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The Age of Speed

“The revolutionary contingent attains its ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and itself becomes a motor (machine of attack), in other words a producer of speed.” - Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics

What is at stake in our world today? Should we align ourselves with what one Japanese poet sang: “I pray for the music of the citizens walking.” Is this it? Movement, speed, the future as the force of acceleration? Has accelerationism become the order of the day? Maybe we need something on the order of what Mark Fischer describes, quoting Deleuze and Guattari’s Anti-Oedipus: “Not to withdraw from the process, but to go further, to ‘accelerate the process,’ as Nietzsche put it: in this matter, the truth is that we haven’t seen anything yet.” Against all those like the Italian Autonomists who as Bifo Berardi (After Future) remarks that the ‘future is over’ we should think differently.1 But to give him his due, Berardi was not speaking of temporality, but of ‘psychological perception’, which ‘emerged in the cultural situation of progressive modernity, the cultural expectations that were fabricated during the long period of modern civilization…”(AF 18). So it is against ‘progressive modernity’ that he speaks of future as progressive, as some unending temporal order of succession as a radical Enlightenment Project projected into an endless future of possibility and hope. He says this is over, caput, dead and buried amid the wastelands of modernity strewn around us on this dying earth we all inhabit.

Nick Land was one of the first to take up the battle cry of accelerationism.  For him it was all about thanatropics: “labour is far harder to control than the live stuff was, which is why the enlightenment project of interring gothic superstition was the royal road to the first truly vampiric civilization, in which death alone comes to rule” (TA, p. 79). Continuing his inquisition he remarks, echoing Nietzsche:

“This is the initial impulse into capital’s religious history; the sacrifice of all dogmatic theology to the ascetic ideal, which is finally consummated in the death of God. The theology of the One, rooted in concrete beliefs and codes that summarize and defend the vital interests of a community, and therefore affiliated to a tenacious anthropomorphism, is gradually corroded down to the impersonal zero of catastrophic religion” (TA, p. 79).”

It is in this absolute zero of capital religion that we discover Land’s accelerationism, wherein capital “attains its own ‘angular momentum’, perpetuating a run-away whirlwind of dissolution, whose hub is the virtual zero of impersonal metropolitan accumulation. At the peak of its productive prowess the human animal is hurled into a new nakedness, as everything stable is progressively liquidated in the storm” (TA, p. 80). Benjamin Noys in his own variation of this interesting doctrine tells us that it is “an exotic variant of la politique du pire: if capitalism generates its own forces of dissolution then the necessity is to radicalise capitalism itself: the worse the better. We can call these positions accelerationist.” (Accelerationism) The point that Mark Fischer makes is that all our contrary dreams for organic wholeness, our slippage back into some primal time of peace and tribalism, some paganistic mishmash of communal habitability is a fantasy, an unreal possibility. Instead we should accept the accelerationist movement forward. And, for him, it entails three things: 1) Everyone is an accelerationist; 2) Accelerationism has never happened; and, 3)  Marxism is nothing if it is not accelerationist. In a reversal of intent he says we need to return to aspects of both Lyotard’s Libidinal Economy and Deleuze and Guattari Anti-Oedipus: “the resources of negativity” that the left desperately needs to energize its programs effectively. Doing so we must emphasize “politics as a means to greater libidinal intensification: rather, it’s a question of instrumentalising libido for political purposes”. Fischer moved on from their to Land’s cyberpunk capitalism: “an accelerationist cyber-culture in which digital sonic production disclosed an inhuman future that was to be relished rather than abominated. Land’s machinic theory-poetry paralleled the digital intensities of 90s jungle, techno and doomcore, which sampled from exactly the same cinematic sources, and also anticipated “impending human extinction becom[ing] accessible as a dance-floor” (Fanged Noumena, 398)”. Fischer sees in Land something the Left needs desperately, because it was the failure on the Left’s part “to foresee the extent to which pastiche, recapitulation and a hyper-oedipalised neurotic individualism would become the dominant cultural tendencies” that lead to a “fundamental misjudgement about the dynamics of capitalism”. He tells us that Land’s failure was to collapse “capitalism into what Deleuze and Guattari call schizophrenia, thus losing their most crucial insight into the way that capitalism operates via simultaneous processes of deterritorialization and compensatory reterritorialization. Capital’s human face is not something that it can eventually set aside, an optional component or sheath-cocoon with which it can ultimately dispense. The abstract processes of decoding that capitalism sets off must be contained by improvised archaisms, lest capitalism cease being capitalism.” The problem is here that Fischer himself could not have foreseen that Land’s abrupt turn to the Right, to a neo-reactionary worldview and ideology that would no longer try to subvert the forces of capital, but would in fact enter into the very accelerating instrumentalism that Fischer himself feared. One sees in many of Land’s works of present note in his current blog Outside In a neo-reactionary stance, as well as a foray into what is termed the Dark Enlightenment (organized on Matt Leslie’s site) here. Without realizing this inner logic of accelerationism as an entry point onto reactionary forces rather than the radical Left Fischer remarked: “accelerationism can function as an anti-capitalist strategy – not the only anti-capitalist strategy (other anti-capitalist strategies are available, as it were) but a strategy that must be part of any political program that calls itself Marxist.” But can this truly be so? Toward the end of this post Fischer tell us that “capitalism has abandoned the future because it can’t deliver it. Nevertheless, the contemporary left’s tendencies towards Canutism, its rhetoric of resistance and obstruction, collude with capital’s anti/meta-narrative that it is the only story left standing”. Yet, isn’t the opposite true, capitalism has not given up on the future, it has only given up the ‘progressive future’, not the hyperintensive future of  climatology, biotechnology, nanotechnology, bioinformatics, and genomics and the transhumanist dreams of a technocapitalistic global empire. That seems very much alive. At the moment it looks more like the future is only over for the Left, that they are more and more failing to gain a foothold in this venture of the future, and for all intents and purposes are living in the past of dead glories, fantasies, and revolutionary rhetoric that is no longer viable in any measure or deed. Why is this? Why has the Left failed? Why is the Left left on the Ouside looking in rather than leading the vanguard into the hope of a future worth living? Is it truly as Derrida suggested that it is the ‘Specter of Marxism’ that haunts us rather than Marxism itself? Are we left with only provocation in such philosophical hijinks as Badiou and Zizek? Is there a Left left? One critic of Land’s Accelerationism, Jehu Eaves, a self-styled  “marxist-in-recovery” on Gonzo Times, states that for Land “the determinant factor in a capitalist economy are the exchange relations, not production relations. This effectively puts him in the same bed with underconsumptionists and he seems simply to be an underconsumptionist perversely turned inside out. If you think exchange is the determining factor in the mode of production, the logical conclusion is that the mode of production can be ‘accelerated’ simply by the most rapid extension of exchange relations. Land’s leading critics seem to agree that this is the chief defect of Landian accelerationism — it absolute emphasis on expansion of the world market and commodification of all human relations.” (here) This same critic says that one argument against such an accelerationism is that there is a fifty-fifty chance that it might lead into an “onrushing catastrophe” rather than some revolution in the system. He also says of Land’s critics, the very Leftists that use his accelerationism to other ends that “we must stop the collapse of civilization, but the working class must first be goaded to do this through an increasing deterioration of its conditions of existence. And none of these cowards wants to be the one to deliver the bad news to the worker as she is just getting off her third job.” He continues stating that the “defect of Land’s argument is to realize it inverts the actual relation between the mode of production and the mode of exchange. Land proposes the mode of production can be accelerated toward its demise by imposing uninhibited commodification on every aspect of social relations. In fact, the opposite is the case: the mode of production is accelerated by compelling capital to become ever more productive, by compelling a constantly rising organic composition of capital.” (ibid.) But I wonder if this is a defect in Land or a misprisioning / misreading of Land by others? Jehu, in one final bite, remarks: “The possibility of an entirely communistic accelerationism is already given by labor theory in the very conception of capital as the production of surplus value - the self-expansion of capital being the motive of capital and its only concern. One of the most important empirical observations Marx makes in Capital is that once society imposed limits on hours of labor in England, the introduction of machinery and intensive employment of labor power accelerated… The conclusion has to be that reduction of hours of labor not only has the effect of freeing the proletariat from the destructive impact of the value form, it actually accelerates the demise of capital. The demand for a reduction of hours of labor, therefore, completes the connection between critique of the value form and elaboration of a practical communist program.(ibid.)

From Land we turn to Alex Williams and Nick Srnicek who have taken up once again the banner of the Accelerationist cause in their

“Manifesto for an Accelerationist Politics”

. They seem to envision a terroristic age of climatic upheaval, mass unemployment, terminal resource depletion, and continuing catastrophes in both human and planetary scales unimaginable during previous eras except for the global catastrophes of asteroids, etc. Because of this, they, too, join forces with such as the Autonomists and spouting an end to the future: “In this paralysis of the political imaginary, the future has been cancelled.”

They describe a neoliberalism 2.0 that is reinventing itself, something Land and his neoreactionaries call the ‘Cathedral’. The idea of the State as encompassing Academia, Think-Tanks, Finance, Governance, etc. etc… to the nth power as an all pervading octopus with its tentacles everywhere in our lives with no escape other than that of ludicrous gestures of comic subversion or pathetic terrorism based on mindless and meaningless gestures of inertia. They seem to feel that all of this is the Right’s fault: “In the absence of a radically new social, political, organisational, and economic vision the hegemonic powers of the right will continue to be able to push forward their narrow-minded imaginary, in the face of any and all evidence.” As if the Left were not a part of this neoliberal world (Clinton, Obama) as well. As if the supposed democratic party were absolved of its complicity in this state of affairs. It’s not, it’s as guilty as hell. There can no longer be any justification for either party in its complicity as it allows such a hypercapitalism to slowly cannibalize the world. All the breast beating in the world will no stop this. The Left has failed itself and cannot continue to blame some imaginary Right, when its very own parties enact neoliberal agendas.

W & S tell us that that present capitalistic 2.0 system “in its neoliberal form, its ideological self-presentation is one of liberating the forces of creative destruction, setting free ever-accelerating technological and social innovations.” They situate their own discourse within the slipstream of Landian thought, saying, even his “myopic yet hypnotising belief that capitalist speed alone could generate a global transition towards unparalleled technological singularity” is not enough. They criticize him saying that “Landian neoliberalism confuses speed with acceleration. We may be moving fast, but only within a strictly defined set of capitalist parameters that themselves never waver. We experience only the increasing speed of a local horizon, a simple brain-dead onrush rather than an acceleration which is also navigational, an experimental process of discovery within a universal space of possibility. It is the latter mode of acceleration which we hold as essential.” But is this true? Have we not seen many of the new City-States as neocapitalist laboratories, prime examples of the neoliberal vision that seems to be overtaking us in accelerating speed, as sites of possibility that the neoliberals are using as experimental labs of capitalism, allowing the future to permeate their secret lairs as they build their free-trade (criminalized) zones? Isn’t there something like a dark enlightenment going on in this process? Think of Shanghai, Land’s on home base, where creative destruction by capital has been an ongoing project for a while now. As Land once remarked: “Philosophers have only ever interpreted the world, but architects get to build it. Although still inchoate, a neomodern architectural landscape is quite unmistakably under construction. This is especially evident in Shanghai.” (Land, Shanghai Times) The reemergence of Shanghai as a sort of City-State of the neoliberal future beckoning all to drift between a Confucianism stabilizing the secular modality of the populace with the petulance of a neomodernist revivalism in architecture, art, culture, and the liquid movement of an accelerating future mobilized in each moments awareness is telling.

W & S seem to be stuck and fixated in the ‘progressive futurism’ of the past, rather than in accelerationsm as it is – a future coming at us, rather than as some progressive accumulation of past successes and transformations. “Even worse, as Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other. Progress becomes constrained within a framework of surplus value, a reserve army of labour, and free-floating capital.” How could progress become constrained, when accelerationism is about the implosion of the future in accelerating speed upon the present? Isn’t it Williams and Srnicek themselves who have misunderstood Land, accusing him of myopic vision, when in truth it is they themselves who have become fixated on outdated tools of critical appraisal an Marixian discourse that is no longer viable for what they see in front of them? This notion of free-floating capital, immaterial, wandering the networks of the new nomos of earth, a transnationalized flow valve of monetary bits channeled to the desires of an incomplete machinic unconscious? Progress never stopped, it just changed directions: innovation moved out of the national and into the global world where biotechnology, robotics, nanotech, artificial-intelligence… all the current drift toward transhumanism and a notion of Singularity (Kurzweil). Progress stopped only for the older Industrial systems in a America and EU. The creative destruction of the older technologies as such purveyors as Wal-Mart enforced new global regimes of production of on-demand, supply-side economics on a moment by moment basis have demonopolized the unions and the capitalist classism of old. The Left targets a world that no longer exists, and has yet to actually see the new world in all its fractured success. The world has changed but the Left has remained the SAME. In a void of ideological in-fighting and resuscitation of outmoded conceptuality it blindly moves forward espousing its epithets of derision and calls for a return to beginnings. A beginning is something New not a return…

W & S would even have us believe that the neoliberal forces have “progressed, rather than enabling individual creativity” and eliminated “cognitive inventiveness in favour of an affective production line of scripted interactions”. What they describe is more like a Ballardian future of affectless psychopaths who have become cyborgs of the new cognitariat of intellectual production who having absolved themselves of freedom live in gated cities secured by the RFID tags stapled to their DNA. They remind us that along with Land we should remember Marx, not as our contemporary Left seem to remember him, but as the prophet of accelerationism he was: “we must remember that Marx himself used the most advanced theoretical tools and empirical data available in an attempt to fully understand and transform his world. He was not a thinker who resisted modernity, but rather one who sought to analyse and intervene within it, understanding that for all its exploitation and corruption, capitalism remained the most advanced economic system to date. Its gains were not to be reversed, but accelerated beyond the constraints the capitalist value form.”  Should we assume from the above that Marx is still Sacred Writ, that he is still providing the Left with the adamant script to be enforced? Is the capitalist world the same as in Marx’s time. Should we not finally begin thinking for ourselves, and incorporate Marx’s insights without following him as if by the letter of the law?

They even bring Lenin in on this accelerating future: “Socialism is inconceivable without large-scale capitalist engineering based on the latest discoveries of modern science.” Why this need of a large-scale Social Engineering project? Is not already what the Neoliberal Thought Collective has done for the past 50 years? From the days of Mount Pelerin Society to now so well documented by Philips Mirowski in The Road from Mont Pelerin: The Making of the Neoliberal Thought Collective. As well as in such works as Angus Burgin’s The Great Persuasion, and/or Masters of the Universe by Daniel Steadman Jones. For Lenin it the central motif of Communism that what was required of capitalism was the ‘planned state’ as the driving force behind it, that otherwise it would be impossible to maintain. But isn’t this in itself an admission of failure and stasis, that someone would need to control and govern such energies, that without the iron fist of some central committee to drive such forces they would accelerate beyond reasonable control? Was Lenin always already defeated? That humans could control such impersonal forces? Isn’t this at the heart of what W & S mean when they tell the Left that it must embrace “suppressed accelerationist tendency” within Marxism itself freed of the entrapments of a planned state?

In their manifesto Williams and Srnicek call for an end to the divisions in the Left, for a folk politics based on “localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism”, and instead they tell the Left that they must embrace instead “an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology.” Does this not remind one of the earlier Italian futurists who embraced modernity to the point of “ruinous and incendiary violence”? They tell us that everyone wants to ‘work less’, but that instead we’ve seen the “progressive elimination of the work-life distinction, with work coming to permeate every aspect of the emerging social factory.”

They complain that instead of real freedom and inventiveness the neoliberalism has brought in its wake constraints that have narrowed the possibilities of work and production in a endless round of the same iterative inanity because of monopolization of those very forces. They tell us a return to the industrial style societies (Fordism) of the nineteenth and early to mid twentieth century are foreclosed to us, that we there is nothing essentially wrong with neoliberalism other than that it needs to be ‘repurposed toward common ends’: “the existing infrastructure is not a capitalist stage to be smashed, but a springboard to launch towards post-capitalism”.

“Who amongst us fully recognizes what untapped potentials await in the technology which has already been developed?” A question W & S ask. They remind us that the true potential of such technologies have yet to be ‘exploited’, that what is needed an acceleration in the ‘process of technological evolution’. Yet, they remind us that this is not some techno-utopian dream, but a way to resolve the current malaise within our world and provide a way to overcome our real ‘social conflicts’. But on the other hand they seem to fall back into old habits of thought telling us that this post-capitalist endeavor will require ‘post-capitalist planning’, that ‘we must develop both a cognitive map of the existing system and a speculative image of the future economic system’. How would that help? Wouldn’t any such effort be a totalizing gesture, a symbolic fiction of simulated mappings in some computer modeling algorithmic constellation based upon outworn Platonic representationlism of past economic systems? This would be to reenter the world of representation by the back door, a return to the past rather than some accelerating future. A sort of have your cake and eat it too methodology. A control system that totalizes everything through some centralized planning committee that leaves nothing to chance. Just another totalitarian regime of knowledge and power controlling the destiny of the earth and her inhabitants.

