A History Made of Glass:

Bluestockings Bookstore, Fair-Trade Café,

& Activist Resource Center
Malav Kanuga

It is a question of producing within the work a movement capable of

affecting the mind outside all representations; it is a question of making
movement itself a work, without interposition; of substituting direct signs
for mediate representations; of inventing vibrations, rotations, whirlings,
gravitations, dances, or leaps which directly touch the mind.
- Gilles Deleuze

As Team Colors propose in their introduction to this journal, tiny gusts of wind have
characterized social struggles in the United States in recent decades. One only has to
think of the ceaseless activity that exists in the space of our daily lives to recognize this
as itself the source of our whirlwinds.i Nevertheless, the very commotion of everyday
life often obscures the political significance of our endless energies. So where to begin?

It is important to recognize the changing compositions of our movements. This is

necessary in order to understand how the politics of our everyday lives relate to long-term
struggles for social change. Additionally, inquiry into our movements’ current
composition allows us to engage clearly with our constantly changing understanding of
what is possible. Many of us look to the sky for our movement’s north star, straining
from our low vantage point in the U.S. for the brightest constellations of resistance in
ongoing struggles. We sometimes forget that the light that reaches us is not always that
of a still-shining star. For example, many look toward the heroic highpoints of the anti-
globalization movement in North America as the last time we truly felt an effectively
constituted resistance. This star, however, seems to have faded, dissolved, imploded,
undone by the gravity of wishes placed upon it, or otherwise forced inward.ii This is by
no means an indication that activity has ceased. Quite the contrary: all around us, there
is an explosion of activities.

Rather than look to the sky, therefore, I would like to direct our gaze toward the ground
below us. The role of space (both physical and relational) in our social struggles is
intimately connected to the question of composition. Indeed, it is the opening up of space
that facilitates the experimentation and multiplication of new relationships. Thus, I

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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would like to ask: What can a lived space of relative autonomy mean in a social
topography increasingly subsumed by domination?

Drawing from the experience of organizing Bluestockings, a radical bookstore and event
space in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, I would like to suggest a few themes that are
integral to the various living answers we might give to this question. Many participants
in the bookstore contribute to the daily effort of ensuring that Bluestockings continues to
be an open ground for the whirlwind of activities that circulate through the space. Yet,
these activities do not largely emerge by direct decree. In a certain sense, there is almost
no way to identify them under the aegis of our space. These activities have circulated
prior to and beyond our efforts. Our role, in many ways, is simply to amplify – but
something else happens in the process.

In what follows below, I offer a few themes that elaborate on the social significance of
Bluestockings. I am purposely staying away from describing the many ideas contained in
the space, either by the many people that participate in the project or by the books we sell
and our nightly programming. All of it exists together, somewhat chaotically. To
centrifuge them out would be to lose the vitality of so many elements existing in concert,
however different and sometimes seemingly incompatible. Therefore, one cannot find a
clear conception of Bluestockings’ politics, either as endorsement, preferred tactic, or
centralized vision of strategy. We could barely agree on the color of the walls.

Rather, what I’d like to do is start with a condensed history of the space, its organizing
principles and how it is loosely conceived and implemented. There are many lessons to
draw from our experiences and I will attempt to discuss some of those as well.

It is instructive in inquiring about the power and composition of various movements

today to begin with what we know about how movements compose and cohere. I hope to
draw out the importance of one type of composition in this long and variegated struggle:
that of a community that bears no conditions of belonging; a community that is defined
by its conditions of capacity and not by conditions of belonging; one that is referred to
simply by what it is capable of doing. Bluestockings is constituted by such communities.
To understand the conditions of the coming-to-be of this kind of community is to
understand the vitality that is infused in a space like Bluestockings. It is a vitality that
provokes the constant reorganization of what it means to work, as well as associate and
collaborate freely toward productive ends. Thus, it is an exemplar of many of the
questions movements are grappling with today.

The Fires that Supplied the Glass

To be truly visionary we have to root our imagination in our concrete

reality while simultaneously imagining possibilities beyond that reality.
– bell hooks

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
www.inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info

Originally founded by different owners, Bluestockings opened in 1999 as a women’s

bookstore. By 2003, the business was under financial duress and ownership was
transferred by the founders to an assemblage of new collective members and old
volunteers, some of whom still comprise our current collective five years later. In this
time, we have fully organized as a self-managed worker-owned business.

