Dissertation
Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy
By
2013
Dissertation Committee:
Philip Armstrong
Mathew Coleman
Copyright by
2013
Abstract
This work reimagines autonomy in the age of spatial enclosure. Rather than proposing a
new version of the escapist running to the hills, “Escape” aligns the desire for
disappearance, invisibility, and evasion with the contemporary politics of refusal, which
politics. Such escape promises to break life out of a stifling perpetual present.
The argument brings together culture, crisis, and conflict to outline the political potential
states that embody various aspects of conquest and contract: the Archaic State, the
Priestly State, the Modern State, and the Social State. The argument then looks to the
present, a time when the state exists in a permanent crisis provoked by global capitalist
forces. Politics today is controlled by the incorporeal power of Empire and its lived
reality, the Metropolis, which emerged as embodiments of this crisis and continue to
further deepen exploitation and alienation through the dual power of Biopower and the
Spectacle. Completing the argument, two examples are presented as crucial sites of
political conflict. Negative affects and the urban guerrilla dramatize the conflicts over life
cultural dimension of politics. The wide breadth of sources, which range from historical
documents on the origins of the police, feminist literature on the politics of emotion,
experimental punk film, and Deleuze and Guattari’s nomadology, thus emulates the
from many of the accounts of political change given by political theory or sociology,
“Escape” shows how the recent politics of autonomy is essential to understanding the
iii
Acknowledgments
Studies for the freedom to study, discuss, and teach material that shakes the foundation of
our contemporary world, and The Ohio State University Graduate School for the
opportunity to clear away the distractions for a year and focus on my dissertation. The
dissertation also benefited from the considerable feedback that I received at conferences;
in particular, I’d like to thank Jeff Bell, Ian Buchanan, and James Williams from Deleuze
Camp in New Orleans, Matt Applegate and his colleagues at Binghamton University,
Jason Read and others at Historical Materialism in Toronto, and the tough room at the
It would have been impossible to finish without the companionship of my writing partner,
Michael Murphy, whose dedication and kind words kept me thoughtfully on task. Early
feedback from writing groups, the first convened by Allison Fish, Elo-Hanna Seljamaa,
Kate Dean-Haidet, Wamae Muriuki, and Ilana Maymind and the second organized by
Tahseen Kazi, josh kurz, and Ricky Crano, was essential for getting the project off the
ground and sustaining me through its most difficult hours. I am forever indebted to the
many friends and colleagues who helped to hone the political message in digital and
analog, most notably Gabriel Piser, Fulvia Carnevale, Matt Applegate, josh kurz, Alex
iv
McDougal-Weber, Brett Zehner, Greta Stokes, Darwin Bond-Graham, Ricky Crano,
Jason Smith, Nick Crane, Josh, Eric Beck, Robert Hurley, Jason D, Kai Bosworth, Hilary
Malatino, and my many online accomplices. Marty Wood, Brennan Baker, Eric Beck,
and John Parman were gracious enough to help put the final touches on it.
I am incredibly grateful for my committee and their guidance. Franco Barchiesi left a
deep and fiery influence despite his short stead. In our markedly longer time together,
Mat Coleman has been the model of feverish curiosity matched by scholarly care. Philip
Armstrong has been far too generous with his intense patience, but it has shown me how
to strike smarter rather than quicker. And my deepest gratitude goes to Gene Holland,
whose generosity is exceeded only by the clarity of his thought. My thinking and writing
I would also like to thank my parents, Wayne and Camille, for their unwavering support,
which gave me the chance to dream. The dissertation would have been far less
provocative without the continuing friendship and intellectual incitements of Oded Nir,
whose advice is the quickest way to cut through bullshit. And lastly, I would have been
v
Vita
(Columbus, OH)
Publications
2013, “The Savage Fruit of Alienation.” Review of Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield
2012, “Giving Shape to Painful Things: An Interview with Claire Fontaine.” Radical
Fields of Study
Abstract.............................................................................................................................. ii
Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ iv
Vita .................................................................................................................................... vi
Prelude ............................................................................................................................... 1
Escape ........................................................................................................................ 35
vii
The Terrifying Magician King .................................................................................. 46
Insurgencies ............................................................................................................... 78
viii
Chapter 3 – Disemboweling the Metropolis ............................................................... 110
ix
And Then It Vanishes… (beyond appearances) ...................................................... 234
x
Prelude
Half a century ago, an anarchist scholar decided to write a heroic story of peasants. When
bodies started piling up in Vietnam, he was intrigued that people actually cared about
peasants for once. Even then, his task was not easy, given that peasants usually serve as
the stage upon which more dramatic disputes between nationalists and colonizers are
performed. However, in the archives he uncovered books and records that he wielded
The heroic peasants were a good start for the scholar. While national liberation struggles
claimed that the heart of the nation beat within the peasant, the scholar focused an even
more elusive class of people: hill peoples, those who buck authorities with a run to the
hills. Through diligent scholarship, he was able to bring together an impressive array of
theories and terms to describe why certain peoples are poor materials for state-making.
1
Stories serve as key touchstones for the critical project presented in this dissertation. I explain the use of
mythic, literary, and historic content first in the ‘alchemy of the example’ as elaborated in this prelude and
later in short excurses on the diagnostic function of culture, dramatization, and sensation.
1
What the scholar loved most about the hill people was their slash-and-burn culture.
Dismissed by others as hillbilly backwardness, he knew that their whole way of life was
an elaborate trick that they used to be left alone. But everything is different now, he
reluctantly admitted; it had all changed after World War II. Most States developed
technologies, both mechanical and human, that eliminated their ‘dark twins’ hiding in the
mountains. Space was spanned and the hill sanctuaries were found, he said. The few
peoples still in the hills were the last ones to escape; but even they are on the verge on
disappearing, he lamented.
A young college student was tired of the usual posturing of campus activism. The daily
barrage of manufactured urgency and its politics of guilt did not interest him. What he did
have was a plan to fight Reagan’s imperialist interventions in Latin America. So after
south to make a real contribution to ‘the people who could use help.’
But the student felt out of place after he got there and was nagged by the feeling that this
struggle was not his. The projects he worked on were practical, no doubt – computer
donations from the States were not hurting the people of El Salvador – but they were not
really helping that much either. When he looked for guidance, the El Salvadorians were
kind but blunt. Their war torn country did not need engineering solutions to political
shot back an incredulous glance. Look, you have mountains here. Just go to the
mountains. That’s what we do. Get some guns, go to the mountains, and wage a
revolution. The student responded thoughtfully, agreeing that, yes, there were mountains
in Seattle, but he was not sure about the rest of the suggestion. A few moments later, with
an embarrassed grin, he admitted that it simply did not correspond to his reality at all.
Though quite different, the two stories agree on a basic point: today, there is no sense in
running to the hills. The hills may have previously been a non-place, a u-topia, where a
people existed without a history. And while it is said that the history of people is the
history of class struggle, it would be at least as truthful to say that the history of the
peoples without history is the history of those who escape. But with the great latticework
of surveillance and control that now spans most of the developed world, the veil of spatial
isolation has been pierced. So today, the hills cannot help make class struggle or freedom
a reality.
Even with hill peoples now under State control, however, is it not obvious that escape
still does and always will exist? Of course it all depends on context – but there is a
political danger in the desire to always want more context. The greatest risk is that
providing context becomes a purely academic exercise that defers judgment or action.
desire for complexity (“well, it’s complicated…” or “let me complicate this a bit
3
first…”). Such an incessant demand for context is to be expected, however, as protesting
simplicity is a critical move in today’s dominant ideology.2 So I will begin there. Yet it is
the distinction between the valley and the hill or the town and the country, I shift to the
new paths of escape that have opened up under the towering figure of the Metropolis.
Because to escape today, one does not run to the hills but burrows deeper into the dark
Governance continues long after the mythic State breaks its final bond or pact and the
social factory produces its last subject. Within The Social, the primacy of ‘states’ was
already debatable – as long as the State is only understood as a mere container for
sovereignty. But everywhere The Social is in crisis, its demise is on the horizon, and with
the death of The Social, what is left of the State will become completely indistinguishable
from Biopower and The Spectacle.3 This transformation often goes unacknowledged
because the State is easily mistaken for its relics, as “Winter Palaces still exist but they
have been relegated to assaults by tourists rather than revolutionary hordes” (Invisible
Committee, The Coming Insurrection, 45). Instead of the State, one must talk today about
2
For more, see Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, 65-6.
3
On origins of The Social and the development of Biopower and The Spectacle as the two poles of
sovereignty deployed by the Social State, see Chapter 2.
4
To bring about its form of power, the Metropolis does not stand alone – historians point
out that in every political revival there are “always two runners, the state and the city”
(Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life, 511-512). Yet in the race between the
lumbering State and the speedy town, the State usually wins and subsequently makes the
city its subject. This is the case with capitalism and is evinced by the Modern State,
which transformed the greedy ambitions of merchants into the global system of
colonialism from which capitalism emerged. This is also true for the Metropolis. As the
global capitalist axiomatic subsumes the State, the locus of power has shifted from
politics to economics, and the Metropolis replaces the Social State. Governing the bloated
space of the Metropolis requires such a proliferation of authorities that the poles of
sovereignty have become diffuse. Such diffusion does not cause individual states to
disappear but to cede their power to Empire, which exercises its power in the Metropolis.
This is how Empire is lived on the ground. Together, Empire and the Metropolis exercise
a form of power altogether different than other States: the Modern State made power into
pliable or easy to control – territory and population become expressions of the health of
the sovereign; and the Social State developed The Social to hold the fragmented body of
the king together, extending sovereignty into all dimensions of modern life. Both of those
States transmuted the two poles of sovereignty that capture power – the Modern State
introduced The Police to take over the functions of conquest and established Publicity to
forge a new type of contract, and the Social State generalized The Police into Biopower
and expanded Publicity into The Spectacle. Everywhere The Social is in crisis and the
Metropolis has taken its place. And what has taken over Biopower and The Spectacle is
5
not a State but the subsumption of all states; it is Empire.
Customary definitions of Empire follow from Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s
reintroduction of the term in their 2000 book Empire, and usually focus on a polycentric
arrives as an entirely incorporeal entity that lacks its own body and is deprived of a
material existence to call its own. However devoid of existence, Empire persists as the
force behind a concept for organizing and directing the capitalist world market. As a
result, Empire operates through management and circulation, but it is not extensive with
its product: the Metropolis. The material reality of contemporary power, which is the
Metropolis is not an urban phenomena – it replaces the city after the abolition of the
distinction between town and country. The Metropolis subsumes both The Social and the
Social State, which does not do away with nation-states but annexes them as parts in
communication with one another, the Metropolis connects through inclusive disjunction,
which does not require its pieces to operate through a shared logic but unfolds their
interiors through exposure. This harsh opening-up process makes the Metropolis a hostile
Most attempts to describe Empire have failed. Those failures usually result from the
6
seductive search for ‘subjects’ behind actions.4 Kafka laughter’s has only become louder
as his mockery of those who hunt for a singular authority of justice turns to recent
attempts to place the evils of Empire at the feet of a clear culprit (Kafka, “Before the
Law”; Kafka, The Castle). Those lost souls will never find their peace, for Empire is the
final step in the full transfiguration of the sovereign head of state into a series of
congress of states, the IMF, the World Bank, ‘polycentric sovereignty,’ or grassroots
power. “Empire does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an environment
that is hostile to us” (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §66). Furthermore, Empire is not
a new positivity – it is not a new world power, an ideological innovation, or a fresh set of
laws. At most, Empire is not even an event but the devices used to prevent the event. And
thus at its limit, Empire is nothing but the summation of all the reactionary forces of the
present; it is everything that prevents the future from breaking with the present.5
because they are incorporeal, which are causes that produce intensive transformations,
incorporeal transformations. The traces of existence are the daily reminder that intensive
4
See Nietzsche’s withering critique of the linguistic prejudice for active subjects in Genealogy of Morality,
Essay 1, §13
5
This reactionary force is temporal and not spatial. As already emphasized, biopower enhances the power
of its subject but through a process of limiting their aleatory (or kairotic) temporality, which is the basis of
revolutionary innovation, creativity, and difference.
6
These transformations are said to ‘insist,’ ‘subsist,’ or ‘persist’ but only exist in their effects. See Deleuze,
Logic of Sense, 52-54. A helpful demonstration in the field of cultural studies is Lash, Intensive Culture:
Social Theory, Religion, and Contemporary Capitalism.
7
abstractions have a real existence through their extension as concrete deployments of an
abstract diagram. This extension, the Metropolis, extends through physical space with a
recklessness Empire is careful to avoid. Moreover, the Metropolis provides the territorial
horizon on which the forces of Empire operate and the world that the citizens of Empire
inhabit. Empire itself does not exist, for Empire is circulation and Empire is management.
This calls for an important caveat: challenging Empire over its extension, whether
showing how it causes short-circuits rather than the smooth flows or revealing its
penchant for unjust incarceration and stratification, only indirectly influences the
intensity of Empire’s abstraction, which does not exist but subsists and insists. Better
circulation and good management would only trade one actualization of Empire for
another one. Even though the forces of Empire cannot go unchallenged, it is only when
circulation and management are drained of their obviousness that Empire loses its
unthinkable, irrelevant or, at the very least, something to be played with “just as children
play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free
them from it for good” (Agamben, State of Exception, 64). For in the end, the products of
The predecessor to the Metropolis is the city. Without industrialism, which is also to say
modernism, two types of cities punctuate the landscape: the central place city and the
gateway city. Central place cities gather in and build up. These cities are hierarchical
8
centers that seize outlaying (usually agricultural) surplus that is stacked on a central point
after heterogeneous material is sorted and consolidated into homogenous layers that form
a towering stratified block. Alternately, gateway cities extend out in overlapping patches.
These cities are knots in trading networks that form into nodes, dense nests of
interlocking local articulations between foreign flows that acquire a certain stability
(DeLanda, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, 37-9; 59-67). The Metropolis is not
simply stratified like the sandstone giant nor networked horizontally like the granite
node. Rather, the Metropolis is a space of capture, a ground prepared by Empire to act
out control.
But the Metropolis is not just a big city, it is an exteriority (Lefebvre, The Urban
Revolution, 50-59). This follows from the original manifestation of the Metropolis, the
Greek mother city and the whole network of colony-cities it dominated (Agamben,
longer an arrangement of cities but a collection of all the relays in the circuit of global
even a homogeneous culture. Rather, the Metropolis is a pure exteriority that abolishes
the line between the town and the country. For a time, cities were defined in opposition to
their outlying lands although the urban elite was dependent on the import of resources
only available from an autonomous rural peasantry. But that one-way flow of dependency
has transformed into a single continuous system (23-44). With farmers text-messaging at
the wheel of their GPS-controlled tractors and squatters living off guerrilla gardens
nestled in the heart of downtown, the breakdown of the barrier between the two has
9
begun. What is left, if anything, is a zig-zag without a clear inside or outside, leaving
behind a delirious mix of high-rises and slums (Negri, “On Rem Koolhaas,” 48). The
Metropolis therefore performs the same essential function of cities: polarization, as in the
escape routes become less apparent, for distance-demolishing technologies such as ultra-
fast transit, satellite imaging, and communication networks make previously remote
hideouts easily accessible to the Metropolis. Therefore, escape will not be found while
eking out an existence in whatever is left of the countryside but in the tactical distance
The Metropolis could also be described as the space of ‘There Is No Outside.’ But this
phrase mystifies too much, perhaps, as the Metropolis always come up short. More
accurately then, it is everywhere where there is no longer a visible Outside, for the
State’s fear of outsiders, the Metropolis embraces a basic maxim of The Spectacle:
“Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear” (Debord, Society of the
Spectacle, §12). By integrating The Outside rather than defeating it, whole worlds
otherwise recognized on their own terms are made into parts of a single system.7
Madness, delinquency, criminality, and perversion – all of which were once causes for
concern and therefore excluded or ‘cured’ – are more than allowed to exist among us,
they are things that everyone is now capable of. With spaces of enclosure turned inside-
7
The Metropolis has no center, rather it is composed of isometric forms that extrinsically coexist in
consistency, yet this consistency is not the trans-consistency of homogeneity or even heterogeneity but an
“exo-consistency,” which gains its own expression through the interactions of the aggregate (Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 434-437).
10
out and made into different neighborhoods of a single exurb, the Metropolis appears
seems to happen. There are three concrete conclusions that can be drawn from this: first,
the Outside still exists, but it exists either in what is indiscernible or on the inside;
second, the giant exteriority of the Metropolis is too saturated to manage all at once, so
in selection and efficiency; and third, escaping the Metropolis does not occur by dropping
out but by ‘dropping in,’ a clandestine form of sabotage that uses density to take cover
while simultaneously undermining the reliability of the herd and utilizes clutter to throw
The Metropolis is not a uniform sheet but a mesh, or better yet, a sieve or a net full of
holes. Yet those holes are by design, as Empire needs a torrent and not a trickle, although
the maximum porosity of open space is not as stable or consistent as that provided by
enclosure. Even as rogue traders leak money through unauthorized transactions, Empire
expands with every dollar invested. Even when undocumented cooks work in the kitchen,
Biopower grows with every diner through the door. And even though laptops ‘fall off the
truck,’ The Spectacle shines brighter with every facebook post. In the ruins of the good
society, the Metropolis stitches a fabric of unlikely connections that holds everyone
together while The Social collapses around us. And although illegalism and subversion
have long helped people get by in spaces of exclusion, the Metropolis introduces bad
behavior into every form of life. And for that, we should hate it, as the Metropolis
registers these protests against the indignity of The Social only so they can be turned
11
against us.
Even the desire to destroy what destroys you, which would call for the abolition of the
Metropolis, would be futile if the end of the Metropolis translated into a return to the
town or the country. That is because, echoing contemporary communists, the Metropolis
ambivalent form that is both the cause of exploitation and the means for revolution (Hardt
and Negri, Commonwealth, 250). The factory did not contain a revolutionary kernel
in ‘work will set you free,’ but because it defined the terrain of struggle. And the
revolutionary elements of the proletariat did not fight for only time, pay, and conditions,
but for everything that exceeded and promised to end those things – dignity, freedom, and
ultimately their own self-abolition as a class. Only when we understand this ambivalence
can we truly appreciate liberated women’s demand to both hold a job and end capitalism,
or the solidarity between a maquiladora worker’s struggle for dignity on the job and the
secret desire to see her factory burn. The Metropolis therefore sets the stage for the most
important social and political dramas of our time. And while it paves the path for
exploitation, it simultaneously opens up lines of flight, many of which hold the potential
The Metropolis is causing the slow death of The Social. Contemporary communists
Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt welcome this change. The Metropolis, they say, is a
diagram for organizing encounters. And if this is the case, it taps into a long history of
12
theory – Baruch Spinoza and the encounter, Georg Simmel and the city, Walter Benjamin
and the flânuer, the Situationists and the dérive. Following the Situationists with a twist
of their own, the communists détourn the phrase ‘beneath the paving stones, the beach,’
instead declaring ‘beneath the Metropolis, the Common.’ It is not worth quibbling with
the intellectual history they draw on – I also argue that the body of the earth is stratified
by The Metropolis, define its operations as a diagram, and describe its process of
connection as an encounter – yet it is worth disagreeing with the celebratory thread sewn
In the piece “The Common in Communism,” Hardt makes his strongest presentation of
the Common. The import of his argument is that capitalism has entered a phase where its
capitalism does, where direct management was needed for laying out capital,
subsistence. The hegemonic form of contemporary production, Hardt claims, now relies
on the feudal action of collecting rent whereby a landowner collects a portion of the self-
organized activity of the landless peasant class as payment; he calls this hegemonic form
common land, which organized production in feudalism, Hardt argues that production is
now organized by a new Common formed from the substance of human communication,
cooperation, and knowledge. In this process, he argues that capital is now external to the
More pessimistic minds argue that the Metropolis is a desert that separates us from the
Common.8 They do not disagree with Hardt and Negri on the point that the Metropolis is
the dominant form of social organization. Moreover, they even agree with the claim that
“the Metropolis is to the multitude what the factory was to the industrial working class”
(Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 250). Where they disagree with Hardt and Negri is on
the rapport between Metropolis and the Common. These pessimists argue that Metropolis
is a form of separation, that it divides and prevents access to a Common in the same way
that money and other abstractions prevent unmediated access to everyday life. The
Metropolis is not a place of taxed plentitude but a hostile environment that slowly
poisons and destroys its residents. For them, the Common is not constituted through the
Metropolis but against it (Plan B Bureau, 20 Theses on the Subversion of the Metropolis,
Theses 6-8; Theses 19-20). This echoes Deleuze and Guattari’s claim that there is only
one class, the bourgeoisie, and that political division is found between the servants and
the saboteurs of the machine (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 255). Thus the
insurrectionists do not turn away from the Metropolis but view it as a site for seizing
weapons.
In sum, two positions hold that the Metropolis stages a conflict over a new earth, the
8
Pessimists include recent ‘insurrectionary’ authors popular within anarchist, communist, and ultra-left
milieus, such as Tiqqun, The Invisible Committee, and Plan B Bureau.
14
Common. One holds that the Metropolis is “the space of the common,” with “people
living together, sharing resources, communication, [and] exchanging goods and ideas”
(Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 250). The other has nothing but disdain for the
while some communists say that the Metropolis should be embraced as a progressive
force to find the Common, the most intense commonality is found in shared struggle.
Before a deeper inquiry into the struggle against Empire can commence, however, it is
necessary to prepare the reader on a few issues of method unique to this investigation:
first, a challenge to the rather stale concepts in the study of social movements; and
Lenin’s Shadow
Radical politics still lives under the shadow of Lenin – and to its detriment. Lenin’s
legacy stands first and foremost for the primacy of organization in political strategy. And
in spite of the recent turn away from Marxism in state policy, after the fall of the Soviet
bloc and in China’s pro-capitalist Dengist reforms, this legacy hangs over social
feats that radicals today can only dream about, yet the relevance of Lenin to today’s
Lenin’s historic triumph took place in the age of massification. The forces of the day
were two great hulking masses, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, that confronted each
15
other on the field of battle. The Leninist strategy was to forge the iron discipline of a
single party to seize the organs of the State through mass mobilization. But that was
before the intensifications in ideology in the aftermath of World War II that made Lenin’s
made it unthinkable to simply gain control over the army and police to establish
Yet even today, a hegemonic sociology of social movements casts Lenin’s long shadow
over politics. Most generally, this sociology looks to theories of organization for the key
to unlock a singular path to political success. Its sociological method evaluates the
potential for political success in three categories, all leftovers from Lenin: structure,
cohesion, and the definition of objectives. When those categories are operationalized,
and types of mobilizations. Specifically, the sociological approach seeks to build political
Under Empire, the world has exploded into trillions of molecular parts barely responsible
to a whole, which is to say that it is increasingly rare for historic upheavals to either start
from the top or be occur in a single epic event. Of course it would be a misunderstanding
of terms to say that large-scale transformations no longer occur, for they surely do – just
16
look to recent internet consumer revolts, the revolutions of the Arab Spring, or the sudden
shift in American public discourse provoked by Occupy Wall Street. But today, the
effects of world historical events are not the result of a group of a few committed
individuals, as the tired Margaret Mead maxim would have it. Rather, historical changes
arise out of dense webs of a networked society that relies on a wide variety of inputs.
The concrete effects of the hegemonic sociology of social movements on politics are
heavy approaches have seen mixed results, at best. The American anti-war movement,
both in its big tent liberal (United For Peace and Justice) and post-Leninist varieties (The
Socialist Organization), serves as the paradigmatic example: the February 15, 2003
global protest against the Iraq War was, by the numbers, the largest protest in history:
organizers turned out more than fifteen million people, and even got them all to echo a
common refrain. But even with a cohesive organizational structure, a unitary message,
and a truly mass mobilization, the Bush Administration embarked on its invasion just the
same.
Alternately, simply dispersing power should not be confused for a radical shift away from
the politics of the past. Even though the counter-cultural revolution was molecular,
driven digital society that promotes integration and differentiation of even the most
unwanted subjects, has been part of the overall shift of the leading capitalist economies
17
toward strategies of flexible accumulation that began in the 1970s. This regime of
that used the architecture of the factory as a diagram for all sectors of society. But
from the self-contained walls of the factory to the open system of the network. The
effects have been drastic. Rather than a small set of institutions determining the direction
of the whole in the last instance (‘as goes the military, so goes the nation’), the whole of
the social body has been mobilized, and is now governed according to whatever patterns
it, governance has shifted from producing good citizens to controlling virtuous and un-
virtuous subjects alike by patterning their space of potential and disciplining their
progressives, and far right-wingers alike. The primary tactic of decentralists is to slow
These roadblocks are potentially valuable for temporarily constructing autonomous zones
for use as both defensive rest stops and opaque spaces of attack. However, when slowing
down becomes the sole weapon against a system built on speed and intensity,
roadblocks without strategic value become routinely maintained out of habit, which
18
transforms them into anchors. For example, melancholic calls for ‘re-localization’ usually
could never trust food made by foreigners’); and while many re-localized communities
may provide a future for their residents, if each is less diverse than a random sample of
Wal-Mart shoppers, how do they constitute a response to capitalism for the other seven
The fatal flaw of the hegemonic sociology of social movements, at its most basic level, is
not that it is for or against organization as such. The approach’s major failing is that
although organizational issues are hardly the only blockage to political problems, it
presents logistical wars of resource deployment and rhetoric as the single corrective. In
its most disabling form, this Field of Dreams guarantee – ‘if you build it, they will come’
– remains indifferent to the actually existing forces that constitute any given political
context. Additionally, the processes they advocate usually mirror the familiar faces of
sovereignty: conquest or contract. This is manifest by Leninists who read State and
Revolution not as Lenin’s “concrete analysis of the concrete situation” in Russia but a
universal formula for revolution. Perhaps it is more common to see anarchist direct-
democracy advocates argue that the process of building consensus will inevitably end in a
mutually beneficial solution for all, or to see even more moderate organization
enthusiasts suggest that establishing process is the prior condition to any possible action.
Anyone who has been to an anarchist meeting knows how often process creates internal
19
‘consensus-based’ conversations that are dominated by those with the most time on their
Ultimately, radical politics will only step outside the shadow of Lenin when the question
itself would be a reactionary fixation on negating organization; nor does it even suggest
structure,’ ‘subjectivism and objectivism,’ ‘the individual and society’) with more
enslavement to the hoary category of ‘the will,’ whether it be the will of the militant9 or
the vague sense of ‘the will of the people’ that rubber-stamps liberal democratic
deterministic models, and a major casualty would be the certainty of revolution, for even
if capitalism may produce its own “gravediggers,” no one model can definitely deliver us
its cold dead corpse (Marx and Engels, The Communist Manifesto, 51). Such a
perspective has already been adopted by some of the French Ultra-Left who argue that
“whoever believes that 1848, 1917, 1968… were compelled to end up as they ended up,
should be requested to prophesy the future — for once. No one had foreseen May ‘68.
Those who explain that its failure was inevitable only knew this afterwards. Determinism
would gain credibility if it gave us useful forecasts” (Dauvé and Nesic, “To Work or Not
9
Such as in Žižek’s fusion of the Terror and the Act or Rousseau’s general will, whose best Marxian
variant is seen in Gramsci’s “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.”
20
to Work?,” 17). Yet such audacity is not a new revisionist spin – it comes from Marx
himself, who wrote that the rise of political economy, which is elevated to the status of
science by the bourgeoisie, is not answered with a new political economy but a critique
of political economy. But critique is not enough by itself and it must be accompanied by
a politics. This dissertation suggests that escape is the first step to actualizing such a
politics.
One fear of writing an academic book today is that it is like whispering to yourself in the
woods. Such concern arrives with the advent of the internet, which was followed by the
rise of a digital culture overburdened by too much information rather than too little.
Academic writing risks adding to an already towering stack of books that few have the
time to read or at least not very closely. The related risk is the ease of getting lost in the
heavens or trapped underground, which is to say that our contributions have long peddled
Idealism, which sometimes parades as rationalism, assumes that ideas are what drive
change. This approach suggests impossible feats that even those who propose them never
hope to achieve while still providing some sense of satisfaction in their failure. Most of
what passes as democracy promotion or democracy theory follows this idealist trajectory.
The idea of democracy is posed as a regulative ideal or some perfect principle that we
should aspire to even if its full potential can never be fully realized. Or alternatively, in
its more cynical variety, it poses as ‘the least worst of nothing but bad options.’
21
The drawback of such idealist approaches is that they rarely ever touch ground.
Movement for these stargazers happens through an ascent and conversion; with their
necks craned toward the sky, they ponder the details of a far-off universe purified of
‘thinkability’ machines. The idealists maintain, like in the case of Columbus’s Egg where
“it’s easy once you’ve thought of it,” that ‘possibility’ is opened up in a single stroke of
genius that lays the groundwork for the dull, obvious realizations that mirror the initial
idea (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206; Foucault, Surveiller et Punir, 208; reference
done all the heavy lifting, and particular cases are brought in to simply confirm general
suspicions.
But while the idealists have their heads in the heavens, others are stuck plumbing the
depths. These miners look for a submerged structure locked beneath the surface. The
appeal of such a system is undeniable: there is no mightier feeling than the certainty that
comes with knowing a truth hidden from everyone else, making them dupes. Behind the
quest for concealed truths lies the problem of esoteric knowledge, where any new
revelation could replace, invert, or cancel out every truth that came before it. These are
10
As the story goes, Christopher Columbus was dining with Spanish nobles when one spoke to him, saying
“Your lordship, if you had not discovered the New World, certainly a Spaniard would have completed the
journey, for we are a land full of learned men with skills in navigation and mapmaking.” Columbus did not
respond directly but instead asked for an egg to be brought to the table, and he issued a challenge: “My
lords, I wager that none of you can stand this egg on its end without help or assistance.” Try as they could,
none of the noblemen were able. Once it was clear that he had outsmarted his critics, Columbus took the
egg and gently cracked one end of the egg, flattening it enough to rest calmly on the table. The lesson was
immediately apparent: once a creative act has been demonstrated, everyone knows how to do it.
22
the perfect conditions for producing mining moles that slowly go blind because they
cannot stop digging deeper and never know when to surface. And even if they do return
to the surface, these approaches rarely equip anyone for decisive action.
Marx’s menagerie includes such a miner: Hamlet’s mole of a father, a ghost who
reappears when the time is right. For Marx, revolution goes underground from time to
time, only to reemerge wearing the clothes of the old yet ready to create a new world.
And there is no better way to turn old moles blind than with hermeneutics and
deconstruction. These scholarly methods largely maintain a fealty to their ascetic origins,
slavishly testing the limits of presence as if responding to a challenge to see how long
they can tunnel through their underground system of references. But even worse than its
a very specific political function” because “it tries to pass off anything that violently
opposes Empire as barbaric, it deems mystical anyone who takes his own presence to self
as a source of energy for his revolt, and makes anyone who follows the vitality of thought
with a gesture, a fascist” (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, 147). These scholarly
techniques are valuable only if revolutionaries make quick journeys into the depths to
find lost objects and immediately plug back into circuits of struggle.
Fortunately, some contemporary Marxists have suggested that the burrowing mole no
longer adequately describes the cycles of revolution and propose in its place the
23
undulating coils of a snake.11 Revolution in this view always appears on the surface as a
continuous network of control. The leading forms of empiricism appear to follow this
configurations of the world ‘as they actually exist.’ One version is the Chicago School of
Anthropology, which identifies all of the different ways that people inhabit the world.
But as a rule, they are resistant to theory not derived from the concrete case, claiming that
‘if we have not observed humans already doing it, it cannot exist.’ Though this
stubbornness provides excellent weapons in their battle against the just-so stories used by
forecloses the creativity of the future. 12 Because strict empiricists limit their thinking to
already-observed phenomenon, they have a narrow basis from which to imagine the
world becoming otherwise. We thus need a much more elaborate speculative engine than
the one provided by these empiricists if academics are to help create a future open to
radical change.
To radicalize empiricism, one can follow Gilles Deleuze, who suggests that works of
science fiction” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xx). The key to this radical
11
The most notable being Deleuze, “Postscript on Societies of Control,” and Hardt and Negri, Empire.
