Adorned with all the signs of insecurity.

If one did want to instigate a mass uprising against an authoritarian regime, how would one go about doing so? What steps are involved? Sure, one could look at various passages in Marx to grasp the economic motivators of social unrest – poverty, disparity, the mechanics of capital as a system of alienation and exploitation – but Marx, rather infamously, won’t teach you much concerning what to do about it.

Ditto for Che Guevara — unfortunately in the best tradition of the (negative) dialectic, his Diaries only tell you what one should not do, which is start guerilla war in a foreign country where the locals aren’t particularly interested in having you there.

Reading up on the French revolution is as engaging as it is instructive (and do watch Danton), though the lessons to be drawn from 1789 through Napoleon, and the American and English Revolutions respectively, is that any major upheaval that destabilizes the pillars of a society – including its engines of economic trade and fabric of social reciprocity – has resulted in generations of bloodsheed, counterrevolution, military dictatorship, soft reinstatement of previous systems of exploitation and privilege, organised criminality masquerading as revolutionary zeal, destructive and nihilist infighting and outright civil – if not Total – war.

Indeed, it remains entirely unclear whether humanity is capable of undertaking massive socioeconomic change without such violence and its repercussions (and this includes the “hidden” violence of globalized capital), which brings one directly to the 20th century and the various attempts to commandeer such violence through a revolutionary vanguard. Yet even the good intentions and creative energies of the various antifascist socialist revolutions gave in to an overwhelming paranoia — that by beheading the despot king, a vacuum had been ripped open in the metaphysical fabric of the cultural imaginary that simply had to be filled. And so the abyss was given over to the singularity of the absolute once again, feeding the ravenous cult of the despot, that destructive violence of supplementarity – the addition necessary for the whole to become whole – rendered flesh. Even radical communism could not escape the logic of the sacrificial god (or as some would have it, rather did such a system only intensify the phallogocentrism of the golden bough). As each State became a surveillance State with its gulag archipelagos, its internal purges  met or exceeded – in its modern, industrial organisation of death and repression – whatever monarchical-autocracy that preceded it.

And we have not yet even touched upon the echo chamber of violence that has seemingly overtaken postcolonial struggles and turned them inside out. Nearly each postcolonial revolution of the mid-20th century has turned into some caricature of its former self as it perpetuates the cycle of violence that brought it into power, rather than dealing with the more mundane task of organising some kind of peaceful and participatory State. Violence is addictive, a high, as any member of organised (or unorganised) crime will tell you: violence is hardwired into the human, and boy, do we love it, in all its most depraved and sadistic forms. Which brings us to the continent of Africa and the Middle East, replete with its petty dictators – many armed with nuclear weapons, of course – that preside over endless parades, publicly stroking their egos, playing out a kind of patriarchal onanism often fetishized with self-stitched uniforms, sunglasses, dorky hats and numerous long and ridiculous titles such as Leader of the Grand Revolution of Such-and-Such-Day, Hero Of Our Fallen Martyrs The SteelWorkers of Some Village, etc., etc., etc..

None of which helps much when in our contemporary moment the entire populace living under the State terrorism of such regimes of absolute violence – cartoon leaders are always the most dangerous – suddenly tips over into a state of all-out insurrection. No-holds-barred, we will die for this style, absolute overthrowing of seemingly absolute power — this is what is happening and, despite all the revolutionary history behind us, new and old, the story is the same and yet every time the outcome is utterly unknown: we can know absolutely nothing about the possible outcome of any of the particular (yet connected) forces at work. Military dictatorships? More than possible. Slow transitions of existing institutions to democratic models? Possible too. Mass slaughter and civil war? Already happening.

What is intriguing is possibly where some of the current dis/organisation comes from. Move over Marx, and meet Gene Sharp. Here’s DiY Revolution in eight (easy?) steps:

• Develop a strategy for winning freedom and a vision of the society you want
• Overcome fear by small acts of resistance
• Use colours and symbols to demonstrate unity of resistance
• Learn from historical examples of the successes of non-violent movements
• Use non-violent “weapons”
• Identify the dictatorship’s pillars of support and develop a strategy for undermining each
• Use oppressive or brutal acts by the regime as a recruiting tool for your movement
• Isolate or remove from the movement people who use or advocate violence

the terrible community of financial capital (spiral formation)

IV. 2

As post-authoritarian formations, the corporations of the “new economy” constitute terrible communities in the fullest sense.  And no one should see any contradiction in the similarity between capitalism’s avant-gardes and the avant-gardes of its opposition: they are both prisoners of the same economic principle, the same need for efficiency and organization, even if they set themselves up on different terrain.  They in fact serve the same modalities of the circulation of power, and in that sense they are politically quite near one another. Tiqqun, Theses on the Terrible Community

In Tiqqun’s Theses on the Terrible Community [translation / French original], what is the terrible community? The community is an illusive circulation of isolated dividuals — subjects struck through with the schizophrenia of capital. Sacrifice holds it together, to an ideology or cause, be it for profit or for the people, and every terrible community revolves around a Leader. The terrible community can take many forms: a corporation is a terrible community, as is any workforce. In particular, Tiqqun seems to have in mind the activist community, or any anarchist squat, insofar as it projects itself as outside to, or at least resisting against, what Tiqqun calls democratic biopower. Yet the activist community just like the business community are both terrible communities, beholden to rituals of sacrifice, isolated existences, vertical hierarchies, and even worse, self-policing and self-censorship. I would like to ask Tiqqun (if they can be addressed) as to what they think of the branding of communities – the Muslim community, the gay community, etc. – in terms of their alleged coherency, unity and collective responsibility within the mediasphere of Spectacle.

Tiqqun flattens all communities to the relations of their form.

IV. 11

The terrible community only feels its own existence when it has crossed over into illegality.  And anyway, all sado-masochistic human exchanges outside of commodity relations are devoted in the end to illegality, as the violent metaphor for the surreptitious misery of this era.  It’s only in illegality that the terrible community perceives itself and ek-sists, negatively of course, as something outside the sphere of legality, as a creation freeing itself from itself.  While never recognizing legality as something legitimate, the terrible community has nevertheless still managed to make the negation of it the space of its existence. Tiqqun, Theses on the Terrible Community

With illegality arises a question, or rather a proposition: is not the most conscious terrible community, the one most alive, not that of some anarchist movement or fringe group, but that of financial capital itself, the terrible community of all those traders and brokers in junk bonds and hedge funds, those money managers who climbed to the heights of financial abstraction, and crept beyond to the very edges of financial legality?

