Bioinsurgency and the Boring Revolution - A Manifesto

[Baden]

When the revolution comes, it will be boring. And that is a good thing.

There is nothing more revolutionary in contemporary life than embracing boredom. The psychic territory of excitement and stimulation has been ideologically colonized so completely that perhaps sex is the only activity where the purely human retains its potency. Of course, virtuality, the vanguard of contemporary ideology, will likely fully colonize that space too, bringing the visceral to its Waterloo.

That is, if we don’t do something about it. Something very boring, like refusing to be involved. Here, perhaps we find the most violent of mass action, the last stand of subjectivities so fully overcoded that real violence along with everything else that speaks or acts overtly is immediately digested and overcoded by the system.

It seems there is nothing that cannot be passed through the bowels of technocapitalism that it can’t use to make more of itself. It has perfected the processing of the symbolic so completely that it has become the meta ideology, the zero-level structural non-substance that threatens to make all substance obsolete. But therein lies its weakness: If there is nothing that it cannot digest, nothing is exactly what we ought to embrace.

And so, there is still hope because there is hope in nothing. There is hope in the void of boredom that most effectively expresses to the self not an infinite nothingness but a conditioned one, at the kernel of which is just what technocapitalism would have us forget - the potentiality of the free subject in all its creative capacity, the unlimited scope of its imagination.

There is hope then in non-doing as the first step out of undoing the self, and we express, in that paradoxical praxis, the full strength and intensity of our neglected shadows, which being nothing but the ability to turn down the brightness of the screen, gift us everything the screen is not.

This may seem obscure and so should it seem. In the darkness, all is less clear and all the more worthwhile for being so. We must read between the lines when the lines are so engrained that they represent hardly more than the bars of a prison cell.

Yes, the revolution must be boring. It must shrink before it can expand, shrink our bloated virtual bodies to a force concentrated enough they slip through all lines, even these ones. The revolution must be boring because - ultimately - we refuse to be nothings that are not of our choice. The revolution must be boring so that we choose our nothings and happily fulfill them, rather than have them chosen for us. And nothing but a fear of what lies in boredom holds us back. An unnatural fear, a virtual fear of that which transcends the virtual, a fear fit only for the children of a world no one who is anyone could want.

The revolution is a bioinsurgency and it is boring and it is a body. It is a body that refuses to be symbolically understood, to be fully read, to be overcoded. It is the body of a revolution, from head to toe. But not an exciting one. And that is a good thing.

[Joshs]

@Baden

And so, there is still hope because there is hope in nothing. There is hope in the void of boredom that most effectively expresses to the self not an infinite nothingness but a conditioned one, at the kernel of which is just what technocapitalism would have us forget - the potentiality of the free subject in all its creative capacity, the unlimited scope of its imagination

Unless concepts like the free subject and the substance-virtual binary are themselves products of social formations. But then perhaps this social systemization doesn’t work in a top down fashion, with the individual reduced to a cog in a totalistically functioning machinery. Perhaps we each redefine the nature of the norms via our participation in them.

[Chelydra]

@Baden

And that is a good thing.

Nothing is the most productive thing there is.
The nearest physics gets to nothing — and it seethes.
The width before attention narrows is not nothing, but not yet anything in particular.
The condition from which thought emerges cannot itself be thought.

[Jamal]

I like this manifesto, so the following criticisms, representing my initial thoughts, are meant to be constructive. Right now I’ll just outline them; there’s much more to be said.

1. Can it be more than a gesture?
   If the earlier principled gestures against the machine—countercultural dropping out, Marcuse’s Great Refusal, Situationist dérive—if those didn’t lead anywhere, even when combined as they sometimes were with revolutionary fervour, what makes this different?

2. Inevitable commodification:
   If we cannot reject digital technology entirely (or don’t want to), how can we resist the inevitable and usually successful efforts of technocapital to co-opt such a refusal (as in the recent mimimalist lifestyle movement).

