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Title: Bloom Theory Author: Tiqqun Date: 1999 Language: en Topics: Insurrectionary Source: Retrieved on May 29, 2010 from http://bloom.jottit.com/ Notes: Alternatively titled as *Theory of Bloom*.
Mr. Bloom watched curiously, kindly the lithe black form. Clean to see:
the gloss of her sleek hide, the white button under the butt of her
tail, the green flashing eyes. He bent down to her, his hands on his
knees.
“Milk for the pussens,” he said.
“Mrkgnao!” the cat cried.
They call them stupid. They understand what we say better than we
understand them.
James Joyce, Ulysses
The great watchmen are dead.
Doubtless THEY killed them.
The weak glow of their solitary stubbornness disturbed the party of
sleep too much. That, at least, is what we think, we guess — we who’ve
come so late — in light of the perplexity that their name still stirs up
at certain times.
Every living trace of what they did and were has been erased, it seems,
by the maniacal obstinacy of resentment. In the end, all that’s left of
them for this world is a handful of dead images that it still haloes
with the villainous satisfaction of having conquered those who were
better than it is.
So here we are, orphans of grandeur, marooned in a world of ice where no
fires light the horizon. Our questions have to remain unanswered, the
old ones assure us; then they say, all the same: “there’s never been a
blacker night for intelligence.”
The pretty, snow-blanketed countryside slips fast across the window. It
won’t be long now until the trip between V. and R., which in the old
days would’ve been a matter of weeks, will be over. For less than an
hour, you’ve been the occupant of some seat or another in one of the
twenty identical cars of this high speed train, one of so many. The
regular — doubtless optimal — arrangement of the seats spreads out in an
abstract harmony of gentle neon. The train follows along its rails, and
in this train car, so seamlessly in harmony with the idea of order, it
seems that human reality itself travels along invisible rails. A clean
and polite indifference inhabits the space that separates you from the
lady sitting in the seat next to you. Neither of you will have your trip
disturbed by the superfluous need to even say a word, much less strike
up a conversation. That would disturb your distraction, and, in the case
of your neighbor, her applied study of the feminine press (“how to sleep
with a guy without him knowing,” “soft flirting,” “gifts with meaning,”
“is he a good lay?” “who are you REALLY?” etc.). And when her cell phone
rings, the young woman doesn’t think it necessary to get up, either:
“hello? ... listen, what do you mean you’re not there? ... are you
shitting me? ... listen, I’ve been stuck with the kids for the past
three weekends, I work all week, and it’s already a bitch finding time
to live, man... no, no, no, I just can’t, that’s all... deal with it,
it’s not my problem... everyone’s gotta have their own social life; I’ve
already wrecked mine enough... how many times do I have to tell you: I’m
going out with Jerry this weekend, and that’s all there is to it... oh
yeah, is that so? With the kid putting me through his freak-outs all
day, sniveling about “where’s daddy?” ... well come on, ‘cause you’re
his father! ... it’s out of the question... I don’t give a fuck, you’re
taking care of them this weekend... well too bad for her, all you had to
do was find a little more of a peacemaker... I’m warning you, if there’s
no one there, I’m leaving them with the doorman... well hell yes; I’m
being completely reasonable... that’s all, then; ciao.”
The scene repeats itself in all its banality. More — obviously — of the
same. It’s like a slap in the face when it happens; it’s brutal at first
— but we should’ve been preparing for it for years, after all,
considering how scrupulously we’ve worked to become perfect strangers to
each other: blank existences, indifferent presences, no depth. At the
same time, nothing in this situation could be so easily acceptable to
everyone if we weren’t absolutely intimate in this foreignness. So, that
foreignness also had to become the figure of our relationship with
ourselves; and really, from all angles — we are Blooms.
If Bloom is also found in a certain book, it’s because all of us have
already crossed paths with him in the street, then, later, in ourselves.
This just confirms it.
One day you pay more attention than usual to the collective silence on a
metro line, and are overtaken by a deep shiver, a primal horror, coming
out from behind the shared fakery of contemporary morals and suddenly
plain for all to see.
The last man, man of the street, man of the crowd, man of the masses,
mass-man; that’s how THEY represented Bloom to us at first: as the sad
product of the time of the multitudes, as the catastrophic child of the
industrial era and the end of all enchantments. But even there, no
matter the name, there’s still that shiver; THEY shiver before the
infinite mystery of ordinary man. Each of us feels a pure force growing
behind the theater of our qualities, hiding out there; a pure force that
we’re all supposed to ignore.
What’s left is the necessary anxiety we think we can appease by
demanding of one another a rigorous absence from each other’s selves,
and an ignorance of a force which is common, but is now unqualifiable,
because it is anonymous. And the name of that anonymity is Bloom.
In spite of the extreme confusion that reigns on its surface, and
perhaps precisely because of that, our era is by its nature messianic.
What should be understood by this is that very old distinctions have now
been effaced, and that many thousand-year-old divisions have now in turn
been divided.
Our era is reducing itself to one single, basic reality, and to
amusement in that reality. More and more visibly, our contemporary
non-societies — those imperative fictions — endlessly populate
themselves with pariahs and parvenus. And the parvenus are themselves
merely pariahs that have betrayed their condition and would like to make
it forgotten by all means — but it always ends up biting them in the
ass. One might also say, following another line of demarcation, that
there’s nothing left of these times but idlers and the disturbed, and
that the disturbed are in the end no more than idlers trying to cheat on
their own essential inaction. Will the pursuit of “deep feelings,” of
“intense life,” which seems to be so many desperate people’s last reason
to live, ever really distract them fully from the fundamental emotional
tone that inhabits them: boredom?
The reigning confusion is the result of the planetary deployment of all
these false paradoxes, under which our central truth nevertheless is
born. And this truth is that we are tenants of an existence which is a
kind of exile, in a world which is a desert, that we’ve been thrown out
into this world with no mission to accomplish, with no place assigned
us, and no recognizable filiation — abandoned. That we are at the same
time so little and already too much.
True politics, ecstatic politics, begins there. With a brutal and
all-enveloping laugh. With a laugh that undoes the pathos oozing out of
the so-called problems of “joblessness,” “immigration,”
“precariousness,” and “marginalization.”
There’s no social problem in unemployment, just the metaphysical fact of
our own idleness.
There’s no social problem in immigration, just the metaphysical fact of
our own foreignness.
There’s no social problem in precariousness or marginalization, just
this inexorable existential reality that we’re all alone, dying of it
alone in the face of death,
that we are all, for all eternity, finite beings.
You decide what’s serious about that and what’s just social
entertainment.
The era that opened in 1914, where the illusion of “modern times”
completed its decomposition while simultaneously metaphysics completed
its self-realization, saw the ontological burst out into history in its
pure state and on all levels. Such tectonic upsurges of truth appear in
those rare moments where the lie of civilizations starts to crumble. Our
times are part of a curious constellation, which includes the decline of
the middle ages and the first Gnostic centuries of our era. The same
Mood [Stimmung] expresses itself everywhere, with the same radicalness:
finiteness, perdition, separation. “Modern times” and the Christian west
were born before that from such outbursts, as a reaction.
This kinship keeps us from considering the emotional tone that dominated
the twentieth century as simple “malaise in civilization.” And it’s not
about subjective dispositions, nor some capricious propensity towards
despair or disapproval: no, this tone is, on the contrary, the most
obvious one of our era, one that THEY work ceaselessly to repress, at
every stage in its advancement.
It’s not that men have — negatively — “lost their bearings”; it’s rather
that they have positively become Blooms.
BLOOM IS THE FINAL UPSURGE OF THE NATIVE.
From now on there’s nothing anywhere but Bloom and Bloom’s escape.
He saw no more future before him, and the past, in spite of all his
efforts to consider it explainable, resembled something
incomprehensible. The justifications were scattered about like crumbs,
and the feeling of pleasure seemed more exhausted every day. Travels and
long walks, which long ago gave him a mysterious joy, had become
strangely odious to him. [...] He was neither truly a man without a
country, nor did he feel honestly and naturally at home anywhere in the
world. He would have liked very much to have been an organ player, or a
beggar, or a cripple, so as to have some reason to ask for men’s pity
and charity; but even more ardently than that he wished to die. He was
not dead, and yet he was dead; he was not poor to the point of having to
beg, and yet was indeed a beggar, though he did not beg; even now he
still dressed elegantly, even now he still humbled himself before people
like a mechanical, annoying girl, uttered clichés and got upset about
and horrified by them. How atrocious his own life appeared to him, his
soul false, and his miserable body dead, the whole world foreign, and
the movements, things and events that surrounded him so empty.
Robert Walser, Short Essays
Kafka’s characters are in a fundamental sense the same thing as Kafka’s
world.
Understanding the figure of Bloom doesn’t just require renouncing the
classical idea of the subject, which is no big deal; it also requires
abandoning the modern concept of objectivity.
The term “Bloom” doesn’t in some exotic way fill the need for a word in
the current lexicon to designate a new human type that has recently
appeared on the surface of the planet that we should defend ourselves
from.
“Bloom,” rather, is the name of a certain Stimmung [mood], a fundamental
tonality of being.
This Stimmung doesn’t come from the subject, like a kind of fog clouding
perception, or from the object, as a liquefied version of the Spirit of
the World; rather it is the basis upon which the subject and the object,
the self and the world, could exist as such in the classical age, i.e.,
as clearly distinct from one another.
Because it’s “how” every being is the way he or she is, this tonality is
not something unstable, fleeting, or simply subjective; rather it is
precisely what gives consistency and possibility to each being. Bloom is
the Stimmung in which and by which we understand each other at the
present time, without which these words would be no more than a
succession of meaningless phonemes.
Historically, Bloom is the name for an uncommon Stimmung: one that
corresponds to the moment the subject retreats from the world and the
world from the subject, the moment when the self and the real are
suddenly suspended, and just might have been abolished. For that reason
Bloom is the general stimmung where nothing but Stimmungs are apparent,
where the primacy of the stimmung over all other realities manifests
itself as such.
Since it always impregnates beforehand all the conceptual instruments by
which PEOPLE might claim to understand it, the Stimmung cannot be
understood, circumscribed, or analyzed “objectively,” no matter how much
one might be able to feel it. The best we can draw out of it is the
Figure that corresponds to it, in the sense where a Figure is a human
power to configure worlds. What we’re aiming at with this “theory” is
therefore indeed a Stimmung, but we’re doing so by seizing upon a
Figure.
Bloom also refers to the spectral, wandering, sovereignly vacant
humanity that can no longer rise to any other content besides that of
the Stimmung that it ex-ists in, to that twilight being for which there
is no more real, no more I, only Stimmungs.
Because Bloom is he who can no longer separate himself from the
immediate context containing him, his gaze is that of a man that does
not identify. Everything blurs under the Bloom effect and is lost in the
inconsequential wavering of objective relationships where life is felt
negatively, in indifference, impersonality, and the lack of quality.
Bloom lives inside of Bloom.
Spread out all around us is a petrified world, a world of things where
we ourselves, with our “I,” our gestures, and even our feelings figure
in as things. Nothing can belong to us as truly our own in such a
landscape of death. We are more and more like exiles, never sure of
understanding what’s happening all around.
In spite of this gigantic relinquishment, in spite of the inexplicable
suspended-animation that now strikes everything that exists, the overall
mechanism continues to function like it was nothing, processing our
isolation.
In this perpetually renovated empire of ruins, there’s nowhere for us to
take refuge, and we don’t even have the ability to desert it all by
withdrawing into ourselves. We’ve been delivered up, without appeal, to
a finiteness with no landmarks to orient us, totally exposed across the
whole surface of our being.
Bloom is thus that man whom nothing can save from the triviality of the
world. A reasonable mind might conclude: “Well, then, in fact, Bloom is
alienated man.” But no, Bloom is man so completely mixed up with his own
alienation that it would be absurd to try to separate him out from it.
Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we
wander among the abysses. Our path, which could easily have come to an
end yesterday or years back, has no reason and no necessity outside of
that of its own contingency. It’s a wandering path, one that carries us
from the same to the same on the road of the Identical; and wherever we
go we carry within ourselves the desert that we’re the hermits in. And
if some days we might swear that we are the “whole universe,” like
Agrippa de Nettesheim did, or more ingenuously that we are “all things,
all men and all animals,” like Cravan, it’s just that all we see in
everything is the Nothing which we ourselves so totally are.
But that Nothingness is the absolutely real, in the light of which
everything that exists becomes somehow ghostly.
Nothing’s more impenetrable to Bloom than those men of the Ancien Regime
who claim to participate fully and immediately in life and have such a
firm feeling of their present incarnation, of their existence, and of
its continuity. For us, wherever we look, we never find this solid,
massive “I,” this substance of our own that we are so generously given
as soon as we claim to exist.
