Individual escape attempts and structural collapse are different orders of resistance
Evidence
I turn to the history of the Berlin Wall as an illustration of these two forms of disagreement. From 1961 through the early 1980s, courageous East Berliners carved seventy-one tunnels through the sandy soil beneath the city, affording several hundred people a means of escape to West Berlin. The tunnels are testament to the necessity of counter-declarations, but they did not bring down the wall or the power that sustained it. … The synthetic declaration gathered force over decades, but its full expression would have to wait until near midnight on November 9, 1989, when Harald Jäger, the senior officer on duty that night at the Bornholmer Street passage, gave the order to open the gates, and twenty thousand people surged across the wall into West Berlin. As one historian describes that event, “By the night of November 9, when the people appeared at the Berlin Wall and demanded to know of the border officials, Will you let us pass?, those people had become so certain of themselves, and the officials so unsure of themselves, that the answer was We will.” — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1096
Categorization
- XREF: Connects to the reader’s past reading on mass movements and institutional collapse — e.g. the book on the fall of communism and moral panics literature. — connects to: Individual resistance is too weak to counter coercive organizational pressure; The Real reasserts itself through attempts to flee it. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 518
- ADDENDUM: The ‘tunnels did not bring down the wall’ logic parallels the ‘On Sacrifice’ piece’s treatment of ritual as stabilizing versus transforming social orders.