Creation Versus Work

The act of creating is to the humanization of nature and life what work is to denaturation and to a programmed death.

An accelerated reading of the obvious now ranks among the banalities a truth which was yesterday put in doubt: economic exploitation has brought humans and their surroundings to the limits of a survival the apogee of which coincides with its fall.

The history of the commodity and the history of the people who produced it is one and the same: it is made by unmaking those who made it.

We have been warned repetitively from century to century, and, if not reassured, at least precautioned, that there are many terrors to fear, terrors which we know to be inherent in a system the mechanisms of which have lost their inescapable character. The apocalypse is part of the past, part of the sinister procession of its cyclical horrors. The real Flood, pouring forth from the first walls of Jericho, was never anything but the surging forth of commodity values burying human values beneath the frozen waters of profit.

The high points of life, which the successive waves of the commodity’s conquest never really leveled, will serve as refuges for a long time for those who have up to now been afflicted by the routine of business and the stipends of passion. These islands that a slow ebb reveals in a new way from beneath the old names of love, generosity, hospitality, enjoyment, and creativity, today designate the true paths of a human presence on the earth. The revolution has to the present time only been a change in decor in the secular set-up of the economy. I don’t see the possibility of any authentic revolution outside of the daily and individual construction of a human landscape.

Perhaps they’ll have to burn up the whole Amazon, tear apart the ozone layer completely, ruin the earth, and put radiation into every breath of air before they discover — beneath a computerized, accounted for nature, dismembered according to exchange value — another nature, which freely offers its resources and its energy to whoever deigns to rip them out and sell them for a fistful of dollars.

The environment changes because of modifications in gaze, hearing, touch, taste, feelings, thought, and attitudes imprisoned for so long within the lonely perspective of power and money. And so, from the dull boredom and monotony of a universe in decline, surges forth the passion to be reborn at the heart of a planet and existence so well known by those who kill them that they end up still seeming new and unexplored to the simple eye of life.

The Misery of Economized Creation

Artworks and works of technological invention are usually borne from the torments of a repressed creativity, which had nothing to express itself through besides the rage of sudden release. Now that creative joy is being born, by transmutation, from the violence of elementary and chaotic impulse, the necessity of producing has changed the operations of the great alchemical oeuvre into a painful birth, a curse which is an expensive price to pay for the freeness of the gifts of nature.

It’s not enough that the creator, which is in all of us and which is one, should renounce creating itself right away after infancy, when the quest for enjoyment is forbidden it; its inventive genius must be smashed under constraint and bastardized by laborious efforts. For a few happy discoveries, how many inventors have been condemned to silence, to death, because the object of their research ran contrary to the law of cui prodest: “who is that profitable for?” How many complacent wise-men have been sold off to power? How many artists have been prematurely worn out and proletarianized by having gone out into the social arena to solicit applause, to undergo the judgment of merits and demerits, to polish a competitive label like the businessmen, the bureaucrats, the politicians, and the other courtesans of the spiritual and material market?

However, it just so happens that the surging of creative energy, corrupted as it is beneath the yoke of work, keeps with it the imprint of the body from which it is born. A strange resurrection: certain works continue nourishing the living long after those who abandoned them over the skimpy course of time have disappeared. Whoever knows how to recreate the life he or she carries receives an eternal life. The others, whose ambition is content with glory, will never be anything more than another few names in the catalogs of memory.

No One Creates Anything Without Creating Themselves

The end of the vanities, or at least, of the means that gave famous people a long-term loan; another step towards returning creativity to its true nature: which is self-enjoyment affirming itself in the enjoyment of the world.

Here it is, recognized in the simple and multiple dimensions of the human: will to live, not will to power; authenticity, not appearances; freeness, not the spirit of profit; the pulsation of desires, not separate thought; gift, not exchange; effort exhausting itself in a graceful, and not constrained way; an insatiable heart, not a dissatisfied one.

