Research Committee 24,
Session 04:
Reflexive Framing and Ecology of Action:
Dr Graeme Chesters, Research Fellow, Centre for Local Policy Studies,
Edge Hill University College, Lancashire, L39 4QP. U.K.
Tel: 00 44 1695 584233, Fax: 00 44 1695 584675,
E-mail: graeme@shiftingground.org
Dr Ian Welsh, Senior Lecturer in Sociology, School of Social Sciences,
Cardiff University, Glamorgan Building, King Edward VII Ave,
Cardiff, Wales, CF10 3TA. U.K.
Tel: 00 44 29 2087 4175, Fax: 00 44 29 2087 4175,
E-mail: welshi@Cardiff.ac.uk
Globalisation and the environment assumed positions of increasing importance from the 1980s onwards with the emergence of the North South debate culminating in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. Governments, corporations and social movement organizations pursued ‘environmental goods’ in the name of a common humanity an unquestioned ‘we’ (McKechnie & Welsh 1994, Mater 1999). The ten years since Rio have witnessed the formulation of theories holding out the promise of harnessing the rationality of modernity to new ends. The most prominent of these, Reflexive modernization (Beck, Giddens & Lash 1994) and Ecological Modernisation (Haajer 1996, Mol 1995), compliment policy approaches based in sustainable development pursued through instruments such as the precautionary principle and ecological foot-printing. After decades in the wilderness, the environment appeared to move centre stage within the formal policy and political communities.
These theories and policy instruments developed against a background of neo-liberal ascendancy - the end of history, the end of left right politics - redolent of the 1970s end of ideology debate. This paper argues that a key question remains what is being sustained capitalism or the environment? The subordination of the environmental aims established at Rio to the ‘hard’ economic regimes associated with the WTO / World Bank / IMF suggests to some that it has been capitalism - and then a particular form of capitalism, that has been sustained by the move to a global arena. The environmentalist slogan of the 1990s: ‘Think Global: Act Local’ effectively left the global arena an uncontested stage upon which established collective actors simultaneously pursued economic and environmental gains.
In terms of the public sphere, this apparently ‘normal’ process of policy formation was unproblematic until the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999 when the ‘anti-globalisation’[1] movement brought the WTO meeting to an abrupt end. A second important question for sociology then becomes what is the significance of this movement? Are such marginal collective voices in fact marginal or do they raise and formalize issues of importance for both the discipline and societies in the 21st century? In what follows we argue that far from being an ‘anti’ movement the social forces that produce such actions are proactive attempts to formalize viable economic, social, political and cultural practices for an increasingly globalised and interdependent world. As Urry (2000) notes Sociology has had a parasitic relationship with emancipatory social movements throughout the development of the discipline. We are deeply indebted to the movement activists who have participated in and tolerated our research interventions to provide us with the qualitative data underpinning this paper.
We introduce two inter-related concepts, reflexive framing and ecology of action, to argue that there are emancipatory agendas embedded within this apparently chaotic movement. Reflexive framing is derived from Goffman’s (1974) Frame Analysis and denotes a ‘new’ phase in movement framing practices arising from increasing levels of global activity and the widespread availability and use of computer mediated communications (CMC). We argue that these techniques undermine the ‘producer’ / ‘reader’ dichotomy associated with media images that previously framed the movement milieu. To address these shifts we reinsert and develop aspects of Bateson’s founding work on framing (1973) that have remained substantively unaddressed in the social movement literature (Snow, Rochford, Warden & Benford 1986, Gamson 1992). Framing is understood as individual ‘sense making activity’ that via processes of social interaction and communication can become a collective understanding. The dominant approach within the social movement literature has emphasized the framing activities of social movement organizations in their efforts to align SMO objectives with prevailing master frames thus securing the advance of movement agendas within established national political systems. Whilst such national systems remain the substantive focus of many influential social movement analysts (McAdam et.al. 2001, Rucht 1999) we focus here on global movement as a phenomenon, with profoundly important implications for the form taken by democracy in a global age that cannot be addressed purely through the consideration of the national. Reflexive Framing within the global movement is self-producing and dialogical, it is technologically mediated and re-orients individual and group relationships, facilitating rapid adaptation and innovation. As a pre-requisite it requires (and of course shapes) a flexible network structure that is able to communicate assimilate and adapt to new conditions and introduce new patterns of behaviour/action as required. This makes the movement network and its trajectories of action very difficult to second guess.
The burgeoning literature on framing within social movement theory tended to ignore key questions about the nature of a frame and the ‘work this concept can perform. In what ways, for example, is a frame different to (or the same as) ideology and or discourse[2]? Of course these differences may be purely semantic, a problem of differing scholars referring to the same thing by different names. Social movement scholars such as Gamson (1992, 1996) and Snow et al (1986) elide here, yet this, as Fischer has pointed out (1997:5) is an important gap in our understanding. This ‘lack’ is important given the relationship between the growing corpus of work on discourse theory and its’ application to radical politics and social movement strategising in an age of increasing sophisticated communications (Laclau and Mouffe, 1985, Zizek, 1999).
By distinguishing between domains of signification (frame, ideology, discourse) we begin the analytical work necessary to engage with the political articulation of a siege of the signs at a global level. The significance we attach to the ecology of action is derived from its capacity to convey two primary arguments about the importance and potential of the planetary movement against neo-liberal globalisation. We argue that the properties of the ecology of action; its network structure, flexibility, co-operation and reflexivity, the emergent ‘general intellect’ (Hardt and Negri, 2000) of the movement, contains within it the capacity to address complex global transformations. At the same time we utilise ecology of action to describe the system of relations that exists between, state, non-state and extra-legal bodies during a protest event and the embedded context or environment in which the protest takes place.
Bateson was a pioneer in applying anthropological techniques ‘at home’, recognising that the analytical importance of culture, cultural codes, practices and customs are not confined to the ‘foreign’. An important part of this need arose from the danger of ‘habits of mind’ (Bateson’s term for a paradigm) blunting social, political and policy ‘flexibility’ in the face of changed circumstances, particularly those posed by the environmental challenges, such as climate change. Bateson identified the dominance of: us against the environment, other people; the primacy of the sub-global actors (e.g. me, my firm, my nation etc), control over the environment; perpetual belief in the frontier mentality, economic determinism and reliance on technology as key elements of the habit of mind to be avoided (Bateson 1973/78:468). Bateson considered this dominant habit of mind so dangerous as to threaten the future of human civilisation.
Against this Bateson advocated an ‘ecological habit of mind’ based in the acceptance of a universal human subject interacting with both social and natural realms, arguing ‘that we should trust no policy decisions which emanate from persons who do not yet have that habit’ (Bateson 1973/78:437). Bateson's postulated Ecology of Mind is complex and this complexity has no doubt contributed to the paucity of commentary upon his thinking within the social movement literature.
One of the most influential of Bateson’s concepts is the idea of the ‘plateau’, a concept that has since entered the lexicon of sociological terminology through the work of Deleuze and Guattari (2002). Bateson (1973:85) uses the term to describe cultural processes in Balinese society (mother/child games, quarrels between men) that are purposefully oriented to avoid culmination. Bateson cites this process – the substitution of a plateau for a climax – as an important mechanism for maintaining social cohesion and reducing competitive and rivalrous behaviour. Metaphors are profoundly important to social scientific work (Urry, 2000) and in this paper we utilise a metaphorical structure which is derived from work in the natural sciences and more specifically the complexity sciences. We argue that it is useful to conceive of the global social movement against capitalism as a network of networks, with nodes consisting of social movement organisations, groups and occasionally individuals, expanding across an ‘n’ dimensional space. Coterminous with this network is a series of ‘plateau’: protest events, campaigns, gatherings of one type or another[3] which allow for a brief but ‘intensive stabilization’ (Deleuze & Guattari, 2002:22) of the network, including processes of identity building, the exchange of ideas, and concrete actions etc. These events are not nodes within the network of networks they are separate, contingent and chaotic ‘plateau of intensity’ (Bateson, 1973:86).
Bateson’s relative neglect within the framing literature may also be due to the fact that many of the emergent environmental processes concerning him have taken more than twenty years to assume recognisable material forms. Whilst a definitive account of these maturing issues is beyond our present scope it is important to elaborate key elements and linkages that in our view require an ecology of action to restore political flexibility and vitality ossified by, amongst other things, the increasingly close alignment of economic and political systems. Successive American and UK political leaders have stressed that globalisation is the only game in town, urging their populations to embrace the opportunities of deregulated financial and labour markets. Simultaneously electoral participation rates have declined to historically low levels whilst expressions of electoral will appear more volatile. The experience of globalisation does not reflect the bright future enshrined in the valedictory speeches of Clinton, Blair and Bush. Job insecurity, soaring house prices, plummeting investment values, corporate collapses, multi-million dollar severance packages for departing ‘failed’ executives, food scares, environmental degradation, terrorist threats from past and present modernization programmes all contribute to a process of social questioning of both political and corporate spheres.
Bateson’s preoccupation with the 1970s harbingers of global warming provides one means of illustrating the importance of flexibility. Burning fossil fuels represents one of the most significant sources of green house gases, with transport representing roughly one third of this impact. The technical means for moving away from this dependency have been available for decades (Lovins). Despite this, the oil and coal lobbies ensure that their fixed capital assets continue to yield returns by means including political sponsorship and the funding of ‘standpoint science’ to frustrate regulatory efforts. This underlines one example of how currently constituted democracy fails to ensure flexible responses to environmental issues by pursuing ‘habits of mind’ namely the primacy of the economic over the social and the subordination of political initiative to vested interests. At a global level the spread of neo-liberal economic doctrine via key institutions such as the IMF, WB and WTO creates enlarged markets for ‘corporate products’ backed by the political and military guarantees of ‘the West’. For our present purposes, the most important habits of mind underpinning this ‘reflex’ response are the tendency to assume that the future will broadly resemble the past and that change will be gradual and incremental.
