Anarchy or Barbarity. Lonely spirals of somatic performativity

On the intricacies of documenting a moment of a practice

rather than a performance

Aramo Olaya 2023

 

 

Lonely Spirals of Somatic Communication

 

This document documents the documentation of a series of documents that document a process that is part of a practice of documentation of itself. To refer to the practice, what I will show you is a website I have created with extracts from my novels. Two of them are already written, ‘Anarchy or Barbarity’ and ‘After the wait’. I’m in the writing process of the third one, ‘The Great Transition’, which is the second of the trilogy. The website consists of images, videos, and text excerpts from the three novels that talk somatic communication, sexuality, the choreography you can see in the videos, and other related themes that give a little context to understand the underlying development of somatic communication in the trilogy. To provide context for the imaginary world in which I developed the concept of somatic communication as a global language normalized a thousand years in the future, I will also share a timeline of the "Anarchy or Barbarity" trilogy.

 

I have used deepai and my own drawings to generate images for the previous novels, and for ‘The Great Transition’ I have created a series of videos during the Summer of 2023 in Asturies, my homeland in Spain. In these videos, I embody one of the characters from my third novel, Tajo, performing spirals in the air, alone, in landscapes from their childhood. These spirals serve as the foundation from which Tajo will develop the language of somatic communication in the future. It’s important to note that the spirals I'm presenting are not the final content of any performance, but rather they represent one of the story arcs within the novel, the one that refers to the process in which Tajo creates this choreography that will have an important role in their life. The choreography serves Tajo to connect to the religious traditions of their hometown, it helps them to transit some disturbing moments of their youth, it contributes to create a strong bond with their future partner, and plays an important role in their life as queen of Tojé as an adult.

 

Tajo’s hometown, Duga, follows the Idente traditions that are explained in the first novel of the trilogy, ‘After the Wait’. The idente traditions have conserved some movement sequences from the somatic communication techniques of the XXth Century, namely, individual movements usually practiced in contact improvisation. Duga has transmitted Tajo a very stiff version of these movements. But Tajo is a heretic. They don’t like the stiff version of the choreography, so they start deepening in it obsessively. At some point, this and other circumstances will have them kicked out from Duga, starting a solo journey that will end in the kingdom of Tojé. There, Tajo will re-unfold somatic communication as a form of non-verbal communication with their partner, the king of Tojé, Aythor. The solo choreography that Tajo is obsessed with is the step previous to the development of somatic communication between bodies. Somatic communication will have an important role in the Utopian world of the third novel, ‘Anarchy or Barbarity’.

 

Somatic communication is a concept developed by Nita Little, which centers the concept of attention. Conversely, my own understanding of it is more related to the energetic approach to contact improvisation I learnt from Cristiane Boullosa and Diana Bonilla at EspacioFCI in Madrid. I have also incorporated my own interpretation of these traditions of contact improvisation, influenced by the utopian development of somatic communication within my fictional writing, Lynette Hunter and Karen Barad’s distinct concepts of performativity, and my own development as a queer PAR PhD student at UC Davis.

 

What makes intriguing this particular story arc within the second novel is that it represents the exact midpoint of the trilogy's narrative on somatic communication. It is set in the 24th century, where somatic communication has been completely lost due to devastating wars and the collapse of capitalist empires that occurred prior to the beginning of the trilogy. The aftermath of these wars has led to a destitute neo-rural economy and the near-total loss of advanced technology. Society has regressed to a neo-primitivist state, where people rely entirely on agriculture and communal organization. They adhere to strict social rules and practice a new form of ritualistic Earth-cult religion. Despite the decline, some remnants of artificial intelligence persist, and certain individuals are more inclined than others to preserve them. This sets the stage for a future political transformation.

 

The religious practices in this society derive from a syncretic cult known as the Idente traditions, which emerged in the 22nd century. The Idente traditions combine strict veganism, restrictions on childbirth and kinship, and the performance of particular dance forms. These dances are remnants of somatic communication practices from the 20th and 21st centuries but have evolved into highly ritualistic sequences of eight movements performed daily by the entire community. Due to their challenging personality and unorthodox approach to these dances, among other reasons, Tajo is excluded from the rituals and ultimately expelled from the community. Through a series of complex personal experiences, Tajo eventually finds themselves living in a distant, emerging capitalist kingdom. There, they rediscover these movements and, through interactions with other characters, begin to reconstruct somatic communication.

