Frostbitten fingers not included—Paul Miller's The Book of Ice

In my hands now is Paul D. Miller’s latest project, the Book of Ice, a collage-work of manifestos, stories, photographs and texts on the southernmost point of this planet, that ice-bound and all-but uninhabited pole, Antarctica. This is something of an artist’s book, a kind of anti-book that collects exappropriated objects from elsewhere. In this context, by exappropriated I mean an act that samples without stealing, that takes part without taking away from the whole. So, like all of DJ Spooky’s work, images of Amundsen and Scott’s voyages are sampled much the same way that Spooky remixed D.W. Griffith’s founding racist myth of US history in Rebirth of a Nation. Though details of Antarctica’s history, discovery and exploration are provided, this beautifully designed and illustrated hardcover from Mark Batty Publishers is much more a meditation on ice through the sampling of Antarctica’s recorded history alongside Spooky’s exploration of design imagery in the melting/consumption of Antarctica.

The Book of Ice includes ”Osmotic Strategy Machine—The (Flawed) Unfolding of Afrofuturism,” an interview I conducted with Paul for my forthcoming edited volume on Afrofuturism (Wayne State UP). The version presented here is somewhat staccato, but to the point through its brevity (the volume will include a remixed exchange and sampladelic text). This interview presents insightful reading, as it is one of the few times in which Paul has openly reflected upon his involvement with the 1990s email list and website Afrofuturism.net, as well as situating his interpretation of Afrofuturism within historical, political and aesthetic contexts. I believe Paul includes this interview as part of the ethos explored elsewhere in the Book of Ice, where he talks about “thawing-out” the cold muthafucka’ aspects of black ice, as well as warming up the ice-cold brittleness of stark whiteness. Paul continues to forge a global aesthetic of remix culture that melts the divisions of colour, and in this respect, Paul remains an exemplary Afrofuturist—whatever he might say otherwise. Paul Miller is remarkable for creating bridges between disparate cultures, and in The Book of Ice Paul puts into perspective the greater forces at work in the melting of Antarctic ice, reminding us that the collapse of our polar regions also calls for the thawing of cold hearts and cultural antagonisms. We are like penguins caught in the flow of the impending great melt, and to move outwards, upward to the stars, we need to begin with swimming together through the thaw….

Osmotic Interview Strategies

In 2008, Paul Miller spent four weeks in Antarctica, conducting sound recordings for his compositional work Terra Nova: Sinfonia Antarctica. It is unfortunate that this book does not include a DVD of the multimedia work (understandably, it was probably not cost feasible for a book already colour printed on quality stock). Miller’s first book for MIT Press, Rhythm Science, included a CD mix which reflected his ideas through his DJ mix—I wrote a lengthy treatise on that book over on EBR. In any case, as Terra Nova is a full-fledged multimedia work that interrelates many of the cold concepts explored in The Book of Ice, here’s an insight:

What I like about The Book of Ice is how it rethinks what this cold space could be otherwise—a place, perhaps, of unclaimed exodus. What then, when it melts? When its resources will undoubtedly become exploited by competing interests, corporate and nation-state? Miller explores the dream of a “People’s Republic of Antarctica” through a series of campaign posters that alternate between early 20th century revolutionary modernism and monochromatic symbolism awash in blue penguins. The print posters call for a manifesto of Antarctica in different languages and national iconographies, from the Arabic half moon to the Chinese Communist red star.

Manifestos of a people's icepublic

The compositional method of Terra Nova is also explored here with a visualization of the score. Miller turns the elements of traditional sheet music into bubbles of chaos complexity, with the notation juxtaposed and carved into circular objects, as if spattered with the geometric shapes of water droplets from Antarctica’s melting ice caps.

Sheet music for snow & ice

Questions of climate change arise throughout the text, as Miller explores the economic, emotional and data landscapes of Antarctica through cartographic mappings of ice flows to dataflows. Aspects of this territorial mapping are reminiscent of Situationist détournement. Along this line, the visual icons of sell-by capitalism are explored in the juxtaposition of consumer-packaging barcodes and the increasingly ubiquitous QR squares with various linguistic scripts. Implicit among these image mixes is Miller’s interrogation of “hyperconsumerism:” is Antarctica for sale? If it can be mapped, can it be scanned and sold?

Antarctica 4 Sale

Ice maps and Antarctic cartographies

The closing section of the book is filled with full-bleed, full-colour images from expeditions mapping the great unknown ice, with double-page spreads of mountains and icebergs, explorers in ice-encrusted parkas and numerous penguins. Black-and-white imagery is contrasted with the subtle blues and grays of monochromatic colour. Night photography of modern research stations revels in the similitude between the neon-lit lighting of science and the southern aurora borealis.

Ice routes abound...

Yet why this obsession with Antarctica? As Miller writes, ever playing the trickster, ice resonates with black culture. As Paul puts it,

Black culture loves ice. We name ourselves after it: Ice-berg Slim, Ice-T, Ice Cube. . . . So, yeah, there’s a long history in black culture of being a “cold muthafucka.” It’s about being a “frigid” person: the ice grill, bling bling, bounce off the light of diamonds in your teeth. Yeah, that’s ice (Book of Ice 10).

If urban black culture tends toward ice, then DJ Spooky aims to thaw it out with sinfonic soundwaves capable of collapsing cultural ice into global flows. If climate change is melting Antarctica, then the melting of ice presents an intersection between the geosphere and the sonosphere, between the axes of black and white ice, cityscape and icescape. Two compositional tools guided Spooky’s process in creating the Terra Nova sinfonia: repetition, on the one channel, and R. Murray Schaefer’s soundscape, on the other.

My concern here is how do we make music out of it, how do we thaw the process, thaw people out, and see the paradox of hyperconsumerism that this kind of stuff celebrates, while at the same time tying the conceptual issues of sound and contemporary art. It’s a Sisphyean task, but considering there’s not much more going on this planet than the ecosystem, I thought it was a worthwhile one. Hip-hop is always considered the soundtrack of the city’s geometric landscape. The grid of most American cities carries what I like to call an “orthogonal” logic. I wanted to take the “urban” concept of repetition and apply it to a different landscape, and see what would pop out of the collision. After all, music is patterns. And so is landscape. The common denominator here is pattern recognition.

And that’s what brings me to Antarctica (Book of Ice 10).

Explorers on ice/

the gonzo academics of soniculture return

Without too much further ado I would like to point you toward issue 1.2 of Dancecult, which features – among other gonzo academic explorations of soniculture and the rave underground – “Technics, Precarity and Exodus in Rave Culture.” This piece of mine, under works in various forms for approximately a decade, explores rave culture from the perspective of political theory of autonomia, the political economy of contemporary labour, and philosophy of technology, proposing that rave culture – which I consider deceased as of 2000 – be considered one of the 20th century’s greater movements of exodus from the constraints of consumer capitalist monoculture, by way of precarity of labour and the technics of its soniculture. Undoubtedly this thesis requires all the more exegesis. La lutte continue.

