Preliminary Thoughts on This Is Not a Program

A redefinition of historical conflict is needed, not intellectually: vitally. (12)

Given Semiotext(e)’s recent translation of Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program into English, I thought I would sketch out some of my thoughts on the text.

This Is Not a Program teases out many of the complications and difficulties of their Introduction to Civil War; in many ways, the interventions made in This Is Not a Program seem to be assumed and refined in Introduction to Civil War. Embedding the work of the collective within a long history of anti-capitalist struggle, from the Black Panthers and the Red Army Faction to a more substantive engagement with the multiple and sometimes conflicting movements of Autonomia, This Is Not a Program works to thoroughly rearticulate political resistance under empire. As indicated in the quote above, the dominant problem of This Is Not a Program is that of partisanship–to redefine absolutely the terms of conflict and resistance. To continue the quote, Tiqqun writes, “I say redefinition because a definition of historical conflict precedes us in which every existence in the pre-imperial period had its part: the class struggle. That definition no longer holds. It condemns us to paralysis, bad faith, and empty talk . . . to continue the struggle today, we will have to scrap the notion of class and with it the whole entourage of certified origins, reassuring sociologisms, identity prostheses” (12). It is thus the eschewal of class that gives rise to a concept of partisanship that is bound neither to a dialectical operation nor its reduction to a fundamentally bi-partisan relation, something like a friend/enemy relation. Enter the form-of-life and its composition in resistance, The Imaginary Party: “When the hostis is no longer a portion of society–the bourgeoisie–but the society as such, the society as power, and when, therefore, we find ourselves fighting not against classical tyrannies but against biopolitical democracies, we know that every weapon, just like every strategy, must be reinvented. The hostis is Empire, and, for Empire, we are the Imaginary Party” (27).

It is in this attempt to redefine partisan relations that Tiqqun’s aversion to Negrism is more fully fleshed out. Where, in The Introduction to Civil War, a critique of Negri is given a mere 2 to 3 pages, two full sections are dedicated to dismantling both Negri’s concept of the multitude and any attempt at fomenting a positive bio-political project. Varying somewhat wildly between biting invective and concise critique, Tiqqun’s engagement with Negri’s thought begins with a critique of citizenship:

The accidents and the rationality that produce the citizen all point to the heart of the imperial enterprise: to attenuate forms-of-life, to neutralize bodies; and the citizen advances this enterprise by self-annulling the risk he represents to the imperial environment . . . There is therefore a factory of the citizen, whose long-term implantation is Empire’s major victory; not social, or political, or economic but anthropological victory . . . The objective [is] to purge the productive center of a society in which production was becoming militarized, to purge it of all the ‘deviants,’ of all the at-risk individuals, of all the agents of the Imaginary Party. (103-104)

It is of this understanding of the citizen and the mechanism by which society is sanitized or purged that Tiqqun refutes Negri on questions of bio-politics and the multitude:

The three watchwords typical of political Negrism–for all its strength lies in its ability to provide informal neo-militants with issues on which to focus their demands–are the ‘citizens dividend,’ the right to free movement (‘Papers for everyone!’), and the right to creativity, especially if computer-assisted. In this sense, the Negrist perspective is in no way different from the imperial perspective but rather a mere instance of perfectionism within it . . . Hence political Negrism’s incestuous relationship with imperial pacification: it wants reality but not its realism. It wants Biopolitics without police, communication without Spectacle, peace without having to wage war to get it. Strictly speaking, Negrism does not coincide with imperial thought; it is simply the idealist face of political thought. (117-118)

So, the importance of a redefinition of partisanship comes to the fore. Not only does Tiqqun consider class to be an antiquated and inadequate means of framing partisan relations in the contemporary moment, articulating a concept of partisanship that distinguishes itself from Negri’s multitude is what remains vital; where the multitude exists as a reconceptualized form of citizenship, citizenship in either local or cosmopolitan iterations must be refused precisely because of its status as an idealized imperial socio-political composition.

On a more general note, This Is Not a Program offers a thorough history of the movements and factions of Autonomia that pairs well with Steven Wrights’ Storming Heaven and the introductory components of Autonomia: Post-Political Politics. Embedding their work firmly within German, Italian, and French Autonome movements, Tiqqun’s This Is Not a Program is in many ways the contemporary antagonistic voice that works to criticize and render undesirable the reformist lines of thought and action that have resulted from Autonomia. Further, I think that This Is Not a Program would serve as a great companion piece to Foucault’s later lectures at the Collège de France, particularly Security, Territory Population, The Birth of Bio-Politics, and The Hermeneutics of the Subject. Where Foucault revisits questions of partisanship, bio-politics, and the form-of-life in these lectures, Tiqqun seems to be intent on elaborating the implications of Foucault’s genealogies of and premises on these subjects in the contemporary moment.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, Foucault, Negri, partisanship, This Is Not a Program, Tiqqun

PANEL: ‘The Time of Protest’ @ The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution Conference

Hey All,

I am organizing a panel for the upcoming The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution at Binghamton University. I have pasted the Panel CFP below.

