On Irregularity: between Analysis and Desire

Often when we feel calm reigning, we busy ourselves with the task of trying to tackle the analysis of the situation. We enter into that order of discussion that recites: the analysis of reality is missing, the study of what is happening around us is missing. And who would disagree with this principle? In attacking a world that horrifies us, knowing what creates the disgust is a rather sage matter. Oh yeah, sagacity, which rhymes with stale authority: eternal historical enemy of every leap into the void, of the taste for the unknown, of savoring the possibility of going beyond the surrounding wall of resignation.

The authoritative sages, dedicating themselves to the post (post-industrial, post-modernity, post-capitalism, etc …) of everything, strive to find the central point of this meaningless existence. Affirming that there is no center is completely impossible, unless one broadens one’s gaze so as to give life a breach in the sterile mechanism that surrounds us. Today some say that production is the central point in the functioning of the world. Others transfer this node into the technological apparatus. Finally, some say that communications, with its consequent speed of information transmission, is the central axis of alienation. No one is wrong, all are right, partially. These three elements combine together to forge the anesthetic scalpel of minds, feeding each other for the only world we know: that of oppression.

Knowledge is a product for sale, ready to be consumed, through its exchange value. Knowledge, completely attached to scientific reality, becomes the power that unites individuals through the subjugation of fear. Many point out to us that effectiveness serves to prevent and combat fear. Effectiveness is the technical paradigm that contributes to the production of needs by unseating the creation of desires. Computerized anesthesia, generalized misery and technological myopia bear on the routine of many living beings reducing them to zombie-inhabitants. Technique is something indissoluble from the concept of profitability: it is responsible for subjugating individuals to the obligations of effectiveness and profit, transmuting desires into emancipatory needs. Or rather: into sham needs artificially classified and connected with each other, represented as emancipatory. Consequently, technology is not derealizing reality, it is reproducing it on the quantum level by harmonizing it with exploitation. In the past and still today, work also makes the exploited participate in their enslavement. Even unemployment participates in work, with the continual search for it by those who are excluded from the productive sphere. Today this also applies to communication and its speed, along with techonology and its immanent abstraction. All reinforce this world.

The techno-democratic system is producing a quantitative reality where knowledge and specialized skills are locked up in a transcendental way in the laboratories, structures and factories of the ruling order, in the hands of a few charlatans, apprentice techno-witches who, as an immanent consequence, claim to have the world as their experimental laboratory. Submission becomes contentment, transforming itself into the worst production that keeps what exists now standing: shared servitude.

Nowadays what intoxicates minds is not the reasoning of analysis, but the firm belief in what works. This is why the only dialog possible is democratic dialog, between unequals, i.e., between oppressors and oppressed, with the consent that becomes a surrogate tool for being in the world.

Power only dialogs with what it possesses. Democracy is an untouchable value, the supporting foundation of technological reality. The state, especially in the west, is the dominant form of social life together. The dynamic of the market is based on the satisfaction of needs: they make the mercantile paradigm function, and this fictitious balance tends to eliminate diversity, the creative difference whose complete eradication would make all the elements homogeneous, so that the mega-machine would function perfectly. Doesn’t this recall the orwellian environment of 1984 together with the paradigm of acceptance of the system in Huxley’s Brave New World?

Technology, production and speed of communication are not things in themselves, replicant structures of the ruling order: they are social relationships, mechanical activities carried out by the world’s inhabitants, habitual and unreflective ways that prevent even merely thinking about grasping our lives in order to destroy the social order that is taking more and more away from us.

Habit and the continual reproduction of what exist has the aim of training us in the impossibility of imagining something else, of giving life to potentially dangerous desires. The power of this world is based on the tendency of these relations to reproduce the ruling order, under the blackmail of sacrifice. This doesn’t only reinforce command, but expands it and perpetuates it in time. The thing that is command intrinsically feeds obedience. But is there anything thrilling in seeing and feeling the inability to express our desires? Will surviving in a world of disasters ever be able to make us grasp the absurdity of life’s authenticity? We live in a society that feeds on catastrophes, where they serve the ruling order in expanding its power. The threat of disaster is a perfect sleight-of-hand for justifying a technologically controlled world, along with the predatory power of its experts and its guardians.

The media, armed wing of the thought police, proclaim continuous terror toward all, chanting the mantra that only the state and its functionaries (uniformed and not) can guarantee the trinket of security: This is how the oppressors convince many to accept police control and even to monitor each other. The integral security of the privileged produces the possibility of civil war. And the possibility of rebellion, which transforms itself into insurrection, i.e., the rupture of the social conventions of the ruling order, where can we find this? Dragged into the necessity of survival we no longer even know how to imagine a life made of passions and adventures.

The objectivity of what we see is not there. What we mean by reality is something that cannot be totally carried out before our eyes. What is there in an inescapable way is its interpretation: it is the language we give each other, the expression of relationships in their concreteness, and we alone decide whether to stagnate in its presumed truthfulness or to incite to moving beyond it. Nothing is neutral when we take our thoughts into our own hands. The mutation of meaning through consensus throws water on what is fire. Analysis that seeks consensus is itself afraid of rebellion, mutilating the potent incommunicability of desire, making the construction of language itself solemn. That one can analyze without desire, but one cannot desire without analyzing, seems to tell us something. The difference between analysis and an idea is precisely in the force of desiring utopia. If causes are at the inside of analysis, the idea wants to destroy all that it recognizes as causes, since they keep the force of this world’s reason standing.

