Notes for Eric #5

I mentioned earlier that the assemblage, the community, is never static and can become something reactionary as well as revolutionary. The group is also an assemblage, and my first thought is about the difference in the assemblage ‘group’ and in the assemblage ‘community’. They obviously share a lot of features – not least being that they can become reactionary as well as revolutionary. They can fuck you up as much as lift you up.

Maybe there’s a difference in scale between a group that is reactionary (fucking you up) and one that is revolutionary (lifting you up) – one that is felt acutely, if incoherently, by anyone involved in revolutionary groups – but I think it’s not really about scale directly. They fuck you up as easily as they lift you up if you’re not careful, but if you are careful then they are the only way in which some which of our capacities can be expressed.

That ‘be careful’ is often taken as a warning but it shouldn’t be, at least not all the time. It’s all in the tone, perhaps, which never comes across so easily online as in a face to face setting (or at least, we tend to think it doesn’t). Is it too easy to just play with the words? Careful, full of care. And who can be full of care all the time? Maybe it’s a function that exists, as Guattari might say, transversally, that only exists in so far as it cuts across a series of ‘care full filling practices’ that are being carried out by different individuals and sub-units of a group, or community.

There’s an interesting connection between ‘care’ and group or community. As assemblages they differ in the way that ‘care’ can be given, or received. I think in some sense the feeling of what care is, differs from group assemblage to community assemblage in such a way as to distinguish the one from the other. There’s that thing about scale again, at what scale do I encounter care (either in terms of giving, receiving or noticing)? At its most intense it’s thought to be commonly found at the one to one level, but this seems like it will feel different from what we’ll find at the group level and then again different at the community level, and I almost feel like I might be able to navigate the movement from one space to the other by the feel of the care relationship that exists, or has the potential to exist (whatever that might mean).

This week I rode to Bristol for the Plan C Congress. It’s the second longish ride out on the new bike, previously I rode to just outside Sheffield. Interestingly enough, that was to go to Plan C Fast Forward Festival. Obviously I don’t travel widely unless it’s for something kind of political. Both times the rides to the venues were done in the pouring rain, although both times I also got sun filled rides home, even if the roads were still wet in places. As I came into Sussex, I rode down the B2141, one of those curious roads seemingly in the middle of nowhere but which is in pretty decent nick. So many of the roads I ride appear to be fucked up it’s noticeable when you get a well maintained, or newish, bit of tarmac. Things flow well on good roads. In the middle of this moment, filled with all that lush green countryside, there was the body of a roe deer, lying full and large on the left hand side and I slowed as I passed it, checking in. It was clearly dead, ‘roadkill’. At what scale does my care for that doe get to be felt? It kind of bounces around, shifting the resonances after the encounter.