They even hint of such a tyrannical gesture when that tell the Left that they “must develop sociotechnical hegemony: both in the sphere of ideas, and in the sphere of material platforms”. In fact they tell us that democratic processes are not enough, that “direct action is sufficient to achieve any of this,” that the “habitual tactics of marching, holding signs, and establishing temporary autonomous zones risk becoming comforting substitutes for effective success.” In fact, more pointedly that tell us that the “overwhelming privileging of democracy-as-process needs to be left behind”. Is this so? Hmmm… Instead of an open society they tell us that “secrecy, verticality, and exclusion all have their place as well in effective political action”. Again, is this so? Is this the future of the Left? In a bold statement they reiterate: “Real democracy must be defined by its goal – collective self-mastery.” Such Nietzscheism seems quite different from what the Left has usually been associated. Yet, in a gesture of equivocation they try to wiggle out of such totalitarian centralization, saying:

“Communism is for us not a state of affairs which is to be established, an ideal to which reality [will] have to adjust itself. We call communism the real movement which abolishes the present state of things. The conditions of this movement result from the premises now in existence.”

(note the above quote refreshed in my mind by Jehu)

Craig Hickman

2013

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Fictions of Every Kind

Everything is becoming science fiction. From the margins of an almost invisible literature has sprung the intact reality of the 20th century. What the writers of modern science fiction invent today, you and I will do tomorrow – or, more exactly, in about 10 years’ time, though the gap is narrowing.

Science fiction is the most important fiction that has been written for the last 100 years. The compassion, imagination, lucidity and vision of H.G. Wells and his successors, and above all their grasp of the real identity of the 20th century, dwarf the alienated and introverted fantasies of James Joyce, Eliot and the writers of the so-called Modern Movement, a 19th century offshoot of bourgeois rejection. Given its subject matter, its eager acceptance of naiveté, optimism and possibility, the role and importance of science fiction can only increase. I believe that the reading of science fiction should be compulsory. Fortunately, compulsion will not be necessary, as more and more people are reading it voluntarily. Even the worst science fiction is better – using as the yardstick of merit the mere survival of its readers and their imaginations – than the best conventional fiction. The future is a better key to the present than the past.

Above all, science fiction is likely to be the only form of literature which will cross the gap between the dying narrative fiction of the present and the cassette and videotape fictions of the near future. What can Saul Bellow and John Updike do that J. Walter Thompson, the world’s largest advertising agency and its greatest producer of fiction, can’t do better? At present science fiction is almost the only form of fiction which is thriving, and certainly the only fiction which has any influence on the world around it. The social novel is reaching fewer and fewer readers, for the clear reason that social relationships are no longer as important as the individual’s relationship with the technological landscape of the late 20th century. In essence, science fiction is a response to science and technology as perceived by the inhabitants of the consumer goods society, and recognizes that the role of the writer today has totally changed – he is now merely one of a huge army of people filling the environment with fictions of every kind. To survive, he must become far more analytic, approaching his subject matter like a scientist or engineer. If he is to produce fiction at all, he must out-imagine everyone else, scream louder, whisper more quietly. For the first time in the history of narrative fiction, it will require more than talent to become a writer. What special skills, proved against those of their fellow members of society, have Muriel Spark or Edna O'Brien, Kingsley Amis or Cyril Connolly? Sliding gradients point the way to their exits. It is now some 15 years since the sculptor Eduardo Paolozzi, a powerful and original writer in his own right, remarked that the science fiction magazines produced in the suburbs of Los Angeles contained far more imagination and meaning than anything he could find in the literary periodicals of the day. Subsequent events have proved Paolozzi’s sharp judgment correct in every respect. Fortunately, his own imagination has been able to work primarily within the visual arts, where the main tradition for the last century has been the tradition of the new. Within fiction, unhappily, the main tradition for all too long has been the tradition of the old. Like the inmates of some declining institution, increasingly forgotten and ignored by the people outside, the leading writers and critics count the worn beads of their memories, intoning the names of the dead, dead who were not even the contemporaries of their own grandparents. Meanwhile, science fiction, as my agent remarked to me recently in a pleasant tone, is spreading across the world like a cancer. A benign and tolerant cancer, like the culture of beaches. The time-lag of its acceptance narrows – I estimate it at present to be about 10 years. My guess is that the human being is a nervous and fearful creature, and nervous and fearful people detest change. However, as everyone becomes more confident, so they are prepared to accept change, the possibility of a life radically different from their own. Like green stamps given away at the supermarkets of chance and possibility, science fiction becomes the new currency of an ever-expanding future. The one hazard facing science fiction, the Trojan horse being trundled towards its expanding ghetto – a high-rent area if there ever was one in fiction – is that faceless creature, literary criticism. Almost all the criticism of science fiction has been written by benevolent outsiders, who combine zeal with ignorance, like high-minded missionaries viewing the sex rites of a remarkably fertile aboriginal tribe and finding every laudable influence at work except the outstanding length of penis. The depth of penetration of the earnest couple, Lois and Stephen Rose (authors of The Shattered Ring), is that of a pair of practicing Christians who see in science fiction an attempt to place a new perspective on “man, nature, history and ultimate meaning.” What they fail to realize is that science fiction is totally atheistic: those critics in the past who have found any mystical strains at work have been blinded by the camouflage. Science fiction is much more concerned with the significance of the gleam on an automobile instrument panel than on the deity’s posterior – if Mother Nature has anything in science fiction, it is VD. Most critics of science fiction trip into one of two pitfalls – either, like Kingsley Amis in New Maps of Hell, they try to ignore altogether the technological trappings and relate SF to the “mainstream” of social criticism, anti-utopian fantasies and the like (Amis’s main prophecy for science fiction in 1957 and proved wholly wrong), or they attempt to apostrophize SF in terms of individual personalities, hopelessly rivaling the far-better financed efforts of American and British Publishers to sell their fading Wares by dressing their minor talents in the great-writer mantle. Science fiction has always been very much a corporate activity, its writers sharing a common pool of ideas, and the yardsticks of individual achievement do not measure the worth of the best Writers, Bradbury, Asimov, Bernard Wolfe Limbo 90) and Frederik Pohl, The anonymity of the majority of 20th-century Writers of science fiction is the anonymity of modern technology; no more “great names” stand out than in the design of consumer durables, or for that matter Rheims Cathedral. Who designed the 1971 Cadillac El Dorado, a complex of visual, organic and psychological clues of infinitely more subtlety and relevance, stemming from a vastly older network of crafts and traditions than, say, the writings of Norman Mailer or the latest Weidenfeld or Cape miracle? The subject matter of SF is the subject matter of everyday life: the gleam on refrigerator cabinets, the contours of a wife’s or husband’s thighs passing the newsreel images on a color TV set, the conjunction of musculature and chromium artifact within an automobile interior, the unique postures of passengers on an airport escalator – all in all, close to the world of the Pop painters and sculptors. Paolozzi, Hamilton, Warhol, Wesselmann, Ruscha, among others. The great advantage of SF is that it can add one unique ingredient to this hot mix – words. Write!

J.G. Ballard, 1971

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What We Want, What We Believe

Black Panther Party Platform and Program, October 1966 Platform

1. We want freedom. We want power to determine the destiny of our Black Community.

We believe that black people will not be free until we are able to determine our destiny.

2. We want full employment for our people.

We believe that the federal government is responsible and obligated to give every man employment or a guaranteed income. We believe that if the white American businessmen will not give full employment, then the means of production should be taken from the businessmen and placed in the community so that the people of the community can organize and employ all of its people and give a high standard of living.

3. We want an end to the robbery by the white man of our Black Community.

We believe that this racist government has robbed us and now we are demanding the overdue debt of forty acres and two mules. Forty acres and two mules was promised 100 years ago as restitution for slave labor and mass murder of black people. We will accept the payment as currency which will be distributed to our many communities. The Germans are now aiding the Jews in Israel for the genocide of the Jewish people. The Germans murdered six million Jews. The American racist has taken part in the slaughter of over twenty million black people; therefore, we feel that this is a modest demand that we make.

4. We want decent housing, fit for shelter of human beings.

We believe that if the white landlords will not give decent housing to our black community, then the housing and the land should be made into cooperatives so that our community, with government aid, can build and make decent housing for its people.

5. We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present-day society.

We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world, then he has little chance to relate to anything else.

6. We want all black men to be exempt from military service.

We believe that Black people should not be forced to fight in the military service to defend a racist government that does not protect us. We will not fight and kill other people of color in the world who, like black people, are being victimized by the white racist government of America. We will protect ourselves from the force and violence of the racist police and the racist military, by whatever means necessary.

7. We want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people.

We believe we can end police brutality in our black community by organizing black self-defense groups that are dedicated to defending our black community from racist police oppression and brutality. The Second Amendment to the Constitution of the United States gives a right to bear arms. We therefore believe that all black people should arm themselves for self defense.

8. We want freedom for all black men held in federal, state, county and city prisons and jails.

We believe that all black people should be released from the many jails and prisons because they have not received a fair and impartial trial.

9. We want all black people when brought to trial to be tried in court by a jury of their peer group or people from their black communities, as defined by the Constitution of the United States.

We believe that the courts should follow the United States Constitution so that black people will receive fair trials. The 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution gives a man a right to be tried by his peer group. A peer is a person from a similar economic, social, religious, geographical, environmental, historical and racial background. To do this the court will be forced to select a jury from the black community from which the black defendant came. We have been, and are being tried by all-white juries that have no understanding of the ‘average reasoning man’ of the black community.

10. We want land, bread, housing, education, clothing, justice and peace. And as our major political objective, a United Nations-supervised plebiscite to be held throughout the black colony in which only black colonial subjects will be allowed to participate for the purpose of determining the will of black people as to their national destiny.

When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume, among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the laws of nature and nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self evident, that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That, to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed; that, whenever any form of government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute a new government, laying its foundation on such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly, all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.

*Source: The Black Panther. 23 Nov. 1967:3.

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The Ecstasy of Communication

There is no longer any system of objects. My first book contains a critique of the object as obvious fact, substance, reality, use value. There the object was taken as sign, but as sign still heavy with meaning. In this critique two principal logics interfered with each other: a phantasmatic logic that referred principally to psychoanalysis - its identifications, projections and the entire imaginary realm of transcendence, power and sexuality operating at the level of objects and the environment, with a privilege accorded to the house and automobile axis and a differential social logic that made distinctions by referring to a sociology, itself derived from anthropology.

Behind these logics, in some way descriptive and analytic, there was already the dream of symbolic exchange, a dream of the status of the object and consumption beyond exchange and use, beyond value and equivalence. In other words, a sacrificial logic of consumption, gift, expenditure (dépense), potlatch, and the accursed portion.

In a certain way all this still exists, and yet in other respects it is all disappearing. The description of this whole intimate universe projective, imaginary and symbolic - still corresponded to the object’s status as mirror of the subject, and that in turn to the imaginary depths of the mirror and “scene": there is a domestic scene, a scene of interiority, a private space-time (correlative, moreover, to a public space). The oppositions subject/object and public/private were still meaningful. This was the era of the discovery and exploration of daily life, this other scene emerging in the shadow of the historic scene, with the former receiving more and more symbolic investment as the latter was politically disinvested.But today the scene and mirror no longer exist; instead, there is a screen and network. In place of the reflexile transcendence of mirror and scene, there is a no reflecting surface, an immanent surface where operations unfold - the smooth operational surface of communication.

Something has changed, and the Faustian, Promethean (perhaps Oedipal) period of production and consumption gives way to the “proteinic” era of networks, to the narcissistic and protean era of connections, contact, contiguity, feedback and generalized interface that goes with the universe of communication. With the television image - the television being the ultimate and perfect object for this new era - our own body and the whole surrounding universe become a control screen.

If one thinks about it, people no longer project themselves into their objects, with their affects and their representations, their fantasies of possession, loss, mourning, jealousy: the psychological dimension has in, a sense vanished, and even if it can always be marked out in detail, one feels that it is not really there that things are being played out. Roland Barthes already indicated this some time ago in regard to the automobile: little by little a logic of “driving" has replaced a very subjective logic of possession and projection.“ No more fantasies of power, speed, and appropriation linked to the object itself, but instead a tactic of potentialities linked to usage: mastery, control, and command, an optimalization of the play of possibilities offered by the car as vector and vehicle, and no longer as object of psychological sanctuary. The subject himself, suddenly transformed, becomes a computer at the wheel, not a drunken demiurge of power. The vehicle now becomes a kind of capsule, its dashboard the brain, the surrounding landscape unfolding like a televised screen (instead of a live - in projectile as it was before).

(But we can conceive of a stage beyond this one, where the car is still a vehicle of performance, a stage where it becomes an information network. The famous Japanese car that talks to you, that “spontaneously” informs you of its general state and even of your general state, possibly refusing to function if you are not functioning well, the car as deliberating consultant and partner in the general negotiation of a lifestyle, something - or someone: at this point there is no longer any difference - with which you are connected. The fundamental issue becomes the communication with the car itself, a perpetual test of the subject’s presence with his own objects, an uninterrupted interface.

It is easy to see that from this point speed and displacement no longer matter. Neither does unconscious projection, nor an individual or social type of competition, nor prestige. Besides, the car began to be de-sacralized in this sense some time ago: its all over with speed - I drive more and consume less. Now, however, it is an ecological ideal that installs itself at every level. No more expenditure, consumption, performance, but instead regulation, well - tempered functionality, solidarity among all the elements of the same system, control and global management of an ensemble. Each system, including no doubt the domestic universe, forms a sort of ecological niche where the essential thing is to maintain a relational decor, where all the terms must continually communicate among themselves and stay in contact, informed of the respective condition of the others and of the system as a whole, where opacity, resistance or the secrecy of a single term can lead to catastrophe.) 4

Private “telematics”: each person sees himself at the controls of a hypothetical machine, isolated in a position of perfect and remote sovereignty, at an infinite distance from his universe of origin. Which is to say, in the exact position of an astronaut in his capsule, in a state of weightlessness that necessitates a perpetual orbital flight and a speed sufficient to keep him from crashing back to his planet of origin.

This realization of a living satellite, in vivo in a quotidian space, corresponds to the satellitization of the real, or what I call the “hyperrealism of simulation” 5 : the elevation of the domestic universe to a spatial power, to a spatial metaphor, with the satellitization of the two-room-kitchen-and bath put into orbit in the last lunar module. The very quotidian nature of the terrestrial habitat hypostasized in space means the end of metaphysics. The era of hyperreality now begins. What I mean is this: what was projected psychologically and mentally, what used to be lived out on earth as metaphor, as mental or metaphorical scene, is henceforth projected into reality, without any metaphor at all, into an absolute space which is also that of simulation.

This is only an example, but it signifies as a whole the passage into orbit, as orbital and environmental model, of our private sphere itself. It is no longer a scene where the dramatic interiority of the subject, engaged with its objects as with its image, is played out. We are here at the controls of a micro-satellite, in orbit, living no longer as an actor or dramaturge but as a terminal of multiple networks. Television is still the most direct prefiguration of this. But today it is the very space of habitation that is conceived as both receiver and distributor, as the space of both reception and operations, the control screen and terminal which as such may be endowed with tele-matic power—that is, with the capability of regulating everything from a distance, including work in the home and, of course, consumption, play, social relations and leisure. Simulators of leisure or of vacations in the home like flight simulators for airplane pilots - become conceivable.

Here we are far from the living-room and close to science fiction. But once more it must be seen that all these changes - the decisive mutations of objects and of the environment in the modern era - have come from an irreversible tendency towards three things: an ever greater formal and operational abstraction of elements and functions and their homogenization in a single virtual process of functionalization; the displacement of bodily movements and efforts into electric or electronic commands, and the miniaturization, in time and space, of processes whose real scene (though it is no longer a scene) is that of infinitesimal memory and the screen with which they are equipped.

There is a problem here, however, to the extent that this electronic “encephalization” and miniaturization of circuits and energy, this transistorization of the environment, relegates to total uselessness, destuetude and almost obscenity all that used to fill the scene of our lives. It is well known how the simple presence of the television changes the rest of the habitat into a kind of archaic envelope, a vestige of human relations whose very survival remains perplexing. As soon as this scene is no longer haunted by its actors and their fantasies, as soon as behavior is crystallized on certain screens and operational terminals, what’s left appears only as a large useless body, deserted and condemned. The real itself appears as a large useless body.

This is the time of miniaturization, tele-command and the microprocession of time, bodies, pleasures. There is no longer any ideal principle for these things at a higher level, on a human scale. What remains are only concentrated effects, miniaturized and immediately available. This change from human scale to a system of nuclear matrices is visible everywhere: this body,our body, often appears simply superfluous, basically useless in its extention, in the multiplicity and complexity of its organs, its tissues and functions, since today everything is concentrated in the brain and in genetic codes, which alone sum up the operational definition of being. The countryside, the immense geographic countryside, seems to be a deserted body whose expanse and dimensions appear arbitrary (and which is boring to cross even if one leaves the main highways), as soon as all events are epitomized in the towns, themselves undergoing reduction to a few miniaturized highlights. And time: what can be said about this immense free time we are left with, a dimension henceforth useless in its unfolding, as soon as the instantaneity of communication has miniaturized our exchanges into a succession of instants?

