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Title: Invisible Politics Author: John Cunningham Date: 29 September 2009 0 Language: en Topics: communization Source: Retrieved on 2021-07-11 from [[ttps://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/invisible-politics-introduction-to-contemporary-communisation]] Notes: Featured in Mute Vol 2, No. 14 − Disorder/Colony/Collapse.
In the wake of the organised left and the demise of working class
self-identity, communisation offers a paradoxical means of superseding
capitalism in the here and now whilst abandoning orthodox theories of
revolution. John Cunningham reports from the picket line of the ‘human
strike’
---
As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take
the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common
such-and-such space, such-and-such-machine, such-and-such-knowledge.
— The Invisible Committee, Call, 2004[1]
The critique of capital, and speculation around the form and content of
communism, always seems to oscillate between a historical materialist
science on the one hand and the elaboration of new forms of subjectivity
and affectivity on the other. Even Marx, while infinitely more familiar
as a close analyst of capital, had early moments of Fourier-style
abandon when he attempted to elaborate the more mutable subjective
content of a communist society. The dissolution of wage labour would
make
it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt
in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening,
criticise after dinner [...].[2]
This suggests a society wherein circuits of affectivity are established
that are no longer based upon the exigencies of value production — even
if I personally prefer communist utopia as idleness to Marx’s endless
activity. Of course, this is one of the rare instances where Marx speaks
in the future tense, leaving aside the messiness of the transition from
capitalism. Recently, a series of texts from the milieu around the
French journal Tiqqun — primarily Call, How is to be Done?, The Coming
Insurrection — have reintroduced this question of the subjective content
of communism in a way that might restore a speculative aspect to the
critique of capital.[3] These are not theoretical texts per se, more
inspirational ‘How To’ manuals for the elaboration of communisation as
subjective and conceptual secession from both capital and the left. As
Call states, ‘Nothing can happen that does not begin with a secession
from everything that makes this desert grow.’[4] This discursive
distance from the more traditional ultra-left positions on communisation
is also reflected in dense, poetic prose that establishes an affinity
with possible precursors in revolt such as Dada, Surrealism and
Bataille. The development of the thesis of communisation within the
ultra-left was always part of an attempt to shift away from the
traditional programmatic forms of the party and the union towards an
engagement with forms of resistance rising immanently from the social
relation of capital, such as wildcat strikes. What might be at stake in
a restating of the question of communisation as radical subjectivist
secession against the often discredited ideological formulas of
anti-capitalist milieus?
It’s best to consider this question alongside the series of texts
presented by Endnotes that ably document the continued elaboration of
communisation within the French ultra-left by presenting a series of
texts by Gilles Dauvé and Theorie Communiste.[5] Both are rooted in the
diverse groupuscles of the French far left in the 1970s that shared a
fidelity to 1968 of whom Debord and the Situationists remain the most
renowned.[6] Dauvé and Theorie Communiste retain a commitment to
communisation but diverge sharply around questions of agency and
history. What remains under-theorised in both Dauvé’s humanist Marxism
and Theorie Communiste’s more recently formulated Marxist structuralism
is any real problematisation of the production of subjectivity within
capital. An insertion of this question might illuminate the impasse
faced by these more hermetic theoretical critiques of capital. In
sketching out the contours of contemporary theories of communisation, a
constellation composed of questions around subjectivity, negation,
history and utopia emerges. Does a reconsideration of communisation open
up new perspectives and different possibilities, given the gap between
the cramped space revolutionary milieus find themselves in and any
genuine expectations of radical change? Or is even discussing
communisation at this time akin to scraping a toothache with a
fingernail, pointless utopianism in the face of the constantly mutating
social relation of capital?
