[The reader who finds this analysis incomprehensible, or who would like an extended and accessible treatment of the subject matter, should look to David Smail's book, The Sense of self in capitalist society. —AFC]
Therefore we say that the central political fact of the last thirty years went unnoticed. Because it took place at such a deep level of reality that it cannot be considered as “political” without bringing about a revolution in the very notion of the political. Because this level of reality is also the one where the division is elaborated between what is regarded as real and what is not. This central fact is the triumph of existential liberalism. The fact that it is now considered natural for everyone to relate to the world on the basis of his own distinct life. That life consists in a series of choices, good or bad. That each one can be defined by a set of qualities, of properties, that make him or her, by their variable weighting, a sole and irreplaceable being. That the idea of the contract adequately epitomises the relations of commitment between individuals, and the idea of respect epitomises all virtue. That language is only a tool to come to an understanding.
That the world is composed on the one hand of things to manage and on the other of an ocean of atomic individuals. Which in turn have an unfortunate tendency to turn into things, by letting themselves get managed.
Of course, cynicism is only one of the possible features of the infinite clinical picture of existential liberalism. It also includes depression, apathy, immunodeficiency (every immune system is intrinsically collective), dishonesty, judicial harassment, chronic dissatisfaction, denied attachments, isolation, illusions of citizenship and the loss of all generosity.
Existential liberalism has propagated its desert so well that in the end even the most sincere leftists express their utopia in its own terms. “We will rebuild an egalitarian society to which each makes his or her contribution and from which each gets the satisfactions he expects from it. [...] As far as individual desires are concerned, it could be egalitarian if each consumes in proportion to the efforts he or she is ready to contribute. Here again the method of measurement of the effort contributed by each will have to be redefined.” This is the language chosen by the organisers of the “alternative, anti-capitalist, and anti-war village” against the g8 summit in Evian in a text entitled When capitalism and wage labour will have been abolished! Here is a key to the triumph of empire: managing to keep in the background, to surround with silence the very ground on which it manoeuvres, the front on which it fights the decisive battle – that of the shaping of the sensible, of the forming of sensibilities. In such a way it preventively paralyses any defence in the very moment of its operation, and ruins the very idea of a counter-offensive. The victory is won whenever the leftist militant, at the end of a hard day of “political work”, slumps in front of the latest action movie.
When they see us withdraw from the painful rituals – the general assembly, the meeting, the negotiation, the protest, the demand – when they hear us speak about the sensible world rather than about work, papers, pensions, or freedom of movement, leftist militants give us a pitying look. “The poor guys”, they seem to say, “they have resigned themselves to minority politics, they have retreated into their ghetto, and renounced any widening of the struggle. They will never be a movement.” But we believe exactly the opposite: it is they who resign themselves to minority politics by speaking their language of false objectivity, whose weight consists only in repetition and rhetoric. Nobody is fooled by the veiled contempt with which they talk about the worries “of the people”, and that allows them to switch from the unemployed person to the illegal immigrant, from the striker to the prostitute without ever putting themselves at stake – for this contempt forms part of the sensibly evident. Their will to “widen” is just a way to flee those who are already there, and with whom, above all, they would fear to live. And finally, it is they who are reluctant to admit the political meaning of the sentiments, who can only count on sentimentality for their pitiful proselytising. All in all, we would rather start from small and dense nuclei than from a vast and loose network. We have known these spineless arrangements long enough.
EVERYONE IS DAILY ENJOINED to accept that the concern of the “link between life and thought” is evidently naive, out of date, and shows at root a simple absence of culture. We consider this a symptom. For this evident is just an effect of that most modern liberal redefinition of the distinction between the public and the private. Liberalism works on the assumption that everything must be tolerated, that everything can be thought, so long as it is recognised as being without direct repercussions on the structure of society, of its institutions and of state power. Any idea can be admitted; its expression should even be favoured, so long as the social and state rules are accepted. In other words, the freedom of thought of the private individual must be total, as well as his freedom of expression in principle, but he must not want the consequences of his thought as far as collective life is concerned.