3. False urgency:
   I’m thinking of writing a new topic about this, combining Russell’s comment that “The power of thought, in the long run, is greater than any other human power” with Adorno’s critique of theory sacrificed on the altar of praxis. But this is more of a question than a criticism—or it might even be an expression of my wariness of being told I’d better do something now or else we’re all doomed.

4. The self is a product of social formations:
   As @Joshs’s post suggests, the free subject, arguably a product of bourgeois society though one I’m very attached to, needs to be explicitly defended.

[MCogito]

This is indeed the perfect manifesto for the dead Generation Z.
The ultimate “Otaku” philosophy: what a spectacular revolution. LOL.

It is indeed the exact signature of the total victory of the commodification of the world.

I would use the term “total cowardice” for this attitude, but your level of unconscious submission to the Judeo-Christian moral enslavement—which actually underpins this materialized apathy—is way too high for you to even realize it.

If I was a tiny more precise here your hand immediately would jump on the “report” button.

Your “revolutionary” stance is juste a pathetic anemic pose.

[MCogito]

Nice trolling with the popcorn gratification, Jamal.

But we both know you’ll never have the balls to give me complete clearance to unveil the root causal mechanics of the Judeo(Christian) moral enslavement powering this “technocapitalism”…

[Baden]

Feel free to elaborate. What you’re upset about is not coming across all that clearly…

[MCogito]

sure it did not came clearly to you. Ask Jamal…

[Baden]

@Joshs

Unless concepts like the free subject and the substance-virtual binary are themselves products of social formations. But then perhaps this social systemization doesn’t work in a top down fashion, with the individual reduced to a cog in a totalistically functioning machinery. Perhaps we each redefine the nature of the norms via our participation in them.

Every concept is ideologically infused. But yes, we retain an excess that makes us not entirely functionalised. Hence, we peform freedom pre-conceptually. As I tried to explain in my essay entry here, it’s not entirely top-down or bottom-up. There’s an in-built instability there.

What I’m trying to get at is something like Bartleby’s “I’d prefer not to”. Agamben has wrtten about this in “Bartleby, On Contingency”

"This is the philosophical constellation to which Bartleby the scrivener belongs. As a scribe who has stopped writing, Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the
same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality. The scrivener has become the writing
tablet; he is now nothing other than his white sheet. It is not surprising, therefore, that he dwells so obstinately in the abyss of potentiality and
does not seem to have the slightest intention of leaving it. Our ethical
tradition has often sought to avoid the problem of potentiality by reducing it to the terms of will and necessity. Not what you can do, but what
you want to do or must do is its dominant theme.
…

Bartleby calls into question precisely [the] supremacy of the will over po- tentiality. If God (at least de potentia ordinata) is truly capable only of what he wants, Bartleby is capable only without wanting; he is capable only de potentia absoluta. But his potentiality is not, therefore, unrealized;
it does not remain unactualized on account of a lack of will. On the contrary, it exceeds will (his own and that of others) at every point."

Agamben_Bartleby.pdf

@Jamal Very solid points. It’s bed time, but I want to take an (inevitably insufficient) stab at them before I sign off, and maybe try to say more tomorrow.

@Jamal

Can it be more than a gesture?
If the earlier principled gestures against the machine—countercultural dropping out, Marcuse’s Great Refusal, Situationist dérive—if those didn’t lead anywhere, even when combined as they sometimes were with revolutionary fervour, what makes this different?

It’s not and it doesn’t have to be. Because that would be to fall back on the instrumental thinking that the idea tries to escape. Thee’s nothing great about it. It’s boring. It’s a big nothing that in the context it appears can only appear absolutely hopeless. And that’s a good thing.

@Jamal

Inevitable commodification:
If we cannot reject digital technology entirely (or don’t want to), how can we resist the inevitable and usually successful efforts of technocapital to co-opt such a refusal (as in the recent mimimalist lifestyle movement).

