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Title: Is Utopianism Dead? Author: Simon Critchley Date: 2011 Language: en Topics: Tiqqun, May 1968, Utopia, Communism, communisation, art, situationist international
We are living through a long anti-1960s. The various anti-capitalist
experiments in communal living and collective existence that defined
that period seem to us either quaintly passe, laughably unrealistic, or
dangerously misguided. Having grown up and thrown off such seemingly
childish ways, we now think we know better than to try and bring heaven
crashing down to earth and construct concrete utopias. To that extent,
despite our occasional and transient enthusiasms and Obamaisms, we are
all political realists; indeed, most of us are passive nihilists and
cynics. This is why we still require a belief in something like original
sin, namely, that there is something ontologically defective about what
it means to be human. The Judeo-Christian conception of original sin
finds its modern analogues in Freud's variation on the Schopenhauerien
disjunction between desire and civilization, Heidegger's ideas of
facticity and fallenness, and the Hobbesian anthropology that drives
Carl Schmitt's defense of authoritarianism and dictatorship, which has
seduced significant sectors of the Left hungry for what they as
Realpolitik. Without the conviction that the human condition is
essentially flawed and dangerously rapacious, we would have no way of
justifying our disappointment -- and nothing gives us a greater thrill
than satiating our sense of exhaustion and ennui by polishing the bars
of our prison cell by reading a little of John Gray. Gray represents a
very persuasive Darwinian variant on the idea of original sin: it is the
theory of evolution that explains the fact that we are homo rapiens.
Nothing can be done about it. Humanity is a plague.
It is indeed true that those utopian political movements of the 1960s,
like the Situationist International, where an echo of utopian
millenarian movements like the Heresy of the Free Spirit could be heard,
led to various forms of disillusionment, disintegration, and, in extreme
cases, disaster. Experiments in the collective ownership of property or
in communal living based on sexual freedom without the repressive
institution of the family, or indeed, R.D. Laing's experimental communal
asylums with no distinction between the so-called mad and the sane, seem
like distant, whimsical cultural memories captured in dog-eared,
yellowed paperbacks and grainy, poor quality film. As a child of punk,
economic collapse, and the widespread social violence in the United
Kingdom in the late 1970s, it is a word that I have always struggled to
understand. Perhaps such communal experiments were too pure and overfull
of righteous conviction. Perhaps they were, in a word, too moralistic to
ever endure. Perhaps such experiments were doomed because of what we
might call a politics of abstraction, in the sense of being overly
attached to an idea at the expense of frontal denial of reality.
Perhaps, indeed.
At their most extreme, say in the activities of the Weather Underground,
the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades in the 1970s, the moral
certitude of the closed and pure community becomes fatally linked to
redemptive, cleansing violence. Terror becomes the means to bring about
the end of virtue. Such is the logic of Jacobinism. The death of
individuals is but a speck on the vast heroic canvas of class struggle.
This culminated in a heroic politics of violence where acts of
abduction, kidnapping, hijacking and assassination were justified
through an attachment to a set of ideas. As a character in Jean-Luc
Godard's Notre musique remarks, "To kill a human being in order to
defend an idea is not to defend an idea, it is to kill a human being."
Perhaps such groups were too attached to the idea of immediacy, the
propaganda of the violent deed as the impatient attempt to storm the
heavens. Perhaps such experiments lacked an understanding of politics as
a constant and concrete process of mediation. That is, the mediation
between a subjective ethical commitment based on a general principle --
for example, the equality of all, friendship, or, in my parlance, an
infinite ethical demands -- and the experience of local organization
that builds fronts and alliances between disparate groups with often
conflicting sets of interests, what Antonio Gramsci called the activity
of "hegemony." By definition, such a process of mediation is never pure
and never complete.
Are these utopian experiments in community dead or do they live on in
some form? I'd like to make two suggestions for area where this utopian
impulse might live on, two experiments, if you will: one from
contemporary art, one from contemporary radical politics, and the two
areas can be interestingly linked. Indeed, if a tendency marks our time,
then it is the increasingly difficulty in separating forms of
collaborative art from experimental politics.
Perhaps such utopian experiments in community live on in the
institutionally sanctioned spaces of the contemporary art world. One
thinks of projects like L'Association des Temps Liberes (1995) or Utopia
Station (2003) and many other examples gathered together in
"theanyspacewhatever." a retrospective show at the Guggenheim Museum in
New York in Fall 2008. In the work of artists like Philippe Parreno and
Liam Gillick or curators like Hans Ulrich Orbist and Maria Lind, there
is a deeply felt Situationist nostalgia for ideas of collectivity,
action, self-management, collaboration, and indeed, the idea of the
groups as such. In such art practice, which Nicoals Bourriaud has
successfully branded as "relational," art is the acting out of a
situation in order to see if, in Orbist's words, "something like a
collective intelligence might exist." As Gillick notes, "Maybe it would
be better if we worked in groups of three." So much contemporary art and
politics is obsessed with the figure of the group and of work as
collaboration, perhaps all the way to the refusal of work and the
cultivation of anonymity.
