stated otherwise, multiplicities within the rhizome’s dynamic space of social relations are taken as given but never wholly determined, thereby allowing analysis to move beyond the task of tracing histories of 15-M or describing ad infinitum its influences and actions, to question instead some of its conjectures in motion. The rhizome then is stated as a problem of critical approach to analyze the movement as many movements with no specific object or unity, but a metamorphosis of circuits, practices, and affects of some-bodies in motion, which are likewise temporally specific to my time of writing about them. In the following pages, concrete tools provided by thinking through social movements as a kind of rhizome—on affect, habit, and the Idea—will be drawn out from the practices of the indignados through Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus and Deleuze’s critique of analytical method in Difference and Repetition. With these practices of protest and action in mind, I have chosen here to follow, more or less, the temporal unfolding of some moments from the first few weeks of the 15-M demonstrations that contributed to constituting multitudes in Madrid and their developments since, which readers will note throughout, pursues these practices in movement by necessarily straying from and returning to a narrative of the first protests.

Within this map, first are its circuits of virtual and physical contact, or its extensive channels of communication, open diffusion, or exchange. By winter 2011 some organized causes and platforms had already established online social media, web pages, and working groups through which to plan actions and publish their initiatives with unmediated visibility, from user to user. Groups such as ATTAC and the Universidad Nómada, whose structures allowed for long-distance and international exchanges of ideas, counted on several years of experience with conferences, educational workshops, and publications within the alter-globalization movement. As did Madrid’s network of neighborhood associations, many of which were actively involved in social struggles since the final years of Francoism. Whereas the more recent local assemblies formed after the 2010 general strike had continued to meet in preparation for a greater nationwide protest the following summer. Physical sites such as the self-managed LaTabacalera cultural center, MediaLab El Prado, and the Centro Social Casablanca from the okupa movement served as meeting points, or active nodes of contact, for developing initiatives in Madrid. Some routine circuits of everyday contact encompassed university campuses and even schools where parents gathered and socialized casually while waiting for their children, and so on.

Many awareness groups had organized independent actions by spring 2011, which included platforms originating in university student protests against the Bologna Plan (JuventudSinFuturo), others for the protection of Internet sharing and copyleft against the “Sinde Law” (NoLesVotes), and others against the notorious abuses of copyright fees collected by the Society of Authors and Editors – SGAE. Groups like Estado de Malestar protesting “social ills” and the corruption scandals of politicians had hosted periodic events in collaboration with other cities, Seville and Santander, for demonstrations, awareness campaigns, and debates. Other platforms included those in defense of LGBTQ rights and gender equality, eco-activism and renewable energy, and the constitutional right to decent housing (“V de Vivienda”). There were also those in solidarity with Judge Baltasar Garzón in the defense and application of the Law for Historical Memory, and others against the privatization of public services, to name a few. Although these and other groups were not in active coordinated communication with each other, their participants’ critical responses and practices channeled some of those shaping the 15-M movement in Madrid and would materialize later in sustained, coordinated actions and the Popular Assembly’s first proposals. Together and separately, they comprised a contemporary assemblage of multiplicities with seemingly endless conjunctions (“and…and…and”) in Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the rhizome, or an assemblage of bodies desiring change (27).

In an action aiming for a greater public outcry against the political class and its management of the crisis, the platform Democracia Real Ya! distributed an open call for a mass demonstration on 15 May 2011, which was seconded by numerous others. The protest #TomaLaCalle would be held “without ideologies” or adhesion to a specific political party, one week before the nationwide elections for municipalities and autonomous communities in Spain. The very strength to have mobilized diverse sympathizers and participants through social circuits was this call for a mass public demonstration, removed from any specific ideological banner, party, or labor union. Thereby one organizing principle for the first demonstrations was intimately dedicated to inclusive uses of public space, which would transform with the multitudes’ practices in the protests and the consolidation of Camp Sol, even later in the popular assemblies in Madrid neighborhoods. The other organizing principle for the protests was founded in the plural critical responses from individuals and groups affected into action (i.e., “Take the Streets”) in solidarity with those who made likeminded claims: “We’re not goods in the hands of politicians and bankers,” “They don’t represent us,” “We won’t pay for your crisis,” etc.

For brevity, I call these open series of statements the multiplicity of negation, which in the practices of the indignados made it possible to mobilize multitudes in solidarity across groups and individuals, as well as reenergize mobilization with growing numbers through their power of association. In practice, the multiplicity of negation was articulated from the protesters’ plural critical readings of social and political relationships between the art of government and the governed (i.e., “No to Bankers and Politicians”) and what was inseparable from them, their biopolitical conditions (i.e., “Spain: A Land of People without Houses and Houses without People”). Stated in announcements for demonstrations and the slogans and signs used in them, this multiplicity arose from “indignant” affective responses that detected and refused the discursive formations of power in the everyday, even if their statements were not formed uniquely through negation alone (i.e., “Capitalism: System Error, Reboot”). I argued earlier that critical responses to the crisis—to one’s own economic hardship or that of others, to the powerful instruments aimed at legitimizing the art of government for the governed—bore an affective intensity to move one to act from the immediacy of thought, which are here brought into practice. For, the multiplicity of negation encompassed more than a series of indignant protest statements alone, but in repetition carried affective potential to mobilize bodies into action from their plural critical readings in open association with others. In circulation via social networks and other circuits, these series of statements comprised an open field of social contact and relational difference among bodies desiring change, who reproduced the multiplicities of negation with new and repeated critical readings—not through accumulation (n+1), but through difference in their many enunciations: “They call it democracy but it’s not,” “Violence means bringing home 600 euros a month,” “More education – less corruption,” etc.

Since the first demonstrations of 15-M, the multiplicity of negation and its variety of refusals would continue to draw multitudes of strangers compelled to mobilize from critical responses that affected one and another to action. In practice, the power of association among some-bodies desiring change was made possible by the protests’ removal from institutionalisms, parties, or ideological banners for the demonstrations, similarly to the rhizome’s rule of subtraction (n-1) that gives way to multiplication, as these affiliations were often the very subject of disenchantment and refusal. Instead the multiplicity of negation was founded in a specific concept of openness through their refusals—in open circulation in physical and virtual circuits, in open association with others who made likeminded claims far from institutionalisms, in an affective openness to unknown others. Translated into structural terms, claims of negation served to establish initial positions likewise removed (n-1) from dominant power dynamics between the art of government and the governed, in a refusal that constituted a first movement of aperture towards their outside. It is this primary displacement that potentialized lines of flight—and the creative production of alternatives—away from the pull of dominant power dynamics that consistently engaged the movement from a hegemonic position (i.e., closed and fixed, as the People and later adversary to the State), but never from its displaced, open position as multitudes engaged in biopolitical struggle.

