💾 Archived View for library.inu.red › file › david-graeber-revolution-in-reverse.gmi captured on 2023-01-29 at 09:07:40. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Title: Revolution in Reverse Author: David Graeber Date: 2007 Language: en Topics: revolution, violence Source: Retrieved on May 16th, 2009 from http://news.infoshop.org/article.php?story=2007graeber-revolution-reverse
ontologies of violence and political ontologies of the imagination)
“All power to the imagination.” “Be realistic, demand the impossible...”
Anyone involved in radical politics has heard these expressions a
thousand times. Usually they charm and excite the first time one
encounters them, then eventually become so familiar as to seem
hackneyed, or just disappear into the ambient background noise of
radical life. Rarely if ever are they the object of serious theoretical
reflection.
It seems to me that at the current historical juncture, some such
reflection wouldn’t be a bad idea. We are at a moment, after all, when
received definitions have been thrown into disarray. It is quite
possible that we are heading for a revolutionary moment, or perhaps a
series of them, but we no longer have any clear idea of what that might
even mean. This essay then is the product of a sustained effort to try
to rethink terms like realism, imagination, alienation, bureaucracy,
revolution itself. It’s born of some six years of involvement with the
alternative globalization movement and particularly with its most
radical, anarchist, direct action-oriented elements. Consider it a kind
of preliminary theoretical report. I want to ask, among other things,
why is it these terms, which for most of us seem rather to evoke
long-since forgotten debates of the 1960s, still resonate in those
circles? Why is it that the idea of any radical social transformation so
often seems “unrealistic”? What does revolution mean once one no longer
expects a single, cataclysmic break with past structures of oppression?
These seem disparate questions but it seems to me the answers are
related. If in many cases I brush past existing bodies of theory, this
is quite intentional: I am trying to see if it is possible to build on
the experience of these movements and the theoretical currents that
inform them to begin to create something new.
Here is the gist of my argument:
different assumptions about the ultimate realities of power. The Right
is rooted in a political ontology of violence, where being realistic
means taking into account the forces of destruction. In reply the Left
has consistently proposed variations on a political ontology of the
imagination, in which the forces that are seen as the ultimate realities
that need to be taken into account are those forces (of production,
creativity...) that bring things into being.
backed by force — structural violence — always produces skewed and
fractured structures of the imagination. It is the experience of living
inside these fractured structures that we refer to as “alienation”.
to brush aside existing realities of violence by overthrowing the state,
then, to unleash the powers of popular imagination and creativity to
overcome the structures that create alienation. Over the twentieth
century it eventually became apparent that the real problem was how to
institutionalize such creativity without creating new, often even more
violent and alienating structures. As a result, the insurrectionary
model no longer seems completely viable, but it’s not clear what will
replace it.
In practice, mass actions reverse the ordinary insurrectionary sequence.
Rather than a dramatic confrontation with state power leading first to
an outpouring of popular festivity, the creation of new democratic
institutions, and eventually the reinvention of everyday life, in
organizing mass mobilizations, activists drawn principally from
subcultural groups create new, directly democratic institutions to
organize “festivals of resistance” that ultimately lead to
confrontations with the state. This is just one aspect of a more general
movement of reformulation that seems to me to be inspired in part by the
influence of anarchism, but in even larger part, by feminism — a
movement that ultimately aims to recreate the effects of those
insurrectionary moments on an ongoing basis
Let me take these one by one.
From early 2000 to late 2002 I was working with the Direct Action
Network in New York — the principal group responsible for organizing
mass actions as part of the global justice movement in that city at that
time. Actually, DAN was not, technically, a group, but a decentralized
network, operating on principles of direct democracy according to an
elaborate, but strikingly effective, form of consensus process. It
played a central role in ongoing efforts to create new organizational
forms that I wrote about in an earlier essay in these pages. DAN existed
in a purely political space; it had no concrete resources, not even a
significant treasury, to administer. Then one day someone gave DAN a
car. It caused a minor, but ongoing, crisis. We soon discovered that
legally, it is impossible for a decentralized network to own a car. Cars
can be owned by individuals, or they can be owned by corporations, which
are fictive individuals. They cannot be owned by networks. Unless we
were willing to incorporate ourselves as a nonprofit corporation (which
would have required a complete reorganization and abandoning most of our
egalitarian principles) the only expedient was to find a volunteer
willing to claim to be the owner for legal purposes. But then that
person was expected to pay all outstanding fines, insurance fees,
provide written permission to allow others to drive out of state, and,
of course, only he could retrieve the car if it were impounded. Before
long the DAN car had become such a perennial problem that we simply
abandoned it.
