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Escape

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

By

Andrew Curtis Culp

Graduate Program in Comparative Studies

The Ohio State University

2013

Dissertation Committee:

Eugene W. Holland, Advisor

Philip Armstrong

Mathew Coleman
Copyright by

Andrew Curtis Culp

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

poses no demands, resists representation, and refuses participation in already-existing

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

of escape. It begins by reintroducing culture to theories of state power by highlighting

complementary mixtures of authoritarian and liberal rule. The result is a typology of

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

and strategy that characterize daily existence in the Metropolis.


ii
Following a transdisciplinary concern for intensity, the work draws from a variety of

historical, literary, cinematic, and philosophical examples that emphasize the

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

importance of force over appearance found in contemporary radical politics. Departing

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

struggle against Empire.

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Acknowledgments

Innumerable people shaped this dissertation. Let me begin by thanking Comparative

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

North American Anarchist Studies Network conference in New Orleans.

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
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McDougal-Weber, Brett Zehner, Greta Stokes, Darwin Bond-Graham, Ricky Crano,

Aragorn!, Brian Murphy, Jedidjah DeVries, Adrian Drummond-Cole, Cricket Keating,

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

blossomed under his guidance.

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

lost without the fighting spirit of my partner, Eva Della Lana.

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Vita

June 2002 ...............................Millard North High School (Omaha, NE)

June 2006 ...............................B.A. with Honors in Philosophy and Economics, University

of Missouri (Kansas City, MO)

2007-2012 ..............................Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of Comparative

Studies, The Ohio State University

June 2009 ...............................M.A. in Comparative Studies, The Ohio State University

(Columbus, OH)

2012-2013 ..............................Presidential Fellow, The Ohio State University

Publications

2013, “The Savage Fruit of Alienation.” Review of Savage Messiah by Laura Oldfield

Ford (2011), The Anvil Review, February.

2012, “Giving Shape to Painful Things: An Interview with Claire Fontaine.” Radical

Philosophy, 175, September/October.

2012, “Ghost Stories and Nightmares.” Three Word Chant, 1, Summer.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Comparative Studies

Specializations: Cultural Politics, Social Theory, Continental Philosophy


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Table of Contents

Abstract.............................................................................................................................. ii  

Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................ iv  

Vita .................................................................................................................................... vi  

Prelude ............................................................................................................................... 1  

Empire and the Metropolis .......................................................................................... 4  

The Emergence of the Metropolis ............................................................................... 8  

Lenin’s Shadow ......................................................................................................... 15  

The Alchemy of the Example .................................................................................... 21  

The Ambivalence of Escape ...................................................................................... 30  

PART 1 – CULTURE ..................................................................................................... 34  

Escape ........................................................................................................................ 35  

A Typology of State-forms ........................................................................................ 35  

Chapter 1 – The Archaic State & The Priestly State ................................................... 37  

The Archaic State of Conquest .................................................................................. 37  

Raiding and Trading .................................................................................................. 39  

The Cruelties of Anti-Production .............................................................................. 41  

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The Terrifying Magician King .................................................................................. 46  

Fleeing the Codes ...................................................................................................... 49  

The Priestly State of Contract .................................................................................... 52  

Faith and Debt ........................................................................................................... 53  

The Violence of Equivalence and Law...................................................................... 56  

The Law As Shared Means for Private Appropriation .............................................. 58  

Peace Outside the State.............................................................................................. 61  

Chapter 2 – The Modern State & The Social State ..................................................... 66  

The Modern State ........................................................................................................ 66  

Forging a Strange Complementarity.......................................................................... 67  

The Four Operations of the Modern State ................................................................. 70  

Insurgencies ............................................................................................................... 78  

The Social State ........................................................................................................... 80  

The Rise of The Social .............................................................................................. 81  

The Welfare State ...................................................................................................... 87  

The Socialist State ..................................................................................................... 91  

Escaping The Social .................................................................................................. 94  

PART 2 – CRISIS ......................................................................................................... 101  

The Birth of the Metropolis ..................................................................................... 107  

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Chapter 3 – Disemboweling the Metropolis ............................................................... 110  

Vein 1: Violent Machines of Subjection ................................................................. 114  

Vein 2: Technical Management of Flows................................................................ 119  

Vein 3: Spectacular Time ........................................................................................ 130  

Vein 4: A System of Compulsory Visibility ........................................................... 141  

PART 3 – CONFLICT ................................................................................................. 149  

Dramatization .......................................................................................................... 150  

Life and Strategy ..................................................................................................... 151  

Chapter 4 – Affect ......................................................................................................... 155  

Interiority, Dark Appetites and the Desire to Confess............................................. 155  

Feel Tank, An Experiment in Negative Affects ...................................................... 166  

SPK, Making Illness Into a Weapon ....................................................................... 176  

Chapter 5 – Anonymity ................................................................................................ 186  

Insinuation, The Underground Current of Incoherence........................................... 186  

Guerrilla, The Force of Liberation .......................................................................... 197  

Digital Subversions, New Strategies for Struggle ................................................... 214  

Coda ............................................................................................................................... 226  

It Begins With Escape… (intensive escape)............................................................ 226  

Escape Precedes Thought… (sensational politics) .................................................. 231  

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And Then It Vanishes… (beyond appearances) ...................................................... 234  

References ...................................................................................................................... 239  

x
Prelude

Escape is the oldest story of freedom, and it is among the simplest.1

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

against those who had dismissed his humble peasants.

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.

Not far away, a similar discovery was made.

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

gaining a little know-how in engineering with a focus on alternative energy, he headed

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

problems, they said. So the student went back home to ponder.


2
Look, just go to the mountains, a comrade said while visiting the student. The student

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.

This deferral is an expression of postmodern relativism, most commonly voiced as the

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

my ultimate aim to demonstrate how a reworked concept of escape is essential to

understanding contemporary power. Therefore, after I finish examining the demolition of

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

underside of the Metropolis.

Empire and the Metropolis

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

Empire and the sprawling form of the Metropolis.

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

a substance by slowing it down enough to find something measurable and therefore

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

sovereignty of global governance as it intersects with the postmodern production of

informatized, immaterial, and biopolitical products. In contrast, I contend that Empire

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

lived existence of Empire, is the Metropolis. As Giorgio Agamben suggests, 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

patchwork of different pieces. To put these otherwise foreign elements into

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

expanse that is subjectively experienced as deepening alienation.

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

unfortunate situations. Empire is not a conspiracy of corporations, one world state, a

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

Although it would be a mistake to identify Empire as a positivity, the evidence of its

existence is everywhere.6 The essential attributes of Empire do not exist in extension

because they are incorporeal, which are causes that produce intensive transformations,

while the Metropolis is the lived form-of-life corresponding to Empire’s network of

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

intensity. To abolish Empire then, circulation and management must be made

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

Empire will live on far after its intensity fades.

The Emergence of the Metropolis

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,

“Metropolis”). Today, Metropolis is worldwide rather than Mediterranean, and it is no

longer an arrangement of cities but a collection of all the relays in the circuit of global

capital. It is not centered, a center of accumulation, a center of exchange, a hierarchy, or

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

intensity produced between differentials. A consequence of this transformation is that

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

afforded by the density, saturation, and noise of the Metropolis.

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

Metropolis appears as if it is composed of nothing but exteriorities. Overcoming 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

simultaneously as an expanse of limitless possibilities and a space where nothing new

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

governability works through increasing speed and extension by means of improvements

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

up interference to both disrupt the enemy and make an escape.

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

is to us as the factory was to the industrial proletariat, which is to say: a profoundly

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

because it caused modernization, as in ‘soviets plus electrification,’ or cruel triumph, as

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

for a better world.

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

through their works.

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

primary mode of production does not actively organize production as industrial

capitalism does, where direct management was needed for laying out capital,

proletarianizing workers, and establishing commodity markets as their only means of

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

“the becoming-rent of capital” (Hardt and Negri, Commonwealth, 451) Instead of a

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

production of the commons, and when it intervenes, it reduces productivity (“Common in

Communism,” 351). If Hardt is correct, then capitalists do not contribute to the


13
production process and have thus made themselves expendable, leaving the plentiful

Common of the Metropolis after their elimination.

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

Metropolis, identifying it as a hostile enemy that must be collectively opposed. And

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

second, an explanation of the status of examples in my project.

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

movements. No doubt, Lenin’s successes should not be denigrated, for he accomplished

feats that radicals today can only dream about, yet the relevance of Lenin to today’s

problems needs to be seriously reexamined.