The limited ability of democratic institutions to achieve flexible responses to environmental impacts noted above emphasizes the dead weight of past capital investment which seeks to prevent market challenges by a variety of means. This is a well-known feature of capitalist economics where pre-emptive takeovers and patent law are amongst the legal means of limiting competition and innovation. More recently a range of scientific work in a number of areas have placed significant question marks over the habit of regarding change as a gradual and incremental process. Mass extinctions by meteor impacts are perhaps the best known and most spectacular example leading to dedicated tracking stations to monitor asteroids with near earth trajectories. Paleo-archeology and ice core sampling suggest that climate change is also a process that once established can proceed remarkably quickly. Once underway significant climatic changes can occur in one or two generations. Given the protracted negotiations required to secure the modest / inadequate measures contained in the Kyoto convention such work suggests that there is an urgent need for more flexibility not less.
Dominant Discourses : Public Quietude?
The decline in electoral participation rates and legitimacy noted earlier have been accompanied by a range of initiatives promoting ‘governance’, ‘transparency’ and ‘bottom-up’ approaches - provided these inputs do not fundamentally challenge established ‘habits of mind’. In the midst of modern democracies public expressions of doubt over the primacy of the economic, scientific progress, modernization, free markets are confined to a small number of increasingly marginalized figures. Jonathan Steele’s article ‘New York is starting to feel like Brezhnev’s Moscow’ (The Guardian, 16.05.02, p.18) depicts public compliance with post S 11 wisdoms and a private scepticism familiar to students of the former Soviet Union and its satellite states (Tickle and Welsh 1998). As public declarations of doubt diminish, sales of critical books mushroom with Chomsky’s book on US state terrorism retailing 160,000 copies. In the FSU and ECE this disjuncture between public compliance and private scepticism contributed to the volatility and ‘surprise’ downfall of Soviet Communism. Commentators such as Vaclav Havel considered that this was not a process confined to communist countries but occurred in capitalist societies in different forms. We suggest below that there is a far greater degree of public support for the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement than their dismissal by prominent political figures as mindless, violent, luddites might suggest.
The important point for present purposes is that the apparent solidity and stability of social forms associated with ‘democracy’, like the climate, are subject to rapid change once certain initial conditions have been met. Social stability and incremental linear progress are assumptions supportive of certain habits of mind that the ‘anti-globalisation’ movement question in a profound manner once their ‘signal’ is cleansed of the white-noise accompanying their performative repertoires. It is to this task that we now turn.
For present purposes perhaps the most important point about the Prague event, and all other examples of ‘summit’ interventions by the ‘anti-capitalist’ global movement, is that the event represents a ‘plateau’, an ‘intensive stabilisation’ of a much more extended set of movement ambitions, strategies and repertoires. As such, there are sets of frames relating to the specific event and beyond these other more submerged frames relating to the long-term evolution of movement. Whilst event specific frames receive some treatment in a variety of mainstream media, long-term frames are rarely acknowledged within such coverage being confined to ‘independent movement media’, activists’ accounts and publications. Prague occupied a particular spatial and temporal location in relation to this long-term movement development.
One way to depict this is in terms of selected critical timeline of events in this movement evolution which included the contestation of the Prague IMF / WB meeting on September 26th 2000 (hereafter S26). This was a unique moment being the first such summit to be contested in a previously communist state. The associated stakes on both sides of the conflict were thus unique.
1996 Zapatista Encuentro - initial meeting of international civil society in Chiapas, Mexico, reportedly 2000 participants.
1997 Second Encuentro Spain - reportedly participants from 72 countries. Peoples’ Global Action (PGA) initiated.
1998 WTO meet in Geneva - First PGA Meeting and Protests
1999 June 18th City of London occupied in ‘Carnival Against Capitalism’ to coincide with G8 meeting in Cologne. November WTO meeting sparks ‘Battle in Seattle’.
2000 Prague IMF/World Bank meeting and protests.
2001 European PGA meeting in Milan. Genoa protests against G8.
2002 World Economic Forum meets in New York. World Social Forum meets in Porto Alegre.
On the ground co-ordination fell to the Czech group INPEG - an acronym derived from the Czech for Initiative Against Economic Globalisation - formed in September 1999 from pre-existing environmentalist, anarchist and socialist groups. Pre-dating Seattle the groups agenda was subsequently transformed as the effectively domestic event was recast in the context of a global movement inspired by this ‘success’. By spring 2000 there were active contacts with groups in England and throughout Europe and the U.S. The small number of inexperienced youthful activists limited the initial effectiveness of INPEG placing the group on a very steep learning curve. Experienced international activists arriving in Prague found it difficult to see what had been achieved in three months of preparatory work (Respondents BI.1, BI.2).
Reflexive Framing
We have outlined our approach to reflexive framing extensively elsewhere (Welsh & Chesters 2001) and will confine ourselves to a summary and elaboration of key points here. This approach to framing must not be confused with established uses in the social movement literature which have developed out of a concern for the framing processes of social movement organisations (SMOs), their alignment with and potency within existing political opportunity structures. The ‘network of networks’ (Melucci 1996) within which we conducted our research are self-declared 'disorganisations' regarding the existing political system as part of the problem not part of the solution. As a grass roots movement with no large scale institutions, permanent buildings, workers, pension funds and a primary commitment to direct action as a preferred mode of intervention rather than a tactic of last resort this movement is sufficiently distinct from those which have been studied under the auspices of frame analysis to require a more nuanced approach.
Following Bateson we take reflexive framing to refer to the process through which individual psychological frames are deployed as 'sense making' strategies leaving an individual with adequate reserves of 'ontological security' to retain the capacity to act.[4] This emphasis on ontology is entirely consistent with recent moves establishing the importance of ontological citizenship as a generic category of increasing importance within contemporary societies (Turner 2001). One important consequence of this is that individuals thus seek to maximise the degree of fit between their personal acts - their repertoires of self - and their desired social, political and cultural ideals. Within social movements’ personal frames thus intersect with elements of the ideological and discursive expression of contemporary society. In this process of reflexive framing, individual psychological and subjective experiences of the ‘life world’ of contemporary society are related to the ideological expressions, discourses and material practices perceived as shaping the personal and planetary milieu. Such ‘frame-work’ unavoidably articulates frames, ideology and discourse in an attempt at sense making that renders concrete (in intended and unintended ways) the material economic, political and cultural forces and practices impacting on person and planet. Clear examples from our data where such ‘frame-work’ occurs include the definition and use of violence, the implications of gender order, freedom of speech, association and movement (Welsh 2002).
A crux issue for all framing approaches lies in the translation of individual psychological frames into group or collective frames, the process of aggregation that Urry has suggested is so problematical for the sociological enterprise (2000). Established approaches have come under mounting criticism on a number of grounds here. These include neglecting issues of frame generation by activists (Tesh 2000), failing to specify the relationship between frame, ideology and discourse and imposing secondary, analytical frames, upon movement categories. Reflexive framing is one response to such criticisms. Whilst individual frames unavoidable articulate ideological and discursive elements of the social formation within which they are situated the process of aggregation leading to group and movement frame remains to be outlined.
Bateson’s relevance here lies in emphasising the necessarily protracted dialogical and cultural nature of a process that is NOT confined to clearly defined rational increments or linguistic acts of communication. The types of communication and interaction generative of such ‘sense making’ are diverse with music, dance, and rhythm serving as examples of communication modes constitutive of social solidarity and trust. Data gathered before our reading of Bateson revealed a clear recognition of the importance of such communication within the diverse networks comprising the ‘global movement’. This movement milieu produces temporal and spatial locations – Hakim Bey's ‘Temporary Autonomous Zones’ (1996) - which suspend the fragmentation of life dominant within established political and economic systems. Anomie - if you will - is transcended through the sharing of views and the realization that these are not individual quirks but are in fact ‘normal’. The normalization of critical reflection empowers movement members to physically confront the economic and political institutions associated with the ‘negative' life world impacts. Framing is also an iterative process.
The iterative nature of this process is amply evidenced in the data collected during the Prague event where amongst key networks the social negotiation of individual as well as national 'frames' occurred over an extended period of time culminating in the 'convergence centre' established immediately prior to the event. We want to emphasise that we are not arguing that the product of this process was or ever can be an uncomplicated, unified, seamless collective identity. One claim that we do defend is that such fora represent an arena within which critical anarchist, liberal, socialist, libertarian, feminist and anti-racist/imperialist perspectives are held in a creative tension around the pursuit of an immediate common goal and beyond this the longer term objectives of the global movement. As such they represent a parallelogram of forces. Within this arena, or ‘strip of activity’ to use Goffman's (1974) term, significant frame generation takes place. As we demonstrate empirically, marginal actors as well as the better-documented sources such as ‘movment intellectuals and entrepeneurs’ generate new movement frames. A second, and related claim, is that such emergent frames achieve longer-term resonances within the network of networks perturbating established movement frames and dispositions. Thirdly, such 'facework' dispels the preconceptions that inevitably accompany CMC contacts (Welsh 2002) exposing participants to each other’s tenor, demeanour and character in real time and space. In terms of core networks, such 'facework' is part of longer cycle of association, interaction and trust building. Whilst not holding this out as a panacea we are cautiously optimistic that such interaction is an important means of consolidating and advancing movement 'frames' across the rapidly imploding North South divide. In the absence of such reflexivity then the movement would develop 'habits of mind' of it's own and eventually ossify losing the ability to lay siege to the signs of global neo-liberal capitalism[5].
