💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › politics › SPUNK › sp000773.txt captured on 2022-04-29 at 02:37:57.
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Anarchy: a journal of desire armed. #38, Fall 1993
ESSAYS
@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
FOR A WORLD Without MORALITY =20
[Translator's note: the following text first appeared in the
theoretical anti-state communist journal La Banquise, which was
published in the early to mid-1980s. Copies of La Banquise and Le
Brise-Glace (mid to late 1980s) are still available by writing to
Mordicus, a more recent journal in which some former La Banquise
and Le Brise-Glace members are participating. Write to: Mordicus,
B.P. 11, 75622 Paris Cedex 13, France.]
This introduction to a critique of social customs is a contribu-
tion to a necessary revolutionary anthropology. The communist
movement possesses a dimension which is both a class and human one.
It is a movement which is based on the central role of workers
without being a form of workerism, and without being a humanism it
moves toward a human community. For now, reformism thrives on
separation by piling up demands in parallel spheres without ever
questioning these spheres themselves. One of the proofs of the
potency of a communist movement will be its capacity to recognize,
and in practice to supersede, this gap and contradiction between
the dimensions of class and community.
It is this gap and contradiction which flourish in the ambiguities
of emotional life, making the critique of morality more delicate
than other critiques.
What follows is not a text about ``sexuality,'' which is an
historical and cultural product in the same sense as the economy
and work. Along with work and the economy, ``sexuality'' came into
being as a specialized sphere of human activity during 19th
century capitalism, when it was finalized and theorized
(discovered). It was then banalized by capitalism in the 20th and
is something we can go beyond in a totally communist life.
For the same reasons, this text is not a ``critique of daily
life.'' Such a critique expresses only the social space which is
excluded from work and is in competition with it. ``Customs,'' on
the contrary, include the entirety of human relations from a
viewpoint of the sentiments. These customs do not exclude material
production (the bourgeois morality of the family, for example, is
indissociable from the work ethic).
Since in its own way capitalism sums up the human past which
produced it, there can be no revolutionary critique without a
critique of the customs and lifeways which preceded capitalism, and
the way they have been integrated by it.
LOVE=FEECSTASY=FECRIME
Love
"There are solitary jerk-offs which are infinitely less miserable
than many embraces. Reading a good adventure novel can be a lot
more lively than organized excursions. What is miserable is to live
in a world where the only adventures are in books."
According to Marx's 1844 Manuscripts, ``The most natural relation-
ship between man and man is the relationship between man and
woman.'' This formula is comprehensible and can be of use as long
as we keep in mind that humanity's history is the history of its
emancipation from nature through the creation of the economic
sphere. The concept that humans are anti-nature, that they are
completely external to nature, is clearly an aberration. Humanity's
nature is at the same time a purely biological given (we are
primates) and the activity, within and outside of themselves, of
people modifying what is a purely natural given.
People are not external to natural conditions because they
themselves are one of them. But they wish to understand these
conditions and have begun to play with them. There is room for
discussion about the mechanisms which have brought this about (the
extent to which it resulted from difficulties of survival,
especially in the temperate regions, etc.). But what is certain is
that, by transforming their environment, and being transformed in
turn by it, people find themselves in a situation which radically
distinguishes them from other known states of matter. Stripped of
all metaphysical presuppositions, this capacity to play to a
certain extent with the rules of matter is in effect human freedom.
This freedom, from which people have been dispossessed in the
process of creating it (since it is what has nourished the
economy), is the freedom that must be reconquered. But without
entertaining any illusions about what it is: neither the freedom of
expansive desires which do not run into obstacles, nor the freedom
to submit to the commands of Mother Nature (who could decipher
them?). It also means giving full rein to our freedom to play with
the laws of nature, a freedom which is as much one of re-routing
the course of a body of water as it is one of making sexual use of
an orifice which was not naturally ``intended'' for this use. It is
a question of finally realizing that only risk guarantees freedom.
Because it must give human freedom full rein, the critique of
human customs cannot single out one practice as opposed to another
as a symbol of their misery. It is sometimes said that in today's
world, the freedom to be found in people's lifestyles is simply a
masturbatory activity (alone, two people, or more). To limit
oneself to this given is to misapprehend the essence of sexual
misery. Must the self-evident be belabored? There are solitary
jerk-offs which are infinitely less miserable than many embraces.
Reading a good adventure novel can be a lot more lively than
organized excursions. What is miserable is to live in a world where
the only adventures are in books. It is not the daydreams eventual-
ly followed by results which someone makes us experience that are
disgusting. The disgusting part is the conditions which must be
fulfilled in order to make it possible to meet the person. When we
read a want ad in which a man with a beard invites the old woman
and her dog who live upstairs over to have some fun, it is neither
his beard, her age nor the zoophilia which disgust us. What is
repugnant is that, by putting an ad in Lib=82ration [a leftist
daily], his desire becomes a means to market a particularly
nauseating ideological commodity.
When someone is alone in a room writing a theoretical text, to the
extent that the text provides insight into social reality, he or
she is less isolated from people than at work or in the subway.
Although the predominance of one of them may be symptomatic, it is
not in one activity as opposed to another that the essence of
sexual misery is to be found; it resides in the fact that, whether
there are ten people, two, or if you are alone, individuals are
irremediably separated from each other through relations of
competition, exhaustion and boredom. Exhaustion from working;
boredom with roles; the boredom of sexuality as a separate
activity.
Sexual misery, in the first place, signifies social constraint
(the constraints of wage-labor, and its cortege of psychological
and physiological miseries; the constraints of social codes). These
social constraints exert influence in a domain which is presented
by the dominant culture and its dissident version as one of the
last regions in the world where adventure remains possible. To the
extent that capitalist Judeo-Christian civilization has been
imposed upon people, sexual misery also signifies their profound
disarray with respect to how the West has handled sexuality.
