MOURNING MITSEINTragedies of Occupy; Failures of Radical Life

Our being-with, as a being-many, is not at all accidental, and it is in no way thesecondary and random dispersion of a primordial essence. It forms the proper and

necessary status and consistency of alterity as such. The plurality of beings is at the foundationof Being.

- Jean-Luc Nancyi

Ethics is the experience of an infinite demand at the heart of my subjectivity, ademand that undoes me and requires me to do more, not in the name of some sovereign

authority, but in the namelessness of a powerless exposure, a vulnerability, aresponsive responsibility, a humorous self-division. Politics is not the naked

operation of a power or an ethics-free agonism, it is an ethical practice that isdriven by a response to situated injustices…Politics requires subjective invention.

- Simon Critchleyii

Failure and hopelessness seem to be strange topics for a book about utopia and hope.Yet I want to see the failure…as active political refusal. These sentiments withdespondence contain the potentiality for new modes of collectivity, belonging in

difference and dissent.- José Muñoziii

INTRODUCTIONBeing: The fundamental question of ontology. Being: The locus of human experience + choice. Being: The site of life. Being Together, as a rhetorical devise, is loaded with

commonality. What does it mean for Being to become a collective project? How does ontological togetherness operate a mode of being-in-the-world?

Being Together in Turbulent Times suggests that groups cohere around fragility—Around protection. At the same time, the turbulence of recent geopolitical events, such as 9/11 and the global recession, act as guideposts for a greater interrelational, and even intersubjective dependence. As it turns out, turbulence, tragedy and mourning are powerful lenses for understanding the stakes of Being With, and offer us means to become more ethical creatures.

Over the course of this paper I will to outline a theoretical framework for understanding Mitsein (Being-in-Common), and, the impermanenceof the balancing act that ontological togetherness requires. Where is Mitsein? And where isn't it? Why can’t it be always?

After much critical thought about a naive position I held, I feelradically pessimistic about the permanence of Mitsein. Like Utopias, Mitsein is a logical limit always worth moving towards in our

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activities, but if Mitsein, as a fundamental affective and ontologicalshift appears, it appears briefly. This is the tragedy of Mitsein—thatwe only truly understand it in its absence.

I want to honor and summon a guide, the late José Muñoz, with whom we all share the togetherness of thought, and work. José’ theorizing of fragility and failure depict the ways in which Being, and Being Together, are only momentarily tangible living experiences. In particular I will draw upon his bold critical utopian thought to speak of the ethics of failure and hope. I would have wanted to examine more Hemispheric sites, such as the Zapatistas, however, in interest of time and focus, I will reflect on some of my own experiences of Mitsein and Mourning, both in Occupy Wall Street and beyond.

The tragedy of Occupy was, not that the movement ended, nor that it had no broader impact. The tragedy, in fact, was built into the very logic of a radial shift in the modes of being. Because so much weight was placed on this necessary alteration of the social fabric, we naturally couldn't predict the shock of returning.

Why are radicals mourning Occupy? Because of harsh reterritorializing forces that return us to our regular ontological relations. Work, War, Capitalism and the State all were still standingwhen we came out of the entropy of the ruptures in flow.

PART I: BACKGROUND + THE CULTURE OF CONSENSUSAmerican Neoliberal culture is fraught with a common faith in the

permanence of structures—economies and workplaces, political machinations and identitarian practices. These operations have come totake the name ‘consensus,’ which implies the regular acceptance with and alignment to the order of things.

As political philosopher Jaques Rancière describes this Liberal phenomenon:

The essence of consensus…does not consist in peaceful discussion and reasonable agreement, as opposed to conflict or violence. Its essences lies in the annulment of dissensus, as separation of the sensible from itself, in the nullification of its surplus subjects, in the reduction of the people to the sum of the parts…Consensus is the end of politics.iv

By reducing subjects to a biopolitics of parts, and by destroying the dissentual,

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consensus always represses the political; the ruptures in ordering of things, from parties, to jobs, to bodies and construction of identity.

