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Title: Now Author: The Invisible Committe Date: 2017 Language: en Topics: insurrectionary, communization Source: Retrived on February 18, 2018 from https://illwilleditions.noblogs.org/files/2018/02/Invisible-Committee-NOW-READ.pdf Notes: The Invisible Committee are an anonymous fragment of the Imaginary Party.
[]
All the reasons for making a revolution are there. Not one is lacking.
The shipwreck of politics, the arrogance of the powerful, the reign of
falsehood, the vulgarity of the wealthy, the cataclysms of industry,
galloping misery, naked exploitation, ecological apocalypse—we are
spared nothing, not even being informed about it all. “Climate: 2016
breaks a heat record,” Le Monde announces, the same as almost every year
now. All the reasons are there together, but it’s not reasons that make
revolutions, it’s bodies. And the bodies are in front of screens.
One can watch a presidential election sink like a stone. The
transformation of “the most important moment in French political life”
into a big trashing fest only makes the soap opera more captivating. One
couldn’t imagine Koh-Lanta with such characters, such dizzying plot
twists, such cruel tests, or so general a humiliation. The spectacle of
politics lives on as the spectacle of its decomposition. Disbelief goes
nicely with the filthy landscape. The National Front, that political
negation of politics, that negation of politics on the terrain of
politics, logically occupies the “center” of this chessboard of smoking
ruins. The human passengers, spellbound, are watching their shipwreck
like a first-rate show. They are so enthralled that they don’t feel the
water that’s already bathing their legs. In the end, they’ll transform
everything into a buoy. The drowning are known for that, for trying to
turn everything they touch into a life preserver.
This world no longer needs explaining, critiquing, denouncing. We live
enveloped in a fog of commentaries and commentaries on commentaries, of
critiques and critiques of critiques of critiques, of revelations that
don’t trigger anything, other than revelations about the revelations.
And this fog is taking away any purchase we might have on the world.
There’s nothing to criticize in Donald Trump. As to the worst that can
be said about him, he’s already absorbed, incorporated it. He embodies
it. He displays on a gold chain all the complaints that people have ever
lodged against him. He is his own caricature, and he’s proud of it. Even
the creators of South Park are throwing in the towel: “Its very
complicated now that satire has become reality. We really tried to laugh
about what is going on but it wasn’t possible to maintain the rhythm.
What was happening was much funnier that what could be imagined. So we
decided to let it go, to let them do their comedy, and we’ll do ours.”
We live in a world that has established itself beyond any justification.
Here, criticism doesn’t work, any more than satire does. Neither one has
any impact. To limit oneself to denouncing discriminations, oppressions,
and injustices, and expect to harvest the fruits of that is to get one’s
epochs wrong. Leftists who think they can make something happen by
lifting the lever of bad conscience are sadly mistaken. They can go and
scratch their scabs in public and air their grievances hoping to arouse
sympathy as much as they like; they’ll only give rise to contempt and
the desire to destroy them. “Victim” has become an insult in every part
of the world.
There is a social use of language. No one still believes in it. Its
exchange value has fallen to zero. Hence this inflationist bubble of
idle talk. Everything social is mendacious, and everyone knows that now.
It’s no longer just the governing authorities, the publicists and public
personalities who “do communication,” it’s every self-entrepreneur that
this society wants to turn us into who practices the art of “public
relations.” Having become an instrument of communication, language is no
longer its own reality but a tool for operating on the real, for
obtaining effects in accordance with more or less conscious strategies.
Words are no longer put into circulation except in order to distort
things. Everything sails under false flags. This usurpation has become
universal. One doesn’t shrink from any paradox. The state of emergency
is the rule of law. War is made in the name of peace. The bosses “offer
jobs.” The surveillance cameras are “video-protection devices.” The
executioners complain that they’re being persecuted. The traitors
profess their sincerity and their allegiance. The mediocre are
everywhere cited as examples. There is actual practice on the one hand,
and on the other, discourse, which is its relentless counterpoint, the
perversion of every concept, the universal deception of oneself and of
others. In all quarters it’s only a question of preserving or extending
one’s interests. In return, the world is filling up with silent people.
Certain ones of these explode into crazy acts of a sort that we’ve seen
at briefer and briefer intervals. What is surprising about this? We
should stop saying, “Young people don’t believe in anything anymore.”
And say instead: “Damn! They’re not swallowing our lies anymore.” No
longer say, “Young people are nihilistic,” but “My lord, if this
continues they’re going to survive the collapse of our world.”
The exchange value of language has fallen to zero, and yet we go on
writing. It’s because there is another use of language. One can talk
about life, and one can talk from the standpoint of life. One can talk
about conflicts, and one can talk from the midst of conflict. It’s not
the same language, or the same style. It’s not the same idea of truth
either. There is a “courage of truth” that consists in taking shelter
behind the objective neutrality of “facts.” There is a different one
that considers that speech which doesn’t commit one to anything, doesn’t
stand on its own, doesn’t risk its position, doesn’t cost anything, is
not worth very much. The whole critique of finance capitalism cuts a
pale figure next to a shattered bank window tagged with “Here. These are
your premiums!” It’s not through ignorance that “young people”
appropriate rappers’ punch lines for their political slogans instead of
philosophers’ maxims. And it’s out of decency that they don’t take up
the shouts of “We won’t give an inch!” by militants who are about to
relinquish everything. It’s because the latter are talking about the
world, and the former are talking from within a world.
The real lie is not the one we tell others but the one we tell
ourselves. The first lie is relatively exceptional in comparison with
the second. The big lie is refusing to see certain things that one does
see and refusing to see them just as one sees them. The real lie is all
the screens, all the images, all the explanations that are allowed to
stand between oneself and the world. It’s how we regularly dismiss our
own perceptions. So much so that where it’s not a question of truth, it
won’t be a question of anything. There will be nothing. Nothing but this
planetary insane asylum. Truth is not something one would strive
towards, but a frank relation to what is there. It is a “problem” only
for those who already see life as a problem. It’s not something one
professes but a way of being in the world. It is not held, therefore,
nor accumulated. It manifests itself in a situation and from moment to
moment. Whoever senses the falseness of a being, the noxious character
of a representation, or the forces that move beneath a play of images
releases any grip these might have had. Truth is a complete presence to
oneself and to the world, a vital contact with the real, an acute
perception of the givens of existence. In a world where everyone
play-acts, where everyone puts on a performance, where one communicates
all the more as nothing really is said, the very word “truth” produces a
chill or is greeted with annoyance or sniggers. Everything sociable that
this epoch contains has become so dependent on the crutches of untruth
that it can’t do without them. “Proclaiming the truth” is not at all
recommended. Speaking truth to people who can’t take even tiny doses of
it will only expose you to their vengeance. In what follows we don’t
claim in any instance to convey “the truth” but rather the perception we
have of the world, what we care about, what keeps us awake and alive.
The common opinion must be rejected: truths are multiple, but untruth is
one, because it is universally arrayed against the slightest truth that
surfaces.
All year long we’re pummeled with words about the thousand threats that
surround us—terrorists, migrants, endocrine disruptors, fascism,
unemployment. In this way the unshakeable routine of capitalist
normality is perpetuated—against a background of a thousand failed
conspiracies, a hundred averted catastrophes. As to the pallid anxiety
which they try, day after day, to implant in our heads, by way of armed
military patrols, breaking news, and governmental announcements, one has
to credit riots with the paradoxical virtue of freeing us from it. This
is something that the lovers of those funeral processions called
“demonstrations,” all those who taste, over a glass of rouge, the bitter
enjoyment of always being defeated, all those who give out a flatulent
“Or else it’s going to blow up!” before they prudently climb back into
their bus, cannot understand. In a street confrontation, the enemy has a
well-defined face, whether he’s in civilian clothes or in armor. He has
methods that are largely known. He has a name and a function. In fact,
he’s a “civil servant,” as he soberly declares. The friend, too, has
gestures, movements, and an appearance that are recognizable. In the
riot there is an incandescent presence to oneself and to others, a lucid
fraternity which the Republic is quite incapable of generating. The
organized riot is capable of producing what this society cannot create:
lively and irreversible bonds. Those who dwell on images of violence
miss everything that’s involved in the fact of taking the risk together
of breaking, of tagging, of confronting the cops. One never comes out of
one’s first riot unchanged. It’s this positivity of the riot that the
spectators prefer not to see and that frightens them more deeply than
the damage, the charges and counter-charges. In the riot there is a
production and affirmation of friendships, a focused configuration of
the world, clear possibilities of action, means close at hand. The
situation has a form and one can move within it. The risks are sharply
defined, unlike those nebulous “risks” that the governing authorities
like to hang over our existences. The riot is desirable as a moment of
truth. It is a momentary suspension of the confusion. In the tear gas,
things are curiously clear and the real is finally legible. It’s
difficult then not to see who is who. Speaking of the insurrectionary
day of July 15, 1927 in Vienna, Elias Canetti said: “It’s the closest
thing to a revolution that I have experienced. Hundreds of pages would
not be enough for describing all that I saw.” He drew from that day the
inspiration for his masterwork, Crowds and Power. The riot is formative
by virtue of what it makes visible.
In the Royal Navy there was this old toast, “Confusion to our enemies!”
Confusion has a strategic value. It is not a chance phenomenon. It
scatters purposes and prevents them from converging again. It has the
ashy taste of defeat, when the battle has not taken place, and probably
will never take place. All the recent attacks in France were thus
followed by a train of confusion, which opportunely increased the
governmental discourse about them. Those who claim them, and those who
call for war against those who claim these attacks, all have an interest
in our confusion. As for those who carry them out, they are very often
children—the children of confusion.
This world that talks so much has nothing to say: it is bereft of
positive statements. Perhaps it believed it could make itself immune to
attack in this way. More than anything else, however, it placed itself
at the mercy of any serious affirmation. A world whose positivity is
built on so much devastation deserves to have what is life-affirming
take the form initially of wrecking, breaking, rioting. They always try
to portray us as desperate individuals, on the grounds that we act, we
build, we attack without hope. Hope. Now there’s at least one disease
this civilization has not infected us with. We’re not despairing for all
that. No one has ever acted out of hope. Hope is a form of waiting, with
the refusal to see what is there, with the fear of breaking into the
present—in short, with the fear of living. To hope is to declare oneself
in advance to be without any hold on that from which something is
expected nonetheless. It’s to remove oneself from the process so as to
avoid any connection with its outcome. It’s wanting things to be
different without embracing the means for this to come about. It’s a
kind of cowardice. One has to know what to commit to and then commit to
it. Even if it means making enemies. Or making friends. Once we know
what we want, we’re no longer alone, the world repopulates. Everywhere
there are allies, closenesses, and an infinite gradation of possible
friendships. Nothing is close for someone who floats. Hope, that very
slight but constant impetus toward tomorrow that is communicated to us
day by day, is the best agent of the maintenance of order. We’re daily
informed of problems we can do nothing about, but to which there will
surely be solutions tomorrow. The whole oppressive feeling of
powerlessness that this social organization cultivates in everyone is
only an immense pedagogy of waiting. It’s an avoidance of now. But there
isn’t, there’s never been, and there never will be anything but now. And
even if the past can act upon the now, this is because it has itself
never been anything but a now. Just as our tomorrow will be. The only
way to understand something in the past is to understand that it too
used to be a now. It’s to feel the faint breath of the air in which the
human beings of yesterday lived their lives. If we are so much inclined
to flee from now, it’s because now is the time of decision. It’s the
locus of the “I accept” or the “I refuse,” of “I’ll pass on that” or
“I’ll go with that.” It’s the locus of the logical act that immediately
follows the perception. It is the present, and hence the locus of
presence. It is the moment, endlessly renewed, of the taking of sides.
Thinking in distant terms is always more comfortable. “In the end,”
things will change; “in the end,” beings will be transfigured.
Meanwhile, let’s go on this way, let’s remain what we are. A mind that
thinks in terms of the future is incapable of acting in the present. It
doesn’t seek transformation; it avoids it. The current disaster is like
a monstrous accumulation of all the deferrals of the past, to which are
added those of each day and each moment, in a continuous time slide. But
life is always decided now, and now, and now.
Everyone can see that this civilization is like a train rolling toward
the abyss, and picking up speed. The faster it goes, the more one hears
the hysterical cheers of the boozers in the discotheque car. You have to
listen carefully to make out the paralyzed silence of the rational minds
that no longer understand anything, that of the worriers who bite their
nails, and the accent of false calm in the exclamations of the card
players who wait. Inwardly, many people have chosen to leap off the
train, but they hesitate on the footboard. They’re still restrained by
so many things. They feel held back because they’ve made the choice, but
the decision is lacking. Decision is what traces in the present the
manner and possibility of acting, of making a leap that is not into the
void. We mean the decision to desert, to desert the ranks, to organize,
to undertake a secession, be it imperceptibly, but in any case, now.
The epoch belongs to the determined.
[]
“Nothing’s right anymore,” say the poor losers. “Yes, the world’s in a
bad state,” says the conventional wisdom. We say rather that the world
is fragmenting. We were promised a new world order, but it’s the
opposite that’s occurring. A planetary generalization of liberal
democracy was announced but what is generalizing instead are “the
electoral insurrections” against it and its hypocrisy, as the liberals
bitterly complain. Zone after zone, the fragmentation of the world
continues, unceremoniously and without interruption. And this is not
just an affair of geopolitics. It’s in every domain that the world is
fragmenting, it’s in every domain that unity has become problematic.
Nowadays there is no more unity in “society” than there is in science.
The wage-work system is breaking up into niches, exceptions,
dispensatory conditions. The idea of a “precariat” conveniently hides
the fact that there is simply no longer a shared experience of work,
even precarious work. With the consequence that there can no longer be a
shared experience of its stoppage either, and the old myth of the
general strike must be put on the shelf of useless accessories. In like
manner, Western medicine has been reduced to tinkering with techniques
that break its doctrinal unity into pieces, such as acupuncture,
hypnosis, or magnetism. Politically, beyond the usual parliamentary
messing around, there’s no more majority for anything. During the
conflict in the spring of 2016, precipitated by the loi Travail, the
most astute journalistic commentary noted that two minorities, a
governmental minority and a minority of demonstrators, were clashing in
front of a population of spectators. Our very ego-self appears as a more
and more complex, less and less coherent puzzle, so that to make it hold
together, in addition to pills and therapy sessions, algorithms are
necessary now. It’s pure irony that the word “wall” is used to describe
the solid stream of images, information, and commentary by which
Facebook attempts to give a shape to the self. The contemporary
experience of life in a world composed of circulation,
telecommunications, networks, a welter of real-time information and
images trying to capture our attention, is fundamentally discontinuous.
On a completely different scale, the particular interests of the elite
are becoming more and more difficult to posit as the “general interest.”
One only has to see how hard it is for states to implement their
infrastructure projects, from the Susa Valley to Standing Rock, to
realize that things aren’t working anymore. The fact that now they have
to be ready to bring the army and its special units into the national
territory to protect building sites of any importance shows rather
clearly that these projects are seen for the mafia-type operations that
they are.
The unity of the Republic, that of science, that of the personality,
that of the national territory, or that of “culture” have never been
anything but fictions. But they were effective. What is certain is that
the illusion of unity can no longer do its work of fooling people, of
bringing them into line, of disciplining them. In every domain, hegemony
is dead and the singularities are becoming wild: they bear their own
meaning in themselves, no longer expecting it from a general order. The
petty supervisory voice that allowed anyone with a bit of authority to
ventrilocate for others, to judge, classify, hierarchize, moralize, to
tell everyone what they need to do and how they need to be, has become
inaudible. All the “need-to’s” are lying on the ground. The militant who
knows what must be done, the professor who knows what you need to think,
the politician who will tell you what is needed for the country, speak
in the desert. As things stand, nothing can match the singular
experience where it exists. One rediscovers that opening oneself to the
world doesn’t mean opening oneself to the four corners of the planet,
that the world is there where we are. Opening ourselves to the world is
opening ourselves to its presence here and now. Each fragment carries
its own possibility of perfection. If “the world” is to be saved this
will be in each of its fragments. As for the totality, it can only be
managed.
The epoch takes amazing shortcuts. Real democracy is buried where it was
born two thousand five hundred years before with the way in which Alexis
Tsipras, scarcely elected, got no rest until he had negotiated its
capitulation. One can read on its tombstone, ironically speaking, these
words of the German Minister of Finance, Wolfgang Schauble: “We can’t
let elections change anything whatsoever.” But the most striking thing
is that the geopolitical epicenter of the world’s fragmentation is
precisely the place where its unification began under the name
“civilization,” five thousand years ago: Mesopotamia. If a certain
geopolitical chaos seems to be taking hold of the world, it’s in Iraq
and Syria that this is most dramatically demonstrated, that is, in the
exact location where civilization’s general setting in order began.
Writing, accounting, History, royal justice, parliament, integrated
farming, science, measurement, political religion, palace intrigues and
pastoral power—this whole way of claiming to govern “for the good of the
subjects,” for the sake of the flock and its well-being— everything that
can be lumped into what we still call “civilization” was already, three
thousand years before Jesus Christ, the distinguishing mark of the
kingdoms of Akkad and Sumer. Of course there will be attempts at
cobbling together a new denominational Iraqi state. Of course the
international interests will end up mounting harebrained operations
aimed at state building in Syria. But in Syria as in Iraq,
state-directed humanity is dead. The intensity of the conflicts has
risen too high for an honest reconciliation to still be possible. The
counter-insurrectionary war that the regime of Bashar Al-Assad has
conducted against his population, with the support that we’re aware of,
has reached such extremes that no negotiations will ever again lead to
anything like a “new Syrian state” worthy of the name. And no attempt at
people-shaping—the bloody putting into practice of Brecht’s ironic poem
after the workers’ uprising of 1953 against the new Soviet regime in
East Germany: “The people through its own fault/ Has lost the confidence
of the government/ And only by redoubling its efforts/ Can it win it
back/Would it not be easier then/ For the government to dissolve the
people and elect a new one?”—will have any positive effect; the ghosts
of the dead won’t let themselves be subdued by barrels of TNT. No one
who’s given some thought to what the European states were like in the
time of their “splendor” can look at what still goes by the name of
“state” these days and see anything other than failures. Compared to the
transnational powers, the states can no longer maintain themselves
except in the form of holograms. The Greek state is no longer anything
more than a conveyor of instructions it has no say in. The British state
is reduced to walking the tightrope with Brexit. The Mexican state no
longer controls anything. The Italian, Spanish, or Brazilian states no
longer appear to have any activity beyond surviving the continuous
avalanches of scandal. Whether on the pretext of “reform” or by fits of
“modernization,” the present-day capitalist states are engaging in an
exercise of methodical self-dismantling. Not to mention the “separatist
temptations” that are multiplying across Europe. It’s not hard to
discern, behind the attempts at authoritarian restoration in so many of
the world’s countries a form of civil war that will no longer end.
