Rhizomes 22

The newest issue of Rhizomes is up. In it you will find a new article by Hilary, “The Becoming-Woman of the Young-Girls:Revisiting Riot Grrrl, Rethinking Girlhood.”

The article combines analyses of two, coincident movements of the late ’90′s: Riot Grrrl and the work of French anarcho-communist collective Tiqqun, specifically, their “Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl.” It is an excellent piece. What follows is merely one example of its overall badassness:

There is a certain prescience to Tiqqun’s writing on the generalization of Young-Girlization, in so far as a move from an analysis of mainstream media’s facilitation of the process into the role of the tertiary sector more generally. This economic sector, traditionally a ‘pink-collar’ ghetto, and accordingly considered only an attaché to the processes of production, a sort of subsidiary and thus feminized lubricant on the cogs of capital, is now occupied by many other minoritized social segments and also by members of differential classes, losing its subsidiary character and coming to claim a space more and more central to the operations of capital—that is, no longer tertiary. “Ah, the Young-Girls of the tertiary sector; marketing; shops; social services. In the near, foreseeable future, the whole of the capitalist regime’s surplus value will be produced by Young-Girls.” [9] In other words, the Young-Girl is a privileged figure, a guiding beacon of social propriety, within communicative capitalism, that re-christening of what used to be called post-Fordism.

[17] With communicative capitalism, the production of ostensible intangibles of communication, relation, and affect are no longer considered secondary to the process of production, but instead are key to the proliferation of capital, which means, to cite Hardt and Negri in Commonwealth, that “production, in other words, is becoming ‘anthropogenetic,’ generating forms of life.” [10] This entails an important transmutation in the role of knowledge-production that is key to grasping the rise of communicative capitalism: it means that “knowledge is no longer a means to the creation of value (in the commodity form), but rather the production of knowledge is itself value creation.” [11] Communication, knowledge production, and relationality more generally are increasingly commoditized: all those skills that the Young-Girls of the tertiary sector are encouraged to cultivate. The Young-Girl, then, can be considered the life form par excellence of communicative capitalism.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Gender Thangs, The Jam, Tiqqun, Hilary Malatino, Raw Materials for a Theory of the Young-Girl, Rhizomes, Tiqqun

Unemployed Negativity on Tiqqun

Jason Read over at Unemployed Negativity just posted a miniature review of Tiqqun’s This is Not a Program. While I think that Jason has a more Marxist inflected reading of Tiqqun than myself (I am far more preoccupied with the collective’s anarchism), Jason has some of the best writing and analysis of Tiqqun/The Invisible Committee out there, blog or otherwise, so I encourage you all to check it out.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Tiqqun, Jason Read, Tiqqun

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

Summer Reading

So, while much of the summer will be dedicated to writing my dissertation proposal, a book review, and conference papers for the ASLE and the Re-visioning Terrorism conference at Purdue in early September, I thought I would document my summer reading list here in an attempt to keep myself honest. The following texts are listed in no particular order.

The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, by Jürgen Habermas

Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida, by Giovanna Borradori

This is Not a Program, by Tiqqun

Green is the New Red, by Will Potter

Text of S. 3880 [109th]: Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act

Selections from Manifesto: A Century of Isms, Edited by Mary Ann Caws

Modernism, Race, and Manifestos, by Laura Winkiel

Poetry of the Revolution: Marx, Manifestos, and the Avant-Gardes, by Martin Puchner

Excitable Speech, by Judith Butler

“Everyday Barf”, by Eileen Myles

The Barf Manifesto, by Dodie Bellamy (with HJM!)

Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, by David Shields

“One Less Manifesto”, by Gilles Deleuze

“The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse and the Everyday Worms”, interview with Michel Foucault

“The Thought of the Outside”, by Michel Foucault

“The Law of Genre”, by Jacques Derrida

The Return of the Political, by Chantal Mouffe

The Democratic Paradox, by Chantal Mouffe

Eros and Civilization, by Herbert Marcuse (with HJM!)