From Stoicism, the dominant outlook during the Roman Empire,
Christianity adopted the double concept that: 1) sex is the basis
of pleasure; 2) therefore it can and should be controlled. The
Orient, for its part, through an open affirmation of sexuality (and
not just the art of making love), tends towards a pan-sexualism
where sexuality must of course be mastered but in the same sense as
everything else; it is not given a privileged position. The West
does not control sexuality by ignoring it but by thinking of
nothing else. Everything is sexualized. The worst aspect is not
that sex is repressed by Judeo-Christianity, but that Judeo-
Christianity was dazzled by it. And not that Judeo-Christianity
kept a lid on sexuality, but that it organized it. The West has
made sexuality the hidden truth of the normal conscience. But of
madness (hysteria) as well. Just as a crisis of morality was
getting underway, Freud discovered that sexuality was the big
secret of the world and of civilization as a whole.
Sexual misery comes from an interaction between two moral orders,
the traditional and modern ones which cohabit, to a greater or
lesser extent, in the minds and glands of our contemporaries. On
the one hand we suffer from constraints of morality and work, which
keep us from attaining the historical ideal of a sexual blossoming
and of a blossoming of love. On the other, the more we free
ourselves from these constraints (in our imaginations in any case),
the more this ideal appears unsatisfactory and empty.
A tendency and its transformation into a spectacle should not be
taken as a totality. If a relative liberalization has occurred
during our era, the traditional order has far from disappeared.
Just try being openly ``pedophile.'' The traditional order
functions and will long continue to function for a lot of people
living in the industrialized countries. In many parts of the world
it is still dominant and on the offensive (in the Islamic countries
and in the Eastern Bloc). Its representatives, priests from Rome or
Moscow, are far from inactive in France itself. The suffering
caused by their misdeeds is still weighty enough that we should
hardly be prevented from denouncing them with the claim that the
underpinnings of traditional morality are being undermined by
capital. Not every revolt against this order necessarily tends
toward neo-reformism. Just as easily revolt can be the oppressed
person's cry, a cry which contains the kernel of the infinite
variety of possible sexual and sensual practices which have been
repressed for millennia.
We are not, it should be clear, against ``perversions.'' We do not
even oppose lifelong heterosexual monogamy. But when litt=82rateurs
or artists (the surrealists for example) wish to impose l'amour fou
(``mad love'') as what is most desirable, it must be stated that
this is a recycled version of the great modern Western reductionist
myth. The object of this myth is to provide a spiritual bonus for
couples=FEthose isolated atoms which constitute the capitalist
economy's best basis. Among the riches of a world free of capital
will be the infinite variations of a perverse and polymorphous
sexuality and sensuality. Only with the blossoming of these
practices will the love praised by Andr=82 Breton and Harlequin
novels (1) appear for what it really is=FEa transitory cultural
construction.
The traditional moral order is oppressive and merits being
criticized and combatted as such. But if it finds itself in a state
of crisis it is not because our contemporaries prize freedom more
than our ancestors. It is because bourgeois morality has been
unable to adapt to modern conditions of producing and circulating
commodities.
The bourgeois morality conceived in its full scope during the 19th
century and transmitted through religious channels and secular
schools arose from a need for ideological conduits towards the
domination of industrial capitalism at a time when capital was not
yet entirely dominant. Sexual morality and the morality of work and
of the family went hand in hand. Capital was based on bourgeois and
petit bourgeois values: property as the fruit of work and saving;
hard but necessary work; family life. In the first half of the 20th
century capital reached a point where it occupied the entire social
space, making itself indispensable and inevitable. Because there is
nothing else, working for a salary becomes the only possible
activity. Thus, even as it imposes itself on everyone, wage labor
is able to present itself as a non-constraint and guarantee of
freedom. Since everything becomes a commodity, each aspect of
morality becomes outmoded. Through credit people gain access to
property before saving. They work because it is practical, not out
of a sense of duty. The extended family gives way to the nuclear
family, which is itself thrown into disarray by the constraints of
money and work. Schools and the media challenge parents with
respect to authority, influence and education. Everything announced
in the Communist Manifesto has been accomplished by capitalism.
With the disappearance of community places to get together (caf=82s
...) and their replacement by places to consume which lack feeling
(discos, malls), too much is asked of the family at a time when it
has less than ever to offer.
More profoundly, beneath the crisis of bourgeois morality lies a
crisis of what is known as capitalist morality. It becomes
difficult to make ``customs'' permanent, to find ways of relating
and behaviour which go beyond the bankruptcy of bourgeois morality.
What morality, then, does modern capitalism offer? The submission
of everyone and everything, since capital's omnipresence theoreti-
cally makes previous relay systems superfluous. Fortunately this
doesn't work. There is no purely, wholly, uniquely capitalist
society, and never will be. Capitalism, for one thing, does not
create something from nothing; it transforms people and relation-
ships which come into being outside it (peasants who come to the
city; petit-bourgeois d=82class=82s; immigrants). And something from
the old sociability, at least in the form of nostalgia, always
remains. As well, capital's functioning itself is not harmonious.
The promises of the dreamworld of commercials are not kept, causing
a reaction, a falling back upon traditional values like the family
which on the whole are outmoded. Which results in the phenomenon of
people continuing to marry although three out of four marriages end
in a divorce. Because it is obliged to order about, push around and
constrain wage workers, capital has to permanently re-introduce
relay values of authority and obedience even though its present
stage has made them obsolete. This is why the old ideology is
constantly used in conjunction with the new one (participation,
etc.).
Our era is one of a coexistence of moralities, of a proliferation
of codes, not their disappearance. Guilt (being afraid of violating
a taboo) is juxtaposed with anguish (a sense of a lack of guide-
posts with respect to ``choices'' to be made). Narcissism and
schizophrenia, the maladies characteristic of our period, replace
the neuroses and hysteria of the previous era.