Of course, the problem with contemporary utopian art experiments is
twofold: on the one hand, they are only enabled and legitimated through
the cultural institutions of the art world and thus utterly enmeshed in
the circuits of commodification and spectacle that they seek to subvert;
and, on the other hand, the dominant mode for approaching an experience
of the communal is through the strategy of reenactment. One doesn't
engage in a bank heist, one reenacts Patty Heartst's adventures with the
Symbionese Liberation Army in a warehouse in Brooklyn. Situationist
détournement is replayed as obsessively planned reenactment The category
of reenactment has become hegemonic in contemporary art, specifically as
a way of thinking the relation between art and politics (perhaps radical
politics has also become reenactment). Fascinating as I find such
experiments and the work of the artists involved, one suspects what we
might call a "mannerist Situationism," where the old problem of
recuperation does not even apply because such art is completely co-opted
by the socioeconomic system that provides its lifeblood.
To turn to politics, perhaps we witnessed another communal experiment
with the events in France surrounding the arrest and detention of the
so-called "Tanac Nine" in November 2008, and the work of groups that go
by different names: Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, The Imaginary
Party. As part of Nicolas Sarkozy's reactionary politics of fear --
itself based on an overwhelming fear of disorder and desire to erase
definitively the memory of 1968 -- a number of activists who had been
formerly associated with Tiqqun were arrested in rural, central France
by a force of 150 antiterrorist police with helicopters and attendant
media. They were living communally in the small village of Tarnac in the
Corrèze district of the massif Central. Apparently a number of the
group's members had bough a small farmhouse and were running a
cooperative grocery store and engaging in such dangerous activities as
operating a local film club, planting carrots, and delivering food to
the elderly. With surprising juridical imagination, they were charged
with "pre-terrorism," an accusation linked to acts of sabotage on
France's TGV rail system.
The basis for this thought-crime was a passage from a 2007 book called
L'insurrection qui vient. It is a wonderfully dystopian diagnosis of
contemporary society -- seven circles of hell in seven chapters -- and a
compelling strategy to resist it. The final pages of L'insurrection
advocate acts of sabotage against the transport networks of the "the
social machine" and ask the question, "How could a TGV line or an
electrical network be rendered useless?" Two of the alleged
pre-terrorists, Julien Coupat and Yldune Levy, were detained in jail and
charged with "a terrorist undertaking" that carried a prison sentence of
20 years. The last of the group to be held in custody, Coupat, was
released without being prosecuted on May 28, 2009, although bail of
16,000 euros was levied and Coupat was forbidden to travel outside the
greater Parisian area. French arrests were made in connection with the
Tarnac affair late in 2009. Such is the repressive and reactionary force
of the state, just in case anyone had forgotten. As the authors of
L'insurrection remind us, "Governing has never been anything but pushing
back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will hang you."
L'insurrection qui vient has powerful echoes of the Situationist
International. Yet -- revealingly -- the Hegelian-Marxism of Guy
Debord's analysis of the spectacle and commodification is replaced with
very strong echoes of Giorgio Agamben in particular the question of
community in Agamben as what would survive the separation of law and
life. Everything turns here on an understanding of the relation between
those two terms, If law is essential violence, which in the age of
biopolitics taps deeper and deeper into the reservoir of life, then the
separation of law and life is the space of what Agamben calls politics.
It is what leads to his anomic misreading of Paul.
The authorship of L'insurrection is attributed to La Comite Invisible,
and the insurrectional strategy of the group turns around the question
of invisibility. It is a question of "learning how to become
imperceptible," of regaining "the taste for anonymity" and not exposing
and losing oneself in the order of visibility, which is always
controlled by the police and the state. The authors of L'insurrection
argue for the proliferation of zones of opacity, anonymous spaces where
communes might be formed. The book ends with the slogan, "All power to
the communes" (Tout le pouvour aux communes"). In a nod to Maurice
Blanchot, these communes are described as "inoperative" or "desoeuvree,"
as refusing the capitalist tyranny of work. In a related text simply
titles Call, they seek to establish "A series of foci of desertion, of
secession poles, of rallying points. For the runaways. For those who
leave. A set of places to take shelter from the control of civilization
that is headed for the abyss."
A strategy of sabotage, blockade, and what is called "the human strike"
is proposed in order to weaken still further our doomed civilization. As
the Tiqqun group write in 1999 text called, "Oh Good, the War!,"
"Abandon ship. Not because it's sinking, but to make it sink." Or again,
"When a civilization is ruined, one declares it bankrupt. One does not
tidy up in a home falling off a cliff." An opposition between the city
and the country is constantly reiterated, and it is clear tat the
construction of zones of opacity is between suited to rural life than
the policed space of surveillance of the modern metropolis. The city is
much better suited ti what we might call "designer resistance," where
people wear Ramones T-shirts and sit in coffee shops saying "capitalism
sucks" before going back to their jobs as graphic designers.
