The present catastrophe is that of a world actively made uninhabitable. A sort of methodical devastation of everything that remained liveable in the relations of humans with each other and with our environments. Capitalism could not have triumphed over the whole planet if it was not for techniques of power, specifically political techniques — there are all kinds of techniques: with or without tools, corporal or discursive, erotic or culinary, the disciplines and mechanisms of control, and it is pointless to denounce the reign of technics. The political techniques of capitalism consist first of all in breaking the attachments through which a group finds the means to produce, in the same movement, the conditions of its subsistence and its existence. In separating human communities from innumerable things - stones and metals, plants, trees that have a thousand purposes, gods, djinns, wild or tamed animals, medicines and psycho-active substances, amulets, machines, and all the other beings in their realms that co-exist with humans.
Ruining all community, separating groups from their means of existence and from the knowledge linked to them: it is political rationality that dictates the imposition of the commodity as the mediator of every relation. Just as it was necessary to liquidate the witches — which is to say their medicinal knowledge as well as the movement between the visible and invisible worlds which they promoted - today peasants have to renounce their ability to sow their own seeds in order to maintain the grip of multinational agribusinesses and other organizations of agricultural politics.
These political techniques of capitalism find their maximal point of concentration in contemporary metropoles. Metropoles are precisely the arena where, in the end, there is almost nothing left to reappropriate. A milieu in which everything is done so the human only relates to itself, only creates itself separately from other forms of life, bumps into or uses them without ever meeting them.
Anonymous, Call, p.10-11
The pervasiveness of the commodity has inserted itself everywhere. This pervasiveness is the most effective instrument for disconnecting ends from means, to reduce everyday life to a living-space we are only required to manage. Everyday life is what we are supposed to want to return to; the acceptance of a necessary and universal neutralization. It is the ever-growing renunciation of the possibility of an unpostponed joy. As a friend once said, it is the average of all our possible crimes.
Anonymous, Call, p.14
We do not perceive humans to be isolated from each other or from the other beings of this world; we see them bound by multiple connections that we have learned to deny. This denial allows the blocking of emotional exchanges through which these multiple connections are experienced. This blockage, in turn, is necessary to make us accustomed to the most neutral, the most lifeless, the most average feelings; that which makes us long for vacations, lunch-breaks, or evenings out as a godsend — that is to say something just as neutral, average, and lifeless — but freely chosen. The imperial order, which is particularly Westernized, is nourished through this boredom.
Anonymous, Call, p.15
Like many, we have experienced that emotions stuck internally turn out badly: they can even turn into symptoms. The rigidities we observe in ourselves come from the partitions that every person believes herself obliged to put up in order to define her own limits, and to contain within herself what must not burst forth. When, for some reason or other, these partitions happen to crack and break, then things come up that might be unpleasant, which may even appear frightful — but it is a fright capable of freeing us from fear. Calling into question both our individual limits and the borders drawn by civilization can be a life-saver. The existence of any real community necessitates a certain physical danger: when emotions and thoughts are no longer ascribable to any one person, when interactions are recovered in which feelings, ideas, impressions, and emotions are exchanged carelessly. It must be understood that community per se is not the solution: it is its disappearance, everywhere and always, that is the problem.
Anonymous, Call, p.15
At root it is here that we begin, where we find each other. What is most singular in us calls to be shared.
But we note this: not only is what we have to share obviously incompatible with the dominant order, but this order strives to track down any kind of sharing for which it does not lay down the rules. For instance, the barracks, the hospital, the prison, the asylum, and the retirement home are the only forms of collective living allowed in the metropole. The normal condition is the isolation of everyone in their private cubicle. This is where they return endlessly, however strong the repulsion they feel, however great the encounters they make elsewhere.
We have known these conditions of existence, and we will never return to them. They weaken us too much. Make us too vulnerable. Make us waste away.
Isolation, in primal cultures, was the harshest sentence that could be passed on a member of the community. It is now the common condition. The rest of the disaster follows logically. It is on account of this narrow idea that everybody has of their own home that makes it seem natural to leave the street to the police. The world could not have been made so uninhabitable, nor sociality so controlled — from malls to bars, from boardrooms to backrooms — had not everyone been previously granted the shelter of private space.
