Octavio Alberola, Revolución o colapso

What follows is an exercise in the sharing of ideas, of visions.  The most recent essay by the invisible committee, NOW, continues a reflection-intervention that began with The Coming Insurrection and To Our Friends, and offers a powerful critique of contemporary politics, along with a defense of “autonomy”.  What is proposed here then is a partial translation, summary, and occasionally a commentary and exemplification, or simply a montage, of some of the ideas that animate their vision of our times.

It also may be taken as a commentary on our recent posts dedicated to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Jacques Rancière, as well as on Spain´s 15th of May movement.

The apparently seamless order of the our world belies its tattered fragments.  The promised unity of a global order is sustained only in the realm of illusion by the flickering of screens bleating forth a continuous flow of images.  The content of the latter is meaningless, it is the flow that matters, that there be images, the spectacle of our own ongoing passivity.  But all about us are the shards of “society”, “science”, “labour”, “states”.  The seeming homogeneity of desires is fractured by unmanageable spaces, proliferating knowledges, precarious, uncertain ways of survival and sovereign authorities that exist only through open or less than hidden states of exception. Fragmentation devours all that is solid in its path, like the touch of a King Midas of instability.

“Wage labour explodes in all sorts of niches, of exception, in conditions of anomaly.  The idea of the “precariat” opportunely conceals that there is simply no longer any common experience of work, even precarious.  So that as well there can no longer be any common experience of its cessation, and the old myth of the general strike can be placed on the shelf of useless accessories.  Western medicine is reduced to tinkering with techniques that explode its doctrinal unity, such as acupuncture, hypnoses or magnetism.  Beyond the usual parliamentary fiddling, there is no longer, politically, any majority for anything.  The wisest political commentary, during the conflict generated by the Labour Law of the spring of 2016 [France], noted that two minorities, a government minority and a demonstrating minority, clashed with each other before a theatre of spectators.” (the invisible committee, Now, 19-20)*

Even our own selves dissolve in a confusing stream of disconnected feelings, experiences, thoughts, held together again in the delusion that meaning is to be found in the blind collecting of consumed experiences.

“The contemporary experience of life in a world comprised of circulation, telecommunications, networks, a chaos of information in real time and of images aiming to capture our attention is fundamentally discontinuous.” (20)

The presumed general interest dissolves and states can do no more than call upon their militarised police and their policing military to see through even the most modest of plans (e.g., Val de Suse, Gezi Park, the airport at Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Standing Rock, and the like); each “public” investment, each infrastructure project, is seen for what it is, criminal theft.

The unities of the past, the person, the nation, the state, the society and economy, and so on, were always fictions, but they were effective fictions.  “What is for sure is that the illusion of unity no longer succeeds in making illusory, in reigning in, in disciplining.  In everything, hegemony is dead and the singularities become savage: they carry with them their own meaning, and await no general order.  The little overlooking point of view that allowed anyone with a little authority to act as ventriloquist  for everyone else, to judge, to classify, to hierarchise, to moralise, to notify each person what they must do and how they should do it, has become inaudible.  All of the things that “must” be done have been laid low.” (21)

History, progress, the roots of tradition and the hopes of the future fall away.  The fragments that remain reduce our temporality to the present, to a now.  The authority of states and all that they command must thus force the illusions of History evermore, but in so doing, only further reveal the emptiness of what is supposed to seduce.  History is nothing before the latest, new and improved, consumer object/relation/experience that is condemned to obsolescence in the very moment of its consumption.  If the State’s ambition is to manage, and to manage the totality of the social life that it gives form to/creates, then it is an ambition that is increasingly strained, depending on ever greater violence and police rule; the more it tightens its hold, the more “society” implodes at its base.

“Of unity, only nostalgia remains, but it speaks louder and louder.  Everywhere candidates present themselves to restore national grander, to “Make America great again” or “bring order back to France”.  At the same time, when one is nostalgic for French Algeria, what can one be nostalgic for?  Everywhere, one promises then to remake by force the lost unity.  Only that the more one “cleaves” by discoursing on the “sentiment of belonging”, the greater the certainty that one does not belong to any of this spreads.  To mobilise the panic to restore order, is to miss what is essentially dispersive in panic.  The process of general fragmentation is so unstoppable that all of the brutalities which will be used to remake the lost unity will only accelerate it, rendering it more profound and more irreversible.  When there is no longer any common experience, except that found in front of screens, one may well create brief moments of national communion after “terrorist” attacks by deploying an array of drooling sentimentality, false and empty, one can decree all manner of “wars on terrorism”, one can promise to retake control of all “no-go areas” that one wants, all this remains a newsflash on BFM-TV, at the back end of a kebab shop, and whose sound can’t be heard.  This kind of nonsense is like medication: for it to remain effective, the dosage has to be continuously increased, until the final neurasthenia.  Those who look favourably on the perspective of ending their existence in a cramped and over-militarised citadel, even one as large as France, while all around, the water rises, carrying the bodies of the unlucky, may very well call “National traitors” all of those who displease them.  In their barking, nothing but their powerlessness is heard.” (27)

And for those who would contest, struggle against, this established order, to appeal to the same false unties that underlie capitalism would be to contribute to those same illusions, restraining what is possible within the frame of those illusions and a future order, or said differently, making possible the capture of struggles by the State.

Everything becomes plural, local, situated; paradoxically sharing the common trait of flight.  “It is not only that the people are wanting … they have already made their suitcases, in a thousand unsuspected directions.  They are not only abstentionist, in retreat, nowhere to be found: they are in flight, even if their flight would be nothing but interior or immobile.  They are already elsewhere.” (28)  And it will not be the new populists of the left, a Mélenchon or Iglesias, who will bring them back.  “What is called ‘populism’ is not only the glaring symptom of the disappearance of the people, it is a desperate attempt to hold on to what remains of the haggard and disoriented.” (29)

In the tired marches and demonstrations of labour unions and left-wing political parties, those who parade are like marionette ghosts, repeating gestures and slogans mechanically, lifelessly.  The Internationale falls like a corpse from their lips, to be swept up by the municipal street cleaners who follow.  What life erupts from these pacified processions of the living dead does so, as it did in France during the 2016 Spring, when the head of the marches were “taken” by those desirous to break with the imposed sleep, by the casseurs, the “violent rioters” quickly labelled “anarchists” and “black blocks”.  But the names hide more than they reveal, for what happened on these occasions, and again the French example is helpful, “is that a certain number of deserters created a political space where to compose their heterogeneity, an ephemeral space certainly, insufficiently organised undoubtedly, but attainable and, for the duration of a Spring, really existing.” (Now, 30)  Our fragmented world is acephalous, mirrored and multiplied in endless forms, including in the futile and paralysed left.  But those who took the “head” of the protests in Paris, for example, did not do so to provide them with a new leadership, but rather to unleash the autonomous multiple gestures that they harboured and rendered possible.

These last months, a remarkable wind of protest rose against labour law.
Facing it, the government, its ministers , its president and its police, have opted for political and police repression , at a rare level and multiplied the blows of force to quell the movement . Normalising, social violence and media manipulation are all so many symptoms that reflect the massive discomfort of a society where the people are strategically muzzled . This film is the voice of those who revolt, whoever they are, and especially those we never hear, despised by authorities, mass media and dominant discourse.]

[Gloss: The “global” occupy movement of 2011, beginning with the Arab Spring and seemingly replicating itself in numerous other countries and cities, is the most significant “social-political movement” of our time. To speak in the singular here though is to suggest a unity of intention and/or ideology across these movements which does not exist. And yet their shared occupation of city squares intimates some commonality, to be sought at other levels of lived reality. Tomás Ibáñez, writing of the Spanish movement 15M of 2011, states that it “marked in a clear way a before and an after in the scenario of protests and collective conflict.” (Anarquismos a contratiempo, 263) Ibáñez’s judgement may not be extendable to other countries for various reasons, but in the Spanish context, it echos true. However, the intensity and resonances of the movement are not due to any unified organisation, ideology or aim born with 15M. The “movement” was and remains as fragmented as the politics that it emerged to challenge. Its force, its radicalness, must therefore be found elsewhere. And for Ibáñez, everything changes the moment we focus on 15M’s organisational forms and practices of struggle, conceived and put into effect without any conscious appeals to past ways of doing politics (15M is a movement of the radical present, for good or ill).

“The originality of 15M consisted in the fact that it was an event, in the full sense of the word, that introduced new things into the political scenario charged with an unquestionable political radicalness, that curiously contrasted with the absence of any radicalness in its explicit demands.” (266) Instead of merely expressing opposition and through protest seeking change, typically at the level of State policy, 15M was much more. “Even though in the beginning, it was the usual popular concentration to express a protest and make a demand, this very quickly transformed itself into a different phenomenon. The thousands of people who invaded the streets and squares did not do so only to demonstrate against this or in favour of that, but they did so also to institute themselves or, more precisely, to self-institute themselves as subjects in a political process.” (267)

…

“This process of self-institution required that the people organise themselves, debate, elaborate collectively their own political discourse, and construct in common the necessary elements to make possible the maintenance of the mobilisation and the development of political action.”

“The importance that the rejection of representation acquired in the heart of the movement – the famous ‘they don’t represent us’, of course, but also accompanied by the refusal to be represented by any permanent entities: ‘no one can claim the right to represent us’ – indicates what the novelty was that the movement introduced into the conventional political game. In effect, a radical rupture was produced with practices that consisted of responding to agendas elaborated externally, that is by others who basically were not among the mobilised. In the public squares, diverted from its conventional and authorised uses, the imagination set to work to create spaces, construct conditions and elaborate procedures that would permit people to elaborate by themselves and collectively their own agenda, at the margin of pre-established and imported ideologies.”

“From the moment that the rejection of representation constituted itself as the active principle of the action of 15M, the only discourses, the only compromises, that were recognised and that were assumed as legitimate, were those that came from the very interior of the movement, those generated from within. Only what the movement produced through and by itself was accepted, autonomously, following the rules of free debate in a non-hierarchical frame.” (268)

The extraordinary significance of 15M thus lies not in what it promised for the future, nor in any rehabilitation of some glorious revolutionary past, ideological or practical, but in what it realised in the present. “If anything profoundly characterised 15M, it was its unyielding will for autonomy, a generalised demand for autonomy and self-determination that imposed the fixing of its own objectives and the determination of its own ways of being, as well as the rejection of domination, not allowing itself to be lead by any external entity, and to decide to act for itself.” (268)

As a political movement, an essentially plural movement, 15M sought not to weld the fragments of social life into a new, false unity, but to create a space of passage, a threshold, through and from which different agencies could enter, gain sustenance, and depart, to possibly return again. If 15M resonated and resonates still in the country, it is because its political children are many. And at its most intense, it not only shared ideas, but bodies. That is, for very, very many who came to the occupied squares of Spain’s cities, what they found was not a politics segregated from all other spheres of life, “politics” as usual, but a politics embedded in life and the care that makes possible the reproduction of forms of life in radical opposition to capitalism, if any such opposition is to be true. 15M was not ideology, organisation, fixed practices, leadership, representatives, but the sharing, to speak metaphorically, of wine and bread in a life giving meal that could be re-enacted and edified into a form of life.

