fragilekeys

(This contribution to the series records an exchange between me and Paul DeFatta, a friend of mine on Facebook who I recommend all my readers to follow. I have left it in its original form, while editing and adding some things for the sake of clarity. Although I mention this later, I want to stress from the beginning that my commentary is only loosely based on Paul’s initial post. I played freely with the ideas at the risk of caricature, for the sake making clear a certain symptom of the philosophical loop (of) self.  Paul writes:)

The first “note” announcing the shift into the interior is jarring and can fill our hearts with dismay. Surprisingly, the second note is often just as soothing as the first one was unsettling – for those who have done some serious inner work to prepare for such “turnabouts” which visit all of us from time to time.

For those who are heavily invested in – and attached to – persons, things, desires, habits, and conditions, this pivoting or about-face will be proportionally more disruptive in its consequences. For those who TRAVEL LIGHT, on the other hand, the reversal will be less jolting. Attachment and personal investment inevitably produce mass and inertia. Like a powerful locomotive pulling many cars behind it, the mind that undergoes an abrupt reversal of the direction of psychic energy will often experience a derailment or, at the very least, a paralyzing stall. Since nothing ABSOLUTELY ESSENTIAL is irretrievably lost or destroyed in such “personal” catastrophes, the survivor who rises up out of the wreckage of such derailments and stalling depressions is invariably a leaner, cleaner, serener being than the unconscious engineer-victim of the train wreck. Thus, we are all given the most compelling incentives to travel light – with ungreedy hearts and un-sticky fingers – through a world that is better simply to behold with a gasp of wonder than to hold, grasp, and plunder.

I understand the pleasure in traveling light, but what bothers me about this outlook is its violence. This is not to say that he who articulates it is violent. In fact, I assume the opposite, at least in terms of his aspirations. What interests me is the philosophical system it forms and of which it is a symptom, specifically, the loop (of) self that it reinstantiates after forcing the self through a thousand jarring movements, destructions, catastrophies, and so on. The paradox here, the source of the duplicity behind this system, is this: on the one hand, the self is to be unburdened of itself, stripped, denuded, wrecked, etc., while on the other hand, this process is framed as a “shift to the interior.” Is this not a devious trap? Looking inward, so the story goes, we will find our higher self or a higher reality: some being or way of being that is quicker on its feet, lighter, serener, because less attached to itself and to the world that surrounds it (body, people, habits, etc.). Through this ordeal and this shift, it is supposed to be purified and made “clean.” This is a reduction to a limit point of nothingness, one could say, especially considering that no removal of any worldly or physical quality could change what is “absolutely essential” for this (non-)being. (Many examples of this system could be cited, but I would prefer Kafka’s, who explains how the self consumes itself down to the undying Flame, cuts itself down to the size of the tiniest indestructible that is common to all humans.)

The irony is that, despite all the self-obliteration undergone, there is still a survivor, “one” who undergoes all these disruptions and who, it is assumed, must muster a rather extreme amount of courage and discipline in the face of all this turbulence; who must overcome that pitiful, “unconscious engineer-victim of the train wreck” that plagues the steps toward enlightenment and/or genuine self-encounter. At the very least, someone who must continue to tell himself that he is doing or has done this “serious inner work” (and for so many years!), and that he is doing it for his own good or for the good of others.

I am aware that the constantly repeated terminus of this process is the realization that this “he” who is shifting to the interior is a sort of mechanism or function, a kind of operative illusion (ego) that is useful only insofar as it is able to poke holes in its own structure, obliterate its own identifications, “die daily,” and so on. “He” is this figment of his own imagination who can only prepare himself to be bombarded, psychically devastated or spiritually violated by the Glorious. But then, toward whose interior does he imagine he is shifting during his preparations? To the heart of God (interior exteriority) or to the heart of the world (exterior interiority)? To “his own” interior, and if so, where is that? Of course, one is prohibited from grasping or appropriating any of these. The glorious finds you, as is the perogative of any Almighty worthy of the name. Put otherwise, this Ultimate Reality obtained through the turn-to-self can only be “beheld” by a being that is shocked-open-wide, bedazzled in a bestowal that is both the trainwreck of ordinary, personological consciousness and the awakening of a higher, quasi-transpersonal one from out of this shock or “death” (not all the way, of course). It is at any rate phenomenological, or at least it is still described on those terms and with those presuppositions. It requires the loop (of) self.

