In November (?) when I got back from seeing you all in London there was the beginning of some kind of movement already underway and then it didn't happen. It felt kind of apocalyptic and then petered out, like everything has felt since the pandemic. Again, I had the strange feeling of not being able to keep up with the news. There was a week without petrol. Refinery workers were on strike for a wage increase, in view of the bonuses TOTAL energies direction were attributing themselves, in view of the cost of living crisis, energy crisis, war on Ukraine, price of gas, all that. The country was completely stalled and there were queues for petrol for several weekends in petrol stations in the North of Paris. A couple of weeks later, there were still intermittent shortages, and people going to the Sainte Soline bassine struggled to find petrol. Someone I know in the south of France cycled three hours to go to a birthday party. Mélenchon, who is now, since standing down after the election – kind of no one and also merely someone – called some demonstrations at the time, trying to mobilise around inflation and the la vie cher. And moreover, trying to make some kind of extra-union movement. So when I came back there was a big first demonstration in Paris, which was strange in its demographic, almost complete absence of any union affiliated cortege, and had the recently nobel prized Annie Ernaux travelling around on a float like a Madonna in a parade making speeches that no one could really hear.
There were a few of these Melenchon-called but not at all melenchonist demos, around the question of the cost of living, the bonuses TOTAL were receiving, the obscenity of the wealth gap, over October and November. There were banners, there were pink smoke flares, there were not many chants, there were tracts distributed. There were most of the things you would expect of a protest. There were Melenchonist student supporters who had come up from Poitiers. But there were barely any police. There was a new chief of police in Paris and the strategy pretty hands off. On one demonstration there was a crush, there were many people, but it was still possible to carry a banner and be right next to the line of police. So these were surprisingly unviolent protests.There were some ‘autonome’ General Assemblies in the North of Paris which grew smaller and smaller in number. At first, these assemblies tried to grasp a potential 'situation'. Everyone talked about the situation. The situation seemed to be that younger people were extremely depressed. Another situation seemed to be that a postal worker, who had been going on strike for years, was also extremely depressed and could no longer understand where any possible leverage could be. Another situation seemed to be that the pandemic had been a common experience. According to friends of mine the real situation was that people had been depoliticised and lost a grasp on language. Very quickly the conversation became about how different everyone was and how nobody could therefore ‘understand each other’s experience’. Inflation had failed as a unifying banner. People wanted to talk about the fundamental impossibility of ‘the situation’. It was almost as if they wanted to say that there was actually no situation. The assembly could only grasp what it identified as past failures. Some others set up an inflation reading group.
In any case, this strange, not street movement petered out because these refinery strikes did not continue because it became clear that Macron was drafting yet another pension reform, and that energy must be saved for that. In late October, PhD students of Italian Marxism stood on the steps of the history of art library saying how much they agreed with Martinez’s idea: a union fight couldn’t be waged over inflation, and only over the question of salaries. Occasionally someone would intervene to wonder if a union struggle could tackle inflation in the form of real wages. In view of the fact a pension reform would be announced in January, the unions would cool off for now.
All winter, it felt hard to grasp any of the elements of whatever people were calling ‘the crisis’ or the situation. On the one hand, there was the energy crisis, which seemed to slip between meaning that petrol was expensive, because of the war on Ukraine. Other people used it as short-hand for the nuclear crisis specific to France. Unlike its neighboring states, energy was not going up as wildly in price in France, and had been subventioné by Macron. The nuclear power stations needed repairs, and the moment of them needing repairs had unfortunately coincided with the European wide energy crisis, which meant that France could not buy extra energy from its neighbors (ie. Germany – doing very badly indeed – see electric radiator crisis). Therefore, the government strategy had been to perform this nationwide ‘lack’ of resources, and encourage an initiative to lower the energy output of France by a kilowatt, a degree, or whatever measure would do it. However, just as with the gas tax that sparked the gilets jaunes, Macron’s ‘ecological transition’ only involved a redistribution or outsourcing of the burden. There were posters all over Paris from various banks, encouraging the idea of 'sobriété' [i.e. a kind of piousness]. Homeworking was encouraged, so that workers would take on cost of heating themselves and so that workplaces wouldn’t go bankrupt. Bars were no longer heated, and the heaters on terrasses had anyway been banned for ecological reasons. So when people talked about the energy crisis it was hard to know whether it was just that it was cold.
I have the impression of seeing things through a filter, being unable to grasp the significance of things or of how to put things together. There's a weirdness to the way I feel I'm discussing things with friends in which the stakes are invisible to us. It feels like the lightness of words hides something altogether much darker, and there's a sense in which people are constantly asking how bad it will get.