In the same way as all harmonious moral philosophy which might have
given consistency to the illusion of an “authentic” self is now lacking,
everything that could have made one believe in the unambiguousness of
life or in the formal positivity of the world has been scattered as
well. In truth, our “sense of what’s real” never ends up as more than a
limited modality of that “sense of the possible which is the faculty of
thinking through all the things that might ‘as well’ be and give no more
importance to everything that is than one gives to what is not.” (Musil,
The Man without Qualities). Under commodity occupation the most concrete
truth about everything is the truth of its infinite replaceability.
All the situations that we find ourselves engaged in bear, in their
equivalence to one another, the infinitely repeated stamp of an
irrevocable “as if.” We collaborate in the maintenance of a “society” as
if we were not part of it; we conceive of the world as if we didn’t
ourselves occupy a specific situation within it; and we continue to grow
old as if we had to always remain young. In a word: we live as if we
were already dead.
And that’s certainly the most painful paradox of Bloom’s existence: he
can no longer hear the voice of his living body, the speech of his
physiology. And this at the very moment that PEOPLE want at every
instant to make them mean something sexual.
Whether Bloom’s flesh is the body of a woman or of a man, or even a body
with indiscernible form, it is always the prisoner of the non-sensual
sexualization it’s riddled with. But this sexualization, which is
omnipresent and at the same time never really lived, is but the source
of a deaf and persistent suffering, like amputees feeling their phantom
limbs. From this comes the essentially spectral character, the sinister
aura of contemporary mass pornography: it is never more than the
presence of an absence. In Bloom’s world — a world made fully semiotic —
a phallus or a vagina are but symbols referring to something else, to a
reference that can no longer be found in a reality that never stops
fading away. Bloom’s flesh is sad and has no mystery to it.
It’s not sex that has to be re-invented: we’re already living among the
ruins of sexuality, and our bodies themselves are but relics therein.
Bloom cannot transform the gender roles that he has inherited due to the
shortcomings of traditional societies, frozen as he is in an unstoppable
pre-pubescent phase. Both male Blooms and female Blooms thus go through
the same old tired dance, to the tune of the classic gender roles. But
their gestures fall apart. Their dance is awkward. They stumble. And
it’s painful to watch.
A thing among things, Bloom keeps himself outside of it all with an
abandonment identical to that of his world. He’s alone in every kind of
company, and naked in all circumstances. That’s where he rests, in
extenuated self-ignorance, away from his desires and the world, where
life rolls the rosary-beads of his absence day after day. All lived
content is indifferently interchangeable for him, as he passes through
it in a kind of existential tourism.
We’ve unlearned joy like we’ve unlearned suffering; we’ve become
emotional illiterates; we only perceive diffracted echoes of feelings.
Everything’s worn out, in our late-in-coming eyes; even unhappiness. And
that, in sum, is perhaps the real disaster: that nowhere do we find
support, doubt, or certainty.
Everything I do and think is but a Specimen of my possibilities. Man is
more general than his life and acts. More possibilities than I could
ever imagine fit perfectly into the expected. Mr. Teste says: My
possibilities never abandon me.
Valéry, Monsieur Teste [Mr. Head]
For a being who feels attached to life no more than by so tenuous a
bond, freedom has such an incomplete and yet final meaning that it can
no longer be taken away from him: the freedom to carry into his becoming
a certain sense of the theatrical uselessness of everything, a terminal
manner of spectatorship on the world, even of being a spectator of
himself. In the eternal Sunday of his existence, Bloom’s interests thus
remain forever emptied of any object, and that’s why Bloom is himself
the man without interest. Here, disinterestedness, in the sense where we
don’t manage to have any importance in our own eyes, but also in the
sense where the bourgeois category of interest can no longer strictly
account for any of our acts, is no longer an expression of individual
idealism, but a mass phenomenon.
Assuredly, man is something that’s been transcended.
All those that loved their virtues have perished — at the hand of their
virtues.
Bloom’s fundamental experience is that of his own transcendence of
himself, but this experience, in spite of how nice it sounds, is above
all one of impotence, an experience of absolute suffering.
Whatever high esteem we’d like to hold ourselves in, we are not
subjects, finished products, autarchic and sovereign even in our
allegiances.
We evolve in a space that is entirely sectioned off and policed; a space
occupied, on the on hand, by the Spectacle, and on the other, by
Biopower. And what’s terrible about this gridding, this occupation, is
that the submission it demands of us is nothing that we could rebel
against with some definitive break-away gesture, but something that we
can only deal with strategically.
The regime of power that we live under in no way resembles that which
could have run its course under administrative monarchy, that expired
concept which up until recently, that is, even within biopolitical
democracies, remained the only enemy recognized by revolutionary
movements: a simple restriction mechanism, a purely repressive mechanism
of coercion.
The contemporary form of domination, on the contrary, is essentially
productive.
On the one hand it rules all the manifestations of our existence — the
Spectacle; on the other, it generates the conditions for it — Biopower.
The Spectacle is the kind of Power that wants you to talk, that wants
you to be someone.
Biopower is benevolent power, full of a pastor’s concern for his flock;
the kind of Power that wants its subjects to be safe, that wants you to
live. Caught in the vise of a kind of control that is simultaneously
totalizing and individualizing, walled into a double constraint that
annihilates us by the same stroke with which it makes us exist, the
majority of us take up a kind of politics of disappearance: feigning an
inner death and keeping our silence, like captives before the Grand
Inquisitor. By subtracting all positivity and subtracting itself from
all positivity, these specters steal from a productive power the very
thing it might have exerted itself upon. Their desire to not live is all
that they have the strength to counterpose to a power that intends to
make them live. In so doing, they remain in Bloom, and often end up
buried there.
So this is what Bloom means: that we don’t belong to ourselves, that
this world isn’t our world. That it’s not just that it confronts us in
its totality, but that even in the most proximate details it is foreign
to us. This foreignness would be quite enjoyable if it could imply an
exteriority of principles between it and us. Far from it. Our
foreignness to the world consists in the fact that the stranger, the
foreigner, is in us, in the fact that in the world of the authoritarian
commodity, we regularly become strangers to ourselves. The circle of
situations where we’re forced to watch ourselves act, to contemplate the
action of a “me” in which we don’t recognize ourselves, now closes up on
and besieges us, even in what bourgeois society still calls our
“intimacy.” The Other possesses us; it is this dissociated body, a
simple peripheral artifact in the hands of Biopower; it is our raw
desire to survive in the intolerable network of miniscule subjugations,
granulated pressures that fetter us to the quick; it is the ensemble of
self-interested contrivances, humiliations, pettiness; the ensemble of
tactics that we must deploy. It is the whole objective machine that we
sacrifice to inside ourselves.
THE OTHER IS THE ECONOMY IN US.
Bloom also means that each person knows for himself that he is not
himself. Even if momentarily, faced with such and such a person — and
most frequently in anonymous interactions — we might get an impression
to the contrary, we still retain at bottom that feeling that this is an
inauthentic existence, an artificial life. The internal presence of the
Other takes shape on every level of our consciousness: it’s a slight and
constant loss of being, a progressive drying-out, a little death doled
out continually. In spite of this, we persist in assuming the external
hypothesis of our identity with ourselves; we play the subject. A
certain shame accompanies this shredding process and evolves with it. So
we try evasion; we project ourselves ever more violently to the outside,
towards wherever is as far away as possible from this terrifying
internal tension. We feel the need to let nothing about it appear, to
glue ourselves to our social “identity,” to remain foreign to our
foreignness: TO KEEP AN AIR OF COMPOSURE before the field of ruins.
This lie is in our every gesture.
That’s the essential thing.
It’s no longer time to make literature out of the various combinations
of disaster.
Up to now, too much has been written, and not enough thought about
Bloom.
The Ptolemean, when looking inside of himself, only found “two
phenomena: sociology and emptiness.” And we must begin there: not from
what we think we are — sociology — but from what we intimately feel
ourselves to lack, because that’s the most real thing, the ens
realissimum. Bloom doesn’t mean that we’re failed subjects compared to
the classical subject and its superb sufficiency; rather it reveals that
there is a principle of incompleteness at the very basis of human
existence, a radical insufficiency. What we are is precisely this
failure, which can, if it so desires, choose to put on the mask of
subjecthood.
What’s certain is that we’re nothing, nothing but the nothingness around
which spins the movement of our ideas, our experiences, our miseries,
and our feelings. What’s certain is that we are the empty axis of this
pit without walls, an axis that does not exist in and of itself, but
only because every circle has its center. But this hopeless deficiency
itself can be understood as an ultimate positivity, which is expressed
as follows:
I AM THE INTERMEDIARY BETWEEN WHAT I AM
AND WHAT I AM NOT.
Bloom is indeed such an intermediary, but he’s a passive one; he’s the
witness to his own desubjectivation, to his endless becoming-otherwise.
He conceals within him a primordial differentiation: knowing that we are
not what we are, and that none of our particular attributes can really
exhaust our potential.
Incompleteness is the mode of being of everything that remains in
contact with potential; the form of existence of everything devoted to
becoming.
Because he is the emptiness in all substantial determinations, Bloom is
indeed the most disturbing guest within man, the one who goes from being
a simple invitee to becoming the master of the house. Ever since he took
up residence inside us, we’ve found ourselves saddled with a purely
sartorial being. Whatever we undertake to try to buy back some
substantiality, it ends up only ever being just something contingent and
inessential relative to our selves. Bloom is thus the name of a new,
ageless nudity, the properly human nudity that disappears under every
attribute and nonetheless bears it, which precedes all form and renders
it possible.
Bloom is masked Nothingness. That’s why it would be absurd to celebrate
his appearance in history as the birth of a particular human type: that
there are such men without qualities is not a certain quality of
mankind; but on the contrary this is mankind as such, as mankind; the
final realization of a generic human essence which is precisely a
deprivation of essence, pure exposedness, pure availability: larva.
The bourgeois republic can flatter itself that it was the first
historical expression of any magnitude of this controlled ecstasy, and
in the end the model for it. In it, in an unprecedented manner, the
existence of man as a singular being finds itself formally separate from
man’s existence as a member of the community. Thus, in the bourgeois
republic, where man is an acknowledged, veritable subject, he is
abstracted from all qualities specific to him, and is a figure with no
reality to it, a “citizen”; and where in his own eyes, as in the eyes of
others, he passes for a real subject — in his everyday existence — he is
a figure with no truth, an “individual.” The classical era has in a way
established the principles whose application has made man what we know
him to be: the aggregation of a double nothingness: that of a
“consumer,” that untouchable, and that of a “citizen,” that pathetic
abstraction of impotence.
But the more the Spectacle and Biopower perfect each other, the more
autonomy is obtained by appearances and the basic conditions of our
existence, the more their world detaches from men and becomes foreign to
them; and the more Bloom draws back into himself, deepening and
recognizing his interior sovereignty relative to objectivity. And as he
detaches ever more painlessly from his social decisions and from his
“identity,” he gets stronger as a pure force of negation, beyond all
effectiveness.
The condition of exile in the unrepresentable that men and their common
world are in coincides with the situation of existential clandestinity
which befalls them in the Spectacle. That condition is a manifestation
of the absolute singularity of each social atom as the absolutely
anonymous, ordinary social atom, and its pure differentiation as pure
nothingness.
It is assuredly true that, as the Spectacle never tires of repeating,
Bloom is positively nothing. But as to what this “nothing” means,
interpretations vary.
— Having come to this point, all sane minds would conclude from all this
that it would be constitutionally impossible to come up with any kind of
a “Theory of Bloom” and would leave this path, as they should. The
cleverest will probably cough up some fallacious reasoning like “Bloom
is nothing; there’s nothing to be said about nothing, and therefore
there is nothing to be said about Bloom, QED” and will then surely
regret having wasted their time on the present writing to the neglect of
their fascinating “scientific study of the French intellectual world.”
For those of you who in spite of the obvious absurdity of our topic of
discussion here continue to read on, you should always keep in mind the
necessarily vacillating character of all discourse regarding Bloom.
Really dealing with the human positivity of pure nothingness can only
mean exposing the most perfect lack of qualities as itself being a
quality, and exposing the most radical insubstantiality as substance,
even at the risk of ending up giving a face to something that’s
invisible. Such a discourse, if it does not wish to betray its object,
must let its object emerge only so as to let it disappear once more the
very next instant, and so on ad infinitum. —
The I has a content that distinguishes it from itself, because it is
either pure negativity or a splitting movement; it is consciousness.
This content, in its differentiation, is also the I, because it is the
movement of self-suppression or that same pure negativity which is I.
— Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind
Although Bloom is the fundamental possibility that man never ceases to
contain, the real possibility of possibility, and has for that reason
been described, felt out, and practiced many times over the centuries —
both by the Gnostics in the first centuries of our era and by the
heretics of the end of the Middle Ages (the brethren of the Free Spirit,
the kabbalists, or the Rhenan mystics), by Buddhists as much as by
Coquillards [large bandit groups of 1450s France] — Bloom nevertheless
only appears as the dominant figure within the historical process at the
moment when metaphysics reaches its completion, that is, in the
Spectacle.