I admit it is very pleasurable to talk this way, to describe this system. It gives one the feeling of having understood something that needs to be disseminated as widely as possible, of having done a service not only to humans who just might escape their narrow and ugly self-enclosures, but also to the Self who has been aided in Self-realization. Because of the existential surplus-value or “ecstasy” generated by such discourses and the behaviors they shape, many books, religious and otherwise, have been written and sold on the topic. And many are yet to come, praise God! Jokes aside, I would never discourage them per se, if only because I am well-acquainted with the turnabouts (of) self that Paul so forcefully describes. But what troubles me here, as I said initially, is simply the violence of these turns. Not of the turning itself per se, but of the operation of turning: the violence of the oppression or suppression that the self imposes upon itself in order to liberate itself or let itself be liberated. This violence, once assumed necessary, reasserts itself whenever the self feels caught in itself, or when it percieves that another self is lacking self-realization and must be taught the ways of violence. This self-“pression” haunts or plagues the suffering I until that breakthrough moment when the I breaks through itself or is broken through by… you name it. All of this inevitably demands, if not a breakdown, then a practiced breaking-down whose horizon is the Unbroken (lightness traveling). In the end, it is a system of despair–which does not mean that it cannot be well-adjusted to and compensated for through renewed exaltations to Becoming, through impassioned and poetic exortations to “go to the limits of the possible” (Bataille), or by touting its wisdom before others and becoming respected for spiritual achievements.

I do not mean that someone who thinks such thoughts is doomed to despair–on the contrary. I only wish to point out is how this system requires it, this “sickness unto death,” in order to function. Check the discourses: they would be in despair if they did not know they could count on a reservoir of despair to slosh around in (in themselves or in others or in humanity in general)! Whereas normally one thinks that despair is what befalls us, and that we must find our way out through some sort of leap, it seems to me rather that the loop–and the command to leap–is the despair. Of course one knows that the loop is unreal. But the deduction that almost always seems to follow is that this unreality is itself “real” in some fashion and must therefore be reckoned with as something to be derealized (on the way to a higher or lower “rerealization”), and reckoned with through some sort of decision or operation (for example, a “shift to the interior”). We should not be fooled by the turns of phrase that say things like: the loop is meant to be broken; at the end of the loop one sees there is no loop there; something will come along to break me whether I like it or not, so I had better get my loops ready. In each case, the loop requires a cut–the scission of trauma–and the looper has to become a “cutter” or a cut-receiver. Something like a hyperreal symbolic suicide machine, a time-traveller who must kill past and future selves and whose cutting field is the abyss’s edge, the void’s teeth. All in all, it is a strange but predictable performance, full of threats and twisted smiles.

I say this without moral critique, but as an observer of this system who took its truth on faith for many years, but who now refuses to inflict upon himself the violence it requires to be maintained. I would instead like to develop an approach or a “discourse” that can suspend its nefarious procedures. Those who follow and articulate this system are not usually violent people, but their discourse very often is, though this is often unperceived. The tone is accusatory, pedagogical, authoritative, condescending, even “hazing,” and all of this in the guise of possessing a higher knowledge or perspecitve that must be imparted to others for their benefit, to save them from their lack of self-knowledge or get them going with the esoteric. They pontificate on the void and do not recognize that the inner essence they are promoting conducts so much despair and, worse, substantializes its conditions. Even when they have internalized all this violence, for example in the form of a humble spiritual mission, traces of bitterness and resentment remain which, sadly, seem invisible to them. Worst of all, none of this can be acknowledged, for fear of being caught out as a fraud. Again, I say this without reference to any one person, for it is entirely a part of the system; indeed, these are its inherent symptoms. (I should say on a personal note that I have felt the need to disavow a great deal of my own old writings simply because I ended up recognizing in them the presence of these symptoms and did not wish to spread them.)

