Let’s return to something that Georges Bataille said in Nietzschean Chronicle:
CAESARIAN UNITY, ESTABLISHED BY A LEADER-A HEAD-IS OPPOSED BY THE HEADLESS COMMUNITY, BOUND TOGETHER BY THE OBSESSIVE IMAGE OF A TRAGEDY. Life demands that men gather together, and men are only gathered together by a leader or by a tragedy. To look for a HEADLESS human community is to look for tragedy: putting the leader to death is itself tragedy, it remains a requirement of tragedy. A truth that will change the appearance of human things starts here: THE EMOTIONAL ELEMENT THAT GIVES AN OBSESSIVE VALUE TO COMMUNAL LIFE IS DEATH.
Georges Bataille, Nietzschean Chronicle
In terms of modern politics, there is really only one division that matters: fascism, which is the ideology of totalitarian unity, and anarchy, which is headless freedom. The headless liberty of anarchy is obviously opposed to fascism, but also opposed to the status quo of capitalist states, dominated either by liberal democracy or some form of autocracy. But the reason why only the division between fascism and anarchism matters is because, as far as the world is concerned, all that matters is tragic violence. Liberal horeshoe theory attempts to conflate the two simply by the notion that they are both willing to exercise violence in order to overthrow or dissolve democracy and thus acheive what they desire. But, in fact, there is only one point: that anarchists, or at least any anarchist worh their salt, recognises that the only solution fascism, and the state, is their abolition, and that abolition entails a violent end.
Every guillotine meme that has ever been posted admits this very premise and the reality that it communicates. Liberalism relies on the unacceptability of violence as a point of principle in order to dismiss any kind of political radicalism as being identical to fascism, since liberalism always seems to define fascism solely by its use of violence. But liberalism not only maintains its authority with the support of state violence, the world order of liberalism was itself inaugurated by revolutionary violence (albeit of bourgeois revolutions). In fact, the entire history of liberalism should be the clearest you need that violence is the primary matter of politics. The difference, of course, barely (if it all) consists in the fact of the use of violence itself, but in the ways by which each movement effectuates violence for specific purpose (domination, liberation, or anything else). The violence of liberalism only matters because it exists to preserve and uphold the status quo of liberal democracy, as effectuated through the institutions of state authority. That leaves fascism, which desires to found the total state upon a firmament made from the corpses of the oppressed, in opposition to anarchy, which wants opposes the violence of domination with the violence of liberation.
At a deeper level, though, one has to take seriously that people will be redacted in any flow of politics, even if all you want to do is uphold the status quo of liberal capitalist democracy. The temptation is to refer to all politics as necropolitics, but, admittedly, that wouldn’t entirely be accurate. After all, the concept of necropolitics starts with the premise that, in a given political arrangement ordered by some sort of authority, some people will die and some will live, but in full detail necropolitics is more like a description of the way that modern societies impose a certain kind of “living death” upon specific categories people through the deliberate imposition of deleterious or hostile social conditions upon them. In another perhaps somewhat different sense, every politics is really a different kind of war, even the politics – even anti-politics, at least in its most active sense. After all, there is never a politics that has no enemies, no politics that does not actively fight for itself against its enemies, no fight that is not ultimately to the death, and no struggle in which there is no loss. But whatever the analogy we choose the reality is the same: there are always violent outcomes to all forms of politics, and that is an unavoidable aspect of politics. This fact tends to make pacifism a broadly untenable philosophy.
Revolution must not only be considered in its overtly known and conscious ins and outs, but in its brute appearance, whether it is the work of Puritans, Encyclopedists, Marxists, or Anarchists. Revolution, in its significant historical existence, which still dominates the present civilization, manifests itself to the eyes of a world mute with fear as the sudden explosion of limitless riots. Because of the Revolution, divine authority ceases to found power; authority no longer belongs to God, but to time, whose free exuberance puts kings to death, to time incarnated today in the explosive tumult of peoples. Even in fascism itself authority has been reduced to founding itself on a so-called revolution-a hypocritical and forced homage to the only imposing authority, that of catastrophic change.
