are—and always have been—many places and spaces where alternatives are in full bloom. Beyond merely diagnosing or combating rigid radicalism, we seek to affirm the multiplicity of ways that spaces can be otherwise.
Questions
This is part of what we have been talking about with people: What makes radical spaces and movements feel transformative and creative, rather than dogmatic, rule-bound, or stifling? What sustains struggles, spaces, and forms of life where we become capable of living and fighting in new ways? What supports people’s capacities to challenge each other and undo deeply ingrained habits, rather than just saying the “right” thing or avoiding the “wrong” thing? How are people carving out relationships based in trust, love, and responsibility amid the violence that permeates daily life? What sustains these worlds—what makes them thrive?
With so much destruction in motion, this might all sound naïve to some readers: why speak of thriving and love when there are so many massive, urgent problems that need to be confronted? To write about the potential of trust and care, at this time in history, could seem like grasping optimistically at straws as the world burns. But durable bonds and new complicities are not a reprieve or an escape; they are the very means of undoing Empire.
We use “Empire” to name the organized destruction under which we live. Through its attempt to render everything profitable and controllable, Empire administers a war with other forms of life. The rhythms it imposes are at once absorptive and isolating. Even when this war takes the apparently subtle forms of assimilation and control, it is backed by brutal violence. Prisons and cops lurk alongside discourses of inclusion and tolerance. Empire works to monopolize the whole field of life, crushing autonomy and inducing dependence.
At the same time, there are cracks everywhere. A basic premise of this book is that resistance and transformation are always in the making at the margins, while Empire is always adapting and reacting. All of its mechanisms of control have been invented as responses to the constant upwelling of resistance, autonomy, and insurrection. This upwelling is a struggle not only against external domination, but also against Empire’s control over identities, desires, and relationships. Undoing Empire also means undoing oneself. This is never a purely negative undoing, because it also means becoming capable of something new.
We are convinced that what is needed is an activation and affirmation of other ways of being. Not a new norm but the exploration of new (and old) capacities. This book explores some of these capacities alongside the ways that people are transforming their own situations without governments or hierarchical institutions. The capacity to treat each other well is connected, we think, to movements that nurture autonomy, trust, responsibility, and the collective power that is palpable when people are able to participate more fully in life. Amid and beyond barricades and Molotovs there are new forms of care and belonging, quiet and humble forms of support. There are emergent sensibilities based in listening, curiosity, and experimentation. There are reconnections with subjugated traditions and practices. There is hatred of the forces that threaten all this, and a willingness to fight. Some have been nurturing these capacities for a long time; others are just beginning to explore them. For this reason, rather than just dwelling in the pervasiveness of rigid radicalism or Empire, here we are exploring, celebrating, and connecting with other ways of being—other thriving forms of resistance and struggle.
Affirmative theory
In many currents of radicalism—especially certain strains of Marxism—radical theory tasks itself with directing the course of struggle, pointing the way forward, or handing down instructions and fixed ways of being. This kind of theory generates necessities or suggestions to be implemented. Theory directs practice. Either this, or theory is tasked with critique of the world, of practice, and of other theories: it is supposed to reveal the limits of current struggles, discover the mistakes and flawed ways of doing or thinking, or reveal the root of oppression. Often both these modes of theory generate positions defined in opposition to others. They give us things to be for or against.
But there are other modes of theory. Theory can also explore connections and ask open-ended questions. It can affirm and elaborate on something people already intuit or sense. It can celebrate and inspire; it can move. We want a kind of theory that participates in struggle and the growth of shared power rather than directing it or evaluating it from outside. We are after a kind of theory that is critical but also affirmative. Rather than pointing to the limits or shortcomings of movements and declaring what they should do, affirmative theory homes in on the most transformative edges and margins.
In writing this book, we’ve been influenced by many divergent voices and movements, and we want to value them all. We combine weighty philosophical concepts with conversations and draw on zines, academic articles and books, speeches, and interviews. Furthermore, we think there’s a lot to be said for bringing things together in unforeseen ways that might intensify their aliveness and dynamism. This entails asking and provoking questions, many of which we leave open and unresolved throughout the book. For us, the most compelling questions are those that can be answered in a multiplicity of ways, in different situations.
One of our basic premises is that transformative potentials are always already present and emergent. Not only can things be otherwise; they already are, and it is a matter of tuning, tending, activating, connecting, and defending these processes of change that are already in the making. People are always enacting alternatives to the dominant order of things, however small, and there are always new connections and potentials to explore. We see this kind of sensibility happening in currents of feminism, queer theory, Black liberation, Indigenous resurgence, youth liberation, anarchism, autonomism, and radical ecology, among others, and we seek to affirm these movements and practices throughout the book.
But this is tricky: how are we to affirm and explore spaces where something transformative is taking place without holding them up as ideals to imitate or telling others to be a certain way? What we are after is not a new critique or new position but a process. Not a new direction for movements but the process of movement itself and the growth of creativity, struggle, experimentation, and collective power.
Joy and the Spinozan current
To reduce these problems to a complete and final analysis would be to miss the point. The best thing would be an informal discussion capable of bringing about the subtle magic of wordplay.
It is a real contradiction to talk of joy seriously.
—Alfredo Bonanno5
Pursuing these questions took us on a long detour through a minor current of Western philosophy associated with Baruch Spinoza. Against the grain of European thought that sought to subdue life through rigid dualisms and classifications, Spinoza conceptualized a world in which everything is interconnected and in process.
This worldview meant that Spinoza was despised by most of his contemporaries, but his ideas have influenced numerous currents of radical theory and practice, including anarchism, autonomous Marxism, affect theory, deep ecology, psychoanalysis, post-structuralism, queer theory, and even neuroscience. We are drawing on a current that runs from Spinoza through Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustav Landauer, Michel Foucault, and Gilles Deleuze to contemporary radicals like the Invisible Committee, Colectivo Situaciones, Lauren Berlant, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri. What we have found exciting about this current is the focus on processes through which people become more alive, more capable, and more powerful together. For Spinoza, the whole point of life is to become capable of new things, with others. His name for this process is joy.
Joy? What? Doesn’t joy just mean happiness, with some vaguely Christian undertones? Later we’ll be more precise about joy, but for now we want to be clear that it is not the same thing as happiness. A joyful process of transformation might involve happiness, but it tends to entail a whole range of feelings at once: it might feel overwhelming, painful, dramatic, and world-shaking,
