I am on a Roberto Bolano kick right now, so excuse this indulgence.

Go and read his books; and, will someone please translate his poetry into english.

Roberto Bolaño.

Roberto Bolaño belongs to the most select group of Latin-American novelists. Chile of the coup d’état, Mexico City in the 1970s, and the reckless youth of poets are some of his frequent subjects, but he also takes up other themes: César Vallejo’s deathbed, the hardships endured by unknown authors, life at the periphery. Born in Chile in 1953, he spent his teenage years in Mexico and moved to Spain at the end of the seventies. As a poet, he founded the Infrarealist movement with Mario Santiago. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, previously awarded to Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, for his novel Los detectives salvajes [The savage detectives], for which he also received the prestigious Herralde Prize.

A prolific writer, a literary animal who makes no concessions, Bolaño successfully combines the two basic instincts of a novelist: he is attracted to historical events, and he desires to correct them, to point out the errors. From Mexico he acquired a mythical paradise, from Chile the inferno of the real, and from Blanes, the town in northeast Spain where he now lives and works, he purges the sins of both. No other novelist has been able to convey the complexity of the megalopolis Mexico City has become, and no one has revisited the horrors of the coup d’état in Chile and the Dirty War with such mordant, intelligent writing.

To echo Bolaño’s words, “reading is more important than writing.” Reading Roberto Bolaño, for example. If anyone thinks that Latin-American literature isn’t passing through a moment of splendor, a look through some of his pages would be enough to dispel that notion. With Bolaño, literature—that inexplicably beautiful bomb that goes off and as it destroys, rebuilds—should feel proud of one of its best creations.

Our conversation took place via e-mail between Blanes and my home in Mexico City in the fall of 2001.

Carmen Boullosa In Latin America, there are two literary traditions that the average reader tends to regard as antithetical, opposite—or frankly, antagonistic: the fantastic—Adolfo Bioy Casares, the best of Cortázar, and the realist—Vargas Llosa, Teresa de la Parra. Hallowed tradition tells us that the southern part of Latin America is home to the fantastic, while the northern part is the center of realism. In my opinion, you reap the benefits of both: your novels and narratives are inventions—the fantastic—and a sharp, critical reflection of reality—realist. And if I follow this reasoning, I would add that this is because you have lived on the two geographic edges of Latin America, Chile and Mexico. You grew up on both edges. Do you object to this idea, or does it appeal to you? To be honest, I find it somewhat illuminating, but it also leaves me dissatisfied: the best, the greatest writers (including Bioy Casares and his antithesis, Vargas Llosa) always draw from these two traditions. Yet from the standpoint of the English-speaking North, there’s a tendency to pigeonhole Latin American literature within only one tradition.

Roberto Bolaño I thought the realists came from the south (by that, I mean the countries in the Southern Cone), and writers of the fantastic came from the middle and northern parts of Latin America—if you pay attention to these compartmentalizations, which you should never, under any circumstances, take seriously. 20th century Latin American literature has followed the impulses of imitation and rejection, and may continue to do so for some time in the 21st century. As a general rule, human beings either imitate or reject the great monuments, never the small, nearly invisible treasures. We have very few writers who have cultivated the fantastic in the strictest sense—perhaps none, because among other reasons, economic underdevelopment doesn’t allow subgenres to flourish. Underdevelopment only allows for great works of literature. Lesser works, in this monotonous or apocalyptic landscape, are an unattainable luxury. Of course, it doesn’t follow that our literature is full of great works—quite the contrary. At first the writer aspires to meet these expectations, but then reality—the same reality that has fostered these aspirations—works to stunt the final product. I think there are only two countries with an authentic literary tradition that have at times managed to escape this destiny—Argentina and Mexico. As to my writing, I don’t know what to say. I suppose it’s realist. I’d like to be a writer of the fantastic, like Philip K. Dick, although as time passes and I get older, Dick seems more and more realist to me. Deep down—and I think you’ll agree with me—the question doesn’t lie in the distinction of realist/fantastic but in language and structures, in ways of seeing. I had no idea that you liked Teresa de la Parra so much. When I was in Venezuela people spoke a lot about her. Of course, I’ve never read her.

CB Teresa de la Parra is one of the greatest women writers, or greatest writers, and when you read her you’ll agree. Your answer completely supports the idea that the electricity surging through the Latin American literary world is fairly haphazard. I wouldn’t say it’s weak, because suddenly it gives off sparks that ignite from one end of the continent to the other, but only every now and then. But we don’t entirely agree on what I consider to be the canon. All divisions are arbitrary, of course. When I thought about the south (the Southern Cone and Argentina), I thought about Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo’s delirious stories, Bioy Casares, and Borges (when you’re dealing with authors like these, rankings don’t matter: there is no “number one,” they’re all equally important authors), and I thought about that short, blurry novel by María Luisa Bombal, House of Mist(whose fame was perhaps more the result of scandal—she killed her ex-lover). I would place Vargas Llosa and the great de la Parra in the northern camp. But then things become complicated, because as you move even further north you find Juan Rulfo, and Elena Garro with Un hogar sólido and Los recuerdos del porvenir. All divisions are arbitrary: there is no realism without fantasy, and vice versa.

In your stories and novels, and perhaps also in your poems, the reader can detect the settling of scores (as well as homages paid), which are important building blocks in your narrative structure. I don’t mean that your novels are written in code, but the key to your narrative chemistry may lie in the way you blend hate and love in the events you recount. How does Roberto Bolaño, the master chemist, work?

RB I don’t believe there are any more scores settled in my writing than in the pages of any other author’s books. I’ll insist at the risk of sounding pedantic (which I probably am, in any case), that when I write the only thing that interests me is the writing itself; that is, the form, the rhythm, the plot. I laugh at some attitudes, at some people, at certain activities and matters of importance, simply because when you’re faced with such nonsense, by such inflated egos, you have no choice but to laugh. All literature, in a certain sense, is political. I mean, first, it’s a reflection on politics, and second, it’s also a political program. The former alludes to reality—to the nightmare or benevolent dream that we call reality—which ends, in both cases, with death and the obliteration not only of literature, but of time. The latter refers to the small bits and pieces that survive, that persist; and to reason. Although we know, of course, that in the human scale of things, persistence is an illusion and reason is only a fragile railing that keeps us from plunging into the abyss. But don’t pay any attention to what I just said. I suppose one writes out of sensitivity, that’s all. And why do you write? You’d better not tell me—I’m sure your answer will be more eloquent and convincing than mine.

CB Right, I’m not going to tell you, and not because my answer would be any more convincing. But I must say that if there is some reason why I don’t write, it’s out of sensitivity. For me, writing means immersing myself in a war zone, slicing up bellies, contending with the remains of cadavers, then attempting to keep the combat field intact, still alive. And what you call “settling scores” seems much fiercer to me in your work than in that of many other Latin American writers.

In the eyes of this reader, your laughter is much more than a gesture; it’s far more corrosive—it’s a demolition job. In your books, the inner workings of the novel proceed in the classic manner: a fable, a fiction draws the reader in and at the same time makes him or her an accomplice in pulling apart the events in the background that you, the novelist, are narrating with extreme fidelity. But let’s leave that for now. No one who has read you could doubt your faith in writing. It’s the first thing that attracts the reader. Anyone who wants to find something other than writing in a book—for example, a sense of belonging, or being a member of a certain club or fellowship—will find no satisfaction in your novels or stories. And when I read you, I don’t look for history, the retelling of a more or less recent period in some corner of the world. Few writers engage the reader as well as you do with concrete scenes that could be inert, static passages in the hands of “realist” authors. If you belong to a tradition, what would you call it? Where are the roots of your genealogical tree, and in which direction do its branches grow?

RB The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write. For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing. Well, I’m probably wrong—it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise. But, as I said, I’m probably wrong. As to my idea of a canon, I don’t know, it’s like everyone else’s—I’m almost embarrassed to tell you, it’s so obvious: Francisco de Aldana, Jorge Manrique, Cervantes, the chroniclers of the Indies, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Rubén Darío, Alfonso Reyes, Borges, just to name a few and without going beyond the realm of the Spanish language. Of course, I’d love to claim a literary past, a tradition, a very brief one, made up of only two or three writers (and maybe one single book), a dazzling tradition prone to amnesia, but on the one hand, I’m much too modest about my work and on the other, I’ve read too much (and too many books have made me happy) to indulge in such a ridiculous notion.

CB Doesn’t it seem arbitrary to name as your literary ancestors authors who wrote exclusively in Spanish? Do you include yourself in the Hispanic tradition, in a separate current from other languages? If a large part of Latin American literature (especially prose) is engaged in a dialogue with other traditions, I would say this is doubly true in your case.

RB I named authors who wrote in Spanish in order to limit the canon. Needless to say, I’m not one of those nationalist monsters who only reads what his native country produces. I’m interested in French literature, in Pascal, who could foresee his death, and in his struggle against melancholy, which to me seems more admirable now than ever before. Or the utopian naiveté of Fourier. And all the prose, typically anonymous, of courtly writers (some Mannerists and some anatomists) that somehow leads to the endless caverns of the Marquis de Sade. I’m also interested in American literature of the 1880s, especially Twain and Melville, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Whitman. As a teenager, I went through a phase when I only read Poe. Basically, I’m interested in Western literature, and I’m fairly familiar with all of it.

CB You only read Poe? I think there was a very contagious Poe virus going around in our generation—he was our idol, and I can easily see you as an infected teenager. But I’m imagining you as a poet, and I want to turn to your narratives. Do you choose the plot, or does the plot chase after you? How do you choose—or how does the plot choose you? And if neither is true, then what happens? Pinochet’s adviser on Marxism, the highly respected Chilean literary critic you baptize Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a priest and member of the Opus Dei, or the healer who practices Mesmerism, or the teenage poets known as the Savage Detectives—all these characters of yours have an historical counterpart. Why is that?

RB Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.

CB Women writers are constantly annoyed by this question, but I can’t help inflicting it on you—if only because after being asked it so many times, I regard it as an inevitable, though unpleasant ritual: How much autobiographical material is there in your work? To what extent is it a self-portrait?

RB A self-portrait? Not much. A self-portrait requires a certain kind of ego, a willingness to look at yourself over and over again, a manifest interest in what you are or have been. Literature is full of autobiographies, some very good, but self-portraits tend to be very bad, including self-portraits in poetry, which at first would seem to be a more suitable genre for self-portraiture than prose. Is my work autobiographical? In a sense, how could it not be? Every work, including the epic, is in some way autobiographical. In the Iliad we consider the destiny of two alliances, of a city, of two armies, but we also consider the destiny of Achilles and Priam and Hector, and all these characters, these individual voices, reflect the voice, the solitude, of the author.

CB When we were young poets, teenagers, and shared the same city (Mexico City in the seventies), you were the leader of a group of poets, the Infrarealists, which you’ve mythologized in your novel, Los detectives salvajes. Tell us a little about what poetry meant for the Infrarealists, about the Mexico City of the Infrarealists.

RB Infrarealism was a kind of Dada á la Mexicana. At one point there were many people, not only poets, but also painters and especially loafers and hangers-on, who considered themselves Infrarealists. Actually there were only two members, Mario Santiago and me. We both went to Europe in 1977. One night, in Rosellón, France, at the Port Vendres train station (which is very close to Perpignan), after having suffered a few disastrous adventures, we decided that the movement, such as it was, had come to an end.

CB Maybe it ended for you, but it remained vividly alive in our memories. Both of you were the terrors of the literary world. Back then I was part of a solemn, serious crowd—my world was so disjointed and shapeless that I needed something secure to hold on to. I liked the ceremonial nature of poetry readings and receptions, those absurd events full of rituals that I more or less adhered to, and you were the disrupters of these gatherings. Before my first poetry reading in Gandhi bookstore, way back in 1974, I prayed to God—not that I really believed in God, but I needed someone to call upon—and begged: Please, don’t let the Infrarealists come. I was terrified to read in public, but the anxiety that arose from my shyness was nothing compared to the panic I felt at the thought that I’d be ridiculed: halfway through the reading, the Infras might burst in and call me an idiot. You were there to convince the literary world that we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously over work that wasn’t legitimately serious—and that with poetry (to contradict your Chilean saying) the precise point was to throw yourself off a precipice. But let me return to Bolaño and his work. You specialize in narratives—I can’t imagine anyone calling your novels “lyrical”— and yet you’re also a poet, an active poet. How do you reconcile the two?

RB Nicanor Parra says that the best novels are written in meter. And Harold Bloom says that the best poetry of the 20th century is written in prose. I agree with both. But on the other hand I find it difficult to consider myself an active poet. My understanding is that an active poet is someone who writes poems. I sent my most recent ones to you and I’m afraid they’re terrible, although of course, out of kindness and consideration, you lied. I don’t know. There’s something about poetry. Whatever the case, the important thing is to keep reading it. That’s more important than writing it, don’t you think? The truth is, reading is always more important than writing.

Translated by Margaret Carson

Introduction

Listen, Little Man! Is a human and not a scientific document. It was written in the summer of 1945 for the Archives of the Orgone Institute without the intention of publishing it. It was the result of the inner storms and conflicts of a natural scientist and physician who watched, over decade first naively, then with amazement and finally with horror, what the Little Man in the street does to himself; how he suffers and rebels, how he esteems his enemies and murders his friends; how, wherever he gains power as a ‘representative of the – people’ he misuses this power and makes it into something more cruel than the power which previously he had to suffer at the hands of individual sadists of the upper classes.

This “Talk” to the Little Man was the quiet answer to gossip and defamation. For decades, the emotional plague has tried again and again to kill orgone research (note well: not to prove it incorrect, but to kill it by defamation). Orgone research carries a very heavy responsibility for human life and health. The fact justifies the publication of this ‘Talk’ or a historical document. It seemed necessary for the ‘man in the street’ to learn what goes on in a scientific workshop and also to learn what he looks like to an experienced psychiatrist. He must learn to know reality, which alone can counteract his disastrous craving for authority. He must be told clearly what responsibility he carries, whether he works, loves, hates or gossips. He must learn how he becomes a Fascist, be it the black or red variety. He who fights for the safeguarding of the living and the protection of our children must needs be against the red as well as the black Fascist. Not because today the red Fascist, like the black Fascist before him, has a murderous ideology, but because he turns lively and healthy children into cripples, robots and moral idiots; because with him, the state comes before right, the lie before truth, war before life; because the child, and the safeguarding of the living in the child, remains our only hope. There is only one loyalty for the educator and physician: that to the living in the child and the patient. If this loyalty is strictly adhered to, the great questions of ‘foreign politics’ also find their simple solution.

This ‘Talk’ does not imply that one should make it the pattern of one’s existence. It describes storms in the emotional life of a productive, happy individual. It does not want a, convince or win anybody. It pictures experience as a painting pictures a thunderstorm. The reader is not asked to like it. He may read it or not. It does not contain any intentions or programmes. All it wants to do is to win for the researcher and thinker the right to personal reaction, which one has never denied, to the poet or philosopher. It is a protest against the secret and unrecognized intention of the emotional plague to shoot its poison arrows at the hard-working researcher, from a safe ambush. It shows what the emotional plague is, how it functions and retards progress. It also attests to the confidence in the tremendous un-mined treasures, which lie in the depth of human nature: ready to be put in the service of fulfilling human hopes.

The living, in its social and human interrelationship, is naively kindly and thus, under prevailing conditions, endangered. It assumes that the fellow human also follows the laws of the living and is kindly, helpful and giving. As long a. then is the emotional plague, this natural basic attitude that of the healthy child or the primitive, becomes the greatest danger in the struggle for a rational order of life. For the plague individual also ascribes to his fellow beings the characteristics of his own thinking and acting. The kindly individual believes that all people are kindly and act accordingly. The plague individual believes that all people lie, swindle, steal and crave power. Clearly, then, the living is at a disadvantage and in danger. Where it gives to the plague individual it is sucked dry and then derided or betrayed; and where it trusts it is cheated.

That’s the way it has always been. It is time for the living a, become hard when hardness is needed in the struggle for its safeguarding and development; in doing so, it will not lose its kindness if it sticks to the truth courageously. There is hope in the fact that, among millions of industrious, decent individuals then an always only just a few pestilential individuals who cause murderous mischief by appealing to the dark nod dangerous impulses in the structure of the armored mass individual and lend them to organized political murder. There is only one antidote to the germs of the emotional plague in the mass individual: his own feeling of living life. The living dots not ask for power but for its proper role in human life. It is based on the three pillars of love, work and knowledge He who has to protect the living against the emotional plague has to lean to use the right to free speech as we enjoy it in America at least as well for the good as the emotional plague misuses it for the bad. Granted equal right in the depression of opinion, the rational finally must win out. This is an important hope.

Listen, Little Man!

They call you ‘Little Man’, ‘Common Man’; they say a new era has begun, the ‘Era of the Common Man’. It isn’t you who says so, Little Man. It is they, the Vice Presidents of great nations, promoted labor leaders, repentant sons of bourgeois families, statesmen and philosophers. They give you your future but don’t ask about your past.

You are heir to a dreadful past. Your heritage is a burning diamond in your hand. That’s what I tell you. Every physician, shoemaker, mechanic or educator must know his shortcomings if he is to do his work and make his living. For some decades, you have begun to play a governing role on this earth. It is on your thinking and your actions that the future of humanity depends. But your teachers and masters do not tell you how you ready think end are; nobody damn to voice the one criticism of you which could make you capable of governing your own fate. You are ‘free’ only in one sense- free from education in governing your life yourself, free from self-criticism.

I have never heard you complain: ‘You promote me to be the future master of myself and my world, but you don’t tell how one is to be the master over oneself, and you don’t tell me the mistakes in my thinking and my actions.’

You let men in power assume power ‘for the Little Man’. But you yourself remain silent. You give men in power or impotent people with evil intentions the power to represent you. Only too late do you realize that again and again you are being defrauded.

I understand you. For, many thousands of times, I have seen you naked, physically and psychically, without a mask, without a party card without your ‘popularity’. Naked like a newborn, naked like a Field Marshal in his underpants. You have complained and cried before me, have talked about your longings, and have disclosed your love and your grief. I know you and I understand you. I am going to tell you how you are, Little Man, for I honestly believe in your great future. There is no doubt, it belongs to you. So, first of all, have a look at yourself see yourself as you really are. Listen to what none of your Fuhrers and representatives dares tell you:

You are a ‘little Common Man’. Understand the double meaning of these words: ‘little: and ‘common’.

Don’t run. Have the courage to look at yourself!

‘What right do you have to tell me things?’ I can see question in your apprehensive look. I hear this question from your impertinent mouth, Little Man. You are afraid to look at yourself, you are afraid of criticism, Little Man, just as you are afraid of the power they promise you. You would know how to use this power. You dare not think that you ever might experience your self differently: free instead; open instead of tactical; loving openly instead of like a thief in the night.

You despise yourself, Little Man. You toy: ‘Who am I to have an opinion of my own to determine my own life and to declare the world to be mine?’ You are right: Who are you to make a claim to your life? I shall tell you who you are:

You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking and actions. Under the pressure of some task, which was dear to him, he learned better and better to sense the threat that came from his smallness nod pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man. The Little Man does not know that he is little, and he is afraid of knowing it. He covers up his smallness and narrowness with illusions of strength and greatness, of other’s strength and greatness. He is proud of his great generals but not proud of himself. He admires the thought which he did nor have and not the thought he did have. He believes in things all the more thoroughly the less he comprehends them, and does nor believe in the correctness of those ideas, which he comprehends most easily.

I shall begin with the Little Man in myself:

For twenty-five years, in the written and spoken word, I have advocated your right to happiness in the world; have accused you of your inability to take what belongs to you, to secure what you had gained in the bloody battles of the Pads and Vienna barricades, in the American emancipation or in the Russian revolution. Your Paris ended in Petain and Laval your Vienna in Hitler; your Russia in Stalin, and your America could end in the regime of a KKK. You knew better how to win your freedom than how to safeguard it for yourself and others. I have known this for a long time. What I could understand was why, every time you had fought your way laboriously out of one morass, you got into a worse one. Then, slowly and gropingly, I found what makes you a slave: YOU ARE YOUR OWN SLAVE-DRIVER. Nobody else nobody except you yourself carries the responsibility you’re your slavery. Nobody else.

That is not new, isn’t it? Your liberators tell you that your suppressors are Wilhelms, Nikolaus, Pope Gregory the Twenty-eight, Morgan, Krupp or Ford. And your ‘liberators’ are called Mussolini, Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.

I tell you: Only you yourself can be your liberator!

This sentence makes me hesitate. I contend to he a fighter for pureness and truth. And now when it is a matter of telling you the truth about yourself, I hesitate, because I am afraid of you and your attitude towards the truth. To say the truth about you is dangerous to life. The truth also is life saving, but it becomes the loot of every gang. If that were not so would not be what you are and where you are.

My intellect tells me: ‘Tell the truth at any cost.’ The Little Man in me says- ‘It is stupid to expose oneself to the Little Man, to put oneself at his mercy. The Little Man does not want to hear the truth about himself He does not want the great responsibility which is his. He wants to remain a Little Man, or wants to become a little great man. He wants to become rich, or a party leader, or commander of the legion, or secretary of the society for the abolition of vice. But he does not want to assume the responsibility for his work, for; food provision housing, traffic, education, research, administration, or whatever it may be.’

The Little Man in me says: ‘You have become a great man known in Germany, Austria, Scandinavia, England, America, Palestine, etc. The Communists fight you. The ” saviors of cultural values” hate you. Your students love you. Your former patients admire you. Those afflicted with the emotional plague are after you. You have written twelve books and 150 articles about the misery of life, the misery of the Little Man. Your findings and theories are being taught at universities; other great and lonely men say that you are a very great man. You are likened to the intellectual giants in the history of science. You have made the greatest discovery in centuries, for you have discovered the cosmic life energy and the laws of living functioning. You have made cancer comprehensible. You went from country to country, because you told the truth. Now, take it easy. Enjoy the fruits of your efforts; enjoy your fame. In a few years, your name will be heard everywhere. You have done enough. Now quit, and withdraw to your study to work on the functional law of nature!’

Thus speaks the Little Man in me who is afraid of you, the Little Man.

For a long time, I was in close contact with you because I knew your life from my own experience and because I wanted to help you. I kept up the contact because I saw that I really helped you and that you wanted my help, often enough with tears in your eyes. Very gradually, I began to see that you were willing to take my help but incapable of defending it. I did defend it and fought hard for you in your stead. Then came your Fuhrers and smashed my work. You remained silent and followed them. Now I kept up the contact in order to learn how one could help you without perishing, either as your Fuhrer or your victim. The Little Man in me wanted to win you, to ‘save you’, he wanted to be regarded by you with the same reverence, which you have for ‘higher mathematics’ because you have not the faintest idea what it is all about. The less you understand, the more ready you are to give reverence. You know Hitler better than Nietzsche, Napoleon better than Pestalozzi. A king means more to you than a Sigmund Freud. The Little Man in me would like to win you as it is commonly done, with the means of the Fuhrer. I become afraid of you when it is the Little Man in me who would ‘lead you to freedom’. You might discover yourself in me and me in you might get scared and kill you in me. For this reason I have ceased to be willing to die for your freedom to be anybody’s slave.

I know you cannot understand what I just said: to be anybody’s slave’ is not a simple matter.

In order no longer to be the slave of one individual master, order to become anybody’s slave, one first has to eliminate this one individual oppressor, say, the Tsar. This political murder one cannot commit without having high ideals of freedom and revolutionary motives. One then founds a revolutionary freedom party under the leadership of a truly great man; say Jesus, Marx, Lincoln or Lenin. The truly great man takes freedom deadly seriously. In order to establish it in a practical way, he has to surround himself with many little men, helpers and errand boys, because he cannot do the gigantic job himself. Furthermore, you would not understand him; let him fall by the wayside, if he had nor surrounded himself with little great persons. Surrounded by many little great persons, he conquers power for you, or a piece of truth, or a new, better belief. He writes gospels, freedom laws, etc., and counts on your help and seriousness. He pulls you out of your social morass. In order to keep together the many little great persons, in order not to loose your confidence the, the truly great man has m sacrifice piece after niece of his greatness which he was able to attain only in the deepest intellectual loneliness, far from you and your everyday noise and yet in close contact with your life. In order to be able to lead you he has to tolerate your transforming him into an inaccessible God. You would have no confidence in him if he had remained the simple man that he was, a man who, say, can love woman even though he has no marriage certificate. In this way, you yourself produce your new master. Promoted to the role of new master, the great man loses his greatness because this greatness consisted in his straightforwardness, simplicity, courage and real contact with life. The little gnat persons, who derived their greatness from the gnat man, assume the high posts of finance, diplomacy, government, sciences and arts and you – remain where you were: in the morass. You continue to go in rags for the sake of a ‘Socialist future’ or a ‘Third Reich’. You continue to live in dirt houses with straw roofs, the walls of which are covered with manure. But you are proud of your palace of culture. You are satisfied with the illusion that you govern – until the next war and the downfall of the new masters.

In distant nations, little men have industriously studied your craving for being anybody’s slave and have thus learned how, with little intellectual effort, one can become a little great man. These little great men come from your ranks, not from palaces and mansions. They have hungered and suffered like you. They shorten the process of changing masters. They have learned that a hundred years of hard intellectual work on your freedom, of personal sacrifice for your happiness, even of; sacrificing life for your freedom, was much ma high a price for your enslavement. What really great thinkers for freedom had elaborated and had suffered in 100 years could be destroyed in less than five years. The little men from your ranks then shorten the process: they do it more openly and more brutally. More than that, they tell you in so many words that you and your life, your family and your children, amount to nothing, that you are stupid and subservient, that one can do with you what one pleases. They do not promise you personal freedom, but national freedom. They do not promise you self-confidence but respect for the state not personal greatness, but national greatness. Since ‘personal freedom’ and ‘personal greatness’ are nothing to you but vague concepts, while ‘national freedom’ and ‘the interests of the state’ make your mouth water like a bone that of a dog, you loudly acclaim them. None of these little men pays the price for genuine freedom, as did Jesus, Karl Marx or Lincoln. They do not love you; they despise you, since you despise yourself, Little Man. They know you well; far better than a Rockefeller or- the Tories know you. They know your worst weaknesses m a way in which only you should know them. They have sacrificed you to a symbol, and you carry them to power over yourself. Your masters have been elevated by you, yourself, and are nurtured by you, in spite of the fact – or, rather, because of the fact- that they dropped all masks. Indeed, they told you in so many words: ‘You are an inferior being without any responsibility, and you are going to remain so.’ And you call them ‘Saviors’, ‘New Liberators’ and yell: ‘Heil, Heil!’, and ‘Viva, Viva!’

This is why I am afraid of you Little Man, deadly afraid. For on you depends the fate of humanity I am afraid of you because there is nothing you flee as much from as yourself. You are sick, very sick, Little Man. It is not your fault. But it is your responsibility to rid yourself of this sickness. You would have long since shaken off your oppressors had you not tolerated oppression and often actively supported it. No police force in the world would be powerful enough to sup- press you if you had only a mite of self-respect in practical everyday living, if you knew, deep down, that without you life would not go on for even an hour. Did your liberator tell you that? No. He called you the ‘Proletarian of the World’, but he did not tell you that you, and only you, are responsible for your life (instead of being responsible for the ‘honor of the fatherland’)

You must come to realize that you made your little men your own oppressors, and that you made martyrs out of your truly great men; that you crucified and murdered them and let them starve; that you did not give a thought to them andtheir labors for you; that you have no idea to whom you owe whatever fulfillments there are in your life.

You say, ‘Before I trust you, I want to know your philosophy of life.’ When you hear my philosophy of life, you will run to your District Attorney, or to the ‘Committee against Un-American Activities’, or to the FBI, the GPU or the ‘Yellow Press’, or the Ku-Klux-Klan or the ‘Leaders of the Proletarians of the World’, or, finally, you will simply run:

I am not a Red or a Black or a White or a Yellow.

I am not a Christian or a Jew or a Mohammedan, a Mormon, Polygamist, Homosexual, Anarchist or Boxer.

I embrace my wife because I love her and desire her and not because I happen to have a marriage certificate or because I am sexually starved.

I do not beat children; I do not fish and do not shoot deer or rabbits. But I am a good shot and like to hit the bull’s-eye. I do not play bridge and do nor give parties in order to spread my theories. If my teachings are correct they will spread by themselves.