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

revolutionary solution obsolete. In particular, more advanced forms of ideology have

made it unthinkable to simply gain control over the army and police to establish

ownership of the means of production as a whole.

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,

social movements are analyzed according to organizational forms, collective identities,

and types of mobilizations. Specifically, the sociological approach seeks to build political

hegemony by empirically identifying social actors with clear organizational

characteristics and communication strategies that develop a repertoire of social actions

used to achieve strategic objectives by capitalizing on monumental events (Zibechi, “The

Revolution of 1968,” 3).

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

markedly disappointing. Ossified political groups that continue to deploy organization-

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

Revolutionary Communist Party, The ANSWER Coalition, and The International

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,

Empire’s response was also molecular. The rise of informationalization, in a computer-

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

accumulation builds upon the already existing infrastructure of capitalist modernization

that used the architecture of the factory as a diagram for all sectors of society. But

informationalization provoked a passage in the leading architectures of society away

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

emerge from the distributed system. Or as post-Foucauldian governmentality scholars put

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

aftereffects (Dean, Governmentality, 184-5).

One common response to outmoded politics is to encourage participation by way of

decentralization, a fairly simple logic espoused by anarchists, anti-modernists,

progressives, and far right-wingers alike. The primary tactic of decentralists is to slow

down the speedy indifference of capitalist imperialism by setting up roadblocks

constructed from insider-only combinations of group identities and subcultural rituals.

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,

decentralists get outmaneuvered by a system that operates at variable speeds. Moreover,

roadblocks without strategic value become routinely maintained out of habit, which
18
transforms them into anchors. For example, melancholic calls for ‘re-localization’ usually

produce homogenous enclaves that espouse conservative restorationist principles (‘I

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

billion people of the world?

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

roadblocks instead of forward momentum by starting wars of attrition clothed as

19
‘consensus-based’ conversations that are dominated by those with the most time on their

hands or with expertise in the technical skills of process maneuvering.

Ultimately, radical politics will only step outside the shadow of Lenin when the question

of organization is forgotten. Yet this claim is definitely not anti-organizational, which

itself would be a reactionary fixation on negating organization; nor does it even suggest

non-organization as an option. Rather, the task of leaving organization behind means

replacing the dominant paradigms of voluntarism and determinism (‘agency and

structure,’ ‘subjectivism and objectivism,’ ‘the individual and society’) with more

productive categories of analysis. To be more specific: forgetting organization would end

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

statecraft. Alternately, forgetting organization would end the strong certainty of

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.

The Alchemy of the Example

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

in heady abstraction and hidden truths.

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

earthly difficulties. At best, these idealist systems function as possibility-generating

‘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

omitted in translation).10 Realization becomes application, as if the theory has already

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

de-intensifying searching, “beneath [its] appearance of complacency, deconstruction has

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

approach. Positivist and even post-positivist empiricists catalogue the different

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

the Chicago School of Economics and their hyper-liberal conservatism, it necessarily

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

philosophy should be “a very particular species of detective novel, in part a kind of

science fiction” (Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, xx). The key to this radical

empiricism is its philosophical definition of experience. According to this approach,

experience is not the subjective lived experience of self-reflection or even the

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

indiscernible elements of experience, not as an exercise in uncovering something that has

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

theory as it unfolds and sometimes even steal the show.

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:

each example is a unique response to a problem, e.g. an organism is a solution to the

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

origin in order to be reenacted elsewhere to produce different effects (Deleuze and

Guattari, What is Philosophy?, 159-160).

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

be thought of as the measured change from a starting-point to an ending-point but an

away-from movement that has multiple potential trajectories without a set endpoint.13

Becoming should therefore be understood as an ongoing series of production, with things

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

outside of literary contexts.14

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

considerable amount of theory is written in the form of commentary and therefore

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

‘community of scholars’ through a citational method that requires fidelity to a particular

author or text. In contrast, my approach builds constellations out of concepts that have

acquired enough consistency to survive outside of their original context – analogously to

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

into pre-assigned discrete emotional categories of perception – excited, shocked, irritated,

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.

The task of alchemy then is to activate the affective potential of examples.15

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

propose that every society is characterized by its mode of production, my analysis

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

colonialism. So escape is therefore not itself preferable, because it is a bundle 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

force, dispossession, and stratification endemic to a world controlled by Empire. One


30
attempt to clarify this shift is the scholarship on neoliberalism, which emphasizes the

increasingly permissive character of contemporary power and hence an increased

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.

The point of clarifying through distinction is to identify what is singular about

contemporary escape. Most acutely, escape is faced with the challenge of the Metropolis,

which evaporates potential antagonisms by incorporating them through inclusive

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

incredibly permissive form of capture, it must then proceed by way of exclusive

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 –

difference flourishes in both incommensurate worlds – the distinction is that the

Metropolis uses a dull repetition of difference to maintain a perpetual present while

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

third part shows brewing conflicts.

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,

the Social State, and Empire.

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

management of flows, the perpetual present of spectacular time, and a system of

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

veins produce lines of flight useful in the struggle against Empire.

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

advantages can be established within digital culture.

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

slogan that evades capture.

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

disseminated throughout a nation of people (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 143). Yet those

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

how to escape the State itself.

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

found in Dumézil’s comparative mythology, which describe a force exterior to the

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

always appears as a sleight of hand, a conjuring trick, followed by grandiose declarations

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

poles as they operate in isolation, together in various complimentary combinations, and

as a system that alternates at different rhythms (Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 161-2; 175-6).

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

uses Biopower and the Spectacle to rule over the Social.

36
Chapter 1 – The Archaic State & The Priestly State

The Archaic State of Conquest

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

horrors of being caught.

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

a bid for mercy…

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,

contemplating his misery.

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

to span elevation, which results in State power leaving a non-contiguous footprint.

Abstracting these characteristics from what is historically specific to padi states in

Southeast Asia, it becomes clear that the basic process of the Archaic State is not
38
cultivation but conquest.

Raiding and Trading

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

never-ending campaign compelled by the endless need for new labor.


39
The second relevant characteristic of the padi state is how it projects power, which can be

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,

‘three rice-cookings’ or ‘two cigarette-smokings,’ rather than by its geometric

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

the Archaic State to guarantee victory over its source of power.

The Cruelties of Anti-Production

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

anarchism is an attempt to explicitly depart from Marxism – because production remains


41
central to his analysis. To put it starkly, Scott depicts hill people as ‘state-effects’ and

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

chapters to hill people’s high-altitude crop cultivation and slash-and-burn ‘swidden’

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

offer an image of existence that either fundamentally reshapes or altogether eliminates

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

possibly counter-intuitive from the perspective of a society obsessed with production, in

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

technology but invades in a flash of lightening (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,

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.

Their slash-and-burn agriculture intentionally looks unappealing as a mode of 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

injunction that restrains members of a social group immediately consuming whatever

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

(Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 202-217; Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

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

means of translation. So in contrast to biological codes and chemical signals, language

makes codes polyvocal and therefore interpretable, which enables expression to grow

independently of both content and substance (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

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

recaptured to constitute the intermediary milieu that is the State. Described

diagrammatically: the State is a grand irrigation system built by transecting separate

codes that had previously been held apart.

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

against it. Deleuze and Guattari describe this process:

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

property without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, then

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

inevitably, slipping through the net of overcoding. (Deleuze and Guattari, A

Thousand Plateaus, 449, trans. modified)

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

others have nothing to do with work, money, and land at all.

The Terrifying Magician King

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

the magician-king is a great conjurer who rules at a distance (Mitra-Varuna, 146).

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,

Romulus is brought victory in two particular aspects: Jupiter as divine protector of

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

stockpiles and fragments their power through dispersion (Clastres, Archaeology of

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

(274). War is therefore a necessary but supplementary dimension of non-state people’s

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

carefully does from a distance (417-8).

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

(Mitra-Varuna, 98). In contrast to pacts, which are made between equal-and-willing

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,

and loss that it took to live ‘meaningful life’:

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

traces, the incorporation is permanent (van Gennep, Rites of Passage: 72).

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

existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life outside it (426).

Fleeing the Codes

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

circulating promiscuously, a prophet eventually appears, giving these furtive myths

enough consistency to transform conspiracy into public revolt. The Burmese monk Sayan

San, for example, underwent a transformation while serving on a colonial committee

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

the Galon King).

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

prayer, where a stranger falls in supplication before the magician-king. Such a

transformation is completely alien to the archaic mode of conquest, as it would require

extending tolerance and civility, which are foreign to a sovereign who knows indifference

but not respect.