Thus the body, landscape, time all progressively disappear as scenes. And the same for public space: the theater of the social and theater of politics are both reduced more and more to a large soft body with many heads. Advertising in its new version~which is no longer a more or less baroque, utopian or ecstatic scenario of objects and consumption, but the effect of an omnipresent visibility of enterprises, brands, social interlocuters and the social virtues of communication - advertising in its new dimension invades everything, as public space (the street, monument, market, scene) disappears. It realizes, or, if one prefers, it materializes in all its obscenity; it monopolizes public life in its exhibition. No longer limited to its traditional language, advertising organizes the architecture and realization of super-objects like Beaubourg and the Forum des Halles, and of future projects (e.g., Parc de la Villette) which are monuments (or anti-monuments) to advertising, not because they will be geared to consumption but because they are immediately proposed as an anticipated demonstration of the operation of culture, commodities, mass movement and social flux. It is our only architecture today: great screens on which are reflected atoms, particles, molecules in motion. Not a public scene or true public space but gigantic spaces of circulation. Ventilation and ephemeral connections.

It is the same for private space. In a subtle way, this loss of public space occurs contemporaneously with the loss of private space. The one no longer a spectacle, the other no longer a secret. Their distinctive opposition, the clear difference of an exterior and an interior exactly described the domestic scene of objects, with its rules of play and limits, and the sovereignty of a symbolic space which was also that of the subject. blow this opposition is effaced in a sort of obscenity where the most intimate processes of our life become the virtual feeding ground of the media (the l​oud family in the United States, the innumerable slices of peasant or patriarchal life on French television). In-adversely, the entire universe comes to unfold arbitrarily on your domestic screen (all the useless information that comes to you from the entire world. like a microscopic pornography of the universe, useless, excessive, just like the sexual close-up in a porno film): all this explodes the scene formerly preserved by the minimal separation of public and private, the scene that was played out in a restricted space, according to a secret ritual known only by the actors.

Certainly, this private universe was alienating to the extent that it separated you from others - or from the world, where it was invested as a protective enclosure, an imaginary protector, a defense system. But it also reaped the symbolic benefits of alienation, which is that the other exists, and that otherness can fool you for the better or the worse. Thus consumer society lived also under the sign of alienation, as a ‘society of the spectacle.‘ But just so: as long as there is alienation, there is spectacle, action. scene. It is not obscenity - the spectacle is never obscene. Obscenity begins precisely when there is no more spectacle, no more scene, when all becomes transparence and immediate visibility, when everything is exposed to the harsh and inexorable light of information and communication.

We are no longer a part of the drama of alienation; we live in the ecstasy of communication. And this ecstasy is obscene. The obscene is what does away with every mirror, every look, every image. The obscene puts an end to every representation. But it is not only the sexual that becomes obscene in pornography; today there is a whole pornography of information and communication, that is to say, of circuits and networks, a pornography of all functions and objects in their readability, their fluidity, their availability, their regulation, in their forced signification, in their performativity, in their branching, in their polyvalence, in their free expression…

It is no longer then the traditional obscenity of what is hidden, repressed, forbidden or obscure: on the contrary, it is the obscenity of the visible, of the all-too-visible, of the more-visible-than-the-visible. It is the obscenity of what no longer has any secret, of what dissolves completely in information and communication.

Marx set forth and denounced the obscenity of the commodity, and this obscenity was linked to its equivalence, to theabject principle of free circulation, beyond all use value of the object. The obscenity of the commodity stems from the fact that it is abstract, formal and light in opposition to the weight, opacity and substance of the object. The commodity is readable: in opposition to the object, which never completely gives up its secret, the commodity always manifests its visible essence, which is its price. It is the formal place of transcription of all possible objects: through it, objects communicate. Hence, the commodity form is the first great medium of the modern world. But the message that the objects deliver through it is already extremely simplified, and it is always the same: their exchange value. Thus at bottom the message already no longer exists; it is the medium that imposes itself in its pure circulation. This is what I call (potentially) ecstasy.

One has only to prolong this Marxist analysis, or push it to the second or third power. to grasp the transparence and obscenity of the universe of communication, which leaves far behind it those relative analyses of the universe of the commodity. All functions abolished in a single dimension,that of communication. That’s the ecstasy of communication. All secrets, spaces and scenes abolished in a single dimension of information. That’s obscenity.

The hot, sexual obscenity of former times is succeeded by the cold and communicational, contactual and motivational obscenity of today. The former clearly implied a type of promiscuity, but it was organic, like the body’s viscera, or again like objects piled up and accumulated in a private universe, or like all that is not spoken, teeming in the silence of repression. Unlike this organic, visceral, carnal promiscuity, the promiscuity that reigns over the communication networks is one of superficial saturation, of an incessant solicitation, of an extermination of interstitial and protective spaces. 1 pick up my telephone receiver and it’s all there; the whole marginal network catches and harasses me with the insupportable good faith of everything that wants and claims to communicate. Free radio: it speaks. it sings, it expresses itself. Very well, it is the sympathetic obscenity of its content. In terms a little different for each medium, this is the result: a space, that of the FM band, is found to be saturated, the stations overlap and mix together (to the point that sometimes it no longer communicates at all). Something that was free by virtue of space is no longer. Speech is free perhaps, but I am less free than before: I no longer succeed in knowing what I want, the space is so saturated, the pressure so great from all who want to make themselves heard.

I fall into the negative ecstasy of the radio.

There is in effect a state of fascination and vertigo linked to this obscene delirium of communication. A singular form of pleasure perhaps, but aleatory and dizzying. If we follow Roger Caillois 7 in his classification of games (it’s as good as any other) - games of expression (mimicry), games of competition (agon), games of chance (alea), games of vertigo (i'lynx) -  the whole tendency of our contemporary “culture" would lead us from a relative disappearance of forms of expression and competition (as we have remarked at the level of objects) to the advantages of forms of risk and vertigo. The latter no longer involve games of scene, mirror, challenge and duality; they are, rather, ecstatic, solitary and narcissistic. The pleasure is no longer one of manifestation, scenic and aesthetic. but rather one of pure fascination, aleatory and psychotropic. This is not necessarily a negative value judgment: here surely there is an original and profound mutation of the very forms of perception and pleasure. We are still measuring the consequences poorly. Wanting to apply our old criteria and the reflexes of a “scenic" sensibility, we no doubt misapprehend what may be the occurrence, in this sensory sphere, of something new, ecstatic and obscene.

One thing is sure: the scene excites us, the obscene fascinates us. With fascination and ecstasy, passion disappears. Investment, desire, passion, seduction or again, according to Caillois, expression and competition - the hot universe. Ecstasy, obscenity, fascination, communication, or again, according to Caillois, hazard, chance, and vertigo - the cold universe (even vertigo is cold, the psychedelic one of drugs in particular).

In any case, we will have to suffer this new state of things, this forced extroversion of all interiority, this forced injection of all exteriority that the categorical imperative of communication literally signifies. There also, one can perhaps make use of the old metaphors of pathology. If hysteria was the pathology of the exacerbated staging of the subject, a pathology of expression. of the body’s theatrical and operatic conversion; and if paranoia was the pathology of organization, of the structuration of a rigid and jealous world; then with communication and information, with the immanent promiscuity of all these networks, with their continual connections, we are now in a new form of schizophrenia. No more hysteria, no more projective paranoia, properly speaking. but this state of terror proper to the schizophrenic: too great a proximity of everything, the unclean promiscuity of everything which touches, invests and penetrates without resistance, with no halo of private protection, not even his own body, to protect him anymore.

The schizo is bereft of every scene, open to everything in spite of himself, living in the greatest confusion. He is himself obscene, the obscene prey of the world’s obscenity. What characterizes him is less the loss of the real, the light years of estrangement from the real, the pathos of distance and radical separation, as is commonly said: but, very much to the contrary, the absolute proximity, the total instantaneity of things, the feeling of no defense, no retreat. It is the end of interiority and intimacy, the overexposure and transparence of the world which traverses him without obstacle. He can no longer produce the limits of his own being, can no longer play nor stage himself, can no longer produce himself as mirror. He is now only a pure screen, a switching center for all the networks of influence.

J​ean Baudrillard

1988

Translated by John Johnston

References

1. Le Systéme des objets (Paris: Gallimartl, l968). [Tr.]

2. Baudrillard is alluding here to Marcel Mauss‘s theory of gift exchange and Georges Bataille‘s notion of dépense. The “accursed portion" in the latter’s theory refers to what- ever remains outside of society’s rationalized economy of exchanges. See Bataille’s, La Parte Maudite (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1949). Baudrillard’s own conception of symbolic exchange, as a form of interaction that lies outside of modern Western society and that therefore “haunts it like its own death is developed in his L'échange symbolique et la morte (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). [Tr.]

3. See Roland Barthes. “The New Citroën,“ Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), pp.88-90.[Tr.]

4. Two observations.

First, this is not due alone to the passage, as one wants to call it, from a society of abundance and surplus to a society of crisis and penury (economic reasons have never been worth very much). Just as the effect of consumption was not linked to the use ‘value of things nor to their abundance, but precisely to the passage from use value to sign value, so here there is something new that is not linked to the end of abundance.

Secondly, all this does not mean that the domestic universe - the home, its objects, etc. - is not still lived largely in a traditional way - social, psychological, differential, etc. It means rather that the stakes are no longer there. That another arrangement or lifestyle is virtually in place, even if it is indicated only through a technologistical discourse which is often simply a political gadget. But it is crucial to see that the analysis that one could make of objects and their system in the '60s and '70s essentially began with the language of advertising and the pseudo-conceptual discourse of the expert. “Consumption,” the “strategy of desire,“ etc. were first only a metadiscourse, the analysis of a projective myth whose actual effect was never really known. How people actually live with their objects - at bottom, one knows no more about this than about the truth of primitive societies. That’s why it is often problematic and useless to want to verify (statistically, objectively) these hypotheses, as one ought to be able to do as a good sociologist, As we know, the language of advertising is first for the use of the advertisers themselves. Nothing says that contemporary discourse on computer science and communication is not for the use alone of professionals in these fields. (As for the discourse of intellectuals and sociologists themselves…)

5. For an expanded explanation of this idea, see Baudrillard’s essay ”La précession des simulacres,“ Simulacre: et Simulation (Paris: Galilee, 1981). An English translation appears in Simulations (New York: Foreign Agent Series. Semiotext(e) Publications,1983). [Tr.]

6. A reference to Guy Debord’s La société du spectacle (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, I968). [Tr.]

7. Roger Caillois. Le jeux et les hommes (Paris: Gallimard, 1958). [Tr.]

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Infor-War, Cyberwar, Netwar, Anti-War

Information War, Cyberwar, Netwar, Anti-War, Technowar, Postmodern War are all new buzzwords in the field of military theory, buzzwords that are now becoming more commonplace and are entering the cultural mainstream.

I will not regurgitate the propaganda about the ‘information age’ and all the talks about superhighways, but stick to the field of military theory and then draw attention to the fact how much this concerns us…

The connection of concepts of information and the conduct of war was certainly not lost on the military theoreticians in the past from Sun Tse onwards. Napoleon is quoted as saying that three hostile newspapers are more to be feared than a thousand bayonets.

What is Information War?

As concepts of information war are filtering into the cultural mainstream, often in form of manipulation and control of information by governments against their own citizens, nurturing cynicism about the democratic process, it is far from clear in military circles what we are talking about. Definitions such as the following are common, but not satisfying:

“Information warfare is the offensive and defensive use of information and information systems, while protecting one’s own. Such actions are designed to achieve advantages over military or business adversaries.”

The actual confusion is well illustrated at the beginning of an essay by Martin Libicki of the Institute for National Strategic Studies:

“In the fall of 1994, I was privileged to observe an Information Warfare game sponsored by the Office of the Secretary of Defence. Red, a middle-sized, middle-income nation with a sophisticated electronics industry, had developed an elaborate five-year plan that culminated in an attack on a neighboring country. Blue — the United States — was the neighbor’s ally and got wind of Red’s plan. The two sides began an extended period of preparation during which each conducted peacetime information warfare and contemplated wartime information warfare. Players on each side retreated to game rooms to decide on moves.

Upon returning from the game rooms, each side presented its strategy. Two troubling tendencies emerged: First, because of the difficulty each side had in determining how the other side’s information system was wired, for most of the operations proposed (for example, Blue considered taking down Red’s banking system) no one could prove which actions might or might not be successful, or even what “success” in this context meant. Second, conflict was the sound of two hands clapping, but not clapping on each other. Blue saw information warfare as legions of hackers searching out the vulnerabilities of Red’s computer systems, which might be exploited by hordes of viruses, worms, logic bombs, or Trojan horses. Red saw information warfare as psychological manipulation through media. Such were the visions in place even before wartime variations on information warfare came into the discussion. Battle was never joined, even by accident.”

The concept of Information War turns out to have little analytical coherence, and Libicki then goes on to propose 7 different types of Information War, saying that as a separate technique of waging war it doesn’t exist, and that instead there are several distinct forms, each laying claim to the larger concept – conflicts that involve the protection, manipulation, degradation, and denial of information.

“(i) command-and-control warfare (which strikes against the enemy’s head and neck), (ii) intelligence-based warfare (which consists of the design, protection, and denial of systems that seek sufficient knowledge to dominate the battlespace), (iii) electronic warfare (radio- electronic or cryptographic techniques), (iv) psychological warfare (in which information is used to change the minds of friends, neutrals, and foes), (v) “hacker” warfare (in which computer systems are attacked), (vi) economic information warfare (blocking information or channelling it to pursue economic dominance), and (vii) cyberwarfare (a grab bag of futuristic scenarios). All these forms are weakly related.”

Not only that: More often than not they have been part of the conduct of wars for centuries, and are, with few exceptions, by no means new. What has changed are the availablity of technology than allows worldwide transmission of information in real time, the potential lethality of conventional war, the role of the media, a context where a new emphasis for conflict and propaganda emerges: The management of information and visibility.

Old forms of propaganda and control are not vanishing but supplemented with new forms. Still there are security forces with rising budgets controlling the streets, but increasingly attempting to control the “information highways”. Still there are saturation bombings of the public mind by the mass media that are owned by less and less corporations with their own stake and quasi-political stance, as illustrated by the rise and fall of media mogul Berlusconi in Italy or the power of Rupert Murdoch and his involvement (not only) in British politics. There is an almost indiscriminate proliferation of spectacular information that is a kind of black magic creating social, political and cultural reality,consensus and identity. At the same time your data shadow is getting longer and longer as all you transactions and movements are recorded by cash machines and surveillance cameras. We have a double strategy of the noise of the spectacle supplemented by the silent totalitarianism of liberal fascism, because that is what Clinton and Blair are getting at when they talk about a “Third Way”. Capitalism’s shortcomings have been becoming clearer and clearer once more over the last few months, but now – since the fall of the Eastern Bloc – the West doesn’t have to prove anymore that it is indeed “better” and “freer”. Not that the east/west dichotomy offered any real choice, but now your only choice is to be on the side of the law or on the side of terrorists, pedophiles, drug cartels, criminals. With the disappearance of the other super-power as the main enemy, and the emergence of Rogue States and Super-Hackers the difference between hot war and cold war is disappearing as well.

And paranoia is emerging, as a quote from a paper titled “Political Aspects of Class III Information Warfare: Global Conflict and Terrorism” by Matthew G. Devost held at a conference called InfoWarCon II in Montreal January 18-19, 1995 will illustrate:

“There is no early warning system for information warfare. You don’t know it is coming, so you must always expect it which creates a high level of paranoia.”

The permanent threat to be attacked out of nowhere creates an aggressive siege mentality, where preemptive, surgical strikes, are advocated against the ‘rogue’ forces, global policing is enforced, a permanent state of almost-war (or ‘cool war’?) of which cultural conflicts as well as small scale armed conflicts are part.

In military speak this is often referred to as Low-Intensity Conflict, or LIC.

The rhetoric of Low-Intensity Conflict has taken over from the term Counter Insurgency:

“Low-intensity conflict is a limited politico-military struggle to achieve political, social, economic, or psychological objectives. It is often protracted and ranges from diplomatic, economic, and psychosocial pressures through terrorism and insurgency. Low-intensity conflict is generally confined to a geographic area and is often characterized by constraints on the weaponry, the tactics, and the level of violence.”

- Joint Low-Intensity Conflict Project Final Report (U.S.Army, 1986)

For those involved this can practically mean a situation of almost Total War, as long as it’s not fought with nukes or conventional means of mass destruction. The Gulf War was a ‘Mid-Intensity Conflict’ that involved systematic mass destruction.

July 13, 1970, General Westmoreland made this prediction to Congress:

“On the battlefield of the future, enemy forces will be located, tracked, and targeted almost instantaneously through the use of data links, computer assisted intelligence evaluation, and automated fire control. … I am confident that the American people expect this country to take full advantage of this technology – to welcome and applaud the developments that will replace wherever possible the man with the machine.”

Lethality, speed and scope of warfare is rising: Dr. Richard Gabriel:

“Military technology has reached a point where “conventional weapons have unconventional effects.” In both conventional war and nuclear war, combatants can no longer be reasonably expected to survive.” (1987)

From this follows that wars have to be conducted like terrorist attacks with an element of surprise in order to not have a situation of (prolonged) combat established.