The financial community crossed over into illegality. Hell, it bought and sold the legal system. It understands full well every ounce of Tiqqun’s phrase that “all sado-masochistic exchanges outside of commodity relations are devoted in the end to illegality.” Indeed, the financial community long exceeded the mere trading of goods, or even that commodity relations – whether it be that of the signifier itself, of money, or of bodies, or of resources, products, processes or objects in general – should determine the basis of trade negotiations, future assessments, currencies, stock prices or debt obligations. The financial community reified, beyond the paradigm of legality, the profiteering of sado-masochistic force itself. When buying and selling against the probable failure of toxic assets, in such a way that utterly erases all ties to any kind of commodity relation, then the financial community trades in nothing but sado-masochistic violence wrought through the power of mystic numerosity. Credit and debit are concepts applied through the distribution of financial “justice” – the simple equation where debt is judgement, bankruptcy, death. The financial community  disregards with sheer contempt the consequences of capitalizing the very human relations outside of commodity relations – where thousands of Blooms would be forced to foreclose and enter into bankruptcy – and their sacrifice is to worship the most pure, abstract illegality, the unleashed violence of abstract Moloch. Or so it thinks.

As any escort will tell you, their clients are businessmen: lawyers and traders and nameless members of the financial community. It is no surprise they purchase sexual pleasure. But it is the form of its purchase that remains obscure to those outside the world of call girls and the GFE. For this purchase is an exchange of power. Money becomes the fe/male slave. Finally, abstraction is laid to rest. Money is realised with control over the body: I HAVE BECOME BIOPOWER, I AM SIGNIFIER. With the casual deposition of bills on the dresser, the abstraction of toxic asset trading becomes flesh, and all that was hazy and muddied in time and space crystallizes in the illegality of prostitution. Prostitution and the purchase of pleasure are the only ways to drive home the illegality of abstract crime, to make it real, to make the community real to itself.

The terrible community of financial capital perceives itself and ex-sists – negatively, of course, “as a creation freeing itself from itself” – in a Hegelian formation otherwise known to conservative ideologues as “pulling oneself up by the bootstraps.”

The negation of legality is indeed the space of the terrible community’s existence. It is precisely here that financial capital exists as a community, with its Leaders, its sacifices, its ideologies, policing and censorship — and its realisation, or reification, in the purchase of fe/male slaves, where the profession of prostitution is the necessary supplement to the abstractions of financial capital.

How does one destroy such a terrible community?

5

The time of the terrible community is spiraloid and of a muddy consistency.  It is an impenetrable time where the planned-form and the habit-form weigh on lives, leaving them paper-thin.  One might define it as the time of naïve freedom where everyone does what they want, since the times wouldn’t permit anyone to want anything aside from what’s already there.

One might say that it is the time of clinical depression, or rather, the time of exile and prison.  It is an endless wait, a uniform expanse of disordered discontinuities. Tiqqun, Theses on the Terrible Community

In this spiraloid (see above), time is cyclic, rotating in a fictional present, and yet muddy, impenetrable. Cash-in on the upswing of the cycle, and gain all the benefits of paper-thin lives: the accumulation of numbers that signal paper, paper that stands-in for the hallucinatory aura of ore. The financial community did what it so desired; its desires were perfectly attenuated to what all communities want: to become-illegal, to play the Outlaw, to wear the Cowboy pants. The financial community couldn’t possibly imagine anything else. How could it possibly  harness its brilliant hyperabstract minds to do anything other than develop the most complex ways to bank-out & cash-in? For the financial community is the terrible community for us all — the meta-community that acts in its totality as the Leader we love to hate. It only wanted, after all, what was already there, that Common Dream of the American People: to get very fucking rich, by fucking everyone around. In its illegality, in its realisation of its own existence, the financial community broke its clinical depression and smashed Nietzsche’s cycle of the endless wait, making haste with the snatch & grab. It was only after that the realisation came thundering down, that it was, indeed, only ever a terrible community, a community all the more vapid for every member was beset by the void of the Leader, and that all it had, waiting for it at home, was the couple of exile and prison, and not its call girls (though always the even more terrible core of the family) once the money dried up — only then did it realise that its snatch & grab had failed to secure all it ever wanted, the mysterious power of the snatch itself.

If you want to destroy the terrible community, then it is through where it realises itself, reifies itself, claims its own existence, and becomes flesh, that one must strike.

CALL TO ALL PROSTITUTES.

Semiotext(e) have recently published the text Introduction to Civil War by the pseudonymous authorial collective Tiqqun. The text is number 4 of the Intervention series which has set for its mission the publication of recent works in political philosophy and political economy, including Christian Marazzi’s The Violence of Financial Capitalism (a crucial analysis of the recession) and The Invisible Committee’s manifesto of contemporary insurgency, The Coming Insurrection [download here].

These texts should not be taken lightly – or rather, these texts weigh heavily on the paranoia of the French state. In France, the alleged author(s) of The Coming Insurrection were violently arrested under “preemptive” measures that identified them as “pre-terrorists”. What is striking – and frightening – is that the Tarnac 9 by all accounts were not a revolutionary cell, but a small alternative commune living off the grid. Apparently such existence, outside of a few norms, is enough to invite the living nightmare of State hostility. Whether Julien Coupat wrote The Coming Insurrection is irrelevant. The text resonates with the zeitgeist that exploded in the banlieu riots of 2005. It is rightly anonymous as its claims are that of a world. Tiqqun’s Introduction to Civil War suggests the experience of the Tarnac 9:

Spectacle’s genius is to have acquired a monopoly over qualifications, over the act of naming. With this in hand, it can then smuggle in its metaphysics and pass of the products of its fraudulent interpretations as facts. Some act of social war gets called a “terrorist act,” while a major intervention by NATO, initiated through the most arbitrary process, is deemed a “peacekeeping operation.” Mass poisonings are described as epidemics, while the “High Security Wing” is the technical term used in our democracies’ prisons for the legal practice of torture. Tiqqun is, to the contrary, the action that restores to each fact its how, of holding this how to be the only real there is. (Civil War §82: 189).

