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Title: Elsewhere
Author: H.T.
Date: 2000
Language: en
Topics: communism, Diavolo in corpo, marxism, reformism
Source: Personal communication with the translator
Notes: From Diavolo in corpo #3, November 2000

H.T.

Elsewhere

“Real life is absent. We are not in the world.” — A. Rimbaud

Existence is elsewhere. By now, we know this much too well. We cannot

find the fullness capable of giving any meaning to our time on this

earth either in a job that sends us traveling along through the

crossroads of the career or in a daily life from that no longer holds

any wonder for us. We may be able to have, but we no longer know how to

be. All the things that surround us and are within our reach in the form

of disposable commodities to be accumulated are only scented balms for

mortal wounds, for festering open sores caused be the renunciation of

the vital minimum. The vital minimum is the possibility of creating and

acting with authentic meaning, in other words, autonomy.

The critique of the miserable daily life that people lead today cannot

be separated from the critique of the social order that determines it:

capitalism. Our whole world has been shaped by exchange values; it has

been built according to the principles of interchangeability, of

quantity, of passivity, of irresponsibility. Our thoughts retrace the

commonplaces dear to public opinion. Our desires are measured in terms

of what can be realized thanks to a current bank account. Our dreams

pursue models taken on loan from television and movie screens. Our words

are inspired by advertising slogans. The very environment that surrounds

us is constrained to assume the form most suited to the needs of the

market as metropolitan architecture or the massacre of the surroundings

brought about for industrial purposes shows. This has reached the point

that soon, the very boundary between what is natural and what is

artificial will dissolve.

Our identification with a world constructed to the measurement of the

bank that even the project of an other world doesn’t seem to escape the

blind alley into which we are forced. Even the activity of one who wants

to put an end to a social system based on money doesn’t manage to avoid

prolonging it, crashing against the reef of social reproduction.

Against a politics that was always a tool in the hands of the ruling

class, a new parliament (however alternative) is elected. Against an

economy preoccupied exclusively with its profits, new credit

institutions (however ethical) are founded. Against a technology that

does not facilitate life but rather renders it superfluous, one demands

its mass distribution (however democratic). Against work that does not

realize the individual but rather alienates her, one asks for its

multiplication (however minimal). Against a power that causes infinite

harm, one calls for its renewal (however revocable). Against this world

one demands...this world (whatever small changes may be changed).

Round and round in circles. The intolerable world in which we live is

also the only world that we know, the only one we have experienced.

Every project of social transformation is based on knowledge — on that

with which we are familiar. Starting from these premises, we analyze, we

criticize, we denounce every sort of social poison present on our

planet. But even though we are aware of the necessity to spew the poison

out of our organism, we are seized with doubts: will we survive such a

drastic treatment? What will become of us afterwards? In order to avert

the risk that such an eventuality allows, we go in search of the formula

for a painless antidote. Medical science rushes to our aid: the antidote

to poison is a minimal dose of the poison itself (and the “cure” very

quickly reveals itself to be not only useless but harmful, because it

has no other effect than that of rendering the poison itself still more

virulent). Thus, the critique of this world ends by proposing its models

once again. Round and round in circles. But this is the surest way not

to bring this world down.

Until recently, it seemed certain that the realm of freedom could find

no place within the realm of necessity. The latter was limited to

predicting and preparing the conditions for the advent of the former

(from this we derive all the eulogies to the “development of the

productive forces” and other pleasantries that favored “the mysterious

identification of the capitalist economy with social revolution”). Under

the rule of capital, happiness is elsewhere; this is impossible to doubt

in view of the chains that leave their mark on our flesh, but its seed

still had to hatch under the snow and one only needed to wait for the

end of winter to see it blossom. This was what we were taught until

recently. But now this certainty in the spontaneous succession of

seasons has frozen to death along with the sporadic swallow that was

occasionally seen on the horizon. And the weather becomes ever harsher.

One cannot keep waiting for the spring. It is necessary to crate this

spring, but the task is not easy. So why not just say that it has

already started?

This is the way that some frozen victims of the social ice age have

decided to get around this obstacle. A new ideological creed has

replaced the old one; it is decided that the realm of freedom no longer

comes after the realm of necessity, but rather flanks it, exists

together with it. Freedom is no longer built on the ruins of the palaces

of power, something that would first require their toilsome destruction.

Instead it is built on their margins. The elsewhere in which one can

finally be oneself is no longer an absent totality that is realized in

the future, as soon as possible, but a partiality, already operating in

the present. The state is not destroyed, but ignored, deserted,

abandoned in favor of a “bipolar society” — in the stalinist version —

or a “non-state public sphere” — in the libertarian version — into which

one can enter, passing through the “crevices” of the capitalist

mega-machine.