Before answering this question, though, what is communisation? The term
immediately evokes various social experiments and revolutionary
endeavours from the Paris Commune and utopian socialist communities in
the 19^(th) century through to various counter-cultural attempts to
reconstitute social relations on a more communitarian basis such as the
squatting scene in the 1970s and ‘80s. The Tiqqun strand — henceforth to
be known as The Invisible Committee after the eponymous signatories of
The Coming Insurrection — draws upon this long history of secessionist
antagonism. They posit communisation as essentially being the
production, through the formation of ‘communes’, of collective forms of
radical subjectivity. This destabilises the production of subjectivity
and value within both capital and more traditional forms of political
organisation, eventually leading to an insurrectionary break. ‘Commune’
in this instance is not necessarily a bunch of hippies aspiring to a
carbon free life style. In The Coming Insurrection a commune is almost
anything that ‘seeks to break all economic dependency and all political
subjugation’, ranging from wildcat strikes to Radio Alice in Bologna in
1977, and innumerable other forms of collective experimentation.[7]
While not completely missing the point, there is a danger of this
understanding obscuring the specificity of ‘communisation’ as a concept
and form of praxis that, as Endnotes trace out, emerged within the
post-’68 ultra-left milieu and then later within insurrectionist
anarchism through Alfredo Bonnano. A minimal definition of communisation
would be, as Dauvé and Francois Martin wrote in 1972 in an early
formulation, the following:
Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the
seizure of power [...]. All past movements were able to bring society to
a standstill and waited for something to come out of this universal
stoppage. Communisation, on the contrary, will circulate goods without
money [...] it will tend to break all separations.[8]
This simultaneous destruction of value production alongside the
thoroughgoing transformation of social relations as an immanent
revolutionary process presupposes the negation of wage labour. The
proletariat rather than being embodied in work and its valorisation,
whether through wage labour or workers’ organisations, becomes the
agency of self-abolition. Communisation would mean no more proletariat
immediately, not after some interminable period of proletarian state or
workers’ council management.
For Dauvé, here writing with Karl Nesic, communisation is the potential
result of the dialectical opposition between living labour and the
inhuman agency of capital. As he states:
‘Subject’ and ‘object’ don’t exist separate from one another. A crisis
is not something exterior to us that happens and forces us to react.
Historical situations (and opportunities) are also made of [...] our
actions or inactions.[9]
Dauvé rejects theoretical determinism in favour of a more realistically
indeterminate historical trajectory, where the only invariants within
capital are humanity, alienation, exploitation and resistance. For
Dauvé, communisation has been a possibility since 1848, as against the
strict periodisation of Theorie Communiste.
Theorie Communiste’s position is that due to the shift in production to
a second phase of real subsumption, post 1960s, capital and labour power
are imbricated in a reproductive circuit.[10] Communisation as the
self-abolition of the proletariat is only now a possible horizon due to
the dissolution of the organised, programmatic parties and unions of the
traditional left. Their unveiling in the 20^(th) century, as the
necessary managers of the production of value has subsequently led to
the inability of the proletariat to constitute an opposition to capital
through their self-identification as workers. Stripped bare of any sense
of voluntarist agency and subjectivity, what is left is the fact of
structural exploitation and increasing proletarianisation that possibly
leads to communisation. This dialectical synthesis without any
reconciliation was impossible in previous phases of capital where
revolution was inexorably tied to labour and the production of value.
Bracketing off the question of political agency and subjectivity in
favour of historical structuralism, waving goodbye to the multitude and
other spectral forms, is a welcome dose of anti-humanism. However,
Theorie Communiste seem too eager to remove any subjective agency from
oppositional politics. There’s a pessimism underlying their evacuation
of any possibility in history that is an inversion of the classic
20^(th) century social democratic Marxist paradigm of an inexorable
movement towards communism. Too much value is fixed on the movement of
history towards real subsumption of capital rather than evaluating
history as composed of discontinuous breaks, fractures and events. One
such might be the Paris Commune.
In its brief existence, the Commune prefigures many of the themes in
contemporary discourse around communisation as both an immanent process
of attempting to construct a non-state public sphere and an
insurrectionist outburst that broke with the slow advance of 19^(th)
century commodity capitalism. Marx grasped that the ‘whole sham of State
mysteries and State pretensions was done (away) by a Commune, mostly
consisting of simple working people’ and that the aim of the commune was
the ‘expropriation of the expropriators’, the dissolution of class and
property.[11] While the commune was primarily political it indicated for
Marx the intertwined nature of revolutionary change, abolishing the
separation between the economic and political and at certain
conjunctures being wedded to insurrectionist force. For Marx the ‘great
social measure of the Commune was its own working existence’, but he
believed it gestured towards social emancipation in the limited
measures, (such as the appropriation of disused workshops), it was able
to undertake in its brief existence.[12] He wrote that ‘... the present
rising in Paris — even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile
curs of the old society — is the most glorious deed of our
Party....’[13]
Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, the juxtaposition of past and present in
order to break the frozen reified image of both, provides a way of
asking what resources an event such as the Paris Commune might offer the
present.[14] This does not pose the existence of an invariant human
subject as much as (re)examines the past in light of the present and
restores an actuality and potentiality to history. For instance, Badiou
has read the Paris Commune as ‘what, for the first and to this day only
time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’
political movements’ establishing a template for ‘a declaration to break
with the left.’[15] Badiou sees this as a model for both a subjective
intervention against capital and a communism subtracted from the state.
