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The black intellectual and poet Aimé Césaire, born in the former French colony of Martinique, an island in the French overseas department in the Caribbean Sea, belonging to the Windward Islands of the Lesser Antilles, wrote in his book Discours sur le colonialisme (1950) that “colonial enterprise is to the modern world what Roman imperialism was to the ancient world: the prelude to Disaster and the forerunner of Catastrophe. Come, now! The Indians massacred, the Moslem world drained of itself, the Chinese world defiled and perverted for a good century; the Negro world disqualified; mighty voices stilled forever; homes scattered to the wind; all this wreckage, all this waste, humanity reduced to a monologue, and you think that all that does not have its price? The truth is that this policy cannot but bring about the ruin of Europe itself, and that Europe, if it is not careful, will perish from the void it has created around itself.
They thought they were only slaughtering Indians, or Hindus, or South Sea islanders, or Africans. They have in fact overthrown, one after another, the ramparts behind which European civilization could have developed freely.
I know how fallacious historical parallels are, particularly the one I am about to draw. Nevertheless, permit me to quote a page from Edgar Quinet (French historian. svh) for the not inconsiderable element of truth which it contains and which is worth pondering. Here it is: ‘People ask why barbarism emerged all at once in ancient civilization. I believe I know the answer. It is surprising that so simple a cause is not obvious to everyone. The system of ancient civilization was composed of a certain number of nationalities, of countries which, although they seemed to be enemies, or were even ignorant of each other, protected, supported, and guarded one another. When the expanding Roman Empire undertook to conquer and destroy these groups of nations, the dazzled sophists thought they saw at the end of this road humanity triumphant in Rome. They talked about the unity of the human spirit; it was only a dream. It happened that these nationalities were so many bulwarks protecting Rome itself... Thus when Rome, in its alleged triumphal march toward a single civilization, had destroyed, one after the other, Carthage, Egypt, Greece, Judea, Persia, Dacia, and Cisalpine and Transalpine Gaul, it came to pass that it had itself swallowed up the dikes that protected it against the human ocean under which it was to perish. The magnanimous Caesar, by crushing the two Gauls, only paved the way for the Teutons. So many societies, so many languages extinguished, so many cities, rights, homes annihilated, created a void around Rome, and in those places which were not invaded by the barbarians, barbarism was born spontaneously. The vanquished Gauls changed into Bagaudae. Thus the violent downfall, the progressive extirpation of individual cities, caused the crumbling of ancient civilization. That social edifice was supported by the various nationalities as by so many different columns of marble or porphyry. When, to the applause of the wise men of the time, each of these living columns had been demolished, the edifice came crashing down; and the wise men of our day are still trying to understand how such mighty ruins could have been made in a moment's time.
Here, Joanna, black people dared finally to criticize the six centuries-old White Men’s Empire. Only in the Twentieth Century the colored people dared to attack the fundaments of the so-called European — and American Culture. In the meantime the West became wealthy through the slave-trade and the plantations in our former colonies, while the “Second Wave / New Imperialism (late 19th–early 20th Century) was driven by the Industrial Revolution, European powers sought raw materials, food, and new markets. This culminated in the Scramble for Africa(formalized at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885) and the expansion of empires into Asia and the Middle East.” It created first and foremost a racism against colored people, which still has not died out, as we can see with our own eyes in the recent revolt of the, relatively high percentage of African people who joined the violent riots in the French metropole Paris, with its more than 12 million residents.
https://tradingeconomics.com/france/at-risk-of-poverty-rate-eurostat-data.html
“Poverty around Paris is heavily concentrated in the so-called banlieues (suburbs), where poverty rates and unemployment are significantly higher than in the rest of France.
Characteristics of poverty in the Parisian banlieues
• Figures and exclusion: In many disadvantaged banlieues (such as Saint-Denis, Aubervilliers, and Sevran), poverty is approximately three times higher than the national average, and the number of welfare recipients is double that of the rest of the country.
• Unemployment: Youth unemployment in these suburbs can reach around 25% to 40%, compared to a much lower national average.
