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don’t know what I want,
but I know how to get it.

Sex Pistols
Anarchy in the UK

I

TWENTY YEARS. Twenty years of counter-revolution. Of preventive counter-revolution.
In Italy.
And elsewhere.
Twenty years of a sleep behind security gates, haunted with security guards. A sleep of bodies, imposed by curfew.
Twenty years. The past does not pass. Because war continues. Ramifies. Extends.
In a global networking of local assemblages [dispositifs]. In an original calibration of subjectivities. In a new superficial peace.
An armed peace
well made to cover the course of an imperceptible
civil war.

Twenty years ago, there was
punk, the movement of 77, Autonomy,
the metropolitan Indians and the diffuse guerrilla.
All at once,
as if born of some underground region of civilization,
appeared a whole counter-world of subjectivities
that no longer wanted to consume, that no longer wanted to produce,
that no longer even wanted to be subjectivities.
The revolution was molecular, the counter-revolution was too.
It saw first the offensive,
then durable,
arrangement of a whole complex machine to neutralize all that carries intensity.
A machine to defuse all that could explode.
All the dangerous dividuals,
all the indocile bodies,
all the autonomous human hosts.
Then came twenty years of foolishness, vulgarity, isolation and desolation.
How is it to be done ?

Standing up again. Lifting the head up. By choice or by necessity. Whatever, really, now. Looking at each other in the eyes and saying “let’s start again”. Let everybody know it, as soon as possible.
We are starting again.
Done with passive resistance, inner exile, conflict by subtraction, survival. We are starting again. In twenty years, we have had enough time to see. We have understood. Demokracy for all, “anti-terrorist” struggle, state massacres, capitalist restructuring and the Great Work of the social purge,
by selection,
by casualisation,
by normalisation,
by “modernisation”.
We have seen, we have understood. The means and the ends. The future that is reserved for us. The one we are denied. The state of exception. The laws that put the police, the administration, the judicial authorities above the laws. The judiciarisation, the psychiatrisation, the medicalisation of everything that escapes the frame. Of everything that flees.
We have seen, we have understood. The means and the ends.

When power establishes in real time its own legitimacy,
when its violence becomes preventive
and its right is a “right to interfere”,
then it is useless to be right. To be right against it.
One has to be stronger, or slier. That is also why
we are starting again.

To start again is never to start something again. Nor to pick up things where they had been left off. What you start again is always something else. Is always unheard of. Because it is not the past that drives us to it, but precisely what in it
has not
happened.
And because it is also ourselves, then, who are starting again.
To start again means: to get out of suspension. To restore the contact between our becomings.
Moving,
again,
from where we are,
now.

For instance there are tricks
we will no longer fall for.
The trick of “society”. To be transformed. To be destroyed. To be bettered.
The trick of the social bond. That some would break while others can pretend to “restore” it.
We will no longer fall for these tricks.
One would have to be a militant element of the planetary-petty-bourgeoisie,
a citizen really,
not to see that society no longer exists.
That it has imploded. That it is only an argument for the terror of those who claim to re/present it.
That which has absented.

All that is social has become alien to us.
We consider ourselves as absolutely free of any obligation, of any prerogative, of any affiliation
that is social.
“Society”
is the name that the Irreparable has often received
among those who also wanted to turn it into
the Un-Assumable.
He who refuses this delusion will have to take
a step to the side
to make
a slight displacement
from the common logic
of Empire and its protest,
the logic of mobilization,
from their common temporality,
that of emergency.

To start again means: to inhabit this displacement. To face capitalist schizophrenia in the sense of a growing capacity of desubjectivisation.
To desert without abandoning the weapons.
To flee, imperceptibly.
To start again means: to marshal social secession, opacity, to join the
demobilization,
draining from one or other imperial production-consumption network the means to live and fight
in order, at the chosen time,
to scuttle it.

What we are talking about is a new war,
a new partisan war. Without front nor uniform, without army nor decisive battle.
A guerilla whose focos unfold away from the commercial flows although plugged into them.
We’re talking about a war full of latency. That’s got time.
A war of position.
Which is waged where we are.
In the name of no one.
In the name of our own existence,
which has no name.

