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Escape

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of

in the Graduate School of The Ohio University

By

Andrew Curtis Culp

Graduate Program in Comparative Studies

The Ohio State University

2013

Dissertation Committee:

Eugene W. Holland, Advisor

Philip Armstrong

Mathew Coleman

Copyright by

Andrew Curtis Culp

2013

Abstract

This work reimagines autonomy in the age of spatial enclosure. Rather than proposing a new version of the escapist running to the hills, “Escape” aligns the desire for disappearance, invisibility, and evasion with the contemporary politics of refusal, which poses no demands, resists representation, and refuses participation in already-existing politics. Such escape promises to break life out of a stifling perpetual present.

The argument brings together culture, crisis, and conflict to outline the political potential of escape. It begins by reintroducing culture to theories of state power by highlighting complementary mixtures of authoritarian and liberal rule. The result is a typology of states that embody various aspects of conquest and contract: the Archaic State, the

Priestly State, the Modern State, and the Social State. The argument then looks to the present, a when the state exists in a permanent crisis provoked by global capitalist forces. Politics today is controlled by the incorporeal power of and its lived , the Metropolis, which emerged as embodiments of this crisis and continue to further deepen exploitation and alienation through the dual power of and the

Spectacle. Completing the argument, two examples are presented as crucial sites of political conflict. Negative affects and the urban guerrilla dramatize the conflicts over life and strategy that characterize daily in the Metropolis. ii

Following a transdisciplinary concern for intensity, the work draws from a variety of historical, literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples that emphasize the cultural dimension of politics. The wide breadth of sources, which range from historical documents on the origins of the , feminist literature on the politics of emotion, experimental punk film, and ’s nomadology, thus emulates the importance of force over appearance found in contemporary radical politics. Departing from many of the accounts of political change given by political theory or sociology,

“Escape” shows how the recent politics of autonomy is essential to understanding the struggle against Empire.

iii

Acknowledgments

Innumerable people shaped this dissertation. Let me begin by thanking Comparative

Studies for the freedom to study, discuss, and teach material that shakes the foundation of our contemporary world, and The Ohio State University Graduate School for the opportunity to clear away the distractions for a year and focus on my dissertation. The dissertation also benefited from the considerable feedback that I received at conferences; in particular, I’d like to thank Jeff Bell, Ian Buchanan, and James Williams from Deleuze

Camp in , Matt Applegate and his colleagues at Binghamton University,

Jason Read and others at Historical in Toronto, and the tough room at the

North American Network conference in New Orleans.

It would have been impossible to finish without the companionship of my writing partner,

Michael Murphy, whose dedication and kind words kept me thoughtfully on task. Early feedback from writing groups, the first convened by Allison Fish, Elo-Hanna Seljamaa,

Kate Dean-Haidet, Wamae Muriuki, and Ilana Maymind and the second organized by

Tahseen Kazi, josh kurz, and Ricky Crano, was essential for getting the project off the ground and sustaining me through its most difficult hours. I am forever indebted to the many friends and colleagues who helped to hone the political message in digital and analog, most notably Gabriel Piser, Fulvia Carnevale, Matt Applegate, josh kurz, Alex iv McDougal-Weber, Brett Zehner, Greta Stokes, Darwin Bond-Graham, Ricky Crano,

Aragorn!, Brian Murphy, Jedidjah DeVries, Adrian Drummond-Cole, Cricket Keating,

Jason Smith, Nick Crane, Josh, Eric Beck, Robert Hurley, Jason D, Kai Bosworth, Hilary

Malatino, and my many online accomplices. Marty Wood, Brennan Baker, Eric Beck, and John Parman were gracious enough to help put the final touches on it.

I am incredibly grateful for my committee and their guidance. Franco Barchiesi left a deep and fiery influence despite his short stead. In our markedly longer time together,

Mat Coleman has been the model of feverish curiosity matched by scholarly care. Philip

Armstrong has been far too generous with his intense patience, but it has shown me how to strike smarter rather than quicker. And my deepest gratitude goes to Gene Holland, whose generosity is exceeded only by the clarity of his . My thinking and writing blossomed under his guidance.

I would also like to thank my parents, Wayne and Camille, for their unwavering support, which gave me the chance to dream. The dissertation would have been far less provocative without the continuing friendship and intellectual incitements of Oded Nir, whose advice is the quickest way to cut through bullshit. And lastly, I would have been lost without the fighting spirit of my partner, Eva Della Lana.

v

Vita

June 2002 ...... Millard North High School (Omaha, NE)

June 2006 ...... B.A. with Honors in , University

of Missouri (Kansas City, MO)

2007-2012 ...... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Comparative

Studies, The Ohio State University

June 2009 ...... M.A. in Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University

(Columbus, OH)

2012-2013 ...... Presidential Fellow, The Ohio State University

Publications

2013, “The Savage Fruit of Alienation.” Review of Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield

Ford (2011), The Anvil Review, February.

2012, “Giving Shape to Painful Things: An Interview with Claire Fontaine.” Radical

Philosophy, 175, September/October.

2012, “Ghost Stories and Nightmares.” Three Word Chant, 1, Summer.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Comparative Studies

Specializations: Cultural Politics, Social Theory, vi

Table of Contents

Abstract ...... ii

Acknowledgments ...... iv

Vita ...... vi

Prelude ...... 1

Empire and the Metropolis ...... 4

The Emergence of the Metropolis ...... 8

Lenin’s Shadow ...... 15

The Alchemy of the Example ...... 21

The Ambivalence of Escape ...... 30

PART 1 – CULTURE ...... 34

Escape ...... 35

A Typology of State-forms ...... 35

Chapter 1 – The Archaic State & The Priestly State ...... 37

The Archaic State of Conquest ...... 37

Raiding and Trading ...... 39

The Cruelties of Anti-Production ...... 41

vii The Terrifying Magician King ...... 46

Fleeing the Codes ...... 49

The Priestly State of Contract ...... 52

Faith and Debt ...... 53

The of Equivalence and Law ...... 56

The Law As Shared Means for Private Appropriation ...... 58

Peace Outside the State ...... 61

Chapter 2 – The Modern State & The Social State ...... 66

The Modern State ...... 66

Forging a Strange Complementarity ...... 67

The Four Operations of the Modern State ...... 70

Insurgencies ...... 78

The Social State ...... 80

The Rise of The Social ...... 81

The Welfare State ...... 87

The Socialist State ...... 91

Escaping The Social ...... 94

PART 2 – CRISIS ...... 101

The Birth of the Metropolis ...... 107

viii Chapter 3 – Disemboweling the Metropolis ...... 110

Vein 1: Violent Machines of Subjection ...... 114

Vein 2: Technical Management of Flows ...... 119

Vein 3: Spectacular Time ...... 130

Vein 4: A System of Compulsory Visibility ...... 141

PART 3 – CONFLICT ...... 149

Dramatization ...... 150

Life and Strategy ...... 151

Chapter 4 – ...... 155

Interiority, Dark Appetites and the Desire to Confess ...... 155

Feel Tank, An Experiment in Negative Affects ...... 166

SPK, Making Illness Into a Weapon ...... 176

Chapter 5 – Anonymity ...... 186

Insinuation, The Underground Current of Incoherence ...... 186

Guerrilla, The Force of Liberation ...... 197

Digital Subversions, New Strategies for Struggle ...... 214

Coda ...... 226

It Begins With Escape… (intensive escape) ...... 226

Escape Precedes Thought… (sensational politics) ...... 231

ix And Then It Vanishes… (beyond appearances) ...... 234

References ...... 239

x

Prelude

Escape is the oldest story of freedom, and it is among the simplest.1

Half a century ago, an anarchist scholar decided to write a heroic story of peasants. When bodies started piling up in Vietnam, he was intrigued that people actually cared about peasants for once. Even then, his task was not easy, given that peasants usually serve as the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are performed. However, in the archives he uncovered books and records that he wielded against those who had dismissed his humble peasants.

The heroic peasants were a good start for the scholar. While national liberation struggles claimed that the heart of the nation beat within the peasant, the scholar focused an even more elusive class of people: hill peoples, those who buck authorities with a run to the hills. Through diligent scholarship, he was able to bring together an impressive array of theories and terms to describe why certain peoples are poor materials for state-making.

1 Stories serve as key touchstones for the critical project presented in this dissertation. I explain the use of mythic, literary, and historic content first in the ‘alchemy of the example’ as elaborated in this prelude and later in short excurses on the diagnostic function of culture, dramatization, and sensation. 1 What the scholar loved most about the hill people was their slash-and-burn culture.

Dismissed by others as hillbilly backwardness, he knew that their whole way of life was an elaborate trick that they used to be left alone. But everything is different now, he reluctantly admitted; it had all changed after World War II. Most States developed technologies, both mechanical and human, that eliminated their ‘dark twins’ hiding in the mountains. Space was spanned and the hill sanctuaries were found, he said. The few peoples still in the hills were the last ones to escape; but even they are on the verge on disappearing, he lamented.

Not far away, a similar discovery was made.

A young college student was tired of the usual posturing of campus activism. The daily barrage of manufactured urgency and its politics of guilt did not interest him. What he did have was a plan to fight Reagan’s imperialist interventions in Latin America. So after gaining a little know-how in engineering with a focus on alternative energy, he headed south to make a real contribution to ‘the people who could use help.’

But the student felt out of place after he got there and was nagged by the feeling that this struggle was not his. The projects he worked on were practical, no doubt – computer donations from the States were not hurting the people of El Salvador – but they were not really helping that much either. When he looked for guidance, the El Salvadorians were kind but blunt. Their war torn country did not need engineering solutions to political problems, they said. So the student went back home to ponder. 2

Look, just go to the mountains, a comrade said while visiting the student. The student shot back an incredulous glance. Look, you have mountains here. Just go to the mountains. That’s what we do. Get some guns, go to the mountains, and wage a . The student responded thoughtfully, agreeing that, yes, there were mountains in , but he was not sure about the rest of the suggestion. A few moments later, with an embarrassed grin, he admitted that it simply did not correspond to his reality at all.

Though quite different, the two stories agree on a basic point: today, there is no sense in running to the hills. The hills may have previously been a non-place, a u-topia, where a people existed without a history. And while it is said that the history of people is the history of class struggle, it would be at least as truthful to say that the history of the peoples without history is the history of those who escape. But with the great latticework of surveillance and control that now spans most of the developed world, the veil of spatial isolation has been pierced. So today, the hills cannot help make class struggle or freedom a reality.

Even with hill peoples now under State control, however, is it not obvious that escape still does and always will exist? Of course it all depends on context – but there is a political danger in the desire to always want more context. The greatest risk is that providing context becomes a purely academic exercise that defers judgment or action.

This deferral is an expression of postmodern , most commonly voiced as the desire for complexity (“well, it’s complicated…” or “let me complicate this a bit 3 first…”). Such an incessant demand for context is to be expected, however, as protesting is a critical move in today’s dominant .2 So I will begin there. Yet it is my ultimate aim to demonstrate how a reworked of escape is essential to understanding contemporary power. Therefore, after I finish examining the demolition of the distinction between the valley and the hill or the town and the country, I shift to the new paths of escape that have opened up under the towering figure of the Metropolis.

Because to escape today, one does not run to the hills but burrows deeper into the dark underside of the Metropolis.

Empire and the Metropolis

Governance continues long after the mythic State breaks its final bond or pact and the social factory produces its last . Within The Social, the primacy of ‘states’ was already debatable – as long as the State is only understood as a mere container for sovereignty. But everywhere The Social is in crisis, its demise is on the horizon, and with the death of The Social, what is left of the State will become completely indistinguishable from Biopower and The Spectacle.3 This transformation often goes unacknowledged because the State is easily mistaken for its relics, as “Winter Palaces still exist but they have been relegated to assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes” (Invisible

Committee, , 45). Instead of the State, one must talk today about

Empire and the sprawling form of the Metropolis.

2 For more, see Jameson, , or, The Cultural Logic of Late , 65-6. 3 On origins of The Social and the development of Biopower and The Spectacle as the two poles of sovereignty deployed by the Social State, see Chapter 2. 4 To bring about its form of power, the Metropolis does not stand alone – historians point

out that in every political revival there are “always two runners, the state and the city”

(Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 511-512). Yet in the race between the lumbering State and the speedy town, the State usually wins and subsequently makes the city its subject. This is the case with capitalism and is evinced by the Modern State, which transformed the greedy ambitions of merchants into the global system of colonialism from which capitalism emerged. This is also true for the Metropolis. As the global capitalist axiomatic subsumes the State, the locus of power has shifted from politics to economics, and the Metropolis replaces the Social State. Governing the bloated space of the Metropolis requires such a proliferation of authorities that the poles of sovereignty have become diffuse. Such diffusion does not cause individual states to disappear but to cede their power to Empire, which exercises its power in the Metropolis.

This is how Empire is lived on the ground. Together, Empire and the Metropolis exercise a form of power altogether different than States: the Modern State made power into a substance by slowing it down enough to find something measurable and therefore pliable or easy to control – territory and population become expressions of the health of the sovereign; and the Social State developed The Social to hold the fragmented body of the king together, extending sovereignty into all dimensions of modern life. Both of those

States transmuted the two poles of sovereignty that capture power – the Modern State introduced The Police to take over the functions of conquest and established Publicity to forge a new type of contract, and the Social State generalized The Police into Biopower and expanded Publicity into The Spectacle. Everywhere The Social is in crisis and the

Metropolis has taken its place. And what has taken over Biopower and The Spectacle is 5 not a State but the subsumption of all states; it is Empire.

Customary definitions of Empire follow from and ’s reintroduction of the term in their 2000 book Empire, and usually focus on a polycentric sovereignty of global governance as it intersects with the postmodern production of informatized, immaterial, and biopolitical products. In contrast, I contend that Empire arrives as an entirely incorporeal entity that lacks its own body and is deprived of a material existence to call its own. However devoid of existence, Empire persists as the force behind a concept for organizing and directing the capitalist world market. As a result, Empire operates through management and circulation, but it is not extensive with its product: the Metropolis. The material reality of contemporary power, which is the lived existence of Empire, is the Metropolis. As suggests, the

Metropolis is not an urban phenomena – it replaces the city after the abolition of the distinction between town and country. The Metropolis subsumes both The Social and the

Social State, which does not do away with nation-states but annexes them as parts in patchwork of different pieces. To put these otherwise foreign elements into communication with one another, the Metropolis connects through inclusive disjunction, which does not require its pieces to operate through a shared logic but unfolds their interiors through exposure. This harsh opening-up process makes the Metropolis a hostile expanse that is subjectively experienced as deepening alienation.

Most attempts to describe Empire have failed. Those failures usually result from the

6 seductive search for ‘subjects’ behind actions.4 Kafka laughter’s has only become louder

as his mockery of those who hunt for a singular authority of justice turns to recent

attempts to place the evils of Empire at the feet of a clear culprit (Kafka, “Before the

Law”; Kafka, The Castle). Those lost will never find their peace, for Empire is the

final step in the full transfiguration of the sovereign head of state into a series of

unfortunate situations. Empire is not a conspiracy of , one world state, a

congress of states, the IMF, the , ‘polycentric sovereignty,’ or

power. “Empire does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an environment

that is hostile to us” (, Introduction to Civil War, §66). Furthermore, Empire is not

a new positivity – it is not a new world power, an ideological innovation, or a fresh set of

laws. At most, Empire is not even an but the devices used to prevent the event. And

thus at its limit, Empire is but the summation of all the reactionary forces of the

present; it is everything that prevents the future from breaking with the present.5

Although it would be a mistake to identify Empire as a positivity, the evidence of its

existence is everywhere.6 The essential attributes of Empire do not exist in extension

because they are incorporeal, which are causes that produce intensive transformations,

while the Metropolis is the lived form-of-life corresponding to Empire’s network of

incorporeal transformations. The traces of existence are the daily reminder that intensive

4 See Nietzsche’s withering critique of the linguistic prejudice for active subjects in of , Essay 1, §13 5 This reactionary force is temporal and not spatial. As already emphasized, biopower enhances the power of its subject but through a process of limiting their aleatory (or kairotic) temporality, which is the basis of revolutionary innovation, , and . 6 These transformations are said to ‘insist,’ ‘subsist,’ or ‘persist’ but only exist in their effects. See Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 52-54. A helpful demonstration in the field of is Lash, Intensive Culture: Social Theory, Religion, and Contemporary Capitalism. 7 abstractions have a real existence through their extension as concrete deployments of an abstract diagram. This extension, the Metropolis, extends through physical space with a recklessness Empire is careful to avoid. Moreover, the Metropolis provides the territorial horizon on which the forces of Empire operate and the world that the citizens of Empire inhabit. Empire itself does not exist, for Empire is circulation and Empire is management.

This calls for an important caveat: challenging Empire over its extension, whether showing how it causes short-circuits rather than the smooth flows or revealing its penchant for unjust incarceration and stratification, only indirectly influences the intensity of Empire’s abstraction, which does not exist but subsists and insists. Better circulation and good management would only trade one actualization of Empire for another one. Even though the forces of Empire cannot go unchallenged, it is only when circulation and management are drained of their obviousness that Empire loses its intensity. To abolish Empire then, circulation and management must be made unthinkable, irrelevant or, at the very least, something to be played with “just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good” (Agamben, State of Exception, 64). For in the end, the products of

Empire will live on far after its intensity fades.

The Emergence of the Metropolis

The predecessor to the Metropolis is the city. Without industrialism, which is also to say , two types of cities punctuate the landscape: the central place city and the gateway city. Central place cities gather in and build up. These cities are hierarchical 8 centers that seize outlaying (usually agricultural) surplus that is stacked on a central point

after heterogeneous material is sorted and consolidated into homogenous layers that form

a towering stratified block. Alternately, gateway cities extend out in overlapping patches.

These cities are knots in trading networks that form into nodes, dense nests of

interlocking local articulations between foreign flows that acquire a certain stability

(DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 37-9; 59-67). The Metropolis is not

simply stratified like the sandstone giant nor networked horizontally like the granite

node. Rather, the Metropolis is a space of capture, a ground prepared by Empire to act

out control.

But the Metropolis is not just a big city, it is an exteriority (Lefebvre, The Urban

Revolution, 50-59). This follows from the original manifestation of the Metropolis, the

Greek mother city and the whole network of colony-cities it dominated (Agamben,

“Metropolis”). Today, Metropolis is worldwide rather than Mediterranean, and it is no longer an arrangement of cities but a collection of all the relays in the circuit of global . It is not centered, a center of accumulation, a center of exchange, a hierarchy, or

even a homogeneous culture. Rather, the Metropolis is a pure exteriority that abolishes

the line between the town and the country. For a time, cities were defined in opposition to

their outlying lands although the urban elite was dependent on the import of resources

only available from an autonomous rural peasantry. But that one-way flow of dependency

has transformed into a single continuous system (23-44). With farmers text-messaging at

the wheel of their GPS-controlled tractors and squatters living off guerrilla gardens

nestled in the heart of downtown, the breakdown of the barrier between the two has 9 begun. What is left, if anything, is a zig-zag without a clear inside or outside, leaving behind a delirious mix of high-rises and slums (Negri, “On Rem Koolhaas,” 48). The

Metropolis therefore performs the same essential function of cities: polarization, as in the intensity produced between differentials. A consequence of this transformation is that escape routes become less apparent, for distance-demolishing technologies such as ultra- fast transit, satellite imaging, and communication networks make previously remote hideouts easily accessible to the Metropolis. Therefore, escape will not be found while eking out an existence in whatever is left of the countryside but in the tactical distance afforded by the density, saturation, and noise of the Metropolis.

The Metropolis could also be described as the space of ‘There Is No Outside.’ But this phrase mystifies too much, perhaps, as the Metropolis always come up short. More accurately then, it is everywhere where there is no longer a visible Outside, for the

Metropolis appears as if it is composed of nothing but exteriorities. Overcoming the

State’s fear of outsiders, the Metropolis embraces a basic maxim of The Spectacle:

“Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear” (Debord, Society of the

Spectacle, §12). By integrating The Outside rather than defeating it, whole worlds otherwise recognized on their own terms are made into parts of a single system.7

Madness, delinquency, criminality, and perversion – all of which were once causes for concern and therefore excluded or ‘cured’ – are more than allowed to exist among us, they are things that everyone is now capable of. With spaces of enclosure turned inside-

7 The Metropolis has no center, rather it is composed of isometric forms that extrinsically coexist in consistency, yet this consistency is not the trans-consistency of homogeneity or even heterogeneity but an “exo-consistency,” which gains its own expression through the interactions of the aggregate (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 434-437). 10 out and made into different neighborhoods of a single exurb, the Metropolis appears simultaneously as an expanse of limitless possibilities and a space where nothing new seems to happen. There are three concrete conclusions that can be drawn from this: first, the Outside still exists, but it exists either in what is indiscernible or on the inside; second, the giant exteriority of the Metropolis is too saturated to manage all at once, so governability works through increasing speed and extension by means of improvements in selection and efficiency; and third, escaping the Metropolis does not occur by dropping out but by ‘dropping in,’ a clandestine form of that uses density to take cover while simultaneously undermining the reliability of the herd and utilizes clutter to throw up interference to both disrupt the enemy and make an escape.

The Metropolis is not a uniform sheet but a mesh, or better yet, a sieve or a net full of holes. Yet those holes are by design, as Empire needs a torrent and not a trickle, although the maximum porosity of open space is not as stable or consistent as that provided by enclosure. Even as rogue traders leak money through unauthorized transactions, Empire expands with every dollar invested. Even when undocumented cooks work in the kitchen,

Biopower grows with every diner through the door. And even though laptops ‘fall off the truck,’ The Spectacle shines brighter with every post. In the ruins of the good society, the Metropolis stitches a fabric of unlikely connections that holds everyone together while The Social collapses around us. And although illegalism and subversion have long helped people get by in spaces of exclusion, the Metropolis introduces bad behavior into every form of life. And for that, we should hate it, as the Metropolis registers these protests against the indignity of The Social only so they can be turned 11 against us.

Even the desire to destroy what destroys you, which would call for the abolition of the

Metropolis, would be futile if the end of the Metropolis translated into a return to the town or the country. That is because, echoing contemporary communists, the Metropolis is to us as the factory was to the industrial , which is to say: a profoundly ambivalent form that is both the cause of exploitation and the means for revolution (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 250). The factory did not contain a revolutionary kernel because it caused modernization, as in ‘soviets plus electrification,’ or cruel triumph, as in ‘work will set you free,’ but because it defined the terrain of struggle. And the revolutionary elements of the proletariat did not fight for only time, pay, and conditions, but for everything that exceeded and promised to end those things – dignity, freedom, and ultimately their own self-abolition as a class. Only when we understand this ambivalence can we truly appreciate liberated women’s demand to both hold a job and end capitalism, or the solidarity between a maquiladora worker’s struggle for dignity on the job and the secret desire to see her factory burn. The Metropolis therefore sets the stage for the most important social and political dramas of our time. And while it paves the path for exploitation, it simultaneously opens up lines of flight, many of which hold the potential for a better world.

The Metropolis is causing the slow death of The Social. Contemporary communists

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt welcome this change. The Metropolis, they say, is a diagram for organizing encounters. And if this is the case, it taps into a long history of 12 theory – and the encounter, and the city, and the flânuer, the Situationists and the dérive. Following the Situationists with a twist of their own, the communists détourn the phrase ‘beneath the paving stones, the beach,’ instead declaring ‘beneath the Metropolis, the Common.’ It is not worth quibbling with the intellectual history they draw on – I also argue that the body of the earth is stratified by The Metropolis, define its operations as a diagram, and describe its process of connection as an encounter – yet it is worth disagreeing with the celebratory thread sewn through their works.

In the piece “The Common in ,” Hardt makes his strongest presentation of the Common. The import of his argument is that capitalism has entered a phase where its primary does not actively organize production as industrial capitalism does, where direct management was needed for laying out capital, proletarianizing workers, and establishing commodity markets as their only means of subsistence. The hegemonic form of contemporary production, Hardt claims, now relies on the feudal action of collecting rent whereby a landowner collects a portion of the self- organized activity of the landless peasant class as payment; he calls this hegemonic form

“the becoming-rent of capital” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 451) Instead of a common land, which organized production in feudalism, Hardt argues that production is now organized by a new Common formed from the substance of human communication, cooperation, and . In this process, he argues that capital is now external to the production of the commons, and when it intervenes, it reduces productivity (“Common in

Communism,” 351). If Hardt is correct, then capitalists do not contribute to the 13 production process and have thus made themselves expendable, leaving the plentiful

Common of the Metropolis after their elimination.

More pessimistic argue that the Metropolis is a desert that separates us from the

Common.8 They do not disagree with Hardt and Negri on the point that the Metropolis is the dominant form of social organization. Moreover, they even agree with the claim that

“the Metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class”

(Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 250). Where they disagree with Hardt and Negri is on the rapport between Metropolis and the Common. These pessimists argue that Metropolis is a form of separation, that it divides and prevents access to a Common in the same way that money and other abstractions prevent unmediated access to everyday life. The

Metropolis is not a place of taxed plentitude but a hostile environment that slowly poisons and destroys its residents. For them, the Common is not constituted through the

Metropolis but against it (Plan B Bureau, 20 Theses on the Subversion of the Metropolis,

Theses 6-8; Theses 19-20). This echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that there is only one class, the bourgeoisie, and that political division is found between the servants and the saboteurs of the machine (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 255). Thus the insurrectionists do not turn away from the Metropolis but view it as a site for seizing weapons.

In sum, two positions hold that the Metropolis stages a conflict over a new earth, the

8 Pessimists include recent ‘insurrectionary’ authors popular within anarchist, communist, and ultra-left milieus, such as Tiqqun, , and Plan B Bureau. 14 Common. One holds that the Metropolis is “the space of the common,” with “people living together, sharing resources, communication, [and] exchanging goods and ”

(Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 250). The other has nothing but disdain for the

Metropolis, identifying it as a hostile enemy that must be collectively opposed. And while some communists say that the Metropolis should be embraced as a progressive force to find the Common, the most intense commonality is found in shared struggle.

Before a deeper inquiry into the struggle against Empire can commence, however, it is necessary to prepare the reader on a few issues of method unique to this investigation: first, a challenge to the rather stale in the study of social movements; and second, an explanation of the status of examples in my project.

Lenin’s Shadow

Radical politics still lives under the shadow of Lenin – and to its detriment. Lenin’s legacy stands first and foremost for the primacy of organization in political strategy. And in spite of the recent turn away from in state policy, after the fall of the Soviet bloc and in China’s pro-capitalist Dengist reforms, this legacy hangs over social movements. No doubt, Lenin’s successes should not be denigrated, for he accomplished feats that radicals today can only dream about, yet the relevance of Lenin to today’s problems needs to be seriously reexamined.

Lenin’s historic triumph took place in the age of massification. The forces of the day were two great hulking masses, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, that confronted each 15 other on the field of battle. The Leninist strategy was to forge the iron discipline of a

single party to seize the organs of the State through mass mobilization. But that was

before the intensifications in ideology in the aftermath of World War II that made Lenin’s revolutionary solution obsolete. In particular, more advanced forms of ideology have made it unthinkable to simply gain control over the army and police to establish ownership of the means of production as a whole.

Yet even today, a hegemonic sociology of social movements casts Lenin’s long shadow over politics. Most generally, this sociology looks to theories of organization for the key to unlock a singular path to political success. Its sociological method evaluates the

potential for political success in three categories, all leftovers from Lenin: structure,

cohesion, and the definition of objectives. When those categories are operationalized,

social movements are analyzed according to organizational forms, collective identities,

and types of mobilizations. Specifically, the sociological approach seeks to build political

hegemony by empirically identifying social actors with clear organizational

characteristics and communication strategies that develop a repertoire of social actions

used to achieve strategic objectives by capitalizing on monumental events (Zibechi, “The

Revolution of 1968,” 3).

Under Empire, the world has exploded into trillions of molecular parts barely responsible

to a whole, which is to say that it is increasingly rare for historic upheavals to either start

from the top or be occur in a single epic event. Of course it would be a misunderstanding

of terms to say that large-scale transformations no longer occur, for they surely do – just 16 look to recent consumer revolts, the of the , or the sudden shift in American public discourse provoked by . But today, the effects of world historical events are not the result of a group of a few committed individuals, as the tired Margaret Mead maxim would have it. Rather, historical changes arise out of dense webs of a networked society that relies on a wide variety of inputs.

The concrete effects of the hegemonic sociology of social movements on politics are

markedly disappointing. Ossified political groups that continue to deploy organization-

heavy approaches have seen mixed results, at best. The American anti-war movement,

both in its big tent liberal (United For Peace and Justice) and post-Leninist varieties (The

Revolutionary Communist Party, The ANSWER Coalition, and The International

Socialist Organization), serves as the paradigmatic example: the February 15, 2003

global protest against the Iraq War was, by the numbers, the largest protest in history:

organizers turned out more than fifteen million people, and even got them all to echo a

common refrain. But even with a cohesive organizational structure, a unitary message,

and a truly mass mobilization, the Bush Administration embarked on its invasion just the

same.

Alternately, simply dispersing power should not be confused for a radical shift away from

the politics of the past. Even though the counter-cultural revolution was molecular,

Empire’s response was also molecular. The rise of informationalization, in a computer-

driven digital society that promotes integration and differentiation of even the most

unwanted subjects, has been part of the overall shift of the leading capitalist 17 toward strategies of flexible accumulation that began in the 1970s. This regime of

accumulation builds upon the already existing infrastructure of capitalist modernization

that used the of the factory as a diagram for all sectors of society. But

informationalization provoked a passage in the leading of society away

from the self-contained walls of the factory to the open system of the network. The effects have been drastic. Rather than a small set of institutions determining the direction of the whole in the last instance (‘as goes the , so goes the nation’), the whole of the social body has been mobilized, and is now governed according to whatever emerge from the distributed system. Or as post-Foucauldian governmentality scholars put it, governance has shifted from producing good citizens to controlling virtuous and un- virtuous subjects alike by patterning their space of potential and disciplining their aftereffects (Dean, Governmentality, 184-5).

One common response to outmoded politics is to encourage participation by way of , a fairly simple logic espoused by anarchists, anti-modernists, progressives, and far right-wingers alike. The primary tactic of decentralists is to slow down the speedy indifference of capitalist imperialism by setting up roadblocks constructed from insider-only combinations of group identities and subcultural rituals.

These roadblocks are potentially valuable for temporarily constructing autonomous zones for use as both defensive rest stops and opaque spaces of attack. However, when slowing down becomes the sole weapon against a system built on speed and intensity, decentralists get outmaneuvered by a system that operates at variable speeds. Moreover, roadblocks without strategic become routinely maintained out of habit, which 18 transforms them into anchors. For example, melancholic calls for ‘re-localization’ usually produce homogenous enclaves that espouse conservative restorationist (‘I could never trust food made by foreigners’); and while many re-localized communities may provide a future for their residents, if each is less diverse than a random sample of

Wal-Mart shoppers, how do they constitute a response to capitalism for the other seven billion people of the world?

The fatal flaw of the hegemonic sociology of social movements, at its most basic level, is not that it is for or against organization as such. The approach’s major failing is that although organizational issues are hardly the only blockage to political problems, it presents logistical wars of resource deployment and rhetoric as the single corrective. In its most disabling form, this Field of Dreams guarantee – ‘if you build it, they will come’

– remains indifferent to the actually existing forces that constitute any given political context. Additionally, the processes they advocate usually mirror the familiar faces of sovereignty: conquest or contract. This is manifest by Leninists who read State and

Revolution not as Lenin’s “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” in Russia but a formula for revolution. Perhaps it is more common to see anarchist direct- advocates argue that the process of building consensus will inevitably end in a mutually beneficial solution for all, or to see even more moderate organization enthusiasts suggest that establishing process is the prior condition to any possible action.

Anyone who has been to an anarchist meeting knows how often process creates internal roadblocks instead of forward momentum by starting wars of attrition clothed as

19 ‘consensus-based’ conversations that are dominated by those with the most time on their

hands or with expertise in the technical skills of process maneuvering.

Ultimately, radical politics will only step outside the shadow of Lenin when the question

of organization is forgotten. Yet this claim is definitely not anti-organizational, which

itself would be a reactionary fixation on negating organization; nor does it even suggest

non-organization as an option. Rather, the task of leaving organization behind means

replacing the dominant paradigms of voluntarism and (‘agency and

structure,’ ‘ and ,’ ‘the individual and society’) with more

productive categories of analysis. To be more specific: forgetting organization would end

enslavement to the hoary category of ‘the will,’ whether it be the will of the militant9 or the vague sense of ‘the will of the people’ that rubber-stamps liberal democratic statecraft. Alternately, forgetting organization would end the strong certainty of deterministic models, and a major casualty would be the certainty of revolution, for even if capitalism may produce its own “gravediggers,” no one model can definitely deliver us its cold dead corpse (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 51). Such a perspective has already been adopted by some of the French Ultra-Left who argue that

“whoever that 1848, 1917, 1968… were compelled to end up as they ended up, should be requested to prophesy the future — for once. No one had foreseen May ‘68.

Those who explain that its failure was inevitable only knew this afterwards. Determinism would gain credibility if it gave us useful forecasts” (Dauvé and Nesic, “To Work or Not

9 Such as in Žižek’s fusion of the Terror and the Act or Rousseau’s general will, whose best Marxian variant is seen in Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” 20 to Work?,” 17). Yet such audacity is not a new revisionist spin – it comes from Marx himself, who wrote that the rise of political , which is elevated to the status of science by the bourgeoisie, is not answered with a new political economy but a critique of political economy. But critique is not enough by itself and it must be accompanied by a politics. This dissertation suggests that escape is the first step to actualizing such a politics.

The Alchemy of the Example

One fear of writing an academic book today is that it is like whispering to yourself in the woods. Such concern arrives with the advent of the internet, which was followed by the rise of a digital culture overburdened by too much rather than too little.

Academic writing risks adding to an already towering stack of books that few have the time to read or at least not very closely. The related risk is the ease of getting lost in the heavens or trapped underground, which is to say that our contributions have long peddled in heady abstraction and hidden .

Idealism, which sometimes parades as , assumes that ideas are what drive change. This approach suggests impossible feats that even those who propose them never hope to achieve while still providing some sense of satisfaction in their failure. Most of what passes as democracy promotion or democracy theory follows this idealist trajectory.

The of democracy is posed as a regulative ideal or some perfect that we should aspire to even if its full potential can never be fully realized. Or alternatively, in its more cynical variety, it poses as ‘the least worst of nothing but bad options.’ 21

The drawback of such idealist approaches is that they rarely ever touch ground.

Movement for these stargazers happens through an ascent and conversion; with their

necks craned toward the sky, they ponder the details of a far-off universe purified of

earthly difficulties. At best, these idealist systems function as possibility-generating

‘thinkability’ machines. The idealists maintain, like in the case of Columbus’s Egg where

“it’s easy once you’ve thought of it,” that ‘possibility’ is opened up in a single stroke of

genius that lays the groundwork for the dull, obvious realizations that mirror the initial

idea (, Discipline and Punish, 206; Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 208; reference

omitted in translation).10 Realization becomes application, as if the theory has already done all the heavy lifting, and particular cases are brought in to simply confirm general suspicions.

But while the idealists have their heads in the heavens, others are stuck plumbing the depths. These miners look for a submerged structure locked beneath the surface. The appeal of such a system is undeniable: there is no mightier feeling than the certainty that comes with knowing a hidden from everyone else, making them dupes. Behind the quest for concealed truths lies the problem of esoteric knowledge, where any new revelation could replace, invert, or cancel out every truth that came before it. These are

10 As the story goes, Christopher Columbus was dining with Spanish nobles when one spoke to him, saying “Your lordship, if you had not discovered the New World, certainly a Spaniard would have completed the journey, for we are a land full of learned men with skills in navigation and mapmaking.” Columbus did not respond directly but instead asked for an egg to be brought to the table, and he issued a challenge: “My lords, I wager that none of you can stand this egg on its end without help or assistance.” Try as they could, none of the noblemen were able. Once it was clear that he had outsmarted his critics, Columbus took the egg and gently cracked one end of the egg, flattening it enough to rest calmly on the table. The lesson was immediately apparent: once a creative act has been demonstrated, everyone knows how to do it. 22 the perfect conditions for producing mining moles that slowly go blind because they cannot stop digging deeper and never know when to surface. And even if they do return to the surface, these approaches rarely equip anyone for decisive action.

Marx’s menagerie includes such a miner: Hamlet’s mole of a father, a ghost who reappears when the time is right. For Marx, revolution goes underground from time to time, only to reemerge wearing the clothes of the old yet ready to create a new world.

And there is no better way to turn old moles blind than with and . These scholarly methods largely maintain a fealty to their ascetic origins, slavishly testing the limits of presence as if responding to a challenge to see how long they can tunnel through their underground system of references. But even worse than its de-intensifying searching, “beneath [its] appearance of complacency, deconstruction has a very specific political function” because “it tries to pass off anything that violently opposes Empire as barbaric, it deems mystical anyone who takes his own presence to self as a source of energy for his revolt, and makes anyone who follows the vitality of thought with a gesture, a fascist” (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 147). These scholarly techniques are valuable only if revolutionaries make quick journeys into the depths to find lost objects and immediately plug back into circuits of struggle.

Fortunately, some contemporary Marxists have suggested that the burrowing mole no longer adequately describes the cycles of revolution and propose in its place the

23 undulating coils of a snake.11 Revolution in this view always appears on the surface as a continuous network of control. The leading forms of appear to follow this approach. Positivist and even post-positivist empiricists catalogue the different configurations of the world ‘as they actually exist.’ One version is the Chicago School of

Anthropology, which identifies all of the different ways that people inhabit the world.

But as a rule, they are resistant to theory not derived from the concrete case, claiming that

‘if we have not observed humans already doing it, it cannot exist.’ Though this stubbornness provides excellent weapons in their battle against the just-so stories used by the Chicago School of Economics and their hyper-liberal , it necessarily forecloses the creativity of the future. 12 Because strict empiricists limit their thinking to

already-observed phenomenon, they have a narrow basis from which to imagine the

world becoming otherwise. We thus need a much more elaborate speculative engine than

the one provided by these empiricists if academics are to help create a future open to

radical change.

To radicalize empiricism, one can follow , who suggests that works of

philosophy should be “a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of

science fiction” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xx). The key to this radical

empiricism is its philosophical definition of . According to this approach,

experience is not the subjective lived experience of self-reflection or even the

11 The most notable Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” and Hardt and Negri, Empire. 12 Perhaps the most relevant here is Chicago School-trained anthropologist , whose economic anthropology of debt and money, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, outlines an anthropological theory of money that undermines key neo-classical assumptions. Due to his unwillingness to theoretically extrapolate much beyond the anthropological evidence, Nietzsche’s account of debt is an early casualty. Moreover, Graeber’s account of communism is entirely prefigured by already existing communal societies. 24 consciousness found in exposés on madmen and eccentrics. Rather, this philosophical

empiricism posits an impersonal world of “a draft, a wind, a day, a time of day, a stream,

a place, a battle, an illness” that is not immediately perceived, with subjects always coming late to the scene, and is therefore experienced and experimented with a- subjectively (Deleuze, Negotiations, 141). Like good detectives, writers should then develop theories to address these immediate situations, and those theories should evolve with the situation. If constructed well, these theories can open a window of for apprehending elements of experience otherwise indiscernible to the subject and forge the

tools necessary to assemble the elements into something useful. And when successful,

those assemblages should gain consistency, yet not in order to produce universal

knowledge from simple logical but in writing apocalyptic science fiction of

the given world. That is because fictionalizing the present, according to Nietzsche, acts

“counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a

time to come” (Untimely Meditations, 60). Ultimately, such an approach seeks out the

indiscernible elements of experience, not as an exercise in uncovering something that has

been hidden, but to tap into wells of intensity that are never fully represented. And by

accessing that intensity, we gain the power to be affected by the world, and in turn, to

affect it.