It struck me there was something important here. Why is it that projects
like DAN’s — projects of democratizing society — are so often perceived
as idle dreams that melt away as soon as they encounter anything that
seems like hard material reality? In our case it had nothing to do with
inefficiency: police chiefs across the country had called us the best
organized force they’d ever had to deal with. It seems to me the reality
effect (if one may call it that) comes rather from the fact that radical
projects tend to founder, or at least become endlessly difficult, the
moment they enter into the world of large, heavy objects: buildings,
cars, tractors, boats, industrial machinery. This is in turn is not
because these objects are somehow intrinsically difficult to administer
democratically; it’s because, like the DAN car, they are surrounded by
endless government regulation, and effectively impossible to hide from
the government’s armed representatives. In America, I’ve seen endless
examples. A squat is legalized after a long struggle; suddenly, building
inspectors arrive to announce it will take ten thousand dollars worth of
repairs to bring it up to code; organizers are forced spend the next
several years organizing bake sales and soliciting contributions. This
means setting up bank accounts, and legal regulations then specify how a
group receiving funds, or dealing with the government, must be organized
(again, not as an egalitarian collective). All these regulations are
enforced by violence. True, in ordinary life, police rarely come in
swinging billy clubs to enforce building code regulations, but, as
anarchists often discover, if one simply pretends they don’t exist, that
will, eventually, happen. The rarity with which the nightsticks actually
appear just helps to make the violence harder to see. This in turn makes
the effects of all these regulations — regulations that almost always
assume that normal relations between individuals are mediated by the
market, and that normal groups are organized hierarchically — seem to
emanate not from the government’s monopoly of the use of force, but from
the largeness, solidity, and heaviness of the objects themselves.
When one is asked to be “realistic” then, the reality one is normally
being asked to recognize is not one of natural, material facts; neither
is it really some supposed ugly truth about human nature. Normally it’s
a recognition of the effects of the systematic threat of violence. It
even threads our language. Why, for example, is a building referred to
as “real property”, or “real estate”? The “real” in this usage is not
derived from Latin res, or “thing”: it’s from the Spanish real, meaning,
“royal”, “belonging to the king.” All land within a sovereign territory
ultimately belongs to the sovereign; legally this is still the case.
This is why the state has the right to impose its regulations. But
sovereignty ultimately comes down to a monopoly of what is
euphemistically referred to as “force” — that is, violence. Just as
Giorgio Agamben famously argued that from the perspective of sovereign
power, something is alive because you can kill it, so property is “real”
because the state can seize or destroy it. In the same way, when one
takes a “realist” position in International Relations, one assumes that
states will use whatever capacities they have at their disposal,
including force of arms, to pursue their national interests. What
“reality” is one recognizing? Certainly not material reality. The idea
that nations are human-like entities with purposes and interests is an
entirely metaphysical notion. The King of France had purposes and
interests. “France” does not. What makes it seem “realistic” to suggest
it does is simply that those in control of nation-states have the power
to raise armies, launch invasions, bomb cities, and can otherwise
threaten the use of organized violence in the name of what they describe
as their “national interests” — and that it would be foolish to ignore
that possibility. National interests are real because they can kill you.
The critical term here is “force”, as in “the state’s monopoly of the
use of coercive force.” Whenever we hear this word invoked, we find
ourselves in the presence of a political ontology in which the power to
destroy, to cause others pain or to threaten to break, damage, or mangle
their bodies (or just lock them in a tiny room for the rest of their
lives) is treated as the social equivalent of the very energy that
drives the cosmos. Contemplate, for instance, the metaphors and
displacements that make it possible to construct the following two
sentences:
Scientists investigate the nature of physical laws so as to understand
the forces that govern the universe.
Police are experts in the scientific application of physical force in
order to enforce the laws that govern society.
This is to my mind the essence of Right-wing thought: a political
ontology that through such subtle means, allows violence to define the
very parameters of social existence and common sense.
The Left, on the other hand, has always been founded on a different set
of assumptions about what is ultimately real, about the very grounds of
political being. Obviously Leftists don’t deny the reality of violence.
Many Leftist theorists have thought about it quite a lot. But they don’t
tend to give it the same foundational status. Instead, I would argue
that Leftist thought is founded on what I will call a “political
ontology of the imagination” — though I could as easily have called it
an ontology of creativity or making or invention. Nowadays, most of us
tend to identify it with the legacy of Marx, with his emphasis on social
revolution and forces of material production. But really Marx’s terms
emerged from much wider arguments about value, labor, and creativity
current in radical circles of his day, whether in the worker’s movement,
or for that matter various strains of Romanticism. Marx himself, for all
his contempt for the utopian socialists of his day, never ceased to
insist that what makes human beings different from animals is that
architects, unlike bees, first raise their structures in the
imagination. It was the unique property of humans, for Marx, that they
first envision things, then bring them into being. It was this process
he referred to as “production”. Around the same time, utopian socialists
like St. Simon were arguing that artists needed to become the avant
garde or “vanguard”, as he put it, of a new social order, providing the
grand visions that industry now had the power to bring into being. What
at the time might have seemed the fantasy of an eccentric pamphleteer
soon became the charter for a sporadic, uncertain, but apparently
permanent alliance that endures to this day. If artistic avant gardes
and social revolutionaries have felt a peculiar affinity for one another
ever since, borrowing each other’s languages and ideas, it appears to
have been insofar as both have remained committed to the idea that the
ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something that we
make, and, could just as easily make differently. In this sense, a
phrase like “all power to the imagination” expresses the very
quintessence of the Left.
