In iron light: Eeriness, decomposition and social movements

Abstract

In the UK, the recent flourishing of organised resistance against austerity and the dominance of the free market over all aspects of life has done little to buck an overall trend of decreasing membership in political parties and similar organisations. Few informal organisational forms on the Left have fared better. However, these diminishing structures have certain key characteristics in common and there are suggestions of alternative political forms emerging in their stead. This article argues that such periods of decomposition, far from being an indication of failure, are an important and desirable element of social movement that can and should be deliberately factored in to political organising. Building from the notion that the basis of social change is the ability to move out of existing institutions, the article explores three methodologies of decomposition that bridge the divides between mythology, poetry, and political theory: Negative Capability, Eeriness, and the surrealist game.

Keywords:

• organisation
• movement
• decomposition
• eeriness
• surrealism

Notes

1 It is very difficult to find reliable sources around this issue. However, an internal debate on the subject can be found recounted in the document ‘SWP conference minority position and reply by Central Committee’ (Socialist Worker Party 2014).

2 The information one would require in order to demonstrate this is not available. It has, however, been the subject of wide speculation (see Joffe 2015, for example). Tellingly, the Guardian reported that 8% of Green Party candidates in the last election had joined the Labour Party as part of the recent influx (Sparrow and Mason 2015).

3 Of course, there is only so far that one can go with that argument and as Trost argued in Vision dans le Cristal, dreams are very much subject to the values of the waking world (or ‘reactionary diurnal remnants’ (cited in Luca and Trost 2001, 39)).

4 Exquisite Corpse is a very early surrealist discovery. Its simplicity means that it serves as an easy aid for the explication of surrealist games in general. However, it is important to note that it is atypical, in that, to the contemporary mind, it seems little more than a parlour game. Although surrealist games can still be ‘quick’ in a similar vein to this one, they are frequently far richer and it is not at all unheard of for them to be played over a period of years or even decades.

5 The Platform of Prague (Audoin et al. 2001) was a major collective text outlining the shared project of the surrealist groups in Paris and in Prague in 1968. It is significant not only because it was at that time the most substantial international collective declaration that the movement had produced but also because it was year of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia and heralded a long period of clandestine organising for the Prague group which made further outside communication difficult.

6 Luca and Trost's development of ‘non-oedipal’ dialectics in this text and elsewhere was an important influence on Deleuze who has written on Luca in several published works (see Deleuze 1997; Deleuze and Guattari 1986; and Deleuze and Parnet 2007, for example).

7 An instar is a stage of insect development. Passing from one instar to the next requires a period of pupation during which the body is deconstructed and reconstructed as part or a process of full or partial metamorphosis.