LoSt dOg

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Hey up,
Lost dog is a zine for those with no money and a political eye on how
much we are being shafted. Eclectic and hopefully fun with serious
commentary and sillyness shoulder barging each other for space. Based
in Squats in Hackney our haphazard collective are always looking for
more fools to join in.

Contents

A View From Ajar………………………..….……..Ham short

Bettsy Bubble…………………………….………….Sue denymph
Dog……………………………………………A Leader She May
Sad Clowns……………………………...…………...A sad Clown
Thought and the State…………….……....……………...…Pergus
Protest too much? ……..………………. Philosophe sans Oeuvre
Images by Kyp Kyprianiou

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 Observations from Ajar:
A Psychospatial Analysis of SelfEnforced
NonVertical Posture

The first known public adventure in improbable posture

occurred in a bus stop opposite the new town hall. Five
individuals participated, using ropes and harnesses to maintain
posture at various angles. The spatial intervention lasted 3
hours, and disinterested
conversation was maintained throughout. Although public
engagement was minimal, several participants reported
interesting effects which obliged us to pursue matters further.
Edited extracts from four out of five participants are printed
below (the fifth participant is currently experimenting with
voluntary loss of language faculty, and showed reluctance to
write up a report).

Participant 1: J
(standing at 4 degrees forwards from vertical)
“...everything was quite normal at first, though a bit awkward.
I had to crane my neck slightly to see the others, apart from
Gibbles who had placed his nearhorizontal face directly between
my feet... apart from that I felt nothing unusual...It was after

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about one hour that things started to change. I was particularly
aware of the verticalness of various objects around me, in
particular the side of the shelter and the angles of buses. When
looking at my precariously positioned comrades in the shelter, a
strange geometrics would arise below my vision. Our
conversations quickly turned to the subject of perspective and
contrast. I don't remember much more in detail, but I retain a
certain nostalgia for the experience.”

Participant 2: Harticot
(sitting at 29 degrees left from vertical)
“The pain! Constantly straining to maintain a straight back
at such an angle was like torture. After 45 minutes or so I was
ready to make my excuses and leave but I stayed strong. After a
while, we where talking about the relative merits of lobster and
crab meat at the time, I believe, the pain left. I felt a
certain tranquil[sic] in my less than symmetrical situation, and
with it a strong affinity with my cosubversives and particular
members of the public who passed waited with us in the bus
stop... Perhaps through our collective physical unease we became
bound within the brain.

Participant 3: sgt. Gibble

(standing at 73 degrees backwards from vertical)
“The process of waiting interests me. I feel we made a
successful intervention into the dynamics of the waiting crowd
through both the longevity of our wait and the abruptness of the
visual we presented... My position was one of submission and
trust, facing upwards from about 25centimeters from the
ground... I made attempts

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SaD clOwNs

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Betsy Bubble

We always knew it would be kept a secret. It wouldn’t be a televised

nationwide search. That would be too easy. We wanted her to be fresh,
unknown, as though sprung from collective imagination, or fallen from
a star. As though we had raised her and groomed her all her life for her
vocation, her previous life erased from all recorded memory. We
started by sending representatives around to drama schools, local talent
shows, state teen beauty pageants. It wasn’t hard to do. It was as
though all of young America was secretly hoping for exactly this, and
preparing themselves accordingly; displaying themselves and waiting.
We drew up a list of certain necessary qualities. Blonde, thin but with
the type of body likely to develop curves and breasts, proficient in
ballet, gymnastics and street dance, strong singing voice, heart melting

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smile, irrepressible energy, below average intelligence, submissive, with
encouraging parents.
It didn’t take long to find her. Her name was Olivia Green. Fourteen
years old from Peru, Indiana. Dreamt of being an actress. Failing
school but her parents didn’t mind because they encouraged her more
in her prospective career than her studies. The dream of all proud
parents. She was just on the brink of sexuality, like a swollen fig ready
to burst open. A flower ready to bloom as the caresses of dawn’s rays
coaxed her latent femininity out of its confused cocoon. Of all of this,
however, she was unaware. She still had no idea how her male dance
instructor looked at her when she did those moves she saw on MTV.
But that was a good thing. The plan was to suppress her adolescence
for a while. We weren’t exactly sure for how long. It would become
apparent through public attention.

When we told her parents about the project they signed the contract
immediately, which they could hardly read for the tears of pride
welling in their childish eyes. She cried as well and thanked us over and
over again, giving us each a little hug and jumping up and down with
excitement, her tiny unsupported breasts jiggling subtly. And what girl
wouldn’t be grateful for this, the greatest opportunity for fame one
could wish for? She would be the nation’s princess, the sweetheart of
the world. We christened her with her new name; Betsy Bubble.

It was the beginning of summer when we let Betsy explode onto the
screens and billboards of the world. We timed the children’s
programme and the TV adverts for simultaneous release. We were
careful not to link the show – ‘Betsy Bright Eyes’ – too blatantly with
any products of Bubble Inc. though it was a contractual rule that she
must be shown chewing gum in at least half of each episode, and at
least two bubbles must be blown by any character. The first single,

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‘Pop’ was scheduled for release at the end of summer.
She took the world by storm, just as we knew she would. Her perfect
white smile, her supple young body, her shining green eyes. She was
irresistible and became the number one idol of 6-16 year old girls
(according to polls in Vogue Girl, Pout, Cosmo Girl, Girl Talk and
Bratz magazines). We had pre-prepared all the appropriate
merchandise; posters, dolls, pencil cases etc. so that shops could stock
them immediately. That’s the way to do it. You have to know exactly
how long the public will wait before moving their attention elsewhere.
Luckily we created a multi-staged plan to ensure the public never
turned their eyes away from our precious Betsy.

After the first album she went on a world tour. She was almost sixteen.
When we discovered several ‘count-down’ calendars until Betsy was
‘legal’ we knew it was time for the next phase; the eagerly awaited
transition phase. The outfits she was to wear on tour were chosen very
carefully; no cleavage, no mini skirts, just feminine, figure hugging
clothes, especially chosen to accentuate her nubile, virginal body. We
then urged her to make a press statement promoting chastity. My
colleague wrote it for her.
“I am still a young girl. I value my body and I respect myself. I am
waiting to fall in love before I get into adult things. I encourage all girls
around the world to stay pure until they are older.”
It worked. She was hailed as a feminist icon by several women’s
magazines. But a quick internet search revealed even more
inappropriate Betsy website than we could have hoped for.

On her 17th birthday we presented her with her new image and her
new name: Bitsy Babelle. She didn’t like it at first, but we found her the
right friends to push her into her destined direction. We surrounded
her with some young celebrities and heiresses and gave her some pocket

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money and time off to party before recording her new album. We
organised a photo shoot for FHM in which she showed off her new
short, tousled hairstyle with blonde and red streaks. Several of the
photos showed her wearing strategically ripped clothes, leaning back in
a suitably submissive position. She appeared on the cover with 5 inch
hoop earrings, winking at the millions of men in the world. “I’m not a
little girl anymore,” read the tagline we wrote for her.
“Wow, I can’t believe I really look like that,” she squealed when we
showed her the article.
“Of course, Bitsy.” We decided it would be counter-productive to
explain air-brushing to her at this stage. “You’re a super star. You’re
the most beautiful woman in the world.”
“Woman?” she said, her watery green eyes shining at us, as if asking
permission.

The money rolled in, poured in, far surpassing the original
projections. Every week or so at the office somebody would come in
wearing a more expensive suit than everybody else and we all had to
update our wardrobes accordingly.

The Bitsy thing worked for a few years. But eventually there was no
further for her to go. She’d even done a film bearing her breasts (done
very artistically, of course) which had caused a lot of controversy
amongst Bubble Inc. executives. Some thought that would be too far
too soon, but the others of us argues that most essential consideration
was never to lose momentum.
And so the next stage was put into action. Bitsy had to grow up fast.
She took a month out to give time for the surgery scars to heal. When
she arrived back on the market she was a femme fatale vamp like
nobody had ever seen. Her once long fair hair was cropped and black,
her clothes were elegant yet highly sexual. Her lips and nails went

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scarlet. “High class prostitute” was how she was described by one
newspaper. We were very happy with the result. Her new name was
Bea La Belle.