What guides people's behaviour today is less and less an unques-
tionable ensemble of dictates which is transmitted by a father or
a priest than a sort of utilitarian morality of personal improve-
ment that utilizes a fetishization of the body and a frenzied
psychologization of human relations. An obsession with
interpretation replaces confessional rites and the examination of
conscience.(2)
Ahead of his time, de Sade simply announced our own, one in which,
until people become themselves, there is no moral guarantee. The
intolerable boredom the reader of the Marquis' monotonous catalogue
sooner or later experiences is recaptured when you read the want
ads, where the traits of a communicationless pleasure are infinite-
ly repeated. Sadeian desire aims to reify other people completely,
to make them a soft dough which can be moulded by one's fantasies.
This is a deadly attitude: to annihilate otherness, to refuse to be
dependent on the desire of someone else, means repeating the same
thing, and death. But whereas the Sadeian hero smashes social
impediments, modern people, with their logic of individual self-
improvement, have become their own fantasy dough-to-be-kneaded.
They are not overcome by desires; they ``achieve their fantasies.''
Or rather they attempt to, like they jog instead of running for the
sake of it or because they have to get somewhere quickly. Today
people do not lose themselves in other people; they activate and
develop their capacity for pleasure, their ability to have orgasms.
Insipid trainers of their own bodies, they tell them: ``Come!'',
``Better than that!'', ``Run!'', ``Dance!'', etc.
For people today, the need for work is replaced by the need to
make leisure time a success. Sexual constraints are replaced by a
difficulty in affirming a sexual identity. This narcissistic
culture goes hand in hand with a change in the function of
religion. Instead of invoking a transcendence, religion becomes a
means of making it easier to handle life-crisis periods (adoles-
cence, marriage, death). Also, not only religion is helping to keep
people up-to-date: the family is invoked as well! ``Not a family
which is omnipresent, as in the previous century, but one that is
omni-absent. A family no longer defined by the work ethic or by
sexual constraints, but by an ethic of survival and by sexual
promiscuity,'' according to psychologist Christopher Lasch. (Le
Monde, April 12, 1981).
In the midst of the crisis of morality that dominates Western
society, people are more poorly equipped than ever to resolve the
``question of sexuality.'' And it is precisely when this question
is posed most directly that the chances of noticing that it is not
a ``question'' are best.
People today are panicking. They are all the more lost, as
everything alive turns into a commodity, when this commodification
concerns a sexuality which has been repressed for 2000 years, only
to resurface as a commodity. It then becomes apparent that
relentless sensuality (e.g. the film La Grande Bouffe), in a world
of commodities, isolates individuals even more from humanity, one's
partners and oneself. Since they end up with the impression that
the idea of sexuality is deadly and alienating, people ultimately
readopt a Christian outlook.
For example, the work of someone like Georges Bataille reveals a
lot about Western evolution since the beginning of the century.
Going against the grain of the history of civilization, Bataille
starts with sexuality and ends up with religion. From the fiction
piece L'Oeil until the end of his life, Bataille searched for what
was implicit in L'Oeil. On the way his trajectory crossed that of
the revolutionary movement, only to veer away all the more quickly
and easily when the movement almost completely disappeared.
Nevertheless, during the last years before World War Two, he
defended positions with respect to anti-fascism and the threat of
war which lucidly cut through the verbiage of the vast majority of
the extreme left. This is why his work remains ambiguous. It can be
used to illustrate the religious impasses where the experience of
the limits of unleashed sexuality ends up:
``A brothel is my true church, the only one that leaves me un-
quenched.''
But if, in the above, as in most of his work, he limits himself
to going against the grain of accepted values, to refining a new
version of Satanism, he has also written sentences which reveal a
profound intuition about essential aspects of communism: ``taking
perversion and crime not as values which exclude, but as things to
be integrated into the totality of humanity.''
Ecstasy
Through the cultural constructions to which it has given birth
(love as it was practised by the ancient Greeks, courtly love,
kinship systems, bourgeois contracts, etc.), emotional and sexual
life has constantly been the stakes, a matrix of passions, a zone
of contact with another cultural sphere: the sacred. In trances, in
ecstasy, in feelings of communion with nature, the desire to go
beyond the limits of the individual expresses itself through states
of paroxysm. This desire to become one with the species which has
been channelled towards the cosmos or a divinity has until now worn
the prestigious rags of the sacred. Religions, and monotheistic
ones in particular, have circumscribed the sacred, assigning it a
leading role while at the same time distancing it from human life.
In contrast to primitive societies, where the sacred is inseparable
from daily life, in statist societies it has become more and more
specialized. Capitalist civilization has not eliminated the sacred;
it has kept a lid on it, and its various residues and ersatz
manifestations continue to encumber social life. In a world in
which obsolete religious ideas and commodity banalization coexist,
a communist critique is double-pronged: it gets rid of the sacred,
that is, it flushes out the old taboos from the places where they
have taken refuge, and at the same time it begins to go beyond the
sacredness which capitalism has only degraded.
The sacred aspects of the zones where the old obsessions such as
the pubis have taken refuge must therefore be removed. To counter
adoration of the penis, its conquering imperialism, the feminist
ideology has come up with nothing better than fetishizing women's
genitalia, and, backed by piles of pathos and literature, making it
the headquarters of what makes them different; the obscure fold
where their being is located! Rape thus becomes the crime of
crimes, an ontological attack. As if violently inflicting a penis'
penetration were more disgusting than forcing a woman into wage
slavery through economic pressure! But it is true that in the first
instance it is easy to locate the guilty party=FEan individual=FE
whereas in the second it is a question of a social relationship. It
is easier to exorcise fear by making rape a blasphemy, an invasion
in the holy of holies=FEas if being manipulated by ads, innumerable
physical aggressions at work, or having the apparatus of social
control start a file on you did not constitute forms of intimate
violence which are just as profound as an imposed intercourse!
