Theory of Bloom by Tiqqun (excerpt)

Mundus Est Fabula (the world is a fiction)

Because Bloom is he who can no longer separate himself from the immediate context containing him, his gaze is that of a man that does not identify. Everything blurs under the Bloom effect and is lost in the inconsequential wavering of objective relationships where life is felt negatively, in indifference, impersonality, and the lack of quality.

Bloom lives inside of Bloom.

Spread out all around us is a petrified world, a world of things where we ourselves, with our “I,” our gestures, and even our feelings figure in as things. Nothing can belong to us as truly our own in such a landscape of death. We are more and more like exiles, never sure of understanding what’s happening all around.

In spite of this gigantic relinquishment, in spite of the inexplicable suspended-animation that now strikes everything that exists, the overall mechanism continues to function like it was nothing, processing our isolation.

In this perpetually renovated empire of ruins, there’s nowhere for us to take refuge, and we don’t even have the ability to desert it all by withdrawing into ourselves. We’ve been delivered up, without appeal, to a finiteness with no landmarks to orient us, totally exposed across the whole surface of our being.

Bloom is thus that man whom nothing can save from the triviality of the world. A reasonable mind might conclude: “Well, then, in fact, Bloom is alienated man.” But no, Bloom is man so completely mixed up with his own alienation that it would be absurd to try to separate him out from it.

Empty angels, creatures without a creator, mediums without a message, we wander among the abysses. Our path, which could easily have come to an end yesterday or years back, has no reason and no necessity outside of that of its own contingency. It’s a wandering path, one that carries us from the same to the same on the road of the Identical; and wherever we go we carry within ourselves the desert that we’re the hermits in. And if some days we might swear that we are the “whole universe,” like Agrippa de Nettesheim did, or more ingenuously that we are “all things, all men and all animals,” like Cravan, it’s just that all we see in everything is the Nothing which we ourselves so totally are.

But that Nothingness is the absolutely real, in the light of which everything that exists becomes somehow ghostly.

“Everyone is more foreign to himself than to anyone else.”

Bloom’s fundamental experience is that of his own transcendence of himself, but this experience, in spite of how nice it sounds, is above all one of impotence, an experience of absolute suffering.

Whatever high esteem we’d like to hold ourselves in, we are not subjects, finished products, autarchic and sovereign even in our allegiances.

We evolve in a space that is entirely sectioned off and policed; a space occupied, on the on hand, by the Spectacle, and on the other, by Biopower. And what’s terrible about this gridding, this occupation, is that the submission it demands of us is nothing that we could rebel against with some definitive break-away gesture, but something that we can only deal with strategically.

The regime of power that we live under in no way resembles that which could have run its course under administrative monarchy, that expired concept which up until recently, that is, even within biopolitical democracies, remained the only enemy recognized by revolutionary movements: a simple restriction mechanism, a purely repressive mechanism of coercion.

The contemporary form of domination, on the contrary, is essentially productive.

On the one hand it rules all the manifestations of our existence — the Spectacle; on the other, it generates the conditions for it — Biopower.

The Spectacle is the kind of Power that wants you to talk, that wants you to be someone.

Biopower is benevolent power, full of a pastor’s concern for his flock; the kind of Power that wants its subjects to be safe, that wants you to live. Caught in the vise of a kind of control that is simultaneously totalizing and individualizing, walled into a double constraint that annihilates us by the same stroke with which it makes us exist, the majority of us take up a kind of politics of disappearance: feigning an inner death and keeping our silence, like captives before the Grand Inquisitor. By subtracting all positivity and subtracting itself from all positivity, these specters steal from a productive power the very thing it might have exerted itself upon. Their desire to not live is all that they have the strength to counterpose to a power that intends to make them live. In so doing, they remain in Bloom, and often end up buried there.

So this is what Bloom means: that we don’t belong to ourselves, that this world isn’t our world. That it’s not just that it confronts us in its totality, but that even in the most proximate details it is foreign to us. This foreignness would be quite enjoyable if it could imply an exteriority of principles between it and us. Far from it. Our foreignness to the world consists in the fact that the stranger, the foreigner, is in us, in the fact that in the world of the authoritarian commodity, we regularly become strangers to ourselves. The circle of situations where we’re forced to watch ourselves act, to contemplate the action of a “me” in which we don’t recognize ourselves, now closes up on and besieges us, even in what bourgeois society still calls our “intimacy.” The Other possesses us; it is this dissociated body, a simple peripheral artifact in the hands of Biopower; it is our raw desire to survive in the intolerable network of miniscule subjugations, granulated pressures that fetter us to the quick; it is the ensemble of self-interested contrivances, humiliations, pettiness; the ensemble of tactics that we must deploy. It is the whole objective machine that we sacrifice to inside ourselves.

 THE OTHER IS THE ECONOMY IN US.

Bloom also means that each person knows for himself that he is not himself. Even if momentarily, faced with such and such a person — and most frequently in anonymous interactions — we might get an impression to the contrary, we still retain at bottom that feeling that this is an inauthentic existence, an artificial life. The internal presence of the Other takes shape on every level of our consciousness: it’s a slight and constant loss of being, a progressive drying-out, a little death doled out continually. In spite of this, we persist in assuming the external hypothesis of our identity with ourselves; we play the subject. A certain shame accompanies this shredding process and evolves with it. So we try evasion; we project ourselves ever more violently to the outside, towards wherever is as far away as possible from this terrifying internal tension. We feel the need to let nothing about it appear, to glue ourselves to our social “identity,” to remain foreign to our foreignness: TO KEEP AN AIR OF COMPOSURE before the field of ruins.

This lie is in our every gesture.

That’s the essential thing.

It’s no longer time to make literature out of the various combinations of disaster.

Up to now, too much has been written, and not enough thought about Bloom.