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

channel it into the power of The Police and Biopower.

51
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

clamor and then abruptly ceased.

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

afterward, the three-man procession left as well.

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

even magical – it is juridical. The jurist-priest is a great organizer: he constitutes a milieu,

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

only the State can provide.

Faith and Debt

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
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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

predicated on his benevolence, so he cultivates a good that only comes through

deliberation and virtue (51-52).

The appearance of the jurist-priest as a just and measured arbiter obscures the full picture

of the obligation-exchange process that he governs. The process of exchange is usually

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

mediator, a force of authority that disappears because it is taken as a given:

“a cosmopolitan, universal energy which overthrows every restriction and bond so as to

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.

The Violence of Equivalence and 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

equivalence. Through equivalence, the jurist-priest promises something to a creditor who

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

pleasure that consciousness is born, most fundamentally as the awareness of one’s

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

consanguine capacities of responsibility and regularity (B2§2, 36-37; B2§1, 35-36). It is


56
the jurist-priest’s second invention, guilt, which completes the system of pain. One might

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

Thousand Plateaus, 457-458; Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 30).

The actions of the jurist-priest are no less violent than those of his horrible cousin, even if

he is averse to conquest. Simply: there is no peaceful sovereign. In fact, faith is the

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

participation in the ‘legitimate’ violence directed by the jurist-priest.18 In return 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

(Dumézil, Mitra-Varuna, 142). An example is the system of mutual-obligation of ‘the

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

sovereign responsibility to all of the faithful that included a mechanism of self-

management that requires people to police each other (Dean and Massumi, First and Last

Emperors, 25).

The Law As Shared Means for Private Appropriation

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

issuing decrees. Alternatively, the jurist-priest deploys overcoding to appropriate and

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

consistency is an internality built within already existing points of order – geographic,

ethnic, linguistic, moral, economic, technological – not external terms, which would

connect to form the transconsistency of the network (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand

Plateaus, 432-433). Moreover, the intraconsistency of the State is not established by


59
simple forced coordination, as networks of towns do in building roads, but appropriated

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
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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

the purpose of conjoining flows to resonate.

Peace Outside the State

Jurist-priests may appear to be the more reasonable of the two twins of sovereignty but

neither is necessary to mediate conflict. Non-state societies provide ample examples of

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

of political power (31-32).

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

fact, direct democracy, a popular alternative to the pact, practices consensus-based

decision-making as developed by the Quakers, who emerged during this time of

Protestant upheaval. Present but largely unacknowledged during the civil rights

movement, consensus-based decision-making was transformed into an explicitly political

tool during the anti-nuclear protests of the 1970s. From then on, consensus-based

decision-making grew in notoriety: it was embraced by anarchists in the 1980s, formed

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

Protestant tool of protest to decision-making process, consensus has enlarged from a

device for striking down the false idols of the State to a weapon against all forms of

transcendent authority – consensus dissolves the bond secured through conquest, an

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

jurist-priest – it is a mere radicalization of the pact. And at the heart of consensus, as in

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

participating in consensus, political groups find consensus-making difficult. Large groups

usually lack the shared investments required to forge consensus while smaller groups

consensus-making is regularly foiled by veto-holders who act irrationally or without

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

consensus is an ineffective means to engineer desire, as it does not eliminate the

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

State universalizes faith, secularizing the divine authority of the jurist-priest to

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

conditions of everyday life. Illustrated by the jurist-priest and subsequent State-forms’

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
64
actions in Publicity and the Spectacle further venerate the State by making contracts

appear not just beneficial but inevitable and necessary.

65
Chapter 2 – The Modern State & The Social State

The Modern 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

machines through sabotage or even cruder methods.

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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

her, her fellow technicians were probably in just as much trouble...

Forging a Strange Complementarity

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

oscillations of sovereignty can be used against an accumulation of forces (Clastres,

Society Against the State; Clastres, Archaeology of Violence).

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).
68
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

69
kings atrocious priests, the Absolute State is only a transitional form that sets into motion

a series of operations that transform it into the Modern State.

The Four Operations of the Modern State

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

something being out of place, or a momentary lapse in transparency.

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

men” (de Mayerne, La Monarchie Aristodemocratique; Kant, Perpetual Peace, 185-196).


70
Besieged by iron efficiency and blistering critique, a waning older form of sovereignty

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

appearance of splendor. By importing the technique of discipline, the power of 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

confessional mode to governance installs reflection as the highest principle of politics.

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

expression of their own right and will.

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

conflict and material scarcity instead.

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
73
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

surveyed territory of the Modern State.

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

of obligation is replaced with legions of professionals. These professionals include the


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petty police, as in the ones that shout orders and detain people, but also include any

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.
75
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

systematization that knowledge can be disciplined as much as bodies. Systemization

begins with technical knowledges, which appear as a disparate multiplicity of practical

approaches to local problems, and disciplines them. This disciplinary power draws in

knowledge to systematize the two poles of sovereignty: through selection, expensive

knowledges are made frugal; in normalization, independent knowledges are made

interchangeable; through hierarchicalization, particular knowledges are subordinated to a

general system of classification; and finally, by centralizing all three procedures under a

system of control, State Science becomes the handmaiden for extending sovereignty

(Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 179-182). And so through the development of a

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

DETECTION OF CRIMES, and in the other Functions which relate to INTERNAL

REGULATIONS for the well ordering and comfort of Civil Society” (Preface, 1).
76
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

statistics (“the science of describing States”).21

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

participation in the publicity of representation. To paraphrase Kant: “Each person was

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

for its theater of operations: the public display of personal preference.

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

resistance is revolutionary eschatology. The plodding history that underwrites the

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,

its escape routes are simply found elsewhere.

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).

The Social State

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.

But just then she heard a loud knock on her door...

The Rise of The Social

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

unrelated elements together into a whole organism.

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

making them co-extensive with the whole social field.

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

politics, whether by turning politics into measured calculations, or by depoliticizing the

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

combines these forms of power: The Social.

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

The Spectacle and Biopower (Anonymous, Call, Scholium II).23

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.
82
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

takes on problems as a matter of management; workplace injury or poverty are no longer

the fault of a negligent boss or capitalist exploitation, just simple administrative

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

future is determined as a well-mananged social aggregate.

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

objectively changes the subjectivity of humanity. But transforming the embodied

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,

and nothing else.

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
84
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

directly regulates certain necessities of life.

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

on their own. Unpunctuated by coordinates, this expanding block of norms is a mobile

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

destroys. And instead of preserving fundamental interests such as rights by quelling

internal conflicts, this State proves its worth by winning modest victories to satisfy social

interests (Hardt and Negri, Labor of Dionysus, 71).

Norms help feed the Social State’s truly global aspirations. Even though The Social is an

oddly shaped net that catches an even stranger set of problems, it dreams of being a

continuous fabric that covers the earth. Therefore, despite its sundry appearance, the

Social State undertakes a global program of integration and regulation, as if pretending

that nothing escapes its grasp. The unrelenting advance of the Nazi 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.
86
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

outperform their less predictable capitalist neighbors.

The Welfare State

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

87
future. There are three paths that led the campaign to renew faith in the present: the

interventionist Keynesianism, Fordist social relations, and Taylorist production.

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

metamorphosis of the State from occasional corrector to the organizing structure of

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

revolution by promising a continual improvement in life and by erecting a structure that

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,

social subjects are required to forgo antagonism and get to work.

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

greater improvements in the workplace. Inspired by various utopias, from back-to-the-


88
land subsistence farming to ‘self-help,’ Ford introduced significantly higher wages,

incentives for good social conduct, and institutions to facilitate self-betterment as an

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

side of the productivist bargain. Taylorism standardized the time-management of tasks on

the assembly line. The assembly line was not the first place to break down bodies into a

series of gestures to be mindlessly repeated, as this disciplining predates the industrial

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

initiative into production (Dohse, Jürgens, and Nialsch, “From ‘Fordism’ to

‘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
89
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

The Social is to conquer not the body but the soul.

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

of its seeming incontrovertibility, and indeed by its monopolization of the realm of

appearances” (Debord, Society of the Spectacle, §12).26 And all that appears is the

Welfare State’s outstretched hand, offering socialized productivity as a fair bargain.

25
This is a phrase commonly used by Wendy Brown.
26
Modified, taking the first three words out of full capitalization.
90
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:

new modes of production, forms of cooperation, means of participation, principles of co-

management, and collective process. However, a few decades after they appeared, most

were steamrolled by the merciless advance of industrial capitalism.