Whether in the name of the war against “terrorism,” “drugs,” or
“poverty,” the states are coming apart at the seams. The facades remain,
but they only serve to mask a pile of rubble. The global disorder now
exceeds any capacity to restore order. As an ancient Chinese sage put
it: “When order reigns in the world, a fool can disturb it by himself
alone; when chaos takes hold of it, a wise man cannot bring back the
order by himself alone.”
We are the contemporaries of a prodigious reversal of the process of
civilization into a process of fragmentation. The more civilization
aspires to a universal completion, the more it implodes at its
foundation. The more this world aims for unification, the more it
fragments. When did it shift imperceptibly on its axis? Was it the world
coup that followed the attacks of September 11? The “financial crisis”
of 2008? The failure of the Copenhagen summit on climate change in 2009?
What is sure is that that summit marked a point of irreversibility in
this shift. The cause of the atmosphere and the planet offered
civilization the ideal pretext for its completion. In the name of the
species and its salvation, in the name of the planetary totality, in the
name of terrestrial Unity one was going to be able to govern every
behavior of each one of the Earths inhabitants and every one of the
entities that it accommodates on its surface. The presiding authorities
were within an inch of proclaiming the universal and ecological imperium
mundi. This was “in the interest of all.” The majority of the human and
natural milieus, customs, and forms of life, the telluric character of
every existence, all that would have to yield before the necessity of
uniting the human species, which one was finally going to manage from
who knows what directorate. This was the logical outcome of the process
of unification that has always animated “the great adventure of
humanity” since a little band of Sapiens escaped from the Rift Valley.
Up till then, one hoped that the “responsible parties” would come to a
sensible agreement, that the “responsible parties,” in a word, would be
responsible. And surprise! What actually happened at Copenhagen is that
nothing happened. And that is why the whole world has forgotten it. No
emperor, even of the collegial sort. No decision by the spokespersons of
the Species. Since then, with the help of the “economic crisis,” the
drive toward unification has reversed into a global
everyone-for-themselves. Seeing that there will be no common salvation,
everyone will have to achieve their salvation on their own, on whatever
scale, or abandon every idea of salvation. And attempt to lose oneself
in technologies, profits, parties, drugs, and heart-breakers, with
anxiety pegged to one’s soul.
The dismantling of all political unity is inducing an evident panic in
our contemporaries. The omnipresence of the question of “national
identity” in the public debate attests to this. “La France,” a
world-class exemplar of the modern state, is having an especially hard
time accepting its consignment to the junkyard. It’s obviously because
“feeling French” has never made so little sense that what we have in the
way of ambitious politicians are reduced to embroidering endlessly on
“the national identity.” And since, despite those glorious “1500 years
of History” which they keep harping on, no one seems to have a clear
idea what “being French” might mean, they fall back on the basics: the
wine and the great men, the sidewalk terraces and the police, when it’s
not quite simply the Ancien Regime and the Christian roots. Yellowed
figures of a national unity for ninth-grade manuals.
All that is left of unity is nostalgia, but it speaks more and more
loudly. Candidates present themselves as wanting to restore the national
greatness, to “Make America Great Again” or “set France back in order.”
At the same time, when one is wistful for French Algeria, is there
anything one can’t be nostalgic about? Everywhere, they promise
therefore to reconstruct the national unity by force. But the more they
“divide” by going on about the “feeling of belonging,” the more the
certainty spreads of not being part of the whole they have in mind. To
mobilize panic in order to restore order is to miss what panic contains
that is essentially dispersive. The process of general fragmentation is
so unstoppable that all the brutality that will be used in order to
recompose the lost unity will only end up accelerating it, deepening it
and making it more irreversible. When there’s no longer a shared
experience, apart from that of coming together again in front of the
screens, one can very well create brief moments of national communion
after attacks by deploying a maudlin, false, and hollow sentimentality,
one can decree all sorts of “wars against terrorism,” one can promise to
take back control of all the “zones of unlawfulness,” but all this will
remain a BFM-TV newsflash at the back of a kebab house, and with the
sound turned off. This kind of nonsense is like medications: for them to
stay effective, it’s always necessary to increase the dose, until the
final neurasthenia sets in. Those who don’t mind the prospect of
finishing their existence in a cramped and super-militarized citadel, be
it as great as “La France,” while all around the waters are rising,
carrying the bodies of the unlucky, may very well declare those who
displease them to be “traitors to the Nation.” In their barkings, one
only hears their powerlessness. In the long run, extermination is not a
solution.
We mustn’t be disheartened by the state of degradation of the debate in
the public sphere. If they vociferate so loudly it’s because no one is
listening anymore. What is really occurring, under the surface, is that
everything is pluralizing, everything is localizing, everything is
revealing itself to be situated, everything is fleeing. It’s not only
that the people are lacking, that they are playing the role of absent
subscribers, that they don’t give any news, that they are lying to the
pollsters, it’s that they have already packed up and left, in many
unsuspected directions. They’re not simply abstentionist, hanging back,
not to be found: they are in flight, even if their flight is inner or
immobile. They are already elsewhere. And it won’t be the great
bush-beaters of the extreme left, the Third Republic-type of socialist
senators taking themselves for Castro, a la Melenchon, who will bring
people back to the fold. What is called “populism” is not just the
blatant symptom of the people’s disappearance, it’s a desperate attempt
to hold on to what’s left of it that’s distressed and disoriented. As
soon as a real political situation presents itself, like the conflict of
the spring of 2016, what manifests itself in a diffuse way is all the
shared intelligence, sensitivity, and determination which the public
hubbub sought to cover over. The event constituted by the appearance, in
the conflict, of the “cortège de tête” has shown this rather clearly.
Given that the social body is taking on water from all sides, including
the old union framework, it was obvious to every demonstrator who was
still alive that the feet-dragging marches were a form of pacification
through protest. Thus from demonstration to demonstration one saw at the
head of the processions all those who aim to desert the social cadaver
to avoid contracting its little death. It started with the high-school
students. Then all sorts of young and not so young demonstrators,
militants, and unorganized elements, swelled the ranks. To top it off,
during the 14^(th) of June demonstration, entire union sections,
including the longshoremen of Le Havre, joined an out-of-control head
contingent of 10,000 persons. It would be a mistake to see the taking
over of the head of these demonstrations as a kind of historical revenge
by “anarchists,” “autonomists,” or the other usual suspects at the end
of demonstrations, who traditionally find themselves at the tail of
marches, engaging in ritual skirmishes. What happened there, as if
naturally, was that a certain number of deserters created a political
space in which to make something out of their heterogeneity, a space
that was insufficiently organized certainly, but rejoinable and for the
duration of a spring, truly existing. The cortège de tête came to be a
kind of receptacle of the general fragmentation. As if, by losing all
its power of aggregation, this “society” liberated from all quarters
little autonomous kernels—territorially, sectorially, or politically
situated—and for once these kernels found a way to group together. If
the cortège de tête succeeded finally in magnetizing a significant part
of those combating the world of the loi Travail this is not because all
those people had suddenly become “autonomous”—the heterogeneous
character of its components argues against that—it’s because, in the
situation, it had the benefit of a presence, a vitality, and a
truthfulness that were lacking in the rest.
The cortège de tête was so clearly not a subject detachable from the
rest of the demonstration but rather a gesture, that the police never
managed to isolate it, as they regularly tried to do. To put an end to
the scandal of its existence, to reestablish the traditional image of
the union march with the bosses of the different labor confederations at
its head, to neutralize this cortège systematically composed of young
hooded ones who defy the police, of older ones who support them or free
workers who break through the lines of riot police, it was necessary
finally to kettle the whole demonstration. So at the end of June there
was the humiliating scene around the basin of the Arsenal, which was
surrounded by a formidable police presence—a nice demoralization
maneuver arranged jointly by the labor unions and the government. That
day L’Humanité would run a front page story on the remarkable “victory”
the demonstration represented—it’s a tradition among Stalinists to cover
their retreats with litanies of triumph. The long French spring of 2016
established this evident fact: the riot, the blockade, and the
occupation form the basic political grammar of the epoch.
“Kettling” does not simply constitute a technique of psychological
warfare which the French order belatedly imported from England. Kettling
is a dialectical image of current political power. It’s the figure of a
despised, reviled power that no longer does anything but keep the
population in its nets. If it’s the figure of a power that no longer
promises anything, and has no other activity than locking all the exits.
A power that no one supports anymore in a positive way, that everyone
tries to flee as best they can, and that has no other perspective than
to keep in its confining bosom all that is on the verge of escaping it.
The figure of kettling is dialectical in that what it is designed to
confine, it also brings together. It is a site where meet-ups take place
between those who are trying to desert. Novel chants, full of irony, are
invented there. A shared experience develops within its enclosure. The
police apparatus is not equipped to contain the vertical escape that
occurs in the form of tags that will soon embellish every wall, every
bus shelter, every business. And that give evidence that the mind
remains free even when the bodies are held captive. “Victory through
chaos,” “In ashes, all becomes possible,” “France, its wine, its
revolutions,” “Homage to the families of the broken windows,” “Kiss kiss
bank bank,” “I think, therefore I break”: since 1968, the walls had not
seen such a freedom of spirit. “From here, from this country where it’s
hard for us to breathe an air that is more and more rarefied, where each
day we feel more like foreigners, there could only come this fatigue
that eroded us with emptiness, with imposture. For lack of anything
better, we paid each other in words, the adventure was literary, the
commitment was platonic. As for tomorrows revolution, a possible
revolution, who among us still believed in it?” This is how Pierre
Peuchmaurd, in Plus vivant que jamais, describes the atmosphere that May
1968 swept away. One of the most remarkable aspects of the fragmentation
that’s underway is that it affects the very thing that was thought to
ensure the maintenance of social unity: the Law. With the exceptional
antiterrorist legislation, the gutting of the labor laws, the increasing
specialization of jurisdictions and courts of prosecution, the Law no
longer exists. Take criminal law. On the pretext of antiterrorism and
fighting “organized criminality,” what has taken shape from year to year
is the constitution of two distinct laws: a law for “citizens” and a
“penal law of the enemy.” It was a German jurist, appreciated by the
South American dictatorships in their time, who theorized it. His name
is Gunther Jacobs. Concerning the riffraff, the radical opponents, the
“thugs,” the “terrorists,” the “anarchists,” in short: all those who
don’t have enough respect for the democratic order in force and pose a
“danger” to “the normative structure of society,” Gunther Jacobs notes
that, more and more, a special treatment is reserved for them that is in
derogation of normal criminal law, to the point of no longer respecting
their constitutional rights. Is it not logical, in a sense, to treat as
enemies those who behave as “enemies of society”? Aren’t they in the
business of “excluding themselves from the law”? And so for them
shouldn’t one recognize the existence of a “penal law of the enemy” that
consists precisely in the complete absence of any law? For example, this
is what is openly practiced in the Philippines by its president Duterte,
who measures the effectiveness of his government, in its “war against
drugs,” by the number of corpses of “dealers” delivered to the morgue,
which were “produced” by death squads or ordinary citizens. At the time
of our writing, the count exceeds 7,000 deaths. That we’re still talking
about a form of law is attested by the questions of the associations of
jurists who wonder if in this instance one might be leaving the “rule of
law.” The “penal law of the enemy” is the end of criminal law. So it’s
not exactly a trifle. The trick here is to make people believe that it
is applied to a previously defined criminal population when its rather
the opposite that occurs: a person is declared an “enemy” after the
fact, after being phone-tapped, arrested, locked up, molested, ransomed,
tortured, and finally killed. A bit like when the cops press charges for
“contempt and obstruction” against those they’ve just beaten up a little
too conspicuously.
As paradoxical as this assertion may appear, were living in the time of
abolition of the Law. The metastatic proliferation of laws is just one
aspect of this abolition. If every law had not become insignificant in
the rococo edifice of contemporary law, would it be necessary to produce
so many of them? Would it be necessary to react to every other minor
news event by enacting a new piece of legislation? The object of the
major bills of the past few years in France pretty much boils down to
the abolition of laws that were in force, and a gradual dismantling of
all juridical safeguards. So much so that Law, which was meant to
protect persons and things faced with the vagaries of the world, has
instead become something that adds to their insecurity. A distinctive
trait of the major contemporary laws is that they place this or that
institution or power above the laws. The Intelligence Act eliminated
every recourse for dealing with the intelligence services. The loi
Macron, which was not able to establish “business secrecy,” is only
called a “law” by virtue of a strange Newspeak: it consisted rather in
undoing a whole set of guarantees enjoyed by employees—relating to
Sunday work, layoffs or firings, and the regulated professions. The loi
Travail itself was only a continuation of this movement that had started
so well: what is the famous “inversion of the hierarchy of norms” but
precisely the replacement of any general legal framework by the state of
exception of each corporation? If it was so natural for a social
democratic government inspired by the extreme right to declare a state
of exception after the attacks of November 2015, this was because the
state of exception already reigned in the form of the Law.
Accepting to see the world’s fragmentation even in the law is not an
easy thing. In France we’ve inherited nearly a millennium of a “rule of
justice”—the good king Saint-Louis who meted out justice under the oak
tree, etcetera. At bottom, the blackmail that keeps renewing the
conditions of our submission is this: either the State, rights, the Law,
the police, the justice system—or civil war, vengeance, anarchy, and
celebration. This conviction, this justicialism, this statism, permeates
the whole set of politically acceptable and audible sensibilities across
the board, from the extreme left to the extreme right. Indeed, it’s in
line with this fixed axis that the conversion of a large portion of the
workers’ vote into a vote for the National Front occurred without any
major existential crisis for those concerned. This is also what explains
all the indignant reactions to the cascades of “affairs” that now go to
make up the daily routine of contemporary political life. We propose a
different perception of things, a different way to apprehend them. Those
who make the laws evidently don’t respect them. Those who want to
instill the “work ethic” in us do fictitious jobs. It’s common knowledge
that the drug squad is the biggest hash dealer in France. And whenever,
by an extraordinary chance, a magistrate is bugged, one doesn’t wait
long to discover the awful negotiations that are hidden behind the noble
pronouncement of a judgment, an appeal, or a dismissal. To call for
Justice in the face of this world is to ask a monster to babysit your
children. Anyone who knows the underside of power immediately ceases to
respect it. Deep down, the masters have always been anarchists. It’s
just that they can’t stand for anyone else to be that. And the bosses
have always had a bandit’s heart. It’s this honorable way of seeing
things that has always inspired lucid workers to practice pilfering,
moonlighting, or even sabotage. One really has to be named Michea to
believe that the proletariat has ever sincerely been moralistic and
legalistic. It’s in their lives, among their own people, that the
proletarians manifest their ethics, not in relation to “society” The
relationship with society and its hypocrisy can only be one of warfare,
whether open or not.
It’s also this line of reasoning that inspired the most determined
fraction of the demonstrators in the conflict of the spring of 2016.
Because one of the most remarkable features of that conflict is the fact
that it took place in the middle of a state of emergency. It’s not by
chance that the organized forces in Paris who contributed to the
formation of the cortège de tête are also those who defied the state of
emergency at the Place de la Republique, during COP21. There are two
ways of taking the state of emergency. One can denounce it verbally and
plead for a return to a “rule of law” which, so far as we can recall,
had always seemed to come at a heavy price in the time before its
“suspension.” But one can also say: “Ah! You do as you please! You
consider yourselves above the laws that you claim to draw your authority
from! Well, us too. Imagine that!” There are those who protest against a
phantom, the state of emergency, and those who duly note it and deploy
their own state of exception in consequence. There where an old
left-wing reflex made us shudder before democracy’s fictitious state of
exception, the conflict of the spring of 2016 preferred to counterpose,
in the streets, its real state of exception, its own presence to the
world, the singular form of its freedom.
The same goes for the world’s fragmentation. One can deplore it and try
to swim back up the river of time, but one can also begin from there and
see how to proceed. It would be simple to contrast a nostalgic,
reactionary, conservative, “right-wing” affect and a “left-wing,”
chaos-inflected, multiculturalist postmodernism. Being on the left or on
the right is to choose among one of the countless ways afforded to
humans to be imbeciles. And in fact, from one end of the political
spectrum to the other, the supporters of unity are evenly distributed.
There are those nostalgic for national greatness everywhere, on the
right and on the left, from Soral to Ruffin. We tend to forget it, but
over a century ago a candidate presented himself to serve as a universal
form of life: the Worker. If he was able to lay claim to that, it was
only after the great number of amputations he required of himself—in
terms of sensibility, attachments, taste or affectivity. And this gave
him a strange appearance. So much so that on seeing him the jury fled
and since then he wanders about without knowing where to go or what to
do, painfully encumbering the world with his obsolete glory. In the time
of his splendor he had all manner of groupies, nationalists or
Bolsheviks even national-Bolsheviks. In our day we’re observing an
explosion of the human figure. “Humanity” as a subject no longer has a
face. On the fringes of an organized impoverishment of subjectivities,
we are witness to the tenacious persistence and the emergence of
singular forms of life, which are tracing their path. It is this scandal
that they wanted to crush, for example, with the jungle of Calais. This
resurgence of forms of life, in our epoch, also results from the
fragmentation of the failed universality of the worker. It realizes the
mourning period for the worker as a figure. A Mexican wake, moreover,
that has nothing sad about it.
To think that, during the conflict of the spring of 2016, we saw
something unthinkable a few years ago, the fragmentation of the General
Confederation of Labor (CGT) itself. While the Marseille CGT used its
tonfas against the “young people”, the Douai-Armentieres CGT, allied
with the “uncontrolled ones,” came to blows with the Lille CGT security
crew, which is more hopelessly Stalinist. The CGT Energie called for
sabotage of the fiber optic cables in Haute-Loire used by the banks and
the telephone operators. During the whole conflict, what happened in Le
Havre bore little resemblance to what was happening elsewhere. The dates
of demonstration, the positions of the local CGT, the caution imposed on
the police: all this was in a sense autonomous from the national scene
as a whole. The CGT in Le Havre passed this motion and called the police
forces and the prefect to advise them of it: “Every time a student is
summoned to police headquarters, it’s not complicated, the port will
shut down!” Le Havre had a happy fragmentation. The frictions between
the “cortège de tête” and the union security personnel led to a
remarkable improvement: the strictly defensive position of many of the
CGT security services from then on. They would cease to play a police
role in the demonstrations, no longer beating on the “autonomists” and
handing the “crazies” over to the cops, but would focus instead solely
on their section of the procession. An appreciable, perhaps long-lasting
shift, who knows? Despite the communique condemning “acts of violence,”
a must after the demonstration against the National Front at Nantes on
February 25, 2017, the CGT 44 had organized for that occasion together
with Zadists and other uncontrollables. It’s one of the fortunate
effects of the spring 2016 conflict, and one that will definitely worry
some people on the side of the government as well as inside the unions.
