In Art and Revolution: Transversal Activism in the Long Twentieth Century, Gerald Raunig (2007) writes on the relationship between the artistic avant-garde and activism. His work provides a useful phenomenological account of the relation between art and political mobilization in the twentieth century, but it fails to grasp the absolute specificity of the current situation, that is, the crisis and exhaustion of all activism.
The term “activism” became largely influential as a result of the antiglobalization movement, which used it to describe its political communication and the connection between art and communicative action. However, this definition is a mark of its attachment to the past and its inability to free itself from the conceptual frame of reference it inherited from the twentieth century. Should we not free ourselves from the thirst for activism that led the twentieth century to the point of catastrophe and war? Shouldn’t we set ourselves free from the repeated and failed attempt to act for the liberation of human energies from the rule of capital? Isn’t the path toward the autonomy of the social from economic and military mobilization only possible through a withdrawal into inactivity, silence, and passive sabotage?
I believe that there is a profound relationship between the drive to activism and male depression in late modernity, which is most evident in the voluntarist and subjectivist organization of Leninism. Both from the standpoint of the history of the workers’ movement in the 1900s and from that of the strategic autonomy of society from capital, I’m convinced that the twentieth century would have been a better century had Lenin not existed. Lenin’s vision interprets a deep trend in the configuration of the psyche of modern masculinity. Male narcissism was confronted with the infinite power of capital and emerged from it frustrated, humiliated, and depressed. It seems to me that Lenin’s depression is a crucial element for understanding the role his thought played in the development of the politics of late modernity.
I have read Hélène Carrère D’Encausse’s biography of Lenin. The author is a researcher of Georgian descent, who also published L’Empire éclaté, where she foresaw the collapse of the Soviet empire as an effect of the insurgence of Islamic fundamentalism. What interested me in Carrère D’Encausse’s biography of Lenin, more than the history of Lenin’s political activity, was his personal life, his fragile psyche, and his affectionate and intellectual relationships with the women close to him: his mother, his sister, Krupskaia, comrade and wife, who looked after him at times of acute psychological crises, and, finally, Inessa Armand, the perturbing, the unheimlich, the lover whom Lenin cut out, along with symphonic music, for softening his character.
The psyche described in this biography is framed by depression, and Lenin’s most acute crises coincided with important political shifts in the revolutionary movement. As Carrère D’Encausse writes:
Lenin used to invest everything he did with perseverance, tenaciousness and an exceptional concentration: such consistency, which he thought necessary in each of his efforts, put him in a position of great superiority over the people around him […]. This feature of his character often had negative effects. Exceedingly intensive efforts would tire him and wear down his already fragile nervous system. The first crisis dates back to 1902. (Carrère D’Encausse 1998, 78)
These were the years of the Bolshevik turn, of What Is to Be Done? Krupskaia played a fundamental role in her comrade’s crisis: she intervened to filter his relations with the outside world, paid for his therapy and isolation in clinics in Switzerland and Finland. Lenin emerged from the 1902 crisis by writing What Is to Be Done? and engaging in the construction of a “nucleus of steel,” a block of will capable of breaking the weakest link in the (imperialist) chain. The second crisis came in 1914 at the height of the break up of the Second International and the split of the Communists. The third crisis, as you might guess, occurred in the spring of 1917. Krupskaia found a safe resort in Finland, where Lenin conceived The April Theses and decided to impose will on intelligence: a rupture that disregarded the deep dynamics of class struggle and forced onto them an external design. Intelligence is depressive, therefore, will is the only cure for the abyss: ignore but do not remove it. The abyss remained and subsequent years did not simply uncover it: the century slipped into it.
I don’t intend to discuss the politics of Lenin’s fundamental choices. I’m interested in pointing out a relationship between Bolshevik voluntarism and the male inability to accept depression and transform it from within. Here lies the root of the subjectivist voluntarism that crippled social autonomy in the 1900s. Leninism’s intellectual decisions were so powerful because they papered over depression with an obsessive male voluntarism.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century, the long history of the artistic avant-garde was over. Beginning with Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk and resulting in the Dadaist cry to “Abolish art, abolish everyday life, abolish the separation between art and everyday life,” the history of the avant-garde culminates in the gesture of 9/11. Stockhausen had the courage to say this, although many of us were thinking the same: it was the consumate work of art of the century with no future. The fusion of art and life (or death, what difference does it make?) is clearly visible in a form of action we might call “terrorizing suicide.” Let us take Pekka-Eric Auvinen as an example. The Finnish youngster turned up at his school with a machine gun, killing eight people, himself included. Printed on his T-shirt was the sentence: “Humanity is overrated.” Wasn’t his gesture pregnant with signs typical of the communicative action of the arts?
Let me explain: I’m not inviting the young readers of this book to go to a crowded place with an explosive belt. I’m trying to say, pay attention: a gigantic wave of desperation could soon turn into a suicidal epidemic that will turn the first connective generation into a devastating psychic bomb.
I don’t think this wave of suicides can be explained in terms of morality, family values, and the weak discourse conservative thought uses to account for the ethical drift produced by capitalism. To understand our contemporary form of ethical shipwreck, we need to reflect on the transformations of activity and labor, the subsumption of mental time under the competitive realm of productivity; we have to understand the mutation of the cognitive and psychosocial system.
The context of my understanding of present historical and cultural dynamics is the transition from a realm of conjunction to one of connection, with a special focus on the emergence of the first connective generation, those who learn more words from a machine than a mother. In this transition, a mutation of the conscious organism is taking place: to render this organism compatible with a connective environment, our cognitive system needs to be reformatted. This appears to generate a dulling of the faculties of conjunction that had hitherto characterized the human condition.
The realm of sensibility is involved in this ongoing process of cognitive reformatting. Aesthetic, ethical, and political thought is reshaping its observational standpoint and framework around the passage from a conjunctive to a connective form of human concatenation.
Conjunction is becoming-other. In contrast, in connection each element remains distinct and interacts only functionally. Singularities change when they conjoin; they become something other than they were before their conjunction. Love changes the lover and a combination of a-signifying signs gives rise to the emergence of a meaning that hadn’t existed prior to it. Rather than a fusion of segments, connection entails a simple effect of machinic functionality. In order to connect, segments must be compatible and open to interfacing and interoperability. Connection requires these segments to be linguistically compatible. In fact the digital web spreads and expands by progressively reducing more and more elements to a format, a standard and a code that make different segments compatible.
The segments that enter this rhizome belong to different realms of nature: they are electronic, semiotic, machinic, biological, and psychic; fibre optic circuits, mathematical abstractions, electromagnetic waves, human eyes, neurons,