"She moves!" said Peroo, just before dawn. "Mother Gunga is awake! Hear!" He dipped his hand over the side of a boat and the current mumbled on it. A little wave hit the side of a pier with a crisp slap.
Rudyard Kipling The Bridge Builders
The theory of communisation is the proposition for human activity to function as the ground of itself. The constraints of action are responsive to action. Purpose in action is responsive to the action of purpose.
The theory of communisation is based on three suppositions: a. that local activity may move in accordance with general movement; b. that human activity may progress as consciously responsive to itself; c. that nothing comes after communism...
Kipling presents a different model. Nothing is more communistic than building a bridge across a river. But Finlayson’s bridge is being built over the River Ganges. As a real movement of socialisation, ‘his’ bridge is therefore also being built against the Ganges. It is an affront to the river's sacred power and an insult to the gods who, we later discover, fear that it indicates the local populace will 'weary’ of the ‘Heavenly Ones'. The bridge is built over, and facilitates the passage of a population across, the past.
Decades before Brecht cured the problem of Ibsen by prescribing penicillin, Kipling saw that the building of a bridge in a sacred place put the local gods to death. Where human activity becomes the ground of itself, where its pathways join up the citadels of itself, the space of external reference is as a consequence both cleared and diminished... gods always depart where to soviet power is added electricity.
And along with the gods, different frames of reference, different modes of human being also depart. As it colonises the relations of a territory, communisation immediately enters into a prematurity, a terminal condition where it is unable to articulate or even comprehend that which it has excluded – communisation, as bridge building, is always an externalisation of what had been integral to a space... succinctly, it is the colonisation of relation pathways by a single strain of purpose. The space of communisation is an emptied space occupied solely by its self-grounding functionality.
And this space remains, despite its expansion, a world within a world, or rather, a world within the world. Communisation, which situates human activity as the cause and purpose of itself conceives only those constraints which are conceivable within its constraints... on its own account it must produce a world designed for its relations to appear within. That is, a world which objectively confirms it.
The obstacle of communisation’s certainty of itself may be still be approached theoretically without abandoning the ideal of communism altogether. By no means is this approach based on communisation's own narrative, which has never escaped its inherent, if de-theorised, leninism. It could be said that another bridge must be built over the one directional flow of communisation, a counter-bridge to the real movement. The other bridge reconnects communism to the old territory... this later, responsive and reconciliatory bridge building, which takes the traumas of communisation itself for its object, might be termed relational communism and be understood as distinct from action communism.
Relational communism perceives that communisation, as purposeful activity, if it is to avoid the spiralling witch-trial mania of dekulakisation, must be constrained by, and drawn from, a world that is not itself grounded in the tenets of communisation.
The narrative of relational communism insists that the process of communisation as it results in a world settled inside another world, must also be cognisant of, and not deny, this recursivity. And furthermore, it must set aside, within its territory, a territory that does not manifest its power but which, contrariwise, is for the other.
Communisation, if it is not to become the synonym of some further hell, must reintegrate the sacred space, the place of sanctuary, where its laws ensure that its laws are suspended.
In Kipling's story, the genius Peroo, who is to be forgotten, as so much scaffolding, in the official narrative of the bridge, initiates the 'name' engineer Findlayson, who will become the bridge's author, into a relational counter-narrative to that of colonisation. Peroo builds a counter-bridge, a mind-bridge over the bridge over the Ganges, and in his imaginative re-telling of Findlayson’s project of engineered socialisation, the bridge is made to appear upon an alien territory where the river really is god.
The story recounts how the bridge builders have almost completed their works but an unexpected flood, which announces its early arrival with a first 'crisp slap' against a pier, immediately threatens their achievement with disaster. The works, and the goals, of the human scale, which hitherto had always taken a dependent character but which at that moment are asserting their autonomy from the river, are suddenly re-contextualised by the Ganges’s judgement on that presumption
The fragile world within a world, where activity is grounded in activity and thereby apparently universalised, now finds that it has reference points beyond mere further extensions of its own logic. It must immediately relinquish the space it has colonised and allow the other world to act upon that which has acted upon the world. Progress is engaged by radical regression.
Peroo mocks the very idea of escalation and further contestation, of Findlayson holding the bridge up against the flood with his hands. There are no actions that might be taken against the flood. Peroo advises that Findlayson should let go of the space, of his works. The entire construction project, and the infrastructure it enables, has been brought up against the edge of itself. Findlayson takes the opium Peroo offers and is removed from the concerns of the world to be transported into visions and exaltations.
Communisation too, that banal re-routing of productive relations... the measures against necessity that are conjured up by the type of minds attracted by the formulae of the ultra-left... must also suspend its practice, and pass into a state of quiet reverie so as to reveal its borders with other worlds.
