Rene — Alliez/Negri — Peace & War
Topic(s): Art/Politics | Comments Off on Rene — Alliez/Negri — Peace & WarPeace and War
Éric Alliez and Antonio Negri
http://pages.akbild.ac.at/aesthetik/eric/peace.html
Ernest Hemingway once wrote:
“The world is a fine place, and worth fighting for.”
I agree with the second part.
– Seven
1.
War and peace: in its classical-modern form, the conjunction of war and peace preserves the disjunctive value implied in the chiasm of these two common notions, whilst showing the impossibility of producing – both historically and conceptually – a positive definition of peace. Peace, as disarmament, negatively designates the social state of affairs characterised by the absence of war. This is Raymond Aron’s peace by disarmament: “It is said that peace reigns when commerce among nations does not entail the military forms of struggle” (R. Aron, Peace and War between Nations, 1962). Being neither essential nor existential, peace does not exclude struggles and conflicts (it demilitarises them) from the moment its principle has become “no different than that of wars: instances of peace are based on power” (ibid.) in a world that the imperative of public security already requires us to consider in its entirety (totus orbis). With security at its core, this first secular form of political globalisation is indissociable from the antinomy War/Peace, which submits the ‘law of peoples’ (jus gentium) to the universal perspective of power (potestas). Antinomy: this is the term used by Proudhon to explain that “peace demonstrates and confirms war”, whilst “war in turn is a demand of peace” (P.-J. Proudhon, War and Peace, Inquiries into the Principle and the Consitution of the Law of Peoples, 1861). Despite the striking actuality of this formula, Proudhon is describing here what he himself calls “the alternative conditions of the life of peoples”, who are subjected to the historical, ‘phenomenological’, alternation between states of peace and states of war in a world in which the national logic of State centralisation both implies and explains the propensity toward military confrontations.
2.
Peace and war: in its hypermodern imperial form, the conjunction of peace and war must be understood in accordance with a substitutive value that makes the two terms absolutely contemporary with one another, starting with the inversion both of their functions and of their ‘classical’ relations. Once war signifies the regulation of constituted powers and the constitutive form of the new order, peace is merely a deceptive illusion fostering the power of disorder and its threat – urbi et orbi – against the security of the world. In the end, in this world without inside or outside in which, with the global disintegration of living-together (‘internal peace’), the “commerce among nations” has thrown off the mask of external peace, everything happens as if peace and war were so tightly enmeshed that they no longer form anything but the two faces of a single membrane projected onto the planet. Peace, in other words, war… This is less a hypothesis than the common recognition of a hybrid identity that throws ‘the whole world’ into a meta-politics in which peace no longer appears as anything other than the continuation of war by other means. A wholly relative alterity, that of a continuous police action exercised upon a globalised polis under the exceptional legislation of an infinite war – from which peace is deduced as the institution of a permanent state of exception.
3.
At the dawn of the modern era, with the paradigms of sovereignty and the nation-state still in their infancy, Hobbes relates the History of humanity as the grand narrative of its deliverance from the state of war in which each is pitted against all, a condition that bears the name of ‘the state of nature’. Founded upon the dissolution of natural relations and the alienation of individuals’ in-definite desire for power, the political institution of sovereignty invents Right as its own principle, thereby guaranteeing civil peace. Obtained at the highest cost – freedom’s alienation without remainder in the obedience to the sovereign – peace is the sole compensation for a pact of submission (the transfer of power) whose juridical absoluteness (the transfer of right) is the real condition of the body politic. The sovereign is absolute by reason of the obedience of subjects and for the sole benefit of security; the ‘safety of the people’ is the condition of reality required for sovereign power (the power of the sovereign) to judge “of what is reasonable, and of what is to be abolished”, according to the formula of Leviathan, XXVI. The Leviathan will hold in its hands both the dagger of justice, whereby it maintains internal peace, and the sword of war, whereby it guarantees external defence and punishes the rebel who declares his will to disobey (non jure imperii sive dominii, sed jure belli: the internal enemy comes under the law of war because “Rebellion is but warre renewed” [Leviathan, XXVIII] setting “the multitude against the people” [De Cive, XII, VIII]). War thus presents itself as the negative condition of peace; it represents the raison d’État as determining the voluntary submission to the Master of the Law. The omnipresence of war and of its representations is necessary so as to create an Order which, in the empty name of the People, turns a scattered multitude into a single subjected body under the ‘absolute power’ of the will of one… The modern State is born of this political representation sustained by war; in the name of peace, it monopolises the logic of accumulation that belongs to a power subtracted from the ‘primitive confusion’ of the multitudes. It is with good reason that the Thirty Years’ War is associated with the birth of modern sovereignty: it comes to an end through a peace that seals the definitive victory of the juridical morality of force over the politeia as a ‘just’ distribution of power (Hobbes perceives Greek justice as a school for sedition). But has anyone ever believed in this peace without justice crossing the landscapes of massacre on the cart of Mother Courage? Between 1618 and 1648, Germany loses half of its population… The peace settled by the modern State is an ideal torn between the theory of just war (Grotius) and the programme of a universal peace which should rightly be accorded the name of Utopia (Thomas More).
