In this milky yet pure and hard, indefinable atmosphere, his wide open eyes seemed to see what all his other senses were telling him without him being able to feel the one which, with greater intensity, could have brought him out of this comfortable haze.
Henri Simon 2011
He perceived nothing other than this colourless, odourless, flavourless presence, without any relief, totally detached from a past time, as if there had been no past and as if there would be no future. A sort of total immutable stability, which would have come from nowhere and would flow towards nothing.
Something was evolving, however, because, although he didn't know where, it was emerging from somewhere he wasn't quite sure what, since he had the feeling of an elsewhere. This thing, which nevertheless had a past, carried within it a progression, contradicting this overall sensation, pushing it back and in a way defining its limits.
Then, in a kind of sequence, questions arose: how long had he been there? What was this vague world in which he was immersed? What was this other world he came from? For a brief moment, he had the feeling that his body was floating motionless on a flat sea stretching out to infinity, with no sign of a shore that he had left or where he could land, nor the emergence of any reef. A reef to which he could have clung. Not to escape a non-existent storm, but to try to find some roughness that would have opened a forgotten door out of this infinite inexorable monotony. But it wasn't even that. His body was not floating on a peaceful ocean, but bathed in a totality in which none of his senses transmitted anything other than a passive neutrality. No sign of pain, joy, sadness or nostalgia that would have been that helping hand allowing him to cross the foggy, opaque and unchanging curtain of this state where he felt nothing - literally nothing - where nothing came or went. Yet something had happened, as he could begin to perceive, as if from the outside, the circumstances of this neutrality, as if outside this system in which he had been placed. This last impression initiated a kind of shift towards a certain perception of the place where he was, but also in the feeling of wanting to know more about it.
It was at that very moment when he opened his eyes, which had not even crossed his mind until then, that this need to know where he was at that moment arose from almost nowhere.
At first, he could only see a kind of narrow, elongated box, which apparently ended on the outside with a window covering the whole side, opposite to what was behind him and which he could not see, certainly some kind of access opening... This box could indeed be considered a kind of room. Apart from these sober architectural features, everything he could see of the walls and ceiling from his motionless or rather immobilised lying position was totally bare: there was no decoration, no surveillance or control device, nothing that could detect any intrusion whatsoever into this closed and totally uniform universe. Nevertheless, he had the strange feeling that everything here was carefully measured and controlled and that, if necessary, interventions could modify the conditions in which he was placed. He could not attach any material detail whose tangibility might have connected him to a past event, which might have brought to the surface of his memories an element, a key to expanding the limited field of knowledge to which he was confined.
Was it deliberate? Was it part of a system that could eliminate all perception while maintaining all vital forces in a kind of temporary lethargy that could be stopped at any time, instantly restoring all the physical and mental capacities of the body thus put into hibernation. The more he tried to grasp simple material details that only appeared at the level of vague generalities, the more he realised that these details did indeed converge towards a generality that he could not yet clearly discern.
As he lifted his head slightly, he realised that his body was dressed in a kind of long white tunic; a tunic made of a fabric so light that he did not even feel its contact or its folds, but which could have a specific function in relation to the other elements of perception, and forming part of a whole system collecting and analysing these elements, to determine the possible interventions according to the criteria fixed for this physiological and mental conditioning. It was not a very clear notion but a kind of orientation of his mind, like a kind of axis of research that was being set up at that moment; a kind of current that was undoubtedly taking paths traced in an inaccessible past.
What was also this sort of mattress on which he was resting? A mattress so soft that it seemed to him that his body was floating in a kind of levitation. It was not an impression that he would have felt, but nevertheless he was resting on something. There was also no doubt that there was a base on which this supposed mattress was placed because, turning his head, he could see that he was some distance above the ground. This base must also contain a collection of sensors and controllers, a whole complex network hidden behind smooth walls so that nothing appeared that could betray its function.
