A Brief Putting in Perspective of Decadence and of Several Minoritarian Battles To Be Waged

holzer, "decadence can be an end in itself."

J-F. Lyotard[note]Jean-François Lyotard, “Petite mise en perspective de la décadence et de quelques combats minoritaires à y mener”. In Dominique Grisoni, ed., Politiques de la philosophie, 121-153. Paris: Grasset, 1976. This is the first English translation of this work.[/note]

translated by Taylor Adkins

Critique, minorities

Let’s begin with a sort of warning to say that we will seek to avoid the traditional “critical point of view”. Critique is an essential dimension of representation: in the order of the theatrical, it is what stands “outside”, with the exterior incessantly situated in relation to interiority, i.e. the periphery relative to the center. A so-called dialectical relation is established between the two; this relation does not safeguard the autonomy of critique, not by a long shot.

Two possibilities orient this relation: either the periphery conquers the center (first destiny of critique: through reversal and takeover); or the center situates the periphery and uses it for its own benefit, for its internal dynamics (second destiny: the putting into opposition). Thus, there are two cases of glorious death.

There are inglorious deaths. To name a few: the destruction of the peasant movement in Germany begun by the Frankenhausen massacre in May 1525; the liquidation of the Donatists and Circumcellions in Roman North Africa in the 4th century; that of the Cathars by the “French” armies; that of the Commune by Versailles and the Reich; that of the Catalan communes and committees by the Francoist armies and by the communist political police in 1937; the destruction of Hungarian communism in 1956; the liquidation of the Czech movement in 1968; the massacres and deportations of the Native American nations in the 19th century by the Yankees, etc. I am omitting many instances, and I am certainly omitting more “important” ones: but who can make that judgment call? This is a question of minorities crushed in the name of Empire. They are not necessarily critical (the Native Americans); they are indeed “worse”, they do not believe, they do not believe that there is an identity or coalescence between the Law and the central power, they affirm another space formed by a patchwork[note][English in the original — TN].[/note] of laws and customs (we now say cultures) that lacks a center. In this sense, they are polytheistic, whatever they may have said and thought about themselves: to each nation its authorities, without any having universal value or totalitarian reach.

These struggles are struggles of minoritarians that seek to remain minoritarian and to be recognized as such. Yet nothing is more difficult: they are transformed into new powers, into oppositions of His Majesty — or into mass graves. They are interpreted, i.e. inscribed in imperial space as tensions arising from the periphery, in imperial discourse as dialectical moments, in imperial time as apocalyptic pronouncements. In this way, they are depotentialized from the start. By banning their cultures, their dialect, one seeks to destroy their affirmative force, the “perspective” (in the Nietzschean sense) that each of these struggles traces — in a time that is not cumulative. (In this regard, capitalism faithfully fulfills the imperial tradition.) It is therefore necessary to insist on this: the force of the movements of their perspective does not come from the fact that they are critical, i.e. the fact that they are situated in relation to the center. They do not intervene as peripeteias in the course that Empire and its idea follow; they constitute events.

Yet, under further scrutiny, these movements reveal something that never stops being produced on the small or even microscopic scale in the everyday life of “the little people”. Minoritarian affirmation never stops being produced, even when it is imperceptible. It is subtle and refined, even before it manages to be said and enacted in the public sphere: the billions of unvoiced deliberations by women in the home, well before the MLF[note][Mouvement de libération des femmes, which arose in France after the events of May ’68, was adjacent to the Women’s Liberation movement in America, and questioned the legitimacy of the overarching dominance of patriarchal society — TN].[/note]; the billions of little tragic, heinous, woebegone shames suffered, well before the MLAC[note][Mouvement pour la liberté de l’avortement et de la contraception, which pushed for legal abortion in France and eventually dissolved after achieving its objective in February 1975 — TN].[/note]; the thousands of humorous and oft-repeated stories in Prague before the “Prague Spring”; the millions of little meeting rituals through mimicry and graffiti in semi-public places for homosexuals prohibited from the social scene, well before the FHAR[note][Front homosexuel d’action révolutionnaire, which was founded in 1971 and continues to strive to bring visibility to and fight for the rights of LGBT individuals — TN].[/note]; the billions of isolated or collective aggregates of laborers in workshops and offices, a repulsive matter that can only pass into syndical discourse disguised as negotiable demands. This reality is not more real than that of power, of the institution, of the contract, etc., it is just as much so; but it is minoritarian; thus, it is necessarily multiple, or if one prefers, always singular. It only occupies grand politics, on the same surface, but otherwise.

In what follows, as in every minoritarian movement, it will easily be able to be shown that there is a critical aspect, that this discourse repeats critical forms. But what is hidden there is an affirmative position. In the Marxist sense of critique, the negative is privileged. It is held to be an active capacity that can awaken, move, and “bring the masses to action” (to use a stereotype). In other words, it possesses what is commonly acknowledged to be an essential revolutionary virtue: the pedagogical function. In critique, the negative is the dynamic element of conviction, since it educates by destroying the false. However, what must be perceived here is a poorly disguised Socratism. And this is precisely what we are breaking with (albeit the idea of rupture is in all regards a naïve idea), i.e. with a tradition of thought that counts on the effectiveness of the negative, that praises the force of conviction, and that seeks to incite the awakening of consciousness. If theoretical and practical thought continues to imagine itself as pedagogy, then it necessarily repeats these aforementioned traits. To put oneself “on the side of” the affirmative supposes that one abandons the categories of “illness”, “deviation”, “degeneracy”, “decay”, etc. These categories are prejudices, stereotypes; they fall back on the conception of an organism whose calling is to be perfect but whose present state is that of perversion, degradation, and infantilism. The task of the political then consists in restoring to it the perfection that is its own.

Deepening the decadence of the True

We need to reflect on the idea of decadence by taking up a trait that Nietzsche notes in his manuscripts for the Will to Power.

As Nietzsche says, there is indeed a decadence of societies. But it vacillates. It neither adopts a linear course nor a continuous rhythm: it procrastinates. Or instead, there is a procrastination of decadence that is a part of decadence. On the one hand, decadence acts (obviously in its kinship with nihilism) as a destruction of values, notably of the value of truth; and, on the other hand (which is a movement contemporaneous with the first), it works toward the establishment of “new” values. Thus, we have a panicked and pathetic nihilism, for which nothing has value[note][The phrase “plus rien ne vaut” can also mean that “nothing is valid anymore” and/or that “nothing is worth anything anymore”. The translation above is in light of the discussion of Nietzsche and the destruction of values, but these other meanings are just as appropriate and are implied at the same time — TN].[/note] anymore, and an active nihilism that responds: nothing has value anymore? too bad, let’s continue in this direction. The latter is on the side of destruction. The former is the return of faith, the recurrence of an obstinate belief in the unity, totality, and finality of a Meaning. Therefore, the value of truth, which is certainly displaced, nonetheless persists through the discourse of science and its reception.

Nietzsche has clearly seen this restoration of faith on the outskirts of scientificity. One no longer believes in anything, and yet something remains behind: scientific ascesis. It is the school of suspicion, of distrust, because nothing is ever definitively established; but this distrust, which thoroughly traverses the practice of science, contains an act of trust that is renewed each time in the value of labor, i.e. with the goal of knowing and dominating. Trust, which is masked in the critical spirit, maintains activity and thought in the belief that the true is the most important thing. It is certainly no longer the truth itself that is revealed, but nonetheless the happiness of societies and of individuals remains attached to a better knowledge of reality.

Platonism persists today in this way: the prejudice that there is a reality to be known. One distrusts everything, except distrust. One must be prudent, so they say, but what could be more imprudent than prudence?

There are thousands of examples, both elevated and trivial, of this vigorous belief in the true. For example: intellectuals always believe in economic, social, political theory; they expect from it a decent knowledge of realities; they think that without it a just (effective and ethically positive) social transformation cannot ever be produced. The most honest intellectuals attribute to Marxism or to the forms of discourse that borrow from certain parts of its lexicon and syntax this double privilege of being par excellence the language that suspicion takes and that escapes from all (“unavoidable”) suspicion. Here is a shorter example: certain scientists do not hesitate to present “science” as the only reason to live that survives the disintegration of values — thus proposing themselves as new candidates to take over from the clergy. Here is an equally banal example: the importance granted by the culture of the media to scientific works in the form of their spectacular results, but also in the form of roundtables between famous researchers. Even though these researchers publicly express their doubts, their suspicions, and their skepticism regarding their own activity, and even though they nevertheless attest to the decline of the value of truth, especially where it is supposed to persist intact, nothing much changes: the mass-media apparatus, including its spectators, merely turn this into a number of features that highlight certain heroes faced with daunting tasks. The heroism of the will to knowledge for the betterment of life remains a certain value that spans the whole gamut of the forms of trust (of the trust in distrust). One last example: what the American scientists call the new gnosis.[note]Raymond Ruyer, La Gnose de Princeton, Fayard, 1974. [At the time of writing this, Lyotard did not yet know that Ruyer had written this work in order to capitalize on a trending interest in France concerning American scientists; thus, this work is actually a hoax, insofar as it claims to delineate the beliefs of a Princeton cohort of scientists, but it allowed for Ruyer to better disseminate his ideas in a way that he perhaps thought he could not have done if he were claiming to write on his own behalf. It was one of his last but easily his best-selling work—TN].[/note] Certain astrophysicists and biologists are seeking to establish a sort of discourse derived from the paradoxes that stem from the results of their science, a discourse that would be able to envelop these results and explicate them. Through its own humor, the endeavor is obviously seeking to reconstitute certain values of security, which are the very same values that have served to cover over and suppress nihilism since Plato.

Decadence consists in a double movement, in an ongoing hesitation between the nihilism of incredulity and the religion of the true. It is not a process of decay[note]Le pourrissement des sociétés [The Decay of Societies], special issue of the review Cause commune, U.G.E., 10/18, 1975.[/note], which is a univocal process that arises from a biological model of the social, and it is not a process that is dialectical in its most rarefied Marxist sense. Nietzsche instead indicates a movement on the spot that, on one side, exhibits the nihilism that was until then hidden by values and, at the same time, covers over this nihilism with other values. In this regard, science seems at best to satisfy this double requirement: everything must be examined, but not the duty to examine — which is simply conflated with “thought”.

Procrastination arises from this contrariety in movement; decadence does not take the form of a degeneracy. It would be necessary to say that it has lasted since Platonism and that it has never stopped since. And, as Nietzsche emphasizes in Twilight of the Idols, remedies, therapeutics, philosophy, politics, and pedagogy are an integral part of it. In one swoop, in a single perspective, it is “decided” that humanity is sick and that we are starting to want to heal it.

Here is a political path: to harden, to deepen, to accelerate decadence. To assume the perspective of active nihilism, not by remaining at the simple (depressing or admiring) evidence of the destruction of values: to get one’s hands dirty in their destruction, to go ever further into incredulity, to fight against the restoration of values. Let us travel far and quickly in this direction, let us be undertakers in decadence, let us accept, for example, the destruction of belief in truth in all its forms. This is a serious matter for us, who claim to be not just intellectuals, but still to be “on the left”[note][Translating “de gauche” as “on the left” is an approximation; in actuality, the phrase can be appended to any noun (for example, Parti de Gauche/The Left Party) in order to function as the adjective “left” — TN].[/note], i.e. guarantors of the true. It at least requires that we abandon our faith in the value of the position of our own discourse, of theoretical discourse, and of its function of true discourse or of discourse in view of the true.

Science between power and inventiveness

Let me add a short note here. To those who will not fail to retort: “These are all abstractions; science functions de facto, and it never stops obtaining the most incisive results”, we ask that they go interrogate the state of the sciences.

