liqqun and the Matter of Bloom in Contemporary Political Philosophy Pedro Jose Mariblanca Corrales Tiqquann dt heM attoefrB looimn ContemporPaorlyi tPihciallo sophy PedrJoo seM ariblaCnocrar ales 2015 licensed under creative commons ccreative �commons Repartee Berkeley, CA LBCbooks.com Published by Aragorn Moser Layout by Leona Benton Printed at "The Compound" 1818 Carleton St. Berkeley, CA 94703-1908 frontisbpyiS eacnet iaLgoob osC,on templaci6n To all those who have contributed in one way or another to the writing of this book. To all those who decided to share time with me and my "bullshit." To my grassroots and all the territories where I have learned anything. To the magic of this world that takes care of us despite our behaviour with it. Introduction 1 What has given rise to Bloom? 12 1.1 On the economy as a black magic 13 1.2 Dispositifs 19 1.3 The Spectacle 27 1.4 Biopower 35 1.5 The habitat of Bloom: Empire 39 1. 5. 1 Metropolis 44 1.5.2 Cybernetics 47 1. 5.3 The Terrible Community 52 1.6 Insurrections and communes against Empire 58 1. 6. 1 Insurrections in the civil war 58 1. 6. 2 Some problems related to insurrections 66 1. 6.3 Communization 69 1. 6. 4 The handicaps ef communes 75 2 Eh bien, le Bloom 79 2.1.The Bloom's dark side 79 2.2. The other side of Bloom 85 2.3. Nevertheless... 89 3 Tiqqun 93 3.1 Why should we take Tiqqun into account? 6 9 3.2 But . 100 . . 3.2. 1 The truth and avant-gardism 101 3.2.2 On dystopia and utopia 104 3.2.3 On negation, silence, opacity 106 Conclusion 108 Bibliography 114 Introduction If today, in the age of Bloom, there is in fact a generalized crisis of presence, this is simply due to the ubiquity of the economy in crisis: the WEST'S MODERN HEGEMONIC ECONOMY OF CON­ STANT PRESENCE. An economy characterized by the negation of the mere possibility of its crisis through the use of the classical subject-master and measure of all things-as a menace in order to keep things in line. Bloom historically marks the end of the socio-magic effectiveness of this kind of blackmail, of this fairytale. The horizon of hu­ man existence once again comprises the crisis of presence, although THEY do not respond to it in the same way as in the traditional world, although THEY do not recognize the crisis as such. A critical metaphysics could emerge as a science of apparatuses ... Tiqqun According to Tiqqun-a philosophical and activist anonymous collective of France that was born in the late 1990s, disbanded in 2001, gave rise to other groups such as Claire Fontaine, and came back in 2007 under the name of Comite Invisible-the contemporary moment that the populations of the Western World are generally living is a historical moment marked by what seems to be a total crisis in every respect. For Tiqqun, the coming together of a series of ele­ ments such as post-Fordism (as the best produc­ tive/creative economical paradigm), globalization (as the best market for the whole world), social democracy (as the best political mechanism to solve the problems between multiplicities), and the complete interconnection between the Fou­ cauldian biopower and the Debordian Spectacle have given rise to a new context that has empow­ ered the previous one. Tiqqun asserts that this context-in which capitalism has been improved by cybernetics-is the context of Empire, and what the Tiqqun calls Bloom is its most represen­ tative form-of-life. The current cultural, social, political, and economic situation in the Western world is the 2 result of a historical transition that has been ana­ lyzed by many of the most influential social, criti­ cal, and political theorists and schools of thought: thinkers such as Nietzsche, Marx, De Martino, the Frankfurt School, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, Negri, Agamben. The work of all of them has been crucial to create a corpus that helps us to understand the reason of our economic, so­ cial, political, and cultural present. Tiqqun has in­ tellectual roots in some of the Marxian theories; part of the Frankfurt's School work; Nietzsche's and Heidegger's critiques of metaphysics and Mo­ dernity; situationism (with Debord and the Specta­ cle as its best representatives); the structuralist in­ fluence of Althusser and Foucault; several of the poststructuralist ideas of Deleuze, Guattari, Agam­ ben, and Negri and Ranciere (among other influ­ ences). Nevertheless, although these theories re­ main important to study what the nature of capitalism is, how it works, and its results, most of them belong to a different context, which is simi­ lar to hut also quite different from this one. For this reason, Tiqqun delves deeply into this theo­ retical genealogy to develop its own theories about contemporary capitalism in the Western world. The group does this by inserting itself in a 3