• Spatial separation: There is a stark contrast between the wealthy center of Paris and the immediate surrounding municipalities (such as Aubervilliers or Saint-Denis), which are sometimes located less than a kilometer away but face a completely different socio-economic reality. • Social tensions: Structural poverty, disadvantage in the labor market, discrimination, and a lack of future prospects regularly lead to social discontent and riots (such as the historic Banlieue riots of 2005 and subsequent uprisings).
- Homelessness and emergency shelters: Pressure on emergency shelters and food banks is also growing in and around the French capital itself; thousands of people live there in precarious or informal conditions.
“Ideology crystallizes itself like a map in memory. It legitimizes itself by propagating the false idea that the world in which we live is the best possible world, or the system is the best system, regardless of its shortcomings. For this reason, it is common to hear that socialism is better than capitalism, the free market is better than the proletarian state, democracy better than fascism, military dictatorship better than communism, republic better than monarchy, feudal bondage better than slavery, city better than country, etc.
However many of these arguments are launched, they all are ultimately absurd because they tend to justify repression at the altar of a supposed necessary order. Ideology demonizes its opposition as partisans of a supposed and constructed chaos, praising moderation and fostering resignation. Ideology skirts logic and cajoles the naive population into accepting evil as inevitable, which carries with it either the aftertaste of fatality or arrogance, but always with surrender or sacrifice. In this vein, it is not uncommon to hear it said that change is impossible, or that there are no longer ideals worth fighting for nor hope to embrace. Ideology programs collective desperation. It alienates. It defeats. It is as recalcitrant as a dogma, because its ultimate goal is self-perpetuation. It uses every means available toward this end: genocide, ecocide, elections, or simply fear — that paralyzes the imagination, or erases it.
Ideology operates like a narrative that domesticates by way of its own systemic standardization. It expands like a virus, or transparent and mimetic plague, which expresses itself in trends or in name-brand identities. No one sees it, no one feels it, no one touches it, yet everyone speaks with its tongue. It strangles the mind—which is connected to a server or a mainframe—and plugs in the eyes. It reproduces itself mechanically and accumulates unsatisfied desires in an oscillating spiral. This spiral is like the pleats of an accordion or, better yet, an artificial heart sounding its own agony. The beating of this false heart will continue until the empire rearms, the government regroups, castes are revived, or until the system collapses, a victim of its own decadence.
Ideology crystallizes itself like a map. This map, however, is false—it portrays the world as a mental creation, a stage constructed over the base of the gears of productivity: the gearing is the material and ideological bubble in which the so-called political and economic systems of eco-social domination exist. Ideology justifies itself with the false idea that this is a happy and viable world, and that, despite its shortcomings, it is better to close your eyes to accustom yourself to survival and to avoid any disruption of the dream. When a person dreams, the nightmares cease and fantasy flowers. This can be, however, highly subversive, because in addition to letting the imagination fly, dreams erase narratives and turn the maps upside down, disposing of them in fetid waste-dumps.2
Domestication is a process that some animals on this planet suffer. It reduces the wild and accustoms the animal to the absence of the natural state of living beings on this planet. It eliminates any wild characteristics that naturally negate planet-wide standardization. It erases that which is natural and spontaneous and which made life possible on this planet. It homogenizes every living creature and organizes life into unities that categorize everything living and breathing on the planet. It places human beings outside the animal kingdom, creating categories of kingdoms and organizing plants and insects as dead objects on this planet. Domestication is a process suffered like a strange sickness that weighs on life in every corner of the planet, threatening to destroy the existence of all who inhabit its magic.
3
Affection instills strength. Without it, it is nearly impossible to struggle with experiences too intense and painful to endure. Tenderness is a way of life, opposed to the automatization of the clock and forced labor. Robotization is a way of death, opposed to the liberation of time and leisure, which allow tenderness to grow like a healthy trunk in the garden of all and so spread its aroma among all beings that inhabit the planetary garden.
In contrast, globalization imposes a standard mold on our garden. It manifests itself in a triple process: imperial expansion of capital; worldwide standardization through economic control by transnational companies, and domestication of the soil through monoculture, destroying natural variety and paving the earth. Its avarice threatens all natural cycles. The soil is the skin and the flesh that covers our planet. Clean air is the landscape that gives us oxygen and protects us from dying, burnt by the penetration of ultraviolet rays. Condors and Magellan sheep have been blinded due to the weakening ozone layer. Water gives us life. Soil, air and water are parts of a natural cycle that pollution interrupts. Then, fire gives us the energy we need, and the sun nurtures us with compassion and tenderness.
