:: Circuits of Struggle ::

ìThere is nothing simple or mysterious about a cycle of struggle. The class struggle has many circuits, sectors, internal divisions and contradictions, but it is neither a mystical unity nor a chaotic mess.î ñ Zerowork Collective

Understanding the multiple circuits and paths running through and composing a cycle of struggles, of the ways where the potentiality and possibilities found within moments of rupture come to reproduce and proliferate themselves, is an important part of the practices of militant investigation. By understanding how these cycles and circuits are formed, how they articulate themselves horizontally (across spatial areas) and vertically (through different parts of society), we come to further understand the power contained within these movements. How and when are the nodes and connections that compose these cycles formed? How intense are the connections? Cycles of struggles form their own geography, unevenly developed and full of potential. Circuits connect with other and replicate, turning cycles of struggles into spirals and opening up new planes of resistance.

We can map the resonances and connections over physical space and encounters, through mediated machinations and communications, through and around the disparate spaces that compose the university, the hospital, the city square, and through all spaces of life. Through looking at the different circuits and channels through which information flows cartographies of resistance trace the multiple and overlapping spaces and forms of struggle that exist extending and expanding them. These connections occur through routes that often might not be expected, from tree sits to hacklabs, from the post-fordist workplace that tries to encompass all of life to the detention camp where life itself seemed to be denied.

It is through these circuits that the processes of composition and decomposition, as described in the autonomist tradition, occur. And it is in these spaces that an analysis of these processes and circulation of the knowledges involved becomes part of this process of recomposition. What is the content, direction, and nature of the struggles? How are these struggles circulated and developed? This process of Imagineering, of deploying images and stories of struggles in other locations, never occurs directly, but is always through other tangled routes, through circulating references and chains of translation. In these spaces, circuits, and cycles new knowledge-practices and possibilities are circulated, creating a collective form of intellectual practice dispersed over time and space.