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

existing State and transform it into a government of development. Once such a

government was in control, which proceeded with the objective development of


91
capitalism – namely, the socialization of the means of production and the rationalization

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

prioritized planned efficiency from the beginning.

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

to certain rationalized principles set forth by Biopower. Furthermore, in an attempt to

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

wealth by further proletarianizing its population (209-213).

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

the heart of the West” to extend the life of capitalism (269).

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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

distinction between alleged Soviet opacity and Republican transparency is worthless

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

depicts a totalized Welfare State:

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

we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial

culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the

centrifugal bumblepuppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited,

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,

Amusing Ourselves to Death, vii–viii)

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

escape birthed by each.

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

you do not have to run to the hills to start a new life.

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

Anarchists; Foster, “The Tragedy of Karaganda”).

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

constructivist art showed a new industrial humanity with everyone performing as a

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

publicity of The Spectacle in order to force a confrontation, the unaccountable withdraw

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

abandoning the perspective of management. This is the only meaningful definition of


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autonomy. Separation and freedom must prevent reconciliation by scrambling the State’s

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

that ‘there is no such things as free lunch’ or as monumental as an autonomous union

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

something altogether new, the decisive politics of the unaccountables is their

demonstration that one can enjoy the benefits of life without paying the price demanded

by the Social State.

Those both avoiding accountability but also intensifying danger usually succeed only as

long as their actions remain unregistered. Many subversions work by refusing

Biopower’s demand that everything good must be universalized. Whether it be looking

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

reveal new worlds already in place.

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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

experience of this drawn-out present is a combination of the profusion of difference

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

its essential modes of operation.

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

mode of circulation.

Empire’s exteriorization is a reversal of the interiorizing tendency of the Modern State,

which operates through folding. Folding is the interiorization of the outside, or “inside as

an operation of the outside,” that constitutes a doubling of the outside (Deleuze,

Foucault, 99-100). A common example of interiorization is the architecture of a house,

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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

and things as an architect constructs a house, crafting a well-ordered interior that

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,

251). Interiorization is a control mechanism, as it slows down forces to a speed where

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

exchange with aspects of the outside without internalizing them.

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

outside and subsequently transforms them into exteriorities themselves. No interior is

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

another, however. Empire’s circulation also performs a second operation:

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

are exploded through a turning-inside-out. Or to repeat a phrase that is popular today,

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

identified and that which can be benefited from.

Although every type of circuit encounters resistance, Empire re-counters resistance by

increasing social conductivity. Everyone in such a system is asked to be a transparent

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

homogenizing impulses of States in order to “constitute an intermediate milieu between

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

temporary or local center. Ultimately, the biopolitical principle behind conductivity

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

(Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, §59).

Proposition 2: Empire is management. The production of difference is the abstract

process of Empire’s mode of management.

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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,

soldier, or citizen) or undertake the laborious task of independently treating every

element within its purview. Rather, this management modulates what exists between

terms, their differential, which gives it a wide reach while still retaining the uniqueness of

everything it affects. Assisted by modulation, Empire presents the world as a swirling

constellation of differences liable to descend into chaos, a chaos it vows to prevent by

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

a mechanism of normalization for Empire, justifying its existence.

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

moderately S & M” because prohibitions against deviance are replaced by the

management of differences, “molecular calibrations of subjectivities and bodies”

(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.

Imperial management therefore appears as private interest that is covertly operating

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

complements the privatization of law, as subjects’ desire to produce a personal and

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

effect of a variety of personal choices.


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When management appears as the effect of Empire, which when it intervenes, appears as

pre-accomplished fact. Biopower’s cessation of the future is never complete, however.

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

agent of intervention. This is why it would be a misunderstanding to think that Empire

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

dispatches other states to intervene under the cover of national interest or

humanitarianism.

Many radicals engage in alternativism by proposing management solutions that appear

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.

The Birth of the Metropolis

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

programs and practices (Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 195-200).

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.

By introducing articulation and division to the space of exclusion, separations such as

borders and walls are still erected but the effects change, a generalized binary division is

replaced by particularized differential individuations – certain subjects are not excluded

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

allows the Metropolis to expand without subjugating difference to a unified principle of

organization. The result is a new understanding of relation where every point is

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.

Disorientation. Most people’s initial experience of the Metropolis is disorientation. When

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

win. “By any means necessary.”

“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

whose bidding they are unwittingly doing.

The last people to have faith in are the authorities. They lost control of the streets a long

time ago. And whatever power they still exercise always plays into the hands of some

higher power. Yet knowing the 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

to be used, never trusted.

“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,

undesirables, and illegalists.

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

answer was stuck deep in the veins of the Metropolis.

“Step three: disembowel the Metropolis.”

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.

In particular, the Metropolis operates according to inclusive disjunction.28 Inclusive

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,

temporalities, and visibilities without suppressing their differences. In assembling them,

the Metropolis does not leave those incommensurate things unperturbed. Rather, Empire

introduces things into the Metropolis by producing a plane of positivities that unfolds

secured elements, exposes them to risk, and eliminates their futurity.

Exploring the Metropolis involves surveying the plane of organization constructed by

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

so invincible although we are told it is all crumbling around us.

What flows through the veins comes from an intensification of the two poles of

sovereignty found in States – an authoritarian pole and a liberal-contract pole. In the

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

against it, though to do so would be a momentous undertaking. It would require that

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

and escape routes.

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

everything and the invention of something new in its place.

Vein 1: Violent Machines of Subjection

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

the surface of bodies with a steady hand.

Incision appears necessary because bodies, in their infinite variation, resist assimilation.

There is no universal measure for an eye to read on the natural body, only birthmarks,

scars, or other accidental markings. For 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

construction of a terrible alphabet, word made flesh, written on bodies through

scarification and tattooing. Bodies enter as elusive folds of flesh that lack unique

identifying characteristics and leave as individuals, inscribed with their own unique

semiotic signature, now worthy of alliance because they paid 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

demand. A freckle, tattoo, or odd mark therefore serves as a counterpoint, allowing


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permanence to serve either as a playful tell set against a background of uncertainty or a

private protest against the desire to make everything negotiable.

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.

Setting the right conditions is an ingenious development, as bodily manipulations are

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

by a whole set of machines assembled to produce an environment that is hostile to us.

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

within a set of rules designed to prevent system-wide transformation. Neither of these

two approaches offer much hope for escape.

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

becomes impossible. Escape is essential to this process, as oppressed subjectivities are

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

anything, I never wanted to be anyone.” Only when enough subjectivizing machines of

Empire are jammed will the future begin to flourish.

Vein 2: Technical Management of Flows

Technical machines of management traverse the Metropolis as if it is a giant

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

Social, it sets them in communication in the Metropolis. By setting layers in

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,”

spaces constructed at a certain intersection of institution and matter to speak truths as if

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

becomes so complete that criminologists, psychologists, and even economists could

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

infractions, outbursts, and prices.

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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

external environment, assemblages produce products within themselves. Further

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

membrane, which negotiations connections separating the organism from its

surroundings. The function of the membrane is regulative and therefore introduces

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

it is dependable for Empire when it counts.

The technical machines of Empire focus on a specific type of connection: inclusive

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.

Technical machines create a passive ongoing introduction of difference as “distributions

and of co-ordinates that serve as points of reference” that allows Empire to capture all

production according to all of the potential “permutations between differences that

always amount to the same as they shift and slide around” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-

Oedipus, 4, 12). The management of Empire thus functions as a conductor for a


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dissipative system whose far-from equilibrium state requires a constant introduction of

external energy to maintain self-organization. This constant predation on the outside

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

connect to any other:

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

network bathed in mucus, dilate the diaphragm of the anal sphincter,

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

you’re sunbathing or taking grass . . . it is not this displacement of parts,

recognizable in the organic body of political economy (itself initially assembled

from differentiated and appropriated parts, the latter never being without the

former), that we first need to consider. Such displacement, whose function is

representation, substitution, presupposes a bodily unity, upon which it is inscribed

through transgression. There is no need to begin with transgression, we must go

immediately to the very limits of cruelty, perform the dissection of polymorphous

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

nothing requires that all excavation remain concave, besides, it is inevitably

convex on the ‘second’ turn, provided it lasts) has not got two sides, but only one,

and therefore neither exterior nor interior (Libidinal Economy, 1-3).