Certainly we all need tenderness: the cat that stretches itself between the calves of guests or meows in your lap; the dog that jumps excited at your return and looks for your recognition. Tenderness reconnects us to all things and makes us well. Who has not felt pleasure at touching the face of a loved one or bathed in the pleasure of a beloved’s touch?
Robotic cybernetic replicas only work. They falsely perceive time, they understand it as a continuous line where past, present and future intersect simultaneously but in an unreal way. The notion of time is an authoritarian imposition of the social order that justifies itself with the false idea of progress, a model of legitimization of the dominant order: industrialization, imprisonment and territorial delimitation. Materially, we live in the present, in existence itself.
“Hic et nunc,” so goes the Latin refrain, here and now. Because of this, memory—always active and arbitrary, changing and selective—gives us a perception of our own experience. Experience amplifies peculiarity, a process distinct from history, this is to say from the standardization of the official. The only common factor to all the peculiarities there are on earth is tenderness. Affection is a primary necessity of human beings. Knowing, then is to understand that without tenderness and love, no revolution can be possible.
4
Efficiency is inflexible. An automatic collector on the bus processes only exact change to print a ticket; otherwise, it does not work, and it invalidates the operation. The automatic teller buzzes at a wrong button pushed and rejects the plastic card. This is the logic of efficiency, or the reason of inflexibility. In the same way, being indecisive is a sign of inefficiency, which marks and burns with the stain of the flexible.
The sap that flows through nature spreads without a stable base of identity. Rather it flows spontaneously, precipitately. It does not reproduce itself identically, and it rejects the molds of mechanization. This fluid is in constant movement. While the river runs, its particles have no possible replica. In this way, freezing a single drop, isolating it from the general flow, is an act against nature. cloning nature in order to pour its double into a test tube is a reifying act. Nature is peculiarity itself and is fragile like every snowflake. Its spirit is flexible. The logic of standardization articulates itself instead through the mechanisms of efficiency. An experiment cannot make itself flexible; it requires a stable pattern that must be tested under inflexible conditions and coordinates. Life flows in an organic way, like the sap of plants; it is not a laboratory experiment under scientific control. On the contrary, it flowers with the flexibility of a bud. Sap waters the world through each one of its peculiarities. Efficiency negates nature, given that it tries to impose a control panel over the garden, which sprouts spontaneously and organically. Efficiency expands and colonizes, ignoring all peculiarity Because of this, its function is to construct categories that operate with the logic of taxonomic standardization. Thus it differentiates and creates sets while it negates the differences in these same sets, which cannot resist the light and organicity of their own peculiarities.
Reality is a garden of peculiarities forged from a constellation of other peculiarities, which at the same time disperse themselves in their own universe to the rhythm of the sap that flows and flowers. The fluid does not organize itself nor does it represent itself. It is only a flow. Everything that inhabits it is part of its own organicity, which grows in the constant movement of each unique and unrepeatable constellation. The organicity of change—which sometimes expresses itself like bubbles in boiling water—surfaces when humans concentrate their energy—which becomes self-reflexive consciousness—and corrects the course of daily events. But organicity is also natural and independent of consciousness. For example, global warming, caused by human technology, will make the planet cool down to counteract the frightening and artificial heat of fossil fuels. This will cause floods, tsunamis and even the disappearance of coastal population centers. To not understand this is to alienate oneself from the course of life that flows between each and every one of us. It is to fall into reification, that is to say, into the logic that situates subjects like dead matter in a control panel. This is the panel that turns the mechanized system on and off, negating with its measured tic-tac the permanent course of life.
5
A few things are certain, or at least, nearly irrefutable. One of these is that life flowers around trees. Another, that trees cannot live without water. On the contrary, they dry up. Clearcutting and the damming of rivers do not only imply the human and corporate-human dominion over nature, but also the destruction of every fountain from which life emanates. The defense of the planet, by every possible means, is not only a question of self-defense, but also of survival.
