In August I will participate/co-facilitate the NYC conference on ‘fleeing as an act of non-passive political resistance’, organized by volunteers of The Public School. Fleeing, exodus, withdrawal, invisibility (as opposed to confrontation, protest, insurrection); in the scope of our conference, the genealogy of thought begins with Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, and later Paolo Virno, though of course many people contributed to, lived, this topic avant-la-lettre. Here is one of the prompt excerpts which we will use as a point of departure for the sessions:
The Italian/French legacy of the exodus, even if it no longer allows dreaming of a completely different outside, is not at all to be understood as harmless, individualist, or escapist-esoteric. “There is nothing more active than a flight!” as Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet wrote in the 1970s, and as Virno repeats almost literally in 2001: “Nothing is less passive than the act of fleeing, of exiting.” What this form of innovation-as-exit involves is a dangerous, positive form of defection, a fleeing that enables one to look for a weapon as one goes. Instead of presupposing relationships of domination as an immovable horizon and yet still fighting against them, this flight changes the conditions under which the presupposition occurs. The exodus transforms the context in which a problem has emerged, instead of treating the problem by deciding between given alternatives. As joke and as innovative action, exodus—the nonpassive, nondialectical, nonindividualist form of defection—opens up a side road, uncharted on political maps, “to modify the very ‘grammar’ which determines the selection of all possible choices.”
From Modifying the Grammar. Paolo Virno’s Works on Virtuosity and Exodus
by Gerald Raunig and translated by Aileen Derieg
[First published in Artforum January 2008]
In mid July it occurred to me that the scope of the discussion needed some articulation, so I wrote an admittedly hastily executed remark about the scope of the ‘fleeing’ we were to be discussing:
July 17
Someone took issue with the casualness with which I seemed to lump together, commensurate matter-of-factly, homelessness and suicide with other individualistic forms of turning away, of which there are more than I can think of if we wish to be expansive in our definition. I agree, there’s no negligible difference there whatsoever, but here was my defense:
July 22
To preface, I want to upgrade our conception of the implications of an act like ‘moving to Berlin to be an artist’, or ‘going to live in Ibitha’, rather than downplay the seriousness of suicide, or imply that homelessness is usually a happily, freely made choice.
Perhaps I was too hasty in lumping them together without articulation in between, and I would be ready to agree that on the face, suicide and homelessness seem to belong to a different strain of ‘fleeing’, if they can be categorized that way at all. But I do not think they are incommensurable with the other escapes I listed; suicide, as an escape from the harsh realities of the Universe, as well a response to the failings of the human project, is well established territory in philosophy, especially in the tradition of antinatalism (stop having children, effectively species suicide), and misotheism, from Durkheim, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Schirmacher, Hume, Appel, Crawford, and others. Suicide in real life is still widely understood as taboo, as accident, as tragedy (which it is), but I would not shy away from implying that everyone, even the mentally unstable, bring to suicide a personal ethics (not in the sense of what ought I to do, but in the posthumanist sense of what can I do?); is suicide also not somehow a fleeing from the world, a turning inward or otherward? The obvious rebuttal, “but then your dead” is too anthropocentric for my tastes.
Homelessness I would be more willing to agree I erred with. But, for example, I was recently told by a medical anthropologist that 3/4 of the homeless people in the US are gay teenagers; their running away from bad homes, abusive or non-present parents must be brought into a comprehensive discussion of fleeing as non-passive resistance, in this case (in the U.S.) a critique of the indoctrinated Christian notions of the family and home. I also think of the West Coast and Northern span railroad culture of homelessness going back to the Depression but possessing its own developed, autonomous, non-state governed ethics; I am reading William Vollmann’s ‘Riding Toward Everywhere’ on the subject and of how the train riding hobos eventually come to view their space as privileged over that of mere ‘citizens’.
I’ll stop there for now since I need to think about this more, but I’ll also add willful ignorance to my list; e.e. cummings once wrote, kisses are a far better fate than wisdom, and every thinking person knows what he meant.
These remarks just touch the surface and I need to spend a lot of time considering them further, but the sessions should be fruitful in this way. The first will be on August 4, and the primary text will consist of excerpts from Tiqqun’s Introduction To Civil War, recently published by MIT Press for Semitotext(e).
Some visual associations:
Gigi Scaria
Cosmia von Bonin
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