“What is constituent power from the perspective of juridical theory? It is the source of production of constitutional norms — that is, the power to make a constitution and therefore to dictate the fundamental norms that organize the powers of the State. In other words, it is the power to establish a new juridical arrangement, to regulate juridical relationships within a new community.”[5]

“We live in an era of generalized fragmentation characterized by the disintegration of mass political subjects and the absence of both a reformist and revolutionary imagination—the “system,” as Lyotard called it, reproduces itself with increasing difficulty. Disorientation is the order of the day. Neither Blanqui’s conspiracies, Lenin’s and Trotsky’s war communism nor, for that matter, Baader-Meinhof’s provocative aesthetic terrorist attacks exist anymore. Even the democratization of the state by Togliatti and all the other Western European social democrats has also disappeared and is difficult to reactivate. The political has collapsed, and various nihilistic phenomena are dancing on its grave.”[7]

In response to the global labor movement, the economy worked overtime to make the constitution of the proletariat as apocalypse impossible. Thus we find the real reason why our experience of work is completely fragmented: it's clear that the powderkeg of the factories were simply too much of a threat. Work becomes less consistent, more precarious and “flexible.” Transitioning from a disciplinary mode—in which the worker is contained by the worksite, forced to keep posture—to a control mode, where the worker is granted an illusory nomadism, as long as their motion through the economy can be modulated by indirect means embedded in the very world itself.[8] Apps like Uber demonstrate the new ideal for how work is organized. No longer does one have to be chained to an assembly line and be shouted down by a boss. Each worker becomes a self-managing cell, modulated by software. A worker gets to pick their own hours and enjoys the misguided idea that they are some kind of up-and-coming business owner. This breakdown of the proletariat is intimately tied up to battles we see in the streets. People throw down, but not as workers. The hooded swarms that flip and burn police cruisers, beat the shit out of riot cops, and maintain their right to secrecy are certainly not the proletariat in the classical sense but something else entirely. A becoming that wears the mask of the worker, the mother, the hoodrat, the student. A whatever. [9] 



Revolutionaries are slowly coming to terms, not only with the death of the proletariat, but with the constituent mode of struggle itself. The constituent element lingers in not just the student movement but ruptures at large. Countless radical intellectuals seem to rail against this, clinging to their pet categories of domination. It is insisted that the proletariat isn’t dead, feminism still lives, black liberation is in a renaissance, and other indecencies. When it is asserted that these frames have the force they once did in the past, what is really being said is that they hold the same degree of revolutionary potential. We cannot help but look around us and see that this idea fails to resonate. The question worth clarifying is this: how can we let go?

Our problem is less a matter of confronting a constituent habit of thought directly, but opening ourselves to a kind of grief. I’d like to look to approach this by looking at how past movements have ended up and what they mean to us today. Let’s take for instance, the fight for queer liberation in the 1960s.

For those fighting for queer lib then, it was generally understood that what was lacking was a group consciousness. Some understanding of a shared condition of domination. For the broader radical movement during this time, patriarchy was largely considered secondary to the big tent issue of class. Queerness, lacking a language acceptable or comprehensible to straight radicals, seemed another poison of the ruling class. It was urgent then to link together the bashings, rape, arrests, despair, and exile as a legible experience so it too could be politicized. Audre Lorde in her memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name captures the sentiment of straight radicals:

“But my feelings of connection with most of the people I met in progressive circles were as tenuous as those I had with my co-workers at the Health Center. I could imagine these comrades, Black and white, among whom color and racial differences could be openly examined and talked about, nonetheless one day asking me accusingly, ‘Are you or have you ever been a member of a homosexual relationship?’ For them, being gay was ‘bourgeois and reactionary,’ a reason for suspicion and shunning. Besides, it made you ‘more susceptible to the FBI.’” [10]

“I have been to jail. I have been raped. And beaten. Many times! By men, heterosexual men that do not belong in the homosexual shelter. But, do you do anything for me? No. You tell me to go and hide my tail between my legs. I will not put up with this shit. I have been beaten. I have had my nose broken. I have been thrown in jail. I have lost my job. I have lost my apartment for gay liberation and you all treat me this way? What the fuck's wrong with you all? Think about that! I do not believe in a revolution, but you all do. I believe in the gay power…The people are trying to do something for all of us, and not men and women that belong to a white middle class club. And that’s what you all belong to!”[11]

