Repopulating the devastated desert of our imaginations
«We have a desperate need for other stories, not fairy tales in which everything is possible for the pure of heart, courageous souls, or the reuniting of goodwills, but stories recounting how situations can be transformed when thinking they can be, achieved together by those who undergo them. Not stories about morals but “technical” stories about this kind of achievement, about the kinds of traps that each had to escape, constraints the importance of which had to be recognized. In short, histories that bear on thinking together as a work to be done. And we need these histories to affirm their plurality, because it is not a matter of constructing a model but of a practical experiment. Because it is not a matter of converting us but of repopulating the devastated desert of our imaginations.» (p.132)
Commoning as building a community to create questions
“[…] The contemporary reference to enclosures, to the appropriation of what was a common good, however, was not invented by union movements defending public services, or by researchers set to be run directly by their old industrial allies, with the blessing of the State. It was computer programmers, whose work was directly targeted by the patenting of their algorithms, that is to say, their very languages, who named what was threatening them thus, and created a response, the now celebrated GNU general public license” (p. 81)
“[…] Let’s not fool ourselves: it is not a matter of the angelic reign of disinterested cooperation. Other ways of making money were organized. But it is a matter of the invention of a mode of resistance to enclosure: everyone who has recourse to programs with a GNU license, or who modifies them, falls under the constraint of the exclusive non-appropriation of what they create” (p. 82)
“[…] That I am referring to the free software movement here doesn’t signify that they are “good,” whereas the software “pirates” and “crackers” of protected software who distribute pirate copies that avoid protection are without interest. One might say that at the level of effects – their power to harm the property rights and ensure the free access to programs – the pirates are more effective. But there is no need to choose here – many in any case belong to both milieus. Nor is there any need to oppose them, like one might oppose reformism and radicalism. Both movements are interesting, neither is exemplary (if many creators of free software get on well with profit, gratuitous piracy, like every war machine, communicates with a problem of capture: many such pirates are taken on as experts and become hunters).” (p. 82, footnote 1)
“The resistance of programmers fits into the general category of struggle against exploitation with difficulty, because it is a matter of resisting the capitalism of the knowledge economy, and those who serve it rarely define themselves as exploited. Of course it is always possible to keep holding on to the theoretical compass, to maintain the heading that identifies capitalism and exploitation by speaking of a form of “false consciousness” – they do not know that they are exploited, but we do. Sticking to the heading here, however, amounts to denying the originality and relative efficacy of what programmers who resist have succeeded in doing” (p. 82)
“How is this type of resistance, which has transformed the reference to the commons as a stake in a struggle, to be recounted? I will distinguish two types of narrative here, in a manner that is a little caricatured” (p. 82)
“The first narrative stages a renewal of the Marxist conceptual theater, which preserves the epic genre (characterizing it in this manner is a way of announcing that for me it is a matter of distancing myself from it)” (p. 83)
“[…] The proposition from which I am distancing myself here is that of Toni Negri and Michael Hardt, staging what they called the “multitude.” This multitude, which is fundamentally anonymous, nomadic, and expert, becomes the new antagonistic force capable of threatening capitalism. The latter, become cognitive, has a vital need of the multitude, which is, on the other hand, capable of escaping its grasp, because it is not identified with industrial modes of production” (p. 83, footnote 2)
“Capitalism today supposedly has to be qualified as “cognitive” – it aims less at the exploitation of labor power than at the appropriation of what must be recognized as the common good of humanity – knowledge. And not no matter what knowledge – it is the workers of the immaterial, those who manipulate abstract knowledges in cooperation with one another, who have become the real source for the production of wealth. From now on, this “proletariat of the immaterial,” as Toni Negri says, is what capitalism is going to depend on but is what it will (perhaps) not be able to enslave” (p.83)
“To the extent that cognitive capitalism exploits a language that allows the communication of everyone with everyone else, a knowledge which, produced by each benefits everyone, would make exist, here and now, what is common to humans, a common that is fundamentally anonymous, without quality or property. […] And as there can only be one revolutionary epic, the working class is chased from the role that Marx had conferred on it, indeed, is even defined in terms that retrospectively disqualify it from playing that role […] And the old working class itself, whose work was material, is now characterized as being too attached to the tools of production to be able to satisfy the concept, to be a bearer of the “common” of humans.