I make use of this radical empiricism with my own method: the alchemy of the example.

For too long there has been a ‘gospel choir of the example.’ Outside of ‘amen’ and a few

‘halleluiahs,’ examples have rarely added much. In contrast, alchemy brings the example

back into the creative process. To transform the example into the raw material for 25 alchemy’s of mastering fire, however, examples must be released from their usual role in empiricism. There are two roles in particular that the example has traditionally filled: first, examples are often abstracted from to identify positivities that confirm the validity of general rules and are therefore treated as particular cases; and second, examples are also chosen to find historical positivities used to determine the historical actuality of an event. Formal logic seeks out clear examples, and historical surveys hunt down timely ones. For alchemy, though, the example is not selected for its positivity or historicity but for its singularity. The complexity of detail is what makes an example good for alchemy, and the best examples turn out to be equal participants in the creation of theory, which means they are not just part of the supporting cast but instead change the trajectory of the theory as it unfolds and sometimes even steal the show.

There are three tasks that guide forging theories with examples:

The first task is to restore internal contestation. For alchemy, examples have proper names: Foucault’s Biopower, the Archaic State, the Metropolis. But these examples are not exemplary, as if lying behind each proper name there is a subject that is a good guy who should be imitated or an evil villain who needs to be avoided. Rather, I follow military strategists and meteorologists, who give every operation and hurricane a proper name. Those names do not describe subjects but a-subjective that are birthed from an ecology of forces, like Nietzsche’s lightning bolt, emerging from charged fields of intensity often unseen. Examples are therefore the effect of a given force-field of speed and intensities without being equivalent to it. Alchemy is then the working out of 26 an example that taps into the movement and power of a milieu. To put it another way:

each example is a unique response to a problem, e.g. an organism is a solution to the

problem posed by its milieu. Yet regardless of how the organism responds, it does not

solve once and for all the problem of the milieu. Similarly, examples present singularities

that neither empty the field of intensity they emerge from, nor prevent alternative

“counter-effectuations of the event” whereby the example is abstracted from its place of

origin in order to be reenacted elsewhere to produce different effects (Deleuze and

Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 159-160).

The second task is to open up paths of becoming – becoming as the production of a new

world and not the re-presentation of same world all over again. This process should not

be thought of as the measured change from a starting-point to an ending-point but an

away-from movement that has multiple potential trajectories without a set endpoint.13

Becoming should therefore be understood as an ongoing series of production, with things and states as products of that becoming. One effect of this change in perspective is a dynamic image of time where all of the past fuses together into a single block that casts a shadow over the present, and that present is seen in a moment and only later felt again through the weight of history. Even more importantly, however, the future appears as a

13 The usual structuralist measurement of difference begins with an immobile field in which a subject in becoming is nothing but the transition between two points; normal becomes deviant, straight becomes queer, pure becomes miscegenated. Such a characterization of change is an error of thought that follows from a method that identifies difference through isolating it as a variable, which first subtracts movement from the field of action, as if the world began with primal and differentiated stillness. This philosophical problematic is at least as old as its formulation in “Zeno’s Arrow,” which the contemporary of becoming was constructed to address. Within the , ’s Creative Evolution remains the crucial reference. For those interested in its operationalization: in Parables for the Virtual, outlines fifteen consequences to introducing Bergsonian becoming to the field of cultural studies (6-13). 27 source of plentitude that opens into many different worlds. Within this alchemy,

examples offer a strategy for negotiating the complex structure of time but also for

reintroducing a future foreclosed by the present. When examples are made through

fabulation, which brings incompatible worlds into existence together within a single

universe, they tap into the power of becoming. This dissertation undertakes such

fabulation, as I weave together examples from literature, politics, history, culture, and

mythology to operationalize the maxim that ‘fiction destroys reality,’ both inside and

outside of literary contexts.14

The third task is draw on the persuasive force of concepts. Even if the brightest post- structuralist stars of textualism are waning, text is still king. One is that a considerable amount of theory is written in the form of commentary and therefore requires texts, no how broadly they are defined, as objects of analysis. This partly results from theory’s early home in , whose stark author/commentator divide has relegated many scholars to the role of mere commentators separated from a world authored by others. Moreover, scholars in other fields, in particular the social sciences, build arguments from the raw materials of the peer-reviewed work of their

‘community of scholars’ through a citational method that requires fidelity to a particular author or text. In contrast, my approach builds constellations out of concepts that have acquired enough consistency to survive outside of their original context – analogously to how sensations become art, which occurs when they acquire enough consistency to break

14 As Ronald Bogue notes, fabulation is the fabrication of “larger-than-life giants” and “hallucinatory visions of future collectives” (Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History, 19). Yet such work is not “merely a form of experimental modernism,” whose engagement with history would be “solely disruptive,” but legends that undue memories of past and present for the sake of a people to come (30). 28 out of their immediate context of production. Ideas may be the product of a given author

or the result of work within a particular historical context, but when those ideas gain

enough consistency to meet, interact with, and contribute to the reinvention of other

ideas, they have become concepts. A conceptual approach must therefore provide

concepts enough room to move and breathe without destroying the consistency that

animates them.

The recent scholarly turn to theories of affect explores how concepts develop and

circulate this animating force. Affect describes both (i) the power of bodies to combine

and (ii) the felt effects of power in the body. Bodies, the content and expression of

affecting and being affected, combine in a very concrete sense, as with nourishment or poison, to produce sensations of joy or sadness. Affect is caught like one catches a cold, through contagion. Moreover, it resists quantification. Yet most people think of affect through a categorical grid, which merely points to the effects of affection as they are fit into pre-assigned discrete emotional categories of perception – excited, shocked, irritated, pissed. So any measurement of qualified affect comes out dull and ignorant of its cause.

In contrast, alchemy uses examples the way one would use art – to construct mobile armies of sensation and not as devices for measuring the world. This follows from the notion that any body or thing can envelop affective potential: a , a sonnet, or a salsa all hold and release energy through folding and unfolding force much like a spring.

The task of alchemy then is to activate the affective potential of examples.15

15 There are two risks that accompany this task: the actualized affect can be too fast and fly off into irrelevance, or too slow and get weighed down by the status quo. 29

The Ambivalence of Escape

Escape is not an innocent concept. While I present escape as especially relevant in the current moment, it is neither entirely new nor always good. In fact, theories of escape have motivated settler colonialism, American exceptionalism, and far-right populism. Yet dreams of freedom have also enabled global liberation struggles, the political elements of dropout culture, and revolutionary projects. Escape, as I use it in this dissertation, is not a goal but the process by which societies change. Contrary to orthodox Marxists, who propose that every society is characterized by its mode of production, my analysis follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that societies are characterized by how they manage their paths of escape. Yet shifting the analysis to escape does not reveal a single path to liberation. Serfs escaped the hierarchical system of feudalism only to be thrown into the factory. Early European nation-states escaped to the New World only to expand the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and deepen all of the other horrors of the age of colonialism. So escape is therefore not itself preferable, because it is a bundle of processes that point toward different social forms, some better and some worse than the one we live in now. Yet it is my contention that certain forms of escape point to forms of internal struggle that defy the caged politics of the State and thus suggest new zones of contestation that contain the best potential for revolution within the Metropolis.

Although escape is not new, it is ‘now,’ as theories of right, entitlement, and the social good that pervade contemporary political rhetoric are slowly being replaced through the force, dispossession, and stratification endemic to a world controlled by Empire. One 30 attempt to clarify this shift is the scholarship on neoliberalism, which emphasizes the increasingly permissive character of contemporary power and hence an increased prevalence of escape whereby deviance and perversions that were previously unthinkable are no longer prohibited but sold at a profit. The question raised by such general permissiveness is whether the ubiquity of escape speaks to its growing potential or its irrelevance. To clarify escape today, I therefore distinguish it from other forms of escape.

The point of clarifying through distinction is to identify what is singular about contemporary escape. Most acutely, escape is faced with the challenge of the Metropolis, which evaporates potential antagonisms by incorporating them through inclusive disjunction. Within this system of inclusion, difference is not a threat but the means by which Empire maintains its hold on the perpetual present. Empire cannot be escaped by simply celebrating the differences that grow out of life in the Metropolis – they must be made political, so that life is just as fast but more rhythmic; strategy is just as collective but more selective; and sensation is just as intense but more consistent. Evading the incredibly permissive form of capture, it must then proceed by way of exclusive disjunction: the forced between two options. Such a forced choice is not the enemy of difference, however, as it does not reduce the world to a simple binary – difference flourishes in both incommensurate worlds – the distinction is that the

Metropolis uses a dull repetition of difference to maintain a perpetual present while exclusive escape opens the door to a new world of difference where there’s no going back.

31 The concept of escape is presented here in three parts. The first part provides a cultural description of the State. The second part outlines why the present is in crisis. And the third part shows brewing conflicts.

In the first part, I follow Nietzsche, who argues that philosophers can act as cultural physicians, diagnosticians who separate out vague groupings of symptoms into discrete, identifiable illnesses. This is the diagnostic function of culture, which uses myth, literature, film, and other creative products to identify general cultural conditions. To undertake this diagnosis, I build on Georges Dumezil’s work on the mythological origins of the two heads of Indo-European sovereignty, which roughly match the contemporary notions of Conquest and Contract. Then this cultural description is extended to various types of States, each having a signature that can be derived from the rhythm, speed, and intensity of the interaction between the two poles of sovereignty. Isolating those signatures, I identify five types: the Archaic State, the Priestly State, the Modern State, the Social State, and Empire.

In the second part, I identify what constitutes the Metropolis. This operation begins with the institutions that organize metropolitan life, Biopower and the Spectacle, which are intensifications of The Police and Publicity that develop out of conquest and contract.

These two poles evolve into four key veins: violent machines of subjection, the management of flows, the perpetual present of spectacular time, and a system of compulsory visibility. Next, I outline the mediums through which they work, and find

32 that in spite of the bleakness of life in the Metropolis, or perhaps because of it, these

veins produce lines of flight useful in the struggle against Empire.

In the third part, I pinpoint two conflicts that come from a dramatization of the desire to

escape the Metropolis: negative affect and . Escape dramatizes the forces

of life and strategy, which transforms affect into negative emotions and anonymity into a

political struggle. Expanding the radical potential of each, I theorize how political

emotions and tactical withdrawal must be adapted for the Metropolis. In the case of

affect, I demonstrate how groups have turned alienation and depression into weapons

against their cause. And in the case of the guerrilla, I suggest ways that guerrilla

advantages can be established within digital culture.

After its passage through culture, crisis, and conflict, a new concept of escape surfaces. It no longer drips with the cold sweat of those who fear the tyrannies of State power or the terror of appearing before the law. This escape burns with the hot fire of revolt sparked by secret complicities that smolder in the streets of the Metropolis. It is an escape that does not find respite in distance but a movement of separation, whose intensive power brings the power of the outside to bear against Empire. While this escape may communicate certain facts, it is delivered through the force of the sensations, which turns the alienating power of the Metropolis against its source. In the final instance, however, best escape disappears as soon as it arrives, dissolving into every feeling, image, and slogan that evades capture.

33

PART 1 – CULTURE

More State history is lived in the single day of a culture than what is entombed in a whole decade of its laws. By extension, studying the State should begin with an examination of

its rituals and not its ledgers. Perhaps the best place to start is with George Dumézil’s

work Mitra-Varuna. Part philology and part folklore, Dumézil compares Indo-European

myths of authority in order to synthesize them into a single general theory of sovereignty.

Mythical sovereignty, he claims, is constituted by two heads: one a mighty conqueror and

the other a righteous priest. And while these two “saviors of the State” are embodied in

literal heads of State, they are realized more regularly in many cultural practices

disseminated throughout a nation of people (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 143). Yet those

cultural expressions of sovereignty are often omitted in studies of the State, which causes

them to miss the essentially cultural character of power. This is why legal or economic

descriptions of the State are not only deficient, as they the essential element of

culture, but also why they assume the State to be the ultimate agent of politics. Cultural

descriptions of the State, in contrast, not only identify what escapes cultural codes but

how to escape the State itself.

34 Escape

In addition to the two poles of sovereignty, a cultural analysis of the State considers a

third term: escape. This term traces back to some of the oldest texts on sovereignty, as

found in Dumézil’s comparative mythology, which describe a force exterior to the

sovereign. But this outside raises suspicion in the State, as any power not under its

control is considered a threat, so the sovereign curses anyone who appears to be a force of the outside – stranger, foreigner, barbarian, wildman, monster, savage! Yet the

State’s jealousy is well founded – indeed, those who escape the State embody the

obviousness of a politics without sovereignty, as their life is exterior to and distinct from

the two heads of the State (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 424-425). And

that is why they are denounced so harshly: in evading the poles of the State, these people

do not lose anything politically but in fact prove that politics emerges on its own terms

and without the commanding authority of sovereignty. The consequence of their existence

is a cultural reversal of perspective – the politics of the State is not the originator of

politics but a mere enclosure or appropriation of an already existing politics that has

captured these outsiders and put them to work for the State.

A Typology of State-forms

Cultural analysis is crucial for objecting to the virgin birth of politics in the State, which

always appears as a sleight of hand, a conjuring trick, followed by grandiose declarations

that before this particular State, there was nothing. For the State is not a divine miracle

but a cold monster that draws its power from forms of life captured between its two

poles. A cultural analysis of those poles thus reveals what “animates the State with a 35 curious rhythm,” but also analytically separates the power of the State from the underlying sources of power it commands but does not create (Deleuze and Guattari, A

Thousand Plateaus, 424). Furthermore, there are a few general types that can be identified through an analysis of its poles. And with this analysis, a typology of State forms can be derived that categorizes them according to the function of each of the two poles as they operate in isolation, together in various complimentary combinations, and as a system that alternates at different rhythms (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 161-2; 175-6).

The State-forms of this typology are: the authoritarian Archaic State that rules through conquest, the liberal Priestly State that rules through contract, the mixed Modern State that rules through The Police and Publicity, and the differently mixed Social State that uses Biopower and the Spectacle to rule over the Social.

36

Chapter 1 – The Archaic State & The Priestly State

The Archaic State of Conquest

They were on the run. As they made their hurried escape through the fields, neither of

them wanted to look back. Everyone traded tales about life in the mountains but they

were the ones daring enough to seek it out. On more than one occasion during their

getaway, fatigue threatened to consume them. And even though they were cloaked in the

dark cover of night, they thought for sure that they would be seen. But dread provided

more than enough fuel for their flight. Both of them had heard frightening stories about

the catchers – cruel, bloodthirsty men said to taunt and toy with runaways just for .

And so they amputated the burn in their legs and the ache in their bellies with the searing

horrors of being caught.

Then, right as they caught of a glimpse of a campfire in the hills, their exodus came to an

abrupt halt. The frightening figure of their captor stood out against the pale, moonlit clearing. The opaline glow of his toothy grin alone made them freeze, stupefied. But right above his devilish smirk were his sickening eyes, or really, where they should been – for

the one that was still there smoldered like fire while the other was simply a dark crater

pouring out venom. This was no usual catcher but an emissary from the sovereign

37 himself, for his clothing was too ostentatious and his weaponry too ornate, which made

his presence that much more awesome. As the terror took hold, they dropped to their

knees. Whether it was thoughtful or just reflex, they timidly demonstrated subservience in

a bid for mercy…

And then he awoke. (Where was the other?) Alone and feverish, he heard the slow

advance of an overseer. Knowing that it meant he would soon be set to work in the

throbbing heat, no matter his delirious state, he lay there for just a moment longer,

contemplating his misery.

At their most peaceful, all States dreams of capture. Yet one State-form is nothing but

unbridled conquest: the Archaic State. In a recent work, The Art of Not Being Governed, anarchist academic James C Scott describes the advent of such a State. Setting the scene,

Scott details the alluvial plains of Southeast Asia where he says that the simplest states formed in fertile valleys. The key to Scott’s account is his political economy of their emergence, which emphasizes the mass cultivation of rice. Further dramatizing the centrality of rice for these states, Scott calls them ‘padi states.’ Among the many aspects of the padi state particular to Southeast Asia, there are two more general characteristics of padi states that are crystallized in the Archaic State: first, a heavy reliance on slave labor, which is secured through raiding and trading to produce the rice; and second, an inability to span elevation, which results in State power leaving a non-contiguous footprint.

Abstracting these characteristics from what is historically specific to padi states in

Southeast Asia, it becomes clear that the basic process of the Archaic State is not 38 cultivation but conquest.

Raiding and Trading

A Burmese proverb, “Yes, a soil, but no people. A soil without people is but a

wilderness,” exemplifies the first relevant characteristic of the padi state (Scott, Art of

Not Being Governed, 70). Dispelling a common misunderstanding, this adage clarifies that manpower is the basic element of padi state political order, and not arable land. Of course land must be conquered and controlled, but labor-power is the source of power for two essential functions for the padi state: wealth, as the fruit of laborer’s work is taken as tribute, and security, as the workers are made to defend the resource intensive infrastructure needed for rice cultivation. And for this reason, the foremost indicator of a padi state’s power is its ability to capture and maintain slaves, which eventually leads to slave majorities or super-majorities in many padi states, as well as to slavery being such a common commodity that it serves as the medium of exchange. Yet this labor-power does not come voluntarily from workers hired or invited but is bled from slaves captured through war or trading and therefore requires a constant application of force, else the source of its power disappears back into the hills. State conquest thus avoids salt-the-

earth wars of annihilation because humans are the State’s most precious resource and

their lives should be preserved not wasted. But while labor-power fuels padi states, its

power grows and recedes with the forces of capture and escape and not innovations in

production. Because the padi state’s hunger for slaves is never satisfied, wars are not rare

bloody events locked away deep in the annals of the State but myriad moments in a

never-ending campaign compelled by the endless need for new labor. 39

The second relevant characteristic of the padi state is how it projects power, which can be

illustrated by way of a light bulb16 (Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 59). Consider two

attributes of its glow: first, how light dims and fuzzes as it travels farther from its source;

and second, that there is no clear edge to the light, but rather a continuous gradient that

fades to black. The State space of the padi state, which Scott describes in terms of

friction, has a similar shape and decay because it thrives in mild, unbroken terrain and

suffers at the hands of more severe conditions (43-50). Usually arising in valleys, padi

states only control land that is easily traversed, either by oxcart or fast waterways, where

the ‘light’ of influence can spread without interruption. Physical obstacles, such as sharp

changes in elevation or the difficult terrain of swamps and thick vegetation, slow down or

even obstruct sovereign influence and thus act as a fetter to its political control. This is why the State-space of padi states is often described by how quickly distance is spanned,

‘three rice-cookings’ or ‘two cigarette-smokings,’ rather than by its geometric measurement, ten feet or ten miles (48). Yet distance not only impedes the flow of goods but also drives an alternating cycle of military occupation and retreat, such as the seasonal friction that comes with monsoon season or the permanent friction of mountains that harbor escaped slaves. In Burma, for instance, military campaigns have been fought from November to February only for the kingdom to shrink to a quarter or an eighth of its

16 Scott borrows the analogy of the light bulb from Benedict Anderson who uses it describe the concept of power in Javanese culture, which he says has four essential characteristics: first, power exists independently of its possible users and thus does not require ; second, power is homogeneous and of uniform type, emerging from the same source, and is identical regardless of user; third, power exists as a fixed and limited quantity, so a rise in power in one place reduces it in another; and fourth, power is not a question of legitimacy but instead establishes what is good or evil. For more, see Anderson, “The Idea of Power in Javanese Culture.” 40 size as roads became impassable in May through October (61). Trying to work against this alternating cycle, colonial states often fight protracted wars with distance- demolishing technologies but usually see their gains washed away during the wet season nonetheless (62). So when padi states are locked in battle against the earth, its enemies develop strategies that take advantage of frictions that keep them at a distance from State rule.

In summary, Scott’s political economy of the padi state suggests that the Archaic State exists through herculean might: either the Archaic State keeps humanity in chains in a feat of strength or they break free. But even in this battle of forces, there are many who escape: there are people who establish rhythms that work against the routine ebb and flow of State governance while others adopt elusive ways of life that make them too costly for the State to pursue. Yet the permanence of their escape is established less by evasion than by distance, as the light bulb analogy demonstrates, which uses spatial separation from the Archaic State to guarantee victory over its source of power.

The Cruelties of Anti-Production

Even when acknowledging that resistance to the Archaic State utilizes the force of the outside, a theory of escape already challenges the orthodox Marxist theory of the State.

As that Marxism proposes, societies are the result of the type of production undertaken in a given society, and political economy is the only proper method for determining how those societies emerge and transform. Scott’s work typifies this Marxism – though his is an attempt to explicitly depart from Marxism – because production remains 41 central to his analysis. To put it starkly, Scott depicts hill people as ‘state-effects’ and

draws a picture of peasants painted by the strokes of state production, which therefore

defines both padi states and their escapees according to comparable modes of production

that merely contrast. The centrality of production is clear, as Scott dedicates whole

chapters to hill people’s high-altitude crop cultivation and slash-and-burn ‘swidden’

agriculture techniques. He finds that these forms of production are what allow them to

maintain a lifestyle that makes capture difficult and undesirable. However, when

considered beyond Scott’s limitations, escape demonstrates that production need not be

the centerpiece of a way of life. In fact, the people who make evasion their form of life

offer an image of existence that either fundamentally reshapes or altogether eliminates

the need for analyzing modes of production. This is because the power that emerges from

outside the State is not organized in terms of production; if anything, the people who

exist exterior to the State, such as hunter-gatherers, anticipate every mode of production

and ward off all of them (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 428-429). While

possibly counter-intuitive from the perspective of a society obsessed with production, in these societies, people find that the plentitude of the earth provides more than enough productive capacity to sustain life. Circulation and not production defines their existence, and production emerges only as the kernel of State thought and is actively suppressed.

When the State does arrive, it does not appear in parts through a slow advance in technology but invades in a flash of lightening (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,

192). Even the State cannot eliminate the anticipation and prevention of production. It instead channels and mobilizes this anti-production to ward off all modes of production but one: its own. Therefore, the State does not appear after an evolutionary leap that 42 builds upon prior modes of production; rather, it arrives the moment that production is made a mode (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 429). It can then be said that all societies are organized by anti-production while only States are organized according to production.

Hill people’s farming techniques offer a glimpse into the operations of anti-production.

Their slash-and-burn agriculture intentionally looks unappealing as a mode of production, as it gives the appearance of reckless and uncontrolled techniques that jeopardize the careful and stable wet-rice cultivation undertaken by the State. As a type of anti- production, slash-and-burn agriculture illustrates how hill life sustains itself and prevents

State production by simultaneously warding off State formation and providing means of subsistence. Yet such a way of life comes at a cost – instead of mutilating bodies to put them to work like the State, societies of plentitude mark bodies to make the means of life circulate. Tattoos, scarification, and other forms of permanent marking on the body are not simply for display but provoke circulation; they are the physical evidence of an injunction that restrains members of a social group immediately consuming whatever fruit of the earth that they directly appropriated, which in turn requires them to forge with other groups to acquire subsistence. Such coding bans direct appropriation of the means of life that one helped secure – ’you, as marked by this particular family line, can eat all except what your family has caught’ – in order to perpetuate alliances with other lines of filiation consummated through trade, marriage, and other means

(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 148-149). This social technology does not reside exclusively within non-State society, however, for the State recognizes the power of this 43 terrible alphabet and thus appropriates coding to transform circulation into a mode of

production; it extends the torturous marking to slaves, who bear marks not only from

whipping but sometimes branding, only to spare the rod for some workers, whose bodies

are mutilated enough by drudgery, while submitting all to the commands of the despot,

whose terrifying voice moves the wound inward to create a psychic pain inside the body

(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 202-217; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus, 425-426).17 State production therefore changes the function of code from a

direct code branded into the flesh of the body to the overcode of the written decree that

introduces the voice of the despot in his absence. This eliminates the group ritual of

inscription, where the whole community would establish the of authority by

festively watching a tattooing, and instead marshals a legion of bureaucrats that interpret

the absent voice of the despot under the threat of death. Overcoding is not the simple

process of replacing old taboos with new sovereign decrees, then, but a two step

operation: first, it captures groups that operate according to differing codes and puts their

lines of filiation and affiliation under a common denominator; and second, it releases

most of their codes to reorient group obligations upward in infinite debt to the sovereign.

Furthermore, state overcoding also differs in kind from coding, as it transects codes by

means of translation. So in contrast to biological codes and chemical signals, language

makes codes polyvocal and therefore interpretable, which enables expression to grow

independently of both content and substance (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

17 As Dumézil notes, the predicates for sovereigns and their actions are not normative judgments about their likability but expressions of a particular mode of sovereignty. Authoritarian sovereigns are thus ‘terrible,’ ‘horrible,’ ‘merciless’ destroyers while liberal sovereigns are ‘kind,’ ‘benevolent,’ ‘loving’ creators. An editorial tone is therefore unavoidable when describing aspects of the Archaic State as ‘terrible’ and ‘cruel’ or the Priestly State as ‘just’ and ‘forgiving’ but the underlying is to single out particular modes of violence. 44 Plateaus, 62). Overcoding still stands on the ground created by non-State peoples,

however, because the codes not eliminated by overcoding are deterritorialized and mostly

recaptured to constitute the intermediary milieu that is the State. Described

diagrammatically: the State is a grand irrigation system built by transecting separate

codes that had previously been held apart.

Yet the process of overcoding is never total and thus gives way to escape. The emperor

does not directly appropriate flows but captures them at a distance. Due to this spatial

separation, the Archaic State frees a large quantity of flows that can be turned back against it. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process:

the overcoding of the archaic State itself makes possible and gives rise to new

flows that escape from it. The State does not create large-scale works without a

flow of independent labor escaping its bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in

metallurgy). It does not create the monetary form of the tax without flows of

money escaping, and nourishing or bringing into being other powers (notably in

commerce and banking). And above all, it does not create a system of public

without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, then

beginning to pass beyond its grasp; this private property does not itself issue from

the archaic system but is constituted on the margins, all the more necessary and

inevitably, slipping through the net of overcoding. (Deleuze and Guattari, A

Thousand Plateaus, 449, trans. modified)

45 So while the ‘trinity formula’ of labor, commodities, and land – or really, profit, tax, and

rent – constitutes a three-headed apparatus of capture for the State, it cannot account for

all of the escaping flows. A whole array of flows leak from overcoding: some evade

capture like independent labor, escaped money, and private appropriation; others are

mutant flows of free activity, alternative exchange, and strange territories; while still

others have nothing to do with work, money, and land at all.

The Terrifying Magician King

The Archaic State utilizes the first pole of sovereignty, the pole of conquest. Scott leaves

little room for remarks on the magic of the State in his political economy and thus

describes the operations of the Archaic State but does not depict the sovereign himself.

The comparative mythology of Dumézil, however, outlines the mythic origins of this

pole, tracing it back to the figure of the magician-king. And in an interesting contrast with Scott’s account of escape, which relies on spatial separation, Dumézil argues that the magician-king is a great conjurer who rules at a distance (Mitra-Varuna, 146).

Indo-European mythology provides a clear entry point for considering the role of magic in sovereign conquest. Romulus, for example, twice risks defeat after founding Rome. To ensure success, Romulus invokes Jupiter, and after each victory, he founds a cult and erects temple in thanks to Jupiter (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 53-54). Romulus does not invoke Mars, as would a true warrior-chief. Rather, by invoking Jupiter, the of State,

Romulus is brought victory in two particular aspects: Jupiter as divine protector of regnum by arms, and Jupiter the great magician that performs “a sovereign conjuring 46 trick” of breaking the morale of the enemy (55). Combing these two specifications of

Jupiter, we know that the Archaic State captures by arms and by magic.

War is never directly undertaken by the Archaic State. This why the magician-king’s

greatest illusion is war, as it is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick. For in the

world beyond the Archaic State, war is an anti-State force that dissolves the king’s great

stockpiles and fragments their power through dispersion (Clastres, Archaeology of

Violence, 274-277). And even when war is appropriated by the State, it is used to shatter

the power of its enemy. This is why the original warrior is an outsider whose knows

nothing about ruling the State, only how to destroy it. Yet war is only an effect of a way

of life built around dispersion, not conflict, whose centrifugal logic maintains autonomy

(274). War is therefore a necessary but supplementary dimension of non-state people’s

existence, as it emerges only when they come in contact with a State or the city (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 417). The consequence is that States have no warriors of their own and the Archaic State must capture them from the outside, which it carefully does from a distance (417-8).

Another name for the magician-kings who seize their enemy from the outside is ‘The

Binder.’ And it is binding that specifies the connection between their use of arms and magic. War may be chaotic, but sovereign wars of conquest are not without rules; and the specific set of obligations use by the sovereign in war is the nexum of bonds and debts

(Mitra-Varuna, 98). In contrast to pacts, which are made between equal-and-willing parties, the bond is a knot tied with force. The power of bonds then comes from both 47 arms and magic, and the substance of those bonds is a shifting economy of the repayment for hostility, the cost of a life, or any other means to bind and subjugate (98; 99). The bond is cast by dazzling sovereigns – for instance, the one-eyed who raise their spear, not to fight, but to paralyze the enemy with fright (129; 139-40; 143). The resulting stupor continues far past the battle as these sovereign uses their terrifying magic to convert the loser’s fright into a bond that divides the victorious from the conquered (155).

It is through the sting of defeat that magician-kings marshal their forces by capturing the vanquished, appropriating their power from afar, and commanding them with terrifying magic.

The Archaic Sovereign thus summons its own war machine by mutilating outsiders, ridding them of any memory of life beyond the State (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus, 424-425). The mutilations of State violence do not come from war but rather as the price people must pay to work. And before it sends these appropriated subjects off to war, the State first inflicts them with a wound that never heals but continues to afflict them until they learn to relish its hot pain as a warm reminder of the suffering, sacrifice, and loss that it took to live ‘meaningful life’:

the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite

of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically

incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable

traces, the incorporation is permanent (van Gennep, Rites of Passage: 72).

48 The violence of the Archaic State therefore takes on a unique significance; it appears as

‘the magic of birth;’ a miracle, the pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified separation

from everything that came before it (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 424-

426). “This is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological,” as the State’s

existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life outside it (426).

Fleeing the Codes

The terrifying power of the magician-king is strong but blunt, which allows many codes to escape his great net. In particular, two types of flows escape the State while it is

freeing codes in order to overcode them. First, there are the scraps of decoded flows that

do not fit and are thus left behind. These relatively decoded leftovers are the cracks and

fissures that constitute the gaps between the abstract categories of the State, such as the

separation between the general rules of the Law and the singularity of the concrete

particular case. Consider a spatial example found in the vague terrain between

overlapping two Archaic States. These spaces of dual sovereignty encourage contestation

and thus subject those who reside there to multiple tributary exactions or raids to punish

disloyalty. And while this can sometimes advantage the State, these ambiguities usually

work against it. Many of the peoples living at the periphery of two States use the relative

autonomy to “strategically manipulate the situation” by playing the two States against

each other, such as people in Cambodia, tributary to Siam and Vietnam in the nineteenth

century (Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 60-1). As this example illustrates, the area at

an arms length from the State is then less a space of lawlessness than a zone of

indistinction where loosened codes are only partially overcoded but also multiplied. Such 49 ambiguity diffuses the Archaic State conquest by spreading the State’s thick overdetermined power out into a thin underdetermined application of codes. But even as strategies of confusion are multiplied within this zone of indistinction, the Archaic State makes up for the infrequency of power by amplifying its capriciousness and brutality.

The second flow to escape overcoding is a . These flows escape by virtue of their speed, as they are too swift for the State to snatch immediately after decoding. In contrast to the indistinct scraps mentioned above, these flows are not accidental or supplemental. Rather, this escape is the exodus of heretics who pervert the magic of the

Archaic State for their own purposes, leading to millennial revolts that are as regular to the feudal world as strikes are to industrial capitalism (Bloch, French Rural History,

170). The seeds of these uprisings are usually planted in secret, hidden from public view.

Yet the principles and prophecies behind these movements are hardly difficult to find; the only necessity is to hide them from the jealous eyes of the magician-king. So after circulating promiscuously, a prophet eventually appears, giving these furtive myths enough consistency to transform conspiracy into public revolt. The Burmese monk Sayan

San, for example, underwent a transformation while serving on a colonial committee surveying peasant living conditions. Through the powerful images of the Hindu bird galon, Sayan promised a utopia that would break the bond of the British and the taxes.

His followers bore the image of galons as part of their divine mission, believing their tattoos and amulets would protect them from British bullets (Aung-Thwin, The Return of the Galon King).

50 This is why, on the occasion that the magician-king casts his gaze beyond the court, his first reaction is , for all he sees are the barbarian virtues of those who speak a different tongue and act with unpalatable violence. If threatened, the Archaic State responds with its primary function, conquest, to recapture the lost codes and make them once again subservient. Yet that disgust sometimes provokes something else altogether: a prayer, where a stranger falls in supplication before the magician-king. Such a transformation is completely alien to the archaic mode of conquest, as it would require extending tolerance and civility, which are foreign to a sovereign who knows indifference but not respect.

Ultimately, we can say that the horrifying sovereign of the Archaic State does not sit on a throne of death but resides over the flesh of the living. His tools of governance are cruelty and magic; one he steals from the system of anti-production and the other is of his own invention. Together, he deploys these forces to reverse the centripetal power of the circulatory system of pain to concentrate its cruelty in a unified mode of production built on the backs of slaves. Furthermore, the magician-king boasts about the effects of his trickery, taking immense pride in the forces he accumulates in his own name, neglecting to admit that his only talent is capturing the power of others. Though other State-forms appear more restrained, all share in its thirst for conquest. And while playing down its cruelty, the Modern State and the Social do not hide this authoritarian force but simply channel it into the power of The Police and Biopower.

51 The Priestly State of Contract

A rowdy crowd swarmed the rustic path. From their hidden perch, the outsiders watched the scene unfold. At the front was a procession made up of an official-looking man flanked by two others, one in bright gaudy attire and the other much more plainly and walking with a slight limp. The whole trail was soon packed with the jubilant crowd, with some clambering up trees, others dangling their feed in the pond, and still others elbowing their way to the front. Concern spread among the group of outsiders on the rocks as they exchanged worried glances, but after someone shot an especially icy glance at the others, they kept watch from their hideout. The noise below grew to an unbearable clamor and then abruptly ceased.

The eerie silence was broken when the limping man winced, which caused the ostentatious man to launch a volley of screeching words in a foreign tongue. The crowd jeered loudly in approval. The assault continued, pausing only when he reached over to the official-looking man to snatch a sword and taunt the victim with it. Matching the rising crescendo of his rapt audience, the man raised the sword in a characteristically lurid gesture, drew blood from his prey with a light strike to the face, and brought the weapon around to his side as if preparing to deliver a lethal blow. But then the official slowly raised an arm, which was missing a hand, and interrupted the scene with a few curt words.

The crowd, somehow expecting the official’s intervention but still displeased that the

52 ritual was so perfunctory, let out of a few collective bellows before swiftly leaving. Soon afterward, the three-man procession left as well.

A jurist-priest presides over the birth of the State, in addition to the magician-king. Key myths depict a one-armed man as the arbiter of law and right who establishes faith in the

State through the execution of contracts. This faith begins with contracts of exchange between the domains of the human and the divine. And the consistency that the jurist- priest brings to these divine acts is subsequently transformed into the force of law

(Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 62). The jurist-priest thus wields a power unlike the terrifying violence of the magician-king. Rather, the priest inspires a faith that is not mystical or even magical – it is juridical. The jurist-priest is a great organizer: he constitutes a milieu, gives it form, imposes laws, disciplines its elements, and subordinates its effects to political ends (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 425). To clarify: while the conquering magician-king of the Archaic State casts magic that binds from a distance, the jurist-priest of the Priestly State establishes faith that appropriates and internalizes forces.

Magic terrorizes its target into catatonia for easy capture. Faith, in contrast, captures through conversion: by convincing the convert that they had been missing something that only the State can provide.

Faith and Debt

Jurist-priests appear as frugal, forgiving men who offer up unparalleled of peace and prosperity in good faith. This faith is not a prerequisite to social life in general, as many obligations do not require good faith. Contracts drawn up in public and before 53 witnesses, for instance, do not require good faith because it is the honor of the contractors involved that ensures that they are not violated (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 56). Following the creed “I give to you, give to me!,” jurist-priests extend a special type of offer that is sealed with no guarantee except good faith (62). Consequently, it is on the basis of belief and piety that the jurist-priest promises unbroken peace through shared contract, even to those who raid his lands (51). Piety is only one possible approach to the law. The magician-king of conquest also employs contracts, but they are not presented in good faith; rather, he treats contracts as part of his trickery. Like many things, such as his propensity to invent and abandon gods simply to ambush opponents, the magician-king uses contracts only when they suit him. However, the jurist-priest’s authority is predicated on his benevolence, so he cultivates a good that only comes through deliberation and virtue (51-52).

The appearance of the jurist-priest as a just and measured arbiter obscures the full picture of the obligation-exchange process that he governs. The process of exchange is usually thought to follow a particular order: first, equal parties take part in an exchange; and second, if one of the parties fails to uphold its end of the bargain, they cower as a subject making a plea to the authority of the jurist-priest. As one Vedic myth goes: if a man who is unable to pay his debts and is set to be beaten falls in supplication to the feet of the jurist-king, then it is forbidden to beat the man that day (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 95).

This image, while popular, is a ploy. It is a convenient subterfuge authored by the jurist- priest to make him appear as a peacemaker who either dispenses forgiveness and grace, or follows blindly infallible rules (59). Behind the apparent naturalness of exchange lies 54 the original act of sovereign appropriation, the jurist-priest’s capture of external forces,

which is later projected backward as the committing of faith. This is why Marx criticizes

the false neutrality of contracts, highlighting that the sovereign is always a vanishing

mediator, a force of authority that disappears because it is taken as a given:

“a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond so as to establish itself instead as the sole politics, the sole universality, the sole limit and sole bond” (1844 Manuscripts, Third Manuscript, 3). So the jurist-priest’s formula for exchange, “I give to you, give to me!,” is in fact a contraction of the expression “I give

that you may give,” which itself alludes to the divine ‘exchange’ of sacrifice that the

jurist-priest first exacts from his subjects before extending faith (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna,

62). Even Hobbes, the great apologist for the State, notes that the obligation to follow any particular law first requires absolute obedience to the sovereign. Consider an Icelandic tale: the gods, acting on prophecies that the wolf Fenrir will soon wreak havoc on them, decide to bind him before he is fully-grown. First through flattery and then through temptation, they try to get Fenrir to play with a special thread that is really a leash Odhinn had the Black Elves forge for him. Anticipating their deception but unwilling to lose face,

Fenrir demands that a god “place his hand in my mouth as a pledge that there will be no trickery!” Tyr, understanding in advance that he will lose his hand, pledges it because he knows that this sacrifice will transform the lie into law through exchange (141-142). And that is how the jurist-priest became the one-armed sovereign. War follows the same general formula set out in this myth – the jurist-priest is willing to directly intervene as a combatant, in contrast to the magician-king who casts his magic at a distance, because he is to commit priestly sacrifice to become the jurist who sets out the rules of war. The 55 implication is clear: the jurist-priest’s pact does not neutralize the violence of conquest objectified in the bond; rather, he regularizes its force by transforming finite debts secured in conquest into limitless obligations of faith that underwrite the force of law.