This worker’s collective has had as many as six members and as few as three. The
collective body has always been majority women (and at the time of this writing,
majority people of color as well). All collective members are equal owners of the
business, participate equally in all decisions through consensus, and, ever since we
established a still-precarious but enduring financial solvency, members are remunerated
equally, as well. These practices took shape slowly as a result of our struggle to establish
ourselves and work out kinks in our collective process. Nevertheless, the ideas and
passion behind collective organization burned from the beginning. One might attribute
this to past anti-authoritarian experiences that constituent members invested into the
collective, or the still warming fires of the anti-globalization movement, whose 'spirit of
’99' directly infused individual orientations to the project. Bluestockings, in many ways,
can be seen as glass that took shape as these fires raged and then subsequently cooled.
While the fires of previous movements have been reduced to embers, we carry the
memory of their flames in glass-form. I hold on to this image of Bluestockings because
our organization shares some qualities of glass: like glass, our organization is fluid
though it appears solid; it is transparent, durable, able to magnify, focus, protect and in
proper orientation to the sun, is even able to concentrate both light and heat. Thus, it has
the capacity to start fires of its own. However, all of this is possible only based on the
specificities of our glass – and we are still learning a lot about the potential of all of our
organizational contours.

Over the last five years, we have become highly visible as a ‘leftist’ bookstore, fair-trade
cafe, and free event space. However, much like any anti-capitalist project, if one does
not analyze the intentions and social relations at the foundation of the endeavor, the
practical purpose seems slightly akin to running an ice cream parlor (which Emma
Goldman indeed attempted in the closing years of the 19th century): nice and sweet, but
not immediately the stuff of social struggle.

In an immediate (formal) sense, our ‘politics’ may be said to exist in what we do: sell
leftist books and host activist-oriented discussions. Accordingly, we are, by derivation, a
political project. Something is missed in this semblance, however. What is perhaps less
visible, mostly because it is not easily verifiable, is our role as a node in an elaborate but
ephemeral network of autonomous community practices across the city, the country, and
increasingly international locations.

The most significant aspect lost, however, is the role that Bluestockings plays in another
register of social struggle, one that is outside the locus of most politics. While we root
ourselves in an array of traditions and current experiences of resistance and movement
organizing, ours is a politics organized around a “refusal to constitute [ourselves] as
frontal opponents,” as Colectivo Situaciones have described similar autonomous practices

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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(2003: footnote 11). We do not put sole emphasis on achieving oppositional stances to
current political orderings. By expanding the category of resistance by focusing
inwardly, we start on the plane of what constitutes our daily life and attempt to invest in
practices and encounters that reconstitute political power within us based on the desire to
affirm and build communal life. This long and slow process affords very few visible
markers of success or defeat. But it does reorient our understanding of the plane of
politics as corresponding with the plane of our lives.

Once we achieve this reorientation, an already implicit problem of this plane immediately
greets us: how to link separate experiences of daily life to each other across the vast
geographic differences of degree and scale. This can range from the challenge of
connecting communities that inhabit the same fragmented city, to the ability to correlate
experiences that arise from local/global differences.

Our fundamental focus is on the articulation of a space that is transparent and open to
participation. Over the years, we’ve found a recipe that works. By linking the openness
of our space with the dynamic of direct participation and the sharing (often times, the
mutual co-articulation) of ideas and visions, it is possible to gather multiple and fluid
communities who continually invest their energy in the space not as individuals (visitors,
guests, passersby) but as an emergent public (rooted, responsive, self-constituted). As a
community space, our energy is supplied and re-supplied in this way.

This is where we shift emphasis from other ‘independent bookstores.’ At every moment,
we integrate the act of selling books with our bigger priority: creating a space through
which many different people can participate and share access to community resources.
Accordingly, it is a very large and variegated community that comes in and buys books.
A smaller but no less striated community intersects or integrates into the fabric of our
space in more direct ways: they volunteer, they attend study and reading groups, they
meet people, they propose events and self-organize events, they participate in
discussions, readings, screenings, etc. Throughout all this, the many people that come
through choose their own level of interest and involvement in what the space can offer.
They choose to interpret the significance of the space, as well as their own orientation to
the multiple participant-created economies propagating at any given time (money
economies, knowledge economies, alternative value practices, mutual aid and just
negotiation, mental, spiritual and emotional support, etc.). We find these multiple
economies in all facets of life, yet in some ways we think of them as only growing in the
cracks of everyday life. Bluestockings as a physical space – or more accurately, as the
embodiment of a collective of individuals – is not responsible for these various
economies, nor the complex web of relations they generate, but we are responsive to
them. We understand our role as a community space in this way.

Our daily encounters and nightly events focus on ways of acting that are not supplied by
a simple or quick reaction to current political order; critique is all too often born from this
moment of reaction. Those who participate in Bluestockings tend to evince a feeling that,
though criticism is necessary for navigating the deceptions intended to dominate our daily
lives and relations, our outrage must not overshadow visionary thinking about solving

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
www.inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info

today’s problems. Indeed, it is quite typical to come to understand the world as political
in a negative sense: the register of today’s defeats and disasters are overwhelmingly
political (political institutions, governments, etc. are the prime actors). At Bluestockings,
we take the inverse relation: the politics that convene in our space generate from the
sense that our everyday formations are creative and each constituent member of this
community lends meaning to the abstract relation of what we understand as ‘politics.’
Such politics require a strange mixture of anger and affection, but that is perhaps what is
most necessary for creating enduring struggles.