The walls were of course bare, absolutely bare, of an unchanging whiteness. As, no doubt, was the base of the mattress, the floor and what he could see of the ceiling. They exuded light and warmth because there was no trace anywhere of any apparatus providing this atmosphere perfectly suited to his body, and who knows what other elements made up what he was beginning to perceive as a total nightmare... He had no feeling, apart from this neutrality of well-being that was provided to him. He perceived nothing except light and heat, nothing else might have been introduced from outside, for example, a smell, a taste, a touch...
The thought occurred to him that the walls, behind their appearance of bland perfection, were observing and recording all his life parameters and all his movements, understanding and sending back to him in real time all the regulations that meant that at no time could he feel good or bad but only quiet. But, here too, nothing took shape in this orientation of his movements of thought, which seemed to be more the product of simple imagination than of sustained reflection.
He could, of course, have tried to ask himself some concrete questions about what he could still remember of the physiological functioning of his body, the usual sensory data of which he perceived so little. But, unwittingly, this realisation that he was immersed, without knowing how it happened, in an interplay of internal observations and external inputs, had opened a window of sorts onto his past. He remembered that he had been involved, he did not know when, in experiments designed to put the human body in such a state of vigilance that it only needed a kind of maintenance. Initially, he saw this research work as nothing more than a scientific approach aimed at finding improvements in a whole host of old and new diseases, particularly those that were described as orphan diseases.
He firmly believed in the notion of unlimited economic and social progress towards a perfect society managed by competent people, which was the dominant and unchallenged thinking of his time. If this implied a high level of professionalism from everyone, it did not bother him at all because he thought that each individual and society as a whole would benefit from it and gain stability.
It was not so much this research in itself that led him to try to see what the real dimension and meaning of this research was, which he thought was limited to a strictly medical field or at best to the preservation of the human species. However, in some apparently insignificant details, he had begun to doubt somewhat the official statements about their purpose because he did not understand the reason for these details. However, this had not shaken the convictions he had professed until then, locked in the harness of his good-natured progressivism, which was, so to speak, the substance of the System in which he was included, and of which he himself, like so many others, was the ideological justification. Nevertheless, something had penetrated this defensive wall that would allow other similar events to widen this crack into a veritable breach in his certainties.
It was purely by chance, during some documentary rambling, that he came across urban planning and architectural research apparently far removed from his ostensibly medical studies concerning the human body. These documents, which he initially glanced at in a distracted manner, covered such a vast field that he quickly realised that they encompassed his own activities and gave them an overall meaning far beyond anything he could ever have imagined.
Everything was said there without mincing words. They were of a historical nature in order to clearly identify what had been, since the birth and development of the System, a fundamental recurring problem but to which it had never put in place, for a whole host of reasons, anything other than individual solutions or solutions within limited frameworks, further forcing the maintenance of an enormous apparatus dispensing repression and controls across the board. By euphemism, it was often referred to as ‘the housing problem’ or the ‘mobility of labour power’. Until then, the System had taken the wrong path largely because it did not have the tools necessary to solve the problems. But also, in fact, because it could not envisage anything else, given the state of progress of technology. But today, anything seemed possible: it was enough to bring together a whole range of research in very diverse fields to enable us to respond to problems that were previously dealt with separately, that is to say without linking them to their original overall purpose. The problem was no longer: ‘how to contain these populations in the geographical sectors where economic necessity forced them to concentrate, by giving them a certain freedom necessary for their survival, limited by ideological and police control carefully dosed according to what the overall needs of the System might require’. The problem became much broader but at the same time simpler because there was a way to resolve and even eliminate all the related problems that were poisoning the harmonious life of the System, which were terribly expensive and had to be constantly questioned in a dialectic of action and repression between the System and all the bearers of this labour power.
In the past, as the System grew stronger, this essential problem – that of how to ensure the ready availability of labour power – had always arisen, but it had only been possible to resolve it temporarily, in line with the System's progress, the structures corresponding to that progress, the production techniques and the ideologies that encompassed it all. It could be said that everything had been experimented with successively or concomitantly, but always in a piecemeal fashion, responding to particular interests in a limited geographical or industrial space, but never on a global scale, that is to say, encompassing all the worldwide activities common to all geographical and professional divisions.
