Tuesday Evening — Central Park — Reading the Coming Insurrection — 04.28.09
Comments Off on Tuesday Evening — Central Park — Reading the Coming Insurrection — 04.28.09Tuesday Evening — Central Park — Reading the Coming Insurrection — 04.28.09
Contents:
1. W,W,W,W
2. The Coming Insurrection
3. Useful Links
4.. Introduction to Civil War [Fragments]
5. How is it to be done?
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1. W,W,W,W
What: Reading / Discussion
Where: Central Park, Cedar Hill
When: Tuesday 5:15 pm
Who: All are invited
This last Fall, a group of activists and thinkers living in Tarnac (central France) were rounded up and arrested under terrorism accusations. Absurdly, the act of terror which supposedly prompted the arrests was a minor sabotage of trains which caused some delays and purportedly damage to equipment.
Thus far, all but one of the accused from the Tarnac affair have been released, but still face charges. The person who continues to be held is pinned as the “leader” of the group. And as a part of the evidence collected against him, the authorities in France have used the text published by the Invisible Committee titled, the Coming Insurrection, claiming he is the author.
The text is connected to other writings published by a collective of individuals using the name Tiqqun (the name of their journal) some translations of their texts can be found below.
This Tuesday, we will meet at Central Park. Cedar Hill Between 76th and 79th on the East Side of the park, off of 5th Avenue.
Directly below the Metropolitan Museum We will have a reading of selections from the Coming Insurrection followed by a discussion of the text.
We hope this event, aside from being an act of solidarity in support of dropping all of the charges against the 9 and releasing Julien who continues to be held – that the discussion can engage with the text both on its merits and possible limits.
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2. The Coming Insurrection
The Coming Insurrection:
English as web page
http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/
English as pdf
http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/
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3. Useful Links
Tarnac 9 Support Page:
http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/
Group Statement:
http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/confronted-by-an-ever-more-absurd-state-power-we-shall-speak-no-more/
Coming Insurrection (French)
http://www.lafabrique.fr/IMG/pdf_Insurrection.pdf
Additional Texts:
Agamben — Terrorisme ou tragi-comédie
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002733.php
Agamben on Tiqqun (French)
http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2009/04/agamben-apropos-of-tiqqun.html
Alberto Toscano — The War Against Preterrorism: The ‘Tarnac Nine’ and The Coming Insurrection
http://www.16beavergroup.org/mtarchive/archives/002779.php
Tiqqun 1 (French) — http://www.archive.org/details/Tiqqun1
Tiqqun 2 (French) — http://www.archive.org/details/Tiqqun2
For translations in many languages:
http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html
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4. Introduction to Civil War [Fragments]
TIQQUN
1. The elementary human unity is not the body—the individual—but the form-of-life.
2. The form-of-life is not beyond bare life, it is its intimate polarization.
3. Each body is affected by its form-of-life as if by a clinamen, a penchant, a leaning, an attraction, a taste. What a body leans toward also leans toward it. This goes for each and every situation. All inclinations are reciprocal.
4. This taste, this clinamen, can either be conjured away or assumed. To assume a form-of-life is not simply to recognize such a penchant, but to think it. I call thought that which converts a form-of-life into a force, into a sensible effectivity.
In every situation there is one line that stands out among all the others, the line along which power grows. Thought is the capacity for singling out this line, and following it. That a form-of-life can only be assumed by following this line means: all thought is strategic.
6. Asking why this body is affected by that form-of-life rather than another is as meaningless as asking why there is something rather than nothing. This question only signals the refusal to recognize, and even the terror before, contingency. A fortiori, acting accordingly.
9. In and of themselves, forms-of-life can be neither said nor described. They can only be shown—each time, in a necessarily singular context. The play between them, considered locally, follows rigorous signifying determinisms. If these determinisms are thought, they become rules and can be modified. Each sequence of this play is bordered, on each side, by an event. The event disorders the play between forms-of-life, introduces a fold within it, suspends past determinations and inaugurates new ones through which it should be interpreted. In all things, we start from the middle.
10. Civil war is the free play between forms-of-life; it is their principle of co-existence.
11. “War” because in each singular play between forms-of-life, the possibility of a fierce confrontation—the possibility of violence—can never be discounted.