Then the backlash started. HAS THE BUBBLE BURST? read the
headlines. HAS BEA GONE TOO FAR? HOW DID BELOVED
BETSY TURN INTO BITCHY BEA? Somewhat unattractive
pictures were printed of poor little Bea after “yet another wild night
out,” but we always knew this day would come. We took full
advantage of the publicity and she made the front page several
newspapers and celebrity magazines at least once a week. We released
statements and quotes about her drugs abuse and sexual deviancy only
half of which were made up. Bea didn’t have time to notice. She’d never
had so much success.

Now we have gotten to the point where we don’t know which path to
take anymore. There are two options. The first is to denounce her lewd
behaviour, disassociate her with our respectable company and create
our new image as the moral saviour of the fallen with the proposed
“Church of BubbleLove” ad campaign.
The second is top secret, known about only by us, the top 12 Bubble
Inc. executives. It would guarantee her infamy and eternal youth. Its
code name is Plan B: “Norma Jean”.

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Dog

It’s the game of culture, burning a dead dog.

I didn’t see the body leave this life.
I saw its body leave this life.
I witnessed its last breaths, not as
Inhalation, exhalation,
Breathing; substance of life.
But the sudden, reflex, the last chance contraction of the lungs.
What did it want from me, this dead dog – it was not yet dead.
But I swear it didn’t die,
there was no death,
it had been dead all along.

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This dog who would run as if a demon round the
Field;
racing, chasing rabbits, dreaming, eyes flittering like
a madness.
Would follow her all day,
Always one step behind always under her feet,
never losing sight of his beloved.
Would lick your ear telling you
Telling you quietly so you can die with him.
Be death with him.
But here on the earth with him.

So what winkles of wisdom do hold your head humble?

Mumble my crumble till voices dig slowly.
The grave, that's slowly, he’s under my thunder,
My rhyming sublimely, nay dearest French feminist.
This dead dog is your dead dog.
I dedicate him to you.
As your book’s my dead book,
Our snake charmers gone home.
I cannot understand how that breath was his last.
Why he wasn’t death already,
Death all along.

A running, barking, loving, dead dog.

I can’t hate him for dying, for turning hard, for
not curling up in his hole.
I’m angry at him for never quite dying,

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For desperately sucking at the air without desire or intention.
There was no will to live yet no acceptance of death.
A disappearance?
But with my hand on his chest I’m still strocking.
With my breast on the table I’m still longing.
An eternal longing.
Part 1
To want.

There is wanting.
Needing? I cross out.
I’m crossed out and explain
I wan’t, it must be, but one step back, I want to want.
You, Ilove you, that much yes.
But I want you I, I do not
It’s wanting, it’s wanting, it’s something I can’t have.
It’s wanting I want
It’s swallowing my pride.
It’s down with the tea and confessing my sins,
It’s female nude model,
It’s your hand on my thigh.
But what is? What’s this?
What’s knowing too much?
It’s giving up a dream to set free a love.

I want to be yours.
The man never wants to own the dog. He wants
To be owned by the dog.

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Freed by the responsibility of feeding the wild.
Thinking and reality.
To want to have you but to want to be yours
It is submission or domination I come?
Is it acceptance or refusal I desire?
Is it for love or disgust I ask?
Is it your choice or my choice or god’s choice?
I don’t want to be yours
I think
I want to know but I don’t know.
I don’t want to know because I want to want,
As the dead dog is buried, my want is alive,
Like a mad dog it’s frothing and biting and fighting.
And refusing my knowledge, abusing my sentence.

I don’t want, I know want, know what want,

Want you want, don’t want want, don’t you
want, and so want… is thus…
muscles rippling he flies,
feet barely touching the ground,
neck straining making stretching body taut with
round in cicles he streams past
grey body pounding pounding
round and round and
heart is pumping,
a terrible mourning
my heart is smothering itself to stop from
screaming in anguish as he’s running round his
grave.

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Faster and faster as he wanted us not to cry,
He mourns his own death… and thus…
I kill you, you kill me, to awaken me.
I don’t want you, I want to want you,
But I know I can’t.
I don’t want you to want me.
I wan to want you to want me.
But I know you can’t
And that is why I love you.
And that is why you love me.
Because we both know more than we know we know.
And we both know more than we want to know.
And we both love more than we know how to love.

The ghost in my reality,

The corporeal in my imaginary,
The nettles in my diversion.
For I can only hate or love you.
(and this is how it’s all the same)
I think this much I know.
I think I know of grass and daisies.
The big daisies – your favourite flowers.
I think of billy, the dead dog, the always dead dog.
Now living bellow them.
Soon to become them.
The dead-dog-daisies.
I was there with his last breath and I love you and
Was he always dead?

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Protest Too Much? Kettle Logic and the G20
Meltdown

In the interview which follows, the Philosophe sans Oeuvre and long-
time collaborator Paul Reed take matters into their own hands and
challenge the prevailing doxa which has come to define the G20
Meltdown protest in April 2008 as ‘little more than a feel-good feel-
bad activity’, which 'made the sum total of zero difference'2 except to
show us 'the futility of the dominant mode of modern protest'3 and to
prove that a new 'theory is neccesary to move past its current
impediments'4. We will refute what we have called ‘the K Punk
Consensus’5 on the following ten points:

1) There is no point in having a theory of political resistance which has an a

priori stance against public protest.

2) There is no point in criticising a political strategy when you do not offer a

political strategy or a political subject to replace it.

2 http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/liquid-revolution-and-the-end-of-folk-politics/
3 http://revolutionaryboredom.wordpress.com/2009/04/02/the-g20-pantomime/
4 http://speculativeheresy.wordpress.com/2009/10/03/liquid-revolution-and-the-end-of-folk-politics/
5 ’The K Punk Consensus’ is the term we have adopted to account for barrage of dismissive new media
accounts of the protest which followed in the wake of the G20 Meltdown, and which finds its canonical
expression in this post at K Punk.

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3) The folk-psychological reading of the protest is a facile interpretation of a
complex event and grossly patronising to those that took part.

4) The failure to sustain popular interest in the protest was partly caused by the
‘neutral coverage’ of the old media in collusion with the negative assessments of
its new media spokesmen.

5) Those who attended the protest represent the real grass-roots anti-capitalist
movement and any political theory which aligns itself on the Left should seek to
draw on their support.

6) The environmentalist wing of the anti-capitalist movement plays a vital role

in raising awareness of the severity of ecological damage caused by our
contemporary mode of production, and is increasingly successful at drawing in
new support for the Left.

7) The G20 Meltdown was ‘the most expensive protest in British history’,
which is a good indication of its real potential: the British government could
not afford to have another one like it.

8) The protest was an attempt to utilise the two great weapons that current
circumstances have afforded the anti-capitalist movement: the use of
communicative technologies as a means of rapid mobilization, and the reliance
on new media coverage as a means of circumventing the older ideological organs
of the state.

9) Occurring at a sensitive moment for neoliberalism, the G20 Meltdown

protest was a novel configuration of different political causes combining to
form what will eventually become ‘a genuinely combustible new left'6.

10) Accordingly, ‘we cannot therefore co-operate with people who openly state
that the workers are too uneducated to emancipate themselves and must be
freed from above’. (Marx and Engels, Circular Letter, 1879)

6 http://nastybrutalistandshort.blogspot.com/2009/04/this-ruckus-is-sponsored-by.html

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Interview with Paul Reed

Philosophe sans Oeuvre: Can you briefly introduce yourself in terms of

your philosophical background, your political standpoint, and your
current projects.