In closing, I believe there is another sort of peace that does not require all this self-violence. In lieu of a longer discussion, I can only share what I believe to be its “first term”: the lived-without-life (Laruelle). This term does not describe a special reality, but is adequate for an approach that would bring down the biases of phenomenology (interiority, self-constitution, properness, etc.) and the loop (of) self system it forms (culminating in a philosophy of life or a negative theology of otherness). It tries to acknowledge experience as a mere occasion, without granting it the transcendental flavor that the self would like to taste in it by turning inward and wrapping itself up in it, or by turning itself around outside because of it, or by letting itself be pierced by it like a traumatic laser beam of Infinity. Without any operation, any decision, or any process of becoming, the self is impossibilized by the Real in an immanent fashion. This is not meant to be another metaphysical statement, but an axiom for practice and for innovation in philosophical discourse. The lived-without-life is a radical solution to the problem of “traveling light,” for it need not reference a living traveler or hallucinate access to the transcendent.

I would like to part on a note of thanks to Paul for all his thought-provoking writings. I have obviously picked up on only a small piece of them. My goal as stated throughout was only to bring some clarity to the problematic of the system, to play with it and profane its sacred structure, which in my view always returns back to an unjustly assumed separation and an imperative of self-scission. My concern here reaches back through many years of “struggle and study” that in retrospect appears like little more than a laughable cruelty, what one might call the “self-inflicted wounds of glory.” Whereas today the only solution I can see passes through the generic, which by definition is unglorious. I leave it there, resting assured that the conversation will continue.

[Paul:] Timothy, to the extent that I was able to follow your language here, I am intrigued by your observations about the violence inherent in the ‘looping system’ that you detect in my piece above. It’s very late and my energy is spent for the day, but I would like to return to this tomorrow and see if I can’t get a better grasp on where you’re going in your critique. One observation I had, concerning the violence of the ‘turnabouts’: as the pairs of opposites that constitute the psyche are better understood and more successfully kept in balance, these ‘about-faces’ occasion less and ever less emotional disruption for me. When I was younger, I was the victim of quite overwhelming pendulum swings (between introverted and extraverted psychic energy; between action and contemplation; feeling and thinking; loving and withholding, etc.), but in recent years I seem to be wiser about allowing lopsidedness to happen, so that I seldom allow myself to stray too far from the ‘middle’ of the polarities that energize my psyche. Does this begin to speak to your concern about the ‘violence’ of the reversals I was writing about?

[Me:] Hi Paul, let me pick up from here: “Whereas normally one thinks that despair is what befalls us, and that we must find our way out through some sort of leap, it seems to me rather that the loop [and the command to leap] is the despair.” What I was trying to get at was how the efforts to escape the loop (of) self are themselves always led back into the same circle–the grinding dialectic of anguish and ecstasy, to paraphrase Bataille. The despair has its grounds in self-attribution or -appropriation of whatever stripe, in the “this is my journey.” Superficially one could attack this as the illusory assumption of “me” and “mine,” but it is clear to me that attempts to destroy this ‘illusion’ are doomed either to despair, again, or to identification with something transcendent, whatever it may be. To put it very simply: why do I attribute the immanent moment that is lived to me? Why this compulsion to “double” it? To fold the lived up into “a life”?

At any rate, this is the problem that has been occupying me, largely due to a reading of Francois Laruelle. He tries to think an immanent reduction of all transcendence, to think how all transcendence “falls” into immanence and can only ever ground itself in immanence. This is an attempt to think transcendence in its most simplified form, and the greatest consequences of this simpliciation is the reduction or neutralization of the self or subject. The lived is then thought, each time, as a simple occasion, the subject nothing but the clone of the Real. It leads to the notion of a lived that is not captured in “living a life.” A lived that is one time each time, and thus not redoubled into the transcendence of a self.