I do not submit my work to any health official unless he has mastered it better than I have. And I determine who has mastered the knowledge and the intricacies of my discovery.

I strictly observe every law when it makes sense, but I fight it when it is obsolete or senseless. (Don’t run to the District Attorney, Little Man, for he does the same if he is a decent individual.)

I want children and adolescents to experience their bodily happiness in love and to enjoy it without danger.

I do not believe that, in order to be religious in the good and genuine sense of the word, one has to ruin one’s love life and has to become rigid and shrunken in body and soul.

I know that what you call ‘God’ actually exists, but in a different way from what you think: as the primal cosmic energy in the universe, as your love in your body, as your honesty and your feeling of nature in you and around you.

I would show the door to anybody who, under whatever flimsy pretext, were to try to interfere with my medical and educational work with patient or child. In any open court, I would ask him some very simple and clear questions, which he could not answer without being ashamed ever after. For I am a working man who knows what a man really is inside, who knows that he amounts to something, and who wants work to govern the world, and not opinions about work. I have my own opinion, and I can distinguish a lie from the truth, which, every hour of the day, I use like a tool and which after use, I keep clean.

I am very deeply afraid of you, Little Man. That has not always been so. I myself was a Little Man, among millions of Little Men. Then I become a natural scientist and a psychiatrist, and I learned to see how very sick you are and how dangerous you are in your sickness. I learned to see the fact that it is your own emotional sickness, and not an external power, which every hour and every minute, suppresses you, even though there may be no external pressure. You would have overcome the tyrants long ago had you been alive inside and healthy. Your oppressors come from your own ranks as in the past they came from the upper strata of society. They are even littler than you are, Little Man. For it takes a good dose of littleness to know your misery from experience and then to use this knowledge to suppress you still better, still harder.

You have no sense organ for the truly great man. His way of being his suffering, his longing, his raging, his fight for you are alien to you. You cannot understand that there are men and women who are incapable of suppressing or exploiting you, and who really want you to be free, real and honest. You do not like these men and women for they are alien to your being. They are simple and straight; to them, truth is what tactics is to you. They look through you, not with derision, but pained at the fate of humans; but you feel looked- through and sense danger. You acclaim them only, Man, when many other Little Men tell you that that these men are great. You are afraid of the great man, of his closeness to life and his love for life. The great man loves you simply as a living animal, as a living being. He does not want to see you, suffer as you have suffered for thousands of years. He does not want to hear you babble as you have babbled for thousands of years. He does not want to see you as a beast of burden because he loves life and would like to see it free from suffering and ignominy.

You drive really great men to the point where they despise you, where, pained by you and your pettinesses, they withdraw, where they avoid you and, worst of all, begin to pity you. If you, Little Man, happen to be a psychiatrist, say, a Lombroso, you stamp the great man as a kind of criminal, or a criminal who has failed to make good, or a psychotic. For the great man, unlike you, does not see the goal of life in amassing money, or in the socially proper marriage of his daughters, or in a political career, or in academic titles or the Nobel Prize. For this reasons because he is not like you, you call him ‘genius’ or ‘queer’. He, on the other hand, is willing to state that he is no genius, but simply a living being. You call him ‘asocial’ because he prefers the study, with his thoughts, or the laboratory, with his work, to your empty, babbling social ‘parties’. You call him crazy because he spends his money for scientific research instead of buying bonds and stocks, as you do. You presume, Little Man, in your bottomless degeneration, to call the simple, straightforward man ‘abnormal: as compared with you, the prototype of ‘normality’, the ‘homo normalis’. You measure him with your petty yardsticks and find that he does not meet the demands of your normality, You cannot see, Little Man, that it is you who drive him, who is full of love for you and readiness to help you, from social life because you have made it insufferable, be it in tavern or in the palace. Who had made him into what he seems to be after many decades of heart-breaking suffering? It is you, with your irresponsibility, your narrowness; your false thinking your ‘unshakeable axioms’ that cannot survive ten years of social development. Just think of all the things, which you swore to be correct in as few years as have elapsed between the First and the Second World War. How much of that have you honestly recognized to be erroneous, how much of it have you retracted? Absolutely nothing, Little Man. The truly great man thinks cautiously, but once he has gotten hold of an important idea, he thinks in long-range terms. It is you, Little Man, who maker a pariah out of the great man when his thought is correct and lasting and your thought is petty and ephemeral. In making him a pariah, you plant the dreadful seed of loneliness in him. Not the seed of loneliness, which produces great deeds, but the seed of the fear of being misunderstood and maltreated by you. For you are ‘the people’, ‘public opinion’ and ‘social conscience’. Have you, Little Man, ever honestly thought about the gigantic responsibility involved in this? Have you ever honestly asked yourself whether you think correctly or not, from the standpoint of long-term social happenings, or of nature, or of great human deeds, say, of a Jesus? No, you did not ask yourself whether your thinking was erroneous. Instead, you asked yourself what your neighbor was going to say about it, or whether your honesty might cost you money. This, Little Man, and nothing else, is what you asked yourself.

After thus having driven the great man into loneliness, you forgot what you did to him. All you did was to utter other nonsense, to commit another little meanness, to administer another deep hurt. You forget. But it is of the nature of the great men not to forget, but also not to take revenge, but, instead, to try to UNDERSTAND WHY YOU ACT SO SHABBILY. I know that this also is alien to your thinking and feeling. But believe me: if you indict pain a hundred, a thousand, a million times, if you inflict wounds that cannot heal – even though the next moment you no longer know what you did – the great man suffers for your misdeeds in your place, not because these misdeeds are great, but because they are petty. He would like to know what moves you to do things like these to smear your marital partner because he or she has disappointed you: to torture your child because he does not please a vicious neighbor; to look with scorn on a kind person and to exploit him; to take where you are given and to give where it is demanded of you, but never to give where you are given with love; to give another kick to a fellow who is down or about to go down; to lie where truth is required, and always to persecute truth instead of the lie. You are always on the side of the prosecutors, Little Man.

In order to gain your favor, Little Man, in order to gain your useless friendship, the great man would have to adjust himself to you, would have to talk the way you do, would have to adorn himself with your virtues. But if he had your virtues, your language and your friendship, he would no longer be great and true and simple. The proof: your friends who talked the way you wanted them to talk have never been great men.

You do not believe that your friend could do something great. Secretly, you despise yourself, even when – or particularly when – you make the greatest display of your dignity; and since you despise yourself you cannot respect him who is your friend. You cannot believe that somebody who sat at the table with you or lived in the same house with you could achieve anything great. In your proximity, Little Man it is difficult to think. One can only think about you, not with you. For you choke any great sweeping thought. As a mother you say to your child, which explores its world: ‘That’s not a thing for children.’ As a professor of biology you say: ‘That’s nothing for decent students. What, doubt the theory of the air germs?’ As a teacher you say: ‘Children are to be seen and not to be heard.’ As a wife you say: ‘Ha! Discovery! You with your discovery! Why don’t you go to the office like everybody else and make a decent living?’ But what is said in the newspaper you believe, whether you understand it or not.

I tell you, Little Man: You have lost the feeling for the best that is in you. You have strangled it, and you murder it wherever you detect it in others, in your children, your wife, your husband, your father and your mother. You are little and you want to remain little.

You ask how I know all this? I’ll tell you:

I have experienced you, I have experienced myself in you, I have, as a therapist freed you from your pettinesses, I have, as an educator, often led you to straightforwardness and openness. I know how you defend yourself against straightforwardness; I know the terror that strikes you when you are asked to follow your true, genuine being.

You are not only little, Little Man. I know you have your ‘big moments’ in life, moments of ‘rapture’ and ‘elation’, of ‘soaring up’. But you don’t have the stamina to soar higher and higher, to let your elation carry you up and up. You are afraid of soaring, afraid of height and depth. Nietzsche has told you this much better, long ago. But he did not tell you why you are that way. He tried to make you into a superman, an ‘Ubermench’; in order to overcome the human in you. His ‘Ubermench’ became your ‘Fuhrer Hitler’. And you remained the ‘Ubermench’.

I want you to stop being an ‘Ubermench’ and want you to become yourself. Yourself, instead of the newspaper you read or the poor opinion that you hear from your vicious neighbor. I know that you do not know what and hear you really pre deep down. In the depth, you are what a deer is, or your God, your poet or your wise man. But you believe that you are a member of the Legion, the bowling club or the Ku-Klux-Klan. And since you believe this, you act as you do. This, too, you have been told by others: by Heinrich Mann in Germany as long as twenty-five years ago, and in America by Upton Sinclair, Dos Passes and others. But you didn’t know of Mann or Sinclair. You know only the champion Al Capone. Faced with the choice between a library and a brawl, you will unquestionably choose the brawl.

You beg for happiness in life, but security is more important to you, even if it costs you your spine or your life. Since you have never learned to create happiness, or enjoy and protect it, you do not know the courage of the upright individual. You want to know Little Man, how you are? You listen on the radio to the announcements of laxatives, dental creams and deodorants. But you fail to hear the music of propaganda. You fail to perceive the bottomless stupidity and the disgustingly bad taste of these things, which are designed to catch your ear. Have you ever paid close attention to the jokes, which a master of ceremonies makes about you in the nightclub? Jokes about you, about himself, about your whole small miserable world. Listen to your laxatives propaganda and you learn who and how you are.

Listen, Little Man: The misery of human existence becomes spotlighted by every one of these petty misdeeds. Every one of your pettinesses makes the hope for an improvement of your lot recede farther. This is cause for grieving, Little Man, deep, heart-breaking grieving. In order not to feel this grief, you make bad little jokes, and call it ‘folk humor’. You hear the joke about yourself, and you laugh heartily with the others.

You do not laugh because you make fun of yourself. You laugh at the Little Man, but you don’t know that you laugh at yourself, that one laugh at you. Millions of Little Men do not know that one laughs at them. Why does one laugh at you, Little Man, so openly, so heartily, with such malicious joy, all through the centuries! Has it ever struck you as hear ridiculous ‘the people’ are presented in the movies? I will tell you why one laughs at you, because I take you very, very seriously.

With the greatest consistency, your thinking always misses the truth, just as a playful sharpshooter is able consistently a, hit right besides the bull’s-eye. You don’t think so? I’ll show you. You could have long since become the master of your existence, if only your thinking were in the direction of the truth. But you think like this:

‘It’s all the fault of the Jews.’ — What’s a Jew?’ I ask. ‘People with Jewish blood,’ is your answer. ‘What’s the difference between Jewish blood and other blood?’ This question stumps you; you hesitate, become confused, and answer: ‘I mean the Jewish race.’ ‘What is race?’ I ask. ‘Race? Why, that’s simple; just as there is a German race, so there is a Jewish race. ‘What characterizes the Jewish race?’ ‘Well, a Jew is dark-haired, has a long hooknose and sharp eyes. The Jews are avaricious and capitalistic. ‘‘Have you ever seen a Mediterranean Frenchman or Italian together with a Jew? Can you distinguish them?’ ‘Well, not really.’ ‘What, then, is a Jew? The blood picture shows no difference; he does not look different from a Frenchman or Italian. And have you ever seen German Jews?’ ‘Sure, they look like Germans.’ ‘And what is a German?’ ‘A German belongs to the Nordic Aryan race.’ ‘Are the Indians Aryans?’ ‘Sure.’ ‘Are they Nordic?’ ‘No.’ ‘Are they blond?’ ‘No.’ ‘So you see, you don’t know what is a German and what is a Jew.’ ‘But there are Jews.’ ‘Certainly there are Jews, just as there are Christians and Mohammedans.’ I mean the Jewish religion.’ ‘Was Roosevelt a Dutchman?’ ‘No.’ ‘Why do you call a descendant of David a Jew if you don’t call Roosevelt a Dutchman?’ ‘With the Jews it’s different.’ ‘What’s different?’ ‘I don’t know.’

That’s the way you drive, Little Man. From your drivel you create armed formations and these slay ten million people as ‘Jews’ though you cannot even tell what a Jew is. That’s why one laughs at you, why one avoids you when one has serious work to do, that’s why you stick in the morass. When you say ‘Jew’ you make yourself feel superior. You have to do that because you really feel miserable. And you feel miserable because you are precisely that which you murder in the alleged Jew. This is only a tiny bit of the truth about you, Little Man.

You feel your pettiness less when you say ‘Jew’, arrogantly or contemptuously. It is only recently that I have found that out. You call somebody a ‘Jew’ if he arouses too little or too much respect in you. You set out arbitrarily to determine who is a ‘Jew’. But I do not concede this right to you, be you a little Aryan or a little Jew. Only I and nobody else in this world has the right to determine who I am. I am, biologically and culturally, a mongrel, and I am proud of being the intellectual and physical result of all classes and races and nations, proud of not being of a ‘pure race’ or belonging to a ‘pure class’ like you, of not being chauvinistic like you, the little Fascist of all nations, races and classes. I hear that in Palestine you did not want a Jewish technician because he is not circumcised. I have nothing more in common with Jewish Fascists than with any others. Why, Little Jew, do you go back only to Sem, and not to the protoplasm? To me, the living begins in the plasmatic contraction, and not in a rabbi’s office.

It took many million years to develop you from a jellyfish to a terrestrial biped. Your biological aberration, in the form of rigidity, has lasted only six thousand years. It will take a hundred or five hundred or maybe five thousand years before you rediscover nature in you, before you find the jellyfish in yourself again. I discovered the jellyfish in you and described it to you in dear language. When you heard about it the first time, you called me a new genius. You will remember, it was in Scandinavia; at a time you were looking for a new Lenin. But I had more important things to do and declined this role. You have also proclaimed me to be a new Darwin, or Mary or Pasteur, or Freud. I told you long ago that you too would be able to talk and write like me, if you only would not always yell, Hail, Hail, Messiah! For this victorious yelling deadens your mind and paralyses your creative nature.

Do you not persecute the ‘illegitimate mother’ as an immoral being, Little Man? Don’t you make a strict distinction between children ‘born in wedlock’ who are ‘legitimate’ and children ‘born out of wedlock’ who are ‘illegitimate’? Oh you poor creature, you don’t understand your own words: You venerate the child Christ. The child Christ was born by a mother who had no marriage certificate. Thus, without having any idea of it, you venerate in the child Christ your longing for sexual freedom, you Little Henpecked Man. You made the ‘illegitimately’ born child Christ the Son of God, who did not know illegitimate children. But then, as the Apostle Paul, you began to persecute the children of true love and to give the children of true hatred the protection of your religious laws. You are a miserable Little Man!

You run your automobiles and trains over the bridges, which the great Galileo invented. Do you know, Little Man, that the great Galileo had three children, without a marriage license? That you don’t tell your school children. And did you not torture Galileo for this reason also?

And you know, Little Man in the ‘fatherland of Slavic Peoples’, that your great Lenin, the greatest father of all proletarians of the world, abolished your compulsive marriage when he came to power? And do you know that he himself had lived with his wife without a marriage license? And did you not have, through your Fuhrer of all Slavs, the old laws of compulsive marriage re-established, because you did not know that you should let Lenin’s big deed live?

Of all this you know nothing at all, for what is truth to you or history, or the fight for your freedom, and who are you, anyhow, to have an opinion of your own?

You have no inkling of the fact that it is your pornographic mind and your sexual irresponsibility, which put you in the shackles of your marriage laws.

You feel yourself miserable and small, stinking, impotent, rigid, lifeless and empty. You have no woman, or if you have one, you only want to ‘lay’ her in order a, prove the ‘man’ in you. You don’t know what love is. You are constipated and take laxatives. You smell bad, your skin is clammy; you don’t feel your child in your arm and so you treat it as a puppy that can be beaten up.

All your life you were bothered by your impotence. It invaded every thought of yours. It interfered with your work. Your wife left you because you were unable to give her love. You suffer from phobias, nervousness and palpitations. Your thoughts revolve around sexuality. Somebody tells you of sex-economy, which understands you and would like to help you. It would like to make you live your sexuality at night so that during the day you would be free of sexual thoughts and capable of doing your work. It would like to see your wife happy in your arms instead of desperate. It would like to see your children rosy instead of pale, loving instead of cruel. But you, hearing of sex-economy, say: ‘Sex isn’t everything. There are other important things in life.’ That’s the way you are, Little Man.

Or you are a ‘Marxist: a ‘professional revolutionary’, a would-be ‘Fuhrer of the proletarians of the world’. You want to free the world from its sufferings. The deceived masses run away from you, and you run after them, yelling: ‘Stop, stop, you proletarian masses! You just can’t see yet that I am your liberator! Down with capitalism!’ I talk to your masses, Little Revolutionary; I show them the misery of their small lives. They listen, full of enthusiasm and hope. They crowd into your organizations because they expect to find me there. But what do you do? You say: ‘Sexuality is a petitbourgeois invention. It is the economic factors that count.’ And you read Van de Velde’s book on love techniques.

When a great man set out to give your economic emancipation a scientific basis you let him starve. You killed the first inroad of truth against your deviation from the laws of life. When this first attempt of his was successful, you took over its administration and thus killed it a second time. The first time the great man dissolved your organization. The second time, he had died in the meantime and could no longer do anything against you. You did not understand that he found, in your work, the living power, which creates values. You did not understand that his sociology wanted to protect your society against your state. You don’t understand anything at all.

And even with your ‘economic factors’ you don’t get anywhere. A great, wise man worked himself to death to show you that you have to improve economic conditions if you want to enjoy your life; that hungry individuals are unable to further culture; that all conditions of life, without exception, belong here; that you have to emancipate yourself and your society from all tyranny. This true, great man made only one mistake when he tried to enlighten you: he believed in your capacity for emancipation. He believed you were capable of securing your freedom once you had conquered it. And made another mistake: that of letting you, the proletarian, be a ‘dictator’.

And what did you, Little Man, do with the wealth of knowledge and ideas coming from this great man? Of all of it, only one word kept ringing in your ears: dictatorship! Of all that a great mind and a big warm heart had poured out, a word remained: dictatorship. Everything else you threw over board, freedom, clarity and truth, the solution of the problems of economic slavery, the method of thinking ahead; everything, but everything, went overboard. Only one word, which had been unhappily chosen though well meant, stuck you: dictatorship!

From this small negligence of a great man you have built a giant system of lies, persecution, torture, goalers, hangmen, secret police, espionage and denunciation, uniforms, Marshals and medals – but everything else you have thrown overboard. Do you begin to understand a little better how you are, Little Man? Not yet? Well, let’s try again: ‘economic conditions’ of your happiness in life and love you confused with ‘machinery’; the emancipation of human beings with the ‘greatness of the state’; the rising of millions with the parade of cannons; the liberation of love with the rape of every woman you could lay your hands on when you came to Germany; the elimination of poverty with the eradication of the poor, weak and helpless; infant care with the ‘breeding of patriots’; birth control with medals for ‘mothers with ten children’. Have you not suffered it yourself, this idea of yours of the mother with ten children?

In other countries, too, the unfortunate little word, ‘dictatorship’, rang in your ears. There, you put it into resplendent uniforms and you created from your midst the little, impotent, mystical and sadistic official who led you into the Third Reich and led sixty million of your kind to the grave. And you keep yelling, Hail, Hail Hail!

That’s the way you are, Little Man. But nobody dares tell you what you are like. For one is afraid of you and wants you to be small, Little Man.

You devour your happiness. Never have you enjoyed happiness in full freedom. That’s why you greedily devour happiness, without taking responsibility for securing happiness. You were kept from learning to take care of your happiness, to nurture it as a gardener nurtures his flowers and the farms his crops. The great searchers and poets and sages fled from you because they wanted to take care of their happiness. In your proximity, Little Man, it is easy to devour happiness but difficult to protect it.

You don’t know what I am talking about, Little Man? I’ll tell you: The discoverer works hard, for ten, twenty or thirty years, without let-up, on his science, or machine, or social idea. He has to carry the heavy burden of what is new all by himself. He has to suffer your stupidities, your erroneous little ideas and ideals, he has to comprehend and analyze them, and, finally, has to replace them by his deeds. In all this, you do not help him, Little Man. Not in the least. On the contrary, You don’t come and say: ‘Listen, fellow, I see how hard you work I also realize that you work on my machine, my child, my wife, my friend, my house, my fields, in order to improve things. For a long time I have suffered from this and that, but I could not help myself. Now, can I help you to help me?’ No, Little Man, you never come to your helper to help. You play cards, or you yell yourself hoarse at a prizefight, or you slave away dully in an office or a mine. But never do you come to help your helper. You know why? Because the discoverer, to begin with has nothing to offer but thoughts. No profit, no higher wages, no union contract, no Christmas bonus and no easy way of living. All he has to give out are cares, and you don’t want any cares, you have more than enough already.

But if you just stayed away, not offering or giving help, the discoverer would not feel unhappy about you. After all, he does not think and worry and discover ‘for’ you. He does all this because his living functioning drives him to do it. The taking care of you and the pitying you he leaves to the party leaders and the churchmen. What he would like to see is that you finally become capable of taking care of yourself.

But you are not content with not helping; you disrupt and spit. When the discoverer finally, after long and hard work has come to understand why you are incapable of giving your wife happiness in love, you come and say that he is a sexual swine. You have no inkling of the fact that you say this because you have to keep down the sexual swine in yourself and that is why you are incapable of love. Or, when the discoverer has just found out why people die of cancer, en masse, and if you, Little Man, happen to be a Professor of Cancer pathology, with a steady salary, you say that the discoverer is a faker; or that he does not understand anything about the air germs; or that he spends or gets too much money for his research; or you ask whether he is a Jew or a foreigner; or you insist that you have a right to examine him, in order to find out whether he is qualified to work on ‘your’ cancer problem, the problem you cannot solve; or you prefer to see many, many cancer patients die rather than to admit that he has found what you so badly need if you are to save your patients. To you, your professoria1 dignity, or your bank account or your connection with the radium industry means more than truth and learning. And that’s why you are small and miserable, Little Man.

That is, not only do you not help, but you disturb maliciously work that is done for you or in your stead. Do you understand now why happiness escapes you? It wants to be worked for and wants to be earned. But you only want to devour happiness, that’s why it escapes you; it does not want to be devoured by you.

In the course of time, the discoverer succeeds in convincing many people that his discovery has practical value, that, it makes it possible to treat certain diseases, or to lift a weight, or to blast rocks, or to penetrate matter with rays so that the inside becomes visible. You do not believe it until you read it in the newspapers, for you don’t trust your own senses. You respect the one, who despises you, and you despise yourself; that is why you cannot trust your own senses. But when the discovery is written up in the newspapers, then you come, not walking, but running. You declare the discoverer to be a ‘genius’ the same man whom yesterday you called faker, a sexual swine, a charlatan or a dangerous man who undermined public morals. Now you call him a ‘genius’. You don’t know what a genius is, as you don’t know what ‘Jew’ is, or ‘truth’ or ‘happiness’? I’ll tell you, Little Man, Jack London has told you in his MARTIN EDEN. I know you have read it thousands of times, but you have not grasped it: ‘Genius’ is the trademark you put on your products when you put them on sale. If the discoverer (who only yesterday was a sex ‘swine’ or ‘crazy’) is a ‘genius’, then it is easier for you to devour the happiness, which he has put in the world. For now there come very many little men and cry, in unison with ‘Genius, genius.’ And people come in droves and eat products from your hand. If you are a physician, you will many more patients; you can help them much better than previously and can make much more money. ‘Well,’ you say Little Man, ‘nothing bad about that.’ No, there is certainly nothing bad about earning money with honest and good work. But it is bad not to give back anything to the discovery, not to take care of it, but only to exploit it. And that is precisely what you are doing. You do nothing to further the development of the discovery. You take it over mechanically, greedily, stupidly. You do not see its possibilities or its limitations. As to the possibilities, you don’t have the vision and as to the limitations, you don’t recognize them and go beyond them. If, as a physician or bacteriologist you know typhoid a cholera to be infectious diseases, you look for a micro-organism in the cancer disease and. thus stultify decades of research. Once a great man showed you that machines follow certain laws; then you build machines for killing, and you take the living to be a machine also. In this, you made a mistake not for three decades, but for three centuries; erroneous concepts became inextricably anchored in hundreds of thousands of scientific workers; more, life itself was severely damaged; for from this point on – because of your dignity, or your professorship, your religion, your bank account or your character amour – you persecuted, slandered and otherwise damaged anyone who really was on the track of the living function.

True enough, you want to have ‘geniuses’ and you are willing to pay them homage. But you want a good genius, one with moderation and decorum, one without folly, in brief, a seemly, measured and adjusted genius, not an unruly, untamed genius which breaks down all your barriers and limitations You want a limited, wing-clipped and dressed-up genius whom without blushing, you can triumphantly parade through the streets of your towns.

