The insurrection as a real event stands for transcendence ~ x, for an outside in which a new relation between the world and lived experience is invented, much more, for an outside that escapes the world. The insurrection can serve as a referent for discourse, and one can debate it almost endlessly, but it should never be the object of a political narrative that appropriates it. If today the insurrection is not only a collective action, but a type of class struggle, then the surplus population in particular must also have an explanatory power in this; it must be understood as a constitutive part of the global proletariat, whose historical task is the negation of capital. The more the better-off and collectively bargained sections of the working class in the Western metropolises affirm capital in order to still be able to reproduce themselves on a relatively comfortable economic and social level, the more massively the political signification of a globally expanding proletariat, large parts of which no longer find access to the traditional forms of reproduction, becomes apparent at the same time. According to Joshua Clover, we are in the midst of a prolonged exodus of the dispossessed from all corners of the globe to the Western world, driven by increasing geopolitical volatility, wars, and the inability of capital to adequately absorb the labor force in the states of the Global South – a diaspora of an expanding superfluidity and simultaneously non-mobile and disused surplus population.
If the everyday life of a part of the world’s population in the global South increasingly takes place in the informal economies, then this part itself becomes surplus and is confronted with the conditions of its reproduction beyond the wage-labor relationship, and in this conflictual situation, which then also manifests itself in the streets, any unauthorized gathering of a group on the corner, in a public square, or precisely in the streets can be understood as a potential riot. Quite unlike the strike, it is difficult to figure out when the riot starts or when it ends. On the one hand it is a particular event, on the other hand it is the holographic miniature of a complete situation, a world picture.
The Riot seems to preserve nothing or affirm nothing, perhaps a shared antagonism, a shared misery, and a shared negation. Often it does not even possess the positive language of a program or a demand, but only the negative language of vandalism, destruction, and the planless. But still, it does not lack determination. Clover speaks of the overdetermination of the riot by historical transformations that make antagonism, specifically struggles in circulation, necessary. The welfare state that still accompanied the accumulation of capital in Fordism has disappeared, and with it the possibilities of capital and the state to guarantee social and economic improvements for wage-dependents. Capital and labor are increasingly moving into circulation, while the surplus population is in the informal economy. The new insurgencies in circulation do not necessarily have to be carried by workers, because in principle anyone can liberate a marketplace, close a street, or occupy a port. The insurgents may be workers, but they do not function as workers in the Riot, for those involved are unified here not by their jobs but in their function as dispossessed.
While the early Riot hardly confronted the police and the armed state (it took place in economic space), this has changed in the post-industrial Riot. On the one hand, one sees directly the ensemble of goods in the local supermarkets; on the other hand, when it comes to the pricing of goods, one is confronted with the capital economy as an invisible planetary logistics and a financial industry that can hardly be grasped. Only the police can be spotted at every corner. Surprisingly, Joshua Clover identifies an important moment of insurgency in the concept of surplus, whereas insurgency is usually understood in the context of deprivation, lack, and deficit, whereas for Clover it indicates precisely the experience of surplus lived in itself, such as surplus danger, surplus instruments, and surplus effects. The most important surplus is the actively negating, resisting population in the rupturing moments of mass mobilization, which coalesce into an event in which the insurgency explodes the policing management of a concrete situation while radically decoupling itself from everyday life. This kind of insurgent surplus production, however, always remains confronted with the conditions of socioeconomic processes and transformations that respond to crises or constitute them in the first place. All this by no means indicates insurgency as a purely contingent, but also as a necessary form of political struggle. Given the existence of a vast surplus population and the insurrectionary politics of the surplus, Clover comes to an important conclusion: insurrection is the modality through which the surplus is lived. Primary circulation is now primary insurgency, which is surplus life itself-however short-term; the latter is the subject of politics and thus also the object of state violence. Police violence now itself becomes part of the insurgency, or, to put it another way, the flashing coalition of the insurgent surplus exists within an economy of state violence.