The Violence of Equivalence and Law

As a lawmaker, the jurist-priest of the Priestly State is the great inventor of responsibility, and with it, he creates a different kind of history. The timeless tales of the Archaic State tell of might and sovereign glory but their details fade with time. The Priestly State, whose exploits are far less exciting and thus lost that much quicker, memorializes itself by attacking the faculty of forgetfulness itself. Humans are forgetful animals with a powerful ability to clear out old which enables them to better live in the presence and happiness of the world (Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, B2§1,

35-36). The jurist-priest’s first great attack on this strength begins with the invention of equivalence. Through equivalence, the jurist-priest promises something to a creditor who is unable to collect a debt. In return for nothing, the creditor is then granted the pleasure of inflicting pain on his indigent debtor (B2§4, 39-40). And this is how history is made for those too insignificant to have ballads written about them. Through a “fearful mnemotechnics,” the historical record is made through a painful marking on the flesh that is strong enough to overcome forgetting. And it is within this economy of pain and pleasure that consciousness is born, most fundamentally as the awareness of one’s responsibilities and a memory of the painful cost of forgetting them (B2§3, 37-39).

Consciousness, then, is culture’s imprint on the body, which endows humans with the consanguine capacities of responsibility and regularity (B2§2, 36-37; B2§1, 35-36). It is 56 the jurist-priest’s second invention, guilt, which completes the system of pain. One might think that punishment is the cause of guilt but for most of history, punishment has not been used to improve criminals but to tame them (B2§15, 55-56). Punishment in fact either destroys or toughens a criminal rather than instilling guilt (B2§14, 54-55). The origin of guilt is found instead in the repressive conditions of the pact, which suppresses the instincts through the gnawing habits of responsibility. Unable to discharge its instincts, humanity retreats to the consciousness that lies deep within the self, which turns consciousness into the directed force that becomes the (B2§16, 56-58; B2§17, 58-

59). With the process complete, the jurist-priest thus creates a brilliant new way to capture subjects. The Priestly State does not need the costly product of conquest, generalized slavery, which treats humans as cogs in a megamachine – the Priestly State can subject humans to machines as ‘free’ workers (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus, 457). These subjects are not treated as machines; rather, they are responsible for themselves, for as Foucault says, the soul becomes the prison of the body, as the soul acts as both the medium and for the jurist-priest (Deleuze and Guattari, A

Thousand Plateaus, 457-458; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30).

The actions of the jurist-priest are no less violent than those of his horrible cousin, even if he is averse to conquest. Simply: there is no peaceful sovereign. In fact, faith is the simplest justification for violence. What the jurist-priest calls peace is merely organized violence – still war, but restricted by a sovereign prohibition on cruel acts on violence.

Such violence is not the result of bonds, which are contracts offered the enemies of the

Archaic State in compensation for utter defeat, as exploitative tricks that demand that the 57 vanquish continue furnishing the State with the spoils of war long after the battle concludes. But those who flee the cruelty of the magician-king do not free themselves from that violence but instead trade their role as the target of State violence for participation in the ‘legitimate’ violence directed by the jurist-priest.18 In return for unbinding, the jurist-priest replaces the bond with a pact, as seen in the myth of the flamen-dialis who sets free any man bound in chains that takes refuge with him. And these pacts sanction the ongoing violence among the followers of the Priestly State

(Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 142). An example is the system of mutual-obligation of ‘the four neighbors’ instituted by the Qin State (778-207 BCE). Following the suggestion of

Legalist (390-338 BCE), society was broken into five-person groups (wu- jen) of military officers, peasant, families, merchants, bureaucrats, etc. When a single member of the cell was found guilty of , all five were punished (Hulsewé, Remnants of Ch’in Law, 145-6). The key innovation of the law was its reflexive extension of sovereign responsibility to all of the faithful that included a mechanism of self- management that requires people to police each other (Dean and Massumi, First and Last

Emperors, 25).

The Law As Shared Means for Private Appropriation

The role of organized violence in the Priestly State deserves a strong clarification. The

Priestly State does not pacify its subjects in the same way that the Archaic State does, by stunning its population through repression in order to set them to work in the fields while still in a stupor. The Priestly State organizes violence through its subjects by means of

18 See the previous footnote, which outlines how sovereign predicates are not normative but descriptive. 58 discipline and logistics, which forms a general system of flows. For instance, all property in the Archaic State is public; officials and feudal lords are simply stewards of the magician-king’s wealth, and peasants do not own the common lands but live on it through usufruct. The public under the Priestly State, in contrast, is not coextensive with everything under the purview of the sovereign but with the legal structure constructed by the sovereign as the shared means of private appropriation (Deleuze and Guattari, A

Thousand Plateaus, 451). The key distinction between the two forms of the public lies in the role of code for each of the two sovereigns. For the magician-king, overcoding produces a surplus value of code that he expends through the terror of his voice while issuing decrees. Alternatively, the jurist-priest deploys overcoding to appropriate and conjoin flows. Because of the different uses of code, the regime of signs between these two State forms also differ – The Archaic State utilizes the imperial signifier whose force is unitary and metaphysical, treating its subjects like cogs in a bio-social megamachine, while the Priestly State engages in the processes of subjectification, which deliver the paradoxical ‘voluntary servitude’ of the pact (451). In summary, the three essential process of organization under the Priestly State are subjectification, appropriation, and resonance.

The pacts of the Priestly State form an intraconsistency that enables resonance. This consistency is an internality built within already existing points of order – geographic, ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological – not external terms, which would connect to form the transconsistency of the network (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus, 432-433). Moreover, the intraconsistency of the State is not established by 59 simple forced coordination, as networks of towns do in building roads, but appropriated

by cutting away and isolating given elements. Yet the isolating function of appropriation does not eliminate elements’ relations to other elements, rather, it reconstitutes those relations as exterior to but still mediated by the State, which allows them to be controlled, inhibited, and slowed down through indirect control (432; 433). For example, the sovereign does not ask for this particular object, that territory, or a unique type of activity in tribute – the jurist-priest demands land, labor, and commodities in general, hence the invention of money, which, contrary to the tall tales of neo-classical economists, was not invented as a solution to the problem of the mutual coincidence of needs. Rather, money is a medium for direct comparison that is imposed on subjects by sovereigns for the purpose of monopolistic appropriation (444; Graeber, Debt). And it is through this act of comparison that the jurist-priest’s function as divine medium between the sacred and the profane proves pivotal – by placing himself as both fully human but fully sacred, the just- priest overwrites the circulatory patchwork to the divine, which requires them to pass through him as holy arbiter of all value on earth (433). The sovereign attempts to seize the whole trinity with such a scared declaration: territory is treated as directly comparable land, which produces differential rent and the landowner; activity is treated as directly comparable work, which produces profit and the capitalist; and objects are treated as commodities, which produces currency and bankers (444). Yet the jurist-priest does not consume all land, work, and commodities but creates a circuit of power whereby they circulate through him; this form of circulation is called resonance, and the State thus becomes a resonance chamber. Resonance can thus be succinctly described as the process of isolating local connections, making them comparable through global equivalence, only 60 to set them free once again in orbit around a State-established power center. To be clear: these power centers are not the intersection where many points of order mesh together but a point on the horizon that stands behind all the other points of order. The consequence is that the Priestly State grows through mutation, in contrast to the Archaic State’s pursuit of consistency. This is the power of conjunction – while the Archaic State overcodes flows to chop them into manageable segments, the Priestly State demands freedom for the purpose of conjoining flows to resonate.

Peace Outside the State

Jurist-priests may appear to be the more reasonable of the two twins of sovereignty but neither is necessary to mediate conflict. Non-state societies provide ample examples of authority-less chiefs that ceremonially imitate the jurist-priest but escape the juridical pact and the power that comes with it. Ethnographic evidence draws a clear picture of a titular chief that is charged with the tasks of arbitration, distribution, and oration

(Clastres, Society Against the State, 29). These chiefs do not execute their duties by power or right. In arbitration, the titular chief is not afforded any force in settling disputes and therefore seeks to reconcile through prestige, fairness, and rhetoric alone. And because the chief lacks the coercive power of jurist-priests, their motivation to resolve disputes is the status and respect bestowed on them by their peers, which diminishes while conflicts simmer (30). The second task, distribution, is the converse of the Archaic bond – the chief is obligated to provide a near constant flow of gifts to his people. The people carry such a strong right to continuously loot their chief that they are never afraid to throw out their current leader to find one less stingy or more resourceful. This is why 61 anthropologists joke that “you can always tell the chief because he has the fewest possession and wears the shabbiest ornaments” (30). Lastly, a chief is valued for his words. The chief must rely on his words in maintaining peace while generously distributing possession, but also in proving his fitness as a leader in general. The role of speech may vary, as some groups demand a discourse before sunset, while for others it is customary to demand a speech but to ignore his words completely – yet all understand speech to be an capacity that the chief must master before he is afforded even a modicum of political power (31-32).

An empty throne much like that of the titular king has been worshipped time and again.

Consider the English Dissenters that sprouted in the interregnum following the First

English Civil War. A strange cast of pacifists, egalitarians, rural communists, pantheists, unitarians, and mystics, they created a world where the only crown was that of God

Himself – wrested from human hands, left open for the second coming. While these groups broke their earthly bonds through an appeal to various versions of the transcendent, their radical impulse flows from the same river as all utopian projects. In fact, , a popular alternative to the pact, practices consensus-based decision-making as developed by the Quakers, who emerged during this time of

Protestant upheaval. Present but largely unacknowledged during the civil rights movement, consensus-based decision-making was transformed into an explicitly political tool during the anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s. From then on, consensus-based decision-making grew in notoriety: it was embraced by anarchists in the 1980s, formed the centerpiece of anti-globalization actions in the 1990s, and entered the popular 62 consciousness through Occupy’s famous ‘General Assembly.’ In its progression from a

Protestant tool of protest to decision-making process, consensus has enlarged from a device for striking down the false idols of the State to a weapon against all forms of transcendent authority – consensus dissolves the bond secured through conquest, an unbinding power it borrows from the arsenal of the jurist-priest, as its in-built anti- grants free association that prevents governance from progressing until the body receives consent from all of its members. And possibly more important for the current era, consensus provides an avenue for people in a society trained to endlessly opine without consequence to have their opinions actually take effect (Graeber, Direct

Action, 318-320).

But as scholars attentive to the religious roots of consensus have identified, consensus is not an anti-sovereign force, as consent derives its power from a silent solidarity with the jurist-priest – it is a mere radicalization of the pact. And at the heart of consensus, as in the pact, is faith. Quakers see the ritual of consensus as an expression of divine will and only hesitantly agree with outsiders who suggest that it is a political tool. Furthermore, without the weight of divine will, which creates a pact of infinite debt between those participating in consensus, political groups find consensus-making difficult. Large groups usually lack the shared investments required to forge consensus while smaller groups consensus-making is regularly foiled by veto-holders who act irrationally or without altruism (Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 22-27). Some anarchists insist that consensus brings out the best dimensions of human and therefore view the struggle to overcome the problems of consensus as a political aim unto itself, as if every consensus 63 brought humanity itself to rationality and altruism. But the existential of consensus is an ineffective means to engineer desire, as it does not eliminate the organized violence of the State but simply imitates it. Perhaps it is only Nietzsche’s forgetful man that can subvert the jurist-priest. But disagreement, cynicism, or malice is not needed to undermine the pact, though they often do. And without jurist-priest’s offer of faith or the rod, the consensual pact barely holds more sway than a bad habit or a passing interest.

In short, the liberal preference for the contract over conquest only replaces faith for the rod without modifying the outcome. Due to the ease with which the State enrolls subjects through faith, other State-forms offer further elaborations on the contract. The Modern

State universalizes faith, secularizing the divine authority of the jurist-priest to nationalize faith, making it a capacity available to everyone and thus compulsory for all subjects of the State. The Social State emphasizes the other side of faith, spreading a universal indebtedness that the State uses to take ownership for and manipulate the conditions of everyday life. Illustrated by the jurist-priest and subsequent State-forms’ radicalization of faith is the hidden power of the contract, which extends through two complementary forces: the violence of equivalence and the shared means of private appropriation. These forces invalidate theories of consent based on the illusions of non- coercion and by consequence, the fiction of the consenting individual. The actions of the faithful are not driven by private motivations codified in contract but through violence and exploitation, which is sponsored by the State. Even in its crudest form, the Priestly

State is able to portray its actions as kind and benevolent, but the intensification of these 64 actions in Publicity and the Spectacle further venerate the State by making contracts appear not just beneficial but inevitable and necessary.

65

Chapter 2 – The Modern State & The Social State

The Modern State

The machine emitted strange buzzing, whirring, and clicking sounds. The noises unsettled casual observers, but to the technician, it made beautiful music. She had listened to its movements so many times that she did not have to look at the monitor to pick out the slow set of clicks that marked the beginning of each cycle. Tck... Tck... Tck... Tck...

The machines had been a triumph over the archaic technology that came before it. It took the dreams of stargazers and a few steady hands to crank out the first prototypes. Even the wildly imperfect geometry of the early models still hypnotized onlookers.

She was charged with maintaining a machine from a newer line. The introduction of this version of the machines had ushered in a new era. In her land, authorities were crushed under the feet of rebelling peasants. As nobles bickered with the monarchy, a new class claiming to “represent the people” had seized power. But instead of quelling the waters, wars became more bloody. And there are still dissident factions trying to destroy the machines through sabotage or even cruder methods.

66 It is her task to keep the machine running. The rules are clear. Polarize the field.

Alternate poles. Keep everything in orbit. She had been trained in basic geometric correction, which usually entailed resetting the aperture but sometimes required redacting elements. While no one told her how to control for the creeping tide of noise, she had come up with some makeshift bypasses. But if a long-term solution was eluding her, her fellow technicians were probably in just as much trouble...

Forging a Strange Complementarity

The political power of sovereignty goes through cycles. Imperial hymns sing of terrible kings’ conquests as well as the reigns of the great kings that follow. But let there be no mistake, terrible kings are only as stupid, brutish, ineffective, or disliked as good kings are inept, violent, and unpopular. That is because those labels merely indicate which of the two poles of sovereignty each ruler personifies. Horrible sovereigns are terrorizing magician-kings, and benevolent ones are jurist-priests. Much as the diplomat gets his way by switching between the carrot and the stick, sovereignty alternates between the two poles to maximize power. “Thus two kings in succession, by different methods, the one by war, the other by peace, aggrandized the state. Romulus reigned thirty-seven years,

Numa forty-three: the state was both strong and well versed in the of war and peace”

(Livy, The History of Rome, Book 1, 27). But the opposite is also true. A-cephalous societies evince a similar two-headed structure to ward off rather than reinforce State power. In the Americas, for instance, some groups had two chiefs, a war chief and a peace chief, whereby only one ruled at a time. Whenever one leader became too zealous, the people would mock him and follow the other leader. Especially in combination with 67 the generalization of the ‘powerless’ titular king and the ritualization of war to disperse

power rather than annihilate or enslave an opponent, these societies exemplify how the

oscillations of sovereignty can be used against an accumulation of forces (Clastres,

Society Against the State; Clastres, Archaeology of Violence).

Given the contrasting examples above, we can generalize by saying that the two poles of

sovereignty form a complementarity. But the form and effects of that complementarity

differ. Fortunately, the rhythm of the alternating poles produces a signature: the

expression of the world that stands as the backdrop behind each State.19 A Roman ritual

produces the clear signatures of the Priestly and Archaic States by repeating the practice

of only allowing a single pole of sovereignty to rule at any given time: once a year, the

flamen-dialis priest turns a blind eye for a day so that the naked Luperci can run wild and

belt women with leather straps in a reenactment of the conquest of the Sabine women

(Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 27-30; 96-97). Obversely, the two poles can maintain

independent signatures while remaining mutually reinforcing; for example, Varuna and

Mitra nearly always exist as a pair in Vedic hymns. While the two gods are

contemporaneous, or even co-present, they are still distinct and separate. So “Mitra may

fasten you by the food,” but if a cow were bound without any special formula, “then she

would be a thing of Varuna” because “the rope assuredly belongs to Varuna” (Dumézil,

19 “The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive, expressive qualities, or matters of expression, are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in the sense that these qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not the indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 316). 68 Mitra-Varuna, 97; Satapatha Brahmana III 2, 4, 18). Yet the complementarities formed when the poles turn a blind eye, exist contemporaneously, or are a mixture of the two express a basic structure that can be easily extrapolated by elaborating on the Archaic and

Priestly States. Other complementarities, however, produce State forms that do more than combine the poles: they pursue different effects by transforming the poles themselves.

One complementarity bears a signature that differs from the mythological State forms: the Modern State. In the Modern State, the two poles of sovereignty are neither separate nor mixed, but fused. The transitional figure for this fusion is the Absolute State. In the

Absolute State, the two mythological poles are united under the single crown of an imperial despot. This inseparable mixture of sovereignty creates a unitary power that aspires to be the single point of order for the entire cosmos. These despots spring up everywhere, but we remember most clearly the European kingdoms that took over the priestly duties of shepherding the flock in the aftermath of the Reformation. The techniques of discipline and confession advanced when the Absolute State intensifies both the magical bond and the priestly pact. Through the disciplinary bond, the conquering king generalizes power through the body, which provides force, an immanent power emitted from the internal organization of its parts. And in the confessional pact, the pacifying priest harmonizes the self through the soul, a power constituted through reflection. Yet these techniques also throw the Absolute State into crisis, since populations are no longer medals to be worn on the chest with pride but instead must be anxiously tended with care and concern. And because magicians make poor jurists and

69 kings atrocious priests, the Absolute State is only a transitional form that sets into a series of operations that transform it into the Modern State.

The Four Operations of the Modern State

The Modern State is composed of The Police and Publicity. The Police ensures that every thing is put in its proper place. Publicity sees that every action is provided a public explanation. These poles are the result of four operations: separation, organization, spatialization, and systematization. It is through these four operations that the Modern

State discards the mythological ground of the Archaic and Priestly states and gains a footing in the divergent paths of economics and politics through liberalism. As an effect of these operations, conquest and contract fade into the background and only occasionally get dragged out as inadequate justifications for the Modern State when it demands death and sacrifice. Otherwise, the Modern State appears as a well-oiled machine. Its existence does not depend on miraculous birth, as in the two mythological states, but on the banal fact that ‘as long as everyone does their job, it works.’ Failure can only appear as something being out of place, or a momentary lapse in transparency.

Separation is the first operation that gives rise to the Modern State. Mythological States project power through the glory and justness of their reign. Yet order and reason wage war on those mythological States by slowly tearing down the ramparts that defend its authority. Myths cannot but wither from fantasies for a State that would tend to “all the living conditions of the people” or demands that laws to be passed “before the eyes of men” (de Mayerne, La Monarchie Aristodemocratique; Kant, Perpetual Peace, 185-196). 70 Besieged by iron efficiency and blistering critique, a waning older form of sovereignty learns to excrete a new substance that will serve as the new substrate on which to build back State power. And when the State stops fighting order and reason but instead turns those partisan weapons into the tools of universal governance, the Modern State is born.

The modern transformation of the two poles of sovereignty occurs in the paired work of the two processes of modernization: the production of a new substance that delivers order and the technological transformation of a weapon into a tool. The modernization of the first pole discards conquest but retains the sovereign quest for glory through the appearance of splendor. By importing the technique of discipline, the power of The

Police in the Modern State prefer symbols of strength to the garish displays of royal bragging. The Police shares the aim of conquest, as they both perform the positive task of adding to the strength of the State. But the Modern State is a two-part technological advancement of order over conquest. First, the army and the law are relegated to the negative task of repelling enemies externally and internally. And second, the Police enhances the already existing forces of the State through the permanent intervention in the lives and behavior of citizens. The motor of conquest, the practice of capturing outsiders to put them to work, is replaced by a well-ordered State that adorns itself with the wealth and happiness of its people. Concurrently, the second pole is modernized by abandoning sovereign right for public reason. The modernizing introduction of the confessional mode to governance installs reflection as the highest principle of politics.

While the mythic jurist demands faith in the benevolent rulings of a jurist who communicates between humanity and the divine, Publicity establishes laws through 71 public right as authorized by the general will of the people. This leap occurs when the history of sovereignty is separated from the sovereign. The initial separation happens as sovereign history is weaponized and turned against the State, for instance, when

European nobles recast sovereign history as a history of betrayals and from the nobility. As that battle over history rages, however, the State vanishes to become a hidden mediator because it serves as both the object and space of struggle. The separation completes itself when history speaks of citizens who recognize the Modern State as an expression of their own right and will.

The second operation of the Modern State is organization. The poles of sovereignty are embodied differently in each State form. Mythological States personify their poles, and they weave deceitful magicians and kind judges into the fabric of their art and culture.

The frightening monotheism of absolute despots also embody the State in human form, but these sovereigns imagine their body to extend to everything they can touch. For them, all the land serves as a great skeleton upon which human subjects hang as flesh to be dressed with the sovereign’s great wealth. If there was any doubt, take a glance at the frontispiece of The Leviathan. Modernization breaks the grand game of chess whereby the singular task is to capture your opponents king. To modernize the State, the whole body of the deposit must be split apart. After cutting the head of the king off its amalgamated body, the rest of the State is dismantled and slowly pieced back together again. The Modern State puts together the fragmented body of the sovereign by institutionalizing the two poles of the sovereignty. The effects of this institutionalization are the figures of the Modern State: The Police and The Public. 72

The switch from personified power to the figures of The Police and The Public through institutionalization enables a new mode of governance. Once the king’s organs are freed from the elaborate rituals performed to maintain the corporeal integrity of the king, they are each set out to complete their own specific functions. With a mode of governance that sets so many things in orbit, Modern States are overrun by a multiplication of institutions that deal with tasks like justice, war, and finance. Yet The Police is not just one institution amongst the others but an entire art of government that oversees them all

(Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 414). Contrary to the specific and limited tasks of other institutions within the Modern State, The Police is charged with securing all forms of co-existence, and seeing to their well-being (420-422). Furthermore, The Public emerges as the mediator of these institutions. In Archaic and Absolute States, all things are public, as the sovereign owns them, but by his grace, he is willing to share. In the

Modern State, however, the nobility seize those public assets for themselves. What is left becomes The Public. The Modern State does not grant access to the public through benevolence or grace: it sets standards and rules to manage access on the basis of legal conflict and material scarcity instead.

Spatialization is the third operation of the Modern State. Spatialization is the result of the

Modern State breaking through the Absolute State’s totalizing . Once separated from the circular logic of omnipresent authority, the Modern State is forced into a sober realization: sovereign power is only one force among many other possible forces. Given the pluralization of force, the Modern State responds by calculating power as a matter of 73 physics. To produce this political physics, force is first materialized by slowing down the forces within its control. Land is appraised, people counted, commodities tracked, and conduct evaluated. From this ecology of forces, the Modern State slowly introduces linear time and a discretization of space to mark out discrete blocks of space-time that serve as the architecture for its power. Like a giant relief sculpture, the Modern States is a material form carved out of a single block to reveal what lies beneath. The Modern State begins from a territorial mass, framed from the earth, from which the sculpture will be formed. To stabilize its form and find the shape imagined to already exist inside, the

Modern State first eliminates excessive forces through subtraction (land is partitioned, deviants locked up, black markets shut down). Next, to bring the frozen world back to life, it sets certain forces within that territory back in motion through manipulation (the fields are seeded, goods made, and currency exchanged). Next, to enhance, supplement, and cover up imperfections, it introduces institutions that intervene within forces through addition (emptied monasteries are made into factories, indigents put to work, and the army professionalized). And lastly, to transact between the still porous inside and the world outside it, it enables exchange through substitution (regions annexed, skilled workers imported, and foodstuffs sold). To complete the process, The Police put a station on every corner and a patron on every street, all set up to keep watch over the recently surveyed territory of the Modern State.

The poles of sovereignty are materialized as a result of the four sculptural methods of spatialization. With spatialization of The Police in the Modern State, the irregular army of obligation is replaced with legions of professionals. These professionals include the 74 petty police, as in the ones that shout orders and detain people, but also include any

number of policy advisers, license granters, and paper stampers. In short, they are anyone

who abandons the abstract duty to a liege in order to better find a place in whatever is at

hand. Plenty of court jesters and sycophants fill their ranks, but the bottom line is that

everything has to be identified, counted, and divided; rewarded and punished. And

regardless of who asks, their reports must stay the same. Likewise, the spatialization of

Publicity in the Modern State creates the public sphere. We are told that the public sphere

is a loose connection of coffee shops and salons where critics debate official policy and

cook up pamphlets to spread dissent. However, there is more to public space than shops

and squares. Politics exists in the Modern State as a space of appearance, the organization

of people acting and speaking together (Arendt, Human Condition, 198). And in the

Modern State, the spatialization of publicity occurs when personal opinion is made

political. Yet the public sphere is not born out of good will but the uneasy consensus

between government and critique. The Modern State gives citizens a monopoly on

morality in return for keeping the monopoly on force. Therefore, whenever critique is

transformed into force, the State swoops in to shut down the presses, quash the , and

jail the subversives. Publicity is set to the specific terms of the public sphere: “Argue as

much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!”20

The Modern State’s fourth operation is systematization. The disciplinary power generated through a micro-physics of the body lays the groundwork for this process. The disciplining demonstrated in monks strict regulation of the body in time and space –

20 Attributed to King Frederick II by Kant in “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” 55. 75 from the time-table they set to perform daily routines to the architecture of the monastery, and from the pacing of fasting and meals to the gestures of prayer – paradoxically increases the body’s power by limiting it. The Modern State demonstrates through systematization that knowledge can be disciplined as much as bodies. Systemization begins with technical , which appear as a disparate multiplicity of practical approaches to local problems, and disciplines them. This disciplinary power draws in knowledge to systematize the two poles of sovereignty: through selection, expensive knowledges are made frugal; in normalization, independent knowledges are made interchangeable; through hierarchicalization, particular knowledges are subordinated to a general system of classification; and finally, by centralizing all three procedures under a system of control, State Science becomes the handmaiden for extending sovereignty

(Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179-182). And so through the development of a science of policing and the technologies of publicity, States become fully Modern.

State Science subtly transforms the occasional brutality of conquest into the permanent violence of The Police. In fact, the Modern State does not use violence to escalate combat but as a system of preemptive and preaccomplished force that is justified before it is used.

In 1806, the British Mercantilist Patrick Colquhoun indicated in the preface of A Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis that “Police in this Country may be considered as a new science; the properties of which consist not in the Judicial Powers which lead to

Punishment, and which belong to the Magistrate alone; but the PREVENTION AND

DETECTION OF , and in the other Functions which relate to INTERNAL

REGULATIONS for the well ordering and comfort of Civil Society” (Preface, 1). 76 Alternately, the German Cameralist Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi imagined The

Police to be more than the basis for a utopia of a well-ordered and well-behaved state, or

even the long arm of a systematic set of regulations to be followed, but rather a

disciplined science that fosters both the lives of citizens and the strength of the State. His

science of The Police, polizeiwissenschaft, combines the ancient art of government with

statistics (“the science of describing States”).21

Publicity follows a slightly different path. Publicity is not unique to the Modern State.

Gods, monarchs, and aristocrats of all sorts enjoy the publicity of representation of the grand show of personal attributes found in the finer points of formal rhetoric, the elaborate customs of greeting and poise, the garish display of dress, and the self- important insignias of badges and arms.22 For representation in those States, the mere presence of a person of publicness makes things visible that were otherwise so worthless as to be invisible. Everything too lowly to be made public is the mere ordinariness of the common. But the Modern State wants to cast its gaze everywhere. Therefore, the Modern

State does not just overturn the exclusive right to publicness but demands universal participation in the publicity of representation. To paraphrase Kant: “Each person was called to be a ‘publicist,’ a scholar ‘whose writings speak to his public, his world’”

(Habermas, Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. 106). To publish its nation

21 Interestingly, polizeiwissenschaft gave rise to political economy. This transition marks the historical moment when capitalism tries to make a jump from the coercive pole of sovereignty to the contract pole. This point is not lost on Marx, who famously points out that the bloody expropriations of original accumulation only later turned into the silent compulsions of the market in Capital: Volume 1. When economics rises to the status of a science, after the marginalist revolution of the late 19th-Century, it creates just-so stories that try to break its ancestral ties to the repressive force of the Police. 22 For a thorough treatment of the arts of representation under the French Monarchy, consult Louis Marin’s excellent study of the “incessant crisscrossing” of and kingship in seventeenth century . 77 of publicists, the Modern State authorizes freedom of speech, mass literacy, state-run presses and publications, and electrification – in short, the technologies of publicity that make up the media. And from this systematized visibility, sovereignty has a grand stage for its theater of operations: the public display of personal preference.

Insurgencies

A number of mechanisms prevent the Modern State form accomplishing full totalization of the forces that it engages. From within the Modern State, there are paths of resistance always available by virtue of the mechanisms that keep it operating. The first internal resistance is revolutionary eschatology. The plodding history that underwrites the

Modern State is short-circuited by the notion that one is living in the ‘end times.’ Such a disruption dreams of the end of politics, the withering of the State, and a perpetual peace.

This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with civil society (Foucault,

Security, Territory, Population, 453). The second internal resistance is the right to revolution. While the Modern State does away with demanding allegiance, it requires obedience to the law. But those rules of obedience are occasionally broken. To change the law, some rise up and break the law. This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with the population (453-454). And the third internal resistance is partisan knowledge. The Police and Publicity of the Modern State act as if they hold the truth of what is happening and what must be done. But some come to feel that every nation within the phenomenal republic of interests possesses their own truth and are entitled to their own knowledge. This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with nations (454). The intertwining of these three forms of resistance is incorporated into the 78 Modern State even as they oppose the State and therefore constitute its genetic makeup.

Opposition to any particular Modern State through these mechanisms presumes a new or better state but not a world without them. Yet the Modern State is not monolithic. Rather, its escape routes are simply found elsewhere.

Decisive disruptions to the expansive geometry of the Modern State come from the outside. This outside is not a great beyond but a power that camps outside the gates of the

City. Barbarian is the name given to these destructive foreigners who have arrived at regular intervals throughout the long history of States. What distinguishes the Barbarian from other outsiders is that these foreigners are not educated in the language of the polis, and so their conduct appears to be a savage roughness that inexplicably ends in blinding violence (Crisso and Odoteo, Barbarians, 40-42). Barbarians appear immune to the mechanisms deployed by the Modern State to reign in everyone and everything around it.

Without a common language, the State lacks the means to form a pact that would reconcile differences and ease conflict. And without the possibility of negotiating a truce, the Modern State fights these invaders to the last drop of blood (42).

Barbarians also upset the emissaries of the State who feel compassion or even affinity for them. Even though the Modern State wields power as a physics of controlling bodies in time and space, communication remains the essential means for connecting those bodies across time and space. Incommunicable bodies that prattle in a foreign language or unintelligibly stammer from not knowing what to say or how to say it right are treated as dangerous. The fear is that once the tongue is paralyzed, they will use their hands to 79 relieve frustration (Crisso and Odoteo, Barbarians, 47). But the real hurdle to stopping

Barbarians is that they sow infantile disorder (for in Latin, infans are the speechless and

inarticulate, in addition to being childlike) by following their passions, which drives them

to struggle furiously. This leaves the Modern State, founded on obligation and ‘a good

days work,’ to ineffectively castigate its offspring and demand that they get a job (45).

Tolerance, resignation, and respect will never be enough to turn away the guttural sounds

and thoughtless acts of Barbarians motivated by hatred, fury, and outrage (52).

The Social State

They are the same as us now, but nobody told her. She had to figure it out for herself. At

first she second-guessed herself. How could those machines, those things, be the same?

Before it had been so clear: the rules, the enemy... everything. But now that she knew, she

felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath her, as if anything could change at

a moment’s notice. In fact, just last week, a childhood friend of hers was dragged in for

questioning. How could the idiots at the bureau think that he is one of them?

Even worse, she felt like she was the only one worrying. Everyone else seemed so damned

indifferent. Of course people need to get on with their lives. But, with those things in our midst, threatening our very way of life, why were people acting so carefree? That is surely what confused her the most: that once something carried in the opinion polls it was made into policy; even something as treasonous as embracing those putrid things.

80 With this, she thought as she looked at her hands, I will surely cross the line. If there even

are lines anymore. People need to understand the real cost of their petty little guarantees.

The wars waged in the name of a house, a job, and three meals a day.

But just then she heard a loud knock on her door...

The Rise of The Social

In the Modern State, the two poles of sovereignty work together to create an elegant geometry of forces. In the Social State, they create an interface that grafts otherwise unrelated elements together into a whole organism.

If the Modern State is the complementarity of politics and economics, through the politics of Publicity and the science of The Police, then the Social State is an intensification of this complementarity through the blurring of the two poles of sovereignty. While the

Modern State de-personified the two poles of sovereign by wresting its authority from the power of both the king and the priest, it still organized society from above, like a commander sending troops into the field. The Social State does not wield the two poles of sovereignty as two different tools to ply matter but rather connects them through by making them co-extensive with the whole social field.

On its face, the co-extension of the politics and economics given by the Modern State would seem infeasible. The politics of right speaks the maxim ‘my rights end where

yours begin,’ whereas the economics of preservation follows an alternate one: ‘my selfish 81 interests multiply with those of others to satisfy everyone’s needs’; one is private and limited, the other public and shared (Lazzarato, “Biopolitics / Bioeconomics,” 5). In an attempt to stave off a false resolution that would subordinate one term to the other, the rear-guards of the Modern State screamed out that economics irreversibly degrades politics, whether by turning politics into measured calculations, or by depoliticizing the struggle for life with the competition of men (ibid). But the architects of the

Social State silenced most critics by finding an invention in an art of government that combines these forms of power: The Social.

The Social arises when the State ceases to be the tyrannical head of society and becomes a poison seething through the whole organism. Its operations are constructed from a combination of the two poles of sovereignty. To bring The Social to life, however, the poles are not simply modified but made somewhat indistinct, as each pole is given characteristics of the other. In this transformation they are made into Biopower and The

Spectacle (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §48). The science of The Police is stripped of the moral philosophy from which it was birthed. As the science of prevention, The

Police governs possibilities, but with Biopower, it is given the additional task of conditioning possibility itself. Moreover, the relative autonomy of the public sphere is taken from Publicity. So in addition to determining what appears, The Spectacle shapes how those things appear. In short: The Social is a collection of worlds made evident by

The Spectacle and Biopower (Anonymous, Call, Scholium II).23

23 Or, as the authors of Call would insist, when we talk about worlds we are really talking about the sensible, which they take from the work of Jacques Rancière. 82

The Social exists as a hybrid in which differing forms of power are captured. But its contours are vague, as the knowledge, institutions, and people that inhabit The Social are an irregular mixture of worlds that have all somehow been made into ‘social problems’ – social illnesses like drug use, social programs for health and reproduction, as well as anti- social perverts and gang bangers (Deleuze, “Rise of the Social,” ix). Once something is caught within the pincers of The Spectacle and Biopower, it is socialized according to three principles:

First, The Social makes guarantees. The Social takes care of you, it gives you something to believe in, and it promises you progress. These social guarantees are not certainties but bargains; for antagonism is the real target of socialization. The social body is grown through massification, the production of great masses, such as races, classes, and other categories. And the rise of the mass lends itself to a whole series of frictions, tensions, and outright conflicts that could prove fatal. These differences are bridged when The

Social fosters solidarity. The most familiar example of solidarity, worker’s call for

‘solidarity forever,’ intensifies conflict by closing off solidarity within a mass, but this limited solidarity is overtaken when The Social creates solidarity across masses. The key tools in the production of solidarity are social rights, which are the guarantees made by the Social State to make up for the shortcomings of society. Once made social, Biopower takes on problems as a matter of management; workplace injury or poverty are no longer the fault of a negligent boss or capitalist exploitation, just simple administrative oversights. As a result of addressing these ills through these bureaucratic means, the 83 Social State makes a nation of claimants who are entitled to compensation from the State

(Donzelot, L’Invention du Social, 139; 175; 224). And once cooperation is secured, The

Social then projects itself into the future. Behaviors are set, trends extrapolated, and the future is determined as a well-mananged social aggregate.

Second, The Social produces human nature. All States employ human bodies for their ability to produce objectively determinable products such as life, labor, and language. Yet within the Social State, humans are not really set to work for those products themselves but for their appearances, which condition and structure lived experience (Foucault,

Order of Things, 352-4). Here, The Social works as a great anthropological machine that objectively changes the of humanity. But transforming the embodied structures by which humans experience the world requires more than convincing them that their lived experience is an illusion. Therefore, The Spectacle manipulates the unconscious structure of norms, rules, and systems that give rise to the representations of function, conflict, and that underwrite how humans think of their world (361-

366; 373-387). Ultimately, by making political the axiom that humans both condition and are conditioned by the sensible, the Social State constructs humanity out of what appears, and nothing else.

Third, The Social looks like a giant organism. This organicity treats social problems through the anatomy of bodies. The architecture of the Modern State is the hardened exoskeleton of the insect, which serves as a container that simultaneously connects its various segments and protects its fragile interior from the outside. But the fortress walls 84 must come down to lay a Social infrastructure extending into the countryside. Therefore, the Social State introjects the mineralized exterior of the exoskeletal shell, converting it into an endoskeletal structure that it stretches across the earth (DeLanda, A Thousand

Years of Nonlinear History, 27; 84; 92). Hanging on its ever-growing infrastructure is a biopolitical membrane for the Social State to interact with a whole web of life.

Importantly, that membrane allows the Social State to exchange with elements without internalizing them. This membrane also allows the State to fold in taken-for-granted aspects of the external environment into The Social and organ-ize them so that the State directly regulates certain necessities of life.

While the refracting expanse of The Social does not eliminate conflict, the social conflict it engenders looks nothing like the protracted civil wars of other States. Simply put, social conflict floats because it replaces the law with norms; The Social exercises control through a patchwork system of guidelines that float and change as they interact. Other

States rely on standards set by the law to which the issues of the day are pegged (these are the proper religious practices, those are the actions of a criminal). Instead of standards, which stick reference points into the swirling uncertainty of change, free- floating norms are used to manage conflicts against and through one another rather than on their own. Unpunctuated by coordinates, this expanding block of norms is a mobile mass of intersecting concerns, with none considered valuable in their own right. This unmooring demonstrates the shifting role of a State invested in The Social. Without the law, the Social State employs a positive form of power. Norms reign, not by introducing the lost concept of the normal, but by ensuring that everything under the gaze of The 85 Spectacle becomes normalized. Normalization does not care if you are good or bad,

normal or abnormal, rather, it only cares what is possible and impossible. Conflict, while

still at times a liability, is then fashioned into a tool of governance that creates as well as

destroys. And instead of preserving fundamental interests such as rights by quelling

internal conflicts, this State proves its worth by winning modest victories to satisfy social

interests (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 71).

Norms help feed the Social State’s truly global aspirations. Even though The Social is an

oddly shaped net that catches an even stranger set of problems, it dreams of being a

continuous fabric that covers the earth. Therefore, despite its sundry appearance, the

Social State undertakes a global program of integration and regulation, as if pretending

that nothing escapes its grasp. The unrelenting advance of the Nazi state is perhaps the

easiest image to conjure of the Social State’s global pretensions. Yet the distinctive

feature of the Social State is not the unification of politics but the socialization of

production (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 28-30). The total mobilization of the

Nazi state was for expansionist war while Social States undertake total mobilizations for

economic development (264).24 The outcome of this total mobilization is not a society still driven by the State, as in the Modern State, but the socialization of the State through an indistinction between the state and society. Therefore, instead of the Nazi State, it is

24 Arguably, the Nazis mobilized first to overcome the disastrous effects of and the Versailles reparations on the German economy, whose continued development may only subsequently have required expansionist war. The memory of the Nazi war state usual weighs too heavily on history to allow a balanced analysis. However, a few texts, such as Schivelbush, Three New Deals and Apparatus of Capture plateau in A Thousand Plateaus offer such accounts. 86 two other twentieth century States that therefore serve as the paradigmatic examples of the Social State: the Welfare State and the Socialist State.

