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Title: Mystical Anarchism Author: Simon Critchley Date: 01 June 2012 Language: en Topics: communes, the commons, religion, spirituality, Utopia, the coming insurrection, insurrection Source: Retrieved on April 15, 2013 from http://www.adbusters.org/magazine/102/mystical-anarchism.html
We are living through a long anti-1960s. The various anticapitalist
experiments in communal living and collective existence that defined
that period seem to us either quaintly passé, laughably unrealistic, or
dangerously misguided. Having grown up and thrown off such seemingly
childish ways, we now think we know better than to try to bring heaven
crashing down to earth and construct concrete utopias.
Despite our occasional and transient enthusiasms and Obamaisms, we are
all political realists; indeed, most of us are passive nihilists and
cynics. This is why we still require a belief in something like original
sin, namely, that there is something ontologically defective about what
it means to be human. The Judeo-Christian conception of original sin
finds its modern analogues in Freud’s variation on the Schopenhauerian
disjunction between desire and civilization, Heidegger’s ideas of
facticity and fallenness, and the Hobbesian anthropology that drives
Schmitt’s defense of authoritarianism and dictatorship (which has
seduced significant sectors of the left hungry for what they see as
Realpolitik).Without the conviction that the human condition is
essentially flawed and dangerously rapacious, we would have no way of
justifying our disappointment, and nothing gives us a greater thrill
than satiating our sense of exhaustion and ennui by polishing the bars
of our prison cell. Nothing can be done about it, we say. Humanity is a
plague.
It is indeed true that those utopian political movements of the 1960s,
in which an echo of utopian millenarian movements like the Free Spirit
could be heard – such as the Situationist International – led to various
forms of disillusionment, disintegration, and, in extreme cases,
disaster. Experiments in the collective ownership of property, or in
communal living based on sexual freedom without the repressive
institution of the family – or indeed R. D. Laing’s experimental
communal asylums with no distinction between the so-called mad and the
sane – seem like distant whimsical cultural memories captured in
dog-eared, yellowed paperbacks and grainy, poor-quality film. As a child
of punk, economic collapse, and the widespread social violence in the
United Kingdom in the late 1970s, it is a world that I have always
struggled to understand. Perhaps such communal experiments tried to be
too pure and were overfull of righteous conviction. Perhaps they were,
in a word, too moralistic to ever endure. Perhaps such experiments were
doomed because of what we might call a politics of abstraction, in the
sense of being overly attached to an idea at the expense of a frontal
denial of reality. Perhaps, indeed.
At their most extreme – say in the activities of the Weather
Underground, the Red Army Faction, and the Red Brigades in the 1970s –
the moral certitude of the closed and pure community becomes fatally
linked to redemptive, cleansing violence. Terror becomes the means to
bring about the end of virtue. Such is the logic of Jacobinism. The
death of individuals is but a speck on the vast heroic canvas of the
class struggle. Such thinking culminated in a heroic politics of
violence, where acts of abduction, kidnapping, hijacking, and
assassination were justified through an attachment to a set of ideas. As
a character in Jean-Luc Godard’s Notre Musique remarks, “To kill a human
being in order to defend an idea is not to defend an idea, it is to kill
a human being.”
Perhaps such groups were too attached to the idea of immediacy, the
propaganda of the violent deed as the impatient attempt to storm the
heavens. Perhaps such experiments lacked an understanding of politics as
a constant and concrete process of mediation. That is, the mediation
between a subjective ethical commitment based on a general principle –
for example the equality of all, friendship, or, as I would say, an
infinite ethical demand – and the experience of local organization that
builds fronts and alliances between disparate groups with often
conflicting sets of interests, what Gramsci called the activity of
“hegemony.” By definition, such a process of mediation is never pure and
never complete.
Are these utopian experiments in community dead, or do they live on in
some form? I’d like to make two suggestions for areas in which this
utopian impulse might live on, two experiments, if you will: One from
contemporary art, one from contemporary radical politics. These two
areas can be interestingly linked. Indeed, if a tendency marks our time,
then it is the increasing difficulty in separating forms of
collaborative art from experimental politics.
