Anarchist Without Content

The Horizon

anarchistwithoutcontent — Fri, 17 May 2013 19:54:07 +0000

I can finally see an end to my diss. After being directed to cut my unwritten chapter and go immediately to rewrites & conclusion, I won’t be writing much new material over the next two months. Which raises the question, what to do about the blog?

So I ask you, my kind readers, what I should I do?

(if you can’t see the poll, leave a comment or try a different browser)

Glitch, Oversaturation, and Noise

anarchistwithoutcontent — Wed, 15 May 2013 22:06:24 +0000

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. Yet 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 models the guerrilla strategy of turning something to one’s advantage and hints at “a resonant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and ultimately desert the dominant political diagram” (The Exploit, 21). But more specifically, the exploit is a hole generated by the hypercomplexity of technical systems that makes such systems vulnerable to penetration and change. And most importantly, the exploit turns already existing power differentials 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 information 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 information gathering suffers from overaccumulation at the point when the cost of transforming the information into something useful 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 (Anti-Oedipus, 230-232; 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 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.” (“A Perverse Logic”)

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. But in contrast to the guerrilla, the overloaded Metropolis leaks time more than space. Just as cyberpunk’s adrenaline-fueled hacking scenes illustrates, the terrain of the Metropolis makes space subservient to time – depicted most vividly in the dramatic ticking down of a clock. The minaret of digital culture is then a tool of temporary misapprehension and incomprehensibility for either lessening the reactionary forces of the enemy or expropriating their resources.

The unavoidable noise of digital culture provides the camouflage for operation. But noise is quite ambivalent even if its sometimes disrupts communication. It is true that the feedback loop of the rising decibels of a loud dinner party drowns out certain intimacies, yet others would be impossible without it. And while “noise destroys and horrifies,” conversely “order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death,” so that noise not only disrupts by “nourishes a new order” because it opens any system to its outside (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” (Genesis, 7). In fact, a certain degree of noise may even aid transmission, for it may “allow for greater compression of the signal” that increases the efficiency of the channel and its system (“Of Glitch and Men,” 27). Yet even if the introduction of noise improves signal compression, it does so by sacrificing fidelity for mobility and flexibility. And it is here that noise becomes its most strategic, as it engenders an indiscernibility similar to the density of urban terrain, but it also spells out the possible effects: distortion and loss. But as the guerrilla dissolves its presence into the people, noise invades the channel with the force of the outside. Like a network detached from any subjection, noise still functions with the intentionality of a ‘strategy without a strategist.’ Yet noise delivers its message with ultimate force of anonymity – letting the outside speaks for itself.

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 typify the truth of force, but they also epitomize the rhetorical power of action. These radicals were unable to find a force of truth independent of power itself. Instead, they found that rhetoric and force were both amplified when treated as imbricated and thus mutually-constituted. Propaganda by the deed was able to declare that the actions of anarchists was more than idle talk or utopian dreams, while guerrillas waged ideologically-fueled wars against occupying powers. Resistance to Empire should take heed. But the prior anarchist or communist approaches do not speak to the thoroughly digital character of life in the Metropolis. Yet neither does the politics of persuasion or the presentation of facts. The Metropolis will remain unphased as long as tactical media leans on the force of truth. Empire will be defeated by a battle that fuses force and truth – injecting insinuations while fighting cultural politics in digital code – releasing a cascade of affect charges while turning glitches into exploits, overaccumulation into overload, and flooding the Metropolis with the noisy force of the outside.

The Digital Politics of the Metropolis

anarchistwithoutcontent — Wed, 15 May 2013 03:44:48 +0000

The Metropolis is not a representation abstracted from contemporary media technologies; but if “history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems,” then it is no doubt structured by informatization, which is the biopolitical medium through which Empire wages its war of movement (Speed and Politics, 90). And it is for this reason that the Metropolis should be described in the same terms of network culture, which is characterized by “an unprecedented abundance of information output and by an acceleration of informational dynamics” that treats that information in three 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 (Network Culture, 1;9). Moreover, revolutionary politics also shifts within such a network culture, as the luddite dream of sabotaging or crippling infrastructure on a mass scale is unthinkable, and cyberterrorism by political-motivated radicals is rare (Noise Channels, 49-51). Instead, network culture has motivated digital actions that gain cultural expression through a tactical use of media that “signifies the intervention and disruption of a dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs, messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible” (Tactical Media, 6). Yet such an approach plays with digital expressions and does not struggle within information itself, which causes tactical media to fails where the guerrilla failed as well – ”confusing tactics and strategy” (The Philosophy of the Guerrilla, 257). For politics to rise to the level of strategy that creates successful interventions in network culture, it must consider how “the content of any medium is always another medium” and thus wrestle with the technologies of the Metropolis (Understanding Media, 8). Such a path has been opened by media and literary theory as they have cross-pollenated and demonstrated how speech, writing, and code operate differently even if they are entangled. And if anything, “the Net is a medium not for propaganda, but for conspiracy,” 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 (“End of the Official Story,” 20). The struggle against the Metropolis must ultimately take note and initiate a shift: from signs to signals and from semiotics to physics.