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

orientation of force, and second in their relationship to movement. In their orientation of

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

tool is relative to a substance it seeks to dominate, as in a hunter who arrests the

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,

Empire is able to construct introceptive compositions of desire that expand subjects’

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

(Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 397-403). By framing the Metropolis as a

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

dwindling stock of holdouts to eke out whatever surplus might be left.

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

engagement with Empire is a take-it-or-leave it proposition, as they can always rely on

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,

subsistence, mobility, and communication provided by Empire is unimaginable. Even the

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

campaign of abandonment. Only when the alienated separation of the Metropolis is

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

undermine its obviousness and necessity

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

opportunities for developers. Radicals looking to establish a platform against Empire

usually identify an especially egregious instance of management to condemn or block,

but political interventions premised on short moments of voluntary action mistake

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

marginalized urban populations control their neighborhoods by setting up informal

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

free activity behind the Metropolis.

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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

Metropolis as the transcendental condition for anything to emerge but presents it as a

transcendent absolute. The future is thus abolished from the Metropolis, even as a

horizon, to be revived only as fantasy.

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

of unverifiable stories, uncheckable statistics, unlikely explanations and untenable

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

conclusively new ever appears.

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

the mode of compensation used to complete the deception. Neoclassical economists

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

exploitation of labor, the future is masked within the Metropolis.

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

universe to facilitate accumulation in its space of encounter, the Metropolis (Althusser,

“The Underground Current of the Materialism of the Encounter”). The challenge for

Empire is that each drop has a lightness that bends toward many potential paths. Other

State-forms use the weight of accumulated space to synchronize the pace of differentials.

The disciplining procedures of the Modern State demonstrate some of the elemental

forms of spatial control of time, as in the economy of time of eighteenth-century warfare,

where objects’ time is controlled by articulating them with a body and setting the body’s
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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

means for coordination. Rather, just as capitalism abstracts labor by proletarianizing

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

by an artificial medium, currency, that translates qualitative labor into a quantitative

measure, the abstract potential of time is similarly displaced but through a different

countable medium, space.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

understood or believed. All abstract space must do is operate.

The novelty of abstract space is how it simultaneously facilitates spatial differentiation

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

means of appropriation, such as unfolding spaces of enclosure, abstract space maintains a

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

never-ending present by translating quality into quantity. As the power of money is to

command labor without relinquishing the fruits of labor, the power of abstract space is to

control time without releasing the future.

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

peculiar structures of production” that exists as an “‘intersection’ of the different times,

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.

Whatever living time The Spectacle preserves, it presents it as memory or meaningless

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

experienced through either loss or interchangeability – as either a string of departed

moments or a set of equivalences within an economy of differential space. The result 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

by the same things, only with duller colors.

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

can finitude and dislocation be turned into strategic resources?

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

follow-through (Worthy, The Homosexual Generation, 184). It breaks with alternativism,

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

understood as an uncritical celebration of alienation or a politics of ressentiment. But

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

them an orientation (Bergen, “Politics as the Orientation of Every Assemblage”). This

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

preservation, reproducibility, and repetition, innovation, difference, and singularity begin

to flourish.

Unfettered from scarcity, finitude takes on an excessive quality, precipitating a future

otherwise made unavailable. Enveloping their finitude, subjects become unresponsive to

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

Metropolis ungovernable or only condemn themselves to a bleaker reality in the process.

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-

simultaneity of the simultaneous. Even if time is subjectively experienced in The

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

simultaneous appearance. As a consequence, differential elements migrate in and out of

the shared space of the Metropolis, remaining unified by Empire’s constitution of a

common present. Their contrasting temporalities are made evident – but only as

dislocations within the present and visualized in abstract space.

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,

represent a mutually engaged dance and not a friction-generating struggle.

Sometimes there is hopping, and both feet move simultaneously parallel. An

alternating gate does not represent movement at cross-purpose. In jazz, a

syncopated rhythm does not produce dissonance. Movement is first and foremost

transgression. It is not transcendence or synthesis (Anonymous).

A radical politics of dislocation therefore targets Empire’s rhythm, which reframes the

power of antagonism. Antagonism cannot form a grand counter-rhythm, as the molecular

potential of the Metropolis is neither decisive nor precise enough to muster a finely-

coordinated counter response. The greatest potential for antagonism within the

Metropolis comes from times that never fall into step.


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Time leaks from the present, providing the material for a politics of dislocation. By a first

approximation, as liquid escapes from holes in a pipe – inefficiencies in a system that

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

whistleblowers release information. There is plenty to leak, as the relations of externality

that constitute the Metropolis makes it so Empire governs through inconsistencies,

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

compromise when both sides can be used to one’s advantage.

Rhythm is fortunately grounded in “the rhythm of feet,” which, “whether intentionally or

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

never be returned to.

Vein 4: A System of Compulsory Visibility

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”

(198, gender modified).

At its most basic level, the plague city’s system of permanent registration is a mode of

communication. As communication, registration constructs a strange type of connection

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

the emaciated angles of one’s body. As a mode of communication, registration is also a

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

subject, even if it is carefully avoided. This communication is unlike circulation,

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

therefore demonstrates how a mode of communication can also function as a mode of

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

overburdensome, so Modern States ultimate abandoned so-called Police States where

registration would control existence down to the smallest detail. The Social State

developed an innovative approach to permanent registration that triumphs over the

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.

As a consequence of Empire’s use of registration, life in the Metropolis is not required to

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

preferable to the difficulties of thought. In spite of these confusing surroundings, subjects

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.

Empire demands that every appearance exist as a positivity, regardless of how it is

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

Metropolis. This marks a revolution in the permanent system of registration whereby

speech and writing are replaced by code. Through code, the Metropolis becomes the

fulfillment of the fantasy of unlimited presence. Even negation is recorded as a positivity,

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

machines. By translating the Metropolis into the language of intelligent machines,

Empire augments human system with the computational power. Empire thus sets

codability as the condition for appearance in the Metropolis, dispatching less refined

forms of control to deal with whatever escapes the codes.

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

of multiple appearances, enabling Empire to differentially handle elements within a

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.

Empire’s democracy of appearance demotes humanity by opening the aperture of control

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

arrogant forms of human expression they have grown accustomed to by overturning

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

incompleteness of Empire’s anti-humanism produces potentials from pitting humanity

against itself. Internet commenting exists as a powerful example of this conflict. When

the complexity of human appearance is reduced to a handle or simply a timestamp, it

becomes difficult to determine whether the commenter is even human at all. But even

more interestingly, without the terrain of bodily appearance, modes of communication

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,

weird associations, or apparent nonsense. These commentators replace information

transmission with affective charges, sending explosive missives simply meant to provoke

rather than be understood. In this mode of communication – insinuation by association –

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

specific enough to disrupt the present configuration of the system of permanent

registration. The system of registration has been called upon to launch a counter-attack

against the dangers of arbitrary self-presentation and anonymity, requiring forms of

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.

At a higher order of magnitude, Empire’s mode of communication produces another

escape route: illegalism. Anticipating the coming unreliability of humanist veridiction,

which assumes helpful subjects willing to provide dependable information based on

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

allows neighborhoods of the Metropolis to decline into a seedy underworld of

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

protection rackets, blackmail and extortion, or outright theft. In abandoning the

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

political challenge is to leverage the anti-humanist potential in modes of communication

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

sovereignty’s mythical foundations. But rationality became a tool of governance as the

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

hostile environment. Frequently felt as a negative reaction to alienated existence, affects

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

breaking through the false dilemma between spontaneity and organization.

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

intensity of actors in a play, transmitting an array of sensations not communicated by the

conceptual personae of the script itself.31 Therefore, dramatization is not a superficial

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

forgotten (Mackenzie and Porter, “Dramatization as Method, “ 485-488). Moreover, the

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

forms to be repeated ad nauseum as well as to open up new paths of becoming that

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.

Life and Strategy

Radical politics was plagued for a time by the dilemma of spontaneity and organization.

Central to Lenin, the opposition of organization to spontaneity assumes that revolt is

routine like a force of nature. Accordingly, spontaneous forms of revolt exist as a

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

decisive moment (History of the Russian Revolution, xix).

But this science of organization and its subsequent iterations – Marxist-Leninism,

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,

passive, and in need of form (Simondon, The Physico-Biological Genesis of the

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

effective technical operation but whose success is actually due to “a socialized

representation of work” (49).

