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Title: 2+2=7 Author: Anonymous Date: Winter 2019 Language: en Topics: reason, rationalism, science, technology, Sans Détour, The Local Kids, The Local Kids #3 Source: Translated for The Local Kids, Issue 3 Notes: First appeared as 2+2=7 in Sans Détour (journal anarchiste apériodique), Issue 1, November 2018
“Don’t ever forget that in every revolution there is three quarters of
imagination and only one quarter of reality, or put differently –
because I see you frowning while reading these lines – life, my friend,
is always more expansive than doctrine; life will never fit into a
doctrine, even if it is as universal as our anarchist doctrine.” -
Mikhail Bakunin
Maybe this jab – life, my friend is always more expansive than doctrine
– gains intensity when made clear that who pronounced it is no other
than the bold insurgent and anarchist agitator from great Russia. Today
many vilify his writings without batting an eyelid; too old, too
philosophical. Often referred because in his ripe years he called for
the destruction of public order and the unleashing of the evil passions.
But it’s willingly ignored that in his early years he was above all a
big fan of rationalism, having declared moreover – still clinging to
Hegel – that “truth is not an abstraction nor the result of a personal
whim, but only the most logical expression of the principles that live
and act within the masses” or that “all that is natural is logic and all
that is logic is realised or has to be realised in the real world; in
nature itself and in its subsequent development: the natural history of
human society.” So yes, that disclosure slipped into a letter to a
friend, has something potent and precious.
At the moment of the passing of power from religious obscurantism to the
first conquests of so-called secular thought, the responsibility of all
the wrongs of society was blamed on the faith in God and they were under
the illusion that humankind could do without belief. That was
irrespective of the warning of Stirner who would later show how God can
very well pack up and move from heaven to earth. Faith in God became
faith in Science, and thereby in Reason. This might have had
considerable consequences – and partly positive – humans have
nevertheless maintained their need to believe in something they consider
capable of averting the uncertain, the undetermined. This belief that
they are looking for in faith, or in reason (and the logic that flows
from it), betrays in both cases the need for a certainty – one
dethroning the other once it is proven unfounded. It didn’t take long
before Christian messianism was replaced by Marxist messianism,
spreading a new belief in the ranks of the exploited. A new hope is
constructed, of the revolution of work. That path that theoretically
would pass first through the organisation of the productive forces, then
through the violent expropriation of the bosses, to end in the
construction of a society relieved of class and exploitation.
Condensed to broad brush strokes we could say that also the anarchist
movement has been – in large part and over a long period – certain that
history had a direction, that society develops towards Progress and that
the role of revolutionaries was to either support evolution or force the
pace. A certain anarchism, the “reasoning” anarchism, developed as a
reading grid of the world and society, pretending to understand and
explain the whole of terrestrial phenomenons and their multiple
interactions. We could have a hunch from the importance that certain
scientific men had over the anarchist movement in their time (for
example Kropotkin or Élisée Reclus). It also allows some today to
promote anarchism bragging about its objectivity, to debate it with
complete peace of mind, to speak about it while making abstraction of
its practical realisations and its viscerality. All in all totally
disembodied ideas: a brain activity, without the emotional turmoil.
Going back to the past, operating a sort of mix between historical
materialism and determinism (every cause has its effect and every effect
is the product of a cause), certain comrades thought in all sincerity
that anarchism –by means of elaboration – could be a key capable of
rationally guiding their action and that the question of revolution was
thus, partly, a case of logic.
Thus, it has been several centuries now that Science tries to assimilate
the Universe. Today the research into terrains such as the alleged
“artificial intelligence” seeks to reduce humans to a set of algorithms
and lines of code. In the same process, the rationality of the machine –
which became our daily fate – levels out bit by bit all that is absurd,
unexpected, fantastic, passionate, irrational in each of us. A real
conquest (with its share of battles) is carried out under our eyes and
inside us, seeking to banish risk, the unforeseen, adventure. As our
existences are augmented, optimised, assisted, ordered and enlisted in a
space-time made up of geographical coordinates and chronometrical
readings, saturated with prostheses, devices, norms, symbols, signs and
codes; life, fundamentally exuberant and excessive, struggling to find a
space-time to experiment that is its own, is absent.