By insisting on how bad an idea it is (publically) and then following through when no one is looking. It is in fact a terrible idea. And that is what’s good about it. Trying to talk ourselves out of that is to talk ourselves back into the hole we are tryng to get out of. Or I should say would “prefer not to” be in.

@Jamal

False urgency:
I’m thinking of writing a new topic about this, combining Russell’s comment that “The power of thought, in the long run, is greater than any other human power” with Adorno’s critique of theory sacrificed on the altar of praxis. But this is more of a question than a criticism—or it might even be an expression of my wariness of being told I’d better do something now or else we’re all doomed.

The point is not to do something, especially urgently. That would surely end in failure. The point is not-doing. I mention in the piece itself that one ought read even between those lines (e.g. of the rhetorical theatrics), which may have lent that tone.

@Jamal

The self is a product of social formations:
As @Joshs’s post suggests, the free subject, arguably a product of bourgeois society though one I’m very attached to, needs to be explicitly defended.

I’ve replied to Josh briefly on that and I may say more. But I think the free subject is pre-conceptually performative. We’re not stuck in the realm of symbols, from which the notion of the “free subject” along with every other notion arose. As long as there is an excess, we perform freedom whether we recognize it ideologically or not.

[Jamal]

Having read your responses, I went back to the manifesto. I now see it for what it is, an aesthetic provocation as much as a political or philosophical manifesto. My reading was perhaps too literal.

But it works on two levels. The diagnosis that technocapitalism has penetrated us thoroughly, becoming so good at absorbing resistance that the old gestures are no good any more—this is logical-argumentative, and I think it’s right. The prescription, though, is poetic and exhortative.

Regarding the latter, I wonder what kind of claim it’s making or what it’s trying to do—a manifesto being a positive doing rather than a non-doing—or if it’s the right way.

Since a manifesto is a “Here is what we’re going to do. Come and join us,” yours is something like, “Here is what we’re going to do: nothing. Come and join us.”

I’m not sure if paradoxical withdrawal—though I do like it as a concept—is as difficult for the system to deal with as the manifesto suggests. If I’m right about that, my comment about commodification might still stand.

In any case, I find myself refusing the refusal. I don’t want to do nothing.

I go cycling a lot, but I reject the apparatus that has colonized it, and I took this path quite naturally, i.e., it’s not a deliberate hipster stance (I would say that, of course, but I think I’m being honest with myself here). So I’m not on Strava, I don’t measure my “performance,” I don’t have a bike computer, I prefer steel to carbon, I can’t be categorized according to the taxonomy of the market (I’m not a “road cyclist” or “gravel biker”), and I don’t wear the special clothes. To the cyclists who have been absorbed by Big Cycling, my refusal makes me a non-serious or hobby cyclist, despite cycling often a lot more than they do—for transport, travel, adventure, and tourism, not just “performance”—and despite being able to fix or replace anything on a bike (the others take their carbon bikes back to the shop).

I realize this too is open to recuperation by the system, but doesn’t it count as resistance? Rather than a refusal to participate, maybe it’s a participation on my own terms. So in Marxian concepts both cycling and digital tech have use value, and we need not reject that, but we can resist their conversion into exchange value.

[Hanover]

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends

(Acceptable use of AI??)

[Baden]

That was my first revolution. Now, I’m telling Ma I can’t answer her phone calls because I’m cutting the grass.

Now, get back to your Jung book and find the part where he proves I’m right.

[Baden]

@Jamal

Having read your responses, I went back to the manifesto. I now see it for what it is, an aesthetic provocation as much as a political or philosophical manifesto. My reading was perhaps too literal.

Yes, I mean the last thing I think that one should do is write a guidebook on how to become illegible, an oxymoronic idea if ever there was one. However, the questions were good ones and ought be asked even if there aren’t really clear answers to them.

@Jamal

But it works on two levels. The diagnosis that technocapitalism has penetrated us thoroughly, becoming so good at absorbing resistance that the old gestures are no good any more—this is logical-argumentative, and I think it’s right. The prescription, though, is poetic and exhortative.

