Contingency and the Guerrilla Way of Life

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.

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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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Guerrilla Talk

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.” Yet 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 the anti-imperialist struggle is a coffee klatch.”

What the RAF thus provides is their own form of insinuation – 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 insinuation as crude materialists whose voice was bullets and bombs, even if they often provided communiques to later afford their expressions a little more meaning.

To most, the RAF’s gestures must appear futile

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A Politics of Failure

A subject without an interior might begin backwards. Such a discussion could start with queer history, which seems to lend itself to this backwardness, as its twentieth centuries stories are full of personal loss, social detachment, and fragmented community (Feeling Backward, 146). Not doubt such backwardness has ample company, as Benjamin wrote that the angel of history has his wings caught in “a storm blowing from Paradise” that blows him toward the future but only faces toward the past and thus keeps a close watch over the horrors of what has already occurred (“Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 257-8). A similarly backward-focused subject would also feeling 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 leads more often to failure than satisfaction (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 begin to return and the gag order on negativity (or hope, for that matter) 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 achievement, the spark of revolt rarely burns bright – but it can still be found.

A good place to search for a politics that ignites the architecture of the soul is in the home.

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Feminist Affects

Perhaps there is an unavoidable complicity between all the girls who weather the daily assault of patriarchy like a bad storm. But can their shared secret turn their 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 critics 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 (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. The aim of such a diagnosis would not be 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, one sheds paranoid anticipation and becomes open to surprise stripped of the dread that comes with waiting for bad news. They key to success is to prevent the clinical tool of a depressive attitude from blossoming into the clinical blockage of depression.

But depression is a real danger, as signaled by the ongoing feminist project Public Feelings.

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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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The Revolt of Nothingness

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 an absolute right based on the categorical and immediate abomination of the social order of the Modern State, which they declared to be a continual of war by other means, to which only their revolt could end (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.

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The Boredom of the Soul

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 (Security, Territory Population, 123-130; The Hermeneutics of the Subjects, 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.

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The Architecture of Confession

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.

“Western man has become a confessing animal” (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.

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A Subject Without Identity

Foucault says “an art of oneself that’s the exact opposite of oneself…” If there’s a subject, it’s a subject without any identity. Subjectification as a process is personal or collective individuation, individuation one by one or group by group. Now, there are many types of individuation. There are subject-type individ­uations ( “that’s you…,” “that’s me…”) , but there are also event­-type individuations where there’s no subject: a wind, an atmosphere, a time of day, a battle… One can’t assume that a life, or a work of art, is individuated as a subject; quite the reverse. Take Foucault himself: you weren’t aware of him as a person exactly. Even in trivial situations, say when he came into a room, it was more like a changed atmosphere, a sort of event, an electric or magnetic field or something. That didn’t in the least rule out warmth or make you feel uncomfortable, but it wasn’t like a person. It was a set of intensities.

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