Who silently respect culture, the rules, and those with the best grades. Even their attachment to their great, critical intellectuals and their rejection of capitalism are branded by this love of school.
The reappearance, over the past twenty years, of a school and a culture of the street, in competition with the school of the republic and its cardboard culture, is the most profound trauma that French universalism is presently undergoing. On this point, the extreme right is already reconciled with the most virulent left. However, the name Jules Ferry — Minister of Thiers during the crushing of the Commune and theoretician of colonization — should itself be enough to render this institution suspect.
The aura that persists around Mesrine has less to do with his uprightness and his audacity than with the fact that he took it upon himself to enact vengeance on what we should all avenge. Or rather, of what we should avenge directly , when instead we continue to hesitate and defer endlessly. It was about time that fuck the police! In this sense, the un-nuanced hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the rotten spirit, the desire for a salvational destruction in which the country is completely consumed.
It would be a waste of time to detail all that which is agonizing in existing social relations. They say the family is coming back, that the couple is coming back. Its return is nothing but a deepening of the reigning separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through this masquerade. Everyone can testify to the rations of sadness condensed from year to year in family gatherings, the forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending in vain, the feeling that a corpse is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though it were nothing.
From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyone feels the inanity of the sad family nucleus, but most seem to believe that it would be sadder still to renounce it.
It is necessary to preserve oneself from such corrosion. The couple is like the final stage of the great social debacle. There is no more truth here than elsewhere; here too lies and the laws of estrangement dominate. And when, by good fortune, one discovers this truth, it demands a sharing that belies the very form of the couple. What allows beings to love each other is also what makes them lovable, and ruins the utopia of autism-for-two.
In reality, the decomposition of all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the ideal condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities. In the death of the couple, we see the birth of troubling forms of collective affectivity, now that sex is all used up and masculinity and femininity parade around in such moth-eaten clothes, now that three decades of non-stop pornographic innovation have exhausted all the allure of transgression and liberation.
We count on making that which is unconditional in relationships the armor of a political solidarity as impenetrable to state interference as a gypsy camp. No question is more confused, in France, than the question of work. No relation is more disfigured than the one between the French and work. Go to Andalusia, to Algeria, to Naples. They despise work, profoundly. Go to Germany, to the United States, to Japan.
They revere work. There are plenty of otaku in Japan, frohe Arbeitslose in Germany and workaholics in Andalusia. But for the time being these are only curiosities. We hate bosses, but we want to be employed at any cost. To have a job is an honor, yet working is a sign of servility. In short: the perfect clinical illustration of hysteria. We love while hating, we hate while loving. And we all know the stupor and confusion that strike the hysteric when he loses his victim — his master.
Most of the time he never recovers. While the Department of Labor was massively manipulating its statistics in order to bring unemployment numbers below two million. While welfare checks and drug dealing were the only guarantees, as the French state has recognized, against the possibility of social unrest at each and every moment. We belong to a generation that lives very well in this fiction.
That has never counted on either a pension or the right to work, let alone rights at work. We accept the necessity of finding money, by whatever means, because it is currently impossible to do without it, but we reject the necessity of working. All these discourses on motivation, quality and personal investment pass us by, to the great dismay of human resources managers. They are lying. To be disappointed, one must have hoped for something.
On behalf of our parents, our only regret is that they fell into the trap, at least the ones who believed. The sentimental confusion that surrounds the question of work can be explained thus: the notion of work has always included two contradictory dimensions : a dimension of exploitation and a dimension of participation. Exploitation of individual and collective labor power through the private or social appropriation of surplus value; participation in a common effort through the relations linking those who cooperate at the heart of the universe of production.
Hence the ambivalence of the relation of work, which is shameful insofar as it makes us strangers to what we are doing, and — at the same time — adored, insofar as a part of ourselves is brought into play.
The disaster has already occurred: it resides in everything that had to be destroyed, in all those who had to be uprooted, in order for work to end up as the only way of existing. Here lies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, mechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product.
We are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. The mine in Carmaux, famous for a century of violent strikes, has now been reconverted into Cape Discovery.
In corporations, work is divided in an increasingly visible way into highly skilled positions of research, conception, control, coordination and communication which deploy all the knowledge necessary for the new, cybernetic production process, and unskilled positions for the maintenance and surveillance of this process.
The first are few in number, very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority who occupy these positions will do anything to avoid losing them.
They and their work are effectively bound in one anguished embrace. Managers, scientists, lobbyists, researchers, programmers, developers, consultants and engineers, literally never stop working. Even their sex lives serve to augment productivity.