As something endured, the process of fragmentation of the world can
drive people into misery, isolation, schizophrenia. It can be
experienced as a senseless loss in the lives of human beings. Were
invaded by nostalgia then. Belonging is all that remains for those who
no longer have anything. At the cost of accepting fragmentation as a
starting point, it can also give rise to an intensification and
pluralization of the bonds that constitute us. Then fragmentation
doesn’t signify separation but a shimmering of the world. From the right
distance, it’s rather the process of “integration in society” that’s
revealed to have been a slow attrition of being, a continuous
separation, a slippage toward more and more vulnerability, and a
vulnerability that’s increasingly covered up. The ZAD of
Notre-Dame-des-Landes illustrates what the process of fragmentation of
the territory can signify. For a territorial state as ancient as the
French state, that a portion of ground is torn away from the national
continuum and brought into secession on a lasting basis, amply proves
that the continuum no longer exists as it did in the past. Such a thing
would have been unimaginable under de Gaulle, Clemenceau, or Napoleon.
Back then, they would have sent the infantry to settle the matter. Now,
a police operation is called “Caesar,” and it beats a retreat in the
face of a woodland guerrilla response. The fact that on the outskirts of
the Zone, buses of the National Front could be assaulted on a freeway in
the style of a stage-coach attack, more or less like a police car posted
to a banlieue intersection to surveil a camera that was surveilling
“dealers” got itself torched by a Molotov cocktail, indicates that
things have indeed become a little like the Far West in this country.
The process of fragmentation of the national territory, at
Notre-Dame-des-Landes, far from constituting a detachment from the
world, has only multiplied the most unexpected circulations, some
far-ranging and others occurring close to home. To the point that one
tells oneself the best proof that extraterrestrials don’t exist is that
they haven’t gotten in touch with the ZAD. In its turn, the wresting
away of that piece of land results in its own internal fragmentation,
its fractalization, the multiplication of worlds within it and hence of
the territories that coexist and are superimposed there. New collective
realities, new constructions, new encounters, new thoughts, new customs,
new arrivals in every sense, with the confrontations arising necessarily
from the rubbing-together of worlds and ways of being. And consequently,
a considerable intensification of life, a deepening of perceptions, a
proliferation of friendships, enmities, experiences, horizons, contacts,
distances—and a great strategic finesse. With the endless fragmentation
of the world there is a vertiginous increase in the qualitative
enrichment of life, and a profusion of forms—for someone who thinks
about the promise of communism it contains.
In the fragmentation there is something that points toward what we call
“communism”: it’s the return to earth, the end of any bringing into
equivalence, the restitution of all singularities to themselves, the
defeat of subsumption, of abstraction, the fact that moments, places,
things, beings and animals all acquire a proper name—their proper name.
Every creation is born of a splitting off from the whole. As embryology
shows, each individual is the possibility of a new species as soon as it
appropriates the conditions that immediately surround it. If the Earth
is so rich in natural environments this is due to its complete absence
of uniformity. Realizing the promise of communism contained in the
world’s fragmentation demands a gesture, a gesture to be performed over
and over again, a gesture that is life itself: that of creating pathways
between the fragments, of placing them in contact, of organizing their
encounter, of opening up the roads that lead from one friendly piece of
the world to another without passing through hostile territory, that of
establishing the good art of distances between worlds. It’s true that
the world’s fragmentation disorients and unsettles all the inherited
certainties, that it defies all of our political and existential
categories, that it removes the ground underlying the revolutionary
tradition itself: it challenges us. We recall what Tosquelles explained
to Francis Pain concerning the Spanish Civil War. In that conflict some
were militia, Tosquelles was a psychiatrist. He observed that the mental
patients tended to be few in number because the war, by breaking the
grip of the social lie, was more therapeutic to the psychotics than the
asylum. “Civil war has a connection with the non-homogeneity of the
Self. Every one of us is made up of juxtaposed pieces with paradoxical
unions and disunions inside us. The personality doesn’t consist of a
bloc. If it did, it would be a statue. One has to acknowledge this
paradoxical thing: war doesn’t produce new mental patients. On the
contrary, there are fewer neuroses during war than in civil life, and
there are even psychoses that heal.” Here is the paradox, then: being
constrained to unity undoes us, the lie of social life makes us
psychotic, and embracing fragmentation is what allows us to regain a
serene presence to the world. There is a certain mental position where
this fact ceases to be perceived in a contradictory way. That is where
we place ourselves.
Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of
happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each
one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one
side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on
the other, there is the global power of the merchants of
infrastructure—Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those
who believe that its one or the other will have them both. Because the
great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists
only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old
unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the
contemporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of
politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural
powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world
remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even
the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of
communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the
cracked façades of the old hegemonies a new, purely operational, form of
unity, which doesn’t get bogged down in the ponderous production of an
always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on “the real,”
reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without
pretentions, which aims to build absolute order under absolute
fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new
phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks,
its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone
without any questions being asked. No other unity than the
standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity
than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great
merchants of infrastructure is that there’s no more need to tire oneself
out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will
be integral with the world, incorporated in its networks, poured into
its concrete. Obviously we don’t feel like we belong to a “Google
humanity,” but that’s fine with Google so long as all our data belong to
it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of
“users,” we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it.
To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from
an attempt to reunify the world by the “rulers of tomorrow”:
fragmentation is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an
initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the
world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is
not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives
it its raison d’etre.
The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple,
Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain
without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be “linking up the
entire world,” what they’re actually doing is working toward the real
isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone
cloistered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic
power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the
whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they
have more and more “friends” when they are more and more autistic. The
serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but
people didn’t transport their personal bubble along with them, as they
have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against
any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This
separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in
the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity,
towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement
that already reigns between individuals in this “society” collectivizes
ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggregates. In the face of
all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the
road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether
conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the
world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving
each other.
[]
If politics were only the politics of “politicians,” it would be enough
to turn off the TV and the radio to no longer hear it talked about. But
it so happens that France, which is the “country of human rights” only
for show, is well and truly the country of power. All social relations
in France are power relations—and in this country what has not been
socialized? So that there is politics at every level. In the
associations and in the collectives. In the villages and the
corporations. In the milieus, all the milieus. It’s at work everywhere,
maneuvering, operating, seeking appreciation. It never speaks honestly,
because it is afraid. Politics, in France, is a cultural disease. Any
time people get together, no matter what’s at issue, no matter what the
purpose is and provided it lasts for a while, it takes on the structure
of a little court society, and there is always someone who takes himself
for the Sun King. Those who reproach Foucault with having developed a
rather stifling ontology of power in which goodness, love of one’s
neighbor, and the Christian virtues have a difficult time finding their
place should reproach him rather with having thought in an admirable
way, but perhaps in a way that was a bit too French. France thus remains
a court society, at the summit of the State even in the milieus that
declare its perdition the most radically. As if the Ancien Regime, as a
system of mores, had never died. As if the French Revolution had only
been a perverse stratagem for maintaining the Ancien Regime everywhere,
behind the change of phraseology, and for protecting it from any attack,
since it’s supposed to have been abolished. Those who claim that a local
politics, “closer to the territories and the people,” is what will save
us from the decomposition of national politics, can defend such an
insanity only by holding their noses, because it’s evident that what
they offer is only a less professional, cruder, and, in a word,
degenerate version of what there is. For us, it’s not a matter of “doing
politics differently,” but of doing something different from politics.
Politics makes one empty and greedy.
This national syndrome obviously doesn’t spare the radical militant
milieus. Each little group imagines it is capturing parts of the
radicality market from its closest rivals by slandering them as much as
possible. By lusting after the “pieces of the cake” of others, it ends
up spoiling the cake and smelling of shit. A clear-headed and completely
unresigned militant recently gave this testimony: “Today, I know that
disinterested militancy doesn’t exist. Our upbringing, our schooling,
our family, the social world as a whole rarely make us into well-rounded
and serene personalities. Were full of hurts, existential issues to be
resolved, relational expectations, and it’s with this “inner baggage”
that we enter into a militant life. Through our struggles, we’re all
looking for “something else”, for gratifications, recognition, social
and friendly relations, human warmth, meaning to give to our life. In
most militants this search for gratifications remains rather discreet,
it doesn’t take up all the space. In certain persons, it should be said,
it occupies a disproportionate space. We can all think of examples of
militants constantly monopolizing the talk or trying to control
everything, of others putting on a performance or always playing on
peoples’ feelings, of others who are especially sensitive, very
aggressive or peremptory in the ways they express themselves... These
problems of recognition, gratifications, or power seem to me to explain
single-handedly the majority of conflicts in the radical groups [...] In
my view, many apparently political conflicts mask conflicts of ego and
between persons. That’s my hypothesis. It’s not necessarily correct. But
from my experience, I have the strong feeling that something else is at
play in the meetings, the mobilizations, the radical organizations,
“something else” than the struggle properly speaking, a veritable human
theater with its comedies, its tragedies, its smooth marivaudages, which
often push the political objectives which supposedly brought us together
into the background.” This country is a heartbreaker for sincere souls.
Nuit debout, in Paris, was many things. It was a rallying point and a
starting point for all sorts of incredible actions. It was the site of
wonderful encounters, of informal conversations, of reunions after the
demonstrations. By offering a continuity between the leapfrog
demonstration dates which the union confederations are so fond of, Nuit
debout enabled the conflict triggered by the loi Travail to be something
altogether different, and more, than a classic “social movement.” Nuit
debout made it possible to thwart the mundane governmental operation
consisting in reducing its opponents to powerlessness by setting them at
odds with each other, under the categories of “violent” and
“non-violent.” Although it was rechristened “Place de la Commune,” the
Place de la Republique was not able to deploy the smallest embryo of
what was Commune-like in the squares movement in Spain or in Greece, to
say nothing of Tahrir Square, simply because we didn’t have the strength
to impose a real occupation of the square on the police. But if there
was a fundamental defect of Nuit debout from the start, it was, on the
pretext of going beyond classic politics, the way in which it reproduced
and staged the latter’s principal axiom according to which politics is a
particular sphere, separate from “life,” an activity consisting in
speaking, debating, and voting. With the result that Nuit debout came to
resemble an imaginary parliament, a kind of legislative organ with no
executive function, and hence a manifestation of powerlessness that was
sure to please the media and the governing authorities. One participant
sums up what happened, or rather what didn’t happen, at Nuit debout:
“The only shared position, perhaps, is the desire for an endless
discussion [...] The unsaid and the vague have always been privileged to
the detriment of taking a position, which would be selective by
definition, hence supposedly non-inclusive.” Another offers the
following appraisal: “A succession of speeches limited to two minutes
and never followed by any discussion could not fail to be tiresome. Once
the surprise had worn off at seeing so many people excited about
expressing themselves, the absence of anything at stake started to empty
these meetings of the sense they appeared to have. [...] We were here to
be together, but the rules separated us. We were here to exorcise the
curse of our respective solitudes, but the assemblies gave the curse a
glaring visibility. For me the assembly should be the place where the
collective is experienced, felt, explored, confirmed, and finally, if
only in a punctual way, declared. But for that, it would have been
necessary for real discussions to occur. The problem was that we didn’t
talk to each other, we spoke one after the other. The worst of what we
meant to avert on the Place unfolded there in a general incomprehension:
a collective impotence that mistakes the spectacle of solitudes for the
invention of an active collective [...] A conjuration of blockades
finally got the better of my patience. The key person of our committee,
no doubt without any intentional ill-will on her part, had a special
gift for discouraging with all sorts of logistic and procedural quibbles
every attempt to reintroduce some stakes into the functioning of the
assemblies.” And finally: “Like many others, I sometimes had the
impression that there was a kind of opaque power structure that
furnished the major orientations of the movement [...] [that there was]
another level of decision-making than that of the ordinary assemblies.”
The microbureaucracy that ran Nuit debout in Paris, and that was
literally a bureaucracy of the microphone, was caught in this
uncomfortable situation that it could only roll out its vertical
strategies hidden behind the spectacle of horizontality presented each
day at 6 pm by the sovereign assembly of emptiness that was held there,
with its changing walk-on actors. That is why what was said there
basically didn’t matter much, and least of all to its organizers. Their
ambitions and strategies were deployed elsewhere than on the square, and
in a language whose cynicism could be given free reign only on the
terrace of a hipster cafe, in the last stage of intoxication, between
accomplices. Nuit debout showed in an exemplary way how “direct
democracy,” “collective intelligence,” “horizontality,” and
hyperformalism could function as means of control and a method of
sabotage. This might seem dreadful, but Nuit debout, nearly everywhere
in France, illustrated line by line what was said about the “movement of
the squares” in To Our Friends, and was judged to be so scandalous by
many militants at the moment of its publication. To the point that,
since the summer of 2016, every time an assembly begins to turn in
circles, and nothing is said beyond a rambling succession of leftist
monologues, there’s almost always someone who will shout, “No, please!
Not Nuit debout!” This is the huge credit that must be granted to Nuit
debout: it made the misery of assemblyism not just a theoretical
certainty but a shared experience. But in the fantasy of the assembly
and decision-making there’s clearly something that escapes any argument.
This has to do with the fact that the fantasy is implanted deeply in
life, and not at the surface of “political convictions.” At bottom, the
problem of political decision-making only redoubles and displaces to a
collective scale what is already an illusion in the individual: the
belief that our actions, our thoughts, our gestures, our words, and our
behaviors result from decisions emanating from a central, conscious, and
sovereign entity— the Self. The fantasy of the “sovereignty of the
Assembly” only repeats on the collective plane the sovereignty of the
Self. Knowing all that monarchy owes to the development of the notion of
“sovereignty” leads us to wonder if the myth of the Self is not simply
the theory of the subject that royalty imposed wherever it prevailed in
practice. Indeed, for the king to be able to rule from his throne in the
middle of the country, the Self must be enthroned in the middle of the
world. One understands better, therefore, where the unbelievable
narcissism of the general assemblies of Nuit debout comes from. It’s the
thing, moreover, that ended up killing them, by making them the site, in
speech after speech, of repeated outbursts of individual narcissism,
which is to say, outbursts of powerlessness.
From “terrorist” attacks to the Germanwings crash, people have forgotten
that the first French “mass killer” of the new century, Richard Durn, at
Nanterre in 2002, was a man literally disgusted with politics. He had
passed through the Socialist Party before joining The Greens. He was an
activist with the Human Rights League (Ligue des droits d’homme). He had
made the Genoa “alter-globalization” switch in July of 2001. In the end,
he had taken a Glock and, on March 27, 2002, opened fire on the
municipal council of Nanterre, killing eight elected officials and
wounding nineteen others. In his private journal he wrote: “I’m tired of
always having in my head this sentence that keeps repeating: ‘I haven’t
lived, I haven’t lived at all at the age of 30.’ [...] Why continue
pretending to live? I can only feel myself living for a few moments by
killing.” Dylan Klebold, one of the two conspirators of Columbine High
School confided to his notebooks: “The meek are trampled on, the
assholes prevail, the gods are deceiving [...] Farther and farther
distant...That’s what’s happening...me and everything that zombies
consider real…just images, not life. [...] The zombies and their society
band together and try to destroy what is superior and what they don’t
understand and what they are afraid of.” There you have some people who
clearly took revenge instead of continuing to stew in their resentment.
They dealt death and destruction because they didn’t see life anywhere.
A point has been reached where it’s become impossible to maintain that
the existential pertains to private life. Every new attack reminds us:
the existential has a power of political eruption.
This is the big lie, and the great disaster of politics: to place
politics on one side and life on the other, on one side what is said but
isn’t real and on the other what is lived but no longer can be said.
There are the speeches of the prime minister and, for a century now, the
barbed satire of the Canard enchaine. There are the tirades of the great
militant and there’s the way he treats his fellow human beings, with
whom he allows himself to conduct himself all the more miserably as he
takes himself to be politically irreproachable. There’s the sphere of
the sayable and the voiceless, orphaned, mutilated life. And that takes
to crying out because it no longer serves any purpose to speak. Hell is
really the place where all speech is rendered meaningless. What is
called “debate” nowadays is just the civilized murder of speech.
Official politics has become so manifestly a repugnant sphere of
deception that the only events still happening in that sphere reduce
down to a paradoxical expression of hatred of politics. If Donald Trump
is truly a figure of hatred it’s because he is first and foremost a
figure of the hatred of politics. And it’s this hatred that carried him
to power. Politics in its totality is what plays into the hands of the
National Front, and not the “casseurs” or the banlieue rioters.
What the media, the card-carrying militants, and the governments cannot
forgive the so-called “casseurs” and other “black blocs” is: 1. proving
that powerlessness is not a destiny, which constitutes a galling insult
for all those who are content to grumble and who prefer to see the
rioters, contrary to any evidence, as infiltrated agents “paid by the
banks to aid the government”; 2. showing that one can act politically
without doing politics, at any point in life and at the price of a
little courage. What the “casseurs” demonstrate by their actions is that
acting politically is not a question of discourse but of gestures, and
they attest this down to the words they spray paint on the walls of the
cities.
“Politique” should never have become a noun. It should have remained an
adjective. An attribute, and not a substance. There are conflicts, there
are encounters, there are actions, there are speech interventions that
are “political,” because they make a decisive stand against something in
a given situation, and because they express an affirmation concerning
the world they desire. Political is that which bursts forth, which forms
an event, which punches a hole in the orderly progression of the
disaster. That which provokes polarization, drawing a line, choosing
sides. But there’s no such thing as “politics.” There’s no specific
domain that would gather up all these events, all these eruptions,
independently of the place and moment in which they appear. There’s no
particular sphere where it would be a question of the affairs of
everyone. There’s no sphere separate from what is general. It suffices
to formulate the matter to expose the fraud. Everything is political
that relates to the encounter, the friction, or the conflict between
forms of life, between regimes of perception, between sensibilities,
between worlds once this contact attains a certain threshold of
intensity. The crossing of this threshold is signaled immediately by its
effects: frontlines are drawn, friendships and enmities are affirmed,
cracks appear in the uniform surface of the social, there is a splitting
apart of what was falsely joined together and subsurface communications
between the different resulting fragments.
What occurred in the spring of 2016 in France was not a social movement
but a political conflict, in the same way as 1968. This is shown by its
effects, by the irreversibilities that it produced, by the lives that it
caused to take a different path, by the desertions it determined, by the
shared sensibility that is being affirmed since then in a part of the
youth, and beyond. A generation could very well become ungovernable.
These effects are making themselves felt even in the ranks of the
Socialist Party, in the split between the fractions that polarized at
that time, in the fissure that condemns it to eventual implosion. Social
movements have a structure, a liturgy, a protocol that define as
excessive everything that escapes their bounds. Now, not only did this
conflict not cease to outstrip all the constraints, whether political,
union, or police in nature, but it was basically nothing but an
uninterrupted series of surges. An uninterrupted series of surges, which
the old worn-out forms of politics tried hopelessly to catch up with.
The first call to demonstrate on March 9, 2016 was a bypassing of the
unions by YouTubers, where the former had no choice but to follow the
latter if they meant to preserve some reason for being. The subsequent
demonstrations saw a continual overrunning of the processions by “young
people” who positioned themselves in the lead. The Nuit debout
initiative itself went beyond any recognized framework for mobilization.