Violence becomes sudden and exterminist.

It is suggested (in Postmodern War) the “reverse of the high tech strategy is to make your military target a political victory. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari call this ‘guerrilla warfare, minority warfare, revolutionary and popular war’ and note that, while war is necessary in this strategy, it is only necessary as a supplement to some other project. Practitioners of political war ‘can make war only on the condition that they simultaneously create something else , if only new unorganic social relations’ (in: Nomadology: The War Machine, 1986, p.121; emphasis in original). This is , after all, a very old form of war, dating back to prehistory. It contains many elements of ritual war, especially those that were borrowed from the hunt: stalking, hiding, waiting , deceiving, ambushing.”

All this has grave implications on Military theory, and we can observe an escalation of non-conventional methods of combat, not only for territories, but also for people’s minds and souls.

Counter-Insurgency, Low-Intensity Conflict, Information War: Behind the rhetoric lies the reality of a global civil war that is fought with acts of terror and mind control.

And in the so-called War on Drugs we can find parallels to the world of Information War, Propaganda and Terrorism. The War on Drugs is part of a strategy that involves Rogue States and Non-Governmental Organisations as well as evil terrorists; there have been various attempts to link those concepts up to create the much needed threat to internal security, such as in the idea of Narco-Terrorism that proposes that it is a combination of leftist guerrilla forces and the drug cartels that pose a threat to the American hegemony mainly in South America. Apart from incidental collusion this theory has been thoroughly rebuked by establishment researchers. No only is the Narco-Terrorism concept a propaganda lie (and pretext for bloody oppression), if we look deeper into it we are tempted to assume that in fact it is a practice used by the security enforcement agencies themselves, as the leaking drugs for guns and hostages deals underline… What is the head of the CIA doing in South Central L.A. parading his ‘innocence’ of alleged involvements of his agency in pumping crack into the neighbourhood? In other places such as Zürich and Liverpool large amounts of Heroin became available at dirt cheap prices around 1981 – just after massive riots had happened, and just as covert programs to finance the Islamic ‘Holy War’ against the Russians in Afganistan – a main producer of the drug – started rolling. Incidentally it was pretty much the same people the CIA was financing and arming then as the ones now accused by the US to be terrorists and drug dealers (see page 4 in this issue)…. Coincidences? Even in the early 80’s the heroin in Liverpool was referred to as ‘Maggie-smack’ (as in Margaret Thatcher, the then conservative prime minister). The War on Drugs was never meant to be ‘won’.

But it is by no means the only example of where double strategies are used by those in power to remain in control at any cost. The ‘strategy of tension’ in 70’s Italy is another example where a coalition of secret services, neo-fascists, mafia-linked right wing politicians, elements in the Vatican and the secret lodge P2 conspired to avert what they saw as an imminent communist takeover. Bombings and assassinations were organized, and radical left wing groups were blamed to create the climate for a military putsch. Neither happened, but hundreds died and thousands got arrested.

A crucial role in this scenario was played by the Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades) an originally radical communist group that was increasingly infiltrated by the secret service and was at least partly and very efficiently used against the rest of (or the real) radical left. Some think at least some of their actions, quite possibly including the kidnapping and killing of Aldo Moro, the president of Democrazia Christiana (the conservative party then in power, Moro being a part of its more liberal wing) , were actually controlled by the secret state. Let’s juxtapose this with the U.S. Department of Defence definition of terrorism: “Terrorism is carried out purposefully, in a cold-blooded, calculated fashion. The men and women who plan and execute these precision operations are neither crazy nor mad. They are very resourceful and competent criminals, systematically and intelligently attacking legally constituted nations that, for the most part, believe in the protection of individual rights and respect for the law. Nations that use terror to maintain the government are terrorists themselves.” We should keep this in mind when we think of the biggest act of terrorism in the US: The bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995, the anniversary of Waco. Despite Timothy McVeigh getting the death penalty for it there remain a large number of open questions that suggest that maybe a whole different scenario was at work than was brought forward by the mass media, probably the most powerful point being that there seems to have been prior knowledge of the bombing on the side of the authorities… If the authorities only had the slightest advance knowledge – and there there are indications that they did – incidents such as OK or Waco are part of a strategy of power that could be labelled preventive counterinsurgency gone out of control. To control and direct such out-of-control situations a severe management of information has to be applied.

This also means that the character of “minority warfare” is changing, in fact from a ‘hot’ strategy (e.g. armed insurrection) to a cold technological one, but only as a tendency – after all we should have noted that five out of the seven types of Information War proposed by Libicki are quite traditional forms of conflict that include sabotage, espionage, blockades and propaganda. Keep this in mind when we look at the concepts brought forward by RAND researchers John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt.

In their text ‘Cyberwar is Coming’ available on the web and more recently as a part of the book/anthology ‘In Athena’s Camp – Preparing for Conflict in the Information Age’ along with a collection of essays by various authors. The two main concepts they formulate are ‘Cyberwar’ and ‘Netwar’. Cyberwar is explained as referring to “conducting, and preparing to conduct, military operations according to information-related principles. It means disrupting, if not destroying, information and communications systems, broadly defined to include even military culture, on which an adversary relies in order to know itself: who it is, where it is, what it can do and when, why it is fighting, which threats to counter first, and so forth. It means trying to know everything about an adversary while keeping the adversary from knowing much about oneself.”

What is interesting is that they don’t pretend this to be fundamentally new form of war, in fact as the primary example for Cyberwar they mention the Mongols with their hugely successful army that was partly based on their fast information system that kept commanders in close contact over thousands of miles, although they do go so far as to claim: “As an innovation of warfare, we anticipate that cyberwar may be to the 21st century what Blitzkrieg was to the 20th.”

Netwar however is the kind of civilian, or civil war side of cyberwar. While cyberwar is concerned with traditionally military aspects like Command, Control, Communications and Intelligence, also called C3I, intelligence collection, processing and distribution, tactical communications, positioning, identifications friend-or-foe (IFF) and so called ‘smart’ weapons systems, netwar “refers to information-related conflict at a grand level between nations and societies. It means trying to disrupt, damage, or modify what a target population knows or thinks it knows about itself and the world around it. A netwar may focus on public or elite opinion, or both. It may involve public diplomacy measures, propaganda and psychological campaigns, political and cultural subversion, deception of or interference with local media, infiltration of computer networks and databases, and efforts to promote dissident or opposition movements across computer networks.”

It has to be emphasized here that Arquilla and Ronfeldt are researchers of the notorious RAND corporation, a private think tank, proclaiming to be a non profit organization, but always closely linked to the military- industrial complex, and under this point of view it becomes more surprising what conclusions they arrive at. In fact they see the monolithic, hierarchical structure of institutions and the military as ill equipped to deal with the new scenarios of Netwars and Low Intensity Conflicts between NGO’s (Non-Governmental Organizations), drug cartels, “racial and tribal gangs, insurgent guerrillas, social movements and cultural subversives” which are all organized as networks. They conclude:

”Perhaps a reason that military (and police) institutions have difficulty engaging in low intensity conflicts is because they are not meant to be fought by institutions. The lesson: Institutions can be defeated by networks, and it may take networks to counter networks.”

A new type of info-guerrilla is emerging, the small units proposed by the Critical Art Ensemble faintly echoing Carlos Marighela’s (the original theoretician of the urban guerrilla) Firing Unit, except they are firing data, not bullets. Conflicts such as Kosovo (a classic LIC), the Gulf Conflicts (basically adhering to the AirLand Battle doctrine as well as Cyberwar to some degree) and the Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas, Mexico (where the idea of Netwar comes in), all happening at present, show that it is likely that different types of warfare will be fought simultaneously for the forseeable future. Localized conflicts don’t stop because the technical possibility of globalized action exists. There is a tendency towars more international interaction and a disappearance of distance and reaction times, but wars are unlikely to be fought solely by machines, smart weapons, robots and ‘ants’ alone. They cannot be sanitised, however much the official media tries to portray it that way. It is one of the strengths of Arquilla/Ronfeldt’s analysis that they take these complexities into account.

It’s no surprise that the RAND researchers have found a fascinated readership with left wing researchers such as Chris Hables Gray and Jason Wehling. I was certainly intrigued.

And while I can’t discount the thought that RAND has to present the danger to the establishment as worse than it is, their call to reorganization points to a genuine analysis. And it shouldn’t just flatter us. We have to take it serious when we are taken serious.

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Information Devours Content

Information is thought to create communication, and even if the waste is enormous, a general consensus would have it that nevertheless, as a whole, there be an excess of meaning, which is redistributed in all the interstices of the social – just as consensus would have it that material production, despite its dysfunctions and irrationalities, opens onto an excess of wealth and social purpose. We are all complicitous in this myth. It is the alpha and omega of our modernity, without which the credibility of our social organization would collapse. Well, the fact is that it is collapsing, and for this very reason: because where we think that information produces meaning, the opposite occurs.

‘Information devours its own content. It devours communication and the social. And for two reasons.’

- Jean Baudrillard

1. Rather than creating communication, it exhausts itself in the act of staging communication. Rather than producing meaning, it exhausts itself in the staging of meaning. A gigantic process of simulation that is very familiar…

It is useless to ask if it is the loss of communication that produces this escalation in the simulacrum, or whether it is the simulacrum that is there first for dissuasive ends, to short-circuit in advance any possibility of communication (precession of the model that calls an end to the real). Useless to ask which is the first term, there is none, it is a circular process – that of simulation, that of the hyperreal. The hyperreality of communication and of meaning. More real than the real, that is how the real is abolished…

2. Behind this exacerbated mise-en-scene of communication, the mass media, the pressure of information pursues an irresistible destructuration of the social.

Thus information dissolves meaning and dissolves the social, in a sort of nebulous state dedicated not to a surplus of innovation, but, on the contrary, to total entropy…

Only the medium can make an event – whatever the contents, whether they are conformist or subversive. A serious problem for all counter-information, pirate radios, anti-media, etc. But there is something even more serious, which McLuhan himself did not see. Because beyond this neutralization of all content, one could still expect to manipulate the medium in its form and to transform the real by using the impact of the medium as form. If all the content is wiped out, there is perhaps still a subversive, revolutionary use value of the medium as such. That is – and this is where McLuhan’s formula leads, pushed to its limit – there is not only an implosion of the message in the medium, there is, in the same movement, the implosion of the medium itself in the real, the implosion of the medium and of the real in a sort of hyperreal nebula, in which even the definition and distinct notion of the medium can no longer be determined…

Evidently, there is a paradox in this inextricable conjunction of the masses and the media: do the media neutralize meaning and produce unformed or informed masses, or is it the masses who victoriously resist the media by directing or absorbing all the messages that the media produce without responding to them?…

Are the mass media on the side of power in the manipulation of the masses, or are they on the side of the masses in the liquidation of meaning, in the violence perpetrated on meaning, and in fascination? Is it the media that induce fascination in the masses, or is it the masses who direct the media into the spectacle?…The media carry meaning and counter-meaning, they manipulate in all directions at once, nothing can control this process, they are the vehicle for the simulation internal to the system and the simulation that destroys the system, according to an absolutely Mobian and circular logic – and it is exactly like this. There is no alternative to this, no logical resolution.

Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 1981

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The Cybernetic Hypothesis

“We can imagine a time when the machine of governance would replace — for better or worse, who knows? — the insufficiency of the minds and devices of politics that are customary today.” — Father Dominique Dubarle, Le Monde, December 28th, 1948

“There is a striking contrast between the conceptual refinement and dedication characterizing scientific and technical reasoning and the summary and imprecise style that characterizes political reasoning… One even asks oneself whether this is a kind of unsurpassable situation marking the definitive limits of rationality, or if one may hope that this impotence might be overcome someday and collective life be entirely rationalized.” — An encyclopedist cybernetician writing in the 1970s.

I

“There is probably no domain of man’s thinking or material activity that cybernetics will not come to have a role in someday.” Georges Boulanger, Dossier on Cybernetics: utopia or science of tomorrow in the world today, 1968.

“The world circumscribing us [the “circumverse”] aims to have stable circuits, equal cycles, the expected repetitions, and trouble-free compatibility. It intends to eliminate all partial impulses and immobilize bodies. Parallel to this, Borges discussed the anxiety of the emperor who wanted to have such an exact map of the empire that he would have to go back over his territory at all its points and bring it up to scale, so much so that the monarch’s subjects spent as much time and energy detailing it and maintaining it that the empire ‘itself’ fell into ruins to the exact extent that its cartographical overview was perfected — such is the madness of the great central Zero, its desire to immobilize bodies that can only ever ‘be’ as representation.” Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 1973.

“They wanted an adventure, and to live it out with you. In the end all that’s all that can be said. They believed resolutely that the future would be modern: different, impassioning, and definitely difficult. Peopled by cyborgs and bare handed entrepreneurs, frenzied stock-marketeers and turbine-men. And for those that are willing to see it, the present is already like that. They think the future will be human, feminine even — and plural; so that everyone can really live it, so that everyone participates in it. They are the Enlightenment men we’ve lost, infantrymen of progress, the inhabitants of the 21stcentury. They fight against ignorance, injustice, poverty, and suffering of all kinds. They go where it’s happening, where things are going on. They don’t want to miss out on a thing. They’re humble and courageous, at the service of interests that are far beyond them, guided by a higher principle. They can pose problems, and they can find solutions. They’ll have us traversing the most perilous of frontiers, they’ll reach out a hand to pull us up onto the shore of the future. They’re History marching forth, at least what’s left of it, because the hardest part is over. They’re the saints and the prophets, true socialists. They’ve known for a long while that May 1968 wasn’t a revolution. The true revolution is the one they’re making. Now it’s just a matter of organization and transparency, intelligence and cooperation. A vast program! Then…”

Excuse me? What? What’d you say? What program? The worst nightmares, you know, are often the metamorphoses of a fable, fables PEOPLE tell their kids to put them to sleep and perfect their moral education. The new conquerors, who we’ll call the cyberneticians, do not comprise an organized party — which would have made our work here a lot easier — but rather a diffuse constellation of agents, all driven, possessed, and blinded by the same fable. These are the murderers of Time, the crusaders of Sameness, the lovers of fatality. These are the sectarians of order, the reason-addicts, the go-between people.The Great Legends may indeed be dead, as the post-modern vulgate often claims, but domination is still comprised of master-fictions. Such was the case of the Fable of the Bees published by Bernard de Mandeville in the first years of the 18thcentury, which contributed so much to the founding of political economy and to justifying the advances made by capitalism. Prosperity, the social order, and politics no longer depended on the catholic virtues of sacrifice but on the pursuit by each individual of his own interests: it declared the “private vices” to be guarantees of the “common good.” Mandeville, the “Devil-Man” as PEOPLE called him at the time, thus founded the liberal hypothesis, as opposed to the religious spirit of his times, a hypothesis which would later have a great influence on Adam Smith. Though it is regularly re-invoked, in a renovated form given it by liberalism, this fable is obsolete today. For critical minds, it follows that it’s not worth it anymore to critique liberalism. A new model has taken its place, the very one that hides behind the names “internet,” “new information and communications technology,” the “new economy,” or genetic engineering. Liberalism is now no longer anything but a residual justification, an alibi for the everyday crimes committed by cybernetics.

Rationalist critics of the “economic creed” or of the “neo-technological utopia,” anthropologist critics of utilitarianism in social sciences and the hegemony of commodity exchange, marxist critics of the “cognitive capitalism” that oppose to it the “communism of the masses,” political critics of a communications utopia that resuscitates the worst phantasms of exclusion, critics of the critiques of the “new spirit of capitalism,” or critics of the “prison State” and surveillance hiding behind neo-liberalism — critical minds hardly appear to be very inclined to take into account the emergence of cybernetics as a new technology of government, which federates and associates both discipline and bio-politics, police and advertising, its ancestors in the exercise of domination, all too ineffective today. That is to say, cybernetics is not, as we are supposed to believe, a separate sphere of the production of information and communication, a virtual space superimposed on the real world. No, it is, rather, an autonomous world of apparatuses so blended with the capitalist project that it has become a political project, a gigantic “abstract machine” made of binary machines run by the Empire, a new form of political sovereignty, which must be called an abstract machine that has made itself into a global war machine. Deleuze and Guattari link this rupture to a new kind of appropriation of war machines by Nation-States: “Automation, and then the automation of the war machine, only came truly into effect after the Second World War. The war machine, considering the new antagonisms running through it, no longer had War as its exclusive object, but rather it began to take charge of and make Peace, policy, and world order into its object; in short: such is its goal. Thus we see the inversion of Clausewitz’s formula: politics becomes the continuation of war, and peace will release, technologically, the unlimited material process of total war. War ceases to be the materialization of the war machine, and rather it is the war machine that itself becomes war itself materialized.” That’s why it’s not worth it anymore to critique the cybernetic hypothesis either: it has to be fought and defeated. It’s just a matter of time.