===
DANCECULT: JOURNAL OF ELECTRONIC DANCE MUSIC CULTURE
edition 1.2
===

// FEATURED ARTICLES

Making a Noise – Making a Difference:
Techno-Punk and Terra-ism
*Graham St John

Technics, Precarity and Exodus in Rave Culture
*tobias c. van Veen

The Aesthetics of Protest in UK Rave
*Ramzy Alwakeel

Memory and Nostalgia in Youth Music Cultures:
Finding the Vibe in the San Francisco Bay Area Rave Scene, 2002-2004
*Eileen M Wu

// CONVERSATIONS

The History of Our World: The Hardcore Continuum Debate
*Simon Reynolds

“Let’s Have At It!”:
Conversations with EDM Producers Kate Simko and DJ Denise
*Rebekah Farrugia

// FROM THE FLOOR

Sound System Nation: Jamaica
*Graham St John

Capturing the Vision at California’s Symbiosis Festival
*Pascal Querner

// REVIEWS

Reggaeton (Rivera, Marshall and Hernandez)
*Alejandro L. Madrid

Rave Culture: The Alteration and Decline of a Philadelphia Music Scene (Anderson)
*Beate Peter

Club Cultures: Boundaries, Identities and Otherness (Rief)
*Fiona Hutton

Review Essay: Run Lola Run and Berlin Calling
*Sean Nye

—————————————-*—–
Dancecult would like to thank:

Karenza Moore, Reviews Editor; Pascal Querner who took the cover image used in this edition, and Alex Canazie, whose images we continue to use in the journal. Our international board of reviewers.

And, with special thanks to Eliot Bates, Dancecult’s outgoing Managing Editor, for his hard work editing, typesetting and the performing the OJS management for the first two editions. Eliot’s dedication has been instrumental to Dancecult’s emergence.

—————————————-*—–

Black union soldiers taking aim.

In The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom, Stephen Hahn makes the case for insurrection – if not a rethinking of rebellion – among Southern slaves during the American Civil War. The title of chapter two places this claim within the context of American history on the subject: “Did We Miss the Greatest Slave Rebellion in Modern History?” Hahn’s casually inclusive “we” invokes the primarily white American scholars who have sculpted something of a glorious history of the Civil War as America’s struggle against slavery. In this narrative – somewhat whitewashed – the Union North took up arms against the slave-owning Confederacy South, if not at first over slavery, then at least by the end of the war broadly claiming emancipation as its raison d’être.

As Hahn is at delicate pains to point out, what this narrative presupposes is the passivity of the slave class (58; 160-161). Slaves have little or no agency in regards to their emancipation. While Northern African-Americans as well as freed southern slaves fought in the Civil War, southern slave plantations did not rise up against their white masters en masse. Why was this? Of course, Confederate mythology, exemplified in films such as D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation, depicts a rose-tinted relationship between benevolent white masters and singin’ & dancin’ black slaves, both who view the Civil War as an invasion. Even among centrist, Abolitionist or integrationist accounts of the War, slaves were often praised for not rising up against the South. In their passivity, the Southern slaves demonstrated civility in this “white man’s war” — a war which was nothing less than a struggle over the fate of black labour.

Hahn poses an alternative reading to the simplism in which passivity marked black patriotism. By contrast, Southern slaves were knowledgeable enough of the conditions of the War, as well as the tricky political terrain in which the War was fought – in short, aware of the ideological role of emancipation, and suspicious of the North’s apparent “freedom” – to carefully navigate between full-scale rebellion and widespread insurrection:

Together, the evidence suggests that slaves could be acutely aware of conflicts that erupted between white people and nations ruled by white people; that slaves often imagined a set of possible allies and enemies; that slaves could be cognizant of the national and international struggle over slavery and the slave trade and, depending on where they resided, of momentous emancipations; that slaves often became conversant with institutions and issues of local and national politics and might develop sophisticated understandings of how the American political system operated; and that slaves fashioned interpretations of what seemed to be afoot, at times in ways that moved well beyond the intentions of the political actors. (Political Worlds 75)

The difference here is between passivity as honourable and patriot civility, and passivity as strategic retreat. While the former ensures that the psychological condition of the black class remains one of subservience to the American white State – substituting the Southern slave for the civility and patriotism of the Northern black – the latter suggests a thoughtful if not coordinated use of passivity as a strategy and as a smokescreen for clandestine activity including direct action. Moreover, as Hahn reveals, passivity and the myth of the civil and patriot black – though undoubtedly correct to the degree that Southern slaves did not ignite a fullscale armed rebellion, as in Saint Domingue – nonetheless partake in an ideological reshaping of history applied after the fact by both Reconstructionist politicians and historians, both within and without the African-American community. In this respect, passivity as a strategic retreat needs to be rethought aside from the limiting concepts of patriotism and civility. From Hahn’s research I would suggest that the southern slaves let the white war fight itself out, aiding the North when and where possible, and for the most part, rather than rising in rebellion, fleeing by the thousands in what has been characterized as exodus to Northern lines (Hahn details the many accounts of slaves arriving ready to fight). If this is the case, then several preconditions must be established, notably that (1) there were operative systems of communication among southern slave plantations capable of transmitting accurate and timely information concerning lines of flight, the political stakes of the War, and the conditions of the War itself (48); and that (2) the quality of such information must include a more nuanced knowledge of the so-called free North, namely that it wasn’t all it was cracked up to be (80; 84).

Hahn sets to work on these two conditions, demonstrating with primary evidence the extensive communication networks among slave plantations, as well as reshaping the American understanding of the “free” North. Hahn recounts evidence of word-of-mouth communication networks that demonstrate how not only were slave plantations aware of slave rebellions in other countries – such as the French colony of Saint Domingue, now Haiti – but that these networks were thick connections capable of transmitting valuable information of escape and aid, such as who was on the run, how, when and where. (Indeed the famed “Underground Railroad” was as much a network of slave plantations aiding fleeing slaves – often escapees went from plantation to plantation, fed and cared for by other slaves – as much as it was a network of Abolitionist whites (37-43).)

