Episode notes and references:
We Are ‘Nature’ Defending Itself: Entangling Art, Activism and Autonomous Zones, by Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan Pluto Press, 2021
Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination, JJ and Isa’s laboratory
Reclaim the Streets, non-violent direct-action movement, founded in 1995
La Guerre des Demoiselles, 18th century movement to defend the commons
Audio available where you listen to podcasts.
Max Haiven: Hello, and welcome to “The Exploits of Play”. This is a podcast about the strange and unexpected role of games and play in our stage of capitalism that just keeps getting weirder and weirder. My name is Max Haiven, and I am the Canada Research Chair in the Radical Imagination.
Halle Frost: And I’m Halle Frost from the platform Weird Economies. We’re presenting this podcast. Today we’re talking to Isabelle Fremeaux and Jay Jordan.
Fremeaux is a popular educator and action researcher. She was formerly a senior lecturer in media and cultural studies at Birkbeck College, London. And along with Jay Jordan, she’s the coordinator of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination.
Jordan is the co-founder of Reclaim the Streets, which was active from 1995 through to 2000, and the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army. They were also the co-author of We Are Everywhere, The Irresistible Rise of Global Anti-Capitalism from Verso in 2003, as well as A User’s Guide to Demanding the Impossible from Minor Compositions in 2011. Together, they are the authors of We Are Nature Defending Itself, Entangling Art, Activism, and Autonomous Zones from Pluto Press in 2021. That book details their role in the struggle for the ZAD, an autonomous community in Western France that for decades fought back against state repression, and is today a beacon of hope for radical ecological activists in that country and around the world. Max, you’ve worked with JJ and Isa before. Do you have anything to add for our audience?
Max Haiven: Just that I think like many people who’ve worked with them, these folks are real legends. They have such an amazing imagination for how to take play and games and move them into the space of militant protest, of uprising. They bring together, I think, incredibly sharp and incisive insights with kind of meaningful optimism about how to change the world.
A lot of that comes from their protagonism in recent years in the ZAD, or Zone to Defend, which is a territory just outside of Nantes in Western France. Beginning in the 1970s, I think, the French state insisted that they would take over some very ecologically sensitive land outside of Nantes to build a massive international airport. This triggered a series of protests over the subsequent decades by farmers and people who’d lived on the land for many generations, who pointed out that in spite of the fact that the French state saw this land as basically useless, it actually had a very particular biological and ecological characteristic. And more importantly, people had been integrating themselves with that land and living with the land and being part of the land and belonging to the land for many generations as well. In the 2000s, many of those people who’d been living on the land and resisting the airport, which had been delayed and delayed and delayed, invited the sort of nascent ecological and climate movement to join them in their protest. And this led to an occupation of this territory, the ZAD, by not only the people who’d been there for a long time, but a lot of new residents. And together, in a really heroic struggle, which is detailed in J.J. and Isa’s book, We Are Nature Defending Itself, which I had the pleasure of editing for the series I published at Pluto Press, these forces were able to finally repel the French state and basically get the French government to admit that they were never going to be able to build an airport and that the ZADists, as they came to be known, were allowed to stay and continue to build their community. This then triggered a whole range of other similar occupations throughout France and along with a number of other kind of grassroots occupation struggles, some of them as small as a squatted house, some of them as big as the radical Kurdish experiment in Rojava or the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, all together have sort of become part of a world of autonomous zones that are trying to become spaces where people can live outside of capitalism and practice not only their politics, but also their ways of living differently beyond the authority of the state or capital. And what I really value about this interview with J.J. and Issa is that they explain to us how important play is in all of this. You know, at the end of the interview, we’ll come back to the ZAD and the struggle and how play is an important role in that, but through most of this interview, we talk about some of the activities they did in the past, including through the Laboratory for the Insurgent Imagination, which they still operate and offers trainings at the ZAD and elsewhere.
For me, what’s so interesting and important about this episode in the context of our podcast is I think a lot of what we’ve been talking about so far has really focused on the way that capitalism and the forces of capitalist exploitation and oppression have been manipulating and weaponizing play, have been operating through mechanisms of gamification, have been leveraging their power over technology in pretty deleterious ways. And it’s nice to have an interview with, you know, long-time, lifelong activists who are really thinking about play and games differently. But the one thing I’ll flag, which I really appreciate about this interview, and you’ll notice that at some points they kind of push back at some of my attempts to define play too broadly, and I really appreciated that as well.
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Max Haiven: Welcome. I wanted to ask you each to begin by talking about, if you can remember back to your childhood and think about the most consequential or influential game you played and what it taught you, what that game taught you, especially as it shaped your life going forward to the point you’re at now.
Isa Fremeaux: I’m a bit ashamed to answer that, but the truth is that I probably played only one game throughout many years of my childhood, and that was teacher. I was a teacher. I was teaching first dolls and teddy bears, and then my little brother. And when I had the opportunity, quite a lot of my cousins, I come from a very large family, so I had a pool of younger cousins that could be in my class. I mean, it’s small things, but one of my strongest memories of one of the best presents that I got was a blackboard that my dad made, and it was a multifunctional blackboard that could also be a table, and that was also a small bench, and that is still here. It’s still behind me. And my second best present was a real blackboard that came from a school. I really had that thing about teaching, and the funny anecdote is that when I gave my first class at university, I was really nervous, and I called my mom afterwards to say, ‘Mom, I gave my first class, and I really, really enjoyed it, and I think I did okay.’