To this emphasis on forces of creativity and production of course the
Right tends to reply that revolutionaries systematically neglect the
social and historical importance of the “means of destruction”: states,
armies, executioners, barbarian invasions, criminals, unruly mobs, and
so on. Pretending such things are not there, or can simply be wished
away, they argue, has the result of ensuring that left-wing regimes will
in fact create far more death and destruction than those that have the
wisdom to take a more “realistic” approach.
Obviously, this dichotomy is very much a simplification. One could level
endless qualifications. The bourgeoisie of Marx’s time for instance had
an extremely productivist philosophy — one reason Marx could see it as a
revolutionary force. Elements of the Right dabbled with the artistic
ideal, and 20^(th) century Marxist regimes often embraced essentially
right-wing theories of power, and paid little more than lip service to
the determinant nature of production. Nonetheless, I think these are
useful terms because even if one treats “imagination” and “violence” not
as the single hidden truth of the world but as immanent principles, as
equal constituents of any social reality, they can reveal a great deal
one would not be able to see otherwise. For one thing, everywhere,
imagination and violence seem to interact in predictable, and quite
significant, ways.
Let me start with a few words on violence, providing a very schematic
overview of arguments that I have developed in somewhat greater detail
elsewhere:
I’m an anthropologist by profession and anthropological discussions of
violence are almost always prefaced by statements that violent acts are
acts of communication, that they are inherently meaningful, and that
this is what is truly important about them. In other words, violence
operates largely through the imagination.
All of this is true. I would hardly want to discount the importance of
fear and terror in human life. Acts of violence can be — indeed often
are — acts of communication. But the same could be said of any other
form of human action, too. It strikes me that what is really important
about violence is that it is perhaps the only form of human action that
holds out the possibility of operating on others without being
communicative. Or let me put this more precisely. Violence may well be
the only way in which it is possible for one human being to have
relatively predictable effects on the actions of another without
understanding anything about them. Pretty much any other way one might
try to influence another’s actions, one at least has to have some idea
who they think they are, who they think you are, what they might want
out of the situation, and a host of similar considerations. Hit them
over the head hard enough, all this becomes irrelevant. It’s true that
the effects one can have by hitting them are quite limited. But they are
real enough, and the fact remains that any alternative form of action
cannot, without some sort of appeal to shared meanings or
understandings, have any sort of effect at all. What’s more, even
attempts to influence another by the threat of violence, which clearly
does require some level of shared understandings (at the very least, the
other party must understand they are being threatened, and what is being
demanded of them), requires much less than any alternative. Most human
relations — particularly ongoing ones, such as those between
longstanding friends or longstanding enemies — are extremely
complicated, endlessly dense with experience and meaning. They require a
continual and often subtle work of interpretation; everyone involved
must put constant energy into imagining the other’s point of view.
Threatening others with physical harm on the other hand allows the
possibility of cutting through all this. It makes possible relations of
a far more schematic kind: i.e., ‘cross this line and I will shoot you
and otherwise I really don’t care who you are or what you want’. This
is, for instance, why violence is so often the preferred weapon of the
stupid: one could almost say, the trump card of the stupid, since it is
the form of stupidity to which it is most difficult to come up with any
intelligent response.
There is, however, one crucial qualification to be made. The more evenly
matched two parties are in their capacity for violence, the less all
this tends to be true. If one is involved in a relatively equal contest
of violence, it is indeed a very good idea to understand as much as
possible about them. A military commander will obviously try to get
inside his opponent’s mind. It’s really only when one side has an
overwhelming advantage in their capacity to cause physical harm this is
no longer the case. Of course, when one side has an overwhelming
advantage, they rarely have to actually resort to actually shooting,
beating, or blowing people up. The threat will usually suffice. This has
a curious effect. It means that the most characteristic quality of
violence — its capacity to impose very simple social relations that
involve little or no imaginative identification — becomes most salient
in situations where actual, physical violence is likely to be least
present.
We can speak here (as many do) of structural violence: that systematic
inequalities that are ultimately backed up by the threat of force can be
seen as a form of violence in themselves. Systems of structural violence
invariably seem to produce extreme lopsided structures of imaginative
identification. It’s not that interpretive work isn’t carried out.
Society, in any recognizable form, could not operate without it. Rather,
the overwhelming burden of the labor is relegated to its victims.
Let me start with the household. A constant staple of 1950s situation
comedies, in America, were jokes about the impossibility of
understanding women. The jokes of course were always told by men.
Women’s logic was always being treated as alien and incomprehensible.
One never had the impression, on the other hand, that women had much
trouble understanding the men. That’s because the women had no choice
but to understand men: this was the heyday of the American patriarchal
family, and women with no access to their own income or resources had
little choice but to spend a fair amount of time and energy
understanding what the relevant men thought was going on. Actually, this
sort of rhetoric about the mysteries of womankind is a perennial feature
of patriarchal families: structures that can, indeed, be considered
forms of structural violence insofar as the power of men over women
within them is, as generations of feminists have pointed out, ultimately
backed up, if often in indirect and hidden ways, by all sorts of
coercive force. But generations of female novelists — Virginia Woolf
comes immediately to mind — have also documented the other side of this:
the constant work women perform in managing, maintaining, and adjusting
the egos of apparently oblivious men — involving an endless work of
imaginative identification and what I’ve called interpretive labor. This
carries over on every level. Women are always imagining what things look
like from a male point of view. Men almost never do the same for women.