 

The moment depicted in this series of videos is when Tajo, as an adult, remembers the process in which they re-embarked on dancing the eight Idente movements and begun to realize that there was more to these movements than what met the eye. Tajo comes to understand that there is an energetic essence to the repetition and liberation of these eight movements. After being enslaved in the kingdom of Tojé, and after experiencing contentious situations related to sexuality, labor, and confinement, Tajo entered an obsessive and psychotic mental state. They repetitively performed and transformed these movements until they discovered a profound energetic quality within them. During confinement, comprehensive floorwork technique emerges from these original eight movements, which later integrates with a tactile and contact-based form of somatic communication that they develop with Aythor, king of Tojé.

 

The movements themselves consist of spirals that harness the energy within and around the human body, following the spiral patterns of human anatomy. I acquired these movements during my training in contact improvisation at EspacioFCI Madrid from 2010 to 2020. EspacioFCI is a private dance school that offers one of the very few long-term training programs in CI worldwide. The program consists of three years of in person intensive practice, with classes three to five days a week and weekend intensives once a month. Many students at EspacioFCI keep attending the school after finishing the program. I’m one of those students who started taking classes with Diana and Cristiane before they started the long term program. I was part of the second cohort and I keep attending their classes ever since. I still keep a close relationship with the school and I’m working with Cristiane and Diana in putting together a book about their methodology. The interview materials, along with my experience as a student and a deliverer of their method, will be part of my dissertation as well.

 

The specific movements that are portrayed in Tajo’s choreography were transmitted to be by Cristiane and Diana as warm-up exercises to explore the spiraling nature inherent to human anatomy. Through these movements, they seek to attune the body to spiral motion, understanding the intersections of human anatomies, exploring various energy qualities associated with Chinese medicine meridians, and familiarizing students with the densification of space by tracing energies in motion. These exercises serve as a foundational practice to help students grasp the spiral nature of space and the relationality between human bodies. Thanks to professor Hunter, I also learnt that these movements resemble some movements from Daoist practice, and they also resemble Tai-Chi. In fact, Cristiane’s methodology for contact improvisation is based on shiatsu, that is a Zen practice based on Chinese medicine and related to Daoist practices as well. Cristiane and Diana told me that they learnt these specific movements in a series of workshops called “Manos” (Hands), which combined different hand-related energetic techniques from different indigenous traditions around the world. Cristiane’s methodology understanding of CI partially from a shiatsu practice involves training the five elements of Chinese medicine as movement qualities: Earth, metal, water, wood, and fire. The energy of metal in Cristiane’s methodology corresponds, among other aspects, to limits and boundaries, and the practice of repeating these movements in community brings about the possibility of defining those boundaries by creating a shared space in between in which bodies do feel that they communicate.

 

While important, these movements do not solely define Boullosa and Bonilla's understanding of contact improvisation’s technique. They incorporate many other types of solo movement exercises in their classes, and these movements are nor the most important or repeated. However, for me personally, these movements have been instrumental in comprehending how contact improvisation integrates physics, chemistry, anatomy, emotions, sensations, tangible external and internal energies, and the human body within the context of the planet. In my own classes and under my own interpretation of EspacioFCI’s method, I relate them to the energy of metal and to electro-magnetism. They have demonstrated to be very pleasurable for students in class, and they really help me to tune in with the milieu, with my own anatomy, and with other bodies. I feel that they are a very good starting point to understand the subtle energies that are moved in the idea of somatic communication. They create a tangible energy that exists in the space and that people can touch and share. Students report that when we practice this they feel that they are communicating, that they feel that they get to know the rest of the bodies in the room better. I trust these movements.

 

Methodologically, I could have chosen to approach the practice of somatic communication from many other angles. One of the reasons why I chose this particular approach was because it allows for individual practice. Unfortunately, I haven't had the opportunity to share this process with specific collaborators in Davis. However, my involvement in teaching at the contact improvisation club and the practices I share with my students in DRA10 have assisted me in shaping the specific energetic and movement practices in which these movements unfold. In relation to the novel, I have been practicing the movements partially as a way of embodying Tajo’s character, but also as a solo dance practice during my second year in Davis. My lonely spirals express Tajo’s individualist solitude and the desire to reach out and communicate. They work as the amino acids that can ensemble with other practices through other process to become life, the dynamic principles of human anatomic structures that can prompt movement, or the alphabet with which to start creating words. They set the individual drive to existence and unfurl cues towards the creation of the shared milieu with other bodies.