The generation that perceived the face of the Gorgon, squinting through
the steely storm — the generation of expressionism, futurism,
constructivism, Dada, surrealism — was the first to bear this terrible
secret all together at once. There it experienced some thing whose
radicalness and white-hot calcination could not find any suitable
expression even in all the vertigo of the 1920s. The whole history of
the century can be interpreted on that basis as a succession of
reactions against what was perceived at that point and in which we still
remain. Because since 1914 it’s not that “civilizations” have come to
know that “they are mortal,” as PEOPLE have said: it is commodity
civilization, as it has been spread from the West to the rest of the
world, that knows that it is moribund.
In reality it’s been more than a century — basically since our exposure
to the fall-out plume of symbolist radiation — that Mr. Bloom has been
the near-exclusive “hero” of all literature, from Jarry’s character Mr.
Sengle to Michaux’s Mr. Plume, from Pessoa himself to the Man without
Qualities, from Bartleby to Kafka, of course forgetting
Camus’-The-Stranger and the New Novel, which we’ll leave to the
undergrads. Even though he was most precociously approached by the young
Lukacs, it was only in 1927, with the treatise Being and Time, that
Bloom, dressed in the transparent rags of Dasein, became the central
non-subject of philosophy — it’s legitimate, one way or another, to see
vulgar French existentialism, which had an impact that came much later
and went much deeper than anyone could have suspected by looking at how
short a time it was in vogue, as the first thinking made exclusively for
the use of Blooms.
PEOPLE have been able to ignore for a long time now the massive evidence
of Bloom in all these manifestations, writing it off as simply a
literary phenomenon, as a purely philosophical exaggeration. For the
rest, PEOPLE still train themselves to do so: it relaxes the atmosphere.
It’s just that, in passing, PEOPLE would like to forget what THEY are
politically the contemporaries of, to forget that Bloom first appeared
in literature at the very moment when literature as an institution was
disrupted, and in philosophy at the moment when it began to crumble as a
system of truth.
In other words, when Valery wrote: “I felt, with a bitter and bizarre
pleasure, the simplicity of our statistical condition. The quantity of
individuals absorbed all my singularity, and I became indistinct and
indiscernible,”
he was not adding another suppelementary object to the venerable
contemplation of Aesthetics: he was expressing politically what it means
to be just one more body in the aggregate of a population managed by
Biopower.
Every new stage in the development of commodity society requires the
destruction of a certain form of immediacy, the lucrative separation of
what had been one and united into a relationship. It is this split that
the commodity then takes over, mediates, and extracts profit from,
clarifying a little more each day the utopia of a world where every
person will be, in all things, exposed on the one market. Marx admirably
described the first phases of this process, though only from a labor
bureaucrat’s perspective, the perspective of Economy: “The dissolution
of all products and all activities into exchange value,” he wrote in
Grundrisse, “presupposes the decomposition of all frozen (historical)
relationships of personal dependence within production, as well as the
universal subjugation of producers to one another.... The universal
dependence of individuals indifferent to each other constitutes their
social bond. And this social bond is expressed in exchange value.”
It would be perfectly absurd to consider the persistent devastation of
all historical attachments and of all organic communities as a
short-term defect in commodity society, one that it would only take the
good will of men working for reform to deal with. The uprooting of all
things, the separation into sterile fragments of each and every living
totality and the autonomization of those fragments within the circuits
of value are precisely the essence of the commodity, the alpha and omega
of its movement. The highly contagious nature of this abstract logic
takes on the form of a real “uprooting sickness” among men, which makes
the uprooted ones throw themselves into an activity that always tends to
uproot those who are still not uprooted or are so only partly, often by
the most violent of methods; whoever has been uprooted will uproot
others. Our era has the dubious prestige of having brought to its apex
the proliferating and multitudinous feverishness of this “destructive
character.”
“Be like passers-by!”
— Gospel of Thomas
Bloom appears inseparably as the product and the cause of the
liquidation of all substantial ethos as a result of the eruption of the
commodity into all human relationships. He himself is thus the man
without substantiality, the man who has really become abstract, because
he’s been effectively cut off from all milieus, dispossessed of all
belonging, and then thrown out to wander. We have come to know him as
such, as that undifferentiated being “that does not feel at home
anywhere,” as that monad who comes from no community at all in a world
“that only gives birth to atoms” (Hegel). Naturally, to admit the
universality of the pariah status, of our pariah status, would mean
admitting too many comfortable lies, both for those who claim to be part
of this “society” and for those who integrate themselves into it while
claiming to criticize it. The famous doctrine of the
“new-middle-classes” or alternatively of the “vast-middle-class” has for
the past half-century corresponded to the denial of our bloomitude, its
total perversion. PEOPLE would thus like to try to reapproach the total
dissolution of all social classes in terms of social class. Because
Bloom is not only today’s neo-bourgeois, who has so pathetically failed
the confidence of his bourgeoisie; he is also today’s proletarian, who
now no longer even has the slightest vestiges of a proletariat behind
him. At the extreme limit, he is the planetary petty-bourgeoisie, the
orphan of a class that never even existed.
In fact, in the same way as the individual resulted from the
decomposition of the community, Bloom results from the decomposition of
the individual, or, to put it plainly, that of the fiction of the
individual — the bourgeois individual has only ever existed on the
freeways, and there are still accidents there. But we would be mistaken
to see the human radicalness that Bloom sketches out by seeing him
merely in light of the traditional concept of the “uprooted” person. The
suffering that all true attachments/commitments now expose one to has
taken on such excessive proportions that no one can even allow
themselves to feel any nostalgia for their origins. In order to survive
it’s been necessary to kill that off too. And so Bloom is, rather, the
man without roots, the man who gets the feeling that he’s at home in his
exile, who has laid down his roots in the absence of a place, and for
whom the idea of uprooting doesn’t evoke any kind of banishment, but on
the contrary an ordinary situation. It’s not the world that he’s lost,
it’s his taste for the world that he’s had to leave behind.
A totally new kind of poverty has swooped down upon men with the
colossal development of technology... What good is all our cultural
heritage now if no experience ties us to it? The last century’s horrible
mish-mash of styles and visions of the world showed only too clearly
where hypocrisy or abuse in such matters gets us in order for us not to
consider it honorable to own up to our misery. So, then, let us confess
it: this poverty of experience is not just the poverty of private
experiences, but a poverty of human experiences. So is it a new kind of
barbarism? In effect. And we declare it to be such in order to introduce
a new concept, a positive concept of barbarism. Because where does a
poverty of experience lead the savage barbarian? It brings him to begin
at the beginning, to start over from the start, to pull himself out of
it with the little he has, to build with the little he has, and in so
doing to look neither to his right nor to his left... We have become
poor. We have sacrificed the heritage of humanity, bit by bit, and often
we have pawned it off for a hundredth of its value in order to receive
in return the petty coin of “what exists” ... Humanity is preparing
itself to survive culture if need be. And the essential thing is that
it’s doing so while laughing about it. It is highly possible that here
or there such laughter might have a really barbaric sound to it. That’s
great. So couldn’t individuals thus give up, some time or another, a
little bit of their humanity to the masses, which would one day pay it
back plus interest on capital and interest on the interest?
Walter Benjamin, Experience and Poverty
As an observable Stimmung, as a specific affective tonality, Bloom is in
touch with the extreme abstraction of the conditions of existence that
the Spectacle fleshes out. The most demented, and at the same time the
most characteristic concretion of the spectacular ethos remains — on a
planetary scale — the metropolis. That Bloom is essentially the
metropolitan man in no way implies that it might be possible by birth or
by choice for him to remove himself from that condition, because there
is no outside of the metropolis: the territories that its metastatic
extension does not occupy are always polarized by it; that is, they are
determined in all their aspects by its absence.
The dominant trait of the spectacular-metropolitan ethos is the loss of
experience, the most eloquent symptom of which is the formation in it of
the very category of “experience” in the restricted sense where one has
“experiences” (sexual, sporting, professional, artistic, sentimental,
ludic, etc.). Everything about Bloom flows from this loss, or is
synonymous with it. Within the Spectacle, as they are within the
metropolis, men never have the concrete experience of events, but only
of conventions, rules; a wholly symbolized, entirely constructed second
nature. There, what reigns is the radical split between the
insignificance of everyday life — called “private” life — where nothing
happens, and the transcendence of a frozen sphere called “public” which
no one has access to.
But all this looks is starting to look more and more like ancient
history. The separation between the Spectacle’s lifeless forms and the
“formless life” of Bloom, with its monochromatic boredom and silent
thirst for nothingness, moves aside at numerous points to make way for
indistinguishability. The loss of experience has finally attained to
such a degree of generality that it can in turn be interpreted as the
primordial, original experience, as the experience of experience as
such; as a clear disposition, that is, towards Critical Metaphysics.
Metropolises are distinct from the other grand human formations first of
all because the greatest proximity, and usually the greatest
promiscuity, coincide in them with the greatest foreignness. Never have
men been gathered together in such great number, and never have they
been so totally separate from one another.
In the metropolis, man experiences his own negative condition, purely.
Finiteness, solitude, and exposedness, which are the three fundamental
coordinates of this condition, weave the décor of each person’s
existence in the big city. Not a fixed décor, but a moving décor; the
amalgamated décors of the big city, due to which everyone has to endure
the ice-cold stench of its non-places.
The hip, plugged-in metropolis-dwellers here comprise a rather
remarkable type of Bloom not only in terms of intensity but also in the
numerical extent of their legions: Bloom’s imperialist fraction. The
hipster is the Bloom that offers himself up to the world as a tenable
form of life, and to do so constrains himself to a strict discipline of
lies.
The final consumer of existence, stricken by a definitive
incredulousness concerning both people and language, the hipster lives
on the horizon of an endless experimentation on himself. He has
circumscribed the volume of his being and has decided to never get out
of it, if not to ensure the self-promotion of his own sterility.
Thus, he has replaced the emptiness of experience with the experience of
emptiness, while waiting for the adventure he’s always ready for but
never comes: he’s already written out all the possible scenarios. In a
deceived ecstasy, the solitary crowd of hipsters, always-already
disapperared, always-already forgotten, pursue their wandering path like
a raft full of suicides, lost in a depressing ocean of images and
abstractions. And that crowd has nothing to communicate, nothing but
conventional formulas for absent enjoyment and a life with no object
within a furnished nothingness.
The metropolis appears, moreover, as the homeland of all freely selected
mimetic rivalries, the sorry but continuous celebration of the
“fetishism of little differences.” PEOPLE play out all year-round a
tragicomedy of separation: the more people are isolated, the more they
resemble one another; the more they resemble one another, the more they
detest one another; and the more they detest one another the more they
isolate themselves. And where men can no longer recognize each other as
the participants in building a common world, everything only further
catalyzes a chain reaction, a collective fission.
The teachings of the metropolis show, from different angles, the extent
to which the loss of experience and the loss of community are one and
the same thing. It must however be taken into account, in spite of the
nostalgia that a certain romanticism so enjoys cultivating even in its
enemies, that before our era there had not, and had never been, any
community. And these are not two contradictory affirmations. Before
Bloom, before “separation perfected,” before the unreserved abandon that
is ours — before, then, the perfect devastation of all substantial
ethos, all “community” could be but a hummus of falsehoods — a false
“belonging,” to a class, a nation, a milieu — and a source of
limitation: and anyway, if it were otherwise it would not have been
annihilated. Only a radical alienation from the Common was able to make
the primordial Common burst forth in such a way that solitude,
finiteness, and exposedness — that is, the only true bond between people
— could also appear as the only possible bond between them. What PEOPLE
call a “community” today, while gazing out upon the past, obviously
shares in this primordial Common, but in a reversible way, because it’s
just second-hand. And so it’s up to us to have for the first time an
experience of real community, a community based on the honest assumption
of our separation, exposedness, and finiteness.
Following Bloom’s example, the metropolis simultaneously materializes
the total loss of community and the infinite possibility of regaining
it.
The elucidation of the possibilities contained in our times depends
exclusively on whether we consider the Bloom figure. Bloom’s eruption
into history determines, for “our party,” the need to completely rebuild
our foundations, both in theory and practice. All analysis and all
action that does not absolutely take Bloom into account will damn itself
to eternalizing the present exile, because Bloom, since he’s not an
individuality, doesn’t let himself be characterized by anything he says,
does, or manifests. Each moment is for him a moment of decision. He has
no stable attributes whatsoever. No habits, no matter how far he pursues
his repetition of them, are susceptible to conferring any being upon
him. Nothing adheres to him, and he doesn’t adhere to anything that may
seem to be his, not even “society,” which would like to support itself
upon him. To cast a light on these times, we must consider that there is
on the one hand the mass of Blooms and on the other the mass of acts.
All truth flows from this.
Bartleby is an office employee.
The diffusion of mass intellectual labor within the Spectacle, in which
conventional knowledge counts as exclusive competency, has an obvious
relationship with the form of consciousness that is proper to Bloom. So
much so that except in situations where abstract knowledge dominates
over all vital milieus, outside of the organized sleep of a world
produced entirely as a symbol, Bloom’s experience never attains the form
of a lived continuum which he might add onto himself; rather it just
starts to look like a series of inassimilable shocks.
