Faced with capitalist organization, a destituent potential cannot
confine itself to its own immanence, to all that grows under the ice
in the absence of sunshine, to all the attempts at local construction,
to a series of punctual attacks, even if this whole little world were to
regularly find itself caught up in great turbulent demonstrations.
And the insurrection will definitely not wait for everyone to become
insurrectionary. The mistake of the Leninists, Trotskyists, Negriists,
and other subpoliticians, a telling one fortunately, is to believe that a
period that sees all the hegemonies lying broken on the ground could
still tolerate a political hegemony, even a partisan one of the sort that
Pablo Iglesias or Chantal Mouffe fantasize. What they don’t see is that
in a time of general horizontality, horizontality itself is the verticality. No
one can expect to organize the autonomy of others any longer. The
only verticality still possible is that of the situation, which commands all
of its components because it exceeds them, because the sum of forces
in presence is greater than each one of them. The only thing capable
of transversally uniting all the elements deserting this society into a
historical party is an intelligence of the situation. It is everything that makes
the situation gradually understandable, everything that tracks the
movements of the adversary, everything that identifies the usable paths
and the obstacles—the systematic character of the obstacles. Based on
that intelligence, an occasional vertical expedient needed to tilt certain
situations in the desired direction can well be improvised.
A strategic verticality of this kind can only emerge from a constant,
generous discussion, undertaken in good faith. In this epoch, the means
of communication are the forms of organization. It’s our weakness, for
the means aren’t in our hands, and those who control them are not our
friends. So there’s no other choice but to deploy an art of conversation
between worlds that is cruelly deficient, but from which, in contact with
the situation, the right decision must emanate. Such a discussion can
gain the center, from the periphery where it is currently contained, only
through an offensive from the domain of sensibility, on the plane of
perceptions, and not of discourse. We’re talking about addressing bodies
and not just the head.