This is presumably the reason why in so many societies with a pronounced
gendered division of labor (that is, most societies), women know a great
deal about men do every day, and men have next to no idea about women’s
occupations. Faced with the prospect of even trying to imagine a women’s
perspective, many recoil in horror. In the US, one popular trick among
High School creative writing teachers is to assign students to write an
essay imagining that they were to switch genders, and describe what it
would be like to live for one day as a member of the opposite sex. The
results are almost always exactly the same: all the girls in class write
long and detailed essays demonstrating that they have spent a great deal
of time thinking about such questions; roughly half the boys refuse to
write the essay entirely. Almost invariably they express profound
resentment about having to imagine what it might be like to be a woman.
It should be easy enough to multiply parallel examples. When something
goes wrong in a restaurant kitchen, and the boss appears to size things
up, he is unlikely to pay much attention to a collection of workers all
scrambling to explain their version of the story. Likely as not he’ll
tell them all to shut up and just arbitrarily decide what he thinks is
likely to have happened: “you’re the new guy, you must have messed up —
if you do it again, you’re fired.” It’s those who do not have the power
to fire arbitrarily who have to do the work of figuring out what
actually happened. What occurs on the most petty or intimate level also
occurs on the level of society as a whole. Curiously enough it was Adam
Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (written in 1761), who first
made notice of what’s nowadays labeled “compassion fatigue”. Human
beings, he observed, appear to have a natural tendency not only to
imaginatively identify with their fellows, but also, as a result, to
actually feel one another’s joys and pains. The poor, however, are just
too consistently miserable, and as a result, observers, for their own
self-protection, tend to simply blot them out. The result is that while
those on the bottom spend a great deal of time imagining the
perspectives of, and actually caring about, those on the top, but it
almost never happens the other way around. That is my real point.
Whatever the mechanisms, something like this always seems to occur:
whether one is dealing with masters and servants, men and women, bosses
and workers, rich and poor. Structural inequality — structural violence
— invariably creates the same lopsided structures of the imagination.
And since, as Smith correctly observed, imagination tends to bring with
it sympathy, the victims of structural violence tend to care about its
beneficiaries, or at least, to care far more about them than those
beneficiaries care about them. In fact, this might well be (aside from
the violence itself) the single most powerful force preserving such
relations.
It is easy to see bureaucratic procedures as an extension of this
phenomenon. One might say they are not so much themselves forms of
stupidity and ignorance as modes of organizing situations already marked
by stupidity and ignorance owing the existence of structural violence.
True, bureaucratic procedure operates as if it were a form of stupidity,
in that it invariably means ignoring all the subtleties of real human
existence and reducing everything to simple pre-established mechanical
or statistical formulae. Whether it’s a matter of forms, rules,
statistics, or questionnaires, bureaucracy is always about
simplification. Ultimately the effect is not so different than the boss
who walks in to make an arbitrary snap decision as to what went wrong:
it’s a matter of applying very simple schemas to complex, ambiguous
situations. The same goes, in fact, for police, who are after all simply
low-level administrators with guns. Police sociologists have long since
demonstrated that only a tiny fraction of police work has anything to do
with crime. Police are, rather, the immediate representatives of the
state’s monopoly of violence, those who step in to actively simplify
situations (for example, were someone to actively challenge some
bureaucratic definition). Simultaneously, police they have become, in
contemporary industrial democracies, America in particular, the almost
obsessive objects of popular imaginative identification. In fact, the
public is constantly invited, in a thousand TV shows and movies, to see
the world from a police officer’s perspective, even if it is always the
perspective of imaginary police officers, the kind who actually do spend
their time fighting crime rather than concerning themselves with broken
tail lights or open container laws.
To imaginatively identify with an imaginary policeman is of course not
the same as to imaginatively identify with a real one (most Americans in
fact avoid a real policeman like the plague). This is a critical
distinction, however much an increasingly digitalized world makes it
easy to confuse the two.
It is here helpful to consider the history of the word “imagination”.
The common Ancient and Medieval conception, what we call “the
imagination” was considered the zone of passage between reality and
reason. Perceptions from the material world had to pass through the
imagination, becoming emotionally charged in the process and mixing with
all sorts of phantasms, before the rational mind could grasp their
significance. Intentions and desires moved in the opposite direction.
It’s only after Descartes, really, that the word “imaginary” came to
mean, specifically, anything that is not real: imaginary creatures,
imaginary places (Middle Earth, Narnia, planets in faraway Galaxies, the
Kingdom of Prester John...), imaginary friends. By this definition of
course a “political ontology of the imagination” would actually a
contradiction in terms. The imagination cannot be the basis of reality.
It is by definition that which we can think, but has no reality.
I’ll refer to this latter as “the transcendent notion of the
imagination” since it seems to take as its model novels or other works
of fiction that create imaginary worlds that presumably, remain the same
no matter how many times one reads them. Imaginary creatures — elves or
unicorns or TV cops — are not affected by the real world. They cannot
be, since they don’t exist. In contrast, the kind of imagination I have
been referring to here is much closer to the old, immanent, conception.
