A Pseudo-History of Civilization

1) Starting with the Hittites Systems of Production and the Mycenaean System of Production associated with what is commonly called "Asian System of production" an analysis of social relations may lead to reveal a hierarchical class system where a minority handled organization (including King, priestly caste and warrior caste) while the majority labored and produced what was centrally redistributed. The "aristocracy" consisted of a managerial class (barons) that supervised workers in villages along with a priestly representative, while no "intellectuals" existed besides the scribes in the central palaces that recorded sales, etc. The silent majority toiled with no "consciousness" associated with individual awareness. This may be traced back even farther in history (and prehistory) in association with tribes and clans, all the way back to Neanderthals and "cave men."…The point is that the initial systems of productions that lasted for thousands of years were merely organized as hierarchical associations (close to bee hives) that produced for re-distribution with minimal luxury associated with the functions of the courtly and priestly classes; commerce consisted of exchange and trade based on needs (including with rare or precious items that were never the bases of exchange, thus no currency was necessary within these systems). Such economic systems of production coincided with political structures that were based on group cohesion and group organization with strong and clear-cut distinctions between classes (for the most past hereditary).
2) The emergence of the "individual" coincided with the erosion of this system in a particular way due to external invasions of those pushed west by drought and other natural disasters. The Indo-Europeans, for example, destroying the Mycenaean system provided the contingent necessity by which individualism (and Capitalism) became possible. The destruction of centers of organizations, as per Vernant, pushed villagers (peasants or workers) to take things into their own hands and, little by little, communication and exchange allowed for a "consciousness" to evolve at various levels (including on the long run, the polis and the individual member of such a polis).
3) Another analysis that reflects economic changes should be found in the ideological reflections of these systems through the belief systems and the institutions that governed pre-capitalist peoples. An exploration of the Epic of Gilgamesh and other significant discourses shows the tension between the world of Gods and the world of Humans: in Gilgamesh politics, or civilization, becomes the concern or domain of humans, while life and especially eternal life were the sole domain of gods. A similar exploration of the Upanishads, Rig Vedas, Homer and Hesiod, and Pharaonic Egypt will show the tension between Gods and Humans as the reflection of changing economic and social circumstances by which humans were acquiring more independence and were setting their own laws in distinction to the sacred laws of the gods as represented by the priestly or warrior castes. A closer analysis of the laws of Hammurabi should be able to indicate how "justice" was becoming a human attribute exemplified by the arts depicting Shamash as enlightening Hammurabi or other kings that became the representatives of Gods on earth. Such a distinction was not possible in earlier systems where an "explanation" of this sort was not conceivable since "consciousness" had not been historically constructed, especially not a consciousness of "authority" or of regulatory practices.
4) "Civilization" would be the tendencies associated with such a distance from the unquestionable domain of the gods (and/or of the ways things are) that are built on control and on the need of explanation and self-explanation of power and authority in unprecedented ways. While "Culture" or "Umran" (as Ibn Khaldun called it) may mark the turn away from the unquestioned way of living associated with pre-capitalist systems of production, "civilizations" are only built on the "violence" associated with reducing others and on repressing or rejecting one's consciousness or self-consciousness. Although historically most analyses dealing with such a topic would start with Alexander the Great being the first to offer an experiment of going beyond considering one's civilization as superior and distant from other "barbarians" through his attempts at merging Persian and Macedonian cultures to build a higher civilization (against the advice of his Greek master Aristotle), one needs to go back even further into Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia to find examplary roots of such a "civilizing mission." The expansions of the Pharaohs and those of Sumerians, Akkadians, and Babylonians, etc., need explanation beyond and beneath the economic needs of such expansions (taxes, resources, etc.). The exertion of power and violence by showing a certain greatness and force (as exemplified by all Mesopotamian conquerors through their stiles commemorating their conquests) must have had an ideological superstructure informing the economic base: civilization and greatness is achieved through domination and reduction of the other, and by realizing a superiority that takes away from the loss of something (or rather the gaining of something, the realization of one's consciousness, "la conscience malheureuse", that takes away from the bliss of just living and toiling and not having to take things and matters into one's hands). Taking matters into one's hands, as Heidegger would have said, and as associated with "Civilization," drives the technological development of humanity, and contrasts with leaving matters to God, to fate, or to a limited number of kings and priests not interested in expansion but rather in an organization and survival that may dip into luxury without the need of the luxurious self-realization through a "war" (interestingly, the initial wars were mere necessary needs of displacement and migration that could only be realized through force, such as the case of the Hyksos, the Palesto from the Aegean, and the various Indo-Europeans sweeping Mesopotamia and then Greece).
