Disobbedienti: problems of language

 

I proceed with my (self-critical) reflections on believing one's own rhetoric and on 'linguistic tic' that end up turning into concepts.

I would like to point out that I am not talking about 'abstract' things in the following notes: language is production, it is network of relations, it is being-in-the-world.

 

-civil disobedience

-Empire

-Social disobedience

-Disobedience tout court

-Multitude

 

When the word 'Disobedience' was associated with 'civil' it referred to the idea of citizenship (the disobedience of 'cives'), and to a path familiar to most of us, it indicated the precise moment when one decided to cross the border of legality and also, in our particular interpretation, it gave a 'biopolitical' twist to the whole, it went well with the expression 'empire'.

The latter was nothing more than a good metaphor for the way in which world powers are re-defined, Negri and Hardt also use it in this manner.

 

'Social disobedience' starts off as an escamotage to make sense of the post-Genoa, it's been like positing a milestone, marking a discontinuity, even though one didn't have the slightest idea of what was awaiting us.

I find the endurance of this expression questionable, its gradual substitution with the word 'disobedience' without attributes and its election as the name of a political subject still entirely virtual ('area of disobedients').

 

All this has happened in parallel with the deterioration of the expression 'empire', used (always inappropriately) by all the commentators as a synonymous of 'imperialism', as a metaphor for the US nation-state, as metonymy for 'the West' and what not.

What was valuable in the term lies buried under a pile of rubbish. Maybe it is not useful anymore as a myth or metaphor to be counterposed to that of the 'disobedient multitude'. At least in the zapatistas way to which we are used.

Especially since there is no dichotomy between empire and multitude. The latter is part of the former. *We* are Empire too. Empire is *also* the heir (however scattered) of centuries and centuries of extension of the right to citizenship.

From the rhetorical point of view, 'disobedience' remains deprived of an effective negative polarity.

But more than that, one risks investing on a dated imaginary, like the CGIL (confederate trade union) when it tried to 'unionise' the 'autonomous second generation worker', following the classical model.

 

One disobeys to the father-master, to the state-master. It is an expression that refers back to the old disciplinary society, that has in fact become something else, something more subtle and integrated: the society of control, the closely woven network of classifications, controls, self-censorships, criteria of inclusion, seeing machines. It is a society based primarily on biopolitics, ergo on the *prevention* and distant management of bodies, a dimension that incorporates and metabolises repression.

Command is more deceitful, mellifluous, often it is itself outside the law, or beyond it (the new mafias are its most advanced expression).

Here too, the notion of 'disobedience' is fighting its own shadow.

Also, who is the disobedient?

Answer: the 'multitude'.

Also here, the word is saturated, it has been stretched in all directions to fit any kind of assembly, aggregation, community and -ouch- *mass* (that in theory ought to be its opposite). Personally, I can't pronounce the word anymore without laughing.

Because the multitude, the real one, is not made of the thousand people that evoke it in any occasion, but by the *million* people that we are only by chance coming into contact with, like on the 10th of November (national day of disobedience in Italy).

In short, the multitude is not that of the 'Carlini' laboratory, that was all but a laboratory, since amongst emergencies, the rainstorm, overcrowding, repression and by the end the will to run away, we haven't elaborated anything at all.

In French there is the expression "langue du bois", wooden tongue. It is the official language of the Stalinism of the PCF (but also of the PCI), with its increasingly vague concepts, made of ritualised calls for a 'socialism' without shape and for a 'working people' the physiognomy of which nobody recognised. A language that continuously produced anathemas and slandering epithets ('opportunists', 'adventurists', 'extremists', 'deviationists' etc.)

Even the old Autonomia had its 'langue du bois', made of 'antagonistic subjectivities', 'recompositions of the urban proletariat', 'real subsumptions' and obsessive reiteration of slogans and images.

In the last ten years (starting with the Panther and the dissembling of the Anti-nuclear and Anti-imperialist Coordination to end with Genoa) we have set fire to that language that distanced experience.

It would be absurd to substitute it with an equally alienating one.

 

R.

 

Email translated by Arianna Bove