Power, influence, charisma
Within the network of networks constitutive of the global movement, certain network actors achieve prominence exerting considerable authority. In terms of the Prague action Earth First!, a network with UK origins and the Italian group Ya Basta being particularly prominent[6]. Our interview data revealed that these groups, particularly Ya Basta on this occasion, exuded considerable charismatic presence which intentional or not, exerted formative influence on events on the streets. From a reflexive framing perspective, such charisma cannot be understood as purely the product of individual psychological traits and performative repertoires. Such concentrated expressions of purpose and self are precisely the product of iterative 'framework' the constant social negotiation and reflection upon the relationship between personal 'life world' and significant impositions from the wider 'life-world'. This process effectively digests the inescapable complexity created by the overlapping layers of signification producing a clear message and purpose producing signs that are both verbal and performative. The performative repertoires and necessary confidence in self, which can be regarded as expressions of charisma, is in effect the product of what we term reflexive framing.
There are three points of central importance for our argument about the siege of the signs here. First, this 'frame-work' produces clear signs that typically invert interpretations associated with prevailing ideology and discourses sedimented within societies. Second, these signs are 'communicated' by a range of direct action repertoires that become increasingly hybridised and diverse in the global arena - to use Touraine's (1977, 1995) term they are ‘centres of innovation’. Thirdly, the clarity of signification achieved and the inversion of 'common senses' involved can resonate with widely dispersed public 'understandings' of the lived relations of global neo-liberal capitalism in effect working as a strange attractors[7].
Whilst acknowledging the dangers associated with the 'tyranny of structurelessness' we would point out that the processual nature of reflexive framing exposes successive network agents achieving charismatic prominence to a process of accountability which has been formalised as extending throughout movement networks (Barker et al, 2001). The notion of charisma can thus be understood not as a personal property but as a social product - the capacity to generate presence, command attention and communicate authority comes from the intense negotiation and reflexive engagement with both personal concerns and wider social structural factors which are frequently seen as intimately connected. In this milieu the view that there must be congruence between means and ends is frequently encountered.
CMC and the Extension of Reflexive Framing
It is now time to turn to implications of reflexive framing in more mediated forms operating over longer time frames than the immediacy of a particular strip of activity as it unfolds in real time and extending beyond the immediate movement milieu. Global protest events represent one of the most intensively surveilled sites within contemporary society. The notion of surveillance is usually associated with the operation of 'state power' or the exercise of a 'disciplinary gaze'. Reflexive framing posits a significant shift in the exercise of surveillance during such siege of the signs due to the ubiquitous presence of video and digital recording equipment. This surveillance capacity is intensified by the ubiquitous presence of cell phones. Cell phones in themselves create a potential for what the military refer to as C3I in battlefield situations - a process that was present at Prague in the form of 'Centrum' a communications centre co-ordinating the movement of protestors on S26. These technologies have transformed the potential for public protests having being evident in several of the 'regime overthrows' in Easter and Central Europe[8]. We will focus upon three aspects of this process for present purposes.
Image Capture, Individual Reflexivity and framing
Digital and video images of a 'strip of activity' transform the relationship of individual participants to that strip of activity in an analogous manner to that in which the VCR transformed the relationship between the viewer and film. The capacity to view, re-wind and re-view material combined with the possibility of viewing the same strip of activity from more than one angle enables’ the individual to 'reflect' upon their repertoires of self, the facial responses of those proximate to them, identify instances when expressions change and an interaction is effectively 're-keyed'. CMC thus becomes a 'resource' facilitating a reflexive relationship of actors with their 'selves' and an appreciation of actors impact upon a variety of 'others'. Viewed alone or in the company of others intimate with the 'strip of activity' the images become a repository of vivid cues, evocative of events, capable of portraying those events in a 'rich' format and communicating more than a 'text'. Whilst interviewees had mixed responses to the presence of digital and video cameras, members of Tactical Frivolity (a UK based group) whose experience we recount below, embraced the technology enthusiastically as a means of record, reflection, affirmation, refinement and long-term communication. The posting of video streams on the Internet is one way of perpetuating particularly 'iconic' moments from within the strip of activity independent of mainstream media broadcasts. The individual frames that had originated their participation in the action became dissected and examined in terms of what worked, could be done better and so on.
‘I’m really glad we've got the video, I think it sort of gives something that can hold onto a bit more than just your memories of what the day was about and what we were doing and, you know ... And just that moment, that moment of me facing up to my fear, you know, and seeing the ridiculousness of this storm trooper like wrestling me for my feather duster. I just like, it amuses me no end that that's on film, you know. Apparently it's on the internet somewhere and somebody after the event, you know, some Italian journalist was saying it's the best bit of footage that he's seen of the day, just this like picture of a this copper like wrestling me, this pink fat fairy for a feather duster.’ (Respondent BI. 3)
Image Capture, Public Performance, Reflexivity and Framing
Use of digital and video imagery in the public sphere adds a further dimension to the process of reflexivity, network recruitment and network extension. Tactical Frivolity's video product consists of edited material from their video diary and imagery from the streets on September 26th. It is one of several products with a wide range of production values originating in this particular strip of activity serving to underline this as a spreading movement practice. Typically such product is available for sale to individuals but perhaps more importantly such video takes are used at public meetings. Here they form a focal point of events which are frequently addressed by participants. The 'frames' of participants and producers are thus exposed to the comments and feedback from audiences including wider movement circles. In terms of our argument about the strength of weak ties (Welsh & Chesters 2001, Granovetter 1973) such fora represent important nodes within the networks of networks. Here the originating network receives feedback and commentary upon their 'frame' and participation within a particular strip and conversely those identifying primarily with other networks appropriate 'frames' that may not have been obvious to them until portrayed in this particular manner. This is an example of the ‘everyday’ cultural work that gives rise to the generation of new frames and repertoires illustrating the creativity and constantly transformative nature of the movement milieu.
Melucci’s (1996) insight that movement are media has been extensively elaborated by Atton (1998, 1999). Whilst the movement milieu produces a wide range of published material in every conceivable format the widespread availability of CMC erodes and blurs producer consumer relations with major implications for communications within movements and movement relations with ‘mainstream’ media. Once portrayed as 'media junkies' in the sense that social movement activity was immediately followed by the avid scrutiny of mainstream media product for 'evidence' that the event took place in a manner redolent of Debord's Society of the Spectacle (1983) the era of reflexive framing heralds some significant shifts in this relationship of dependence.
The global social movement we are engaged with set out to invert this power relationship as early as 1996 by discrediting the IMF / World Bank in the public domain through the use of direct action. The eruption of coverage of the ‘Battle of Seattle’ in 1999 heralded the success of this objective and the start of a struggle for control of the signs that is ongoing. Given the massive disparity of resources and the alignment of mainstream media around ‘official sources’ this is a significant power shift revealing the double edged nature of compulsory visibility in the public sphere for political actors (Thompson 1995). For present purposes, there are two main elements of relevance here. First, there is the creation of autonomous media capacities within the movement milieu and second there is the impact of these autonomous capacities upon the relationship between the movement milieu, mainstream media and the formal political sphere.
The origins and basic philosophy behind this were related by one of our respondents in the following way:
‘During J18 the other thing that was developed that has become a key part of this network was Indymedia – there again Indymedia is always seen as something that came out of Seattle but actually the seeds for it were actually in London. A small group of people got together and thought lets try and stream this on the web and then a group in Sydney or Melbourne, of programmers, created the first version of the Indymedia programme that allows you to basically send e-mails – it’s a kinda democratic form of reporting where there is an edited page and you send your e-mails to the other side of the page and anyone can contribute basically. So those ideas you known in terms of using the web as a document live during an action and opening it out to reports from the street were seeding at J18’. (Respondent BI. 2)
The emphasis on dialogical, real time media capacity here represents part of an important breach in the dependence on ‘official sources’. Indymedia groups and sites represent an important element in the network of networks that increased in sophistication over time to become a major resource. Such sites exist alongside web sites maintained by activists such as ‘Starhawk’. In terms of the Prague Plateau another respondent viewed their post-event communication in the following way,
‘after an action I write it up and e-mail it out to all my mates, I know a lot of them email it on to their mates. It’s direct kind of journalism. You know, because it’s written from the heart by someone there who’s not been paid. It hits home and bounces on and on and on. It’s amazing how far and wide they can spread.’ (Respondent BI.1)
Combined with more traditional paper products the movement milieu thus has an autonomous capacity to represent and reflect upon it’s engagements given access to the web. State efforts to police and exercise surveillance over the electronic realm which pre-dated the destruction of the World Trade Centre on S11 give some indication of the importance attached an area that can also serve as a means of conflictual engagement in its own right.
This autonomous capacity also impacts upon mainstream media frames. Cottle (1999) has noted the impact on ‘news magazine’ programmes which have sought to include the voices from the street, arguing that this represents a shift in programme balance. The environment correspondent of The Guardian travelled to Prague with the Tactical Frivolity adding a depth to that newspapers coverage. Beyond this mainstream media recognize Indymedia as a valuable source. The dominance of violence frames within mainstream media coverage clearly demonstrates that the challenge posed by the movement as media has not significantly shifted dominant reporting categories. Commenting on the Czech print medias’ response to the violence and destruction of property after the main event on S26, CZI.7 (mediator between protesters and the state) commented:
‘The police were able to clear all of Wencleslas Square in a hundred and ten seconds. the media simply collapsed, they have failed in informing the public um.. I mean, you know at the end I think it was 26 shop windows broken. The next morning all major dailies used the word war in the headlines on the front pages so hell for Czech's 26 shop windows equals war. Um.. this was revolting.’