Both the Welfare State and Socialist State functioned primarily through connection, not repression. This connection worked by first priming the pump and then normalizing the result. This began with enormous State projects in the arts, culture, society, politics, and the economy, from which it picked and chose which ones to extend. However, a bifurcation occurred as each built The Spectacle and Biopower around this production of flows. In particular, it was the political strategies employed for releasing and plugging flows that diverged. On the one hand, the wild oscillations in the economies of the West, in particular a capitalist America that was riding out the anarchic development of the

Gilded Age, expanded the contractarian pole of sovereignty across large swaths of society; while on the other, a whole series of nations initiated aggressive modernization programs that followed the lead of the Soviet Union in the hopes that the socialization of production under the rationalist watch of the authoritarian pole of sovereignty would outperform their less predictable capitalist neighbors.

The Welfare State

The stability of the Welfare State was secured through the productivist bargain. After two crises, the Great Depression and mass working class autonomy, upset confidence in the future of the capitalist heart of many Social States, the Welfare State emerged to restore certainty, and it did so by performing a singular task: defending the present against the

87 future. There are three paths that led the campaign to renew faith in the present: the interventionist Keynesianism, Fordist social relations, and Taylorist production.

Under Keynesian interventionism, the future was projected from within the present. To do so, the State first seized exclusive representation of production itself (not just management but goals and even the presentation of facts), which began the metamorphosis of the State from occasional corrector to the organizing structure of investment, making the State into its own productive subject (Hardt and Negri, Labor of

Dionysus, 39-40). And second, the State committed itself to a series of norms, which did not guarantee any particular event in the future, just that future development would be a simple extension of the forms and rhythms of the present (39). Moreover, because the future was set to the internal structure of production, far less intervention was needed, as production itself was designed to address the one political element that seemed likely to derail the Social State: class struggle (42-44). Ultimately, the Welfare State repelled revolution by promising a continual improvement in life and by erecting a structure that served production in delivering on its promise. This success was in part due to the flip side of this productivist bargain, which is that, for an ever-increasing standard of life, social subjects are required to forgo antagonism and get to work.

Next, with Fordist social relations, the Welfare State was able to split militants from the working class. Fordism theorizes that a new relationship between production and consumption that provides simple reforms in the life of a worker would result in even greater improvements in the workplace. Inspired by various utopias, from back-to-the- 88 land subsistence farming to ‘self-help,’ Ford introduced significantly higher wages, incentives for good social conduct, and institutions to facilitate self-betterment as an experiment to create a ‘New Man’ (Harvey, “Fordism,” 126-127). Fordism should never be confused with Ford the man, as many of his innovations were codifications of already existing trends, and his plans were never brought completely into fruition. Yet the central tenet of Fordism – that the massification of consumption would drive the massification of production – spread across industrial capitalist nations as a whole way of life (127-137).

Lastly, Taylorist production was the technical tool used to hold the social subjects to their side of the productivist bargain. Taylorism standardized the time-management of tasks on the assembly line. The assembly line was not the first place to break down bodies into a series of gestures to be mindlessly repeated, as this disciplining predates the industrial age, but with Taylorism it is made into a science. Through time and motion studies, tasks were distilled into a single best way, which reduced the workers to near automatons programmed to complete a single task. These workplaces were not mere dungeons, though they were ostensibly silent as there was nothing for the workers to share among themselves: they formed giant machines that followed a unified rationality imposed from above. Japan, however, demonstrated that the worker need not be subjected to the machine. Toyotist management through internal control mechanisms set the worker to innovate even more productive ways to work the machines, and thereby reintroduce initiative into production (Dohse, Jürgens, and Nialsch, “From ‘Fordism’ to

‘Toyotism’?,” 121). What Toyotism shows is that The Social’s takeover of the Welfare

State is not complete when the human is subjected to standardization and therefore to 89 machines, but rather, The Social can be a permanent engine for change if production is

run by “machines with a human touch” (Ohno, Toyota Production System, 6-7). To rule

The Social is to conquer not the body but the soul.

In spite of this tripartite system of totalizing control, the Welfare State insists first and

foremost that its people are free. But it is an odd, paternalistic form of freedom; for in the

Welfare State, everyone is treated like family. Sons and daughters are free to strike out on

their own, but they are just as likely to work for the family business and live under their

father’s roof. Having operationalized the parable of the Prodigal Son, the Welfare State

will always welcome its lost sons back into the fold, as long as they learn the cost of

freedom. The Spectacle of freedom is therefore the freedom of choice, even if it is not

exercised. Especially when it is not exercised. “Love it or leave it.” “If you hate your job,

why not get another one?” The paths to success and the channels of power are already set

up in advance. Or as one political theorist says, power can be irrigated.25 “The Spectacle

manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is:

‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.’ The attitude that it

demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means

of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of

appearances” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §12).26 And all that appears is the

Welfare State’s outstretched hand, offering socialized productivity as a fair bargain.

25 This is a phrase commonly used by Wendy Brown. 26 Modified, taking the first three words out of full capitalization. 90 The Socialist State

In contrast to the Welfare State, the Socialist State supposes that The Social is all that is

necessary. This premise comes from a before Marx. Aristocrats and dreamers

of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the so-called utopian socialists, laid out fanciful

social solutions as the answer to society’s ills. For them, the rational benevolence of

planned communities would skip past the reckless and greedy merchants who were

setting the groundwork for industrialism. And for a time, a whole constellation of factory

towns dotted the land east of the Mississippi, run by communities who collectively

owned their own mills. Miraculously, these separatist spaces served as stops on the

Underground Railroad, provided the freedom for sexual experimentation, and resisted

assimilation by adopting subversive lifestyles like naturism. And for that, these towns

offered excellent sites for creative advancement of the subjective element of socialism:

new modes of production, forms of cooperation, means of participation, principles of co-

management, and collective process. However, a few decades after they appeared, most were steamrolled by the merciless advance of industrial capitalism.

It took Marx to propose a scientific basis for the development of socialism, who offered a guide not only for its subjective elements but for its objective elements as well. In its most orthodox form, the Social State followed the Marxian ‘stages of development’ theory and set about the program of socialism to lift humanity up to a higher form of life.

To direct this process, the first step to socialism was to seize the reins of an already existing State and transform it into a government of development. Once such a government was in control, which proceeded with the objective development of 91 capitalism – namely, the socialization of the means of production and the rationalization of command. After subsuming civil society, the Socialist State then brought about the total reign of Biopower. This redirection of forces animated the great mass of The Social, not through the long patchwork process of the capitalist West, but by swiftly imposing the objective elements of socialization. For even though the Welfare State pursued productivity with a scientific program as well, the total mobilization of the Socialist State prioritized planned efficiency from the beginning.

The price the Socialist State paid for its singular pursuit of efficiency was high. In trying to make history, the Socialist State used the conditions laid out before it: juridical socialism and liberal (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 308). Through a juridical socialism, the Socialist State commanded. This strategy, motivated by a desire to bring about a ‘revolution from above,’ commanded socialized labor and capital according to certain rationalized principles set forth by Biopower. Furthermore, in an attempt to socialize the benefits of an internalized class struggle, the Socialist State launched reformist campaigns to make evident the benefits of socialism (205-209). This reformism took the form of public spending, for instance, which only highlighted the fact that the

Socialist State had given up on abolishing the class system and merely sought to socialize wealth by further proletarianizing its population (209-213).

Caught in the race to out-produce its industrial neighbors, the Social State hastily installed The Spectacle to produce a social order. However, this version of The Spectacle shut down the horizon of liberation unique to the Socialist State. Che addresses this very 92 problem in a note to a friend after serving as Finance Minister and President of the

National Bank of Cuba, writing that “pursuing the chimera of achieving socialism with the aid of the blunted weapons left to us by capitalism” set the Socialist State on a path where “the adapted economic base has undermined the development of consciousness.”

Pointing out what was missing, Che insists: “To build communism, a new humanity [el hombro nuevo] must be created simultaneously with the material base” (“Socialism and

Man in Cuba,” 217; trans. modified). But the liberatory experiments in the subjective elements of socialism, futurism or socialist realism for instance, were set aside to win the great showdown with its capitalist enemies. Those subjective experiments were suspended and replaced by the middling humanism of The Social, which prematurely ended the quest for a radically different humanity. And it is this shared vision of The

Social that led the Welfare State and the Socialist State to their strikingly similarity, even if each initially sought different visions. The convergence of these Social States did not result from the failures of socialism, however, but is an unintentional effect of the speed and efficiency by which the Socialist State expanded the market and civil society in countries ignored by capitalism (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 265). The greatest mistake of the Socialist State was made irreversibly clear as the final barrier between the

Socialist State and the Welfare State crumbled with the Berlin Wall – in its failure to create a completely different way of life, “real socialism carried the world of the East into the heart of the West” to extend the life of capitalism (269).

93 Escaping The Social

The Welfare State and the Socialist State fostered different forms of control and resistance despite their similarities. Biopower and The Spectacle may have provided both

States the mineralized skeleton of industrial market society, but social divergence eventually gave rise to significant anatomical differences. For example, the dull distinction between alleged Soviet opacity and Republican transparency is worthless unless we note that the membrane of each utilized contrasting modes of communication and selection. The Iron Curtain was not an impenetrable veil that blocked out modernist publicity; rather, it was the hardening of the organic membrane between two clusters of

Social States. A better diagnosis is found in the differences between George Orwell’s

1984, which depicts a totalized Socialist State, and Huxley’s Brave New World, which depicts a totalized Welfare State:

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was

that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who

wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.

Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to

passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.

Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared

we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial

culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the

centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited,

the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny 94 “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In

1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New

World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what

we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us. (Postman,

Amusing Ourselves to Death, vii–viii)

Despite drift in the expression of the three principles of the Social State, the most important aspect of Cold War isolation is the politically decisive forms of corporeal escape birthed by each.

The Social State makes escape part of the everyday functions of its body. While the

Modern State freezes space in time so it could get a handle on everything within its reach, the Social State sets its organs free, giving them the resources to self-regulate. The Social

State therefore does not care if subjects think that they are going it alone. Moreover, corporeal escape does not begin with declaring independence from the body politic. Exit must come from the body itself. What escapes must first threaten the life of the organism.

Then, the State will purge, shit, or excise whatever frightens, scares, or frustrates the life of The Social. And it will either empower or ignore the rest – Native are sent into exile on reservations, poor blacks are freed from slavery but left to die in urban ghettos, and illegal immigrants are deported. There is nothing glorious about this slow gnawing death by disregard, but it opens up a potential passage out of The Social.

Accordingly, escape must ultimately grow from being a threat to having a life of its own.

Running to the hills is the oldest form of escape to illustrate what it takes to start a new 95 life. As we have seen, those who ran from the Archaic State into the mountains of

Southeast Asia used highlands for cover, practiced slash-and-burn agriculture for mobility, lived in small dispersed social units to avoid appropriation, and prayed to heretical priests that broke the pact. What the Social State demonstrates, however, is that you do not have to run to the hills to start a new life.

The examples of politically decisive escape in the Social State are numerous. Laying the groundwork for social war while still under the watch of the Modern State, the Calico

Indians flouted social norms with a ridiculous set of names, clothes, and traditions which they used to wage a successful anti-rent insurrection that broke three-hundred thousand farmers out of debt bondage (Metzger, “Transform and Rebel”). A century later, the rucksack revolution struck at the consumer core of the Welfare State. A generation of hippy-refusenicks dropped out and hit the road with little more than a deep dissatisfaction with the fruits of America’s post-war boom. Or in perhaps a deeper fashion, the specter of Makhno haunted the whole history of Soviet Russia. The short-lived anarchist society in Ukraine lived on in the hearts of peasants, with the black flag raised time and time again by guerrilla partisans, Tolstoyans, and gulag insurrectionists (Avrich, The Russian

Anarchists; Foster, “The of Karaganda”).

In general, holes in The Social that open into potential escape routes for two social subjects: the dangerous and the unaccountable. The dangerous individual is a product of the Social State. To begin with, for dangerousness to even appear, the law must be on its way out. The Social State does not look at danger as a matter of juridical fault or liability 96 (Foucault, “Dangerous,” 16). Nor does it consider danger to be an abomination or deformity (having profaned god or nature). Moreover, it does not treat danger as an illness or even a symptom. The Social State rather speaks of danger in terms of risk. This may seem odd, as everyone takes risks, whether it be jaywalking or taking a stroll in the wrong side of town. But the Social State knows precisely when risks become danger: it is when the dangerous threaten the health of both themselves and others (16). Put another way: individuals are considered dangerous not because they have committed acts that violate the law but because their existence itself poses an unacceptable risk, as deemed by the preventative mechanisms of the norm. What sets up the dangerous individual as an agent of escape is that they are dangerous as long as their are hidden. The powerful mechanisms of The Social are designed to extract pleas of guilt, sobbing criminal confessions, and a whole string of detailed explanations aired to make right with

God (1-8). But without an identifiable reason for the danger, whether from the mouth of the accused or cobbled together by the experts, the Social State is unable to manage dangerousness (8-11). Even more striking, as the Social State casts its suspicious gaze across its wide body, it finds that dangerous individuals are not rare and monsters gptou but common creatures (17). Therefore, the inhabitants of The Social are never far from a standoff with the Social State that would end in either fight or flight. The struggle would begin with a refusal to keep feeding useful information to the managers of Biopower and

The Spectacle.

As the Social State shows, the escape of the dangerous comes in many different forms.

The Socialist State, for instance, centralizes The Spectacle in order to present the official 97 publicity of the people, even if it is really centered on a cult of personality or a central committee. What escapes here does not come in the form of universal pronouncements of humanism but acts that bear an oddly strict adherence to the party line. When Soviet constructivist art showed a new industrial humanity with everyone performing as a perfect cog in the machine, Stalin shuddered, and responded with a gag order (Žižek,

“Leninist Freedom,” 123-124). Yet critics found ways to make the socialist Spectacle leak time and again, as shown by East German playwright Heiner Müller, who could pack eight hundred people into a theater, all knowing that his staging of classic theater was really a critique of the party bureaucracy (Müller, Germania, 38-39). Alternately, while things can be discussed out in the open in the Welfare State, everything is risky but few become truly dangerous. Here, The Spectacle controls risks by indulging the most fickle tendencies of the masses. Escape, however, follows the same route. Mass exodus comes in the form of ‘movements’ that whip up popular sentiment. But with the quick, violent oscillations of the attention cycle, few can maintain their self-imposed exile from

Biopower.

The second class of subjects that escape The Social are the unaccountable. The unaccountable evade Biopower and The Spectacle by means of autonomy. This struggle is less striking but is far more common than inviting danger. Instead of provoking the publicity of The Spectacle in order to force a confrontation, the unaccountable withdraw to upset the social guarantees the Social State employs to buy support. Withdrawal does not mean ‘go it alone.’ Rather, it means pursuing autonomy, which is to say totally abandoning the perspective of management. This is the only meaningful definition of 98 autonomy. Separation and freedom must prevent reconciliation by scrambling the State’s attempts to organize The Social as a body (Tiqqun, This is Not a Program, 59-63). This disruption can be as simple as punks trying to prove wrong the Welfare State’s maxim that ‘there is no such things as free lunch’ or as monumental as an autonomous union springing up in Tiananmen Square to rebuff the Socialist State’s standing offer of ‘a fair day’s wages for a fair day’s work.’ Whether it is by reappropriating the forces taken away from them after being captured by The Social or by finding a passage that leads to something altogether new, the decisive politics of the unaccountables is their demonstration that one can enjoy the benefits of life without paying the price demanded by the Social State.

Those both avoiding accountability but also intensifying danger usually succeed only as long as their actions remain unregistered. Many subversions work by refusing

Biopower’s demand that everything good must be universalized. Whether it be looking the other way when a house on your block becomes a squat or shrugging off someone’s bald attempts to cut work, there are many ways to support efforts that would otherwise shrink under the public scrutiny of The Spectacle. But talking about or even imagining a world operating without accountability and confrontation requires a discourse more akin to telling ghost stories than keeping the books. Or for those who prefer something more substantial, consider the fictions, characters, and narratives that leave behind the “paper life” of revolutionaries that exist only in books (Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus,”

12-14).

99 Regardless of how one chooses to think ‘the existence of the inexistent,’ the stakes are clear: the politics of escape is the search for dis-junctions. Broken promises, misplaced memories, startling anachronisms, and habitual repetitions are all little pieces of untimeliness stuck in the present (Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus,” 5). Therefore, against the total advance of the Social State, escape can be rethought. Instead of dreaming of a flight that would carry you across space to foreign land or to a cabin in the woods, escape carefully searches for loose threads of time left untrimmed by the Social State.

And just maybe, when the correct ones are pulled, they slowly unravel the present to reveal new worlds already in place.

100

PART 2 – CRISIS

Unlike the mythic State, governance today is no longer a question of divinity or even mastery. Empire is instead the force of prevention. What Empire prevents is the future, which it claims is only full of horror, chaos, and disappointment – where apocalyptic monsters or dystopian nightmares come true. The present, we are told, is in crisis.

Paradoxically, Empire’s solution is to deepen the crisis in order to save the present. The experience of this drawn-out present is a combination of the profusion of difference paired with the vague notion that nothing is really changing. To achieve this confusing state – where the more that things change, the more they stay the same – Empire undertakes two abstract processes: circulation and management. These two processes are its essential modes of operation.

Proposition 1: Empire is circulation. Exteriorization is the abstract process of Empire’s mode of circulation.

Empire’s exteriorization is a reversal of the interiorizing tendency of the Modern State, which operates through folding. Folding is the interiorization of the outside, or “inside as an operation of the outside,” that constitutes a doubling of the outside (Deleuze,

Foucault, 99-100). A common example of interiorization is the architecture of a house,

101 which erects a structure on a frame set against a landscape. Floors, ceilings, and walls concretize frames to provide a barrier from the outside while windows and doors are frames within a frame that enable a selective flow of materials and affects in and out.

Furniture is placed within the fold as the double of the outside and thus model the outside environment with which bodies touch and interact even while lacking any resemblance to it (Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 13-17). Analogously, The Modern State governed people and things as an architect constructs a house, crafting a well-ordered interior that carefully folds in aspects of the outside so that “from now on, things will be represented only from the depths of this density withdrawn into itself” (Foucault, Order of Things,

251). Interiorization is a control mechanism, as it slows down forces to a speed where they are easily captured and managed. But the power of the fold is not one-sided, for it holds force like a spring. Following this realization, the Social State intensified interiorization by increasing the relative speed of force within the fold. To extend the interior, however, the Social State did not build an array of interiorities (the school, the kitchen, the prison) but encouraged circulation within a single shared inside: The Social.

The Social State unfolded conflicts into a single intersecting mass so they do not arise within the interiority of separate folds but rather play out in the unified field of The

Social. And the fold of The Social serves as a membrane that enables the State to exchange with aspects of the outside without internalizing them.

Empire’s mode of circulation is unfolding. At first glance, Empire seems to appear only when there is a mistake in the circuit, but circulation does not occur on its own accord; it is Empire that directs this expansion. Under the watchful gaze of The Spectacle and 102 through the selective membrane of Biopower, Empire first exposes interiorities to the

outside and subsequently transforms them into exteriorities themselves. No interior is

safe. Yet in the beginning, the outside might appear to be the breath of fresh air that

everyone needs: families are reunited despite distance or borders, old enemies find new

grounds for friendship, and all kinds of deviations are allowed to flourish. But countless

illustrations draw a bleaker picture of exposure: social rights such as healthcare vary

according to a privatized system of global debt, labor competes for jobs half-way across

the world, and pockets of the so-called third world grow throughout the first. Those

examples of circulation only describe the first action of exposing interiorities to one

another, however. Empire’s circulation also performs a second operation:

desubstantializing the power that is sprung from folds, which is used for shaping

exteriorities that expand the Metropolis. This operation occurs by transduction – the

conversion of energy from one medium to another (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus, 60). To complete this operation, interiorities are not just made risky but they

are exploded through a turning-inside-out. Or to repeat a phrase that is popular today,

capitalism is not just in crisis but capitalism is crisis.27 Empire turns every breakdown into something positive – positive in both senses: a presence that can be positively identified and that which can be benefited from.

Although every type of circuit encounters resistance, Empire re-counters resistance by increasing social conductivity. Everyone in such a system is asked to be a transparent

27 The slogan ‘capitalism is the crisis’ is perhaps even more popular than ‘capitalism is crisis,’ but it does not capture the key transcendental point that capitalism is both the cause and beneficiary of crisis. 103 conductor of social information (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §59). This conductive circuit extends through diffusion, which does not spread from a single center but goes in-between already present formations. Such diffusion forgoes the homogenizing impulses of States in order to “constitute an intermediate milieu between coexistent orders” that expands through multiplying difference rather than flattening sameness (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 435). Moreover, since Empire does not emanate from a single point, diffusion allows every node to be a possible temporary or local center. Ultimately, the biopolitical principle behind conductivity means that Empire affords us our power – we live in its house, wear its clothes, and eat its food. While diffusion ensures that resistance is both everywhere and nowhere at the same time, it is equally true that resistance to Empire is also resistance against ourselves

– a human strike that turns the force of self-abnegation into a strike against Empire. There are at least three consequences that follow from the diffusion of conductivity: first, the simultaneous demands for transparency, flexibility, and self-reliance establish thin social bonds on the basis of weak solidarity; second, we are all always-already guilty because no form of life serves as a perfect conductor social flows, and Empire materializes that guilt at any moment it finds useful; and third, a global economy of responsibility ensures that a guilty party is identified after every event, even if they are not punished for it

(Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §59).

Proposition 2: Empire is management. The production of difference is the abstract process of Empire’s mode of management.

104 The basic unit of Imperial management is the differential. Empire has learned that ‘to exist is to differ’ and therefore abstains from ruling through a social whole. Imperial management does not start from scratch every time by inventing new terms (a student, soldier, or citizen) or undertake the laborious task of independently treating every element within its purview. Rather, this management modulates what exists between terms, their differential, which gives it a wide reach while still retaining the uniqueness of everything it affects. Assisted by modulation, Empire presents the world as a swirling constellation of differences liable to descend into chaos, a chaos it vows to prevent by maintaining the current state of things. This is a balancing act, as Empire’s constant exteriorization pushes nearly every system into crisis, which creates a generalized state of exception. Such a state generates faith in the present, for the present appears under the guise of security and is sealed with its promise to prevent the future. Crisis thus serves as a mechanism of normalization for Empire, justifying its existence.

During times of crisis, certain allowances are made as long as they remain limited.

Something with such a degree of intensity as to be excessive may still threaten Empire, but “under Empire, nothing forbids you from being a little bit punk, slightly cynical, or moderately S & M” because prohibitions against deviance are replaced by the management of differences, “molecular calibrations of and bodies”

(Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §55, Gloss α). The watchful guise of The Social sought norms that discouraged transgression because it is seen as a risk to the shared image of a unified social body. But both transgression and norms disappear within

Empire – only normalization remains. Empire’s operations are far more limited than the 105 Social State, which produced virtuous subjects that tend to follow norms of good behavior. Empire performs only one primary act, which has two aspects, one positive and one negative: it invests in as many possible worlds as are necessary to prevent the future.

Empire’s form of management draws on the power of limiting its own appearance. It does so by multiplying its techniques through the privatization of law. This privatization transforms the Social State’s a priori use of the law to privilege particular forms-of-life to

Empire’s impersonal and practical use of the law, which it makes available to every citizen (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §49). Despite constitutional scholars’ best assurances, Empire’s contradictory patchwork of laws does not establish order through reason. Rather, the laws of Empire are there to empower citizens just as it authorizes the police, making the techniques of Imperial management available to all the residents of the

Metropolis, all parties involved knows how rare it is for things to actually end up in court.

Imperial management therefore appears as private interest that is covertly operating through the force of law. Further limiting Empire’s appearance is existential liberalism, the belief that each person relates to the world according to their own unique perspective, which they are made to believe exists as a result of the series of they made in the life (Anonymous, Call, Scholium II). The confessional aspect of existential liberalism complements the privatization of law, as subjects’ desire to produce a personal and positive ownership of the world covers up the impersonal and negative dimension of

Imperial management. Much as wealth appears under economic liberalism as nothing but the result of differential exchanges, Empire appears under existential liberalism as the effect of a variety of personal choices. 106

When management appears as the effect of Empire, which when it intervenes, appears as

pre-accomplished fact. Biopower’s cessation of the future is never complete, however.

Differences are always breaking through or slowing down, opening up paths to the future.

Empire thus intervenes to put them back in their place. Empire often chooses a state as its

agent of intervention. This is why it would be a misunderstanding to think that Empire

does away with states. States still exist, but mostly because they are useful. As centers of

command, states control and direct resources, and state sovereignty exists as a justified force without the need for an explanation, available as a strategic resource – even when

financial capital, drug syndicates, outlaw warlords, and Special Economic Zones make

global sovereignty look more like Swiss cheese. So just as Imperial management drives

some states to sell their resource-rights to corporations for enclave accumulation, Empire

dispatches other states to intervene under the cover of national interest or

humanitarianism.

Many radicals engage in alternativism by proposing management solutions that appear

realistic if only they could find a source of legitimacy. But already Empire presents us

with all the best possible forms of management available. That is why there is no good

management, only different versions of the present and no future at all. This is why you

cannot critique Empire, all you can do is oppose it forces – wherever you are.

The Birth of the Metropolis

Empire, an incorporeal system, is realized in the daily life of the Metropolis. The 107 architecture of the Metropolis is built to optimize circulation and management, which is built as a space of capture. The space of capture of the Metropolis emerges from two distinct diagrams of control: the leper colony and the plague city (Agamben,

“Metropolis,” 6-7). The leper colony is an intentional outside, a closed-up and excluded space to which lepers are sent into permanent exile. A plague city, in contrast, cannot stem its affliction by simply casting out the victims; instead, the plague city fixes everyone in place by confining them to their homes and sets someone to watch each street – provisions are delivered through elaborate delivery systems that connect the street to each house while closing off communication, and residents must regularly appear in their windows for an observation, which is recorded and made into a system of permanent registration. The first diagram produces a space of exclusion based on a single binary division (normal/abnormal; mad/sane), while the other produces a divided space of individualization that encases, surveils, and cures illness through a complex set of programs and practices (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195-200).

Despite their differences, the diagrams of the leper colony and the plague city are not incompatible; yet it takes the Modern State to combine them, which it does by creating a space of double capture that treats subjects as simultaneously plague victims and lepers.

By introducing articulation and division to the space of exclusion, separations such as borders and walls are still erected but the effects change, a generalized binary division is replaced by particularized differential individuations – certain subjects are not excluded but cured through the careful tools of plague control (the productive effects of registration, monitoring, treatment) while others subjects are intentionally helped through 108 exclusion itself (the exclusivity of private networks, accumulation enclaves, sidestepped regulations). This differential control weaves the elementary fabric of the Metropolis

(Agamben, “Metropolis,” 3-6). This is the origin of Hardt and Negri’s claim that struggle no longer link “horizontally,” but instead “each one leaps vertically, directly to the virtual center of Empire” (Empire, 58). Not every strike against Empire is equally effective, however, because the fabric of the Metropolis fabric is not continuous, homogeneous, or isonomic but extends through a series of veins. This interweaving of control allows the Metropolis to expand without subjugating difference to a unified principle of organization. The result is a new understanding of relation where every point is potentially inside and out – watched by the Spectacle but also ignored, cared for by

Biopower but also abandoned. The struggle against Empire must then address the uneven development of the Metropolis and the role that its veins play in imperial control.

109

Chapter 3 – Disemboweling the Metropolis

Leaning back as I took another puff on my cigarette, things went in and out of focus as the whiskey worked its way through my body. Still unable to shake a lingering desire for clarity, I jotted down some notes while playing it back in my head like a movie reel.

Disorientation. Most people’s initial experience of the Metropolis is disorientation. When you first hit the streets, you settle into the strangeness of it as if it was all just a dream.

And while you are trapped in its dreamlike embrace, the Metropolis slowly reveals its erotic and morally ambiguous nature, a tempting but repulsive allure set against a background of violence.

Most of the smart ones leave. I hope they’re happy back on the farm. Others try to be good Samaritans. I gave up being a white knight a long time ago. There are some tall tales that shovel the regular bullshit about good detectives. But I’ve never seen one. And if I did, I’d probably hate their guts. Asking someone to get their hands dirty doesn’t work when they think they’re already helping. I don’t want to be a role model, I want to win. “By any means necessary.”

“Step one: ditch the false piety of doing good and start using your feet.” 110

A lot of red herrings had been thrown my way. The Metropolis makes it hard to trust anyone or anything. There are no longer any good guys, only con men looking for dupes unable to see through their whole nice-guy act. Everyone here has the potential to do bad, and more importantly, everyone has an angle. Nobody is innocent. Neutrality is the sure sign that someone is either playing it close to the chest or too clueless to figure out whose bidding they are unwittingly doing.

The last people to have faith in are the authorities. They lost control of the streets a long time ago. And whatever power they still exercise always plays into the hands of some higher power. Yet knowing the phone numbers of a few bureaucrats and cops is never a bad idea, as long as you don’t get too close – mistaking them for a friend or a confidant makes you worse than a singing jailbird. Information is their greatest weapon; it gives them leverage. It therefore isn’t wise to feed them even a breadcrumb because that’s how people like you and me end up in trouble to begin with. The bottom line: authorities are to be used, never trusted.

“Step two: track down the leads before the trail goes cold.”

The spoils of my stakeout were lying out on my desk like stolen loot. The killer had left a path of dead bodies in his wake. And in my search to find out whodunnit, I had uncovered every one of them. It all started when I stumbled across what remained of the once- terrifying king of the Archaic State after some of his slaves had gotten to him. My hunt 111 continued when I spotted His Benevolence of the Priestly State after his blackmail and

extortion racket went south. The Police and Publicity gave away the Modern State next,

but the threads only started to unravel. I knew I was close when I spotted what remained

of the Social State, broken and half-crazy, having fallen into a crowd of marginals,

undesirables, and illegalists.

Just when I thought the trail went cold, I got the call. The anonymous caller told me to

meet at an abandoned lot in a rather seedy part of downtown. But when I got there, I was

too late. The killer had struck again. This time, however, I knew that the body would give

me all I needed to know. But this operation would have to be a full-blown autopsy, for the

answer was stuck deep in the veins of the Metropolis.

“Step three: disembowel the Metropolis.”

…

The Metropolis is the ground on which Empire operates. It exists on its own accord as a material reality, although it is improbable that the Metropolis would last long without

Empire to govern it. Despite its material existence, the Metropolis is more a process, the process of composition that brings together material according to a specific set of rules.

In particular, the Metropolis operates according to inclusive disjunction.28 Inclusive

28 In their critique of , Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that the unconscious is composed of desiring-machines that operate according to three syntheses: the connective synthesis of recording, the disjunctive synthesis of recording, and the conjunctive synthesis of consumption- consummation. Furthermore, they argue that each synthesis has legitimate and illegitimate uses, with illegitimate uses leading to errors of thought that impede the immanent flow of life. These syntheses are not 112 disjunction allows the Metropolis to connect otherwise incommensurate subjects, flows,

temporalities, and visibilities without suppressing their differences. In assembling them,

the Metropolis does not leave those incommensurate things unperturbed. Rather, Empire

introduces things into the Metropolis by producing a plane of positivities that unfolds

secured elements, exposes them to risk, and eliminates their futurity.

Exploring the Metropolis involves surveying the plane of organization constructed by

Empire. Such a survey identifies the veins of the Metropolis and searches for the

antagonisms within each one. Such a process is not done from on high, like watching

pedestrians swarm like ants from atop the Empire State building. The Metropolis’ veins

open only when we walk its streets like strangers, no longer comforted by a place that

always seemed to make sense, unsettled and hungry to figure out why everything looks

so invincible although we are told it is all crumbling around us.

What flows through the veins comes from an intensification of the two poles of

sovereignty found in States – an authoritarian pole and a liberal-contract pole. In the

Modern State they appeared as The Police and Publicity, and in the Social State they

transformed into Biopower and The Spectacle. Within the Metropolis, Biopower operates

through violent machines of subjection and the technical management of flows, and The

Spectacle operates through spectacular time and a compulsory system of visibilities. But

limited to the operation of the unconscious, however, but are essential to the function of society, as every society is the result of social-production, which codes and directs the flows of desiring-production. It is my contention that the Metropolis is an effect of the legitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis of recording. In its illegitimate use, exclusive disjunction, the disjunctive synthesis creates an ‘either/or’ forced choice. In its legitimate use, however, the disjunctive synthesis of ‘either… or… or…’ whose effect is an intensive milieu that accesses the infinite of the virtual (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 12-13; 76-77). 113 unlike States, Empire does not command these poles; it is happy to let the Metropolis do

most of the work. Yet Empire still induces their operation and reaps its reward. By

handing over its duties to the Metropolis, Empire enables the Metropolis to be used

against it, though to do so would be a momentous undertaking. It would require that

subjects undermine their own means of subsistence in the process and presupposes that

Empire is willing to take the risk. Thus, within every vein exist spaces of capture, which

Empire uses to direct the Metropolis, and lines of escape, showing potential antagonisms

and escape routes.

The purpose of disemboweling the Metropolis should be clear: to find a new people and a

new world. It is not to save everyone as they already are and will fail if it leaves anyone

the same. The transformation is nothing short of revolutionary: the complete abolition of

everything and the invention of something new in its place.

Vein 1: Violent Machines of Subjection

In the Archaic State, the frightening magician-king ruled through a theater of cruelty. The magician-king knew that humans are more accustomed to lying, forgetting, and all forms of cognitive dissonance than living their life according to one deliberate and coherent plan. His cruelty was not indulgent but followed the notion that “if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stay in the memory” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Book II, §3). To make loyal subjects worth , the magician-king declared with his loud voice that rituals of enrollment must be established to bring each member’s organs into possession of the 114 whole group. And at the center of this system of cruelty was a terrible alphabet cut into the surface of bodies with a steady hand.

Incision appears necessary because bodies, in their infinite variation, resist assimilation.

There is no universal measure for an eye to read on the natural body, only birthmarks, scars, or other accidental markings. For the body to fit the binaries of social code, they have to be imposed: life does not naturally split into two neatly-defined sides but exists as

“a thousand tiny sexes” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 213). Thus the construction of a terrible alphabet, word made flesh, written on bodies through scarification and tattooing. Bodies enter as elusive folds of flesh that lack unique identifying characteristics and leave as individuals, inscribed with their own unique semiotic signature, now worthy of alliance because they paid the painful price of membership.

When the same cruel practices are repeated today, they are significant because of their superfluousness. A tattoo may hold meaning for its wearer, but it no longer provides the signature that transforms a body into a member of a society. Papers now authorize one’s official existence, though the possibility of forgery makes the body remain a secondary means for verification. Clumsy documents draw few eyes away from the surface of the body. Rather, bodies are released from the compulsory marking to be made flexible, which is to say, more satisfying. When one’s papers are all that remains permanent, the body can be put under a state of constant transformation, bent to meet every moment’s demand. A freckle, tattoo, or odd mark therefore serves as a counterpoint, allowing 115 permanence to serve either as a playful tell set against a background of uncertainty or a

private protest against the desire to make everything negotiable.

The aim of subjection in the Metropolis is to shape the body. But the violence of

subjection is now found in a system that preexists any given body. It is secret the

operations of the fog machine and the whirring machinery hidden behind the walls that

Chief Bromden senses throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. These machines are

never seen, they are only felt through changes in the climate, for they produce small

shifts in environmental conditions to make docile bodies that are more likely to behave.

Setting the right conditions is an ingenious development, as bodily manipulations are

passed off as the triumph of existential liberalism– changes in attitude or diet appear as

individual choices even although their actions were predicted far before they occurred.

Prediction has long been a part of governance; demographic statistics made the Modern

State possible, allowing it to fend off famines and their associated riots, while social insurance and sociological modeling helped the Social State flourish, as it was able to direct society through social engineering. But now, vast assortments of models deliver ideal outcomes without demanding virtuous behavior. These outcomes are made possible by a whole set of machines assembled to produce an environment that is hostile to us.

The Police was not always so atmospheric. Violence is the of policing, even when it is at its most preventative. Everything had its place in the Modern State, and The

Police did its job to keep that order with violence and deterrent force. The Social State, in turn, introduced everything into mass society. In such a society, The Police made it clear 116 that certain identities are undesirable and invested in masses that extend The Social in good faith. Predicates are thus used as leverage. Through biopolitical investment, The

Social State used masses against one another, pitting white homeowners against blacks and business owners against the unemployed. The subjection of The Social thus determined success or failure, freedom or oppression. Yet masses have at least a minimal consistency and often fight wars of position, sometimes even rising up to change who does the policing. But as more enclaves are broken up and thrown into the fabric of the

Metropolis, these conflicts become molecular. The greatest tool of The Police in Empire is thus stratification, which results in the Metropolis being polarized into not just two warring camps but a war without a clear enemy. Subjection does not completely evaporate but no longer comes guaranteed. Instead, the pain of inclusion is said to be all that stands between a body and the war of all against all. That way, subjects willingly take on their own subjection even when the system appears to be disintegrating.

The violent machines of subjection hidden throughout the Metropolis pose a unique problem for escape. It is clear that law uses the “blood dried in the codes” to make violence routine (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 10). Setting aside the abuses of power that it justifies, the other purpose of law is to delegitimize organized self-defense.

Autonomy must then present itself to Empire as either a declaration of war or a harmless indulgence. Declarations of war have, in all but a few instances, resulted in disaster. The death of The Social has led to a fragmentation of mass society and the ability to constitute a mass-in-resistance within it. And in the hostile desert of the Metropolis, popular movements that rise to a mass scale lack militancy and discipline and are repressed with 117 military- policing. Alternately, autonomous elements that express themselves as harmless are either marginalized or incorporated. The general hostility of the Metropolis does not leave space for virtuous subjects; to exist is a negotiation with exploitation.

Some subjects try to contain exploitation by bearing it themselves, but this does nothing to sap Empire’s power and only reduces their own. Others attempt transformation from within a set of rules designed to prevent system-wide transformation. Neither of these two approaches offer much hope for escape.

Escaping the machines of subjection thus requires a form of strike – not just a labor strike, but a strike against all the biopolitical investments that produce the contemporary subjects of the Metropolis. In fact, even the first proletariat began outside of labor and not within it, for the word ‘proletariat’ comes the Latin word for ‘offspring,’ which was used to describe those so impoverished that the only labor they could offer was childbirth

(Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, 169). This is why labor silently assumes reproduction even when capital purchases labor-power for the sake of production. Striking against the hidden tolls of reproduction thus initiates a human strike that begins with a refusal, which is not a literal refusal to be human but a refusal of the biopolitical subjection of the human. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism” (Federici, Wages Against Housework). Such a strike does not imply that there is a true subject just waiting to be revealed, however. Good humanism has not been suppressed by Empire. Social solidarity has not been demolished by the Metropolis.

Virtuous subjects are not awaiting in exile. Subjection is merely the process by which the objects of Empire perform its violence, all under the pretense that they are really subjects. 118

Human strike uses autonomy to begin the process of self-annihilation. But to launch an

assault on one’s self is to misidentify the cause of the collective malaise. “Neuroses,

suicides, desexualization” are “occupational diseases of the housewife” and not advances

in the struggle (Federici, Wages Against Housework). A biopolitical strike must subvert

the conditions that create the human, not any particular , until Imperial subjection

becomes impossible. Escape is essential to this process, as oppressed subjectivities are

worthy of temporary defense but must also set their own paths of escape. “Homosexuality

and heterosexuality are both working conditions... but homosexuality is worker’s control

of production, not the end of work” (Federici, Wages Against Housework). The abolition

of Empire does not occur by taking over Empire but by separating bodies from their

Imperial subjection. An autonomous power is then made to grow in that gap, its distance

measuring the degree to which the machines of subjection can be used against

themselves. This separation may at times appear as a Social struggle but it must end in

all-out civil war within the Metropolis. Autonomy is only as good as it is antagonistic.

There are no Social solutions to the present situation. No identity or plurality of identities

wield enough Social power to entrap all of Empire’s violence. “I never wanted to be

anything, I never wanted to be anyone.” Only when enough subjectivizing machines of

Empire are jammed will the future begin to flourish.

