The break-out of rioting and the break-in of looting that formed part of our life in Brazil for some months in 1983 is the kind of phenomenon that lends itself to a reading in terms of the processes of singularization with their disruptive potential, but also with their seductive promises and perils. We all remember those times when hordes of people suddenly irrupted into the streets in the big city centers, invading, looting, and overturning everything that lay before them. It was particularly noticeable that at first they only stole food, but very soon they moved on to another stage in which they stole anything, sometimes not even for consumption but just for the savor of divesting from the dominant code that free access to things provided.
In this circumstance, as was to be expected, the cities panicked and promptly responded by closing their doors. In the newspapers and on the radio and television there was a procession of deeply worried technical experts and scientists, lay people and specialists, atheists and religious people, civilians and military personnel, intellectuals and business leaders, politicians of the left, center, and right. They all repeated the same refrain: “We can understand that the unemployed demonstrate and demand jobs. Nothing could be more fair and honest. We can even understand that the unemployed an underemployed dare to steal food and clothes—after all, the com-munity owes them at least food and clothing; we can’t let our workers die of want. But stealing jewels, candies, or stereos is rioting. It’s certainly being led by criminals or professional agitators (fascists, according to the left; communists, according to the right). In which case, there is no way that we can let this behavior go unpunished.”
In fact, there were some people who only dared to take clothes and food (in order to work). And it is also true that they were not the real agitators, they were not the bearers of the “breakdown,” despite the importance and legitimacy of their struggle. The disruptive effect lay in the gesture, made up of humor and violence, which shattered a certain conception of the relation between work and leisure; which shattered the criterion of productivity as the principle of the organization of time and space; which shattered the principle of private ownership of the means of production and consumption—a gesture that did not show respect for a life reduced to hierarchical values organized in accordance with general equivalents, and that manifestly divested from man, reduced to the condition of a neutral support for values dissociated from sensible experience.
And, beyond all that breaking and smashing, what was also broken down was a certain conception of political struggle that reduced it to a polarized confrontation between interlocutors authorized and recognized by a state machine. The disruptive effect lay, above all, in breaking away from that dependent, infantilized, demanding posture, a “weaning” from the state as a universal provider, a privileged interlocutor, a certified translator of all desires. In the tumult of the rioting, what seemed to be shattered was basically the mode of production of subjectivity that characterizes contemporary societies.
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What was unbearable in all this was the danger of the breakdown of the principal mechanisms of the society in which we live. For those who viewed the events in that way, changes are only conceivable on the molar plane, the plane of forms and their representations, whereas each and every change of molecular texture is invariably experienced as conveying a danger of violence and chaos. The preservation of the texture of a particular social order is confused with the preservation of the social order as such, whatever its nature may be; and, implicitly, the preservation of the texture of a particular psychic world is confused with the preservation of the psychic world as such. In other words, what was confused in this case was the preservation of a particular figure of oneself with the preservation of one’s supposed essence. From this viewpoint, the rioting conveyed something much more violent and distressing than having one’s property looted. The fear of losing houses and objects is nothing in comparison with the terror of losing oneself.
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Excerpts from Félix Guattari and Suely Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil, Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2007
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