Anonymous, Call, p.17
Against the possibility of communism, against any possibility of happiness, there stands a hydra with two heads. On the public stage each one of them makes a show of being the sworn enemy of the other. On one side, there is the program for a fascistic restoration of unity, and on the other, there is the global power of the merchants of infrastructure-Google as much as Vinci, Amazon as much as Veolia. Those who believe that it's one or the other will have them both. Because the great builders of infrastructure have the means for which the fascists only have the folkloric discourse. For the former, the crisis of the old unities is primarily the opportunity for a new unification. In the contemporary chaos, in the crumbling of institutions, in the death of politics, there is a perfectly profitable market for the infrastructural powers and for the giants of the Internet. A totally fragmented world remains completely manageable cybernetically. A shattered world is even the precondition for the omnipotence of those who manage its channels of communication. The program of these powers is to deploy behind the cracked facades of the old hegemonies a new, purely operational, form of unity, which doesn't get bogged down in the ponderous production of an always shaky feeling of belonging, but operates directly on "the real," reconfiguring it. A form of unity without limits, and without pretentious, which aims to build absolute order under absolute fragmentation. An order that has no intention of fabricating a new phantasmal belonging, but is content to furnish, through its networks, its servers, its highways, a materiality that is imposed on everyone without any questions being asked. No other unity than the standardization of interfaces, cities, landscapes; no other continuity than that of information. The hypothesis of Silicon Valley and the great merchants of infrastructure is that there's no more need to tire oneself out by staging a unity of facade: the unity it intends to construct will be integral with the world, incorporated in its networks, poured into its concrete. Obviously we don't feel like we belong to a "Google humanity," but that's fine with Google so long as all our data belong to it. Basically, provided we accept being reduced to the sad ranks of"users," we all belong to the cloud, which does not need to proclaim it. To phrase it differently, fragmentation alone does not protect us from an attempt to reunify the world by the "rulers of tomorrow": fragmentation is even the prerequisite and the ideal texture for such an initiative. From their point of view, the symbolic fragmentation of the world opens up the space for its concrete unification; segregation is not contradictory to the ultimate networking. On the contrary, it gives it its raison d'etre.
The necessary condition for the reign of the GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) is that beings, places, fragments of the world remain without any real contact. Where the GAFA claim to be "linking up the entire world" what they're actually doing is working toward the real isolation of everybody. By immobilizing bodies. By keeping everyone cloistered in their signifying bubble. The power play of cybernetic power is to give everyone the impression that they have access to the whole world when they are actually more and more separated, that they have more and more "friends" when they are more and more autistic. The serial crowd of public transportation was always a lonely crowd, but people didn't transport their personal bubble along with them, as they have done since smartphones appeared. A bubble that immunizes against any contact, in addition to constituting a perfect snitch. This separation engineered by cybernetics pushes in a non-accidental way in the direction of making each fragment into a little paranoid entity, towards a drifting of the existential continents where the estrangement that already reigns between individuals in this "society" collectivizes ferociously into a thousand delirious little aggregates. In the face of all that, the thing to do, it would seem, is to leave home, take to the road, go meet up with others, work towards forming connections, whether conflictual, prudent, or joyful, between the different parts of the world. Organizing ourselves has never been anything else than loving each other.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p. 46-49
One can live a whole life without experiencing anything, by being very careful not to think and feel. Existence is then reduced to a slow process of degradation. It wears down and ruins, instead of giving form. After the miracle of the encounter, relations can only go from wound to wound towards their consumption. Life, on the contrary, gradually gives form to whoever refuses to live beside themselves, to whoever allows themselves to experience. They become a form of life in the full sense of the term.
In sharp contrast to that, there are the inherited methods of activist construction, so grossly defective, so exhausting, so destructive, when they are so focused on building. Communism does not hinge on self-renunciation but on the attention given to the smallest action. It's a question of our plane of perception and hence of our way of doing things. A practical matter. What the perception of entities-individual or collective bars our access to is the plane where things really happen, where the collective potentials form and fall apart, gain strength or dissipate. […] To live communism is not to work to ensure the existence of the entity we belong to, but to deploy and deepen an ensemble of ties, which sometimes means cutting certain ones. What is essential occurs at the level of the smallest things. […] Perception in terms of bonds dismisses the whole alternative between individual and collective, and does so positively. In a real situation, an "I" that says what needs to be said can be a "we" of extraordinary power. And so, the particular happiness of any "commune" reflects the plenitude of its singularities, a certain quality of ties, the radiant energy of each fragment of world that it harbors-good-bye to entities, to their protrusiveness, good-bye to individual and collective confinement, adios to the reign of narcissism.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.143-144
