It’s a mistake to assume we are moving towards a state of happy primitivism. The model here seems to be less the noble savage than our un-innocent post-Freudian selves, outraged by all that overindulgent toilet training, dedicated breast-feeding and parental affection - obviously a more dangerous mix than anything our Victorian forebears had to cope with. Our neighbours had happy childhoods to a man and still feel angry. Perhaps they resent never having had a chance to be perverse...’
Getting caught up in the punctuating events that are visited upon otherwise stable environments causes the metabolisms of dependent life-forms to adapt to the new conditions. It is in the deep structure of the theory of environment-led lifeform adaptation that ‘species’ either rise to the challenge or fall by the wayside. In cultural structures it is assumed that social forces, behaving environmentally, invite social groups down one of two analogous adaptation paths, along which the group either progresses, via the eternal virtues, to a higher state, or they deteriorate into abject barbarism.
‘By the first decade of the C21st, the entire Arab world seemed to be stuck in a jam, a sense of malaise and stagnation had spread across the region and a shared feeling emerged which was summed up in a phrase regularly heard in conversation, ‘something has gone wrong’. Tarek Osman begins his analysis of the Arab Spring whilst sitting in a queue of traffic that has not moved for 25 minutes in the Dokki area of central Cairo (a city which takes 4 hours to traverse by car). The furring up of traffic infrastructure is also an important motif in JG Ballard’s dystopian novel High Rise. The rights of access to the tower block community’s lifts become the territorial loci around which class tensions congeal, and as such signify within the three military registers (tactics, strategy, logistics) as the main flashpoints of conflict. The breakdowns, blockings, commandeerings and weaponisations of the lifts directly convey the seething process of social recomposition and its constraints which the narrative of High Rise describes. The specifics of social war are recorded (as ‘aerosoled obscenities’) upon the conduits, in the corridors, underpasses, on bridges, in lifts.
Evolutionary theory suggests that revolt always occurs in accordance with the limit of conditions. It extends the logic of the territory which has denied the discomfortment of the unadapted a way out. The first pressure is to leave the scene and find somewhere more hospital... where emigration is forbidden, ‘revolt’ is adopted as a second path.
Revolt is an exacerbation in responses where these are structurally denied a path to dispersal. It is by recovering the energy of behavioural responses (society’s ‘working fluid’) that the compound engine of social institutions becomes more efficient. The crowd’s behavioural ‘exhaust’ is channelled through secondary and tertiary cylinders as a means of better powering the environmental mechanisms of governance. It is by recycling the same crowd energy that the territorialised space available becomes more tightly packed, and thus more efficiently expressive of its constraints.
The constrained territory’s goal is to use every available inch as itself. By process of heat transfer, it discloses itself as efficiently as possible in the form of behavioural energy - a perfect mobilisation of the crowd supposes no loss of energy to exodus or dispersal. The crowd as conveyor of constraining messages, is directed by the social mechanism to return to the ‘square’, to the contested space. This was as true for the events called the Arab Spring as it is in High Rise... the crowds’ disturbance can only occupy the available territory that they already occupy by intensifying it (by dramatisation if you will) as a direct expression of how this territory causes them to behave. The energetic function of the crowd is to facilitate the environment’s latent abstractions to a full realisation - specifically, the bourgeois crowd enables the transfer of abstraction (derived from accumulated behaviours) back into behaviour.
So, the crowd is realising its constraints, but these are not necessarily either the constraints which it comprehends, or which it directs itself against. Its objective function is not to ‘re-realise’ the bourgeois world of democracy, participation, law (nor to oppose irrational tyranny) but rather it is to set in motion at the level of affect, the optimisation of the governed space as a fully integrated environment - essentially, the crowd is a police function.
It does realise a transformation (or a moment within the unfolding of a transformation - a sort of teething mechanism) but this is not the transformation that it imagines - it is constrained to act in accordance with a structural logic that is already implemented beneath the streets and requires only an ‘event’ to bring it out in the open.
And so it is that the roads are blocked, the lifts are out of action - a territory is self-altering. The personified model of power is progressively displaced by a banal remoteness... if the crowd broke into the presidential palace today it would find only a quietly humming data centre, a mute grey box. The anachronistic revolt against the ‘corrupt leader’ both acts in accord with the instrumentalising ripples emanating from the data centre, and also nostalgically seeks to claw back that which is being lost from the human domain (personal responsibility for that which has gone wrong).
The crowd is forced to reoccupy the bewildering square, as if reapplying for its job... But, the square is not there. It has become a mysterious black box: there are multiple and intensifying inputs but no discernible outputs - where does the energy invested into it go? What hidden engine is powered by the crowd?
In High Rise, the architect, Royal, perceives this mechanism of reconstitution at a higher level via convulsive breakdown and ferment at the level of basic services and even baser behavioural disturbances (confrontation, personal frustrations, relationship breakdowns, outbreaks of irrational violence - these are the pathways by which abstraction overrides the ancien form of ‘the concrete’):
Royal was certain that a rigid hierarchy of some kind was the key to the elusive success of these huge buildings. As he often pointed out to Anne, office blocks containing as many as thirty thousand workers functioned smoothly for decades thanks to a social hierarchy as rigid and as formalised as an anthill's, with an incidence of crime, social unrest, and petty misdemeanours that was virtually nil. The confused but unmistakable emergence of this new social order-apparently based on small tribal enclaves-fascinated Royal. To begin with, he had been determined to stay on, come what may and whatever the hostility directed against him, in the hope of acting as its midwife. In fact, this alone had stopped him from notifying his former colleagues of the mounting chaos within the building. As he told himself repeatedly, the present breakdown of the high-rise might well mark its success rather than its failure. Without realising it, he had given these people a means of escaping into a new life, and a pattern of social organisation that would become the paradigm of all future high-rise blocks.