Consensus is not a new phenomenon, but it evolves quite dangerously in the Neoliberal and post 9/11 worlds. To cope with this newfound precarity, consensus’ grasp grows ever tighter. Philosopher Judith Butler demonstrates the fragility 9/11 brings into the world, to being-in-the-world, speaking about a state of, “heightened vulnerability and aggression.”v Butler posits:

That we can be injured, that others can be injured, that we are subject to death at the whim of another, are for all reasons for both fear and grief. What is less certain, however, is whether theexperiences of vulnerability and loss have to lead straightaway tomilitary violence and retribution…The fundamental dependency on anonymous others is not a condition that I can will away. No security measure will foreclose this dependency; no violence act of sovereignty will rid the world of this fact.vi

Vulnerability marks our era. The radical interdependence on subjects and beings we will have never met, halfway across the globe, to spark and be a site of violence is a fundamentally new political phenomena. To be distanced and alienated from these Others puts a new layer of precarity on life.

As the political scene has become fragile, from the public outcryto USA Patriot Act surveillance, to [as] images of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan return to our doorsteps on our newspapers, and to the recession of 2007, Americans (by no means are we alone), become increasingly aware of the fragility of our globalized systems. It is for these reasons that former President Bush called on Americans to keep shopping. Dissent becomes increasingly oppressed, both by tactical repression by police and the Department of Homeland Security, but, even further, the expansion of this Liberal consensus, to simply return to your jobs, to continue to consume and vote, thoughtlessly, is an even more damning manipulation of the body politic by the regime of consensus. Fragility, as it were, enabled thetightening of the order of things, by policing and the broader police-force produced by a culture of consensus.

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PART 2: TRANSFORMATIONS OF OCCUPY The Occupy Wall Street movement of 2011 was a site of major

demonstrations against political power and the corroding structure of American financial institutions, and later, the New York Police Department (NYPD). OWS was several months long, a transformation of the urban fabric of NYC—physical, ideological, discursive, political, economic, and even ontological changes. At its core, OWS was both a space for action, for developing negative systemic critiques, and for the organization of a positive and prefigurative alternative. OWS was even briefly a utopia, providing everyone and anyone with food, shelter, a library, a media center, and myriad ways to plug in. General Assemblies, the direct democratic procedurals offered new waysto calculate the various ideas being shared out.

To develop our analysis of the utopian soul of OWS, let’s turn toPhilosopher Jean-Luc Nancy, who, in The Truth of Democracy, formulates thisconcept of sharing (out) as a social practice that helps to elude the disenchanting calculations of Capitalist-Managerial society:

There is here a share here of the incalculable that is, no doubt, the share most resistant to appropriation by a culture of general calculation—the one named “capital.” This share requires that one break with all predictive calculations... The element in which theincalculable can be shared (out) goes by the names of art or love,friendship or thought, knowledge or emotion.vii

Sharing (out) allows for a break with the overvaluation of distributions of money that equality relies on, as does the limiting calculus of a managerial technocracy—the form of social and political control that turns subjects into bodies and statistics. OWS instead focused on the essentially invaluable, qualitative offerings. This operated within the basic logic of OWS—occupiers were encouraged to share (out) into the collectivity: ideas, skills, food, shelter, and support.

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Despite ‘consensus’ being a tool employed by prefigurative political apparati, OWS was responsible for fundamentally altering thelimiting culture of consensus, and its avatar, the police. Returning to Rancière, we are better positioned to examine the ruptures in consensus and police force. He says, “Politics stands in distant opposition to the police. The police is a distribution of the sensible.”viii What we can say about the police is that it is a force that orders, organizes, produces boundaries and defines what is or isn't logical, what body does or does not count as a subject. Countingas a subject means being defined as a human, with rights, in contradistinction from bodies that are less-than-human, animals. Rancière’s struggle is with those people who do not count as human, who do not have access to the political. Rancière continues in saying,“The essential work of politics is the configuration of its own space.It is to make the world of its subjects and operations seen. The essence of politics is the manifestation of dissensus.”ix The politicalstruggle of dissensus is to reorganize the regime of the sensible to open the space that includes more actors and discourses. Riots, being the only politically efficacious means for some minoritarian subjects,are internally overlooked as irrational. The project of Occupy was, inpart, to make these riots make sense— to make these bodies count as subject.This culture of consensus took a liberating turn under the Occupy banner.