The historical periodization “insurrection-strike-primary insurrection” maps for Clover the logical line “circulation-production-circulation (of capital).” While Clover places the period 1784 to 1973 for the period of productive industrial capital, for the period thereafter he sees the decisive characteristics of the movement of capital in circulation, in financialization and its accompanying deindustrialization, at least in the Western industrialized countries. Following historian Fer- dinand Braudel, Clover believes that 1973 marked a point in time – think of the series of oil shocks, the final collapse of the Bretton Woods system, and the final U.S. withdrawal from Viet- nam – that ushered in a new phase of economic crisis development in global capitalism unfolding beyond a business cycle. In the context of Braudel’s and Arrighi’s economic business cycle theories, Clover grasps 1973 as a metonym that stands for economic changes far beyond the transformational capacity of a decade. The decline in growth and profit rates that began in 1973 represents a period of decline in industrial capital in Western countries, while at the same time money capital flows more than ever into the financial sectors, where higher profit rates can be expected and realized.
The contemporary insurgency cannot be thought of without the economic and political transformations of global capital since the 1970s. One thesis is that the uprisings that have taken place since that time are a constitutive part of the global circulation struggles against capital and its states, that is, they take place mainly in circulation, which must be understood, first, as an important constituent of capital and, second, as a social dispositif sui generis. On a purely empirical level, the circulation of capital includes the various service sectors, commercial enterprises such as Wal-Mart, Aldi or McDonald`s, and the enterprises and institutions of the international financial system. On a conceptual level, it is important to note that capital ever already ties the production process to (monetary) circulation, i. e. production is itself to be understood as a part of the circulation of capital, the general form of which can be inscribed in the following formula: G-W-P-W’-G’.
If capital has the capacity to set itself as an end in itself in an excessive, growth-oriented and spiral form – the starting point here is the end point and vice versa – then, as a sui generis monetary process, it comprehensively dominates the sphere of production in order to integrate it precisely into the primary “monetary circulation and distribution” G-W-G’. Accordingly, production, distribution and circulation, in terms of their integration (both structural and temporary), are necessarily to be understood as parts of the monetary economy of capital and its metamorphoses. If the capital principle is the engine of the breathing monster called total capital, then the financial system is its central nervous system. The financial system executes the competition, the coordination and the regulation of the enterprises, which in turn are presupposed by the total capital, which actualizes itself via the real competition of the individual capitals, which for Marx is always not a ballet, but a war. Financial capital constantly modulates the competition of all enterprises and rekindles it – it is therefore an integral part of the capital economy and not a cancer that a doctor can remove to help the capital body back to health.
Today’s highly technical and globally networked infrastructures are unthinkable without the existence of logistics companies. Logistics today runs around the globe and like capital, it processes in spirals and cybernetic feedback loops whose non-linearity and vectoriality is differential, a-linear – they are lines that spread out in all directions depending on their effectiveness and geography. In this course, capital in real and virtual terms increasingly tends towards an economy of logistical and virtual space, shaped by series of intra-capitalist and inter-state competitive struggles. Financialized global shipping, logistics, and containerization signal this infrastructural shift, with just-in-time production indicating the methodological and temporal capital aspect of the same change. The triumph of logistics begins with containerization, which has been integrated into global value chains since the 1970s in order to build them up, speed them up and make them more effective. Accordingly, it is no coincidence that the blockades at the Port of Oakland were among the more radical actions of the Occupy movement. If capital is increasingly in the sphere of circulation in order to reduce costs through credit, the technological acceleration of transport, and with the help of logistics, that is, to shorten the turnover times of capital as a whole, then the struggles in these areas also take on an ever greater importance for capital and the states. However, one does not only think of the barricades, blockades and struggles in the streets, but also of collective forms of resistance in other social spheres, such as debt strikes or the hacking of algorithms.