The Invisible Committee constantly refers to the Paris Commune in a
similar fashion making suggestive juxtapositions throughout The Coming
Insurrection. The Paris Commune is present in the text as a constant
reminder of the barbarism that the French republic is founded upon, the
‘tradition of the oppressed’ that’s all too easily effaced by the empty
continuum of history as the onward march of capital.[16]
A theory and practice formed in the still tempestuous wake of May ’68
wildcat strikes — the refusal of work, the proliferation of left
groupuscles — and conditioned by this event, communisation posits an
escalation of the destruction of commodity production as a millennial
break. Concepts such as this, formed at a particular conjunction of
forces and material conditions, can easily decline into ideology or, at
best, a regulative idea that has little to do with actual social
struggle in the present once that moment has passed. All of these
different theories of communisation emerge from a sense of a cramped
discursive and political space. Post 1968, this cramped space might be
viewed as the all too obvious limitations of the traditional workers’
movement, specifically the Communist Party and its affiliated trade
unions, in abetting the state suppression of the events alongside, of
course, commodified social relations. In terms of the continued
elaboration of communisation in the present, such a cramped space, given
the weakness of the institutional left, might be composed of the
post-Seattle ‘anti-capitalist’ movement itself, or at least its
remnants. This movement has given rise to what The Invisible Committee
describes, in How is it to be Done?, as the ‘desire killing
demonstrations’ that ‘no longer demonstrate anything but a collective
absence.’[17]
This ‘collective absence’ is not so much a lack of organisation for The
Invisible Committee as a plenitude of organisational forms that serve to
divert antagonism into reformist or activist dead ends, constructing
milieus that are concerned with their own self-perpetuation as
fetishised organisational structures. At best, these attempt symmetrical
conflict with capital rather than more asymmetrical tactics of
withdrawal, diffusion and sabotage. For me, this ‘collective absence’ in
contemporary forms of activism and militancy is all too apparent in
those constrained ideologies, such as the identity politics that
dominate much of contemporary ‘radical’ politics. Hence, contemporary
anti-capitalism is riddled with a ridiculous anarchist, ecological and
socialist moralism that masks itself as a politics. This critique of
militancy is prefigured in Dauvé and Martin’s early 1970s observation
that the ‘communist movement is anti-political, not a-political.’ Dauvé
and Martin grasp communism as inherently social and immanent to capital
while rejecting the traditional role of the militant who ‘interferes in
these struggles to bring the communist gospel’.[18] It’s this
anti-political strand, the negation of contemporary political forms or
what Jacques Camatte termed ‘rackets’ that I find most constructive, in
a destructive way, within theories of communisation.[19] Nick Thoburn,
in his book Deleuze, Marx and Politics, argues that cramped political
and discursive spaces, composed of both traditional organisational forms
and capital as a social relation, are productive of innovative attempts
to reassemble lines of flight from available resources. These clear a
space and allow the articulation of previously ignored demands and the
formation of oppositional subjectivities.[20] Or more succinctly, all
the strands of communisation are attempting to dissolve the worker as
worker into a more diffuse antagonistic subject.