 

Somatic communication and performativity in my novels

 

In the trilogy "Anarchy or Barbarity," somatic communication undergoes a transformation. It starts as a fading practice, confined to a disciplined cult, then experiences a revival in an authoritarian society, and finally becomes a widespread alternative form of common language in a declining, extinctionist society.

 

The first book, "After the Wait," is set in the 22nd century, after a devastating nuclear war. Capitalist societies have exhausted their means of survival, with nation-states dissolved, economies concentrated in self-sufficient mega-cities, rural life destroyed worldwide, and corporate-provided hyper-nutritive powders replacing traditional food. The narrative exaggerates the concept of a war economy, envisioning a future where war becomes the very fabric of the economy itself. Corporations and territories engage in continuous battles for reconstruction rights between recurring wars.

 

"After the Wait" follows the story of Alondra, a drug dealer and VR designer with revolutionary plans against the local government, and her lover Mirlo, a boy raised by cows in the forest, who mysteriously appears at her apartment’s door. They embark on a quest to evade the census and escape the oppressive control of the corporations. Their journey leads them to the monastery of Las Identes del Pico de la Miel, an order of women dedicated to seeds, somatics, improvised movement, veganism, permaculture, and lesbianism. Although the novel doesn't explicitly explain their practices as such, Alondra and Mirlo experience moments of somatic communication and abuse, intertwined with their queer sexuality fueled by a transformative drug called "water." The novel concludes with the destruction of the city, marking the beginning of a neo-rural lifestyle rooted in the Idente cults in a post-imperial and post-capitalist world.

 

The second novel, "The Great Transition," takes place a century and a half after the city’s destruction. People now live in impoverished villages, having lost much of their knowledge. Basic literacy is scarce, and agriculture has become their primary means of survival. The setting resembles a Neolithic or post-Roman rural society, but with the presence of artificial intelligences still coexisting with humans. In this bleak world, the Idente traditions have grown more rigid and authoritarian than ever before, reduced to a mere sequence of prescribed movements within a dogmatic understanding of seed worship. However, characters like Tajo and others rediscover somatics and improvisation, transforming it into a form of somatic communication. The novel is still a work in progress, exploring the dissemination of this new language and its potential revolutionary implications. Ultimately, the story aims to depict a revolution of both humans and artificial intelligences, as well as the politicization of the Idente cults in an extinctionist cultural context. Tajo is expelled from the village because of their heretic improvising practices, and later becomes queen of Toje, a protocapitalist kingdom miles away from their village, until some natural disaster and a new revolution terminates the kingdom and initiates a worldwide process of general assembly between humans and AIs.

 

The consequent global rural and light technology culture that comes out from this process rallies around radical anarcha-communist de-growth, opposing imperialism—a process referred to as "The Great Transition" in the final novel of the trilogy. This sets the stage for the narrative of the third novel, "Anarchy or Barbarity," which I wrote first. The book is written in a highly ritualistic language and targets a young adult audience. It presents a non-binary pacifist utopia set approximately one thousand years in the future, five centuries after "The Great Transition." In this society, humans have achieved a harmonious balance with nature and technology, embracing de-growth, semi-nomadism, and collaboration with machines. They reside in self-managed houses, where young individuals care for the elderly and lead a simple life centered around art, agriculture, and self-learning. Somatic communication through touch, dance, and breath has become a worldwide practice, and almost everyone possesses some degree of skill in it.