I have very high regard for your writings and they often remind me of my own quasi-Nietzschean efforts to come to terms with the problem of self. I also share with you the need, even the mission, to de-program us from our conscriptions to power and false-self-thinking, which no doubt requires a “separation” in some manner from the deformities of our culture. Likewise your description of the “overwhelming pendulum swings” resonates with years of experience from my younger days. I can still remember when these swings went from being long (a week in the doldrums, a week on high) to being just a few days apart, and finally to shorter almost infinitesimal time-spans. This certainly has to do with allowing the “lopsidedness to happen,” as you say. It would be a lie to say that these swings end, or ever could end, for “me”; they are indemic to the loop of self-affection. But is it really a loop? What evidence, what justification do we have for turning the affect so spontaneously into an affect (of) self, into self-affection? Nothing would seem more natural or spontaneous than this, of course, but this is the “program” I am trying to treat (“philosophy” itself, in Laruelle-speak).

What concerns me is the root of these violent reversals and circles (“shifting inward”…) and if there isn’t a way to treat them that would not come from the will, from decision, or from any effort or operation of self, which usually amounts to a counter-violence against the (old) self. This concern stems from lots of observation and a distaste for the ‘traps’ that even the most spiritual of remedies set up for the self. By focusing these energies on the self-problem, especially when the self is construed as the one singular actor who might work for its own liberation (beginning with the interpellation, “you must change your life!”), they can even lead to its exacerbation–to arrogance in spiritual achievement when they succeed, and to terrible confusion when they fail.

So I am trying to displace the entire problem away from the self, not by not caring about it, but by inventing a solution that, rather than starting from its transcendence (which constantly turns about itself, reverses on itself, attacks itself, denounces itself, or wills itself to its own destruction…), begins one time each time from or in immanence, where immanence so to speak “impossibilizes” the self a priori. This allows, not the ignoring of, nor the obliteration of, the “objective appearance” of transcendence, but its radical treatment and simplification. The power of this objective appearance is weakened, brought down, rooted back in immanence as non-acting, non-thinking, non-speaking, non-decisional and non-positional (of) self. The question then shifts from the will-to-power–which accuses, obligates, and assumes so much, not only about itself, but about “others”–toward the passivity of the lived-without-life (traveling light). This is obviously not without a connection to the detachment you articulated in your original post, but it no longer retains the imperative: detach! Instead, one will speak of the Subtracted-without-subtraction, for example, in order to get at the non-operatory quality of detachment, and to loosen the command upon the self to effect by some means its own detachment from itself. This is about an a priori reduction from immanence that is not an operation or effected by a decision, but one time each time “complete.” (Transposed to the register of wholeness, what is at stake is the One–to which one does not need to “go”…)

I am not sure if this makes any sense to you. It isn’t a defense of what I wrote before but an attempt to make the problem clearer. Despite the sound of it (one sometimes gets polemic when thinking, as you know, and it is often necessary to draw contrasts), I did not mean to raise a critique. It’s more that I was inspired by your thoughts to bring them into contact with my own, and to discover therein the remnants of the loop-system, of the “vicious circle” of the eternal return of the same, one could say, or what Laruelle simply calls “double transcendence.” It is from there that I tried to isolate the (structural) “violence” of the “shift to the interior” as an unnecessary task, yet another hurdle to test the self, and once again guilt-tripping it into transcending itself toward itself, or to think itself all the better for having turned inward–for having operated on itself, for having determined its reality, and so on. There is nothing but recoil in this structure, for the self is a harsh master. When it isn’t raising threats against itself, it’s looking to save a world of selves from themselves. This not an unworthy goal. I consider Laruelle’s non-philosophical work and my small attempts to build from it in continuity with other philosophical and spiritual systems. But here it is a matter of recognizing symptoms in them and how those symptoms run amock in the most lofty guises of greatness (the pretension of “enlightened minds” or “exemplary figures”). Here, systems are seen in their insufficiency, which lets us treated them as raw materials for modeling immanence instead of as a support for the self-loop and its violences.

I regret that my initial text was so “negative” in nature, but I am trying to have patience with myself in letting these thoughts “sink in” in a playful way. I hope with this comment I have at least made my aims a bit clearer.

