The Theory Of Bloom

In a sense they foreshadowed what was to come, in their own sad and skeptical way, which led them one by one to the abyss.

-Roberto Bolaño

Tiqqun was a two volume journal published in France at the turn of the 21st century. The first volume appeared in 1999 and included a text entitled Théorie du Bloom. In 2000, the text was augmented by the authors and published by La Fabrique Editions. In the two volumes of Tiqqun, the idea of the Bloom appears throughout the interrelated texts. Its clearest articulation resides in the augmented, book-length version of The Theory Of Bloom.

The book begins by narrating a scene of total, entropic disconnection between passengers on a train. A woman yells through the phone at her ex-husband, the two of them negotiating time with their child and time with their respective boyfriend and girlfriend. While she talks she is propelled forward on a train, sitting in a seat identical to all others in a car which is identical to all the others. The detachment of everyone on the train, the “strangeness” between them, is something we all share in common. This “strangeness” is also called the Bloom. We only experience it as a “strangeness” because we are so separated and so masked to one another. But in fact, the Bloom is the common power we all share. Bloom is the name given to the nameless.

From there, the book dives into the history of the 20th century, narrating the development of Biopower from 1914 onwards. Biopower, the science of control, is the “ benevolent power, full of the solicitude of a shepherd for his flock, the power that wants the salute of its subjects, the power that wants you to live.” Working hand in hand with Biopower is the Spectacle, “the power that wants you to talk, that wants you to be someone.” You must have a social role in the Spectacle, you must be recognizable and clearly distinct so as to be better classified in its shows, magazines, soap operas, social scenes–its theater of masks. As Biopower and the Spectacle’s control grew more total in scope and effect throughout the course of the 20th century, the Bloom had to survive and adapt. It had to exist with the bombardments of the radio, the television, advertisements, moral duties, mandatory military service, and the conditions in modern factories.

But soon, the Bloom caused the strategies of Biopower to shift. Too many people concentrated together would produce too much resistance. The common ground had to be pulled out from under the Bloom. The workplace had to be diffused, more and more had to become automated, and the workers had to be stripped of their collective power. By being made easily replaceable and anonymous, workers fell deeper into the grips of Biopower. At the same time, the worker became disinterested in crumbling truths regarding living wages, job security, and fair employment. All ties the Bloom once had to economy started to fade, and are still fading.

KEEP A GOOD FACE, before the domain of ruins.

-Tiqqun

The Bloom is forced to fixate on certain social roles in order to survive. Worker, housewife, professional, student, citizen, all of the roles are but masks, donned and rarely removed. The Bloom must remain positive while wearing these masks, ignoring its own power and sovereignty. “The Bloom is the masked nothing.” But underneath the mask is the pure potential of every person.

To catch a glimpse of one’s pure potential most often causes either fear or destructive elation. On one end, the fear invoked by one’s own freedom makes people cling ever more tightly to their masks. “At first I was lost without my cage,” said the canary. This produces the western hipster, the devotee of nothingness, the champion of the mask. Hipsters are neutralized beings, forever terrified of what they could do, might do, and will never do. “The hipster is the Bloom who offers himself to the world as a bearable form of life, and in order to do so forces himself into a strict discipline of lies.” The hipster is a finished being, “ever-already disappeared, ever-already forgotten.”

On the other end, the intoxication of one’s own freedom, finally experienced, causes the Bloom to lash out, to affirm its power as the ability to kill and destroy. The school shooters, the cop killers, “the maniacs of nothing,” expend themselves asserting their sovereignty over the systems which once dominated them. The book references the Columbine shooters and children killing their parents as examples of these eruptions of pure potential as death. But the authors stress that their “aim is not to lend an ordinary revolutionary signification to such acts, and hardly to confer an exemplary category to them. Instead, we wish to understand the way they express fatality and to seize upon it so as to explore the depths of the Bloom. Whomever follows that view will see that the Bloom is NOTHING, but that this NOTHING is the nothing of sovereignty, the emptiness of pure power.”

One path leads to the nothingness of commercial society, the hipster. The other path leads to the nothingness of death. The authors of The Theory Of Bloom suggest a different path, one which leads to neither death or perdition, but towards the “strategic community of the Invisible Committee.”