The Invisible Committee’s complex assemblage of ultra-leftism and
situationist theory has operative within it just such an attempt to
produce new forms of political subjectivity, Agamben and Foucault
playing a theoretically pivotal role. To inspire secessionist
communisation seems an odd fate for Agamben, a philosopher who is most
famed for the melancholic framing of contemporary subjectivity within
the parameters of ‘bare life’, the passive residue of the human subject
under biopolitical sovereignty.[21] The reduction of humanity, through
political sovereignty, to classes, identities and subjects such as
citizen, worker or migrant is essentially based upon the exception that
is ‘bare life’. Opposing this, Agamben’s concept of ‘form-of-life’ or
‘whatever singularity’ is utilised by The Invisible Committee to suggest
a political subjectivity that isn’t contained within the parameters of
‘bare life’ and an identifiable subject.[22] As they note, ‘I become a
whatever singularity. My presence starts overflowing the whole apparatus
of qualities that are usually associated with me.’[23] Sounds esoteric,
but it’s worth emphasising the explicit relation to labour power that
‘whatever singularity’ retains in its element of the refusal of the role
of worker. Agamben writes that ‘form-of-life’ is
a life [...] in which the single ways, acts and processes of living are
never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life,
always and above all power.[24]
And in this case it’s the power, or Potenza, to refuse wage labour and
hence challenge the extraction of value from living labour. This
‘irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty’ is an emancipation from
producing value towards the potentialities of an inseparability between
activity and subject.[25]
This inoperative collective political subject takes the form of the
‘Human Strike’ within The Invisible Committee’s radical subjectivism. In
How is it to be Done? ‘Human Strike’ is the point where the human
subject as constituted within capital breaks down and refuses or simply
ceases to function, a ‘Luddism of the human machinery that feeds
capital’.[26] This is a Bartleby style refusal that responds to the
(re)production of subjectivity within contemporary capitalism throughout
the entire social field by valorising negativity and dysfunction. The
Coming Insurrection highlights an advertising slogan, ‘I AM WHAT I AM’,
and sarcastically but accurately notes, ‘Never has domination found such
an innocent sounding slogan.’[27] An individualism that is the
subsumption of affective qualities within the circuits of capital. The
individual is nothing but the residual effects of an incorporation of
identities promulgated through the apparatuses of production,
consumption and leisure. The real subsumption of the human by capital
presented in The Coming Insurrection begins to resemble a bad day
commuting to work. This production of subjectivity is what Foucault
termed ‘governmentality’, wherein power is not only repressive and
disciplininary but also creates the conditions for the production of
value, encouraging forms of subjectification that channel creativity and
affective identification towards the valorisation of capital.[28]
As Theorie Communiste point out, what produces a blockage within the
Marxist humanism of Dauvé is a view of subjectivity within capital as
something produced purely through the repression of an invariant
humanity. Granted, this Marxist humanism still has a radical import
around unleashing the potentiality of the human outside of the wage
relation but there’s little problematisation of the forms of
subjectivity. However, in attempting to embrace a rigorous
anti-humanism, Theorie Communiste fall prey to simply evacuating any
notion of subjective agency as being a soppy romanticism in favour of
economic determination. This reinforces the hermetic nature of such
critique as relatively divorced from the experiences of everyday life.
None of this is a particularly new problematic, given the proliferation
of theories of radical subjectivity since at least György Lukács, but
The Invisible Committee restate this critique in a way that restores a
sensual apprehension of what might be at stake in any form of
oppositional politics. The image of a proliferation of communes as ‘a
power of production’ that is ‘just incidentally relationships of
production’ establishes what is best termed desiring production.[29] It
arises through assemblages of communised spaces, knowledge, means,
bodies and desires that establish a refrain between them, displacing the
secessionist collective from capital and those identities such as
‘worker’ or ‘migrant’ that are fixed within it. This could produce a
blockage within the flows of value production as information and
commodity in what The Invisible Committee, again taking their lead from
Agamben, theorise as the ‘metropolis’; the undifferentiated, sprawling
non-place of contemporary biopolitical capital.[30] This process of
blockage is expressed in The Coming Insurrection thus:
The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable [...].
Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves
reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its
networks.[31]
Does this simultaneous production of subjectivity and disruption of
value production posit ‘whatever being’ as a new form of political
agency? As the model of an actualised Fourierist utopia, or even as an
allegory of the production of oppositional politics this seems fine, but
communes form an insurrectionist phantom organisation, a piloting
machine that is more or less organically formed through the act of
secession, constituting an avant garde of the disaffected and
voluntarily displaced. A residual aristocratism emerges alongside a
phantom vanguardism that is revealed in the formulation, ‘Making the
paralyzed citizens understand that if they do not join the war they are
part of it anyway.’[32] These communes that, for The Invisible
Committee, are immanent in the present but not formalised encompass any
number of spaces and collectivities, from proletarian to
counter-cultural and illegal. Squats, wildcat strikes, riots, rural
collectives, any bunch of the disaffected or excluded (re)appropriating
the neighbourhood. At its best this carries within it an involuntary
viral diffusion of communal and subjective disaffiliation from capital
as a social relation. At its worst they all end up sharing within the
insurrectionist thematic voluntary renunciation and conscious refusal.
