Film scriptScene 1 There is nothing outside. There is nothing outside this world. Once, society said that this was as good as it can get. Now it just says that this is what there is. It can be good or bad, but there is nothing else. Capitalist society is what there is. It is endless. Capitalist society is endless. There is nothing else. Nothing but the huge body of capitalism, of which we are a tiny part. Which we reproduce every day. Again and again. Every day we recreate this enor- mous, indisputable, impenetrable body of control, oppression and dominance, from which it is impossible to distance ourselves. We are the body, it is us. Now and tomorrow. It is within us, we cannot get away from it, it has penetrated into us. There is no ‘us’ outside, there is no ‘me’ separate from capital. I am the image, the image is me. Every day we recreate a totality that we cannot understand. We are all quite aware that the totality to which we are subjected only exists because we create it, and yet it appears to be beyond our reach, as if we were not helping to recreate it every single day. We have lost perspective. I see myself lying flat on my belly, closing my eyes and falling asleep. And waking up and opening my mouth, and my tongue comes out. But I don’t wake up. I can’t wake up again. We all sleep the same sleep, from which we cannot wake up. We lie moving back and forth in the bed, but our bodies get more and more tired and slowly decompose, decay and wither. For sleep gives us no rest, we only become more afraid and completely desperate in order to finally fall asleep properly; sleeping and on our way to somewhere else. But there is nothing outside. The bad dream of modernism has become reality. Any kind of outside has been swallowed up and folded into the flicker of the spectacle.
Scene 2 “Not only has universal anarchy broken out among the reformers, but also every individual must admit to himself that he has no precise idea about what ought to happen. However, this very defect turns to the advantage of the new movement, for it means that we do not anticipate the world with our dogmas, but instead attempt to discover the new world through the critique of the old.” - Karl Marx A: There is no peaceful revolt. There is no reason to glorify the use of violence; but violence is necessarily an essential ingredient in the foundation of a new society. It is therefore stupid and naive to imagine politics without violence, and there is undoubtedly always a need to answer back, to defend oneself and ensure the new. As when the Black Panthers armed themselves, or the Communards in Paris refused to be disarmed by the Government soldiers who tried to seize the city guns. The power monopoly of the state must be broken, and that is that! The French writer Alfred Jarry, who was often armed when he walked around in Paris at the beginning of the 20th century, understood this. It didn’t mean that he fired his revolver, but he was armed and refused to accept the power of the police and the army. He understood that terror is the health of the state. When the conflicts only simmer under the surface, state annexation is less visible, but once the revolt comes and we are on the street together, then the army is brought in, and the state shows its terrorist nature. B: But there’s no longer any so-called revolutionary movement here. There was once a movement that called itself revolutionary, but it disappeared and collapsed when it turned out that it was only a capitalist movement that helped to reorganize capitalist society, to optimize it. The European proletariat existed as a class from 1848 until 1968, when it definitively emerged that it was unable to handle the social conflicts of the modern world. At no time has the proletariat acted to abolish the monetary and state order. Instead they voted in Social Democrat fashion for worker’s consumption and are today hand-in-glove with the national democracies. Today it is the huge human masses in China, South East Asia, Africa and South America who are most active. If there is any subversive world-subject that can exert pressure, rebel against the prevailing supremacy and abolish work, money and the state, it is the ‘wretched of the earth’. C: I don’t know where to begin. Here? Now? Where now? When now? Call it now. It’s now it’s happening! But what if it turns out that it wasn’t now after all, if we should have waited a little, were too quick off the mark? That we don’t have the energy for anything. No more questions. Now it’s happening. What will happen? What is to be done? No more analyses and deliberations. Time for action. Interpretation must be replaced by action. But is it conceivable that, after you’ve been active, after the action, when you have done something, you’ve just done the same, that nothing has happened. What if it turns out that I’ve just stayed where I was? Remained what I was. But nothing at all has happened. Maybe the only thing I have done is confirmed the way things are. A: But the wretchedness is so comprehensive that the shit is falling apart. We are helping it on its way. Making it collapse. The goal is to make it all break down. To struggle against the existing order must mean to destroy it all and block communication, traffic and exchanges. The cybernetic network of the spectacle must be short-circuited. Its lines of communication must be smashed. That is where we begin. B: But what is to be done? Do we actually know that? Is it clear? Vladimir Lenin’s solution – the creation of a small avant-garde of aware men who seize power and control the revolution – is surely no longer a solution? The Russian Revolution has to be the proof of the failure of that model. That much must be clear. It makes no sense to claim that you are building up the party of the proletariat. But what do we do then? Can we at all ask the question ‘What is to be done?’? Do we know what it means? And who is asking the question, or for that matter answering it? Isn’t it just a short-circuit that ensures that nothing at all happens? Maybe it would be better not to ask the question at all, to retract it, to cancel it. Withdraw it, slide away, evaporate. A: There’s always a certain amount of passion in the revolutionary struggle for commu- nism. Always. Killing is of course not the same as communizing, the communist revolution undermines more than it eliminates. But to reject the use of violence, that is to renounce revolution. C: All these questions and all these answers – or are they all questions? What can I do in the situation I am in? How should I move forward? Where do I go from here? Is it me? Is there anyone at all? Any me? Are there more of us? Any ‘we’? It’s enough to drive you to despair. I don’t even know what ‘we’ means. At any rate I’m not sure. Not of ‘I’ either. The truth seems to be that I am talking about things I know nothing about, that I’m not sure of very much, but that I am ... No, I’m not sure of that either. Or else I’ve forgotten it. Yet I won’t stop talking, I won’t shut up. I can’t. Not now. Now. B: The thing is, there’s no revolutionary identity. In the society of biopolitical control it is the active renunciation of identity that is revolutionary. We throw out the predicates and stay well away from the so-called revolutionary subjects that only have a function in relation to power as the mirror-image of the police. It’s exactly what biopolitical power wants – to tie any resistance to so-called society, to paste the revolutionaries into the insane scrapbook of the ‘one society’ that power is always busy creating. It is absolutely necessary not to affirm any new identity; we are neither one thing nor the other, neither anarchists nor reactionar- ies, ‘Black Bloc’ nor hooligans. We can justifiably proclaim “We do not exist”. And you’ll never catch us. The bombs are already in place, and they blew everything up five minutes ago.
Scene 3 “2nd August 1914. Germany declares war on Russia. In the afternoon, to the swimming baths.” People stand talking together, discussing, gesticulating, many are laughing, some stand bowed over the groceries they have dragged from the supermarket out on to the road, while others try to set fire to a cash register that has been put in a supermarket trolley. A couple of dead policemen are floating around in the city lake. Yet another stretch of motorway has been ploughed up and planted with bushes and trees. Others have been filled with landmines. More and more soldiers are deserting. The director of Jyske Bank has changed sides and has blown up his bank. The banknotes are burning. The city streets are full of chaos and orgies. |