Despite such portrayals, the global movement have precipitated the IMF and World Bank into the public sphere as contested concrete entities pursuing questionable programmes. Criticism of these institutions, particularly within the business and economics pages of the broadsheet press in America and the UK have become sustained categories of reporting. A recent UN document reportedly told the IMF and World Bank ‘to stop peddling discredited policies’ and permit poor countries to ‘abandon the economic adjustment programmes they were forced to adopt in the 1990s’ (Denny & Elliot 2002). This shift in the public acceptability of neo-liberal doctrine is in part a result of the exposure achieved by the ecology of action pursued by the global movement in it’s identification of key niches responsible for social and environmental degradation – a product of the unity in diversity that enables a diverse range of actors to engage with a common enemy.
By laying siege to the summits of the IMF / WB/WTO these events are rendered visible in a concrete manner and revealed as contested domains - the symbolic stakes are thus laid bare to society and made tangible (Melucci 1996). Bateson’s insight that there are no unaffected spectators to communicative acts results in the IMF / WTO neo-liberal agenda becoming publicly visible. The way in which this visibility is constructed thus becomes a major battle ground of signification - a literal siege of the signs. The depiction of the anti-capitalist movement as deviant, violent and nihilistic (Donson, Chesters, Tickle and Welsh 2001) masks other aspects of movement ‘frame-work’ and far from garnering uncompromising public support for the political and economic system leaves public opinion uneasy and inclined to support a movement that resonates with a range of ‘common sense’ perceptions of life in a deregulated neo-liberal world (1st & 3rd world)[9]. In the UK Government and Ministers ‘hate direct action’ part of this hatred derives from the potency of these interventions in terms of the production of symbolic multipliers that resonate with authenticity in the public sphere. Part of this authenticity is derived from activists’ exposure to high-risk situations where physical harm (even death) can result from participation.
The Ecology of Action
For Bateson’s ecology of mind to be translated into ‘social force’ (Welsh 2000) requires a corresponding ‘ecology of action’. At a high level of abstraction the global movement we are describing and analysing is the product of a process of social environing – adaptation to and engagement with a process of systemic change. We argue that the processes of assimilation, social learning, capacity building (Welsh 2000, 2001) and intervention which are the co-evolving dynamics of this network of networks demonstrates an ecology of action that is perfectly suited to addressing complex global transformations in a number of different domains, social, economic, cultural and so forth. At the more concrete level we also utilise the term ecology of action to refer to what Melucci (1996:26) defines as the complex of relationships between elements constituting a system of collective action. This system creates a ‘field of relations’ in which state, non state and extra legal bodies interact around resource claims, challenges to normative practices, and in a small number of conflictual instances, fundamental challenges to the structure of the system, its production, and reproduction itself.
In advancing our argument this way we wish to recognise and reflect the complex task facing researchers of contemporary social movements if they are to avoid reducing dynamism and complexity to single issue focci orientated around success and failure within existing political processes[10]. Secondly, by using an ‘organic systems’[11] approach we are signalling our broad acknowledgement that the contemporary complexity sciences offer insights in to the nature of self organising bodies, networks and the chaordic elements of systems, including the social, from which social movement studies might benefit[12]. Consequently, we allude to a number of comparative and illustrative examples of where work in the complexity sciences informs our study of social movements. Clearly, metaphors have an evocative power, yet it would be wrong to import natural science metaphors if it could not be shown that there was intellectual value in doing so. In this sense, our intent is to move up the operational hierarchy of the concepts utilised by the complexity sciences in a manner that avoids telling us what we already know and begins to offer ‘new’ results[13]. The next step in this hierarchy is the specification of models, or what the philosopher of science Max Black[14] calls ‘systematically developed metaphors’. Let us explore this further through explanation of our use of the term ecology.
Ecology in its biological sense denotes a system of relations existing between different organisms and between those organisms and their environment. Ecological systems are complex and generative, they involve subtly mutating constellations of material forces: agents, actions and energies, which may be viewed as emergent totalities or differentiated using deconstructive analyses to identify synergistic patterns of cause and effect, and to capture the integrative and interdependent forces that are the constitutive precursors of the whole. In utilising the concept of ecology to describe and analyse collective action we are consequently referring to an evolving system comprised of relationships existing between differing networks, organisations, groups and individuals who are engaged in producing collective action within a context determined by temporal, spatial and material constraints which are constructed by contingent social, political, and cultural forces.
The ‘strip of activity’ analysed here is frequently approached as a ‘protest event’ (della Porta, 1996). By defining the protests in Prague against the IMF and World Bank as a movement plateau the ‘length’ of this ‘strip’ becomes comparatively fluid being determined by actors engagement with the process of originating, conducting and reflecting upon the protest. It is our contention that in order to understand the process of frame generation by social movement actors, organisations and networks, one must locate this process within the immanent ecology of action of the protest plateau and its broader discursive context. Essentially this means that one must be able to understand the operative frame of a given set of social movement actors at a given moment in a particular context, and one must also be able to elucidate how that frame can be located within the broader discursive and ideological parameters that shape a movement network or milieu.
During a strip of activity the ecology of action forms through a re-territorialization of social movement flows (people, ideas, issues, resources), within parameters shaped by the actions of the ‘local’ state and pressure from extra-national bodies and other influential political/economic actors (external states/trans-national corporations). The ‘movement’ manifests in the self-organised ‘liminal spaces’ (Hetherington, 1996, 1998) provided by convergence centres, information points, counter-summits, social forums and independent media. This is a constitutive and generative domain, formed by the interpolation of local actors and contexts within the more general global social movement milieu. Complex processes of negotiation and dialogue between groups and individuals, state and non-state actors, facilitate the construction and stabilisation of the ecology of action, whose structure and emergent properties are produced through cross fertilisation of material, intellectual and symbolic resources. These resources include issue or protest specific activist frames, distinctive repertoires of collective action and critical and strategic reflection. Thus, ecology of action describes a discursively constructed field of meaning, comprising physical spaces, social practices and symbolic multipliers, which co-evolve from the interaction of the ‘global’ social movement milieu and the specific actors and contexts of the ‘local’ protest event.
To understand the production, circulation and attribution of meaning amongst different social movement actors in specific contexts, and the consequent construction of individual and/or movement frames, we contend that for analytical purposes the ecology of action can be differentiated in to three domains of signification. These are frame, ideology and discourse, and we argue that these domains structure the sense-making activities of social movements at the micro, mezzo and macro level. For the purposes of clarity we are not claiming that signification within these domains is reducible to text, quite the opposite in fact. We recognise that signification occurs through the deployment and reception of a variety of physical, material and symbolic repertoires all of which are liable to escape analysis based within the cage of text. This model and its attendant claims requires considerable elucidation and our current work is oriented towards this project (Chesters & Welsh, 2001 Welsh & Chesters, 2001). However the bulk of this work lies beyond the scope of this paper, and consequently we are only providing an overview in this context for the purposes of clarity and to nuance the data we present below.
Ontology of Signification
In a review of the social movement literature on framing Fischer claims that despite the massive amount of material written about framing and frame analysis there is no clear agreement about what a frame is, how a frame is identified, recognised or used (1997:2). She also notes that the boundary between frames and other elements of discourse have become blurred (1997:5) and that key scholars do not make plain how they analytically identify frames (1997:6). We concur with all of these points and consequently we would wish to avoid similar elision in our description of frames and their relationship to ideology and discourse. We believe that slippage between these concepts is inevitable as their rhetorical function is the description of parameters for understanding and deducing meaning from an action, event or process. However, we would also argue analytically that these terms describe distinct domains and processes of signification, which are constitutive, along with material constraints and social practices, of the ecology of action.
Conceptually our model of the ontology of signification within social movements might be thought of as a consisting of three concentric circles. The smallest and most central of these being a frame, the mechanism through which an individual makes sense of a particular strip of activity by establishing a level of abstraction that leaves them ontologically comfortable and able to be an actor in a given situation. A frame is a sense-making device that can be communicated through a variety of human expressive media and is only fully comprehended by exposure to the relevant range of communicative signals (Goffman, 1973:150-166). A frame is therefore dependent upon social and cultural emersion within the social movement milieu, a factor that has considerable methodological implications (Chesters 2000:ch 2).
Framing provides the basis of forms of social solidarity, which are also structured by ideology, the second of our domains of signification and the next concentric circle in our model. As Steinberg has argued ‘ideology or belief systems are interactional accomplishments that emerge from the framing process’ (1998:847) There is thus a reciprocal structurating process of correspondence between frame and ideology, which belies our simple concentric model. However, we argue that ideology is the more-or-less continuous terrain that forms the background to framing processes and we recognise the impact of gender, race, class and other social divisions on the affinity an actor may have with a particular ideologically constructed mode of understanding. We utilise insights from Laclau (1985, 1990) to retain an inverted notion of ideology, which recognises the importance in counter-hegemonic practice of necessarily invoking a totalising reduction of the infinite play of meaning[15]. Thus we conceive of ideology as a higher order process of abstraction, a narrative device that constructs and is constructed by frames and which sutures meaning within pre-formulated social and political parameters thereby shaping emergent patterns of signification.