The instinct of self-preservation of the human species has brought about dominion over nature. But this very dominion threatens our self-preservation. It is a vicious circle that sooner or later will break down. And any breakdown will be a total breakdown, a rupture both mental and material because it necessarily involves our ways of perceiving and interacting with nature.
The dominion over the environment and creatures that inhabit it does not bring about preservation but colonization. Its effect is concrete: the conquest of the planet, of animals, of plants, of insects and, of course, humans. Real people, those who still have not been alienated from their own natures—by luck or resistance— still feel a strong connection with the earth and maintain a strong connection with their ancestors. Native peoples have a sense of well-being not seen in civilized cultures. Primitive populations still preserve an atavistic wisdom. In their eyes, the understanding that we are nothing but nature is an act of simple lucidity.
For civilization, every act of destruction of its icons is an iconoclastic or terrorist act. When civilization destroys a way of life or culture different from its civilized order, this becomes civilizing action. This is the logic of colonialization. The extermination of colonized communities is not just brought about by the cracking of the whip or the shot of the cannon, but also by the clearcutting of forests and the construction of dams.
6
The individual tends to see him or herself as an individual subject. This is to say, as an indivisible being, unique and monolithic. This vision has generated a false consciousness of the being that justifies pragmatic individualism as much as the cartesian disembodiment of the self: 'Cogito ergo sum,' mind over body, the virtual world, personal space, etc. The institutional propaganda of school and the authoritarianism of the expert scientific voice have impelled civilized populations to internalize the notion of the monolithic subject whose incorporeal identity reifies itselfinto an expansive ego, thus reproducing the instrumental logic of colonizing western thought. The expansive “I” turns itself into a unique and indivisible individual, thus negating its own multiplicity, plurality and flexibility, all that constitutes its own peculiarity. Thus, while the monolithic identity negates multiplicity, disembodiment rejects reality. So, the indivisible identity reifies itself through the disembodied consciousness of the “I” And this consciousness is nurtured and forms itself through the standardizing mechanizations of taxonomic knowledge.
The individual is not a being apart from its totality, nor is it fragmented between body and consciousness. The individual is a part of its totality, and its body interacts with reality. Denying this is justifying alienation. To feel the wind, for example, that crosses our pores when we stop at night to look at the stars, is sufficient proof that this totality exists. To believe the opposite is to be sadly alienated.
Poetry and art prevent the standardization of peculiarity. Artistic language suggests, instead of describing comprehensively, the immediate presence of being. Art and poetry dismantle the reduction driven by intellectual control, allowing its practitioners to become a part of totality. This transformation is called authenticity or one’s own voice, that is, the genuine that exists in everyone.
This authenticity is nothing more than the peculiarity of every being: that which opposes standardization expressed by—among other things— the reification of the “I.” To think, for example, that one is an image projected in a mirror, or to believe in the formal and pictorial combination of a portrait, or in a mechanically reproduced image—photography, video or film — represents an alienating distance between the reality of a being and the reifying Cartesian consciousness to which the civilized world submits. Images as mediating ideological constructs of human relationships constitute what Guy Debord early on called ‘The society of the spectacle.’ Since then, the world has conglomerated like a swarm of bees around panoptical centers of domestication: television, Hollywood, the cult of celebrity. This is without even taking into consideration surveillance and control. Images massively lead individuals to see themselves as individual subjects, that is, as indivisible beings, unique and monolithic, thus ignoring their flexibility, plurality and mulitiplicity. This final trilogy is the stuff of which the innate peculiarity of the self is made.
7
Monads, according to the philosophic system of Leibniz, are indivisible substances of different natures that compose the universe. The neutrino, according to the physical sciences that speculate about black holes and parallel universes, is an electrically neutral particle of unappreciable mass. Human beings are part of the universe and we are all different from one another. Personality is not reproduced; it constantly grows within us. This occurs because we are divisible, multiple and flexible beings—the child who was is not the old person he or she will soon be. The obstinate personality also varies. It is unique and poly-dimensional. Every dimension of being is divisible by everything that constitutes it: mind, body, experience, memory, etc. To lean toward neutrality is also negating a part of the being. We irradiate positive and negative vibrations. We can also be magnetic and arbitrary.
