'Work on oneself, in as much as one is a collective singularity; construct and in a permanent way re-construct this collectivity in a multivalent liberation project. Not in reference to a directing ideology, but within the articulation of the Real. Perpetually recomposing subjectivity and praxis is only conceivable in the totally free movement of each of its components, and in absolute respects of their own times—time for comprehending or refusing to comprehend, time to be unified or to be autonomous, time of identification or of the most exacerbated differences.' - Felix Guattari and Toni Negri
'I LIVE ON THE EDGE OF THE UNIVERSE AND I DON'T NEED TO FEEL SECURE' - Raoul Vaneigem, 'The Revolution of Everyday Life'
Of course, one must live. Perpetually, this demand shrieks at us, no level of abstraction sufficient to dampen it. There is no way out of time, so what exactly am I supposed to do? It's not for nothing that Nietzsche recognised the demand of the eternal return as something that we are perhaps not yet capable of. To think the full immanence of ones life - its humble mere NOW, with no guarantor, no supplementary dimension by which we might orientate ourselves... If immanence leaves us at the mercy of the event, then we have an entirely new set of questions to plague us. No longer must we ask after the rightness of our actions. Such a question loses its sense when one no longer makes any appeals to a reckoning, the eschatological judgement which will neatly draw up the balance sheet of a life. We will not be judged, except by the wheel that will offer us our actions back to us, not once or twice but to the nth power. What might be asked of such a world, which has composed us from so many disparate elements, contracted us into a fragile and inestimable singularity and given us a life, a plane on which to trace some kind of territory, make a few hesitant moves? The most pressing perhaps is this: what are we to do with this life? from which we have tentatively been able to emerge, to say 'I', to consider ourselves capable of something, though we know not what...?
Let us say, cautiously, that the question is really one of power. We run into a terminological problem here - when we say power, there is inavariably a political inflection, a subtext of domination perhaps. A sour taste of the state, the authority, perhaps some Kantian tribunal to be set up. French offers a distinction between pouvoir and puissance which has no direct equivalence in English - they are both generally translated as power. Yet there is a distinction, played upon by both Deleuze and Foucault. With puissance we have the specific, macropolitical dimension of power - power one possesses and exercises from a certain privileged position, power as authority and discipline. With pouvoir we mean something different; we are speaking of a set of capacities, of the actions of which a thing is capable, its power to affect and be affected, the other things with which is can productively connect, the compositions it can enter into... So, before we might ask what it is we might do, how that we might live in the givenness of this life, we need to know our powers of being.
Again, we must be careful to strip this question of the traces of the subject which cling to it. We must be aware that the subject is one effect of our composition, and its fixity is entirely illusory. The question must not become an adumbration of the properties we can claim to possess, for we will always miss the real movement, the activity of being that will always be 'behind ones back'. Deleuze gives the task of knowing our powers 'schizoanalysis' or 'transcendental empiricism'. Guattari refers to the 'existential Territories' that we inhabit, along the surface of which the subject moves, capturing for itself some libidnal surplus and telling itself 'so that was me!'. The central point is this - we are social before we are personal, 'there is only desire and the social and nothing else.' You assemble yourself, you bricoleur, from whatever is offered you. And then you forget it, repress the process in the name of your sovereignity. I accuse you, but I really accuse myself. In any case, it is a task that we can take up or not. But until we know how it is we are produced - the milieus we inhabit, the territories of meaning and desire that we traverse in our daily micromovements, the becomings that we partake of and the things which threaten to dissolve us - then how can we know how we might live?
Things are still quite abstract, though that is not in itself a problem. But we need a few concrete suggestions, a few more specific concepts to deploy, to quieten the shriek of life. Perhaps our talk of territories and mileus, desires and affects, sounds pretty but altogether empty, dispersed all to easily before the furnace of a life, with all its demands and its sadnesses. Well, an experiment is in order, and we cannot guarantee success. But here is a humble suggestion, and one that expresses very well the simplicity of a 'project' and the possibility, forever denounced but always lurking at the edges of our field of vision, of a liberation:
Let's be pragmatists. Don't change everything, don't push yourself to dissolution, catatonia. Just isolate a set of relations, find their points of fixity, the controls exerted; find the moments of liberation or joy, the 'trembling' that escapes any overcoding. Exert some pressure. Ultimately, the question we first pose is always too much, too far. The hubristic desire to know how to live, how life might be possible. I have said we need these utopianisms, and I believe it. But let's not destroy ourselves in their name - there is work to be done, quiet and humble work in the name of liberation or revolution. It will always be of the nature of an experiment, tentative and open; but is this not the greatest power - the greatest degree of movement, always navigating in the openness of a world never quite done?
We will always have to start again, from the middle.
