 |
|
|||
|
|
|||
83 (Melucci 1989, 120-121)
(Melucci 1989, 120-121)
Here lies the root of all ambiguity in collective action. Contemporary movements centred on the spontaneity, purity and immediacy of ’natural’ needs stand in opposition to the tendency of ’the social’ to reduce individual differences to systemic normality. But at the same time nature becomes an ideological phantom that nourishes the delusion of escaping from the constraints of social relations. The retreat to naturalism in marginal counter-cultures thereby becomes a pathological denial of the problems involved in all forms of sociality - scarcity of resources, the need for efficient and effective action, the distribution of work and power.
Hence the urge for liberation results in the exaltation of an illusory ’spontaneity’, the veneration of immediate experience over and above reflective thought. In this way actors nullify and disguise the essential character of the human need for identity, i.e. for belonging to nature and to society, for simultaneously experiencing each as a possibility and a limit. Through this experience, the ’nature’ within and around us ceases to be the realm of obscure forces and lays itself open to conscious human action; but none the less it remains the ’limit’ of this action. In turn, society ’delimits’ nature by means of rules and codes, by turning natural human energy into information.
This point is obscured by appeals to ’spontaneous’ nature, which can justify every act of submission. Meanwhile, in highly developed societies the systems of control are being restructured to integrate the alleged ’naturalness’ of needs in support of the new models of conformity promoted, for example, by advertising campaigns based on the mythology of a ’pure’ body and a ’natural’ and ’healthy’ environment. This trend can be resisted only by keeping open the tension between ’natural’ needs and the constraints of social existence. That in turn requires the recognition that the ’nature’ we are beginning to discover within us, and which expresses itself as a site of deeply felt needs and resistance to external pressures, is in reality inseparable from the rules and rituals of social life.
An analogous ambivalence is evident in the appeal to the social character of needs. This appeal becomes ideological when it is instrumental in the diffusion of social control, and especially when it is used to justify the integration of the individual into networks that impose conformity and reduce individual problems to those of the group. But at the same time this appeal testifies to the presence of communicative needs that atomlzed, mass society tends to deny. It underlines the social origins of welfare demands and the political character of collective needs. And it resists the reduction of needs to processes of bureaucratic/ administrative specialization, and to the fragmentation produced by the welfare system. [Melucci, Alberto. 1989. Nomads of the Present. London: Hutchinson Radius.]