While the accumulation of capital at the beginning of the 20th century entailed a shift of the working population from agriculture to industry, at the end of the 20th century it led to the widespread transfer of capital from the industrial production sectors to the financial, service, and information sectors, and at the same time entailed increased unemployment in the industrial centers. At this point, we should return to Marx’s law of capi- talist accumulation,7 which states that, depending on the conjunctural cycles of capital accumulation, both an industrial reserve army and a surplus population develop at the margins or outside the official labor markets, with both populations either socially subsidized or employed at low wages, or somehow trying to secure their reproduction with slave labor, part-time jobs and illegal activities. The important membrane here is that between the industrial reserve army (as part of the official labor market) and the surplus population, which is outside the official labor market and pushed into informational, semi-legal, or illegal economies worldwide.
Any theory of insurgency is always also a theory surplus population and its crisis, that of an entire economy, but also that of a community or city, that of an hour or that of days. Surprisingly, Clover identifies the first important relation between insurgency and crisis in the concept of surplus, whereas insurgency is usually understood in the context of deprivation, lack, and deficit, whereas for Clover it indicates precisely the experience of surplus lived in itself, such as surplus danger, surplus instruments, and surplus effects. The most important surplus is the actively negating, the resisting surplus population in the rupturing moments of mass mobilization, which coalesce into an event in which the insurrection explodes the policing management of a concrete situation and at the same time radically decouples from everyday life. This kind of insurgent surplus production, however, always remains confronted with the conditions of socioeconomic processes and transformations that respond to crises or constitute them in the first place. All this by no means indicates insurgency as a purely contingent, but also as a necessary form of political struggle. Given the existence of a vast surplus population and the insurrectionary politics of the surplus, Clover comes to an important conclusion: insurrection is the modality through which the surplus is lived. Primary circulation is now primary insurgency, which is surplus life itself-however short-term; the latter is the subject of politics and thus the object of state violence. The violence of the police now itself becomes part of the insurgency, or, to put it another way, the flashing coalition of the insurgent surplus exists in an economy of state violence. does not make any demands, the primary insurgency establishes civil war.
The global proletariat, which includes the surplus population vegetating in the slums of the metropolises, today, when it rebels in the streets, is directly confronted by the state and the police (in the early uprisings of the 17th century, the economy was close and the state far away). While capitalist lines of production have become more and more bifurcated, huge quantities of goods are channeled through long global transportation routes, and in the Western metropolises even staple foods are imported from other continents, leaving the global export of goods, not to mention the export of capital, largely invisible, the standing army of the state, the police, now highly militarized ostensibly solely for the anti-drug and anti-terrorist wars, is ever present on the streets, especially in the so-called problem zones of the metropolises. The police can be spotted by insurgents on every corner. Well-trained and militarized task forces, conditioned to use violence like workers are conditioned to work on an assembly line, dominate the public space during demonstrations to such an extent that any political dissent articulated in the streets has from the outset merely the character of being tolerated and at the same time of being eliminated at any time – and thus almost the definition of absurdity. Riots are not an exclusively spontaneous and short-lived expression of discontent, but are more broadly, to put it in the words of Stuart Hall, a mode through which the class struggle is lived.
As this cannot be separated from the question of the many, the re-composition of the class body, which is constantly transformed in relation to the material base. In this context, insurrection and strike are not singular events, but part and figure of the many that are adjacent to them. In contrast to the strike, the insurrection today, although it remains bound to certain necessities of reproduction, can only be political, since the surplus population participating in it remains fundamentally denied participation in social wealth. Capitalist states have long since replaced Keynesian economic policies and the politics of social peace with austerity policies and with direct police confrontation, especially toward the surplus population, whereby the violent appearance of the police, which today dominates airports and other places of transit, and their militarization have become part of everyday life. Police and insurgency are therefore mutually dependent. The insurgency has a necessary correlation to the current structure of the state (and economy), it is characterized by the abject – it is those who are excluded from any productivity gains who are at the forefront of the insurgency.