5) Thus if wars and conquests marked "civilization" what can be said of those civilizations that were not imperialistic in the way the Persians, Macedonians, and Romans were? What of China, for example? China had its own ideological reflections of the social realities extending over centuries of wars and chaos culminating in a certain order through empires built on a superiority associated with a civilization that is not imperialistic. While Daoism and its uncarved block offered a constant undermining of any positionality that would be prolonged enough to impose a civilizing mission, Confucianism was always imbued with a certain transcendence that made its order otherworldly: the ancestor worship at the basis of piety was not transcendent enough to be rejected and projected unto others (thus resulting in conquests and the mission of reduction of others, as in taking control of the world away from the gods). The superiority of the Chinese civilization did not necessitate it to conquer and reduce others but left them distant as they were and even evaded them; no real struggle there between an external God and humans, projected as a struggle between others and those humans becoming gods on the way to civilization.
6) The Pharaohs had that external and internal split projected unto an afterlife (Cult of Osiris) that resolved the matters for a while until the time came when Akhenaton's monotheism projected the social need for unity in front of an "outside" world that was threatening, but before that it was always the others who needed to be reduced in ways where the Pharaohs were conquering the world as gods, realizing the control over everything that may make them forget the inadequacy of a life that is no longer blindly submitting to gods but only acknowledges them as measurements of what they achieve on this earth. The reward and punishment associated with an afterlife that the Egyptians established was a basic archetype of what civilizations will be constructed upon: that consciousness of an otherness of humanity as something that can and may confront gods and the blind forces of nature and that resolve not to submit and live in harmony with the unfathomable forces of nature. Science, modernity, techne, and consciousness as well as individuality go hand in hand. It wasn't a few years ago that Capitalism started but many centuries ago, with the whole belief in human civilization, human superiority, human worth, and human needs. With an organization that was not basically sustaining anyone but engaged in controlling resources rather than accepting things as they were: it started of course with the taming of animals, with fire, with other discoveries and so on, but it id not become the dangerous Capitalist machine until the ejection fo gods and the projection of their powers.
7) The Dark Middle Ages of Europe were a going back to an era of comfort, away from civilization, until the contact with the Muslim-Arab social imaginaries and with the reawakening of political needs, whereby the powers of humans, in the name of God, aimed once again at becoming gods, taking control of riches and of one's environment. Satisfaction with one's life, one's simple surrounding, with very little "techne," is what become "barbarism" to civilization: the barbarians are not the foreigners but those who are close to the earth, who have not lost their innocence but were "savages." The romantics, and the "noble savage" period had something to say about the world: they were thrown into the leap of taking control of the world, knowing well that this is but a call to legitimizing violence, through conquests, states, subjectivity. Civilization is violence, conquest, repression against the world as a whole, and it follows the economic and social advancement by which modes of production become individualized and not socialized, by which social solidarity is reduced for the advantages of the few. In the absence of consciousness in pre-capitalists systems, there couldn't be any "class consciousness." Consciousness only evolved with the economic need to hold individuals responsible for the field or for agricultural and other products: when central organization lacked, a new system emerged where responsibility and free will, and holding people accountable, brought with them laws, human laws (based on god's laws but that have for goal a different achievement, a certain control of society away from the usual bee hive). Societies were no longer bee hives but means of organizing and upholding people in terms of interests and reward and punishment. That is the purpose of religions and of laws. Legislating for the future, through the mouth of God, the mouth of prophets, or the mouth of The Law, became the only means to get people, who are becoming more and more responsible themselves without central authority, to uphold a system on personal motivation. This is where liberalism and capitalism could find roots and not in places where communal work and communal solidarity flourished. Beliefs in ordained things do not allow for competition and accumulation but rather function on accumulation along with redistribution. The redistribution that was the basis of the pre-capitalist systems disappeared. In the anarchic spirit of the times, production became the imperative and the redistribution was no longer possible through central means: exchange and barter along with other means of compensation and of exchange developed, and thus slavery and fiefdom evolved, and the basis for Capitalist civilization.

