Polar Chaos

This essay considers recent instantiations of the commune-form, notably the zad (zone à défendre) at Notre-Dame-des-Landes and the ronds-points of the gilets jaunes, in relation to the set of practices initiated during the Paris Commune of 1871 to which Communard artists and artisans gave the name “luxe communal.” The 1871 insurrection and the contemporary communal experiments form bookends around the whole counter-revolutionary period following the Commune—that colonial era of over-production and accumulation Rimbaud called “bourgeois magic.”