Worker’s Self-Activity

As a worker-owned bookstore, we have developed a framework over the last five years
grounded in cooperation, mutualism, autonomy and participation. It would be
impossible, I believe, to explore the political potentialities described above and
throughout this journal without first solving for ourselves the ownership problem.
Without collective control and autonomy, it would not be possible for us to expand our
vision and determine for ourselves the fate of the space. The autonomy afforded to us by
being a worker-owned business is not a goal, but a necessary precursor and premise.
While we are beholden to a staggering rent (resulting from the rapid gentrification of our
neighborhood) and nearly debilitating overhead, we have so far been able to keep up with
the pressures and challenges.

Given our location in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, it is important to add that even
despite (or indeed because of) of our activist orientations, we pay all our overhead and
expenses entirely from sales. This is quite a bit more than most independent bookstores
in New York City are able to manage, even with special relationships with neighboring
university landlords, wealthy owners floating ‘vanity’ book projects, rich investors, and
so on; despite these advantages, many independent bookstores seem to be closing their
doors.

Our worker-collective maintains the responsibility of satisfying all the preconditions of

keeping the space open. We work as hard as it takes to make rent every month, keep our
lease-agreement in good standing, pay our vendors, and otherwise stay financially
solvent. All of this ensures we have a space to work and organize in tomorrow. What
does this enormous effort then produce?

The nature of work at Bluestockings is of course fundamentally marked by the lack of

bosses. Being a self-managed worker project requires us to rearticulate a new dynamic
and ethic of work within the space as well as in our daily lives. In their essay in the first
issue of Turbulence, Todd Hamilton and Nate Holdren eloquently describe a model of
workplace organizing that fits with our own: “It’s more like a scale or key in music [than
a model], it provides the framework within which we improvise the affective, immaterial,
flexible processes of organizing and building organization” (Hamilton and Holdren 2007:
20). Much of our organization stems from the multiplication and repetition of affects of
care and cooperation. Perhaps it is a simple anti-authoritarian revulsion to cumbersome

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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structures, or something more significant, but we rarely quote our by-laws or rehearse
canned answers to daily questions about our policies in the store. Rather, we speak our
structure. We derive our reasons based on the well of affect that circulates in the room,
much of it seeping into the architecture in the form of memory and will to hope. None of
it comes from outside. Indeed, it is not premised upon outside knowledge or the
sufficient accumulation of past experience. Nevertheless, just because no structural
position is left for a boss does not mean that we have not all internalized the boss in our
modes of behavior and interaction, nor does it mean that we’ve been able to successfully
eradicate all the potential indignities that soft hierarchies sometimes rear. This
experiment repeats each day, creating the new challenges as well as the new possibilities
that constitute the space.

An equally enduring challenge is how to sustain the perpetual democratizing machine of

worker’s autonomy in such a way that it extends into all other facets of our lives. Most
of the collective works elsewhere, and to varying degrees we are required to transition
from the horizontalism of our workplace to more alienated work. We still struggle with
the familiar questions that we come across as a worker’s collective, but in other work
spaces we become isolated individuals dealing as best we can with the precarious
psychological and structural forces that command our labor. At times, it can seem like
we recompose and are decomposed in the span of a day. Longer volleys into the feeling
of our own power do make all the difference. But, nevertheless, as everyone else, we
struggle.

Furthermore, we admit that worker control does not inherently emancipate daily life.
Nevertheless, decoding the work relation amounts to quite a bit organizationally. As
workers without a boss, the question becomes, what new antagonism are we able to open
up at the same time as we become elusive? Is the stake of the wager that we can (and
should) run a ‘successful’ business guided by anti-capitalist principles, a business that
therefore requires even more scrutiny to the obedience of legal and financial authority?
The consequences of these questions arise out of the hope that if we organize collectively
as workers, we may achieve a certain confidence in duration – that this enormous effort
won’t suddenly dissolve, but can find itself slowly taking root in many other spaces of
daily life as well as proliferate into the lives of others.

Free-Action/Activity

In order to shift emphasis to another decoded work relation, I would like to draw out the
significance of volunteer work at Bluestockings. Qualitatively speaking, Bluestockings
volunteers are everywhere and do everything. Indeed, since our inception in 2003, our
collective ownership structure has been pooled from our volunteer base. Currently, this
volunteer base is approximately 70 active volunteers who participate in the running of the
space during weekly three-hour shifts. In addition, there have been many hundreds more
volunteers over the years, many of which continue to participate in one way or another.
The combination of collective workers and weekly (and more provisional) volunteers run
the entire project day by day. In the process, we reproduce the skills and knowledge of

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
www.inthemiddleofawhirlwind.info

how to organize a collectively run social space, as well as manage a worker-owned

business.

