„Jouir sans entraves“ was one of the wild slogans that appeared all over the city walls in Paris in May 68. We translated it in 1973 in a MaD fold-out text with collected „May slogans“ as „Enjoyment without inhibitions“. The complete slogan of this wall: „Life without dead time – enjoyment without inhibitions“ was a central slogan for my collective political development. „Entrave“ is translated into German in the 1979 dictionary as „Shackles, inhibition, hindrance, obstruction, disturbance“. That’s what we were about: the uninhibition, the disruption of the existing, breaking free from the shackles. We wanted to claim the moment of revolt for ourselves and develop it further.
Initially, this meant freeing ourselves from social conventions in a radical impulse, rejecting the moral concept of guilt and atonement, as well as rejecting participation in the „old world“ and its stagnation. We wanted to explore a revolutionary concept and content of enjoyment and make it tangible – in the still post-fascist, inhibited, staid and violent Germany of the early 1970s. This was a special historical embedding that still resonates on the surface of society today.
If we look at the current societies around us, the concept and practice of immediate enjoyment is subject to forced recuperation, as the Situationists put it: its content is to be torn out of its „revolutionary“ context, fragmented and devalued in digital consumption, or transformed into capitalistically usable values. The commodification goes hand in hand with the flattening and atomisation of enjoyment, the isolation of those who enjoy it.
On the other hand, when we talk about the current non-movements, the moment of immediate enjoyment can still be felt in the old, non-recuperated sense. The moments of revolt are about anger and pleasure at the same time, about rupture and utopia. They are also simultaneously about past and present revolts, about echoes and reverberations, about clear political demands and about the expression of a universal imaginary that breaks through again and again as a longing for a completely different life.
To examine the connection between unmediated anger and immediate pleasure, it is first necessary to briefly clarify the two adjectives: unmediated and immediate. Unmediated here means, in my understanding: no discourse with „power“, neither with state, trade union, political or cultural institutions. No media talk. Doing what corresponds to your own „truth“, your self-defined „necessity“, what serves your own pleasure. No leaders, no representatives, no mediators of any gender.
And immediately: no step-by-step plan, no development model, but demanding everything at every moment, unconditionally. And then: understanding rage and pleasure as a unity, as an impulse for a biographical and political break with oppressive conditions, and at the same time as a spontaneous counter-plan against survival in renunciation and humility.
Forming an experimental we out of subjective rage that makes enjoyment possible. A we that does not necessarily speak the same language, that does not represent a compact „revolutionary we“, a closed „class we“ or a fixed political we, but a we composed of diverse subjectivities that is formed at the moment of the uprising. The aim is to strengthen the subjective forms that emerge from the collective composition. Of course, the questions whose free and processual discussions make up the „revolution“, the revolutionary situation, begin immediately after the outbreak of the revolt. divergent, passionate subjectivities or collectivities must also develop a form of cooperation for pragmatic interventions in the here and now. An orientation must emerge, the foundations and details of doing things together. Laboratories of a new consciousness and a new way of being active, collective, communal values, new spaces of togetherness.
The Paris Commune articulated such values in 1871: a universal republic, decentralisation and participation and, as far as enjoyment is concerned: not a luxury of the ruling class, but a communal luxury. In reflecting on the Commune, it becomes clear that a revolutionary process means a never-ending transformation that must not be ideological or identitarian, but instead requires solidarity among extreme diversities. Perhaps the realisation that the unity of experience counts more than the divergence of judgements was and is helpful. Kropotkin formulated solidarity as a revolutionary strategy. Solidarity understood as a practice not in spite of, but for the purpose of the diversity of groups. As a result, the essential quality of the movement is the coalescence, the composition of a freely diverse society, a composite social autonomy. During and in the commune, secular places of assembly, meetings, communal knowledge and symbols were created, and communal power and local solidarity were practised. The places were part of communal life as a tentative movement of communism that had to be lived and tried out. The commune emerged as an unmediated and immediate form of gathering and self-determination through association and co-operation.
The Commune was brutally crushed after barely three months. But the resonances of this great anti-state experiment were taken up again, for example in the discussions and assemblies of the Spanish proletarised, oppressed and plundered at the beginning of the 20th century.
