Šokis liepsnose: vaizduotė ir mažosios saviorganizacijos formos
Dancing amidst the Flames: Imagination and Self-organisation in a Minor Key

Summary/Abstract: During the mid-1960s in Chicago there emerged a crossover between the militant syndicalist labor organizing of Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) and Surrealist inspired flights of fancy, embodied and circulated in publications such as the Rebel Worker. But rather than the somber and austere images of labor struggle that one often finds, this section of the IWW embraced youth revolt, free jazz and artistic experimentation, and rock n’ roll in their pursuit of developing “critical theory at it Bugs Bunniest Best” and “dialectics in the spirit of the Incredible Hulk”. Taking their inspiration from the growing tides of political unrest expressed increasingly through forms of pop culture they would come to write about the political potential for developing social struggle drawing from these social energies, arguing in pamphlets like Mods, Rockers, and Revolution that songs like “Dancin in the Streets” show that the yearning for freedom and refusal to submit to bureaucratic pressures are not just the desires of small bands of militants but rather “almost instinctive attitudes of most of our fellow workers”. From this they would conclude that their task was not to “bring” awareness of the problems of capitalism, racism, and the social injustice to people who for the most part were already quite aware of them. Rather, taking more inspiration from Lennon than Lenin, they sought to connect the multitude of forms of rebellion and discontent that already existed involving all sorts of social subjects whose actions were not often assumed to have a political character. But how are these moments and revolts and insubordination, bridged tenuously through the semiotic scaffolding of these pop songs, connected? While such a question could easily raise the concern that such is a mere coincidence, it is illustrative of a larger process of the politics of minor composition – a politics based on using whatever materials are available in the social milieu to formulate new relations, forms of self-organization, and embodiments of the radical imagination. Through the circulation of particular musical compositions people found a means to organize and articulate their desires for escaping from the daily workday, to develop a critique in culture (rather than of culture) of the dystopian nature of work that people sought to escape from. It is through these kinds of circulations, connections, and relays that the revolution of everyday life is fermented and realizes – that is, it is embodied and evolves through a constantly morphing everyday life of revolution.

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