The strategic principles of guerrilla theory can thus be resurrected even if guerrilla warfare cannot. But as the Red Army Faction notes, it is the very architecture of the Metropolis that is the target, as “neither Marx nor Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg 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.,” Empire 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” through the silent compulsions of the market (“The Black September Action in Munich”). 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. Yet it is the problems of materiality where 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; the swells of density that create mobility and flexibility are navigated by the opposition of signal and noise of information theory, which fights against distortion or loss; and the clutter of the Metropolis that provides the cover of camouflage is found in digital oversaturation, where spam and ‘big data’ make identification difficult.

Yet despite the pervasiveness of glitch, noise, and oversaturation, early imagery of the cyberpunk hacker as guerrilla warrior against faceless corporations has not been realized. Instead, numerous cultures have embodied these digital byproducts, with glitch giving rise to jarring video game art, noise creating a distinctive form of post-punk music, and anonymity fueling screen-based versions of cruising for a fix (Noise Channels). And the problem with these cultural expression is that are “local” and “bounded,” thus caught between 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” (Network Culture, 70). So perhaps the cyberpunk console cowboys has instead become pervasive and diffuse phenomena typified in the “evanescent and mobile informational islands” of peer-to-peer media pirates that appear and disappear, “springing out of nowhere” to send signal,”only to dissolve as soon as the frantic transactions are carried out” (70). It is thus 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 contrasting architecture of the Metropolis stretches out like the open system of the Internet, a common space that is simultaneously divergent and differentiated, and thus operates as a diagram whose basic function is communicative – the overcoming of incompatibilities (42). If the guerrilla then exists in digital culture, albeit transformed, it is as the strategic force of divergence. And this is not embodying divergence, as done by various subcultures of glitch and noise, but the strategizing of incompatibility as offensive escape. What remains is the question of how.

“Who are our nomads today, our real Nietzscheans’?”

anarchistwithoutcontent — Tue, 14 May 2013 19:41:06 +0000

In a difficult to find essay published in a 1977 collection on Nietzsche, Deleuze ends his piece “Nomadic Thought” (an argument against Kant, neo-Kantianism, and the dialectic) with this wonderful point on nomads:

One final point remains to be made. Let us go back to that grand passage in The Genealogy of Morals about the founders of empires. There we encounter men of Asiatic production, so to speak. On a base of primitive rural communities, these despots construct their imperial machines that codify everything to excess. With an administrative bureaucracy that organizes huge projects, they feed off an overabundance of labor (“Wherever they appear something new soon arises, a ruling structure that fives, in which parts and functions are delimited and coordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a place that has not first been assigned and coordinated, in which nothing whatever finds a place that has not first been assigned a ‘meaning’ in relation to the whole”‘). It is questionable, however, whether this text does not tie together two forces that in other respects would be held apart – two forces that Kafka distinguished, even opposed, in The Great Wall of China. For, when one tries to discover how primitive segmented communities give rise to other forms of sovereignty – a question Nietzsche raises in the second part of The Genealogy – one sees that two entirely different yet strictly related phenomena occur. It is true that, at the center, the rural communities are absorbed by the despot’s bureaucratic machine, which includes its scribes, its priests, its functionaries. But on the periphery, these communities commence a sort of adventure, They enter into another kind of unit, this time a nomadic association, a nomadic war machine, and they begin to decodify instead of allowing themselves to become overcodified. Whole groups depart; they become nomads. Archaeologists have led us to conceive of this nomadism not as a primary state, but as an adventure suddenly embarked upon by sedentary groups impelled by the attraction of movement, of what lies outside. The nomad and his war machine oppose the despot with his administrative machine: an extrinsic nomadic unit as opposed to an intrinsic despotic unit. And yet the societies are correlative, interrelated; the despot’s purpose will be to integrate, to internalize the nomadic war machine, while that of the nomad will be to invent an administration for the newly conquered empire. They ceaselessly oppose one another – to the point where they become confused with one another.