And her reply was, ‘Well, I really hope so, because you’ve been practicing for about 25 years. So here we go!’
And I haven’t stopped. I’m 50, and I’m still teaching. The good thing is that I’ve expanded my toolbox, and I don’t use blackboards very much anymore.
I try to use more participatory tools. I was not a very participatory teacher when I was four.
Jay Jordan: Being a Joseph Beuys fan, I’ve often tried to push more use of the blackboard, but I mean, for me, it’s really hard to think of one game, so I’m just going to use the intuition that came when you said it, and there were three things that came up when you said it. The first thing was the board game called Escape from Colditz. Yeah, I’m really old. You won’t even remember the TV series called Colditz, which was a TV series based on British soldiers. It was a Second World War board game, and they were in this Colditz prison of war castle in Germany, and you had to escape. Now I think about it, it was a lot very DIY. It’s like, okay, what have you got? You’ve got to escape a Nazi prison, so you’ve got to dig with spoons and turn everyday objects. There’s a lot of hacking of everyday objects to escape the enemy, which kind of makes sense now a bit. The other game I used to, and I think this was profound in my politicization. When I was about eight years old, I was living in Brussels, and in the 70s, there was still lots of land, empty land in cities which hadn’t been developed and gentrified and built on. There was a place where I would always go and play, and we would always play with cabins.It would probably be quite politically incorrect games of cowboy and Indian and things like that in this wasteland. That was my play zone in this foresty wasteland thing. One day, I went, and basically there were fences all around it.
No one had taught me about direct action at the time, so we didn’t know what to do about the fences, but the fences went round, and then they bulldozed the whole thing and turned it into a massive supermarket and Europe’s first ever fast food outlet. It wasn’t McDonald’s. It was GB Quick.
Now, since doing a bit of research on it, I found out that it was actually the first. Then I ended up going there to the GB Quick because no one had ever had fast food in those days. They had to do a whole load of quite playful marketing things to get us to go in and have this food that no one had ever had before, and this way of having the food. There was even an evening of free hamburgers, I remember. Action Men, I did play a lot with Action Men, I have to say. I did play a lot with Action Men because I wasn’t allowed to play with– I wanted a doll’s house, basically. I always wanted a doll’s house. I wasn’t allowed a doll’s house, so I made do with soldiers.
Isa Fremeaux: A lot of apologies come with our memories of games and play.
Max Haiven: I think that’s true of everyone. I think that’s an important part of it. I want you to take us back to the early 1990s when Reclaim the Streets started. I want to ask about the origins of Reclaim the Streets and the kind of tactics that Reclaim the Streets used that incorporated play and games. First, I want to ask why those tactics were necessary. What was the state of the left, let’s say, before Reclaim the Streets came along, and why did you folks embrace those tactics at that time?
Jay Jordan: There’s a kind of complex double history, but to make things more simple, what we now understand as Reclaim the Streets begins in 1995, in spring, May 1995. The left, you’d had the end of the Soviet Empire, the collapse of the belief in a kind of alternative to capitalism that was presented in the way it was presented by the traditional left. There were big demonstrations.
As a student, your access to politics was the socialist worker newspaper. You thought that politics was basically about boring newspapers, selling newspapers, going to meetings, and having A to B demonstrations, which is about as playful as a dead rat. Meanwhile, in Britain, you’ve got the rise of a rave culture, a free party culture, which is a beautiful mixture of play, ritual, performance, and healing, all coming together in a kind of playful, disobedient way.
You also had the traveler’s culture. You had these huge convoys of people who decided to drop out of the system, live on the dole, and build and have nomadic lives, tribal nomadic lives, parallel to capitalism. You had all that arising in the early 90s in the UK. And you had the rise of a radical direct action movement, influenced by Earth First in the US and Australia. Those influences came into the UK around 1991, 1993, and really influenced a massive anti-roads movement, which basically brought direct action back. There’d been the anti-nukes movement in the 80s that had used direct action, but really direct action in terms of radical ecology comes from there, and a mixture of direct action and sabotage. So direct action, non-violent direct action, as kind of the daily thing where you’re working with locals, you’re trying to stop a local road scheme, you’re squatting the trees, you’re squatting the land. And then at night, what we call pixying, so at night kind of sabotage took place, which wasn’t mediated at all. So that was the kind of context, and Reclaimed Streets came out of that cocktail of rave culture, radical ecological direct action, and the playfulness of the rave culture, I think, was absolutely key to the tactics.
This idea that you had a secret place that you wanted to go to, you needed to bring a lot of people to that secret place. It had to be secret because if you told the cops about it, they would shut it down. And so you had to find playful ways of getting one of the cops and getting a large crowd of people to a place. And so all those tactics we learned from rave culture, and we had people from, you know, Reclaimed Streets was this cocktail of people from that rave culture. And added to that, you had this incredible capacity of rave culture, which I’m saying this right now, feeling very, very rich, because we had a massive free party on the Z this weekend. And I spent some time there and re-remembered how, in terms of logistics, it’s not just playful, it’s also incredibly logistically strong and organized, you know, to get massive sound systems to a place with electricity in a place which normally is muddy and, you know, and make sure there’s care for people who are, you know, have taken too many drugs. And, you know, it’s also, there’s this playful element, but it’s also very, very good organizing culture. So, you know, to politicize that was super important. And in the end, it was, you know, the old thing, you know, how do you turn radical politics into something that’s not sacrificial?