Our bodily mass is visible, palpable, and enjoyable. It can be appreciated. The body is real. Neither the neutrino nor monads can accurately describe the human being completely. The multiplicity, which overwhelms or fulfills us, describes on a human scale, the multiplicity of the universe, the multitude of multiple universes. Truly, every-thing inhabits everything, although not without contradictions. Multiple universes are a reality. It is like going to a party and meeting multiple people, parallel to themselves.
Probably, from the collision of these two universes other universes were born, grew, developed themselves, matured, grew old and died over time. At some point in this riddle we find ourselves, just like the microscopic organisms we host inside our bodies. The expansion of the universe represents its growth and ageing. And it will have the right age at the moment of its dying or concentration of its multiple entirety into the empty hole. We can’t do anything about this because there is no machine that can take us from this universe to another, although, of course, it is possible that death is nothing more than a voyage to other coordinates where the stampede of energy that keeps us alive is still flowing.
Retaking life’s path in order to correct it is what Indo-American sages believe is necessary. Maybe that would mean returning to a pre-neolithic stage, knowing what we already know. Is that a dilemma? There is no drama in being born, developing, maturing, growing old or maybe dying. The important thing is that in the meanwhile we can live in a state of permanent celebration. Life organized as a carnivalesque and prolonged act of being is an intelligent way of alleviating the pain. Celebrating our time on this rotating orb stimulates our community feeling. We all have to live with everyone and around everyone. We have no other choice. The state of permanent festivity leads to the joy of being and has a liberating movement. For this reason, the revelling impulse dehierarchizes and makes us happy.
And in moments of tranquillity, silence and leisure, it is good to appreciate the infinite expansion of the night and our growth in between the maturity of everything that inhabits the planet: the astral dome that gives us cover and lets us live.
8
Human beings can be beautiful creatures. But for this to happen we need to shift our perception of reality from the utilitarian to one of appreciation. In other words, we need to replace the instrumental with the aesthetic. The dominant ideological paradigm creating the present gives free rein to technological reason, but it displaces creation. Heidegger calls this latter mental agitation “poiesis.” But to replace the drive to dominate, expand and colonize — in order to radically dismantle economies based on competition and comparison — it is absolutely necessary to change the lenses through which we see reality. This is to say, refashion your perspective to appreciate day, night, the seasons, waves, the potency of rivers, the birds’ songs, the movement of animals, the woods, bees, women, men and all of the constellations of peculiarities that form other constellations of peculiarities and that spring savagely like orchids in the forest.
The State exists because it territorializes itself. It builds itself through colonizing territorial expansion. This expansion comes about through the forced deterritorialization of the original inhabitants from the lands that the state has appropriated. This appropriation implies the mobilization of military force that the state can use to expand or maintain its territory. This has meant wars and genocide. But the state also has its experts to write history; they turn the facts around so as to justify their atrocities and obligate following generations to repeat the meaningless official litanies written by the experts.
Education, then, is nothing more than the institutionalization of disciplines of training and domestication, a training ground where children and adolescents are taught to perpetuate the dominant system. There they learn to give way to the dominant order and they begin the process of reification. On these parade grounds or schools of social indoctrination, the ideology that legitimates the system is reproduced. New members of society internalize a false consciousness, which inflates in them like a lung until everyone repeats with more or less success the same discourse. Its idea is that everyone says, dreams, and thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds. And if it has its faults, it doesn’t matter because they can be fixed. Thinking anything different is to be part of the anarchistic ranks, to go crazy or to call to insurrection. According to Adorno, standardization obliges the subject to choose between mercantilization (commercializering. svh) or schizophrenia. There is no exit from this binary mold. In this society, preferring the garden to cement is seen with distrust. And depending on the political wind of the moment, this preference can cost one’s life. When the system breaks and sheep escape from the flock, prisons grow with criminal efficiency, as well as coups d’état, raids, tear gas, repressive measures, war, etc. While all of this is occurring, the state rein forces its propaganda through radio, television and newspapers. And so the state materializes itself in the minds of individuals.