12
Perhaps the most relevant here is Chicago School-trained anthropologist David Graeber, whose economic
anthropology of debt and money, Debt: The First 5,000 Years, outlines an anthropological theory of money
that undermines key neo-classical assumptions. Due to his unwillingness to theoretically extrapolate much
beyond the anthropological evidence, Nietzsche’s account of debt is an early casualty. Moreover, Graeber’s
account of communism is entirely prefigured by already existing communal societies.
24
consciousness found in exposés on madmen and eccentrics. Rather, this philosophical
empiricism posits an impersonal world of “a draft, a wind, a day, a time of day, a stream,
a place, a battle, an illness” that is not immediately perceived, with subjects always
coming late to the scene, and is therefore experienced and experimented with a-
subjectively (Deleuze, Negotiations, 141). Like good detectives, writers should then
develop theories to address these immediate situations, and those theories should evolve
with the situation. If constructed well, these theories can open a window of perception for
apprehending elements of experience otherwise indiscernible to the subject and forge the
tools necessary to assemble the elements into something useful. And when successful,
those assemblages should gain consistency, yet not in order to produce universal
knowledge from simple logical propositions but in writing apocalyptic science fiction of
the given world. That is because fictionalizing the present, according to Nietzsche, acts
“counter to our time and thereby acting on our time and, let us hope, for the benefit of a
time to come” (Untimely Meditations, 60). Ultimately, such an approach seeks out the
been hidden, but to tap into wells of intensity that are never fully represented. And by
accessing that intensity, we gain the power to be affected by the world, and in turn, to
affect it.
I make use of this radical empiricism with my own method: the alchemy of the example.
For too long there has been a ‘gospel choir of the example.’ Outside of ‘amen’ and a few
‘halleluiahs,’ examples have rarely added much. In contrast, alchemy brings the example
back into the creative process. To transform the example into the raw material for
25
alchemy’s art of mastering fire, however, examples must be released from their usual role
in empiricism. There are two roles in particular that the example has traditionally filled:
first, examples are often abstracted from to identify positivities that confirm the validity
of general rules and are therefore treated as particular cases; and second, examples are
also chosen to find historical positivities used to determine the historical actuality of an
event. Formal logic seeks out clear examples, and historical surveys hunt down timely
ones. For alchemy, though, the example is not selected for its positivity or historicity but
for its singularity. The complexity of detail is what makes an example good for alchemy,
and the best examples turn out to be equal participants in the creation of theory, which
means they are not just part of the supporting cast but instead change the trajectory of the
There are three tasks that guide forging theories with examples:
The first task is to restore internal contestation. For alchemy, examples have proper
names: Foucault’s Biopower, the Archaic State, the Metropolis. But these examples are
not exemplary, as if lying behind each proper name there is a subject that is a good guy
who should be imitated or an evil villain who needs to be avoided. Rather, I follow
military strategists and meteorologists, who give every operation and hurricane a proper
name. Those names do not describe subjects but a-subjective individuations that are
birthed from an ecology of forces, like Nietzsche’s lightning bolt, emerging from charged
fields of intensity often unseen. Examples are therefore the effect of a given force-field of
speed and intensities without being equivalent to it. Alchemy is then the working out of
26
an example that taps into the movement and power of a milieu. To put it another way:
problem posed by its milieu. Yet regardless of how the organism responds, it does not
solve once and for all the problem of the milieu. Similarly, examples present singularities
that neither empty the field of intensity they emerge from, nor prevent alternative
“counter-effectuations of the event” whereby the example is abstracted from its place of
The second task is to open up paths of becoming – becoming as the production of a new
world and not the re-presentation of same world all over again. This process should not
away-from movement that has multiple potential trajectories without a set endpoint.13
and states as products of that becoming. One effect of this change in perspective is a
dynamic image of time where all of the past fuses together into a single block that casts a
shadow over the present, and that present is seen in a moment and only later felt again
through the weight of history. Even more importantly, however, the future appears as a
13
The usual structuralist measurement of difference begins with an immobile field in which a subject in
becoming is nothing but the transition between two points; normal becomes deviant, straight becomes
queer, pure becomes miscegenated. Such a characterization of change is an error of thought that follows
from a method that identifies difference through isolating it as a variable, which first subtracts movement
from the field of action, as if the world began with primal and differentiated stillness. This philosophical
problematic is at least as old as its formulation in “Zeno’s Arrow,” which the contemporary notion of
becoming was constructed to address. Within the philosophy of science, Henri Bergson’s Creative
Evolution remains the crucial reference. For those interested in its operationalization: in Parables for the
Virtual, Brian Massumi outlines fifteen consequences to introducing Bergsonian becoming to the field of
cultural studies (6-13).
27
source of plentitude that opens into many different worlds. Within this alchemy,
examples offer a strategy for negotiating the complex structure of time but also for
reintroducing a future foreclosed by the present. When examples are made through
fabulation, which brings incompatible worlds into existence together within a single
universe, they tap into the power of becoming. This dissertation undertakes such
fabulation, as I weave together examples from literature, politics, history, culture, and
mythology to operationalize the maxim that ‘fiction destroys reality,’ both inside and
The third task is draw on the persuasive force of concepts. Even if the brightest post-
structuralist stars of textualism are waning, text is still king. One reason is that a
requires texts, no matter how broadly they are defined, as objects of analysis. This partly
results from theory’s early home in literary theory, whose stark author/commentator
divide has relegated many scholars to the role of mere commentators separated from a
world authored by others. Moreover, scholars in other fields, in particular the social
sciences, build arguments from the raw materials of the peer-reviewed work of their
author or text. In contrast, my approach builds constellations out of concepts that have
how sensations become art, which occurs when they acquire enough consistency to break
14
As Ronald Bogue notes, fabulation is the fabrication of “larger-than-life giants” and “hallucinatory
visions of future collectives” (Deleuzian Fabulation and the Scars of History, 19). Yet such work is not
“merely a form of experimental modernism,” whose engagement with history would be “solely disruptive,”
but legends that undue memories of past and present for the sake of a people to come (30).
28
out of their immediate context of production. Ideas may be the product of a given author
or the result of work within a particular historical context, but when those ideas gain
enough consistency to meet, interact with, and contribute to the reinvention of other
ideas, they have become concepts. A conceptual approach must therefore provide
concepts enough room to move and breathe without destroying the consistency that
animates them.
The recent scholarly turn to theories of affect explores how concepts develop and
circulate this animating force. Affect describes both (i) the power of bodies to combine
and (ii) the felt effects of power in the body. Bodies, the content and expression of
affecting and being affected, combine in a very concrete sense, as with nourishment or
poison, to produce sensations of joy or sadness. Affect is caught like one catches a cold,
through contagion. Moreover, it resists quantification. Yet most people think of affect
through a categorical grid, which merely points to the effects of affection as they are fit
pissed. So any measurement of qualified affect comes out dull and ignorant of its cause.
In contrast, alchemy uses examples the way one would use art – to construct mobile
armies of sensation and not as devices for measuring the world. This follows from the
notion that any body or thing can envelop affective potential: a sculpture, a sonnet, or a
salsa all hold and release energy through folding and unfolding force much like a spring.
15
There are two risks that accompany this task: the actualized affect can be too fast and fly off into
irrelevance, or too slow and get weighed down by the status quo.
29
The Ambivalence of Escape
Escape is not an innocent concept. While I present escape as especially relevant in the
current moment, it is neither entirely new nor always good. In fact, theories of escape
have motivated settler colonialism, American exceptionalism, and far-right populism. Yet
dreams of freedom have also enabled global liberation struggles, the political elements of
dropout culture, and revolutionary projects. Escape, as I use it in this dissertation, is not a
goal but the process by which societies change. Contrary to orthodox Marxists, who
follows from Deleuze and Guattari’s contention that societies are characterized by how
they manage their paths of escape. Yet shifting the analysis to escape does not reveal a
single path to liberation. Serfs escaped the hierarchical system of feudalism only to be
thrown into the factory. Early European nation-states escaped to the New World only to
expand the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and deepen all of the other horrors of the age of
processes that point toward different social forms, some better and some worse than the
one we live in now. Yet it is my contention that certain forms of escape point to forms of
internal struggle that defy the caged politics of the State and thus suggest new zones of
contestation that contain the best potential for revolution within the Metropolis.
Although escape is not new, it is ‘now,’ as theories of right, entitlement, and the social
good that pervade contemporary political rhetoric are slowly being replaced through the
prevalence of escape whereby deviance and perversions that were previously unthinkable
are no longer prohibited but sold at a profit. The question raised by such general
permissiveness is whether the ubiquity of escape speaks to its growing potential or its
irrelevance. To clarify escape today, I therefore distinguish it from other forms of escape.
contemporary escape. Most acutely, escape is faced with the challenge of the Metropolis,
disjunction. Within this system of inclusion, difference is not a threat but the means by
which Empire maintains its hold on the perpetual present. Empire cannot be escaped by
simply celebrating the differences that grow out of life in the Metropolis – they must be
made political, so that life is just as fast but more rhythmic; strategy is just as collective
but more selective; and sensation is just as intense but more consistent. Evading the
disjunction: the forced choice between two options. Such a forced choice is not the
enemy of difference, however, as it does not reduce the world to a simple binary –
exclusive escape opens the door to a new world of difference where there’s no going
back.
31
The concept of escape is presented here in three parts. The first part provides a cultural
description of the State. The second part outlines why the present is in crisis. And the
In the first part, I follow Nietzsche, who argues that philosophers can act as cultural
physicians, diagnosticians who separate out vague groupings of symptoms into discrete,
identifiable illnesses. This is the diagnostic function of culture, which uses myth,
literature, film, and other creative products to identify general cultural conditions. To
undertake this diagnosis, I build on Georges Dumezil’s work on the mythological origins
of the two heads of Indo-European sovereignty, which roughly match the contemporary
notions of Conquest and Contract. Then this cultural description is extended to various
types of States, each having a signature that can be derived from the rhythm, speed, and
intensity of the interaction between the two poles of sovereignty. Isolating those
signatures, I identify five types: the Archaic State, the Priestly State, the Modern State,
In the second part, I identify what constitutes the Metropolis. This operation begins with
the institutions that organize metropolitan life, Biopower and the Spectacle, which are
intensifications of The Police and Publicity that develop out of conquest and contract.
These two poles evolve into four key veins: violent machines of subjection, the
compulsory visibility. Next, I outline the mediums through which they work, and find
32
that in spite of the bleakness of life in the Metropolis, or perhaps because of it, these
In the third part, I pinpoint two conflicts that come from a dramatization of the desire to
escape the Metropolis: negative affect and guerrilla warfare. Escape dramatizes the forces
of life and strategy, which transforms affect into negative emotions and anonymity into a
political struggle. Expanding the radical potential of each, I theorize how political
emotions and tactical withdrawal must be adapted for the Metropolis. In the case of
affect, I demonstrate how groups have turned alienation and depression into weapons
against their cause. And in the case of the guerrilla, I suggest ways that guerrilla
After its passage through culture, crisis, and conflict, a new concept of escape surfaces. It
no longer drips with the cold sweat of those who fear the tyrannies of State power or the
terror of appearing before the law. This escape burns with the hot fire of revolt sparked
by secret complicities that smolder in the streets of the Metropolis. It is an escape that
does not find respite in distance but a movement of separation, whose intensive power
brings the power of the outside to bear against Empire. While this escape may
communicate certain facts, it is delivered through the force of the sensations, which turns
the alienating power of the Metropolis against its source. In the final instance, however,
best escape disappears as soon as it arrives, dissolving into every feeling, image, and
33
PART 1 – CULTURE
More State history is lived in the single day of a culture than what is entombed in a whole
decade of its laws. By extension, studying the State should begin with an examination of
its rituals and not its ledgers. Perhaps the best place to start is with George Dumézil’s
work Mitra-Varuna. Part philology and part folklore, Dumézil compares Indo-European
myths of authority in order to synthesize them into a single general theory of sovereignty.
Mythical sovereignty, he claims, is constituted by two heads: one a mighty conqueror and
the other a righteous priest. And while these two “saviors of the State” are embodied in
literal heads of State, they are realized more regularly in many cultural practices
cultural expressions of sovereignty are often omitted in studies of the State, which causes
them to miss the essentially cultural character of power. This is why legal or economic
descriptions of the State are not only deficient, as they lack the essential element of
culture, but also why they assume the State to be the ultimate agent of politics. Cultural
descriptions of the State, in contrast, not only identify what escapes cultural codes but
34
Escape
In addition to the two poles of sovereignty, a cultural analysis of the State considers a
third term: escape. This term traces back to some of the oldest texts on sovereignty, as
sovereign. But this outside raises suspicion in the State, as any power not under its
control is considered a threat, so the sovereign curses anyone who appears to be a force
of the outside – stranger, foreigner, barbarian, wildman, monster, savage! Yet the
State’s jealousy is well founded – indeed, those who escape the State embody the
obviousness of a politics without sovereignty, as their life is exterior to and distinct from
the two heads of the State (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 424-425). And
that is why they are denounced so harshly: in evading the poles of the State, these people
do not lose anything politically but in fact prove that politics emerges on its own terms
and without the commanding authority of sovereignty. The consequence of their existence
is a cultural reversal of perspective – the politics of the State is not the originator of
politics but a mere enclosure or appropriation of an already existing politics that has
captured these outsiders and put them to work for the State.
A Typology of State-forms
Cultural analysis is crucial for objecting to the virgin birth of politics in the State, which
that before this particular State, there was nothing. For the State is not a divine miracle
but a cold monster that draws its power from forms of life captured between its two
poles. A cultural analysis of those poles thus reveals what “animates the State with a
35
curious rhythm,” but also analytically separates the power of the State from the
underlying sources of power it commands but does not create (Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, 424). Furthermore, there are a few general types that can be
identified through an analysis of its poles. And with this analysis, a typology of State
forms can be derived that categorizes them according to the function of each of the two
The State-forms of this typology are: the authoritarian Archaic State that rules through
conquest, the liberal Priestly State that rules through contract, the mixed Modern State
that rules through The Police and Publicity, and the differently mixed Social State that
36
Chapter 1 – The Archaic State & The Priestly State
They were on the run. As they made their hurried escape through the fields, neither of
them wanted to look back. Everyone traded tales about life in the mountains but they
were the ones daring enough to seek it out. On more than one occasion during their
getaway, fatigue threatened to consume them. And even though they were cloaked in the
dark cover of night, they thought for sure that they would be seen. But dread provided
more than enough fuel for their flight. Both of them had heard frightening stories about
the catchers – cruel, bloodthirsty men said to taunt and toy with runaways just for fun.
And so they amputated the burn in their legs and the ache in their bellies with the searing
Then, right as they caught of a glimpse of a campfire in the hills, their exodus came to an
abrupt halt. The frightening figure of their captor stood out against the pale, moonlit
clearing. The opaline glow of his toothy grin alone made them freeze, stupefied. But right
above his devilish smirk were his sickening eyes, or really, where they should been – for
the one that was still there smoldered like fire while the other was simply a dark crater
pouring out venom. This was no usual catcher but an emissary from the sovereign
37
himself, for his clothing was too ostentatious and his weaponry too ornate, which made
his presence that much more awesome. As the terror took hold, they dropped to their
knees. Whether it was thoughtful or just reflex, they timidly demonstrated subservience in
And then he awoke. (Where was the other?) Alone and feverish, he heard the slow
advance of an overseer. Knowing that it meant he would soon be set to work in the
throbbing heat, no matter his delirious state, he lay there for just a moment longer,
At their most peaceful, all States dreams of capture. Yet one State-form is nothing but
unbridled conquest: the Archaic State. In a recent work, The Art of Not Being Governed,
anarchist academic James C Scott describes the advent of such a State. Setting the scene,
Scott details the alluvial plains of Southeast Asia where he says that the simplest states
formed in fertile valleys. The key to Scott’s account is his political economy of their
emergence, which emphasizes the mass cultivation of rice. Further dramatizing the
centrality of rice for these states, Scott calls them ‘padi states.’ Among the many aspects
of the padi state particular to Southeast Asia, there are two more general characteristics of
padi states that are crystallized in the Archaic State: first, a heavy reliance on slave labor,
which is secured through raiding and trading to produce the rice; and second, an inability
Southeast Asia, it becomes clear that the basic process of the Archaic State is not
38
cultivation but conquest.
A Burmese proverb, “Yes, a soil, but no people. A soil without people is but a
wilderness,” exemplifies the first relevant characteristic of the padi state (Scott, Art of
Not Being Governed, 70). Dispelling a common misunderstanding, this adage clarifies
that manpower is the basic element of padi state political order, and not arable land. Of
course land must be conquered and controlled, but labor-power is the source of power for
two essential functions for the padi state: wealth, as the fruit of laborer’s work is taken as
tribute, and security, as the workers are made to defend the resource intensive
infrastructure needed for rice cultivation. And for this reason, the foremost indicator of a
padi state’s power is its ability to capture and maintain slaves, which eventually leads to
slave majorities or super-majorities in many padi states, as well as to slavery being such a
common commodity that it serves as the medium of exchange. Yet this labor-power does
not come voluntarily from workers hired or invited but is bled from slaves captured
through war or trading and therefore requires a constant application of force, else the
source of its power disappears back into the hills. State conquest thus avoids salt-the-
earth wars of annihilation because humans are the State’s most precious resource and
their lives should be preserved not wasted. But while labor-power fuels padi states, its
power grows and recedes with the forces of capture and escape and not innovations in
production. Because the padi state’s hunger for slaves is never satisfied, wars are not rare
bloody events locked away deep in the annals of the State but myriad moments in a
illustrated by way of a light bulb16 (Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 59). Consider two
attributes of its glow: first, how light dims and fuzzes as it travels farther from its source;
and second, that there is no clear edge to the light, but rather a continuous gradient that
fades to black. The State space of the padi state, which Scott describes in terms of
friction, has a similar shape and decay because it thrives in mild, unbroken terrain and
suffers at the hands of more severe conditions (43-50). Usually arising in valleys, padi
states only control land that is easily traversed, either by oxcart or fast waterways, where
the ‘light’ of influence can spread without interruption. Physical obstacles, such as sharp
changes in elevation or the difficult terrain of swamps and thick vegetation, slow down or
even obstruct sovereign influence and thus act as a fetter to its political control. This is
why the State-space of padi states is often described by how quickly distance is spanned,
measurement, ten feet or ten miles (48). Yet distance not only impedes the flow of goods
but also drives an alternating cycle of military occupation and retreat, such as the
seasonal friction that comes with monsoon season or the permanent friction of mountains
that harbor escaped slaves. In Burma, for instance, military campaigns have been fought
from November to February only for the kingdom to shrink to a quarter or an eighth of its
16
Scott borrows the analogy of the light bulb from Benedict Anderson who uses it describe the concept of
power in Javanese culture, which he says has four essential characteristics: first, power exists
independently of its possible users and thus does not require belief; second, power is homogeneous and of
uniform type, emerging from the same source, and is identical regardless of user; third, power exists as a
fixed and limited quantity, so a rise in power in one place reduces it in another; and fourth, power is not a
question of legitimacy but instead establishes what is good or evil. For more, see Anderson, “The Idea of
Power in Javanese Culture.”
40
size as roads became impassable in May through October (61). Trying to work against
this alternating cycle, colonial states often fight protracted wars with distance-
demolishing technologies but usually see their gains washed away during the wet season
nonetheless (62). So when padi states are locked in battle against the earth, its enemies
develop strategies that take advantage of frictions that keep them at a distance from State
rule.
In summary, Scott’s political economy of the padi state suggests that the Archaic State
exists through herculean might: either the Archaic State keeps humanity in chains in a
feat of strength or they break free. But even in this battle of forces, there are many who
escape: there are people who establish rhythms that work against the routine ebb and flow
of State governance while others adopt elusive ways of life that make them too costly for
the State to pursue. Yet the permanence of their escape is established less by evasion than
by distance, as the light bulb analogy demonstrates, which uses spatial separation from
Even when acknowledging that resistance to the Archaic State utilizes the force of the
outside, a theory of escape already challenges the orthodox Marxist theory of the State.
As that Marxism proposes, societies are the result of the type of production undertaken in
a given society, and political economy is the only proper method for determining how
those societies emerge and transform. Scott’s work typifies this Marxism – though his
draws a picture of peasants painted by the strokes of state production, which therefore
defines both padi states and their escapees according to comparable modes of production
that merely contrast. The centrality of production is clear, as Scott dedicates whole
agriculture techniques. He finds that these forms of production are what allow them to
maintain a lifestyle that makes capture difficult and undesirable. However, when
considered beyond Scott’s limitations, escape demonstrates that production need not be
the centerpiece of a way of life. In fact, the people who make evasion their form of life
the need for analyzing modes of production. This is because the power that emerges from
outside the State is not organized in terms of production; if anything, the people who
exist exterior to the State, such as hunter-gatherers, anticipate every mode of production
and ward off all of them (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 428-429). While
these societies, people find that the plentitude of the earth provides more than enough
productive capacity to sustain life. Circulation and not production defines their existence,
and production emerges only as the kernel of State thought and is actively suppressed.
When the State does arrive, it does not appear in parts through a slow advance in
192). Even the State cannot eliminate the anticipation and prevention of production. It
instead channels and mobilizes this anti-production to ward off all modes of production
but one: its own. Therefore, the State does not appear after an evolutionary leap that
42
builds upon prior modes of production; rather, it arrives the moment that production is
made a mode (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 429). It can then be said that
all societies are organized by anti-production while only States are organized according
to production.
Hill people’s farming techniques offer a glimpse into the operations of anti-production.
as it gives the appearance of reckless and uncontrolled techniques that jeopardize the
careful and stable wet-rice cultivation undertaken by the State. As a type of anti-
production, slash-and-burn agriculture illustrates how hill life sustains itself and prevents
State production by simultaneously warding off State formation and providing means of
subsistence. Yet such a way of life comes at a cost – instead of mutilating bodies to put
them to work like the State, societies of plentitude mark bodies to make the means of life
circulate. Tattoos, scarification, and other forms of permanent marking on the body are
not simply for display but provoke circulation; they are the physical evidence of an
fruit of the earth that they directly appropriated, which in turn requires them to forge
relations with other groups to acquire subsistence. Such coding bans direct appropriation
of the means of life that one helped secure – ’you, as marked by this particular family
line, can eat all except what your family has caught’ – in order to perpetuate alliances
with other lines of filiation consummated through trade, marriage, and other means
(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 148-149). This social technology does not reside
exclusively within non-State society, however, for the State recognizes the power of this
43
terrible alphabet and thus appropriates coding to transform circulation into a mode of
production; it extends the torturous marking to slaves, who bear marks not only from
whipping but sometimes branding, only to spare the rod for some workers, whose bodies
are mutilated enough by drudgery, while submitting all to the commands of the despot,
whose terrifying voice moves the wound inward to create a psychic pain inside the body
Plateaus, 425-426).17 State production therefore changes the function of code from a
direct code branded into the flesh of the body to the overcode of the written decree that
introduces the voice of the despot in his absence. This eliminates the group ritual of
inscription, where the whole community would establish the gaze of authority by
festively watching a tattooing, and instead marshals a legion of bureaucrats that interpret
the absent voice of the despot under the threat of death. Overcoding is not the simple
process of replacing old taboos with new sovereign decrees, then, but a two step
operation: first, it captures groups that operate according to differing codes and puts their
lines of filiation and affiliation under a common denominator; and second, it releases
most of their codes to reorient group obligations upward in infinite debt to the sovereign.
Furthermore, state overcoding also differs in kind from coding, as it transects codes by
makes codes polyvocal and therefore interpretable, which enables expression to grow
17
As Dumézil notes, the predicates for sovereigns and their actions are not normative judgments about their
likability but expressions of a particular mode of sovereignty. Authoritarian sovereigns are thus ‘terrible,’
‘horrible,’ ‘merciless’ destroyers while liberal sovereigns are ‘kind,’ ‘benevolent,’ ‘loving’ creators. An
editorial tone is therefore unavoidable when describing aspects of the Archaic State as ‘terrible’ and ‘cruel’
or the Priestly State as ‘just’ and ‘forgiving’ but the underlying intention is to single out particular modes of
violence.
44
Plateaus, 62). Overcoding still stands on the ground created by non-State peoples,
however, because the codes not eliminated by overcoding are deterritorialized and mostly
Yet the process of overcoding is never total and thus gives way to escape. The emperor
does not directly appropriate flows but captures them at a distance. Due to this spatial
separation, the Archaic State frees a large quantity of flows that can be turned back
the overcoding of the archaic State itself makes possible and gives rise to new
flows that escape from it. The State does not create large-scale works without a
flow of independent labor escaping its bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in
metallurgy). It does not create the monetary form of the tax without flows of
money escaping, and nourishing or bringing into being other powers (notably in
commerce and banking). And above all, it does not create a system of public
beginning to pass beyond its grasp; this private property does not itself issue from
the archaic system but is constituted on the margins, all the more necessary and
45
So while the ‘trinity formula’ of labor, commodities, and land – or really, profit, tax, and
rent – constitutes a three-headed apparatus of capture for the State, it cannot account for
all of the escaping flows. A whole array of flows leak from overcoding: some evade
capture like independent labor, escaped money, and private appropriation; others are
mutant flows of free activity, alternative exchange, and strange territories; while still
The Archaic State utilizes the first pole of sovereignty, the pole of conquest. Scott leaves
little room for remarks on the magic of the State in his political economy and thus
describes the operations of the Archaic State but does not depict the sovereign himself.
The comparative mythology of Dumézil, however, outlines the mythic origins of this
pole, tracing it back to the figure of the magician-king. And in an interesting contrast
with Scott’s account of escape, which relies on spatial separation, Dumézil argues that
Indo-European mythology provides a clear entry point for considering the role of magic
in sovereign conquest. Romulus, for example, twice risks defeat after founding Rome. To
ensure success, Romulus invokes Jupiter, and after each victory, he founds a cult and
erects temple in thanks to Jupiter (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 53-54). Romulus does not
invoke Mars, as would a true warrior-chief. Rather, by invoking Jupiter, the god of State,
regnum by arms, and Jupiter the great magician that performs “a sovereign conjuring
46
trick” of breaking the morale of the enemy (55). Combing these two specifications of
Jupiter, we know that the Archaic State captures by arms and by magic.
War is never directly undertaken by the Archaic State. This why the magician-king’s
greatest illusion is war, as it is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick. For in the
world beyond the Archaic State, war is an anti-State force that dissolves the king’s great
Violence, 274-277). And even when war is appropriated by the State, it is used to shatter
the power of its enemy. This is why the original warrior is an outsider whose knows
nothing about ruling the State, only how to destroy it. Yet war is only an effect of a way
of life built around dispersion, not conflict, whose centrifugal logic maintains autonomy
existence, as it emerges only when they come in contact with a State or the city (Deleuze
and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 417). The consequence is that States have no
warriors of their own and the Archaic State must capture them from the outside, which it
Another name for the magician-kings who seize their enemy from the outside is ‘The
Binder.’ And it is binding that specifies the connection between their use of arms and
magic. War may be chaotic, but sovereign wars of conquest are not without rules; and the
specific set of obligations use by the sovereign in war is the nexum of bonds and debts
parties, the bond is a knot tied with force. The power of bonds then comes from both
47
arms and magic, and the substance of those bonds is a shifting economy of the repayment
for hostility, the cost of a life, or any other means to bind and subjugate (98; 99). The
bond is cast by dazzling sovereigns – for instance, the one-eyed gods who raise their
spear, not to fight, but to paralyze the enemy with fright (129; 139-40; 143). The resulting
stupor continues far past the battle as these sovereign uses their terrifying magic to
convert the loser’s fright into a bond that divides the victorious from the conquered (155).
It is through the sting of defeat that magician-kings marshal their forces by capturing the
vanquished, appropriating their power from afar, and commanding them with terrifying
magic.
The Archaic Sovereign thus summons its own war machine by mutilating outsiders,
ridding them of any memory of life beyond the State (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 424-425). The mutilations of State violence do not come from war but rather as
the price people must pay to work. And before it sends these appropriated subjects off to
war, the State first inflicts them with a wound that never heals but continues to afflict
them until they learn to relish its hot pain as a warm reminder of the suffering, sacrifice,
the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite
of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically
incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable
48
The violence of the Archaic State therefore takes on a unique significance; it appears as
‘the magic of birth;’ a miracle, the pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified separation
from everything that came before it (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 424-
426). “This is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological,” as the State’s
The terrifying power of the magician-king is strong but blunt, which allows many codes
to escape his great net. In particular, two types of flows escape the State while it is
freeing codes in order to overcode them. First, there are the scraps of decoded flows that
do not fit and are thus left behind. These relatively decoded leftovers are the cracks and
fissures that constitute the gaps between the abstract categories of the State, such as the
separation between the general rules of the Law and the singularity of the concrete
particular case. Consider a spatial example found in the vague terrain between
overlapping two Archaic States. These spaces of dual sovereignty encourage contestation
and thus subject those who reside there to multiple tributary exactions or raids to punish
disloyalty. And while this can sometimes advantage the State, these ambiguities usually
work against it. Many of the peoples living at the periphery of two States use the relative
autonomy to “strategically manipulate the situation” by playing the two States against
each other, such as people in Cambodia, tributary to Siam and Vietnam in the nineteenth
century (Scott, Art of Not Being Governed, 60-1). As this example illustrates, the area at
an arms length from the State is then less a space of lawlessness than a zone of
indistinction where loosened codes are only partially overcoded but also multiplied. Such
49
ambiguity diffuses the Archaic State conquest by spreading the State’s thick
overdetermined power out into a thin underdetermined application of codes. But even as
strategies of confusion are multiplied within this zone of indistinction, the Archaic State
makes up for the infrequency of power by amplifying its capriciousness and brutality.
The second flow to escape overcoding is a line of flight. These flows escape by virtue of
their speed, as they are too swift for the State to snatch immediately after decoding. In
contrast to the indistinct scraps mentioned above, these flows are not accidental or
supplemental. Rather, this escape is the exodus of heretics who pervert the magic of the
Archaic State for their own purposes, leading to millennial revolts that are as regular to
the feudal world as strikes are to industrial capitalism (Bloch, French Rural History,
170). The seeds of these uprisings are usually planted in secret, hidden from public view.
Yet the principles and prophecies behind these movements are hardly difficult to find; the
only necessity is to hide them from the jealous eyes of the magician-king. So after
enough consistency to transform conspiracy into public revolt. The Burmese monk Sayan
surveying peasant living conditions. Through the powerful images of the Hindu bird
galon, Sayan promised a utopia that would break the bond of the British and the taxes.
His followers bore the image of galons as part of their divine mission, believing their
tattoos and amulets would protect them from British bullets (Aung-Thwin, The Return of
50
This is why, on the occasion that the magician-king casts his gaze beyond the court, his
first reaction is disgust, for all he sees are the barbarian virtues of those who speak a
different tongue and act with unpalatable violence. If threatened, the Archaic State
responds with its primary function, conquest, to recapture the lost codes and make them
once again subservient. Yet that disgust sometimes provokes something else altogether: a
extending tolerance and civility, which are foreign to a sovereign who knows indifference
Ultimately, we can say that the horrifying sovereign of the Archaic State does not sit on a
throne of death but resides over the flesh of the living. His tools of governance are cruelty
and magic; one he steals from the system of anti-production and the other is of his own
invention. Together, he deploys these forces to reverse the centripetal power of the
circulatory system of pain to concentrate its cruelty in a unified mode of production built
on the backs of slaves. Furthermore, the magician-king boasts about the effects of his
trickery, taking immense pride in the forces he accumulates in his own name, neglecting
to admit that his only talent is capturing the power of others. Though other State-forms
appear more restrained, all share in its thirst for conquest. And while playing down its
cruelty, the Modern State and the Social do not hide this authoritarian force but simply
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The Priestly State of Contract
A rowdy crowd swarmed the rustic path. From their hidden perch, the outsiders watched
the scene unfold. At the front was a procession made up of an official-looking man
flanked by two others, one in bright gaudy attire and the other much more plainly and
walking with a slight limp. The whole trail was soon packed with the jubilant crowd, with
some clambering up trees, others dangling their feed in the pond, and still others
elbowing their way to the front. Concern spread among the group of outsiders on the
rocks as they exchanged worried glances, but after someone shot an especially icy glance
at the others, they kept watch from their hideout. The noise below grew to an unbearable
The eerie silence was broken when the limping man winced, which caused the
ostentatious man to launch a volley of screeching words in a foreign tongue. The crowd
jeered loudly in approval. The assault continued, pausing only when he reached over to
the official-looking man to snatch a sword and taunt the victim with it. Matching the
rising crescendo of his rapt audience, the man raised the sword in a characteristically
lurid gesture, drew blood from his prey with a light strike to the face, and brought the
weapon around to his side as if preparing to deliver a lethal blow. But then the official
slowly raised an arm, which was missing a hand, and interrupted the scene with a few
curt words.