BEARINGS OF LOVE
May 26, 2016

Hallucination of interiority, sovereign of rage and complaint, master of habit and personhood, where does your love go?

Where does your love go, your bizarre signals of desire and distress?

Where does your love go—with life or with death? Emerging to serve the purpose of rest, or to tumble endlessly in dread of no requital?

(For Andre Breton, only requited love could fuse and reconcile essence and existence; it alone conditions us for a “total magnetization” and “turns the mind into an eternally welling spring, unalterable and always lively.” Such love lives from one principle: sensual pleasure and intellectual activity, all that can be expected from within and without, are only ever reconciled in a single being, in a single instant that one can only surrender to as in a trance, seizing thus the eternal. Such was the only alternative to a life devoid of meaning in a denatured world: to seek for this “state of grace” in which perception and visualization are one, an ecstasy beyond the distinction between subjective and objective in which I and the other I love make up an indestructible unit of light. It is here that you take me back to my most spiritual source: our tingling embrace, edging beyond consciousness, where we could conceive, from all the sorrow we’d felt, a reason for the accidents of existence and it seemed, if only for our ‘instant’ together, that there might be a justification for creation after all and that, in some not-unimportant way, our lives and our moment not only participated in it but sealed its truth and delivered on its promise directly, in the heart of a world otherwise vile and senseless.)

O beloved others I’ve so often united with beyond the bounds of time and space, all those who have turned my way, extending their touch and thought and merging their words with mine in an event of seizure without proportions, whoever has come this way and called me out—where are we now? To what have we come? Who else shall get lost in our reflectionless gaze?

(A white butterfly unfolds its torn wings, exposing the soot black design to the fire’s glare, and instantly it metamorphoses into a smoke trail escaping under the street lamp, into the nothingness of night; far above, high on the proud weeping willow’s branch, sits a young cardinal who catches the peculiar scent of that trail and twists his head and hops here and there to discern it until he decides to rebel against it all, taking flight madly just then and refusing to land anywhere for years of miles, until one day he comes by a similar willow and a similar flame and, catching sight of himself inwardly for the first time, realizes he too is a white butterfly prepared to unfold its untorn wings, and just as he approaches the light, whimsically and enthralled, he metamorphoses…)

Irreparable frivolity of this craving for rebound and relay: in love one says anything for a fix, the chest beats like a locomotive with the unified force of freedom and affection; action that leads to uncertain consequences cannot be avoided, the legs uncrumple and dance, the mouth spits out its silent resignation and demands the saving word of possibility, everything rushes into orbit around the obscure inkling of a coming frisson that will shiver the agent down to perfect relation, to the passionate patience of nonsense and playfulness and in that strengthened against every obstacle with the promise of the encounter shared, in adoration of a time without horizons, revoking every inscription and summoning the one necessary thing: love, singular dive of nothing, faith finding its refuge in its leap—a confidence unbroken, unique and repeating until all hope has been rewon for life’s cause and the dead rise in us to sing out our own hymn, this frivolous, irreparable expression of our one being.

Where will my love go then? Into the funeral march or the baptismal procession? Calmly returning you to the peace that surpasses all effort, or agitating you to reach with utmost urgency for the limits of the possible?

Where will my love go, with its contradiction and awkwardness, its naivety and underdevelopment, its irreverence and irresponsibility?

Obsessed by the indefatigable exterior, called out by intangible timbres and textures, exhibited fully vulnerably to the other’s magic act, fumbling decisions and fabricating commitments, dispossessed servant of a self whose intention wholly escapes it, who remains in adoration of you and only you, stranded on the shore of your infinity, sparkling incommensurably—tell me, tell me where, where shall our love go?