This volunteer body has no real composite identity to be referred to – one or more of
them may be grouped in one sense as students, artists, educators, non-profit workers,
organizers, the skillfully self-employed or not at all, in addition to a multiplicity of other
things that define their lives. Indeed, as multiplicity, what defines Bluestockings
volunteers is not their identity but the force of what they are capable of doing in unity.
This force is governed mostly by chance. When volunteers assemble in the space, it is to
recompose (befriend, enjoy) as a group that cooperates without command. They mix and
combine differences in orientation, experience, ambition, desire, and form temporary
(though regularly recombining) teams in order to embody the space. They work
alongside those of us in the workers collective as well. Here too, people combine in quite
fluid ways that resist the possibility of their differences becoming opaque (i.e., paid and
unpaid labor). Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari characterize this combination as a type
of ‘free action’: “Regardless of the effort or toil they imply, they are of the order of free
action, related to pure mobility, and not of the order of work with its conditions of
gravity, resistance, and expenditure” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 401).

It is certainly true that collective work retains the character of ‘gravity,’ ‘resistance’ and
‘expenditure.’ But what happens when we combine these conditions with the condition
of ‘pure mobility’ of free action, of unencumbered (volunteer) power? An alternative
ethic is brought into the world; a value-system proliferates that forms the dispositif of a
more novel emergent power.iii

Commons as Common-Differences

Bluestockings is conceived as a space of encounter for movement(s). In one sense, this

encounter is at the individual level of newly forming relations, borne from the co-
articulation of desires, experiences, and modes of acting. Thus it is both bodily and
affective. There is, however, another level to the encounter that we facilitate. Almost
every night, we serve as a venue space for social justice/movement thinking and
reflecting. We host authors, filmmakers, writers, poets, musicians, visionaries, travelers,
and storytellers in an effort to construct new knowledges about our daily lives and the
larger (often equally obscured) world we live in.

Our events offer people a chance to organize to their concerns and be hosted in a friendly
space. The ‘audiences’ that come to these events are always, each day, very different; in
aggregate, our community, year after year, tends to be less easily identified. Since space
that is open and inviting is at a premium, we find that offering ours for free event
programming every night is one of the more critical resources we can generate and
allocate into community concerns.

This is in a similar spirit of what Michal Osterweil and Graeme Chesters describe in their
own coordinating experiences, in that it is

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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…our attempt to create a critical public space, one that exists for sustained
periods of time and in various physical and virtual places. We believe that
the creation of such a space will allow us to include more people and
different ideas, as well as make possible wisdom that only comes from
reflection; reflection and iteration that in turn only come with time. The
content of our politics is more precisely that of engagement, culture, and
encounter than of programs, campaigns, and building institutions
(Osterweil and Chesters 2007: 255).

The emphasis that emerges is not simply a catalog of injustices against gender, nation,
class, etc. in different communities, but what Mohanty calls the “mutuality and co-
implication” of these struggles, “which suggests attentiveness to the interweaving of the
histories of these communities” (Mohanty 2003: 242). Thus, we foreground not just the
connections of domination but also those of struggle and resistance.

Our starting point is the yearning for a better world; at the heart of this yearning is the
question of knowledge and value production. Our activities begin with an understanding
that we cannot advance from our own conditions of knowing the world (since the world
is infused with a vast ecology of knowledges), nor can we claim knowledge of how to
proceed. In its place is a “not-knowing,” a mere intuition about how to begin organizing
and expanding our knowledge. On the one hand, the attempt to bring people together to
co-produce and expand local knowledges into the register of larger ecologies begins with
the realization that knowledge itself is a terrain of struggle. The facilitation of local and
global productions of knowledge is not a static phenomenon, nor are there any ‘neutral
subjects.’ Our resources and capacity to engage in this struggle must necessarily be
attuned to linkages, the strategic navigation around conceptual blockages, and the ability
to recognize our own practical inertias. In this way, inquiries, discussions, and debates
themselves become adversarial spaces of knowledge. This is as true within the space of
our events as it is in the practice of daily encounters.

The most immediate outcome of the existence of our event-space is the ability to raise the
level of engagement in our everyday lives. Equally important is the creation of an
intellectual commons that resists identity: this commons based on intellect (and the
ability to link this intellect to everyday life) does not exist as a set of different
knowledges treated as equivalents. Nor are these differences passed through some higher
identity, for example that they all constitute a commons, or ‘counter public sphere’ in
some time and place. What is significant about this commons is that it is not subject to
any ideological ordering. Here too, it is important to note that none who gather around
this commons are subsumed by it. This commons expands at every point that limitations
are posed. It swells through the multiplicity of people’s involvement and orientation to it,
into the sphere of ‘common differences.’

