Tension and Syndicalism: Atmospheres of the Strike

Vibrant ideology is a resonant, reverberating, electrifying set of ideas that are produced by (and producing of) the affective intensity of a strike. From the fraught atmospheres of conflict at the picket line to joyful imbricating solidarities in social spaces of organisation, the strike is affectively intense. Vibrant ideology names a form of ideology that emerges from these shared experiences, and which organises and amplifies these shared experiences. To understand this sense of ideology, the article deploys a Bergsonian line of thinking in Georges Sorel, which is heavy on the affective vibrance, and light on the ideology; and the generative workerist analysis of labour refusal in Nanni Balestrini's fiction, which rebalances matters somewhat. In each, we see a turning towards the self-generative power of the workers in strike which reorients them ideologically.