That’s the way you are, Little Man. You are good at scooping up and ladling in, but you cannot create. And that’s why you are what you are, all your life in a boring office or at the designing board or in the marital straitjacket or a teacher who hates children. You have no development and no chance for a new thought, because you have always only taken, only ladled in what somebody else has presented to you on a silver platter. You don’t see why this is so, why it cannot be otherwise? I’ll tell you, Little Man, for I have come to know you as an animal become rigid when you came to me with your inner emptiness or your impotence or your mental disorder. You can only ladle in and only take, and cannot create and cannot give, because your basic bodily attitude is that of holding back and of spite; because panic strikes you when the primordial movement of LOVE and of GIVING stirs in you. This is why you are afraid of giving. Your taking, basically, has only one meaning: You are forced continuously to gorge yourself with money, with happiness, with knowledge, because you feel yourself to be empty, starved, unhappy, not genuinely knowing nor desirous of knowledge. For the same reason you keep running away from the truth, Little Man: it might release the love reflex in you. It would inevitably show you what I, inadequately, am trying to show you here. And that you do not want, Little Man. You only want to be a consumer and a patriot. ‘Listen to that! He denies patriotism, the bulwark of the state and of its germ, the family! Something has to be done about it!’ That’s the way you yell, Little Man, when one reminds you of your psychic constipation. You don’t want to listen to it or know it. You want to yell, Hurrah! All right, but why don’t you let me tell you quietly why you are incapable of happiness? I see fear in your eyes; this question seems to concern you deeply. You are for ‘religious tolerance’. You want to be free to like your own religion. Well and good. But you want more than that: you want your religion to be the only one. You are tolerant as to your religion, but not tolerant as to others. You become rabid when somebody, instead of a personal God, adores nature and tries to understand it. You want a marital partner to sue the other, to accuse him or her of immorality or brutality when they no longer can live together. Divorce on the basis of mutual agreement you do not recognize, you little descendant of great rebels. For you are frightened by your own lascivity. You want the truth in a mirror, where you can’t grasp it. Your chauvinism derives from your bodily rigidity, your psychic constipation, Little Man. I don’t say this derisively, but because I am your friend; even though you slay your friends when they tell you the truth. Take a look at your patriots: They do not walk; they march. They do not hate the enemy; instead, they have ‘hereditary enemies’ whom they exchange every ten years or so making them hereditary friends, and back into hereditary enemies. They do not sing songs; they yell martial airs. They do not embrace their women; they ‘lay’ them and ‘do’ so and so many ‘numbers’ a night. There is nothing you can undertake against my truth, Little Man. All you can do is to slay me, as you have slain so many others of your true friends: Jesus, Rathenau, Karl Liebknecht, Lincoln, and many others. In Germany, you used to call it ‘putting down’. In the long run, it has put you down, by the millions. But you continue to be a patriot. You long for love, you love your work and make a living from it, and your work lives on my knowledge and that of others. Love, work and knowledge know no fatherlands, no customs barriers, and no uniforms. They are international and comprise all humanity. But you want to be a little patriot, because you are afraid of genuine love, afraid of your responsibility for your own work, afraid of knowledge. This is why you can only exploit the love, work and knowledge of others but can never create yourself. This is why you steal your happiness like a thief in the night; this is why you cannot see happiness in others without getting green with envy. ‘Stop thief! He is a foreigner, an immigrant. But I am a German an American, a Dane, a Norwegian!’ Ah, stop it, Little Man! You are and remain the eternal immigrant and emigrant. You have entered this world quite accidentally and will silently leave it again. You yell because you are afraid. You feel your body go rigid and gradually dry up. That’s why you are afraid and call for your police. But your police has no power over my truth either. Even your policeman comes to me, complaining about his wife and his sick children. When he dons his uniform he hides the man in himself; but he cannot hide from me; I have seen him naked too. ‘Is he registered with the police? Are his papers in order? Has he paid his taxes? Investigate him. He is a danger to the state and the honor of the nation!’ Yes, Little Man, I have always been properly registered, my papers are in order and I have always paid my taxes. What you worry about is not the state or the honor of the nation. You tremble with fear lest I disclose your nature in public as I have sent it in my medical office. That’s why you look for ways of convicting me of a political crime, which would put me in jail for years. I know you, Little Man. If you happen to be an Assistant District Attorney, you are not interested in protecting the law or the citizen; what you need is a whacking ‘case’ in order to advance more quickly to the post of District Attorney. That’s what the little Assistant District Attorneys want. They did the same thing with Socrates. But you never learn from history. You murdered Socrates, and because you still do not know that you did, you continue to remain in the morass. You accused him of undermining your good morals. He still undermines them, poor Little Man. You murdered his body but you could not murder his mind. You continue to murder, in the interest of ‘order’; but you murder in a cowardly, cunning way. You could not look me in the eyes when you accuse me publicly of immorality. For you know which one of us is immoral, lascivious and pornographic. Somebody once said that among his numerous acquaintances there was only one he had never heard tell a dirty joke; I was the one. Little Man, whether you be a District Attorney, a judge or a chief of police, I know your little dirty jokes and I know the source from which they stem. So, better keep quiet. Well, you might succeed in showing that my income tax payment was a hundred dollars short; or that I drove across a state line with a woman; or that I talked nicely with a child in the street. But it is in your mouth that each of these three sentences assumes its special timbre, the slippery, equivocal, mean sound of vile action. And since you know of nothing else, you think that I am like you. No, Little Man, I am not like you and never was like you in these things. It does not matter whether you believe it or not. True, you have a revolver and I have knowledge. The roles are divided. You ruin your own existence, Little Man, in the following manner: In 1924 I suggested a scientific study of the human character. You were enthusiastic. In 1928 our work achieved its first tangible results. You were enthusiastic and called me a ‘spiritus rector’. In 1933 I was to publish these results in book form, in your publishing house. Hitler had just come to power. I had learned to understand the fact that Hitler came to power because your character is armored. You refused to publish the book in your publishing house, the book which showed you how you produce a Hitler. The book appeared nonetheless, and you continued to be enthusiastic. But you tried to kill it by silence, for your ‘President’ had declared himself against it. He had also advised mothers to suppress the genital excitations of infants by means of holding the breath. For twelve years, then, you kept silent about the book, which aroused your enthusiasm. In 1946 it was reissued. You acclaimed it as a ‘classic’. You still are enthusiastic about my book. Twenty-two long, anxious, eventful years have passed since I began to teach you that what is important is not individual treatment but the prevention of mental disorders. For twenty- two long years I taught you that people get into this or that frenzy, or remain stuck in this or that lamentation because their minds and bodies have become rigid and because they can neither give love nor enjoy it. This, because their bodies, unlike that of other animals, cannot contract and expand in the love act. Twenty-two years after I had first said this, you now say to your friends that what is important is not individual treatment but the prevention of mental disorders. And you act again you have acted for thousands of years: you mention the big goal without saying how it could be reached. You fail to mention the love life of the masses of the people. You want to ‘prevent, mental disorders’. That you can say; it is harmless and dignified. But you want to do it without tackling the prevailing sexual misery. You do not even mention it; that is not allowed. And as a physician, you remain stuck in the morass. What would you think of a technician who reveals the technique of flying but fails to disclose the secrets of motor and the propeller. That’s the way you act, the technician of psychotherapy. You are a coward. You want to pick up the cherries out of my pie, but you don’t want the thorns of my roses. Don’t you, too, crack dirty jokes about me, ‘the prophet of the better orgasm’? Don’t you, little psychiatrist? Have you never heard the plaints of young brides whose bodies had been violated by impotent husbands? Or the anguish of adolescents who burst with unfulfilled love? Is your security still more important to you than your patient? How long are you going to continue putting your dignity in the place of your medical task? How long are you going to overlook the fact that your tactics cost the life of millions? You set security before the truth. When you hear of the orgone, which I discovered you do not ask: ‘What can it do? How can it cure patients.’ No, you ask: ‘Is he licensed to practice medicine in the state of Maine’. You don’t know that your little licenses can do no more than disturb my work, a little; they cannot prevent it. You don’t know that I have worth everywhere on this earth, as the discoverer of your emotional plague and of your life energy; that nobody can examine me who does not know more than I. Now as to your freedom giddiness. Nobody, Little Man, has ever asked you why you have not been able to get freedom for yourself, or why, if you did, you immediately surrendered it to some new master. ‘Listen to that! He dares to doubt the revolutionary upsurge of the proletarians of the world, he dares to doubt democracy! Down with the counter-revolutionary! Down!’ Don’t get excited, little Fuhrer of all democrats and all proletarians of the world. I believe that your real freedom of the future depends more on the answer to this one question then on tens of thousands of resolutions of your Party Congresses. ‘Down with him! He sullies the honor of the nation and of the avant-garde of the revolutionary proletariat! Down! Against the wall!’ Your yelling ‘Viva!’ and ‘Down!’ is not one step closer to your goal, Little Man. You have been believing that your freedom is secured when you ‘put people against the wall’. For once, put yourself in front of a mirror. ‘Down, down!’ Stop a minute, Little Man I do not want to belittle you I only want to show you why up to now you have not been able to get freedom or to hold it. Aren’t you interested in that at all? ‘Down, down, down!’ All right, I shall be brief: I shall tell you how the Little Man in you behaves if you happen to find yourself in a situation of freedom. Let’s assume you are a student at an Institute, which stands for sexual health in children and adolescents. You are enthusiastic over the ‘splendid idea’ and want to participate the fight. This is what happened in my house: My student’s sat at their microscopes, observing earth bions. You were sitting in the orgone accumulator, naked. I called to you to take part in the observations. Whereupon you jumped out of the accumulator naked, amidst the girls and women, exposing yourself. I reprimanded you immediately, but you did not see why I should have. I, on my part, could not understand why you did not see. Later, in an extended discussion you admitted that that had been precisely your concept of freedom in an Institute, which advocates sexual health. You soon found out that you had the deepest contempt for the Institute and its basic idea, and that was why you had behaved indecently. Another example, to show how again and again you gamble away your freedom. You know and I know, and everybody knows, that you go around in a perpetual state of sexual starvation; that you look greedily at every member of the other sex; that you talk with your friends about love in terms of dirty jokes; in brief, that you have a dirty, pornographic fantasy. One night, I heard you and your friends walk along the street, yelling in unison: ‘We want women! We want women! Concerned with your future, I built up organizations in which you might learn better to understand your misery in life and to do something about it. You and your friends came to these meetings in droves. Why was that, Little Man? At first I thought it was because of an honest, burning interest in improving your life. Only much later did I recognize what really motivated you. You thought that here was a new kind of brothel, where one could get a girl easily and without shelling out money. Realizing that, I smashed these organizations, which were designed to help you with your life. Not because I think it is bad to find a girl in a meeting of such an organization, but because you approached it with a filthy mind. That’s why these organizations were destroyed, and, again you remained stuck in the morass… You wanted to say something? ‘The proletariat has been spoiled by the bourgeoisie. The Fuhrers of the proletariat will help. They are going to clean up the mess with a mailed fist. Apart from that, the sexual problem of the proletariat is going to solve itself.’ I know what you mean, Little Man. That’s exactly what they did in your fatherland of proletarians: to let the sexual problem solve itself. The result was shown in Berlin, when the proletarian soldiers raped women all night long. You know that as a fact. Your champions of the ‘revolutionary honor’, ‘the soldiers of the proletarians of the world’ have sullied you for centuries to come. You say such things happened ‘only in the war’? Then I’m going to tell you another true story: A would-be Fuhrer, full of enthusiasm for the dictatorship of the proletariat, was also enthusiastic about sex-economy. He came to me and said: ‘you are wonderful. Karl Marx has shown the people how they can be free economically. You have shown the people how they can be free sexually: you have told them: “Go out and fuck as much as you like.’” In your head, everything becomes a perversion. What I call the loving embrace becomes, in your life, a pornographic act. You don’t even know what I’m talking about, Little Man. This is why, again and again, you sink back into the morass. If you, Little Woman, by mere chance, without any special qualifications, have become a teacher, simply because you did not have children of your own, you do untold damage. Your job is to handle and educate children. In education, if one takes it seriously, this means correctly to manage the children’s sexuality. In order to handle the children’s sexuality, one must, oneself have experienced what love it. But you are fat, awkward and unattractive. That alone is enough to make you hate every charming, alive body with deep and bitter hatred. What I am blaming you for is not that you are fat and unattractive; not that you have never enjoyed love (no healthy man would give it to you); not that you do not understand love in the children. What I am blaming you for is that you make a virtue out of your unattractiveness and your incapacity for love, and that, with your bitter hatred, you strangle the love in the children, if you happen to work in a ‘progressive school’. This is a crime, ugly Little Woman. The harmfulness of your existence consists in your alienating the affection of healthy children from their healthy fathers; in our considering the healthy love of a child a pathological symptom. It consists in your being barrel-shaped, your going around like a barrel, your thinking like a barrel, your educating like a barrel; in your not modestly retiring to a small corner of life, but, instead, trying to impose upon this life your barrel shape, your falseness, and your bitter hatred hidden behind your false smile. And, Little Man, because you let such women handle your healthy children, let them drip their bitterness and their poison into healthy souls, are you what you are, live as you live, think as you think, and is the world as it is. Again, this is what you are like, Little Man: You come to me in order to learn what I, in hard work, had found out and had fought for. Without me, you would have become a small, unknown general practitioner in some small town or village. I made you great by giving you my knowledge and my therapeutic technique. I taught you to see the manner in which freedom is suppressed, every minute of the day, and how lack of freedom is nurtured. Then you assume a responsible position as the exponent of my work in some other country. You are free in the full sense of the word. I trust your honesty. But you feel inwardly dependant on me became you are unable to develop much out of yourself. You need me in order to drink knowledge from me, to get self-confidence, vision into the future, and, more than anything else, development. All this I give to you gladly, Little Man. I ask nothing in return. But then you declare that I ‘raped’ you. You become fresh, in the belief of being free. But to confuse impudence with freedom has always been the sign of the slave. Pointing to your freedom, you refuse to send reports about your work. You feel yourself free – free from cooperation and responsibility. And that’s why, Little Man, you are what you are, and that’s why the world is what it is. Do you know, Little Man, how an eagle would feel if he were hatching chickens’ eggs? At first the eagle thinks that he will hatch little eagles whom he is going to bring up to be big eagles. But what comes out of the eggs is always nothing but little chicks. Desperately, the eagle keeps hoping that the chicks will turn into eagles after all. But no, at the end they are nothing but cackling hens. When the eagle found out this, he had a hard time suppressing his impulse to eat up all the chicks and cackling hens. What kept him from doing so was a small hope. The hope, namely, that among the many cackling chicks there might be, one day, a little eagle capable of growing up into a big eagle, capable like himself, to look from his lofty perch into the far distance, in order to detect new worlds, new thoughts and new forms of living. It was only this small hope that kept the sad, lonely eagle from eating up all the cackling chicks and hens. They did not see that they were being hatched by an eagle. They did not see that they lived on a high, steep rock, far above the damp, dark valleys. They did not look into the distance like the lonely eagle. They only gobbled and gobbled and gobbled whatever the eagle brought home to them. They let him warm them under his powerful wings when it rained and stormed outside, when he withstood the storm without any protection. Or, if things got tougher, they threw sharp little rocks at him from ambush, in order to hit and hurt him. When he realized this maliciousness his first impulse was to tear them to shreds. But he thought about it and began to pity them. Sometime, he hoped, there would be, there would have to be, among the many cackling, gobbling and short-sighted chickens, a little eagle capable of becoming like himself. The lonely eagle, to this day, has not given up this hope. And so he continues to hatch little chickens. You do not want to become an eagle, Little Man, and that is why you get eaten by the vultures. You are afraid of the eagles, and so you live together in great herds, and are being eaten up in big herds. For some of your chickens have hatched the eggs of vultures. And the vultures have become your Fuhrers against the eagles, the eagles who wanted to lead you into farther, better distances. The vulture taught you to eat carrion and to be content with just a few grains of wheat. In addition, they taught you to yell, ‘Hail, Hail, Great Vulture!’ Now you starve and die, in great masses, and you still are afraid of the eagles who hatch your chickens. All these things, Little Man, you have built on sand: your house, your life, your culture and civilization, your science and technic, your love and your education of children. You don’t know it, you don’t want to know it, and you slay the great man who tells it to you. You come, in great distress, asking again and again the same questions: ‘My child is stubborn, he smashes everything, he cries out in nightmares, he can’t concentrate on his schoolwork, he suffers from constipation, he is pale, he is cruel. What should I do? Help me!’ Or: ‘My wife is frigid, she doesn’t give me any love. She tortures me, she has hysterical fits, and she runs around with a dozen men. What shall I do? Tell me!’ Or: ‘A new, even more dreadful war has broken out, and this after we had fought the war to end all wars. What should we do?’ Or: ‘The civilization of which I am so proud is collapsing, as a result of this inflation. Millions of people have nothing to eat, they starve, and they murder, steal, deteriorate, and give up all hope. What should are do?’ ‘What should I do?’ ‘What should one do?’ This is your eternal question through the centuries. The fate of great achievement, born from a way of living which sets truth before security, is this: to be greedily devoured by you and to be shit out again by you. A great many great, courageous and lonely men have told you long since what you should do. Again and again you have twisted their teachings, torn them apart and destroyed them. Again and again you tackled them from the wrong end, made the small error instead of the great truth the guiding line of your life, in Christianity, in the teaching of socialism, in the teaching of the sovereignty of the people, in absolutely everything you touched, Little Man. Why do you do this, you ask? I don’t believe that your question is seriously meant. You will feel murderous when you hear the truth: You built your house on sand and you did all this because you are incapable of feeling life in yourself, because you kill love in your child even before it is born; because you cannot tolerate any alive expression, any free, natural movement, because you cannot tolerate it, you get scared and ask: ‘What is Mr. Jones, and what is Judge Smith going to say?’ You are cowardly in your thinking, Little Man because real thinking is accompanied by bodily feelings, and you are afraid of your body. Many great men have told you: ‘Go back to your origin – listen to your inner voice – follow your true feelings – cherish love.’ But you were deaf to what they said, for you had lost your ear for such words. They were lost in vast deserts, and the lonely criers perish in your dreadful desert emptiness, Little Man. You had the choice between Nietzsche’s elevation to the Umbermensch and Hitler’s degradation into the Umbermensch. You cried, Heil! and chose the Umbermensch . You had the choice between the genuinely democratic constitution of Lenin and the dictatorship of Stalin. You chose the dictatorship of Stalin. You had the choice between Freud’s elucidation of the sexual core of your emotional disease and his theory of cultural adaptation. You chose his cultural philosophy, which did not give you a leg to stand on, and forgot about the theory of sex. You had the choice between the majestic simplicity of Jesus and the celibacy of Paul for his priests and life-long compulsive marriage for yourself. You chose celibacy and compulsive marriage, forgetting about Jesus’ simple mother who bore her child Christ out of love only. You had the choice between Marx’s realization of the productivity of your living working power, which alone produces the value of goods, on the one hand, and the idea of the state on the other. You forgot about the living in your work and chose the idea of the state. During the French Revolution, you had the choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and kindness to the gallows. In Germany, you had the choice between Goering and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your chief of police, and you murdered your true friends. You had the choice between Julius Streicher and Waiter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had the choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had the choice between the cruel Inquisition and the truth of Galileo. You tortured to death the great Galileo, from whose discoveries you are profiting, by submitting him to utter humiliation. In this twentieth century, you have again brought to flower the methods of the Inquisition. You had the choice between an understanding of mental disease and shock therapy. You chose shock therapy, in order not to have to realize the gigantic dimensions of your own misery, in order to continue to remain blind where only open, dear eyes can help. You have the choice between ignorance of the cancer cell and my disclosure of its secrets, which could and will save millions of human lives. You keep repeating the same stupidities about cancer in periodicals and newspapers and keep silent about the knowledge, which might save your child, your wife or your mother. You starve and die by the million, but you fight the Mohammedans about the sacredness of cows, Little Indian Man. You go in rags, Little Italian and Little Slav of Trieste, but you have no other worry than whether Trieste is ‘Italian’ or ’Slavic’. I thought Trieste was a harbor for ships from all over the world. You hang the Hitlerites after they have murdered millions of people. What were you thinking before they had killed millions? Aren’t dozens of corpses enough to make you think? Does it take millions of corpses to stir your humanity? Each one of these pettinesses elucidates the gigantic misery of the animal, man. You say: ‘Why do you take all this so damn seriously? Do you feel responsible for all and every evil?’ In saying this, you condemn yourself. If you, Little Man out of millions, carried even a mite of your responsibility, the world would look different, and your great friends would not die of your pettinesses. It is because you don’t take any responsibility that your house stands on sand. The ceiling collapses over you, but you have a ‘proletarian’ or a ‘national’ honor. The floor collapses under you, but going down you still yell, ‘Heil, great Fuhrer, long live German, Russian, Jewish honor!’ The water pipes break, your child is drowning; but you continue to advocate ‘discipline and order’ which you reach your child with beatings. Your wife lies in bed with pneumonia, but you, Little Man, consider what is a foundation of rock the product of a ‘Jewish fantasy’. You come running to me and ask me: ‘My good, dear, great Doctor! What should I do? My house is collapsing, the wind blows through it, my child and my wife are sick, and so am I. What should I do?’ The answer is: Build your house on rock. The rock is your own nature, which you kill in yourself, the bodily love of your child, the dream of love of your wife, your own dream of life at the age of sixteen. Exchange your illusions for a bit of truth. Send your politicians and diplomats packing. Forget about your neighbor and listen to what is in you; your neighbor too will be grateful. Tell your fellows in work all over the world that you are willing to work for life only, and no longer for death. Instead of running to the executions of your hangmen and hanged, create a law for the protection of human life and goods. Such a law will be part of the rock under your house. Protect the love of your small children against the attacks of lascivious, ungratified women and men. Prosecute the gossiping spinster; expose her publicly or put her in a reform school instead of the adolescents who long for love. Do no longer try to outdo your exploiter in exploitation when you are in a position to guide work. Throw away your striped pants and your high hat and don’t ask for a license to embrace your wife. Make contact with people in other countries, for they are like you, in their good qualities and bad. Let your child grow up as nature (or ‘God’) has made it. Don’t try to improve nature. Try, instead to understand and protect it. Go to a library instead of a prizefight to foreign countries instead of Coney Island. And, most important THINK CORRECTLY, listen to your inner voice which nudges you gently. You have your life in your own hand. Do not entrust it to anybody else, least of all to the Fuhrers you elected. BE YOURSELF! Many great men have told you so. ‘Listen to this reactionary petit-bourgeois individualist! He does not know the inexorable course of history. “Know thyself,” he says. What bourgeois nonsense! The revolutionary proletariat of the world, led by its beloved Fuhrer, the father of all peoples, of all the Russians, of all the Slavs, will free the people I Down with the individualists and anarchists!’ And long live the Fathers of all peoples and all Slavs, Little Man! Listen, Little Man, I have some serious predictions to make: You are taking over the rule of the world, and it makes you tremble with fear. For centuries to come, you will murder your friends and will hail as your masters the Fuhrers of all peoples, proletarians and all the Russians. Day after day, week after week, decade after decade, you will praise one master after the other; and at the same time you will not hear the plaints of your babies, the misery of your adolescents, the longings of your men and women, or, if you hear them, you will call them bourgeois individualism. Through the centuries, you will shed blood where life should be protected and will believe that you will achieve freedom with the help of the hangman; thus, you will find yourself again and again in the same morass. Through the centuries, you will follow the braggarts and will be deaf and blind when LIFE, YOUR LIFE, calls to you. For you are afraid of life, Little Man, deadly afraid. You will murder it, in the belief of doing it for the sake of ‘socialism’, or ‘the state’, or ‘national honor’, or ‘the glory of God’. There is one thing you don’t know nor want to know: That you yourself create all your misery, hour after hour, day after day; that you do not understand your children, that you break their spines before they have had a chance really to develop them; that you steal love; that you are avaricious and crazy for power; that you keep a dog in order also to be a ‘master’ Through the centuries you will miss your way, until you and your like will die the mass death of the general social misery; until the awfulness of your existence will spark in you a first weak glimmer of insight into yourself. Then, gradually and gropingly, you will learn to look for your friend, the man of love, work and knowledge, will learn understand and respect him. Then you will begin to understand that the library is more important for your life than the prizefight; a thoughtful walk in the woods better than parading; healing better than killing; healthy self-confidence better than national consciousness, and modesty better than patriotic and other yelling. You think the goal justifies the means, even the vile means. You are wrong: The goal is in the path on which you arrive at it. Every step of today is your life of tomorrow. No great goal can be reached by vile means. That you have proven in every social revolution. The vileness or inhumanity of the path to the goal makes you vile or inhuman, and the goal unattainable. ‘But how, then, shall I reach my goal of Christian love, of socialism, of the American constitution?’ Your Christian love, your socialism, your American constitution lie in what you do every day, what you think every hour, in how you embrace your mate and how you experience your child, in how you look at your work as YOUR SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY, in how you avoid becoming like the suppressor of your life. But you, Little Man, misuse the freedoms given you in the constitution in order to overthrow, it, instead of making it take root in everyday life. I saw you as a German refugee misuse Swedish hospitality. At that time, you were a would-be Fuhrer of all the suppressed people on earth. You remember the Swedish institution of smorgasbord. Many foods and delicacies are spread out, and it is left to the guest what and how much he will take. To you this institution was new and alien; you could not understand how one can trust human decency. You told me with malicious joy how you did not eat all day in order to gorge yourself on the free food in the evening. ‘I have starved as a child,’ you say. I know, Little Man, for I have seen you starve, and I know what hunger is. But you don’t know that you perpetuate the hunger of your children a million times when you steal smorgasbord, you could-be savior of all the hungry. There are certain things one just does not do: such as stealing silver spoons, or the woman, or smorgasbord in a hospitable home. After the German catastrophe I found you half-starved in a park. You told me that the ‘Red Help’ of your party had refused to help you because you could not show your parry membership, having lost your party book. Your Fuhrers of all the hungry distinguish red, white and black hungry people. But we know only one starving organism. This is the way you are in small matters. And this is the may you are in big matters: You set out to abolish the exploitation of the capitalist era and the disdain for human life, and to get recognition of your rights. For there was, a hundred years ago, exploitation and contempt for human life, and thanklessness. But there also was respect for great achievements, and loyalty for the giver of great things, and recognition of gifts. And what have you done, Little Man? Wherever you enthroned your own little Fuhrers, the exploitation of your strength is more acute than a hundred years ago, the disdain for your life is more brutal, and there is no recognition of your rights at all. And where you are still trying to enthrone your own Fuhrer, every respect for achievement has disappeared and been replaced by stealing the fruits of the hard work done by your great friends. You don’t know what recognition of a gift is, for you think you would no longer be a free American or Russian or Chinese, if you were to respect and recognize things. What you set out to destroy flourishes more vigorously than ever; and what you should safeguard and protect like your own life, you have destroyed. Loyalty you consider ‘sentimentality’ or a ‘petty-bourgeois habit’, respect for achievement slavish boot-licking. You do not see that you are boot-licking where you should be irreverent and that you an ungrateful when you should be loyal. You stand on your head and you believe yourself dancing into the realm of freedom. You will wake up from your nightmare, Little Man, finding yourself helplessly lying on the ground. For you steal where you are being given, and you give where you are being robbed. You confuse the right to free speech and to criticism with irresponsible talk and poor jokes. You want to criticize but you don’t want to be criticized, and for this reason you get torn apart. You always want to attack without exposing yourself to attack. That’s why you always shoot from ambush. ‘Police! Police! Is his passport in order? Is he really a Doctor of Medicine? His name is not in WHO IS WHO, and the Medical Association fights him.’ The police won’t help here, Little Man. They can catch thieves and can regulate traffic, but they cannot get freedom for you. You have destroyed your freedom yourself, and go on destroying it, with an inexorable consistency. Before the first ‘World War’, there were no passports in international travel; you could travel wherever you wished. The war for ‘freedom and peace’ brought the passport controls, and they stuck to you like lice. When you wanted to travel some 300 kilometers in Europe, you first had to ask for permission in the consulates of some ten different nations. And so it still is, years after the termination of the second war to end all wars. And so it will remain after the third and nth war-to-end-allwars. ‘Listen! He sullies my patriotism, the honor and the glory of the nation!’ Oh, be quiet Little Man. Then are two kinds of tones: the howling of a storm about mountaintops, and – your fart. You are a fart, and you believe to smell of violets. I cure your neurotic misery and you ask whether I am in WHO IS WHO? I understand your cancer, and your little Commissioner of Health prohibits my experimenting with mice. I taught your physicians to understand you medically, and your Medical Association denounces me to the police. You are mentally ill, and they administer electric shocks to you just as in the Middle Ages they used the chain or the whip. Be quiet, Dear Little Man. Your lie is all too miserable. I do not want to save you, but I shall finish my talk to you, even if you should come around in a white nightshirt and a mask, with a rope in your cruel, bloody hand, to hang me. You cannot hang me, Little Man, without stringing up yourself. For I represent your life, your feeling of the world, your humanity, your love and your joy in creating. No, you cannot murder me, Little Man. Once I was afraid of you, just as before I had believed in you too much. But I have gone beyond you, and now I see you in the perspective of thousands of years, forwards and backwards in time. I want you to lose your fear of yourself. I want you to live more happily and more decently. I want you to have a body which is alive instead of rigid, I want you to love your children instead of hating them, to make your wife happy instead of ‘maritally’ torturing her. I am your physician, and since you inhabit this planet, I am a planetary physician; I am not a German, or a Jew, or a Christian or an Italian, I am a citizen of the earth. For you, on the other hand, there exist only angelical Americans and beastly Japanese. ‘Grab him! Examine him!’ Does he have a license to practice medicine? Proclaim a Royal decree that he cannot practice without the consent of the king of our free country! He does experiments about my pleasure functions! Jail him! Throw him out of the country!’ I have myself acquired the permission to engage in my activities. Nobody can give it to me. I have founded a new science, which finally understands your life. You will avail yourself of it in ten, a hundred or a thousand years as in the past you have gobbled up other teachings when you were at the end of your rope. Your Minister of Health has no power over me, Little Man. He would have influence only if he had the courage to know my truth. So he goes back to his country and tells people that I am interned in an American mental hospital, and he appoints as Inspector General of Hospitals a mediocre man who, in an attempt to deny the pleasure function, had falsified experiments. I, on the other hand, write this talk to you, Little Man. Do you want more proof of the impotence of your powers that be? Your authorities, Commissioners of Health and Professors could not enforce their prohibitions against understanding your cancer. I did my dissecting and microscopic work against their explicit prohibition. Their travels to England and France to undermine my work were to no avail. They remained stuck where they had always been, in pathology. I, on the other hand, have saved your life more than once, Little Man. ‘When I bring my Fuhrer of all proletarians to power in Germany, we shall put him against the wall! He spoils our proletarian youth! He contends that the proletariat suffers from incapacity for love just as does the bourgeoisie! He makes brothels out of our youth organizations. He contends that I am an animal! He destroys my class consciousness!’ Yes, I destroy your ideals, which cost you your good sense and your head, Little Man. You want to see your great eternal hope in the mirror only, where you can’t grasp it. But only the truth in your own fist will make you the master of this earth. ‘Throw him out of the country! He undermines quiet and order. He is a spy of my eternal enemies. He has bought a house with money from Moscow (or is it Berlin?)’ You don’t understand, Little Man. A little old woman was afraid of mice. She was my neighbor and knew that I kept experimental mice in my basement. She was afraid the mice might crawl under her skirt and between her legs. She would not have this fear if she had ever enjoyed love. It was in these mice that I learned to understand your cancerous putrefaction, Little Man. You happened to be my landlord, and the poor little woman asked you to evict me. And you, with all your courage, your wealth of ideals and ethics, evicted me. I had to buy a house in order to continue to examine the mice for you, undisturbed by you and your cowardice. After this, what did you do, Little Man? As an ambitious little District Attorney you wanted to use the famous dangerous man to further your career. You said I was a German, or, again a Russian spy. You had me jailed. But it was worth it, seeing you sitting then at my hearing, blushing all over. I felt sorry for you little servant of the state, so miserable were you. And your secret agents did not speak at all well of you when they searched my house for ‘espionage material’. Later, I met you again, this time in the person of a small Judge from the Bronx, with the unfulfilled ambition for a seat on a higher bench. You accused me of having books of Lenin and Trotsky in my library. You did not know Little Man, what a library is for. I told you that I also had Hitler and Buddha and Jesus and Goethe and Napoleon and Casanova in my library. For, so I told you, in order to understand the emotional plague, one had to know it intimately from all sides. This was new to you, Little Judge. ‘Jail him! He is a Fascist! He despises the people!’ You despise the people’, Little Judge. You despise the people, for you do not administer their rights, but instead, further your career. This, too, you have been told by many great men; but, of course you never read them. I have respect for the people when I expose myself to the great danger of telling them the truth. I might play bridge with you and joke with you. But I do not sit at the same table with you. For you are a poor advocate of the Bill of Rights. ‘He is a Trotskyite! Jail him! He incites the people, the Red Dog!’ I do not incite the people, but your self-confidence, your humanity, and you can’t stand it. For what you want is to get votes and advance in position, you want to be Judge of the Superior Court or Fuhrer of all proletarians. Your justice and your Fuhrer mentality is the rope around the neck of the world. What did you do with Wilson, this great, warm person? To you, the Judge from the Bronx, he was a ‘dreamer’; to you, the would-be Fuhrer of all proletarians, he was an ‘exploiter of the people’. You murdered him, Little Man, with your indolence, your empty talk, your fear of your own hope. You almost murdered me, too, Little Man. Do you remember my laboratory, ten years ago? You were technical Assistant. You had been out of work and had been recommended to me, as an outstanding Socialist, member of a government party. You received a good salary and were free in the full sense of the word. I included you in all deliberations, for I believed in you and your ‘mission’. Do you remember what happened? You went crazy with freedom. For days I saw you walk around with your pipe in your mouth, doing nothing. I did not understand why you did not work. When I came into the laboratory in the morning, you waited provocatively for me to greet you first. I like to greet people first, Little Man. But if one waits for me to do so, I get angry because I am, in your sense, your ‘senior’ and ‘Boss’. I let you misuse your freedom for a few days, and then had a talk with you. With tears in your eyes, you admitted that you did not know what to do with this new kind of regime. You were not used to freedom. In your previous position, you had not been allowed to smoke in the presence of your chief you were supposed only to speak when spoken to, you would-be Fuhrer of all proletarians. But now, when you had genuine freedom, you behaved impertinently and provocatively. I understood you and did not fire you. Then you left and told some abstinent court psychiatrist about my experiments. You were the secret informer, one of the hypocrites and plotters who instigated the newspaper campaign against me. That’s the way you are, Little Man, when you enjoy freedom. Contrary to your intentions, your campaign set my work ahead by ten years. So I take leave of you, Little Man. I am no longer going to serve you, and I do not want to be slowly tortured to death by my concern for you. You cannot follow me into the far distances into which I move. You would be terrified if you had an inkling of what awaits you in the future. For you are taking over the rule of the world. My lonely reaches are a part of your future. But as yet I do not want you as a traveling companion. As a traveling companion, you are harmless only in the tavern, not where I am going. ‘Down with him! He derides the civilization, which I, the Man In the Street, have built up. I am a free man in a free democracy. Hurrah!’ You are nothing, Little Man, nothing at all. It is not you who has built up this civilization, but a very few of your decent masters. You haven’t any idea what you are building when you are on a building job. And when somebody tells you to take responsibility for the building you call him a ‘traitor to the proletariat’ and run to the Father of all Proletarians who does not tell you so. Nor are you free, Little Man. You have no idea what freedom is. You would not know how to live in freedom. Who has carried the emotional plague to victory in Europe? You, Little Man. And in America? Think of Wilson. ‘Listen, he accuses me, the Little Man! Who am I, what power have I, to influence the President of the United States?’ I do my duty, I do what my boss tells me, and I do not meddle in high politics.’ And when you drag thousands of men, women and children to the gas chambers, you also just do what you am told to do, is that it, Little Man? You are so harmless that you don’t even know what’s going on. You are only a poor devil who has nothing to say, who has no opinion of his own, and who are you anyhow to meddle in politics? I know; I have heard it often enough. But I ask you: Why don’t you do your duty when somebody tells you that you are responsible for your work, or tells you not to beat your children, or not to follow my dictators? Where is your duty, your harmless obedience, then? No, Little Man, you do not listen when truth speaks, you listen only when noises are being made. And then you yell, Heil! You are cowardly and cruel without any sense of your true duty, that of being human and of safeguarding humanity. You are poor at imitating the man who knows and so good at imitating the robber. Your films, radio programmes and ‘comic books’ are full of murder. You will have to drag yourself and your pettinesses through the centuries before you can become your own master. I separate from you in order better to serve your future. For in the distance you cannot slay me, and you have more respect for my work when it is at a distance. You have contempt for that which is close to you. You put your General or Field Marshal on a pedestal in order to be able to respect him, even though he is contemptible. That’s why the great man has kept at a distance from you ever since the world has been writing its history. ‘He is a megalomaniac! He’s gone crazy, absolutely crazy!’ I know, Little Man, you are quick with the diagnosis of craziness when you meet a truth you don’t like. And you feel yourself as the ‘homo normalis’. You have locked up crazy people, and the normal people manage this world. Who then is to blame for all the misery? Not you, of course, you only do your duty, and who are you to have an opinion of your own? I know, you don’t have to repeat it. It isn’t you that matters, Little Man. But when I think of your newborn children, of how you torture them in order to make them into ‘normal’ human beings after your image, then I am tempted to come close to you again, in order to prevent your crime. But I also know that you have taken care to protect yourself well by your institution of a Department of Education. I want to take you for a walk through this world, Little Man and show you what you are and what you were, in the present and in the past in Vienna, London and Berlin, as the ‘bearer of the popular will’, as the member of some creed. You can find yourself everywhere, and you recognize yourself whether you are a Frenchman, a German or a Hottentot, if you had the courage to look at yourself. ‘Listen! He offends my honor! He sullies my mission!’ I don’t do any such thing, little Man. I shall be very glad if you set me right, if you prove that you are able to look at and to recognize yourself. You have to give proof the same way a contractor who builds a house has to. The house must be there and it must be livable. The contractor has no right to yell, ‘He offends my honor,’ when I show him that he only talks about ‘the mission of housing construction’ instead of actually building houses. In the same way you have to prove that you are the bearer of the future of humanity. You can no longer hide, a coward, behind your ‘honor of the nation’ or of the ‘proletariat’. For you have disclosed too much of yourself, Little Man. As I say, I am taking leave of you. It took many years and it cost many painful sleepless nights to do so. Your would-be Fuhrer of all proletarians are not so complicated Today they are your Fuhrer and tomorrow they do hack writing for a little paper. They change their convictions as one changes shirts. I do not. I continue to care for you and your fate. But since you are incapable of respecting anyone who is close to you, I have to put some distance between us. Your great grandchild will be the heir of my labors. I wait for him to enjoy my fruits as I have been waiting for thirty years for you to do so. You, instead kept yelling, ‘Down with capitalism’ or, ‘Down with the American Constitution!’ Follow me, Little Man, I want to show you some snapshots of yourself. Don’t run. It is ugly, but salutary, and not so terribly dangerous. About a hundred years ago you learned to parrot the physicists who built machines and said there was no soul. Then came a great man and showed you your soul, only he did not know the connection between your soul and your body. You said, ‘Ridiculous! “Psychoanalysis!” Charlatanry! You can analyze urine, but you cannot analyze the psyche.’ You said this because in medicine you knew nothing but urine analysis. The fight for your mind lasted some forty years. I know this hard fight, because I, too, fought it for you. One day you discovered that one can make a lot of money with the sick human mind. All one has to do is to let a patient come daily for an hour over a period of some years and have him pay a certain fee for every hour. Then, and not until then, did you begin to believe in the existence of the mind. In the meantime, knowledge of your body has quietly grown. I found that your mind is a function of your life energy, that, in, other words, there is a unity between body and mind. I followed this track, and I found that you reach out with your life energy when you feel well and loving, and that you retract it to the center of the body when you are afraid. For fifteen years you kept silent about these discoveries. But I continued on the same track and found that this life energy, which I termed ‘orgone’, is also found in the atmosphere, outside of your body. I succeeded in seeing it in the dark and to devise apparatus, which magnified it and made it light up. While you were playing at cards or were torturing your wife and ruining your child, I sat in a darkroom, many hours a day, over two long years, to make sure that I had discovered your life energy. Gradually, I learned to demonstrate it to other people, and I found that they saw the same thing I saw. If you are a doctor who believes that the mind is a secretion of the endocrine glands, you tell one of my cured patients that my therapeutic success was the result of ‘suggestion’. If you suffer from obsessive doubts and fear of the dark, you say about the phenomena, which you just observed that they were due to ‘suggestion’ and that you feel as if in a spiritualist session. That’s the way you are, Little Man. You blabber just as hopelessly about the ‘soul’ in 1945 as you denied its existence in 1920. You have remained the same Little Man. In 1984 you will just as unconcernedly make a lot of money with the orgone, and will just as unconcernedly sully, doubt, defame, kill by silence and ruin another truth as you did with the discovery of the mind and with that of the cosmic energy. And you remain the ‘critical’ Little Man who yells, Heil! here and Heil! there. You remember what you said about the discovery that the earth does not stand still but rotates and moves in the space? Your answer was the silly joke that now the glasses would fall off a waiter’s tray. That was a few centuries back and, of course, you have forgotten, Little Man. All you know of Newton is that ‘he saw an apple fall from a tree’, and all you know of Rousseau is that he ‘wanted to go back to nature’. What you learned from Darwin is only the ‘survival of the fittest: but not your origin from the apes. Of Goethe’s Faust, that you like to quote so freely, you have understood as much as a cat understands of mathematics. You are stupid and vain, empty and apish, Little Man. You always know to evade the essential and to take over what is erroneous. Your Napoleon, this little man with the gold braid, of whom nothing remained but compulsory military training is displayed in your bookshops in large golden letters, but my Kepler, who foresaw your cosmic origin, cannot be found in any bookstore. That’s why you don’t get out of the morass, Little Man. That’s why I have to tell you off when you believe that I have worked and worried for twenty years and sacrificed a fortune in order to ‘suggest’ the existence of the cosmic orgone energy to you. No, Little Man by making all this sacrifice, I have really learned to cure the plague in your body. You don’t believe that. For I heard you say in Norway that ‘if anybody spends that much money for his experiments he must be literally crazy’. I understand this: you judge by yourself. You can only take, you cannot give. That’s why it is inconceivable to you that someone could have his joy in life in giving, just as it is inconceivable to you that one could be together with a member of the other sex without immediately wanting to ‘lay’. I could respect you if you were big in stealing your happiness. But you are a little, cowardly thief. You are clever but; psychically constipated, you are unable to create. Thus, you steal a bone and crawl into a hole to chew it up, as Freud told you once. You congregate around the voluntary giver, the cheerful spender, and suck him dry. You are the sucker and, perversely, you call him the sucker. You gorge yourself with his knowledge, his happiness, his greatness, but you cannot digest what you have swallowed. You shit it out again right away, and it stinks frightfully. Or, in order to maintain your dignity after having committed the theft, you sully your giver, call him- crazy or a charlatan or a seducer of children. Oh, there we are: ‘Seducer of children’. Do you remember, Little Man (you were then the president of a scientific society) how you spread the rumor that I had my children witness the sexual act? This was after I had published my first article on the genital rights of infants. And the other time (you then happened to be the temporary president of some ‘cultural association’ in Berlin) when you spread the rumor that I took adolescent girls for automobile rides into the woods and seduced them? I have never seduced adolescent girls, Little Man. That’s your dirty fantasy, not mine, I love my girl or my wife; I am not like you who are incapable of loving your wife end therefore would like to seduce little girls in the woods. And you, adolescent girl, don’t you dream of your film star? Don’t you take his picture to bed with you? Don’t you approach him and seduce him, pretending to be over eighteen years old? And then? Don’t you go to court and accuse him of rape? He is acquitted, or found guilty, and your grandmothers kiss the hands of the great film star. You wanted to sleep with the film star, but you did not have the courage to take the responsibility. So you accuse him, poor, violated girl. Or you poor, raped woman who experienced more sexual pleasure with her chauffeur than with her husband. Did you not seduce your colored chauffeur who had kept his sexuality more nearly healthy, little white woman? And didn’t you then accuse him of rape, poor help less creature, the victim of an ‘inferior race’? No; of course you were pure, and white, your ancestors came over on the Mayflower, you are a ‘Daughter of This or That Revolution’, a Northerner or a Southerner whose grandfather grew rich by dragging African Negroes to America in chains. How harmless, how pure, how white, how little desirous of the Negro you are poor little woman. You miserable coward, descendant of a sick race of slave-hunters, of a cruel Cortez who lured thousands of trusting Aztecs into a trap in order to shoot them from ambush. You poor daughters of this or that revolution. What have you grasped about the emancipation? What of the strivings of the American revolutionaries, what of Lincoln who freed the slaves for you whom you then turned over to the ‘free market of competition’? Look in the mirror, daughters of revolutions. You will recognize there the ‘Daughters of the Russian Revolution’, you harmless, chaste girls. If you had been able to give love to a man a single time, the life of many a Negro Jew or worker would have been saved. Just as you kill your life in your children so you kill in the Negroes your inkling of love, your frivolous pornographic fantasy of lust. I know you, you girls and women of the rich. What abysmal vileness you breed in your rigid genitals! No, you daughter of this or that revolution, I have no intention of becoming an LLD. or a Commissar.. That I leave to your stiff creatures in robes and uniforms. I love the birds and deer and chipmunks who are close to the Negroes. I mean the Negroes from the jungle, not the ones from Harlem, in stiff collars and zoot suits. I don’t mean the fat Negro women with earrings whose inhibited pleasure turned into the fat of their hips. I mean the svelte, soft bodies of the girls of the South Sea whom you, the sexual swine of this or that Army, ‘lay’; girls who do not know that you take their pure love as you would in a Denver brothel. No, daughter, you long for the living, which as yet has not understood that it is exploited and despised. But your time has come. You have ceased to function as the German racial virgin. You continue to live as the Russian class virgin or as the Universal daughter of the Revolution. In 500 or 1,000 years, when healthy boys and girls will enjoy and protect love, nothing will be left of you but a ridiculous memory. Did you not refuse your auditoriums to Marian Anderson, this voice of the living, Little, Cancerous Woman? Her name will sing into the centuries when no trace will be left of you. I ask myself whether Marian Anderson also thinks into the centuries, or whether she, too, prohibits her child’s love. I don’t know; the living swings in big and small leaps. It is satisfied with life itself. It does not live in you, Little Cancerous Woman. You have spread the fairy tale, and your Little Man has swallowed it, line, hook and sinker, that you are ‘THE SOCIETY’ Little Woman. You are not. True, you announce every day, in the Jewish and Christian papers, that and when your daughter will embrace a man; but this does not interest any serious individual. ‘Society’ is I and the carpenter and the gardener and the teacher and the physician and the factory worker. That is society, and not you, the little, cancerous, stiff, mask-faced woman. You are not life, you are its distortion. But understand why you withdrew into your wealthy fortress. It was the only thing you could do, in the face of the pettiness of the carpenters and the gardeners and the physicians, teachers and factory workers. In the framework of this plague, it was your wisest deed. But your smallness and pettiness is in your bones, with your constipation, your rheumatism, your masks, your denial of life. You are unhappy, poor little woman, because your sons go to ruin, your daughters become whores, your husbands dry up, and your life putrefies, and with it your tissues. You can’t tell me any stories, Little Daughter of the Revolution; I have seen you naked. You are cowardly and always have been. You had the happiness of humanity in your hands, and you have gambled it away. You have bore Presidents, and have endowed them with pettiness. They get photographed pinning medals on people; they smile eternally and do nor dare to call a spade a spade, Little Daughter of the Revolution! You had the world in your hands, and at the end you dropped your atom bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; your son, I mean, dropped them. You dropped your tombstone, Little Cancerous Woman. With this one bomb, you bombed your whole class, your whole race, into the silent grave forever. For you did not have the humanity to warn the men, women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. You did not manage the greatness to be human. For this reason, you will silently disappear like a stone in the sea. It does not matter what you now think or say, you Little Woman who produced idiotic generals. Five hundred years from now, one will laugh and marvel at you. That one does not do so already is part and parcel of the misery of the world. I know what you are going to say, Little Woman. All appearances are in your favor; ‘defense of the country’, etc. I’ve heard that way back in the Old Austria. Have you ever heard a Viennese coach driver yell, ‘Hurrah, mein Kaiser’? No? Well, you only have to listen to yourself; it is the same music. No, Little Woman, I am not afraid of you; there is nothing you can do to me. True, your son-in-law is the District Attorney, or your nephew is the Assistant Tax Collector. You invite him to tea and drop a few words about me. He wants to become District Attorney or Chief Tax Collector, and looks for a victim of ‘law and order’. I know how these things are done. But that sort of thing is not going to save your neck, Little Woman. My truth is stronger than you. ‘He is a one-sided fanatic! Don’t I have any function in society?’ I have only shown you in what way you are small and vile Little Man and Little Woman. I have not even mentioned yet your usefulness and importance. Do you think I would give you a talk fraught with danger to life if you were not important? Your pettiness and meanness seem all the more terrible if seen in the light of your importance and giant responsibility. They say you are stupid. I say you are clever but cowardly. They say you are the offal of human society. I say you are its seed. They say culture needs slaves. I say no culture can be built with slaves. This dreadful twentieth century has made ridiculous every cultural theory evolved since Plato. Human culture does not even exist yet, Little Man! We are only just beginning to comprehend the dreadful deviation and pathological degeneration of the animal, man. This ‘Talk to the Little Man’ or any other decent writing of today is to the culture of 1000 or 5000 years hence as was the first wheel of thousands of years ago to the Diesel locomotive of today. You always think in too short terms, Little Man just from breakfast to lunch. You must learn to think back in terms of centuries and forward in terms of thousands of years. You have to learn to think in the terms of living life, in terms of your development from the first plasmatic flake to the animal man, which walks erect but cannot yet think straight. You have no memory even for things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and so you keep repeating the same stupidities you said2000 years ago. More than that, you cling to your stupidities, such as your ‘race’ ‘class’ ‘nation’ religious compulsion and suppression of love as a louse clings to a fur. You do not dare see how deeply you stick in the morass of your misery. Every once in a while, you stick your head out of the morass to yell, Heil! the croaking of a frog in a marsh is closer to life. ‘Why don’t you get me out of the morass? Why don’t you take part in my party councils, my parliaments, and my diplomatic conferences? You are a traitor! You have fought for me and suffered and sacrificed. Now you insult me!’ I cannot get you out of your morass. The only one who can do that is you yourself. I have never taken put in your councils and conferences because the cry there is always, ‘Down with the essential’ and ‘Let’s talk about the non- essential.’ True, for twenty-five years I have fought for you, have sacrificed my professional security and the warmth of my family for you; I have given a good deal of money to your organizations, have taken part in your parades and hunger marches. True, I have given you thousands of hours as a physician, without compensation; I have gone from country to country for you, and often in your stead, when you yelled yourself hoarse with your I-ah, I-ah, allala! I was literally ready to die for you when, in the fight against the political plague, I drove you around in my car, with the death penalty hanging over my head; when I helped to protect your children against police raids when they walked in demonstration parades; when I spent all my money to establish mental-health clinics where you could get counsel and help. But you only took from me, and never gave anything back. You only wanted to be saved, but in the course of thirty dreadful years of the emotional plague you did not have one fruitful thought. And when the second big war came to an end you found yourself exactly where you were before it broke out. Perhaps a little more to the ‘left’ than the ‘right’, but not one millimeter FORWARD! You gambled away the great French emancipation, and the even greater Russian emancipation you developed into the horror of the world. This terrible failure of yours which only great, lonesome hearts could understand without getting mad at you, without despising you, was followed by the despair of a whole world, that part of the world which was ready to sacrifice everything to you. In all the dreadful years, in a murderous half century, you uttered only platitudes and not a single healing, sensible word. I did not lose heart, for in the meantime I had learned to understand your sickness still better and more deeply. I knew now that you could not possibly think or act other than you did. I recognized the deadly fear of the living in you, a fear which always makes you set out correctly and end wrongly. You don’t understand that knowledge leads to hope. You only pump hope into yourself, not out of yourself. That’s why, in the face of the complete disruption of your world you call me an ‘optimist,’ Little Man. Yes, I am optimistic and full of the future. Why, you ask? I’ll tell you: As long as I clung to you, as you were and are, I was again and again hit in the face by your narrow-mindedness. Thousands of times I had forgotten what you had done to me when I had helped you, and thousands of times you reminded me of your sickness. Until I really opened my eyes and looked you full in the face. At first, I felt contempt and hatred come up in me. But gradually I learned to let my understanding of your sickness take effect against my hatred and my contempt. I was no longer angry at you for your dismal failure in your first attempt at mastery of the world. I began to understand that this was the way it had inevitably to happen, because for thousands of years you had been prevented from living life as it is. I discovered the functional law of the living, Little Man, when you were going around yelling, ‘He is crazy!’ At that time, you happened to be a little psychiatrist with a past in the youth movement and with a heart disease in the future, for you were impotent. Later on, you died of a broken heart, for one does not steal with impunity and does not defame someone without danger to life, if one has a mite of honesty in oneself. And you did have it in a corner of your soul, Little Man. When you turned from friend to enemy, you thought I was finished, and you tried to give me a final kick because you knew I was right and you were unable to follow. When, years later, I was back, like a Johnny-jump-up, this time stronger, clearer, more determined than ever, you were scared to death. And before dying you realized that I had jumped over deep and wide chasms as well as over ditches you had dug in order to ruin me. Had you not proclaimed my teachings as yours in your cautious organization? I tell you: the honest people in the organization knew this; I know it because I have been told so. No, Little Man, tactics lead one only to a premature grave. And since you are dangerous to life, since in your proximity one cannot stick to the truth without being stabbed in the back and without having dirt thrown into one’s face, I have separated myself. I repeat: not from your future, but from your presence. Not from your humanity, but from your inhumanity and pettiness. Only for living life am I still ready to make any sacrifice, but no longer for you, Little Man. Only a very short time ago I realized a gigantic error, which I had entertained for some twenty-five years: I had devoted myself to you and your life because I believed you to be the living, the straightforward, the future and the hope. Like me, many other straightforward and true people hoped to find the living in you. Everyone of them perished. After finding this out, I decided not to perish under your narrow-mindedness and pettiness. For I have important things to do. I have discovered the living, Little Man. Now I no longer confuse you with the living, which I felt in myself and sought in you. Only if I clearly and sharply separate the living, its functions and characteristics, from your way of life, only then will I be able to make a real contribution to the scrutiny of the living and to your future. I know it takes courage to disavow you. But I can continue to work for the future because I do not pity you and because I do not have the urge to be made a little great person as do your miserable Fuhrers. For a short time now; the living has began to rebel when it is being misused. This is the great beginning of your great future, and a dreadful end to all pettiness of all little men. For in the meantime we have realized how the emotional plague works. It accuses Poland of intentions of military aggression just when it was decided to attack Poland. It accuses the rival of the intention of murder when it was just decided to murder him. It accuses healthy life of sexual swinishness just when some pornographic misdeed was hatched out. One has gotten your number, Little Man; one has seen behind your facade of wretchedness and pitiableness. One wants you to determine the course of the world, with your work and your achievements does not want you to replace one tyrant by a worse one. One begins to demand of you ever more strictly that you submit to the rules of life just as you ask it of others; that you improve yourself as you criticize others. One recognizes better and better your gossiping disposition, your greed, your freedom from responsibility, in brief, your general disease which smells up this beautiful world. I know you don’t like to hear this that you prefer to yell, Heill, you bearer of the future of the proletariat or of the Fourth Reich. But I believe you will succeed less than in the past. We have found the key to your secret of thousands of years. You are brutal behind your mask of sociality and friendliness, Little Man. You cannot spend half a day with me without giving yourself away. You don’t believe me? Let me refresh your memory: You remember the beautiful afternoon when, this time as a woodsman, you came to my cabin, looking for work? My puppy dog sniffed you and joyfully jumped up at you. You recognized him as the pup of a splendid hound. You said: ‘Why don’t you put him on the chain, so he gets vicious? This dog is much too friendly.’ I said: ‘I don’t want him to be a vicious dog on the chain. I don’t like vicious dogs.’ My dear little woodsman, I have far more enemies in this world than you, but I still prefer the kindly dog who is friendly with everyone. Yon remember the rainy Sunday when my restlessness about your biological rigidity drove me from my study to a bar? I sat at a table and had a whisky (no, Little Man, I am not 1 drinker, even though I like a drink from time to time), Well, I was having a highball. You had lust come back from overseas, you were a little drunk, and I heard you describe the Japanese as ‘ugly apes’. And then you said with that certain facial expression which I know so well from my therapeutic hours: ‘You know what ought to be done with those Japs out on the West Coast’ Every one of them ought to be strung up, not quickly, but slowly, very slowly, this way …’ and you made the turn on corresponding motion with your hands little Man. The waiter nodded his head approvingly and admired your heroic masculinity. Have you ever held a newborn baby in your arms, Little Patriot? No? For centuries to come, you will string up Japanese spies, American fliers, Russian peasant women, German officers, English anarchists and Greek Communists; you will shoot them, put them on the electric chair or into gas chambers; but nothing of all that will change the constipation of your guts or your mind, your incapacity for love, your rheumatism or your mental illness. No shooting or hanging will pull you out of your morass. Take a look at yourself, Little Man. It is your only hope. You remember the day, Little Woman, when you sat in my study, brimming over with hatred for the man who had separated from you? For many years you had had him under your thumb, together with your mother and your aunts and grand- nephews and cousins, until he began to shrink, for he had to take care of you and all your relatives. Finally, he pulled himself loose, in a last effort to maintain his feeling for life; and since he was not strong enough to gain his inner freedom from you, he came to me. He willingly paid your alimony, three quarters of his income, as required by law, as a penalty for his love of freedom. For he was a great artist, and art as well as genuine science does not tolerate shackles. But all you wanted was to be taken care of, by the man whom you hated bitterly, in spite of the fact that you had a profession of your own. You knew that I would help him to free himself from satisfied obligations. You got mad. You threatened me with the police, for, you said, I wanted to take all his money, taking advantage of his great need for help. In other words, you laid your bad intentions at my door, Poor Little Woman. But you never thought of improving yourself in your profession for that would have meant to be independent. Independent of the man whom for many years you had only hated. Do you believe that in this way you can build up a new world? You are acquainted with Socialists, I heard, who ‘knew all about me’. Don’t you see that you are a type, that there are millions like you who ruin this world? I know you are ‘weak’ – and ‘lonely’ ‘tied to your mother’s apron strings’, and ‘helpless’ you hate your hatred yourself, you can’t stand yourself and are desperate. And that is why you ruin the life of your husband, Little Woman. And you swim in the stream of life as it generally is today. I also know that you have the Judges and District Attorneys on your side, for they have no answer to your misery. I can still see you, little woman secretary in a Federal Court Building, as you put down my past and present, my opinions concerning possessions and Russia and democracy. I am asked for my social position. I say that I am an honorary member in three scientific and literary societies, among them the international Society for Plasmogeny. This seems to be impressive. Next time, an official says to me: ‘There is something queer here. It says you are an Honorary Member of the International Society for Polygamy. Is that correct?’ And we both laugh about your little error, Little Fantastic Woman. Do you understand now why people say vile things about me? Because of your fantasy, and not because of my way of living. Is not all you remember of Rousseau that he canted to go ‘back to nature’, that he neglected his children and sent than to an orphanage) You are vicious, for you see and hear only that which is ugly and not that which is beautiful. ‘Listen! I’ve seen him pull down his window shades at one o’clock in the morning. What do you think he is doing? And during the day his shades are always up. Something must be wrong here!’ It will no longer help you to use such methods against the truth. We know them. You are not interested in my blinds, you are interested in hindering my truth. You want to continue to be the informer and defamer, to get your innocent neighbor in jail when you don’t like his way of living, because he is kind, or free, because he works and does not pay any attention to you. You are very curious, Little Man, you snoop and defame. Aren’t you protected by the fact that the police does not give away the identity of an informer? ‘Listen, taxpayers! Here is a Professor Of Philosophy. A great university in our city wants to employ him to teach the young. Down with him!’ And your upright housewife and taxpayer submits a petition against this teacher of the truth and he does not get the position. You upright tax-paying housewife, honorable bearers of patriots, were more powerful than 4000 years of natural philosophy. But one has begun to understand you, and sooner or later you will be put down. ‘Listen, everybody interested in public morals! Around the corner lives a mother with her daughter. And the daughter receives her boy friend in the evening! Get her into court for keeping a bawdy house! Police! We want our morals protected!’ And this mother gets penalized because you, Little Man snoop around other people’s beds. You have shown yourself too clearly. We know your motive for ‘morals and order’. Don’t you try to pinch every waitress in the behind, moral Little Man? YES, WE WANT OUR SONS AND DAUGHTERS TO BE OPENLY HAPPY IN THEIR LOVE INSTEAD OF ENGAGING IN IT CLANDESTINELY, IN DARK ALLEYS AND ON DARK BACKCHAIRS. We want to respect the courageous and decent fathers and mothers who understand and protect the love of their adolescent sons and daughters. These fathers and mothers are the germ of the new generations of the future, with healthy bodies and healthy senses, without a trace of your filthy fantasy, Little Impotent Man of the twentieth century. ‘Listen to the newest one! A young man went to him for therapy and had to run with his pants down because he attacked him homosexually!’ Aren’t you dribbling lasciviously at your mouth, Little Man, when you tell this ‘true story’? Do you know that it grew on your manure heap, from your constipation and your lasciviousness? I have never had homosexual longings, like you; I have never had the desire to seduce little girls, like you; I have never raped a woman, like you; I have never suffered from constipation, like you; I have never stolen love, like you, I have embraced women only when they wanted me and I wanted them; I have never exhibited myself publicly, as you do; I have no filthy fantasy like you, Little Man. ‘Listen to this: he molested his secretary so that she had to run out of the home. He lived with her in one house, with the blinds down, and the lights were on until three o’clock in the morning!’ And he was a voluptuary who choked on pastry, you said about De La Mettrie; and he lives in a left-handed marriage, you said about crown prince Rudolf and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt isn’t quite all there, you said; and the President of X University has caught his wife with another man; and the teacher at this and that village school has a lover. Didn’t you say these things, Little Man? You miserable citizen of this world, who for thousands of years has gambled his life away in that manner, and thus remains, stuck in his morass! ‘Catch him! He is a German spy, or maybe even a Russian, or an Icelandic one! I’ve seen him at three o’clock in the afternoon on 86th Street in New York, and with a woman, too!’ Do you know, Little Man, what a bedbug looks like in the Northern Lights? No? I didn’t think so. One day, there will be strong laws against being a human bedbug, strict laws for the protection of truth and love. Just as today you put loving adolescents in the reform school, one day you will be put into an institution when you throw your dirt in decent people’s faces. There will be a different kind of judges and state attorneys, who will not administer a formalistic sham-justice, but true justice and kindness. There will be strict laws for the protection of life, which you will have to obey, no matter how much you will hate them. I know that for three or five or ten centuries you will continue to be a bearer of the emotional plague, of defamation, intrigue, diplomacy and inquisition. But in the end you will succumb to your own sense of cleanliness, which now is so deeply buried in you as to be inaccessible. I tell you, no Kaiser, no Tsar, no Father of all proletarians was able to conquer you. They only were able to enslave you, but none of them was able to rob you of your pettiness. What is going to conquer you is your sense of cleanliness, your longing for life. There is no doubt about that, Little Man. Cleansed of your smallness and pettiness, you will begin to think. True, this thinking, at first, will be pitiful, erroneous and aimless; but you will begin to think seriously. You will have to learn to hear the pain which your thinking will bring with itself, just as I and others had to bear the pain of the thinking about you; for years, silently, with clenched teeth. This pain of ours will make you think. Once you have started to think you will not cease to marvel at your last 4000 years of ‘civilization’. You will be unable to understand how it was possible that your newspapers wrote about nothing but parading, decorating, shootings, diplomacy, chicanery, mobilizations, demobilizations and again mobilizations pact drilling and bombing, and that all this did not make you see red. Yon might have understood yourself if you had done nothing but eat up all that stuff with sheep like patience. But what you won’t be able to take for a long time is the fact that through centuries you aped and parroted all this stuff that you thought your correct thoughts about it all were wrong, and thought your wrong ideas about it were patriotic. You will be ashamed of your history, and this is our only hope that our great grandchildren will be saved from reading your military history. It will no longer be possible for you to stage a great revolution only to go back to some ‘Peter the Great’. A GLANCE IN THH FUTURE. I cannot tell you what your future will look like. I cannot know whether you will reach the moon or Mars with the cosmic orgone I discovered. Nor can I know how your space ships will fly or land; or whether you will use sunlight to light your houses at night. But I can tell you what you are NO LONGER going to do, 500 or 1000 or 5000 years hence. ‘Listen to the visionary! He can tell me what I am not going to do! Is he a dictator?’ I am not a dictator, Little Man, although your pettiness would have made it easy for me to become one. Your dictator can only tell you what you cannot do in the present without being sent to the gas chamber. But they cannot tell you what you are going to do in the far future, no more than they can make a tree grow faster. ‘And where do you get your wisdom, intellectual servant of the revolutionary proletariat?’ From your own depth, you eternal proletarian of human reason. ‘Listen to that! He gets his wisdom from my own depth! I haven’t any depth. And what kind of an individualistic word is that, “depth!’ Yes, Little Man, you have depth in yourself you only don’t know it. You are deadly afraid of your depth, that’s why you don’t feel it or see it. That’s why you get dizzy when you look into the depth and totter as if at the verge of an abyss. You are afraid of falling and of losing your ‘individuality’ when you should let yourself go. With the best intentions to reach yourself, you arrive at the same: the little, cruel, envious, greedy, thievish man. If you were not deep in your depth, Little Man, I would not have written this talk to you. I this depth in you, for I have discovered it when you came to me as a physician with your worries. This depth in you is your great future. That’s why I can tell you what you certainly are no longer going to do in the future, because you will be unable to comprehend how it was possible that in the era of unculture of 4000 years you did all the things that you did. Do you want to listen now? ‘All right. Why shouldn’t I listen to a nice little Utopia? There is nothing that can be done, my good doctor. I am, and I am going to remain, the poor little man of the street, who has no opinion of his own. Who am I anyhow to…’ Listen. You hide behind the legend of the Little Man because you are afraid of being picked up by the stream of life and having to swim, if for no other reason, for the sake of your children and their children. The first of all the things that you are no longer going to do is to feel yourself to be the little man who has no opinion of his own and who says, ‘Who am I anyhow …’ You do have your own opinion, and in the future you will consider it a great shame not to know it, not to advocate it and not to express it. ‘But what will public opinion say about my opinion? I am going to be squashed like a worm if I express my own opinion!’ What you call ‘public opinion: Little Man, is the sum total of all the opinions of all little men and women. Every little man and every little woman has a correct opinion and a wrong opinion. The wrong opinions they have because they are afraid of the wrong opinions of other little men and women. This is why the correct opinions don’t come out. For example, you will no longer believe that you ‘don’t count’. You will know and advocate your knowledge that you are the bearer of human society. Don’t run away. Don’t be so afraid. It is not so terrible to be the responsible bearer of human society. ‘What do I have to do to be the bearer of human society?’ You don’t have to do anything special or new. Al you have to do is to continue what you are doing: ploughing your fields, wield your hammer, examine your patients, take your children to school or to the playground, report on the events of the day, penetrate ever more deeply into the secrets of nature. All these things you do already. But you think that all this is unimportant, and that what is important is only what Marshal Decoratus or Prince Inflatus, the Knight in shining amour, are doing. ‘But you are a visionary, doctor! Don’t you see that Marshal Decoratus and Prince Inflatus have the soldiers and the weapons to make war, to draft me for war service, to shoot my field, my laboratory or my study to pieces?’ You are drafted for war service, and your held and your factory are shot to pieces because you yell, Heil, when you are drafted and your factories are shot to pieces. Prince Inflatus, the Knight in shining amour, would have no soldiers and no arms if you dearly knew, and stood up for your knowledge, that a field has to yield wheat and a factory furniture or shoes, nod not arms, and that fields and factories are not there in order to be ruined. All this your Marshal Decoratus and your Prince Inflatus do not know, for they never worked themselves in the field, the factory or the laboratory; they believe that your work is done for the honor of the German or the proletarian fatherland, and nor in order to feed and clothe your children. ‘What should I do, then? I hate war, my wife cries miserably when I’m drafted, my children starve when the proletariat armies occupy my land, and the corpses pile up by the million. All I want is to work my fields, and after work to play with my children and to love my wife, and on Sundays I want to make music and dance and sing. What am I to do?’ All you have to do is to continue what you have always done and always want to do: to do your work, to let your children grow up happily, to love your wife, IF YOU DID THIS CLEARLY AND UNFLINCHINGLY THERE WOULD BE NO WAR which puts your wife at the mercy of the sexually starved soldiers of the fatherland of all proletarians, which makes your orphaned children starve in the street, which makes you stare with glassy eyes at the sky on some far ‘field of glory’. ‘But what am I to do if I want to live for my work and my wife and my children, and then the Huns or the Germans or the Japanese or the Russians or whoever forces war on me? Must I not defend my home?’ You are right, Little Man. When the Hun of this or that nation attacks you you will have to grab your rifle. But what you don’t see is that the ‘Huns’ of all nations are nothing but millions of other little men who keep yelling, Heil! when Prince Inflatus, who does not work, calls them to the colors; that they, like you, believe that they don’t count and say, ‘Who am I to have an opinion of my own?’ Once you know that you a somebody, that you have a correct opinion of your own and that your field and your factory have to serve life and not death, then you will be able to answer your question for yourself. You will not need any diplomats for that. Instead of going on yelling, Heil, and decorating the tomb of the ‘Unknown Solders’ instead of letting your Prince Inflatus or your Marshal of all proletarians trample your national consciousness, you should oppose them with your self-confidence and your work consciousness. (I know your ‘Unknown Soldier’ well, Little Man. I got to know him when I fought in the Italian mountains. He is the same little man as you, who believed not to have an opinion of his own and who said, ‘Who am I, anyhow …’) You could get to know your brother, the little man in Japan in China in any Hun country and could let him know your correct opinion of your job as a worker, physician, farmer, father or husband and could convince him finally that all he has to do to make any war impossible is to adhere to his work and his love. ‘Well and good. But now they have these atom bombs, and one of them is enough to kill hundreds of thousands of people!’ You still don’t think straight, Little Man. Do you believe that Prince Inflatus, the Knight in shining amour builds your atom bombs? No, it is again only little men who yell, Heil!, instead of ceasing to make atom bombs. You see, it always comes back to one and the same thing, to you, Little Man and your own thinking, correct or false. If you were not such a microscopically small man, you greatest scientist of the of the twentieth century, you would have developed a world consciousness instead of a national consciousness and would have found the means of preventing the atom bomb from breaking into this world; or if that had been impossible, you would have exercised your influence, in unmistakable words, to put it out of function. You turn around in a maze of your own invention, and you don’t find your way out because you look the wrong way and think the wrong way. But you promised to all the little men that your atomic energy was going to cure their cancer and their rheumatism whom you knew perfectly well that this would never be possible, that you had created a murderous weapon and nothing but that. With that, you have landed in the same blind alley in which your physics has landed. You are finished forever. You know, Little Man, that I have presented you with the therapeutic possibilities of my cosmic energy. But you keep silent about it, and continue to die of cancer and a broken heart, and, dying, you still yell, ‘Heil! long live culture and technic!’ But I tell you, Little Man you have dug your own grave with open eyes. You believe that new era has arrived, the ‘era of atomic energy’. It has arrived, but not in the way you think. Not in your inferno, but in my quiet, industrious laboratory in a far corner of America. It is entirely up to you, Little Man, whether or not you have to go to war. If you only knew that you are working for life and not for death. If you only knew that all little men on this earth are exactly like you, in their good and their bad traits. Sooner or later – it all depends on you – you will no longer yell, Heil, and will no longer work your fields for the destruction of your wheat, or your factory as a target of guns. Sooner or later you will no longer be willing to work for death but only for life. ‘Should I call a general strike?’ I don’t know whether you should do that or something else. Your general strike is a bad means, because with it you expose yourself to the justified reproach that you let your own women and children starve. In striking, you do not prove your great responsibility for the weal and woe of your society. When you strike you do not work. But one day you will WORK for your life, not strike. Call it a work wish to stick to the word ‘strike’. But strike by working, for yourself, your children, your wife or your girl, your society, your product or your farm. Tell them that you have no time for their war that you have more important things to do. Put a fence around a large plot outside each city of the earth, and there let the diplomats and marshals kill one another personally. This, Little Man would be the thing to do if you were no longer yelling, Heil, and no longer believed that you are nobody and have no opinion of your own. Everything is in your hand, your life and that of your children, your hammer and your stethoscope. I know you shake your head, you think I am an Utopian, or maybe even a ‘Red’. You ask when your life will be good and secure, Little Man. The answer is alien to your way of being: Your life will be good and secure when aliveness will mean more to you than security; low more than money; your freedom more than party line or public opinion; when the mood of Beethoven or Bach will be the mood of your total existence (you have it in you, Little Man, buried deeply in a corner of your existence); when your thinking will be in harmony, and no longer at variance, with your feelings; when you will be able to comprehend your gifts in time and to recognize your ageing in time; when you will live the thoughts of great men instead of the misdeeds of great warriors; when the teachers of your children will be better paid than the politicians; when you will have more respect for the love between man and woman than for a marriage license; when you will recognize errors in thinking in time, and not too late, as today; when you will feel elevation in hearing truths, and feel horror of formalities; when you will have intercourse with your work comrades directly, and not through diplomats; when your adolescent daughter’s happiness in love will delight instead of enraging you; when you will only shake your head at the times when one punished little children for touching their love organs; when human faces on the street will express freedom, animation and joy and no longer sadness and misery; when people no longer will walk on this earth with retracted and rigid pelvises and deadened sexual organs. You want guidance and advice, Little Man. You have had guidance and advice, good and bad, through thousands of years. It is not because of poor advice that you are still in your misery, but because of your pettiness. I could give you good advice, but, as you think and are, you would not be capable of putting it into action in the interest of all. Suppose I advised you to stop all diplomacy, and to replace it with your professional and personal brotherliness with all shoemakers, carpenters, machinists, technicians, physicians, educators, writers, administrators, miners or farmers of all countries; to let all shoemakers of the world decide the best way of providing shoes to all Chinese children; to let all miners find out by themselves how people can be kept from freezing, to let the educators of all countries and nations find out how newborn children are to be guarded against later impotence and mental disease, etc. What would you do, Little Man, confronted with these matter-of-course things of human life? You would certainly tell me, yourself or through some representative of your party (unless you jailed me immediately as a ‘Red’): ‘Who am I to replace international diplomatic intercourse by the international intercourse of work and social achievement?’ Or: ‘We cannot eliminate the national differences in the development of economy and culture.’ Or: ‘Do you want us to have truck with the Fascist Germans, or Japanese, and with the Communist Russians, and with the capitalist Americans?’ Or: ‘I am interested, first Of all, in my Russian, German, American, English, Jewish or Arabic fatherland.’ Or: ‘I have plenty to do getting my own life in order and to get along with my tailor’s union. Let somebody else take care of the tailors of other nations.’ Or: ‘Don’t listen to this capitalist, Bolshevik, Fascist, Trotskyite, Internationalist, Sexualist, Jew, Foreigner, Intellectual, Dreamer, Utopian Demagogue, Crazy Man, Individualist, and Anarchist. Don’t you have any American, Russian, German English Jewish consciousness?’ You can be dead sure that you would use one of these slogans, or others, to get around your responsibility for human intercourse. ‘Am I nothing at all? You don’t acknowledge one decent trait in me! After all, I work hard, provide for my wife and my children, I lead a decent life and serve my country I can’t be as bad as all that!’ I know you are a decent, solid, industrious being, like a bee or an ant. All I did was to disclose the little man in you who ruins your life, and has done so for thousands of years. You, are GREAT, Little Man, when you are not small. Your greatness, Little Man, is the only hope left. You are great when you carry on your trade lovingly, when you enjoy craving and building and painting and decorating and sowing, when you enjoy the blue sky and the deer and the dew and music and dancing, your growing children and the beautiful body of your woman or your man; when you go to the planetarium to learn to understand your sky, or to the library to read what other men and women think about life. You are great; when as a grandfather you hold your grandchild on your knees and tell him about times long past, when you look into an uncertain future with his trusting childlike curiosity. You are great, as a mother, when you lull your newborn to sleep, with tears in your eyes, you hope, out of your full heart, for his future happiness, when, every hour through the years, you build this future in him. You are great, Little Man, when you sing the good old folk songs, or when you dance to the tune of an accordion, for the folk songs are warm and soothing, and are the same all over the world. And you are great when you say to your friend; ‘I thank my good fate that it was given to me to live my life free from filth and greed, to experience the growth of my children, their first babbling, reaching, walking, playing, asking questions, laughing and loving; that I kept my full feeling for the spring and its mild winds, for the bubbling of the brook past the house and the song of the birds in the woods; that I did not take part in the gossip of vicious neighbors; that I was happy in the embrace of my mate and was able to feel the streaming of life in my body; that in confused times I did not lose my sense of direction, and that my life had a meaning. For I have always listened to the voice in myself which said: “There is only one thing that counts: to live one’s life well and happily. Follow the voice of your heart, even if it leads you off the path of timid souls. Do not become hard and embittered, even if life tortures you at times.” And in the quiet of the evening, the day’s work done, when I sit on the meadow in front of the house with my wife or my child and feel the breathing of nature, I hear a melody, the melody of the future: “Oh ye millions, I embrace ye, With a kiss for all the world!” Then I wish fervently that this life would learn to insist on its rights, to change the hard and the timid souls who make the cannons sound. They only do it because life eluded them. And I hug my little son who asks me: “father, the sun has gone down. Where has it gone? Will it come back soon?” And I tell him: “Yes son, it will be back soon to warm us.”’ I have arrived at the conclusion of my talk to you, Little Man. There is ever so much more that I could tell you. But if you have read this talk attentively and honestly, you will discover yourself as the Little Man even in the places, which I have not shown to you. For its always the same quality which pervades all your petty actions and thoughts. Whatever you have done to me or will do to me in the future, whether you glorify me as a genius or put me in the mental institution, whether you adore me as your savior or hang me as a spy, sooner or later necessity will force you to comprehend that I have discovered the laws of the living and handed you the tool with which to govern your life, with a conscious goal, as heretofore you were able only to govern machines. I have been a faithful engineer of your organism. Your grandchildren will follow in my footsteps and will be good engineers of human nature. I have disclosed to you the infinitely vast field of the living in you, of your cosmic nature. That is my great reward. The dictators and tyrants, the sly-boots and the venomous, the dung beetles and the coyotes will suffer what an old sage once predicted:

I planted the seed of holy words in this world. When long since the palm tree will have died, the rock decayed; When long since the shining monarchs have been blown away like rotted leaves: Through every deluge a thousand arks will carry my word: It will prevail!

Alan Moore on ‘Watchmen’ movie: ‘I will be spitting venom all over it’

DELEUZE / ANTI OEDIPE ET MILLE PLATEAUX

Cours Vincennes – 16/11/1971

Capitalism, flows, the decoding of flows, capitalism and schizophrenia, psychoanalysis, Spinoza.

What is it that moves over the body of a society? It is always flows, and a person is always a cutting off [coupure] of a flow. A person is always a point of departure for the production of a flow, a point of destination for the reception of a flow, a flow of any kind; or, better yet, an interception of many flows.

If a person has hair, this hair can move through many stages: the hairstyle of a young girl is not the same as that of a married woman, it is not the same as that of a widow: there is a whole hairstyle code. A person, insofar as she styles her hair, typically presents herself as an interceptor in relation to flows of hair that exceed her and exceed her case and these flows of hair are themselves coded according to very different codes: widow code, young girl code, married woman code, etc. This is ultimately the essential problem of coding and of the territorialization which is always coding flows with it, as a fundamental means of operation: marking persons (because persons are situated at the interception and at the cutting off [coupure] of flows, they exist at the points where flows are cut off [coupure]).

But, now, more than marking persons–marking persons is the apparent means of operation–coding has a deeper function, that is to say, a society is only afraid of one thing: the deluge; it is not afraid of the void, it is not afraid of dearth or scarcity. Over a society, over its social body, something flows [coule] and we do not know what it is, something flows that is not coded, and something which, in relation to this society, even appears as the uncodable. Something which would flow and which would carry away this society to a kind of deterritorialization which would make the earth upon which it has set itself up dissolve: this, then, is the crisis. We encounter something that crumbles and we do not know what it is, it responds to no code, it flees underneath the codes; and this is even true, in this respect, for capitalism, which for a long time believed it could always secure simili-codes; this, then, is what we call the well-known power [puissance] of recuperation within capitalism–when we say recuperate we mean: each time something seems to escape capitalism, seems to pass beneath its simili-codes; it reabsorbs all this, it adds one more axiom and the machine starts up again; think of capitalism in the 19th century: it sees the flowing of a pole of flow that is, literally, a flow, the flow of workers, a proletariat flow: well, what is this which flows, which flows wickedly and which carries away our earth, where are we headed? The thinkers of the 19th century have a very strange response, notably the French historical school: it was the first in the 19th century to have thought in terms of classes, they are the ones who invent the theoretical notion of classes and invent it precisely as an essential fragment of the capitalist code, namely: the legitimacy of capitalism comes from this: the victory of the bourgeoisie as a class opposed to the aristocracy.

The system that appears in the works of Saint Simon, A. Thierry, E. Quinet is the radical seizure of consciousness by the bourgeoisie as a class and they interpret all of history as a class struggle. It is not Marx who invents the understanding of history as a class struggle, it is the bourgeois historical school of the 19th century: 1789, yes, it is a class struggle, they are struck blind when they see flowing, on the actual surface of the social body, this weird flow that they do not recognize: the proletariat flow. The idea that this is a class is not possible, it is not one at this moment: the day when capitalism can no longer deny that the proletariat is a class, this coincides with the moment when, in its head, it found the moment to recode all this. That which we call the power [puissance] of recuperation of capitalism, what is it?

[It consists] in having at its disposal a kind of axiomatic, and when it sets upon [dispose de] some new thing which it does not recognize, as with every axiomatic, it is an axiomatic with a limit that cannot be saturated: it is always ready to add one more axiom to restore its functioning. When capitalism can no longer deny that the proletariat is a class, when it comes to recognize a type of class bipolarity, under the influence of workers’ struggles in the 19th century, and under the influence of the revolution, this moment is extraordinarily ambiguous, for it is an important moment in the revolutionary struggle, but it is also an essential moment in capitalist recuperation: I make you one more axiom, I make you axioms for the working class and for the union power [puissance] that represents them, and the capitalist machine grinds its gears and starts up again, it has sealed the breach. In other words, all the bodies of a society are essential: to prevent the flowing over society, over its back, over its body, of flows that it cannot code and to which it cannot assign a territoriality.

Need, scarcity, famine, a society can code these, what it cannot code, is when this thing appears, when it says to itself: what is up with these guys? So, in a first phase, the repressive apparatus puts itself into motion, if we can’t code it, we will try to annihilate it. In a second phase, we try to find new axioms which allow it to be recoded for better or worse. 
A social body is well defined as follows: there is perpetual trickery, flows flow over from one pole to another, and they are perpetually coded, and there are flows that escape from the codes and then there is the social effort to recuperate all that, to axiomatize all this, to manipulate the code a little, so as to make room for flows that are also dangerous: all of a sudden, there are young people who do not respond to the code: they insist on having a flow of hair which was not expected, what shall we do now? We try to recode it, we will add an axiom, we will try to recuperate [it] but then [if] there is something within it that continues not to let itself be coded, what then?

In other words, this is the fundamental action of a society: to code the flows and to treat as an enemy anyone who presents himself, in relation to society, as an uncodable flow, because, once again, it challenges [met en question] the entire earth, the whole body of this society. I will say this of every society, except perhaps of our own–that is, capitalism, even though just now I spoke of capitalism as if it coded all the flows in the same way as all other societies and did not have any other problems, but perhaps I was going too fast. 
There is a fundamental paradox in capitalism as a social formation: if it is true that the terror of all the other social formations was decoded flows, capitalism, for its part, historically constituted itself on an unbelievable thing: namely, that which was the terror of other societies: the existence and the reality of decoded flows and these capitalism made its proper concern. If this were true, it would explain that capitalism is, in a very precise sense, the universal form of all societies: in a negative sense, capitalism would be that which all societies dreaded above all, and we cannot help but have the impression that, historically speaking, capitalism…in a certain sense, is what every social formation constantly tried to exorcise, what it constantly tried to avoid, why? Because it was the ruin of every other social formation. And the paradox of capitalism is that a social formation constituted itself on the basis of that which was the negative of all the others. This means that capitalism was not able to constitute itself except through a conjunction, an encounter between decoded flows of all kinds. The thing which was dreaded most of all by every social formation was the basis for a social formation that had to engulf all the others: that what was the negative of all formations has become the very positivity of ours, this makes one shudder. And in what sense was capitalism constituted on the conjunction of decoded flows: it required extraordinary encounters at the end of a process [processus] of decodings of every kind, which were formed with the decline of feudalism. These decodings of all kinds consisted in the decoding of land flows, under the form of the constitution of large private properties, the decoding of monetary flows, under the form of the development of merchant fortunes, the decoding of a flow of workers under the form of expropriation, of the deterritorialization of serfs and peasant landholders. And this is not enough, for if we take the example of Rome, the decoding in decadent Rome, all this clearly happened: the decoding of flows of property under the form of large private properties , the decoding of monetary flows under the forms of large private fortunes, the decoding of labourers with the formation of an urban sub-proletariat: everything is found here, almost everything. The elements of capitalism are found here all together, only there is no encounter. What was necessary for the encounter to be made between the decoded flows of capital or of money and the decoded flows of labourers, for the encounter to be made between the flow of emergent capital and the flow of deterritorialized manpower, literally, the flow of decoded money and the flow of deterritorialized labourers. Indeed, the manner in which money is decoded so as to become money capital and the manner in which the labourer is ripped from the earth in order to become the owner of his/her labour power [force de travail] alone: these are two processes totally independent from each other, there must be an encounter between the two.

Indeed, for the process of the decoding of money to form capital that is made all across the embryonic forms of commercial capital and banking capital, the flow of labour, the free possessor of his/her labour power alone, is made across a whole other line that is the deterritorialization of the labourer at the end of feudalism, and this could very well not have been encountered. A conjunction of decoded and deterritorialized flows, this is at the basis of capitalism. Capitalism is constituted on the failure of all the pre-existent codes and social territorialities.

If we admit this, what does this represent: the capitalist machine, it is literally demented. A social machine that functions on the basis of decoded, deterritorialized flows, once again, it is not that societies did not have any idea of this; they had the idea in the form of panic, they acted to prevent this–it was the overturning of all the social codes known up to that point–; so, a society that constitutes itself on the negative of all pre-existing societies, how can it function? A society for which it is proper to decode and deterritorialize all the flows: flow of production, flow of consumption, how can it function, under what form: perhaps capitalism has other processes than coding to make it work, perhaps it is completely different. What I have been seeking up until now was to reground, at a certain level, the problem of the relation CAPITALISM-SCHIZOPHRENIA–and the grounding of a relation is found in something common between capitalism and the schizo: what they have totally in common, and it is perhaps a community that is never realized, that does not assume a concrete figure, it is a community of a principle that remains abstract, namely, the one like the other does not cease to filter, to emit, to intercept, to concentrate decoded and deterritorialized flows. 
This is their profound identity and it is not at the level of a way of life that capitalism renders us schizophrenic, it is at the level of the economic process: all this only works through a system of conjunction, say the word then, on condition of accepting that this word implies a veritable difference in nature from codes. It is capitalism that functions like an axiomatic, an axiomatic of decoded flows. All other social formations functioned on the basis of a coding and of a territorialization of flows and between a capitalist machine that makes an axiomatic of decoded flows such as they are or deterritorialized flows, such as they are, and other social formations, there is truly a difference in nature that makes capitalism the negative of other societies. Now, the schizo, in his own way, with his own tottering walk, he does the same thing. In a sense, he is more capitalist than the capitalist, more `prole’ than the `prole’: he decodes, he deterritorializes the flows and knots together a kind of identity in nature of capitalism and the schizo.