Thus he has had to create an organ to protect him against the uprooting
that the currents and discordances of his external milieu threaten him
with: instead of reacting with his sensibilities to this uprooting,
Bloom reacts essentially with his intellect, and the intensification of
consciousness that the same cause produces ensures its psychic
preponderance. Thus the reaction to these phenomena is buried in the
least sensitive psychic organ, the one that is most distant from the
depths of being. His pure consciousness is, then, the only thing that
Bloom manages to recognize as his own, but it is a consciousness that
has become autonomous from life, that no longer feeds it but merely
observes it, and in its lapse, muzzles itself.
Bloom cannot take part in the world in an inner way. He only ever goes
into it in exception to himself. That’s why he has such a singular
disposition towards distraction, towards deja-vus, towards clichés, and
above all why he has such an atrophy of memory that confines him in an
eternal present; it’s also why he’s so exclusively sensitive to music,
which alone can offer him abstract sensations — we should here mention
speed and “sliding,” which are also bloomesque enjoyments but this time
only insofar as they are abstraction itself arising as sensation.
Everything that Bloom lives, does, and feels remains something external
to him. And when he dies, he dies like a baby, like someone who’s never
learned anything. With Bloom, the relations of consumption have extended
themselves over the totality of existence, and over the totality of what
exists. In Bloom’s case, commodity propaganda has so radically triumphed
that he effectively conceives of his world not as the fruit of a long
history, but like a primitive man conceives of the forest: as his
natural surroundings. A number of things become clear about Bloom when
he’s looked at from this angle. Because Bloom is indeed a primitive man,
but he’s an abstract primitive. It would be enough to summarize the
provisional state of the question in a formula: Bloom is the eternal
adolescence of humanity.
The recent mutations in the modes of production within late capitalism
have done much to move things towards universal bloomification. The
period of the classical proletariat, which ended at the dawn of the
1970s, itself made a proud contribution to this bloomification.
Statute-regulated, hierarchical wage labor in effect slowly replaced all
other forms of social belonging, in particular replacing all the
organic, traditional ways of life. It was also then that the
dissociation of singular man and his social being began: all power being
no more than simply functional therein, that is, delegated anonymously,
each “I” which attempted to affirm itself never affirmed anything but
its anonymity. But although there was in the classical wage system only
power deprived of a subject and subjects deprived of power, the
possibility remained — because of the relative stability of employment
and a certain rigidity in the hierarchies — that the subjective totality
of a large number of men could still be mobilized.
After the 1970s, the relative guarantee of stable employment, which
allowed commodity society to impose itself as the replacement for a
particular social formation — the traditional order — whose primary
virtue was this guarantee of stability, lost all necessity upon the
annihilation of its adversary. So then a process of introducing greater
flexibility into production began, of giving the exploited an ever more
precarious status; this is a situation we are still in and which has
even today still not attained to its final limit. It has now been almost
three decades that the industrialized world has been in an autonomic
involution phase where the classical wage system is dismantling itself
step by step, and driving itself on the basis of such dismantlement. We
have since then been watching the abolition of wage society on the wage
society’s own terrain, that is, within the domination-relations that it
commands. “Work here ceases to carry out its function as a powerful
substitute for the objective ethical fabric, and no longer holds the
place of the traditional forms of ethics, which anyway have for a long
time now been emptied out and dissolved.” (Paolo Virno, Opportunism,
Cynicism, and Terror). All the intermediary screens between the
“atomized individual,” owner of no more than his “labor power,” and the
market — where he must sell it — have been liquidated to such an extent
that now each person stands in total isolation before the crushing
autonomous social totality. Nothing from then on could prevent the
so-called “post-fordist” forms of production from becoming generalized,
and with them flexibility, tense flow, mobility, “project based
management” and “enhanced tasks” for “polyvalent agents.” Such an
organization of labor, the efficiency of which rests on the
inconsistency, “autonomy,” and opportunism of the producers, has the
merit of making impossible any kind of identification on the part of men
with their own social function; in other words, it is highly
Bloom-generative.
Born of the acknowledgement of a general hostility towards wage labor
that manifested itself after 1968 in all industrialized nations, the
present organization of production was devised to work on the basis of
that very hostility. And so, while its flagship-commodities — cultural
commodities — are born of an activity which is foreign to the
narrow-minded framework of wage labor, getting it into a totally optimal
state requires tricking everyone; that is, it rests upon the
indifference, the repulsion, even, that people feel towards their
activity — Capital’s present utopia is a society where the totality of
surplus value comes from a generalized “coping” phenomenon. As you can
see, it’s labor’s alienation itself that’s been put to work.
In this context, a mass marginality begins to take shape where
“exclusion” is not, as PEOPLE would have us believe, the short-term drop
in status of a certain fraction of the population, but the fundamental
relationship that each person has with his own participation in social
life, and above all the one the producer has with what he produces. Work
has now ceased to be bound up with man as something specific to him; it
is now only perceived by Blooms as a contingent form of the general
social oppression. Unemployment is but the visible concretion of the
foreignness of each person to their own existence in the world of the
authoritarian commodity.
Bloom thus also appears as the product of the quantitative and
qualitative decomposition of wage-labor society; Bloom is the humanity
that corresponds to the mode of production of a society that’s become
definitively asocial, and one that none of its members feel in any way
connected to anymore. The fate prepared for him, to have to adapt
himself without respite to an environment in constant upheaval, is also
his apprenticeship in an exile in this world, which he must nevertheless
act like he’s participating in, in the absence of anybody really
participating in it at all.
But beyond all his forced lies, he discovers himself little by little to
be the man of non-participation, as well as a creature of non-belonging.
To whatever extent the crisis of industrial society heats up, the livid
figure of Bloom peeks out from under the titanic magnitudes of the
Worker.
“One drives the beasts out to pasture with whip lashes.”
— Heraclitus
For domination — and by this term we cannot properly understand anything
other than the symbolically mediated relations of complicity between the
dominators and the dominated — in proportion to the autonomy that the
Blooms acquire relative to their assigned social positions, there is a
strategic need to extract ever more appropriations, and to constantly
carry out new subjugations.
Maintaining the central mediation of everything by commodities thus
demands that ever larger sections of humanity’s being need to be brought
under control. From this perspective, one cannot fail to note the
extreme diligence with which the Spectacle has burdened Bloom with the
heavy duty of Being, the prompt solicitude with which it has taken
charge of his education, and of defining the complete panoply of
conforming personalities — in sum, one cannot fail to notice how it’s
been able to extend its grip over the totality of what may be said and
seen, and the codes according to which all relationships and identities
are to be built. The development of Biopower since the 18^(th) century,
a development whose qualitative leap took place with the Total
Mobilization of 1914, can only be understood strictly in light of this.
The taking of control over men as living beings within biopolitical
democracies, the application of the social forces of integration even to
bodies, the ever tighter management of the conditions of our existence,
comprise domination’s response to the disintegration of individuality,
to the erasure of the subject within Bloom. Its response, in sum, to the
fact that it has lost its grip.
The productive character of power as it circulates in the world of the
authoritarian commodity can be illustrated, among other ways, by the
manner in which the control of behaviors operates therein: most often it
is enough simply to master the organization of public space, the
arrangement of décor, the material organization of infrastructure so as
to maintain order; and to maintain order by the simple power of coercion
that the anonymous mass exerts over each of its elements, so as to make
that mass respect the abstract norms in force. In a downtown street, a
metro train aisle, or among a team of collaborators, the perfection of
the apparatus of surveillance resides precisely in the absence of any
surveillance watchmen.
Panoptical control is only all the more operative when it’s faceless. In
the final analysis, it doesn’t care at all whether its subjects reject
it or accept it, as long as they submit to it outwardly.
Since 1914, commodity domination has only been able to respond to the
enormity of its disaster with the use of Total Mobilizations. It
intends, with the use of a state of exception — sometimes manifest,
sometimes latent, but always permanent — to contain the overflowing
flood of its inconsistencies.
The first of these inconsistencies has to do with the fact that its
development demands in the same movement both the production of ever
more extensive possibilities and the general prohibition against making
them real. Commodity domination must thus simultaneously produce both an
overabundance of resources and the overabundance of terror necessary in
order that no one make use of them. Bloom is the man of this terror, the
one that spreads it and the one that suffers through it: he is the
collaborator.
The recent period, over the course of which brutal crises of control
have claimed to put whole sectors of what exists into step with a
categorical imperative of transparency and traceability, is marked by a
rapid movement of the concentration of domination.
Only a minority of conformed subjectivities, from whom PEOPLE require a
new fusion between life and work, personality and function, are co-opted
into the really vital positions, which meanwhile have become ever fewer.
The formation of this Praetorian Guard of Capital, whose elements are
not interchangeable (contrary to the situation of the large mass of wage
workers), is part of this concentration of domination, which is
inseparable from the militarization of disaster. As for the excess
people, they essentially are set to work keeping each other busy,
reciprocally dispossessing one another of their idleness, which indeed
takes some real effort.
At the moment of domination’s general restructuring, Bloom finds himself
hunted down everywhere and in everyone, since he is just as much the
idle person as he is the foreigner or the pariah. That’s why he has to
camouflage himself under so much artificiality, because Bloom is the
civil figure at the heart of the universal militarization of disaster.
“All that you are, you are through me; everything that I am, I only am
through you.”
Hitler
Bloom lives in a state of terror, above all in the terror of being
recognized as Bloom.
Everything happens as if the mimetic hell we suffocate in was
unanimously judged preferable to our encountering ourselves.
Biopower organizes itself ever more visibly as a directed economy of
subjectivations and resubjectivations.
There is, thus, a certain inevitability about the feverish enthusiasm
for the industrial production of personality-kits, of disposable
identities and other hysterical temperaments. Rather than really
examining their central emptiness, the majority of people recoil before
the vertigo of a total absence of ownership, of a radical
disinclination, and thus, at root, they recoil before the yawning chasm
of their freedom. They prefer to be engulfed ever more deeply in poor
substantiality, towards which everything pushes them, after all. And so
it must be expected that, hidden in some unequally latent depression
they will discover some buried root or other, some spontaneous
belonging, some incombustible quality. French, outcast, woman, artist,
homosexual, Briton, citizen, fireman, Muslim, Buddhist, or unemployed
person — anything’s fine as long as it lets one moo out that miraculous
“I AM...” in some tone or another, eyes glazed over and gazing off into
the infinite distance.
It doesn’t matter what empty and consumable particularity gets taken on,
or what social role is at hand, because it’s only all about warding off
your own nothingness. And since all organic life fails in light of these
pre-chewed forms, they never take long to quietly reenter the general
system of commodity exchange and commodity equivalence, which reflects
and pilots them.
Poor substantiality thus means that PEOPLE have put all their substance
on record within the Spectacle and that the latter operates as the
universal ethos of the celestial community of spectators. But a cruel
ruse makes it so that in the end all this does is accelerate even more
the process of the collapse of all substantial forms of existence. The
man of poor substantiality’s primary non-resolution inexorably spreads
itself out underneath the waltz of dead identities, where he always
successively leads the dance. What should mask a lack of individuality
not only fails to do so, it also increases the mutability of what could
have lived off it.
Bloom triumphs above all in those who flee from him.
Simulacra
It is vain to claim substantiality within the Spectacle. Nothing in the
final analysis is less authentic or more suspect than “authenticity.”
Anything that claims to have a name of its own or claims to adhere to
itself can only be usurpation or stupidity.
By imposing upon each living singularity the need to consider itself as
specific — that is, from a formal perspective, from a point of view
outside of itself — the Spectacle tears it apart from inside, and
introduces an inequality, a difference into it. It forces the I to
consider itself as an object, to reify itself, to understand itself as
an Other. Consciousness thus finds itself pulled into a flight without
respite, into a perpetual split stimulated by the imperative — for
anyone who refuses to let himself be won over by a lethal ‘peace’ — to
detach itself from all substance. By applying to all the manifestations
of life its tireless work of denomination, which is thus a work of
anxious reflexivity, the Spectacle wrenches the world out of its
immediacy with continual blasting. In other words, it produces and
reproduces Bloom: the thug that knows he’s a thug is no longer a thug,
he’s a Bloom playing the thug.
Many of the things that we call by names that are thousands of years old
ceased to exist long ago. We don’t need neologisms to replace the old
words: we should just replace them all with “Bloom.” For instance,
there’s no such thing anymore as that supposedly substantial reality
that used to be called “the family.” There aren’t even any more fathers,
mothers, sons or sisters; there’s nothing but Blooms playing family,
Blooms playing dad, mom, son or sister. And these days one finds so few
philosophers, artists, or writers: there’s hardly anything but Blooms
anymore in these extras’ roles, just Blooms producing cultural
commodities and striking the standard poses becoming of their position.
To top it off, even farmers themselves have ended up by deciding that
they’ll have to play “farmer.” It just seems like that would be more
profitable.