Liberalism may have invented the individual, but it was born mutilated. The liberal individual, which expresses him or herself better than ever in the pacifist and civil rights movements of today, is supposed to be attached to his or her freedom as far as this freedom does not commit him or herself to anything, and certainly does not try to impose itself upon others. The stupid precept “my freedom ends where that of another begins” is received today as an unassailable truth. Even John Stuart Mill, though one of the essential agents of the liberal conquest, noticed that an unfortunate consequence ensues: one is permitted to desire anything, on the sole condition that it is not desired too intensely, that it does not go beyond the limits of the private, or in any case beyond those of public “free expression”.
What we call existential liberalism is the adherence to a series of evidents marked by a constant propensity of the subject to betrayal. It is evident, for example, that everyone acts in their own interest, and no-one can be accused of infamy for becoming exactly the kind of bastard he would spit on as a young man. We have been taught to function at a lower gear in which we are relieved of the very idea of betrayal. This emotional lower gear is the guarantee we have accepted of our becoming-adult. Along with, for the most zealous, the mirage of an affective self-sufficiency as an insuperable ideal. And yet there is simply too much to betray for those who decide to keep the promises which they have carried since childhood. Among the liberal evidents is that of behaving like an owner, even towards your own experiences. This is why not behaving like a liberal individual means primarily not being attached to ones properties. Or yet again another meaning must be given to “properties”: not what belongs to me peculiarly, but what attaches me to the world, and that is therefore not reserved for me, has nothing to do with private property nor with what is supposed to define an identity (the “that's just the way I am”, and its confirmation “that's just like you!”). While we reject the idea of individual property, we have nothing against attachments. The question of appropriation or re-appropriation is reducible to the question of knowing what is appropriate for us, that is to say suitable, in terms of use, in terms of need, in terms of relation to a place, to a moment of a world.
Existential liberalism is the spontaneous ethics suitable for social democracy considered as a political ideal. You will never be a better citizen than when you are capable of renouncing a relation or a struggle in order to maintain your place. It will not always be exactly easy going, but that is precisely where existential liberalism is efficient: it even provides the remedies to the discomforts that it generates. The cheque to Amnesty International, the fair trade coffee, the demo against the last war, seeing the last Michael Moore film, are so many non-acts disguised as salvational gestures. Carry on exactly as normal, that is to say go for a walk in the designated spaces and do your shopping, the same as always, but on top of that, additionally, ease your conscience; buy No Logo, boycott Shell, this should be enough to convince you that political action, in fact, does not require much, and that you too are capable of “engaging” yourself. There is nothing new in this trading of indulgences, just another false trail in the prevailing confusion.
The invocatory culture of the other-possible-world and fair-trade thought leave little room to speak of ethics beyond that on the label. The increase in the number of environmentalist, humanitarian and “solidarity” associations opportunely channels the general discontentment and thus contributes to the perpetuation of the state of affairs, through personal valorisation, recognition by public opinion, through the worship, in short, of social usefulness.
Above all no more enemies. At the very most, problems, abuses or catastrophes – dangers from which only the mechanisms of power can protect us.
If the obsession of the founders of liberalism was the neutralisation of sects, it is because they united all the subjective elements that had to be banished in order for the modern state to exist. For a sectarian life is, above all, what is adequate to its particular truth – namely a certain disposition towards things and events of the world, a way of not losing sight of what matters. There is a concomitance between the birth of “society” (and of its correlate: “economy”) and the liberal redefinition of the public and the private. The sectarian community is in itself a threat to what is referred to by the pleonasm “liberal society”. It is so because it is a form of organisation of the secession. Here lies the nightmare of the founders of the modern state: a section of collectivity detaches itself from the whole, thus ruining the idea of social unity. Two things that society cannot bear: that a thought may be incorporated, in other words that it may have an effect on an existence; that this incorporation may be not only transmitted, but also shared, communised. All this is enough to discredit as a “sect” any collective experience beyond control. The evident of the commodity world has inserted itself everywhere.