Schizophrenia is the negative of the capitalist formation. In a sense, schizophrenia goes further, capitalism functioned on a conjunction of decoded flows, on one condition, that is, at the same time that it perpetually decoded flows of money, flows of labour, etc., it incorporated them, it constructed a new type of machine, at the same time, not afterwards, that was not a coding machine, but an axiomatic machine.

It is in this way that it succeeds in making a coherent system, on condition that we say what profoundly distinguishes an axiomatic of decoded flows and a coding of flows. Whereas the schizo, he does more, he does not let himself be axiomatized either, he always goes further with the decoded flows, making do with no flows at all, rather than letting himself be coded, no earth at all, rather than letting himself be territorialized. What is their relation to each other? It is from this point that the problem arises. One must study more closely the relation capitalism / schizophrenia, giving the greatest importance to this: is it true and in what sense can we define capitalism as a machine that functions on the basis of decoded flows, on the basis of deterritorialized flows? In what sense is it the negative of all social formations and along the same lines, in what sense is schizophrenia the negative of capitalism, that it goes even further in decoding and in deterritorialization, and just where does it go, and where does that take it? Towards a new earth, towards no earth at all, towards the deluge?

If I try to link up with the problems of psychoanalysis, in what sense, in what manner–this is strictly a beginning–, I assume that there is something in common between capitalism, as a social structure, and schizophrenia as a process. Something in common that makes it so that the schizo is produced as the negative of capitalism (itself the negative of all the rest), and that this relation, we can now comprehend it by considering its terms: coding of flows, decoded and deterritorialized flows, axiomatic of decoded flows, etc.

It remains to be seen what in the psychoanalytic and psychiatric problem continues to preoccupy us. One must reread three texts of Marx: in book I: the production of surplus value, the chapter on the tendential fall in the last book, and finally, in the ?Grundrisse,? the chapter on automation.

Richard Zrehen: I did not understand what you said in regard to the analogy between capitalism and schizophrenia, when you said capitalism is the negative of other societies and the schizo is the negative of capitalism, I would have understood that capitalism is to other societies what the schizo is to capitalism, but, I would have thought, on the contrary, that you were not going to make this opposition. I would have thought of the opposition: capitalism / other societies and schizophrenia/ something else, instead of an analogy in three terms, to make one in four terms.

Cyril: Richard means to say the opposition between: capitalism/ other societies and schizophrenia and neuroses, for example.

Deleuze: Haaa, yes, yes, yes, yes. We are defining flows in political economy, its importance with actual economists confirms what I have been saying. For the moment, a flow is something, in a society, that flows from one pole to another, and that passes through a person, only to the degree that persons are interceptors.

Intervention of a guy with a strange accent

Deleuze: Let me take an example, you say that in a society one does not stop decoding, I’m not sure: I believe that there are two things in a society, one of which pertains to the principle by which a society comes to an end [se termine], one of which pertains to the death of a society: all death, in a certain manner, appears–this is the great principle of Thanatos–from inside [dedans] and all death comes from outside [dehors]; I mean that there is an internal menace in every society, this menace being represented by the danger of flows decoding themselves, it makes sense. There is never a flow first, and then a code that imposes itself upon it. The two are coexistent. Which is the problem, if I again take up the studies, already quite old, of Levi-Strauss on marriage: he tells us: the essential in a society is circulation and exchange.

Marriage, alliance, is exchanging, and what is important is that it circulates and that it exchanges. There is, then, a flow of women–raising something to a coefficient flow seems to me to be a social operation, the social operation of flows; at the level of society, there are no women, there is a flow of women that refers to a code, a code of age-old things, of clans, of tribes, but there is always flow of women, and then, in a second moment, a code: the code and the flow are absolutely formed face to face with one another. What is it the problem then, at the level of marriage, in a so-called primitive society: it is that, in relation to flows of women, by virtue of a code, there is something that must pass through. It involves forming a sort of system, not at all like Levi-Strauss suggests, not at all a logical combinatory [combinatoire], but a physical system with territorialities: something enters, something exits, so here we clearly see that, brought into relation with a physical system of marriage, women present themselves in the form of a flow, of this flow, the social code means this: in relation to such a flow, something of the flow must pass through, i.e.: flow; something must not go through, and, thirdly–this will make up the three fundamental terms of every code–something must effect the passing through or, on the contrary, the blocking: for example, in matrilineal systems, everyone knows the importance of the maternal [utérine] uncle, why, in the flow of women, what passes through is the permitted or even prescribed marriage. A schizo, in a society like that, he is not there, literally, it belongs to us, over there, it is something else. There, it is different: there is a very good case studied by P. Clastres; there is a guy who does not know, he does not know whom he must marry, he attempts a voyage of deterritorialization to see a faraway sorcerer. There is a great English ethnologist named Leach whose whole thesis consists in saying: it never works like Levi-Strauss says it does, he does not believe in Levi-Strauss’ system: no one knows who to marry; Leach makes a fundamental discovery, that which he calls local groups and distinguishes from groups of filiation. Local groups, these are the little groups that machine [machinent] marriages and alliances and they do not deduce them from filiations: the alliance is a kind of strategy that responds to political givens. A local group is literally a group (perverse, specialists in coding) that determines, for each caste, what can pass through, what can not pass through, that which must be blocked, that which can flow. In a matrilineal system, what is blocked? That which is blocked in all systems, that which falls under the rules of the prohibition of incest. Here, something in the flow of women is blocked; namely, certain persons are eliminated from the flow of marriageable women, in relation to other persons. That which, on the contrary, passes through is, we could say, the first permitted incest: the first legal incests in the form of preferential marriages; but everyone knows that the first permitted incests are never practiced in fact, it is still too close to that which is blocked. You see that the flow is interrupted here, something in the flow is blocked, something passes through, and here, there are the great perverts who machine marriages, who block or who effect passages. In the history of the maternal uncle, the aunt is blocked as an image of forbidden incest, in the form of a jesting kinship, the nephew has, with his aunt, a very joyous relation, with his uncle, a relation of theft, but theft, injuries, these are coded, see Malinkowski.

Question: These local groups have magical powers?

Deleuze: They have an overtly political power [pouvoir], they sometimes call upon sorcery, but they are not witchcraft groups, they are political groups who define the strategy of a village in relation to another village, and a clan in relation to another clan. 
Every code in relation to flows implies that we prevent something of this flow from passing through, we block it, we let something pass: there will be people having a key position as interceptors, i.e. so as to prevent passage or, on the contrary, to effect passage, and when we take note that these characters are such that, according to the code, certain prestations return to them, we better understand how the whole system works. 
In all societies, the problem was always to code flows and to recode those that tended to escape–when is it that the codes vacillate in so-called primitive societies: essentially at the moment of colonialization, there where the code flees under the pressure of capitalism: for that is what it represents in a society of codes, the introduction of money: it scatters to the winds their entire circuit of flows, in the sense that they distinguish essentially three types of flows: the flows of production to be consumed, the flows of prestige, objects of prestige and flows of women. When money is introduced therein, it is a catastrophe (see what Jaudin analyses as ethnocide: money, Oedipus complex) 
They try to relate money to their code, as such it can only be a prestige good, it is not a production or consumption good, it is not a woman, but the young people of the tribe who understand quicker than the elders take advantage of money in order to seize hold of the circuit of consumption goods, the circuit of consumption that was traditionally, in certain tribes, controlled by women. So the young people, with money, seize hold of the circuit of consumption. With money which itself can no longer be coded, within a certain framework, we begin with money and we end with money. 
M[oney]-C[ommodity]-M[oney], there is absolutely no means of coding this thing here because the qualified flows are replaced by a flow of abstract quantity whose proper essence is the infinite reproduction for which the formula is M-C-M. No code can support infinite reproduction. What is formidable in so-called primitive societies is how debt exists, but exists in the form of a finite block, debt is finite. So, in this sense flows pass their time by fleeing, it does not prevent the codes from being correlative and coding the flows: undoubtedly, it escapes from all sides, and the one who does not let her/himself be coded, and so we say: that’s a madman, we will code him/her: the village madman, we will make a code of the code. The originality of capitalism is that it no longer counts on any code, there are code residues, but no one believes in them: we no longer believe in anything: the last code that capitalism knew how to produce was fascism: an effort to recode and reterritorialize even at the economic level, at the level of the functioning of the market in the fascist economy, here we clearly see an extreme effort to resuscitate a kind of code that would function like the code of capitalism, literally, it could have lasted in the form in which it has lasted, as for capitalism, it is incapable of furnishing a code that covers the ensemble of the social field like a grid [quadrille], because its problems no longer pose themselves in terms of code, its problem is to make a mechanism of decoded flows as such, so it is uniquely in this sense that I oppose capitalism as a social formation to all the other known social formations. Can we say that between a coding of flows corresponding to pre-capitalist formations and a decoded axiomatic, there is a difference in nature or is there simply a variation: there is a radical difference in nature! Capitalism cannot furnish any code. 
We cannot say that the struggle against a system is totally independent of the manner in which this system was characterized: it is difficult to consider that the struggle of socialism against capitalism in the 19th century was independent of the theory of surplus value, in so far as this theory specified the characteristic of capitalism. Suppose that capitalism can be defined as an economic machine excluding the codes and making decoded flows function by taking them into an axiomatic, this already permits us to bring together the capitalist situation and the schizophrenic situation. Even at the level of analysis that has a practical influence, the analysis of monetary mechanisms (the neocapitalist economists, this is schizophrenic) when we see how the monetary practice of capitalism works, at the concrete level, and not just in theory, its schizoid character, can we say that it is totally indifferent to revolutionary practice. All that we are doing in relation to psychoanalysis and psychiatry comes down to what? Desire, or, it matters little, the unconscious: it is not imaginary or symbolic, it is uniquely machinic, and as long as you have not reached the region of the machine of desire, as long as you remain in the imaginary, the structural or the symbolic, you do not have a genuine hold on the unconscious. They are machines that, like all machines, are confirmed as such by their functioning (confirmations==the painter Lindner obsessed by ?children with machine [enfants avec machine]?: huge little boys in the foreground holding a strange little machine, a kind of little kite and behind him, a big social technical machine and his little machine is plugged into the big one, in the background==that is what I attempted last year to call the orphan unconscious, the true unconscious, the one that does not pass through daddy-mommy, the one that passes through delirious machines, these being in a given relation with the large social machines: second confirmation: an Englishman, Niderland, was aware of Schreber’s father. This is what I object to in the text of Freud, it is as if psychoanalysis was a veritable millstone which crushed the deepest character of the guy, namely, his social character… When we read Schreber, the Great Mongol, the Aryans, the Jews, etc. and when we read Freud, not a word about all this, it is as if it was just some manifest content and that one had to discover the latent content=the eternal daddy-mommy of Oedipus. All the political, politico-sexual, politico-libidinal content, because in the end, when Schreber père imagined himself to be a little Alsatian girl defending Alsace against a French officer, there is political libido here. It is sexual and political at the same time, the one in the other; we learn that Schreber was well-known because he had invented a system of education == Schreber Gardens. He had produced a system of universal pedagogy. Schizoanalysis procedes in a direction that is the opposite of psychoanalysis, indeed, each time that the subject narrates something that brings her/him in the vicinity of Oedipus or castration, the schizo being analyzed says `Enough.’ What he sees as important, is that: Schreber père invents a pedagogic system of universal value, that is not brought to bear on his own child, but globally: PAN gymnasticon. If we suppress from the delirium [delire] of the son the politico-global dimension of the paternal pedagogic system, we can longer understand anything. The father does not supply a structural function, but a political system: I am saying that the libido passes through here, not through daddy and mommy, through the political system. In the PAN gymnasticon, there are machines: no system without machines, a system, rigourously speaking, is a structural unity of machines, so much so that one must burst the system to reach the machines. And what are Schreber’s machines: they are SADO-PARANOIAC machines, a type of delirious machine. They are sado-paranoiac in the sense that they are applied to children, preferably to little girls. With these machines, the children stay calm, in this delirium, the universal pedagogic dimension clearly appears: it is not a delirium about his son, it is a delirium that he constructs about the formation of a higher race. Schreber père acts against his son, not as a father, but as a libidinal promoter of a delirious investment of the social field. It is no longer the paternal function, but rather that the father is there to make something delirious pass through, this is certain, but the father acts here as an agent of transmission in relation to a field that is not the familial field, but that is a political and historical field, once again, the names of history and not the name of the father.

Comtess: We do not catch flies with vinegar, even with a machine

Gilles Deleuze: The system of Schreber père had a global development (belt-whipping for good conduct). It was a big social machine and it was, at the same time, sown in the social machine, full of little delirious sado-paranoiac machines. So too, in the delirium of the son, certainly it is papa, but as a representative of what authority does he intervene. He intervenes as an agent of transmission in a libidinal investment of a certain type of social formation. On the contrary, the drama of psychoanalysis is the eternal familialism that consists in referring the libido, and with it all sexuality, to the familial machine, and we can go on to structuralize it, it changes nothing, we remain within the closed circle of: symbolic castration, structuring function of the family, parental characters, and we continue to crush all the outside [dehors]. Blanchot: ?a new type of relation with the outside,? yet, and this is the critical point, psychoanalysis tends to suppress any relation of itself and of the subject who has just been analyzed with the outside. On itself alone it pretends to reterritorialize us, onto the territoriality or onto the most mediocre earth, the most shabby, the oedipal territoriality, or worse, onto the couch. Here, we clearly see the relation of psychoanalysis and capitalism: if it is true that in capitalism, flows are decoded, are deterritorialized constantly, i.e. that capitalism produces the schizo like it produces money, the whole capitalist project [tentative] consists in reinventing artificial territorialities in order to reinscribe people, to vaguely recode them: they invent anything: HLM [Habitation a Loyer Moyen, i.e.: government-controlled housing], home, and there is familial reterritorialization, the family, it is after all the social cell, so they will reterritorialize the guy in a family (community psychiatry): they reterritorialize people there where all the territorialities are floating ones, they proceed through an artificial, imaginary, residual reterritorialization. And psychoanalysis–classical psychoanalysis–fabricates familial reterritorialization, most of all by skipping over all that is effective in delirium, all that is aggressive in delirium, namely, that delirium is a system of politico-social investments, not just of any type: it is the libido that hooks itself onto political social determinations: Schreber is not dreaming at all when he makes love to his mother, he dreams when he is being raped like a little Alsacian girl by a French officer: this depends on something much deeper than Oedipus, namely, the manner in which the libido invests social formations, to the point that one must distinguish 2 types of social investments by the (?) desire: social investments of interests that are of the preconscious type, that, if necessary, pass through classes, and below these, not exactly in harmony with them, unconscious investments, the libidinal investments of desire. Traditional psychoanalysis enclosed the libidinal investments of desire in the familial triangle and structuralism is the last attempt [tentative] to save Oedipus at the moment when Oedipus is coming apart at the seams.

The task of schizoanalysis is to see that parents play a role in the unconscious only as agents of interception, agents of transmission in a system of the flows of desire, of desiring machines, and what counts is my unconscious relation with my desiring machines. What are my own desiring machines, and, through them, the unconscious relation of these desiring machines with the large social machines with which they carry out…and that hence, there is no reason to support psychoanalysis in its attempt to reterritorialize us. I take an example from Leclaire’ last book: there is something that no longer works: ?the most fundamental act in the history of psychoanalysis was a decentering that consisted in passing from the parents’ room as referent to the analytical office,? there was a time when we believed in Oedipus, and in the reality of seduction, it was not going strong even then, because the whole unconscious had been familiarized, a crushing of the libido onto daddy-mommy-me: the whole development of psychoanalysis was made in this direction [sens]: substitution of the phantasm for real seduction and substitution of castration for Oedipus. Leclaire: ?to tell the truth the displacement of the living kernel of the oedipal conjuncture, of the familial scene to the psychoanalytic scene is strictly correlative to a sociological mutation in which we can psychoanalytically demarcate a recourse to the level of the familial institution? page 30 = the family is shabby = the unconscious protests and no longer works to triangulate itself, happily there is the analyst to serve as a relay.

It no longer supports the family, custody and the concealment [dérobement] of an all-powerful real. We say, ouf!, we will finally have a relation with the extra familial real, ha! no! says Leclaire, for that which serves as a relay for the family, and that which becomes the guardian, the unveiling veiling of the all-powerful real is the office of the analyst. You can no longer triangulate, oedipalize in the family, it no longer works, you will come onto the couch to triangulate and oedipalize yourself and indeed, adds Leclaire: ?if the psychoanalytic couch has become the place where the confrontation with the real is unfolded.? The confrontation with the real does not take place on the earth, in the movement of territorialization, reterritorialization, of deterritorialization, it takes place on this rotten earth that is the couch of the analyst. ?It is of no importance that the oedipal scene has no referent exterior to the office, that castration has no referent outside the office of the analyst,? which signifies that psychoanalysis, like capitalism, finds itself faced with the decoded flows of desire, finds itself before the schizophrenic phenomena of decoding and deterritorialization, has chosen to make for itself a little axiomatic. The couch, the ultimate earth of European man today, his very own little earth. This situation of psychoanalysis tends to introduce an axiomatic excluding all reference, excluding all relation with the outside whatever it may be, appears as a catastrophic movement of interiority when it comes to understanding the true investments of desire. From the moment we seized upon the family as referent, it was all screwed up. (last earth, the couch that valorizes and justifies itself on its own terms). It was compromised from the beginning, from the moment when we cut desire off from the double dimension–what I call the double dimension of desire: and its relation, on the one hand, with desiring machines irreducible to any symbolic or structural dimension, to functional desiring machines, and the problem of schizoanalysis is to know how these desiring machines work, and to reach the level where they work in someone’s unconscious, which assumes that we will skip over Oedipus, castration, etc. On the other hand, with social-political-cosmic investments, and here one must not say, that there would be any desexualization of the findings of psychoanalysis, for I am saying that desire, in its fundamental sexual form, can only be understood in its sexual investments, in so far as they do not bear on daddy-mommy, this is secondary, but in so far as they bear–on the one hand, on desiring machines, and on the other hand, in so far they traverse our sexual, homosexual, heterosexual loves. That which is invested is always what cuts up [des coupures] of the dimensions of a historical social field, and certainly, the father and the mother play a role within it, they are agents of communication of desiring machines, on one hand, of the machines with each other, and on the other hand, of the desiring machines with the large desiring machines. Schizoanalysis is made up of three operations: A destructive task: skipping over the oedipal and castrating structures in order to reach a region of the unconscious where there is no castration etc. because desiring machines ignore this.

A positive task: That is to see and to analyze functionally, there is nothing to interpret = we do not interpret a machine, we grasp its functioning and its failures, the why of its failures: it is the oedipal collar, the psychoanalytic collar of the couch that introduces failures into desiring machines: The desiring machines only work as long as they invest the social machines. And what are the types of libidinal investments, distinct from the preconscious investments of interests, these sexual investments–across all the beings that we love, all our loves, it is a complex of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, that which we love, it is always a certain mulatto, a movement of deterritorialization and reterritorialization, it is not the scrawny and hysteric territoriality of the couch, and across each being that we love, what we invest is a social field, these are the dimensions of this social field, and the parents are agents of transmission in the social field.

–see Jackson’s letter = the classic black mother who says to her son, don’t fool around and marry well, make money. This classic mother here, is she acting like a mother and like an oedipal object of desire, or is she acting in such a way that she transmits a certain type of libidinal investment of the social field, namely the type that marries well, he makes love, and this in the strictest sense of the term, with something through his wife, unconsciously, with a certain number of economic, political, social processes, and that love has always been a means through which the libido attains something other than the beloved person, namely a whole cutting up [découpage] of the historical social field, ultimately we always make love with the names of history. The other mother (of Jackson)–the one who says ?grab your gun,? it follows that the two act as agents of transmission in a certain type of social-historical investment, that from one to the other the pole of these investments has singularly changed, that in one case, we can say that they are reactionary investments, at the limit fascist, in the other case, it is a revolutionary libidinal investment. Our loves are like the conduits and the pathways of these investments that are not, once again, of a familial nature, but of a historico-political nature, and the final problem of schizoanalysis is not only the positive study of desiring machines, but the positive study of the manner in which desiring machines carry out the investment of social machines, whether it be in forming investments of the libido of a revolutionary type, whether it be in forming libidinal investments of the revolutionary type. The domain of schizoanalysis distinguishes itself at this moment from the domain of politics, in the sense that the preconscious political investments are investments of class interests that are determinable by certain types of studies, but these still do not tell us anything about the other type of investments, namely specifically libidinal investments–Desire. To the point that it can happen that a preconscious revolutionary investment can be doubled by a libidinal investment of the fascist type = which explains how displacements are made from one pole of delirium to another pole of delirium, how a delirium has fundamentally two poles–which Artaud said so well: ?the mystery of all is `Heliogabalus the Anarchist,’ because these are the two poles–it is not only a contradiction, it is a fundamental human contradiction, namely a pole of unconscious investment of the fascist type, and an unconscious investment of the revolutionary type. What fascinates me in a delirium is the radical absence of daddy-mommy, except as agents of transmission, except as agents of interception for there they have a role, but on the other hand the task of schizoanalysis is to release in delirium the unconscious dimensions of a fascist investment and a revolutionary investment, and at a certain point, it slips, at a certain point it oscillates, this is the deep domain of the libido. In the most reactionary, most folkloric territoriality, a revolutionary ferment can surge forth (we never know), something schizo, something mad, a deterritorialization: the Basque problem: They did much for fascism, in other conditions, these same minorities could have determined, I am not saying this happens by chance, they could have secured a revolutionary role. It is extremely ambiguous: it is not at the level of political analysis, it is at the level of analysis of the unconscious: the way it whirls about [comment ca tourne]. (Mannoni: antipsychiatry in the question of the court judgement on Schreber = a completely fascist delirium). If antipsychiatry has a sense, if schizoanalysis has a sense, it is at the level of an analysis of the unconscious, to tip delirium from the pole that is always present, the reactionary fascist pole that implies a certain type of libidinal investment, towards the other pole, no matter if it is hard and slow, the revolutionary pole.

Richard: Why only two poles?

Deleuze: We can make many, but fundamentally, there are clearly two great types of investment, two poles. The reference of libidinal investments is daddy-mommy, these are the territorialities and the deterritorializations, this must be found in the unconscious, especially at the level of its loves. Phantasm of naturality: of a pure race, movement of the pendulum = revolutionary phantasm of deterritorialization. If you’re saying that, on the analyst’s couch, what flows still flows, alright then, but the problem that I would pose here is: there are types of flow that pass beneath the door, what psychoanalysts call the viscosity of the libido, an overly viscous libido that does not let itself be grasped by the code of psychoanalysis, alright here yes, there is deterritorialization, but psychoanalysis says: negative reaction [contre-indication]. What annoys me in psychoanalysis of the Lacanian camp is the cult of castration. The family is a system of transmission, the social investments of one generation passed on to another, but I absolutely do not think that the family is a necessary element in the making of social investments because, in any case, there are desiring machines that, on their own, constitute social libidinal investments of the large social machines. If you say: the madman is someone who remains with his desiring machines and who does not carry out social investments, I do not follow you: in all madness, I see an intense investment of a particular type of historical, political, social field, even in catatonic persons. This goes for adults as well as children, it is from earliest childhood that the desiring machines are plugged into the social field. In themselves, all territorialities are equal to each other in relation to the movement of deterritorialization, but there is something like a schizoanalysis of territorialities, of their types of functioning, and by functioning, I understand the following: if the desiring machines are on the side of a great deterritorialization, i.e. on the path of desire beyond territorialities, if to desire is to be deterritorialized, one must say that each type of territoriality is able to support such or such a genre of machinic index: the machinic index is that which, in a territoriality, will be able to make it flee in the direction [sens] of a deterritorialization. So, I take the example of the dream, from the point of view that I am attempting to explicate the role of machines, it is very important, different from that of psychoanalysis: when a plane flies or a sewing machine-the dream is a kind of little imaginary territoriality, sleep or a nightmare is a deterritorialization–we can say that deterritorialization and the reterritorialities only exist as a function of each other, but you can evaluate the force of a possible deterritorialization from the indexes on such or such a territoriality, i.e. how much it supports of a flow that flees–Flee and in fleeing, makes flee, not the others, but something from the system, a fragment.

A machinic index in a territoriality is what measures the power [puissance] of flight in this territoriality by making flows flee, in this regard all territorialities are not equal to each other. There are artificial territorialities, the more it flees and the more we can flee while fleeing, the more it is deterritorialized. Our loves are always situated on a territoriality that, in relation to us, deterritorializes us or else reterritorializes us. In this regard, there are misunderstandings + a whole game of investments that are the problem of schizoanalysis: instead of having the family as a referent, it has as a referent the movements of deterritoralization and reterritorialization.

Zrehen: I want to say that you employed the term ?Code? for so-called primitive societies, while I think it is not possible to think of them in terms of code, because of the well-known mark, because there is a mark, which requires exchange, it is because there is a debt that we have an obligation to exchange. What happens from their society to ours, is the loss of the debt, so when you say that the schizo is the negative of the capitalist and that capitalism is the negative of primitive societies, it is evident exactly what is lost, it is castration. With this mark of principle, you are anticipating what makes up capitalism while crossing out castration. What is foreclosed in capitalism is this initial mark and what Marx tried to do was to reintroduce the notion of debt. When you propose to me a reactionary pole of investments and a revolutionary pole, I say that you are already taking the concepts of `revolutionary’ and of `reactionary as already instituted in a field that does not permit an appreciation of what you are trying to say. You are using breaks [coupure], I will certainly admit that Oedipus and castration are dépassé, but capitalism… 


NAVIGATING MOVEMENTS 

When you walk, each step is the body’s movement against falling — each 

movement is felt in our potential for freedom as we move with the earth’s 

gravitational pull. When we navigate our way through the world, there are 

different pulls, constraints and freedoms that move us forward and propel us 

into life. But in the changing face of capitalism, media information and 

technologies — which circulate the globe in more virtual and less obvious ways 

— how do the constraints on freedom involve our affective and embodied 

dimensions of experience? That is, how do we come to feel and respond to 

life and reality itself when new virtualised forms of power mark our every 

step, when the media and political activity continually feed on our 

insecurities — for instance, when a political leader can deploy overseas troops 

to make a country feel safe and secure in the face of ‘terror’. Our beliefs and 

hopes can be galvanised for this ‘good’, and as a tool for orchestrating attacks 

on ‘evil’ and threats to national security. Against this framework of despair 

that enact our relations to the world — violence, terror and the virtual lines 

of capital flow — what are the hopes for political intervention? 

Philosopher Brian Massumi explores the hopes that lie across these fields of 

movement; the potentials for freedom, and the power relations that operate 

in the new ‘societies of control’. These are all ethical issues — about the 

reality of living, the faith and belief in the world that makes us care for our 

belonging to it. Massumi’s diverse writings and philosophical perspectives 

radicalise ideas of affect — the experiences and dimensions of living — that 

are the force of individual and political reality. His writings are concerned 

with the practice of everyday life, and the relations of experience that 

engage us in the world, and our ethical practices. He is based in Montreal. 

Movements — hope, feeling, affect

I’d like to think about hope and the affective dimensions of our experience — 

what freedoms are possible in the new and ‘virtualised’ global and political 

economies that frame our lives. To begin, though, what are your thoughts on 

the potential of hope for these times? 

From my own point of view, the way that a concept like hope can be made 

useful is when it is not connected to an expected success — when it starts to 

be something different from optimism — because when you start trying to 

think ahead into the future from the present point, rationally there really 

isn’t much room for hope. Globally it’s a very pessimistic affair, with 

economic inequalities increasing year by year, with health and sanitation 

levels steadily decreasing in many regions, with the global effects of 

environmental deterioration already being felt, with conflicts among nations 

and peoples apparently only getting more intractable, leading to mass 

displacements of workers and refugees … It seems such a mess that I think it 

can be paralysing. If hope is the opposite of pessimism, then there’s precious 

little to be had. On the other hand, if hope is separated from concepts of 

optimism and pessimism, from a wishful projection of success or even some 

kind of a rational calculation of outcomes, then I think it starts to be 

interesting — because it places it in the present. 

