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Title: For a World Without Morality Author: Anonymous Date: early-mid 1980s Language: en Topics: AJODA, AJODA #38, crime, La Banquise, morality, sexuality Notes: Translated from “La Banquise” #1 by Michael William. 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. Later published in “Anarchy: A Journal of Desire Armed” #38 — Fall ’93.
This introduction to a critique of social customs is a contribution 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 19^(th) century capitalism, when it was
finalized and theorized (discovered). It was then banalized by
capitalism in the 20^(th) 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.
According to Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts, “The most natural relationship
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 eventually 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 Liberation [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 symtomatic, 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 litterateurs or artists
(the surrealists for example) wish to impose I’amourfou (“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 — those 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 Andre Breton and
Harlequin novels[1] appear for what it really is — a 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 19^(th)
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 20^(th) 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 (cafés ...) 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 theoretically 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
relationships which come into being outside it (peasants who come to the
city; petit-bourgeois déclassés; 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 guideposts 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 unquestionable
ensemble of dictates which is transmitted by a father or a priest than a
sort of utilitarian morality of personal improvement 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 infinitely 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 (adolescence, 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 unquenched.”
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.”
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 —
an individual — 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 — as 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 — not 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 everything has
been levelled, everything is equal and everything can be exchanged —
playing 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 questioning everything the stakes.
The a historical 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 Sacre, 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 patribtic outbursts and other manifestations of the “union sacree”
(”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
counterrevolutionary 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 traditional 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 — what is worth risking
one’s life for and what could impart another rhythm to time — is the
content of life in its entirety.
“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 — accidents
without consequence in an intolerable monotony of perplexities.” (E.M.
Cioran, Precis de decomposition)
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 — fine, 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 — ones whose bringing to fruition would not
compromise other people — to 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 — which 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 assassinated 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 convincing: “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 Liberté, 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 definition, 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 Mickeies)
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’etre 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 Revolution Surrealiste, 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 19^(th) 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 revolutionary 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
“revolutionary,” “counterrevolutionary,” “survival tactics,” etc.
Ongoing communization will resolve this, but in one or two generations,
perhaps longer. Until then, measures must be taken — not in the sense of
a “return to law and order,” which will be one of the key slogans of the
antirevolutionaries — but 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 19^(th)
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 — which 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 — In your opinion, is suicide a last resort?
— Precisely, and one which is hardly less antipathetic than a job skill
or a morality.”
(Jacques Rigaut, testimony in the “Barres 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 — it 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” — war and
revolution, etc. — must 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 — no participating in attempts
at mystification or repression (neither cops nor stars), and no
careerism — there 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 circumscribed 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 attraction 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 generalized nor
abolished by communism. All life (collective or individual) 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 — those 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 — any morality — and, 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.
Â
[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 ea»y 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 sacrée: 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 sacree” (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.