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
Contrary to what a bad philosophical legacy has taught us, form does not pertain to visible appearance but to dynamic principle. The real individuation is not that of bodies, but of forms. One only has to reflect on the process of ideation to be convinced of this: nothing better illustrates the illusion of the stable and individual Self than the belief that "I" have ideas, since it is abundantly clear that ideas come to me, even without my knowing from where, from neuronal, muscular, and symbolic processes so opaque that they pour in naturally while I'm walking, or when I'm falling asleep and the boundaries of the Self are giving way. An occurring idea is a good example of form: there enters into its realization, in a language envi ronment, something that's infra-individual-an intuition, a splinter of experience, a bit of affect in a constellation with something that's supra-indi vidual. A form is a mobile configuration that holds together, in a tense and dynamic unity, heteroge neous elements of the Self and the world. "The essence of form," said the young Lukacs in his idealist jargon, "has always resided in the process by which two principles that absolutely exclude each other become form without mutually abolishing each other. Form is the paradox that has materialized, the reality of lived experience, the true life of the impossible. For form is not reconciliation but the war of conflicting principles, transposed into eternity." Form is born of the encounter between a situation and a necessity. Once born, it affects things far beyond itself. In the conflict of the spring of 2016, one could have seen the birth of a form from a perfectly singular, perfectly identifiable point. On the Austerlitz Bridge, a courageous little group forced the riot police to pull back. There was a first line of masked people sporting gas masks and holding a reinforced banner, other masked ones backing them in case of attempted arrests and making up a bloc behind the first line, and behind that bunch and on the sides, baton-wielding masked folk who whacked on the cops. Once this little form had appeared, the video of its exploit circulated on the social media. And kept making babies in the weeks that followed, up to the acme ofJune 14, 2016 when its offspring could no longer be counted.
The Invisible Committee, Now, p.152-154