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LAVA: From Global Insurrection to COVID-19

@e_flux wrote:

by Mitra Azar & Hugo Sir

Introduction

LAVA – Letters from the Volcano is an experimental zine conceived by Franco “Bifo” Berardi and developed by Mitra Azar, Hugo Sir, and a small group of agitators from the four corners of the world. LAVA emerged from a desire to understand the recent wave of social movements starting in autumn of 2019. These movements involved a number of people from countries with very different sociopolitical and cultural conditions who nevertheless displayed certain common dispositions: the desire to break free from the psychic and economic impoverishment engrained into surveillance-oriented computational neoliberalism, and strategies developed both offline and online towards the achievement of this goal.

LAVA believes that the inevitable is always superseded by the unpredictable.

Issue #1 of LAVA – Letters from the Volcano, entitled “Be Water,” can be read here.

Until the beginning of 2020 it seemed that the volcanic explosion in the form of the unpredictable and simultaneous appearance of radical and direct forms of resistance was taking over the global political scene. Then, all of a sudden, this human-unpredictable was replaced by a nonhuman-unpredictable: the virus COVID-19. The human lava was swept away by a nonhuman lava, and the explosion of the volcano turned inward, imploding.

The virus COVID-19 has taken over the stage of human unrest and has opened the door for a meltdown of the global capitalist economy. At the same time, the COVID-19 pandemic opens space for rethinking politics from scratch: on the one hand, it allows a profound questioning of the structural dysfunction of global capitalism; on the other, it risks turning the cadaver of capitalism into a zombified techno-fascist limbo of total surveillance, ultimately killing civil society. This political conundrum will be the center of issue #2 of LAVA – Letters from the Volcano, entitled “Be Earth.” The forthcoming issue will deal with nonhuman agents such as COVID-19, melting ice, pollution, and the nonhuman forces that more and more turn into political vectors in ways that, paradoxically, go beyond politics.

Why LAVA? Why Now: A Conversation between Franco “Bifo” Berardi and Mitra Azar

December 31, 2019

Bifo: …you pose a horizon that was necessary to have—the idea of doing four issues, based on the four elements, Water, Fire, Air, Earth. It was necessary conceptually, aesthetically and for production as well.

Mitra: And this is still within the stratigraphic approach, the idea of cutting transversally the schizo-creativity of the movements emerging from this last fall.

Bifo: If we want to find the solution to every problem, we get lost. So, at a certain point, I said, no, we just need to find the solution to one problem, and that problem is how can we get to our target…

Mitra: Friends.

Bifo: …with a message, an aesthetic, a political message. Full stop. Then I say also, but who is the target, what kind of people are we talking to? And that is a crucial problem. It is a social and political problem. Now, for instance, can we say that those people who live in Hong Kong, the Hong Kong students, are they the same, are they similar to the students of Santiago de Chile? Yes and no. This is why we are doing LAVA, because we know that it’s very different what’s happening now, the movements that are exploding in the world at this moment. Very divergent, on many points. But we are looking for the common ground of the different expressions of these movements. The students of Hong Kong are fighting for democracy. Yes, democracy, what does it mean? Everything and nothing. And in Santiago, they are fighting for writing a constitution from below. What does it mean? Everything and nothing at the same time. But what is the common ground of those people who fight in Hong Kong and the people who fight in Santiago? My answer is, the common ground is that they are suffering from the effects of 40 years of neoliberal dictatorship. So the common ground of diverse, different movements—Lebanon, Iraq, Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, Hong Kong, Paris, Barcelona—the common ground of those very different movements is that all those young precarious collective workers suffer from the privatization of the school system, suffer from the precarisation of work. Their common enemy is the neoliberal dictatorship. That is my point. And we should be able to respect the total difference and divergence of the movements which are exploding like a volcano, and to focus on the common ground.

