Counter-Tribes, Global Protest and Carnivals of Reclamation

Abstract

When Reclaim the Streets (RTS) activists passionately recount the first London events, as they have recently in Are Everywhere, by the Notes from Nowhere collective, they effectively recollect what became a template for popular in the emergent of movements. appearance in the mid 1990s of a global justice movement consisting of multitudes with a common grievance against neoliberalism suggests the presence of a single issue protest movement. issue, condensed as One No, Many Yeses, encompasses the entire planet, but is fought on multiple fronts, in variant guises, with diverse influences. And while commentators report that this anti-corporate globalisation movement has been stirred by such seemingly disparate events as the Zapatista uprising and Reclaim the Streets, it also appears that the anti-disciplinary counter-culturalism of an earlier period was getting a second wind. Indeed, by the beginning of the twenty-first century, slogans like We Are Everywhere and The Whole World Is Watching were being enthusiastically recycled. Something was happening here, again. And with the maturation of networked cultural politics, this time around it appeared truly global. While extensive comparisons with earlier movements cannot be undertaken here, this essay contributes to discussions of methods through which global anxieties are addressed and redressed in local acts of resistance. In particular it makes exploratory forays into the cultural politics of reclaiming (of land, culture, the internet, the commons, the streets), which appears to have obtained a zeitgeistUke grip upon those compelled to resist corporate globalization. proliferation of anti-corporate struggle necessitates the search for useful models through which to comprehend cultures of and youth activism. tradition of youth cultural studies provides us with little assistance in this regard. Attending to rituals of resistance and discrete subcultures, the theoretical developments emanating from Birmingham's Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) provide inappropriate heuristics for the comprehension of formations networked in opposition to corporate rule. semiotic and physical tactics of contemporary activism are not synonymous with symbolic or stylistic disruption, nor are they efforts at winning space from the parent culture for leisure and recreational pursuits. In his Profane Culture, Paul Willis identified how, for post-war working class youth, struggle was waged exclusively through lifestyle, and since stylistic transgression provided no real solution to their subordinate structural position, style was the tragic limit of working class cultural politics. While style—a desire for cutting-edge or hardcore transgres-