From the conceptual point of view, the fact that in the name of competition workers are exploited today with a rare intensity, without even talking about the sweatshops reserved for poor countries, or about the appearance in our countries of poor workers who aren’t capable of making ends meet on their salaries, doesn’t count for much. But above all, as in every theater of concepts, we are functioning here in the long, even the indefinite, term.” (p.84)
“[…] According to the second narrative that I am proposing, what was destroyed with the commons was not just the means of living for poor peasants, but also a concrete collective intelligence, attached to this common on which they all depended. From this point of view, it is this kind of destruction that programmers have been able to resist. They would no longer be the figure of annunciation, represented by the immaterial nomadic proletariat, incarnating the common social character of immaterial production. The “common” that they were able to defend was theirs, it was what made them think, imagine, and cooperate. That this common may have been immaterial doesn’t make much difference. It is always a matter of a concrete, situated, collective intelligence, in a clinch with constraints that are as critical as material constraints. It is the collective brought together by the challenge of these constraints, rather different from the indefinite ensemble of those who, like me, use or down- load what has been produced, that have been able to defend against what had endeavored to divide them. In other words, the programmers resisted what was endeavoring to separate them from what was common to them, not the appropriation of the common good of humanity. It was as “commoners” that they defined what made them programmers, not as nomads of the immaterial.
The divergence between the two narratives thus bears on the question of community. From the point of view of the first, there isn’t any great difference between the creators and the end users of software” (p.85)
“[…] From the point of view of the second, cognitive capitalism doesn’t appropriate the inappropriable, but destroys (continues to destroy) what is required by the very existence of a community. The “common” here cannot be reduced to a good or a resource and it doesn’t in the least have the traits of a sort of human universal, the (conceptual) guarantor of something beyond oppositions. It is what unites “commoners,” I utilize software as an end user, but those who resisted enclosure by IP rights did not defend the free use of a resource but the very practices that made them a community, that caused them to think, imagine, and create in a mode in which what one does matters to the others, and is a resource for the others. And it is as such, because the knowledge economy was attacking what made them a community, and not as the precursors of a multitude freed of its attachments, that they laid claim to the precedent of the enclosures.” (p. 86)
User movements and patient associations and science practitioners joining together as commoning, as reclaiming the power to create questions in situations of knowledge heterogeneity
“[…] the term [commoner] has also been used to talk about those who unite around a “common,” a river or a forest, with the ambition of thwarting the sinister diagnosis of the “tragedy of the commons” and of succeeding in learning from one another not to define it as a means for their own ends but as that around which users must learn to articulate themselves” (p. 87)
“[…] conferring on the “common,” which was often defined in terms of rival utilizations, the power to gather them, to cause them to think, that is to say, to resist this definition, and produce propositions that it would otherwise have rendered unthinkable. In brief to learn again the art of paying attention […] the rapprochement of programmers and commoners quickly encounters difficulties that it would be dangerous to ignore. Whether they have resisted or not, programmers know that, like scientists or lawyers, they are bearers of a recognized knowledge, which makes them what I call practitioners. On the other hand, in the same movement, unrepentant drug users and members of associations such as Act Up, for example, have created a collective “profane” knowledge and struggled for the recognition of this knowledge by practitioners and acknowledged experts […] but isn’t confusing these two types of protagonists under the same term to introduce an ambiguity regarding its signification?” (p. 88)
“[…] The fact that I am tentatively using the same term “commoners” for practitioners who defend what causes them think and imagine, and for the heterogeneous group of those who learn to be caused to think by what they refuse to be the end users of, creates an ambiguity that doesn’t have to be removed but much rather made explicit. To remove it would be to look for a ready-made solution, and there is no such solution when the question is “making common.” This question must rather be a dimension of situations that, around a common concern, gathers representatives of user movements, practitioners, and experts, a dimension that belongs to the situation and cannot be thought independent of it.” (pp. 88-89)
“There is no general solution here, the only generality is the necessity of foreseeing that there will be tension, that is to say, in particular, of nourishing the common engagement with knowledges, narratives and experiences which, when the time comes, will allow the trap not to be fallen into” (p. 89)
“We will not, however, oppose practitioners, who would be people with a genuine craft, and users, who would be amateurs who wish to assert their objections and suggestions but would be divided when it is a question of participating fully in the construction of the problem. The question of divergent engagements is equally posed on the practitioners’ side. They too can be divided, depending on whether they behave as professionals or are actually able to understand their specialized knowledge as contributing to a common concern, not defining it.” (pp. 89-90)
“[…] it is not impossible that they [users] might, with and in the same way as practitioners, contribute to the construction of the problem, the concerning situation now being defined in terms of the heterogeneous knowledges, requirements, and manners of paying attention that its unfolding demands” (p. 90)