At the conclusion of The Theory Of Bloom, the positive objectives of the Invisible Committee are elaborated. After having taken the reader through an erratic genealogy of western literature, religion, philosophy, and capitalism, the authors lay out their prescription. They ask the reader to not “merely struggle against the dominant schizoid state, against our schizoid state, but to begin there.” By making use of our dual natures of public and private, of worker and party animal, of criminal and model citizen, we are to “coordinate in silence a sabotage of grand style.”

Only those who know the meaning that they will give to the catastrophe retain calmness and precision in their movements. By the type and the proportions of panic to which a spirit allows itself to go, one can tell one’s rank.

-Tiqqun

The goal for the reader is to understand the context and significance of their situation, to not run in terror from their pure potential, their total freedom. They recommend experimentation, massive experimentation in which the reader detaches themselves from their detachment “using a conscious, strategical practice of dual self.” In this way, one becomes part of the Imaginary Party, the anonymous sea of actors who cannot help but hinder the movements of civilization. But rather than be a hipster or a school shooter, the agents of the Invisible Committee move anonymously through their environs, composing strategically within a collapsing system, refusing to be frozen in popular culture or sacrificed to the Spectacle as a psychotic killer.

To embrace the Bloom in oneself is “the practical experience of the self as trickster.” Everything which exists in the world of the Spectacle and Biopower can be utilized but must never be embraced or championed. It is all at our disposal, every bit of it, ready to be re-appropriated. “To not only survive in the constant immanence of a miraculous departure, to not merely force oneself to believe in the job that one does, in the lies that one tells, but to begin from there, to enter into contact with other agents of the Invisible Committee.” The Invisible Committee is “an openly secret society, a public conspiracy…the name of which is everywhere and the headquarters nowhere.” All defectors, all deserters, all escape artists can take part in the “inassignable plan” of the infiltration of every echelon of society. The book ends by telling the reader, very simply, to leave the rank “without appearing to.” The authors tell the reader when to do this. NOW.

“In the metropolis, man purely undertakes the trial of his negative condition. Finitude, solitude and display, which are the three fundamental coordinates of that condition, weave the decor of the existence of each within the grand village. Not the fixed decor, but the moving decor, the combinational decor of the grand village, for which everybody endures the icy stench of their non-places. ”

-Tiqqun

It is very difficult to synthesize the various conclusions in this book. All I have done here is present a few of their main points. The book itself, according the Junius Frey, the author of the books intro, does not act like a book. It is what he calls an “editorial virus” which “exposes the principle of incompleteness, the fundamental insufficiency that is in the foundation of the published work.” It is not meant to leave the reader feeling satisfied as they would be with a book they could read on the beach and then throw away. It is meant to bring the reader to a position where their withdrawal from its conclusions “can no longer be neutral. ”

The Theory of Bloom is a very dangerous book, filled with warnings against fascism, laziness and stagnation. It describes our era as one whose defining characteristics are display, finitude, and solitude. We display ourselves to each other because it the only way to be seen. We are finite beings, forever sealed off from each other, only able to display our masks in a grand masquerade. And we are all alone, solitary, stumbling over each other when the dance is over and the masks have grown uncomfortable. In times of decadence, people get to the bottom of things, growing disgusted and tired with their masks. We are all orbiting around the gravity of our potential power, unsure of and afraid to use it. But that power is not something which only one group may access. Fascism is simply another response to glimpsing ones power, ones pure potential. Fascism is the mass-experience of freedom as death. It is a very real, ever present danger.

The book is terrifying in its simplicity, nearly overwhelming in its descriptions of modern culture. The fact that it was written over a decade ago is a testament to the resonance it still carries within it. There are dozens of passages describing familiar scenes which still hold true today and are no less potent because of their age. This book is one of the main keys to the two volumes of Tiqqun and the later work of the Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection. It holds everything which was to come later, and contains to seeds of what is still to be sown. This book should be read and read again.

Evidently, it has no other end but devastating this world; this is even its destiny, but it will never say so. Because its strategy is to produce the disaster, and around it, silence.

-Tiqqun