Georges Bataille, Propositions
As radicals of all stripes probably already know, the natural response of liberals is to deny this fact, while at the same time supporting or at least rationalising violent repression of dissent – a fact most clearly borne out by liberal reaction to police repression of pro-Palestine protesters on American college campuses. Conservatives, however, manage to be even more hypocritical in their denial simply by their contradiction. Their support for the politics of law and order entail the familiar Christian disgust for law-breaking and the disruption of order in general, and so, in theory, a distaste for violence since violence is criminal, but at the same time they often proudly defend the violence by which patriarchy perpetuates itself, in addition to the violent suppression of dissent and the killing of criminals. But of course, the conservative could be a “realist” or they could still maintain the illusion that political order is not derived from violence, and in any case are certainly not so inclined to uphold violent upheaval as a source of political order (except perhaps for long dead bourgeois revolutions like the American Revolution). In this respect, their fascist counterparts go even further, fully embracing the violent origins and means of the state entirely, often even all the way to the aesthetic level. Their reason for it is quite simple: if there is nothing outside the fascist state, then no crime is beyond the fascist state, and all crimes are “necessitated” by the fascist state. Socialists sometimes have a more conflicted response, defined by the age old debate between democratic reform on one side and violent revolution (led by an authoritarian vanguard party) on the other – the debate for socialists is really nothing more the question “do you accept violence?”. I believe we are all familiar with Mao Zedong’s axiom on the subject. Anarchists, on the other hand, have a general tendency towards recognising that fact that all forms of domination are violence, that the struggle for liberation is social war against all forms of domination, and, unless they’re committed to some form of anarcho-pacifism, they recognise that this entails a violent struggle against opression. This leaves little room for the liberal fixation on debate as the dialectical resolution of struggle, but also leaves many more interesting implications.
If the ultimate form of political debate is done with weapons instead of words or ideas, and if the very basis of democratic norms is the establishment of democracies through violent revolution, as radicals have kept pointing out for countless times, then to even raise this objection against liberalism and debate culture necessarily communicates that violence is the “matter” or “base matter” of politics. From there, everything else makes sense. Could one admit anything else? Class war, couched in the notion that class struggle (and therefore revolution) is the real motor of history, can only ever affirm the Heraclitean base matter. A more polite choice of language can never succeed in obscuring this meaning. “No war but the class war”, “no war but the social war”, “no war but my war”, these all still profess that the only justified war is the only war that matters, the one war that counts because it is everything. Peter Kropotkin himself already made such an admission when he declared as follows:
Struggle! To struggle is to live, and the fiercer the struggle the intenser the life. Then you will have lived; and a few hours of such life are worth years spent vegetating.
Peter Kropotkin, Anarchist Morality
In Bataillean terms this is nothing but the expression of violent catastrophe as the prime mover, the only “real” “imposing authority”, in turn the basis of revolution, and that substance that fascism itself can only ever pay lip service to, and at that, at most, by way of a cheap imitation or hypocritical homage. A fascist could indeed say “war is god”, but all their violence in all its extremity is only to silence the catastrophe of life. Hence the apparent contrast between the fullsome violence of extermination that they’re prepared to embrace and the more idyllic image of a perhaps agrarian or quasi-agrarian life in the hinterland, or perhaps a similarly idyllic though hardly less utopian metropolis of homogeneity. The fascist wants an order that Land called “maximally bovine, inflexible, and stagnant”, and they want it to rest upon the bloody and tortured corpses of all that they deem alien and “degenerate”. All to repel the real chaos of life as it is, but this itself is a different sort of violence that will inevitably swallow them up. Remember, most “actually existing fascisms” have only existed very briefly; often not much more than a decade in fact.
