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Title: There's an apparatus for that
Author: Anonymous
Date: 2011
Language: en
Topics: Tiqqun
Source: Retrieved on 3 October 2015 from http://web.archive.org/web/20110925004316/http://anarchistnews.org/?q=node/15396

Anonymous

There's an apparatus for that

Once again saying they are the opposite of things in italics, once again

rupturing with things, once again universalizing bourgeois French

intellectualism, once again referencing their own concepts to generate

the illusion of importance (à la Bob Avakian). Again all this: sex,

action, excitement, big words, petty leftist squabbling (and it’s new!).

To begin with, the book is premised on the notion that we need to scrap

the idea of class, a notion only possible from the same position that

waxes political over the pressing concerns of alienation at “the dinner

party”. Historical conflict now apparently bears striking resemblance to

the way liberalism envisions it: on the terms of the universal abstract

individual. “When the host is is no longer a portion of the society- the

bourgeoisie – but the society as such, the society as power, and when,

therefore, we find ourselves fighting not against classical tyrannies

but against biopolitical democracies, we know that every weapon, just

like every strategy, must be reinvented.”

From here we generate an ontology whose individual is the bloom, whose

class is the imaginary party, both of which are postulated as managing

all these ruptures not within a historical framework, but as “a negation

that comes from the outside”. Ironic that they agree here with Negri

(the subject of a large portion of the books scoffing) whose paranoid

reading of the Grundrisse [1] postulates that the proletariat should

operate outside of the dialectic. Trying to negate dialectic as a whole

is a premise that assumes one could negate and surpass it; it would fall

into it the very moment it is destroyed. In concrete terms, a historical

period affects the people that live in it. If you are in France you

probably speak French, go through French institutions, or experience

marginalization and systematic abuse by those who do; there is a

political and an ethical circumstance. There is no metaphysical location

beyond time and outside of reality: the mystified analogy might sound

extreme, but it doesn’t translate into the sensible world. Negri’s first

solution to accomplish this external assault was to simply not work

(which sounds remarkably like a strike…). This “refusal to play a part”

strategy assumes the role one plays in society is voluntary—one chooses

to work as they choose to experience violence based on gender or race.

Organizing around embodied and real experiences of systemic violence

seems to me not only like a meaningful way to organize, but actually

possible, unlike the idea that people can just dip out into this

content-less anomaly that the invisible party is apparently constructed

of. Whatever they think they are, Leibniz was wrong, and there is no

unassimilated monad, and thus the invisible party is not “heterogeneous

to biopolitical formation”, even if it is only supposed to exist only in

motions of pure external opposition. “Violence delirium and madness” are

all categories that capitalism is perfectly willing to assimilate; they

have mad houses, jails, and pills to do so. “Ruining equivalence” is not

a revolutionary strategy, anymore than deconstruction is a revolutionary

philosophy. Absconding equivalence doesn’t mean one destroys all

equivalence, because then everything would be equal in its

non-equivalence and would run into some insurrectionary version of

Russell’s paradox. The author continues: “…accepting ourselves as such,

as a Black Block, an imaginary party, or something else, would be the

end of us. For the imaginary party [I hope somebody else noticed the

joke here] is but the form of pure singularity”, a.k.a. they are a

“complete abstraction”: … my thoughts exactly. The claim that the

author’s royal We represents “the fact that contradiction exists at all”

is about as humorous as it is lofty.

“Class against class actually means classes against non-class”.

Post-modernism’s trope of using the remainder against the general is

implemented in an attempt to define people who don’t fall into a

traditional class bracket. Somehow the fact that ambiguous class

positions are true of some peoples experience annihilates the fact that

there is a growing number of poor, and there are those that are

profiting off them. It is fair to critique some rigid ideological

conception that only the people working in manufacture constitute the

proletariat, but I think it is also fair to say there is a huge lower

class, that is increasingly less fluid, and there is a (dwindling) group

of people that profit off of expropriated labour. There is an antagonism

here that no remainder will erase, and no bourgeois thinker can theorize

away. Not even the dictatorship of the petite bourgeoisie in its

Stalinist manifestation can erase this antagonism. “What is ultimately

at stake is no longer the abstraction of surplus value, but control” is

an interesting thesis that just happens to be invalidated by every

economic statistic indicating the insane wealth being generated by a

decreasing number of people that is especially pertinent given issues of

neo-liberalism and austerity. It is troubling to me to have an analysis

that glosses over this, given the extreme relevance to what is happening

all over the world. I am not claiming we can boil down all conflict into

two categories, but trying to elaborate that this hypothesized complete

dispersal leaves just one.