Figuratively our model situates our third element – discourse - as beyond ideology, as the ‘outer circle’ whose edges are indistinct, blurring with the social practices and materiality of the ‘real’; that constellation of immanent powers and causal processes[16]. This does not indicate any desire to fall in neatly on one side or the other of the dichotomous trap of realist and constructivist assumptions. Rather it demonstrates our desire to focus upon the means through which social movements symbolically reveal what is at odds in the contested domains inhabited by the WTO/IMF/World Bank. Their physical and discursive attention to the material entities and immaterial processes of these institutions provides them with surfaces of inscription that are strategically important because they reveal the stakes of the conflict to be the control of the system of production, distribution and exchange of crucial social and economic goods. However, within the global social movement milieu these foci are routinely accompanied by forms of signification indicating collective identity, solidarity and ‘affect’, such as the colours assigned to protest routes or carnivalesque protest repertoires, which become equally meaningful as surfaces for the inscription of an anti-capitalist discourse.
The ontology of signification discernable within the siege of large international trade summits occur, has produced a surfeit of symbolic resources that contribute to the production of an anti-capitalist discourse. This discourse is shaped by a number of ideological currents, including: liberal constitutionalism (human rights, anti-corporatism, fair trade; democratic representation); socialism (trade unions, welfarism, internationalism); anarchism (participation, direct democracy, direct action) and ecologism (environment, sustainability, nature) each of which interacts with the others exchanging, assimilating and adapting concepts, slogans, symbols and other cognitive, emotive and affective resources.
These ideological perspectives contribute arguments that can be understood as anti-capitalist, albeit few of their proponents would conceive themselves to be explicitly taking an anti-capitalist position. However, during interactions between different groups and individuals within the emergent protest plateau of the ecology of action, it is evident that ‘anti-capitalism’ has a similar effect to a ‘strange attractor’ in complexity theory. It provides a ‘phase shift’, a perturbation in the pattern of behaviour and the context of bodies encountering it as discursive practice. It opens new directions of movement for opposition bodies such as NGOs, charities and religious groupings, that would otherwise tend toward the equilibrium offered by normative forms of political engagement e.g. institutional lobbying, media work etc (these would be point attractors in complexity theory).
This breach in the system of relations allows for engagement, albeit briefly, in more speculative and possibly more dynamic repertoires of collective action, a classic example of this phase shift would be the oft-repeated maxim from Seattle ‘Teamsters and Turtles united’[17]. A new domain or trajectory is therefore opened through the ecology of action of counter-summitry and associated protest events, which introduces a chaotic element into the development of formerly regulated social actors and forces. Anti-capitalism understood in this way is an example of a bounded discourse as conceived in our model of concentric circles; it is constitutive of, yet beyond ideological suture and it remains distinct from the irreducible surplus of meaning that makes up the broader discursive realm.
To explore this model further and to demonstrate a method of elucidating the ecology of action discernible in Prague, we now turn to the core framing devices, forces and environments that we were able to elicit from participant observation, interview and multi-modal recording techniques during the IMF/World Bank protests in Prague. The ecology of action is retrospectively reconstructed through interrogation of the three marches that took place on September 26th 2000, (S26 in movement circles), the opening day of the World Bank/IMF Conference in Prague.
These marches, distinguished by the colours Blue, Pink and Yellow, were the outcome of protracted intra-movement negotiation about the political and strategic goals for the protest event. Each delineated a form of collective action, that expressed the outcome of attempts to synthesise the ideological foundations and cultural traditions of protest of the different groups/organisations composing each march, their relative charisma[18] congruent to the social movement network they formed part of, and their respective preferences for the use of particular protest repertoires. Inevitably because of the differential within networks of power and influence noted above, conflated with strength of numbers, organisational ability, discipline and so on, the outcomes in each instance were less a synthesis and more a negotiated refinement of the ideology/frame/repertoire of the dominant group(s) in each march.
These colours acted as frames, sense-making devices operationalised at different levels of abstraction according to the individual’s capacity and need to orientate his or herself towards the entirety of the event or movement s/he was helping to constitute. In previous papers, we have described these marches in depth (Chesters and Welsh, 2002). However, our focus here is to consider the implications of our methods of analysis and theoretical framework for our collective understanding of the ecology of action and its future evolution. Consequently, our focus is analytical rather than descriptive.
The ‘Rebel Colours’[19], which were manifest in the three marches and their particular outcomes, provide us with three categories, three analytical frames, which we have used to interrogate the protest event and the data collected. To these three we have subsequently added a fourth frame, which is deducible from our data. This fourth aspect we have called the ‘grey’ frame, which constitutes a partially hidden frame that emerges from negotiations between political, institutional and extra-legal elites. Whilst three of these frames correspond, in colour, to the frames employed by activists and were thus visibly manifest on the streets, they should not be considered as reducible to, or interchangeable with activist frames. Instead, the three frames we utilise should be seen for what they are: analytically discrete models of ideal types, which are unlikely ever to correspond precisely with the messiness of large-scale collective action.
The emergence and coherence of a global social movement, which is continuously called upon to renegotiate its identity in relation to external threats and internal diversity is an analytical puzzle for social movement theorists. As Alberto Melucci has suggested, understanding how the ‘we’ is formed in the ‘cultural laboratories’ of ‘subterranean networks’ remains a key task (Melucci, 1989:208) and one which is aided by analysis of the perceptual and sense-making capacities of social movement actors engaged in framing activities:
‘Undoubtedly, the emergence of concrete actions is aided by conjunctural factors (such as the structure of political opportunities, the existence of entrepreneurs, the existence of equilibrium or crisis in the environment). But it would be impossible for these factors to exert any influence were the actor not able to perceive them and integrate them into the system of orientations which frames the action.’ (Melucci, 1996:41)
How can this global social movement - which is by definition international in reach, comprised of diverse groups and individuals drawn from differing social and economic strata, holding positions which are often incompatible, on a range of issues - coalesce and manifest itself with any air of unity? This is a question which resonates with the complexity sciences, a reformulation being how can we understand complex order on the ‘edge of chaos’? To respond to this question we return to those who have engaged critically with the social movement literature on framing. Fischer (1997) suggests that ‘The frame itself will be the smallest common denominator that subsumes all of the main elements’ (1997:4.12). We argue that in Prague the Rebel Colours (Chesters and Welsh, 2001) were the smallest common denominator through which the complex set of orientations towards collective action exhibited by different individuals and groups were aggregated. Diversity of political perspective, preference for protest repertoire, distinctive cultures of resistance and strategic orientation were assimilated using a mechanism that allowed for difference, holding it in tension, both within the respective marches and between them. These Rebel Colours require considerable unpacking if we are to understand their role in shaping the ecology of action.
Following Melucci, we would argue that this ‘strip of activity’ was the result of purposive collective action that ‘combines different orientations, involves multiple actors, and encompasses a system of opportunities and constraints which shape the actors’ relationships’ (Melucci, 1996:40). Our task as researchers is therefore not only to provide a descriptive account of the manifestation of this ecology of action, but also to illustrate the generative processes which give rise to emergent properties that are likely to change the future trajectory of the movement against capitalist globalization. This involves analysing its constitutive parts and explaining something of the complex of social relationships that it contains. This epistemological shift requires, however, that we recognise what we are developing as conceptual tools for the analysis of differing forms of collective action; our frames are not those of the activists albeit they may overlap, and these categories are not in themselves empirical entities with hard and fixed boundaries. With these provisos in mind, we have derived the following analytical frames from our data.
Yellow.
The orientation of key actors on the Yellow March and the negotiation of a yellow frame in the pre- and post-event period was premised upon an intellectual, knowing, disciplined and symbolic critique, both of the neo-liberal regime represented by the IMF and World Bank and of traditional methods of engagement with political and economic elites. ‘Ya Basta!’(Enough!) - part of the international Tute Bianche (the white overalls movement[20]) led the ‘Yellow March’ towards Nusle Bridge, the main traffic artery to the Congress Centre, that was heavily fortified by the Czech Police and Military using security barriers, officers in riot clothing and gas masks, Armoured Personnel Carriers (APCs), water cannons and buses. The Tute Bianche mix currents that have become familiar on the Italian political left; the valorisation of ‘new social subjects’, autonomy and radical disobedience[21] with a Zapatista inspired emphasis upon dialogue and democracy. Tute Bianche framed the Prague protests as another step in a circulation of struggles that offer the prospect of globalization from below:
‘Regaining our international relations thus means a direct contact with people, groups, movements, individuals and communities that identify with the same, mutual condition as fodder for the many-headed neoliberalist monster. It means avoiding the mediation of large national and multinational bodies and fighting material and mental boundaries, so as to build direct relationships consisting of shared struggles, exchange of information, memories, future plans.’ (Associazione Ya Basta!, The Age of Clandestinity, Agit-prop, emphasis in the original)
As a frame, yellow was oriented towards direct communication and mediation and it was appreciative of the powerful effect of symbolic multipliers. Yellow privileged the idea of the maximisation of representational control by social movement actors. Yellow was Ya Basta! in their white overalls with their comic provocations of balloons and water pistols (to ‘liquidate the IMF’) facing lines of riot police clad in black and armed with APCs and guns, a classic exploitation of the black/white binarism of good and evil, which was used to maximum effect. If the media has become, as some commentators suggest - the political space (Castells, 1996:476) then Yellow was the means of making-sense of this gift of dramatis personae, it provided a script for concrete action, contestation and symbolic appeal[22].