Ultimately, what makes a Somalian rip out his wife's clitoris and
what animates the feminists flows from the same concept of human
individuality as the object of property relations. Convinced that
his wife is one of his belongings, the Somalian believes that it is
his duty to protect her from feminine desire, which is seen as
parasitically dangerous to the economy of the group. But in so
doing, he profoundly reduces and impoverishes his own pleasure and
his own desire. In the clitoris of his wife it is the human desire
of both sexes which is symbolically targeted. The mutilated woman
has been amputated from humanity. The feminist who shouts that her
body belongs to her wants to keep her desire for herself. (3) But
when she desires, she becomes part of a community in which
appropriation dissolves.
The demand ``My body belongs to me'' supposedly gives concrete
content to the ``Rights of Man'' of 1789. Has it not been often
enough repeated that these rights only concern an abstract person
and have only ultimately benefitted the bourgeois individual!
Bourgeois, male, white, adult, it is said nowadays. Neo-reformism
claims to correct this by giving real content to this hitherto
abstract ``man.'' The real ``rights'' of the real ``man,'' in
short. But the ``real man'' is simply the woman, the Jew, the
Corsican, the gay, the person from Vietnam, etc. ``My body belongs
to me'' follows directly in the footsteps of the bourgeois
revolution which these feminists are attempting to complete and
perfect for ever and ever by requesting democracy to cease being
``formal.'' What is being criticized here are effects which are
said to be their cause!
The demand to control one's body is a restatement of the bourgeois
demand for property rights. To escape the secular oppression of
women who were previously treated as objects to be possessed by
their husbands (and who still are today in other ways), feminism
has come up with nothing better than expanding property rights. By
becoming an owner in turn, women will be protected: to each her
own! This pitiful demand reflects the obsession with ``security''
which the media and all the political parties are doing their
utmost to make contemporary people adopt. This demand arises in
relation to a horizon which is blocked off: to master something (in
this case one's body), private appropriation is the only means
which can be envisioned. Our bodies, though, belong to those who
love us=FEnot because of a legally guaranteed ``right,'' but because,
as flesh and feelings, we live and evolve only through them. And to
the extent that we are able to love the human species, our body
belongs to it.
At the same time that it strips away what is sacred, a communist
critique denounces the capitalist utopia of a world in which people
are no longer able to love to death, a world where, since every-
thing has been levelled, everything is equal and everything can be
exchanged=FEplaying sports, making love and working would take place
in the same quantified, industrial time frame chopped into pieces
like a sausage. Sexologists will be around to cure any libidinal
letdowns, psychotherapists to avoid mental suffering, and the
police, with the help of chemistry, to prevent any excesses. In
such a world there would no longer be a field of human activity
which would create a different temporal rhythm by making question-
ing everything the stakes.
The ahistorical illusion which is the basis of mystical practices
is a dangerous one. The only important thing about these practices
is what, by definition, they don't really possess: what can be
communicated. We cannot escape from history, but the history of
individuals or of the species is also not a purely linear unfolding
which capitalism produces (and convinces people that it produces).
History includes high points which go beyond and are part of the
present, orgasms where people lose themselves in other people, in
society, and in the species.
``Christianity has substantialized the sacred. But the nature of
the sacred (...) is perhaps the hardest thing to pin down which
takes place between people. The sacred is simply a privileged
moment of communal union, an instant of convulsive communication
which is usually snuffed out.'' (G. Bataille, Le Sacr=82, Works).
Today this instant of ``communal unity'' is to be found at
concerts, in the panic which grips a crowd, and, in its most
degraded form, in the great patriotic outbursts and other
manifestations of the ``union sacr=82e'' (``sacred union'') (4)whose
manipulation allows every dirty trick. As opposed to what is taking
place in backward capitalist countries like Iran, it can be
presumed that in modern war only a minority would participate; the
rest would watch. But nothing is for certain. The manipulation of
the sacred still has sunny days ahead, perhaps, because until now
it is the sacred which has represented the only high point where
people's irrepressible need to be together has manifested itself.
If they have provided a more or less imaginary nook sheltered from
class struggle, mystical practices have also cemented revolts. This
has been demonstrated for example in Taoist trances in resistance
to the central powers in ancient China, in voodoo during slave
revolts, and in millenarian prophecies. If contemporary mystical
quests play a counter-revolutionary role because they are just a
way for bourgeois individuals to withdraw into themselves, the fact
remains that commodity banalization of every aspect of life tends
to empty existence's passionate content. Today's world asks us to
love just a jumble of individual inadequacies. Compared to tradi-
tional societies it has lost an essential dimension of human life:
the high points when people are united with nature. We are
condemned to watch harvest festivals on TV.
But we are not interested in a ridiculous longing for the past,
a return to the joys whose repetitive, illusory and limited nature
history has made plain. At a time when capitalism tends to impose
its reign without sharing, searching for ``communal unity'' and
``convulsive communication'' elsewhere than in revolution becomes
purely reactionary. Since capitalism has banalized everything, this
gives us an opportunity to free ourselves from sexuality as a
specialized sphere. The world we desire is one in which the
possibility of going beyond oneself exists in every human activity,
a world which proposes that we love the species and individuals
whose insufficiencies will be ones of the species and no longer
those of existence. The stakes today=FEwhat is worth risking one's
life for and what could impart another rhythm to time=FEis the
content of life in its entirety.
Crime
"It is capitalism which imposes the monstrous scam of an assurance
of maximal survival in exchange for maximum submission to the
economy. But isn't a world where you must hide to choose the hour
when you die a world that is extremely devalued?"