Science and its armed wing, technology, if they might have acquired a
power without precedent in the history of human societies, are
nonetheless not able to give a sense to our life. On the contrary. The
first has been for ages at the service of deadly projects, and its
outcomes eliminate, reduce or degrade the conditions of the perpetuation
of life itself; as for the second, after having undermined its sense,
eroded, deformed, clouded, reduced, falsified, it is driving us,
gradually but certainly, to a generalised loss of sense.
That’s why among other things we reject science and technology, and that
we scorn them. And together with these, that condition and structure our
existences, we reject the rules and presumptions that are at the root,
till questioning logic (meaning the whole of rules that determine the
work of reason) on which this world is based, and on which also a big
majority of its (even fierce) adversaries are based.
This ambitious claim is nothing new. Remember that almost one century
ago, one of the driving forces of the surrealist movement – considered
as one of the most subversive movements of the century – appealed to
pass “the head, then an arm, through the bars thus breaking away from
logic, that is, the most hated of prisons.” Think also about that occult
poet, who during the same period, had this dialogue with the
psychiatrist of the asylum where he was imprisoned:
“- Yes, but look where it [automatic writing] got you. At a point of
such unsociability that you cannot get along with your fellows and that
you are the prisoner of your images, of your dreams.
- I prefer my spiritual, anguished, hopeless ways over the logical and
reasonable ways of intelligence.
- So you don’t want to heal, to become a normal, balanced man, master of
your emotions and impressions?
- I loathe that kind of men. I desire to be possessed – even if I am
undermined by it in a terrible way – by my thought, my desire and my
dream.”
Think finally of this other poet, Ramses Younane, who in 1940 saw that
bourgeois society was confronted with a crisis more important than the
question of consumption, of subsistence (the problem of bread), namely
“a crisis of thirsty and starving hearts, of imagination gone mad; a
crisis of poetry, of joy and folly; a crisis of movement, of expansion
and opening. A crisis of life.” (An observation that an accursed poet
wouldn’t have objected to, who almost a century before and in the middle
of the industrial revolution, already warned that the universal ruin –
or universal progress, whatever the name – would manifest itself in “the
depreciation of the hearts.”) According to Younane, in the past the
bourgeoisie laboured to replace blind faith with rational logic. The
glorification of rationality has bit by bit shaped life in a
technological mechanical system allowing neither the twists of
imagination nor the pleasure of a free spirit. From then on, the
instincts and profound feelings that naturally tend to seek pleasure,
were exploited and deformed by the commercial battle, by the competitive
struggle or by the military hymns. His conclusion was clear: “The values
of bourgeois rationalism are incapable of curing us of the crisis of
bourgeois civilisation. If we want to survive and save ourselves, we
have to rebel against these values, against rationalism and go beyond –
without going back to a humble and servile belief, but rather by
confirming the right of the free and rebellious spirit to overcome the
limits of reason and the chains of faith.”
In an anarchist perspective, thus of total liberation, I think, as a lot
of comrades do, that the destruction of the structures of domination
should go hand in hand with the subversion of the existing social
relations. Social relations that are at the same time the product and
the necessary condition, and the other way around. But I’m as well
firmly convinced that we should each, individually, fight against the
absolutism of reason and the empire of logic that have been instilled,
shaped by centuries of culture and civilisation. On the one hand, it’s a
matter of stopping thinking that logic could, in an absolute way,
establish the standards of rationality (not more than the rules of
non-reason, meaning irrationality). On the other hand, it’s a matter of
fighting against the dominant logic, that we have internalised without
our knowledge and from which freeing ourselves is not an easy task. That
logic that proves to be deeply useful for the perpetuation of power and
the existing order that dominates us all and that we reproduce because
it grants the majority of people who accept or at least put up with the
conditions in which they live, the idea that they reason “well”. That
logic that forces them into “reasonable” choices. It’s that logic that,
in the course of years, wore down this life that as a child we imagined
full of marvels, or at least full of possibilities, till imprisoning it
in its image: an existence narrowed by routine, compromise, calculations
and constraints.