Critically, it is in no sense static and free-floating, but entirely
caught up in projects of action that aim to have real effects on the
material world, and as such, always changing and adapting. This is
equally true whether one is crafting a knife or a piece of jewelry, or
trying to make sure one doesn’t hurt a friend’s feelings.
One might get a sense of how important this distinction really is by
returning to the ‘68 slogan about giving power to the imagination. If
one takes this to refer to the transcendent imagination — preformed
utopian schemes, for example — doing so can, we know, have disastrous
effects. Historically, it has often meant imposing them by violence. On
the other hand, in a revolutionary situation, one might by the same
token argue that not giving full power to the other, immanent, sort of
imagination would be equally disastrous.
The relation of violence and imagination is made much more complicated
because while in every case, structural inequalities tend to split
society into those doing imaginative labor, and those who do not, they
do so in very different ways. Capitalism here is a dramatic case in
point. Political economy tends to see work in capitalist societies as
divided between two spheres: wage labor, for which the paradigm is
always factories, and domestic labor — housework, childcare — relegated
mainly to women. The first is seen primarily as a matter of creating and
maintaining physical objects. The second is probably best seen as a
matter of creating and maintaining people and social relations. The
distinction is obviously a bit of a caricature: there has never been a
society, not even Engels’ Manchester or Victor Hugo’s Paris, where most
men were factory workers or most women worked exclusively as housewives.
Still, it is a useful starting point, since it reveals an interesting
divergence. In the sphere of industry, it is generally those on top that
relegate to themselves the more imaginative tasks (i.e., that design the
products and organize production), whereas when inequalities emerge in
the sphere of social production, it’s those on the bottom who end up
expected to do the major imaginative work (for example, the bulk of what
I’ve called the ‘labor of interpretation’ that keeps life running).
No doubt all this makes it easier to see the two as fundamentally
different sorts of activity, making it hard for us to recognize
interpretive labor, for example, or most of what we usually think of as
women’s work, as labor at all. To my mind it would probably be better to
recognize it as the primary form of labor. Insofar as a clear
distinction can be made here, it’s the care, energy, and labor directed
at human beings that should be considered fundamental. The things we
care most about — our loves, passions, rivalries, obsessions — are
always other people; and in most societies that are not capitalist, it’s
taken for granted that the manufacture of material goods is a
subordinate moment in a larger process of fashioning people. In fact, I
would argue that one of the most alienating aspects of capitalism is the
fact that it forces us to pretend that it is the other way around, and
that societies exist primarily to increase their output of things.
In the twentieth century, death terrifies men less than the absence of
real life. All these dead, mechanized, specialized actions, stealing a
little bit of life a thousand times a day until the mind and body are
exhausted, until that death which is not the end of life but the final
saturation with absence.
— Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life
Creativity and desire — what we often reduce, in political economy
terms, to “production” and “consumption” — are essentially vehicles of
the imagination. Structures of inequality and domination, structural
violence if you will, tend to skew the imagination. They might create
situations where laborers are relegated to mind-numbing, boring,
mechanical jobs and only a small elite is allowed to indulge in
imaginative labor, leading to the feeling, on the part of the workers,
that they are alienated from their own labor, that their very deeds
belong to someone else. It might also create social situations where
kings, politicians, celebrities or CEOs prance about oblivious to almost
everything around them while their wives, servants, staff, and handlers
spend all their time engaged in the imaginative work of maintaining them
in their fantasies. Most situations of inequality, I suspect, combine
elements of both.
The subjective experience of living inside such lopsided structures of
imagination is what we are referring to when we talk about “alienation”.
It strikes me that if nothing else, this perspective would help explain
the lingering appeal of theories of alienation in revolutionary circles,
even when the academic Left has long since abandoned them. If one enters
an anarchist infoshop, almost anywhere in the world, the French authors
one is likely to encounter will still largely consist of Situationists
like Guy Debord and Raoul Vaneigem, the great theorists of alienation
(alongside theorists of the imagination like Cornelius Castoriadis). For
a long time I was genuinely puzzled as to how so many suburban American
teenagers could be entranced, for instance, by Raoul Vaneigem’s The
Revolution of Everyday Life — a book, after all, written in Paris almost
forty years ago. In the end I decided it must be because Vaneigem’s book
was, in its own way, the highest theoretical expression of the feelings
of rage, boredom, and revulsion that almost any adolescent at some point
feels when confronted with the middle class existence. The sense of a
life broken into fragments, with no ultimate meaning or integrity; of a
cynical market system selling its victims commodities and spectacles
that themselves represent tiny false images of the very sense of
totality and pleasure and community the market has in fact destroyed;
the tendency to turn every relation into a form of exchange, to
sacrifice life for “survival”, pleasure for renunciation, creativity for
hollow homogenous units of power or “dead time” — on some level all this
clearly still rings true.
