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The Last Night

Anti-work, Atheism, Adventure

John Hunt Publishing Ltd.

CHAPTER 1

Migrating

Imagine growing up as a young atheist in a stiflingly Catholic country.

Imagine migrating to London, the Babylon of 'really existing atheism'.

Imagine the expectations.

When I first set foot on the cold, secular ground of the metropolis, I felt that I couldn't have asked for more. A few empty churches, scattered here and there. No Vatican City, no Pope. Charles Darwin's face on banknotes. I could finally breathe freely.

Yet I realised quickly that something wasn't right. Somehow, the smell of religion still lingered in the air, as sickening as always. I found it on the trains coming back home from the office, filled with exhausted workers. I smelt it on the benches on a Monday afternoon, covered with the beer cans of the unemployed. Most of all, I felt it surrounding me when I walked into the office every morning, finding my colleagues already there, frantically typing on their keyboards as if fiddling with digital rosaries. I had walked in perfectly on time, why was everybody there already? Why did they look so satisfied when they greeted me from their desks? They were working hard, harder than they were expected to. And in the evening, when the darkness of Northern Europe enveloped the office blocks and young professionals' houses, they were still at their desks, typing as fast as greyhounds race. Looking at me packing up, as if I had been a weak opponent abandoning the match before time. Why did they keep working late, when no pay or praise was ever to be awarded to them by anybody? What did they find in their silent, tragic sacrifice?

Once again I was surrounded by that smell. The same smell that filled the churches of my childhood on a Sunday morning. It had spread everywhere. Not just in churches, but all around the office blocks. Not just confined to one day a week, but every day – eight, nine ten hours a day. No longer accompanied by the chanting of monks, but by the clicking march of a million ants on the keyboard of one, immense metropolitan organ.

Religion had never left. I had never managed to escape it. Its name had changed, but its believers remained the same. They were just a little more honest, a little more self-sacrificing than the old Catholics back at home. Possibly, a little more fanatical.

Radical Atheism

A New Faith

At the beginning of the 21st Century, Westerners seemed to have reached the stage in which their aspirations to autonomy and freedom could finally become reality.

After centuries of secularism, traditional religions appeared to have lost their hypnotic powers. Together with the emptying of churches, the cult of the 'true gods' had shrunk into the object of purely academic research, or a handle for the desperate clinging of the most impoverished masses. At the same time, the bloodbaths of the 20th Century's total wars, betrayed revolutions and political nightmares had managed to break the spell of even the most insidious secular religions. Fascism had lost any rights of citizenship within the political discourse. Communism had turned into the pet-idea of intellectually oriented art institutions, the earthly limbo of failed utopias. Capitalism's pretence of being the only possible, rational global system had shattered against its own contradictions. As everything tilted on the verge of an epochal change, the notion of time opened itself to transformation. The linear progression of past, present and future had ceased to act as the herdsman of human populations, no longer pushing them towards the epic massacres that always accompany idealistic delusions. Historical time seemed to have vanished, clearing the sky above everyday life. And together with the end of History, the bundle of promises of Progress had also finally run out of string.

In front of Westerners, the future opened like an unmapped oceanic expanse, emerging through the cracks of the earth. No routes were set for them to sail along obediently. Admirals and priests relinquished their position, claiming to have always been simply part of the crew. Flags were taken down the masts and set alight. The laces holding abstract social morality on Westerners' heads, like the incandescent helmets used in medieval torture, were loosened. At last, they could swap the ill-fated demand for freedom of religion with the emancipatory cry for freedom from any religion. At last, they could build for themselves communities that did not irradiate from any central totem. No longer would they have to seek the autonomy of capital, of knowledge or of the law above them, but they could assert their own autonomy above any abstraction.

But none of this happened. When the religious mist above their heads vanished, and they saw that the stars were nothing but cold lights indifferent to their fate, panic overwhelmed them. The limit between freedom and despair suddenly turned too thin. Unshielded by religion or ideology, the horizon appeared to them as too wide, and the wind too strong. How could a person know how to behave, if no God told them what to do? The nervous systems of the Westerners cracked, letting them sink into a self-harming frenzy. They needed a new, low roof above their head. They needed a new form of reassurance.

As inspired by panic, their plan for engineering their own, new submission neared a perverse logical perfection. They knew that if they built another idol to rule over them, another God of sorts, or ideology, they would have to spend their nights in fear of yet another catastrophic collapse of their faith. Gods rise and fall, ideologies crumble, on battlefields as well as on the stock market. Even golden calves can be melted and turned into earrings. They also realised that prayers were not the tools to employ in their dealings with superior powers, since their prayers had never managed to maintain the kingdoms of their defunct Gods.