The free marches starting from the Place de la Republique, such as the
“aperitif at [Prime Minister] Valls’ house,” were a spillover from Nuit
debout in their turn. And so on. The only “movement demand”—the repeal
of the loi Travail—was not really one, since it left no room for any
adjustment, for any “dialogue.” With its entirely negative character, it
only signified the refusal to continue being governed in this manner,
and for some the refusal to be governed period. No one here, neither
from the government nor among the demonstrators, was open to the least
negotiation. Back in the days of the dialectic and the social, conflict
was always a moment of the dialogue. But here the semblances of dialogue
were simply maneuvers: for the state bureaucracy and the union
bureaucracy alike, it was a matter of marginalizing the party that was
eternally absent from all the negotiating tables—the party of the
street, which this time was the whole enchilada. It was a frontal shock
between two forces—government against demonstrators—between two worlds
and two ideas of the world: a world of profiteers, presided over by a
few profiteers in chief, and a world made up of many worlds, where one
can breathe and dance and live. Right at the outset, the slogan “the
world or nothing” expressed what was at issue in reality: the loi
Travail never formed the terrain of struggle, but rather its detonator.
There could never be any final reconciliation. There could only be a
provisional winner, and a loser bent on revenge.
What is revealed in every political eruption is the irreducible human
plurality, the unsinkable heterogeneity of ways of being and doing—the
impossibility of the slightest totalization. For every civilization
motivated by the drive toward the One, this will always be a scandal.
There are no strictly political words or language. There is only a
political use of language in situation, in the face of a determinate
adversity. That a rock is thrown at a riot cop does not make it a
“political rock.” Nor are there any political entities—such as France, a
party, or a man. What is political about them is the inner
conflictuality that troubles them, it’s the tension between the
antagonistic components that constitutes them, at the moment when the
beautiful image of their unity breaks into pieces. We need to abandon
the idea that there is politics only where there is vision, program,
project, and perspective, where there is a goal, decisions to be made,
and problems to be solved. What is truly political is only what emerges
from life and makes it a definite, oriented reality. And it is born from
what is nearby and not from a projection toward the far-distant. The
nearby doesn’t mean the restricted, the limited, the narrow, the local.
It means rather what is in tune, vibrant, adequate, present, sensible,
luminous, and familiar—the prehensible and comprehensible. It’s not a
spatial notion but an ethical one. Geographic distance is unable to
remove us from that which we feel to be near. Conversely, being
neighbors doesn’t always make us close. It’s only from contact that the
friend and the enemy are discovered. A political situation does not
result from a decision but from the shock or the meeting between several
decisions. Whoever starts from the nearby doesn’t forgo what is distant,
they simply give themselves a chance to get there. For it’s always from
the here and now that the far away is given. It’s always here that the
distant touches us and that we care about it. And this holds true in
spite of the estrangement power of images, cybernetics, and the social.
A real political force can be constructed only from near to near and
from moment to moment, and not through a mere statement of purposes.
Besides, determining ends is still a means. One uses means only in a
situation. Even a marathon is always run step by step. This way of
situating what is political in the nearby, which is not the domestic, is
the most precious contribution of a certain autonomous feminism. In its
time, it threw the ideology of entire leftist parties, armed ones, into
a crisis. The fact that feminists subsequently contributed to
re-distancing the nearby, the “everyday,” by ideologizing it, by
politicizing it externally, discursively, constitutes the part of the
feminist legacy that one can very well decline to accept. And to be
sure, everything in this world is designed to distract us from what is
there, very close. The “everyday” is predisposed to be the place which a
certain stiffness would like to preserve from conflicts and affects that
are too intense. It’s precisely that very cowardice that lets everything
slide and ends up making the everyday so sticky and our relations so
viscous. If we were more serene, more sure of ourselves, if we had less
fear of conflict and of the disruption an encounter might bring, their
consequences would likely be less disagreeable. And perhaps not
disagreeable at all.
[]
Even though 80% of French people declared that they no longer expect
anything from the politicians, the same 80% have confidence in the state
and its institutions. No scandal, no evidence, no personal experience
manages to make a dent in the respect owed to the institutional
framework in this country. It’s always the men who embody it who are to
blame. There have been blunders, abuses, extraordinary breakdowns. The
institutions, similar to ideology in this respect, are sheltered from
the contradiction of facts, however recurrent. It was enough for the
National Front to promise to restore the institutions to become
reassuring instead of troubling. There’s nothing surprising in that. The
real has something intrinsically chaotic about it that humans need to
stabilize by imposing a legibility, and thereby a foreseeability, on it.
And what every institution provides is precisely a stationary legibility
of the real, an ultimate stabilization of phenomena. If the institution
suits us so well, it’s because the sort of legibility it guarantees
saves us above all, each one of us, from affirming anything whatsoever,
from risking our singular reading of life and of things, from producing
together an intelligibility of the world that is properly ours and
shared in common. The problem is that choosing not to do that is the
same as choosing not to exist. It’s to resign from life. In reality,
what we need are not institutions but forms. It so happens, in fact,
that life, whether biological, singular or collective, is precisely a
continual creation of forms. It suffices to perceive them, to accept
allowing them to arise, to make a place for them and accompany their
metamorphosis. A habit is a form. A thought is a form. A friendship is a
form. A work is a form. A profession is a form. Everything that lives is
only forms and interactions of forms.
Except that, voila, we are in France, the country where even the
Revolution has become an institution, and which has exported that
ambivalence to the four corners of the world. There is a specifically
French love of the institution that must be dealt with if we wish to
talk again about revolution one day, if not make one. Here the most
libertarian of the psychotherapies has seen fit to label itself
“institutional,” the most critical of the sociologies has given itself
the name “institutional analysis.” If the principle comes to us from
ancient Rome, the affect that accompanies it is clearly Christian in
origin. The French passion for the institution is a flagrant symptom of
the lasting Christian impregnation of a country that believes itself to
be delivered from that. All the more lasting, moreover, as it believes
itself to be delivered. We should never forget that the first modern
thinker of the institution was that lunatic Calvin, that model of all
the despisers of life, and that he was born in Picardy. The French
passion for the institution comes from a properly Christian distrust
towards life. The great malice of the institution idea is in its
claiming to free us from the rule of the passions, from the
uncontrollable hazards of existence, that it would be a transcendence of
the passions when it is actually just one of them, and assuredly one of
the most morbid. The institution claims to be a remedy against men, none
of whom can be trusted, whether the people or the leader, the neighbor
or the brother or the stranger. What governs it is always the same
idiocy of sinful humanity, subject to desire, selfishness, and lust, and
who must keep from loving anything whatsoever in this world and from
giving in to their inclinations, which are all uniformly vicious. It’s
not his fault if an economist like Frederic Lordon can’t picture a
revolution that is not a new institution. Because all economic science,
and not just its “institutional” current, has its basis finally in the
lessons of Saint Augustine. Through its name and its language, what the
institution promises is that a single thing, in this lower world, will
have transcended time, will have withdrawn itself from the unpredictable
flux of becoming, will have established a bit of tangible eternity, an
unequivocal meaning, free of human ties and situations—a definitive
stabilization of the real, like death.
This whole mirage dissolves when a revolution breaks out. Suddenly what
seemed eternal collapses into time as though into a bottomless pit. What
seemed to plunge its roots into the human heart turns out to have been
nothing but a fable for dupes. The palaces are vacated and one discovers
in the prince’s abandoned jumble of papers that he no longer believed in
it all, if he ever had. For behind the façade of the institution, what
goes on is always something other than it claims to be, its precisely
what the institution claimed to have delivered the world from: the very
human comedy of the coexistence of networks, of loyalties, of clans,
interests, lineages, dynasties even, a logic of fierce struggles for
territories, resources, miserable titles, influence— stories of sexual
conquest and pure folly, of old friendships and rekindled hatreds. Every
institution is, in its very regularity, the result of an intense
bricolage and, as an institution, of a denial of that bricolage. It’s
supposed fixity masks a gluttonous appetite for absorbing, controlling,
institutionalizing everything that’s on its margins and harbors a bit of
life. The real model of every institution is universally the Church.
Just as the Church clearly does not have as its goal leading the human
flock to its divine salvation, but rather achieving its own salvation in
time, the alleged function of an institution is only a pretext for its
existence. In every institution the Legend of the Grand Inquisitor is
re-enacted year after year. Its true purpose is to persist. No need to
specify how many souls and bodies must be ground down in order to secure
this result, and even within its own hierarchy. One doesn’t become a
leader without being basically the most ground down—the king of the
ground-down. Reducing delinquency and “defending society” are only the
pretext of the carceral institution. If, during the centuries it has
existed, it has never succeeded at these things—on the contrary—this is
because its purpose is different; it is to go on existing and growing if
possible, which means tending to the breeding ground of delinquency and
managing the illegalities. The purpose of the medical institution is not
to care for people’s health, but to produce the patients that justify
its existence and a corresponding definition of health. Nothing new on
this subject since Ivan Illich and his Medical Nemesis. It’s not the
failure of the health institutions that we are now living in a world
that is toxic through and through and that makes everyone sick. On the
contrary, we’ve seen their triumph. Quite often, the apparent failure of
the institutions is their real function. If school discourages children
from learning, this is not fortuitously: it’s because children with a
desire to learn would make school next to useless. The same goes for the
unions, whose purpose is manifestly not the emancipation of workers, but
rather the perpetuation of their condition. What could the bureaucrats
of the labor unions do with their life, in fact, if the workers had the
bad idea of actually freeing themselves? Of course in every institution
there are sincere people who really think they are there to accomplish
their mission. But it’s no accident if those people see themselves
systematically obstructed, are systematically kept out of the loop,
punished, bullied, eventually ostracized, with the complicity of all the
“realists” who keep their mouths shut. These choice victims of the
institution have a hard time understanding its double talk, and what is
really being asked of them. Their fate is to always be treated there as
killjoys, as rebels, and to be endlessly surprised by that.
Against the slightest revolutionary possibility in France, one will
always find the institution of the Self and the Self of the institution.
Inasmuch as “being someone” always comes down finally to the recognition
of, the allegiance to, some institution, inasmuch as succeeding involves
conforming to the reflection that you’re shown in the hall of mirrors of
the social game, the institution has a grip on everyone through the
Self. All this couldn’t last, would be too rigid, not dynamic enough, if
the institution wasn’t determined to compensate for its rigidity by a
constant attention to the movements that jostle it. There’s a perverse
dialectic between institution and movements, which testifies to the
former’s relentless survival instinct. A reality as ancient, massive,
and hieratic as that, inscribed in the bodies and minds of its subjects
for the hundreds of years the French state has existed, could not have
lasted so long if it had not been able to tolerate, monitor, and
recuperate critics and revolutionaries as they presented themselves. The
carnivalesque ritual of social movements function within it as a safety
valve, as a tool for managing the social as well as for renewing the
institution. They bring it the flexibility, the young flesh, the new
blood that it so cruelly lacks. Generation after generation, in its
great wisdom, the state has been able to coopt those who showed
themselves amenable to being bought off, and crush those who acted
intransigent. It’s not for nothing that so many leaders of student
movements have so naturally advanced to ministerial posts, being people
who are sure to have a feel for the state, that is, an appreciation of
the institution as mask.
Breaking the circle that turns our contestation into a fuel for what
dominates us, marking a rupture in the fatality that condemns
revolutions to reproduce what they have driven out, shattering the iron
cage of counter-revolution—this is the purpose of destitution. The
notion of destitution is necessary in order to free the revolutionary
imaginary of all the old constituent fantasies that weigh it down, of
the whole deceptive legacy of the French Revolution. It is necessary to
intervene in revolutionary logic, in order to establish a division
within the idea of insurrection. For there are constituent
insurrections, those that end like all the revolutions up to now have
ended: by turning back into their opposite, those that have been made
“in the name of ”—in the name of whom or what? the people, the working
class, or God, it matters little. And there are destituent
insurrections, such as May ‘68, the Italian creeping May and so many
insurrectionary communes. Despite all that it may have manifested that
was cool, lively, unexpected, Nuit debout—like the Spanish movement of
the squares or Occupy Wall Street previously—was troubled by the old
constituent itch. What was staged spontaneously was the old
revolutionary dialectic that would oppose the “constituted powers” with
the “constituent power” of the people taking over the public space.
There’s a good reason that in the first three weeks of Nuit debout,
Place de la Republique, no fewer than three committees appeared that
gave themselves the mission of rewriting a Constitution. What was
re-enacted there was the old debate that’s been performed to a full
house in France since 1792. And it seems there’s no getting enough of
it. It’s a national sport. There’s not even any need to spruce up the
decor to please today’s taste. It must be said that the idea of
constitutional reform presents the advantage of satisfying both the
desire to change everything and the desire that everything stay the
same—it’s just a matter, finally, of changing a few lines, of symbolic
modifications. As long as one debates words, as long as revolution is
formulated in the language of rights and the law, the ways of
neutralizing it are well-known and marked out.
When sincere Marxists proclaim in a union leaflet, “We are the real
power!” it’s still the same constituent fiction that is operating, and
that distances us from strategic thinking. The revolutionary aura of
this old logic is such that in its name the worst mystifications manage
to pose as self-evident truths. “To speak of constituent power is to
speak of democracy.” It’s with this risible lie that Toni Negri begins
his book on the subject, and he’s not the only one to trumpet these
kinds of inanities that defy good sense. It’s enough to have opened the
pages of Constitutional Theory by Carl Schmitt, who can’t exactly be
counted among the good friends of democracy, to realize the contrary.
The fiction of constituent power suits monarchy as well as it suits
dictatorship. Doesn’t that pretty presidential slogan, “in the name of
the people,” say anything to anybody? It’s regrettable to have to point
out that Abbe Sieyes, inventor of the disastrous distinction between
constituent power and constituted power, that brilliant sleight of hand,
was never a democrat. This is what he said in his famous speech of
September 7, 1789: “The citizens who appoint representatives refrain and
must refrain from making the law themselves: they do not have any
particular will to impose. If they dictated wills, France would no
longer be this representative state; it would be a democratic state. The
people, I repeat, in a country that is not a democracy (and France
cannot be one), the people cannot speak, cannot act, except through its
representatives.” If to speak of “constituent power” is not necessarily
to speak of “democracy,” both these notions do, however, always lead
revolutions into a cul-de-sac.
Destituere in Latin means: to place standing separate, raise up in
isolation; to abandon; put aside, let drop, knock down; to let down,
deceive. Whereas constituent logic crashes against the power apparatus
it means to take control of, a destituent potential is concerned instead
with escaping from it, with removing any hold on it which the apparatus
might have, as it increases its hold on the world in the separate space
that it forms. Its characteristic gesture is exiting, just as the
typical constituent gesture is taking by storm. In terms of a destituent
logic, the struggle against state and capital is valuable first of all
for the exit from capitalist normality that is experienced therein, for
the desertion from the shitty relations with oneself, others, and the
world under capitalism. Thus, where the “constituents” place themselves
in a dialectical relation of struggle with the ruling authority in order
to take possession of it, destituent logic obeys the vital need to
disengage from it. It doesn’t abandon the struggle; it fastens on to the
struggles positivity. It doesn’t adjust itself to the movements of the
adversary but to what is required for the increase of its own potential.
So it has little use for criticizing: “The choice is either to get out
without delay, without wasting one’s time criticizing, simply because
one is placed elsewhere than in the region of the adversary, or else one
criticizes, one keeps one foot in it, and has the other one outside. We
need to leap outside and dance above it,” as Jean-Francois Lyotard
explained, by way of recognizing the gesture of Deleuze and Guattari’s
Anti-Oedipus. And Deleuze made this remark: “Roughly speaking, one
recognizes a Marxist by their saying that a society contradicts itself,
is defined by its contradictions, especially its class contradictions.
We say rather is that in a society everything is escaping, that a
society is defined by its lines of escape [...] Escape, but while
escaping look for a weapon.” It’s not a question of fighting for
communism. What matters is the communism that is lived in the fight
itself. The true richness of an action lies within itself. This doesn’t
mean that for us there’s no question of the observable effectiveness of
an action. It means that the impact potential of an action doesn’t
reside in its effects, but in what is immediately expressed in it. What
is constructed on the basis of effort always ends up collapsing from
exhaustion. Typically, the operation that the cortege de tete causes the
processional setup of union demonstrations to undergo is an operation of
destitution. With the vital joy it expressed, the rightness of its
gesture, its determination, with its affirmative as well as offensive
character, the cortege de tete drew in all that was still lively in the
militant ranks and it destituted demonstrations as an institution. Not
with a critique of the rest of the march but something other than a
symbolic use of capturing the street. Withdrawing from the institutions
is anything but leaving a void, it’s suppressing them in a positive way.
To destitute is not primarily to attack the institution, but to attack
the need we have of it. It’s not to criticize it—the first critics of
the state are the civil servants themselves; as to the militant, the
more they criticize power the more they desire it and the more they
refuse to acknowledge their desire—but to take to heart what the
institution is meant to do, from outside it. To destitute the university
is to establish, at a distance, the places of research, of education and
thought, that are more vibrant and more demanding than it is—which would
not be hard—and to greet the arrival of the last vigorous minds who are
tired of frequenting the academic zombies, and only then to administer
its death blow. To destitute the judicial system is to learn to settle
our disputes ourselves, applying some method to this, paralyzing its
faculty of judgment and driving its henchmen from our lives. To
destitute medicine is to know what is good for us and what makes us
sick, to rescue from the institution the passionate knowledges that
survive there out of view, and never again to find oneself alone at the
hospital, with one’s body handed over to the artistic sovereignty of a
disdainful surgeon. To destitute the government is to make ourselves
ungovernable. Who said anything about winning? Overcoming is everything.
The destituent gesture does not oppose the institution. It doesn’t even
mount a frontal fight, it neutralizes it, empties it of its substance,
then steps to the side and watches it expire. It reduces it down to the
incoherent ensemble of its practices and makes decisions about them. A
good example of this is the way in which the party then in power, the
Socialist Party, was led in the summer of 2016 to cancel its universite
annuelle, the party’s summer school in Nantes. What was constituted in
June within the assembly called “Attack” [A l’abordage] did something
the cortege de tete couldn’t do during the whole spring conflict: it got
the heterogeneous components of the struggle to meet and organize
together beyond a movement time frame. Unionists, Nuit-deboutists,
university students, Zadists, high school students, retirees, community
volunteers, and other artists began to put together a well-deserved
welcoming committee for the Socialist Party. For the government, the
risks were great that the little destituent potential that had spoiled
life for it throughout the spring would be reborn at a higher degree of
organization. The convergent efforts of the confederations, the police,
and the vacations to bury the conflict would have all been for nothing.
So the Socialist Party withdrew and abandoned the idea of doing battle
faced with the threat posed by the very positivity of the bonds formed
in the “Attack!” assembly and the determination emanating from them. In
exactly the same way, it’s the potential of the connections that are
formed around the ZAD that protects it, and not its military strength.
The finest destituent victories are often those where the battle simply
never takes place.
Fernand Deligny said: “In order to fight against language and the
institution, the right phrase is perhaps not to fight against, but to
take the most distance possible, even if this means signaling one’s
position. Why would we go and press ourselves against the wall? Our
project is not to take and hold the square.” Deligny was clearly being
what Toni Negri cannot abide, “a destituent.” But observing what happens
when a constituent logic of combining social movements with a party
aiming to take power, it does look like destitution is the way to go.