How do you turn radical politics into something that’s prefigurative, that shows the world you want? And how do you make it irresistible? And play is central to that. And dancing was key to that, you know, dancing, moving bodies. So you had the playful getting from the secret location up to the street that we were going to occupy with a sound system, with moving bodies, and to what we called, you know, it was all about reclaiming the commons. So that for us, the street was the commons, was an urban commons that was very influenced by Illich and Goethe’s work on the motor car and the car. You know, car culture was less criticized, you know, the idea of the pedestrian city was less visible, and was less public in the 90s. And we always said in Reclaimed Streets, it’s not about pedestrianizing cities and replacing the motor car with commerce. That was always very key, you know, it was actually replacing the motor car with neighborhoods and bodies and assemblies and convivial cities, not commerce.
The first street party was kind of mythical. So you’ve got to imagine a couple of hundred people, 500 people maybe meeting in a squatted church, a church in North London, at least quite. And then going underground, not knowing where the street party would be, it’s announced as a street party. So you have this whole bunch of hippies, ravers, kind of, you know, anarchist types, communist types, eco-types, family types, real mixture of folk, and all going into the underground, where the police radios didn’t work. And then in a street above ground, you had these two cars that were driving down the street, and they crashed into each other. And out of the cars, people, the drivers come out and have this road rage.
And one of the drivers takes out a huge sledgehammer from her boot, and starts to smash up the other car. And then the other person takes up loads of paint and starts to throw paint on the car. And then 500 people come out of the subway, just next to the cars in Camden High Street. And a massive banner goes onto the top of the cars, which says reclaim streets. And they were our cars. And this was a piece of invisible theatre to block the street from the other cars and to create a distraction. And then a sound system arises. And the first street party didn’t even have an electric sound system. It had a pedal powered sound system. And food and the street is just taken back for people. It ends in a kind of minor riot. Minor, I mean, Britain is not a riot culture massively. But then the street parties were bigger and bigger and sound system culture came in. And then you had this whole game of how did you get the van with the sound systems into space. And, you know, I mean, the biggest street party we ever had was 8000 people on a motorway.
And there, there was a beautiful, playful moment, because actually the idea only came in the car, on the way to the street party with two organizers. One, a woman who had built these incredibly large dresses, these kind of carnivalesque dress figures that would go up and down the street, which were like five meter high puppets kind of things. And you’d have a real person at the top with this huge kind of Baroque dress coming out.
And on the way there, someone had, they were chatting and one of the organizers, he was like, I know, why don’t we actually put jackhammers under the dresses and drill holes in the street and plant trees because the flyers that we were giving out said under the tarmac, the forest. And so that idea suddenly became reality. And as these dresses were going up and down the motorway with 8000 people dancing to rave music with sand had been placed down onto the middle of the street, the remote motorway where kids were playing with families, under the dresses hidden from the eyes of the police, you had people with jackhammers making holes in the tarmac and planting trees that had actually been saved from one of the road protests sites. And that taught me the power, not necessarily the power of play, but the power of audacious imagination and how audacious imagination can cross class and boundaries of difference.
And so that story got to the ears of the Liverpool Dockers who we had kind of never really worked with. They were a very completely different culture, you know, Marxists, Leninists, stock workers, pretty patriarchal. We were a bunch of anarcho-communists, queers, ravers, artists, eco-direction folk, and they wanted to work with us because they’d heard this story of the people drilling underneath the skirts.
So that was a very, for me, that was a very, very big lesson on the power of audacious imagination. But then we used lots of playful, actual playful tactics in other things. We used a playful tactic in a carnival against capitalism where we produced 4,000 different coloured masks and the masks had different colors, red, green, black, and gold, and on the back of the mask was a text and people handed out the masks in our meeting point, which was Liverpool Street Station.
The idea was to take the City of London to replace the sound of profit with the sound of pleasure, which was the slogan. It was a global street party, a global day of action against capitalism all over the world, a carnival against capitalism all over the world, and in the City of London we gave out the mask in four different directions of the of the station, and there were like about 9,000 people there, and on a signal which actually ended up being the, it was meant to be the sound of Mission Impossible, the doom, doom, doo-doo, doom, doom, doo-doo, coming out of these, we’d made these multiple carnival figures representing social movements from around the world, and their heads had sound systems in them. So we had Canadian postal workers, we had MST activists, we had Zapatistas, and no one heard the sound of the thing, the doom, doom, doom, because it was too loud, there were too many people, but we sent out the firework, and then people with little flags who had been told about where we were going just the day before, took their little coloured flags out, and on the mask it said, on the signal follow your color, and then they followed, the red mask followed red, green mask followed green, black mask followed black, gold mask followed gold, and we got to where we wanted to go, and the cops afterwards in their report called it a starburst effect, which was quite poetic, I thought, for cops language. So yeah, and that, all these things were really just aesthetic tools that would bring fun and joy and pleasure and make radical politics irresistible, and had tactical uses to outdo the cops. It wasn’t decoration, it was tactics and aesthetic power in some way.
