FISCAL YEAR 2011 AND THEREAFTER.—Beginning on October 1, 2010, for the purposes of section 6(o) of the Food and Nutrition Act of 2008 (7 U.S.C. 2015(o)), a State agency shall disregard any period during which an individual received benefits under the supplemental nutrition assistance program prior to October 1, 2010. (f) FUNDING.—There are ap- propriated to the Secretary out of funds of the Treasury not otherwise appropriated such sums as are necessary to carry out this section. SEC. 102. AGRICULTURAL DISASTER ASSISTANCE TRANSITION. (a) FEDERAL CROP INSURANCE ACT. Section 531(g) of the Federal Crop Insurance Act (7 U.S.C. 1531(g)) is amended by adding at the end the fol- lowing: ‘‘(7) 2008 TRANSITION ASSISTANCE.— ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—Eligible producers on a farm described in subparagraph (A) of paragraph (4) that failed to timely pay the ap- propriate fee described in that subparagraph shall be eligible for assistance under this section —in accordance with subparagraph (B) if the eligible producers on the farm— ‘‘(i) pay the appropriate fee described in paragraph (4)(A) not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this paragraph; and ‘‘(ii)(I) in the case of each insurable commodity of the eli- gible producers on the farm, excluding grazing land, agree to obtain a policy or plan of insurance under subtitle A (excluding a crop insurance pilot program under that subtitle) for the WHAT’S MAKING IT HAPPEN? next insurance year for which crop insurance is available to the eligible producers on the farm at a level of coverage equal to 70 percent or more of the recorded or appraised average yield indemnified at 100 percent of the expected market price, or an equivalent coverage; and ‘‘(II) in the case of each noninsurable commodity of the eligible producers on the farm, agree to file the required paperwork, and pay the administrative fee by the applicable State filing deadline, for the non-insured crop assistance program for the next year for which a WHAT THE HELL DIFFERENCE DOES IT policy is available. ‘‘(B) AMOUNT OF ASSISTANCE.—Eligible producers on a farm that meet the requirements of subparagraph (A) shall be eligible to receive assistance under this section as if the eligible producers on the farm— ‘‘(i) in the case of each insurable commodity of the eligible producers on the farm, had obtained a policy or plan of insurance for the 2008 crop year at a level of coverage not to exceed 70 percent or more of the recorded or appraised average yield indemnified at 100 percent of the expected market price, or an MAKE, WHAT’S MAKING IT HAPPEN. equivalent coverage; and ‘‘(ii) in the case of each noninsurable commodity of the eligible producers on the farm, had filed the required paperwork, and paid the administrative fee by the applicable State filing deadline, for the non-insured crop assistance program for the 2008 crop year, except that in determining the level of coverage, the Secretary shall use 70 percent of the applicable yield. ‘‘(C) EQUITABLE RELIEF.—Except as provided in subparagraph (D), eligible producers on a farm that met the requirements of paragraph (1) before the deadline described in paragraph (4)(A) and are eligible to receive, a disaster assistance payment under this section for a production loss during the 2008 crop year shall be eli- gible to receive an amount equal to the greater of— ‘‘(i) the amount that would have been calculated under subparagraph (B) if the eligible producers on the farm had paid the ap- propriate fee under that subparagraph; or ‘‘(ii) the amount that would have been calculated under subparagraph (A) of subsection (b)(3) if— ‘‘(I) in clause (i) of that subparagraph, ‘percent’ is substituted for ‘115 percent’; and ‘‘(II) in clause (ii) of that subparagraph, ‘125’ is substituted for ‘120 percent’. —‘‘(D) LIMITATION.—For amounts made available under this paragraph, the Secretary may make such adjustments as are necessary to ensure that no producer receives a payment under this paragraph for an amount in excess of the assistance received by a similarly situated producer that had purchased the same or higher level of crop insurance prior to the date of enactment of this paragraph. ‘‘(E) AUTHORITY OF THE SECRETARY.—The Secretary may provide such additional assistance as the Secretary considers appropriate to provide equitable treatment for eligible producers on a farm that suffered production losses in the 2008 crop year that result in multiyear production losses, as determined by the Secretary. ‘‘(F) LACK OF ACCESS.—Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, the Secretary may provide assistance under this section to eligible producers on a farm that— ‘‘(i) suffered a production loss due to a natural cause during the 2008 crop year; and ‘‘(ii) as determined by the Secretary— ‘‘(I)(aa) except as provided in item (bb), lack access to a policy or plan of insurance under subtitle A; or ‘‘(bb) do not qualify for a written agreement because 1 or more farming practices, which the Secretary has determined are good farming practices, of the eligible producers on the farm differ sig- nificantly from the farming practices used by producers of the same crop in other regions of the United States; and ‘‘(II) are not eligible for the noninsured crop disaster assistance program established by section of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (7 U.S.C. 7333).’’. (b) TRADE ACT OF 1974.—Section 901(g) of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. 2497(g)) is amended by adding at the end the following: ‘‘(7) 2008 TRANSITION ASSISTANCE.— ‘‘(A) IN GENERAL.—Eligible producers on a farm described in subpara- graph (A) of paragraph (4) that failed to timely pay the appropriate fee described in that subparagraph shall be eligible for assistance under this section in accordance with subpara- graph (B) if the eligible producers on the farm— ‘‘(i) pay the appropriate fee described in paragraph (4)(A) not later than 90 days after the date of enactment of this paragraph; and ‘‘(ii)(I) in the case of each insurable commodity of the eligible producers on the farm, excluding grazing land, agree to obtain a policy or plan of insurance under the Federal Crop Insur- ance Act (7 U.S.C. 150et seq.) (excluding a crop insurance pilot program under that Act) for the next insurance year for which crop insurance is available to the eligible producers on the farm at a level of coverage equal to 70 percent or more of the recorded or appraised average yield —indemnified at 100 percent of the expected market price, or an equivalent coverage; and ‘‘(II) in the case of each noninsurable commodity of the eligible producers on the farm, agree to file the required paperwork, and pay the administrative fee by the ap- plicable State filing deadline, for the non-insured crop assistance program for the next year for which a policy is available. ‘‘(B) AMOUNT OF ASSISTANCE.—Eligible producers on a farm that meet the requirements of subparagraph (A) shall be eligible to receive assistance under this section as if the eligible producers on the farm— ‘‘(i) in the case of each insur- able commodity of the eligible producers on the farm, had obtained a policy or plan of insurance for the 2008 crop year at a level of coverage not to exceed 70 percent or more of the recorded or appraised average yield indemnified at 100 percent of the expected market price, or an equivalent coverage; and ‘‘(ii) in the case of each noninsurable commodity of the eligible producers on the farm, had filed the required paperwork, and paid the administrative fee by the applicable State filing deadline, for the non-insured crop assistance program for the 2008 crop year, except that in determining the level of coverage, the Secretary shall use 70 percent of the applicable yield. ‘‘(C) EQUITABLE RELIEF.—Except as provided in subparagraph (D), eligible producers on a farm that met the requirements of paragraph (1) before the deadline described in paragraph (4)(A) and are eligible to receive, a disaster assistance payment under this section for a production loss during the 2008 crop year shall be eligible to receive an amount equal to the greater of— ‘‘(i) the amount that would have been calculated under subparagraph (B) if the eligible producers on the farm had paid the appropriate fee under that subparagraph; or ‘‘(ii) the amount that would have been calcu- lated under subparagraph (A) of subsection (b)(3) if— ‘‘(I) in clause (i) of that subparagraph, ‘percent’ is substituted for ‘115 percent’; and ‘‘(II) in clause (ii) of that subparagraph, ‘125’ is substituted for ‘120 percent’. ‘‘(D) LIMITATION.—For amounts made available under this paragraph, the Secretary may make such adjustments as are necessary to ensure that no producer receives a payment under this paragraph for an amount in excess of the assistance received by a similarly situated producer that had purchased the same or higher level of crop insurance prior to the date of enactment of this paragraph. ‘‘(E) AUTHORITY OF THE SECRETARY.—The Secretary may provide such additional assistance as the Secretary considers appropriate to provide equitable treatment for eligible producers on a farm that suffered production losses in the 2008 crop year that result in multiyear production losses, as determined by the Secretary. —‘‘(F) LACK OF ACCESS.—Notwithstanding any other provision of this section, the Secretary may provide assistance under this section to eligible producers on a farm that— ‘‘(i) suffered a production loss due to a natural cause during the 2008 crop year; and ‘‘(ii) as determined by the Secretary— ‘‘(I)(aa) except as provided in item (bb), lack access to a policy or plan of insurance under subtitle A; or ‘‘(bb) do not qualify for a written agreement because 1 or more farming practices, which the Secretary has determined are good farming practices, of the eligible producers on the farm differ significantly from the farming practices used by producers of the same crop in other regions of the United States; and ‘‘(II) are not eligible for the noninsured crop disaster assistance program established by section of the Federal Agriculture Improvement and Reform Act of 1996 (7 U.S.C. 7333).’’. (c) FARM OPERATING LOANS.— (1) IN GENERAL.—For the principal amount of direct farm operating loans under section 311 of the Consolidated Farm and Rural Development Act (7 U.S.C. 1941), $173,367,000. (2) DIRECT FARM OPERATING LOANS.—For the cost of direct farm operating loans, including the cost of modifying loans, as defined in section 502 of the Congressional Budget Act of 1974 (2 U.S.C. 661a), $20,440,000. (d) 2008 AQUACULTURE ASSISTANCE.— (1) DEFINITIONS.—In this subsection: (A) ELIGIBLE AQUACULTURE PRODUCER.—The term ‘‘eligible aquaculture producer’’ means an aquaculture producer that during the 2008 calendar year, as determined by the Sec- retary— (i) produced an aquaculture species for which feed costs represented a substantial percentage of the input costs of the aquaculture operation; and (ii) experienced a sub- stantial price increase of feed costs above the previous 5-year average. (B) SECRETARY.—The term ‘‘Secretary’’ means the Secretary of Agriculture. (2) GRANT PROGRAM.— (A) IN GENERAL.—Of the funds of the Commodity Credit Corporation, the Secretary shall use not more than $50,000,000, to remain available until September 30, 2010, to carry out a program of grants to States to assist eligible aquaculture producers for losses associated with high feed input costs during the 2008 calendar year. (B) NOTIFICATION.—Not later than 60 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall notify the State department of agriculture (or similar entity) in each State of the availability of funds to assist eligible aquaculture producers, including such terms as determined by the Secretary to be necessary for the equitable treatment of eligible aquaculture producers. (C) PROVISION OF GRANTS.— —(i) IN GENERAL.—The Secretary shall make grants to States under this subsection on a pro rata basis based on the amount of aquaculture feed used in each State during the 2007 calendar year, as determined by the Secretary. (ii) TIMING.—Not later than 120 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall make grants to States to provide assistance under this subsection. (D) REQUIREMENTS.—The Secretary shall make grants under this subsection only to States that demonstrate to the satisfaction THIS SITUATION IS CONTROLLABLE. of the Secretary that the State will— (i) use grant funds to assist eligible aquaculture producers; (ii) provide assistance to eligible aquaculture producers not later than 60 days after the date on which the State receives grant funds; and (iii) not later than 30 days after the date on which the State provides assistance to eligible aquaculture producers, submit to the Secretary a report that describes— (I) the manner in which the State provided assistance; (II) the amounts of assistance provided per species of aquaculture; and (III) the process by which the State determined the levels of assistance to eligible aquaculture producers. (3) REDUCTION IN PAYMENTS.—An eligible aquaculture producer that receives assistance under this subsection shall not be eligible to receive any other assistance under the supplemental agricultural disaster assistance program established under section 531 of the PEOPLE MUST COME TO GRIPS WITH THIS CONCEPT. Federal Crop Insurance Act (7 U.S.C. 1531) and section 901 of the Trade Act of 1974 (19 U.S.C. 2497) for any losses in 2008 relating to the same species of aquaculture. (4) REPORT TO CONGRESS.—Not later than 180 days after the date of enactment of this Act, the Secretary shall submit to the appropriate committees of Congress a report that— (A) describes in detail the manner in which this subsection has been carried out; and (B) includes the information reported to the Secretary under paragraph (2)(D)(iii). SEC. 103. For fiscal years 2009 and 2010, in the case of each program established or amended by the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 (Public Law 110–246), other than by title I of such Act, that is authorized or required to be carried out using funds of the Commodity Credit Corporation— (1) such funds shall be available for the purpose of covering salaries and related ad- ministrative expenses, including technical assistance, associated with the implementation of the program, without regard to the limitation on the total amount of allotments and fund transfers contained in section 11 of the Commodity Credit Corporation Charter Act (15 U.S.C. 714i); and (2) the use of such funds for such purpose shall not be considered to be a fund transfer or allotment for purposes —of applying the limitation on the total amount of allotments and fund transfers contained in such section. SEC. 104. In addition to other avail- able funds, of the funds made available to the Rural Development mission area in this title, not more than 3 percent of the funds can be used for administrative costs to carry out loan, loan guarantee and grant activities funded in this title, which shall be transferred to and merged with the appropriation for ‘‘Rural Development, Salaries and Expenses’’: Provided, That of this amount $1,750,000 shall be committed to agency projects associated with maintaining the compliance, safety, and soundness of the portfolio of loans guaranteed through the section 502 guaranteed loan program. SEC. 105. Of the amounts appropriated in this title to the ‘‘Rural Housing Service, Rural Community Facilities Program Account’’, the ‘‘Rural Business-Cooperative Service, Rural Business Program Account’’, and the .Rural Utilities Service, Rural Water and Waste Disposal Program Account’’, at least 10 percent shall be allocated for assistance in persistent poverty counties: Provided, That for the purposes of this section, the term ‘‘persistent poverty counties’’ means any county that has had 20 percent or more of its population living in poverty over the past 30 years, as measured by the 1980, 1990, and 2000 decennial censuses. TITLE II—COMMERCE, JUSTICE, SCI- ENCE, AND RELATED AGENCIES DEPARTMENT OF COMMERCE ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ADMINISTRATION ECONOMIC DEVELOPMENT ASSISTANCE PROGRAMS For an additional amount for ‘‘Economic Development Assistance Programs’’, $150,000,000: Provided, That $50,000,000 shall be for economic adjustment assistance as authorized by section of the Public Works and Economic Development Act of 1965, as amended (42 U.S.C. 3149): Provided further, That in allocating the funds provided in the previous proviso, the Secretary of Commerce shall give priority consideration to areas of the Nation that have experienced sudden and severe economic dislocation and job loss due to corporate re- structuring: Provided further, That not to exceed 2 percent of the funds provided under this heading may be transferred to and merged with the appropriation for ‘‘Salaries and Ex- penses’’ for purposes of program administration and oversight: Provided further, That up to $50,000,000 of the funds provided under this heading may be transferred to federally authorized regional economic development commissions. BUREAU OF THE CENSUS PERIODIC CENSUSES AND PROGRAMS For an additional amount for ‘‘Periodic Censuses and Programs’’, —of applying the limitation on the total amount of allotments and fund transfers contained in such section. SEC. 104. In addition to other available funds, of the funds made available to the Rural Development mission area in this title, not more than 3 percent of the funds can be used for administrative costs to carry out loan, loan guarantee and grant activities funded in this title, which shall be transferred to and merged with the appropriation for ‘‘Rural Development, Salaries and Expenses’’: Provided, That of this amount $1,750,000 shall be committed to agency projects associated with maintaining the compliance, safety, and soundness of the portfolio of loans guaranteed through the section 502 guaranteed loan program. SEC. 105. Of the amounts appropriated in this title to the ‘‘Rural Housing Service, Rural Community Facilities Program Account’’, the ‘‘Rural Business- Cooperative Service, Rural Business Program Account’’, and the .Rural Utilities Service, Rural Water and Waste Disposal Program Account’’, at least 10 percent shall be allocated for Symptoms of exposure: The symptoms of exposure are anything but obvious. In fact one of the greatest problems in diagnosing it, is that those developing exposure are oftenShelter For a light shelter the tarp or army poncho is the most versatile. These can be easily erected as fly sheets in a variety of ways using improvised pegs and some nylon cordage. quiet and go unnoticed. They may also fail to recognise any changes in themselves and claim that they are fine, so if you are in a leadership position it is important to watchThey are strong and cheap. In recent years Gore-tex bivvi bags have become popular as they simply fit over your sleeping bag but they are very expensive for what they are. Tents closely for signs of exposure. If you suspect a member of your party is developing the problem you might shorten your route or make an impromptu stop in the lee of some rocksare more specialised shelters which like sleeping bags must be carefully chosen to meet your needs. Take specialist and detailed advice before investing in such a long-term shelter. for a warming brew and sugar snack. This is always more preferable than confront- ing a party member with the suggestion he is suffering from exposure. Once exposure sets in,(See Chapter Three for natural shelters.) Cookware It is in the camp kitchen that stainless steel really wins out over all of the rest. While you can improvise billy cans from catering- deterioration can be very rapid and if untreated can lead to death. After a period of worsening lethargy and further loss of sensory faculties, shivering stops and the body begins tosized tin cans nothing really equals the convenience of well-designed cooking pots. Round are best for they are easily cleaned, cook food evenly and fit well over both fires and hike close down in a last effort to maintain life, the casualty slipping from unconsciousness into a coma, which may precede death. Even though these stages are extremely dangerous,stoves alike. Choose your pans to have lids and all-metal fittings if they are to be used on the campfire. If you intend to carry only one pan carry a large one rather than a small one death is not the inevit- able outcome. With the advantages of modern medicine and first class rescue services there is every reason not to give in. Should the casualty’s respirationas this is more practical—especially in regions where you have to boil all of your drinking and washing water. For most of your needs one large pan and a cup will suffice adding stop, treat them for exposure and carry out artificial respiration for as long as you can, making certain that you do not exhaust yourself and become a second casualty. Signs toan extra pan for up to three people. With your cookset (which should be contained in a stuff sack) carry a stainless steel spoon and fork, and any condiments you prefer to use (see THE SITUATION MUST BE CONTROLLED... watch for are complaints or signs of coldness, tiring and lethargy, dragging feet, slurred speech, bursts of energy, lack of physical co-ordination, slipping and tripping, failing visionChapter Ten). Rucksacks To carry all of this gear you will need a rucksack of a suitable design. Here again modern technology has revolutionised mat- ters and made the choice a and involuntary shivering. The last two are serious warning signs which must not go unheeded. If you walk with a regular circle of friends it is a good idea to try and adopt a steadymatter of complication. Whatever rucksack you buy and whatever the manufacturers claim, it is not going to make your burden any lighter. old-fashioned rucksack which is wider at calm walking pace by habit, in this way any unusual behaviour signs will show up more easily. A couple of years ago while walking in the Peak district I came across one of the mostthe bottom than top. Make certain that the rucksack is fitted with a padded waistbelt which is designed to transmit some of the load to your hips. Women must choose their rucksacks BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE... flagrant examples of inadequate attention to exposure I have ever seen. While ascending a ridge with some friends I noticed some unusual tracks. The average build who wasparticu- larly carefully as most sacks on the market are designed around male anatomy. Despite manufacturers’ claims, depending on the shape of your back, one make of rucksack dragging her feet and quite obviously developing exposure. She was part of a rambling party a quarter of a mile ahead. When we caught up with the rest of the party we discoveredmay fit you better than another. Try them on and if possible ask shop assistants to load them with genuine gear for weight rather than featherweight padding for bulk. The best way the leader was totally unaware that she had been left behind. Treating exposure on the trail: Treating exposure in the wilds is much more difficult than taking steps to avoid it in theto find a sack which suits you though is to try or borrow a friend’s to gain some idea of fit and how design features work. Some of the better-known manufacturers produce sacks first place. The treatment must firstly prevent any further cooling of the vital core and then gradually effect a rewarming. Place the casualty out of the reach of the external factorsin different back lengths. Check with them how to measure your back to discover what size you need. Be very wary of over enthusiastic shop assistants; a wrongly fitting rucksack which have contributed to the expo- sure, perhaps in a tent well insulated from the ground. Then place him into a sleeping bag. If the casualty is wearing wet clothing it is better tocould very easily damage your back. Choose a large capacity sack which has compression straps that allow you to reduce the sack’s volume when you are carrying average loads. place a waterproof layer such as a poly bag between him and the dry insulation of the sleeping bag. The classic rewarming process is to place a fit and well person in the sleepingThe large size is not intended for weight but to accommodate the bulk of winter insulative clothing. Choose a sack which has an internal frame which will conform to the shape of bag with the casualty as a heating element; this is best effected through skin to skin contact. If you are able to warm the tent or shelter with a stove do so but make sure that youyour back; this is more comfortable and convenient than an external frame. Lastly, more by personal preference than practical import, choose a simple sack without too many straps allow adequate ventilation. If the patient is capable of taking them, warm sweet drinks can be administered. The most important aspect of treating exposure is that the rewarmingand buckles. In General While good outdoors equipment will enhance your enjoyment of the outdoors it is all too easy to become preoccupied with it. Equip- ment does not make must be gradual, if you try to rewarm the patient too quickly he can go into shock or become more exposed. This happens because as your body becomes cool the blood vesselsyou a better outdoors- man or woman; that comes from skill, patience, enthusiasm and practise. For that reason I have deliberately curbed my discuss- ion with regards to gear. which carry warm blood to the extremities contract to reduce heat loss from these areas, so that the bulk of body warmth is retained in the vital core. If these extremities are sud-Occasionally people are lured far from their campsite by the hypnotic meander of a brook or the glimpse of a spire-like peak waiting to be climbed; the halfway point of the day’s denly heated by the use of hot water bottles or a fire, the vessels expand allowing the blood flow to resume normally. This sudden turning on of the radiators drains the vital core oftravel is passed unnoticed, and a return to camp before nightfall impossible. For the tenderfoot such a moment can be frightening; in the silence of the forest the shadows lengthen heat, thereby worsening the problem. A classic, more minor problem particularly associated with backwoodsmanship in winter conditions, is that while building a shelter the back-and the obscuring trees can seem to crowd threateningly, causing him to panic. For the experienced outdoorsman, however, such a moment is the perfect excuse for a memorable woodsman may frequently stop to re- warm his hands by a fire and once they feel warm again resume work. He is of course 9 increasing heat loss for the above reasons. The bestwilderness adventure, perhaps a moonlit hike back to camp or an impromptu campout. Secure in the knowledge of his practised skills, the experienced backwoodsman will select way to rewarm hands is to place them under your armpits or in your crotch where they will warm and regain sensation but not to the excessive degree of fire warming. With all ofhis building needs from the natural materials which surround him and will calmly construct his home for the night. By the time the dark blanket of night has fallen, he will have settled your rewarming efforts direct them at the body core, chest and abdomen, leaving the extremities till later. While mentioning exposure we should also look at frostbite. As mentioneddown by the warmth of his campfire and be listening to the nightshift going about their dark business, until with a hearty yawn he falls victim to the sweet aroma of his leaf bed. The above, when extremities become chilled, the body reduces heat loss from them by reducing the supply of blood to these regions. Frostbite is the freezing of tissue and is greatlyability to find or provide yourself with shelter is a fundamental step towards being at home in the outdoors. In most situations this is not a difficult task to achieve, but it nearly always hastened if you are dehydrated, because your blood is more viscous and cannot reach the extremities such as finger tips and toes when the vessels contract. Were you to be fullyrequires the investment of physical labour. For this reason it is essential that you know how to go about the task in as efficient a way as possible. The key to a good shelter is prac- hydrated the warm blood would reach these areas more easily. Heat Exhaustion Heat exhaustion is caused by over exertion in conditions where the body’s heat cannot be losttical planning and organisation. Any shelter must provide two things; firstly protec- tion from the prevailing elements and secon- dly the comfort of a good night’s sleep. At the same quickly enough, particularly hot and humid conditions. In simple terms your body becomes overheated and dehydrated, this is frequently encountered in expeditions where thetime it must not be so ambitious as to drain you of precious energy reserves. Strive to achieve maximum efficiency for minimum effort. Having been a witness to shelter building by members are. working at altitudes above those of their normal environment, especially when insufficient time has been allowed for acclimatisation. Heat exhaustion can easily bewidely varying individuals and groups of individuals I have come to realise that there are essentially four ‘internal’ factors which will determine how successful your shelter building avoided by wearing sensible light airy clothing and reducing pack loads. Before starting the day’s activities drink as much water as you can, and make full use of the cooler tem-efforts will be: 1. Attitude: In a wilderness situation you will find life less stressful if you are able to adapt your attitude and aspirations to your immediate physical needs. In this way perature of the early morning and late afternoon, stopping at midday for a siesta. The symptoms of heat exhaustion are general discomfort in the head, headache and nausea, acom- fort becomes a relative consideration. The most successful backwoods men and women are those who make the most of their circumstances and optimistically anticipate an ruddy complexion, cramp and even some disorientation. If allowed to worsen the patient may develop heat stroke, stop sweat- ing and eventually collapse. This is very serious. Toimprovement. 2. Brains: Your greatest asset in life is your ability to conceive an idea before you set to work. Yet all too often shelters show little or no planning in their construction. treat heat exhaustion rest the patient in some cooling shade, loosen his or her clothing, apply wet towels to the limbs, and gradually administer clean water to rehydrate them.When I set about building a shelter, at least 80% of 21 the process is planning: choosing the shelter location, carefully scrutinizing the lie of the land, searching for a site which might Under no circumstances give the patient salt. * * * So having equipped yourself with a firm foundation for outdoors safety and a skeleton of lores on which to hang the details of theprovide a beneficial feature to include in the shelter design and visualising the shelter in situ at every stage of construction so that by the time I start to gather the building materials • following skills, you can begin to develop your expertise. The most important thing to remember is that you will only learn the following techniques by practise; practise and ex-I know precisely what I am looking for. As the shelter is erected I remain flexible and will make alterations to my original plan as I gain a better understanding of the building mat- perience is what counts. I cannot stress this enough; the only way to learn is to have a go yourself. Simply reading, watching or lis- tening is not enough. To help you in your en-erials I am employing. 3. Confidence: Without any doubt, anyone who has been taught and practised shelter building begins with a great advan- tage. Experienced people, even deavours I have included as many clear illustrations or photographs of the techniques as space will allow. Equipment, kit, duffle, tackle, gear— whatever you call it—has alwayswhen faced with a totally alien environment will set about the task of building a shelter with a self assurance which not only totally removes the fear of failure but reduces it to a been a major topic of conversation between outdoors folk. During the hey day of the fur traders, rifles and other items which exchanged between Indians and mountain men earnedseries of practical problems. The advantage of practise cannot be overstressed in shelter building. 4. Determination: All too often the inex- perienced will spend too long building powerful reputations and some such as Hawken rifles and Hudson Bay point blankets are still sought after today. So respected was the judgement of these pioneers that everythe structure, leaving little or no time before nightfall to insulate it or gather wood for a fire. The wise woodsman or woman works hard to finish their shelter early so that he enjoys IF WE’D LISTENED...IF WE’D DEALT WITH THE PHENOMENON PROPERLY... aspiring mountain man would try to emulate them. Today things are somewhat different; repu- tations are not earned in the field so much as in the media where the hype anda warm night, insulated from the cold. While as a general rule you should work at a leisurely pace in the outdoors this does not hold true for shelter building. If you do not achieve publicity surrounding the launch of new outdoors gear matches that of any other product. A side effect of this is that fewer and fewer manufac- turing firms put practicality and du-a warm, comfortable night’s sleep your morale is greatly reduced and the next morning, instead of getting on with other important tasks you must spend valuable foraging time rability before a fashionable colour and styling. While such clothing and equipment is suitable for day hikers, the more adventurous outdoors person who aims to explore the wilderimproving your shelter. The quicker you complete and refine your shelter the quicker you are going to adapt to your new environment. What Type of Shelter? There is an unlimited regions of the world often has to fall back on the soldier-proof khaki and camouflage clothing of the military. In most cases an unpopular choice. For the emerging outdoors enthu-number of shelter designs at your disposal for a wide variety of situations and environments. So how do you choose which suits you best? The answer is usually decided for you siast no path has more hidden pitfalls and hurdles than the one which leads to the outdoor outfitters. Walk into any outdoor pursuits shop and you are met with a sophisticated salesby the circumstances. Is your shelter for an emergency? Are you injured? Are you alone? Is your shelter an overnight shelter or a long-term shelter? What building materials do you pitch on the latest revolutionary mat- erials, and a range of clothing supplied in every colour of the spectrum and sporting the price tag to match. Fortunately though, the backwoods-have at your disposal? How much daylight do you have left? What useful materials do you have with you that could be incorporated in the construction? What must the shelter man’s needs are simple, and the equipment he or she carries will form the foundation of a kit that is suitable for most other more specialist outdoor pursuits. Before discussingprotect you from? Can you light a fire? Do you have a sleeping bag? The above questions will help you establish your aim, identify your resources and highlight any difficulties. clothing and equipment though, I would point out that the most important items any outdoors person can carry are know-how and training. These are much harder to lose than aShelters fall into two categories: those that have to be built and natural shelters you can ‘borrow’. Each type of shelter has its use so never rule one out without careful evaluation knife or cagoule, and will never be left behind. Train yourself to be self reliant and able to improvise an alternative for every piece of equipment or clothing you carry. Use yourof its potential. Whilst most people might, given a choice, opt for a natural shelter, in my experience they often require as much effort to make habita- ble as a tailor-made shelter knowledge instead of high-tech gadgetry. So often I see folks burdened down with all manner of knick-knacks which are unnecessary ballast in the backcountry. On one particularbuilt from scratch. A middle course is to look for an easily adapted natural feature. If you find yourself caught without shelter make every effort to find terrain which will provide you occasion I met a backpacker who carried a survival kit which weighed as much as his tent and sleeping bag combined! He did not seem to realise that his tent, sleeping bag, knifewith plenty of shelter-building materials; ideally woodland. This cannot be overstressed. While it may take you an hour to walk back to where you last saw a suitable site, that time and other conventional gear was the only survival kit he needed. By simplifying your needs you will lighten your load as well as your budget. Like many people, when I first startedwill soon be regained in the time you will save building your shelter. Natural Shelters Caves: Theses are the most obvious form of natural shelter; after all they provided early man camping I couldn’t afford either a sleeping bag or a tent, and I was forced to improvise cooking pots out of old biscuit tins and a tent from polythene. I can clearly remember anwith shelter from weather and wild animals for many thousands of years. But not all caves are suitable for habitation—they are frequently damp and drafty and are always dark. If early hike made with a school friend who was 11 also adept at improvisation. Without sleeping bags we spent the night around the campfire warmed by the flames and above allyou were able to travel back in time to observe Stone Age cave communities you would find the scene a smelly and smoky one with animal bones and fat being burned to provide enjoying the sense of adventure and new-found Our free- dom we had discovered. The advantage of a sleeping bag was not obvious even then and it was several years and many tripslight and warmth. Caves in many regions of the world are associated with evil and bad luck and this in some cases can be linked to the large populations of bats which inhabit some later that I bought my first sleeping bag—a two-season bag which on its first outing was pressed into service in a winter bivouac with temperatures as low as —27 degrees. Now Icaves: a fungus on the guano of bats, if breathed in, can lead to a very serious illness called Histoplasmosis which has often proved fatal. There is also evidence of the disease responibility can look back at my tenderfoot years and laugh at the first time I sat on a sleeping mat and realised its obvious advantage, or the snowy night I sited my bivouac in the wrong placeoccuring in association with large bird populations. Some caves of course will pro- vide excellent shelter but they are in my experience few and far between. Cliff overhangs: These and was kept awake by repeated facefuls of snow from the swaying trees. But that is the essence of the great outdoors: the excitement and wildness of it all which make the hard-are the next best thing to a cave and in many parts of the world are still in use as homes. Very often walls are built under the overhang to reduce drafts and give a sense of cosiness. ships seem unimportant. Today when I work with youth groups where the youngsters are fully equip- ped from the start, I realise that it was in those green novice days that I wasNearly always these shelters are found on south-facing cliffs which make best advantage of the sunlight and local 22 winds. In New Mexico the cliff faces were so soft that the tempered to the trail and I wonder if they aren’t missing something. The equipment list which follows is not essential, it simply represents the gear you might eventually gather. OfAnasazi inhabitants were able to carve homes out of the rock itself, almost invariably on the sunny side of the Mesas. If you find a cliff overhang which you think will make a good the students I have taught it is often those who cannot afford the fancy gear who learn bushcraft the quickest and most thoroughly—and in doing so gain in experience and confi-home for the night feel the ground at its base for dampness. This will tell you whether or not the overhang is a good rain shelter. You will be able to reduce chilly drafts by construct- dence. Clothing Your outdoors clothing is your first defence against the elements; many disasters could be averted if everyone who ventured into wild places wore the correcting low walls at ninety degress to the cliff at either end of your sleeping area. For insulation and further comfort you can build a sleeping mattress and blanket (see Beds). Arbors: clothing. So what is the ‘correct’ clothing? In Britain this has become rather stereotyped into cagoule, breeches, walking boots and a day-sack containing the obligatory cheese andThese will usually provide cool shade from the bright sun but can also on occasion provide a waterproof canopy. Many’s the time I have taken refuge from a heavy downpour inside pickle sandwich. The answer to the question is clothing which suits the prevailing conditions while allowing full and free movement of the whole body. Comfort is your instinctivethe dry shade of an old holly tree and enjoyed the bonus of finding in the fallen leaves and branches at the tree base, the fixings of a small fire, enough to warm a drink with. Usu- guide to correct clothing. Then it should be easily adaptable to the widest range of situations you will face. In hot conditions your clothing should be light and airy, preferably withally evergreen trees such as yew provide the best rain cover. While arbors provide excellent even in quite heavy downpours your general living space will be spared from the dis- long sleeves and trousers which will prevent sunburn and reduce moisture loss. In cold climates your clothing should enable you to maintain an even body temperature. This maycom- fort of mud and you will be able to go about your chores without the effort of enlarging your shelter or building a porch. Siting: The siting of your shelter will be crucial to its mean extra layers for use when standing or sitting still and clothing which can be easily vented to prevent you over heating when working hard. As a general rule stick to clothingsuccess and to the amount of labour it will require to construct. Until you develop an experienced eye for just the right location take your time to select it carefully. You are looking WITHOUT EMOTION... which is uncomplicated with the minimum fittings to go wrong. Always it is best to work on the layer principle so that you have maximum flexibility; three or four layers of t-shirt, shirt,for a compromise: a site which is not too far from water yet not so close as to bring you within striking distance of biting insects. Also check that you are not too near to wasp or then woollen jumper jacket will cater for many more situations than just a heavy jumper and waterproof. Underwear: As the layer of clothing closest to your skin, it is most importanthornet nests. The site should provide you with plenty of easily available materials and fuel for your fire. I’m Check that it is not on the runs of any dangerous animals and that it is not that your underwear is chosen carefully and fits well; it can otherwise be the cause of some nasty problems. Any clothing that is too tight will not provide adequate insulation in coldoverhung by any dead branches. Consider whether you are building in an area full of poison ivy or whether afraid you risk a flash flood for example in the base of a canyon. A few minutes weather, but underwear in particular can cause painful chafing; especially when damp from perspiration. Comfortable underwear is a priority when dressing for the outdoors, so,spent in this way can save you many hours of discomfort. The star fire: Often confused with the Indian fire, the star fire is fuelled with four or five logs 15cm thick or more. Their choose carefully and if in doubt buy on the large side. If you expect to be wading through rivers you might substitute a swimming costume, but this is generally too tight for normalends rest in the embers close together, maintaining a way to prevent the fire from spreading. But in truth a correctly sited fire will not spread beyond itself. Rocks can be placed use. In really cold weather you will need underwear which covers as much of your skin as possible with long sleeves and legs. Thermal underwear though a little more expensivearound a fire to heat them for rock boiling (see Chapter 53 Three) or drying woollen socks or such uses, but care must be used. Never heat damp or glassy rocks such as flint as should seriously be considered, otherwise those made from synthetic mat- erials, are cheap, long lasting and effective. More expensive still are silk garments—but they are morethese contain moisture and air pockets which when heated cause the rocks to pop open. At most, this usually only scatters some embers, but there is always the danger that the comfortable and some would say warmer. Cotton can be worn in dry, cold environments, but it loses its warmth when wet, as it has the unfortunate habit of absorbing moisture likerocks will explode more violently. If you can avoid it, it is better not to build a fire place of rocks at all as they become blackened and look unsightly when you leave them behind. blotting paper and being reluctant to give it up; it is better to avoid cotton underwear. Do not wear warm underwear simply because the is weather is cold; consider whether or notThe criss-cross fire: Some winters ago, while working for Operation Raleigh, I was involved in the selection of some youngsters for a TV adventure expedition. For part of the selec- you really need to. Consider your metabolism, your amount of body fat, and how much strenuous activity you will be doing. Make your choice of clothing to suit the conditions yoution process they were taken to a remote outdoors location and given various cunning initiative tests to complete, and were filmed in the process. On the second day we awoke to finished, are to encounter. Shirts and sweaters: Usually the second layer of your clothing, the choice of material falls between cotton, synthetics and wool. Cotton shirts are best suited tofind a heavy blanket of snow on the. ground, so by lunch time everyone was pretty cold and the producer asked me if I could provide a campfire for everyone to eat their lunch hot climates, although brushed cotton is an acceptable second layer in cold dry conditions. Wool shirts are an excellent choice for winter or as a warm night garment on the summeraround. In all there were I suppose about thirty people which posed a problem. How could I provide sufficient heat to warm so many people from a comparatively small supply of trail. 