One reason our society remains locked in hatred and stupidity is our unwillingness to be uncomfortable, to have the honest conversation, to feel challenged and be changed. Such is the minor and quotidian cycle of accepting what appears to be the most acceptable of acceptable things that perpetuates not only inequality, but a situation of “cowardice” and “unfreedom.” Because we are afraid to jeopardize our own situation, we accept a situation that jeopardizes millions of others, though we rarely give this a moment’s thought. As Jeff Buckley sang, “Our mutiliation is to gain from the system.” These are of course incredibly difficult patterns to break. Thus the need for a daily effort to break them and first of all to break them in ourselves: to combat the inertia, the complacency, the inaction, the silence. We simply must risk our reputation. We must refind our identity in a common cooperation against lies and blindness. All other projects should run secondary to this. If it comes to it, we must become unrecognizable, even to those who love us. We must risk what we have been for what’s coming…

For the State will continue to organize oppression and capitalism will continue to reduce us to exchangeables―and as part of the laughing masses, we are right where it wants us to be―unless we antagonize, unless we band together in a singular intention to antagonize without rest, and to affirm an antagonism-to-capital that is irrepressible. The comfortable position invariably perpetuates the system of inequality and oppression; it is inert and “timeless”; its happiness is static and circular. Only through a practice of immanent and constant antagonism is another form of subjectivity given a chance: a time productive of another collective, with a happiness that loses itself in the cause of the other and not in the system of the organized world.

This is not the antagonism of armed revolt, a new political party, or organized secession. It is rather, following Negri, the antagonism of an immediate separation, effective materially and intellectually and directed cooperatively to the production of the other’s chance: a negative activity of separation rooted in a refusal of the exploited situation. This means antagonizing ourselves out of our own torpor, our own enjoyment of the system, our “mutilation.” It means being dissatisfied with the self-orientation of our own quest (for material wealth, knowledge, social relationship) and instead engaging ourselves on the collective front of antagonism. Participation in that collective takes place not through a simulacrum of information but through active contributions to a knowledge base that is indissociable from a new time and a new practice of being, grounded in an episteme that is radically separate from the circular time of packaged laughter, the blasé ontology of the “disillusioned” whose knowledge can only serve the continued mutilation.

Antagonism means heeding a responsibility that prevents us from sleeping and only deepens the more we respond to it: an advance into the eternity of the struggle. But though oriented collectively, it also implies each us traveling our own irreversible trajectories, in dimensions that are plural and irreducible to each other. For unity lies not in a common cause or agreed agenda, but in the direct work of antagonism: the negative labor that refuses the commands of the capitalist-military State and that co-operates for the sake of constituting not an alternative but the break itself―an “alternative” that, however indefinite it may seem, is nonetheless definite in its moment, concrete in its product, and experienced as determinative for being. These many moments, products, and experiences disperse themselves throughout the fabric of society like Benjamin’s messianic splinters, ever ready to be resumed by the other for the continued production of the new collective subjectivity and its continued antagonism to capital. No matter how uncomfortable it makes us, no matter how much we want to crawl back, no matter how much we’d like to think about something else, it is there in this “eternal” cooperation that we will find what can genuinely be called our future.

Antagonism-to-capital, for Negri, is inseparable from human creativity and autonomy. Antagonism acts in this sense as a sort of pure telos that need not ever be reabsorbed by the system against which it is antagonistic. It is not in a dialectical relationship where the negative (antagonism) would have to be negated or reconciled with what it negates (the capitalist time of command and its law of value). On the contrary, the “negation” is in full force as the affirmation of the radical break. Its “value” is immanent to its activity and is neither exchangeable nor negligible. Its products are valuable in themselves, meaning that they cannot be measured by the law of value operative in capital. Antagonism is itself productive and powerful, but it is a counterforce that does not need to negotiate with or assimilate itself to the forces it counters (even if that happens when Power tries to neutralize it). In Negri’s view, the subjectivity produced through this antagonism is auto-valorizing and auto-determining. Creativity is a kind of use of life and power against the exploitation of life by Power.