Perhaps such utopian experiments in community live on in the
institutionally sanctioned spaces of the contemporary art world. One
thinks of projects like L’Association des temps libérés (1995) or Utopia
Station (2003), as well as many other examples gathered together in a
show at the Guggenheim Museum in New York in Fall 2008,
Theanyspacewhatever. In the work of artists like Philippe Parreno and
Liam Gillick, or curators like Hans-Ulrich Obrist and Maria Lind, there
is a deeply felt Situationist nostalgia for ideas of collectivity,
action, self-management, collaboration, and indeed the idea of the group
as such. In such art practice, which Nicolas Bourriaud has successfully
branded as “relational,” art is the acting out of a situation in order
to see if, in Obrist’s words, “something like a collective intelligence
might exist.” As Gillick notes, “Maybe it would be better if we worked
in groups of three.” So much contemporary art and politics is obsessed
with the figure of the group and of work as collaboration, perhaps all
the way to the refusal of work and the cultivation of anonymity.
Of course, the problem with such contemporary utopian art experiments is
twofold. On the one hand, they are only enabled and legitimated through
the cultural institutions of the art world and thus utterly enmeshed in
the circuits of commodification and spectacle that they seek to subvert;
and, on the other hand, the dominant mode for approaching an experience
of the communal is through the strategy of reenactment. One doesn’t
engage in a bank heist, one reenacts Patty Hearst’s adventures with the
Symbionese Liberation Army in a warehouse in Brooklyn, or whatever.
Situationist détournement is replayed as obsessively planned
reenactment. The category of reenactment has become hegemonic in
contemporary art, specifically as a way of thinking the relation between
art and politics – perhaps radical politics has also become reenactment.
Fascinating as I find such experiments and the work of the artists
involved, I suspect here what we might call a “mannerist Situationism,”
where the old problem of recuperation does not even apply because such
art is completely co-opted by the socio-economic system which provides
its lifeblood.
To turn to politics, perhaps we witnessed another communal experiment
with the events in France surrounding the arrest and detention of the
so-called “Tarnac Nine” on November 11, 2008, and the work of groups
that go under different names: Tiqqun, the Invisible Committee, the
Imaginary Party. As part of Nicolas Sarkozy’s reactionary politics of
fear – itself based on an overwhelming fear of disorder and a desire to
erase definitively the memory of 1968 – a number of activists who had
been formerly associated with Tiqqun were arrested in rural, central
France by a force of 150 anti-terrorist police, helicopters, and
attendant media. They were living communally in the small village of
Tarnac in the Corrèze district of the Massif Central. Apparently a
number of the group’s members had bought a small farmhouse and ran a
cooperative grocery store, besides which they were engaged in such
dangerous activities as running a local film club, planting carrots, and
delivering food to the elderly. With surprising juridical imagination,
they were charged with “pre-terrorism,” an accusation linked to acts of
sabotage on France’s TGV rail system.
The basis for this thought-crime was a passage from a book published in
2007 called L’insurrection qui vient, or The Coming Insurrection. It is
a wonderfully dystopian diagnosis of contemporary society – seven
circles of hell in seven chapters – and a compelling strategy to resist
it. The final pages of L’insurrection advocate acts of sabotage against
the transport networks of “the social machine” and ask the question,
“How could a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless?” Two
of the alleged pre-terrorists, Julien Coupat and Yldune LĂ©vy, were
detained in jail and charged with “a terrorist undertaking” that carried
a prison sentence of twenty years. The last of the group to be held in
custody, Coupat, was released without having faced prosecution on May
28, 2009, on bail of 16,000, and was forbidden to travel outside the
greater Parisian area. Late that year, fresh arrests were made in
connection with the Tarnac affair. Such is the repressive and
reactionary force of the state – just in case anyone had forgotten. As
the authors of L’insurrection remind us, “Governing has never been
anything but pushing back by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the
crowd will hang you.”
L’insurrection qui vient has powerful echoes of the Situationist
International. Yet – revealingly – the Hegelian-Marxism of Debord’s
analysis of the spectacle and commodification is replaced with very
strong echoes of Agamben, in particular the question of community in
Agamben as that which would survive the separation of law and life. The
question is the relation between law and life, and the possibility of a
nonrelation between those two terms. If law is essentially violence,
which in the age of bio-politics taps deeper and deeper into the
reservoir of life, then the separation of law and life is the space of
what Agamben calls politics. It is what leads to his anomic misreading
of Paul.
