Hello, Where Are You? A Review of Hello

We are young, heartache to heartache, we stand, 
no promises or demands, love is a battlefield

Hello, as an everyday term, has at least two uses. On the one hand we use the term as a voice-call to an other, a voice that may never arrive, as in “Hello, is there anyone there?” The term has also become a trivial everyday greeting: “hello”, and it even appends a looking: “hello, where are you?”

We can say that what differentiates these two contextual uses is the intentionality in the context; in the latter we have a greeting in which the other is known and the greeting is intended to arrive, to be heard—that there is someone to hear it. In the former it is not that one is irrationally intending not to be heard; it is that one doesn’t know if ones’ call will be fruitful. The intentional query in “Hello, where are you?” indexes the other in space-time since they are (real)ly present but remaining unlocated. The intentionality present in “Hello, is there anyone there?” must only be apparent, hopeful, because we might not be able to assign a positive value to our referential quantifier. We could then say that hello itself, as an assembled word, because of its two different uses, at once merely marks the possibility of communication. At most, “hello” might start a conversation.

If, then, hello permits a tracing to potential communication, the same potential follows for other terms given a common etymological root. For the etymological root (com-) links hello to “community” and also “commitment”, given that these two latter terms relate through “communion”. In other words, there may not be communion because the call may not arrive; similarly, there may or may not be community. As Critila reminds us: “[Hello] remains concerned with the communicative situation itself, and how we are bound or unbound in it” (Anvil #4 (16)). But how are we bound or unbound? How are we obligated?

If I promise that I will be somewhere, or do something, I bind myself to my word, and the other counts on this self-binding. But we are never really bound in our commitments, for such obligation is merely probable; the (unbound) other might never arrive, might never heed the call (hello). Hence, Hello advocates a tincture of skepticism; that we ought to be skeptical about the possibility of genuine communion, perhaps because it is unwise to deceive ourselves about the freedom of the other to dissociate from our binding, just as much as it is unwise to deceive ourselves about our own freedoms against our own binding. So we are called to be “agile” with others and ourselves, to be shifty, (Hello 9-10), to reject obligatory promise and not hope that the other will necessarily arrive. Given that the other might arrive, no more no less, given that necessity here has been deflated, all that is left to do is to test the limitations of the contract, with others or ourselves, “of finding the limitations that we are capable of and pushing past them” (Hello 16). In all of this the call is to be honest, to be true to our own potential desires, and to be true to the limitations of the other, all of which may conflict. But it is out of this honing our practice, of testing possibilities, that we are already active, which is not to say that we must be active. We do not hold others or ourselves to moralistic account; for we do not care to reduce the other to a function of our desires, and, in the same breath, we are not stupid to think that we can (Hello, 41). It is in the face of hopelessness, in the possibility that communion might fail, that we look (and test) to see if it does.

The author(s) of Hello suggest that their analysis tracks a resolution to the relationship between means and ends without bottoming out in Everything (33-5). Our (anarchist) methods of achieving ends that we want usually fall short, or worse, are co-opted. Strikes usually do not end in less work, but the same amount for more money; and even if we supposed that working less were our goal, as Bonnano has suggested, less work is now a Capitalist method to make us like working in the first place (cf. Let’s Destroy Work, Let’s Destroy the Economy). As Bonnano suggests, we need to discover ways to live outside work—to discover truly libratory ends. This text appears to be saying that we need to find ways to live outside obligation, or, better to be obligated to the absence of obligation. In deciding ends for ourselves, without consulting others, but rather, actually determining them for ourselves, without compromise, is surely a tall order; and this mode of connecting means and ends for oneself is certainly denied to us by the rulers of our ends, as well as the leftists that vilify us for rejecting their game plan. The goal is to have an end that is actually ours, a joyous life, to actually connect our means with our ends; that is, to no longer permit them to be unbound as they are truthfully disconnected from our desires in Everything, but to join these ‘unified’ moments of “means and ends every time we know how” (Hello, 34).

The term “commitment to commitment” is offered as a rhetorical approximation; it does work. At once it indicates true friendship, which is not directly reducible to a moment of connectivity between means and ends, prior to being incorporated into Everything (35). To have a stance towards a friend that is not reductive is to be committed to them as friends. This moment is already Outside Everything because it doesn’t indicate a moral contract of obligation; it is to permit them to bind themselves, should they will it, without hope that the binding will be permanent. Just as hello itself can go either way, perhaps the binding will be permanent.

Proposition 5 indicates that this commitment to commitment stands outside of any particular commitment, and certainly outside of the commitment to Everything. It is, positively, a commitment to that which is Outside Everything. Critila suggests that the text perhaps has a strain of anti-civilizational thinking; and it is precisely here that we find it; for the commitment to the Outside might very well be the commitment to that which is uncivilized, to life itself (Hello, 42)—that which cannot really, which is to say, genuinely, be co-opted. Of course, many anarcho-primitivists have tried to yield the Outside as a “more complete hug” (Hello, 38) but it would seem all too obvious that the corrosive skepticism of the text occludes such a hopeful embrace. Thinking and life come together, and thinking means being on your guard against belief in the Other to remain bound by your desires. Nature, Self and other selves (all Others) may perform as we want them to; or they may not; but we are committed to the fact that these are free to go either way, for in every moment, as such, they are Outside.

The promise that we keep is kept because we want to keep it, not because there is a transcendent order of obligation set in motion by the utterance “I promise…” Hence, it is only if we decide to break our promises or keep them that such is Outside; for such is a making of space for oneself. To potentially carve a space means that it is there, reserved for occupancy in opposition to Everything—and here, especially, in opposition to feeling bound to someone else, whether it is for class war, or some “higher” historical purpose. Importantly, Everything makes keeping promises to the Outside impossible; obviously Everything hides the idea of an outside, a truly free (unbound) passion, given that Everything would have us believe that it can provide Anything. If we come together, on the other hand, if you respond to my hello, it is our non-necessary desire to respond that opens the event to the Outside. It is not the fact of your word—a tyrannical word that holds us captive, a word with power regardless of our desires—, but the desire itself that generates unbound joy. The authors of Hello want “a friendship understood as an immanent quality rather than something referred to a command from on high” (45). Seeing friends as unbound others anterior to the masks of identity politics, as Agamben suggests in ‘The Friend’ (What is an Apparatus), sets all of us free from Everything and opens up a genuine invitation.

For most, intense French style theory will be inaccessible; but for those familiar with The Coming Insurrection or The Call, this text is an important individualist intervention. Calling us beyond morality, to be committed to the Whatever Outside (necessarily not Everything), offers a distinction between passive nihilism and active nihilism without supposing that active nihilism requires a positive end. To be active is to call to anyone, and see if communion with, or commitment to, free unbound selves (self included) could happen, given that it often does not. Limits arrive to be overcome, not passively avoided, and not passively presumed to be resolvable independent of our playful desires.

Copies can be ordered from hellofriend@riseup.net or Little Black Cart.