The crowd, somehow expecting the official’s intervention but still displeased that the
52
ritual was so perfunctory, let out of a few collective bellows before swiftly leaving. Soon
A jurist-priest presides over the birth of the State, in addition to the magician-king. Key
myths depict a one-armed man as the arbiter of law and right who establishes faith in the
State through the execution of contracts. This faith begins with contracts of exchange
between the domains of the human and the divine. And the consistency that the jurist-
priest brings to these divine acts is subsequently transformed into the force of law
(Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 62). The jurist-priest thus wields a power unlike the terrifying
violence of the magician-king. Rather, the priest inspires a faith that is not mystical or
gives it form, imposes laws, disciplines its elements, and subordinates its effects to
political ends (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 425). To clarify: while the
conquering magician-king of the Archaic State casts magic that binds from a distance, the
jurist-priest of the Priestly State establishes faith that appropriates and internalizes forces.
Magic terrorizes its target into catatonia for easy capture. Faith, in contrast, captures
through conversion: by convincing the convert that they had been missing something that
Jurist-priests appear as frugal, forgiving men who offer up unparalleled times of peace
and prosperity in good faith. This faith is not a prerequisite to social life in general, as
many obligations do not require good faith. Contracts drawn up in public and before
53
witnesses, for instance, do not require good faith because it is the honor of the contractors
involved that ensures that they are not violated (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 56). Following
the creed “I give to you, give to me!,” jurist-priests extend a special type of offer that is
sealed with no guarantee except good faith (62). Consequently, it is on the basis of belief
and piety that the jurist-priest promises unbroken peace through shared contract, even to
those who raid his lands (51). Piety is only one possible approach to the law. The
magician-king of conquest also employs contracts, but they are not presented in good
faith; rather, he treats contracts as part of his trickery. Like many things, such as his
propensity to invent and abandon gods simply to ambush opponents, the magician-king
uses contracts only when they suit him. However, the jurist-priest’s authority is
The appearance of the jurist-priest as a just and measured arbiter obscures the full picture
thought to follow a particular order: first, equal parties take part in an exchange; and
second, if one of the parties fails to uphold its end of the bargain, they cower as a subject
making a plea to the authority of the jurist-priest. As one Vedic myth goes: if a man who
is unable to pay his debts and is set to be beaten falls in supplication to the feet of the
jurist-king, then it is forbidden to beat the man that day (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 95).
This image, while popular, is a ploy. It is a convenient subterfuge authored by the jurist-
priest to make him appear as a peacemaker who either dispenses forgiveness and grace,
or follows blindly infallible rules (59). Behind the apparent naturalness of exchange lies
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the original act of sovereign appropriation, the jurist-priest’s capture of external forces,
which is later projected backward as the committing of faith. This is why Marx criticizes
the false neutrality of contracts, highlighting that the sovereign is always a vanishing
establish itself instead as the sole politics, the sole universality, the sole limit and sole
bond” (1844 Manuscripts, Third Manuscript, 3). So the jurist-priest’s formula for
exchange, “I give to you, give to me!,” is in fact a contraction of the expression “I give
that you may give,” which itself alludes to the divine ‘exchange’ of sacrifice that the
jurist-priest first exacts from his subjects before extending faith (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna,
62). Even Hobbes, the great apologist for the State, notes that the obligation to follow any
particular law first requires absolute obedience to the sovereign. Consider an Icelandic
tale: the gods, acting on prophecies that the wolf Fenrir will soon wreak havoc on them,
decide to bind him before he is fully-grown. First through flattery and then through
temptation, they try to get Fenrir to play with a special thread that is really a leash Odhinn
had the Black Elves forge for him. Anticipating their deception but unwilling to lose face,
Fenrir demands that a god “place his hand in my mouth as a pledge that there will be no
trickery!” Tyr, understanding in advance that he will lose his hand, pledges it because he
knows that this sacrifice will transform the lie into law through exchange (141-142). And
that is how the jurist-priest became the one-armed sovereign. War follows the same
general formula set out in this myth – the jurist-priest is willing to directly intervene as a
combatant, in contrast to the magician-king who casts his magic at a distance, because he
is to commit priestly sacrifice to become the jurist who sets out the rules of war. The
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implication is clear: the jurist-priest’s pact does not neutralize the violence of conquest
objectified in the bond; rather, he regularizes its force by transforming finite debts
secured in conquest into limitless obligations of faith that underwrite the force of law.
As a lawmaker, the jurist-priest of the Priestly State is the great inventor of responsibility,
and with it, he creates a different kind of history. The timeless tales of the Archaic State
tell of might and sovereign glory but their details fade with time. The Priestly State,
whose exploits are far less exciting and thus lost that much quicker, memorializes itself
by attacking the faculty of forgetfulness itself. Humans are forgetful animals with a
powerful ability to clear out old experiences which enables them to better live in the
presence and happiness of the world (Nietzsche, On The Genealogy of Morality, B2§1,
35-36). The jurist-priest’s first great attack on this strength begins with the invention of
is unable to collect a debt. In return for nothing, the creditor is then granted the pleasure
of inflicting pain on his indigent debtor (B2§4, 39-40). And this is how history is made
for those too insignificant to have ballads written about them. Through a “fearful
mnemotechnics,” the historical record is made through a painful marking on the flesh that
is strong enough to overcome forgetting. And it is within this economy of pain and
responsibilities and a memory of the painful cost of forgetting them (B2§3, 37-39).
Consciousness, then, is culture’s imprint on the body, which endows humans with the
think that punishment is the cause of guilt but for most of history, punishment has not
been used to improve criminals but to tame them (B2§15, 55-56). Punishment in fact
either destroys or toughens a criminal rather than instilling guilt (B2§14, 54-55). The
origin of guilt is found instead in the repressive conditions of the pact, which suppresses
the instincts through the gnawing habits of responsibility. Unable to discharge its
instincts, humanity retreats to the consciousness that lies deep within the self, which turns
consciousness into the directed force that becomes the soul (B2§16, 56-58; B2§17, 58-
59). With the process complete, the jurist-priest thus creates a brilliant new way to
capture subjects. The Priestly State does not need the costly product of conquest,
generalized slavery, which treats humans as cogs in a megamachine – the Priestly State
can subject humans to machines as ‘free’ workers (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 457). These subjects are not treated as machines; rather, they are responsible
for themselves, for as Foucault says, the soul becomes the prison of the body, as the soul
acts as both the medium and object for the jurist-priest (Deleuze and Guattari, A
The actions of the jurist-priest are no less violent than those of his horrible cousin, even if
simplest justification for violence. What the jurist-priest calls peace is merely organized
violence – still war, but restricted by a sovereign prohibition on cruel acts on violence.
Such violence is not the result of bonds, which are contracts offered the enemies of the
Archaic State in compensation for utter defeat, as exploitative tricks that demand that the
57
vanquish continue furnishing the State with the spoils of war long after the battle
concludes. But those who flee the cruelty of the magician-king do not free themselves
from that violence but instead trade their role as the target of State violence for
unbinding, the jurist-priest replaces the bond with a pact, as seen in the myth of the
flamen-dialis who sets free any man bound in chains that takes refuge with him. And
these pacts sanction the ongoing violence among the followers of the Priestly State
four neighbors’ instituted by the Qin State (778-207 BCE). Following the suggestion of
Legalist Shang Yang (390-338 BCE), society was broken into five-person groups (wu-
jen) of military officers, peasant, families, merchants, bureaucrats, etc. When a single
member of the cell was found guilty of crime, all five were punished (Hulsewé, Remnants
of Ch’in Law, 145-6). The key innovation of the law was its reflexive extension of
management that requires people to police each other (Dean and Massumi, First and Last
Emperors, 25).
The role of organized violence in the Priestly State deserves a strong clarification. The
Priestly State does not pacify its subjects in the same way that the Archaic State does, by
stunning its population through repression in order to set them to work in the fields while
still in a stupor. The Priestly State organizes violence through its subjects by means of
18
See the previous footnote, which outlines how sovereign predicates are not normative but descriptive.
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discipline and logistics, which forms a general system of flows. For instance, all property
in the Archaic State is public; officials and feudal lords are simply stewards of the
magician-king’s wealth, and peasants do not own the common lands but live on it
through usufruct. The public under the Priestly State, in contrast, is not coextensive with
everything under the purview of the sovereign but with the legal structure constructed by
the sovereign as the shared means of private appropriation (Deleuze and Guattari, A
Thousand Plateaus, 451). The key distinction between the two forms of the public lies in
the role of code for each of the two sovereigns. For the magician-king, overcoding
produces a surplus value of code that he expends through the terror of his voice while
conjoin flows. Because of the different uses of code, the regime of signs between these
two State forms also differ – The Archaic State utilizes the imperial signifier whose force
is unitary and metaphysical, treating its subjects like cogs in a bio-social megamachine,
while the Priestly State engages in the processes of subjectification, which deliver the
paradoxical ‘voluntary servitude’ of the pact (451). In summary, the three essential
process of organization under the Priestly State are subjectification, appropriation, and
resonance.
The pacts of the Priestly State form an intraconsistency that enables resonance. This
ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological – not external terms, which would
connect to form the transconsistency of the network (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
by cutting away and isolating given elements. Yet the isolating function of appropriation
does not eliminate elements’ relations to other elements, rather, it reconstitutes those
relations as exterior to but still mediated by the State, which allows them to be controlled,
inhibited, and slowed down through indirect control (432; 433). For example, the
sovereign does not ask for this particular object, that territory, or a unique type of activity
in tribute – the jurist-priest demands land, labor, and commodities in general, hence the
invention of money, which, contrary to the tall tales of neo-classical economists, was not
invented as a solution to the problem of the mutual coincidence of needs. Rather, money
is a medium for direct comparison that is imposed on subjects by sovereigns for the
purpose of monopolistic appropriation (444; Graeber, Debt). And it is through this act of
comparison that the jurist-priest’s function as divine medium between the sacred and the
profane proves pivotal – by placing himself as both fully human but fully sacred, the just-
priest overwrites the circulatory patchwork to the divine, which requires them to pass
through him as holy arbiter of all value on earth (433). The sovereign attempts to seize
the whole trinity with such a scared declaration: territory is treated as directly comparable
land, which produces differential rent and the landowner; activity is treated as directly
comparable work, which produces profit and the capitalist; and objects are treated as
commodities, which produces currency and bankers (444). Yet the jurist-priest does not
consume all land, work, and commodities but creates a circuit of power whereby they
circulate through him; this form of circulation is called resonance, and the State thus
becomes a resonance chamber. Resonance can thus be succinctly described as the process
of isolating local connections, making them comparable through global equivalence, only
60
to set them free once again in orbit around a State-established power center. To be clear:
these power centers are not the intersection where many points of order mesh together but
a point on the horizon that stands behind all the other points of order. The consequence is
that the Priestly State grows through mutation, in contrast to the Archaic State’s pursuit
of consistency. This is the power of conjunction – while the Archaic State overcodes
flows to chop them into manageable segments, the Priestly State demands freedom for
Jurist-priests may appear to be the more reasonable of the two twins of sovereignty but
authority-less chiefs that ceremonially imitate the jurist-priest but escape the juridical
pact and the power that comes with it. Ethnographic evidence draws a clear picture of a
titular chief that is charged with the tasks of arbitration, distribution, and oration
(Clastres, Society Against the State, 29). These chiefs do not execute their duties by
power or right. In arbitration, the titular chief is not afforded any force in settling disputes
and therefore seeks to reconcile through prestige, fairness, and rhetoric alone. And
because the chief lacks the coercive power of jurist-priests, their motivation to resolve
disputes is the status and respect bestowed on them by their peers, which diminishes
while conflicts simmer (30). The second task, distribution, is the converse of the Archaic
bond – the chief is obligated to provide a near constant flow of gifts to his people. The
people carry such a strong right to continuously loot their chief that they are never afraid
to throw out their current leader to find one less stingy or more resourceful. This is why
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anthropologists joke that “you can always tell the chief because he has the fewest
possession and wears the shabbiest ornaments” (30). Lastly, a chief is valued for his
words. The chief must rely on his words in maintaining peace while generously
distributing possession, but also in proving his fitness as a leader in general. The role of
speech may vary, as some groups demand a discourse before sunset, while for others it is
customary to demand a speech but to ignore his words completely – yet all understand
speech to be an capacity that the chief must master before he is afforded even a modicum
An empty throne much like that of the titular king has been worshipped time and again.
Consider the English Dissenters that sprouted in the interregnum following the First
English Civil War. A strange cast of pacifists, egalitarians, rural communists, pantheists,
unitarians, and mystics, they created a world where the only crown was that of God
Himself – wrested from human hands, left open for the second coming. While these
groups broke their earthly bonds through an appeal to various versions of the
transcendent, their radical impulse flows from the same river as all utopian projects. In
Protestant upheaval. Present but largely unacknowledged during the civil rights
tool during the anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s. From then on, consensus-based
the centerpiece of anti-globalization actions in the 1990s, and entered the popular
62
consciousness through Occupy’s famous ‘General Assembly.’ In its progression from a
device for striking down the false idols of the State to a weapon against all forms of
unbinding power it borrows from the arsenal of the jurist-priest, as its in-built anti-
authoritarianism grants free association that prevents governance from progressing until
the body receives consent from all of its members. And possibly more important for the
current era, consensus provides an avenue for people in a society trained to endlessly
opine without consequence to have their opinions actually take effect (Graeber, Direct
Action, 318-320).
But as scholars attentive to the religious roots of consensus have identified, consensus is
not an anti-sovereign force, as consent derives its power from a silent solidarity with the
the pact, is faith. Quakers see the ritual of consensus as an expression of divine will and
only hesitantly agree with outsiders who suggest that it is a political tool. Furthermore,
without the weight of divine will, which creates a pact of infinite debt between those
usually lack the shared investments required to forge consensus while smaller groups
altruism (Wolff, In Defense of Anarchism, 22-27). Some anarchists insist that consensus
brings out the best dimensions of human nature and therefore view the struggle to
overcome the problems of consensus as a political aim unto itself, as if every consensus
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brought humanity itself to rationality and altruism. But the existential liberalism of
organized violence of the State but simply imitates it. Perhaps it is only Nietzsche’s
forgetful man that can subvert the jurist-priest. But disagreement, cynicism, or malice is
not needed to undermine the pact, though they often do. And without jurist-priest’s offer
of faith or the rod, the consensual pact barely holds more sway than a bad habit or a
passing interest.
In short, the liberal preference for the contract over conquest only replaces faith for the
rod without modifying the outcome. Due to the ease with which the State enrolls subjects
through faith, other State-forms offer further elaborations on the contract. The Modern
nationalize faith, making it a capacity available to everyone and thus compulsory for all
subjects of the State. The Social State emphasizes the other side of faith, spreading a
universal indebtedness that the State uses to take ownership for and manipulate the
radicalization of faith is the hidden power of the contract, which extends through two
complementary forces: the violence of equivalence and the shared means of private
appropriation. These forces invalidate theories of consent based on the illusions of non-
coercion and by consequence, the fiction of the consenting individual. The actions of the
faithful are not driven by private motivations codified in contract but through violence
and exploitation, which is sponsored by the State. Even in its crudest form, the Priestly
State is able to portray its actions as kind and benevolent, but the intensification of these
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actions in Publicity and the Spectacle further venerate the State by making contracts
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Chapter 2 – The Modern State & The Social State
The machine emitted strange buzzing, whirring, and clicking sounds. The noises unsettled
casual observers, but to the technician, it made beautiful music. She had listened to its
movements so many times that she did not have to look at the monitor to pick out the slow
set of clicks that marked the beginning of each cycle. Tck... Tck... Tck... Tck...
The machines had been a triumph over the archaic technology that came before it. It took
the dreams of stargazers and a few steady hands to crank out the first prototypes. Even
the wildly imperfect geometry of the early models still hypnotized onlookers.
She was charged with maintaining a machine from a newer line. The introduction of this
version of the machines had ushered in a new era. In her land, authorities were crushed
under the feet of rebelling peasants. As nobles bickered with the monarchy, a new class
claiming to “represent the people” had seized power. But instead of quelling the waters,
wars became more bloody. And there are still dissident factions trying to destroy the
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It is her task to keep the machine running. The rules are clear. Polarize the field.
Alternate poles. Keep everything in orbit. She had been trained in basic geometric
correction, which usually entailed resetting the aperture but sometimes required
redacting elements. While no one told her how to control for the creeping tide of noise,
she had come up with some makeshift bypasses. But if a long-term solution was eluding
The political power of sovereignty goes through cycles. Imperial hymns sing of terrible
kings’ conquests as well as the reigns of the great kings that follow. But let there be no
mistake, terrible kings are only as stupid, brutish, ineffective, or disliked as good kings
are inept, violent, and unpopular. That is because those labels merely indicate which of
the two poles of sovereignty each ruler personifies. Horrible sovereigns are terrorizing
magician-kings, and benevolent ones are jurist-priests. Much as the diplomat gets his way
by switching between the carrot and the stick, sovereignty alternates between the two
poles to maximize power. “Thus two kings in succession, by different methods, the one
by war, the other by peace, aggrandized the state. Romulus reigned thirty-seven years,
Numa forty-three: the state was both strong and well versed in the arts of war and peace”
(Livy, The History of Rome, Book 1, 27). But the opposite is also true. A-cephalous
societies evince a similar two-headed structure to ward off rather than reinforce State
power. In the Americas, for instance, some groups had two chiefs, a war chief and a
peace chief, whereby only one ruled at a time. Whenever one leader became too zealous,
the people would mock him and follow the other leader. Especially in combination with
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the generalization of the ‘powerless’ titular king and the ritualization of war to disperse
power rather than annihilate or enslave an opponent, these societies exemplify how the
Given the contrasting examples above, we can generalize by saying that the two poles of
sovereignty form a complementarity. But the form and effects of that complementarity
differ. Fortunately, the rhythm of the alternating poles produces a signature: the
expression of the world that stands as the backdrop behind each State.19 A Roman ritual
produces the clear signatures of the Priestly and Archaic States by repeating the practice
of only allowing a single pole of sovereignty to rule at any given time: once a year, the
flamen-dialis priest turns a blind eye for a day so that the naked Luperci can run wild and
belt women with leather straps in a reenactment of the conquest of the Sabine women
(Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 27-30; 96-97). Obversely, the two poles can maintain
independent signatures while remaining mutually reinforcing; for example, Varuna and
Mitra nearly always exist as a pair in Vedic hymns. While the two gods are
contemporaneous, or even co-present, they are still distinct and separate. So “Mitra may
fasten you by the food,” but if a cow were bound without any special formula, “then she
would be a thing of Varuna” because “the rope assuredly belongs to Varuna” (Dumézil,
19
“The expressive is primary in relation to the possessive, expressive qualities, or matters of expression,
are necessarily appropriative and constitute a having more profound than being. Not in the sense that these
qualities belong to a subject, but in the sense that they delineate a territory that will belong to the subject
that carries or produces them. These qualities are signatures, but the signature, the proper name, is not the
constituted mark of a subject, but the constituting mark of a domain, an abode. The signature is not the
indication of a person; it is the chancy formation of a domain” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 316).
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Mitra-Varuna, 97; Satapatha Brahmana III 2, 4, 18). Yet the complementarities formed
when the poles turn a blind eye, exist contemporaneously, or are a mixture of the two
express a basic structure that can be easily extrapolated by elaborating on the Archaic and
Priestly States. Other complementarities, however, produce State forms that do more than
combine the poles: they pursue different effects by transforming the poles themselves.
One complementarity bears a signature that differs from the mythological State forms:
the Modern State. In the Modern State, the two poles of sovereignty are neither separate
nor mixed, but fused. The transitional figure for this fusion is the Absolute State. In the
Absolute State, the two mythological poles are united under the single crown of an
imperial despot. This inseparable mixture of sovereignty creates a unitary power that
aspires to be the single point of order for the entire cosmos. These despots spring up
everywhere, but we remember most clearly the European kingdoms that took over the
priestly duties of shepherding the flock in the aftermath of the Reformation. The
techniques of discipline and confession advanced when the Absolute State intensifies
both the magical bond and the priestly pact. Through the disciplinary bond, the
conquering king generalizes power through the body, which provides force, an immanent
power emitted from the internal organization of its parts. And in the confessional pact,
the pacifying priest harmonizes the self through the soul, a power constituted through
reflection. Yet these techniques also throw the Absolute State into crisis, since
populations are no longer medals to be worn on the chest with pride but instead must be
anxiously tended with care and concern. And because magicians make poor jurists and
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kings atrocious priests, the Absolute State is only a transitional form that sets into motion
The Modern State is composed of The Police and Publicity. The Police ensures that every
thing is put in its proper place. Publicity sees that every action is provided a public
explanation. These poles are the result of four operations: separation, organization,
spatialization, and systematization. It is through these four operations that the Modern
State discards the mythological ground of the Archaic and Priestly states and gains a
footing in the divergent paths of economics and politics through liberalism. As an effect
of these operations, conquest and contract fade into the background and only occasionally
get dragged out as inadequate justifications for the Modern State when it demands death
and sacrifice. Otherwise, the Modern State appears as a well-oiled machine. Its existence
does not depend on miraculous birth, as in the two mythological states, but on the banal
fact that ‘as long as everyone does their job, it works.’ Failure can only appear as
Separation is the first operation that gives rise to the Modern State. Mythological States
project power through the glory and justness of their reign. Yet order and reason wage
war on those mythological States by slowly tearing down the ramparts that defend its
authority. Myths cannot but wither from fantasies for a State that would tend to “all the
living conditions of the people” or demands that laws to be passed “before the eyes of
learns to excrete a new substance that will serve as the new substrate on which to build
back State power. And when the State stops fighting order and reason but instead turns
those partisan weapons into the tools of universal governance, the Modern State is born.
The modern transformation of the two poles of sovereignty occurs in the paired work of
the two processes of modernization: the production of a new substance that delivers order
and the technological transformation of a weapon into a tool. The modernization of the
first pole discards conquest but retains the sovereign quest for glory through the
Police in the Modern State prefer symbols of strength to the garish displays of royal
bragging. The Police shares the aim of conquest, as they both perform the positive task of
adding to the strength of the State. But the Modern State is a two-part technological
advancement of order over conquest. First, the army and the law are relegated to the
negative task of repelling enemies externally and internally. And second, the Police
enhances the already existing forces of the State through the permanent intervention in
the lives and behavior of citizens. The motor of conquest, the practice of capturing
outsiders to put them to work, is replaced by a well-ordered State that adorns itself with
the wealth and happiness of its people. Concurrently, the second pole is modernized by
abandoning sovereign right for public reason. The modernizing introduction of the
While the mythic jurist demands faith in the benevolent rulings of a jurist who
communicates between humanity and the divine, Publicity establishes laws through
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public right as authorized by the general will of the people. This leap occurs when the
history of sovereignty is separated from the sovereign. The initial separation happens as
sovereign history is weaponized and turned against the State, for instance, when
European nobles recast sovereign history as a history of betrayals and thefts from the
nobility. As that battle over history rages, however, the State vanishes to become a
hidden mediator because it serves as both the object and space of struggle. The separation
completes itself when history speaks of citizens who recognize the Modern State as an
The second operation of the Modern State is organization. The poles of sovereignty are
embodied differently in each State form. Mythological States personify their poles, and
they weave deceitful magicians and kind judges into the fabric of their art and culture.
The frightening monotheism of absolute despots also embody the State in human form,
but these sovereigns imagine their body to extend to everything they can touch. For them,
all the land serves as a great skeleton upon which human subjects hang as flesh to be
dressed with the sovereign’s great wealth. If there was any doubt, take a glance at the
frontispiece of The Leviathan. Modernization breaks the grand game of chess whereby
the singular task is to capture your opponents king. To modernize the State, the whole
body of the deposit must be split apart. After cutting the head of the king off its
amalgamated body, the rest of the State is dismantled and slowly pieced back together
again. The Modern State puts together the fragmented body of the sovereign by
institutionalizing the two poles of the sovereignty. The effects of this institutionalization
are the figures of the Modern State: The Police and The Public.
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The switch from personified power to the figures of The Police and The Public through
institutionalization enables a new mode of governance. Once the king’s organs are freed
from the elaborate rituals performed to maintain the corporeal integrity of the king, they
are each set out to complete their own specific functions. With a mode of governance that
sets so many things in orbit, Modern States are overrun by a multiplication of institutions
that deal with tasks like justice, war, and finance. Yet The Police is not just one
institution amongst the others but an entire art of government that oversees them all
(Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, 414). Contrary to the specific and limited tasks
of other institutions within the Modern State, The Police is charged with securing all
forms of co-existence, and seeing to their well-being (420-422). Furthermore, The Public
emerges as the mediator of these institutions. In Archaic and Absolute States, all things
are public, as the sovereign owns them, but by his grace, he is willing to share. In the
Modern State, however, the nobility seize those public assets for themselves. What is left
becomes The Public. The Modern State does not grant access to the public through
benevolence or grace: it sets standards and rules to manage access on the basis of legal
Spatialization is the third operation of the Modern State. Spatialization is the result of the
Modern State breaking through the Absolute State’s totalizing despotism. Once separated
from the circular logic of omnipresent authority, the Modern State is forced into a sober
realization: sovereign power is only one force among many other possible forces. Given
the pluralization of force, the Modern State responds by calculating power as a matter of
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physics. To produce this political physics, force is first materialized by slowing down the
forces within its control. Land is appraised, people counted, commodities tracked, and
conduct evaluated. From this ecology of forces, the Modern State slowly introduces
linear time and a discretization of space to mark out discrete blocks of space-time that
serve as the architecture for its power. Like a giant relief sculpture, the Modern States is a
material form carved out of a single block to reveal what lies beneath. The Modern State
begins from a territorial mass, framed from the earth, from which the sculpture will be
formed. To stabilize its form and find the shape imagined to already exist inside, the
Modern State first eliminates excessive forces through subtraction (land is partitioned,
deviants locked up, black markets shut down). Next, to bring the frozen world back to
life, it sets certain forces within that territory back in motion through manipulation (the
fields are seeded, goods made, and currency exchanged). Next, to enhance, supplement,
and cover up imperfections, it introduces institutions that intervene within forces through
addition (emptied monasteries are made into factories, indigents put to work, and the
army professionalized). And lastly, to transact between the still porous inside and the
world outside it, it enables exchange through substitution (regions annexed, skilled
workers imported, and foodstuffs sold). To complete the process, The Police put a station
on every corner and a patron on every street, all set up to keep watch over the recently
The poles of sovereignty are materialized as a result of the four sculptural methods of
spatialization. With spatialization of The Police in the Modern State, the irregular army
number of policy advisers, license granters, and paper stampers. In short, they are anyone
who abandons the abstract duty to a liege in order to better find a place in whatever is at
hand. Plenty of court jesters and sycophants fill their ranks, but the bottom line is that
everything has to be identified, counted, and divided; rewarded and punished. And
regardless of who asks, their reports must stay the same. Likewise, the spatialization of
Publicity in the Modern State creates the public sphere. We are told that the public sphere
is a loose connection of coffee shops and salons where critics debate official policy and
cook up pamphlets to spread dissent. However, there is more to public space than shops
and squares. Politics exists in the Modern State as a space of appearance, the organization
of people acting and speaking together (Arendt, Human Condition, 198). And in the
Modern State, the spatialization of publicity occurs when personal opinion is made
political. Yet the public sphere is not born out of good will but the uneasy consensus
between government and critique. The Modern State gives citizens a monopoly on
morality in return for keeping the monopoly on force. Therefore, whenever critique is
transformed into force, the State swoops in to shut down the presses, quash the riots, and
jail the subversives. Publicity is set to the specific terms of the public sphere: “Argue as
much as you like and about whatever you like, but obey!”20
The Modern State’s fourth operation is systematization. The disciplinary power generated
through a micro-physics of the body lays the groundwork for this process. The
disciplining demonstrated in monks strict regulation of the body in time and space –
20
Attributed to King Frederick II by Kant in “An Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?,” 55.
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from the time-table they set to perform daily routines to the architecture of the monastery,
and from the pacing of fasting and meals to the gestures of prayer – paradoxically
increases the body’s power by limiting it. The Modern State demonstrates through
approaches to local problems, and disciplines them. This disciplinary power draws in
general system of classification; and finally, by centralizing all three procedures under a
system of control, State Science becomes the handmaiden for extending sovereignty
science of policing and the technologies of publicity, States become fully Modern.
State Science subtly transforms the occasional brutality of conquest into the permanent
violence of The Police. In fact, the Modern State does not use violence to escalate combat
but as a system of preemptive and preaccomplished force that is justified before it is used.
In 1806, the British Mercantilist Patrick Colquhoun indicated in the preface of A Treatise
on the Police of the Metropolis that “Police in this Country may be considered as a new
science; the properties of which consist not in the Judicial Powers which lead to
Punishment, and which belong to the Magistrate alone; but the PREVENTION AND
REGULATIONS for the well ordering and comfort of Civil Society” (Preface, 1).
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Alternately, the German Cameralist Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi imagined The
Police to be more than the basis for a utopia of a well-ordered and well-behaved state, or
even the long arm of a systematic set of regulations to be followed, but rather a
disciplined science that fosters both the lives of citizens and the strength of the State. His
science of The Police, polizeiwissenschaft, combines the ancient art of government with
Publicity follows a slightly different path. Publicity is not unique to the Modern State.
Gods, monarchs, and aristocrats of all sorts enjoy the publicity of representation of the
grand show of personal attributes found in the finer points of formal rhetoric, the
elaborate customs of greeting and poise, the garish display of dress, and the self-
important insignias of badges and arms.22 For representation in those States, the mere
presence of a person of publicness makes things visible that were otherwise so worthless
as to be invisible. Everything too lowly to be made public is the mere ordinariness of the
common. But the Modern State wants to cast its gaze everywhere. Therefore, the Modern
State does not just overturn the exclusive right to publicness but demands universal
called to be a ‘publicist,’ a scholar ‘whose writings speak to his public, his world’”
(Habermas, Structural Transformations of the Public Sphere. 106). To publish its nation
21
Interestingly, polizeiwissenschaft gave rise to political economy. This transition marks the historical
moment when capitalism tries to make a jump from the coercive pole of sovereignty to the contract pole.
This point is not lost on Marx, who famously points out that the bloody expropriations of original
accumulation only later turned into the silent compulsions of the market in Capital: Volume 1. When
economics rises to the status of a science, after the marginalist revolution of the late 19th-Century, it creates
just-so stories that try to break its ancestral ties to the repressive force of the Police.
22
For a thorough treatment of the arts of representation under the French Monarchy, consult Louis Marin’s
excellent study of the “incessant crisscrossing” of aesthetics and kingship in seventeenth century France.
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of publicists, the Modern State authorizes freedom of speech, mass literacy, state-run
presses and publications, and electrification – in short, the technologies of publicity that
make up the media. And from this systematized visibility, sovereignty has a grand stage
Insurgencies
A number of mechanisms prevent the Modern State form accomplishing full totalization
of the forces that it engages. From within the Modern State, there are paths of resistance
always available by virtue of the mechanisms that keep it operating. The first internal
Modern State is short-circuited by the notion that one is living in the ‘end times.’ Such a
disruption dreams of the end of politics, the withering of the State, and a perpetual peace.
This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with civil society (Foucault,
Security, Territory, Population, 453). The second internal resistance is the right to
revolution. While the Modern State does away with demanding allegiance, it requires
obedience to the law. But those rules of obedience are occasionally broken. To change
the law, some rise up and break the law. This approach produces resistance by opposing
the State with the population (453-454). And the third internal resistance is partisan
knowledge. The Police and Publicity of the Modern State act as if they hold the truth of
what is happening and what must be done. But some come to feel that every nation
within the phenomenal republic of interests possesses their own truth and are entitled to
their own knowledge. This approach produces resistance by opposing the State with
nations (454). The intertwining of these three forms of resistance is incorporated into the
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Modern State even as they oppose the State and therefore constitute its genetic makeup.