DISIDENTIFICATIONHow can we understand the transformations that the Occupiers

underwent through a lens of disidentification? In Disidentifications, our late queer cultural guru Jose Muñoz charts the modes of critical resistance to interpellation and ideology that many minoritarian subjects develop as lived praxis. Disidentification is, “A performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian

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subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourse of dominant ideology.”x These tactics help to decode social frameworks in intersectional ways that allow queering of rules and identity to exist in the world.

Within the codes of political and economic identification, white men, two major parties, narrow streams of ideological control, and repression of difference seem to be mainstays of the hegemonic matrix.If voting, brand loyalty, and reformist strategy represent the normative formulations of identifying‚ meaning, if wealth, whiteness, masculinity are a part of how one formulates one’s identity, then one is more likely to believe in Empire and hold political power. On the other hand, from the varying minatorial subject hoods we see a clear disidentification both with normative culture and with politics-at-large. Folks of color, the poor, women, queers, gender queers, transients, anarchists, punks, all share strongly resonant disidentifications with normative culture and the political and financial practices that are the backbone of the powerful.

OWS represented this common resonance, this collective rejection and operating outside of the conventions that are expected of us. Occupy was an intersectional movement, acting more as a hub that allowed for the addressing of a wide variety of social issues: banks, capitalism, climate change, queer resistance…This is why, in a Rancièrian way, Occupy was a true site of the Political, and in a Nancian way, we are able to articulate this powerful collective affectand relationally as being-in-common.

UTOPIANISMSJosé Muñoz, in Cruising Utopia, was onto a fundamentally radical

subject with his final book. Understanding queer not as an identity, but as a tool, an analysis, a mode of resting and relating, Muñoz postulates:

We may never touch Queerness, but we can feel it as a warm illuminationof a horizon imbued with potentiality. Queerness is essentially about

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the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or aconcrete possibility for another world.xi

Queer, for Muñoz, is to come. Queer is a futurity, a logical limit, tomove towards. In this way, queer and utopian as descriptives strongly resonate with Mitsein. Being-With is an ontological state that we may briefly encounter, but it will never be a permanent condition. Muñoz bases much of his utopian thinking around Ernst Bloch:

[Bloch] makes a critical distinction between abstract and concreteutopias, valuing abstract utopias only insofar as they prose a critique function that fuels a critical and potential transformative political imagination…Concrete utopias can also be daydreamlike, but they are the hopes of a collective, an emergent group.xii

Muñoz, throughout his book, summons Bloch’s concept of concrete utopias, which are lived, historically situated experiences of collectivity. The ‘daydreamlike’ and emergent qualities that Muñoz beautifully paints have a similar relational modality to Mitsein, where the Being’s and their associations are in a constant process of becoming. Continuing, Muñoz suggests that, “The field of utopian possibility is one in which multiple forms of belonging in difference cohere around a collectivity.”xiii Difference, of experience, of interests, of Being is at the core of both Muñoz’s utopianism and Nancy’s Being-with. Queer utopian thinking is present within the formulation of Mitsein, particularly in OWS and the broader project of radical life. Occupy shares queer utopian indeterminate becomings, as a strong senseof relational collectivity, and multiples sharing outs, all of which happen to help produce the quality of Mitsein. Visible were singular Being’s affirmations of a multiple! As a movement situated in disidentification, queer is a critical and ethical analytic form that gives life to OWS.

Muñoz traces a broader project of an ethics of failure and of hope. Perhaps failing, and trusting failure, is an example of living

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beyond your means, beyond this world. Failure is a desperate act of hope. In this way, we are able to understand the ethical imperative behind queer failure, not to live in nihilism or fear, but in an affirmation of a better world that failure hopes for; this is a world-making ethics.

MITSEINTo understand the radical ontological shifts that were present in

the Occupy movement, we must first be able to conceptualize a lived experience of Being-with. This orientation with and towards others (first), towards, which I originally presumed to be a praxis of respect and affirmation of the whoeverness of the other, and the whateverness of their shadings (out) is called Mitsein.