On 15 May 2011 well over one hundred thousand protesters marched in fifty cities across Spain, extending in Madrid alone from Cibeles to La Puerta del Sol. Despite the peaceful but tense nature of the march in Madrid, near its end the anti-riot brigades charged to disperse protesters who had stopped traffic on Gran Vía, moving demonstrators into side-streets where they were subject to police force—a strategy employed in other demonstrations—as small groups took to acts of “anti-systemic vandalism.” Property was defaced and trash bins burned. Twenty were arrested, several of them bystanders, and were charged with disrupting public order and undermining authority. After the demonstration, some twenty protesters soon joined by dozens others gathered in Spain’s kilometer zero and the symbolic center of the capital, La Puerta del Sol, where they discussed their determination to stay. Working quickly to launch Sol’s first webpage, they named the group @acampadasol on Twitter, announcing their intention to remain in Sol until Election Day on May 22 while calling for supporters to join them urgently. Protesters drafted their first declaration of intent, identifying themselves as persons unaffiliated with any political party or association, brought together by a conviction for advocating social awareness, dignity, and change in a “society that gives priority to life above all economic and political interests.” These words were accompanied by an affirmation of the demonstrators’ peaceful, nonviolent aims. Although subsequent declarations would modify this language over time, from the outset Camp Sol was founded from the multiplicities of its refusals in a biopolitical struggle, termed in defense of dignity and quality of life and in the creation of alternatives through social change that had yet to be defined. Labor and debate were inseparable, arising at once. On the first day of the encampment, the protesters established a live streaming video of Sol and published their declaration, schedule for assemblies, and web log on social media. After day one, early in the morning on May 17, local and national police dispersed more than 200 campers from Sol through the use of force and continued arrests against seated demonstrators chanting “No to violence!” When communicated through social networks, the incidents inspired greater numbers to join them in the retaking of the public square. Citing Articles 20 and 21 of the Constitution on the freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate peacefully, the protesters returned to Sol to establish the beginnings of the first encampment seen in press images, where they held further assemblies on how to proceed.

As Sol was drafting its first public statement on May 15, incidents of police violence had continued in scattered points in downtown Madrid, in what became an important necessity for protesters to articulate a position from a collective voice, speaking from the particularity of this specific circumstance to denounce all forms of violence, whether by the police or demonstrators. The incidents required them to enunciate, publicly and collectively, their defense of civil disobedience and their constitutional right to demonstrate peacefully, which later proved key for sympathizers to associate with the movement in great numbers, granting legitimacy to its future lines of action. If the mass demonstration on May 15 and its offshoot in Sol constituted a multiplicity of critical responses addressed to politicians and the public at large, the movement’s constituent act was founded in Sol in these protesters’ collective enunciation and public dissemination of a specific position of nonviolence before the state. In this manner, the generality of protest claims from the march acquired their status as singularities through the physical encampment in space and through positions spoken from context in time. In public action and speech, a multitude had formed.

In the following weeks, as now, the movement’s legitimacy indeed hinged upon the reenactment of this defining moment in practice in which demonstrators distanced their activities from engaging in, or associating with, violent forms of protest despite police repression. As government officials have attempted since to construct the multitude as the state’s adversary in political rhetoric and law, the eruption of violence in protests only serves to benefit the state within this dialectic: in its use of police force on demonstrators, in its campaign against the movement in public opinion, and in its engagement of multitudes from within the friend-enemy binary constructed for its own policing strategies. These three strategies of engagement generate an affective force, contrary to the mobilizing potential of association, to decrease a body’s potential to act. Perhaps nowhere more literally is this affirmed than in the affective force of a police baton wielded against the body, which diminishes one’s potential to act. Yet, another affective force is at play in these strategies, as fear is deployed as a powerful tool to deter further demonstrations through self-correction in Foucauldian terms, either to protect oneself from physical harm (i.e., a form of self-care) or to foster dissociation from demonstrators through social atomization (i.e., the reification of civil society). Played out in physical space, police violence is, after all, employed in order to disperse concentrations of protesters, which aims for a similar affective blockage to stasis in social circuits.

Civil disobedience and passive resistance, on the other hand, reinforce the constituent practices of the movement through the protesters’ reenactment of their rejection of violent police repression in demonstrations, to stand outside the friend-enemy distinction (i.e., in a tertiary position subtracted from this binary: n-1). In this manner, when the police and anti-riot teams advance on peaceful demonstrators, the protesters reenact a declaration of nonviolence by practicing, time and again, the same gestures with an intense affective force: by holding open-palmed hands in the air or kneeling before the police while chanting, “No to violence,” “These are our weapons!” (fig. 1). This practice reenacts the often repeated slogan “We are not afraid!” before the police, in what confronts directly the state’s strategies of engagement from the multitude’s tertiary position in negation and refusal, here against the debilitating power of fear. The protesters’ practice in body and language is, in Deleuzian terms, an intense affective response of solidarity and corporal blockade against a contrary affective deployment, one in which state strategy aims for stasis and atomization. In the labors of demonstrators, peer education on the rights of protesters before the authorities, the legal uses of public space, and the norms of civil disobedience as well as other educational and juridical issues have been developed internally since the first demonstrations, compiled today in the extensive documentation of the 15-M network of legal commissions. Thereby teaching and learning from one another on legal rights and how to disengage violence—a form of self-managed care for the common—have unfolded in practices that defend the movement’s proposed alternatives and the safety of protesters.