The State response to these texts has only highlighted what Tiqqun outlines with so much clarity: the frightening reality of a military complex that operates in a world of pre-emptive strikes and precognitive assurance in preventative measures. Never has Philip K. Dick’s short-story-turned-Hollywood-epic, Minority Report, rung out with such unfortunate resonance. The world is now temporally adjudicated before the act. You are accused before you commit – and this you is the general you, the Blooms, the interpellated subject in all of us – and committed to imprisonment before acting upon the accusation. Orwell called it thoughtcrime, but the current manifestation is all the more insidious, as the outward signs of State repression are not nearly so theatrical. Instead, as Tiqqun analyses, we live in a nonsociety of atomistic “Blooms”, or “citizens of Empire” that, in the mode of Foucauldian discipline and biopower, self-censor and self-regulate the mechanics of subjectivity.

Giorgio Agamben observed that Tiqqun managed to radicalize and blur the two strains of Foucault’s later work: the analysis of techniques of governance and the processes of subjectivation (see video above & here; this translation here). Agamben (roughly translated):

Thus, as demonstrated by Foucault, in a microphysics of power, power does and always has circulated in mechanisms of all kinds; legal, material, etc. For Tiqqun, power is nothing more than that. It doesn’t stand as a sovereign hypostatic entity in relation to civil society and life; it coincides internally with life and society.

Power cannot be understood as having a center anymore; it is a mere accumulation of mechanisms into which subjects, or in Foucault’s words “processes of subjectivation”, are entangled.

In this context, Tiqqun tries to cause the two plans, the two analyses kept separate in the work of Foucault – mechanisms and techniques of governance, subject – to fully coincide with one another. There is a text in one of the essays published in the book called “métaphysique critique”, and it says it very clearly: “a theory of the subject is only possible as a theory of mechanisms.” [from the translation]

The subject is a mechanism. Clearly, this position accords with Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on the subject as a machine (or an assemblage thereof), and perhaps more intriguingly, with work in philosophy of technology that articulates the subject as technically constructed, or rather perpetually reconstructed through technics (such as in the deconstructive work of Bernard Stiegler and Mark Hansen, or Bruno Latour’s Actor Network Theory). With Tiqqun, subjectivity is likewise kept in a state of perpetual reconstruction through the reactionary forces of Empire, which is not a positive object (and certainly not a sovereign entity or even operation of sovereignty). For Tiqqun, Empire is a wholly negative and reactionary force; it only comes into being through its policing actions. The place of the sovereign Prince is now occupied by the Principle:

Empire exists “positively” only in crisis, only as negation and reaction. If we too belong to Empire, it is only because it is impossible to get outside it. [...] This is why Empire is not only without a government, but also without an emperor: there are only acts of government, all equally negative. In our historical experience, the phenomenon that comes closest to this state of affairs is still the Terror. (§51; Gloss B, 125-126).

If Empire is a negative policing operation, existing positively only in the moment of its negativity, which is to say in a perpetual state of emergency, then so is the subject. The subject exists only when interpellated. The difference with Althusser is, however, that Empire only exists within the same logic of interpellation; the microphysics of power reveals only the apparatuses of its circulation. There is no centre to this power, nor to the subject; it is this core of absence which upholds the transcendent violence of the absolute Principle. So it is that the subject and Empire come into effect through circulations of force, and that Tiqqun’s absent-centre at the heart of both Empire and the subject remains profoundly indebted to Derrida: the subject as a feedback loop of consciousness through a nonsovereign other constructed through the technics and force of the sign is explored throughout Of Grammatology.

In this respect – and remaining exterior to the French cliques that unfortunately segregate radical discourse – I find it utterly senseless that Tiqqun attacks not only deconstruction as the “weak thought” of Empire (145) but Toni Negri in his “ridiculous hope for a global democratic state” (159). I would tend to unfortunately agree that all too often deconstruction has been reduced to academic exercises in pseudonihilism and the soft ethics of hospitality. That said, the force of Derrida’s work cannot be said “to dissolve and disqualify all intensity, while never producing any itself” (§57, 145). On the contrary, Derrida’s work, through its interplay of exoteric to esoteric discourses, intensifies and accelerates the texts it comes into contact with through its affirmative acts of parasitism.  And as Tiqqun likes asking “what X has actually done” (160), then Tiqqun must account for the fact that Derrida as a figure intensified debate to the boiling point throughout the world, adhering both followers and detractors, and causing entire upheavals within disciplines and departments (like, I should add, Foucault, who remains sanctimonious and unchallenged in Tiqqun’s work). Further, Tiqqun must also account for its own erasure: we cannot ask, in turn, what Tiqqun has done (other than to anonymously write texts).

As for Negri, his utopianism is palpable in attempting to rethink a telos of the multitude, or rather, prescribe a telos to the content of multitude in such texts as The Porcelain Workshop. Yet, this is no reason to discredit multitude as a useful descriptor of global interconnectedness stemming from precarious and cognitive labour. Paulo Virno has offered several analyses of multitude that think the multitude without content, which is to say, sans the telos of a definitive positive class (a.k.a. the digital proletariat). Yet Tiqqun appears to pay no attention to the accuracy of these socioeconomic analyses, all the more surprising given their accuracy in dissecting the global economic crises post-2007.

It is also frustrating that Tiqqun attacks Negri’s work with the ridiculous charge of “aspiring to hold institutional positions” (161). Here Tiqqun descends to a fruitless level of name-calling that lacks respect for Negri as a political prisoner.

Moreover there is a greater point at stake here that undermines Tiqqun’s own position, or rather reveals its lack of coherency. In brief, Tiqqun at times wavers between contingency and determinism, positivism and negativism. Tiqqun does not clearly distinguish between what is and what should be (or what ought to be) nor between its own means and those of its proclaimed enemies.

To take one particular, though telling example: Tiqqun claims that as Empire and the subject are negative and thus reactionary effects, deconstruction, as such a negative operation, must be complicit with the operations of Empire. Indeed, apparently deconstruction operates as the officious discourse of Empire. (A similar critique has been advanced by Zizek of Deleuze and Guattari: the dazzled reader of D&G advocating nomadic deterritorialization has just swallowed transnational capital’s modus operandi — hook, line & sinker. Tiqqun uses D&G and Foucault without question in this respect. Such claims tend to lead nowhere. What matters is what one does with the tools — including their reshaping or repurposing. Everything is complicit. Nothing is outside Empire.)