Making this slight displacement.
No longer fearing our time.
“Not to fear one’s time is a matter of space”.
In a squat. In an orgy. In a riot. In an occupied train or village. In search, among strangers, of a free party that is nowhere to be found. I make the experience of this slight displacement. The experience
Of my own desubjectivisation. I become
a whatever singularity. My presence starts overflowing the whole apparatus of qualities that are usually associated with me.
In the eyes of someone who would like to consider me for what I am, I savour the disappointment, his disappointment to see me becoming so common, so perfectly accessible. In the gestures of someone else, I find an unexpected complicity.
Everything that isolates me as a subject, as a body provided with a public configuration of attributes, I feel melting.
The bodies fray at their limit. At their limit, become indistinct.
Block by block, the whatever ruins the equivalence. And I reach a new nudity,
an improper nudity, as if dressed with love.
Does one ever escape from the prison of the Self alone?

In a squat. In an orgy. In a riot. In an occupied train or village. We get together again.
We get together again
as whatever singularities. That is to say
not on the basis of a common affiliation,
but of a common presence.
This is our
need for communism. The need for nocturnal spaces, where we can
get together
beyond
our predicates.
Beyond the tyranny of recognition Which imposes recognition as a final distance between bodies.
As an ineluctable separation.
Everything through which ONE – my boyfriend, my family, my environment, my company, the state, the opinion – recognizes me is just that through which ONE takes me to be constrained.
By constantly reminding me of what I am, of my qualities, ONE wants to extract me from each situation. ONE wants to extort from me, in every circumstance, a fidelity to myself which is but a fidelity to my predicates.
I am expected to behave as a man, as an employee, as an unemployed, as a mother, as a militant, as a philosopher.
ONE wants to contain within the bounds of an identity the unpredictable course of my becomings.
ONE wants to convert me to the religion of a coherence
that was chosen for me.

The more I am recognized, the more my gestures are hindered, internally hindered. Here I am, caught in the super-tight meshwork of the new power. In the impalpable net of the new police:
THE IMPERIAL POLICE OF QUALITIES.
There is a whole network of assemblages through which I “integrate” myself, and that incorporates these qualities in me.
A whole petty system of filing, identification and mutual surveillance.
A whole diffuse prescription of absence.
A whole machinery of comporte/mental control, which aims at panopticism, at privatized transparency, at atomization.
And in which I struggle.

I need to become anonymous. In order to be present.
The more anonymous I am, the more present I am.
I need zones of indistinction
to reach the Common.
To no longer recognize myself in my name. To no longer hear in my name anything but the voice that calls it.
To give substance to the how of beings, not what they are but how they are what they are. Their life-form.
I need zones of opacity where the attributes,
even criminal, even brilliant,
no longer separate bodies.

Becoming whatever. Becoming a whatever singularity, is not given.
Always possible, but never given.
There is a politics of the whatever singularity.
Which consists in snatching from Empire
the often interstitial conditions and means
to experience yourself as such.
This is political, because it implies a capacity of confrontation,
and it corresponds to a new human aggregation.
The politics of the whatever singularity: opening those spaces where no act is assignable to any given body.
Where the bodies recover their ability of gesture which the so clever distribution of metropolitan devices – computers, cars, schools, cameras, cell-phones, gyms, hospitals, televisions, cinemas, etc. – had stolen from them.
By recognising them.
By immobilising them.
By making them spin uselessly.
By making the head exist separately from the body.

The politics of the whatever singularity.
Becoming whatever is more revolutionary than any whatever-being..
Liberating spaces sets us free a hundred times more than any “liberated space”.
More than putting any power into action, I enjoy the circulation of my potentialities. The politics of the whatever singularity lies in the offensive. In the circumstances, the moments and the places where we seize the circumstances,
the moments and the places
of such an anonymity,
of a momentary halt in a state of simplicity,
the opportunity to extract from all our forms the pure adequation to the presence,
the opportunity, at last, to be
here.

II

How is it to be done? Not what is to be done? How to do? The question of the means.
Not of the goals, the objectives,
what there is to be done, strategically, in the absolute.
The question of what we can do, tactically, from the situation,
and of the acquisition of this ability.
How to? How to desert? How does it work? How to make a fit between my wounds and communism? How to stay at war without losing tenderness?
The question is technical. Not a problem. Problems are profitable.
They feed experts.
A question.
A question of techniques. Which reduplicates itself in the question of the techniques of transmission of those techniques.
How to do? The result always contradicts the goal. Because setting an end is still a means.
another means.

