We can address the problem of scaling by thinking how to “de-scale.” Current societies are centralized, the size of cities is  increasing, the centralization of resources through the management by corporations and information/media monopolies leads to the question of how there can be a “de-scalation” through decentralization so that alliances can be built in an easier way, not necessarily by proximity or similarity. “Technopolitics” describes a new paradigm, we have a working decentralized paradigm like the Internet where to learn from, FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) as a decentralized community bringing innovation and creating technological solutions, p2p as communication and exchange network. A transfer from virtual to real world can take place by thinking of a decentralized network of city-states. Reducing the size of the problems, we are able to reduce complexity and find specific solutions that experiment and exchange, and still retain the richness of the whole, if it is thought as a part of a network and not isolated. The network deconstructs the idea of proximity as the only one to create alliances, nowadays societies are interconnected and alliances do not rely on distance but on commons goals or ways of doing, empathy, or feeling of care.

Maybe this can be related to the feeling of a general unease that grows stronger the more we learn about the impacts of our modes of production on climate and social justice. A feeling in your belly that you constantly have to suppress to be able to take part in urban consumer society. I think it’s important we get out of our theoretical comfort zones and get into real world action, especially considering climate. I mean such things as “don’t move”: all the flying around must come to an end, like “make your neighbors understand it, too” and push the demand for ecological and affordable transport. “Get your bodies on the streets to support groups in direct demands,” support groups in court, too, and help prevent evictions etc. As for now, people who are doing this are not very numerous and I’d be curious to see what happens if that changed. I think by now, we all know that “fame is lame” and we want to connect and overcome hierarchies. Plus, what to do about language? As I feel very restricted by having to think it all in English. Generally I’d appreciate if we’d use terms that everybody understands or briefly explain unknown terms. I like it in e.g. anarchist circles that a language is chosen that does not open up any hierarchies, in the sense of being initiated into a language or being excluded from it.

What interests us, is our own uneasy alliance with the so-called “neoliberal” narrative. We have been practically dealing with the questions of how to discuss this alliance with the people who are in alliance with the neoliberal logic—entrepreneurs during our documentary process. The core of our work is to engage with a selection of entrepreneurs, whose services, products, or networks that they establish and scale, “train” and educate a new kind of subject, the “entrepreneurial” subject. We have met and filmed community managers of startup incubators, venture capitalists, municipality workers who promote innovation, and governmental support for entrepreneurship as well as organizers of startup awards, monthly networking events,  and pitch sessions. They are addressing us with new, innovative tools of their ventures to be even more efficient, flexible, and communicative. These companies try to reinforce entrepreneurship itself as main mode of operation in the contemporary and a future society. As they accelerate their visions and proposals to evermore domains—education, politics, and governance, among others—we wanted to have a dialog about the actual meaning and repercussions of their visions.

In the documentary we unfold our own process of articulating critical self-reflections and an analysis of increasingly  demanding self-management and self-actualization imperatives that we recognize in our own lives in parallel with our attempt to establish a conversation with our subjects of the film through interviews, ongoing discussions, group workshops, and an observation of the entrepreneurial scene. The driving force to start this project three years ago was our desire to seek dialog with people that are empowered as well as gaining financial value from neoliberal conditions. Since then, it has been our attempt to take the discussion out of the contemporary art or film field and bring it to an environment where we think it should also take  place. However, the problematics of a possibility of dialog and discussion in the tradition of theories of deliberative democratic, and the antagonistic discussion by Jürgen Habermas and Chantal Mouffe respectively, proved much harder in the realities we have experienced. The main tension in the project is the (im)possibility to conduct a dialog with such a different social world—to which we would like to have access, but whose political attitude we strongly contradict.  What does it take to produce knowledge together across seemingly irreconcilable political positions?

Could you elaborate a little more on that?

In my book Solidarity Poiesis (which is the result of my learning process with the popular assemblies in Athens) I talk about “solidarity from the vantage point of an intolerable present.” I also talk about the elementary role of personal contact/encounter/confrontation in solidarity processes. At the heart of true equality, status is not worked out in advance or outside relation. Lending oneself to “raw” social exposure—beyond merely acting a role—usually leads to a breach of protocol, to a rupture of established, preconceived, or imagined distinctions. This is why the Greek expression for “solidarity”, αλληλεγγύη (allilengýi), which means “close [to] each other”, is so adequate. Thus, uneasy alliances make up every solidarity process. But they are foremost uneasy alliances of lived experiences, not so much of individuals/actors. So I agree with Ewa that it’s a bit more complicated than Butler’s proposal, and that William’s focus on the nature of our lived experiences as emergent, particular, and contingent, while at the same time transindividual, is much more useful. Because it points out why “uneasy alliances that stands against injustice” (Butler) could be conceived as ineliminably tragic, resulting in the absence of any form of reconciliation. Is this a problem? No. This is the nature of our vulnerabilities.

