Abstract
A regime of late ordoliberal governmentality in contemporary Germany keeps generating not only specific assemblages and apparatuses of power, technologies of government and selves, but as well specific arts of resistance with appropriate subjectivities. Our paper scrutinizes "political versatility" as one form of protesting selves specifically located on the militant margins - Black Block activists.
It is argued that political engagement of thousands of young Black Block militants from Germany embraces formation of so called versatile selves. Political versatility is the art of resistance which enables to navigate oneselves through multiple - and at first sight contradictory - political terrains.
Contemporary left radicals in Germany navigate their lifes through new middle class milieu as university students and liberal individualities communicating critical opinions through discussions, texts, arguments and having symbiotic relationship with the state as much as they cultivate invisible, confrontational and collective modus operandi of Black bloc rioters and anti-austerity rebels with fighting and disobedient bodies immersed in street direct actions, riots, urban and virtual techniques of anonymization, and communicating through non-discursive, yet highly symbolical attacks on the state, the nation as well as the market. This paper based on our long-term ethnographic research explores the cultivation of versatile selves and argues that the art of political versatility enables to avoid either-or question concerning life trajectory and thus to practice as much as militant protest as to pursue new middle class trajectory of liberal individualities and future teachers, social workers etc.