What is to be done? Babeuf, Chernychevsky, Lenin. Classical virility needs an analgesic,
a mirage, something. A means to ignore yourself a bit more. As a presence.
As a life-form. As a situated being, endowed with inclinations.
Determined inclinations.
What is to be done? Voluntarism as the ultimate nihilism. As the nihilism peculiar
to classical virility.
What to do? The answer is simple: submit once again to the logic of mobilization, to the temporality of emergency. On the pretext of rebellion. Set down ends, words. Tend towards their accomplishment. Towards the accomplishment of words. In the meantime, postpone existence. Put yourself into brackets. Live in the exception of yourself. Well away from time. That passes. That does not pass. That stops.
Until… Until the next end.

What to do? In other words: life is futile. All that you have not lived, History will return to you.
What to do? It is the ignorance of oneself cast onto the world.
As ignorance of the world.

How to do? The question of how. Not of what a being, a gesture, a thing is but of how it is what it is. The question of how its predicates relate to it.
And it to them.
Let be. Let be the gap between the subject and its predicates. The abyss of the presence.
A man is not “a man”. A “white horse” is not a “horse”.
The question of how. The attention to the how. The attention to the way “a woman” is, and is not
a woman – it takes many assemblages [dispositifs] to turn a female being into “a woman”,
or a black-skinned man into “a Black”.
The attention to the ethical difference. To the ethical element. To the irreducibilities that run through it.
What goes on between bodies in an occupation is more interesting than the occupation itself.
How to do? means that the military confrontation with Empire has to be subordinated to the intensification of the relationships inside our Party. It means the political is just a certain degree of intensity within the ethical element. That revolutionary war must not be confused with its representation: the raw fact of the struggle.

The question of how? To pay attention to the happening of things, of beings. To their event. To the tenacious and silent saliency of their own temporality under the planetary crushing of all temporalities
by the one of emergency.
The What to do? as the programmatic denial of this. As the inaugural formula of a busy lack of love.

The What to do? is coming back. It has been coming back for a few years. Since the mid-nineties more than since Seattle. A revival of the critique is pretending to challenge Empire.
With the slogans and tricks of the sixties. Except that this time it is faked.
Innocence, indignation, good intentions and the need for society are faked. The whole range of old social-democratic affects are put back into circulation. Of Christian affects.
And again, here come the demonstrations. The desire-killing demonstrations. Where nothing happens.
And which no longer demonstrate anything
but a collective absence.
Now and forever.

For those who feel nostalgic about Woodstock, pot, May 68 and militancy, there are the counter-summits. The setting has been set again, minus the possible.
Here is today’s command of the What to do?: to travel to the other side of the world in order to contest the global commodity,
And then come back, after a big bath of unanimity and mediatised separation,
to submit yourself to the local commodity.
Back home, you’ve got your picture in the newspaper… All alone together!… Once upon a time… Good old youth!…
Too bad for the few living bodies lost there, looking in vain for some room for their desires.
They will return a bit more bored. A bit more tired. Weakened.
From counter-summit to counter-summit, they will eventually understand. Or not.

One doesn’t contest Empire over its management. One doesn’t critique Empire.
You oppose its forces.
From where you are.
To give your opinion about such or such alternative, to go where you are called, makes no sense. There is no global alternative project to the global project of Empire. Because there’s no global project of Empire. There is an imperial management. Any management is bad. Those who demand another society should better start to realize that there is none left. And maybe they would then stop being wannabe-managers. Citizens. Indignant citizens.

The global order cannot be taken as an enemy. Directly.
Because the global order does not take place. On the contrary. It is the order of the non-places.
Its perfection is not to be global, but to be globally local. The global order is the exclusion of any event because it is the utmost, authoritarian occupation of the local. The global order can only be opposed locally. Through the extension of opaque zones over Empire’s maps. Through their growing contiguity.
Underground.

The coming politics. Politics of local insurrection against global management. Of presence won over the absence to oneself. Over the citizen, the imperial estrangement.
Won through theft, fraud, crime, friendship, enmity, conspiracy.
Through the elaboration of ways of living that are also
ways of fighting.
The politics of the event.
Empire is everywhere nothing is happening. It administrates absence by waving the palpable threat of police intervention in any place.
Whoever regards Empire as an opponent to confront will meet preventive annihilation.
From now on, to be perceived means to be defeated.