The looting, the barricade, and ultimately the entire destructive arsenal of insurgent actions are always to be understood as an implicit response to the logics of capitalization and the state. The tactics, means, and methods of today’s insurgencies include, in particular, looting, blockades, and barricades that challenge the state’s monopoly on the use of force and the police’s control of public space; looting that at least hints at a redistribution of general wealth (in the 1970s, such actions were still called “proletarian shopping” in Italy); and property damage that symbolizes a specific form of property critique. If the uprisings do not refer to any explicit strategy, they certainly bring a political articulation into play, as a radical negation – and partly also as an inversion – of workers’ power; whereby it is important to bear in mind here that the workers in Fordism were still successful at least in the wage struggles, but today they are completely on the defensive even in these as a class, insofar as the preservation of the reproduction of the workers often also goes hand in hand with the moral support and thus the stabilization of the successes of the companies in which they are currently employed.
Most of the time, then, the uprisings do not have explicit demands, but are (seemingly) purely infused with the negative language of vandalism, destruction, and chaos. But still, the insurgencies do not lack political determination. What is at stake is the overdetermination of the insurrection by historical transformations that necessitate a reconstruction of class antagonism, that is, specifically today, the reframing of struggles in circulation. The new insurgencies in circulation do not necessarily have to be carried by workers, because in principle any political group can liberate a marketplace, blockade a street, or occupy a port.
When the daily life of large segments of the population takes place more and more in circulation, in the informal economies or outside the employment system, these groups tend to become abjects and are confronted with the conditions of reproduction no longer through wages and factory work but directly in the supermarkets and shopping malls where the necessities of life are offered, and in this situation potentially any gathering of people on a street corner, in a public square or in the street can be understood as an insurrection. Quite unlike the strike, it is difficult to figure out when the riot even starts or when it ends. On the one hand, it is a particular event; on the other hand, it is also the holographic miniature of a complete socio-economic situation, a world picture. Whereas the early insurrection precisely confronted less the police and the armed state (it took place in the economic spaces of the early markets), this has changed in the post-industrial insurrection. On the one hand, it finds itself confronted with an ensemble of almost unattainable goods in the department stores and local stores; on the other hand, even when it comes to the prices of the goods, it suspects that the economy today has a planetary logistics, a police-military secured transportation system, and a barely visible financial industry.
Why are the movements today occupying the squares and not, say, the universities or the factories? What united almost all political parties and movements, from the communists to the syndicalists to the anarchists until well into the 20th century, was the understanding that labor and the working class can constitute a common world, which, if capitalism is overcome, will be a new community of horizontality. Baudrillard, in his book The Mirror of Production, pointed out that even larger parts of Marxism were imbued with the anthropological idea of “man as producer,” which came to a head in the world-historical significance of the working class and the teleology of the dictatorship of the proletariat. But if today the global proletariat is split into the official wage-earning class, the precarious, the industrial reserve army and the surplus proletariat, and can no longer easily organize a common resistance, for example through the strike, and moreover not only labor power is exploited but almost the whole of life is capitalized, then there is necessarily an exodus of the insurgents from the factories, schools and universities to the public squares, a last space still available for the insurgents struggling for common ground to assemble.
It is also essential to recognize that from the middle of the 20th century, capital established new technological relations between networks, communication industries, and infrastructures in tremendous shock waves, which then finally became dominant around the year 2000. In this context, the blocking of traffic and the disruption of circulation circuits at different levels of the system expresses the collective desire to bring it to a complete standstill. The transition from the Occupy to the Blockupy movement marks the replacement of the politics of occupying squares with the politics of blockades, specifically blockades of commodity flows and infrastructures. All too often, however, individual actions still involve blocking precisely where the opponent expects or even desires it, and at the same time the emphasis is not on disrupting the infrastructure itself, but on symbolic actions, it being essential to bear in mind that the functioning of infrastructures is now inextricably linked to the rhizomes and abstractions of financial capital. One must therefore ask the inescapable question: How does one block an abstraction today? As Alexander Galloway has surmised, both financialization and the cybernetics with which digital technology is focused on the input/output relation (black box) and the interface would have to be countered today by a (non)politics of black bloc focused on the question of the appearance and disappearance of actions and struggle groups in digital media as well as outside. The politicization of the problem of presence and absence requires a very special rhythmology that cannot be grasped as mere acceleration.