The epistemological reshaping of the free North is perhaps more shocking to sanitized versions of American history in which the Civil War is cast as a black and white struggle (metaphorical as well as literal). On the contrary, the much vaunted and mythologized freedom of America was then (as is now) deeply contradictory (7-14). Many Northern states allowed Southern slave owners to not only hunt down escaped slaves, but to keep slaves on their Northern properties. Northern African-Americans organised against such extensions of slavery into so-called free States; in the North one sees organised committees of African-Americans actively warning escaped slaves of these dangers, organising self-defence militias and armed parties to return escaped slaves – through forceful means – who had been brutally recaptured. In ways sociocultural and legal, the white North aided and abetted slavery; in ways rebellious and insurrectionary, Northern African-Americans fought against not only the slave-owning South but the slave-abetting North. They fought, in other words, against the apparatus of a discriminatory State in general. In many African-American writings and slave diaries, the only true save haven became an exit from the Union entirely — to Canada or the United Kingdom (where one undoubtedly encountered institutionalized as well as cultural racism, but not outright slavery).

Overall, the nature of rebellion is reconsidered by Hahn in light of the complexity of the War, a situation demanding exacting strategy between an enslaved underclass – itself a multitude of privilege and skill, from the agricultural labourers to the Big House skilled practitioners – and the various degrees of educated and employed Northern blacks, though undoubtedly still an underclass to white supremacy. It is from this position that Hahn makes the case for widespread insurrection during the Civil War, including acts of sabotage, disruption, property destruction, refusal of work, demands for pay, direct action and exodus (60-66; 70-72; 141). Though southern slaves did not stage a full-scale rebellion against the slave-owning South, they fled it en masse to Northern lines. Strategically this is good sense: why stage a rebellion with pitchforks when one can do so from a position of power – armed with the weapons and military strategy of the North? The consequences of a Southern rebellion might have precipitated a massacre, staged not only by their former masters (as demonstrated with Nat Turner) but with the aid of a “civil” North which viewed black rebellion against whites, no matter what the terms and conditions, as impermissible. Furthermore, fighting under the North – often in black brigades – granted a degree of armed autonomy to African-Americans. Undoubtedly this knowledge was put to good use.

Implicit in Hahn’s thesis is that exodus is a form of insurrection (141), a thesis that is rendered explicit in theories of Italian Autonomia (Paolo Virno, Christian Marazzi, Toni Negri, etc). To flee in an organised fashion – exodus as strategic retreat – is to establish the conditions for a new republic. The history of North America itself can be charted against the various attempts by peoples of all kinds to flee the State through forms of exodus. In this respect, Hahn traces in some detail the attempts by African-Americans, former slaves or not, to establish autonomous territory or freetowns, in the likes of maroon camps, in places in which neither North nor South would venture (24; 32). Though banding together in numbers for reasons of self-defence led to the ghettos of the 20th century (and perhaps one must ask: has the strategy changed?), the history of maroonage implies that organised exodus was undertaken as a separation from the State itself. Freetowns often had their own armed militias, systems of governance, networks of trade and barter, industries including agriculture and amenities, and basic infrastructure (though certainly impoverished, even by the standards of the day). Can the maroonage be viewed as total secession? Perhaps the most telling evidence is that, like the French Revolution, time itself was overthrown, the marking of the past and the future redefined, the rituals of life and religion rewritten:

black settlements and enclaves developed around churches benevolent societies of their own making and around political calendars of their own design, which, among other things, commemorated signal events of an unfolding emancipation process: the abolition of the international slave trade, the ending of slavery in their particular states, and the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies. (Political Worlds 33).

Further, one must ask the question – a question undoubtedly also posed by African-Americans, North and South – what if the Confederacy won? If widescale rebellion had erupted in the South, its days would have been numbered, and the Confederate response brutal and without mercy; there would have been no North to come to their aid. But if the North had fallen and there had been no slave uprising, then one could imagine the emergence of armed black units conducting guerilla warfare against the South, using the military knowledge (and arms) they had accumulated from fighting with the North. Indeed, one could imagine a mixed white/black Northern guerilla force. Why would this be so? For there would be no “Black Reconstruction” of the North; the Confederacy summarily executed Northern African-American soldiers, refusing to recognise them as such. In the eyes of the Confederacy, armed blacks were a double negative: slaves and traitors (55). There was no mercy for blacks on the battlefield. Undoubtedly those who fought with them were treated with scarcely more leniency. Black units were often noted for their courageous battlefield actions; they had nothing to lose. When fighting such an enemy, Lao Tse comes to mind, for the war is unwinnable. If the South had won, the Vietnam war would have torn apart the United States a century earlier — and it would have resulted in the complete ruin of Confederate America.

But the North did win. I can imagine militant African-Americans being faced with a choice after tasting the self-governance that “emerged out of the struggles and experiences of enslavement and quickly manifested itself in the period after emancipation” (139). There must have been the moment, here and there, where armed black militias considered their options: fight for autonomy over land and state, or accept the terms of Northern “emancipation”? One can understand the resulting retreat into a narrative of honourable and civil passivity; to continue to fight would have been impossible, for a defeated South would have gladly joined the victorious North in ending any such rebellion. Indeed, if African-Americans had fought for further gains in emancipation, if not outright autonomy, it would have vindicated the arguments of the slave-owning South, and confirmed all the racist fears of the North. By consequence, and strategy, the underground rebellion and acts of general insurrection against the State itself would have to be rewritten otherwise, especially among African-Americans (even if their festivals and calendars, as Hahn remarks, celebrated them). And so double-consciousness was, if not already born, organised as a discourse:

But with rare exception, they did not speak or write of rebellion and revolution. From the hustings, the pulpits, the newspapers, and the history books, black leaders took pains to stress the order, discipline, responsibility, restraint, and sobriety that were to be found in their wartime communities, and especially among their men. Slaves did not so much rebel against their condition and their masters as come to save the Union in its darkest hour. [...] They were civil, their masters barbarous. (Political Worlds 104)

Hahn ends his text on an interesting note by reconsidering the reception of Marcus Garvey and the UNIA, correcting the misperception that Garvey solely advocated a “back to Africa” movement (122; 132). Today, Garvey’s position appears far more amenable in the position of internationalism. In this respect Garvey’s impact has been under-appreciated. Within the context of slave rebellion, and generalized if not continued attempts at African-American and Afrodiasporic autonomy, Marcus Garvey can be seen not only as setting the grounds for postcolonial struggle in the 1960s – militant or otherwise – but as part of a generalized struggle for autonomy worldwide (156-157). Afrofuturist scholars have increasingly turned their attention to Garvey, as in many ways his inventive platforms of internationalist autonomy set the cultural parameters for expanding political and cultural Africanism beyond not only the United States, but beyond the confines of race itself. It is in this sense that both Afrofuturism and the politics of Marcus Garvey upset the “liberal integrationist framework” (159).