12 Wool has long been a favourite material amongst hunters and trappers, because of its ability to remain warm when wet. In really cold weather I’m I prefer a roll neck sweaterwood? The criss-cross fire is best used for cooking and burns quickly and evenly. The solution was to build more than one fire and with a colleague I elected to build three fires in to a shirt. Increasingly there are synthetic al- ternatives to wool which should be considered as they are often as warm yet absorb less moisture afraid than wool, making them lightera triangle large enough to accommodate thirty people in the centre. Several small fires are always warmer than one big fire. We chose the criss-cross fire for the job because it when wet and enabling them to dry far quicker. Jersey and thermal jacket: While the oiled wool Jersey or Arran pullovers are still a common sight in the hills of Britain they are noburns fast and hot to give a good even bed of embers, and because it is stable unlike the tipi fire. Each fire was about 6ocm square and 90cm tall. They were lit five minutes before longer the most popular. Now they must compete with a host of synthetic alternatives, most notably the fibre piles. The great advantage of fibre pile is its ability to cope with wetlunch was served, and by the time the first of the crew arrived, it was already too hot to stand comfortably in the middle of the triangle! We were all astonished at just how effective conditions. It is also very hard wearing; I have a Helly Hansen pile pullover which is now seven years old and still in constant use. Very often this pullover is the outer layer of mythe fires had proven, testifying the fact that several small fires are warmer than one larger fire. Despite the fact that the criss-cross is probably the finest fire lay for producing cook- clothing; had it been wool, it would long ago have been pulled to pieces by snagging branches and thorns. However wool still remains a favourite material which is functional anding embers, I also use it when I need a very warm fire very fast even in bad weather. It has several times won me bets in such conditions and I think this is because it remains aesthetically pleasing; it is also less costly to the environment to produce. Thermal jackets are best suited to extreme cold and situations where you may be standing around fortightly packed as it burns down and it settles on top of itself; the tipi fire for example usually needs the addition of fuel and attention once it has collapsed. Reflector fires: By build- long periods. For the outdoorsman or woman the weight of such a garment would be more usually better spent on several independent layers of insulative clothing. In this way youing a reflector on one side of your fire you will greatly increase your warmth. It can also be used for cooking when baking bread or biscuits (see Cooking). To make a really effective can tailor the insulation of your clothing far more closely to your actual needs. Trousers: Trousers are a most essential article of clothing for many reasons. They give protectionreflector partly enclose the fire with a reflecting wall and then place another reflector behind you to give all round heat; you will be surprised at just what a difference this makes. from the ravages of coarse foliage and biting insects as well as providing essential warmth in cold weather and shade in hot. They take a constant pounding from being in constantReflectors can be made of wood or you could simply place a rucksack or an emergency foil blanket (if carried) by the fire. Fuel So far we have looked at how to light a fire and IT WOULDN’T HAVE movement as well as from sitting down on the ground, and unlike other layers of clothing which come off and on with the changing weather, trousers are expected to do their jobwhat shape of fire to build, but these techniques are all dependent upon your burning the correct fuel. I doubt there is any other aspect of backwoods knowhow that will save you regardless. Yet for all this they remain the article of clothing that is least well served by most clothing manufacturers. What is needed are trousers that are lightweight, which dryas much effort as knowing which woods burn best. Amongst other things, which woods a backwoodsman gathers reveals how skilled he is. In unfamiliar terrain the expert will either WITHOUT EMOTION... COME TO THIS! fast when wet, while remaining strong, are resistant to abrasion and do not melt with the merest spark from a campfire. They should also provide adequate resistance to wind. Asmake enquiries of the locals or carry out quick experiments by- gathering different local woods in each load. As a general rule, woods which are physically soft tend to burn fast and yet I have only found a few varieties of polycotton trousers to meet these demands, the best of which are the lightweight trousers used by the British Army. Windproof jackets: Togive few 54 embers but a lot of light, whilst hard woods burn slowly and very hot giving good embers for cooking, though some may need soft wood to help them to burn. Green stay warm you must prevent the loss of body heat. This is best achieved by using layers of insulative clothing to trap layers of insulative air. To take full advantage of such layershard woods burn slowly, and moderately hot and are ideal for overnight logs. Biologists term hard woods as flowering trees and soft woods as cone- bearing trees but since this you must prevent them moving or being replaced by cold air. This is where a windproof shell to your clothing is essential. This can either be a specific garment such as a ventile ormakes balsa a hard wood and teak a soft wood, you should use this definition as a guide line only. It would be easily possible to fill a whole chapter on the different burning qualities buckskin jacket or can be a waterproof cagoule. Socks and gloves: The hardest parts of your body to keep warm are the extremities which are farthest from your heart— espe-of a variety of woods, but in woodcraft we do not gain from memorising comprehensive lists. Learning comes best from practical ex- perience and experimentation. So the list of cially your feet. Always make certain you have plenty of spare pairs of socks. 80% wool, 20% nylon mixes are the best. To avoid blisters check the socks for any fluff balls or loosewoods I have included is deliberately short, you should be able to find one or more of the listed woods in your region, but by burning it and then referring to the list you will gain a threads which may rub sore spots. Change your socks when they become damp from perspiration. You should always have dry socks to wear at the end of the day. Some peoplereference from which to make your own judgements. There is however one way to remember the best fuel woods if you are in doubt: BOAC the old British Overseas Air Couriers prefer two pairs of thinner socks to one thicker pair. Because you can warm your hands under your armpits or between your thighs, gloves are slightly less essential. However theytranslates well into beech, oak, ash, chestnut—the best burning woods you will find most commonly. Fuel List Soft woods: Balsam, Spruce, Pines, Alder, Basswood, Cedar. Best should be of either wool or pile and preferably a mitten design. Some excellent versions are currently available which have waterproof outers with changeable inners. In cold, dampfuels: Apple, Ash, Beech, Holly, Hawthorn, Hornbeam, Oak, Chestnut. Green overnight: Ash, Beech, Birch, Oak, Maple. Other fuels than wood: In some regions wood may not be conditions carry two pairs. Footwear: This has been a point of contention for many years. In general I would advise you to choose a quality pair of walking boots with a sole thatthe most available source of fuel; on the prairies for instance you may be better off gathering the droppings of herbi- vores which, if dry, make excellent fuel. Fat-soaked bones can ‘Visit any modern shopping mall and you will find a fountain of crystal clear water, and in the bottom of that fountain pool coins cast in by passers by, who would perchance a dreamremoved. Very often however this water is too contaminated with tannin to really be con- sidered potable. This contamination shows as a dark translucent brown stain in the water. come true. For as the light shimmers from these offerings it illuminates, deep within our subcon- scious minds, visions of the life-controlling water spirits who alone, by ArthurianTannin water such as this should not be discarded though as it can be used as a first rate antiseptic once it has been sterilised by boiling. Slightly diluted and taken as a tea it is legend have puissance enough to hold in stillness Excaliber.’ All around the globe people have revered water and in some parts of Britain ancient ceremonies linked to holy wellsalso an effective remedy for diarrhoea. If you find trapped water which is not badly polluted by tannin purify it before con- sumption. Note: Only gather water trapped by non-poi- and springs are still enacted. If you are lucky to be walking in the Peak District in the spring you might find a well adorned with flowers by people who carry on the tradition of wellsonous trees. Common poisonous trees which trap water are yew and holly. Saps: During the early spring, the sap from some trees can be tapped to obtain a thirst-quenching drink. dressing. But there is nothing surprising in this for water is life and as every backwoods- man knows, it is his most important daily task to find it. Water is an elemental part of outdoorsThis sap is not a long-term substitute for water as it has too high a sugar content, however, it will help to raise your morale and keep you alive until you can find a more reliable life and an understanding of it, and respect for it, are essential to safety and well-being on any outdoors trek. Just as fire can be both a beneficial and harmful force of nature so toosource of water. The fact that the sap is rising in the trees is a good indicator that there We is water haveavailable never so redouble your efforts to find it. Of the trees that can be tapped for their can water; there is much to learn about harnessing it to your benefit and avoiding its hazards. Moreover in recent years we have become complacent about our water supply, losingsap, the maple is the best, particularly the sugar maple whose sap runs fast and long. In the same family the sycamore can also bewe see though tapped it for I have found this to give much hoped for any- our respect for it and casting into it our effluents and poisons which pollute and kill. Rare now is the sight of otters playing in rivers, even in wild and remote country. It is hard toless sap. For emergency purposes We are though you can always fall back on the remarkable tree which provides so much to outdoors folk, the birch tree. This tree can be tapped like the thing from busi- whatonly it ismature trees for tapping. To tap a imagine that these mischievous creatures—whose appearance now symbolises healthy water habitats— were once a common sight. Pollution by chemicals is now a problem whichothers during the early springnot (the de- end of March and the beginning of April are best), especially after recent rain or thunder storms. Choose outdoors men and women must learn to watch for, even though it is one of the hardest of all problems to detect. Why Water? Within your body, water acts as a regulator, helpingtree, make two diagonal slashes pressed in the bark about eighty centimetres above the ground. Cut ness to form a ‘V shape, with each slash being aboutandten centimetres long, two centimetres you to stay warm in cold envir- onments and cool in hot environments. It also plays an important role in distributing food and removing waste products. Without water your bodywide and deep enough to cut into the sap wood layer (the cambium). Below this, cut a vertical channel about ten centime- tres long to feed the sap onto a ten centimetre peg cannot function and if you cannot replace the water your body loses naturally, your health will deteriorate to the point where you are no longer physically able to collect or searchdriven into a cut below the channel. This peg should be angled downwards at about a forty-five degree angle, and grooved to allow the sap to run accurately into a container placed for water. If you find yourself cut off from a source of water the length of time you can expect to stay alive will vary according to a variety of factors: how much water your body alreadybelow it. Without this peg the sap will run away down the bole uselessly. It is possible to put two taps in one tree, but if you do this you must make certain that the bark is 62 not cut contains, what the temperature is, how fit you are, whether or not you are eating or smoking, what clothes you are wearing, whether you are calm or nervous and how hard you areall the way around the trunk as this will kill the tree. An easy way to avoid this problem is to stagger the taps at different heights. The Chippewa people of the Great Lakes region working. But as a general rule four to six days would be an average maximum. As you travel through wilderness areas try to plan your routes to take in regular watering halts, andof North Americawe’re have foroncenturies tapped maple and birch trees for their sap which they then boiled down to produce maple syrup and sugar, if you have the time, the sap and make certain you have enquired about the availability and safety of water from locals; they may be able to warn you of seasonal flash floods or poison wat- erholes. If you are unablethe utensils you might strike also try producing this delicacy. Springs and seepages: If I only had a pound for every time I have heard outdoors folk refer to springs as guaranteed to make such enquiries or you are without a map, as you travel make full use of high ground to scan the valleys below for indications of water. Above all take steps to reduce thesources of clean water, I would be a rich man. It seems that because the water springs from the earth it must be inherently blessed with purity. Of course this is nonsense, what- rate at which you are dehydrating, in fact this is a policy you should employ whenever you are travelling in remote areas unfamiliar to you. Dehydration and How To Reduce It Tire-ever the water source you must treat it as you find it and if uncertain, purify it before consumption. While most springs run with cold clear water (coldness and clarity are not indica- less warriors of the desert, the Apache trained their braves from childhood to endure hardships and to be self reliant. Schooling in survival techniques was of paramount im- por-tors of water purity), some run with warm or even hot water; the ideal breeding place for waterborne bacteria. Warm water must al- ways be purified before consumption. Not all tance, for a warrior was expected to raid on foot and make his escape alone. With the location of the water holes known to the enemy no survival skill was of more im- portancesprings which you find bubble forth from rock; many are no more than saturated patches of ground. This does not pose too great a problem though, as water can be easily ex- than being able to find water where others could not. Trained also to avoid resting in the shade, an obvious place for an enemy to search, the first lesson the aspiring brave learnedtracted from such ground by digging an Indian well. To make an Indian well, choose a patch of saturated or damp ground and dig a round hole about sixty centimetres in diameter was to avoid losing the water his body already contained. On long training runs the boy was forced to retain a mouthful of water, in this way he learned to breathe through his noseand the same depth; if you dig this hole at the lowest point of the ground you have chosen, the water can more easily drain into the well. Soon you will find that the hole begins to to avoid breathing out his water reserves. Sucking a stone achieved the same effect, and was a technique employed by more seasoned warriors (if you breathe onto a piece offill with murky water. Wait for it to fill nearly completely and then bale this water out (if you are desperate you can filter and purify this water). The next filling of the well should be glass or mirror you will soon see how much water can easily be lost from your mouth). The clothing worn by these desert wolves was also chosen to reduce water loss; light andless murky. Bail this out and allow it to fill again. The well will fill less quickly with each bailing but if you are careful not to disturb the sides of the well as you bail out the water should airy it covered most of their exposed skin. In this way they prevented excessive evaporation of sweat to the surrounding air. The temptation in hot arid conditions is to strip off be-run clear after two or three emptyings. The bottom layer of water will always be murky but the top water can be carefully ladled out and should be nearly as clear as tap water. cause you feel cooler that way. The reason you feel cooler is that your sweat is evaporating giving a cooling effect. This is fine when you have plenty of water but has often provedStreams, rivers and lakes: Rain falls on the land, it seeps into gullies and gathers pace as it grows from brook to stream to river to lake, or estuary and ocean. As it makes its long lethal in desert survival situations, where many bodies found are completely naked. In really serious conditions you may even have to cover up completely, including head and face.weary journey it becomes more and more dirty. In our age of weedkillers and chemical fertilisers we must regard all sources of water from rivers upwards as polluted, and avoid Although less comfortable you will at least live longer. To further reduce water loss the young warrior was taught to make full use of the coolness of the morning and evening and tousing them as sources of water for even boiling does not purify chemically contami- nated water; indeed in some cases it can concentrate the chemicals. Sea water and the sea stop in the heat of midday for a siesta. When a war party came to a water hole they would suck down the water in great volume. One observer’s account actually describes theshore: Salt water is not a substitute for pure water. Because of its high salt content, drinking it can actually cause you to further dehydrate just as with salt tablets. Along the sea thirst of the party being so great that they almost sucked a water hole dry. Water is always of more use inside your body than inside your canteen. Never ration your water; drink asshore you should be able to find fresh water. Search for rockpools after the tide has gone out and taste the surface layer of water for its saltiness. Because salt water is heavier much as you can whenever you can, but make certain it is safe to drink first. Pilots who operated in desert regions during the Second World War would tank up with water beforethan fresh water the top few inches may be salt free or at least not so salty as to do you any harm. Where there are no rockpools and only a sandy shore you should search above a sortie by drinking as much as their bodies could stand. This policy saved the lives of many airmen who survived being shot down, some of whom walked back to their own linesthe high tide mark for trapped water or saturated ground suitable for the site of an Indian well, skim off the surface water in these cases and taste it the same as you would at a across the desert. Fre- quently their journeys lasted several days and they had to make do with only the water they carried inside themselves. A problem often encountered byrockpool. Poison water holes: Fortunately these are extremely rare, but may be encountered in some remote regions. Today you are far more likely to find a water hole which has doctors working with expedi- tions in arid regions is that of progressive dehydration, where the expedition members are drinking only enough water to slake their thirst. This is notbeen contaminated by industrial or agricultu- ral pollution. Look for obvious signs such as the remains of dead animals, a lack of healthy water-loving vegetation. forRather what more vague, enough water to prevent a build up of body salts, which over a prolonged period of time can lead to nasty problems such as kidney stones. Fortunately we are all able to ascertainbut every bit as valid, you may just have a bad feeling about the place. Purifying Water In the world of woodlore every skill is linked to every other; it is impossible to learn one skill it has whether we are drinking enough water or not by studying the colour of our urine. As we become dehydrated the colour of our urine will darken from its normal light straw yellowwithout recourse to another, and so it is with water. THE ONLY SAFE WAY TO PURIFY WATER IS TO BOIL IT THOR- OUGHLY. To boil water you are going toalways need fire, and more colour. Remember, when it comes to water, if it is safe to drink you cannot drink too much; your body functions will rid you of any excess. If you are short of water do not eat, youlikely than not a suitable container. For those who have studied survi- val techniques and practised them, this should not provide too great a problem, although it will take some been can live many days without food but only a few without water. To digest food your body needs water which it will draw from your reserves. Salt Under no circumstances should youtime. But for those who have not perfected these skills, pure water may seem out of your reach tempting you to risk drinking unpurified water; unfor- tunately there are no short cuts take salt when short of water though some confusion has arisen over the value of salt in hot climates. If you are working in a hot environment and perspiring above average,in nature. Our health is something we tend to take for granted when we have skilled doctors and 63 powerful, quick-acting synthetic drugs at our disposal. But in the bush, removed slightly extra salt should be included in your food to replace what you have lost. But if you are short of water, taking salt will only make matters worse. This is because the saltfrom these advantages, the simplest of infections can prove fatal. Consider the full implications of developing a simple case of diarrhoea. This infection causes a rapid and unpleas- within your body must remain in solution at a more or less constant level. If you take extra salt your body will try to dilute it to the required level of salinity—and if you are unable toant dehydration of your system; it makes you feel uncomfortable, lowers your morale and gene- rally makes a safe standard of personal hygiene difficult to maintain. To counteract drink, the water thus needed will be drawn from other parts of your body. In cold climates the problem of dehyd- ration is slightly different. Then you tend not to drink because youthe effects you will need to drink plenty of pure water; if you were short of this to start with you are in trouble. Under such circum- stances maintaining the will to get yourself out of are not obviously thirsty. In fact it is highly unlikely that you will die from dehydration in a cold climate. But this is 59 little comfort, for if you become dehydrated your body losesthe situation, or in extreme cases to live, can be very difficult. There are a number of different waterborne infections, and some of them can cause problems far more debilitating efficiency for keeping you warm thereby accelerating the likelihood of hypothermia and frostbitten extremities. The traditional remedy for cold problems, a tot of brandy or somethan diarr- hoea. Some of them do not respond to the effects of chemical purifying agents. For this reason, to purify your water, boil it for at least five minutes. The general rule is such, while livening some sensations will only further dehydrate and chill you, making matters worse. Finding Water Every backcountry traveller will tell you that water is an every-to boil water furiously for five minutes plus an extra minute for every thousand feet you are above sea level. Containers for water are described in Chapter Eleven. When it comes a fool’s day necessity of outdoors life, and that when on the trail a nearby source of water is often the deciding factor in their choice of campsite. Most will also have tales of a time or ato purifying water there are basically two types of con- tainer: 1. Kettles which are used directly over the heat source. These can be manufactured from flammable materials so long journey when water was scarce or in short supply, even when in apparently green and lush surroundings. It is at such times that backcountry know-how is at its most useful, turningas the flames cannot reach beyond the level of the water which prevents their consumption. 2. Cauldrons which will hold hot water but cannot be used over a fire. In the case of game of an uncomfortable ex- perience into a rewarding if novel demon- stration of the wisdom of having practised your training. For all its cunning elusiveness water can be found in morethese vessels the water is heated by dropping heated stones into the water. This is an effective and easy way to cook, but you must choose your stones carefully. They must be of varying cases than not, but this does not mean that it will always be obvious. Just as a good hunter knows the habits of his prey so you must know the habits of water: 1. Water seeps inan easily manageable size and weight and collected from dry ground (stones which are damp or have been sitting on a riverbed contain moisture which when heated expands to porous ground, but runs across rock and clay. Because of this you will be more likely to find water in rock or clay conditions. If you find an area of porous ground which is satu-causing the stone to explode. Also avoid glass-like rocks such as flint or obsidian as these also explode). Heat the rocks until they are hot, brush off any ash (or quickly rinse this degrees rated with water it is possible to extract it. 2. Water runs downhill along the path of least resistance. For this reason it is nearly always best to start your search at the foot of steepoff in some other water) and then transfer them to the cauldron using suitably impro- vised tongs. The ash is rinsed off to prevent the water you are boiling becoming too alkaline. of com- slopes or cliffs and in the bottom of valleys and canyons. Narrow canyons are often a good bet as there is more shade and less chance for moisture to evaporate. 3. Where thereApart from the cauldrons already men- tioned you can also use hollows in trees as cauldrons or even make a gypsy cauldron: a bowl dug out of clay and lined with broad non- is water there is nearly always an abundance of lush vegetation, particularly water-loving species such as ferns and mosses, willows alder, rushes, cattails, elder and marestail. Inpoisonous leaves. The water from this cauldron is less safe than the other methods and tastes awful but is a simple emergency technique. Filtering water If the water you have fort some circumstances you will be able to spot these trees and plants from a distance. Make the best use of high ground to scout ahead for obvious signs of water. This is a habit togathered contains sediment it will need, filtering before boiling. This is a relatively simple operation; the easiest filter to impro- vise is that using your trousers. Turn one trouser leg adopt regardless of the abundance of water; you should always be gathering information concerning your surrounding topography. 4. The activity of local wildlife can be an excel-inside of the other so you have a double thickness of cloth and tie a knot in the end. Arrange this filter on a frame suspended over your container and soak the cloth before use. Fill lent guide to your proximity to water. Grain and seed-eating birds must have water as must frogs and similar amphibians who may lead you to water by the sound of their croaking.the trouser filter with dirty water, leave the first part of the filtrate to run through before collecting. If, despite several times through the filter, the water has still not cleared, fill the The trails of larger mammals will eventually lead you to a source of water and their very presence is a good indicator that you are searching in the right area. While these guidelinestrouser filter with cold charcoal NOT ASH. Should you find yourself without trousers a filter can be made from a large cone of birch bark filled with charcoal and finely teased non- may seem obvious written down here on paper they are more difficult to apply in practice. To reach water may involve pushing through thick tangles of thorny vegetation on yourpoisonous plant material. Perforate the outside of the cone with tiny holes. Rehydrating Once you have found and purified your water, do not drink it down too fast or you may make hands and knees. Under such circumstances it is very easy to pass by a small brook or stream which is obscured by undergrowth that superficially does not seem promising. Whenyourself sick. This is especially true of very cold water which can be a shock to your system. It is very dangerous to gulp down icy water if you are still hot from hard physical exer- you do eventually find a source of water it may not be in a form you are used to dealing with. Sources of Water In the Kalahari desert the bushmen live with virtually no water attion, sip your water until your body has had time to adjust to the cold or better still brew a warming we don’t mug of tea. There are many times I must admit when I have not bothered to Business all. To supplement their meagre supply of water they have learned to search for substitutes; water found in roots for example is extracted by grating the root and then squeezingpurify my water, and to date I have not been struck down by any bugs my stomach could not handle. But there are also times when for no good reason I can give, other than perhaps the gratings. The stomach contents of recently-killed game can be drunk for moisture and when the rains come, excess water is collected and stored in ostrich eggs. To a bushmanan instinct, I have insisted on purifying my water. Above all trust your instincts—but if in doubt boil. On one work any- backcountry hike with two very experienced outdoors friends one of them is not every drop of water is precious, when he wrings moisture out of a root every drop is carefully directed along his thumb into his mouth. It is highly unlikely that you will ever know acame down with a case of Giardia, a particularly nasty micro-organism (resistant to chemical purifi- more: weagents, but killed by boiling). We cation “becoming were all drinking from the same water thirst as great as his, but if you do run short of water you can learn from his adaptability. There are many sources of water available to you if you are familiar with them. Dew. Dewsource and didn’t boil the water; he was just unlucky. However, we all paid the price as we walked along behind him, as severe flatulence isself-suffi- one of the symptoms of this unpleasant a place do our is probably the most reliable of all water sources, in fact many small creatures rely upon it completely, even in some of the most arid regions of the world. It begins to condense onand As a general rule though, always gather water from the purest source available to you, always purify it and don’t be lulled into a falsecient” senseisof a security by crystal clear water. where we foliage and rocks just after sunset and can be gathered until sunrise. To collect it you need to improvise an absorbent mop, this could be a T-shirt or bandana or a large bundle ofAlready in the skills of fire lighting, shelter building and water procurement, it has become evident that time the ability to recognise trees and plants is important. But more than this, they euphemism finely teased bark (not poisonous) similar to that which you use for tinder. Generally speaking, the larger the mop the better; you will find that fitting a long broom-like handle helpscan provide you with food con- tainers, cordage, tools, medicine and even clothing; the more plants you can recognise and know the value of, the better equipped you will be to exist alleviate backache. The best areas to gather dew are low lying areas of grass or similar vegetation. Once the mop is saturated, wring it out into a container for purification. Whiletravel. To begin a study of plants is to set foot on an endless path of growth and learning. Whether you study plants of utility or those of beauty you will enhance your vision of the it’s a dew itself is a pure 60 form of water, in the process of mopping it up you will also be mopping up bacteria and possibly parasites from the ground, so make sure you boil it beforenatural world by their study. If you watch a party of ramblers, you will easily spot those who have befriended the plant world, for where other members of the party have passed drinking. This is an underestimated source of water; with suitable containers and good conditions a determined person can gather several gallons quite easily. Even under lessstraight by, they pause to acknowledge the presence of friends. You may think that I am anthropomorphising weeds, but every spring asfor place favourable circumstances sufficient quantities can be collected to greatly increase your morale. If you have a shelter sheet or large plastic bag with you leave this out for the dewshows again I look forward to meeting plants of long aquain- tance as they re-emerge for the growing season, precisely as I might look the snows recede and the green of grass “having forward to seeing again a friend who has we pass to collect on, if both your mop and sheeting are clean you can drink this water straight away. Rain: Rain is usually the safest natural source of water which can be collected by thebeen away travelling for many months. This is not so strange: after all, a plant is a living organism—like you or I—so in a way they are brothers. found a I first became seriously interested opportunistic backwoodsman. It can be collected straight into a suitable container by arranging a suitable collecting funnel— basically any wide flat surface that the rain can run offin plants in my early teens. I can well remember my first encounter with wild edible plants. After several months of reading about the boss. various” wild foods available in my locality, I through into a container. During World War II the whole of Gibraltar was thus supplied from two enormous rain traps. You might use a suitably angled rock slab or large broad leaves or afound a pocket-sized field guide in the local library which contained photographs rather than drawings. Having been brought up, like most people, to fear wild plants as poisonous, shelter sheet. Of course you can also create rain reservoirs of water by deepening existing puddles and damming small streams (see Puddles). Whatever your method of collectionI wasn’t taking any chances. Armed with suitable books for cross reference, and with the photographic field guide I set out on my first plant hunt, excited by the preparations. I did remember that your rain water is only as pure as its container and your gathering apparatus. Snow: Snow is an interesting substance in that you can be surrounded by it and yetnot need to go far before I found plants which I suspected were edible. There was a lacy white-flowered plant which I thought was probably cow parsley but was put off by my guide be struggling to provide yourself with water. The problem is that it contains ten times as much air as it does water, so for every pint of water you will need to melt ten or so pints oftelling me that it could easily be confused with the deadly hemlock. The day was warm and bright and the sounds and smells of the season drew me into the dappled shade of the snow. Without a container which can be heated over a fire this can pose a difficult problem. However, clean white snow is a pure source of water, which should not need boiling.woodland. As I moved along the trail I was careful not to make any careless sounds or movements, hoping to catch a glimpse of the local fox sunbathing on her favourite fallen tree. Eating snow does not make you go blind or dehydrate you as some have suggested, but it can take quite a lot of body heat to collect a quantity of snow which will yield only a futileAhead of me I noticed something blue moving—it was a fledgling jay that had not quite mastered the fundamentals of flight. I watched absorbed as after great effort it took off, and amount of water. Avoid packing your con- tainer too tightly with snow when melting it over a fire; it is an excellent insulator and it has been known for aluminium mess tins to burnmanaged a wobbly flight to a low oak branch. After a few minutes and a few perilous flights it was safe in the higher branches and the parent birds 66 returned to feed the wayward through before the snow has melted. Probably