The Two Faces of the Present
One cannot enter twice into the same river—Heracleitus
What’s new? There’s Clio—A Renault advertisement
The totalitarian
dream of power is to make us bathe not twice, but thousands of times in the
same river. The governors of time want to force us to survive within the walls
of an eternal present – the social measurement of a continuous and collective
deferment of life to the future.
What happened
today? The images of products on advertisements changed. Some different faces
appeared on television and an identical commentary gathered facts in a
different order. A statesman disappeared into the void that is absence in the
news after forty years in government. For forty years, it was a difficult
enterprise not to come across his name at least once a day – now he has become
a perfect Carneade. What happened today?
Capital has
managed to make almost all the activity of individuals nearly identical day
after day. The way in which they dream of doing something different (the career, the unexpected prize, fame, love) is also identical.
But bodies, though malnourished and atrophied, are different from each other
and from themselves from one moment to the next. Everything that has happened
can even be reconstructed and rewritten (“one never knows what the past
reserves for us” as a worker under the Stalinist regime commented), but bodies
are not recuperated, not yet.
Power has made
recycling, in all senses, its proper practice and ideology. The science of
transplants – which an effective euphemism calls “the frontiers of medicine” –
has been working for some time so that the exchange of parts insures an
ever-longer survival to the social machine that is the human body. Like all the
other property of the state domain, individual existence obeys only one
imperative: to endure. For anyone who produces (automobiles or rights,
resignation or false critiques, it matters little), domination is quick to
replace an arm, a liver, a heart. In the name of progress any organ of anyone
who is no longer of service can be easily sacrificed. On the other hand, as a
doctor favorable to transplants said, “If someone is clinically dead, why waste
all that good stuff?”
Human beings whose opinions are interchangeable, just like the
performances carried out during work and “free time”, must have the bodies they
deserve. This serial world wants everything to be in its image and likeness.
Only religion is
left to talk of tomorrow (ideologies, as is well known, are all dead). Capital,
however, speaks of today, speaks of that which must be bought and sold now. But
at bottom they say the same thing. The first distances happiness, the second
brings misery close. For both, the future is the thing that is always the same,
for which one sacrifices the previous day that becomes the present. The next
day, one starts again.
What happened
today?
Living beyond laws that enslave, beyond
narrow rules, even beyond theories formulated for the generations to come. Living without believing
in earthly paradise. Living for the present hour
beyond the mirage of future societies. Living and
feeling existence in the fierce pleasure of social battle. It is more
than a state of mind: it is a way of being, and immediately. —Zo d’AxA
Quick —graffiti from May
’68 in
The struggle
against oppression is merely the indispensable minimum of an insurrection that
wants to lay hold of life. It is now that one plays the game, not tomorrow or
the day after. Our lives are much too short and there have never been so many
kings’ heads to chop off.
The unsuccessful
realization of militance has produced its wretched counter-image everywhere.
There is no longer anyone speaking of the duties to the Cause and promising the
future society. All are for the “here and now”, quick to accuse every
discussion and every practice that does not guarantee the security of the known
and approved here and now of martyrdom and messianism. On sale today is
militance in its most laicized version: realism.
To those who talk
of wanting to enjoy life without concerning themselves over the oppressors, one
can only respond in one way: by watching how they live. One will discover how
much they accept the way the oppressors concern themselves over them.
The one who does
not hide the limits and impositions by which she is constrained knows that,
beyond empty proclamations, one can be outside of that which exists only to the
extent to which she is against it. Really because he wants much more, he
launches herself into the struggle.
When she lacks the
strength, he has no need of an ideology of pleasure to disguise his weakness
and fear. They exist and are part of the game as well, like love and hatred,
relationships torn away from exchange value and actions that spit in the face
of the order of passivity.
My ideas, my
activity and my body are not those of yesterday, nor of everyone – so she desires to think and feel. Today something happened.
Each day he must release her own unique perfume from
the impersonality – now secretly, now with the roar of the tempest. Then one
can speak of tomorrow as well. As it is currently written for us, there is only
slavery behind the imperative: Attend to the future.
In a time that is
always the same, the rulers of survival want to impose their measure on each
and all. The immeasurability of our demands is the only true necessity of a
change much more than necessary, and that is to say, possible.
Today something
happened.
—Massimo Passamani