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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Community, Whatever, Wherever, and However

While I stated at the outset that the organizing principles of Bluestockings tend to fall
outside the oppositional logic of most protest-politics, we do situate ourselves in the
context of struggle. The vitality, yet inherent disorder of larger social struggles as they
relate to our coordinating efforts does not bifurcate neatly into discrete realms. Much of
what Bluestockings facilitates, engenders or otherwise makes possible does remain in the
(more) familiar register of oppositions, a terrain characterized most clearly as conflicts in
power. But as we look toward the creation of autonomous experiences we find that we
cannot simply reject antagonism in order to more fully explore our autonomous potential.

In order to push the problematic of antagonism versus autonomous self-creation, I would

like to draw out two meanings of ‘community’ that take shape at Bluestockings. On one
hand, we might position ‘community’ as simply the time and space that we gather
‘outside’ of work-time or labor-command. This community, by definition, aims to situate
itself in many ways ‘outside’ the logic of capitalism. It is a space wherein people orient
themselves around an inverted value-relation. Our encounters are not predicated solely
upon commodity exchange (although who wouldn’t bring up the fact that books are
commodities as well?), but more significantly, they are predicated on the social use-value
of shared knowledge, a celebration of the printed word, and the circulation of the
empowered imaginaries into a self-expanding commons. As Ben Holtzman, Craig
Hughes and Kevin Van Meter remind us, “while this is not noncapitalist activity, since a
commodity still does exist, it is a first step in the process of going beyond capital”
(Holtzman, Hughes and Van Meter 2007: 45). More to the point are the relationships
created through these encounters. We must be hesitant, however, to adopt too quickly the
jubilee of the above realizations. Together, they can be far too congratulatory and,
consequently, distracting.

If we follow the Italian autonomist analysis of the social factory, we must remember to
constantly bring forward the notion of discipline and control as it permeates all facets of
social life. There are two major points here. First, our community cannot pretend to
exist apart from the larger capitalist relations or society that constantly threatens to
further entrench and subsume our being. Remembering this merely makes clear the
necessity of inscribing our autonomous spaces within the struggle against capital, the
‘refusal’ to be productive for capital while simultaneously being productive of ourselves.
As Selma James states in her introduction to The Power of Women and the Subversion of
the Community, “once we see the community as a productive center and thus a center of
subversion, the whole perspective for generalized struggle and revolutionary organization
is re-opened” (Dalla Costa and James 1972: 17).

Second, this same community may work its politics not through confrontation or
opposition but through elusion. Our community is formed in relation to desire (whatever
you want) and not identity (the conditions of belonging). In this formation, we are freed
from claims of belonging that are based on properties (being queer, being young, being
fearless). What takes the place of identity is activity: the action, orientation, values and

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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practices that emerge from encounters with others. The precursor is an ethics that is
constantly opening up the space for perpetual transformation.

Given the necessary precursor, this community takes shape as an unrepresentable

“multiple common place” (Agamben, 1993: 28). There is no substitute for this
community, yet there is no singular uniqueness to it; it is not organized by way of
individuals represented by it, just as it is only possible to refer to it but not wholly or
adequately describe it (i.e. ‘capture’ its meaning). In this formation, the community has
no identity but only potentiality, the ability to do something next.iv

This dynamic of “unrepresentability” raises the scale of antagonism. Here Giorgio

Agamben’s discussion of community (what he calls the gathering of ‘singularities’)
outside the limitations of individuality and (state) institutions is both useful and decisive:

These communities set out “an insurmountable disjunction” between

themselves and the State organization, not as a “simple affirmation of the
social in opposition to the State. [These communities] cannot form a
societas because they do not possess any identity to vindicate nor any
bond of belonging for which to seek recognition. In the final instance the
State can recognize any claim for identity […] What the state cannot
tolerate in any way, however, is that the singularities form a community
without affirming an identity, that humans co-belong without any
representable condition for belonging […] For the State, therefore, what is
important is never the singularity as such, but only its inclusion in some
identity, whatever-identity (but the possibility of the whatever itself being
taken up without an identity is a threat the State cannot come to terms
with). A being radically devoid of any representable identity would be
absolutely irrelevant to the State. [This being] rejects all identity and
every condition of belonging, [and is thus] the principal enemy of the
State” (Agamben 1993: 86-87).

The political potential of this community is something that remains to be seen in the
example of Bluestockings. However, wherever and whenever this community sheds its
nebulous cloak and mobilizes as an identifiable entity, the context and power of this
community will change; it is a question of composition and changing forms.

Interrupting the Myth of Neoliberalism

At every level, a different set of relations is taking the place of relations

imposed by capitalism.
– Ben Holtzman, Craig Hughes and Kevin Van Meter

Outside the question of political composition, I think, resides a still lurking communal
power, untouched yet plugged into the veins of all political life. This community has the
power, by its very ontology, to interrupt the myth of neoliberalism. The myth attempts a

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Coordinator: Team Colors Publisher: The Journal of Aesthetics and Protest
 In the Middle of a Whirlwind: 2008 Convention Protests, Movement & Movements
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mass erasure of solidarity with the simple image-illusion of the individual. We are told
(seduced, bribed, coerced) to bypass communal forms and increasingly identify the
market as the only resort for our needs, even though we find everywhere concrete
examples of people’s self-activity.

