In order to best present the becoming of the inversion, it is necessary to situate it within various historical phenomena of greater or lesser amplitude. To begin with let’s consider it in relation to the whole proletarian movement since it is from studying the latter that we have managed to think and propose inversion as we have previously explained in Inversion and Unveiling.¹  This movement emerged at the end of the C18th during the realization of the substantive (real) domination of capital in the immediate process of production and began to impose itself as an important social force which heavily contributed to the destruction of a totality, which is to say, of all that remained of the feudal mode of production, and especially those important remnants of communitarian forms that had survived within the latter and which potentially involved re-forming another totality; in fact, another community. However, the vast movement that operated on both sides of the North Atlantic encompassed not only workers of various nationalities, but slaves from different countries; uprooted people, rebels of all kinds, and Native Americans. In other words, all those who could not tolerate the established order – as M. Rediker and P. Linebaugh clearly showed – tended to operate in this way.²  The violent repression that it underwent at the beginning of the C19th was accompanied by the flowering of nationalism, racism and sexism, phenomena fostered by the dominant class and that contributed to the movement's ultimate enfeeblement. This proletarian movement resumed later but on a narrower basis: class. However, the tendency to inversion manifested itself again, as during the 1848 revolution with the demand for universal fraternity.

We cannot limit ourselves to the proletarian movement but must consider equally that during the bourgeois revolutions, particularly that of 1789, a certain overcoming was imposed; a going beyond the historical limit; an ‘over-growth’ [transcroissance] took place, founding a certain ambiguity in the discourse of the revolutionaries, in the discourse on liberation: an ambiguity between the immediate individualist aim and a universal aim concerning the realisation of happiness for all. This not only has to do with a conscious aim to manipulate the masses but derives from unconscious phenomena linked to the weight of the past, to the dynamics of repression and enmity. 

That said, we can consider the two constitutive moments of the rise of the necessity for inversion due to the objective loss of what founds the dynamics of enmity: the friend and the enemy.

In the 1970s and 1980s we had the disappearance of the proletariat and therefore of the friend. Hence the great disarray and the search for substitutes. In the 1990s and 2000s it was the turn of capital and therefore the loss of the enemy, hence the theme of whom to blame now, as its disappearance was in fact accompanied by a deterioration of living conditions. Hence also the fact that the enemy is very often perceived as elusive and thus the flourishing of conspiracy theories – when in fact everything is quite apparent – which is the recognition that we have no control over anything, that we are manipulated, but by the totality encompassed by the autonomized form of capital, by virtuality.

What reinforces the disarray is the great dissolution of all the essential components of capitalist society and the increasingly considerable development of virtuality. Everything that has passed is necessarily obsolete and all links with it are abolished: innovation is all that matters. Wage labor, the unions, services and even the enterprise dissolve and their constituent parts can be taken up into a new dynamic. Finally, all the natural behaviours pertaining to mutual-aid and immediate trust – that had escaped capitalisation (often called commodification) – are deemed reprehensible and are penalized. The denaturalisation of men and women tends to go to the extreme, potentially leading them to ask themselves what it is that grounds [support] their being.

Social control and repression tend to occur in an increasingly insidious way. These are difficult to perceive because they are achieved through the various devices that men and women use in their daily lives in order to consume. These devices are subject to a surveillance that has been masterfully imposed by the Internet.

For the dominated what prevails is dereliction and, in order to survive the dissolution of the various bonds that previous institutions could guarantee to them, they will be led to return to the very basis of the relation between men and women: solidarity, which implies the trust that has in large part disappeared and been replaced by money. In the course of the millennial wandering, the phenomenon of substitution, an essential determination of speciosis, increasingly prevails and leads to the replacement of natural with artificial being, implying the obsolescence of the former, but also the jamming [enraiement] of the phenomenon itself because of the reaction of humans against this threat that arouses the possibility of inversion. This phenomenon of substitution tends to be realized by means of material as well as intellectual and even affective techniques.

The second historical phase that we want to take into consideration is of much longer duration and concerns the development of the western region from the beginning of the Christian era when the vast uprising against slave society took place, the rejection of the phenomenon of value, the will to abandon the current world as Christians of all denominations, the Manicheans, and Gnostics did. All this testified to the emplacing of a certain inversion. But there was more: the recognition of the power of children, and that they were not absolutely dependent beings, breaking with a conception and practice of millennia that had been the basis of a parental repression carrying on that of the community and later that of the state. This teaching of Jesus was the most powerful contribution in initiating and effecting a wide-ranging inversion. Nevertheless, recuperation and retraction [escamotage] were imposed very quickly. The practice of initiation, necessary to make the child capable of becoming an adult by breaking with his deep relationship with his mother and her world, was, in a way, reestablished with baptism, confirmation, communion. The Church also hijacked and recuperated the dangerous teachings of Jesus by proclaiming itself the mother of all men and women.