May 2001

Notes on the new barbarism

1) We will start by introducing the meaning of "barbarism" as appropriated here, before assessing what we are designating as "new barbarism" in association with new means of production and control of meaning--and the relative means of resistance to these--that consolidate a political and economic hegemony and justify a "savage capitalism" and genocidal interventions and policies on the world scene. Certain particular sites of resistance to this "new barbarism" have in turn taken on the same strategies and tactics of the dominant barbarism which flourishes on the production of sub-human "others" and the elaboration of a quasi-universal superiority built on empty concepts and constructed self-righteousness and centrality. While such a barbarism is obviously a trait that traverses the history of humanity, it was precisely what "civilization" was supposed to remedy in its universal bent towards applying equality and distributive justice, human rights and value of all human life with no distinction to race, gender, religion, and nationality. All this ideological baggage that started building a civilized world collapsed after or just before the end of the Cold War and a savage capitalism and a new barbarism, pushed forth through capitalist forces supported by policies of hegemonic states started shaping the "new world order" in ways where economism and/or economic assessment is used as an explanatory mechanism, thus perpetuating the extra-social transcendence inherent in former schemes unto a "market" that is reified and idolized, and through empty concepts that are stripped of meaning and signification, such as "freedom" and "democracy" that are, in fact being demolished through the new forces of new barbarism. Both "freedom" and "democracy" as they were approached in the past and how they were significant have become impossible, especially in countries such as the United States and this is in turn--i.e. the destruction of what is associated with freedom and democracy--is being used as a new form of domination and control, where a few countries set such empty concepts based on reification of the market and associating "freedom" with the market and democracy with the possibility of voting and expressing opinion without paying any attention to how this opinion is constructed and produced through the dominant means of control of meaning and interpretation. The media has been taking on the role of cultural production on a global scale and the needs and desires of the population, while previously produced through local mechanisms, including cultural, and civilizational traits, have become increasingly produced through trans-national and trans-cultural means but many of these are associated with dominant imaginaries. In other words, one needs to pay particular attention to global forces that are effectively imposing certain cultural traits over others through economic, cultural, political, and other forces inaugurated in the 40s and 50s and continuing through the 80 and 90s at various levels: international economic and financial institutions: IMF, WORLD BANK, GATT, WTO, etc.; international political institutions: United Nations and particularly the security council composition, as well as the international juridical order and the issue of ICC along with international law; communicational and information networks increasingly dominated by U.S. and US-style means of disseminating information (watering down and absence of situation or context), media (marketing and selling consumer goods and depicting fashion and image), and of goals and hopes and dreams (celebrity, rich and famous, highlighting individual achievement over communal one); educational under-achievement or the dumbing down of education reflected in the dumbing down of politics where the masses are sold "consumer goods" including sports and entertainment in order to let politics and the economy be governed by "specialists", thus watering down democracy to voting booths (where even that is manipulated directly and indirectly) and eradicating the notion of participatory democracy through the elimination of critical thought attributed to citizens who can take informed decisions and become part of a polity (the citizenry is expected to consume, shop, and let the specialists take care of everything)…

2) Aimé Césaire, in his Discourse on Colonialism, described a civilization that is built on the large-scale massacres of so-called "barbarians", a barbarism that will inevitably turn against itself. Nazi Germany and the horrors of WWII, according to Césaire were not accidental oddities: they were the inevitable outcome of the barbarism at the heart of a civilization that is not built on human values but on greed and exploitation. By criticizing relations of domination and submission inherent in colonialism and in neo-colonialism, by deploring the specialization and de-humanization (chosification or "thingification") inherent in industrial-capitalist societies, he was attacking the new barbarism at the heart of Western European civilization. But Césaire also points out that the barbarism of Western Europe is "far surpassed... by the barbarism of the United States." He proclaims: "The hour of the barbarian is at hand. The modern barbarian. The American hour. Violence, excess, waste, mercantilism, bluff, gregariousness, stupidity, vulgarity, disorder..." What he was concerned with is a new kind of domination: "American Domination--the only domination from which one never recovers. I mean from which one never recovers unscarred." (Césaire 1955).

