The Zad and NoTAV. Mauvaise Troupe

And it is the ability of these movements to have stabilized in time, to fashion new and creative ways of inhabiting a conflict, which emerges as one of the most important elements of their stories. For these struggles are what the Maoists used to call ‘protracted wars’ – children, even grandchildren of early opponents are now implicated in the struggles. Ogawa’s filming of the ‘Mama’s Brigades’ during the Narita battles makes this vividly clear. Their sheer duration is a vital factor in creating a different relationship to the territory than shorter-lived occupations like Taksim, Occupy, or Madrid – not coincidentally, all urban occupations. As Peter Kropotkin pointed out in his re-writing of the history of the Paris Commune in The Conquest of Bread, proximity to and involvement with the means of subsistence is essential not only to the duration of a movement but to establishing a lived intimacy with the territory. At the heart of that relationship is a form of embeddedness that this book’s authors describe as the breakdown in daily life of any distinction between dwelling in a territory and defending it. With the passage of time, however, the nature of what is being defended changes. Where once it may have been an unpolluted environment or agricultural land, what is defended as the struggle deepens now comes to include all the new social links, solidarities, affective ties, and lived entanglements that the struggle produced. Any place owes its character to the experiences it affords to those who dwell in it or spend time there, and these include the new physical relation – what Gaston Bachelard called the ‘muscular consciousness’ of the territory – something that derives in part from the seasonal rhythm of agricultural labour and in part from physical combat during the many skirmishes and battles with the forces of order. And in both the Susa Valley and Notre-Dame-des-Landes these physical battles with the state have been severe. Perhaps for this reason, the new relationship to the territory also includes the reawakening of its past rebel history: the anti-fascist resistance in the Susa Valley, or a vernacular commune-precedent to the zad like the Commune de Nantes in 1968. Defending the territory in a protracted war comes to entail defending the very collective life project that has taken shape there during its defense – a project that, as Escobar suggests, may include the very concept of territoriality itself.¹⁵ To the extent that the concept nurtures a certain autonomy and will to self-determination akin to what Raymond Williams theorized as ‘militant particularism’, this seems to be the case in the two struggles. The notion of a territory helps create an environment that, in Williams’ words, can be ‘received and made and remade’, actively molded and achieved through work, play and battle.¹⁶ It creates in the dweller an experiential center or standpoint from which to perceive the greater world, a mode of apprehension based on being actively engaged in the labour, practices, and material details of conducting life collectively at the daily level – cultivating, building, caring for animals, assembling a library.

A smaller-scale and more circumscribed territory like the zad may lend itself more easily to fashioning a productive form of livable secession than the vast Susa Valley. This was what William Morris, for one, believed – direct management of one’s own affairs can occur only on a scale small enough that each person ‘can take pleasure in all the details of life.’¹⁷ The NoTAV movement numbers in the tens of thousands dispersed throughout a large region, while the zad’s residents, whose exact number is unknown since the most recent administrative census could find no volunteers willing to enter the zone to take an official count, are perhaps a couple hundred, only swelling to the tens of thousands on the days of mass mobilization in the face of impending evacuation. Experiments at the zad include, but are not limited to, a weekly ‘non-market’ to distribute vegetables, collective use of lands, the embrace of what the Parisian Communards called ‘communal luxury’ – the aesthetic, pleasurable dimension of all labour, in any number of examples.¹⁸ To cite again one of communal luxury’s most adept exponents, William Morris: ‘the true secret of happiness lies in the taking of interest in all the details of daily life, in elevating them by art instead of handing the performance of them over to unregarded drudges.’¹⁹ This is a version of happiness proven to provoke aggravation and retaliation on the part of the state. ‘If it has become so crucial for the political classes to crush the zad, it is because the zad constitutes an insolent demonstration of a life that is possible without them. A better life …’²⁰ Left to its own devices, which is not at all certain to be the case, the zad’s future points to a becoming-commune. But this book shows militants in the Susa Valley also undergoing a substantial transformation of their daily life by re-owning it, by and through political struggle, and becoming fully accountable for it. Thus, the importance granted to those creative movement-driven inventions and forms of sociability like the presidii (protest sites) in the Susa Valley that are at once banquets, meeting places, and shelters.

      In both cases, defending a territory from the outset brought together extremely eclectic and diverse groups of people around that goal. The never-ending process of soldering together black bloc anarchists and nuns, retired farmers and vegan lesbian separatists, lawyers and autonomistas into a tenacious and effective community is what the authors call ‘composition’, and the story of its unfolding is, to my mind, the most compelling part of the book. This is the daily drama of unexpected encounters, of co-existing, sharing space, coordinating, recognizing difference, undergoing existential overhaul, and, above all, learning to avoid the temptation of trying to convert others to the superiority of one’s practices, whether these be spreading counter information, hunger strikes, the fastidious preparation of legal appeals, nocturnal sabotage, naturalist surveys to document the endangered species among the flora and fauna of the zone, or frontal confrontations with the police. And it is what is meant by the book’s subtitle: ‘the making of a new political intelligence’. ‘In the act of holding diverse elements together’, write the authors, ‘it is more a question of tact than tactics, passion than sad necessities, and opening up the field than carving up the terrain.’

      The phenomenon of solidarity in diversity is mirrored in another ‘composition’ as well: the formal decisions the authors have made in recounting its achievement almost entirely through the voices of those who built it. This book is not an anti-state manifesto or an abstract treatise. While highly theoretical, very little time is wasted on theoretical edifices or citational strategy. It does not prophesize the coming insurrection but instead recounts – from the inside, for the authors are themselves actively engaged in the struggles they narrate – two insurrections in progress. Telling the two stories together, in a productive entanglement that isolates moments of convergence, while allowing each struggle its own history, poetry and praxis, is not only difficult – it is itself an exemplary exercise in solidarity in diversity. The narrative choice to relate the movements almost entirely in the individual voices of their protagonists mirrors the authors’ territorial commitments and it also leads to something quite new in the creation of a tableau of what revolution might look like today. The personal testimonies are not merely called upon to provide context or local colour to the dominant story, as is so frequently the case. They certainly do this, and very vividly, but they also move the plot forward in time, providing key eye-witness depictions of dramatic moments in their sagas; they enact conflicting viewpoints and commentary on strategy debates; they reflect on the reasons behind particular choices made under given conditions – choices that are the very essence of historical change; they theorize their own commitments and conflicts. They show the forceful role of women in every aspect of the struggle – something I have witnessed myself at the zad. Often intensely personal, the voices reach beyond to a common flow. And as such, those who speak are not mere data, illustrations, or foot-soldiers to a pre-existing theory or revolutionary prediction but the flesh, blood and thought of the movements they are making.

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1See Arturo Escobar, Territories of Difference: Place,