They are entrepreneurs. This flexible, undifferentiated workforce that moves from one task to the next and never stays long in a business can no longer even consolidate itself as a force, being outside the center of the production process and employed to plug the holes of what has not yet been mechanized, as if pulverized in a multitude of interstices.
The temp is the figure of the worker who is no longer a worker, who no longer has a trade — but only abilities that he sells where he can — and whose very availability is also a kind of work. On the margins of this workforce that is effective and necessary for the functioning of the machine, is a growing majority that has become superfluous, that is certainly useful to the flow of production but not much else, which introduces the risk that, in its idleness, it will set about sabotaging the machine.
The menace of a general demobilization is the specter that haunts the present system of production. I have to keep myself busy. This floating population must somehow be kept occupied. But to this day they have not found a better disciplinary method than wages. This is accompanied by a continual raising of the standards of security, hygiene, control, and culture, and by an accelerated recycling of fashions, all of which establish the need for such services.
The order of work was the order of a world. The evidence of its ruin is paralyzing to those who dread what will come after. Today work is tied less to the economic necessity of producing goods than to the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work. To be mobilized is to relate to work not as an activity but as a possibility.
This is the new standard of socialization. Mobility brings about a fusion of the two contradictory poles of work: here we participate in our own exploitation, and all participation is exploited.
Ideally, you are yourself a little business, your own boss, your own product. On the one hand, ghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the living are left to die. This is the properly political function of the contemporary production apparatus. To organize beyond and against work, to collectively desert the regime of mobility, to demonstrate the existence of a vitality and a discipline precisely in demobilization, is a crime for which a civilization on its knees is not about to forgive us.
From up close or from afar, what surrounds us looks nothing like that: it is one single urban cloth, without form or order, a bleak zone, endless and undefined, a global continuum of museum-like city centers and natural parks, of enormous suburban housing developments and massive agricultural projects, industrial zones and subdivisions, country inns and trendy bars: the metropolis. Certainly the ancient city existed, as did the cities of medieval and modern times. But there is no such thing as a metropolitan city.
All territory is synthesized within the metropolis. Everything occupies the same space, if not geographically then through the intermeshing of its networks. The factory buildings of Lille become concert halls. In Beijing, the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City were demolished, replaced by fake versions, placed a little farther out, on display for sightseers. In Troyes they paste half-timber facades onto cinderblock buildings, a type of pastiche that resembles the Victorian shops at Disneyland Paris more than anything else.
The old historic centers, once hotbeds of revolutionary sedition, are now wisely integrated into the organizational diagram of the metropolis. They are the fairy-tale commodity islands, propped up by their expos and decorations, and by force if necessary.
Control has a wonderful way of integrating itself into the commodity landscape, showing its authoritarian face to anyone who wants to see it. Equal parts police surveillance and enchantement! In chasing out the poor people, the cars, and the immigrants, in making it tidy , in getting rid of all the germs, the petty bourgeoisie pulverizes the very thing it came looking for.
The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city and country. It is the crossroads where all the petty bourgeois come together, in the middle of this middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much a result of rural flight as of urban sprawl. To cover the planet with glass would fit perfectly the cynicism of contemporary architecture. A school, a hospital, or a media center are all variations on the same theme: transparency, neutrality, uniformity. These massive, fluid buildings are conceived without any need to know what they will house.
They could be here as much as anywhere else. But what artists! And they were not even aware of their own masterpiece! But nothing can compare to what I have seen here tonight before my very eyes. There still remain some fragments of the city and some traces of the country caught up in the metropolitan mesh. The dormitory towers in the suburbs north of Paris, abandoned by a petty bourgeoisie that went off hunting for swimming pools, have been brought back to life by mass unemployment and now radiate more energy than the Latin Quarter.
In words as much as fire. The conflagration of November was not a result of extreme dispossession, as it is often portrayed. It was, on the contrary, a complete possession of a territory. People can burn cars because they are pissed off, but to keep the riots going for a month, while keeping the police in check — to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the terrain perfectly, and share a common language and a common enemy.
Mile after mile and week after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones, appearing where they were least expected. The metropolis is a terrain of constant low-intensity conflict, in which the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus mark points of culmination. For a long time, the city was a place for the military to avoid, or if anything, to besiege; but the metropolis is perfectly compatible with war.
Armed conflict is only a moment in its constant reconfiguration. War is no longer a distinct event in time, but instead diffracts into a series of micro-operations, by both military and police, to ensure security.
The police and the army are evolving in parallel and in lock-step. A criminologist requests that the national riot police reorganize itself into small, professionalized, mobile units. The military academy, cradle of disciplinary methods, is rethinking its own hierarchical organization.
The plan is considered and reconsidered for days, right through the training phase and according to the latest intelligence […] There is nothing like group planning for building team cohesion and morale.