Mitsein was first conceived by philosopher Martin Heidegger in his magnum opus Being and Time. Heidegger’s restless search for Being (andits condition and meaning), Dasein is a qualified, but fluctuating mode of being—a human, that by the nature of being human, grapples with its existence, being thrown into the world, selfhood and relationality. Inevitably, Heidegger interrogates what this Being doeswith others:

The world of Dasein is a with-world [Mitwelt]. Being-in is being-with [Mitsein] others...The characteristic of encountering others is, after all, oriented towards ones own Dasein...Knowing oneself is grounded in being-with which primordially understands. [In] being-with and toward others, there is a relation of being from Dasein to Dasein.xiv

Dasein is rooted in the question of Mitsein; in being-with, Dasein sees itself in Others. Mitsein activates the existential mode of Dasein, which suggest human experience is grounded and formed by withness or commonality. Knowing oneself, one of the primary functionsof Dasein, is rooted in the question of being-with.

Understanding Mitsein as an orientation (towards openness, radical proximity, and mutual critical inquiry) that multiple Daseins

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do, or, necessarily have to enact on encountering one another, we are able to understand how being-in-common necessitates a new community: acommunity of worlds, a grouping of humans and relationalities that we orient ourselves around. The primary importance here is, for and experience of Mitsein, we must do the hard work of orienting our actions

and concerns outward and toward. To further unpack this complex question of Mitsein, we turn to

the preeminent expert on the subject, Jean-Luc Nancy: There is no meaning if meaning not shared…because meaning is itself the sharing of Being. The ‘creation of the world’ is not the production of a pure something from nothing…but is the explosion of presence in the original multiplicity of it division…Being cannot be anything but being-with-one-another, circulating the in the with and as the with of this singularly plural coexistence.xv

In this introduction to Being Singular Plural, Nancy articulates the way in which Being is determined by a multiplicity that is its creation, its worlds, and its dense relationality with other Beings. Meaning; sense;language are all formulated in worlds that fundamentally are shared. We know nothing about meaning without discourse—without learning it from others. Continuing, Nancy argues that his project, “Being singular plural…[is] a single continuous-discontinuous mark tracing the entirety of the ontological domain.”xvi Being singular plural is an expanded notion of the ontology of self and with others that covers the whole spectrum of what it means to be human.

TOGETHERNESSIn order to differentiate the specific qualities of Being-with

from a mere community, Nancy says:Togetherness and being-together are not equivalent. (On the contrary, the equivalence between the two make the status of the gods of onto-theology uncertain …Collection assumes a regrouping that is exterior and indifferent to the being-together…Being is together, and it.xvii

Throughout his book, Nancy outlines the differences between a community and being-in-common, arguing that neither one seem to

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determine the other. Living in a commune or in a communist state does not guarantee being-with. Being Together implies specifically an ontological co-appearance of self and world, infinitely interdependent—different, and richer than the formal facts of a lived community and togetherness. This distinction plays heavily into the subject of our working group.

Having established Being-with as an ontological framework, Nancy moves onto the social and political—realms of being-in-the-world. His enriched critique of the individualizing efforts of Capitalism can be understood in the following:

This is why ‘social Being’ becomes, in a way that is at first infinitely poor and problematic, ‘being-in-common,’ ‘being-many,’ ‘being-with-one-another,” exposing the ‘with’ as the category thatstill has no status or use…Liberalism is showing all the signs of exhaustion—at the very least, exhaustion in terms of meaning…The liberal response to the collapse of communism, then, involves nothing more than an eager repression of the very question of being-in-common.xviii

Neoliberal repression on the commons, on our capacity to share affect our ability for being-in-common. Capitalism provides us with a thinness of experience and meaning, which produces spectacular lifestyles with no deeper worth.

Thus, to address the contemporary problems of examining Being as a social phenomena, Nancy details the ways an ontology of communism may address and resolve concerns.

It is no accident that communism and socialism of all sorts…are responsible for the hope of a rupture and innovation from which there is no turning back; it is the hope for a revolution, a recreation of the world…To say ‘we’ is not at all sentimental, notat all familial or ‘communitarian.’ It is existence reclaiming itsdue or its condition: coexistence.xix

The stakes of commoning (communist) ontologies become clear—they are a rupturing with the Neoliberal experience—a thickening of life. This thickening is promoted by utilizing, “A common measure, which is not some one unique standard applied to everyone and everything. It is

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the commensurability of incommensurable singularities, the equality ofall the origins-of-the-world, which, as origins, are strictly unexchangeable.”xx Capital strips bare life—mit from sein. The immeasurable value is the truth of value. We must go beyond exchange-value, measurement and even equality to move beyond the limits of capitalism and its weakened experience of life. We must respect the radically different origins of singularities.