Vein 2: Technical Management of Flows

Technical machines of management traverse the Metropolis as if it is a giant

intermediary. The purview of these machines spans from the basic task of directing of 119 human waste to the complex task of exploiting cultural conflict for profit. To complete these tasks, the machines perch between heterogeneous layers. Their operation begins with the constitution of flows – when Empire peels off heterogeneous layers of The

Social, it sets them in communication in the Metropolis. By setting layers in communication rather than limiting them through reduction, the Metropolis thus multiplies their connections. The Metropolis, which reconstitutes the layers as a new , thus produces new connections whose excretions exhibit emergent patterns.

But the products of those connections remain abstract and undetermined flows until they are selected, qualified, or blocked. Empire therefore finds technical objects within those material products, through which its machines operate. Just as a stoplight directs , these machines transform points within the Metropolis into centers of gravity that draw in elements from the exterior and orient them with signs (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus, 395-402). Foucault spent his career documenting these “sites of veridiction,” spaces constructed at a certain intersection of institution and matter to speak truths as if they were subjects but to be as malleable as subjects (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics,

33-7). Its crudest form exists in the Modern State where the mad that speak are thought to speak in a deceptive tongue that analysts artfully confine to the objective rules of language. But it is in the Metropolis where the technical objectification of the Social becomes so complete that criminologists, psychologists, and even economists could safely ask ‘who are you?’ instead of ‘what have you done’ and still get answers about killers, depressives, and commodities that reveal more than a simple history of infractions, outbursts, and prices.

120 Technical machines’ primary function is to frame, which regulates how things arise within that frame.29 Much like organisms, which evolve by internalizing aspects of their external environment, assemblages produce products within themselves. Further extending the analogy of the organism, it could be said that these products are mere extensions of the assemblages, as organisms may appear as the mere accretion of flows rhythmically circulating between the bodies and environment: material flows of food and energy, social flows of bonding and reproduction, and psychic flows of perception and cognition. But between the interior and exterior lies a regulatory mechanism, a membrane, which negotiations connections separating the organism from its surroundings. The function of the membrane is regulative and therefore introduces tendencies, but it is not constitutive and thus provides neither determinism nor a total picture. And within this small fold of the outside created inside the organism, the separation is consummated when an autonomous power grown from its own organs allows it to double the outside, freeing the organisms to seek out different milieus.

Within Empire, Biopower operates as such a membrane. Yet Imperial Biopower does not act on behalf of organisms and each individuated life, Biopower modulates the general

29 Despite widely divergent approaches, the frame is a concept that Deleuze and Derrida utilize similarly. For both of them, the frame is how bodies select their engagement with the exterior world. For Derrida, following Heidegger, provides a structure, a frame, for the unveiling world that should be loosened. For Deleuze, following Bergson, life expands through an experimental of the earth. The implication of both approaches is that technical management temporally limits (/becoming) but also provides a path for its undoing (deconstructive différance/lines of flight). ’s unification of the two approaches develops André Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of technical object in Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus far beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s use in A Thousand Plateaus, but it often comes to often startlingly conservative conclusions. In particular, his normative project to reverse the exteriorization of the human, central to the technics series but clearly stated in the For A New Critique of Political Economy, can be read as restoriationist conservation of a traditional image of the human. It is the intention of this work to provide a radical counterpoint. 121 environment. Empire’s technical machines reverse the flow of life, tearing open The

Social’s protective organs, exposing the contents of institutions to the Metropolis. And

with this exposure, even transgression and sexuality become open secrets. Bankers fondle

their money on reality TV, the bourgeoisie fuck the proletariat in public, and the citizens of Empire get aroused watching political assassinations on the ‘net (Deleuze and

Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 293). The terrifying power of Empire’s technical control of flows

arrives under a libertine guise. But Empire provides allowances and not freedom, as it

tolerates deviations only as long as they return more productive results. Otherwise,

allowance is a thinly veiled excuse for technical abandonment. And once Empire

abandons The Social’s project of sustaining certain forms of life, its technical machines

simply set general environmental conditions for any life whatsoever to benefit so long as

it is dependable for Empire when it counts.

The technical machines of Empire focus on a specific type of connection: inclusive

disjunction. This disjunction forges a connection that transforms through the addition of a

created difference rather than reducing through essentialization. Yet the effects that

Empire is looking for are found in the Metropolis itself rather than any particular new

subject or object of governance, which should not be confused for any individual product.

Technical machines create a passive ongoing introduction of difference as “distributions

and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference” that allows Empire to capture all

production according to all of the potential “permutations between differences that

always amount to the same as they shift and slide around” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-

Oedipus, 4, 12). The management of Empire thus functions as a conductor for a 122 dissipative system whose far-from equilibrium state requires a constant introduction of external energy to maintain self-organization. This constant predation on the outside often appears as ‘mere propensity’ for equal exchange, but expansion is essential to its survival, as evinced by dead zones in the Metropolis where Empire either short-circuited or burned out. So while disjunctive inclusion assures that Empire regulates everything and everywhere in the Metropolis, it is also true that Empire does not extend equally into every street corner or subjectivity. This blurring of the boundaries is not meant to obscure, as there are apt metaphors to describe Empire’s movement: it hops without covering like a blanket, which makes the world spiky and not flat. It is Lyotard’s description of the unfolding of the social body that perhaps best illustrates how technical machines unfold The Social in an effort to make every part of the Metropolis be able to connect to any other:

Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with

each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to

that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, hair, hard

transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes–but

open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue

network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter,

longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon,

then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit;

as though your dressmaker’s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of

trousers, go on, expose the small intestines’ alleged interior, the jejunum, the 123 ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its comers, pull out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous and the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass . . . it is not this displacement of parts, recognizable in the organic body of political economy (itself initially assembled from differentiated and appropriated parts, the latter never being without the former), that we first need to consider. Such displacement, whose function is representation, substitution, presupposes a bodily unity, upon which it is inscribed through transgression. There is no need to begin with transgression, we must go immediately to the very limits of cruelty, perform the dissection of polymorphous perversion, spread out the immense membrane of the libidinal ‘body’ which is quite different to a fume. It is made from the most heterogeneous textures, bone, epithelium, sheets to write on, charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples, grasses, canvases to paint. All these zones are joined end to end in a band which has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the 124 contrary (is this topologically possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases,

cavities which when it passes on the ‘first’ turn will be cavities, but perhaps on

the ‘second’, lumps. But as for what turn the band is on, no-one knows nor will

know, in the eternal turn. The interminable band with variable geometry (for

nothing requires that all excavation remain concave, besides, it is inevitably

convex on the ‘second’ turn, provided it lasts) has not got two sides, but only one,

and therefore neither exterior nor interior (, 1-3).

Technical machines produce technological objects to assist their operation. The machines produces two different types of objects, although they are nearly identical and generally convertible: tools and weapons (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 395). The difference between the two can be distinguished through use and concept; first by their orientation of force, and second in their relationship to movement. In their orientation of force, tools are introceptive, they centripetally draw forces inward toward a center of power – the net or hunting. Alternately, weapons are projective, they send forces on accelerating paths outward – the missile or martial arts (395). And in terms of speed, a tool is relative to a substance it seeks to dominate, as in a hunter who arrests the movement of their prey. On the other hand, a weapon has unlimited speed, as its speed is not pegged to anything and is thus free to pursue acceleration for its own sake (396).

The technical machines of Empire aim to transform every object into a tool. With tools,

Empire is able to construct introceptive compositions of desire that expand subjects’ capacity for sending and receiving direction. Empire thus establishes gravitational centers 125 amidst the growing exteriority of the Metropolis. And from those points of power,

Empire not only directs flows but also puts them to work. Unlike free action, which powers the conceptual motor of weapons, work uses tools to capture and direct force

(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 397-403). By framing the Metropolis as a problem of work, Empire actualizes a specific model for producing force that operates on an exterior, meets resistances during incorporation, loses its cause at the completion of every task, and requires renewal for each use (397). The hallmark of the so-called neoliberal turn of Empire reduces production to the work of expropriation – a new rentier class emerges, as developers draft artists as homesteaders in the new urban frontier; and the paradigm of securitization and risk now sets best practices for business, government, and family. This expropriation will continue as long as the tattered remnants of The

Social exist, with Empire squeezing dry every institution of The Social, privatizing its capital and emptying the subjects of its enclosure, only to hop to the next in the dwindling stock of holdouts to eke out whatever surplus might be left.

Subjects unable to think outside the motor of work often turn to a naive escapism. This naive escapism looks for places outside the reach of the Metropolis, as if Empire could be starved to death. But such fugitives are usually trapped in a struggle over the same surplus as Empire and are in danger of transforming their autonomy into a tool of work.

A few truly autonomous subjects have established forms of life outside of Empire’s networks of dependency, the most recognizable being the peasant. The peasant’s engagement with Empire is a take-it-or-leave it proposition, as they can always rely on their preformed way of life to provide. But most citizens of Empire can only take partial 126 leave, if any at all, because Empire has established the Metropolis as the transcendental condition for life. And with few exceptions, life without the modes of association, subsistence, mobility, and communication provided by Empire is unimaginable. Even the most ambitious attempts to live autonomously from Empire’s influence still requires that these free spirits find flows to latch onto, like in guerrilla warfare, “that little war in which you have to find allies in fog, damp and the height of rivers, in the rainy season, the long grass, the owl’s cry, and the phase of the moon and sun” (Genet, Prisoner of

Love, 125). Withholding from Empire does not deny it of anything and only fuels its campaign of abandonment. Only when the alienated separation of the Metropolis is turned into an offensive force against Empire does autonomy reappear as a threat to

Empire. Rather than hiding out in pockets adjacent to the Metropolis, as if they did not operate under the precepts of technical management, effective modes of escape must then take their lead from the guerrilla, who uses aspects of the Metropolis against Empire to undermine its obviousness and necessity

Weapons are one way to expropriate the expropriators; they are former tools freed from the chains of work. Free action exploits the convertibility of technological objects by selecting, converting, or even inventing speeds that exceed work’s gravity. Changing the usage of an object is not an individual choice, however, but an effect of the whole ensemble of forces in which the technology is deployed. In contrast to work, free activity is powered by perpetual mobility and thus does not overcome resistances, as it joins with already present forces to orient and provoke additional acceleration (Deleuze and

Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 396, 395). To the extent that weapons account for their 127 origin as tools, weapons assume production, resistance, expenditure, and displacement and then exceed all these aspects with the exercise of speed (398). Weapons are thus the effect of unworkable flows. Following Nietzsche, Empire understands that “work is the best policeman,” but even work in unable to rein in certain automatically generated dimensions of the Metropolis (Daybreak, §173, 105). There are four problematic flows in particular that work is incapable of resolving: matter-energy, population, food, and the urban (468). Weapons are the consequence of assemblages that frame these problems, and others, as reservoirs of free activity. Behind the doomsday scenarios of energy crisis, sobering analyses of social stratification, forecasts of spreading food riots, and lament over the explosion of global slums lies a motor perpetually inventing new weapons against Empire.

Yet the mere existence of irresolvable flows does not itself cripple Empire. In fact,

Empire benefits when certain problems appear irresolvable for all time – permanent crisis calls for technical management in perpetuity. The recurring issue of crime makes The

Police an inevitable but incomplete response, while urban decline forever opens up new opportunities for developers. Radicals looking to establish a platform against Empire usually identify an especially egregious instance of management to condemn or block, but political interventions premised on short moments of voluntary action mistake political mobilization for the movement of perpetual flows. The defense of a single house against foreclosure or even a whole neighborhood against does not dislodge .

128 Empire’s general environment of hostility can be successfully confronted. But only the

weapons joined with the centrifugal speed of Empire’s irresolvable flows are sufficient to

overcome the tools of its technical machines. Empire claims that food shortages are

problems in distribution and is happy to help you organize a charity food drive, yet The

Black Panthers launched a revolutionary party on the premise that there was more than

enough food go to around. Empire claims that unemployment is the result of glitches in

the economy and assists everyone looking for a job, yet youth across the world launch

revolutions having realized that Empire has abandoned them, but also because they have

better things to do than work. Empire claims that peasants degrade valuable land by

living too simply and shows them how to grow cash crops, yet peasants in Mexico and

Bolivia rose up against the government when their way of life was threatened and

established their own self-governed municipalities (Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-

Modernism; Zibechi, Dispersing Power). Empire claims that gangs pose a threat for its citizens and encourages neighbors to ‘say something when you see something,’ yet marginalized urban populations control their neighborhoods by setting up informal networks and other markets in their struggle against the degradation of Empire. None of these paths are ideal, few have succeeded in subverting the Metropolis, and some result in violence and domination as brutal as Empire, but they all demonstrate examples of weapons that arise in the movement of flows. Ultimately, the great hope of escape is to find weapons powerful enough to destroy Empire’s motor of work, to reveal the world of free activity behind the Metropolis.

129 Vein 3: Spectacular Time

The Metropolis appears timeless, but the timelessness does not represent a utopia where time has been overcome – only the reign of the perpetual present. Empire set up the

Metropolis as the transcendental condition for anything to emerge but presents it as a transcendent absolute. The future is thus abolished from the Metropolis, even as a horizon, to be revived only as fantasy.

To the extent that time still exists in the Metropolis, it is simply a variable measured by tools for limiting and controlling time as something to be saved (Lefebvre, The

Production of Space, 95). In its measurement, time is isolated and drained of intensity so as to be integrated into a field of all possible extensions of the present. This prevents lived time from becoming historical time. Such an economic awareness of time, as something wasted or spent, sets time against itself with the appearance that all time emerges equally from the same source and is thus subject to universal comparison and substitution. Moreover, in a world where every moment is like any other, historical time disappears as “contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable reasoning” (Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 16). Even though it brags of its resplendent potential, the Metropolis is therefore a boring place where nothing conclusively new ever appears.

Empire arrests time through separation. Time is stolen in the Metropolis as capital steals from the proletariat, with alienation: subjects are divided against themselves and their 130 activity, allowing the producers to be separated from their products. Alienation and estrangement are the present condition. Yet even more important than the initial is the mode of compensation used to complete the deception. Neoclassical economists repeat ’s founding myth of money, rooted in the double coincidence of wants, whereby an orange farmer may not want apples from his neighbor but is happy to make the sale if he receives money, which is not a product but a medium of exchange.

This just-so story makes a capitalist labor arrangement appear to be a simple exchange of the products of labor for money, which is infinitely more convertible than labor’s product and should be appealing to labor. Yet workers do not sell products to their employer but their time, which is a commodity that is sold for less than the value it produces. The real theft of capital and the key to Empire’s exploitation is thus the alienation of subjects from their time. Moreover, just as money’s operation as a medium of exchange hides the exploitation of labor, the future is masked within the Metropolis.

Space is Empire’s mechanism for the concealing its theft of time. The Spectacle seeks to replicate the pile-up of atoms that occurs every time it rains in Epicurus’ metaphysical universe to facilitate accumulation in its space of encounter, the Metropolis (Althusser,

“The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter”). The challenge for

Empire is that each drop has a lightness that bends toward many potential paths. Other

State-forms use the weight of accumulated space to synchronize the pace of differentials.

The disciplining procedures of the Modern State demonstrate some of the elemental forms of spatial control of time, as in the economy of time of eighteenth-century warfare, where objects’ time is controlled by articulating them with a body and setting the body’s 131 gestures to a timetable – “Bring the weapon forward. In three stages. Raise the rifle with

the right hand, bringing it close to the body so as to hold it perpendicular with the right

knew;” “the of the marching step will be a bit longer than one second. The

oblique step will take one second; it will be at most eighteen inches from one heel to the

next...” (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 135-169, 153, 151). This form of disciplined

time synchronizes speeds through enclosure and measure, which sets a single common

time.

But even as the factory bell still rings in many of Empire’s schools and an economy of

motion can be found throughout the Metropolis, the time of The Spectacle is not

disciplined time. Empire is less concerned with restricting space and time within manageable blocks of the barracks or factory, which treat space as a container and time as means for coordination. Rather, just as capitalism abstracts labor by proletarianizing workers, which begins with removing them from their means of subsistence and reducing them to absolute poverty, The Spectacle abstracts time through dislocation, which treats it

not as an object but as a source of power; moreover, just as labor’s potential is displaced

by an artificial medium, currency, that translates qualitative labor into a quantitative

measure, the abstract potential of time is similarly displaced but through a different

countable medium, space.30 For abstract space, The Spectacle produces a quantitative and formal space, stripped down to mere object – “a set of things/signs and their formal relationships: glass and stone, concrete and steel, angles and curves, full and empty”

30 Bergson argues that space, which he calls extension, actualizes quantitative extension through a discontinuous multiplicity that forms an assemblage, while time, which he calls duration, is the qualitative intension of a continuous multiplicity as virtual potential. 132 (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 49). Interestingly, because this abstract system has shed the social shell of representation, it need not be universally apprehended, let alone understood or believed. All abstract space must do is operate.

The novelty of abstract space is how it simultaneously facilitates spatial differentiation and temporal closure. At first glance, abstract space appears to produce differences itself, but upon closer inspection it is obvious that abstract space expands by appropriating difference from the outside (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 389-391). Yet in its means of appropriation, such as unfolding spaces of enclosure, abstract space maintains a differential field – everywhere in the Metropolis, laughter, music, sex, dance, language, and film mutate and change despite certain restrictions. Amidst this flourishing difference, however, the present expands like a vast desert. The halting power of space comes from its heterogeneity, which The Spectacle uses to homogenize time into the never-ending present by translating into quantity. As the power of money is to command labor without relinquishing the fruits of labor, the power of abstract space is to control time without releasing the future.

Empire’s dislocation produces time that is “a time of times,” “a complex time that cannot be read in the continuity of the time of life or clocks, but has to be constructed out of the peculiar structures of production” that exists as an “‘intersection’ of the different times, rhythms, turnovers, etc.” apprehended only “in its concept, which, like every concept is never immediately ‘given’, never legible in visible reality” (Althusser and Balibar,

Reading Capital, 101-2). The result of this complex intersection of time is not an 133 underlying time by which all other times are set or even measured but a mediating circuit

of abstract space and the temporalities it issues and revokes (Lefebvre, The Production of

Space, 95-99). Moreover, The Spectacle leverages time against space by charting a path

through the cycles of the Metropolis before committing to their extension. Time enables

Empire to lay out a structure to overdetermine the contingency of the Metropolis’s space of encounter. Just as “a spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” Empire’s worst architects triumph over the best bees because “the architect raises his structure in imagination before he erects it in reality” so “at the end of every labour-process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement”

(Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 7). Recognizing the implication of this argument – that it is time being gutted and not some idealized version of the human – Marx further clarifies the distinction with the declaration that “time is everything, man is nothing; he is at the most time’s carcass” (The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter 1.2). Empire thus mocks the search for authenticity, which holds that lived time as the only authentic experience, an illusion that the Spectacle can provide without threatening its iron grasp on the future.

Whatever living time The Spectacle preserves, it presents it as memory or meaningless

abstractions. While the present passes as one continuous line, the past and future do not

(Deleuze, Bergsonism, 53). The past exists as a collection of the present after it has

passed; these past-presents then gather like a photonegative to be projected onto the now-

present. Alternately, the future already existing in the present as anticipation, which is not

the future itself but ideas of the possible futures. To freeze the vitality of time in the 134 Metropolis, The Spectacle translates each side of time into the permanent nostalgia of relics and the infinitely malleable but empty code of calculus; captured in photographs as moments already passed and traded as the variable potential of commodity futures

(Internationale Situationniste, 57). Locked into abstract space and made visual, time is experienced through either loss or interchangeability – as either a string of departed moments or a set of equivalences within an economy of differential space. The result is that images of futures that depart from the present are so overburdened by cynical ideology that they are sold for cheap thrills and every politician comes of age by denouncing ‘utopian thinking.’ The only believable future is painted from the same palette as the present, subject to the same rules and relations, and objectively constituted by the same things, only with duller colors.

Covering up the alienation of time with the permanent spatial extension of the present is not Empire’s original sin. Neither non-futurity nor quantitative abstraction need to be treated as wound in need of healing. Or to put it another way, “the more we contemplate, as spectators, the degradation of all values, the less likely we are to get on with a little real destruction” (The Situationist International, Leaving the 20th Century, 102). When considered from this perspective, alienation should not be subject to melancholic lament, which would only birth political formations that court moments that never come. Rather, the alienation of time raises different questions: what can be done with alienation? how can finitude and dislocation be turned into strategic resources?

The Sex Pistol’s prophetic exclamation of “No Future!” is not an admission of defeat but 135 a rallying cry. It is spoken by those who find finitude refreshing, delivered in a reassuring tone to those who want nothing to do with the future presented to them, and offers a common refrain for those who reject any reproduction or extension of the present. It directly addresses reactionaries who label their enemies as harbingers of the apocalypse, such as hate-mongers who claim that queers “so hate the world that will not accept them that they, in turn, will accept nothing but the destruction of that world,” by promising follow-through (Worthy, The Homosexual Generation, 184). It breaks with alternativism, which only thinks about a future that stands on the shoulders of the past. Instead, it pronounces that whatever indiscernible time subsists outside the Metropolis must be better than all the past, presents, and futures made visible by The Spectacle. The exact details of how to live without a future is contentious, but everyone seems to agree that it begins when one stops being a good citizen (Bersani, Homos, 113).

Embracing finitude turns the alienation of time into a political position. Its politics uses alienation as a fulcrum to pit the exploited products of Empire against its beneficiaries.

This process begins by abandoning forced austerity and its measured scarcity. Finitude turns away from reproduction, both as an aim and a source of power. Cynicism, depression, and hopelessness fill reservoirs unleashed against Empire in revenge for the wounds it causes. Dangerous emotions pose a threat, not just to those who bear them but their source, Empire – the political imperative is to channel them. This should not be understood as an uncritical celebration of alienation or a politics of . But these dangerous emotions are not unhealthy reactions to a sound world; they should be everyone’s natural reaction to the terrible situation facing us all. To throw them away 136 would only rob some subjects of the only thing Empire has ever given them. So instead of avoiding their terrifying energy, dangerous emotions can be made political by giving them an orientation (Bergen, “Politics as the Orientation of Every Assemblage”). This politics can become reactionary, as when it is used to restore a lost time or attack abstraction with stubborn disbelief. But once politics is freed from the demands of preservation, reproducibility, and repetition, innovation, difference, and singularity begin to flourish.

Unfettered from scarcity, finitude takes on an excessive quality, precipitating a future otherwise made unavailable. Enveloping their finitude, subjects become unresponsive to risk, debt, and other tools designed to temporally limit their behavior and begin living futures not possible in the present. These lives are no longer punctuated by the same reference points as the citizens of Empire, which gives them access to potentials that they are expected to withhold from themselves. The political test is whether subjects engaged in a politics of excess will exhaust Empire by releasing temporalities that make the

Metropolis ungovernable or only condemn themselves to a bleaker reality in the process.

Dislocation contains a different set of potentials. Rather than treating the loss of time as an enabling condition, as finitude does, the politics of dislocation attends to the non- simultaneity of the simultaneous. Even if time is subjectively experienced in The

Spectacle as a never-ending present, that present is not a single time but a collection of times. The uneven process of dislocation thus constitutes a peculiar present where:

137 not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the

fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at

the same time with others. Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which

are intricately involved. [...] Times older than the present continue to effect older

strata; here it is easy to return or dream one’s way back to older times. [...] In

general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails.

Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they

contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear. The strength of this

untimely course has become evident; it promised nothing less than new life, despite

its looking to the old (Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its

Dialectics,” 22).

Thus the only thing synchronous about the many times of the present is their simultaneous appearance. As a consequence, differential elements migrate in and out of the shared space of the Metropolis, remaining unified by Empire’s constitution of a common present. Their contrasting temporalities are made evident – but only as dislocations within the present and visualized in abstract space.

Empire does not control those times like a State. States present static images of themselves as eternal and unchanging. But Empire does not seek to monumentalize the

Metropolis, which is pregnant with disjointed times sprung from the folds of other social formations. Empire does not strip those times of their force or march them to a single cadence. Rather, Empire draws on the power of differentials, alienating that power from 138 its source by cloaking the Metropolis in false cyclical time (Debord, The Society of the

Spectacle, Theses 148-163). Made cyclical, time is given a false movement that always returns time to the same moment. Thus, even as the Metropolis takes on a differential appearance in space, it presents every new moment as a simple repetition of the last.

Empire’s movement proceeds by way of rhythm. Coordinating the various cycles of the

Metropolis, Empire creates a vibration that builds correspondence between space and time. This is not the well-drilled marches that Foucault found so interesting, though

Empire does maintain them to dazzle subjects wistfully searching for authoritarian order in an age of chaos. Dislocation instead demands that Empire produce an odd rhythm:

Even in biology, the movement of feet, while they alternate when walking,

represent a mutually engaged dance and not a friction-generating struggle.

Sometimes there is hopping, and both feet move simultaneously parallel. An

alternating gate does not represent movement at cross-purpose. In jazz, a

syncopated rhythm does not produce dissonance. Movement is first and foremost

transgression. It is not transcendence or synthesis (Anonymous).

A radical politics of dislocation therefore targets Empire’s rhythm, which reframes the power of antagonism. Antagonism cannot form a grand counter-rhythm, as the molecular potential of the Metropolis is neither decisive nor precise enough to muster a finely- coordinated counter response. The greatest potential for antagonism within the

Metropolis comes from times that never fall into step. 139

Time leaks from the present, providing the material for a politics of dislocation. By a first approximation, as liquid escapes from holes in a pipe – inefficiencies in a system that remain forgettable as long as small puddles never turn into massive torrents. But following a more illustrative example, the Metropolis leaks time as moles and whistleblowers release information. There is plenty to leak, as the relations of externality that constitute the Metropolis makes it so Empire governs through inconsistencies, contradictions, hypocrisy, double-talk, and unfair treatment rather than in spite of it. The error emerges from the assumption that revealing these inconsistencies somehow neutralize their power. But the uneven ground of the Metropolis ensures that Empire will never be consistent, and Empire itself appears less concerned with containing or preventing these leaks than turning them to its own advantage. This is because Empire has internalized the Maoist lesson that the two sides of a contradiction need not end in compromise when both sides can be used to one’s advantage.

Rhythm is fortunately grounded in “the rhythm of feet,” which, “whether intentionally or not,” produces a rhythmic sound that cannot help but generate difference, as “two feet never strike the ground with exactly the same force,” “can be larger or smaller according to individual constitution or mood,” and because “it is also possible to walk faster or slower, to run, to stand still suddenly, or to jump” (Canetti, Crowds and Power, 31). The power of this difference is felt in the crowd. “The means of achieving this state was first of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied, steps added to steps in quick succession conjure up a larger number of [people] than there are” (31). The effect is not a 140 single coordinated mass, but a rhythmic or throbbing crowd, a disjointed crowd motivated by the sound of footsteps. This sets the stage for a politics of rhythm, which emerges from “steps added to steps in quick succession” that “conjure up a larger number of [people] than there are” (31). Rather than disrupting Empire’s rhythm, these movements are a creative production of their own, ecstatic rhythms that beat to tempos independent of the ones that pervade the Metropolis (Tiqqun, The Cybernetic

Hypothesis). These rhythms have the potential to disrupt the temporality of the

Metropolis, but to do so, they must dislocate the present in both space and time so it can never be returned to.

Vein 4: A System of Compulsory Visibility

Once the plague appeared in the seventeenth-century Modern State, certain measures were ordered to be taken. It began with shuttering the town, locking residents into their homes, and emptying the streets of anyone but officials. After segmenting the town so it could be swept section-by-section, inspection became the norm – all functionaries were deputized as monitors, and sentinels were appointed to watch every gate and street. Daily, a legion of syndics were dispatched to review the health of all residents. Their inspection began with a syndic stopping by every house; the inhabitants were required to appear in the window before him, he called each by name, recorded the health of each person, and if an inhabitant did not appear, the inspector determined why. “Everyone locked up in their cage, everyone at their window, answering to their name and showing themselves when asked – it is the great review of the living and the dead” (Foucault, Discipline and

Punish, 196, modified to be neutral). From these daily reports, the duties of the 141 lowliest of syndics produced a system of reports that became a “system of permanent registration” good enough for even the magistrate or mayor, for it contained the age, sex, and condition of everyone within the town (196). While it is unlikely that the actual task was undertaken with the precision outlined in the general order, it was no doubt executed carefully enough to indulge the fantasy it creates: a world where regulation utterly pervades all aspects of everyday life that every individuals was laid bare by power, so that control acted not on “masks that were put on and taken off,” but through “the assignment to each individual of their ‘true’ name, their ‘true’ body, their ‘true’ disease”

(198, gender modified).

At its most basic level, the plague city’s system of permanent registration is a mode of communication. As communication, registration constructs a strange type of connection because it connects anomalous pieces, such as bodies to a voice and appearance, and not other bodies, drawing a transversal thread through organs – thus hunger is expressed not by forcing another’s stomach to growls but in pleading them for food or showing them the emaciated angles of one’s body. As a mode of communication, registration is also a type of transmission, yet one that returns in the final instance to a subject. Famine or disease are thus centered on an active subject, communicated with the declaration, ‘we need food!’ or ‘he is stricken.’ And even in the event of circumlocution, there is still a subject, even if it is carefully avoided. This communication is unlike circulation, however, because registration communicates only after affixing attributes to the subject.

Ultimately, the connections that registration forges through communication are not kept internal to the subject but facilitate transmissions between a definite subject and its 142 outside. In these openings, pierced by the outside, registration splits the subject open to soliciting sights and sounds for observation, recording, and intervention. Registration therefore demonstrates how a mode of communication can also function as a mode of control.

Even after the plague was treated and gone, the Modern State retained the system of permanent registration. Maintaining such a system for all aspects of life proved overburdensome, so Modern States ultimate abandoned so-called Police States where registration would control existence down to the smallest detail. The Social State developed an innovative approach to permanent registration that triumphs over the problems such a system posed for the Modern State – selective use. The selectivity of the

Social State enabled exclusion, which results in the differential treatment of subjects and flows whereby it regulates them with less surveillance, not more. And unless the excluded become nomads able to find an autonomous way of life, Biopower leaves them to flounder if not die. So while the Social State constructed the massive system of The

Social on the basis of permanent registration, it did so as a ‘frugal state,’ which posits that governance works best when it is efficient and offered only to subjects that have won its favor.

Empire, however, is unwilling to support even the subjects willing to compete for its favor. At most, it provides the means to ‘help them help themselves.’ And it is for that purpose that Empire preserves the system of permanent registration. Each of measures set up for the plague city can be found in the Metropolis: there are bodies that are treated as 143 individuals, locations where they are registered, places where they are commanded to appear, names to which they must respond, and records that report their condition. And yet, while the compulsory system of appearance that arose in the Modern State still exists in the Metropolis, the treatment regimen it was constructed for does not. Empire makes exposure mandatory, enjoining subjects to reenact the drama of the plague, but it modifies the ending by withholding the cure. And due to this mandatory exposure, all the residents of the Metropolis are given a voice – but only to confess why they are not already dead.

As a consequence of Empire’s use of registration, life in the Metropolis is not required to understand anything. Subjects are not required to understand what they do or why things operate the way they do. This is because it is not necessary to dupe anybody when it is easier to confuse them. The Metropolis is thus full of clutter, filled with enough incomplete theories, half-truths, and distracting stories that meaningless habits seem preferable to the difficulties of thought. In spite of these confusing surroundings, subjects are still expected to profess investments, intentions, and beliefs. To compensate, Empire experiments with forms of knowledge so it can still reliably trust confused subjects. For a time, psychoanalysts dominated marketing firms and ad agencies, selling secret codes for unlocking consumer deepest urges. After a while, survey teams replaced the mysteries of the unconscious with scientifically-designed studies, hoping that buyers act in the market just as they act in the lab. And now marketing has entered the age of neuromarketing: psychologists armed with brain scanners search for autonomic responses strong enough to circumvent humans’ rational faculties altogether. What these different approaches have 144 in common is that they identified visibilities similar to the ones made available through

compulsory registration.

Empire demands that every appearance exist as a positivity, regardless of how it is

generated. While only the seeable and sayable determined how subjects received

treatment in the plague city, absolutely anything that can be recorded is gathered in the

Metropolis. This marks a revolution in the permanent system of registration whereby

speech and writing are replaced by code. Through code, the Metropolis becomes the

fulfillment of the fantasy of unlimited presence. Even negation is recorded as a positivity,

and whatever cannot be recorded is treated as if it does not even exist. Moreover, while

speech and writing is intended for humans, code is intended for humans and intelligent

machines. By translating the Metropolis into the language of intelligent machines,

Empire augments human system with the computational power. Empire thus sets

codability as the condition for appearance in the Metropolis, dispatching less refined

forms of control to deal with whatever escapes the codes.

The positivities of the Metropolis make possible Empire’s adaptive system of control. In

systems such as the Modern State, division operates through a general binary whereby

everything in a particular category marked for exclusion. Even in floating system of The

Social, where exclusions are under constant revisions, division occurs by relegating

subjects to the outside. In the Metropolis, however, positivities are treated as intersections

of multiple appearances, enabling Empire to differentially handle elements within a single shared category. Furthermore, the sea of positivities that constitute the Metropolis 145 also changes how articulation functions. The Modern State considers each part to be a representative of a greater whole, a stand-in with access to the same resources as many other similar parts. Empire, however, selects visibilities for their composability – their ability to relate to and interact with other visibilities to form a composite, and the power that is produced in such fabrication. Thus, when Empire makes additional selections, it does not do so to produce the same effect but a differential one. By affording visibilities the ‘democracy’ of appearance whereby they all appear different but they all appear in the same way, Empire differentially and selectively administers division and articulation while claiming to have done away with the ills of exclusion and representation.

Empire’s democracy of appearance demotes humanity by opening the aperture of control to gain a wider grasp of the sensible. This ecological expansion of the senses listens to screaming yeast, surrenders bodies to their bacterial overlords, and looks for the

Michelangelo of the stars. And the change of scenery empties the luster from the more arrogant forms of human expression they have grown accustomed to by overturning habits of thought wedded to bodily wholeness and psychic mastery. Yet Empire’s rigid anti-humanism does not follow from a project of liberation but enslavement; it changes its way of looking so as to tap into a wider array of material forces. Thus the widening of

Empire’s gaze trades off the fine-tuned expressiveness of language for the force of code.

As one programmer notes, language is useful for inventing because its complex constructions grasp at nearly inexpressible things unavailable to code. In the end, code is not make for good reading because it only has one meaning: what it does; “its entire meaning is its function” (Ullman, “ and Entropy”). The same goes for Empire, it 146 produces effects in the Metropolis that are worth appreciation or even study, but behind

Empire lies only one thing: the total domination of everything that appears.

Yet Empire does not tear humanity from the heavens all at once. The processural incompleteness of Empire’s anti-humanism produces potentials from pitting humanity against itself. Internet commenting exists as a powerful example of this conflict. When the complexity of human appearance is reduced to a handle or simply a timestamp, it becomes difficult to determine whether the commenter is even human at all. But even more interestingly, without the terrain of bodily appearance, modes of communication shift to regain traction. Particularly thorny aspects of human appearance such as gender or race reappear, but emerge from more dubious locations – gender-identity is inferred from self-reported tastes and race extends from the user’s location. But following in the footsteps of marketing, internet commentators often forgo facts for obvious inaccuracies, weird associations, or apparent nonsense. These commentators replace information transmission with affective charges, sending explosive missives simply meant to provoke rather than be understood. In this mode of communication – insinuation by association – messages are transmitted, but not as carriers of meaning between two easily identifiable subjects. This is not new to the Metropolis, as it is also found in anonymous pamphlets or unsigned images popular in other times and places, but it suggests a political power specific enough to disrupt the present configuration of the system of permanent registration. The system of registration has been called upon to launch a counter-attack against the dangers of arbitrary self-presentation and anonymity, requiring forms of authentication that tie accounts to verified identities. Despite those controls, insinuation 147 has only grown and permeates most forms of online communication.

At a higher order of magnitude, Empire’s mode of communication produces another escape route: illegalism. Anticipating the coming unreliability of humanist veridiction, which assumes helpful subjects willing to provide dependable information based on thoughtful self-reflection, The Spectacle finds other avenues for generating visibilities.

Empire extends the limited ‘truth of the market’ that was turned into a form of governance by the Social State into a regime of veridiction for all of the Metropolis. In turn, Empire is able to release its hold on The Social, letting it die a slow death, while opening up subjects and flows to other forms of registration. At its most extreme, Empire allows neighborhoods of the Metropolis to decline into a seedy underworld of degenerates, illegals, and cheats to complete its metamorphosis into a crime syndicate that finds a way to always take a cut, whether it be through skimming off the top, running protection rackets, blackmail and extortion, or outright theft. In abandoning the registration of The Social for less humanist systems, Empire taps into far greater reservoirs of value – from the inorganic body of the earth to the slowly-accumulated evolutionary wealth of living species – but in turn gives up on its most powerful mechanisms of . As visibilities shift and the Metropolis gnaws through what remains of The Social, fraud, piracy, and other anonymous behavior will only rise. The political challenge is to leverage the anti-humanist potential in modes of communication that undermine the system of permanent registration in the service of liberation, not exploitation.

148

PART 3 – CONFLICT

The point is not just to understand Empire but to destroy it. At least for a time, the walls of the State were under siege by critique, which mustered an army of reason targeting sovereignty’s mythical foundations. But rationality became a tool of governance as the

State found ways to capture reason for its own purposes. The Spectacle packages every product through cynicism, and critique has become just another means to spread detachment and fatalist alienation. Yet even if Empire’s pervasive use of cynical reason does not completely damn the future of critique, it does serve as a cautionary tale for those engaged in the politics of truth and warns of the declining efficiency of forces backed by critique alone. It is then the destructive power of critique that should be recovered, its critical function, as it realizes a particular type of force – the force of conflict.

Conflict remains essential – it is not enough to turn one’s back on Empire, for it persists regardless of how much one denounces, refutes, or scorns it. And even if Empire can withstand critique, its forces can be opposed. Fortunately, opportunities for struggle are numerous within the Metropolis, as there is much that escapes the grasp of Empire, if only partially. Two forces in particular are already sites of conflict that have the potential to expand into general revolt: affect and anonymity. Affects emanate from the residents 149 of the Metropolis as they manage their conflicted sense of self to secure survival in a

hostile environment. Frequently felt as a negative reaction to alienated existence, affects

usually confine subjects to a dark interiority, yet a handful of political groups have

demonstrated that these affects can serve as resources for action. Anonymity abounds

amidst the glitch, noise, and clutter ubiquitous to the digital culture of the Metropolis.

Furthermore, while those aspects of digital culture can frustrate the coherence required

for many political projects, they also expose advantages for anonymous action. But it is

not enough to merely describe affect and anonymity – they must be intensified. And to do

so, the conflicts should be dramatized and given their own consistency, which requires

breaking through the false dilemma between spontaneity and organization.

Dramatization

On their own, concepts are bloodless things begging to be brought to life. And as long as

they remain pure knowledge, we remain ignorant of the conditions that give concepts

their force. When dramatized, however, concepts spring alive with the quality and

intensity of actors in a play, transmitting an array of sensations not communicated by the

conceptual personae of the script itself.31 Therefore, dramatization is not a superficial

ploy but an integral part in the practical, artistic, and critical expression of concepts:

practical, because a dramatic script calls out to be picked up and animated with force;

artistic, because each director stages a new version of concepts and each actor puts their

own slant on their character; and critical, because many foreseeable dramas are imagined

31 “We distinguish Ideas, concepts and dramas: the role of dramas is to specify concepts by incarnating the differential relations and singularities of an Idea,” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 218. 150 but only one is acted out, leaving many potential sensations unexpressed or even

forgotten (Mackenzie and Porter, “Dramatization as Method, “ 485-488). Moreover, the

aim of dramatization is not the establishment any particular state of affairs or a set of

exemplary models to be imitated but blocks of sensation that inspire further movement.32

In fact, its power is greatest if expression persists even when the expressed thing is no longer there.