Thus, since the battle of Nablus, Israeli soldiers have become interior designers. Forced by Palestinian guerrillas to abandon the streets, which had become too dangerous, they learned to advance vertically and horizontally into the heart of the urban architecture, poking holes in walls and ceilings in order to move through them. This is the essence of war. I need to win […] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls […] Like a worm that eats its way forward.
This echoes the advice of Blanqui who recommended in this case for the party of insurrection that the future insurgents of Paris take over the houses on the barricaded streets to protect their positions, that they should bore holes in the walls to allow passage between houses, break down the ground floor stairwells and poke holes in the ceilings to defend themselves against potential attackers, rip out the doors and use them to barricade the windows, and turn each floor into a gun turret.
The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this final collision between city and country. It is also a flow of beings and things, a current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train lines, satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making sure that this world never stops running straight to its ruin. It is a current that would like to drag everything along in its hopeless mobility, to mobilize each and every one of us.
Where information pummels us like some kind of hostile force. Where the only thing left to do is run. Where it becomes hard to wait, even for the umpteenth subway train.
With the proliferation of means of movement and communication, and with the lure of always being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the here and now.
Hop on an intercity or commuter train, pick up a telephone — in order to be already gone. Such mobility only ever means uprootedness, isolation, exile. The process of cocooning is not going away, it is merely being put into motion.
From a train station, to an office park, to a commercial bank, from one hotel to another, there is everywhere a foreignness, a feeling so banal and so habitual it becomes the last form of familiarity. Metropolitan excess is this capricious mixing of definite moods, indefinitely recombined. The city centers of the metropolis are not clones of themselves, but offer instead their own auras; we glide from one to the next, selecting this one and rejecting that one, to the tune of a kind of existential shopping trip among different styles of bars, people, designs, or playlists.
It is precisely due to this architecture of flows that the metropolis is one of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has ever existed.
Supple, subtle, but vulnerable. A brutal shutting down of borders to fend off a raging epidemic, a sudden interruption of supply lines, organized blockades of the axes of communication — and the whole facade crumbles, a facade that can no longer mask the scenes of carnage haunting it from morning to night.
The metropolis aims to shelter itself from inevitable malfunction via its network structure, via its entire technological infrastructure of nodes and connections, its decentralized architecture. The internet is supposed to survive a nuclear attack. But the metropolis also produces the means of its own destruction.
They brought with them one of the weapons of their own defeat. The proliferation of mobile phones and internet access points gave the guerrillas newfound ways to self-organize, and allowed them to become such elusive targets. Every network has its weak points, the nodes that must be undone in order to interrupt circulation, to unwind the web. The last great European electrical blackout proved it: a single incident with a high-tension wire and a decent part of the continent was plunged into darkness.
In order for something to rise up in the midst of the metropolis and open up other possibilities, the first act must be to interrupt its perpetuum mobile. That is what the Thai rebels understood when they knocked out electrical stations. That is what the French anti-CPE protestors understood in when they shut down the universities with a view toward shutting down the entire economy.
That is what the American longshoremen understood when they struck in October, in support of three hundred jobs, blocking the main ports on the West Coast for ten days. The American economy is so dependent on goods coming from Asia that the cost of the blockade was over a billion dollars per day.
With ten thousand people, the largest economic power in the world can be brought to its knees. We must admit that the litany of stock market prices moves us about as much as a Latin mass. Luckily for us, there are quite a few of us who have come to this conclusion. Or of all those who no longer find their identity in their jobs and live for their time off.
All those struck by this strange mass detachment , adding to the ranks of retirees and the cynically overexploited flexible labor force. The soft crisis of vocation that the West is now experiencing is completely absent in these places. What is happening in Guinea, Russia, Argentina and Bolivia is a violent and long-lasting debunking of this religion and its clergy. For total misery becomes intolerable the moment it is shown for what it is, without cause or reason. The accounting departments of corporations confess that they have no idea where value comes from.
It is common sense now to see progress as synonymous with disaster. The collapse of the socialist bloc was in no way victory of capitalism; it was merely the bankrupting of one of the forms capitalism takes.
Besides, the demise of the USSR did not come about because a people revolted, but because the nomenclature was undergoing a process of reconversion. When it proclaimed the end of socialism, a small fraction of the ruling class emancipated itself from the anachronistic duties that still bound it to the people.
Everyone else got poverty or emigration. They no longer hesitate to send in anti-terrorism units to shut down a strike, like with the ferries and the occupied recycling center in Rennes.
And yet there is no doubt that we are cut out for the economy. For generations we were disciplined, pacified and made into subjects , productive by nature and content to consume.