What they needed was a new, self-fulfilling type of prayer, which was not directed at any Gods that could betray them.

In fact, what they really needed wasn't a prayer, but a mantra: an invocation that revolves on itself, a spell that endlessly produces itself, a belief in believing.

Yet, in its traditional form, a mantra is too impractical a routine to be of any use to others than monks and hermits. If they ever wanted to apply it to their everyday life, Westerners had to find a way of adapting this mystical exercise to the structures of contemporary capitalism. What would a mantra look like, in the heart of a global metropolis of the 21st Century? What other act might be able to host its obsessive spirit, whilst functioning like a round, magic shield, covering the frightened believers from their fear of freedom?

There was only one possible, almost perfect candidate. The activity of repetition par excellence: Work. The endless chain of gestures and movements that had built the pyramids and dug the mass graves of the past. The seal of a new alliance with all that is divine, which would be able to bind once again the whole of humanity to a new and eternal submission. The act of submission to submission itself.

Work.

The new, true faith of the future.

The Paradox of Work

What do we talk about, when we talk about Work?

Clearly, we talk about the type of activity that produces all the artefacts we see around us. Work is the origin of the pipe and the wall, of milk and bread, of smiling customer service, of police, of the plumber and the washing machine. But we would be mistaken, if we thought that such products and services are the main raison d'être for Work, today. Products and services are only its most spectacular outcome, but no longer its core aim. It is simpler to understand this distinction if we look back at traditional conscription armies. On a superficial level, it might seem reasonable to believe that their belligerent outcome was the main, if not the only, object of their production. Supposedly armies were only a means to war. Yet, that was hardly the case. War was the most spectacular outcome of traditional armies, but not the main focus of their production. Above all else, armies produced discipline, both in peace and in wartime.

Similarly, products and services constitute Work's most spectacular outcome, but in the present day they can hardly be considered as its core production.

This disjunction between Work and economic production becomes especially clear if we consider the economic paradox that characterises contemporary Work.

On the one hand, we have a global economy that is cyclically devastated by recurrent crises of overproduction. The endless supply that pours out of our factories and offices under the dogma of limitless economic growth, does not meet an equivalent level of demand, as should be the case in a capitalist economy. Every so many years, a crisis or a war is needed in order to destroy the supply in excess. We produce too much, we Work too much, and by doing so we regularly destroy our economy. An even more dramatic state of affairs belongs to the relationship between production and the natural environment. In order to fuel current levels of overproduction – as well as overconsumption, although only in terms of industrial, rather than individual consumption – we are progressively and stubbornly devastating the collection of natural resources which goes under the name of 'the environment'. Overproduction does not only destroy the global economy, but the global biosphere. Our excessive Work not only leads to economic crisis, but to an environmental catastrophe. Finally, we now have at our disposal a set of technologies that would be able to make most of human labour redundant. Instead of profiting from the ease allowed by a production devolved to machines, humans find themselves competing against technology and are thus forced to reduce their demands and expectations to the level of the machine. We try to work as much and as tirelessly as machines do, and by doing so we turn ourselves into second-rate production machines, never as efficient as the real ones.

On the other hand, the discourse over Work is now more obsessive then ever. For the vast majority of the world population waged-labour still remains the only possible way of accessing the resources necessary for survival. Especially in the West, the army of the tragically overworked – fed on psychoactive drugs and self-help remedies – faces the hordes of the equally tragically unemployed. Work does not simply act as the only entrance to the market of resources, but also as the main platform for the exchange of social recognition, and as the intimate theatre of happiness. It is not only in front of their peers, but also in front of themselves, that a person's worth is defined by their job and by their level of productivity. Every moment of the day that escapes the universe of Work is a wasted moment, a time of despair and loneliness. Without Work, outside of Work, we are nothing, and so much so that even consumption has had to be turned into a Work-related activity. The office has become the place where we are supposed to find our happiness and self-respect – or, to say it in the new-age parlance of office culture, to 'find ourselves' – as well as the love of what we do: is there any place where we can feel safer than when we are in our workplace, snug in the warm embrace of our office family?