Thirteen years before Discourse on Colonialism is completed, R. G. Collingwood was completing his The New Leviathan: or Man, Society, Civilization and Barbarism, where he expounds an understanding of "civilization" and "barbarism" where the first constituent of "civilization" is deemed to be"a system of conduct so determining the relations of members within a civilized community that each refrains from the use of force in his dealings with the rest" (Collingwood 1942, 292). Collingwood extends his analyses to dealings with members of other communities and considers it "barbaric" not to apply "civility" in treating foreigners or strangers but as long as they are recognized as "human" (294). He does acknowledge that "strangers (i.e. foreigners not sharing our communal home) are in fact often treated with the utmost uncivility; often, for example, murdered with impunity and a clear conscious even by people who enjoy a relatively high civilization" for, in that case, "all that is lacking is a conviction that strangers are human beings" (295). Thus, if we were to apply such an understanding to the colonial relation, or to the "international community" as constructed after the 1980s, what barbarism lacks is "the conviction that strangers are human beings." But "barbarism" is a bit more, for Collingwood, since it is "a process that accentuates the non-social, the non-voluntary, character of its life; hands itself over to the control of emotions which it has contemplated controlling but decided not to control" (307). The will to barbarism is described as "a will to do nothing" that entails the privileging of emotions over the allowance for an increased level of education--an education that is not professionalized and over-specialized, mind you (313)--and a marked contrast between rich and poor. Since people in a community are socialized, or civilized, in particular manners--associated with family, education, media, access to information, behavior, etc.--barbarism entails "to treat others in a servile spirit and produce in them a servile spirit towards oneself" (308). Thus rather than producing subjects that can join with others in doing something about the situation they find themselves in, as civilization should do (308), barbarism highlights a professionalized and over-specialized education in a world of office-drudges and factory-drudges that is "consuming its own capital of civilization" (313). Similarly, barbarism dwells on the existence of a contrast between rich and poor, "for it involves the constant use of one kind of force by the rich in all their dealings with the poor; economic force..." (324).

The barbarism described by Césaire and Collingwood is alive and well today, but in a new guise that we will call "new barbarism." Characteristics attributed by Collingwood to Barbarism--while he may have omitted "colonialism" from the list of 4 examples of barbarism that include Nazi Germany, one need not forget that he remains the child of his own colonial times and the reflection of its prejudices that are consciously or unconsciously repressed--are becoming increasingly attributable to entities, including countries, especially in the beginning of the 21st century. Let us list a few sentences from Collingwood’s section of "What Barbarism Is" that may shed a light on how recent U.S. demeanor could be described as associated with "New Barbarism."

"… the barbarist feels himself to be in one sense at least the intellectual superior o his enemy, and prides himself upon it." (346)

"In a military sense he thinks of himself as armed and equipped for aggression, and is proud of it; but in a psychological sense he thinks of himself as a peaceful, domestically minded eagle protecting himself against a sea of bloodthirsty dolphins; and prides himself on that, too.
This is not hypocrisy; he really does think of himself in both ways, inconsistent though they are... It is the eagle’s persecution-mania that drives him into prosecuting a hopeless war..."(349)

3) So far, we have approached "barbarism" as described by Césaire and Collingwood. What we are calling "new barbarism" is somewhere in between, but at the same time somewhere completely different. The new barbarism we are interested in exploring has a few characteristics: belief in superiority, self-righteousness, peaceful nature on the world scene while bullying other countries abroad and repressing its own population through terrorizing it (keeping fear and anxiety alive to better control and produce the “emotions’ of the masses) and producing scapegoats that are depicted as part of a threat; control of media and means of interpretation, directly or indirectly, and partly through the centralization of processes of education and decimating these processes; terrorizing and enticing its own population to "action" and being cautious in an atmosphere of "fear" perpetuated through the construction of a false sense of insecurity; disappearance of freedom and democracy by dismantling the possibility of producing subjects endowed with critical thinking and that can make informed choices and become active participants in politics (through the construction of "dumb and dumber" subjects in a consumer society that privileges "purchase power" and material achievement over ethical or political goals); manufacturing of "reality" and production of the world through control of the means of signification and interpretation (in the U.S., for example: war on terrorism as a campaign to terrorize the US population and manufacturing factors supportive of the policy of instilling fear and anxiety for political goals) . This could be a starting point for reflecting on "new barbarism".

2001

CASE STUDY OF REFLECTIVE SUBLIMATORY NIHILISM: ROLAND JACCARD

The following are extracts from Roland Jaccard's La Tentation Nihiliste (Presses Universitaires de France, 1989).