Each of the following chapters is centered on a concept, first affect and then anonymity, and is dramatized by their own set of conceptual personae struggling against Empire.

Some of the dramatic scenes of conflict are later identified or even unpacked, while others are not. The result is a tenor that carries through each chapter, even when it causes the narrative to appear disjointed. The intent is to create movement through sensations which escape the hegemonic sociology of social movements that stamps out cookie-cutter forms to be repeated ad nauseum as well as to open up new paths of becoming that subvert the Metropolis. And the method is to play out, to dramatize, some of the differences that express the quality and intensity of our conflict with Empire.

Life and Strategy

Radical politics was plagued for a time by the dilemma of spontaneity and organization.

Central to Lenin, the opposition of organization to spontaneity assumes that revolt is routine like a force of nature. Accordingly, spontaneous forms of revolt exist as a

32 In his book The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influences, James Williams argues that sensation is “movement in itself, an inner resistance to identification” (48). 151 seemingly natural reaction to the horrible circumstances of violence and tyranny – often leading to slave uprisings, peasant revolts, or political exodus. Jealous of the elegant geometry of the Modern State, Lenin suggested a science of revolution to turn natural instincts into an objective force. Sharing in this belief, his comrade Trotsky illustrated the scientific model with the metaphor of a steam engine, explaining that the powerful energy of the mass mobilizations driving the Russian Revolution would have dissipated if not for the piston-box of the party, which compressed the people’s energy like steam at the decisive moment (History of the Russian Revolution, xix).

But this science of organization and its subsequent iterations – Marxist-Leninism,

Luxemburgism, and more contemporary resurrections of the party – are all based on an unfortunate error of thought that holds substance to be hylomorphic, that is to say, that matter lacks order (the spontaneous actions of a people) and must have laws imposed on it from the outside to give it form (the organization of the party). At least two strong objections should be made to a hylomorphic model of politics: first, its emphasis on unity and coherence gives ways to today’s hegemonic sociology of social movements, which extends the gaze of the Spectacle to all matter, representing it as abstract, unspecified, passive, and in need of form (Simondon, The Physico-Biological Genesis of the

Individual, 47-48); and second, it treats the whole world as the Archaic State treated labor: as a master commanding his slaves, whose activity appears as the result of an effective technical operation but whose success is actually due to “a socialized representation of work” (49).

152 Even Lenin realized this error, and after August 1914, he considered the question of organization in both form and content, which he used to differentiate between “an objectively conservative organization” and “an objectively revolutionary one” (Mandel,

“The Leninist Theory of Organization,” 96). Though such a refinement worked for a time, it was doomed to replicate its error on a larger scale by way of the statist dialectic of recognition whereby the image of politics is only seen through its photonegative, depicting only what the narrow vision of the State has already captured. Empire has done away with this lifeless dilemma, subsuming the State, which was unable at last to repel what it could not identify. It is time for radical politics to respond in kind. In place of spontaneity and organization, we can thus look to escape, which poses questions of life and strategy.

Life and strategy can evade the false dilemma of spontaneity and organization. Even though both life and strategy are often represented hylomorphically in preparation for capture by nascent State-forms. Life, for instance, is often cast into the torturous depths of a subjective interiority so that subjects willingly seek out relief, even from their tormentors. Strategy, similarly, is repeatedly reduced to a question of coherence and identity for the sake of easy reproduction regardless of circumstance. But here, life is presented as the process of becoming-otherwise whose movement of constant undoing generates a set of felt relations – affects. Though affects are usually registered as feelings, positive, negative, and everything in-between – joy, anxiety, sadness, exhilaration, anticipation, sympathy, fear – they also live an autonomous existence, embodying spontaneous and passive processes that can be drawn on as a political resource against 153 Empire. Strategy also isolates forces that can be used in political struggle, foremost among them the power of anonymity. Of the previous strategies of anonymity, one installed anonymity and escape as decisive principles: guerrilla warfare. The theory of guerrilla warfare thus suggests how certain strategic advantages can be exploited by anonymous forces constituted against the Empire, which are fighting deep within the

Metropolis. Ultimately, affect and anonymity reveal a new conceptual terrain beyond spontaneity and organization that is populated by negative affect, feminist killjoys, political illness, insinuation, glitch, clutter, and noise – all forms of escape essential for surviving Empire and subverting the Metropolis.

154

Chapter 4 – Affect

“Everybody Talks About the Weather, but Nobody Does Anything About It”

Interiority, Dark Appetites and the Desire to Confess

The noises of a public place set the scene as the shot fades from black. Wobbly, droning music overtakes the din of the crowd, capturing the suffocating alienation of the

Metropolis where mutual presence is characterized more by mutual separation than social connection.

A floor cuts the frame in half, the low shot focusing on people’s feet as they hurry from one side of the frame to another. Some disappear, their presence reduced to nothing before we know anything about them. Others appear, but not as complex characters in a drama but as anonymous subjects, either to be ignored or simply forgotten. In big red text, the words “NADIE ES INOCENTE” are emblazoned on the screen.

A pair of skinny legs appears, and the film quickly cuts to a backlit character walking up stairs with the same placid determination it takes to safely walk big city streets.

In the next shot, we finally catch a glimpse the character as he moves in and out of the 155 shadows. A young punk in a red cut-off shirt and wild hair boards a train and finds a seat. While the train picks up speed, the disorienting music stops and is replaced by the mechanical clanks of locomotion. The punk stares out the window. His are broadcast through voice-over.

In a meandering tone, the punk gives a wry farewell to Neza City, a slum outside Mexico

City. His excitement builds as he says goodbye to pickpockets, the police, and a no-good government. But even in escape, he returns his thoughts to his gang of Shit Punks

(Mierdas Punks). Later, he mentions what he thinks makes them unique. Los Mierdas, unlike other gangs, hold no territory and therefore go anywhere they want to go – ”We have no turf, we go from one place to another. Gangs with turfs chase us or we chase them. It’s all the same.”

This journey provides a loose arc for the otherwise haphazard everyday life of his gang.

At times, the dull emptiness of description almost finds meaning. The young punk may have a name: Kara? Yet as he travels, he changes his name to Juanillo, which casts a darker shade of doubt. The train itself offers tempting certainty, as its fixed path seems more determined than the rest of the scene. But dizzying jump-cuts and a disorienting trip through the train after the punk huffs something intoxicating undermine his veracity.

Truth would be wasted in this instance, anyway; Los Mierdas are the children of “No

Future.” No one is there to mourn their death, only curse their existence. Perhaps the only bit of truth is found in a phrase said in a moment of indifferent reflection on the 156 train. “Yo no quiero ser nadie. Yo no quiero ser nada.”

A decade earlier, Foucault declared that he was driven by the same motivation: “to get free of oneself” (Foucault, The Uses of Pleasure, 94-5). Yet he did not imagine such an escape to occur when someone leaves it all behind by skipping town. For Foucault, one does not shed oneself by shaking whatever authorities may be after you, joining a different gang, adopting a new name, or taking up a completely different lifestyle. Unlike the ancients who are nothing but their visible public acts, we moderns are tied to something much deeper than mere practices: a private self stricken with the poisoned gift of a deep interior. The product of Publicity and the Spectacle, the deep interiority of the self opens like a crack for Empire to plunge into. Escape is only partial as long as it is haunted by a specific desire – confession.

“Western man has become a confessing animal” (Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 59).

Foucault says that the centrality of confession in modern life appears as an accident, but those with a careful eye can spot the jurist-priest’s hand in its construction. Confession was not just a strange act to be excavated like a corpse from the decaying pages of confessional manuals in archival tombs, but the invention of a particular technology of politics.

The private inner self of confession boasts a striking architecture built for introspection.

In his Confessions, the seminal text on confession, the great jurist-priest Augustine depicts enormous monuments that furnish the depths of the soul. Fields. Wide expanses. 157 Souls are constructed like a lata praetoriae (spacious palace) or aula ingenti (vast court) but without ceilings, open to bask in the light of the Sun (Augustine, Confessions,

10:8:12, 10:8:14). Furthermore, each private structure is erected to direct two movements, inward and upward. Inward, as a container, the soul holds the immense store of memories unique to each soul. And upward, as an opening, its paves a startling array of avenues that all lead toward the heavens. But jurist-priests do not ask their subjects to look inward to its every curve, as one comes to know the shape of their body, or study its structure for hidden truths unique to one’s nature, as our contemporaries do.

Their obedient eyes must turn in-and-then-up to find a God that shines within the courtyard of those who leave behind the outside world and look in themselves. Yet such exposure does not reward them with the pleasure of basking in fields of glory or even the gift of the truth of the self; searching the wide spaces reveals a divine knowledge – the truth of their sin. The soul shields sinners who follow the jurist-priest from the penetrating eyes of others, deflecting the judge of visible acts by locating inner truth in a deep hidden space only accessible by the self. Yet such deflection comes from opening up the self to an endless form of intimate judgment, the infinite knowledge of God, who not only sees all actions – both public and private – but also hears all thoughts, knows all motivations, and senses all desires. Furthermore, jurist-priests demand that followers bare their soul in the vastness of great courts, presenting every result of the endless searching in-and-then-up, or be condemned to eternal damnation.

Empire, happy to indulge religious fantasies of the infinite, does nothing to impede the ongoing construction of cathedrals to the self. Yet few build the steeples that reach 158 toward the heavens in a vain attempt to touch the divine. The souls of Empire take after

Locke’s dark room, sealed off from the Sun (An Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, 11.17). But unlike Locke, who thought like a carpenter when designing windows of perception to the soul, Empire teaches its subjects to be miners that enjoy the darkness. At first glance, souls in the Metropolis appear as dark rooms hidden from the prying eyes of the Spectacle, deep caverns of sensation that subjects flee to for private relief. The Modern State has problems with such spaces, worried that they offered refuge to men fit in action but sick in or heart. But with its legions of experts, it expands the priesthood to a broad range of eyes and ears. Doctors, fathers, teachers, and judges benefitted from the invention of confession’s most curious effect, ‘the speaker’s benefit’

– a tool that cuts with the twin blades of truth and power in order to leave a strange wound that pleases the victim as it sears with pain.

If confession is understood not only as a declaration of wrongdoing but as an exclamation of the truth of one’s inner self, confessional utterances do not simply restate facts already found in the world. Rather, confession had to be invented in order to establish a process for subjects withdrawn into their private worlds to still register their existence. Therefore, by attaching the heaviness of judgment, speech is then burdened with real or imagined repression or shame. With the death of God, confession barely seems worthwhile, for hidden barbs do not carry a divine penalty. Yet the power of confession grew in profanation, as the State’s experts found that the measured palliative of clerical absolution can give way to the deep reservoir of inner pleasure unlocked through transgression, which sets aside the marginal comforts of ultimate forgiveness for near 159 endless oceans of masochistic passion delivered by the shame and difficulty of

confession. For the compensation of the speaker’s benefit, Empire radiates mixtures of

pain and pleasure, producing desires that ease subjects out of hiding through the pleasure

of exposure.

Empire’s subjects live in an age of appetites, indulgences that come from the Spectacle

piercing the dark folds of the soul’s architecture. The scorching light of the Spectacle

sears the soul, not by shining in the courtyard of the devoted or peaking through the dark

room’s cracks of perception, but by igniting uncontrollable private passions. The

explosion of appetites cannot help but be subversive – it toppled the Eastern Bloc to end the Cold War, recently overthrew North African dictators, and nearly upended the whole world in the 1960s. But despite their unruly nature, Empire usually finds a use for these desires, stoking and redirecting them through the most basic technique of misrecognition: ventriloquization. Confessional admissions are treated as secrets; so charged that only hushed tones or anesthetized clinical terms can prevent their explosion, or in the event of detonation, control its concussive waves. Just as madmen are kept in cages, not for their own protection but to minimize their ability to disrupt others, confession also occurs in a private language behind closed doors. When forced to speak familiarly about themselves with such an estranged tongue, many subjects forget to consider whether the words on their lips are truly theirs or the voice of another. Yet the ritual of confession is not just an expression of dark truths – it is their consummation. And experts of all stripes have developed techniques to implant new appetites. Psychoanalysts use transference to rope in their patients, marketers convince consumers that they have been missing something 160 their whole lives, and politicians whip the people into a frenzy. The confusion further extends to secrecy, as subjects seeking to avoid the penalty of breaking a taboo are to enjoy confession but simultaneously deny that anything was spoken at all. Buoyed by a culture of denial, the Metropolis is filled by anxious residents who spread rumor and half- truth, and despite being unsure of the source, they are eager to pass it on all the same.

The Metropolis is barely more than a swirling circuit for the dark force of appetites. Yet the Metropolis would collapse without Empire, which unfolds the dark depths of introspection in order to extend its far-reaching circuit. Empire demands that all secrets are made public and thus engineers souls that transparently conduct appetites while concurrently uncovering even more subterranean passions. The Modern State is desperate to generate transparency and thus sets the Police to cordon off a scene and suspend all motion until everyone and everything has given an account of itself. But the minimum speed of life in the Metropolis is far too fast for total arrest, however, so Empire establishes transparency in what is left of the Social. The social desire for virtue sets good citizens down the tangled path of their souls as if their liberation depends on every possible discovery. Each descent uncovers what appears to be fragments of truth, which are later confirmed by experts as prized artifacts of the self. As the trips become more numerous, the process drops lower into the subconscious until its is nothing but a habit emptied of shame and giving an account of oneself becomes a custom as regular as any other part of everyday life. This is how Empire makes the profusion of dark appetites synonymous with the public display of preference: by constructing an avenue of satisfaction for taking personal ownership over a passing interest. And this unending 161 stream of difference is why the Metropolis cannot help but be banal. Private rooms are completely exposed by Empire’s compulsion to confess and thus drained of the thrill of secrecy; the soul no longer obscures a dispersed network of thoughts, obsessions, and pleasures but puts each and every one of them on display, open to the prying eyes of the

Spectacle and managed by the violent force of Biopower.

The Spectacle’s command over the Metropolis undermines the tempting theory that the modern soul is a refuge. It is not a safe house but a set-up. Fugitive moments in the seemingly private life of the soul appear to move securely between hideouts, but their organization was infiltrated by Empire long ago. In contrast to the soul’s appearance in

Empire as a dark room that hides dangerous appetites, its function is far more collective.

Empire governs a whole community of souls, as a shepherd tends his flock or a captain pilots his ship, while declaring that the movements of the Metropolis originate from innumerable causes of private origin (Foucault, Security, Territory Population, 123-130;

The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 249-250). But this ventriloquism should not be mistaken for an organized conspiracy, as Empire does not give direct orders but simply marshals whatever reactionary forces are necessary to preserve a perpetual present. The soul today enables Empire’s negative operation by taking on the architecture of the waiting room.

The waiting room is an essentially boring space where subjects are forced to give the most insipid account of themselves while waiting for something to happen. Beckett canonizes this practice in Waiting for Godot by satirizing tramps who remain stuck in 162 self-reflection and thus fail to explore humanity’s newfound freedom from transcendent authority. Despite the absurdity of searching for the truth of oneself while waiting, the myth persists. And thus to exist in the Metropolis is to respond to an endless barrage of questions, which inevitably lead to interrogation, supervision, and modification, and often end in punishment and constraint. For some, anticipating the interventions of authority makes the soul a place of anxiety, even if they are unable to determine why or for what reason. But for those habituated to waiting, Empire’s repression of the event is no cause for concern, as the knowledge extracted through interrogation is helpful or even desirable; experts will analyze the material and get back to them with a proper diagnosis, whether it is the cause to their marital strife or which Harry Potter character they ‘are.’

Caught within the trinity of souls – Augustine’s divine courtyard, Locke’s dark room, and

Empire’s waiting room – contemporary subjects are unsure whether it is their eternal fate that lies in the balance or just a way to pass the time. What is clear, however, is that

Empire has extended the reign of the present by indulging the subject’s dark appetites and strengthening the compulsion to confess. Yet Empire’s creeping is not enough to satisfy all desires; so, just as Christianity secretes its own , with Empire arrives a bottomless passion that renounces any name but nothingness itself.

Nothingness is more than just revolt. Revolt exists as a potential for resistance everywhere and at all times, yet differing forms of revolt exist alongside each State-form.

Foucault outlines how the Levelers and Diggers of the English Civil War developed an

innovative form of revolt to the Modern State. Rather than rebelling to have their voices

heard or to establish a more just society, the Levelers and Diggers called for rebellion as 163 an absolute right based on the categorical and immediate abomination of the social order of the Modern State, which they declared to be the continuation of war by other means, which only their revolt could end (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 109-110). In the

Modern State, then, the radical right to revolt is not based on the liberal principle of good governance but its opposite, an ungovernability that employs historical analysis to argue that the State is nothing but the permanent state of war.

Refusal is how nothingness revolts against Empire. More than a withdrawal, refusal attacks the relations of the Metropolis and everything that they entail. Its aim is to make those relations impossible, sweeping away the Metropolis and Empire with it. Militants used the notion during ’s decade-long Years of Lead, looking to subvert the labor- relation through a subtraction that started in Turin’s Fiat plants and magnified across society through the 1970’s. Workers unwilling to struggle with management for command over their own power developed a strategy for what they did control, the productive capacity of labor. The gamble was that without production, management would wither away and die. The strategy of refusal thus rejected the aspect of Leninism that replaces capital’s party-form with its own, and it instead revealed a force of life that exists outside the workplace and beneath the streets (Tronti, “Strategy of Refusal”). The conflict simmered and grew too hot for the otherwise sympathetic population when the

Red Brigades assassinated Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro, which allowed the

State to launch a punishing anti- campaign that destroyed the movement and imprisoned thousands.

164 It is through the refusal of interiority that the soul is incorporated into the strategy of nothingness. The can be easily modified to consider Empire’s domination of the soul. Work has not disappeared in the Metropolis, but it is no longer limited to the factory. As Empire makes work a general condition rather than a clearly defined activity, work becomes an activity centered on the soul. Everywhere one looks in the Metropolis one finds the soul at work. Less obliquely, however, refusal pits nothingness against interiority itself. Under the terrifying gaze of the Spectacle, the interior of the self may appear natural or simply inevitable, but Foucault’s genealogy of the self reveals ancient conceptions of the soul that lack private secrets. To the extent that Seneca or other ancients imagined themselves to have a conscience that engaged in personal reflection, it held no secrets and was meant only to enhance public life (Foucault, “Technologies of the Self”, 35-7). Yet the ancients hold no clues for resistance to Empire, only the notion that humans have the capacity to exist without the interiors to which the residents of the

Metropolis have grown so accustomed.

The refusal of interiority comes into its own when it uses the landscape of the Metropolis against Empire. First, it begins with subjects that embrace the dark desires of the soul, as they peddle in the most potent form of power. And every tool has an infinite amount of possible uses, many of them contradictory. So once a tool is released from its expected function, it is free to become a weapon. Second, the soul becomes a form of struggle when it is rewired to disrupt the circuit of social conductivity. Self-righteous fugitives flee their habitat to the dark recesses of the soul only to bare its contents in an attempt to gain salvation. The enemies of Empire do not change their habitat but instead change 165 their habits, using the soul to invent novel ways of revolt. And third, the struggle transforms into revolt when refusal begets nothingness. Nothingness will reign when the soul annihilates the transcendental conditions that enable all interiority. In this sense, nothingness is not the indulgence of destructive appetites but the making-possible of new ones. Such is the state of war against the perpetual present; at a certain moment, nothing becomes everything. And it is the freeing capacity of nothingness that makes it antagonistic to Empire.

Feel Tank, An Experiment in Negative Affects

“I don’t want these things to happen, they just do,” murmurs Rita, a character in Joyce

Carol Oates’s Foxfire. A tragic girl, Rita could not help that terrible things always seemed to happened to her. Her brothers and other boys exploited her. The abuse would begin with teasing and sometimes ended in worse. To speak of a milder incident: one time when she was seven, her brothers yanked off her panties and hoisted them in a high tree for the cruel satisfaction of the neighborhood boys. Every time she apologized in a detached and matter of fact way, as if each injustice happened around but not to her, like the weather, totally absent of anything about her – her body, her status as a female.

One day it all changes. Rita and three other high school girls cram in a small room on

New Years Eve Day 1953. Led by Legs (“First-in-command”), they form a blood- sisterhood. A girl gang. (FOXFIRE IS YOUR HEART!) Foxfire quickly develops a for revenge. They feast on the joy and pleasure that follows from breaking through the shame and disdain of long submitting to absent and alcoholic fathers, lecherous teachers 166 and uncles, and ruthless boys and brothers. Separately, the girls felt suffocated. But together, they are delirious with life.

Foxfire’s bond is underwritten by love even if it is fueled by vengeance. When others would feel regret or remorse, or guilt and sin, they simply scream FOXFIRE BURNS &

BURNS and FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS SORRY! And the way they tell it, there is no reason for you to feel sorry either. As Maddy writes of their notebooks, Foxfire’s actions are no doubt crimes, yet “most of these went not only unpublished but unacknowledged – our victims, all male, were too ashamed, or too cowardly, to come forward to complain.”

Yet it is not the crimes that define them, it just adds to their strength. Simply being together, even before undertaking their campaign of justice, the girls began their migration from forgettable girls to figures of history. Foxfire was already on everyone’s lips. Their mere presence bred curiosity and suspicion. But they truly command respect once they begin striking against the men who left them hurt, alone, or vulnerable, and it is this respect that allow the girls to finally embrace the distrust for adults and boys they had long privately nursed.

There is much to say about the history of Foxfire. Tales of youthful exuberance or irresponsibility that lead them astray. Explanations on how FOXFIRE HOMESTEAD and FOXFIRE FINANCES seal their sad fate. But these distract from Foxfire’s agonizing truth: the path of liberation and escape winds through negative affects and not around them. For revenge can serve as the greatest act of love. 167

Perhaps there is an unavoidable complicity between all the girls who weather the daily assault of patriarchy like a bad storm. Their innermost feelings well up, some given expressed through grief or outrage, but more often, they are nursed in seclusion. Can this shared secret turn ugly feelings into outright conspiracy? Or even more importantly, turn revenge into collective liberation? Most sober-minded critics find ugly feelings unfit for something as noble as shared liberation. Confirming critic’s skepticism, few political projects outwardly declare that they draw their strength from envy, irritation, paranoia, and anxiety. Furthermore, most actions taken on behalf of these emotions are quickly marked within public discourse as hostile, destructive, and uncontrolled. Yet Sianne Ngai argues that although these negative affects are weaker than “grander passions like anger and fear” and thus lack an orientation powerful enough to form clear political motivations, the unsuitability of weakly intentional feelings “amplifies their power to diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or thwarted actions in particular

(Ngai, Ugly Feelings, 27). From this perspective, ugly feelings are blockages – cruel replacements that inspire only enough optimism to discourage the search for a better alternative. Diagnosing such feelings should avoid what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls a paranoid reading, which takes pleasure in the suspicious search for sources of discontent and its subsequent exposure, but rather a reparative and transformative reading driven by hope and surprise (Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity, 123-151). The embodiment of reparation, she suggests echoing Melanie Klein, is a depressive attitude that drains the shock and anxiety of surprise. This approach proposes that once the world appears as fundamentally ambivalent, with the good always hopelessly tied up in the bad, 168 one sheds paranoid anticipation and becomes open to surprise stripped of the dread that comes with always waiting only for bad news. The key is to prevent the clinical tool of a depressive attitude from blossoming into the clinical blockage of depression.

Depression is a real danger, however, a cause for concern for the ongoing feminist project

‘Public Feelings.’ After decades of battle against Empire by means of queer activism, the

AIDS crisis, anti-racist advocacy, electoral campaigns, and anti-war mobilizations, these feminists undertook a program of diagnosis and self-care. The positive valence of a depressive attitude seemed lost as all that seemed possible was full-blown depression.

Recognizing collective burnout, they questioned dominant diagnostic paradigms, which look for causes in neurochemical imbalances or damaged psyches. Hardly convinced by solely clinical explanations for their shared anxiety, exhaustion, incredulity, split focus, and numbness, they began investigating how the already-alienated life in the Metropolis was compounded by the trauma of national crises, beginning with 9/11 and continuing with the war in Iraq, the Bush reelection, and Hurricane Katrina (Cvetkovich, “Public

Feelings,” 459-468). This is not to say that they find psychiatry or psychoanalysis wrong or counterproductive, but these feminists were determined to turn feelings into collective forces against Empire; and from that struggle, Feel Tank Chicago was born.

Feel Tank Chicago seeks access to political life through the affective register. The project names their malaise ‘political depression,’ which they define as “the sense that customary forms of political response, including and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better” (Cvetkovich, “Public 169 Feelings,” 460). To further their investigation, Feel Tank holds conferences, exhibitions, and International Days of the Depressed. As a celebration of depression, they dress in bathrobes and protest with banners, signs, stickers, and chants emblazoned with slogans diagnosing the environment of hostility produce by Empire: “Depressed? It

Might Be Political”; “Exhausted? It Might Be Politics”; or just “I Feel Lost” (Zorach,

“Make It Stop,” 2). Contrary to cynical ideology’s denunciation of those who are apathetic as complicit with the status quo, political depression identifies Empire and not selfishness or individual illness as the cause of apathy. Causes for this suffering are numerous and easy to identify – the racism of white supremacy, the exploitation of global capitalism, the sexism of patriarchy, the degradation of the environment, and the violence of heteronormativity to name a few – while the course for their abolition is not readily apparent. Political depression thus demonstrates how Empire spreads depression like a fog, cloaking adequately political alternatives in the everyday life of the Metropolis. One such blockage is the traditional politics of think tanks who manage technical flows by drawing on ‘whiz kids’ computer models, policy expertise, and insider connections to craft politically-relevant briefs. The effect of reducing politics to this form of government is cataclysmic: it reduces time to a perpetual present whereby politics is nothing but the art of compromise. In such a world, the status quo is all that is visible and thus reigns supreme. The group has found a less restricted route through the Metropolis as a ‘feel’ tank, which works to turn private feelings into a public resource for political action. And to this end, Feel Tank operates in the nexus of activism, academia, and art. Such an approach reveals different paths to politics, animated by perspectives that still imagine alternatives to the Metropolis and are careful to avoid those channels long mastered by 170 Empire.

By making depression political, Feel Tank also challenges a deeper and more pervasive

blockage: the interiority of the subject. With its attention to the affective dimension of

politics, Feel Tank upsets the dark room of the self that is cynically manipulated by policy analysts and liberal political theorists. Affects point to a circuit of power whereby external forces impress themselves on the biological imperatives of bodies, which makes emotion an emergent quality of the interrelational exteriority that constitutes the

Metropolis even if a necessary biological component exists in the body. And although a certain body may be predisposed to depression, its affective cause emerges as a political event in the life of the Metropolis. Identifying such a cause may be difficult, as depression often arises due to something as diffuse as bad weather or accumulative time spent in an adverse environment, but it is in this sense that patriarchy appears as a storm and Empire as a desert. It can therefore be said that affect not only demands that the emotions of subjects count as politics, but it also demands a political account of emotion exterior to subjects; as Ann Cvetkovich writes, politicizing feelings requires “the same historicization that is central to Foucauldian and other social constructionist approaches to sexuality” because “Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis applies as much to affect as sexuality, warranting a skeptical approach to claims for interiority or emotional expression as the truth of the self” (Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” 462). Feel Tank experiments, such as “Psychological Prosthetics,” reveal that affects can be treated to a large extent as external to the subjects that feel them. Even visualizing fatigue as an object and treating it as such coaxes people to explicitly connect their internal feelings to 171 external problems (“if Psychological Prosthetics™ were to make you custom-designed set of luggage for your emotional baggage, how large should it be? Would you like to send it off to someone?”) (Hibbert-Jones and Talisman, “Psychological Prosthetics,” 3).33 When this notion is expanded, its political conclusion is decisive: affects do not reveal the truth of a subject’s private life and are often merely a habituated response to Empire’s twin forces of Biopower and the Spectacle. This point may confuse those who imagine affect only as a tool of liberation. But only those who mistake Empire for its authoritarian cousin the Archaic State of conquest would think that the State only grows through crippling paralysis. This is not to say that Empire has stopped using its most effective instrument, fear, especially since the general environment it creates in the Metropolis is no doubt to blame for political depression. But the difficult truth is that any State-form

that incorporates the liberal pole of governance also expands its oppressive control

through the inspirational force of positive affects. Although social movements may draw

on affect as a form of power, so does the Social State. Positive affects swirl through both

the vortex of Zuccotti Park and the high rises of Goldman Sachs. Negative affects are

caught at work at temp jobs but also at feminist conference panels. Like the ambivalence

of any other form of power, affect is not a virtue but a diagnostic.

Treating affect as a point of disagreement is one way to maintain its ambivalence, and a

crucial aspect of that disagreement is the struggle over happiness. Sara Ahmed contends

that because happiness has been historically given as an emotional reward to women for

33 The full Psychological Prosthetics luggage questionnaire asks: “How big is your emotional baggage can it fit in a backpack, do you need a hand truck, or a moving company? Is it toxic, explosive? Do you share it with others? Does it get smaller if you share it, or larger? How do you get rid of it?” Hibbert-Jones and Talisman, “Psychological Prosthetics,” 3. 172 submission to gendered demands, especially those of the family, the struggle over happiness “forms the political horizon in which feminist claims are made” (Ahmed, The

Promise of Happiness, 59). Her complication of happiness enhances the contemporary utilization of Baruch Spinoza’s account of affect whereby affective connections with a body are either joyous or sad, with joyous affects being those that increase the capacity of the body and sad affects being those that are destructive to the body. Whereas such a

Spinozism intends joyous connections to be virtuous regardless of context, his account of affect theorizes the capacity of objects to evoke feelings of pleasure or disgust in subjects. Furthermore, in the alienated world of the Metropolis, the ability for objects and bodies to evoke pleasure in subjects is not always beneficial, as most of its residents are consumed by dark appetites they know to be against their best interest. Objects of desire’s ability to bruise subjects, their uncanny talent for wounding people but also teaching them to enjoy that wound, does not reveal the true nature of the soul; it merely confirms the indelible power of connection. And the world is not at a loss for connections, as today is not the age of sad passions but of the masochistic contract which

Empire seals by fusing the cruel thrill that comes from exploiting others with the self- destructive delights of being oppressed, bossed around, hopelessly addicted, completely dependent, and knowing your place, creating a split subject that desires happiness but only experiences pleasure. ’s project is to end the tireless pursuit of pleasure, which Ahmed argues begins through becoming a killjoy. Killjoys initiate a revolt against the promise of happiness through “acts of revolution” and “protests against the costs of agreement” (213). Feminist killjoys complete their revolutionary conversion when they abandon happiness and embrace affects as troublemakers. The face of their struggles may 173 appear surprisingly common – queer novels that end on a sad note, or spoilsports who ruin the atmosphere of a room – but their aim is transformative: to not satisfy already existing tastes but to establish new ones. This requires dismantling the current architecture of the soul and the construction of a new one. Killjoys thus open escape routes from the Metropolis that “open a life” and “make room for possibility, for chance” by not only wanting “the wrong things” that Empire has asked us to give up but to “create life worlds around these wants” (20, 218). Yet such openings are only visible to those who have given up on the illusion that positive affects draw out the best in people.

What ultimately characterizes a troublemaker is how they live life. For the troublemaker, life is not about survival but escape – escape from the causes of suffering, escape to a better world, and most importantly, escape as a form of struggle. The troublemaker dreams of freedom by imaging politics as a utopian space where “we could possibly go somewhere that exists only in our imagination” (Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 2). Yet this freedom is without shape, as it is only the notion that things must change. Such belief is founded on the revolutionary demand to live a life without compromise, and in doing so, it sees demands to imagine a world after the revolutionary break as collaborating with the reactionary forces of the present. And it is this veiled desire for something better than motivates the dreamer to gamble the transient pleasures of the present for the of permanent revolution. Audre Lorde powerfully distinguishes her own dreams of liberation from her mother’s focus on happy survival in her autobiographical biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. As a young child, she was often caught in the tension of a racially-mixed neighborhood of Harlem. While walking with 174 her mother, the tension literally spilled over onto the streets and she was spit on by racist whites. She grew to hate the throaty sound of men clearing their throats because she knew it would most likely end in a disgusting mark on her coat or shoe. But her mother, quick to explain the randomness of the event, would deflect the importance of race by complaining about the “lowclass people who had no better sense nor manners than to spit into the wind no matter where they went” (18-19). Although she was convinced by her mother, the memory of the event always nagged her. Years later, noticing a decline in the pervasive but seemingly random behavior, she asked her mother, “Have you noticed people don’t spit into the wind so much the way they used to?” (19). She immediately realized her mistake after seeing the pain in her mother’s face. Rather than admitting that she was helpless to prevent her young daughter from being spit on, her mother used the only protection she knew: to change reality, or at least her daughter’s perception of reality. Despite the complicated relationship she has with her mother’s classism, Lorde does not seem to begrudge her mother’s quietism. What the event ultimately demonstrates is a deeper distinction: the difference between escapism as a compromise with the present and political escape as the struggle for freedom.

Negative affects are thus to be seen as weapons in the struggle against Empire. Anger, frustration, disdain, and envy are reasonable reactions to the hostile environment of the

Metropolis. But when subjects soberly manage those negative affects, they are privately treating symptoms and not publicly addressing their external cause. As Feel Tank shows, those affects can become a resource for political action when the private space of the subject is emptied and feelings are made public. But these affects are also revolutionary, 175 as they imply their own escape: by signaling a bad reaction to a toxic environment, negative affects speak to a cause outside the interiority of the subject as the source of general discontent – a cause that can be changed. Yet ugly feelings are not enough if they are only employed to battle the oppressive conditions of everyday life in the Metropolis just to live to fight another day. To become truly antagonistic to Empire, then, troublemakers must combine negative affect’s motivational force with a refusal of interiority and utopian struggle. For negatives affects may serve as motivation for a better world (FOXFIRE BURNS AND BURNS), but they generate black holes of misery unless subjects refuse to blame themselves for negative affects (FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS

SORRY!) and maintain a revolutionary trajectory without compromise with the present

(FOXFIRE NEVER LOOKS BACK!).

SPK, Making Illness Into a Weapon

“Everybody talks about the Weather... We Don’t” read an advertisement launched in

1966 that depicted a train from the German national rail service plowing through the snow. The message: regardless of bad weather’s obstructions, Deutsche Bahn always powers through.

But in spite of its clever reworking of Mark Twain’s quip, “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it,” Deutsche Bahn was soon plagued by weather delays, which led to a chilly Germany reaction and gave rise to a new joke:

“Have year heard this one? German rail has four enemies: spring, summer, fall and winter.” 176

Within a couple years, the slogan reemerged with an explicitly political valence. A new spate of posters arrived bearing the same slogan, “Alle Reden vom Wetter... Wir Nicht.”

But this time, the phrase appeared on a bright red background above the faces of Marx,

Engels, and Lenin. Made by the German SDS, it elevated the original poster to world- historical proportions: regardless of capitalist obstructions to revolution, Marxist socialism will power through.

Yet the German SDS would suffered a similar fate. Peaking a few months after the posters were designed in 1968, the group met extreme government resistance and was unable to mount an effective opposition to the German Emergency Acts, which led to its ultimate collapse in 1970.

As the black clouds of repression gathered, other groups emerged. Waging a revolt against the so-called Auschwitz Generation, post-68 militants had one goal: agitation. Among them, one of the most innovative forms of agitation came from the

Socialists Patients’ Collective (Socialistisches Patientenkollektiv), a radical mental health group at the University of Heidelberg. Convinced that illness is a necessary byproduct of capitalism, they developed a radical form of therapy – agitation therapy – whose therapeutic effects were found in pitting one’s mental illness against centers of capitalism. In that way, SPK was determined to “turn illness into a weapon.”

By externalizing the cause of one’s condition, SPK’s agitation therapy echoes an 177 important question: If the subject no longer has the truth of an interior to confess, about what does the subject speak? Moreover, if they refuse the idle chatter of the waiting room that Mark Twain so despises, is there a form of talk that is itself a form of action?

A history of the subject without an interior might be constructed backwards. Such a discussion could start with queer history, which seems to lend itself to this backwardness, as its twentieth century stories are full of personal loss, social detachment, and fragmented community (Love, Feeling Backward, 146). No doubt such backwardness has ample company, as Benjamin wrote that the angel of history has his open wings caught in

“a storm blowing from Paradise” that propels him into the future facing backwards, so that all he can see are the horrors of what has already occurred (“Theses on the

Philosophy of History,” 257-8). A similarly backward-focused subject would also feel the full force of the catastrophe, which is pregnant with “shyness, ambivalence, melancholia, loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred, despair, [and] shame” that lead more often to failure than satisfaction (Love, Feeling

Backward, 146). Yet failure is the point of such an orientation. In contrast to work that focuses on transforming negative affects (understood as blockages, traumas, and the cessation of movement) into positive affects (empowerment, capacity, power), a backwards history identifies negativity as an antagonism generated within the Social.

And when this antagonism reemerges, feelings that were previously wished away or ignored reappear, and the gag order on negativity is lifted. When telling the history of failure, however, one speaks of projects that fail to complete their aims. And because most politics is built on positive projects, especially those premised on pride and 178 achievement, the spark of pure revolt rarely burns bright – but it can still be found.

A good place to search for the politics of fire that will engulf the soul is in the home. For, if “the soul is the prison of the body,” then Locke’s dark room is not only the prison of the soul, but has served as a private place of torment for women (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30). As Claire Fontaine maintains, when Virginia Woolf illuminated the dark rooms of The Social, all she found society to be was a conspiracy of men:

conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to

respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist,

childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within

whose mystic boundaries human are penned, rigidly, separately,

artificially; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he

goes through mystic rites and enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and

dominion while we, “his” women, are locked in the private house without share in

the many societies of which his society is composed (quoted in “Human Strike

Within the Field of Libidinal Economy,” 145-146).

So even as Empire’s unfolding of the Social into the sprawling exteriority of the

Metropolis scatters the markings, the home – wherever it appears – still serves as a private place of torment kept separate from the space of politics. Its violence remains unique because contrary to the worker, whose spaces of production are public and thus has a social infrastructure widely written about by scholars of politics and labor, the 179 housewife at home is marked by isolation and enforced privacy. And the symptoms of

such incarceration are severe. As Adrienne Rich explains, “the worker can unionize, go

out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by

compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have often taken the form of physical or mental

breakdown” (Rich, Of Woman Born, 30). Locked in such a lonely place, many captive

souls can hardly imagine rebelling against anything or anyone except themselves.

Yet it is precisely rebellion against oneself that may offer escape. And perhaps that

liberation arrives through the failure and incompleteness generated by negative affects.

The power of negative affects does not seem to draw from interiority even if Empire

makes it appear so. Rather, the negative circulates through a radically exterior path. By

way of Hitchcock’s The Birds, recent queer theories suggest an escape from the violence

of the home, especially after the forces of the negative takes flight. The

slogan Hitchcock devised, “The Birds is coming,” gives the film a sexual dimension.

Taking the license to perform a sexualized reading, one must then consider how the birds

enter the scene: as an excessive, interrupting force that upsets the heterosexual aim of the

film (Edelman, No Future, 129-133). In particular, the film’s lovebirds, Mitch and

Melanie, are not only distracted but their attempts to consummate their love are

prematurely disrupted by birds that keep coming without meaning or explanation; as Leo

Bersani would note, the birds are not an enjoinment to come together (Homos, 129).