Antagonism therefore constitutes a time of life that is shared, inciting singularities to enter the commons and engage in the production of antagonistic subjectivity. “Revolution” is a long-term project and its organization is inseparable from negative labor. The communist “event” is thus, from the perspective of the World, the result of a long work of liberation, whereas from the “communist’s” perspective, the event is the experience of communism itself and its negative work. That work―which generates new desires, new languages, new beings―creates a surplus that cannot be exploited by capital and that the state cannot command. Living labor, by definition antagonistic to the exploitation of life (wage labor), tends toward an autonomous, auto-catalytic “cognitive” surplus knowledge of communism that cannot be “digested” by capital or translated into any of its schemes. The wager is this: to accumulate in the commons the results of our excess, our negative and cognitive labor. Our proximity to the coming communism increases to the extent that we accumulate and organize or let-be-catalyzed the products of this labor. Antagonism, in other words, is not an incremental change to what exists, nor does it project some sort of radical change that it could imagine anticipating. It is more profoundly a qualitative leap into new temporal being: direct experience of communism.

The distinction between struggle and hope therefore is not a meaningful one in practice. “Hope” is flimsy unless it is active as antagonistic creativity, as life productive of new being. It will never let any illusion or any guarantee of future prosperity pacify. It will never give up its indignation and dissatisfaction with the situation of exploitation, but it will also never lose the love it finds in its poverty-of-world. What “transcends” capitalist society is in fact an immanent Real: the living alternative to be built upon relentlessly and with the highest sense of dedication to the other and to the future. Those thus antagonized can only act in defense of this Real. “Hope” is only hope in you: that you will take up our work of liberation and the responsibility to struggle against mutilation and for the new time. More than hope, it is an anticipation convinced of the coming of what it anticipates through its very life and work―through the autocatalytic antagonism constantly “left alive” in a subjectivity that knows communism immanently.

The notion of a grand rupture, shock, or intervention in the system is therefore outdated. It is again based on a false ontology of the event as something sudden, unprecedented, mysterious, or “befalling.” The idea that things could become different while I myself stay the same is also erroneous. For Negri, productivity is always a production of subjectivity itself (not “also”). We should also probably not pretend like anything is going to happen “later.” We are, right now, producing what will have happened, what will have been the “collectivized” subjectivity, the temporality proper to communism. We should not fantasize about the spectacular and the extreme, for then we will miss all the cues for this transformation that remains “invisible” to the World. Antagonism against the system is just as “real” as the big-screen productions of Power witnessed on television. As immanent practice, it is even even powerful than it. Lives committed to antagonism in common are not only powerful, but productive of a commons that capital can never grasp and which can only be erased when people give up on that life and forget how much it is, “a project worth our seriousness.”

The experience of communism at stake here not only can happen through knowledge. The thesis expressed above about cognitive labor suggests that it can only happen through it, but of course where knowledge is inseparable from practices and the subjects that produce them in common. Negri writes,

To put it in Foucauldian terms, when we are immersed in the crisis of an episteme we must place ourselves in circumstances and conditions that enable us to modify, along with the systems that organize knowledge, the episteme’s forms of production and the subjects that produce it. To deconstruct systems means, in this case, to reconstruct the forms of knowledge.

Once it is understood that subjectivity is itself a production, it comes as no surprise that our indifference and complacency is a product of the system of banality “that pervades our minds.” Individuality itself is a trap, a form of subjectivity-knowing that is perfectly digestible by capital and State command, entirely conformed to its law of value, to time-as-measure, and to the alienation of human means. The excess over the system can never be reduced to the transcendental presuppositions of individualism, for it is immediately and immanently “singular-common,” a shared work. Negri’s wager is ultimately that time itself is of a collective essence and thus not ruled by the debts of history’s scripts. Without collectivity, the only time that individuals can know is capitalism’s. But the immeasurable new being is known to be collective  through and through. “Consciousness rises up as consciousness of antagonistic collectivity.” Irrepressible, it is also irresistible: autocatalytic antagonism. Only this consciousness frees itself from commodification and subordination to the system of banality, since it emerges in a radical separation from it, from a refusal of the exploitative razzmatazz and its mutilations. Separation is immediately collectivization. Its time is (of) collective essence. The task for each of us, then, is to work our singular out into the commons, so as to create a commons that is singularizing and antagonizing, a “stretched” event that thus makes history, perhaps without ever even seeming to appear there. A clandestine life in-common, destined to find itself in the other, to let its cause be the other’s, and thus to cause the other to find itself in our cause.