In a defining moment of civil disobedience some 200 protesters gathered again in Sol, determined to camp until Election Day. Different groups in cities across Spain quickly joined them by setting up simultaneous encampments in Barcelona, Seville, Valencia, Granada, Tenerife, Santiago de Compostela, among others, eventually totaling fifty-eight reported encampments at that time, and over one hundred documented later. Communicating primarily through online social media and the Internet, Camp Sol resisted in numbers, gaining every day in thousands of supporters who responded to news of police repression in other encampments and the Ministry of Interior’s public order to disperse protesters in the event of disturbances. Others joined after hearing first word of the protests through the mainstream and social media, in association with the protests’ multiplicities of negation, “They don’t represent us” and others. In a decisive act to reclaim public space for common use, demonstrators in several cities renamed their place of encampment “Plaza 15 of May” (fig. 2) in Spain’s co-official languages, highlighting the movement’s constitution as a co-federal assemblage of multiplicities arising from the regional and local. Internationally, by May 18 the movement had stirred protests in solidarity in Amsterdam, Berlin, Rome, Mexico City, and New York City, as elsewhere.

Demonstrators in Sol held the first few assemblies addressed at collective needs and self-management (e.g., food provisions and supplies, camp maintenance and security, peer education on protesters’ rights, the prohibition of alcohol on site, etc.), at the same time as debates on its initial demands for the Spanish State. Labor committed to these structural, logistic, and educational matters was in part the basis from which Sol could develop sustained actions and demands through deliberative process. An accessible sign language was employed as a voting system for inclusive, horizontal participation in the popular assemblies (fig. 3), in which administrative roles (moderator, secretary, etc.) rotated among volunteers. All residents, regardless of citizenship, had a voice and vote in open assemblies held in the public square in which decisions were approved by consensus after long debates. In this manner, the assemblies’ initial operative structure disabled the potential concentration of power or cooptation of interests by specific platforms, partisan politics, or individuals among its constituents, which when reenacted in practice over time contributed to defining another element of its self-managed care for the common: the defense of inclusive participation against potential concerted interests among its constituents. Thus, attitudes and practices of open engagement with others would be defined subsequently in the online WikiLibro 15-M resource as the foundations from which to conserve the movement’s horizontal, inclusive participation: “nonviolence, no-machismo, no-homophobia, no-racism, no-leadership, no-membership…,” and so on, thereby giving names to a series of common norms already in usage.

In other words, self-managed labor and deliberation were practiced through an open engagement with others, among participants familiar with assembly procedures who could teach and learn from one another by doing together, before procedure itself was a matter of contemplation. For Deleuze, these practices of engagement and labor constitute acquired habits or routine repetitions subject to change over time as they are practiced. “Repetition is a condition of action before it is a concept of reflection,” Deleuze stresses. “We produce something new only on condition that we repeat—once in the mode which constitutes the past, and once more in the present of metamorphosis” (Difference and Repetition 90). As Jon Beasley-Murray takes this observation further in his work Posthegemony, “habit leads us to the multitude: a social subject that gains power as it contracts new habits, new modes of being in the world whose durability is secured precisely by the fact that they are embodied well beneath consciousness” (178). Beasley-Murray’s argument on the multitude here rings true, for self-managed labor and the open engagement of others were routine practices in Camp Sol well before they were named, documented, or consciously contemplated for improvement. Stated otherwise, bodies came into contact with others by doing together, and their practices in the multitude transformed into new habits or new ways of doing together. As such, the popular assemblies’ guidelines for propositions, deliberation, and consensus would continue to change over time, developing into the movement’s multiple lines of self-management and democratic process, compiled today on the Madrid Popular Assembly website (fig. 4). To illustrate with an example, debate and labor were inseparable from the outset, addressed at once. In Camp Sol, protesters identified material and structural needs, prioritized them as objectives, and devised specific self-assigned tasks distributed across working groups on communication, provisions, security, education, some social causes mentioned previously, and others. This generic structure for local working groups and commissions would be reproduced with growing complexity as the movement in Madrid expanded beyond Sol. When in contact with the nascent local assemblies and decision-making practices in activist groups and organizations—or, other bodies and habits of doing together—these channels developed in plural ways into the deliberative procedures employed by the 15-M neighborhood assemblies in Madrid, which would become an extensive operative network by June 2011.

Within these rhizomatic channels today, the commissions operate with lateral interconnectivity, working to sustain the basic structural, communication, and informational needs of the local assemblies and their working groups. The commissions function as independent service providers and technical consultants with specialized knowledge, whose activities are dispatched to support the self-managed working groups and assemblies that propose actions for specific causes from the local. Their coverage is extensive, worth repeating here. They include internal and external coordination-communication, analysis and documentation, legal advice and residents’ rights, technical support for web design and audiovisuals, news feeds and 15-M Ágora Sol Radio, information and recruitment for participation, initiatives in the arts and related cultural activities, and infrastructure, to name a few. Through similar channels, the working groups within a given assembly serve a dual purpose as both observatories and task forces to identify and address the neighborhood’s needs. The working groups entail short- and long-term political initiatives, labor actions and strikes, the neighborhood economy, employment opportunities, housing rights and evictions, services for small businesses and self-employed persons, international relations, the financial system, the environment, public education and the university, culture and thought, social cooperation and diversity, feminism and LGBTQ rights, ethical journalism, and so on. Comprised of volunteers, the self-managed working groups and commissions propose and create initiatives for the local assemblies and may be made, abandoned, or divided into subgroups on an ad hoc basis, as deemed fit by its participating constituents.

True to an assemblage of multiplicities, the coordinated actions and critical responses of these organisms form a series of conjunctions (…and… and… and....), akin to what Deleuze and Guattari describe as the fabric of the rhizome across desiring bodies, which resists any unified ontological or hierarchical order. Together and separately, the networked fabric among these multiplicities, in figurative terms, “carries enough force to shake and uproot the verb ‘to be’” (27). For, the 15-M movement is a horizontal multiplicity that has no specific being, or even a questionable proper name; rather, through the practices, statements, and initiatives of its groups and individuals—through its acquired and new habits—the many nodes of its activity transform the movement to become something else, but not wholly other. As such, one of the 120 assemblies in the Community of Madrid, the Chamberí Popular Assembly, has gathered petitions against the privatization of Madrid’s public water supply in the past and has organized back-to-school events for parents and schoolchildren; it hosts repeated actions to halt forced evictions this week and to support the student and parent strike against cutbacks to public education; it will offer a seminar on constituent power in mobilizations next week and will develop further plans to install a new social center in an abandoned building, to name only a few. That is, its channels of activities operate through diverse circuits across the local and regional, from which new initiatives may be proposed from different nodes of activity over time. As an a-centered structure in constant flux, the movement has neither specific agency nor static, polarized concentrations of activity and influence within it. Rather, it is an assemblage of practices and social relations that are habitually reenacted through critical responses to the crisis, to the relationships between the art of government and the governed, to the discursive strategies of power.  In sum, the movement constitutes an assemblage of biopolitical labors in the multiplicity of negation and common creative production as the very basis for coordinated actions open to others. To host informational sessions on the crisis, to arrange trades of goods and services among neighbors, to provide job postings for the unemployed, to disseminate information on the legal rights of immigrants, to organize film screenings and cultural activities …and…and…and…