Opposition to any particular Modern State through these mechanisms presumes a new or
better state but not a world without them. Yet the Modern State is not monolithic. Rather,
Decisive disruptions to the expansive geometry of the Modern State come from the
outside. This outside is not a great beyond but a power that camps outside the gates of the
City. Barbarian is the name given to these destructive foreigners who have arrived at
regular intervals throughout the long history of States. What distinguishes the Barbarian
from other outsiders is that these foreigners are not educated in the language of the polis,
and so their conduct appears to be a savage roughness that inexplicably ends in blinding
violence (Crisso and Odoteo, Barbarians, 40-42). Barbarians appear immune to the
mechanisms deployed by the Modern State to reign in everyone and everything around it.
Without a common language, the State lacks the means to form a pact that would
reconcile differences and ease conflict. And without the possibility of negotiating a truce,
the Modern State fights these invaders to the last drop of blood (42).
Barbarians also upset the emissaries of the State who feel compassion or even affinity for
them. Even though the Modern State wields power as a physics of controlling bodies in
time and space, communication remains the essential means for connecting those bodies
across time and space. Incommunicable bodies that prattle in a foreign language or
unintelligibly stammer from not knowing what to say or how to say it right are treated as
dangerous. The fear is that once the tongue is paralyzed, they will use their hands to
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relieve frustration (Crisso and Odoteo, Barbarians, 47). But the real hurdle to stopping
Barbarians is that they sow infantile disorder (for in Latin, infans are the speechless and
inarticulate, in addition to being childlike) by following their passions, which drives them
to struggle furiously. This leaves the Modern State, founded on obligation and ‘a good
days work,’ to ineffectively castigate its offspring and demand that they get a job (45).
Tolerance, resignation, and respect will never be enough to turn away the guttural sounds
and thoughtless acts of Barbarians motivated by hatred, fury, and outrage (52).
They are the same as us now, but nobody told her. She had to figure it out for herself. At
first she second-guessed herself. How could those machines, those things, be the same?
Before it had been so clear: the rules, the enemy... everything. But now that she knew, she
felt like the rug had been pulled out from underneath her, as if anything could change at
a moment’s notice. In fact, just last week, a childhood friend of hers was dragged in for
questioning. How could the idiots at the bureau think that he is one of them?
Even worse, she felt like she was the only one worrying. Everyone else seemed so damned
indifferent. Of course people need to get on with their lives. But, with those things in our
midst, threatening our very way of life, why were people acting so carefree? That is
surely what confused her the most: that once something carried in the opinion polls it
was made into policy; even something as treasonous as embracing those putrid things.
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With this, she thought as she looked at her hands, I will surely cross the line. If there even
are lines anymore. People need to understand the real cost of their petty little guarantees.
The wars waged in the name of a house, a job, and three meals a day.
In the Modern State, the two poles of sovereignty work together to create an elegant
geometry of forces. In the Social State, they create an interface that grafts otherwise
If the Modern State is the complementarity of politics and economics, through the politics
of Publicity and the science of The Police, then the Social State is an intensification of
this complementarity through the blurring of the two poles of sovereignty. While the
Modern State de-personified the two poles of sovereign by wresting its authority from the
power of both the king and the priest, it still organized society from above, like a
commander sending troops into the field. The Social State does not wield the two poles of
sovereignty as two different tools to ply matter but rather connects them through by
On its face, the co-extension of the politics and economics given by the Modern State
would seem infeasible. The politics of right speaks the maxim ‘my rights end where
yours begin,’ whereas the economics of preservation follows an alternate one: ‘my selfish
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interests multiply with those of others to satisfy everyone’s needs’; one is private and
limited, the other public and shared (Lazzarato, “Biopolitics / Bioeconomics,” 5). In an
attempt to stave off a false resolution that would subordinate one term to the other, the
rear-guards of the Modern State screamed out that economics irreversibly degrades
struggle for life with the competition of business men (ibid). But the architects of the
Social State silenced most critics by finding an invention in an art of government that
The Social arises when the State ceases to be the tyrannical head of society and becomes
a poison seething through the whole organism. Its operations are constructed from a
combination of the two poles of sovereignty. To bring The Social to life, however, the
poles are not simply modified but made somewhat indistinct, as each pole is given
characteristics of the other. In this transformation they are made into Biopower and The
Spectacle (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §48). The science of The Police is stripped
of the moral philosophy from which it was birthed. As the science of prevention, The
Police governs possibilities, but with Biopower, it is given the additional task of
conditioning possibility itself. Moreover, the relative autonomy of the public sphere is
taken from Publicity. So in addition to determining what appears, The Spectacle shapes
how those things appear. In short: The Social is a collection of worlds made evident by
23
Or, as the authors of Call would insist, when we talk about worlds we are really talking about the
sensible, which they take from the work of Jacques Rancière.
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The Social exists as a hybrid in which differing forms of power are captured. But its
contours are vague, as the knowledge, institutions, and people that inhabit The Social are
an irregular mixture of worlds that have all somehow been made into ‘social problems’ –
social illnesses like drug use, social programs for health and reproduction, as well as anti-
social perverts and gang bangers (Deleuze, “Rise of the Social,” ix). Once something is
caught within the pincers of The Spectacle and Biopower, it is socialized according to
three principles:
First, The Social makes guarantees. The Social takes care of you, it gives you something
to believe in, and it promises you progress. These social guarantees are not certainties but
bargains; for antagonism is the real target of socialization. The social body is grown
through massification, the production of great masses, such as races, classes, and other
categories. And the rise of the mass lends itself to a whole series of frictions, tensions,
and outright conflicts that could prove fatal. These differences are bridged when The
Social fosters solidarity. The most familiar example of solidarity, worker’s call for
‘solidarity forever,’ intensifies conflict by closing off solidarity within a mass, but this
limited solidarity is overtaken when The Social creates solidarity across masses. The key
tools in the production of solidarity are social rights, which are the guarantees made by
the Social State to make up for the shortcomings of society. Once made social, Biopower
oversights. As a result of addressing these ills through these bureaucratic means, the
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Social State makes a nation of claimants who are entitled to compensation from the State
(Donzelot, L’Invention du Social, 139; 175; 224). And once cooperation is secured, The
Social then projects itself into the future. Behaviors are set, trends extrapolated, and the
Second, The Social produces human nature. All States employ human bodies for their
ability to produce objectively determinable products such as life, labor, and language. Yet
within the Social State, humans are not really set to work for those products themselves
but for their appearances, which condition and structure lived experience (Foucault,
Order of Things, 352-4). Here, The Social works as a great anthropological machine that
structures by which humans experience the world requires more than convincing them
that their lived experience is an illusion. Therefore, The Spectacle manipulates the
unconscious structure of norms, rules, and systems that give rise to the representations of
function, conflict, and meaning that underwrite how humans think of their world (361-
366; 373-387). Ultimately, by making political the axiom that humans both condition and
are conditioned by the sensible, the Social State constructs humanity out of what appears,
Third, The Social looks like a giant organism. This organicity treats social problems
through the anatomy of bodies. The architecture of the Modern State is the hardened
exoskeleton of the insect, which serves as a container that simultaneously connects its
various segments and protects its fragile interior from the outside. But the fortress walls
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must come down to lay a Social infrastructure extending into the countryside. Therefore,
the Social State introjects the mineralized exterior of the exoskeletal shell, converting it
into an endoskeletal structure that it stretches across the earth (DeLanda, A Thousand
Years of Nonlinear History, 27; 84; 92). Hanging on its ever-growing infrastructure is a
biopolitical membrane for the Social State to interact with a whole web of life.
Importantly, that membrane allows the Social State to exchange with elements without
internalizing them. This membrane also allows the State to fold in taken-for-granted
aspects of the external environment into The Social and organ-ize them so that the State
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 put,
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 (these
are the proper religious practices, those are the actions of a criminal). Instead of
standards, which stick reference points into the swirling uncertainty of change, free-
floating norms are used to manage conflicts against and through one another rather than
mass of intersecting concerns, with 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
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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
internal conflicts, this State proves its worth by winning modest victories to satisfy social
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
that nothing escapes its grasp. The unrelenting advance of the Nazi 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 (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 28-30). The total mobilization of the
Nazi state was for expansionist war while Social States undertake total mobilizations for
economic development (264).24 The outcome of this total mobilization is not a society
still driven by the State, as in the Modern State, but the socialization of the State through
an indistinction between the state and society. Therefore, instead of the Nazi State, it is
24
Arguably, the Nazis mobilized first to overcome the disastrous effects of World War I and the Versailles
reparations on the German economy, whose continued development may only subsequently have required
expansionist war. The memory of the Nazi war state usual weighs too heavily on history to allow a
balanced analysis. However, a few texts, such as Schivelbush, Three New Deals and Apparatus of Capture
plateau in A Thousand Plateaus offer such accounts.
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two other twentieth century States that therefore serve as the paradigmatic examples of
the Social State: the Welfare State and the Socialist State.
Both the Welfare State and Socialist State functioned primarily through connection, not
repression. This connection worked by first priming the pump and then normalizing the
result. This began with enormous State projects in the arts, culture, society, politics, and
the economy, from which it picked and chose which ones to extend. However, a
bifurcation occurred as each built The Spectacle and Biopower around this production of
flows. In particular, it was the political strategies employed for releasing and plugging
flows that diverged. On the one hand, the wild oscillations in the economies of the West,
in particular a capitalist America that was riding out the anarchic development of the
Gilded Age, expanded the contractarian pole of sovereignty across large swaths of
society; while on the other, a whole series of nations initiated aggressive modernization
programs that followed the lead of the Soviet Union in the hopes that the socialization of
production under the rationalist watch of the authoritarian pole of sovereignty would
The stability of the Welfare State was secured through the productivist bargain. After two
crises, the Great Depression and mass working class autonomy, upset confidence in the
future of the capitalist heart of many Social States, the Welfare State emerged to restore
certainty, and it did so by performing a singular task: defending the present against the
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future. There are three paths that led the campaign to renew faith in the present: the
Under Keynesian interventionism, the future was projected from within the present. To
do so, the State first seized exclusive representation of production itself (not just
management but goals and even the presentation of facts), which began the
investment, making the State into its own productive subject (Hardt and Negri, Labor of
Dionysus, 39-40). And second, the State committed itself to a series of norms, which did
not guarantee any particular event in the future, just that future development would be a
simple extension of the forms and rhythms of the present (39). Moreover, because the
future was set to the internal structure of production, far less intervention was needed, as
production itself was designed to address the one political element that seemed likely to
derail the Social State: class struggle (42-44). Ultimately, the Welfare State repelled
served production in delivering on its promise. This success was in part due to the flip
side of this productivist bargain, which is that, for an ever-increasing standard of life,
Next, with Fordist social relations, the Welfare State was able to split militants from the
working class. Fordism theorizes that a new relationship between production and
consumption that provides simple reforms in the life of a worker would result in even
experiment to create a ‘New Man’ (Harvey, “Fordism,” 126-127). Fordism should never
be confused with Ford the man, as many of his innovations were codifications of already
existing trends, and his plans were never brought completely into fruition. Yet the central
tenet of Fordism – that the massification of consumption would drive the massification of
production – spread across industrial capitalist nations as a whole way of life (127-137).
Lastly, Taylorist production was the technical tool used to hold the social subjects to their
the assembly line. The assembly line was not the first place to break down bodies into a
age, but with Taylorism it is made into a science. Through time and motion studies, tasks
were distilled into a single best way, which reduced the workers to near automatons
programmed to complete a single task. These workplaces were not mere dungeons,
though they were ostensibly silent as there was nothing for the workers to share among
themselves: they formed giant machines that followed a unified rationality imposed from
above. Japan, however, demonstrated that the worker need not be subjected to the
machine. Toyotist management through internal control mechanisms set the worker to
innovate even more productive ways to work the machines, and thereby reintroduce
‘Toyotism’?,” 121). What Toyotism shows is that The Social’s takeover of the Welfare
State is not complete when the human is subjected to standardization and therefore to
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machines, but rather, The Social can be a permanent engine for change if production is
run by “machines with a human touch” (Ohno, Toyota Production System, 6-7). To rule
In spite of this tripartite system of totalizing control, the Welfare State insists first and
foremost that its people are free. But it is an odd, paternalistic form of freedom; for in the
Welfare State, everyone is treated like family. Sons and daughters are free to strike out on
their own, but they are just as likely to work for the family business and live under their
father’s roof. Having operationalized the parable of the Prodigal Son, the Welfare State
will always welcome its lost sons back into the fold, as long as they learn the cost of
freedom. The Spectacle of freedom is therefore the freedom of choice, even if it is not
exercised. Especially when it is not exercised. “Love it or leave it.” “If you hate your job,
why not get another one?” The paths to success and the channels of power are already set
up in advance. Or as one political theorist says, power can be irrigated.25 “The Spectacle
manifests itself as an enormous positivity, out of reach and beyond dispute. All it says is:
‘Everything that appears is good; whatever is good will appear.’ The attitude that it
demands in principle is the same passive acceptance that it has already secured by means
appearances” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §12).26 And all that appears is the
25
This is a phrase commonly used by Wendy Brown.
26
Modified, taking the first three words out of full capitalization.
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The Socialist State
In contrast to the Welfare State, the Socialist State supposes that The Social is all that is
necessary. This premise comes from a socialism before Marx. Aristocrats and dreamers
of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the so-called utopian socialists, laid out fanciful
social solutions as the answer to society’s ills. For them, the rational benevolence of
planned communities would skip past the reckless and greedy merchants who were
setting the groundwork for industrialism. And for a time, a whole constellation of factory
towns dotted the land east of the Mississippi, run by communities who collectively
owned their own mills. Miraculously, these separatist spaces served as stops on the
Underground Railroad, provided the freedom for sexual experimentation, and resisted
assimilation by adopting subversive lifestyles like naturism. And for that, these towns
offered excellent sites for creative advancement of the subjective element of socialism:
management, and collective process. However, a few decades after they appeared, most
It took Marx to propose a scientific basis for the development of socialism, who offered a
guide not only for its subjective elements but for its objective elements as well. In its
most orthodox form, the Social State followed the Marxian ‘stages of development’
theory and set about the program of socialism to lift humanity up to a higher form of life.
To direct this process, the first step to socialism was to seize the reins of an already
of command. After subsuming civil society, the Socialist State then brought about the
total reign of Biopower. This redirection of forces animated the great mass of The Social,
not through the long patchwork process of the capitalist West, but by swiftly imposing
the objective elements of socialization. For even though the Welfare State pursued
productivity with a scientific program as well, the total mobilization of the Socialist State
The price the Socialist State paid for its singular pursuit of efficiency was high. In trying
to make history, the Socialist State used the conditions laid out before it: juridical
socialism and liberal reformism (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 308). Through a
juridical socialism, the Socialist State commanded. This strategy, motivated by a desire to
bring about a ‘revolution from above,’ commanded socialized labor and capital according
socialize the benefits of an internalized class struggle, the Socialist State launched
reformist campaigns to make evident the benefits of socialism (205-209). This reformism
took the form of public spending, for instance, which only highlighted the fact that the
Socialist State had given up on abolishing the class system and merely sought to socialize
Caught in the race to out-produce its industrial neighbors, the Social State hastily
installed The Spectacle to produce a social order. However, this version of The Spectacle
shut down the horizon of liberation unique to the Socialist State. Che addresses this very
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problem in a note to a friend after serving as Finance Minister and President of the
National Bank of Cuba, writing that “pursuing the chimera of achieving socialism with
the aid of the blunted weapons left to us by capitalism” set the Socialist State on a path
where “the adapted economic base has undermined the development of consciousness.”
Pointing out what was missing, Che insists: “To build communism, a new humanity [el
hombro nuevo] must be created simultaneously with the material base” (“Socialism and
Man in Cuba,” 217; trans. modified). But the liberatory experiments in the subjective
elements of socialism, futurism or socialist realism for instance, were set aside to win the
great showdown with its capitalist enemies. Those subjective experiments were
suspended and replaced by the middling humanism of The Social, which prematurely
ended the quest for a radically different humanity. And it is this shared vision of The
Social that led the Welfare State and the Socialist State to their strikingly similarity, even
if each initially sought different visions. The convergence of these Social States did not
result from the failures of socialism, however, but is an unintentional effect of the speed
and efficiency by which the Socialist State expanded the market and civil society in
countries ignored by capitalism (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 265). The greatest
mistake of the Socialist State was made irreversibly clear as the final barrier between the
Socialist State and the Welfare State crumbled with the Berlin Wall – in its failure to
create a completely different way of life, “real socialism carried the world of the East into
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Escaping The Social
The Welfare State and the Socialist State fostered different forms of control and
resistance despite their similarities. Biopower and The Spectacle may have provided both
States the mineralized skeleton of industrial market society, but social divergence
eventually gave rise to significant anatomical differences. For example, the dull
unless we note that the membrane of each utilized contrasting modes of communication
and selection. The Iron Curtain was not an impenetrable veil that blocked out modernist
publicity; rather, it was the hardening of the organic membrane between two clusters of
Social States. A better diagnosis is found in the differences between George Orwell’s
1984, which depicts a totalized Socialist State, and Huxley’s Brave New World, which
What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was
that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information.
Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to
passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us.
Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared
culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the
the civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny
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“failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In
1984, Orwell added, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New
World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what
we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us. (Postman,
Despite drift in the expression of the three principles of the Social State, the most
important aspect of Cold War isolation is the politically decisive forms of corporeal
The Social State makes escape part of the everyday functions of its body. While the
Modern State freezes space in time so it could get a handle on everything within its reach,
the Social State sets its organs free, giving them the resources to self-regulate. The Social
State therefore does not care if subjects think that they are going it alone. Moreover,
corporeal escape does not begin with declaring independence from the body politic. Exit
must come from the body itself. What escapes must first threaten the life of the organism.
Then, the State will purge, shit, or excise whatever frightens, scares, or frustrates the life
of The Social. And it will either empower or ignore the rest – Native Americans are sent
into exile on reservations, poor blacks are freed from slavery but left to die in urban
ghettos, and illegal immigrants are deported. There is nothing glorious about this slow
gnawing death by disregard, but it opens up a potential passage out of The Social.
Accordingly, escape must ultimately grow from being a threat to having a life of its own.
Running to the hills is the oldest form of escape to illustrate what it takes to start a new
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life. As we have seen, those who ran from the Archaic State into the mountains of
Southeast Asia used highlands for cover, practiced slash-and-burn agriculture for
mobility, lived in small dispersed social units to avoid appropriation, and prayed to
heretical priests that broke the pact. What the Social State demonstrates, however, is that
The examples of politically decisive escape in the Social State are numerous. Laying the
groundwork for social war while still under the watch of the Modern State, the Calico
Indians flouted social norms with a ridiculous set of names, clothes, and traditions which
they used to wage a successful anti-rent insurrection that broke three-hundred thousand
farmers out of debt bondage (Metzger, “Transform and Rebel”). A century later, the
rucksack revolution struck at the consumer core of the Welfare State. A generation of
hippy-refusenicks dropped out and hit the road with little more than a deep dissatisfaction
with the fruits of America’s post-war boom. Or in perhaps a deeper fashion, the specter
of Makhno haunted the whole history of Soviet Russia. The short-lived anarchist society
in Ukraine lived on in the hearts of peasants, with the black flag raised time and time
again by guerrilla partisans, Tolstoyans, and gulag insurrectionists (Avrich, The Russian
In general, holes in The Social that open into potential escape routes for two social
subjects: the dangerous and the unaccountable. The dangerous individual is a product of
the Social State. To begin with, for dangerousness to even appear, the law must be on its
way out. The Social State does not look at danger as a matter of juridical fault or liability
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(Foucault, “Dangerous,” 16). Nor does it consider danger to be an abomination or
deformity (having profaned god or nature). Moreover, it does not treat danger as an
illness or even a symptom. The Social State rather speaks of danger in terms of risk. This
may seem odd, as everyone takes risks, whether it be jaywalking or taking a stroll in the
wrong side of town. But the Social State knows precisely when risks become danger: it is
when the dangerous threaten the health of both themselves and others (16). Put another
way: individuals are considered dangerous not because they have committed acts that
violate the law but because their existence itself poses an unacceptable risk, as deemed by
the preventative mechanisms of the norm. What sets up the dangerous individual as an
agent of escape is that they are dangerous as long as their intentions are hidden. The
powerful mechanisms of The Social are designed to extract pleas of guilt, sobbing
criminal confessions, and a whole string of detailed explanations aired to make right with
God (1-8). But without an identifiable reason for the danger, whether from the mouth of
the accused or cobbled together by the experts, the Social State is unable to manage
dangerousness (8-11). Even more striking, as the Social State casts its suspicious gaze
across its wide body, it finds that dangerous individuals are not rare and monsters gptou
but common creatures (17). Therefore, the inhabitants of The Social are never far from a
standoff with the Social State that would end in either fight or flight. The struggle would
begin with a refusal to keep feeding useful information to the managers of Biopower and
The Spectacle.
As the Social State shows, the escape of the dangerous comes in many different forms.
The Socialist State, for instance, centralizes The Spectacle in order to present the official
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publicity of the people, even if it is really centered on a cult of personality or a central
committee. What escapes here does not come in the form of universal pronouncements of
humanism but acts that bear an oddly strict adherence to the party line. When Soviet
perfect cog in the machine, Stalin shuddered, and responded with a gag order (Žižek,
“Leninist Freedom,” 123-124). Yet critics found ways to make the socialist Spectacle
leak time and again, as shown by East German playwright Heiner Müller, who could
pack eight hundred people into a theater, all knowing that his staging of classic theater
was really a critique of the party bureaucracy (Müller, Germania, 38-39). Alternately,
while things can be discussed out in the open in the Welfare State, everything is risky but
few become truly dangerous. Here, The Spectacle controls risks by indulging the most
fickle tendencies of the masses. Escape, however, follows the same route. Mass exodus
comes in the form of ‘movements’ that whip up popular sentiment. But with the quick,
violent oscillations of the attention cycle, few can maintain their self-imposed exile from
Biopower.
The second class of subjects that escape The Social are the unaccountable. The
unaccountable evade Biopower and The Spectacle by means of autonomy. This struggle
is less striking but is far more common than inviting danger. Instead of provoking the
to upset the social guarantees the Social State employs to buy support. Withdrawal does
not mean ‘go it alone.’ Rather, it means pursuing autonomy, which is to say totally
attempts to organize The Social as a body (Tiqqun, This is Not a Program, 59-63). This
disruption can be as simple as punks trying to prove wrong the Welfare State’s maxim
springing up in Tiananmen Square to rebuff the Socialist State’s standing offer of ‘a fair
day’s wages for a fair day’s work.’ Whether it is by reappropriating the forces taken
away from them after being captured by The Social or by finding a passage that leads to
demonstration that one can enjoy the benefits of life without paying the price demanded
Those both avoiding accountability but also intensifying danger usually succeed only as
the other way when a house on your block becomes a squat or shrugging off someone’s
bald attempts to cut work, there are many ways to support efforts that would otherwise
shrink under the public scrutiny of The Spectacle. But talking about or even imagining a
world operating without accountability and confrontation requires a discourse more akin
to telling ghost stories than keeping the books. Or for those who prefer something more
substantial, consider the fictions, characters, and narratives that leave behind the “paper
life” of revolutionaries that exist only in books (Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus,”
12-14).
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Regardless of how one chooses to think ‘the existence of the inexistent,’ the stakes are
clear: the politics of escape is the search for dis-junctions. Broken promises, misplaced
memories, startling anachronisms, and habitual repetitions are all little pieces of
untimeliness stuck in the present (Rancière, “The Thinking of Dissensus,” 5). Therefore,
against the total advance of the Social State, escape can be rethought. Instead of dreaming
of a flight that would carry you across space to foreign land or to a cabin in the woods,
escape carefully searches for loose threads of time left untrimmed by the Social State.
And just maybe, when the correct ones are pulled, they slowly unravel the present to
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PART 2 – CRISIS
Unlike the mythic State, governance today is no longer a question of divinity or even
mastery. Empire is instead the force of prevention. What Empire prevents is the future,
which it claims is only full of horror, chaos, and disappointment – where apocalyptic
monsters or dystopian nightmares come true. The present, we are told, is in crisis.
Paradoxically, Empire’s solution is to deepen the crisis in order to save the present. The
paired with the vague notion that nothing is really changing. To achieve this confusing
state – where the more that things change, the more they stay the same – Empire
undertakes two abstract processes: circulation and management. These two processes are
mode of circulation.
which operates through folding. Folding is the interiorization of the outside, or “inside as
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which erects a structure on a frame set against a landscape. Floors, ceilings, and walls
concretize frames to provide a barrier from the outside while windows and doors are
frames within a frame that enable a selective flow of materials and affects in and out.
Furniture is placed within the fold as the double of the outside and thus model the outside
environment with which bodies touch and interact even while lacking any resemblance to
it (Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art, 13-17). Analogously, The Modern State governed people
carefully folds in aspects of the outside so that “from now on, things will be represented
only from the depths of this density withdrawn into itself” (Foucault, Order of Things,
they are easily captured and managed. But the power of the fold is not one-sided, for it
holds force like a spring. Following this realization, the Social State intensified
interiorization by increasing the relative speed of force within the fold. To extend the
interior, however, the Social State did not build an array of interiorities (the school, the
kitchen, the prison) but encouraged circulation within a single shared inside: The Social.
The Social State unfolded conflicts into a single intersecting mass so they do not arise
within the interiority of separate folds but rather play out in the unified field of The
Social. And the fold of The Social serves as a membrane that enables the State to
Empire’s mode of circulation is unfolding. At first glance, Empire seems to appear only
when there is a mistake in the circuit, but circulation does not occur on its own accord; it
is Empire that directs this expansion. Under the watchful gaze of The Spectacle and
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through the selective membrane of Biopower, Empire first exposes interiorities to the
safe. Yet in the beginning, the outside might appear to be the breath of fresh air that
everyone needs: families are reunited despite distance or borders, old enemies find new
grounds for friendship, and all kinds of deviations are allowed to flourish. But countless
illustrations draw a bleaker picture of exposure: social rights such as healthcare vary
according to a privatized system of global debt, labor competes for jobs half-way across
the world, and pockets of the so-called third world grow throughout the first. Those
examples of circulation only describe the first action of exposing interiorities to one
desubstantializing the power that is sprung from folds, which is used for shaping
exteriorities that expand the Metropolis. This operation occurs by transduction – the
conversion of energy from one medium to another (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 60). To complete this operation, interiorities are not just made risky but they
capitalism is not just in crisis but capitalism is crisis.27 Empire turns every breakdown
into something positive – positive in both senses: a presence that can be positively
27
The slogan ‘capitalism is the crisis’ is perhaps even more popular than ‘capitalism is crisis,’ but it does
not capture the key transcendental point that capitalism is both the cause and beneficiary of crisis.
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conductor of social information (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §59). This
conductive circuit extends through diffusion, which does not spread from a single center
but goes in-between already present formations. Such diffusion forgoes the
coexistent orders” that expands through multiplying difference rather than flattening
sameness (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 435). Moreover, since Empire
does not emanate from a single point, diffusion allows every node to be a possible
means that Empire affords us our power – we live in its house, wear its clothes, and eat
its food. While diffusion ensures that resistance is both everywhere and nowhere at the
same time, it is equally true that resistance to Empire is also resistance against ourselves
– a human strike that turns the force of self-abnegation into a strike against Empire. There
are at least three consequences that follow from the diffusion of conductivity: first, the
simultaneous demands for transparency, flexibility, and self-reliance establish thin social
bonds on the basis of weak solidarity; second, we are all always-already guilty because
no form of life serves as a perfect conductor social flows, and Empire materializes that
guilt at any moment it finds useful; and third, a global economy of responsibility ensures
that a guilty party is identified after every event, even if they are not punished for it
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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,
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
maintaining 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. 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
During times of crisis, certain allowances are made as long as they remain limited.
Something with such a degree of intensity as to be excessive may still threaten Empire,
but “under Empire, nothing forbids you from being a little bit punk, slightly cynical, or
(Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §55, Gloss α). The watchful guise of The Social
sought norms that discouraged transgression because it is seen as a risk to the shared
image of a unified social body. But both transgression and norms disappear within
Empire – only normalization remains. Empire’s operations are far more limited than the
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Social State, which produced virtuous subjects that tend to follow norms of good
behavior. Empire performs only one primary act, which has two aspects, one positive and
one negative: it invests in as many possible worlds as are necessary to prevent the future.
Empire’s form of management draws on the power of limiting its own appearance. It
does so by multiplying its techniques through the privatization of law. This privatization
transforms the Social State’s a priori use of the law to privilege particular forms-of-life to
Empire’s impersonal and practical use of the law, which it makes available to every
citizen (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §49). Despite constitutional scholars’ best
assurances, Empire’s contradictory patchwork of laws does not establish order through
reason. Rather, the laws of Empire are there to empower citizens just as it authorizes the
police, making the techniques of Imperial management available to all the residents of the
Metropolis, all parties involved knows how rare it is for things to actually end up in court.
through the force of law. Further limiting Empire’s appearance is existential liberalism,
the belief that each person relates to the world according to their own unique perspective,
which they are made to believe exists as a result of the series of choices they made in the
life (Anonymous, Call, Scholium II). The confessional aspect of existential liberalism
positive ownership of the world covers up the impersonal and negative dimension of
Imperial management. Much as wealth appears under economic liberalism as nothing but
the result of differential exchanges, Empire appears under existential liberalism as the
Differences are always breaking through or slowing down, opening up paths to the future.
Empire thus intervenes to put them back in their place. Empire often chooses a state as its
does away with states. States still exist, but mostly because they are useful. As centers of
command, states control and direct resources, and state sovereignty exists as a justified
force without the need for an explanation, available as a strategic resource – even when
financial capital, drug syndicates, outlaw warlords, and Special Economic Zones make
global sovereignty look more like Swiss cheese. So just as Imperial management drives
some states to sell their resource-rights to corporations for enclave accumulation, Empire
humanitarianism.
realistic if only they could find a source of legitimacy. But already Empire presents us
with all the best possible forms of management available. That is why there is no good
management, only different versions of the present and no future at all. This is why you
cannot critique Empire, all you can do is oppose it forces – wherever you are.
Empire, an incorporeal system, is realized in the daily life of the Metropolis. The
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architecture of the Metropolis is built to optimize circulation and management, which is
built as a space of capture. The space of capture of the Metropolis emerges from two
distinct diagrams of control: the leper colony and the plague city (Agamben,
“Metropolis,” 6-7). The leper colony is an intentional outside, a closed-up and excluded
space to which lepers are sent into permanent exile. A plague city, in contrast, cannot
stem its affliction by simply casting out the victims; instead, the plague city fixes
everyone in place by confining them to their homes and sets someone to watch each
street – provisions are delivered through elaborate delivery systems that connect the street
to each house while closing off communication, and residents must regularly appear in
their windows for an observation, which is recorded and made into a system of
permanent registration. The first diagram produces a space of exclusion based on a single
binary division (normal/abnormal; mad/sane), while the other produces a divided space of
individualization that encases, surveils, and cures illness through a complex set of
Despite their differences, the diagrams of the leper colony and the plague city are not
incompatible; yet it takes the Modern State to combine them, which it does by creating a
space of double capture that treats subjects as simultaneously plague victims and lepers.
borders and walls are still erected but the effects change, a generalized binary division is
but cured through the careful tools of plague control (the productive effects of
registration, monitoring, treatment) while others subjects are intentionally helped through
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exclusion itself (the exclusivity of private networks, accumulation enclaves, sidestepped
regulations). This differential control weaves the elementary fabric of the Metropolis
(Agamben, “Metropolis,” 3-6). This is the origin of Hardt and Negri’s claim that struggle
no longer link “horizontally,” but instead “each one leaps vertically, directly to the virtual
center of Empire” (Empire, 58). Not every strike against Empire is equally effective,
however, because the fabric of the Metropolis fabric is not continuous, homogeneous, or
isonomic but extends through a series of veins. This interweaving pattern of control
potentially inside and out – watched by the Spectacle but also ignored, cared for by
Biopower but also abandoned. The struggle against Empire must then address the uneven
development of the Metropolis and the role that its veins play in imperial control.