Through the emissaries of the International, the ideas of the commune were passed on and discussed locally. The idea of decentralised federalism, consisting of autonomous local units cooperating in a global association, the strict rejection of the state or even the concept of the nation, the formation of self-governing collectives and committees at work and in neighbourhoods, free coexistence and popular education were further developed. The question of emancipation was separated from that of institutions, as institutions always represent a form of control and containment and are designed to reproduce themselves.
The wealth of historical experience and the practical social processes emerged in full force in the Spanish revolution of 1936, when the subaltern class empowered itself in a kind of „wild democracy“ and gave itself a social form. What was already evident in the Commune was practised here: the revolution as anti-state autonomy. By the way, this autonomy was not crushed by the fascist alliance in 1939, but as early as 1937 by the „republican“ forces, who re-established the state with its control bodies and instruments of power with the help of the Soviet power apparatus.
In 1968, there was a worldwide shake-up of existing power relations, which in France was accompanied by a wildcat strike (against the Communist Party and the trade unions) by 11 million workers. The movements of 1968 can be understood as a further development and catalyst of the worldwide wave of anti-institutional, anti-authoritarian, anti-state movements that continue to this day. The partisans of enjoyment, the poets of autonomy once again expressed themselves collectively, in immense diversity. One finds a variety of explicit traces of the defence of subjectivity, traces of rage and the desire for enjoyment, subjectivities full of cheerful and tormenting monsters that felt allied with other subjectivities. And who understood individual creativity at its best as the basis of assemblies for a „generalised self-government“ of all aspects of society. A federation of individuals longing for autonomy.
What took place in the streets of Paris and all over the world were impulses for pleasure, carried by radical vehemence and fierce humour. You can feel how the perspective of power was turned into a manifesto for the liberation of people from all role assignments, inclusions and exclusions, dispossession and oppression. And how once again the relations of violence were transformed into a potential, a potency, a possibility and a strength that combines subjectivity and collectivity.
In 1994, the Zapatistas built a large and powerful space of possibility in their autonomous communities in Chiapas, Mexico. Everything described here can be found in their long-lasting initiative. Here is a quote from Rita Segato:
„While capital and modernity are by nature short-sighted, the strategic intelligence of indigenous communities is of a cautious temporality, with a long-term view. Their intelligence teaches them to endure ambivalence, the reality of the inconsistent and contradictory. This was the practical experience of the ’subalterns‘ of colonialism: they tried to survive in the ‚folds‘ of the strategy of cruelty in order to preserve their ‚historical project of ties‘. The communitarian subject of the pre- or post-colonial period accepts the simultaneity of A and non-A. It is the survival strategy of decolonial communality.“
In such a decolonial sense, utopia is the freedom of history, its openness and unpredictability. The revolts taking place around the world destabilise norms and hierarchies, and are based on the pragmatics of versatility. One can recognise in them the „shadow plays of an archaic imaginary“ (Segato), their symbolism and rituals. Colonial modernity and capitalism have reduced and standardised the plurality of dreams. To contribute to other kinds of happiness, of enjoyment, i.e. to the permanence of a world in which bonds of friendship, respect, solidarity etc. have priority – to find an understanding for this other world is also what I hope for from this meeting.
Thinking the imaginary and liberation together. Sensing and expressing the resonances that arise from their friction. Practically experiencing that freedom is only possible without a represented identity – these are the lessons learnt from the anti-state movements. The „unrepresentable forms a community without preconditions and without conditions of belonging“, as Giorgio Agamben put it. And also that a true political life is only „conceivable on the basis of the irrevocable renunciation of all sovereignty“, through the act of a conscious appropriation of one’s own „political“ existence
The state is (also according to Bourdieu) a great fetish, a quasi-theological convention, a collective fiction. But the conscious appropriation of one’s own conditions of existence, one’s own desires, a self-organised way of life requires a radical detachment from this convention. It requires us to grow into subjective autonomy in the indispensable connection with all beings on this planet. It requires the willingness to accept „the other“ in a subjective-collective process. In my view, this is what a „life without dead time and enjoyment without inhibitions“ is all about.