it wasn’t that long ago

Then measure it.

reachable,
about the distance of a blister on the other ankle

Theoretical Practice #27: An Althusserian Prison Break

We were behind barbed wire, watched over by guards and subjected to the vexations of roll-calls, searches, fatigues. We were hungry…

I never seriously thought of escaping… On the other hand, I dreamed up a way of escaping to which I subsequently gave a great deal of thought.

Having noticed that the Germans alerted all the police and troops within a very wide radius once they realised one of us had escaped, which usually resulted in the capture of the daring individual concerned, I decided the surest way of escaping would be to let them believe someone had escaped, wait until the general alert was over which never lasted more than three or four weeks, and then escape after that. What I therefore had to do was disappear from the camp (I must have had a vocation for ‘disappearing’!), and let them think I had gone, before actually have escape, but simply disappear, in other words hide within the camp itself (which was not impossible) and only then vanish into thin air, when all the measures adopted for the alert had been dropped (three weeks later). In essence I had found a way of escaping the camp without actually leaving and of remaining a prisoner in order to escape! Though I perfected my plan, I did not carry it out, but simply pride myself on the fact that I had found ‘the solution’. Having proved that I could do it, there was no need to out it into practice. I have often thought since that the ‘solution’ came from deep within me, combining a fear of danger and the absolute need for security to produce a fictitious act of bravery. If my friend Rancière had known about his ‘episode’ when he reproached me at a much later date for criticising the Communist Party in order to remain within, I believe it would have given him food for thought.

P. 108 The Future Lasts Forever - L. Althusser

The Communist Hypothesis, p.74

2. ‘Pure’ theoretical practice (the sciences) was divorced from ideological education (the humanities) as though they were two different essences, and everyone is required to choose between the two on the basis of their so-called ‘gifts’, which the system took upon itself to detect. The long-term implication of this ‘choice’ was that science itself was made subservient to the vague humanism in which the ‘liberal’ thought languished. As a rule, no one is more blind to the critical powers of science than a scientist. No one is better prepared by the educational apparatus for slavery than an ‘expert’ or agent of a defined specialism.

Alain Badiou

Room 18, Hostellerie de la Mer, Le Fret (Crozon) - Olivier Rolin, Hotel Crystal (pp. 31-33, 2004)

A pleasing lullaby is indeed what we needed, my old master Louis Althusser and I, on the night we spent in room 18 of the Hostellerie de la Mer. It was just a few years after the so-called “68” events. He got it into his head, as he would recall in his posthumous memoirs, to steal an atomic submarine. Through the bathroom transom, one could make out the nearby sodium lights at the Longue Isle base. Did this business seem straightforward to my old master, in his delirium, or had he just decided on a rather complicated way to kill himself? Whatever the case, he had purchased an officer’s uniform in dark blue wool at the Clichy flea market, on which – after referring to the Larousse Encyclopedia of the Twentieth Century – he saw five gold stripes corresponding to the rank of ship’s captain. With the face of a manic-depressive spaniel under his ornamental officer’s cap, he would have been laughable, were it not for the nerve-racking circumstances, as he chain-smoked Gauloises that night, seated on the little bamboo bed beneath the window (he absolutely insisted that I sleep in the double). His plan consisted of simply showing up the next day at the entrance to the base and informing the maritime gendarmerie that he was the new commander of the Redoutable, appointed at a Council of Ministers that same morning (this detail struck him as tremendously cunning, likely to allay any suspicion). I, on the other hand, harbored grave doubts as to the reliability of this scheme, but I had too mush respect for the philosopher who had helped me discover scientific Marxism not to go along with it. I just pointed out to my old master that it was (probably) forbidden to smoke aboard a nuclear submarine. The proletariat is going to change all that, Rolin, he replied from inside a bluish cloud. All the same, I persisted, all the same: he shouldn’t show up at the security checkpoint with a cigarette hanging from his mouth; it just wasn’t very ship captain-like, in my view. We’ll see, we’ll see, was his reply. Then, putting out his Gauloise: all right, let’s get some sleep. And soon that’s what we were doing, rocked by the faint sound of surf, the light clinking of the halyards.