Philosophic discourse is born out of the imperial state, and it passes through innumerable metamorphoses, the same metamorphoses that lead us from the foundations of empire to the Greek city. Even within the Greek city-state, philosophic discourse remained in a strict relation with the despot (or at least within the shadow of despotism), with imperialism, with the administration of things and people (Leo Strauss and Kojève give a variety of proofs of this in their work On Tyranny). Philosophic discourse has always been essentially related to law, institutions, and contracts – which taken together, constitute the subject matter of sovereignty and have been part of the history of sedentary peoples from the earliest despotic states to [149] modem democracies. The “signifier” is really the last philosophical metamorphosis of the despot. But if Nietzsche does not belong to philosophy, it is perhaps because he was the first to conceive of another kind of discourse as counter-philosophy. This discourse is above all nomadic; its statements can be conceived as the products of a mobile war machine and not the utterances of a rational, administrative machinery, whose philosophers would be bureaucrats of pure reason. It is perhaps in this sense that Nietzsche announces the advent of a new politics that begins with him (which Klossowski calls a plot against his own class).

It is common knowledge that nomads fare miserably under our kinds of regime: we will go to any lengths in order to settle them, and they barely have enough to subsist on. Nietzsche lived like such a nomad, reduced to a shadow, moving from furnished room to furnished room. But the nomad is not necessarily one who moves: some voyages take place in situ, are trips in intensity. Even historically, nomads are not necessarily those who move about like migrants. On the contrary, they do not move; nomads, they nevertheless stay in the same place end continually evade the codes of settled people. We also know that the problem for revolutionaries today is to unite within the purpose of the particular struggle without falling into the despotic and bureaucratic organization of the party or state apparatus. We seek a kind of war machine that will not re-create a state apparatus, a nomadic unit related to the outside that will not revive an internal despotic unity. Perhaps this is what is most profound in Nietzsche’s thought and marks the extent of his break with philosophy, at least so far as it is manifested in the aphorism: he made thought into a machine of war – a battering ram – into a nomadic force. And even if the journey is a motionless one, even if it occurs on the spot, imperceptible, unexpected, and subterranean, we must ask ourselves, “Who are our nomads today, our real Nietzscheans’?” pg 148-149

Escaping Cyberpunk

anarchistwithoutcontent — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:40:38 +0000

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 outskirts – everything is connected, just some parts have older streets and some areas have no official names. In this world, cities are not dots on the maps but dissolve into their own regions. The Sprawl, for instance, covers all 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 research “who kept one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button” 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” (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 have drastically changed 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 existentialism. Instead of celebrating difference as an iron-clad vehicle for pluralist harmony, these worlds draw 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 escape to communes in the woods, and immediate 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.

Guerrilla Summary

anarchistwithoutcontent — Mon, 13 May 2013 21:34:08 +0000

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 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, for it learns from Guy Debord who once insisted that “I am not a philosopher, I am a strategist” (“Metropolis”). 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 route will be taken?.’

But to be clear: this is not an enjoinment to practice guerrilla warfare. Everywhere that the Metropolis spreads, it makes all previous forms of guerrilla warfare obsolete. The subversion of the Metropolis will not be a military one, but a battle of intensities. Yet the history of guerrilla warfare demonstrates that escape, when raised 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 differ 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 product 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.

The Necessity of Camouflage (for guerrilla action)

anarchistwithoutcontent — Thu, 09 May 2013 21:27:04 +0000

The necessity of camouflage. The guerrilla demonstrates the importance of selective engagement, which affirms the strategic importance of visibility. 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 (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 an image that swiftly appears with an explosive force only to immediately recede. The guerrilla thus substantiates the potential of difference, whose singular acts must only be produced once, in contrast to authoritarian power, which expands by means of a coherent identity that is reproduced over and again. This difference was amplified during Italy’s Years of Lead, whereby numerous armed guerrillas simply imitated the state while others disseminated “in a multiplicity of foci, like so many rifts in the capitalist whole” (This Is Not A Program, 84). These rifts opened up “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). [Note: 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.] These operations did not speak with the coherence of a subject, but rather, they formed their own consistency through frequency and intensity, “like so many marks etched in the half-light” that leave only traces of authorship or militancy, to constitute an offensive “more formidable” than their hardened counterparts in the Brigate Rosse or Prima Linea (85). The non-coherence of the autonomous elements thus outlined the struggle, which was not simply between revolutionary and conservative forces, but a way of politics. On one side was the coherence of Italian state “derived from popular Italian perceptions 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” (Shadows of Things Past, 7; This is Not a Program, 85).

