Bioinsurgency and the Boring Revolution - A Manifesto

Political Philosophy
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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Nice trolling with the popcorn gratification, Jamal. :smiley:

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”…

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

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

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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."

@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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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 cycle 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.