Paul Reed: I’m Paul Reed, one of the co-organsiers of the monthly
Radical Theory Group which was previously based at rampART until
the recent eviction, but is now currently located at the LARC, and runs
on the first Friday of every month from 6 o’ clock. What’s great about
this reading group is that it manages to draw in a wide cross-section of
the general public who are interested in learning about political theory,
rather than just the usual students and academics. As an undergraduate
I studied for a degree in English Literature, before studying history
with Paul Gilroy at Queen Mary. My current research explores the
relationship between the ‘blat’ economics of the late Soviet Union7
with the growth of new social movements which exist within neoliberal
governments. Basically, my guiding question is to what extent does the
growth of these social movements (such as ‘squatting’, ‘free schooling’,
etc) depend upon the current political system, and to what extent can
they effectively challenge it.

PSO: Can you give us an overview of your personal experience at the

G20 Meltdown Protest?
7 See Alena Ledeneva’s Russia’s Economy of Favours for an analysis of how the soviet planned
economy depended upon an internal freemarket of private favours. The concept of ‘Blat' derives from the
colloquial Russian expression for the black market and is used by Ledeneva as a network concept which
combines an economic determinable response to the intrinsic shortfalls of the soviet system with an emergent
potential for subjective resistance.

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PR: Sure. I arrived at the protest outside the Bank of England with a
photographer friend of mine just as the police were beginning to seal
off the area, around 1 o’ clock. We got some great pictures of police
horses being forced to step over sitting protesters who were trying to
keep open the access to the demonstration; inevitably one of the
protesters gets trodden on, but none of them moved until the police
dragged them off. I was also quite close by when we heard the jubilant
roar of the crowd as the windows of the Royal Bank of Scotland were
smashed. It was an exhilarating moment: at that point it was still early
in the day and nobody knew how the demonstration was going to end
up Soon afterwards we ended up getting forced out of the area by the
police, and after a few failed attempts to get back in through the kettle
we ended up recuperating for most of the afternoon in the ‘fluffy’
climate camp. Initially, the climate camp protest had appeared to have
all the political content of a ‘back to the sixties’ parody, with its
obligatory tree-huggers, samba band, and cool ‘chill-out’ zone. Yet
there I would witness the most courageous acts of resistance of the
whole demonstration. Around 6 o’ clock, the now kettled and
overcrowded climate camp was invaded by the riot police, who waded
in swinging batons and using their shields to shove people over. But,
amazingly, the protesters didn’t panic; instead, they literally stood up
to them with their hands in the air, forcing the riot police to strike at
non-aggressive citizens if they wanted to take over the protest space.
This they did, but eventually stopped, presumably because it could
have looked very bad for them if word got out to the media. At this
point my friend gets struck on the hand by a baton, and I saw young
girls getting beaten with police truncheons. But it was their courage
which kept the Climate Camp going and prevented the protest as a
whole from being broken up. In the end, the riot police decided to

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kettle us in until some nearby solidarity protests had subsided, before
finally letting most of us stagger home around midnight, whilst packs
of police continued to hunt down the few remaining protesters through
the streets. Needless to say, this experience has left a profound
impression on me.

PSO: Can you summarise what you think were the main positive
outcomes from the G20 Meltdown protest?

PR: Happily. Firstly, and contrary to received opinion, the protest

struck its target in a very direct way: it cost the government and the
financial centre of London a serious amount of money. So whilst it
might have looked like a harmless spectacle to the folks at home, for
those of us who were there, and for those who were forced to cancel
work and pay for security, it was a very different story. Using a kettle
not only contains heat, it stirs it up, and costs the system a lot of
energy, and if the Daily Telegraph acknowledges the G20 Meltdown
protest as ‘the most expensive police operation in British history’ then
you don’t need to be a brain surgeon to figure out that a few more of
these costly protests and the government might reconsider its policies,
because it’s a very sensitive time for neoliberal administrations right
now. Secondly, we shouldn’t underrate the value of the experience for
those involved. Watching the Royal Bank of Scotland get its windows
smashed in; watching teenage protesters stand up and defend their
camp site from an illegal invasion by heavily armed riot police-it
certainly demonstrates the growing strength of public dissent. What
was interesting about this protest was that, unlike the Stop the War
movement, the G20 Meltdown seemed to bring out a new
configuration of political resistance, mobilised by the fall-out from the
credit crunch. This is only based conjecture, but to me there seemed to
be a greater diversity of people involved in this protest than I’ve seen

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before at demonstrations, ranging from rebellious school children
skiving off from school to unemployed city bankers who wanted to
find out what was going on. I hope they learned something about the
vulnerability of a government which needs to police a public
demonstration with such violence. And no-one will forget about the
manslaughter of Ian Tomlinson This might be in bad taste, but there's
an irony in the fact that up until the death of one of their newspaper
sellers, the Evening Standard had been wholly supportive of the
London Metropolitan police. Afterwards they were distinctly more
critical, if only for a short while. Lastly, and without wanting to
trivialise the event as some kind of networking opportunity, I think the
protest should be remembered as a kind of practical unification of
what Owen hetherely has called ‘a genuinely combustible new left’. It’s
irrelevant whether the protestors knew which policies were being
decided upon at the G20 summit, and it really doesn’t matter if
everyone present had previously agreed upon a stable set of non-
contradictory demands. The protest has a kind of emergent logic of its
own, in which the different issues of the protesters all coalesced into a
legitimate critique of how things currently stand. Of course, it’s up to
the political theorists to find a way of coherently articulating and
reinforcing these demands, but this can only happen post festum.

PSO: What do you say to those theorists on the left who would argue
that for all its good intentions, recent large-scale public protests have
achieved nothing concrete or sustainable? As an example, the Stop the
War movement has the record for the largest public protest in British
history, and yet it has completely failed to achieve its stated aim.
Similarly, and despite coinciding with a particularly vulnerable moment
in the history of neoliberalism, there hasn’t been any noticeable change
for the better in our government’s economic policies since the G20
Meltdown protest.

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PR: I’m tempted to respond with the quip which Mao gave when
asked about the French Revolution: ‘it’s still too early to tell’. But in a
way this is true for the G20 protest: one cannot assess the concrete
effects of a revolutionary event according to the standard measures of
party politics. Of course, we have to pragmatically assess the outcomes
of the event at some point, in relation to some future political
objective; to say that we cannot measure all the effects of the protest on
the day or six months after is not to the same as contending that we
can never know the effects of an event. The one original aspect of the
protest, which to my knowledge no-one has yet really picked up on,
was the integral role of new media technology for contemporary
political activism. In theory the government will always be able to find
money to contain protests so long as the media is behind them, but if
the media turned against them, then it wouldn’t be so easy for them to
justify a costly war against the will of the general public. This is why
the role of the media is crucial to the protest, and why in particular, the
new media has a vital role to play in terms of bypassing the established
ideological organs of the state. It’s easy to criticise the protest as one
big spectacle, and this is precisely what the government is banking on,
but isn’t there something encouraging about the fact that it generated
so much media interest? Never has a protest been photographed so
much; never has a protest been given so much instant relay to the
general public through new media technology. Doesn’t this at least
demonstrate that the people are interested in a revolutionary politics?
Of course you can interpret this ‘interest’ in a positive or a pejorative
sense. During the actual protest I’d naively hoped that all this
instantaneous media coverage would somehow set off a kind of chain
reaction enabling the protest to spread. Perhaps the police also feared
this too, which would explain why they were using the dubious Section

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76 of the Counter Terrorism Act to intimidate photographers into
deleting their footage.8 The fact that there were more photographers
than policemen also had some immediately practical benefits too.
Effectively, they restrained the police from becoming too brutal, and
when the police did manage to kill someone then there was a camera
around to see exactly how they did it, and that’s how we all got to see
the appalling footage of Ian Tomlinson’s death. It’s instructive to recall
how it wasn’t the liberal media who brought the manslaughter of Ian
Tomlinson to public attention. Until those private videos surfaced, the
BBC and the liberal broadsheets had managed to studiously avoid the
widespread police brutality on display at the protest in favour of their
usual ‘neutral coverage’, which basically meant portraying the whole
thing as the work of a few hundred blood-crazed anarchists trying to
break into the Bank of England. In fact, I’d argue that despite the great
efforts of the organisers to publicise the event, and in particular the
ingenious showmanship of Chris Knight who delighted reporters with
his jokes about hanging bankers from lamp-posts, the key reason why
the G20 Meltdown became such a damp fuse was due to the lack of
support from both the old and the new media. In the same way that
the police will always deliberately underestimate the attendence figures
of a political protest in order to downplay its significance, the closed
ranks of the old-media coincided with the cynical views of the new left,
and both were equally to blame for the still birth of the protest.