The crucial thing is to build autonomy. This references autonomous structures and infrastructures, to live together and also to have a group practice. Partially uneasiness is linked to life unsustainability, therefore the role of economy is important, implies building resistance by developing new economical frameworks based on mutual and shared economy, social, and solidarity economy that helps living and going through uncertain and precarious processes. I am not into theoretical approaches since they have been detached from practice instead of supporting ongoing processes. I like the idea of garage philosophy, to bring thought as a daily practice to reflect upon daily situations. I also think that theory is framed by the academic world but thoughts cannot be restricted to academy. Thought is bound to human beings and can be achieved in different ways.

In the squares we dissolved the idea of strong identities. New “soft” and “organic” identities were created, based on active listening and questioning the “truths” coming from ideologies. In countries like Germany, the identities associated with ideologies are still very strong in the left scene. We are seeing how the #GiletsJaunes or #YellowVests are creating a big uneasiness in the French society where people are debating if it’s an extreme left or an extreme right movement. What we are seeing in this process is that those identities, left and right, don't represent the concern of citizens regarding their living conditions, their disillusionment on politicians, the rejection of the 1% stealing the wealth, and that there is a demand for a people’s democracy. On the other side, the uneasy relationship between support and solidarity among equals becomes evident in a migrant environment. Support dominates over solidarity, equality between people is left aside. The charity model is winning with solidarity, that is power relations taking form, which prevents from sharing and genuinely doing things together. We need new references and leave Western-Centrism behind, question theory and practices narrated by neoliberal societies, accept the uneasiness of playing on other grounds with other languages, other believes and other ways of doing. Senegal is a role model in Africa, Y’en a Marre brings in open, alternative ways of making politics—it’s inspiring and offers alternative references.

In The New Way of the World philosopher Pierre Dardot and sociologist Christian Laval offer a very accurate articulation of the neoliberal subject or the entrepreneurial subject as an imperative we could very well recognize in our own lives. They describe neoliberalism as a mode of conduct that demands a certain subjectivity—the desire of limitless production has to come from within which turns self-realization into an internalized control power. Finding this precise articulation by Dardot and Laval gave us a certain comfort in constant clash between this imperative and the failure to respond to the demand to be unconditionally entrepreneurial. We believe many freelance cultural workers like us find themselves continuously on the verge of personal bankruptcy, a state that one has to face again and again. With the impossibility to make a firm distinction between one’s own failure to deliver and the failure of the economic rationality we live in, one never abandons the cruel optimism to perform even harder in order to escape the precarious living conditions once and for all. Perhaps the only way to stop this cruelly optimistic performance is a collective endeavour. On the other hand, how come it is also so easy to become a collective that intensifies such performance? How can we resist it?

Disappointment as well as unease is part of our current social framework, you have to deal with it from a learning perspective, it opens the space for other possibilities. Also political work brings inspiration from corners where you didn't expect them, from people not call many times political and there should be a look to existing experiences of social organization from a Non-Western perspective.
Learning by doing and finding solutions together is a way of building up unexpected alliances, putting ideas together and into practice, creating a collective brain, a brain of the commons. In the aim of creating other political frameworks and narratives, I like the one that is opened through cooking and food, where tastes are a part of identity, resistance, and memory, and as a cultural ritual is key in the construction of unions and alliances. The kitchen is a transversal space which is good for exchange and conversations created by women with a political impact, as well as social and economical, having as background the question of care and away from the rigid forms of meetings. Food leads us to questions regarding food sovereignty, GMO, or climate change. In a world falling apart, storytelling is important; to reach people by opening up other imaginaries and languages is key to bring awareness. A good example of how this is being carried out is the use of hip-hop in Senegal, since it is spreading a critical message, and at the same time showing an alternative path in countries still colonized by Europe, encouraging youth to rise up and take the future in their hands by using urban culture.

The nature of the shared perspective of the alliance is, in my opinion, interestingly exemplified in the last scene of Apichatpong’s Hotel Mekong (2012) in which two male characters look out at the river: “the frame initially strikes us as the unmediated conduit for what the men are seeing. But they never reappear. So while we feel at times vitally connected to this diegetic couple's watching, there are other periods when we feel that our meandering attention has abandoned their point-of-view for ours alone. The shot's variegated temporality confronts the viewer with a tension between individual and collective registers of looking”1 Eventually, the collective look, while necessary, remains temporary and fragile, while the individual look is essentially hesitant and becomes haunted. If we learn to understand the constitution of this reciprocal relation better, we can learn to build our muscle for it.

From the vantage point of living in an intolerable present, the inclinations, behavior patterns, and aspirations of any organism become haunted. It paves the way for an alliance of unease. I’m talking about an alliance that works toward a shared perspective at lived experiences and feelings of unease, vulnerability, contingency, catastrophe. What Marcuse called sensory “organs for the alternative” can become assembled into a transindividual “body for the alternative”. However, it’s the nature of the alliance that it is unstable, that this body remains ephemeral, situational, and conversational. But this isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

• 1. http://www.criticalcommons.org/Members/MCIMR/clips/mekong-hotel-ending/v... This scene was brought to my attention by Ana Vujanović in her lecture on "Landscape Dramaturgy" in P.A.R.T.S, Brussels, September '18.