“Civil,” because the confrontation between forms-of-life is not a confrontation between States—those coincidences between a population and a territory—but between parties, in the sense this word had before the advent of the modern State. Because we must be precise from now on, let us say that they confront one another as partisan war machines.
“Civil war” then, because forms-of-life are indifferent to the separations between men from women, political existence from bare life, civilians from military;
because to be neutral is to take sides in the free play of forms-of-life;
because this play between forms-of-life has no beginning or end that can be declared, its sole end being the physical end of the world that no one would be able to declare;
and above all because I know of no body that is not hopelessly carried off into the excessive, and perilous, course of the world.
12. The point of view of civil war is the point of view of the political.
16. When I encounter a body affected by the same form-of-life as I am— community—this encounter puts me in contact with my own power.
18. When, at a certain moment and in a certain place, two bodies animated by forms-of-life that are absolutely foreign to one another meet, they experience hostility. This type of encounter gives rise to no relation; to the contrary, it bears witness to the prior absence of relation.
The hostis can be identified and its situation can be known, but it itself cannot be known for what it is—singular. Hostility is therefore the impossibility for certain bodies to enter into composition with each another, for certain bodies to know each other as singular.
Whenever a thing is known in its singularity, it takes leave of the sphere of hostility and thereby becomes a friend—or an enemy.
19. For me, the hostis is a nothing that must be annihilated, either through cessation of hostility, or by ceasing to exist altogether.
23. Hostility puts me at a distance from my own power.
24. What comes between the extremes of community and hostility is the sphere of friendship and enmity. Friendship and enmity are ethico-political concepts. That both give rise to an intense circulation of affects only shows that affective realities are works of art, and that the play between forms-of-life can be elaborated.
30. I call “communism” the real movement that elaborates, everywhere and at every moment, civil war.
33. The modern State referred its etymology to the Indo-European root st- and its implications of fixity, unchangingness, to what is. This maneuver fooled more than one of us. Today, when the State is no more than a survival of itself, the reverse becomes clear: it is civil war—what the Greeks called stasis—that is permanent, and the modern State that will have been a mere reaction-process to this permanent war.
46. The modern State will have failed in three different ways: first, as the absolutist State, then as the liberal State, and finally as the Welfare State. The passage from one to the other can only be understood in relation to three corresponding forms of civil war: the wars of religion, class struggle, and the Imaginary Party. It should be noted that the failure here is not found in the result, but in the process itself and its entire duration.
53. Empire is the turning outside-in of the liberal State. Once this has taken place, ONE has passed from a world partitioned by the Law to a space polarized by norms. The Imaginary Party is the other, hidden side of this turning outside-in.
Gloss: What do we mean by Imaginary Party? That the Outside has moved inside. The turning outside-in of the liberal State into Empire has occurred silently, without violence, as if in the night. From without, nothing seems to have changed. ONE is simply struck by the sudden uselessness of so many familiar things, and the old divisions that once had so much weight now no longer function.
A nagging little neurosis makes ONE want to continue to distinguish the just from the unjust, the healthy from the sick, work from leisure, the criminal from the innocent or the ordinary from the monstrous. But we need to acknowledge the obvious: these old divisions are no longer intelligible.
They have not been suppressed, however. They are still there, but without consequences. The norm has not abolished the Law—it has merely voided the Law and ordered it to its own ends, in line with its own immanent practices of calculation and administration. When the Law enters the force field of the norm, it loses all its faded luster of transcendence, and can only function in a sort of state of exception that repeats itself indefinitely.
The state of exception is the normal regime of the Law.
There is no longer any visible Outside—no pure Nature, no Great Madness, no Great Criminal and no classical Great Proletariat with its really-existing Homeland of Justice and Liberty. These have all disappeared, above all because they have lost their imaginary force of attraction. There is no longer any Outside precisely because there is exteriority at every point of the biopolitical tissue. Madness, crime or the proletariat no longer make up a world outside the world, their own ghetto with or without walls. With the dissipation of the social, they have become reversible modalities, latent violences or suspect possibilities of each and every body. This suspicion is what justifies the continuous socialization of society, the perfecting of the micro-mechanisms of control. Not that Biopower claims to directly govern men and things—to the contrary, it governs possibilities and conditions of possibility.