[...] And what if the right way was that of true nihilism? What if it was not only about rejecting all transcendence, about negating Satan as well as God? What if it was also, and especially, about the irony, the doubt, the impossibility of accepting one conception of the world, the incessant mobility of interpretations, the intimate and calm persuasion that existence has no meaning and is quite useless and unintelligible, and that for us, transient survivors, to finish here or farther is equally laughable.

[...] When metaphysics is reduced to language games, reason to silence, and philosophy to an impotence proudly proclaimed, we must admit (with Schopenhauer) that "if to preach morality is difficult, to give it an intellectual justification is impossible."…Maybe we will admit, then, that [...] the aspiration to save the world, a morbid practice par excellence, inescapably goes along with the rage to destroy it.. Art tends towards absence--speech thus finally takes leave from itself--and that is why it is the supreme luxury. The rest is not necessary--and that is most probably why we are so aggressively attached to it.

[...] It is a radical philosophy of desisting and deserting: it refuses to produce. It dreams of a planetary euthanasia. But it dreams of it with malice, as if it wanted still to measure the extent of the disaster. And it happens often that, facing this apocalyptic reverie, it explodes in a Homeric laughter: it would be too beautiful, for us ravings bugs, to finish once and for all.

[...] The big secret does not lie in the conspicuous utterance of Lacan: "there are no sexual relations," but in the fact that even someone in agony refuses to acknowledge that there is no sexual pleasure--or very little. And thus the fascination exercised by the eroticism of the other sex. But nobody gets off. In the past, we used to get off, of that we are certain; we will get off in the future, of that we promise ourselves. As for the present, it is pretty sad, and if we embrace our partner with such a violence, it is for want of strangling that partner. The most cynical of psychoanalysts affirms [...] that love consists of giving what we do not have to someone who does not want it.

[...] Groping about, everyone is looking for the illusion of getting off (Jouissance); it is pretty much like happiness: kids attribute it to adults, and adults attribute it to kids. "What is good about the happiness of others is that we believe in it," said Proust. But even when we stop believing in it, we do not give up on the idea that we are loved--be it by God or by one's dog. The majority of the base things we do comes from here:…Contempt, the temptation of vengeance, the will to humiliate induce and reinforce sexual excitement... A vindicative act of cruelty, fetishism, strips our partner of his/her human characteristics.

[...] When our orgasms become spasms of despair, we consent to reducing our pretences and to admitting that a successful marriage is one where both partners learn to become friends...… Initially, we dreamt of sharing everything and of getting rid of our demons and of our wretched solitude, but we found ourselves signing a pact of non-aggression with a stranger--who does not any longer even have the attraction of the stranger.

[...] To want children is to want to avenge oneself of one's past...…And it is for every couple a cure for despair. When life has cheated our expectations, when we have renounced on creating ourselves, when we feel that everything is fucked up, then, rather than checking in the morgue, we invite our family and relatives to a more sinister place--because it is more kitsch: the maternity ward.

[...] Nihilism starts where the will to cheat oneself stops. But without this will, we would not have drunkenness, art or love. So let us go about it "as if" .. and may the party begin!

CASE STUDY OF REACTIVE NIHILISM:

SERGEI NECAEV


Catechism of a revolutionary (1869)
By Sergei Necaev (in collaboration with Bakunin = b)

1. The revolutionary is a consecrated man. He has no interests on his own, no affairs, no feelings, no attachments, no belongings, not even a name. Everything in him is absorbed by a single exclusive intention, a single thought, a single passion – the revolution.

2. In the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken every tie with the civil order and the entire educated world, with all its laws, proprieties, social conventions and its ethical rules. He is an implacable enemy of this world, and if he continues to live in it, it is only to destroy it more effectively.

3. The revolutionary despises all doctrinairism and has rejected the peaceful sciences, leaving them to future generations. He knows only one science, the science of destruction. To this end, and to this end alone, he will study mechanics, physics, chemistry and perhaps medicine. To this end he will study day and night the living science of people, characters, situations and all the features of the present social order at all possible levels. His only goal is the swiftest and most certain destruction of this vile order. [b]

4. He despises public opinion. He despises and abhors the existing social ethic in all its manifestations and expressions. For him, everything is moral which assists the triumph of the revolution.