The reformist tendencies of the new uprisings must be avoided in the future: The tendency toward populism, which desperately seeks sympathy in the mass media, and toward pacifism, which tirelessly pleads for a policy that is respectable to the state. The demandless insurrection is often coded correctly at first as if it were the demand itself, although then it is often continued that the existing order must finally recognize it, if only it would understand it. The much more radical political impulse finds in the uprising something that comes as an event before or after hegemonic communication, and this in the context of a practice that consists in looting, the auto nomen control of space, or the successful erosion of police power. The success of the former, the discursive strategy often adopted by civil rights movements, seems more than doubtful today, especially in light of the socioeconomic transformations of capital and the state. And the frenzy of insurrection that springs from these transformations is undoubtedly a gauge of the social pressures that are permanently bearing down on the surplus population in particular (see the banlieues). Finally, in the struggles, it is necessary to look at the Commune that appears on the horizon, as a social relation, as a political practice, and as an event that also requires a corresponding theory.
On the one hand, insurrection in the U.S. is always in confrontation with the violence of the racist state; on the other hand, the identification of insurrection with “race” proves to be a mistake (a confusion between correlation and reason), as if skin color were the origin of the insurrections themselves. At the same time, the ideological definition of insurgency as spontaneistic and undis- ziplined proves to be a vehicle for portraying the racialized black subject as animalistic, irrational, and naturalistic. In this context, skin color is not the cause of insurrection; rather, blacks are part of insurrections directed against the racialization processes of white elites and middle classes. It is not race that makes insurrection, but insurrection that makes race, but only insofar as it is the modality of the lived class that experiences and recognizes itself in insurrection as excluded, exploited, and controlled. The logic of a structural surplus that characterizes the new proletariat permeates the (alleged) antinomy between class and race, ultimately to radically challenge racism as a feature of the new class composition by the ruling class. In this context, surplus is not to be placed identically with race, nor are the two readily distinguishable.
Deindustrialization in the U.S. itself has a racial compo- nent: for example, unemployment among the black population in the U.S. has remained higher than that of the white population since the 1960s-until today. Moreover, the militant actions carried out by blacks, for example in Detroit, usually moved at a certain distance from the official labor markets; they were often struggles for better conditions of reproduction, outside the sphere of production. In regions where one finds a high unemployment rate, especially among black youth, who are constantly monitored and harassed by state control instruments and apparatuses, today the state’s only response to the existence of the surplus population seems to be prison. Thus, resistance to incarceration is also inscribed in the insurgency. It is the radical response to the regime of inclusion and exclusion, to the demanded superfluidity of the labor force, to the lack of purchasing power, and to state surveillance, control, and violence. In relation to the economy and to state and law, blackness appears here as a surplus that promises the transgression of regulation and order. It can only expand in its own modulation, it is a collective action through which the struggle must happen, it is a social modality. It is in this context that the black resistance movements establish their links with the anti-colonial movements, although ultimately, and this remains decisive, it is the global class of the dangerous that is unified not by its role as producer but by its common relation to state violence. This is the basis of surplus rebellion.