the best way to melt snow is to use the eskimo method of creating a hot plate which is angled slightly to allow melt water to run intoyoungster. Hoping to find some interesting tracks, I stopped to scrutinise the spot I had first seen the young bird, but there was nothing except a downy feather. And then I noticed a carefully placed container. Another eskimo method of obtaining water from snow Because snow is mostly composed of air it can take much energy to obtain sufficient quantitiesit. A small clump of emerald green, clover-like leaves, still clad in droplets of dew. It did not take long to find the plate in the field guide that matched: Oxalis Acetosela (wood sorrel), of water. If you melt it down, do it slowly, and never pack the billy can tightly, otherwise the snow will act as an insulator and you can burn through the bottom of the can. Alterna-contains oxalic acid but is edible in small quantities. With great trepidation I carefully selected a couple of the tenderest young leaves and ate them. To my surprise and pleasure tively pack a T-shirt with snow and allow it to melt slowly or use a slanting hot plate. was to fill a seal skin with snow which was then suspended inside the shelter (where there isthe leaves tasted just like apple peel and from that moment on I have been hooked on wild plants for food—even though not all taste as pleasant as wood sorrel! As I walked home plenty of warm air) and as the snow melted it would drip through the skin into a container. I have used this method several times, substituting a T-shirt for the skin— although thethat day I felt different as though I had just been accepted into an exclusive club and even now, when I discover a new plant I feel as though the plant has revealed itself to me water does need purification! Ice: Unlike snow, ice is not a pure source of water; freezing is no guarantee that the bacteria and other micro-organisms are dead. Always boil icerather than I have sought it out. Learning to Recognise Plants In the modern age, science has greatly simplified the process of identifying plant species using standardised terminol- water before consumption. But unlike snow, ice consists solely of frozen water so what you melt is what you get. There is also virtually no risk of burning through the bottom of yourogy to describe their form and labelling. Each species with a scientific name and classifi- cation. Absolutely essential to your study of plant species will be suitable scientific field container. Ice can frequently be found in the form of icicles hanging from trees, if these are dark brown avoid them as they will contain tannin which has leached out of the bark. Ifguides. All of these books should explain how their identification key works. Make sure you thoroughly familiarise yourself with this. As you study plants, use the scientific name for on the other hand they are only slightly stained, so long as you boil the melt water you will be fine. In arctic 61 conditions, snow is generally more pure than otherwise, but alwaysreference purposes; in most cases this is the standard name for a plant species throughout the world. This is not a fanciful notion but a very practical and important part of your collect new ice. Glacier ice is another story altogether as are streams of glacial meltwaters. As a glacier moves across rock it gouges and grinds the rock, becoming filled withlearning. Local names are often an excellent way to learn a plant’s characteristics or where it grows, but they can sometimes be very confusing. For example ‘Jack by the hedge’ minute particles of rock dust. If drunk this sediment must be filtered out or your stomach and intestine can be damaged by the abrasive action of these particles passing throughwhich is the country name for Alliaria petiolata derives from the fact that this edible species frequently grows by hedges and smells of garlic as in folklore did the devil, or ‘Jack’s the gut. Puddles and hidden water: Muddy puddles may not be the most beautiful wells but they can provide you with your needs. Very often they are the only reliable water sourcebreath’. Another country name is ‘Old man’s beard’ which usually refers to the seed down produced by Clematis vitalba a poisonous plant, however I have come across the same that is easily accessible to the local large mammals, drying up for only a short period each year if at all. The water in these is fine so long as it is purified. In Britain the early farmerscountry name ‘Old man’s beard’ being used to describe Epilobium augustifolia which is an edible and useful species, more usually known as ‘Fireweed’ or ‘Rosebay Willowherb’. As of chalk downland devised ingenious dew ponds for their upland herds. These were made by digging large depressions out of the chalk which were lined with straw and then clay,you can see, even within the same country, local names can vary widely even between edible and poisonous plants, so always double check your research using the scientific name. so that they trapped and collected the dew. Some of these dew traps are still functioning today. The water from both these sources will need to be filtered until the water is as clearHowever learning to recognise plant spe- cies is not as simple as just looking them up in a field guide. Even the best guides with clear photographs or botanical drawings suffer from as possible before thoroughly boiling. Stagnant water also comes into this cate- gory of drinkable water that may not look good. Even after careful purification you may not havebeing two dimensional, and the text— no matter how carefully crafted—is woefully inadequate for describing a plant’s subtler characteristics such as scent, taste, texture or even removed the bad smell though, and then there is only one thing to do—hold your nose, close your eyes and swallow! Rain water can also be found trapped in rock depressions,the sound the leaves make as you brush past them. The best way to learn about plants is to accompany an expert in the field learning a few at a time. For survival purposes you often referred to as kettles. If fresh (recently trapped) clear and cool, this water is probably safe to drink, although it is of course safer to boil it first. You may find such rock kettlesmust be able to identify the plant at all stages of its development; not just when it is in flower. Pay extra careful attention to the fine details. When I introduce a group of students to partially filled with decaying plant matter but by clearing this out you can easily produce a first-class rain reservoir. If you travel frequently through an area of backcountry which isplants there are those who from the start examine the species in detail and those who give them only a fleeting glimpse. When later in the day I compare the details of a poisonous sparsely supplied with water or where the water takes considerable effort to collect, consider creating natural reservoirs. So long as you only enhance existing natural features andplant to one of the plants covered earlier there is an obvious look of panic in the eyes of those who did not pay adequate attention. Fortunately I am able to recap what was seen leave no obvious sign of your labour you can create a chain of water holes along your route which may save you long treks to a spring or stream. Trees which are hollow or haveearlier, but when you are in the company of an old herbalist or tree expert such luxuries are rare. Train yourself to absorb all that is said and to look more closely at the fine detail. hollows in the folds of their branches and roots can provide another source of trapped water. To extract this you may need to improvise a straw from a stalk of elder with the pithThere are a number of occasions I have been fortunate enough to have spent a few hours in the company of real plant experts—old country folk who grew up surrounded by tradi- I. Historical Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organizationThe following, according to an order published at the end of the seventeenth century, were the measures to be taken when the plague appeared in a town.l First, a strict spatial of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school (“you are nopartitioning: the closing of the town and its outlying districts, a prohibition to leave the town on pain of death, the killing of all stray animals; the division of the town into distinct quarters, longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosedeach governed by an intendant. Each street is placed under the authority of a syndic, who keeps it under surveillance; if he leaves the street, he will be condemned to death. On the environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’s Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.”appointed day, everyone is ordered to stay indoors: it is forbidden to leave on pain of death. The syndic himself comes to lock the door of each house from the outside; he takes the Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; tokey with him and hands it over to the intendant of the quarter; the intendant keeps it until the end of the quarantine. Each family will have made its own provisions; but, for bread and compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was thewine, small wooden canals are set up between the street and the interior of the houses, thus allowing each person to receive his ration without communicating with the suppliers and transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, toother residents; meat, fish and herbs will be hoisted up into the houses with pulleys and baskets. If it is absolutely necessary to leave the house, it will be done in turn, avoiding any rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in theirmeeting. Only the intendants, syndics and guards will move about the streets and also, between the infected houses, from one corpse to another, the ‘crows’, who can be left to die: turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we alreadythese are ‘people of little substance who carry the sick, bury the dead, clean and do many vile and abject offices’. It is a segmented, immobile, frozen space. Each individual is fixed no longer were, what we had ceased to be. We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure--prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is anin his place. And, if he moves, he does so at the risk of his life, contagion or punishment. Inspection functions ceaselessly. The gaze is alert everywhere: ‘A considerable body of “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to re-militia, commanded by good officers and men of substance’, guards at the gates, at the town hall and in every quarter to ensure the prompt obedience of the people and the most I woke form industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of ad-absolute authority of the magistrates, ‘as also to observe all disorder, theft and extortion’. At each of the town gates there will be an observation post; at the end of each street sentinels. up ministering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. These are the societies of control, which are in the process ofEvery day, the intendant visits the quarter in his charge, inquires whether the syndics have carried out their tasks, whether the inhabitants have anything to complain of; they ‘observe replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also istheir actions’. Every day, too, the syndic goes into the street for which he is responsible; stops before each house: gets all the inhabitants to appear at the windows (those who live and I can’t continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the ex-overlooking the courtyard will be allocated a window looking onto the street at which no one but they may show themselves); he calls each of them by name; informs himself as to the traordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which isstate of each and every one of them - ‘in which respect the inhabitants will be compelled to speak the truth under pain of death’; if someone does not appear at the window, the syndic remember the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure,must ask why: ‘In this way he will find out easily enough whether dead or sick are being concealed.’ Everyone locked up in his cage, everyone at his window, answering to his name neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confine-and showing himself when asked - it is the great review of the living and the dead. This surveillance is based on a system of permanent registration: reports from the syndics to the ments. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. II. Logic The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passesintendants, from the intendants to the magistrates or mayor At the beginning of the ‘lock up’, the role of each of the inhabitants present in the town is laid down, one by one; this are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it is analogical. One the other hand, the differ-document bears ‘the name, age, sex of everyone, notwithstanding his condition’: a copy is sent to the intendant of the quarter, another to the office of the town hall, another to enable ent control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosuresthe syndic to make his daily roll call. Everything that may be observed during the course of the visits - deaths, illnesses, complaints, irregularities is noted down and transmitted to the are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh willintendants and magistrates. The magistrates have complete control over medical treatment; they have appointed a physician in charge; no other practitioner may treat, no apothecary transmute from point to point. This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in termsprepare medicine, no confessor visit a sick person without having received from him a written note ‘to prevent anyone from concealing and dealing with those sick of the contagion, of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factoryunknown to the magistrates’. The registration of the pathological must be constantly centralized. The relation of each individual to his disease and to his death passes through the was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate throughrepresentatives of power, the registration they make of it, the decisions they take on it. Five or six days after the beginning of the quarantine, the process of purifying the houses one challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it’s because they express the corporate situation with great preci-by one is begun. All the inhabitants are made to leave; in each room ‘the furniture and goods’ are raised from the ground or suspended from the air; perfume is poured around the sion. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass re-room; after carefully sealing the windows, doors and even the keyholes with wax, the perfume is set alight. Finally, the entire house is closed while the perfume is consumed; those sistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another andwho have carried out the work are searched, as they were on entry, ‘in the presence of the residents of the house, to see that they did not have something on their persons as they runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of “salary according to merit” has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation re-left that they did not have on entering’. Four hours later, the residents are allowed to re-enter their homes. This enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in l which the places the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the cor-individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements are supervised, in which all events are recorded, in which an uninterrupted work of writing links the centre poration. In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finishedand periphery, in which power is exercised without division, according to a continuous hierarchical figure, in which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation.among the living beings, the sick and the dead - all this constitutes a compact model of the disciplinary mechanism. The plague is met by order; its function is to sort out every pos- In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittalsible confusion: that of the disease, which is transmitted when bodies are mixed together; that of the evil, which is increased when fear and death overcome prohibitions. It lays down of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and the limitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicialfor each individual his place, his body, his disease and his death, his well-being, by means of an omnipresent and omniscient power that subdivides itself in a regular, uninterrupted life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it’s because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates theway even to the ultimate determination of the individual, of what characterizes him, of what belongs to him, of what happens to him. Against the plague, which is a mixture, discipline individual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between thesebrings into play its power, which is one of analysis. A whole literary fiction of the festival grew up around the plague: suspended laws, lifted prohibitions, the frenzy of passing time, two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of eachbodies mingling together without respect, individuals unmasked, abandoning their statutory identity and the figure under which they had been recognized, allowing a quite different member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by othertruth to appear. But there was also a political dream of the plague, which was exactly its reverse: not the collective festival, ‘’but strict divisions; not laws transgressed, but the penetra- means to make itself lay “priest.”) In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, whiletion of regulation into even the smallest details of everyday life through the mediation of the complete hierarchy that assured the capillary functioning of power; not masks that were on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control isput on and taken off, but the assignment to each individual of his ‘true’ name, his ‘true’ place, his ‘true’ body, his ‘true’ disease. The plague as a form, at once real and imaginary, of made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become “dividuals,” and masses,disorder had as its medical and political correlative discipline. Behind the disciplinary mechanisms can be read the haunting memory of ‘contagions’, of the plague, of rebellions, samples, data, markets, or “banks.” Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that lockscrimes, vagabondage, desertions, people who appear and disappear, live and die in disorder. If it is true that the leper gave rise to rituals of exclusion, which to a certain extent pro- gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole isvided the model for and general form of the great Confinement, then the plague gave rise to disciplinary projects. Rather than the massive, binary division between one set of people the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the systemand another, it called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power. The under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undula-leper was caught up in a practice of rejection, of exile-enclosure; he was left to his doom in a mass among which it was useless to differentiate; those sick of the plague were caught tory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the older sports. Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machinesup in a meticulous tactical partitioning in which individual differentiations were the constricting effects of a power that multiplied, articulated and subdivided itself; the great confinement are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers,on the one hand; the correct training on the other. The leper and his separation; the plague and its segmentations. The first is marked; the second analysed and distributed. The exile pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; theof the leper and the arrest of the plague do not bring with them the same political dream. The first is that of a pure community, the second that of a disciplined society. Two ways of societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This techno-exercising power over men, of controlling their relations, of separating out their dangerous mixtures. The plague-stricken town, traversed throughout with hierarchy, surveillance, ob- logical evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalismservation, writing; the town immobilized by the functioning of an extensive power that bears in a distinct way over all individual bodies - this is the utopia of the perfectly governed city. is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also,The plague (envisaged as a possibility at least) is the trial in the course of which one may define ideally the exercise of disciplinary power. In order to make rights and laws function progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school). As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, some-according to pure theory, the jurists place themselves in imagination in the state of nature; in order to see perfect disciplines functioning, rulers dreamt of the state of plague. Underly- times by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Thirding disciplinary projects the image of the plague stands for all forms of confusion and disorder; just as the image of the leper, cut off from all human contact, underlies projects of exclu- World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It’s a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finishedsion. They are different projects, then, but not incompatible ones. We see them coming slowly together, and it is the peculiarity of the nineteenth century that it applied to the space products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for theof exclusion of which the leper was the symbolic inhabitant (beggars, vagabonds, madmen and the disorderly formed the real population) the technique of power proper to disciplinary product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory arepartitioning. Treat ‘lepers’ as ‘plague victims’, project the subtle segmentations of discipline onto the confused space of internment, combine it with the methods of analytical distribu- no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner--state or private power--but coded figures--deformable and transformable--of a single corporation that nowtion proper to power, individualize the excluded, but use procedures of individualization to mark exclusion - this is what was operated regularly by disciplinary power from the beginning has only stockholders. Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and noof the nineteenth century in the psychiatric asylum, the penitentiary, the reformatory, the approved school and, to some extent, the hospital. Generally speaking, all the authorities longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruptionexercising individual control function according to a double mode; that of binary division and branding (mad/sane; dangerous/harmless; normal/abnormal); and that of coercive as- thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the center or the “soul” of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in thesignment of differential distribution (who he is; where he must be; how he is to be characterized; how he is to be recognized; how a constant surveillance is to be exercised over him world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but alsoin an individual way, etc.). On the one hand, the lepers are treated as plague victims; the tactics of individualizing disciplines are imposed on the excluded; and, on the other hand, continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retainedthe universality of disciplinary controls makes it possible to brand the ‘leper’ and to bring into play against him the dualistic mechanisms of exclusion. The constant division between as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but withthe normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and exile of the leper to quite different objects; the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos. III. Program The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at anythe existence of a whole set of techniques and institutions for measuring, supervising and correcting the abnormal brings into play the disciplinary mechanisms to which the fear of given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city wherethe plague gave rise. All the mechanisms of power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him, are composed of those two forms one would be able to leave one’s apartment, one’s street, one’s neighborhood, thanks to one’s (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easilyfrom which they distantly derive. Bentham’s Panopticon is the architectural figure of this composition. We know the principle on which it was based: at the periphery, an annular be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person’s position--licit or illicit--and effects a universal modulation.building; at the centre, a tower; this tower is pierced with wide windows that open onto the inner side of the ring; the peripheric building is divided into cells, each of which extends the The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution forwhole width of the building; they have two windows, one on the inside, corresponding to the windows of the tower; the other, on the outside, allows the light to cross the cell from one the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, butend to the other. All that is needed, then, is to place a supervisor in a central tower and to shut up in each cell a madman, a patient, a condemned man, a worker or a schoolboy. By with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In the prison system: the attempt to find penalties of “substitution,” at least for petty crimes,the effect of backlighting, one can observe from the tower, standing out precisely against the light, the small captive shadows in the cells of the periphery. They are like so many and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the schoolcages, so many small theatres, in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualized and constantly visible. The panoptic mechanism arranges spatial unities that make it possible to of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the “corporation” at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medi-see constantly and to recognize immediately. In short, it reverses the principle of the dungeon; or rather of its three functions - to enclose, to deprive of light and to hide - it preserves cine “without doctor or patient” that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual oronly the first and eliminates the other two. Full lighting and the eye of a supervisor capture better than darkness, which ultimately protected. Visibility is a trap. To begin with, this made numerical body the code of a “dividual” material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old fac-it possible - as a negative effect - to avoid those compact, swarming, howling masses that were to be found in places of confinement, those painted by Goya or described by Howard. tory form. These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dis-Each individual, in his place, is securely confined to a cell from which he is seen from the front by the supervisor; but the side walls prevent him from coming into contact with his persed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle againstcompanions. He is seen, but he does not see; he is the object of information, never a subject in communication. The arrangement of his room, opposite the central tower, imposes on the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we alreadyhim an axial visibility; but the divisions of the ring, those separated cells, imply a lateral invisibility. And this invisibility is a guarantee of order. If the inmates are convicts, there is no grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being “motivated”; they re-request apprenticeshipsdanger of a plot, an attempt at collective escape, the planning of new crimes for the future, bad reciprocal influences; if they are patients, there is no danger of contagion; if they are and permanent training. It’s up to them to discover what they’re being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of amadmen there is no risk of their committing violence upon one another; if they are schoolchildren, there is no copying, no noise, no chatter, no waste of time; if they are workers, there serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill. I. Historical Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their heightare no disorders, no theft, no coalitions, none of those distractions that slow down the rate of work, make it less perfect or cause accidents. The crowd, a compact mass, a locus of at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having itsmultiple exchanges, individualities merging together, a collective effect, is abolished and replaced by a collection of separated individualities. From the point of view of the guardian, own laws: first the family; then the school (“you are no longer in your family”); then the barracks (“you are no longer at school”); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; pos-it is replaced by a multiplicity that can be numbered and supervised; from the point of view of the inmates, by a sequestered and observed solitude (Bentham, 60-64). Hence the sibly the prison, the preeminent instance of the enclosed environment. It’s the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some laborers, the heroine of Rossellini’smajor effect of the Panopticon: to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power. So to arrange things that the Europa ‘51 could exclaim, “I thought I was seeing convicts.” Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the fac-surveillance is permanent in its effects, even if it is discontinuous in its action; that the perfection of power should tend to render its actual exercise unnecessary; that this architec- tory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its compo-tural apparatus should be a machine for creating and sustaining a power relation independent of the person who exercises it; in short, that the inmates should be caught up in a nent forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were somethingpower situation of which they are themselves the bearers. To achieve this, it is at once too much and too little that the prisoner should be constantly observed by an inspector: too quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-little, for what matters is that he knows himself to be observed; too much, because he has no need in fact of being so. In view of this, Bentham laid down the principle that power should scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which acceleratedbe visible and unverifiable. Visible: the inmate will constantly have before his eyes the tall outline of the central tower from which he is spied upon. Unverifiable: the inmate must after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be. We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure-never know whether he is being looked at at any one moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so. In order to make the presence or absence of the inspector unverifiable, -prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an “interior,” in crisis like all other interiors--scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcingso that the prisoners, in their cells, cannot even see a shadow, Bentham envisaged not only venetian blinds on the windows of the central observation hall, but, on the inside, partitions supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever thethat intersected the hall at right angles and, in order to pass from one quarter to the other, not doors but zig-zag openings; for the slightest noise, a gleam of light, a brightness in a length of their expiration periods. It’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door. Thesehalf-opened door would betray the presence of the guardian. The Panopticon is a machine for dissociating the see/being seen dyad: in the peripheric ring, one is totally seen, without are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. “Control” is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucaultever seeing; in the central tower, one sees everything without ever being seen. It is an important mechanism, for it automatizes and disindividualizes power. Power has its principle recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame ofnot so much in a person as in a certain concerted distribution of bodies, surfaces, lights, gazes; in an arrangement whose internal mechanisms produce the relation in which individu- a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enterals are caught up. The ceremonies, the rituals, the marks by which the sovereign’s surplus power was manifested are useless. There is a machinery that assures dissymmetry, dis- the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it’s within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisisequilibrium, difference. Consequently, it does not matter who exercises power. Any individual, taken almost at random, can operate the machine: in the absence of the director, his of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighborhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms offamily, his friends, his visitors, even his servants (Bentham, 45). Similarly, it does not matter what motive animates him: the curiosity of the indiscreet, the malice of a child, the thirst control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons. II. Logic The different internments of spaces of en-for knowledge of a philosopher who wishes to visit this museum of human nature, or the perversity of those who take pleasure in spying and punishing. The more numerous those closure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, itanonymous and temporary observers are, the greater the risk for the inmate of being surprised and the greater his anxious awareness of being observed. The Panopticon is a marvel- is analogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (whichlous machine which, whatever use one may wish to put it to, produces homogeneous effects of power. A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. So it is not doesn’t necessarily mean binary). Enclosures are molds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment tonecessary to use force to constrain the convict to good behaviour, the madman to calm, the worker to work, the schoolboy to application, the patient to the observation of the regula- the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point. This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the leveltions. Bentham was surprised that panoptic institutions could be so light: there were no more bars, no more chains, no more heavy locks; all that was needed was that the separations should be clear and the openings well arranged. The heaviness of the old ‘houses of security’, with their fortress-like architecture, could be replaced by the simple, economic geom-not as an assembled crowd, but as a unity that derives from this very unity an increase in its forces; discipline increases the skill of each individual, coordinates these skills, accelerates etry of a ‘house of certainty’. The efficiency_of power, its constraining force have, in a sense, passed over to the other side - to the side of its surface of application. He who is sub-movements, increases fire power, broadens the fronts of attack without reducing their vigour, increases the capacity for resistance, etc. The discipline of the workshop, while remain- jected to a field of visibility, and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the powering a way of enforcing respect for the regulations and authorities, of preventing thefts or losses, tends to increase aptitudes, speeds, output and therefore profits; it still exerts a relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection. By this very fact, the external power may throw off its physical weight; it tends tomoral influence over behaviour, but more and more it treats actions in terms of their results, introduces bodies into a machinery, forces into an economy. When, in the seventeenth the non-corporal; and, the more it approaches this limit, the more constant, profound and permanent are its effects: it is a perpetual victory that avoids any physical confrontation andcentury, the provincial schools or the Christian elementary schools were founded, the justifications given for them were above all negative: those poor who were unable to bring up which is always decided in advance. Bentham does not say whether he was inspired, in his project, by Le Vaux’s menagerie at Versailles: the first menagerie in which the differenttheir children left them ‘in ignorance of their obligations: given the difficulties they have in earning a living, and themselves having been badly brought up, they are unable to com- elements areI think Leave me not, asIthey traditionally were, distributed in a park (Loisel, 104-7). At the centre was an octagonal pavilion which, on the first floor, consisted of only a single room, themunicate a sound upbringing that they themselves never had’; this involves three major inconveniences: ignorance of God, idleness (with its consequent drunkenness, impurity, lar- Wait. alone. By Bentham’s time,ceny, brigandage); and the formation of those gangs of beggars, always ready to stir up public disorder and ‘virtually to exhaust the funds of the Hotel-Dieu’ (Demia, 60-61). Now, at king’s salon; live on here. every side large windows looked out onto seven cages (the eighth side was reserved for the entrance), containing different species of animals. What? this menagerie had disappeared. But one finds in the programme of the Panopticon a similar concern with individualizing observation, with characterization and classification, with thethe beginning of the Revolution, the end laid down for primary education was to be, among other things, to ‘fortify’, to ‘develop the body’, to prepare the child ‘for a future in some analytical arrangement of space. The Panopticon is a royal menagerie; the animal is replaced by man,, individual distribution by specific grouping and the king by the machinery of amechanical work’, to give him ‘an observant eye, a sure hand and prompt habits’ (Talleyrand’s Report to the Constituent Assembly, lo September 1791, quoted by Leon, 106). The Who are furtive power. With this exception, the Panopticon also does the work of a naturalist. It makes it possible to draw up differences: among patients, to observe the symptoms of eachdisciplines function increasingly as techniques for making useful individuals. Hence their emergence from a marginal position on the confines of society, and detachment from the you individual, without the proximity of beds, the circulation of miasmas, the effects of contagion confusing the clinical tables; among school-children, it makes it possible to observe per-forms of exclusion or expiation, confinement or retreat. Hence the slow loosening of their kinship with religious regularities and enclosures. Hence also their rooting in the most impor- formances (without there being any imitation or copying), to map aptitudes, to assess characters, to draw up rigorous classifications and, in relation to normal development, to distin-tant, most central and most productive sectors of society. They become attached to some of the great essential functions: factory production,~the transmission of knowledge, the people? guish ‘laziness and stubbornness’ from ‘incurable imbecility’; among workers, it makes it possible to note the aptitudes of each worker, compare the time he takes to perform a task,diffusion of aptitudes and skills, the war-machine. Hence, too, the double tendency one sees developing throughout the eighteenth century to increase the number of disciplinary in- and if they are paid by the day, to calculate their wages (Bentham, 60-64). So much for the question of observation. But the Panopticon was also a laboratory; it could be used as astitutions and to discipline the existing apparatuses. 