In associating all of deconstruction with Empire (as a discursive network, series of texts, and a mode of inquiry), what Tiqqun implies is that its own discourse is not reactionary nor weak thought of Empire. By contrast, it is – and must be, unless qualified – positivist and actionary. Yet, and somewhat ironically, it is this very positivist force that Tiqqun charges Negri with not only holding in his theses concerning Empire, but as projecting from a positivism of his own self (!):

The entire Negrian perspective boils down to this: to force Empire to take on the form of a universal State, by staging the emergence of a so-called “global civil society.” Coming from people who have always aspired to hold institutional positions, who thus have always pretended to believe in the fiction of the modern State, the absurdity of this strategy becomes clear; and the evidence to the contrary in Empire itself acquires historical significance. When Negri asserts that the multitude produced Empire, that “sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule,” that “Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world,” or again that “[t]his order is expressed as a juridical formation,” he gives an account, not of the world around him, but of his own ambitions. (§63 Gloss B, 161-162).

Many would agree with Tiqqun’s critique, which is precisely why Virno’s account of a multitude without content – and its exodus – appears all the more significant for articulating power without a sovereign centre. On the contrary, Negri explicitly argues for the telos of potentia (however contingent), and this unfolding of quasi-determined historicity nonetheless ensures the inevitable revolution of the (proletarian) multitude. Even if Tiqqun decontextualizes much of Negri’s complexity on these points, and descends into a personal attack, their critique accurately reflects the contestable elements of Negri’s position. That said, what can Tiqqun offer? Tiqqun appears to pose a theoretical bind: deconstruction on the one side, Negriism on the other. Yet the more one advances into a reading of Tiqqun, the more it appears that Tiqqun remains unsure of their strategy:

(a) After denouncing deconstruction as weak thought of the Empire in §58, in §59 Gloss A Tiqqun adapts the very procedure of deconstruction and the substantive form of one of Derrida’s most well known theses:

Because no one is ever depersonalized enough to be a perfect conductor of these social flows, everyone is always-already, as the very condition of survival, at fault in the eyes of the norm, a norm that will only be established after the fact, after the intervention. We call this state a blank blame. It is the moral condition of the citizens of Empire. It is the reason why there are, in fact, no citizens, but only proofs of citizenship.

What Tiqqun has described is the law of the supplement articulated in its political negativity. One could rewrite the last sentence in its logical form: there is no positive X, but only its signs or effects, its force, which is why a supplement, added after the fact, is always added to that which must appear whole, even as its substantive content is lacking. This is precisely why there is no X, but only its always-already effect after-the-fact. The temporality of the supplement is such that it provides the content after the fact through the delay and differal of signs. Mark the Derridean language: always-already, survival (sur-vivance), the fault, etc. This entire thesis is not only deconstructive, it is the thetic form of deconstruction itself. Later, deconstructive articulations inhabit Deleuze’s war machine in the observation that “the war machine has a supplemental relation to war” (§79, 186) — a marked convergence of D&G to Derrida’s strategy that has been oft ignored.

(b) While denouncing multitude as a general abstraction akin to that of “society”, and taking its meaning directly from Hobbes without considering its rearticulation by Autonomist thought, Tiqqun claims that its enemy is not Empire itself (as there is no positive content to Empire, no subject) but the formidably abstract hostis, “a nothing that demands to be annihilated, either through a cessation of hostility, or by ceasing to exist altogether” (§19, 47). Tiqqun sets as its enemy a nothing which demands its annihilation. The entire means of how – which forms the essential question of the essay “How Is It To Be Done?” – is moreover thrown into confusion. How does one combat nothing? At first, it would appear that this is to be answered through the reclamation of violence as “what has been taken from us” (§11, Gloss A, 34). Yet, annihilation above is expressed in a cessation of hostility. Is hostility, then, not equivocal to an operation of violence? Is Tiqqun advocating Ghandi-esque methods that nonetheless reclaim violence? Later, in §71, we read that

For us, the hostis is this very hostility that, within Empire, orders both the non-relation to self and the generalized non-relation between bodies. Anything that tries to arouse in us this hostis must be annihilated. What I mean is that the sphere of hostility itself must be reduced.

The means of this reduction are again unclear. Furthermore, how can a nonsovereign, nonsubstantive Empire compose and enforce an order? The negativity of Empire here is often articulated in a positivism that appears not within the policing actions of the State of Emergency (this or that operation), but of a general condition in which Empire would, then, be perpetually positive in its negativity. The positivity of Empire would, of course, serve justification for Negri’s position in regards to Empire’s substantive qualities that Tiqqun despises. Moreover, this dialectical relation of negativity/positivity would also lead one to consider with more weight a deconstructive analysis of these operational concepts.

In regards to reducing the sphere of hostility, the dividuals that are supposed to accomplish this act appear to unite only in their abstraction as near-essentialist “forms-of-life” which are not “cultures” or “styles” but communist relations to “how I am what I am” (§5, 22) that form the core of their ethical relations, a relation situated before politics. In short, forms-of-life are contingent in their communality; they are constructed as ethical relations before political ones. However, this raises questions, even traditional ones, concerning the ethical construction of contingent communism, or, in philosophical terms, of how we know that we have the good life, how we know that we are acting ethically, and so on. Indeed, is not the collective inquiry into these questions precisely that of politics? Yet, Tiqqun dismisses such avenues of questioning thought in §6 as “meaningless” and as betraying “only a rejection,” if not a “fear of undergoing contingency.” On the contrary, such questions embrace contingency as inherently malleable in their content and means and advance their questioning as essential to the ethico-political relation. If forms-of-life are contingent, then should we not inquire how to create, share, and remix them? Is this not the ethical question par excellence? The problem here is that Tiqqun has severed the relationship between ethics and politics while nonetheless claiming communism as an ethical good.