Max Haiven: I want to jump forward in time a little bit to the Climate Games, which the Laboratory for the Insurrectionary Imagination, which you are both protagonists in, called for and created a hub for a whole multitude of actions to confront the COP21 climate summit in Paris in 2015. I wonder if you can paint us a little picture of that project and how it carried forward some of these themes that Jay you were just speaking of, of both on the one hand opening the space for play and creativity and the flourishing of many of those elements of what it means to be human, or whatever we are, multi-species assemblage on the one hand, and then also create these actual tactical, these tactics that actually do disrupt.
Tell us the story of the Climate Games.
Isa Fremeaux: I think that I’d like to start a bit earlier, because the Climate Games come more than 10 years after the beginning of the Laboratory of the Insurrectionary Imagination that we co-founded in 2004. I think that the idea of playfulness has always been in the DNA of the Lab. Actually, when we co-founded the Lab, it was in the context of the Social European Forum in London that had been taken over by the very boring socialists that Jay was talking about earlier.
We decided to join other people that wanted the Social Forum to be the space for something that would be much more participatory and creative. Basically, what we did was to use a squat in London and invite loads and loads of people from all over Europe that were using, inventing super playful and disobedient tactics. The idea was very simple.
There would be workshops during the morning where various groups would share their tactics. In the afternoon, everybody would go and actually use them, play together. There were people from Yo Mango that had turned the idea of shoplifting into a super cool practice that would literally share the tips to go and shoplift without getting caught.
There was a Swedish group at the time that had turned fair dodging in public transport into a massive game as well. It was really this ethos of we share the tactics and then we go and play. I think that a lot of the experimentations that we proposed, because I think that our work very much is about proposing frames and invite people to appropriate them and go and play, has been around that.
I know that, for instance, to this day, one of the most invigorating experiences as part of the lab was the Great Rebel Raft Regatta that we organised during the third climate camp in the UK, which aimed to actually condemn and block the construction of a coal-fired power station, because it was an old coal-fired power station that was to be decommissioned and a new one should be rebuilt. The climate camp, the movement, had actually announced that we would block the coal-fired power station by land, by water and by air. The lab had taken the water and basically had prepared, months before, two operations which were Operation IKEA and Operation Treasure Island. So Operation IKEA was basically prefabricated rafts made out of pallet and water fountain bottles that people would very quickly reassemble on the side of the river, because the coal-fired power station was by the side of the other river, because it needs to be cooled. Operation Treasure Island consisted of having buried inflatable dinghies along the river to distribute maps to small groups that would, by night, find their dinghies, in which we had hidden a bottle of rum to be in the pirate spirit.
Jay Jordan: They were kind of treasure maps.
Isa Fremeaux: They were treasure maps, basically. The call was that all the crews that were part of Operation Treasure Island and Operation IKEA would take the water at the same time, at seven o’clock in the morning. It was extraordinary, because it had brought a lot of enthusiasm, because it was an adventure.
It was not to go and disobey and just meet there and block that. It was to build your own crew, find your people, find your map, get lost at night in the forest, find your dinghies, find a bottle of rum, sleep in the forest and wake up, and then do this absolutely ridiculous thing, which is try and block a coal-fired power station on an inflatable dinghy with five people or a raft made out of a pallet. But I think that there is something in the spirit of children that are able to say, well, we’ll do as if, except that there, you do as if, and you try.
It’s not just completely imaginary. It’s like you do as if, and it’s very much as if that Angela Davis talks about. It’s like you need to live as if you could change the world and you need to, as if it was possible, transform the world, and you need to do it all the time.
Then you do as if it was possible to block a coal-fired power station with your mates on a raft, being chased by enormous cop zodiacs, and they arrest you, and because they have no idea what to do with you, they just bring you to the shore and de-arrest you, having made you promise that you’re not going to join the demonstration. Obviously, that’s also what you do, is that you lie to the police. I really remember, I have this bodily memory of being on the raft, because we were part of the Operation IKEA, and with your oar on this river, and actually having the coal-fired power station inside and thinking, I think it’s possible, I think we can do it.