2. The swarming of disciplinary mechanisms. While, on the one hand, the disciplinary establishments increase, their mechanisms machine to carry out experiments, to alter behaviour, to train or correct individuals. To experiment with medicines and monitor their effects. To try out different punishments on prison-have a certain tendency to become ‘de-institutionalized’, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state; the massive, compact ers, according to their crimes and character, and to seek the most effective ones. To teach different techniques simultaneously to the workers, to decide which is the best. To try outdisciplines are broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted. Sometimes the closed apparatuses add to their internal and specific function a pedagogical experiments - and in particular to take up once again the well-debated problem of secluded education, by using orphans. One would see what would happen when, inrole of external surveillance, developing around themselves a whole margin of lateral controls. Thus the Christian School must not simply train docile children; it must also make it their sixteenth or eighteenth year, they were presented with other boys or girls; one could verify whether, as Helvetius thought, anyone could learn anything; one would follow ‘thepossible to supervise the parents, to gain information as to their way of life, their resources, their piety, their morals. The school tends to constitute minute social observatories that genealogy of every observable idea’; one could bring up different children according to different systems of thought, making certain children believe that two and two do not make fourpenetrate even to the adults and exercise regular supervision over them: the bad behaviour of the child, or his absence, is a legitimate pretext, according to Demia, for one to go and or that the moon is a cheese, then put them together when they are twenty or twenty-five years old; one would then have discussions that would be worth a great deal more than thequestion the neighbours, especially if there is any reason to believe that the family will not tell the truth; one can then go and question the parents themselves, to find out whether they sermons or lectures on which so much money is spent; one would have at least an opportunity of making discoveries in the domain of metaphysics. The Panopticon is a privilegedknow their catechism and the prayers, whether they are determined to root out the vices of their children, how many beds there are in the house and what the sleeping arrangements place for experiments on men, and for analysing with complete certainty the transformations that may be obtained from them. The Panopticon may even provide an apparatus forare; the visit may end with the giving of alms, the present of a religious picture, or the provision of additional beds (Demia, 39-40). Similarly, the hospital is increasingly conceived of supervising its own mechanisms. In this central tower, the director may spy on all the employees that he has under his orders: nurses, doctors, foremen, teachers, warders; he will beas a base for the medical observation of the population outside; after the burning down of the Hotel-Dieu in 1772, there were several demands that the large buildings, so heavy and No...I’m able to judge them continuously, alter their behaviour, impose upon them the methods he thinks best; and it will even be possible to observe the director himself. An inspector arrivingso disordered, should be replaced by a series of smaller hospitals; their function would be to take in the sick of the quarter, but also to gather information, to be alert to any endemic afraid things unexpectedly at the centre of the Panopticon will be able to judge at a glance, without anything being concealed from him, how the entire establishment is functioning. And, in anyor epidemic phenomena, to open dispensaries, to give advice to the inhabitants and to keep the authorities informed ,of the sanitary state of the region. One also sees the spread of case, enclosed as he is in the middle of this architectural mechanism, is not the - 5 director’s own fate entirely bound up with it? The incompetent physician who has allowed contagiondisciplinary procedures, not in the form of enclosed institutions, but as centres of observation disseminated throughout society. Religious groups and charity organizations had long are a little to spread, the incompetent prison governor or workshop manager will be the first victims of an epidemic or a revolt. ‘ “By every tie I could devise”, said the master of the Panopticon,played this role of ‘disciplining’ the population. From the Counter-Reformation to the philanthropy of the July monarchy, initiatives of this type continued to increase; their aims were more compli- “my own fate had been bound up by me with theirs”’ (Bentham, 177). The Panopticon functions as a kind of laboratory of power. Thanks to its mechanisms of observation, it gains inreligious (conversion and moralization), economic (aid and encouragement to work) or political (the struggle against discontent or agitation). One has only to cite by way of example efficiency and in the ability to penetrate into men’s behaviour; knowledge follows the advances of power, discovering new objects of knowledge over all the surfaces on which powerthe regulations for the charity associations in the Paris parishes. The territory to be covered was divided into quarters and cantons and the members of the associations divided cated than is exercised. The plague-stricken town, the panoptic establishment - the differences are important. They mark, at a distance of a century and a half, the transformations of the disci-themselves up along the same lines. These members had to visit their respective areas regularly. ‘They will strive to eradicate places of ill-repute, tobacco shops, life-classes, gaming that. I gotta plinary programme. In the first case, there is an exceptional situation: against an extraordinary evil, power is mobilized; it makes itself everywhere present and visible; it invents newhouse, public scandals, blasphemy, impiety, and any other disorders that may come to their knowledge.’ They will also have to make individual visits to the poor; and the information get out. I woke up mechanisms; it separates, it immobilizes, it partitions constructs for a time what is both a counter-city and the perfect society; it imposes an ideal functioning, but one that is reduced,to be obtained is laid down in regulations: the stability of the lodging, knowledge of prayers, attendance at the sacraments, knowledge of a trade, morality (and ‘whether they have not in the final analysis, like the evil that it combats, to a simple dualism of life and death: that which moves brings death, and one kills that which moves. The Panopticon, on the otherfallen into poverty through their own fault’); lastly, ‘one must learn by skilful questioning in what way they behave at home. Whether there is peace between them and their neighbours, and I can’t hand, must be understood as a generalizable model of functioning; a way of defining power relations in terms of the everyday life of men. No doubt Bentham presents it as a particu-whether they are careful to bring up their children in the fear of God . . . whether they do not have their older children of different sexes sleeping together and with them, whether they remember. lar institution, closed in upon itself. Utopias, perfectly closed in upon themselves, are common enough. As opposed to the ruined prisons, littered with mechanisms of torture, to bedo not allow licentiousness and cajolery in their families, especially in their older daughters. If one has any doubts as to whether they are married, one must ask to see their marriage seen in Piranese’s engravings, the Panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that it should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or real-certificate’.5 3. The state-control of the mechanisms of discipline. In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions of social discipline (cf. ized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years. But the Panopticon must not be understood as a dream building: it is the diagram ofRadzinovitz, 203-14); in France, although a part of this role remained in the hands of parish guilds or charity associations, another - and no doubt the most important part - was very a mechanism of l power reduced to its ideal form; its functioning, abstracted from any obstacle, resistance or friction, must be represented as a pure architectural and optical system:soon taken over by the police apparatus. The organization of a centralized police had long been regarded, even by contemporaries, as the most direct expression of absolutism; the it is in fact a figure of political technology that may and must be detached from any specific use. It is polyvalent in its applications; it serves to reform prisoners, but also to treat patients,sovereign had wished to have ‘his own magistrate to whom he might directly entrust his orders, his commissions, intentions, and who was entrusted with the execution of orders and to instruct schoolchildren, to confine the insane, to supervise workers, to put beggars and idlers to work. It is a type of location of bodies in space, of distribution of individuals in rela-orders under the King’s private seal’ (a note by Duval, first secretary at the police magistrature, quoted in Funck-Brentano, 1). In effect, in taking over a number of pre-existing functions tion to one another, of hierarchical organization, of disposition of centres and channels of power, of definition of the instruments and modes of intervention of power, which can be- the search for criminals, urban surveillance, economic and political supervision the police magistratures and the magistrature-general that presided over them in Paris transposed implemented in hospitals, workshops, schools, prisons. Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed,them into a single, strict, administrative I just machine: ‘All the radiations of force and information that spread from the circumference culminate in the magistrate-general. . . . It is he who the panoptic schema may be used. It is - necessary modifications apart - applicable ‘to all establishments whatsoever, in which, within a space not too large to be covered or com-operates all the wheels that hopetogether We’ve got to your produce order and harmony. The effects of his administration cannot be better compared than to the movement of the celestial bodies’ (Des manded by buildings, a number of persons are meant to be kept under inspection’ (Bentham, 40; although Bentham takes the penitentiary house as his prime example, it is becauseEssarts, 344 and 528). But, What the although the police as an institution were certainly organized in the form of a state apparatus, and although this was certainly linked directly to the centre friends get them out it has many different functions to fulfil - safe custody, confinement, solitude, forced labour and instruction). In each of its applications, it makes it possible to perfect the exercise ofof political sovereignty, the type of power that it exercises, the mechanisms it operates and the elements to which it applies them are specific. It is an apparatus that must be coexten- power. It does this in several ways: because it can reduce the number of those who exercise it, while increasing the number of those on whom it is exercised. Because it is possible sive with the entire social know what body_and of there! fuck is Quiet. not only by the extreme limits that it embraces, but by the minuteness of the details it is concerned with. Police power must bear ‘over everything’: they’re do- to intervene at any moment and because the constant pressure acts even before the offences, mistakes or crimes have been committed. Because, in these conditions, its strength isit is not however the totality of the down here? state nor of the kingdom as visible and invisible body of the monarch; it is the dust of events, actions, behaviour, opinions - ‘everything that happens’;’ Run! ing.‘those things of every moment’, those ‘unimportant things’, of which Catherine II spoke in her Great Instruction (Supplement to the Instruction for the that it never intervenes, it is exercised spontaneously and without noise, it constitutes a mechanism whose effects follow from one another. Because, without any physical instrumentthe police are concerned with other than architecture and geometry, it acts directly on individuals; it gives ‘power of mind over mind’. The panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assuresdrawing up of a new code, 1769, article 535). With the police, one is in the indefinite world of a supervision that seeks ideally to reach the most elementary particle, the most passing its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacity by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms. It is a way of obtainingphenomenon of the social body: ‘The ministry of the magistrates and police officers is of the greatest importance; the objects that it embraces are in a sense definite, one may perceive from power ‘in hitherto unexampled quantity’, ‘a great and new instrument of government . . .; its great excellence consists in the great strength it is capable of giving to any institutionthem only by a sufficiently detailed examination’ (Delamare, unnumbered Preface): the infinitely small of political power. And, in order to be exercised, this power had to be given the it may be thought proper to apply it to’ (Bentham, 66). It’s a case of ‘it’s easy once you’ve thought of it’ in the political sphere. It can in fact be integrated into any function (education,instrument of permanent, exhaustive, omnipresent surveillance, capable of making all visible, as long as it could itself remain invisible. It had to be like a faceless gaze that transformed medical treatment, production, punishment); it can increase the effect of this function, by being linked closely with it; it can constitute a mixed mechanism in which relations of powerthe whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network which, according to Le Maire, (and of knowledge) may be precisely adjusted, in the smallest detail, to the processes that are to be supervised; it can establish a direct proportion between ‘surplus power’ andcomprised for Paris the forty-eight commissaires, the twenty inspecteurs, then the ‘observers’, who were paid regularly, the ‘basses mouches’, or secret agents, who were paid by the ‘surplus production’. In short, it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, butday, then the informers, paid according to the job done, and finally the prostitutes. And this unceasing observation had to be accumulated in a series of reports and registers; through- is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact. The panoptic mechanism is not simply a hinge, a point of exchange betweenout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society by means of a complex documentary organization (on the police registers in the eighteenth century, a mechanism of power and a function; it is a way of making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations. Bentham’s Prefacecf. Chassaigne). And, unlike the methods of judicial or administrative writing, what was registered in this way were forms of behaviour, attitudes, possibilities, suspicions - a permanent to Panopticon opens with a list of the benefits to be obtained from his ‘inspection-house’: ‘Morals reformed - health preserved - industry invigorated - instruction diffused -public bur-account of individuals’ behaviour. Now, it should be noted that, although this police supervision was entirely ‘in the hands of the king’, it did not function in a single direction. It was in thens lightened - Economy seated, as it were, upon a rock - the gordian knot of the Poor-Laws not cut, but untied - all by a simple idea in architecture!’ (Bentham, 39) Furthermore,fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond, by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate wishes of the king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations the arrangement of this machine is such that its enclosed nature does not preclude a permanent presence from the outside: we have seen that anyone may come and exercise in thefrom below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the king’s private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal rule and which brought detention into disrepute on central tower the functions of surveillance, and that, this being the case, he can gain a clear idea of the way in which the surveillance is practised. In fact, any panoptic institution, evenpolitical grounds, were in fact demanded by families, masters, local notables, neighbours, parish priests; and their function was to punish by confinement a whole infra-penality, that if it is as rigorously closed as a penitentiary, may without difficulty be subjected to such irregular and constant inspections: and not only by the appointed inspectors, but also by theof disorder, agitation, disobedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city and which he called ‘offences of non-surveillance’. public; any member of society will have the right to come and see with his own eyes how the schools, hospitals, factories, prisons function. There is no risk, therefore, that the increaseIn short, the eighteenth-century police added a disciplinary function to its role as the auxiliary of justice in the pursuit of criminals and as an instrument for the political supervision of of power created by the panoptic machine may degenerate into tyranny; he disciplinary mechanism will be democratically controlled, since it will be constantly accessible ‘to the greatplots, opposition movements or revolts. It was a complex function since it linked the absolute power of the monarch to the lowest levels of power disseminated in society; since, be- tribunal committee of the world’. This Panopticon, subtly arranged so that an observer may observe, at a glance, so many different individuals, also enables everyone to come andtween these different, enclosed institutions of discipline (workshops, armies, schools), it extended an intermediary network, acting where they could not intervene, disciplining the observe any of the observers. The seeing machine was once a sort of dark room into which individuals spied; it has become a transparent building in which the exercise of power maynon-disciplinary spaces; but it filled in the gaps, linked them together, guaranteed with its armed force an interstitial discipline and a meta-discipline. ‘By means of a wise police, the be supervised by society as a whole. The panoptic schema, without disappearing as such or losing any of its properties, was destined to spread throughout the social body; its voca-sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience’ (Vattel, 162). The organization of the police apparatus in the eighteenth century sanctioned a generalization of the disciplines tion was to become a generalized function. The plague-stricken town provided an exceptional disciplinary model: perfect, but absolutely violent; to the disease that brought death,that became co-extensive with the state itself. Although it was linked in the most explicit way with everything in the royal power that exceeded the exercise of regular justice, it is un- power opposed its perpetual threat of death; life inside it was reduced to its simplest expression; it was, against the power of death, the meticulous exercise of the right of the sword.derstandable why the police offered such slight resistance to the rearrangement of the judicial power; and why it has not ceased to impose its prerogatives upon it, with everincreas- There will The Panopticon, on the other hand, has a role of amplification; although it arranges power, although it is intended to make it more economic and more effective, it does so not foring weight, right up to the present day; this is no doubt because it is the secular arm of the judiciary; but it is also because to a far greater degree than the judicial institution, it is be no social power itself, nor for the immediate salvation of a threatened society: its aim is to strengthen the social forces - to increase production, to develop the economy, spread education, raiseidentified, by reason of its extent and mechanisms, with a society of the disciplinary type. Yet it would be wrong to believe that the disciplinary functions were confiscated and absorbed I’ve passed the level of public morality; to increase and multiply. How is power to be strengthened in such a way that, far from impeding progress, far from weighing upon it with its rules andonce and for all by a state apparatus. ‘Discipline’ may be identified neither with an institution nor with an apparatus; it is a type of power, a modality for its exercise, comprising a whole solution to regulations, it actually facilitates such progress? What intensificator of power will be able at the same time to be a multiplicator of production? How will power, by increasing its forces,set of instruments, techniques,through procedures, levels of application, targets; it is friends, a flow a ‘physics’loves, or an ‘anatomy’ of power, a technology. And it may be taken over either by ‘specialized’ insti- obviously are the present be able to increase those of society instead of confiscating them or impeding them? The Panopticon’s solution to this problem is that the productive increase of power can be assuredtutions (the penitentiaries or ‘houses of correction’ of milk, smells, of the nineteenth events, century), or by languag- institutions that use it as an essential instrument for a particular end (schools, hospitals), or by only if, on the one hand, it can be exercised continuously in the very foundations of society, in the subtlest possible way, and if, on the other hand, it functions outside these sudden,pre-existing authorities that find in it a means of reinforcing or reorganizing their internal not me.relations, essentially in the mechanisms of power (one day we should show how intra-familial situation. violent, discontinuous forms that are bound up with the exercise of sovereignty. The body of the king, with its strange material and physical presence, with the force that he himselfparents-children cell, have become stories, es, memories, sounds, absorbing since the classical age external schemata, first educational and military, then medical, psychiatric, psychological, which ‘disciplined’, I am deploys or transmits to some few others, is at the opposite extreme of this new physics of power represented by panopticism; the domain of panopticism is, on the contrary, that wholehave made the family the privileged emotions, nurs- locus of emergence for the disciplinary to all questionkinds of the of normal and the abnormal); or by apparatuses that have made discipline their principle of what lower region, that region of irregular bodies, with their details, their multiple movements, their heterogeneous forces, their spatial relations; what are required are mechanisms thatinternal functioning (the disciplinarization of the administrative apparatus from the ery rhymes, things that period), or finally by state apparatuses whose major, if not exclusive, function is to assure Napoleonic analyse distributions, gaps, series, combinations, and which use instruments that render visible, record, differentiate and compare: a physics of a relational and multiple power, whichthat discipline reigns over society as a whole (the police). On the whole, therefore, one can speak of the formation of a disciplinary society in this movement that stretches from the I am. has its maximum intensity not in the person of the king, but in the bodies that can be individualized by these relations. At the theoretical level, Bentham defines another way of analys-enclosed disciplines, a sort of social substances, ‘quarantine’, to an indefinitely generalizable mechanism of ‘panopticism’. Not because the disciplinary modality of power has replaced all the ing the social body and the power relations that traverse it; in terms of practice, he defines-a procedure of subordination of bodies and forces that must increase the utility of powerothers; but because it has infiltrated gestures, the others, ideas,sometimes undermining them, but serving as an intermediary between them, linking them together, extending them and above all while practising the economy of the prince. Panopticism is the general principle of a new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not the relations of sovereignty but the relationsmaking it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements. It assures an infinitesimal distribution of the power relations. A few years after Bentham, of discipline. The celebrated, transparent, circular cage, with its high towers powerful and knowing, may have been for Bentham a project of perfect disciplinary institution; but he alsoJulius gave this society its birth impressions, Diffuse schizophrenia. certificate (Julius, 384-6). Speaking of the panoptic principle, he said that there was much more there than architectural ingenuity: it was an event in Rampant gazes, set out to show how one may ‘unlock’ the disciplines and get them to function indepression. a diffused, multiple, polyvalent way throughout the whole social body. These disciplines~ which thethe ‘history of the human mind’. In appearance, it is merely the solution of a technical problem; but, through it, a whole type of society emerges. Antiquity had been a civilization of classical age had elaborated in specific, relatively enclosed places - barracks, schools, Atomization workshops - and whose total implementation had been imagined only at the limited and tem-spectacle. ‘To render accessible to a multitude of men the inspection into fine songs, and of a small number of objects’: this was the problem to which the architecture of temples, theatres and circuses porary scale of a plague-stricken town, Bentham dreamt of transforming into a network of mechanisms that would be everywhere and always alert, running through society withoutresponded. With spectacle, there was a predominance of public life,What foods. the intensity of festivals, sensual proximity. In these rituals in which blood flowed, society found new vigour and interruption in space or in time. The panoptic arrangement provides the formula paranoiac particles. for this generalization. It programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism,formed for a moment a single great body. The modern age poses the opposite problem: ‘To procure for a small number, or even for a single individual, the instantaneous view of a the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary Hysterization mechanisms. of con- am I? Tied There are two images, then, of discipline. At one extreme, the discipline-blockade,great multitude.’ In a society in which the principal elements are no longer the community and public life, but, on the one hand, private individuals and, on the other, the state, relations the enclosed institution, established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative tact. The more I want functions: arresting evil, breaking communications, suspending time. At the other ex- can be regulated only in a form that is the exact reverse of the in every way‘It was to the modern age, to the ever-growing influence of the state, to its ever more profound intervention spectacle: treme, with panopticism, is the discipline-mechanism: a functional mechanism that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design ofin all the details and all the relations of social life, that was reserved the task of increaSing and perfecting its guarantees, by using and directing towards that great aim the building to places, to be me, the more I subtle coercion for a society to come. The movement from one project to the other, from a schema of exceptional discipline to one of a generalized surveillance, rests on a historical and distribution of buildings intended to observe a great multitude of men at the same time.’ Julius saw as a fulfilled historical process that which Bentham had described as a techni- transformation: the gradual extension of the mechanisms of discipline throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, their spread throughout the whole social body, the forma-cal programme. Our society is one not of spectacle, but of surveillance; feel an emptiness. sufferings,under the surface of images, one invests bodies in depth; behind the great abstraction of exchange, there tion of what might be called in general the disciplinary society. A whole disciplinary generalization - the Benthamite physics of power represents an acknowledgement of this - hadcontinues the meticulous, concrete training of useful forces; tbe ancestors, circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge; the play of signs operated throughout the classical age. The spread of disciplinary institutions, whose network was beginning to cover an ever larger surface and occupying above all a less and lessdefines the anchorages of power; it is not that the beautiful totality of the individual is amputated, repressed, altered by our social order, it is rather that the individual is carefully fab- marginal position, testifies to this: what was an islet, a privileged place, a circumstantial measure, or a singular model, became a general formula; the regulations characteristic of thericated in it, according to a whole technique of forces and bodies. We are much less Greeks than we believe. We are neither in the amphitheatre, nor on the stage, but in the panop- Protestant and pious armies of William of Orange or of Gustavus Adolphus were transformed into regulations for all the armies of Europe; the model colleges of the Jesuits, or thetic machine, invested by its effects of power2 which we bring to ourselves since we are part of its mechanism. The importance, in historical mythology, of the Napoleonic character schools of Batencour or Demia, following the example set by Sturm, provided the outlines for the general forms of educational discipline; the ordering of the naval and military hospi-probably derives from the fact that it is at the point of junction of the monarchical, ritual exercise of sovereignty and the hierarchical, permanent exercise of indefinite discipline. He is tals provided the model for the entire reorganization of hospitals in the eighteenth century. But this extension of the disciplinary institutions was no doubt only the most visible aspectthe individual who looms over everything with a single gaze which no detail, however minute, can escape: ‘You may consider that no part of the Empire is without surveillance, no of various, more profound processes. 1. The functional inversion of the disciplines. At first, they were expected to neutralize dangers, to fix useless or disturbed populations, to avoidcrime, no offence, no contravention that remains unpunished, and that the eye of the genius who can enlighten all embraces the whole of this vast machine, without, however, the the inconveniences of over-large assemblies; now they were being asked to play a positive role, for they were becoming able to do so, to increase the possible utility of individuals.slightest detail escaping his attention’ (Treilhard, 14). At the moment of its full blossoming, the disciplinary socieSy still assumes with the Emperor the old aspect of the power of Military discipline is no longer a mere means of preventing looting, desertion or failure to obey orders among the troops; it has become a basic technique to enable the army to exist,spectacle. As a monarch who is at one and the same time a usurper of the ancient throne and the organizer of the new state, he combined into a single symbolic, ultimate figure the whole of the long process by which the pomp of sovereignty, the necessarily spectacular manifestations of power, were extinguished one by one in the daily exercise of surveillance,equivalent or at least a point of comparison had to be found for them, it would be rather in the inquisitorial’ technique. The eighteenth century invented the techniques of discipline in a panopticism in which the vigilance of intersecting gazes was soon to render useless both the eagle and the sun. The formation of the disciplinary society is connected with aand the examination, rather as the Middle Ages invented the judicial investigation. But it did so by quite different means. The investigation procedure, an old fiscal and administrative number of broad historical processes - economic, juridico-political and, lastly, scientific - of which it forms part. 1. Generally speaking, it might be said that the disciplines are tech-technique, had developed above all with the reorganization of the Church and the increase of the princely states in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. At this time it permeated to a niques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities. It is true that there is nothing exceptional or even characteristic in this; every system of power is presented with the samevery large degree the jurisprudence first of the ecclesiastical courts, then of the lay courts. The investigation as an authoritarian search for a truth observed or attested was thus op- problem. But the peculiarity of the disciplines is that they try to define in relation to the multiplicities a tactics of power that fulfils three criteria: firstly, to obtain the exercise of power atposed to the old procedures of the oath, the ordeal, the judicial duel, the judgement of God or even of the transaction between private individuals. The investigation was the sovereign the lowest possible cost (economically, by the low expenditure it involves; politically, by its discretion, its low exteriorization, its relative invisibility, the little resistance it arouses);power arrogating to itself the right to establish the truth by a number of regulated techniques. Now, although the investigation has since then been an integral part of western justice secondly, to bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, without either failure or interval; thirdly, to link this ‘economic’ growth(even up to our own day), one must not forget either its political origin, its link with the birth of the states and of monarchical sovereignty, or its later extension and its role in the forma- of power with the output of the apparatuses (educational, military, industrial or medical) within which it is exercised; in short, to increase both the docility and the utility of all the ele-tion of knowledge. In fact, the investigation has been the no doubt crude, but fundamental element in the constitution of the empirical sciences; it has been the juridico-political matrix ments of the system. This triple objective of the disciplines corresponds to a well-known historical conjuncture. One aspect of this conjuncture was the large demographic thrust of theof this experimental knowledge, which, as we know, was very rapidly released at the end of the Middle Ages. It is perhaps true to say that, in Greece, mathematics were born from eighteenth century; an increase in the floating population (one of the primary objects of discipline is to fix; it is an anti-nomadic technique); a change of quantitative scale in the groupstechniques of measurement; the sciences of nature, in any case, were born, to some extent, at the end of the Middle Ages, from the practices of investigation. The great empirical We love to be supervised or manipulated (from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the eve of the French Revolution, the school population had been increasing rapidly, as had noknowledge that covered the things of the world and transcribed them into the ordering of an indefinite discourse that observes, describes and establishes the ‘facts’ (at a time when doubt the hospital population; by the end of the eighteenth century,while the peace-time army exceeded 200,000 men). The other aspect of the conjuncture was the growth in the appara-the western world was beginning the economic and political conquest of this same world) had its operating model no doubt in the Inquisition - that immense invention that our recent hatingand complex, it was also becoming more we hate tus of production, which was becoming more and more extended costly and its profitability had to be increased. The development of themildness has placed in the dark recesses of our memory. But what this politico-juridical, administrative and criminal, religious and lay, investigation was to the sciences of nature, while disciplinary methods corresponded to these two processes, or rather, no doubt, to the new need to adjust their correlation. Neither the residual forms of feudal power nor the structuresdisciplinary analysis has been to the sciences of man. These sciences, which have so delighted our ‘humanity’ for over a century, have their technical matrix in the petty, malicious loving of the administrative monarchy, nor the local mechanisms of supervision, nor the unstable, tangled mass they all formed together could carry out this role: they were hindered fromminutiae of the disciplines and their investigations. These investigations are perhaps to psychology, psychiatry, pedagogy, criminology, and so many other strange sciences, what the doing so by the irregular and inadequate extension of their network, by their often conflicting functioning, but above all by the ‘costly’ nature of the power that was exercised in them.terrible power of investigation was to the calm knowledge of the animals, the plants or the earth. Another power, another knowledge. On the threshold of the classical age, Bacon, It was costly in several senses: because directly it cost a great deal to the Treasury; because the system of corrupt offices and farmed-out taxes weighed indirectly, but very heavily,lawyer and statesman, tried to develop a methodology of investigation for the empirical sciences. What Great Observer will produce the methodology of examination for the human on the population; because the resistance it encountered forced it into a cycle of perpetual reinforcement; because it proceeded essentially by levying (levying on money or productssciences? Unless, of course, such a thing is not possible. For, although it is true that, in becoming a technique for the empirical sciences, the investigation has detached itself from by royal, seigniorial, ecclesiastical taxation; levying on men or time by corvées of press-ganging, by locking up or banishing vagabonds). The development of the disciplines marksthe inquisitorial procedure, in which it was historically rooted, the examination has remained extremely close to the disciplinary power that shaped it. It has always been and still is an the appearance of elementary techniques belonging to a quite different economy: mechanisms of power which, instead of proceeding by deduction, are integrated into the productiveintrinsic element of the disciplines. Of course it seems to have undergone a speculative purification by integrating itself with such sciences as psychology and psychiatry. And, in effect, efficiency of the apparatuses from within, into the growth of this efficiency and into the use of what it produces. For the old principle of ‘levying-violence’, which governed the economyits appearance in the form of tests, interviews, interrogations and consultations is apparently in order to rectify the mechanisms of discipline: educational psychology is supposed to of power, the disciplines substitute the principle of ‘mildness-production-profit’. These are the techniques that make it possible to adjust the multiplicity of men and the multiplicationcorrect the rigours of the school, just as the medical or psychiatric interview is supposed to rectify the effects of the discipline of work. But we must not be misled; these techniques of the apparatuses of production (and this means not only ‘production’ in the strict sense, but also the production of knowledge and skills in the school, the production of health in themerely refer individuals from one disciplinary authority to another, and they reproduce, in a concentrated or formalized form, the schema of power-knowledge proper to each discipline hospitals, the production of destructive force in the army). In this task of adjustment, discipline had to solve a number of problems for which the old economy of power was not suf-(on this subject, cf. Tort). The great investigation that gave rise to the sciences of nature has become detached from its politico-juridical model; the examination, on the other hand, is ficiently equipped. It could reduce the inefficiency of mass phenomena: reduce what, in a multiplicity, makes it much less manageable than a unity; reduce what is opposed to the usestill caught up in disciplinary technology. In the Middle Ages, theThose who procedure claim to gradually superseded the old accusatory justice, by a process initiated from above; the of investigation Listen. of each of its elements and of their sum; reduce everything that may counter the advantages of number. That is why discipline fixes; it arrests or regulates movements; it clears updisciplinary technique, on the other hand, insidiously and as if fromhave below,solutions has invaded area penal justice that is still, in principle, inquisitorial. All the great movements of extension that confusion; it dissipates compact groupings of individuals wandering about the country in unpredictable ways; it establishes calculated distributions. It must also master all the forcescharacterize modern penality - the Do problematization you of the criminal behind his crime, the concern with a punishment that is a correction, a therapy, a normalization, the division of the You haven’t that are formed from the very constitution of an organized multiplicity; it must neutralize the effects of counter-power that spring from them and which form a resistance to the poweract of judgement between various hear it? authorities that are supposed tocontradicted measure, assess, almost diagnose, cure, transform individuals - all this betrays the penetration ofstopped the disciplinary it. examina- There’s no that wishes to dominate it: agitations, revolts, spontaneous organizations, coalitions - anything that may establish horizontal conjunctions. Hence the fact that the disciplines usetion into the judicial inquisition. What is now imposed on penal justiceimmediately. as its point of application, its ‘useful’ object, will no longer be the body of the guilty man set up against the body procedures of partitioning and verticality, that they introduce, between the different elements at the same level, as solid separations as possible, that they define compact hierarchicalof the king; nor will it be the juridical subject of an ideal contract; it will be the disciplinary individual. The longer any point of penal justice under the Ancien Regime was the infinite extreme networks, in short, that they oppose to the intrinsic, adverse force of multiplicity the technique of the continuous, individualizing pyramid. They must also increase the particular utilitysegmentation of the body of the regicide: a manifestation