In this respect Tiqqun seems to fear strategies that would elevate questions of contingency to a political level, given its repeated emphasis on the ethical dimensions of its positions before politics – an “ethics of civil war” (§31, §95). Tiqqun would appear to avoid addressing how it is that its contingent, though fundamental theses concerning forms-of-life are precisely that: forms without content, and thus without ethical content nor foundation. What constitutes “an ethics of civil war” if forms-of-life are contingent, and war is advanced before politics? Such questions are meaningless in this schema; no ethics can exist in a war of all-against-all. It is a war not even of ethics, but of the free play of power itself. As Tiqqun writes, “Civil war is the free play of forms-of-life; it is the principle of their coexistence” (§10). Yet this play is free only insofar as it would be unequal and ruthless – which is to say, without ethics it would operate without constraint. Surely Tiqqun is not trying to convince us Blooms of Rousseau’s myth of the Noble Savage? And are we really supposed to believe that the State impoverished an ethics of civil war by translating it into economic (or class) war? For Tiqqun, it is a question of

how the “war of each against each” is instead the impoverished ethic of civil war imposed everywhere by the modern State under the name of the economic, which is nothing other than the universal reign of hostility. (§42)

(c) In regards to the state of civil war, and Tiqqun’s mission to seek it through communist forms-of-life, these communes of unquestioned sameness (§13) must be pursued in an ethical capacity, which is to open oneself to other forms-of-life. If there is an ethical dimension, it is usually sought in the relation to the other: the ethics of hospitality. For Tiqqun, our capacity to be affected by other forms-of-life appears not in our relations to the other, and the choices made in relation to the other, but by abdicating the Bloomesque notions of freedom and choice and following one’s form-of-life “right to the end, to the point where it vanishes” (§6, gloss B, 25). In short, one must take up a form-of-life and pursue it to the end in order to be affected by others. The more one pursues the communism of a form-of-life to the point of its disappearance, to the point of forgetfulness, to the point of incorporation without memory, to the point wherein one forgets one is pursuing a contingent ethics, the more one is affected by others. There is a deeply troubling aspect to this thesis, for it is a position that wishes to bury, without memory, the contingency of its form. One is reminded of every attempt to start at Year Zero.

Surely the autonomist language of exodus develops a contingent position from which to articulate a new political relation much better. Through exit or organised retreat a collectivity can reset the parameters for a new republic. Rave culture demonstrated such a movement. Exodus organises the parameters of its  alternative world (the latter a term that Tiqqun also uses).

Yet Tiqqun’s articulation is troubling also in its linearity – its simplism of relations to the other. Here, the ability to be affected by others (and one would suppose this includes empathy) follows from the linear yet forgetful development of one’s form-of-life in relation to those whom one is already affiliated with (here one is somewhat reminded of Stirner). In this logic, the ethical capacity is suspended or reduced until one’s form-of-life has reified to the point of its disappearance. In short, after shaping one’s form-of-life to the point of its absolute introjection (to put it in psychoanalytic terms), the other can no longer trouble it: one’s contingent foundations for ethical relations is no longer open to question. Is this not precisely the policing operation of biopower and self-regulation that Foucault investigates? Is this not precisely the methodology of indoctrination, of all forms of unconscious programming?

For Tiqqun, ethical relations are not relations of disagreement, but of political hostility through civil war (§12). All encounters with the other are hostile until proven innocent. Unless the other is the same – and thus not the other – the encounter is always one of hostility (§18). This means that each encounter is not open to questioning but only to hostility and by necessity takes place within a politics of civil war (§12) without recourse to an ethics of hospitality. The “capacity to then be affected by other forms-of-life” is only a capacity to enter into hostile relations. Other forms of life that appear as nonhostile are not other forms-of-life, but the same forms-of-life that serve to reinforce reified power through the strengthening of the same community (§13, §16). This is perhaps why Tiqqun ends up with civil war as the point of view of the political, rather than seeing the contingent construction of ethical relations as the genesis of the political to begin with. If Tiqqun did see it this way, then the relation to the other would always already be at stake in the perpetual – and necessary – renegotiation of ethico-political relations.

Finally, Tiqqun’s position admits only a pure, positivist subjectivity without unconscious alterity. There can be no schizoid subject, no heteronymous multiple, no incorporated ghosts. All of this must be forgotten in the indoctrination of one’s form-of-life. This is the precise point at which Tiqqun defeats itself. No subject is functional, nor seemingly whole in its holes of memory, without alterity. What Tiqqun desires is an isolated subject, a cloistered subject raised without exposure to otherness, so that when otherness is encountered, it is viewed as hostile, and its relations to it, those of civil war. Without question. This is precisely the agenda of every authoritarian State that constructs its New Youth through the means of erasure that eradicates of alterity. If this is so, then how are Tiqqun’s means at all different from those of State biopower?

(c) Civil war (§12). Even though this term is qualified throughout, Tiqqun views the political perspective of the world as one of competing forms-of-life held in a perpetual state of Civil War. Tiqqun’s view is militantly anti-Statist (without question, even). Moreover, Tiqqun holds an entirely romantic view of what preceded the State:

In the West, the unity of the traditional world was lost with the Reformation and the “wars of religion” that followed. The modern State then bursts on the scene with the task of reconstituting this unity – secularized, this time – no longer as an organic whole but instead as a mechanical whole, as a machine, as a conscious artificiality. (§35, 74).

Political theory always fails when it takes up such hopelessly lost narratives, and Tiqqun is no exception. Even as forms-of-life are the perfectly contingent communities of Civil War prior to the State, the State itself is viewed as a new form — a construct. Are not the preceding nonStatist forms also constructs? In any case, the State is apparently a machine that disrupts the organic whole of the nonartificial unity of the world. This line of theorisation never fails to win its adherents among those who enjoy all the benefits of the State. At its worst, such positions are a justification for contingent violence. Moreover, I fail to see why the State is not merely the most successful community of the same in this schema.

Secondly, why Tiqqun accepts Hobbes’ polarisation of the State vs. Civil War remains unclear. Tiqqun dislikes Hobbes, so why accept his schema? Tiqqun’s apparently radical thesis is to wholeheartedly embrace Civil War over the State, and thus to render the contingency of the communities of Civil War into a positively ethical dimension. How a contingent form-of-life wrought in a community of the same can only contain ethical content is again unclear. A deconstructive analysis would question – which is to say intensify – Hobbes’ dichotomy to begin with. I have no real desire to fight an impossible struggle against the State. Exodus offers precisely an abdication of such heroic naratives. Nor would I desire to blindly accept a violently idealist vision of civil war that reeks with all the musk of patriarchy, the kind of vision that casts about with homoerotic dreams of warrior nomads.

/ exit /

There is more – much more – to be writ in response to Tiqqun’s text, which despite its romantic idealism contains many cogent theorisations of Empire and organisation, especially where it turns toward exodus. When Tiqqun write that “To begin again means: to exit the suspension” (201), they begin to articulate the means, the very how, of what has already been taking place. When Tiqqun deconstruct Lenin’s question “What is to be done?”, asking instead “How is it to be done?”, they reset the stakes for political strategy. Yet their fundamental theses remain flawed — if not marred with the same inadequate and romantic theorisations that have long plagued weak anarchist thought.

