« Communique | Main | The New Badiou »
March 26, 2006
Down with Guardrails! Up with Precarité!
Strange dissonances between the lyrical existentialism of the communiqué (see below) and the ostensible origins of the action. How does the following square with the demand for the revocation of the CPE?
The night of the eviction of the Sorbonne, part of the students had no idea why they were there or what they could do, let alone what they should do. They were wandering in anguish of the freedom offered but impossible to grasp, because it was not desired. A week later, after numerous occupations and confrontations with the police, their asserted impotence is finally giving place to an innocent taste for direct action. Pacifism finally becomes what it has never stopped being: a benign existential pathology.
What seems immediately evident is what small price the heads of a few flics constitutes, in return for the vision – surely delightful to the state – of 'revolutionary' groups revolting for security. For security within the framework not only of Capital, but of state-hobbled Capital. Surely no-one can misrecognise as a 'law' what is clearly only a dismanting of state-law in favour of uncontrolled nomos? If there is certainly a touch of the adolescent cri de coeur "I didn't ask to be born" in the following:
No one has ever voted the establishment of capitalism.
more profoundly there is the danger here of a failure to be equal, in thought, to the situation, even in the thick of potentiality: whence the antipathy for precarité? Precarité is surely the greatest gift Capital has given us. Something painful, difficult, but nonetheless a gift. Even Badiou affirms that the great virtue of capitalism's "errant automation" is its disenchantment, its destruction of every bond that effected to find the truth of any configuration of multiplicity in being itself. In short, its brutal revelation of the "subject's" nothingness is contemporaneous with the revelation of being (alias the in-itself) as inessential, impotent ordered monotony (to this extent Badiou is obviously just Sartre with a powerful pocket calculator). Capitalism delivers us irreversibly, actually, to anguish: so surely the nonsense of revolting against this gift is only the stuff of cowardice and idealism.
Leave aside the pragmatic point that the demands misunderstand the structural precarité under which business itself operates (themselves hardly free to make a salto mortale out of their situation - no limited company asked to be born either). The prospect of being obligated to a new employee for decades to come is hardly likely to make employers more likely to take on the youth of the banlieue, whereas a certain precarité might make experimentation possible - on both sides (the greatest weapon and freedom the capitalist worker has is his ability simply not to turn up). The pragmatic basis of the CPE is, yes, a capitulation to Capitalism's errant autonomy and thus a capitulation to a precarité that essentially belongs no more to the state or the multinational than to the worker. It's the skein of orthodoxy, social mores, tradition, fearfulness, propriety, in other words bad faith that limit the immediate exercise of this precarité on the part of the worker (at least, in developed economies - but how does an ameliorative, corrective politics here help the less-developed?)
If the riots marches and occupations in Paris harbour some potential it is to the extent that they make of this precarité a social, collective exercise rather than militate 'against' it in/on principle.
The event will never arrive until every dream of carrying some political booty back to the land of the 'real' is renounced; until we reach a universal affirmation of something beyond the picket line, beyond unemployment - unemployability, vagrancy, precarity, the reversibility of futility and unconditional joy, the positivity of anguish. Refusal of the wage-labourer as fetishised ideal in favour of the vagrant, the vagabond. Beckett would surely appreciate this sentiment: only when every worker and student finds their inner tramp is the purposive exoskeleton of capitalism shed and its relative deterritorialization accelerated into the production of a 'new earth'.
The constant movement, the circulation of everything is a paradoxical condition for the functioning of the capitalist machine. In the same paradox, interrupting its functioning is a condition for its disruption.
Substitute acceleration for interruption. Capitalism-schizophrenia functions only in virtue of its axiomatisation, in the freeze-frame of its systemic recuperation. If the CPE releases the brakes a little, of course it is only to shortly re-engage them. For all this, it cannot be mistaken for the enemy. Form a stone-sucking collective machine which refuses to 'function' as much as capitalism-schizophrenia does. (It goes without saying that this refusal of function is easier for students than for workers. But if there is no 'being' of the worker – that is, if we affirm something beyond ones vocational coordinates – but only a becoming, then it is still possible for that becoming to be diverted.)
Finally, the power of this turmoil is in the act, not in any 'cause' but in the practical realisation of freedom. In this sense no barricade, no picket-line, no occupation is any more or less political than Antoine Doinel's bunking off school.
No doubt the first step is taken in rejecting the sham of democracy; the words go further:
We have to embrace with serenity the fact that there will be no return to normal, and then inhabit this irreversibility.
It remains to be seen how long the affirmation of insecurity, the distancing from all cause, can be upheld.
Only wild demonstrations and occupations from now on.
Posted by robin at March 26, 2006 10:06 AM