That feeling is really extraordinary, and what was really interesting is that a lot of that, when we debriefed that action, there were people who had been really, really, really worried, that had come to us the day before, saying you’re completely irresponsible, someone is going to drown. I mean, I have to clarify that we had distributed life jackets to participants, and so we’re not completely crazy, and actually the same person came back to us and said, I take it all back, I had the best day of my life, and people just talked about how joyful, how funny, how collective it felt, and one of our great prides is that we are still in touch with people whose first action it was, and that are still involved in movements, and are still organizing disobedient actions, because they caught the bug of the fun, and I think that there is something in this kind of action that you basically outplay the authorities, it’s like you’re just cleverer, and you’re cleverer because you have fun, and I think that that’s really important. So that was a very long introduction to the climate games, because the climate games were in 2015, and we had taken part in the COP15 in 2009, that had been in Copenhagen, that had been such a downer on the movements, because people had been very involved, and it’s kind of, you know, a lot of energy, and a lot of hope had been put in it, and the outcome was so pitiful, and the repression was so important, but it really felt like a moment where in Paris needed to give the movements the oomph again, and the perspective of victory, and of collectivity, and so what we proposed was the climate games were basically a process that we organized throughout the year prior to the COP, where we organized a series of hackathons, where we brought together and invited artists, activists, designers, coders, gamers, and dotted invitations in cultural institutions in Europe, so in Belgium, in Berlin, in London, in Paris, in Nantes, to have that kind of incremental way of working, and the idea was to have an anonymous website that would be used as the base where, and to invite people to form teams, and to, on that website that had an anonymous map, to actually locate playgrounds, i.e. targets, targets against the taking over of the negotiations by lobbyists in the fossil fuel industries, basically, and those playgrounds could be anywhere in the world, online, offline, on the streets, in Paris, or wherever people were, and then teams would pick one of those targets, do an action, and post the reports of their action, and each team had the opportunity to nominate other teams for a series of prizes, so there was the action that was the funniest action, the most clandestine one, the one that showed the greatest show of solidarity, there were 16 prizes, prizes, there were 16 prizes, and interestingly, even though the state of emergency was imposed two weeks before the beginning of the COP15, because of the terrorist attacks in Paris, which put a massive stop to a lot of the other actions that had been planned, because we were also involved in the organizing of mass actions, and that was just totally stopped, is that the framework of the climate games offered enough flexibility and imagination, I think, that more than 125 teams organized more than, I think, about 225 actions that went from brandalism that replaced, in one night in Paris, replaced 600 advertising posters on bus stops, with specially commissioned posters that were talking about the denunciation of the COP on climate justice, there was a crew that replaced all the, that actually went into the conference center and replaced all the lurals in the toilets with lurals on which they had printed the IPCC report, kind of, you know, making the invisible visible, there were crews that, you know, had also much more classical actions of blocking the gigantic machines that kind of, that literally swallow villages in the north of Germany for the lignite coal mine, I mean, there was a whole range of actions, and I think that there was very much the emulation of the competition that was not a real competition, that the fact that it also allowed for a whole range of entering the game where you were, the way you wanted, and still be part of the same game, that allowed for that multiplicity.
Jay Jordan: And I think the award ceremony was fantastic, there was an award ceremony of 500 people turning up, and that was amazing, but I think a lot of our work, one of the other reasons they’re using play is also to, I mean, a lot of our work is how do you create windows into direct action movements that are more accessible to people who’ve never done direct action, and who have a certain image of militancy as this hard, difficult, scary thing, and so I think, and both the Grower and the Climate Games, we know did that, and we know people who we’re still in touch with now, who are still involved, and because it was a, yeah, it’s a much more warm window to step through.
Isa Fremeaux: It’s finding that space between the hardcore, quiet, virilist, direct action methodology, but also the kind of decorative street art understanding of what artivism could be, and to actually really open that space and say, actually modes of disobedience need to be reinvented all the time. All the tools, all the modes of engaging have been invented, and one of the things that is crucial is to reinvent them all the time, to surprise the authorities, to surprise ourselves, to have more fun, because you have more fun when you do something for the first or the second time than when you’ve done it 300 times, and there is a tendency amongst movements, amongst activists, to just repeat the same forms all the time, and actually one of the things that we’ve been trying to do in many different ways, because we’ve experimented it, for sure, is that when you reinvent the codes, like magic happens, and it’s then the the mixture of surprise and fun means that you can do things that you didn’t think were possible.
Max Haiven: Yes, this is great. This is, yeah, very, very happy with how this is going. You guys are, of course, as ever, brilliant and inspiring. I want to ask a little bit about then the struggle at ZAD and the importance of play and games in that struggle and in the life of the ZAD, but before I get there, I wanted to just sort of let you in a bit on the tension that animates this whole podcast and see what you think about it, which is that I think in each of our episodes, we’re looking at the way that, strangely, play and games have become more central than ever to the operations of capitalism itself. I mean, on the one hand, we have the massive video game industry, which blows many of the other entertainment industries out of the water in terms of its profitability these days, and you have young people and people of all ages really playing games kind of constantly on their mobile devices. You have the gamification of all sorts of things by these corporations, whether it’s the gamification of dating apps to finance apps to health and exercise-related apps. Then on a broader level, there’s the sense that we’ve been sold the lie by the kind of neoliberal capitalist bullshit machine that we can all be players in this great game on the level playing field.
When I bring up all of those things, I wonder if there’s anything that you would want to say about why playful forms of resistance to capitalism and this kind of gamification from below, people’s gamification, if you will, why that’s so important now?
Jay Jordan: I don’t know if it changes much, actually, to be quite honest. I think game play is a pretty central evolutionary force in humans and more than humans. It enables us to adapt, it enables us to have social bonds, it enables us to try things out and explore. The beauty of games for me is that it enables us to let go whilst being held, and that I think is so important as a kind of cultural process. This is the potentiality to just let go, let go of all the preconceived things, just let go, and yet let go in a safe health space. That’s what games, for me, what games do beautifully. I’m not sure that the fact that capitalism has taken, used gamification everywhere in its toxic ways, means that we should be more or less game, use games from below more or less. I think it’s always going to be useful. The fact that capitalism uses something, there’s often this discourse in the radical left, capitalism uses this, therefore you cannot use capitalism, you cannot use it.
Isa Fremeaux: You cannot use capitalism, say it again.
Jay Jordan: Yeah, you cannot use capitalism, capitalism uses you. We have this all the time, as our activists, often it’s like, oh, capitalism uses beauty, therefore you can’t use beauty, because then you become capitalist, so you’ve got to make your things really fucking ugly. Or capitalism uses mobile phones, or capitalism uses the internet. This is just a ridiculous debate. Of course, capitalism is going to use every single thing that moves to make profit from that. It’s the logic of capitalism. As Stephen Duncan said in his 90s book or 2000s book, Dream, Progressive Politics in the Age of Fantasy, he uses Las Vegas and Grand Theft Auto as examples of the Left needs to learn from these things. There’s a reason these things work. This is the reason people get engaged in these things. Therefore, if we don’t realize the mechanisms, then what are we doing in terms of the left?