It is interesting to see other perspectives in regards to Hahn’s short text, such as this blog post by Kevin Levin, a Civil War historian, who interprets Hahn as meaning that “we should understand the presence of black soldiers in Union ranks as a slave rebellion from the perspective of the white South” (see Hahn 55-57). While this is indeed the case – as the historical evidence attests in letters from the South, Southern articles in newspapers, the policies of the Confederate military, and so on – I believe Hahn goes much farther: we must understand the entire historical period as one of a complex African-American insurrection against both North and South, one that to this day haunts the “United States,” and which can be summarized as the extension of the Civil War by sonicultural and philotechnological means under Afrofuturism: “a full-out struggle over who would control the state itself” (16).

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?

interstellar tones transport Sun Ra offworld

But in reality, it is the inherent failure of representation, both in the visual and the political sense, that continually leads activist-artists to abandon their works and their familiar skills, and to dissolve once again into the intersubjective processes of society’s self-transformation.

This moment of dissolution is where one could locate exodus, not as a concept, but as a power or a myth of resistance. On the one hand, exodus is a pragmatic response to the society of control, in which any widespread political opposition becomes an object of exacting analysis for those who can afford to invest major resources in the identification, segmentation and manipulation of what we naively call the public. In the face of these strategies, exodus is a power of willful metamorphosis: the capacity for a movement to appear, to intervene and to disappear again, before changing names and recommencing the same struggle in a different way. (Brian Holmes, Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 185)

Exodus is a movement — defection from the State, exit from the state of things, toward the formation of a “new republic” (as Paolo Virno puts it). While Virno and other Italian-based theorists of the Autonomia/Operaismo movement have traced exodus as a response to the factory regime of Fordist labour that saw its dismantling in the ’70s and ’80s, Brian Holmes has placed exodus within the artistic lineage of interventions and occupations, in which the fluidity of art, and of art as an occupation or role offers an exit strategy from institutionalized engagement. Holmes’ historical references are those of the alterglobalization movement, notably the public sonic occupations of Reclaim the Streets and the deployment of carnivale tactics in general, but also in specific art projects such as Nikeground. Here, art (and the artist) move through an interzone of activism and art, a zone in which intervention and representation are no longer distinct sides or sites of the work.

Significantly, Holmes writes how the passage toward exodus opens in the breakdown of representation. One can think such representation in (at least) two ways: the representative politics of the democratic order and the politics of representation of the object and identity, or rather the ordering of representation in which art is supposed to traffic (albeit at a distance). When representation fails, or rather proves itself inadequate through its persistent failure (some might say its planned obsolescence), then strategies of exodus come into play.

And quite literally — exodus as a myth of resistance is also a time of play, a site in which the play of representation can be remixed, through exit from its confines, into a new scenario. For the artist, exodus from an institutionalized art world changes the play of what it means to respond to a Call — no longer a competitive call for new works, but now a Call for collective action, in which art becomes the performative habitus for an alternative republic, a “non-state public sphere” (Virno).

Exodus is thus a spacetime of energies; a site of withdrawal in the gathering of force. Nor is this performed alone. Play takes at least a few, if not the many. Exodus is a collective gathering of experience:

…exodus seems to designate an existential reserve, that psychic space where fragments of artistic, poetic and musical refrains are inseparable from the wellsprings of action, but expressible only as a kind of myth. To touch this intangible space is the ultimate intervention on social material — something no individual can do, because it is only achieved through a collective experience, by a multiplicity that has no authority, no signature. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

At times, Holmes risks representing exodus as a near mythical or “intangible” sign — which is perhaps due to a received idea of engagement or rather perspective upon the appearance of engagement that remains within either declarative art (despite its activism) or activism (despite its  aesthetics). This is surprising given that exodus, as a withdrawal or disappearance, would seem to call into question the appearance of things, and consequently of of activistism and art as being the only hybridity that registers exodus’ passing. In some forthcoming work for Dancecult: Journal for Electronic Dance Music Culture, I have set out to think rave culture as an embodied, collective exodus that performs all the ambiguities of its play, from its sonic interventions to its interruptions of politics, within the broader schema of a worldwide alternative network of soniculture.

In short, exodus needs to be thought beyond or rather before the realm of myth. Exodus happens. It occurs; it is a strategy of the cultural unconscious manifest in collective and energetic desire. It organises and disorganises vast collective actions in tandem.

In this respect Holmes is entirely correct: exodus can only be experienced through collective passage. But to say this collectivity has no authority nor signature leaves many questions concerning its manifold of structures, signs and play. The multitude that is rave culture has its many signatures, even its signature of a soniculture, qua rave culture; and it too has its authors and its authorities. In this respect, exodus as the pure flight from authority or signature remains a myth – but as such a myth, it loses much of its efficacity. I am more intrigued by the taking-place of exodus on the ground, so to speak (and I might add, like Holmes, who spends much of his excellent book detailing “activist aesthetics” and delineating the heritage of the 20thC avant garde).

And so Holmes leaves us with:

Exodus is an expression of process politics. It points beyond the distorting mediations and structural inequalities of capitalism toward a strange sort of promised land for the profane, which is the immediacy of the everyday, the direct experience of cooperation with others. The carnival that sometimes breaks out in the midst of concerted political action is a way to celebrate the occasional reality of this powerful and persistent myth. (Holmes, Unleashing @ 186)

I would like to reverse the proposition: it is protest that breaks out in the midst of carnival, it is political action in the realm of appearance that interrupts the exodus toward disappearance, it is the coming into the light of Reclaim the Streets that was the anomaly to rave culture’s occupations by night. Exodus has more to do with the collective unconscious of the everynight than the everyday — it has more to do with creating the alternative habitus of a place to sleep and to dream without fear, then to awake and, with a shit-eating grin, make that which is desired take place — regardless.

This reversal stakes out a different terrain. Exodus, or the exit strategy in general, is a priori to (as its qualifier phoneme suggests) representation. Exodus does not take its place after the fact; it is the escape which something has come to capture. In this respect, Deleuze and Guattari were correct; even if the State is a priori (arising always), exodus is that which the State arises against.

Secondly, it reinforces my intuition that exodus, like Virno’s contentious theorisation of multitude (and much to Negri’s discontent), is without content. Exodus is the state of most States. Most “people of the State” are in a state of exodus; they do not vote, they do not participate. Rather, they flee to various safehouses and wait it out. Unfortunately, this form of exodus – properly, perhaps this is not exodus as liberty but as confinement – is not collective but individual, even as it is the dominant form of being-together of so many. The political apathy of overdeveloped nation states of the 21C is an expression of this collective exodus. So is the collective experience of consumption. However this exodus is not energetically collective; it is collective without connection, a disconnected exodus, a passive escape from exodus itself. Various traces of its potential are found here and there in technological infonetworks, particularly with data piracy (music, film, software, intellectual property). However few P2P downloaders have connected their bits & bytes to a connection with their peers in the flesh, or with an organised attempt at its force (such as open source, hacking, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, or the Pirate Bay – all of which signal the new republics of data and property).