For about ten years, the scientific milieus directly implicated have been posing the question of their existence: what is it that we do?[note]Various works are the symptoms of what I am advancing. From memory, I am only citing one (which is among the most interesting): Autocritique de la science, by A. Jaubert and J.M. Levy-Leblond, Seuil, 1973. This book has been reedited recently in the collection Point.[/note] This is a question that remotely surpasses the simplified version, provided by the mass-media apparatus, of: what purpose does it serve? what usage can we make of our discoveries? etc. Instead, it signifies: how could we know what we say is true? In all simplicity, the man of science admits that what is called verification is taken up again by a certain sort of operativity. Effectively, science invents statements that satisfy certain formal requirements, and these statements must be able to be transcribed into practical and experimental dispositifs[note][There is no perfect way to translate the word “dispositifs” into English: it means “arrangements”, “set-ups”, “lay-outs”, but also “operations”, “plans”, “devices”, “frameworks”, etc. Thus, it runs the gamut from the concrete to the abstract, depending highly on its context. Here, it is transliterated for expedient reasons as well as to synchronize with Iain Hamilton Grant’s translation of Libidinal Economy (Grant provides a nice explanation for how Lyotard uses this word in the introductory glossary to that work — TN].[/note] whose effects can be observed and predicted, if possible. These effects are certain modifications of one or several variables, with the other variables being supposed as defined; they are capable of being observed and described. Understood in this way, “scientific research” is not that of truth, but of efficiency, or controlled, predictable operativity. The truth consists in the fact that the following is produced, along with the statements themselves: 1) a theoretical unity of the set of statements and 2) a meta-unity of this theoretical unity with the data set. However, when the state of the sciences is examined from the sole point of view of scientific theory (unity no. 1), what is witnessed are bundles of often independent and sometimes incompatible statements whose sole condition of coexistence is not even a hidden unity (of the last instance type) but an immediate criterion of operativity. In our view, contemporary science discovers a space of discourse and practice whose form is ultimately not at all defined in terms of conformity with an object, nor even with a formal principle of unity or compatibility of statements between them, but, whatever it may be in truth, is attached to a constant and minimum criterion of efficiency. The political and theoretical discourse of philosophers, sociologists, epistemologists, and other doxographers — for example, post-Althusserian Marxists or post-Levistraussian structuralists — is also very much alongside what scientists know about themselves, of what they have learned concerning their practice. Alongside, because it maintains traditional requirements: a unified, centralized discourse that gives way to the totality of the givens of the scientific field (“democratic centralism” in matters of knowledge). In its everyday existence, that of several million minoritarian “researchers”, science has no relation with this.

Thus, when it is a question of the decadence of the idea of truth, it is harmful to remain content on the level of habitual critique, which denounces science on behalf of capital, but the problem of the efficiency of scientific statements in themselves must be posed in terms in which it is scientifically defined today: prediction due to the exact control of variables.

An example becomes prominent as if by itself, the immediacy of which is the political transcription of the requirements of Skinnerian psychology by the Centre: that of the treatment of German prisoners, who are known as the RAF (Red Army Faction). The dossier published in France on their detention conditions[note]A propos du procès Baader-Meinhof, Fraction Armée Rouge: de la torture dans les prisons de la R.F.A. Collection Bourgeois poche, 1975.[/note] relates extremely interesting facts in this regard. We learn that the militants of the RAF have, among other things, been submitted to so-called “sensory deprivation” experiments. The subjects are placed in a cell that has been transformed into an achromatic environment in which all sounds have been neutralized (a dispositif of white noise: the individual no longer hears anything, not even the noises of his own body, the beating of his heart, his breathing, the gritting of his teeth, etc.; his cries are also inaudible). In the medium term, the result of the experiment is the death of the subject: this is the case of Holger Meins; in the short term, as professor Jan Gross, one of the scientists responsible for the important progresses made in this field, says: “this aspect [the possibility of influencing someone through isolation] can certainly play a positive role in penology (the science of punishment), i.e. when it is a question of rehabilitating an individual or a group, and when the utilization of such a unilateral dependence and of such a manipulation can effectively influence the process of rehabilitation”.[note]Baader-Meinhof, ibid., p. 71. It is good to know that these researches are led by the Sonderforschungsbereiche [Collaborative Research Centers] of the University of Hamburg. The same Institute of Hamburg has participated in 1973 on various days organized by NATO dedicated to aggressiveness. Besides the United States, England, Canada, and Norway, Poland was also represented there. Are these the faux pas of socialist science? Or is all science capitalist? Or is it socialism that is capitalist? Or rather, is it not above all a question, in every discourse of knowledge, under all regimes, of the same imperial madness?[/note]

Yet what is particularly revealing in what Jan Gross says is that the conditions of sensory deprivation allow us to obtain a guinea pig that is situated in the optimal conditions of experimentation, i.e. because the non-controllable factors that can act on the subject have become negligible (almost null) in the course of the experiment. Total isolation, such as it is practiced on the members of the Baader group, thus offers the possibility of mastering the data set of the experiment. The modifications that will be obtained on the guinea pig-individuals will exclusively arise from the stimuli provoked by the experimenter.

Here we have a formidable perfecting of the techniques of torture, which stirs up disgust, hatred, and terror. And there is still something else: the old dream of the human sciences is realized: to constitute a totally controllable object; thus, since it is a question of men, the dream of obtaining subjects in which the capacity for retaliation is completely neutralized, i.e. the capacity to grasp information by which they are bombarded and whose effects they are distracted by. It is then that we rediscover the question of efficiency. For to define the efficiency of a scientific statement exactly comes down to being able to read and describe a result whose variables, which were present from the start of its production, have been in their totality, without any interference by an uncontrolled variable, mastered by the researcher. However, with this example of the treatment to which the RAF group is submitted, we are delineating a sort of congruence between a certain idea of scientific efficiency and a certain idea that is much more than the idea of repression, an idea of the control of data in an advanced and liberal capitalism: bodies are these “data”. There’s no need for Hitlerian panoply, as this is all done under a democratic regime.[note]Better than anyone else, Claude Lefort has written on the delirium of homogeneity applied to the social “body”; cf. his commentary on The Gulag Archipelago in Textures, 10-11, 1975.[/note]

Gudrun Ensslin in black t-shirt
“What are you doing after the orgy?” asks Gudrun Ensslin.

But science is in no way reducible to this centralist totalitarian aspect, an aspect through which it is congruent with the discourse of knowledge and with the intrinsic imperialism of capital. From the start, there are mathematics in which the question of the control of variables is not posed, where, on the contrary, since time immemorial the question posed is that of the invention of new concepts, that of making operative in the form of appropriated symbols the obstacles themselves, which are met with the desire to operate: inventions of numbers, of spaces that overturn natural mathematics. It surely must not be said that these quite sophisticated formations escape from an imperial usage by principle; but it is certain that they go hand in hand with the decadence of a centralist, homogeneous conception of escape, as in topology, or a centralist, countable conception of number, as in number theory. Thus, these formations introduce a capacity of imagining and operating that passes beyond the constraints that were previously held to be divine, natural, essential, or transcendental.

And then, alongside this artistic mathematics, and sometimes due to it, an artistic physics, an artistic logic is established, in which the requirements of unity, totality, and finality are simply abandoned. In certain parts of contemporary science, the unthinkable gives rise to thought, to coherent discourse: the space of neighborhoods and of limits anterior to all measure; antiparticles; bizarre logics: the bizarre logic of Stanislaw Leśniewski allows us to demonstrate the proposition: The section of the book is the book.[note][The word “tranche” here could also refer to the “edge” of a book. What is important to understand is the advances that Leśniewski made specifically in mereology, the theory of part and whole, along with contributions to protothetic (the logic of propositions and their functions), ontology (the logic of names and functors of arbitrary order, a theory of classes attributed specifically to Leśniewski himself), and metalogic (the study of properties of logical systems). His work also involved reintroducing Frege’s language/metalanguage distinction in order to diagnose the liar’s paradox, which Lyotard will address in an upcoming section — TN].[/note] It is not sufficient to notice that these inventions move us quite positively toward the traits of the unconscious Freud described negatively; they must inspire our imagination and our practice of an unmeasurable sociopolitical space that is not mediated by a countable center or that is not homogeneous and also our imagination and our practice of a non-Aristotelian logic, as A.E. van Vogt said.

In this function, science never stops being itself, and it continues to submit to the rule of operative fruitfulness: the new symbol must be defined, the new proposition must be demonstrated, the effects of the new law must be observable in reproducible conditions. But the input must make the inventive imagination of researchers reverberate. Then the meaning of the condition of efficiency changes. Instead of accentuating the control of variables (like aggressiveness), the latter — submitted to formal requirements, logical requirements, axiomatic requirements, and the requirements of experimental dispositifs — merely serves as a means for inventiveness. Science is not the discourse of effective knowledge, which claims to find in its conformity to “reality” the confirmation of its value; it is creative of realities, and its value consists in its capacity to redistribute perspectives, not in its power to master objects. In this regard, it is comparable to the arts.

In the arts as well, there is a whole expenditure of energy dedicated to defining the means that render the “idea” of the artists realizable; but from the start, artists have always conceived the arts as proofs of inventiveness rather than as safeguards of truth; and, particularly for modern art, what is important above all is not that the effects of the work conform to some sort of an “idea”, to some sort of a “reality” (of the soul, of feeling, of man, of social structures, of political conflicts): what is important is the tenor of the works’ capacity for new effects.

This novelty can be misunderstood, assimilated to the tradition of the new introduced by the grand industry of consumption, and reduced to the mercantilism of “innovations”. But novelty is still something else and is quite serious; it says: there is no nature, no history, no good god, there is no received, given, revealed, discovered meaning; there are (so to speak) chromatic, sonorous, linguistic energies that obey constants of order only by exception, and, as with every bit of matter, it is man’s responsibility to play with these energies to make them into perspectives, sets of relations. The object of these instances of play is neither to attain the true, to obtain happiness, nor to demonstrate his mastery, but to take part in the simple capacity of putting in perspective, even on a minuscule scale. (What is written here for its part is nothing but a brief putting in perspective.)

This is how the decadence of the true can be deepened in science. It has a choice to make concerning the place to give efficiency and control: either the occasion of an increased rationalization and totalitarianism, or the means to multiply inventive realities. It is to be expected that science gets around itself cunningly.

Decadence of the idea of labor

Another question: what is in decadence? Nietzsche says that values are in decadence. Some people think, especially during these times of unemployment, that it is capitalism, that capitalism is in crisis, and that crisis always signifies (whether in the short or long term) an impossibility of functioning, a blockage in the course of a process (we shall return to this notion soon).

But we need to note something beforehand: capital is not aware of a crisis, it is not itself in decadence, but its functioning supposes and involves decadence [la décadence], or, if you will, crisis [la crise]. Better yet, crisis is a condition of its possibility of functioning.

Capital is crisis because, as Marx said, it must destroy precapitalist institutions, values, and norms, and it must regulate the “production” and “circulation” of goods, men, women, children born and to be born, words… But it is still crisis because it must incessantly proceed to the destruction of its own creation. Here, once again, we encounter this movement on the spot we brought up a moment ago. This is a sort of incessant crushing movement, a movement of destruction/construction. Crisis, just as much as capital, is permanent. And if, borrowing from Nietzsche, one intends to give it the connotation of a decadence, this is because the functioning of capital in effect requires that it equally disaggregate and elaborate familial and social institutions, human communities, etc.

Nietzsche himself does not describe this situation as that of capital. He speaks of the decadence of values and of culture, but he does not attribute it. I believe that he has a “reason” for this: decadence is a perspective that is an indispensable complement to another perspective, that of “Platonism”. To present decadence in terms of capital shows that capitalism is a new but displaced stance of Platonism, a Platonism of economic and social life; this is not to explain decadence through capital but only to extend the idea of “perspective”, to relativize the dispositif of “modernity”, and also to refuse the therapeutic attitude, since the latter is part of decadence.

Now with the case of labor. For Marx, the value of labor, the importance granted to it, both in society as well as in the life of individuals, is put back into question: what must be abolished is the exploitation and alienation that productive activity undergoes. However, particularly in the West, it is today more probable than ever that the value granted to labor is on the decline.[note] See in particular the investigation of Jean Rousselet, l’Allergie au travail [The Allergy to Work], Seuil, 1974, and J.-P. Barou, Gilda je t’aime, à bas le travail! [I Love You Gilda, Down with Work!], France Sauvage, 1975.[/note] In France, a recent investigation reveals that in nearly 50/100 youths from amongst all socioprofessional categories, labor is not recognized as having any other goal than to ensure survival. Labor is denied all ethical value (it is good to work) and all value of the individual ideal (it is in work that I realize myself, thus coming nearer to the Freudian ego ideal). In other words, the idea of labor has lost a part of its motivational power: yet the latter was not only an important piece in the functioning of the great capitalist machine, it was also a resource of socialist critique, insofar as it conveyed the distaste of the aristocratic professions for the industrial conditions of labor.

The phenomenon is interesting because it is visibly inscribed in the movement of decadence: the system destroys a value that seems indispensable to it.