Isa Fremeaux: Also, I don’t think that we should have this presumptuous idea that playfulness in resistance is new, and we’ve kind of invented it in the 20th or 21st century. I think that actually, history of struggles shows a level of playfulness and gamification in resistance from time immemorial. The one that comes to my mind is La Guerre des Demoiselles in the south of France in the 17th century, 18th century, a few centuries ago.
That literally was a struggle to defend the commons, where some of the fighters were dressing up as young women to be able to move through the landscape and escape police. Of course, there was the very tactical dimension of hiding and the anonymity to be able to do what you want. But when you actually read some of the communiques of the time, there was also something that was very playful in the way they were taking the pits out of the authorities. If you think of, I don’t know, the Yippies in the 60s, you think of the Zapatistas. I think that resistance always had that dimension of playfulness. Capitalism brings resistance, and for me, as Jay was saying, I think that it is really important to not be in this Manichean binary approach of, oh well, the internet has become the tool of evil, therefore we can’t touch it anymore. No, reinvent it, re-appropriate it, take it and do what it was not supposed to do. And I think that in that sense, we all should become hackers, not as the super duper professionals, not the hackers as the incredible people that can do shit with computers, but people who are able to ask that very simple question, like what is this thing able to do that was not its primary purpose? And I think that that means that if you do that, then all the tools at your disposal, because they all become, like tools become toys that you can, you know, that you can play with.
And I think that in that sense, that the as if of kids really is a quality not to be lost.
Jay Jordan: And I think some of the early, I mean in Europe, some of the earliest forms of resistance against capitalism really were a kind of merger of, you know, before you’ve got parties and so on, merger of secret societies, carnivalesque action, ritual and magic. I mean the Luddites, 1812, you know, first actions against industrial capitalism in the UK, in the north of the UK, you know, they came out of, there really was this merger of ritual and play and secret society and magic and the carnival and masking, all the masking traditions of the carnival. And I think, you know, I think it’s always going to, that in a way, I think we need to bring back that rich cocktail of all those forms.
Max Haiven: Fantastic. Let’s turn to the ZAD, because I know that ritual and play and rekindling the magic is so central to the play, not the work, but the play of that place. I wonder if you could sort of tell us briefly what the ZAD is for listeners who are not familiar, and a tiny bit about the struggle to maintain it against the state.
And then in that struggle, and now today, the role that play plays.
Isa Fremeaux: So very briefly, what the ZAD is, is a rather large territory of about 4000 acres, that is 20 kilometers to the northwest of Nantes, which is one of the major cities in France, in Brittany. And that basically fought for almost 50 years against the project of an international airport that was announced in the 60s, and resisted initially by farmers, and then went into dormancy for a couple of decades, and then was fought against by an extraordinary composition of local residents, and farmers, and activists from the whole range of the on the left. And that on the invitation of local residents, who realized that one of the techniques of the states when a massive infrastructure like that is planned, is to basically buy out the land and the buildings to empty and gut out the territory.
And some local residents realized that and published an open letter saying beautifully, to defend a territory, you need to inhabit it, and inviting people to come and squat land and buildings to resist it from the ground. And in 2009, after a climate camp, people responded to that invitation. And this is when the ZAD, which is initially an administrative acronym, that means Zona Aménagements Différés, which means a zone that will be further developed, in inverted commas, actually became the zone to defend. And it was occupied with all the reticence that I have using that term at the moment. It was inhabited. And in 2012, there was a military operation that aimed to evict all the squatters. And through the extraordinary diversity and determination of the resistance that faced the cops, that operation failed and opened up a period of extraordinary elaboration because the cops retreated and didn’t set a foot on that zone for six years. And so the ZAD became a laboratory for the commons in resistance for six years that really went far beyond the soil territory. And the movement grew to several hundreds, thousands of people, all the way to the cancellation of the airport project in 2018. And a lot of us, about 200 people, still live on that territory, trying to find ways to rebuild the commons against the authorities who have no intention of letting us do that and do everything they can to atomize and fragment us the way they do everywhere else. It’s not a particularly specific approach to the ZAD. They just try to destroy any kind of truly collectivized attempt until we’re still in resistance.
That’s the short version.