L'insurrection is a compelling, exhilarating, funny, and deeply lyrical
text that sets off all sorts of historical echoes with movements like
the Free Spirit and Franciscan Spiritual in the Middle Ages, through the
proto-anarchist Diggers in the English Revolution and different strands
of 19th-century utopian communism. We should note the emphasis on
secrecy, invisibility, and itinerancy, on small-scale communal
experiments in living, on the politicization of poverty, which recalls
medieval practices of mendicancy and the refusal of work. What is at
stake is the affirmation of a life no longer exhausted by work and cowed
by law and the police.
This double program of sabotage, on the one hand, and secession from
civilization, on the other, risks, I think remaining trapped within the
politics of abstraction identified above. In this fascinatingly creative
reenactment of the situationist gesture -- which is why I stressed the
connection with contemporary art practice -- what is missing is a
thinking of political mediation where groups like The Invisible
Committee would be able to link up and become concretized in relation to
multiple and conflicting sites of struggle, workers, the unemployed,
even the designer resisters, and, perhaps most importantly, with more or
less disenfranchised ethnic groups. We need a richer political
cartography than the opposition between the city and the country.
Tempting as it is, sabotage combined with secession from civilization
smells of the moralism we detected above, an ultimately anti-political
purism.
That said, I understand the desire for secession: it is the desire to
escape a seemingly doomed civilization that is headed fir the abyss. The
proper theological name for such secessionism is Marcionism, which turns
on the separation of law from life, the order of creation from that of
redemption, the Old and New Testament. In the face of globalizing,
atomizing, biopolitical, and legal regime of violence and domination
that threatens to drain dry the reservoir of life, secession offers the
possibility of withdrawal, the establishment of a space where another
form of life and collective intelligence are possible. Secession offers
the possibility of an antinomian separation of law from life, a retreat
from the old order through experiments with free human sociability: in
other words, communism, understood as the "sharing of sensibility and
elaboration of sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the
building of a force."
It is also the case that something has changed and is changing in the
nature of tactics of political resistance. With the fading away of the
so-called antiglobalization movement, groups like The Invisible
Committee offer a consistency of though and action that possesses great
diagnostic power and tactical awareness. They provide new and compelling
vocabulary of insurrectionary politics that has both described and
unleashed a series of political actions in numerous locations, some
closer to home, some further away. The latter is performed by what The
Invisible Committee calls -- in an interesting choice of word --
"resonance." A resonating body in one location -- like glasses on a
table -- begins to make another body shake, and suddenly the whole floor
is covered with glass. Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the
so-called antiglobalization movement, a struggle for, and with,
visibility. Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility,
opacity, anonymity, and resonance.
I have my doubts about the politics of abstraction that haunts groups
like The Invisible Committee. But if we reject such political
experiments, then what follows from this? Are we to conclude that the
utopian impulse in political thinking is simply the residue of a
dangerous political theology that we are much better off without? Is the
upshot of the critique of utopianism that we should be resigned in the
face of the world's violent inequality and update a belief in original
sin with a reassuringly miserabilistic Darwinism? Should we reconcile
ourselves to the options of political realism, authoritarianism, or
liberalism, John Gray, Carl Schmitt, or Barack Obama? Should we simply
renounce the utopian impulse in our personal and political thinking?
If so, then the consequence is clear: we are stuck with the way things
are. To abandon the utopian impulse in thinking and acting is to
imprison ourselves within the world as it is and to give up once and for
all the prospect that another world is possible, however small,
fleeting, and compromised such a world might be. In the political
circumstances that presently surround us in the West, to abandon the
utopian impulse in political thinking is to resign ourselves to liberal
democracy. Liberal democracy is the rule of the rule,. the reign of law
that renders impotent anything that would break with law: the
miraculous, the moment of the event, the break with the situation in the
name of the common. It is a political deism governed by the hidden and
divine hand of the market. Other political forms of life are possible.
Allow me a final word on the future. I'm against it. I think we have to
resist the future, I mean resist the idea of the future, which is the
ultimate ideological trump card of capitalist narratives of progress. I
think we have to resist the future and the ideology of the future. But
in the name of what? In the name of sheer potentiality of the radical
past and the way that past can shape the creativity and imagination of
the present/ The future of radical, creative thought is its past, and
radicalism has always driven a car whose driver is constantly looking in
the rearview mirror. Some objects appear bigger, some smaller.
Capitalism is an evil that presents itself as inevitability, as a
destiny to whom the future by necessity belongs. Capitalism -- at the
level of ideology -- has become a form of passive nihilist,
quasi-Buddhist, self-help amnesia, a new jargon of authenticity and
well-being. All we have to oppose it is an understanding of history, a
clear-sightedness about the structural injustices present and a
willingness to take action, a need to confront commitment-free bovine
contentment with the urgency of anguished commitment, the anguish of a
demand as that which prepares the possibility of action. Such action
should not just dream of a nonrelation of law and life, and a secession
from an allegedly doomed civilization, but requires that the relation
between be decisively rethought. The world is shit, I agree; the problem
is that it's our excrement.