At every level, capitalism attempts to re-supply and re-impose social relations based on
control, exploitation and oppression. There is nothing inherent in the order of practice
that transverses capitalism. There are no well-ordered levels to social struggle, such that
the satisfactory completion of one level implies the advancement to the next. Struggle is
rather a matter of constantly (re-)opening space for participation and co-articulation. The
ephemerality of these spaces is not something to mourn, just as the ephemerality of
dominant spaces make us no less vigilant.

Interrupting the myth means rejecting the inverted form in which our own commons are
represented back to us. This is most obviously the commodity-form and the state-form,
but is also the forms that comprise our real community. In this last sense, as in the
previous, a universal identity calms all the activity that threatens its existence.

To return to the image of music that Todd Hamilton and Nate Holdren introduce (see
above), we might say that our activities produce vibrations that resonate in broad
frequencies and rich timbres across the register of our common life. These activities
naturally have the ability to link and reverberate with those of others. Insofar as we make
these frequencies audible, a common motif (if not song) emerges. But the inverted form
of our songs that are too often returned to us is this myth of neoliberalism. It is
characterized not by our collective sound-making, but by the individual silences that
isolate each note. Our challenge is to hear the cry of all social struggles as different forms
of our music, not by noting the gaps (which the state and capital seek to impose), but by
searching out, note by note, that which constitutes the hidden repertoire of all these songs
with no name.

We are able to engage in the production of a commons by continually opening, and

keeping open, the conditions of its creation. If this creation remains mobile and open,
perhaps it will endure. The capacity of these commons to reorder social life almost
becomes a simple question of endurance. What new subjectivities and value-relations
would arise from this community-form, whose only quality is that it is characterized by
the constituent capacity to act to which members each contribute?

Spatializing Feminism, De-Neoliberalizing the Mind?v

…a world that is definable only in relational terms, a world traversed with

intersecting lines of power and resistance, a world that can only be
understood in terms of its destructive divisions of gender, color, class,
sexuality, and nation…but also a world with powerful histories of
resistance and revolution in daily life and as organized liberation
movements.

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– Chandra Talpade Mohanty

As a continuation and updating of our origins, Bluestockings remains an overwhelmingly

women-run movement space. This is a substantial principle of our collective. Inheriting a
failing ‘women’s bookstore’ compelled us to reinterpret the legacies of feminism anew.
Indeed, as Chandra Mohanty reminds us, “many of the democratic practices and process-
oriented aspects of feminism appear to be institutionalized into the decision-making
processes of some of [the anti-globalization] movements” (Mohanty 2003: 250).

Our challenge has been to affirm a multiplicity of feminist perspectives that enables all of
us to further our liberatory tendencies within the space of Bluestockings, as well as our
daily lives. This question simultaneously exists as a process within the collective, a
policy and orientation of how to manage the space, as well as a textual and curatorial
project of how to follow the links being made by numerous thinkers and writers on the
connections between feminism and broadly conceived social justices issues.

None of this is to say that feminism or feminist movement spaces such as Bluestockings
are an accomplished fact. Our task is a process: as a fundamental challenge to patriarchy
and the establishment/transvaluation of freer social relations, we continually organize,
struggle, and resist the “micro-fascisms” that pervade all social spaces. Such micro-
fascisms infuse the ordinary space of our daily interactions with a residue of despair and
defeat and create a dynamic of explosive capacity. These microfascisms result because
real dilemmas created by patriarchy have yet to be solved within our movements.

According to Osterweil (2007), the potentialities of anti-authoritarianism rooted in

feminism must be matched with reality. She asks, “what does it mean to see yourself as
part of a movement governed by feminist and minoritarian logics when in so many of the
most visible spaces, the voices and languages of women continue to be less audible?”
(Osterweil 2007: 22). It is our hope and contention that the affect of
feminizing/queering-the-everyday pours vitality into a multiplicity of practices and
modes of behavior that all, constituted together, increase our power (i.e., capacity to act).
This, of course, is a working proposition. It must be verified and furthered in daily
experience. Feminizing the everyday, which involves divesting oneself of patriarchical
practices, does not alone eradicate the system of patriarchy, sexism and male domination.
Oppressions are situational, structural and institutional but also coordinate power in quite
diffuse ways. Thus we must view our struggles as enduring processes that are capable of
recomposing in sustainable ways. In other words, we must conceive of struggle as
something in which we can all participate in the space of our everyday lives.