Thus we saw, in the last few years, Syriza, that political party
“issuing from the movement of the squares,” becoming the best relay for
the austerity policies of the European Union. As for Podemos, everyone
no doubt can appreciate the radical novelty of the quarrels for its
control, which pitted its number 1 against its number 2. And how could
one forget the touching speech of Pablo Iglesias during the legislative
campaign of June 2016: “We are the political force of law and order
[...] We are proud of saying our country. [...] Because our country has
institutions that enable children to go to the theater and to school.
That is why we are defenders of the institutions, defenders of the law,
because the poor only have the law and their rights.” Or this
instructive tirade of March 2015, in Andalusia: “I’d like to pay a
tribute: long live our democratic servicemen! Long live the Guardia
Civil, those policemen who put handcuffs on the corrupt.” The latest
deplorable political intrigues that now make up the life of Podemos
moved certain of its members to make this bitter observation: “They
wanted to take power, and it is power that has taken them.” As for the
“citizens’ movements” that decided to “squat power” by taking possession
of the Barcelona mayor’s office, they’ve confided to their former
friends of the squats something they still can’t declare in public: by
gaining access to the institutions, they were indeed able to “take
power,” but there was nothing they could do with it from there, apart
from scuttling a few hotel projects, legalizing one or two occupations
and receiving with great ceremony Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris.
Destitution makes it possible to rethink what we mean by revolution. The
traditional revolutionary program involved a reclaiming of the world, an
expropriation of the expropriators, a violent appropriation of that
which is ours, but which we have been deprived of. But here’s the
problem: capital has taken hold of every detail and every dimension of
existence. It has created a world in its image. From being an
exploitation of the existing forms of life, it has transformed itself
into a total universe. It has configured, equipped, and made desirable
the ways of speaking, thinking, eating, working and vacationing, of
obeying and rebelling, that suit its purpose. In doing so, it has
reduced to very little the share of things in this world that one might
want to reappropriate. Who would wish to reappropriate nuclear power
plants, Amazons warehouses, the expressways, ad agencies, high-speed
trains, Dassault, La Defense business complex, auditing firms,
nanotechnologies, supermarkets and their poisonous merchandise? Who
imagines a people’s takeover of industrial farming operations where a
single man plows 400 hectares of eroded ground at the wheel of his
megatractor piloted via satellite? No one with any sense. What
complicates the task for revolutionaries is that the old constituent
gesture no longer works there either. With the result that the most
desperate, the most determined to save it, have finally found the
winning formula: in order to have done with capitalism, all we have to
do is reappropriate money itself ! A Negriist deduces this from the
spring of 2016 conflict: “Our goal is the following: transformation of
the rivers of command money that flow from the faucets of the European
Central Bank into money as money, into unconditional social income!
Bring the fiscal paradises back down to Earth, attack the citadels of
offshore finance, confiscate the deposits of liquid returns, secure
everyone’s access to the world of commodities—the world in which we
really live, whether that pleases us or not. The only universalism that
people love is that of money! Let anyone wishing to take power begin by
taking the money! Let anyone wishing to institute the commons of
counter-power begin by securing the material conditions on the basis of
which those counter-powers can actually be constructed! Let anyone
preferring the destituent exodus consider the objective possibilities of
a withdrawal from the production of the dominant social relations that
are inherent in the possession of money! Let anyone in favor of a
general and renewable strike reflect at the margins of the wage autonomy
granted by a socialization of income worthy of that name! Let anyone
wishing for an insurrection of the subalterns not forget the powerful
promise of liberation contained in the slogan “Let’s take the money!’” A
revolutionary who cares about their mental health will want to leave
constituent logic and its rivers of imaginary money behind them.
So the revolutionary gesture no longer consists in a simple violent
appropriation of this world; it divides into two. On the one hand, there
are worlds to be made, forms of life made to grow apart from what
reigns, including by salvaging what can be salvaged from the present
state of things, and on the other, there is the imperative to attack, to
simply destroy the world of capital. A two-pronged gesture that divides
again: it’s clear that the worlds one constructs can maintain their
apartness from capital only together with the fact of attacking it and
conspiring against it. It’s clear that attacks not inspired by a
different heartfelt idea of the world would have no real reach, would
exhaust themselves in a sterile activism. In destruction the complicity
is constructed on the basis of which the sense of destroying is
constructed. And vice versa. It’s only from the destituent standpoint
that one can grasp all that is incredibly constructive in the breakage.
Without that, one would not understand how a whole segment of a union
demonstration can applaud and chant when the window of a car dealership
finally gives way and falls to the ground or when a piece of urban
furniture is smashed to pieces. Nor that it seems so natural for a
cortege de tete of 10,000 persons to break everything deserving to be
broken, and even a bit more, along the whole route of a demonstration
such as that of June 14, 2016 in Paris. Nor that all the anti-smashers
rhetoric of the government apparatus, so well-established and normally
so effective, lost its traction and was no longer convincing to anyone.
Breaking is understandable, among other things, as an open debate in
public on the question of property. The bad-faith reproach “they always
break what is not theirs” needs to be turned back around. How can you
break something unless, at the moment of breaking it, the thing is in
your hands, is in a sense yours? Recall the Civil Code: “As regards
furniture, possession can be taken as ownership.” In effect, someone who
breaks doesn’t engage in an act of negation, but in a paradoxical,
counterintuitive affirmation. They affirm, against all appearances:
“This is ours!” Breaking, therefore, is affirmation, is appropriation.
It discloses the problematic character of the property regime that now
governs all things. Or at least it opens the debate on this thorny
point. And there is scarcely a different way to begin it than this, so
prone it is to close back down as soon as it is opened in a peaceful
manner. Everyone will have noted, moreover, how the conflict of the
spring of 2016 served as a divine lull in the deterioration of public
debate.
Only an affirmation has the potential for accomplishing the work of
destruction. The destituent gesture is thus desertion and attack,
creation and wrecking, and all at once, in the same gesture. It defies
the accepted logics of alternativism and activism at the same time. It
forms a linkage between the extended time of construction and the
spasmodic time of intervention, between the disposition to enjoy our
piece of the world and the disposition to place it at stake. Along with
the taste for risk-taking, the reasons for living disappear.
Comfort—which clouds perceptions, takes pleasure in repeating words that
it empties of any meaning, and prefers not to know anything—is the real
enemy, the enemy within. Here it is not a question of a new social
contract, but of a new strategic composition of worlds.
Communism is the real movement that destitutes the existing state of
things.
[]
During the conflict triggered by the loi Travail, it seemed to be a
question of government, of democracy, of article 49.3 of the
constitution, of violence, migrants, terrorism, of whatever one prefers.
But a question of work itself ? Almost not at all. By comparison, in
1998, during the “movement of the unemployed,” it had paradoxically only
been a question of that, of work, even if it came down to refusing it.
Not so long ago, when one met someone it was still natural to ask: “So
what do you do in life?” And the answer came just as naturally. One
still managed to say what position one held in the general organization
of production. That could even serve as a calling card. In the time
since, the wage-earning society has imploded to such an extent that one
avoids questions of this sort, which tend to make people uneasy.
Everyone patches things together, gets by, branches off, takes a break,
starts up again. Work has lost its luster and its centrality, not just
socially but existentially as well.
From generation to generation, a larger and larger number of us are
supernumerary, “useless to the world”—in any case, to the economic
world. Seeing that for sixty years there have been people like Norbert
Wiener who prophesized that automation and cybernatization “will produce
an unemployment compared to which the current difficulties and the
economic crisis of the years 1930–36 will look like child’s play,” it
eventually had to come to pass. The latest word is that Amazon is
planning to open, in the United States, 2000 completely automated
convenience stores with no cash registers hence no cashiers and under
total monitoring, with facial recognition of the customers and real-time
analysis of their gestures. Upon entering you make your smartphone beep
at a terminal and then you serve yourself. What you take is
automatically debited from your Premium account, thanks to an app, and
what you put back on the shelf is re-credited. It’s called Amazon Go. In
this shopping dystopia of the future there is no more cash money, no
more standing in line, no more theft, and almost no more employees. It’s
predicted that this new model, if implemented, will turn the whole
business of distribution, the greatest provider of jobs in the U.S.,
upside down. Eventually, three quarters of the jobs would disappear in
the sector of convenience stores. More generally, if one limits oneself
to the forecasts of the World Bank, by about 2030, under the pressure of
“innovation,” 40% of the existing jobs in the wealthy countries will
have vanished. “We will never work,” was a piece of bravado by Rimbaud.
It’s about to become the lucid assessment of a whole generation of young
people.
From the extreme left to the extreme right, there’s no lack of
bullshitters who endlessly promise us a “return to full employment.”
Those who would have us regret the golden age of the classic wage
system, whether they are Marxists or liberals, are not averse to lying
about its origin. They claim that the wage system freed us from serfdom,
from slavery, and from the traditional structures—in sum, that it
constituted a “progress.” Any somewhat serious historical study will
show on the contrary that it came into being as an extension and
intensification of prior servitude. The truth is that making a man into
the “possessor of his labor power” and making him disposed to “sell it,”
that is, bringing the figure of the Worker into everyday life and
customs, was something that required a considerable quantity of
spoliations, expulsions, plunderings, and devastations, a great deal of
terror, disciplinary measures, and deaths. One hasn’t understood
anything about the political character of the economy until they’ve seen
that what it hinges on as far as labor is concerned is not so much
producing commodities as it is producing workers—which is to say, a
certain relationship with oneself, with the world, and with others.
Waged labor was the form by which a certain order was maintained. The
fundamental violence it contains, the violence that is obscured by the
broken-down body of the assembly-line worker, the miner killed in a
methane explosion, or the burnout of employees under extreme managerial
pressure, has to do with the meaning of life. By selling their time, by
turning themselves into the subject of the thing they’re employed to do,
the wage worker places the meaning of their existence in the hands of
those who care nothing about them, indeed whose purpose is to ride
roughshod over them. The wage system has enabled generations of men and
women to live while evading the question of life’s meaning, by “making
themselves useful,” by “making a career,” by “serving.” The wage worker
has always been free to postpone this question till later—till
retirement, let’s say—while leading an honorable social life. And since
it is apparently “too late” to raise it once retired, all that’s left to
do is to wait patiently for death. We will thus have been able to spend
an entire life without entering into existence. There is a good reason
why Munch’s painting, The Scream, portrays, still today, the true face
of contemporary humanity. What this desperate individual on their jetty
doesn’t find is an answer to the question, “How am I to live?”
For capital, the disintegration of wage-earning society is both an
opportunity for reorganization and a political risk. The risk is that
humans might devise an unforeseen use of their time and their life, that
they might even take to heart the question of its meaning. Those in
charge have even made sure, therefore, that we humans having the leisure
are not at liberty to make use of it as we please. It’s as if we needed
to work more as consumers in proportion as we work less as producers. As
if consumption no longer signified a satisfaction, but rather a social
obligation. Moreover, the technological equipment of leisure
increasingly resembles that of labor. While in our fooling around on the
Internet all our clicks produce the data that the GAFA resell, work is
tricked out with all the enticements of gaming by introducing scores,
levels, bonuses and other infantilizing caveats. Instead of seeing the
current security push and the orgy of surveillance as a response to the
September 11 attacks, it would not be unreasonable to see them as a
response to the economically established fact that it was precisely in
2000 that technological innovation started to decrease the volume of job
offerings. It’s now necessary to be able to monitor en masse all our
activities, all our communications, all our gestures, to place cameras
and sensors everywhere, because wage-earning discipline no longer
suffices for controlling the population. It’s only to a population
totally under control that one can dream of offering a universal basic
income.
But that’s not the main thing. It’s necessary above all to maintain the
reign of the economy beyond the extinction of the wage system. This has
to do with the fact that if there is less and less work, everything is
all the more mediated by money, be it in very small amounts. Given the
absence of work, the need to earn money in order to survive must be
maintained. Even if a universal basic income is established one day, as
so many liberal economists recommend, its amount would need to be large
enough to keep a person from dying of hunger, but utterly insufficient
to live on, even frugally. We are witnessing a change of regime within
economy. The majestic figure of the Worker is being succeeded by the
puny figure of the Needy Opportunist [le Crevard]—because if money and
control are to infiltrate everywhere, it’s necessary for money to be
lacking everywhere. Henceforth, everything must be an occasion for
generating a little money, a little value, for earning “a little cash.”
The present technological offensive should also be understood as a way
to occupy and valorize those who can no longer be exploited through
waged labor. What is too quickly described as the Uberization of the
world, unfolds in two different ways. Thus on the one hand you have
Uber, Deliveroo and the like, that unskilled job opportunity requiring
only one’s old machine as capital. Every driver is free to self-exploit
as much as they like, knowing that they must roll around fifty hours a
week to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. And then there are
Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, dating sites, “coworking,” and now even “cohoming” or
“costorage,” and all the applications that enable the sphere of the
valorizable to be extended to infinity. What is involved with the
“collaborative economy,” with its inexhaustible possibilities of
valorization, is not just a mutation of life—it’s a mutation of the
possible, a mutation of the norm. Before Airbnb, an unoccupied room was
a “guest room” or a room available for a new use; now it’s a loss of
income. Before BlaBlaCar, a solo drive in one’s car was an occasion to
daydream, or pick up a hitchhiker, or whatever, but now it’s a missed
chance to make a little money, and hence a scandal, economically
speaking. What one gave to recycling or to friends one now sells on Le
bon coin. It’s expected that always and from every point of view one
will be engaged in calculating. That the fear of “missing an
opportunity” will goad us forward in life. The important thing is not
working for one euro an hour or making a few pennies by scanning
contents for Amazon Mechanical Turk, but where this participation might
lead someday. Henceforth everything must enter into the sphere of
profitability. Everything in life becomes valorizable, even its trash.
And we ourselves are becoming needy opportunists, human trash, who
exploit each other under the pretext of a “sharing economy.” If a
growing share of the population is destined to be excluded from the wage
system this is not in order to allow it the leisure to go hunt Pokemons
in the morning and to fish in the afternoon. The invention of new
markets where one didn’t imagine them to be the year before illustrates
this fact that is so difficult to explain to a Marxist: capitalism
doesn’t so much consist in selling what is produced as in rendering
accountable whatever is not yet accountable, in assigning a measureable
worth to what seemed to be absolutely unsusceptible to that the day
before, in creating new markets. That is its oceanic reserve of
accumulation. Capitalism is the universal expansion of measurement.
In economics, the theory of the Needy Opportunist, the Crevard, is
called the “theory of human capital,” which is more presentable. The
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development defines it these
days as “the knowledge, skills, competencies and attributes in
individuals that facilitate the creation of personal, social and
economic well-being.” Joseph Stiglitz, the left-economist, estimates
that “human capital” now represents between 2/3 and 3/4 of the total
capital—which tends to confirm the correctness of Stalin’s unironic
title: Man, the Most Precious Capital. According to Locke, “Man has a
Property in his own Person. This no Body has any Right to but himself.
The Labour of his Body, and the Work of his Hands, we may say, are
properly his” (Treatise of Civil Government), which in his mind did not
rule out either servitude or colonization. Marx made “man” the
proprietor of his “labor power”—a rather mysterious metaphysical entity,
when you think about it. But in both cases man was the owner of
something that he could alienate while remaining intact. He was formally
something other than what he sold. With the theory of human capital, man
is less the possessor of an indefinite cluster of capitals—cultural,
relational, professional, financial, symbolic, sexual, health— than he
is himself that cluster. He is capital. He constantly arbitrates between
increasing what he is as capital, and the fact of selling it in some
market or other. He is inseparably the producer, the product, and the
seller of the product. Football players, actors, stars, and popular
YouTubers are logically the heroes of the era of human capital, people
whose value fully coincides with what they are. Micro-economics thus
becomes the general science of behaviors, whether this is in commerce,
at church, or in love. Everyone becomes an enterprise guided by a
constant concern with self-valorization, by a vital imperative of
self-promotion. In essence man becomes the optimizing creature— the
Needy Opportunist.
The reign of the Needy Opportunist is an aspect of what the journal
Invariance called, in the 1960s, the anthropomorphosis of capital. As
capital “realizes, on the entire planet and in the whole life of every
person, the modes of total colonization of what exists that are
designated by the terms real domination [...] the Self-as-capital is the
new form that value aims to assume after devalorization. Within each one
of us capital is summoning the life force to work (Cesarano, Apocalypse
et revolution).” This is the machination by which capital appropriates
all the human attributes and by which humans make themselves into the
neutral support of capitalist valorization. Capital no longer just
determines the forms of cities, the content of work and leisure, the
imaginary of the crowds, the language of real life and that of intimacy,
the ways of being in fashion, the needs and their satisfaction, it also
produces its own people. It engenders its own optimizing humanity. Here
all the old chestnuts about value theory take their place in the wax
museum. Consider the contemporary case of the dance floor of a
nightclub: no one is there for the money but to have fun. No one was
forced to go there in the way one goes back to work. There is no
apparent exploitation, no visible circulation of money between future
partners who are still moving and grooving together. And yet everything
going on there has to do with evaluation, valorization,
self-valorization, individual preference, strategies, ideal matching of
a supply and a demand, under constraint of optimization—in short, a
neo-classical and human-capital market, pure and simple. The logic of
value now coincides with organized life. Economy as a relationship with
the world has long surpassed economy as a sphere. The folly of
evaluation obviously dominates every aspect of contemporary work, but it
also rules over everything that escapes that sphere. It determines even
the solitary jogger’s relationship with themselves, the jogger who, in
order to improve their performances, needs to know them in detail.
Measurement has become the obligatory mode of being of all that intends
to exist socially. Social media outlines very logically the future of
all-points evaluation that we are promised. On this point, one can rely
on the prophesies of Black Mirror as well as those of this analyst who
is enthusiastic about contemporary markets: “Imagine that tomorrow, with
every little word posted on the Web, for no matter what online babble,
exchange, meeting, transaction, share, or behavior, you will need to
consider the impact this might have on your reputation. Consider next
that your reputation will no longer be a kind of immaterial emanation
that certain people will be able to inquire about with your friends and
professional partners, but an actual certificate of all-round ability
established by complex algorithms based on the intersection of a
thousand and one pieces of information about you on the Web...data which
are themselves cross-referenced with the reputations of the persons you
have rubbed shoulders with! Welcome to an imminent future, where your
“reputation” will be concretely recorded, as a universal file accessible
to all: a relational, professional, commercial door-opener, capable of
allowing or preventing an opportunity for car sharing on Mobizen or
Deways, a romantic meeting on Meetic or Attractive World, a sale on eBay
or Amazon....and more, this time in the quite tangible world: a
professional appointment, a real estate transaction, or a bank loan.
Increasingly, our appearances on the Web will constitute the foundation
of our reputation. Furthermore, our social value will become a major
indicator of our economic value.”
