Experimental Politics and the Making of Worlds

Creative strategies have been central to global social movements. From the theatrics of the 1999 Seattle protests to the rebel clowns at the 2005 G8 summit in Gleneagles and the antics of the Yes Men the crossovers between art and politics have increasingly become more visible and prolific. This book explores an innovative form of creative and communicative politics: the ’performative encounter’ as a strategy for facilitating new ways of being relating and making worlds. Unlike existing scholarship that frames such encounters in artistic or cultural terms this book analyzes performative encounters through an organizational lens to accentuate their social-political potential engaging a wealth of material from autonomist philosophy political science performance studies geography and social movement texts. Intertwining conceptual and ethnographic research it uniquely maps out one narrative of the encounter tracing a line through the twentieth century from the Berlin Dadaists to the Situationist International to several contemporary German collectives and campaigns showing how performative encounters intervene in global and local issues such as the privatization of public space and resources human mobility and the corporatization of education.