PSO: It has been argued that a key reason for the failure of the G20
Meltdown was mainly due to the fact that the general public were
shrewd enough to see that the spectacle of protest was just that: the
usual suspects indulging in a display of affective politics. The protest

8 Section 76 of the Counter Terrorism Act allows ’the police to criminalise photographers in certain, but
by no means arbitrary cases’, on the grounds that the identity of police officers will need to be protected from
the threat of terrorist reprisals. See Kypros Kyprianou’s activist-artwork, ’A Restless State’ for a brilliant
détounement of Section 76.

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may have made the few activists who attended it feel like they were
doing something worthwhile, but to the rest of the country it was just
a naïve and insignificant spectacle which cost them a lot of money.

PR: I don’t deny myself the affective dimension of politics, whether it’s
from the sense of enthusiasm I felt on the morning, or the anger I felt
when I saw young girls at the climate camp getting beaten with
truncheons by riot police. By the time we were let out of the kettle
around midnight, my overall impression was that these kinds of protest
are simply barbaric: very soon it became little fun for either the
protesters or the police (although clearly the unarmed protesters had a
much harder time of it if we compare injuries). But protests are
necessary. It’s sad that we still have to stoop to this level in order to
make a point, but hasn’t it always been this way? Those in power will
do all they can to prevent their privileges from being taken away from
them, and likewise, there’s nothing ‘moral’ about the protestors who
are coming together only to fight for their fair share of the pie. So the
affective dimension to this kind of protest does not come from feeling
morally sanctified through your good efforts. But it does takes genuine
courage to break the law at a protest for political reasons; it’s genuinely
frightening and genuinely dangerous. But the reasons why people turn
up to a protest precede this affective element. Why attempt to
psychologise the event as some cry for attention from a big father? Not
only is this a dubious application of a reductive folk-psychology to a
complex event, it’s also a patronising condemnation of that active
minority of people who get involved in real politics outside of the
party electoral system. Of course, the general aim of these
demonstrations is to steer governments towards more egalitarian policy
decisions, and they seldom manage to overthrow capitalism in one go;
but neither do they sit around and wait for other people to do their
politics for them. To be a priori against public demonstrations is a

33
useless limitation for a critical theory of resistance.

PSO: Couldn’t it be said that this ‘general aim’ was the cause of the
problem? The aggregate demands of the protest amounted to little
more than an insipid socialist reformism, of the kind exemplified by
the Socialist Workers Party. That is, a politics which is based upon the
soliciting of pity and an empty promise to nurse the wounds of an
anachronistic working class. Basically, the demands of the G20
Meltdown protest were either too weak or too unrealistic to inspire the
people.

PR: The G20 Meltdown organisers were an original political

configuration and not a covert wing of the Socialist Workers Party.
Although the SWP did try and reclaim the protest as their own in the
aftermath of Ian Tomlinson’s death-and the cynicism by which they
used his death to propagate their own cause was a particularly ugly

34
example of Realpolitik-they did not predominate the organisation
beforehand. In fact, so far as I understand it, the SWP were so miffed
by their lack of influence on the G20 Protest that they decided to have
their own separate and explicitly ‘peaceful’ demonstration in Trafalgar
Square, far from the maddening crowd. It’s ironic that the SWP
wouldn’t want to dilute their very particular demands by joining in
with the masses. It’s also hypocritical to criticise the weakness of a
demand without postulating any of your own. How far does one have
to capitulate to the norms of the contemporary political field before
one’s goal is recognised as viable? At what moment is a mass political
movement able to achieve ‘practical sufficiency in itself’ through
unifying around a determinate goal? Does this occur before, during, or
after the event? In practice, politics is too messy and ad hoc to be fully
grasped by an abstract political theory. It may seem like I’m making a
gratuitous attack on the SWP at a time when we should be seeking to
unify all those groups who are loosely associated with the left. But the
SWP are more than capable of taking care of themselves and in my
view their position on the protest was damaging to the anti-capitalist
movement, as were the dismissive accounts of the G20 Meltdown
delivered by the new media spokesmen on the left. (which, incidently,
were based upon the negative assessments of the protest by the SWP:
See how Mark Fisher’s piece on the protest draws upon the ‘evidence’
from SWP Supporter, Richard Seymour, at Lenin’s Tomb.) For the
record, I am also opposed to the Khmer Rouge, Hugo Chavez, Tony
Blair and Terry Eagleton.

PSO: Why should the demands of the active minority who protest
take precedence over the silent majority who votes and stays silent?
Your position would seem to imply that we should always consider
political demonstrations as the direct manifestation of an a priori
emancipatory political subject. There have been moments in the past,

35
particularly in the 1940’s, when the will of the people has been led
astray. What gives the G20 protesters their legitimacy? To provide an
example closer to home, the London squatter movement justifies its
appropriation of private property on the grounds that it aims towards a
more equitable re-distribution of wealth, when in fact it could also be
viewed as a de facto black market operation which takes over
properties in the interest of a particular social milieu (primarily middle
class students and those who can afford to risk an alternative lifestyle).
For all their good intentions, these squatters effectively undermine the
stringency of a democratically validated legal system for their own
advantage. Whilst we can both agree that private property is a
pernicious institution, it is also one which needs to be carefully
dismantled. Why should we immediately advocate all political
resistance as if pure anarchy were a kind of good in itself?

PR: My flippant response would be to say that the only valid

challenges to the institution of private property are the most expedient
ones. But really, I don’t have an adequate solution to this problem. I
would agree with you and say that these activist groups have no
privileged access to any fool-proof political theory, and if I’m honest,
then I’d be afraid if some of them ever actually managed to get into a
position of power. Yet I can say that many of them are very well-
informed about politics, certainly more so than your average student or
academic. In their defence it could be argued that these activist groups
are self-validating to the extent that the people involved in them make
the strongest political demands. This would entail a dangerous logic in
which a) politics is about expressing the will of the people, b) and
these activists have the strongest will, so c) their political struggle
becomes justified. It sounds very brutal to express it in this way, but
politics is not a whipped-cream cake: the struggle for the new left to
achieve power is not about the achievement of an ahistorical abstract

36
good, whether you codify this in terms of an innate anarchistic
tendency in humanity or the application of an ideal mathematical truth
onto society; it doesn’t get you off the hook from doing the dirty
work: for me, politics is a prescription based on a hypothesis which is
at best grounded in the speculations of the historical method.

PSO: To press you on this point, doesn’t ‘faith’ then become the
ultimate motivating force behind your political activism? You have no
guarantees that your political standpoint is valid, yet you justify your
antagonism towards neoliberalism by the hope that something better
will replace it. Isn’t this still a form of faith in the power of
revolutionary politics for revolution’s sake?