MOTION SICKNESS 

One of the most relevant forms the constituent element takes in our smoldering terrain is in a social movement apparatus. By social movement apparatus, I mean the mechanism that arranges an otherwise rightfully unreasonable crowd into a representative political body, one with singular purpose and a set of actionable demands that can be met by the adversary. The creation of social movements is now just the engine of statecraft. A more labor-intensive way of filing a complaint to the butchers, in the off chance it might be addressed. It is a great tragedy that it has become such a dominant lens to understand today’s ruptures. Riots, occupations,“terrorism”, sabotage, the commune are all liquidated into its body. Such that each of these distinct blows become steps in the march towards progress. When the party of order engages in operations such as its celebration of Stonewall as a riot, this is how they are capable of doing so. Unrest is reframed as a “pre-constituent” lack of discipline. Barbaric cries that precede the proper speech of man. The progressive forces appropriation of Dr. King’s famous line, “the riot is the language of the unheard,” is also telling. When those doing imperial politics interpret this, they understand it as a call to become better listeners. This in turn lures some rioters to meet this effort in the middle, by becoming better communicators. And so the social movement is able to chug along, through its mobilization of those who once knew the joy of the incomprehensible.

This surround of the social movement is a poison that seeps in, it is the craggy shore where we shipwreck. Despite this, the curious rise of what Mikkel Rasmussen observes as being called  “non-movements,” like the Yellow Vests in France, shows us that an outside is possible. In the case of the Yellow Vests, a minimal amount of visual coherency—the iconic neon vests common to some French workers–was contrasted by the chaotic content of the swarm’s militancy, giving a point of memetic entry with no program for revolt. These kinds of mutations are something we can expect more of in the future. It is of course important to develop ways of speaking of them, but what is more crucial is that we learn to embody their difference and instigate our own monstrosities, ones that push these ruptures even further beyond.

These evasions of the social movement happen not because they are the next step in some dialectic but because they are desirable. We cannot expect the champions of the social movement, its petty politicians and simple street generals, to know anything of desire, even less of seduction. They play the same notes over and over and we are sick of them; deep within us, new kinds of noises are being uncovered. The constituent tonality of the social movement is simply a turn off. It is responsible for the continued lack of place and particularity. In the mad rush to clear the husks which conceal the world, the last thing one wants is to route their appetite  through another screen. What is even remotely appealing in the social movement? In its set up between two abstracted political subjects, made to haggle like sock puppets sharing a performer? The students and the university system, the people and the government, and so on.

Attention should be paid to that which is singular in the social movement’s molar view. We could even come to see how the lives concealed in these abstractions move in the world, finding seditious exceptions within the groups we all belong to. On the campuses, the idea of a unified student body is laughable, no matter how much the administration speaks of that unity. By cutting past the student as dogmatic image, we see all kinds of ways of being and their difference. It is this we need to come into contact with. Forming kinship with those ways that strengthen us and distancing ourselves from those which weaken.

This isn’t of course the first time the social movement has struck. We saw it in the fiery summer of 2020. Back then, an abolitionist social movement leeched energy off the party of George Floyd. The party of George Floyd was that destructive non-class content to not talk to press, cops, or politicians, instead taking the demolition of the United States as an immediate and practical project. We saw the work of the social movement’s sorcery. If you weren’t down in the streets, you likely have the impression that people peacefully demonstrated for a reformist brand of police abolition. We see the emptiness of these visions for what they are. The reformist abolitionists spoke of Camden as the example Minneapolis could aspire to. Camden, New Jersey is the site of total urban oblivion, not uncommon in many parts of America. It was asserted that the city had allegedly “disbanded” their police force, but in reality policing was exported to the county and surveillance was expanded. Again the obsession with demands like “defund the police” create a political tunnel vision. We wish to deepen our militancy, spreading atoms of hatred all throughout our lives. We don’t know what this deepening means, and how we can go further. What exists outside of social movement apparatus? How can we decisively pick our fights in a way that isn’t formalized or representative?

FUCK THE POLIS