In this respect, we might consider “downloadable data piracy” the capitalist answer to the challenge that remixing/sampling and rave culture provided to infotainment as a containment apparatus. By this I mean that data piracy, even with all the publicized hype surrounding its damage and its prosecution, is a contained strategy, or rather an attempt to contain what could express itself in a global cultural form and network of the likes we have not seen since the rave/alterglobalization convergence of the 1990s. (Music industry executives and the defenders of intellectual property will of course disagree with this premise, pointing out that infopiracy is truly a threat to IP; however in this respect capitalism itself is far ahead of them. Capitalism always cannibalizes its own.)

Third, exodus is a cultural strategy that has already shaped the 20thC. Though Italian Autonomist theorists such as Virno, Marazzi, Negri and others theorised exodus as a response to Fordism, I believe that its force was already well underway as a cultural strategy of transformation thanks to Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism as cultural exodus

Holmes mentions several key concepts in relation to exodus: myth, collectivity, transformation, metamorphosis, and the blend of direct action and art. Perhaps we should look no further than the mythical corpus of Afrofuturism.

Afrofuturism plays out an abundance of interstellar exits from planet earth: alternative alien origin myths, the power of sound to transport us beyond prejudice and conflict (if not space and time itself), transforming the forced exile of the Middle Passage into an interplanetary and cosmic exodus.

Afrofuturism demonstrates that all humans are in some way or other fundamentally alien. What Marx thought through labour (like the Autonomists) Afrofuturist artists, musicians, poets, writers, sci-fi writers and prophets have lived through the exploitation and cultural memory of  of (post)slave labour. We are all alien in this alien nation. This is an accurate myth, precisely attenuated to the truth of a reality constructed upon the myths of racial origin and supremacy.

Afrofuturism has engineerd various exits (not the least of which is an exit from philo sophia – but this will have to wait for a future post). At the very least, we can speak of the Afrodiasporic exappropriation of technology and mutation of the cultural viruses of sound and rhythm that engendered jazz, hip-hop, techno, electro, disco and house – not as musical genres but as cultural interventions that changed the dynamics of race, gender, sexuality, autonomy, carnival, and liberation — up to and including the cyborg heteronymy of the human form itself, from becoming-alien (Sun Ra) to becoming-machinic (Model 500).

One can think the vastness of these interventions: within property (sampling, riffing, remixing, improvisation), white culture (the dance Twist, the disco fix, the funk phenomenon), politics (what is Afrofuturism other than the mythus to black power?). All the Greek conceptual categorizations (polis, mythus, tekhne) are remixed through Afrofuturism. In this respect Afrofuturism plays out an exodus from the default culture (whose colours until recently have been Imperial White). Afrofuturism is not constrained by soniculture, however. It has its articulation (Kodwo Eshun, Paul D. Miller, Alondra Nelson), its literature (Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler — only to name a few), its science fictions and phonofictions.

Significantly, Afrofuturism was an alterglobalization network before activist-artists, high on a rave culture directly engendered from black gay disco, Chicago acid house and Detroit techno, decided to bring electronic soniculture and carnivale into the light and name it as such in the 1990s.

Afrofuturism is a network from Jamaican dub to British ska-punk, New York hip-hop to disco, Chicago house to Detroit techno, dancehall to Dogon and Ngome ritual. And, of course — jazz and rock n’ roll, Chubby Checker and Little Richard, the blues and Dixieland. That said, it traces its historical appearance far beyond its  postslave / postcolonial cultures and the advent of recording technologies that echoed and intensified its force (in a manner which needs further explanation, technology is essential to Afrofuturism). Ron Eglash’s research into African fractals suggests that there is more Africa in the computer than Brian Eno thinks. Afrofuturism is the cultural evolution of black secret technology that underlies algorithms of computing technology. It arises at the same time as the invention of the computer as an exit from what Heidegger identified as technology’s apparent containment of being within en-framing. If the computer is the machinic materialization of African fractal thought, then Afrofuturism is the cultural anticipation of its machinic overcoding. Think on this. This is an entirely other and radical justification of sampling, remixing, open use, piracy, sharing networks, and otherwise collective exappropriation of technology. And not only a justification before the Law, but a rethinking of its basis.

Exodus, then, is vast, trans-epochal, interstellar. In its lineages it sustains both apathy and energy. Reconnecting or hooking-up apathetic exodus to its energizing variant – without burning out, as rave culture did – is a question of sustained and urgent consideration.

Beside itself: alterglobalization as alternative power

The parallel polis —

does not compete for power. Its aim is not to replace the power of another kind, but rather under this power – or beside it – to create a structure that represents other laws and in which the voice of the ruling power is heard only as an insignificant echo from a world that is organised in an entirely different way. (Václav Benda, quoted in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms: Essays in Reverse Imagineering @ 180).

The alternative power grows within existing structures; like a weed it cracks the cement walls and foundations. But what has come of the strategy? Is it at all a possibility in the 21C, and what is its efficacity?

Perhaps, again, the question and its problem should be reversed. Not only is the parallelism of alterglobalization possible, it operates as the basis of existing distributions of power today. That there is no unification to power, no centralization of its control (and thus no conspiracy of the few over the many) is the secret hiding in plain sight — the purloined letter of alterglobalization. Alternative globalizations exist as the means by which attempts at militarized and economic centralization take place. In this sense, the strategy of the parallel polis has been well incorporated within military strategy; but this also only acknowledges that the terrain of its passage remains open.

./..

in the darkness the shapes of the light (thx to JBurke for this photo)

Excerpt from an unpublished missive — the mythus of the underground.

The outsider, insubordinate, and risk-laden character of dance, legitimated in this sense through its criminalization, provides participants with an outlaw or rebel identity forged in an ambiguous relationship with the law. — Graham St John, Technomad@20

The underground resonates with flights from the drudgery of everyday life into realms of secrecy and substance, where liberated encampments of rebel fugitives revel in the immediatism of autonomous existence…

What is the underground? A glimpse of the unfound country of the unknown. In its myth, the underground is a place otherwise than what exists all around, a place where what will and wants to be can take place without hindrance; and it exists at a far cry from the laborious processes of representative politics, petitions, and protests. In this sense, the underground is a mythic place; it is a distant and ever-receding horizon precisely because it is no secret. This is no more apparent than in the popular press, where the underground proclaims its mythic status as that fertile place from which the unknown emerges.

It appears hidden in plain sight.

