Saturday, December 09, 2006

As if everything strange and dysfunctional in administration and bureaucracy has tumbled upon me. It seams that I am the odd case – the one who effortlessly attracts the blank, stupid face of bureaucratic machine to its fullest. The problem, then, is in me – how I treat the world around me and why it produces no” understanding”. As if we speak different languages – and yet, it might be the truth.

Here, in Paris, I am restless flaneur, but without Benjamin’s, messianic lightness of insight – since, life is not here merely to be observed and reflected upon, but to be carried around in all its unattractiveness. It seams that the “epiphanic moments” haven’t completely ceased to visit me, but they scarce and few.

Caught in the bureaucratic machine of the today’s capitalist welfare – where people when want to say something “critical” about minorities, even when speaking the language other then official, they lower their voice – I feel that except being uninvolved individual (by decision, not by factual development) there is little to do. But, then, in this complete dis-subjectivisation, you are experiencing nothing of the quality of life that it intrinsically possesses because it is life that we live.

In this line of thought I have been thinking a lot about terrorism, these days. About the psycho-profile of today’s suicide-bomber. Or just suicide-terrorist. It seams to me that there is nothing strange about this particular individual, since dispositives which are producing him are the ambivalent ones (as are all of today’s dispostives) – they both produce the subject and disinvest him of his/hers subjectivity. Indeed, the terrorist of today is non-entity, neither here or there, desperately trying to be “someone” i.e. e. suicide-bomber, but in very “becoming-possible” as suicide-bomber he is denying his subjectivity by proclaiming himself to be a tool. This situation of a man-becoming-a tool is present in everyday life of each one of us. And yet terrorists proclamation of becoming a tool is a false one – this individual doesn’t really believe in becoming the tool, he is just enacting something that is thought it would heal the gap between subject and non-subject, that would produce a “more full, rounded subject” snatched of the here-and-now dimension. Terrorism today is a ritual – it is a ritual of our capitalist, globalized world – that is more “true” of its character then no-global movement or any other “positive” force. By true, I don’t think that terrorism is truthful, because it is not – it is just showing us a futile and perpetual dance around undecidedness that today’s world is living.

Paris, as any other global capital, is a city of many pleasures. And the particular potential of Paris is that “the pleasures” are meant to be there, by default. Yet, it is as any other big city – cold and inhuman. The inhuman element is propulsion – the constant need and horror of moving. With metro and RER hundreds thousands of people are displacing themselves thought the city, in perpetual hunger for moving and reaching its goal. In this sense, you spend more time in the tunnels of Metro, then on actual streets. You are too tired for streets, and yet never tired of shops.

And the problem of abundance. The abundance of shops, of bakeries, of restaurants, of people, of everything. The abundance is a joy-killer, especially in the pre Christmas times of shopping frenzy.

Where is now ingovernabile, as Agamben calls someone who is for him a “messianic subject” – someone who is already here, but we cannot see him completely? Where can we search for something that has not constituted itself completely as ordained entity, but it functions as a propeller of the political constitution?

It should be someone who converts itself, thus hiding from the gaze, someone who rejects the subjecitivization and yet presents itself as a proper subject to the world.

But, maybe it is someone completely insignificant – passerby and helper category. Someone that we cannot pinpoint, that escapes the subject perception. A mole?

I think that being a rat, and the charming one, has something to do with a stern face of the bureaucratic machine. They know you don’t belong to them, that you despise them and yet they can’t really tell why. Then, administrative wisdom states – transform that individual in qualunque, make him powerless and dispossessed. Yet, there lays the seed of possible change.

And to be precise – i am not the rat, yet…

1 comment:

razorsmile said...

London too flows too much, and the visits I have to make there every week, where work is one place and home another, enable a little distance to not yet feel at home in that flow - and to notice that I'm not sure I ever want to feel at home in that flow.

Nice blog, dropped by after googling the 'grammar of the multitude'...