It is important to root the above process in everyday experience in order to focus on the
potentialities that emerge when we shift power relations on a micro-scale. Our ground is
the basis for the many particularized analyses that inform, identify and re-imagine forms
of collective practice that we enact in our many different communities. This is the red
soil that fortifies our collective existence from the isolation and fear that neoliberalism
intends to harvest in our minds. Mohanty reminds us of the intimate/integral relation
between capital and our (though particularly women’s) lives and bodies. She

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recommends “it is by paying attention to and theorizing the experiences of these

communities of women and girls that we demystify capitalism as a system of debilitating
sexism and racism and envision anticapitalist resistance” (Mohanty 2003: 235). By
engendering a feminist space, we are able to articulate the many ways forward from this
debilitating and isolating neoliberalization of our headspace.

On the other hand, it is equally important to remain systematic and attuned to global
processes that reproduce domination. Indeed, it is the relay between these registers of
everyday and global that we must be careful to acknowledge and understand.
Engendering a direct and lived space for feminist practices to experiment, confront
challenges, and pose community solutions must appeal to a politics without
representations. Equally, we must expand the scales from which we understand
domination and force ourselves from “the micropolitics of context, subjectivity and
struggle […to…] the macropolitics of global economic and political systems and
processes” (Mohanty 2003: 223 and 225). In the process, we must not allow mediations
to substitute equivalence for real differences, nor must we allow contradictions that exist
in our global movements to simply pass along in some higher form or for some higher
purpose. These questions cannot live in the apparatuses of representation because they
are manifest – they rely on lived experience as the register for struggling against these
dominations, everywhere and simultaneously.

What We See When Our Glass Illuminates this Fractured City

The ambitions of the many that participate in Bluestockings are not possible without
reference to all sorts of similar approaches being experimented with everyday. We see
our ‘local’ work as incomprehensible without a sense of the already existing cooperative
efforts of building new networks across the country and the world. This situates the
imperative for us to resist the comfort of celebrating the ‘local’ while shouting slogans
about global injustices. It is not a matter of simply connecting the ‘local’ and the
‘global.’ Indeed, we have seen this exercise become fraught with traps.

Accordingly, we do not simply orient ourselves in local, national and global registers, as
if to create a spatial balance sheet of politics and place. This would be, I think, to
surrender to the vortex of neoliberalism, which attempts to create and manage socio-
spatial divides. Rather we try to retain a fluid and relational sense of space, by mapping
the question of ‘local,’ ‘national’ and ‘global’ space in more than just absolute terms.

Thus, we try to understand our project in the context of our neighborhood as well as in
the context of New York as a neoliberal city. This is intimately tied to the issues of
geographic scale just mentioned. Here, the perspective is to understand neoliberalism not
simply as a general system of coordination that structures power relations and remakes
urban space in an attempt to enervate working class composition. Rather the task is to
look much more carefully at “actually-existing neoliberalism” (Brenner and Theodore
2002). Here we see many struggles situated against specific threats to daily life in the
city, each organizing under different logics and coordinating principles. The fragmented

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nature of the city is such that these struggles do not clearly link up with others. This is
partially because different communities experience the social effects of neoliberal
strategy differently, but also because differences in organizing models and a strict
adherence to identity- and issue-based analysis trumps the propensity to circulate
struggles – to find commonalities that properly understand and illuminate differences.

We have yet to learn how to properly see through the glass lens that is Bluestockings in
order to rise to the challenge of understanding “actually existing neoliberalism” as it
affects communities in struggle across the city and the globe. Addressing this problem
necessarily starts with the ability to understand the many social struggles that exist today
and to inquire how the knowledges produced in these struggles can circulate into larger
spheres. We recognize that we are not alone in this challenge but that we share this
urgency with the many communities that are struggling for social justice in the city.

Nevertheless, we have much more to realize about the capacity of our lens and the need
for innovation alongside the emergence of newer struggles. We do not feel alone,
however, nor do we feel as fragile as a history made of glass suggests. Around us in this
fragmented city, on a daily basis, there are countless other shards that are continually
constituting themselves and their ability to see each other. These are already the
conditions of possibility for focusing our intensities into a spark, setting off the next cycle
of fires in this city.

A Conclusion with Questions

I found the safest place to keep all our tenderness…keep all those bad
ideas, keep all our hope. It’s here in the smallest bones; the feet and the
inner ear. It’s such an enormous thing to walk and to listen.
– John K. Samson

The state-apparatus also produces its own whirlwinds. We are sucked into them on a
daily basis. But in an exploration of our whirlwinds, I have tried to suggest another
rotational force that we should be eager to acknowledge: the rotating ground of everyday
life. While we must admit that this ground of everyday life is overwhelmingly the
constructed space of capture and control, this only clarifies the relationship between
autonomous movements and the context of apparatuses of state and capital. Thus, in the
space of a day, this ground alternatively illuminates and darkens our lives.