Rather, the birds point to a power outside oneself so potent that it empties the home and

threatens all imaginable futures (or at least those of the domestic couple). To be clear: the antisocial force does not emerge from the pleasure of any particular identity, as if it was a 180 singular source found in either the dark recesses of the home or patiently received while queuing in the waiting room of the Metropolis. If anything, the swarming birds feed on the same destructive power that surges through Empire as it unfolds the remains of the

Social – not the product of an identity, no matter how deviant or transgressive, but the undoing of any and all identities. Dependent on the anti-normative power of unfolding, however, Empire also opens itself to attack from the damaged, failed, or abandoned subjects that litter the Metropolis.

Looking backward, the Socialist Patients’ Collective, a militant group in Germany from the 1970s, provides an interesting example of the power of failure. According to the SPK, illness itself is resistance. Recounting a passage from anti-psychiatrist D.G. Cooper, SPK found the potential for alienated life to make its mark on history:

there is the story relayed by Bruno Bettelheim in The Informed Letter (1961)

about a girl who, in an extreme moment of insight, recognized and broke out of

one of the most formidable piece of alienation in all human history. This girl was

one of a group of Jews queuing naked to enter the gas chamber. The SS officer

supervising proceedings heard that she had been a ballet dancer and ordered her to

dance. She danced, but gradually approached the officer and suddenly seized his

revolver and shot him. Her fate was obvious and it was equally obvious that

nothing she could do would alter the physical facts of the situation, namely the

extermination of the group. But what she did was to invest her death with an

intense personal meaning that at the same time expressed an historic opportunity 181 that was tragically lost in the massified process of the extermination camps

(Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, 40).34

Knowing that their own illnesses were enabled them to make a similar intervention, SPK began “multi-focal expansion” based on the theory that every mentally ill person is a compact point of focus of society, and that the effects of illness can be released back into society through agitation (SPK, Turn Illness Into a Weapon, 74).35 Acutely aware that

society was just as afraid of illness as violence, SPK undertook an exploration of how

illness is “life broken in itself” (10). Confident that “illness as a destroyed labour force is

the grave-digger of capitalism,” which they state geometrically in the formula “illness =

internal barrier of capitalism,” they promise to make “all persons fall ill at once” in order

to collectively exhaust humanity’s potential to take part in capitalist production (84;

trans. modified). Although they saw many different reactions to capitalist alienation, SPK

imagined alienation to be fully generalized as a shared condition that makes every subject

feel at least some illness of a sort and thus establishes a common strand for collective

revolt (9-11). Knowing that illness was not oriented exclusively toward revolt, they

sought a dialectical explanation for its reactionary and progressive moments. In its

reactionary moment, they argue that illness as a “destroyed labour force” is repaired “in

order to continue its exploitation” by means of a healing process that only performs

34 The reference to Naziism is not hyperbole for SPK was agitating against what some in Germany called “The Auschwitz Generation,” which formed a cultural and political hegemony that had not found much distance from National Socialism and even included many former Nazis. 35 The theory of guerrilla warfare was conceived by Régis Debray, though he attributed it to Ernesto “Che” Guevara. Foco unifies all three of Mao’s stages of guerrilla warfare in a single movement whereby the role of the is not to seize state power but to stoke a popular insurrection through armed struggle. For more on the original concept of the foco, see the subsequent chapter and Debray, The Revolution in the Revolution?. 182 simple “repairs of the labour force” to return “the ability to work” (84). But in it progressive moment, illness expands, “starting from the affects of ill people (that means starting from those ones who have become conscious of their suffering),” through the liberation of “energies that when released will turn sufferers into activists”; a release “as an explosive material, an intensification, that will smash the ruling system of murder”

(65; trans. modified). For SPK, agitation thus unlocks the progressive moment of illness as collective organization focused in protest.36 SPK thus shows how Empire produces numerous antagonisms that populate the Metropolis. And thus the concept of illness produced by SPK still threatens Empire, not in terms of a mass organization or even focalized expansion, but as an antagonism that spreads through the fabric of the

Metropolis.

In short, the positive task of the SPK is much like that of Feel Tank, which is to turn the inside out by reconnecting internal feelings to external problems in order to short-circuit their cause. On the level of the self, such a rewired circuitry externalizes negative affects and attenuates the destructive impact of interiority by distributing misery throughout the

36 For a more personal description of SPK’s activities, consider former member Magrit Schiller’s account in Remembering the Armed Struggle, “I immediately put my name down for one-on-one meetings, which were called ‘individual agitations’ in the SPK. During the meetings, I had a great need to talk first of all about me, my life up to now, my insecurities, my fears and my search for something different. At the beginning, this was the only reason I went to the SPK several times a week. During all of this, it became clear to me that my loneliness and sadness and the many problems I had with myself were not my personal and inescapable fate. … I realized that there were lots of people who felt the same way I did, that there were social and political for many things that made people suffer… After a few weeks, I felt at home in the SPK. I took part in several working groups, put together flyers with others, and printed them on our small machine. I felt good about things and I worked eagerly. We had an old record player on which we repeatedly played the ‘Ton, Stein Scerben’ song ‘Macht kaputt, was euch kaputtmacht’ [Destroy what is destroying you] and sang along with passion to the texts that expressed exactly how we felt about life. There was always something going on. Small or larger groups of people held heated discussions about the latest events, the situation in the world, books or personal questions. We prepared protest actions and demonstrations” (21-24). 183 shared space of politics. But negative affects continue to burn cold when locked away

inside the isolated depths of victimized subjects or even shared among accomplices like a

million tiny daggers. In contrast, the SPK’s externalization process intensifies negativity

rather than dissipating it, cultivating the force of incapacity that channels power through

refusal. In particular, it refuses to make the subject receptive to negative affects. And in

refusing to bear even a single negative affect, this politics of fire turns the dark interiority

into a weapon against its own very existence, consuming the pain of affliction as its cause

recedes. Yet the repressive powers of Empire lie ready to neutralize subjects that grow too intense for the Metropolis. This was the downfall of SPK. After a few turbulent months in 1971, an SPK member committed suicide, dozens of SPK members were jailed, and SPK was evicted from the University of Heidelberg, which lead to the SPK dissolving to protect its patients (xvii-xviii).

As an organization, SPK unfortunately ended in failure. Yet failure need not spell defeat.

As the blistering storm of Empire beats down on subjects, it is destroying the interiority of subjects. Yet subjects willing to weather the storm have already given up the refuge of the soul and are undertaking a refusal of the interiorities imposed by Empire. Though they do not abandon interiorities completely, refusal allows these subjects to refashion their dark appetites from tools of Empire to weapons for its dissolution. The black clouds of patriarchy often transform their appetites into negative affects and the subsequent pain of isolation, paranoid, or depression, even when the subjects know the true cause of their suffering. Yet it is those negative affects that form the basis of revolt. Troublemakers have shown that they can use their detachment to reorient blame, interruption, and 184 destruction and direct the torrent within the Metropolis. And embracing such a struggle is painful, taxing, and promises to end in failure, but surviving in a hostile environment is not enough. The path out of the desert has never been more certain, for “it isn’t running away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can open in yourself, given a cutting edge” (Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 8). As the severity of the weather increases, these opportunities for escape spread. With each additional downpour, a new reservoir of emotion collects. With time, the angel of history will look back on the refusal of interior in the revolt against Empire as just another catastrophe. But let’s hope that instead of horror or failure, he finds joy.

185

Chapter 5 – Anonymity

Insinuation, The Underground Current of Incoherence

Radicalism’s tame but dignified existence in the early parts of nineteenth century

America was a triumph for well-reasoned order. Immigrant intellectuals spread the heady ideals of socialism across the newly-opened frontier, founding mutualist or collectivist factory towns across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana and establishing revolutionary societies and educational clubs in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Chicago. Allergic to lawbreaking and violence, the communalists set out to foster the best-ordered and most-moral dimensions of utopian society. But as corruption and industry grew inseparable, a new radical energy gathered in the darker corners of society. While the socialists kept outrunning the company mines and industrial looms, a growing underclass either unwilling or unable to escape the greed of indecent men toiled away.

Only a short decade after the Great War, the polite pretensions of American radicalism fell away. This shift was due to two things: first, the Panic of 1873, which threw hundreds of thousands of workers into destitution and unleashed their fury; and second, the arrival of anarchists. It takes the entrance of a protagonist, , a fiery German anarchist, to give shape to the turbulence. Inspired by Most, a persuasive orator with scorching rhetoric, anarchists and other radicals brought ‘propaganda by the deed’ to 186 America. ‘Propaganda by the deed,’ an idea on the lips of the European radicals of the

time, is derived from the earlier Italian socialist Carlo Pisacane, who argues that “Ideas

spring from deeds and not the other way around,” so that “conspiracies, plots, and

attempted uprisings” are more effective propaganda “than a thousand volumes penned

by doctrinarians who are the real blight upon our country and the entire world”

(Graham, Anarchism, 68).

A determined Most found propaganda by the deed straightforward and published fiery

celebrations of the growing practice of anarchist regicide – and these writings often

landed in him jail. After a year and a half stay in an English jail for praising the

assassination of Alexander II of Russia, Most immigrated to the United States and soon

published a pamphlet entitled Science of Revolutionary Warfare–A Manual of Instruction

in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating

Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc, etc. Among these tools of destruction, he had a

clear weapon of choice: dynamite. Writing in the Parsons’s Alarm, Most declared his

love: “Dynamite! Of all the good stuff, that is the stuff! Stuff several pounds of this

stuff into an inch pipe (gas or water pipe), plug up both ends, insert a cap with a

fuse attached, place this in the immediate vicinity of a lot of rich loafers who live by the

sweat of other people’s brows, and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result

will follow. ... It is a genuine boon for , while it brings terror and fear to

the robbers. A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow – and don’t

you forget it!” So with the arrival of Most, his dynamite, and propaganda by the deed, the anarchist siege against robber barons and the forces of the State commenced. 187

Striking fear in hearts of the three enemies of classical anarchism – The Church, The

State, and Capital – radicals committed a remarkable number of regicides and other assassinations from the late 1870s through the early twentieth century. Yet the practice was not universally accepted in radical circles: pacifists, social democrats, and pragmatists hotly debated the principles and effectiveness of attacks on power. Paul

Rousse, French socialist and the first to coin the phrase propaganda by the deed, plays down violence when describing the concept’s realization. “Propaganda by the deed is a mighty means of rousing the popular consciousness,” he writes, because it serves as the pragmatism of the possible: as the masses are naturally skeptical of any idea as long it remains abstract, one must actually start a or a factory and “let the instruments of production be placed in the hands of the workers, let the workers and their families move into salubrious accommodation and the idlers be tossed into the streets,” after which the idea will “spring to life” and “march, in flesh and blood, at the head of the people” (Graham, Anarchism, 151). Echoing Rousse’s possibilism, argues that “no language can be loud and decisive enough for the uplifting of our compatriots, so that they may be incited out of their engrained daily drudgery,” and thus the seeds of a new society must be prefigured in actual reality to entice others the join

(139). Propaganda by the deed thus has two intentionally distinct valences as either creative violence or persuasive prefiguration; one masks its anonymous force to avoid capture while the other loudly boasts about itself.

Our contemporary times are replete with radicals who have found their own boastful 188 propaganda. Anarchists such as David Graeber speak about a new generation of activists that came of age during the anti-globalization movement who practice propaganda by prefiguration that ‘builds a new society in the shell of the old’ (as the popular IWW phrase goes). These ‘New Anarchists,’ as they are called, practice social justice and deep democracy although they cannot hum even a bar of .

Yet missing from this description are many radical tendencies that draw on the first valence of propaganda by the deed – to name a few, there are -hating anarcho-primitivists, destruction-loving anarcho-queers, democracy-averse nihilists, and anti-organizational insurrectionists. There are many reasons why those elements are often disavowed or even denied by their radical relatives but one is obvious: these dissident tendencies draw their power from a dangerous source that resists legibility.

Rather than constructing their propagandistic appeals on images of a well-ordered society constituted by a moral majority, these hidden elements draw on deeper and darker desires of nonexistence and disappearance. However, this opposition – the reasonable proposals of social anarchists and the excesses of their darker offspring – is stale, so perhaps there is a way to break through.

Is there a power of truth that is not just the truth of power? asks Gilles Deleuze

(Foucault, 94-95). Written alternately in the language of anarchism: what is the propaganda by the deed if it is not just the deed of propaganda? The answer is found in a mode of communication whereby actions ‘speak for themselves’ – actions that need not be owned, named, or explained. Actions as expression without speaking subjects.

Expressions that speak reason but do not prefigure. Expressions that speak passions but 189 are not feelings. The expression that lingers when the thing expressed is nowhere to be

found. In short: the force of anonymity. That is today’s dark propaganda by the deed.

A dangerous current flows through propaganda by the deed. It circulates below the streets

of the Metropolis without paying the tolls set up by possessive . To survive,

it must remain hidden, anonymous, as Empire, through the power of the Spectacle, silently reduces sense to the mere expression of personal ownership. This is because the

power of this existential liberalism lies in its image of the subject: separate and

subjective, each subject is presented as a master of a self-contained world made up of

nothing but a series of choices (Anonymous, Call, Scholium II). Caught between the

needs of biopolitical management and a system of compulsory visibility, there is only one

mode of communication that Empire makes officially available to its

subjects: confession, the noisy baring of the soul. The consummate existential individual

communicates by publicly expressing their private interests, and moreover, by taking

personal ownership for them as if revealing a truth unique to their particular existence.

Accordingly, the Metropolis does not create a private hell for each subject – it merely sets

out vortices in a turbulent sea of difference to trap individuals. Yet Empire strains when

guiding subjects to these traps, as there are forms of expression that flow right past the

machines of subjection. Expression flows beneath and around the subject and thus

constitutes an undertow or riptide that only sometimes leads to the vortexes that traps it.

And this is where danger arrives, for everything that swims through Hjelmselv’s net and

avoids nibbling on Lacan’s fishhook expresses the potential of an event that cannot be

190 contained by a subject.37 When expression explodes onto the scene like a crashing wave, the event rushes past ownership to flood the Metropolis with images, affects, and signs.

And it is in this chaotic surge of expression that propaganda by the deed delivers a great dangerous potential and overwhelms Empire’s subtle management of difference.

Burroughs is no doubt right when he says that language is a virus. Language infects humans like an alien intruder – arriving as an external force that can be captured but never fully tamed. The virus infects its host through fragments from passing conversations on the bus, garbled text messages from a friend, billboards mostly ignored, and webpages only skimmed. In fact, most humans spread the virus without even stopping to understand what they are doing. “Your wife looked at you with a funny expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw two sticks on the sidewalk positioned like the hands of a watch. They were whispering behind your back when you arrived at the office. It doesn’t matter what it means, it’s still signifying” (Deleuze and

Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 112). At its core, language shows that expression contains a simple imperative: self-replication. And it is because of this tendency toward dissemination, often detached from or even contrary to truth or understanding, that most of the Metropolis inoculates itself through skeptical cynicism, which neutralizes the intensity of the new with the knowing repetition of a dull prefabricated self. Yet some

37 Louis Hjemslev uses the net as a diagram to explain how ‘capture’ the referent, which is an unformed matter he calls ‘purport.’ For more, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 43-44; 108. Another, more widely used, semiotic model is ’s “Che vuoi?” graph, which curls with the Other’s question of ‘What do you want?,’ or more colloquially, ‘What’s bugging you?.’ See Lacan, Écrits, 690. 191 communication slips past this cynicism by evading the public gaze of the Spectacle.

Rumor, allusion, and innuendo propagate without a definite subject and thus

anonymously fill the hearts and minds of the Metropolis without broadcasting from a

pinpointable location; these ignoble forms of expression spread through contagion, which

thrives on mutated or deformed transmissions.38 Among the most furtive modes of

communication is insinuation, which provides a dangerous hint without giving away the

whole conspiracy. While providing poor material for fact, insinuations travel quickly and

build a heightened need for action as they deform. And it is thus insinuation that may

transmit the plague that brings down Empire.

As a mode of communication that gives forces to anonymity, insinuation lends itself to a

novel politics of articulation. Its politics is neither that of persuasion nor the presentation

of facts, which are the forms of rhetoric used by authoritarians and liberals, respectively,

but the anonymous subversion of indiscernibility. To further clarify, persuasion is

employed by authoritarians to enroll you in their form of association, often through fear

and alarmism. A nest of such associations entwine the Metropolis, but their incomplete

strands are always coming apart because Empire does not draw lines as the Modern State

did – Empire’s fragmentary subjection guarantees that there are friends, enemies, allies,

and foes inside everyone. In spite of this fragmentation, however, there are still

paranoiacs who maintain the party line, and the result of their imagined associations is

38 Insinuation thus blurs the distinction between two dominant models of communication, the transmission model and the cultural, because it asks the materialist question of transmission of a signal through a medium but without focusing on the genesis or reception of that signal but also asks questions about the cultural effects of common forms and a communication event. For more on the distinction between the two approaches, see Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” Communication as Culture, 13-36, and Grossberg et al, “Media in Context,” MediaMaking, 3-33. 192 always the same: they either implode under the weight of inconsistency or explode their

milieu with the fury of a million minute distinctions. Alternately, the presentation of facts

is a naive liberal belief that ‘the truth sets you free.’ It is evident that the politics informed

by its worn motto ‘speak truth to power’ no longer works – (if it ever did) – for “truth

isn’t outside power or lacking in power . . . truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child

of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms of constraint. And it induces regular forms of power... it is produced and transmitted under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic

apparatuses (university, army, writing, media)...” (Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 131-

132).

In the Metropolis, the question should be inverted: it is not ‘what truth works?’ but ‘why

is illusion so effective?’ Insinuation provides a response through the assertion that

language starts with “the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication

of a sign as information” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 77). Therefore,

signs “are never univocal packets of information but rather affective charges,” which

suggests a practice of reading that “consists in the appropriation of signs through free and

indirect discourse – properly ‘free’ and ‘indirect’ to the degree that emitting singularities

are respected as capable of new expressions and connections” (Smith, “Deleuze’s

of Reading,” 49). Language is thus not meant to be believed but to be obeyed. And

insinuation, itself a form of language, demonstrates this force of anonymity without

recourse to either of the two poles of sovereignty. It is expressed in graffiti that ‘just 193 appears’ in the absence of an obvious author to announce Empire’s incomplete control over the Metropolis and to take sides in the Spectacle’s war of appearances. And as insinuation spreads through the Metropolis, it resists the control of organization structures and refuses to build the party; it spreads the virus and mutates as it interacts with every new host. At most, insinuation builds an “Imaginary Party” – a party of negativity that renounces any positive form and whose conspirators only communicate through insinuation. The object of the Imaginary Party is thus not to build a against

Empire but to gather “an ensemble of conditions such that domination succumbs as quickly and as largely as possible to the progressive paralysis to which its paranoia condemns it” (Tiqqun, “Theses on the Imaginary Party,” 59-60). The Imaginary Party does not appear as a concentrated force, then, so when its actions are attributed to someone or something, they are simply blamed on ‘madmen,’ ‘barbarians,’ ‘irresponsible individuals,’ and anyone else fed up with society. This is how the insinuations of the

Imaginary Party have been able to hide in the shadow of every recent political rebellion, from Egypt to – for they do not help in a swift seizure of the state but blaze paths that mimic the strange drift of aesthetic revolutions, which are sometimes sudden and at other times slow.

Insinuation’s transmissions are not always received clearly; it confuses those who cannot understand communication when it is stripped of its rational kernel. Even without reason, insinuation can still connect with chains of association, though whatever insinuation becomes associated with is only fastened to it through external relation. Images are perhaps the most suitable vehicle for insinuation, then, as they resist signification in order 194 to remain receptive, which allows them to shed layers of interpretation almost as easily as

they accumulate them. Yet insinuation is possible with any medium that communicates

intensity. Describing expression in terms of intensity may appear strange to those who

imagine language to be at the root of communication, however, as they focus on the

meaning passed either from mouth to ear or from text to eye – but language is only one

way to communicate the world, and it is a flighty one at that. Consider a few other forms

of expression: dance demonstrates that the movement of bodies can tug at the heart;

challenges the viewer to utilize every one of their organs as an eye; and music

sets life itself to rhythm and pitch.39 Each forms brings together expression and sensation in its own way. And as each combination thrives in different circumstances, insinuation is most suited to the most elusive sensations of the Metropolis. This is because Empire’s circulation depends on the Spectacle creating subjects that are transparent conductors of information, on which it depends on for positivities to use in biopolitical management.

Insinuation, in contrast, raises words to a degree of intensity that avoids the amputated consistency of clear speech but builds a longer sustain than a piercing scream. Instead of communicating through exchange within Empire’s system of equivalence, insinuation sends a charge whose message, when intelligible, is often tangential, unreliable,

39 “Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies. We can thus speak with exactitude of a sonorous body, and even of a bodily combat in music – for example, in a motif – but as Proust said, it is an immaterial and disembodied combat “in which there subsists not one scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind.” In a sense, music begins where painting ends, and this is what is meant when one speaks of the superiority of music. It is lodged on lines of flight that pass through bodies, but which find their consistency elsewhere, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body escapes from itself. But in escaping, the body discovers the materiality of which it is composed, the pure presence of which it is made, and which it would not discover otherwise. Painting, in short, discovers the material reality of bodies with its line-color systems and its polyvalent organ, the eye.” Deleuze, , 46-47. 195 contingent, contaminated, or unextractable. Yet the question remains: is its wild and uncontrollable force suitable for politics?

Insinuation’s effects are anything but clear, but that is what distinguishes it from the

Spectacle’s preferred mode of communication. To gain the upper hand against the

Spectacle, insinuation cannot have truck with most forms of thought. In particular, political projects premised on clear demands, ‘best practices,’ and rational rules of government have little use for the murkiness of insinuation. The triumph of liberalism, and in turn the Social State, was the result of governance becoming purely presentist. By casting history aside, the Social State declared that the government that rules best is the government with the greatest capacity to extend the present (Foucault, Society Must Be

Defended, 217-223). And while liberalism allows seemingly incommensurate approaches and world-views to coexist, it does so by requiring a minimum degree of coherence.

Without a speaking subject to hold accountable, insinuation may thus be the raw material for a politics detached from or even contrary to the State. Its anonymity escapes the coherent channels through which the Social State irrigates its capacities – functions such as agriculture, industry, and trade, and apparatuses such as the army, courts, and administration – and either disperses, seeping through the cracks to fill underground reservoirs of power beyond the gaze of the Spectacle, or accumulates, forming rivers whose uncontrolled fragments of words, images, and thoughts feed a sea of difference with currents too strong for Biopower to pilot. This is why conspiracy and deviance are two of the greatest enemies to Modern and Social States. Empire, however, transmutes the State’s struggle against underground reservoirs of power and unpredictable currents 196 of differences into the building blocks of the Metropolis. Lacking the State’s allergy to insinuation, Empire often finds ways to put the products of insinuation to use. This is because Empire establishes consistency and not coherence, and consistency concretely connects elements by avoiding homogeneity so as to respect the differences of disparate elements (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 507). Empire thus uses the products of insinuation to make the Metropolis an estuary, a transitional zone, which connects flows and regulates their access to the outside. Without coherence to prevent the incursion of the outside, however, the Metropolis is pushed past its limits and becomes saturated. Marketers call it ‘clutter’ – and they are always trying to break through it.

Following the intersection of consistency and saturation, not coherence and conduction, the political question thus takes on a compositional valence: what combinations of insinuation feed reservoirs that remain untapped by Empire? And what anarchic explosion of forces will drown Empire?

Guerrilla, The Force of Liberation

Recognizing the force of insinuation, The Red Army Faction impugns the German government and press in their first major text, The Urban Guerrilla Concept, writing that

“some people want to use these lies to prove that we’re stupid, unreliable, careless, or crazy” and therefore “encourage people to oppose us,” which causes them difficulties because “it’s not easy to clear things up with denials, even when they’re true” (P5). But instead of waging their own war of propaganda, the group denounces anyone who spreads rumors, claiming that “in reality, they are irrelevant to us” because “they are only consumers,” and that “we want nothing to do with these gossipmongers, for whom 197 the anti-imperialist struggle is a coffee klatch” (P5).

What the RAF thus provides is their own anonymous communication: operating clandestinely, the group stole cars, robbed banks, broke prisoners out of jail, assassinated former-Nazi officials, and bombed the military, the police, and the press. In that way, the RAF approached expression as crude materialists whose voice were bullets and bombs, even if they later provided communiques to endow their expressions with a little more meaning.

To most, the RAF’s gestures must appear futile, as they were not strong enough to overthrow the government and did not present a public organization to build mass membership. Yet the novelty of the RAF was that its members fashioned their way of life into liberation struggles against Empire even without a colonial power to expel. In particular, they adopted the perspective of military strategists whose life and death scenarios had little room for self-abnegation or ineffective action. Moreover, they developed a form of action that broke with the State’s politics of compromise and its monopoly on the use of violence.

The RAF does not serve as a model, however. Although they gained substantial popular support, especially among German youth, most of the RAF was quickly liquidated because of the intensity with which they approached the struggle; similar situations played out in the Europe, North America, and elsewhere. What the RAF does point to, however, is the conceptual innovation possible when insinuation is taken beyond mere 198 idle talk – most notably, a politics of clandestinity derived from guerrilla war, but one that avoids hardening into an army.

The basic requirement for a guerrilla war is a rural population, at least according to its theorists. Following a line from Mao through the classic texts on the guerrilla, we find that the key to victory is a rural population’s semi-autonomy from the politics of the metropole, a separation that hides and sustains the guerrilla. As one Maoist maxim goes,

‘the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.’ This gives the appearance of the guerrilla as an architect of insinuation who sharpens the people into a political force. But to clarify, the guerrilla neither takes the peasants’ lead nor develops them into a revolutionary force – though both remain a strategic option – but uses rural areas and their residents for material support. What the rural enables is an autonomous way of life from which the guerrilla constructs a base. And because the base is independent, it provides a reliable means of subsistence and draws the enemy out into the countryside where the guerrilla’s use of terrain is at its greatest advantage. The people are thus not the object of propaganda but the cover used by the guerrilla to evade retaliation.

And as a result of the guerrilla blending in with the rural population, the enemy is left with few options for identifying, containing, or eliminating the guerrilla. At their most drastic, commanders thus resort to ‘draining the pond to catch the fish.’ Ultimately, guerrilla war is a clandestine operation premised on the power of escape, which serves as the decisive element in asymmetric warfare. Guerrilla distills escape in three basic principles for defeating a superior enemy: an autonomous way of life, the advantage of terrain, and indistinguishability. 199

Though guerrilla was once effective against the State, it cannot lead the struggle against

Empire. The conditions have shifted from those present in the middle of the 20th century as Empire abolishes the boundary between the urban and the rural to form the Metropolis.

It is not a totalizing shift, as there are still many small ponds across the globe in which guerrilla still swim, but self-sufficient peasants are quickly drying up as a resource. Latin

American theorists have been aware of this problem, as their thinner rural populations act differently than those in Asia, and they have designed their own liberation struggles accordingly (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 50-53; Guillén, Philosophy of the

Urban Guerrilla, 284-286). Focoism, a largely failed project, was formulated after the

Cuban Revolution to draw Mao’s three-stage developmental model of guerrilla war into a single small nucleus of militants which leads by recruiting, organizing, and attacking in rural terrain while simultaneously forming a subservient nucleus of politics in the metropole (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 75-78). Though many theorists jettison a substantial amount of focoism, most retain the theory of ‘armed propaganda’ whereby militants do not wait for the right conditions to begin but use armed struggle as a political expression that will itself ripen the conditions. Elevating the strategic role of the city due to its function as the seat of political power, the theory of the urban guerrilla marries armed propaganda with its political aim of . This theoretical shift, from the rural to the urban, is based on a strategic gamble: that the urban way of life, terrain, and camouflage are politically superior its rural counterparts.

The urban guerrilla concept offers a powerful diagnostic for the subversion of the 200 Metropolis. As Biopower and the Spectacle stitch together the urban and the rural into the dense fabric of the Metropolis, the separation between town and country that enabled peasant insurrections collapses. Upon closer investigation, however, the historical record of urban guerrilla operations is also mixed at best, which renders it a bad model for political action. What the theory of urban guerrilla diagnoses, however, are fractures within the urban that can be exploited in clandestine struggle against the Metropolis. In particular, the urban guerrilla leverages the contingency, density, and clutter of the

Metropolis. To capitalize on each of these weaknesses, the urban guerrilla utilizes them as both points of antagonism and also forms of escape, elevating withdrawal to the primary objective in the process of attack. And because the Metropolis provides ample opportunities for escape, it offers its enemies the means for its own destruction. Escape is not the product of the guerrilla, as if they opened up escape routes; rather, the guerrilla is escape itself – an army in perpetual retreat that wields withdrawal as an offensive force.

If the politics of the future is to avoid the same grisly fate of the guerrilla, however, it may employ escape like the guerrilla – but to bring life where the guerrilla too often only caused death.

The guerrilla way of life. The success of the guerrilla depends on transforming anthropology into a weapon unto itself – “in revolutionary war the human is always superior to military hardware” (Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 279; trans. modified). Guerrilla theorists depict this transformation in various mixtures of conservative and progressive forces. On the one hand, there are the conservative theorists, such as Mao, who imagine the guerrilla to spring from souls of an oppressed 201 people like a natural reaction to an exterior threat that enables a nation “inferior in army and military equipment” to turn their “conditions of terrain, climate, and society in general” against an imperialist oppressor as “obstacles to his progress” and used “to advantage by those who oppose him” (On Guerrilla Warfare, 42). On the other, there are progressivists, such as Che, who see the guerrilla as an agent not of solidarity but creative evolution in the human condition where the guerrilla is a “guiding angel” whose shared

“longing of the people for liberation” directs their conversion into an “ascetic” soldier and “social reformer” that fights for a revolutionary new humanity (Guerrilla Warfare).

But regardless of the origin of power, whether from conserving life or liberating it, the theory puts forth the guerrilla as the effect of discipline. The theory further proposes that it is discipline alone that separates the guerrilla from the mere criminal. The criminal selfishly preys on oppressors and the oppressed alike with the only goal being their own profit. In contrast, the guerrilla lives simply and expropriates resources from the rich and powerful in order to build up the forces that distract, demoralize, and drive away the enemy (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 4). The guerrilla thus shares the fruits of expropriation with allies, which teaches those not directly engaged in the struggle to enjoy it nonetheless.

Yet in the Metropolis, it is difficult to maintain the hardness necessary to remain a guerrilla. “The city is a cemetery” the revolutionary declares, because its inhabitants lose sight of the struggle as they must live as consumers and inevitably let slip “the vital importance of a square yard of nylon cloth, a can of gun grease, a pound of salt or sugar, a pair of boots” – a disregard not driven by malevolent indifference but an irreducible 202 difference in the conditions of thought, action, and ultimately life itself (Debray,

Revolution in the Revolution?, 69, 70-71). Diminishing hardness is an effect of Biopower, which develops softness through a power that produces more than it represses. Empire thus casts the guerrilla into a sea of difference where the hardness of discipline become a burden; for the shattered masses no longer appear as a people, but as the molecular movements of the Metropolis, leaving the guerrilla to make wooden ideological appeals for a humanity no longer there. Guillén, veteran of the , recognizes the need for innovation. “Strategy,” he writes, “is not created by geniuses or by generals, but by the development of the productive forces, the logic of events and the weight of history” that now point almost exclusively to one place: the city (Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 240). The most promising avenue for success is thus not the lightening victory but “the strategy of the artichoke:” “to eat at the enemy bit by bit, and through brief and surprise encounters of encirclement and annihilation to live off the enemy’s arms, munitions, and paramilitary effects” (250-1). Furthermore, in place of the disciplined ascetics of the rural guerrilla, the urban fighter must possess initiative, mobility, flexibility, versatility, and command of any situation (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 5). These characteristics are responsive to the subjective life of the Metropolis, which is experienced by subjects as an unending stream of accidents and coincidences. Yet these accidents and coincidences are merely the expression of the river of contingency that flows through the Metropolis – the vital force of renewal that is only barely kept in check by the careful watch of the Spectacle and the immense management of Biopower.

203 The urban guerrilla is the embodiment of contingency made into a revolutionary force, as the guerrilla does not try to foresee everything or wait for orders but instead embraces the duty of initiative: a duty “to act, to find adequate solutions for each problem they face, and to retreat” (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 5; trans. modified).

Thus with every rise in unemployment, social outrage, and cultural discontent, the urban guerrilla does not respond by “encouraging them to demonstrate in the streets just to be trampled by the horses of the police” or “temporarily stopping thousands of them with a barricade” but to “strike unexpectedly here and there with superiority of arms and numbers” (Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 240; trans. modified). And it is with the power of the unexpected that the guerrilla wages armed propaganda, for the goal is to mire the enemy in confusion, much like the disabling power of insinuation. The urban guerrilla is caught in the same fog and can choke while navigating between the hardness that granted victory to their rural counterparts and the softness required to operate in the Metropolis. It is here that most have faltered. Yet when the guerrilla is considered a progressive force, which liberates rather than conserves, then a different route can be plotted – this time between living and struggling that leads neither to the softness of the Metropolis nor the hardness of the guerrilla. And this new form of life does not seek to unify the people but unleash a deluge of contingency against Empire.

And to do so, it must shape the force of escape into a weapon of liberation that, like the guerrilla, moves with the fluidity of water and the ease of the blowing wind but whose movements become as automatic as the daily humiliations of life in the Metropolis.

The decisiveness of terrain. The guerrilla is mobile and avoids direct conflict. This is 204 because the guerrilla cannot afford the narcissism of political activists who fight only for moral victories. So accustomed to losing, some activists invented a way of winning that parades their weaknesses in front of a higher authority to secure their pity – a ritual of liberalism that Nietzsche ridicules as slave morality. The theory of guerrilla, in contrast, pinpoints a weakness that can be made into a decisive advantage and compensates for the rest. For the guerrilla, the weakness is the avoidance of direct conflict, an exceptional case in regular combat, which is made orthodox and governed by a strategic principle: the guerrilla should only engage the enemy at a time and place of their own choosing, and only if success is guaranteed. The tactic of the minuet ‘dance’ is an elaboration of this principle: the guerrilla force encircles an advancing column from the four points of a compass but far enough away to avoid encirclement or suffering casualties; the couple begins their dance when one of the guerrilla points attacks and draws out the enemy, after which the guerrilla then falls back to attack from a new safe point – and thus the guerrilla leads by escape (Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare). And it is with knowledge of the terrain that the guerrilla dances the movements of life; imaginatively creating new combinations of dispersion, concentration, and the constant change of position, the guerrilla dances to the cadence of organic life’s interaction with its environment. The guerrilla, like insinuation, thus grows in power as it learns new rhythms of advancement and withdrawal – awakening its own strength as it draws its partner away from the source of their power one step at a time. It is the choreography of escape that then distinguishes guerrilla warfare from “armed self-defense,” which immobilizes life rather than setting it free, and thus suffers from “a profusion of admirable sacrifices,” “of wasted heroism leading nowhere” – that is, “leading anywhere except to the conquest of political power” 205 (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 29).40 Instead, the guerrilla is an offensive force,

as it strikes at difficult-to-defend positions but is exclusively clandestine and not

equipped to defend or occupy space. Moreover, the environment is the guerrilla’s most

powerful offensive weapon, for the guerrilla uses it to exact a military cost from any

occupying force – ”if the enemy is concentrated, it loses ground; if it is scattered, it loses

strength” (49). At its absolute limit, the guerrilla force becomes fully realized when all

territory is indefensible and the emergence of a new people or a new power is thus

inevitable.

The terrain of the Metropolis requires strategic innovation as it is not like the countryside,

yet new maneuvers can still be a variation on the standard movement of dispersion,

concentration, and change of position. The Latin American theorists developed one such

variation, which was necessary because of the difference between the thinness of the

populations of their mountain regions and the overpopulation of cities and villages in

Asian countries that won guerrilla wars, such as Vietnam or China, and their tightly-knit

indigenous populations who are skeptical of all outsiders – imperialists and

revolutionaries alike (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 50-53). The Metropolis

poses a problem similar to Latin America’s mountains because the small parts of the rural

preserved by Empire are not only watched by suspicious locals but are also connected by

modern roads, electrified by nuclear power, connected by cell-phone towers, and

40 As an emergent response to its milieu, life’s rhythmic expansion and contraction of difference leads to the internalization of its surroundings, which encourages it to leave and explore new environments. Shaping this Darwinian analogy into the movement of life, Deleuze uses this among many other analogies to describe the character of a line of becoming. For more, consult the work of Henri Bergson, Deleuze’s Difference and Repetition and Bergsonism, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, ’s recent work on Darwin, and ’s work on vitalism. 206 globally-positioned by satellites. Even as Empire networks and controls the rural, whose

previous autonomy made it an outside and therefore the perfect staging ground for the

guerrilla, a different terrain of struggle emerges as a new outside within the Metropolis –

slums – which share many characteristics with the countryside. In particular, slums are a

site of underdevelopment created by Empire’s management through abandonment. And it

is from that abandonment that a new, crueler form of autonomy arises bearing the

potential to disrupt the operations of the Metropolis. Contemporary military theorists

have noticed this risk, noting that:

because of their warren-like alleys and unpaved roads, the slums have become as

impregnable to the security forces as a rural insurgent’s jungle or forest base. The

police are unable to enter these areas, much less control them. The insurgents thus

seek to sever the government’s authority over its cities and thereby to weaken both

its resolve to govern and its support from the people, the aim being to eventually

take power, first in the cities and then in the rest of the country (Taw and Hoffman,

“The Urbanisation of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to US Army

Operations,” 74).

The most relevant characteristic of slums are their density. As the Latin American

theorists note, it is the density of Asian villages that allowed their guerrilla to ‘swim like

fish’ among the people – something that their own mountains were unable to provide. In the density of the Metropolis, guerrillas have been able to employ tactics similar to those used in the countryside. Brazilian students, for instance, have used a street tactic much 207 like the minuet whereby coordinated teams of protestors would alternately attack and withdraw against advancing lines of police, as well as the ‘the net within the net,’ which draws police squads designated to snatch an individual into a crowd far enough for them to be surrounded, looted, and immobilized (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban

Guerrilla, 24-25). In spite of the difference of terrain, the urban guerrilla ultimately navigates density in the same way as its rural predecessor: the urban guerrilla becomes a friend of density in order to maintain the same advantages – mobility and flexibility – and becomes a student of density to realize the same strategic principles – knowing where and when to strike so success is the only conceivable outcome and is certain to fulfill the twin goals of neutralizing the enemy’s repressive forces and expropriating resources to expand the forces of liberation.

Escape remains the greatest challenge to politics created by the Metropolis. As every theory of guerrilla warfare maintains, escape is fundamental because it establishes how direct conflict is avoided. Rural warfare only needs a crude concept of escape, as combat occurs in an ‘open field’ that radiates outward from nearly any point in the advancing enemy’s column. In the Metropolis, however, the Spectacle casts a gaze that touches nearly everything, at least in part – even what is abandoned by the nourishing power of

Biopower. Therefore, the urban guerrilla cannot depend on density to prevent their encirclement, as the open field does, but only on situations porous enough to provide escape routes unknown to the authorities. In fact, these escape routes as so important that the guerrilla must not operate when there is no escape plan, “since to do so will prevent them from breaking through the net which the enemy will surely try to thrown around 208 them” (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 25; trans. modified). If escape

routes are established, then politics can develop by way of the guerrilla, which identifies

terrains of struggle that afford the mobility and flexibility necessary for the movement of

dispersion, concentration, and escape. Such a terrain can be found in the Metropolis

where there is density, which is often located in zones of abandonment. Even as the goals

of this politics may parallel those of the urban guerrilla, which are the neutralization of

repressive forces and the expropriation of force for the powers of liberation, it must

develop a new form of escape to avoid their fate; for the history of urban action shows

that most guerrillas rose like lions only to be hunted, killed, or caged.

The necessity of camouflage. The guerrilla demonstrates the importance of selective

engagement, which affirms the strategic importance of visibility, anonymity, and escape.

