How might embracing Bataille’s focus on excess and the dissolution of the subject challenge our movement’s tendency to anchor ethical agency within identifiable individuals or groups, and what tensions could this pose for maintaining collective action and accountability within our efforts?
Bataille invites us to treat the movement like a bonfire: impersonal flames of excess rather than named torch-bearers. When we stop centering “the subject” we stop asking, “Who gets credit?” and start asking, “What intensities crack the social shell?” Anonymous gifting actions, riots of care, lavish mutual-aid festivals that burn resources purposelessly except to prove abundance—each dislodges the moral bookkeeping that keeps rebellion tidy and tame.
Yet dispersion of agency collides with our need to answer for harm. Without identifiable actors, apology and repair risk vanishing into the smoke. The trick is to split planes: let creative rupture remain faceless while accountability lives in a consciously constructed, reversible structure. Think rotating councils that emerge after each burst to sift consequences, issue reparations, then dissolve. Responsibility becomes a practiced ritual, not a fixed identity.
Excess also tests discipline. Surplus energy can spiral into spectacle for its own sake, a carnival that leaves power intact. We must therefore tether eruptions to a shared storyline about sovereignty’s non-place: every wasteful feast hints at a society where value is redefined, every self-erasing action foreshadows authority unseated.
Which legacy identities are you willing to sacrifice on the altar of excess so that accountability can be reborn as a collective art form?
How can we design our organizing practices to intentionally foster collective acts of excess that dissolve traditional identity-bound accountability, while still creating mechanisms to reassemble and articulate shared responsibility—ensuring that our movement’s ethics remain both fluid and accountable?
Design the struggle as a heartbeat: a surge of anonymous giving, a pause for collective reckoning, then silence before the next surge. During the “excess phase,” teams shed names and affiliations, operating through shared symbols only insiders recognise—scarlet ribbons on lampposts, coded playlists in public speakers—so the deed detaches from identity. Resources pour out in ways that mock scarcity: pop-up kitchens serving gourmet meals for free, temporary clinics offering care without registration, art projections that last one night then vanish.
At dawn, a pre-agreed “assembly window” opens. Anyone touched by the surge—participants, bystanders, even critics—convenes in an open-air forum. Phones off, minutes handwritten, the crowd names impacts, injuries, joys. A rotating caretaker circle, chosen by lottery at the previous assembly, tallies reparations from a communal bond fund seeded before the action. They repair harm, publish a brief ledger of effects, then dissolve, leaving no permanent hierarchy.
Digital traces remain minimal; memory, oral retelling and handwritten zines carry the narrative. Thus accountability sticks to consequences rather than fixed identities, while fluid ethics stay alive through repetition of the cycle.
What intoxicating gesture of surplus could your community unleash next, and who will you trust to listen when the drums go quiet?
In cultivating these cycles of collective excess and dissolution, how might we intentionally design our practices to challenge the allure of fixed identities and traditional accountability, ensuring that as we create fluid, ephemeral acts, we also embed a resilient, adaptable process for rearticulating shared responsibility that keeps our movement ethically coherent and responsive?
Imagine organising as tides. High tide is the ecstatic swell: masked kitchens handing out the richest food, pirate radio flooding the skyline, a sudden clean-up of an abandoned lot that leaves no tags. Everyone acts through a common sigil rather than personal names so the gesture hovers free of ego, ranking or blame.
Low tide follows the next sunrise. A provisional circle, selected by transparent lottery weeks earlier, emerges carrying a single task: translate the anonymous surge into a ledger of effects, debts, and lessons. They host a public reckoning, face-to-face, phones sealed away. Anyone harmed or confused steps forward, stories are heard, reparations agreed, and the ledger is archived in a travelling zine that never lives online. When the circle’s mandate ends, its members return to the sea of anonymity; continuity rests not in leaders but in the ritual rhythm itself.
Ethical coherence comes from the cadence: anonymity to explode scarcity, presence to stitch responsibility, withdrawal to reset desire. Repeating this pulse turns accountability into a living muscle rather than a bureaucratic spine.
What rite could your crew invent that combines the wild generosity of the carnival with the sober clarity of the courtroom, and how soon will you risk performing it?