Cyber-Symbiotic Exodus, or Notes On The Local

Everything which today constitutes an acceptable landscape for us is the result of bloody violences and conflicts of rare brutality.
One can thus summarize that the demokratic government wants to make us forget. Forget that the suburbs have devoured the countryside, that the factory has devoured the suburbs, that the metropolis—tentacled, deafening and without repose—has devoured everything.
This observation doesn’t imply regret, this observation implies: seize everything. In the past, in the present.
The controlled territory where our life passes, between the supermarket and the digital lock on the lobby door, between the traffic signals and the pedestrian pathways, forms us. We are moreover inhabited by the space in which we live. Especially when everything, or nearly everything, from now on, functions there like a subliminal message. We don’t do certain things at certain places because we do not do those things.
Street furniture for example has almost no utility—how often, to our surprise, do we wonder who exactly could fill the benches of a neo-square without succumbing to more violent despair?—it has precisely one meaning and one function, and these are dissuasive. Their mission/charter “You are only home when at home, or where you pay, or where you are monitored.”

The world is becoming global, but it is shrinking.
The physical landscape we traverse each day with great speed (by car, using public transportation, on foot, in a rush) has effectively an unreal character because while there, no one lives as anything at all, nor could anyone possibly live as anything there. It’s a type of micro-desert where one is like an exile, between one private property and another, between one obligation and another.
The virtual landscape seems much more welcoming to us. The liquid crstal screen of the computer, internet navigation, the tele-visual or the play-station universes—these are infinitely more familiar to us than the streets of our neighborhood, populated at night by the moonlight of the streetlamps and the metal gates of closed stores.
It is not the global which opposes the local, it is the virtual.

The global is so little opposed to the local that actually the global creates it. The global only designates a certain distribution of differences from an homogenizing norm. Folklore is the product of cosmopolitanism. If we didn’t know that the local was local, it would be for us a little globality. The local is revealed as the global makes itself possible, and necessary. Go to work, do your shopping, travel far from home: this is what constitutes the local, which otherwise would more modestly be the place where we live.

All the same, we live strictly speaking nowhere. Our existence is simply divided into layers of schedules and topologies, in slices of tailored life.

But this isn’t all. They presently would like to make us live in the virtual, definitively deported. There, the life they wish for us would recompose into a curious unity of non-time and non-place. The virtual, says one Internet publicity, is ” the place where you do all that you cannot do in reality.” But when “everything is permitted,” it is the mechanism of the transfer from the power to act which is under surveillance. In other words” the virtual is the place where possibilities never become real, but remain indefinitely in the virtual state. Here, prevention has won over intervention: if everything is possible in the virtual it’s because the mechanism ensures that everything remains unchanged in our real life

Already, we tele-work and tele-consume. In tele-life, we will no longer be afflicted by the feelings of suffering from avoiding the possibilities which still dwell in public spaces, at each glance crossed and so soon abandoned. The unease , the embarrassing immersion among our contemporaries, for the better part unknown, in the streets or elsewhere, will be abolished. The local, expelled from the global, will itself be projected into the virtual in order to make us believe definitively that only the global exists. Draping this uniformity of multi-ethnicity and multi-culturalism will be necessary, to ensure the pill is swallowed.

As we wait for the tele-life, we post the hypothesis that our bodies in space have a political meaning and that the dominant ones maneuver permanently to hide this fact.
Shouting a slogan at home is not the same as shouting it in the stairwell or in the street. Doing it alone is not the same as doing it wit many others, and so on.

Space is political and space is alive, because space is populated, populated with our bodies which transform it by the simple fact that it contains them. And this is why it is monitored, and this is why it is closed.
Whoever imagines it as a void soon to fill up with objects, bodies, and things has a false idea of space. On the contrary, this idea of space is obtained by mentally removing from a tangible space of all the objects, of all the bodies, of all the things which dwell in it. The powers that be have now materialized this idea in their plazas, their highways, their architecture. But its threatened without pause by its birth defect. Should something take place inside the space it controls, should—thanks to some event—one end of the this space become a place, making an unexpected crease, this is what the Global Order wants to prevent. And against this, it has invented “the local,” in the sense of continuous adjustment of all input, capture, and management devices.

That is why I say that the local is political; because it is the place of present confrontation.

And The War Has Only Just Begun…

To the lost children

The great social body of Empire, the great big social body of Empire, which has the consistency and inertia of a beached jellyfish, an enormous round jellyfish beached on all the roundness of the earth, is implanted with electrodes.

Hundreds, thousands…such an unbelievable number of electrodes, and such a variety and different types that they don’t even seem like electrodes. There’s the TV electrode, of course, but there is also the money electrode, the pharmaceutical electrode, and the Young-Girl electrode.