The meaninglessness of history is delightful. Why torment
ourselves about destiny's happy ending, a final party that can only
be earned through our sweat and disasters? For future idiots
prancing on our ashes? In its absurdity a vision of a paradisiacal
culmination surpasses hope's worst wanderings. The only pretext to
apologize for Time is that some moments are found to be more
profitable than others=FEaccidents without consequence in an
intolerable monotony of perplexities.'' (E.M. Cioran, Pr=82cis de
d=82composition)
Communism is not a paradise-like culmination.
Calling communism a paradise, in the first place, allows accepting
everything in the meantime. In the event of a social revolution,
not changing society from top to bottom will be accepted: a society
without a state or prisons=FEfine, but for later, when people are
perfect. Until then, everything becomes justifiable: a workers'
state, people's prisons, etc., since communism is only fit for a
humankind of gods.
Next there is the soothing vision of a desirable society which
would disgust us if it were achieved. Any community, whatever its
size, obliges its members to renounce a part of themselves. And, in
the sense of positive desires=FEones whose bringing to fruition would
not compromise other people=FEto leave certain positive desires
unfulfilled, for the simple reason that these desires are not
necessarily shared by others. What makes such a situation tolerable
is the certainty that there remains the possibility of withdrawing
if someone finds that giving these things up threatens their
personal integrity. This would not take place without suffering.
But to feel fully alive, is not the risk of suffering and death
indispensable?
The fact that humanity threatens to wipe itself out by playing
with the laws of matter, and with it all life on the planet, is not
what upsets us. What is intolerable is that humanity is doing so
entirely unconsciously. And because it has created capital, which
imposes its own inhumane laws, in spite of itself. It is true,
though, that as soon as people began to alter their environment
they risked destroying it and themselves with it, and that this
risk will probably remain despite the forms of social organization
in place. One could even conceive of a humanity which, having
initially fought and then tamed and loved the universe, decides to
disappear and to reintegrate into nature in the form of dust. There
can be no humanity without risk in any case, because there can be
no humanity without other people=FEwhich is also just as evident in
the game of passions.
If we can easily imagine that a less harsh society would give
women and men (men who have been condemned to wear only work
clothes since the bourgeois revolution!) a chance to be more
beautiful, to practice relations of seduction which are at the same
time simpler and more refined, we are also unable to stifle a yawn
when a world in which everyone pleases everyone else is evoked, one
where making love is like shaking hands and does not imply any kind
of involvement. This, however, is the world promised by the
liberalization of customs.
So it would appear that Karl will continue to please Jenny more
than Friedrich. But one would have to believe in miracles to
imagine that if Friedrich desired Jenny, she would automatically
desire him. Communism in no way guarantees that all desires will be
complementary. And the very real tragedy of unshared desire would
appear to be the unavoidable price to pay to keep the game of
seduction exciting. Not because of the principle ``anything
obtained without effort is useless,'' but because desire includes
otherness and thus its possible negation. No human and social games
without stakes and risks! This is the unique and seemingly
unavoidable norm. Unless, by remaining in hock to the old world,
our monkey-like imagination makes us unable to understand human
beings.
Aside from its very poetic and extensive list of possibilities,
what makes Fourier's system less tedious than those of most other
utopians is that his system integrates the necessity of conflicts.
We know that virtually all the accidents the old world considers
crimes or offenses are just sudden changes of owners (theft),
accidents due to competition (the murder of a bank teller), or
products of the misery of human social customs. But in a stateless
world it is not unimaginable that exacerbated passions could make
someone kill someone else or make them suffer. In such a world the
only guarantee that people would not torture other people would be
that they feel no need to. But if someone needs to? If the person
enjoys torturing? With the old eye-for-an-eye and blood price etc.
representations swept away, a woman whose lover was just assassi-
nated or a man whose lover had just been tortured would find it
completely idiotic (in spite of their sorrow) to kill someone or to
lock them up in order to compensate for the loss suffered in such
a weird way. Perhaps ... But if the desire for vengeance gets the
upper hand? And if the other person continues to kill?
In the workers' movement the anarchists are undoubtedly among the
few people who have concretely considered the problem of social
life without the state. Bakunin's response is not really convinc-
ing: ``The complete abolition of all degrading and cruel sentences,
of corporal punishment and death sentences which have been blessed
and carried out by the law. The abolition of all indefinite
sentences or ones which are too long and leave no possibility for
rehabilitation: crime must be considered a sickness, etc.'' You
would think you were reading the Socialist Party program before
they took power. But the passage which follows in the text is of
more interest: ``Any individual who is condemned by the laws of any
society, commune, province or nation will retain the right to
refuse to accept the sentence which has been imposed by declaring
that he or she no longer wishes to be a member of the society in
question. But in this case the society, in turn, will have the
right to eject the person from its midst and to declare that
society's protection is not guaranteed to the individual. Since the
person is thrown back into a situation where the usual eye-for-an-
eye laws are in place, at least in the territory occupied by the
society, someone who refuses to submit can thus be pillaged,
mistreated or even killed without the society becoming perturbed.
Everyone can rid themselves of the individual as if he or she were
a harmful beast. However, never must the person be forced into
servitude or enslaved.'' (Bakunin, La Libert=82, Pauvert)
This makes one think of the solution of primitive peoples:
individuals who violate taboos are no longer taken seriously; they
are laughed at every time they open their mouths. Or they are
obliged to leave and go into the jungle. Or they become invisible,
etc. Expelled from the community, in any case, that death will
shortly occur is assured.
If it is a question of destroying prisons in order to rebuild ones
which are a bit less harsh and better ventilated, count us out. We
will always be on the side of those who are unwilling to submit.