Everything that had its source in the Outside (illegality, first of all, but also misery and death) is, to the extent it is administered, taken up in an integration that positively eliminates these exteriorities in order to permit their subsequent recirculation. This is why, at the heart of Biopower, there is no such thing as death: there is only murder, and its circulation. Through statistics, an entire network of causalities embeds each living thing in an aggregate of deaths. . . . The truth is that there is no margin that can be identified as such, since liminarity itself has become the intimate condition of all that exists.
The Law fixes divisions and establishes distinctions, it outlines what defies it, and recognizes a world it both forms and gives duration to; the Law ceaselessly names and enumerates what is outlawed. The Law says its outside. The inaugural gesture of the Law is to exclude its own foundation—sovereignty, violence. But the norm has no sense of foundation. It has no memory, and stays as close as possible to the present, always claiming to be on the side of immanence. Where the Law gives itself a face and honors the sovereignty of what is outside it, the norm is acephalic—headless—and is delighted every time ONE severs the head of some sovereign. The norm has no hieros, no place of its own, but acts invisibly over the entirety of the gridded, edgeless space it distributes. Nothing and no one is excluded from this space, or rejected into an identifiable exteriority. What is called “excluded” is here only a modality of a generalized inclusion. It is therefore no longer anything but a single and same field, homogenous but diffracted into an infinity of nuances, a regime of limitless integration that sets out to maintain the play between forms-of-life at the lowest possible level of intensity. In this space, an ungraspable agency of totalization reigns, dissolving, digesting, absorbing and deactivating all alterity a priori. A process of omnivorous immanentization deploys itself on a planetary scale. The goal: make the world a continuous biopolitical tissue. In the meantime, the norm stands watch.
Under the regime of the norm, nothing is normal and everything must be normalized. What functions here is a positive paradigm of power. The norm produces all that is, insofar as the norm is itself, ONE says, the ens realissimum. Whatever does not belong to its mode of unveiling is not, and whatever is not cannot belong to its mode of unveiling. Under the regime of the norm, negativity is never recognized as such, but reduced to a simple default of the norm, a hole to be taken back up into the biopolitical tissue. Negativity, this power that is not supposed to exist, is quite logically abandoned to a traceless disappearance. Not without reason, since the Imaginary Party is the Outside of the world without Outside, the essential discontinuity lodged at the heart of a world rendered continuous.
58. Empire perceives civil war neither as an affront to its majesty nor as a challenge to its omnipotence. It sees it only as a risk. This explains the pre-emptive counter-revolution Empire has not failed to wage against anyone who might have punctured holes in the biopolitical continuum. Unlike the modern State, Empire does not deny the existence of civil war—instead, it manages it. If it denied it, it would have to do without certain means it needs to steer, or contain, this same civil war. Wherever its networks are insufficiently intrusive, it will ally itself for as long as it takes with some local mafia or even some local guerilla group, on the condition that these parties guarantee they will maintain order in the territory they have been assigned. Nothing is more irrelevant to Empire than the question, “who controls what?”—provided, of course, that control has been established.
62. Imperial sovereignty means that no point of space or time and no element of the biopolitical tissue is safe from intervention. The electronic archiving of the world, today’s generalized traceability, the fact that the means of production are becoming just as much a means of control, the reduction of the juridical edifice to a mere weapon in the arsenal of the norm—all this tends to turn each and every citizen of Empire into a suspect.
72. The sphere of hostility can be reduced only by extending the ethico-political domain of friendship and enmity. This is why Empire has always failed to extend this domain, despite all its protestations in favor of peace. The becoming-real of the Imaginary Party is simply the formation—by contagion—of a plane of consistency where friendships and enmities can freely deploy themselves and make themselves legible to one another.
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5. How is it to be done?
TIQQUN
http://tarnac9.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/how-is-it-to-be-done.pdf
I
TWENTY YEARS. Twenty years of counter-revolution. Of preventive counter-revolution.
In Italy.
And elsewhere.
Twenty years of a sleep behind security gates, haunted with security guards. A sleep of bodies, imposed by curfew.
Twenty years. The past does not pass. Because war continues. Ramifies. Extends.