In contrast to its enemy, who strains to defend occupied territory, the guerrilla is born in

the shadows and grows under the cover of secrecy (Debray, Revolution in the

Revolution?, 41). And while the guerrilla in part relies on its enemy for arms and

ammunition, it does not draw its political force from the same coherent identity but

instead produces a temporary consistency: the flash of an image that swiftly appears with

an explosive force only to immediately recede. The guerrilla thus affirms the potential of

difference, whose singular acts must only be produced once, in contrast to reproduction,

which is how the State expands its coherent identity over and again (Lazzarato, Capital-

Labour to Capital-Life, 200-205). This difference was amplified during Italy’s tumultuous Years of Lead, when numerous armed guerrillas simply imitated the state while others dispersed “in a multiplicity of foci, like so many rifts in the capitalist whole” 209 (Tiqqun, This Is Not A Program, 84). These rifts were filled by “radio stations, bands,

celebration, riots, and squats” that did not exist as occupations but as an empty

architecture of indistinction, informality, and semi-secrecy that became anonymous, that

is “signed with fake names, a different one each time,” and thus “unattributable, soluble

in the sea of Autonomia” (84-85).41 These operations did not speak with the voice of a coherence of a subject, but rather, their frequency and intensity formed a consistency that nonetheless, “like so many marks etched in the half-light,” left but mere traces of authorship and militancy and thus constituted a multi-faceted offensive “more formidable” than their hardened counterparts in the armed ranks of the Brigate Rosse and

Prima Linea (85). The non-coherence of the autonomous elements therefore outlined the struggle, which was not simply between revolutionary and conservative forces, but a different way of doing politics. On one side was the coherence of Italian state “derived from popular Italian that the authority of the state was genuine and effective and that it used morally correct means for reasonable and fair purposes,” and on the other was a diffusion of fragmented appearances that formed “a certain intensity in the circulation of bodies between all of [its] points” (Manwaring, Shadows of Things Past, 7;

Tiqqun, This is Not a Program, 85).

Controlling terrain in the city is difficult for the guerrilla. In the city as much as the countryside, the night is a greater friend to the guerrilla than its enemy. Therefore, “if at night the city belongs to the guerrilla and, in part, to the police by day,” then it becomes a

41 Tiqqun suggests that such spaces worked best when they were abandoned, when they either stopped emitting lines of becoming or became too costly to maintain. 210 battle of endurance rather than a show of strength (Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban

Guerrilla, 241). There are many parts of the Metropolis that appear as dark as a moonless night even when the sun is shining its brightest, for anonymity is to the Metropolis as the cover of nighttime is to the city. Within the density of the Metropolis, abandoned zones shield activity from the prying eyes of Empire. It is in these zones that underworlds emerge to address the daily needs of residents whose precarious lives benefit from less legal interactions. Yet some of the best hiding spots are in the heart of the Metropolis.

Clutter, for instance, temporarily creates cover for movement. Furthermore, the theory of the guerrilla illustrates the importance of time. If mobile, one can move through clutter fast enough to avoid being singled out by the watchful eye of the Spectacle or the calculating management of Biopower (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla,

15-17). As the guerrilla shows, subverting the Metropolis does not occur by occupying its space but by embodying the time of politics. In the face of the perpetual present established by Empire, the guerrilla controls time and thus free space from the enemy.

And because the guerrilla need not reproduce its actions, as it is not tied to defending or extending any particular space or time, it has a greater degree of freedom. The guerrilla thus turns the byproducts of Empire, namely zones of abandonment and clutter, into camouflage for offensive strikes against the Metropolis.

The offensive use of camouflage orients politics away from the Spectacle, which limits politics to the space of appearance, to the underground movement of forces not descendent from the State. The guerrilla initiates this shift by establishing an indistinguishability between themselves and everyone else. Once the guerrilla becomes 211 imperceptible, their actions are no longer viewed as the actions of a crank, madman, or

criminal against the public but as the concrete expression of sentiments held by many –

every act ‘signs itself,’ claiming responsibility for itself “through its particular how” and

“through its specific meaning in situation,” rendering it immediately discernible (Tiqqun,

This Is Not A Program, 85). This underground force thus exposes itself to political scrutiny even when hiding its source. The guerrilla therefore lives as the expression of others or dies as an solitary individual – which is to say that the guerrilla renounces the notion of the revolutionary subject and instead gives force to the non-subject as it is becoming-revolutionary (85). Imperceptibility is difficult to maintain, however, as the enemy of the guerrilla realizes its power and retaliates by personalizing whatever it faces, which confines problems to isolated subjects and represents their actions as individual dysfunctions. Although guerrillas are imperceptible, so is Empire. That is to say: Empire has a proper name and can still known in its effects, just as an ocean, a wind, a season, or an hour exist without becoming a subject or object, but it appears without a coherence

(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 261-263). And to the extent that Empire does appear, it is only through management and circulation, whose temporary consistencies are only the effects of its existence. The imperceptibility of the guerrilla and

Empire differ, however, in appearance. While Empire maintains the appearance of neutrality, the guerrilla invites their enemy to “attack wildly” and paints them “as utterly black and without a single virtue” (Red Army Faction, Urban Guerrilla Concept). The reason is that such a bald characterization of the guerrilla draws a clear line between the guerrilla and its enemy and substantiates that the guerrilla has won “spectacular successes” (Red Army Faction, Urban Guerrilla Concept). This desire to be caricatured 212 demonstrates how the guerrilla uses the strength of an enemy – its near-monopoly on the

mass communication – as its greatest weakness, as the enemy’s strength can be shown to

be mere bluster (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 52). When imperceptible attacks

lead to grand overreaction by the enemy, the image of an unassailable enemy vanishes.

While the enemy had previously fostered fear and humility – a deference produced less

by Empire’s sober supporters than its pessimistic critics – the guerrilla shatters this

unassailability, propagandizing the guerrilla’s strength while turning habits of respect for

the enemy into belittling mockery. To strip away unassailability, radical politics does not

need to follow the militarized path of the guerrilla, however, it only needs to evince the

consistency of its intensity. And in that way, there are alternative means to spreads the

assailablity of Empire that avoid liquidation.

In summary, guerrilla theory outlines the strategic principles for a politics built around

the concept of escape. The sober, strategic character of guerrilla theory also distinguishes

its clandestine potential from more spontaneous protests, such as punks and runaways

who simply ‘go it alone’ to refuse assimilation, as well as the politics of compromise,

such as power brokers and activists who articulate their demands in the already-existing

halls of power. Moreover, escape is not an abstract ideal in guerrilla theory but a practical force – a distinction with enough difference to goad to insist, “I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist!” (quoted in Agamben, “Metropolis,” 1). And in turn, guerrilla theory establishes escape as a strategic principle for inclusion in any planning, process, and procedure – ‘escape must be guaranteed’ means determining ‘how does escape ensure victory?,’ ‘what are the available tactics for escape?,’ and ‘which escape 213 route will be taken?.’

To be clear: this is not a suggestion to practice guerrilla warfare. Everywhere that the

Metropolis spreads, it makes all previous forms of guerrilla warfare obsolete. The subversion of the Metropolis may be clandestine; it will not be through military means but through a battle of intensities. The weaknesses of the Metropolis cannot be exploited through armed propaganda without ending in death. As the history of guerrilla warfare demonstrates, escape, when it raises anonymity to a strategic principle, can bring success to a forces inferior in numbers, arms, and training. To share in the history of success, the struggle against Empire must adapt its tactics to fit the new terrain of the Metropolis, namely its contingency, density, and clutter. This struggle can derive advantages from the same elements as the guerrilla by transforming the products of Empire into the means for its destruction: a way of life, knowledge of terrain, and camouflaged operations. And with these strategic advantages, the struggle against Empire throws off the nightmare of cynical politics and begins revolutionary dreaming once again.

Digital Subversions, New Strategies for Struggle

Degenerate hacker Case is down and out. This protagonist was unable to jack into cyberspace after getting his hand caught in the till and now wanders the Japanese underworld as an addict in the search of a cure to get back into the matrix. Although he is outside Tokyo, it is not the outskirts – everything is connected, just some parts have older streets and some areas have no official names. In this world, cities are not distinct dots on the maps but dissolve into their own regions. The Sprawl, for instance, covers all 214 of the eastern United States from Boston to Atlanta. There is no day or night but a permanent grey that emanates from an artificial sky cast over each artificial environment. It is a place where ‘the actors change but the play remains the same.’ As

Case laments, it was like “a deranged experiment” with a bored researcher “who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button” and whose cruel rules are: “stop hustling and you sank without a trace, but move a little too swiftly and you’d break the fragile surface tension of the black market; either way, you were gone” (Gibson,

Neuromancer, 7). Moreover, cyberspace has taken over much of people’s lives:

“Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... a graphical representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system.

Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...” (51).

The Metropolis is rendered most vividly in these cyberpunk underworlds – places where giant corporations control the world, ubiquitous technology drastically changes the face of humankind, and low-lifes commit actions that cascade into monumental change. These fictional places serve as dramatizations of our own stolen time and thus update noir’s savage depiction of doomed characters languishing in the Social State to Empire’s triumphant reign over the wastelands of digital culture. Most importantly, cyberpunk draws on computers as engines of difference. Thus, by installing the computer as the core literary device, the genre offers a dystopian contrast to liberal . Instead of celebrating difference as an iron-clad vehicle for pluralist , these worlds draw 215 startlingly dark depictions of cultures digitally saturated by difference but plunged deeper into futuristic miseries. Moreover, because The Sprawl mirrors our own

Metropolis, it points to the transformation of escape – gone is the extensive form of escape to in the woods, and immediately relevant are all its intensive forms.

Perhaps it is these intersecting planes of intensity that will deliver something worthy of

Foucault’s search for a force of truth that is not just force itself.

The Metropolis is not a representation abstracted from contemporary media technologies; but if “history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems,” then the architecture of the Metropolis is no doubt structured by informatization, which is the biopolitical medium through which Empire wages its war of movement (Virilio, Speed and Politics,

90). And it is for this reason that the Metropolis should be described in the same terms as network culture, which is characterized by an abundance of information and an acceleration of informational character (Terranova, Network Culture, 1). But the information utilized is quite specific in three distinct ways: as “the relation of signal to noise,” “a measure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system,” and “a nonlinear and nondeterministic relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic levels of a physical system” – all of which find corollaries in culture (9). Moreover, the reconfigured terrain of network culture also shifts the potential objectives of revolutionary politics, as the Luddite dream of sabotaging or crippling infrastructure on a mass scale is unthinkable and cyberterrorism by political-motivated radicals is rare (Krapp, Noise Channels, 49-

51). Instead, network culture motivates digital actions that gain cultural expression through a tactical use of media that “signifies the intervention and disruption of a 216 dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible” (Raley,

Tactical Media, 6). Such a cultural characterization of the political potentials within network culture, which focuses on expression and not the struggle within information itself, threatens to ruin tactical media where the guerrilla failed as well – by “confusing tactics and strategy” (Guillén, The Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 257). Moreover, many of the mediums of digital culture are not well suited for tactical media’s emphasis on persuasion or the presentation of facts – the internet, for instance, is a breeding ground for conspiracy and insinuation, as the sheer volume of participants and incredible speed of information accumulation means that in the time it takes to put one conspiratorial theory to bed, the raw material for many more will have already begun circulating

(Dyson, “End of the Official Story,” 20). There is a way to cut through this confusion, however: if politics considers how “the content of any medium is always another medium,” then it can develop a strategy to wrestle simultaneously with the technologies of the Metropolis and the world of digital culture, which demands a shift from signs to signals and from semiotics to physics (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8). Media and literary studies have outlined theories for such a multi-dimensional shift, demonstrating the different operations of speech, writing, and code. Now it is time to combine those theories into a strategy to be used in the struggle against the Metropolis

The strategic principles of guerrilla theory can thus be resurrected to guide anonymous forces in the struggle against the digital culture of the Metropolis even if guerrilla warfare cannot. In the Metropolis, anonymity is not just a force of subversion. In fact, Empire 217 realizes itself as an anonymous force, for it won the Cold War not with an arms race but by precipitously melting into a distributive network. As the Red Army Faction notes, it is this anonymity that is the target, as “neither Marx nor Lenin nor nor

Mao had to deal with Bild readers, television viewers, car drivers, the psychological conditioning of young students, high school reforms, advertising, the radio, mail order sales, loan contracts, ‘quality of life,’ etc.,” which disperses the State into a diffuse

Empire that cannot be combatted as “an openly fascist” enemy but as a “system in the metropole” that “reproduces itself through an ongoing offensive against the people’s psyche” (“The Black September Action in Munich,” 223). Yet it would be wrong to imagine Empire’s offensive as dehumanizing. Rather, it is non-human. From the algorithms governing Wall Street financial transactions to the Obama Campaign’s voter prediction models, material objects are interpreted like information on the internet: inhuman movements “recorded in a myriad of different locations (log files, server statistics, email boxes)” treated as “the clustering of descriptive information around a specific user” and devoid of a real identity (Galloway, Protocol, 69). Once fully rendered within this new strategic environment, cultural politics then becomes a struggle over information theory’s concept of communication: the accurate reproduction of an encoded signal across a media channel (telephony, radio, computing) – which reintroduces the question of materiality. It was with respect to materiality that the guerrilla first found its strategic advantage, and so it is here that the guerrilla’s three advantages reappear in terms of media effects: the accidents and coincidences of contingency plague the digital as bugs and glitches, which easily turn into errors and exploits; density creates mobility and flexibility within digital oversaturation, where spam and ‘big data’ make overload 218 possible; and the clutter of the Metropolis that provides the cover of camouflage is found in the opposition of signal and noise of information theory, which both covers-up and disrupts through distortion and loss.

In spite of the pervasiveness of glitch, oversaturation, and noise, early imagery of the cyberpunk hacker as guerrilla warrior against faceless corporations has not been realized.

Instead, numerous cultures have celebrated these digital byproducts, with glitch giving rise to jarring video game art, oversaturation causing a boom in information miners and data hoarders, and noise creating a distinctive form of post-punk music (Krapp, Noise

Channels). The problem with these cultural expressions is that they give an identity and voice to these forces rather than circulate its anonymous force. The effect is that force is slowed down to be made local and bounded, which causes it to either drown after being

“overwhelmed by the open network ecology” of oceanic difference or get marooned on

“a self-contained and self-referential archipelago of the like-minded” (Terranova,

Network Culture, 70). Perhaps today’s cyberpunk console cowboys have already become inhuman, vanishing into “evanescent and mobile informational islands” of peer-to-peer media pirates that appear and disappear, “springing out of nowhere” to send signals, only to dissolve as soon as the frantic transactions are carried out” (70). Whether or not these pirates constitute a serious threat, it is clear that the struggle against Empire does not unfold in the antagonism between a revolutionary subject and an easily identified occupying power within the carefully delineated territory of a nation-state. The lack of a spatial solution itself is a consequence of the Metropolis, for it stretches out like the open system of the Internet – a common space that grows through differentiation but also 219 divergence and thus operates as a diagram whose basic function is communicative: the

overcoming of incompatibilities (42). And if the guerrilla then exists in digital culture,

albeit transformed, its strategy of withdrawal can utilize connective divergence rather

than spatial distance. There are already instances of this divergence, as seen in various subcultures of glitch and noise, but they do not weaponize incompatibility, which must be done if divergence is to be utilized in a strategy of offensive escape. How to weaponize

incompatibility, however, is the question that remains.

Just as the guerrilla makes use of contingency, the glitch introduces accidents into the

heart of the Metropolis. The glitch is an unexpected moment where a passing fault

disrupts a system but fails to crash it. These transitory events are irritating nuisances but

common enough that they are routinely ignored, for glitches are still a deviation from the

predetermined outcome – in short, an error. And although not immediately catastrophic,

these errors indicate the possibility of a deeper problem beneath, whether it be incorrect

software, invalid inputs, or hardware malfunction. Thus there are those who choose not to

ignore glitches. For developers, chasing glitches is motivated by the desire to clear the

bugs out of the system. But for others, the glitch signals the potential for an exploit. In

general, an exploit replicates the guerrilla strategy of turning something to one’s

advantage; so in video games a glitch can exploit grant a player powers not intended by

the developers. As culture takes on characteristics of the digital, social, or economic

glitches can hint at exploits that exist as “a resonant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and

ultimately desert the dominant political diagram” (Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit,

21). While culture has a different architecture than that of a computer, exploits are holes 220 generated by the hypercomplexity of any technical system that makes such systems vulnerable to penetration and change. Given that the oceanic difference of the Metropolis expands through complexity, exploits must exist throughout it. And most importantly, the exploit hijacks an already existing system, it turns the already existing power differentials in that system to its advantage so it does not have to introduce its own (21). The search for new antagonisms in the digital life of the Metropolis must then begin with tracking down glitches and other traces of exploits.

The struggle continues with the hunt for a new terrain of struggle. If it is density that allows the guerrilla to maintain the dance of concentration and dispersion, oversaturation serves a similar function in the Metropolis. Through the twin forces of Biopower and the

Spectacle, Empire has collected an enormous amount of data about the behaviors, habits, and preferences of the Metropolis. The residents of the Metropolis thus live in an environment with a high degree of exposure. But every data-gathering process suffers from overaccumulation at the point when the cost of transforming the raw data into useful information is more than its predicted payout. Furthermore, if the speed by which Empire poses the limits of the Metropolis is matched only by the swiftness in which it overcomes them, then its accelerating integration of information is both its greatest strength but also a potential weakness (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 230-232; Deleuze and

Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 436-437; 463; 472-473). This vulnerability:

is not the result of society’s inability to integrate its marginal phenomena; on the

contrary, it stems from an overcapacity for integration and standardization. When 221 this happens, societies which seem all-powerful are destabilized from within, with

serious consequences, for the more efforts the system makes to organize itself in

order to get rid of its anomalies, the further it will take its logic of over-

organization, and the more it will nourish the outgrowth of those anomalies

(Baudrillard, “A Perverse Logic,” 6).

The terrain of the Metropolis is therefore caught in the tension between exposure and overaccumulation that sometimes gives way to overload. The Metropolis is thus most exposed to choreography crafted to manipulate its openness and speed to create temporary escape routes. In contrast to the guerrilla, the overloaded Metropolis leaks time more than space. Just as cyberpunk’s adrenaline-fueled hacking scenes illustrate, the terrain of the Metropolis makes space subservient to time – depicted most vividly in the dramatic ticking down of a clock. Adapting the minuet to digital culture, it is conceivable that temporary misapprehension and incomprehensibility could be used for the same strategic purposes as in its guerrilla form: lessening the reactionary forces of the enemy and expropriating their resources.

The unavoidable noise of digital culture provides the camouflage for operation. Noise is quite ambivalent even if it sometimes disrupts communication. The rising decibels of a loud dinner party, for example, create a feedback loop that drowns out certain intimacies but initiates others that would be impossible without it. Noise should not then be understood as always detrimental to a system, for even if it “destroys and horrifies,” it is also true that “order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death;” rather, noise holds 222 any system open to its outside and “nourishes a new order” (Serres, The Parasite, 27).

This is because background noise forms “the ground of our perception,” whose constant concealments are an unstoppable force of “perennial sustenance” and “the element of the software of all our logic” (Serres, Genesis, 7). In fact, a certain degree of noise may even aid transmission, for it may allow signal compression that increases the efficiency of the channel and its system (Hainge, “Of Glitch and Men,” 27). Even if the introduction of noise improves signal compression, it does so by sacrificing fidelity for mobility and flexibility. And it is here that the strategic role of noise emerges, as it engenders an indiscernibility like that of the urban guerrilla and the people, but a more fundamental one – for noise is the very material through which information travels. On the one hand, this is why cultural forms of resistance like ‘’ focus on signal distortion, and other methods for introducing noise to disrupt the easy flow of communication. On deeper level, however, strategic manipulation of noise allows for the creation of

“vacuoles of non-communication,” opening up tiny breaches that allow one to evade control, at least temporarily (Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” 195). Noise also marks a destabilizing moment in a system that has a chance to widen the space of non- communication by invading a channel with the desubjectified force of the outside.

It is finally time to answer Foucault’s demand for a force of truth that is not just the truth of force by way of a reintroduction of insinuation. The ‘propaganda by the deed’ of turn- of-the-century anarchists and the ‘armed propaganda’ of mid-century guerrillas each typify the truth of force but they also epitomize the rhetorical power of action. Yet these radicals were unable to find a force of truth independent of power itself. Instead, they 223 found that rhetoric and force were both amplified when treated as imbricated and thus mutually constitutive – propaganda by the deed declared that the actions of anarchists to be more than idle talk or utopian dreams, and guerrillas waged ideologically-fueled wars against occupying powers. Resistance to Empire should take heed.

The oversaturated streets of the Metropolis seem to announce that “we do not lack communication,” but “on the contrary, we have too much of it,” and in fact what we lack is creation, or really, “resistance to the present” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is

Philosophy?, 108). If that is the case, then neither the politics of persuasion or the presentation of facts will do, for the Metropolis will remain unfazed as long as tactical media leans on the force of truth. Rather, in the struggle against Empire, the only mode of communication appropriate to the task is one that disrupts proper communication and whose signal is one of ungovernability: insinuation. Though its effects are not clear, it is obvious that insinuation unlocks an underground force in its flight of invisibility and anonymity that subverts identification and legibility while distorting signals and overloading the system. Insinuation has barely converged with the dangerous politics of those who desire nonexistence and disappearance – those who have no demands, refusal political representation, and rebuke negotiation with the present (Galloway, “Black Box,

Black Bloc,” 244). In the battles of appearances that consumes the Metropolis, the two promise to make a potent combination. And perhaps they will be the fusion of force and truth that will defeat Empire – injecting insinuations while fighting cultural politics in digital code – releasing a cascade of affect charges while turning glitches into exploits, over-accumulation into overload, and flooding the Metropolis with the noisy force of the 224 outside.

225

Coda

In the beginning, there is escape. It arrives ahead of thought and vanishes before it can be caught.

And it is in this movement that escape can be brought to a close.

It Begins With Escape… (intensive escape)

Stories like those of the hill people resonate throughout the Metropolis, as many of its residents are restless souls that dream of other worlds just beyond the horizon of their own. There is something American about this craving and it is epitomized by the frontier mentality, which is an outgrowth out of sovereignty’s dual desire for conquest and divine providence. Yet escape exists far before the sovereign captures it for nationalist projects, for the first escape began before humanity or even life itself. In fact, the origins of escape stretch back to the earliest beginnings of the universe and the first differentiation of matter. In that sense, escape is the primordial movement that contains its own cause

(Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 172). It need not be caused by anything but itself – said otherwise: escape comes first and is superior, ‘escape is,’ and only secondarily does escape exist as a reaction or rebound, as an ‘escape from’ or ‘escape to.’

More concretely, escape is the process of change found in all things, in the indeterminate 226 dance of subatomic particles, the origami folding of proteins, the slow drift of mountains,

and the mutant speciation of organic life. In short, escape is becoming, the force of

change, but described through its converse: ’unbecoming’ (Grosz, “Bergson, Deleuze,

and the Becoming of Unbecoming,” 10-11). Unbecoming can be arrested, restricted, or

otherwise limited in many ways; of them, cultural confinements of escape are particularly

potent. Capitalism, for instance, clothes itself in cultural representations of freedom,

declaring itself as the enemy of slave labor and state control by being the guarantor of

‘the right to work,’ ‘free markets,’ and ‘.’ As anarchists have long shown, these

freedoms are not escape routes – the right of the worker to leave an employer does not

lead to free existence, for “he is driven to it by the same hunger which forced him to sell

himself to the first employer” and thus , “so much exalted by the economists,

jurists, and bourgeois republicans” is but a “theoretical freedom” that is “lacking any

means for its possible realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter

falsehood” (Bakunin, “The Capitalist System,” 24). Escape suffers an additional cultural

confusion that is even more basic: the notion that escape is an odyssey through space.

From this perspective, escape is a migration from this place to that – leaving the

country, running to the hills, finding refuge. But “some journeys take place in the same

place, they’re journeys in intensity” (Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” 259-260). These

adventures appear motionless because they “seek to stay in the same place” and instead escape by evading the codes (260). And as long as we fail to distinguish between these two uses of escape, extensive change and internal transformation, it remains a confused concept.

227 When escape is an evasion, and not a departure, it can be a potent political tool. That is

not to say that creating distance between oneself and a potential captor is ineffective –

exodus and withdrawal have been powerful tools of refusal, especially against the

Archaic State. But it is no longer the Pharaoh that is nipping at the Israelites’ heels.

Rather, Empire has set out a brutally productive system of control that has enclosed

global space through distance-demolishing technologies, leaving behind a few isolated

spaces as graveyards for the scattered peoples that remain there. In doing so, Empire

internalizes its own outside and reconstructs it as the Metropolis, unfolding as a giant

network of exteriorities. This theorization of Empire and the Metropolis owes much to

previous scholarly work, namely Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s trilogy of Empire,

Multitude, and Commonwealth, and the two journal issues of Tiqqun. Hardt and Negri,

who deserve credit for their part in re-popularizing concepts like ‘Empire’ and

‘communism,’ offer a thoroughly intensive theory of escape. The path through

capitalism, they argue, is the Common: the plentiful immaterial products of biopolitical production, such as communication and cooperation, which cannot be fully captured by

Empire (Hardt and Negri, Empire, 348-349). Yet their version of the Common commits a cardinal offence according to Marx: Proudhonism. Just as Marx criticized social anarchist

Jean-Pierre Proudhon of misunderstanding dialectics for thinking that capitalism had a good side that could be expanded and a bad side could be suppressed, one should object to Hardt and Negri’s support of biopolitical production and its product, the Common, as the good side of capitalism. For, if we follow Marx, “it is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by providing a struggle” (Poverty of Philosophy,

Seventh Observation). And thus the Common is not a ‘good’ form of biopolitical 228 production that can be wrested from the unscrupulous hands of Empire. This is not to say

that capitalism will be defeated through a grand dialectical negation, for it certainly will

not be, but it clarifies the role of the Common: the Common is the shared efforts of those

who oppose the forces of Biopower and the Spectacle. Tiqqun is even more harsh on this

point, accusing Hardt and Negri of “an incestuous relationship with imperial pacification”

that wants “reality but not its realism” and thus “Biopolitics without police,

communication without Spectacle, peace without having to wage war to get it” (Tiqqun,

This Is Not A Program, 117). Yet they temper this criticism by concluding, like Marx

against Proudhon, that “strictly speaking, Negrism does not coincide with imperial

thought; it is simply the idealist face of political thought” (118). In place of Hardt and

Negri’s idealist Common, Tiqqun turn to struggle through an ‘ethic of civil war.’ This

struggle, however, is not a head-on confrontation with Empire through antagonistic battle

but a diffuse warfare against its biopolitical fabric. Intensive escape can utilize this sense

of struggle without elevating it an ethic of war, for Tiqqun indicates that struggle emerges

from a “movement of separation” that breeds hostility to Empire (55). Some critics have

misunderstood this separation, confusing its intensive movement with the extensive

escape practiced by back-to-the-landers in search of a new outside. But intensive

separation proceeds “through the middle” of the Metropolis by finding points of living

and struggling within it (69).42 Living follows from the reappropriation of space, the

Common, violence, and other tools for basic survival, and struggling is the effect of

42 Deleuze suggests finding revolutionary war machines here, stating that, “just as the despot internalizes the nomadic war-machine, capitalist society never stops internalizing a revolutionary war-machine. It’s not on the periphery that the new nomads are being born (because there is no more periphery)” (“Nomadic Thought,” 261). Tiqqun further advise “going through the middle,” warning against the dangers of seceding “from above” into “golden ghettos” of the hyper-bourgeoisie or “from below” in the “no-go-area” of the hyper-exploited (This Is Not A Program, 68). 229 imperceptible war machines that destroys the biopolitical fabric of the Metropolis. Alone, each leads to failure, as living alone softens into a narcissistic focus on difference while struggling alone hardens into an army that desires its own annihilation (69-70). With living-and-struggle together, the movement of separation makes its intensive escape from

Empire. And it is this movement of separation that intensifies the distinction between all of the vain attempts to run away from Empire and the event of its defeat.

Empire cannot be defeated by a subject but only by the force of the outside. In the struggle against Empire, the most powerful forces do not strike like lightning but gradually tear open the Metropolis and cause it to leak. By liberating flows from the veins of the Metropolis, the byproducts of Empire are thus used against it. Against the violence machines of subjection, resistance takes the form of a human strike, which negates the forced reproduction of identity. By either evading or annihilating versions of the self, the human strike liberates the conflictual force of life. In revolt against the technical machines of management, technical objects are transformed from tools to weapons.

When detached from their intended purpose, these weapons operate with newfound speed and intensity unavailable to Empire. As a rebellion against spectacular time, finitude brings together the dislocated times of the Metropolis. These odd times have limited lives but only need to be used to find unusual rhythms that break the monotony of the perpetual present. And in defiance of the system of compulsory visibility, the forces of anti-humanism, insinuation, and illegalism feed the hidden undercurrent of struggle.

Spreading the chaotic effects of confusion, they work to make the Metropolis ungovernable. Unified only by a shared enemy, these subversions illustrate the potential 230 of intensive escape: a new Common, not found in property but forged in struggle. It is difficult to say what will emerge from the ashes of the Metropolis. Yet what is certain is that the problems it addresses must cease to be problems at all. Just as Marx and Engels identify communism as the real movement that abolishes the present, sweeping away the

State, private property, the exploitation of labor, and the class relation, the common struggle against Empire will dissolve the perpetual present, escaping the problems of governance, subjective interiority, the stratification of difference, and the fragmented self.

Escape Precedes Thought… (sensational politics)

Some things can only be sensed. These things perplex the soul, troubling, prodding, and pushing it into movement as though they “were the bearer of a problem” (Deleuze,

Difference and Repetition, 140). No amount of good will prepares one for them, for these sensations are awakened through a violence that carries faculties “to their own limit,” which fries nerves and murders souls (145). Yet this violence brings sense and memory into a discordant harmony that can provoke an even more important faculty: thought.

That is because thought only emerges under constraint. Thought is painful, and it is easy to rely on the idiocies and falsehoods of ‘what everybody knows,’ that is, until the event when one is forced to think. This is the thought of “philosophers of passion, of pathos, distinct from philosophers of logos” – they do not sing, but scream (Deleuze, “Cours

Vincennes: Leibniz,” 7). The reason for the scream is that the force of thought comes from sensations – from how much they poke and prod – and these sensations defy preconceived recognition, which means that the persuasive force of concepts must be communicated through sensation as well (Williams, Transversal Thought, 23-24). And 231 unlike the music of the scream, which surrenders the scream to other sounds to make an accord, these philosophers create concepts that depict only the effects of the scream, which builds a relationship with the forces of the scream without presenting them. These concepts thus impart thought with “invisible and insensible forces that scramble every spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling” (Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 60). To think, then, one does not calm the body to make it receptive to dispassionate information.

Thought only comes after the body is made to spasm, opening it up as a plexus with the force of the scream to liberate “interior forces that climb through the flesh,” which ends in “the entire body trying to escape, to flow out of itself” (xi; xii).

As a concept, escape is filled with the screams of millions who protest the indignities of life in the Metropolis. It follows from a refusal to recite the psalms of purely philosophical discourses on politics, which have “always maintained an essential relation to the law, the institution, and the contract, all of which are the Sovereign’s problem, traversing the ages of sedentary history from despotic formations to ”

(Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” 259). Rather, escape takes leave of ‘right,’ ‘peace,’ and

‘law’ to find the blood and corpses that cemented the foundation of the State. And in this journey, which began with the slaves of the terrifying magician-king and the devout followers of the merciful jurist-priest, escape highlights the importance of a cultural theory of the State. The significance of such a cultural theory expands beyond a typology of State-forms, however, as it fills out other accounts of the rise of liberalism. Michel

Foucault’s historical account in Society Must Be Defended, for instance, considers the role that the philosophical-juridical discourse of sovereignty played in displacing the 232 historico-political justification of State rule (57-58; 98-99). Through his investigation,

Foucault shows how liberalism stands at the end of the Modern State’s long struggle to discursively erase its violence, which it does by inventing legal and rational discourses that deduce sovereignty through reason alone. While Foucault’s historico-political account of the triumph of governmental reason is persuasive, it pits the discourse of reason against the discourse of conflict and thus glosses the points of contact between them. This is where a cultural theory proves itself to be essential, as it can seal this connection with the concept of complementarity. Drawing from the cultural dimension of sovereignty, complementarity demonstrates how conquest and contract, each a pole of the

State, work together to animate the State with its curious rhythm. Accordingly, the triumph of philosophico-juridical discourse over a historico-political one was not the result of a battle for and against the State but a squabble between sovereignty’s two poles.

The cultural theory of the State therefore suggests that Society Must Be Defended should not be interpreted as a lament for a historico-political discourse of the State but as a genealogy of its absences. Moreover, as a genealogy, Foucault’s book skillfully demonstrates how historico-political discourse was taken up in specific, local acts of resistance to the State, which can erupt again in an insurrection of subjugated knowledges. What he fails to complete, however, is a history of cultural forms of escape that mobilizes the force of the outside. Only a cultural theory of escape, then, dares to dream beyond the horizon of the State.

Escape’s insurrection against State reason need not avoid discourse but must incite movement that carries thought far beyond it. Empire’s attempt to poison the cultural 233 politics of emotion intensifies the dark appetites of the soul. Fragmented, discordant

bodies now haunt the Metropolis, many of them aching to find a release for their negative

affects. Most often, subjects only consume themselves in a slow gnawing misery or burn

up in a single outburst. Yet a growing band of troublemakers have shown how to turn

these dangerous forces against their source. Moreover, deep within the codes of digital

culture, a new strategy has materialized. Borrowing from the strategies of bomb-throwing

anarchists and the urban guerrilla, agents of subversion have found new ways to combat

Empire. They exploit glitches, overload the circuits, and hide in the noise, turning the

sprawling network of the Metropolis against its creator. Yet there is something even more monumental at stake than Empire. Digital culture has triggered an anthropological transformation nourished by underground forces that are hard to trace. This shift is occurring faster than we can theorize, and its effects are irreversible. There are those who resist these changes but perhaps they should be pushed to their limits. Negative affects fuel a human strike against the soul, whose dim interiority is a prison for the body.

Tearing down its walls liberates the body, but only to cast it into a whole new universe of pleasures. Worrying about the particular pains and ecstasies that this new world will bring is not foolish, but it is impractical. Instead, we should dare to dream beyond measure, indulging in hallucinatory fantasies where our bodies have lost their interiors altogether and float like the stars, at one with the universe.

And Then It Vanishes… (beyond appearances)

At the height of its power, escape does not appear but disappears. And because it draws on the same power of unbecoming as the scream, its forces are also expressed best 234 through relation rather than direct presentation. Invisibility and absence, disappearance

and nonexistence, anonymity and illegibility, indistinguishability and indiscernibility all

express its force.43 In contrast, Empire derives its power from making things appear.

Confronted by the Spectacle and its system of compulsory visibility, every thing is required to give an account of itself, which is broadcast through confession and the public display of preferences. Those accounts are then treated as positivities and managed by

Biopower, reducing politics to order and movement in the space of appearance. Together, the Spectacle and Biopower carry out the two operations of Empire, circulation and management, and in turn administer the life of the Metropolis. To complete this process, however, Empire commands more than what it sees. In fact, Empire operates by maintaining a particular relationship between space, time, and appearance.

Empire intensifies its power with the assertion of space. And as a consequence, Empire freezes time. Stuck in a perpetual present, time slows to a standstill. As the veins of the

Metropolis cover the earth, difference flourishes but things the same. Never before has so much changed without anything actually happening. Unlike the State-forms that precede it, Empire itself does not exist; it gives up material existence to become an incorporeal diagram whose intensive power only insists and persists in management and circulation.

This control is extended in the Metropolis through space and the spatializing of power, which internalizes the force of the outside and renders bodies incapable of distantiation

(Jameson, Postmodernism, 47-48). Moreover, spatialization taps into the foreign or

43 There is also a less noble tale of escape where disappearance follows the lonely path of isolation, solitude, exile, defeat, and annihilation. This is the story told by the Spectacle, which is not so much untrue as it is far too common to deserve anything more than a passing footnote. 235 otherwise incommensurate worlds of past and present, with their exotic rituals and

eccentric rhythms of life, by relating them through space, which makes them concurrent.

The effect of this spatialization is not the deadening of space, however, but of time. And with all of the disjointed times of the Metropolis being re-captured in this way, Empire accelerates difference under the assurance that they will all result in the same perpetual present.

The State-forms the came before Empire dealt with the future through depth. The Modern

State, paranoid of outside influence, ordered The Police to surround its subjects in enclosed blocks of space-time and commissioned Publicity to fill them with projective interiorities. The Modern State thus produced subjects whose power increased directly with the depth of their discipline. Yet this process is costly, so other States developed more frugal ways to abate external forces. The Social State, through a bargain with its outside, created The Social as an intermediary that exchanged between surface and depth to defend the present against the future. Two states exemplified this process, the Welfare

State, which followed the triangle of Keynesianism-Fordism-Taylorism, and the Socialist

State, which elevated The Social to a science. But Empire does not protect depth. In fact, its power comes from invading depth. Empire constructs the Metropolis with the force sprung from the spaces of interiority when they are unfolded. This makes the Metropolis a space of exposure and exteriority.

The power of escape does not come from occupying space. Rather, escaping the

Metropolis requires that one exist but without appearing. It was the guerrilla hiding in the 236 jungles of Brazil. In the Metropolis, one does not vanish through isolation; to escape, one

dissolves and fades away by becoming indistinguishable from everyone else. It was the members of the Red Army Faction, who resembled all the other disaffected citizens of

Empire. And rather than shrinking until one is too worthless to be seen, this form of escape increases potential by amplifying intensity to the point of opacity, for the strategy is not to occupy territory but to be the territory (Invisible Committee, The Coming

Insurrection, 108). It was Autonomia, who formed a barely-visible tear in the Metropolis with each protest, rally, , squat, social center, radio station, and newspaper. Finally, the concept of escape can be elevated to the level of strategy, which uses escape to exploit weaknesses in the Metropolis. It is the cyberpunk hacker who hides in the codes.

The politics of the perpetual present may operate through appearances but the politics of the future does not. The dislocated times of the Metropolis, snatched, and communicated through the anonymous force of insinuation. These times are embodied, if only for a moment, and then captured again by Biopower or the Spectacle. Yet in that short time, they give life to differences that reach beyond the present. For even in its absence, the persistence of escape powerfully affirms the force of liberation. It is the voice of a silent struggle already underway against Empire, crying out, declaring the ongoing conflict, “A war without a battlefield. A war without an enemy. A war that is everywhere. A thousand civil wars. A war without end” (Soohen and Rowley, Fourth World War, 0:04-0:17). “It is hard, now, to remember what life was like back then,” it continues, “I believed them when they told me that I was alone in the world, and that this place and time were invincible… Before that day in September, in April, in December, in May, in November, 237 when this city’s veins opened, and we lived a hundred years of history in one afternoon.

The world has changed and we have changed with it” (0:21-0:46). This voice speaks for all the forces that evade Empire’s grasp, fueling a clandestine rebellion within the

Metropolis. They are dramatic stories that flow like water to feed the underground current of revolt. They are incoherent attacks that gather like clouds to cast shadows over

Empire. And they are strategies for escape that shift with the changes in the weather.

Escape does not negotiate. Escape is the legend of FOXFIRE that burns and burns. It does not demand political representation. It is the group agitations of the Socialist

Patients Collective that turns illness into a weapon. It makes no demands. It is the terrifying excess of ‘the birds’ that interrupt normalcy. It does not make a claim to power.

It is the deadly dance of the guerrilla’s minuet making mobility lethal. It does not want to be. It is the flood of digital noise that destroys and horrifies.

238

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