Its separative and selective power, which goes far beyond processes of normalization, determines who is granted belonging in the public sphere and who is excluded or even locked up in prisons. Only the police are legally authorized to exercise extra-legal functions, Di Cesare writes, citing Walter Benjamin in this context, who speaks of the “ignominious of an authority” that operates ceaselessly in the interstice of law-making and law-maintaining violence. For Di Cesare, the function of the police is synonymous with an interpretive violence that it monopolizes and with which it can also always flexibly force its procedures in public space and apply them to the bodies of the population. Its violent sovereignty is as intangible as it is haunting, Di Cesare writes, and rests on a dark ground that makes it possible to establish the police state within the rule of law, ensuring legality on the one hand and juridical extraterritoriality on the other. Agamben writes: “It is the margin of discretion that even today determines the actions of the police officer who, in a concrete situation of danger to public safety, acts in a sovereign manner, so to speak. But even when he exercises this discretion, he does not make a real decision, nor does he prepare the decision of the judge, as is usually claimed. Any decision concerns causes, while the police act on effects, which are by definition undecidable.” And further, “The security state is a police state: but in legal theory the police is again a kind of black hole … It is surprising, however, that the police now coincides with the actual political function, while the term politics is reserved for foreign policy. Thus, in his treatise on police science, von Justi refers to politics as the relationship of a state to other states, while he refers to the police as the relationship of a state to itself. It is worth reflecting on this definition: (quoting): “Police is the relationship of a state to itself”.”
DI Cesare then arrives at a phenomenology of revolts, highlighting their heterogeneity, discontinuity and diversity, but wants to bring into play the concept of constellation for connections and similarities that, in her opinion, do exist, wherein in this the unexpected simultaneity of events without beginning and the mobilizations that are at the same time sudden, interrupt the habitual flow of the system. Here, for Di Cesare, it is necessary to find an “underlying guideline” of the revolts and to discover their revolutionary kinetics. The outside that the revolt tries to capture is by no means apolitical, as is often claimed by right-wingers and left-wingers alike; rather, for Di Cesare it is hyperpolitical, precisely because it resists state politics and its demarcations, which locate only chaos and anarchy in the outside. On the outside of state politics, on a global level, for example, are migration movements; on a local level are the youth of the suburbs. The radical questioning of the state in all its forms requires the redefinition of a political space that, despite the diversity of events that give rise to revolt, challenges an interweaving of the same, which not only stages the struggle against the economic miseries of the surplus population and for the share of the shareless, but also politics of dissent, distance and interruption, resisting the thoroughly contingent state order as well as the command of the police.
The revolt, which includes anarchic upheavals and a “against”, is also in the historical course still before the revolution, then accompanies it, but is increasingly seen as the negative pole, even determined as the chaotic, apolitical and much too spontaneous antipode, with which it must ultimately also always fail. Even Bakunin and Marx, each in his own way, insist on the dichotomy of revolution and revolt, which led the latter, for example, to underestimate the force of the Haitian revolution of the Black Jacobins. Against the sedentariness of revolution, which tries to conquer the command centers of the state and power according to plan and program, revolt remains nomadic, joining the homeless, the migrants without passports, the barbarians and vagabonds.
While Marcuse himself still marginalizes the ’68 revolt in relation to the revolution, for Di Cesare it is the Italian philosopher Furio Jesi, whose book “Spartacus” does not approach the revolt as a failed revolution, but rather quite in contrast to the revolution, which remains integrated in historical time, as an event that interrupts historical time and prepares the front garden for another time, casting an untimely glance at the day after tomorrow today, which does not give a damn about the revolutionary and realistic view of tomorrow. Di Cesare writes: “Because of this constitutive untimeliness of itss, revolt is an impatient epiphany to the day after tomorrow.”
Leftist engagement usually moves entirely within the framework of recognition in the public sphere, in which one participates in demonstrations, signs petitions, or makes demands. The committed leftist yearns to be noticed in the political space, fights for visibility, and is all too eager to be in the spotlight of the powerful as well. For Di Cesare, however, this is precisely a dispositive that consists of neutralizing struggles, regulating antagonisms, and managing conflict. This political position, which focuses on gaining public recognition in democratic discourse, is contrasted with Carl Schmitt’s famous friend-foe dichotomy, which defines political space as a war front. However, a differentiation would have to be made against Di Cesare at this point, because Schmitt first differentially defines the political as the degree of intensity of an association or dissociation of people, although this differentiation does not yet make use of friend and enemy. When Schmitt then speaks of the enemy, and in this Di Cesare is again to be agreed with, he is the disreputable stranger who questions the identity of the self or of the citizen, and must therefore be fought. But even this form of struggle still recognizes the modalities of public space, at least recognizes the other as an enemy, and thus holds on to a relationship in the struggle.