In this way, we had moved from dormitories in the place of production to Russian or Chinese work units, an extension of utopian visions in the style of the phalanstery, to garden cities adjoining the factory, while seeking a stable workforce that could be used throughout its life, and upon which all the conditions for the renewal of labour power were imposed. But everything had changed in the most advanced countries. The development of unidentified company towns had begun, located geographically in such a way as to be able to supply labour to various production sites, like reservoirs that could be drawn on as needed. These reservoirs had ended up specialising in a way, not according to a company but according to the qualification and social level of the labour power. This had always existed in working-class, petit-bourgeois or wealthy neighbourhoods, but it had taken on a greater dimension, and there had been the creation on the outskirts of cities, whose centres were increasingly being reclaimed because they were called the ‘new middle classes’, of ghettos of ‘precarious’ people ranging from unplanned shanty towns to multitudes of council tower blocks. Everything considered, and in extremely different forms, we were not far from these hotels for Japanese proletarians, which were just a simple long box in which one could do nothing but rest or sleep.
Finally, it was by reflecting on this history that he became aware of this grandiose project, which claimed to definitively solve, killing two birds with one stone, on the one hand, the regular and immediate supply of a totally flexible labour power and, on the other hand, the hitertoo almost insoluble problem posed, in both historical and concomitant forms, by the economic obligation to accumulate concentrations of bearers of labour power, leading to an almost eternal source of social unrest and repressive necessities that were as costly as they were ineffective.
The problem had even recently taken on another dimension with the increase in the world population, technological changes in an overinvestment that was producing ‘useless’ people left to their own devices in the ghettos of the precarious or the shanty towns of the third world. On all sides, both in the employed labour power and among those who remained ‘on standby’, protests arose from these small or large concentrations on issues essentially affecting survival, protests that could take on new or violent forms, which, even if they were not openly expressed as such, were transgressions and attacks on the necessary stability of the economic whole. The System lived in fact in fear that all these specific, isolated and localised movements could come together on such a scale that the means of repression would prove ineffective or would have to be applied on an unprecedented level, the use of which would risk triggering situations that were as dangerous as they were unpredictable for the System.
In a flash, he revisited and even relived some of those great movements which, for nearly two centuries, had recurrently shaken the masses leaving the places of production where they were consigned, trying to change the course of their lives, perhaps not putting the System at risk but forcing it to respond to the problems arising from its own functioning. This recurrence of identical problems, even if they were part of a dynamic, was the System's Achilles heel and until then it had never been resolved - temporarily - except by force. A whole mixture of images passed before his eyes, the real ones of large demonstrations, of these surges of masses of exploited people that he had been able to see or in which he had even participated superimposed on others of cinematographic fictions that had thrilled him. All this abounded in the various forms or dimensions that had clung to his memory. It flowed like a river between the imaginary and the real.
It was then that a question came to him that he had not really asked himself until then with this precision. Why had he arrived where he was currently resting? Had he become aware of the reality of this project – of an unacknowledged uniqueness relegated to the highest echelons of leadership – of which he had discovered by chance two of the heads – the medical one with a human face of total control of the body's functions and the architectural one of storage of conditioned beings (and there were certainly others)? Had he spoken to others about it or even tried to organise some kind of resistance? To the point of being sidelined and being one of the ‘beneficiaries’ of this total and totalitarian project, much more advanced than he thought? Or had he taken part in a more or less large demonstration or any other action by opponents of this project? One way or another, he would have been arrested and ‘conditioned’ to be put in the box where he was. But did this only concern those opponents who had to be neutralised in this way, or was it only a small part of the vast project that he had glimpsed? The System would thus have achieved its goal of eliminating all risks by storing up all these bearers of labour power, whether real or potential, so as to have at its disposal at all times the human being capable of performing a specific function for the necessary time and then putting him or her back in his or her box.