But if we are looking at a circle of violence, wherever we go, where does that take us? One way or the other, straight back into the jungle. It is the very same jungle that the fascist state and modern democracy both dream of cutting away into the ground, to leave behind only a field for domesticated cattle. And yet, it always seems to rise up.
“The law of the jungle” is a familiar phrase that has been invoked to describe life without the order of the state, though it’s probably less frequently uttered today. It’s a phrase that rings with the old cliches of Social Darwinism, but Social Darwinism is a phrase that implies a secret natural order, with an implicit (and not to mention eugenicist) hierarchy that, somehow without any deliberation, organises life forms into their “natural” place by “strength” and “weakness”. Fictional dichotomies of order and chaos (especially Law-versus-Chaos dynamic seen in Shin Megami Tensei) frequently employ a confused expression of this to represent the side of chaos, with the intent of communicating the dangers of “anarchy” or “absolute freedom”, alongside the other danger of “absolute order”, in support of a balance that seems to resolve the best of both worlds. But “the jungle” is not order. That Rudyard Kipling invoked the image of the jungle in an explicit contrast to a clearly colonial “civilisation” should not be lost on us, because the real meaning of that axiom is that “the jungle” is the chaos of a wilderness endlessly filled with violence, whereas colonial civilisation is order, and without civilisation the violence of nature returns unabated. Such an argument is, quite obviously, a defense of the state and all of its repressive apparatus, but the logic of it, no matter how transparently fallacious, is so straightforwardly powerful that even some anarchists feel the need to recoil into a defensive posture on behalf of order and against chaos, little realising what has been perpetauted.
There is always something funny about Social Darwinism: the strong are said to rule the weak, but the strong don’t rule for long; in fact a lot of the strong are killed in battle, dying in the violence that they presume to rule over. But what’s even funnier is that Social Darwinism in its modern parlance seems to imply a moralistic imperative, even if insidiously disguised as an antidote to moral idealism. That moralsitic imperative consists of a eugenic demand that “the strong” and “the beautiful” sit at the top of a hierarchy dedicated to reproducing “the strong” and “the beautiful” while subjugating or eliminating “the weak” and “the undesirable”. In fact, even funnier still Plato’s Laws presents us with an archetypical Social Darwinism that, in reality, is just the ideology of “natural” authority.
In Plato’s dialogue, an unnamed Athenian asserted that “the noble” had the right to rule “the ignoble”, that the old had a right to rule and the young had the right to be ruled, that masters ought to rule and slaves ought to be ruled, and, of course, that the strong had a right to rule and the weak ought to be ruled by them. The unnamed Athenian based all of these assertions on the premise of a kind of natural law or harmony that ordered the world and thus also ordered human life, and therefore granted specific rights to specific people (masters vs slaves, rulers vs subjects, “the strong” vs “the weak”, these were all really the same thing for Plato). Living in harmony with that order meant the possibility of a rational share in divine order, and the rejection of this order was supposed to lead to anarchy, disorder, ruin, and lawless violence. The eugenic order of the modern concept of Social Darwinism is, at least at base, practically indistinguishable from the old Platonic or Hellenic political philosophy of natural order, or natural law, and therefore natural rights (the natural rights of the powerful and their subjects). Thus, the irony of all ironies is that fascist Social Darwinism emerges not only some “inversion” of chaos, but a fully totalitarian defense of “natural order” and, at that, really a reiteration of one of the oldest arguments in defense of rigid social hierarchy.