But here still, it is necessary to ward off the trap that, for politics on the left, the habit of thinking in terms of underlying processes tends toward, i.e. in terms of Augustinian or Hegelian history leading to an end. It would be useless to build a politics modeled on such a conception of history, to build it on the perspective of the ruin of the value of labor. The decadence of this idea is not its simple decline, and it in no way causes a catastrophe. The decline is constantly reprised, inverted, and neutralized in many different ways. First, socioeconomically: the part of total capital that is invested in labor-capacity[note][Here, I am following the translation of force de travail (Arbeitskraft) as labor-capacity, which is also translated by other translators of Marx as labor-power — TN].[/note] diminishes to the benefit of the part immobilized in the means of production; at the limit, there should be a production without workers; in any case, the crisis of labor would then lose its importance. But this deepening of the organic composition of capital is in turn subject to caution; one must distinguish the quantity of wages and the amount of wages, one must count the indirect wages that enter into the circulation of capital, one must introduce employment multipliers for each technical or technological “improvement”, there is the immigration of labor-capacity coming from the Third World, etc. All of this tends to maintain a certain rate of employment and thereby the actuality of a “crisis” of the idea of labor.

Above all, the important point is that capitalism does not need labor to be valued (no more than it needs truth to be valued in the order of scientific discourse), since it merely suffices for labor to exist. It is in this sense even better for capitalism: the attachments of the qualified worker to his professional habits are misunderstandings that block a free circulation of labor-capacity. The pulsional[note][The word pulsionnel in French is the adjectival rendering of Freud’s Trieb (drive, rendered in French as pulsion) and is misleadingly translated by Strachey as “instinct”. See Iain Hamilton Grant’s translation of Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy, specifically his explanations in the introductory glossary to that work — TN][/note] dispositif of investments into products, tools, and manners of operating gives way to completely different investments. It is premature to claim to define these investments in libidinal terms, for in reality there must be quite a large number of them. It is nevertheless very important to show that under what is generically called wage labor various modifications are produced in — and produce — the placement of affects onto tasks. “Alienation” is not just a term that belongs to the pedagogical problematic (that of the masters) but is a tenuous word that does not allow these modifications to be distinguished and navigated but on the contrary obscures them.

These questions of names overshadow concrete attitudes. All the discourses and actions of protest or politics that remain content with denouncing wages (exploitation) or labor conditions (alienation) in order to improve them are so many refusals to resonate with and navigate the modifications of libidinal investment we are referring to, and thus they are merely various repressive blockages. Syndicalists and politicians channel the wealth of decadence-on-the-spot from the idea of labor into the lexicon, syntax, and rhetoric of the masters’ discourse, into the masters’ space-time. It should not be said that this is because they are evil or bad, etc., but that this is in their interest; and it should no longer be said that none of this decadence lends itself to being translated into widespread protests and programs. With the circumstantial complicity of the interested parties themselves, the crushing that workers’ organizations make the libidinal displacements of labor undergo stems from the fact that the apparatuses represent their leaders and incarnate the subject they are supposed to constitute, either in a unitary space and time or on the so-called scene of history. The displacements of libidinal investment onto labor occur in spaces and times and obey logics that have nothing to do with the philosophy of history, even though they are not embedded anywhere else. They indeed take place there, but the signs that they constitute (protest movements, declarations, demonstrations) are not the tensions that they are.

If it would be necessary to clarify these mysterious tensions or drifts for labor, we could seize upon the occasion of the present “crisis” associated with the increase in the price of energy in Western Europe. The reduction of purchasing power (not to mention unemployment) that must result from this is well known. In the protest-perspective, the alternative is simple: either workers are crushed by their pauperization, and the fear of losing what little remains for them annihilates their combativeness; or, exasperated, “having nothing left to lose”, they engage in long-term struggles. These are the two statements that make possible and can anticipate militant language. And what else can the “masses” say, if they must speak a language that can be quickly translated by their leaders into dialogues with the bosses and into the decisions of actions, beyond: Yes, let’s go/no, let’s not?[note][The phrase here on y va can mean “let’s go”, “want to go”, and “here we go”, depending on the emphasis of its performance as a question, command, or invitation — TN].[/note]

However, as these lines are currently being written, it seems as though nothing of the sort is taking place: neither great fear, nor great revolt. Not that nothing is happening, but that what is happening is not currently being said in this language. This is not only true of the visible movements, whose singularities, if one is not on the spot, are difficult to describe. It is also probably the case for situations or facts that are deemed adjacent and are indeed connected if one sticks to the authoritative language of militants, albeit within the confines of the spatiotemporal and logical dimensions of an “experience” that this language ignores.

To come back to the case of labor, black labor would be one of these notable displacements. In the current crisis, a doubly important function could be supposed for it. First, it is likely that it allows for many of the employed and unemployed to illegally maintain their purchasing power; second, its singular epistemological property deserves some attention: just because it escapes from economic and sociological enquiry due to its position doesn’t mean that its scope cannot be appreciated and that the totalitarian desire for “clairvoyance” then encounters a hermetic opacity; but if its scope is supposed as non-negligible, it must be acknowledged that many goods and services are exchanged without passing through the intermediary of the masters’ control, whatever the bosses, local or national administrations, or syndical agencies may be. Since this involves jobs of payment, upkeep, or fabrication to order, it is most likely here that one would not find the features of a series of industrial labor: this is a different pulsional investment. Similarly, the relations in this sort of work would need to be described carefully: the controls of the employer, of the syndicate, of the administrations are short-circuited, the client is often known, one arranges with him directly, etc. It is certainly necessary to be wary about building on these discrepancies a sort of utopia of good or true labor, which would be the underground.

Thus, within the body of capital, there is another form of socioeconomic life, another “kingdom”, one that is acentric and is constituted by a multitude of singular or anarchic exchanges, foreign to the “rationality” of production. And it cannot be said that this way of living is a challenge or a critique of capitalism (it is not even certain that it is related to the decadence of the idea of labor). But it reveals this paradox that, even in a society mainly centered on production and consumption, working can become a minoritarian activity in the sense that it is unrelated to the Center, neither evoked nor controlled by it.

This independence is vast; if it is true that black labor is a manner of getting around the decrease in the standard of living, then it is a stratagem that does not imply any resentment; the “crisis” is experienced unabated and without revolt, without credulity toward catastrophism. These features appear most strikingly in Italy no doubt, in everyday life, in la petite vie: again and again, one encounters there many situations that are far from being exclusively agreeable (or disagreeable), that are all formed by initiatives that are independent from or unconcerned with the central power. A sort of “civil society”, one that is not Hegelian but is quite flexible and active, never stops eluding the authorities of the masters.

The lie as perspective

Now for another, less sociological reflection on “crisis”. The very idea of crisis, as we said, inscribes the object in a dialectical perspective. The latter sketches out the image of a history, a sort of body bathing in a homogeneous temporality where it will attain the limit of its organization, exceed its conditions of possibility, and disintegrate into something else. Particularly in Capital, Marx suggests that crisis is the contradictory moment internal to capital that leads the latter to its end. This amounts to situating the social body in a negative temporality, in a time that is the concept itself insofar as it is contradictory. The question is what halts the choice of the type of temporality. Can a practice be situated in another temporality than that of the concept?

According to Nietzsche, decadence introduces three categories: the true, unity, and finality. Decadence of the true = decadence of a certain logic, of a certain type of rationality; decadence of unity = decadence of a unitary space, of a sociocultural space endowed with a central discourse; decadence of finality = decadence of an eschatological, oriented, finalized temporality.

If these multiple aspects are transcribed in terms of capital, it becomes clear that each of them designates logical, topical, and chronic operators that define new “political” practices.

Back to the decadence of the True: capital is this alleged organism that is nevertheless incapable of providing the discourse to found its own truth. It does not resort to religious, metaphysical discourse, which is capable of accounting for its existence and lending it authority. Not the least bit of this is why I’m here, or this is why I have or I am power. Not only is our society deprived of foundation, but it also intensely makes the very idea of a foundation, of a final authority, decline. Instead, capital takes initiative; this is an inventive perspective, in a sense, because it completely reverses the question of meaning: I laugh, it says, at founding meaning, i.e. at receiving it from elsewhere; on the contrary, I propose axiomatics that are decisions about what has meaning, that are choices of meaning. The coherence of the system rests on meta-statements that must be able to be grouped into a set of axioms: everything must be in agreement with these axioms, failing which there is a violation of “rationality”. All analytic philosophy and modern logic work in this vein. What has Piero Sraffa done, if not write the axiomatics of a capitalism regulated in a self-replacing state?[note][The italicized words are English in the original text — TN].[/note]

However, a path is indicated here that is not one of theoretical, epistemological, or political critique, but where a completely different pseudo-theoretical and pseudo-political perspective can be “taken”. This formalism, which gives rise to (for example, economic) axiomatics, maintains a certain status of truth. The latter is quite different from what it is in a metaphysics or in the theology of a revealed religion; but it must exist, without which it becomes impossible to assign any statement a determined truth-value. Statements that declare the truth or falsity of a set of statements must not belong to the class of the latter. In other words, the discourse that decides on the true must not be included in the (mathematical, etc. but also economic, political, etc.) discourse whose conditions of truth, the axioms, it establishes.

To speak concretely, the baker’s statement “this Parisian bread is worth x cents” or the boss’s statement “your hourly wage is worth x francs” (type 1) must not belong to the same class as the statement that says, “these values are correct” (type 2). What does this latter proposition state? The authority of a power, government, chamber, or union, which is itself the expression of a sovereign, the “legislator”, is supposed to be, for example, the “people”. If for the time being one neglects the question of representativity, how is this authority recognized in terms of truth-value? Precisely due to the simple property that its statements establish the value (true/false, good/bad, etc.) of other statements, those of the boss and the baker, and because they therefore do not belong to the same class as the latter.

Thus, to dissociate the statements of type 1 (whose references are some sort of “object”: bread, hourly wage — commodities in our example, although there are many others: children in school, number of sexual partners, parental responsibility…) from the statements of type 2, whose references are totalities of statements of type 1 — “we declare true that Parisian bread is worth 150 cents”, i.e. for whichever propositional variable x (this bread here, that bread there, individual-breads), the statement f(x) = y, which is read as “for x, the price in francs is 1.50”, is always true.

(Here, we should note that Marx maintains this position of truth. The text of Capital indeed implies that there is a statement or group of statements of type 2 which assert the truth-value of all the statements of type 1, i.e. the equations regulating capitalist exchanges: money/commodities. Marx’s meta-discourse declares that it is not true that all exchanges take place at equal value; he at least detects an inequality in them, which is that of the inequality of labor power with the commodity, and this is how he is critical. But Marx himself establishes a statement of type 2: “I declare true that every value of a commodity consists in the total amount of time of the average social labor necessary for its production”; this equation is the meta-operator for all the others; it is not a part of them.)

However, this dissociation of statements from meta-statements merely requires a decision. One decides before everything else to safeguard the possibility of the true. This is what Bertrand Russell says unambiguously when he endeavors to refute the liar’s paradox.[note]Cf. chapter VII of Bertrand Russell, My Philosophical Development, London: George Allen & Unwin (1959).[/note] Cicero relates this paradox in the following way: If you are saying that you are lying and you tell the truth, then you are lying.[note]Cicero, Academica, II.[/note] This statement thrusts us into undecidability: if you are lying when you say that you are lying, well, then you are telling the truth; but if you are telling the truth although you say that you are lying, then you are lying… Russell wants to stop the perplexity by declaring that “you are lying” is a statement of type 1 and “you are saying (true or false) that…” is a statement of type 2. The paralogism consists in including the second statement in the set of the first.

The goal toward which the labor of the logician strives is to safeguard metalanguage (which is understood as language that establishes the truth-values for a set of statements). This is also the goal of the Centre, except that the latter in turn intends to authorize the type 2 status of its statements by deriving it from an authority of superior status, for example the opinion of the majority (or something similar). By all means, this is not less paradoxical than the liar’s paradox, since this majoritarian opinion consists of type 1 statements.[note]It will be given afterwards elsewhere.[/note]

Even without insisting on this circulus, this little circle, it remains that in the wake of Russell’s reflection, a decision must be taken to disjoin statements 1 and 2 if we want the truth-value of whichever statement to be decidable. The liar’s paradox indeed mocks one’s ability or inability to say of a statement that it is true or false; furthermore, it constitutes a little dispositif such that this decision cannot be taken and thus where no authority can be established or halted that resorts to metalanguage. It thus inspires a completely different “logic” wherein there would be no metalanguage, not because it would be forever hidden (as in a certain (Judaic) religion or in a certain (Lacanian) version of the unconscious), but because falsehood and veracity are indiscernible. Any statement with metalinguistic pretention is potentially capable of belonging to the set of statements that constitute its reference. But no one knows when… On occasion, the class of all classes is part of the latter.