“Dressing up what is hostile to the system of representation in the

guise of the “negative”, “protest”, the “rebel” is simply a tactic that

the system uses to bring within its plane of inconsistency the

positivity it lacks.” Though the authors themselves are guilty of this

multiple times, it also happens to be the way capitalism sustains itself

by projecting artificial threats like “the terrorist”, so that it can

mop them up and keep its people thinking they are protecting their

safety. Having an abstract non-identity as a basis of resistance is a

very easy way to allow the state to simply project whatever image they

want, and thus assimilate despite claims to “heterogeneity”. Also, I

wonder about how this is possible given their claim that “The unique

thing about Empire is that it has expanded its colonization over the

whole of existence and over all that exists”? All this talk of

non-identity based struggle is seems extremely more complex than it is

made out to be: they say a worker should abscond his role as worker, the

woman from her role as woman (as if gender roles are only enforced by

personal choice). Despite the fact that everyone is supposed to revoke

their roles, they are revoking their roles from those positions. The

person who would abandon their role as a woman (even if this were as

simple as they make it out to be) would not be equivalent to the person

who forfeits their role as a worker. And I hope that I am not the only

one to read this and think that there are multiple forms of oppression

that cannot be unified into this mystical singular antithesis. The

people who seriously believe this is true are taking the position that

people don’t experience violence based on class, gender, or race. The

argument relies on a caricature of feminism and Marxism, on exploiting

the annoyance and difficulties of revolutionary struggles, and

validating the urge to ignore suffering and only engage in politics for

the sake of personal valorization.

Perhaps they could offer some sort of ends to justify these means, but

their depiction of this seems even more grim: “We are not looking for a

better alternative world to come, but in virtue of what we have already

confirmed through experimentation, in virtue of the radical

irreconcilability between empire and this experimentation, of which war

is a part”. The conflict is an end in itself, as we will see in the most

comical portion of the text in which the hero discusses his idea about

being a really cool warrior. Despite juvenile assertions like “We refuse

to play the game”!, the state uses coercive violence to enact its will:

it isn’t a choice or some kind of strategy to interact with it from

inside this, it is reality. If we are talking about these ideas as a

strategy, what point is there to employing them without the intention to

win? This is perhaps the most absurd version of reformism to have crept

out of the bowels of the intelligentsia, but it is not too different

from the reformist jargon of the early 1900’s. The reactionary

neo-Kantian Bernstein’s statement that “The movement is everything, the

ultimate goal is nothing”, sounds nearly identical to this modern faux

revolutionary rhetoric. Spontaneous action without any desire to really

take power is the strategy of reformism. This doesn’t mean that the

position I am arguing for is the opposite thing: namely that we can

create some static utopia. Dynamism and difference are a part of living

that we have to recognize will never be totally eliminated, but the

interplay is something we need to identify and theorize specifically

without these collapsing discourses.

The main point of the author seems to be that the rich can be cool

revolutionaries too. In terms of class: “Empire need only play one

against the other, the civilized modernity of the trendy, against the

retrograde barbarism of the poor”, the problem is “no more than the

hostile environment opposing us at every turn”. The cornered bourgeois

intellectual uses cheap rhetoric to try and reintegrate himself onto the

revolutionary side (without renouncing or even accounting for his

privilege) by using words like us as if we are moved in tandem, and

poses this mechanic territory free of actors as the opposition. The

argument is aimed at not holding the rich accountable for the creation

of poverty, or for perpetuating this anomalous “Empire”: the only

enemies are apparently the Zapatistas, workers, and feminists. It is

strategic for the author’s self-validation to argue for this anonymous

de-subjugated character, and as such should at least make us suspect.

I want people to really imagine this more than likely French professor

sitting down and writing about how he is a war-machine. Imagine this

same person writing: “Every war-machine is by nature a society, a

society without a state; but under empire, given its obsidional status,

another determination has to be added. It is a society of a particular

kind: a warrior society.” The great warrior bourgeois professor, who

“exists only in combat”, “Condemned to be alone”… “his solitude is at

once his salvation, and his damnation”. This could easy be the opening

to Steven Seagal movie, but sadly this is the theory that people

allegedly advocating for revolutionary anti-capitalism are following.

“The subversive counter-society must, we must recognize the prestige

connected to the exploits of every warrior, of every combatant

organization”[my emphasis], “such is the defense mechanism primitive

society erects”. These are the words of someone who has clearly never

been involved in real combat, or experienced real violence. Violence is

absolutely necessary to revolutionary struggle, and as such should be

treated with the extreme severity it entails. This blatant uncritical

vision of some action movie version of revolutionary violence is in no

way helpful. Not to mention this is the same war-machine that later says

that shoplifting is sometimes “Too much for [him]… so [he] pays”. When

the author eventually goes into depth about shoplifting and skipping

tickets, one can smell the pungent aroma of Crimethinc… (I want to

repeat this more explicitly: Tiqqun is crimethinc. in French.)