Plato’s unnamed Athenian argued that “excessive liberty” inspired by music eventually proceeds into multiple cascading stages, from fearlessness to one’s “betters” to refusing to be subject to rulers, from refusing to be subject to rulers to disregading parents and elders, from disregarding parents and elders to disregarding the law, leading ultimately to total disrespect for oaths, pledges, and divinities. He argued in turn that this would lead to human beings becoming more like the Titans, a primordial clan of gods who were defeated by the Olympian gods and are said to have “reverted to their original state” and thus to a painful existence. One has to infer that the Titans are meant to refer to a pre-civilised state defined by primordial, lawless violence, disorder, and impeity. Once again, we are dealing with “the law of the jungle”, brought about the dissolution and rejection of order. But, for Plato and his Athenian, “the law of the jungle” is exactly what the rigid Social Darwinist hierarchy of “natural order” is there to correct. Of course, this invites several important questions: for example, if worldly order ultimately emanates from the divine order of the Forms, as if an imperfect imitation of their splendour, why would civilisation be preceded by a lawless chaos of violence that a divinely-inspired aristocratic dictatorship has to repress and bring to order through hierarchies lead by “the strong”, “the noble”, “the masters”, “the old” etc? Even imperfection doesn’t necessarily account for polar opposites.
What if whatever we take for the rational harmony of the world is not an inherent property of being or the universe but instead a consequence of impersonal unconscious creativity, or an outcome of violent struggle? Such a conclusion cannot be more antithetical to the Hellenic and later Western philosophical establishment, and yet the ancient Greeks were prepared to acknowledge it in their mythologies of primordial chaos, wherein the whole of the cosmos emerges from the abyss of chaos and all forms of political order emerge much later, most of them products of insurrectionary violence. In a very similar sens, all hierarchies of “natural” law and order are not some iron clad law of nature, but instead outcomes of violent struggle. And this is where the possibilities of subversion begin.
To look for anything close to “the iron law of nature” is to look for base matter, but, for politics, the real base matter is violence. This is because political forms and social orders are not only established and maintained by violence, they can also be destroyed by them, and often inevitably are. The sole basis of authority is the ability to wield violence, or as Bataille said it “catastrophic change”, but violence also always threatens authority, law, and order, and eventually it often destroys them. There is no rightful order to rule, and there aren’t even “rights”, let alone “the right of the strong to rule the weak”: the violence that decides and destroys them is all that there is. Control inevitably breaks down, and when it does, it often fragments viciously. Stability is essentially a byword for keeping a lid on violence and maintaining control for as long as possible. The fear of anarchy is the fear of lawless violence, but the fear of lawless violence is really the fear that violence will destroy order and domination and not act as their prerogative. Since violence can destroy order, hierarchies are set up to establish the “natural” place of violence in the hands of the elect: the responsible rulers of states who impose the threat of violence on their subjects. Without these hierarchies, the monopoly on violence collapses, the illusion of “natural” authorities is dissolved, and violence is no longer the sole prerogative of domination and law. Now violence is horizontal, that is to say universal. In fact, anarchy still needs violence, at least to prevent some people from trying to establish another state, and certainly to be exacted against those who would oppress other people even without the state. But to accept this is also to admit that all things, at least in politics, are decided by violence or force: that Heraclitus was right, when he said “War Is The Father Of All”.
One establishes authority by means of violence or maintains order with the mere threat of violence, and one destroys order and authority with violence. One might victimise someone with violence, and one may also resist victimisation with violence, or avenge victimisation with violence as the case may be. Fascism establishes totalitarian order with violence, and at that genocidal violence. Anarchism, at least in theory, recognises that fighting fascism and other forms of oppression means anti-fascist violence. Marxism also accepts the same premise with regards to fascism while more generally accepting the violent overthrow of capitalism as the precondition of establishing revolutionary government. Liberalism defines itself in opposition to the violence of all of these positions, and was yet inaugurated by revolutionary violence, asserts international hegemony through war, and maintains domestic order through both the implicit violence of the law and sometimes even explicit violent repression of dissent. There is no way to account for violence being held in common between all of these forms of politics without admitting that violence is the base matter of politics. Once you do that, you start to see politics as a contest of violence, and/or perhaps even, as Michel Foucault said, war by another means (as opposed to war being policy by another means). The implications, in some ways, speak for themselves, but are not to be taken lightly. You cannot really create a society or social order that is organised around a normative ideology on this observation, not least because it is futile, since it is already the lived reality of politics (and anti-politics). In other words, you do not create a new society whose principle is strife because that is what the world already is. All that anarchy wants is to wage social war on the side of headless freedom, therefore raising violence against hierarchy, dominion, and the order of statehood, and uphold the disordered horizontality of violence against the monopoly of centralised violence.