Everything is put up with embarrassedly as long as it remains in the grip of work, but could open slowly the doors of economic enclosure; the true nature of creativity lets rip the poetry made by all; it encourages a joyful wisdom in the diversity of its freedoms to sing, to compose, to write, to garden, to study, to dream, to dance; to invent a new world on the ruins of a world destroyed by the empire of progressive exploitation. When it finally rids our consciences of the cross of misfortune erected atop the will to live by the necessity of amassing money and dominating, it will have done more for humanity’s happiness than all the revolutions that programmed its hopes.

Without a doubt, the time is come to take back from the gods the creation of the world which was so abusively given over to them, and of which they have made such worthless use. Creation is the exclusive property of human beings, in spite of their daily resignation to skin themselves for work. And it will belong to them even more, as their unquestionable privilege.

Today the silly idea of praying backwards, thanking God for giving them a slice of bread which they themselves produced and earned by the sweat of their brow, has at last passed away. So many human riches, sent out to pasture, trapped in nothingness, incite us at last to turn towards ourselves, not out of presumption, not in the vanity of that “individualism” where individuals deny themselves, but rather out of the taste for creating and for self-creation.

Reconciliation with a nature we must save is inseparably a reconciliation with the self, with the nascent creator discovering its well-being everywhere except in work. In creation takes place a slow foundation-laying of the true unity of the body, the symbiosis of the being of desires and of earthly nature; it’s the great concordance of the living which will abolish the reign of the separate mind and of separate thought.

Joblessness is Just Off-Peak Work

Work isn’t what’s important to destroy; it will destroy itself — it is already exhausting itself by exhausting people and natural resources. But servility, unintelligence, the lack of imagination that continue propagating, in behaviors and in consciousness, the memory of its past utility and the anguish of its present innocuousness — that is the true calamity of our moribund society, which draws along the totality of the world towards death beneath the flag of realism and rationality.

The force of work depends above all on the weakness and self-contempt it perpetuates, but what a fearful power it has; how can one measure the nefarious effects it has on that social category that the popular milieus call “the jobless” and the business milieus call the “out of work”: what a hassle, to be deprived of what deprives you of life.

Under the pejorative labels of pity and derision that are placed on their heads, the jobless become nothing-people, since it is well understood that work makes you into a man. They were beasts of burden, with a guaranteed stable to live in — now they have been made into wandering dogs. They had, from the virtue of their labor, the right to demand pay; now that they aren’t tiring themselves out all day anymore they’re restored to that immoral state where, to deserve their alms, it fits them to lower their heads, shut up, and be discreet about the agreeableness of no longer losing their days fatigued and bored.

But such is the unhealthy impregnation of “duty”; joblessness must be lived as though it were work, just outside the factory door, even if without and within reigns the same uselessness — the one is paid and the other not (the marketable sectors, it is well known, are the bureaucracy and those that produce useless goods, while agriculture and the industries that cover primordial needs are condemned).

Because of the emptiness that provokes and compensates its frenetic activity, work acts on the mind like a drug. Wages guarantee the regularity of provisions, their absence interrupts it, provokes a withdrawal, and throws people into panic, hopelessness, and fear.

If it is true for those who keep their eyes fixed on the drab horizons of survival that welfare payments don’t make the springtime come, one would have to be as blind as a drunk to despise the wealth and richness of a time suddenly free of obligations, to howl about “job offers being everywhere” like a morphine addict howling at the moon instead of sparking the lighter of his own creativity and collectively undertaking the great task — judged to be impossible because economic prejudice prohibits it — of creating freeness, of the creation of the free.

The imposture of necessary work is the slowest, the most consoling, and the most cruel manner of ending life. There is something very pathetic about the suicidal circulation of the masses — ebbing and flowing according to the rhythms of a machine that’s running on empty, while capital waits in hiding for bankruptcies to invest itself in — as well as about the ridiculousness they ensnare themselves in by dying of thirst next to the water-fountain.

The voluntary and shameful misery of workers and of the jobless defends itself with a fundamental idiocy in the demonstrations of the strikers turning work-stoppages into work again — a labor of contestation — to the point that they fill the streets sweating with boredom. What a crazy dream, stopping the postmen from delivering the mail, paralyzing the mass-transport systems, to the displeasure of everyone, when only the union-leaders — the State’s mafia whose rights are all paid and who refuse to redistribute the money to the workers — would be sad if a letter managed to be delivered without a stamp or if the trains, subways, and busses were kept running for the free use of the people.