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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

objectively conservative organization” and “an objectively revolutionary one” (Mandel,

“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

tormentors. Strategy, similarly, is repeatedly reduced to a question of coherence and

identity for the sake of easy reproduction regardless of circumstance. But here, life is

presented as the process of becoming-otherwise whose movement of constant undoing

generates a set of felt relations – affects. Though affects are usually registered as feelings,

positive, negative, and everything in-between – joy, anxiety, sadness, exhilaration,

anticipation, sympathy, fear – they also live an autonomous existence, embodying

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

spontaneity and organization that is populated by negative affect, feminist killjoys,

political illness, insinuation, glitch, clutter, and noise – all forms of escape essential for

surviving Empire and subverting the Metropolis.

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Chapter 4 – Affect

“Everybody Talks About the Weather, but Nobody Does Anything About It”

Interiority, Dark Appetites and the Desire to Confess

The noises of a public place set the scene as the shot fades from black. Wobbly, droning

music overtakes the din of the crowd, capturing the suffocating alienation of the

Metropolis where mutual presence is characterized more by mutual separation than

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

text, the words “NADIE ES INOCENTE” are emblazoned on the screen.

A pair of skinny legs appears, and the film quickly cuts to a backlit character walking up

stairs with the same placid determination it takes to 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

broadcast through voice-over.

In a meandering tone, the punk gives a wry farewell to Neza City, a slum outside Mexico

City. His excitement builds as he says goodbye to pickpockets, the police, and a no-good

government. But even in escape, he returns his thoughts to his gang of Shit Punks

(Mierdas Punks). Later, he mentions what he thinks makes them unique. Los Mierdas,

unlike other gangs, hold no territory and therefore go anywhere they want to go – ”We

have no turf, we go from one place to another. Gangs with turfs chase us or we chase

them. It’s all the same.”

This journey provides a loose arc for the otherwise haphazard everyday life of his gang.

At times, the dull emptiness of description almost finds meaning. The young punk may

have a name: Kara? Yet as he travels, he changes his name to Juanillo, which casts a

darker shade of doubt. The train itself offers tempting certainty, as its fixed path seems

more determined than the rest of the scene. But dizzying jump-cuts and a disorienting trip

through the train after the punk huffs something intoxicating undermine his veracity.

Truth would be wasted in this instance, anyway; Los Mierdas are the children of “No

Future.” No one is there to mourn their death, only curse their existence. Perhaps the

only bit of truth is found in a phrase said in a moment of indifferent reflection on the
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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

haunted by a specific desire – confession.

“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

confessional manuals in archival tombs, but the invention of a particular technology of

politics.

The private inner self of confession boasts a striking architecture built for introspection.

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,

10:8:12, 10:8:14). Furthermore, each private structure is erected to direct two

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

in-and-then-up, or be condemned to eternal damnation.

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

wound that pleases the victim as it sears with pain.

If confession is understood not only as a declaration of wrongdoing but as an exclamation

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

room’s cracks of perception, but by igniting uncontrollable private passions. The

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:

ventriloquization. Confessional admissions are treated as secrets; so charged that only

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

developed techniques to implant new appetites. Psychoanalysts use transference to rope

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

synonymous with the public display of preference: by constructing an avenue of

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

Spectacle and managed by the violent force of Biopower.

The Spectacle’s command over the Metropolis undermines the tempting theory that the

modern soul is a refuge. It is not a safe house but a set-up. Fugitive moments in the

seemingly private life of the soul appear to move securely between hideouts, but their

organization was infiltrated by Empire long ago. In contrast to the soul’s appearance in

Empire as a dark room that hides dangerous appetites, its function is far more collective.

Empire governs a whole community of souls, as a shepherd tends his flock or a captain

pilots his ship, while declaring that the movements of the Metropolis originate from

innumerable causes of private origin (Foucault, Security, Territory Population, 123-130;

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

for concern, as the knowledge extracted through interrogation is helpful or even

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

a bottomless passion that renounces any name but nothingness itself.

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

that the State is nothing but the permanent state of war.

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

ancients imagined themselves to have a conscience that engaged in personal reflection, it

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

Metropolis have grown so accustomed.

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

when it is rewired to disrupt the circuit of social conductivity. Self-righteous fugitives

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

becomes everything. And it is the freeing capacity of nothingness that makes it

antagonistic to Empire.

Feel Tank, An Experiment in Negative Affects

“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

together, they are delirious with life.

Foxfire’s bond is underwritten by love even if it is fueled by vengeance. When others

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

had long privately nursed.

There is much to say about the history of Foxfire. Tales of youthful exuberance or

irresponsibility that lead them astray. Explanations on how FOXFIRE HOMESTEAD

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

them. For revenge can serve as the greatest act of love.


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Perhaps there is an unavoidable complicity between all the girls who weather the daily

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

something as noble as shared liberation. Confirming critic’s skepticism, few political

projects outwardly declare that they draw their strength from envy, irritation, paranoia,

and anxiety. Furthermore, most actions taken on behalf of these emotions are quickly

marked within public discourse as hostile, destructive, and uncontrolled. Yet Sianne Ngai

argues that although these negative affects are weaker than “grander passions like anger

and fear” and thus lack an orientation powerful enough to form clear political

motivations, the unsuitability of weakly intentional feelings “amplifies their power to

diagnose situations, and situations marked by blocked or thwarted actions in particular

(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

embodiment of reparation, she suggests echoing Melanie Klein, is a depressive attitude

that drains the shock and anxiety of surprise. This approach proposes that once the world

appears as fundamentally ambivalent, with the good always hopelessly tied up in the bad,
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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

depressive attitude from blossoming into the clinical blockage of depression.

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

feminists undertook a program of diagnosis and self-care. The positive valence of a

depressive attitude seemed lost as all that seemed possible was full-blown depression.

Recognizing collective burnout, they questioned dominant diagnostic paradigms, which

look for causes in neurochemical imbalances or damaged psyches. Hardly convinced by

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

slogans diagnosing the environment of hostility produce by Empire: “Depressed? It

Might Be Political”; “Exhausted? It Might Be Politics”; or just “I Feel Lost” (Zorach,

“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

emotion an emergent quality of the interrelational exteriority that constitutes the

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

historicization that is central to Foucauldian and other social constructionist approaches

to sexuality” because “Foucault’s critique of the repressive hypothesis applies as much to

affect as sexuality, warranting a skeptical approach to claims for interiority or emotional

expression as the truth of the self” (Cvetkovich, “Public Feelings,” 462). Feel Tank

experiments, such as “Psychological Prosthetics,” reveal that affects can be treated to a

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

off to someone?”) (Hibbert-Jones and Talisman, “Psychological Prosthetics,” 3).33 When

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

of any other form of power, affect is not a virtue but a diagnostic.

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
33
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

Promise of Happiness, 59). Her complication of happiness enhances the contemporary

utilization of Baruch Spinoza’s account of affect whereby affective connections with a

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

Spinozism intends joyous connections to be virtuous regardless of context, his account of

affect theorizes the capacity of objects to evoke feelings of pleasure or disgust in

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-

destructive delights of being oppressed, bossed around, hopelessly addicted, completely

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

permanent revolution. Audre Lorde powerfully distinguishes her own dreams of

liberation from her mother’s focus on happy survival in her autobiographical

biomythography Zami: A New Spelling of My Name. As a young child, she was often

caught in the tension of a racially-mixed neighborhood of Harlem. While walking with


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her mother, the tension literally spilled over onto the streets and she was spit on by racist

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

demonstrates is a deeper distinction: the difference between escapism as a compromise

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,

troublemakers must combine negative affect’s motivational force with a refusal of

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

(FOXFIRE NEVER LOOKS BACK!).

SPK, Making Illness Into a Weapon

“Everybody talks about the Weather... We Don’t” read an advertisement launched in

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-

historical proportions: regardless of capitalist obstructions to revolution, Marxist

socialism will power through.

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

ultimate collapse in 1970.

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

Socialists Patients’ Collective (Socialistisches Patientenkollektiv), a radical mental

health group at the University of Heidelberg. Convinced that illness is a necessary

byproduct of capitalism, they developed a radical form of therapy – agitation therapy –

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.”

By externalizing the cause of one’s condition, SPK’s agitation therapy echoes an


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important question: If the subject no longer has the truth of an interior to confess, about

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?

A history of the subject without an interior might be constructed backwards. Such a

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,

loneliness, regression, victimhood, heartbreak, antimodernism, immaturity, self-hatred,

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

focuses on transforming negative affects (understood as blockages, traumas, and the

cessation of movement) into positive affects (empowerment, capacity, power), a

backwards history identifies negativity as an antagonism generated within the Social.

