R E A D E R

THE ART OF ORGANISING HOPE

New Narratives for Europe
8-11 November 2019 // Ghent (BE)
 TAOH READER: NEW NARRATIVES FOR EUROPE

We must learn hope

by Ana Cecilia Dinerstein
performed at the closing session // 11 Nov 2018

It is a question of learning hope … The work Principle of Hope (1959.) Bloch lived and worked
of this emotion requires people to throw during two World Wars, through the Holocaust
themselves actively into what is becoming to and Soviet politics, and suffered exile as a Jewish
which they themselves belong’ (Ernst Bloch) intellectual until he could return to Eastern Europe.
Today, his ideas can help us to bring back hope as
Good evening. I am thrilled to be here. This is a
real force of herstory, as a movement of resistance.
dream come true for an academic: the dream that
Our context is marked by violent mediocrity, the
a ‘theoretical’ idea becomes embodied in social
advancement of neo Fascism/neo Nazism and the
praxis. And now I have the opportunity to tell you
far right. And this is happening amidst a crisis of
what we have been doing during these four days
representational democracy, the dismantling of
at the TAOH Alternative Summit. I will elaborate
welfare systems, debt and poverty, combined with
briefly on the concept-idea and then, I shall bring
the progressive authoritarianism of the nation
our experience to you. Before that, let me express
States, and the poisonous mixture of homophobia,
my gratitude to Dominique Willaert and to Victoria
misogyny, xenophobia, racism, violence and
Deluxe. I am humbled by their generosity and by the
loneliness in civil societies.
way they have engaged with my work in a serious
and loving manner; to my Summit Fellows -sitting How to address this complex configuration of
behind me, on stage, for being the most talented negative forces and dystopian situations today?
congregation of committed activists, artists, TAOH offers a characterisation of hope that is
curators and academics that I have ever met, and not fantasy or wish, but an emotion that gives us
who have worked hard during the Summit to give energy to act, gather, learn, mobilise, organise,
substance to TAOH; and to you, our audience, for act politically. The redefinition of what is the
being attracted to idea of the art of organising hope political is also a task for TAOH. It is true that we
(TAOH) and came tonight to find out more about it. do not know what do we want exactly, and how to
get there, yet. But for now, this gives us a sense of
The question tonight is how can we create different
openness and possibility. In his book Radical Hope:
narratives for Europe, narratives that are inspiring
Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation Jonathan
and hopeful in terms of activism, theory, in terms of
Lear suggests that the radical nature of hope lays
ideas and strategy? This question begs for another
in the fact that it ‘radical hope anticipates a good
one: Who is we? Well, the task ahead about creating
for which those who have the hope as yet lack the
alternative narratives for Europe is also -inevitably,
appropriate concepts with which to understand
about creating a fluid, plural but firm ‘We’. So ‘We’
it(103).
remains as a question to explore.
Since the 1980s we have been depriving ourselves
The idea of TAOH found inspiration from Latin
from exploring real political options. We have not
American social movements and societies in
been able to think about possibilities properly. We
movement. In my work, I established a strong
have felt defeated and silenced. But this is finished.
connection between social activism and struggles
At the Alternative Summit we have presented and
around issues of social reproduction -land, water,
discussed the hope-thinking-work that is developing
food, work, care, education- and Ernst Bloch’s
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in Europe right now. To recognise this politically is
crucially important for the democratisation and
the emergence of new narratives for Europe. Why?
Because this is the first step to escape the ‘there is
no alternative’ (TINA) prison. TINA entrapped us
into alienated forms of doing politics, to inhuman
policies and confined us to attend to insensitive
and empty political discourses, repeatedly. This is
no more. We feel capable of negating the demented
fiction represented by TINA close ‘reality’. We can
sense possibilities. In this Summit we said it aloud:
we have moved away from TINA and we are working
together towards the creation of alternatives.
The TAOH research project shows that these
are already being shaped in European streets,
neighbourhoods, urban spaces, countrysides,
ports, theatres, cinemas, schools. All these
‘alternatives’ are mobilising an-other reality, the
reality of the not yet. The not yet is an interesting
term that designates something that has not
become yet visible, organised, articulate by people,
but it is possible. Inspiring! The power of TAOH is
that it enables us to start thinking how to occupy
the reality of the not yet. This is what I have done
with my book: to name what we are doing in a
way that could be recognised, reflected upon,
organised. This is what Victoria Deluxe has done
with the TAOH project: to engage with and occupy
a space that was not yet, and now is ‘a fact’ that
challenges the ‘there is no alternative’ in Europe.
TAOH is a prefigurative uncertain, determined,
exciting, social practice.
During the Summit, we deployed and expanded
on the language of hope and possibility. Each of
us brought to the Summit a M2 of hope and talked
about it. This exercise was vital for all of us because
we were invited to affirm, visualise, and share
our dreams and ideas about hope. In the opening
session, we tried to established a common ground
and create a supportive environment for the days
to come. Before coming to Ghent, we had already
agreed that the problem is not whether we should
seek a utopia or not. But to discuss what kind of
utopia and where to look for it. So, we did!
We put our collective autonomous actions in the
key of hope, in the same way as I did in my book.
This means that, like ‘composers’, we used ‘hope’ as