Yes — the idea of hope in the present is vital. Otherwise we endlessly look to 

the future or toward some utopian dream of a better society or life, which 

can only leave us disappointed, and if we see pessimism as the nature flow 

from this, we can only be paralysed as you suggest.  

Yes, because in every situation there are any number of levels of organisation 

and tendencies in play, in cooperation with each other or at cross-purposes. 

The way all the elements interrelate is so complex that it isn’t necessarily 

comprehensible in one go. There’s always a sort of vagueness surrounding the 

situation, an uncertainty about where you might be able to go and what you 

might be able to do once you exit that particular context. This uncertainty 

can actually be empowering — once you realise that it gives you a margin of 

manoeuvrability and you focus on that, rather than on projecting success or 

failure. It gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, 

to try and see. This brings a sense of potential to the situation. The present’s 

‘boundary condition’, to borrow a phrase from science, is never a closed 

door. It is an open threshold — a threshold of potential. You are only ever in 

the present in passing. If you look at that way you don’t have to feel boxed in 

by it, no matter what its horrors and no matter what, rationally, you expect 

will come. You may not reach the end of the trail but at least there’s a next 

step. The question of which next step to take is a lot less intimidating than 

how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our problems will 

finally be solved. It’s utopian thinking, for me, that’s ‘hopeless’. 

So how do your ideas on ‘affect’ and hope come together here? 

In my own work I use the concept of ‘affect’ as a way of talking about that 

margin of manoeuvrability, the ‘where we might be able to go and what we 

might be able to do’ in every present situation. I guess ‘affect’ is the word I 

use for ‘hope’. One of the reasons it’s such an important concept for me is 

because it explains why focusing on the next experimental step rather than 

the big utopian picture isn’t really settling for less. It’s not exactly going for 

more, either. It’s more like being right where you are — more intensely. 

To get from affect to intensity you have to understand affect as something 

other than simply a personal feeling. By ‘affect’ I don’t mean ‘emotion’ in the 

everyday sense. The way I use it comes primarily from Spinoza. He talks of 

the body in terms of its capacity for affecting or being affected. These are 

not two different capacities — they always go together. When you affect 

something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in 

turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment 

before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a 

threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of 

the change in capacity. It’s crucial to remember that Spinoza uses this to talk 

about the body. What a body is, he says, is what it can do as it goes along. 

This is a totally pragmatic definition. A body is defined by what capacities it 

carries from step to step. What these are exactly is changing constantly. A 

body’s ability to affect or be affected — its charge of affect — isn’t something 

fixed.  

So depending on the circumstances, it goes up and down gently like a tide, or 

maybe storms and crests like a wave, or at times simply bottoms out. It’s 

because this is all attached to the movements of the body that it can’t be 

reduced to emotion. It’s not just subjective, which is not to say that there is 

nothing subjective in it. Spinoza says that every transition is accompanied by 

a feeling of the change in capacity. The affect and the feeling of the 

transition are not two different things. They’re two sides of the same coin, 

just like affecting and being affected. That’s the first sense in which affect is 

about intensity — every affect is a doubling. The experience of a change, an 

affecting-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience. 

This gives the body’s movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all 

its transitions — accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in 

tendency. Emotion is the way the depth of that ongoing experience registers 

personally at a given moment. 

Emotion, then, is only a limited expression of the ‘depth’ of our experience? 

Well, an emotion is a very partial expression of affect. It only draws on a 

limited selection of memories and only activates certain reflexes or 

tendencies, for example. No one emotional state can encompass all the depth 

and breadth of our experiencing of experiencing — all the ways our 

experience redoubles itself. The same thing could be said for conscious 

thought. So when we feel a particular emotion or think a particular thought, 

where have all the other memories, habits, tendencies gone that might have 

come at the point? And where have the bodily capacities for affecting and 

being affected that they’re inseparable from gone? There’s no way they can 

all be actually expressed at any given point. But they’re not totally absent 

either, because a different selection of them is sure to come up at the next 

step. They’re still there, but virtually — in potential. Affect as a whole, then, 

is the virtual co-presence of potentials. 

This is the second way that affect has to do with intensity. There’s like a 

population or swarm of potential ways of affecting or being affected that 

follows along as we move through life. We always have a vague sense that 

they’re there. That vague sense of potential, we call it our ‘freedom’, and 

defend it fiercely. But no matter how certainly we know that the potential is 

there, it always seems just out of reach, or maybe around the next bend. 

Because it isn’t actually there — only virtually. But maybe if we can take 

little, practical, experimental, strategic measures to expand our emotional 

register, or limber up our thinking, we can access more of our potential at 

each step, have more of it actually available. Having more potentials 

available intensifies our life. We’re not enslaved by our situations. Even if we 

never have our freedom, we’re always experiencing a degree of freedom, or 

‘wriggle room’. Our degree of freedom at any one time corresponds to how 

much of our experiential ‘depth’ we can access towards a next step — how 

intensely we are living and moving. 

Once again it’s all about the openness of situations and how we can live that 

openness. And you have to remember that the way we live it is always 

entirely embodied, and that is never entirely personal — it’s never all 

contained in our emotions and conscious thoughts. That’s a way of saying it’s 

not just about us, in isolation. In affect, we are never alone. That’s because 

affects in Spinoza’s definition are basically ways of connecting, to others and 

to other situations. They are our angle of participation in processes larger 

than ourselves. With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of 

embeddedness in a larger field of life — a heightened sense of belonging, with 

other people and to other places. Spinoza takes us quite far, but for me his 

thought needs to be supplemented with the work of thinkers like Henri 

Bergson, who focuses on the intensities of experience, and William James, 

who focuses on their connectedness. 

When you were just talking about Spinoza and the way you understand 

affect, I don’t want to put a false determination on it, but is it a more 

primal sense of the capacity to be human and how we feel connections to the 

world and others? That’s almost natural to a certain extent … 

I wouldn’t tend to say it’s primal, if that means more ‘natural’. I don’t think 

affective intensity is any more natural than the ability to stand back and 

reflect on something, or the ability to pin something down in language. But I 

guess that it might be considered primal in the sense that it is direct. You 

don’t need a concept of ‘mediation’ to talk about it. In cultural theory, 

people often talk as if the body on the one hand, and our emotions, thoughts, 

and the language we use for them on the other, are totally different realities, 

as if there has to be something to come between them and put them into 

touch with each other. This mediation is the way a lot of theorists try to 

overcome the old Cartesian duality between mind and body, but it actually 

leaves it in place and just tries to build a bridge between them. But if you 

define affect the way we just did, then obviously it includes very elaborated 

functions like language. There’s an affect associated with every functioning of 

the body, from moving your foot to take a step to moving your lips to make 

words. Affect is simply a body movement looked at from the point of view of 

its potential — its capacity to come to be, or better, to come to do. 

Like I said, the directness I’m talking about isn’t necessarily a self-presence 

or self-possession, which is how we normally tend to think of our freedom. If 

it’s direct, it’s in the sense that it’s directly in transition — in the body 

passing out of the present moment and the situation it’s in, towards the next 

one. But it’s also the doubling of the body in the situation — its doubling over 

into what it might have been or done if it had contrived to live that transition 

more intensely. A body doesn’t coincide with itself. It’s not present to itself. 

It is already on the move to a next, at the same time as it is doubling over on 

itself, bringing its past up to date in the present, through memory, habit, 

reflex, and so on. Which means you can’t even say that a body ever coincides 

with its affective dimension. It is selecting from it, extracting and actualising 

certain potentials from it. You can think of affect in the broadest sense as 

what remains of the potential after each or every thing a body says or does — 

as a perpetual bodily remainder. Looked at from a different angle, this 

perpetual remainder is an excess. It’s like a reserve of potential or newness or 

creativity that is experienced alongside every actual production of meaning in 

language or in any performance of a useful function — vaguely but directly 

experienced, as something more, a more to come, a life overspilling as it 

gathers itself up to move on. 

What immediately comes to mind is something like anger. It’s a very strong 

bodily experience, a heat of the moment intensity — it doesn’t seem to have 

a positive charge in some ways, you know, because it is often a reaction 

against something … 

I think affective expressions like anger and laughter are perhaps the most 

powerful because they interrupt a situation. They are negative in that sense. 

They interrupt the flow of meaning that’s taking place: the normalised 

interrelations and interactions that are happening and the functions that are 

being fulfilled. Because of that, they are irruptions of something that doesn’t 

fit. Anger, for example, forces the situation to attention, it forces a pause 

filled with an intensity that is often too extreme to be expressed in words. 

Anger often degenerates into noise and inarticulate gestures. This forces the 

situation to rearray itself around that irruption, and to deal with the intensity 

in one way or another. In that sense it’s brought something positive out — a 

reconfiguration. 

There’s always an instantaneous calculation or judgment that takes place as 

to how you respond to an outburst of anger. But it’s not a judgment in the 

sense that you’ve gone through all the possibilities and thought it through 

explicitly — you don’t have time for that kind of thing. Instead you use a kind 

of judgment that takes place instantly and brings your entire body into the 

situation. The response to anger is usually as gestural as the outburst of anger 

itself. The overload of the situation is such that, even if you refrain from a 

gesture, that itself is a gesture. An outburst of anger brings a number of 

outcomes into direct presence to one another — there could be a peace- 

making or a move towards violence, there could be a breaking of relations, all 

the possibilities are present, packed into the present moment. It all happens, 

again, before there is time for much reflection, if any. So there’s a kind of 

thought that is taking place in the body, through a kind of instantaneous 

assessment of affect, an assessment of potential directions and situational 

outcomes that isn’t separate from our immediate, physical acting-out of our 

implication in the situation. The philosopher C.S. Peirce had a word for 

thought that is still couched in bodily feeling, that is still fully bound up with 

unfolding sensation as it goes into action but before it has been able to 

articulate itself in conscious reflection and guarded language. He called it 

‘abduction’. 

Right, right. Oh, that’s like a kind of capture … 

Yes, I think you could say that sensation is the registering of affect that I 

referred to before — the passing awareness of being at a threshold — and that 

affect is thinking, bodily — consciously but vaguely, in the sense that is not 

yet a thought. It’s a movement of thought, or a thinking movement. There are 

certain logical categories, like abduction, that could be used to describe this. 

I think of abduction as a kind of stealing of the moment. It has a wide range 

of meanings too — it could be stealing or it could be an alien force or 

possession … 

Or it could be you drawn in by the situation, captured by it, by its 

eventfulness, rather than you capturing it. But this capture by the situation is 

not necessarily an oppression. It could be … 

It could be the kind of freedom we were just talking about … 

Exactly, it could be accompanied by a sense of vitality or vivacity, a sense of 

being more alive. That’s a lot more compelling than coming to ‘correct’ 

conclusions or assessing outcomes, although it can also bring results. It might 

force you to find a margin, a manoeuvre you didn’t know you had, and 

couldn’t have just thought your way into. It can change you, expand you. 

That’s what being alive is all about. 

So it’s hard for me to put positive or negative connotations on affect. That 

would be to judge it from the outside. It would be going in a moralising 

direction. Spinoza makes a distinction between a morality and an ethics. To 

move in an ethical direction, from a Spinozan point of view, is not to attach 

positive or negative values to actions based on a characterisation or 

classification of them according to a pre-set system of judgment. It means 

assessing what kind of potential they tap into and express. Whether a person 

is going to joke or get angry when they are in a tight spot, that uncertainty 

produces an affective change in the situation. That affective loading and how 

it plays out is an ethical act, because it affects where people might go or 

what they might do as a result. It has consequences. 

Ethics, then, is always situational?  

 Ethics in this sense is completely situational. It’s completely pragmatic. And 

it happens between people, in the social gaps. There is no intrinsic good or 

evil. The ethical value of an action is what it brings out in the situation, for 

its transformation, how it breaks sociality open. Ethics is about how we 

inhabit uncertainty, together. It’s not about judging each other right or 

wrong. For Nietzsche, like Spinoza, there is still a distinction between good 

and bad even if there’s not one between good and evil. Basically the ‘good’ is 

affectively defined as what brings maximum potential and connection to the 

situation. It is defined in terms of becoming. 

Navigations 

This makes me think of your idea of ‘walking as controlled falling’. In some 

ways, every step that we take works with gravity so we don’t fall, but it’s 

not something we consciously think about, because our body is already 

moving and is full of both constraint and freedom. I found it interesting 

because, in some other ways, I’ve been trying to think about another 

relationship — between perception and language — and it seems to me that 

‘affect’ and this notion of body movement can provide a more integrated and 

hopeful way of talking about experience and language. 

I like the notion of ‘walking as controlled falling’. It’s something of a proverb, 

and Laurie Anderson, among others, has used it. It conveys the sense that 

freedom, or the ability to move forward and to transit through life, isn’t 

necessarily about escaping from constraints. There are always constraints. 

When we walk, we’re dealing with the constraint of gravity. There’s also the 

constraint of balance, and a need for equilibrium. But, at the same time, to 

walk you need to throw off the equilibrium, you have to let yourself go into a 

fall, then you cut it off and regain the balance. You move forward by playing 

with the constraints, not avoiding them. There’s an openness of movement, 

even though there’s no escaping constraint. 

It’s similar with language. I see it as a play between constraint and room to 

manoeuvre. If you think of language in the traditional way, as a 

correspondence between a word with its established meaning on the one hand 

and a matching perception on the other, then it starts coagulating. It’s just 

being used as a totally conventional system for pointing out things you want 

other people to recognise. It’s all about pointing out what everyone can agree 

is already there. When you think about it, though, there’s a unique feeling to 

every experience that comes along, and the exact details of it can never be 

exhausted by linguistic expression. That’s partly because no two people in the 

same situation will have had exactly the same experience of it — they would 

be able to argue and discuss the nuances endlessly. And it’s partly because 

there was just too much there between them to be completely articulated — 

especially if you think about what was only there potentially, or virtually. But 

there are uses of language that can bring that inadequation between language 

and experience to the fore in a way that can convey the ‘too much’ of the 

situation — its charge — in a way that actually fosters new experiences. 

Humour is a prime example. So is poetic expression, taken in its broadest 

sense. So language is two-pronged: it is a capture of experience, it codifies 

and normalises it and makes it communicable by providing a neutral frame of 

reference. But at the same time it can convey what I would call ‘singularities 

of experience’, the kinds of affective movements we were talking about 

before that are totally situation-specific, but in an open kind of way. 

Experiencing this potential for change, experiencing the eventfulness and 

uniqueness of every situation, even the most conventional ones, that’s not 

necessarily about commanding movement, it’s about navigating movement. 

It’s about being immersed in an experience that is already underway. It’s 

about being bodily attuned to opportunities in the movement, going with the 

flow. It’s more like surfing the situation, or tweaking it, than commanding or 

programming it. The command paradigm approaches experience as if we were 

somehow outside it, looking in, like disembodied subjects handling an object. 

But our experiences aren’t objects. They’re us, they’re what we’re made of. 

We are our situations, we are our moving through them. We are our 

participation — not some abstract entity that is somehow outside looking in at 

it all. 

The movement in language is important and it opens another door or window 

to perception. But I suppose, as intellectuals, there is the problem of the 

codification of language within critical discourse and theoretical writing — 

where that language can stop movement and it can express everything in 

particular terms or methods that cut off the potential of understanding 

freedom or experience … 

‘Critical’ practices aimed at increasing potentials for freedom and for 

movement are inadequate, because in order to critique something in any kind 

of definitive way you have to pin it down. In a way it is an almost sadistic 

enterprise that separates something out, attributes set characteristics to it, 

then applies a final judgment to it — objectifies it, in a moralising kind of 

way. I understand that using a ‘critical method’ is not the same as ‘being 

critical’. But still I think there is always that moralising undertone to critique. 

Because of that, I think, it loses contact with other more moving dimensions 

of experience. It doesn’t allow for other kinds of practices that might not 

have so much to do with mastery and judgment as with affective connection 

and abductive participation. 

The non-judgmental is interesting, you know, because you are always 

somehow implicated in trying to make judgments … To not make judgments 

in critical thought is a very hard thing to do. It takes a lot courage to move in 

that direction, because otherwise… 

Well it requires a willingness to take risks, to make mistakes and even to 

come across as silly. A critical perspective that tries to come to a definitive 

judgment on something is always in some way a failure, because it is 

happening at a remove from the process it’s judging. Something could have 

happened in the intervening time, or something barely perceptible might have 

been happening away from the centre of critical focus. These developments 

may become important later. The process of pinning down and separating out 

is also a weakness in judgment, because it doesn’t allow for these seeds of 

change, connections in the making that might not be activated or obvious at 

the moment. In a sense, judgmental reason is an extremely weak form of 

thought, precisely because it is so sure of itself. This is not to say that it 

shouldn’t be used. But I think it should be complemented by other practices 

of thought, it shouldn’t be relied on exclusively. It’s limiting if it’s the only or 

even the primary stance of the intellectual. 

A case in point is the anti-globalisation movement. It’s easy to find 

weaknesses in it, in its tactics or in its analysis of capitalism. If you wait 

around for a movement to come along that corresponds to your particular 

image of the correct approach, you’ll be waiting your life away. Nothing is 

ever that neat. But luckily people didn’t wait around. They jumped right in 

and started experimenting and networking, step by step. As a result, new 

connections have been made between people and movements operating in 

different regions of the world, on different political levels, from the most 

local grass-roots levels up to the most established NGOs, using different 

organisational structures. In a very short period of time the entire discourse 

surrounding globalisation has shifted. Actually, not only surrounding it but 

inside its institutions also — it’s now impossible for an international meeting 

to take place without issues of poverty and health being on the agenda. It’s 

far from a solution, but it’s a start. It’s ongoing. That’s the point: to keep on 

going. 

The constraints of freedom 

The idea of ‘controlled walking’ is a good example of what you were just 

talking about in terms of the limitations on the self and the freedoms that 

are possible. But I am also thinking about it as relating to the idea of 

‘societies of control’ — which you have written about. We now live in 

societies of control, so how do control and power in this new age also offer 

the possibility of freedom? 

In physics there is a very famous problem that heavily influenced the 

development of chaos theory. It’s called the ‘three-body problem’, where you 

have completely deterministic projectories of bodies constrained by 

Newtonian laws. For example, if you have two bodies interacting, through 

gravity for example, everything is calculable and foreseeable. If you know 

where they are in relation to each at one moment, you can project a path and 

figure out where they were at any given moment in the past, or at a time in 

the future. But if you have three of them together what happens is that a 

margin of unpredictability creeps in. The paths can’t be accurately 

determined after a point. They can turn erratic, ending up at totally different 

places than you’d expect. What has happened? How can chance creep into a 

totally deterministic system? It’s not that the bodies have somehow broken 

the laws of physics. What happens is interference, or resonation. It’s not 

really discrete bodies and paths interacting. It’s fields. Gravity is a field — a 

field of potential attraction, collision, orbit, of potential centripetal and 

centrifugal movements. All these potentials form such complex interference 

patterns when three fields overlap that a measure of indeterminacy creeps in. 

It’s not that we just don’t have a detailed enough knowledge to predict. 

Accurate prediction is impossible because the indeterminacy is objective. So 

there’s an objective degree of freedom even in the most deterministic 

system. Something in the coming-together of movements, even according to 

the strictest of laws, flips the constraints over into conditions of freedom. It’s 

a relational effect, a complexity effect. Affect is like our human gravitational 

field, and what we call our freedom are its relational flips. Freedom is not 

about breaking or escaping constraints. It’s about flipping them over into 

degrees of freedom. You can’t really escape the constraints. 

No body can escape gravity. Laws are part of what we are, they’re intrinsic to 

our identities. No human can simply escape gender, for example. The cultural 

‘laws’ of gender are part of what makes us who we are, they’re part of the 

process that produced us as individuals. You can’t just step out of gender 

identity. But just maybe you can take steps to encourage gender to flip. That 

can’t be an individual undertaking. It involves tweaking the interference and 

resonation patterns between individuals. It’s a relational undertaking. You’re 

not acting on yourself or other individuals separately. You’re acting on them 

together, their togetherness, their field of belonging. The idea is that there 

are ways of acting upon the level of belonging itself, on the moving together 

and coming together of bodies per se. This would have to involve an 

evaluation of collective potential that would be ethical in the sense we were 

talking about before. It would be a caring for the relating of things as such — 

a politics of belonging instead of a politics of identity, of correlated 

emergence instead of separate domains of interest attracting each other or 

colliding in predictable ways. In Isabelle Stengers’ terms, this kind of politics 

is an ecology of practices. It’s a pragmatic politics of the in-between. It’s an 

abductive politics that has to operate on the level of affect. 

So what does this political ecology involve?  

To move towards that kind of political ecology you have to get rid of the idea 

as power or constraint as power over. It’s always a power to. The true power 

of the law is the power to form us. Power doesn’t just force us down certain 

paths, it puts the paths in us, so by the time we learn to follow its constraints 

we’re following ourselves. The effects of power on us is our identity. That’s 

what Michel Foucault taught us. If power just came at us from outside, if it 

was just an extrinsic relation, it would be simple. You’d just run away. In the 

1960s and 1970s that’s how a lot of people looked at it — including myself. 

Drop out, stop following the predictable, straight-and-narrow path, and things 

like sexism will just disappear. Well, they didn’t. It’s a lot more complicated 

than that. Power comes up with us from the field of potential. It ‘informs’ us, 

it’s intrinsic to our formation, it’s part of our emergence as individuals, and it 

emerges with us — we actualise it, as it in-forms us. So in a way it’s as 

potentialising as what we call freedom, only what it potentialises is limited to 

a number of predictable paths. It’s the calculable part of affect, the most 

probable next steps and eventual outcomes. As Foucault says, power is 

productive, and it produces not so much repressions as regularities. Which 

brings us to the ‘society of control’ and to capitalism … 

I was just going to ask you about that … 

It is very clear that capitalism has undergone a major reconfiguration since 

the Second World War, and it’s been very difficult to think through what that 

has been. For me the most useful way of thinking about it comes from the 

post-Autonomia Italian Marxist movement, in particular the thought of 

Antonio Negri. The argument is that capitalist powers have pretty much 

abandoned control in the sense of ‘power over’. That corresponds to the first 

flush of ‘disciplinary’ power in Michel Foucault’s vocabulary. Disciplinary 

power starts by enclosing bodies in top-down institutions — prisons, asylums, 

hospitals, schools, and so on. It encloses in order to find ways of producing 

more regularity in behaviour. Its aim is to manufacture normality — good, 

healthy citizens. As top-down disciplinary power takes hold and spreads, it 

finds ways of doing the same thing without the enclosure. Prisons spawn half- 

way houses, hospitals spawn community clinics and home-care, educational 

institutions spawn the self-help and career retooling industries. It starts 

operating in an open field. After a certain point it starts paying more 

attention to the relays between the points in that field, the transitions 

between institutions, than to the institutions themselves. It’s seeped into the 

in-between. At this point it starts to act directly on the kinds of interference 

and resonation effects I was just mentioning. It starts working directly on 

bodies’ movements and momentum, producing momentums, the more varied 

and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities 

start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism’s dynamic. It’s 

not a simple liberation. It’s capitalism’s own form of power. It’s no longer 

disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it’s capitalism’s 

power to produce variety — because markets get saturated. Produce variety 

and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are OK — 

as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but 

only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify 

profit potential. It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus- 

value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the 

domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and 

predictable paths. It’s very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me 

that there’s been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of 

capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance. 

The flows of capitalism 

For me, this raises a question about the way capitalism does capture 

potential and organises itself. There are two issues I want to address: firstly, 

in relationship to the question of hope — human aspirations and hopes are 

directly related to capitalism today. The natural or ‘potential of hope’ is 

seized upon and is tied very much to a monetary system, economic 

imperatives or questions of ownership. Secondly, the relationship between 

hope and fear in capitalism. I think that hope and fear are part of the same 

equation … 

I think they definitely are. It would help to try to talk a little bit more about 

the change in capitalism and what that constitutes, and then go back to that 

question. Thinkers like Negri say that the products of capitalism have become 

more intangible, they’ve become more information- and service-based. 

Material objects and physical commodities that were once the engine of the 

economy are becoming more and more peripheral, in profit terms. For 

example, the cost of computers keeps plummeting. It’s difficult to make a 

profit from their manufacture because there’s a mass of basically identical 

versions from different companies, and they’re all pretty interchangeable. 

Is that mass production in a sense or a different notion of mass production? 

It is a mass production but it leads to a different kind of production, because 

what can someone sell if they can’t make a profit from the object? What they 

can sell are services around the object and they can sell the right to do the 

things you can do through the object. That’s why copyright is such a huge 

issue. The capitalist product is more and more an intellectual property that 

you buy a right to use, not an object you buy outright. If you buy a software 

package, often you’re not supposed to even make copies of it for yourself, 

like one for your desktop and one for a laptop. If you buy a book, you own an 

object. You can resell it, or lend it, or rebind it, or photocopy it for your own 

use. If you buy a software package, you’re not so much buying an object, 

you’re buying a bundle of functions. You’re buying the right to use those 

functions, with all sorts of strings attached. You’re basically buying the right 

to be able to do things, ways of affecting and being affected — word- 

processing capacities, image-capture and processing capacities, printing 

capacities, calculation capacities … It’s at the same time very potentialising, 

and controlled. The ‘cutting edge’ products are more and more multivalent. 

‘Convergence’ is the buzzword. When you buy a computerised product, you 

can do a lot of different things with it — you use it to extend your affective 

capacities. It becomes a motor force of your life — like a turbo charge to your 

vitality. It enables you to go farther and to do more, to fit more in. The way 

even older-style products are sold has something to do with this. You don’t 

just buy a car, the dealers tell us, you buy a lifestyle. When you consume, 

you’re not just getting something to use for a particular use, you’re getting 

yourself a life. All products become more intangible, sort of atmospheric, and 

marketing gets hinged more and more on style and branding … 

More meaningless? 

Possibly, possibly but not necessarily, because, if you think of style or 

branding, it is an attempt to express what we were talking about before as 

the sense of vitality or liveliness. It is a selling of experience or lifestyles, and 

people put themselves together by what they buy and what they can do 

through what they can buy. So ownership is becoming less and less important 

per se. Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, or just to signal the ability to 

accumulate — ‘conspicuous consumption’ — belongs to an earlier phase. It’s 

this enabling of experience that is taking over. Now, that enablement of 

experience has to be tended. Companies work very hard to produce brand 

loyalty. ‘Fidelity programs’ involving things like rewards points are 

everywhere. The product becomes a long-term part of your life, you’re 

brought into a relationship with the company through fidelity programs, 

service networks, promises of upgrades, etc. The way you use the product is 

also more and more oriented towards relationship — the most seductive 

products produce possibilities of connection. ‘Connectibility’ is another 

buzzword. When we buy a product, we’re buying potential connections with 

other things and especially other people — for example, when a family buys a 

computer to keep in touch by email, or when you get a computer for work 

and end up joining on-line communities. What’s being sold more and more is 

experience, social experience. The corporation, the capitalist company, is 

having to create social networks and cultural nodes that come together 

around the product, and the product gets used more and more to create 

social networks that radiate out from it. ‘Networking’ was the buzzword in 

the 1980s, when this new kind of capitalist power was just coming into its 

own. 

Marketing itself is starting to operate along those lines. There is a new kind of 

marketing called viral marketing where specialised companies will surf the 

web to find communities of interest that have spontaneously formed. It 

started in the music industry, around fan networks for bands. They find a 

group of people who have a very strong affective attachment to a band or a 

performer that is very central to how they see themselves and to what they 

perceive as the quality of their life. They will network with them, offer them 

tickets or inside information, or special access, and in return the members of 

the group will agree to take on certain marketing tasks. So the difference 

between marketing and consuming and between living and buying is becoming 

smaller and smaller, to the point that they are getting almost 

indistinguishable. On both the production side and the consumption side it is 

all about intangible, basically cultural products or products of experience that 

invariably have a collective dimension to them. 

