The thicker the string, the less visible it is. In the phenomenon now known as “giant apéros,” attention is focused on this informal gathering of young people who get drunk. And on the tragedy that sometimes follows. Yet the symptom is as massive as the event itself. One can certainly understand the public authorities’ concern to combat “binge drinking,” this excessive alcoholism practiced by teenagers. We cannot help but notice, upon reflection, if we dare say, the psychological coherence of the various episodes that underpin the organization and unfolding of this true false happening: escaping the framework, exploiting the resources of the virtuality offered by the Web, dodging administrative oversight, achieving and maintaining anonymity in the eyes of others, disappearing oneself into the crowd, and finally celebrating the success of the endeavor.
Escaping the framework. The prefectures desperately try to identify an interlocutor, to designate a responsible person. That’s the crux of it. The very goal of “giant apéros” aims for the opposite: evanescence, fluidity, and invisibility. No one should appear. A subtle game of hide-and-seek develops: the structural intangibility of administration against the elusive anonymity of social networks. Interviewed by France Infos, a Prefect’s office director was irritated: “a public demonstration,” he reminded, “is prohibited when it is not authorized: the responsible parties must fill out forms, provide documents.” Offices against virtuality. The questioning of the “framework” reveals much about the spirit of the event: challenging the tutelary grip of administration. A response in the form of a nod, perhaps, to its own anonymity.
Whether one approves of them or not, there is in these modes of action a form of “resistance” to designation. One thinks of those compact schools of small fish, indistinguishable from each other, a survival strategy intended to confuse the predator: the latter charges into the shapeless mass that splits, dodges, and reshapes immediately after the intruder’s passage.
The announced location acquires the sanctity of an improvised temple: concluding the scavenger hunt, the collective libation takes place outdoors, a guarantee of preserving harmony with the cosmos, a symbolism worthy of a “starry vault” in a lodge or the open-roofed huts of the Jewish festival of Sukkot. Festive, the “apéritif” replaces the conventional, formalistic, costly “seated dinner.” Its unfolding must retain this shifting flexibility in an open space. It ebbs and flows. As if any static state, any permanence, were intolerable. To move and dissolve into the crowd. There’s no need to dwell on the fragile narcissism of the scenario.
The hyper-alcoholization completes this inexorable disintegration of the self, the “hateful” constraint according to Pascal. Out of the framework outwardly, without limits inwardly: it is necessary to briskly make the relentless censors of morality and education disappear. And with them, the terrible sufferings for which they are blamed—rightly or wrongly. The search for the disinhibitory effects of alcohol takes place in groups: a collective consciousness is deconstructed to allow the emergence, atomized and neutral, of a kind of individuality: the deepest, the most absolute. The most tragic surely, the most precious undoubtedly.