Jay Jordan: And in terms of playfulness, it would depend on what day of the week you would ask us during the struggle, because there were days definitely did not feel like playing. It was very hard and there was lots of conflict. But I think some of the… Of course, when the state evaporates from the territory and you have to self-manage your own lives, an enormous amount of creativity and play comes in because you no longer… For example, we no longer had building regulations so people… There was a kind of playfulness in the architecture of people’s housing and the way people lived that was incredible. So people make houses out of all kinds of strange materials that you could never, ever have permission to do if you had to go for planning permission. And so, yeah, there’s a kind of playfulness in the way you build your habitat. We even built a lighthouse where they wanted to build a control tower for the airport. So that was pretty important. There was a playfulness in the naming, renaming places. So there were word games, lots of word games like you would rename…
So because at its peak, the ZAD had 70 different living collectives and about 400 different people. And so each living collective had to have a new name for this new place where… So all these play on words. I mean, French radical love language anyway, and they love to play, do word plays. So a lot of that. During the…We organized a mass training to prepare people to defend the zone so that the people were prepared to defend the zone. We did eight weekend training sessions and trained a thousand people. And that involved a big game where basically the first day they worked, learned about affinity groups, learned what your rights were. If you get arrested, what you should do… If you’re arrested, what your rights are, how you should behave, what the weapons of the police are, how to walk in the territory without making a noise, without cracking the… And also how to use… We had a pirate radio station which squatted the airwaves of the multinational company that wanted to build the runway because they have a motorway radio station. So we squatted on it. And so the training taught people to use radios and a whole radio system. And so on the next day, they went off in their affinity groups and we played this wide scale orientation course game where people had to bring a ridiculous object from one place to a central place. So for example, you had little groups of five people trying to bring a big surfboard across this landscape whilst not being caught by the police. And the police were actually people from… ZAD people dressed up as police with black balaclavas and red things looking more scary than the fucking police did actually. And they would be driving around in these kind of Mad Max cars because there was no… It wasn’t called…
The state called it the Territory Lost to the Republic or the Outlaw Zone. So you could drive around in a car with no number plates with all sorts of crazy things. And they would be driving around in these cars trying to catch the affinity groups who were trying to bring their surfboard or whatever to this base. And then if they got caught, then they had to go into a fake prison where all the process would be done. So they had to rehearse. It was basically a giant rehearsal for if there was an eviction and it was a serious play. And that’s the best kind of play is serious play, where you are having a really good time with this new group of people. You’re in the mud, you’re running around trying to escape being caught. It’s like cat and mouse. And at the same time, you know that if you do this in real life next time, it’s going to be really serious. And yet you will have the memory in your body. You’ll have that embodied memory of the fun that you had.
So it’s great training. It’s great as a form of training. And we were super proud, you know, we were super proud because the minister, the local head of the department hated that.
He still hates us. He’s a guy from the right. And he tried to ban it.
He wrote a letter to the minister of interior saying these games, this training should be banned and everyone associated with it should be arrested. But we would continue to do it anyway. And we were quite proud because he was once on TV and we’d made this little video after the game.
The first one where we interviewed people, we put the bits of his letter because he called it the school of violence. And so we put bits of his letter with people who’d done the game and they were going, oh, it was great. It was like being a girl guide again and learning how to work together. And then he got interviewed once on telly and he said, oh yeah, this ad is full of guerrillas, guerrilla training camps, a guerrilla training camp. And the journalist said, oh yeah, we’ve got some guerrillas here and put on our video. And you had this 80 year old woman saying, oh, it was like the girl guides. And he was like, ah, it’s communication. They’re geniuses at communication, but it’s just communication. It’s pure communication. And we think it was actually one of the many elements that actually stopped the government coming because it was also performing to them the fact that we were super well-organized, even though we were probably less organized than the performance, but that’s always the case.
Max Haiven: I want to test a theory on you just before we go and see if you would agree with this, because I wanted to go back to what you were mentioning about the kind of playfulness that inhabits the building of the houses, for example. And I mean, I think one of the things that, one of the concepts I’m working with that’s inspired by your book, We Are Nature Defending Itself, is, I mean, in that book, you point out that there’s this artificial separation between art and life that’s been created by capitalism and its associated systems of domination, and then in turn sustains capitalism and its associated systems of domination, to the extent that those things can just be separated out and you have art that happens in like the art world and you have life that happens in, you know, the little consumer hellhole. And I wonder if you’d say the same thing about play in some ways, and particularly the way that at a place like the ZAD, where autonomy is built among people, you have a reintegration of play and life in a way where they’ve been sort of artificially separated under most, you know, capitalist structures, so that play only happens in very specific parts of life, mostly childhood, and specific activities, you know, notably like games and things that, you know, games that can be sold. I don’t know, what do you think of that?
Do you think, does it work?
Isa Fremeaux: I don’t think it’s just the ZAD. I think it’s really important, but I think that there are loads and loads of pockets of autonomy. I think that one of the things about the ZAD is that it’s probably larger than a lot of the pockets of autonomy.
But I think that, yes, there is, there is a sense of, at least there is a sense of possibility, or at least there is a sense of the validity for trying out, which I think is kind of one of the bases of play, is that you, you try out things and see if it works. And I think that one of the main emotions that comes with capitalism is that it’s not possible, that, that you can’t, you can’t do that, you can’t go there, you can’t be this, unless you do it within the very specific framework that is imposed from the outside. So unless you actually go to that place, and you pay that price, and I think that when, you know, if we think of the free parties, and how it’s been made pretty much forbidden, because the way you go, you know, the place you go to dance is the club where you pay a price, and there is someone at the door that says yes or no. And so, and I think that that’s, that’s the sense of possibility that I think actually quite a lot of people try to accommodate in pockets of autonomy, is to think, well, yes, I can, let’s, let’s try, let’s, and, and I think that sometimes there is also, because very often when we, when we talk about playfulness, there is a sense of, oh, it’s, it’s only light and fun, and I think that they can be, they can be very serious playfulness, the sense of, of experimentation, and of trying out, I think is not necessarily incompatible with, with playfulness, that, and I’m thinking, for instance, of, of all the collectives at the moment that are trying to experiment with ways of dealing with conflict without having to resort to cops or authorities.