Nowhere does Tiqqun speak of political economy beyond thinking it as impoverished Civil War (§42); everywhere the question is of the subject and the State, and even when Empire is the prevailing condition, it remains the Liberal state turned inside out (§53). Nevertheless, many intriguing theses remain: whereas the modern State attempted to eliminate Civil War, Empire attempts to manage it (§58). Of course, this calls into question the very strategic direction of Tiqqun in advocating Civil War.

And the question of political economy remains. Are Empire’s economics reactionary and negative, or only its military force? According to David Harvey, financial capital has been entirely innovative – in the sense that it seeks to transcend its barriers – and not reactionary. Marazzi, Berardi, Negri, Virno and others have  already outlined how capital commodified the very schizoid & nomadic forms of resistance dreamt up by the likes of Deleuze and Guattari as an antidote to Freudian repression (to give Deleuze and Guattari credit, they address this development in their last works, as well as in various passages of A Thousand Plateaus that don’t receive nearly enough attention).

A question then arises: if the economics of capitalism – a phrase not to be found in Tiqqun – do not operate merely or only as a negative impoverishment of Civil War, then what precisely is to be made of the substantive violence and innovative workarounds of global economic capitalism? In Tiqqun’s schema, what is the relation of the global capitalist economy to Empire’s military-policing operations? Or: what is the relation of the positive to the negative? Is economics a double negative, a shadow of Empire’s negativity? Or: how Hegelian is this all, really? For Negri, capitalist economics are reactionary and this is precisely why he argues that the multitude produced Empire, or rather that Empire formed as a reaction against the organisation of increasingly globalized labour. Negri retains the dialectics of the negative — a dialectics of history that is, at points, even deconstructive. But Tiqqun?

Voilà.! Some 5 years in the making, Circulation & the City.

With appropriate fanfare & deep bows, Will Straw & Alexandra Boutro’s edited volume entitled Circulation and the City: Essays on Urban Culture (McGill Queen’s UP, 2010) now graces the shelves. This book has been quite a few years in the works. The earliest drafts I have of work for the volume date back to 2005, and by the time we went to press, the final chapter I submitted on Henri Lefebre, rhythm, and revolution in the city had been transformed entirely from the words originally writ on rave culture and rhythm (funny thing: the new article I am finishing for Dancecult picks up on these earlier themes  – sometimes work must encounter different sets of theoretical concepts, and years of reflection, for the excavation of the intellect to yield its bounty). The book forms the third in a trilogy of publications from the Culture of Cities Project, a multi-university research endeavour that sought to unearth “the mix of universal and local influences in the everyday life of cities,” with research concentrated in Toronto, Berlin, Dublin and Montréal, and with researchers across Canada and the Continent. So, with the intent of lurking y’all into picking this up (or perhaps unwittingly scaring you off), I offer the introduction to my chapter “Cities of Rhythm & Revolution.”

Until August 2010, here be the 20% off code: enter BSTRAW10 at checkout through MQUP.

qork / o d d i ty | Vancouver 1998 |<ST> | photo: Tanya Goehring

Cities of Rhythm & Revolution

// tobias c. van Veen

The urban problematic, urbanism as ideology and institution, urbanization as a worldwide trend, are global facts. The urban revolution is a planetary phenomenon. – Henri Lefebvre, The Urban Revolution (2003, 113)

Like Seeds in a Sack: the State and Urban Revolution

A revolution happens somewhere: in a city, a springtime revolt, the unexpected uprising, the insurgency of the city against its occupiers, whether military or monetary – these are all the classic forms. In the violence, boredom and exhaustion of the 21C,[1] there are revolutions in product design, software, advertising and taste while the upheavals that remake the world are rarely granted the dubious privilege of ‘revolution’. Despite its broad application, or rather, the attempt to render its force banal by subsuming it to the language of consumption, ‘the revolution’ nonetheless maintains an exclusive meaning when it comes to the remaking of the world as such. And this remaking has had particular import by way of the City: it is the City that is the locus of the State.[2]

What is the City that it overwhelms the world with a concentrated force, that it, once expressed as ‘the urban’, a tendency of the city to globalize, becomes the engine of history? Such would be Lefebvre’s ‘urban revolution’, the city as the dominant global manifestation in which a new form of the social emerges: the “urban society” (Lefebvre 2003: 5). The urban supercedes the agrarian and overtakes not only the country but even the city itself – for once all is woven within the urban fabric, the city loses its particularity, its oppositional architecture to the country’s expanse: “The urban fabric grows, extends its borders, corrodes the residue of agrarian life. This expression, ‘urban fabric’, does not narrowly define the built world of cities but all manifestations of the dominance of the city over the country” (3-4). But what is the city? Society? The country? A dialectical comment by Deleuze and Guattari on the matter, writ around the same time as The Urban Revolution (1970, trans. 2003), teases out the ambiguity of Lefebvre’s hypothesis remarkably well:

It is not the country that progressively creates the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode’. The last reasons for presuming a progressive development are invalidated. Like seeds in a sack: It all begins with a chance intermixing. The ‘state and urban revolution’ may be Paleolithic, not Neolithic…. (Deleuze and Guattari 429)

Deleuze and Guattari challenge the – traditional, Marxist, liberal, linear, etc. – narrative of humanity’s ‘progressive development’ (from nomads to cities, agrarian to urban) by arguing that the progressive timeline that would posit the emergence of the City-State at a specific moment in the ‘linear development of civilization’ falls prey to tautology in its quest for the origin and evolutionism of historical succession (427-428). Theses “on the origin of the State are always tautological” not only because they fall into tautology, but because the State is tautological. In fact, according to Lefebvre, it is because all “logics,” including that of the state and the law, commodities, the organization of space, the object, daily life, language, information and communication want “to be restrictive and complete, eliminating anything that is felt to be unsuitable, claiming to govern the remainder of the world,” that they become “an empty tautology” (2003: 35). This tautology, however, is not meaningless: its emptiness shares a common point in the accumulation of surplus value in the city. Thus Deleuze and Guattari “are always brought back to the idea of a State” – as an “apparatus of capture” – “that comes into the world fully formed and rises up in a single stroke, the unconditioned Urstaat,” to which we might add its dimensional aspects: centripetal, circular, enclosing, inscribed in the corridors and walls of the polis (427). The City-State emerges with the origin of History itself:

Economic evolutionism is an impossibility… An evolutionary ethnology is no better… Nor an ecological evolutionism… All we need to do is combine these abstract evolutions to make all of evolutionism crumble; for example, it is the city that creates agriculture, without going through small towns. To take another example, the nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather, nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries, just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads. (Deleuze and Guattari 430)

Let us make quick work of this moment – for the radically anti-evolutionary, nondevelopmental thesis of a “coexistence of becomings” (against which “history translates into a succession”) (ibid.), is also to be found in Lefebvre. It is found in the complex interplay of the ‘urban’, wherein the urban anticipates its own realization as the ‘virtual’ horizon of its own becoming.[3] Lefebvre is quite aware of Simondon’s theory of transduction (2003: 5) which will later be incorporated by Deleuze and Guattari when encountering this exact problem: the virtual.

