between the weather and the commercials: the empire strikes back

She says: war between the weather and the commercials.
I say: smooth page, blank page - no, better: a hole.

They kill and bomb while the others do their cleansing. Ethnic on both sides. The only hard part is deciding who is more ferocious. The art of military strategy and the art of killing have always been twin brothers who like to play their unspeakable games under cover of the same blanket. The stench of the decaying nation state is everywhere, but the stink of the other, the Empire that is being born, is so strong that even the weather reports (a low over the Atlantic) and the commercials of the most chaste of TV whores (for a useless perfume) can't stop the viewers from puking.

I'm on the side of those who escape. On the side of those who "exodus" - and who knows if the verb exists: no Webster's or Petit Robert could cope with its conjugation. And yet, if you watch television, between the weather and the commercials, between the neutral, technological images of war and those of dead bodies that fail to occupy the screen, between images of nothing and non-images of horror, you'll see them, those thousands of men united in the same flight. "Exodus." What are they fleeing? Thousands of them, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands. Between the weather and the commercials, the war correspondent explains that they are fleeing from "ethnic cleansing". I'm sure he's right. But donÍt the bombs have something to do with it, too? Or even (and there's no way you can formulate such a theory between the weather and commercials) isn't it also their poverty, made worse by the bombs, that forces them to flee? To flee: not towards nothingness, not towards the abyss, but towards wealth and work... What is the unemployment rate in Kosovo? And how many of those who are working are doing so under the table? Forgive the vulgarity of my question, but the massacres from one side and the bombs from the other just add to the misery, they don't erase it. The question was just as crude six months ago, when Italian coastguards turned back the waves of Albanians washing up on the beaches of Puglia. Exodus, the insoluble problem. Today, escape is an imperative of survival. But it is also, has always been, a quest. A quest for freedom and happiness.

Kosovars, don't let them lock you up in camps. Italians, stop firing on the Albanians who cross the Adriatic.

What is a camp? Between the weather and the commercials, they explain that a camp is a respite, a lull - hey, sounds like the weather - ; they say it's the possibility of returning - hey, sounds like a commercial for insurance. If I were in a camp, the only thing I could think of would be escaping. If I had got away from misery, if I had survived the madness on both sides, I would want to make a run for freedom and wealth. Why are these soldiers and volunteers around me dressed like TV commentators? Why do the men and women rescuing me seem to come straight out of an insurance ad, and me from a disaster movie? Why is this weather report given by an Air Force colonel? And why does this weatherman colonel look so much like the NATO colonel who destroyed my village after the Serbs had cleaned out the little that was left to take, lives included?
The camp is what comes between the weather and the commercials. Let's destroy it.

It goes without saying that we've nothing against the weather report or the commercials. One ruins our weekend, the other consoles us for this sad loss of illusions. That makes it even. The die is cast.

Let's invade the territory of the weather and the commercials. How absurd their fascination is. The fascination of wealth, of the well-being of wealth. The Orthodox Church (and the Catholic Church) always said that wealth wasn't something to aim for, not if you wanted to go to Heaven. And yet there are a few cases where this sin must be allowed. Rotting here in my camp, don't you think I might just prefer to live in Beverly Hills than be sent back to my misery? Give me a boat, give me a raft, give me hope of reaching the other side of the Adriatic. And to hell with those who deny me the right.

I want to desert the camp of death: the camp of cleansing, the camp of the bombs-to-clean-out-the-cleansers, the camp of misery. I want to be dirty, black, a half-caste, but with the same dignity as anyone else. I want to be free. I want to be against the war and against the bombs: no war is more just than another, except for the Lords of Power. I'm the one they massacre and the one they bomb, the one they chase out and the one they lock up, the one who suffers, always, whether they exterminate me or save me. Fuck war.

Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Michel Foucault are dead. What would they have said about the war against/in/for Kosovo? It's hard to have doubts. It all seems pretty clear. For peace and against war, for the Kosovars and against Milosevic, for freedom and against the Empire.

She says: war between the weather and the commercials.
I say: what can we say, we're choking on it all. Goddamn war! Goddamn peace!

What is peace? It's a rather disturbing question. Peace is the result of the tranquil development of the weather and the commercials. In other words, as the other guy said (a riddle: who?), of the development of the Empire. Long live peace, long live the weather, long live advertising. One thing, though: if there were no war, perhaps the weather and the commercials couldn't be sold as antidotes to our anxiety. And it's the same for peace: who could propose peace if there weren't the reality of war, who could make it into a value if there were no risk of its opposite? If it were possible to forget that war is at the gates of Europe, and that all that comes between the war and us now is the Lagoon of Venice?

I say: perhaps they are making war to show just how important peace is. Therefore: war is not a rupture, or a negation of peace; war is a condition of peace. Really? That's what Dedalus says, somewhere in Joyce's Ulysses. Not to mention those rogues who wrote the history of political thought... War is the condition of peace. In the weather report, that translates as peace as an ad for blue skies.

She says: blue skies in the camp, gray skies elsewhere, there's not much difference. It hurts me.

I would like to be with the Kosovars in the camps. I would organize bands of migrants who would roam the world destroyed by war. Didn't you ever read Semplicissimus on the Thirty Years War? Didn't you ever read the Discourse on Method, that great quest for something that would allow us to escape from the war-peace dichotomy? Didn't you ever read Mother Courage, by Brecht?

We are letting ourselves die. Happiness is not for us. And yet, happiness means resisting, deserting when faced with the choice between war and peace. Your war is not our war. Your peace is not our peace. Only suffering belongs to us.

Peace and war: we ask that these words disappear for good. War and peace. We would also really like the weather reports to disappear. And, while we're at it, commercials too. Especially commercials.

I am here. I wake up with my brain like mush, dazed like the hero in Stendhal crossing the plane of Waterloo slightly late. The stupor of a moron: itÍs less literary but just as sad. I'm recovering the use of my body like after the explosion of a shell in a trench at Verdun. This is no longer Stendhal but Celine. Sadder and sadder. Dumber and dumber.

Enough of this world of death that is bent on destroying life. I've had it with the war, and with the sacrifices made to keep a peace that resembles it like a twin sister. Enough of peace: we want life.

We want life: that's the opposite of what was said - no small paradox, this - by both the Nazis and the liberal Americans. They said: not life but peace; there can be no peace if life doesn't adapt to our peace, to our egotism. Gentlemen, you are pigs.

Desertion, desertion. Continuous and infinite desertion. Desertion as the only heroism possible. Desertion as the only chance of rebuilding life.Of being life.

In 1943, right in the middle of the fight against German Nazis and Italian fascists, a Venetian partisan said to me: "We should destroy all the monuments to the unknown soldier. We should raise monuments to the deserters. This would take nothing away from the soldiers who died - on the contrary: we just need to remember their desire to desert at the very moment they were killed in the name of a function, in the name of a flag, in the name of an identity, and to pay homage to that desire. The only people we want to bow to now are those who fight for men's happiness, against State hierarchies, against strategic interests, against orders from 'the top'.“

Kosovars, you have a right to live. That right is worth more than any weather forecast or fluoride toothpaste.

Toni Negri, May 1999

(translated by Charles Penwarden)