HOW DOES MITSEIN COLOR OWS?How do the experiences of radical life and the reorganization of

bodies and space within the Occupy movement address the concerns Nancyraises above about the life and ontology under Neoliberal Capitalism?

The valuation of wealth, even equal wealth, was challenged by OWS. While some socialist and liberal agendas spoke about tax reforms and economics, the organizational means of OWS functioned inherently against the use of money. From accepting donations of materials to dumpster diving, many occupiers were happier utilizing free goods. Andnot every individual working group had equal resources, it appeared closer to the old Marxist adage, ‘from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.’ And, as illustrated above, OWS was a space open to ability— the sharing (out) of resources, music, ideas, hugs, actions. It also follows that the Media Working Group would havedifferent needs than the Direct Action group; troubling again this liberal construct of equality, quantification, and measurability.

There became a thickening of life—suddenly our lives were radically commingled and interdependent. A group’s needs would be relayed into a spokes council whereby a clustering of other groups would help determine what was allocated. Occupy saw a matrix of actants, beyond organizers, but even the police, the barricades and spaces themselves became part of a webwork that transformed how I understood interrelationality. In particular, the gravity of each

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decision, each meal, each action, each drum circle all provided a comprehensive idea that life, in those few months, was thickened and dense.

This thickening helps to account for strategies of resistance towards the ways that Capitalism strips bare being. Being-with is the truth of being. Mitsein is respect and affirmation for the different origins-of-the-world, and an acknowledgment that we share the world through its meaning, its discourse, and perhaps most centrally, through our care. By caring for the world and others, our being orients itself around with and towards inter-subjecthood. OWS was a world of care, in part because the the activist culture was committed towards making a better world, but more specifically, our deep care and love for one another, which was radically new experience to love complete strangers, depicts the ways that Being-towards reflects BeingTogether.

PART 3: MOURNING, ETHICS, AND FAILUREMOURNING, GRIEF + ETHICS

To understand Being-with, and its lack, it’s essential to talk about mourning in the context of Occupy. All Occupiers morn the event in various ways. But what does mourning do, and more importantly, whatdoes mourning suggest about what it is we long for? Returning to Butler, on the subject of mourning, she says:

One mourns when one accepts that by the loss one undergoes one will be changed, possibly for ever. Perhaps mourning has to do with an agreeing to undergo a transformation the full result of which one cannot know in advance…One can try to choose it, but sitmay be that this experience of transformation deconstitutes choice.xxi

Mourning is a process we have little control over, with little means to predict what course it will take. Occupy was an incredible affective, ontological and political transformation, and yet, there was no way to know or foresee what these actions would lead to. In

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this case, I mourn twice, first for my life before the movement and second, for my life within it. And yet, its unclear if any specific action I take will return me to this affective state. Butler continues, saying:

When we lose certain people, or when we are disposed a place, a community, we may simply feel that we are undergoing something temporary…But maybe we undergo what we do, something about who we are is revealed, something that delineates the ties we have to others, that these ties constitute what we are.xxii

Mourning is a process by which we begin to understand our origins—the essential relational ties that make us us. We notice the precarity of our selfhood and the deeply relational quality of human experience. These were felt, but not quite articulated in OWS. We all were too busy to try to put coherent thought into what broader impacts the movement had on our sense of being. It is only through the process of mourning are we able to understand Mitsein.

Simon Critchley, in Infinitely Demanding, articulates an ethical and political framework for navigating out of the disappointment with Neoliberal politics and the fatelessness of nihilism. Affirmation, mourning and precarity leave us better positioned to understand the radical interrelational responsibility required to engage the world inits present state. Commenting on the mode of mourning Judith Butler describes above, Critchley says:

Such an experience of grief is not depoliticizing, but on the contrary shows our essential interconnectedness and vulnerability to the others demand…It is this meta-political moment that propelsone into…confronting a situation of injustice, not through sovereign legal norms backed up with the threat of violence, but through an ethical responsiveness to the sheer precarious of the others face, of their injurability, and our own.xxiii

Grief intensifies with the changing geopolitical landscape. Globalization complicates its subjects to the point of unseen and essential connections to far off points. 9/11 is but one example of the extreme fragility of interdependence. If that’s the case, then

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this implosion of selfhood makes us more aware of the multitude of beings we create worlds with.