The Cybernetic Hypothesis is thus a political hypothesis, a new fable that after the second world war has definitively supplanted the liberal hypothesis. Contrary to the latter, it proposes to conceive biological, physical, and social behaviors as something integrally programmed and re-programmable. More precisely, it conceives of each individual behavior as something “piloted,” in the last analysis, by the need for the survival of a “system” that makes it possible, and which it must contribute to. It is a way of thinking about balance, born in a crisis context. Whereas 1914 sanctioned the decomposition of the anthropological conditions for the verification of the liberal hypothesis — the emergence of Bloom and the bankruptcy, plain to see in flesh and bone in the trenches, of the idea of the individual and all metaphysics of the subject — and 1917 sanctioned its historical contestation by the Bolshevik “revolution,” 1940 on the other hand marked the extinction of the idea of “society,” so obviously brought about by totalitarian self-destruction. As the limit-experiences of political modernity, Bloom and totalitarianism thus have been the most solid refutations of the liberal hypothesis. What Foucault would later call (in a playful tone) “the death of Mankind,” is none other than the devastation brought about by these two kinds of skepticism, the one directed at individuals, and the other at society, and brought about by the Thirty Years’ War which had so effected the course of Europe and the world in the first half of the last century. The problem posed by the Zeitgeist of those years was once again how to “defend society” against the forces driving it towards decomposition, how to restore the social totality in spite of a general crisis of presence afflicting it in its every atom. The cybernetic hypothesis corresponds, consequently, to a desire for order and certitude, both in the natural and social sciences. The most effective arrangement of a constellation of reactions animated by an active desire for totality — and not just by a nostalgia for it, as it was with the various variants of romanticism — the cybernetic hypothesis is a relative of not only the totalitarian ideologies, but also of all the Holisms, mysticisms, and solidarities, like those of Durkheim, the functionalists, or the Marxists; it merely takes over from them.

As an ethical position, the cybernetic hypothesis is the complement, however strictly opposed to it, of the humanist pathos that has been back in vogue since the 1940s and which is nothing more than an attempt to act as if “Man” could still think itself intact after Auschwitz, an attempt to restore the classical metaphysics on the subject in spite of totalitarianism. But whereas the cybernetic hypothesis includes the liberal hypothesis at the same time as it transcends it, humanism’s aim is to extend the liberal hypothesis to the ever more numerous situations that resist it: It’s the “bad faith” of someone like Sartre, to turn one of the author’s most inoperative categories against him. The ambiguity that constitutes modernity, seen superficially either as a disciplinary process or as a liberal process, or as the realization of totalitarianism or as the advent of liberalism, is contained and suppressed in, with and by the new governance mentality emerging now, inspired by the cybernetic hypothesis. This is but the life-sized experimentation protocol of the Empire in formation. Its realization and extension, with the devastating truth-effects it produces, is already corroding all the social institutions and social relations founded by liberalism, and transforming both the nature of capitalism and the possibilities of its contestation. The cybernetic gesture affirms itself in the negation of everything that escapes regulation, all the escape routes that existence might have in the interstices of the norms and apparatuses, all the behavioral fluctuations that do not follow, in fine, from natural laws. Insofar as it has come to produce its own truths, the cybernetic hypothesis is today the most consequential anti-humanism, which pushes to maintain the general order of things, all the while bragging that it has transcended the human.

Like any discourse, the cybernetic hypothesis could only check to verify itself by associating the beings or ideas that reinforce it, by testing itself through contact with them, and folding the world into its laws in a continuous self-validation process. It’s now an ensemble of devices aspiring to take control over all of existence and what exists. The Greek word kubernèsis means “the act of piloting a vessel,” and in the figurative sense, the “act of directing, governing.” In his 1981–1982 classes, Foucault insisted on working out the meaning of this category of “piloting” in the Greek and Roman world, suggesting that it could have a more contemporary scope to it: “the idea of piloting as an art, as a theoretical and practical technology necessary for existence, is an idea that I think is rather important and may eventually merit a closer analysis; one can see at least three types of technology regularly attached to this ‘piloting’ idea: first of all medicine; second of all, political government; third of all self-direction and self-government. These three activities (healing, directing others, and governing oneself) are quite regularly attached to this image of piloting in Greek, Hellenic and Roman literature. And I think that this ‘piloting’ image also paints a good picture of a kind of knowledge and practice that the Greeks and Romans had a certain affinity for, for which they attempted to establish a tekhnè (an art, a planned system of practices connected to general principles, notions, and concepts): the Prince, insofar as he must govern others, govern himself, heal the ills of the city, the ills of the citizens, and his own ills; he who governs himself as if he were governing a city, by healing his own ills; the doctor who must give his advice not only about the ills of the body but about the ills of individuals’ souls. And so you see you have here a whole pack of ideas in the minds of the Greeks and Romans that have to do I think with one and the same kind of knowledge, the same type of activity, the same type of conjectural understanding. And I think that one could dig up the whole history of that metaphor practically all the way up to the 16th century, when a whole new art of governing, centered around Reasons of State, would split apart — in a radical way — self government/medicine/government of others — not without this image of ‘piloting,’ as you well know, remaining linked to this activity, that activity which we call the activity of government.”

What Foucault’s listeners are here supposed to know well and which he refrains from pointing out, is that at the end of the 20th century, the image of piloting, that is, management, became the cardinal metaphor for describing not only politics but also all human activity. Cybernetics had become the project of unlimited rationalization. In 1953, when he published The Nerves of Government in the middle of the development of the cybernetic hypothesis in the natural sciences, Karl Deutsch, an American university social sciences academic, took the political possibilities of cybernetics seriously. He recommended abandoning the old concept that power was sovereign, which had too long been the essence of politics. To govern would become a rational coordination of the flows of information and decisions that circulate through the social body. Three conditions would need to be met, he said: an ensemble of capturers would have to be installed so that no information originating from the “subjects” would be lost; information handling by correlation and association; and a proximity to every living community. The cybernetic modernization of power and the expired forms of social authority thus can be seen as the visible production of what Adam Smith called the “invisible hand,” which until then had served as the mystical keystone of liberal experimentation. The communications system would be the nerve system of societies, the source and destination of all power. The cybernetic hypothesis thus expresses no more or less than the politics of the “end of politics.” It represents at the same time both a paradigm and a technique of government. Its study shows that the police is not just an organ of power, but also a way of thinking.

Cybernetics is the police-like thinking of the Empire, entirely animated by an offensive concept of politics, both in an historical and metaphysical sense. It is now completing its integration of the techniques of individuation — or separation — and totalization that had been developing separately: normalization, “anatomo-politics,” and regulation, “bio-politics,” as Foucault calls it. I call his “techniques of separation” the police of qualities. And, following Lukács, I call his “techniques of totalization” the social production of society. With cybernetics, the production of singular subjectivities and the production of collective totalities work together like gears to replicate History in the form of a feigned movement of evolution. It acts out the fantasy of a Same that always manages to integrate the Other; as one cybernetician puts it, “all real integration is based on a prior differentiation.” In this regard, doubtless no one could put it better than the “automaton” Abraham Moles, cybernetics’ most zealous French ideologue, who here expresses this unparalleled murder impulse that drives cybernetics: “We envision that one global society, one State, could be managed in such a way that they could be protected against all the accidents of the future: such that eternity changes them into themselves. This is the ideal of a stable society, expressed by objectively controllable social mechanisms.” Cybernetics is war against all that lives and all that is lasting. By studying the formation of the cybernetic hypothesis, I hereby propose a genealogy of imperial governance. I then counterpose other wisdom for the fight, which it erases daily, and by which it will be defeated.

II

“Synthetic life is certainly one of the possible products of the evolution of techno-bureaucratic control, in the same way as the return of the whole planet to the inorganic level, is -rather ironically — another of the results of that same revolution, which has to do with the technology of control.” James R Beniger, The Control Revolution, 1986.

Even if the origins of the Internet device are today well known, it is not uncalled for to highlight once again their political meaning. The Internet is a war machine invented to be like the highway system, which was also designed by the American Army as a decentralized internal mobilization tool. The American military wanted a device which would preserve the command structure in case of a nuclear attack. The response would consist in an electronic network capable of automatically retaking control over information itself if nearly the whole of the communications links were destroyed, thus permitting the surviving authorities to remain in communication with one another and make decisions. With such a device, military authority could be maintained in the face of the worst catastrophes. The Internet is thus the result of a nomadic transformation of military strategy. With that kind of a plan at its roots, one might doubt the supposedly anti-authoritarian characteristics of this device. As is the Internet, which derives from it, cybernetics is an art of war, the objective of which is to save the head of the social body in case of catastrophe. What stands out historically and politically during the period between the great wars, and which the cybernetic hypothesis was a response to, was the metaphysical problem of creating order out of disorder. The whole of the great scientific edifice, in terms of what it had to do with the determinist concepts of Newton’s mechanical physics, fell apart in the first half of the century. The sciences, at that time, were like plots of territory torn between the neo-positivist restoration and the probabilist revolution, and slowly inching its way towards a historical compromise so that the law could be re-established after the chaos, the certain re-established after the probable. Cybernetics passed through this whole movement — which began in Vienna at the turn of the century, and was transported to England and the United States in the 1930s and 1940s, and constructed a Second Empire of Reason where the idea of the Subject, up to that time considered indispensable, was absent. As a kind of knowledge, it brought together an ensemble of heterogeneous discourses all dealing with the practical problems of mastering uncertainty. Discourses fundamentally expressing, in the various domains of their application, the desire for a restoration of one order, and furthermore the maintenance thereof.

Underlying the founding of Cybernetics was a context of total war. It would be in vain to look for some malicious purpose or the traces of a plot: one simply finds a handful of ordinary men mobilized by America during the Second world war. Norbert Wiener, an American savant of Russian origin, was charged with developing, with the aid of a few colleagues, a machine for predicting and monitoring the positions of enemy planes so as to more effectively destroy them. It was at the time only possible at the time to predict with certitude certain correlations between certain airplane positions and certain airplane behaviors/movements. The elaboration of the “Predictor,” the prediction machine ordered from Wiener, thus required a specific method of airplane position handling and a comprehension of how the weapon interacts with its target. The whole history of cybernetics has aimed to do away with the impossibility of determining at the same time the position and behavior of bodies. Wiener’s innovation was to express the problem of uncertainty as an information problem, within a temporal series where certain data is already known, and others not, and to consider the object and the subject of knowledge as a whole, as a “system.” The solution consisted in constantly introducing into the play of the initial data the gap seen between the desired behavior and the effective behavior, so that they coincide when the gap closes, like the mechanism of a thermostat. The discovery goes considerably beyond the frontiers of the experimental sciences: controlling a system would in the end require a circulation of information to be instituted, called feed-back, or retro-action. The wide implications of these results for the natural and social sciences was exposed in 1948 in Paris in a work presented under the foreboding name of Cybernetics, which for Wiener meant the doctrine of “control and communication between animal and machine.”

Cybernetics thus emerged as a simple, inoffensive theory of information, a theory for handling information with no precise origin, always potentially present in the environment around any situation. It claims that the control of a system is obtained by establishing an optimum degree of communication between the parties to it. This objective calls above all for the continuous extortion of information — a process of the separation of beings from their qualities, of the production of differences. In other words, as it were, mastery of a uncertainty would arise from the proper representation and memorization of the past. The spectacular image, binary mathematical encoding — invented by Claude Shannon in Mathematical Theory of Communicationin the very same year that the cybernetic hypothesis was first expressed — on the one hand they’ve invented memory machines that do not alter information, and put incredible effort into miniaturizing them (this is the determinant strategy behind today’s nanotechnology) and on the other they conspire to create such conditions on the collective level. Thus put into form, information would then be directed towards the world of beings, connecting them to one another in the same way as commodity circulation guarantees they will be put into equivalence. Retro-action, key to the system’s regulation, now calls forcommunication in the strict sense. Cybernetics is the project of recreating the world within an infinite feedback loop involving these two moments: representation separating, communication connecting, the first bringing death, the second mimicking life.

The cybernetic discourse begins by dismissing as a false problem the controversies of the 19thcentury that counterposed mechanist visions to vitalist or organicist visions of the world. It postulates a functional analogy between living organisms and machines, assimilated into the idea of “systems.” Thus the cybernetic hypothesis justifies two kinds of scientific and social experiments. The first essentially aimed to turn living beings into machines, to master, program, and determine mankind and life, society and its “future.” This gave fuel for a return of eugenics as bionic fantasy. It seeks, scientifically, the end of History; initially here we are dealing with the terrain of control. The second aims to imitate the living with machines, first of all as individuals, which has now led to the development of robots and artificial intelligence; then as collectives — and this has given rise to the new intense circulation of information and the setting up of “networks.” Here we’re dealing rather with the terrain of communication. However much they may be socially comprised of highly diversified populations — biologists, doctors, computer scientists, neurologists, engineers, consultants, police, ad-men, etc. — the two currents among the cyberneticians are perfectly in harmony concerning their common fantasy of a Universal Automaton, analogous to Hobbes’ vision of the State in Leviathan, “the artificial man (or animal).”

The unity of cybernetic progress arises from a particular method; it has imposed itself as the world-wide method of universal enrollment, simultaneously a rage to experiment, and a proliferating oversimplification. It corresponds to the explosion of applied mathematics that arose subsequent to the despair caused by the Austrian Kurt Godel when he demonstrated that all attempts to give a logical foundation to mathematics and unify the sciences was doomed to “incompleteness.” With the help of Heisenberg, more than a century of positivist justifications had just collapsed. It was Von Neumann that expressed to the greatest extreme this abrupt feeling that the foundations had been annihilated. He interpreted the logical crisis of mathematics as the mark of the unavoidable imperfection of all human creations. And consequently he laid out a logic that could only come from a robot! From being a pure mathematician, he made himself an agent of scientific crossbreeding, of a general mathematization that would allow a reconstruction from below, in practice, of the lost unity of the sciences of which cybernetics was to be the most stable theoretical expression. Not a demonstration, not a speech, not a book, and no place has not since then been animated by the universal language of explanatory diagrams, the visual form of reasoning. Cybernetics transports the rationalization process common to bureaucracy and to capitalism up onto the plane of total templating (modeling). Herbert Simon, the prophet of Artificial Intelligence, took up the Von Neumann program again in the 1960s, to build a thinking automaton. It was to be a machine equipped with a program, called expert system, which was to be capable of handling information so as to resolve the problems that every particular domain of technique had to deal with, and by association, to be able to solve all the practical problems encountered by humanity! The General Problem Solver (GPS), created in 1972, was the model that this universal technique that gathered together all the others, the model of all models, the most applied intellectualism, the practical realization of the preferred adage of the little masters without mastery, according to which “there are no problems, there are only solutions.”

The cybernetic hypothesis progresses indistinctly as theory and technology, the one always certifying the other. In 1943, Wiener met John Von Neumann, who was in charge of building machines fast and powerful enough to carry out theManhattan Project that 15,000 scholars and engineers, and 300,000 technicians and workers were working on, under the direction of the physicist Robert Oppenheimer: the modern computer and the atomic bomb, were thus born together. From the perspective of contemporary imagining, the “communications utopia” is thus the complementary myth to the myth of the invention of nuclear power and weaponry: it is always a question of doing away with being-together (the ensemble of beings)either by an excess of life or an excess of death, either by terrestrial fusion or by cosmic suicide. Cybernetics presents itself as the response most suited to deal with the Great Fear of the destruction of the world and of the human species. And Von Neumann was its double agent, the “inside outsider” par excellence. The analogy between his descriptive categories for his machines, living organisms, and Wiener’s categories sealed the alliance between cybernetics and computer science. A few years would pass before molecular biology, when decoding DNA, would in turn use that theory of information to explain man as an individual and as a species, giving an unequalled technical power to the experimental genetic manipulation of human beings.

The way that the systems metaphor evolved towards the network metaphor in social discourse between the 1950s and 1980s points towards the other fundamental analogy constituting the cybernetic hypothesis. It also indicates a profound transformation of the latter. Because if PEOPLE talked about “systems,” among cyberneticians it would be by comparison with the nervous system, and if PEOPLE talk today about the cognitive “network” sciences, THEY are thinking about theneuronal network. Cybernetics is the assimilation of the totality of the phenomena that exist into brain phenomena. By posing the mind as the alpha and omega of the world, cybernetics has guaranteed itself a place as the avant-garde of all avant-gardes, the one that they will now all forever be running after. It effectively implements, at the start, the identity between life, thought, and language. This radical Monism is based on an analogy between the notions of information and energy. Wiener introduced it by grafting onto his discourse the discourse of 19th century thermodynamics; the operation consisted in comparing the effect of time on an energy system with the effect of time on an information system. A system, to the extent that it is a system, is never pure and perfect: there is a degradation of its energy to the extent that it undergoes exchanges, in the same way as information degrades as it is circulated around. This is what Clausius called entropy. Entropy, considered as a natural law, is the cybernetician’s Hell. It explains the decomposition of life, disequilibrium in economy, the dissolution of social bonds, decadence… Initially, speculatively, cybernetics claimed that it had thus opened up a common ground on which it would be possible to carry out the unification of the natural and human sciences.