The question though is why. Contemporary social theory offers little
explanation. Poststructuralism, which emerged in the immediate aftermath
of ‘68, was largely born of the rejection of this sort of analysis. It
is now simple common sense among social theorists that one cannot define
a society as “unnatural” unless one assumes that there is some natural
way for society to be, “inhuman” unless there is some authentic human
essence, that one cannot say that the self is “fragmented” unless it
would be possible to have a unified self, and so on. Since these
positions are untenable — since there is no natural condition for
society, no authentic human essence, no unitary self — theories of
alienation have no basis. Taken purely as arguments, these seem
difficult to refute. But how then do we account for the experience?
If one really thinks about it, though, the argument is much less
powerful than it seems. After all, what are academic theorists saying?
They are saying that the idea of a unitary subject, a whole society, a
natural order, are unreal. That all these things are simply figments of
our imagination. True enough. But then: what else could they be? And why
is that a problem? If imagination is indeed a constituent element in the
process of how we produce our social and material realities, there is
every reason to believe that it proceeds through producing images of
totality. That’s simply how the imagination works. One must be able to
imagine oneself and others as integrated subjects in order to be able to
produce beings that are in fact endlessly multiple, imagine some sort of
coherent, bounded “society” in order to produce that chaotic open-ended
network of social relations that actually exists, and so forth.
Normally, people seem able to live with the disparity. The question, it
seems to me, is why in certain times and places, the recognition of it
instead tends to spark rage and despair, feelings that the social world
is a hollow travesty or malicious joke. This, I would argue, is the
result of that warping and shattering of the imagination that is the
inevitable effect of structural violence.
The Situationists, like many ’60s radicals, wished to strike back
through a strategy of direct action: creating “situations” by creative
acts of subversion that undermined the logic of the Spectacle and
allowed actors to at least momentarily recapture their imaginative
powers. At the same time, they also felt all this was inevitably leading
up to a great insurrectionary moment — “the” revolution, properly
speaking. If the events of May ’68 showed anything, it was that if one
does not aim to seize state power, there can be no such fundamental,
one-time break. The main difference between the Situationists and their
most avid current readers is that the millenarian element has almost
completely fallen away. No one thinks the skies are about to open any
time soon. There is a consolation though: that as a result, as close as
one can come to experiencing genuine revolutionary freedom, one can
begin to experience it immediately. Consider the following statement
from the Crimethinc collective, probably the most inspiring young
anarchist propagandists operating in the Situationist tradition today:
“We must make our freedom by cutting holes in the fabric of this
reality, by forging new realities which will, in turn, fashion us.
Putting yourself in new situations constantly is the only way to ensure
that you make your decisions unencumbered by the inertia of habit,
custom, law, or prejudice — and it is up to you to create these
situations
Freedom only exists in the moment of revolution. And those moments are
not as rare as you think. Change, revolutionary change, is going on
constantly and everywhere — and everyone plays a part in it, consciously
or not.”
What is this but an elegant statement of the logic of direct action: the
defiant insistence on acting as if one is already free? The obvious
question is how it can contribute to an overall strategy, one that
should lead to a cumulative movement towards a world without states and
capitalism. Here, no one is completely sure. Most assume the process
could only be one of endless improvisation. Insurrectionary moments
there will certainly be. Likely as not, quite a few of them. But they
will most likely be one element in a far more complex and multifaceted
revolutionary process whose outlines could hardly, at this point, be
fully anticipated.
In retrospect, what seems strikingly naïve is the old assumption that a
single uprising or successful civil war could, as it were, neutralize
the entire apparatus of structural violence, at least within a
particular national territory: that within that territory, right-wing
realities could be simply swept away, to leave the field open for an
untrammeled outpouring of revolutionary creativity. But if so, the truly
puzzling thing is that, at certain moments of human history, that
appeared to be exactly what was happening. It seems to me that if we are
to have any chance of grasping the new, emerging conception of
revolution, we need to begin by thinking again about the quality of
these insurrectionary moments.
One of the most remarkable things about such moments is how they can
seem to burst out of nowhere — and then, often, dissolve away as
quickly. How is it that the same “public” that two months before say,
the Paris Commune, or Spanish Civil War, had voted in a fairly moderate
social democratic regime will suddenly find itself willing to risk their
lives for the same ultra-radicals who received a fraction of the actual
vote? Or, to return to May ‘68, how is it that the same public that
seemed to support or at least feel strongly sympathetic toward the
student/worker uprising could almost immediately afterwards return to
the polls and elect a right-wing government? The most common historical
explanations — that the revolutionaries didn’t really represent the
public or its interests, but that elements of the public perhaps became
caught up in some sort of irrational effervescence — seem obviously
inadequate. First of all, they assume that ‘the public’ is an entity
with opinions, interests, and allegiances that can be treated as
relatively consistent over time. In fact what we call “the public” is
created, produced, through specific institutions that allow specific
forms of action — taking polls, watching television, voting, signing
petitions or writing letters to elected officials or attending public
hearings — and not others. These frames of action imply certain ways of
talking, thinking, arguing, deliberating. The same “public” that may
widely indulge in the use of recreational chemicals may also
consistently vote to make such indulgences illegal; the same collection
of citizens are likely to come to completely different decisions on
questions affecting their communities if organized into a parliamentary
system, a system of computerized plebiscites, or a nested series of
public assemblies. In fact the entire anarchist project of reinventing
direct democracy is premised on assuming this is the case.