the basic material and all other concepts, notions
and ideas were modified by the category of hope.
In the key of hope, our varied and rich collective
actions and resistances formed a complex atlas
of four intertwined modes of hope. First, we have
seen many examples of people coming together
to say ‘NO!’ to domination, oppression, injustice,
exploitation or appropriation. NO! to gender
discrimination of all kinds, to environmental
destruction, to coloniality, to corporate power, to
poverty, the Fascist/Nazi mafias, to the far right, to
state violence, and more. You name it!
But to say NO! means that a YES! is on its way.
In this second ‘affirmative’ mode, we have seen
how people challenge dominant beliefs about
human sociability and create concrete utopias.
We addressed the issue of public ownership and
the commons. We learnt how the occupation of
urban spaces by social activists has served to create
alternative forms of living, producing, living,
loving, educating, organising, consuming, etc. We
learnt how the right to the city has been defended
and how the occupy of space facilitated the
emergence of new forms of collective organisation,
solidarity and sociability. We learnt how the
platform of those affected by the mortgages (PAH)
in Catalonia set the goal of having ‘no houses
without people, and no people without a home’. We
have also seen new gender identities of resistance
affirming themselves with hope, without entering
the controversial terrain of identity politics.
But we also spoke about the conflict between the
principles of autonomy and self-management and
the state. TAOH is not outside capitalism, patriarchy
and coloniality. It arises and grows within and from
these systems of oppression to move beyond. We
know that collective autonomy can be distorted
and translated into something else by the state
at all levels via politics, policy, institutional
dynamics, finances, the law. Nonetheless, we
cannot avoid the state even if we think we are
eluding it. It permeates and mediates capitalist
life. In this third moment of contradiction, there
will be disappointment. We have seen how difficult
has been to deal with the far right in public
spaces. We still do not know how to deal with this
 TAOH READER: NEW NARRATIVES FOR EUROPE
appropriately. How frustrating and disappointing
can be to try to send Nazi Mafiosi criminals to jail
when they are somehow protected by the state. At
this moment, we wonder whether ‘we have failed’.
But have we? Is it not ‘failure’ a measurement used
by power to control social mobilisation? TAOH
cannot be measured with the traditional forms of
understanding success, because our success is an
alternative form of success! The debate ‘with or
without the state’ contains binary thinking and we
know this too well: binary thinking is the enemy
on hope. Hope is rich, open, brave, cannot be seen
in black and white. Beyond binary thinking, we
can see that TAOH creates surplus possibilities.
The task is then to understand and navigate the
contradictions, analyse the possibilities, and focus
on the production of surplus possibilities that
cannot be integrated into capitalist, patriarchal or
colonial rationalities, or at least not completely.
TAOH exists beyond the boundaries of what is
politically acceptable.
Now: What are the Traces of Hope that were
revealed during the Alternative Summit and which
can contribute into a future conversation about
new narratives for Europe? The first one is the
return of utopia in a new form. We recognised
that the emergence of new narratives for Europe
should expose the problem with paralysing
and dystopian expectations for the emergence
of new abstract ready-made utopias, led by an
allege revolutionary party, with the industrial
working class as the subject of revolution. This
is no longer an option. The left, argues Jerome
Roos, in a deep crisis of imagination marked by a
‘total inability to even conceive of a world beyond
capitalism’. He highlights following Marx that to
renew itself, the Left, European and other, ‘must
let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its
own content’. The new content will come from the
immeasurable power of present concrete utopias.
This utopia is synonymous with praxis (Levitas) so
that is now conceived of as a concrete collective
effort to address what is needed in the present,
within historical specific contexts and conditions,
drawing on past revolutionary practices, but
adding new and exciting elements to it. Concrete
utopias are organised around people’s everyday life
needs for social reproduction, particularly in those
countries where the financial crisis and European
neoliberal policy hit hard, and nation states led by
weak politicians became trapped in the neoliberal
logic of financial crisis and austerity, instead of
providing for their people. We need to work more
to associate grassroot and labour movements,
for both represent work as a totality, in terms of
production and social reproduction, they are two
sides of the same coin.
The second trace of hope that can contribute to the
creation of new narratives for Europe is a feature
of the new European citizen and the subjectivities
that are emerging out of the political, social,
cultural and economic transformations of the
past 40 years. The hope-organisers of today are at
once plural, democratic, communal, ecological,
decolonial, emotional, political, embodied, anti-
patriarchal, anti-capitalist. Europe is rich of
grassroot movements and individual thinkers,
activists and artists who are the producing serious
innovative proposals about technology, production,
consumption, distribution, education, food. We
have explored how to deploy different knowledges
by ‘shifting the centre’ and by recognising different
forms of power, learnt how to create alternatives
that specifically work against and beyond such
power.
Yet, another imperative question must be posed:
What is and would be the role of grassroot activism,
artists, intellectuals in the democratisation of
Europe? The ‘Balcony Project’ at NGent featured
the symbolic declaration of the European Republic
under the logo ‘Europe can be different’. But can
Europe be different and democratise its democracies
