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What the idea of power brings forth is perhaps the image of an instituted power : It is thus that, before 1982, one used to speak of : the Dominion of Canada, or, in French, Puissance du Canada, in reference to this geopolitical emanation of the British Empire of which we are perhaps, if we are lucky enough, citizens.
Power (puissance), potestas, a Latin word used to refer to the so-called sovereignties of absolute monarchies which, with the backing of the Western Christian Empire’s well-known spiritual monopoly,
commissioned conquests from intercontinental transport businesses, banks and insurance companies, subcontractors and pirates, religious congregations, ragtag soldiers, and human resources specialists – hired hands, colonists, slaves, notaries and Filles du roi 2, influencers, unskilled workers, what’s your job?
Power is thus the STATE, the Leviathan, the proper noun, the legal person, the Queen, the “monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force” as the State likes to define itself.
The Powerful
Power necessarily also evokes the idea of the powerful : Though these include “statesmen,” they are more often friends of the State, who meet around a platter, born of a mythological collusion between shadow and light, upon which one probably does not collectively eat vegan ramen in recyclable take-out boxes.
They are orange Jesuses;
Chainsaw-wielding presidents;
Technology peddlers;
The owners of yachts that cost $50,000 each to fill up on gas and whose toilets flush directly into the Mediterranean;
They are creepy media moguls, smug hate-peddlers;
These killers of women who have a million followers on Instagram;
Old guys who traffic baby tigers with which they amuse escorts in Las Vegas hotel rooms;
They are philanthropists who own the companies of dynamic careerists who empty public coffers and fill them up with truckloads of flexibility, agility, lean approaches and just-in-time manufacturing lines — you could mistake them for private jets.
And then there are those, all of them, they, sellouts, cellulose, cellophane, overpackaged ones ordered by cell phone and perhaps delivered by drone to the doorsteps of lavish mortgaged addresses where vacuum cleaners nevertheless do their work and take-out containers travel via blue plastic bins in hypothetical revalorization loops.
Power is in the singular, and the powerful in the plural. Everybody has their own name and dirty secrets. It’s a certain order of things. The only one we know.
The image: an accumulator of power
The young Nietzsche wrote, and the young Dalie never forgot this, even if I don’t remember where it’s written because it’s written within me : “there is no civilization without slavery.”
The curve of civility is always the construction of the scale determining the value of beings, thus a hierarchy in sum whose purpose is to legitimize a power of capture,
a power of extermination,
a power of concentration,
a power of confiscation,
a power of domestication,
a power of enslavement,
a power of destruction, whose sole and total horizon is that of accumulation.
Domination as a general form of territoriality, a territoriality that could be called imperial, this territory of power, that of the powerful, is the condition of possibility of surplus. It’s an all-accumulating territoriality:
escalators, conveyors, launch pads, viaducts, service stations, fiber optics, submarine cables, transceivers, multi-storey car parks, turn signals, cranks, swipe, swipe, swipe, jingle, fill up, pay.
As civilized beings, we live in accumulators of power — our houses are those mortgages and our attention publicity revenues.
Surviving
Homo sapiens emerged with the upright position.
It’s the beast that rises on its hind legs.
Stand up on your hind legs and free your hands : the birth of technique. Knife, stick, stone, rope. Scrape, cut, throw, hit, pull. Eventually : sending an army to take possession of a continent. The image of the State.
Stand up on your hind legs and free your hands, and thus, open your jaws : the birth of speech. Vocalize, speak, symbolise, transmit. Eventually : invent a measure of universal equivalence to capture the future. The image of capital.
State and capital constitute the complex of monopolistic and autonomous accumulation that characterizes the global contemporary, a techno-scientific war machine that presents itself as the zoological extension of Sapiens, waging war on the Earth, on finitude. It heats, produces waste, desertifies, razes, burns, displaces, accumulates, produces surplus, pharaonic landscapes, speed, satellite skies, Vachon sponge cakes and smart cards.
