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: 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. (This is how religion must be practice, those are the actions of a criminal.) But without standards, which stick reference points in the swirling uncertainty of change, free-floating norms are used to manage conflicts against and through one another rather than on their own. Out at sea and unpunctuated by coordinates, this expanding block of norms is a mobile mass of intersecting concerns, 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 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 an expanding set of social interests (LoD 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 death 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 (LoD 28-30). The total mobilization of the Nazi state was for expansionist war, while Social States undertake total mobilizations for economic development (264). The outcome of this total mobilization is socialization of the State is the indistinction between the state and society rather than a society still driven by the State, as in the Modern State. Therefore, instead of the Nazi State, it is two other twentieth century States that therefore serve as the paradigmatic examples of the Social State: the Welfare State and the Socialist State.
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If we understand politics not as the ontological ground upon which forces swirl but those forces themselves, then This Is Not A Program and Sonogram of Potentiality are perhaps the most political texts of Tiqqun. And for that reason, This Is Not A Program is not a work of philosophy but strategy. Just as Debord balked at being labelled a philosopher and instead called himself a strategist, This Is Not A Program employs philosophical dispositifs [devices, tools] but never philosophy itself; rather, it is part historical warning and part field manual for the present.
