A Case for Failure: from the Alterglobalization Movement to Occupy & Beyond

• In Event: On Protest II: “Endemic crises and continuing protests in comparative and transnational perspective”

Abstract

In this paper I argue that the “failures” of many contemporary movements are not what we think they are. On the one hand this is because the diagnoses of failure are premised on our own failures in perception and an inability to recognize the planes of reality and politics that are at play and at stake. And on the other hand, it is because we need to recognize that assessments of failure are part of what movements do as they go about the difficult work of trying to radically remake society. Taking seriously claims by Indigenous and Latin American movements to civilizational and epistemic struggle, I suggest that we must re-vision our understanding of the political aims and impacts of contemporary social movements. They must be understood to be creating new worlds, new designs for living, not just making demands or accommodations within the old and given political institutions or cultural logics. As such their effectiveness is not measurable or visible in the modern political terrain defined almost exclusively by a rationalistic Western and Modern ontology. This is particularly important because recently even many who had previously lauded the Alter-globalization movements, as well as Occupy, the Indignados, etc. now criticize them for being too dispersed, too open-ended; too focused on form rather than concrete demands or outcomes. The fact that certain actors—namely indigenous movements, feminists and others activists involved in networked forms of protest—virtual and actual—maybe understood to be more disposed to, or already involved in, these different ways of knowing-being-doing in the world, suggests an important possibility for learning and theoretical development, traversing geopolitical and epistemological frontiers, and re-iterating the importance of social movements as knowledge and theoretical-practitioners. At the same time, narratives of movement failure—at times in the form of claims of movement absence—can also be very productive—both in helping to clarify the political conjuncture and by pushing activists to modify their own analysis and methods, even change course. Here absence and failure work as a not-yet, pushing movements to continue walking while questioning.

Author

• Michal Osterweil, University of North Carolina/Chapel Hill