“[…] But the question of practitioners has an extra dimension. One can become part of a user movement but one must be trained in a practice. This doesn’t signify any kind of hierarchy but translates a belonging, the fact that the knowledge of a practitioner, her capacity to participate in the construction of a problem, refers to the community to which she belongs. The extra, political dimension is that a future in which the very notion of a practice would be destroyed, in which the sciences would no longer produce anything other than professionals, incapable as such of dealing with what the encounter with users demands, is easily imagined” (pp. 90-91)
«I have tried to characterize scientific practitioners (in contrast to those who serve Science) as gathered together by a “common,” that is to say, by a cause: they are engaged by a type of achievement proper to each field the eventuality of which obliges those who belong to this field, forces them to think, to act, to invent, to object, that is to say, to work together, depending on one another.” (p.91)
“[…] what distinguishes practitioners from professionals is also the capacity to perceive the difference between situations and question the definition of what matters to them as a community, what causes them to gather, and to others for which their knowledge or expertise can be useful, even necessary, but will never allow them to define the “right manner of formulating the problem.” Certainly, and it’s the least one can say, such a capacity hasn’t really been cultivated by scientific communities and the modes of training they developed” (p.92)
“[…] But with the triumph of professionals, this capacity will be eradicated. Another potential resource will have been destroyed, which matters in a crucial manner if it is a question of the gathering together of heterogeneous knowledges, requirements, and concerns around a situation that none can appropriate” (pp. 92-93)
“[…] the transformation of users into (selfish) consumers, or practitioners into (submissive) professionals doesn’t testify to people always being inclined to follow the easiest path. It testifies to the destruction of that which gathers together and causes people to think. But to adopt this point of view is equally to take note that the response to intrusion will not be one that a humanity which is finally reconciled, reunited under the sign of a general goodwill, would become able to give, but depends on the repopulating of a world devastated today by the confiscation or the destruction of collective, and always situated, capacities to think, imagine, and create” (p. 93)
«[…] “taking power” presupposes that a government has power, that it can betray the role that capitalism makes it play. How to reclaim power is doubtless a better question, but the response then passes via a dynamic of engagements that produce possibilities, a dynamic that breaks the feeling of collective impotence without toppling over into the formidable “together anything becomes possible!”
Breaking the feeling of impotence in effect has nothing to do with what is, rather, the correlate of impotence, the feeling of omnipotence, the cult of hidden powers that ask only to be liberated, the abstract dream of the day when, at last, “the people will be in the street.” If it isn’t only a question of the reappropriating of the wealth produced through work, the people who may well invade the street should come there with concrete experience of what is demanded by reclaiming what has been destroyed, reappropriating the capacity to fabricate one’s own questions, and not responding to the trick questions that are imposed on us. One never fabricates in general and one is never capable in general.
The people in the street is an image that I do not want to give up, however, because it is an image of emancipation that can be delinked from the grand, epic prospect. After all, before our cities were reconfigured according to the imperatives of frictionless circulation, purified of threats to the public order that crowds and mixing together can always constitute, the people were in the street… But to prevent this image from becoming a poison, an abstract dream, perhaps it is worth transforming the image of what a street is. For the grand boulevards that lead to the places of power, a labyrinth of interconnected streets could be substituted, that is to say, a multiplicity of gatherings around what forces thinking and imagining together, around common causes, none of which has the power to determine the others, but each one of which requires that the others also receive the power of causing to think and imagine those that they gather together. Because if a cause is isolated, it always risks being dismembered according to the terms of different preexisting interests. And it also risks provoking a closing up of the collective, the collective then defining its milieu in terms of its own requirements, not as that with which links must be created. Which is what has happened to scientific communities. In short, a cause that receives the power to gather together is, par excellence, that which demands not to be defined as good, or innocent, or legitimate, but to be treated with the lucidity that all creation demands.» (pp. 94-95)
Creation and maintenance of situations granting us the power to think
«if the occasion is appropriately constructed, people can become capable of acquiring or reclaiming the taste for thinking” (p. 132)
“Avoiding situations that produce inequality is not enough, just as most of the so-called egalitarian modes of functioning, those that make equality into an abstract injunction, claiming to make a clean slate of all the processes that have always already transformed differences into inequalities, are not. Thus in meetings in which “everyone has a right to express themselves”: boredom, self-censorship, effects of terror, feelings of impotence in the face of those with big mouths and other unrepentant windbags, questions that get bogged down incessantly in personality clashes or rivalries between people, the gnawing desire that someone “take things in hand,” the progressive rout, weary, fragile compromises…it is pointless elaborating this, as it is a shared experience.
