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.

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