What is new in the current phase of capital is that it now has the
technical means at its disposal for a generalized, real-time evaluation
of every aspect of beings. The passion for rating and cross-rating has
escaped the classrooms, the stock market, and supervisors’ files and
invaded every area of life. If one accepts the paradoxical notion of
“use value” as designating “the very body of the commodity [...], its
natural properties [...], an assemblage of multiple characteristics”
(Marx), the field of value has been refined to the point that it manages
to achieve a tight fit with that famous “use value,” places, the
characteristics of beings, and things: it conforms to bodies so closely
that it coincides with them like a second skin. This is what an
economist-sociologist, Lucien Karpik, calls the “economy of
singularities.” The value of things tends not to be distinguishable from
their concrete existence. A French-Lebanese financier, Bernard Mourad,
made this into a piece of fiction: Les Actifs corporels [Corporal
Assets]. It may be useful to know that the author went from the Morgan
Stanley commercial bank to the directorship of the Altice Media Group,
Patric Drahi’s holding branch that controls Liberation, L’Express and
i24 News in particular, before becoming Emmanuel Macron’s special
adviser during his campaign. In the novel, he imagines the entry of a
person into the stock market, a banker obviously, with his
psychoanalytic and professional profile and biological checkup in
support. This story of the insertion of a “society-cum-person” into a
market position in the context of a “New Individual Economy” was
futuristic upon its publication in 2006. Currently the employer
federation MEDEF is proposing that a SIRET number, a business
identification number, be assigned to every French citizen at their
birth. The value of beings becomes the set of their “individual
characteristics”—their health, their humor, their beauty, their
know-how, their relations, their “social skills,” their imagination,
their creativity, and so on. That’s the theory, and the reality, of
“human capital.” The value field has incorporated so many dimensions
that it has become a complex space. It’s become the whole ensemble of
the socially sayable, legible, and visible. The value that was social in
a formal sense has become social in a real sense. As money lost its
impersonal, anonymous, indifferent character to become traceable,
localized, personalized, currency came alive as well. “The modern
world,” wrote Peguy, “is not prostitutional through lust. It is quite
incapable of that. It is universally prostitutional because it is
universally interchangeable.” Something prostitutional enters in
wherever our “social value” reigns, wherever a part of ourselves is
exchanged for the least remuneration, be it financial, symbolic,
political, affective, or sexual. Contemporary dating sites form a
remarkable case of mutual and fun prostitution, but prostitution happens
everywhere, and all the time, whenever people sell themselves. Who can
say, nowadays when all reputational capital is so easily convertible
into sexual surplus value, that we are not in “a phase in industrial
production where producers are able to demand objects of sensation from
consumers as a form of payment. These objects would be living beings.
[...] Living currency, even if it existed in parallel with the market of
inert currency, would be fully capable of being substituted for the role
of the gold standard, once it was implanted in habits and instituted in
economic norms.” (Pierre Klossowski, Living Currency).
The giddiness associated with money derives from its nature as pure
potential. Monetary accumulation is the postponement of any actual
enjoyment, since money brings into equivalence as possibilities the
whole array of things that can be bought with it. Every expenditure,
every purchase is first a forfeiture, relative to what money is capable
of. Every specific enjoyment it allows one to acquire is first a
negation of the set of other potential enjoyments it contains within it.
In the epoch of human capital and living currency, every moment of life
and every real relation are haloed by a set of possible equivalents that
gnaw at them. Being here involves the untenable renunciation of being
everywhere else, where life is apparently more intense, as our
smartphone has charged itself with informing us. Being with a particular
person is an unbearable sacrifice of all the other persons with whom one
could just as well be with. Every love is vitiated in advance by all the
other possible loves. Hence the impossibility of being there, the
ineptitude for being-with. Universal unhappiness. Torture by
possibilities. Sickness unto death. “Despair,” as Kierkegaard diagnosed
it.
Economy is not just a system we must exit if we are to cease being needy
opportunists. It is what we must escape simply in order to live, in
order to be present to the world. Each thing, each being, each place is
immeasurable inasmuch as it is there. One can measure a thing as much as
one likes, from every angle and in all its dimensions, its concrete
existence is eternally beyond all measure. Each being is irreducibly
singular, if only from the fact of being here now. Ultimately, the real
is incalculable, unmanageable. That is why it takes so many policing
measures to preserve a semblance of order, uniformity, equivalence. “The
confusing reality of things/ Is my everyday discovery/ Each thing is
what it is/ It’s hard to explain to anyone how much that pleases me, and
how sufficient it is for me/ It’s enough to exist to be complete. [...]
If I extend my arm, I reach exactly where my arm reaches./ Not even a
centimeter farther./ I touch there where I touch, not there where I
think./ I can only sit down where I am./ And what is truly laughable is
that we’re always thinking of something else and roaming far from a
body” (Alberto Caeiro). As its guiding principle, the economy makes us
scurry about like rats, so that we’re never there, to uncover the secret
of its usurpation: presence.
To leave the economy is to bring out the plane of reality it covers
over. Commodity exchange and all that it comprises in the way of harsh
negotiation, mistrust, deceit, and wabu wabu, as the Melanesians say, is
not exclusively Western. In places where people know how to live, one
only practices this type of relations with outsiders, people one is not
connected with, who are distant enough so that a mix-up cannot develop
into a general conflict. To pay, in Latin, comes from pacare, “to
satisfy, to calm,” for example by distributing money to soldiers so they
can buy themselves some salt—thus a wage. One pays in order to have
peace. The whole vocabulary of economy is basically a vocabulary of
avoided war. “There is a link, a continuity, between hostile relations
and the provision of reciprocal prestations: Exchanges are peacefully
resolved wars, and wars are the result of unsuccessful transactions.”
(Levi-Strauss). Economy’s defect is to reduce all possible relationships
to hostile relations, every distance to foreignness. What it covers over
in this way is the entire gamut, all the gradation, all the
heterogeneity among the different existing and imaginable relations.
Depending on the degree of proximity between beings, there is a
commonality of goods, a sharing of certain things, exchange with an
adjusted reciprocity, mercantile exchange, or a total absence of
exchange. And every form of life has its language and its notions for
expressing this multiplicity of regimes. Making the bastards pay is good
warfare. When you love you don’t count the cost. Where money talks,
words are worth nothing; where words matter, money’s worth nothing.
Thus, exiting the economy is being able to clearly distinguish between
the possible divisions and, from where one is, to deploy a whole art of
distances. It’s to push the hostile relations—and the sphere of money,
accounting, measurement—as far away as possible. It’s to banish to the
margins of life that which is presently its norm, its core, its
essential condition.
There’s a boatload of people nowadays who are trying to escape the rule
of the economy. They’re becoming bakers instead of consultants. They’re
going on unemployment as soon as they can. They’re forming cooperatives,
SCOPs and SCICs. They’re trying to “work differently.” But the economy
is so well designed that it now has a whole sector, that of the “social
and solidarity economy,” which runs on the energy of those escaping it.
A sector that merits a special ministry and accounts for 10% of the
French GDP. All kinds of nets, discourses, and legal structures have
been put in place to capture the escapees. They devote themselves in all
sincerity to the thing they dream of doing, but their activity is
socially recoded, and this coding ends up overshadowing everything they
do. A few people take collective responsibility for the upkeep of their
hamlets water source and one day they find that they’re “managing the
commons.” Not many sectors have developed such an obsessive love of
bookkeeping, out of a concern for justice, transparency, or exemplarity,
as that of the social and solidarity economy. Any small to medium
business is a bookkeeping bordello by comparison. However, we do have
more than a hundred and fifty years of experience of cooperatives
telling us they have never constituted the slightest threat to
capitalism. Those that survive end up sooner or later becoming
businesses like the others. There is no “other economy,” there’s just
another relationship with the economy. A relationship of distance and
hostility, to be exact. The mistake of the social and solidarity economy
is to believe in the structures it adopts. It’s to insist that what
occurs inside it conforms to the statutes, to the official modes of
operation. The only relationship one can have with the structures
adopted is to use them as umbrellas for doing something altogether
different than what the economy authorizes. So it is to be complicit in
that use and that distance. A commercial print shop tended by a friend
will make its machines available on the weekends it is idle, and the
paper will be paid for under the table so there’s no record. A group of
carpenter friends will use all the equipment they have access to in
their company to build a cabin for the ZAD. A restaurant whose name is
known and respected throughout the city hosts after-hours discussions
among comrades that mustn’t be heard by the intelligence services. We
should make use of economic structures only on condition that we tear a
hole in them.
As an economic structure, no business has any meaning. It exists, and
that is all, but it is nothing. Its meaning can only come to it from an
element that is foreign to economy. Generally, it’s the task of
“communication” to clothe the economic structure in the meaning it
lacks—moreover, the exemplary moral significance and reasons for being
that the entities of the social and solidarity economy are so fond of
giving themselves must be considered as a banal form of “communication”
intended for internal consumption as much as it is directed toward the
outside. This makes some of those entities into niches that allow
themselves to practice oddly expensive pricing on the one hand, and on
the other to be exploitative in a way that’s all the more brazen as it
is “for a good cause.” As for the structure with holes in it, it draws
its meaning not from what it communicates but from what it keeps secret:
its clandestine participation in a political scheme immeasurably larger
than it, its use for ends that are economically neutral, not to say
senseless, but politically judicious, and for means that as an economic
structure it is designed to accumulate without end. Organizing in a
revolutionary way via a whole resistance network of legal structures
exchanging between themselves is possible, but risky. Among other
things, this could furnish an ideal cover for international
conspiratorial relations. There’s always the threat, however, of falling
back into the economic rut, of losing the thread of what we’re doing, of
no longer seeing the sense of the conspiracy. The fact remains that we
must organize ourselves, organize on the basis of what we love to do,
and provide ourselves the means to do it.
The only gauge of the state of crisis of capital is the degree of
organization of those aiming to destroy it.
[]
It resembles a physical law. The more the social order loses credit, the
more it arms its police. The more the institutions withdraw, the more
they advance in terms of surveillance. The less respect the authorities
inspire, the more they seek to keep us respectful through force. And
it’s a vicious circle, because force never has anything respectable
about it. So that to the growing debauchery of force there is an ever
diminishing effectiveness of the latter in response. Maintaining order
is the main activity of an order that has already failed. One only has
to go to the CAF, the family assistance fund, to take stock of things
that cannot last. When an agency as benign as that must surround itself
with guards, ploys, and threats to defend itself from its clients, one
realizes that a certain rationality has come to an end. When the
orderliness of demonstrations can no longer be assured except by means
of sting-ball grenades and kettlings, and the demonstrators are forced
to flee the green lasers of the Anti-Crime Brigade’s LBD 40s, targeting
its future victims, this is an indication that “society” has already
reached the stage of palliative treatment. When the calm of the
banlieues comes at the cost of arming the CRS with automatic rifles, we
know that a certain figure of the world has faded. It’s never a good
sign when a democratic regime takes up the habit of having its
population fired upon. Since the time when politics started to be
reduced, in every domain, to a vast police operation conducted day after
day, it was inevitable that policing would become a political question.
Let’s go back a few months. After the declaration of the state of
emergency, the Forfeiture-of-Nationality Bill, the Intelligence Act, the
Macron Law, the killing of Remi Fraisse, the Competitiveness and
Employment Tax Credit and its millions offered to the bosses, the loi
Travail was meant to complete the ultimate demoralization of a
“left-leaning people” supposedly brought to the edge of the abyss. What
the powers-that-be could not understand is that the loss of every hope
also forms the precondition for pure revolt—the revolt that no longer
seeks support in the thing it is negating and gets its warrant only from
itself. What crystallized in the conflict against the loi Travail was
not the partial refusal of a disastrous reform, but the massive
discrediting of the government apparatuses, including the union ones.
It’s not surprising that the banner of the French spring, “Soyons
ingouvernable,” rendered as “Become ungovernable,” re-emerged in
Washington in the protests against Donald Trump’s inauguration. Since
within the governmental apparatus the police have the function of
ensuring individual submission in the last instance, of producing the
population as a population, as a powerless, and hence governable,
depoliticized mass, it was logical that a conflict expressing the
refusal to be governed would begin by laying into the police and would
adopt the most popular slogan: “Everybody hates the police.” Escaping
its shepherd, the flock could not have found a better rallying cry. What
is more unexpected is that this slogan, appearing in the demonstrations
following the killing of Remi Fraisse at Sivens eventually reached all
the way to Bobigny after the police rape of Theo, as a slogan of “young
people” there, thrown in the face of the uniformed brutes who were
eyeing them from a raised metal passageway turned into a mirador.
“Tout le monde deteste la police” expresses more than a simple animosity
towards cops. Because for the first thinkers of sovereignty, at the
beginning of the 17^(th) century, policing was nothing other than the
constitution of the state, its very form in fact. At the time, it was
not yet an instrument in the hands of the latter, and there was not yet
a police lieutenancy in Paris. So that during the 17^(th) and 18^(th)
centuries, “police” still had a very broad meaning: thus la police was
“everything that can give an adornment, a form, and a splendor to the
city” (Turquet de Mayerne), “all the means that are useful to the
splendor of the whole State and to the happiness of all the citizens”
(Hohenthal). Its role was said to be that of “leading man to the most
perfect felicity he can enjoy in this life” (Delamare). Policing had to
do with the cleanliness of the streets and the provisioning of markets,
with public lighting and the confinement of vagabonds, with the fair
price of grains and the clearing of canals, the healthiness of the urban
environment and the arresting of bandits. Fouche and Vidocq had not yet
given it its modern, popular face.
If one wishes to understand what is at stake in this eminently political
question of policing, its necessary to grasp the conjuring trick
operating between policing as a means and policing as an end. On the one
hand, there is the ideal, legal, fictitious social order—policing as an
end—and then there is its real order, or rather its real disorder. The
function of policing as a means is to make sure that the desired
external order appears to reign. It ensures the order of things by using
the weapons of disorder and reigns over the visible through its elusive
activity. Its daily practices—kidnapping, beating, spying, stealing,
forcing, deceiving, lying, killing, being armed—cover the whole register
of illegality, so that its very existence never ceases being basically
unavowable. Being proof that what is legal is not what is real, that
order does not reign, that society doesn’t cohere since it’s not held
together by its own powers, policing is constantly pushed into the
shadows, where it occupies one of the world’s blind spots as far as
thinking is concerned. For the ruling order, it’s like a birthmark in
the middle of the face. It is the persistent and constant expression of
the state of exception—that which every sovereignty wishes it could
hide, but which it is regularly forced to exhibit in order to make
itself feared. If the state of exception is that momentary suspension of
the law that makes it possible to reestablish the conditions for the
rule of law, through the most arbitrary and bloody measures, the police
in their daily operation are what remains of the state of exception when
those conditions have been restored. The police in their daily operation
are what persists of the state of exception in the normal situation.
This is why their sovereign operation is itself so concealed. When the
policeman faced with a recalcitrant arrestee lets loose with “The law, I
am the law!” it’s always out of earshot. Or when on a day of
demonstration, the riot cop dragging a comrade away for no valid reason
waxes ironic: “I do as I like. You see, for me too its anarchy today!”
For political economy and cybernetics alike, the police remain like a
shameful and unthinkable relic, a memento mori that reminds them that
their order, which wants to think of itself as natural, is still not
that and doubtless never will be. Thus the police oversee an apparent
order that internally is only disorder. They are the truth of a world of
lies, and hence a continuing lie themselves. They testify to the fact
that the ruling order is artificial and will sooner or later be
destroyed.
So it’s no small matter that we live in a time when this obscene, opaque
recourse which the police constitute is coming into the full light of
day. That armed, hooded police officers calmly march as an unauthorized
cortege on the Elysee, as they did last autumn, to the cry of “corrupt
unions” and “Freemasons to prison,” without anyone daring to talk about
a seditious activity... that an American president finds himself facing
a large portion of the “intelligence community” and that the latter,
after forcing the resignation of his national security adviser, clearly
aim to bring him down... that the death penalty, abolished by the law,
has manifestly been re-instituted by the police in the case of
interventions against “terrorists”... that the police have succeeded in
asserting a near-total judicial impunity for their most indefensible
sprees... that certain bodies within the police structure more and more
openly declare their alignment with the National Front... that what was
treated as newsworthy about May 18, 2016 was not that certain police
unions had privatized the Place de la Republique—where Nuit debout was
still meeting—for the duration of their get-together in the presence of
Gilbert Collard and Eric Ciotti or Marion Marechal-Le Pen, but a police
car in flames along the Saint Martin Canal—taken together, these items
outline the contours of a substantial shift. This is what the media’s
promotion of a minor fracas to the status of a big deal was meant to
hide. It was necessary, moreover, to prevent this police parade that
ended at a little sign placed a few meters in front of the burning
vehicle: “grilled chicken, pay as you like,” from setting off, in
reaction to such a nose-thumbing, a big ripple of laughter infecting the
whole population. So the Interior Minister felt obliged to hastily
announce possible charges of “attempted homicide.” In this way, he could
replace an irresistible comical urge traversing the population by
feelings of fear and gravity, culminating in a call for revenge.
Policing operations are also operations aimed at the affects. And it’s
because of this particular operation that the justice system has been
obsessing over its indictees for the Quai Valmy attack. After Theo’s
rape, a police officer made this matter-of-fact confession to the
Parisien: “We belong to a gang. Whatever happens, we’re in it together.”
The slogan “Everybody hates the police” doesn’t express an observation,
which would be false, but an affect, which is vital. Contrary to the
cowardly worries of governing authorities and editorialists, there is no
“gulf that deepens year by year between the police and the population,”
there is a deepening gulf between those—and they are countless—who have
excellent reasons for hating the police and the fear-ridden mass of
those who embrace the cause of the cops, when they are not hugging the
cops themselves. In reality, what we’re witnessing is a major turnaround
in the relation between the government and the police. For a long time,
the forces of order were those ignorant puppets, despised but brutal,
that were brandished against the restive populations. Somewhere between
a parachutist, a lightning rod, and a punching ball. The governing
authorities have now reached such depths of discredit that the contempt
they elicit has surpassed that of the police, and the police know it.
The police understood, albeit slowly, that it had become the
precondition of government, its survival kit, its mobile respirator. So
that their relationship has reversed itself. Henceforth the governing
authorities are rattles in the hands of the police. They no longer have
any other choice but to rush to the bedside of the lowest-grade cop with
a pain and to yield to all the whims of the force. After the license to
kill, anonymity, impunity, the latest weaponry, what can they still want
to obtain? Even so, there is no lack of factions in the police force who
imagine themselves growing wings and turning into an autonomous force
with its own political agenda. In this regard, Russia looks like a
paradise, where the secret services, the police, and the army have
already taken power and govern the country to their benefit. While the
police are certainly not in a position to go autonomous materially, that
doesn’t prevent them from waving the threat of their political autonomy
to the sound of all their wailing sirens. The police are thus torn
between two contradictory tendencies. One of them, conservative,
bureaucratic, “republican,” would definitely prefer to remain just a
means in the service of an order that is less and less respected, to be
sure. The other is spoiling for a throwdown, wanting to “clear out the
rabble” and no longer answer to anyone—to be their own end. Basically,
only the coming to power of a party determined to “clear out the rabble”
and to support the police apparatus one hundred percent could reconcile
these two tendencies. But such a government would be in its turn a
government of civil war.
