Revolution in Christiania - day 2

The revolutionary event is a matter of four components, interlaced and intertwined - there is no chronology here, but a simultaneous precsence of components of the revolutionary event.

The first is the intuitive component. For revolutions to take place, rather than just riots, revolts or mass suicides, intuition is called for, in the philosophical meaning of the word, as coined and held from Spinoza to Bergson. A truth that poises itself as a clear, but often wordless distinction – a point de mire, the bull’s eye ahead of the mind that draws thought, action, and order forwards. Though historical reconstruction is always brought to us through the angle of causes and effects, they mostly fail to catch the intuitive component that comes from the vestige of no-sense, of a place inside history in its constantly living and multiple of virtuality. If revolution is immanence coming forth, there must be active forces within it in the present, or maybe active from the point of a future already inside the present, a non-transcendance of the emanence of a future exploding from the inside of actuality. Or the past actively decomposing itself. Such a past in decomposition would be similar to an intuition of society reinventing itself in its own decomposition, as a constant re-opening of the impossible.
 

The second movement is suspension. Suspensions are the component of waiting of the movement of becoming. It does not belong to any fixed duration, which would already make time a factor inside suspension. But suspension is nto a matter of time, or rather, time is not the essence of suspension. Suspensions inside revolutions may follow a number of dimensions, they may be political, economic, epistemic, temporal, spatial, but always in duration and as such it presents in history unfolding the component of the multiple going mad in the face of the world.

Like intuition, suspension is a necessary component in the construction of revolutions. In Christiania, intuitions and suspensions are hard to ignite. As a place in constant suspension on several dimensions, suspended from the distance of more normal places from the visibility of the forces of the law, intuition is often awakened, but just as often silenced under the fabric of control, fear, bureaucracy, or a complex inertia of deliberation between fractions living apparently different worlds. Suspension is imposed from without: we are in the suspension of Agamben's naked life: when the freetown decided to suspend the nomos of society some 30 years ago, society began a movement of re-suspension of the suspended. This state of reciprocal suspension creates a strange vacuum, where everything is possible and everything is impossible. As the art boys mark on their badges "It's always been like this" and "Where did bigotry come from?" - so many aspects of their everyday life have come out of an excluding movement of re-suspension.

Maybe this is what has always made the other two components of revolution less obvious to the world outside Christiania - the structuration component and the selection component. There has been plenty of structuration and selection in here, ever since the beginning. But of course, a lot of them tend to repeat themselves, rather than moving in new directions. Ironically, but not unusual for a place like this and for initiatives on the fringe of nomos and the law, change often emerges in violent bursts rather than quiet development. Two major events mark these re-structurations and selections in the free town: the first one was the cleaning out of heroine junkies, a necessary move completed only with a combination of physical violence and forced therapeutic initiatives. The second one is on its way now, as normalisation forces its way in and the locals are pressed a little bit more to realise one of the selective moves that hurts even more: curing the free town of its problem with non-payers: more than a third of the inhabitants never pay their rent. So what do you do? On the one hand, kicking out the non-payers could be seen as a clear sign of normalisation according to market economic principles. On the other, the rent is the only form of tax here, and thus makes everything else possible, as long as C is not self-supplying. The world outside wants cash. So you can get it from the pushers, or you can get it from rent. As long as pushers were safe, more or less, they would invest in local projects, though not exactly solidary with the nomos inside. Now that Pusher Street has been (almost) cleaned out, pressure rises on the inside.

C has never accepted the changes imposed from the outside. Has it ever carried out the revolutions necessary to move ahead of the pressure from without? Almost. And now? Will there be a non-violent revolution along with the violent one of fixing economy? Will there be anything at all, like a revolution? Like four components? Intuition, suspension, structuration, selection? Will the muddle of almost-invisible nomos and fluent bureacracy still be preferred to the explosion from under the skin? Still, there are more tourists than changers. maybe I hould find another time of day. 2 p.m. is a bit early, when revolutions take place at night. There was a "political salon" here last night - no signs of it today, maybe someone will tell me later..

Comments

[Mezomian]

I wanted to do some serious work at Christiania this summer, about the Renew Christiania project. But time and other obligations caught up with me - and a sense of dispair among many of the people that I talked to, though it would not have been the first time that I entered a project with dispair as one of the bases. There was certainly more than that, though.
Anyway, I had to work more to pay my rent, and had to tend to my newborn daughter. So Christiania made it through their 100 days, aminly without me. Might make an intervention there later, though.