The transformative potential of these networked operations among task-oriented organisms, teams of service providers with specialized knowledge, and their multiple infrastructures for open communication, is characterized by the tempo of adaptability with which the movement can propose and carry out initiatives with seeming spontaneity. Within this rhizomatic fabric, initiatives may gain visibility across working groups, commissions, or other social causes described earlier through online interfaces such as social networks and the N-1 web, and thereby may enact specific actions in solidarity with others. Their interconnectivity comprises the resilient telos from which the shifting nodes of activity prove incalculable to administrative logics accustomed to hierarchical management and time-cycles for decision-making. In protest, when this incalculable spontaneity is practiced in physical space, the movement, whose members communicate through online social networks and mobile phones, demonstrates its mobilizing capacity in the sudden synchronized abandonment of the public square, which to the surprise of the police, migrates to Gran Vía where the multitude stops traffic to seize the street in an unannounced march through Madrid. Together with the gestural reenactment of nonviolence in protests, this repeated practice—a sort of nomadism that requires active coordinated movement and the passive flocking of followers—has become a habitual maneuver for demonstrators in public space in Madrid. It likewise serves as a parallel to the movement’s short- and long-term initiatives, which rely on actions coordinated across its channels and on greater involvement among supporters who join in its lines of action disseminated through social circuits.

In the first demonstrations around Camp Sol, social circuits encompassed both physical and virtual space, inseparably bound together in the practices for mobilization. Concomitant to the reclaiming and renaming of public space was Camp Sol’s unmediated diffusion of information through the Internet which served to draw protesters, as Sol had established its own communication hub of computers and tech teams working to document events, communicate with other camps, and issue statements on Twitter, Facebook, GoogleMaps, its own webpage, and an improved “live TV” webcam broadcast online. This confluence between uses of public space and virtual agora sustained the autonomous, self-managed network of the encampments in unmediated participation, with growing sophistication and public visibility. By broadcasting itself live online, Sol circumvented the mainstream media through direct communication with potential sympathizers for the demonstrations, as it transformed the public square into a space for the movement’s self-expression in slogans, banners, and organized activities.

But this broadcast, even if by chance, also served a self-protective purpose for the encampment. Against the extraordinary numbers of demonstrators and their growing visibility in the international press, the Ministry of Interior ordered the police not to intervene, justifiable only in the event of public disturbances. In separate incidents, recorded digital videos and photographs of police brutality against protesters, when distributed online, were a powerful tool to denounce violations of democratic rights, as well as mobilize protesters in critical reaction to these abuses. In this sense, the freelance and independent press had played a fundamental role in defending the rights of protesters in Madrid, as did casual bystanders who recorded incidents of police brutality with their mobile phones to distribute them online. It is not by chance that the state has attempted since to restrict the media’s access to demonstrations before Congress and is currently studying the possibility of outlawing the online distribution of videos and photographs of the police corps on duty, as public visibility of police repression has indeed fueled association among protesters in defense of democratic rights. In a Foucauldian turn, then, Camp Sol’s choice to broadcast itself live effectively re-appropriated one technique of vigilance and state security for its own aim by transforming a powerful tool of control into a protective measure to deter police intervention by force, which conserved their democratic right to demonstrate peacefully. As labors for common production may be “closely interwoven with the themes of constituent power—adopting new media (cellular technologies, Twitter, Facebook, and more generally the Internet) as vehicles of experimentation with democratic and multitudinary governance”—Hardt and Negri explain, so too was the technology of public surveillance made to work for the movement’s own protection and survival (Declaration). 

Further evidence of how the multitude confounded the hegemonic position of the state was located in the address of politicians who were left with little recourse but to comment on the massive protests, particularly during the final stretch of an election campaign. Among statements from politicians in the rightwing Popular Party, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría seconded the protesters’ “indignation,” recasting their outrage as a tool to criticize the ruling Socialist party’s responsibility for high unemployment rates; whereas the party’s leader Mariano Rajoy, when pressed to comment on 15-M, dismissed the protests as facile criticism of politicians. Among candidates on the left, Tomás Gómez (PSOE) and Cayo Lara from Izquierda Unida (IU) both empathized with the movement’s aims, contributing indirectly to a far-fetched conspiracy theory in the rightwing media that the PSOE had engineered protests that were “neither chance nor spontaneous.” On the other hand, President Rodríguez Zapatero of the ruling PSOE expressed the need to “listen and be sensitive” to the demands of protesters, while stressing the need for a representative democracy with a party system. In different ways, despite the partisan blame-seeking in statements from the political right, elected officials of all stripes found a form of appropriation in the mass mobilizations, either to seek potential votes in the coming elections or to bid lessons on conserving the status quo of the state and party system. In this way, President Rodríguez Zapatero’s words indeed drove at the heart of a perceptible antagonism between the direct democracy of assembly procedure practiced in Camp Sol and the representative democracy of the Spanish State. Tellingly, in the following months, the PSOE’s presidential candidate Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba would elaborate the most direct response to the movement in his proposal for the “351^st seat” in Congress, which if approved would have allowed for one civilian representative to participate in congressional debates, an initiative that never materialized. In theories on hegemony, Rubalcaba’s proposal would have equated to an attempt at cooptation, for participants in a movement who had largely refused hegemonic engagement as the governed. In all cases, then, the public address of politicians demonstrated that institutional knowledge rested upon addressing the multitude from a hegemonic position towards the People, as partisan voters of one political color or another in representative democracy. And in all cases, their language showed traces of the undeniable force with which the multitude had pronounced itself with great visibility and international projection. For, the presence and visibility of the demonstrations proved capable of interpellating politicians in a manner that incited a direct response to channel voter interests into partisan lines. And these responses spoken from the Spanish State were not addressed to the multitude’s tertiary position that had refused the conditions of life and techniques of government for the governed, but instead could only be articulated from a hegemonic position when speaking to the People.