5. The revolutionary is a consecrated man. Merciless towards the state and towards the whole of the educated and privileged society, he must expect no mercy from them either. Between him and them there exists, secretly or openly, an unceasing and irreconcilable war of life and death. Every single day, he must be prepared to die. He must condition himself to endure torture.

6. Severe with himself, he must be severe with others. All tender and effeminate emotions of kinship, friendship, love, gratitude and even honor itself must be crushed in him by a single cold passion of the revolutionary cause. There exists for him only one delight, one consolation, one reward and one gratification –the success of the revolution. Night and day he must have only one thought, one aim –merciless destruction. Cold bloodedly and tirelessly pursuing this aim, he must always be prepared to die and to destroy with his own hands everything that hinders its achievement.

7. The nature of the true revolutionary excludes all romanticism, all sentimentality, rapture and enthusiasm. It even excludes personal hatred and vengeance. The revolutionary passion, which becomes his normal, constant state, must be combined with cold calculation. Always and everywhere he must not be what his personal inclinations prompt him to be, but what the general interest of the revolution prescribes.

8. The revolutionary considers one a friend and holds dear only a person who has shown himself in practice to be as much a revolutionary as he is. The extent of his friendship, devotion and other obligations towards his comrade is determined only by his degree of usefulness in the practical work of the all-destructive revolution.

9. The need for solidarity among revolutionaries is self-evident. In it lies the whole strength of revolutionary work. Revolutionary comrades of the same level of revolutionary understanding and passion must, as far as possible, discuss all important matters together and decide together unanimously. But by implementing a plan decided upon in this manner, each man must act for himself and have recourse to the advice and help of his comrades only when this is necessary for success. [b: questionable]

10. Each comrade would have under him several revolutionaries of the second and third categories, that is, comrades who are not completely initiated. He should regard them as portions of a common fund of revolutionary capital, placed at his disposal. He should expend his portion of the capital economically, always attempting to derive the utmost possible benefit from it. He should regard himself as capital consecrated for use in the triumph of the revolutionary cause, but as capital which he may not dispose of independently without the consent of the entire company of the fully initiated comrades.

11. When a comrade gets into trouble, the revolutionary, in deciding the question to rescue him or not, must not think in terms of his personal feelings but only of the good of the revolutionary cause. Therefore he must weigh, on the one hand, the usefulness of the comrade and on the other, the expenditure of revolutionary energy required for his deliverance, and must decide for the weightier side.

12. The admission into the society of a new member, who has proven himself, not by words but by deeds, may be decided upon only by unanimous agreement. [b]

13. The revolutionary enters the world of the state, of class and of so-called education and lives in it only because he has faith in its total and near destruction. He is not a revolutionary if he feels pity for anything in this world, if he hesitates before the destruction of a situation, of a relationship, or of some individual belonging to this world in which everyone and everything must be equally odious to him.

14. Aiming at merciless destruction, the revolutionary can and often even must live in society while pretending to be something quite other than what he is. The revolutionary must penetrate everywhere; all classes, the highest and middle classes, the merchants’ stores, the church, the homes of the nobility, the world of bureaucracy, the military, the literary world, the Third section and even the Winter Palace.

15. All of this foul society must be split up into several categories. The first category is condemned immediately to death. The society will compile a list of these condemned persons in order of the relative harm they may do to the success of the revolutionary cause, so that the first numbers are removed before the later ones.

16. In compiling these lists and deciding the order referred to above, the guiding principle must not be the individual’s personal acts of villainy, nor even the hatred he provokes among the society or the people. This villainy and hatred may sometime even be useful to a certain extent since they help to incite popular rebellion. The guiding principle must be the measure of benefit which must result from the person’s death for the revolutionary cause. Therefore, in the first instance, must be annihilated all those who are especially harmful to the revolutionary organization, and whose sudden and violent death will inspire the greatest fear in the government and, by depriving it of its cleverest and most energetic figures, will shatter its strength.

17. The second category must consist of those who are allowed to live temporarily so that through a series of their bestial crimes they may drive the people to inevitable revolt.

18. To the third category belongs a multitude of highest ranking cattle or persons distinguished neither for their particular intelligence nor for their energy, but who, because of their position, enjoy wealth, connections, influences, and power. They must be entangled and confused, and, when we have learned enough about their dirty secrets, we must make them our slaves. Their power, influence, connections, wealth and strengths thus become an inexhaustible treasurehouse and a powerful aid to various revolutionary undertakings.