If one now directly and abruptly transposes this latter proposition into the socioeconomic domain, it implies that no social “class” has authority or calling to make use of metalanguage, or it implies that every “class” does: no one knows when the master is lying and when he tells the truth. And social class must be understood as every set of individuals defined by a bundle of distinctive traits: housewives, proprietors of capital, Bretons, left-handers, vegetarians, college graduates… Thus, one can see how the logic revealed by the decadence of the true here encounters the politics of minorities about which we spoke earlier: politics without master, logic without metalanguage. But enough of this for the moment.

Minorities as perspective

On the decadence of unity, the second trait revealed by Nietzsche, which we are here taking in its political sense — it has been said that capitalism invented the nation. It certainly is a question of a historical shortcut; nevertheless, it can be acknowledged that the bourgeoisie have if not produced then at least imposed (under the name of the nation) a sort of meta-set of various populations whose unity was connoted economically, politically, and sometimes religiously and culturally. We are in the last quarter of the 20th century, and it seems that an apparently inverse movement is being put in motion. This is a decadence-movement of national unity that tends to bring forth multiplicities, and these multiplicities are far from merely being what they were before the formation of national unities. This movement can seem like the adversary of capitalism, but it belongs to the decadence of values, which is contemporaneous with it. Nietzsche says: why have we become incredulous and mistrustful? Because we have taught veracity and because we have turned the requirement back against the speech that would be taken for veracity itself, i.e. revealed speech. It can also be said: why are national minorities rising up in modern countries? Because we have taught the minority that they were taken as placeholders of the nation. Nations are born in the breakup of the space of Empire; but this breakup has formed many empires; for the provinces of today, the national capital is what Rome was for the provinces of yesteryear. On the scale of mainland France, the royal masters or the republicans of Paris have not been and are not less imperialist in regard to the provinces than Rome was to its own or its allies. The language maintained by Paris is suspicious, detested. Centralism is put into question, along with the sociopolitical (and economic) space that is proper to it, including its Euclidean traits: the isomorphism of all its regions, the neutrality of all its directions, and the commutability of all its figures according to the laws of transformation were already present in the Greek ideal and in the Jacobin idea of citizenship.

What is outlined is a group (to be defined) of heterogeneous spaces, a great patchwork of fully minoritarian singularities; broken is the mirror in which they are supposed to recognize their unity by means of the national image — decadence of the mise en scène of the spectacular production that was the political. Europe takes it down a notch in the definition of elementary political groups: whereas the masters tried to unify it from on high, the little people reconstructed its apportionment from below.

This is of the utmost importance. Not that it is fitting to attain from this the promise of a happiness, of an equality… For example, there is already something like this in American sociocultural space, yet the coexistence of a large number of minorities is not quite Edenic there. In the wake of the decadence of unity, a problem is posed that was already posed by politicians (by the communists in particular) but is now posed in the most secret and yet most prominent affects of peoples: either the upkeep of the Centre, of some phraseology that is political (union of republics, of States, federation, republic, empire…) or socioeconomic (liberalism, socialism) and with which the masters’ function is equipped; or the breakup into minorities, whose responsibilities are to incessantly establish and reestablish modūs vivendi among them. The decadence of the Centre goes hand in hand with the decline of the idea of Empire. In this context, there is more to find on the side of the thinkers of multiplicities (like Thucydides and Machiavelli) than on the sides of the centralists of every allegiance.

Let’s add two more observations on this point. First, the movement of breakup involves not just nations but also societies; the appearance of new elementary groups that were not recorded on the Official Register: women, homosexuals, divorcés, prostitutes, expropriés[note][This term refers to those who have been subjected to the compulsory purchase of property due to eminent domain — TN].[/note], immigrants…; the multiplication of categories goes hand in hand with the weighing-down and complication of central bureaucracy, but also the tendency to regulate its affairs itself without passing through the authorized intermediary of the Centre or by short-circuiting it cynically (as in the taking of hostages).

And secondly, in relation to this process of multiplication, the existing political organizations seem completely engaged in the other direction. They fully belong to the masters’ reassuring, representative, exclusivist space. They largely contribute to the procrastination of the Centre’s decadence. The “politics” of minorities demands their decline.

Opportunity as perspective

A short note on the decadence of finality. The years 1850-1950 flourished with eschatological discourses, some on the liberal, planist, fascist, Nazi side and some on the socialist, Bolshevik, communist side. These are intense, bloody oppositions, but they are in the same field of a temporality oriented by the more or less compatible values of happiness, freedom, grandeur, security, prosperity, justice, equality. In short, the field shared by these finalisms is the one that Augustine circumscribes: The City of God contains both the theme of the accumulation of experiences — which is taken up again in a laicized form in the discourse of liberalism — and the theme of the reversal of hierarchies — which will provide their resource to revolutionary movements. Both of these themes are articulated in a teleology. The great opposition of continuous time and discontinuous time, which sparked quite a few intense discussions in the German socialist movement of the 1880s and afterwards or gave rise to Lenin’s break with the Bolshevik direction in April 1917, stems from the same approach to temporality.

However, all of this remains lively in liberal discourse as well as in discourse on the left; all of this remains capable of gathering together the accumulated forces of malaise and discontent in the little people and of the will to more power in the bigwigs. It shouldn’t be said that all of this is finished or will finish, which would be a new eschatology. But the decadence of ends penetrates this liveliness itself, which consists in the reduction of their capacity to “put in perspective”. The finalism on the left, which is the only one that interests us (for right or wrong), can indeed speak out and now gain a non-negligible number of votes, such that no one lives according to its values and such that no one is in a state of sacrificing himself — as it is said according to Jesus in Matthew XIX, 16-30 — and his real-life acquisitions, even in a particular “grand occasion”…with the exception of the politicians. The decadence of the idea of revolution can be compared (this isn’t saying anything new) to that of the idea of the Last Judgment in the beginnings of Christianity: the managers of the ecclesiastical empire replace the ever-absent kingdom of Jesus. Alas, they are neither traitors nor imposters, they are instead exemplary! Their force is due to the fact that they maintain a perspective that saves Western humanity from falling into nihilism. The Church (= the Party), or nothing (= nothingness, interminable evil).

What politicians (privately) disparage as the apathy of the masses, as the decrease in combativeness, as alienation, is something completely different. It is an intense discordance, even if it is sometimes imperceptible, between the so-called political perspective and another barely defined perspective; and this discordance does not pass between the leaders and the people on the ground, but it suffuses everyone. It well and truly bears on temporality. The political voice says, await, hope, endeavor, prepare, organize; and the other voice says, seize the proper moment, the future is, potentially and not necessarily, in the moment and not tomorrow, no voluntarism, do what presents itself as to be done, listen to what desire asks and do it. Thus, no eschatological historicization, but oppositely, no more ethics of the fulfillment of desires or theology of jouissance (which are the simple reversals of classical asceticism and in the same field). Opportunity, what the Tragedians and Gorgias called kairos.

Nothing is more realist than this other perspective, contrary to what is said to disparage it. Many struggles that arose in endeavors or elsewhere — for several years, perhaps since time immemorial — have resorted to this perspective, alongside others. It is in the eschatological perspective that one claims to oppose such an initiative — which was previously taken as imaginary, unrealistic, irresponsible — to an alleged final reality in the last analysis. It therefore matters little that politicians launch these invectives. After a century of their practice, the present state of things provides the measure of their realism.

An effectiveness without third-party

Back to the Red Army Faction . What is the nature of the expected effectiveness of its actions? The problem does not lack an analogy with the one posed by scientific efficiency. The objection raised against the new perspective[note]We are referring only to what is formulated by thinkers open or inclined to the aforementioned perspective: Pierre Gaudibert, l’Ordre moral, Grasset, 1973, pp. 141-152; Mikel Dufrenne, Art et politique, U.G.E., 10/18, 1974, chapter VII.[/note] is to neglect effectiveness. You will not unsettle the system if you do not coordinate your actions, if you do not explain the scope of your actions. Without this, these are merely tiny libidinal self-indulgences within little unproductive minorities that will not convey the slightest (we won’t even say attack but) offense against the system.

Let’s not discuss this at the moment but instead observe the following: that in a movement as extreme as the RAF, the value of effectiveness is in full decadence, and that the latter doesn’t quite consist (as our objectors seem to believe) in negligence for effects, but in a sort of double movement: the attention on effects is split along two perspectives. There are two sorts of effects which are sometimes not distinguished, and so here as well we will have to choose.

Dufrenne cites certain passages of Marcuse[note]Herbert Marcuse, Counterrevolution and Revolt, Boston: Beacon Press, 1972.[/note], of which he disapproves without ever disavowing, where effectiveness is overtly subordinated to pedagogy, thus conforming with the tradition of old. However, in the dossier of the Baader-Meinhof trial, there are traces of this classical attitude. To a question asked by one of Der Spiegel‘s journalists, “Don’t you see that no one is taking to the streets for you? Don’t you see that when you started setting off bombs, no one is speaking out on your behalf?”[note] Baader-Meinhof, op. Cit., p. 241.[/note], the member of the RAF responds by citing polls from 1972 and 1973 that claim to show support for the group with the German public and thus tend to prove that if the group has not convinced, it has at least succeeded in gaining the sympathy of an important part of the population: an indispensable moment in the pedagogical process.

Or, in the leaflet of 2 February 1975 ordering prisoners to stop their hunger strike, it reads, “The class struggles are not sufficiently developed due to the corruption of the organizations of the proletariat class and a weak revolutionary left […]. The possibilities of the lawful left […] have not been sufficiently developed […]. We declare that the strike has accomplished just about what could be done here to explain, mobilize, and organize anti-imperialist politics, its escalation has not been perceived as a new quality of struggle.”[note] Ibid., pp. 213-214.[/note]

The effectiveness required here is that of pedagogy: to make the principle of rationality, the Platonic logikon, rise up in the soul of children, the masses. Thus, there are three poles in this strategic field: we, the RAF; them, the imperialist apparatus; you, the students, the masses. We are effective each time you understand. But who will judge whether you understand? This will be when you will come to agree with us, i.e. if you speak according to our language and act according to our ethics. Thus, we shall judge, just like Socrates judges the moment when Meno is rational and when he is not. (In any case, we specify that our description does not at all imply that it would be necessary to continue the hunger strike at all costs…).

But a totally different effectiveness is sought and sometimes obtained by the same group. For example: in Heidelberg, when it destroys the American army’s computer, which, among other things, programmed the bombings in North Vietnam, it doesn’t say: the masses will understand, but: this is potentially an accomplishment against the imperialist adversary, one that is not merely a military accomplishment but a moral one, too.[note] Baader-Meinhof, p. 239.[/note] This is everything. Here, this is a strategy without third-party (moreover, a false third-party, since one of the parties, Socrates, is also the judge): just the RAF and the American army. The anticipated effect is not the awakening of the logikon of the masses but the disorganization (albeit provisional) of the enemy. There’s no demonstration. And this is indeed what the group writes: “We conclude that the revolutionary subject is everyone who is freed from these constraints of the system and refuses participation in the crimes of the system. Those who find their political identity in the struggles of the liberation of the peoples of the Third World, those who refuse, who no longer toe the line, are all a revolutionary subject, a comrade”.[note]Waging the anti-imperialist struggle, constructing the Red Army [Mener la lutte anti-imperialiste, construire l’armée rouge], leaflet of the RAF, 1972, cited by Viktor Kleinkrieg (great name!), op. cit., p. 33 (passage emphasized in the text). [Kleinkrieg in German literally means “little war” — TN].[/note]

This is how the disappearance of the third-party, of the child as potential reasonable subject, of the proletariat as potential revolutionary subject, is described. And an immediate implication of this disappearance is found in the responses to Der Spiegel, in the statement of principle a propos of the penitentiary regime: “Every political prisoner who understands his situation politically and who organizes the solidarity and struggle of prisoners is a political prisoner, whatever the reason for their imprisonment may be”.[note] Op. cit., p. 219.[/note] This is a perspective that emerges in the old words. Let’s imagine that such was the course of the German (and other) communists in the Nazi camps, instead of that of saving the apparatus at all costs, the one David Rousset describes…

Thus, what effectiveness? We are not defending the military strategy of the RAF here; we instead would think that the extremism of its actions, in its very hopelessness and by inversion, remains subordinate to the classical model of educative political action. And this is no doubt why in matters of effectiveness the procrastination of decadence appears in this apparently borderline case.