PR: But what is to be gained by this reduction of complex political

antagonisms into a question of brute faith? All I can do is re-direct
your question onto the problems of historical method: can we
empirically determine the course of history and then judge where we
should best channel our energies? For me, a politics based upon
conviction deriving from practical activist experiences is superior to an
ideal theory of politics based upon faith, although I know this crude
assertion won’t satisfy our delicate neo-Adornians. If you are a
hardworking activist for a particular political cause then it seems to me
that you must have recourse to some kind of realist understanding of
history which justifies your time and effort. Unless of course you are
some kind of Christian existentialist and you do your good deeds for
the thrill of devotion and the promise of an ideal heaven to come. But
determining the course of history is no easy matter, and clearly there
are serious problems with the metaphysical underpinnings of a Marxist
causal history, for example. What does it mean to say that class
struggle is the motor of history? This is the problem with the energetic
model which underlies the Marxist philosophy as a whole: the idea that

37
the capitalist mode of production is intrinsically wrong because it
places artificial limits upon our infinite potential as a species, which is
continuous with Marx’s conception of freely-given labour as man’s
ultimate purpose. In both cases we can see how these ideas seem to
coincide with a particular historical moment, in which the growth of
industry was combined with the transformation of the Protestant work
ethic. For me, it’s still the standpoint of history which provides us with
the most reliable means by which we can make pragmatic
prognostications about the future. Philosophy and science might
function as history’s epistemological checks, while art stands in as the
realm of pure speculation common to all three. So, from my limited
understanding of our contemporary situation, I am convinced that the
grass-roots political movements involved in the G20 Meltdown
represent the emergent progressive elements within our society. The
alternative position, which is to cast doubt on these movements until
that theoretical breakthrough falls from the sky, seems much worse.
The break on activism in favour of a ‘new’ political theory, or a ‘new’
politcal strategy-which of course will have no relation to what activists
are currently doing-is politically debilitating, even if it's a vain delusion
to believe that the revolutionary masses are being held back by the lack
of a theory. Regardless of whether the views of these activists groups
can be brought into line with a teleological view of enlightenment,
what redeems them is the fact that they are the real social movements
who are constructing actual political institutions which exist outside
the limited range of professional party politics. The rampART social
centre was one example, and for me its very existence precluded any
need for ‘faith’. To illustrate what I mean I’ll share with you some
inside information: At rampART, which had for years served as a
meeting place for activist groups, there was often talk about whether
the building might have been bugged by the police. Some people were
sure that it must have been, while others thought that the police

38
wouldn’t bother, given that the groups who used the space posed no
real threat to government. The strange thing is that I don’t think it
mattered whether the building was bugged or not. Why? Because if the
activist groups who operated from there were only small-scale, then the
police wouldn’t have any reason to interfere, and they wouldn’t want to
draw any attention to the activists' cause. Conversely, when the
building was used as a meeting place for organisers of large-scale public
protests like the G20 Meltdown, the police couldn’t harass them too
much beforehand for risk of creating a media-outrage. Governments
are still vulnerable to the media, and this is what makes the ‘K Punk
Consensus’ on the futility of political protest so egregious: it’s not just
that the denigration of the G20 Meltdown is an insult to those activist
groups who were involved; it’s not just that to describe police brutality
as the work of a bad father inflicting signs of grace on willing
protesters is distasteful, it’s rather that this neo-Adornian scepticism of
the ‘pseudo-praxis’9 of political demonstrations is an active factor in
rendering them worthless.

9 Adorno’s concept of ’pseudo-praxis’ designates forms of political activism such as student protests,
which are undertaken for subjective reasons alone and fail to effect the objective conditions of society at large.
See his essay, ’Marginalia to Theory and Praxis’ available in the Critical Models collection.

39
PSO: Adorno argued that in an age where the state has control over the
culture industry and the atom bomb, it would be absurd to believe that
a government would allow itself to be toppled by a few thousand
protestors marching through the streets. Political protests like the G20
Meltdown are completely contained within the state system and
function as a simulation of authentic resistance whilst possessing no
direct impact on governmental policies whatsoever. Whatever the long
term political implications of these protests, couldn’t it be argued that
the immediate task of the political theorist today is to find more
effective means of organisation which will have greater traction on the
decisions of neoliberal administrations already weakened by the
financial crisis?

40
PR: I’d agree that political protests appear like a simulation of
authentic resistance as far as their conventional media representation
goes, and even when you are directly involved in a protest it’s hard to
shake the paranoia that ‘all this has been arranged’. There’s certainly no
doubt that at every mass protest there will be a number of agent
provocateurs assigned to do things which will make the protest look
bad in the media, and here one might wonder about the broken
windows at the Royal Bank of Scotland. This is indisputable, a tried
and tested police tactic. But in the same way that the state cannot
afford to create the protest as a whole, they also lack the resources to
fully contain it. The organisation of a large-scale public protest should
be viewed as only one aspect of a spectrum of political protest, with
hunger strikes and suicide bombing at one end, and petitioning your
local MP at the other. Undoubtedly, the various anti-capitialist
movements should try and co-ordinate their efforts and sometimes a
large-scale public protest is a way of achieving this kind of practical
unity, and it can also draw in new support for the left through
exposing the injustice of a democratic government which has to
violently stamp out public dissent. Does a protest need to have a
deteminate demand which is met by Government in order to be
succesful? Look at the example of the Poll Tax Riots nearly two
decades ago: they had a determinate demand, the abolishment of the
poll tax, which they succeeded in achieving. Of course, the council tax
which was brought into replace it was little better, but at least they had
managed to achieve a determinate goal, right? Well, actually, I think
the value of the Poll Tax Riots had less to do with the government’s
mimed capitulation over a single issue and more to do with the
formation of a violently dissenting public who proved that real
resistance is possible. And the recent G20 Protest in London, far from

41
being a street carnival (although some of the organisers had publicized
it in this way) was in fact the first violent protest against neoliberal
government in over ten years. Admittedly then, the aggregate demands
of the G20 Meltdown protest were fairly vague and open-ended, but at
least it was an organisation of something, for something. Organisation
is not a good in itself. Look at the Socialist Workers Party: this party
has probably the highest degree of political organisation this side of
North Korea and yet it remains unsuccessful as an active force in
politics. Why? Perhaps because they are more concerned with achieving
a permanent inclusion within the political system as it currently stands
than actively working towards real change, while all they offer in return
is a miserabilist critique of how bad the world is along with the empty
promise to make it a little better for the worker. If you have ever
wondered what a highly organised ‘inhumanist’ politics might look like
then I suggest you try having a conversation with one of their drones,
and don’t forget to have your pound ready to buy their newspaper
afterwards. Yet, for all that, at least their politics has some content to
it, even if it’s primarily negative. Perhaps the cynicism of these neo-
Adornians is worse: on the one hand, these theorists appear to lack any
strong connection with grass-roots political movements (bar the
respectful tilt of the cap for the odd striking factory worker),
presumably because current activist group have unrealistic goals and
cannot sustain a ‘practical sufficiency in itself’. On the other hand, all
these theorists have to offer in return is an empty invocation to
‘organise’, without either a grand philosophical system or even a
modest tactical hypothesis to back it up. And yet they still have the
nerve to criticise the allegedly exorbitant demands of the protesters.
Why can they not specify what their own realistic political demands
might be? Perhaps they have a dim intuition that their own determinate
political goals will not be theirs alone, and that they’ll be forced to
recognise that many activist groups are already working to achieve these

42
demands in practice. I’d say that their glib dismissal of the G20 protest
is tied in with this: their reluctance to align themselves with actual
political activists betrays a hidden desire to differentiate themselves
from the people. Effectively, their politics becomes little more than a
posture which aims to affect politics from a safe distance. Without any
positive content then, political theorising just becomes a purely
affective gesture, an empty posturing, of a kind which is classically
figured in Hegel’s concept of the ‘beautiful soul’.

PSO: It can still be argued that the incoherencies of the demands of

the anti-capitalist movement are the key factor in its current
ineffectiveness, and this makes it prone to co-option by governmental
rhetoric. Whilst the voice of the modern worker has been claimed by
new labour, the environmentalist movement has become highly
susceptible to conservative appropriation. The Climate Camp’s vague
demand to ‘save the planet’ does not necessarily entail egalitarian social
consequences, nor does it lend itself to any obvious political program
given that there is as yet no scientific consensus on how climate change
might be best tackled: everyone agrees that something should be done,
but nobody knows what should be done.