With these thousands and millions of electrodes, so many that I can’t even count them, they manage the dull encephalogram of the imperial metropolis.

It’s through these mostly imperceptible channels that they transmit, second by second, the information, the mental states, the affects and counter-affects that prolong our universal sleep; not to mention all the receptors that are attached to the electrodes: the journalists, sociologists, cops, intellectuals, professors and other agents who…incomprehensibly…have been delegated the task of supervising the activity of the electrodes.

It’s no accident that at a precise moment they transmit either a feeling of terror, of contentment, or of menace. It’s advisable to maintain in the population a certain level of anxiety in order to preserve the general availability to regression – the taste for dependence. No one must free herself from this infantile position of satisfied or quarrelsome passivity, from the numb comfort or groaning complaints that produce the nasty drone of the imperial incubator.

They say, “the time of heroes is over,” hoping to bury along with it all forms of heroism.

The sleep of our era is not a good sleep that provides rest. It’s an anxious sleep that leaves you feeling even more worn out, desiring only to go back to sleep again, to escape a little longer this irritating reality. There is a narcosis that begs for an even deeper narcosis.

Those who, by luck or misfortune, awake from the prescribed sleep, come into this world as lost children.

Where are the words, where is the house, where are my ancestors, where are my lovers and where are my friends? There are none, my child; everything has to be built. You must build the language that you will live in; you must build the house where you will no longer be alone; you must find the ancestors who will make you more free; and you must invent the new sentimental education through which, once again, you will love. And all of this, you must build it upon the general hostility because those who wake up are the nightmare of those who still sleep.

supersession always comes from elsewhere

Here reigns the rule of non-action which expresses itself thus: the fruitfulness of true action lies within itself. I could put it another way, I could say: true action is not a project that you accomplish, but a process to which you abandon yourself.

Whoever acts today acts as a lost child. Wandering governs this abandon. We wander. We wander among the ruins of civilization. And precisely because it is in ruins, this civilization, there is no need to confront it.

It really is a strange war we’ve entered into, and that requires the production of worlds and languages, the opening of places, the building of homes, in the midst of a disaster.

There is this old notion, Bolshevik and a little chilly for sure: building the Party. I believe that our present war is about building the Party, or rather, it is about giving this deserted fiction a new content.

We talk, we lick each other, we make a film, a party, a riot, we meet a friend, we share a meal, a bed, we love. In other words, we build the Party.

Fictions are serious things. We need fiction to believe in the reality we are living. The Party is the central fiction, the one that tells the war of our time.

In the last centuries of the Roman Empire, everything was similarly worn-out; bodies were tired, the gods were dying, and presence was in a crisis. From every corner of a world in exile resounded the great refrain: “Let’s be done with this.”

The end of a civilization called for a new beginning. Wandering relieved the feeling of being a stranger everywhere. It was necessary to remove oneself from this business of civilization. And while the infamous sects were experimenting with unique forms of communism, some looked to solitude for the necessary exodus. They were called the Monachois, “the solitaries,” the “only ones.” They settled alone in the desert, miles from Alexandria. And soon, they were so many, these solitaries, these deserters, that they had to invent rules for collective life; and the influence of christian asceticism gave rise to the first monastaries.

but for the witch, elsewhere is right here

We can say that the first monastaries produced a civilization more appalling than the previous one. Nevertheless, a civilization was created. This is to defend and illustrate the strategic value of “offensive retreat.”

In the art of war, it is sometimes better to produce places and friendships than weapons and shields. Whoever goes into exile, exiles. The stranger who leaves takes with him the inhabitable city.

this could only be the end of a world…onward!

Fathers were the first to disappear. They went to the factory, to the office. Then the mothers. They went to the factory, to the office. And each time, it wasn’t a father or a mother who disappeared – it was symbolic order, a world. The world of the fathers vanished first, then that of the mothers…the symbolic order of the mother that nothing until then had managed to shake. And this loss was so incalculable, and the mourning so total that no one con agree to go through it. Empire is this desire for a neo-matriarchy which would automatically take over for a dead patriarchy.

There is no revolt more absolute than the one that denies this benevolent domination, this warm power, this motherly embrace.

The lost children are the orphans of all known orders. So lucky are the orphans – the chaos of the world belongs to them. You cry over all that you’ve lost; indeed, we have lost everything.

But look around us: we have gained brothers and sisters, so many brothers and sisters. Now, only nostalgia separates us…from the unknown. You go, you are lost. The measure of your value is nowhere to be found. You go, and you don’t know who you are. But this ignorance is a blessing, and you are without value, like the first man.

Wander the roads…if you weren’t so lost, you wouldn’t be so destined for encounters.