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Last night in the 18ème arrondissement of Paris un mec a sauté, as they say. For days there have been increased police in the neighbourhood, often plain clothes. They hang around in little groups of five and they are often in the way. In Aldi everyone has to leave their bags at the door and people take items off their shopping when they find they don’t have enough cash on them to pay. The cashier is not annoyed at all, she patiently takes things off: chocolate, biscuits, things that are less necessary. The girls ahead of me have exactly thirty four euros between them but I think there are things in their pockets. The vigil doesn't do anything. At the Square Léon, there they were again, the police. They are always here but there are more of them in the last few days and it’s impossible to figure out exactly why but it feels like a cleaning-up mission. Two nights ago there was an ambulance. Yesterday they were in front of my door but I realised too late that it was them. A young woman was surrounded by them. I couldn't really tell what was going on and I was already on the other side of the door. In that kind of way where everyone is keeping the fiction, no-one is letting on they’re being arrested, no-one is letting on they’re cops, except for the red armband. I saw it after I had said excuse me. But there they are again at the Square Léon, arresting two young black men for no reason except that they are there in a discreet fashion, calling for back up for no reason at all. About a month ago the shop across from my house was dismantled in only a day because the old man running it died. The three brothers inheriting it will sell it leasehold. During the dismantlement yuppie joggers (never before seen in these ends!) were running past. Above it is the exact apartment where Eugene Poitier wrote the Internationale. The shop was a kind of ecosystem; a mess of suitcases which the dealers would kind of hide in. Now there is a clean grill. There is nowhere to hide. It was dismantled in only a day. I will miss it because it was one of the many signs I like to read. I get no direct sunlight but the shop was called MAGREBIN SOLEIL. So last night, cops everywhere and a cordon barring off where rue Poissoniers and rue Myrha cross. Lots of cops. So I ask one of them what is happening. 'Pourquoi?' Says the Police National. I say because I live here, although I feel like a traitor and a spy even speaking to them, and he says 'Ce n’est rien de grave, Madame'. A man coming out of the boulangerie says 'Les gens vont mal, hein? quel’qu’un a sauté de le 3ème étage. On n’en peux plus, hein? Et encore une autre dans one grande surface mardi'. He doesn't say from which shopping mall the person last week has jumped, or maybe he does. I take it in slowly -- me who thought there had been a violent murder, or a raid, (it's quite commonplace in my neighborhood to see heavily armored police doing a house raid, skulking around) or -- what did I even bother thinking -- it is the millionth time this year that I hear a voice that isn't just my own saying the phrase les gens vont mal -- people are doing badly, or people aren't doing so well. People are gathering outside the boulangerie or coming out of the fabric shop. It must have happened only just now because the area is not completely clear, there's just a cordon. 'Une autre personne qui a sauté?' I say. 'Oui. La vie est belle, hein? Ca ne va pas du tout les gens vont mal', he says. He isn't nonchalant about it at all. He is concerned in a deeply spiritual way. It contrasts very bluntly with what the policeman has told me -- what? to protect me? -- that what has happened was rien de grave. Or maybe he said that because he decided that it was a private matter. Someone else is asking me what has happened, and I say, but instead of saying someone has jumped, I say, 'another suicide'. I don't know why I say that. This autumn was full of broadcasts about the increasing rate of young people peeling themselves off the planet, about the fragility of youth, and how les gens vont mal. All over the bourgeois media the broadcasters cared to put this down to the 'fragility' of a 'particularly woke' generation, who suddenly have 'the means of expressing themselves' but can't cope 'with real life'. After each of these broadcasts in the same breath there would often be features about how students in Paris are queuing at food banks, about the cold, and the energy crisis. But all of these were images; they were never connected. Just facts. The dots didn't join up. This morning I couldn't particularly detect anything on that corner, and I didn't go in to the cafe to ask. I just looked through the window and waved and was glad it wasn't him. The butcher with the blue glasses told me my eyes were beautiful, as is our morning routine, and there were stacks of ribs on the street, ready to be loaded. But some pink pigment -- from where I don't know, maybe from the houses currently being renovated -- had exploded everywhere and my friend from the beauty shop was washing down the pavement, but there were traces of it all over the street, nearly at the corner where the man must have jumped. People were in good humour. It's beautifully sunny et la vie est belle et les gents vont mal.
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thursday a crowd sat on a rock facing off to the police, preening feathers, hoping to be their elders, only late style remains and gone are the days of rap, this isn’t a lament, but they stayed in hoodies, cagoules, picking up the edge of an eyebrow piercing, there was a moment when it was really a bit intense, we nearly did something, they say, nod their heads, they are born in 2004, where was I then, to look ten years younger these days you’d have to look ten years older than you actually are and I do, I do try, you are perhaps the oldest person here they say as the young ones bop and get hip to the sex pistols, and some 120bpm stuff older than I am, all that’s retained is style, all that’s transmitted is thru videos, it’s not for lack of trying, this one was arrested for taking a knife to a lycée demo I lament the aging of the MiLi, the dinosaurs wont be resurrected again for years now, too much spectatorship but this is the point isn’t it, you can’t do anything exactly on your own, we are alone, we are never really alone, we are cosmologies, our friends are constellations exploding in our mouths, no one I know is here, I miss when cars would burn and we’d run into the streets and secretly, mainly because it meant 'something' 'happening', being somewhere and with people, the warmth of dying together on dreams, I despair at the passing, what is real life and when did it get this way and what does it mean to live in a place?
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I’m trying so hard to write you something that wouldn’t be a lie. My interlocuter keeps melting in front of me and I in turn melt. Dust, molten, scum on the carpet. How can I have the bravery to keep cutting it up, place one cut up after another, when in between the images everything gets totally erased and we have to start always a nouveau anyway. Like, all glass gets cleared away in between. I’m thinking of why there’s no material to write about and about when I thought there was but how even then my involvement was the same, fucking disgusting, spectral. I can’t write because there’s no form. There’s nothing that presents itself to me right now as a form. What I write feels like a lie pusique there’s no social form. All the writing is horrible, little snarky notes on the edge. I would like to keep going for several days, I try like ritual to believe in it. But I am unconvinced by the pallor of my words. I wanted to write it in montage. I want there to at least be something to pick over – the face of the actor in Sicilia saying 'da vero' one million times as Straub and Huillet dig for the beginnings of a smile (have u seen this film, Pedro Costa -- it's a film of Straub and Huillet re-cutting Sicilia) -- I don’t want all the dreadful sentences that burn and melt our skins into a smooth surface, shiny and wrapped over the holes of our eyes. Can u even throw a hole? Why I can’t write endings. Why we can’t share experiences. I want to give away my experiences.
(RL)
(RL)
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