19. The fourth category consists of politically ambitious persons and liberals of various shades. With them we can conspire according to their own programs, pretending that we are blindly following them while in fact we are taking control of them, and, having mastered all their secrets, compromising them to the utmost, so that it is impossible for them to turn back and they will cause disorder in the state.

20. The fifth category consists of doctrinaires, conspirators, revolutionaries in idly babbling circles or on paper. We must continually incite and force them into making violent declarations of practical intent, the result of which will be the destruction of the majority without a trace and the real revolutionary development of a few.

21. The sixth, and an important category is that of women, which must be divided into three main types. First, those empty-headed, thoughtless, vapid women whom we may use as we use the third and fourth categories of men. Second, women who are ardent, gifted and devoted but who are not ours because they have not yet achieved the phase of factual revolutionary understanding. We must use them like the men of the fifth category. Finally, the women who are ours completely, that is, who have been fully initiated and have accepted our program in its entirety. They are our comrades. We should regard these women as the most valuable of our treasures, whose assistance we cannot do without.

22. [lost; to find]

23. By popular revolution our brotherhood does not mean a regulated movement on the classical Western model –a movement which has always been stopped short by respect for property and for the traditions of social customs of so-called civilization and morality, which has until now always confined itself to the overthrow of one political structure merely to substitute it with another, and has striven thus to create the so-called revolutionary state. The only revolution that can save the people is one that eradicates all statism and exterminates all state traditions, customs, and classes in Russia. [b]

24. Therefore our society does not intend to impose on the people any organization from above. Any future organization will undoubtedly take shape through the movement and life of our people, but that is a task for future generations. Our task is terrible, total, universal, merciless destruction. [b]

25. Therefore, in drawing closer to the people, we must unite above all with those elements of the popular life, which, ever since the foundation of the state power of Muscovy, have never ceased to protest, not only in words, but in deeds, against everything directly or indirectly connected with the state: against the nobility, against the bureaucracy, against the priests, against the world of the [merchant] guilds, and against the kulak exploiters. But we shall unite with the valiant world of brigands, who are the only true revolutionaries in Russia, [b]

26. To unite this world into a single invincible, all-destroying force –this is our entire organization, conspiracy and task.

On Nihilism (a dumbed down approach)

Nihilism has a long history. The history of the word, as well as the history of what has been associated with the word. We are not interested here in tracing a history of the word or its signification. What we want to try to focus on is the ascription of the word to particular instances. First we want to ascribe this word to a variety of situations related to meaning. It is not the absence of meaning that we would like to call Nihilism. What we would like to call nihilism is being trapped in an emptiness (nihil) and the various attempts to deal with this entrapping. What kind of emptiness are we talking about? Not an emptiness of the existentialist kind or a physical emptiness: It is an emptiness related to goal and orientation in life (sens in French rather than meaning in English). What orientation? We are all conditioned in such a way that a goal or an orientation for our life is a ground for our engagement with life and with others. When this orientation lacks, or is reflected upon and rejected consciously or unconsciously, a certain emptiness emerges. It is an emptiness associated with dissatisfaction and could be related to a lack in psychoanalytic terms, but it cannot be reduced to that. While the impossibility of fulfilling desires, of attaining certain needs may create an emptiness, these particular instances are not what interested in exploring. We will be talking about the emptiness that does not come and go, but one that stays there and takes control of every aspects of our engagements, consciously or unconsciously.

Is this emptiness related to belief? It may be. When we talked earlier about goal and orientation in life, we did not elaborate on where these goals and orientations come from, or are presumed to come from. In most instances, goals or orientations are acquired through a socialization, acculturation, and subjectivization [conditioning] processes that carry both social-historical, or sociological dimensions and the psychological-phenomenological, or personal experiences. It is inevitable that these dimensions provide beliefs, not necessarily in the shape of ready-made belief systems, but in the guise of a complex set of beliefs and counter-beliefs rooted in daily engagements within a social-historical era. We believe in things, even though these beliefs are not necessarily condoned or sold to us by others, they are inevitably provided by these others. If particular beliefs are accepted by the overall society, the so-called individuals who build their goals according to them can fit in so-called society. If these particular beliefs are not condoned by the overall society, the individuals who built their goals according to them will either reform by suppressing these goals, successfully or not, or will turn psychotic, criminal, or sublimate these goals by projecting them unto other socially more acceptable goals. Actually, societies as a whole function this way as well, and why could not talk of a psychotic society, it is easy to understand what is meant by schizophrenic, violent, and/or entertainment-happy populace.