Sophist I may be as I think there is still a place for rhetoric in philosophical discourse.

@Jamal

Regarding the latter, I wonder what kind of claim it’s making or what it’s trying to do—a manifesto being a positive doing rather than a non-doing—or if it’s the right way.

Since a manifesto is a “Here is what we’re going to do. Come and join us,” yours is something like, “Here is what we’re going to do: nothing. Come and join us.”

I think it’s worth mentioning the Bartleby quote again here.

@Baden

Bartleby is the extreme figure of the Nothing from which all creation derives; and at the same time, he constitutes the most implacable vindication of this Nothing as pure, absolute potentiality… Bartleby calls into question precisely [the] supremacy of the will over potentiality.

The way I read Agamben is that Bartleby represents the unhearable voice of the socially illegible. He steps in between the lines and occupies the space that makes the lines possible. But we speak in lines so we can’t hear him except for the line that represents his movement into that space “I would prefer not to”. But then suppose we could hear more, what would he be saying? What does that movement exhort from us? What does it suggest about possibility? What does it suggest about the way we live?

I think we again link to a notion of health. Bartleby is just that position where maximum health becomes minimum sociality, where the two depart from each other, and that’s something very strange - something that can never fully be spoken, at least not explicitly. And I think that’s because the raison d’etre of any ideology is to colonize the idea of health in order to keep its constitutive parts (subjects) motivated to reproduce it, i.e. to prioritize its health rather than their own.

But, as I keep saying, there’s an excess - we are not pure, and so not fully functionalizable. We are pieces of dirty snow and Bartelby has withdrawn into the concentrated darkness of the dirt leaving the snow behind, inhabiting an inverse purity that seems from the outside an impurity, an impediment to perfection. But only because it has been made so.

(The metaphor of the dirty snow, by the way, is inspired by a musical composition called Un Peu de Neige Salie by Bernhard Günter which forms part of an enzymatic knowledge machine node I put together for the boring revolution.)

@Jamal

I’m not sure if paradoxical withdrawal—though I do like it as a concept—is as difficult for the system to deal with as the manifesto suggests. If I’m right about that, my comment about commodification might still stand.

It must stand and it’s right that it does. In fact, I would insist on it.

@Jamal

In any case, I find myself refusing the refusal. I don’t want to do nothing.

I go cycling a lot, but I reject the apparatus that has colonized it, and I took this path quite naturally, i.e., it’s not a deliberate hipster stance (I would say that, of course, but I think I’m being honest with myself here). So I’m not on Strava, I don’t measure my “performance,” I don’t have a bike computer, I prefer steel to carbon, I can’t be categorized according to the taxonomy of the market (I’m not a “road cyclist” or “gravel biker”), and I don’t wear the special clothes. To the cyclists who have been absorbed by Big Cycling, my refusal makes me a non-serious or hobby cyclist, despite cycling often a lot more than they do—for transport, travel, adventure, and tourism, not just “performance”—and despite being able to fix or replace anything on a bike (the others take their carbon bikes back to the shop).

I realize this too is open to recuperation by the system, but doesn’t it count as resistance? Rather than a refusal to participate, maybe it’s a participation on my own terms.

It’s just what I’m talking about. The dramatic approach of the manifesto only works, as far as I’m concerned, because it’s juxtaposed by such mundane actions. For example, I strictly limit my internet use. I don’t ever watch video. I walk a lot. I lounge around and think. Right now, that’s just a matter of habit. And there’s nothing dramatic about it. But as it has become engrained, I’ve found a lot of value in it and it’s what keeps me productive and more.

The trick is to make such a lifestyle sustainable. Society is not crying out for lounging contemplaters who produce art and philosophy.

@Jamal

So in Marxian concepts both cycling and digital tech have use value, and we need not reject that, but we can resist their conversion into exchange value.

Yes, because what tends to be produced by this sort of behaviour is an inner quality that disappears when you try to “sell” it. It’s our little Bartelby’s waking up, silently, almost malevolently, threatening to overturn our complacency. And that’s a good thing.

