Imagining an umbrella community : place, practice and affect

Abstract

‘Have we come to a post-community era?’ This is probably one of the seeming naïve, while nonetheless mind-boggling, questions facing anyone who finds the recent trend of revolutions and unorthodox political developments challenging and disturbing. Collectivities no longer aspire towards commonality as a basis for creating a sense of community. Nor are they swinging completely towards the desire for anarchy. Given that ‘politics’ is fundamentally a matter of building and shaping society, it is high time to revisit the concept of ‘community’. Drawing upon the Deleuze-Guattarian concept of ‘assemblage’, this thesis argues that ‘community’ is created in the continuous wrestling between the tendencies of territorialisation and de-territorialisation. On the one hand, social members aspire towards consolidation in the establishment of proximity in daily life. On the other hand, the desire for emancipation leads to continuous resistance to the stabilisation of social structures. Instead of forming a stable object that can be located, identified, and analysed, processes of community creation engender the continuous becoming of a community. Neither consensus nor difference can capture ‘community’ as a phenomenon in which forces of stasis and change are interpolated. ‘Community’ as a phenomenon exists in the co- temporality of the two forces. Processes of territorialisation and de-territorialisation, structuralisation and de-structuralisation occur as one. Through an examination of the Umbrella Movement that took place in Hong Kong from September to December 2014, the thesis explores an alternative way of conceptualising the phenomenon of ‘community’. The Umbrella Movement was chosen for the current study in part because it developed as an ‘anti-structure’ collectivity, i.e. one that embodied in multiple dimensions the paradoxical tension between stasis and becoming. This thesis looks at the Movement through three specific framings or dimensions: place, practice, and affect. ‘Place’ concerns the spatial dimension of the collectivity. The analysis addresses the embodied occupation and semiotic transformation of the city space as both a site place of politics and a residential locale for the participants. While the dimension of place demonstrates the opening up of potentiality through the displacement of established orders, the dimension of practice reveals the twin discursive processes of naturalising the political and politicising the quotidian. ‘Practice’ also highlights the metadiscursive tensions among participants, who held conflicting conceptualisations of the Movement. The dimension of affect is centrally concerned with the temporal dimension of the collectivity. It involves the synchronic affective alignment and emotional impact created through conflicts between the participants and the regime, and the formation of internal solidarity and coherence as an effect of affective resonance. Arguing that affectivity is not confined to actual experiences in the here and now, the dimension of affect ventures into the virtuality of the diachronic as participants transpose threats of the past and hope of the future into the present. By integrating the three dimensions, the thesis aims to shed light on the concept of ‘community’ and to develop a model that could be used for conceptualising collectivities as phenomena constituted out of multiplicities and shaped by co-temporal tensions between forces of consolidation and forces of transformation.