Strategies for the Subversion of the Metropolis (draft chapter)

This is a draft of the fifth chapter. I need to do more summary work & pull insinuation through sections 2 & 3. -awc

INSINUATION AND 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, which unleashed their fury; and second, the arrival of anarchists. But to takes the entrance of a protagonist, Johann Most, 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 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” (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 sublime 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 the disinherited, 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.

Striking fear in hearts of the three enemies of classical anarchism – The Church, The State, and Capital – radicals committed a remarkable number 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 commune 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” (Anarchism, 151). Echoing Rousse’s possibilism, Gustav Landauer 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.

Our contemporary times are replete with radicals preaching about the non-threatening virtues of propaganda by the deed. 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 The Internationale. 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 civilization-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. 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. But I am dissatisfied by the stale repetition of this opposition – the reasonable proposals of social anarchists and the excesses of their darker offspring – but 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 passion but are not feelings. This is what I understand propaganda by the deed to be.

A dangerous current flows through propaganda by the deed.

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

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.

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“Everybody Talks About the Weather, but Nobody Does Anything About It”: Interiority, Affect, and Negation in the Metropolis

(This is the full chapter draft. Enjoy.)

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 shared presence is characterized more by mutual separation than social connection.

A floor cuts the frame in half, the low shot focusing just as much 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 safety walk big city streets.

In the next shot, we finally catch a glimpse the character as he moves in and out of the 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 thoughts 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 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” (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. Escape is only partial as long as it is haunted by a specific desire – confession.

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Foxfire, A Lesson in Negative Affect

“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 taste 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 and uncles, and ruthless boys and brothers. Separately, the girls felt suffocated. But together, they are delirious with life.

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Forget the Greeks

As many of you may know, there has been a trend in Foucault Studies to ponder over his late work on the Ancients. Some liberal Foucault scholars looked to him as a guru that offered an ethical system for a new form of life washed of the worries of power. While us radicals scoff at the so-called ‘ethical’ reading of Foucault, it is perhaps Deleuze who best dismisses such a reading.

Gilles Deleuze writes in his book Foucault, that:

If power is constitutive of truth, how can we conceive of a ‘power of truth’ which would no longer be the truth of power, a truth that would release transversal lines of resistance and not integral lines of power? How can we ‘cross the line’? And, if we must attain a life that is the power of the outside, what tells us that this outside is not a terrifying void and that this life, which seems to put up a resistance, is not just the simple distribution within the void of ‘slow, partial and progressive’ deaths?

….

What remains, then, except an anonymous life that shows up only when it clashes with power, argues with it, exchanges ‘brief and stridence words’, and then fades back into the night, what Foucault called ‘the life of infamous men’, whom he asked us to admire by virtue of ‘their misfortune, rage or uncertain madness’? … This culminated in The Use of Pleasure’s searing phrase: ‘to get free of oneself’. (94-95)

….

The redistribution or reorganization [found in the Greeks] takes place all on its own, or at least over a long period. For the relation to oneself will not remain the withdrawn and reserved zone of the free man, a zone independent of any ‘institutions and social system’. The relation to oneself will be understood int rems of power-relations and relations of knowledge. It will be reintegrated into these systems from which it was originally derived. The individual is coded or recorded within a ‘moral’ knowledge, and above all he becomes the stake in a power struggle and is diagrammatized.

The fold therefore seems unfolded, and the subjectivation of the free man is transformed into subjection: on the one hand it involved being ‘subject to someone else by control and dependence’, with all the processes of individuation and modulation which power installs, acts on the daily life and the interiority of those it calls its subjects; on the other it makes the subject ‘tied to his own identity by a conscience or self-knowledge’, through all the the techniques of moral and human science that go to make up a knowledge of the subject.n24 Simultaneously, sexuality becomes organized around certain focal points of power, gives rise to a ‘scientia sexualis’, and is integrated into an agency of ‘power-knowledge’, namely Sex (here [in The Uses of Pleasure,] Foucault returns to the analysis given in The History of Sexuality).

Must we conclude from this that the new dimension hollowed out by the Greeks disappears, an falls back on the two axes of knowledge and power? In that case we could go back to the Greeks and find a relation to oneself based on free individuality. but this is obviously not the case. There will always be a relation to oneself which resists codes and power; the relation to oneself is even one of the origins of these points of resistance which we have already discussed. For example, it would be wrong to reduce Christian moralities to their attempts at codification, and the pastoral power which they invoke, without also taking into account the ‘spiritual and ascetic movements’ or subjectivation that continued to develop before the Reformation (there are collective subjectivations).n25 It is not even enough to say that the latter resists the former; for there is a perpetuation communcatio between them, whether in terms of struggle or of composition. What must be stated, then, is that subjection, the relation to oneself, continues to create itself, but by transforming itself and changing its nature to the point where the Greek mode is a distant memory. Recuperated by power-relations and relations of knowledge, the relation to oneself is continually reborn, elsewhere and otherwise. (102-104)

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Disemboweling the Metropolis (complete)

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 linger desire for clarity, I jotted down some notes while played things back in my head like a movie reel.

Disorientation. Most people’s initial experience of the Metropolis is through disorientation. When you first hit the streets, you settle into its 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 (Borde and Chaumeton).

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. Raymond Chandler said that a hardboiled detective could walk these dirty streets and do no wrong. Bullshit, 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.”

A lot of red herrings had been thrown my way. The Metropolis makes it hard to know who to trust. There are no longer any good guys, only con men looking for dupes who couldn’t 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 numbers of a few bureaucrats and cops is never a bad idea, given that you don’t get too close – mistaking them for a friend or a confidant makes you worse than a signing 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: find allies.”

The spoils of my stakeout laid out on my desk likes 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 continued when I spotted His Benevolence of the Priestly State after his blackmail and extortion 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 marginal, undesirables, and illegalists.

Just when I thought the trail went cold, I got the call. The anonymous caller told me to meet them 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 stands as 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 or another state-form to govern it. Despite its material existence, the Metropolis itself is not material but a real abstraction – it is a process of composition that brings together material according to a specific set of rules. In particular, the Metropolis operates according to inclusive disjunction. Inclusive disjunction allows the Metropolis to connect otherwise incommensurate subjects, flows, temporalities, and visibilities without suppressing their differences. Yet in assembling them, Empire does not leave those incommensurate things unperturbed. Rather, Empire introduces things into the Metropolis by producing an immanent plane of positivities the unfolds secured elements, exposes them to risk, and eliminates their futurity.

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Vein 3: Resisting Spectacular Time, Finitude & Dislocation (part 3)

The Sex Pistol’s prophetic exclamation of “No Future!” is not an admission of defeat but 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,” promising follow-through (The Homosexual Generation, 184). It breaks with alternativism, which demands that any preferable future stand on the shoulders of the past, by pronouncing 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 ones stops being a good citizen (Homos, 113).

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Vein 3: Spectacular Time (Part 2)

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 its rains in Epicurus’ metaphysical universe, to facilitate accumulation in its space of encounter, The Metropolis (“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 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 duration 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…” (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 concerning 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, removing them from their means of subsistence and reducing them to absolute poverty, The Spectacle abstracts time through dislocation, treating 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. [fn: 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.] 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” (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.

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Vein 3: Spectacular Time (part 1)

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.

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Existence 2: Empire is management

The production of difference is the abstract process of Empire’s mode of management.

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, while vowing to maintain 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. But 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.

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