It’s forbidden to us under the present regime of things to durably
identify ourselves with any specific content, only with the movement of
tearing ourselves away from it.
Man is the indestructible being
that can be infinitely destroyed.
Blanchot
The Indestructible is one; it is each man in full,
and all of us have it in common.
It is the unchangeable cement
that bonds men forever.
Kafka
Ah, this night of the world,
this empty nothingness that contains
everything in its abstract simplicity,
this form of pure disquiet...
Hegel
In the present reality, the question of who’s masked and who isn’t is
moot. It’s simply grotesque to claim to establish oneself outside of the
Spectacle, outside of a mode of disclosure in which everything manifests
itself in such a way that its appearance becomes autonomous, that is, as
a mask. Its costume, as a costume, is the truth of Bloom; that is,
there’s nothing behind it, or rather — and this unveils much more casual
horizons — behind it is the great Nothing, which is a potential power.
That the mask comprises the general form of appearance within the
universal comedy from which only hypocrites still think they can escape
doesn’t mean that there’s no more truth, just that truth has become
something quite subtle and biting.
The figure of Bloom finds its highest and most contemptible expression
in the “language of flattery,” and in this ambiguity there’s no room for
whimpering or rejoicing, just for fighting.
“Here the Self sees its certainty of itself as such become the thing
most emptied of essence; it sees its pure personality become absolute
impersonality. The spirit of its gratitude is thus just as much the
sentiment of this profound abjection as it is that of the most profound
revolt. Since the pure I sees itself outside itself, and all torn to
shreds in this shredding of everything that has any continuity and
universality to it, what we call Law, Good, and Rights is disintegrated
in one fell swoop and falls into the abyss.”
(Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind)
The reign of travesty always just slightly precedes the final death of a
given reign. We’d do wrong to take off domination’s mask, since it’s
always known itself to be threatened by the element of night, savagery,
and impersonality that are introduced when masks are worn. What is evil
about the Spectacle is rather that faces themselves are petrified until
they become like masks, and that a central authority sets itself up as
the master of metamorphoses.
The living are those who are able to fathom the words of the maniac
tremblingly proclaiming: “Happy is he who in his disgust for empty,
satisfied faces decides to cover himself with a mask: he will be the
first to rediscover the raging drunkenness of all that dances to its
death over the waterfall of time.”
“Alienation also means being alienated from alienation.”
Hegel
Historically speaking, it’s in the figure of Bloom that alienation from
the Common attains to its maximum degree of intensity. It’s not so easy
to imagine the extent to which the existence of man as a singular being
and his existence as a social being have in appearances had to become
foreign to one another in order that it become possible to speak of
“social bonds,” that is, to grasp man’s being-in-common as something
objective, as something exterior to him, and as something confronting
him.
The true front lines pass right through the fine milieu of Blooms, and
determine their schizoid neutrality. The militarization of disaster
spreads out like a final warning, given to him so that he will choose
sides: he must either endorse in an unconditional manner whichever
social role, whichever servitude, or starve to death.
We are dealing here with a kind of urgent measure taken quite ordinarily
by regimes in desperate straits; one that simply allows Bloom to be
hidden, but not suppressed.
But, for the time being, that’s good enough. The essential thing is that
the eye that sees the world in a different way than the Spectacle does
can be sure that PEOPLE have never seen any such thing this side of the
Pyrenees — “what’s that you say? A what? A Bloom???” — and that it’s
just a metaphysician’s chimera; and thus that will make its critiques on
that basis. All that matters is that bad faith can become a clear
conscience, and that it can counterpose to us its time-stamped
improbabilities. For the rest, how could that which PEOPLE have
essentially dispossessed of all appearance ever appear as such in the
Spectacle?
It is Bloom’s fate to never be visible except to the extent that he
participates in poor substantiality, that is, only to the extent that he
disowns himself as Bloom.
All the radicalness of the figure of Bloom is concentrated in the fact
that the choice he finds himself permanently faced with has on the one
side the best and on the other side the worst, with no transition zone
between the two accessible to him. He is the neutral core that casts a
light on the analogical relationship between the highest point and the
lowest point. His lack of interest can comprise a great opening to
agapê, or the desire to simply operate like a gear in a technocratic
extermination enterprise, for instance. In the same way, an absence of
personality can prefigure the transcendence of the classical petrified
personality, as well as the terminal inconsistency of the metropolitan
hipster.
There is the “me ne frego” [I don’t give a damn] of fascism, and there
is the “me ne frego” of the insurgent. There is the banality of evil,
and there is also the banality of good. But in circumstances of
domination, Bloom’s banality always manifests itself as the banality of
evil. Thus, for the 20^(th) century, Bloom would have been Eichmann much
more than Elser (1); as for Eichmann, Hannah Arendt tells us, “it was
obvious to everyone that he was not a ‘monster,’” and that “one couldn’t
help thinking that he was really a clown.” It should be mentioned in
passing that there is no difference in their nature between Eichmann —
who identified purely and completely with his criminal function, and the
hipster who, unable to assume his fundamental non-belonging to the
world, nor the consequences of an exile situation, devotes himself to
the frenetic consumption of the symbols of belonging that this society
sells so expensively. But in a more general sense, everywhere PEOPLE
talk about “economy,” the banality of evil prospers. And it is there
peeking out from under the allegiances of all kinds that men swear to
“necessity,” “doin’ alright,” to the “that’s the way it is” by way of
“all work is honorable.”
And it is there that the extreme reaches of unhappiness begin, when all
commitments are replaced by the commitment to surviving. And commitment
/ attachment is thus stripped naked. With no object but itself. Hell.
The pure exteriority of the conditions of existence also form the
illusion of pure interiority.
Bloom is that being who has taken up into himself the emptiness that
surrounds him.
Hunted out of any place of his own, he himself has become a place.
Banished from the world, he has become a world.
It was not in vain that Paul, the Gnostics, and later on the Christian
mystics drew a distinction between the inner man and outer man, because
in Bloom this separation has taken place historically.
The marginal condition of those who, like Ruysbroeck the Admirable’s
inner man, feel “more inwardly inclined than outwardly inclined,” who
live “anywhere at all, and among anyone at all, in the depths of
solitude... sheltered from multiplicity, sheltered from places,
sheltered from men,” has since then become the common condition.
However, it is a rare person who, having experienced it positively, has
had the strength to want it. Pessoa:
“To create myself, I destroyed myself; I exteriorized myself so totally
within myself that inside myself I only exist outwardly. I am the living
stage over which various actors pass, playing various theater pieces.”
But for the time being if Bloom resembles this inner man it’s most often
only in a negative manner. The non-essential interior of his personality
hardly contains more than the feeling that he’s found himself to be
pulled along on an endless fall towards an underlying dark and
all-enveloping space, as if he were ceaselessly jumping off into himself
while disintegrating. Drop by drop, in uniform beads, his very being
oozes, rushes away, and bleeds out. His interiority is less and less a
space or a substance, and more and more a threshold and its passage.
And this is also what makes Bloom fundamentally a free spirit, because
he is an empty spirit.
“Whoever would thus leave himself behind shall truly be returned to
himself”
Meister Eckhart
The ecstatic “essence” of Bloom is expressed as follows:
IN EVERYTHING THAT HE IS,
BLOOM IS OUTSIDE OF HIMSELF.
In the empire of Biopower and autonomous publicity — the tyranny of the
impersonal, of what PEOPLE say, do, or think — the ecstatic structure of
human existence becomes manifest in the form of a generalized schizoid
state. Each person now distinguishes between his “true self,” something
pure, detached from all objectifiable manifestations, and the system of
his “false self,” social, acted, constrained, inauthentic.
In each of his determinations — in his body, in his “qualities,” in his
gestures, in his language — Bloom clearly feels that he is leaving
himself behind, that he has left himself behind. And he contemplates
that egress. And he is that wandering among those attributes, in that
contemplation.
His becoming is a becoming-foreign.
Léon Bloy, in his time, compared the capitalist to the mystic; his The
Blood of the Poor dedicates a good number of pages to a rather free
interpretation of the “fetishistic character of the commodity”:
“This money, which is but the visible figure of the blood of Christ
circulating through all his limbs,” “far from loving it for its material
enjoyment, which he deprives himself of, (the greedy man) adores it in
spirit and in truth, like the Saints adore the God that gives them their
duty of penitence and their martyrs’ glory. He adores it for the sake of
those who do not adore it; he suffers in the place of those who do not
wish to suffer for money. The greedy are mystics! Everything they do is
done in view of pleasing an invisible God whose visible and so
laboriously sought-after simulacrum showers them in tortures and
ignominy.”
If the capitalist is similar to the mystic in his activity, Bloom is
similar to the mystic in his passivity. And in fact, nothing resembles
Bloom’s existential situation better than the detachment of the mystics.
His reified consciousness effectuates upon it a definite propensity
towards contemplation, whereas his indifference corresponds to that
“honorable detachment (that is) none other than the fact that the mind
remains immobile in the face of all the vicissitudes of love and
suffering, honor, shame, and outrage.” Until paralysis sets in.
In the end, Bloom reminds one of Meister Eckhart’s God, a God that is
defined as “he who has no name, who is the negation of all names, and
has never had a name,” like the pure nothingness for whom all things are
nothingness.
Under its perfection, Bloom’s alienation conceals a truly primordial
alienation.
CLOWN
One day.
One day, maybe soon.
One day I’ll pull up the anchor
that keeps my ship far from the high seas.
With that kind of courage
one needs to have in order to be nothing and nothing but nothing,
I will let go of everything that had seemed to be so indissolubly close
to me.
I’ll cut it off, I’ll overturn it,
I’l smash it, I’ll make it collapse.
Disgorging in one fell stroke my miserable prudishness, my miserable
passwords and sequences, ‘with them dropping like dominoes.’
Drained out of the abscess of having to be someone, I’ll drink of
life-giving space once more...
...
With ridicule, by debasement (what is debasement?), bursts, emptiness,
and with a total dissipation-derision-purging, I will expel from myself
the form in which I was believed to be so attached, made up of,
coordinated by, and well-matched to my entourage and my peers, so
worthy, my ever so worthy peers.
Reduced to a humility evoking catastrophe, a perfect leveling like after
being intensely frightened.
Brought back immeasurably to my true rank, the lowly rank that I don’t
know what idea/ambition made me abandon.
Annihilated in my haughtiness, my esteem,
lost in a far away place
(or not even), with no name, no identity.
A CLOWN, tearing down in roaring laughter, guffaws, and grotesqueness
the sense of my own importance that I had
in spite of my seeing myself in such a clear light;
I will take the plunge,
with no stipend, into the underlying
Infinity-mind open to all,
and myself open to a new
and incredible dewdrop
because of my being null
and blank,
and laughable...
Henri Michaux, Paintings
For Meister Eckhart, the poor man is he who “wants nothing, knows
nothing, and has nothing.”
Eventually dispossessed and deprived of everything, mutely foreign to
his world, and as ignorant of himself as of what surrounds him, Bloom
realizes, at the heart of the historical process and in all its
fullness, the truly metaphysical magnitude of the concept of poverty.
Indeed, they needed every bit of the dense tackiness of an era where
economy has served as metaphysics in order to make an economic notion
out of poverty (now that this era is coming to an end, it becomes
obvious once again that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but
misery, and that of those three, only poverty has any perfection about
it. Poverty means the state of he who can make use of anything, having
nothing specifically his own, and misery means the state of he who
cannot make use of anything, whether because he has too much, or because
he doesn’t have the time, or because he has no community).
Thus, everything that the idea of wealth has been able to carry through
history, all the bourgeois tranquility, all the domestic bliss, all the
immanent familiarity with the readily perceived reality here below, is
something that Bloom can appreciate, out of nostalgia or simulation, but
that he cannot experience. For him, happiness has become a very old
idea, and not only in Europe. Together with all interest, and all ethos,
the very possibility of use value has been lost. Bloom only understands
the supernatural language of exchange value. He gazes upon the world
with eyes that see nothing; nothing but the nothingness of value. His
desires themselves are only roused towards absences, abstractions, not
the least of which is the YoungGirl’s ass (2). Even when Bloom appears
to want something, he never ceases to not-want, since he wants emptily,
since he wants emptiness.
That’s why wealth, in the world of the authoritarian commodity, has
become something grotesque and incomprehensible, merely a cluttered form
of miserable poverty.
Wealth is now merely something that possesses you; something PEOPLE
restrain you with.
...ja wohl, alles scheisse! [yes sir-ee! It’s all shit!] Your conscience
is clean. “We were right, all you’ve got to do is take a look at them!”
You are more mystified than anyone, and by us, we who are taking you to
the endpoint of your error. Relax, we aren’t going to set you straight;
we’ll just take your outrageous remarks to their necessary conclusions.
We’ll let ourselves go along with it even to the death, and you’ll see
the vermin dying.
We don’t need to wait for the liberation of bodies or count on them to
be resurrected for us to be right. Our reasoning triumphs now, living
and like waste. It’s true that it isn’t plain to see. But we’re just as
right as you are unlikely to understand anything about it, anything at
all. Not only do we have reason on our side, we are the right thinking
that you’ve pushed into a clandestine existence.