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Chapter 3 – Disemboweling the Metropolis
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 lingering desire for
clarity, I jotted down some notes while playing it back in my head like a movie reel.
you first hit the streets, you settle into the 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.
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. There are some tall
tales that shovel the regular bullshit about good detectives. But 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
“Step one: ditch the false piety of doing good and start using your feet.”
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A lot of red herrings had been thrown my way. The Metropolis makes it hard to trust
anyone or anything. There are no longer any good guys, only con men looking for dupes
unable to 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
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 phone numbers of a few bureaucrats and cops is never a
bad idea, as long as you don’t get too close – mistaking them for a friend or a confidant
makes you worse than a singing 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
“Step two: track down the leads before the trail goes cold.”
The spoils of my stakeout were lying out on my desk like 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
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continued when I spotted His Benevolence of the Priestly State after his blackmail and
extortion racket 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 marginals,
Just when I thought the trail went cold, I got the call. The anonymous caller told me to
meet 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
The Metropolis is 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 to govern it. Despite its material existence, the Metropolis is more a process, the
process of composition that brings together material according to a specific set of rules.
28
In their critique of psychoanalysis, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari argue that the unconscious is
composed of desiring-machines that operate according to three syntheses: the connective synthesis of
recording, the disjunctive synthesis of recording, and the conjunctive synthesis of consumption-
consummation. Furthermore, they argue that each synthesis has legitimate and illegitimate uses, with
illegitimate uses leading to errors of thought that impede the immanent flow of life. These syntheses are not
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disjunction allows the Metropolis to connect otherwise incommensurate subjects, flows,
the Metropolis does not leave those incommensurate things unperturbed. Rather, Empire
introduces things into the Metropolis by producing a plane of positivities that unfolds
Empire. Such a survey identifies the veins of the Metropolis and searches for the
antagonisms within each one. Such a process is not done from on high, like watching
pedestrians swarm like ants from atop the Empire State building. The Metropolis’ veins
open only when we walk its streets like strangers, no longer comforted by a place that
always seemed to make sense, unsettled and hungry to figure out why everything looks
What flows through the veins comes from an intensification of the two poles of
Modern State they appeared as The Police and Publicity, and in the Social State they
transformed into Biopower and The Spectacle. Within the Metropolis, Biopower operates
through violent machines of subjection and the technical management of flows, and The
Spectacle operates through spectacular time and a compulsory system of visibilities. But
limited to the operation of the unconscious, however, but are essential to the function of society, as every
society is the result of social-production, which codes and directs the flows of desiring-production. It is my
contention that the Metropolis is an effect of the legitimate use of the disjunctive synthesis of recording. In
its illegitimate use, exclusive disjunction, the disjunctive synthesis creates an ‘either/or’ forced choice. In
its legitimate use, however, the disjunctive synthesis of ‘either… or… or…’ whose effect is an intensive
milieu that accesses the infinite of the virtual (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 12-13; 76-77).
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unlike States, Empire does not command these poles; it is happy to let the Metropolis do
most of the work. Yet Empire still induces their operation and reaps its reward. By
handing over its duties to the Metropolis, Empire enables the Metropolis to be used
subjects undermine their own means of subsistence in the process and presupposes that
Empire is willing to take the risk. Thus, within every vein exist spaces of capture, which
Empire uses to direct the Metropolis, and lines of escape, showing potential antagonisms
The purpose of disemboweling the Metropolis should be clear: to find a new people and a
new world. It is not to save everyone as they already are and will fail if it leaves anyone
the same. The transformation is nothing short of revolutionary: the complete abolition of
In the Archaic State, the frightening magician-king ruled through a theater of cruelty. The
magician-king knew that humans are more accustomed to lying, forgetting, and all forms
of cognitive dissonance than living their life according to one deliberate and coherent
plan. His cruelty was not indulgent but followed 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” (Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morality, Book II, §3). To make loyal
subjects worth his trust, the magician-king declared with his loud voice that rituals of
enrollment must be established to bring each member’s organs into possession of the
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whole group. And at the center of this system of cruelty was a terrible alphabet cut into
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 the body to fit the binaries of social code, they
have to be imposed: life does not naturally split into two neatly-defined sides but exists as
“a thousand tiny sexes” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 213). Thus the
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 the painful price of
membership.
When the same cruel practices are repeated today, they are significant because of their
superfluousness. A tattoo may hold meaning for its wearer, but it no longer provides the
signature that transforms a body into a member of a society. Papers now authorize one’s
official existence, though the possibility of forgery makes the body remain a secondary
means for verification. Clumsy documents draw few eyes away from the surface of the
body. Rather, bodies are released from the compulsory marking to be made flexible,
which is to say, more satisfying. When one’s papers are all that remains permanent, the
body can be put under a state of constant transformation, bent to meet every moment’s
The aim of subjection in the Metropolis is to shape the body. But the violence of
subjection is now found in a system that preexists any given body. It is secret the
operations of the fog machine and the whirring machinery hidden behind the walls that
Chief Bromden senses throughout One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. These machines are
never seen, they are only felt through changes in the climate, for they produce small
shifts in environmental conditions to make docile bodies that are more likely to behave.
passed off as the triumph of existential liberalism– changes in attitude or diet appear as
individual choices even although their actions were predicted far before they occurred.
Prediction has long been a part of governance; demographic statistics made the Modern
State possible, allowing it to fend off famines and their associated riots, while social
insurance and sociological modeling helped the Social State flourish, as it was able to
direct society through social engineering. But now, vast assortments of models deliver
ideal outcomes without demanding virtuous behavior. These outcomes are made possible
The Police was not always so atmospheric. Violence is the essence of policing, even
when it is at its most preventative. Everything had its place in the Modern State, and The
Police did its job to keep that order with violence and deterrent force. The Social State, in
turn, introduced everything into mass society. In such a society, The Police made it clear
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that certain identities are undesirable and invested in masses that extend The Social in
good faith. Predicates are thus used as leverage. Through biopolitical investment, The
Social State used masses against one another, pitting white homeowners against blacks
and business owners against the unemployed. The subjection of The Social thus
determined success or failure, freedom or oppression. Yet masses have at least a minimal
consistency and often fight wars of position, sometimes even rising up to change who
does the policing. But as more enclaves are broken up and thrown into the fabric of the
Metropolis, these conflicts become molecular. The greatest tool of The Police in Empire
is thus stratification, which results in the Metropolis being polarized into not just two
warring camps but a war without a clear enemy. Subjection does not completely
evaporate but no longer comes guaranteed. Instead, the pain of inclusion is said to be all
that stands between a body and the war of all against all. That way, subjects willingly
take on their own subjection even when the system appears to be disintegrating.
The violent machines of subjection hidden throughout the Metropolis pose a unique
problem for escape. It is clear that law uses the “blood dried in the codes” to make
violence routine (Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 10). Setting aside the abuses of
power that it justifies, the other purpose of law is to delegitimize organized self-defense.
Autonomy must then present itself to Empire as either a declaration of war or a harmless
indulgence. Declarations of war have, in all but a few instances, resulted in disaster. The
death of The Social has led to a fragmentation of mass society and the ability to constitute
a mass-in-resistance within it. And in the hostile desert of the Metropolis, popular
movements that rise to a mass scale lack militancy and discipline and are repressed with
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military-style policing. Alternately, autonomous elements that express themselves as
harmless are either marginalized or incorporated. The general hostility of the Metropolis
does not leave space for virtuous subjects; to exist is a negotiation with exploitation.
Some subjects try to contain exploitation by bearing it themselves, but this does nothing
to sap Empire’s power and only reduces their own. Others attempt transformation from
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. In fact, even the first proletariat began outside of labor and not
within it, for the word ‘proletariat’ comes the Latin word for ‘offspring,’ which was used
to describe those so impoverished that the only labor they could offer was childbirth
(Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right, 169). This is why labor silently assumes reproduction
even when capital purchases labor-power for the sake of production. Striking against the
hidden tolls of reproduction thus initiates a human strike that begins with a refusal, which
is 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” (Federici, Wages 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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Human strike uses autonomy to begin the process of self-annihilation. But to launch an
assault on one’s self is to misidentify the cause of the collective malaise. “Neuroses,
suicides, desexualization” are “occupational diseases of the housewife” and not advances
in the struggle (Federici, Wages Against Housework). A biopolitical strike must subvert
the conditions that create the human, not any particular identity, until Imperial subjection
worthy of temporary defense but must also set their own paths of escape. “Homosexuality
and heterosexuality are both working conditions... but homosexuality is worker’s control
of production, not the end of work” (Federici, Wages Against Housework). The abolition
of Empire does not occur by taking over Empire but by separating bodies from their
Imperial subjection. An autonomous power is then made to grow in that gap, its distance
measuring the degree to which the machines of subjection can be used against
themselves. This separation may at times appear as a Social struggle but it must end in
all-out civil war within the Metropolis. Autonomy is only as good as it is antagonistic.
There are no Social solutions to the present situation. No identity or plurality of identities
wield enough Social power to entrap all of Empire’s violence. “I never wanted to be
intermediary. The purview of these machines spans from the basic task of directing of
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human waste to the complex task of exploiting cultural conflict for profit. To complete
these tasks, the machines perch between heterogeneous layers. Their operation begins
with the constitution of flows – when Empire peels off heterogeneous layers of The
communication rather than limiting them through reduction, the Metropolis thus
multiplies their connections. The Metropolis, which reconstitutes the layers as a new
assemblage, thus produces new connections whose excretions exhibit emergent patterns.
But the products of those connections remain abstract and undetermined flows until they
are selected, qualified, or blocked. Empire therefore finds technical objects within those
material products, through which its machines operate. Just as a stoplight directs traffic,
these machines transform points within the Metropolis into centers of gravity that draw in
elements from the exterior and orient them with signs (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, 395-402). Foucault spent his career documenting these “sites of veridiction,”
they were subjects but to be as malleable as subjects (Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics,
33-7). Its crudest form exists in the Modern State where the mad that speak are thought to
speak in a deceptive tongue that analysts artfully confine to the objective rules of
language. But it is in the Metropolis where the technical objectification of the Social
safely ask ‘who are you?’ instead of ‘what have you done’ and still get answers about
killers, depressives, and commodities that reveal more than a simple history of
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Technical machines’ primary function is to frame, which regulates how things arise
within that frame.29 Much like organisms, which evolve by internalizing aspects of their
extending the analogy of the organism, it could be said that these products are mere
extensions of the assemblages, as organisms may appear as the mere accretion of flows
rhythmically circulating between the bodies and environment: material flows of food and
energy, social flows of bonding and reproduction, and psychic flows of perception and
cognition. But between the interior and exterior lies a regulatory mechanism, a
tendencies, but it is not constitutive and thus provides neither determinism nor a total
picture. And within this small fold of the outside created inside the organism, the
separation is consummated when an autonomous power grown from its own organs
allows it to double the outside, freeing the organisms to seek out different milieus.
Within Empire, Biopower operates as such a membrane. Yet Imperial Biopower does not
act on behalf of organisms and each individuated life, Biopower modulates the general
29
Despite widely divergent approaches, the frame is a concept that Deleuze and Derrida utilize similarly.
For both of them, the frame is how bodies select their engagement with the exterior world. For Derrida,
following Heidegger, metaphysics provides a structure, a frame, for the unveiling world that should be
loosened. For Deleuze, following Bergson, life expands through an experimental deterritorialization of the
earth. The implication of both approaches is that technical management temporally limits ontology
(Dasein/becoming) but also provides a path for its undoing (deconstructive différance/lines of flight).
Bernard Stiegler’s unification of the two approaches develops André Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of technical
object in Technics and Time, 1: The Fault of Epimetheus far beyond Deleuze and Guattari’s use in A
Thousand Plateaus, but it often comes to often startlingly conservative conclusions. In particular, his
normative project to reverse the exteriorization of the human, central to the technics series but clearly stated
in the For A New Critique of Political Economy, can be read as restoriationist conservation of a traditional
image of the human. It is the intention of this work to provide a radical counterpoint.
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environment. Empire’s technical machines reverse the flow of life, tearing open The
Social’s protective organs, exposing the contents of institutions to the Metropolis. And
with this exposure, even transgression and sexuality become open secrets. Bankers fondle
their money on reality TV, the bourgeoisie fuck the proletariat in public, and the citizens
of Empire get aroused watching political assassinations on the ‘net (Deleuze and
Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 293). The terrifying power of Empire’s technical control of flows
arrives under a libertine guise. But Empire provides allowances and not freedom, as it
tolerates deviations only as long as they return more productive results. Otherwise,
allowance is a thinly veiled excuse for technical abandonment. And once Empire
abandons The Social’s project of sustaining certain forms of life, its technical machines
simply set general environmental conditions for any life whatsoever to benefit so long as
disjunction. This disjunction forges a connection that transforms through the addition of a
created difference rather than reducing through essentialization. Yet the effects that
Empire is looking for are found in the Metropolis itself rather than any particular new
subject or object of governance, which should not be confused for any individual product.
and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference” that allows Empire to capture all
always amount to the same as they shift and slide around” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-
often appears as ‘mere propensity’ for equal exchange, but expansion is essential to its
survival, as evinced by dead zones in the Metropolis where Empire either short-circuited
or burned out. So while disjunctive inclusion assures that Empire regulates everything
and everywhere in the Metropolis, it is also true that Empire does not extend equally into
every street corner or subjectivity. This blurring of the boundaries is not meant to
obscure, as there are apt metaphors to describe Empire’s movement: it hops without
covering like a blanket, which makes the world spiky and not flat. It is Lyotard’s
description of the unfolding of the social body that perhaps best illustrates how technical
machines unfold The Social in an effort to make every part of the Metropolis be able to
Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces: not only the skin with
each of its folds, wrinkles, scars, with its great velvety planes, and contiguous to
that, the scalp and its mane of hair, the tender pubic fur, nipples, hair, hard
transparent skin under the heel, the light frills of the eyelids, set with lashes–but
open and spread, expose the labia majora, so also the labia minora with their blue
longitudinally cut and flatten out the black conduit of the rectum, then the colon,
then the caecum, now a ribbon with its surface all striated and polluted with shit;
as though your dressmaker’s scissors were opening the leg of an old pair of
trousers, go on, expose the small intestines’ alleged interior, the jejunum, the
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ileum, the duodenum, or else, at the other end, undo the mouth at its comers, pull
out the tongue at its most distant roots and split it, spread out the bats’ wings of
the palate and its damp basements, open the trachea and make it the skeleton of a
boat under construction; armed with scalpels and tweezers, dismantle and lay out
the bundles and bodies of the encephalon; and then the whole network of veins
and arteries, intact, on an immense mattress, and then the lymphatic network, and
the fine bony pieces of the wrist, the ankle, take them apart and put them end to
end with all the layers of nerve tissue which surround the aqueous humours and
the cavernous body of the penis, and extract the great muscles, the great dorsal
nets, spread them out like smooth sleeping dolphins. Work as the sun does when
from differentiated and appropriated parts, the latter never being without the
perversion, spread out the immense membrane of the libidinal ‘body’ which is
quite different to a fume. It is made from the most heterogeneous textures, bone,
epithelium, sheets to write on, charged atmospheres, swords, glass cases, peoples,
grasses, canvases to paint. All these zones are joined end to end in a band which
has no back to it, a Moebius band which interests us not because it is closed, but
because it is one-sided, a Moebian skin which, rather than being smooth, is on the
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contrary (is this topologically possible?) covered with roughness, corners, creases,
cavities which when it passes on the ‘first’ turn will be cavities, but perhaps on
the ‘second’, lumps. But as for what turn the band is on, no-one knows nor will
know, in the eternal turn. The interminable band with variable geometry (for
convex on the ‘second’ turn, provided it lasts) has not got two sides, but only one,
Technical machines produce technological objects to assist their operation. The machines
produces two different types of objects, although they are nearly identical and generally
convertible: tools and weapons (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 395). The
difference between the two can be distinguished through use and concept; first by their
force, tools are introceptive, they centripetally draw forces inward toward a center of
power – the net or hunting. Alternately, weapons are projective, they send forces on
accelerating paths outward – the missile or martial arts (395). And in terms of speed, a
movement of their prey. On the other hand, a weapon has unlimited speed, as its speed is
not pegged to anything and is thus free to pursue acceleration for its own sake (396).
The technical machines of Empire aim to transform every object into a tool. With tools,
capacity for sending and receiving direction. Empire thus establishes gravitational centers
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amidst the growing exteriority of the Metropolis. And from those points of power,
Empire not only directs flows but also puts them to work. Unlike free action, which
powers the conceptual motor of weapons, work uses tools to capture and direct force
problem of work, Empire actualizes a specific model for producing force that operates on
an exterior, meets resistances during incorporation, loses its cause at the completion of
every task, and requires renewal for each use (397). The hallmark of the so-called
neoliberal turn of Empire reduces production to the work of expropriation – a new rentier
class emerges, as developers draft artists as homesteaders in the new urban frontier; and
the paradigm of securitization and risk now sets best practices for business, government,
and family. This expropriation will continue as long as the tattered remnants of The
Social exist, with Empire squeezing dry every institution of The Social, privatizing its
capital and emptying the subjects of its enclosure, only to hop to the next in the
Subjects unable to think outside the motor of work often turn to a naive escapism. This
naive escapism looks for places outside the reach of the Metropolis, as if Empire could be
starved to death. But such fugitives are usually trapped in a struggle over the same
surplus as Empire and are in danger of transforming their autonomy into a tool of work.
A few truly autonomous subjects have established forms of life outside of Empire’s
networks of dependency, the most recognizable being the peasant. The peasant’s
their preformed way of life to provide. But most citizens of Empire can only take partial
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leave, if any at all, because Empire has established the Metropolis as the transcendental
condition for life. And with few exceptions, life without the modes of association,
most ambitious attempts to live autonomously from Empire’s influence still requires that
these free spirits find flows to latch onto, like in guerrilla warfare, “that little war in
which you have to find allies in fog, damp and the height of rivers, in the rainy season,
the long grass, the owl’s cry, and the phase of the moon and sun” (Genet, Prisoner of
Love, 125). Withholding from Empire does not deny it of anything and only fuels its
turned into an offensive force against Empire does autonomy reappear as a threat to
Empire. Rather than hiding out in pockets adjacent to the Metropolis, as if they did not
operate under the precepts of technical management, effective modes of escape must then
take their lead from the guerrilla, who uses aspects of the Metropolis against Empire to
Weapons are one way to expropriate the expropriators; they are former tools freed from
the chains of work. Free action exploits the convertibility of technological objects by
selecting, converting, or even inventing speeds that exceed work’s gravity. Changing the
usage of an object is not an individual choice, however, but an effect of the whole
ensemble of forces in which the technology is deployed. In contrast to work, free activity
is powered by perpetual mobility and thus does not overcome resistances, as it joins with
already present forces to orient and provoke additional acceleration (Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 396, 395). To the extent that weapons account for their
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origin as tools, weapons assume production, resistance, expenditure, and displacement
and then exceed all these aspects with the exercise of speed (398). Weapons are thus the
effect of unworkable flows. Following Nietzsche, Empire understands that “work is the
best policeman,” but even work in unable to rein in certain automatically generated
dimensions of the Metropolis (Daybreak, §173, 105). There are four problematic flows in
particular that work is incapable of resolving: matter-energy, population, food, and the
urban (468). Weapons are the consequence of assemblages that frame these problems,
and others, as reservoirs of free activity. Behind the doomsday scenarios of energy crisis,
sobering analyses of social stratification, forecasts of spreading food riots, and lament
over the explosion of global slums lies a motor perpetually inventing new weapons
against Empire.
Yet the mere existence of irresolvable flows does not itself cripple Empire. In fact,
Empire benefits when certain problems appear irresolvable for all time – permanent crisis
calls for technical management in perpetuity. The recurring issue of crime makes The
Police an inevitable but incomplete response, while urban decline forever opens up new
political mobilization for the movement of perpetual flows. The defense of a single house
against foreclosure or even a whole neighborhood against gentrification does not dislodge
urbanization.
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Empire’s general environment of hostility can be successfully confronted. But only the
weapons joined with the centrifugal speed of Empire’s irresolvable flows are sufficient to
overcome the tools of its technical machines. Empire claims that food shortages are
problems in distribution and is happy to help you organize a charity food drive, yet The
Black Panthers launched a revolutionary party on the premise that there was more than
enough food go to around. Empire claims that unemployment is the result of glitches in
the economy and assists everyone looking for a job, yet youth across the world launch
revolutions having realized that Empire has abandoned them, but also because they have
better things to do than work. Empire claims that peasants degrade valuable land by
living too simply and shows them how to grow cash crops, yet peasants in Mexico and
Bolivia rose up against the government when their way of life was threatened and
established their own self-governed municipalities (Esteva and Prakash, Grassroots Post-
Modernism; Zibechi, Dispersing Power). Empire claims that gangs pose a threat for its
citizens and encourages neighbors to ‘say something when you see something,’ yet
networks and other markets in their struggle against the degradation of Empire. None of
these paths are ideal, few have succeeded in subverting the Metropolis, and some result in
violence and domination as brutal as Empire, but they all demonstrate examples of
weapons that arise in the movement of flows. Ultimately, the great hope of escape is to
find weapons powerful enough to destroy Empire’s motor of work, to reveal the world of
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Vein 3: Spectacular Time
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
transcendent absolute. The future is thus abolished from the Metropolis, even as a
To the extent that time still exists in the Metropolis, it is simply a variable measured by
tools for limiting and controlling time as something to be saved (Lefebvre, The
Production of Space, 95). In its measurement, time is isolated and drained of intensity so
as to be integrated into a field of all possible extensions of the present. This prevents
lived time from becoming historical time. Such an economic awareness of time, as
something wasted or spent, sets time against itself with the appearance that all time
emerges equally from the same source and is thus subject to universal comparison and
substitution. Moreover, in a world where every moment is like any other, historical time
disappears as “contemporary events themselves retreat into a remote and fabulous realm
reasoning” (Debord, Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, 16). Even though it brags
of its resplendent potential, the Metropolis is therefore a boring place where nothing
Empire arrests time through separation. Time is stolen in the Metropolis as capital steals
from the proletariat, with alienation: subjects are divided against themselves and their
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activity, allowing the producers to be separated from their products. Alienation and
estrangement are the present condition. Yet even more important than the initial theft is
repeat Adam Smith’s founding myth of money, rooted in the double coincidence of
wants, whereby an orange farmer may not want apples from his neighbor but is happy to
make the sale if he receives money, which is not a product but a medium of exchange.
This just-so story makes a capitalist labor arrangement appear to be a simple exchange of
the products of labor for money, which is infinitely more convertible than labor’s product
and should be appealing to labor. Yet workers do not sell products to their employer but
their time, which is a commodity that is sold for less than the value it produces. The real
theft of capital and the key to Empire’s exploitation is thus the alienation of subjects from
their time. Moreover, just as money’s operation as a medium of exchange hides the
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 it rains in Epicurus’ metaphysical
“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
where objects’ time is controlled by articulating them with a body and setting the body’s
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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...” (Foucault, 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 concerned with restricting space and time within
manageable blocks of the barracks or factory, which treat space as a container and time as
workers, which begins with removing them from their means of subsistence and reducing
them to absolute poverty, The Spectacle abstracts time through dislocation, which treats it
not as an object but as a source of power; moreover, just as labor’s potential is displaced
measure, the abstract potential of time is similarly displaced but through a different
countable medium, space.30 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”
30
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.
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(Lefebvre, 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
and temporal closure. At first glance, abstract space appears to produce differences itself,
but upon closer inspection it is obvious that abstract space expands by appropriating
difference from the outside (Lefebvre, The Production of Space, 389-391). Yet in its
differential field – everywhere in the Metropolis, laughter, music, sex, dance, language,
and film mutate and change despite certain restrictions. Amidst this flourishing
difference, however, the present expands like a vast desert. The halting power of space
comes from its heterogeneity, which The Spectacle uses to homogenize time into the
command labor without relinquishing the fruits of labor, the power of abstract space is to
Empire’s dislocation produces time that is “a time of times,” “a complex time that cannot
be read in the continuity of the time of life or clocks, but has to be constructed out of the
rhythms, turnovers, etc.” apprehended only “in its concept, which, like every concept is
never immediately ‘given’, never legible in visible reality” (Althusser and Balibar,
Reading Capital, 101-2). The result of this complex intersection of time is not an
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underlying time by which all other times are set or even measured but a mediating circuit
of abstract space and the temporalities it issues and revokes (Lefebvre, The Production of
Space, 95-99). Moreover, The Spectacle leverages time against space by charting a path
through the cycles of the Metropolis before committing to their extension. Time enables
Empire to lay out a structure to overdetermine the contingency of the Metropolis’s space
of encounter. Just as “a spider conducts operations that resemble those of a weaver, and a
bee puts to shame many an architect in the construction of her cells,” Empire’s worst
architects triumph over the best bees because “the architect raises his structure in
imagination before he erects it in reality” so “at the end of every labour-process, we get a
result that already existed in the imagination of the labourer at its commencement”
(Marx, Capital, Volume 1, Chapter 7). Recognizing the implication of this argument –
that it is time being gutted and not some idealized version of the human – Marx further
clarifies the distinction with the declaration that “time is everything, man is nothing; he is
at the most time’s carcass” (The Poverty of Philosophy, Chapter 1.2). Empire thus mocks
the search for authenticity, which holds that lived time as the only authentic experience,
an illusion that the Spectacle can provide without threatening its iron grasp on the future.
abstractions. While the present passes as one continuous line, the past and future do not
(Deleuze, Bergsonism, 53). The past exists as a collection of the present after it has
passed; these past-presents then gather like a photonegative to be projected onto the now-
present. Alternately, the future already existing in the present as anticipation, which is not
the future itself but ideas of the possible futures. To freeze the vitality of time in the
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Metropolis, The Spectacle translates each side of time into the permanent nostalgia of
relics and the infinitely malleable but empty code of calculus; captured in photographs as
moments already passed and traded as the variable potential of commodity futures
(Internationale Situationniste, 57). Locked into abstract space and made visual, time is
that images of futures that depart from the present are so overburdened by cynical
ideology that they are sold for cheap thrills and every politician comes of age by
denouncing ‘utopian thinking.’ The only believable future is painted from the same
palette as the present, subject to the same rules and relations, and objectively constituted
Covering up the alienation of time with the permanent spatial extension of the present is
not Empire’s original sin. Neither non-futurity nor quantitative abstraction need to be
treated as wound in need of healing. Or to put it another way, “the more we contemplate,
as spectators, the degradation of all values, the less likely we are to get on with a little
real destruction” (The Situationist International, Leaving the 20th Century, 102). When
considered from this perspective, alienation should not be subject to melancholic lament,
which would only birth political formations that court moments that never come. Rather,
the alienation of time raises different questions: what can be done with alienation? how
The Sex Pistol’s prophetic exclamation of “No Future!” is not an admission of defeat but
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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,” by promising
which only thinks about a future that stands on the shoulders of the past. Instead, it
pronounces 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 one stops being a good citizen (Bersani, Homos, 113).
Embracing finitude turns the alienation of time into a political position. Its politics uses
alienation as a fulcrum to pit the exploited products of Empire against its beneficiaries.
This process begins by abandoning forced austerity and its measured scarcity. Finitude
turns away from reproduction, both as an aim and a source of power. Cynicism,
depression, and hopelessness fill reservoirs unleashed against Empire in revenge for the
wounds it causes. Dangerous emotions pose a threat, not just to those who bear them but
their source, Empire – the political imperative is to channel them. This should not be
these dangerous emotions are not unhealthy reactions to a sound world; they should be
everyone’s natural reaction to the terrible situation facing us all. To throw them away
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would only rob some subjects of the only thing Empire has ever given them. So instead
of avoiding their terrifying energy, dangerous emotions can be made political by giving
politics can become reactionary, as when it is used to restore a lost time or attack
abstraction with stubborn disbelief. But once politics is freed from the demands of
to flourish.
risk, debt, and other tools designed to temporally limit their behavior and begin living
futures not possible in the present. These lives are no longer punctuated by the same
reference points as the citizens of Empire, which gives them access to potentials that they
are expected to withhold from themselves. The political test is whether subjects engaged
in a politics of excess will exhaust Empire by releasing temporalities that make the
Dislocation contains a different set of potentials. Rather than treating the loss of time as
an enabling condition, as finitude does, the politics of dislocation attends to the non-
Spectacle as a never-ending present, that present is not a single time but a collection of
times. The uneven process of dislocation thus constitutes a peculiar present where:
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not all people exist in the same Now. They do so only externally, by virtue of the
fact that they may all be seen today. But that does not mean that they are living at
the same time with others. Rather, they carry earlier things with them, things which
are intricately involved. [...] Times older than the present continue to effect older
strata; here it is easy to return or dream one’s way back to older times. [...] In
general, different years resound in the one that has just been recorded and prevails.
Moreover, they do not emerge in a hidden way as previously but rather, they
contradict the Now in a very peculiar way, awry, from the rear. The strength of this
untimely course has become evident; it promised nothing less than new life, despite
its looking to the old (Bloch, “Nonsynchronism and the Obligation to Its
Dialectics,” 22).
Thus the only thing synchronous about the many times of the present is their
common present. Their contrasting temporalities are made evident – but only as
Empire does not control those times like a State. States present static images of
themselves as eternal and unchanging. But Empire does not seek to monumentalize the
Metropolis, which is pregnant with disjointed times sprung from the folds of other social
formations. Empire does not strip those times of their force or march them to a single
cadence. Rather, Empire draws on the power of differentials, alienating that power from
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its source by cloaking the Metropolis in false cyclical time (Debord, The Society of the
Spectacle, Theses 148-163). Made cyclical, time is given a false movement that always
returns time to the same moment. Thus, even as the Metropolis takes on a differential
appearance in space, it presents every new moment as a simple repetition of the last.
Empire’s movement proceeds by way of rhythm. Coordinating the various cycles of the
Metropolis, Empire creates a vibration that builds correspondence between space and
time. This is not the well-drilled marches that Foucault found so interesting, though
Empire does maintain them to dazzle subjects wistfully searching for authoritarian order
in an age of chaos. Dislocation instead demands that Empire produce an odd rhythm:
Even in biology, the movement of feet, while they alternate when walking,
syncopated rhythm does not produce dissonance. Movement is first and foremost
A radical politics of dislocation therefore targets Empire’s rhythm, which reframes the
potential of the Metropolis is neither decisive nor precise enough to muster a finely-
coordinated counter response. The greatest potential for antagonism within the
remain forgettable as long as small puddles never turn into massive torrents. But
following a more illustrative example, the Metropolis leaks time as moles and
contradictions, hypocrisy, double-talk, and unfair treatment rather than in spite of it. The
error emerges from the assumption that revealing these inconsistencies somehow
neutralize their power. But the uneven ground of the Metropolis ensures that Empire will
never be consistent, and Empire itself appears less concerned with containing or
preventing these leaks than turning them to its own advantage. This is because Empire
has internalized the Maoist lesson that the two sides of a contradiction need not end in
not,” produces a rhythmic sound that cannot help but generate difference, as “two feet
never strike the ground with exactly the same force,” “can be larger or smaller according
to individual constitution or mood,” and because “it is also possible to walk faster or
slower, to run, to stand still suddenly, or to jump” (Canetti, Crowds and Power, 31). The
power of this difference is felt in the crowd. “The means of achieving this state was first
of all the rhythm of their feet, repeating and multiplied, steps added to steps in quick
succession conjure up a larger number of [people] than there are” (31). The effect is not a
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single coordinated mass, but a rhythmic or throbbing crowd, a disjointed crowd
motivated by the sound of footsteps. This sets the stage for a politics of rhythm, which
emerges from “steps added to steps in quick succession” that “conjure up a larger number
of [people] than there are” (31). Rather than disrupting Empire’s rhythm, these
movements are a creative production of their own, ecstatic rhythms that beat to tempos
independent of the ones that pervade the Metropolis (Tiqqun, The Cybernetic
Hypothesis). These rhythms have the potential to disrupt the temporality of the
Metropolis, but to do so, they must dislocate the present in both space and time so it can
Once the plague appeared in the seventeenth-century Modern State, certain measures
were ordered to be taken. It began with shuttering the town, locking residents into their
homes, and emptying the streets of anyone but officials. After segmenting the town so it
could be swept section-by-section, inspection became the norm – all functionaries were
deputized as monitors, and sentinels were appointed to watch every gate and street. Daily,
a legion of syndics were dispatched to review the health of all residents. Their inspection
began with a syndic stopping by every house; the inhabitants were required to appear in
the window before him, he called each by name, recorded the health of each person, and
if an inhabitant did not appear, the inspector determined why. “Everyone locked up in
their cage, everyone at their window, answering to their name and showing themselves
when asked – it is the great review of the living and the dead” (Foucault, Discipline and
Punish, 196, modified to be gender neutral). From these daily reports, the duties of the
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lowliest of syndics produced a system of reports that became a “system of permanent
registration” good enough for even the magistrate or mayor, for it contained the age, sex,
and condition of everyone within the town (196). While it is unlikely that the actual task
was undertaken with the precision outlined in the general order, it was no doubt executed
carefully enough to indulge the fantasy it creates: a world where regulation utterly
pervades all aspects of everyday life that every individuals was laid bare by power, so
that control acted not on “masks that were put on and taken off,” but through “the
assignment to each individual of their ‘true’ name, their ‘true’ body, their ‘true’ disease”
At its most basic level, the plague city’s system of permanent registration is a mode of
because it connects anomalous pieces, such as bodies to a voice and appearance, and not
other bodies, drawing a transversal thread through organs – thus hunger is expressed not
by forcing another’s stomach to growls but in pleading them for food or showing them
type of transmission, yet one that returns in the final instance to a subject. Famine or
disease are thus centered on an active subject, communicated with the declaration, ‘we
need food!’ or ‘he is stricken.’ And even in the event of circumlocution, there is still a
however, because registration communicates only after affixing attributes to the subject.