Freeness is frightening because it is natural. But who would have any reason to get disturbed today if those who are discontented with rising prices and sinking wages would decide that it was a better idea to refuse to pay to move around, sleep, eat, express themselves, meet up, communicate, amuse themselves, and cheer themselves up?

Ecological Investing is the Economy’s Last Reprieve

The ecological reconversion of the economy is a predictable transition to the era of the new harvest.

The paradox of economic totalitarianism, the logic of which is conducive only to planetary genocide, is that it condemns itself to disappear according to the law of profit, the avidity of which enjoins it elsewhere to perpetuate itself.

The exploitation of nature obeys a death-principle: it transforms the living into a commodity and gives rise to an empire where people become nothing but a shadow of themselves. What’s beyond the river Styx has never been anything but what’s beneath the earth.

On the other hand, the hunger for gain, which is the first cause of an unavoidable pillage, has a terrible fear of nothingness, and knows how to prolong the duration of a privilege, how to avoid killing the goose that lays golden eggs, and how to keep people alive, since you can’t get anything out of a corpse but flesh and bones.

And so, the economy discovers, at the accelerated rhythm of the desert it propagates, that it has a chance of surviving if it reconstructs what it can’t destroy anymore without losing its marketability and its credit.

The alternative that the economic system is faced with is somewhere between shutdown and postponement. Either commodity civilization will come to nothingness by annihilating those who engendered it, or it will extend itself into the last possible surplus-value accorded it by the restoration of nature.

The natural energies and the plan to heal the earth offer at the same time an end to the marketability that fundamentally threatened everyone and everything with its rape and pollution of resources, and a chance for creativity to break the yoke of work and make way for the era of freeness.

The more the economy puts the declining credit of its last forces into ecological investments, the more easily the traps of the commodity will be eluded, and the closer the reality of a radically different civilization will come to the body and to our consciousness.

The Local Creation of a Living Surroundings

Nothing big or little can be undertaken today that will not be penetrated by the following new banality: the ideology of work has imposed on us the reality of a nature which can be carved and shaped at will, where nothing is obtained that isn’t taken by force. The shift in perspective, perceived by every eye that is bored of having only ugliness and ruins to contemplate, unveils another nature without a counterpart, the raw material and resources of which is offered up freely to those with the ingenuity to use them without ever exhausting them.

What is taking shape in mentalities and behaviors lets us preview the emergence of a transitory phase between the collapse of the economy and the beginning of a civilization of creativity, between work and creation, commodity proliferation and a naturally cultivated abundance, abstract man and self-enjoyment, commodity exploitation and the new gathering.

And who will be the new attackers fighting the waste of state planning and of orders “passed down from on high”? Small local collectives, in villages, in city blocks, that will not hesitate to carry on the defense of their environment until they’re standing on the tables where the international debates take place, denouncing the disposal of toxic products, prohibiting polluting industries from setting up, demanding solutions to replace all this.

Perhaps it will be then that wind and solar energies will be put into action, and break the public and private monopolies of the gas and electric companies. The development of organic agriculture could supplant the production of adulterated foods; it could lead to naturally recycling waste, and forbidding the fabrication of materials whose byproducts cannot be reconverted.

Open the Cities to Nature

It’s a question of creating a natural surroundings which is simultaneously affectionate and nourishing. It is a project that has been prohibited by the concentration-camp agriculture of today, from its origins to its industrial prolongation in modern urbanism. It separates men from their nature and drafts them into a war they will fight against themselves and their environment.

We live in the lethargy of dead cities. The labyrinth, long ago left to the drifting wanderers, has given way to huge avenues squared off by boredom, walls of concrete where the head knocks against the resonances of crime, since to unlearn how to live is to learn how to kill. Can’t we imagine a few pedestrian streets and the multiplication of green zones saving from suffocation an urban tissue that would only anyway just reproduce the arrangement of the supermarkets around the city, where nature does not enter without a plastic wrapping around it?

