Читать книгу In the Name of the People - Liaisons - Страница 10

In 2012, we were struck by a student strike of an unprecedented scale. It overtook all of Quebec and provoked splits in every sector—even dividing families. In that instant, our reality was both transfigured and took on a more real consistency: the territory seemed, for a rare moment, inhabited. Everything was happening as if it was reaching a threshold: mass demonstrations, riots, a state of emergency, casserole movements, repression.¹ Then in the end, elections.

Capitalizing on the ambivalence of the casserole movement—whose insurgent character was confounded with the desire for reconciliation—the Parti Québécois, a nationalist-independentist political party that was “neither left nor right” won the bet in extremis. The rule of the Parti Québécois was a pathetic display, a series of operations seeking to deploy social rifts around an entirely different polarity, and thus convert the popular anger into a national unity. It attempted to institute a “Charter of Values” focused on “secularism,” but clearly directed against cultural particularities (read: women wearing veils) and Canadian multiculturalism.

Despite the fact that this government did not last long—it was a brief pause of a year and a half in fifteen years of liberal rule—the effect of its ethnocultural repolarization with a republican-populist flavor continues to be felt to this day. The ascent of the intra- and extra-parliamentary xenophobic Far Right has not stopped, even as the memory of the strike has slowly been reduced to the charismatic figure of its principal student leader, who became a media star and soon after took the reins of a leftist, populist party inspired by Syriza and Podemos.

During the institutional reframing of the strike, we witnessed the systematic elimination of its eruptive and fragmentary character in order to transform the division into a new call for the unification of the People—be it the populism of the Far Right or of the left-wing media. The clearly grotesque nature of this outcome drove us to think through its historical basis. Along the way, Quebec was overwhelmed by the duration of the conflict, darkened by a profound instability that allowed us to see at what point the reaction had deep “roots.” Once menaced, the semblance of order revealed itself as the crystallization of a precarious historical compromise.

This hypothesis put us on the path of the past, in search of the tragedy of which the farce of 2012 would have been just the repetition. In the first place, it seemed crucial for us to take a retrospective look at such prior conflicts on the territory, to better understand the conditions of possibility as much as the emergence of their containment. To consider, in other words, how “the call to the people,” a corollary of all mass mobilization, may allow a minoritarian people as well as a majoritarian People to occupy the terrain. Which underground communication made it possible for the plebeian energy of the 2012 strike to be so rapidly captured and reconverted into nationalist familialist resentment? This question is clearly not unique to Quebec and could equally address what happened in the aborted revolutions in Tunisia, Egypt, or Turkey.

Just as the populist mobilization had disguised the plebeian demobilization during the strike, the order that had preceded it had once been based on the camouflage and sealing of past conflicts, crystallized in social and institutional forms, but which were also equally cultural, psychological, and economic. Thus, to think through the longer-term story is also to think through the eternal return of its counterfeiting: both a triumphant falsification and plebeian counter-use. This is what we started doing with the Anarchives Collective, dedicated to exploring the forgotten archives of the revolutionary movement in Quebec. In excavating these ruins, which have received little attention, we have been surprised by the traces of an almost unknown legacy: a network of insurrectionary autonomy whose momentum had been thwarted by nothing short of a large-scale military intervention. This history had not been passed on to our generation except in the form of a cautionary tale, declared “terrorist” by the state to cover with the veil of tragedy the ways through which this past still speaks to us. We have discovered that there were many more affinities with our desires and forms of life than we could have suspected. In short: we were not alone, not on this territory, nor in this history.

Since 2013, through the Anarchives Collective, as well as a few public exhibitions and discussions, we have tried to continue that which the strike started—bringing a latent ungovernability into contact with its past forms—by reaching the spectral outlines of a plane of revolutionary consistency in Quebec. We have grasped this history, which they have taken to calling “separatism,” as fragmentary remnants, which we must excavate through a work of anarcheology, to clear the many strata that make up our present situation.

If we approach the question of nationalism here, it is because it stands irreparably in front of us as soon as we address the relationship between history and territory. Often unbeknownst to their very creators, revolutionary situations are always accompanied by a counter-history punctuated by eruptive events—a counter-time—whose continued existence is incarnated in forms of adherence to territories—traditions—as so many ways to make use of and to inhabit it. Territory is not simply a place circumscribed by borders, even symbolic ones, but carries a plurality of ways to inhabit a given geo-biological assemblage. Emanating from the territory, these ways of inhabiting maintain a spectral presence, a retrievable one. Thus, any counter-history is, from the outset, counter-geography. But if the official history tends to spatialize time by folding in on a chronological timeline, the practice of counter-history—the anarchivistic—is an attempt at the temporalization of space, in order to restore it to the possible ways of inhabiting it. It acts, in sum, by extricating a counter-historical time, a time of tradition.

Opposite the study of these small territorialities stands—in a homogenous bloc—the occupation and then the development that we call “colonial,” to which the narrative of the winners pays homage. Within this bloc, particularism and universalism—trying to threaten us with their infernal alternative—become the guarantors of each other, bound to each other’s becoming where everything is done to prevent the fragmentary secession of imaginaries and practices singular to a place.