of the strongest power over the body of the greatest language criminal, for whose total destruction made the crime explode into its truth. of each element of the multiplicity, but by means that are the most rapid and the least costly, that is to say, by using the multiplicity itself as an instrument of this growth. Hence, in The ideal point of penality today would be an indefinite discipline: an interrogation without end, an investigation that would be extended without limit to a meticulous and ever more order to extract from bodies the maximum time and force, the use of those overall methods known as time-tables, collective training, exercises, total and detailed surveillance. Fur-analytical observation, a judgement that would at the same time be the constitution of a file that was never common closed, the calculated leniency of a penalty that would be interlaced with thermore, the disciplines must increase the effect of utility proper to the multiplicities, so that each is made more useful than the simple sum of its elements: it is in order to increasethe ruthless curiosity of an examination, a procedure that would be at the same time the permanent measure of a gap in relation to an inaccessible norm and the asymptotic movement experience. the utilizable effects of the multiple that the disciplines define tactics of distribution, reciprocal adjustment of bodies, gestures and rhythms, differentiation of capacities, reciprocalthat strives to meet in infinity. The public execution was the logical culmination of a procedure governed by the Inquisition. The practice of placing individuals under ‘observation’ is a coordination in relation to apparatuses or tasks. Lastly, the disciplines have to bring into play the power relations, not above but inside the very texture of the multiplicity, as discreetlynatural extension of a justice imbued with disciplinary methods and examination procedures. Is it surprising that the cellular prison, with its regular chronologies, forced labour, its as possible, as well articulated on the other functions of these multiplicities and also in the least expensive way possible: to this correspond anonymous instruments of power, coex-authorities of surveillance and registration, its experts in normality, who continue and multiply the functions of the judge, should have become the modern instrument of penality? Is it tensive with the multiplicity that they regiment, such as hierarchical surveillance, continuous registration, perpetual assessment and classification. In short, to substitute for a powersurprising that prisons resemble factories, schools, barracks, hospitals, which all resemble prisons? From whatever angle you approach it, the present offers no way out. This is not that is manifested through the brilliance of those who exercise it, a power that insidiously objectifies those on whom it is applied; to form a body of knowledge about these individuals,the least of its virtues. From those who seek hope above all, it tears away every firm ground. Those who claim to have solutions are contradicted almost immediately. Everyone agrees rather than to deploy the ostentatious signs of sovereignty. In a word, the disciplines are the ensemble of minute technical inventions that made it possible to increase the useful sizethat things can only get worse. “The future has no future” is the wisdom of an age that, for all its appearance of perfect normalcy, has reached the level of consciousness of the first of multiplicities by decreasing the inconveniences of the power which, in order to make them useful, must control them. A multiplicity, whether in a workshop or a nation, an army or apunks. The sphere of political representation has come to a close. From left to right, it’s the same nothingness striking the pose of an emperor or a savior, the same sales assistants school, reaches the threshold of a discipline when the relation of the one to the other becomes favourable. If the economic take-off of the West began with the techniques that madeadjusting their discourse according to the findings of the latest surveys. Those who still vote seem to have no other intention than to desecrate the ballot box by voting as a pure act possible the accumulationThis man’sit might perhaps be said that the methods for administering the accumulation of men 220 Panopticism made possible a political take-off in relationof protest. We’re beginning to suspect that it’s only against voting itself that people continue to vote. Nothing we’re being shown is adequate to the situation, not by far. In its very si- of capital, stillviolent to the traditional, ritual, costly, Technically alive.forms of power, which soon fell into disuse and were superseded by a subtle, calculated technology of subjection. In fact, the two processes - thelence, the populace seems infinitely more mature than all these puppets bickering amongst themselves about how to govern it. The ramblings of any Belleville chibani contain more and biologi- accumulation of men and the accumulation of capital - cannot be separated; it would not have been possible to solve the problem of the accumulation Cooperationof men without the growth ofwisdom than all the declarations of our so-called leaders. The lid on the social kettle is shut triple-tight, and the pressure inside continues to build. From out of Argentina, the specter an apparatus of production capable of both sustaining them and using them; conversely, the techniques that made the cumulative ‘rnultiplicity of men useful accelerated the accumu-of Que Se Vayan Todos is beginning to seriously haunt the ruling class. The flames of November 2005 still flicker in everyone’s minds. Those first joyous fires were the baptism of a cally, though is our only lation of capital. At~a’ less general level, the technological mutations of the apparatus of production, the division of labour and the elaboration of the disciplinary techniques sustaineddecade full of promise. The media fable of “banlieue vs. the Republic” may work, but what it gains in effectiveness it loses in truth. Fires were lit in the city centers, but this news was an ensemble of veryI don’t close relations (cf. Marx, Capital, vol. 1, chapter XIII and the very interesting analysis in Guerry and Deleule). Each makeschance of possible and necessary;methodically suppressed. Whole streets in Barcelona burned in solidarity, but no one knew about it apart from the people living there. And it’s not even true that the country has the other each provides a modelwant toforbe he’ll never the other. The disciplinary pyramid constituted the small cell of power within which the separation, coordination and supervisionsaving our-of tasks was imposed and stopped burning. Many different profiles can be found among the arrested, with little that unites them besides a hatred for existing society – not class, race, or even neighborhood. here. recover. made efficient; and analytical partitioning of time, gestures and bodily forces constituted an operational schema that could easily be transferred from the groups to be subjected to theWhat was new wasn’t the “banlieue revolt,” since that was already going on in the 80s, but the break with its established forms. These assailants no longer listen to anybody, neither selves. mechanisms of production; the massive projection of military methods onto industrial organization was an example of this modelling of the division of labour following the model laidto their Big Brothers and Big Sisters, nor to the community organizations charged with overseeing the return to normal. No “SOS Racism” could sink its cancerous roots into this event, down by the schemata of power. But, on the other hand, the technical analysis of the process of production, its ‘mechanical’ breaking-down, were projected onto the labour forcewhose apparent conclusion can be credited only to fatigue, falsification and the media omertà. This whole series of nocturnal vandalisms and anonymous attacks, this wordless de- whose task it was to implement it: the constitution of those disciplinary machines in which the individual forces that they bring together are composed into a whole and therefore in-struction, has widened the breach between politics and the political. No one can honestly deny the obvious: this was an assault that made no demands, a threat without a message, creased is the effect of this projection. Let us say that discipline is the unitary technique by which the body is reduced as a ‘political’ force at the least cost and maximized as a usefuland it had nothing to do with “politics.” One would have to be oblivious to the autonomous youth movements of the last 30 years not to see the purely political character of this resolute force. The growth of a capitalist economy gave rise to the specific modality of disciplinary power whose general formulas, techniques of submitting forces and bodies, in short, ‘politi-negation of politics. Like lost children we trashed the prized trinkets of a society that deserves no more respect than the monuments of Paris at the end of the Bloody Week- and knows You can’t cal anatomy’, could be operated in the most diverse political regimes, apparatuses or institutions. 2. The panoptic modality of power - at the elementary, technical, merely physicalit. There will be no social solution to the present situation. First, because the vague aggregate of social milieus, institutions, and individualized bubbles that is called, with a touch of level at which it is situated - is not under the immediate dependence or a direct extension of the great juridico-political structures of a society; it is nonetheless not absolutely indepen-antiphrasis, “society,” has no consistency. Second, because I’m there’s trying! no longer any language for common experience. And we cannot share wealth if we do not share a language. It stop it. dent. Historically, the process by which the bourgeoisie became in the course of the eighteenth century the politically dominant class was masked by the establishment of an explicit,took half a century of struggle around the Enlightenment to make the French Revolution possible, and a century of struggle around work to give birth to the fearsome “welfare state.” coded and formally egalitarian juridical framework, made possible by the organization of a parliamentary, representative regime. But the development and generalization of disciplin-Struggles create the language in which a new order expresses itself. But there is nothing like that today. Europe is now a continent gone broke that shops secretly at discount stores ary mechanisms constituted the other, dark side of these processes. The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle was supported byand has to fly budget airlines if it wants to travel at all. No “problems” framed in social terms admit of a solution. The questions of “pensions,” of “job security,” of “young people” and these tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-power that are essentially non-egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines. And although, in atheir “violence” can only be held in suspense while the situation these words serve to cover up is continually policed for signsmain of further unrest. Nothing can make it an attractive city formal way, the representative regime makes it possible, directly or indirectly, with or without relays, for the will of all to form the fundamental authority of sovereignty, the disciplinesprospect to wipe the asses of pensioners for minimum wage. Those who have found less humiliation and Themore advantage in a life of crime than in sweeping floors will not turn in their purely provide, at the base, a guarantee of the submission of forces and bodies. The real, corporal disciplines constituted the foundation of the formal, juridical liberties. The contract mayweapons, and prison won’t teach them to love society. Cuts to their monthly pensions will undermine the desperate pleasure-seeking centers,of hordes of retirees, making them stew and have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power; panopticism constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. It continued to work in depth on thesplutter about the refusal to work among an ever larger section of youth. And finally, no guaranteed income metropolitan granted the day after a quasi-uprising will be able to lay the foundation of juridical structures of society, in order to make the effective mechanisms of power function in opposition to the formal framework that it had acquired. The ‘Enlightenment’, whicha new New Deal, a new pact, a new peace. The social feeling has already evaporated too much for sections that. As of an attempted solution, the pressure to ensure that nothing happens, discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines. In appearance, the disciplines constitute nothing more than an infra-law. They seem to extend the general forms defined by lawtogether with police surveillance of the territory, will only intensify. The unmanned drone that flew over willpolice go about theSeine-Saint-Denis country, last July 14th – as the later confirmed – presents a to the infinitesimal level of individual lives; or they appear as methods of training that enable individuals to become integrated into these general demands. They seem to constitute much more vivid image of the future than all the fuzzy humanistic projections. That they were careful to assure us that the drone was unarmedtheir givesopulent us a clear indication of the road the same type of law on a different scale, thereby making it more meticulous and more indulgent. The disciplines should be regarded as a sort of counter-law They have the precisewe’re headed down. The territory will be partitioned into ever more restricted zones. Highways built around the the borders of “problem neighborhoods” already form invisible walls closing role of introducing insuperable asymmetries and excluding reciprocities. First, because discipline creates between individuals a ‘private’ link, which is a relation of constraints entirelyoff those areas off from the middle-class subdivisions. Whatever defenders of the Republic may think, the control of neighborhoods “by the community” lives in an ever is manifestly the most effective different from contractual obligation; the acceptance of a discipline may be underwritten by contract; the way in which it is imposed, the mechanisms it brings into play, the non-revers-means available. The purely metropolitan sections of the country, the main city centers, will go about their opulent lives in an ever more crafty, more evercrafty, more sophisticated, ever more ible subordination of one group of people by another, the ‘surplus’ power that is always fixed on the same side, the inequality of position of the different ‘partners’ in relation to theshimmering deconstruction. They will illuminate the whole planet with their glaring neon lights, as the patrols of the BAC and private security companies (i.e. paramilitary units) prolif- common regulation, all these distinguish the disciplinary link from the contractual link, and make it possible to distort the contractual link systematically from the moment it has as itserate under the umbrella of an increasingly shameless judicial protection. The impasse of the present, everywhere in evidence, is everywhere denied. There will be no end of psy- content a mechanism of discipline. We know, for example, how many real procedures undermine the legal fiction of the work contract: workshop discipline is not the least important.chologists, sociologists, and literary hacks applying themselves to the case, each with a specialized jargon from which the conclusions are especially absent. It’s enough to listen to There are Moreover, whereas the juridical systems define juridical subjects according to universal norms, the disciplines characterize, classify, specialize; they distribute along a scale, aroundthe songs of the times – the asinine “alt-folk” where the petty bourgeoisie dissects the state of its soul, next to declarations of war from Mafia K’1 Fry – to know that a certain coexis- complica- a norm, hierarchize individuals in relation to one another and, if necessary, disqualify and invalidate. In any case, in the space and during the time in which they exercise their controltence will end soon, that a decision is near. This book is signed in the name of an imaginary collective. Its editors are not its authors. They were content merely to introduce a little and bring into play the asymmetries of their power, they effect a suspension of the law that is never total, but is never annulled either. Regular and institutional tions. as it may be, the disci-order into the common-places of our time, collecting some of the murmurings around barroom tables and behind closed bedroom doors. They’ve done nothing more than lay down a glaring neon lights, pline, in its mechanism, is a ‘counter-law’. And, although the universal juridicism of modern society seems to fix limits on the exercise of power, its universally widespread panopticismfew necessary truths, whose universal repression fills psychiatric hospitals with patients, and eyes with pain. They’ve made themselves scribes of the situation. It’s the privileged enables it to operate, on the underside of the law, a machinery that is both immense and minute, which supports, reinforces, multiplies the asymmetry of power and undermines thefeature of radical circumstances that a rigorous application of logic leads to revolution. It’s enough just to say what isasbefore the patrols our eyesof and not to shrink from the conclusions. First limits that are traced around the law. The minute disciplines, the panopticisms of every day may well be below the level of emergence of the great apparatuses and the great politicalCircle “I AM WHAT I AM” “I AM WHAT I AM.” This is marketing’s latest offering to the world, the final stage in the development of advertising, far beyond all the exhortations to be private security struggles. But, in the genealogy of modern society, they have been, with the class domination that traverses it, the political counterpart of the juridical norms according to whichdifferent, to be oneself and drink Pepsi. Decades of concepts in order to get where we are, to arrive at pure tautology. I = I. He’s running on a treadmill in front of the mirror in his gym. shameless companies (i.e. power was redistributed. Hence, no doubt, the importance that has been given for so long to the small techniques of discipline, to those apparently insignificant tricks that it has in-She’s coming back from work, behind the wheel of her Smart car. Will they meet? “I AM WHAT I AM.” My body belongs to me. I am me, you are you, and something’s wrong. Mass judicial vented, and even to those ‘sciences’ that give it a respectable face; hence the fear of abandoning them if one cannot find any substitute; hence the affirmation that they are at the very personalization. Individualization of all conditions – life, work and misery. Diffuse ever more schizophrenia. Rampant depression.paramilitary Atomization units) into fine paranoiac particles. Hysterization of con- foundation of society, and an element in its equilibrium, whereas they are a series of mechanisms for unbalancing power relations definitively and everywhere; hence the persistencetact. The more I want to be me, the more I feel an emptiness. The more I express sophisticated, myself, the more I am drained. The more I run after myself, the more tiredprotec- I get. We cling to our self proliferate under the in regarding them as the humble, but concrete form of every morality, whereas they are a set of physico-political techniques. To return to the problem of legal punishments, thelike a coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization that feels, in the end, a lot more like antion. amputation. We insure prison with all the corrective technology at its disposal is to be resituated at the point where the codified power to punish turns into a disciplinary power to observe; at the point whereour selves to the point of bankruptcy, with a more or less disguised clumsiness. ever more shim- Meanwhile, I manage. The quest for aumbrella of my apartment, the latest fashionable crap, re- self, my blog, the universal punishments of the law are applied selectively to certain individuals and always the same ones; at the point where the redefinition of the juridical subject by the penaltylationship dramas, who’s fucking who… whatever prosthesis it takes to hold onto mering an “I”! If “society” decon- hadn’t become such anaincreasingly definitive abstraction, then it would denote all the existential becomes a useful training of the criminal; at the point where the law is inverted and passes outside itself, and where the counter-law becomes the effective and institutionalized con-crutches that allow me to keep dragging on, the ensemble of dependencies I’ve contracted as the price of my identity. The handicapped person is the model citizen of tomorrow. It’s struction. They tent of the juridical forms. What generalizes the power to punish, then, is not the universal consciousness of the law in each juridical subject; it is the regular extension, the infinitelynot without foresight that the associations exploiting them today demand that they be granted a “subsistence income.” The injunction, everywhere, to “be someone” maintains the willproduces illuminate thethe minute web of panoptic techniques. 3. Taken one by one, most of these techniques have a long history behind them. But what was new, in the eighteenth century, was that, by beingpathological state that makes this society necessary. The injunction to be strong combined and generalized, they attained a level at which the formation of knowledge and the increase of power regularly reinforce one another in a circular process. At this point, thetherapeutic character, even working, even love. All those “how’s it goings?” that wewhole exchange As the very weakness by which it maintains itself, so that everything seems to take on a give the impression of a society composed of patients taking each other’s temperatures. planet disciplines crossed the ‘technological’ threshold. First the hospital, then the school, then, later, the workshop were not simply ‘reordered’ by the disciplines; they became, thanks toSociability is now made up of a thousand little niches, a thousand little refuges where you can take shelter. Where it’s always better than the bitter cold outside. Where everything’s with their seconds them, apparatuses such that any mechanism of objectification could be used in them as an instrument of subjection, and any growth of power could give rise in them to possiblefalse, since it’s all just a pretext for getting warmed up. Where nothing can happen since tick we’re all too busy shivering silently together. Soon this society will only be held together by branches of knowledge; it was this link, proper to the technological systems, that made possible within the disciplinary element the formation of clinical medicine, psychiatry, childthe mere tension of all the social atoms straining towards an illusory cure. It’s a power plant that runs its turbines on a gigantic reservoir of unwept tears, always on the verge of spill- psychology, educational psychology, the rationalization of labour. It is a double process, then: an epistemological ‘thaw’ through a refinement of power relations; a multiplication of theing over. “I AM WHAT I AM.” Never has domination found such an innocent-sounding slogan. The maintenance of the self in a permanent state of deterioration, in a chronic state of away. effects of power through the formation and accumulation of new forms of knowledge. The extension of the disciplinary methods is inscribed in a broad historical process: the develop-near-collapse, is the best-kept secret of the present order of things. The weak, depressed, self-critical, virtual self is essentially that endlessly adaptable subject required by the cease- ment at about the same time of many other technologies - agronomical, industrial, economic. But it must be recognized that, compared with the mining industries, the emergingless innovation of production, the accelerated obsolescence of technologies, the constant overturning of social norms, and generalized flexibility. It is at the same time the most vora- chemical industries or methods of national accountancy, compared with the blast furnaces or the steam engine, panopticism has received little attention. It is regarded as not muchcious consumer and, paradoxically, the most productive self, the one that will most eagerly and energetically throw itself into the slightest project, only to return later to its original more than a bizarre little utopia, a perverse dream - rather as though Bentham had been the Fourier of a police society, and the Phalanstery had taken on the form of the Panopticon.larval state. “WHAT AM I,” then? Since childhood, I’ve passed through a flow of milk, smells, stories, sounds, emotions, nursery rhymes, substances, gestures, ideas, impressions, And yet this represented the abstract formula of a very real technology, that of individuals. There were many reasons why it received little praise; the most obvious is that the dis-gazes, songs, and foods. What am I? Tied in every way to places, sufferings, ancestors, friends, loves, events, languages, memories, to all kinds of things that obviously are not me. courses to which it gave rise rarely acquired, except in the academic classifications, the status of sciences; but the real reason is no doubt that the power that it operates and whichEverything that attaches me to the world, all the links that constitute me, all the forces that compose me don’t form an identity, a thing displayable on cue, but a singular, shared, living it augments is a direct, physical power that men exercise upon one another. An inglorious culmination had an origin that could be only grudgingly acknowledged. But it would be unjustexistence, from which emerges – at certain times and places – that being which says “I.” Our feeling of inconsistency is simply the consequence of this foolish belief in the permanence to compare the disciplinary techniques with such inventions as the steam engine or Amici’s microscope. They are much less; and yet, in a way, they are much more. If a historicalof the self and of the little care we give to what makes us what we are. It’s dizzying to see Reebok’s “I AM WHAT I AM” enthroned atop a Shanghai skyscraper. The West everywhere rolls out its favorite Trojan horse: the exasperating antimony between the self and the world, the individual and the group, between attachment and freedom. Freedom isn’t the act ofthe familiarities of one’s neighborhood and trade, of one’s village, of struggle, of kinship, our attachment to places, to beings, to the seasons, to ways of doing and speaking. Here shedding our attachments, but the practical capacity to work on them, to move around in their space, to form or dissolve them. The family only exists as a family, that is, as a hell, forlies the present paradox: work has totally triumphed over all other ways of existing, at the very moment when workers have become superfluous. Gains in productivity, outsourcing, those who’ve quit trying to alter its debilitating mechanisms, or don’t know how to. The freedom to uproot oneself has always been a phantasmic freedom. We can’t rid ourselves ofmechanization, automated and digital production have so progressed that they have almost reduced to zero the quantity of living labor necessary in the manufacture of any product. what binds us without at the same time losing the very thing to which our forces would be applied. “I AM WHAT I AM,” then, is not simply a lie, a simple advertising campaign, but aWe are living the paradox of a society of workers without work, where entertainment, consumption and leisure only underscore the lack from which they are supposed to distract us. military campaign, a war cry directed against everything that exists between beings, against everything that circulates indistinctly, everything that invisibly links them, everything thatThe mine in Carmaux, famous for a century of violent strikes, has now been reconverted into Cape Discovery. It’s an entertainment “multiplex” for skateboarding and biking, distin- prevents complete desolation, against everything that makes us exist, and ensures that the whole world doesn’t everywhere have the look and feel of a highway, an amusement parkguished by a “Mining Museum” in which methane blasts are simulated for vacationers. In corporations, work is divided in an increasingly visible way into highly skilled positions of I am It was like he was or a new town: pure boredom, passionless but well-ordered, empty, frozen space, where nothing moves apart from registered bodies, molecular automobiles, and ideal commodities.research, conception, control, coordination and communication which deploy all the knowledge necessary for the new, cybernetic production process, and unskilled positions for the The eyes what France wouldn’t be the land of anxiety pills that it’s become, the paradise of anti-depressants, the Mecca of neurosis, if it weren’t also the European champion of hourly productivity.maintenance and surveillance of this process. The first are few in number, very well paid and thus so coveted that the minority who occupy these positions will do anything to avoid expecting it, waiting are every- Sickness, fatigue, depression, can be seen as the individual symptoms of what needs to be cured. They contribute to the maintenance of the existing order, to my docile adjustmentlosing them. They and their work are effectively bound in one anguished embrace. Managers, scientists, lobbyists, researchers, programmers, developers, consultants and engineers, I am. for it. He knew it to idiotic norms, and to the modernization of my crutches. They specify the selection of my opportune, compliant, and productive tendencies, as well as those that must be gentlyliterally never stop working. Even their sex lives serve to augment productivity. A Human Resources philosopher writes, “[t]he most creative businesses are the ones with the greatest where was coming. discarded. “It’s never too late to change, you know.” But taken as facts, my failings can also lead to the dismantling of the hypothesis of the self. They then become acts of resistancenumber of intimate relations.” “Business associates,” a Daimler-Benz Human Resources Manager confirms, “are an important part of the business’s capital [...] Their motivation, their in the current war. They become a rebellion and a force against everything that conspires to normalize us, to amputate us. The self is not some thing within us that is in a state ofknow-how, their capacity to innovate and their attention to clients’ desires constitute the raw material of innovative services [...] Their behavior, their social and emotional competence, crisis; it is the form they mean to stamp upon us. They want to make our self something sharply defined, separate, assessable in terms of qualities, controllable, when in fact we areare a growing factor in the evaluation of their work [...] This will no longer be evaluated in terms of number of hours on the job, but on the basis of objectives attained and quality of creatures among creatures, singularities among similars, living flesh weaving the flesh of the world. Contrary to what has been repeated to us since childhood, intelligence doesn’tresults. They are entrepreneurs.” The series of tasks that can’t be delegated to automation form a nebulous cluster of jobs that, because they cannot be occupied by machines, are mean knowing how to adapt – or if that is a kind of intelligence, it’s the intelligence of slaves. Our inadaptability, our fatigue, are only problems from the standpoint of what aims tooccupied by any old human – warehousemen, stock people, assembly line workers, seasonal workers, etc. This flexible, undifferentiated workforce that moves from one task to the subjugate us. They indicate rather a departure point, a meeting point, for new complicities. They reveal a landscape more damaged, but infinitely more sharable than all the fantasynext and never stays long in a business can no longer even consolidate itself as a force, being outside the center of the production process and employed to plug the holes of what lands this society maintains for its purposes. We are not depressed; we’re on strike. For those who refuse to manage themselves, “depression” is not a state but a passage, ahas not yet been mechanized, as if pulverized in a multitude of interstices. The temp is the figure of the worker who is no longer a worker, who no longer has a trade – but only abilities bowing out, a sidestep towards a political disaffiliation. From then on medication and the police are the only possible forms of conciliation. This is why the present society doesn’tthat he sells where he can – and whose very availability is also a kind of work. On the margins of this workforce that is effective and necessary for the functioning of the machine, hesitate to impose Ritalin on its over-active children, or to strap people into life-long dependence on pharmaceuticals, and why it claims to be able to detect “behavioral disorders” atis a growing majority that has become superfluous, that is certainly useful to the flow of production but not much else, which introduces the risk that, in its idleness, it will set about age three. Because everywhere the hypothesis of the self is beginning to crack. Second Circle “Entertainment is a vital need” A government that declares a state of emergencysabotaging the machine. The menace of a general demobilization is the specter that haunts the present system of production. Not everybody responds to the question “why work?” against fifteen-year-old kids. A country that takes refuge in the arms of a football team. A cop in a hospital bed, complaining about being the victim of “violence.” A city councilwomanin the same way as this ex-welfare recipient: “for my well-being. I have to keep myself busy.” There is a serious risk that we will end up finding a job in our very idleness. This floating issuing a decree against the building of tree houses. Two ten year olds, in Chelles, charged with burning down a video game arcade. This era excels in a certain situation of thepopulation must somehow be kept occupied. But to this day they have not found a better disciplinary method than wages. It’s therefore necessary to pursue the dismantling of “social grotesque that seems to escape it every time. The truth is that the plaintive, indignant tones of the news media are unable to stifle the burst of laughter that welcomes these headlines.gains” so that the most restless ones, those who will only surrender when faced with the alternative between dying of hunger or stagnating in jail, are lured back to the bosom of A burst of laughter is the only appropriate response to all the serious “questions” posed by news analysts. To take the most banal: there is no “immigration question.” Who still growswage-labor. The burgeoning slave trade in “personal services” must continue: cleaning, catering, massage, domestic nursing, prostitution, tutoring, therapy, psychological aid, etc. up where they were born? Who lives where they grew up? Who works where they live? Who lives where their ancestorsof did? And to whom do the children of this era belong, toThis is accompanied by a continual C’mon. To call population Smallraising of the own- business standards of security, hygiene, control, and culture, and by an accelerated Open recycling of fashions, all of which establish the need for the parking slip, and, if it’s raining, will even rent you an television or their parents? The truth is that we have been completelythis torn from any belonging, we are nostrangerslonger fromin anywhere, the and the result, in addition to a new disposition tosuch services. In Rouen, we now have “human parking meters:” someone who waits around on the street and delivers you your ers, small bosses, door. tourism, is an undeniable suffering. Our history is one of colonizations, of migrations, of wars, of exiles, of the destruction of all roots. It’s the story of everything that has made usumbrella. The order of work was the order of a world. The evidence of its ruin is paralyzing to those who dread what will come after. Today work is tied less to the economic neces- midst of which we foreigners in this world, guests in our own family. We have been expropriated from our own language by education, from our songs by reality TV contests, from our flesh by masssity of producing goods than tominor bureaucrats, the political necessity of producing producers and consumers, and of preserving by any means necessary the order of work. Producing oneself is pornography, from our city by the police, and from our friends by wage-labor. To this we should add, in France, livethe “society” ferociousis sociolo- and secular work of individualization by the power of thebecoming the dominant occupation managers, profes- of a society where production no longer has an object: like a carpenter who’s been evicted from his shop and in desperation sets about hammer- such an usurpa- state, that classifies, compares, disciplines and separates its subjects starting from a very young age, that instinctively grinds down any solidarities gists thatdream escape it until nothing remainsing and sawing himself. All these sors, youngjournalists, people smiling for their job interviews, who have their teeth whitened to give them an edge, who go to nightclubs to boost the company spirit, except citizenship – a pure, phantasmic sense of belonging to the Republic. The Frenchman, more than anyone tion that else, even is the of renounc-the destitute. His hatredwho learn English to advance their embodiment of the dispossessed, careers, who get divorced or married to move up the ladder, who take courses in leadership or practice “self-improvement” in order to better “man- of foreigners is based on his hatred of himself as a foreigner. The mixture of jealousy and fear he feels toward the “cités“ expresses nothing but his middlemen of every ingresentment a con- for all he has lost. Heage conflicts” – “the most intimatesort ‘self-improvement’”, says one guru, “will lead to increased emotional stability, to smoother and more open relationships, to sharper intellectual focus, make up this can’t help envying these so-called “problem” neighborhoods where there still persists a bit of communal life, a few links between beings, some solidarities cept that not controlled by the state,and therefore to a better economic performance.” This swarming little crowd that waits impatiently to be hired while doing whatever it can to seem natural is the result of an attempt an informal economy, an organization that is not yet detached from those who organize. We have arrived at a point of privation where the only way to feel French is to curse the im-to rescue the order of work through an ethos of mobility. To be mobilized is to relate to work not as an activity but as a possibility. If the unemployed person removes his piercings, was, for migrants and those who are more visibly foreign. In this country, the immigrants assume a curious position of sovereignty: if they weren’t here, the French might stop existing. Francegoes to the barber and keeps himself busy with “projects,” if he really works on his “employability,” as they say, it’s because this is how he demonstrates his mobility. Mobility is this a century, is a product of its schools, and not the inverse. We live in an excessively scholastic country, where one remembers passing an exam as a sort of life passage. Where retired peopleslight detachment from the self, this minimal disconnection their bread non-class, from what constitutes us, this condition of strangeness whereby the self can now be taken up as an object of work, and it still tell you about their failure, forty years earlier, in such and such an exam, and how it screwed up their whole career, their whole life. For a century and a half, the national schoolnow becomes possible to sell oneself rather than one’s thislabor power, social to be remunerated not for what one does but for what one is, for our exquisite mastery of social codes, for our gela- system has been producing a type of state subjectivity that stands out amongst all others. People who accept competition on the condition that the playing and field is level. Who expectrelational talents, for our smile and our way of presenting ourselves. This is the new standard of socialization. Mobility brings about a fusion of the two contradictory poles of work: in life that each person be rewarded as in a contest, according to their merit. Who always ask permission before taking. Who silently respect culture,butter. the rules, and those with the besthere we participate in our own exploitation, and all participation tin composed is exploited. Ideally, you are yourself a little business, your own boss, your own product. Whether one is working or grades. Even their attachment to their great, critical intellectuals and their rejection of capitalism are branded by this Now lovethey of school. prefer It’s this construction of subjectivities by the statenot, it’s a question of generating contacts, abilities, networking, of the mass in short: of “human capital.” The planetary injunction to mobilize at the slightest pretext – cancer, “terrorism,” an earth- that is breaking down, every day a little more, with the decline of the scholarly institutions. The reappearance, overthe past twenty years, of a school and a culture of the street, inquake, the homeless – sums up the reigning powers’ determination the metaphor all those who to maintain the reign of work beyond its physical disappearance. The present production apparatus is therefore, competition with the school of the republic and its cardboard culture, is