The efficacy of the underground is oft discredited when viewed from the study of a particular cultural enclave. In the sobering reality of the 21C, the place of an imaginative rebellion, and of the entanglement of the avant-guarde with political organisation, or more precisely, the entwinement of politics and aesthetics, has been oft discredited since Benjamin attempted to distinguish the aestheticization of politics – which accordingly can only result in war – from the politicization of art. Myth is a form aestheticization; it is fiction given force. A myth may, or may not, be exactly true, but the veritas of its actuality is always unverifiable, and what is more true than its de facto accountability is the force of its suggestiveness, which is measured only by the limitations of its imaginary.

Disseminated throughout the 1980s in print and worldwide through online BBS networks and the early public internet in the 1990s, Hakim Bey’s communiques of the Temporary Autonomous Zone (TAZ), a “guerilla operation which liberates an area (of land, of time, of imagination) and then dissolves itself to re-form elsewhere/elsewhen, before the state can crush it” (Bey 1991 TAZ@101), have catalysed generations of “happy mutants” (Frauenfelder, Sinclair, Branwyn 1995), be they ravers, anarcho-punks, drop-outs or neo-situationists and surrealists, through the “poetic terrorism” of the mythic underground. Reading the TAZ communiques as they were leaked from some safe haven of the mystic anarchist was in itself a transformative undertaking. Apparently communicating from the position of the TAZ, performing in his text the narrative of an experienced initiate in occult practices and mythic rituals of liberation, and writing with the uninhibited parlance of the poetic imaginary, Bey disseminated not only the mythus of immediatist autonomy, but put myth to work in its service. The legends of the Hashisheen, the invocations of ritual chaos, the dreams of pirates and corsairs…

The dream of the underground, as disappearance from overbearing social constraints and the accountability of the State, was sought through means as unreal as they were nearly possible. In Bey’s text, the practices of occult magick and symbolic surrealism offered creative resistance against restricted living that surpassed, through their jouissance, the sober methods of organised political representation. The use of myth hinged precisely on the moment when the unbelieveable elements of Bey’s text came into contact with possibility. That a symbolic tactic of, say, incanting a ritual spell against a corporation, might hold as much leverage as – if not more than – writing letters to governmental representatives demonstrates a coherent grasp of the power of symbols. For by deploying symbolic practices against a society drowning in advertising and marketing, and overflowing with such an abundance of surveillance data and harvested information that no possible aggregation could compute its many dimensions, spaces of slippage and misrepresentation could be opened in which something other could take place – and here is where Bey gestured toward an actual event, a liberation of place, a Temporary Autonomous Zone. A slippage between symbols, between map and reality, could be put to work to enact disappearance as a strategy in which the possibility of living otherwise could be put into place. To put it in Paolo Virno’s terms, the TAZ is sought by way of “engaged withdrawal” – withdrawal not as retreat, but as a means to clear new space – and where “Exodus is the foundation of a Republic”; and like Freud’s relation between Ego and Id (Wo Es war, soll Ich werden), where I shall be is where the State shall be not: “if Republic, then no longer State” (Virno Virtuosity 1996@197).

[...]

Full version yet to be published.

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.

Yet another bloodsucker dressing-up to play the Glamour game.

I think the motto of recent living for me could be DOWN WITH THE TROLLS & GREY VAMPIRES, BUT ABOVE ALL, DOWN WITH THE PSYCHODRAMA DEMONS. What’s these here Grey Vampires and Trolls? K-punk outlines the concepts:

Grey Vampires are creatures who disguise their moth-greyness in iridescent brightness, all the colours of attractive sociability. Like moths, they are drawn by the light of energetic commitment, but unable to themselves commit. Unlike the Toll, the Grey Vampire’s mode is not aggressive, at least not actively so; the Grey Vampire is a moth-like only on the inside. On the outside, they are bright, humorous, positive – everyone likes them. But they are possessed by a a deep, implacable sadness. They feed on the energy of those who are devoted, but they cannot devote themselves to anything. (K-Punk)

Psychodrama Demons are somewhere in-between a Grey Vampire and a Troll. A Grey Vampire appears somewhat romantic at times, caught in a melancholia, only able to live vicariously through others, even as their mode-of-being sucks away at the marrow of life, draining those around them. A Troll is more outright aggressive. As K-Punk writes, a Troll “above all wants to waste time, its libido involves a banal sadism, the dull malice of snatching people’s toys away from them” (K-Punk).

Grey Vampires don’t feed on energy directly, they feed on obstructing projects. The problem is that, often, they don’t know that they are doing this. (That’s one difference between them and a troll – trolls usually aren’t under any illusions about themselves, they just find spurious justifications for their activities.) [...] the Grey Vampire is also a subject position that (any)one can be lured into if you enter certain structures. (K-Punk)

Certain structures include academia for k-punk, and many postgraduate students are Trolls, refusing to take positions, offering instead a constant barrage of critique without ground (oh, I know). But one could begin a list almost neverending of such “certain structures”: non-profits, start-ups, volunteer organisations, and of course, most corporate environments. After some consideration of management languages and hierarchies, it would appear that there be a third subject position between hideous Trolls and Grey Vampires worth investigating: the Psychodrama Demon. While the Grey Vampire might not know of their energy-sucking existenz, and while the Troll knowingly ignites a disastrous civil war amongst inhabitants (usually behind the cover of anonymity, sneaking away under cover of darkness as the flames fan higher & higher), the Psychodrama Demon turns every point of difference into a contest of wills, a battle of personalities. Everything is at stake with a Psychodrama Demon. It’s not only that they cannot appreciate another’s opinion; the real issue is that Psychodrama Demons don’t even notice that there are others around them. A demon doesn’t recognise others. Those other meaningless bodies are tools for use, not fellow travelers in Hell but a slave force of the Damned just waiting to be set to work under their auspices. Which is why any point of difference immediately becomes Psychodrama; for a minion to respond to a Demon calls into question the self-evident (for them) Master/Slave relationship that is the basis of their self-worth and existence. This is also why we have Psychodrama: because any point of resistance calls into question their self-confidence as beings, given that all other beings around them are reduced, in a demonstratively Kantian way, to means for their own nefarious ends. In short, Psychodrama Demons act with more potent violence than Trolls, for they stake their very being in being able to manipulate and control others through such brute means that one would usually think that no one would fall for it. Unfortunately, usually there is no choice in the matter. Psychodrama Demons are often so-called captains of knowledge, academia and industry. If in a leadership position, they are bottlenecks. Everything must go through them. They act as if they took Edward Gordon Craig’s theories of acting as a philosophy-of-life: those around them must be pulled with strings, mere instruments, as if “Uber-marionettes.”