As a means of justifying itself, the state was left with the
plebiscitary legitimacy of the grand democratic elections, but that last
fount of legitimacy has gone dry. Whatever the outcome of a presidential
election, even if the option of a “strong power” wins out, such an
election is bound to produce a weak power, considering how things stand.
It will be as if the election had never taken place. The minority that
mobilized to carry its favorite to victory will put them in command of a
foundering ship. As we see with Donald Trump in the U.S., the pledge to
brutally restore the national unity delivers its opposite: once in
power, the return-to-order candidate finds themselves at odds not only
with whole swaths of society but also entire sections of the state
apparatus itself. The promise to reestablish order only adds to the
chaos.
In a country like France, that is, in a country that may very well be a
police state on condition that it not declare it publicly, it would be
foolish to seek a military victory over the police. Taking aim at a
uniform with a paving stone is not the same thing as entering into
close-quarters combat with an armed force. The police are a target and
not an objective, an obstacle and not an opponent. Whoever takes the
cops for an opponent prevents themselves from breaking through the
obstacle the police constitute. To successfully sweep them aside, we
must aim beyond them. Against the police, the only victory is political.
Disorganizing their ranks, stripping them of all legitimacy, reducing
them to powerlessness, keeping them at a good distance, giving oneself
more room for maneuver at the right moment and at the places one
chooses: this is how we destitute the police. “In the absence of a
revolutionary party, the true revolutionaries are those who fight the
police.” One needs to hear all the melancholy that’s expressed in this
observation by Pierre Peuchmard in 1968.
While, compared to the police, revolutionaries may currently present
themselves as weak, unarmed, unorganized, and watch-listed, they have
the strategic advantage, however, of being nobody’s instrument, of
having no order to maintain, and of not being a corps. We
revolutionaries are not bound by any obedience, we are connected to all
sorts of comrades, friends, forces, milieus, accomplices, and allies.
This enables us to bring to bear on certain police interventions the
threat that an operation to enforce order might trigger an unmanageable
disorder in return. If since the failure of Operation Caesar, no
government has dared to try and expel the ZAD, it’s not out of a fear of
losing the battle militarily, but because the reaction of tens of
thousands of sympathizers could prove to be unmanageable. That a
“blunder” in a banlieue sets off weeks of widespread riots is too high a
price to pay for the Specialized Brigade’s license to humiliate. When an
intervention by the police causes more disorder than what it
reestablishes in the way of order, it’s their very reason for being
that’s in question. So, either they insist and end up emerging as a
party with its own interests, or they go back into their kennel. Either
way, they cease being a useful means. They are destituted.
There is a basic asymmetry between the police and revolutionaries.
Whereas they take us as the target of their operations, our aims reach
far beyond them—it’s the general policing of society, it’s very
organization, that we have in our line of sight. The outrageousness of
police prerogatives and the incredible expansion of the technological
means of control delineate a new tactical perspective. A purely public
existence places revolutionaries before the alternative of a practical
impotence or an immediate repression. A purely conspiratorial existence
does allow a greater freedom of action, but makes one politically
inoffensive and vulnerable to repression. So it’s a matter of combining
a capacity for mass dissemination and a necessary conspiratorial level.
Organizing revolutionarily entails a subtle interplay between the
visible and the invisible, the public and the clandestine, the legal and
the illegal. We have to accept that our struggle is essentially
criminal, since in this world everything has become criminalizable. Even
the militants who go in aid of the migrants have to use clever tricks to
evade the surveillance of which they are the object, before they can act
freely. A revolutionary force can be constructed only as a network, a
step at a time, by relying on sure friendships, by furtively
establishing unanticipated ties even within the enemy apparatus. This is
how the “tanzikiyat” were formed in Syria, as a web of little autonomous
pockets of revolutionaries that would later become the backbone of
popular self-organization. In their day, the first French Resistance
networks didn’t do things differently. In the case of Syria as in the
old maquis, by successfully reclaiming urban districts and areas of the
countryside, by establishing relatively secure zones, it became possible
to go beyond the stage of discrete, anonymous activity on the part of
little groups. “Life is in the use, not in the time,” as Manouchian put
it.
[]
What within us is anxious to protect the inner chains that bind us,
What within us so sick that it clings to our conditions of existence,
precarious though they are,
What’s so exhausted from troubles, jolts, needs, that on a given day
tomorrow seems further away than the moon,
What finds it pleasant to pass the time in hip cafes sipping lattes with
jungle in the background while surfing on one’s MacBook—the Sunday of
life alloyed with the end of history,
Is expecting solutions.
Cities in transition, social and solidarity economy, Sixth Republic,
alternative municipalism, universal basic income, the film Tomorrow,
migration into space, a thousand new prisons, expulsion of all
foreigners from the planet, man-machine fusion.
Whether they’re engineers, managers, activists, politicians, ecologists,
actors, or simple hucksters, all those who claim to offer solutions to
the present disaster are really doing just one thing: imposing their
definition of the problem on us, hoping to make us forget that they
themselves are plainly part of the problem. As a friend said, “The
solution to the problem you see in life is a way of living that makes
the problem disappear.”
We don’t have any program, any solutions to sell. To destitute, in
Latin, also means to disappoint. All expectations will be disappointed.
From our singular experience, our encounters, our successes, our
failures, we draw a clearly partisan perception of the world, which
conversation among friends refines. Anyone who finds a perception to be
correct is adult enough to draw the consequences from it, or at least a
kind of method.
However repressed it may be, the question of communism remains the heart
of our epoch. If only because the rule of its contrary—economy—has never
been so complete. The delegations from the Chinese state who go every
year to place flowers on Marx’s tomb in London don’t fool anybody. One
can avoid the communist question, of course. One can get used to
stepping over the bodies of the homeless or migrants on one’s way to the
office every morning. One can follow the melting of the polar ice in
real time, or the rise of the oceans and the panicked pell-mell
migrations of animals and humans alike. One can go on preparing one’s
cancer with every forkful of mashed potatoes that one swallows. One can
tell oneself that the recovery, or a dose of authority, or ecofeminism
will eventually fix all this. Continuing in such a manner is possible,
at the cost of suppressing our feeling that the society we live in is
intrinsically criminal, and one that doesn’t miss a chance to remind us
that we belong to its little association of miscreants. Every time we
come in contact with it—by using any of its devices, consuming the least
of its commodities, or doing whatever job we do for it—we make ourselves
its accomplices, we contract a little of the vice on which it is based:
that of exploiting, wrecking, undermining the very conditions of every
earthly existence. There’s no longer any place for innocence in this
world. We only have the choice between two crimes: taking part in it or
deserting it in order to bring it down. If the stalking of criminals and
the orgy of judgment and punishment are so popular nowadays, it’s
because they provide a momentary ersatz innocence to the spectators. But
since the relief doesn’t last, it’s necessary to blame, punish, and
accuse over and over again—to maintain the illusion. Kafka explained the
success of the detective story in this way:
Detective stories are always concerned with the solution of mysteries
that are hidden behind extraordinary occurrences. But in real life its
absolutely the opposite. The mystery isn’t hidden in the background. On
the contrary! It stares one in the face. It’s what is obvious. So we do
not see it. Everyday life is the greatest detective story ever written.
Every second, without noticing we pass by thousands of corpses and
crimes. That’s the routine of our lives. But if, in spite of habit,
something does succeed in surprising us, we have a marvelous sedative in
the detective story, which presents every mystery of life as a legally
punishable exception. It is a pillar of society, a starched shirt
covering the heartless immorality which nevertheless claims to be
bourgeois civilization.
So it’s a matter of jumping outside the circle of killers.
Few questions have been as poorly formulated as the question of
communism. And that’s not yesterday’s failure; it goes far back to
ancient times. Open the Book of Psalms and you’ll see. The class
struggle dates back at least to the prophets of Jewish Antiquity. What
is utopian in communism is already found in the apocrypha of that age:
And equal land for all, divided not/By walls or fences, [...] and the
course/Of life be common and wealth unapportioned./For there no longer
will be poor nor rich,/ Tyrant nor slave, nor any great nor small,/Nor
kings nor leaders; all alike in common/
The communist question was badly formulated because, to start with, it
was framed as a social question, that is, as a strictly human question.
Despite that, it has never ceased to trouble the world. If it continues
to haunt it, that’s because it doesn’t stem from an ideological fixation
but from a basic, immemorial, lived experience: that of community— which
nullifies all the axioms of economy and all the fine constructions of
civilization. There is never community as an entity, but always as an
experience of continuity between beings and with the world. In love, in
friendship, we have the experience of that continuity. In my calm
presence, here, now, in this familiar town, in front of this old sequoia
sempervirens whose branches are stirred by the wind, I experience that
continuity. In this riot where we all stick to the plan we’ve decided
on, where the chants of the comrades give us courage, where a street
medic delivers aid and comfort to an unknown person with a head injury,
I experience this continuity. In this print shop dominated by an antique
Heidelberg 4 Color which a friend ministers to while I prepare the
pages, another friend glues, and a third one trims, to put together this
little samizdat that we’ve all conceived, in this fervor and enthusiasm,
I experience that continuity. There is no myself and the world, myself
and the others, there is me and my kindred, directly in touch with this
little piece of the world that I love, irreducibly. There is ample
beauty in the fact of being here and nowhere else. It’s not the least
sign of the times that a German forester, and not a hippy, scores a
bestseller by revealing that trees “talk to each other,” “love one
another,” “look after each other,” and are able to “remember” what
they’ve gone through. He calls that The Hidden Life of Trees. Which is
to say, there’s even an anthropologist who sincerely wonders how forests
think. An anthropologist, not a botanist. By considering the human
subject in isolation from its world, by detaching living beings from all
that lives around them, modernity could not help but engender a
communism destined to eradicate: a socialism. And that socialism could
only encounter peasants, nomads, and “savages” as an obstacle to be
shoved aside, as an unpleasant residue at the bottom of the national
scale of importance. It couldn’t even see the communism of which they
were the bearers. If modern “communism” was able to imagine itself as a
universal brotherhood, as a realized equality, this was only through a
cavalier extrapolation from the lived experience of fraternity in
combat, of friendship. For what is friendship if not equality between
friends?
Without at least the occasional experience of community, we die inside,
we dry out, become cynical, harsh, desert-like. Life becomes that ghost
city peopled by smiling mannequins, which functions. Our need for
community is so pressing that after having ravaged all the existing
bonds, capitalism is running on nothing but the promise of “community.”
What are the social networks, the dating apps, if not that promise
perpetually disappointed? What are all the modes, all the technologies
of communication, all the love songs, if not a way to maintain the dream
of a continuity between beings where in the end every contact melts
away? Opportunely, this frustrated promise intensifies the need, making
it hysterical even, and accelerates the great cash machine of those who
exploit it. Maintaining misery while dangling the possibility of escape
is capitalisms great stratagem. In 2015, a single website of
pornographic videos called PornHub was visited for 4,392,486,580 hours,
which amounts to two and a half times the hours spent on Earth by Homo
sapiens. Even this epochs obsession with sexuality and its
hyper-indulgence in pornography attests to the need for community, in
the very extremity of the latter’s deprivation.
When Milton Friedman says that the market is the magic mechanism
enabling “millions of individuals to come together on a daily basis
without any need to love one another or even to speak to one another,”
he’s describing the end result while carefully redacting the process
that has brought so many people into the market, the thing that keeps
them there, which is not just hunger, threat, or the lure of profit. He
also spares himself from having to admit the devastations of all sorts
which make it possible to establish something like “a market,” and to
present it as natural. The same is true when a Marxist pontificates that
“disease, death, love’s sorrow, and assholes will continue to take their
toll after capitalism, but there will no longer be any massive
paradoxical poverty, resulting from an abstract production of wealth.
One will no longer see an autonomous fetishistic system or a dogmatic
social form.” (Robert Kurz) In reality, the question of communism is
also raised in each of our tiny and unique existences in response to
what is making us sick. In response to what is slowly killing us, to our
failures in love, to what makes us such strangers to each other that by
way of an explanation for all the world’s ills, we’re satisfied with the
foolish idea that “People are assholes.” Refusing to see this amounts to
wearing one’s insensitivity like a tattoo. It’s well suited to the kind
of pale, myopic virility that’s required for becoming an economist.
To this the Marxists, or many of them at least, add a certain cowardice
in the face of life’s smallest problems, which was also the mark of the
Bearded One. There are even those who organize symposia around the “idea
of communism” which seem expressly designed to make sure that communism
remains an idea, and doesn’t meddle too much in the business of living.
Not to mention the conventicles where one presumes to decree what is and
what isn’t communism.
With the breakdown of European social democracy faced with World War
One, Lenin decides to restyle the façade of the crumbling old socialism
by painting the pretty word “communism” on it. Rather comically, he
borrows it from anarchists who have already made it their banner. This
convenient confusion between socialism and communism contributed a good
deal, in the last century, to making this word synonymous with
catastrophe, massacre, dictatorship, and genocide. Since then,
anarchists and Marxists have been playing ping pong around the couple
individual/society, without being concerned that this false antinomy was
shaped by economic thought. Rebelling against society on behalf of the
individual or against individualism on behalf of socialism is to head
down a dead end street. Society is always a society of individuals.
Individual and society have not ceased being affirmed, each at the
others expense, for three centuries, and this is the reliable
oscillating mechanism which keeps the charming wheel called “economy”
turning round, year after year. Against what economy wants us to
imagine, what there is in life are not individuals endowed with all
kinds of properties which they can make use of or part with. What there
is in life are attachments, assemblages [agencements], situated beings
that move within a whole ensemble of ties. By adopting the liberal
fiction of the individual, modern “communism” was bound to conflate
property and attachment, and carry the confusion to the very arena where
it believed it was attacking private property. It was helped in that by
a grammar in which property and attachment have become
indistinguishable. What grammatical difference is there when I speak of
“my brother” or “my part of town,” and when Warren Buffet says “my
holding” or “my shares”? None. And yet one is speaking of an attachment
in the first instance and of an ownership in the second, of something
that constitutes me in the one case and of an object I own in the other.
Only by means of this type of confusion did it become possible to
imagine that a subject like “Humanity” could exist. Humanity— that is,
all human beings, stripped of what weaves together their concrete
situated existence, and gathered up phantasmally into one great
something-or-other, nowhere to be found. By wiping out all the
attachments that make up the specific texture of worlds, on the pretext
of abolishing private ownership of the means of production, modern
“communism” has effectively made a tabula rasa—of everything. That’s
what happens to those who practice economy, even by criticizing it. As
Lyotard reportedly said: “Economy—a thing we needed to find a way out
of, not criticize!” Communism is not a “superior economic organization
of society” but the destitution of economy.
Economy rests on a pair of fictions, therefore, that of society and that
of the individual. Destituting it involves situating this false antinomy
and bringing to light that which it means to cover up. What these
fictions have in common is making us see entities, closed units and
their relations, whereas what there is in fact are ties. Society
presents itself as the superior entity that aggregates all the
individual entities. Since Hobbes and the frontispiece of Leviathan,
it’s always the same image: the great body of the sovereign, composed of
all the minuscule, homogenized, serialized bodies of his subjects. The
operation which the social fiction depends on consists in trampling on
everything that forms the situated existence of each singular human
being, in wiping out the ties that constitute us, in denying the
assemblages we enter into, and then forcing the depleted atoms thus
obtained into a completely fictitious, spectral association known as the
“social bond.” So that to think of oneself as a social being is always
to apprehend oneself from the exterior, to relate to oneself as an
abstraction. It’s the peculiar mark of the economic perception of the
world to grasp nothing except externally. That Jansenist scumbag, Pierre
Nicole, who exerted such a large influence on the founders of political
economy, provided the recipe already in 1671: “However corrupt any
society might be within, and in the eyes of God, there would be nothing
on the outside that would be better regulated, more civil, more just,
more peaceful, more decent, more generous. And the most admirable thing
would be that, being animated and moved only by self-love, self-love
would not appear there, and being a thing completely devoid of charity,
one would only see the form and signs of charity everywhere.” No logical
question can be raised, let alone resolved, on this basis. Everything
becomes a question of management. It’s not surprising that societe is
synonymous with entreprise in France. This was already the case,
moreover, in ancient Rome. If one started a business, under Tiberius,
one started a societas. A societas, a society, is always an alliance, a
voluntary association that one joins or withdraws from according to
one’s interests. So all in all it’s a relationship, an external “bond,”
a “bond” that doesn’t touch anything inside us and that one can walk
away from without prejudice, a “bond” with no contact—and hence not a
bond at all.
The characteristic texture of any society results from the way humans
are pulled into it, by the very thing that separates them:
self-interest. Given that they participate as individuals, as closed
entities, and thus always provisionally, they come together as separate.
Schopenhauer offered an arresting image of the consistency peculiar to
social relations, of their inimitable pleasures and of the “unsociable
human sociability”: “On a cold winters day, a group of porcupines
huddled together to stay warm and keep from freezing. But soon they felt
one another’s quills and moved apart. When the need for warmth brought
them together again, their quills again forced them apart. They were
driven back and forth at the mercy of their discomforts until they found
the distance from one another that provided both a maximum of warmth and
a minimum of pain. In human beings, the emptiness and monotony of the
isolated self produces a need for society. This brings people together,
but their many offensive qualities and intolerable faults drive them
apart again. The optimal distance that they finally find that permits
them to coexist is embodied in politeness and good manners.”
The genius of the economic operation is to conceal the plane on which it
commits its misdeeds, the one on which it conducts its veritable war:
the plane of bonds. In this way it confounds its potential adversaries,
and is able to present itself as totally positive whereas it is quite
evidently motivated by a fierce appetite for destruction. It has to be
said that the bonds readily lend themselves to this. What is more
immaterial, subtle, intangible than a bond? What’s less visible, less
opposable but more sensitive than a bond that’s been destroyed? The
contemporary numbing of sensibilities, their systematic fragmentation,
is not just the result of survival within capitalism, it’s the
precondition for survival. We don’t suffer from being individuals, we
suffer from trying to be that. Since the individual entity exists,
fictitiously, only from the outside, “being an individual” requires
remaining outside oneself, strangers to ourselves, forgoing any contact
with oneself as well as with the world and others. Obviously everyone is
free to take everything from the outside. One only has to keep from
feeling, hence from being present, hence from living. We prefer the
opposite mode—the communist mode. It consists in apprehending things and
beings from the inside, grasping them by the middle. What comes of
grasping the individual by the middle or from the inside? Nowadays it
yields a chaos. An unorganized chaos of forces, bits of experience,
scraps of childhood, fragments of meaning, and more often than not,
without any communication between them. Saying that this epoch has
produced a human material in very poor condition is to say little. It is
in great need of repair. We’re all aware of this. The fragmentation of
the world finds a faithful reflection in the shattered mirror of
subjectivities.