Critchley’s project is a reimagining of ethical space politically, and carving political relations ethically. In order to have a correct view of politics, and a correct praxis, one must understand that being is singular plural. Injecting Emmanuel Levinas into his formula of subjecthood and responsibility, Critchley says, “My autonomy is called into question by the fact of the others demand…Levinas’s claim is that responsibility precedes freedom…a heteronomousdemand calls them into question and calls me to respond.”xxiv If responsibility and relations precede the freedom of a subject, we knowthat we are speaking of Mitsein—of the ethical resolutions that chart intersubjectivity. It appears that the project Critchley is posing is a call towards a radical responsibility for ones relations, ones mitsein, in the face of that which demands infinitely. This is a call to (both ethical and political) action.

FAILURES OF OWS Now that the ethical and political stakes of Mitsein are at hand, I want to ask, what changed to wear away this deeply important intersubjective mode? Phrased differently, what was lost that allowed us Mitseiners to be able to see what it is was we mourned for? Was it the end of a honeymoon? Was it the settling in to routine? I did notice some significant changes to the dynamics of relationality as wedecided on demands, and as the scale skyrocketed overnight.

The radically utopian, queer indeterminacy in Occupy was, no doubt, killed off. General Assemblies no longer functioned as direct democratic tools, but simply as soap boxes. Instead of deterritorializing through adaption, the GA was reterritorialized, andlater condemned. The movement lost its disidentifying core.

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The great second wave of reformist and normative NYC Liberals welcomed themselves into the movement, utilizing a cocktail of massiveorganizing, phone banks, and letter writing, what had been a fundamentally rhizomatic structure took to verticality in no time. Before long, countless months were wasted on weak Labor alliances and political campaigns.

While I did and do understand the perceived necessity of reformist strategies, I felt it went against my deterritorializing anddisidentifying impulses. The dissentual affects of OWS were nullified by these Liberal reterritorializing efforts, and, by addressing the State and law as helpful resources was the return of the culture of consensus.

The death knell would be the witch hunt on anarchists and the black bloc, the final push to kill off the queer utopianism I associated with, and our Mitsein. When Citizens (Liberal) become the Police, dissent ends. One mans felony is another mans Mitsein.

PART 4: AN AFTERTHOUGHTRADICAL LIFE & THE TERRIBLE COMMUNITY

In this next section of my paper, I will chart the varying livingexperiments that post-Occupiers attempted in order to collectivize ourbodies and attempt more Being-with. For my friends and I, the next fewmovements toward Mitsein landed us outside of NYC and the Occupy movement, into small radical collectives across the US, with two options: an urban punk squat, or the hippy homestead.

MORE MITSEINMy own journey took me towards both styles of living-with, which

I believed would be the praxis necessary to make Mitsein a permanent state of Being. The worlds created by collectively participating in

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growing, harvesting and cooking in which we took care, was an incredible new experience of sharing (out). In fact, the seed is a powerful metaphor for living-with in general; you take-care, you pay careful attention to all of the elements in the environment around you. Care, according to Heidegger, is critical determinate of Mitsein.This movement out, and towards others (including plants) reframed my experience of being. Working on the house and the collective became incredible tools of radical life. These experiences, at first, recalled the thickening of life seen in the brief indeterminate monthsof Occupy.

LESS MITSEINHowever, after having lived by radical codes and ethics,

cultivated in part around concerns of a “Safer Space,” and also in part by a flat rejection, and reversal of all Normative frameworks, I slowly became reminded that the extreme exclusivity in fact has a stronger sense of counteridentification than disidentification. In warning against its flaws, Muñoz states that counteridentification is,“A structure that validates the dominant ideology by reinforcing its dominance through the controlled symmetry of ‘counterdetermination.”xxv Counterdetermination thus exists as a flat inversion of the ideology that in direct conversation with hegemony depends on society to be defined outside of it.

Radical culture can have a laundry list of rules and behavioral codes, which can be very difficult to breach. These sentiments can be fundamentally charged with racism and classism. White-radicalism can have a strong streak of totalizing, non-relativistic moral frameworks,that exclude other cultural perspectives.