Continued in the following post...

From Affect to the Line of Flight: Mapping 15-M (part I of III)

Empire constitutes the ontological fabric in which all relations of power are woven together—political and economic relations as well as social and personal relations. Across this hybrid domain the biopolitical structure of being is where the internal structure of imperial constitution is revealed, because in the globality of biopower every fixed measure of value tends to be dissolved, and the imperial horizon of power is revealed finally to be a horizon outside measure.

Hardt and Negri, Empire 354

The ongoing financial crisis since 2008 and its social implications have come to bear upon Spanish residents in immeasurable, powerful ways that far exceed any thermometer for a given country’s economic downturn. In this light, the ratios and statistics of the housing crisis, unemployment, and the markets are but a quantified abstraction for their real lived effects—evident in demographic trends emerging from hardship, in everyday practices of communal and family living, in some cultural responses in film, literature, the arts, television. For, the crisis has pervaded most all spheres of life and indeed serves in part to structure them, indexed in changes to consumer habits and casual social exchanges, in the televised speech of politicians and public posts on social networks, in renewed vindications of nationalisms and even collective patterns of decision-making against great risk.

Here I set out to analyze how the first protests of 15-M, characterized by general outrage and indignation, formed the multitude through a constituent act to articulate demands and then operative working groups in Spain. This conjecture passes from the biopolitical field of social production (affect), to a mass demonstration (enunciation), and will require analysis of the social and political circumstance of the crisis which has continued to fuel mobilizations and motivate protesters to take action. (NB readers will note that here I refer to some conclusions from a separate section that hasn’t been posted yet, on Foucault’s notion of biopower and neoliberal practices of government.)

In what follows, I find that the circumstances of the crisis since 2008 have been articulated in powerful discursive formations on sacrifice, charity, excess, and criminality, to name a few. When deployed in the media, the workplace, and the rhetoric of politicians, these discursive formations carry the weight of a powerful paradigm of subordination in different spheres of life. Spanish residents are told time and again, directly or indirectly, that they have outlived their means irresponsibly, that demonstrations are not the solution, that the government’s policies are the only effective resolution to the crisis, among other statements that circulate in all spheres of life and as they do, acquire social cachet as truth. They become, in a sense, powerful tools of social conditioning to conserve the status quo. Nevertheless, as these imposed “truths” serve in part to legitimize the art of government for the governed, they also become fodder for demonstrators who read critically—and resist—the discourse of power behind them: “We are not goods in the hands of bankers,” “They don’t represent us,” “We are the alternative!” These constituent discursive formations are never static but are mimicked in this or that news source or online social network, are recited with difference in the context of specific social interactions, are spoken publicly in press conferences and thereby transform as the circumstances of the crisis create real, lived economic hardships and new social meanings. But is this enough to understand why demonstrators, called the indignados, came together for multiple reasons?

Indignation has become somewhat of a reductionist but necessary catchword that stands in for the plural reasons motivating protesters to take action. On the other hand, it appropriately names one intimately personal and yet shared response—or, outrage—to the crisis and the government’s policies and statements, presumably without the need to describe this response in greater detail. As I argued in the previous section, the use of “spontaneous” by protesters to describe their actions plays sincerely, though indirectly, on politicians’ fear of the incalculable multitude, which elected officials attempt to criminalize undemocratically. This relational field of indirect address (i.e., of a multitude that reads the discursive formations of politicians and their attempt to render the protesters’ actions criminal) demonstrates how indignation in this case is not a purely emotive or emotional reaction (i.e., “outrage”), but is necessarily rooted in the immediacy of critical response as the very basis for action. Were it not so, the demonstrations against police brutality in summer 2011 and ever since would not have mobilized massive numbers of protesters simply from indignation, but from an outrage produced at the same time as a critical response that underpins this reaction: that if the Spanish State is to call itself a democracy, police brutality against peaceful demonstrators should not be tolerated. When taking into account its mobilizing potential for action, affect is inextricably bound to the immediacy of critical readings to events and statements, and is thereby also intimately formed by contexts, experiences, and systems of thought that inform interpretation. Affect in my initial reading is the nexus of intensity for action and critical response that are bound together, arising at once, in the same way that one who views a video clip of a policeman beating an unarmed protester recognizes “that’s wrong,” without necessarily passing through the cognitive process to articulate that democratic ideals inform the immediacy of this response in this viewer’s specific context. Or, in the same way that one who hears an analyst on television argue that Spanish residents have outlived their economic means irresponsibly, which stirs an indignant response without thinking twice, “that’s simply not true, what about politicians’ squandering of public funds?” And yet, certainly not all viewers will respond similarly.

Therefore, as I explore in the context of Spain’s crisis, affect also bears the possibility for powerful discursive strategies to condition one’s reading, critical response, or possibility for action when taking into account its potential intensity to act upon individuals to conserve the status quo. In this sense, when developing my reading on the affective potential of the multitude hereafter, I refer to and depart from Brian Massumi’s definition of Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of affect in A Thousand Plateaus in which affect describes the “ability to affect and be affected” into action or movement. “It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act.” If we read the practices of the indignados, the potential for affect to move one to act is not a prepersonal intensity, but arises instead from a specific sociopolitical context and from critical responses to this context by some-bodies affected to take action. In other words, indignation here is not a feeling or an emotive trigger, though it may produce feelings and emotions, nor is it purely pre-cognitive in character, but is inherently bound to a simultaneous interpretation that affects one to take action and allows one to be affected into action from the immediacy of thought. Thereby critical reaction is a necessary condition to understand how “indignation” and its many forms arise as an affective critical response for action, not only from specific social circumstances of economic hardship, but from the multitude’s plural readings, for example, of how politicians justify their adoption of economic policies against the interests of the multitude. Or, of how televised commentators attempt to recast citizens as irresponsible economic decision-makers, to name only two interpretations for now. In this light, my reading of affect is derived from the critical practices and responses of the indignados and thereby privileges the potential affective intensity for mobilization (e.g., demonstrations, actions, etc.) and common creative production (e.g., Camp Sol, initiatives from the popular assemblies, etc.). On the other hand, when taking into account its potential intensity to conserve the status quo, affect may be deployed from powerful discursive strategies as a tool for biopolitical conditioning, to which I now turn.