Learning how to become imperceptible. To merge. To regain the taste
for anonymity
for promiscuity.
To renounce distinction,
To elude the clampdown:
setting the most favourable conditions for confrontation.
Becoming sly. Becoming merciless. And for that purpose
becoming whatever.

How to do? is the question of the lost children. Those who were not told. Those with the clumsy gestures. To whom nothing was given. Whose creature-ality, whose wandering, always betrays itself.
The coming revolt is the revolt of the lost children.
The thread of historical transmission has been broken. Even the revolutionary tradition
leaves us orphaned. Especially the workers’ movement. The workers’ movement that’s turned into a tool for higher integration to the Process. To the new, cybernetic Process of social valorisation.
In 1978, it was in the name of the workers’ movement that the Italian Communist Party, the so-called “party with clean hands” launched its witch-hunt against Autonomy.
In the name of its classist conception of the proletariat, of its mystique of society, of respect for work, utility and decency.
In the name of “democracy” and legality.
The workers’ movement which managed to survive through “operaismo“.
The only existing critique of capitalism from the point of view of Total Mobilization.
A formidable and paradoxical doctrine,
that will have saved Marxist objectivism by only talking about subjectivity.
That will have brought the denial of the how to an unprecedented sophistication.
That achieved the ultimate reduction of the gesture to its result.
The wheals of the future anterior.
Of what each thing will have been.

Critique has become vain. Critique has become vain because it amounts to an absence. Everyone knows where the ruling order stands. We no longer need critical theory. We no longer need teachers. Henceforth, critique is allied to domination. Even the critique of domination.
It reproduces absence. It speaks to us from where we are not. It propels us elsewhere. It consumes us. It is craven. And stays cautiously sheltered
when it sends us to the slaughter.
Secretly in love with its object, it continually lies to us.
Hence the brief romances between proletarians and ‘engaged’ intellectuals.
Those rational marriages in which neither has the same idea of pleasure or of freedom.
Rather than new critiques, it is new cartographies
that we need.
Not cartographies of Empire, but of the lines that flee out of it.
How to do? We need maps. Not maps of what is off the map.
But navigating maps. Maritime maps. Orientation tools. That do not try to explain or represent what lies inside of the different archipelagos of desertion, but indicate how to join them.
Portulans.

III

This is Tuesday, September the 17^th 1996, just before dawn. The ROS (Special Operational Group) coordinates the arrest of some 70 Italian anarchists throughout the country.
The goal is to put an end to fifteen years of fruitless investigations of insurrectionalist anarchists.
The technique is well-known: fabricate a “turncoat”, make him denounce the existence of a wide subversive hierarchical organization.
Then on the basis of this chimerical creation, accuse all those to be neutralized of being part of it.
Once again, “drain the sea to catch the fish”.
Even though it is only a tiny pond.
And a few roaches.

An “informative service note” was leaked from the ROS on this case.
It explains its strategy.
Based on the principles of General Dalla Chiesa, the ROS is the classic example of imperial counter-insurrection service.
It works on the population.
Where an intensity has occurred, where something happened, it is the French doctor of the situation. The one that sets,
under cover of prophylaxis,
the lines of quarantine aimed at isolating
the contagion.
What it fears is written in this document. What it fears is “the swamp of political anonymity”.
Empire is afraid.
Empire is afraid that we might become whatever.
A delimited circle, an armed organization. It does not scare them. But an expansionary constellation of squats, self-managed farms, collective homes, fine a se stesso meetings, radios, skills and ideas. The whole linked by an intense circulation of bodies, and of the affects between those bodies. That is quite another matter.

The conspiracy of the bodies. Not of the critical minds, but of the critical corporeities.
This is what Empire fears. This is what is slowly rising,
with the increase of the flows
of social defection.
There is an opacity inherent to the contact of bodies. Which is not compatible with the imperial reign of a light that shines on things
only to disintegrate them.

