:: Moments of Possibility // Genealogies of Resistance::

ìAction is a struggle to constitute the world, to invent it . . . To act is at once a form of knowledge and a revolt . . . [it] is precisely the search for and the construction of the common, which is to say the affirmation of absolute immanence.î ñ Antonio Negri

Moments of possibility, of rupture ñ these are what Yves Fremion calls the ìorgasms of history.î From Greek slave revolts to the San Francisco Diggers, from the Brethren of the Free Spirit to the Dutch Provos, these social explosions unleashed the power of collective imagination in ways that are almost never appreciated by conventional histories. Emerging without leaders or guidance from institutional structures they open up where it seems possible that everything could change at once and the world remade anew. It is in these moments where the borders and boundaries that separate people burst open into renewed periods of social creativity and insurgencies. Workers talk to and organize with students, artists collaborate with housing organizers, the very boundaries between these categories blur and break as singular antagonisms combine and recombine to create new forms. Where before there existed multiple but separate struggles instead these same struggles are multiplied, transformed, fused, and increased exponentially in their presence and potentialities. That is not to say that they are homogenized or combined into one thing, but rather complementarities and affinities are weaved, dancing new strategies through the social fabric.

These new forms reveal glimpses of a future world to come, of the possibilities for liberation existing in the present. We can trace the connections between these moments, a genealogy of resistance that draws together hidden histories and points towards the future. Each contains difficulties and complications, places where it was necessary to take a leap of faith and risk the impossible. It is from these moments, these spaces of creation, that we can learn the most. From the College of Sociology turning festivals and the sacred into resistance to punks creating new social relations and forms of production through zines forms of DIY culture, these moments embody not just practices to be adapted and creatively redeployed, but are in themselves ways of understanding the world and forms of research in action.

To treat practices as forms of knowing in themselves as knowledges as forms of doing is to reject the idea that theory and practice can ever truly be separated; truthfully they are always interconnected and woven through each other. All too often and easily the knowledges and understanding embodied in organizing are not understood or appreciate for the forms of knowledge they contain; likewise theorization often becomes disembodied from the location of its production and circulation. In these moments of possibility, these openings in the flow of history, such boundaries and distinctions break down forming an archipelago of possibility and understandings that is our task to extend into tomorrow.