For me this loses something of the negativity of the more primordial
‘human strike’ hinted at, that refuses as much as an involuntary
reaction to unbearable social relations, as through a conscious act of
will. There’s an import to ‘human strike’ that restores an actuality to
the ways that depression for instance might function as both a sign of
vulnerability and site of resistance. As The Coming Insurrection notes,
‘depression is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a side-step
towards a political disaffiliation.’[33] Rather than the insurrection,
it’s this awareness that most productively marks The Invisible Committee
off from more conventional radical milieus. What Camatte termed the real
subsumption and domestication of the human by the community of capital
here turns to speculative forms of resistance.[34]
The Coming Insurrection has had the dubious distinction of having
reached the exalted heights of Fox News with a text extolling
communisation, due to the controversy following the Tarnac 9 case in
France. As an ironic confirmation of The Invisible Committee’s
attachment to Debord’s notion of the spectacle, it is also proof that
the hysteria of projected insurrectionism is more than met by the
hysteria of the spectacle. This commitment to insurrectionism by The
Invisible Committee underlines the value of the more sober assessments
by Dauvé and Theorie Communiste. In a well balanced engagement with
Call, Dauvé writes that there is lack of ‘an analysis of the present
social movement, the fights, the retreats and the resistances to the
world of waged labour, the strikes, their appearance, their frequent
failure, their absence sometimes [...].’[35] This criticism of secession
is well founded and it is this very material awareness of the
instauration of capital as a social relation that is lacking in the more
voluntarist exhortations towards insurrection. There is a correlation
here with the post-Autonomist theory of exodus formulated by Paolo Virno
as a strategy of refusal and subjective break with capital. This can
give rise to a pre-emptive theoretical negation of any role as worker,
suspending the fact that for most people a shit job is a necessity and
the only exodus is the weekend.[36]
Nevertheless, the re-inscription of a political agency as negation is
refreshing when compared to the inclusivity of concepts such as Negri’s
‘multitude’. It’s in keeping with a line of active nihilism that
permeates the theoretical production of The Invisible Committee. As
opposed to Negri, where such an affective turn by capital is replete
with immanent possibility, the production of subjectivity within
contemporary capital is presented as part of the destruction of
experience, what Call terms ‘the desert’. Almost nothing is exempted
from this line of negation that runs from the micro-politics of an
‘existential liberalism’ that produces the individual through to all
forms of politics, including anti-capitalism. The ‘desert’ is a form of
passive nihilism endlessly replicating exchange-value, the obscure
disaster of what both Benjamin and, in his footsteps, Agamben have
conceptualised as the evacuation of experience by the shock and vacuity
of the commodity.[37]
The response of The Invisible Committee is to accelerate this nihilism
through a series of inversions such as the valorisation of gangs and
illegalism — a heightening of the anti-sociality of contemporary
capital. As such they are part of a current within French anarchism that
runs from the Bonnot gang through to the Situationists and Os
Cangaceiros. The latter, a group of post-’68 proletarian illegalists
rejected leftist politics and its armed struggle variants in favour of
tactics such as sabotaging railways in solidarity with prison revolts.
Or, as they stated succinctly ‘of shitting on this world with its
prisons.’[38] There’s always a risk with such illegalism that it reifies
something like gang culture in a simple inversion of spectacular
hysteria, but at least The Coming Insurrection‘s evocation of the
November 2005 revolt in the banlieues restores a sense of agency to what
were routinely decried as criminal acts within mainstream politics. In
the fairly early Tiqqun text ‘Theses on the Imaginary Party’, this
illegalism extends to random acts of violence produced by the subjective
forms of spectacular commodity capitalism and its evacuation through
shootings, suicides, etc..[39] This aspect is most certainly an
avant-garde provocation similar to Breton’s simple surrealist act of
firing into the crowd, though it is not necessarily lightly meant;
indeed, it generalises the sense of crisis that The Invisible Committee
wishes to instill. In an oblique comment, Agamben references this active
nihilism as ‘the irreparable that allows the coming of the redemption’,
a messianic opening into forms of political agency that refuses the
exigencies of political sovereignty.[40] Such an active nihilism posits
a joyful destruction as necessary in order to break with contemporary
society’s immersion in the commodity form. The Coming Insurrection notes
that ‘[a]nnihilating this nothingness is hardly a sad task [...]’ and
that ‘fucking it all up will serve [...] as the last collective
seduction.’[41] In embracing this they connect via some punk rhetoric to
the destructive impulses of both the political and artistic 20^(th)
century avant gardes.[42]
What relation might this active nihilism have to the more general
economic violence of communisation as the suspension and destruction of
production? Communisation in whatever form always seems caught in a
tension between an immanent supersession of capital, the gradual
proliferation of struggles that breach the limits of party, self
management and workplace organisation, and the radical break, the
institution of what Benjamin termed ‘the real state of exception’ in
opposition to the state of exception imposed by the sovereignty of the
state.[43] This two-fold rhythm of communisation is paralleled by the
tension that’s evident, in any attempt to theorise and practise it in
the present, between a subjective activity and a more objective analysis
of capital. Marx’s concept of Gewalt might be a good way to grasp the
imbrication of different forms of force and power within communisation.