And when this antagonism reemerges, feelings that were previously wished away or

ignored 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

whose mystic boundaries human beings are penned, rigidly, separately,

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

Within the Field of Libidinal Economy,” 145-146).

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

subjects that litter the Metropolis.

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

(Cooper, Psychiatry and Anti-Psychiatry, 40).34

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

to collectively exhaust humanity’s potential to take part in capitalist production (84;

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

inside out by reconnecting internal feelings to external problems in order to short-circuit

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

dissolving to protect its patients (xvii-xviii).

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

Insinuation, The Underground Current of Incoherence

Radicalism’s tame but dignified existence in the early parts of nineteenth century

America was a triumph for well-reasoned order. Immigrant intellectuals spread the

heady ideals of socialism across the newly-opened frontier, founding mutualist or

collectivist factory towns across Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Indiana and establishing

revolutionary societies and educational clubs in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia,

and Chicago. Allergic to lawbreaking and violence, the communalists set out to foster the

best-ordered and most-moral dimensions of utopian society. But as corruption and

industry grew inseparable, a new radical energy gathered in the darker corners of

society. While the socialists kept outrunning the company mines and industrial looms, a

growing underclass either unwilling or unable to escape the greed of indecent men toiled

away.

Only a short decade after the Great War, the polite pretensions of American radicalism

fell away. This shift was due to two things: first, the Panic of 1873, which threw hundreds

of thousands of workers into destitution and unleashed their fury; and second, the arrival

of anarchists. It takes the entrance of a protagonist, Johann Most, a fiery German

anarchist, to give shape to the turbulence. Inspired by Most, a persuasive orator with

scorching rhetoric, anarchists and other radicals brought ‘propaganda by the deed’ to
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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”

(Graham, Anarchism, 68).

A determined Most found propaganda by the deed straightforward and published fiery

celebrations of the growing practice of anarchist regicide – and these writings often

landed in him jail. After a year and a half stay in an English jail for praising the

assassination of Alexander II of Russia, Most immigrated to the United States and soon

published a pamphlet entitled Science of Revolutionary Warfare–A Manual of Instruction

in the Use and Preparation of Nitroglycerine, Dynamite, Gun-Cotton, Fulminating

Mercury, Bombs, Fuses, Poisons, etc, etc. Among these tools of destruction, he had a

clear weapon of choice: dynamite. Writing in the Parsons’s Alarm, Most declared his

love: “Dynamite! Of all the good stuff, that is the stuff! Stuff several pounds of this

sublime stuff into an inch pipe (gas or water pipe), plug up both ends, insert a cap with a

fuse attached, place this in the immediate vicinity of a lot of rich loafers who live by the

sweat of other people’s brows, and light the fuse. A most cheerful and gratifying result

will follow. ... It is a genuine boon for the disinherited, while it brings terror and fear to

the robbers. A pound of this good stuff beats a bushel of ballots all hollow – and don’t

you forget it!” So with the arrival of Most, his dynamite, and propaganda by the deed,

the anarchist siege against robber barons and the forces of the State commenced.
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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

capture while the other loudly boasts about itself.

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

valence of propaganda by the deed – to name a few, there are civilization-hating

anarcho-primitivists, destruction-loving anarcho-queers, democracy-averse nihilists, and

anti-organizational insurrectionists. There are many reasons why those elements are

often disavowed or even denied by their radical relatives but one is obvious: these

dissident tendencies draw their power from a dangerous source that resists legibility.

Rather than constructing their propagandistic appeals on images of a well-ordered

society constituted by a moral majority, these hidden elements draw on deeper and

darker desires of nonexistence and disappearance. However, this opposition – the

reasonable proposals of social anarchists and the excesses of their darker offspring – is

stale, so perhaps there is a way to break through.

Is there a power of truth that is not just the truth of power? asks Gilles Deleuze

(Foucault, 94-95). Written alternately in the language of anarchism: what is the

propaganda by the deed if it is not just the deed of propaganda? The answer is found in a

mode of communication whereby actions ‘speak for themselves’ – actions that need not

be owned, named, or explained. Actions as expression without speaking subjects.

Expressions that speak reason but do not prefigure. Expressions that speak 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

subjective, each subject is presented as a master of a self-contained world made up of

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

mode of communication that Empire makes officially available to its

subjects: confession, the noisy baring of the soul. The consummate existential individual

communicates by publicly expressing their private interests, and moreover, by taking

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

dangerous potential and overwhelms Empire’s subtle management of difference.

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

contains a simple imperative: self-replication. And it is because of this tendency toward

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

thrives on mutated or deformed transmissions.38 Among the most furtive modes of

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

transmit the plague that brings down Empire.

As a mode of communication that gives forces to anonymity, insinuation lends itself to a

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,

but the anonymous subversion of indiscernibility. To further clarify, persuasion is

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

of constraint. And it induces regular forms of power... it is produced and transmitted

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

is illusion so effective?’ Insinuation provides a response through the assertion that

language starts with “the transmission of the word as order-word, not the communication

of a sign as information” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 77). Therefore,

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

insinuation, itself a form of language, demonstrates this force of anonymity without

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

someone or something, they are simply blamed on ‘madmen,’ ‘barbarians,’ ‘irresponsible

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

other times slow.

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

imagine language to be at the root of communication, however, as they focus on the

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

information, on which it depends on for positivities to use in biopolitical management.

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

communicating through exchange within Empire’s system of equivalence, insinuation

sends a charge whose message, when intelligible, is often tangential, unreliable,

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

uncontrollable force suitable for politics?

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

Defended, 217-223). And while liberalism allows seemingly incommensurate approaches

and world-views to coexist, it does so by requiring a minimum degree of coherence.

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

connects elements by avoiding homogeneity so as to respect the differences of disparate

elements (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 507). Empire thus uses the

products of insinuation to make the Metropolis an estuary, a transitional zone, which

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,

the political question thus takes on a compositional valence: what combinations of

insinuation feed reservoirs that remain untapped by Empire? And what anarchic

explosion of forces will drown Empire?

Guerrilla, The Force of Liberation

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

little more meaning.

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

monopoly on the use of violence.

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

that avoids hardening into an army.

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

terrain, and indistinguishability.


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Though guerrilla was once effective against the State, it cannot lead the struggle against

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

accordingly (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 50-53; Guillén, Philosophy of the

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

rural terrain while simultaneously forming a subservient nucleus of politics in the

metropole (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 75-78). Though many theorists

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.

modified). Guerrilla theorists depict this transformation in various mixtures of

conservative and progressive forces. On the one hand, there are the conservative

theorists, such as Mao, who imagine the guerrilla to spring from souls of an oppressed
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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

struggle to enjoy it nonetheless.

Yet in the Metropolis, it is difficult to maintain the hardness necessary to remain a

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,

a pair of boots” – a disregard not driven by malevolent indifference but an irreducible


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difference in the conditions of thought, action, and ultimately life itself (Debray,

Revolution in the Revolution?, 69, 70-71). Diminishing hardness is an effect of Biopower,

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,

mobility, flexibility, versatility, and command of any situation (Marighella, Mini-Manual

of the Urban Guerrilla, 5). These characteristics are responsive to the subjective life of

the Metropolis, which is experienced by subjects as an unending stream of accidents and

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,

and to retreat” (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla, 5; trans. modified).

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

movements become as automatic as the daily humiliations of life in the Metropolis.

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

insinuation, thus grows in power as it learns new rhythms of advancement and

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,

as it strikes at difficult-to-defend positions but is exclusively clandestine and not

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

indigenous populations who are skeptical of all outsiders – imperialists and

revolutionaries alike (Debray, Revolution in the Revolution?, 50-53). The Metropolis

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

modern roads, electrified by nuclear power, connected by cell-phone towers, and

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

site of underdevelopment created by Empire’s management through abandonment. And it

is from that abandonment that a new, crueler form of autonomy arises bearing the

potential to disrupt the operations of the Metropolis. Contemporary military theorists

have noticed this risk, noting that:

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,

“The Urbanisation of Insurgency: The Potential Challenge to US Army

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

to be surrounded, looted, and immobilized (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban

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

the forces of liberation.

Escape remains the greatest challenge to politics created by the Metropolis. As every

theory of guerrilla warfare maintains, escape is fundamental because it establishes how

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.

