Collettivo La Boétie

Antologia ragionata di testi introduttivi al Discorso della servitù volontaria di Étienne de La Boétie. I passi proposti, inediti in italiano, spaziano dal Settecento all’attualità, e dagli Stati Uniti a Damasco, alla Russia sovietica. Ogni saggio è introdotto e contestualizzato dai curatori.
«I testi raccolti esemplificano (pur senza alcuna pretesa di completezza) quel singolare procedere a balzi, in costante contrappunto alla storia politica europea, che sin dalla sua nascita (1548-1553) contraddistingue la storia del Discours. Alcuni rientrano in casi ormai celebri, come la riscoperta di La Boétie in chiave anti-Asse nei primi anni quaranta del Novecento, altri a episodi dimenticati: è il caso di Johann Benjamin Erhard, traduttore del Discours nell’orbita del giacobinismo tedesco, o dell’eccellente edizione sovietica pubblicata nel pieno della repressione staliniana.
Saggi critici – in cui l’analisi del testo laboetiano dà vita a riflessioni sui temi del consenso, del potere e dell’antropologia politica – questi testi recano al contempo l’impronta marcata della funzione cui dovevano assolvere: introdurre edizioni del Discours strettamente intrecciate a un dato contesto socio-politico.
Esegesi, teoria politica e militanza vengono così a fondersi in un amalgama che è necessario penetrare. L’interesse di questi testi – è opportuno chiarirlo – non è infatti riducibile al piano della curiosità storiografica. Esso è invece connesso alla natura del Discorso della servitù volontaria, opera incisiva e perturbante anche perché strutturalmente aperta. Il suo interrogativo fondamentale – perché il potere? – non è solo insolubile: ma assume un senso pieno proprio in quanto declinato nelle ricerche, storicamente determinate, di chi attraverso di esso tenta di decifrare il proprio presente politico, interrogandosi al contempo sulle condizioni di possibilità di un legame sociale diverso e più umano».

This article aims to integrate the existing theoretical framework for thinking the power relations between individuals and sociotechnical systems in social media. In the first section, the authors show how Panopticism found breeding ground in social media studies. Yet they claim that despite an expanding critical literature, not much seems to be changing in prosumers’ practices online. Their hypothesis is that this is happening not only because individuals are forced or cheated by the sociotechnical systems, as it has been usually argued, but also because they voluntarily submit to them. For this reason, in the second section, the authors introduce the notion of voluntary servitude, coined by Étienne de la Boétie in the XVIth century. Voluntary servitude is a paradoxical notion because it represents the attempt of tidying up two opposite facts: human beings’ will of freedom and their reiterated submission. In the third section, they make the notion operative in the context of social media by focusing on privacy as the counter-discourse of surveillance. In conclusion, the authors deal with the emancipatory character of voluntary servitude, as well as with the concept of subjectivity it entails.

This paper aims to offer a new theoretical framework for thinking surveillance and submission in social media. Two attitudes have been dominant in this context until now. In the first wave of Internet studies, academicians used to consider virtual environments as “technologies of emancipation”. With the birth of the social web, scholars started to treat social media as “technologies of surveillance”. Surveillance and Panopticism found breeding ground in Internet and social media studies. Our hypothesis is that this perspective, although interesting and valuable, is today unsatisfactory, because it fails to give an account of what we consider as evidence: despite an increasing critical literature, and despite the fact that people are more and more aware of the surveillance exercised by social media, not much seems to be changing in prosumer’s (producers and consumers) practices. Our thesis is that this happens because individuals are not forced or cheated by the sociotechnical system, but rather they voluntarily submitted to it. In the first section, we are going to introduce La Boétie’s notion of “voluntary servitude”. According to a minimal definition, four aspects characterize voluntary servitude: (1) disadvantageousness – submission is a form of uncertainty because it depends upon power's arbitrariness; (2) abstainability – if the serfs choose submission, than freedom is just a matter of abstention; (3) (collective) subalternity – servitude presupposes a condition of submission to a form of power, a submission that singles out a collective dimension; (4) awareness – the submission cannot be reduced to a form of deceit of the power or to a miscalculation of the subjugated. In the second section, considering the paradigmatic case of Facebook, we are going to make the notion of voluntary servitude operative in the context of social media.

The category of «voluntary servitude» (coined by Étienne de La Boétie) is a two-dimensional term for political theorists. Most commonly, militant thinkers use it as a freedom tool, as it deplores political obedience. On the other side, since it describes servitude as a voluntary condition, it can easily turn into an obstacle for emancipatory ambitions: how could you set slaves free, if they choose not to be? In this case, the term «voluntary servitude» can assume two different meanings: emancipatory (as it states that people could free themselves simply by wanting to), and authoritarian (in which slaves are willing to be slaves); and as a matter of fact, this second implication of the Discours has often been overlooked by philosophers. How should we deal with such an ambiguous concept? Reading La Boétie again is required first in order to fully understand all the implications embedded in the term «voluntary servitude». Two characteristics stand out. First, people’s submission is stupid, since they will never be happy in tyranny (freedom being a necessary condition for happiness). At the same time, they nevertheless wittingly choose it (this is not a «miscalculation» which we could make them aware of). In order to fully understand the meaning of this tool, we need to test it against those authoritarian theories whose thinkers found in the voluntariness of submission the legitimation for despotism. To accomplish this task, we start with two comparisons: La Boétie and Thomas Hobbes, whose theories, despite their opposite premises and conclusions, present many points in common and reveal to be closely related; the Discours and the Legend of the Great Inquisitor by Fedor Dostoevskij, the latter describing freedom as an unbearable burden for most people. The discussion on these two comparisons allows us to turn our attention to the analysis of Antonio Borgese’s reflections on La Boétie and fascism, and in particular to his definition of Mussolini as an «empty automaton». This second inquiry helps us to make an attempt to answer our fundamental question: is the category of voluntary servitude a secret ally of authoritarianism? In order to prevent this possibility, militant thinkers ought to make a more rigorous use of La Boétie’s category. Voluntary Servitude can be profitably adopted as a «freedom tool» by political thinkers and philosophers only by respecting its fundamental ambiguity and its unsolvable and paradoxical content.