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Love Letters, The Jam, Tiqqun, Lists, Summer Reading

Forms-of-Life, Living Biomass, and Foucault

Over this semester my goal is to move through about 5 years of Foucault’s lectures series at the Collège de France. Throughout the lecture series, Foucault refers to what he calls ‘forms-of-life’ without ever giving much definition to what they are. From the lectures that I have read, the ‘form-of-life’ appears most often, and without detailed explanation of its meaning, in The Hermeneutics of the Subject. I’ll offer a couple examples.

The first time I noted Foucault’s use of the ‘form-of-life’ is in reference to the questions, ‘who can take care of the self?’ ‘Under what conditions is the care of the self an open possibility?’ In reference to these questions, Foucault writes:

We cannot take care of the self unless the life before us, the life available to us, is such that we can–forgive the expression–treat ourselves to the luxury of skhole or otium (which is not, of course, leisure as we understand it; we will not come back to this). Anyway, a certain particular form of life, which is distinct from all other forms of life in its particularity, will in fact be regarded as the real condition of the care of the self. So, in reality, the care of the self in ancient Greek and Roman culture was never really seen, laid down, or affirmed as a universal law valid for every individual regardless of his mode of life. (113)

In reference to the ‘Roman form of private counselor,’ the philosopher as cultural agent for the ‘non-philosopher,’ Foucault writes:

As you can see, the role of the counselor is not that of private tutor any more than it is entirely that of friendly confidante. He is, rather what could be called a counselor of existence who gives his views on specific occasions. He is the person who guides and initiates someone who is both his patron, almost his employer, and his friend, but his superior friend. He initiates him into a particular form of life, because one is not a philosopher in general. (143)

There is also a reference to the ‘form-of-life’ in Arnold Davidson’s introduction that is important when we consider the transition from The Hermeneutics of the Subject to The Government of Self and Others. Here, Davidson writes,

Foucault distinguishes between an understanding of Aufklärung that consists in a commitment to certain theories, elements of doctrine, and accumulated bodies of knowledge and a conception of Aufklärung as the ‘permanent reactivation of an attitude,’ an ethos, a form of philosophical life. At the moment when Foucault fleshes out the various components of this attitude and specifically when he singles out that feature which he identifies as the ‘experimental attitude,’ he has recourse to the notion of l’épreuve, the testing of oneself, of one’s mode of being and thought, which plays a crucial interpretive role in The Hermeneutics of the Subject . . . Tests, techniques, practices, exercises, attitudes, events–so many layers of our experience that philosophy has turned away from and that Foucault was able to recover through a style of critical work that is inextricably historical and philosophical. (xxvii)

And this is precisely where The Government of Self and Others opens. The first lecture beings with a preliminary interpretation of Immanuel Kant’s What is the Aufklärung? and Idea for a Universal History of a Cosmopolitan Point of View. Here, Foucault claims that, for the first time in these texts, philosophical reflection begins with the now–philosophical reflection addresses the question of “What is this ‘now’ in which we all live and which is the site, the point [from which] I am writing?” (11) Foucault expands on this question two pages later:

That is to say, the question will no longer be one of his adherence to a doctrine or a tradition, or of his membership of a human community in general, but a question about him being part of a present, about his membership of a particular ‘we’ if you like, which is linked, to a greater or lesser extent, to a cultural ensemble characteristic of his contemporary reality. This ‘we’ has to become, or is in the process of becoming, the object of the philosopher’s own reflection. By the same token, it becomes impossible for the philosopher to dispense with an interrogation of his singular membership of this ‘we.’ It seems to me that philosophy as the surface of emergence of a present reality, as a questioning of the philosophical meaning of the present reality of which it is a part, and philosophy as the philosophers questioning of this ‘we’ to which be belongs and in relation to which he has to situate himself, is a distinctive feature of philosophy as a discourse of modernity and on modernity. (13)

