I haven’t been reflecting much since my first post, but I did go on a 2+ weeks trip and spent much of that time disconnecting which is something that always puts things in perspective.

As I sat down to write my first reflection in several weeks, I found notes from the last fellowship meeting I participated in, some 3 weeks ago. These notes are sparse and prompt me to reflect on the aspects of my day to day work at 1RG that are community care, in particular the ritual of the dinners, and their origins. Sharing meals is almost ubiquitous across cultures and times and while identifying its origin might be an interesting rabbit hole to go down (hello Symposia!), I think it is beside the point.

A strong motivation for my research is to be able to better articulate what and why is 1RG Space so the notes make sense, but they also feel distant - this is maybe an obvious result of the time that has passed between writing those notes and sitting down to reflect upon them, but there’s more. They excercise no traction on my curiosity.

My mind wonders, uneasy, and unsure what direction to take. Something is missing.

My natural inclination, when I start learning something new, is to to start from first principles. Then what’s missing is a definition of community, one that is personal as opposed to the wikipedia impersonal¹. I am convinced that definition holds the keys to the direction of this research.

Much of my time in Italy was spent lounging in the sun and reading - a historical fantasy epic about student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British Empire², a journalistic account of the Sidewalk Labs debacle in Toronto³, and the philosophical manifesto of resistance to the attention economy⁴

While none of the reads is explicitly related to this research, I can see a common thread that connects them to it.

Humor me⁵.

I started reading How to do Nothing before my vacation and I was captivated by the concept of resistance-in-place ⁶ as described by the author:

To resist in place is to make oneself into a shape that cannot so easily be appropriated by a capitalist value system [ … ] embracing and trying to inhabit somewhat fuzzier or blobbier ideas: of maintenance as productivity [… ] recognizing and celebrating a form of the self [ … ] whose identity doesn’t always stop at the boundary of the individual.

In the book weaves in the history of labor movement with strikes being the quintessential manifestation of doing nothing as a form or collective resistance that requires extreme focus and individual commitment to the cause.

This theme of collective resistance also appears in the other two books. In Babel, is the Hermes Society and the students and translators who rebel to Empire with a strike that culminates in a violent confrontation. In Sideways, it’s the local groups that oppose the development of a high-tech high-surveillance space on the lakeshore of Toronto.

There’s something here, in the idea of a collective resistance, that points me towards a definition of community that feels more meaningful to the context of this research: community as a place where the individual meets with others, to give origin to some sort of being that is larger than the sum of the parts, and wields a stronger power for resistance and change⁷.

What are then, the actions we can take, to forge and strengthen the bonds that enable the generation of a powerful collective being that supports its individuals in (big and small) acts of resistance?