Furthermore, radical culture often presents itself in a calculus of “Radical Points,” which are earned by who you know, how many actions, workshops, or protests you have been a part of, and very

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often how you dress. I’ve witnessed multiple counts of aesthetic microfascisms that do no more than reproduce the managerial and biopolitical control that the State has hold over us. This branch of radicalism determines exactly what bodies can and cannot do in space, what discourse is permitted, what is thinkable and what an individuals

values are—all of which are shaped by the hive. Bearing witness to my own participation in this microfascist

culture destroyed me, and positioned me in a glaring mode of disidentification with relation to this and other forms of radical culture. I overlap both in a critique of the State, the Social and Capitalism, and even partially identify with some of the strategic remedies proposed, but distanced myself greatly from these microfascist modes, which are, fundamentally opposed to Anarchism as amode of thought.

Perhaps the mistake we made was expecting that by changing a way of life, that we would experience some permanent state of Mitsein, or even more naively was the mistake in thinking that Mitsein could be, in any way at all, a permanent state of Being.

TERRIBLE COMMUNITYThe French, radical-insurrectionary, anti-nihilist writing

collective, Tiqqun, whose work is fueled by molten Nietzschean + Foucaultianisms, highlights beautifully the fallacies of false Being Togethers that permeate many intentional communities. They name this the ‘Terrible Community,’ the commune that thinks all too highly of its minute actions, and its capacity to distance and invert the world as opposed to tackle it full on.

The Terrible Community is a community of flat counteridentification, one that defines itself as a purely reactive inversion of what it is society calls for. This counteridentification is thus never enriched; and from which it becomes impossible to

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develop a deeper rationale, a true politics, or a true utopia. The Terrible Community is formed around pushing all things outside, and, instead of addressing the social, it is interested in destroying its own. Tiqqun paints this damning picture here:

They end up seeking the rage they need for the fight in their mutilated lives; they attribute their wounds to noble and imaginary battles, when they’ve really just hurt themselves by preparing themselves for them to the point of exhaustion. Truth betold, they’ve never had the chance to go down into the field of battle: the enemy does not acknowledge them, and takes them for simply some kind of interference, and with its indifference to them pushes them to madness.xxvi

Terrible Communities have false faith in their totalizing nihilist frameworks, delusionally fighting the ‘good fight,’ which only actualized in self-destructive actions—the squelching of friendships and annihilation of relationality. They’re so far removed from the normative realm that literally no one knows about their activity, let alone cares.

The cruelly of the Terrible Community, driven by individuals in search of ‘freedom,’ is that it is never free, but, fixed within the patterns of activist biopolitics. This dystopia of strict policing andcontrol of bodies and discourse destroys anything most individuals attempt to share (out). without potential, affirmation and hope, fabricated ‘communal living’ turns Mitsein into a mockery of itself. Being-with returns to a state of ‘doing-me,’ and Being-me.

Perhaps what’s at odds is the discourse of the liberation of the subject, as a form of pure ‘radical’ freedom, and an ethical accountability towards all potential relations: the earth, animals, humans, our computers, etc. Self-liberation and this culture of ‘doingme,’ which has its roots in identity politics as an act of autonomy and self-creating unfortunately has all too many parallels with the individualist ontology of Neoliberal Capitalism. There are plenty of industrialists and financial capitalists ‘just doing them and theirs’

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as well. Again, flat inversions of culture often reproduce the same structural problems endemic to normative society and aren't true modesof Mitsein.

Tiqqun illustrates the mentality of these false communities’ self-importance:

All the weakness of the terrible community has to do with its closure, its incapacity to get out of itself… The end of the terrible community coincides with its opening to events: and it isaround events that singularities aggregate, and learn to cooperateand touch one another…The true ‘elsewhere’ left to us to create cannot be sedentary; it is a new coherence between beings and things.xxvii

The Terrible Community is formed around pushing all things outside; instead of addressing the social, it is interested in destroying its own. Thus, moving beyond these Terrible Communities is key. We must open ourselves to the affirmative; to the expanded relationality between things that Mitsein brings. The turbulence of our times would suggest that it is extremely challenging to predict when true Being Together might return; however, we must understand that the terrible community is no answer for any form, regardless of how temporary, of Mitsein. Mitsein is only truly known in its absence—in mourning. Thus, the Terrible Community helped to develop a second, deeper state of Mourning; a richer sense of Mitsein. I finally learned the warning both Simon Critchley and Jean-Luc Nancy offered, reminding mitseiners that first that there is no true responsibility or ethical framework in a deeply nihilistic life, and second, there is no being-in-common just by virtue of living in a commune. If you aren't oriented around afundamental phenomenological practice of being-with, then any collections of bodies that remain will not cohere around Being Together. Being Together has to take form, but how does it

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return?