4.
In an age of self-proclaimed postmodernity whose planetary framework is set less by the United Nations – a distant heir to the Projects for a perpetual peace – than by the World Trade Organisation, war has become the ordering power, drawing its authority from the ‘outdated’ character of territorial conquest. Unlike the classical-modern age, which had conceived of peace as a regulative idea for the international community – by associating the practice of exchange and commerce (usus commercium) to the sovereign will of States – peace, under the heading of Peace Research, can no longer express itself otherwise than in war and through a logic/logistics of war; arguing from the ‘situation of exception’ in order to substitute the international relation of forces with a unitary global power. This is war as peace-keeping: the police-guard of peace. The difference with respect to the founding myth of political modernity manifests itself in the reversal of the relationship between War and Peace. Peace and war: freed from the secularised utopia of the Respublica christiana, peace is no longer the ‘solution’ to war based upon a (relative) balance of forces or a ‘reasoned’ hegemony (taking stock of the costs of war); peace becomes the procedural condition inherent to the conduct of a war founded upon the distinction between friend and enemy. In this context, which deserves to be called one of ‘opacification’, the Schmittian decisionism that sets the production of sovereignty in motion now serves to mobilise Empire by means of its very persistence. Presenting the latest affirmation of the emptiness of its truth, and grafting itself onto the theological analogies of the reality of the State, the only present use for the notion of the political lies in making sovereignty and decision coincide within an imperial ‘megalo-politics’ upon whose axis the whole world turns – totus orbis – around the power of the sovereign who decides continually on the “exception”. (According to the famous opening of Carl Schmitt’s first Political Theology: “Souverän ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet: Sovereign is he who decides on the [state of] exception”.) We will therefore forego any ironic remarks about the Axis of Evil in order to consider the hypermodernity of a situation which, when compared to the hegemonic model of the pax romana (such as it can be made out even in the precept “Si vis pacem, para bellum”), marks a complete displacement of the stakes of warfare. It is no longer a question of preparing war in order to attain peace (the principle of dissuasion), but of making peace within war according to a continuous destruction (an inversion of the ‘progressive’ theological scenario of continuous creation), thereby reducing sovereignty to an imbalance of terror. Has Peace become the postmodern label for War? A Project to make war in the world perpetual, a Project of perpetual world war?
5.
When it devotes itself to war, modern literature always dramatises the moment on the battlefield when man discovers his own solitude. Grimmelshausen, Tolstoi, Stendhal, Céline, Hemingway… all of them present this man, miraculously unscathed or physically wounded, stupefied by the sound and the fury and, above all, by the fact that the sun and moon can still shine. The return to peace entails the natural restoration of the sensory presentation of the world; the aesthetic restoration of being-within an outside. Today, this would then be our question: can we still approach peace from within, when the postmodern designates the an-aesthesia of a life thrown into emptiness, the mourning of our affinity with the spatio-temporal plasma in the midst of its generalised marketing, and, above all, the arrangement of the world as the theatre for a total war aiming at a total peace? How can we subtract ourselves from the unwordly squalor [l’immonde] of war, whose end lies in the definitive supremacy of ‘global security’? Has peace reached its nihilistic stage, as it capitulates to the reign of a ‘humanitarianism’ as monstrous as war itself (in accordance with the formula proposed by Jacques Rancière: “the category of the humanitarian as the double of the Realpolitik of States”)? Where are we to find peace, if not in a post-war condition in which the civil dissuasion that permeates post-democracy will have taken over from the ‘anti-City strategy’ of nuclear dissuasion? Are we to wait for the unexpected – a new monster, no doubt – to free us from the daily misery of this peace and this war remote-controlled from the towers of the new imperial order? No longer knowing how to imagine or describe a battlefield after the massacre robs us of the stupor of still being alive, of feeling-alive on the verge of death.
6.