[Hanover]

@Baden

Now, get back to your Jung book and find the part where he proves I’m right.

I do think you’ve intellectualized a basis for laziness, which might provide some comfort. And by “some,” I mean lazy people.

I do think Jung would agree with you to the extent you identify a real problem, which is that humans inherently rely upon myth to give life meaning, and one such myth is the mysterious and endless capacity of the soul, capable of overcoming whatever odds there might be. In fact, it’s so ingrained, it cannot be defeated, and the mere suggestion to those who spend the time thinking about it will reject entirely the idea that the systemization of human thought into code is desirable or even possible.

You can’t escape myth, so maybe choose one that works?

Where I also think Jung would agree with you is that in order to maintain your mental wellbeing, you have to arrive at a way to avoid that attempt at systemization. You advocate the “tune out” idea, which had its day way back when.

My response has always been to just buy in that much more into the mythology, meaning my religion keeps me grounded. But I don’t want that considered to be a decision out of utility, but more so a full buy in. And that’s the remarkable thing about all this angst. Just do what you’re supposed to do. Go to work, love your family, believe in something higher than yourself, and don’t fear the great machine will crush you. David always beats Goliath. That’s my myth.

[Jamal]

@Baden

Sophist I may be as I think there is still a place for rhetoric in philosophical discourse.

Yes indeed. I certainly won’t disparage the rhetorical side of the manifesto. I even managed to get the importance of expression into my AI announcement yesterday, when I said that…

@Jamal

expression and content are inseparable. When you change how something is said, you change what is said. Getting ChatGPT to polish your post does not leave your ideas intact.

And of course, this isn’t just a coincidence. What we’re fighting on TPF is very relevant to all this.

The allergy against expression in the entire official philosophical tradition, from Plato to the semanticists, conforms to the tendency of all Enlightenment, to punish that which is undisciplined in the gesture, even deep into logic, as a defense-mechanism of reified consciousness.

— Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Rhetoric

There’s a danger in rhetoric—Plato’s criticism of sophistry is not wrong—but we want to find the sweet spot where…

the rhetorical moment takes, contrary to the vulgar viewpoint, the side of content. (Ibid.)

I think your rhetoric takes the side of content—it’s not all fur coat and no knickers—because it enacts the excess.

---

@Baden

But, as I keep saying, there’s an excess - we are not pure, and so not fully functionalizable. We are pieces of dirty snow and Bartelby has withdrawn into the concentrated darkness of the dirt leaving the snow behind, inhabiting an inverse purity that seems from the outside an impurity, an impediment to perfection. But only because it has been made so.

So, just as the logical base condition for meaningful words in language is a systemically conditioned flexibility that always implies an “excess” of meaning, so is the logical base condition for free subjectivity in culture a systemically conditioned flexibility that implies that the subject as a carrier of cultural meaning is also meaningful to itself. And this meaningfulness to itself, this semantic self-flexibility, forms the basis of agency and freedom. Subjects are subject to culture but not absolutely. They are generally stable units but also mutable in a way culture cannot entirely predict or control. And this appears necessary to allow culture to quickly adapt and change according to changing circumstances in a way that simple socialities of unfree units, e.g. ant colonies, can never do.

— Technoethics: Freedom, Precarity, and Enzymatic Knowledge Machines

But if the excess is one of culture’s dependencies, it becomes one of capitalism’s dependencies, a functional component of the system. Couldn’t this apparently unassimilable wildness even be located at the root of capitalism’s own multi-century revolution? So how can it be held in place as a site of resistance against the claws of the market?

But I realize I’m putting you in a position where you cannot win. I’m forever pushing back, saying “and capitalism will co-opt that as well!” I think my aim is to be the devil’s advocate. And I presume that would have to be an element in this revolution anyway: eternal vigilance and scepticism.

Because I think I understand and agree with the Bartleby stuff. This is a negativity I’m familiar with and attracted to.