La crisis

From 2008 to 2011 the burden of the financial crisis, well underway, came to bear directly on residents in Spain with inseparable economic and social significance. The vast majority of Spain’s homeowners experienced a short-term spike in mortgage payments and then the devaluation of property value, marking the end of the so-called housing bubble and construction boom that had characterized the particular gravity of the financial crisis for Spain. Successive state interventions to rescue semipublic savings banks seemed not only to echo first news of a compounded crisis rippling out from the United States and the European financial economy, but of a greater crisis for business ethics and practices at large that favored the wealthy at the expense of the middle and working classes. For, the construction boom in Spain had produced abandoned or unfinished tourist destinations, ghost airports in small cities, and housing developments—the subject of artist Hans Haacke’s installation “Castles in the Air”—in exchanges benefitting contractors and local politicians at great costs to homeowners and public funds. Semipublic savings banks that had overestimated their possibilities for loan and investment required government intervention, whereas directors and their leadership teams received healthy severance packages with benefits. News of unethical and illegal practices from big business and the abuses of power by politicians in corruption scandals such as Malaya, Gürtel, or Pretoria, among countless others, served in part as the primer for growing distrust in big business, banks, and political privilege. Many of these figures’ apparent immunity from trial and conviction further deepened popular distrust in the judicial and political mechanisms that protected them.

During these years unemployment rates reached historical records and would continue to rise thereafter. Fearing that businesses would fold, the ruling Socialist party (PSOE) passed into law urgent labor reforms of a neoliberal stripe, which among other concessions allowed employers greater leeway to fire employees at less expense to companies. Underpinning these measures was the justification of an end—that of diminishing the state’s juridical role in guaranteeing job security, furthering the deregulation of the labor market as one speculative remedy to the crisis. Following the pretense of the government’s utilitarian decision, it was more advantageous for the economy to suffer a short-term rise in unemployment than to face the long-term consequences from companies forced out of business. And so the Socialist government advocated a law that would cut Spain’s expected losses by providing employers with greater freedoms to downsize. In September 2010 the labor unions Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT) and Comisiones Obreras (CCOO) called for a national strike, denouncing reforms that would indeed contribute to precariousness for workers, corporate and manual laborers alike. That this scenario would repeat itself after May 2011 in a second general strike—against the Popular Party’s urgent reform that allowed companies to fire employees based on projected future losses—seemed to confirm the common assumption that politicians ignored massive demonstrations and labor actions altogether. In a parallel to Sergio Villar’s argument in La década sorprendente, if the Socialist administrations from the Transition era (1982-1996) had disappointed the political left by abandoning the party’s founding ideological principles in favor of neoliberal policies, then the PSOE’s navigation of the financial crisis proved to be an evocative reminder of recent history, both in the administration’s cutbacks to the social programs it championed and in the popular disenchantment this provoked.

During these years the Socialist government adopted a battery of neoliberal interventions in response to the crisis, which were pursued thereafter with sharpened severity by the conservative Popular Party (PP): cutbacks to social programs, tax reforms that favored the wealthy, bailouts of public funds for the banking sector, further deregulatory measures for the labor market, among other corrective instruments for the markets. The dismantling of social programs and the welfare state was inaugurated amidst public speculation about a new wave of privatizations, primarily in healthcare and education. Demonstrators holding signs with “PPSOE,” which fused the letters of the conservative Popular (PP) and Socialist (PSOE) parties into one, pointed out the lack of distinction between these parties’ economic policies and the growing popular disenchantment with bipartisan politics in a plural democracy. One sign of this equation between parties materialized four months after the first massive protests in 2011; the PP and PSOE bloc would eventually agree to amend the Constitution, without calling a popular vote by referendum and despite opposition from minority parties, to include a future cap on the deficit that equated to a limit on public spending. Nevertheless, this measure was applauded by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, as Spain had “chosen the path of reason” for “the common good” of the European markets. It became increasingly evident in policy-making by Spain’s major right and leftwing parties that both were subservient to the influence of banking and financial capital, whose objective was to conserve the neoliberal projects of the Euro Zone at great economic and social costs for residents.

In turn, the PSOE and PP leaders’ successive attempts to demonstrate their allegiance to the solvency of European neoliberal projects constituted a dual crisis of sovereignty, on the one hand for Spanish citizens who paid the social and economic expense of the crisis against their will, and on the other for state leaders who faced the increasing intervention of European administration in domestic affairs, whether economic, social, or political. Some peripheral indications of the deterritorializing effects of late capitalism were evident in the Spanish state’s weakened autonomy in policy-making decisions within the European Union. In 2011 the European Commission evaluated Spain’s economic and fiscal policy in at least two public reports, which urged greater liberalization of the labor market and tighter centralized monitoring and controls of the autonomous regions’ decision-making on public spending. However, in the public eye, the Spanish government’s displaced role in its administration of domestic affairs became more evident only after the first demonstrations in 2011, in successive news stories in which domestic issues were addressed not with Spanish officials, but with European administration: in Chancellor Merkel’s exceptional meeting with union leaders Cándido Méndez (UGT) and Ignacio Fernández Toxo (CCOO) who denounced the Spanish government’s deregulatory measures for the labor market and the deteriorating welfare state; in the European Central Bank’s conditions for the government to reduce spending on social programs in preparation for a potential bailout; in the European Commission’s position on Catalonian independence, to name a few. Whereas the deterritorializing effects of capital contributed to a crisis of sovereignty for the state, they also laid the conditions for new forms of transversal solidarity in the constitution of a multitude, both locally and on an international scale. What remains unclear at this time, however, is how this crisis of sovereignty laid the foundations for renewed social cohesion to national projects of different ideological or simply populist stripes.