Whenever I have someone write to me with the conversation-killer “I have real concerns with XYZ you’ve writ/said…”, I know two things: (1) this person believes that their real concern is at all a concern of mine; (2) this person believes that they exert power over me, and now we have to deal with an exercise in their attempt to exert it, i.e. I have to sit down and deal with it as if it mattered to me as much as it does to them; and that thus (ergo sum) this person be a Psychodrama Demon.

Of course such assessment calls to mind the classic work of Adorno & Horkheimer in The Authoritarian Personality, to which Brian Holmes has gone one step further, and combined  the sociological analysis of power with the economics of precarity, naming something he calls (in Unleashing the Collective Phantoms) the “Flexitarian Personality.”  As Holmes writes:

To grasp the way this hegemony [flexible accumulation - the subordination of social life to economic globalization - tV] is experienced by individuals, I have proposed the notion of the flexible personality. It is an ambiguous notion, because it designates both the managerial culture that legitimates the globalized economy, and renders it tolerable or even attractive for those who are its privileged subjects, as well as the “flexible” nature of a workforce that is subject to increasingly individualized forms of exploitation. In other words, the flexible personality designates the lived experience of a relation of domination. (Brian Holmes, Unleashing 59)

What is devilish (indeed) about the Flexible Personality is its Manichean structure, by which I mean devilishly dualist: both Master and Slave are caught up in this flexitarian regime. The Flexible Personality is precisely the managerial culture in which Grey Vampires, Trolls and Psychodrama Demons thrive. They thrive because – and I think this remains important for a basic faith in human kind (and not mauvais foi, in Sartre’s sense) – such devilish personalities are seduced, as if by the power of the Glamour which vampiric TV shows such as True Blood exploit (and to such lovely results). We can even call such glamour the Glamour of Globalization; all those expansive, vast networks, available for the biting & sucking (if one be a Grey Vampire), for the destroying (a Troll) or the controlling (mais oui, the Psychodrama Demon).

So the flexitarian system appears attractive, and to those that jump hell’s bells for it (the Sociopaths, to use the previous post’s language from Venkat), they are rewarded in kind, but only at the expense – and here our devilish theme continues – of their soul. The Glamour works upon those in the Slave position of this power relation, of course; in believing they might achieve such status, or in being the kind that likes being bitten & sucked off of their energies, those that do battle with Trolls, or attempt to stand-up to Psychodrama Demons… such positions engage in the game, this Hell which all are playing out, this fantasy land of mytho-economics that is the mechanic of servitude, ultimately, for all. Holmes’ great insight here is that the flexible aspect of the workforce is “subject to increasingly individualized forms of exploitation.” In short, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. You too can have your individualized relationship to the abstraction of capital; you too can find your own personal Hell.

The question is how to get out of it, which brings us to two points, both of them courtesy of Paolo Virno. The first is that our concepts deployed here are empty. Like multitude, they have no (ontological) content. By this I mean there is no essence to these devilish subjects. The multitude is not inherently revolutionary just as authoritarian leaders are not inherently Psychodrama Demons. That said, it be the intersection of the complex of desires that make up my being, the economic position I find myself perched within (precariously, it would appear), and the exit strategies I can see that make up what I become in this anthronomics of the subject/precariat. And exit strategies become increasingly important, which brings us to point two: exodus. How does one flee from this scenario? As Venkat writes, we are nearly in a no-option, No Exit scenario (Sartre would be happy):

While the thought of exodus as a strategy is appealing, we have to keep in mind one harsh fact. The real economy requires people to earn paychecks to pay the rent. A job isn’t a “nice to have” part of life like Facebook, but a “must have,” at least for now. And while I am among the most ardent champions of cloudworking and free-agenting, I am also pragmatic enough to recognize that the economy doesn’t really provide support for exodus as a strategy on any significant scale.

At least not yet. (Venkat)

As I writ in a comment to Venkat, which I will repost here as a comment to this post for posterity, exodus is already under way. There might not be an easy exit, and there is never a way to merely pick-up and exist “outside” of any system. But by outlining the contours in which we find our servitude, at least we can face up to the age-old problem Spinoza so aptly laid out for us, by marking out not only the “one man” we might be serving, but the “one man” – the Last Man – that hides within all of us, that Grey Vampire/Troll/Psychodrama Demon waiting to take hold, seductive and desperate, which is not an exit strategy, but a Personal Hell waiting for you, individualized, this salvation by servitude:

Granted, then, that the supreme mystery of despotism, its prop and stay, is to keep men in a state of deception, and with the specious title of religion to cloak the fear by which they must be held in check, so that they will fight for their servitude as if for salvation, and count it no shame, but the highest honour, to spend their blood and their lives for the glorification of one man. (Spinoza, Preface to Theological-Political Treatise: 3)

over & out ./.

the pyramid of corporate cognitive labour

I recently came across a rather awesome analysis on Ribbonfarm that adds some much-needed complexity to the basic dichotomy between vertical and horizontal models of corporate control. These fantastic and well-writ posts (The Gervais Principle I and II) have been hit up on Slashdot and have circulated far & wide for good reason. Like Christian Marazzi’s work that deftly summarizes the significance of language to capital – the way language informs the fluctuations of the stock market and global economy (see Capital and Language) – Venkat analyses the way in which language is ab/used by particular players in corporate organisations. He deploys his deft analysis to unravel bureaucratic power principles as well as propose a theory of microclass. And he accomplishes this all by taking as his primary example the hit TV series The Office — Ricky Gervais’ brilliant satire of water cooler politics and management mediocrity. Venkat’s analysis, informed by his research into theories of corporate management, complements Marazzi’s observation that

In the post-Fordist context, in which language has become in every respect an instrument of the production of commodities and, therefore, the material condition of our very lives, the loss of the ability to speak, of the “language capacity,” means the loss of belonging in the world as such, the loss of what “communifies” the many who constitute the community. (Marazzi, Capital and Language: 131).

In his first post, Venkat complexifies the horizontal/vertical models with a theory of microclass. The Sociopaths (senior mgmt), Clueless (middle mgmt) & Losers (bottomfeeders) are constituted by their ability (or lack thereof) to learn, engage with, and ultimately ab/use corporate language for their own ends. In short, Venkat’s analysis jives with Marazzi, Virno and Berardi’s claims concerning not only the significance of language to contemporary labour conditions – insofar as linguistic affect structures fluctations of the stock market – but its operational effacity, insofar as linguistic competence structures the very field of labour. In short, one’s subjectivity under cognitive labour is structured by one’s ability to process the linguistic matrix of capital (which of course says much about education and class composition, among other things, but also about the linguistic seduction of capital – the great mass of all those who, to rephrase Spinoza, fight to remain slaves).