He could not rule out either of these hypotheses, but it could equally be both at the same time. If this project, which is pharaonic on a global scale (this could not be ruled out because all the States in the System had the same interest in solving the same problem), were to be realised, it would indeed be a true revolution: the System's sustainability would be assured since all social relations would be controlled by the mere implementation of these extremely sophisticated multipurpose techniques. And what's more, huge savings on all sides, particularly with the abolition of all social control organisations, both material and ideological, but also in the possibilities for total rational planning. No more risks of any kind, since any individual or collective deviation would not only be neutralised but eliminated. No more need for cops, prisons, psychologists, social services, various forms of assistance or even doctors and hospitals: a total social reconstruction, truly revolutionary. All the costs of the research that led to this new organisation, as well as its current operating costs, would be more than compensated. On closer inspection, it wasn't that new after all; it was just the culmination of a multitude of futile attempts dating back to the dawn of time, ephemeral, localised, unsuitable, quickly obsolete, all aimed, however, at this ‘objectification’ of labour power, reducing its bearers, human beings, to a simple raw material available at will in terms of quality and quantity.
This total flexibility had always been and still was, beyond the global issues concerning the maintenance of the social order, the major concern of all the ‘users’ of labour power, to reduce the ‘used’ to the status of a raw material like any other. Their dream was to have immediate access to labour power with the required qualifications under optimum conditions, enabling them to deal with all foreseeable or unforeseeable contingencies at all levels of the global organisation of the System. Here too, the System's errors had led to unlimited competition and a multitude of conflicts between States. Had this unbridled progressivism finally led to the establishment of a System from which these destructive problems had been eliminated?
In that case, it was the hibernation and storage of millions of ‘useful producers’ labelled according to their previous professionalism but also their conditioning (in fact their physical and mental resistance) and able to be ‘operational’ for a time, and even ‘improved’ or ‘recycled’ according to the advancement of techniques, to be returned to their storage box duly labelled. Ultimately, their past was of little importance. Their ‘return to activity’, within a few minutes of their ‘release’, could take place in a specific location for individual or collective use, so that even if there were a large number of them, any resistance could not be maximised. At any time, this ‘worker’ could be withdrawn from the circuit and returned to his box, possibly after repackaging.
The System could even afford the luxury, for those who were ‘at the end of the line’, who had been ‘overused’, of putting them in gilded coffins where they could even dwell on their past rebellions without really knowing how they had been led there.
All this was jostling around in his head in a sort of confusion from which a kind of anxiety nevertheless emerged, especially in relation to himself. His wanderings in his vague past and in these ramblings based on what he could perceive led him to want to know more about what his presence in this place really meant, and what this place was. Without really knowing why, almost instinctively, he tried to lift his head to see what was behind the large window, which in fact constituted the entire wall opening outwards. For a moment he even wondered how he could do it on the soft bed, which had no solid material point that could have provided leverage. But the fact is that he succeeded.
A brief glance, the result of this effort that he considered almost superhuman, was enough for him to fix an image, which he was able to detail at leisure once his head had fallen back. An image as surprising as it was unknown, but also almost expected because it confirmed the worst apprehensions that had flashed through his somewhat disturbed mind a few moments before. He was clearly at the top of a kind of tower, one of those countless towers, hundreds, thousands perhaps, that rose like a vast collar on the edge of a kind of large basin where thousands of twinkling lights, fixed or moving, traced the contours of a great city. These towers were obviously the storage facilities he had just thought of, storing labour power available at any time for the diverse tasks the city might require. And he was one of the ‘residents’ of these reservoirs.
The System had therefore succeeded in the project of which it had only guessed in his past - by chance - the coherence and the broad outlines; and he had found himself caught, for whatever reason, it didn't matter, in this storage network from which he saw no means of escape. Everything was totally under control, escaping any individual will, at least with this image that remained engraved before his eyes. It was the totality that the System had built.