It's necessary above all to maintain the reign of the economy beyond the extinction of the wage system. This has to do with the fact that if there is less and less work, everything is all the more mediated by money, be it in very small amounts. Given the absence of work, the need to earn money in order to survive must be maintained. Even if a universal basic income is established one day, as so many liberal economists recommend, its amount would need to be large enough to keep a person from dying of hunger, but utterly insufficient to live on, even fru gally. We are witnessing a change of regime within economy. The majestic figure of the Worker is being succeeded by the puny figure of the Needy Opportunist [le Crevard]-because if money and control are to infiltrate everywhere, it's necessary for money to be lacking everywhere. Henceforth, everything must be an occasion for generating a little money, a little value, for earning "a little cash." The present technological offensive should also be understood as a way to occupy and valorize those who can no longer be exploited through waged labor. What is too quickly described as the uberization of the world, unfolds in two different ways. Thus on the one hand you have Uber, Deliveroo and the like, that unskilled job opportunity requiring only one's old machine as capital. Every driver is free to self-exploit as much as they like, knowing that they must roll around fifty hours a week to earn the equivalent of the minimum wage. And then there are Airbnb, BlaBlaCar, dating sites, "coworking," and now even "cohoming" or "costorage," and all the applications that enable the sphere of the valorizable to be extended to infinity. What is involved with the "collaborative economy," with its inexhaustible possibilities of valorization, is not just a mutation of life-it's a mutation of the possible, a mutation of the norm. Before Airbnb, an unoccupied room was a "guest room" or a room available for a new use; now it's a loss of income. Before BlaBlaCar, a solo drive in one's car was an occasion to daydream, or pick up a hitchhiker, or whatever, but now it's a missed chance to make a little money, and hence a scandal, economically speaking. What one gave to recycling or to friends one now sells on Le bon coin. It's expected that always and from every point of view one will be engaged in calculating. That the fear of "missing an opportunity" will goad us forward in life. The important thing is not working for one euro an hour or making a few pennies by scanning contents for Amazon Mechanical Turk, but where this participation might lead someday. Henceforth everything must enter into the sphere ofprofitability. Everything in life becomes valorizable, even its trash. And we ourselves are becoming needy opportunists, human trash, who exploit each other under the pretext of a "sharing economy." If a growing share of the population is destined to be excluded from the wage system this is not in order to allow it the leisure to go hunt Pokemons in the morning and to fish in the afternoon. The invention of new markets where one didn't imagine them to be the year before illustrates this fact that is so difficult to explain to a Marxist: capitalism doesn't so much consist in selling what is produced as in rendering accountable whatever is not yet accountable, in assigning a measureable worth to what seemed to be absolutely unsusceptible to that the day before, in creating new markets. That is its oceanic reserve of accumulation. Capitalism is the universal expansion of measurement.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.96-98
Bourgeois democracy is a phase in capital’s seizure of power, and its extension in the 20th century completes capital’s domination by intensifying the isolation of individuals. Proposed as a remedy for the separation between man and community, between human activity and society, and between classes, democracy will never be able to solve the problem of the most separated society in history. As a form forever incapable of modifying its content, democracy is only a part of the problem to which it claims to be the solution. Each time it claims to strengthen the “social bond”, democracy contributes to its dissolution. Each time it papers over the contradictions of the commodity, it does so by tightening the hold of the net which the state has placed over social relations.
Giles Dauve, When Insurrections Die, Endnotes #1, https://endnotes.org.uk/articles/when-insurrections-die
Here is daylight, and here are perspectives that now no longer mean anything. The sectors of a city are, at a certain level, decipherable. But the personal meaning they have had for us is incommunicable, like all that secrecy of private life regarding which we possess nothing but pitiful documents.
Debord, Critique of Separation (Film), 1961 - https://remixedcity.wordpress.com/2014/02/17/critique-of-separation-english-subtitles-by-guy-debord-1961/
the incursion of capitalist cyberspace into every area of life and the psyche has intensified the processes of de-socialisation. This is not to say that there are no progressive potentials in the web, but these have almost certainly been overrated, while the impact of cyberspace in de-socialising culture and subjectivity has been massively underestimated. Here I merely rehearse Bifo’s account of semio-capitalism and Jodi Dean’s critique of communicative capitalism, but it is important to operationalise this critique.
Blogs and social media have allowed us to talk to ourselves (but not to reach out beyond the left bubbles); they have also generated pathological behaviours and forms of subjectivity which not only generate misery and anger — they waste time and energy, our most crucial resources. Email and handhelds, meanwhile, have produced new forms of isolation and loneliness: the fact that we can receive communications from work anywhere and anytime means we are exposed to work’s order-words when we are alone, without the possibility of support from fellow workers.
In sum, the obsession with the web, its monopolisation of any idea of the new, has served capitalist realism rather than undermined it. Which does not mean, naturally, that we should abandon the web, only that we should find out how to develop a more instrumental relationship with it. Put simply, we should use it — as a means of dissemination, communication and distribution — but not live inside it. The problem is that this goes against the tendencies of handhelds. We all recognise the by now clichéd image of a train carriage full of people pecking at their tiny screens, but have we really registered how miserable this really is, and how much it suits capital for these pockets of socialisation to be closed down?
Mark Fisher & Darren Ambrose, Abandon Hope (Summer is Coming) - Socialization Beyond Social Media, K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished Writings of Mark Fisher, 2018, p.592