Nation states assemble their repressive police and military to protect the transnationals and expand a lifestyle of standardization based on the reduction of humans into economic units of production and consumption. With this, a new kind of territorialization and labor slavery is produced. The technology and the goods that the global minority, dominant class uses are manufactured in sweatshops that operate with the logic of exploitation. Schools and factories are centers of control imposed by the state. In order to abolish the state, it is necessary to abolish factories and schools. The authoritarianism that the civilized order reproduces in these institutions is responsible for ethnic cleansing, political genocide, and social exploitation. In order to construct a work without hierarchies, jails, propaganda, or coups, it is necessary to sweep, away the state. And it depends on us to wipe it off the face of the earth.
10
Any attempt to standardize life is a form of domination that imposes an alienating model over people. European colonization and American transnationalization impose standardizing patterns over the differences and peculiarities of the planet and its people. Every standardizing pattern is a by-product of state and business planning, which operate in temporal-linear terms: the progression toward macro-standardizing goals that take away all liberties. Colonization fostered by the so-called civilized world negates the peculiarity of nature — people, animals, vegetation, soil, etc. — and destroys the liberty of life. To defend oneself against these perpetrations is a vital kind of will that requires thinking—with imagination and audacity—of a different world. For this reason, in the absence of educational centers it is absolutely necessary to embrace personalized education, each person teaching the other, everyone at the same time. If half of the world transfers its knowledge to the other half, there is no need for authoritarian campuses of standardization.
Next time more about the world to come for the Joanna's M. of Eastern and Western Europe.
Institutional education reproduces in each generation the false idea that this is the best of all possible worlds, or, at least, the one that functions the best, without placing too much importance on its shortcomings. Thus, the process of normalization of knowledge through written texts—to the detriment of orality—is nothing more than the process of standardization of a certain perception of the world. In this sense, education has an ideological function: to reproduce a standardizing discourse regulated by the state. It legitimates itself through the fabricated intersection between power and knowledge, that is to say, between state control and the professional fields of experts.
For this reason, the appropriation of one does not exist without the appropriation of the other. Only when groups of humans live organically in communities and cultivate their own food toward I lie end of enjoying the liberating pleasure of a permanent carnival state and prolonged aesthetic appreciation will formal education, as well as the exploitation of 90% of the human population and the destruction of the planet, no longer fit within the perception of reality.
The guarantor of destructive repression is the state, and it is up to us to dismantle it.
11
The notion of race is linked to colonial practices. The Western World is constructed on a base of the distinction between a ‘we’ and a ‘they.’ Or rather, between what constitutes one’s own ethnicity — as if by magic, ethnicity becomes a racially neutral standardizing pattern — and ‘the others’: that which is associated with barbarians, or the Ethnic, in modern terminology.
Ethnocentrism manifested itself in slave logic, imposing Eurocentric, supremacist categories. The Machiavellian concept of racial superiority perpetuated itself through the equating of Caucasian-European and civilized. Thus, the notion of race justified — and justifies — colonization, which is nothing more than ethnocentric dominion over nature and other ethnicities. The colonial expansion of the West classified and categorized the colonized: groups of people, animals, plants, soil, etc., through their technically self-justifying taxonomies. In this way the West marched along imposing the scientific instrumental rationality that justifies colonial practices and universal models.
Mercantile capitalism unfurled the maps and printed the dictionaries, accelerating its steamroller march. This ethnic expansion was the expansion of the colonizing ego legitimating itself in diverse historical narratives under the banner of civilization. In the name of civilization the notion of race has been constructed. This notion is the direct consequence of the instrumental mechanism of technological thinking that categorizes human experience and standardizes reality.
• Total number: In the Amsterdam-Amstelland region, there are approximately 13,904 to 15,731 people who are homeless, without a home, or at risk of becoming homeless. In the municipality of Amsterdam itself, the estimated number is 11,065 (including 9,619 adults and 1,446 children).
Joanna, do you still want to join the Western world without knowing or feeling what this neoliberal system really implies for you? I tried to warn you, but my experience did not count for you. You only wanted to know if I and my friends could help you to climb the career ladder as quick as possible. More later.
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