Luca Basso reads Gewalt, a complex term meaning both violence and power,
as being present in Marx’s formulation of the originary violence of
capital as primitive accumulation, a violence that is repeated
politically by the state as the imposition of wage labour. He quotes
Étienne Balibar as characterising it as ‘violence of economics, the
economics of violence’, violence being immanent to capital as
exploitation.[44]
Attempts to formulate communisation contest this by positing an
oppositional Gewalt that would break with capital politically and
economically. Given the day to day Gewalt of contemporary capital it is
not surprising that there are attempts to formulate projects of
secession which, however doomed to failure, seem necessary as breathing
spaces. Overstated as insurrectionary projects, such secession is a
little optimistic as to its chances of even escaping capital, never mind
overcoming it. Simultaneously, the theoretical analysis of Theorie
Communiste and Dauvé/Nesic seems lacking in the necessary juncture of
events to make anything other than potential interventions. Pessimism in
the face of contemporary capital’s ability to adapt would probably be
the best approach, but pessimism tempered with an awareness of the
subjective and theoretical possibilities offered by the various theories
of communisation. Benjamin wrote that ‘The destructive character sees
nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways
everywhere.’[45] Maybe in this complex allegorical figure something like
the use value of theories such as communisation resides.
---
John Cunningham <coffeescience23 AT yahoo.co.uk>is a sometime writer and
occasional wage labourer who lives in South London
[1] Anonymous, Call, 2004, UK, no imprint, p.66. PDF available here:
http://zinelibrary.info/call
[2] Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, London:
Lawrence and Wishart, 1996, p.54.
[3] Tiqqun was a French journal published between 1999 and 2001. The
term is the French transliteration of a Hebrew/Kabbalistic word for
redemption, an obvious reference towards the Benjamin and Agamben
influenced model of messianic politics to which this strand of
communisation subscribes. There were two issues and associated books
such as Theorie du Bloom, Theorie de la Jeune Fille and later texts such
as The Coming Insurrection. More Tiqqun and related material is
available at the following: http://www.tiqqun.info/ ;
http://www.bloom0101.org/tiqqun.html ;
http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html . A good article on the
Tarnac 9 case and the controversy around The Coming Insurrection is
Alberto Toscano’s ‘The War Against Pre-Terrorism’ available at
http://slash.interactivist.net/node/11805
[4] Call, op. cit., p.33.
[5] Endnotes, Brighton, UK, 2008. For texts and ordering details see the
following: http://endnotes.org.uk/ . The introduction is a great account
of the genealogy of communisation in the French ultra-left though it
doesn’t engage with Tiqqun.
[6] For further details on the milieu out of which communisation arose,
this interview with Giles Dauvé is useful: http://www.riff-raff.se/en/7/
gd_corr.php
[7] The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Los Angeles:
Semiotext(e), 2009. Recently published by Semiotext(e) the book has been
circulating on the internet for some time and is also available here:
http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/. Page
references refer to the published version (p.102).
[8] Gilles Dauvé and Francois Martin, The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of
the Communist Movement, London: Antagonism, 1997, p.36. Originally
published in 1974 by Black and Red, Detroit, USA.
[9] Dauvé and Nesic, ‘Love of Labour, Love of Labour Lost...’ in
Endnotes, op. cit., p.152.