In a global networking of local assemblages [dispositifs]. In an original calibration of subjectivities. In a new superficial peace.
An armed peace
well made to cover the course of an imperceptible
civil war.
Twenty years ago, there was
punk, the movement of 77, Autonomy,
the metropolitan Indians and the diffuse guerrilla.
All at once,
as if born of some underground region of civilization,
appeared a whole counter-world of subjectivities
that no longer wanted to consume, that no longer wanted to produce,
that no longer even wanted to be subjectivities.
The revolution was molecular, the counter-revolution was too.
It saw first the offensive,
then durable,
arrangement of a whole complex machine to neutralize all that carries intensity.
A machine to defuse all that could explode.
All the dangerous dividuals,
all the indocile bodies,
all the autonomous human hosts.
Then came twenty years of foolishness, vulgarity, isolation and desolation.
How is it to be done ?
Standing up again. Lifting the head up. By choice or by necessity. Whatever, really, now. Looking at each other in the eyes and saying “let’s start again”. Let everybody know it, as soon as possible.
We are starting again.
Done with passive resistance, inner exile, conflict by subtraction, survival. We are starting again. In twenty years, we have had enough time to see. We have understood. Demokracy for all, “anti-terrorist” struggle, state massacres, capitalist restructuring and the Great Work of the social purge,
by selection,
by casualisation,
by normalisation,
by “modernisation”.
We have seen, we have understood. The means and the ends. The future that is reserved for us. The one we are denied. The state of exception. The laws that put the police, the administration, the judicial authorities above the laws. The judiciarisation, the psychiatrisation, the medicalisation of everything that escapes the frame. Of everything that flees.
We have seen, we have understood. The means and the ends.
When power establishes in real time its own legitimacy,
when its violence becomes preventive
and its right is a “right to interfere”,
then it is useless to be right. To be right against it.
One has to be stronger, or slier. That is also why
we are starting again.
To start again is never to start something again. Nor to pick up things where they had been left off. What you start again is always something else. Is always unheard of. Because it is not the past that drives us to it, but precisely what in it
has not
happened.
And because it is also ourselves, then, who are starting again.
To start again means: to get out of suspension. To restore the contact between our becomings.
Moving,
again,
from where we are,
now.
For instance there are tricks
we will no longer fall for.
The trick of “society”. To be transformed. To be destroyed. To be bettered.
The trick of the social bond. That some would break while others can pretend to “restore” it.
We will no longer fall for these tricks.
One would have to be a militant element of the planetary-petty-bourgeoisie,
a citizen really,
not to see that society no longer exists.
That it has imploded. That it is only an argument for the terror of those who claim to re/present it.
That which has absented.
All that is social has become alien to us.
We consider ourselves as absolutely free of any obligation, of any prerogative, of any affiliation
that is social.
“Society”
is the name that the Irreparable has often received
among those who also wanted to turn it into
the Un-Assumable.
He who refuses this delusion will have to take
a step to the side
to make
a slight displacement
from the common logic
of Empire and its protest,
the logic of mobilization,
from their common temporality,
that of emergency.
To start again means: to inhabit this displacement. To face capitalist schizophrenia in the sense of a growing capacity of desubjectivisation.
To desert without abandoning the weapons.
To flee, imperceptibly.
To start again means: to marshal social secession, opacity, to join the
demobilization,
draining from one or other imperial production-consumption network the means to live and fight
in order, at the chosen time,
to scuttle it.
What we are talking about is a new war,
a new partisan war. Without front nor uniform, without army nor decisive battle.
A guerilla whose focos unfold away from the commercial flows although plugged into them.
We’re talking about a war full of latency. That’s got time.
A war of position.
Which is waged where we are.
In the name of no one.
In the name of our own existence,
which has no name.
Making this slight displacement.
No longer fearing our time.
“Not to fear one’s time is a matter of space”.
In a squat. In an orgy. In a riot. In an occupied train or village. In search, among strangers, of a free party that is nowhere to be found. I make the experience of this slight displacement. The experience
Of my own desubjectivisation. I become
a whatever singularity. My presence starts overflowing the whole apparatus of qualities that are usually associated with me.