Regardless of whether or not I am correct in my assumption that we are

dealing with a white, bourgeois, French professor, the argument of the

text is unmistakably theorized from such a position. This is hardly

speculative as race is never addressed (despite the current imperatives

to do so in France [2]), gender only mocked, and the canonical reference

is exclusively white European males.

The rejection of subjectivity posited as a liberatory movement, as

“presence itself is INHUMAN”, in reality condones the action of Empire.

Radical removal of subjectivity is the methodology of capital, though

Tiqqun argues the opposite. The technological methodology pushes

increasing methods of alienation, of technological disembodiment that

threaten the existence of subjectivity. Regardless of the mystical

destabilization championed as a disruption of an “economy of presence”,

the prevalence of disembodied forms of communication and socialization

threaten material interaction, the last bastion of possibility for a

revolutionary movement. The problem is that “self” no longer references

the user; identity as such now incorporates a virtual abstraction, a

constructed appearance that comes to condition material experience.

Socially any event comes as fodder for virtual (dis)embodiment, real

scenarios are photographed and captured to provide content for a virtual

mode of experience which leeches, and reinterprets the event. Events

become reified in the immaterial world as a grid of photographs. The

threat to our bodies is removal and qualification by capitalist

commodities like our facebook personas; the most radical acceptance of

consumer culture is to “think of yourself as a product.” [3] The threat

to presence is the threat against material embodied interaction, and the

interactions that give meaning to life under capitalist despotism. I

also find the claim that “metaphysical grammar compels us” to a “covert

position” which makes it “…increasingly difficult to make ‘an

intellectual’ of those who think, ‘a wage earner’ of those who work…” is

morbidly pedantic, perhaps nearly as much as the “ …language police

[who] would ensure that every sentence carries with it its own guarantee

of scientificity.” Perhaps they could learn something from the first

chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (which they reference here):

that it is impossible to theorize from or into a position that exists

outside of a historical and political context, ones relationship is

always mediated, despite the employment of obscurantist language that

tries to mask the subject.

Perhaps the most troubling aspect of the text is the total restructuring

of the history of Italy in 1977 to meet the author’s ideology, one of

pure spontaneity and radical desubjectivity that transcends the

political. There was numerous amazing underground work being done by

dedicated Marxist/Leninist groups for years building up to the events,

as well as massive strike activity. Susanna Ronconi (who kneecapped

business students, committed armed robberies to fund the revolutionary

activity, and plotted to assassinate government officials) does not fall

into the selective appropriation with which they characterize the left.

This re-framing of history is dangerous, as well as anachronistic.

Further contesting the ‘spontaneous’ characterization of ‘77, the book

Shoot the Women First describes the situation in Italy leading up to

’77:   “Around 250 revolutionary groups were formed encompassing every

political persuasion from Troyskism to Anarchism”. [4]

There is certainly some wisdom in the text, it is true that were being

driven to experience “a world devoid of qualities”, that capitalist

hegemony strips away the life and colour of reality, “a world which has

become foreign, precisely, in each of its details”. However, the

solution is not then to adapt the atomistic dispersal, nor to bind as an

abstract amorphous entity. The solution is an embodied, affective, and

collectivist drive. Tiqqun ironically tries very hard to create a

subject position, one that is the antithesis to all the things that very

well might have annoyed the reader about leftists or their straw-man

“activists”. However, like the humanists of enlightenment, their whole

critique is empty husk of a response whose content is derived only from

this antithesis. A dialectic consideration is useful to unpack this

formulation, to prevent annoyance and ego from reifying a position that

ends up mirroring the mistakes of what one it critiquing.

Late capitalism tries its best to put everything in terms of

individualism, to support forced isolation that dissuades people from

organizing around common experiences, to depoliticize everything... I am

interested in those people coming together, discussing the ways

capitalist society treats them as black, as poor, as a women, as

trans-persons: fucking terribly. I want to hold the people that make

this structure responsible. Power is certainly more complex than Marxism

initially thought, but that doesn't negate all collective effort, or

eliminate the responsibility of the bourgeoisie, it only means we need

to build communities that unify while accepting and not flattening, or

folding in, the extreme differences of subjective positions. This is of

course incredibly complicated in practice, but that is precisely why we

need to start moving in such a direction. It seems like these glossy and

militant diatribes rope people in with intellectual-sounding

mystification, but we should avoid buying into the hype.

“The boredom that people are running away from merely mirrors the

process of running away, that started long before.” –Adorno: Vandals

[1] Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse; Negri, Antonio

[2] http://france-for-visitors.com/society/racism-in-france.html

[3] Midatlantic edition, Spring 2011

[4] Shoot the Women First; Macdonald, Eileen (pg.173)