Podemos is Judas at this supper, but the murder that it desires and with which it is complicitous has so far failed.

The invisible committee is critical of Nuit Debout, France’s incarnation of the “occupy movement”, precisely for its fetishism of form, democratic form, voting upon matters that could have no possible execution and which in the end only served to domesticate the occupation. If it too was lacking in any homogeneity, if unplanned gatherings and demonstrations also gestated in its midst, if it also contributed to making the movement against the proposed labour law reform of 2016 in France much more than simply another protest movement, it came to grief on the separation of politics from life and the presumed and desired sovereignty of the former; the belief that life can be governed, mirrored in the image of government of the self. (Now, 52-6)

The invisible committee’s argument here takes us further than most of the political readings of the occupy movements. For what emerges from their considerations is a re-thinking of the very concept of autonomy. So often imagined in terms of self-possession, it finds expression in the State and in the person in the concept of sovereignty. Neither of the two, State or person, are conceivable without it. But then neither are imaginable without violence, the violence that represses and/or destroys that which escapes rule. The task then is to think and live autonomy beyond sovereignty; a sovereignty which in any case has been irretrievably lost in the debris of capitalism’s disaster. The anonymous many who have filled streets and city squares are the uprooted and disoriented offspring of the disaster, who gather not as the “people united”, but as a community of the nameless.]

If any semblance of unity continues to structure State authority, it is only through fear, surveillance and the physical presence of police.  The law, the armour of declared and legislated rights that is supposed to protect each citizen’s moral and physical integrity, and thus the guarantor of social unity, is an edifice of ruins.  Indeed, as far as the invisible committee is concerned, the Law no longer exists. (33)

“As long as the security of our fellow citizens justifies it, as long as administrative search warrants [passed without a judicial decision] that only the state of emergency allow are indispensable, it is advisable to maintain the state of emergency.”  The words were proffered by Emmanuel Macron during the French presidential election campaign and they are now confirmed by his desired extension of the legal exception until the 1st of November, bringing the state of emergency in France up to two years.  Whatever hesitations he may have had in the past have vanished (“We cannot live permanently in a regime of exception.  It is necessary to return to ordinary law … and to act with the right instruments.  We have the legislative apparatus permitting us to respond, over time, to our situation”).  And in parallel, there is a proposal for a new and additional anti-terrorist law. (Liberation 24/05/2017)  As such laws multiply, both in France and elsewhere, states of emergency in fact cease to be exceptional; such laws create distinct legal subjects with different rights and duties.  And as they do so, the diminished rights of suspected criminals and terrorists seep into the fabric of general law, rendering everyone a potential suspect.

The German legal theorist Günther Jakobs elaborated a distinction between two criminal laws: one for “citizens” and another for “enemies”.  For Jakobs, the latter includes the rabble, radical opponents, thugs and rogues, “terrorists”, “anarchists”, in sum, all of those who fail to sufficiently respect the reigning democratic order and thereby represent a “danger” to the “normative structure of society”.  Should not then such “dangerous individuals” be treated as enemies of society? Do they not exclude themselves from ordinary criminal law, justifying the elaboration of a criminal law for enemies? (33)  But to elaborate a law for enemies, is to erase the Schmittian distinction of friend-enemy, which places the enemy outside a constituted sovereignty.  That is, it makes all of us potential enemies, it renders the exception normal, thus destroying “normal” criminal law altogether.  (The example of the increasing criminalisation of dissent in Spain in the wake of 15M, with the law of Citizen Security of 2013 and the recent police operations, pandoraand piñata, against anarchists, is but one example among many today).

“However paradoxical this affirmation may appear, we live in the time of the abolition of the Law.  The metastatic proliferation of laws is nothing but one aspect of this abolition.  If each law had not become insignificant in the rococo of contemporary law, would it be necessary to produce so many?  Would it be necessary to communicate, with each event, by means of the enactment of new legislation?  The aim of the great legal reforms over the last years in France amount almost all to the abolition of current laws, to the progressive dismantling of all judicial guarantees.  So much so that the Law, which professed to protect men/women and things before the hazards of the world, has instead become what adds to their precariousness.”  The state of exception today reigns “under the form of the law.” (34-5)

[Gloss: “The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “emergency situation” in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history which corresponds to this. Then it will become clear that the task before us is the introduction of a real state of emergency; and our position in the struggle against Fascism will thereby improve.” Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History]

There are two ways to respond to the state of emergency, we are told by the invisible committee.  The first is to denounce it and call for the return of a state of law; an illusory exercise that calls for what never really existed, because the law depends upon the exception, on the constitution of those who are outside the law.  There is no law without the violence of separation and that violence is always potentially and in fact directed at the body constituted by the State. The second response is to assume the exception of the law.  If the State frees itself from its laws under the exception, then it is for those who contest the State to do the same.  “There are those who protest against a phantom, the state of emergency, and there are those who take action and deploy from their own state of exception.” (38)

Before the permanent state of exception, “the maintenance of order is the principle activity of an already failed order”. (109)  And the greater the fragmentation of social order, the greater is the presence of an increasingly militarised police.

The loss of all hope among the increasingly superfluous many is also the condition for pure revolt, a “revolt that no longer seeks support in what it denies and which is its own self-authorisation”. (110)  Before such disobedience, potential or active, politics is reduced to a vast, daily police operation. (110)  And thus rebellion can only direct itself at the body of the State, namely, the police.  In Paris, the slogan was, “Everyone hates the police”.

That this statement should appear shocking to some is testimony to the successful imposition of sovereignty by modern State power.  At the beginning of the 17th century, for the first thinkers on sovereignty, the police were held to be the very constitution of the State, its very form, rather than a mere instrument of State authority.  The police was thus “all that can give ornament, form and splendour to the city” (Turquet de Mayerne), “the ensemble of means that serve the splendor of the whole State and the happiness of all of its citizens” (Hohenthal).  Its role is to “lead man to the most perfect felicity that he may enjoy in this life” (Delmare). (111-2)  The police then are the government of all of the conditions that render this felicity possible, from the cleanliness of streets to the imprisonment of vagabonds. (112)  It is the police as identical with to be policed, that is, ordered, administered, governed by policy, belonging to the city, the polis, the realm of the civilised, in contrast to the savage, those outside the city, inhabitants of unpolicedforests.  The police in this instance are the very end of sovereignty: the ideal, legal and ultimately fictional order of the world.  The police however must also assure that the order is real, or as real as possible.  And here it appears as a means to its own ideal end.  Yet without the former, the latter reveals itself as a fiction, and thus “the function of the police as a means is to ensure that from the outside the order desired appears to reign”.  Failure however haunts its double role.  To act from the “outside” with “necessary” violence is to act from outside the law, to act illegally, to preserve the law.  The police is the very embodiment of the paradox of sovereignty, the paradox that the sovereign who defines the legal order does so in an initial act that is a-legal; that the sovereign who defends the constituted order does so through illegalacts.  The police “are the proof that the legal is not the real, that order does not reign, that society does not hold because it does not hold by itself“; that all are the work and consequence of their force, a permanent agency of exception in the heart of constituted and “constitutional” political authority.  “If the state of exception is this temporary suspension of the law that permits re-establishing, by the most arbitrary and bloody measures, the condition for the rule of law, the police is what remains of the state of exception when these conditions have been restored.  The police, in their daily functioning, is what persists of the state of exception in normal circumstances.  It is why its sovereign functioning is itself so hidden.” (113)

A French CRS police officer, after arresting someone for no reason during the Paris Spring protests states: “I do what I want.  You see, it’s anarchy for me also!” (113)

“The police thus ensure an apparent order that is from within only disorder.  It is the truth of a world of lies, and by continuous lies.  It confirms that the reigning order is artificial, and that it will sooner or later be destroyed.” (114)

The police is unmasked.  It is not that everyone in fact hates the police.  They do not.  But for those who cry out loudly that they do, they have excellent reasons for doing so.  The fragmentation of State power and authority however changes the relation between government and police.  Once the mere instruments of politicians, the generalised discredit of the latter renders the police the very condition of government.  It is the politicians who now turn to them before any crisis, and cede to them on every demand.  Few police bodies would be able, or even willing, to assume openly political autonomy; and for such a body to do so would be to engender a government at war with all or a part of its population. (115-8)

And in response: “It would be senseless to seek a military victory over the police. … The police is a target and not an objective, an obstacle and not an adversary.  Whoever takes the cops for an adversary prohibits themselves  from breaking through the obstacle that they are.  To be able to sweep them aside, one has to aim beyond.  Against the police, there is only political victory.  Disorganise their ranks, strip them of all legitimacy, reduce them to impotence, hold them at a good distance, grant oneself a larger margin of manoeuvre at the desired moment, as in the chosen places: thus is the police destituted.” (118)

Suffered, the processes of fragmentation may push us towards misery, isolation, schizophrenia.  Life may be lived as a pure waste.  Nostalgia then possesses us; nostalgia for family, nation, or so many other fictions of wholeness.  For is not belonging the only thing that remains to those who no longer have anything?  Yet this same fragmentation can also be a starting point, it may also give rise to an intensification and pluralisation of the “relations that make us.” (41)  Perhaps then we may see finally that it was our “integration in society” that was “a slow loss of being, a continuous separation, a slipping towards ever greater vulnerability, and an ever more disguised vulnerability.” (41)

“There is in the fragmentation something that points towards what we call ‘communism’: it is the return to earth, the ruin of everything made equivalent, the restitution of all singularities to themselves, the failure of subsumption, abstraction, the fact that moments, places, things, beings and animals all acquire their own name – their own name.  Every creation is born of a rupture with the whole. … If the Earth is so rich in natural milieus, it is in virtue of is complete absence of uniformity.  To realise the promise of communism held within the fragmentation of the world calls for a gesture, a gesture to be repeated interminably, a gesture that is life itself: that of to provide passages between the fragments, to put them into contact, to organise their encounter, to open the paths that lead from one friendly bit of the world to another without passing through hostile territory, that of establishing the good art of distances between the worlds.” (43)

What these connected fragments are remains open, changing.  But they are held together in moving affinities of plural forms of life, archipelagos of life beyond the politics of institutionalised and enforced spectacular commoditification.