In the eyes of someone who would like to consider me for what I am, I savour the disappointment, his disappointment to see me becoming so common, so perfectly accessible. In the gestures of someone else, I find an unexpected complicity.
Everything that isolates me as a subject, as a body provided with a public configuration of attributes, I feel melting.
The bodies fray at their limit. At their limit, become indistinct.
Block by block, the whatever ruins the equivalence. And I reach a new nudity,
an improper nudity, as if dressed with love.
Does one ever escape from the prison of the Self alone?
In a squat. In an orgy. In a riot. In an occupied train or village. We get together again.
We get together again
as whatever singularities. That is to say
not on the basis of a common affiliation,
but of a common presence.
This is our
need for communism. The need for nocturnal spaces, where we can
get together
beyond
our predicates.
Beyond the tyranny of recognition Which imposes recognition as a final distance between bodies.
As an ineluctable separation.
Everything through which ONE – my boyfriend, my family, my environment, my company, the state, the opinion – recognizes me is just that through which ONE takes me to be constrained.
By constantly reminding me of what I am, of my qualities, ONE wants to extract me from each situation. ONE wants to extort from me, in every circumstance, a fidelity to myself which is but a fidelity to my predicates.
I am expected to behave as a man, as an employee, as an unemployed, as a mother, as a militant, as a philosopher.
ONE wants to contain within the bounds of an identity the unpredictable course of my becomings.
ONE wants to convert me to the religion of a coherence
that was chosen for me.
The more I am recognized, the more my gestures are hindered, internally hindered. Here I am, caught in the super-tight meshwork of the new power. In the impalpable net of the new police:
THE IMPERIAL POLICE OF QUALITIES.
There is a whole network of assemblages through which I “integrate” myself, and that incorporates these qualities in me.
A whole petty system of filing, identification and mutual surveillance.
A whole diffuse prescription of absence.
A whole machinery of comporte/mental control, which aims at panopticism, at privatized transparency, at atomization.
And in which I struggle.
I need to become anonymous. In order to be present.
The more anonymous I am, the more present I am.
I need zones of indistinction
to reach the Common.
To no longer recognize myself in my name. To no longer hear in my name anything but the voice that calls it.
To give substance to the how of beings, not what they are but how they are what they are. Their life-form.
I need zones of opacity where the attributes,
even criminal, even brilliant,
no longer separate bodies.
Becoming whatever. Becoming a whatever singularity, is not given.
Always possible, but never given.
There is a politics of the whatever singularity.
Which consists in snatching from Empire
the often interstitial conditions and means
to experience yourself as such.
This is political, because it implies a capacity of confrontation,
and it corresponds to a new human aggregation.
The politics of the whatever singularity: opening those spaces where no act is assignable to any given body.
Where the bodies recover their ability of gesture which the so clever distribution of metropolitan devices – computers, cars, schools, cameras, cell-phones, gyms, hospitals, televisions, cinemas, etc. – had stolen from them.
By recognising them.
By immobilising them.
By making them spin uselessly.
By making the head exist separately from the body.
The politics of the whatever singularity.
Becoming whatever is more revolutionary than any whatever-being..
Liberating spaces sets us free a hundred times more than any “liberated space”.
More than putting any power into action, I enjoy the circulation of my potentialities. The politics of the whatever singularity lies in the offensive. In the circumstances, the moments and the places where we seize the circumstances,
the moments and the places
of such an anonymity,
of a momentary halt in a state of simplicity,
the opportunity to extract from all our forms the pure adequation to the presence,
the opportunity, at last, to be
here.
II
How is it to be done? Not what is to be done? How to do? The question of the means.
Not of the goals, the objectives,
what there is to be done, strategically, in the absolute.
The question of what we can do, tactically, from the situation,
and of the acquisition of this ability.
How to? How to desert? How does it work? How to make a fit between my wounds and communism? How to stay at war without losing tenderness?
The question is technical. Not a problem. Problems are profitable.
They feed experts.
A question.
A question of techniques. Which reduplicates itself in the question of the techniques of transmission of those techniques.
How to do? The result always contradicts the goal. Because setting an end is still a means.
another means.
What is to be done? Babeuf, Chernychevsky, Lenin. Classical virility needs an analgesic,
a mirage, something. A means to ignore yourself a bit more. As a presence.
