Autonomies

Abracadabrant – Encyclopédie des Nuisances

(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Nº 15, 1992)

Everything that used to be part of the sphere of knowledge, its transmission and its acquisition, has disappeared into the hands of those who confiscated it. The consequences of such a strange victory must necessarily be reproduced in a chain reaction and affect a wide range of domains, and must do so in a spectacular way [“de modo abracadabrante”]. Since the announcement of the unfolding of potential disasters crowns the techno-scientific marvels of our time, and since the latter, whatever else may happen, will know no other course, now is the time to organize the confusion by making the slaves take responsibility, so as to cause them to deposit their still-embryonic anger in the test tubes of those whose job is to make it disappear.

… we feel confident in asserting that henceforth this world can contain only two kinds of seriousness: the seriousness of the extremists of domination, as obvious as the means at their disposal for perpetuating it any price — and ours, the proof of whose existence is supplied, paradoxically, by the scale upon which those same means are deployed. Between the two lies a gamut of unrealistic attitudes that are, in the last analysis, of negligible import. On the one hand, then, is the will to maintain a society of dispossession at whatever cost, and the attendant conviction, reminiscent of Macbeth’s, that once one is “in blood stepp’d in so far […] returning were as tedious as go o’er.” For our part, in face of the material changes that demonstrate day after day that there is nothing so bad that it cannot become worse, we want merely “to keep the door open to all other possibilities of change — first and foremost, of course, to the primordial hope that the minimum conditions for the survival of the species may be preserved. The changes we desire are, of course, the very ones that the dominant society seeks to obstruct by limiting history, irrevocably, to a broader reproduction of the past, and limiting the future to the management of the debris of the present” (“Discours preliminaire,” Encyclopedie des Nuisances, No. 1).

Abyss – L’Encyclopedie des Nuisances

(Encyclopédie des Nuisances, Nº 8, 1986)

A bottomless chasm, or at any rate one that cannot be plumbed, we call an abyss. What of the gulf into which this society of dispossession is plunging before our very eyes? That there may be no end to this descent, or that it may end only with the self-destruction of the human race — these are, of course, mere hypotheses, much like the famous “China syndrome” itself. The crushing presence of such a possibility, however, already sits in judgment over all human actions and governs the construction of the various “safety barriers” whereby a world at war with its own power hopes to avoid a terrifying end by surviving in an endless terror. The real question is therefore: How many Chernobyls will be needed before the truth of the old slogan “Revolution or death!” is recognized as the last word of the scientific thought of this century?