And thus less than ever can we admire any of these apparent victories.
Understand this well: you have transformed reason into conscience. You
have remade the unity of man. You have manufactured the most diehard
conscience. You can never again hope to manage to make us simultaneously
take your place and remain in our own skin, which would condemn us.
Nobody here will ever become his own SS.
Robert Antelme, The Human Race
Bloom is the man in whom everything has been socialized, but socialized
as private. Nothing is more exclusively common than what he calls his
“individual happiness.” Bloom is ordinary and characterless even in his
desire to stand out as a singular individual. For Bloom, all substantial
differences between him and other men has been effectively abolished.
All that remains is a pure difference without content. And everything,
in the world of the authoritarian commodity, aims to maintain this pure
difference, which is pure separation. And so Bloom may still answer to a
particular name, but that name no longer means anything.
All the misunderstandings regarding Bloom have to do with the depth of
the gazes that people allow themselves to stare at him with. In any
case, the award for blindness has to go to the sociologists, who like
Castoriadis talk about “a retreat into the private sphere” without
clarifying that this sphere itself has been entirely socialized. At the
other extreme we find those who have let themselves go so far as even to
go into Bloom. And the stories they bring back all resemble in one way
or another the experience that the narrator of Monsieur Teste had upon
discovering what that character was like “at home”: “I’ve never had a
greater impression of the ordinary. It was an ordinary, characterless
dwelling, similar at any given point to the theorems, and perhaps just
as useful. My host’s existence took place within the most general home,
the most common of interiors.” Bloom is, indeed, the man that exists in
the “most common of interiors.”
It is only in those places and circumstances where the Spectacle’s
effect is temporarily suspended that the most intimate truth about Bloom
comes out: that he is, at bottom, in agapê. Such a suspension arises in
an exemplary manner in uprisings, but also at the moment when we talk to
a stranger in the streets of the metropolis, and in the final analysis
anywhere that people must recognize themselves, beyond all specifics, as
simply people; as separate beings, finite and exposed. It is then not
rare to see perfect strangers show us their common humanity, by
protecting us from some danger, by offering us their whole pack of
cigarettes instead of just the one cigarette we’d asked for, or by
spending a quarter-hour helping us find the address we’d been looking
for when otherwise they are usually so stingy with their time. Such
phenomena are in no way explainable by an interpretation using the
classical ethnological terms of gift and counter-gift like a certain
kind of bar-room sociality, on the contrary, might indeed be. No
hierarchical rank is in play here. There’s no glory being sought after.
The only thing that can explain it is the ethics of infinite gift,
which, in the Christian tradition, and specifically the Franciscan, is
known as agapê.
Agapê is part of the existential situation of man that has informed
commodity society in this, its final age. And that’s the state commodity
society has left mankind in, by making it so foreign to itself and its
desires. In spite of all indications to the contrary, and as disturbing
as it may be, this society is coming down with a serious kindness
infection.
“Be Different — Be Yourself!”
(an underwear ad)
In many respects, commodity society can’t do without Bloom. The return
to effectiveness of spectacular representations, known as “consumption,”
is entirely conditioned by the mimetic competition that Bloom’s inner
nothingness impels him towards. The tyrannical judgments of the
impersonal, of what “PEOPLE” will think, would remain just another item
in a universal mockery if “being” did not, in the Spectacle, mean “being
different,” or at least making an effort to. So it’s not so much, as
good old Simmel put it, that “a person’s personal, special importance
comes about through their having a certain impersonal trait,” but rather
that the special importance of impersonality would be impossible without
a certain labor on the part of individual persons.
Naturally what is reinforced with the originality that PEOPLE give to
Bloom is never his singularity, but the impersonal “PEOPLE”-ness itself,
in other words, poor substantiality. All recognition within the
Spectacle is but recognition of the Spectacle.
Without Bloom, therefore, the commodity would be no more than a purely
formal principle deprived of all contact with becoming.
I walked amongst them as a foreigner, but none of them saw that I was
one. I lived among them as a spy, but none of them — not even me —
suspected that I was one. All of them took me for one of their
relatives: no one knew that there’d been a change-out when I was born.
And so I was a peer of the others that in no way resembled them, the
brother of each and all but without being from any of their families.
I came from vast lands, from landscapes more beautiful than life itself,
but I never mentioned these countries. My footprints on the
theater-floors and pavements were similar to theirs, but my heart was
far away, all the while beating quite near, the fictive master of an
exiled, foreign body...
No one really knew me underneath this mask of similarity, no one even
knew that I was wearing one because no one knew that there are masked
beings here in this world. No one ever dreamed that there was always
someone else standing beside me, which in the final analysis was
actually me. I was always believed to be identical to myself.
Bernardo Soares, The Book of Disturbances
At the same time, one thing’s for sure — Bloom carries within himself
the destruction of commodity society. In Bloom we find that same
ambivalent character seen in all the realities in which the
transcendence of commodity society on its own terrain manifest itself.
In this dissolution, it is the foundations themselves, which have for a
long time now been deserted, rather than the great edifices of the
superstructure that are the first to be attacked. The invisible precedes
the visible, and the basis of the world changes imperceptibly.
Bloom bears the end of the world within himself, but does not declare
its abolition; he just empties it of meaning and reduces it to the state
of a left-over husk awaiting demolition. In this sense one might affirm
that the metaphysical upheaval that Bloom is a synonym for is already
behind us, but that the bulk of its consequences is yet to come.
With Bloom, for whom all the self-intimacy that gave rise to private
property is lacking, the latter has lost all substance: what is really
left that is truly proper to anyone, that is really anyone’s own? What
is left, a fortiori, that is private, in the proper sense? Private
property now subsists merely in an empirical manner, as a dead
abstraction gliding along above a reality that escapes it ever more
visibly.
Bloom doesn’t contest the law, he lays it down. And how could the law
not have been definitively outdated with the appearance of this being
who is not a subject, whose acts bear relation to no particular
personalty at all, and whose behaviors are no more dependent on the
bourgeois categories of interest and motivation than they are on passion
or responsibility?
Faced with Bloom, thus, the law loses all its competence to deliver
justice — what could justice mean to a totally indifferent being? — and
it is only when PEOPLE leave it strictly to police terror that it can be
applied at all. Because in the world of the always-similar, we stagnate
just as much in jail as we do at Club Med: life is everywhere
identically absent.
That’s why it’s so important to domination for prisons to become places
of prolonged torture, and for that to be well known by everyone.
But it is the economy itself, and with it all notions of utility,
credit, or instrumental rationality, that Bloom has above all made a
thing of the past. That’s the reason for the well planned and public
constitution of a lumpen-proletariat in all the nations where late
capitalism reigns: the lumpens are there to dissuade Bloom from
abandoning his essential detachment by the abrupt but frightening threat
of hunger. Because from the economic point of view, this “non-practical
man” (Musil) is a disastrously clumsy producer, and a totally
irresponsible consumer. Even his egoism itself is in decline: it is an
egoism without ego.
If Bloom hasn’t failed to devastate classical politics in its very
principles, it’s in part only by default (there can be no more
imaginable establishment of equivalence between everything within the
universal than there can be senatorial elections among rats — each rat
is an equal and inalienable representative of his species, primus inter
pares [first among equals]) but also in part by excess, because Bloom
moves spontaneously within the un-representable, which is Bloomness
itself.
So; what can we think, then, of the troubles that this ungrateful son
causes the Spectacle, from under which all characters and all roles slip
out with a little murmur saying “I would prefer not to?”
“For the awakened ones, there is a world that is one and common to all,
whereas for the sleepers each turns away from it towards their own.”
Heraclitus
Tiqqun goes to the root of things. It is still only crossing through
purgatory. It carries out its work methodically. Tiqqun is the only
possible outlook for revolution. Not the revolution that must be waited
for, much less the revolution that we can prepare: but the revolution
that is taking place according to its own invisible pulsations, in a
temporality operating internally within history.
Tiqqun is not a determinable point in the future, with a validity period
more or less short, even if it is also that, but rather it is the “real
movement that abolishes the existing state of things.”
Tiqqun is always already there; that is, it is but the manifestation
process of what exists, which also entails the annulment of that which
does not exist.
The fragile positivity of this world has to do precisely with the fact
that it is nothing, nothing but the suspension of Tiqqun. This epochal
suspension can now be felt everywhere. And there really isn’t anything
else that can truly be felt at all anymore.
Bloom is a part of Tiqqun. Precisely because he is the man of
full-fledged nihilism, his fate is either to make his escape from
nihilism or perish. The intuition of the proletariat, for Marx, aims at
that, but its trajectory ends up warped before it reaches its target. So
we read, in The German Ideology: “The productive forces are confronted
by the great mass of individuals, from whom these forces have been torn,
and who, all the real substance of their lives having been frustrated,
have become abstract beings, but precisely for that reason are able to
establish relationships with one another as individuals.”
But it is precisely to the extent that he is not an individual that
Bloom establishes relations with his peers. The individual carries
within his deceptive integrity, in an atavistic manner, the repression
of communication, or the need for its artificiality. The ecstatic
opening of mankind, and specifically of Bloom, that I that is a THEY,
that THEY that is a I, is the very thing that the fiction of the
individual was invented to counter.
Bloom does not experience a particular finiteness or a specific
separation; he experiences an ontological finiteness and separation
common to all men. Furthermore, Bloom is only alone in appearances,
because he is not alone in his being alone; all men have that solitude
in common. He lives like a foreigner in his own country; non-existent
and on the margins of everything — but all Blooms inhabit together their
fatherland: Exile. All Blooms belong indistinguishably to one and the
same world, which is the world of forgetting — forgetting the world. And
so, the Common is alienated, but only in appearances, because it is even
more alienated as the Common; the alienation of the Common only refers
to the fact that what is common to them appears to men as something
particular, something of their own, something private.
And this Common, issued from the alienation of the Common and formed by
it, is none other than the veritable and unique Common among mankind,
its primordial alienation: finiteness, solitude, exposedness. Here the
most intimate coincides with the most general, and the most “private” is
the most shared.
Did You See Yourself When You Were Drunk?
“They say he’s dead since he has no taste for earthly things.”
Meister Eckhart
As PEOPLE can easily see, all this sketches out a catastrophic
possibility for commodity domination, the realization of which it must
ward off by all means: the possibility that Bloom might come to want
what he is and reappropriate his inappropriateness.
This “society,” that is, the set of situations that it authorizes, fears
nothing more than Bloom, that “condemned man that has no business, no
feelings, no attachments, no property, and not even a name of his own.”
(Nechayev). It must be considered, even in the most miserable of its
details, as a formidable apparatus set up with the exclusive purpose of
eternalizing the Bloom Condition, which is a condition of suffering. In
principle, entertainment is no more than the politics devoted to such
ends; eternalizing Bloom’s condition starts by distracting him from it.
Thence, as if in a cascade, come certain absolute necessities — the
necessity of containing all manifestations of the general suffering,
which presupposes an ever more absolute control over appearances, and
the necessity of painting pretty makeup on the all-too-visible effects
of that suffering, to which the totally disproportionate inflation of
Biopower is the response. Because at the confused point things have
gotten to now, the body represents, on a generic scale, the last
performer of the irreducibility of human beings to total alienation.
It’s through the body’s illnesses and dysfunction, and only through
them, that the demand for self-knowledge remains an immediate reality
for each person. This “society” would never have declared such an
all-out war on Bloom’s suffering if it didn’t constitute in itself and
in all its aspects an intolerable attack on the empire of positivity; if
it didn’t go hand in hand with an immediate revocation of all the
illusions of participation in its flowery immanence.
Maintaining in everyday life the use of representations and categories
that long ago became inoperative; periodically imposing the most
ephemeral but renovated versions of the most gappy asses’ bridges of
bourgeois morality; maintaining, beyond the intense obviousness of their
falsehood and expiration, the sad illusions of “modernity”; such are
just a few chapters in the heavy labor that the perpetuation of this
total separation among people requires.
The impersonal ‘THEY’ decides in advance on what is comprehensible, and
what must be rejected for its incomprehensibility. Bloom and his ecstasy
are incomprehensible; they must be rejected. His poverty is also reputed
to be a pretty shady thing in alienated Publicity — it is quite true
that capitalism has done all it can to make poverty identical to misery
at its heart, the property of a given thing always being essentially the
right to deprive others of its use. PEOPLE are even ready, in order to
keep Bloom shameful of his poverty, to allow Bloom to subjectivize
himself in this shame. The executive failure will thus, in the panoply
of fashionable writers, find a lot to identify with and be reassured by:
yes, “abject man” is indeed on its way towards becoming an honorable
form of life. Otherwise, he may turn towards Buddhism, that nauseating,
sordid, corny spirituality for oppressed wage workers, which sees as
already quite the excessive ambition the idea that it might teach its
fascinated and stupid faithful flock the art of wading in their own
nullity. It is of absolutely primary importance from domination’s
perspective that we never recognize ourselves as having all the traits
of Bloom, that we appear to ourselves and each other as opaque,
terrifying objects. At all costs Bloom must be given ideas, desires, and
a subjectivity by the impersonal force of PEOPLE. THEY give him
everything he needs so that he can remain that mute man in whose mouth
the Spectacle puts the words it wants to hear. THEY aren’t even averse
to wielding Bloom against Bloom, turning his own impersonality against
him, precisely by personifying him, in “society,” “the people,” or even
“the average joe.”