I like to imagine the vast organizing energy that surrounds Bluestockings as magnifying
the sunlight just beyond the shadow. This shadow, ever expanding and contracting, has a
long history – much longer than our time as a project. In its current composition, the
shadow can be viewed as the inheritance and increasing reaction of the politics of
domination and oppression effectively organized under the concept of ‘the society of
control.’ We simultaneously produce ourselves and wage battles against this shadow
every day and night. But since these battles are grounded in the spatial ordering of social
life, we must be ready to defend not only the idea of space, but also the many ideas that

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arise from our social recoding of space. This is an inseparable component to our self-
activity – both for our ambitions to embody a new daily life, and for our aspirations for
new subjectivities to arise in and through the experimentation of new social encounters,
values, and modes of behavior.

As a microscopic inquiry, my discussion lacks the conceptual power to clarify many of

the instances and urgencies that arise as our movements struggle to recompose
themselves. Instead, the above has merely been an attempt to introduce into a narrative of
Bluestockings what Maria Mies previously called ‘struggle concepts,’ derived from
experiences of struggle as well as reflection of those experiences. For Mies, these are
“not based on theoretical definitions worked out by an ideological mastermind of the
movement” but are fundamentally have and “open character” (Mies 1986: 36). The
resources that these ‘struggle concepts’ offer are limitless because they borrow from
experiences, hopes, daily lives and possibilities that walk in all directions.

Finding useful registers within which to explore what we’ve learned from recent cycles
of struggle is the united work of all of our experiences. The questions that should be
asked: What struggle concepts may emerge that can guide our movements forward?
What line of inquiry allows the greatest space possible for the apprehension of
confluences (not equivalences) in our whirlwind of activity? The answers lie in our
ability to see how various activities derive from both common and disparate conditions.
Perhaps our challenge is to learn how to see difference when searching for
commonalities, and to see commonalities when searching for difference.

Notes:
i
As Subcommandante Marcos originally wrote in August of 1992, "The storm is here. From the
clash of these two winds the storm will be born, its time has arrived. Now the wind from above
rules, but the wind from below is coming..."
ii
It seemed to have risen suddenly in 1999 in Seattle only to be felled by the twin shocks of brutal
repression in Genoa in 2001 and the onslaught of an intensified repressive response to our
movements after the fall of the World Trade Center buildings just a few months later.
iii
Deleuze and Guattari’s words to describe the war machine as it intersects the work relation are
illuminating. The model juxtaposes free action (what they call “war”) with work, which lives
analogously with their distinction between weapon and tool: “doubtless the State apparatus tends
to bring uniformity to the regimes, by disciplining its armies, by making work a fundamental unit,
in other words, by imposing its own traits. But it is not impossible for weapons and tools, if they
are taken up by new assemblages of metamorphosis, to enter other relations of alliance.” The
concept brings together the worker and the ‘warrior’ of the war machine, “the shared line of flight
of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility, a mutation.” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus: 402
iv
This community-being “is not…either an essence or an existence but a manner of rising forth;
not a being that is in this or that mode, but a being that is its mode of being, and thus, while
remaining singular and not indifferent, is multiple and valid for all.” Giorgio Agamben, The
Coming Community (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press, 1993: 28)

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v
See Anita Lacey’s “Forging Spaces of Liberty” in Constituent Imaginations for more on the
creation of space that links patriarchy and neoliberalism, especially in the direct-action,
temporary contexts of the anti-globalization movement in which she writes.

References:

Agamben, Giorgio. 1993. The Coming Community. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota
Press.

Brenner, Neil and Nik Theodore. 2002. "Cities and the geographies of 'actually existing
neoliberalism'.” Antipode, 34, 3: 356-386.

Colectivo Situaciones. 2003. “On the Researcher-Militant.” Translated by Sebastian Touza.

Transform.
(http://transform.eipcp.net/transversal/0406/colectivosituaciones/en)

Dalla Costa, Mariarosa and Selma James. 1972. The Power of Women and the Subversion of the
Community. Brighton, UK: Falling Walls Press.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987. A Thousand Plateaus. Minneapolis, MN: University
of Minnesota Press.

Hamilton, Todd and Nate Holden. 2007. “Compositional Power” Turbulence: Ideas for
Movement, June 2007: 20-21.

Holtzman, Ben, Craig Hughes and Kevin Van Meter. 2007. “Do It Yourself…and the
Movement Beyond Capitalism.” Pp. 44-61 in Constituent Imaginations: Militant Investigations,
Collective Theorization. Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle.
Oakland, CA: AK Press.

Mies, Maria. 1986. Patriarchies and Accumulation on a World Scale: Women in the
International Division of Labor. London, UK: Zed Books.

Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. 2003. Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing
Solidarity. Durham, NC: Duke University.

Osterweil, Michal and Graeme Chesters. 2007. “Global Uprisings: Towards a Politics of the
Artisan.” Pp. 253-262 in Constituent Imaginations: Militant Investigations, Collective
Theorization. Edited by Stevphen Shukaitis and David Graeber with Erika Biddle. Oakland, CA:
AK Press.

Osterweil, Michal. 2007. “Becoming-Woman: In Theory or in Practice?” Turbulence: Ideas for

Movement, June 2007: 22-23.

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