I think one important problem with doug's reading of autonomy is that he's unaware of a tradition of seeing it much differently. Nomos doesn't mean law, rather there's a sociological meaning that refers to the Greek 'nomos' as all the tacit rules, norms, practices that organize our shared lives together in our daily activities. Peter Berger calls it meaningful order. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomos_(sociology) additionally, simply google "positive freedom" + autonomy.
Be that as it may, I'm not sure I would describe the people in our Occupy as people made to feel empty but one thing is clear: the ecstasy - the collective effervescence and energy -- is overflowing because there is an opportunity to debate issues with one another, to figure out how to do so without getting into disastrous fights (it gets heated), and the recognition that, together, they can get things done even when there are serious disagreements.
There was a debate over the demands working group, one fellow said, "this is a declaration of independence. this isn't about demanding things from the king. they didn't make demands; they declared independence."
This was said on the heels of a small , but invigorating, victory where the group had pulled together unimaginable resources, negotiated with various local businesses, entities, and law enforcement, in order to set up a power station and internet connection. What is most interesting to me is that the building of interpersonal relationships is inevitable in such a situation, in this case, there's also an acute awareness that complete strangers, sometimes very far away, are not just supporting them but giving them money, supplies, resources, access.
It occurred to me after that young man said that, especially after he turned and said, I don't know a whole lot about the circumstances then, does anyone know?, that they are rewriting Robinson Crusoe and Electric Kool Aid Acid Test.
It's like they've been shipwrecked and they must figure out how to survive, together, working off what they have of existing society - with its traditions, technologies, art, music, credos, declarations, laws, history, culture, norms. I mean, you can't help but flounder around and realize how dependent you are on a host of things, practices, and ideas you once took for granted. You are keenly aware of society, of civilization, and all it has bequeathed to you at this point. How else do you get a power station and a secure internet connection up and running without recognizing how precisely you are bound up in, dependent on, and necessary to society and its continued existence.
This is what autonomy looks like. It's what I described earlier as the "cultivation of practices which nurture citizens capable of autonomous democratic self-rule where practices and authorities are understood as something we must actively, consciously agree to and participate in, rather than merely accept them as natural. In the name of democracy, it is claimed that a social order might possibly to transcend its own naturalized arbitrariness."
Here, the process gives the birth of a sense of self keenly felt as part of something quite larger than the self. This is why autonomy is always posed as distinct from, if not the opposite of, liberty. Where autonomy is freedom understood positively, the freedom to, as opposed to a liberty where freedom is understood negatively, the freedom from.
What you know is that you have never done any of this alone, but with the help of myriad people, many of whom you are building relationships with at the encampment, but also many people who help make things happen who never show up. They live in the wilds of North Carolina and can't make it, so they are sending a generator. They live 40 miles away in Onancock, but they will write the working paper. They work all day and have small children, but they are sending $500 they raised at church.
All of a sudden, someone shows up with a car full of tarps, tents, blankets, water, food. You have so much food, in fact, you don't know what to do with it. You have money coming in and you have to figure out what to do with it. How do you work within existing institutions to put money for the group into a bank and be sure some jackass doesn't abscond with it? How do you run a facebook group on collective principles when it is clear that not everyone can be an admin. How do you amanage it with 10 admins? You contemplate all that and think, "woah dude. This shit's getting complicated." Then, two guys show up who know how to build a sustainable source of energy to power laptops. Someone runs into the camp excitedly saying she's found two local business who will let us set up a wireless connection.
The naysayers can sneer at this, they can call this prefigurative politics simple-minded, they can dismiss it as a lot of drum circle folderol. Obviously, there is much amusement about all this, although perhaps poor Max can pour some ketchup on it like my dad poured ketchup on the Army's hamburger gravy to make it a little more palatable. :)
But the people who enter into this kind of politics are not, by any means, uncritically reproducing the empty bourgeois individualism fostered by shopping malls and consumerism, where citizenship has been reduced to carrying around knapsacks of preferences which you whip out at cash registers in order to make your (vote) preferences known, with little understanding of how those preferences are socially constituted, let alone a meaningful say in how those products were made, who made them, how they were paid, what their labor conditions were like.
Instead, when you have to figure out how to build something together like this, you realize that you never build it from scratch, you are always working off the old. Witness the young man who becomes keenly aware that he needs some guidance from 1776 which then propels him to a history book to ask questions of his answers. Under such conditions, you have to continually question everything you once assumed was a given, was normal, was just the way things were. This is often exhilerating, it is the source of the joy you see, it is why they feel powerful. It is why some of them will lay their asses on the line for this, why they will be willing to die for it. It is not because they are asserting an individuality against a hollow core of emptiness bequeathed them by a chain store that they would have their arms twisted behind their backs as a boot is shoved on their neck, their face smashed into concrete.
As they build a life together, as they exercise this prefigurative politics in precisely the way someone who's been in traction for six months exercises atrophied muscles, they develop an sense of autonomy in what might otherwise seem a rather mundane experience: generating a power supply and firing up an internet connection.
They have to ask, in a way they never asked before,where does power to run a laptop come from? How do we get internet connectivity?. How do we get it to where we need it. Who 'owns' it, who controls it? And now, for our shipwrecked crew, how do we want to make it, run it, control it, maintain it? What has worked? What didn't work? Compelled by the force of circumstances to answer those practical questions, you are, at the same time, compelled to finally see, or are at the very least nourishing the abilities that will allow you to finally see what the old man said were the real conditions of life and our relationships with one another.
And if that sense of autonomy within community isn't quite so profound well, my money is on the capacity for people involved in *this* kind of mobilization to be more capable of at last facing with sober senses the real conditions of life and their relations with those whom they know and those whom they will never know. I surely do not see how that sort of understanding will ever be built by anyone sitting around casting ballots and wanly gazing at the Communist Horizon.
In Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, Wolfe constantly points the reader at the snaking tangle of power cords at every acid test. The power cords amp their instruments and voices. Without it, nothing would happen. The tangle of power cords symbolized their connection to society and Wolfe, by point at them, signaled the Merry Pranksters failure to recognize how dependent they were on this society, even as they ostensibly rebelled against it. Their's was a fantasy of being outside society.
I don't see that going on in these encampments. The prefigurative politics is, intriguingly, making everyone acutely aware of tradition, culture, norms, unspoken values, tacit assumption, art, history, civilization, technology. They are called into questions - and that process of calling into question is both exhilarating and exhausting - but so far I haven't heard one single person say, as students used to say to me, "Do we always have to think so hard about everything. Can't we just watch the news and veg out?"
No one wants to veg out yet. They will, eventually. They will become exhausted by the constant demand to engage in conscious social reproduction. And when they do, they will - as countless people have before them - figure out a way to resolve the problem.
BTW, I couldn't agree with Voyou more.