The urban, like Deleuze and Guattari’s Urstaat, always seems to have coexisted in the tension between city and country, as the fabric of their antinomy, though one might argue – as Lefebvre will – that the urban has now become the Ur-apparatus of capture, the overwhelming of all other becomings wherein both city and country dissolve within the urban fabric. And it is certainly the case that Lefebvre’s insistence on the urban as the global revolution – if not as the production of globalization per se – derails the dialectical succession of history and empties it of its content, for the urban revolution swaps out history’s engine, the relations of production, for an ambiguous and virtual fabric, Ur-becoming, that is the urban itself. This is one tendency of Lefebvre, and one which I shall insist on, to draw out its heterodoxy, to amplify all that it has to say, and to emphasize its precedent to Lefebvre’s later technique of rhythmanalysis. Not surprisingly, then, the samizdat concept that is the urban upsets the orthodoxy of teleological history: the virtual-urban, the becoming-urban, in-forms the present material reality.

Can the transductive logic of the urban, even if thought as synchrony, function within a linear development of history? Lefebvre insists upon the diachrony of urban history – a dialectical progression of the urban – all the while arguing that the ‘impossible’ barriers to the urban realization, erected on the horizon of the virtual object, must be torn down (2003: 7; 17). The impossible is reduced to a possibility to be overcome. The tension between becoming and historical succession, diachrony and synchrony, transduction and economic evolutionism develop a kind of rhythm – unresolved, impossible, aporetic, even – that is taken up at length in the complex thought of The Urban Revolution – and later in the problematic of rhythm itself, in Rhythmanalysis.

Works Cited

Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. 2000. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

Lefebvre, Henri. 2003. The Urban Revolution. Trans. Robert Boronno. Minneapolis: U Minnesota P.

–. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: space, time and everyday life. Trans. Stuart Elden and Gerald Moore. London: Continuum.

Endnotes

1. “21C” is here abbreviated to designate the binarization – or digital codification – of the historical timeline as the archives of humanity become accessibly only through complex technological systems. The soundbyte style of “21C” can be attributed to DJ Spooky’s defunct magazine of the same name (RIP).
2. “City,” as well as “State,” are here capitalized in accordance with the work of Lefebvre, where the signifiers attain a quasi-atemporal status, as if referring to a near a priori manifestation of human activity. Thus, at times, I refer to “cities” or a particular city in contrast to the City (a city’s ur-principle of centripetal control). Likewise for “the revolution,” which is marked by the near teleological destination of its pronoun, and later, Negri and Hardt’s deployment of “Empire” to demarcate an organisational command that exceeds the nation-state.
3. Lefebvre will write of the urban how “its complexity surpasses the tools of our understanding and the instruments of practical activity,” serving as a “constant reminder of the theory of complexification” (2003, 45). If our missive bows to such a theory, it is in part because any would-be Occam’s Razor would only prove that simplism empties itself out in reductionism. The law of parsimony (Pluralitas non est ponenda sine necessitate) should read: Reductio non est ponenda sine necessitate.

find someone to hold hands with: remember this

Not posting here registers a kind of disappearance. Where have I gone? Am I working? What constitutes labour when it is non-present? Is a life unrecorded in the 21C a life lived? Does not the precariat, the precarious immaterial class, take as much time archiving as doing? What precisely is the measure of this distance between doing and recording, acting and archiving? A desire to be done with it, enough with it, competes against the same urge to document. We are all tourists now: tourists, becoming a tourist, was the first manifestation of pathological levels of documentation. All must be photographed, recorded; the lived experience is better — oh, but isn’t it — in the re-telling than the actuality. The banality of “postmodern” readings (and this remains the ugly legacy of postmodernism) celebrated the retelling over the actuality. What is the actuality? So easy to diss this concept of lived experience – but in the critical deconstruction of presence, what the imitators forgot was the actuality or lived experience of thinking without a master. Actuality is living without a master. Writing is living too — but without a master. The only master being the master to take apart within the self (yes: this be alterity, otherness). Postmodernism found the easy-way out by generating endless critique of the lived plenitude instead of seeking its own experience thereof. Lived experience as the repetition of plenitude and suffering is the basis of anarchic living: organisation without mastery. And this concept has much more to do with the deconstruction of presence than the mere dialectical reversal of retelling over doing.

A strange kind of permanence is the new pathology. All actions recorded: one’s loves, hates, connections, events, photos, videos, sounds, names. The Net is the new fear of lived presence in its final, accountable record. Peter at the Gates has been replaced by Google in the Search Bar. Your Life: in 50 odd pages of depth. The transient occurs over time as links die, websites condemned to oblivion (but even then, Archive.org and the Wayback Machine attempt to sustain posterity; Google copies the entire Internet). The initial objections to the Net’s transience are now inverted, reversed, as instead objection grows over data-harvesting, the impossibility of severance, of making a damn relation end, when the evidence is scattered everywhere. Permanence threatens us: it is there when we don’t want it, and when we want it, it is gone.

Don’t we dream of an electron bomb, knocking out all electrical systems, wiping all hard-drives. This collective wiping of memory that would liberate forgetfulness by not forgetting liberation. The greatest act conceived was put to film in Fight Club: destroy the records of the banks, the credit card companies, the insurers. Disappear the financial, put to death what Marazzi calls the “financialization” of the world. Down, down, down.

musikal resistance (2000) / dj.glim

Revolutionary movements do not spread by contamination but by resonance. Something that is constituted here resonates with the shock wave emitted by something constituted over there. A body that resonates does so according to its own mode. An insurrection is not like a plague or a forest fire – a linear process which spreads from place to place after an initial spark. It rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density. To the point that any return to normal is no longer desirable or even imaginable. (The Coming Insurrection 13)

As of 2009, the suspected authors of this lively and at times satirically brilliant text – in the best tradition of insurrectionist French theory, a nod to Voltaire – are still facing charges, some released from prison, others being held & questioned. Any following critical comments are critical only insofar as they applaud the force of this text.

