[NextGenderation]
collective translation of a leaflet circulated in the occupied Athens
School of Economics and elsewhere, written by the “girls in revolt”.
There is also a french translation here
http://katalipsiasoee.blogspot.com/2008/12/blog-post_2310.html
Friday, December 19, 2008
(Self) destruction is creation
We won’t forget the night of December 6th that easily. Not because the
assassination of Alexis was incomprehensible. State violence, as much as it
might try to construct itself into more productive formations of
sovereignty, will endlessly return to dear and archetypal forms of
violence. It will always retain within its structure a state disobeying the
modernist command for discipline, surveillance and control of the body -
opting, rather, for the extermination of the disobedient body and chosing
to pay the political cost coming with this decision.
When the cop shouts “hey, you”, the subject to which this command is
directed and which turns its body in the direction of authority (in the
direction of the call of the cop) is innocent by default since it responds
to the voice reproaching it as a product of authority. The moment when the
subject disobeys this call and defies it, no matter how low-key this moment
of disobedience might be (even if it didn’t throw a molotov to the cop
car but a water bottle) is a moment when authority loses its meaning and
becomes something else: a breach that must be repaired. When the manly
honour of the fascist-cop is insulted he may even kill in order to protect
(as he himself will claim) his kids and his family. Moral order and male
sovereignty - or else the most typical form of symbolic and material
violence - made possible the assassination of Alexis; they proped the
murder, produced its “truth” and made it a reality.
Along with this, at the tragic limit of a death that gives meaning to lives
shaped by its shade, revolt became a reality: this incomprehensible,
unpredictable convulsion of social rhythms, of the broken time/space, of
the structures structured no more, of the border between what is and what
is to come.
A moment of joy and play, of fear, passion and rage, of confusion and some
consciousness that is grievous, dynamic and full of promises. A moment
which, regardless, will either frighten itself and preserve the automations
that created it or will deny itself constantly in order to become at each
moment something different to what it was before: all in order to avoid
ending up at the causalıty of revolts suffocated ın normalıty, revolts
becoming another form of authority whilst defending themselves.
How did this revolt become possible? What right of the insurgents was
vindicated, at what moment, for what murdered body? How was this symbol
socialised? Alexis was “our Alexis”, he was no “other”, no
foreigner, no migrant. High school students could identify with him;
mothers feared losing their own child; establishment voices would turn him
into a national hero. The body of the 15-year old mattered, his life was
worth living, its ending was an assault against the public sphere - and for
this reason mourning Alex was possible and nearly necessary. This sphere
turned against a community us who revolted don’t identify with, exactly
like Alexis did not identify. This is a community, regardless, in which
many of us many have the priviledge to belong since the others recognise us
as their own. The story of Alexis will be writen from its end. He was a
good kid, they said. The revolt, which we would have been unable to
predict, became possible through the cracks of authority itself: an
authority deciding what bodies matter in the social network of relations of
power. The revolt, this hymn to social non-regularity, is a product of
regularity… It is the revolt for “our own” body that was
exterminated, for our own social body. The bullet was shot against the
society as a whole. It was a wound on every bourgeiois democrat who wants
their own security to be reflected upon the state and its organs. The
bullet was a declaration of war against society. The social contract was
breached - there is no consensus. The moral and political act of resistance
became possible, understandable, just, visible at the moment when it came
under the terms and conditions of justice of the dominant symbolic order
encompassing the social fabric.
This starting point does not cancel the righteousness of the uprising.
Because the dominant Speech, the authority that gives name, shape and
meaning to things, the range of dominant ideas from which the concept of
social segmentation derives so as to control the hierarchical social
relations have all already excluded the “hooded youths” from this
community. They have cornered them at the community’s dangerous
borderline in order to set the limits of disobedience.
They tell us to resist but not in this fashion, they say, because it is
dangerous. What the social legitimation we came across at the beginning of
all this has got to tell us is that even if we are tangled in the web of
authority, even if we are its creations, we are inside and against it; we
are what we do in order to change who we are. We want this historical
moment to adopt the content we have set ourselves and not the meanings from
which it can escape overnight.
It is not possible for this authority to bloodlessly cross the boundary
between obedience and autonomous action, since if the rebels need to muster
up their masculinity in order to fight the cop, they need to question it at
the same time because it constitutes the authority they use to fight the
cop. And this ambivalence lies at the heart of our subjectivity, it is a
contradiction that tears us apart and forms the moral splendour that takes
place in the margins of the rebellion, outside and inside us, on the quiet
nights when we wonder what is going on now, what has gone wrong, and we can
only hear silence.
Nothing exists without the meaning assigned to it. Resistance strategies
can turn into strategies of authority: Chaos will recreate a hierarchy in
social relationships unless we fight with ourselves while fighting the
world, some selves that we formed as part of this world: we have grown
within the moral and political limits this world sets, within the
moral-political ties in which the self comes into being… It will recreate
itself into a hierarchy, should we not bring off male macho behaviour that
goes berzerk and gets carried away by emotion, should we adopt positions
that densify in positions of authority.
girls in revolt