The idea is a thought that moves one to act. It challenges its concreteness by giving itself to the quality of its possibilities, struggling with its temptation toward realization. If one doesn’t have the glimmer of an idea, one remains entangled in the mechanisms of opinion, i.e., of induced thoughts that are realized in their democratization. Interpretation and desire give life-blood to a subversive idea. To have an opinion it is enough to give air to the mouth. This is why ideas are rocks to throw against every form of authority, while opinions make this world completely debatable, i.e., the intrinsic ruling order of technologically armed democracy.

The ruling language of an epoch, in this instance democratic dialog, corresponds to the construction of social relationships necessary for the ruling order of the same epoch. Anyone who is outside of this language is thought of as a stranger. How can contempt for society stir up this strangeness? How can the barbarians destroy the polis and break with the community of the agora in its dual sense of the city center and the market?

“Our social structure, meaning with this rough formula the whole of Europe currently affected by the pressure of the migrants, could not withstand the impact of the arrival of millions of people. A collapse doesn’t require the arrival of tens of millions, four or five million would be sufficient. In that case it would no longer be a question of building walls or voting in more or less permissive or liberticidal laws. It would be the collapse of a social concept that cannot tolerate the eventuality of slaughtering two or three million on our coasts in order to accept a couple million of them. We are not prepared for such an eventuality. No one can predict what it will have to be done. What will the revolutionaries with their mouths full of words devoted to little pinpricks on the body of the governing whale do when these forebearers of humanity arrive at the gates, the gates of our so-called civilization, and set about destroying it? Will they contribute to the more than welcome destruction? Will they do everything possible to prevent the reconstitution of a new power with the sign changed and some strange coloured flag on the ruins of the magnificent temple of the now fallen Christianity? Who can tell?” (AMB, “The Long Shadow Over the Wall”, Negazine n. 1, 2017)

Perhaps this is where our dreams will play out, where joy and sorrow will be at stake. The storm of primordial chaos will not bring any certainty, but choice. With the good peace of beautiful minds linked to the sun of the future. This is why only a different life can give rise to different thoughts. It is in encounter, in the conspiracy against this world, that we can weave subversive plots. Here are the wicked passions to drive out the demons that smolder in us. Starting to think that the rejection of political rackets also begins with a different way of communicating, without being afraid of a possible inability to communicate desire, so as not to leave the totality of our words to the analysis of this or that. To disrupt ourselves and the world in which we feel like strangers, we need a desertion that allows us to abandon ourselves to something totally different, to make a clean sweep of this consensual reality, sowing doubt.

The epoch of passivity has always needed leaders and experts; as someone said, those who cry that it is not time for rebellion reveal to us in advance which society they are working for. Acting for pleasure goes hand in hand with the eradication of politics and the lighting of the fuse that unleashes the passions and desires of the dark forest of one’s self, ripping to bits the efficientist opinion. Attacking when everyone else is waiting for the so-called decisive analysis is what puts the refusal of this world into the flow of a dawn as magnificent as possible.

One basic aspect of the creation of other worlds would have to speak of sabotage, spreading knowledge and desires for experimenting with sedition among subversives, writing about what happens, without the mediation of any of the collaborators of those in power. Not to fall into the litany of the already-said, but to make the practices of rupture reproducible by anyone. Then it is necessary to experiment with informality, becoming accomplices on the basis of affinity. Without a name to declare, without a group to propagate, but with the creative solitude of an insurrectional project to carry out.

Words can not be shuffling steps that refer to themselves. They will not find their salvation in analysis, but in one’s own singularity and in the desire to destroy all that submerges it. Affirming that we are strangers in the world, refractory to every order, is also knowing how to understand that our interpretation is fighting with something that will be. As an old philosopher said, the moment is eternity. The thought police want to transform us into individuals without a shred of desire, but if we want to be poets of an idea that doesn’t give a damn about deities, laws and regulations, giving ourselves over to the disorder of dreams is what can stop the world, or at least trying to provoke various blackouts. No polished and well-done analysis will ever be able to upset the minds that burn on the earth any more than the unhappiness of knowing – desiring the disorganization of all the senses – that life is elsewhere. To make the boundaries between destruction and creation disappear, the reciprocity of certain relationships is necessary, because destruction is the creation of an inaccessible route toward the unknown.

The certainty of the efficientist gaze is linked, in an indissoluble way, to the technological reality that does not only construct oppressive control outside the individual, but penetrates into the individual him or herself, but without being overly invasive (most individuals do not feel it) literally changing our way of feeling and imagining. Against this persuasion we can oppose the uncertainty of freedom, without dying of security.

Some anarchists at the turn from the 19^th to the 20^th century dedicated themselves to propaganda of the deed. And if today other subversive were to dedicate themselves to the poetry of acting, what would happen?