Notes for Eric #2

The scale of things, to come back to that word, is still troubling my thoughts. The inhuman scale of politics operates at the scale of population, community and beyond, but appears in the face of the individual, whether that individual be Trump, Johnson or Corbyn – or any number of other figures. Underneath that ‘face’ we find the ‘faceless masses’, a phenomenon not of minor or major forms but of the everyday life we lead in which we’re anonymous.

This was one of the things that was fascinating about the masks of the Anonymous movement or the Zapatistas. This displacement of the face brought to life the communities’ face, not as some kind of strange void or absent presence but precisely in the only form it could take, as a shared face. The mask forms a face for the faceless, and is deeply hated by liberal politics. It produces a community of faces, and brings with it all kinds of possible fascisms and archaic dominances – as the Anonymous ‘movement’ proved in many ways, drawing in a wide range of people who had to put a ‘face to the name’ of their oppression, too often in the form of the racialised other. Despite these possibilities, the mask also forms the community, it operates as that abstract machine that Deleuze and Guattari go on about, the crystal that co-ordinates a range of forces into an assemblage. The assemblage, the community, is never static of course, and can become something reactionary as well as revolutionary. The danger is always there, but the real question is whether the escape can take any other route? Can the revolution take any other form other than that of a mask? Does it not need to abolish the face of the individual?

You can almost hear the squeals of the liberal individualist, or the liberal socialist. No, no, never that, never the loss of my individuality. Quite right my dear. We must remain in defence of the individual and their face, or their car, or their right to eat meat, or their rights in some form or other, right up to the end, which is already upon us and which will never be allowed to stop our right to consume.

I’m being sarcastic of course, but it’s such a chore to have to extract something real from the collapse of politics into the rights of the individual that I find myself becoming irritable.

What would it mean, to abolish the face of the individual? What it doesn’t mean is to superimpose a new face onto the individual, a new totalitarian dominance. Rather, it might better take form of the short circuiting of the connection between this me here and that me there. The mask forms something like a machine for such a short circuit.

Within political life the mask has been prominent within the Zapatistas, the Black Bloc and the Irish republican struggle. The Zapatistas have no doubt articulated it in its most sophisticated form in many ways, as a form that enables participation and which challenges anonymity – the imposition of the ‘faceless mass’ – but its role as tactical necessity for the Black Bloc or within the Irish republican struggle also produced a vibrant revolutionary imaginary that short circuited the face of ‘the great leader’. It’s this thread that connects the mask to this problematic of scale, connecting the ‘community of action’ that operates at the scale of politics to the ‘practices of ethics’ that operates at the scale of the personal. The moment of ‘masking up’ shifts the person from one scale to another.

There is a curious experience that runs analogous to this but which takes it into another form, which is the motorcyclists full face helmet. As I pull my helmet over my face there is this curious movement of recombination that simply doesn’t take place when getting into a car or onto a bus or train. It’s part of a ritual that takes place before riding where the body is shifted from one set of connections into another. As I pull on my jacket, helmet and then gloves – almost always in that order, because putting a helmet on with gloves is awkward – the body slips into becoming-biker. Here too, there is an anonymity and perhaps for some a kind of threatening presence, but also a community formation. As I ride, particularly if I’m riding rather than simply going somewhere, I acknowledge other bikers as I pass them, we nod at each other, offering a gesture across the tarmac and through the speed, a gesture of connection to a face I most likely will never see. It’s one of the small joys of biking and arises from a shared need to acknowledge that what we do escapes the lines of car and carriage, at the cost of a vulnerability that is irrational and yet, for all that, deeply personal – not individual, but personal.

There, in that curious word, ‘personal’, there’s perhaps something that might enable a connection between the scale of this me here, this ‘individual’ and the me there, at the scale of the ‘political’. What is personal provides a thread through the various relations of one-to-one, group and community since the person involved in each relation is always personal. Talk of ‘the personal’ seems to fail at this point and transform something intimate into something ‘theoretical’ once again, something depersonalised. It’s always personal. This perhaps is the real thread of connection, from dreams to actions, that it’s always personal. No doubt this is such an obvious point as to seem trivial, yet my reaction to political theory, to political talk in general, still pushes me to want to stop at this point, at this point where it’s always personal.

In one sense it’s vital to a revolutionary community that the individuals involved go beyond their reactions and move towards a commons of connection that, by definition, does not yet exist. We cannot but act from the positions we are in, with all the shit that the social has burdened us with, and this involves acknowledging that those very ‘personal’ responses often don’t express much more than the social constructions of which we are part.

These social constructions form layers of complexity, as the revolutionary moves from a moment of escape from large scale social constructions into the new social construction of the revolutionary community. How much that community itself can escape is difficult to say, usually less than it believes. The single most difficult encounter for a revolutionary is with others in the revolutionary community, with the little fascisms, failures and fuck-ups that it consists of, that we are. Partly this is because the revolutionary community is, inevitably and without blame, a bad mixture of escape and retreat, variation and homogeneity; partly it is because it must impose its sociality (its’ borders and exclusions) or it dissipates within the scale of the political communities.

Within this situation that which is always personal is often a poorly masked ego that cannot but protect itself with falsehood and illusion. The ego cannot abolish itself any more than the capitalist. Thus that which is always personal is the ego, that self that has been formed if we are to avoid the asylums. Yet that which is personal beyond the self, beyond the individual, still operates as the connecting thread between the various relation formations of one to one, group and community, because the revolutionary is engaged in a transformation of that which is always personal. In some sense we are incapable of yet taking anything personally and that, perhaps, is the challenge: to take it personally, beyond society, towards community.