That what appears externally as a person is really only a complex of
heterogeneous forces is not a new idea. The Tzeltal Maya of Chiapas have
a theory of the person in which everyone’s sentiments, emotions, dreams,
health, and temperament are governed by the adventures and misadventures
of a whole host of spirits who reside and move about at the same time in
our hearts and inside the mountains. We are not a fine collection of
egoic completenesses, of perfectly unified Selves. We are composed of
fragments, we teem with minor lives. The word “life” in Hebrew is a
plural and so is the word “face.” Because in a life there are many lives
and in a face there are many faces. The ties between beings are not
formed from entity to entity. Every tie goes from fragment of being to
fragment of being, from fragment of being to fragment of world, and from
fragment of world to fragment of world. It is established below and
beyond the individual scale. It brings into immediate play parts of
beings that discover themselves to be on the same level, that are felt
as continuous. This continuity between fragments is what is experienced
as “community.” An assemblage is produced. It’s what we experience in
every real encounter. Every encounter carves out a specific domain
within us where elements of the world, the other, and oneself are
mingled indistinctly. Love does not bring individuals into relation, it
cuts through them as if they were suddenly on a special plane where they
were making their way together amid a certain foliation of the world. To
love is never to be together but to become together. If loving did not
undo the fictitious unity of being, the “other” would not be capable of
making us suffer to such a degree. If, in love, a piece of the other did
not end up being a part of us, we wouldn’t have to mourn it when
separation time rolled around. If there were nothing but relations,
nobody would understand one another. Everything would be awash with
misunderstanding. So there is no subject or object of love, there is an
experience of love.
The fragments that constitute us, the forces inhabiting us, the
assemblages we enter into don’t have any reason to compose a harmonious
whole, a fluid set, a movable articulation. The banal experience of life
in our time is characterized rather by a succession of encounters that
undo us little by little, dismember us, gradually deprive us of any sure
bearings. If communism has to do with the fact of organizing
ourselves—collectively, materially, politically—this is insofar as it
also means organizing ourselves singularly, existentially, and in terms
of our sensibility. Or else we must consent to falling back into
politics or into economy. If communism has a goal, it is the great
health of forms of life. This great health is obtained through a patient
re-articulation of the disjoined members of our being, in touch with
life. One can live a whole life without experiencing anything, by being
very careful not to think and feel. Existence is then reduced to a slow
process of degradation. It wears down and ruins, instead of giving form.
After the miracle of the encounter, relations can only go from wound to
wound towards their consumption. Life, on the contrary, gradually gives
form to whoever refuses to live beside themselves, to whoever allows
themselves to experience. They become a form of life in the full sense
of the term.
In sharp contrast to that, there are the inherited methods of activist
construction, so grossly defective, so exhausting, so destructive, when
they are so focused on building. Communism does not hinge on
self-renunciation but on the attention given to the smallest action.
It’s a question of our plane of perception and hence of our way of doing
things. A practical matter. What the perception of entities—individual
or collective— bars our access to is the plane where things really
happen, where the collective potentials form and fall apart, gain
strength or dissipate. It’s on that plane and only there that the real,
including the political real, becomes legible and makes sense. To live
communism is not to work to ensure the existence of the entity we belong
to, but to deploy and deepen an ensemble of ties, which sometimes means
cutting certain ones. What is essential occurs at the level of the
smallest things. For the communist, the world of important facts extends
as far as the eye can see. Perception in terms of bonds dismisses the
whole alternative between individual and collective, and does so
positively. In a real situation, an “I” that says what needs to be said
can be a “we” of extraordinary power. And so, the particular happiness
of any “commune” reflects the plenitude of its singularities, a certain
quality of ties, the radiant energy of each fragment of world that it
harbors— good-bye to entities, to their protrusiveness, good-bye to
individual and collective confinement, adios to the reign of narcissism.
“The one and only progress,” wrote the poet Franco Fortini, “consists
and will consist in reaching a higher level, one that is visible and
visionary, where the powers and qualities of every singular existence
can be promoted.” What is to be deserted is not “society,” or
“individual life,” but the dyad they compose. We must learn to move on a
different plane.
There’s a flagrant disintegration of “society,” certainly, but there’s
also a move aimed at recomposing it. As often happens, to see what lies
in store for us we must turn our gaze to the other side of the Channel.
What the conservative governments of Great Britain have already been
implementing since 2010 is the so-called “Big Society.” As its name
doesn’t indicate, the “Great Society” of which it is a question here
consists in a final dismantling of the last institutions vaguely
recalling the “welfare state.” What’s curious is the list of priorities
that this purely neoliberal reform sets out: “give more power to
communities’ (localism and decentralization), encourage individuals to
engage actively in their community’ (volunteer work), transfer
responsibilities from the central government to local authorities,
support cooperatives, mutual societies, charitable associations and
social enterprises,’ publish public data (open government).” Liberal
society’s maneuver, at the moment when it can no longer hide its
implosion, is to try and save the particular and particularly
unappealing nature of the relations that constitute it by replicating
itself in a proliferation of little societies or collectives.
Work-based, neighborhood-based collectives, collectives of citizens, of
activists, of associations, of artists, etc., collectives of every sort
are the future of the social. There again, one joins as an individual,
on an egalitarian basis, around an interest, and one is free to leave
when one chooses. So they share society’s loose and ectoplasmic texture.
They appear to be simply a blurry reality, but that vagueness is their
distinguishing trait. On the other hand, the theater troupe, the
seminar, the rock group, the rugby team, are collective forms. They are
assemblages composed of multiple heterogeneous elements. They contain
humans allotted different positions, different tasks, who make up a
particular configuration, with its distances, its spacings, its rhythm.
And they also contain all kinds of non-humans—places, equipment and
materials, rituals, cries, and refrains. This is what makes them forms,
specific forms. But what characterizes “the collective” as such is
precisely that it is formless. Even in its very formalism. The
formalism, which claims to be a remedy for its absence of form, is only
a mask for it or a ruse, and generally temporary. It’s enough to apply
for membership and be accepted in order to belong just like anyone else.
The postulated equality and horizontality basically make any asserted
singularity scandalous or meaningless, and enable a diffuse jealousy to
set its prevailing mood. The average members find an opium there which
allows them to forget their feelings of inadequacy. The tyranny peculiar
to collectives is that of an absence of structure. That is why they have
a tendency to spread everywhere. Thus nowadays when one is really cool,
one doesn’t just form a “music group,” one establishes a “musicians
collective.” Ditto for contemporary artists and their “artist
collectives.” And since the sphere of art so often anticipates what will
be generalized as the economic condition of everyone, one won’t be
surprised to hear a management researcher and “specialist in collective
activity” note this development: “Before, one considered the team as a
static entity in which everybody had their role and their objective. One
spoke then about a production team, an intervention team, a
decision-making team. Now however, the team is an entity in motion
because the individuals composing it change roles to adapt to their
environment, which also is changing. Today the team is regarded as a
dynamic process.” What salaried employee in one of the “innovative
professions” still doesn’t know what the “tyranny of the absence of
structure” means? In this way the perfect fusion of exploitation and
self-exploitation is brought about. While every business is not yet a
collective, collectives are now already businesses—businesses that for
the most part don’t produce anything, anything other than themselves.
Just as a batch of collectives could very well take over from the old
society, it is to be feared that socialism will survive only as a
socialism of collectives, of little groups of people who force
themselves to “live together,” that is, to be social. Nowhere is “living
together” talked about more than where everyone basically hates everyone
else. A journalist recently titled his piece, “Against the Uberization
of Life, the Collectives.” Self-entrepreneurs also need an oasis against
the neoliberal desert. But the oases are annihilated in their turn:
those seeking refuge there bring the desert sands in with them.
The more “society” falls apart the more the attraction of collectives
will grow. They will project a false escape. This scam works all the
better as the atomized individual becomes painfully aware of the
freakishness and misery of their existence. Collectives are designed to
reintegrate those whom this world rejects, and who reject it. They may
even promise a parody of “communism,” which inevitably yields
disappointment and swells the mass of those disgusted with everything.
The false antinomy formed by individual and collective together is not
hard to unmask, however. All the defects which the collective is in the
habit of lending so generously to the individual—selfishness,
narcissism, mythomania, pride, jealousy, possessiveness, calculation,
the fantasy of omnipotence, self-interest, mendacity—are found in worse
measure, more caricatured and unassailable, in collectives. No
individual will ever be as possessive, narcissistic, self-centered, full
of bad faith, and determined to believe in their own nonsense as a
collective can be.
One thinks of those who say “France,” “the proletariat,” “society” or
“the collective” without blinking an eye. Anyone with a good ear can’t
help but hear them saying “Me! Me! Me!” underneath those other words. In
order to construct something collectively powerful, we should abandon
the idea of “collective” and all the disastrous exteriority to oneself
and to others that it conveys. Heiner Muller went further:
“What capitalism offers is aimed at collective groupings but its
formulated in such a manner that it makes them break apart. What
communism offers, by contrast, is utter solitude. Capitalism never
offers solitude but always just a placing in common. McDonalds is the
absolute offer of collectivity One is seated in the same space
everywhere in the world; one eats the same shit and everybody’s content.
Because at McDonald’s they are a collective. Even the faces in
McDonald’s restaurants resemble each other more and more. [...] There’s
the cliché about communism as collectivization. Not at all. Capitalism
is collectivization [...] Communism is the abandonment of man to his
solitude. In front of your mirror communism gives you nothing. That is
its superiority. The individual is reduced to his own existence.
Capitalism can always give you something, insofar as it distances people
from themselves.” (Fautes d’impression)
Feeling, hearing, thinking are not politically neutral faculties, nor
are they fairly distributed among contemporaries. And the spectrum of
what the latter perceive is variable. Besides, in contemporary social
relations one is one’s own troubled introspection. If the whole social
circus endures it’s because everyone is straining to keep their head
above water when they should rather assent to going deeply enough into
themselves to finally touch something solid. During the conflict against
the loi Travail, the emergence of what became the “cortege de tete,” the
lead contingent in marches, was the result of a vision. A few hundred
“young people” saw, as early as the first demonstrations, that the union
groups were marching like zombies, that they didn’t believe a word of
the slogans they were mouthing, that their security marshalls were
clubbing the high-school students, that there was no way to follow that
big cadaver, and so it was necessary to claim the front of the
demonstration at all costs. Which is what was done. And done again. And
again. Until a limit was reached where, with the “cortege de tete”
repeating itself, it was no longer a gesture in a situation, but a
subject mirrored back in the media, the alternative media in particular.
So it was time to desert that desertion, which was congealing and
becoming a parody of itself. And to keep moving. That being said, for
the whole time it was vibrant, the “cortege de tete” was the locus from
which things became clear, the site of a contagion in the ability to see
what was going down. From the simple fact that there was struggle, that
different determinations were clashing, that forces were joining,
allying, separating, that strategies were called into play, and that all
this was manifesting in the streets and not just on television, there
was a situation. The real was returning, something was taking place. One
could disagree about what was happening, one could read it in
contradictory ways, but at least there was a legibility of the present.
As for knowing which readings were correct and which mistaken, the
course of events would sooner or later decide; and then it would no
longer be a matter of interpretation. If our perceptions were not
adjusted, that would be paid for in baton blows. Our errors would no
longer be a question of “point of view”; they would be measured in
suture points or swollen body parts.
Deleuze said of 1968 that it was a “phenomenon of clairvoyance: a
society suddenly saw what it contained that was intolerable and also saw
the possibility of something else.” To which Benjamin adds:
“Clairvoyance is the vision of that which is taking form. [...]
Perceiving exactly what is taking place is more decisive than knowing
the distant future in advance.” In ordinary circumstances most people do
end up seeing, but when it is much too late—when it’s become impossible
not to see and, quite often, seeing no longer serves any purpose. This
aptitude owes nothing to any great body of knowledge, which often serves
for overlooking what’s essential. Conversely, ignorance can crown the
most banal insistence on not seeing. Let’s say that social life demands
of everyone that they not see, or at least act as if they didn’t see
anything.
It makes no sense to share things if one doesn’t begin by communizing
the ability to see. Without that, living the communist way is like a
wild dance in utter darkness; one crashes against the others, one gets
hurt, one inflicts bruises on the body and the soul without meaning to
and without even knowing exactly who to be angry with. Compounding
everyone’s capacity for seeing in every domain, composing new
perceptions and endlessly refining them, resulting in an immediate
increase of potential, must be the central object of any communist
development. Those who don’t want to see anything cannot help but
produce collective disasters. We must become seers, for ourselves as
much as for others.
Seeing means being able to apprehend forms. Contrary to what a bad
philosophical legacy has taught us, form does not pertain to visible
appearance but to dynamic principle. The real individuation is not that
of bodies, but of forms. One only has to reflect on the process of
ideation to be convinced of this: nothing better illustrates the
illusion of the stable and individual Self than the belief that “I” have
ideas, since it is abundantly clear that ideas come to me, even without
my knowing from where, from neuronal, muscular, and symbolic processes
so opaque that they pour in naturally while I’m walking, or when I’m
falling asleep and the boundaries of the Self are giving way. An
occurring idea is a good example of form: there enters into its
realization, in a language environment, something that’s
infra-individual—an intuition, a splinter of experience, a bit of
affect— in a constellation with something that’s supra-individual. A
form is a mobile configuration that holds together, in a tense and
dynamic unity, heterogeneous elements of the Self and the world. “The
essence of form,” said the young Lukacs in his idealist jargon, “has
always resided in the process by which two principles that absolutely
exclude each other become form without mutually abolishing each other.
Form is the paradox that has materialized, the reality of lived
experience, the true life of the impossible. For form is not
reconciliation but the war of conflicting principles, transposed into
eternity.” Form is born of the encounter between a situation and a
necessity. Once born, it affects things far beyond itself. In the
conflict of the spring of 2016, one could have seen the birth of a form
from a perfectly singular, perfectly identifiable point. On the
Austerlitz Bridge, a courageous little group forced the riot police to
pull back. There was a first line of masked people sporting gas masks
and holding a reinforced banner, other masked ones backing them in case
of attempted arrests and making up a bloc behind the first line, and
behind that bunch and on the sides, baton-wielding masked folk who
whacked on the cops. Once this little form had appeared, the video of
its exploit circulated on the social media. And kept making babies in
the weeks that followed, up to the acme of June 14, 2016 when its
offspring could no longer be counted. Because that’s how it is with
every form, with life even, the real communist question is not “how to
produce,” but “how to live.” Communism is the centrality of the old
ethical question, the very one that historical socialism had always
judged to be “metaphysical,” “premature,” or “petty-bourgeois”—and not
the question of labor. Communism is a general detotalization, and not
the socialization of everything.
For us, therefore, communism is not a finality. There is no “transition”
towards it. It is transition entirely: it is en chemin, in transit. The
different ways of living will never cease to chafe and move against each
other, to clash with and occasionally combat each other. Everything will
always have to be rethought. There are bound to be the usual Leninists
who will reject an immanent conception of communism such as this, by
citing the necessity of a vertical, strategic articulation of the
struggle, and an instant later we’re sure to hear the lumbering
“question of organization.” The “question of organization” is still and
always the Leviathan. In a time when the apparent unity of the Self can
no longer mask the chaos of forces, attachments, and participations that
we are, how could we still believe in the fable of organic unity? The
myth of “organization” owes everything to the depictions of the
hierarchy of natural faculties that were handed down to us by ancient
psychology and Christian theology. We are no longer nihilistic enough to
think that inside us there is something like a stable psychic organ—a
will, let’s say—that directs our other faculties. This neat invention of
the theologians, much more political than it appears, had a dual
purpose: first, to make man, newly provided with a “free will,” into a
moral subject and to deliver him over in this way to the Last Judgment
and the century’s punishments; second, based on the theological idea of
a God having “freely” created the world and essentially standing apart
from his action, to institute a formal separation between being and
acting. For centuries, this separation, which was to mark Western
political ideas in a durable way, made ethical realities illegible—the
plane of forms-of-life being precisely that of a nondifferentiation
between what one is and what one does. So “the question of organization”
exists since those Bolsheviks of Late Antiquity, the Church Fathers. It
was the instrument of legitimation of the Church just as it would later
be that of the legitimation of the Party. Against this opportunistic
question, against the postulated existence of the “will,” it’s necessary
to emphasize that what 4 wants” within us, what inclines us, is never
the same thing. That it is a simple outcome, crucial at certain moments,
of the combat waged within and outside us by a tangled network of
forces, affects, and inclinations, resulting in a temporary assemblage
in which some force has just as temporarily subdued other forces. That
the sequence of these assemblages produces a kind of coherence that may
culminate in a form is a fact. But to always label with the same noun
something that in a contingent way finds itself in a position to
dominate or give the decisive impetus, to convince oneself that it’s
always a matter of the same authority, to convince oneself finally that
every form and every decision are dependent on a decision organ, is to
perform quite a trick, but one that’s been repeated all too long. By
believing in such an organ for such a long time, by stimulating that
imaginary muscle over and over again, one ends up in a fatal aboulia
that seems nowadays to be afflicting the late offspring of the Christian
Empire that we happen to be. In opposition to that, we propose paying
careful attention to situations and to the forces that inhabit and
traverse beings, in conjunction with an art of decisive assemblages.
Faced with capitalist organization, a destituent potential cannot
confine itself to its own immanence, to all that grows under the ice in
the absence of sunshine, to all the attempts at local construction, to a
series of punctual attacks, even if this whole little world were to
regularly find itself caught up in great turbulent demonstrations. And
the insurrection will definitely not wait for everyone to become
insurrectionary. The mistake of the Leninists, Trotskyists, Negriists,
and other subpoliticians, a telling one fortunately, is to believe that
a period that sees all the hegemonies lying broken on the ground could
still tolerate a political hegemony, even a partisan one of the sort
that Pablo Iglesias or Chantal Mouffe fantasize. What they don’t see is
that in a time of general horizontality, horizontality itself is the
verticality. No one can expect to organize the autonomy of others any
longer. The only verticality still possible is that of the situation,
which commands all of its components because it exceeds them, because
the sum of forces in presence is greater than each one of them. The only
thing capable of transversally uniting all the elements deserting this
society into a historical party is an intelligence of the situation. It
is everything that makes the situation gradually understandable,
everything that tracks the movements of the adversary, everything that
identifies the usable paths and the obstacles—the systematic character
of the obstacles. Based on that intelligence, an occasional vertical
expedient needed to tilt certain situations in the desired direction can
well be improvised.
A strategic verticality of this kind can only emerge from a constant,
generous discussion, undertaken in good faith. In this epoch, the means
of communication are the forms of organization. It’s our weakness, for
the means aren’t in our hands, and those who control them are not our
friends. So there’s no other choice but to deploy an art of conversation
between worlds that is cruelly deficient, but from which, in contact
with the situation, the right decision must emanate. Such a discussion
can gain the center, from the periphery where it is currently contained,
only through an offensive from the domain of sensibility, on the plane
of perceptions, and not of discourse. We’re talking about addressing
bodies and not just the head.
“Communism is the material process that aims to render sensible and
intelligible the materiality of the things that are said to be
spiritual. To the point that we’re able to read in the book of our own
body all that humans did and were, under the sovereignty of time—and to
decipher the traces of humanity’s passage upon an Earth that will
preserve no trace.” (Franco Fortini)