To illustrate what I mean, consider that in America, the same collection
of people referred to in one context as “the public” can in another be
referred to as “the workforce.” They become a “workforce”, of course,
when they are engaged in different sorts of activity. The “public” does
not work — at least, a sentence like “most of the American public works
in the service industry” would never appear in a magazine or paper — if
a journalist were to attempt to write such a sentence, their editor
would certainly change it. It is especially odd since the public does
apparently have to go to work: this is why, as leftist critics often
complain, the media will always talk about how, say, a transport strike
is likely to inconvenience the public, in their capacity of commuters,
but it will never occur to them that those striking are themselves part
of the public, or that whether if they succeed in raising wage levels
this will be a public benefit. And certainly the “public” does not go
out into the streets. Its role is as audience to public spectacles, and
consumers of public services. When buying or using goods and services
privately supplied, the same collection of individuals become something
else (“consumers”), just as in other contexts of action they are
relabeled a “nation”, “electorate”, or “population”.
All these entities are the product of institutions and institutional
practices that, in turn, define certain horizons of possibility. Hence
when voting in parliamentary elections one might feel obliged to make a
“realistic” choice; in an insurrectionary situation, on the other hand,
suddenly anything seems possible.
A great deal of recent revolutionary thought essentially asks: what,
then, does this collection of people become during such insurrectionary
moments? For the last few centuries the conventional answer has been
“the people”, and all modern legal regimes ultimately trace their
legitimacy to moments of “constituent power”, when the people rise up,
usually in arms, to create a new constitutional order. The
insurrectionary paradigm, in fact, is embedded in the very idea of the
modern state. A number of European theorists, understanding that the
ground has shifted, have proposed a new term, “the multitude”, an entity
that cannot by definition become the basis for a new national or
bureaucratic state. For me the project is deeply ambivalent.
In the terms I’ve been developing, what “the public”, “the workforce”,
“consumers”, “population” all have in common is that they are brought
into being by institutionalized frames of action that are inherently
bureaucratic, and therefore, profoundly alienating. Voting booths,
television screens, office cubicles, hospitals, the ritual that
surrounds them — one might say these are the very machinery of
alienation. They are the instruments through which the human imagination
is smashed and shattered. Insurrectionary moments are moments when this
bureaucratic apparatus is neutralized. Doing so always seems to have the
effect of throwing horizons of possibility wide open. This only to be
expected if one of the main things that apparatus normally does is to
enforce extremely limited ones. (This is probably why, as Rebecca Solnit
has observed, people often experience something very similar during
natural disasters.) This would explain why revolutionary moments always
seem to be followed by an outpouring of social, artistic, and
intellectual creativity. Normally unequal structures of imaginative
identification are disrupted; everyone is experimenting with trying to
see the world from unfamiliar points of view. Normally unequal
structures of creativity are disrupted; everyone feels not only the
right, but usually the immediate practical need to recreate and
reimagine everything around them.
Hence the ambivalence of the process of renaming. On the one hand, it is
understandable that those who wish to make radical claims would like to
know in whose name they are making them. On the other, if what I’ve been
saying is true, the whole project of first invoking a revolutionary
“multitude”, and then to start looking for the dynamic forces that lie
behind it, begins to look a lot like the first step of that very process
of institutionalization that must eventually kill the very thing it
celebrates. Subjects (publics, peoples, workforces...) are created by
specific institutional structures that are essentially frameworks for
action. They are what they do. What revolutionaries do is to break
existing frames to create new horizons of possibility, an act that then
allows a radical restructuring of the social imagination This is perhaps
the one form of action that cannot, by definition, be institutionalized.
This is why a number of revolutionary thinkers, from Raffaele Laudani in
Italy to the Colectivo Situaciones in Argentina, have begun to suggest
it might be better her to speak not of “constituent” but “destituent
power”.
There is a strange paradox in Marx’s approach to revolution. Generally
speaking, when Marx speaks of material creativity, he speaks of
“production”, and here he insists, as I’ve mentioned, that the defining
feature of humanity is that we first imagine things, and then try to
bring them into being. When he speaks of social creativity it is almost
always in terms of revolution, but here, he insists that imagining
something and then trying to bring it into being is precisely what we
should never do. That would be utopianism, and for utopianism, he had
only withering contempt.
The most generous interpretation, I would suggest, is that Marx on some
level understood that the production of people and social relations
worked on different principles, but also knew he did not really have a
theory of what those principles were. Probably it was only with the rise
of feminist theory — that I was drawing on so liberally in my earlier
analysis — that it became possible to think systematically about such
issues. I might add that it is a profound reflection on the effects of
structural violence on the imagination that feminist theory itself was
so quickly sequestered away into its own subfield where it has had
almost no impact on the work of most male theorists.