[10] See ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ in Endnotes, ibid, p.155 and the
afterword in Endnotes for details of the position that Theorie
Communiste take towards Dauvé and their elaboration of communisation
from conditions of contemporary ‘real subsumption’. Also Riff-Raff 8 has
a good series of texts around TC 11. See,
http://www.riff-raff.se/en/8/at
[11] Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, Peking: Foreign Languages
Press, 1977, p.176; for the phrase ‘expropriation of the expropriators’,
p.75.
[12] Marx, ibid, p.81.
[13] Marx to Dr Kugelman [London] April 12, 1871, text available here:
http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_04_17.htm
[14] See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London: Harper Collins, 1992, p.245.
[15] Alain Badiou, Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, pp.272–273.
[16] The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.88 and p.130. A further
suggestive connection is in the text ‘To a Friend’ wherein the 19^(th)
century revolutionary Auguste Blanqui is presented as an inspirational
‘conceptual persona’ containing the unfulfilled potentiality of the
past. The text is available here:
http://libcom.org/history/auguste-blanqui
[17] Tiqqun, How is it to be Done?, 2008,
http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html
[18] Dauvé and Martin, op. cit., p.39.
[19] Jacques Camatte, ‘On Organization’, in This World We Must Leave,
New York: Autonomedia, 1995, p.19. Camatte is an important precursor to
much of the Invisible Committee’s anti-politics both in his rejection of
orthodox radicalism and the tendency towards secession that he expressed
by moving towards primitivism. Given that he started as an ultra-left
follower of Bordiga, Camatte might be the missing link between the
different strands of communisation.
[20] Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Taylor and
Francis, 2003.
[21] Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford, CA: Stanford University
Press, 1998.
[22] Georgio Agamben, Means Without End, Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2000, p.3.
[23] How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.5.
[24] Giorgio Agamben, ‘Form-of-Life’, in Paolo Virno and Michael Hardt
eds., Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, Minneapolis, MN:
University of Minnesota Press, 1996, p.151.
[25] Agamben, 2000, op. cit. p.3. When Agamben speaks of power in this
context it has more in common with the Italian term Potenza, usually
linked to a sense of potentiality than force or violence as sovereignty.
[26] How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.16.
[27] The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.31.
[28] Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p.184–85
[29] Call, op. cit., p.67.
[30] See, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben4.htm
[31] The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.111.
[32] How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.17.
[33] The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.34.
[34] Camatte, op. cit., p.39.
[35] Dauvé and Nesic, aka Troploin, issued this in response to the
initial publication of Call, one of the few instances, to my knowledge,
of any overt communication between the post ’68 communisation theorists
and their later descendants around Tiqqun. Thanks to Adeline Mannarini
for translation. See,
http://troploin0.free.fr/ii/index.php/textes/19-communisation-un-appel-et-une-invite
. Tiqqun have disavowed any connection with other ultra-left currents
with Julian Coupat, one of the founders of Tiqqun, saying recently that
‘the ultra-left is a political current that had its moment of glory in
the 1920s and that, subsequently, never produced anything other than
inoffensive volumes of Marxology’. This seems like a classic avant-garde
tactic of breaking with precursors, though there are undoubted
differences. The interview is available here:
http://www.notbored.org/julien-coupat.html
[36] Paolo Virno, ‘Virtuosity and Revolution: The Political Theory of
Exodus’ in Virno & Hardt, op. cit., pp.189–213.
[37] Benjamin, op. cit., especially ‘The Storyteller’, p.83 and ‘On Some
Motifs in Baudelaire’, p.152; and Agamben, Infancy and History, London:
Verso, 2007, p.13.
[38] Os Cangaceiros, A Crime Called Freedom, Portland: Eberhardt Press,
2006, p.85.
[39] See http://libcom.org/library/theses-imaginary-party
[40] From Agamben’s 2001 postscript to the Italian edition of the Coming
Community:
http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiqqun-de-la-noche.html
[41] The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.112.
[42] See ‘The Problem of the Head’,
http://libcom.org/library/problem-head , a Tiqqun text that illuminates
their relation to avant-gardes from Surrealism to the Red Brigades.
[43] Walter Benjamin, Selected Works, Volume 1, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/
Harvard, 1996, p.236.
[44] Luca Basso, ‘The Ambivalence of Gewalt in Marx and Engels: On
Balibar’s Interpretation’ in Historical Materialism 17 (2009), p.220.
[45] Walter Benjamin, Selected Works, Volume 2, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/
Harvard, 1999, p.541.