The Necessity of Camouflage (for guerrilla action)

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.

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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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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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Empire & The Grid

Yesterday, Matt asked a wonderful question about my theory of subjection in Empire and its relevance to Massumi’s use of “the grid” in the introduction to Parables For the Virtual.

Let me first preface this by saying that I believe Empire has already overcome the problem of the grid. It’s now just a problem for cultural studies and other disciplines that linger on old models of social analysis. In contrast to Empire, subjection in The Social State is absolutely indicative of a grid-type model of power, as are parts of the Modern State. ***Therefore: struggles against hierarchy and binary exclusion may benefit Empire rather than confront it.***

At the beginning Parables, Massumi claims that most cultural studies uses a social model premised on structural positions (“feminine,” “black,” etc). This is an application of an argument he inherits from Anti-Oedipus, where Deleuze and Guattari develop an elaborate critique of certain Fruedo-Lacanian psychoanalytic models that use a grid. They spare Lacan himself (Guattari was once the heir-apparent to Lacan’s ecole freudienne and remained under analysis even after the publication of AO), but are not so kind to his more dogmatic followers, such as Serge Leclaire.

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Empire and The Metropolis, long

Governance can continue long after the mythic State breaks its final bond (or pact) and the social factory produces its last subject. With the rise of The Social, the primacy of ‘states’ was already debatable – as long as state is a mere container for sovereignty. Yet with the death of The Social, the State becomes indistinguishable from Biopower and The Spectacle. This transformation often goes unacknowledged because the State is easily confused for its relics, as “Winter Palaces still exist but they have been relegated to assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes” (The Coming Insurrection). But to talk of the State today, one should speak of Empire, which governs the sprawling form of The Metropolis.

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Biopolitical Strike

Escaping the machines of subjection thus requires a form of strike. Not just a labor strike, but a strike against all the biopolitical investments that produce the contemporary subjects of The Metropolis.  This is a human strike that begins with a refusal, not a literal refusal to be human, but a refusal of the biopolitical subjection of the human. “They say it is love. We say it is unwaged work. They call it frigidity. We call it absenteeism” (“Against Housework”). Such a strike does not imply that there is a true subject just waiting to be revealed, however. Good humanism has not been suppressed by Empire. Social solidarity has not been demolished by The Metropolis. Virtuous subjects are not awaiting in exile. Subjection is merely the process by which the objects of Empire perform its violence, all under the pretense that they are really subjects.

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Vein 1: Violent machines of subjection

In the Archaic State, the frightening magician-king rules through a whole theater of cruelty. The magician-king knows that humans are more accustom to lying, forgetting, and all forms of cognitive dissonance. His cruelty is thus not indulgent, but following the notion that “if something is to stay in the memory it must be burned in: only that which never ceases to hurt stay in the memory” (On the Genealogy of Morality, Book II, §3). To make loyal subjects worth his trust, the magician-kind declares with his loud voice that rituals of enrollment must be established to bring each member’s organs into possession by the whole group. And at the center of this system of cruelty should be a terrible alphabet cut into the surface of bodies with a steady hand.

Incision appears necessary because bodies, in their infinite variation, resist assimilation. There is no universal measure for an eye to read on the natural body, only birthmarks, scars, or other accidental markings. For bodies to fit the binaries of social code, they have to be imposed; life does not split into two neatly-defined sides but “a million tiny sexes” (A Thousand Plateaus, 376). Thus the construction of terrible alphabet, word made flesh, written on bodies through scarification and tattooing. Bodies enter as elusive folds of flesh that lack unique identifying characteristics and leave as individuals, inscribed with their own unique semiotic signature, now worthy of alliance because they paid painful price of membership.

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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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Empire Is Circulation

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

Such exteriorization is a reversal of the interiorizing tendency of the Modern State, which operates through folding. Folding is the interiorization of the outside, or “inside as an operation of the outside,” that constitutes a doubling of the outside (Foucault, 99-100). A common example of interiorization is the architecture of a house, which erects a structure on a frame set against a landscape.

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Escape: A Talk

This following talk was presented last week at the 2012 North American Anarchist Studies Network conference. The Q/A period was perhaps more interesting than my talk. If you look around, you’ll find the videos.

Today, I will do three things:
1) Sketch a model of the State
2) Outline our terrain of struggle
and 3) Fill your arsenal with a few political weapons

This paper is a gloss of my current writing project, which is entitled Escape. Like many, I love stories of leaving it all behind, whether those are tales of fed-up employees quitting their jobs, restless romantics hitting the road, or the enraged laying waste to the civilization around them. Yet my thinking about escape originated from an academic interest that began after reading a curious comment early on in the popular book on “running to the hills,” James C Scott’s “The Art of Not Being Governed.”

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