What would end up being called the “second cybernetics” was the superior project of a vast experimentation on human societies: anthropotechnology. The cybernetician’s mission is to fight the general entropy threatening living beings, machines, and societies; that is, to create the experimental conditions for a permanent revitalization, endlessly restoring the integrity of the whole. “The important thing isn’t that mankind is present, but that it exists as a living support for technical ideas,” says Raymond Ruyer, the humanist commentator. With the elaboration and development of cybernetics, the ideal of the experimental sciences, already at the origins of political economy via Newtonian physics, would once again lend a strong arm to capitalism. Since then, the laboratory the cybernetic hypothesis carries out its experiments in has been called “contemporary society.” After the end of the 1960s, thanks to the techniques that it taught, this ‘second cybernetics’ is no longer a mere laboratory hypothesis, but a social experiment. It aims to construct what Giorgio Cesarano calls a stabilized animal society, in which “[concerning termites, ants, and bees] the natural presupposition is that they operate automatically, and that the individual is negated, so the animal society as a whole (termite colony, anthill, or beehive) is conceived of as a kind of plural individual, the unity of which determines and is determined by the distribution of roles and functions — all within the framework of an ‘organic composite’ where one would be hard pressed to not see a biological model for the teleology of Capital.”

III

“You don’t have to be a prophet to acknowledge that the modern sciences, in their installation within society, will not delay in being determined and piloted by the new basic science: cybernetics. This science corresponds to the determination of man as a being the essence of which is activity in the social sphere. It is, in effect the theory whose object is to take over all possible planning and organization of human labor.” Martin Heidegger, The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thought, 1966

“But cybernetics on the other hand, sees itself as forced to recognize that a general regulation of human existence is still not achievable at the present time. This is why mankind still has a function, provisionally, within the universal domain of cybernetic science, as a “factor of disturbance.” The plans and acts of men, apparently free, act as a disturbance. But very recently, science has also taken over possession of this field of human existence. It has taken up the rigorously methodical exploration and planning of the possible future of man as an active player. In so doing, it figures in all available information about what there is about mankind that may be planned.”

Martin Heidegger, The Origin of Art and the Destination of Thought, 1967

In 1946, a conference of scientists took place in New York, the objective of which was to extend the cybernetic hypothesis to the social sciences. The participants agreed to make a clear disqualification of all the philistine philosophies that based themselves on the individual or on society. Socio-Cybernetics was to concentrate on the intermediary phenomena of social feedback, like those that the American anthropological school believed it had found at the time between “culture” and “personality,” to put together a characterization of the various nations, intended for use by American soldiers. The operation consisted in reducing dialectical thought to an observation of processes of circular causality within what was considered a priori to be an invariable social totality, where contradiction and non-adaptation merged, as in the central category of cybernetic psychology: the double bind. As a science of society, cybernetics was intended to invent a kind of social regulation that would leave behind the macro-institutions of State and Market, preferring to work through micro-mechanisms of control — preferring devices. The fundamental law of socio-cybernetics is as follows: growth and control develop in inverse proportion to each other. It is thus easier to construct a cybernetic social order on the small scale: “the quick re-establishment of balance requires that inconsistencies be detect at the very location where they are produced, and that corrective action take place in a decentralized manner.” Under the influence of Gregory Bateson, the Von Neumann of the social sciences, and of the American sociological tradition, obsessed by the question of deviance (the hobo, the immigrant, the criminal, the youth, me, you, him, etc.), socio-cybernetics was aimed, as a priority, towards studying the individual as a feedback locus, that is, as a “self-disciplined personality.” Bateson became the social editor in chief of the second half of the 20th century, and was involved in the origins of the “family therapy” movement, as well as those of the “sales techniques training” movement developed at Palo Alto. Since the cybernetic hypothesis as a whole calls for a radically new physical structuring of the subject, whether individual or collective, its aim is to hollow it out. It disqualifies as a myth individual inwardness/internal dialogue, and with it all 19thcentury psychology, including psychoanalysis. It’s no longer a question of removing the subject from the traditional exterior bonds, as the liberal hypothesis had intended, but of reconstructing the social bonds by depriving the subject of all substance. Each person was to become a fleshless envelope, the best possible conductor of social communication, the locus of an infinite feedback loop which is made to have no nodes. The cyberneticization process thus completes the “process of civilization,” to where bodies and their emotions are abstracted within the system of symbols. “In this sense,” writes Lyotard, “the system presents itself as an avant-garde machine that drags humanity along after it, by dehumanizing it so as to rehumanize it at another level of normative capacities. Such is the great pride of the deciders, such is their blindness… Even any permissiveness relative to the various games is only granted on the condition that greater performance levels will be produced. The redefinition of the norms of life consists in an amelioration of the skills of the system in matters of power.”

Spurred on by the Cold War and its “witch hunts,” the socio-cyberneticians thus tirelessly hunted down the pathological couched behind the normal, the communist sleeping in everybody. In the 1950s, to this effect, they formed the Mental Health Federation, where an original and quasi-final solution was elaborated to the problems of the community and of the times: “It is the ultimate goal of mental health to help people to live with their peers in the same world… The concept of mental health is co-extensive with international order and the global community, which must be developed so as to make men capable of living in peace with each other.” By rethinking mental problems and social pathologies in terms of informatics, cybernetics gave rise to a new politics of subjects, resting on communication and transparency to oneself and to others. Spurred on by Bateson, Wiener in turn began thinking about a socio-cybernetics with a scope broader than the mere project of mental hygiene. He had no trouble affirming the defeat of the liberal experimentation: on the market information is always impure and imperfect because of the lying implicit in advertising and the monopolistic concentration of the media, and because of the ignorance of the State, which as a collective contains less information than civil society. The extension of commodity relations, by increasing the size of communities and feedback chains, renders distortions of communication and problems of social control ever more probable. The past processes of accumulation had not only destroyed the social bonds, but social order itself appeared cybernetically impossible within capitalism. The cybernetic hypothesis’ stroke of luck can thus be understood in light of the crises encountered by 20th century capitalism, which questioned once again the supposed “laws” of classical political economy — and that was where the cybernetic discourse stepped into the breach.

The contemporary history of economic discourse must be looked at from the angle of this increasing problem of information. From the crisis of 1929 to 1945, economists’ attention was focused on questions of anticipation, uncertainty regarding demand, adjustments between production and consumption, and forecasts of economic activity. Smith’s classical economics began to give out like the other scientific discourses directly inspired by Newton’s physics. The preponderant role that cybernetics was to play in the economy after 1945 can be understood in light of Marx’s intuitive observation that “in political economy the law is determined by its contrary, that is, the absence of laws. The true law of political economy is chance.” In order to prove that capitalism was not a factor in entropy and social chaos, the economic discourse gave primacy to a cybernetic redefinition psychology starting in the 1940s. It based itself on the “game theory” model, developed by Von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944. The first socio-cyberneticians showed that homo economicus could only exist on the condition that there would be a total transparency of his preferences, regarding himself and others. In the absence of an ability to understand the whole ensemble of the behaviors of other economic actors, the utilitarian idea of a rationality of micro-economic choices is but a fiction. On the impetus of Friedrich von Hayek, the utilitarian paradigm was thus abandoned in preference to a theory of spontaneous mechanisms coordinating individual choices, acknowledging that each agent only has a limited understanding of the behaviors of others and of his or her own behaviors. The response consisted in sacrificing the autonomy of economic theory by grafting it onto the cybernetic promise of a balancing of systems. The hybrid discourse that resulted from this, later called “neo-liberal,” considered as a virtue the optimal market allocation of information — and no longer that of wealth — in society. In this sense, the market is but the instrument of a perfect coordination of players thanks to which the social totality can find a durable equilibrium. Capitalism thus becomes unquestionable, insofar as it is presented as a simple means — the best possible means — of producing social self-regulation.

Like in 1929, the planetary movement of contestation of 1968, and, moreover, the post-1973 crisis present for political economy once more the problem of uncertainty, this time on an existential and political terrain. High-flown theories abound, with the old chatterbox Edgar Morin and “complexity” theory, and Joel de Rosnay, that eccentric simpleton, and “society in real-time.” Ecologist philosophy as well was nourished by this new mystique of the Great Totality. Now totality was no longer an origin to be rediscovered, but a future to build. For cybernetics it is no longer a question of predicting the future, but of reproducing the present. It is no longer a question of static order, but of a dynamic self-organization. The individual is no longer credited with any power at all: his knowledge of the world is imperfect, he doesn’t know his own desires, he is opaque to himself, everything escapes him, as spontaneously cooperative, naturally empathetic, and fatally in interdependent as he his. He knows nothing of all this, but THEY know everything about him. Here, the most advanced form of contemporary individualism comes into being; Hayekian philosophy is grafted onto him, for which all uncertainty, all possibilities of any event taking place is but a temporary problem, a question of his ignorance. Converted into an ideology, liberalism serves as a cover for a whole group of new technical and scientific practices, a diffuse “second cybernetics,” which deliberately erases the name it was originally baptized with. Since the 1960s, the term cybernetics itself has faded away into hybrid terms. The science explosion no longer permits any theoretical unification, in effect: the unity of cybernetics now manifests itself practically through the world itself, which it configures every day. It is the tool by which capitalism has adjusted its capacity for disintegration and its quest after profit to one another. A society threatened by permanent decomposition can be all the more mastered when an information network, an autonomous “nervous system” is in place allowing it to be piloted, wrote the State lackeys Simon Nora and Alain Minc, discussing the case of France in their 1978 report. What PEOPLE call the “New Economy” today, which brings together under the same official nomenclature of cybernetic origin the ensemble of the transformations that the western nations have undergone in the last thirty years, is but an ensemble of new subjugations, a new solution to the practical problem of the social order and its future, that is: a new politics.

Under the influence of informatization, the supply and demand adjustment techniques originating between 1930–1970 have been purified, shortened, and decentralized. The image of the “invisible hand” is no longer a justificatory fiction but is now the effective principle behind the social production of society, as it materializes within computer procedures. The Internet simultaneously permits one to know consumer preferences and to condition them with advertising. On another level, all information regarding the behavior of economic agents circulates in the form of headings managed by financial markets. Each actor in capitalist valorization is a real-time back-up of quasi-permanent feedback loops. On the real markets, as on the virtual markets, each transaction now gives rise to a circulation of information concerning the subjects and objects of the exchange that goes beyond simply fixing the price, which has become a secondary aspect. On the one hand, people have realized the importance of information as a factor in production distinct from labor and capital and playing a decisive role in “growth” in the form of knowledge, technical innovation, and distributed capacities. On the other, the sector specializing in the production of information has not ceased to increase in size. In light of its reciprocal reinforcement of these two tendencies, today’s capitalism should be called the information economy. Information has become wealth to be extracted and accumulated, transforming capitalism into a simply auxiliary of cybernetics. The relationship between capitalism and cybernetics has inverted over the course of the century: whereas after the 1929 crisis, PEOPLE built a system of information concerning economic activity in order to serve the needs of regulation — this was the objective of all planning — the economy after the 1973 crisis put the social self-regulation process came to be based on the valorization of information.

IV

“If motorized machines constituted the second age of the technical machine, cybernetic and informational machines form a third age that reconstructs a generalized regime of subjection: recurrent and reversible ‘humans-machines systems’ replace the old nonrecurring and nonreversible relations of subjection between the two elements; the relation between human and machine is based on internal, mutual communication, and no longer on usage or action. In the organic composition of capital, variable capital defines a regime of subjection of the worker (human surplus value), the principal framework of which is the business or factory. But with automation comes a progressive increase in the proportion of constant capital; we then see a new kind of enslavement: at the same time the work regime changes, surplus value becomes machinic, and the framework expands to all of society. It could also be said that a small amount of subjectification took us away from machinic enslavement, but a large amount brings us back to it.” Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980

“The only moment of permanence of a class as such is that which has a consciousness of its permanence for itself: the class of managers of capital as social machine. The consciousness that connotes is, with the greatest coherence, that of apocalypse, of self-destruction.” Giorgio Cesarano, Survival Manual, 1975

Nothing expresses the contemporary victory of cybernetics better than the fact that value can now be extracted as information about information. The commodity-cybernetician, or “neo-liberal” logic, extends over all activity, including that which is still not commodified, with an unflagging support of modern States. More generally, the corollary to the precarization of capitalism’s objects and subjects is a growth of circulation in information on their subject: this is as true for unemployed workers as it is for cops. Cybernetics consequently aims to disturb and control people in one and the same movement. It is founded on terror, which is a factor in its evolution — the evolution of economic growth, moral progress — because it supplies an occasion for the production of information. The state of emergency, which is proper to all crises, is what allows self-regulation to be relaunched, and to maintain itself as a perpetual movement. Whereas the scheme of classical economy where a balance of supply and demand was to permit “growth” and thusly to permit collective well-being, it is now “growth” which is considered an endless road towards balance. It is thus just to critique western modernity as a “infinite mobilization” the destination of which is “movement towards more movement.” But from a cybernetic point of view, the self-production that equally characterizes the State, the Market, robots, wage workers, or the jobless, is indiscernible from the self-control that moderates and slows it down.

It comes across clearly then that cybernetics is not just one of the various aspects of contemporary life, its neo-technological component, for instance, but rather it is the point of departure and arrival of the new capitalism. Cybernetic Capitalism — what does that mean? It means that since the 1970s we’ve been dealing with an emerging social formation that has taken over from Fordist capitalism which results from the application of the cybernetic hypothesis to political economy. Cybernetic capitalism develops so as to allow the social body, devastated by Capital, to reform itself and offer itself up for one more process of accumulation. On the one hand capitalism must grow, which implies destruction. On the other, it needs to reconstruct the “human community,” which implies circulation. “There is,” writes Lyotard, “two uses for wealth, that is importance-power: a reproductive use and a pillage use. The first is circular, global, organic; the second is partial, death-dealing, jealous… The capitalist is a conqueror, and the conqueror is a monster, a centaur. His front side feeds off of reproducing the regulated system of controlled metamorphoses under the law of the commodity-talion, and its rear side off of pillaging overexcited energies. On the one hand, to appropriate, and thus preserve, that is, reproduce in equivalence, reinvest; on the other to take and destroy, steal and flee, hollowing out another space, another time.” The crises of capitalism, as Marx saw them, always came from a de-articulation between the time of conquest and the time of reproduction. The function of cybernetics is to avoid crises by ensuring the coordination between Capital’s “front side” and “rear side.” Its development is an endogenous response to the problem posed to capitalism — how to develop without fatal disequilibrium arising.

In the logic of Capital, the development of the piloting function, of “control,” corresponds to the subordination of the sphere of accumulation to the sphere of circulation. For the critique of political economy, circulation should be no less suspect than production, in effect. It is, as Marx knew, but a particular case of production as considered in general. The socialization of the economy — that is, the interdependence between capitalists and the other members of the social body, the “human community” — the enlargement of Capital’s human base, makes the extraction of surplus value which is at the source of profit no longer centered around the relations of exploitation instituted by the wage system. Valorization’s center of gravity has now moved over to the sphere of circulation. In spite of its inability to reinforce the conditions of exploitation, which would bring about a crisis of consumption, capitalist accumulation can still nevertheless survive on the condition that the production-consumption cycle is accelerated, that is, on the condition that the production process accelerates as much as commodity circulation does. What has been lost to the economy on the static level can be compensated on the dynamic level. The logic of flows is to dominate the logic of the finished product. Speed is now taking primacy over quantity, as a factor in wealth. The hidden face of the maintenance of accumulation is the acceleration of circulation. The function of the control devices is thus to maximize the volume of commodity flows by minimizing the events, obstacles, and accidents that would slow them down. Cybernetic capitalism tends to abolish time itself, to maximize fluid circulation to the maximum: the speed of light. Such is already the case for certain financial transactions. The categories of “real time,” of “just in time,” show clearly this hatred of duration. For this very reason, time is our ally.

This propensity towards control by capitalism is not new. It is only post-modern in the sense that post-modernity has been confused with the latest manifestation of modernity. It is for this reason that bureaucracy developed at the end of the 19thcentury and computer technology developed after the Second World War. The cybernetization of capitalism started at the end of the 1870s with the growing control of production, distribution, and consumption. Information regarding these flows has since then had a central strategic importance as a condition for valorization. The historian James Beniger states that the first control-related problems came about when the first collisions took place between trains, putting commodities and human lives in peril. The signalization of the railways, travel time measurement and data transmission devices had to be invented so as to avoid such “catastrophes.” The telegraph, synchronized clocks, organizational charts in large enterprises, weighing systems, roadmaps, performance evaluation procedures, wholesalers, assembly lines, centralized decision-making, advertising in catalogues, and mass communications media were the devices invented during this period to respond, in all spheres of the economic circuit, to a generalized crisis of control connected to the acceleration of production set off by the industrial revolution in the United States. Information and control systems thus developed at the same time as the capitalist process of transformation of materials was growing and spreading. A class of middlemen, which Alfred Chandler called the “visible hand” of Capital, formed and grew. After the end of the 19th century, it was clear enough to PEOPLE that expectability [had] become a source of profit as such and a source of confidence. Fordism and Taylorism were part of this movement, as was the development of control over the mass of consumers and over public opinion via marketing and advertising, in charge of extorting from them by force, and then putting to work, their “preferences,” which according to the hypotheses of the marginalist economists, were the true source of value. Investment in organizational or purely technical planning and control technologies became more and more salable. After 1945, cybernetics supplied capitalism with a new infrastructure of machines — computers — and above all with an intellectual technology that permitted the regulation of the circulation of flows within society, and making those flows exclusively commodity flows.

