P O L I S

In the primitive phase of capitalist accumulation, political economy saw in the proletarian only the worker, who must receive the minimum indispensable for the conservation of his labor power, without ever seeing him 'in his leisure and humanity.'

But these ideas of the ruling class are reversed as soon as the production of commodities reaches a level of abundance which requires a surplus of collaboration from the worker. This worker -- suddenly redeemed from the total and obvious contempt by all the varieties of organization and supervision of production -- finds himself every day, outside of production and in the guise of a consumer, seemingly treated as an adult, with zealous politeness.

At this point the humanism of the commodity takes charge of the worker’s “leisure and humanity,” simply because now political economy can and must dominate these spheres as political economy. Thus the “perfected denial of man” has taken charge of the totality of human existence.

Tourism, human cicrculation considered as consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities, is fundamentally northing more than the leisure of going to see what has become banal. The economic organization of visits to different places is already in itself the guarantee of their equivalence. The same modernization that removed time from the voyage also removed from it the reality of space.

Theordo Adorno | The Culture Industry

Under monopoly all mass culture is identical, and the lines of its artificial framework begin to show through. The people at the top are no longer so interested in concealing monopoly: as its violence becomes more open, so its power grows. Movies and radio need no longer pretend to be art. The truth that they are just business is made into an ideology in order to justify the rubbish they deliberately produce. They call themselves industries; and when their directors’ incomes are published, any doubt about the social utility of the finished products is removed.

The Invisible Committee | The Coming Insurrection

Those who’ve found less humiliation and more benefit in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not give up their weapons, and prison won’t make them love society.

The injunction to be strong produces the very weakness it maintains itself on, to such a point that everything seems to take on a therapeutic aspect, even working or love. All the time, we ask “how’s it going?” all day long – like a society full of patients, taking each other’s temperature

We aren’t depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state, but a passage, a good bye, a step to the side towards a political disaffiliation. And from then on there’s no possible reconciliation besides medications and the police. Indeed, that’s why this society has no fear of imposing Ritalin so much on its too-lively children or of fixing people into life-long dependency on pharmaceuticals, and claims to be able to detect “behavioral troubles” at three years of age: because the hypothesis of the “I” is cracking everywhere.

The family is no longer so much the asphyxiation of the maternal stranglehold or the patriarchy of cookies in your face, but the infantile abandonment to a fleecy dependency where everything is known, to a moment of carelessness in a world that no one can deny is crumbling, a world where “becoming independent” is a euphemism for “finding a boss to work for."

To work today is less about the economic need of producing commodities than about the political need to produce producers and consumers, to save the order of work by any means necessary. Producing oneself is about to become the dominant occupation in a society where production has become aimless: like a carpenter who’s been kicked out of his workshop and who out of desperation starts to plane himself down.

This world wouldn’t be on the move so fast if it weren’t for the fact that its collapse is so hot on its tail.

There’s no “environmental catastrophe.” The environment itself is the catastrophe. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in a neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop – they don’t have an “environment;” they’re living in a world, peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, living and dying areas, all kinds of beings. This world has its own substance, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the connections that attach us to all these beings, all these places. There’s no one but us, we children of the final dispossession, the exiles of the end times – who come into the world in concrete cubes, harvest our fruits at the supermarket, and catch the echo of the world through television – only we get to have an environment. And there’s no one but us watching our own annihilation as if it were just a simple change of atmosphere. Getting indignant about the latest advancements of the disaster, and patiently putting together encyclopedia entries about them.

What is frozen in this environment is a relationship with the world based on management, that is, on foreignness. A relationship with the world where we’re not made as well as the rustling of trees, the smell of frying oil in the building, the bubbling of water, the uproar of school classrooms, the mugginess of summer evenings, a relationship with the world where there is me and then there is my environment, surrounding me but never really constituting me. We have become neighbors in a planetary co-owners’ meeting. It’s hard to imagine a more complete hell.

The present paradox of ecology is that on the pretext of saving the Earth, it is merely saving the foundations of what’s desolated it.

The saying “nothing is true” says nothing about the world, but it says everything about the western concept of truth. Truth, here, is not seen as an attribute of beings or things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to experience is considered true. Science is the last resort of this empire of universal verification. All human behaviors, from the most ordinary to the most learned, rest on a foundation of unequally formulated pieces of evidence: but in practice things and representations are only indistinctly linked, and so into every life is introduced a dose of truth that isn’t included in the western concept. They talk about “real people,” but it’s only to mock the “poor in spirit.” That’s why Westerners are universally considered liars and hypocrites by people in the countries they’ve colonized. That’s why they’re envied for what they have, for their technological advancement, and never for what they are, indeed they’re rather justly scorned for it. One couldn’t teach de Sade, Nietzsche, and Artaud in the high schools if their whole idea of truth hadn’t been discredited in advance. To endlessly contain all affirmation; to deactivate all those certitudes that can’t help but come out: such is the long labor of the western intellect. Philosophy and the police are two of its convergent but formally distinct means for doing so.

There’s no reason to react to the news of the day, but to understand each information given as an operation carried out on a hostile battlefield full of strategies to decode, an operation aiming precisely to stir up some certain reaction or another among some group of people or another, and to see that operation itself as the real news contained within the apparent news. There’s no more reason to expect or wait for anything – to expect that it will all blow over, that the revolution will come, a nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To wait anymore is madness. The catastrophe isn’t coming; it’s here. We’re already situated within a civilization’s movement of collapse. And we have to take part in it.

A truth isn’t a view on the world; a truth is something that keeps us tied to it in an irreducible way. A truth isn’t something you hold but something that holds you. It makes and unmakes me, it’s my constitution and destitution as an individual; it distances me from a lot, but brings me closer to those who feel it too. An isolated being attached to it will unavoidably meet a few fellow creatures.