In Autonomist theory, this centrality of linguistic operations, interlaced and communicated by way of mobile and networked technologies, has been called the general intellect, insofar as the intellectualization of labour via technics constitutes the overall condition of cognitive labour. In this increasing technicization of labour, linguistic competence becomes the measure of labour itself: it is the brain that becomes the machine or engine of (cognitive) labour. As I think I’ll comment on in an upcoming post, mind you, I think the significance of a functioning brain is overrated in cognitive labour and it is a living-dead brain or zombie labour that still constitutes the scenario for the majority of the workforce (one is required to think, but not think too much). I think Venkat captures something of the zombie labour hyperthesis in his breakdown of the Loser class into two subclasses (becoming-Sociopath and Clueless Losers) and by analysing the seemingly lost Clueless as the middle manageriat, i.e., as those who believe the most in the conditions of their own enslavement.

In his second post, Venkat breaks down language into Posturetalk, Powertalk, Babytalk & Gametalk, and details how it is ab/used by each class. Powertalk is the language of control and conquer used by Sociopaths; it works on multiple levels at once, communicating several meanings in discrete semantic utterances. Such communication is a poker game of words, where what is left unsaid determines the value of what is said, where parameters of the language game itself are relayed in the delivery of each utterance, and where ambiguity destabilizes erstwhile assurances. While the Clueless attempt to imitate Powertalk, they only fail to grasp the most superficial level of its meaning, and though they might deploy all the buzzwords, the Clueless can only speak Posturetalk – all copy and no depth, all bark and no bite. For Powertalk is only Powertalk if the speaker has table stakes — some actual informational capital to wager. In a similar way, Gametalk is what Losers like to talk to each other, which is basically showroom-style hot air; but as this is a language for Losers only, it holds no value, unlike the way in which Posturetalk signals that one is dealing with a Clueless class member. And in a truly brilliant move, Venkat outlines how Babytalk is not only what Sociopaths use to communicate with the Clueless – for the Clueless can’t grasp Powertalk – but Babytalk is also the language that Losers use to address their middle management superiors, which is why Losers are the breeding ground of Sociopaths as well as containing an exodus-class of what I will call “Carefrees” who know perfectly well the game but have no real interest in playing it. And in those rare instances where upper management Sociopaths talk directly to Loser minions, a variant form of Powertalk is used called Straight Talk — a direct and one-way command utterance with threatening overtones. Mind you it is also in such instances that a becoming-Sociopath Loser can demonstrate their knowledge of Powertalk and forge a path to senior management.

Venkat's Gervais Principle Language Model

Like all great fiction, The Office models only what is more real than reality, the world in its representation, in its vicious deployments of language and power. One moment I particular dig in this worthy read (which I cannot do justice to here – do go and devour it) is when Venkat contrasts The Gervais Principle with the Dilbert Principle:

Scott Adams, seeing a different flaw in the Peter Principle, proposed the Dilbert Principle: that companies tend to systematically promote their least-competent employees to middle management to limit the damage they can do. This again is untrue. The Gervais principle predicts the exact opposite: that the most competent ones will be promoted to middle management. Michael Scott was a star salesman before he become a clueless middle manager. The least competent employees (but not all of them — only certain enlightened incompetents) will be promoted not to middle management, but fast-tracked through to senior management. To the sociopath level. (Venkat, Gervais Principle)

Venkat adds a subtle flavour here, though he isn’t quite acknowledging that both principles appear to be operational and correct. The Dilbert Principle applies in general: middle management is composed of the Clueless. That said, the truly incompetent remain as Losers – those forever loyal to the company but who will never achieve middle management as quite simply they do their menial jobs too well (though it’s hard to say who is more incompetent: the Losers who never get anywhere or the Clueless who believe they have gotten somewhere by becoming middle management but are just being played by the Sociopaths as a buffer between the upper management and the lumpenLosers). Indeed, it is the deployment of the Clueless as the buffer between the harsh and vicious world of the Sociopaths and the lumpenLosers that marks Venkat’s insight – for it also opens the door to possible action. Remove middle management, and a classic class antagonism reveals itself in all its possible violence. As Venkat puts it, the Clueless mediate between an otherwise untenable master/slave dialectic.

What I also dig about Venkat is that the Losers aren’t just “losers” in the usual, derogatory sense but are often composed of the completely Careless who couldn’t give a rat’s ass about this powergame – those coasting by who watch it unfold all around them and say to hell with it. The Careless Losers – the carefree, perhaps – have something else going on in their lives and see work for what it is: a distraction from what counts. In this sense, the Losers, as the biggest group that constitutes most of us, are composed of that “silent majority” that upholds a good deal of old fashioned anarchist sensibility: act as if the State/Corp doesn’t exist. In the indication of a blindspot within an organisation’s powergame environment, Venkat’s analysis suggests that other systems of power might lie elsewhere. This elsewhere keeps those with an ear to the outside constantly seeking an alternative means to living without working, and as Virno suggests, means that exodus (or the politics of disappearance) constitutes the general strategy of the (Loser) workforce.

The other strategy is, of course, to try and manipulate the system from the inside. And those with some sense of how to manipulate language (the Sociopaths) forge a path directly from Loserdom to senior management. Becoming-Sociopath Losers aren’t headhunted because they do their menial job well, but because they demonstrate (by subtle language signs) that they know that their job is worthless by the standards of other Sociopaths. By slacking in their work (getting others to do it for them or just plain deferring it) and putting the extra energy into getting ahead (manoeuvring and conniving), and taking advantage of risk-taking scenarios (playing the game), Sociopaths advance directly from Loser status to senior management — which does not necessarily imply that a Sociopath is bad. For if one is playing the powergame for different ends, such strategies are also the purview of the good. For this general assessment of power applies as much to NPOs and artist-run centres as it does to oil corporations and PR firms.

Check out how the way language plays into this sacking story recently sent to me (the author requested anonymity):

The most telling thing, in my 15-year design career, is I’ve never worked anywhere longer than two years. I’ve been made redundant once and been sacked one and a half times.

The first sacking came on a Friday evening completely out of the blue. It was at the end of the month, so it was nice and tidy for them. The boss had been out of the office all afternoon, walked in the office and asked to have a word with me outside the door. He simply said: “we’re going to let you go”— that was it. I walked away there and then. He did my colleague, the same way, 3 minutes later. Needless to say, it was ruthless and illegal. There was no dismissal process followed.

However, at the time, the job market was buoyant and I got a way better job (oxymoron) shortly afterwards. Needless to say, that company has been erased from my CV. It’s a futile act but it feels the most dignified response to how I was treated— walk away, shake the dust from your shoes and take back control.

The ‘point 5’ sacking was more gentle and evolved over the course of a month. It came to a head and can be summarised in one sentence. They said: “I think you need to move on”. I agreed and left at the end of the week.

*.*.*