the most profound trauma that French universalism is presently undergoing. On this point, the extreme right ison the one hand, a gigantic machine for psychic and physical just want mobilization, to for sucking the energy of humans that have become superfluous, and, on the other hand, it is a sorting of a network to already reconciled with the most virulent left. However, the name Jules Ferry – Minister of Thiers during the crushing of the Commune and theoretician of colonization – should itselfmachine that allocates survival to conformed subjectivities and rejects all “problem individuals,” all those who embody another use of life and, in this way, resist it. On the one hand, be enough to render this institution suspect. When we see teachers from some “citizens’ vigilance committee” describe come on the the con- news to whine about someone burning downghosts are brought to life, and on the other, the living are evening live lefttheir to die.little This is the properly political function of the contemporary production apparatus. To organize beyond and against nection of cyber- about the barbarism of groups of kids harass-work, to collectively desert the regime of mobility, to demonstrate private lives at But we their school, we remember how many times, as children, we dreamed of doing exactly this. When we hear a leftist intellectual blabbering the existence of a vitality and a discipline precisely in demobilization, is a crime for which a civilization on its knees ing passersby in the street, shoplifting, burning cars, and playing cat and mouse with riot police, we remember what they netic can’t yet said about the greasers in the 50s or, better, the apaches inis not about to forgive us. In fact, it’s the only way to survive a distanceit. fromCircle “More simple, more fun, more mobile, Fourth see more secure!” We’ve heard enough about the “city” and the what’s us looks nothing like that: it is one single urban cloth, the “Belle Époque”: “The generic name apaches,” writes a judge at the Seine tribunal in 1907, “has for the past few years been a way of designating all dangerous individuals, enemies“country,” and particularly about the supposed ancient opposition history and between its the two. From up close or from afar, whatinside!!! surrounds of society, without nation or family, deserters of all duties, ready for the most audacious confrontations, and for any sort of attack on persons and properties.” These gangs who fleewithout form or order, a bleak zone, endless and undefined, a global continuum of museum-like city centers and natural parks, of enormous suburban housing developments and work, who adopt the names of their neighborhoods, and confront the police are the nightmare of the good, individualized French citizen: they embody everything he has renounced,massive agricultural projects, industrial zones and subdivisions, tumults. country inns and trendy bars: the metropolis. Certainly the ancient city existed, as did the cities of medieval and all the possible joy he will never experience. There is something impertinent about existing in a country where a child singing as she pleases is inevitably silenced with a “stop, you’remodern times. But there is no such thing as a metropolitan city. All territory is synthesized within the metropolis. Everything occupies the same space, if not geographically then through going to stir things up,” where scholastic castration unleashes floods of policed employees. The aura that persists around Mesrine has less to do with his uprightness and his audac-the intermeshing of its networks. It’s because the city has finally disappeared that it has now become fetishized, as history. The factory buildings of Lille become concert halls. The on what we should all avenge. Or rather, of what we should avenge directly, when instead we continue to hesitaterebuilt concrete core of Le Havre is now a UNESCO World Heritage sire. In Beijing, the hutongs surrounding the Forbidden City were demolished, replaced by fake versions, placed ity than with the fact that he took it upon himself to enact vengeancesolitudes, and defer endlessly. Because there is no doubt that in a thousand imperceptible and undercover ways, in all sorts of slanderous remarks, in every spiteful little expression and venom-a little farther out, on display for sightseers. In Troyes they paste half-timber facades onto cinderblock buildings, a type of pastiche that resembles the Victorian shops at Disneyland ous politeness, the Frenchman continues to avenge, permanently and against everyone, the fact that he’s resigned himself toor being “date.trampled ” over. It was about time that fuck theParis more than anything else. The old historic centers, once hotbeds of revolutionary sedition, are now wisely integrated into the organizational diagram of the metropolis. They’ve police! replaced yes sir, officer! In this sense, the un-nuanced hostility of certain gangs only expresses, in a slightly less muffled way, the poisonous atmosphere, the rotten spirit, thebeen given over to tourism and conspicuous consumption. The moodThey is are the fairy-tale commodity islands, propped up by their expos and decorations, and by force if necessary. The op- the intermesh- Such networks desire for a salvational destruction in which the country is completely consumed. To call this population of strangers in the midst of which we live “society” is such an usurpation thatpressive sentimentality of every “Christmas Village”urgent, is offset by ever more security guards and city patrols. Control has a wonderful way of integrating itself into the commodity land- ing of weak sometimes condense even sociologists dream of renouncing a concept that was, for a century, their bread and butter. Now they prefer the metaphor of a network to describe the connection of cyberneticscape, showing its authoritarian face to anyone whotense. wants to see it. It’s an age of fusions, of muzak, telescoping police batons and cotton candy. Equal parts police surveillance and solitudes, the intermeshing of weak interactions under names like “colleague,” “contact,” interactions “buddy,” “acquaintance,” or “date.” into a milieu, Such networks where sometimes condense into a milieu, whereenchantement! This taste for the “authentic,” and for the control that goes with it, is carried by the petty bourgeoisie through their colonizing drives into working class neighborhoods. Pull nothing is shared but codes, and where nothing is played out except the incessant under names recomposition of identity. It would be a nothing waste of time is shared to detail all that which is agonizing in existingPushed out of the city centers, they find on the frontiers the kind of “neighborhood feeling” they missed in the prefab houses of suburbia. In chasing out the poor people, the cars, and the family ”that’s coming back isbut not codes, andonewhere back. social relations. They say the family is coming back, that the couple is coming back. likeBut “colleague, the same that went away. Its return is nothing but athe immigrants, in making it tidy, in getting rid of all the germs, the petty bourgeoisie pulverizes the very thing it came looking for. A police officer and a garbage man shake hands in deepening of the reigning separation that it serves to mask, becoming what it is through “contact, ” this masquerade. Everyone cannothing is played testify to the rations ofoutsadness condensed from year to yeara picture on a town billboard, and the slogan reads: “Montauban – Clean City.” The same sense of decency that obliges urbanists to stop speaking of the “city” (which they destroyed) in family gatherings, the forced smiles, the awkwardness of seeing everyone pretending “buddy, in vain, ” “ac-the feeling that a corpseexcept the incessant is lying there on the table, and everyone acting as though itand instead to talk of the “urban,” should compel them also to drop “country” (since it no longer exists). The uprooted and stressed-out masses are instead shown a countryside, a were nothing. From flirtation to divorce, from cohabitation to stepfamilies, everyonequaintance, feels the inanity” of the sad family recomposition of iden- nucleus, but most seem to believe that it would be sadder still tovision of the past that’s easy to stage now that the country folk have been so depleted. It is a marketing campaign deployed on a “territory” in which everything must be valorized or renounce it. The family is no longer so much the suffocation of maternal control or the patriarchy of beatings as it is this infantile abandon tity. to a fuzzy dependency, where everything isreconstituted as national heritage. Everywhere it’s the same chilling void, reaching into even the most remote and rustic corners. The metropolis is this simultaneous death of city familiar, this carefree moment in the face of a world that nobody can deny is breaking down, a world where “becoming self-sufficient” is a euphemism for “having found a boss.” Theyand country. It is the crossroads where all the petty bourgeois come together, in the middle of this middle class that stretches out indefinitely, as much a result of rural flight as of urban want to use the “familiarity” of the biological family as an excuse to eat away at anything that burns passionately within us and, under the pretext that they raised us, make us renouncesprawl. To cover the planet with glass would fit perfectly the cynicism of contemporary architecture. A school, a hospital, or a media center are all variations on the same theme: the possibility of growing up, as well as everything that is serious in childhood. It is necessary to preserve oneself from such corrosion. The couple is like the final stage of the greattransparency, neutrality, uniformity. These massive, fluid buildings are conceived without any need to know what they will house. They could be here as much as anywhere else. What social debacle. It’s the oasis in the middle of the human desert. Under the auspices of “intimacy,” we come to it looking for everything that has so obviously deserted contemporaryto do with all the office towers at La Défense in Paris, the apartment blocks of Lyon’s La Part Dieu, or the shopping complexes of EuraLille? The expression “flambant neuf” per- social relations: warmth, simplicity, truth, a life without theater or spectator. But once the romantic high has passed, “intimacy” strips itself bare: it is itself a social invention, it speaksfectly captures their destiny. A Scottish traveler testifies to the unique attraction of the power of fire, speaking after rebels had burned the Hôtel de Ville in Paris in May, 1871: “Never the language of glamour magazines and psychology; like everything else, it is bolstered with so many strategies to the point of nausea. There is no more truth here than elsewhere;could I have imagined anything so beautiful. It’s superb. I won’t deny that the people of the Commune are frightful rogues. But what artists! And they were not even aware of their own here too lies and the laws of estrangement dominate. And when, by good fortune, one discovers this truth, it demands a sharing that belies the very form of the couple. What allowsmasterpiece! [...] I have seen the ruins of Amalfi bathed in the azure swells of the Mediterranean, and the ruins of the Tung-hoor temples in Punjab. I’ve seen Rome and many other beings to love each other is also what makes them lovable, and ruins the utopia of autism-for-two. In reality, the decomposition Producing all social forms is a blessing. It is for us the idealthings. But nothing can compare to what I have seen here tonight before my very eyes.” There still remain some fragments of the city and some traces of the country caught up in ofoneself condition for a wild, massive experimentation with new arrangements, new fidelities. The famous “parental resignation” has isimposed becoming ontheus a confrontation with the world that demandsthe metropolitan mesh. But vitality has taken up quarters in the so-called “problem” neighborhoods. It’s a paradox that the places thought to be the most uninhabitable turn out to be a precocious lucidity, and foreshadows lovely revolts to come. In the death of the couple, we see the birth of troubling forms dominant occupa- affectivity, now that sex is all used up andthe only ones still in some way inhabited. An old squatted shack still feels more lived in than the so-called luxury apartments where it is only possible to set down the furniture and get of collective masculinity and femininity parade around in such moth-eaten clothes, now that three decades of non-stop pornographic innovation have exhausted all the allure of transgression andthe décor just right while waiting for the next move. Within many of today’s megalopolises, the shantytowns are the last living and livable areas, and also, of course, the most deadly. tion of a society liberation. We count on making that which is unconditional in relationships the armor of a political solidarity as impenetrable to state where interference as a gypsy camp. There is no reasonThey are the flip-side of the electronic production Sociabilitydécorisof the global metropolis. The dormitory towers in the suburbs north of Paris, abandoned by a petty bourgeoisie that went off hunting for that the interminable subsidies that numerous relatives are compelled to offload onto their proletarianized progeny can’t no become longerahas an of patronage in favor of social subversion.swimming pools, have been brought form now made back toup life by mass unemployment and now radiate more energy than the Latin Quarter. In words as much as fire. The conflagration of Novem- “Becoming autonomous,” could just as easily mean learning to fight in the street, to occupy empty houses, to cease working, toobject love each other madly, and to shoplift. No question isber 2005 was not a result of extreme of a thousand dispossession, as it is often portrayed. It was, on the contrary, a complete possession of a territory. People can burn cars because they are pissed more confused, in France, than the question of work. No relation is more disfigured than the one between the French and work. Go to Andalusia, to Algeria, to Naples. They despiseoff, but to keep the riots goinglittle for a niches, month, while a keeping the police in check – to do that you have to know how to organize, you have to establish complicities, you have to know the The work, profoundly. Go to Germany, to the United States, to Japan. They revere work. Things are changing, it’s true. There are plenty of otaku in Japan, frohe Arbeitslose in Germanyterrain perfectly, and share a common language and a common enemy. Mile after mile and week after week, the fire spread. New blazes responded to the original ones, appearing thousand little handicapped and workaholics in Andalusia. But for the time being these are only curiosities. In France, we get down on all fours to climb the ladders of hierarchy, but privately flatter ourselves thatwhere they were least expected. Rumors can’t be wiretapped. The metropolis is a terrain of constant low-intensity conflict, in which the taking of Basra, Mogadishu, or Nablus mark refuges where we don’t really give a shit. We stay at work until ten o’clock in the evening when we’re swamped, but we’ve never had any scruples about stealing office supplies here and there, orpoints of culmination. For a long time, the city was a place for the military to avoid, or if anything, to besiege; but the metropolis is perfectly compatible withperson war. Armed conflict is only carting off the inventory in order to resell it later. We hate bosses, but we want to be employed at any cost. To have a job is an honor, yet working is a sign of servility. In short: thea moment in its constant reconfiguration. you can take The battles led by the great powers resemble a kind of never-ending police work in the black holes of the metropolis, “whether in Burkina perfect clinical illustration of hysteria. We love while hating, we hate while loving. And we all know the stupor and confusion that strike the hysteric when he loses his victim – hisFaso, in the South Bronx, in Kamagasaki, shelter.in Chiapas, or in La Courneuve.” No longer undertaken in view of victory or peace, or even the re-establishment of order, such “interventions” master. Most of the time he never recovers. This neurosis is the foundation upon which successive governments could declare war on joblessness, pretending to wage a “battle oncontinue a security operation that is always already at work. War is no longer a distinct event in time, but instead diffracts into a series of micro-operations, by both military and police, unemployment” whileWhat are camped with their cell phones in Red Cross shelters along the banks of the Seine. While the Department of Labor was massively manipulating itsto ensure security. The police and the army are ex-managers evolving in parallel and in lock-step. A criminologist requests that the national riot police reorganize itself into small, professionalized, statistics in order to bringmy Where it’s always bet- unemployment numbers below two million. While welfare checks and drug dealing were the only guarantees, as the French state has recognized, againstmobile units. The military academy, cradle of disciplinary methods, is rethinking its own hierarchical organization. For his infantry battalion a NATO officer employs ter than the bitterand evaluation of an action. The plan is considered and reconsidered for days, right through is the a “participatory the possibility of social unrest at each and every moment. It’s the psychic economy of the French as much as the political stability of the country that is at stake in the maintenancemethod that involves everyone in the analysis, preparation, execution, choices? cold modelthe training phase of the workerist fiction. Excuse us if we don’t give a fuck. We belong to a generation that lives very well in this fiction. That has never counted on either a pension or the right toand according to the latest intelligence [...] There is outside. nothing like Where group planning for building team cohesion and morale.” The armed forces don’t simply adapt themselves to the work, let alone rights at work. That isn’t even “precarious,” as the most advanced factions of the militant left like to theorize, because to be precarious is still to define oneself in relationmetropolis, they produce it. Thus, since the battle everything’s of Nablus,false, Israelisince citizen of soldiers have become interior designers. Forced by Palestinian guerrillas to abandon the streets, which had be- to the sphere of work, that is, to its decomposition. We accept the necessity of finding money, by whatever means, because it is currently impossible to do without it, but we reject thecome too dangerous, they learned to advance vertically it’s all just pretext into the heart of the urban architecture, poking holes in walls and ceilings in order totomor- andahorizontally move through them. An necessity of working. Besides, we don’t work anymore: we do our time. Business is not a place where we exist, it’s a place we pass through. We aren’t cynical, we are just reluctantofficer in the Israel Defense Forces, and a graduate for getting warmed in philosophy, up. “the enemy interprets space in a traditional, classical manner, and I do not want torow. explains: obey this interpretation to be deceived. All these discourses on motivation, quality and personal investment pass us by, to the great dismay of human resources managers. They say we are disappointed byand fall into his traps. [...] I want to surprise him! Where nothing can hap- This is the essence of war. I need to win [...] This is why that we opted for the methodology of moving through walls [...] Like a worm business, that it failed to honor our parents’ loyalty, that it let them go too quickly. They are lying. To be disappointed, one must have hoped for something. And we have never hopedthat eats its way forward.” Urban space is more than just the pen since we’re all too theater of confrontation, it is also the means. This echoes the advice of Blanqui who recommended (in this case for the for anything from business: we see it for what it is and for what it has always been, a fool’s game of varying degrees of comfort. On behalf of our parents, our only regret is that theyparty of insurrection) that the future insurgentsbusy of Paris take oversilently shivering the houses on the barricaded streets to protect their positions, that they should bore holes in the walls to allow pas- fell into the trap, at least the ones who believed. The sentimental confusion that surrounds the question of work can be explained thus: the notion of work has always included twosage between houses, break down the ground floor stairwells and poke holes in the ceilings to defend themselves against potential attackers, rip out the doors and use them to bar- together. contradictory dimensions: a dimension of exploitation and a dimension of participation. Exploitation of individual and collective labor power through the private or social appropriationricade the windows, and turn each floor into a gun turret. The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this final collision between city and country. It is also a flow of beings and things, of surplus value; participation in a common effort through the relations linking those who cooperate at the heart of the universe of production. These two dimensions are perverselya current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train lines, satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making sure that this world never stops running straight to confused in the notion of work, which explains workers’ indifference, at the end of the day, to both Marxist rhetoric – which denies the dimension of participation – and managerialits ruin. It is a current that would like to drag everything along in its hopeless mobility, to mobilize each and every one of us. Where information pummels us like some kind of hostile rhetoric – which denies the dimension of exploitation. Hence the ambivalence of the relation of work, which is shameful insofar as it makes us strangers to what we are doing, and – atforce. Where the only thing left to do is run. Where it becomes hard to wait, even for the umpteenth subway train. With the proliferation of means of movement and communication, the same time – adored, insofar as a part of ourselves is brought into play. The disaster has already occurred: it resides in everything that had to be destroyed, in all those who hadand with the lure of always being elsewhere, we are continuously torn from the here and now. Hop on an intercity or commuter train, pick up a telephone – in order to be already gone. to be uprooted, in order for work to end up as the only way of existing. The horror of work is less in the work itself than in the methodical ravaging, for centuries, of all that isn’t work:Such mobility only ever means uprootedness, isolation, exile. It would be insufferable if it weren’t always the mobility of a private space, of a portable interior. The private bubble doesn’t burst, it floats around. The process of cocooning is not going away, it is merely being put into motion. From a train station, to an office park, to a commercial bank, from onescenery, to get indignant about the latest progress of the disaster, to patiently compile its encyclopedia. What has congealed as an environment is a relationship to the world based hotel to another, there is everywhere a foreignness, a feeling so banal and so habitual it becomes the last form of familiarity. Metropolitan excess is this capricious mixing of definiteon management, which is to say, on estrangement. A relationship to the world wherein we’re not made up just as much of the rustling trees, the smell of frying oil in the building, run- moods, indefinitely recombined. The city centers of the metropolis are not clones of themselves, but offer instead their own auras; we glide from one to the next, selecting this onening water, the hubbub of schoolrooms, the mugginess of summer evenings. A relationship to the world where there is me and then my environment, surrounding me but never really and rejecting that one, to the tune of a kind of existential shopping trip among different styles of bars, people, designs, or playlists. “With my mp3 player, I’m the master of my world.”constituting me. We have become neighbors in a planetary co-op owners’ board meeting. It’s difficult to imagine a more complete hell. No material habitat has ever deserved the To cope with the uniformity that surrounds us, our only option is to constantly renovate our own interior world, like a child who constructs the same little house over and over again, orname “environment,” except perhaps the metropolis of today. The digitized voices making announcements, tramways with such a 21st century whistle, bluish streetlamps shaped like It’s late! like Robinson Crusoe reproducing his shopkeeper’s universe on a desert island – yet our desert island is civilization itself, and there are billions of us continually washing up on it. Itgiant matchsticks, pedestrians done up like failed fashion models, the silent rotation of a video surveillance camera, the lucid clicking of the subway turnstyles supermarket checkouts, The whole is precisely due to this architecture of flows that the metropolis is one thing’s of the most vulnerable human arrangements that has ever existed. Supple, subtle, but vulnerable. A brutal shut-office time-clocks, the electronic ambiance of the cyber café, the profusion of plasma screens, express lanes and latex. Never has a setting been so able to do without the souls tra- Only one ting down of borders to fend off a raging epidemic, a sudden interruption of supply lines, organized blockades of the axes of communication – and the whole facade crumbles, a facadeversing it. Never has a surrounding been more automatic. Never has a context been so indifferent, and demanded in return – as the price of survival – such equal indifference from falling apart on that can no longer mask the scenes of carnage haunting it from morning to night. The world would not be moving so fast if it didn’t have thing to do outrun its own collapse. Theus. Ultimately the environment is nothing more than the relationship to the world that is proper to the metropolis, and that projects itself onto everything that would escape it. It goes to constantly metropolis aims to shelter itself from inevitable malfunction via itsus! network structure, via its entire technological infrastructure of nodes and connections, its decentralized architecture.like this: they hired our parents to destroy this world, now they’d like to put us to work rebuilding it, and – to top it all off – at a profit. The morbid excitement that animates journalists The internet is supposed to survive a nuclear attack. Permanent control of the flow of information, people and products makes the mobility of the metropolis secure, while its’ trackingand advertisers these days as they report each new proof of global warming reveals the steely smile of the new green capitalism, in the making since the 70s, which we waited for at systems ensure that no shipping containers get lost, that not a single dollar is stolen in any transaction, and that no terrorist ends up on an airplane. All thanks to an RFID chip, athe turn of the century but which never came. Well, here it is! It’s sustainability! Alternative solutions, that’s it too! The health of the planet demands it! No doubt about it anymore, it’s biometric passport, a DNA profile. But the metropolis also produces the means of its own destruction. An American security expert explains the defeat in Iraq as a result of the guer-a green scene; the environment will be the crux of the political economy of the 21st century. A new volley of “industrial solutions” comes with each new catastrophic possibility. The rillas’ ability to take advantage of new ways of communicating. The US invasion didn’t so much import democracy to Iraq as it did cybernetic networks. They brought with them one ofinventor of the H-bomb, Edward Teller, proposes shooting millions of tons of metallic dust into the stratosphere to stop global warming. NASA, frustrated at having to shelve its idea the weapons of their own defeat. The proliferation of mobile phones and internet access points gave the guerrillas newfound ways to self-organize, and allowed them to become suchof an anti-missile shield in the museum of cold war horrors, suggests installing a gigantic mirror beyond the moon’s orbit to protect us from the sun’s now-fatal rays. Another vision of elusive targets. Every network has its weak points, the nodes that must be undone in order to interrupt circulation, to unwind the web. The last great European electrical blackoutthe future: a motorized humanity, driving on bio-ethanol from Sao Paulo to Stockholm; the dream of cereal growers the world over, for it only means converting all of the planet’s ar- proved it: a single incident with a high-tension wire and a decent part of the continent was plunged into darkness. In order for something to rise up in the midst of the metropolis andable lands into soy and sugar beet fields. Eco-friendly cars, clean energy, and environmental consulting coexist painlessly with the latest Chanel ad in the pages of glossy magazines. open up other possibilities, the first act must be to interrupt its perpetuum mobile. That is what the Thai rebels understood when they knocked out electrical stations. That is what theWe are told that the environment has the incomparable merit of being the first truly global problem presented to humanity. A global problem, which is to say a problem that only those French anti-CPE protestors understood in 2006 when they shut down the universities with a view toward shutting down the entire economy. That is what the American longshoremenwho are organized on a global level will be able to solve. And we know who they are. These are the very same groups that for close to a century have been the vanguard of disaster, understood when they struck in October, 2002 in support of three hundred jobs, blocking the main ports on the West Coast for ten days. The American economy is so dependent onand certainly intend to remain as such, for the small price of a change of logo. That EDF had the impudence to bring back its nuclear program as the new solution to the global en- goods coming from Asia that the cost of the blockade was over a billion dollars per day. With ten thousand people, the largest economic power in the world can be brought to its knees.ergy crisis says plenty about how much the new solutions resemble the old problems. From Secretaries of State to the back rooms of alternative cafés, concerns are always ex- According to certain “experts,” if the action had lasted another month, it would have produced “a recession in the United States and an economic nightmare in Southeast Asia.” Fifthpressed in the same words, the same as they’ve always been. We have to get mobilized. This time it’s not to rebuild the country like in the post-war era, not for the Ethiopians like in Circle “Less possessions, more connections!” Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy. Thirty years punctu-the 1980s, not for employment like in the 1990s. No, this time it’s for the environment. It will thank you for it. Al Gore and degrowth movement stand side by side with the eternal great ated, it is true, by delusionary interludes: the interlude of 1981-83, when we were deluded into thinking a government of the left might make people better off; the “easy money” inter-souls of the Republic to do their part in resuscitating the little people of the Left and the well-known idealism of youth. Voluntary austerity writ large on their banner, they work be- lude of 1986-89, when we were all supposed to be playing the market and getting rich; the internet interlude of 1998-2001, when everyone was going to get a virtual career throughnevolently to make us compliant with the “coming ecological state of emergency.” The round and sticky mass of their guilt lands on our tired shoulders, coddling us to cultivate our being well-connected, when a diverse but united France, cultured and multicultural, would bring home every World Cup. But here we are, we’ve drained our supply of delusions, we’vegarden, sort out our trash, and eco-compost the leftovers of this macabre feast. Managing the phasing out of nuclear power, excess CO2 in the atmosphere, melting glaciers, hur- hit rock bottom and are totally broke, or buried in debt. We have to see that the economy is not “in” crisis, the economy is itself the crisis. It’s not that there’s not enough work, it’sricanes, epidemics, global over-population, erosion of the soil, mass extinction of living species… this will be our burden. They tell us, “everyone must do their part,” if we want to save that there is too much of it. All things considered, it’s not the crisis that depresses us, it’s growth. We must admit that the litany of stock market prices moves us about as much as aour beautiful model of civilization. We have to consume a little less in order to be able to keep consuming. We have to produce organically in order to keep producing. We have to Latin mass. Luckily for us, there are quite a few of us who have come to this conclusion. We’re not talking about those who live off various scams, who deal in this or that, or who havecontrol ourselves in order to go on controlling. This is the logic of a world straining to maintain itself whilst giving itself an air of historical rupture. This is how they would like to convince been on welfare for the last ten years. Or of all those who no longer find their identity in their jobs and live for their time off. Nor are we talking about those who’ve been swept underus to participate in the great industrial challenges of this century. And in our bewilderment we’re ready to leap into the arms of the very same ones who presided over the devastation, the rug, the hidden ones who make do with the least, and yet outnumber the rest. All those struck by this strange mass detachment, adding to the ranks of retirees and the cynicallyin the hope that they will get us out of it. Ecology isn’t simply the logic of a total economy; it’s the new morality of capital. The system’s internal state of crisis and the rigorous screen- overexploited flexible labor force. We’re not talking about them, although they too should, in one way or another, arrive at a similar conclusion. We are talking about all of the coun-ing that’s underway demand a new criterion in the name of which this screening and selection will be carried out. From one era to the next, the idea of virtue has never been anything tries, indeed entire continents, that have lost faith in the economy, either because they’ve seen the IMF come and go amid crashes and enormous losses, or because they’ve gottenbut an invention of vice. Without ecology, how could we justify the existence of two different food regimes, one “healthy and organic” for the rich and their children, and the other no- a taste of the World Bank. The soft crisis of vocation that the West is now experiencing is completely absent in these places. What is happening in Guinea, Russia, Argentina andtoriously toxic for the plebes, whose offspring are damned to obesity. The planetary hyper-bourgeoisie wouldn’t be able to make their normal lifestyle seem respectable if its latest Bolivia is a violent and long-lasting debunking of this religion and its clergy. “What do you call a thousand IMF economists lying at the bottom of the sea?” went the joke at the Worldcaprices weren’t so scrupulously “respectful of the environment.” Without ecology, nothing would have enough authority to gag any and all objections to the exorbitant progress of Bank, – “a good start.” A Russian joke: “Two economists meet. One asks the other: ‘You understand what’s happening?’ The other responds: ‘Wait, I’ll explain it to you.’ ‘No, no,’ sayscontrol. Tracking, transparency, certification, eco-taxes, environmental excellence, and the policing of water, all give us an idea of the coming state of ecological emergency. Every- the first, ‘explaining is no problem, I’m an economist, too. What I’m asking is: do you understand?” Entire sections of this clergy pretend to be dissidents and to critique this religion’sthing is permitted to a power structure that bases its authority in Nature, in health and in well-being. “Once the new economic and behavioral culture has become common practice, dogma. The latest attempt to revive the so-called “science of the economy” – a current that straight-facedly refers to itself as “post autistic economics” – makes a living from disman-coercive measures will doubtless fall into disuse of their own accord.” You’d have to have all the ridiculous aplomb of a TV crusader to maintain such a frozen perspective and in the tling the usurpations, sleights of hand and cooked books of a science whose only tangible function is to rattle the monstrance during the vociferations of the chiefs, giving their de-same breath incite us to feel sufficiently “sorry for the planet” to get mobilized, whilst remaining anesthetized enough to watch the whole thing with restraint and civility. The new green- mands for submission a bit of ceremony, and ultimately doing what religions have always done: providing explanations. For total misery becomes intolerable the moment it is shownasceticism is precisely the self-control that is required of us all in order to negotiate a rescue operation where the system has taken itself hostage. From now on, it’s in the name of for what it is, without cause or reason. Nobody respects money anymore, neither those who have it nor those who don’t. When asked what they want to be some day, twenty percentenvironmentalism that we must all tighten our belts, just as we did yesterday in the name of the economy. The roads could certainly be transformed into bicycle paths, we ourselves of young Germans answer “artist.” Work is no longer endured as a given of the human condition. The accounting departments of corporations confess that they have no idea wherecould perhaps, to a certain degree, be grateful one day for a guaranteed income, but only at the price of an entirely therapeutic existence. Those who claim that generalized self- value comes from. The market’s bad reputation would have done it in a decade ago if not for the bluster and fury, not to mention the deep pockets, of its apologists. It is common sensecontrol will spare us from an environmental dictatorship are lying: the one will prepare the way for the other, and we’ll end up with both. As long as there is Man and Environment, now to see progress as synonymous with disaster. In the world of the economic, everything is in flight, just like in the USSR under Andropov. Anyone who has spent a little time ana-the police will be there between them. Everything about the environmentalist’s discourse must be turned upside-down. Where they talk of “catastrophes” to label the present system’s lyzing the final years of the USSR knows very well that the pleas for goodwill coming from our rulers, all of their fantasies about some future that has disappeared without a trace, allmismanagement of beings and things, we only see the catastrophe of its all too perfect operation. The greatest wave of famine ever known in the tropics (1876-1879) coincided with of their professions of faith in “reforming” this and that, are just the first fissures in the structure of the wall. The collapse of the socialist bloc was in no way victory of capitalism; it wasa global drought, but more significantly, it also coincided with the apogee of colonization. The destruction of the peasant’s world and of local alimentary practices meant the disappear- merely the bankrupting of one of the forms capitalism takes. Besides, the demise of the USSR did not come about because a people revolted, but because the nomenclature wasance of the means for dealing with scarcity. More than the lack of water, it was the effect of the rapidly expanding colonial economy that littered the Tropics with millions of emaciated undergoing a process of reconversion. When it proclaimed the end of socialism, a small fraction of the ruling class emancipated itself from the anachronistic duties that still bound itcorpses. What presents itself everywhere as an ecological catastrophe has never stopped being, above all, the manifestation of a disastrous relationship to the world. Inhabiting a to the people. It took private control of what it already controlled in the name of “everyone.” In the factories, the joke went: “we pretend to work, they pretend to pay us.” The oligarchynowhere makes us vulnerable to the slightest jolt in the system, to the slightest climactic risk. As the latest tsunami approached and the tourists continued to frolic in the waves, the replied, “there’s no point, let’s stop pretending!” They ended up with the raw materials, industrial infrastructures, the military-industrial complex, the banks and the nightclubs. Everyoneislands’ hunter-gatherers hastened to flee the coast, following the birds. Environmentalism’s present paradox is that under the pretext of saving the planet from desolation it merely else got poverty or emigration. Just as no one in Andropov’s time believed in the USSR, no one in the meeting halls, workshops and offices believes in France today. “There’s nosaves the causes of its desolation. The normal functioning of the world usually serves to hide our state of truly catastrophic dispossession. What is called “catastrophe” is no more point,” respond the bosses and political leaders, who no longer even bother to file the edges off the “iron laws of the economy.” They strip factories in the middle of the night and an-than the forced suspension of this state, one of those rare moments when we regain some sort of presence in the world. Let the petroleum reserves run out earlier than expected; let nounce the shutdown early next morning. They no longer hesitate to send in anti-terrorism units to shut down a strike, like with the ferries and the occupied recycling center in Rennes.the international flows that regulate the tempo of the metropolis be interrupted, let us suffer some great social disruption and some great “return to savagery of the population,” a The brutal activity of power today consists both in administering this ruin while, at the same time, establishing the framework for a “new economy.” And yet there is no doubt that we“planetary threat,” the “end of civilization!” Either way, any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision. When this comes, the specialists are cut out for the economy. For generations we were disciplined, pacified and made into subjects, productive by nature and content to consume. And suddenly everything that wein sustainable development won’t be the ones with the best advice. It’s within the malfunction and short-circuits of the system that we find the elements of a response whose logic were compelled to forget is revealed: that the economy is political. And that this politics is, today, a politics of discrimination within a humanity that has, as a whole, become superflu-would be to abolish the problems themselves. Among the signatory nations to the Kyoto Protocol, the only countries that have fulfilled their commitments, in spite of themselves, are ous. From Colbert to de Gaulle, by way of Napoleon III, the state has always treated the economic as political, as have the bourgeoisie (who profit from it) and the proletariat (whothe Ukraine and Romania. Guess why. The most advanced experimentation with “organic” agriculture on a global level has taken place since 1989 on the island of Cuba. Guess why. confront it). All that’s left is this strange, middling part of the population, the curious and powerless aggregate of those who take no sides: the petty bourgeoisie. They have alwaysAnd it’s along the African highways, and nowhere else, that auto mechanics has been elevated to a form of popular art. Guess how. What makes the crisis desirable is that in the pretended to believe that the economy is a reality-because their neutrality is safe there. Small business owners, small bosses, minor bureaucrats, managers, professors, journalists,crisis the environment ceases to be the environment. We are forced to reestablish contact, albeit a potentially fatal one, with what’s there, to rediscover the rhythms of reality. What middlemen of every sort make up this non-class in France, this social gelatin composed of the mass of all those who just want to live their little private lives at a distance from historysurrounds us is no longer a landscape, a panorama, a theater, but something to inhabit, something we need to come to terms with, something we can learn from. We won’t let our- and its tumults. This swamp is predisposed to be the champion of false consciousness, half-asleep and always ready to close its eyes on the war that rages all around it. Each clari-selves be led astray by the one’s who’ve brought about the contents of the “catastrophe.” Where the managers platonically discuss among themselves how they might decrease Listen. Do A crowd of PASSERS-BY fication of a front in this war is thus accompanied in France by the invention of some new fad. For the past ten years, it was ATTAC and its improbable Tobin tax -a tax whose imple-emissions “without breaking the bank,” the only realistic option we can see is to “break the bank” as soon as possible and, in the meantime, take advantage of every collapse in the hover around a display of mentation would require younothing hear less than a global government-with its sympathy for the “real economy” as opposed to the financial markets, not to mention its touching nostalgia forsystem to increase our own strength. New Orleans, a few days after Hurricane Katrina. In this apocalyptic atmosphere, here and there, life is reorganizing itself. In the face of the the state. The comedy lasts only so long beforetelevisions in the turning into windowAnd a sham. of then another fad replaces it. So now we have “degrowth“. Whereas ATTAC tried to save economics as ainaction of the public authorities, who were too busy cleaning up the tourist areas of the French Quarter and protecting shops to help the poorer city dwellers, forgotten forms are re- it? science with its popular education courses, degrowth an electronics preserves store, theawait- economic as a morality. There is only one alternative to the coming apocalypse: reduce growth. Consume andborn. In spite of occasionally strong-armed attempts to evacuate the area, in spite of white supremacist lynch mobs, a lot of people refused to leave the terrain. For the latter, who produce less. Become joyously frugal. Eat organic, ride ing developments. your bike, stop smoking, and pay close attention to the products you buy. Be content with what’s strictly necessary. Voluntaryrefused to be deported like “environmental refugees” all over the country, and for those who came from all around to join them in solidarity, responding to a call from a former Black simplicity. “Rediscover true wealth in the blossoming of convivial social relations in a healthy world.” “Don’t use up our natural capital.” Work toward a “healthy economy.” “No regula-Panther, self-organization came back to the fore. In a few weeks time, the Common Ground Clinic was set up. From the very first days, this veritable “country hospital” provided free tion through chaos.” “Avoid a social crisis that would threaten democracy and humanism.” Simply put: become economical. Go back to daddy’s economy, to the golden age of theand effective treatment to those who needed it, thanks to the constant influx of volunteers. For more than a year now, the clinic is still the base of a daily resistance to the clean-sweep petty bourgeoisie: the 1950s. “When an individual is frugal, property serves its function perfectly, which is to allow the individual to enjoy his or her own life sheltered from public ex-operation of government bulldozers, which are trying to turn that part of the city into a pasture for property developers. Popular kitchens, supplies, street medicine, illegal takeovers, istence, in the private sanctuary of his or her life.” A graphic designer wearing a handmade sweater is drinking a fruity cocktail with some friends on the terrace of an “ethnic” café.the construction of emergency housing, all this practical knowledge accumulated here and there in the course of a life, has now found a space where it can be deployed. Far from the They’re chatty and cordial, they joke around a bit, they make sure not to be too loud or too quiet, they smile at each other, a little blissfully: we are so civilized. Afterwards, some ofuniforms and sirens. Whoever knew the penniless joy of these New Orleans neighborhoods before the catastrophe, their defiance towards the state and the widespread practice of them will go work in the neighborhood community garden, while others will dabble in pottery, some Zen Buddhism, or in the making of an animated film. They find communion in themaking do with what’s available wouldn’t be at all surprised by what became possible there. On the other hand, anyone trapped in the anemic and atomized everyday routine of our smug feeling that they constitute a new humanity, wiser and more refined than the previous one. And they are right. There is a curious agreement between Apple and the degrowthresidential deserts might doubt that such determination could be found anywhere anymore. Reconnecting with such gestures, buried under years of normalized life, is the only prac- movement about the civilization of the future. Some people’s idea of returning to the economy of yesteryear offers others the convenient screen behind which a great technologicalticable means of not sinking down with the world. The time will come when we take these up once more. Seventh Circle “We are building a civilized space here” The first global leap forward can be launched. For in history there is no going back. Any exhortation to return to the past is only the expression of one form of consciousness of the present, andslaughter, which from 1914 to 1918 did away with a large portion of the urban and rural proletariat, was waged in the name of freedom, democracy, and civilization. For the past five rarely the least modern. It is not by chance that degrowth is the banner of the dissident advertisers of the magazine Casseurs de Pub. The inventors of zero growth-the Club of Romeyears, the so-called “war on terror” with its special operations and targeted assassinations has been pursued in the name of these same values. Yet the resemblance stops there: at in 1972-were themselves a group of industrialists and bureaucrats who relied on a research paper written by cyberneticians at MIT. This convergence is hardly a coincidence. It isthe level of appearances. The value of civilization is no longer so obvious that it can brought to the natives without further ado. Freedom is no longer a name scrawled on walls, for part of the forced march towards a modernized economy. Capitalism got as much as it could from undoing all the old social ties, and it is now in the process of remaking itself by re-today it is always followed, as if by its shadow, with the word “security.” And it is well known that democracy can be dissolved in pure and simple “emergency” edicts – for example, in building these same ties on its own terms. Contemporary metropolitan social life is its incubator. In the same way, it ravaged the natural world and is driven by the fantasy that it canthe official reinstitution of torture in the US, or in France’s Perben II law. In a single century, freedom, democracy and civilization have reverted to the state of hypotheses. Our lead- now be reconstituted as so many controlled environments, furnished with all the necessary sensors. This new humanity requires a new economy that would no longer be a separateers’ work from here on out will consist in shaping the material and moral as well as symbolic and social conditions in which these hypotheses can be more or less validated, in con- sphere of existence but, on the contrary, its very tissue, the raw material of human relations; it requires a new definition of work as work on oneself, a new definition of capital as humanfiguring spaces where they can seem to function. All means to these ends are acceptable, even the least democratic, the least civilized, the most repressive. This is a century in which capital, a new idea of production as the production of relations, and consumption as the consumption of situations; and above all a new idea of value that would encompass all of thedemocracy regularly presided over the birth of fascist regimes, civilization constantly rhymed – to the tune of Wagner or Iron Maiden – with extermination, and in which, one day in qualities of beings. This burgeoning “bioeconomy” conceives the planet as a closed system to be managed and claims to establish the foundations for a science that would integrate1929, freedom- showed its two faces: a banker throwing himself from a window and a family of workers dying of hunger. Since then – let’s say, since 1945 – it’s taken for granted that all the parameters of life. Such a science threatens to make us miss the good old days when unreliable indices like GDP growth were supposed to measure the well-being of a people-manipulating the masses, secret service operations, the restriction of public liberties, and the complete sovereignty of a wide array of police forces were appropriate ways to ensure for at least no one believed in them. “Revalorize the non-economic aspects of life” is the slogan shared by the degrowth movement and by capital’s reform program. Eco-villages,democracy, freedom and civilization. At the final stage of this evolution, we see the first socialist mayor of Paris putting the finishing touches on urban pacification with a new police video-surveillance cameras, spirituality, biotechnologies and sociability all belong to the same “civilizational paradigm” now taking shape, that of a total economy rebuilt from theprotocol for a poor neighborhood, announced with the following carefully chosen words: “We’re building a civilized space here.” There’s nothing more to say, everything has to be ground up. Its intellectual matrix is none other than cybernetics, the science of systems-that is, the science of their control. In the 17th century it was necessary, in order to com-destroyed. Though it seems general in nature, the question of civilization is not at all a philosophical one. A civilization is not an abstraction hovering over life. It is what rules, takes pletely impose the force of economy and its ethos of work and greed, to confine and eliminate the whole seamy mass of layabouts, liars, witches, madmen, scoundrels and all thepossession of, colonizes the most banal, personal, daily existence. It’s what holds together that which is most intimate and most general. In France, civilization is inseparable from the other vagrant poor, a whole humanity whose very existence gave the lie to the order of interest and continence. The new economy cannot be established without a similar screeningstate. The older and more powerful the state, the less it is a superstructure or exoskeleton of a society and the more it constitutes the subjectivities that people it. The French state is of subjects and zones singled out for transformation. The chaos that we constantly hear about will either provide the opportunity for this screening, or for our victory over this odiousthe very texture of French subjectivities, the form assumed by the centuries-old castration of its subjects. Thus it should come as no surprise that in their deliriums psychiatric patients project. Sixth Circle “The environment is an industrial challenge.” Ecology is the discovery of the decade. For the last thirty years we’ve left it up to the environmentalists, jokingare always confusing themselves with political figures, that we agree that our leaders are the root of all our ills, that we like to grumble so much about them and that this grumbling is about it on Sunday so that we can act concerned again on Monday. And now it’s caught up to us, invading the airwaves like a hit song in summertime, because it’s 68 degrees inthe consecration that crowns them as our masters. Here, politics is not considered something outside of us but as part of ourselves. The life we invest in these figures is the same life December. One quarter of the fish species have disappeared from the ocean. The What rest won’t last much longer. Bird flu alert: we are given assurances that hundreds of thousandsthat’s taken from us. If there is a French exception, this is why. Everything, even the global influence of French literature, is a result of this amputation. In France, literature is the of migrating birds will be shot from the sky. Mercury levels in human breast milk are ten times higher than the legal level for cows. And these lips which swell up after I bite the appleprescribed space for the amusement of the castrated. It is the formal freedom conceded to those who cannot accommodate themselves to the nothingness of their real freedom. That’s are my – but it came from the farmer’s market. The simplest gestures have become toxic. One dies at the age of 35 from “a prolonged illness” that’s to be managed just like one manageswhat gives rise to all the obscene winks exchanged, for centuries now, between the statesmen and men of letters in this country, as each gladly dons the other’s costume. That’s also everything else. We should’ve seen it coming before we got to this place, to pavilion B of the palliative care center. You have to admit: this whole “catastrophe,” which they so nois-why intellectuals here tend to talk so loud when they’re so meek, and why they always fail at the decisive moment, the only moment that would’ve given meaning to their existence, choices? ily inform us about, it doesn’t really touch us. At least not until we are hit by one of its foreseeable consequences. It may concern us, but it doesn’t touch us. And that is the real catas-but that also would’ve had them banished from their profession. There exists a credible thesis that modern literature was born with Baudelaire, Heine, and Flaubert as a repercussion trophe. There is no “environmental catastrophe.” The catastrophe is the environment itself. The environment is what’s left to man after he’s lost everything. Those who live in aof the state massacre of June 1848. It’s in the blood of the Parisian insurgents, against the silence surrounding the slaughter, that modern literary forms were born – spleen, ambiva- neighborhood, a street, a valley, a war zone, a workshop – they don’t have an “environment;” they move through a world peopled by presences, dangers, friends, enemies, momentslence, fetishism of form, and morbid detachment. The neurotic affection that the French pledge to their Republic – in the name of which every smudge of ink assumes an air of dig- of life and death, all kinds of beings. Such a world has its own consistency, which varies according to the intensity and quality of the ties attaching us to all of these beings, to all ofnity, and any pathetic hack is honored – underwrites the perpetual repression of its originary sacrifices. The June days of 1848 – 1,500 dead in combat, thousands of summary execu- these places. It’s only us, the children of the final dispossession, exiles of the final hour – the ones who come into the world in concrete cubes, pick our fruits at the supermarket, andtions of prisoners, and the Assembly welcoming the surrender of the last barricade with cries of “Long Live the Republic!” – and the Bloody Week of 1871 are birthmarks no surgery watch for an echo of the world on television – only we get to have an environment. And there’s no one but us to witness our own annihilation, as if it were just a simple change ofcan hide. In 1945, Kojeve wrote: “The “official” political ideal of France and of the French is today still that of the nation-State, of the ‘one and indivisible Republic.’ On the other hand, in the depths of its soul, the country understands the inadequacy of this ideal, of the political anachronism of the strictly “national” idea. This feeling has admittedly not yet reached theORGANIZED Get organized in order to no longer have to work We know that individuals are possessed of so little life that they have to earn a living, to sell their time in exchange level of a clear and distinct idea: The country cannot, and still does not want to, express it openly. Moreover, for the very reason of the unparalleled brilliance of its national past, it isfor a modicum of social existence. Personal time for social existence: such is work, such is the market. From the outset, the time of the commune eludes work, it doesn’t function particularly difficult for France to recognize clearly and to accept frankly the fact of the end of the ‘national’ period of History and to understand all of its consequences. It is hard for aaccording to that scheme – it prefers others. Groups of Argentine piqueteros collectively extort a sort of local welfare conditioned by a few hours of work; they don’t clock their hours, country which created, out of nothing, the ideological framework of nationalism and which exported it to the whole world to recognize that all that remains of it now is a document tothey put their benefits in common and acquire clothing workshops, a bakery, putting in place the gardens that they need. The commune needs money, but not because we need to be filed in the historical archives.” This question of the nation-state and its mourning is at the heart of what for the past half-century can only be called the French malaise. We po-earn a living. All communes have their black markets. There are plenty of hustles. Aside from welfare, there are various benefits, disability money, accumulated student aid, subsidies litely give the name of me Find “alternation” something,to this twitchy indecision, this pendulum-like oscillation from left to right, then right to left; like a manic phase after a depressive one that is thendrawn off fictitious childbirths, all kinds of trafficking, and so many other means that arise with every mutation of control. It’s not for us to defend them, or to install ourselves in these followed by another, or like the way a completely rhetorical critique of individualism uneasily co-exists with the most ferocious cynicism, or the most grandiose generosity with antemporary shelters or to preserve them We’veasgot a to privilege for those in the know. The important thing is to cultivate and spread this necessary disposition towards fraud, and to share its Wait. aversion to crowds.I don’t Sincecare1945,where this malaise, which seems to have dissipated only during the insurrectionary fervor of May 68, has continually worsened. The era of states, nationsinnovations. For communes, the question remain of work is only posed in relation to other already existing incomes. And we shouldn’t forget all the useful knowledge that can be acquired and republics is coming toit an is. end; this country that sacrificed all its life to these forms is still dumbfounded. The firestorm caused by Jospin’s simple sentence “the state can’t do ev-through certain trades, professions and well-positioned jobs. The exigency of the commune is to free up the most time for the most people. And we’re not just talking about the erything” allowed us to glimpse the one that will ignite when it becomes clear that the state can no longer do anything at all. The feeling that we’ve been tricked is like a wound that isnumber of hours free of any wage-labor exploitation. Liberated time doesn’t mean a vacation. Vacant time, dead time, the time of emptiness and the fear of emptiness – this is the becoming increasingly infected. It’s the source of the latent rage that just about anything will set off these days. The fact that in this country the obituary of the age of nations has yettime of work. There will be no more time to fill, but a liberation of energy that no “time” contains; lines that take shape, that accentuate each other, that we can follow at our leisure, to to be written is the key to the French anachronism, and to the revolutionary possibilities France still has in store. Whatever their outcome may be, the role of the next presidentialtheir ends, until we see them cross with others. Plunder, cultivate, fabricate Some former MetalEurop employees become bank robbers rather prison guards. Some EDF employees elections will be to signal the end of French illusions and the bursting of the historical bubble in which we are living – and which makes possible events like the anti-CPE movement,show friends and family how to rig the electricity meters. Commodities that “fell off the back of a truck” are sold left and right. A world that so openly proclaims its cynicism can’t expect which was puzzled over by other countries as if it were some bad dream that escaped the 1970s. That’s why, deep down, no one wants these elections. France is indeed the redmuch loyalty from proletarians. On the one hand, a commune can’t bank on the “welfare state” being around forever, and on the other, it can’t count on living for long off shoplifting, lantern of the western zone. Today the West is the GI who dashes into Fallujah on an M1 Abrams tank, listening to heavy metal at top volume. It’s the tourist lost on the Mongoliannighttime dumpster diving at supermarkets or in the warehouses of the industrial zones, misdirecting government subsidies, ripping off insurance companies and other frauds, in a plains, mocked by all, who clutches his credit card as his only lifeline. It’s the CEO who swears by the game Go. It’s the young girlchchases who chases happiness in clothes, guys,word: plunder. So it has to consider how to continually increase the level and scope of its self-organization. Nothing would be more logical than using the lathes, milling machines, and and moisturizing creams. It’s the Swiss human rights activist who travels to the four corners of the earth to show solidarity with all the world’s rebels – provided they’ve been defeated.photocopiers sold at a discount after a factory closure to support a conspiracy against commodity society. The feeling of imminent collapse is everywhere so strong these days that unemotional... It’s the Spaniard who couldn’t care less about political freedom once he’s been granted sexual freedom. It’s the art lover who wants us to be awestruck before the “modern genius” ofit would be hard to enumerate all of the current experiments in matters of construction, energy, materials, illegality or agriculture. There’s a whole set of skills and techniques just a century of artists, from surrealism to Viennese actionism, all competing to see who could best spit in the face of civilization. It’s the cyberneticist who’s found a realistic theory ofwaiting to be plundered and ripped from their humanistic, street-culture, or eco-friendly trappings. Yet this group of experiments is but one part of all of the intuitions, the know-how, consciousness in Buddhism and the quantum physicist who’s hoping that dabbling in Hindu metaphysics will inspire new scientific discoveries. The West is a civilization that hasand the ingenuity found in slums that will have to be deployed if we intend to repopulate the metropolitan desert and ensure the viability of an insurrection beyond its first stages. How survived all the prophecies of its collapse with a singular stratagem. Just as the bourgeoisie had to deny itself as a class in order to permit the bourgeoisification of society as a whole,will we communicate and move about during a total interruption of the flows? How will we restore food production in rural areas to the point where they can once again support the from the worker to the baron; just as capital had to sacrifice itself as a wage relation in order to impose itself as a social relation – becoming cultural capital and health capital in addi-population density that they had sixty years ago? How will we transform concrete spaces into urban vegetable gardens, as Cuba has done in order to withstand both the American tion to finance capital; just as Christianity had to sacrifice itself as a religion in order to survive as an affective structure – as a vague injunction to humility, compassion, and weakness;embargo and the liquidation of the USSR? Training and learning What are we left with, having used up most of the leisure authorized by market democracy? What was it that made so the West has sacrificed itself as a particular civilization in order to impose itself as a universal culture. The operation can be summarized like this: an entity in its death throwsus go jogging on a Sunday morning? What keeps all these karate fanatics, these DIY, fishing, or mycology freaks going? What, if not the need to fill up some totally idle time, to re- sacrifices itself as a content in order to survive as a form. The fragmented individual survives as a form thanks to the “spiritual” technologies of counseling. Patriarchy survives byconstitute their labor power or “health capital”? Most recreational activities could easily be stripped of their absurdity and become something else. Boxing has not always been limited attributing to women all the worst attributes of men: willfulness, self-control, insensitivity. A disintegrated society survives by propagating an epidemic of sociability and entertainment.to the staging of spectacular matches. At the beginning of the 20th century, as China was carved up by hordes of colonists and starved by long droughts, hundreds of thousands of So it goes with all the great, outmoded fictions of the West maintaining Busythemselves through artifices that contradict these fictions point by point. There is no “clash of civilizations.”its poor peasants organized themselves into countless open-air boxing clubs, in order to take back what the colonists and the rich had taken from them. This was the Boxer Rebellion. There is a clinically dead civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the planet’s atmosphere. At this point it can no longer believe inIt’s never too early to learn and practice what less pacified, less predictable times might require of us. Our dependence on the metropolis – on its medicine, its agriculture, its police worker bees. a single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, deconstructed, and returned to a state– is so great at present that we can’t attack it without putting ourselves in danger. An unspoken awareness of this vulnerability accounts for the spontaneous self-limitation of today’s of doubt. Today Western imperialism is the imperialism of relativism, of the “it all depends on your point of view”; it’s the eye-rolling or the wounded indignation at anyone who’s stupid,social movements, and explains our fear of crises and our desire for “security.” It’s for this reason that strikes have usually traded the prospect of revolution for a return to normalcy. primitive, or presumptuous enough to still believe in something, to affirm anything at all. You can see the dogmatism of constant questioning give its complicit wink of the eye every-Escaping this fate calls for a long and consistent process of apprenticeship, and for multiple, massive experiments. It’s a question of knowing how to fight, to pick locks, to set broken What? where in the universities and among the literary intelligentsias. No critique is too radical among postmodernist thinkers, as long as it maintains this total absence of certitude. A cen-bones and treat sicknesses; how to build a pirate radio transmitter; how to set up street kitchens; how to aim straight; how to gather together scattered knowledge and set up wartime tury ago, scandal was identified with any particularly unruly and raucous negation, while today it’s found in any affirmation that fails to tremble. No social order can securely foundagronomics; understand plankton biology; soil composition; study the way plants interact; get to know possible uses for and connections with our immediate environment as well as itself on the principle that nothing is true. Yet it must be made secure. Applying the concept of “security” to everything these days is the expression of a project to securely fasten ontothe limits we can’t go beyond without exhausting it. We must start today, in preparation for the days when we’ll need more than just a symbolic portion of our nourishment and care. logical places, behaviors, and even people themselves, an ideal order to which they are no longer ready to submit. Saying “nothing is true” says nothing about the world but everything aboutCreate territories. Multiply zones of opacity More and more reformists today agree that with “the approach of peak oil,” and in order to “reduce greenhouse gas emissions,” we will the Western concept of truth. For the West, truth is not an attribute of beings or things, but of their representation. A representation that conforms to experience is held to be true.need to “relocalize the economy,” encourage regional supply lines, small distribution circuits, renounce easy access to imports from faraway, etc. What they forget is that what char- Science is, in the last analysis, this empire of universal verification. Since all human behavior, from the most ordinary to the most learned, is based on a foundation of unevenly for-acterizes everything that’s done in a local economy is that it’s done under the table, in an “informal” way; that this simple ecological measure of relocalizing the economy implies mulated presuppositions, and since all practices start from a point where things and their representations can no longer be distinguished, a dose of truth that the Western conceptnothing less than total freedom from state control. Or else total submission to it. Today’s territory is the product of many centuries of police operations. People have been pushed out knows nothing about enters into every life. We talk in the West about “real people,” but only in order to mock these simpletons. This is why Westerners have always been thought ofof their fields, then their streets, then their neighborhoods, and finally from the hallways of their buildings, in the demented hope of containing all life between the four sweating walls as liars and hypocrites by the people they’ve colonized. This is why they’re envied for what they have, for their technological development, but never for what they are, for which theyof privacy. The territorial question isn’t the same for us as it is for the state. For us it’s not about possessing territory. Rather, it’s a matter of increasing the density of the communes, are rightly held in contempt. Sade, Nietzsche and Artaud wouldn’t be taught in schools if the kind of truth mentioned above was not discredited in advance. Containing all affirmationsof circulation, and of solidarities to the point that the territory becomes unreadable, opaque to all authority. We don’t want to occupy the territory, we want to be the territory. Every and deactivating all certainties as they irresistibly come to light-such is the long labor of the Western intellect. The police and philosophy are two convergent, if formally distinct, meanspractice brings a territory into existence – a dealing territory, or a hunting territory; a territory of child’s play, of lovers, of a riot; a territory of farmers, ornithologists, or flaneurs. The rule to this end. Of course, this imperialism of the relative finds a suitable enemy in every empty dogmatism, in whatever form of Marxist-Leninism, Salifism, or Neo-Nazism: anyone who,is simple: the more territories there are superimposed on a given zone, the more circulation there is between them, the harder it will be for power to get a handle on them. Bistros, like Westerners, mistakes provocation for affirmation. At this juncture, any strictly social contestation that refuses to see that what we’re faced with is not the crisis of a society butprint shops, sports facilities, wastelands, second-hand book stalls, building rooftops, improvised street markets, kebab shops and garages can all easily be used for purposes other the extinction of a civilization becomes an accomplice in its perpetuation. It’s even become a contemporary strategy to critique this society in the vain hope of saving this civilization.than their official ones if enough complicities come together in them. Local self-organization superimposes its own geography over the state cartography, scrambling and blurring it: it So we have a corpse on our backs, but we won’t be able to rid ourselves of it just like that. Nothing is to be expected from the end of civilization, from its clinical death. In and of itself,produces its own secession. Travel. Open our own lines of communication. The principle of communes is not to counter the metropolis and its mobility with local slowness and unemotional... it can only be of interest to historians. It’s a fact, and it must be translated into a decision. Facts can be conjured away, but decision is political. To decide on the death of civilization,rootedness. The expansive movement of commune formation should surreptitiously overtake the movement of the metropolis. We don’t have to reject the possibilities of travel and With the proliferation of means of then to work out how it will happen: only decision will rid us of the corpse. GET GOING! We can no longer even see how an insurrection might begin. Sixty years of pacificationcommunication that the commercial infrastructure offers; we just have to know their limits. We just have to be prudent, innocuous. Visits in person are more secure, leave no trace, and containment of historical upheavals, sixty years of democratic anesthesia and the management of events, have dulled our perception of the real, our sense of the war in progress.and forge much morerational... consistent connections than any list of contacts on the internet. The privilege many of us enjoy of being able to “circulate freely” from one end of the continent movement and communication, and We need to start by recovering this perception. It’s useless to get indignant about openly unconstitutional laws such as Perben II. It’s futile to legally protest the complete implosionto the other, and even across the world without too much trouble, is not a negligible asset when it comes to communication between pockets of conspiracy. One of the charms of the with the lure of always being else- of the legal framework. We have to get organized. It’s useless to get involved in this or that citizens’ group, in this or that dead-end of the far left, or in the latest “community effort.”metropolis is that it allows Americans, Greeks, Mexicans, and Germans to meet furtively in Paris for the time it takes to discuss strategy. Constant movement between friendly com- Every organization that claims to contest the present order mimics the form, mores and language of miniature states. Thus far, every impulse to “do politics differently” has only con-munes is one of the things that keeps them from drying up and from the inevitability of abandonment. Welcoming comrades, keeping abreast of their initiatives, reflecting on their where, we are continuously torn from tributed to the indefinite spread of the state’s tentacles. It’s useless to react to the news of the day; instead we should understand each report as a maneuver in a hostile field ofexperiences and making use of new techniques they’ve developed does more good for a commune than sterile self-examinations behind closed doors. It would be a mistake to un- tactical! strategies to be decoded, operations designed to provoke a specific reaction. It’s these operations themselves that should be taken as the real information contained in these piecesderestimate how much can be decisively worked out over the course of evenings spent comparing views on the war in progress. Remove all obstacles, one by one It’s well known of news. It’s useless Thetoroom wait-for the here and now. a breakthrough, for the revolution, the nuclear apocalypse or a social movement. To go on waiting is madness. The catastrophe is not coming, it isthat the streets teem with incivilities. Between what they are and what they should be stands the centripetal force of the police, doing their best to restore order to them; and on the is dim here. We are already situated within the collapse of a civilization. It is within this reality that we must choose sides. To no longer wait is, in one way or another, to enter into the logicother side there’s us, the opposite centrifugal movement. We can’t help but delight in the fits of anger and disorder wherever they erupt. It’s not surprising that these national festivals and of insurrection. It is to eerie,again once bankshear the slight but always present trembling of terror in the voices of our leaders. Because governing has never been anything other than postpon-that aren’t really celebrating anything anymore are now systematically going bad. Whether sparkling or dilapidated, the urban fixtures – but where do they begin? where do they end? ing by a thousand subterfuges the moment when the crowd will string you up, and every act of government is nothing but a way of not losing control of the population. We’re setting– embody our common dispossession. Persevering in their nothingness, they ask for nothing more than to return to that state for good. Take a look at what surrounds us: all this will of dimly flicker- out from a point of extreme ing lights isolation, and the of extreme weakness. An insurrectional process must be built from the ground up. Nothing appears less likely than an insurrection, but nothinghave its final hour. The metropolis suddenly takes on an air of nostalgia, like a field of ruins. All the incivilities of the streets should become methodical and systematic, converging in is more necessary. FIND EACH OTHER Attach yourself to what you feel to be true. Begin there. An encounter, ainterrupt discovery, a vast wave of strikes, an earthquake: every eventa diffuse, effective guerrilla war that restores us to our ungovernability, our primordial unruliness. It’s disconcerting to some that this same lack of discipline figures so prominently hum of air-cooling produces truth by changing our way of being in the world. Conversely, any observation that leaves us indifferent, doesn’t affect us, doesn’t commit us to anything, no longer deservesamong the recognized military virtues of resistance fighters. In fact though, rage and politics should never have been separated. Without the first, the second is lost in discourse; the name truth. There’s a truth beneath every gesture, every practice, every relationship, and every situation. We usually just avoid it, manage it, which produces the madness of sowithout the second the first exhausts itself in howls. When words like “enragés” and “exaltés” resurface in politics they’re always greeted with warning shots. As for methods, let’s machinery. many in our era. In reality, everything involves everything else. The feeling that one is living a lie is still a truth. It is a matter of not letting it go, of starting from there. A truth isn’t aadopt the following principle from sabotage: a minimum of risk in taking the action, a minimum of time, and maximum damage. As for strategy, we will remember that an obstacle that circulation view on the world but what binds us to it in an irreducible way. A truth isn’t something we hold but something that carries us. It makes and unmakes me, constitutes and undoes mehas been cleared away, leaving a liberated but uninhabited space, is easily replaced by another obstacle, one that offers more resistance and is harder to attack. No need to dwell as an individual; it distances me from many and brings me closer to those who also experience it. An isolated being who holds fast to a truth will inevitably meet others like her. In fact,too long on the three types of workers’ sabotage: reducing the speed of work, from “easy does it” pacing to the “work-to-rule” strike; breaking the machines, or hindering their function; every insurrectional process starts from a truth that we refuse to give up. During the 1980s in Hamburg, a few inhabitants of a squatted house decided that from then on they wouldand divulging company secrets. Broadened to the dimensions of the whole social factory, the principles of sabotage can be applied to both production and circulation. The technical only be evicted over their dead bodies. A neighborhood was besieged by tanks and helicopters, with days of street battles, huge demonstrations – and a mayor who, finally, capitu-infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable. Its flows amount to more than the transportation of people and commodities. Information and energy circulates via wire networks, fibers lated. In 1940, Georges Guingouin, the “first French resistance fighter,” started with nothing other than the certainty of his refusal of the Nazi occupation. At that time, to the Com-and channels, and these can be attacked. Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks. munist Party, he was nothing but a “madman living in the woods,” until there were 20,000 madmen living in the woods, and Limoges was liberated. Don’t back away from what isHow can a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless? How does one find the weak points in computer networks, or scramble radio waves and fill screens with white tactical! political in friendship We’ve been given a neutral idea of friendship, understood as a pure affection with no consequences. But all affinity is affinity within a common truth. Everynoise? As for serious obstacles, it’s wrong to imagine them invulnerable to all destruction. The promethean element in all of this boils down to a certain use of fire, all blind voluntarism encounter is an encounter within a common affirmation, even the affirmation of destruction. No bonds are innocent in an age when holding onto something and refusing to let goaside. In 356 BC, Erostratus burned down the temple of Artemis, one of the seven wonders of the world. In our time of utter decadence, the only thing imposing about temples is the usually leads to unemployment, where you have to lie to work, and you have to keep on working in order to continue lying. People who swear by quantum physics and pursue itsdismal truth that they are already ruins. Annihilating this nothingness is hardly a sad task. It gives action a fresh demeanor. Everything suddenly coalesces and makes sense – space, consequences in all domains are no less bound politically than comrades fighting against a multinational agribusiness. They will all be led, sooner or later, to defection and to combat.time, friendship. We must use all means at our disposal and rethink their uses – we ourselves being means. Perhaps, in the misery of the present, “fucking it all up” will serve – not The pioneers of the workers’ movement were able to find each other in the workshop, then in the factory. They had the strike to show their numbers and unmask the scabs. They hadwithout reason - as the last collective seduction. Flee We’vevisibility. got to Turn anonymity into an offensive position In a demonstration, A relationship a union to the member world tears the mask off of an anonymous the wage relation, pitting the party of capital against the party of labor, on which they could draw the lines of solidarity and of battle on a global scale. We have the whole of socialperson who has just broken a window. “Take responsibility for what you’re doing instead of hiding yourself.” To be visible where is there to beisexposed, me and then that is to say above all, vulnerable. When remain space in which to find each other. We have everyday insubordination for showing our numbers and unmasking cowards. We have our hostility to this civilization for drawing lines ofleftists everywhere continually make their cause more “visible” – whether that of the homeless, of women, or of undocumented immigrants – in hopes that it will get dealt with, they’re solidarity and of battle on a global scale. Expect nothing from organizations. Beware of all existing social milieus, and above all, don’t become one. It’s not uncommon, in thedoing exactly the contrary of what must be done. Not making ourselves visible, but instead turning the anonymity to which my environment, we’ve been surrounding relegated to our advantage, and through con- course of a significant breaking of the social bond, to cross paths with organizations – political, labor, humanitarian, community associations, etc. Among their members, one may evenspiracy, nocturnal or faceless actions, creating an invulnerable position of attack. The fires of November 2005 offer a model me but fornever this. No leader, really consti-no demands, no organization, but words, find individuals who are sincere – if a little desperate – who are enthusiastic – if a little conniving. Organizations are attractive due to their apparent consistency – they have a history,gestures, complicities. To be socially nothing is not a humiliating condition, the source of some tragic lack of recognition – from whom do we seek recognition? – but is on the contrary tuting me. We have become a head office, a name, resources, a leader, a strategy and a discourse. They are nonetheless empty structures, which, in spite of their grand origins, can never be filled. In all theirthe condition for maximum freedom of action. Not claiming your illegal actions, only attaching to them some fictional acronym – we still remember the ephemeral BAFT (Brigade Anti- affairs, at every level, these organizations are concerned above all with their own survival as organizations, and little else. Their repeated betrayals have often alienated the commit-Flic des Tarterêts)- is a way to preserve that freedom. Quite obviously, one of the regime’s first defensive maneuvers was neighbors in a planetary the creation of a “banlieue” subject to treat as the author of ment of their own rank and file. And this is why you can, on occasion, run into worthy beings within them. But the promise of the encounter can only be realized outside the organiza-the “riots of November 2005.” Just looking at the faces on some of this society’s somebodies illustrates why there’s such joy in being nobody. Visibility must be avoided. But a force tion and, unavoidably, at odds with it. Far more dreadful are social milieus, with their supple texture, their gossip, and their informal hierarchies. Flee all milieus. Each and everythat gathers in the shadows can’t avoid it forever. Our appearance as a force must be pushed back until the opportune moment. The longer we avoid visibility, the stronger we’ll be milieu is orientated towards the neutralization of some truth. Literary circles exist to smother the clarity of writing. Anarchist milieus to blunt the directness of direct action. Scientificwhen it catches up with us. And once we become visible our days will be numbered. Either we will be in a position to pulverize its reign in short order, or we’ll be crushed in no time. milieus to withhold the implications of their research from the majority of people today. Sport milieus to contain in their gyms the various forms of life they should create. ParticularlyOrganize Self-Defense We live under an occupation, under police occupation. Undocumented immigrants are rounded up in the middle of the street, unmarked police cars patrol the to be avoided are the cultural and activist circles. They are the old people’s homes where all revolutionary desires traditionally go to die. The task of cultural circles is to spot nascentboulevards, metropolitan districts are pacified with techniques forged in the colonies, the Minister of the Interior makes co-op declarations owners’ board of war on “gangs” that remind us of the Algerian intensities and to explain away the sense of whatever it is you’re doing, while the task of activist circles is to sap your energy for doing it. Activist milieus spread their diffuse webwar – we are reminded of it every day. These are reasons enough to no longer let ourselves be beaten down, reasons enough to organize our self-defense. To the extent that it grows throughout the French territory, and are encountered on the path of every revolutionary development. They offer nothing but the story of their many defeats and the bitterness theseand radiates, a commune begins to see the operations of power target that which constitutes it. These counterattacks meeting.take It’s difficult the form of seduction, of recuperation, and as a last resort, have produced. Their exhaustion has made them incapable of seizing the possibilities of the present. Besides, to nurture their wretched passivity they talk far too much and this makesbrute force. For a commune, self-defense must be a collective fact, as much practical as theoretical. Preventing an arrest, to imagine a more gathering quickly and in large numbers against eviction them unreliable when it comes to the police. Just as it’s useless to expect anything from them, it’s stupid to be disappointed by their sclerosis. It’s best to just abandon this dead weight.attempts and sheltering one of our own, will not be superfluous reflexes in coming times. We cannot ceaselessly reconstruct our bases from scratch. Let’s stop denouncing repression complete hell. Never All milieus are counter-revolutionary because they are only concerned with the preservation of their sad comfort. Form communes Communes come into being when people findand instead prepare to meet it. It’s not a simple affair, for we expect a surge in police work being done by the population itself – everything from snitching to occasional participation You’re not each other, get on with each other, and decide on a common path. The commune is perhaps what gets decided at the very moment when we would normally part ways. It’s the joy ofin citizens’ militias. The police forces blend in with the crowd. The ubiquitous model of police intervention, even hasinariot surrounding situations, is now the cop in civilian clothes. The effectiveness an encounter that survives its expected end. It’s what makes us say “we,” and makes supposed that an to talkWhat’s strange isn’t that people who are attuned to each other form communes,of the police during the last anti-CPE demonstrations was a result of plainclothes officers mixing among us and waiting for an incident before revealing who they are: gas, nightsticks, event. but that they remain separated. Why shouldn’t Notcommunes supposed proliferate everywhere? In every factory, been more about it? Who toldevery street, every village, every school. At long last, the reign of the base com-tazers, detainment; all in strict coordination with demonstration stewards. The mere possibility of their presence was enough to create suspicion amongst the demonstrators – who’s mittees! Communes that accept being what they are, where they are. And if possible, a multiplicity of communes that will displace the institutions of society: family, school, union,who? – and to paralyze action. If we agree that a demonstration is not merely a way to stand and be counted but a means of action, we have to to talk equip ourselves better with resources automatic. sports club, etc. Communes that aren’t afraid, beyond their specifically political activities, youtothat? organize themselves for the material and moral survival of each of their members and ofto unmask plainclothes officers, chase them off, and if need be snatch back those they’re trying to arrest. The police are not invincible in the streets, they simply have the means to all those around them who remain adrift. Communes about it.that would not define themselves – as collectives tend to do – by what’s inside and what’s outside them, but by the density of theorganize, train, and continually test new weapons. Our weapons, on the other hand, are always rudimentary, cobbled-together, and often improvised on the spot. They certainly don’t ties at their core. Not by their membership, but by the spirit that animates them. A commune forms every time a few people, freed of their individual straitjackets, decide to rely onlyhave a hope of rivaling theirs in firepower, but can be used to hold them at a distance, redirect attention, exercise psychological pressure or force passage and gain ground by surprise. on themselves and measure their strength against reality. Every wildcat strike is a commune; every building occupied collectively and on a clear basis is a commune, the action com-None of the innovations in urban guerilla warfare currently deployed in the French police academies are sufficient to respond rapidly to a moving multiplicity that can strike a number mittees of 1968 were communes, as were the slave maroons in the United States, or Radio Alice in Bologna in 1977. Every commune seeks to be its own base. It seeks to dissolveof places at once and that tries to always keep the initiative. Communes are obviously vulnerable to surveillance and police investigations, to policing technologies and intelligence the question of needs. It seeks to break all economic dependency and all political subjugation; it degenerates into a milieu the moment it loses contact with the truths on which it isgathering. The waves of arrests of anarchists in Italy and of eco-warriors in the US were made possible by wiretapping. Everyone detained by the police now has his or her DNA founded. There are all kinds of communes that wait neither for the numbers nor the means to get organized, and even less for the “right moment” – which never arrives. GETtaken to be entered into an ever more complete profile. A squatter from Barcelona was caught because he left fingerprints on fliers he was distributing. Tracking methods are becom- ing better and better, mostly through biometric techniques. And if the distribution of electronic identity cards is instituted, our task will just be that much more difficult. The Paris Com-feated twice-over, by fascism and by the republic. When things get serious, the army occupies the terrain. Whether or not it engages in combat is less certain. That would require mune found a partial solution to the keeping of records: they burned down City Hall, destroying all the public records and vital statistics. We still need to find the means to perma-that the state be committed to a bloodbath, which for now is no more than a threat, a bit like the threat of using nuclear weapons for the last fifty years. Though it has been wounded nently destroy computerized databases. INSURRECTION The commune is the basic unit of partisan reality. An insurrectional surge may be nothing more than a multiplication offor a long while, the beast of the state is still dangerous. A massive crowd would be needed to challenge the army, invading its ranks and fraternizing with the soldiers. We need a communes, their coming into contact and forming of ties. As events unfold, communes will either merge into larger entities or fragment. The difference between a band of brothersMarch 18th 1871. When the army is in the street, we have an insurrectionary situation. Once the army engages, the outcome is precipitated. Everyone finds herself forced to take and sisters bound “for life” and the gathering of many groups, committees and gangs for organizing the supply and self-defense of a neighborhood or even a region in revolt, is onlysides, to choose between anarchy and the fear of anarchy. An insurrection triumphs as a political force. It is not impossible to defeat an army politically. Depose authorities at a local a difference of scale, they are all communes. A commune tends by its nature towards self-sufficiency and considers money, internally, as something foolish and ultimately out oflevel The goal of any insurrection is to become irreversible. It becomes irreversible when you’ve defeated both authority and the need for authority, property and the taste for ap- place. The power of money It is a domestic is to connect those who are unconnected, to link strangers as strangers and thus, by making everything equivalent, to put everything into circulation. Thepropriation, hegemony and the desire for hegemony. That is why the insurrectionary process carries within itself the form of its victory, or that of its defeat. Destruction has never been cost of money’s capacity to connect everything comfort- I AM... scene. The group has is the superficiality of the connection, where deception is the rule. Distrust is the basis of the credit relation. The reign of money is,enough to make things irreversible. What matters is how it’s done. There are ways of destroying that unfailingly provoke the return of what has been crushed. Whoever wastes their therefore, always the reign of control. The practical abolition of money will happen only able living with the extension of communes. Communes must be extended while making sure they do notenergy on the corpse of an order can be sure that this will arouse the desire for vengeance. Thus, wherever the economy is blocked and the police are neutralized, it is important to exceed a certain size, beyond become which a family they lose touch with themselves and give rise, almost without fail, to a dominant caste. It would be preferable for the commune to split up and toinvest as little pathos as possible in overthrowing It’s thereally... authorities. They must be deposed with the most scrupulous indifference and derision. In times like these, the end of centralized spread in that way, avoiding such an unfortunate outcome. with allThe the uprising of Algerian youth that erupted across all of Kabylia in the spring of 2001 managed to take over almost therevolutions reflects the decentralization of power. AllWinter Palaces still exist but they have been relegated to assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes. Today it is possible over, isn’t entire territory, attacking police stations, courthouses and every representation of the state, generalizing the revolt to the point of compelling the unilateral retreat of the forces of orderto take over Paris, Rome, or Buenos Aires without it being a decisive victory. Taking over Rungis would certainly be more effective than taking over the Elysée Palace. Power is no disadvantages it...world itself, its flows and its avenues, its people and its norms, its codes and its technologies. Power is the organization of the and physically preventing the elections. The movement’s strength was in the diffuse complementarity of its components-only partially represented by the interminable and hopelesslylonger concentrated in one point in the world; it is the male-dominated village assemblies and other popular committees. of The “communes” of this still-simmering insurrection had many faces: the young hotheads in helmets lobbing gasmetropolis itself. It is the impeccable totality of the world of the commodity at each of its points. Anyone who defeats it locally sends a planetary shock wave through its networks. The canisters at the riot police from the rooftop of a building in Tizi Ouzou; the wry smile of an old resistance fighter draped in his burnous; the spirit of the women in the mountain villages,riots that began in Clichy-sous-Bois filled more than one American household with joy, while the insurgents of Oaxaca found accomplices right in the heart of Paris. For France, the stubbornly carrying on with the traditional farming, without which the blockades of the region’s economy would never have been as constant and systematic as they were. Make theloss of centralized power signifies the end of Paris as the center of revolutionary activity. Every new movement since the strikes of 1995 has confirmed this. It’s no longer in Paris that most of every crisis “So it must be said, too, that we won’t be able to treat the entire French population. Choices will have to be made.” This is how a virology expert sums up, in athe most daring and consistent actions are carried out. To put it bluntly, Paris now stands out only as a target for raids, as a pure terrain to be pillaged and ravaged. Brief and brutal September 7, 2005 article in Le Monde, what would happen in the event of a bird flu pandemic. “Terrorist threats,” “natural disasters,” “virus warnings,” “social movements” and “urbanincursions from the outside strike at the metropolitan flows at their point of maximum density. Rage streaks across this desert of fake abundance, then vanishes. A day will come when violence” are, for society’s managers, so many moments of instability where they reinforce their power, by the selection of those who please them and the elimination of those whothis capital and its horrible concretion of power will lie in majestic ruins, but it will be at the end of a process that will be far more advanced everywhere else. All power to the com- make things difficult. Clearly these are, in turn, opportunities for other forces to consolidate or strengthen one another as they take the other side. The interruption of the flow ofmunes! In the subway, there’s no longer any trace of the screen of embarrassment that normally impedes the gestures of the passengers. Strangers make conversation without commodities, the suspension of normality (it’s sufficient to see how social life returns in a building suddenly deprived of electricity to imagine what life could become in a city deprivedmaking passes. A band of comrades conferring on a street corner. Much larger assemblies on the boulevards, absorbed in discussions. Surprise attacks mounted in city after city, day of everything) and police control liberate potentialities for self-organization unthinkable in other circumstances. People are not blind to this. The revolutionary workers’ movementafter day. A new military barracks has been sacked and burned to the ground. The evicted residents of a building have stopped negotiating with the mayor’s office; they settle in. A understood it well, and took advantage of the crises of the bourgeois economy to gather strength. Today, Islamic parties are strongest when they’ve been able to intelligently compen-company manager is inspired to blow away a handful of his colleagues in the middle of a meeting. There’s been a leak of files containing the personal addresses of all the cops, to- sate for the weakness of the state – as when they provided aid after the earthquake in Boumerdes, Algeria, or in the daily assistance offered the population of southern Lebanon aftergether with those of prison officials, causing an unprecedented wave of sudden relocations. We carry our surplus goods into the old village bar and grocery store, and take what we it was ravaged by the Israeli army. As we mentioned above, the devastation of New Orleans by hurricane Katrina gave a certain fringe of the North American anarchist movementlack. Some of us stay long enough to discuss the general situation and figure out the hardware we need for the machine shop. The radio keeps the insurgents informed of the retreat the opportunity to achieve an unfamiliar cohesion by rallying all those who refused to be forcefully evacuated. Street kitchens require building up provisions beforehand; emergencyof the government forces. A rocket has just breached a wall of the Clairvaux prison. Impossible to say if it has been months or years since the “events” began. And the prime minister medical aid requires the acquisition of necessary knowledge and materials, as does the setting up of pirate radios. The political richness of such experiences is assured by the joyseems very alone in his appeals for calm. they contain, the way they transcend individual stoicism, and their manifestation of a tangible reality that escapes the daily ambience of order and work. In a country like France, where radioactive clouds stop at the border and where we aren’t afraid to build a cancer research center on the former site of a nitrogen fertilizer factory that has been condemned by The great concrete slab the EU’s industrial safety agency, we should count less on “natural” crises than on social ones. It is usually up to the social movements to interrupt the normal course of the disaster. There is no sign of is silhouetted silently Of course, in recent years the various strikes were primarily opportunities for the government and corporate management to test their ability to maintain a larger and larger “minimum life in the building. service,” to the point of reducing the work stoppage to a purely symbolic dimension, causing little more damage than a snowstorm or a suicide on the railroad tracks. By going against against the darken- established activist practices through the systematic occupation of institutions and obstinate blockading, the high-school students’ struggle of 2005 and the struggle against the CPE- ing sky. law reminded us of the ability of large movements to cause trouble and carry out diffuse offensives. In all the affinity groups they spawned and left in their wake, we glimpsed the conditions that allow social movements to become a locus for the emergence of new communes. Sabotage every representative authority. Spread the palaver. Abolish general as- Other officers semblies. The first obstacle every social movement faces, long before the police proper, are the unions and the entire micro-bureaucracy whose job it is to control the struggle. Shots ring out. begin to restore Communes, collectives and gangs are naturally distrustful of these structures. That’s why the parabureaucrats have for the past twenty years been inventing coordination committees and spokes councils that seem more innocent because they lack an established label, but are in fact the ideal terrain for their maneuvers. When a stray collective makes an attempt order among the at autonomy, they won’t be satisfied until they’ve drained the attempt of all content by preventing any real question from being addressed. They get fierce and worked up not out of civilians. passion for debate but out of a passion for shutting it down. And when their dogged defense of apathy finally does the collective in, they explain its failure by citing a lack of political consciousness. It must be noted that in France the militant youth are well versed in the art of political manipulation, thanks largely to the frenzied activity of various trotskyist factions. They could not be Theexpected illusion hastobecome learn thereal.lesson of the conflagration of November 2005: that coordinations are unnecessary where coordination exists, organizations aren’t needed when people organize themselves. Another reflex is to call a general assembly at the slightest sign of movement, and vote. This is a mistake. The business of voting and deciding a And the more real it be- winner, is enough to turn the assembly into a nightmare, into a theater where all the various little pretenders to power confront each other. Here we suffer from the bad example of bourgeois parliaments. comes, the Anmore assembly is not a place for decisions but for palaver, for free speech exercised without a goal. The need to assemble is as constant among humans as desperately the necessity of making decisions is rare. Assembling corresponds to the joy of feeling a common power. Decisions are vital only in emergency situations, where the exercise of de- Women scream over their they want it. Blurred faces, mocracy is already compromised. The rest of the time, “the democratic character of decision making” is only a problem for the fanatics of process. It’s not a matter of critiquing as- and cry dead loved bodies, suits, semblies or abandoning hats,but them, attache of liberating the speech, gestures, and interplay of beings that take place within them. We just have to see that each person comes to an assembly ones. not only with a point casesof view float intoorview a motion, pressedbut with desires, attachments, capacities, forces, sadnesses and a certain disposition toward others, an openness. If we manage to set aside the fantasy of the General Assembly and replace it with an assembly of presences, if we manage to foil the constantly renewed temptation of hegemony, if we stop making the decision our final aim, then there is a chance for a kind of massification, one of those moments of collective crystallization where a decision suddenly takes hold of beings, completely or only in part. The same goes for deciding on actions. By starting from the principle that “the action in question should govern the assembly’s agenda” we make both vigorous debate and effective action impossible. A large assembly made up of people who don’t know each other is obliged to call on action specialists, that is, to abandon action for the sake of its control. On the one hand, people with mandates are by definition hindered in their actions, on the other hand, nothing hinders them from deceiving everyone. There’s no ideal form of action. What’s essential is that action assume a certain form, that it give rise to a form instead of having one imposed on it. This presupposes a shared political and geographical position – like the sections of the Paris Commune during the French like sardines against the Revolution – as well as the circulation of a shared knowledge. As for deciding on actions, the principle could be as follows: each person should do their own reconnaissance, the information sides wouldnow of a door which then be put together, and the decision WHAT HAVE will occur WErather than being made by us. The circulation of knowledge to us cancels hierarchy; it equalizes by raising up. Proliferating horizontal communication is also the best form open, releasing an outward DONE TO of coordination among different communes, the best way to put an end to hegemony. Block the economy, but measure our blocking power by our level of self-organization At the end of June 2006 in the State of Oaxaca, the occupations of city halls velocity of anger and greed OURSELVES? multiply, and insurgents occupy public buildings. In certain communes, mayors are kicked out, official vehicles are requisitioned. A month later, access is cut off to certain hotels and tourist compounds. Mexico’s Minister of Tourism speaks of a disaster “comparable to hurricane Wilma.” A few years earlier, blockades had become the main form of action of the revolt in Argentina, with different local groups helping each other by blocking this or that major road, and continually threatening, through their joint action, to paralyze the entire country if More confusion, as civil- their demands were not met. For years such threats have been a powerful lever for railway workers, truck drivers, and electrical and gas supply workers. The movement against the CPE in France did not hesitate to block train stations, ring roads, factories, highways, supermarkets and even airports. In Rennes, only three hundred people were needed to shut ians push through the down the main access road to the town for hours and cause a 40-kilometer long traffic jam. Jam everything-this will be the first reflex of all those who rebel against the present order. In a delocalized economy where companies function according to “just-in-time” production, where value derives from connectedness to the network, where the highways are links in Troopers who try to hold the chain of dematerialized production which Blank moves faces stare from subcontractor to subcontractor and from there to another factory for assembly, to block circulation is to block production as well. But a blockade is only as effective as the insurgents’ capacity to supply themselves and to communicate, as effective as the self-organization of the different communes. How them back. will we feed ourselves once everything ahead, each lost Looting stores, as in Argentina, has its limits; as large as the temples of consumption are, they are not bottomless pantries. is paralyzed? Acquiring the skills to provide, over time, for one’s own basic subsistence implies appropriating the necessary means of its production. And in this regard, it seems pointless to wait any longer. Letting two percent of the population produce the food of all the others – the situation today – is both a historical and a strategic anomaly. Liberate territory from police occupation. If possible, avoid direct confrontation. “This business shows that we are not dealing with young people making social demands, but with individuals who are declaring war on the Republic,” noted a lucid cop about recent clashes. The push to liberate territory from police occupation is already underway, and can count on the endless reserves of resentment that the forces of order have marshaled against it. Even the “social movements” are gradually being seduced by the riots, just like the festive crowds in Rennes who fought the cops every Thursday night in 2005, or those in Barcelona who destroyed a shopping district during a botellion. The movement against the CPE witnessed the recurrent return of the Molotov cocktail. But on this front certain banlieues remain unsurpassed. Specifically, when it comes to the technique they’ve been perfecting for some time now: the surprise attack. Like the one on October 13, 2006 in Epinay. A private-security team headed out after getting a report of something stolen from a car. When they arrived, one of the security guards “found himself blocked by two vehicles parked diagonally across the street and by more than thirty people carrying metal bars and pistols who threw stones at the vehicle and used tear gas against the police officers.” On a smaller scale, think of all the local police stations attacked in the night: broken windows, burnt-out cop cars. One of the results of these recent movements is the understanding that henceforth a real demonstration has to be “wild,” not declared in advance to the police. Having the choice of terrain, we can, like Troopers and the Black Bloc of Genoa in 2001, bypass the red zones and avoid direct confrontation. By choosing our own trajectory, we can lead the cops, including unionist and pacifist ones, befuddled old rather than being herded by them. In Genoa we saw a thousand determined people push back entire buses full of carabinieri, then set their vehicles on fire. The important thing is not to be better armed but to take the initiative. Courage is nothing, confidence in your own courage is everything. Having the initiative helps. Everything points, nonetheless, toward a people The conception of direct confrontations as that which pins down opposing forces, buying us time and allowing us to attack elsewhere – even nearby. The fact that we cannot prevent a confrontation from occurring doesn’t prevent us from making it into a simple diversion. Even more than to actions, we must commit ourselves to their coordination. Harassing the sound seem to drift police means that by forcing them to be everywhere they can no longer be effective anywhere. Every act of harassment revives this truth, spoken in 1842: “The life of the police agent of the It is QUIET. is painful; his position in society is as humiliating and despised as crime itself… Shame and infamy encircle him from all sides, society expels him, isolates him as a pariah, society through the spits out its disdain for the police agent along with his pay, without remorse, without regrets, without pity… The police badge that he carries in his pocket documents his shame.” On gunfire clouds of gas November 21, 2006, firemen demonstrating in Paris attacked the riot police with hammers and injured fifteen of them. This by way of a reminder that wanting to “protect and serve” can never be an excuse for joining the police. Take up arms. Do everything possible to make their use unnecessary. Against the army, the only victory is political. There is no such thing as a peaceful insurrection. Weapons are necessary: it’s a question of doing everything possible to make using them unnecessary. An insurrection is more about taking up arms and maintaining an “armed presence” than it is about armed struggle. We need to distinguish clearly between being armed and the use of arms. Weapons are a constant in revolution- ary situations, but their use is infrequent and rarely decisive at key turning points: August 10th 1792, March 18th 1871, October 1917. When power is in the gutter, it’s enough to walk over it. Because of the distance that separates us from them, weapons have taken on a kind of double character of fascination and disgust that can be overcome only by handling them. An authentic pacifism cannot mean refusing weapons, but only refusing to use them. Pacifism without being able to fire a shot is nothing but the theoretical formulation of im- potence. Such a priori pacifism is a kind of preventive disarmament, a pure police operation. In reality, the question of pacifism is serious only for those who have the ability to open fire. In this case, pacifism becomes a sign of power, since it’s only in an extreme position of strength that we are freed from the need to fire. From a strategic point of view, indirect, asymmetrical action seems the most effective kind, the one best suited to our time: you don’t attack an occupying army frontally. That said, the prospect of Iraq-style urban guerilla warfare, dragging on with no possibility of taking the offensive, is more to be feared than to be desired. The militarization of civil war is the defeat of insurrection. The Reds had their victory in 1921, but the Russian Revolution was already lost. We must consider two kinds of state reaction. One openly hostile, one more sly and democratic. The first calls for our out and out destruction, the second, a subtle but implacable hostility, seeks only to recruit us. We can be defeated both by dictatorship and by being reduced to opposing only dictator- ship. Defeat consists as much in losing the war as in losing the choice of which war to wage. Both are possible, as was proven by Spain in 1936: the revolutionaries there were de- Nothing is played out Keep except the talking. incessant re- composition of “IAM” identity. The economy is itself the crisis. They have no idea where value The more I express myself, the comes from more I am drained. The more I The econ- run after myself, the more tired omy is not I get. We cling to our self like a “in” crisis coveted job title. We’ve become our own representatives in a strange commerce, guarantors of a personalization Now they prefer the that feels, in the end, metaphor of a network to a lot more like an describe the connection amputation. We insure of cybernetic solitudes, our selves to the point the intermeshing of weak of bankruptcy, with a interactions under names more or less like “colleague,”“contact,” disguised “buddy,”“acquain- clumsiness. tance,” or “date.” Such networks sometimes condense into a milieu, where nothing is shared but codes. I don’t want to go...I really don’t...You know that? I really Let’s don’t. go... I don’t want to go Any loss of control would be preferable to all the crisis management scenarios they envision. Every network has its weak points, the nodes that They hired our parents Massive. to destroy this world, Terrifying. now they’d like to put It’s been to talk must be us to work rebuilding so with me. undone. it, and – to top it all long off – at a profit. since anyone has come The whole I gotta thing’s falling You are get out. apart on us. here. The silence of individual tension reigns over all. What are my choices? conspiracy, Flee visibility. Turn nocturnal or anonymity into an faceless offensive position actions, cre ating If you’re not inside an in- you’re out- vulnerable side position Run! of attack. No leader no demands no middle of the street, demands unmarked police cars but words, patrol the boule- I’m not I’ve been gestures, vards, metropolitan looking to doing that complici- districts are paci- just survive. all my life. ties. We fied with techniques live under an oc- forged in the colo- cupation, under nies police occupation. Undocumented immigrants are rounded up in the We still need to find the means to Jam It’s really... permanently de- everything All over, isn’t stroy computerized it... databases. for their Their terrified lives. running faces Their faces Then the We’re going to tell lights go out. Wait! them what we’ve found. What we’ve learned. Shots ring out. You haven’t stopped it. You can’t stop it. Is that supposed to happen? I don’t There is a clinically dead know. civilization kept alive by all sorts of life-support machines that spread a peculiar plague into the Air planet’s at- conditioning? mosphere. At this point it can no longer believe in a Sorry. single one of its own “values”, and any affirmation of them is considered an impudent act, a provocation that should and must be taken apart, de- Everyone finds A civilization construct- I’m not waiting to herself forced to is what rules, ed, and take sides, takes possession find out. returned of, colonizes the to a state Now of doubt. move! most banal, personal, daily exis- tence. What the hell’s going on? to choose be- tween anarchy and the fear of anarchy. There will be no A swarm of helicopters Pull social solution fills the sky. back. to the present situation. Soon this soci- ety will only be held together by on the the mere tension verge of Depose authorities of all the social spilling at a local level atoms straining over. The militarization of towards an il- civil war is the defeat lusory cure. It’s What’s taking a power plant so long? of insurrection. that runs its turbines on a gigantic reser- voir of unwept tears, always What? I think I and I Say live here. I woke can’t Busy whatever rememer. up worker you say! bees. I am what I am. Leave me alone this work is dedicated to the victims of the Trump Pandemic, whose who have passed, those about to pass, and those who are still holding on. coming collapse by paige treebridge completed 2011 context Mar 24, 2020
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