forward

It almost seems pointless to continue. It's all very well that the attempts by "dominant forces" to impose order aren't guaranteed to succeed. In the end, the point is that there are no longer any guarantees: the efforts of localisation, of resistance, can establish a creative line of flight away from the forces of stratification, but seem destined to ebb and swell, successes and failures, aleatory rather than strategic.

It could be fractal: that these patterns repeat over and over in miniature, making, eventually, a larger picture. Certainly, the alliances and identities formed in these spaces shift the perceptions of the participants, disconcert unitary identity and through their assemblage, start to spin off on the "becoming-minoritarian of everybody/everything" that Deleuze and Guattari argue is part of the revolutionary constellation (1980: 471).

As for recommended actions? Massumi lists five approaches (1992: 103 - 106): stopping the world (creating a zone of indeterminacy by disconnecting stimuli with their regular habitual response); cherishing derelict spaces, whether that means squatting in abandoned warehouses, parties in the ghetto or reforesting industrial wastelands, whether in New York or in Khartoum; studying camouflage, that is, learning to fake being what you are expected to be in order to infiltrate "apparatuses of capture such as government or the media"; sidling and straddling (charging straight on succeeds infrequently, instead, "one must move sideways through cracks in accepted spatial and temporal divisions"; a lastly, coming out, throwing off the camouflage at the right moment, declaring your hand.

Why resist? In a world with no guarantee of success, but no guarantee of failure either, we have a few degrees of freedom: speaking, shopping, spending. If we can use these tools, through culture hacking, boycotts and networks such as grassroots development organisations, the question is actually, why not?