I define this as an economic paradox, since the signals given by economic and environmental devastation, combined with the availability of labour-reducing technologies, logically point towards a dramatic downsizing of human investment into Work. Yet, as we have seen, the cultural discourse around Work seems to be speeding in the opposite direction, claiming an ever-greater role for it in our lives and in the construction of our economic, social and even affective environment.

How is this possible? If the effects of contemporary Work are both unnecessary and harmful, why do we continue investing everything in it? What is Work for?

A History of Obedience

Traditional conscription armies produced discipline, the most precious resource for traditional, ancien régime societies. Contemporary offices and factories produce obedience, the necessary cement for a society struggling to maintain an abstract, immortal roof over its head. If we want to understand this relationship between obedience and Religion, we must begin by taking a closer look at obedience itself.

There is often a deep misunderstanding about the relationship between power and obedience. We are used to believing that obedience is submitted to the power that rules over it, both in a logical and a productive sense. We are used to considering the command of the master as productive of the activity of those submitted to it. We couldn't be more mistaken. Without the obedience of the slave, the orders of the masters would be little more than barks in the wind. Even when displayed with the outmost authority and supported by the most brutal force, power could do nothing without obedience. It is the obedience of the worker that replenishes the storages of the master, which polishes the master's silverware and protects his home. The relationship between power and obedience is the same as that between capital and labour: if capital is nothing but crystallised labour – which collapses as a coercive reality over the labourers themselves – then power is nothing but crystallised obedience, which collapses like an avalanche over the very heads of those who obey. Power is powerless, obedience is all-powerful.

After such considerations, a question arises almost spontaneously: if power is so weak, to the point of being unable to exist without the active obedience of those who submit to it, then why do people obey? Who do we obey? Clearly, nobody would ever do anything if they did not think that it would bring them some advantage of some type. Nobody would obey for the sake of it, but always as a means to an end. Yet, we should not look for these ends in the catalogue of immediately material benefits, but rather in what we defined before as the realm of Religion.

A look at the history of obedience could help us to clarify such a utilitarian reading of the relationship between obedience and Religion.

When we talk about the history of obedience, we could as well invert the order of the words and talk about the obedience of History. History and obedience have always, and by necessity, travelled together, since their common origin in the invention of writing. According to traditional historiography, we can define as History the period of time that begins with the first appearance of written records 3,200 years BC. Such written records, as discovered by archaeologists in the area anciently known as Mesopotamia, were the clay tablets issued by the temples in their dealing with the local peasant population. At that time, Mesopotamian temples used to function both as places of worship and as storages for the seeds and tools used for agriculture. Temples used to lend seeds and tools to peasants, and recorded the peasants' debts on the tablets. If a peasant was unable to repay his debt, both him and his family would have to pay back with their own freedom. It was a custom that every new king would destroy all the tablets at the beginning of their kingdom or at the end of a successful war campaign. But the temple's cunning accountants soon found a way around the inconvenience of royal mercy. Together with the first form of writing and of debt, the first clause was invented: the temple accountants began to insert a non-termination clause to all their new debt tablets. The debt was to be active forever, regardless of the decisions of the king.

The effects of the invention of this clause were tremendous, far exceeding the grey world of mere accountancy. We could say that with the immortalisation of peasants' debts through writing, the very composition of the world changed. Until that moment, all that existed were living creatures, floating over the thin layer of mortality, and lifeless, inorganic matter. Even the immortality of the gods was rather relative, and often more akin to the mortal fragility of humans than to the celestial serenity typical of the gods of monotheistic religions. With the introduction of the non-termination clause, for the first time abstract immortality appeared. Something consciously created by humans suddenly rose above their heads and began a life of its own: a life that could potentially transcend and survive that of its creators. First debts, then laws, then History itself: the flesh became word, and its abstract, immortal form fell again over the living, crushing them, binding them hand and foot. This man-made space of immortality – which we could define as a space of 'normative abstraction' – wrapped itself around human lives as their second nature. Alongside biological nature, which limited and defined the sphere of human action and possibility, the second nature of normative abstractions cut an even stricter, narrower border. Humans had created it, yet they could not undo it. While people died, the written word was immortal and its commands were to be perennially productive. Civilisation was born. With the realisation of their powerlessness, humans first experienced panic, then fear and finally, envy. They started to desire immortality for themselves. They wanted to acquire it or, better, they wanted to be allowed within its immortal fields.
(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Last Night by Frederico Campagna. Copyright © 2013 Frederico Campagna. Excerpted by permission of John Hunt Publishing Ltd..
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