[D66] Alberto Toscano: Logistics And Opposition

[Antid Oto]

http://www.thenewsignificance.com/2011/08/11/alberto-toscano-logistics-and-opposition/

Alberto Toscano: Logistics And Opposition
August 11th, 2011
By Alberto Toscano

‘Sabotage the social machine’. ‘Incinerate the documents!’. In the first 
contribution to a group of articles on logistics, workplace surveillance 
and national security, Alberto Toscano examines the anti-urbanist 
presuppositions of insurrectionary anarchism, speculating on how the 
catastrophic destiny of certain technological innovations might instead 
be turned to different ends.

The Spontaneous Philosophy of Interruption

It is rare, in contemporary oppositional thought, to encounter the 
totalising temporal imaginary of revolution that so marked the visions 
and strategies of the modern left. When it hasn’t been victim to 
melancholy retreats from the teleology of emancipation, that 
encompassing horizon of social change and political action has come 
under attack, alongside the very idea of transition, for domesticating 
antagonism. Interstitial enclaves or temporary liberated zones, 
ornamented by discourses of withdrawal and difference, have widely 
replaced the reference to an advancing, unifying and largely homogeneous 
planetary movement of liberation. The space-time of much of today’s 
anti-capitalism is one of subtraction and interruption, not attack and 
expansion.

Needless to say, any negation of the status quo brings with it spatial 
separation and temporal disruption, but the contemporary ideology, or 
spontaneous philosophy, of interruption appears – perhaps as a testament 
to the claustrophobia of our present – to make something of a fetish out 
of rupture. This cuts across theory and activism, laying bare a shared 
structure of feeling between the political metaphysics of events or 
‘dissensus’ and the everyday tactics of struggles. Foregrounding 
interruption implies a particular understanding of the nature of 
contemporary capital, the capabilities of antagonism and the temporality 
(or lack thereof) of transformation.


The Coming Insurrection formulates, in a compellingly abrasive way, a 
widespread conviction that contemporary struggles against capital have 
shifted from the point of production to those of circulation, 
distribution, transport and consumption. In other words, that arresting 
the flow of this homogenised society is a conditio sine qua non for the 
irruption of non-capitalist forms-of-life:

The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable. Its flows 
amount to more than the transportation of people and commodities. 
Information and energy circulate via wire networks, fibers and channels, 
and these can be attacked. Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with 
any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of 
interrupting its networks. How can a TGV line or an electrical network 
be rendered useless? i

Behind this statement lies an anti-urbanism that regards contemporary 
spectacular exploitation and conformity as products of the capillary 
management of everyday life. Cities are stripped of any life not 
mobilised for the commodity and pre-empted from any behaviour at odds 
with a tautological drive for systemic reproduction:

The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this final collision 
between city and country. It is also a flow of being and things, a 
current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train 
lines, satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making sure that this 
world keeps running straight to its ruin. It is a current that would 
like to drag everything along in its hopeless mobility, to mobilize each 
and every one of us. ii


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