Yet – and there is a yet with this text – something of the darkly humorous & inventive tone is lost by the time the text announces, in a rather didactic fashion, its prescriptions for action as a way of closure. These prescriptives are a tad too prescriptive for me. And I think in this passage all of what invigorates me – yet frustrates me – can be heard.

The shift from contamination to resonance is an intriguing one insofar as what it does not say. Contamination presupposes uncontaminated bodies or spheres. Resonance resonates because all things resonate, vibrate, are in or out of tune, skipping along or playing the wallflower to the dance – no matter what. Thus the potential for a large scale resonance is inherent to its constitution as resonant bodies, assemblages, spaces. Nothing fails to resonate, and thus nothing is pure of resonance. There is nothing to contaminate. Insurrection arrives from within by way of a resonance with an other that is always at play in the rhythm of the within/without. This interplay of inside/outside without need of a linearity of contamination or politic of porosity leads into the motif of music.

Hakim Bey once wrote of “music as an organisational principle” (TAZ 124). As Bey recaps, this principle has been put into action in the Constitution of the Republic of Fiume by Gabriele D’Annunzio, which declared music to be the central principle of the State. D’Anunzio was a First World War hero, “Decadent poet, artist, musician, aesthete, womanizer, pioneer daredevil aeronautist, black magician, genius and cad… with a small army at his back and command: the ‘Arditi’”, who went out to capture the city of Fiume and give it to Italy; Italy declined; so he declared independence… to see how long it would last. ‘The Italian fleet finally showed up some 18 months later, right around the same time the wine & money had run out.’ As Bey notes, though not as serious as anarchist Barcelona or free Ukraine, Fiume is possibly the last pirate utopia and the first modern Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ). And Bey makes the relevant point that Fiume has much in common with the Paris uprising of May ’68, American countercultural communes, and other mid-to-late 20th century anarcho-New Left actions. Point being the significance of aesthetics in organisational principles:

…we should notice certain similarities, such as: – the importance of aesthetic theory (cf. the Situationists) – also, what might be called “pirate economics,” living high off the surplus of social overproduction – even the popularity of colorful military uniforms – and the concept of music as revolutionary social change – and finally their shared air of impermanence, of being ready to move on, shape-shift, re-locate to other universities, mountaintops, ghettos, factories, safe houses, abandoned farms – or even other planes of reality. No one was trying to impose yet another Revolutionary Dictatorship, either at Fiume, Paris, or Millbrook. Either the world would change, or it wouldn’t. Meanwhile keep on the move and live intensely. (TAZ 127)

Music, like all sonics, is a temporary movement of air affecting aesthetic interpretations through the body’s elongated ear, a becoming-ear of the body in which the whole body resonates with the passing temporalization of sound, either in movement (dance) or stillness (meditation). To organise with music as the principle thereof means to embrace the temporary (though a rhythm may last as long as it needs to, or can, it nonetheless is never fixed as-such like a visual object in-the-world) and the temporalization of the temporary (the passing of time through the repetition of what was into what becomes: the principle of repetition and difference). Certainly, then, the kind of music deployed as organisational principle matters. It matters as it comes to shape the matter of things: what matters (gravitas) and what informs the shaping of matter (the organisation of objects in the world; the archi-texture of the world).

In short, top 40 music regardless of genre, oft clocking in at under 3 minutes with a catchy hook is the organisational principle of the 21C everyday, with its short attention-spans, eyeball economies, push advertising, commodification of all aspects of everyday life, and banal sexuality / violence interplays under the great empty signifier of money. Needless to say the trance inducing mixes of electronic dance music form a very different organisational principle, calling for collective, participatory organisation in the creation of such events and in their celebration under dance, while punk intensifies the brevity of the song, eschewing the catchy hook for amped anger against the state of things. These are different sonics that resonate with different organisational principles; in short, aesthetics matters.

Back to The Coming Insurrection:

It [insurrection] rather takes the shape of a music, whose focal points, though dispersed in time and space, succeed in imposing the rhythm of their own vibrations, always taking on more density.

This is where something is amok with the principle. Insurrection organises itself by way of resonance, which is to say the principle of difference and repetition, at its core (we could say music; but music is the aesthetic superposition of (a)rhythmia – np. Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis). Insurrection does not take the shape of a music insofar as it is music at its ontological level. Perhaps this is quibbling. But the sentence continues with a mixed metaphor (one needs to consult the French, to be sure) in that it discusses focal points. There are no focal points – points of visual focus over distance – in music. This mixed metaphor then mixes time and space, and begins to introduce a logic of imposition, wherein music imposes rhythm, imposes order, lays down the law of revolution. This kind of rhythm is the organisational principle of a deafening that drowns out echoes, arrhythmia, counterrhythmia, soundclashes, mixes, samples. Imposed vibrations becomes possessive, in this case, as the text notes they are own vibrations, possessed by a sense of ownership. The logic of this mixed metamorphical sentence is thus not empiricist enough; it does not take seriously enough music as an organisational principle, instead seeing it as a (mixed) metaphor. And so it reveals a logic that was two sentences early denounced: that of contamination. Only contamination can infiltrate one’s own, the possessive, insofar as it is a purity, an ownness with borders against which it defends (and a rhythm can be this: the rhythm of a military marching band, for example). And so what is this density that is taken on? This density that feels suddenly so heavy, which weighs down the music into an imposing, deafening regimentation of the march, the battle cry towards The Revolution? It is this battle cry that resonates throughout The Coming Insurrection, which ends with a far too imposing series of prescriptions, which can be read as already making their mark some 13 pages in.

As for the return – beyond the point of no return – music always returns (np. Proust’s ‘refrain’). There is always a return, in time, in temporality, but only insofar as each return strikes its difference (a philosophical observation; but a significant one politically). The re- of the return is why theorists/agitators such as Bey reject The Revolution in favour of the transient principles of the TAZ to begin with. Any movement beyond the point of no return is a movement in which all must march through the same imposed singularity, march on to the same rhythm. This is why such totalizing things are called movements, and not convergences, which is where this passage in the text begins – on the wrong foot, about to trip into a march when I desire to dance.