PR: It’s true that the environmentalist movement is greatly

compromised by its lack of critical self-scrutiny; it seems obvious to
me that we can only save the planet for ourselves and that we can’t
really take the side of nature in a discussion, unless of course it is the
nature that we want to see preserved. So when it comes to the
environment at least, I’m a strict correlationist.10 Personally, I can’t
10 ’Correlationism’ is a term originally coined by Lenin to define philosophical idealist conceptions of
the world which can only define its reality in relation to our human access to it. The (false) equation being no
mind, no world to concieve of. The term is currently enjoying a revival thanks to Quentin Melliassoux’s usage

43
motivate myself to struggle on behalf of the planet in order to provide
beautiful scenery for rich people to lose themselves in, and it’s difficult
to avoid the impression that the Greens are mainly just a bunch of
complacent middle-class liberals with a sentimental approach to
politics. Why should I care if ‘the polar bears are drowning’11 when I’m
forced to work sixty hours a week in a mind-numbingly boring job,
just to pay the bills? Meanwhile, another section of society has the
moral luxury of buying organic food out of consideration for these
polar bears or whatever. The counter-argument from the Greens would
be that they are the only ones who are actively trying to preserve the
bio-diversity of life on earth so that we might all still be around to
appreciate it in a few more years time. For them, the old divisions
between right and left no longer matter in the face of imminent
environmental catastrophe brought on by climate change. Frankly, I
think they are right: finding ways to address global heating and the
energy crisis is not only our most pressing challenge as a species, but is
also the challenge which has the most potential to unite us on a global
scale. The danger is that these issues get reduced into a kind of
greenwash ideology which achieves little more than making middle-
class consumers feel better about themselves for buying ‘organic food’
or ‘renewable energy’. As an interesting case in point, James Lovelock’s
work straddles both sides of this problem. Primarily Lovelock’s name
is associated with his ‘Gaia Theory’, which argues that the earth should
be viewed as a single organism which strives to make itself more
hospitable for new life.12 Whilst in practice, Gaia theory is compatible
with a kind of cybernetics approach to biology, the definite theological
implications of Lovelock’s concept of Gaia have been used to license
the now familiar new-age mysticism about ‘saving the planet’. Yet on

of it in his seminal work ‘After Finitude.’ (2008)

11 http://hyperstition.abstractdynamics.org/archives/008891.html
12 See Lovelock’s ‘The Vanishing Face of Gaia’ for a controversial popular science account of climate
change.

44
the other hand, I think you’ll be hard pushed to find a contemporary
scientist who is more anti-humanist, at least in the literal sense of the
term: Lovelock is stoically resigned to the fact that approximately
eighty percent of the human population will die out within the next
hundred years as a consequence of global heating, and he believes
there’s very little we can do about it. His fierce naturalism won’t allow
him to take seriously the possibility of collective political acts reversing
climate change, comparing them with the likelihood of convincing a
shark to become vegetarian by sheer effort. I find his anti-utopian
stance on humanity refreshing in terms of its critique of greenwash
ideology, which is said to find its perfect symbol in the well-
intentioned but practically useless wind turbines which litter our
landscape like a contemporary version of the crucifix. But for all his
scientific credentials, Lovelock’s standpoint amounts to a form of
political quietism, which at best functions as a warning and an
incitement to deal with the colossal environmental problems which
cannot be solved through piecemeal reform, and at worst, it lends
itself to a potential neo-fascism: a politics which accepts that those
who are lucky enough to be born on one of the islands which will
escape the immediate consequences of climate change should do all
they can to protect its borders from the desperate hordes who will
soon be seeking sanctuary there. Faced with this alternative, I’d prefer
to endorse those who argue for more drastic re-constructions of
species-being, and ones which will utilise all the technological resources
we can get our hands on. But the problem comes when we try and find
the rational justifications by which such a re-construction of the
species can take place: if, as a strict naturalist, you don’t believe that
human beings can be subjectively free, then what’s the point in freeing
the people? Why amplify our human capacities through technical
prosthesis unless you believed that the resulting increase will yield a
greater potential for the development of life as a whole? And here it

45
makes little difference whether you codify this concept of life in terms
of ‘a culture’, or ‘a science’, or ‘the singularity’, such a privileging of the
species along Aritototelian lines with its consequent teleology would be
a difficult position for a strict naturalist to uphold: the constructive
force of law always impinges on any dream of a natural justice, and
scientists who have political convictions would do well to remember
Bismarck’s quip about ‘laws being like sausages: it’s best not to see
them being made.’ To return back to your question, I think the
Climate Camp at the G20 Meltdown serves as a good example of the
two contradictory tendencies within the environmentalist movement in
general. On the one hand it stands for the expanded moral demands of
a wealthy middle-class who can afford to grow sentimental over the
fate of the polar bears, and on the other, protests like Climate Camp
are laying the basis for what will be the most significant political
movement of the next century; one which radically questions our
nature as a species and explicitly demands the conscious re-
construction of society as a whole if we are to survive the oncoming
environmental crisis.
PSO: To end on a positive note, in your opinion what are the main
opportunities which our current situation offers to a potentially
combustible new left?
PR: I think our current situation offers us two main tendencies which
are ripe for appropriation. Firstly, as we’ve already discussed, there’s the
impending environmental crisis: whilst everyone can agree that
something must be done to prevent climate change, many are as yet
unaware of the severity of the problem and fail to realise that any
potential solution will involve co-ordinated efforts on a global scale.
The necessity of this global co-ordination is highly significant for a
leftist politics, for the obvious reason that it’ll have to counter the
fatalism of naturalists like Lovelock, and simultaneously expose the
46
myth of the free-market as man’s natural predisposition. Arguably, it’s
these twin ideologies-what Marx would call ‘the physiocratic
illusion’-which do most to sustain late capitalism. These days, the
popular idea of communism is still severely tarnished by its association
with the real failings of a planned economy along with the widespread
environmental damage caused by rapid over-industrialisation in the
socialist states. Yet any proposed solution to the global environmental
crisis will demand a kind of collective labour on a scale which will
make the soviets seem like a modest experiment. It could be popular
support for an idea of communism will return around the same time as
the new left overcomes its cynicism towards the environmentalist
movement. Secondly, the exponential growth in communicative
technology provides the new left with the possibility of bypassing the
older state supporting media and creates a new form of human
socialisation. This is not to say that the world has already become
communist along the lines of those who would argue that the
‘multitude’ now ‘subjectively’ owns the dominant means of production
through their affective labour. Instead, it’s more a question of how this
new technology might be utilised as a medium through which the left
can rapidly mobilise and alert the public to injustice-basically, I think
it’s an extremely powerful tool which hasn’t yet been fully exploited,
and it provides a perfect forum from which the new left can develop its
own political theories in tandem with the growing popular demands
for social change.

47
48
Thought and the State

Assumption: We cannot think The Political without thinking the

State.

Media pundits and politicians agree: Politics is the State. Everywhere

politics is restricted to ‘The Political’ that nefarious object which only
exists where the terms have already been set, the scene furnished with
the possibilities of the acceptable. The media is a great example: only
that which fits their criteria of the political are covered: its phrasing, its
always present relationship with the market determines its values:

Don't Miss
•Ousted president vows to return

•Police, demonstrators clash 13

...Politics which sells and at once annuls conclusions. We have become

consumers instead of political actors.

