The
book Anti-Oedipus,
by the French thinkers Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, has an
interesting insight about three types of social formation and their
registration surfaces: the primitive society where all is inscribed
on land, the bodies are registered on it and everything leads to it;
the despotic society where all is inscribed in the despot’s body,
everything belongs to him and he demands all for himself as his
right; and the capitalist society where all is inscribed in the
deterritorialized and fluid body of the capital, all life is oriented
towards it, it is organized by and for it, outside of it there is
almost no life, the capital encodes desires, shapes the bodies to its
molds, to the point of matching the notion of freedom with its own
reproduction.
There
is not a progressive line between these three social forms that lead
from one to another. The first two have not disappeared and their
virtualities persist on the capitalist societies, actualizing
themselves in several ways. Moreover, in each one of these
formations, there is always something that escapes their codes, which
is always risky when the ways of being alive themselves inscribe on
their registration surface. Considering these social formations
features helps us to think about our struggles for reinventing life
today.
How
to free the life from capitalists’ codes? How to create the
conditions of experience of freedom beyond money when even love,
charming and libido are stimulated by wealth? How not to let the
conscience be subjugated by work, having honesty as the value of
appeal through which poor people try to justify the little autonomy
they have? All these questions pass by struggles to produce oneself,
but this will not go much further if they follow the same
individualizing endeavor to conquer freedom through money.
We
should not reduce the achievement of freedom to a conception of the
free subject as a self-made
man,
for he is but one who has been well disciplined to do well the
functions that have been imposed on him to survive and this is not
self-determination.
Ok,
self-determination can always be an illusion if we consider that our
action or will is always a response to some set of obscure causes
that we are almost never conscious and much less do we have any
control of. As for some accelerationists who believe that everything
we do is an effect of causes of the Capital itself acting upon us and
anything we do against it will only lead to improving its ways of
self-reproduction and its control of its own entropy. But then, how
to produce causes among these causes? I can try to exercise Stoic
self-discipline but I know that at any time I could to succumb to a
society that unequally distributes precariousness, difficulties, and
failures.
Therefore,
the question must be about a common cause of freedom. And this very
question must encourage us to seek the means to reconnect us
collectively, considering the solidarity networks that we create
between us allows conditions that make the exercise of autonomy
possible, such as better security, hospitality, affection and mutual
care, sharing of common use of some goods, among another things
without which life becomes even more solitary and narrow.
We
need a concept of freedom as sharing between us, and the most
challenging thing for this is perhaps to recreate between us the
mutual trust and the desire to be together. This may not be enough
for restructuring an entire society, but it is crucial to make this
path possible. But this trust does not arise like an awareness of
virtue to which social forces must conform, but through the
propagation of desire by collective experience of blending and being
together.
A
socio-political organization is first of all an articulation from a
place of desire that multiplies itself by the edges. It is in this
way that we comprehend that all desiring production is immediately
social production. In order for a collective be able to spread
socially, it must make its capacities of fabulation and delirium the
social field works. It must make the flow of desire cross through the
social field. Considering that this flows is the fuel of production
of the multitude. The desire has here a connective and diffuse
function at same time.
With
the recent far-right populist governments, everything seems like a
great simulation machine that incapacitate us to orient ourselves
towards the State. The continuing polemics of these governments seems
to be mobilized to keep us on this paranoid state and keep their
bases warm, like a cybernetic system that controls its own degree of
intensity.
The
Israeli writer Yuval Harari said in his book 21
Lessos for the 21st Century that
“Politicians
are a bit like musicians, and the instrument they play on is the
human emotional and biochemical system. They give a speech – and
there is a wave of fear in the country. They tweet – and there is
an explosion of hatred”.
The
important feature to point out about the current far-right populist
governments that are they learned to manipulate these effects. They
understood the causality relations of their own speeches and they
handle the public opinion as a thermostat, controlling the agitation,
attention and intensity degrees of its behavior. For instance, it is
the case of an enterprise as Cambridge Analytica, that developed a
method for observing data and public behavior through social
networks. Then, it can predict what news speeches is better to give
to the public as output.
However,
this confuses our capacity of discerning and making decisions more
towards to choice that impose us in the institutional and the
representative dimension of politics. I consider being possible,
moreover, a type of action that comes out of having to respond or
position itself in relation to the juggling of the representative
figures of power as government.
To
get out of this always reactive situation of action, which force us
to always have to respond as quickly as possible to the paranoid
stimuli of the figures of power, it is interesting to think of a kind
of unconditional mobilization of the desire of experiencing
democracy. This does not mean a mobilization without strategy, but a
strategy that is not articulated only as reactive responses to
government decisions. A strategy that thinks the concrete conditions
that allows us to act and build a shared experience of the ways of
producing our life. The municipalism can be a path to do this insofar
as it takes the urban space as place of these corporeal and
collective experience of democracy.
When
I say “shared”, I want to say transindividual.
I reject the idea of a collective subject that establishes an
identity from that can include or exclude individuals. I also refuse
the idea of autonomous and atomics individuals endowed with free
will. This shared freedom (capacity of act upon ourselves) happens
through what passes between
us.
It is the desire that draws us, that leads us to say this or that, to
meet with this or that group and share this or that, regardless of a
center of diffusion that concentrates everything.
It
is this capacity to mobilize the desire and the belief that needs to
be regained in order for us to be able to make politics a different
experience from what is this fight between bosses. The biggest
obstacle to this may be really abandoning the strategy that revolves
exclusively around the government power and its urgencies and so
dislocate ourselves to a strategy that is indifferent in relation to
politics personalisms, moving us to a more impersonal way of making
politics.
When
I talk about an impersonal political practice, I think of a type of
throng and diffuse and simultaneous actions that interact with each
other, which does not have as condition for existence a binding to a
coordination center. An impersonal name here would be in maximum a
metonymy for a set of claims and demands. Claims and demands are the
concrete names that the desires gain and produce on politics.
Municipalism
makes the politics a more concrete experience because it is on space
that politics happens as a relation of forces and a corporeal
experience. Here we should not oppose local and global because on
actual socio-technical conditions we are always connected and the
local experiences will be always dialoguing and making exchanges with
one another in a translocal way. It
is on space that we find the power as a relation of force mutually
exercised between bodies. In this way we get out of representative
figures of power, such as the government, that maintain us on this
paranoid state of constant threat that makes us servants of some
other good boss who will never save us.
Der Beitrag Thinking Collective Self-Determination Through Municipalism erschien zuerst auf non.copyriot.com.