The Philosophy, Interpretation, and Culture Student Alliance at
Binghamton University (S.U.N.Y.) Presents:
The Revolution of Time and the Time of Revolution
A conference
The 25th – 26th of March, 2011
Keynote Speaker: Dr. Peter Gratton, Assistant Professor of Philosophy
University of San Diego, CA

The Time of Protest

In keeping with the conference theme, this panel seeks to give a sense of the ways in which time is produced in radical politics. More specifically, however, the scope of this panel is focused on what we are calling here ‘time of protest.’ From Guy Debord, Attila Kotányi, Raoul Vaneigem’s “Theses on the Paris Commune,” to Hakim Bey’s “Temporary Autonomous Zone,” The Invisible Committee’s The Coming Insurrection and “Infinite Strike,” to Giorgio Agamben’s treatment of Tiananmen, a rich radical philosophical theorization of spatio-temporal configurations of protest informs a radical commitment to social change.

This panel thus seeks submissions that theorize protestive praxis with an eye toward the relation shared between conceptual and tactical formulations of space, time, and protest in their social and political production and across disciplinary divides. In this way, submissions might also analyze current student and labor protest, protest literature in the form of pamphlets, manifestoes, or zines, cartoons, video and/or film, or dominant and alternative sources of news coverage.

Given the particular scope of this panel, some possible topics might include larger topics representative of overall conference themes:
* Radical notions of futurity, historicity, or the expansive present.
* Conceptions on the right moment of action.
* The political reality of time as stasis or cyclical.
* The colonial creation of universal time, and decolonial cosmologies of time.
* Work on thinkers of time and revolution.
* Work on potentiality, the virtual, and the actual.
* Capital and labor time.

Abstracts of 500 words maximum due by January 25th, 2011. In a separate paragraph state your name, address, telephone number, email and organizational or institutional affiliation, if any.

Email proposals to: mappleg1@binghamton.edu
with a cc: to clawren1@binghamton.edu and pic.conference2011@gmail.com

Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, The Invisible Committee, The Jam, Tiqqun

Voyoucracy and the City: Derrida and the Situationists Revisted

As I alluded to in a previous post, an interesting and yet uncharted relationship exists between Derrida’s thoughts, scattered as they are, on ‘the city’ and that of the Situationist International. Here, I am interested in Derrida’s thoughts on what he terms the ‘voyoucracy‘ in Rogues: Two Essays on Reason as it relates to more general thoughts on the city and urbanity and the concepts developed by the Situationists that immediately pertain, specifically dérive and psychogeography.

When uttered, the noun voyou, on Derrida’s account, announces interpellation, calls to order; it, “casts a normative, indeed performative, evaluation, a disdainful or threatening insult, an appellation that initiates an inquiry and prepares prosecution before the law” (64). Thus, the voyou is interpellated as a rogue, a terrorist, a criminal, an anarchist, etc., a person or group that is identified as deviant, threatening, oppositional to established norms, laws, and the police. Not to be mistaken, however, the voyou is a citizen but also one who resists citizenship, a suspect citizen or a citizen suspected of illegal status, a legal criminal or an illegal immigrant. In this way, the voyou’s consummate place of habitation is in and of the street, in and of public urban space–in spaces of surveilled fluidity, movement, and anonymity, and thus in spaces that, while characteristic of its composition, resist and undermine the ordering principles of the law.

But here we are confronted with the how of voyou activity; what does voyou activity accomplish within in the spaces of the city and to what end? Obviously, a question like this is radically contingent, only answerable through an investigation of the resistant practices of individuals or groups working from specific and intimate histories of oppression. At the same time, however, the how of voyou activity redefines the space of the city and the figure of the citizen through its practice. Thus, concepts created and employed by the Situationists, concepts like dérive and psychogeography are at once voyouish activities and constitutive of practices of fluidity and movement. In other words, dérive loosely defined by Gilles Ivain as ‘the changing [of] landscape from one hour to the next [which] will result in complete disorientation’ and psychogeography defined by Guy Debord as that which ‘will aim to study the precise laws and specific effects of the geographic milieu, consciously planned or not, acting directly on the affective comportment of individuals’ both imagine alternatives to the space and life of the city, alternative laws governing the space and life of the city, as well as attempt to think acts of interpellation in relation with their resistances.

Here, one can think of the commune offered by The Invisible Committeas an attempt to think something like what Derrida terms the voyou and what the Situationsts term dérive together, in its practice: “Communes come into being when people find each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy of an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say ‘we,’ and makes that an event” (101). Further, The Invisible Committee positions the commune, or what they call the multiplicity of communes, as what “will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union, sports clubs, etc.” (102). Thus, the continuous formation and interrelation of communes is the simultaneous play and joining together of groups and bodies and the acting out of those groups and bodies. “The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. An insurrectional surge may be nothing more than a multiplication of communes, their coming to contact and forming ties” (117).

But what of a voyoucracy? Why does Derrida give such a name to voyouish activity?

Voyoucracy is characterized by Derrida as a “principle of disorder, to be sure, a threat against public order; but, as a cracy, it represents something more than a collection of individual or individualistic voyous . . . the voyoucracy already constitutes, even institutes, a sort of counterpower or countercitizenship. It is what is called a milieu” (66). Here, a voyoucracy does not refer to a principle of unification or a totalization of resistant and/or illegal activity. Rather, I think Derrida attributes voyoucracy to a radical relationship of alterity and criminalization shared between individuals and practices denounced by ‘the law.’ The voyoucracy is thus not the imposition of a new city, new civic structure, maybe not, like the Situationists would have it, a new Babylon, but the very practices that defer the concretization, the total organization of civic space and life, maybe to something like continuous acts of secession that characterize the city itself and thus the possibility of it existing otherwise.

Filed under: Everything's Political, The Invisible Committee, Tiqqun, Derrida, The Invisible Committe, The Situationists, Tiqqun, voyou