What are the standards of that dominant logic, pillar of the existing
order?
Accommodation and gradualism are the cornerstone of this logic,
personified as much by progressives and reformists as by conservatives.
The result is they can only formulate partial modifications of reality,
thus allowing this organisation of the world – based in domination and
exploitation – to survive and carry on ruling in exchange for small
progressive adjustments. From this perspective we can understand that
the classical dichotomy progressive/conservative is a fake opposition:
the first try to preserve the old order of things by attaching some
devout ornaments, the second try to maintain the order of things through
change. On top of that is the reasonable despotism of one thing at a
time, that feeds and supports the source of voluntary servitude and
assures, thanks to politics, the perpetuation of the existence of
masters and slave, more sustainable than the use of force from which the
world is nonetheless not spared. Facing this, fighting against the
dominant logic means tending towards an “irrational” refusal, to oppose
to the partial and gradual modification the total transformation,
through a destruction that chooses to annihilate rather than going in
search of a cure for the incurable.
It is undeniable that dominant logic is inseparable from the
reproduction of the organisation of the world. Just as it is undeniable
that this logic is based on the acceptance of what is, and that it can
not at all be recuperated by an anarchist. Because all revolt draws its
force and its vibrancy from the refusal of only the things that “are”,
from the rejection of the only possibility of what “is”. It is from
there that anarchists strive to trace and to travel paths that we can
show and incite to take, to reach by trespassing upon what supposedly
“is not” even upon what supposedly “cannot be”. And that should
strengthen us, because it is both a challenge for ourselves and the
first charge in our fight against the dominant logic.
We should thus go beyond the rules of the existent, beyond what is,
beyond the rationality in force, to seek a sense for our lives. And this
sense, can we seek it in a “counter-logic”, a freeing logic instead of
the logic of submission, a “freer” logic? Or should we seek in the magma
of suggestions that life offers us, these suggestions that we try to
immediately ignore, suppress or repulse?
“Logic may indeed be unshakeable, but it cannot withstand someone who is
determined to live.” - Franz Kafka
The sense we’re searching for our life cannot be given by our existence
in this world based on the rules of the dominant logic. Because
existence is based on reduction: reduction of life to the material needs
of survival, reduction to the vital minimum of our desires,
expectations, dreams, instincts, reduction of life to something
measurable, quantifiable.
Existence is made of reasoning and “common sense”, small and sparse
calculations make us give up on the essential (the adventure, the
passion, the dream) to be certain of the mediocre, comfort, order,
security. Life – and I say this fully conscious of the lightness of this
remark – is expansive, is movement, energy, attraction and drive, is
diversity and creativity, and through this, is chaotic. Life is
application, essentially, is a matter of self-determination, of
discovery, of self-realisation, is an opening to joy. There is in it
something upsetting, that consists the opposition to the “course of
events” and to the established order, natural or social, familial or
divine.
Existence is but a flattened event, without depth and deprived of sense,
that finds it raison d’être in the preservation and the repeating of
models. It is evaluated through duration and quantity, while the
criteria of life are intensity and quality. Rather than giving
importance to what life is made from only on the base of the dominant
logic, conventions and values imposed by society, we should give it to
life when it emerges at the surface of our being, consider and receive
it as an occurrence, nervous because it is the one and only that we
possess, but insanely excited because it can reveal itself as full of
marvels. Careful thus, that it can express at best its potentials.