Lets not fool around, politics only occurs in one place: the thought of
13 http://edition.cnn.com/2009/WORLD/americas/07/04/honduras.coup.OAS/index.html

49
the political in the event of its becoming. It will be the aim of this
article to try and determine this position in itself and in distinction to
the position of politics as a particular activity and a particular thought.
At present this particularity of thought finds it's generality in the
thought of Capital and the State, and further, within the position of
resistance, a specific non-thinking which mistakenly apes liberal
democracy’s anti-intellectualism and urge for practicality in its motto
of ‘do or die’ painfully close to Nike's 'just do it'. In both cases action
becomes impoverished by a mistaken barring of thought and, denying
its own theorising, miss-recognises itself; becomes the victim of the
underwater movements of ideology and prejudice that sustains the
power and inequity of the State and Capital. Opposed to both of these
dissimulations I would affirm a thought which recognises its inception
within the thought of the decision, and experiences its knowledge in
the immediacy of its life. It does not deny and leave unexplored the
particularity of its becoming; the tensions and antagonisms that bare it
towards an unbounded solidarity. Thought and action are separate in
rhetoric and ideology only

The State does not think.

The non-thought which sustains the State and Capital and frustrates
resistance to it is the non-thought of the state-of-things. A frozen
thought, caught in the dead time of administrative bureaucracy.
The movement towards democracy and the state – so the story goes -
under the gaze of the enlightenment, sought to distance the influence
of the community, the church and the political, from the individuals
private life. We all know the story: it was a freedom of the individual
in the separation of the public and private realm. The state protects the
individual from the inequities of human caprice.

50
The counter history is that the State becomes, in turn, a governing
system concerned with the control of society: the population, the
economy, delinquency, madness, education; and any dissension towards
its power, are the sole concern of the state. No longer individuals, but
measurable productive forces. Its governing logic becomes self
referential and self justifying. Raison d’état confirms the death of a free
politics.14

This story of our redemption by the State is lived out daily every time
an alternative to the State and Capital falls victim to human caprice. It
is, then, not enough to sit in awe at the State and Capital, oppose it,
and seek to destroy it, if we do not attend to the very place which we
argue shall replace it: the common. If we turn from a critique of the
State and Capital to the alternatives that the thought of the to-come
determine, we find terms and ideas which are irreducible to the State
and Capital, they exceed the bounds of such terms. Solidarity and the
common cannot be thought within the confines of the State-of-things.
They call on a logic which is barred from the ‘Political’ and is lost
when one concerns oneself with the terms ‘State’ and ‘Capital’ alone. A
differential equality, which seeks to render thinkable a fulfillment of
the individual that is at once the fulfillment of society; requiring a
rendering of the individual that is not self-referential nor subsumed
under the authority of social compliance. In the eternal choice between
the individual or the community that pervades the antagonism’s of the
twenty first century our answer is ‘yes please!’, we have no time for the
logic of either/or, we know that our world overflows any demarcation
we wish to set it. The logic of an opposition between thought and
action stops the thinking of this to-come that is the productive labour
of free time.
Concerned with necessity, the State, Capitalism and a strain of
14 Badio thermadores

51
activism, require the same leveling concepts to render the practicality of
their actions possible. The greatest irony of action set against theory is
that this ‘action’ requires a conceptual framework to order its activity
within a functional apparatus. This is an inevitability which repeats the
essential risk of politics: the negotiation between an idealism which is
necessary to project our desires into the world and a necessity of action
which will betray any aspect of this ideal as it falls onto the rough and
uneven ground of the world. We must consider an indispensable
understanding of anarchism to overcome this double-bind. An-arche
gestures towards the negation of the logic of imperialism, which, from
Aristotle onwards, formulates the idea of arche as its guiding principle.
Arche means at once order and origin, both the inceptive and
dominative fact of the world (both the prime mover of the natural
world and the basis of civic authority)

‘Aristotle [...] justifies slavery by founding the archē of rulership

upon the archē of genesis. “Authority and subordination are
conditions not only inevitable but also expedient: in some cases
things are marked out from the moment of birth to rule or to be
ruled.”’15

It is the logic which seeks to measure, collate and level the infinite
variety of the social within a fixed topology. Arche became both the
fact of domination and the fact of things; common sense: ‘this is the
way things are’. The common sense of domination has been ossified
into the common sense of competition and ambition. Again we find a
conceptual apparatus that stops the thought of the to-come, that
another world is possible, is lost to a logic which is bound to the dead
time of the measurable and the knowable.
This is again repeated in Hobbes. The logic - within Modern

15 http://www.waste.org/~roadrunner/writing/Levinas/AnarchismOtherPerson_WEB.htm

52
Capitalism - of companies relation with their employees and Hobbes'
conception of the leviathan's relation with it's subjects, can be shown
to be almost indistinct. Both rely upon a dis-identification and
cynicism caused by the necessity of absolute obedience of action with a
supposed freedom of thought, leading to an inevitable cynicism and
loss of a sense of responsibility towards the systemic violence’s
occurring around them. That is, both the leviathan and the modern
company, and in turn, the subjects caught in this subject positions,
conflate obedience to ones job with the a sense of ones very survival, or
being. As in Aristotle the present order of power is assumed because it
is the form of order and as such protects one from dis-order. And
guaranties its own continuation.

These systems thus base their success on equating their specific

dominant articulations with the existence of Law completely...
without these institutions people would be unable to draw a salary,
buy a house, or even purchase food... by situating ideological
compliance with subsistence Hobbes and capitalism effectively
conflate such conformity to the achievement of order in toto.16

humans are caught within the measurable value of productivity and

obedience, your worth is measured by your capacity and solidarity is
replaced by careerism. Importantly thought and actions separation are
essential for such an operation.

Hobbes distinguishes between words and actions in terms of

importance. It is only in and through the act that the word or verbal
longing can be actualized and judged...to think disobedience is as
harmless and non-punishable as to dream of murder.17

16 Peter Bloom 'Capitalism's Cynical Leviathan: Cynicism, Totallitarianism, and Hobbes in Moderrn
Capitalist Regulation' in International Journal of Zizek Studies Vol.2.1 p.27
17 Ibid p22-24

53
An essential moment, then, of breaking out of this process is to end
this separation of thought and action. Obviously this is not an
argument for theory as such; especially a privileged and specific place
of the academic, but of an increasing awareness of the place of thought
within the realm of social change; more than anything it is the capacity
to think, free of cynicism, that another world is possible.

The To-Come
54
whatever singularity is the impossible name for the individual after its
emancipation from the ego and the State.

‘Whatever singularity, which wants to appropriate belonging

itself, its own being-in-language, and thus rejects all identity and
every condition of belonging, is the principle enemy of the
State.’18

The whatever singularity is the necessary attempt to resist positioning

subjectivity in a place of antagonism with any object which we think
can be determined, the point at which all that is solid turns to air. As
much as we can name our object of revolt: the State, Capital... when we
look around us hegemony has been entrenched within the everyday and
the logic of the State and Capital run through our bodies and our
desires as much as through Institutions and laws.

The thought of the to-come founded the politics of liberation, not

within the thought of Philosophers or Political theorists, but in the
thought of the dispossessed in the decision of their revolt

‘Workerism and the feminism of difference were born in the

1960s from the opportunity opened by the enormous
development of struggles; in these struggles, irreducible
differences were posed, as new subjectivities were formed both in
the workers’ battle against waged labour and in the feminine
insurrection against patriarchal domination. It was the discovery
of these differences that determined the rebirth of philosophy. It
is resistance that produces philosophy.’19

18 Giorgio Agamben The Coming Community, page 86

19 Antonio Negri 'The Italian Difference' in Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural
and Social Philosophy, vol. 5, no. 1, 2009

55
Politics is of the multitude. The party, the State, informal hierarchies,
political philosophy, none of these terms touch politics. Caught within
functionalism, administration and ambition these places never touch
the singularity of liberation, solidarity, nor the common.