Meanwhile, those who remained in the workforce faced the precariousness of a job market that enabled potential abuses by employers, one motive for the demonstrations in Madrid called by unions UGT and CCOO in 2009. Some common consequences for workers who consented to measures in order to keep their jobs were the suspension of contracts for unpaid vacations, the demand to work extra hours without compensation, the negotiation of extended leaves for a company to avoid reporting a collective dismissal (expediente de regulación de empleo - ERE), and the restructuring of positions to distribute greater job responsibilities among fewer personnel. For workers in the public sector who generally benefitted from greater job security (i.e., in education, healthcare, social services, law, administrative offices, etc.), the government announced later that state employees could expect to receive one monthly paycheck less in 2012, which consolidated participation in mobilizations across these sectors. Residents in Spain were told ad nauseam that they had lived well beyond their means and according to the neoliberal axiom, that either increased productivity or lower wages were the only viable solutions to the crisis. Facing growing expendability, employees were expected to be “overworked but thankful” or mindful of sacrifices required for corporate downsizing and cutbacks, which may describe the discourse of power-subservience permeating the workplace. On parodying the expectation of servile gratitude from the employed, with relevant Christian undertones, comedian Eva Hache joked in one stand-up routine that summer vacations had changed since the crisis, since workers who returned to find the office still in business kissed the ground as Pope John Paul II would have done.  

In domestic affairs, the economic forecast that warned of a long-term crisis eroded popular support for the PSOE and President Rodríguez Zapatero’s administration, which had initially downplayed its impact in light of a “robust” European and Spanish economy on the whole. The Bank of Spain, which supported this assertion, became another focus of popular skepticism, echoed by analysts in debates on television and radio, and in humor. Late-night host Andreu Buenafuente summarized this popular distrust in his monologue on the Bank of Spain, corrupt politicians, and loaning agencies, whose representatives had abused credit-lending with a soothing smile worthy of Michael Landon’s in Little House on the Prairie. On a more serious note, in his recognition of the immense hardship experienced by many, Socialist President Rodríguez Zapatero reminded Spanish citizens that combined “great effort and sacrifice” was the only viable solution to the crisis, an assertion that would be taken up in the rhetoric of the Popular Party, and as well cited verbatim every year in king Juan Carlos I’s Christmas Eve address since 2009. The notion that administration was left with “no alternative” but to adopt austerity measures and neoliberal policies circulated with growing political currency among politicians and media commentators, and even inspired a direct replication from economists Vicenç Navarro, Juan Torres, and Alberto Garzón who dissented with alternative proposals to sustain the welfare state in their reply Hay Alternativas. The dominant discourse of “no alternative” (i.e., from Spain’s major political parties on the right and left, from neoliberal analysts in the media) was recast as a powerful tool to legitimize the government’s choices in policy-making, and to a certain degree acquired its status as truth through habitual repetition. Although perhaps the most burdensome feature of the crisis, “no alternative” would be contested later in Camp Sol’s open call for new proposals on change as the very possibility from which to imagine alternative models of democratic participation, constitutionalism, and inclusive social wellbeing.

For university students, the Bologna Plan had sparked an awareness for local, national, and European politics in the public university, including the rising costs for higher education, the elimination or standardization of degree programs across Europe (particularly in the Humanities), and the exclusion of faculty and student interests from the plan’s design or implementation. Renewed activism in the university provided the grounds for networked communication to mobilize in specific actions, in which the use of online social networks (Twitter, Facebook, Tuenti, etc.) played a key role to draw supporters, project the visibility of a given cause, and ultimately organize against national and European measures adopted without local democratic participation.

In the overall demographic picture, trends in relocations began to take on multiple forms. For working- and middle-class families no longer able to pay the costs of nursing homes, many elderly were moved from residences with specialized care to their children’s homes, where care depended primarily on their relatives. Spanish citizens—from middle-class workers and graduating university students, to high-earning business professionals and executives—became “emigrantes otra vez” in ways that newspaper editorials associated with a strong evocation of the past, while many immigrants in Spain likewise returned to their countries of origin for greater work opportunities. Many of Spain’s nearly 50% of young adults without jobs had fewer possibilities to become independent from their parents, while many others moved back to the nest, which contributed to the depopulation trend from Spain’s urban centers to provincial hometowns and to the city outskirts where the costs of living are usually lower. Although television series before the crisis tended to focus on questions of “convivencia” in the family and neighborhood community (Aída, Aquí no hay quien viva, etc.), others have come to make this circumstance—as well as bartering and exchanges of favors without currency—the very premise of episodes (Con el culo en el aire, La que se avecina, Stamos Okupa2, etc.).  

As unemployment lines grew, rightwing politicians and media sources spoke of the abuses of those collecting unemployment from the government, thereby promoting the image that those who could not find work were not demonstrating effort to do so. Keeping in mind that wages in Spain are notoriously low—with more than 7.8 million mileuristas earning less than one thousand euros per month (National Institute of Statistics, 2010)—the imperative to assume greater long-term expenses equated to a vital threshold, if not poverty, for many middle- and working-class households and retirees. The derogatory term “thankful stomachs” circulated in the rightwing media, aiming to portray leftwing voters as dependent on “a free handout” from the state in exchange for their votes. In its direct attack on social programs and the voters who support them, statements such as these contributed to justifying the elimination of the welfare state by imposing a reading of pure contract-exchange (i.e., social services for my vote) upon citizens who are assumed to be uncritical thinkers. Returning to my previous argument on Foucault, this discourse emerges from the biopolitical production of neoliberal government in social relations, in which the dominant economic paradigm and its practice becomes the lens through which all political and social relations are explained and organized. In the same vein, the alleged abuses of the welfare system by the unemployed became a powerful discourse of political leverage to inaugurate the dismantling of social services through the criminalization of the jobless. The casual and often repeated phrase “chupan del bote” to describe welfare recipients as moochers or slackers, tended to shift public attention from the markets to the unemployed. Policing of the jobless would become evident later in a statement from Madrid’s future mayor Ana Botella who proposed that the unemployed perform obligatory volunteer work, from street cleaning to staffing public libraries, in order to minimize their abuses of the welfare system. In this sense, the neoliberal art of government is reproduced in social attitudes towards unemployment and poverty, not only to justify the elimination of social services, but to recast those in favor and dependent on them as economically irresponsible decision-makers, or even criminals. This is the stuff of the social production of class difference in neoliberal systems of thought, which following Foucault, not only reaffirms the fully autonomous, enterprising homo oeconomicus as the ideal model for upstanding society, but furthermore contributes to justifying the subordination of this model’s exclusions from the inequalities implicit in socioeconomic status.