Ultimately, the connections that registration forges through communication are not kept
internal to the subject but facilitate transmissions between a definite subject and its
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outside. In these openings, pierced by the outside, registration splits the subject open to
soliciting sights and sounds for observation, recording, and intervention. Registration
control.
Even after the plague was treated and gone, the Modern State retained the system of
permanent registration. Maintaining such a system for all aspects of life proved
registration would control existence down to the smallest detail. The Social State
problems such a system posed for the Modern State – selective use. The selectivity of the
Social State enabled exclusion, which results in the differential treatment of subjects and
flows whereby it regulates them with less surveillance, not more. And unless the
excluded become nomads able to find an autonomous way of life, Biopower leaves them
to flounder if not die. So while the Social State constructed the massive system of The
Social on the basis of permanent registration, it did so as a ‘frugal state,’ which posits that
governance works best when it is efficient and offered only to subjects that have won its
favor.
Empire, however, is unwilling to support even the subjects willing to compete for its
favor. At most, it provides the means to ‘help them help themselves.’ And it is for that
purpose that Empire preserves the system of permanent registration. Each of measures set
up for the plague city can be found in the Metropolis: there are bodies that are treated as
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individuals, locations where they are registered, places where they are commanded to
appear, names to which they must respond, and records that report their condition. And
yet, while the compulsory system of appearance that arose in the Modern State still exists
in the Metropolis, the treatment regimen it was constructed for does not. Empire makes
exposure mandatory, enjoining subjects to reenact the drama of the plague, but it
modifies the ending by withholding the cure. And due to this mandatory exposure, all the
residents of the Metropolis are given a voice – but only to confess why they are not
already dead.
understand anything. Subjects are not required to understand what they do or why things
operate the way they do. This is because it is not necessary to dupe anybody when it is
easier to confuse them. The Metropolis is thus full of clutter, filled with enough
incomplete theories, half-truths, and distracting stories that meaningless habits seem
are still expected to profess investments, intentions, and beliefs. To compensate, Empire
experiments with forms of knowledge so it can still reliably trust confused subjects. For a
time, psychoanalysts dominated marketing firms and ad agencies, selling secret codes for
unlocking consumer deepest urges. After a while, survey teams replaced the mysteries of
the unconscious with scientifically-designed studies, hoping that buyers act in the market
just as they act in the lab. And now marketing has entered the age of neuromarketing:
psychologists armed with brain scanners search for autonomic responses strong enough
to circumvent humans’ rational faculties altogether. What these different approaches have
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in common is that they identified visibilities similar to the ones made available through
compulsory registration.
generated. While only the seeable and sayable determined how subjects received
treatment in the plague city, absolutely anything that can be recorded is gathered in the
speech and writing are replaced by code. Through code, the Metropolis becomes the
and whatever cannot be recorded is treated as if it does not even exist. Moreover, while
speech and writing is intended for humans, code is intended for humans and intelligent
Empire augments human system with the computational power. Empire thus sets
codability as the condition for appearance in the Metropolis, dispatching less refined
The positivities of the Metropolis make possible Empire’s adaptive system of control. In
systems such as the Modern State, division operates through a general binary whereby
everything in a particular category marked for exclusion. Even in floating system of The
Social, where exclusions are under constant revisions, division occurs by relegating
subjects to the outside. In the Metropolis, however, positivities are treated as intersections
single shared category. Furthermore, the sea of positivities that constitute the Metropolis
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also changes how articulation functions. The Modern State considers each part to be a
representative of a greater whole, a stand-in with access to the same resources as many
other similar parts. Empire, however, selects visibilities for their composability – their
ability to relate to and interact with other visibilities to form a composite, and the power
that is produced in such fabrication. Thus, when Empire makes additional selections, it
does not do so to produce the same effect but a differential one. By affording visibilities
the ‘democracy’ of appearance whereby they all appear different but they all appear in
the same way, Empire differentially and selectively administers division and articulation
while claiming to have done away with the ills of exclusion and representation.
to gain a wider grasp of the sensible. This ecological expansion of the senses listens to
screaming yeast, surrenders bodies to their bacterial overlords, and looks for the
Michelangelo of the stars. And the change of scenery empties the luster from the more
habits of thought wedded to bodily wholeness and psychic mastery. Yet Empire’s rigid
anti-humanism does not follow from a project of liberation but enslavement; it changes
its way of looking so as to tap into a wider array of material forces. Thus the widening of
Empire’s gaze trades off the fine-tuned expressiveness of language for the force of code.
As one programmer notes, language is useful for inventing poetry because its complex
constructions grasp at nearly inexpressible things unavailable to code. In the end, code is
not make for good reading because it only has one meaning: what it does; “its entire
meaning is its function” (Ullman, “Elegance and Entropy”). The same goes for Empire, it
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produces effects in the Metropolis that are worth appreciation or even study, but behind
Empire lies only one thing: the total domination of everything that appears.
Yet Empire does not tear humanity from the heavens all at once. The processural
against itself. Internet commenting exists as a powerful example of this conflict. When
becomes difficult to determine whether the commenter is even human at all. But even
shift to regain traction. Particularly thorny aspects of human appearance such as gender
or race reappear, but emerge from more dubious locations – gender-identity is inferred
from self-reported tastes and race extends from the user’s location. But following in the
footsteps of marketing, internet commentators often forgo facts for obvious inaccuracies,
transmission with affective charges, sending explosive missives simply meant to provoke
messages are transmitted, but not as carriers of meaning between two easily identifiable
subjects. This is not new to the Metropolis, as it is also found in anonymous pamphlets or
unsigned images popular in other times and places, but it suggests a political power
registration. The system of registration has been called upon to launch a counter-attack
authentication that tie accounts to verified identities. Despite those controls, insinuation
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has only grown and permeates most forms of online communication.
thoughtful self-reflection, The Spectacle finds other avenues for generating visibilities.
Empire extends the limited ‘truth of the market’ that was turned into a form of
governance by the Social State into a regime of veridiction for all of the Metropolis. In
turn, Empire is able to release its hold on The Social, letting it die a slow death, while
opening up subjects and flows to other forms of registration. At its most extreme, Empire
degenerates, illegals, and cheats to complete its metamorphosis into a crime syndicate
that finds a way to always take a cut, whether it be through skimming off the top, running
registration of The Social for less humanist systems, Empire taps into far greater
reservoirs of value – from the inorganic body of the earth to the slowly-accumulated
evolutionary wealth of living species – but in turn gives up on its most powerful
mechanisms of social control. As visibilities shift and the Metropolis gnaws through what
remains of The Social, fraud, piracy, and other anonymous behavior will only rise. The
that undermine the system of permanent registration in the service of liberation, not
exploitation.
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PART 3 – CONFLICT
The point is not just to understand Empire but to destroy it. At least for a time, the walls
of the State were under siege by critique, which mustered an army of reason targeting
State found ways to capture reason for its own purposes. The Spectacle packages every
product through cynicism, and critique has become just another means to spread
detachment and fatalist alienation. Yet even if Empire’s pervasive use of cynical reason
does not completely damn the future of critique, it does serve as a cautionary tale for
those engaged in the politics of truth and warns of the declining efficiency of forces
backed by critique alone. It is then the destructive power of critique that should be
recovered, its critical function, as it realizes a particular type of force – the force of
conflict.
Conflict remains essential – it is not enough to turn one’s back on Empire, for it persists
regardless of how much one denounces, refutes, or scorns it. And even if Empire can
withstand critique, its forces can be opposed. Fortunately, opportunities for struggle are
numerous within the Metropolis, as there is much that escapes the grasp of Empire, if
only partially. Two forces in particular are already sites of conflict that have the potential
to expand into general revolt: affect and anonymity. Affects emanate from the residents
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of the Metropolis as they manage their conflicted sense of self to secure survival in a
usually confine subjects to a dark interiority, yet a handful of political groups have
demonstrated that these affects can serve as resources for action. Anonymity abounds
amidst the glitch, noise, and clutter ubiquitous to the digital culture of the Metropolis.
Furthermore, while those aspects of digital culture can frustrate the coherence required
for many political projects, they also expose advantages for anonymous action. But it is
not enough to merely describe affect and anonymity – they must be intensified. And to do
so, the conflicts should be dramatized and given their own consistency, which requires
Dramatization
On their own, concepts are bloodless things begging to be brought to life. And as long as
they remain pure knowledge, we remain ignorant of the conditions that give concepts
their force. When dramatized, however, concepts spring alive with the quality and
ploy but an integral part in the practical, artistic, and critical expression of concepts:
practical, because a dramatic script calls out to be picked up and animated with force;
artistic, because each director stages a new version of concepts and each actor puts their
own slant on their character; and critical, because many foreseeable dramas are imagined
31
“We distinguish Ideas, concepts and dramas: the role of dramas is to specify concepts by incarnating the
differential relations and singularities of an Idea,” Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 218.
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but only one is acted out, leaving many potential sensations unexpressed or even
aim of dramatization is not the establishment any particular state of affairs or a set of
exemplary models to be imitated but blocks of sensation that inspire further movement.32
In fact, its power is greatest if expression persists even when the expressed thing is no
longer there.
Each of the following chapters is centered on a concept, first affect and then anonymity,
and is dramatized by their own set of conceptual personae struggling against Empire.
Some of the dramatic scenes of conflict are later identified or even unpacked, while
others are not. The result is a tenor that carries through each chapter, even when it causes
the narrative to appear disjointed. The intent is to create movement through sensations
which escape the hegemonic sociology of social movements that stamps out cookie-cutter
subvert the Metropolis. And the method is to play out, to dramatize, some of the
differences that express the quality and intensity of our conflict with Empire.
Radical politics was plagued for a time by the dilemma of spontaneity and organization.
32
In his book The Transversal Thought of Gilles Deleuze: Encounters and Influences, James Williams
argues that sensation is “movement in itself, an inner resistance to identification” (48).
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seemingly natural reaction to the horrible circumstances of violence and tyranny – often
leading to slave uprisings, peasant revolts, or political exodus. Jealous of the elegant
geometry of the Modern State, Lenin suggested a science of revolution to turn natural
instincts into an objective force. Sharing in this belief, his comrade Trotsky illustrated the
scientific model with the metaphor of a steam engine, explaining that the powerful energy
of the mass mobilizations driving the Russian Revolution would have dissipated if not for
the piston-box of the party, which compressed the people’s energy like steam at the
Luxemburgism, and more contemporary resurrections of the party – are all based on an
unfortunate error of thought that holds substance to be hylomorphic, that is to say, that
matter lacks order (the spontaneous actions of a people) and must have laws imposed on
it from the outside to give it form (the organization of the party). At least two strong
objections should be made to a hylomorphic model of politics: first, its emphasis on unity
and coherence gives ways to today’s hegemonic sociology of social movements, which
extends the gaze of the Spectacle to all matter, representing it as abstract, unspecified,
Individual, 47-48); and second, it treats the whole world as the Archaic State treated
labor: as a master commanding his slaves, whose activity appears as the result of an
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Even Lenin realized this error, and after August 1914, he considered the question of
organization in both form and content, which he used to differentiate between “an
“The Leninist Theory of Organization,” 96). Though such a refinement worked for a
time, it was doomed to replicate its error on a larger scale by way of the statist dialectic
of recognition whereby the image of politics is only seen through its photonegative,
depicting only what the narrow vision of the State has already captured. Empire has done
away with this lifeless dilemma, subsuming the State, which was unable at last to repel
what it could not identify. It is time for radical politics to respond in kind. In place of
spontaneity and organization, we can thus look to escape, which poses questions of life
and strategy.
Life and strategy can evade the false dilemma of spontaneity and organization. Even
though both life and strategy are often represented hylomorphically in preparation for
capture by nascent State-forms. Life, for instance, is often cast into the torturous depths
of a subjective interiority so that subjects willingly seek out relief, even from their
identity for the sake of easy reproduction regardless of circumstance. But here, life is
generates a set of felt relations – affects. Though affects are usually registered as feelings,
spontaneous and passive processes that can be drawn on as a political resource against
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Empire. Strategy also isolates forces that can be used in political struggle, foremost
among them the power of anonymity. Of the previous strategies of anonymity, one
installed anonymity and escape as decisive principles: guerrilla warfare. The theory of
guerrilla warfare thus suggests how certain strategic advantages can be exploited by
anonymous forces constituted against the Empire, which are fighting deep within the
Metropolis. Ultimately, affect and anonymity reveal a new conceptual terrain beyond
political illness, insinuation, glitch, clutter, and noise – all forms of escape essential for
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Chapter 4 – Affect
“Everybody Talks About the Weather, but Nobody Does Anything About It”
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
social connection.
A floor cuts the frame in half, the low shot focusing 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
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 safely walk big city streets.
In the next shot, we finally catch a glimpse the character as he moves in and out of the
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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
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
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
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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” (Foucault, 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. The product of Publicity and the Spectacle, the deep interiority of the
self opens like a crack for Empire to plunge into. Escape is only partial as long as it is
“Western man has become a confessing animal” (Foucault, 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
politics.
The private inner self of confession boasts a striking architecture built for introspection.
In his Confessions, the seminal text on confession, the great jurist-priest Augustine
depicts enormous monuments that furnish the depths of the soul. Fields. Wide expanses.
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Souls are constructed like a lata praetoriae (spacious palace) or aula ingenti (vast court)
but without ceilings, open to bask in the light of the Sun (Augustine, Confessions,
movements, inward and upward. Inward, as a container, the soul holds the immense store
of memories unique to each soul. And upward, as an opening, its paves a startling array
of avenues that all lead toward the heavens. But jurist-priests do not ask their subjects to
look inward to trace its every curve, as one comes to know the shape of their body, or
study its structure for hidden truths unique to one’s nature, as our contemporaries do.
Their obedient eyes must turn in-and-then-up to find a God that shines within the
courtyard of those who leave behind the outside world and look in themselves. Yet such
exposure does not reward them with the pleasure of basking in fields of glory or even the
gift of the truth of the self; searching the wide spaces reveals a divine knowledge – the
truth of their sin. The soul shields sinners who follow the jurist-priest from the
penetrating eyes of others, deflecting the judge of visible acts by locating inner truth in a
deep hidden space only accessible by the self. Yet such deflection comes from opening
up the self to an endless form of intimate judgment, the infinite knowledge of God, who
not only sees all actions – both public and private – but also hears all thoughts, knows all
motivations, and senses all desires. Furthermore, jurist-priests demand that followers bare
their soul in the vastness of great courts, presenting every result of the endless searching
Empire, happy to indulge religious fantasies of the infinite, does nothing to impede the
ongoing construction of cathedrals to the self. Yet few build the steeples that reach
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toward the heavens in a vain attempt to touch the divine. The souls of Empire take after
Locke’s dark room, sealed off from the Sun (An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, 11.17). But unlike Locke, who thought like a carpenter when designing
windows of perception to the soul, Empire teaches its subjects to be miners that enjoy the
darkness. At first glance, souls in the Metropolis appear as dark rooms hidden from the
prying eyes of the Spectacle, deep caverns of sensation that subjects flee to for private
relief. The Modern State has problems with such spaces, worried that they offered refuge
to men fit in action but sick in mind or heart. But with its legions of experts, it expands
the priesthood to a broad range of eyes and ears. Doctors, fathers, teachers, and judges
benefitted from the invention of confession’s most curious effect, ‘the speaker’s benefit’
– a tool that cuts with the twin blades of truth and power in order to leave a strange
of the truth of one’s inner self, confessional utterances do not simply restate facts already
found in the world. Rather, confession had to be invented in order to establish a process
for subjects withdrawn into their private worlds to still register their existence. Therefore,
by attaching the heaviness of judgment, speech is then burdened with real or imagined
repression or shame. With the death of God, confession barely seems worthwhile, for
hidden barbs do not carry a divine penalty. Yet the power of confession grew in
profanation, as the State’s experts found that the measured palliative of clerical
absolution can give way to the deep reservoir of inner pleasure unlocked through
transgression, which sets aside the marginal comforts of ultimate forgiveness for near
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endless oceans of masochistic passion delivered by the shame and difficulty of
confession. For the compensation of the speaker’s benefit, Empire radiates mixtures of
pain and pleasure, producing desires that ease subjects out of hiding through the pleasure
of exposure.
Empire’s subjects live in an age of appetites, indulgences that come from the Spectacle
piercing the dark folds of the soul’s architecture. The scorching light of the Spectacle
sears the soul, not by shining in the courtyard of the devoted or peaking through the dark
explosion of appetites cannot help but be subversive – it toppled the Eastern Bloc to end
the Cold War, recently overthrew North African dictators, and nearly upended the whole
world in the 1960s. But despite their unruly nature, Empire usually finds a use for these
desires, stoking and redirecting them through the most basic technique of misrecognition:
hushed tones or anesthetized clinical terms can prevent their explosion, or in the event of
detonation, control its concussive waves. Just as madmen are kept in cages, not for their
own protection but to minimize their ability to disrupt others, confession also occurs in a
private language behind closed doors. When forced to speak familiarly about themselves
with such an estranged tongue, many subjects forget to consider whether the words on
their lips are truly theirs or the voice of another. Yet the ritual of confession is not just an
expression of dark truths – it is their consummation. And experts of all stripes have
in their patients, marketers convince consumers that they have been missing something
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their whole lives, and politicians whip the people into a frenzy. The confusion further
extends to secrecy, as subjects seeking to avoid the penalty of breaking a taboo are to
enjoy confession but simultaneously deny that anything was spoken at all. Buoyed by a
culture of denial, the Metropolis is filled by anxious residents who spread rumor and half-
truth, and despite being unsure of the source, they are eager to pass it on all the same.
The Metropolis is barely more than a swirling circuit for the dark force of appetites. Yet
the Metropolis would collapse without Empire, which unfolds the dark depths of
introspection in order to extend its far-reaching circuit. Empire demands that all secrets
are made public and thus engineers souls that transparently conduct appetites while
concurrently uncovering even more subterranean passions. The Modern State is desperate
to generate transparency and thus sets the Police to cordon off a scene and suspend all
motion until everyone and everything has given an account of itself. But the minimum
speed of life in the Metropolis is far too fast for total arrest, however, so Empire
establishes transparency in what is left of the Social. The social desire for virtue sets good
citizens down the tangled path of their souls as if their liberation depends on every
possible discovery. Each descent uncovers what appears to be fragments of truth, which
are later confirmed by experts as prized artifacts of the self. As the trips become more
numerous, the process drops lower into the subconscious until its is nothing but a habit
emptied of shame and giving an account of oneself becomes a custom as regular as any
other part of everyday life. This is how Empire makes the profusion of dark appetites
satisfaction for taking personal ownership over a passing interest. And this unending
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stream of difference is why the Metropolis cannot help but be banal. Private rooms are
completely exposed by Empire’s compulsion to confess and thus drained of the thrill of
secrecy; the soul no longer obscures a dispersed network of thoughts, obsessions, and
pleasures but puts each and every one of them on display, open to the prying eyes of the
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
The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 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.
The waiting room is an essentially boring space where subjects are forced to give the
most insipid account of themselves while waiting for something to happen. Beckett
canonizes this practice in Waiting for Godot by satirizing tramps who remain stuck in
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self-reflection and thus fail to explore humanity’s newfound freedom from transcendent
authority. Despite the absurdity of searching for the truth of oneself while waiting, the
myth persists. And thus to exist in the Metropolis is to respond to an endless barrage of
questions, which inevitably lead to interrogation, supervision, and modification, and often
end in punishment and constraint. For some, anticipating the interventions of authority
makes the soul a place of anxiety, even if they are unable to determine why or for what
reason. But for those habituated to waiting, Empire’s repression of the event is no cause
desirable; experts will analyze the material and get back to them with a proper diagnosis,
whether it is the cause to their marital strife or which Harry Potter character they ‘are.’
Caught within the trinity of souls – Augustine’s divine courtyard, Locke’s dark room, and
Empire’s waiting room – contemporary subjects are unsure whether it is their eternal fate
that lies in the balance or just a way to pass the time. What is clear, however, is that
Empire has extended the reign of the present by indulging the subject’s dark appetites and
strengthening the compulsion to confess. Yet Empire’s creeping boredom is not enough
to satisfy all desires; so, just as Christianity secretes its own atheism, with Empire arrives
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
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an absolute right based on the categorical and immediate abomination of the social order
of the Modern State, which they declared to be the continuation of war by other means,
which only their revolt could end (Foucault, 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
Refusal is how nothingness revolts against Empire. More than a withdrawal, refusal
attacks the relations of the Metropolis and everything that they entail. Its aim is to make
those relations impossible, sweeping away the Metropolis and Empire with it. Militants
used the notion during Italy’s decade-long Years of Lead, looking to subvert the labor-
relation through a subtraction that started in Turin’s Fiat plants and magnified across
society through the 1970’s. Workers unwilling to struggle with management for
command over their own power developed a strategy for what they did control, the
productive capacity of labor. The gamble was that without production, management
would wither away and die. The strategy of refusal thus rejected the aspect of Leninism
that replaces capital’s party-form with its own, and it instead revealed a force of life that
exists outside the workplace and beneath the streets (Tronti, “Strategy of Refusal”). The
conflict simmered and grew too hot for the otherwise sympathetic population when the
Red Brigades assassinated Christian Democratic leader Aldo Moro, which allowed the
State to launch a punishing anti-terrorism campaign that destroyed the movement and
imprisoned thousands.
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It is through the refusal of interiority that the soul is incorporated into the strategy of
nothingness. The refusal of work can be easily modified to consider Empire’s domination
of the soul. Work has not disappeared in the Metropolis, but it is no longer limited to the
factory. As Empire makes work a general condition rather than a clearly defined activity,
work becomes an activity centered on the soul. Everywhere one looks in the Metropolis
one finds the soul at work. Less obliquely, however, refusal pits nothingness against
interiority itself. Under the terrifying gaze of the Spectacle, the interior of the self may
appear natural or simply inevitable, but Foucault’s genealogy of the self reveals ancient
conceptions of the soul that lack private secrets. To the extent that Seneca or other
held no secrets and was meant only to enhance public life (Foucault, “Technologies of
the Self”, 35-7). Yet the ancients hold no clues for resistance to Empire, only the notion
that humans have the capacity to exist without the interiors to which the residents of the
The refusal of interiority comes into its own when it uses the landscape of the Metropolis
against Empire. First, it begins with subjects that embrace the dark desires of the soul, as
they peddle in the most potent form of power. And every tool has an infinite amount of
possible uses, many of them contradictory. So once a tool is released from its expected
function, it is free to become a weapon. Second, the soul becomes a form of struggle
flee their habitat to the dark recesses of the soul only to bare its contents in an attempt to
gain salvation. The enemies of Empire do not change their habitat but instead change
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their habits, using the soul to invent novel ways of revolt. And third, the struggle
transforms into revolt when refusal begets nothingness. Nothingness will reign when the
soul annihilates the transcendental conditions that enable all interiority. In this sense,
nothingness is not the indulgence of destructive appetites but the making-possible of new
ones. Such is the state of war against the perpetual present; at a certain moment, nothing
antagonistic to Empire.
“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
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and uncles, and ruthless boys and brothers. Separately, the girls felt suffocated. But
would feel regret or remorse, or guilt and sin, they simply scream FOXFIRE BURNS &
BURNS and FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS SORRY! And the way they tell it, there is no reason
for you to feel sorry either. As Maddy writes of their notebooks, Foxfire’s actions are no
doubt crimes, yet “most of these went not only unpublished but unacknowledged – our
victims, all male, were too ashamed, or too cowardly, to come forward to complain.”
Yet it is not the crimes that define them, it just adds to their strength. Simply being
together, even before undertaking their campaign of justice, the girls began their
migration from forgettable girls to figures of history. Foxfire was already on everyone’s
lips. Their mere presence bred curiosity and suspicion. But they truly command respect
once they begin striking against the men who left them hurt, alone, or vulnerable, and it
is this respect that allow the girls to finally embrace the distrust for adults and boys they
There is much to say about the history of Foxfire. Tales of youthful exuberance or
and FOXFIRE FINANCES seal their sad fate. But these distract from Foxfire’s agonizing
truth: the path of liberation and escape winds through negative affects and not around
assault of patriarchy like a bad storm. Their innermost feelings well up, some given
expressed through grief or outrage, but more often, they are nursed in seclusion. Can this
shared secret turn ugly feelings into outright conspiracy? Or even more importantly, turn
revenge into collective liberation? Most sober-minded critics find ugly feelings unfit for
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
(Ngai, 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. Diagnosing such feelings should avoid 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
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,
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one sheds paranoid anticipation and becomes open to surprise stripped of the dread that
comes with always waiting only for bad news. The key is to prevent the clinical tool of a
Depression is a real danger, however, a cause for concern for the ongoing feminist project
‘Public Feelings.’ After decades of battle against Empire by means of queer activism, the
AIDS crisis, anti-racist advocacy, electoral campaigns, and anti-war mobilizations, these
depressive attitude seemed lost as all that seemed possible was full-blown depression.
solely clinical explanations for their shared anxiety, exhaustion, incredulity, split focus,
and numbness, they began investigating how the already-alienated life in the Metropolis
was compounded by the trauma of national crises, beginning with 9/11 and continuing
with the war in Iraq, the Bush reelection, and Hurricane Katrina (Cvetkovich, “Public
Feelings,” 459-468). This is not to say that they find psychiatry or psychoanalysis wrong
or counterproductive, but these feminists were determined to turn feelings into collective
forces against Empire; and from that struggle, Feel Tank Chicago was born.
Feel Tank Chicago seeks access to political life through the affective register. The project
names their malaise ‘political depression,’ which they define as “the sense that customary
forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer
working either to change the world or to make us feel better” (Cvetkovich, “Public
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Feelings,” 460). To further their investigation, Feel Tank holds conferences, exhibitions,
and International Days of the Depressed. As a camp celebration of depression, they dress
in bathrobes and protest with banners, signs, stickers, and chants emblazoned with
“Make It Stop,” 2). Contrary to cynical ideology’s denunciation of those who are
apathetic as complicit with the status quo, political depression identifies Empire and not
selfishness or individual illness as the cause of apathy. Causes for this suffering are
numerous and easy to identify – the racism of white supremacy, the exploitation of global
capitalism, the sexism of patriarchy, the degradation of the environment, and the violence
of heteronormativity to name a few – while the course for their abolition is not readily
apparent. Political depression thus demonstrates how Empire spreads depression like a
fog, cloaking adequately political alternatives in the everyday life of the Metropolis. One
such blockage is the traditional politics of think tanks who manage technical flows by
drawing on ‘whiz kids’ computer models, policy expertise, and insider connections to
craft politically-relevant briefs. The effect of reducing politics to this form of government
is cataclysmic: it reduces time to a perpetual present whereby politics is nothing but the
art of compromise. In such a world, the status quo is all that is visible and thus reigns
supreme. The group has found a less restricted route through the Metropolis as a ‘feel’
tank, which works to turn private feelings into a public resource for political action. And
to this end, Feel Tank operates in the nexus of activism, academia, and art. Such an
approach reveals different paths to politics, animated by perspectives that still imagine
alternatives to the Metropolis and are careful to avoid those channels long mastered by
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Empire.
By making depression political, Feel Tank also challenges a deeper and more pervasive
blockage: the interiority of the subject. With its attention to the affective dimension of
politics, Feel Tank upsets the dark room of the self that is cynically manipulated by
policy analysts and liberal political theorists. Affects point to a circuit of power whereby
external forces impress themselves on the biological imperatives of bodies, which makes
Metropolis even if a necessary biological component exists in the body. And although a
certain body may be predisposed to depression, its affective cause emerges as a political
event in the life of the Metropolis. Identifying such a cause may be difficult, as
depression often arises due to something as diffuse as bad weather or accumulative time
spent in an adverse environment, but it is in this sense that patriarchy appears as a storm
and Empire as a desert. It can therefore be said that affect not only demands that the
emotions of subjects count as politics, but it also demands a political account of emotion
exterior to subjects; as Ann Cvetkovich writes, politicizing feelings requires “the same
expression as the truth of the self” (Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” 462). Feel Tank
large extent as external to the subjects that feel them. Even visualizing fatigue as an
object and treating it as such coaxes people to explicitly connect their internal feelings to
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external problems (“if Psychological Prosthetics™ were to make you custom-designed set
of luggage for your emotional baggage, how large should it be? Would you like to send it
this notion is expanded, its political conclusion is decisive: affects do not reveal the truth
of a subject’s private life and are often merely a habituated response to Empire’s twin
forces of Biopower and the Spectacle. This point may confuse those who imagine affect
only as a tool of liberation. But only those who mistake Empire for its authoritarian
cousin the Archaic State of conquest would think that the State only grows through
crippling paralysis. This is not to say that Empire has stopped using its most effective
instrument, fear, especially since the general environment it creates in the Metropolis is
no doubt to blame for political depression. But the difficult truth is that any State-form
that incorporates the liberal pole of governance also expands its oppressive control
through the inspirational force of positive affects. Although social movements may draw
on affect as a form of power, so does the Social State. Positive affects swirl through both
the vortex of Zuccotti Park and the high rises of Goldman Sachs. Negative affects are
caught at work at temp jobs but also at feminist conference panels. Like the ambivalence
Treating affect as a point of disagreement is one way to maintain its ambivalence, and a
crucial aspect of that disagreement is the struggle over happiness. Sara Ahmed contends
that because happiness has been historically given as an emotional reward to women for
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The full Psychological Prosthetics luggage questionnaire asks: “How big is your emotional baggage can
it fit in a backpack, do you need a hand truck, or a moving company? Is it toxic, explosive? Do you share it
with others? Does it get smaller if you share it, or larger? How do you get rid of it?” Hibbert-Jones and
Talisman, “Psychological Prosthetics,” 3.