Of course, one must live. Perpetually, this demand shrieks at us, no level of abstraction sufficient to dampen it. There is no way out of time, so what exactly am I supposed to do? It's not for nothing that Nietzsche recognised the demand of the eternal return as something that we are perhaps not yet capable of. To think the full immanence of ones life - its humble mere NOW, with no guarantor, no supplementary dimension by which we might orientate ourselves... If immanence leaves us at the mercy of the event, then we have an entirely new set of questions to plague us. No longer must we ask after the rightness of our actions. Such a question loses its sense when one no longer makes any appeals to a reckoning, the eschatological judgement which will neatly draw up the balance sheet of a life. We will not be judged, except by the wheel that will offer us our actions back to us, not once or twice but to the nth power. What might be asked of such a world, which has composed us from so many disparate elements, contracted us into a fragile and inestimable singularity and given us a life, a plane on which to trace some kind of territory, make a few hesitant moves? The most pressing perhaps is this: what are we to do with this life? from which we have tentatively been able to emerge, to say 'I', to consider ourselves capable of something, though we know not what...?
Let us say, cautiously, that the question is really one of power. We run into a terminological problem here - when we say power, there is inavariably a political inflection, a subtext of domination perhaps. A sour taste of the state, the authority, perhaps some Kantian tribunal to be set up. French offers a distinction between pouvoir and puissance which has no direct equivalence in English - they are both generally translated as power. Yet there is a distinction, played upon by both Deleuze and Foucault. With puissance we have the specific, macropolitical dimension of power - power one possesses and exercises from a certain privileged position, power as authority and discipline. With pouvoir we mean something different; we are speaking of a set of capacities, of the actions of which a thing is capable, its power to affect and be affected, the other things with which is can productively connect, the compositions it can enter into... So, before we might ask what it is we might do, how that we might live in the givenness of this life, we need to know our powers of being.
Again, we must be careful to strip this question of the traces of the subject which cling to it. We must be aware that the subject is one effect of our composition, and its fixity is entirely illusory. The question must not become an adumbration of the properties we can claim to possess, for we will always miss the real movement, the activity of being that will always be 'behind ones back'. Deleuze gives the task of knowing our powers 'schizoanalysis' or 'transcendental empiricism'. Guattari refers to the 'existential Territories' that we inhabit, along the surface of which the subject moves, capturing for itself some libidnal surplus and telling itself 'so that was me!'. The central point is this - we are social before we are personal, 'there is only desire and the social and nothing else.' You assemble yourself, you bricoleur, from whatever is offered you. And then you forget it, repress the process in the name of your sovereignity. I accuse you, but I really accuse myself. In any case, it is a task that we can take up or not. But until we know how it is we are produced - the milieus we inhabit, the territories of meaning and desire that we traverse in our daily micromovements, the becomings that we partake of and the things which threaten to dissolve us - then how can we know how we might live?
Things are still quite abstract, though that is not in itself a problem. But we need a few concrete suggestions, a few more specific concepts to deploy, to quieten the shriek of life. Perhaps our talk of territories and mileus, desires and affects, sounds pretty but altogether empty, dispersed all to easily before the furnace of a life, with all its demands and its sadnesses. Well, an experiment is in order, and we cannot guarantee success. But here is a humble suggestion, and one that expresses very well the simplicity of a 'project' and the possibility, forever denounced but always lurking at the edges of our field of vision, of a liberation:
'Our advice is to start with a small thing. First, realise that we are in a social formation; then see how it is for us and in us at the place where we are. Next, descend from the strata to the deeper assemblage. From here, you will have to make the assemblage pass over to the side of the plane of immanence. That's the hard part. Tip it gently; don't use a sledgehammer but a very fine file. Count the connections in the assemblage (there will be several), find the rhythm of its trembling (for it will tremble), slip into its mean time (for there is always time). Finally, create immanent revolutions (small ones) and lines towards the outside (fast ones) in order to deterritorialise and connect again with outside.' - Fugslang and Sorenson, 'Deleuze and the Social'
Let's be pragmatists. Don't change everything, don't push yourself to dissolution, catatonia. Just isolate a set of relations, find their points of fixity, the controls exerted; find the moments of liberation or joy, the 'trembling' that escapes any overcoding. Exert some pressure. Ultimately, the question we first pose is always too much, too far. The hubristic desire to know how to live, how life might be possible. I have said we need these utopianisms, and I believe it. But let's not destroy ourselves in their name - there is work to be done, quiet and humble work in the name of liberation or revolution. It will always be of the nature of an experiment, tentative and open; but is this not the greatest power - the greatest degree of movement, always navigating in the openness of a world never quite done?
We will always have to start again, from the middle.