“There has always been a basic flaw in my nature; a love of the
fantastic, of extraordinary and unheard-of adventure, of undertakings
with boundless horizons the outcome of which no one can predict. In an
ordinary and calm existence, I suffocated, I felt out of place. Most men
seek tranquillity and consider it the highest good; in me, however, it
produces only despair. My spirit is in constant turmoil, demanding
action, movement, and life.” - Mikhail Bakunin
What is then this need for action, movement and life? Wouldn’t it be a
sign of… vitality?! The anarchist revolution, such as I can conceive of,
is as well as a struggle for the annihilation of exploitation and
domination and the subversion of the existing social relations, also the
abundance and liberation of this vitality, today weighed down. This
vitality, that can manifest itself in thousand and one ways, we can see
it in all its magnificence and charged with its wild force in revolt,
this balance of awareness and sensitivity, of head and arms. And it’s
also in this vitality that attack and destruction (that come so often
back in, among others, the speech of anarchists) have their roots, not
in logic. Our anarchist tension springs from our vitality, from this
feeling that life that simmers in us has to emerge. And vice versa, we
feel alive because we revolt and because we are able for a moment to
leave the terrain of words, thought and reflection, of the rational
explanation and the rational construction of our existences, to act. Of
course, from the viewpoint of the dominant logic this is illogical,
senseless, incomprehensible, even mad. That there are logical
foundations for destruction, that it is possible to argue in its favour
and to debate it only by reasoning, to reflect on its different aspects
– that is still undeniable and necessary. But if we wait until we
dispose of a logical faultless and detailed system to start acting, then
we will stay prisoners for eternity and be paralysed by shortcomings and
uncertainties – because such a system doesn’t exist, it cannot exist.
Our “personal logic” is not capable of responding in an adequate manner
to the madness that is our destructive tension to liberty. Neither do we
have complete, detailed and ready-to-use “logics” to propose to those
who understand and suffer from the distance that separates their
existence from their life, and thus decide to fight.
If we fight for a radically different world, we should also fight to
form and circulate ways of reasoning differently. We’re living in an age
where the means subjugate the individuals, rather than the other way
round that would consist in adopting the means in function of the ends.
And it is the same reversal – where the instrument becomes master – that
happened with reason. Moreover, this instrument with which we thought to
be able to read, to understand the world and to emancipate ourselves,
didn’t keep its promises and never did what it pretended to do at the
dawn of its first realisations. As a first step we should break away
from that deceitful and harmful idea that it’s only up to reason (and
the logic it produces) to determine our choices and the orientations we
want to give to our life. To seize with both hands this idea that our
life is a space crossed by countless forces in conflict and to consider
of greatest importance the will, the conscience, the desire, the
attraction, the intuition, the sense of daring, the dream, the
curiosity, the sensitivity, the taste (not only for adventure or
discovery, but more prosaic everything that gives pleasure to our
senses), the joy in the effort. It shouldn’t be something that controls
us, keeps us in the boundaries of the reasonable, but something that
allows us to orient ourselves beyond this cornered patch. It should also
not be the leash on our most generous thoughts and impulses, but on the
contrary guide us when we free ourselves from the yoke of realism and we
achieve to think dangerously: meaning, amongst other things, to not
systematically hold in suspicion the ends (and the necessary projects to
achieve them) that are not in line, or that exceed, the immediate
possibilities and the available means. The dichotomy between that what
supposedly is a matter of the reasonable and what pertains to insanity
is ready to be thrown out from the moment we become the adventurers of
our Idea, determined to create and follow our own path.
“Dreams! Always dreams! And the more ambitious and delicate is the soul,
the more its dreams bear it away from possibility. Each man carries in
himself his dose of natural opium, incessantly secreted and renewed,
and, from birth to death, how many hours can we count that are filled by
positive enjoyment, by successful and decisive action? Shall we ever
live, shall we ever pass into this image which my soul has painted, this
image which resembles you?” - Baudelaire