Gambetti 99structures of collective life were exposed to critical scrutiny and eventu-
ally modified through debate or actual practice was seemingly emerging
in the period that roughly began in the middle half of the 1990s and con-
tinued till 2006.
e Diyarbakir case, now left in limbo owing to renewed Turkish Th
nationalist frenzy, shared similarities with examples of mobilization where
conflict, rupture and struggle have also become “commun-icative”: the
case of the Zapatistas in Mexico’s Chiapas, the alter-globalization move-
ment that forged itself a space of existence in Porto Allegre and in the
World Social Forums, and the peace movement that emerged as a result
of the 2003 Iraq War. Together with feminist struggles and the making
of working classes throughout the past century,^20 these recent instances
of collective action sufficiently demonstrate that conflict is not always
destructive. But to what extent public spheres so constituted acquire stay-
ing power is the next question that needs to be answered.
II. On dangerous grounds: Revisiting conflict
Dana Villa’s claim is tragic: resistance is the only responsible mode of
action in a world where the space of politics has been usurped by the
modern subjectification of the real^21 and by the automatism of natural and
technical processes. Echoing the distraught tone of some of Heidegger and
Arendt’s work, Villa contends that the absence of a genuine public sphere
frustrates efforts to “resurrect the agora or some approximation thereof
by appealing to deliberation, intersubjectivity, or ‘acting in concert.’”^22
We have, then, no other alternative but to resist falling into the trap of
norm-bound functional behavior and must preserve “as far as possible,
our capacity for initiatory, agonistic action and spontaneous, independent
judgment.” Of course, resisting and preserving cannot accomplish what
genuine political action can in the way of founding spaces of freedom. But
in the public realm that Villa depicts, “the only things that are ‘seen and
heard by all’ are the false appearances ... offered up under the single aspect
of mass culture.”^23 Resistance is a “re-action”; but it is the only modality
of acting available for dissidents, the only bulwark against the total with-
drawal of politics. Although the chances of beginning something new are