Because what is a sentence that is ``too long''? It is hardly
necessary to have wasted away in prison to know that, by defini-
tion, any time spent in one is too long. But don't count on us
either if you want to replace prisons with an even more extreme
distancing. As for treating crime like a sickness, this opens the
door to a tranquilizer-ridden totalitarianism or to the discourse
of psychiatrists.
``It is curious to state that one only has to lighten up (and in
this sense someone not prematurely old cannot help but rival the
most unruly child) in order to find the sleaziest thieves charming.
Is the social order only a burst of laughter away from becoming
unglued? (...) Life is not a laughing matter, teachers and mothers
affirm, not without the most hilarious gravity, to children who are
astounded by the news. In the unfortunate mind clouded by this
mysterious training, however, I can imagine a still-gleaming
paradise which begins with a resounding crash of broken dishes.
(...) Unimpeded fun has all the products of the world at its
disposal; each object is to be tossed in the air and smashed like
a plaything.'' (Georges Bataille, Les Pieds Nickel=82s)
What to do with the dish smashers? Today it is impossible to
answer this question and it is not certain that there will be a
satisfactory one even in a stateless society. That there will be
people who refuse to play the game, who smash the dishes, who are
prepared to risk suffering and even death for the simple pleasure
of rupturing social bonds, such is the no doubt unavoidable risk
any society will run if it refuses to expel anyone at all, however
asocial they might be. The damage such a society undergoes will
always be less than the damage it exposes itself to by turning
asocial people into monsters. Communism must not lose its raison
d'=88tre in order to save a few lives, however ``innocent'' they
might be. Until now, the mediations conceived to avoid or soften
conflicts or to maintain internal order in societies have caused
oppression and human losses which are infinitely greater than those
they were supposed to prevent or limit. In a communist world there
will be no substitute state, no ``non-state'' which would still
remain a state.
``To repress anti-social reactions would be as unimaginable as it
would be unacceptable on principle.'' (``Letter to the Insane
Asylum Head Doctors,'' La R=82volution Surr=82aliste, no. 3, 15 April
1925)
It is not only with respect to the distant future that this
question is pertinent. It is also at stake during periods of social
unrest. Consider the fate reserved for looters and thieves during
19th century riots and the moral order which was reproduced in
these riots. In the same sense, during the first years of the
Russian revolution a ``Bolshevik marriage code'' whose title is an
entire program in itself was juxtaposed onto a powerful movement
which was transforming social customs. Any more or less revolution-
ary period will witness the appearance of groups which are halfway
between social subversion and delinquency, as well as temporary
inequalities, hoarders, profiteers, and above all, an entire
spectrum of nebulous conduct which will be hard to label ``revolu-
tionary,'' ``counterrevolutionary,'' ``survival tactics,'' etc.
Ongoing communization will resolve this, but in one or two
generations, perhaps longer. Until then, measures must be taken=FEnot
in the sense of a ``return to law and order,'' which will be one of
the key slogans of the antirevolutionaries=FEbut by developing what
is original in a communist movement: for the most part it does not
repress, it subverts.
This means, in the first place, that a communist movement uses
only the amount of violence which is strictly necessary to reach
its goals. Not out of moralism or non-violence, but because any
superfluous violence becomes autonomous and an end in itself. Next,
it signifies that a communist movement's weapons are above all the
transformation of social relationships and the production of social
conditions of existence. Spontaneous looting will cease to be a
massive change of owners, a simple juxtaposition of private
appropriations, if a community of struggle is formed between the
looters and producers. Only on this condition can looting become a
point of departure for a social reappropriation and use of riches
in a perspective which is broader than one of simply consuming.
(Which is not to be condemned in itself. Social life is not only
productive activity but also consumption and consummation. And if
the poor wish to offer themselves a few pleasures first, who but
priests would think of holding it against them?) As for hoarders,
if violent measures will be necessary at times it will be to
reappropriate things, not to punish. In any case, only when a world
without price tags begins to spread will the possibility of harm
being done by hoarders be completely removed. If money is nothing
more than pieces of paper, if what is hoarded can no longer be
exchanged for money, what would be the point of hoarding?
The more a revolution radicalizes, the less it needs to be
repressive. We are all the more willing to affirm this since human
life, in the sense of biological survival, is not the supreme value
for communism. It is capitalism which imposes the monstrous scam of
an assurance of maximal survival in exchange for maximum submission
to the economy. But isn't a world where you must hide to choose the
hour when you die a world that is extremely devalued?
Communism does not use values people adopt as a starting point;
it uses the real relations they are experiencing. Each group
carries out, refuses, allows and imposes certain acts and not
others. Before having values, and in order to have them, there are
things which people do or don't do, which they impose or forbid.
In contradictory class societies what is forbidden is set in stone
and simultaneously subject to be outmanoeuvred or violated. In
primitive societies, and to a certain extent in traditional
societies, what is forbidden does not constitute a morality as
such. Values and taboos are constantly produced in every activity
of social life. It is when work and private life became more and
more radically opposed that the question of social customs imposed
itself, becoming acute in 19th century Europe with the rise of what
the bourgeoisie called the dangerous classes. It was necessary for
workers to be said to be free to go to work (in order to justify
the capitalists' freedom to refuse to provide it to them). At the
same time morality had to be kept in good working order and people
were told not to drink too much and that work equals dignity. There
is morality only because there are social customs, that is, a
domain which society theoretically leaves up to individuals against
whom it at the same time enacts legislation from the outside.