Against this politics of appearance, Di Cesare tries to bring into play a politics of rage: “When rage takes to the streets, it seeks power.” This means that the Riot is not only about sheer destructiveness, but at least about the symbolic attack on “planetary governance,” be it banks, luxury boutiques, or Apple’s stores. The streets and squares become the site of an encounter in which the hooded face of the insurgent attempts to unmask the hidden face of power, according to Di Cesare, which at least succeeds insofar as power becomes visible embodied in its institutionalized form, the police. Di Cesare writes, “The clash evokes the impression of finally coming into contact with power as embodied in the brutality of the sovereign police, who give body and face to politics … Power has taken off its mask.” of the drive structure is pornographic.
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Constitution versus destitution
For Tari, all the revolts of recent years have been destitutionary. The destitutionary spirit that has characterized recent revolts seems at odds with that stable, statuary axiom of modern politics according to which revolution can only occur when a constituent power opposes a constituted power. From this standpoint, the constituent power subdues or overthrows the constituted power, leading to the familiar sequence from insurrection to a provisional government, which then promulgates a new constitution after new elections. For those on the left who continue to believe in a constituent power, it is disappointing today to have to admit that in the recent uprisings the destituting moment has not been replaced by a constituent moment. Restitution has not taken place. Moreover, even the radical left, in the absence of a constituent movement or popular power, has welcomed all the “alternative” governments without exception – Tsipras, Iglesias, Sanders and Corbyn were defended in the hope that a decisive impulse could be triggered by them, without being able to see that they preferred total nullity.
All other left forces, on the other hand, aware of the impossibility that a universal subject could yet form, engage in the dispersed potentialities of a fragmentary communalization that is at once fatiguing and vital.
As Agamben writes, “While a constituent power destroys law only to restore it in a new form, a destituent power, insofar as it abolishes law once and for all, can open up a truly new historical epoch.” For the Invisible Committee, destituent acts or gestures are realized according to the conjunction of the positive/creative logic of creating the conditions for another world, in which many worlds fit, with the negative/destructive acts of definitively ending the present world, fashioned in the image and likeness of capital. That is, the destituent gestures follow a “logic” in which “the one divides into two” (“The destituent gesture is thus desertion and attack, creation and destruction, and all at once, in the same gesture”). That is, the destituent gestures create and destroy in one and the same act
Moreover, these collective gestures belong to that class of acts that rely on the temporality inherent to social reproduction and are realized in times of decision, that is, in times of crisis. It is not the radicals who make the movement, it is the movement that radicalizes people. Unlike those collectives that tend toward “constituent” or “constituted” power and locate their strategy in the dialectical relationship of recognition/negotiation with the ruling authority (in the hope of taking possession of the state), collectives that follow a destituent logic hold to the vital need to disengage and distance themselves from the dialectical trap of constituent-constituted power Tari writes in his book There is no unhappy revolution: “It is important to understand that neither the paradigm of antagonism nor that of the constituent is sufficient to meet the challenges of our current epoch. One must always find a way to initiate both a destruction of the present and an exit, an exit-not from Europe or the Euro or who knows what other state deviltries-but from this compressed time, this relation of power and production, this stupid life, these instruments of appropriation. An exit that affirms our being here and now. Only such a presence can bring redemption.”
Di Cesare herself still criticizes the notion of destitution and its still present logic of positing and creating, pointing out that in the verb “statuere” statehood still resonates, and therefore to volte-face in order to bring about the turning away and follow new lines of flight. What can this mean?