There are instances where the repression succeeds. Other instances where it fails. A certain discontent results from not being able to implement goals that have been produced within the sphere of licit or illicit social interactions. Sublimation and repression are the basic reactions to this dissatisfaction. Now at the social level, there are means of accommodating and integrating certain goals that are not widely acceptable: social change allows for this whenever social-historical institutions are due to adapt to the changes of its productions. Social-historical institutions adapt either peacefully or forcefully, through so called social revolutions. Nothing in revolutions is external to the social-historical course itself. It would be deluded to think that human beings can effectuate any changes that the social-historical conditions are not ready and set for, or even calling for. This reification of the social-historical will not be construed as such if the social-historical institutions are described as then sum total of human events and interpretations stratifying to the point before change: here, we are close to Diodorus KronosÂ’ affirmation of motion and possibility: nothing will happen differently than the way it happened, or more precisely, potentiality is realized possibility and nothing else. This is what is otherwise known as "contingency becoming necessity." Since history is written after the fact, it is tautological: nothing can be described differently from the way it is--even though we are not here addressing the question of communication and are assuming a perfect concordance between description and events which will prove to be an impossibility and an illusory subliminal creation.

Thus, no matter how much individuals struggle to change, change is not possible outside of the social-historical conditions, and whatever contributions of so-called individuals to the overall social-historical development is already embedded by what the social-historical has invested in this so-called individual. Let us change terminology. The individual should be called the multiple self and society should be called the social imaginary. There is no multiple self outside of the social imaginary. It is the social imaginary that gives all significations to the multiple self and the multiple self flourishes on that basis: even though the particular occurences or experiences that it endures are not shared by other multiple selves, they are still part of the social imaginary and embedded in it in a positive way. Let us imagine a large receptacle. The receptacle is filled with water and wine. Let us imagine a small receptacle that is thrown into the larger receptacle. That receptacle is also filled with water and wine. Assuming that water and wine mix and produce various concentrations, the concentrations in the main receptacle may differ from that of the small receptacle but the content is one and the same. Assuming that some bacterial life emerges in the various areas of the receptacle, some bacterial lives are different than others due to the particular concentrations enveloping them. What lives in the small receptacle is different than what lives outside it, but it is all made possible through and by the large receptacle. There is no way the small receptacle could be considered separately from the overall receptacle, as one cannot reduce the small receptacle to the larger one since it has certain differences that qualify it as unique, especially if there are multiple other receptacles within the large receptacle. The multiple self is that small receptacle within a larger receptacle that is the social imaginary. One cannot dissociate the two entirely, they are connected and the connection between the two is integral to defining each.

The emptiness that we talked about earlier is when the multiple self cannot breathe in the social imaginary. It is aware of its situation but cannot breathe, act, fulfill anything that can be construed as a goal or orientation. This emptiness results from a certain reflection, a self reflection on the goals and orientation and the beliefs grounding them. One form of suppressing this emptiness is by creating emptiness all around, a deluded attempt at destruction as if destruction would make a difference. One finds the emptiness overwhelming and either tries to disprove it by believing that something could be done, even if it is an attempt of spreading that emptiness, or sharing it. This is what exemplifies itself in literary and artistic creations, or in aphoristic or philosophical depictions of the state of the world in what claims to be an acute clarity stage of reflection. This is where we come back to nihilism.

The nihilism that we are talking about is of that kind of sublimation. It is not nihilism then if nihilism means or represents the emptiness described above. Nor is revolutionary action aiming at destruction and annihilation nihilism in other sense than the one described above: a sublimational activity attempting at evading the emptiness at issue.

We will not be addressing the question of emptiness then, but a different question, that of nihilism. Nihilism has a relatedness to this emptiness but a reactive one, if one may say so. Communication requires a set of conventional signs and symbols that are productive. They produce meanings. It seems that if anything could be said about the emptiness pointed to above is the groundlessness that takes away from any goal or orientation or any meaningful productivity. Writing, talking, communicating, destroying, all are activities that are, by and in themselves goals and orientations. How can they be compared to that emptiness that is defined as a lack of orientation and goal?

1997 - From Class notes on Nihilism