Religious law, and, later, the law of the state, have presupposed
a separation. This is the difference compared to communism, where
there will be no need for intangible laws that everyone knows will
not be respected. There will be no absolutes, except, perhaps, the
primacy of the species=FEwhich is not to say its survival. There will
be no falsely universal rules. Like the law, every morality
rationalizes ideology after the fact; they always wish and claim to
be the basis of social life while at the same time wishing to be
without a basis themselves since they are based only on God,
nature, logic, or the good of society ... That is, a basis which
cannot be questioned because it does not exist. In a communist
world, the rules which human beings will adopt, in ways we cannot
predict, will flow from communist social bonds. They will not
constitute a morality in the sense that they will claim no illusory
universality in time and space. The rules of the game will include
the possibility of playing with the rules.
``Revolt is a form of optimism which is hardly less repugnant than
the usual kind. In order to exist revolt implies that people must
envisage an opportunity to react. In other words, that there is a
preferable way of doing things which we must strive towards. When
it is a goal, revolt is also optimistic; change and disorder are
considered satisfactory. I am incapable of believing that there is
something satisfactory.
(...)
Question=FEIn your opinion, is suicide a last resort?
=FEPrecisely, and one which is hardly less antipathetic than
a job skill or a morality.''
(Jacques Rigaut, testimony in the ``Barr=8As Affair,'' Ecrits)
An entire body of nihilist literature has set out the viewpoint
of the ``dishbreaker,'' of people who resist any social connection
(with a death urge as a compulsory corollary). But the attractive
music of the nihilist thinkers has not prevented most of them from
losing themselves in the hum of daily life until they reached a
respectable old age. This incoherence supports the contention that
these purely refractory people are just a literary myth. For the
rare individuals who, like Rigaut, have chosen the last resort of
suicide, or have really tasted misery like Genet, this myth was
lived passionately. But the fact that sincere intransigent mystics
have no doubt existed hardly proves the existence of god. These
``refractory people'' foster an elitism which is a false approach
from the very start. The worst part is not that they believe that
they are superior, but that they are different from the rest of
humanity. They would like to think that they are observing a world
from which they have distanced themselves. People, however, can
only understand what they are participating in. When they believe
that they are lucid because they are on the outside, they fall into
the worst trap. In Bataille's words:
``I have never been able to consider existence with the distracted
scorn of a man who is alone.'' (Oeuvres, II, p. 274)
``For it is the tumult of humanity, with all the vulgarity of
people's big and little needs and their flagrant disgust with the
police who hold them back=FEit is the activity of everyone (except
the cops and the friends of the cops) which alone conditions
revolutionary mental forms as opposed to bourgeois ones.''
(Oeuvres, II, p. 108-9)
At times this refractory people myth has encumbered revolutionary
theory, as in the case of the Situationists' fascination with
outlaws in general and Lacenaire in particular, a fascination which
reached its high point with Debord's last appalling film. (5) But
if this myth must be criticized, it is also because it simply
represents the flipside of the coin and thus tends to assist class
society's production of fascinating monsters.
At times a shudder of passion passes through the ocean of zombies
we are swimming in. It is when citizens are served up a being which
is completely foreign, a thing which looks like a person but to
which any real humanity is denied. For the Nazi it is the Jew; for
the antifascist, the Nazi. For today's crowds it is terrorists,
criminals or child killers. When it is comes to tracking down these
monsters and determining their punishment, passions surge again at
last and imaginations that appeared dead race. Unfortunately, this
type of imagination and its fine-tuning is precisely what is
attributed to that other guaranteed-non-human monster: the Nazi
executioner.
It has never been possible to force everyone to respect laws which
are in contradiction with the way social relationships really work.
Nor has it been possible to prevent murder when there have been
reasons to kill. Nor to prevent theft when there have been
inequalities and as long as commerce is based on theft. So an
example is made by homing in on one case. And what is more: this
exorcises the part of you which would like to execute the
defenceless bodies or the child killer/raper too. The element of
envy in the crowd's cries of hatred is obvious. Even to those who
are naturally blind, like journalists.
Communism, on the contrary, is a society without monsters. Without
monsters because everyone will finally recognize, in the desires
and acts of others, the different possible shapes of their own
desires and being. ``Human beings are the true being-in-its-
totality of man'' (Marx). The words being-in-its-totality, or
collective being, expresses our movement even better than the word
communism, which is primarily associated with collectivizing
things. Marx's sentence is worth developing extensively, and we
will return to it. For now it will be sufficient to grasp the
critique of bourgeois humanism contained in this sentence. Whereas
the Montaigne-type honest individual can become everyone thanks to
the mediation of culture, communists know from practice that they
only exist as they are because everyone exists the way they do.
Which hardly signifies that no desire should be repressed.
Repression and sublimation prevent people from sliding into a
refusal of otherness. But communism is a society with no guarantee
other than the free play of passions and needs, whereas capitalist
society is gripped by a frantic need to guarantee against every
mishap of life, including death. Every conceivable danger and risk,
except ``natural disasters''=FEwar and revolution, etc.=FEmust be
``insured against.'' The only thing which capitalism is unable to
insure against is its own disappearance.
When one is after a critique of the totality of this world, there
is no question of remaining at a level of pure theory. There are
times when subversive activity is almost entirely reduced to
writing texts and an exchange of viewpoints between individuals. It
is this ``almost'' that bothers us: to continue to view the world
lucidly you have to possess a tension which is hard to keep up
because it implies a refusal, a certain marginalization, and a
profound sterility. This refusal, marginalization and sterility
contribute to maintaining passion just as much as they tend to
congeal it into misanthropic mean-spiritedness or intellectual
frenzy. Those who refuse a world organized by capital know that
none of the acts of social life are unquestionable. Even the
manifestations of biological givens do not escape their torment! To
accept to procreate appears suspect: how can someone have kids in
such a world when there is not even a gleam of a possibility of
transforming it?