This was the re-establishment of dependence against which all revolts and revolutions, particularly those of the C18th, arose. But the positivity of the child was never taken up again, even if certain currents like Rousseauism granted childhood a certain importance. It was not until the last century that a certain break took place with the old conception of the incapacity of the child, entailing the necessity of a violent education, of a dressage, and the perpetuation of parental repression to ensure that the child became a man or a woman. We owe this break, which adds impetus to any future inversion, to various members of the psychoanalytic movement. Unfortunately, this contribution also met with strong resistance and is usually rejected.

The revival of the thesis about the weakness of the child, the dangerousness of childhood, is now the focus of scientific work. Thus, evil and diseases are seen as having their main source in childhood. From then on vaccination appears as the new form of initiation. The child must be immunised against disease (with which he or she is easily affected) so as to adapt it to an increasingly artificial world and thereby become compatible with it. All the repression that children undergo and which makes them vulnerable is foreclosed and increasingly so since the power of affectivity, of individual thought, are deeply underestimated (even denied), as well as the deleterious impact of the dissolution of the family with the flowering of “unisexual” and single-parent families, where the de-differentiation of human relations tends to prevail favouring the phenomenon of substitution that can go as far as replacing one of the parents with a robot.³

Let us now consider a period that begins in prehistory, since it begins with the emergence of Homo sapiens, which, according to current estimates, goes back two hundred thousand to a hundred thousand years ago. As a general rule pre-historic men and women are considered, like children, as deficient beings who acquired capacities only after a self-repression, the control of their impulses. In rejecting this reductive and repressive conception, we will only consider one essential fact that made it possible: the great power of the community [communauté] endowed with a strong cohesion through its affirmation of continuity among all its members. Only such a community could allow the harmonious development of the child who is born premature and can therefore survive only through a practice of haptogestation provided by those around it. The current outcome of the wandering of the species is the abandonment of such a practice which has been achieved by retracting or denying affectivity; by tending to control it as much as possible, reducing the human being to a discontinuous and autonomisable being, because affectivity is the greatest force in the life process – both at the organic and intellectual level – with which to oppose and counter domestication. This result can be seen with the dissolution of the family and the weakening of children’s health that we previously pointed out. However, it must be considered in relation to a phenomenon that is immeasurably greater than the human phenomenon, that of sexuality, which appeared, according to scientists, one billion or eight hundred million years ago. We are now witnessing the rejection of this phenomenon and its dissolution, which will ultimately lead to the dissolution of the species.

Thus, once more, the species will not be able to avoid its obsolescence – its dissolution preluding its extinction – unless a vast inversion is set in motion. For the moment it is replaying [rejoue] the risk of extinction in the form of a threat, which implies that for the inversion to become effectively feasible, it is necessary that the species no longer apprehends nature, the cosmos through dereliction (the anxiety of being alone) and the enmity that have affected it for thousands of years. 

To conclude, let's return to our era and its fantasy of the computer surpassing human capabilities and becoming the master of men and women. With his book The Myth of the Machine,⁴  Lewis Mumford enables us to understand that this fantasy is not new since it highlights the realisation, five-thousand years ago, of the first megamachine [city] made up of men and women extracted from their natural life process; artificial beings, which, like the planet, have been undergoing an accelerated mineralization since the middle of last century. For Mumford: "To understand the point of origin of the machine and its line of descent is to have a new intuition about the origins of our current hyper-mechanized civilization, and about the fate and destiny of modern man. We will discover that the original myth of the machine was the projection of extravagant hopes and desires that have found their abundant realisation in our own time."⁵  For me, this desire is essentially that of absolute control, of mastery, so as to abolish insecurity and dereliction. The computer can achieve this, but only by subjugating men and women (as the megamachine did), by rendering them ineffective and inefficient. For this to reach fruition, a complete connection must be established between the computer and all the machines involved in the various processes of production, exploration, analysis, etc. (everything that enables current activity) while the execution of all tasks must be accomplished by robots seen as more reliable than humans. In other words, to truly realize the computer that surpasses the brain of human beings and is capable of becoming autonomous, it is necessary to produce a megamachine similar to that described by Lewis Mumford, but where everything is artificial.⁶  

The way out of millennia of wandering and multiple fantasies, and back to a natural way of life on a regenerated earth, is through inversion. 

Translated by Howard Slater 
Original text at http://www.revueinvariance.net/devenirinversion.html