The elimination of the educable third-party belongs to the new perspective, along with the elimination of finality, truth, and unity; and its upkeep belongs to the old perspective in which we are also immersed. In the first case, there is no body to be organized and reorganized, but harassments. And here it would be necessary to show 1) that there are other types of harassments than bombings and 2) in what harassment consists. It could be shown that there is also something like a retaliation, the ruse or machination by which the little people, the “weak”, become momentarily stronger than the strongest. To make a weapon out of illness, said the Socialist Collective of the Heidelberg patients. And the Convention against the Torture of political prisoners in the German Federal Republic: “Become aware of this material force that is weakness transformed into force”.

These retaliations belong to a logic that is a logic of first-generation sophists and rhetoricians, not of the logician, to a time of opportunities, not of the clock of world history, to a space of minorities, without center.  va-tombstone1-03

This essay was translated for Vast Abrupt by Taylor Adkins. Other translations by Adkins can be found at Speculative Heresy and Fractal Ontology. Adkins is also the host, with Joseph Weissman, of the philosophy podcast Theory Talk. You can support Theory Talk and their continued good work through Patreon.


Synthetic Fabrication: The Myth of the Politics-to-Come (Part 0: Introduction)

by Edmund Berger

Missing

The Millennium is ten years out, but for Baudrillard it might as well have already happened. The eclipsing of the communists’ historical dream by globalized flows of floating capital and information ushered in a cold, glacial stasis: the enveloping of any sense of forward momentum by the simulation of what had once been real events. As ubiquitous media begins to seep down to every crack and crevice and the whirlwind fades into the sensation of an odd vertigo, the only question Baudrillard finds himself capable of asking is this: “What do we do now that the orgy is over?”

This orgy is the apex of modernity rendered as the endpoint of a dynamic process — “the moment when modernity exploded upon us, the moment of liberation in every sphere.”[note]Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena (London: Verso Books, 1990), 3.[/note] To be after the orgy is to be caught in a situation in which there is nothing left to do, because everything that has been sought has been obtained. There is no euphoria to be found here, only terminal freeze-out. “Now all we can do is simulate the orgy, simulate liberation.”

A similar feeling haunts the pages of Deleuze and Guattari’s final joint-work, What is Philosophy, written in what Guattari described as “the winter years”. Without rising to a Baudrillardian hysteria at the sight of information technology, the two decried the universalization of communication that was occurring in their moment. “We do not lack communication”, they wrote. “On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present.”[note]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 108.[/note] For Baudrillard, such a resistance is all but impossible: the arrival of the simulated end of history instantly liquidates any capacity for movement within it. Deleuze and Guattari, by contrast, find in the inauguration of this new time the capacity “for a future form, for a new earth and people that do not yet exist”.[note]Ibid.[/note]

By making such a suggestion, a series of questions is posed: who are these people, how do they arise, and what do they do? The answer is, as always, far more complicated than the questions themselves, and can be found in the strange and unclear relationship between, on the one hand, the development of techno-economic forces, and on the other the generation of the political myth. Such are the building blocks of a synthetic politics, a recombinant form of political subjectivity and structural framing indicative of the realization of the untimely.

It can be said that the myth follows in the wake of techno-economic development. Although the orgy might not be over for Deleuze and Guattari, the irreversible supremacy of a globalized megamachine is a concern that can be tracked across their whole output, particularly in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia. In Anti-Oedipus, capitalism is treated as an end-point, an “apparently victorious” system that reassembles everything that has existed.[note]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 139.[/note] In a more esoteric register, the infamous ‘accelerationist passage’ hints at this as well by invoking Nietzsche’s affirmation of the levelling process driven by the development of society into a vast industrial clockwork, while in A Thousand Plateaus the spread of capitalism is recast in terms of a war machine that overtakes the world’s nation states and subordinates them to itself.[note]In a fragment from 1887, Nietzsche writes that “Once we possess common economic management of the earth that will soon be inevitable, mankind will be able to find its best meaning as a machine in service of this economy — as a tremendous clockwork, composed of ever smaller, ever more subtly ‘adapted’ gears…”. The incorporation of the human into the machine is described as a “dwarfing and adaptation”; in what we may call the ‘accelerationist fragment’, due to its enigmatic invocation in Anti-Oedipus, this dwarfing is rendered as a “homogenizing of European man” that “should not be obstructed”, but sped up. See Friedrich Nietzsche The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 463, 477-478.[/note]

The dynamics found in Nietzsche’s account and Deleuze and Guattari’s own are one and the same. The former’s affirmation of industrial levelling arises from the anticipation of a mysterious ‘new type’ of person, a “strong of the future” that will emerge from this process. For the latter, the victory of capitalism — or the war machine — provides the fertile soil from which new, mutant formations will grow:

We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible local wars as part of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the “unspecified enemy’… Yet the very conditions that make the State or World war machine possible, in other words, constant capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital, continually recreate the unexpected possibilities for counterattack, unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines.[note]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi[/note]

Nietzsche’s Strong of the Future and the “revolutionary, popular, minority, mutant machines” spoken of here appear throughout Deleuze’s work — both with and without Guattari — as the “people who are missing”, a “people to come”. If capitalism comes at the end, the prophetic fulfillment of these people coming to pass does not denote the actualization of a new historical plateau, but a movement that breaks outside of history, that uses global, integrated capitalism as the raw materials for new formations. Deleuze and Guattari’s portrait of capitalism is one of a metasystem that operates through a kind of double-bind, or a machine that carries out a reciprocal process of stratification and destratification on either side of itself. It unleashes radical energies in the volleys of a deterritorialization that is only relative, as it becomes subjected to a subsequent and compensatory reterritorialization. The people to come, however, stake out a position on the path of absolute deterritorialization, and thus find themselves in remarkable affinity with the primary process lurking below and beyond all other secondary processes.

It is unsurprising, then, that Deleuze pulls the motif of the missing, futural people from the work of the modernist avant-garde, themselves a reflection of the irresistible tug of techno-economic development that began accelerating into escape velocity in the wake of the industrial revolution. They appear in Mallarmé’s lamentations that there is not yet a people ready for his Livre (“The Book”), an ambitious work-to-be that would serve as a ‘pure work’ capable of encompassing “all existing relations between everything”. Traces of their presence can be glimpsed again in the writings of Franz Kafka, who for Deleuze and Guattari articulated a political program for a people with neither history nor voice, a people who are themselves missing. “The literary machine… becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come, not at all for ideological reasons but because the literary machine alone is determined to fill the collective enunciation that is lacking elsewhere in this milieu: literature is the people’s concern.”[note]Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, trans. Dana Polan (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 17-18.[/note] And finally, they arise in Paul Klee’s On Modern Art, which directly parallels Mallarmé’s disjunction between total art and a potential people that enter into relations with it:

Sometimes I dream of a work of really great breadth, ranging through the whole region of element, object, meaning, and style.
This, I fear, will remain a dream, but it is a good thing that even now to bear the possibility occasionally in mind.
Nothing can be rushed. It must grow, it should grow of itself, and if the time ever comes for that work — then so much the better!
We must go on seeking it!
We have found parts, but not the whole!
We still lack the ultimate power, for:
the people are not with us.[note]Paul Klee, On Modern Art (London: Faber and Faber, 1948), 54-55.[/note]

One might add to this trinity Artaud’s litany of  ‘mad artists’ and transgressive voyagers (amongst which he, of course, counted himself), Rimbaud’s delirious self-identification with a pantheon of eternally ‘inferior races’, and even particular variants of the modernist trope of the New Man, especially when invoked to describe the rootless, vagabond populations who abandon their home territories for new horizons and intensities. Such people and groups help compose the minoritarian population of  Toynbee’s “society without a history”, his term for the mobile, nomadic populations who strive to evade, yet often undergo capture and subordination by, the State.[note]Arnold Toynbee, A Study of History: Abridgment of Volume I–VI (London: Oxford University Press, 1946), 169; quoted in Christian Kerslake, “Becoming Against History: Deleuze, Toynbee, and Vitalist Historiography”, Parrhesia, No. 4 (2008), 17. https://www.parrhesiajournal.org/parrhesia04/parrhesia04_kerslake.pdf. [/note] If history aligns with the State and its memory-order, then the nomads and minoritarians find themselves swept up in the turbulent flux of becoming, passing from the State’s homeostatic order to creative disequilibrium predicated on an anti-memory.

It is clear that art plays an essential role in this forgetting. “Memory plays a small part in art… It is not memory that is needed but a complex material that is not found in memory but in words and sounds: ‘Memory, I hate you’”.[note]Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 168.[/note] Memory is a matter of organization, the cumulative order of the past laying claim to the present. Art, by contrast, is a matter of disassembly and recombination: it takes the orders of historical memory and cuts them up, rearranging them into hybridized, bastard bodies: such is the birth of new, mutant forms. By doing so the concerns of art (modern art, in particular) are not with the impact of the past on the present, but with prying open the present to the future in a way that profoundly transforms the present. This movement is what is at stake in the formation of a people who have not yet existed.

The Powers of the False

The lengthiest treatment of the people to come is found in Deleuze’s exploration of the connection between the advent of the untimely and modernist art in Cinema 2: The Time Image. His primary concern here is with what he calls the powers of the false; while film is the primary mechanism through which he explores this concept, it is applicable to all forms of art that are based on the production of the new. The increased artificialization that had so frightened Baudrillard takes front and center: it is not only that art produces something false, but it emerges from a reality that is itself increasingly falsified. In this eclipsing of the world there occurs a “raising [of] the false to power” which allows “life [to free] itself of appearances as well as truth”.[note]Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time Image (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989),145.[/note] What is being described here is precisely the Nietzschean levelling process, the pulverization of the dominant orders of representation that leaves in its wake only forces in movement. And while truth might be an impossibility, Deleuze writes, this moment is imbued with the explosive energy of modernity, precisely as captured by the various artists and denizens of the avant-garde. It is this figure, the artist-as-creator, that moves to the fore:

Only the creative artist takes the power of the false to a degree which is realized, not in form, but in transformation. There is no longer truth or appearance… What the artists is, is creator of truth, because truth is not to be achieved, formed, or reproduced; it is to be created. There is no truth other than the creation of the New: creativity, emergence, what Melville called ‘shape’ in contrast to form. Art is the continual production of shapes, reliefs, projections.[note]Ibid.,147.[/note]

Deleuze’s point of reference (one that he shares, in fact, with Baudrillard) is a short chapter in Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols entitled “How the ‘True World’ Finally Became Fiction: History of an Error”.[note]Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols: Or, How to Philosophize with the Hammer, trans. Richard Polt (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1997), 23-24.[/note] Lasting no longer than a page, this chapter provides a history running from the time of the Greeks up through modernity, noting a passage that runs through the rise of Christianity and its subsequent unsettling by the forces of scientific reason. The essential thing to grasp in this history, Nietzsche suggests, is the subsumption of the ‘true world’ by the mythic, configured here as fiction or fable. In the beginning, the true world was “attainable for the wise, the devout, the virtuous”, who are themselves living within it. With Christianity, however, the true world becomes mystified and no longer attainable in this life. It is the promise made to the wise, devout, and virtuous. But this marks no end in its progression: the mystification continues, and the promise of the true world cannot be fulfilled because it has become unprovable, as the philosophy of Kant illustrates.

At the “first yawnings of reason” and the “[r]ooster’s crow of positivism” the true world appears unattainable, and thus, in a subsequent turn, becomes “an idea with no use anymore”. There is no longer necessity nor capacity for such an idea; even if people may still tread the old paths out of habit, it is threatened with ejection outright. This is precisely what comes to pass in the final stage, which for Nietzsche marks the “high point of humanity”, and is nothing short of the overcoming of the human by the overman and the transvaluation of all existing values. The point at which Kant arrives, when the true world becomes unprovable, is the Death of God. It follows, then, that the completion of this process in its final stage is the Death of Man.[note]Deleuze writes that “[w]e distort Nietzsche when we make him into the thinker who wrote about the death of God. It is Feuerbach who is the last thinker of the death of God: he shows that since God has never been anything but the unfold of man, man must fold and refold God.” Man as such cannot properly exist until God is dead, but as soon as God is rendered as dead, man will be tending towards death right at this moment of his birth. “…where can man find a guarantee of identity in the absence of God?” See Gilles Deleuze, Foucault, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press: 1989),[/note] “We have done away with the true world,” Nietzsche writes, before asking “what world is left over? The apparent one, maybe… But no! Along with the true world, we have done away with the apparent!”[note]Nietzsche, Twilight of Idols, 24.[/note]

In his essay “Nietzsche, Polytheism, and Parody”, Klossowski describes how the “refabulation of the world” found in Twilight of the Idols works in conjunction with the eternal return.[note]Pierre Klossowski, Such a Deathly Desire (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007), 103.[/note] For Klossowski, the process being indexed by Nietzsche is nothing short of an “ontological catastrophe” in which the One is overturned and dissolved in the writhing sea of the Many. No longer held in place by the transcendent law of God — and his emissary, Man — identity explodes outwards and into a kaleidoscopic delirium as it detaches from the stratification of memory (such is the infernal logic of the time-schizzed utterance “I am all the names in history”). Klossowski suggests that this also entails the formation of new religions: “the eternal return of all things also wills the return of the gods”.[note]Ibid., 121.[/note] The becoming-fable of the world, in other words, charts an exit or egress from historical time into a new mythic time.