As a life-form. As a situated being, endowed with inclinations.
Determined inclinations.
What is to be done? Voluntarism as the ultimate nihilism. As the nihilism peculiar
to classical virility.
What to do? The answer is simple: submit once again to the logic of mobilization, to the temporality of emergency. On the pretext of rebellion. Set down ends, words. Tend towards their accomplishment. Towards the accomplishment of words. In the meantime, postpone existence. Put yourself into brackets. Live in the exception of yourself. Well away from time. That passes. That does not pass. That stops.
Until… Until the next end.
What to do? In other words: life is futile. All that you have not lived, History will return to you.
What to do? It is the ignorance of oneself cast onto the world.
As ignorance of the world.
How to do? The question of how. Not of what a being, a gesture, a thing is but of how it is what it is. The question of how its predicates relate to it.
And it to them.
Let be. Let be the gap between the subject and its predicates. The abyss of the presence.
A man is not “a man”. A “white horse” is not a “horse”.
The question of how. The attention to the how. The attention to the way “a woman” is, and is not
a woman – it takes many assemblages [dispositifs] to turn a female being into “a woman”,
or a black-skinned man into “a Black”.
The attention to the ethical difference. To the ethical element. To the irreducibilities that run through it.
What goes on between bodies in an occupation is more interesting than the occupation itself.
How to do? means that the military confrontation with Empire has to be subordinated to the intensification of the relationships inside our Party. It means the political is just a certain degree of intensity within the ethical element. That revolutionary war must not be confused with its representation: the raw fact of the struggle.
The question of how? To pay attention to the happening of things, of beings. To their event. To the tenacious and silent saliency of their own temporality under the planetary crushing of all temporalities
by the one of emergency.
The What to do? as the programmatic denial of this. As the inaugural formula of a busy lack of love.
The What to do? is coming back. It has been coming back for a few years. Since the mid-nineties more than since Seattle. A revival of the critique is pretending to challenge Empire.
With the slogans and tricks of the sixties. Except that this time it is faked.
Innocence, indignation, good intentions and the need for society are faked. The whole range of old social-democratic affects are put back into circulation. Of Christian affects.
And again, here come the demonstrations. The desire-killing demonstrations. Where nothing happens.
And which no longer demonstrate anything
but a collective absence.
Now and forever.
For those who feel nostalgic about Woodstock, pot, May 68 and militancy, there are the counter-summits. The setting has been set again, minus the possible.
Here is today’s command of the What to do?: to travel to the other side of the world in order to contest the global commodity,
And then come back, after a big bath of unanimity and mediatised separation,
to submit yourself to the local commodity.
Back home, you’ve got your picture in the newspaper… All alone together!… Once upon a time… Good old youth!…
Too bad for the few living bodies lost there, looking in vain for some room for their desires.
They will return a bit more bored. A bit more tired. Weakened.
From counter-summit to counter-summit, they will eventually understand. Or not.
One doesn’t contest Empire over its management. One doesn’t critique Empire.
You oppose its forces.
From where you are.
To give your opinion about such or such alternative, to go where you are called, makes no sense. There is no global alternative project to the global project of Empire. Because there’s no global project of Empire. There is an imperial management. Any management is bad. Those who demand another society should better start to realize that there is none left. And maybe they would then stop being wannabe-managers. Citizens. Indignant citizens.
The global order cannot be taken as an enemy. Directly.
Because the global order does not take place. On the contrary. It is the order of the non-places.
Its perfection is not to be global, but to be globally local. The global order is the exclusion of any event because it is the utmost, authoritarian occupation of the local. The global order can only be opposed locally. Through the extension of opaque zones over Empire’s maps. Through their growing contiguity.
Underground.
The coming politics. Politics of local insurrection against global management. Of presence won over the absence to oneself. Over the citizen, the imperial estrangement.
Won through theft, fraud, crime, friendship, enmity, conspiracy.
Through the elaboration of ways of living that are also
ways of fighting.
The politics of the event.
Empire is everywhere nothing is happening. It administrates absence by waving the palpable threat of police intervention in any place.
Whoever regards Empire as an opponent to confront will meet preventive annihilation.
From now on, to be perceived means to be defeated.