However, beyond a few simple principles=FEno participating in
attempts at mystification or repression (neither cops nor stars),
and no careerism=FEthere is no way that precise and definitive forms
of refusal can be pinned down. There are no good social customs as
far as a radical critique is concerned; there are just ones which
are worse than others, and there is behaviour which turns theory
into a mockery. To be a revolutionary in a non-revolutionary period
... What counts is less the unavoidably fragmented and mutilating
results of this contradiction than the contradiction itself and the
tension of refusal.
Why criticize the misery of social customs if this misery will
persist? Only in relation to communism does our behaviour make
sense. For, with respect to the Cioran quote which opened this
section, the response must be that the sweat and disasters which do
not belong to us and that the world imposes are the ones that are
really intolerable. When time is killing us, the only excuse at our
disposal is that history will avenge us. The meaning of what we do
is the possibility that the social connection is guaranteed only by
itself. And that it works!
If the social crisis worsens, there will be less and less room for
half choices. Calling for ``a few less cops'' will become less
feasible. More and more the choice will be between what exists and
no cops at all. It is then that humanity will really have to
demonstrate whether it loves freedom or not.
* * *
Love, ecstasy, crime: three historical products through which
humanity has lived and lives its practical and emotional relations.
Love: the consequence of indifference and generalized selfishness;
taking refuge in a few people who, by chance or out of necessity,
have been given a privileged role. Love is the impossible love of
humanity which is fulfilled in a few individuals, for better or
worse. Ecstasy: a voyage beyond the profane, the banal, and into
the sacred; an escape which is immediately cut off and circum-
scribed by religion. Crime: the only way out when the norm can no
longer be respected or circumvented.
Love, the sacred and crime are ways to escape the present and to
give it meaning. Positive or negative: each of them include
attraction and rejection and enter into a relationship of attrac-
tion and rejection with respect to each other. Love is put on a
pedestal but people mistrust it. The sacred inherently contains the
threat of being profaned; it evokes profanation in order to exclude
it and in so doing reinforces itself. Though punished, crime
fascinates.
These three means of going beyond daily life are neither general-
ized nor abolished by communism. All life (collective or individu-
al) implies boundaries. But communism will be amoral in the sense
that there will be no fixed norms which are external to social
life. Not without clashes or violence, ways of behaving will
circulate, and will be transmitted, transformed and produced along
with social relationships. As an absolute separation between an
interior and an exterior the sacred will melt away. Thus there will
be no more room for religion=FEthose of yesteryear or modern
religions which no longer recognize gods, just devils which are to
be ejected from the social body. People's freedom, their capacity
to modify nature, will project them outside themselves. Until now,
morality=FEany morality=FEand, even more insidiously, those which do
not present themselves as ones, turn these places beyond oneself
into entities which crush people's being. Communism will not level
the ``magic mountain''; it will make it possible to avoid being
dominated by it. It will create and multiply distant places and the
pleasure of losing oneself in them, but also the capacity to create
what is new, what subverts a ``natural'' submission to any type of
worldly order.
Translated from La Banquise #1 by Michael William.
1) Author's note: romantic stories.
2) Author's note: Examen de conscience: A Catholic religious rite
imposed on believers from time to time, especially before
confession.
3) Author's note: this sentence and the following two paragraphs
have been understandably attacked by many readers since they were
based on our biased understanding of a famous slogan of the free
abortion movements of the 70s: "My body belongs to me." This slogan
did not mean what we said it did ("I am the property-owner of my
body") but was just an easy way to say "My body (the right to give
birth or to have an abortion) is my business and not that of
politicians, doctors, or priests." If re-written today, this part
would have to be entirely different.
Translator's note: Several people who read or proofread this part
(and the preceding paragraph) had trouble with it too.
4) Author's note: Union sacr=82e: term used at the beginning of the
First World War when the parties in France worked together against
the German threat. We witnessed a broader "union sacr=82e" (worldwide
this time) at the beginning of the Gulf War.
5) Translator's note: In Girum Imus Nocte et Consumimur Igni. A
translation of the script recently became available from BM
Signpost, London WC1N 3XX, England. Also see the review in this
issue by John Zerzan.
YESTERDAY
>> (pre-capitalist societies)
>> the social connection is not developed enough for people to
locate their humanity in themselves: they recognize themselves as
human beings through belonging to a particular community.
>> the coexistence of partial communities
>> people/god dialogue
>> unity is experienced as something assured by an external factor:
the necessity of privileged moments to affirm unity
>> festivals
>> a concentrated sacred, which is contrasted with the profane
>> people go beyond themselves through transcendence
>> people live outside themselves
>> territorial war, with frequent religious and ritual motivations
>> tradition
Today
>> (capitalism)
>> the development of a universal commodity society which brings
together people as individuals: individuals acknowledge each other
through the exchange of objects and signs
>> the generalization of a community of isolated people linked to-
gether by things
>> an absence of gods; an abstract humanity; conflicts between
people and society
>> unity is assured by the universality of commodities and
guaranteed by the state
>> an end to festivals, which take refuge in rare moments: in
archaic capitalism (fascism, Stalinism), they become an instrument
of the state; in other cases, festivals represent a longing for the
past, or are mistaken for the revolutionary movement
>> generalized profanation; preeminence is accorded to entities
which are all the more powerful because they are intangible: the
state and capital
>> the immanence of objects; transcending oneself through things
>> people live inside objects
>> economic war; the Sacred Union; humanitarianism
>> social customs/mores
Tomorrow
>> (communism)
>> the development of a social interaction where people's humanity
is based only on themselves
>> the multiplication of specific communities which interpenetrate
in a human community
>> people interact in multipolar groups which fuse together
>> unity through the contradictory interaction of practices and
needs
>> an end to nostalgia for festivals
>> the sacred is dispersed and no longer has to be organized or
animated
>> each person and group transcends itself through other people and
groups
>> an end to the transcendent/imminent and external/internal
antagonism
human violence
>> life