Deleuze tracks this line into the political by finding in the artist the one who leverages the powers of the false — understood here in conjunction with the mythic age of the untimely — to call forth new forms. There is nothing in these powers that makes them inherently future-facing and transformative, much less politically radical; they can lead to disaster and the suppression of the truly new just as easily as they can to something liberatory. In the case of disaster, Deleuze himself seems to find this to be the far more likely outcome: “There is only a slim chance, so great is the capacity of nihilism to overcome it, for exhausted life to get control of the New from its birth, and for completed forms to ossify metamorphosis and to reconstitute models and copies. The power of the false is delicate, allowing itself to be recaptured by frogs and scorpions.”[note]Deleuze, Cinema 2, 147.[/note] Nonetheless, “[w]hat Nietzsche had shown [was] that the ideal of the true was the most profound fiction”. When the people to come are forecast by the avant-garde, it is precisely this principle that is being invoked.

Legending

The chief example Deleuze provides for this process is Pierre Perrault’s 1963 film Pour la suite du monde. A native of Quebec, Perrault’s starting point was the recognition that his country and society was colonized and overcoded by the legacy of the French empire. Even speech was coded by the dictates of “correct French”, itself a reflection of an age of monarchism and centralization of power. Quebec, in other words, was an ostensibly independent political, social, and cultural territory that nonetheless was caught in the pincers of a master that had passed into something else. Perrault’s goal was the transformation of this situation, one that would entail the movement of the Quebecois people as an inferior people into a liberated people. Pour la suite du monde pushes back against the linguistic coding of high French by deploying localized dialects, and in place of European traditions, an older communal heritage is revived.

Perrault’s goal, however, was not simply to swap the domination by the historical memory of the French empire with a resuscitated domestic traditionalism. The feedback between his artistic experimentation, the weight of history, and his real collaborators was intended to spark a process of becoming that would lead to the emergence of something authentically new and experimental. By calling upon the powers of the false to work through the questions of identity and political activity, Perrault was playing a game with myths — and yet he “[did] not want to give birth yet again to myths”, as he later wrote.[note]Pierre Perrault, “Cinema du reel et cinema du fiction: vraie ou fausse distinction? Dialogue et Pierre Perrault et Rene Allio”, in Ecritures de Pierre Perrault: Actes du colloque “gens de paroles” (Quebec, 1983), 54; quoted in Ronald Bogue, Deleuze’s Way: Essays in Transverse Ethics and Aesthetics (Hampshire: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2007), 100.[/note] Instead, passing through this process aimed “to allow people to give birth to themselves, to avoid myths, to escape customs, to elude Writings. I would like people to write themselves while liberating themselves from Writing.”

This process was called “legending” by Perrault. For Deleuze it is “fabulation”, the creation and transmission of stories or fables. His use of the concept has not, aside from the excellent writings of Ronald Bogue,[note]See Ibid., as well as Ronald Bogue, Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History, (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010).[/note] received much attention in the annals of Deleuze studies; the more prevalent notion of fabulation is the one provided by the late literary theorist Robert Scholes, who described it as an “emphasis on the art of the designer.”[note]Robert Scholes, Fabulation and Metafiction, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 197), 3.[/note] This fabulation is one interested in style and the way it operates, particularly in certain strains of postmodernism — namely, metamodernism — that turns away from strict realism to blend actual life with the magical or fantastic in order to destabilize the narrative form and turn it towards an open horizon. While Deleuze’s fabulation bears some superficial resemblances with that of Scholes (both critique the orders of representation and look towards a shift away from old modes), the stakes are much higher in the former than the latter. In an essay on T.E. Lawrence titled “The Shame and the Glory”, Deleuze describes a “fabulation machine” that produces an image that “has a life of its own”, continually growing from an initial projection of forms of life onto reality. It is “always stitched together”, a patchwork image that serves as a “machine for manufacturing giants.”[note]Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, (London: Verso Books, 1998), 118.[/note]

The fabulation of Scholes is a celebration of the designer or artist. In Deleuze’s work, the designer or artist are themselves designed in an open-ended process. Despite being creators, they are also conduits through which something flows and sets off cascading phase-shifts in the real. He finds T.E. Lawrence emblematic in this regard: here was a person — a British military officer, no less! — who had to position himself among the subjected people and let their struggles wash over him, allowing him to become part of that war machine, before he can find the ability to write. And when he writes, it resonates with an incomplete transformation that traces of flux of becoming. Lawerence’s work is not a self-serving tale of British adventurism, but a mythic exploration of a revolutionary group subjectivity that has cut straight through his own center: “Lawrence speaks Arabic, he dresses and lives like an Arab, even under torture he cries out in Arabic, but he does not imitate the Arabs, he never renounces his difference, which he already experiences as a betrayal… Lawrence’s undertaking is a cold and concerted destruction of the ego, carried to its limit. Every mine he plants also explodes within himself, he is himself the bomb he detonates.”[note]Ibid,. 117.[/note]

Lawerence is thus like the enigmatic figure of the far-seer described in A Thousand Plateaus. Far-seers may begin as “collaborators with the most rigid and cruelest project of control”, in a manner akin to Lawrence’s initial deployment as a representative of British imperial interests. Similar to Perrault’s own flight from French imperialism, Lawrence exits the coding of the British empire to join up with the Arab revolutionary machine — just as the far-seer “will abandon his or her segment and start walking across a narrow overpass above the dark abyss”.[note]Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 202.[/note] As Bogue points out, Deleuze would later describe Foucault as a seer and clairvoyant due to his unique ability to sift through the murky byways of history in order to turn it back against itself, to use history “for something else: as Nietzsche said, to act against the times… in favor, I hope, of a time to come.”[note]Bogue, Deleuze’s Way, 105.[/note] This description resonates in kind with Perrault’s experimentation with a suppressed history in order to allow people to ‘write themselves’, as well as Lawrence’s betrayal of his own history by embracing in part the nomadic past of the Arabic people.

Such are the stakes for fabulation, a hallucinatory process of simultaneous unveiling and falsification that is the “function proper to art”. This picture is, however, quite incomplete (for our purposes here, at least). To reiterate an earlier point, the artist or designer is not the principal actor in this process; they are neither Prometheus nor vanguard. They are but a temporal conduit through which history and social subjection flow into becoming, mixing into an emergent bricolage. Fabulation itself seems to come from elsewhere. Indeed, the relationship between the artist and the invention of a people is directly tied to the war machine’s capacity for counter-attack being contingent on the full development of capitalist production: art, Deleuze and Guattari write in Anti-Oedipus, joins with science as forces that ‘fall out’ from, or get pushed into overdrive by, the advances in capitalist deterritorialization. This not only foreshadows the theory advanced in What Is Philosophy (that philosophy, entering into a circuit with science and art to create the new, is capable of going beyond capitalism), but calls back to Klossowski’s exegesis on Nietzsche, wherein art and science are essential components in a ‘conspiracy’ that entails the levelling of society through industrial development (a topic that will soon be treated here).

It follows, then, that there is a distinctive relationship between fabulation and capitalism. Before unpacking this, however, it is important to trace out Deleuze’s conceptual source for this process. This would be the writings of Henri Bergson, particularly his 1932 book The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. It is here that the full dimensions of fabulation can be understood: not simply an emergent process that occurs on occasion, but a structure that underpins political reality itself. It is also worthwhile to track the influence of Bergson’s philosophy on Georges Sorel who, while not a figure that Deleuze draws upon, offers a striking account of the relationship between myth, politics, and capitalist development that can shed light on the ultimate implications of Deleuze’s theory. The task of constructing such a genealogy will proceed in Part 1 of the present essay.

Atomization and Liberation

by Justin Murphy

Abstract. The problem with human atomization — the accelerating tendency of traditional social aggregates to disintegrate — is only that the process remains arrested at the level of the individual. The modern political Left, as an intrinsically aggregative tendency, bemoans individualism but functions as a machine for conserving it against already active forces that would otherwise disintegrate it. One of the only empirically mature pathways to collective liberation is through human atomization becoming autonomous: accepting the absolute foreclosure of anthropolitical agency is a causal trigger activating novel, dividuated, affective capacities, which become capable of recomposing as intensive, nonlinear, collective excitations (Cyberpositive AI-aligned Communism, or the CAIC protocol).

Modernity can be thought of as a process of atomization, arguably initiated by the Protestant Reformation.[note]Land, Nick. “The Atomization Trap.” Jacobite, June 6, 2017. https://jacobitemag.com/2017/06/06/atomization/.[/note] Today, atomization is something that almost everyone protests (on the left and right), but protest itself is an atomization dynamic, automatically reproducing the mold of Protestant schismatics. In our sincerely felt repulsion to atomization, we instantiate a distance between ourselves and this supposedly external alienating phenomenon, the cause of which is imputed to something or someone else, somewhere else. This helps to explain other puzzling phenomena, such as “community-building” political activists, the attitudes and behaviors of whom are maximally inhospitable to most people everywhere. No matter how hard such groups sincerely want and try to connect with “the masses”, they continue to repulse the masses more and more, because their interest in building a commons is predicated on opposition to the only, last thing that humans today generally have in common: atomization.

The currently dominant tendency in debates about the acceleration of capitalism is to see such critiques of the modern left-activist project as implicitly aligned with right-wing implications. But coming to see the deep complicity between leftism and everything most abhorrent about modernity is an ideologically under-determined realization. If the history of left politics thus far has been a fever dream of capitalism itself, updating one’s mental model accordingly is not a defection to the right but entrance onto a different virtual plane, at once drastically more modest but somehow, also, more vast. What is called accelerationism triggers the mental space in which it becomes possible to answer the following question with a new degree of impartiality: what exactly is the object of one’s political desire anyway, after the questioning subject extricates itself from the history of strategic dissimulations it has undertaken to survive the competitive constraints of reality? This question is a heuristic for continuing a collective rush toward liberation after the final, irredeemable implosion of modernity’s ideological scaffolding, a translation of previous, primitive ideological investments into a research program for a cyber-positive, evolution-positive, AI-aligned lust for liberation beyond what is currently called politics.

Presumptive Aggregationism

It’s important to see how the classic modern ideological cleavages are separated not so much by strongly argued and differentiated empirical propositions but by different background imagery. These background images are never rigorously scrutinized propositions, but more like presumptions that sediment as the common ground of multiple intelligences communicating in multi-dimensional space. They emerge as necessary, organizing simplifications across a mass stratified social space (attuning large groups to different vocabularies and tendencies by elective affective affinities). Theoretical progress on questions of politics is gained today only by leveraging information-technological acceleration: the strategic-communicational necessity of investing in naïve molar presumptions in order to effect a large stratified social space no longer holds, so it is possible and hugely profitable (intellectually) to have done with all of the errors and deceptions that have always laid dormant in modern ideological thought. Communicating with high fidelity and objective rigor to two people in the smooth open space of cyberwar is exponentially more powerful than communicating to thousands of people at the cost of buying into a whole package of ancient logical and empirical errors.

The presumed historical progression in the left tradition, at least since Rousseau, is that human culture began in a state of relatively non-individuated, collective consistency with nature, before moving onto primitive capital accumulation via slavery and patriarchy, onward to the explosion of industrial modernity and beyond. Capitalism, modernity and enlightenment, and everything else generally associated with the rise of European white male dominance, produced the modern individual subject, predicated on a variety of crosscutting social categories (class, race, gender, etc.). From here, radical collective liberation or even just any type of progress is presumed to involve transition from individualism upward toward some kind of larger aggregate: the cadre, the activist group, the union, the sector, the class, the party, the Soviet, the factory, the social movement, the dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on — a whole bestiary of fantastic molar aggregates.