If citizen juries are able to escape this poison, like juries in courts, it seems that it is to the extent that the apparatus gathers its participants around a common cause, that is to say, achieves the transformation of a problematic situation into a cause for collective thinking. But this cause that makes participants equal cannot be equality itself, or any other cause supposed to transcend particularities and demand equal submission. Equality is a pharmakon too, one that can become a poison when it is associated not with a production but with an imperative, and an imperative that always sanctions its privileged spokespersons. A common cause, endowed with the power to put those it gathers together in a situation of equality, cannot have a spokesperson
[…] it is a question the answer to which will be messed up if one amongst those it gathers together appropriates it. When the event of an achievement occurs, it is the “questioning” situation that produces equality, that is to say, the capacity of “simple citizens” to participate in juries. It is this situation that transmutes what is presented as an expert response, with an authoritative status, into a contribution the importance of which must be evaluated as well as what it makes matter, what it leaves indeterminate” (pp.136-137)
«[…] The power of the situation is nothing if it isn’t actualized in concrete apparatuses however, apparatuses that gather concerned people around concrete situations. The only generality, here again, is of a pharmacological order. We have a need, a terrible need, to experiment with such apparatuses, to learn what they require, to recount their successes, failures and drift. And this culture of the apparatus can only be constructed in real time, with real questions, not in protected experimental places, because what has also to be learned is precisely what such places, because they are protected, take shortcuts on: how is one to hold up in a milieu that is at one and the same time poisoned by stupidity and turned into a hunting ground for the predators of free enterprise? And how is one to do so without closing up on oneself, with fabricating a nice little world that may well become a stakeholder, protecting its particular success in contempt for everyone else (just do what we do!)» (p.138)
“That the milieu of a group experimenting with the possibility of a collective regime of thinking and action can at the same time be what poisons it, what threatens it and that to which links have to be created, indicates clearly that any shortcut in thinking here is lethal, and notably any search for a guarantee, but also every transformation of what is experimented with into a model. The questions that such a group raises, because they form part of this group’s milieu, are operative questions, even and especially if they pretend to be neutral, the questions that judges or voyeurs ask. As for the responses, they will never be general, they will always be linked to the invention of practical means for making a response” (pp. 138-139)
“[…] Let us take a fairly crucial example, that of trust, as much the trust between members of a group as between this group and its milieus. Making of trust an operative question is to make two linked senses of this word diverge – let us call them the “having” and the “fabrication” of trust. When the trust that one had turns out to have been misplaced, one feels betrayed […] This is in effect what often happens and it is what testifies to the unhealthy character of our milieus: not only can a group be betrayed by those it thought were its allies, but it can be denounced for betraying the trust of those who had celebrated it as exemplary. On the other hand, American activists practicing nonviolent direct action have given us the example of veritable, artful fabrications of trust. What is presupposed here is that betrayal is what everyone will be incited to do during an action. These activists in effect know that what they must prepare for is a test […] Fabricating trust, for these activists, corresponds to apparatuses that make for the envisaging of action on the basis of these tests and these foreseeable traps. And this, once again, implies resisting the fiction of equality” (p. 139)
“[…] It is, on the contrary, a matter of conferring on the tests to come the power to make the participants feel, think, and dare to speak in a mode that renders perceptible and legitimate the heterogeneity of everyone’s modes of commitment, and what they feel capable of. In short, an entire pragmatics, not of avowal but of imagination and of the creation of the means to make equality pass via differences that are not the object of any judgment, but which will be that which the vectors of betrayal will profit from if they are not taken into account.