Existence means insistence, either alone or in solidarity with others, and to insist upon one’s own existence, or even the existence of someone else, means to participate in struggle: to either assert your existence through violent struggle against the world, or be destroyed by the violence of the world, or escape violence for as long as you can, before death inevitably finds you. “Survival of the fittest” is in some ways misleading, at least beneath this reality. There is no order by which the highest beings are sorted from the lowest in a natural hierarchy. There is just the unconscious struggle for life from which everything else proceeds, a struggle to be found most eloquently in the jungle, whose “law” means nothing but the unconscious struggle.
The jungle is not a place where monarchs, dictators, thearchs, or presidents rule over a stratified hierarchy of life. Instead it’s a place where even the mighty may fall just as they struggle, and meet their fate at the ends of infinitesimal and perhaps parasitic life that, just as all other forms of life, also struggles for its own existence. It is in this same sense, as Euclides da Cunha said in his preface to Alberto Rangel’s Verdant Inferno, that man kills man. Alberto Rangel describes the duel of the plants much better:
The apuizero is an octopus in plant form. It wraps itself around its sacrifice, extending thousands of tentacles all over it. Gilliat’s octopus had eight arms and four hundred suckers; those of the apuizero are uncountable. In the structure of the tissue, every one of its microscopic cells takes the form of a thirsty mouth. And the whole struggle takes place silently, without a whisper. It begins by curling around the branch, which is attacked by woody threads, coming from who knows where. Then these threads swell, and, once swollen, begin to proliferate into others still. Finally, the weft thickens and advances slowly, in order to mesh together with its prey, which it completely replaces. The apuizero is like a shroud enwrapping a corpse: the corpse rots but the shroud lives on, immortal.
The abiu tree would have only a short time left to live. A desperate effort could be sensed in the miserable creature, determined as it was to break free from the noose in which it was held. Yet its captor seemed to become stronger, gripping this unfortunate organism that was being strangled by the gradual, unexpected pressure with each and every one of its constricting fibres. The process was irreversible. With a machete, the tentacles could be torn to shreds and ripped out. But it would be enough if just a small piece of capillary filament was left stuck to the tree. The polyp is part of a colony of polyps. Generations live in a single body, in a single part, in a single fragment. Every part, no matter how small, is alive. It cannot be reduced to an individual. It is the solidarity of the infinitesimal, essential, elemental, inseperable, and indivisible in the republic of synergetic embryos. What remains is always enough to bring it back to life. It reproduces easily, in its latent but irrepressible haste to procreate more and more.
The abiu tree’s canopy of small leathery and glabrous leaves had almost disappeared into the broad foliage of the monstrous parasite.
In fact, this duel between forms of plant life represented a perfectly human spectacle. Roberto, the potentate, was himself a social apuizero.
Alberto Rangel, Verdant Inferno
So to return to the tragedy that Bataille so eloquently presents us, what do we want? We want a world which is no longer subjected to the domination of state power and hierarchies, and freed from the repression and illusions that the support their existence. We demand nothing less than the destruction of the order spread over the world, which binds even life itself to the domination of human patriarchal authority. And, as Bataille tells us, the death of the leader and the death of order are tragedies, and that is in the sense that it is tragic violence. We all already recognise this to be the case whenever we admit its necessity in support of liberation, even if we need the concept of justice to rationalise that recognition. So then, let us accept no illusions of the peace of natural law proferred by pacifists and liberals, nor the “realism” of the Clausewitizians and conservatives. Life is locked in struggle and we are very much a part of it, and the oppression in which we find ourselves will either end in tragic victory or in our own annihilation.
With that, the battle for Numantia continues, and will do so until Rome has fallen. Long live the tragic liberty of the headless community.
Aleph's Heretical Domain 