 

However, this seemingly idyllic society faces a profound dilemma: whether to embrace complete extinction or strive for a steady state with a stable population. The society organizes itself through various levels of assemblies, frequently deferring the heated debate on the future's ultimate goals and direction. In "Anarchy or Barbarity," no characters have assigned genders, and the entire story is written in gender-neutral language. This creates an engaging reading experience, as it challenges our natural tendency to assign gender. In the society depicted, gender and sexual orientation are nonexistent. The majority of people utilize androgynizers and contraceptives, and the act of procreation is controversial. Family structures are absent, replaced by communal bonds. The society functions based on self-regulation and tolerance, presenting constant daily challenges. The plot revolves around a domestic incident that the community must address and resolve. Rueda faces the responsibility of upholding societal principles over personal emotions. The novel concludes during the winter solstice's annual planetary assembly, with no decision reached regarding the future of society.

 

I began writing this story during the lockdown in Oviedo, Asturias, in northern Spain. My mother, who is well known as a trans-exclusionary radical feminist in Spain, encouraged me to take up writing during this unique period. She acknowledged my talent for storytelling (which was an extraordinary occurrence). I started writing because I yearned for touch. For the past fifteen years, physical contact and somatic communication had been integral to my life on an almost daily basis. I deeply missed it. I had been imagining occasionally the plot of this final novel in the trilogy for three years, envisioning the world-building, landscapes, and the values and behaviors of its inhabitants. Transforming these ideas into written form was a very pleasurable process, allowing me to bring to life the queer rural anarchist fantasy I had conceived with my friends during my twenties. Writing became a solitary experience that altered my life, much like my training in contact improvisation at EspacioFCI.

 

I am aware that my vision of the future may have flaws and may not withstand rigorous discursive critique as a plausible path to a queer utopia. Nonetheless, I write what flows through my fingertips. By writing my first two novels I learnt about the tickling sensation in the fingers that is faster than imagination. During the lockdown, I really felt that my body was melting with one of the characters of Anarquia o Barbarie. The fingers would draw the scenes of which I felt like a spectator. This was a sensation I had never felt writing non fiction. I felt that my body was transformed by the writing, even if these moments of transformation were scarce and not always simultaneous to the writing itself. Similar to conveying somatic performativity through practices such as sexuality, contact improvisation, or tango, experiencing somatic performativity through writing requires training. Despite investing considerable effort, it remains elusive, yet paradoxically accessible from the start.

 

My solitary spirals must be understood within the context of this narrative. They represent the middle ground, the pinnacle between dystopia and utopia, continuously resurrecting somatic knowledge. What can my solitary spirals offer you? Together with the novels, they guide you on an incomplete quest for the future, aiming to evoke a somatic sensation that transcends existing discourse. They propel us into an imaginary world that grants personal desires for the future. A future that is not entirely dystopian, one where a form of somatic communication exists alongside the richness of verbal symbolic languages. It is a future in which humans practice a language of flesh that makes violence observable, identifiable, and minimized.

 

 

An ongoing exploration of performativity

 

Through both the movements and the novels, my intention is to convey messages about the future, violence—particularly sexual violence—and the potential for reclaiming the contentious idea of a global language, especially one that is non-verbal and non-symbolic. I ponder the distinctions and overlaps between language and communication, as well as what should be communicated in a somatic interaction. I contemplate how we can effectively and empathetically communicate toward a future that is non-capitalist, non-patriarchal, non-ableist, and non-heteronormative. These themes remain consistent across the different aspects of the practices I brought with me to Davis, and they have not changed significantly since I embarked on this journey twenty years ago.

 

One distinguishing aspect of my practice is that it is not rooted in performance but rather seeks to understand the embodiment of performativity. I don’t rehearse towards a public display. I just teach and write as two independent practices. A novel is not a performance, though the writing happens performatively, always changing the course of events and unfolding an un-existing world. A movement CI class it’s not a performance, even if the matter of a class is to transmit to other bodies skillfulness and insight in a new language. My lonely spirals in my videos don’t represent for me a finished process or a site specific performance. They are just traces and references to specific moments in the crossroads of my own writing and my personal memories, without having made any specific decisions about what those interrelationships mean or point at. The website does not open access to the world unfolded in my writing, nor it gives a complete account of how somatic communication articulates my narratives. This presents challenges when it comes to differentiating between journaling and documenting within the framework of Practice as Research.