Mitra: Yes. And the common ground, indeed, can express itself in a, let’s say, dissenting way, which is: who is the enemy, what are we fighting against? At the same time, there is another way of looking at what is the common ground, an assertive way, reflected by the active forms or strategies put in place by these different flows of lava, by the common tools that these people protesting all over the world are using, the fact that they are writing letters to each other to bridge struggles that are very different, and yet they are fought with the same weapons. And the weapons are shared online and are navigating and moving, like digital instruments that are free, diffused, distributed without top-down authority or leadership. There is a commonality in the enemy, in the struggles against something. There is a commonality in the forms that we are trying to find, and LAVA should help us find these emerging common shapes. And that’s a challenge. That’s what we’re trying to do in some way. Yes, the common enemy is very important because we get rid of this misunderstanding about what is democracy. You’ve been teaching for more than ten years that democracy is an empty word, it doesn’t mean anything. We know that it is not simply democracy that’s moving people. There is something—

Bifo: Sometimes the word “democracy” means many things that go beyond the mere political methodology. If I think what democracy is in Europe, for instance, it’s an empty word. The word “democracy” has lost its meaning in Greece in 2015. So, fighting for democracy in Europe means nothing. Salvini is democracy in Italy. The majority of people are voting for him. Is this democracy or what? So, if we speak of the methodology, the political methodology that democracy is in Europe, that’s that, that’s nothing. The point is the social content of inequality, of privatization, of precarization.

Mitra: To me the question of commonality when it comes to the age factor, which I think it’s interesting, is the demographic factor. That’s a factor that is also very transversal and might be one of the… I mean this is the ground maybe we’re looking for to explain what is happening. Demography. And to me, demography means, politically, that there is a rupture between generations, which contributes to this recent outburst. And we’ve symptoms of this, like we have Greta Thunberg now, who is representing the incapability of generations to talk to each other, the incapability of the adults to take care of their kids in terms of giving them a livable planet, for example. So, inter-generation. You’ve been also writing and thinking about that in a very radical way. You write a novel about killing the elder. Why is there a gap between the old and the young? Is it a problem of neuroplasticity? Adults don’t understand their kids, and vice versa, because the brains of youngsters work in a completely different way from the way that the brains of elders work. Because the effect of computational technology on the young brain is completely different and way more accelerated, increasing the trans-individual gap between generations at a speed unseen before. So, we can explain a lot of these movements as the desperate attempt to create, in a disruptive and constructive way simultaneously, a common ground that is lacking because of the neurodiversity produced by technologies and harnessed by them. What do you think about that?

Bifo: Neurodiversity, interesting…

Mitra: And generations.

Bifo: Look at the map of the social situation. The explosion, the convulsive explosion of autumn 2019, from La Paz, to Chile, to Hong Kong, to Barcelona, to Lebanon, to Iraq, to Tehran, and more, consists in very young people with no memory of the past and with no responsibility for the disaster that has been produced by forty years of neoliberal dictatorship. But, demographically speaking, what we see is also that Europe, the Northern hemisphere, is growing older. And, simultaneously, Africa, India, the Islamic world are demographically booming. In Africa, we will have 1.5 billion people in 2050. So, how can we imagine the future if we do not accept the idea, if we do not become friendly with the idea that the white race is over. Demographically speaking, this is unavoidable. The Great Replacement theory that the right wing, the ethno-nationalists of the world are talking about is a process that is going on. It’s not a conspiracy, it’s not the fact of a political will, it’s not George Soros who is pushing for the Great Replacement. It’s the evolution of humankind in the next fifty years. This is why migration is a natural process that cannot be ruled, organized, stopped. It is stronger than the political will. Politics is unable to deal with this kind of anthropological evolution process. So, this hysteria of the white race which is manifested by fascism, by Trumpism, by the dementia of people like Boris Johnson—the majority of northern white people are expressing an impotent reaction to the evolution process. White supremacy is a cry of impotent people who are trying to deal with their depression in a fully impotent way. They will lose in the long run, but meanwhile, they are doing much harm, much evil too. The problem is to become other, to accept this process, a process which is not only unavoidable but full of possibilities. Growing old, dying, declining, this is a process that you can live in a very happy way. If you are able to deal with exhaustion, the paranoia of growth, the idea that we must expand geographically, economically, energetically, turns out to be sick. It’s impossible, dangerous, sick. And the pleasure of living is the pleasure of accepting death, of growing dead in yourself, of confronting that with irony, and friendship.