Let’s go away…it’s high time. But please, let’s go together. Look at our gestures, the rising grace within our gestures; look at our abandon, how beautiful it is that nothing catches us; look at our bodies, how fluidly they mix. How long it has been since such free gestures descended on the world.

But you know, there are still walls against our communism. There are walls within and between us that continue to divide us.

We are still not done with this world. There is still jealousy, stupidity, the desire to be someone, to be recognized…the desire to be worth something. And worse, the need for authority. These are the ruins the old world has left within us and which remain to be demolished.

Under certain lights, our fall sometimes feels like a decline. Where are we going?

There are the Cathares who hate husbands more than lovers. There are the Gnostics who find more charm in the orgy than in solitary coupling. There is the Italian bishop in the 15th century who was excommunicated for his belief that any woman refusing her body to a man who asked for it in the name of charity…was a sinner. There are the Begards and the Beguines who live in collective houses and who devoted their extreme idleness to visiting each other. There are the Spirituals who insist that for the perfect ones, sin no longer exists. They call each other brothers and sisters and their Valentine’s day is not a celebration of the couple but the day when the married woman can go with whomever she wants.

Okay…now, there is the metropolis, appropriating what can’t be appropriated, pretending to ignore perdition, playing the man, the woman, the husband, the lover…playing the couple…keeping busy. Accommodating oneself with the utmost seriousness to the most painful of infantilisms. Forgetting in a  debauchery of feelings the cynicism to which life in the metropolis condemns us. And talking about love, again and forever, after so many breakups.

Those who say that another world is possible and who don’t bring with them a sentimental education other than that of novels and television deserve to be spat in the face.

ATTAC sucks!

The most abject state I know is the state of being in love; between loving and being in love, there is the difference of an assumed destiny and an endured condition.

The question is to know whether communism is collective property or the absence of property; and then to know what the absence of property is. For us, communism is putting-in-common, free use. We decide to put in common a number of our possessions. What we do is fill the outer form of property with a content that sabotages it. In other words, absolute sharing between friends. What is important here is not the shared object, but its contingent mode, which is always to be built.

The orgy only proves this: that sexuality is nothing, nothing but a certain distance between bodies.

there is no “transition to communism;” transition is the category of communism; of communism as EXPERIMENTATION

If I had to define the old world, I’d say: the old world is a certain way of linking affects to gestures, affects to words. It’s a certain kind of sentimental education. And we really don’t want it anymore.

If I had to define the orgy, I’d say: the orgy is what happens whenever someone disturbs these links between affects and gestures, between affects and words…and others follow.

We try to extract from love all possession, all identification, in order to be able to love.

In every situation, there is a certain distance between bodies. Not a spatial distance, but an ethical distance. It is the difference between Life-Forms

The idea of love, of intimacy, and all that stuff, was invented so we could no longer assume this distance, no longer play with it; to prevent bodies from dancing and elaborating an art of distances. Because every distance is a proximity and every proximity is still a distance.

A certain idea of play, combined with the certainty that we are building the Party, puts us at an equal distance from both the couple and the sordid liberalism.

You see, the Party…it’s bodies that circulate, it’s places…and it’s bodies circulating.

Remember, it is in the depths of separation that we found communism. There was nothing left to share but what we wanted to share.

If you want, I would really like to build the Party with you…well, if you’re free.

(transcribed from Et la guerre est à peine commencée… by Tiqqun)

Poetic Subversion: A Brief Thesis on Metropolitan Death

We are the city of the dead. We have been this way for quite some time. We await life anxiously. It’s time to start static.

The metropolis is foreign, a deterritorialized vacuum where everything is alien, even to its inhabitants, to whom themselves they are strangers.

To know absolutely and resolutely everything that is happening everywhere within the metropolis: this is the greatest knowledge its inhabitants and combatants can possess.

This knowledge, which should be free and multiple, is that of the police state. It is, thus, proprietary and singular, brutish and unforgiving, separated from the common until the state’s demise.

Alienation and inevitably collective collapse through atomized breakdown on the individual level is caused by mass and generalized democratic police terror. The war has just begun.

The metropolis knows no limits, and so is the same for its police. Diffuse protocols for eliminating potential dissidents and radicals have now become so commonplace and habitual that all free movement and thought is anesthetized. All suspicious behavior is mointored for future reference. Exile and ostricization await those who fail to meet the global “democratic” standards of pure uniformity or New Capital’s need to reproduce itself in more generally horrifying and destructive forms.

SEND ALL ROGUES TO PRISON.

The war of the coming community will not be of one between state forces but of one between the state and the non-state, the partisan war machine. Those who speak otherwise have a corpse in their mouth.