Lineas dividuales

Dividual Lines

Individuality is dying. Or even worse: Good old individual has never existed as anything other than zombie. Individuality is undead. Dying, dead, undead. But to be clear: We don’t really know if this is good news or bad news or if it’s any news at all. For the doctrines of liberal capitalism, possessive individualism was the driving force. Its core was the sovereign, the autonomous, the European individual with its freedom, its free will and its free choice, its free exchange of ideas and its free market. Becoming possessed was the greatest danger, the risk of losing self-ownership in serfdom and enslavement, but also that being possessed, that dividual outside of self-possession of the non-normalized, the deviant, the indisciplined und unruly, the sorcerers and the witches, the thieve s and the vagabonds, the travellers, the voyagers, the deserters and the partisans, the loonies and the madmen possessed. 

As we draw dividual lines, dividual multitudes
We are drawn by those same dividual lines
They attract us, stay beside us, they traverse and they divide us
We’re sharing and gathering on dividual lines

So the state of the individual seems to have always been a zombie state. Today we only encounter it in the oblique figure of the self-caringself-healing, self-measuring, self-governing self, narcissistic and resilient and obedient, ceaselessly producing ever new data without ever getting paid. Yet, while every individual techno-self has its chip implanted, wears its electronic collar, and carries its navigation app, what needs to be tracked, valorized, and controlled are the dividual lines and mobilities and relationships of the many, tracking not only each person’s position but their concentrations and agglomerations, their movements as multitudes and swarms. 

As we draw dividual lines, dividual multitudes
We are drawn by those same dividual lines
They attract us, stay beside us, they traverse and they divide us
We’re sharing and gathering on dividual lines

So the leash of online life is short, but it gets pulled from more than one side. 
Desires of machinic subservience are being kept on the leash, but dividual production of desire also runs over the same lines. 
There dividuality  means fleeing the limits of me. Conviviality of the under-selved absentees. Escaping, deserting, evading the cage of autonomy. There, on dividual lines, we will meet the others, the precarious, the underprecarious, the subprecariat, “in short, the entirely indefinite, disintegrating mass”, 
unwilling to become identifiable class, unwilling to become a unity, unwilling to become totality, unwilling to become one, “which the French call la bohème”, and we call revolutionary multiplicity.

As we draw dividual lines, dividual multitudes
We are drawn by those same dividual lines
They attract us, stay beside us, they traverse and they divide us
We’re sharing and gathering on dividual lines