I think that there is a playfulness in that. It’s not the light and fun version of playfulness, but it is the playfulness of, yeah, we’re gonna, we’re gonna try out, and we’re giving ourselves the possibility to fuck up, basically, where you, you lose, and it’s, and it’s scary, and it’s kind of, you know, and anyone who’s been really, really involved in some games is like, it becomes really serious. So I think that there is, there is that sense, and I, I don’t, I think that I would feel uncomfortable putting that as unique to the ZAD, because, because I think that they’re contrary to what the dominant discourse keeps on suggesting.
I mean, there are literally hundreds and millions of people that keep experimenting all the time, everywhere. Like, every squat is a place of experimentation and play. It’s like, you know, talk to anyone who opens squat, and it’s like, there is a sense of, of play, of the adventure, of the trying, and then, and then you experiment. So, yeah, I think that it’s, I think that it’s, it’s boiling up everywhere.
Jay Jordan: And I think we’ve, one thing we haven’t talked about, we haven’t talked about riots very much, but, you know, but rituals that we now work in a collective called the Salut d’Action Rituelle, which sets rituals to, as a tool of, a kind of healing tool, and a tool for the community to re-find its, its common, after a struggle, and also to celebrate the seasons, to celebrate the more-than-humans. And we hate solemn ritual. It’s nothing worse than solemn hippie ritual. And so, for us, it’s super important to have playfulness in that. So, we’ve actually done rituals where we have games. For a seminar, there was a seminar around the ZAD, where we had three days of seminar to discuss the future of the ZAD. And the seminar group commissioned us to do a ritual to work on the cops inside our heads, and how to get rid of the cops inside our own heads, and the judgments we had towards ourselves and towards others. And so, we designed a whole game, which involved these giant cell costumes being grabbed in the, in the, in the forest, and having to run and get these giant cell costumes, and then have to throw mud at a riot, a real riot cops helmet, that was on a pole. And the helmet had to fall down with a kind of game of stuck in the mud, but being played underneath it. And it all turned into total chaos. And in the end, the participants burned the riot cop helmet, which was never part of the plan. But that’s what happens when you play with anarchists. Two weeks ago, we facilitated an event for 15 gamers and game makers on the ZAD, and a handful of video game players. So it brought out all these people who play video games on the ZAD, who we didn’t know existed, because I don’t play video game. But we had organized, after a little conversation with someone who works at Ubisoft, who had come for a six-month sabbatical, and had spent a month of that here on the ZAD. And one day we were working together, and I said to her, oh, I’ve always imagined, I’ve never played video games, but I’ve always imagined you could do a really good video game about the ZAD. And she was like, oh, wow, that’s a great idea, and went with it, not with Ubisoft Soft, but with a, with a, with a local, with a folk from, you know, that world, but she set up a collective thing, it’ll be a non-profit game, and a strategy game. And so they’re in the process of making a strategy game about the video game, about the ZAD, and this was the first workshop to test, to play-test the game. So, yeah, so that’s…
Isa Fremeaux: And it was actually really funny to see a lot of our friends on the ZAD who are, who are gamers, and it’s kind of, I mean, because we’re not gamers, it’s like, you had all these people who have kind of a bit of a guilty pleasure around playing some of the really mainstream games, and same to us, it’s like, yeah, no, because we know, like, politically, it’s like, there’s nothing good to say about it, but they are amazing games, the quality is really good, and there was that sense of, you know, having, having, again, another underground world of people who know each other, but don’t really say it publicly, and, and this encounter of, of world, of worlds that came through that, that possibility of, of games, because for quite a lot of the, of the game designers, the programmers, and the artists, and it was a completely exceptional opportunity to come to the ZAD, where they had never felt that they had had that opportunity before, so it felt like an open door, so, you know, like game, like many, many things in, in the true culture of resistance, game can open doors that nothing else opens.
Jay Jordan: Something I learned through the research for We Are Nature Defending Itself is reading a lot of and who’s a biologist, philosopher, a biologist become philosopher, and he, he has this great critique of the, I mean, he’s, he’s, he’s, he has a critique of Darwinism, and his whole thing is that, you know, we have to understand the living world, not as a mechanism, not as a kind of Newtonian, Cartesian, Darwinian, patriarchal mechanism, but as a, as a force of feeling, that there’s feeling that is every single being is basically feeling out what is good or bad for it, and he says in that process, there isn’t this idea that, you know, evolution is, is efficient, it’s just a joke, it’s not efficient, if it was efficient, why would you put a massive fur coat on a lion in Africa? I mean, that’s not efficiency, and, and his thing, and the way I understood it, is that it’s actually, the living world loves to play, it loves to throw different bits of DNA together and go, oh, look, this fish has 15 eyes and 14 genitals, and makes love with, you know, shells attached to its ears, I don’t know, it’s just, this, the, the living world, evolution is playful, and it’s just one big play, play, play, and yeah, and I think that, for me, something that also means one’s approach to the world is, is, you know, if you understand that deeply, I mean, I, I hate quoting Einstein, but Einstein did say something like, you know, is the universe friendly or not? And I think if you think, well, the universe is playful, let’s play with it, then I think, you know, that, I think that can be a revolutionary position, actually.
Halle Frost: Weird Economies is sponsored by the Canada Council for the Arts. You can listen to the whole podcast as well as read the transcript at weirdeconomies.com.