It is only by hearing these two bells — the stalinist bell and the

libertarian bell — at the same time that one can clearly perceive the

identity of their ringing. Here the first one tolls: “It is necessary

first of all to tend to the construction of these experiments in

liberation, rather than tending to the organization of the proletarian

masses to the end of the rupture or supercession of the general

arrangements of the system, because it is possible to carve out spaces

of liberation even in the absence of this rupture or supercession, or

precisely because liberation will come to pass through the gradual,

molecular and interwoven expansion of these spaces. Thus, in this case,

the state and the market would not be ‘overthrown’, but rather

‘marginalized’, ‘extinguished’.” And now let’s listen to the second:

“Self-government submerges action tending to organize moments of

collective participation extraneous to the presence of the state

starting with a simulation in effect: ‘as if’ it were not there. The

erosion of the aspects of existence ruled by the state mortgage can

become a collective practice that makes participation trenchant if these

moments are really laboratories of unheard-of resolutions for problems

tied to social life...the spreading of moments of self-government

acquires a sense of opposition that, from a phenomenon that is

antagonistic or subordinately or subordinately reactive to a temporary

lack of institutional services, is posed as an unpublished rough draft

of projected organizations of society.” The prose varies its range of

expression, but isn’t the refrain really the same?

And so the smaller one’s desires are, the greater the possibility of

satisfying them. The successes obtained through a realist politics

cannot hide the naked reality that they have been paid for with the coin

of renunciation. The “happy isle” carved out by an ocean of denials is

not a free world. The “socially useful” job carried out in a small

enterprise (no matter how collectively it is run) is not communism. The

life passed inside the walls of “self-managed” spaces is not anarchy.

Whatever their colors may be, flowers cultivated in an artificial

hothouse are not the spring. The “experiments in liberation”, the

“moments of self-government”, all these instances in which we feel that

we are protagonists can certainly take place and perhaps even increase,

but only to the extent to which they are granted. Only to the extent to

which they would not constitute a danger to the social order that they

would like to weaken. Only to the extent to which they represent the

crumbs that fall at our feet from the table of those who rule us. A

warning to insurgents: the state is not going to fade away on its own

and it certainly has no intention of killing itself.

Until recently, revolutionary hope expressed the secular disguise of a

messianic vision. The great dusk represented a kind of Final Judgment

capable of splitting history in two, with the world before the

revelation quickly disappearing as freedom, which has finally been

acquired, erases the last traces of original sin. The disappearance of

such millenarian assurances will never be adequately toasted. Only now

we would be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire if we were

to replace it with the old Marxist idea of a freedom that “can only

bloom on this reign of necessity.” With its blackmail, necessity renders

only the terrain of constraint fertile, certainly not the terrain of

autonomy. If freedom is elsewhere, we cease to experience shame when we

do not know what will arise on the on the ashes of the prison in which

we are presently enclosed.

If we want to be realists, we are finally such at bottom. A utopia

cannot exist with both feet on the ground. What makes utopia subversive

is the tension that it generates, the insatiability that leads it to

never be contented and to never be resigned. To not look where one is

going because one does not want to remain where the gaze reaches. On the

other hand, the utopia that claims to be concrete, the one of modest

practical reason, the one that is revealed in the contrast between the

grandiosity of the ends and the cringing mediocrity of the means, the

utopia of shopkeepers who want to subvert the world while still

remaining at peace with every Christian neighbor, this utopia is only a

reformist lie.

What else could reformism be if not the endeavor to find an artificial

bridge — parties, conferences, social centers, nonprofit enterprises,

rural communes, municipal lists... — capable of uniting means and ends,

a supposedly unchangeable reality and the designated ideal, after having

abandoned the real forces of revolution? Is not its psychological origin

perhaps exposed by observation of the partial possibility of modifying

social organization? Isn’t its stimulus possibly born from the need for

victory, the need to say goodbye to the long trail of defeats that the

revolutionary idea has known? Couldn’t its fortune derive from the

radical opposition to extremism? It is of little importance to know

whether its supporters sit in parliament in double-breasted suits or

march in the streets in white overalls.

It is a cliché, but one worth remembering: the world in which we live is

one. It is the world of authority, of money, of the market, of the

state. It is the realm of necessity. Today in its pervasive presence,

there is no elsewhere. There is no realm of freedom, miraculously

preserved from the genocide in course, in which to find refuge. So if we

are persuaded that existence is elsewhere, then we must realize that

elsewhere here. Without deluding ourselves that the process of social

becoming is automatic and irresistible, and that it will spontaneously

understand all of the obstacles blocking its interests. On a practical

level, this delusional perspective would work itself out in the

renunciation of all active and conscious intervention aimed at fighting

against the activities of domination. Without deluding ourselves that

those who built this world in their image and likeness will turn it over

to us without a fight in the face of our supposed greater “technical

competence” in formulating adequate solutions to social problems. The

nightmare in which we live will not end in a peaceful sunset.

Although the idea is no longer fashionable, the great game of freedom

cannot do without a radical break, a social upheaval. Simply because its

realization has all the characteristics of a wager: it is a risk that

depends to great extent on chance. On her behalf, the player only has

the passion for the game and the determination of his will. We leave the

reassuring promises to advertisements. It is true that we may never

experience the enchantment of being in the world. It is true that we may

never live our existence here, feeling instead that it is elsewhere. But

why not try it? Is there really anything better for which it is

worthwhile to take the trouble of living?