The thought-word-action plot in the autonomous experiences of militant research in Argentina

Abstract

In this article I analyze the relations between thought, words and action that emerge from reading works published by those experiments in militant research that gravitated around Colectivo Situaciones. What comes into view is an original a way of interpreting both the resistances to neoliberalism that are part of the daily lives of the subaltern and the paths those lives have taken in response to the Kirchner administrations, the traditional Left, autonomists biased by academicism, and the neoliberal Right. I focus on the distinctive features of a conception of thought which, without losing from view the structural characteristics of neoliberalism, flees from abstractions to assert itself as a singular way of asking questions, listening, and paying attention to raw and plebeian forms of life. This way of thinking does not conceive words as means to convey contents or declare positions. Rather, words are seen as travelling between bodies to compose affects in order to enhance the power to act, to affect, and to be affected. Thought and words are as well linked to a way of understanding autonomous struggles, the aftermath of 19th and 12th of December of 2001, and the becoming of that legacy in the long decade of the Kirchner administrations and the ascent of Mauricio Macri to the presidency of Argentina.