__________

*Unless otherwise indicated, all references are to the essay Maintenant, published by La fabrique, 2017.

source: http://autonomies.org/2017/05/reading-our-times-with-now-the-invisible-committee/

The post Reading our times with “NOW”: The invisible committee appeared first on Void Network.

The ingenuity of the Imaginary Party’s essay on Blanqui is that it goes way beyond merely contextualizing Blanqui; it even goes beyond trying to defend the indefensible Blanqui, the revolutionary who is unacceptable to everyone, especially self-proclaimed revolutionaries. “To a friend” (as the preface is also known) aims to be a modern Blanquist statement: an advancement of Blanqui’s own ideas and actions by people unafraid to be called “Blanquists.” Who will stop these “agents” of the Imaginary Party from seizing these positions? No one. This terrain is completely empty of other combatants; and no one will want to re-take it once it has been seized. A very neat trick: affirm Blanqui by negating his absence. And, more importantly, a very meaningful gesture: there are other once-revolutionary terrains can be re-taken by agents of the Imaginary Party without firing a single shot.

Part of the introduction from translator’s collective 
NOT BORED!
3 June 2009

“To a friend”

“To judge from the current disposition of people’s minds, communism isn’t exactly knocking on the door. But nothing is as deceptive as the situation, because nothing is so changeable.” (Blanqui)
We are still afflicted by many superstitions. We have our collective hallucinations that are only doubted by the crazy, and our images of ourselves that are only distinguishable from those of yesteryear by being more secular. We meet our equals and we sincerely believe we see persons and people. We love someone, and we speak of “the Other.” A century separates us from a certain life and we postulate it as being faraway. Dissimilar customs or a few variations in vocabulary are sufficient to convince us of an uncrossable distance. But what we understand can only be a part of ourselves; what we understand cannot go much further [than that]. Enlighten yourself: Blanqui[1] is not a historical person. He does not return to us as a phantom from the 19th century, though a century can traverse the ages. Blanqui is from yesterday, tomorrow, today. Blanqui did indeed exist, the facts attest to it, but the facts also attest to the fact he existed, above all, as a conceptual persona, like Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, Bataille’s Gilles de Rai or Artaud’s Heliogabale.[2] From whence comes Blanqui’s proper eternity. Gustave Lefrancais notes in his Souvenirs: “For the 400,000 voters of la Seine, ‘Blanqui’ is a revolutionary expression.”[3] The name ‘Blanqui’ relates, not to a person, but to an existential possibility, to a manner of being-there, to a power of affirmation. If Blanqui was named “the Imprisoned One,” this was in part due to his three decades in jail, but also due to the stubbornness with which this power remained in the historical figure of Blanqui. Prison, glory and calumny are the means that opportunely command the necessity of isolating [human] existences that are too ardent.
*
The universal desire to be someone, to be recognized, founds the comic atrocity of our era and gives it an aspect of free improvisation in the midst of crazy people, an open-air theatre of narcissistic pathologies of all kinds. We divert our glance from this bad show. We imagine a being who could not close his or her eyes to the horror of the present (this canvas of boredom, injustice, stupidity, separation and cynicism, the disastrous coherence of which is guaranteed by the police); a being who a kind of infirmity, certainly, but also perhaps some spirit of defiance had rendered unable to remain at peace with such a state of things; a being who had also found, while still young and in the midst of rioting, fires and conspiracy, the exact contraries of what he saw around him: intelligence, courage, adventure, friendship and truth. Such a being — and there is no doubt that there were a number of people who, at that very moment, lived and sought each other out — would be Blanqui, as much as Blanqui was Blanqui. Each moment of his life, each beat of his heart, would be propelled by these unique questions: How to do it? How to constitute a revolutionary force? How to win? Historical figures are there to provide screens for the powers that carry them. Nothing is simpler, clearer, more communal than Blanqui. And this is precisely why it will be necessary to cloud this menacing clarity with so many calumnies, rumors and dirty water. There is no “Mystery of Blanqui,” despite all of his nocturnal intrigues, secret enterprises and [other] confabs. There is only bottomless evidence of a revolutionary existence. But what devil drove him? How could he still attempt, how could he still want to apply himself, always and forever, to theorizing [penser] the situation after so many betrayals, losses and disappointments? And what does it all mean? Don’t worry, spectators: he will cave in one day and you will be able to whisper about him. Or he will triumph, and you will succumb. By waiting [for Blanqui], he will be your obsession; it will be your possibility that you will exhaust by incessantly conjuring him up.
*
“The me has always left me cold.”[4] This is what Blanqui opposed to the malevolent hysteria, to the concert of jealousy that his very nature sufficed to unleash. And this redoubled the din. He who does not deign to respond to his accusers, who have in their turn circulated rumors, he must expect to see them become exaggerated, then dry up into thin streams of bile. Warning to the activist milieus:
“If you encounter these personal hatreds, jealousies and rivalries of ambition, I will join with you to weaken them; they are one of the scourges of our cause; but remark that they are not a special plague of our party; all of our adversaries suffer from them as we do. They only explode with greater noise in our ranks because of the more expansive character and more open morals of the democratic world. Furthermore, individual struggles focus on human infirmity; it is necessary to resign oneself to such weaknesses and take men as they are. To lose one’s temper about a fault of nature is puerile, if not stupid. Firm spirits know how to navigate through the obstacles that can’t be removed but which can be avoided or overcome by anyone. Thus, we know to yield to the necessity and, deploring the evil, never slow down our march. To repeat: the truly political man doesn’t keep obstacles in mind and instead goes straight ahead, without otherwise worrying about the pebbles on the road ahead.”
This is in the letter to Maillard.[5] Read it.
*
Dionys Mascolo[6] said something about Saint-Just that is also worthy of Blanqui: “Saint-Just’s ‘inhumanity’ lay in the fact that he didn’t have several distinct lives, like other men, but a single one.” The custom among human beings is to let life go by. The hand on the shoulder that says, “Go, have no cares, it will pass,” is the best-known carrier of this grippe. Thus, ‘inhuman’ is the one who devotes herself to the highest intensity she has encountered like a truth. The one who does not oppose herself to the shock, to the motion of experience, the hesitations of bad faith, skepticism and comfort. She becomes a force in her turn. A little discipline, and this force — the force that attaches her to this intensity — will successfully organize the maelstrom of attractions that compose all of us and imprint upon them a unique direction. What spectators stupidly call “will” is instead an unreserved abandon. For Blanqui, the intensity was insurrection. It was insurrection that, from the first days of July [1830], polarized his existence. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” is a decoration in bad taste for the porticoes of schools; for some it is also the most succinct expression of the experience of being in a riot. “Liberty, equality, fraternity” in street combat, facing death. It is still too soon to say how many Blanquis were born to the world in Genoa [Italy] on 20-21 July 2001. So many have already died from being unable to find, in the desert of the real, the road that leads there. “Weapons and organization — these are the decisive elements of progress, the serious means by which to have done with poverty! He who has iron, has bread. We grovel before the bayonets; we sweep away the unarmed crowds. France bristles with workers in arms: it is the advent of socialism.”
*
We lead ourselves astray by reviving the specter of “the superman.”[7] Blanqui’s enemies amply take up this question. “Somber temperament, haughty, unsociable, hypochondriac, sarcastic, great ambition, cold, inexorable, pitilessly breaking men to pave his road. Heart of marble, head of iron.” “The head and heart of the proletarian party in France” (a journalist). “The most cynical of the demoniacs conjured up by the fear of modern society” (a reactionary). These are maneuvers suited to assure the isolation of a being outside the prisons. The superman is a toy, as man is a chimera. It is sufficient to distinguish between the mediocre existence that floats and navigates by what is possible, and the settled existence that is attached to a truth and works and makes headway from it. It isn’t curious that the word “destiny” [destin] is derived from the [Latin] verb destinare, which means “to attach.”[8] He who becomes devoted [s’attache] must become less and less a “person” and more and more a presence. Less and less “human,” but more and more communal, simpler. With good cause, the subject of such an attachment is treated as “irreducible,” because it is no longer reducible to itself. For our part, we are please to name the reducible the crowd of those who, taking themselves for people, betray themselves at every moment.
*
On the eve of the proclamation of the [Paris] Commune, [Adolphe] Thiers took Blanqui away. He kept Blanqui in secret and refused to exchange him for sixty-four hostages, including the Archbishop of Paris. Flotte[9] recounts this remark by Thiers: “To bring Blanqui to the insurrection is to send him a force equal to an armed corps.” Blanqui is feared, and even in his own party, not as a leader, but as power. He knows how to show his abilities in [both] action and thought, and to practice [tenir] them together. One need search no further for the origin of the implacable hatred and the unfailing loyalty that Blanqui inspired. “The tribunes compare [s’addresser] the heroic and barbaric beastliness of the multitudes to a wild bearing, the lion’s face, Taurus’ neck. As for Blanqui, the cold mathematician of revolt and reprisals, he seems to hold between his thin fingers the tally [le devis] of the sorrows and rights of the people” (Valles, L’Insurge).[10] Blanqui addressed himself to justice and determination; he addressed himself to his equals. Unlike a leader, he neither flattered nor snubbed anyone, and he preferred to keep people at a distance than to take the risk of [mutual] seduction. By his very existence, he contradicted all the bourgeoisie’s propaganda, which — before turning insurgent Parisian proletarians into piles of cadavers as tall as barricades — began by painting them as a shapeless mass, as a brainless Plebian class of thieves, drunks, prison-escapees, headless devils, creatures that were unintelligible, monstrous and foreign to all humanity. And so: there is a logic of revolt. There is a science of insurrection. There is an intelligence in the riot, an idea of upheaval. It is necessary to have all the class-hatred of de Tocqueville to fail to recognize it.
“There then appeared in front of the tribunal a man who I only saw that one day, but whose memory has always filled me with disgust and horror. He had haggard and sunken cheeks, white lips, a sickly, wicked and unclean air, a dirty pallor, the bearing of a moldy body, apparently no underclothes, an old black frock coat gathered about thin and emaciated limbs. He seems to have lived in a cesspool and crawled out; one told me that this was Blanqui.” (Souvenirs).
*
“Sink the Romantics!” These were Blanqui’s first words, while he was still sweating, covered with gunpowder, at the end of the three days in July 1830. There is indeed a romantic feeling for life that extends down to us and even more profoundly infests our era than the previous century. Musset[11] codified it once and for all in 1836, in the first few pages of La Confession:
“A feeling of inexpressible malaise thus begins to ferment in all the young hearts. Condemned to rest by the sovereign of the world, delivered up to the pedants of all species, to idleness and boredom, the young people see recede from them the foaming waves against which they had prepared their arms (. . .) At the same time that the life of the beyond was so pale and petty, the inner life of society took on a somber and silent aspect; the most severe hypocrisy reigned in morals (. . .) This was like a denial of all things in heaven and on earth, which one could disenchantedly name despair, as if lethargic humanity had been thought dead by those who felt its pulse. In the same way that the soldier of yesteryear — whom one had asked, “What do you believe in?” — answered “In me,” the youth of France would today say “In nothing.””
All that has been valuable in the last two centuries — in all domains — has been made against the romantic feeling for life, that is to say, by keeping it in mind. Lautreamont’s Poesies, Chklovski’s Lettres de non-amour, Deleuze and Parnel’s Dialogues, and Gang Of Four’s album Entertainment[12] mark out a front that includes Durruti’s cold passion, Lenin’s best intuitions, Italian feminism, Huey P. Newton’s speeches, the urban guerrilla and the wind that blows through la villa Savoye.[13] All this reveals what we would, in opposition, call the Blanquist feeling for life. [His texts] L’Eternite par les astres and Instructions pour une prise d’armes[14] are the purest expression of it in this volume. Starting with what is here, and not with what is missing, with what (as they say) will default on the real. Never wait; operate with those who are there. Learn oneself, learn [other] beings and situations, not as entities, but as intersections [parcourus] of lines and planes, traversed by misfortunes [fatalites]. No afterlife, reveries, recriminations or explications. “One only consoles oneself too much.” To renounce the idea of chaos, the simple mental transcription of renunciation — “The shadow of chaos never existed, it will never exist, anywhere.” Once what is there is accounted for, get organized. Do not recoil from any logical consequence. Those who speak of revolution without concerning themselves with the questions of arms and supplies already have cadavers in their hands.[13] Leave the questions of origin and finality to the metaphysicians; the here-and-now is our only starting point, and what we can do practically is our only serious goal. If the state of things is untenable, it is not because of this or that, but because I am powerless within it. Never oppose the necessities of thought and action. Remain firm in moments of ebb, when one must start again, alone, from the beginning: one is never alone with the truth. Such a way of being can find no excuse in the eyes of those for whom life is only a scholarly collection of justifications. Faced with this Blanquist way of being, resentment hurls invectives; it denounces “the taking of power” and “megalomania”; it erects its security corridors of bad faith, stupidity and contentment; it announces the banning of the monster that seems to be in the process of extricating itself from the human herd.
But when a sincere man, leaving aside the fantastic mirage of the programs and the mists of the Kingdom of Utopia, leaves the [romantic] novel to enter reality; when he speaks seriously and practically — “Disarm the bourgeoisie, arm the people: these are the first necessities, the only signs of the health of the revolution” — oh! then indifference vanishes and a long howl of fury resounds from one end of France to the other. Sacrilege! Patricide! Hydrophobia! There is rioting; the furies are unleashed upon that man; he is condemned to the infernal gods for having modestly spelled out the first words of common sense.
*
The partisans of waiting have always used the adjective “Blanquist” as an unanswerable insult. The purists among the anarchists use it as a synonym for “Jacobin,” while the Stalinists used it as the equivalent of “anarchist.” The cultivated imbeciles of the Encyclopedia of Nuisances,[16] who for twenty years have had the lucid courage to relentlessly bet on counter-revolution, have [also] spoken of the Unabomber’s “imaginary Blanquism” so as to better dissociate it from his gestures, and thereby introduce their grossly falsified translation of his Manifesto.[17] Among Marxists, “Blanquist” is a synonym for “putschist” that denounces an avant-garde adventurism and a haste to get organized without due care for theory, while the masses are not always ready for it. All this surface confusion is of no interest. “Let’s go! With patience, always! With resignation, never!” That is the Blanquist way. The alternative is not between waiting and activism, between participating in “social movements” and forming an avant-garde army; it is between being resigned or organized. A force can grow in an underground [sous-jacente] manner, according to its own rhythm, and can seize the time at the opportune moment. If the success of the October coup d’Etat had value for the Bolsheviks [in the form of] the admiration of a crowd of followers and opportunists of all nationalities, the unfortunate attempts of Blanqui — surrounded with an evil aura — at least had the merit of distancing him from this race of wood lice. In its text On the armed struggle in Western Europe, the Red Army Faction cites a passage from the famous article on partisan warfare written by Lenin: “In an era of civil war, the ideal of the party is a militarily engaged party (. . .) In the name of the principles of Marxism, we categorically demand that one does not dodge the analysis of the conditions of the civil war via cliches and worn-out phrases about anarchism, Blanquism and terrorism, and [we demand] that one does not come to discuss with us the scarecrow of certain absurd procedures applied by such and such organization in a war fought by partisans.”
*
He who becomes absorbed in a destiny finds himself on equal footing with those who share it. The experience of friendship is the sweetest effect of such discipline. “I regard having made alliances and friendships with several hearts capable of great affection and great sacrifices like a conquest; it is an ability that everyone has.” Just as love falls under the heading of the romantic cesspool, friendship belongs to Blanquist joy. It is that rare form of affection in which the horizon of the world does not disappear. Hannah Arendt says that “friendship is not intimately personal, but poses political requirements and remains oriented towards the world.” Here beings belong to each other in a free state, that is to say, each belongs to the others as much as each always-already belongs to a destiny. If Cicero’s Lelius foresees the dangers of secession that friendship poses to the City, it is because an unjust world, a detestable society, doesn’t get forgotten in friendship as [it does] in the suffocating ecstasies of love. It still has the chance to orient itself against such a world, against such a society. To speak in blunt terms: today, all friendship is in some way at war with the imperial order or it is only a lie.
*
Lacambre, Tridon, Eudes, Granger, Flotte and the majority of Blanqui’s co-conspirators were at first only friends who did not repress their latent politics. Conversely, all friendships have a conspiratorial kernel. In 1833, Vidocq[18] deplored the fact that there were more than a hundred secret societies in Paris. Any history of the revolutionary movement in France between 1830 and 1870 carries the trace of the societies that — clubs as far as the regime would permit — changed into hotbeds of clandestine propaganda or conspiracies when repression came and once again became clubs the moment that the regime vacillated. In 1848, there were no less than 600 [secret societies] in Paris, including — to mention only one — the club of l’Emeute revolutionnaire, located at 69 rue Mouffetard and presided over by Palanchan, an old accomplice of Blanqui. The official history of the workers movement has it that the conspiratorial tradition — with its oaths, admission rituals and secret decorum — succumbed during the development of the workers movement, though it had been its crucible. Did not the members of the League of the Just, ancestor of the League of the Communists, participate in the aborted insurrection of 1839, launched by the Society of the Seasons? Wasn’t it Buonarroti who delivered the precious message of Babeuf to the modern world? Certainly one wasn’t admitted to the so-called Revolutionary Communist League as one was admitted to the Association of Egalitarian Workers in 1839.
“Listen with confidence and without fear: you are with communist republicans and consequently you now begin to live in the era of equality. They will be your brothers if you are loyal to your oath, but you will be forever lost if you betray it. They have all sworn to it just as you have sworn to it. Always listen with the greatest attention: the community is the veritable republic: work in common, communal education, property and pleasure; it is the symbolic sun of equality, it is the new faith for which we have all sworn to die! We know no borders, boundaries, or homeland; all communists are our brothers; the aristocrats [are] our enemies. Today, if you fear prison, torture or death; if you find your courage to be weak; you should withdraw. To enter our ranks, one must confront all that: once the oath has been taken, your life belongs to us; you have risked your neck [19] and that of the one who will lead you for the rest of your days. Reflect and respond.”
With the end of the era of conspiracies, the workers movement supposedly passed from its infantile to its adult phase, from night to light. At least according to Marxist historiography. The public organizations of Social Democracy took up the slack from shapeless proletarian politics. From the League of the Communists one proceeds by degrees to the International Association of Workers and the existence of Social Democrat Parties in all countries [of Europe], while the anarchists [supposedly] sank stupidly into terrorism and syndicalism. The truth is that conspiratorial politics never ended. [Supposedly] all the traditional links, all the familiarities based on trade and neighborhood — the village, in short — on which proletarian politics rested until the Commune have been irreversibly destroyed. And that the organizations that have substituted themselves for a thenceforth missing “people” have only demoted [repousser] the conspiratorial to “the informal” and have consequently de-ritualized all that depends upon friendship. At bottom, the conflict between Marx and Bakunin concerning the International and its alleged infiltration by an obscure International Alliance of Socialist Democracy (founded by Bakunin) came down to this: on the one side, a politics based on programs and, on the other, a politics founded on friendship. A Prussian, Karl Marx did not expect the sad end of the League of Communists due to his hatred of the politics of friends. His 1850 review of Chenu’s book Les Conspirateurs already oozed pure hostility.[20]
“The entire lives of these professional conspirators are marked by the sign of Bohemia. Recruiting-sergeants for conspiracy, they shuffle from wine merchant to wine merchant, feeling the pulse of the workers, choosing their people, attracting them to [the] conspiracy by dint of cajoling them, and charging to the firm’s account or their new friend the inevitable glasses that they themselves consume. In sum, the wine merchant may be consider the veritable fathers of their companionship (. . .) Due to a temperament that is very much shared by all Parisian proletarians, the conspirator doesn’t delay becoming an accomplished “carouser” in this incessant tavern ambiance. The shady conspirator, who observes a rigid Spartan virtue in the secret sessions, suddenly loosens up and becomes someone who — in the eyes of all the scholarly barflies — knows how to appreciate wine and women. This tavern joviality is even more heightened by the constant dangers to which the conspirators are exposed: at any minute, he could be called to the barricades and perish there; at each step, the police lay traps for him that could lead to prison or even a galley ship. Such dangers precisely constitute the attraction of the trade: the greater the insecurity, the more the conspirator hastens to enjoy the pleasures of the moment. At the same time, the habituation to danger renders him completely indifferent to both life and liberty. He is as at home in prison as at a cabaret. Every day he expects to receive the order to go into action. The desperate rashness that manifests itself in every Parisian insurrection is precisely the contribution of these old professional conspirators, the henchmen. They are the ones who erect and command the first barricades, who organize resistance, lead the pillaging of armories, seize weapons and munitions, and carry out in full upheaval those audacious blows that so often throw the party in power into confusion.”
