In: En Juan Domínguez y Victoria Pérez Royo (eds.), Dirty room, Continta me tienes, Madrid, 2017, pp. 305-336. ISBN: 978-84-947096-4-7
The Argument I will make here will take two themes: crime and communal experience; both ideas spring from Juan Domínguez’s invitation to participate in a conspiracy. All conspiracy requires secrecy; this is necessary to ensure it can take place, since such an act involves allegiances and modes of behavior. We conspire to subvert the established order and, depending on the type of conspiracy, to be discovered. Our participation could be considered as treason or crime. But we are never alone in conspiracy: conspiracy presupposes the impossibility of a single individual having the capacity to perform the act of subversion. We are many united around a common goal, and that conspiracy allows us to temporarily free ourselves from the need to affirm our individual freedom: we put ourselves at the service of a common good, even though its temporary nature has a negative aspect. The necessary criminal activity and participation in the common good meet in anonymity, in the temporary loss of names. What the conspirators must avoid is the discovery of their identity (with the exception of the hero-delinquent). Traditionally anarchist philosophy upholds the illegitimacy of an individual linking his name to any type of property, that is to say, it appropriates the common ground.
However the conspiracy in which we are invited to participate is not political, but poetic. It is true that, in the romantic tradition, the figure of the poet has appeared, on occasions, identified with that of the criminal. The poet becomes delinquent on not accepting the normalcy, such a rebellion carried to the extreme can breach the law. The poet is also delinquent for his rejection of productive work, and his resistance could be considered, as much by the bourgeois worshipers of capitalism as by the bureaucrat custodians of the collective property, as caprice. A «Caprichoso» is one who abandons the common good and departs from the law that governs the wider society. Being «Caprichoso» is the inevitable result of the nature of poetic work: that of constant destabilisation.
Poetic conspiracy is revealed as a business incompatible with the traditional definition. The objective of poetic conspiracy is not to destabilise order, but to provoke a collective destabilisation that makes the nonexistent exist. How do we organize disorganisation? Can one imagine a Device whose function is to destabilise the Device itself?
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