Democracy, to use retrospectively the words of the first public demonstrations, had been “held hostage by the elite” political class governing for the interests of the few. The demand for “Real Democracy Now” embodied the estrangement from democratic participation—in the university, in state politics, in the public—from a field of juridical and economic interests that protected financial and banking capital, neoliberal European projects, and partisan power. In the everyday, this usurping of agency equated to frustration, exasperation, and other indignant responses to the intangible trappings of discursive power in its multiple forms. From the material and social consequences of the financial crisis, different responses crystallized and circulated within a dispersed field of social relations, which found their public expression primarily through the Internet, the media, and television (editorials, televised commentary, entertainment, blogs, social networks, etc.). A vast and often contradictory field of irony, fear, cynicism, willfulness, resignation, optimism, outrage, empowerment, to name only a few, were some first responses to a shared condition collapsed into a term readily identifiable to others living through the same: la crisis.

Repeated and mirrored in the media, in official state discourse, in social exchanges, were some common threads of what could be construed as a form of self-pedagogy in circulation: that there is no alternative to resolve the crisis other than the sacrifice of labor conditions and public services (e.g., healthcare, education, social security, etc.); that living beyond one’s means excludes the privileges of the wealthy; that the employed working “to lift Spain up” should be thankful despite managerial abuses; that the unemployed and demonstrators are irresponsible or even criminal in their actions. Pointing generally towards a system of thought on the crisis, these suppositions in circulation form the topology of biopower, which produced real effects in everyday social relations. As Foucault reminds his readers, if neoliberal economic policies are designed to correct the markets as needed—not through direct intervention, but through specific instruments that produce correction from their secondary effects on the markets—then we might draw a parallel to the neoliberal techniques of government and its social instruments of “correction” in civil society. For, in the imposed truths on sacrifice, charity in work, excess in lifestyle, lack of alternative, and criminality, one finds the corrective instruments of discursive power that, when taken uncritically, may produce emotive responses that conserve the status quo—a sense of shame, gratitude, humility, irresponsibility, etc. These are the secondary (biopolitical) effects of corrective instruments that tend be constructed around the provocation of moral judgment toward oneself and others, or even abstractly towards entire socioeconomic classes, in the justification of economic and social policies. Effectively, they contribute to defining civil society and class difference through an economic and sociopolitical paradigm, as I argued earlier. Perversely, they also serve to legitimize the neoliberal art of government (or generally speaking, the governments’ economic policies) as the only valid solution to the crisis by tangentially drawing from narratives of exclusion and subordination that define sacrifice, the shames of excess, gratitude in charity work, and the criminal nature of social and economic irresponsibility. This point might help readers understand why, then, “humility and modesty” in times of austerity were touted by conservative politician Sáenz de Santamaría (PP) as the crisis’s saving grace, for in her view Spanish society had recuperated important values once lost.

In this specific context, one confronts a distinguishable characteristic of the possible political implications between emotion and affect, particularly as emotion here is deployed as a powerful persuasive tool—not of intensity for action, like affect, but of adherence to and alignment with the discourse of power (i.e., to reify upstanding citizens and their “others” through a neoliberal paradigm, to legitimize the art of government for the governed), inasmuch as emotion can persuade or debilitate one into stasis or compliance without critical thought. To explore this point further, having detected that emotions play an important role in response to economic hardship, the progressive think-tank Fundación Alternativas published a study of some 250 participants in the 15-M movement in 2011 in which the survey describes the participants’ “fear of unemployment” and the emotions that “may energize mobilization” when thinking about the unemployed. Notably, “outraged” tops the list, followed by “angry,” “sad,” “guilty,” and “hopeful,” in what could be said within the limits of the study is an indiscriminate grouping of emotive and potentially affective responses to economic hardship, comprised of both critical reactions to the crisis and their more debilitating effects (Likki, 10). However, this sociological approach to emotions (and potentially, affects) removes practices and critical responses from their contexts, whereby “outrage” shares its place with moral judgment and its debilitating effects, “guilty” and “sad.” Stated otherwise, the study does not distinguish between the emotive effects of persuasion and conditioning, indexed in the powerful rhetorical instruments in circulation between the art of government and the governed. Thereby emotional responses to powerful discursive strategies on employment are indistinguishable from their affective potential for action and critical response, which in practice is not the case. Moving beyond the study then, a more concrete distinction between emotion and affect is made in the practices of the indignados, summarized in one platform’s open invitation to participate in dialogue with other young adults: “Organize your anger, but don’t forget to defend your happiness” (JuventudSinFuturo). Affect in the practices of the indignados, in other words, requires a critical response in order to affect one and be affected into action (i.e., organization) from stasis, from the status quo. Affect, through its potential intensity, likewise bears the possibility of resisting emotional persuasion when the latter is dispatched as a manipulative tool to conserve power.

The indignados do not read these messages as truth, by any means. So, although the social and economic burden of the crisis contributed to generating what I called earlier the “tipping point” for outrage, it is the critical practice of reading the government’s policy-making and public statements, and those of likeminded commentators and analysts in the media, which further regenerates the intensity of affect as a critical response and mobilizing potential for action. In other words, indignation may be reactivated when watching the news to hear a politician make similar claims, or to learn first on Twitter that the monarchy is also involved in a multimillion-euro corruption scandal. Thereby the critical responses of the indignados produce, in Deleuzian terms, the creative line of flight for the movement’s resistance which escapes this powerful discourse and resists its effects; it is a line of flight potentialized by its mobilizing ability and the imaginative capacity of renewed activism in Spain today. This line of flight is also, at once, the multitude’s production of a multiplicity of imagined alternatives to a social, economic, and political paradigm that claims there is none. Thereby affect sets into motion the constitution of the multitude through critical responses that detect and reject the corrective instruments of discursive power in the everyday, in a line of flight that escapes and resists their burdensome effects.

Part I of II to be continued