“They created a desert and they called it peace”, writes Tacitus. And Thucydides before him. Historians are hyperrealist poets. They experience no unease in considering brute force as the lever of political order. Operating under the register of the pure observation of the modalities of the political in its historical reality, Machiavelli painstakingly describes the military actions and wars undertaken in order to impose an armed peace. Which is to say: peace conquered through arms, symbolising the virtù of the people assembled in the political affirmation of its own (represented) power. Peace discovers herein its transitory value, which war only can ‘realise’, as the vector of a general system of power relations whose truth denies any but a formal difference between the time of peace and the time of war. Lest he allow rest to turn into idleness and disorder, thereby leading a State forgetful of the permanence of war to its ruin, the Prince “cannot rely on what he has experienced in times of tranquillity”(The Prince, IX). Were he to do so, the Prince would fall for the most dangerous of lures: the love of peace – when he must instead, together with all of his subjects, live peace in the thought of war. Realism and cynicism unite here in a discourse that identifies war as the condition of truth of every political order. But does the Machiavellian affirmation (of ‘roman’ inspiration) according to which war is creative of order make sense in a world as ‘un-civic’ in spirit as ours? Would this Machiavellian stance in turn have become a pure and simple deception, conveyed by the state of emergency of a communication devoid of any being-in-common? The geo-strategic reality proper to the bellicose illusionism of pentagon-capitalism – as Virilio calls it – dispenses with all supplementary rhetoric. From now on, war, peace and barbarism interact within the one and same history, with no rule other than that of the common sense of the Unworldly [l’Immonde]. The great pacifisms – be they Christian or Communist – considered war as a sacrifice made in order to construct peace: it was therefore necessary to arm war with the thought and the desire of peace “so as to lead the enemy, by victory, to the advantages of peace” (St. Augustine, Letter 189 to count Bonifacius). This ‘liberal’ idea of peace as the goal of war, and of war as the necessary means of peace (“One must want peace and only make war out of the need […] to achieve peace. So remain peaceful, even when fighting…” [Ibid.]), can only be conceived in terms of the reconciled truth (in God or in humanity) of a universal subject; the result being that pacifism no longer manages to embody the effectiveness of a project of peace. Peace and war: pacifism can no longer draw its authority from any chronology or teleology capable of leading us from war to a separate peace. No longer able to desire peace, otherwise than nostalgically, resistance to war – the constitutive machine of the new order – is now embodied in the call: “war against war”.
7.
Within this global hybridisation of war and peace, what do the ‘will to art’ and the production of aesthetic acts mean? Where should art be inscribed, when the new configurations of experience refuse to assign themselves to one side or the other? What does “war against war” mean for a contemporary artist opposed to the paltry drama played out in the thought of mourning and disenchantment? All evidence points to the fact that the aesthetic power of sensation can only base itself upon the expression of indistinction, which constitutes the very violence of the age of the spectacle in its deranged endurance. The artist must therefore pass through the absolute hybrid, through this immersion in a present in which the ruin of art’s autonomy is finally accomplished at the same time as the heteronomy of its vital powers is affected. Dwelling in the sphere of pure means when assuming any singularity whatever, the artist begins the flight from the phantasmagoria of peace and war by recording the common marks that both of them leave upon the bodies of things. Investing this opaque zone of the indiscernible, the artist appropriates the expropriated regime of politics in a “war against war” that destroys the system of sensory proofs that belongs to a false social peace. Perhaps the primary reason for the social danger posed by contemporary art lies here: it attacks directly the partition of identities that regulates the political effects of the relation between the utterable and the visible, or between appearing, being, and doing. Yet this is what it cannot do for real, that is, without academic mediation, without situating itself in the taking-place of what it wants to de-monstrate in order to reverse – by situating itself, and therefore placing us, both within and “after the passage of life through the ordeal of nihilism”(Agamben). This topos, which responds to the hegemonic media regime of the image through an extension of the notion of artwork, reveals to us the distinction of the artist in his or her effort to extract expression from the unworldly [l’immonde] by way of a more ‘profound’ cosmic immersion into the materials of sensation; by the construction of a world once again made possible. It belongs to the contemporary register of the arts that the experience of the possible as an aesthetic category of the world only produces work through the material subtraction from the world’s collective and unworldly squalor, and to the degree that the unworking of community is reversed into the site of processual revival for the singularities which we are in-common, outside of any representative identity. To expose this ex-position, which no longer lets itself be commonly represented, in the aesthetic anticipation of a communist future; to expose ourselves to the tearing of the sensible through the overexposure of peace to war – this is art’s new address, outlining its difference within the common machine of an alterity to war that can no longer base itself on any remembrance of the being of peace. (Impossibility of thinking the ‘fact’ of peace as a ‘freedom’: peace is no longer available qua existence on the ‘war front’ against the mediatic image of the world.)
8.