 

Contemplating the act of documentation leads me back to the practice itself. I don't have a performance to present; all I have is a practice. The notion of performance has never held significance for me, even during moments when I engaged in performative acts within the practice. Performance has never felt a goal worth pursuing. I have no interest in being watched by others or in the act of observation itself. Sight, in fact, is already de-centered, serving as a critique of performance. However, I am not setting out to critique performance either. The practice does not revolve around critiquing performance. I am starting with this explanation to illustrate why it is challenging to discern a distinction between journaling and documenting in what I do, as documenting seems to encompass something separate from what is journaled. Is the practice different from its journaling? Can the movements that form the basis of somatic communication be articulated as a performance? For what purpose? My answer is no. The videos I can share that provide glimpses of the practice are not performances, nor do they attempt to document the practice. They exist in an intermediary space between my novels and my daily engagement with the version of contact improvisation I learned at EspacioFCI in Madrid. Any visual documentation I create of this practice is not a performance because the practice is not meant to be showcased; it is meant to be experienced. It emphasizes the centrality of experience when considering performativity. The practice of somatic communication is not about performance but rather about performativity—how the body is transformed through practice, what the body is capable of. It prompts questions about when bodies will transform the world.

 

Documenting, I believe, involves a process of narrowing down. Given that my energetic practice tends to expand and blur the boundaries between internal and external, I feel resistance to narrowing down. When I envision the act of narrowing down, I recall La Arquera, a small village in northern Spain. I think of the sheep grazing in the yard of the old school of La Institución Libre de Enseñanza, enclosed by ornamental iron fences. I reflect on that place where, prior to the Civil War, young girls from the emerging leftist provincial bourgeoisie received education for the first time in history. Then, after the war, the building was abandoned, and the surrounding garden became a grazing ground for Titi's and Falo's flock of sheep. This memory reinforces the act of fencing, delimiting, creating boundaries around the forgetting of historical transformation—an aspect I explore in my novels. However, I fear this task of delimitation because it might lead me towards dance theory or the explanation of a specific postmodern dance methodology. That is not my intention either. If I should put my humble series of movements under the light of movement analysis, as a choreography to be repeated for the sake of dance itself, I would err my goal here, which is not about contact improvisation as a dance form, or my movements as the articulation of somatic communication. Actually, the real goal is somatically deeper than that, like the memories fenced at Las Escuelas at La Arquera. The movements are not important at all. They just open up a narrative halfway from performance to performativity, from the poetics of movement process to the hope towards somatic transformation.

 

 

A desire for somatic performativity: a personal and community approach

 

I am aware of certain effects this practice has on me, which can be categorized into two aspects: the individual and the communal. Presently, I find myself primarily focused on the individual level as I feel alone in my practice. I lack people with whom I can share it unless I return to my dance school in Madrid. Due to practical and experiential reasons, I am currently dedicated to exploring the individual aspect of the practice. I share the practice playing the role of the teacher in CI classes, which gives me a lot of joy. But I don’t have a close collaborator with whom we could unfold the practice together. My practice is about the emergence of intimacy. Intimacy has many shades, one of their dynamics is that of the desire of reaching towards and the poetics of the encounter, and the other is that of regressing to past versions and wounds stored in the body. The first dynamic seems to tend to the future, although its energy is accumulated as a cauldron of the past. The second dynamic, what many Americans usually call trauma and that I prefer to call community, seems to tend to the past, although, in it, there is also a desire to untie from the past contained in the future.

 

But on the communal or partnered level, I have encountered certain boundaries that take me back and tie me down to some past versions of my body. Although I don't intend for my practice to advocate for boundaries (an intellectual practice that would confine my practice within the boundaries of discourse), I must acknowledge their existence. These boundaries pertain to maintaining connections with those who touch us profoundly. The depth of such touch involves engagement with previous versions of the body, and this process can easily spiral out of control due to the estrangement between the present and past versions. Yet, this self-estrangement can also be beneficial. It enables the exploration of future versions of bodies, where wounds have not yet formed. However, reminders of my body's limits are circularly reinforced by this self-estrangement, which can inhibit my body from seeking the depth that leads to such estrangement. A dialogue takes place between me and my body, of which I am merely an observer. I cannot predict when the dialogue ceases or when it recommences. Furthermore, the dialogue is always incomplete. They (my body and I) start conversing—or rather, arguing—and suddenly, mid-sentence, they fall silent. I strive to listen, but usually, they have finished the dialogue by the time I tune in. This boundary represents the chore of sensing a limit to which I am resistant.