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submission to gendered demands, especially those of the family, the struggle over
happiness “forms the political horizon in which feminist claims are made” (Ahmed, The
body are either joyous or sad, with joyous affects being those that increase the capacity of
the body and sad affects being those that are destructive to the body. Whereas such a
subjects. Furthermore, in the alienated world of the Metropolis, the ability for objects and
bodies to evoke pleasure in subjects is not always beneficial, as most of its residents are
consumed by dark appetites they know to be against their best interest. Objects of
desire’s ability to bruise subjects, their uncanny talent for wounding people but also
teaching them to enjoy that wound, does not reveal the true nature of the soul; it merely
confirms the indelible power of connection. And the world is not at a loss for
connections, as today is not the age of sad passions but of the masochistic contract which
Empire seals by fusing the cruel thrill that comes from exploiting others with the self-
dependent, and knowing your place, creating a split subject that desires happiness but
only experiences pleasure. Feminism’s project is to end the tireless pursuit of pleasure,
which Ahmed argues begins through becoming a killjoy. Killjoys initiate a revolt against
the promise of happiness through “acts of revolution” and “protests against the costs of
agreement” (213). Feminist killjoys complete their revolutionary conversion when they
abandon happiness and embrace affects as troublemakers. The face of their struggles may
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appear surprisingly common – queer novels that end on a sad note, or spoilsports who
ruin the atmosphere of a room – but their aim is transformative: to not satisfy already
existing tastes but to establish new ones. This requires dismantling the current
architecture of the soul and the construction of a new one. Killjoys thus open escape
routes from the Metropolis that “open a life” and “make room for possibility, for chance”
by not only wanting “the wrong things” that Empire has asked us to give up but to “create
life worlds around these wants” (20, 218). Yet such openings are only visible to those
who have given up on the illusion that positive affects draw out the best in people.
What ultimately characterizes a troublemaker is how they live life. For the troublemaker,
life is not about survival but escape – escape from the causes of suffering, escape to a
better world, and most importantly, escape as a form of struggle. The troublemaker
dreams of freedom by imaging politics as a utopian space where “we could possibly go
somewhere that exists only in our imagination” (Kelley, Freedom Dreams, 2). Yet this
freedom is without shape, as it is only the notion that things must change. Such belief is
founded on the revolutionary demand to live a life without compromise, and in doing so,
it sees demands to imagine a world after the revolutionary break as collaborating with the
reactionary forces of the present. And it is this veiled desire for something better than
motivates the dreamer to gamble the transient pleasures of the present for the ecstasy of
biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. As a young child, she was often
whites. She grew to hate the throaty sound of men clearing their throats because she knew
it would most likely end in a disgusting mark on her coat or shoe. But her mother, quick
to explain the randomness of the event, would deflect the importance of race by
complaining about the “lowclass people who had no better sense nor manners than to spit
into the wind no matter where they went” (18-19). Although she was convinced by her
mother, the memory of the event always nagged her. Years later, noticing a decline in the
pervasive but seemingly random behavior, she asked her mother, “Have you noticed
people don’t spit into the wind so much the way they used to?” (19). She immediately
realized her mistake after seeing the pain in her mother’s face. Rather than admitting that
she was helpless to prevent her young daughter from being spit on, her mother used the
only protection she knew: to change reality, or at least her daughter’s perception of
reality. Despite the complicated relationship she has with her mother’s classism, Lorde
does not seem to begrudge her mother’s quietism. What the event ultimately
with the present and political escape as the struggle for freedom.
Negative affects are thus to be seen as weapons in the struggle against Empire. Anger,
frustration, disdain, and envy are reasonable reactions to the hostile environment of the
Metropolis. But when subjects soberly manage those negative affects, they are privately
treating symptoms and not publicly addressing their external cause. As Feel Tank shows,
those affects can become a resource for political action when the private space of the
subject is emptied and feelings are made public. But these affects are also revolutionary,
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as they imply their own escape: by signaling a bad reaction to a toxic environment,
negative affects speak to a cause outside the interiority of the subject as the source of
general discontent – a cause that can be changed. Yet ugly feelings are not enough if they
are only employed to battle the oppressive conditions of everyday life in the Metropolis
just to live to fight another day. To become truly antagonistic to Empire, then,
interiority and utopian struggle. For negatives affects may serve as motivation for a better
world (FOXFIRE BURNS AND BURNS), but they generate black holes of misery unless
subjects refuse to blame themselves for negative affects (FOXFIRE NEVER SAYS
SORRY!) and maintain a revolutionary trajectory without compromise with the present
1966 that depicted a train from the German national rail service plowing through the
snow. The message: regardless of bad weather’s obstructions, Deutsche Bahn always
powers through.
But in spite of its clever reworking of Mark Twain’s quip, “everybody talks about the
weather, but nobody does anything about it,” Deutsche Bahn was soon plagued by
weather delays, which led to a chilly Germany reaction and gave rise to a new joke:
“Have year heard this one? German rail has four enemies: spring, summer, fall and
winter.”
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Within a couple years, the slogan reemerged with an explicitly political valence. A new
spate of posters arrived bearing the same slogan, “Alle Reden vom Wetter... Wir Nicht.”
But this time, the phrase appeared on a bright red background above the faces of Marx,
Engels, and Lenin. Made by the German SDS, it elevated the original poster to world-
Yet the German SDS would suffered a similar fate. Peaking a few months after the
posters were designed in 1968, the group met extreme government resistance and was
unable to mount an effective opposition to the German Emergency Acts, which led to its
As the black clouds of repression gathered, other groups emerged. Waging a New Left
revolt against the so-called Auschwitz Generation, post-68 militants had one goal:
agitation. Among them, one of the most innovative forms of agitation came from the
whose therapeutic effects were found in pitting one’s mental illness against centers of
capitalism. In that way, SPK was determined to “turn illness into a weapon.”
what does the subject speak? Moreover, if they refuse the idle chatter of the waiting room
that Mark Twain so despises, is there a form of talk that is itself a form of action?
discussion could start with queer history, which seems to lend itself to this backwardness,
as its twentieth century stories are full of personal loss, social detachment, and
fragmented community (Love, Feeling Backward, 146). No doubt such backwardness has
ample company, as Benjamin wrote that the angel of history has his open wings caught in
“a storm blowing from Paradise” that propels him into the future facing backwards, so
that all he can see are the horrors of what has already occurred (“Theses on the
Philosophy of History,” 257-8). A similarly backward-focused subject would also feel the
full force of the catastrophe, which is pregnant with “shyness, ambivalence, melancholia,
despair, [and] shame” that lead more often to failure than satisfaction (Love, Feeling
Backward, 146). Yet failure is the point of such an orientation. In contrast to work that
And when this antagonism reemerges, feelings that were previously wished away or
ignored reappear, and the gag order on negativity 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
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achievement, the spark of pure revolt rarely burns bright – but it can still be found.
A good place to search for the politics of fire that will engulf the soul is in the home. For,
if “the soul is the prison of the body,” then Locke’s dark room is not only the prison of
the soul, but has served as a private place of torment for women (Foucault, Discipline
and Punish, 30). As Claire Fontaine maintains, when Virginia Woolf illuminated the dark
rooms of The Social, all she found society to be was a conspiracy of men:
conspiracies that sink the private brother, whom many of us have reason to
respect, and inflate in his stead a monstrous male, loud of voice, hard of fist,
childishly intent upon scoring the floor of the earth with chalk marks, within
artificially; where, daubed red and gold, decorated like a savage with feathers he
goes through mystic rites and enjoys the dubious pleasures of power and
dominion while we, “his” women, are locked in the private house without share in
the many societies of which his society is composed (quoted in “Human Strike
So even as Empire’s unfolding of the Social into the sprawling exteriority of the
Metropolis scatters the markings, the home – wherever it appears – still serves as a
private place of torment kept separate from the space of politics. Its violence remains
unique because contrary to the worker, whose spaces of production are public and thus
has a social infrastructure widely written about by scholars of politics and labor, the
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housewife at home is marked by isolation and enforced privacy. And the symptoms of
such incarceration are severe. As Adrienne Rich explains, “the worker can unionize, go
out on strike; mothers are divided from each other in homes, tied to their children by
compassionate bonds; our wildcat strikes have often taken the form of physical or mental
breakdown” (Rich, Of Woman Born, 30). Locked in such a lonely place, many captive
souls can hardly imagine rebelling against anything or anyone except themselves.
Yet it is precisely rebellion against oneself that may offer escape. And perhaps that
liberation arrives through the failure and incompleteness generated by negative affects.
The power of negative affects does not seem to draw from interiority even if Empire
makes it appear so. Rather, the negative circulates through a radically exterior path. By
way of Hitchcock’s The Birds, recent queer theories suggest an escape from the violence
of the home, especially after the forces of the negative takes flight. The advertising
slogan Hitchcock devised, “The Birds is coming,” gives the film a sexual dimension.
Taking the license to perform a sexualized reading, one must then consider how the birds
enter the scene: as an excessive, interrupting force that upsets the heterosexual aim of the
film (Edelman, No Future, 129-133). In particular, the film’s lovebirds, Mitch and
Melanie, are not only distracted but their attempts to consummate their love are
prematurely disrupted by birds that keep coming without meaning or explanation; as Leo
Bersani would note, the birds are not an enjoinment to come together (Homos, 129).
Rather, the birds point to a power outside oneself so potent that it empties the home and
threatens all imaginable futures (or at least those of the domestic couple). To be clear: the
antisocial force does not emerge from the pleasure of any particular identity, as if it was a
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singular source found in either the dark recesses of the home or patiently received while
queuing in the waiting room of the Metropolis. If anything, the swarming birds feed on
the same destructive power that surges through Empire as it unfolds the remains of the
Social – not the product of an identity, no matter how deviant or transgressive, but the
undoing of any and all identities. Dependent on the anti-normative power of unfolding,
however, Empire also opens itself to attack from the damaged, failed, or abandoned
Looking backward, the Socialist Patients’ Collective, a militant group in Germany from
the 1970s, provides an interesting example of the power of failure. According to the SPK,
illness itself is resistance. Recounting a passage from anti-psychiatrist D.G. Cooper, SPK
found the potential for alienated life to make its mark on history:
there is the story relayed by Bruno Bettelheim in The Informed Letter (1961)
about a girl who, in an extreme moment of insight, recognized and broke out of
one of the most formidable piece of alienation in all human history. This girl was
one of a group of Jews queuing naked to enter the gas chamber. The SS officer
supervising proceedings heard that she had been a ballet dancer and ordered her to
dance. She danced, but gradually approached the officer and suddenly seized his
revolver and shot him. Her fate was obvious and it was equally obvious that
nothing she could do would alter the physical facts of the situation, namely the
extermination of the group. But what she did was to invest her death with an
intense personal meaning that at the same time expressed an historic opportunity
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that was tragically lost in the massified process of the extermination camps
Knowing that their own illnesses were enabled them to make a similar intervention, SPK
began “multi-focal expansion” based on the theory that every mentally ill person is a
compact point of focus of society, and that the effects of illness can be released back into
society through agitation (SPK, Turn Illness Into a Weapon, 74).35 Acutely aware that
society was just as afraid of illness as violence, SPK undertook an exploration of how
illness is “life broken in itself” (10). Confident that “illness as a destroyed labour force is
the grave-digger of capitalism,” which they state geometrically in the formula “illness =
internal barrier of capitalism,” they promise to make “all persons fall ill at once” in order
trans. modified). Although they saw many different reactions to capitalist alienation, SPK
imagined alienation to be fully generalized as a shared condition that makes every subject
feel at least some illness of a sort and thus establishes a common strand for collective
revolt (9-11). Knowing that illness was not oriented exclusively toward revolt, they
sought a dialectical explanation for its reactionary and progressive moments. In its
reactionary moment, they argue that illness as a “destroyed labour force” is repaired “in
order to continue its exploitation” by means of a healing process that only performs
34
The reference to Naziism is not hyperbole for SPK was agitating against what some in Germany called
“The Auschwitz Generation,” which formed a cultural and political hegemony that had not found much
distance from National Socialism and even included many former Nazis.
35
The foco theory of guerrilla warfare was conceived by Régis Debray, though he attributed it to Ernesto
“Che” Guevara. Foco unifies all three of Mao’s stages of guerrilla warfare in a single movement whereby
the role of the vanguard is not to seize state power but to stoke a popular insurrection through armed
struggle. For more on the original concept of the foco, see the subsequent chapter and Debray, The
Revolution in the Revolution?.
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simple “repairs of the labour force” to return “the ability to work” (84). But in it
progressive moment, illness expands, “starting from the affects of ill people (that means
starting from those ones who have become conscious of their suffering),” through the
liberation of “energies that when released will turn sufferers into activists”; a release “as
an explosive material, an intensification, that will smash the ruling system of murder”
(65; trans. modified). For SPK, agitation thus unlocks the progressive moment of illness
as collective organization focused in protest.36 SPK thus shows how Empire produces
numerous antagonisms that populate the Metropolis. And thus the concept of illness
produced by SPK still threatens Empire, not in terms of a mass organization or even
focalized expansion, but as an antagonism that spreads through the fabric of the
Metropolis.
In short, the positive task of the SPK is much like that of Feel Tank, which is to turn the
their cause. On the level of the self, such a rewired circuitry externalizes negative affects
and attenuates the destructive impact of interiority by distributing misery throughout the
36
For a more personal description of SPK’s activities, consider former member Magrit Schiller’s account in
Remembering the Armed Struggle, “I immediately put my name down for one-on-one meetings, which
were called ‘individual agitations’ in the SPK. During the meetings, I had a great need to talk first of all
about me, my life up to now, my insecurities, my fears and my search for something different. At the
beginning, this was the only reason I went to the SPK several times a week. During all of this, it became
clear to me that my loneliness and sadness and the many problems I had with myself were not my personal
and inescapable fate. … I realized that there were lots of people who felt the same way I did, that there
were social and political reasons for many things that made people suffer… After a few weeks, I felt at
home in the SPK. I took part in several working groups, put together flyers with others, and printed them
on our small machine. I felt good about things and I worked eagerly. We had an old record player on which
we repeatedly played the ‘Ton, Stein Scerben’ song ‘Macht kaputt, was euch kaputtmacht’ [Destroy what is
destroying you] and sang along with passion to the texts that expressed exactly how we felt about life.
There was always something going on. Small or larger groups of people held heated discussions about the
latest events, the situation in the world, books or personal questions. We prepared protest actions and
demonstrations” (21-24).
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shared space of politics. But negative affects continue to burn cold when locked away
inside the isolated depths of victimized subjects or even shared among accomplices like a
million tiny daggers. In contrast, the SPK’s externalization process intensifies negativity
rather than dissipating it, cultivating the force of incapacity that channels power through
refusal. In particular, it refuses to make the subject receptive to negative affects. And in
refusing to bear even a single negative affect, this politics of fire turns the dark interiority
into a weapon against its own very existence, consuming the pain of affliction as its cause
recedes. Yet the repressive powers of Empire lie ready to neutralize subjects that grow
too intense for the Metropolis. This was the downfall of SPK. After a few turbulent
months in 1971, an SPK member committed suicide, dozens of SPK members were
jailed, and SPK was evicted from the University of Heidelberg, which lead to the SPK
As an organization, SPK unfortunately ended in failure. Yet failure need not spell defeat.
As the blistering storm of Empire beats down on subjects, it is destroying the interiority
of subjects. Yet subjects willing to weather the storm have already given up the refuge of
the soul and are undertaking a refusal of the interiorities imposed by Empire. Though
they do not abandon interiorities completely, refusal allows these subjects to refashion
their dark appetites from tools of Empire to weapons for its dissolution. The black clouds
of patriarchy often transform their appetites into negative affects and the subsequent pain
of isolation, paranoid, or depression, even when the subjects know the true cause of their
suffering. Yet it is those negative affects that form the basis of revolt. Troublemakers
have shown that they can use their detachment to reorient blame, interruption, and
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destruction and direct the torrent within the Metropolis. And embracing such a struggle is
painful, taxing, and promises to end in failure, but surviving in a hostile environment is
not enough. The path out of the desert has never been more certain, for “it isn’t running
away they’re afraid of. We wouldn’t get far. It’s those other escapes, the ones you can
open in yourself, given a cutting edge” (Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale, 8). As the
severity of the weather increases, these opportunities for escape spread. With each
additional downpour, a new reservoir of emotion collects. With time, the angel of history
will look back on the refusal of interior in the revolt against Empire as just another
catastrophe. But let’s hope that instead of horror or failure, he finds joy.
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Chapter 5 – Anonymity
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
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
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 and unleashed their fury; and second, the arrival
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
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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”
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
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.
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Striking fear in hearts of the three enemies of classical anarchism – The Church, The
State, and Capital – radicals committed a remarkable number of 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” (Graham, 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; one masks its anonymous force to avoid
Our contemporary times are replete with radicals who have found their own boastful
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propaganda. 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
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 that resists legibility.
society constituted by a moral majority, these hidden elements draw on deeper and
reasonable proposals of social anarchists and the excesses of their darker offspring – is
Is there a power of truth that is not just the truth of power? asks Gilles Deleuze
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
Expressions that speak reason but do not prefigure. Expressions that speak passions but
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are not feelings. The expression that lingers when the thing expressed is nowhere to be
found. In short: the force of anonymity. That is today’s dark propaganda by the deed.
A dangerous current flows through propaganda by the deed. It circulates below the streets
of the Metropolis without paying the tolls set up by possessive individualism. To survive,
it must remain hidden, anonymous, as Empire, through the power of the Spectacle,
silently reduces sense to the mere expression of personal ownership. This is because the
power of this existential liberalism lies in its image of the subject: separate and
nothing but a series of choices (Anonymous, Call, Scholium II). Caught between the
needs of biopolitical management and a system of compulsory visibility, there is only one
subjects: confession, the noisy baring of the soul. The consummate existential individual
personal ownership for them as if revealing a truth unique to their particular existence.
Accordingly, the Metropolis does not create a private hell for each subject – it merely sets
out vortices in a turbulent sea of difference to trap individuals. Yet Empire strains when
guiding subjects to these traps, as there are forms of expression that flow right past the
machines of subjection. Expression flows beneath and around the subject and thus
constitutes an undertow or riptide that only sometimes leads to the vortexes that traps it.
And this is where danger arrives, for everything that swims through Hjelmselv’s net and
avoids nibbling on Lacan’s fishhook expresses the potential of an event that cannot be
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contained by a subject.37 When expression explodes onto the scene like a crashing wave,
the event rushes past ownership to flood the Metropolis with images, affects, and signs.
And it is in this chaotic surge of expression that propaganda by the deed delivers a great
Burroughs is no doubt right when he says that language is a virus. Language infects
humans like an alien intruder – arriving as an external force that can be captured but
never fully tamed. The virus infects its host through fragments from passing
conversations on the bus, garbled text messages from a friend, billboards mostly ignored,
and webpages only skimmed. In fact, most humans spread the virus without even
stopping to understand what they are doing. “Your wife looked at you with a funny
expression. And this morning the mailman handed you a letter from the IRS and crossed
his fingers. Then you stepped in a pile of dog shit. You saw two sticks on the sidewalk
positioned like the hands of a watch. They were whispering behind your back when you
arrived at the office. It doesn’t matter what it means, it’s still signifying” (Deleuze and
Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 112). At its core, language shows that expression
dissemination, often detached from or even contrary to truth or understanding, that most
of the Metropolis inoculates itself through skeptical cynicism, which neutralizes the
intensity of the new with the knowing repetition of a dull prefabricated self. Yet some
37
Louis Hjemslev uses the net as a diagram to explain how semiotics ‘capture’ the referent, which is an
unformed matter he calls ‘purport.’ For more, see Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 43-44; 108.
Another, more widely used, semiotic model is Jacques Lacan’s “Che vuoi?” graph, which curls with the
Other’s question of ‘What do you want?,’ or more colloquially, ‘What’s bugging you?.’ See Lacan, Écrits,
690.
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communication slips past this cynicism by evading the public gaze of the Spectacle.
Rumor, allusion, and innuendo propagate without a definite subject and thus
anonymously fill the hearts and minds of the Metropolis without broadcasting from a
pinpointable location; these ignoble forms of expression spread through contagion, which
communication is insinuation, which provides a dangerous hint without giving away the
whole conspiracy. While providing poor material for fact, insinuations travel quickly and
build a heightened need for action as they deform. And it is thus insinuation that may
novel politics of articulation. Its politics is neither that of persuasion nor the presentation
of facts, which are the forms of rhetoric used by authoritarians and liberals, respectively,
employed by authoritarians to enroll you in their form of association, often through fear
and alarmism. A nest of such associations entwine the Metropolis, but their incomplete
strands are always coming apart because Empire does not draw lines as the Modern State
did – Empire’s fragmentary subjection guarantees that there are friends, enemies, allies,
and foes inside everyone. In spite of this fragmentation, however, there are still
paranoiacs who maintain the party line, and the result of their imagined associations is
38
Insinuation thus blurs the distinction between two dominant models of communication, the transmission
model and the cultural, because it asks the materialist question of transmission of a signal through a
medium but without focusing on the genesis or reception of that signal but also asks questions about the
cultural effects of common forms and a communication event. For more on the distinction between the two
approaches, see Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” Communication as Culture, 13-36, and
Grossberg et al, “Media in Context,” MediaMaking, 3-33.
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always the same: they either implode under the weight of inconsistency or explode their
milieu with the fury of a million minute distinctions. Alternately, the presentation of facts
is a naive liberal belief that ‘the truth sets you free.’ It is evident that the politics informed
by its worn motto ‘speak truth to power’ no longer works – (if it ever did) – for “truth
isn’t outside power or lacking in power . . . truth isn’t the reward of free spirits, the child
of protracted solitude, nor the privilege of those who have succeeded in liberating
themselves. Truth is a thing of this world: it is produced only by virtue of multiple forms
under the control, dominant if not exclusive, of a few great political and economic
apparatuses (university, army, writing, media)...” (Foucault, “Truth and Power,” 131-
132).
In the Metropolis, the question should be inverted: it is not ‘what truth works?’ but ‘why
language starts with “the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication
signs “are never univocal packets of information but rather affective charges,” which
suggests a practice of reading that “consists in the appropriation of signs through free and
indirect discourse – properly ‘free’ and ‘indirect’ to the degree that emitting singularities
are respected as capable of new expressions and connections” (Smith, “Deleuze’s Ethics
of Reading,” 49). Language is thus not meant to be believed but to be obeyed. And
recourse to either of the two poles of sovereignty. It is expressed in graffiti that ‘just
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appears’ in the absence of an obvious author to announce Empire’s incomplete control
over the Metropolis and to take sides in the Spectacle’s war of appearances. And as
insinuation spreads through the Metropolis, it resists the control of organization structures
and refuses to build the party; it spreads the virus and mutates as it interacts with every
new host. At most, insinuation builds an “Imaginary Party” – a party of negativity that
renounces any positive form and whose conspirators only communicate through
insinuation. The object of the Imaginary Party is thus not to build a united front against
Empire but to gather “an ensemble of conditions such that domination succumbs as
quickly and as largely as possible to the progressive paralysis to which its paranoia
condemns it” (Tiqqun, “Theses on the Imaginary Party,” 59-60). The Imaginary Party
does not appear as a concentrated force, then, so when its actions are attributed to
individuals,’ and anyone else fed up with society. This is how the insinuations of the
Imaginary Party have been able to hide in the shadow of every recent political rebellion,
from Egypt to Greece – for they do not help in a swift seizure of the state but blaze paths
that mimic the strange drift of aesthetic revolutions, which are sometimes sudden and at
Insinuation’s transmissions are not always received clearly; it confuses those who cannot
understand communication when it is stripped of its rational kernel. Even without reason,
insinuation can still connect with chains of association, though whatever insinuation
becomes associated with is only fastened to it through external relation. Images are
perhaps the most suitable vehicle for insinuation, then, as they resist signification in order
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to remain receptive, which allows them to shed layers of interpretation almost as easily as
they accumulate them. Yet insinuation is possible with any medium that communicates
intensity. Describing expression in terms of intensity may appear strange to those who
meaning passed either from mouth to ear or from text to eye – but language is only one
way to communicate the world, and it is a flighty one at that. Consider a few other forms
of expression: dance demonstrates that the movement of bodies can tug at the heart;
painting challenges the viewer to utilize every one of their organs as an eye; and music
sets life itself to rhythm and pitch.39 Each forms brings together expression and sensation
in its own way. And as each combination thrives in different circumstances, insinuation is
most suited to the most elusive sensations of the Metropolis. This is because Empire’s
circulation depends on the Spectacle creating subjects that are transparent conductors of
Insinuation, in contrast, raises words to a degree of intensity that avoids the amputated
consistency of clear speech but builds a longer sustain than a piercing scream. Instead of
39
“Certainly music traverses our bodies in profound ways, putting an ear in the stomach, in the lungs, and
so on. It knows all about waves and nervousness. But it involves our body, and bodies in general, in another
element. It strips bodies of their inertia, of the materiality of their presence: it disembodies bodies. We can
thus speak with exactitude of a sonorous body, and even of a bodily combat in music – for example, in a
motif – but as Proust said, it is an immaterial and disembodied combat “in which there subsists not one
scrap of inert matter refractory to the mind.” In a sense, music begins where painting ends, and this is what
is meant when one speaks of the superiority of music. It is lodged on lines of flight that pass through
bodies, but which find their consistency elsewhere, whereas painting is lodged farther up, where the body
escapes from itself. But in escaping, the body discovers the materiality of which it is composed, the pure
presence of which it is made, and which it would not discover otherwise. Painting, in short, discovers the
material reality of bodies with its line-color systems and its polyvalent organ, the eye.” Deleuze, Francis
Bacon, 46-47.
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contingent, contaminated, or unextractable. Yet the question remains: is its wild and
Insinuation’s effects are anything but clear, but that is what distinguishes it from the
Spectacle’s preferred mode of communication. To gain the upper hand against the
Spectacle, insinuation cannot have truck with most forms of thought. In particular,
political projects premised on clear demands, ‘best practices,’ and rational rules of
government have little use for the murkiness of insinuation. The triumph of liberalism,
and in turn the Social State, was the result of governance becoming purely presentist. By
casting history aside, the Social State declared that the government that rules best is the
government with the greatest capacity to extend the present (Foucault, Society Must Be
Without a speaking subject to hold accountable, insinuation may thus be the raw material
for a politics detached from or even contrary to the State. Its anonymity escapes the
coherent channels through which the Social State irrigates its capacities – functions such
as agriculture, industry, and trade, and apparatuses such as the army, courts, and
administration – and either disperses, seeping through the cracks to fill underground
reservoirs of power beyond the gaze of the Spectacle, or accumulates, forming rivers
whose uncontrolled fragments of words, images, and thoughts feed a sea of difference
with currents too strong for Biopower to pilot. This is why conspiracy and deviance are
two of the greatest enemies to Modern and Social States. Empire, however, transmutes
the State’s struggle against underground reservoirs of power and unpredictable currents
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of differences into the building blocks of the Metropolis. Lacking the State’s allergy to
insinuation, Empire often finds ways to put the products of insinuation to use. This is
because Empire establishes consistency and not coherence, and consistency concretely
elements (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 507). Empire thus uses the
connects flows and regulates their access to the outside. Without coherence to prevent the
incursion of the outside, however, the Metropolis is pushed past its limits and becomes
saturated. Marketers call it ‘clutter’ – and they are always trying to break through it.
Following the intersection of consistency and saturation, not coherence and conduction,
insinuation feed reservoirs that remain untapped by Empire? And what anarchic
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” (P5). But
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
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the anti-imperialist struggle is a coffee klatch” (P5).
What the RAF thus provides is their own anonymous communication: 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 expression as crude materialists whose voice were bullets
and bombs, even if they later provided communiques to endow their expressions with a
To most, the RAF’s gestures must appear futile, as they were not strong enough to
overthrow the government and did not present a public organization to build mass
membership. Yet the novelty of the RAF was that its members fashioned their way of life
into liberation struggles against Empire even without a colonial power to expel. In
particular, they adopted the perspective of military strategists whose life and death
scenarios had little room for self-abnegation or ineffective action. Moreover, they
developed a form of action that broke with the State’s politics of compromise and its
The RAF does not serve as a model, however. Although they gained substantial popular
support, especially among German youth, most of the RAF was quickly liquidated
because of the intensity with which they approached the struggle; similar situations
played out in the Europe, North America, and elsewhere. What the RAF does point to,
however, is the conceptual innovation possible when insinuation is taken beyond mere
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idle talk – most notably, a politics of clandestinity derived from guerrilla war, but one
The basic requirement for a guerrilla war is a rural population, at least according to its
theorists. Following a line from Mao through the classic texts on the guerrilla, we find
that the key to victory is a rural population’s semi-autonomy from the politics of the
metropole, a separation that hides and sustains the guerrilla. As one Maoist maxim goes,
‘the guerrilla must move amongst the people as a fish swims in the sea.’ This gives the
appearance of the guerrilla as an architect of insinuation who sharpens the people into a
political force. But to clarify, the guerrilla neither takes the peasants’ lead 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 of terrain is at its greatest advantage. The people are
thus not the object of propaganda but the cover used by the guerrilla to evade retaliation.
And as a result of the guerrilla blending in with the rural population, the enemy is left
with few options for identifying, containing, or eliminating the guerrilla. At their most
drastic, commanders thus resort to ‘draining the pond to catch the fish.’ Ultimately,
guerrilla war is a clandestine operation premised on the power of escape, which serves as
the decisive element in asymmetric warfare. Guerrilla distills escape in three basic
principles for defeating a superior enemy: an autonomous way of life, the advantage of
Empire. The conditions have shifted from those present in the middle of the 20th century
as Empire abolishes the boundary between the urban and the rural to form the Metropolis.
It is not a totalizing shift, as there are still many small ponds across the globe in which
guerrilla still swim, but self-sufficient peasants are quickly drying up as a resource. 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
Urban Guerrilla, 284-286). Focoism, a largely failed project, was formulated after the
Cuban Revolution to draw Mao’s three-stage developmental model of guerrilla war into a
single small nucleus of militants which leads by recruiting, organizing, and attacking in
jettison a substantial amount of focoism, most 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 itself ripen the conditions. Elevating the strategic role of the
city due to its function as the seat of political power, the theory of the urban guerrilla
marries armed propaganda with its political aim of political revolution. This theoretical
shift, from the rural to the urban, is based on a strategic gamble: that the urban way of
life, terrain, and camouflage are politically superior its rural counterparts.
The urban guerrilla concept offers a powerful diagnostic for the subversion of the
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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. Upon closer investigation, however, 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 clandestine 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, elevating withdrawal to the
primary objective in the process of attack. And because the Metropolis provides ample
opportunities for escape, it offers its enemies the means for its own destruction. Escape is
not the product of the guerrilla, as if they opened up escape routes; rather, the guerrilla is
escape itself – an army in perpetual retreat that wields withdrawal as an offensive force.
If the politics of the future is to avoid the same grisly fate of the guerrilla, however, it
may employ escape like the guerrilla – but to bring life where the guerrilla too often only
caused death.
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” (Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 279; trans.
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
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people like a natural reaction to an exterior threat that enables a nation “inferior in army
and military equipment” to turn 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 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. The theory further proposes that
it is discipline alone that separates the guerrilla from the mere criminal. The criminal
selfishly preys on oppressors and the oppressed alike with the only goal being their own
profit. In contrast, the guerrilla lives simply and expropriates resources from the rich and
powerful in order to build up the forces that distract, demoralize, and drive away the
enemy (Marighella, 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
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,
which develops softness through a power that produces more than it represses. Empire
thus casts the guerrilla into a sea of difference where the hardness of discipline become a
burden; for the shattered masses no longer appear as a people, but as the molecular
movements of the Metropolis, leaving the guerrilla to make wooden ideological appeals
for a humanity no longer there. Guillén, veteran of the Spanish Civil War, recognizes the
need for innovation. “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 point almost exclusively to one place: the city (Guillén, Philosophy of
the Urban Guerrilla, 240). The most promising avenue for success 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 the
disciplined ascetics of the rural guerrilla, the urban fighter must possess initiative,
of the Urban Guerrilla, 5). These characteristics are responsive to the subjective life of
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 is only
barely kept in check by the careful watch of the Spectacle and the immense management
of Biopower.
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The urban guerrilla is the embodiment of contingency made into a revolutionary force, as
the 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,
Thus with every rise in unemployment, social outrage, and cultural discontent, the urban
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 to “strike unexpectedly here and there with superiority of arms and
numbers” (Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 240; trans. modified). And it is
with the power of the unexpected that the guerrilla wages armed propaganda, for the goal
is to mire the enemy in confusion, much like the disabling power of insinuation. The
urban guerrilla is caught in the same fog and can choke while navigating 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, which liberates rather than conserves, then a different
route can be plotted – this time between living and struggling that leads neither to 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 unleash a deluge of contingency against Empire.