All this converges in a social sum that always puts an ever more
exorbitant price on “being yourself,” that is, it all converges in a
strict assignment to a residence within one of the identities recognized
by autonomized Publicity.
Parallel to this, the processes of subjectivation and desubjectivation
become more and more violent and their control more and more measured to
the millimeter. And since this control can’t operate other than in a
strict economy of time, in a synchrony, Bloom is henceforth regularly
exhorted to be “proud” of this or that, proud of being homo or techno,
second-generation north African, black, or even a gang-member. No matter
what, Bloom absolutely must be something, anything, rather than nothing.
[your kingdom’s days are numbered;
it has been weighed and found wanting;
and it is divided.]
Adorno speculated, in his work Prisms, that “those men that no longer
exist except through others, being the absolute zöon politicon, may
certainly lose their identity, but they would at the same time escape
their grip on self-preservation, which ensures the coherence of the
‘best of worlds,’ as well as that of the old world. Total
interchangeability would destroy the substance of domination and show
some promise for freedom.”
Meanwhile, the Spectacle has had all the time in the world to test out
the truth of such conjectures, but has at the same time victoriously
applied itself to wrecking the fulfillment of that incongruous promise
of freedom. Naturally, that wouldn’t work out too well without taking a
tougher stance, and the commodity world thus had to become ever more
implacable in the exercise of its dictatorship.
From “crises” to “recoveries,” from “recoveries” to depressions, life in
the Spectacle has since 1914 never ceased to become ever more stifling.
A look of terror hangs on all gazes, even in would-be popular
celebrations. The planetary watchword of “transparency” explains the
present context of permanent war against Bloom’s opacity, as well as the
deferred character of the existence that arises from it.
As a first response to this situation we see appearing among Blooms not
only a certain taste for anonymity, but at the same time a certain
defiance towards visibility, a hatred for things. There’s a metaphysical
hostility coming back again, a hostility towards that which exists, and
it threatens to burst at every moment and in every circumstance.
At the origin of this instability is a disorder, a disorder that comes
from unused strength, from a negativity that can’t eternally remain
unemployed, on pain of physically destroying those experiencing that
negativity.
Most often, that negativity remains silent, though as a result of its
being so bottled up it constantly manifests itself in a hysterical
formalization of all human relationships. But here already we are
looking at the critical zone of totally disproportionate backlash
against repression. An ever more compact mass of crimes, of strange acts
comprising a “violence” and destruction “with no apparent motive,”
besieges the everyday life of biopolitical democracies — in general, the
Spectacle calls “violence” everything that it intends to handle by
force, everything that it would like to be able to wield all its
arbitrary power against; and this category only has any validity within
the commodity mode of disclosure, which itself has no validity, and
which always hypostatizes the means relative to the ends, which here is
all activity itself, even to the detriment of its immanent significance.
Incapable of preventing them and even more incapable of understanding
them, commodity domination claims to be committed to not allowing any
such attacks on the social control of behavior. So it broadcasts its
habitual saber-rattling about video-surveillance and “zero tolerance,”
the repression of “uncivil behaviors” and of the “feeling of
insecurity,” as if the surveillers themselves didn’t need to be
surveilled, as if the “feeling of insecurity” had not been ontologically
assigned to Bloom!
A socialist cop, high up in the bureaucracy of some Japanese teachers’
union, expresses in the following passage his disturbance about the
little Blooms under him: “The phenomenon is all the more concerning
because the authors of these violent acts have often always been such
‘good kids.’ We used to get problem children; but today the kids don’t
revolt, they just ditch out of school. And if we punish them, their
reaction is totally disproportionate: they just explode.” (Le Monde,
Friday April 16^(th), 1998). An infernal dialectic is at work here, one
that will tend to make such “explosions” become ever more frequent,
fortuitous, and ferocious as the massive and systematic character of the
control necessary for their prevention is ever more emphasized. It is a
rarely disputed fact: we know from experience that the violence of
explosions grows in proportion to excessive confinement.
In Bloom, domination, which thought it prudent to impose the economy as
a morality so that commerce could make men soft, predictable, and
inoffensive — we’ve seen a number of centuries’ worth of this now — sees
its project flipping over into its opposite: to wit, it appears that
“homo economicus,” in his perfection, is also what makes the economy
outdated; and he makes it outdated as that which, having deprived him of
all substance, has made him perfectly unpredictable.
The man without content, has, in the final analysis, the hardest time of
anyone trying to contain himself.
In which every Bloom, as a Bloom, is an agent of the Imaginary Party.
Faced with this unknown enemy — in the sense that we can speak of an
Unknown Soldier, that is, a soldier that everyone knows to be unknown,
singularized as an “anybody,” who has no name, no face, no epic history
of his own, who resembles nothing, but is present under his camouflage
everywhere in the order of possibilities — domination’s disquiet becomes
more and more clearly paranoid. The dedication it has now undertaken to
carrying out its decimation, even in its own ranks and against all odds,
appears to the detached viewer as rather a comedic spectacle.
There’s something objectively terrifying about the sad forty-year-old
who, up to the moment of the outbreak of total carnage, had been the
most normal, the flattest, the most insignificant of average men. No one
had ever heard him declare his hatred for the family, work, or his
petty-bourgeois suburb, up until that fine morning when he wakes up,
takes a shower, and eats his breakfast, with his wife, daughter and son
still sleeping, and then loads his hunting rifle and very discreetly
blows all their brains out. Confronted by his judges, or even by
torture, Bloom will remain silent about the motives of his crime. Partly
because sovereignty doesn’t need to give reasons, but also because he
senses that the worst atrocity he could subject this “society” to would
be to leave his act unexplained.
And thus has Bloom managed to insinuate into all minds the poisonous
certainty that in each and every man there is a sleeping enemy of
civilization. Quite apparently he has no other purpose than to devastate
this world — indeed, it’s his destiny, even — but he’ll never say so.
Because his strategy is to produce disaster, and around himself to
produce silence.
transcendental homeland.”
Lukacs, Theory of the Novel
To the extent that the desolate forms we are intended to be contained
within tighten their tyranny, some strikingly curious manifestations
come about.
Runners-amok, for instance, adapt to existing in the very heart of the
most advanced societies, in unexpected forms, and take on new
significance.
In the territories administered by autonomous Publicity, such
disintegration phenomena are rare things that expose the true state of
the world nakedly, the pure scandal of things.
And at the same time as they reveal the lines of force within the reign
of apathy, they show the dimensions of the possibilities we’re living
in. That’s why — even in their very distance — they are so familiar to
us.
The traces of blood that they leave behind in their trail mark the last
steps taken by a man who made the mistake of wanting to escape alone
from the grey terror in which he had been detained at such high cost.
Our tendency to conceive of that is a measure of what life is left in
us.
The living are those who understand for themselves that at the moment
when fear and submission attain, in Bloom, to their ultimate figure as a
fear and submission that is absolute because it has no object, the
liberation from that fear and that submission means an equally absolute
liberation from all fear and all submission. Once he who had
indistinctly feared everything passes such a point, he can never fear
anything again. There is, beyond the most far-flung wastelands of
alienation, a zone of total clear and calm where man becomes incapable
of feeling any interest in his own life, nor even the slightest hint of
attachment to his place in the world.
All freedom, present or future, which departs in some way or other from
that detachment, from that serene calm/ataraxy, can hardly do any more
than expound the principles of a more modern servitude.
“I’m sorry. Like Shakespeare says, Good
wombs hath borne bad sons.”
Eric Harris, Littleton, April 20^(th), 1999
There aren’t many ways out from under the universal crush.
We extend our arms but they don’t find anything to touch. The world’s
been distanced from our grasp; PEOPLE put it outside our range. Very few
Blooms manage to resist the disproportionate enormity of that pressure.
The omnipresence of the commodity’s occupation troops and the rigor of
their ‘state of emergency’ condemn most projects of freedom to a short
existence. And so, everywhere that order appears to have firmly set in,
negativity prefers to turn against itself, as illness, suffering, or
frenzied servitude. There are some invaluable cases, however, where
isolated beings take the initiative, without hope or strategy, to open a
breach in the well-regulated, smooth course of disaster.
In them, Bloom violently liberates himself from the patience that PEOPLE
would like to make him languish in forever. And since the only instinct
that can tame such a howling presence of nothingness is that of
destruction, the taste for the Totally Different takes on the appearance
of crime and is experienced in a passionate indifference where its
author manages to hold steady when confronted with it.
This manifests itself in the most spectacular way in the growing number
of Blooms, big and small, who, for lack of anything better, lust after
the charm of the simplest surrealist act (recall that “the simplest
surrealist act consists in going out into the street, revolvers in hand,
and firing at random, as much as possible, into the crowd. Whoever has
not at least once had the urge to finish off in this way the wretched
little system of degradation and cretinization in force belongs in that
crowd himself, with his gut at bullet height.” (Breton). Recall as well
that this inclination, like many other things, remained among the
surrealists a mere theory without practice, just like its contemporary
practice is most often without theory).
These individual eruptions, which are doomed to proliferate among those
who have still not fallen into the deep sleep of cybernetics, are indeed
desperate calls for desertion and fraternity. The freedom that they
affirm is not that of a particular man assigning himself a particular
end, but the freedom of each, the freedom of the human race itself: a
single man is enough to declare that freedom has still not disappeared.
The Spectacle cannot metabolize characteristics bearing so many poisons.
It can report them, but it can never strip them entirely of the
unexplainable, the inexpressible, and the terror at their core. These
are the Noble and Generous Acts of our times, a world-weary form of
propaganda by the deed, whose ideological mutism only increases its
disturbing and somberly metaphysical character.
“I am NOTHING”: this parody of an affirmation is the final word of
sovereign subjectivity, liberated from the influence that it would like
to — or that it must — have on things... Because I know that I am, at
bottom, this subjective, content-free existence.
Georges Bataille, Sovereignty
In the Spectacle, power is everywhere; that is, all relations are in the
final analysis relations of domination. And because of this no one is
sovereign in the Spectacle. It is an objective world where everyone must
first subjugate themselves in order to subjugate others in turn.
To live in conformance with man’s fundamental aspiration to sovereignty
is impossible in the Spectacle except in one single instant: the instant
of the act.
He who isn’t just playing around with life has a need for acts, for
gestures, so that his life can become more real to him than a simple
game which can be oriented in any given direction. In the world of the
commodity, which is the world of generalized reversibility, where all
things merge and transform into one another, where everything is merely
ambiguous, transitional, ephemeral, and blended together, only acts cut
through it all. In the splendor of their necessary brutality, they carve
an unsolvable “after” into what had been “before,” which PEOPLE will
regretfully have to recognize as definitive.
A gesture/an act is an event. It cuts open a wound in the chaos of the
world, and installs at the bottom of that wound its shards of
unambiguity/univocity. It is a matter of establishing so profoundly in
their difference things that have been judged as different that what
separated them out from each other can never have any possibility of
being erased. If there’s anything in Bloom that thwarts domination, it
is the fact that even dispossessed of everything, even in all his
nudity, man still has an uncontrollable metaphysical power of
repudiation: the power to kill others and to kill himself. Death, every
time it intervenes, rips a disgraceful hole in the biopolitical tissue.
Total nihilism/nihilism fulfilled, which has really fulfilled nothing
but the dissolution of all otherness in a limitless circulatory
immanence, always meets its defeat right there: upon contact with death,
life suddenly ceases to be taken for granted. The duty to make decisions
which sanctions all properly human existence has always been in part
tied to the approach to that abyss.
On the eve of the day in March 1998 when he massacred four
Bloom-students and a Bloom-professor, little Mitchell Johnson declared
to his incredulous schoolmates: “Tomorrow I will decide who will live
and who will die.” This is as far from the Erostratus-ism of Pierre
Riviere as it is from fascist hysteria. Nothing is more striking in the
reports on the carnage brought about by Kipland Kinkel or Alain Oreiller
than their state of cold self-control and total vertical detachment
relative to the world. “I’m no longer acting out of sentiment,” said
Alain Oreiller while executing his mother. There’s something calmly
suicidal in the affirmation of so omnilateral a non-participation,
indifference, and refusal to suffer.
Often the Spectacle uses this as a pretext to start talking about
“gratuitous” acts — a generic qualifier with which it hides the purposes
it doesn’t want to understand, all the while making use of them as a
fantastic opportunity to reinject some life into one or the other of
bourgeois utilitarianism’s favorite false paradoxes — as long as those
acts aren’t lacking in hatred or reason. To prove this all one needs to
do is watch the five video tapes that the “monsters of Littleton” filmed
in anticipation of their operation. Their program appears in them quite
clearly: “We’re going to set off a revolution, a revolution of the
dispossessed.”