CONCLUSION What articulations as collections of Beings can we position

ourselves in that honors Muñoz’s queer utopian hopefulness and Critchley’s ethical demand for radical responsibility towards others, in the face of this seemingly meaningless precarity? How can we remainsensitive towards the potentiality of relations in our increasingly interdependent global context? What lessons about being-in-common, andits terrible double, the community, can we learn from Tiqqun and Nancy? What guideposts should we follow in this complex political and ethical matrix? Can we chase these very queer utopian practices without reproducing the practices of the Terrible Community?

This is an enormous task. To close oneself off, to aggress upon others is central to the nature of these Terrible Communities, as are deeply situated ideologies of nihilism, both passive and active. Thus,what it takes is an injection, not only of Mitsein, but of the ethicalcall Simon Critchley demands—an ethical and political imperative of responsibility preceding (subjective) freedom. This responsibility is towards all of the possible relationalities one has and ever will interact with—a being-in-common or Being Together.

Being-with is radically different than Being Together, or living commonly. Those are just mere veneers—lifestyle-isms. I find that I can experience Mitsein wherever, and that cities are easiest to be outward facing. Reading this through the lens Critchley creates in "Infinitely Demanding” gives us the sense that intersubjectivity has no real praxis by which is has to be formally prefigured—it’s an ethical demand to respect all relationality above subjective freedom.

Indeed this lens requires mourning, failure and disappointment, with the repressive biopolitical consensus both of normative culture

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and the terrible communities, to understand what Mitsein is, and how to approach it. We also must understand that Mitsein is an ephemeral state, and not to count on it being present in any permanent state. Being Together is not a praxis, it is an intersubjective orientation. Being Together is turbulent, and requires turbulence to be understood.

We need to have hope for the impossible ontological utopianism's that Jose Muñoz attempts to grace, in and beyond his life. If Jose went to the grave living according to this impossible political and ethical demand—a praxis of queer Mitsein, should not we try the same? I imagine that Muñoz would argue that critical utopias are more fundamentally about how we are than formal living arrangements.

Mitsein is not a praxis, it’s an orientation. If Mitsein was a preconceived social relationship wouldn't it remain? The infinite demand is marked by infinite and constant reestablishments with our interconnectedness. From one moment to the next, our relational matrixwith individuals, groups and spaces (ie. a subway or a park), are always in rearrangement. Thus this orientation cannot exist within fixity—it is not consensus, but dissensus.

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i Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural. Trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Bryne. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996. 12.ii Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. New York: Verso, 2007.132. iiiMuñoz, José. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity. New York: NYU Press, 2009. 176-177. iv Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus: on Politics and Aesthetics. New York: Continuum, 2010. 42.v Butler, Judith. Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence. New York: Verso, 2004, xi-xii. vi Ibid. vii Nancy, Jean-Luc. The Truth of Democracy. Trans. Pascale- Anne Brault and Michael Naas. New York: Fordham University Press. 2010. 16-17. viii Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus. 36.ix Ibid. 37.x Muñoz, Jose. Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. 97. xi Muñoz, José. Cruising Utopia. 1. xii Ibid. 2. xiii Ibid. 20. xiv Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. Joan Stambaugh. Albany: SUNY Press, 1953. 115-221.xv Nancy, Jean-Luc. Being Singular Plural.. 2-3. xvi Ibid. 37.xvii Ibid. 60.xviii Ibid. 42-43. xix Ibid.41-42.xx ibid. 75.xxi Butler, 21. xxii Ibid. 22. xxiii Critchley, Simon. Infinitely Demanding. 120. xxiv Ibid. 56-57. xxv Muñoz, Jose. Disidentifications. 11. xxvi Tiqqun, Theses on the Terrible Community. 5.6. Brooklyn: Petroulous Press, 2008. xxvii Ibid.