without integrating the organisational and political
creativity of grassroots practices? The existing
European Institutions work well for neoliberal
Europe. What type of ‘institutions’ we would like
to see to ensure that our experiential critique is
central to the new narratives for Europe? Is the
creation of a Republic the best option? Does this
not bring unwanted colonial memories that flash at
a time of ‘hatred of democracy’ (Rancière)? It is not
horizontal, bottom up and radical democracy, with
its ‘disagreement’ as the political sine qua non-
condition, what can revitalise Europe?
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The new narrative of Europe must be anti/de/
colonial. We are tempted to think that coloniality
is over and that we live in a post-colonial world.
This is partly true if we think of the independence
of many colonies from their European invaders.
However, the ‘coloniality of power’, as Quijano
calls it, persists in the post-colonial world. The
‘coloniality of power’ is a practice that penetrates
social, cultural, economic, political interactions
and relations and exists between countries in the
Global North and South, between countries in the
North and South of Europe, and between people
within European countries, all reinforced by
class and gender discriminations. The following
statement might surprise you but hear me out:
‘race’ is not a fact of life but, as Quijano writes, it is
rather an invention that can be specifically situated
at the time of the conquest of the Americas in the
14th Century, which facilitated the emergence of
modernity-capitalism. At this point in the history
of oppression, it occurred the creation of the ‘other’
and their subsequent subordination. Race was
invented. There is nothing physical or intellectual
that justified the subordination of indigenous or
black people to European power but the need to
create an inferior ‘other’ that could serve the eager
European Empires to expand by navigating the
seven seas in search of new lands to conquer. You
might agree politically that this subordination was
wrong! But what is race then?
A new narrative for Europe requires a serious
reflection on the European past, to understand the
problem and to construct alternative narratives
of this historical development because the past is
never a real past. This past is pretty much alive
in the present colonial divisions between Global
North and South, the North and South of Europe,
between people within European countries and in
the colonial attitudes towards the rest of the world.
Quoting Chakrabarty we must provincialise Europe,
that is to re situate Europe in the world not at the
center of it. Europe will not to lose but become richer
with a massive ecology of knowledges (BS Santos)
that today is being awfully oppressed, subjugated
and even obliterated by several mechanisms of
coloniality of power such as xenophobia, traffic
of women, child labour, work super exploitation,
gender violence. ‘Provincialising Europe’ means
that Europeans and those living in Europe today
will be able to freely reinvent themselves with the
others in light of new decolonial developments.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos warned us once
of the mounting confrontation between rival
knowledges from the North and the South exposed
at the World Social Forum (WSF) in the recent past.
This is inextricably connected to environmental
destruction and the Ecocidio.
In the ‘Mining Stories’ session at Arca, we have
exposed Ecocidio and showed with music,
performance, and words, the connection between
Ecocidio and the oppression of indigenous people.
For them the ‘environment’ is, in no way, external to
their bodies, communal life and cosmologies. For
them (in general terms) the search for the ‘we’ (that
I previously mentioned) includes the mountain, the
river, the animals and plants. The ‘protection of the
environment’ is almost like an alien term because
there is no separation between the protection of
the environment and the protection of life. The
environment is not surrounding them: it is them.
And nature is a component of the formation of the
‘we’.
In Europe, we are just starting to experience
this. Unfortunately, our liberal minds struggle
to embrace the need to defend the environment
because it remains somehow external to us. A
new narrative for Europe must learn from the
indigenous way of thinking. Millions of trees are
being chopped down on daily basis. Do we feel
the pain? We must try harder to use our emotional
intelligence and develop alternative forms of
‘thinking’ in an embodied manner to connect
better with this. During the Summit, it became
apparent that the rescuing of the environment from
its collapse requires a dramatic change towards
the conception of an alternative system where
we produce and consume differently and where
human life would not reproduce through money.
Capitalism-coloniality seems incompatible with
the ecological world that we are dreaming about
Finally, the new narrative for Europe is anti-
patriarchal. We have reflected on gender
oppressions, from violence against women to the
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oppression of LGBT people and movements. At the

Summit, personal experiences illustrated social
and political tendencies and inspired interesting
debates. The democratisation of Europe cannot
leave gender issues for later. The present war
against women and the constant oppression of
gender minorities are also taking place in Europe.
TAOH offers Europe a new all-encompassing
narrative.
We have opened a path. We have taken hope out of
the Pandora’s jar and played with it. Some believe
that we were wasting our time because hope is a
vice. Hope would mislead humans into believing
that happiness is attainable and, therefore, would
make our ordeal longer. We disagree. TAOH is
synonymous with conscious praxis, action, active
imagination to enact collective dreams towards
the creation of concrete utopias. This entail
contradiction, set-backs and disappointments. We
do not have the answers. But, as the Indigenous
Mexican Zapatista Movement say, asking we walk.
Thank you!

Ana Cecilia Dinerstein

11 November 2018