Mitra: And that’s what these new movements are trying to do. They’re trying to do it in a way—let’s talk about that. You’re reluctant to say it and I want instead to push you on that. It’s a suicidal form of resistance and yet—you say it very poetically—it’s better a dreadful end than a dread without end. And yet this dreadful end is the reactivation of the schizo-flux of becoming as a form of resistance against neurosis. The circuits we’re talking about, the demographic circuit and the paranoid circuit, are neurotic circuits which are stiffened to the point that protesters occupying streets for months, they are incapable of sweeping up or smoothing them. And yet, there is an opportunity there because the very fact of occupying the streets for so long is fueling the schizotic process towards an orientation that we are trying, indeed, to figure, to prefigure, to understand. And yet this process is completely unpredictable. I mean, a schizo-process that is trying to dig into the loophole of neurosis, which is a loop without time, out of time, and that’s why we can stay months in the streets and nothing happens, nothing changes, because the neurosis frees itself from the circuit of time, and becomes this snake that eats its own tail. I guess the process of becoming together and being in the street together is a process that, because of such stiffness, becomes simultaneously a process of care, of empathy, and a process of militarization. So becoming together in the streets requires a level of organization which is typical of a military structure, although a military structure without leaders, without hierarchies, but organized roles based on providing basic needs for a form of civil street survival in what have become war-like zones. And thus we see these incredible forms of self-organization and structures without leadership which create, eventually, malleable forms that are continually changing and that are shared across the internet between movements resisting the same blind and neurotic violence. And, on the other side, you have joy. People within this militarization of being together are rediscovering the fun, the beauty, the joy, the pleasure, the eroticism of sharing the same public space and of resisting something that we couldn’t even name for a long time. And what we’re trying to do is also naming what it is that we are fighting against. We didn’t have the right words to talk about that. The words of politics weren’t enough. And now the words of fire—now is the rule of fire, and we are entering into this phase where it is not anymore about how long you stay in the street, it’s not anymore about organizing with the unions. Look at France: two years ago or so they managed to have Macron increasing salaries by basically destroying the Champs-Élysées. Now they have been in the streets for four months, with demonstrations organized by unions. And the demonstrations have been, at least at the beginning, quite peaceful. There have been no crazy outbursts of violence recently, until December 2019. Nothing is fucking changing. Nothing. Three years ago, after one month of destruction, salaries got slightly bumped up. So you see what’s happening? And that’s the lava we’re trying to work with. What are we going to do in this scenario, the scenario of fire? How are we going to bring water into the fire? How are we going to bring the earth, ground? How are we going to solidify? How are we going to breathe into the fire, into teargas? How are we going to not get drowned in the sea, as immigrants have been in the Mediterranean for far too long, or in the fucking water coming from the military cannons shooting at people in Chile and in Beirut—when they’re not shooting real bullets, killing or blinding people? Let’s talk for a second about the issues of LAVA we want to release and the idea behind the four elements…

Bifo: The water means that identity has to be forgotten. Identity is dissolving. Identity is becoming-others in a liquid way. Lebanon, the end of “identitarian” politics, and Hong Kong, the refusal of the national identity of China. Then comes fire. Fire was everywhere in 2019. Fire was in Northern and Southern of California, the forests were burning. And the Amazon, Brazil, burning. And Siberia, burning. And Australia, burning. Fire is the effect of the late-capitalist acceleration of everything. But fire is also a way to dissolve the solidity of stones, to dissolve the consistency of power. The statue of Macron dissolved by fire. The statue, the simulacrum, the automaton of power. Air is the problem. Think New Delhi in November, day and days of impossible air in the city. You could not go out in the streets of New Delhi because the air was so thick with pollution, with invisible particles, with evil suffocation. I can’t breathe! So the movement is a sort of convulsion of a suffocating body, and this convulsion gives you the possibility of breathing again. Then earth, ground, the territory, the body, the process of subjectivation—the earth is these. How can we, at last, find a new, pleasurable relation with the present? No answers at the moment, but the movement, the convulsive movement is trying to find a new body for itself, a new earth.