There is transformation of the territory, that can be inferred from the build up of internal tensions at its borders - there is an non-permitted pressure to leave the scene. There is a ratchetting up, an exponetiating movement within a positional number system - a transformation of amassed quantities of things into the fuel for further abstraction... but the escalation does not follow the demands of those who are amassed in the space. On the contrary, they (and their demands) are modified by it - they are assigned new demands, to be better and more efficiently fitted in to the process.
The transformational process somewhat contradicts their presence and yet is also (incoherently) expressed by it. Tarek Osman observes that the ‘revolution’ is an expression of loss more than of aspiration, he quotes Nizar Qabbani, ‘since revolution grows in the wounds of grief.’ There is an exaggerated behaviour, ordinarily associated with (and this has been commented on elsewhere by commentators on the Arab Spring) the ‘five stages of grief’. The crowd, a sort of mumuration, is performing its own disappearance. The ground of Tahrir Square is all sand, it drains away through the fingers of the protesters... it is funnelled elsewhere but no longer as sand, it would be too easy to imagine sandbags or dunes as metaphors of governance.
Where there are enigmatic, or occult, flows these are manifested as chokings of process, as traffic congestion, broken lifts, tripped switches, overloads, strange bunching and flocking behaviours... it seems that a blockage in the infrastructure indicates a slip or shift in the configuration of social forces. From Diotima to Hegel, from Marx to Freud perturbations in behaviour are interpreted as indicating a choking of the given form which has somehow become metaphorically pregnant with transformations of the deeper structure. Within these metaphors, new canals are already in place between past, present and future forms - it is only a matter of the crowd being, tumultuously, squeezed out along them.
If the crowd converges, if its massing occurs in correlation to an exponentiation movement within a positional number system, then might there not be another movement at the level of behaviour which does not express itself as the crowd, that does not fall into line with totalising process? Certainly, every post-situationist is aware of the abortifacient or self-regulatory mechanisms of precapitalist societies by which the ‘new’ is averted: the ostentatious squanderings; the ritualised destruction of incidentally accumulated wealth; the over-coding by which seasonal excess both brings the system to its impoverished but purified spring and also inhibits the accretion of a mercantile class around autumnal stockpiles. But capital has long since crossed the threshold where its automatic accumulations, it translations of mass into abstraction, might have proved responsive to the project of self-management.
Then, this other movement must take the form of flight, or more accurately, of decommissioning and disengagement. The factories (and with them, the general tendency to abstraction and the relations of force into which they are embedded) must be ‘put beyond use’. Undoubtedly, a cutting loose of the present entanglement of all paths within productive forces would be as catastrophic as the currently dominant phase of self-destruction. And anyway, ‘dispersal’ is as much a capitalist movement as convergence (capital flight and emigration are two significant negative reinforcements, or safety valves, in the process of abstraction).
Then, it has to be in the manner of a gentle passing through, and leaving in its wake softly deflating rooms as if they were tents, the coming to rest of canopies ripped from their frames, of collapsing soufflés, the slow (to use Ballard’s word) deliquescing of armatures. If communisation means anything (and here we understand it along the lines of behaviours that are in accord with communism), then far from further intensifying the productive processe, it must (in a series of regressive manoeuvres) put beyond use those components of the territory that cause it to serve instrumentalising rationality. It is not a future-oriented movement towards achievement, or of vanquishment, but of retrospective undoing and making amends. Above all, it is a matter of disintegrating the totalising community:
Above all, he looked down on them for their good taste. The building was a monument to good taste, to the well-designed kitchen, to sophisticated utensils and fabrics, to elegant and never ostentatious furnishings-in short, to that whole aesthetic sensibility which these well-educated professional people had inherited from all the schools of industrial design, all the award-winning schemes of interior decoration institutionalised by the last quarter of the twentieth Century. Royal detested this orthodoxy of the intelligent. Visiting his neighbours' apartments, he would find himself physically repelled by the contours of an award-winning coffee-pot, by the well-modulated colour schemes, by the good taste and intelligence that, Midas-like, had transformed everything in these apartments into an ideal marriage of function and design. In a sense, these people were the vanguard of a well-to-do and well-educated proletariat of the future, boxed up in these expensive apartments with their elegant furniture and intelligent sensibilities, and no possibility of escape. Royal would have given anything for one vulgar mantelpiece ornament, one less than snow-white lavatory bowl, one hint of hope. Thank God that they were at last breaking out of this fur-lined prison.
Communisation is a burrowing movement into, or rather a tentative unearthing of, past forms of domination. It follows the paths of heat loss and structural relaxation, it liquifies past binds. As it moves from enclosure to enclosure, through the halls and burial chambers of the ruined city, it must softly detach and remove that component (the well-designed coffee pot) which holds the present, which binds congealed labour to forms of domination. It delicately unprises the grip of the present on the past. Upon departure, as it closes the door to each successive scene, and taking with it the keystone or fetish object of that particularity, the dimensions of that moment as territorial domination (and its embedding into the process of abstraction) all melt into air.
But the retreat is endless, and is conducted as yet another form of struggle, primarily against the wrong form of withdrawal. Communising agents will be baffled by the immensity of the past, just as it is observed of Kafka’s powerful and indefatigable messenger, who traversed the rooms of domination: never will he get to the end of them. And if he succeeded in that, nothing would be gained; he must next fight his way down the stair; and if he succeeded in that, nothing would have been achieved; the courts would still have to crossed; and after the court through the second outer palace; and once more stairs and courtyards; and once more another palace, and so on for thousands of years.