Learning how to become imperceptible. To merge. To regain the taste
for anonymity
for promiscuity.
To renounce distinction,
To elude the clampdown:
setting the most favourable conditions for confrontation.
Becoming sly. Becoming merciless. And for that purpose
becoming whatever.
How to do? is the question of the lost children. Those who were not told. Those with the clumsy gestures. To whom nothing was given. Whose creature-ality, whose wandering, always betrays itself.
The coming revolt is the revolt of the lost children.
The thread of historical transmission has been broken. Even the revolutionary tradition
leaves us orphaned. Especially the workers’ movement. The workers’ movement that’s turned into a tool for higher integration to the Process. To the new, cybernetic Process of social valorisation.
In 1978, it was in the name of the workers’ movement that the Italian Communist Party, the so-called “party with clean hands” launched its witch-hunt against Autonomy.
In the name of its classist conception of the proletariat, of its mystique of society, of respect for work, utility and decency.
In the name of “democracy” and legality.
The workers’ movement which managed to survive through “operaismo“.
The only existing critique of capitalism from the point of view of Total Mobilization.
A formidable and paradoxical doctrine,
that will have saved Marxist objectivism by only talking about subjectivity.
That will have brought the denial of the how to an unprecedented sophistication.
That achieved the ultimate reduction of the gesture to its result.
The wheals of the future anterior.
Of what each thing will have been.
Critique has become vain. Critique has become vain because it amounts to an absence. Everyone knows where the ruling order stands. We no longer need critical theory. We no longer need teachers. Henceforth, critique is allied to domination. Even the critique of domination.
It reproduces absence. It speaks to us from where we are not. It propels us elsewhere. It consumes us. It is craven. And stays cautiously sheltered
when it sends us to the slaughter.
Secretly in love with its object, it continually lies to us.
Hence the brief romances between proletarians and ‘engaged’ intellectuals.
Those rational marriages in which neither has the same idea of pleasure or of freedom.
Rather than new critiques, it is new cartographies
that we need.
Not cartographies of Empire, but of the lines that flee out of it.
How to do? We need maps. Not maps of what is off the map.
But navigating maps. Maritime maps. Orientation tools. That do not try to explain or represent what lies inside of the different archipelagos of desertion, but indicate how to join them.
Portulans.
III
This is Tuesday, September the 17th 1996, just before dawn. The ROS (Special Operational Group) coordinates the arrest of some 70 Italian anarchists throughout the country.
The goal is to put an end to fifteen years of fruitless investigations of insurrectionalist anarchists.
The technique is well-known: fabricate a “turncoat”, make him denounce the existence of a wide subversive hierarchical organization.
Then on the basis of this chimerical creation, accuse all those to be neutralized of being part of it.
Once again, “drain the sea to catch the fish”.
Even though it is only a tiny pond.
And a few roaches.
An “informative service note” was leaked from the ROS on this case.
It explains its strategy.
Based on the principles of General Dalla Chiesa, the ROS is the classic example of imperial counter-insurrection service.
It works on the population.
Where an intensity has occurred, where something happened, it is the French doctor of the situation. The one that sets,
under cover of prophylaxis,
the lines of quarantine aimed at isolating
the contagion.
What it fears is written in this document. What it fears is “the swamp of political anonymity”.
Empire is afraid.
Empire is afraid that we might become whatever.
A delimited circle, an armed organization. It does not scare them. But an expansionary constellation of squats, self-managed farms, collective homes, fine a se stesso meetings, radios, skills and ideas. The whole linked by an intense circulation of bodies, and of the affects between those bodies. That is quite another matter.
The conspiracy of the bodies. Not of the critical minds, but of the critical corporeities.
This is what Empire fears. This is what is slowly rising,
with the increase of the flows
of social defection.
There is an opacity inherent to the contact of bodies. Which is not compatible with the imperial reign of a light that shines on things
only to disintegrate them.
Offensive Opacity Zones are not
to be created.
They are already there, in all the relations in which a true
communication occurs between bodies.
All we must do is accept that we are part of this opacity. And provide ourselves with the means to extend it,
to defend it.
Wherever we manage to thwart imperial assemblages, to ruin all the perpetual work of Biopower and Spectacle, to extricate a fraction of the citizens. To isolate new untorelli. In this recovered indistinction
an autonomous ethical fabric
will spontaneously form
a plan of secessionist consistency.