This evident is the most effective instrument to disconnect ends from means, to release “everyday life” as a space of existence that we only have to manage. Everyday life is what we are supposed to want to return to, like the acceptance of a necessary and universal neutralisation. It is the ever-growing renunciation of the possibility of an unmediated joy. As a friend once said, it is the average of all our possible crimes.
Rare are the communities that can avoid the abyss that is awaiting them, in the extreme dullness of the real, the community as the epitome of average intensity, a slow dwindling it cannot escape, clumsily filled with the stuff of kitchen-sink romances.
This neutralisation is an essential characteristic of liberal society. Everybody knows the centres of neutralisation, where it is required that no emotion stands out, where each one has to contain himself, and everybody experiences them as such: enterprises (the family included), parties, sports centres, art galleries, etc. The real question is to know why, since everyone knows what these places are about, they can nevertheless be so popular. Why would one prefer, always and above all, that nothing happens; that nothing occurs, in any case, that might cause shocks that are too deep? Out of habit? Because of despair? Because of cynicism? Or else: because you can feel the delight of being somewhere while not being there, of being there while being essentially somewhere else; because what we are at heart would be preserved to the point of no longer even having to exist.
These ethical questions must be addressed first, and above all, because they are those that we find at the very heart of the political: how to answer the neutralisation of the affective, and of the effects of decisive thoughts? How do modern societies work with these neutralisations or rather put them to work? How does our tendency towards attenuation reflect in us, and in our collective experiences, the material effectiveness of empire?
The acceptance of these neutralisations can of course go hand in hand with great intensities of creation. You can experiment as far as madness, provided that you are a creative singularity, and that you produce in public the proof of this singularity (the “oeuvre”). You can still know the meaning of the sublime, but on condition that you experience it alone, and that you pass it on indirectly. You will then be recognised as an artist or as a thinker, and, if you are “politically engaged”, you will be able to send out as many messages as you want, with the good conscience of one who sees further and will have warned the others.
We have, like many, experienced the fact that affects blocked in an “interiority” turn out badly: they can even turn into symptoms. The rigidities we observe in ourselves come from the dividing walls that everyone felt obliged to build, in order to mark the limits of themselves and to contain what must not overflow. When, for some reason, these walls happen to crack and shatter, then something happens that might essentially have to do with fright, but a fright capable of setting us free from fear. Any calling into question of the individual limits, of the borders drawn by civilisation, can be salvational. To any material community corresponds a certain jeopardising of bodies: when affects and thoughts are no longer ascribable to one or the other, when a circulation seems to be restored in which affects, ideas, impressions and emotions transmit indifferently among individuals. But it has to be understood that community as such is not the solution: it is its incessant and ubiquitous disappearance that is the problem. We do not perceive humans as isolated from each other nor from the other beings of this world; we see them bound by multiple attachments that they learned to deny. This denial blocks the affective circulation through which these multiple attachments are experienced. This blockage, in turn, is necessary to become accustomed to the most neutral, the dullest, the most average intensity, that which can make one long for the holidays, the lunchbreaks, or the tv dinners as a godsend – that is to say something just as neutral, average and dull, but freely chosen. The imperial order revels in this average intensity.
We will be told: by advocating emotional intensities experienced in common, you go against what living beings require to live, namely gentleness and calm – quite highly priced these days, like any scarce commodity. If what this means is that our point of view is incompatible with permitted leisure, then even winter sports fanatics might admit that it would be no great loss to see all the ski resorts burn and give the space back to the marmot. On the other hand, we have nothing against the gentleness that any living being, as a living being, carries. “It could be that living is a gentle thing,” any blade of grass knows it better than all the citizens of the world.