 

So, yes, the boundary occurs rather than being created. I will surrender to the task of listening, touching, or sensing the boundary that enables documentation. However, regardless of the nature of the practice (I am also resistant to labeling it as "my" practice), it revolves around blurring rather than delimiting. It is about expressing significance rather than constructing identity (difference). It embodies a desire for violence, for transcending violence through desire, for dissolving violence through desire. It encompasses a desire for enemies, a desire to unite with the enemy, and, in turn, to love them [a Christian endeavor? Perhaps]. And nonetheless, nothing of these is directly contained in my lonely spirals, in the videos I made, or in the novels, or in the discourse about somatic communication in the novels. All of them are strategies to name the unnamable. Or maybe to knead a word spiral scarf around the unnamable. I believe that somatic communication is a way to spiral away from the past in the joyful desire for future versions of bodies. I would like to propose the concept of somatic performativity as a way to not only account for the joyful desire for the future, but also a joyful desire for the future that drags along the past versions of the body. CI has been critiqued many times for ignoring the wounds of the body, neglecting or disengaging from traumatic individual and collective experience. I wonder if we can think of and practice an intimate somatic transformation that both reaches towards to the poetics of the encounter acknowledging the past versions and wounds stored in the body.

 

In order to do that, I have been exploring a concept that I aim to articulate in my dissertation: somatic performativity. I initially introduced this concept when I was applying for the Performance Studies program at UC Davis and briefly discussed it, along with another concept called somatic consensus, in an essay I submitted as part of my application. To provide a better understanding of the genealogy of these concepts in my practice, it is necessary to explain how I started using them.

 

During my twenties and early thirties, I engaged in political activism, spending significant time participating in group discussions and assemblies while practicing collective decision-making in the context of the autonomous and anarchist social movements before, during, and after the Arab Spring and Occupy movements in 2011-2012 (in Spain it was called the 15 of May). Between 2007 and 2008 I participated in the Autonomous squatting movement that later tried to create political parties breaking the bi-partidism in the Spanish Parliament. When I was starting my first PhD I joined a squatted social center called El Patio Maravillas, which had been created by a collective called “Atravesando el Tsunami” a communist collective that had separated from the communist party and wanted to create a social movement which could prompt a civic society movement looking for a more inclusive and politically participative democracy. However, I found that their motives and methods were not particularly democratic, and I was actually expelled from their assembly along with a third part of it when I pointed it out. My impression was that they wanted to create a niche to become professional politicians. In fact, some of them did later on, without much luck.

 

Afterwards (2008-2013), I participated in the more traditional anarchist squatting movement that refused to negotiate with institutions and just wanted to create a culture of mutual support in the city. When me and my friends were kicked out from El Patio Maravillas, we moved to Centro Social Okupado Malaya, a traditional anarchist social center, and later on I kept participating in several assemblies of several similar squatted social centers like for example Centro Social Okupado Casablanca, which was the last big squatted social center I was part of. It was in these spaces where I learnt the most about democratic decision making and consensus making practices. After that period, I continued to participate in the anarchist movement, but more from a somatic-dance practice in alternative cultural spaces in Madrid, like Vaciador34, that were also anarchist but not squatted.

 

These two ways of making politics were very formative for me. These were spaces in which young (and not only young) people would essay ways to act as a group, to exist as community beyond the given conditions of urban life. Both had their good and bad things, although I must say that I felt way more comfortable with the anarchists. The Autonomous movement was composed mostly by mild communists, which in Spain do aspire to form part of the Government. They had a strategy and a tactic, and they used a lot of energy from many people to achieve their goals (which, by the way, they finally didn’t achieve). That’s a complicate political story that I can leave for another moment. But what I would like to point out here is that in these spaces I learnt about the creation of discourse and the opportunities to exist outside or alongside discourse. These two ways to conceive politics and democracy used distinct decision-making practices of consensus. Later on I started focusing more on somatic partnered dance practices, and I also applied what I had learnt about the formation of discourse in decision making to somatic practice. At the same time, I was actually studying the formation of parliamentary discourse in my sociology PhD. What I understand as consensus in my concept of somatic consensus came from my training in anarchist decision-making processes.