Here hatred itself is undifferentiated, free of all personality. Death
enters into the universal in the same way as it emerges from the
universal, and it has no anger about it.
This isn’t about giving some revolutionary significance to such acts,
and it’s hardly even about treating them as exemplary. It’s about
understanding what they express the doom of, and grasping onto them in
order to plumb the depths of Bloom. And whoever follows this path to the
end will see that Bloom is NOTHING, but that this NOTHING is a nothing
that is sovereign, an emptiness with a pure potential.
The contradiction between Bloom’s isolation, apathy, powerlessness, and
insensitivity on the one hand and on the other his dry and brutal need
for sovereignty can only bring about more of these acts, absurd and
murderous as they may be, yet still necessary and true. It’s all about
knowing how to deal with them in the right terms in the future: like [in
Mallarmé’s] Igitur, for instance: “One of the acts of the universe has
been committed there. Nothing else but the breath remained, the end of
speech and gesture united — blow out the candle of being, by which
everything has existed. Proof.”
Men don’t have the option of not fighting; the only choice they have is
which side they’re on. Neutrality has nothing neutral about it; it is
indeed the bloodiest side there is to take.
Bloom, both when he’s the one that shoots the bullets and when he’s one
that succumbs to them, is certainly innocent. After all, isn’t it true
that Bloom is but dependence itself on the central farce? Did he choose
to live in this world, whose perpetuation is the result of an autonomous
social totality that appears ever more extraterrestrial to him every
day? How could he do otherwise, stray Lilliputian confronting the
Leviathan of the commodity? All he can do is speak the language of the
spectacular occupier, eat from the hand of Biopower, and participate in
his own way in the production and reproduction of its horrors.
This is how Bloom would like to be able to be understood: as a
foreigner, as something external to himself. But in this defense, he
only tacitly admits that he himself is that fraction of himself that
sees to it that the rest of his being will remain alienated.
It matters little that Bloom can’t be held responsible for any of his
acts: he remains nonetheless responsible for his own irresponsibility,
which he is at every instant given the opportunity to declare himself
against. Since he has consented, negatively at least, to being no more
than the predicate of his own existence, he is an objective part of
domination, and his innocence is itself pure guilt.
The man of total nihilism, the man of “what’s the point?” who cries on
the shoulder of the man of “what can I do about it?” is indeed quite
mistaken to believe himself free of fault just because he hasn’t done
anything and because so many others are in the same situation he’s in.
The Spectacle, in so regularly admitting that the murderer was “an
ordinary man,” a “student like any other,” is suggesting that the men of
our times all participate equally in the unappealable crime that our
times really are. But it refuses to recognize this as a metaphysical
fact: as the case of the gas-chamber operators in Auschwitz shows, the
fear of responsibility is not only stronger than conscience, it is in
certain circumstances even stronger than the fear of death.
In a world of slaves without masters, in a world of collaborators, in a
world dominated by a veritable tyranny of servitude, the simplest
surrealist act is governed by none other than the ancient duty of
tyrannicide.
“One day or another the bombs will drop, and people will finally believe
what they’d always refused to admit; that words have a metaphysical
sense to them.”
Brice Parain, The Trouble with Choice
The possessed of nothingness begin by drawing the consequences from
their Bloom condition. And thus they expose the dizzying vertigo of it:
Bloom is sacer, in the sense of the word used by Giorgio Agamben; that
is, a creature that has no rights, who cannot be judged or condemned by
men, but who anyone may kill without being considered to have committed
a crime. Bloom is sacer to the exact extent that he knows himself to be
possessed by bare life, to the extent that, like a Muselmann in the
concentration camps, he is the simple witness to his own
becoming-inhuman.
Insignificance and anyonymity, separation and foreignness — these are
not the poetic circumstances that the melancholic penchant of certain
subjectivities may tend to exaggerate them as: the scope of the
existential situation they characterize — Bloom — is total, and it is
exceedingly political.
Anyone that has no community is sacer.
Being nothing, remaining outside all recognition, or presenting oneself
as a pure, non-political individuality, is enough to make any man at all
a being whose disappearance is uninscribable. However inexhaustible the
obituary eulogies may be — eternal regrets, etc. — such a death is
trivial, indifferent, and only concerns he who disappears; meaning, that
is — in keeping with good logic — nobody. Analogous to his entirely
private life, Bloom’s death is such a non-event that anybody can
eliminate him. That’s why the expostulations of those who, sobs in their
voices, lament the fact that Kip Kinkel’s victims “didn’t deserve to
die” are inadmissible, because they didn’t deserve to live, either; they
were outside the sphere of deservingness. To they extent that they found
themselves in the hands of Biopower, they were already the living dead,
at the mercy of any sovereign decision-making, whether that of the State
or of a murderer. Hannah Arendt:
“Being reduced to nothing anymore but a simple specimen of an animal
species called Mankind; this is what happens to those who’ve lost all
distinct political qualities, and who have become human beings and that
alone... The loss of the Rights of Man takes place at the moment when a
person becomes just a human being in general — without profession,
citizenship, opinion, or any acts by which he identifies himself and
specifies himself — and appears as differentiated only in a general way,
representing no more than his own and absolutely unique individuality,
which, in the absence of a common world where it might express itself
and upon which it might act, loses all meaning.” (Imperialism)
Bloom’s exile has a metaphysical status to it; that is, it is effective
in all domains. And that metaphysical status expresses his real
situation, in light of which his legal situation has no truth to it. The
fact that he can be shot down like a dog by a stranger without the
slightest justification, or — parallel to that and conversely — that he
is capable of murdering “innocents” without the slightest remorse, is a
reality that no jurisdiction whatsoever is capable of dealing with. Only
weak and superstitious minds could give themselves up to believing that
a verdict of life in prison or some orderly trial could suffice to sweep
those facts into the limbo of null and void-ness. At the most,
domination is free to attest to the Bloom condition, for instance by
declaring an only slightly-disguised state of exception, as the United
States did with its 1996 adoption of a so-called “anti-terrorist” law
which allows the arrest of “suspects” on the basis of secret
information, without any count of indictment or any limit to its
duration. There’s a certain physical risk to being metaphysically nil.
Doubtless it was in anticipation of the truly glorious possibilities
that such nullity was to give rise to that Unesco adopted the oh-so
highly consequential “Universal Declaration of Animal Rights” on October
15^(th), 1978, which stipulates in article 3: “1 — No animal should be
subjected to mistreatment or to acts of cruelty. 2 — If it is necessary
to kill an animal, it should be carried out in a manner that is
instantaneous, painless, and does not cause it fear. 3 — Dead animals
must be treated with decency.”
“Tu non sei morta, ma se’ismarrita
Anima nostra che si ti lamenti.”
[you are not dead, but merely lost,
o ever-lamenting soul of ours.]
Dante, Convivio [Banquet]
That Bloom’s kindness still expresses itself here and there in acts of
murder is a sign that the dividing line is near but has not yet been
crossed.
In zones governed by nihilism in its final stage, where the ends are
still lacking though the means abound, kindness is a mystical
possession. There, the desire for an unconditional freedom gives rise to
singular formations, and gives words a value full of paradoxes. Lukacs:
“Kindness is savage and pitiless, it is blind and daring, In the soul of
a kind person all psychological content is erased, all causes and
effects. Their soul is a blank slate upon which fate writes its absurd
commandments. And said commandments are carried out blindly, in a
reckless and pitiless manner. And that this impossibility becomes an
act, that this blindness becomes illumination, that this cruelty is
transformed into kindness — that’s the real miracle, that’s true grace.”
(On Mental Poverty)
But at the same time as these eruptions bear witness to an
impossibility, they also, in their proliferation, announce a speedup of
the flow of time. The universal disturbance, which tends to subordinate
itself under ever greater quantities of ever more minute activities,
brings to a glowing intensity in each man his need to make his choice.
Already those for whom this necessity means annihilation speak of
apocalypse, while the vast majority content themselves with living under
it all in the swampy pleasures of the last days.
Only those who understand the meaning they themselves will give to the
catastrophe will remain calm and retain the precision of their
movements.
In the magnitude and the way in which a given mind gives itself over to
panic, one can recognize its station, the ranks it falls in. And this is
a mark that is valid not only ethically and metaphysically but also in
praxis, and in time.
Etcetera.
But the world that we’re born into is a world at war, all the dazzle of
which comes from its sharp division into friends and enemies. Naming the
front lines in that war is part of crossing the line, but that’s not
enough to really do it. Only combat can really cross the line. Not so
much because it gives rise to such grandeur, but more because it is the
deepest experience of community, the one that permanently mingles with
annihilation and only measures itself in extreme proximity to risk.
Living together in the heart of the desert, with the same resolution to
never reconcile ourselves with it; that’s the proof, that’s the light.
Etcetera.
.......
Theory is not
about thought,
A certain quantity of coagulated,
manufactured
thought.
Theory
is a state,
a state of shock.
A Theory of Bloom,
Where Bloom is not the object of theory, where theory is but the most
familiar activity, the spontaneous penchant of an essentially
theoretical creature,
of a Bloom.
Theory is WITHOUT END.
thence
the need
to PUT AN END TO IT,
decisively.
The weariness of speech
What’s the way out of Bloom?
The Assumption of Bloom,
for instance.
— You can only really liberate yourself from anything by reappropriating
the thing you’re liberating yourself from. —
What does the assumption of Bloom mean?
Making use of the metaphysical situation defined by Bloom, the exercise
of the self as a prankster.
Not fighting against the dominant schizoid state, against our schizoid
state, but starting from there, and making use of it as a pure power of
subjectivation and desubjectivation, as an aptitude for experimentation.
Breaking with the old anxiety of “who am I really?” to the benefit of a
real understanding of my situation and the use of it that I could
possibly make.
Not just surviving in the constant imminence of a miraculous departure,
not forcing ourselves to believe in the jobs we do, the lies we tell,
but starting from there, to enter into contact with other agents of the
Invisible Committee — through Tiqqun for example — and silently
coordinate a truly elegant act of sabotage.
To detach from our detachment through a conscious, strategic practice of
self-splitting.
BREAKING WITH THE WORLD, FIRST OF ALL INWARDLY.
The Invisible Committee:
an openly secret society,
a public conspiracy,
an instance of anonymous subjectivation,
whose name is everywhere and headquarters nowhere,
the experimental-revolutionary polarity of the Imaginary Party
The Invisible Committee: not a revolutionary organization, but a higher
level of reality,
a metaphysical territory of secession with all the magnitude of a whole
world of its own,
the playing area where positive creation alone can accomplish the great
emigration of the economy from the world.
IT’S A FICTION THAT’S MADE ITS REALITY REAL.
All the elsewheres that we could have fled to have been liquidated;
we can only desert the situation inwardly,
by reclaiming our fundamental non-belonging to the biopolitical fabric
with a participation
on a more intimate,
and thus unattributable level,
in the strategic community of the Invisible Committee,
where an infiltration of society on all levels is being plotted.
This desertion is
a metamorphosis.
The Invisible Committee — the concrete space where our attacks, our
writings, our acts, our words, our gatherings, our events circulate:
our desertion —
transfigures the totality of what we’d accepted as a trade-off,
of what we’d endured as our “alienations,”
into a infiltration strategy.
The Other ceases to possess us:
and indeed,
possession itself is reversed
and becomes gentle.
We will conceal our act
within a relationship
that our powers have not yet attained to.
A TONGUE-IN-CHEEK ACCESS TO EXPERIENCE
Experimentation:
the practice of freedom,
the practice of idleness,
opposing the design of
a process of emancipation separate
from the existence of men,
and sending back to their desks all the learned plans and projects of
liberation.
A kind of Contestation
whose authority
and methods are not
in any way distinct
from experience.
Taking the possibilities that my situation contains all the way.
Revolutionary experimentation,
collective-revolutionary experimentation,
revolutionary-experimental collectivity carrying out the assumption of
finiteness, separation and exposedness as the ecstatic coordinates of
existence.
The life of he who
knows that his appearance and his essence are identical to one another,
but not identical to him,
cannot be in the world without remembering that he is not of this world,
cannot accommodate himself to a community which would be a simple
amusement of his solitude in the face of death,
— dancing, in total precision, to the death with time, which kills you —
THAT’S EXPERIMENTATION.
Language,
words and gestures:
that’s the common home of the placeless.
The bond between those that cannot be reduced to the lie of belonging,
to a certain plot of land, a certain birthplace.
A journey into dispersion and exile,
communication
that acts upon
our essential separation.
“Once we’ve spoken, to remain as close as possible in line with what
we’d said, so that everything won’t be effectively up in the air, with
our words on the one side and ourselves on the other, and with the
remorse of separations.”
This text is a pact.
The protocol for an experimentation now open
among deserters.
Without anyone noticing,
Break ranks.
NOW