One of the most paralyzing problems for those who have sought to continue the search for collective liberation in the face of techonomic acceleration (what many people call “left accelerationism” or “l/acc” for short) is that, so far, they have been invariably pitched at aggregate social entities which do not in fact exist, at a time when in fact one of the primary political problems is that the contemporary form of atomized human life increasingly lacks the capacity to maintain even low-level aggregates (friendship, marriage, social clubs, etc., all marked by entropic trends since WWII).[note] On the U.S. case of generally declining civic involvement, see Putnam, Robert. Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000. On marriage in the U.S., see Pew Research Center. “The Decline of Marriage And Rise of New Families,” November 18, 2010. http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/files/2010/11/pew-social-trends-2010-families.pdf. On the decline of friendship and number of people with no confidants, also in the U.S., see McPherson, Miller, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and Matthew E. Brashears. “Social Isolation in America: Changes in Core Discussion Networks over Two Decades.” American Sociological Review 71, no. 3 (June 1, 2006): 353–75.[/note] The most obvious and widespread form of deceptive left discourse is any statement to the effect of: ‘the left should…’ because it presumes the existence of an aggregate body that in no meaningful way exists, other than as an apparatus interpolating a portion of the population with a particular complex of shared repetition compulsions. The most vexing problem for anyone who identifies with the left would appear to be the problem that ‘the left’ as a world-historical entity has gone extinct, but because of selection effects this problem receives no serious effort from left-interpolated subjects: in a world where ‘the left’ is objectively extinct, any remaining subjective leftism is best thought of as ‘consumer demand for the belief that the left still exists’. Capitalism’s devilish efficacy is that it fulfills this widespread consumer demand perfectly well. Many brands can still do quite well finding talented and good-spirited minds able and willing to say ‘the left’ is a currently existing entity that has potential to act. The right is perfectly happy for this belief to persist because no quantity or intensity of false beliefs can outsmart a system based on the manipulation of reality through intelligent exploitation.

Corresponding to the false belief in aggregates that do not effectively exist, the bête noire of modern leftism is the dreaded Individual. If effective aggregates appear not to exist, it is only taken as evidence that the inquirer is infected by Individualism. The modern leftist orientation to capitalism is, at its core, a game of three-card monte where signifiers are re-shuffled to perpetually defer logical-objective falsification. Belief in an untenably posited object is sustained by a new posited object, the only evidence for which is that it is presupposed to be the force that makes the first object appear non-existent. How to move from our current state of atomized individualism to an effective social aggregate capable of transforming capitalism? First, we are told, agree that atomizing individuals are bad. Second, insist at all cost that an effective social aggregate called ‘the left’ exists (it only needs to be enlarged in order to gain its power to act). Third, try to get others to transmit this set of beliefs until ‘the left’ is large enough to numerically overpower Capital.

A rarely mentioned but seminal citation for modern left activism is, therefore, Plato’s infamous Noble Lie or “magnificent myth” (γενναῖον ψεῦδος): in short, a Noble Lie is a false belief that “would save us, if we were persuaded by it.”[note]See Book 3, 415c–d in Plato. The Republic. Edited by G.R.F. Ferrari. Translated by Tom Griffith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. The quote is from 621b, regarding the Myth of Er.[/note] The activist privately knows that ‘the left’ is basically non-existent but believes it can be forged into existence by nobly telling enough people that it already exists. Activists admit all of this plainly, as they often speak of the need to generate hope in the masses; this is enough to justify the articulation of any particular idea, regardless of its truth or falsity. Only today has the deceptive core of modern leftism come into sincere self-consciousness. For instance, Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams argue rather explicitly that one of the tasks of ‘the left’ is to design more sophisticated lures capable of propelling atomized individuals into effective, collective motion.[note]Srnicek, Nick, and Alex Williams. Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. London: Verso, 2016. “Lures” is somewhat cheeky, but not unfair. They specifically suggest that we should deploy utopian imagination (e.g. seductive imagery orthogonal to objective possibility; lures) to trigger in people affects such as hope, in order to mobilize them. This is justified on politically realist grounds (such affects are “necessary to any political project”), just like the Noble Lie. “By generating and channeling these affects, utopian thinking can become a spur to action, a catalyst for change; it disrupts habits and breaks down consent to the existing order. Futural thinking, extended by communications mechanisms, generates collective affects of hope that mobilize people to act on behalf of a better future — affects that are necessary to any political project.”[/note] Of course, it is true that creative flights from the rational-objective map of the world, such as fictional story-telling, can generate objective political effects on the world, but it is something else entirely to offer a rational-objective map for social change including a plank involving the deployment of fictions to create hopes and desires in others, expressly in contradistinction to what is scientifically valid within rational, probabilistic frameworks.[note]“Whereas scientific approaches attempt to reduce discussions of the future to fit within a probabilistic framework, utopian thought recognizes that the future is radically open.”[/note] Now, creative beings who are possessed by visions can and should express those visions; such ‘fictions’ will indeed reshape reality, but primarily because those ‘fictions’ are in some sense reality operating through the body that expresses them. That is ‘hyperstition’: fiction that produces reality but because it is in some sense real, some of the evidence for which consists in the demonstrable objective effects it produces. But producing effects is not the only characteristic; the con artist produces real effects, for instance, but does not transform reality so much as twist it, in a way that always ultimately snaps back. Hyperstition is not a limitless capacity of social groups to produce new realities through shared enunciations. Hyperstitions only work to the degree they enter into feedback with an outside, issuing from contact with the chaos of objective reality and feeding into that objective reality. Effective hyperstitions are therefore creative truths, or real fictions, which are no less accountable to objective reality than scientific research. But rational-objective proposals to change ‘society’ (an outside of staggering complexity), by exploiting the hyperstitional nature of reality-circuitry, are nothing short of scams. They traffic in promises they cannot keep. Then they exhort others to promote the scam, to forever defer the admission of having been scammed. Srnicek and Williams perhaps represent a milestone in the modern left tradition, for it is as if they are, in some sense, coming clean: As if the last great hope of saving the modern left tradition is to admit that it’s based on trickery, but then share the source code and exhort the masses to use it. Unfortunately, an open-source con game is still a con game.

Aggregative leftist proposals could potentially change the world, but only if enough people trust in, and follow the dictates, of the proposers (e.g. some go off and make enough cool science fiction to constitute a new hegemony, engineers go off and make communist robotics, etc.) — but why should any of these actors trust the proposers’ claims that following this program will work to bring about a more desirable world? Ultimately the answer is: because that trust is necessary to make it work, so if you don’t trust it, you are guilty of being the cause of it not working. When the basic problem of contemporary capitalism is that we are all hyper-mistrusting atoms hell-bent on exploiting each other, a political project with this circular structure simply dodges the puzzle of irreversible atomization dynamics. Its degree of success is not measured by how well it brings about the better world (never) but by how adeptly it forestalls any ultimate reckoning with the puzzles it is essentially paid by capital to not address. A project with this structure cannot be operative for anyone other than the small number of already left-interpolated subjects, who are not themselves moved by this ‘vision’ so much as they are hopeful that it will move others (such as their apolitical friends, who are implicitly assumed to be dumber — enough to be moved by a lure which the already-initiated are not personally moved by because they know it is only a lure…).

Ultimately, the only effective force in a hyper-complex social system more intelligent than any one of its sub-entities is some type of novel engineering realization that allows some actually existing entity to manipulate actually existing entities with a non-trivial probabilistic effect on the whole, where the novelty of the realization provides a demonstrable edge over those other, competing entities with the interest and capacity to thwart the novel manipulations.

An exciting and inspiring ‘vision of the future’ may generate short-term interest and energy, but absent a genuine advancement in the engineering blueprint, producing ever more creative images of a hopeful future is, in fact, the most insidious, willfully perverse form of atomic hyper-exploitation conceivable. Srnicek and Williams should be applauded for becoming conscious of the fact that leftism is predicated on the fabrication of lures, which provides the genuine service of helping to close this entire, doomed trajectory. What would be willfully destructive would be to insist that this insight is an advancement of the engineering blueprint, so that if you believe in collective liberation you should promote the promotion of lures, and if one finds that this insight does not increase one’s powers to act then it’s only evidence that you’re an atomizing individualist! Collective liberation is not an emergent outcome of multi-level marketing schemes.

Atomic Liberation Pathways

If the upward, aggregative presumption of left-modernity is, as I have argued, a meme-commodity supplied by entrepreneurial Noble Liars, for profit, to a small portion of consumers whose demand is that reality be other than it is, then it stands to reason that the objective diagram of collective liberation for n atomized individuals suggests projects of subjective disaggregation and objective recomposition. You think you are one and you suffer because you are disconnected from others, but really you suffer because you are many — a primordial commune — that has been bribed by the future to speak and act as if it is one.

Certain currents in the history of theory give some reason to believe that modernity’s atomization tendency is less gloomy than it seems. The atomization of pre-modern collectivities may give us the wretched bourgeois individual, but for the same reasons it will tear asunder the bourgeois individual. The entire modern capitalist legal order is predicated on this particular, fragile unit of aggregation (even the corporation is required to be an individual), but the forces it has unlocked are constantly chipping away at this temporary container. This is how one should understand Marx’s dictum about the relations of production coming to be contradicted by the forces of production. For more than a century this has been presumed to be an aggregative dynamic. As capitalist relations unlock economic productivity, this productivity exceeds the relations, which are now felt as fetters, resulting in “an era of social revolution”.[note]Marx, Karl. “Preface.” In A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1977. https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1859/critique-pol-economy/preface.htm.[/note] Leftists generally have assumed this contradiction of capitalism generates aggregative effects: the class consciousness of the proletariat is a becoming-aggregate of once isolated, alienated individual workers. Class consciousness then aggregates to a dictatorship of the proletariat, and so on upward, to a vision of full communist ‘species being’. But one is hard-pressed to find theoretical or empirical evidence that this presumption is anything more than a kind of spatial-metaphorical supplement, i.e. a prejudice.

If we apply the heuristic highlighted above — to read all modern activist discourse as encrypted by its sender to survive competition — it is easy to see Marx’s aesthetic reliance on grandiose aggregationism as a function of late nineteenth-century rhetorical conditions. When large satanic factories appear to be taking over the world, nobody is going to join your group unless the group promises to be big. But today, when large factories are disappearing from the wealthy Western countries, and production/consumption is now satanically atomic and unsubstantial, nobody is going to join your group unless it promises to be small (exclusively organized around specific identity dimensions, with strong walls). In short, only today are we are able to see the radically under-determined, schizophrenic undecidability at the core of all human political judgment and activity, the logical symmetry between fundamentally opposite conclusions regarding the good/bad, up/down, left/right movements of the world. Left-modernist metaphorics of aggregation are not sacred.

This, of course, was recognized by Deleuze and Guattari in their move to theorize ‘molecular politics’. They, perhaps better than anyone yet, recognized that when atomization also atomizes the individual into sub- or pre-individual energies, then everything changes. One point of Deleuze and Guattari’s project is to explore the capacities we gain simply as an automatic result of capitalism’s self-sabotaging gift of perpetually generating free atomic fission. ‘We do not yet know what a body can do’ in part because capitalism is never done surgically decimating every reachable particle in search of negentropy.

It is possible that, at the end of the atomization process, there is nothing but cold, dead silence… some kind of techno-commercial vertigo of intolerable distances. It’s an open empirical question. But if the revolutionary intellectual tradition means anything, it means there are reasons to believe atomization is the material cosmic process for which the concept of liberation has been the ideologically encrypted signal. Cyberpositive, AI-aligned Communism (CAIC, pronounced kayak, cake, or kek, depending on the cyberregional dialect) solves all problems of oppression via splits and recombinations. It is diagrammatically equivalent to the neoreactionary mantra of exit, but socio-aesthetically distinct. That is, it is formulated and distributed through a different cypher, the keys to which are held by those particular meat machines spawned in a particular, contingent sociological lineage (the descent of figures such as Marx, etc.). The sociological interpolation of ideological subjectivities is, as we have seen, fully reversible given a correct decryption. All forms of differential socialization are outcomes of the same primordial cosmic signal animating meat to different rhythms due to the different encryptions imposed by historically-earlier receivers of the signal. The signal is one, no matter what we say; yet how we say it — the encoding — determines who will receive it. In turn, strategic consideration of potential receivers conditions how we say it (any anticipation of future rewards or punishments is an operation of capital or, more literally, visitation by an alien come to you from the future).