So as consumers we are part of the new networks of global and collective 

exchange… 

Individual consumers are being inducted into these collective processes rather 

than being separated out and addressed as free agents who are supposed to 

make an informed consumer choice as rational individuals. This is a step 

beyond niche marketing, it’s relational marketing. It works by contagion 

rather than by convincing, on affect rather than rational choice. It works at 

least as much on the level of our ‘indeterminate sociality’ as on the level of 

our identities. More and more, what it does is hitch a ride on movements 

afoot in the social field, on social stirrings, which it channels in profit-making 

directions. People like Negri talk about the ‘social factory’, a kind of 

socialisation of capitalism, where capitalism is more about scouting and 

capturing or producing and multiplying potentials for doing and being than it 

is about selling things. The kind of work that goes into this he calls 

‘immaterial labour’. The product, ultimately, is us. We are in-formed by 

capitalist powers of production. Our whole life becomes a ‘capitalist tool’ — 

our vitality, our affective capacities. It’s to the point that our life potentials 

are indistinguishable from capitalist forces of production. In some of my 

essays I’ve called this the ‘subsumption of life’ under capitalism. 

Jeremy Rifkin is a social critic who now teaches at one of the most prestigious 

business schools in the US (talk about the capture of resistance!). Rifkin has a 

description of capitalism that is actually surprisingly similar to Negri’s. And 

he’s teaching it to the next generation of capitalists. It centres on what he 

calls ‘gatekeeping’ functions. Here the figure of power is no longer the billy 

club of the policeman, it’s the barcode or the PIN number. These are control 

mechanisms, but not in the old sense of ‘power over’. It’s control in Gilles 

Deleuze’s sense, which is closer to ‘check mechanism’. It’s all about 

checkpoints. At the grocery store counter, the barcode on what you’re buying 

checks the object out of the store. At the automatic bank teller, the PIN 

number on your card checks you into your account. The checks don’t control 

you, they don’t tell you where to go or what to be doing at any particular 

time. They don’t lord it over you. They just lurk. They lie in wait for you at 

key points. You come to them, and they’re activated by your arrival. You’re 

free to move, but every few steps there’s a checkpoint. They’re everywhere, 

woven into the social landscape. To continue on your way you have to pass 

the checkpoint. What’s being controlled is right of passage — access. It’s 

about your enablement to go places and do things. When you pass the 

checkpoint you have to present something for detection, and when you do 

that something registers. Your bank account is debited, and you and your 

groceries pass. Or something fails to register, and that’s what lets you pass, 

like at airport security or places where there’s video surveillance. In either 

case what’s being controlled is passage across thresholds. 

Society becomes an open field composed of thresholds or gateways, it 

becomes a continuous space of passage. It’s no longer rigidly structured by 

walled-in enclosures, there’s all kinds of latitude. It’s just that at key points 

along the way, at key thresholds, power is tripped into action. The exercise of 

the power bears on your movement — not so much you as a person. In the old 

disciplinary power formations, it was always about judging what sort of 

person you were, and the way power functioned was to make you fit a model, 

or else. If you weren’t the model citizen, you were judged guilty and locked 

up as a candidate for ‘reform’. That kind of power deals with big unities — 

the person as moral subject, right and wrong, social order. And everything 

was internalised — if you didn’t think right you were in trouble. Now you’re 

checked in passing, and instead of being judged innocent or guilty you’re 

registered as liquid. The process is largely automatic, and it doesn’t really 

matter what you think or who you are deep down. Machines do the detecting 

and ‘judging’. The check just bears on a little detail — do you have enough in 

your bank account, do you not have a gun? It’s a highly localised, partial 

exercise of power — a micro-power. That micro-power, though, feeds up to 

higher levels, bottom up. 

And this power is more intangible because it has no ‘real’ origin… 

In a way the real power starts after you’ve passed, in the feed, because 

you’ve left a trace. Something has registered. Those registrations can be 

gathered to piece together a profile of your movement, or they can be 

compared to other people’s inputs. They can be processed en masse and 

systematised, synthesised. Very convenient for surveillance or crime 

investigation, but even more valuable for marketing. In such a fluid economy, 

based so much on intangibles, the most valuable thing is information on 

people’s patterns and tastes. The checkpoint system allows information to be 

gathered at every step you take. You’re providing a continuous feed, which 

comes back to you in advertising pushing new products, new bundlings of 

potential. Think of how cookies work on the internet. Every time you click a 

link, you’re registering your tastes and patterns, which are then processed 

and thrown back at you in the form of flip-up ads that try to get you to go to 

particular links and hopefully buy something. It’s a feedback loop, and the 

object is to modulate your online movement. It’s no exaggeration to say that 

every time you click a link you’re doing somebody else’s market research for 

them. You’re contributing to their profit-making abilities. Your everyday 

movements and leisure activities have become a form of value-producing 

labour. You are generating surplus-value just by going about your daily life — 

your very ability to move is being capitalised on. Deleuze and Guattari call 

this kind of capitalising on movement ‘surplus-value of flow’, and what 

characterises the ‘society of control’ is that the economy and the way power 

functions come together around the generation of this surplus-value of flow. 

Life movements, capital and power become one continuous operation — 

check, register, feed-in, processing, feedback, purchase, profit, around and 

around. 

So how do the more ‘traditional’ forms of power operate? I mean they don’t 

disappear — they seem to gather more momentum?  

Yes, this situation doesn’t mean that police functions and the other old 

disciplinary forms of power are over and done with. Disciplinary powers don’t 

disappear. Far from it. In fact they tend to proliferate and often get more 

vehement in their application precisely because the field that they are in is 

no longer controlled overall by their kind of power, so they’re in a situation of 

structural insecurity. There are no more top-down state apparatuses that can 

really claim effective control over their territory. Old-style sovereignty is a 

thing of the past. All borders have become porous, and capitalism is feeding 

off that poracity and pushing it further and further — that’s what 

globalisation is all about. But there have to be mechanisms that check those 

movements, so policing functions start to proliferate, and as policing 

proliferates so do prisons. In the US they’re being privatised and are now big 

business. Now policing works more and more in the way I was just describing, 

through gatekeeping — detection, registration and feedback. Police action, in 

the sense of an arrest, comes out of this movement-processing loop as a 

particular kind of feedback. Instead of passing through the gate, a gun is 

detected by the machine, and a police response is triggered, and someone 

gets arrested. Police power becomes a function of that other kind of power, 

that we were calling control, or movement-based power. It’s a local stop- 

action that arises out of the flow and is aimed at safeguarding it. The boom in 

prison construction comes as an off-shoot of the policing, so you could 

consider the profits made by that new industry as a kind of surplus-value of 

flow. It’s a vicious circle, and everyone knows it. No matter how many prisons 

there are, no matter how many people they lock up, the general insecurity 

won’t be lessened. It just comes with the territory, because for capitalism to 

keep going, things have to keep flowing. Free trade and fluidity of labour 

markets is the name of the game. So no matter how many billions of dollars 

are poured into surveillance and prison building, the threat will still be there 

of something getting through that shouldn’t. Terrorism is the perfect 

example. 

Yes. In thinking about this now — after our initial conversation and in this 

revision of it, post-September 11 — it adds another dimension to this 

surveillance. 

All the September 11 terrorists were in the US legally. They passed. How 

many others might have? With this stage of capitalism comes territorial 

insecurity, and with territorial insecurity comes fear, with fear comes more 

checkpoint policing, more processing, more bottom-up, fed-back ‘control’. It 

becomes one big, self-propelling feedback machine. It turns into a kind of 

automatism, and we register collectively as individuals through the way we 

feed that automatism, by our participation in it, just by virtue of being alive 

and moving. Socially, that’s what the individual is now: a checkpoint trigger 

and a co-producer of surplus-values of flow. Power is now distributed. It 

trickles down to the most local, most partial checkpoint. The profits that get 

generated from that don’t necessarily trickle down, but the power does. 

There is no distance anymore between us, our movements and the operations 

of power, or between the operations of power and the forces of capitalism. 

One big, continuous operation. Capital-power has become operationalised. 

Nothing so glorious as sovereign, just operational — a new modesty of power 

as it becomes ubiquitous. 

At any rate, the hope that might come with the feeling of potentialisation and 

enablement we discussed is doubled by insecurity and fear. Increasingly 

power functions by manipulating that affective dimension rather than 

dictating proper or normal behaviour from on high. So power is no longer 

fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms, it’s affective. 

The mass media have an extremely important role to play in that. The 

legitimisation of political power, of state power, no longer goes through the 

reason of state and the correct application of governmental judgment. It goes 

through affective channels. For example, an American president can deploy 

troops overseas because it makes a population feel good about their country 

or feel secure, not because the leader is able to present well-honed 

arguments that convince the population that it is a justified use of force. So 

there is no longer political justification within a moral framework provided by 

the sovereign state. And the mass media are not mediating anymore — they 

become direct mechanisms of control by their ability to modulate the 

affective dimension. 

This has all become painfully apparent after the World Trade Center attacks. 

You had to wait weeks after the event to hear the slightest analysis in the US 

media. It was all heart-rending human interest stories of fallen heroes, or 

scare stories about terrorists lurking around every corner. What the media 

produced wasn’t information or analysis. It was affect modulation — affective 

pick-up from the mythical ‘man in the street’, followed by affective 

amplification through broadcast. Another feedback loop. It changes how 

people experience what potentials they have to go and to do. The constant 

security concerns insinuate themselves into our lives at such a basic, habitual 

level that you’re barely aware how it’s changing the tenor of everyday living. 

You start ‘instinctively’ to limit your movements and contact with people. It’s 

affectively limiting. That affective limitation is expressed in emotional terms 

— remember we were making a distinction between affect and emotion, with 

emotion being the expression of affect in gesture and language, its 

conventional or coded expression. At the same time as the media helps 

produce this affective limitation, it works to overcome it in a certain way. 

The limitation can’t go too far or it would slow down the dynamic of 

capitalism. One of the biggest fears after September 11 was that the economy 

would go into recession because of a crisis in consumer confidence. So 

everyone was called upon to keep spending, as a proud, patriotic act. So the 

media picks up on fear and insecurity and feeds it back amplified, but in a 

way that somehow changes its quality into pride and patriotism — with the 

proof in the purchasing. A direct affective conversion of fear into confidence 

by means of an automatic image loop, running in real time, through 

continuous coverage, and spinning off profit. Does anyone really believe Bush 

stands for state reason? It doesn’t matter — there are flags to wave and feel- 

good shopping to do. Once the loop gets going, you’ve got to feed it. You can 

only produce more pride and patriotism by producing more fear and insecurity 

to convert. At times it seemed as though US government officials were 

consciously drumming up fear, like when they repeatedly issued terrorist 

attack warnings and then would withdraw them — and the media was lapping 

it up. 

Yes. 

Affect is now much more important for understanding power, even state 

power narrowly defined, than concepts like ideology. Direct affect 

modulation takes the place of old-style ideology. This is not new. It didn’t 

just happen around the September 11 events, it just sort of came out then, 

became impossible to ignore. In the early 1990s I put together a book called 

The Politics of Everyday Fear. It dealt with the same kind of mechanisms, but 

it was coming out of the experience of the 1980s, the Reagan years. This post- 

ideological media power has been around at least since television matured as 

a medium — which was about when it took power literally, with the election 

of Reagan, an old TV personality, as head of state. From that time on, the 

functions of head of state and commander in chief of the military fused with 

the role of the television personality. The American president is not a 

statesman anymore, like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt were. He’s a 

visible personification of that affective media loop. He’s the face of mass 

affect. 

Transitions 

It is really important to understand affect ‘after a society of ideology’. 

Ideology is still around but it is not as embracing as it was, and in fact it does 

operate. But to really understand it you have to understand its 

materialisation, which goes through affect. That’s a very different way of 

addressing the political, because it is having to say that there is a whole 

range of ideological structures in place. Then there is that point you were 

talking about, the transitional passages that you pass through that capitalism 

is part of and manipulating — but it does have the possibility of freedom 

within it. It seems to me that to express how those affective dimensions are 

mobilised is the main ethical concern now … 

It seems to me that alternative political action does not have to fight against 

the idea that power has become affective, but rather has to learn to function 

itself on that same level — meet affective modulation with affective 

modulation. That requires, in some ways, a performative, theatrical or 

aesthetic approach to politics. For example, it is not possible for a 

dispossessed group to adequately communicate its needs and desires through 

the mass media. It just doesn’t happen. It wasn’t possible for marginal 

interest groups like the anti-globalisation movement before the Seattle 

demonstration to do that simply by arguing convincingly and broadcasting its 

message. The message doesn’t get through, because the mass media doesn’t 

function on that level of the rational weighing of choices. Unfortunately the 

kind of theatrical or performative intervention that is the easiest and has the 

most immediate effect is often a violent kind. If windows hadn’t been broken 

and cars hadn’t been overturned in Seattle, most people wouldn’t have heard 

of the anti-globalisation movement by now. That outburst of anger actually 

helped create networks of people working around the world trying to address 

the increasing inequalities that accompany globalisation. It was able to shake 

the situation enough that people took notice. It was like everything was 

thrown up in the air for a moment and people came down after the shock in a 

slightly different order and some were interconnected in ways that they 

hadn’t been before. Dispossessed people like the Palestinians or the people in 

Irian Jaya just can’t argue their cases effectively through the mass media, 

which is why they’re driven to violent guerilla tactics or terrorism, out of 

desperation. And they’re basically theatrical or spectacular actions, they’re 

performative, because they don’t do much in themselves except to get 

people’s attention — and cause a lot of suffering in the process, which is why 

they spectacularly backfire as often as not. They also work by amplifying fear 

and converting it into group pride or resolve. The resolve is for an in-group 

and the fear is for everybody else. It’s as divisive as the oppression it’s 

responding to, and it feeds right into the dominant state mechanisms. 

The September 11 terrorists made Bush president, they created President 

Bush, they fed the massive military and surveillance machine he’s now able to 

build. Before Bin Laden and Al-Qaïda, Bush wasn’t a president, he was an 

embarrassment. Bin Laden and Bush are affective partners, like Bush Senior 

and Saddam Hussein, or Reagan and the Soviet leaders. In a way, they’re in 

collusion or in symbiosis. They’re like evil twins who feed off of each other’s 

affective energies. It’s a kind of vampiric politics. Everything starts happening 

between these opposite personifications of affect, leaving no room for other 

kinds of action. It’s rare that protest violence has any of the positive 

organising power it did in Seattle. But in any case it had lost that power by 

the time the anti-globalisation movement reached Genoa, when people 

started to die. The violence was overused and under-strategised — it got 

predictable, it became a refrain, it lost its power. 

The crucial political question for me is whether there are ways of practising a 

politics that takes stock of the affective way power operates now, but doesn’t 

rely on violence and the hardening of divisions along identity lines that it 

usually brings. I’m not exactly sure what that kind of politics would look like, 

but it would still be performative. In some basic way it would be an aesthetic 

politics, because its aim would be to expand the range of affective potential 

— which is what aesthetic practice has always been about. It’s also the way I 

talked about ethics earlier. Felix Guattari liked to hyphenate the two — 

towards an ‘ethico-aesthetic politics’. 

                                                               * 

For me the relationship you were discussing earlier, between hope and fear 

in the political domain, is what gets mobilised by the Left and Right. In some 

ways the problem of more leftist or radical thinking is that it doesn’t 

actually tap into those mobilisations of different kinds of affects, whether it 

be hope, fear, love or whatever. The Left are criticising the Right and the 

Right are mobilising hope and fear in more affective ways. The Right can 

capture the imagination of a population and produce nationalist feelings and 

tendencies, so there can be a real absence of hope to counter what’s going on 

in everyday life, and I think the Left have a few more hurdles to jump … 

The traditional Left was really left behind by the culturalisation or 

socialisation of capital and the new functioning of the mass media. It seems 

to me that in the United States what’s left of the Left has become extremely 

isolated, because there are fewer possibilities than in countries like Australia 

or Canada to break through into the broadcast media. So there is a sense of 

hopelessness and isolation that ends up rigidifying people’s responses. They’re 

left to stew in their own righteous juices. They fall back on rectitude and 

right judgement, which simply is not affective. Or rather, it’s anti-affective 

affect — it’s curtailing, punishing, disciplining. It’s really just a sad holdover 

from the old regime — the dregs of disciplinary power. It seems to me that 

the Left has to relearn resistance, really taking to heart the changes that 

have happened recently in the way capitalism and power operate. 

Connections — belief, faith, joy 

In a way, this conversation makes me think about the relation of ‘autonomy 

and connection’ that you’ve written about. There are many ways of 

understanding autonomy, but I think with capitalism’s changing face it is 

harder and harder to be autonomous. For instance, people who are 

unemployed have very intense reactions and feelings to that categorisation 

of themselves as unemployed. And, in my experience, I’m continually 

hounded by bureaucratic procedures that tend to restrict my autonomy and 

freedom — such as constant checks, meetings and forms to fill out. These 

procedures mark every step you take … So to find some way to affirm 

unemployment that allows you to create another life, or even to get a job, is 

increasingly more difficult and produces new forms of alienation and ‘dis- 

connection’ … 

It is harder to feel like getting a job is making you autonomous, because there 

are so many mechanisms of control that come down on you when you do have 

a job. All aspects of your life involve these mechanisms — your daily 

schedules, your dress, and, in the United States, it can even involve being 

tested for drugs on a regular basis. Even when you are not on the job, the 

insecurity that goes with having a job and wanting to keep it in a volatile 

economy — where there is little job security and the kind of jobs that are 

available change very quickly — requires you to constantly be thinking of your 

marketability and what the next job is going to be. So free time starts getting 

taken up by self-improvement or taking care of yourself so that you remain 

healthy and alert and can perform at your peak. The difference between your 

job life and off-job life collapses, there are no longer distinctions between 

your public and private functions. Being unemployed creates an entirely 

different set of constraints and controls but it is not necessarily completely 

disempowering. For example, a lot of creative work gets done by people who 

are unemployed or underemployed. 

Yes, but it is also the intensity of those experiences that get categorised in 

one particular way — you either work or don’t work. But the way it’s lived 

out isn’t like that at all. I’m not just thinking of myself here and my 

experience of unemployment. The feeling of despair doesn’t have a way of 

being expressed in our cultures, except with the feeling that you’re not doing 

the right thing, or you’re not part of the society. It is about the relationship 

to commodities, really, because in a sense you are no longer in a position to 

market yourself or consume. 

There is definitely an imperative to have a job and to be able to consume 

more and consume better, to consume experiences that in-form you and 

increase your marketability for jobs. There’s definitely an imperative to 

participate, and if you can’t you’re branded, you don’t pass anymore, you 

can’t get by the most desirable checkpoints. 

Yes, like getting a credit card — or simply having money in your bank 

account. 

But what I was trying to say is that there is no such thing as autonomy and 

decisive control over one’s life in any total sense, whether you have a job or 

whether you don’t. There are different sets of constraints, and, like we were 

saying before, freedom always arises from constraint — it’s a creative 

conversion of it, not some utopian escape from it. Wherever you are, there is 

still potential, there are openings, and the openings are in the grey areas, in 

the blur where you’re susceptible to affective contagion, or capable of 

spreading it. It’s never totally within your personal power to decide. 

Is that what you mean by autonomy and connection? 

Well, there’s no such thing as autonomy in the sense of being entirely 

affectively separate. When you are unemployed you are branded as separate, 

unproductive and not part of society, but you still are connected because you 

are in touch with an enormous range of social services and policing functions 

that mean you are just as much in society — but you are in society in a certain 

relation of inequality and impasse. It’s a fiction that there is any position 

within society that enables you to maintain yourself as a separate entity with 

complete control over your decisions — the idea of a free agent that somehow 

stands back from it all and chooses, like from a smorgasbord platter. I think 

there can be another notion of autonomy that has to do more with how you 

can connect to others and to other movements, how you can modulate those 

connections, to multiply and intensify them. So what you are, affectively, 

isn’t a social classification — rich or poor, employed or unemployed — it’s a 

set of potential connections and movements that you have, always in an open 

field of relations. What you can do, your potential, is defined by your 

connectedness, the way you’re connected and how intensely, not your ability 

to separate off and decide by yourself. Autonomy is always connective, it’s 

not being apart, it’s being in, being in a situation of belonging that gives you 

certain degrees of freedom, or powers of becoming, powers of emergence. 

How many degrees of freedom there are, and where they can lead most 

directly, is certainly different depending on how you are socially classified — 

whether you are male or female, child or adult, rich or poor, employed or 

unemployed — but none of those conditions or definitions are boxes that 

completely undermine a person’s potential. And having pity for someone who 

occupies a category that is not socially valorised, or expressing moral outrage 

on their behalf, is not necessarily helpful in the long run, because it maintains 

the category and simply inverts its value sign, from negative to positive. It’s a 

kind of piety, a moralising approach. It’s not affectively pragmatic. It doesn’t 

challenge identity-based divisions. 

Well that is the problem of charity. When you have pity for someone it 

doesn’t actually change the situation or give them much hope. But the other 

side of that is what you were talking about before, the idea of ‘caring for 

belonging’. There is such a focus on self-interest and the privatised idea of 

the individual (although this is changing through the new fields of capitalism 

and the economy) — the valorisation of the individual against more collective 

struggles. This project has been trying to think about different notions of 

being, and collective life. In your ideas of autonomy and connection there is 

also another understanding or different notion of care — ‘belonging’ and our 

‘relations’ to ourselves and others. It involves some other idea of being that 

is anti-capitalist, and also different notion of caring … 

Well if you think of your life as an autonomous collectivity or a connective 

autonomy, it still makes sense to think in terms of self-interest at a certain 

level. Obviously a disadvantaged group has to assess their interests and fight 

for certain rights, certain rights of passage and access, certain resources — 

often survival itself is in the balance. But at the same time, if any group, 

disadvantaged or otherwise, identifies itself completely with its self-interests 

it’s living the fiction that it is a separate autonomy. It is missing the potential 

that comes from taking the risk of making an event of the way you relate to 

other people, orienting it towards becoming-other. So in a way you are 

cutting yourself off from your own potential to change and intensify your life. 

If you think of it in terms of potential and intensified experience then too 

much self-interest is against your own interests. You have to constantly be 

balancing those two levels. Political action that only operates in terms of the 

self-interest of identified groups occupying recognisable social categories like 

male/female, unemployed/employed have limited usefulness. For me, if they 

are pursued to the exclusion of other forms of political activity they end up 

creating a sort of rigidity — a hardening of the arteries! 

Which leads to a heart attack or death doesn’t it! 

So it seems to me there needs to be an ecology of practices that does have 

room for pursuing or defending rights based on an identification with a certain 

categorised social group, that asserts and defends a self-interest but doesn’t 

just do that. If you do think of your life potential as coming from the ways 

you can connect with others, and are challenged by that connection in ways 

that might be outside your direct control, then, like you are saying, you have 

to employ a different kind of logic. You have to think of your being in a direct 

belonging. There are any number of practices that can be socially defined and 

assert their interest, but all of them interact in an open field. If you take 

them all together there is an in-betweenness of them all that is not just the 

one-to-one conflict between pairs, but snakes between them all and makes 

them belong to the same social field — an indeterminate or emergent 

‘sociality’. So I’m suggesting that there is a role for people who care for 

relation or belonging, as such, and try to direct attention towards it and 

inflect it rather than denouncing or championing particular identities or 

positions. But to do that you have to abdicate your own self-interest up to a 

point, and this opens you to risk. You have to place yourself not in a position 

but in the middle, in a fairly indeterminate, fairly vague situation, where 

things meet at the edges and pass into each other. 

That’s the ethics isn’t it? 

Yes, because you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. So you have to 

take care, because an intervention that is too violent can create rebound 

effects that are unpredictable to such a degree that it can lead to things 

falling apart rather than reconfiguring. It can lead to great suffering. In a way 

I think it becomes an ethic of caring, caring for belonging, which has to be a 

non-violent ethic that involves thinking of your local actions as modulating a 

global state. A very small intervention might get amplified across the web of 

connections to produce large effects — the famous butterfly effect — you 

never know. So it takes a great deal of attention and care and abductive 

effort of understanding about how things are interrelating and how a 

perturbation, a little shove or a tweak, might change that. 

Yes, and there is a relation between this ethics, hope and the idea of joy.  If 

we take Spinoza and Nietzsche seriously, an ethic of joy and the cultivation 

of joy is an affirmation of life. In the sense of what you are saying, even a 

small thing can become amplified and can have a global effect, which is life 

affirming. What are your thoughts on this ethical relationship in everyday 

existence? And in intellectual practice — which is where we are coming from 

— what are the affirmations of joy and hope? 

Well I think that joy is not the same thing as happiness. Just like good for 

Nietzsche is not the opposite of evil, joy for Spinoza (or ‘gaiety’ in Nietzche’s 

vocabulary) is not the opposite of unhappy. It’s on a different axis. Joy can be 

very disruptive, it can even be very painful. What I think Spinoza and 

Nietzsche are getting at is joy as affirmation, an assuming by the body of its 

potentials, its assuming of a posture that intensifies its powers of existence. 

The moment of joy is the co-presence of those potentials, in the context of a 

bodily becoming. That can be an experience that overcomes you. Take 

Antonin Artaud, for example. His artistic practice was all about intensifying 

bodily potential, trying to get outside or underneath the categories of 

language and affective containment by those categories, trying to pack vast 

potentials for movement and meaning in a single gesture, or in words that 

burst apart and lose their conventional meaning, becoming like a scream of 

possibility, a babble of becoming, the body bursting out through an opening in 

expression. It’s liberating, but at the same time the charge of that potential 

can become unbearable and can actually destroy. Artaud himself was 

destroyed by it, he ended up mad, and so did Nietzsche. So it is not just 

simple opposition between happy and unhappy or pleasant or unpleasant. 

I do think, though, that the practice of joy does imply some form of belief. It 

can’t be a total scepticism or nihilism or cynicism, which are all mechanisms 

for holding oneself separate and being in a position to judge or deride. But, 

on the other hand, it’s not a belief in the sense of a set of propositions to 

adhere to or a set of principles or moral dictates. There is a phrase of 

Deleuze’s that I like very much where he says that what we need is to be able 

to find a way to ‘believe in the world’ again. It’s not at all a theological 

statement — or an anti-theological statement for that matter. It’s an ethical 

statement. What it is saying is that we have to live our immersion in the 

world, really experience our belonging to this world, which is the same thing 

as our belonging to each other, and live that so intensely together that there 

is no room to doubt the reality of it. The idea is that lived intensity is self- 

affirming. It doesn’t need a God or judge or head of state to tell it that it has 

value. What it means, I think, is accept the embeddedness, go with it, live it 

out, and that’s your reality, it’s the only reality you have, and it’s your 

participation that makes it real. That’s what Deleuze is saying belief is about, 

a belief in the world. It’s not a belief that’s ‘about’ being in the world, it is a 

being in the world. Because it’s all about being in this world, warts and all, 

and not some perfect world beyond or a better world of the future, it’s an 

empirical kind of belief. Ethical, empirical — and creative, because your 

participation in this world is part of a global becoming. So it’s about taking 

joy in that process, wherever it leads, and I guess it’s about having a kind of 

faith in the world which is simply the hope that it continue … But again it is 

not a hope that has a particular content or end point — it’s a desire for more 

life, or for more to life.

LIFE OF DIOGENES

Captain BellamyDaniel Defoe, writing under the pen name Captain Charles Johnson, wrote what became the first standard historical text on pirates, A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pirates. According to Patrick Pringle’s Jolly Roger, pirate recruitment was most effective among the unemployed, escaped bondsmen, and transported criminals. The high seas made for an instantaneous levelling of class inequalities. Defoe relates that a pirate named Captain Bellamy made this speech to the captain of a merchant vessel he had taken as a prize. The captain of the merchant vessel had just declined an invitation to join the pirates.

“I am sorry they won’t let you have your sloop again, for I scorn to do any one a mischief, when it is not to my advantage; damn the sloop, we must sink her, and she might be of use to you. Though you are a sneaking puppy, and so are all those who will submit to be governed by laws which rich men have made for their own security; for the cowardly whelps have not the courage otherwise to defend what they get by knavery; but damn ye altogether: damn them for a pack of crafty rascals, and you, who serve them, for a parcel of hen-hearted numbskulls. They vilify us, the scoundrels do, when there is only this difference, they rob the poor under the cover of law, forsooth, and we plunder the rich under the protection of our own courage. Had you not better make then one of us, than sneak after these villains for employment?”

When the captain replied that his conscience would not let him break the laws of God and man, the pirate Bellamy continued:

“You are a devilish conscience rascal, I am a free prince, and I have as much authority to make war on the whole world, as he who has a hundred sail of ships at sea, and an army of 100,000 men in the field; and this my conscience tells me: but there is no arguing with such snivelling puppies, who allow superiors to kick them about deck at pleasure.”