Here one has a faithful description of the type of man that Bakunin was at the continental level. Bakunin, who could not in the course of his incessant transcontinental peripatetics encounter a being whom he liked without unloading upon him the statutes of his most recently formed secret society, hoping that he would adhere to what the Program and Object of the Secret Revolutionary Organization of the International Brothers calls a “kind of revolutionary [general] staff composed of individuals who are devoted, intelligent and sincere friends, especially; neither ambitious nor vain; of the people; capable of serving as the intermediary between the revolutionary idea[l] and working-class instincts. The number of these individuals thus most not be large. For the international organization in all of Europe, one hundred strongly and seriously allied revolutionaries would suffice.” In truth, conspiratorial politics hasn’t ceased to double all the organizational realities. In Spain, the FAI doubled the CNT, while its military office paid no attention to the Social-Democrat Workers Party in Russia. [in Russia,] Lenin was the only one up on the latest expropriation of Kamo, in 1912, [which worked] to the advantage of the Organization. [In Italy,] the “illegal work” commission of Potere Operaio[21] tasked itself with auto-financing, and [in France, it] was evoked by the constitution of the “invisible party.” The party — this is often forgotten — has never ceased to be legal and illegal, visible and invisible, public and conspiratorial. It is one of the traits of the present that, at the moment we need all the resources of conspiratorial politics, we no longer understand anything about it. It is necessary, at any cost, to maintain the following epistemological principle: the history of he revolutionary movement is, first of all, the history of the links that make up its reality [qui font sa consistance].
*
Resentment’s rationalizations have the art of inverting logical relations. For more than a century, and notably since The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, every event finds its explication among the slaves in a conspiracy by the powerful. The global petite bourgeoisie dote upon this literature, because it comforts its ignorance and powerlessness. The progression of conspiracism [complotisme] has everywhere followed the progression of this “class.” In fact, the revelation that the powerful conspire against us only serves to mask evidence of the contrary: the power that is found in friendship and through conspiracy. In his preface to Histoire des Treize, Balzac[22] expresses as no one else the ambivalence of this power, which can return as aristocratic secession just as it can give birth to a revolutionary force.
“It happened that, under the Empire and in Paris, thirteen men equally struck by the same feeling, all endowed with a very great energy for being loyal to the same thought; quite honest amongst themselves due to never betraying each other; quite profoundly political so as to dissimulate the sacred links that unite them; strong enough to be above the law; bold enough to undertake anything; very happy for having almost always succeeded in their designs; having run the greatest dangers, but keeping quiet about their defeats; insusceptible to fear, and having never trembled before the prince, the executioner or innocence; having accepted each other, such as each was, without minding social prejudices (. . .) This world apart from the world, hostile to the world, accepted none of the ideas of the world, and recognized no law in it (. . .) This intimate union of superior people, cold and teasing, smiling and cursing in the midst of a false and petty society (. . .) Thus there were in Paris thirteen brothers who were their own masters and yet under-estimated in the world (. . .) There were no leaders nor followers; no one could arrogate power to himself; only the most vivid passion, only the most demanding circumstance, was the best. There were thirteen unknown kings, but real kings, and, more than kings, they were judges and executioners who — organized into flanks that could traverse the entire country — deigned to be something else, because they could be everything.”
*
All of Blanqui’s texts are circumstantial texts. They are driven by the conditions in which and against which they were written. It isn’t until l’Eternite par les astres [1872] that the Fort du Taureau is mentioned. From whence comes the nonexistence of Blanqui’s oeuvre, in the sense of something that includes an entire treasure. From whence also comes the absence of a Blanquist doctrine as there exists a Marxist metaphysics. “A little passion; doctrines later!” There is, nevertheless, a Blanquist style.
“Revolutions desire men who have faith in them. To doubt their triumphs is to already betray them. It is through logic and audacity that one launches them and saves them. If you lack these qualities, your enemies will have it over you; they will only see one thing in your weaknesses — the measure of their own forces. And their courage will grow in direct proportion with your timidity.”
Everything’s there. Blanqui is the author of the phrase “Neither God, nor master,” the man who wrote “Honest [reguliere] anarchy is the future of humanity,” and the author of an appeal against mutualism and in favor of integral association entitled “Communism is the future of society.” Go find an orthodoxy there. Of course, constructing a revolutionary force when overthrowing an administrative monarchy, when there is only an elite to put down, this can be the work of an elite. When Bismarck’s armies marched on Paris, acting in a revolutionary way was “making barricades and digging trenches; assigning churches to national usages; arming the priests and, consequently, suppressing all cults; mandating enlistment; placing food in common and rationing it; dismissing and dispersing the former police forces; and denouncing suspects and Bonapartists” (Dommanget, Blanqui [1972]). in current society, in which power circulates within the flows of nourishment, information and medicines; in which citizens take advantage of their rights to call the cops; it goes without saying that a revolutionary force must embrace all aspects of existence; it must be constructed as a force of supply-provisioning and as an armed force, as a power that is both poetic and medical; and it must seize territories. It must collect all useful intelligence about the adversary’s organization and provoke desertions in all ranks of society. It must socialize itself to the same extent that the social becomes military. But no more than yesterday: things can’t wait. Such a force is in the process of being constituted. If this force closely studies Blanqui, it is only to better understand the war in progress.
*
Time passes. That is its nature. As long as there is time, there will be boredom, and time passes. The past does not pass. All that has really passed carries in itself a spark of eternity; it is inscribed in some nook of communal experience. One can efface the traces, but not the event. One can indeed pulverize the memory, [but] each piece of debris contains the total monad of what one believed to have been destroyed and will engender it anew, when the opportunity arises. We repeat: historicism is a brothel in which one takes care that the clients never believe [the illusion]. The past is not a succession of dates, deeds or modes of living; it is not a closet full of costumes; it is a reservoir of forces and gestures, a proliferation of existential possibilities. Knowledge of it is not necessary; it is simply vital. Vital for the present. It is from the present that one comprehends the past, not the reverse. Each era dreams its predecessors. The loss of all historical meaning — like the loss of all meaning in general — in our era is the logical corollary of the loss of all experience. The systematic organization of forgetting doesn’t at all distinguish itself from the systematic loss of experience. The most demented form of historical revisionism, which now manages to apply itself even to contemporary events, finds it compost in the suspended life of the metropolises, where one never experiences anything, except for [all] the signs, signals and codes, and their padded conflicts. Where one has experiences, private/tame experiences that float, mute, unwrittable and empty; implosive intensities that cannot be communicated beyond the walls of an apartment and that any narrative would empty out more than it shares. It is under the form of its privatization that the deprivation of experience expresses itself the most communally.
*
December 2006.[23] The ship of state is taking on water everywhere. Soon it will only be a look-out post. France burns and shipwrecks. This is good. It revives memories. The schools on fire burn in memory of the generations of proletarians who therein experienced the bitter taste of timetables, work and obedience, and incorporated the feeling of complete inferiority. Those who no longer vote honor the insurgents of June 1848 — that “revolt by rebellious angels who have not arisen since then” (Coeurderoy) — whom one put to the bayonet in the name of universal suffrage. The leftist intellectuals [of today] wonder on the radio if the government has the courage to send the army into the banlieus, just as their ancestors [who in the early 1960s] applauded the generals who, upon returning from Algeria, massacred Parisian proletarians, though the generals had gotten into the habit of “civilizing” the indigenous people [of that country]. Today as yesterday, this species of skunk calls himself republican and speaks of “the rabble.” The imprisoned members of Action Directe have long ago surpassed their mandatory-minimum sentences. Regis Schleicher[24] soon will compete with Blanqui for length of incarceration. More than ever, the army trains for urban warfare. In France, the historical clock is stuck at May 1871. The question of communism is invisibly the only question that haunts all social relations, even porn. The universe fidgets in place. Last March 31st, a wild demonstration of 4,000 people lasts more than eight hours: from the intervention of the president of this senile Republic — he came on TV to announce that the CPE would be maintained — to four o’clock in the morning. The demonstration wants to go to the Eylsee, oblique to la Concorde sur l’Assemblee national, which it fails to approach [investir] due to lack of materials and weapons — same thing for the Senate.
At the edges of the march, determination grows. A martial scansion is heard at the door: “Paris! Get up, wake up!” It is an order. On the Boulevard de Sebastopol, then at de Magenta, the windows of the banks and interim-job agencies begin to fall, one after the other, methodically. Prostitutes at Pigalle salute from a window. The crowd mounts le Sacre-Coeur to cries of “Vive la Commune!” The door to the crypt does not budge; what a shame, one could have burnt it down. Descending to a small street, a lady in a baby-doll outfit leans on her third-floor balcony and yells at the top of her voice, “The bad days will end.”[25] The permanently-open office of the vile Pierre Lellouche[26] will soon be sacked. It is three o’clock in the morning. The past does not pass. The burning of Paris will be the worthy completion of Baron Haussmann’s destruction.

