“To great writers, finished works
weigh lighter than those fragments on which they labor their entire
lives”
W. Benjamin
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The Institute for
Experimental Freedom is proud to announce the release of Between
Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle.
Almost two years in the making, Between Predicates, War is a fragmented collection of theses on our tumultuous
situation. From Egypt to the US, Greece to the UK, contemporary
struggle announces a revolt against government. These theses draw a
line connecting the forces at play, examine their parodic language,
affective practices and radically self-annihilating tactics. At the
threshold of our epoch and at our phase of self-governance, the
events unfolding rub up against the meaning of autonomy, and in doing
so ask the question, “What does it mean to live a life?” This
uneasy question—and this decade of experiments aimed at answering
it—anticipate the formation of a real force. What grew
rhizomatically—in subterranean practices of sharing—between
anti-globalization and radical environmentalism, between riots
against the democratic police and irruptions of occupied spaces,
burst through into the open and unpredictable air of the now. At our
particular moment there is a chance that—from ancient Athenian
democracy to our refined economy of subjectivation techniques—the
paradigm of government may come to close.
As we wrote
in Politics is Not a Banana,
we have no illusions of leading a charge—and furthermore, that's
the wrong way to think about the situation. We simply want to
understand our conditions, and act accordingly. With humility, a
healthy sense of the humors, and the passion, we
offer this text as another chapter in this project.
Between
Predicates, War: Theses on Contemporary Struggle is
a pocket book, of a 100 or so pages, designed with care and finesse,
available from LBC Books,
or directly from the Institute.
From the
Introduction
“Contemporary
struggle” is our way to conceptualize what links the events of our
epoch—events that cannot be defined as social movements or
categorized within leftist conceptions of reform and revolution. Events
are the common form that struggles take after the collapse of the
historical subject and the zone of the social. We define contemporary
struggle as a vast set of heterogeneous practices of revolt that
appear to have everything
as their object; that is to say, events whose antagonisms are not
directed against the state or capitalism per se but against
techniques of government, against the productive power of government.
Perhaps we will be reproached for reducing the specificity of all the
movements of the past decade. However, the velocity with which
struggles since the Greek uprising of ’08 have moved from
intelligible anger over a collectively perceived injustice to
celebratory or revolutionary situations, reveals that they are
irreducibly revolts against the paradigm of government.
Government
no longer sits in a closed chamber of educated men; it acts through
each of us and through every apparatus that orients us and amplifies
our senses in a particular direction. Government doesn't just
repress, it produces
a distributed multiplication of governable subjectivities.
Contemporary struggle resists, flees, and attacks being produced as a
subject, appearing in the space between one coherent subjectivity and
another.
Because
it appears in the space between subjectivities, contemporary
struggle—consciously or not—contests the meaning of autonomy.
Capitalism has done away with the social as a foundation to human
life, leaving the individual as self-entrepreneur to develop
solutions to the crises of baseless existence. If social media
appears on the theater of culture and politics this is because
economic life demands that individuals collaborate on
problem-solving. In order to develop itself in harmony with the
economy, the individual is allocated the self, as the vehicle and
instrument of freedom. It is given the space to think freely, go
against the rules, and open doors of creativity—if only to
eliminate flaws in the flows of the economy. Government needs
subjects to self-govern because principles no longer reign with any
authority; the economy needs subjects to self-manage because
technology and ecology present fatal limits to its rhythm of
expansion. However, when struggles originate in an open field devoid
of authoritative principles, the desired affects of self-management
sometimes fail to materialize, and in turn the space between
coherency, contingency, and predicates can appear more hospitable
than the generalized hostilities of economic life. Contemporary
struggle locates the space of autonomy as a potential for a different
way of living, and holds on for as long as it can.
Contemporary
struggle reveals the limits of language. The grammar of justice,
democracy, and equality could limit past movements because these
terms were situated in a meaningful discourse—that of the enemy.
Today, these words and their institutions are empty. What is
perceived as logical inconsistency by political pundits is precisely
the plane of consistency where a new language is being constructed.
The parodic, ironic, and absurd character of today’s movements'
discursive promiscuity, irrational application of language, and use
of memes reveal a new language coming into being.
Contemporary
struggle loves/hates technology. It’s no surprise that the same
mobile apparatuses we are required to buy to integrate our lives into
the flows of the economy—smart phones, laptops, and tablets—are
the media protagonists of the turbulent present.. However, the use of
technology by today’s uprisings is no mere affirmation, even in the
“Free Information” movement. From hacking to instagram flashmobs,
from social networking an occupation to manipulating attention spans,
contemporary struggle renders technological apparatuses inoperative
in their proper form.
Contemporary
struggle will produce the basis for either generalized
ungovernability or a more horrific form of government. Social
movements from the '60s to the late '90s created the conditions for
general self-management; the most radical horizon they could perceive
was a world democratically administrated and without work as
production. The social movements anticipated the distribution of
racial, gender, and sexual subjectivities, freedom as choice, and
cybernetics. Today their demands reflect back at us in so many
commodities, so many techniques of government, so many empty
environments affectively managed by food and retail attendants.
Today’s revolt could give way to our dreams or our nightmares.
…
Available for mail order at LBC Books, and at the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair.
Nothing is too beautiful for the unwanted children of capital,
kisses,
The Institute for
Experimental Freedom | March, 2013
