becoming-responsible

on responsibility beyond morality and punishment

earlier today i was laying down on the ground in our land project “tierra de los voladores.” the air was fresh, i could hear nothing but the breeze moving the treetops as if playing an instrument and a symphony of forest creatures and birds. clouds above were moving quickly creating a perfect temperature between short periods of shade and full sun. my tiered body still healing from a stomach bug sprawled, stretched open’; finally, rest.

at some point i turned to my side and put my ear to the ground and was immediately washed over by a deep sense of awe and love for this earth. i imagined the entire planet, enormous, in all its vast landscapes from surface to the deepest of depths, all laying beneath my ear, heartbeats, life, life, life.

i thought about what i just read in Klossowski’s “Nietzsche and the vicious circle” about his concept of the will to power, one of the most misunderstood of his entire body of work. the will to power was Nietzsche’s way of articulating the sense of individual will experienced by living beings that’s both illusory and at the same time necessary for the affirmation of life. for him, in the cosmic reality, there’s only Power without any will.

the will, the experience that one has a will is observably an utter illusion, nevertheless, it is a necessary one for the proliferation of life and the continuation of humanity (the concept specie and humanity themselves are illusory of course).

yesterday, we asked “why do people desire their own oppression?” to which we gave a few answers and landed on Deleuze and Guattari’s; because Desire as the material of the unconscious itself, thought the process of desiring-production, produces everything including the social machine which in turn regulates, repress and invest Desire. in other words: people, their sense of subjectivity is produced by entirely unconscious processes outside their control way before a point of subjectivity identifies with the process and takes credit for it; “it is me who wanted this.”

this is a radical departure from how we experience ourselves as fixed beings with agency and ability for decision making but nevertheless is accurate according to every possible observation of our bodily faculties. there are massive implications to the proposition that humans 1. do not exist as fixed subjects with continuous consistency but rather 2. are a collection of processes moved by impulses and intensities outside their control. one question that we raised yesterday was an ethical one “if we have no will, how can anyone be responsible for anything”?

if we understand that Israelis for example want fascism, Desire their own subjegation and Palestinian oppression, not because they choose it or are brainwashed into it but because Desire itself is invested towards domination and the pleasures of power, than are they not responsible for their actions?

i am not an expert of Nietzsche by any means but if we are just going by his concept of the will to power we mentioned above, i can imagine how we can say that although the sense of will is an illusion it is a necessary illusion for the affirmation of life in organisms and so perhaps holding accountable, holding responsible is a necessary illusion. we know that people are produced by their material conditions and do not consciously choose anything and yet, in order to being able to organize socially in any meaningful capacity just as much as to be an organism that affirms life to the highest degree, the illusion of will is necessary.

but i think we can take this much further and completely destroy the moral sense in responsibility. to make responsibility a purely relational, material phenomena. what if responsibility has nothing to do with punishment (to be held accountable) or with an individual will (they chose that), but instead is something emergent, a becoming; a becoming-responsible.

in the same way that Israelis do not will themselves into this investment in fascism, occupation and bloodshed, anti-Zionists like myself who grew up there as well did not “choose” to suddenly face reality and care about Palestinian liberation. in both cases, shifts in material conditions, historical, economic, social and political forces inscribe impulses on bodies and are both generated by Desire and invest Desire in different directions.

this is a complex thing to talk about and i am sure it will piss some people off but if you know me even a little bit you know i absolutely detest Israelis and have no love for their society, so remember that when i say again—no body chooses anything consciously and the only way to change people’s behavior is to meaningfully shift material conditions around them. and, even in the most sever cases of fascism, oppression and mass murder such as this, our passion for “holding them accountable” is the same moral stance that produced western colonial society, a society of discipline, control and punish.

i mean just think for a moment on the vapidness of spectacles like the Nuremberg trials or Aichman’’s execution, did it do anything to meaningfully shift the material conditions that produced Nazism and the social investment in supremacy? not even a little bit and Germany today is a testimony to it.

this does not mean i don’t want to see war criminals suffer or even be killed by the resistance, again, this is NOT about morality. not about good or bad, not about right or wrong. it is about taking the most material analysis we can possibly take and building our ethics from there.

a becoming-responsible is not about accountability or punishment it is about shifting people material conditions in a way that produce different subjectivities, that invests Desire differently thought them, that inscribes new impulses on their bodies. away from hierarchy, domination, supremacy and control.

becoming-responsible is not a moral stance nor is it a basis of law. it is an event, a bloc of sensations that one may pass through and become something other than what they are in the process; a something that cares more, not because it’s “good” or because they are a good person, it is care without cause.

observation: my becoming-responsible is not happening because i am exposed to new information, nor because i am now a “better person”, definitely not because i am afraid of punishment. for whatever reason, thought whatever shifts in material conditions i entered becoming-responsible and started feeling a deep care for every living and non-living things in existence.

in our becoming-responsible we stand with palestinians and all opressed and margininalzied people everywhere not because we are “good people” or because they are some particulalrly special form of sacred humans; we start with them because we feel care without a cause or a condition. because our love for life itslef propells us to. because we have a relational bond of interconnectivity. because thet are us and we are all of them.

we are so so deeply stuck with the frame of reference of morality that it’s hard for people to hold this complexity and will label me a “liberal,” of course projecting that i am somehow saying that nothing should happened to Israelis committing atrocities because i am against violence or something, while being completely oblivious to the fact that even this judgment is moral all the way through. i do not care one bit for the fate of Israelis, i think that when you become a full speed fascist eventually reality will correct and slap you in the face in all kinds of ways, i will welcome any consequences they suffer gladly. ok? i am not a particulalrly kind person, definetly not a good one.

what i am saying is that the very way we are trained to think about responsibility is inseparable from discipline and punishment “to be held accountable” and that we will do well to separate responsibility from such moral rigidity because 1. this is simply not how reality works, people are not fixed subjects with agency, 2. such moralizing does not stop with war criminal and leaks into how we see everything and everyone and hurt our revolutionary organizing abilities, and 3. does not leave any room for actually doing the only things that can shift people’s behavior; meaningfully changing their material conditions.

this is not a complete thought, i have so much more to write or say about all of this, i mean even the concept becoming-responsible itself came to me as i was writing this. but i feel a bit tired and still am healing from a stomach flu and so i will leave you with this for now. please continue the conversation in the comments, i will do my best to respond to your comments in the next posts and we can keep developing together.

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alright adios, see you tomorrow