But then came the thought that, in this perfection, what he was now experiencing - consciously - (even if this consciousness was incoherent and vague) was perfectly incongruous. This could only be explained if there was a flaw somewhere, since he was there thinking about bits of his past and trying to piece them together to interpret the sensations he found in the environment in which he found himself. What could give him access to such an escape if not some kind of bug in the whole system of control, surveillance and corrective orders? His intellect and imagination, and even some physical effort, could therefore be in action independently of all this conditioning. He then began to rave somewhat.
Since this was happening to him, he was certainly not the only one to emerge from the technical shroud in which he was enclosed. And if others, thousands, millions perhaps, found themselves able to think about their forced rest, about wanting to move, why wouldn't these crowds of slaves come out of their reserves and converge on the nerve centres of this city, the contours of which he had guessed. And so he saw millions of these phantoms in white shirts surging down the slopes of the basin he had glimpsed. Perhaps, in the madness of its absolute confidence in technology, the System had completely eliminated any force to protect the vital centres, any police or other instrument of repression of a revolt that could no longer exist; this had become not only costly but totally useless and obsolete. Nothing would stand in the way of the System's order being swept away and something completely different being rebuilt. It made his head spin.
The great mass of those who were thus setting out through this crack in the System was perhaps only an amoebic multitude, but quantity was turning into quality and everything was falling into place. Suddenly he felt a kind of pinch, as if a door had closed. Somewhere, automatically or not, someone or some mechanism had triggered a ‘counter’, a ‘correction’. Against him alone or against those thousands of others? How could he know? How could he react to escape what he thought was a ‘tidying up’ with, perhaps, an elimination for having been ‘corrupted’?
A dull anguish then took hold of him and imperatively commanded him to do the impossible; to try anything to get out of what he sensed without delay. In a final effort to pull himself together against what he felt was a creeping advance, he managed to place one of his hands on the shelf next to his bed, to which he had paid little attention until then. He felt a small hard object under his fingers, which he managed to grasp and bring closer to him. Strange as it seemed, he recognised it as a mobile phone. A totally incongruous presence. Who could have left this instrument – perhaps from another age – in any case quite useless in his prisoner's cell under constant surveillance? An oversight by some maintenance operator or a trap to prevent any bug or escape attempt like the one he was experiencing?
It didn't matter after all. Forget the questions. Forget about what might happen. Since he was holding this instrument, he might as well use it to try to make contact with the outside world. He would see. It became all the more urgent as he could feel the return to normality of his conditioning progressing, and that he would soon be unable to move at all and perhaps even to speak. He wasn't sure who to call, but something had to be done, he had to give it his all.
One number came to mind, probably because he used it frequently in the past: 01 42 80 11 116. With great difficulty, he managed to dial it. It rang somewhere. Someone picked up and he heard a woman's voice, a voice he didn't recognise. Had they changed everything? It didn't matter. He was so surprised that he could only stammer: ‘I'm in danger, you have to help me. It's urgent.’ The voice replied, a little mocking, a little cheeky, ‘My mate will get you treatment. As for me, I'm going back to bed. Bye.’ And the voice hung up.
He didn't know what to do. Of course it was working, but maybe it was working differently. But why not try again? He might have dialled the wrong number. He tried again, desperately: 01 42 80 11 16. The phone rang a few times and then picked up. But he recognised the voice immediately: a gentle, familiar voice. It was definitely her and he rushed into his stammering words: ‘I'm in danger. I'm a prisoner. You have to come and rescue me. Quickly, I'm in danger.’ He couldn't say anything else; but the voice replied calmly, reassuringly: ‘No, you're not in danger. You're in hospital. You've just had an emergency operation. Everything went well. Stay calm, rest. Try to sleep. I will come to see you during the day. Love and kisses.’
That was all. All these efforts had cost him so much that he was completely exhausted. Reassured, he fell into sleep and oblivion.
Until another awakening when everything would be different.