So there is the argument that every real revolt contains the double drive, namely to destroy the old and at the same time to provide for the construction of the new. But the solution with regard to destituent power certainly does not lie in a supposed dialectical contradiction with constituent power as such. A somewhat more elegant version at least underscores the dangers of getting stuck here in a dialectic with no way out. Constituent power and destituent potential, on the other hand, stand in a relationship similar to Euclidean and Riemannian geometry; in other words, it is a non-relationship. They do not start from the same premises, nor do they aim at the same kind of conclusion. Rather, the question is how to escape the double bind that has stifled past revolutions so far, to finally ensure that the destituent gesture contains both destructive and constructive moments, but which become inseparable precisely in their non-relationship, to generate a level of consistency that interrupts the present and cuts through the real (by recognizing it as completed and insurmountable. Cf. Laruelle).
The leftist intelligentsia knows that the insurgency exists, but always prefers to trivialize its destituent potential and to go in search of the smallest grain of constitutional violence. According to the doctrine of state power, this should be a tireless “political will” (following Carl Schmitt) that takes shape and breathes life into a new constitution. Will is power. But especially in the context of what has happened in recent years, this metaphysical will seems to have been lost; instead, what emerges from many leftist theorists is more of an angry disappointment. Theorists from Hardt to Esposito to Mezzadra say that what is missing is constituent power, which must then still be linked to democracy and the metropolis. Tari strongly denies this.
If socialism was nothing more than the bureaucratic workers’ administration of a deformed state-capital state, then it can also be said that the global practice of democracy is that of a permanent state of exception that suspends not only the new but also the old “freedom of the moderns.” These are, for Tari, the essential functions of the state: to remain always in action, guaranteeing at all costs the stability of a mass, crisis of presence; to always start from the beginning, never losing control and following up with slogans whatever happens. We cannot get out of this present, it repeats itself ceaselessly. If the state of exception has become permanent, Tari argues with Agamben, if it is the rule of our present world, then the constituent power has no potential in a revolutionary sense, because everything has already been absorbed into the sovereign power. From this point of view, all that remains to be done is what Walter Benjamin described in 1940 in a similar situation: “To bring about the one real state of exception.”
One variant of the discourse on constitutional power believes that if democracy and capitalism had been wedded from the beginning, things might not have gone so badly and there would have been no need to appeal to the political myth of modernity. This variant prefers not to abandon the hope of a “constituent conflict” serving as a bridge to a second marriage, or more precisely, to a new form of government. For the leftist discourse, the emphasis is always on the constituent process of new institutions (which, according to Tari, is in fact always absent, except for some stage sets of government), while the destituent power (which shows up wherever there is an insurgency) is often painted in dark colors. Its appearance along the way is seen as an unfortunate coincidence, and even if it is sometimes recognized as a necessary gesture, it represents the part of events that must be immediately remedied like a natural disaster. And yet, for Tari, it is only in these moments – streets full of acrid fumes, skies full of black smoke that rises above the roofs of crystalline palaces, blurring the identity of each individual while politicizing the lives of all; zones that secede from the state, anonymous gestures of sharing with which to express the presence of communism. There is further evidence of this as well: when the “people” are in the streets and squares, the government does not rule. The revolutionary problem is how to ensure that this potential is not foreclosed, or, in other words, how to prevent it from crystallizing into a form of government.
Collective gestures belong to that class of actions that rely on the temporality inherent in social reproduction and are realized in times of decision, that is, in times of crisis. It is not the radicals who make the movement, it is the movement that radicalizes people. Unlike those collectives that tend toward “constituent” or “constituted” power and locate their strategy in the dialectical relationship of recognition/negotiation with the ruling authority (hoping to take possession of the state), collectives that follow a destituent logic hold to the vital need to break free from the dialectical trap of constituent-constituted power. Tari writes: “It is important to understand that neither the paradigm of antagonism nor that of the constituent is sufficient to meet the challenges of our contemporary epoch. One must always find a way to set in motion both a destruction of the present and an exit, an exit-not from Europe or the Euro or who knows what other state deviltries-but from this compressed time, this relation of power and production, this stupid life, these instruments of appropriation. An exit that affirms our being here and now. Only such a presence can bring redemption.”
translated by deepl.