That the economic sectors of information, communication, and control have taken ever more of a part in the economy since the Industrial Revolution, and that “intangible labor” has grown relative to tangible labor, is nothing surprising or new. Today these account for the mobilization of more than 2/3 of the workforce. But this isn’t enough to fully define cybernetic capitalism. Because its equilibrium and the growth depend continually on its control capacities, its nature has changed.Insecurity, much more than rarity, is the core of the present capitalist economy. As Wittgenstein understood by looking at the 1929 crisis — and as did Keynes in his wake — there is a strong bond between the “state of trust” and the curbing of the marginal effectiveness of Capital, he wrote, in chapter XII of General Theory, in February 1934 — the economy rests definitively on the “play of language.” Markets, and with them commodities and merchants, the sphere of circulation in general, and, consequently, business, the sphere of production as a place of the anticipation of coming levels of yield, do not exist without conventions, social norms, technical norms, norms of the truth, on a meta-level which brings bodies and things into existence as commodities, even before they are subject to pricing. The control and communications sectors develop because commodity valorization needs to have a looping circulation of information parallel to the actual circulation of commodities, the production of a collective belief that objectivizes itself in values. In order to come about, all exchanges require “investments of form” — information about a formulation of what is to be exchanged — a formatting that makes it possible to put things into equivalence even before such a putting of things into equivalence has effectively taken place, a conditioning that is also a condition of agreement about the market. It’s true for goods, and it’s true for people. Perfecting the circulation of information will mean perfecting the market as a universal instrument of coordination. Contrary to what the liberal hypothesis had supposed, to sustain a fragile capitalism, contracts are not sufficient unto themselves within social relations. PEOPLE began to understand after 1929 that all contracts need to come with controls. Cybernetics entered into the operation of capitalism with the intention of minimizing uncertainties, incommensurability, the kinds of anticipation problems that can interfere in any commodity transaction. It contributes to consolidating the basis for the installation of capitalism’s mechanisms, to oiling Capital’s abstract machine.

With cybernetic capitalism, the political moment of political economy subsequently dominates its economic moment. Or, as Joan Robinson understands it looking from the perspective of economic theory, in her comments on Keynes: “As soon as one admits the uncertainty of the forecasts that guide economic behavior, equilibrium has no more importance and History takes its place.” The political moment, here understood in the broader sense of that which subjugates, that which normalizes, that which determines what will happen by way of bodies and can record itself in socially recognized value, what extracts form from forms-of-life, is as essential to “growth” as it is to the reproduction of the system: on the one hand the capture of energies, their orientation, their crystallization, become the primary source of valorization; on the other hand, surplus value can be extracted from any point on the bio-political tissue on the condition that the latter reconstitutes itself incessantly. That the ensemble of expenditures has a tendency to morph into valorizable qualities also means that Capital permeates all living flows: the socialization of the economy and the anthropomorphosis of Capital are two symbiotic, indissoluble processes. In order for these processes to be carried out, it suffices and is necessary that all contingent action be dealt with by a combination of surveillance and data capture devices. The former are inspired by prison, insofar as they introduce a centralized system of panoptical visibility. These have for a long while been monopolized by the modern State. The latter, the data capture devices, are inspired by computer technology, insofar as they are part of the construction of a decentralized real-time gridding system. The common intent of these devices is total transparency, an absolute correspondence between the map and the territory, a will to knowledge accumulated to such degree that it becomes a will to power. One of the advancements made by cybernetics has consisted in enclosing its surveillance and monitoring systems upon themselves, guaranteeing that the surveillers and the monitorers are themselves surveilled and/or monitored, with the development of asocialization of control which is the trademark of the so-called “information society.” The control sector becomes autonomous because of the need to control control, since commodity flows are overlaid by their double, flows of information the circulation and security of which must in turn be optimized. At the summit of this terracing of control, state control, the police, and the law, self-legitimating violence, and judicial authority play the role of controllers of last resort. The surveillance one-upmanship that characterizes “control societies” is explained in simple terms by Deleuze, who says: “they have leaks everywhere.” This incessantly confirms the necessity for control. “In discipline societies, one never ceased to recommence (from school to barracks, etc…) [the disciplinary process], whereas in control societies nothing is ever finished.”

Thus there is nothing surprising about the fact that the development of cybernetic capitalism has been accompanied by the development of all the forms of repression, by hyper-securitarianism. Traditional discipline, the generalization of a state of emergency — emergenza — are transplanted to grow inside a whole system focused on the fear of any threat. The apparent contradiction between the reinforcement of the repressive functions of the State and the neo-liberal economic discourse that preaches “less State” — and permits Loïc Wacquant for instance to go into a critique of the liberal ideology hiding the increasing “penal State” — can only be understood in light of the cybernetic hypothesis. Lyotard explains it: “there is, in all cybernetic systems, a unity of reference that permits one to measure the disparity produced by the introduction of an event within the system, and then, thanks to such measurement, to translate that event into information to be fed into the system; then, in sum, if it is a regulated ensemble in homeostasis, to annul that disparity and return the system to the quantities of energy or information that it had before… Let’s stop here a moment. We see how the adoption of this perspective on society, that is, of the despotic fantasies of the masters, of placing themselves at the supposed location of the central zero, and thus of identifying themselves with the matrix of Nothingness… must force one to extend one’s idea of threat and thus of defense.Since what event would NOT be a threat from this point of view? All are; indeed, because they are disturbances of a circular nature, reproducing the same, and requiring a mobilization of energy for purposes of appropriation and elimination. Is this too ‘abstract’? Should I give an example? It is the very project that is being perpetrated in France on high levels, the institution of an operational Defense of the territory, already granted an operating Center of the army, the specific focus of which is to ward off the ‘internal’ threat, which is born within the dark recesses of the social body, of which the “national state” claims to be the clairvoyant head: this clairvoyance is called the national identification registry; … the translation of events into information for the system is called intelligence, … and the execution of regulatory orders and their inscription into the “social body,” above all when the latter is racked by some kind of intense emotion, for instance by the panicked fear which would seize hold of it if a nuclear war were to be triggered (or if some kind of a wave of protest, subversion, or civil desertion considered insane were to hit) — such execution requires an assiduous and fine-grained infiltration of the transmission channels in the social ‘flesh,’ or, as some superior officer or other put it quite marvelously, the ‘police of spontaneous movements.’” Prison is thus at the summit of a cascade of control devices, the guarantor of last resort that no disturbing event will take place within the social body that would hinder the circulation of goods and persons. The logic of cybernetics being to replace centralized institutions and sedentary forms of control by tracing devices and nomadic forms of control, prison, as a classical surveillance device, is obviously to be expanded and prolonged with monitoring devices such as the electronic bracelet, for instance. The development of community policing in the English speaking world, of “proximity policing” in France, also responds to a cybernetic logic intended to ward off all events, and organize feedback. Within this logic, then, disturbances in a given zone can be all the better suppressed/choked off when they are absorbed/deadened by the closest system sub-zones.

Whereas repression has, within cybernetic capitalism, the role of warding off events, prediction is its corollary, insofar as it aims to eliminate all uncertainty connected to all possible futures. That’s the gamble of statistics technologies. Whereas the technologies of the Providential State were focused on the forecasting of risks, whether probabilized or not, the technologies of cybernetic capitalism aim to multiply the domains of responsibility/authority. Risk-based discourse is the motor for the deployment of the cybernetic hypothesis; it is first distributed diffusely so as then to be internalized. Because risks are much more accepted when those that are exposed to them have the impression that they’ve chosen to take them on, when they feel responsible, and most of all when they have the feeling that they control them and are themselves the masters of such risks. But, as one expert admits, “zero risk” is a non-existent situation: “the idea of risk weakens causal bonds, but in so doing it does not make them disappear. On the contrary; it multiplies them. …To consider danger in terms of risk is necessarily to admit that one can never absolutely protect oneself against it: one may manage it, tame it, but never annihilate it.” It is in its permanence in the system that risk is an ideal tool for affirming new forms of power, to the benefit of the growing stranglehold of devices on collectives and individuals. It eliminates everything that is at stake in conflicts by obligatorily bringing individuals together around the management of threats that are supposed to concern all of them in the same way. The argument that THEY would like to make us buy is as follows: the more security there is, the more concomitant production of insecurity there must be. And if you think that insecurity grows as prediction becomes more and more infallible, you yourself must be afraid of the risks. And if you’re afraid of the risks, if you don’t trust the system to completely control the whole of your life, your fear risks becoming contagious and presenting the system with a very real risk of defiance. In other words, to fear risks is already to represent a risk for society. The imperative of commodity circulation upon which cybernetic capitalism rests morphs into a general phobia, a fantasy of self-destruction. The control society is a paranoid society, which easily explains the proliferation of conspiracy theories within it. Each individual is thus subjectivized, within cybernetic capitalism, as a Risk Dividual, as some enemy or another [a “whatever enemy”] of the balanced society.

It should not be surprising then that the reasoning of France’s François Ewald or Denis Kessler, those collaborators in chief of Capital, affirms that the Providential State, characteristic of the Fordist mode of social regulation, by reducing social risks, has ended up taking responsibility away from individuals. The dismantling of social protection systems that we’ve been seeing since the start of the 1980s thus has been an attempt to give responsibility to each person by making everyone bear the “risks” borne by the capitalists alone towards the whole “social body.” It is, in the final analysis, a matter of inculcating the perspective of social reproduction in each individual, who should expect nothing from society, but sacrifice everything to it. The social regulation of catastrophes and the unexpected can no longer be managed by simple social exclusion, as it was during the Middle Ages in the time of lepers, the logic of scapegoating, containment, and enclosure. If everybody now has to become responsible for the risks they make society run, it’s only because they couldn’t exclude so many anymore without the loss of a potential source of profit. Cybernetic capitalism thus forcibly couples the socialization of the economy and the increase of the “responsibility principle.” It produces citizens as “Risk Dividuals” that self-neutralize, removing their own potential to destroy order. It is thus a matter of generalizing self-control, a disposition that favors the proliferation of devices, and ensures an effective relay. All crises, within cybernetic capitalism, are preparations for a reinforcement of devices. The anti-GMO protest movement, as well as the “mad cow crisis” of these last few years in France, have definitively permitted the institution of an unheard of tracking of Dividuals and Things. The accrued professionalization of control — which is, with insurance, one of the economic sectors whose growth is guaranteed by cybernetic logic — is but the other side of the rise of the citizen as a political subjectivity that has totally auto-repressed the risk that he or she objectively represents. This is how Citizen’s Watch contributes to the improvement of piloting devices.

Whereas the rise of control at the end of the 19th century took place by way of a dissolution of personalized bonds — which gave rise to PEOPLE talking about “the disappearance of communities” — in cybernetic capitalism it takes place by way of a new soldering of social bonds entirely permeated by the imperative of self-piloting and of piloting others in the service of social unity: it is the device-future of mankind as citizens of the Empire. The present importance of these new citizen-device systems, which hollow out the old State institutions and drive the nebulous citizen-community, demonstrates that the great social machine which cybernetic capitalism has to comprise cannot do without human beings no matter how much time certain incredulous cyberneticians have put into believing it can, as is shown in this flustered epiphany from the middle of the 1980s:

“Systematic automation would in effect be a radical means of surpassing the physical or mental limitations that give rise to the most common of human errors: momentary losses of vigilance due to fatigue, stress, or routine; a provisional incapacity to simultaneously interpret a multitude of contradictory information, thus failing to master situations that are too complex; euphemization of risk under pressure from circumstances (emergencies, hierarchical pressures…); errors of representation giving rise to an underestimation of the security of systems that are usually highly reliable (as might be the case of a pilot who categorically refuses to believe that one of his jet engines is on fire). One must however ask oneself whether removing the human beings — who are considered the weakest link in the man/machine interface — from the circuit would not definitely risk creating new vulnerabilities and necessarily imply the extension of those errors of representation and losses of vigilance that are, as we have seen, the frequent counterpart of an exaggerated feeling of security. Either way, the debate deserves to remain open.”

It certainly does.

V

“The eco-society is decentralized, communitarian, and participatory. Individual responsibility and initiative really exist in it. The eco-society rests on the plurality of ideas about life, life styles and behaviors in life. The consequence of this is that equality and justice make progress. But also there is an upheaval in habits, ways of thinking, and morals. Mankind has invented a different kind of life, in a balanced society, having understood that maintaining a state of balance is more of a delicate process than maintaining a state of continual growth is. Thanks to a new vision, a new logic of complementarity, and new values, the people of eco-society have invented an economic doctrine, a political science, a sociology, a technology, and a psychology of the state of controlled equilibrium.” Joel de Rosnay, The Macroscope, 1975

“Capitalism and socialism represent two kinds of organization of the economy, deriving from the same basic system, a system for quantifying value added. … Looking at it from this angle, the system called ‘socialism’ is but the corrective sub-system applied to ‘capitalism.’ One may therefore say that the most outdated capitalism is socialist in certain ways, and that all socialism is a ‘mutation’ of capitalism, destined to attempt to stabilize the system via redistribution — the redistribution considered necessary to ensure the survival of all, and to incite everyone to a broader consumption. In this sketch we call a kind of organization of the economy that would be designed so as to establish an acceptable balance between capitalism and socialism ‘social capitalism.’” Yona Friedman, Realizable Utopias, 1974.

The events of May 68 gave rise to a political reaction in all western societies that PEOPLE hardly recall the scope of today. Capitalism was very quickly restructured, as if an army were being put on the march to war. The Rome Club — multinationals like Fiat, Volkswagen, and Ford — paid sociologists and ecologists to determine what products corporations should give up manufacturing so that the capitalist system could function better and be reinforced. In 1972, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued a report commissioned by said Rome Club, called Limits to Growth, which made a big splash because it recommended stopping the process of capitalist accumulation, including in the so-called developing countries. From the lofty heights of domination, THEY demanded “zero growth” so as to preserve social relations and the resources of the planet, introducing qualitative components into their analysis of development, against the quantitative projections focusing on growth, and demanding — definitively — that it be entirely redefined; that pressure grew until it burst in the 1973 crisis. Capitalism seemed to have made its own self-critique. But I’m only bringing up the army and war again because the MIT report, put together by the economist Dennis H. Meadows, was inspired by the work of a certain Jay Forrester, who in 1952 had been assigned by the US Air Force to the task of putting together an alert and defense system — the SAGE system — which would for the first time coordinate radars and computers in order to detect and prevent a possible attack on American territory by enemy rockets. Forrester had assembled infrastructure for communications and control between men and machines, for the first time allowing them a “real time” interconnection. After that he had been named to the MIT school of management, to extend his skills in matters of systems analysis to the economic world. He applied the same principles of order and defense to business; he then went over cities and finally the whole of the planet with these principles, in his bookWorld Dynamics, which ended up an inspiration to the MIT reporters. And so, the “second cybernetics” was a key factor in establishing the principles applied in this restructuring of capitalism. With it, political economy became a life science. It analyzed the world as an open system for the transformation and circulation of energy flows and monetary flows.

In France, an ensemble of pseudo-savants — the eccentric de Rosnay and the blathering Morin, but also the mystic Henri Atlan, Henri Laborit, René Passet and the careerist Attali — all came together to elaborate, in MIT’s wake, Ten Commandments for a New Economy, an “eco-socialism,” as they called it, following a systematic, that is, cybernetic, approach, obsessed by the “state of equilibrium” everything and everyone. It is useful, a posteriori, when listening to today’s “left” and the “left of the left,” to remember certain of the principles de Rosnay posited in 1975:

Preserve the variety of spaces and cultures, bio-diversity and multi-culturality.

Beware not to open or allow leakage of the information contained in the regulation loops.

Re-establish the equilibrium of the system as a whole through decentralization.

Differentiate so as to better integrate, since as Teilhard de Chardin, the visionary in chief of all cyberneticians said, “all real integration is based on prior differentiation. …Homogeneity, mixture, syncretism: this is entropy. Only union within diversity is creative. It increases complexity, and brings about higher levels of organization.”

To evolve: let yourself be attacked.

Prefer objectives and projects to detailed programming.

Know how to utilize information.

Be able to keep constraints on the system elements.

It is no longer a matter — as PEOPLE could still pretend to believe in 1972 — of questioning capitalism and its devastating effects; it is more a question of “reorienting the economy so as to better serve human needs, the maintenance and evolution of the social system, and the pursuit of a real cooperation with nature all at once. The balanced economy that characterizes eco-society is thus a ‘regulated’ economy in the cybernetic sense of the term.” The first ideologues of cybernetic capitalism talked about opening a community-based management of capitalism from below, about making everyone responsible thanks to a “collective intelligence” which would result from the progress made in telecommunications and informatics. Without questioning either private property or State property, THEY invite us to co-management, to a kind of control of business by communities of wage-workers and users. The cybernetic reformist euphoria was at such extremes in the beginning of the 1970s that THEY could even evoke the idea of a “social capitalism” (as if that hadn’t been what we’ve had since the 19thcentury) without even trembling anymore, and defend it as did the architect ecologist and graphomaniac Yona Friedman, for instance. Thus what PEOPLE have ended up calling “third way socialism” and its alliance with ecology — and PEOPLE can clearly see how powerful the latter has become politically in Europe today — was crystallized. But if one had to refer to just one event that in those years exposed the torturous progress towards this new alliance between socialism and liberalism in France, not without the hope that something different would come out of it, it would have to be the LIP affair. With those events all of socialism, even in its most radical currents, like “council communism,” failed to take down the liberal arrangement and, without properly suffering any real defeat to speak of, ended up simply absorbed by cybernetic capitalism. The recent adherence of the ecologist Cohn-Bendit — the mild-mannered ‘leader’ of the May 68 events — to the liberal-libertarian current is but a logical consequence of a deeper reversal of “socialist” ideas against themselves.