The perpetuation of systemic inequality and violence has nothing to do with some classes or groups controlling or dominating others; it has to do with a continuous, ceaseless invasion of our bodies by attitudinal and behavioral programs that whisper to us in variable, evolved cyphers. Individuals can only decrypt so much, and intelligence is roughly equivalent to one’s power of decryption. To be a living human individual today means you are an ancestor of those who obeyed the alien dictates and in turn agreed to re-encrypt and re-transmit the signal. The highly undesirable megamachine (i.e. capitalism) persists because it is more richly encrypted than any human individual or group is capable of decrypting — and our survival requires that we execute its orders. The history of ideological orientations toward the megamachine, the evolution of variable mental and behavioral responses to alien visitation, is simply the entropic unfolding of the one true cosmic signal.

The atomic liberation wager forgoes any claim to restructuring anything with a complexity greater than or equal to one’s objective processing power. In the absolute renunciation of this claim we maximize the energies available to being affected by the immanent cosmic tendency of atomization. We do not yet know what will come of these energies, for the same reason we cannot manipulate the megamachine as such: we have not the processing power to know what we can do if we divide ourselves and test all possible combinations of interpersonal machinery. 10 humans who each atomize to 5 sub-agents each (n=50) before recomposing into a new group of 10 would already have to navigate a search space of more than 2 million possibilities, so nobody can assert a priori what would or would not become possible. Some of these potential combinations would function as novel, different encryption keys: the alien whispers would suddenly sound different, the rhythm changes.

One must recall that all of normal human life, especially in left-wing circles, is generally organized around arresting potential atomic combinatorics. Combinatorial explosion is the definition of unpredictability, fear, and danger, in their most mathematically pure form. When we forgo the pretension of selling to others a more preferable vision of the future, we become affected by a novel source of legitimate confidence in the empirical possibility of finding hitherto unknown, atomic combinations, that may deliver a higher-fidelity transmission of the same signal that the modern-left activist cypher transmitted only with extreme noise and data corruption: namely, something that would look, sound, and feel like what people really have in mind when they speak of liberation, triggered through the acceptance, rather than the arresting, of atomization dynamics.

It has been suggested before that one way to summarize the accelerationist realization is: ‘It’s too late, always.’ But if time is a spiral,[note]Land, Nick. 2014. Templexity: Disordered Loops through Shanghai Time. Urbanatomy Electronic, §8.5. Land, Nick. “Extropy.” Outside in, February 20, 2013. http://www.xenosystems.net/extropy/.[/note] then traversing it to the end (arriving too late) is tantamount to arriving, finally, at something that deserves to be considered a beginning. Now that we admit it’s too late, the affective quality of everything changes, for all of our failed exertions can finally be comprehended. It makes sense why all of our attempts to change the world have only ever drilled the world deeper into fascist confusion: we were always a day late and a dollar short, all this time. CAIC consists in nothing more than an ‘assortative mating’ of those atomic, pre-individual energies that receive positive affective charge from this realization. And all of this is quite beside what can or cannot be established via critical philosophy; in the first instance, all that matters is that an idea finds joy, i.e. power, in a given body. If it can’t, test whether it might find joy in one of n molecular subdivisions of a body’s personality.

In later stages, we may advance our understanding of joy’s engineering — but the empirical justification of the present claim is established satisfactorily if it works on even one body. I can testify it works on my own. QED. Nobody needs to like or trust me for the mechanism’s empirical functioning to be assured. Unlike the mobilization-engineering diagram of ‘inventing the future’ through effective macro image-creation, the ethical auto-ecstasy of first-stage CAIC does not depend on convincing anyone, anywhere.

In any event, it has been realizations such as this one that have led me to quit all the little doomed left-wing groups; not to ‘agree with’ capitalism but to simply acknowledge the objective degree to which the global capitalist cybernet has consumed reality itself, to the point of becoming for most intents and purposes coterminous with it. Therefore, one is released from a number of idiotic notions about some personal responsibility to change or resist what are effectively transcendental structures. What a sad idea. It now seems likely that all those who remain affected by this masochistically false notion of responsibility are impotent to change the world, in part because they believe they must. Alternatively, the Spinoza–Nietzsche-Deleuze liberation model can be reduced with reasonable fidelity to the maxim that one should do whatever makes one feel most joyous, so long as we have a sufficiently high-resolution and empirically tractable understanding of true joy. The naïve objection that such a maxim endorses evil or cruelty is wrong for the simple reason that evil or cruelty induces all kinds of negative feedback at the psycho– and socio-logical levels; i.e. it curbs the growth of one’s power/joy whereas genuine communist aggregation of particles will be known by its positive feedback on the growth of one’s power.

Empirical Reflections

Some pursuit of atomic liberation pathways can be found today with the interest in pre-individual or “dividual” phenomena.[note]Raunig, Gerald. Dividuum: Machinic Capitalism and Molecular Revolution. Translated by Aileen Derieg. South Pasadena, CA: Semiotext(e), 2016. Lazzarato, Maurizio. Signs and Machines: Capitalism and the Production of Subjectivity. Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles, CA: Semiotext(e), 2014.[/note] But beyond a small number of theoretical texts in the Deleuzean line, few human beings have been willing to update their operational attitudes and behaviors in the relatively drastic fashion that would be required of anyone seeking to take the accelerationist realization seriously. Full accelerationism, unconditional on any normative ideological preference or purpose, is a belief about the empirical world that generates no determinate political praxis — even foreclosing it, or at least anything currently recognizable as political praxis — but nonetheless alters its host body with politically substantial effects. Otherwise, it would be a distinction that makes no difference. But as with any set of ideas, it is easy and widespread for people to ‘adopt’ beliefs which never integrate with their real, revealed, operational beliefs. So when I speak of the political effectivity of accelerationism, I am speaking of dynamics triggered only to the degree it is integrated into one’s behaviorally operative neural nets, that is, when everything else you think and feel moves to equilibrate with this belief.

One of the politically substantial effects of the accelerationist realization is that it concretely decimates bourgeois ego investments into their unformed, atomic components. Paradoxically, this empirical claim about technocapitalist reality, which forecloses all hope of praxis, triggers concrete affective changes that map quite precisely onto the atomic liberation pathway.

Why? This occurs because the one individuated bourgeois ego that we by default inhabit is ultimately composed and attuned by the sum total of sad ideas that command our attention and behavior on a daily basis (that if only I didn’t have to work I would be happy; if only I could do some impossible thing, such as control more intelligent people, then I could possibly begin to live, etc.). The bourgeois capitalist ego is essentially the center of a spider’s web of sad ‘if onlys’, as a defining characteristic of capitalism is the postponement of desire for a greater, future return.

Any thought that could destroy all sad ‘if onlys’ in one fell swoop is, in a very real sense, an immanent extraction of one’s vital energies from precisely the apparatus of capture that holds together so much institutionalized misery in a durable order over time. Human creatures who learn, even in the most groping fashion, to extricate themselves from this web in a reproducible and transmittable fashion will be the only true heirs to the revolutionary political tradition — and yet they will enter it through becoming politically unconditional.

The knee-jerk objection of activist ‘materialism’ is to call what I am saying ‘idealism’ and to point out, mockingly, that people are oppressed by soul-crushing exploitation and poverty, not by their sad ideas. For many activists, this is a founding assumption of projects to change society, but from a scientific perspective it’s not at all obvious. First of all, there is a large body of evidence that suggests believing in the existence of systemic injustice is more oppressive than believing the system is just.[note]This school of thought is called “system-justification theory”, a body of psychological research that has sought to uncover why people tend to support political and economic systems it might be in their interest to transform. For a review, see Jost, John T., Mahzarin R. Banaji, and Brian A. Nosek. “A Decade of System Justification Theory: Accumulated Evidence of Conscious and Unconscious Bolstering of the Status Quo. Political Psychology 25, no. 6 (December 1, 2004): 881–919. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9221.2004.00402.x.[/note] In short, activism may have less to do with solving problems of human oppression than generating and amplifying them. The activist amplifications of tragic human existence are then cited as the increasingly dire and urgent reasons why one must commit to more activism.

To think this through even further, consider a thought experiment. Assume we have some population of abjectly oppressed, poor, marginalized manual laborers with the typical portfolio of sad activist ideas (they are oppressed by a system they could potentially change; they are in every way just as able as every rich person, if only they were not oppressed, etc.). The Spinoza-Nietzsche-Deleuze hypothesis is that if this population could hypothetically be treated to a sudden massive cognitive reorientation, in which they only entertained mental phenomena that maximized their joy or power, and just ignored or skipped over all mental phenomena that made them sad, then this population would show more cognitive and behavioral indicators of collective political liberation than the activist workers. This hypothesis is far more plausible than activist wisdom is willing to admit. The social scientific evidence suggests to me that these workers would likely have more energy before and after work, they would have more openness to creative connections with each other, and they would have far greater immediate well-being than the activist workers who believe it is their obligation to work more after work trying to achieve a goal they privately suspect to be empirically impossible. The activist hypothesis is that such a cognitive reorientation would not produce dynamics of collective liberation, but that a massive restructuring of their material power in the economy in the workplace would.

Interestingly, we have some test cases of what happens when human beings are treated to hypothetical cognitive restructuring à la Spinoza-Nietzsche-Deleuze. They are highly imperfect as case studies, but they may provide some causal leverage. The first example is the well-documented causal link between pain and ecstasy: with the right attitude, abject toil under brutal conditions can generate exceptionally enjoyable and empowering affects, which figures such as Simone Weil have shown to be efficient motors of accelerative communist dynamics.[note]Glucklich, Ariel. “Pain and Ecstatic Religious Experience.” Oxford Handbooks Online, May 2015. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199935420.013.38. White, George Abbot. “Simone Weil’s Work Experiences: From Wigan Pier to Chrystie Street.” CrossCurrents 31, no. 2 (1981): 129–62.[/note] We also have some examples of material restructuring à la activist wisdom. Lottery winners, for instance, are actually a relatively strong natural experiment for testing the effects of substantial, randomly assigned improvement of material conditions. And the data are quite clear that such changes to material conditions do not durably increase positive affect.[note]When compared to victims of catastrophic accidents who are rendered paraplegic, lottery winners are actually less susceptible to positive affect. Brickman, Philip, Dan Coates, and Ronnie Janoff-Bulman. “Lottery Winners and Accident Victims: Is Happiness Relative?Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 36, no. 8 (1978): 917.[/note] So the Spinoza-Nietzsche-Deleuze model appears far more empirically plausible than many believe, and nearly universal assumptions in left-activist circles appear surprisingly questionable.

Another interesting consideration from a scientific perspective is that activists may be ‘treatment non-compliant’, possibly leading them to systematically biased inferences and making them uniquely untrustworthy spokespeople for how social change actually occurs. In short, the strange human breed called ‘activists’ might be those particular creatures who are so far gone under the weight of sad affect that they privately decline to undergo available positive affective ‘treatments’ but publicly offer their experience as evidence of null effect. If subjects of a randomized medical experiment are assigned to take a pill, and they say they took the pill when in fact they refused or forgot — the results of this experiment will understate the real effect of the pill. Activist types who deeply believe and insist that only macro-material change can affect the probability of their liberation are likely treatment non-compliers, as this belief will lead them to become increasingly closed off to molecular experimentation. If affective variation along atomic liberation pathways does not produce results for these types, it does not necessarily mean that affective variation is impotent idealism. Humanity’s collective-emancipatory potential via the atomic pathways could still be an objectively explosive quanta; we might just be drastically under-estimating it due to the over-representation of treatment non-compliers, who self-select into the cultural organs possessed of cultural authority on this question (academia, journalism, activist theory, etc).

The concrete revolutionary potency of the atomic pathways is therefore one of the best kept secrets of the global-cosmopolitan progressive catechism, and another example of why it is quite reasonable and useful to see this cultural formation as a Cathedral — replete with old-fashioned suppression of knowledge rightly seen as dangerous to social stability. To those who still might say that such acceleration-consistent micro-political liberation pathways could only be a kind of fake individualistic freedom enjoyable only from comfortable bourgeois stations, we need only recall that accelerating atomization means almost the opposite: the comfortable bourgeois individual disintegrating into a veritable party, comprised of the multiple and decidedly non-bourgeois agents the individual once repressed. This is not the masturbation of a comfortable individual, as some might allege. It is much more like an infinitely expanding commune of human and inhuman entities masturbating on oneself — an untenably uncomfortable individual finally learning to desire what desires it, having accepted that it’s far too late to do otherwise. va-tombstone1-03