The necessity of camouflage. The guerrilla demonstrates the importance of selective

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-

Labour to Capital-Life, 200-205). This difference was amplified during Italy’s

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

architecture of indistinction, informality, and semi-secrecy that became anonymous, that

is “signed with fake names, a different one each time,” and thus “unattributable, soluble

in the sea of Autonomia” (84-85).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

authorship and militancy and thus constituted a multi-faceted offensive “more

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

was a diffusion of fragmented appearances that formed “a certain intensity in the

circulation of bodies between all of [its] points” (Manwaring, Shadows of Things Past, 7;

Tiqqun, This is Not a Program, 85).

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

calculating management of Biopower (Marighella, Mini-Manual of the Urban Guerrilla,

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

camouflage for offensive strikes against the Metropolis.

The offensive use of camouflage orients politics away from the Spectacle, which limits

politics to the space of appearance, to the underground movement of forces not

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

“through its specific meaning in situation,” rendering it immediately discernible (Tiqqun,

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

becoming-revolutionary (85). Imperceptibility is difficult to maintain, however, as the

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

dysfunctions. Although guerrillas are imperceptible, so is Empire. That is to say: Empire

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

does appear, it is only through management and circulation, whose temporary

consistencies are only the effects of its existence. The imperceptibility of the guerrilla and

Empire differ, however, in appearance. While Empire maintains the appearance of

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

assailablity of Empire that avoid liquidation.

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

philosopher, I am a strategist!” (quoted in Agamben, “Metropolis,” 1). And in turn,

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

cynical politics and begins revolutionary dreaming once again.

Digital Subversions, New Strategies for Struggle

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:

“Cyberspace: A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate

operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... a graphical

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

constellations of data. Like city lights, receding...” (51).

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

savage depiction of doomed characters languishing in the Social State to Empire’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

Metropolis, it points to the transformation of escape – gone is the extensive form of

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.

The Metropolis is not a representation abstracted from contemporary media technologies;

but if “history progresses at the speed of its weapons systems,” then the architecture of

the Metropolis is no doubt structured by informatization, which is the biopolitical

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

network culture, which is characterized by an abundance of information and an

acceleration of informational character (Terranova, Network Culture, 1). But the

information utilized is quite specific in three distinct ways: as “the relation of signal to

noise,” “a measure of the uncertainty or entropy of a system,” and “a nonlinear and

nondeterministic relationship between the microscopic and the macroscopic levels of a

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

the Luddite dream of sabotaging or crippling infrastructure on a mass scale is unthinkable

and cyberterrorism by political-motivated radicals is rare (Krapp, Noise Channels, 49-

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

theories into a strategy to be used in the struggle against the Metropolis

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

imagine Empire’s offensive as dehumanizing. Rather, it is non-human. From the

algorithms governing Wall Street financial transactions to the Obama Campaign’s voter

prediction models, material objects are interpreted like information on the internet:

inhuman movements “recorded in a myriad of different locations (log files, server

statistics, email boxes)” treated as “the clustering of descriptive information around a

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

information theory’s concept of communication: the accurate reproduction of an encoded

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

disrupts through distortion and loss.

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

“overwhelmed by the open network ecology” of oceanic difference or get marooned on

“a self-contained and self-referential archipelago of the like-minded” (Terranova,

Network Culture, 70). Perhaps today’s cyberpunk console cowboys have already become

inhuman, vanishing into “evanescent and mobile informational islands” of peer-to-peer

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

unfold in the antagonism between a revolutionary subject and an easily identified

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

done if divergence is to be utilized in a strategy of offensive escape. How to weaponize

incompatibility, however, is the question that remains.

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

predetermined outcome – in short, an error. And although not immediately catastrophic,

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

general, an exploit replicates the guerrilla strategy of turning something to one’s

advantage; so in video games a glitch can exploit grant a player powers not intended by

the developers. As culture takes on characteristics of the digital, social, or economic

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

down glitches and other traces of exploits.

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

a potential weakness (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 230-232; Deleuze and

Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 436-437; 463; 472-473). This vulnerability:

is not the result of society’s inability to integrate its marginal phenomena; on the

contrary, it stems from an overcapacity for integration and standardization. When


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this happens, societies which seem all-powerful are destabilized from within, with

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

(Baudrillard, “A Perverse Logic,” 6).

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

exposed to choreography crafted to manipulate its openness and speed to create

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

and expropriating their resources.

The unavoidable noise of digital culture provides the camouflage for operation. Noise is

quite ambivalent even if it sometimes disrupts communication. The rising decibels of a

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

understood as always detrimental to a system, for even if it “destroys and horrifies,” it is

also true that “order and flat repetition are in the vicinity of death;” rather, noise holds
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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

“vacuoles of non-communication,” opening up tiny breaches that allow one to evade

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-

communication by invading a channel with the desubjectified force of the outside.

It is finally time to answer Foucault’s demand for a force of truth that is not just the truth

of force by way of a reintroduction of insinuation. The ‘propaganda by the deed’ of turn-

of-the-century anarchists and the ‘armed propaganda’ of mid-century guerrillas each

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
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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

against occupying powers. Resistance to Empire should take heed.

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

is creation, or really, “resistance to the present” (Deleuze and Guattari, What is

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
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outside.

225
Coda

In the beginning, there is escape. It arrives ahead of thought and vanishes before it can be

caught.

And it is in this movement that escape can be brought to a close.

It Begins With Escape… (intensive escape)

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

(Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, 172). It need not be caused by anything

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
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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,

and the Becoming of Unbecoming,” 10-11). Unbecoming can be arrested, restricted, or

otherwise limited in many ways; of them, cultural confinements of escape are particularly

potent. Capitalism, for instance, clothes itself in cultural representations of freedom,

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

place, they’re journeys in intensity” (Deleuze, “Nomadic Thought,” 259-260). These

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.

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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

global space through distance-demolishing technologies, leaving behind a few isolated

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

‘communism,’ offer a thoroughly intensive theory of escape. The path through

capitalism, they argue, is the Common: the plentiful immaterial products of biopolitical

production, such as communication and cooperation, which cannot be fully captured by

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

Jean-Pierre Proudhon of misunderstanding dialectics for thinking that capitalism had a

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

movement which makes history, by providing a struggle” (Poverty of Philosophy,

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

escape practiced by back-to-the-landers in search of a new outside. But intensive

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

machines of management, technical objects are transformed from tools to weapons.

When detached from their intended purpose, these weapons operate with newfound speed

and intensity unavailable to Empire. As a rebellion against spectacular time, finitude

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

anti-humanism, insinuation, and illegalism feed the hidden undercurrent of struggle.

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.

Escape Precedes Thought… (sensational politics)

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

communicated through sensation as well (Williams, Transversal Thought, 23-24). And


231
unlike the music of the scream, which surrenders the scream to other sounds to make an

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

philosophical discourses on politics, which have “always maintained an essential relation

to the law, the institution, and the contract, all of which are the Sovereign’s problem,

traversing the ages of sedentary history from despotic formations to democracies”

(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

followers of the merciful jurist-priest, escape highlights the importance of a cultural

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

role that the philosophical-juridical discourse of sovereignty played in displacing the


232
historico-political justification of State rule (57-58; 98-99). Through his investigation,

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

that deduce sovereignty through reason alone. While Foucault’s historico-political

account of the triumph of governmental reason is persuasive, it pits the discourse of

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

triumph of philosophico-juridical discourse over a historico-political one was not 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

not be interpreted as a lament for a historico-political discourse of the State but as a

genealogy of its absences. Moreover, as a genealogy, Foucault’s book skillfully

demonstrates how historico-political discourse was taken up in specific, local acts of

resistance to the State, which can erupt again in an insurrection of subjugated

knowledges. What he fails to complete, however, is a history of cultural forms of escape

that mobilizes the force of the outside. Only a cultural theory of escape, then, dares to

dream beyond the horizon of the State.

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

monumental at stake than Empire. Digital culture has triggered an anthropological

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.

And Then It Vanishes… (beyond appearances)

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

and nonexistence, anonymity and illegibility, indistinguishability and indiscernibility all

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

maintaining a particular relationship between space, time, and appearance.

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

(Jameson, Postmodernism, 47-48). Moreover, spatialization taps into the foreign or

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 followed the triangle of Keynesianism-Fordism-Taylorism, and the Socialist

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

a space of exposure and exteriority.

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

invincible… Before that day in September, in April, in December, in May, in November,


237
when this city’s veins opened, and we lived a hundred years of history in one afternoon.

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

be. It is the flood of digital noise that destroys and horrifies.

238
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