Nor yet good red herring: Autumn (5.3)

Reservationism: An unintended consequence of the project of radical subjectivity where distinct fragments of soul, previously incorporated into the identitarian form of the committed self, break  free under the weight of accumulated contradiction. Like the Graffito of Esmet-Akhom, the reservationist fragment expresses the decomposition of its parent form at the point of dispersal. Reservation is the counting of costs incurred by the self's committing to inappropriate or premature projects. The object committed to, around which the unity of the radical subject coheres, is always in error - its only function, drawing the subject down into the labyrinth of false moves. The post-ultraleft version of communism is nothing but the accumulation of such labyrinthine diversions where the milieu is induced through its commitment to its object to insert its representations into that space vacated by the workers' movement. Commitment is itself the main proof for the object's polarisation of error. Nothing true requires subjective commitment or belief to survive. Occasionally, that which is committed to proves itself the good error, but more commonly the object is a travesty of its idealisation. The internal conflict around what cause is motivating what action is the determining factor of self-activity which always appears as an epiphenomenon of its moment just as its reservations appear as if at a further remove. Alternatively, the source of reservation may be discovered as being situated at a more fundamental level. The talking cricket eternally submits its minority report from a position seemingly separated from the decisive action which itself is only undertaken on the basis of internalised exigency and hasty rationalisation. Reservation is expressed privately by the self as knowledge that the practice it has involved itself in is either morally wrong or inoperable. And yet, it is the privacy of the expressed reservation, the admittance that there can be no involvement of reservation with political self-activity, which indicates the sense of incommensurability and inextricability - the fateful intuition that there is no politics but realpolitik. If the tension between what justifies the measures taken and what condemns them is the true extent of subjectivity, the subject's defining characteristic in revolt is its desire to sever all connections with its own reservations and thereby free itself to act, in truncated form, autonomously. The goal of revolutionary self-activity is the mobilisation of the individual's divergent cares within a unified form - all of the self is wholly committed or it is not committed at all. The radical subject recruits itself to the cause of generalising the conditions for its own reproduction. It takes its intuitive praxis as the model for the revolutionising of its conditions.  It finds its identity affirmed in its struggle with external conditions. As a seeming product of autonomous self-activity, the radical subject complies with its own directive to suppress its own incoherence. In a mobilised state, traitor fragments of the self (whatever is incompatible with the identity of self-activity) are projected as characteristics of enemies and competitors. The good revolutionary is merciless to his other self, to the Strelnikov-like overdetermination of his actions. The good revolutionary scorns whoever is not a member of the party - those who remain, despite a sufficiency of incitement, reserved. It is probable that the pocket of reservation, where resides the recognition of lies, losses and cosmic irrelevance of mobilisation, was never actually mobilised, no totalisation ever completes itself. It is probable that the unsubsumed reservation of character, the better part of human nature, is simply filtered out within imperative-saturated contexts, silenced, forgotten, misdirected, only to reemerge in a state of subtle contradiction when revolutionary events are absorbed into the apparatus of world production. The mobilised self exists in a state of immediate relation with its environmental triggers, whilst the mode of reservation draws in exterior and non-present materials from what has already passed. Even if it were to be achieved, the idealist category of praxis would still remain a momentary and passing state. It recedes only to be recalled later and invoked as a measure of that which may not appear again - the revolutionaries are not now what the revolutionaries were then. The production of ideal unities through efforts towards willed self-coherence also produces the conditions for its own fragmentation. The work of committed unity, itself a hollow and compensatory product of separation, disperses into the world yet further shell-like fragments - the brave faced defence of insupportable propositions. In spite of itself, commitment leaks - hypocrisy may only appear where morality has first set the scene. There is always a something else not articulated by the subject's discourse, something of itself which its work of externalisation is structured to deny. Labour camps, prisons, curfews, expulsions, executions - these are the subject's apparatuses of liberation. Where all is in the process of realisation, something has remained unrealisable. The identitarian subject suppresses its own incompatibilities with its project and internalises the ideal image of unity in its self as labour process. The product of the radical subject, of self-activity, cannot and will not belong to it - there is no subject but the representation of the subject and its revolt a mere unwitting caricature of non-compliance. The non-unity, the bad faith, the fragmentation of the identitarian product results precisely from the project of conceiving unity, authenticity, completion within the subject formation's works. Just as the committed self fragments into pathological traits each vying to identify itself with the totality, so the group form born out of common purpose creates unprecedented and unanticipated schisms, heresies, factions, vendettas. Just as the individual expresses reservation in private upon what is committed to public, so entire communities exist in a state of reservation to the political domain. The incompatible, if not opposed, political trajectories of the identitarian self and its consequent reservations are expressed through equally incompatible, if not opposed, forms of violence. The conventional and expansionist form of political violence is directed towards realising the identity of the universal with the particular, its objective is to mobilise the entire territory and thus produce a conformity of objects to the law.  The violence of reservation does not register as violence at all and is only identified negatively from the decomposing outline of once mobilised forces, now isolated and abandoned at the point of committed subject's furthest reach. Neither is the reservation an accusation, although it may be deployed as such by later subject forms, it is rather the overriding preference not to become involved in those actions undertaken 'against the better part of our natures.' .
 
Reservationism is a trivial neologism but difficulty with the 'we' form of political enthusiasm has its own history: 'But what does this ‘subjectivist approach’ refer to? In short, it seems to suppose an authentic involvement with the limits of the umwelt and a recognition of categorical hierarchies in relations of force. The subject formation may only gain knowledge of the world on terms set by the world and then  reflect upon these as the constraint of its appearance in the world. It may come to know on its own terms and to a greater extent what it is and what it can achieve but that is something very difficult. Its may also, but this too is a very great thing, come to recognise through its own activity, that the fundamental condition for the appearance of the subject in the world is that it may never function as the condition for the appearance of the world.'