After all the blockquotes, what, then, is the ‘form-of-life?’ In The Hermeneutics of the Subject the form-of-life refers to the techniques of the self by which ‘the self’ is constituted as a culture. In other words, the form-of-life refers to the set of habits that constitute the self where those habits are utilized and between the subjects that are in the position to ‘care for the self.’ But the form-of-life seems to demand more than a set of practices or habits. Indeed, much of Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War establishes this demand. In assertions 1 and 2, and the footnote that follows, this demand is made clear: “1. The elementary human unity is not the body–the individual–but the form of life. 2. The form of life is not beyond bare life, it is intimate polarization (16-17).” And from the footnote, “When in English one speaks of a ‘polarizing’ figure or event, it indicates the production of irreconcilable differences between groups or parties. Here, the term evokes a process in which a body is affected by a form-of-life in such a way as to take on a charge that orients it in a specific manner: it is attracted by certain bodies, it is repulsed by others” (227-228). Here, the form-of-life is, in addition to the techniques of the self or habits that produce the subject, constitutive of a fundamental opacity between bodies and a relation of force. The form-of-life is constitutive of an ensemble that constantly gains and loses the bodies that comprise it as well as an antagonistic relation with forms-of-life that oppose it, oppress it, or work to eliminate it. It seems to be a miniature environment and biomass–both a milieu and the amount of living or organic matter present in an organism–that the subject participates in and is produced by. And, on Foucault’s account, the form-of-life is that which demands that philosophy considers its social, political, cultural, and historical milieu as its ground as well as its reason for being.

While I am not sure how far this comparison of the form-of-life to biomass can go, thinking the ecology of the form-of-life might be one avenue of thinking the relationship between the form-of-life and partisan relations. Here, I think, for both Foucault and Tiqqun, the form-of-life is an attempt at thinking partisanship in opposition to any kind of determinative mode of thought and action–democratic or fascist as it may be. For, where philosophical thinking takes its social, historical, and cultural relations to be its ground and reason for being, it cannot be separated the political relations that surround, cross it, and constitute it. Thus, where we consider the ‘form-of-life,’ partisanship cannot be merely reduced to the relationship shared between friends and enemies. Neither can it be merely considered as one’s devotion to or bias in support of a party, group, or cause. In the same way, it means that philosophy, even on a metaphysical plane, can’t be neutral.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Tiqqun, Biomass, ecology, ethics, form of life, Foucault, governmentality, Kant, techniques of the self

RAF on Legality and Illegality

For the past day or so I have been fighting the impulse to write a post about Charlie Sheen’s tiger blood, Adonis DNA.

Here, I am supplanting that impulse with a post on the Red Army Faction. I am teaching a course this semester on manifestoes–this week we are finishing up a unit of the Black Panther Party, The Weather Underground, The Red Army Faction, and Jean Genet. Much of our discussions have focused on questions of political violence and the organization of radical political movements. In each manifesto or set of manifestoes authored by the groups mentioned above, a political program is offered as a model for revolutionary organization and means to a revolutionary outcome. The Red Army Faction offers the concept of the Urban Guerilla and analysis of ‘the dialectic between legality and illegality’ that fits the framework above.

The dialectic between legality and illegality is, for the RAF, premised on a necessary and fundamental bipartisanship derived from Mao: “A clear dividing line must be drawn between ourselves and the enemy” (7). The difference between legality and illegality actuates this line. There are two points in the sixth and final section of The Urban Guerilla Concept that make this argument clear. On the one hand, the relationship between legality and illegality is situated between reformist and fascist ideologies:

Legality is a question of power. The relationship between legality and illegality has to be determined by examining the contradiction between reformist and fascist domination . . . the reformist line attempts to avoid conflicts by using institutional options (co-management) and promises of improvements (in prison conditions, for example), by addressing obsolete sources of conflict (the Chancellor’s genuflection in Poland, for example), by avoiding provocation (the soft line of the Munich Police and the Federal Administrative Court in Berlin, for example), and by airing grievances (regarding public education in Hessen and Berlin, for example). (26-27)

What follows from this in later pages is a de facto definition of Fascism,

Legality is the ideology of parliamentarianism, of social partnership, and of a pluralistic society. Legality becomes a fetish when those who insist upon it ignore that fact that phones are legally tapped, mail is legally monitored, neighbors are legally interrogated, and informants are legally paid. The organization of political work, if it is not to be under constant observation by the political police, must be simultaneously conducted both legally and illegally. (29)