Controlling terrain in the city is difficult for the guerrilla. But 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 in the end the war will be won by whoever endures longest” (Philosophy of the Guerrilla, 241). Yet there are many parts of the Metropolis that appear as night even when the sun in shining its brightest, for the shadow of the Spectacle is to the Metropolis as the cover of nighttime is to the city. Within the density of the Metropolis, abandoned zones shield their 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 free 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 (Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 15-17). As the guerrilla shows, subverting the Metropolis does not occur by occupying its space but in returning the time of politics. In the face of the perpetual present established by Empire, the guerrilla controls time and thus conquers the space its enemy. And because the guerrilla differs 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 watch of 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 indistinguishable, guerrilla strikes are not viewed as the actions of a crank, madman, or criminal against the public but how the sentiments held by many are made concrete – every act ‘signs itself,’ claiming responsibility for itself “through its particular how” and “through its specific meaning in situation,” rendering it immediately discernible (This Is Not A Program, 85). This underground force thus exposes itself to political scrutiny even when hiding its existence. 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. Moreover, the explosive political force of non-subjection is not limited to guerrillas and their allies. In fact, Empire is the becoming-imperceptible of the repressive forces of the present. 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 (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. In contrast to the Empire’s attempt at a neutral appearance, the guerrilla declares that it is best “if the enemy attacks us wildly and paints us as utterly black and without a single virtue,” for it not only draws a clear line between the guerrilla and its enemy but speaks to the their “spectacular successes” (Urban Guerrilla Concept). And this demonstrates how the strength of an enemy can be its greatest weakness, as the enemy’s strength can be shown to be mere bluster (Revolution in the Revolution?, 52). The assumed unassailability of the enemy begets fear and humility – a deference produced less by Empire’s sober supporters than its pessimistic critics, who Mao denounced as the guardians of paper tigers. The guerrilla shatters this unassailability, making obvious its own strength while turning habits of respect for the enemy into belittling mockery. But instead of following the militarized path of the guerrilla, radical politics need only evince the consistency of its intensity. And in that way, it spreads the assailablity of Empire but avoid liquidation.

The Decisiveness of Terrain (for the Urban Guerrilla)

anarchistwithoutcontent — Tue, 07 May 2013 22:39:23 +0000

The decisiveness of terrain. The guerrilla is mobile and avoids direct conflict. This is because the guerrilla cannot afford the narcissism of political activists who only fight for moral victories and thus flaunt their weaknesses. The theory of guerrilla, in contrast, pinpoints a decisive advantage in weakness and otherwise compensates for the rest. In particular, the guerrilla uses mobility and the avoidance of direct conflict to engage the enemy at a time and place where success is guaranteed. The popular tactic of the minuet ‘dance’ demonstrates this concept: a guerrilla force encircles an advancing column from the four points of a compass but far enough away to avoid encirclement or to suffer 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 (Guerrilla Warfare). And it is with knowledge of the terrain that the guerrilla dances the movements of life itself. Imaginatively creating new combinations of dispersion, concentration, and the constant change of position, the guerrilla dances to the cadence of organic life’s encounter with its milieu; 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. The choreography of escape is then what 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” (Revolution in the Revolution?, 29). [FN: Bergson on vitalism, D and D&G on "life", and Colebrook on "queer vitalism"/passive vitalism] Instead, the guerrilla is an offensive force, as it strikes at difficult to defend positions but is not equipped to defend or occupy space. Moreover, the environment is the 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 power is thus inevitable.

The terrain of the Metropolis requires strategic innovation as it is not like the countryside. Yet new maneuvers must 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 (Revolution in the Revolution?, 50-53). The Metropolis poses a similar problem, as 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, criss-crossed by cellphone towers, and globally-positioned by satellites. So, as the Red Army Faction notes, it is the very architecture of the Metropolis that the guerrilla fights, as “neither Marx nor Lenin nor Rosa Luxemburg 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.” and thus Empire 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” through the silent compulsions of the market (“The Black September Action in Munich”). Yet 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 shares many characteristics with the countryside. In particular, slums are a site of underdevelopment created by Empire management through abandonment. And it is from that abandonment that a new, more cruel 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 (“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 identify, 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 mobilize tactics similar to those used in the countryside. Brazilian students, for instance, have used a street tactics much 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 (Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 24-25). But 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 guaranteed and certain to fulfill the twin goals of neutralizing the enemy’s repressive forces and expropriating resources to expand the forces of liberation.

Yet 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 needed a crude concept of escape, as theorists were able to identify an ‘open field’ of combat that radiates outward from nearly any point in the advancing enemy’s column. In the Metropolis, however, the Spectacle casts a gaze that touches everything, at least in part – even what is abandoned by the nourishing power of Biopower. Therefore, the urban guerrilla does not presume that density will prevent their encirclement, as the open field does, but it will create a situation so porous as to offer escape routes unknown to the authorities; and 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 them” (Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 25; trans. modified). Yet 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 exists in the Metropolis in the density often found in zones of abandonment. And while 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 avoid their fate; for the history of urban action shows that most guerrillas rose like lions only to be hunted, killed, or caged.