‘Politics is a mass procedure because all singularity calls for it, and
because its axiom, both straight forward and difficult, is that people
think. Administration cares nothing for this, because it considers
only the interests of parts. We can therefore say that politics is of
the masses, not because it takes into account the ‘interests of the
greatest number’, but because it is founded on the verifiable
supposition that no one is enslaved, whether in thought or in deed,
by the bond that results from those interests that are a mere
function of one’s place.’20

Philosophy does not give any privileged access to revolutionary action,

but, in holding itself away, shares in a distance and difference towards
the struggles to which it speaks and from which it is born. The
distance and difference which barres Philosophy from the common, of
common sense and of universal comprehension is not, of necessity, an
act of elitism. Clearly it can be so, but philosophy's alienation is the
alienation of the fool, the idiot, the person that 'just doesn't get it'.
What is this 'it' which the philosopher doesn't get? it is nothing more
than the cogiatio natura universalis: natural thought, the clear relation
between thought and appearance which has been the building block of
power for the last two thousand years and especially in the era of
Capitalism and Democracy: common sense. The head of Ideology
today is crowned with the laurels of facts and figures, empirical proof,
political necessity; the facts of life... Philosophy seeks to sever this head
of laurels.

20 Alain Badiou Metapolitics p.73

56
What must be understood today is how much institutional state
ideology - the assumption of the logic of the state by all individuals
within society through state education, the media, and work place
conservativism- requires not a call of ‘do or die’ but of ‘stop, think;
revolt’. The logic of the State and Capital is the logic of crisis; of panic,
‘do or die’ reiterates this panic. Most people are too caught up in the
former to entertain the later.

We know everything
57
The specialists already know everything, we should just leave it up to
them. But the specialists know nothing, divorced from the reality of
others lives they fulfill the necessities of their function, never
questioning the parameters of there authority. Another form of
specialisation: the activist, chasing the newest trend in resistance,
becomes lost in an ever changing certainty, always precocious. the term
activist denotes and causes the creation of a subject caught in a bound
solidarity. Caught up in the subjectivities prescribed to us, often
assumed in resistance, we lose the true sight of insurrection: love. Love
is the moment in which the multitude correspond, it is the moment of
the more than one which calls us beyond the egoism of Capitalism. It
is born of poverty and found in the mutual suffering of this world.
The revolt of the multitude is the becoming poor of the multitude.

As much as they are irreducible, any moment when we cannot produce

ourselves as the very lack of the State, its pointlessness; that is, every
time a scene collapses on itself out of egoism and ambition, or
shudders under the weight of the clique, we justify the necessity of the
State. As a general principle: ‘when the movement is there, act as if it
was not there; when it's not, act as if it was.'21 The threat is however
serious.

The understanding of 'movement' has a history which began with the

revolts of France, the Paris commune etcetera, but one which at some
point became Fascism, the movement of the people subsumed under
the ideology of the State and Capital found in the bitter compromises
of Europe - which proceeded from the internal wars between the
people and the State and Capital - and the violent disavowal of this
necessary contradiction in the determination, and attempted negation,
21 Giorgio Agamben 'Movement' in http://www.generation-online.org/p/fpagamben3.htm

58
of ‘the Jew’. If a movement becomes enamoured of itself; becomes itself
for itself, it loses the decisive movement: the movement of the
common, the multitude; the whatever singularity. That is, in terms of
logic it becomes self referential, no longer multiple; totalising, and
thus, excluding. But movements are beyond us, they are not, if they are
at all, under our control.

'movement is the constitution of a power as power. But if this is

true then we cannot think of movement as external or
autonomous in relation to the multitude or the people. It can
never be the subject of a decision, organisation, direction of the
people, or the element of politicisation of the multitude or the
people.'

State Democracy is the re-presentation of the population; 'movement'

is the presentation of the multitude. As soon as the movement seeks to
be a re-presentation it enters the logic and the function of the State.

‘the movement is that which if it is, is as if it wasn't, it lacks

itself; and if it isn't, is as if it was, it exceeds itself'. It is the
threshold of indeterminacy between an excess and a deficiency
that marks the limit of every politics in its constitutive
imperfection. '22

Similarly the whatever-singularity is the sign of that which presents

itself in politics, manifests in an unbounded solidarity, and seeks
nothing for itself.

Talking with others it seems they feel excluded from ‘Activism’ this
word which has a precarious relationship with the term ‘movement’: it
was a movement it is a movement, the movement is probably dead,
22 ibid

59
remembering, nostalgia, a term without content: The Scene…
without conscious effort the multitude are excluded and the common
is lost in a precocious vanguardism. Here we see a moment of tragedy
and of hope. It is a tragedy because, if we consider ourselves to be in
possession of a movement, it will fall through our fingers as we grasp
at its becoming. A hope because, if we cannot find it, it will constitute
itself from our longing and consolidate itself forever in the thought of
our emancipation.

From this point we need to become multiple, holding contradictory

thoughts: we need to constitute groups and networks of resistance:
sabotage, riots, theft; human strike. We need to exit from the
hegemony of Capitalism, determine new communities, new relations
outside of the production of capital. But at once, we cannot let this exit
allow us to think we can distinguish oursleves from the common which
finds itself in the very grips of this hegemony, not only in our
situation but in the very sense of our selves, as subjects. We need to be
able to respond to all the manifold dissimulations by which we adhere
to a structure which oppresses everyone.

The whatever singularity and the call of solidarity shatter the common
sense of the separations, conducted and made natural by the power and
ideology of the State and Capital, which oppose each individual against
the other and reduces us to measurable value. 'Solidarity', 'the
common'; 'the whatever singularity', these terms relate to a particular
form of thought opposed to the privileging of the same above
difference, the one over the multiple, the self over the other; the
measurable over the immeasurable. In this sense, the thought that these
terms relate to require multiple nominations to resist the order of the
same. Further the nominations cannot relate to a particular order of the

60
world - a subject as such - It is only the order of the one that cons
itself into such an assumption. No, these nominations can only hope to
call out in the night of dissimulations, hear others call back, and begin
to come.

Similarly the terms of critique can only nominate terms which, within
the thought gambled for, cannot place its analysis at the feet of a
precise object; a person to blame, but, through the nominations of
'Capital', the 'State' and the 'Ego' relate the thought of the one; the
measurable; the self in negation of the other, toward impossible
moments that catch our freedom in dead time and bind us all in the
servitude of subsumption. Solidarity is the negation of judgement.
However (unlike the thought that emanates from these moments and
determine, judge and condemn), from the position of difference, these
nominations can only be placed in the service of a reflection upon the
thought of each of these oppressions as if they were already whatever
singularities, as if they were already not operating under the
subsumption of the same, calling out across the fog of ideology. It is a
thought outside the order of representation, a thought which is the
creative production at the point of the void of the future. Action
divorced from thought is a dead action condemned to repeat the values
of the same; action which understands it’s generation in the thought of
the decision and the creative production of the to-come; played out
amongst the singularities of the common, produces freedom.

The hegemony around us conducts two movements: at once it divides

us in two: friend/enemy; civilian/barbarian, and shatters us all in a
personal alienation. Our response: to unify in the more than one:
solidarity and egalitarianism are the qualitive obverse of the friend/
enemy distinction. And rather than being shattered into a million

61
personal alienations we forge, amidst this more-than-one, multiple
singularities which find solidarity in their common relation. The
bastardisation of freedom into the meritocracy which binds it to the
ambition of the individual is reversed in the real separation of personal
desire and social prescription in the only possible way: through the
spontaneous consideration of other people found in the movement of
the more-than-one. It is not enough to note that without the State we
would still have a lot to deal with, a lot of problems, almost too many
given the amount of trauma the Nation State itself has managed to
dole out in its short life, we must affirm that these problems are ours.

Disenchantment does not restore the enchanted thing to its

original state: According to the principle that purity never
lies at the origin, disenchantment gives it only the possibility
of reaching a new condition.23

We are within a civil war, global in nature, a war which occurs within
the social. It is applied through law, ideology, prescription, exclusion,
and cowardice; as much as on any physical violence or coercion. It
oppresses us all as it is directly opposed to life. It freezes labour, the
law and social relations within an equalising and functional
meritocracy. obsessed with the reduction of life to that of calculable
effect, it can no longer consider the incalculable, immeasurable affects
of an often silent violence that rages through the blood and desires of
each one of us.

23 Giorgio Agamben State of exception p.88

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63