Text handwritten on the back of a “Tourist Map of the Crozon Peninsula”

Olivier Rolin, Hotel Crystal (pp. 31-33, 2004 [2008])

Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier, trans. William Cloonan (pp.29-30, 2007 [2002])

…, in the same way back then several years seemed a vast stretch of time, and so Gideon possessed in our eyes a formidable seniority, as if he had been anointed by History, and also by “The Theory,” as we used to say. Because he had been a favorite student of the philosopher whose name the public only learned the day he strangled his wife, but you had read his books, which seems to restore Marxism to the dignity of a science. Lives are forests filled with shadows and mysteries, Marie, you tell Thirteen’s daughter; enormous things rot, hideous, nightmarish animals caterwaul in the darkness of each life. All the while you were stupidly wandering what was keeping him from joining The Cause, this mentor who was for you the image of rigor was going nuts, imagining he was hijacking a nuclear submarine or stealing gold from the Banque de France, he was trembling on his knees at the feet of the woman he would wind up killing. On the first days when the red flags were invading Paris streets, at the beginning of that long ago month of May, he was crossing the city in an ambulance from a psychiatric clinic. He never believed that could ever happen, the avenues transformed into poppy fields. And him, haggard, fleeing. What good had been “The Theory?” You had no idea how completely men are woven from darkness, scarred by fear; literature would have taught you that, but you had rejected literature, you only believed in “life,” “life,” and “experience,” clarified by the Theory ,and by Gideon’s analyses and instructions ,which were of a terrifying simplicity. You were intransigent and frightfully ignorant – and it would have done you no good to tell you that.

Olivier Rolin, Tigre en papier, trans. William Cloonan (pp.29-30, 2007 [2002])

Black Baroque Interventionists

BLACK BAROQUE INTERVENTIONISTS

Black Baroque Interventionists is neither an organised movement, nor collective. Their approach is neither serious nor frivolous. They despise all hypocritical declarations of good and evil. The textbook dichotomy of optimism and pessimism, or beauty and ugliness, is absurd to all BBI members who had amputated their sentiments. Their experiments are not to be understood as science, their gestures not to be taken as art, their activities are never political, and their words have hardly anything to do with the notion named 'love'. To them, the necessity of such differentiation is as useless as the petit-bourgeois distinction between tiring labour and boring leisure.

Operating within a decentred structure, and sharing a common hatred of statistics, Black Baroque Interventionists could not establish an exact figure of those who are currently involved. To them, history and memory are overrated - none of the members remember the year they emerged. The practice of leaving no traces during their operations has resulted in the impossibility of presenting a chronology of their activities. Except for a few names shamelessly sold to the public by an affiliated art collective based in Singapore (which Black Baroque Interventionists has recently declared as an act of treason) none of the members are identifiable. According to a joint statement issued in Jan 2010, in the form of a cassette recording, 'We are not identical even to ourselves […] to hell with identity and personality! But we could be your politicians smiling on TV, the CEOs of every MNC and the cleaners of all the toilets in this filthy world! We are everyone and no one. […] All members affirm their participation by the relentless self-denial of their involvement in the group.'

In the Jan 2010 statement, Black Baroque Interventionists, as prime advocates of local anaesthetics, summarises their agenda with this quotation found in the jotter book of a member who went missing during an operation:

'Non-imperial [...]* must be as rigorous as a mathematical demonstration, as surprising as an ambush in the night, and as elevated as a star.'

*Illegible inkblot

Wang Hui, ‘An Asia that isn’t the East’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 27 February 2005

The idea is simultaneously colonialist and anti-colonialist, conservative and revolutionary, nationalist and internationalist; it originated in Europe and shaped the self-interpretation of Europe; it is closely related to the matter of the nation-state and overlaps with the vision of empire; it is a geographic category established in geopolitical relations.