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91 CHAPTER SIX Revolutionary Rehearsals? The crowd sees the city around them with different eyes. John Berger To be on anew and basking in the panaroma of all flores of speech. James Joyce I. Encounters in Transition The spark that triggers any irruptive, swerving encounter is like that first Jackson Pollock drip: suddenly the paint falls onto the giant canvas; things explode at ground level, on the floor, in the street; dense skeins of black and white swirls disrupt the field of vision; brown and silver nebulae dazzle; paint is layered on swiftly, like meteorites flashing across a white void. There’s neither beginning nor end here; entering is via some middle door, with no meaning other than a pure intensity, a flow of pure becoming. Standing in front of a huge Pollock masterpiece like One, Number 31 (1950), or Autumn Rhythm (1950), is an experience filled with the same dramatic (and unnerving) intensity as standing amid a huge crowd at a demonstration or occupation, amid a huge mob on the street or in a square. There’s violence and beauty, and the same spontaneous energy that both incites and terrifies; the same splattering of colors and entangled lines are there before you but now they’re direct extensions of your own body. Now you’re in the canvas. Those swift, dripped lines that run right across the canvas somehow flow through you and become frenzied gestures of your own self, yourself in the crowd, the crowd in you. You forget all, tear yourself away from all, are present here and now; passions are expressed rather than illustrated. During such intense mob moments, such moments when people encounter one another, “the instant of greatest importance,” a thinker like Henri Lefebvre reckons, “is the instant of failure. The drama is situated within that instant of failure: it is the emergence from the everyday or collapse on failing to emerge, it 92 • chapter six is a caricature or a tragedy, a successful festival or a dubious ceremony.”1 Therein lies the problem: The encounter “wants to endure,” Lefebvre says, needs to endure , has to endure. “But it cannot endure (at least, not for very long). Yet this inner contradiction gives it its intensity, which reaches crisis point when the inevitably of its own demise becomes apparent.”2 One moment leads to another, and a politics of encounter erupts when moments collide, when affinities take hold. But how can the intensity of the encounter be sustained, how can it be harmonized with a continuous political evolution, with a politics of transformation , one that endures over the long haul? How to ensure that this encounter in everyday life—this spontaneous lived moment—assumes a mutation of world-historical significance? The question assumes considerable gravity as well as grace (as Simone Weil might have said) for any would-be revolutionary. In fact, it lays down the stakes of what it means to be revolutionary in the first place; to want to initiate a clear and clean break with existing reality, wanting to break on through into another reality, into another realm, into another mode of production. Needless to say, the theme is first and foremost political not theoretical, answerable only through practice, not radical thought. But the issue of break—the idea that the revolutionary encounter or series of encounters unleashes a transition into something distinctively new, that it can punctuate different eras, signal a rupture between an old and a newer epoch—has been debated among Marxists ever since the beginnings of Marxism. Lefebvre says “the urban” is itself revolutionary , and, as such, the revolution would consequently be urban. In a single line, that summarizes the gist of The Urban Revolution. And yet within that line lurks something else. By “revolution,” Lefebvre says, “I refer to transformations that affect contemporary society. . . . Some transformations are sudden; others gradual, planned, determined. But which ones?” “It is by no means certain in advance,” he says, “that the answer will be clear, intellectually satisfying, or unambiguous.”3 Lefebvre reckons that the urban revolution—the arrival of urban society—is a complex mix of organicism, continuism, and evolutionism, something both determined and contingent, a radical break and a gradual morphing, something real and virtual, “the actual” and “the possible” encountering one another. The seeds of urban society, for instance, were sown in the city. The medieval town harbored the emergence of the industrial city, and within one its other could be glimpsed. The transition from one to this other...

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