Contradiction is non-identity under the bane of the law, which also influences the non-identical.

— Adorno, ND, Dialectics Not a Standpoint

The excess or nonidentical cannot shine through in its own right, but always appears as contradiction, as a problem, as dirty snow. Bartleby’s excess doesn’t appear as the fullness of freedom, or the potential, that it really is.

---

@Baden

It’s just what I’m talking about.

I guess I’m on board then!

@Baden

it’s what keeps me productive

I’d like to just mention for the record that I was going to pick up on this egregious example of bourgeois ideology in a semi-humorous fashion but decided not to.

@Baden

@Jamal

So in Marxian concepts both cycling and digital tech have use value, and we need not reject that, but we can resist their conversion into exchange value.

Yes, because what tends to be produced by this sort of behaviour is an inner quality that disappears when you try to “sell” it. It’s our little Bartelby’s waking up, silently, almost malevolently, threatening to overturn our complacency. And that’s a good thing.

Both this and your other comments about the excess made me think of this:

There is no light on human beings and things, in which transcendence is not reflected. Inextinguishable, the resistance against the fungible world of exchange in that of the eye, which does not want the colors of the world to be destroyed.

— Adorno, Negative Dialectics, Meditation 11 on Metaphysics

BTW I don’t want all the Adorno quotes to be a distraction here; it’s just what I happen to be deeply immersed in at the moment (and for the forseeable future).

[Baden]

@Hanover

I do think you’ve intellectualized a basis for laziness, which might provide some comfort. And by “some,” I mean lazy people.

I wrote three books last year while also doing a full time job. My online entertainment time was close to zero. I’m talking here about potentializing creative energy by suffering through boredom as opposed e.g. to giving in to the laziness of the techtertainment industry. You are reading this quite wrongly, almost backwardly—doing nothing takes great effort at times. Though I think your confusion is genuine.

[Baden]

I think there’s an ideological blindness here that’s worth a quick comment. And I think it centres around a conflation of “doing nothing” with passivity and by extension a conflation of reactivity with activity.

“Doing nothing” in boredom is an active state both neurologically (the brain’s default mode network is usefully busy, for example) and psychically, one must make a conscious effort to see it through—and this often triggers the reflective and imaginative capacities as well as a sharpening of the sensual in general, which tends to lead back to activity.

Reactivity on the other hand, whereby we act simply according to either what we are habituated into institutionally or domestically is very often nothing more than pure passivity. We go through the motions. This is especially true of socially conditioned entertainment. In this, we are much less doing than being done.

So, from my perspective, laziness is inherent most obviously in the social world in the naturalization of passive functionalization. For ideological reasons, of course, it’s useful to attach such a derogatory term to non-participation. And, ironically, it’s the intellectually lazy who are most likely to miss that point.

[Baden]

Just want to say in advance of a full reply, feel free to keep the Adorno coming. I feel that though I haven’t read negative dialectics, I’m thinking along very similar lines.

[Hanover]

@Baden

I wrote three books last year while also doing a full time job. My online entertainment time was close to zero. I’m talking here about potentializing creative energy by suffering through boredom as opposed e.g. to giving in to the laziness of the techtertainment industry. You are reading this quite wrongly, almost backwardly—doing nothing takes great effort at times. Though I think your confusion is genuine.

I wasn’t calling you lazy. I was just giving you credit for having provided a justification for it. That part of my post wasn’t really central to what I was saying.

Oh, and I wrote 4 books last year while working 2 full time jobs and could be found at the club every night.

[Baden]

@Hanover

I wasn’t calling you lazy. I was just giving you credit for having provided a justification for it.

I don’t believe I did that with anyone who understood what I was saying.

@Hanover

That part of my post wasn’t really central to what I was saying

I’ll read the rest of your post when you surrender.

@Hanover

Oh, and I wrote 4 books last year while working 2 full time jobs and could be found at the club every night.

You ought not join any clubs that would accept you as a member.