(Signed “Some Agents of the Imaginary Party,” this text was published as the preface to Dominiqu Le Nuz’s collection of texts by Blanqui entitled Maintenant, il faut des arms, published by Editions La Fabrique in 2007. Translated from the French by NOT BORED! 26 May 2009.)

[1] Louis Auguste Blanqui (1805-1881) was a French insurrectionist.
[2] Unlike Zarathustra and Heliogabale, Gilles de Rais was a real person. But it is true that, for Georges Bataille, author of The Trial of Gilles de Rais, (original 1965, translated by Richard Robinson, 1991), de Rais was more (evil) than just a “mere” man.
[3] Gustave Lefrancais (1826-1901) was a French anarchist.
[4] Uncited quotations are phrases from Blanqui.
[5] Letter dated 6 June 1852.
[6] See Dionys Mascolo’s preface to collection of Saint-Just’s writings published by Gallimard in 1968.
[7] Surhomme in French and uber Mensch in German.
[8] To fasten, make firm, establish.
[9] Benjamin Flotte.
[10 Jules Valles, L’Insurge, published post-humously in 1886.
[11] Alfred de Musset, The Confession of a Child of the Century (1836).
[12] Released in 1979, this album is strongly influenced by the Situationist International.
[13] A “machine for living” (a house) designed by Le Corbusier in Poissy, France, between 1928 and 1931.
[14] The Instructions for an armed uprising was first published in 1866, while Eternity through the stars was published in 1872.
[15] A detournement of a famous phrase by Raoul Vaneigem: “People who talk about revolution and class struggle without referring explicitly to everyday life, without understanding what is subversive about love and positive in the referral of constraint, have corpses in their mouths.” A great deal could be said about this detournement: 1) it removes love from the subversive equation; 2) it re-territorializes a remark from Vaneigem, whom Guy Debord once criticized for his “Blanquism” (see letter to Mustapha Khayati dated 13 November 1965); and 3) it reminds us of Debord’s complete absence from this text on Blanqui, in particular, the following highly relevant remarks from Debord’s Comments on the Society of the Spectacle.
“The notion of acceptable political crime only became recognized in Europe once the bourgeoisie had successfully attacked previously established social structures. The nature of political crime could not be separated from the diverse intentions of social critique. This was true for Blanqui, Varlin, Durruti. Nowadays there is a pretense of wishing to preserve a purely political crime, like some inexpensive luxury, a crime which doubtless no one will ever have the occasion to commit, since no one is interested in the subject any more; except for the professional politicians themselves, whose crimes are rarely pursued, nor for that matter no longer called political. All crimes and offenses are effectively social. But of all social crimes, none must be seen as worse than the impertinent pretension to still want to change something in this society, which thinks that it has only been only too kind and patient, but which no longer wants to be blamed.”
[16] The Encyclopedia of Nuisances was founded as a group and a journal in 1984 by Jaime Semprun, Christian Sebastiani and others, in response to the murder of Gerard Lebovici, the editor of Editions Champ Libre. It began a publishing house in 1993.
[17] The EdN published a translation of the Unabomber’s allegedly anarchist manifesto, “Industrial Society and Its Future,” in 1999.
[18] Eugene Francois Vidocq (1775-1857) was a French criminal who became a police spy.
[19] The French here is tu es engage sur ta tete (literally, “you are engaged on your head”).
[20] This review by Marx is available on-line in an English translation. Ironically, this website — “Marxist,” though it is — is the best on-line resource for Blanqui’s writings in translation.
[21] Potere Operaio (“Workers Power”) was an Italian group active between 1968 and 1973.
[22] Honore de Balzac, Histoire des Treize: Ferragus, chef des devorants, XIII, 13.
[23] In the midst of spirited protests against the rescinding of the CPE (Contrat Premiere Embauche).
[24] Regis Schleicher, a member of Action Directe, was sentenced to life in prison in 1986.
[25] “The Bad Days Will End” was the title of an essay published in April 1962 by the Situationist International, and also the title of a film made by Thomas Lacoste in 2008.
[26] A right-wing French politician, born in 1951 and, one way or another, in power since 1993.

source: http://www.notbored.org/blanqui.html

The post “To a Friend / Essay on Blanqui” by The Imaginary Party appeared first on Void Network.

In the wake of the organised left and the demise of working class self-identity, communisation offers a paradoxical means of superseding capitalism in the here and now whilst abandoning orthodox theories of revolution. John Cunningham reports from the picket line of the ‘human strike’.


As we apprehend it, the process of instituting communism can only take the form of a collection of acts of communisation, of making common such-and-such space, such-and-such-machine, such-and-such-knowledge. – The Invisible Committee, Call, 2004

The critique of capital, and speculation around the form and content of communism, always seems to oscillate between a historical materialist science on the one hand and the elaboration of new forms of subjectivity and affectivity on the other. Even Marx, while infinitely more familiar as a close analyst of capital, had early moments of Fourier style abandon when he attempted to elaborate the more mutable subjective content of a communist society. The dissolution of wage labour would make

it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner…[ii]

This suggests a society wherein circuits of affectivity are established that are no longer based upon the exigencies of value production – even if I personally prefer communist utopia as idleness to Marx’s endless activity. Of course, this is one of the rare instances where Marx speaks in the future tense, leaving aside the messiness of the transition from capitalism. Recently, a series of texts from the milieu around the French journal Tiqqun – primarily Call, How is to be done?, The Coming Insurrection – have reintroduced this question of the subjective content of communism in a way that might restore a speculative aspect to the critique of capital.[iii] These are not theoretical texts per se, more inspirational ‘How To’ manuals for the elaboration of communisation as subjective and conceptual secession from both capital and the Left. As Call states, ‘Nothing can happen that does not begin with a secession from everything that makes this desert grow.'[iv] This discursive distance from the more traditional ultra-left positions on communisation is also reflected in dense, poetic prose that establishes an affinity with possible precursors in revolt such as Dada, Surrealism and Bataille. The development of the thesis of communisation within the ultra-left was always part of an attempt to shift away from the traditional programmatic forms of the party and the union towards an engagement with forms of resistance rising immanently from the social relation of capital, such as wildcat strikes. What might be at stake in a restating of the question of communisation as radical subjectivist secession against the often discredited ideological formulas of anti-capitalist milieus?

It’s best to consider this question alongside the series of texts presented by Endnotes that ably document the continued elaboration of communisation within the French ultra-left by presenting a series of texts by Gilles Dauvé and Theorie Communiste.[v] Both are rooted in the diverse groupuscles of the French far left in the 1970’s that shared a fidelity to 1968 of whom Debord and the Situationists remain the most renowned.[vi] Dauvé and Theorie Communiste retain a commitment to communisation but diverge sharply around questions of agency and history. What remains under-theorised in both Dauvé’s humanist Marxism and Theorie Communiste’s more recently formulated Marxist structuralism is any real problematisation of the production of subjectivity within capital. An insertion of this question might illuminate the impasse faced by these more hermetic theoretical critiques of capital. In sketching out the contours of contemporary theories of communisation, a constellation composed of questions around subjectivity, negation, history and utopia emerges. Does a reconsideration of communisation open up new perspectives and different possibilities, given the gap between the cramped space revolutionary milieus find themselves in and any genuine expectations of radical change? Or is even discussing communisation at this time akin to scraping a toothache with a fingernail, pointless utopianism in the face of the constantly mutating social relation of capital?

Before answering this question, though, what is communisation? The term immediately evokes various social experiments and revolutionary endeavours from the Paris Commune and utopian socialist communities in the 19th century through to various counter-cultural attempts to reconstitute social relations on a more communitarian basis such as the squatting scene in the 1970s and ’80s. The Tiqqun strand – henceforth to be known as ‘The Invisible Committee’ after the eponymous signatories of The Coming Insurrection – draws upon this long history of secessionist antagonism. They posit communisation as essentially being the production, through the formation of ‘communes’, of collective forms of radical subjectivity. This destabilises the production of subjectivity and value within both capital and more traditional forms of political organisation, eventually leading to an insurrectionary break. ‘Commune’ in this instance is not necessarily a bunch of hippies aspiring to a carbon free life style. In The Coming Insurrection a commune is almost anything that ‘seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation’, ranging from wildcat strikes to Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977, and innumerable other forms of collective experimentation.[vii]





While not completely missing the point, there is a danger of this understanding obscuring the specificity of ‘communisation’ as a concept and form of praxis that, as Endnotes trace out, emerged within the post-’68 ultra-left milieu and then later within insurrectionist anarchism through Alfredo Bonnano. A minimal definition of communisation would be, as Dauvé and Francois Martin wrote in 1972 in an early formulation, the following:

Communism is not a set of measures to be put into practice after the seizure of power… . All past movements were able to bring society to a standstill and waited for something to come out of this universal stoppage. Communisation, on the contrary, will circulate goods without money… it will tend to break all separations.[viii]

This simultaneous destruction of value production alongside the thoroughgoing transformation of social relations as an immanent revolutionary process presupposes the negation of wage labour. The proletariat rather than being embodied in work and its valorisation, whether through wage labour or workers organisations, becomes the agency of self-abolition. Communisation would mean no more proletariat immediately, not after some interminable period of proletarian state or workers council management.

For Dauvé, here writing with Karl Nesic, communisation is the potential result of the dialectical opposition between living labour and the inhuman agency of capital. As he states

‘Subject’ and ‘object’ don’t exist separate from one another. A crisis is not something exterior to us that happens and forces us to react. Historical situations (and opportunities) are also made of … our actions or inactions.[ix]

Dauvé rejects theoretical determinism in favour of a more realistically indeterminate historical trajectory, where the only invariants within capital are humanity, alienation, exploitation and resistance. For Dauvé, communisation has been a possibility since 1848, as against the strict periodisation of Theorie Communiste.

Theorie Communiste’s position is that due to the shift in production to a second phase of real subsumption, post 1960s, capital and labour power are imbricated in a reproductive circuit.[x] Communisation as the self-abolition of the proletariat is only now a possible horizon due to the dissolution of the organised, programmatic parties and unions of the traditional left. Their unveiling in the 20th century as the necessary managers of the production of value has subsequently led to the inability of the proletariat to constitute an opposition to capital through their self-identification as workers. Stripped bare of any sense of voluntarist agency and subjectivity, what is left is the fact of structural exploitation and increasing proletarianisation that possibly leads to communisation. This dialectical synthesis without any reconciliation was impossible in previous phases of capital where revolution was inexorably tied to labour and the production of value.

Bracketing off the question of political agency and subjectivity in favour of historical structuralism, waving goodbye to the multitude and other spectral forms, is a welcome dose of anti-humanism. However, Theorie Communiste seem too eager to remove any subjective agency from oppositional politics. There’s a pessimism underlying their evacuation of any possibility in history that is an inversion of the classic 20th century social democratic Marxist paradigm of an inexorable movement towards communism. Too much value is fixed on the movement of history towards real subsumption of capital rather than evaluating history as composed of discontinuous breaks, fractures and events. One such might be the Paris Commune.