André Leroi-Gourhan writes that from the moment that gatherings of homo sapiens form national groups,
“The collective organism becomes increasingly imperative, and man becomes the instrument of a techno-economic ascent to which he lends his ideas and his hands. In this way, human society becomes the main consumer of men, in all forms, through violence or work. Man gains by progressively taking possession of the natural world, which, if we project the techno-economic terms of the present into the future, should end in total victory, with the last pocket oil drained to cook the last handful of grass eaten with the last rat.” 3
Powerlessness
What is the link, and is there a link, between the powerful, those who wield or believe they wield power, the power of the State, the power of capital, and the others, those who don’t, those who aren’t ? Who is the other of the powerful? And what is the flip side of power in the singular? Who are the powerless, and what is powerlessness?
Burn 60 liters of gasoline every week and fret about climate change;
Fill a four-foot-high recycling bin to the brim every two weeks;
Plug in your devices to recharge while Hydro-Québec subcontractors clear the forest under the wires, eight meters on each side, all over the province’s power grid;
Choose between the red of liberal virtue or the blue of conspiracy-fuelled FREEDOM once every four years;
Use Facebook;
Don’t use Facebook;
Build yourself a luxury raft in the middle of the ocean to not pay the taxes you already don’t pay;
Go into the woods with a rifle to not pay the taxes you already don’t pay;
To suffer from eco-anxiety and go on vacation to Europe, jet fuel and all;
Eat at fossil speed;
Dress at fossil speed;
Have a good time at fossil speed;
House yourself at fossil speed;
Take care of yourself at fossil speed;
Have degrees sold to you;
Get into debt to pay the degrees that are being sold to you;
To have the choice between buying and buying, selling and selling, buying and selling, selling oneself and being bought, shopping online or in stores, shopping for training, marketplace or kijiji, buying a dog, getting rid of it, subscribing to a gym membership, subscribing to an info-letter, returning a package, changing insurers.
Knowing deep down that there is no such thing as virtue, that separating the world into good guys and bad guys won’t help, and that we are obviously lost, as Walter Benjamin wrote in an enigmatic and perhaps accurate manner, when we confuse the means to act with the power to act.
– Where it is a question of stopping to thinking (of oneself) as a State.
The judgement : a multiple becoming
Could one envisage something that is not power, the power of the powerful, the powerlessness of the powerless, their proper names and fantasies of mastery, but rather : a life, a science, collectives in the company of the powerful, plural powers, powers in the plural.
Powers that stir us, confront us, overtake us, threaten us, powers that we marry, navigate, make dance until the music changes;
Powers that we experience and that test us, powers that we pray to;
Powers that animate us, anima, wind, ai\r, breath,
laughter and tears of which we are the medium and vector;
Powers of action, shared, muted, eternal, conspiratorial, incompressible, always renewed;
Power of the elements, fire, water, insects, viruses, carnivores, the mineral world, the dream world, magical operations;
Power of the body, of bodies, power of number, becoming multiple, contingency, contiguity, power to affect, power of affect — what can, what can be. Actualized. All that can be.
Powers on the verge of ruining the accumulators of power, on a small and large scale, the everyday and the structural, standing in the way and going against the grain, by the roots, frontally, imperceptibly, by wear and tear, I prefer not to, practices of de-accumulation, margins of civility, unproductivity, inoperativity, détournement, dilapidation, uselessness, sterility, abolition, mutiny, disaffection, friendship, damage, dream.
Since the world is burning : on the path towards an ethics of combustion.
- «Puissances» was read by the author on December 13, 2023 as part of Salon #2, organized by AXENÉO7 in Gatineau. English translation by Bernard Schütze→
- The “Filles du roi ” (King’s Daughters) refer to the 800 young French women sent by ship to New France under the guardianship of Louis XIV between 1663 and 1763 to be married off to colonists in view of boosting the colony’s population growth.→
- Leroi-Gourhan, A. (1993) Gesture and Speech. Anna Bostock Berger (Translator), Randall White (Introduction), October Books. p.260→