March 1, 2020

Mitra: …what are we doing now, everything seems so different since when we started LAVA, to the point that you’re even claiming that it doesn’t make any sense to publish the first issue of the zine…

Bifo: Let’s recapitulate what has happened in the last three months, and what’s happening with LAVA now. At the beginning of December I get a fit of inspiration. It seems to me that the collective body has reached a boiling point, pre-explosion, or perhaps more properly, a convulsion phase.

I contact you to do a project about that with a number of other people.

The project goes on, we feel the urgency to come out with it soon but inevitably the project takes more time than expected. Then at some point, it seemed to me that the color of the sky had completely changed and that the eruption had petrified. All of a sudden I felt we were doing something meaningless, no longer related to the new emotional wave that was arising starting in the middle/end of January 2020. Within three months the convulsion was over and it was leaving room for the counter-wave that we should now try to understand. How can we talk about Santiago and Hong Kong in revolt, while in Santiago and Hong Kong the fires have gone out and the epidemic of resignation that is bringing the history of the modern economy to an end commences?

All the things we were talking about in December seemed in February a hundred years old to me, and the panorama that was unfolding from Wuhan to Milan and Bologna was much more original and much more definitive than that of the global revolt.

Society is shutting down. Does it seem minor to you? Do you think we can stand here messing around with riots that have already tapered off when something a hundred times bigger, unpredictable, and definitive is happening?

But let’s go back to the beginning of the year 2020.

Trump kills Soleimani. Millions of desperate Iranians take to the streets, cry, promise an act of amazing revenge. Nothing happens, they bomb a courtyard. Following the bombing, some Americans have PSTD. Tehran, panicking, takes down a civilian plane.

Trump wins everything, his popularity rises, while the Democrats begin their primary in a state of such division that only a miracle could lead to the nomination and then the victory of the good old Sanders.

And then, here’s the surprise, the reversal, the unexpected that makes any speech about the inevitable vain. The exact opposite of rebellion, the opposite of the explosion. The implosion. The overexcited organism of mankind, after decades of acceleration, and after a few months of screams and convulsions without prospects, is finally hit by the collapse.

An epidemic disease breaks out, a disease that hurts mainly very old people (and not all, but only some of them), while for a few thousands of young people, it’s just an annoying flu. However, this virus manages to block, piece by piece, the global machine of excitement, frenzy, and growth.

It is now inevitable: capitalism is entering an irremediable phase of stagnation.

A revolution without subjectivity, purely implosive?

Not really a revolution because this is a revolt of passivity, of resignation.

Resign. All of a sudden this looks like an ultra-subversive slogan. Enough with unnecessary agitation that tries to improve something and instead only produces deterioration in the quality of life. Literally: there is nothing more to do. So let’s not do it.

At this point, anything can happen, but it makes no sense to preach the explosion.

If there was an explosion from a volcano, it has been extinguished.

If there was lava, it dried out. It became stone, sand, dust, I don’t know.

The antennas receive different signals now: resignation, reduction of energy, there is no more traffic, students have disappeared from Bologna, travel agencies delete entire regions from the map, schools are closed, cinemas are closed, fine particles in the air are reduced to a minimum. Silence.

What if this was the way out that we couldn’t find, and now it comes in the form of an epidemic? What causes panic is that the virus escapes our knowledge: medicine does not know it, nor does the immune system know it. And the unknown suddenly stops the engine of abstract automaton. A virus and its semiotic counterpart block the abstract functioning of the economy, because it takes away its bodies, because the bodies slow down their movements, swimming passively, according to the “dead man’s float” technique.