In its brief existence, the Commune prefigures many of the themes in contemporary discourse around communisation as both an immanent process of attempting to construct a non-state public sphere and an insurrectionist outburst that broke with the slow advance of 19th century commodity capitalism. Marx grasped that the ‘whole sham of State mysteries and State pretensions was done (away) by a Commune, mostly consisting of simple working people’ and that the aim of the commune was the ‘expropriation of the expropriators,’ the dissolution of class and property.[xi] While the commune was primarily political it indicated for Marx the intertwined nature of revolutionary change, abolishing the separation between the economic and political and at certain conjunctures being wedded to insurrectionist force. For Marx the ‘great social measure of the Commune was its own working existence’, but he believed it gestured towards social emancipation in the limited measures, (such as the appropriation of disused workshops), it was able to undertake in its brief existence.[xii] He wrote that ‘…the present rising in Paris – even if it be crushed by the wolves, swine and vile curs of the old society – is the most glorious deed of our Party…'[xiii]

Benjamin’s ‘dialectical image’, the juxtaposition of past and present in order to break the frozen reified image of both, provides a way of asking what resources an event such as the Paris Commune might offer the present.[xiv] This does not pose the existence of an invariant human subject as much as (re)examines the past in light of the present and restores an actuality and potentiality to history. For instance, Badiou has read the Paris Commune as ‘what, for the first and to this day only time, broke with the parliamentary destiny of popular and workers’ political movements’ establishing a template for ‘a declaration to break with the left.'[xv] Badiou sees this as a model for both a subjective intervention against capital and a communism subtracted from the state. The ‘Invisible Committee’ constantly refers to the Paris Commune in a similar fashion making suggestive juxtapositions throughout The Coming Insurrection. The Paris Commune is present in the text as a constant reminder of the barbarism that the French republic is founded upon, the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ that’s all too easily effaced by the empty continuum of history as the onward march of capital.[xvi]

A theory and practice formed in the still tempestuous wake of May ’68-wildcat strikes – the refusal of work, the proliferation of left groupuscles – and conditioned by this event, communisation posits an escalation of the destruction of commodity production as a millennial break. Concepts such as this, formed at a particular conjunction of forces and material conditions, can easily decline into ideology or, at best, a regulative idea that has little to do with actual social struggle in the present once that moment has passed. All of these different theories of communisation emerge from a sense of a cramped discursive and political space. Post 1968, this cramped space might be viewed as the all too obvious limitations of the traditional workers’ movement, specifically the Communist Party and its affiliated trade unions, in abetting the state suppression of the events alongside, of course, commodified social relations. In terms of the continued elaboration of communisation in the present, such a cramped space, given the weakness of the institutional left, might be composed of the post-Seattle ‘anti-capitalist’ movement itself, or at least its remnants. This movement has given rise to what Tiqqun describes, in How is it to be Done?, as the ‘desire killing demonstrations’ that ‘no longer demonstrate anything but a collective absence’.[xvii]

This ‘collective absence’ is not so much a lack of organisation for the ‘Invisible Committee’ as a plenitude of organisational forms that serve to divert antagonism into reformist or activist dead ends, constructing milieus that are concerned with their own self-perpetuation as fetishised organisational structures. At best, these attempt symmetrical conflict with capital rather than more asymmetrical tactics of withdrawal, diffusion and sabotage. For me, this ‘collective absence’ in contemporary forms of activism and militancy is all too apparent in those constrained ideologies, such as the identity politics, that dominate much of contemporary ‘radical’ politics. Hence, contemporary anti-capitalism is riddled with a ridiculous anarchist, ecological and socialist moralism that masks itself as a politics. This critique of militancy is prefigured in Dauvé and Martin’s early 1970s observation that the ‘communist movement is anti-political, not a-political.’ Dauvé and Martin grasp communism as inherently social and immanent to capital while rejecting the traditional role of the militant who ‘interferes in these struggles to bring the communist gospel’.[xviii] It’s this anti-political strand, the negation of contemporary political forms or what Jacques Camatte termed ‘rackets’ that I find most constructive, in a destructive way, within theories of communisation.[xix] Nick Thoburn, in his book Deleuze, Marx and Politics, argues that cramped political and discursive spaces, composed of both traditional organisational forms and capital as a social relation, are productive of innovative attempts to reassemble lines of flight from available resources. These clear a space and allow the articulation of previously ignored demands and the formation of oppositional subjectivities.[xx] Or more succinctly, all the strands of communisation are attempting to dissolve the worker as worker into a more diffuse antagonistic subject.

The Invisible Committee’s complex assemblage of ultra-leftism and situationist theory has operative within it just such an attempt to produce new forms of political subjectivity, Agamben and Foucault playing a theoretically pivotal role. To inspire secessionist communisation seems an odd fate for Agamben, a philosopher who is most famed for the melancholic framing of contemporary subjectivity within the parameters of ‘bare life’, the passive residue of the human subject under biopolitical sovereignty.[xxi] The reduction of humanity, through political sovereignty, to classes, identities and subjects such as citizen, worker or migrant is essentially based upon the exception that is ‘bare life’. Opposing this, Agamben’s concept of ‘form-of-life’ or ‘whatever singularity’ is utilised by the Invisible Committee to suggest a political subjectivity that isn’t contained within the parameters of ‘bare life’ and an identifiable subject.[xxii] As they note ‘I become a whatever singularity. My presence starts overflowing the whole apparatus of qualities that are usually associated with me.'[xxiii] Sounds esoteric, but it’s worth emphasising the explicit relation to labour power that ‘whatever singularity’ retains in its element of the refusal of the role of worker. Agamben writes that ‘form-of-life’ is

a life … in which the single ways, acts and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power.

And in this case it’s the power, or Potenza, to refuse wage labour and hence challenge the extraction of value from living labour. This ‘irrevocable exodus from any sovereignty’ is an emancipation from producing value towards the potentialities of an inseparability between activity and subject.[xxiv]

This inoperative collective political subject takes the form of ‘Human Strike’ within the Invisible Committee’s radical subjectivism. In How is it to be Done? ‘Human Strike’ is the point where the human subject as constituted within capital breaks down and refuses or simply ceases to function, a ‘Luddism of the human machinery that feeds capital’.[xxv] This is a Bartleby style refusal that responds to the (re)production of subjectivity within contemporary capitalism throughout the entire social field by valorising negativity and dysfunction. The Coming Insurrection highlights an advertising slogan, ‘I AM WHAT I AM’, and sarcastically but accurately notes, ‘Never has domination found such an innocent sounding slogan.'[xxvi] An individualism that is the subsumption of affective qualities within the circuits of capital. The individual is nothing but the residual effects of an incorporation of identities promulgated through the apparatuses of production, consumption and leisure. The real subsumption of the human by capital presented in the Coming Insurrection begins to resemble a bad day commuting to work. This production of subjectivity is what Foucault termed ‘governmentality’, wherein power is not only repressive and disciplininary but also creates the conditions for the production of value, encouraging forms of subjectification that channel creativity and affective identification towards the valorisation of capital.[xxvii]

As Theorie Communiste point out, what produces a blockage within the Marxist humanism of Dauvé is a view of subjectivity within capital as something produced purely through the repression of an invariant humanity. Granted, this Marxist humanism still has a radical import around unleashing the potentiality of the human outside of the wage relation but there’s little problematisation of the forms of subjectivity. However, in attempting to embrace a rigorous anti-humanism, Theorie Communiste fall prey to simply evacuating any notion of subjective agency as being a soppy romanticism in favour of economic determination. This reinforces the hermetic nature of such critique as relatively divorced from the experiences of everyday life.

None of this is a particularly new problematic, given the proliferation of theories of radical subjectivity since at least György Lukács, but the Invisible Committee restate this critique in a way that restores a sensual apprehension of what might be at stake in any form of oppositional politics. The image of a proliferation of communes as ‘a power of production’ that is ‘just incidentally relationships of production’ establishes what is best termed desiring production.[xxviii] It arises through assemblages of communised spaces, knowledge, means, bodies and desires that establish a refrain between them, displacing the secessionist collective from capital and those identities such as ‘worker’ or ‘migrant’ that are fixed within it. This could produce a blockage within the flows of value production as information and commodity in what the Invisible Committee, again taking their lead from Agamben, theorise as the ‘metropolis’; the undifferentiated, sprawling non-place of contemporary biopolitical capital.[xxix] This process of blockage is expressed in The Coming Insurrection thus:

The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable … Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks.[xxx]

Does this simultaneous production of subjectivity and disruption of value production posit ‘whatever being’ as a new form of political agency? As the model of an actualised Fourierist utopia, or even as an allegory of the production of oppositional politics this seems fine, but communes form an insurrectionist phantom organisation, a piloting machine that is more or less organically formed through the act of secession, constituting an avant-garde of the disaffected and voluntarily displaced. A residual aristocratism emerges alongside a phantom vanguardism that is revealed in the formulation ‘Making the paralyzed citizens understand that if they do not join the war they are part of it anyway.'[xxxi] These communes that, for the Invisible Committee, are immanent in the present but not formalised encompass any number of spaces and collectivities, from proletarian to counter-cultural and illegal. Squats, wildcat strikes, riots, rural collectives, any bunch of the disaffected or excluded (re)appropriating the neighbourhood. At its best this carries within it an involuntary viral diffusion of communal and subjective disaffiliation from capital as a social relation. At its worst they all end up sharing within the insurrectionist thematic voluntary renunciation and conscious refusal. For me this loses something of the negativity of the more primordial ‘human strike’ hinted at, that refuses as much as an involuntary reaction to unbearable social relations, as through a conscious act of will. There’s an import to ‘human strike’ that restores an actuality to the ways that depression for instance might function as both a sign of vulnerability and site of resistance. As the Coming Insurrection notes ‘depression is not a state but a passage, a bowing out, a side-step towards a political disaffiliation.'[xxxii] Rather than the insurrection, it’s this awareness that most productively marks the Invisible Committee off from more conventional radical milieus. What Camatte termed the real subsumption and domestication of the human by the community of capital here turns to speculative forms of resistance.[xxxiii]

The Coming Insurrection has had the dubious distinction of having reached the exalted heights of Fox news with a text extolling communisation, due to the controversy following the Tarnac 9 case in France. As an ironic confirmation of the Invisible Committee’s attachment to Debord’s notion of the spectacle, it is also proof that the hysteria of projected insurrectionism is more than met by the hysteria of the spectacle. This commitment to insurrectionism by the Invisible Committee underlines the value of the more sober assessments by Dauvé and Theorie Communiste. In a well balanced engagement with Call, Dauvé writes that there is lack of ‘an analysis of the present social movement, the fights, the retreats and the resistances to the world of waged labour, the strikes, their appearance, their frequent failure, their absence sometimes…'[xxxiv] This criticism of secession is well founded and it is this very material awareness of the instauration of capital as a social relation that is lacking in the more voluntarist exhortations towards insurrection. There is a correlation here with the post-Autonomist theory of exodus formulated by Paulo Virno as a strategy of refusal and subjective break with capital. This can give rise to a pre-emptive theoretical negation of any role as worker, suspending the fact that for most people a shit job is a necessity and the only exodus is the weekend.[xxxv]

