29 May 2010

The End Of The Social

The Social has no end. It regularly has means of different kinds: of conduct, of misconduct, of power, of control. Round means of these types, a series of conflicts rise. Each conflict, no matter how micro or macro it may be, involves only aspects of the Social. There never is one single conflict to comprise all conflicts in the landscape of the Social. But there are myths of conflicts that claim to do so. This mythic claim, whenever it appears, functions as the origin of conflict as such. Because it produces an aspiration of an end: an end as scope and an end as a conclusion. Through this aspiration, conflict reproduces imaginaries and desires. And by attempting to fulfill its aspiration, it acts against the constant flow of the Social: conflict tries to interrupt this vital flow, to arrest it within the imaginary conclusion that it aspires: namely, it attempts to castrate it. 

Yet, this castrating force, the desire-to-reach the (double) end is the contradiction that keeps the Social in motion. Conflicts, with all their energy and their need to accumulate resources (material or conceptual), directly result to the mobilisation of the Social and its infinite flow. They reproduce a spiral movement of ideas, beliefs, hopes, struggles, power games and resolutions, all clashing at the plain of discourse, all for-themselves, all dead before we know it. This constant death keeps the Social alive. This death is the very erasure of the End that haunts the Social. Against this Real condition, all we need to know, is the means for and with which we participate in the games of conflicts. And keep participating but as knowing subjects and as subjects of knowledge. 

For what we know is what we owe and what we own.