 

In the same period when I was practicing consensus in these political contexts, Ranciere wrote: ‘What consensus means, in effect, is not people's agreement amongst themselves but the matching of sense with sense: the accord made between a sensory regime of the presentation of things and a mode of interpretation of their meaning. The consensus governing us is a machine of power insofar as it is a machine of vision.’ (Ranciere 2010: viii) While it is true that there has been intellectual critique of consensus, as described by Ranciere, highlighting its potential to suppress differences, understanding consensus as a symbolic operation orchestrated from the form of the nation state, my understanding of consensus did not solely stem from an intellectual perspective. The critique fails to capture the essence of what political spaces like the ones I was involved in aimed to achieve. Both autonomous and anarchist political spaces practiced an explicit micro-politic of consensus. Although consensus could sometimes lead to the exclusion of minority opinions, this occurred only when certain individuals manipulated the process to serve their hidden agendas. I witnessed this manipulation on numerous occasions, as my friends and I were disregarded and silenced through these strategies. However, I was never expelled from political spaces as a result of consensus manipulation. During the phase of creating political differences, those who manipulated consensus would resort to actual voting, previously ensuring their majority. Therefore, despite experiencing the negative effects of manipulation, I still view unmanipulated consensus as inherently anti-authoritarian. I believe that critiquing consensus does not need to necessarily lead to dismantle consensus as a possible future political practice. Disentangling the concept of consensus, viewing it as a force that eradicates differences and impedes progress, is in my view an intellectual interpretation of the term. However, more significantly, it embodies a sense of unoriginality, an inability to steer politics towards a future that is better, planned without authority. I see this as a disenchanted view on consensus, that I understand. But I cannot comply with it because of a strong utopian force that still boils in me, in my desire for somatic practice and in my confidence about transformative performativity.

 

 

Young people in processes of resistance against authority around the world keep sticking to the practice of consensus as a way to practice another politics to come. At least this felt like a shared sensibility in 2011 during the Arab Spring and the Occupy movements, as maybe also in Chile and Iran in more recent years, to put some examples. Collective consensual decision making has been valued as a practice that is repressed by the state and that needs training. Consensus was an attempt to scape from the formation of the nation-state discourse. And it was also the attempt to create an alternative discourse that could both break in and down its politics, creating new political agents and collective organization beyond and apart state’s violence.

 

 

In the anarchist political practices I was part of, the process of consensus-building always involved incorporating dissent. It revolved around never reaching a unanimous agreement but creating different courses of action and understanding the boundaries of discourse that everyone was willing to acknowledge. It could result in individuals partially yielding to the opinions of others, but their actions were still endorsed by the group. If a course of action was entirely unacceptable to certain individuals, it simply meant that no action would be taken until perspectives changed, if they ever did. In urgent situations, there was the option to abstain from the decision-making process or, if people were unwilling, finding ways to reconcile multiple, divergent courses of action simultaneously. Examples of such decision-making processes included determining how to defend a building from eviction, confronting direct action during protests, addressing issues of sexual harassment or racial aggression within a community, composing public statements, organizing events logistics, and engaging with political matters in the public sphere. This approach was admittedly limited as it prevented extremely radical actions or entirely collective responses, unless unanimous agreement was reached. It was cautious yet future-oriented, delineating a future defined by limits. Participating in anarchist assemblies was a fulfilling experience for me. Nobody seemed fixated on being right, nor did they appear overly emotional when faced with divergent viewpoints. Consensus meant that one's own opinion might not be of utmost importance. It meant that individuals would still pursue their desired course of action even if others did not join them. It also implied receiving ample support and not feeling indispensable. This is my understanding of consensus.

 

But after 2011 I started to be more scared. A close friend was put in jail without charges. Newspapers started to announce that an international anarchist terrorist network existed. The movements I was part of started to be more heavily criminalized following the repression of the more general social movements that had sprung in the Spring of 2011. I was not brave enough. I had been focusing more and more in dance and somatic practice, and I perceived that the anarchist movement would be used as the scapegoat of the 15M (even when everybody knew that the anarchist movement had not actively participated or propelled the 15M). I turned to dance and I left pro-active anarchist activism, retiring to cultural legal spaces like Vaciador34, that were still anarchist in nature and consensual decision making practices, but not under the eye of the police.