Blue:
The Blue march set off shortly after the Yellow march had departed; they were equally unique in appearance with a large contingent of what the media subsequently referred to as ‘black-clad protesters’[23] and ‘black clad demonstrators wearing scares around their faces’[24]. The Blue march was distinctively international in character and included the Infernal Noise Brigade, a uniformed anarchist marching band from Seattle complete with baton twirlers and flags. This march was largely comprised of the wide spread anarchist/autonomist movement who have used a ‘black bloc’ tactic (wearing balaclavas, black clothing and being prepared to physically defend themselves and confront the police) throughout northern Europe over the last twenty to thirty years (see Katsiaficas, 1997). This is a tactic that has been used in the U.S. since the demonstrations against the Gulf War in the early 1990s and came to prominence once again with the Seattle Black Bloc, which inflicted damage on the outlets of TNCs running into hundreds of thousands of dollars. Amongst Black Bloc activists (particularly in Europe) there is a long tradition of struggle built largely around themes of anti-imperialism, anti-fascism and for the establishment of autonomous spaces including squatted social centres (Ibid.).
The blue frame was direct, confrontational and without compromise, violence was perceived to be problematic but acceptable defensively, and if considered necessary, in offence. When manifest in collective action it overlapped variously with Black Bloc strategies and used the symbolic resources of anarchism. The Blue march attracted most of the traditional central European anarchist groups and it was apparent to a number of our respondents that blue ‘was going to be the really heavy confrontational pretty violent block’ (Respondent BI.2). The presence on the day of a large number of black clad young people with ski-masks and scarves and the ubiquitous anarchist flags and ‘Anti-Fa’ and ‘Anti-Imp’ (Anti-Fascism/Anti-Imperialism) slogans on banners was sufficient to indicate that this march was likely to follow a very ‘traditional’ pattern of engagement including attacking the police if blocked on route. The account of an Irish anarchist from the Workers Solidarity Movement (WSM) affirms the make-up and constituency of the Blue march:
‘I had chosen to march with the anarchist block that headed up (and indeed comprised the majority of) the blue march. The front of this was taken up by Czech anarchists followed by anarchists from the other Eastern European countries numbering perhaps a thousand in all. Holding the banners down one side of the march and taking position behind the eastern Europeans were anarchists from all the western European countries and a large number of autonomen from Germany. This anarchist block probably numbered at least 3,000 but we may have had as many as 5,000… At the head of the blue section we were to march in tightly packed rows with our arms linked and banners stretched across the front and down the sides of the march. The majority of those on the march wore masks to protect their identity and offer some limited protection from tear gas. Those at the front also wore construction helmets and many had gas masks.’ (http://flag.blackened.net/revolt/wsm/news/2000/prague_sept.html)
The blue frame provides an unapologetic rationale for engagement with few limits, it positively affirms the distinction between violence against property and violence against the person, yet maintains a pragmatic assessment of power which suggests that violence against the person is a likely outcome of ‘revolutionary activity’. It is a familiar and recurrent frame that has been manifest to various degrees in numerous social movements in both Europe and the US.
Pink:
The construction of the pink frame is where our data is richest, largely as a result of the access we have been fortunate enough to obtain to those (mainly UK) actors who were directly implicated in the construction and articulation of this frame. This frame is derived from protest repertoires developed most recently in the UK by Reclaim The Streets and Earth First!, disorganisations that have both been active in anti-roads protests, the organisation of impromptu street parties and a variety of ecologically oriented and ‘anti-capitalist’ direct actions. This frame privileges playful, ludic and carnivalesque forms of protest[25], valorises the creative and expressive over the instrumental and rational, and utilises a variety of performative repertoires that are dependent upon sophisticated and nuanced understandings of protest dynamics. The origination of the colour pink as a signifier for this frame, in this context, is particularly interesting coming as it does from at least two separate sources, both of whom take pleasure from its apparent ambiguity and immediately invest it with a revealing playfulness. A UK activist who latterly participated in the Pink march suggests the original choice of pink was because of its lack of political connotations[26] and as a provocation to socialists who would have to self-classify as pink instead of red. Whilst ‘Tactical Frivolity’, a group of mainly women activists, whose choice of name brilliantly evokes the playful, performative and carnivalesque repertoires familiar from the UK direct action scene also chose pink and silver as a signifier:
‘ XXXX came, who on Mayday had worn like great big carnival costumes and had a feather stick, you know, a feather tickling stick, a feather duster, so we started to talk about that and talking about going in a total non-violent way and being really up-front about the fact that we’ve been non-violent, you know, not disguising ourselves, not wearing black, you know, being quite blatantly dressed up for a party, for a carnival. And XXXX like said right from then well, we’ll wear pink and silver, we’ve got to wear pink and silver’ (Respondent BI.3)
Although Tactical Frivolity were composed of individuals who were marginal to the decision-making processes and organisational networks through which the Prague protests evolved, their influence was significant. Tactical Frivolity, in both name and practice managed to distil some of the symbolic resources and affective currents that have helped construct successful roads protests and large-scale carnivalesque collective actions in the UK since the early 1990s (Jordan, 1998). Theirs was a deliberate intervention provoked by a desire to move set-piece confrontations in a particular direction, a standpoint that is implicitly critical of a perceived slide towards routinized conflict leading to violence.
‘I think quite a lot of us had got, you know, from RTS things and just different things that, you know, it had got violent and we wanted to able to say in a way that couldn’t be misunderstood, you know we’re not here for violence and by wearing sort of vulnerable sort of clothing rather than protective clothing, you know, that we weren’t going protected in any way shape or form, apart from our pink feather dusters!!!’ (Respondent BI.3)
The emphasis they placed upon non-violence here is important, for it signifies a far more fluid concept than one might initially presume and it represents a nuanced understanding of protest events that emerge from the process of ‘reflexive framing’ of which this social movement milieu is a prime site. The pink frame derived as it is from a movement culture that prizes the affective, emotional and intuitive dimensions of collective action facilitates the opening of a performative space where provocation and contestation can take place, a space Tactical Frivolity sought to inhabit:
‘And this sort of like stage space appears, this performance space seemed to appear between like the rows of policemen and the rows of people blockading, like physically blockading and then there’s this little gap in the middle, you know what I mean, and we found ourselves going into this gap and tickling policemen’s toes, do you know what I mean, with your feather duster on the side of their face and just like performing…’ (Respondent BI.3).
An understanding of the contingent nature of this space and its potential capacity to ‘re-key’ (Goffman, 1974: 40-82) the meaning of interactions between police and protesters, to re-order them and to provide further, new, or different interpretations through play, requires a considerable reflexive capacity and a sophisticated understanding of the complex of social relationships that are temporally and spatially contiguous. This space is constantly opening and closing as it becomes refined through the ebb and flow of the protest event, it facilitates opportunities for routinized or playful encounters, yet simultaneously it threatens rapid closure. A miscalculation or failure to ‘read the signs’ can result in violent confrontation, the prospect of which is sufficient to qualify the position of Tactical Frivolity:
‘…well, yes, okay, if you’re protecting yourself maybe you have to use violence. I mean it’s difficult the whole no-violent/violent thing, I know it’s difficult and there’s so many levels to it, and it’s difficult to say I’m completely non-violent because you just don’t know.’ (Respondent BI.3)
Instead, pink for Tactical Frivolity is a frame that infers an ‘active non-violence’:
‘I felt that a lot of non-violence in the past has been more passive non-violence like the sitting blockade, you know what I mean, whereas we were being actively non-violent, the whole, sort of, the way that we were moving as a group of people, I thought that was really creative. We had people on bikes reporting back to other people and then this flag would go up with a fish on it which meant that everybody had to go over to the fish and make decisions about where we’re gonna go, and I thought that was really sort of creative, active kind of thing that we’re doing, you know?’[27] (Respondent BI.3)
Interestingly, the consolidation of the pink frame through the process of ‘reflexive framing’ occurring within this milieu has prompted its assimilation within other European social movement groups, as a signifier of both political orientation and protest repertoire. The protests against the G8 in Genoa, Italy during July 2001, contained a Pink march, despite there being little involvement from amongst UK activist networks. The leaflet accompanying it is a powerful example of what might be referred to as memetic transfer, the remarkable capacity for cross-fertilisation within the global social movement milieu, which is capable of rapidly assimilating, adapting and communicating resonant frames:
‘We are a colourful party in the
street, a carnival with theatre, pink fairies and radical cheerleaders, clowns
and music, a creative, magical and confrontational dance that takes decisions
in a horizontal manner through affinity groups. We want to reduce aggressivity
to the minimum with imagination, samba, art, playing with space (and with the
police), to create an relaxed atmosphere with good vibes. While we dance we
denounce the brutality of capitalism, patriarchy, racism and all the forms of
oppression and domination, denying any
legitimacy to those 8 men who meet as if the world belonged to them and they
could exploit and destroy at their will… Our strategy: Tactical Frivolity, Our
identification: Pink and Silver’ (Pink March, Agit-Prop, Genoa, July 20th,
2001).
The pink frame has apparently come to act as a symbolic multiplier, escaping the site of its first articulation and providing a means through which a collective identity - constructed through engaged, playful and carnivalesque repertoires of collective action - can be signified[28].
‘We uh… based our expectation on a detailed study of events in Seattle and Washington. We have tried to convince both sides that there is a possibility to have a negotiated ritual, that would uh.. eliminate, or at least limit violence. And we tried to as I said with both parts that, both sides that this is the aim or solution, both sides should see as advantages for their interest.’ (Respondent CZI.7)
‘I mean we travelled to Germany, we travelled to Switzerland to talk to PGA people and we gave several suggestions of how to ritualise the event, one was the sitting blockade that would be time limited.’ (Respondent CZI.7)
‘His whole plan was to not let this thing turn into a riot. He said we can have a win-win situation, you can have your demonstration the IMF can have their meeting and everyone is happy. He went round Europe doing talks and he basically wanted to have as much influence in INPEG and so on… So this was an interesting situation because what this guy became was a link between the state and us and he then managed to get buildings for us. Apparently it was through him we got the Convergence Centre and the INPEG centre and the whole thing was – you know – he was saying well I want to help you do this and at the same time I want to reduce the violence, and I think he just didn’t understand how it was a impossible unless you implanted micro-chips in everyone’s brain who was going to go on the action to get control of this thing – he didn’t get the spirit of the movement he didn’t understand how this movement works.’ (Respondent BI.2).