It seems to me no coincidence, then, that so much of the real practical
work of developing a new revolutionary paradigm in recent years has also
been the work of feminism; or anyway, that feminist concerns have been
the main driving force in their transformation. In America, the current
anarchist obsession with consensus and other forms of directly
democratic process traces back directly to organizational issues within
the feminist movement. What had begun, in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s,
as small, intimate, often anarchist-inspired collectives were thrown
into crisis when they started growing rapidly in size. Rather than
abandon the search for consensus in decision-making, many began trying
to develop more formal versions on the same principles. This, in turn,
inspired some radical Quakers (who had previously seen their own
consensus decision-making as primarily a religious practice) to begin
creating training collectives. By the time of the direct action
campaigns against the nuclear power industry in the late ‘70s, the whole
apparatus of affinity groups, spokescouncils, consensus and facilitation
had already begun to take something like its contemporary form. The
resulting outpouring of new forms of consensus process constitutes the
most important contribution to revolutionary practice in decades. It is
largely the work of feminists engaged in practical organizing — a
majority, probably, tied to the anarchist tradition. This makes it all
the more ironic that male theorists who have not themselves engaged in
on-the-ground organizing or taken part in anarchist decision-making
processes, but who find themselves drawn to anarchism as a principle, so
often feel obliged to include in otherwise sympathetic statements, that
of course they don’t agree with this obviously impractical,
pie-in-the-sky, unrealistic notion of consensus.
The organization of mass actions themselves — festivals of resistance,
as they are often called — can be considered pragmatic experiments in
whether it is indeed possible to institutionalize the experience of
liberation, the giddy realignment of imaginative powers, everything that
is most powerful in the experience of a successful spontaneous
insurrection. Or if not to institutionalize it, perhaps, to produce it
on call. The effect for those involved is as if everything were
happening in reverse. A revolutionary uprising begins with battles in
the streets, and if successful, proceeds to outpourings of popular
effervescence and festivity. There follows the sober business of
creating new institutions, councils, decision-making processes, and
ultimately the reinvention of everyday life. Such at least is the ideal,
and certainly there have been moments in human history where something
like that has begun to happen — much though, again, such spontaneous
creations always seems to end being subsumed within some new form of
violent bureaucracy. However, as I’ve noted, this is more or less
inevitable since bureaucracy, however much it serves as the immediate
organizer of situations of power and structural blindness, does not
create them. Mainly, it simply evolves to manage them.
This is one reason direct action proceeds in the opposite direction.
Probably a majority of the participants are drawn from subcultures that
are all about reinventing everyday life. Even if not, actions begin with
the creation of new forms of collective decision-making: councils,
assemblies, the endless attention to ‘process’ — and uses those forms to
plan the street actions and popular festivities. The result is, usually,
a dramatic confrontation with armed representatives of the state. While
most organizers would be delighted to see things escalate to a popular
insurrection, and something like that does occasionally happen, most
would not expect these to mark any kind of permanent breaks in reality.
They serve more as something almost along the lines of momentary
advertisements — or better, foretastes, experiences of visionary
inspiration — for a much slower, painstaking struggle of creating
alternative institutions.
One of the most important contributions of feminism, it seems to me, has
been to constantly remind everyone that “situations” do not create
themselves. There is usually a great deal of work involved. For much of
human history, what has been taken as politics has consisted essentially
of a series of dramatic performances carried out upon theatrical stages.
One of the great gifts of feminism to political thought has been to
continually remind us of the people is in fact making and preparing and
cleaning those stages, and even more, maintaining the invisible
structures that make them possible — people who have, overwhelmingly,
been women. The normal process of politics of course is to make such
people disappear. Indeed one of the chief functions of women’s work is
to make itself disappear. One might say that the political ideal within
direct action circles has become to efface the difference; or, to put it
another way, that action is seen as genuinely revolutionary when the
process of production of situations is experienced as just as liberating
as the situations themselves. It is an experiment one might say in the
realignment of imagination, of creating truly non-alienated forms of
experience.
Obviously it is also attempting to do so in a context in which, far from
being put in temporary abeyance, state power (in many parts of the globe
at least) so suffuses every aspect of daily existence that its armed
representatives intervene to regulate the internal organizational
structure of groups allowed to cash checks or own and operate motor
vehicles. One of the remarkable things about the current, neoliberal age
is that bureaucracy has come to be so all-encompassing — this period has
seen, after all, the creation of the first effective global
administrative system in human history — that we don’t even see it any
more. At the same time, the pressures of operating within a context of
endless regulation, repression, sexism, racial and class dominance, tend
to ensure many who get drawn into the politics of direct action
experience a constant alteration of exaltation and burn-out, moments
where everything seems possible alternating with moments where nothing
does. In other parts of the world, autonomy is much easier to achieve,
but at the cost of isolation or almost complete absence of resources.
How to create alliances between different zones of possibility is a
fundamental problem.
These however are questions of strategy that go well beyond the scope of
the current essay. My purpose here has been more modest. Revolutionary
theory, it seems to me, has in many fronts advanced much less quickly
than revolutionary practice; my aim in writing this has been to see if
one could work back from the experience of direct action to begin to
create some new theoretical tools. They are hardly meant to be
definitive. They may not even prove useful. But perhaps they can
contribute to a broader project of re-imagining.