And to do so, it must shape the force of escape into a weapon of liberation that, like the
guerrilla, moves with the fluidity of water and the ease of the blowing wind but whose
The decisiveness of terrain. The guerrilla is mobile and avoids direct conflict. This is
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because the guerrilla cannot afford the narcissism of political activists who fight only for
moral victories. So accustomed to losing, some activists invented a way of winning that
parades their weaknesses in front of a higher authority to secure their pity – a ritual of
liberalism that Nietzsche ridicules as slave morality. The theory of guerrilla, in contrast,
pinpoints a weakness that can be made into a decisive advantage and compensates for the
rest. For the guerrilla, the weakness is the avoidance of direct conflict, an exceptional
case in regular combat, which is made orthodox and governed by a strategic principle: the
guerrilla should only engage the enemy at a time and place of their own choosing, and
only if success is guaranteed. The tactic of the minuet ‘dance’ is an elaboration of this
principle: the guerrilla force encircles an advancing column from the four points of a
compass but far enough away to avoid encirclement or suffering 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 (Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare). And it is with knowledge of the terrain
that the guerrilla dances the movements of life; imaginatively creating new combinations
of dispersion, concentration, and the constant change of position, the guerrilla dances to
the cadence of organic life’s interaction with its environment. The guerrilla, like
withdrawal – awakening its own strength as it draws its partner away from the source of
their power one step at a time. It is the choreography of escape that then 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”
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(Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 29).40 Instead, the guerrilla is an offensive force,
equipped to defend or occupy space. Moreover, the environment is the guerrilla’s 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 people or a new power is thus
inevitable.
The terrain of the Metropolis requires strategic innovation as it is not like the countryside,
yet new maneuvers can 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
poses a problem similar to Latin America’s mountains because the small parts of the rural
preserved by Empire are not only watched by suspicious locals but are also connected by
40
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.
Shaping this Darwinian analogy into the movement of life, Deleuze uses this among many other analogies
to describe the character of a line of becoming. For more, consult the work of Henri Bergson, Deleuze’s
Difference and Repetition and Bergsonism, Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus, Elizabeth Grosz’s
recent work on Darwin, and Claire Colebrook’s work on vitalism.
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globally-positioned by satellites. 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 share many characteristics with the countryside. In particular, slums are a
is from that abandonment that a new, crueler form of autonomy arises bearing the
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 (Taw and Hoffman,
Operations,” 74).
The most relevant characteristic of slums are their density. As the Latin American
theorists note, 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 employ tactics similar to those
used in the countryside. Brazilian students, for instance, have used a street tactic much
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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
Guerrilla, 24-25). 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 the only conceivable outcome and is certain to fulfill the twin
goals of neutralizing the enemy’s repressive forces and expropriating resources to expand
Escape remains the greatest challenge to politics created by the Metropolis. As every
direct conflict is avoided. Rural warfare only needs a crude concept of escape, as combat
occurs in an ‘open field’ that radiates outward from nearly any point in the advancing
enemy’s column. In the Metropolis, however, the Spectacle casts a gaze that touches
nearly everything, at least in part – even what is abandoned by the nourishing power of
Biopower. Therefore, the urban guerrilla cannot depend on density to prevent their
encirclement, as the open field does, but only on situations porous enough to provide
escape routes unknown to the authorities. In fact, these escape routes as so important that
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
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them” (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 25; trans. modified). 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 can be found in the Metropolis
where there is density, which is often located in zones of abandonment. Even as 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
develop a new form of escape to avoid their fate; for the history of urban action shows
that most guerrillas rose like lions only to be hunted, killed, or caged.
engagement, which affirms the strategic importance of visibility, anonymity, and escape.
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 (Debray, 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 of an image that swiftly appears with
an explosive force only to immediately recede. The guerrilla thus affirms the potential of
difference, whose singular acts must only be produced once, in contrast to reproduction,
which is how the State expands its coherent identity over and again (Lazzarato, Capital-
tumultuous Years of Lead, when numerous armed guerrillas simply imitated the state
while others dispersed “in a multiplicity of foci, like so many rifts in the capitalist whole”
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(Tiqqun, This Is Not A Program, 84). These rifts were filled by “radio stations, bands,
celebration, riots, and squats” that did not exist as occupations but as an empty
is “signed with fake names, a different one each time,” and thus “unattributable, soluble
in the sea of Autonomia” (84-85).41 These operations did not speak with the voice of a
coherence of a subject, but rather, their frequency and intensity formed a consistency that
nonetheless, “like so many marks etched in the half-light,” left but mere traces of
formidable” than their hardened counterparts in the armed ranks of the Brigate Rosse and
Prima Linea (85). The non-coherence of the autonomous elements therefore outlined the
struggle, which was not simply between revolutionary and conservative forces, but a
different way of doing 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
circulation of bodies between all of [its] points” (Manwaring, Shadows of Things Past, 7;
Controlling terrain in the city is difficult for the guerrilla. 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 it becomes a
41
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.
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battle of endurance rather than a show of strength (Guillén, Philosophy of the Urban
Guerrilla, 241). There are many parts of the Metropolis that appear as dark as a moonless
night even when the sun is shining its brightest, for anonymity is to the Metropolis as the
cover of nighttime is to the city. Within the density of the Metropolis, abandoned zones
shield 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 from 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
15-17). As the guerrilla shows, subverting the Metropolis does not occur by occupying its
space but by embodying the time of politics. In the face of the perpetual present
established by Empire, the guerrilla controls time and thus free space from the enemy.
And because the guerrilla need not reproduce 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
The offensive use of camouflage orients politics away from the Spectacle, which limits
descendent from the State. The guerrilla initiates this shift by establishing an
indistinguishability between themselves and everyone else. Once the guerrilla becomes
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imperceptible, their actions are no longer viewed as the actions of a crank, madman, or
criminal against the public but as the concrete expression of sentiments held by many –
every act ‘signs itself,’ claiming responsibility for itself “through its particular how” and
This Is Not A Program, 85). This underground force thus exposes itself to political
scrutiny even when hiding its source. 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
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
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
(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 261-263). And to the extent that Empire
consistencies are only the effects of its existence. The imperceptibility of the guerrilla and
neutrality, the guerrilla invites their enemy to “attack wildly” and paints them “as utterly
black and without a single virtue” (Red Army Faction, Urban Guerrilla Concept). The
reason is that such a bald characterization of the guerrilla draws a clear line between the
guerrilla and its enemy and substantiates that the guerrilla has won “spectacular
successes” (Red Army Faction, Urban Guerrilla Concept). This desire to be caricatured
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demonstrates how the guerrilla uses the strength of an enemy – its near-monopoly on the
mass communication – as its greatest weakness, as the enemy’s strength can be shown to
be mere bluster (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 52). When imperceptible attacks
lead to grand overreaction by the enemy, the image of an unassailable enemy vanishes.
While the enemy had previously fostered fear and humility – a deference produced less
by Empire’s sober supporters than its pessimistic critics – the guerrilla shatters this
unassailability, propagandizing the guerrilla’s strength while turning habits of respect for
the enemy into belittling mockery. To strip away unassailability, radical politics does not
need to follow the militarized path of the guerrilla, however, it only needs to evince the
consistency of its intensity. And in that way, there are alternative means to spreads the
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 clandestine 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 but a practical
force – a distinction with enough difference to goad Guy Debord to insist, “I am not a
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
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route will be taken?.’
To be clear: this is not a suggestion to practice guerrilla warfare. Everywhere that the
Metropolis spreads, it makes all previous forms of guerrilla warfare obsolete. The
subversion of the Metropolis may be clandestine; it will not be through military means
but through a battle of intensities. The weaknesses of the Metropolis cannot be exploited
through armed propaganda without ending in death. As the history of guerrilla warfare
demonstrates, escape, when it raises anonymity 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 adapt 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 products 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
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 the outskirts – everything is connected, just some parts have
older streets and some areas have no official names. In this world, cities are not distinct
dots on the maps but dissolve into their own regions. The Sprawl, for instance, covers all
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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 researcher “who kept
one thumb permanently on the fast-forward button” and 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” (Gibson,
Neuromancer, 7). Moreover, cyberspace has taken over much of people’s lives:
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
The Metropolis is rendered most vividly in these cyberpunk underworlds – places where
giant corporations control the world, ubiquitous technology drastically changes 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
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
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startlingly dark depictions of cultures digitally saturated by difference but plunged
deeper into futuristic miseries. Moreover, because The Sprawl mirrors our own
escape to communes in the woods, and immediately relevant 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.
but if “history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems,” then the architecture of
medium through which Empire wages its war of movement (Virilio, Speed and Politics,
90). And it is for this reason that the Metropolis should be described in the same terms as
information utilized is quite specific in three distinct ways: as “the relation of signal to
physical system” – all of which find corollaries in culture (9). Moreover, the reconfigured
terrain of network culture also shifts the potential objectives of revolutionary politics, as
51). Instead, network culture motivates digital actions that gain cultural expression
through a tactical use of media that “signifies the intervention and disruption of a
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dominant semiotic regime, the temporary creation of a situation in which signs,
messages, and narratives are set into play and critical thinking becomes possible” (Raley,
Tactical Media, 6). Such a cultural characterization of the political potentials within
network culture, which focuses on expression and not the struggle within information
itself, threatens to ruin tactical media where the guerrilla failed as well – by “confusing
tactics and strategy” (Guillén, The Philosophy of the Urban Guerrilla, 257). Moreover,
many of the mediums of digital culture are not well suited for tactical media’s emphasis
on persuasion or the presentation of facts – the internet, for instance, is a breeding ground
for conspiracy and insinuation, 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
(Dyson, “End of the Official Story,” 20). There is a way to cut through this confusion,
however: if politics considers how “the content of any medium is always another
medium,” then it can develop a strategy to wrestle simultaneously with the technologies
of the Metropolis and the world of digital culture, which demands a shift from signs to
signals and from semiotics to physics (McLuhan, Understanding Media, 8). Media and
literary studies have outlined theories for such a multi-dimensional shift, demonstrating
the different operations of speech, writing, and code. Now it is time to combine those
The strategic principles of guerrilla theory can thus be resurrected to guide anonymous
forces in the struggle against the digital culture of the Metropolis even if guerrilla warfare
cannot. In the Metropolis, anonymity is not just a force of subversion. In fact, Empire
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realizes itself as an anonymous force, for it won the Cold War not with an arms race but
by precipitously melting into a distributive network. As the Red Army Faction notes, it is
this anonymity 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.,” which disperses the State into a diffuse
Empire that 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” (“The Black September Action in Munich,” 223). Yet it would be wrong to
algorithms governing Wall Street financial transactions to the Obama Campaign’s voter
prediction models, material objects are interpreted like information on the internet:
specific user” and devoid of a real identity (Galloway, Protocol, 69). Once fully rendered
within this new strategic environment, cultural politics then becomes a struggle over
signal across a media channel (telephony, radio, computing) – which reintroduces the
question of materiality. It was with respect to materiality that 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; density creates mobility
and flexibility within digital oversaturation, where spam and ‘big data’ make overload
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possible; and the clutter of the Metropolis that provides the cover of camouflage is found
in the opposition of signal and noise of information theory, which both covers-up and
In spite of the pervasiveness of glitch, oversaturation, and noise, early imagery of the
cyberpunk hacker as guerrilla warrior against faceless corporations has not been realized.
Instead, numerous cultures have celebrated these digital byproducts, with glitch giving
rise to jarring video game art, oversaturation causing a boom in information miners and
data hoarders, and noise creating a distinctive form of post-punk music (Krapp, Noise
Channels). The problem with these cultural expressions is that they give an identity and
voice to these forces rather than circulate its anonymous force. The effect is that force is
slowed down to be made local and bounded, which causes it to either drown after being
Network Culture, 70). Perhaps today’s cyberpunk console cowboys have already become
media pirates that appear and disappear, “springing out of nowhere” to send signals, only
to dissolve as soon as the frantic transactions are carried out” (70). Whether or not these
pirates constitute a serious threat, it is clear that the struggle against Empire does not
occupying power within the carefully delineated territory of a nation-state. The lack of a
spatial solution itself is a consequence of the Metropolis, for it stretches out like the open
system of the Internet – a common space that grows through differentiation but also
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divergence and thus operates as a diagram whose basic function is communicative: the
overcoming of incompatibilities (42). And if the guerrilla then exists in digital culture,
albeit transformed, its strategy of withdrawal can utilize connective divergence rather
than spatial distance. There are already instances of this divergence, as seen in various
subcultures of glitch and noise, but they do not weaponize incompatibility, which must be
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, for glitches are still a deviation from the
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
advantage; so in video games a glitch can exploit grant a player powers not intended by
glitches can hint at exploits that exist as “a resonant flaw designed to resist, threaten, and
ultimately desert the dominant political diagram” (Galloway and Thacker, The Exploit,
21). While culture has a different architecture than that of a computer, exploits are holes
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generated by the hypercomplexity of any technical system that makes such systems
vulnerable to penetration and change. Given that the oceanic difference of the Metropolis
expands through complexity, exploits must exist throughout it. And most importantly, the
exploit hijacks an already existing system, it turns the already existing power differentials
in that system 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
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 data 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 data-gathering process suffers
from overaccumulation at the point when the cost of transforming the raw data into useful
information 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
is not the result of society’s inability to integrate its marginal phenomena; on the
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
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
temporary escape routes. In contrast to the guerrilla, the overloaded Metropolis leaks time
more than space. Just as cyberpunk’s adrenaline-fueled hacking scenes illustrate, the
terrain of the Metropolis makes space subservient to time – depicted most vividly in the
dramatic ticking down of a clock. Adapting the minuet to digital culture, it is conceivable
that temporary misapprehension and incomprehensibility could be used for the same
strategic purposes as in its guerrilla form: lessening the reactionary forces of the enemy
The unavoidable noise of digital culture provides the camouflage for operation. Noise is
loud dinner party, for example, create a feedback loop that drowns out certain intimacies
but initiates others that would be impossible without it. Noise should not then be
also true that “order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death;” rather, noise holds
222
any system open to its outside and “nourishes a new order” (Serres, 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” (Serres, Genesis, 7). In fact, a certain degree of noise may even
aid transmission, for it may allow signal compression that increases the efficiency of the
channel and its system (Hainge, “Of Glitch and Men,” 27). Even if the introduction of
noise improves signal compression, it does so by sacrificing fidelity for mobility and
flexibility. And it is here that the strategic role of noise emerges, as it engenders an
indiscernibility like that of the urban guerrilla and the people, but a more fundamental
one – for noise is the very material through which information travels. On the one hand,
this is why cultural forms of resistance like ‘culture jamming’ focus on signal distortion,
and other methods for introducing noise to disrupt the easy flow of communication. On
deeper level, however, strategic manipulation of noise allows for the creation of
control, at least temporarily (Deleuze, “Control and Becoming,” 195). Noise also marks a
destabilizing moment in a system that has a chance to widen the space of non-
It is finally time to answer Foucault’s demand for a force of truth that is not just the truth
typify the truth of force but they also epitomize the rhetorical power of action. Yet these
radicals were unable to find a force of truth independent of power itself. Instead, they
223
found that rhetoric and force were both amplified when treated as imbricated and thus
mutually constitutive – propaganda by the deed declared that the actions of anarchists to
be more than idle talk or utopian dreams, and guerrillas waged ideologically-fueled wars
The oversaturated streets of the Metropolis seem to announce that “we do not lack
communication,” but “on the contrary, we have too much of it,” and in fact what we lack
Philosophy?, 108). If that is the case, then neither the politics of persuasion or the
presentation of facts will do, for the Metropolis will remain unfazed as long as tactical
media leans on the force of truth. Rather, in the struggle against Empire, the only mode of
communication appropriate to the task is one that disrupts proper communication and
whose signal is one of ungovernability: insinuation. Though its effects are not clear, it is
obvious that insinuation unlocks an underground force in its flight of invisibility and
anonymity that subverts identification and legibility while distorting signals and
overloading the system. Insinuation has barely converged with the dangerous politics of
those who desire nonexistence and disappearance – those who have no demands, refusal
political representation, and rebuke negotiation with the present (Galloway, “Black Box,
Black Bloc,” 244). In the battles of appearances that consumes the Metropolis, the two
promise to make a potent combination. And perhaps they will be the fusion of force and
truth that will defeat Empire – injecting insinuations while fighting cultural politics in
digital code – releasing a cascade of affect charges while turning glitches into exploits,
over-accumulation into overload, and flooding the Metropolis with the noisy force of the
224
outside.
225
Coda
In the beginning, there is escape. It arrives ahead of thought and vanishes before it can be
caught.
Stories like those of the hill people resonate throughout the Metropolis, as many of its
residents are restless souls that dream of other worlds just beyond the horizon of their
own. There is something American about this craving and it is epitomized by the frontier
mentality, which is an outgrowth out of sovereignty’s dual desire for conquest and divine
providence. Yet escape exists far before the sovereign captures it for nationalist projects,
for the first escape began before humanity or even life itself. In fact, the origins of escape
stretch back to the earliest beginnings of the universe and the first differentiation of
matter. In that sense, escape is the primordial movement that contains its own cause
but itself – said otherwise: escape comes first and is superior, ‘escape is,’ and only
secondarily does escape exist as a reaction or rebound, as an ‘escape from’ or ‘escape to.’
More concretely, escape is the process of change found in all things, in the indeterminate
226
dance of subatomic particles, the origami folding of proteins, the slow drift of mountains,
and the mutant speciation of organic life. In short, escape is becoming, the force of
change, but described through its converse: ’unbecoming’ (Grosz, “Bergson, Deleuze,
otherwise limited in many ways; of them, cultural confinements of escape are particularly
declaring itself as the enemy of slave labor and state control by being the guarantor of
‘the right to work,’ ‘free markets,’ and ‘free trade.’ As anarchists have long shown, these
freedoms are not escape routes – the right of the worker to leave an employer does not
lead to free existence, for “he is driven to it by the same hunger which forced him to sell
himself to the first employer” and thus liberty, “so much exalted by the economists,
jurists, and bourgeois republicans” is but a “theoretical freedom” that is “lacking any
means for its possible realization, and consequently it is only a fictitious liberty, an utter
falsehood” (Bakunin, “The Capitalist System,” 24). Escape suffers an additional cultural
confusion that is even more basic: the notion that escape is an odyssey through space.
From this perspective, escape is a migration from this place to that – leaving the
country, running to the hills, finding refuge. But “some journeys take place in the same
adventures appear motionless because they “seek to stay in the same place” and instead
escape by evading the codes (260). And as long as we fail to distinguish between these
two uses of escape, extensive change and internal transformation, it remains a confused
concept.
227
When escape is an evasion, and not a departure, it can be a potent political tool. That is
not to say that creating distance between oneself and a potential captor is ineffective –
exodus and withdrawal have been powerful tools of refusal, especially against the
Archaic State. But it is no longer the Pharaoh that is nipping at the Israelites’ heels.
Rather, Empire has set out a brutally productive system of control that has enclosed
spaces as graveyards for the scattered peoples that remain there. In doing so, Empire
internalizes its own outside and reconstructs it as the Metropolis, unfolding as a giant
network of exteriorities. This theorization of Empire and the Metropolis owes much to
previous scholarly work, namely Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s trilogy of Empire,
Multitude, and Commonwealth, and the two journal issues of Tiqqun. Hardt and Negri,
who deserve credit for their part in re-popularizing concepts like ‘Empire’ and
capitalism, they argue, is the Common: the plentiful immaterial products of biopolitical
Empire (Hardt and Negri, Empire, 348-349). Yet their version of the Common commits a
cardinal offence according to Marx: Proudhonism. Just as Marx criticized social anarchist
good side that could be expanded and a bad side could be suppressed, one should object
to Hardt and Negri’s support of biopolitical production and its product, the Common, as
the good side of capitalism. For, if we follow Marx, “it is the bad side that produces the
Seventh Observation). And thus the Common is not a ‘good’ form of biopolitical
228
production that can be wrested from the unscrupulous hands of Empire. This is not to say
that capitalism will be defeated through a grand dialectical negation, for it certainly will
not be, but it clarifies the role of the Common: the Common is the shared efforts of those
who oppose the forces of Biopower and the Spectacle. Tiqqun is even more harsh on this
point, accusing Hardt and Negri of “an incestuous relationship with imperial pacification”
that wants “reality but not its realism” and thus “Biopolitics without police,
communication without Spectacle, peace without having to wage war to get it” (Tiqqun,
This Is Not A Program, 117). Yet they temper this criticism by concluding, like Marx
against Proudhon, that “strictly speaking, Negrism does not coincide with imperial
thought; it is simply the idealist face of political thought” (118). In place of Hardt and
Negri’s idealist Common, Tiqqun turn to struggle through an ‘ethic of civil war.’ This
struggle, however, is not a head-on confrontation with Empire through antagonistic battle
but a diffuse warfare against its biopolitical fabric. Intensive escape can utilize this sense
of struggle without elevating it an ethic of war, for Tiqqun indicates that struggle emerges
from a “movement of separation” that breeds hostility to Empire (55). Some critics have
misunderstood this separation, confusing its intensive movement with the extensive
separation proceeds “through the middle” of the Metropolis by finding points of living
and struggling within it (69).42 Living follows from the reappropriation of space, the
Common, violence, and other tools for basic survival, and struggling is the effect of
42
Deleuze suggests finding revolutionary war machines here, stating that, “just as the despot internalizes
the nomadic war-machine, capitalist society never stops internalizing a revolutionary war-machine. It’s not
on the periphery that the new nomads are being born (because there is no more periphery)” (“Nomadic
Thought,” 261). Tiqqun further advise “going through the middle,” warning against the dangers of seceding
“from above” into “golden ghettos” of the hyper-bourgeoisie or “from below” in the “no-go-area” of the
hyper-exploited (This Is Not A Program, 68).
229
imperceptible war machines that destroys the biopolitical fabric of the Metropolis. Alone,
each leads to failure, as living alone softens into a narcissistic focus on difference while
struggling alone hardens into an army that desires its own annihilation (69-70). With
living-and-struggle together, the movement of separation makes its intensive escape from
Empire. And it is this movement of separation that intensifies the distinction between all
of the vain attempts to run away from Empire and the event of its defeat.
Empire cannot be defeated by a subject but only by the force of the outside. In the
struggle against Empire, the most powerful forces do not strike like lightning but
gradually tear open the Metropolis and cause it to leak. By liberating flows from the veins
of the Metropolis, the byproducts of Empire are thus used against it. Against the violence
machines of subjection, resistance takes the form of a human strike, which negates the
forced reproduction of identity. By either evading or annihilating versions of the self, the
human strike liberates the conflictual force of life. In revolt against the technical
When detached from their intended purpose, these weapons operate with newfound speed
brings together the dislocated times of the Metropolis. These odd times have limited lives
but only need to be used to find unusual rhythms that break the monotony of the
perpetual present. And in defiance of the system of compulsory visibility, the forces of
Spreading the chaotic effects of confusion, they work to make the Metropolis
ungovernable. Unified only by a shared enemy, these subversions illustrate the potential
230
of intensive escape: a new Common, not found in property but forged in struggle. It is
difficult to say what will emerge from the ashes of the Metropolis. Yet what is certain is
that the problems it addresses must cease to be problems at all. Just as Marx and Engels
identify communism as the real movement that abolishes the present, sweeping away the
State, private property, the exploitation of labor, and the class relation, the common
struggle against Empire will dissolve the perpetual present, escaping the problems of
governance, subjective interiority, the stratification of difference, and the fragmented self.
Some things can only be sensed. These things perplex the soul, troubling, prodding, and
pushing it into movement as though they “were the bearer of a problem” (Deleuze,
Difference and Repetition, 140). No amount of good will prepares one for them, for these
sensations are awakened through a violence that carries faculties “to their own limit,”
which fries nerves and murders souls (145). Yet this violence brings sense and memory
into a discordant harmony that can provoke an even more important faculty: thought.
That is because thought only emerges under constraint. Thought is painful, and it is easy
to rely on the idiocies and falsehoods of ‘what everybody knows,’ that is, until the event
when one is forced to think. This is the thought of “philosophers of passion, of pathos,
distinct from philosophers of logos” – they do not sing, but scream (Deleuze, “Cours
Vincennes: Leibniz,” 7). The reason for the scream is that the force of thought comes
from sensations – from how much they poke and prod – and these sensations defy
preconceived recognition, which means that the persuasive force of concepts must be
accord, these philosophers create concepts that depict only the effects of the scream,
which builds a relationship with the forces of the scream without presenting them. These
concepts thus impart thought with “invisible and insensible forces that scramble every
spectacle, and that even lie beyond pain and feeling” (Deleuze, Francis Bacon, 60). To
think, then, one does not calm the body to make it receptive to dispassionate information.
Thought only comes after the body is made to spasm, opening it up as a plexus with the
force of the scream to liberate “interior forces that climb through the flesh,” which ends
in “the entire body trying to escape, to flow out of itself” (xi; xii).
As a concept, escape is filled with the screams of millions who protest the indignities of
life in the Metropolis. It follows from a refusal to recite the psalms of purely
to the law, the institution, and the contract, all of which are the Sovereign’s problem,
(Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” 259). Rather, escape takes leave of ‘right,’ ‘peace,’ and
‘law’ to find the blood and corpses that cemented the foundation of the State. And in this
journey, which began with the slaves of the terrifying magician-king and the devout
theory of the State. The significance of such a cultural theory expands beyond a typology
of State-forms, however, as it fills out other accounts of the rise of liberalism. Michel
Foucault’s historical account in Society Must Be Defended, for instance, considers the
Foucault shows how liberalism stands at the end of the Modern State’s long struggle to
discursively erase its violence, which it does by inventing legal and rational discourses
reason against the discourse of conflict and thus glosses the points of contact between
them. This is where a cultural theory proves itself to be essential, as it can seal this
connection with the concept of complementarity. Drawing from the cultural dimension of
sovereignty, complementarity demonstrates how conquest and contract, each a pole of the
State, work together to animate the State with its curious rhythm. Accordingly, the
result of a battle for and against the State but a squabble between sovereignty’s two poles.
The cultural theory of the State therefore suggests that Society Must Be Defended should
that mobilizes the force of the outside. Only a cultural theory of escape, then, dares to
Escape’s insurrection against State reason need not avoid discourse but must incite
movement that carries thought far beyond it. Empire’s attempt to poison the cultural
233
politics of emotion intensifies the dark appetites of the soul. Fragmented, discordant
bodies now haunt the Metropolis, many of them aching to find a release for their negative
affects. Most often, subjects only consume themselves in a slow gnawing misery or burn
up in a single outburst. Yet a growing band of troublemakers have shown how to turn
these dangerous forces against their source. Moreover, deep within the codes of digital
culture, a new strategy has materialized. Borrowing from the strategies of bomb-throwing
anarchists and the urban guerrilla, agents of subversion have found new ways to combat
Empire. They exploit glitches, overload the circuits, and hide in the noise, turning the
sprawling network of the Metropolis against its creator. Yet there is something even more
transformation nourished by underground forces that are hard to trace. This shift is
occurring faster than we can theorize, and its effects are irreversible. There are those who
resist these changes but perhaps they should be pushed to their limits. Negative affects
fuel a human strike against the soul, whose dim interiority is a prison for the body.
Tearing down its walls liberates the body, but only to cast it into a whole new universe of
pleasures. Worrying about the particular pains and ecstasies that this new world will
bring is not foolish, but it is impractical. Instead, we should dare to dream beyond
measure, indulging in hallucinatory fantasies where our bodies have lost their interiors
altogether and float like the stars, at one with the universe.
At the height of its power, escape does not appear but disappears. And because it draws
on the same power of unbecoming as the scream, its forces are also expressed best
234
through relation rather than direct presentation. Invisibility and absence, disappearance
express its force.43 In contrast, Empire derives its power from making things appear.
Confronted by the Spectacle and its system of compulsory visibility, every thing is
required to give an account of itself, which is broadcast through confession and the public
display of preferences. Those accounts are then treated as positivities and managed by
Biopower, reducing politics to order and movement in the space of appearance. Together,
the Spectacle and Biopower carry out the two operations of Empire, circulation and
management, and in turn administer the life of the Metropolis. To complete this process,
however, Empire commands more than what it sees. In fact, Empire operates by
Empire intensifies its power with the assertion of space. And as a consequence, Empire
freezes time. Stuck in a perpetual present, time slows to a standstill. As the veins of the
Metropolis cover the earth, difference flourishes but things the same. Never before has so
much changed without anything actually happening. Unlike the State-forms that precede
it, Empire itself does not exist; it gives up material existence to become an incorporeal
diagram whose intensive power only insists and persists in management and circulation.
This control is extended in the Metropolis through space and the spatializing of power,
which internalizes the force of the outside and renders bodies incapable of distantiation
43
There is also a less noble tale of escape where disappearance follows the lonely path of isolation,
solitude, exile, defeat, and annihilation. This is the common sense story told by the Spectacle, which is not
so much untrue as it is far too common to deserve anything more than a passing footnote.
235
otherwise incommensurate worlds of past and present, with their exotic rituals and
eccentric rhythms of life, by relating them through space, which makes them concurrent.
The effect of this spatialization is not the deadening of space, however, but of time. And
with all of the disjointed times of the Metropolis being re-captured in this way, Empire
accelerates difference under the assurance that they will all result in the same perpetual
present.
The State-forms the came before Empire dealt with the future through depth. The Modern
State, paranoid of outside influence, ordered The Police to surround its subjects in
enclosed blocks of space-time and commissioned Publicity to fill them with projective
interiorities. The Modern State thus produced subjects whose power increased directly
with the depth of their discipline. Yet this process is costly, so other States developed
more frugal ways to abate external forces. The Social State, through a bargain with its
outside, created The Social as an intermediary that exchanged between surface and depth
to defend the present against the future. Two states exemplified this process, the Welfare
State, which elevated The Social to a science. But Empire does not protect depth. In fact,
its power comes from invading depth. Empire constructs the Metropolis with the force
sprung from the spaces of interiority when they are unfolded. This makes the Metropolis
The power of escape does not come from occupying space. Rather, escaping the
Metropolis requires that one exist but without appearing. It was the guerrilla hiding in the
236
jungles of Brazil. In the Metropolis, one does not vanish through isolation; to escape, one
dissolves and fades away by becoming indistinguishable from everyone else. It was the
members of the Red Army Faction, who resembled all the other disaffected citizens of
Empire. And rather than shrinking until one is too worthless to be seen, this form of
escape increases potential by amplifying intensity to the point of opacity, for the strategy
is not to occupy territory but to be the territory (Invisible Committee, The Coming
Insurrection, 108). It was Autonomia, who formed a barely-visible tear in the Metropolis
with each protest, rally, riot, squat, social center, radio station, and newspaper. Finally,
the concept of escape can be elevated to the level of strategy, which uses escape to
exploit weaknesses in the Metropolis. It is the cyberpunk hacker who hides in the codes.
The politics of the perpetual present may operate through appearances but the politics of
the future does not. The dislocated times of the Metropolis, snatched, and communicated
through the anonymous force of insinuation. These times are embodied, if only for a
moment, and then captured again by Biopower or the Spectacle. Yet in that short time,
they give life to differences that reach beyond the present. For even in its absence, the
persistence of escape powerfully affirms the force of liberation. It is the voice of a silent
struggle already underway against Empire, crying out, declaring the ongoing conflict, “A
war without a battlefield. A war without an enemy. A war that is everywhere. A thousand
civil wars. A war without end” (Soohen and Rowley, Fourth World War, 0:04-0:17). “It
is hard, now, to remember what life was like back then,” it continues, “I believed them
when they told me that I was alone in the world, and that this place and time were
The world has changed and we have changed with it” (0:21-0:46). This voice speaks for
all the forces that evade Empire’s grasp, fueling a clandestine rebellion within the
Metropolis. They are dramatic stories that flow like water to feed the underground current
of revolt. They are incoherent attacks that gather like clouds to cast shadows over
Empire. And they are strategies for escape that shift with the changes in the weather.
Escape does not negotiate. Escape is the legend of FOXFIRE that burns and burns. It
does not demand political representation. It is the group agitations of the Socialist
Patients Collective that turns illness into a weapon. It makes no demands. It is the
terrifying excess of ‘the birds’ that interrupt normalcy. It does not make a claim to power.
It is the deadly dance of the guerrilla’s minuet making mobility lethal. It does not want to
238
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