Nothing is guaranteed, as is always the case with the pharmacological art. The transformation that confers on the test the power to make think, which constitutes it as an integral part of the questioning situation, however, is able to “treat” what are foreseeable poisoning operations. Attention no longer bears on persons but on modes of collective functioning that in and of themselves render some vulnerable, their possible betrayal being subsequently taken as a reference so as to accentuate the mis- trust, intensify suspicion, and thus to anticipate and provoke new betrayals.” (p.140)
“[…] The art of apparatuses is a pharmacological art because those whom it concerns are gathered together by what is, in the first place, a question that requires an apprenticeship […] not only because the possibility of betrayal is taken as a constitutive dimension of the situation, but also because it gives a positive signification to the heterogeneity of the gathering together, through its response. It constitutes this heterogeneity as something that must be recognized, indeed even as something that must be actively produced, a production that requires apprenticeship.” (pp. 140-141)
“[…] To be reliable, the ensemble must not presuppose a postulated equality, but must translate operations for the production of equality amongst its participants. This signifies that it must be of the order of an alloying of heterogeneous elements, not a fusion. What it is a matter of learning, in each case, is the manner of making divergences exist, of naming and taking them into account where otherwise the poison of unspoken, shameful differences would have acted, with its potential for the divisive maneuvers that will inevitably occur” (p. 141)
“[…] It should be unnecessary to emphasize that making divergences present and important has nothing to do with respect for differences of opinion, it must be said. It is the situation that, via the divergent knowledges it activates, gains the power to cause those who gather around it to think and hesitate together. I would go so far as to say that the achievement of an alloying, of a practice of the heterogeneous, doesn’t require a respect for differences but an honoring of divergences.” (p.143)
“Divergence doesn’t belong to a person, rather it is that which makes an aspect of this world matter” (p.144)
Inventing non-guaranteed modes of response to the intrusion of Gaïa
“Responding to Gaia’s intrusion by means of triumphalist slogans/order-words that put the ends of humanity on stage would always show that we have learned nothing, again and as always, accepting the grand epic narrative that makes us, always us, into the pathfinders. Didn’t we invent the fateful concept of humanity? It is, instead, a matter of detoxifying the narratives that have made us forget that the earth was not ours, in the service of our history, narratives that are everywhere, in the heads of all those who in one manner or another feel themselves responsible, the bearers of a compass, the representatives of a direction that must be maintained.
It is not enough to denounce the pastors, responsible for a herd that they must protect from seduction and illusion. If I have offered a eulogy to artifice, it is because it is necessary for us to reclaim, to reappropriate, to relearn that whose destruction has turned us into a quasi herd. And what I have called artifice translates this necessity. We who are the inheritors of a destruction, the children of those who, being expropriated of their commons, have been the prey not only of exploitation but also of the abstractions that made them into whoevers, we have to experiment with what is likely to recreate – to take root again as one says of a plant – or to regenerate the capacity to think and act together.
I haven’t stopped emphasizing that such experimentation is political, because it is not a question of making things better, but of experimenting in a milieu that is known to be saturated with traps, infernal alternatives, and impossibilities concocted as much by the State as by capitalism.” (p.152)
“Political struggle should happen everywhere that a future that none dare imagine is being fabricated, not limiting itself to the defense of acquired gains or the denunciation of scandals, but seizing hold of the very question of this fabrication. Who pays the technicians, how are scientists educated, what promises make the wheels of fascination turn round, to what dreams of the rich is one entrusting the issue of restarting the economy?” (p.153)
“The outline of a possible new kind of researcher, inventing the means for independence in relation to their sources of finance, which enslave their practices, is the order of the day. This possibility is part of the stakes that couple political struggle and creation, because whatever happens we will need scientists and technicians […]
What is missing in the GMO event? Firstly a political resonance chamber that is up to the job […] and notably politicizing the question of progress that technoscientific rationality bears, or that of the knowledge economy, its patents and partnerships […] But perhaps what is also missing is its having been celebrated as an event, its having been named such, its having generated witnesses who learn to recount what they owe to it, what it has taught them, how it united them, how it forced them to learn from one another. We need, we desperately need, to fabricate such witnesses, such narratives, such celebrations. And above all we need what such witnesses, narratives, and celebrations can make happen: the experience that signals the achievement of new connections between politics and an experimental, always experimental, production of a new capacity to act and to think. This experience is what I, after Spinoza and many others, will call joy. Joy, Spinoza writes, is that which translates an increase in the power of acting, that is to say too, of thinking and imagining, and it has something to do with a knowledge, but with a knowledge that is not of a theoretical order, because it does not in the first place designate an object, but the very mode of existence of whoever becomes capable of it” (p. 155)
“Joy is what makes me bet on a future in which the response to Gaia would not be the sadness of degrowth but that which the conscientious objectors to economic growth have already invented, when they discover together the dimensions of life that have been anesthetized, massacred, and dishonored in the name of a progress that is reduced today to the imperative of economic growth. Perhaps, finally, joy is what can demoralize those who are responsible for us, bringing them to abandon their sadly heroic posture, and betray what has captured them.
No one is saying that everything will then turn out well, because Gaia offended is blind to our histories. Perhaps we won’t be able to avoid terrible ordeals. But it depends on us, and that is where our response to Gaia can be situated, in learning to experiment with the apparatuses that make us capable of surviving these ordeals without sinking into barbarism, in creating what nourishes trust where panicked impotence threatens. This response, that she will not hear, confers on her intrusion the strength of an appeal to lives that are worth living” (p. 156)
– Stengers, I. (2015). In Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism. Lüneburg: meson press.
Stengers: In catastrophic times