The Third Element were undoubtedly instrumental in gaining INPEG access to significant resources including the media centre that INPEG and some independent media activists/journalists operated out of for brief periods. CZI.7’s influence here is significant, as was his involvement in securing the Convergence Centre, a large empty warehouse complex near the docks in the north of Prague.
‘I went to talk to CZI.7, he went and talked to God knows who and things just happened, for free, more or less immediately without all this hassle. And quite what that means I don’t know, quite how he, the influence he had I don’t know.’ (Respondent BI.6)
The gradual assimilation of the Third Element’s position by those activists negotiating with them is apparent in our data. However, the respondent cited above (BI.6), who played a key part in these negotiations, also indicates something of the paradox of the state tacitly attempting to limit violent confrontation through the provision of monitored meeting and organising spaces,
‘I believed and so did CZI.7 that if we were better organised there would be less violence. That was what he believed and what I believed. He certainly believed it, I strongly suspected it. If we were better organised there would be less violence. That’s why in my opinion we got the convergence space. That may not be the answer but… He said to the police, I think he said to the police, let them organise and it will work out better. That didn’t happen, other people used that space for their own meeting or a lot of people who actually organised violence never ever went near the convergence space because they had their own agenda. They’d never go near a place where the police are crawling all over it!’ (Respondent BI.6)
These comments also reveal something of the plurality of groups and networks operating within the same spaces and the limits this imposes on any attempt to control or direct events within an ecology of action. It also demonstrates the differential impact that particular repertoires might have upon a protest and demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling these in protest plateau, where the ‘intensive stabilization’ of a network of networks can occur best where violent/non-violent repertoires co-exist temporally but are spatially separated. This has been a feature of many large counter-summit protests since.
The grey frame reflects a key liberal tenet that also underpins resource mobilization theory (Oberschall, 1973, Tilly, 1978, McCarthy and Zald, 1977, 1987) namely the idea that protest is rational and a common feature in all societies, with success or failure determined by the social movement’s capacity to access resources of differing types. The intent behind the initiation of this frame is probably best summed up in the comments of one of the key activist negotiators,
‘…his agenda, which he was quite open about, certainly with me and I think with anybody else who took the care to ask him, was that he wanted to make the Czech Republic look like a modern European democracy where non-violent demonstrations can take place without vicious political pressure, because he had seen and experienced police repression.’ (Respondent BI.6)
What appears unique about it, is the apparent willingness of the Czech state to tacitly countenance the humbling of delegates to the IMF/World Bank who if the plan had been successful would have been subjected to some form of highly mediated and symbolic confrontation over the nature of their business in Prague. However, as we have demonstrated the ecology of action extant at counter-summits is unlikely ever to conform to ‘top-down’ initiatives whatever their intent.
Conclusions
We opened this paper arguing that social, political and economic engagement with the environment is framed by habits of mind derived from the culture of capitalist representative democratic forms. Important elements of this habit of mind include a view of change and progress as incremental processes and an historic prioritisation of the ‘nation’. The alignment between nation, economy and polity sediments particular technological practices which become ‘habits’ – one might say addictions (Bateson 1973:280-307) – which are difficult to break at a social and behavioural level and which become economically entrenched through monopoly tendencies and the scale of fixed capital assets. We thus question the ability of the representative democracy habit to address environmental change given growing scientific work suggesting that such change can and does take place in short time frames once certain thresholds are passed.
In response to this we have argued that a distinctly ‘global social movement’ has emerged as a result of a process of ‘reflexive framing’ leading to an ‘ecology of action’ fusing emancipatory social and environmental questions that have been substantively treated as separate movement domains spatially and figuratively (e.g. Rucht 1999). Reflexive framing and ecology of action produce conflictual social engagements with the economy / capital / democracy nexus at the level of specific institutions and at a high level of abstraction. Perhaps more importantly this movement pursues a pro-active agenda through (dis)organisations such as People’s Global Action creating a parallel ‘shadow realm’. Here engaged citizens from around the world undertake the necessarily collective work of deciphering their individual experiences of ‘globalisation’, forging these into shared meanings that can become the basis of recognizable needs. These then become the basis for political demands.
Through qualitative data, we have shown how this process operated within the Prague Plateau, revealing the role of ‘marginal’ actors in the framing process and the rhizomatic character of the networks of networks. It is not wise to make strong claims from a single small qualitative data set but what we have done is to render tangible processes that are not and cannot be detected by dominant methodological means in social movement scholarship reliant upon mediate sources. We would also argue that we have rendered tangible elements of the dense but vitally important post-structuralist/ modern canon. In concluding the paper, we would like to elaborate some of these elements.
At the end of his last book Alberto Melucci argued that social movements ‘had’ to be listened to as a matter of some urgency though to some there is little evidence that this is happening within the forums of the ‘risk society’ (McKechnie & Welsh 2002). Beyond the task of articulating a voice lies the struggle to win a hearing in a world where what is broadcast is what exists – Debord’s Society of the Spectacle rendered ‘real’. We have argued that through ‘frame-work’, a global movement holds in dynamic tension the expressive and transformative potential of a number of ideological and discursive traditions not as an integrated collective identity but as a parallelogram of forces that demands a hearing. Hybridity, diversity and difference combine here in forms of collective action rendering identity and cultural politics material in a proximate sense and highly visible in terms of the wider siege of the signs that is underway in the public sphere.
Sociology and the social sciences more generally have a remarkable poor record in terms of understanding the dynamics of let alone predicting significant social change. Social movement and historical scholarship demonstrate that significant shifts in habits of mind originate in the liminal spaces on social margins. The problem has been, and remains, identifying the marginal vectors with transformatory potential within the prevailing set of material circumstances and conflicts. In terms of the themes we have engaged with, there is no consensus over these conditions but some key elements are arguably clear. Amongst these, the significance of networks in a global age stands out as a prime example (Melucci 1996, Castells 1996, Hardt & Negri 2000).
These accounts typically share an analytical focus upon the rise of computer based communication, the transition to knowledge economies and the significance of ‘sign values’ (see Lash & Urry 1994). Hardt & Negri argue for the increasing importance of ‘immaterial labour’ producing services, cultural product, knowledge or communication (2000:290). Their analysis emphasizes that such ‘affective labour’ is a collective production of ‘social networks, forms of community,’ (2000:293). Our interrogation of the Prague Plateau suggests that this resonates with the production of political cultures and the creation of the ‘new type of resistance’ Hardt and Negri envisage. Just as cultural forms have suffused products and brands (Klein 2000) they are affecting the ‘political’ by rendering visible – declaring global moral stakes – namely that ‘what is at stake is life itself.’ (Hardt & Negri, 2000 313).
We broadly agree with Hardt (2002) that one of the central tensions within the global movement lies between those advocating a renaissance of the nation state as a political bastion against capitalist globalisation and the network of networks seeking to challenge all forms of capitalism and centralized political representation. Our conception of this dynamic differs in a crucial respect with significant methodological implications however. By approaching Prague as a Plateau rather than one of the ‘nodes in its indefinitely expansive network’ (Hardt 2002:118) we preserve the essence of rhizomatic forms. Network analyses reproduce a cartographic form of engagement within the social science seeking to map networks, measure densities and so on. Networks are depicted as if they are bounded conduits connecting discrete actors with specific grievances and aims intersecting within equally bounded ‘nodes’. This approach faces the cartographic contradiction dating from Aristotle namely that it is impossible to draw a map of the world on the world.
The rhizome metaphor does not just stand for non-hierarchical forms but also reflects the multi-layered diffuse interactional nature of the rhizome prioritising what we have dubbed the ‘weak law of network interaction’. Whilst mapping the networks is analytically useful it is important not equate such maps with ‘the movement’. This merely reproduces the reification the term social movement has been accused of. As Hardt's own account of a World Social Forum (WSF) meeting attests it was ‘unknowable, chaotic, dispersive’ due to the huge penumbra of ‘weak’ actors and their sprawling networks. In terms of our data, the notion of ‘serendipitous entrants’ (Welsh 2002) and mapping of the impact of one such entrant within movement networks is one tiny empirical illustration of this phenomenon. Taken as a collective social expression the movement might be termed a ‘strange attractor’. A subsequent World Social Forum meeting held in Porto Alegre to coincide with an World Economic Forum summit in January 2002 was frequented by IMF / WB delegates keen to engage in quality interaction with attendees.
In terms of the ‘habits of mind’ associated with political democracy we will elaborate one argument that illustrates the potential of this strange attractor the need for what can be termed ‘market maker states’. The need for speed in changing habits of mind to confront environmental and social challenges is too pressing. The power of states to regulate can be inverted from a negative control to a form of positive opportunity creation. The neo-liberal claim to dynamism and creativity can be put to the test given the necessary political will. An obvious example already exists at the regional level in Italy where a time-box has been placed on the registration of further fossil fuelled vehicles. This effectively sends a message to car manufacturers that they must innovate or lose a market. This is a creative stimulating of ecological modernization based on political intervention utilizing the long established principle of stating what has to be achieved not how it has to be achieved. Market incentives and mechanisms have been found wanting in terms of their ability to deliver such change. It is a regulatory stance with immense potential given the political will and vision to realize Beck’s insight that risks are also opportunities (Beck 1992).