Bodies aggregate. Breathe again. Conspire.
Whether such zones are condemned to be suppressed militarily really does not matter. What matters, each time, is to preserve a sure escape route.
And then re-aggregate
Elsewhere.
Later.
Underlying the problem of What is to be done? was the myth of the general strike.
What answers the question How to do? is the practice of the HUMAN STRIKE.
The general strike meant that exploitation was limited
in time and space,
that alienation was partial, due to a recognizable enemy, and thus beatable.
Human strike replies to an age in which the limits between work and life are fading away.
In which consuming and surviving,
producing “subversive texts” and dealing with the most toxic effects of industrial civilization,
doing sports, making love, being a parent or taking Prozac
Everything is work.
Because Empire manages and digests, absorbs and reintegrates
all that lives.
Even “what I am”, the subjectivisation that I do not deny hic et nunc,
everything is productive.
Empire has put everything to work.
Ideally, my professional profile will coincide with my own face.
Even if it does not smile.
For in any case, the grimaces of the rebel sell nicely.
Empire is when the means of production have become means of control
at the very same time that the opposite revealed itself to be the case.
Empire means that in all things the political moment dominates
the economic one.
A general strike is helpless against this.
What must be opposed to Empire is a human strike.
Which never attacks relations of production without attacking at the same time
the affective knots which sustain them.
Which undermines the shameful libidinal economy of Empire,
Which restores the ethical element – the how – repressed in every contact between neutralised bodies.
Where one would expect such or such predictable reaction,
such or such contrite or indignant tone,
the human strike is that strike which
PREFERS NOT TO.
That slips away from the assemblage. That saturates it or explodes it.
Pulls itself together, preferring
something else.
Something else that does not belong to the authorized possibilities of the assemblage.
At the counter of such and such government office, at the check out of such and such supermarket, in a polite conversation, during a police raid,
according to the balance of power,
human strike gives consistency to the spaces between bodies,
pulverizes the double bind in which they are caught,
forces them into presence.
There is a whole new Luddism to be invented, a Luddism of the human machinery
that feeds Capital.
In Italy, radical feminism was an embryonic form of human strike.
“No more mothers, women and girls, let’s destroy the families!” was an invitation to the gesture of breaking the expected chain of events,
to release the compacted potentialities.
It was a blow to fucked up love affairs, to ordinary prostitution.
It was a call to the overcoming of the couple as elementary unit in the management of alienation.
A call for complicity, then.
Such a practice required circulation, contagion.
The women’s strike implicitly called for the strike of men and children, summoned them to run from factories, schools, offices and prisons,
to reinvent for each situation another way to be, another how.
Italy in the seventies was an enormous area of human strike.
“Self-reductions”, hold-ups, squatted neighbourhoods, armed demonstrations, pirate radios, countless cases of “Stockholm syndrome”, even the famous letters sent by Moro towards the end of his detention, were forms of human strike.
The Stalinists, back then, used to talk of “diffuse irrationality”.
There are also writers
who are doing nothing else but
human strike.
Kafka, Walser,
or Michaux,
for instance.
To collectively acquire this ability to shake off
familiarities,
this art of dealing, within oneself,
with the most disturbing of all guests.
In the present war,
where the emergency reformism of Capital has to dress up as a revolutionary to be heard,
where the most democratic fights, those of the counter-summits,
practice direct action,
a role is prepared for us.
The role of the martyrs of the demokratic order
that preventively hits every body that could hit.
I should let myself be immobilized in front of a computer while nuclear plants explode, while one plays with my hormones or poisons me.
I should start singing the victim’s rhetoric. As is well-known,
everyone is a victim, even the oppressors.
And savour the discreet circulation of masochism
which re-enchants the situation.
Today human strike means
refusing to play the role of the victim.
Attacking it.
Taking back violence.
Imposing impunity.
Making the paralyzed citizens understand
that if they do not join the war they are part of it anyway.
That when we are told it is either this or dying, it is always
in reality
this and dying.
Thus,
human strike
after human strike, to reach
the insurrection,
where there is nothing but,
where we are all,
whatever
singularities.