Nevertheless, the re-inscription of a political agency as negation is refreshing when compared to the inclusivity of concepts such as Negri’s ‘multitude’. It’s in keeping with a line of active nihilism that permeates the theoretical production of the Invisible Committee. As opposed to Negri, where such an affective turn by capital is replete with immanent possibility, the production of subjectivity within contemporary capital is presented as part of the destruction of experience, what Call terms ‘the desert’. Almost nothing is exempted from this line of negation that runs from the micro-politics of an ‘existential liberalism’ that produces the individual through to all forms of politics, including anti-capitalism. The ‘desert’ is a form of passive nihilism endlessly replicating exchange-value, the obscure disaster of what both Benjamin and, in his footsteps, Agamben have conceptualised as the evacuation of experience by the shock and vacuity of the commodity.[xxxvi]

The response of the Invisible Committee is to accelerate this nihilism through a series of inversions such as the valorisation of gangs and illegalism – a heightening of the anti-sociality of contemporary capital. As such they are part of a current within French anarchism that runs from the Bonnot gang through to the Situationists and Os Cangaceiros. The latter, a group of post-’68 proletarian illegalists rejected leftist politics and its armed struggle variants in favour of tactics such as sabotaging railways in solidarity with prison revolts. Or, as they stated succinctly ‘of shitting on this world with its prisons.’ There’s always a risk with such illegalism that it reifies something like gang culture in a simple inversion of spectacular hysteria, but at least the Coming Insurrections evocation of the November 2005 revolt in the banlieues restores a sense of agency to what were routinely decried as criminal acts within mainstream politics. In the fairly early Tiqqun text ‘Theses on the Imaginary Party’, this illegalism extends to random acts of violence produced by the subjective forms of spectacular commodity capitalism and its evacuation through shootings, suicides, etc..[xxxvii] This aspect is most certainly an avant-garde provocation similar to Breton’s simple surrealist act of firing into the crowd, though it is not necessarily lightly mean; indeed, it generalises the sense of crisis that the Invisible Committee wishes to instill. In an oblique comment, Agamben references this active nihilism as ‘the irreparable that allows the coming of the redemption’, a messianic opening into forms of political agency that refuses the exigencies of political sovereignty.[xxxviii] Such an active nihilism posits a joyful destruction as necessary in order to break with contemporary society’s immersion in the commodity form. The Coming Insurrection notes that ‘[a]nnihilating this nothingness is hardly a sad task …’ and that ‘fucking it all up will serve… as the last collective seduction.’ In embracing this they connect via some punk rhetoric to the destructive impulses of both the political and artistic 20th century avant-gardes.[xxxix]

What relation might this active nihilism have to the more general economic violence of communisation as the suspension and destruction of production? Communisation in whatever form, always seems caught in a tension between an immanent supersession of capital, the gradual proliferation of struggles that breach the limits of party, self management and workplace organisation, and the radical break, the institution of what Benjamin termed ‘the real state of exception’ in opposition to the state of exception imposed by the sovereignty of the state.[xl] This two-fold rhythm of communisation is paralleled by the tension, that’s evident in any attempt to theorise and practise it in the present, between a subjective activity and a more objective analysis of capital. Marx’s concept of Gewalt might be a good way to grasp the imbrication of different forms of force and power within communisation.[xli] Luca Basso reads Gewalt, a complex term meaning both violence and power, as being present in Marx’s formulation of the originary violence of capital as primitive accumulation, a violence that is repeated politically by the state as the imposition of wage labour. He quotes Étienne Balibar as characterising it as ‘violence of economics, the economics of violence’, violence being immanent to capital as exploitation.[xlii]

Attempts to formulate communisation contest this by positing an oppositional Gewalt that would break with capital politically and economically. Given the day to day Gewalt of contemporary capital it is not surprising that there are attempts to formulate projects of secession which, however doomed to failure, seem necessary as breathing spaces. Overstated as insurrectionary projects, such secession is a little optimistic as to its chances of even escaping capital, never mind overcoming it. Simultaneously, the theoretical analysis of Theorie Communiste and Dauvé/Nesic seems lacking in the necessary juncture of events to make anything other than potential interventions. Pessimism in the face of contemporary capital’s ability to adapt would probably be the best approach, but pessimism tempered with an awareness of the subjective and theoretical possibilities offered by the various theories of communisation. Benjamin wrote that ‘The destructive character sees nothing permanent. But for this very reason he sees ways everywhere.'[xliii] Maybe in this complex allegorical figure something like the use value of theories such as communisation resides.

John Cunningham coffeescience23 AT yahoo.co.uk is a sometime writer and occasional wage labourer who lives in South London


Footnotes

i Anonymous, Call, 2004, UK, no imprint, p.66. PDF available here: http://zinelibrary.info/call

ii Karl Marx and Frederick Engels, The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1996, p.54.

iii Tiqqun was a French journal published between 1999 and 2001. The term is the French transliteration of a Hebrew/Kabbalistic word for redemption, an obvious reference towards the Benjamin and Agamben influenced model of messianic politics to which this strand of communisation subscribes. There were two issues and associated books such as Theorie du Bloom, Theorie de la Jeune Fille and later texts such as The Coming Insurrection. More Tiqqun and related material is available at the following: http://www.tiqqun.info/; http://www.bloom0101.org/tiqqun.html ; http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html . A good article on the Tarnac 9 case and the controversy around The Coming Insurrection is Alberto Toscano’s ‘The War Against Pre-Terrorism’ available at http://slash.interactivist.net/node/11805

iv Call, op. cit., p.33.

v Endnotes, Brighton, UK, 2008. For texts and ordering details see the following: http://endnotes.org.uk/ . The introduction is a great account of the genealogy of communisation in the French ultra-left though it doesn’t engage with Tiqqun.

vi For further details on the milieu out of which communisation arose, this interview with Giles Dauvé is useful: http://www.riff-raff.se/en/7/gd_corr.php

vii.The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2009. Recently published by Semiotext(e) the book has been circulating on the internet for some time and is also available here: http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/texts/the-coming-insurrection/ Page references refer to the pdf available from the above (p.102).

viii Gilles Dauvé and Francois Martin, The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, London: Antagonism, 1997, p.36. Originally published 1974 by Black and Red, Detroit, USA.

ixDauvé and Nesic, ‘Love of Labour, Love of Labour Lost…’ in Endnotes, op. cit., p.152.

xSee ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ in Endnotes, ibid, p.155 and the afterword in Endnotes for details of the position that Theorie Communiste take towards Dauvé and their elaboration of communisation from conditions of contemporary ‘real subsumption’. Also Riff-Raff 8 has a good series of texts around TC 11. See, http://www.riff-raff.se/en/8/at

xi Karl Marx, The Civil War in France, Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977, p.176; for the phrase ‘expropriation of the expropriators’, p.75.

xiiMarx, ibid, p.81.

xiii Marx to Dr Kugelman [London] April 12, 1871], text available here: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71_04_17.htm

xiv See Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, London: Harper Collins, 1992, p.245.

xvAlain Badiou, Polemics, London: Verso, 2006, p.272-273.

xvi The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.88 and p.130. A further suggestive connection is in the text ‘To a Friend’ wherein the 19th century revolutionary Auguste Blanqui is presented as an inspirational ‘conceptual persona’ containing the unfulfilled potentiality of the past. The text is available here: http://libcom.org/history/auguste-blanqui

xvii Tiqqun, How is it to be Done?, 2008 reprint see http://www.bloom0101.org/translations.html

xviii Dauvé and Martin, op. cit., p.39.

xix Jacques Camatte, ‘On Organization’, in This World We Must Leave, New York: Autonomedia, 1995, p.19. Camatte is an important precursor to much of the Invisible Committee’s anti-politics both in his rejection of orthodox radicalism and the tendency towards secession that he expressed by moving towards primitivism. Given that he started as an ultra- left follower of Bordiga, Camatte might be the missing link between the different strands of communisation.

xx Nicholas Thoburn, Deleuze, Marx and Politics, London: Taylor and Francis, 2003.

xxi Georgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998.

xxii Georgio Agamben, Means Without End, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p.3.

xxiii How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.5.

xxiv Agamben, 2000, op. cit. p.3. When Agamben speaks of power in this context it has more in common with the Italian term Potenza, usually linked to a sense of potentiality than force or violence as sovereignty.

xxv How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.16.

xxvi The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.31.

xxvii Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007, p.184-85

xxviii Call, op. cit., p.67.

xxix See, http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben4.htm

xxx The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p. 111.

xxxi How is it to be Done?, op. cit., p.17.

xxxii The Coming Insurrection, op. cit., p.34.

xxxiii Camatte, op. cit., p.39.

xxxiv Dauvé and Nesic aka Troploin issued this in response to the initial publication of Call, one of the few instances, to my knowledge, of any overt communication between the post ’68 communisation theorists and their later descendants around Tiqqun. Thanks to Adeline Mannarini for translation. See, http://troploin0.free.fr/ii/index.php/textes/19-communisation-un-appel-et-une-invite . Tiqqun have disavowed any connection with other ultra-left currents with Julian Coupat, one of the founders of Tiqqun saying recently that ‘the ultra-left is a political current that had its moment of glory in the 1920s and that, subsequently, never produced anything other than inoffensive volumes of Marxology’. This seems like a classic avant-garde tactic of breaking with precursors, though there are undoubted differences. The interview is available here: http://www.notbored.org/julien-coupat.html

xxxv Paulo Virno and Michael Hardt (eds), Radical Thought in Italy, Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1996, p.189- 213.

xxxvi Benjamin, op. cit., especially ‘The Storyteller’, p.83 and ‘On Some Motifs in Baudelaire’, p.152 and Agamben, Infancy and History, London: Verso, 2007, p.13.

xxxvii Os Cangaceiros, A Crime Called Freedom, Portland: Eberhardt Press, 2006, p.85. For Theses on the Imaginary Party: http://libcom.org/library/theses-imaginary-party

xxxviii From Agamben’s 2001 postscript to the Italian edition of the Coming Community: http://notesforthecomingcommunity.blogspot.com/2008/04/tiqqun-de-la-noche.html

xxxix See ‘The Problem of the Head’, http://libcom.org/library/problem-head , a Tiqqun text that illuminates their relation to avant-gardes from Surrealism to the Red Brigades.

xlWalter Benjamin, Selected Works, Volume 1, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ Harvard, 1996, p.236.

xliLuca Basso, ‘The Ambivalence of Gewalt in Marx and Engels: On Balibar’s Interpretation’ in Historical Materialism 17 (2009), p.215-236.

xlii Ibid, p.220.

xliii Walter Benjamin, Selected Works, Volume 2, Cambridge, MA: Belknap/ Harvard, 1999, p.541.

Source: http://www.metamute.org/

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