In this world abandoned to the communication of a blind facticity, the artist or ‘anartist’ imposes – i.e., poses in the immanence of this world without-inside-or-outside – exodus as the only possible creative event. Exodus from obedience to the regulation of utterable and visible identities, exile toward the measurelessness opened up by the deregulation of the a priori forms of war and peace. Because exodus and “war against war” are one and the same thing, leading nowhere but here, and conditioned by an extreme deterritorialisation that decides on the common telos. The fugitive does not flee the spectacle of the market without turning its annihilating power against the State management of nihilism; s/he does not desert war without attacking the semblances of peace in favour of new spaces of commonality and cooperation. Inverting the messianic displacement of the elsewhere into the here in order to construct a new mobility and a new temporality, Exodus is the name for a transmutation of the values of resistance into the constitutive power of a biopolitics that would finally exhibit an other postmodernity. To take leave means destroying all the transcendental barriers that give meaning to the commanding logic of political representation the better to reappropriate ‘global’ mobility; to take leave by constituting means investing generation against corruption, opposing the cosmopolitan hybridisations of the world of life to the police-led hybridisation of peace within war. In the exposition to measurelessness that belongs to it, the singularity of art teaches us that the product of generation is always a ‘monster’ that implicates the ‘common’ (bodies, languages, machines) in a biopolitics of exodus.
9.
War against war: peace is no longer the condition of life; peace must be reinvented through the exodus of the Godless world which the ‘city of men’ intends to put into play in order to leave the unworldly squalor [l’immonde]. In the absence of a peace that could amount to the ethos of the world, exodus is war against and subtraction from war, guerilla and creation of peace ex nihilo. This is a peace to be invented: as the departure from nihilism; as a global device locally creative of sense; as the de facto sense of an ecosophy of the multitudes making a virtue out of the differential idea of the common and of its metamorphic generations of the world. The opposite of a utopia: the open and total dystopia of war against war. This work is a long, complex and militant one: peace is no more an intuition than is the work of art; peace, like art, is a registering and composition of forces (and not a forced pacification: “a peace without force resembles death”, writes Marie José Mondzain). Whence the fact that peace can only be conceived by going through war in order to destroy the misery that it feeds upon, and by affirming the living force that can be constructed from the reserves of violence. Exodus is the opening of this path that can lead to the stoic’s ‘tranquillity of the soul’ only by making the crossing of human chaos into a work, a work of peace (once again in an analogy of the work of peace with the work of art that would not hold together by itself were it not for the chaosmosis of forces it implies). Exodus, for there is neither elsewhere nor beyond for a world without an outside. And therefore exodus of the world, as a collective construction of being, the living labour of the world and the globalisation of living labour set against the transcendental dominance of ‘dead labour’, since the latter is able to recompose itself only through war, both primary condition (for the establishment of the police-led regulation of laws) and final stage of the State-form (in accordance with the lawless operations of the sovereign global police). Exodus is the transformation of passions in the vita activa of knowledge when knowledge deploys its generative potential qua cooperation, and remains incommensurable to every political thought of measure and unity, as well as to the transcendental illusion of community. Thus, from the viewpoint of a radical materialism, it is not peace but the constitutive cooperation of singular multitudes that creates the common existence of the world – in the guise of an operative community that must be thought of as ontologically anterior and superior to the transcendental distinction of war and peace ‘decided’ on by sovereign power. The proof lies on the edge of time: it is against the latter that the sovereign ‘decides’ on the monstrous hybridisation of war and peace which signals the definitive equation of sovereignty and the police. The consequence lies on the edge of being: peace is no longer able to provide the conditions of life to which the name of ethics is attached. Related back to the reality of the composition and decomposition of relations, ethics is the operational reverse of the peace-war situation; precipitation of atoms and struggle of passions, crystallisation of differences in the multitudinous chaos of singularities, and emission of new powers forming indissociably affective and productive constellations via the inflection of differences. No ethics without this clinamen orienting the matter of the common towards exodus, understood as the constructivist transitivity of the world. But equally, no aesthetics without the decision to “allow the real connection of existences to appear as their real sense” (Jean-Luc Nancy). That we can here invoke, following Félix Guattari, a new – transversalist – aesthetic paradigm basing itself upon social creativity, reminds us that art is the ‘Vigilambulant’, the wake-walker, in this process that faces up to war (instead of fleeing from it into an illusory peace) so as to liberate a Life that has let itself be captivated by the representations of war. The work of art is the vital transmutation of the conditions of death commonly imposed upon us, the raising up of the power of the common in a teleology of liberation which is the creative machination of a language at once irreducibly singular and plural.
10.
Let us conclude by compressing in the extreme: if art is this collective projection that shows war to be impotent in the face of those singular constructions of the world that it intends to shatter, then from the outset contemporary art – in the non-place bestowed upon it and through the ‘installations’ it constructs – owes it to itself to demonstrate that peace may be reinvented as the biopolitical condition of life; as a common resistance working through the multimedia constellation of bodies to unite Eros with the General Intellect of the multitudes.
Translated by Alberto Toscano