And suddenly everything that we were compelled to forget is revealed: that the economy is political. And that this politics is, today, a politics of discrimination within a humanity that has, as a whole, become superfluous.
From Colbert to de Gaulle, by way of Napoleon III, the state has always treated the economic as political, as have the bourgeoisie who profit from it and the proletariat who confront it. They have always pretended to believe that the economy is a reality — because their neutrality is safe there. Small business owners, small bosses, minor bureaucrats, managers, professors, journalists, middlemen of every sort make up this non-class in France, this social gelatin composed of the mass of all those who just want to live their little private lives at a distance from history and its tumults.
This swamp is predisposed to be the champion of false consciousness, half-asleep and always ready to close its eyes on the war that rages all around it. Each clarification of a front in this war is thus accompanied in France by the invention of some new fad. The comedy lasts only so long before turning into a sham.
And then another fad replaces it. Whereas ATTAC tried to save economics as a science with its popular education courses, degrowth preserves the economic as a morality. There is only one alternative to the coming apocalypse: reduce growth.
Consume and produce less. Become joyously frugal. Eat organic, ride your bike, stop smoking, and pay close attention to the products you buy. Voluntary simplicity. Afterwards, some of them will go work in the neighborhood community garden, while others will dabble in pottery, some Zen Buddhism, or in the making of an animated film. They find communion in the smug feeling that they constitute a new humanity, wiser and more refined than the previous one. And they are right. There is a curious agreement between Apple and the degrowth movement about the civilization of the future.
For in history there is no going back. Any exhortation to return to the past is only the expression of one form of consciousness of the present, and rarely the least modern. It is not by chance that degrowth is the banner of the dissident advertisers of the magazine Casseurs de Pub.
The inventors of zero growth — the Club of Rome in — were themselves a group of industrialists and bureaucrats who relied on a research paper written by cyberneticians at MIT. This convergence is hardly a coincidence. It is part of the forced march towards a modernized economy.
Capitalism got as much as it could from undoing all the old social ties, and it is now in the process of remaking itself by rebuilding these same ties on its own terms.
Contemporary metropolitan social life is its incubator. In the same way, it ravaged the natural world and is driven by the fantasy that it can now be reconstituted as so many controlled environments, furnished with all the necessary sensors. This new humanity requires a new economy that would no longer be a separate sphere of existence but, on the contrary, its very tissue, the raw material of human relations; it requires a new definition of work as work on oneself, a new definition of capital as human capital, a new idea of production as the production of relations, and consumption as the consumption of situations; and above all a new idea of value that would encompass all of the qualities of beings.
Such a science threatens to make us miss the good old days when unreliable indices like GDP growth were supposed to measure the well-being of a people — for at least no one believed in them. Its intellectual matrix is none other than cybernetics, the science of systems — that is, the science of their control.
In the 17 th century it was necessary, in order to completely impose the force of economy and its ethos of work and greed, to confine and eliminate the whole seamy mass of layabouts, liars, witches, madmen, scoundrels and all the other vagrant poor, a whole humanity whose very existence gave the lie to the order of interest and continence.
The new economy cannot be established without a similar screening of subjects and zones singled out for transformation. The chaos that we constantly hear about will either provide the opportunity for this screening, or for our victory over this odious project.
Ecology is the discovery of the decade. One quarter of the fish species have disappeared from the ocean. Bird flu alert: we are given assurances that hundreds of thousands of migrating birds will be shot from the sky. Mercury levels in human breast milk are ten times higher than the legal level for cows. User icon An illustration of a person's head and chest. Sign up Log in. Web icon An illustration of a computer application window Wayback Machine Texts icon An illustration of an open book.
Books Video icon An illustration of two cells of a film strip. I am not calling for a ban on this book. It's important that you read this book. Don't dismiss them. It deserves to be read and discussed. The Invisible Committee. Tiziana Terranova. Sadri Khiari. One of its members more adequately described the group as " the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality. Simon Critchley. Critchley challenges the absoluteness of such consequences drawn from the failures of the utopian experiments of the s.
While his exemplary analyses of and references to contemporary art and revolutionary practices seem to feed the wide-spread scepticism towards utopian endeavors, Critchley concludes by emphasizing the necessity to confront past and current experiments in a critical but non-pejorative way. He pleads for the persistence of a certain utopian impulse, which is less directed at a future that is to be improved, but rather understands that the future of radical, creative thought is its past.
We are living through a long antis. Having grown up and thrown off such seemingly childish ways, we now think we know better than to try and bring heaven crashing down to earth and construct concrete utopias. To that extent, despite our occasional and transient enthusiasms and Obamaisms, we are all political realists; indeed most of us are passive nihilists and cynics.
The essay was revised in and was widely distributed mostly on the Internet.
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