Offensive Opacity Zones are not
to be created.
They are already there, in all the relations in which a true
communication occurs between bodies.
All we must do is accept that we are part of this opacity. And provide ourselves with the means to extend it,
to defend it.
Wherever we manage to thwart imperial assemblages, to ruin all the perpetual work of Biopower and Spectacle, to extricate a fraction of the citizens. To isolate new untorelli. In this recovered indistinction
an autonomous ethical fabric
will spontaneously form
a plan of secessionist consistency.
Bodies aggregate. Breathe again. Conspire.
Whether such zones are condemned to be suppressed militarily really does not matter. What matters, each time, is to preserve a sure escape route.
And then re-aggregate
Elsewhere.
Later.
Underlying the problem of What is to be done? was the myth of the general strike.
What answers the question How to do? is the practice of the HUMAN STRIKE.
The general strike meant that exploitation was limited
in time and space,
that alienation was partial, due to a recognizable enemy, and thus beatable.
Human strike replies to an age in which the limits between work and life are fading away.
In which consuming and surviving,
producing “subversive texts” and dealing with the most toxic effects of industrial civilization,
doing sports, making love, being a parent or taking Prozac
Everything is work.
Because Empire manages and digests, absorbs and reintegrates
all that lives.
Even “what I am”, the subjectivisation that I do not deny hic et nunc,
everything is productive.
Empire has put everything to work.
Ideally, my professional profile will coincide with my own face.
Even if it does not smile.
For in any case, the grimaces of the rebel sell nicely.

Empire is when the means of production have become means of control
at the very same time that the opposite revealed itself to be the case.
Empire means that in all things the political moment dominates
the economic one.
A general strike is helpless against this.
What must be opposed to Empire is a human strike.
Which never attacks relations of production without attacking at the same time
the affective knots which sustain them.
Which undermines the shameful libidinal economy of Empire,
Which restores the ethical element – the how – repressed in every contact between neutralised bodies.
Where one would expect such or such predictable reaction,
such or such contrite or indignant tone,
the human strike is that strike which
PREFERS NOT TO.
That slips away from the assemblage. That saturates it or explodes it.
Pulls itself together, preferring
something else.
Something else that does not belong to the authorized possibilities of the assemblage.
At the counter of such and such government office, at the check out of such and such supermarket, in a polite conversation, during a police raid,
according to the balance of power,
human strike gives consistency to the spaces between bodies,
pulverizes the double bind in which they are caught,
forces them into presence.
There is a whole new Luddism to be invented, a Luddism of the human machinery
that feeds Capital.

In Italy, radical feminism was an embryonic form of human strike.
“No more mothers, women and girls, let’s destroy the families!” was an invitation to the gesture of breaking the expected chain of events,
to release the compacted potentialities.
It was a blow to fucked up love affairs, to ordinary prostitution.
It was a call to the overcoming of the couple as elementary unit in the management of alienation.
A call for complicity, then.
Such a practice required circulation, contagion.
The women’s strike implicitly called for the strike of men and children, summoned them to run from factories, schools, offices and prisons,
to reinvent for each situation another way to be, another how.
Italy in the seventies was an enormous area of human strike.
“Self-reductions”, hold-ups, squatted neighbourhoods, armed demonstrations, pirate radios, countless cases of “Stockholm syndrome”, even the famous letters sent by Moro towards the end of his detention, were forms of human strike.
The Stalinists, back then, used to talk of “diffuse irrationality”.

There are also writers
who are doing nothing else but
human strike.
Kafka, Walser,
or Michaux,
for instance.

To collectively acquire this ability to shake off
familiarities,
this art of dealing, within oneself,
with the most disturbing of all guests.

In the present war,
where the emergency reformism of Capital has to dress up as a revolutionary to be heard,
where the most democratic fights, those of the counter-summits,
practice direct action,
a role is prepared for us.
The role of the martyrs of the demokratic order
that preventively hits every body that could hit.
I should let myself be immobilized in front of a computer while nuclear plants explode, while one plays with my hormones or poisons me.
I should start singing the victim’s rhetoric. As is well-known,
everyone is a victim, even the oppressors.
And savour the discreet circulation of masochism
which re-enchants the situation.

Today human strike means
refusing to play the role of the victim.
Attacking it.
Taking back violence.
Imposing impunity.
Making the paralyzed citizens understand
that if they do not join the war they are part of it anyway.
That when we are told it is either this or dying, it is always
in reality
this and dying.

Thus,
human strike
after human strike, to reach
the insurrection,
where there is nothing but,
where we are all,
whatever
singularities.