Contingency and the Guerrilla Way of Life

anarchistwithoutcontent — Mon, 06 May 2013 21:49:46 +0000

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” (Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 279; 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 people like a natural reactive force to an exterior threat when a nation “inferior in army and military equipment” turns 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 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. Furthermore, the theory proposes that it is discipline alone that separates the guerrilla from the mere criminal. The criminal selfishly preys on oppressors and the oppressed alike without the only goal being their own profit. And alternatively, the guerrilla lives simply and expropriates from the rich and powerful in order to build up the forces that distract, demoralized, and drive away the enemy (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” – an oversight not driven by malevolent indifference but an irreducible difference in the conditions of thought, action, and ultimately life itself (Revolution in the Revolution?, 69, 70-71). This condition is an effect of Biopower, which develops softness through a power that produces more than it represses. Empire thus drowns the guerrilla in a sea of difference where the hardness of discipline become a burden; for the shattered masses no longer appear as a people molecular movements of the Metropolis, leaving the guerrilla make wooden ideological appeals to for a humanity no longer there. Guillén, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, recognizes this. “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 points almost exclusively to one place: the city (Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 240). The most promising avenue for defeat 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 of the disciplined ascetics of the rural guerrilla, the urban fighter must possess initiative, mobility, flexibility, versatility, and command of any situation (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 only barely kept in check by careful watch of the Spectacle and the immense management Biopower.

The urban guerrilla is a dramatization of contingency made into a revolutionary force, as the urban 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” (5; trans modified). Thus, with every rise in unemployment, social outrage, and cultural discontent, the 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 with a “strike unexpectedly here and there with superiority of arms and numbers” (Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 240; trans. modified). Perhaps the greatest challenge to the urban guerrilla comes when trying to build a coincidence 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, as in not an agent restoration but liberation, then a different coincidence must be built, this time between living and struggling that compromises neither with 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 to unleash a deluge of contingency against Empire. And to do so, it must constitute a force of liberation that, like the guerrilla, moves with the fluidity of water and the ease of the blowing wind but whose movements are judged to be as automatic as the daily humiliations of life in the Metropolis.

Toward A Guerrilla Analysis of the Metropolis

anarchistwithoutcontent — Thu, 02 May 2013 21:17:50 +0000

The basic requirement for a guerrilla war is a rural population, or at least according to the theory. Following a line from Mao through the classic texts on the guerrilla, we find that it is a rural population’s semi-autonomy from the politics of the metropole that holds the key to organizational and military victory. As one Maoist maxim goes, ‘the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.’ But to clarify, the guerrilla neither takes lead from the peasants 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 terrain is at its greatest advantage. Lastly, because the guerrilla blends in with the rural population, the enemy is left with few options for identifying, containing, or eliminating the guerrilla. At their most drastic, commanders often resort to ‘draining the pond to catch the fish.’ It is thus by leveraging these three strategic principles – an autonomous way of life, the advantage of terrain, and indistinguishability – that many guerrilla wars have been won.

The conditions present in the middle of the 20th century have shifted as Empire abolishes the boundary between the urban and the rural to form the Metropolis. This is not to declare a totalizing shift, as there are still many small ponds across the globe in which guerrilla still swim, but the oceans of self-sufficient peasants are quickly drying up. 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 (Revolution in the Revolution?, 50-53; Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 284-286). Focoism, a largely failed project, was formulated after the Cuban Revolution to draw Mao’s three stages of guerrilla war into a single small nucleus of militants who leads by simultaneously recruiting, organizing, and attacking in rural terrain while also forming a subservient nucleus of politics in the metropole (Revolution in the Revolution?, 75-78). Even while jettisoning much of foco, most theorists 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 ripen the conditions in itself. Elevating the strategic role of the city as the seat of political power, others have proposed a theory of the urban guerrilla that marries armed propaganda with its political aim of political revolution. The theoretical shift is based on a strong premise: the urban way of life, terrain, and camouflage remains politically superior its rural counterparts.

The urban guerrilla concept offers a powerful diagnostic for the subversion of the 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. But upon closer investigation, 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 the 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. It is from this strategic distance that the Metropolis offers its enemies the means for its own destruction. And it is by way of the theory of the urban guerrilla that new tactics can find their inspiration but reworked to bring life where the guerrilla so often only caused death.