Nothingness swallows one thing after another. How long is the effect of this pandemic destined to last? The effect of the virus is not so much in the people that it weaken or kills, but in the relational paralysis that it spreads.

The world economy ended its expansive parable long ago, but we could not accept the idea of ​​stagnation as a new long-term regime. Now the virus is helping us to transition towards immobility.

Mitra: I totally understand what you’re saying and yet I slightly disagree—I think forcing ourselves to live inside the furious and hyper-accelerated present this garbage society is forcing us to live (or die) in is a mistake. Certainly, LAVA needs to be reframed to understand the changed scenario, but the original mistake was to believe we could do something in the present, rushing after the dopamine hit, because this approach, inevitably, was only waiting for its afterglow, its post-orgasmic low. I don’t think is possible to do anything “actual,” anything present, because the present doesn’t exist anymore, because, in a time of computational production and surveillance, the present simply moves too fast for human emotional and cognitive capacity. The shrinking of the present into an instant, as understood by phenomenology, now becomes the state of the sociopolitical, the nonhuman scale of the speed at with political events unfold in a time of ecological, social, economic, and political collapse. If this is true, in some sense running after the present, or the instant—which, as such, is overcharged affectively and in turn produces allure and addiction—can only produce frustration and unhappiness. This is what has happened in relation to LAVA—we tried to be in the moment, and the constitutional impossibility of succeeding in doing that left space for doubt and frustration. Of course, the past and the future do not exist anymore either. And yet, the destruction of past, present, and future is exactly the reason why LAVA still makes sense. It makes sense because you’re right. Because the only thing to do is doing things aprés-coup, postmortem, after the glow, from a state of limbo: not to galvanize crowds and hope in the global insurrection, the way our naive enthusiasm was telling us only a couple of months ago, but to slowly plant the seeds for another unpredictable to come, to care and preserve some of the energy that came from the outburst, when the outburst is gone, dissolved, silenced, in Santiago as much as in Hong Kong or elsewhere. Because the unpredictable opens to a new temporality, and although the unpredictable is the event that we can’t predict, I want to believe that there is a way to prepare the ground for it, or better, there is a way to prepare ourselves for its arrival. This preparation is LAVA too. And this is care at its best, I think, cause it’s care without aim, it’s care for itself, it’s care for caring, and, as such, it’s the desire for desire. Doing something postmortem, resisting the dopamine rush, not getting fooled by it—breath slow, remember, build an alternative version of the story. This makes me feel good cause it goes beyond performative stress, cause it doesn’t make any sense to do it, cause there is no right or wrong time for doing it, and now it’s too late. Yes, it is too late, although it has always been too late, and that’s exactly why we need to do it, to do LAVA.

My proposal is the following: let’s reframe the furious madness we were taken by while working on LAVA a few months ago, let’s release LAVA #1, “Be Water,” spamming it everywhere, torrent, webpages, as a virus. At the same time, let’s work on a second issue—“Be Earth.” It will be about this new phase you’re talking about, the zombified phase of capitalism and the movement, the virus as a means for the system to shore up computational surveillance on a global scale, while at the same time turning into the strongest and strangest and most unimaginable form of imploded a-signifying nonhuman variation of resistance to global capitalism, freezing everything, putting everything on pause, clotting the arteries of the economy, the movement of goods and people, killing mainly the elders but not the youngsters, scaring white bodies and giving them a taste of what’s already happening on a daily basis in some nonwhite parts of the world, prefiguring the new normal that will emerge when viruses and bacteria in the Arctic unfreeze and circulate on a global scale. Isn’t, in a strange way, the COVID-19 virus a form of LAVA too? And as such, isn’t it ambivalent, Janus-faced? A new unpredictable will emerge, again and again, because this is the magic of the biosphere, and it’s beyond politics. Let’s make the second issue of LAVA, “Be Earth,” an abstract issue, about COVID-19, about fires burning, about pollution. A nonhuman issue that can best grasp this new state of things you’re talking about. Are you in?

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