The authorship of L’insurrection is attributed to La Comité Invisible
and the insurrectional strategy of the group turns around the question
of invisibility. It is a question of “learning how to become
imperceptible,” of regaining “the taste for anonymity,” and of not
exposing and losing oneself in the order of visibility, which is always
controlled by the police and the state. The authors of L’insurrection
argue for the proliferation of zones of opacity, anonymous spaces in
which communes might be formed. The book ends with the slogan, “All
power to the communes” (Tout le pouvoir aux communes). In a nod to
French philosopher Maurice Blanchot, these communes are described as
“inoperative” or “désœuvrée,” as refusing the capitalist tyranny of
work. In a related text simply entitled Call, they seek to establish a
“series of foci of desertion, of secession poles, of rallying points.
For the runaways. For those who leave. A set of places to take shelter
from the control of a civilization that is headed for the abyss.”
A strategy of sabotage, blockade, and what is called “the human strike”
is proposed in order to weaken still further our doomed civilization. As
the Tiqqun group write in a 1999 text called “Oh Good, the War!”:
“Abandon ship. Not because it’s sinking, but to make it sink.” Or again:
“When a civilization is ruined, one declares it bankrupt. One does not
tidy up in a home falling off a cliff.” An opposition between the city
and the country is constantly reiterated, and it is clear that the
construction of zones of opacity is better suited to rural life than the
policed space of surveillance of the modern metropolis. The city is much
better suited to what we might call “designer resistance,” where people
wear Ramones T-shirts and sit in coffee shops saying “capitalism sucks,”
before going back to their jobs as graphic designers.
L’insurrection is a compelling, exhilarating, funny, and deeply lyrical
text that sets off all sorts of historical echoes with movements like
the Free Spirit and the Franciscan Spirituals in the Middle Ages,
through to the proto-anarchist Diggers in the English Revolution and
different strands of nineteenth-century utopian communism. We should
note the emphasis on secrecy, invisibility, and itinerancy, on
small-scale communal experiments in living, on the politicization of
poverty that recalls medieval practices of mendicancy and the refusal of
work. What is at stake is the affirmation of a life no longer exhausted
by work, cowed by law and the police. These are the core political
elements of mystical anarchism.
This double program of sabotage, on the one hand, and secession from
civilization on the other, risks, I think, remaining trapped within the
politics of abstraction. In this fascinatingly creative reenactment of
the Situationist gesture – which is why I stressed the connection with
contemporary art practice – what is missing is a thinking of political
mediation, where groups like the Invisible Committee would be able to
link up and become concretized in relation to multiple and conflicting
sites of struggle, workers, the unemployed, even the designer resisters
and – perhaps most importantly – more or less disenfranchised ethnic
groups. We need a richer political cartography than the opposition
between the city and the country. Tempting as it is, sabotage combined
with secession from civilization smells of the moralism we detected
above: An ultimately anti-political purism.
That said, I understand the desire for secession: It is the desire to
escape a seemingly doomed civilization that is headed for the abyss. I
would argue that the proper theological name for such secessionism is
Marcionism (an early Christian belief system) which turns on the
separation of law from life, the order of creation from that of
redemption, the Old and New Testaments. In the face of a globalizing,
atomizing, bio-political legal regime of violence and domination that
threatens to drain dry the reservoir of life, secession is withdrawal,
the establishment of a space where another form of life and collective
intelligence are possible. Secession offers the possibility of an
antinomian separation of law from life, a retreat from the old order
through experiments with free human sociability: In other words,
communism, understood as the “Sharing of a sensibility and elaboration
of sharing. The uncovering of what is common and the building of a
force.”
It is also the case that something has changed and is changing in the
nature of tactics of political resistance. With the fading away of the
so-called anti-globalization movement, groups like the Invisible
Committee offer a consistency of thought and action that possesses great
diagnostic power and tactical awareness. They provide a new and
compelling vocabulary of insurrectionary politics that has both
described and unleashed a series of political actions in numerous
locations, some closer to home, some further away. The latter is
performed by what the Invisible Committee calls – in an interesting
choice of word – “resonance.” A resonating body in one location – like
glasses on a table – begins to make another body shake, and suddenly the
whole floor is covered with glass.
Politics is perhaps no longer, as it was in the so-called
anti-globalization movement, a struggle for and with visibility.
Resistance is about the cultivation of invisibility, opacity, anonymity,
and resonance.