To humanize the cities is to assure its access to natural resources. The glacis that isolates the last quarters where it is nice to live and hang around calls for a real fertilization of everything. The buildings of statist, bureaucratic, military, financial, police, and religious uselessness, the vague terrains, the public places, the streets and boulevards ruined by the automobile exhaust — all of these things will make nice soup gardens for everyone’s enjoyment, while we wait for better things from the creative genius that would then be able to exercise itself there.

There’s no other way to rid yourself of work besides giving back to individual creativity a confidence that has been, up to the present, stingily doled out to it, if not refused to it.

What must now guide all future research is the creation of a natural freeness which the sustainable energies offer an early model of — not the dominant inertia and the conditionings of money. The end of wage production and of forced consumption implies the end of the exploitation of nature and the putting into practice of a new gathering, the only enterprise that might give a real efficiency and a truly human sense to the wealth of technological discoveries.

From Work to Creation

In order that creation might supplant work, an economy which will take its last dying profits from the healing of the earth and the production of sustainable energy will have to supplant the economy of denaturation.

The gradual passage from the factories to the workshops of creation will have, at least, the advantage of putting in doubt the old prejudice that saw freeness as merely an incongruous and abnormal gift, as an imperfection in the form of the process of exchanges, as the immoral retribution of those who do nothing. Then we will reencounter the assimilation of pleasure into a compensation for services rendered, into the recompense of the gods, into the repose of the warrior, into the relaxation of the body.

The artists, who for a long time passed themselves off as the only creators, have never ignored the mass of disillusionments and repetitive efforts which makes up the patient alloy of inspiration. The gifts of writing, composing, painting, gardening, caressing, dreaming, seeing, tasting, changing the world and life — these gifts do not fall from the sky; they are the freeness that creates itself, drawing itself up from the magma of impulses, struggling along from failures to retries, to germinate at last, one day or another, in a graceful, happy moment.

Only a constant insistence permits the creation of this accomplishment of the self, from whence all the happiness of creating flows. But so much feverish stubbornness must never be confused with work. There’s no hell of creation, since it is simultaneously enjoyment and the pursuit of enjoyments, the movement and its goal. The rage of dissatisfied desires to create does not transform into the renunciation-reflex which is the very essence of work; no, it only reconstructs more beautifully what was destroyed.

Far from losing itself in it, creation does not obey constraints, and is pushed along by the irresistible and often discordant force of desires. It is there that it goes into battle without dissolving, growing from what it gives, the very inverse of work, which only means wearing out and exhaustion. Because it comes from a nature which offers its wealth to those who know how to gather them, not from a nature which is raped by the oppression and glory of money. Work always means working against yourself and against others. Creation is for yourself and for everyone’s pleasure.

Creation and Transcendence

The experimental intelligence which invented fire, the wheel, boats, and tools was inspired by the example of nature to perfect the substance of nature. From hiding beneath rocks to the hospitals, the different stages of a transcendence of the maternal belly manifest themselves; baking bread, fermenting beer, the invention of sauces and hot meals all translate the culinary refinement of the primitive need to eat. The whole process of creation — smashed and discredited by the necessity of producing — operates within the specifically human genius of transcending animal impulse and seeking in the surrounding environment the resources useful for the project of perfecting things. The creation of the self takes its force from nature, which creates itself to be recreated in the image of human nature. The first religions rushed to transform these forces, which were doubtlessly still perceptible at the beginning of the economic era, into elementary spirits, with which they peopled the fountains, the forests, the air, and the depths of the earth, disguising them as hostile divinities from which it was necessary to buy favors by means of bloody sacrifice.

Beyond the mess of separations — that head in perpetual conflict with libidinal energy that only leaves for the individual the congruent portion of his or her mental, emotional, muscular, impulsive, and psychological capacities — the totality of the body is today learning to invest itself in the unified creation of individual destiny and of its surroundings. And it’s as if the old fatalism, which taught everyone how to bend to divine decision, changed into a fatalism of having to order the chaos of impulses in living matter — the inseparable substance of the body and of nature — for the greatest plenitude. Amor fati unconsciously becomes fatum amoris.[6]

Whoever desires becomes the god that answers prayers.