On both counts, the RAF insist on illegality so as to deny any complicity with reformist or fascist ideologies, to make clear the line that divides friend from enemy, but also so as to produce or actuate some kind of revolutionary ‘outside.’ Implicit in the block quotes above is the argument that the continued operation of the law requires that its violence either be normalized, in and through mechanisms of governmentality, or that its violence infiltrate, totally, relations among people. The RAF cannot say, here, though, that the enforcement of the law requires illegality, especially when confronted with a revolutionary force. Neither can the RAF say that revolutionary organization wait for the law to be enforced against it. This, for the RAF, is a fundamental misunderstanding of the dialectic between legality and illegality. This, on their view, is what the Black Panthers and the French Maoist organization Gauche Proletarienne get wrong:

The fate of both the Black Panther Party and Gauche Proletarienne resulted from an incorrect understanding of the contradiction between the constitution and legal reality and the increased intensity of this contradiction when organized resistance occurs. And this incorrect understanding prevents people from see that the conditions of legality are changed by active resistance, and that it is therefore necessary to use legality simultaneously for political struggle and for the organization of illegality, and that it is an error to wait to be banned, as if it were a stroke of fate coming from the system, because then the banning will constitute a death blow, and the issue will be resolved.
The Red Army Faction organizes illegality as an offensive position for revolutionary intervention.

Illegality is thus armed struggle, offensive revolutionary attack, and the RAF imagines itself to be that which “can make verbal internationalism concrete by providing weapons and money. It can blunt the system’s weapons and the banning of communists by organizing an underground that can elude police” (22). The Urban Guerilla, in the form of the RAF, is that which “creates the connection between legal and illegal struggle” (30).

Illegality in the form of armed struggle is, for the RAF, in some way constitutive of this ‘revolutionary outside.’ Maybe we can say illegality is, for the RAF, this outside. But, again, this is derivative of Mao: “A clear dividing line must be drawn between ourselves and the enemy” (7). And this is the limit of the RAF, that it does not think its complex complicity with and against reformist and fascist ideologies, it denies them. And this is precisely the point intimated in Foucault’s introduction to Anti-Oedipus: “How does one keep from being a fascist, even (especially) when one believes oneself to be a revolutionary militant” (xiii)? This is what the RAF’s dialectic between legality and illegality cannot account for–it does not even broach the question. The RAF seems to assume that illegality cannot become a fascist or reformist mode of organization.

Given this, however, there is one sentiment in The Urban Guerilla Concept that I find to be relevant and useful:

Without political practice, readingCapital is nothing more than bourgeois study. Without political practice, political programs are just so much twaddle. Without political practice, proletarian internationalism is only hot air. Adopting a proletarian position in theory implies putting it into practice. (20)

This is the very same sentiment that is expressed in Tiqqun’s critique ‘Negriism’:

From counter-summit to counter-summit, we see our ‘anti-globalization’ movement consumed by more and more doubt: What if inside these pompous edifices, behind these proud facades, what if there was NOTHING? Intuitively they realize that these grand global shells are empty, and this is, moreover, why they besiege them. These palace walls are made from nothing but good intentions. They were constructed each in their time as a reaction to some world crisis, and since they have been left there, uninhabited, unusable for anything, to serve, for example, as a decoy for the dissenting herds of Negriism. (160)

In other words, I think this is where the RAF gets complex and, maybe, the dialectic between legality and illegality can be salvaged from its unquestioning Maoism and its necessary bipartisanship, that a critique of Hardt and Negri’s multitude or a critique of cosmopolitanism and plans for perpetual peace can be formulated along with that of Tiqqun’s.

–MLA

Filed under: Everything's Political, Tiqqun, illegality, legality, Negri, Negriism, RAF, Red Army Faction, Tiqqun, Urban Guerilla Concept

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

“The discourse of biopower,

both on the topic of our suffering and on the topic of our
enjoyment, needs to be silenced. All practices of freedom start there.”

From Tiqqun’s “Sonogram of a Potential,” written in the context of fomenting an ecstatic feminism.

Filed under: Gender Thangs, Love Letters, 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