Animating Up and Down the Street.

Most of us get beaten down by life every day. Your immortality is hammered out of you day by day, where little by little you’re cut down to size to a mere mortal. Where you get to feel that you don’t matter, that if someone else was occupying the space your life occupies, there would not be any difference. And as this happens, our desire grows to be a part of something that affirms who we are as part of a group. The only problem is that in joining the group we often lose ourselves and degrade our individuality, that which is essential about us. In the desire to join the group we forget who we are in order to meet the exigencies of the group. So how can we become oneself with a group that requires homogeneity and similarity in order for it to exist? I feel that the answer lies within us all but in a strange place. It lies in the affirmation of the awkwardness and tentativeness of becoming, because within that alienating feeling of awkwardness and tentativeness is the moment when we are truly being, when we are improvising our unfolding, walking on the tightrope of our becoming without a net. And this awkwardness and tentativeness is always part of the creative process. It is a constant companion on the path of creativity. And this is not the studied preciousness of an affected tentativeness, but the insecurity and uncertainty that accompanies becoming. Some of us thrive on it, some of us disregard it as par for the course. It’s the feeling you get in trying to express yourself in a new way, where you are not sure of what you’re doing but you feel compelled to keep on going. It usually entails exposing your self, with all the attendant awkwardness of a seedling sprouting towards the light.

And it is in this awkward and tentative becoming that something extraordinary happens that Erin calls moving the relation. As soon as you move the relation, you engage the micropolitical. It’s an interesting way of thinking about what constitutes the political and how to participate in the political process by incorporating its aesthetics. These ideas surround principles of heightened subjectivity, relation and process. For me, what I’ve taken out of it is and what I’m sure is a cliché for you all, is that you can make a difference by participating in any activity, in any process. However, the way that I understand their process of participation is by fomenting subjectivity. It’s not a question of a right approach or the right direction, but one of embarking on a process, any process and letting it develop, mutate, unfold, change you.

The idea is to make things happen, to celebrate becomings, to inflect anything that moves with your subjectivity, personality, character or whatever you want to call it. We all do this more or less as a matter of course on a daily basis; most likely the people you interact with on a regular basis would likely miss you if you suddenly went missing. But I think that what constitutes the micropolitical difference is to make a conscious effort to inflect some activity in your life with a gesture that will generate animation, movement to subjectivity. To give it spin. We hear the word spin all the time applied to sports and obviously to politics. But the kind of spin I’m talking about is a lot smaller than that. It consists of dropping a seed, a nugget of possibility, a germ of potential and to let it grow, let it germinate. It’s not a question of doing the grand-geste afin d’épatter les bourgeois. The micropolitical activist is a political Johny Appleseed, or if you prefer un Homme qui plantait des arbres—like the character in Frederic Bach’s animated film. You plant the seed and walk on to plant others. It doesn’t matter where the seed falls, or whether it germinates, or becomes a huge tree. What matters is the process and not the outcome; you’ve changed in some minor and perhaps imperceptible way the unfolding of the universe of potential. You break a strand in what would have been the inevitable becoming of a future becoming past and spin the future into a something ever so slightly different that is tinged with more of your subjectivity. The key is not to get ego-involved with the seeding: don’t look back, move on to the next animation, to the next movement relation.

If you don’t like what's going on, make signs on 8 ½ x 11 paper right out of your computer with what you want to say and put it up on bulletin boards and telephone poles in your neighbourhood. Make copies and stuff them in people’s mail boxes on your street. Do it without asking anyone or telling anyone, just do it. Just thinking about this should make you feel awkward and stupid. Simply acknowledge that it is creativity and your self-becoming. Your $6 campaign will result in change, perhaps ever so slightly and imperceptibly. Any kind of small change to the intuition of the future is a micropolitical move of the relation. Who knows what it will bring, who cares? Move on!