The parallelogram of forces that constitutes the ecology of action sketched here for the first time can also be constitutive of the necessary social dynamic and innovation that can shape state level initiatives and simultaneously re-shape the institutional contours of modernity. The vibrancy of the initiatives present within the WSF meeting represents a sea of innovative stances to every imaginable ‘policy sphere’ articulated by marginal groups typically excluded by the expert dominated thinking of technocratic decisional forms. The challenge is not to ‘bolt these insights’ onto established technocratic agendas but to reconfigure that agenda to reflect the hybrid aspirations of people – Negri and Hardt’s multitude? Respect, tolerance and unity of difference and the recognition that global, hegemonic technical solutions intensify conflicts whilst attempting to ‘solve problems’ are, in Bateson’s terms, urgent necessities[32].
At the launch of the journal Social Movement Studies at the LSE Professor Touraine argued for the importance of locating social scientific engagement with social movements as close to the activist milieu as possible in order to maintain contact with ‘the transformative fire burning at the heart of society’. Reflexive framing and the ecology of action represent a means of achieving this in the context of global social movement. At the launch Dieter Rucht argued for engaging with social movements with transformative political programmes posing the question of what the mode of engagement advocated by Touraine added to insights gained by established approaches.
The material presented here illustrates the relevance of Touraine’s position in that we have engaged directly with activists framing processes demonstrating
Finally, we would argue that despite the sprawling and apparently chaotic nature of this movement there is within it a nascent political agenda with transformative potential. This final point can be illustrated by comparing this movement with the Chartists of the nineteenth century. Whilst featuring prominently in the historical record for the bloody and violent Newport uprising of 1839 (Jones 1999) this movement is also widely regarded as laying the foundations for the present form of representative democracy in the UK. Chartists demands for salaried MPs and constituencies of equal size are widely acknowledged as prime features of democracy. We have argued that one of the things being brought into focus through reflexive framing / ecology of action / immaterial labour / is the need for political representation of people independent of the global ambitions of capital. Here we are mindful of Touraine’s argument that today we have ‘ventriloquist states’ claiming to speak for the people whilst effectively silencing them (Touraine 1995). Transforming this is an immense project that it would be foolish to try and produce a blue print for even if one thought it was possible. The global movement at the heart of this paper by is, in our view, part of this process through ‘demanding a hearing’ and reflexive framing and the ecology of action articulated here offer means of sociological engagement with it.
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[1] We are aware that labelling this movement is problematic. In activist publications and discourse the point is repeatedly made that this is an ‘alternative globalisation movement’ rather than an anti-globalization movement. Other commentators have referred to a process of ‘globalization from below’ (Brecher et al, 2000). Throughout the text we use these terms interchangeably to indicate and acknowledge this difference, but the slogan utilised in the title of this paper and our preferred short hand for this ‘movement of movements’ is the Zapatista slogan ‘por La Humanidad y contra el NeoLiberalismo’.
[2] See Mobilization Vol. 5, No.1 for some discussion of these issues & Welsh 2002 for a consideration of the implications in relation to global movement.
[3] The World Social Forums (I & II) held in Porto Alegre, Brazil are probably the best example of meetings which constitute ‘plateau’.
[4] There are obvious parallels here with Giddens work on Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) where such psychological 'bracketing-out' is regarded as vital in constituting an 'identity'. We depart from Giddens in that we do not associate this sense of self / identity as based in a primary set of 'trust relations' resulting in a 'carapace' but see the process as reflexive in the anglophile sense of the word i.e. an open and iterative negotiation of identity and meaning giving rise, in a Kantian sense, to a need to make judgement and engage in social action in pursuit of aesthetically prioritised ends
[5] National movements, including liberation movements have a tendency to do exactly this. A notable exception has been the creativity of the Zapatista insurgency in Chiapas, Mexico, which is cited extensively has an influence, both theoretically and pragmatically, on the planetary movement against neo-liberal capitalism.
[6] We have noted the primarily environmental and social orientations of EF! And Ya Basta elsewhere (Welsh & Chesters 2001)
[7] Apparently incongruous alliances illustrate this point. For example a colleague found that herself ‘upstaged’ in her provisioning of a Greenham Common Peace Camp on New Years Eve by the local ‘County Set’ whom she found unloading crates of Champagne from the back of their Range Rovers.
[8] The police were reportedly given powers to jam all radio and mobile phone signals within 13 miles of the G8 summit in Kananaskis ostensibly to prevent remote detonation of pre-placed bombs. The Guardian, 24.6.02,p.15.
[9] Offe (1985) evokes a sense of the importance of what might be called ‘residual responsibility’ for the actions of elected politicians sedimented within populations. Resonance between movement actions and reservoirs of such public sentiment explain in part the potency of symbolic multipliers produced by direct action engagements.
[10] Although we disagree with the analytical framework offered in the social movement literature by structuralist theorists such as McAdam et al, (2001) there is an increasing acknowledgement in this same literature of the importance of a ‘relational’ perspective, see McAdam et al (2001:22).
[11] Organic systems are both self-producing (autopoietic) and self-maintaining, they are responsive and adaptive to their environment unlike general cybernetic systems.
[12] There is very little written on the possibility of utilising complexity theory to interrogate social movements, although the impact of complexity theory on core issues in the social sciences, such as the structure/agency debate has been considerable. For an introduction to complexity theory see Byrne (1998) and Cilliers (1998) and for a recent work that references anti-capitalist organising as an instance of ‘emergence’ see Johnson (2001).
[13] We are deliberately paraphrasing the comments made by Stevens in a discussion sponsored by the Santa Fe Institute and moderated by Jen (1994:559), where Stevens wonders if these metaphorical perspectives are ‘a restatement of things we already know in a different language and there’s no new result. Sometimes this can be useful but it’s not a theory’.
[14] Cited by Barbour (1974).
[15] We underline the point that the schema sketched hear applies specifically to the contestation of dominant ideology and discourses through the interaction of movement actors influenced by a range of ideological position.
[16] This conception of the real is drawn from the critical realist ontology elucidated by Bhaskar (1986), see also Sayer (1992) and Outhwaite (1987).
[17] This slogan has been used on several occasions to denote the novel synergy between trade unionists and environmentalists during protests against the WTO in Seattle in November 1999, see Callinicos in Bircham & Charlton, (2001:387), Cockburn et al, (2000:17) Greider in Danaher & Burbach, (2000:143).
[18] Charisma
here is understood as an outcome of the process of reflexive framing (see
above).
[19] ‘Rebel Colours’ is the title of a video produced by the Prague Independent Media Centre (IMC) which used the three colours (Pink, Blue and Yellow) to organise its narrative account of the day’s events.
[20]The white overall movement emerged from the network of autonomous squatted social centres in Italy. The white overall has became iconic as a symbol of visibility and as a play on the blue overall/white collar class distinction, which they perceive as having broken down in the Post-Fordist era. It also serves as a riposte to state repression, as following one of the many evictions of Leoncavallo Social Centre in Milan the occupants were described by a local politician as ‘ghosts’, existing on the margins of society, easy to disperse and soon to disappear. These ghosts returned all too quickly dressed as ghosts should be, entirely in white.
[21] c.f. Virno & Hardt, (1996). Hardt and Negri, (2000)
[22] Some movement ‘accountability’ on Ya Basta appeared in Do or Die’s ‘Ya Bastards’ report (Issue 9, p.11).
[23] International Herald Tribune, September 27, 2000, p.1.
[24] Financial Times, September 27, 2000, p.18.
[25] See Jordan, (1998), Chesters, (2000).
[26] It is recognised that the colour Pink has long been associated with the Gay and Lesbian movement, however this is absent from the argumentation in our respondents interview.
[27] This creativity is of course contingent upon the availability of ‘space’. When this is actively and forcibly denied by the authorities as it was in London on May 1st, 2001 the possibilities for ‘creative play’ are severely restricted and the influence of these forms of collective action are diminished.
[28] The rapid assimilation and diffusion of ideas, repertoires and action that is typical of reflexive framing also proceeds through critique. It is worth noting that the most recent call for action, which was associated with the G8 summit in Ottawa, Canada, was by Triangle Trash (a ‘Radical Queer Collective’) calling for a ‘Pink Block’, in order to re-appropriate pink as a political signifier of gay identity within anti-capitalist protest.
[29]INPEG is an acronym of the
Czech words for Initiative Against Economic Globalisation. INPEG formed in
Prague in September 1999 from a number of different Czech groups including
environmentalists, anarchists and socialists who came together with the express
purpose of providing a platform for opposition to the meeting of the IMF and
the World Bank. INPEG formed before the Seattle protests which occurred later
that year - at the end of November and the beginning of December.
[30] This is an interesting example of the flexibility and openness of the ecology of action existing in Prague. Whilst widespread cynicism towards negotiation or communication with the state or sub-state bodies existed, it was still possible for these meetings to proceed with the proviso that further attendees should be drawn from those activists who were the most sceptical. This offers an instance of where the investment of trust based upon experiential knowledge of a negotiator is qualified intuitively by mechanisms that diminish any undue influence that person might accrue.
[31] An example of an outcome suggested by respondent CZI.7 a key member of the ‘Third Element’.
[32] This can be illustrated by reference to the GM industry’s argument against explicit labelling of their products. Their stance that this is unnecessary because those wishing to avoid GM product can do so by buying organic ignores the increasing evidence that some level of GM contamination in organic product is unavoidable. The underlying issue is then one about the freedom to exercise choice despite the dominance of risk debates in the public sphere.