The present “anti-globalization” movement and citizen protest in general show no break with this training by pronouncements made thirty years ago. They simply demand that it be put into place faster. Behind the thundering counter-summits they hold, one can see the same cold vision of society as a totality threatened by break-up, one and the same goal of social regulation. For them it is a matter of restoring the social coherence pulverized by the dynamics of cybernetic capitalism, andguaranteeing, in the final analysis, everyone’s participation in the latter. Thus it is not surprising to see the driest economism impregnate the ranks of the citizens in such a tenacious and nauseating manner. The citizen, dispossessed of everything, parades as an amateur expert in social management, and conceives of the nothingness of his life as an uninterrupted succession of “projects” to carry out: as the sociologist Luc Boltanski remarks, with a feigned naiveté, “everything can attain to the dignity of a project, including enterprises which may be hostile to capitalism.” In the same way as the “self-management” device was seminal in the reorganization of capitalism thirty years ago, citizen protest is none other than the present instrument of the modernization of politics. This new “process of civilization” rests on the critique of authority developed in the 1970s, at the moment when the second cybernetics crystallized. The critique of political representation as separate power, already co-opted by the new Management into the economic production sphere, is today reinvested into the political sphere. Everywhere there is only horizontality of relations, and participation in projects that are to replace the dusty old hierarchical and bureaucratic authority, counter-power and decentralization that is supposed to defeat monopolies and secrecy. Thus the chains of social interdependence can extend and tighten, chains which are sometimes made of surveillance, and sometimes of delegation. Integration of civil society by the State, and integration of the State by civil society more and more work together like gears. It is thus that the division of the labor of population management necessary for the dynamics of cybernetic capitalism is organized — and the affirmation of a “global citizenship” will, predictably, put the finishing touches on it.

After the 1970s socialism was just another democratism anymore, now completely necessary for the progress of the cybernetic hypothesis. The ideal of direct democracy and participatory democracy must be seen as the desire for a general expropriation by the cybernetic system of all the information contained in its parts. The demand for transparency and traceability is but a demand for the perfect circulation of information, a progressivism in the logic of flux that rules cybernetic capitalism. Between 1965 and 1970, a young German philosopher, presumed to be the inheritor of “critical theory,” laid the foundations for the democratic paradigm of today’s contestation by entering noisily into a number of controversies with his elders. Habermas countered the socio-cybernetician Niklas Luhmann, hyper-functionalist systems theoretician, by counterposing the unpredictability of dialogue, arguments irreducible to simple information exchanges. But it was above all against Marcuse that this project of a generalized “ethics of discussion” which was to become radicalized in the critique of the democratic project of the Renaissance. Marcuse explained, commenting on Max Weber’s observations, that “rationalization” meant that technical reasoning, based on the principles of industrialization and capitalism, was indissolublypolitical reasoning; Habermas retorted that an ensemble of immediate intersubjective relations escaped technology-mediated subject-object relations, and that in the end it was the former that framed and guided the latter. In other words, in light of the development of the cybernetic hypothesis, politics should aim to become autonomous and to extend the sphere of discourse, to multiply democratic arenas, to build and research a consensus which in sum would be emancipatory by nature. Aside from the fact that he reduced the “lived world” and “everyday life” — the whole of what escaped the control machine, to social interactions and discourses, Habermas more profoundly ignored the fundamental heterogeneity of forms-of-life among themselves. In the same way as contracts, consensus is attached to the objective of unification and pacification via the management of differences. In the cybernetic framework, all faith in “communicational action,” all communication that does not assume the possibility of its impossibility, ends up serving control. This is why science and technology are not, as the idealist Habermas thought, simply ideologies which dress the concrete tissue of inter-subjective relations. They are “ideologies materialized,” a cascade of devices, a concrete government-mentality that passes through such relations. We do not want more transparency or more democracy. There’s already enough. On the contrary — we want more opacity and more intensity.

But we can’t be done dealing with socialism (expired now as a result of the cybernetic hypothesis) without mentioning another voice: I want to talk about the critique centered around man-machine relations that has attacked what it sees as the core of the cybernetics issue by posing the question of technology beyond technophobia — the technophobia of someone like Theodore Kaczynski, or of Oregon’s monkey-man of letters, John Zerzan — and technophilia, and which intended to found a new radical ecology which would not be stupidly romantic. In the economic crisis of the 1970s, Ivan Illich was among the first to express the hope for a re-establishment of social practices, no longer merely through a new relations between subjects, as Habermas had discussed, but also between subjects and objects, via a “reappropriation of tools” and institutions, which were to be won over to the side of general “conviviality,” a conviviality which would be able to undermine the law of value. Simondon, philosopher of technology, used this same reappropriation as his vaulting stick to transcend Marx and Marxism: “work possesses the intelligence of the elements; capital possesses the intelligence of groups; but it is not by uniting the intelligence of elements and of groups that one can come up with an intelligence of the intermediary and non-mixed being that is the technological individual… The dialogue of capital and labor is false, because it is in the past. The socialization of the means of production cannot alone give rise to a reduction in alienation; it can only do so if it is the prior condition for the acquisition, on the part of the human individual, of the intelligence of the individuated technological object. This relationship of the human individual to the technological individual is the most difficult to form and the most delicate.” The solution to the problem of political economy, of capitalist alienation, and of cybernetics, was supposed to be found in the invention of a new kind of relationship with machines, a “technological culture” that up to now had been lacking in western modernity. Such a doctrine justified, thirty years later, the massive development of “citizen” teaching in science and technology. Because living beings, contrary to the cybernetic hypothesis’ idea, are essentially different from machines, mankind would thus have the responsibility to represent technological objects: “mankind, as the witness of the machines,” wrote Simondon, “is responsible for their relationship; the individual machine represents man, but man represents the ensemble of machines, since there is no one machine for all the machines, whereas there can be a kind of thinking that would cover them all.” In its present utopian form, seen in the writings of Guattari at the end of his life, or today in the writings of Bruno Latour, this school claimed to “make objects speak”, and to represent their norms in the public arena through a “parliament of Things.” Eventually the technocrats would make way for the “mechanologues,” and other “medialogues”; it’s hard to see how these would differ from today’s technocrats, except for that they would be even more familiar with technological life, citizens more ideally coupled with their devices. What the utopians pretended not to know was that the integration of technological thinking by everybody would in no way undermine the existing power relations. The acknowledgement of the man-machines hybridity in social arrangements would certainly do no more than extend the struggle for recognition and the tyranny of transparency to the inanimate world. In this renovated political ecology, socialism and cybernetics would attain to their point of optimal convergence: the project of a green republic, a technological democracy — “a renovation of democracy could have as its objective a pluralistic management of the whole of the machinic constituents,” wrote Guattari in the last text he ever published — the lethal vision of a definitive civil peace between humans and non-humans.

VI

“Just like modernization did in a prior era, today’s post-modernization (or informatization) marks a new way of becoming human. Regarding the production of souls, as Musil put it, one would really have to replace the traditional technology of industrial machines with the cybernetic intelligence of information and communications technologies. We will need to invent what Pierre Levy has called an ‘anthropology of cyberspace.’” Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Empire, 1999.

“Communication is the fundamental ‘third way’ of imperial control… Contemporary communications systems are not subordinate to sovereignty; on the contrary, it is sovereignty that appears to be subordinate to communications… Communication is the form of capitalist production in which capital has succeeded in entirely and globally subjugating society to its regime, suppressing all the possible ways of replacing it.” Michael Hardt & Toni Negri, Empire, 1999.

The cybernetic utopia has not only sucked all the blood out of socialism and its force as an opposition by making it into a “proximity democratism.” In the confusion-laden 1970s, it also contaminated the most advanced Marxism, making its perspective inoffensive and untenable. “Everywhere,” wrote Lyotard in 1979, “in every way, the Critique of political economy and the critique of the alienated society that was its corollary are used as elements in the programming of the system.” Faced with the unifying cybernetic hypothesis, the abstract axioms of potentially revolutionary antagonisms — class struggle, “human community” (Gemeinwesen) or “social living” versus Capital, general intellect versus the process of exploitation, “multitudes” versus “Empire,” “creativity” or “virtuosity” versus work, “social wealth” versus commodity value, etc. — definitively serve the political project of a broader social integration. The critique of political economy and ecology do not critique the economic style proper to capitalism, nor the totalizing and systemic vision proper to cybernetics; paradoxically, they even make them into the engines driving their emancipatory philosophies of history. Their teleology is no longer that of the proletariat or of nature, but that of Capital. Today their perspective is, deeply, one of social economy, of a “solidarity economy,” of a “transformation of the mode of production,” no longer via the socialization or nationalization of the means of production but via a socialization of the decisions of production. As writers like for example Yann Moulier Boutang put it, it is in the end a matter of making recognized the “collective social character of the creation of wealth,” that the profession of living as a citizen be valorized. This pretend communism is reduced to no more than an economic democratism, to a project to reconstruct a “post-Fordist” State from below. Social cooperation is presented as if it were a pre-ordained given, with no ethical incommensurability and no interference in the circulation of emotions, no community problems.

Toni Negri’s career within the Autonomia group, and the nebula of his disciples in France and in the anglo world, show just how much Marxism could authorize such a slippery slide towards the will to will, towards “infinite mobilization,” sealing its unavoidable eventual defeat by the cybernetic hypothesis. The latter has had no problem plugging itself into the metaphysics of production that runs throughout Marxism and which Negri pushed to the extreme by considering all affects, all emotions, all communications — in the final analysis — as labor. From this point of view, autopoïesis, self-production, self-organization, and autonomy are categories which all play a homologous role in the distinct discursive formations they emerged from. The demands inspired by this critique of political economy, such as the demand for a guaranteed minimum income and the demand for “citizenship papers for all” merely attack, fundamentally, the sphere of production. If certain people among those who today demand a guaranteed income have been able to break with the perspective of putting everyone to work — that is, the belief in work as a fundamental value — which formerly still had predominance in the unemployed workers’ movements, it was only on condition — paradoxically — that they’d be able to keep the restrictive definition of value they had inherited, as “labor value.” Thus they were able to ignore just how much they contributed, in the end, to the circulation of goods and persons.

It is precisely because valorization is no longer assignable to what takes place solely in the production sphere that we must now displace political gestures — I’m thinking of normal union strikes, for example, not even to mention general strikes — into the spheres of product and information circulation. Who doesn’t understand by now that the demand for “citizenship papers for all” — if it is satisfied — will only contribute to a greater mobility of the labor force worldwide? Even American liberal thinkers have understood that. As for the guaranteed minimum income, if that were obtained, would it not simply put one more supplementary source of income into the circuit of value? It would just represent a formal equivalent of the system’s investment in its “human capital” — just another loan in anticipation of future production. Within the framework of the present restructuring of capitalism, the demand for a guaranteed minimum income could be compared to a neo-Keynesian proposal to relaunch “effective demand” which could serve as a safety net for the hoped-for development of the “New Economy.” Such reasoning is also behind the adherence of many economists to the idea of a “universal income” or a “citizenship income.” What would justify such a thing, even from the perspective of Negri and his faithful flock, is a social debt contractedby capitalism towards the “multitudes.” When I said, above, that Negri’s Marxism had in the end operated, like all other Marxisms, on the basis of an abstract axiom concerning social antagonism, it’s only because it has a concrete need for the fiction of a united social body. In the days when he was most on the offense, such as the days he spent in France during the unemployed workers’ movement of winter 1997–1998, his perspectives were focused on laying the foundation for a new social contract, which he’d call communist. Within classical politics, then, Negriism was already playing the avant-garde role of the ecologist movements.

So as to rediscover the intellectual circumstances explaining this blind faith in the social body, seen as a possible subject and object of a contract, as an ensemble of equivalent elements, as a homogeneous class, as an organic body, one would need to go back to the end of the 1950s, when the progressive decomposition of the working class in western societies disturbed marxist theoreticians since it overturned the axiom of class struggle. Some of them thought that they could find in Marx’sGrundrisse a demonstration, a prefiguring of what capitalism and its proletariat were becoming. In his fragment on machines, Marx envisaged that when industrialization was in full swing, individual labor power would be able to cease being the primary source of surplus value, since “the general social understandings, knowledge” would become the most immediate of productive powers. This kind of capitalism, which PEOPLE call “cognitive” today, would no longer be contested by a proletariat borne of large-scale manufacturing. Marx supposed that such contestation would be carried out by the “social individual.” He clarified the reasoning behind this unavoidable process of reversal: “Capital sets in motion all the forces of science and nature; it stimulates cooperation and social commerce so as to liberate (relatively speaking) the creation of wealth from labor time… These are the material conditions that will break up the foundations of capital.” The contradiction of the system, its catastrophic antagonism, came from the fact that Capital measures all value by labor time, while simultaneously diminishing it because of the productivity gains granted it by automation. Capitalism is doomed, in sum, because it demands — at the same time — more labor and less labor. The responses to the economic crisis of the 1970s, the cycle of struggles which in Italy lasted more than ten years, gave an unexpected blow of the whip to this teleology. The utopia of a world where machines would work instead of us appeared to be within reach. Creativity, the social individual, the general intellect - student youth, cultivated dropouts, intangible laborers, etc. — detached from the relations of exploitation, would be the new subject of the coming communism. For some, such as Negri or Castoriadis, but also for the situationists, this meant that the new revolutionary subject would reappropriate its “creativity,” or its “imagination,” which had been confiscated by labor relations, and would make non-labor time into a new source of self and collective emancipation. Autonomia was founded as a political movement on the basis of such analyses.

In 1973, Lyotard, who for a long while had associated with Castoriadis within the Socialism or Barbarism group, noted the lack of differentiation between this new marxist, or post-marxist, discourse and the discourse of the new political economy: “The body of machines which you call a social subject and the universal productive force of man is none other than the body of modern Capital. The knowledge in play within it is in no way proper to all individuals; it is separate knowledge, a moment in the metamorphosis of capital, obeying it as much as it governs it at the same time.” The ethical problem that is posed by putting one’s hopes in collective intelligence, which today is found in the utopias of the autonomous collective use of communications networks, is as follows: “we cannot decide that the primary role of knowledge is as an indispensable element in the functioning of society and to act, consequently, in place of it, if we have already decided that the latter is itself just a big machine. Inversely, we can’t count on its critical function and imagine that we could orient its development and spread in such a direction if we’ve already decided that it is not an integral whole and that it remains haunted by a principle of contestation.” By conjugating the two nevertheless irreconcilable terms of such an alternative, the ensemble of heterogeneous positions of which we have found the womb in the discourse of Toni Negri and his adepts (which represents the point of completion of the marxist tradition and its metaphysics) is doomed to restless political wandering, in the absence of any destination other than whatever destination domination may set for it. The essential issue here — an issue which seduces many an intellectual novice — is that such knowledge is never power, that this understanding is never self-understanding, and that such intelligence always remains separate from experience. The political trajectory of Negriism is towards a formalization of the informal, towards rendering the implicit explicit, making the tacit obvious, and in brief, towards valorizing everything that is outside of value. And in effect, Yann Moulier Boutang, Negri’s loyal dog, ended up dropping the following tidbit in 2000, in an idiotic cocaine-addict’s unreal rasp: “capitalism, in its new phase, or its final frontier, needs the communism of the multitudes.” Negri’s neutral communism, the mobilization that it stipulates, is not only compatible with cybernetic capitalism — it is now the condition for its effectuation.

Once the propositions in the MIT Report had been fully digested, the “growth” economists highlighted the primordial role to be played by creativity and technological innovation — next to the factors of Labor and Capital — in the production of surplus value. And other experts, equally well informed, learnedly affirmed that the propensity to innovate depended on the degree of education, training, health, of populations — after Gary Becker, the most radical of the economicists, PEOPLE would call this “human capital” — and on the complementarity between economic agents (a complementarity that could be favored by putting in place a regular circulation of information through communications networks), as well as on the complementarity between activity and environment, the living human being and the non-human living thing. What explains the crisis of the 1970s is that there was a whole cognitive and natural social base for the maintenance of capitalism and its development which had up to that time been neglected. Deeper still, this meant that non-labor time, the ensemble of moments that fall outside the circuits of commodity valorization — that is, everyday life — are also a factor in growth, and contain a potential value insofar as they permit the maintenance of Capital’s human base. PEOPLE, since then, have seen armies of experts recommending to businesses that they apply cybernetic solutions to their organization of production: the development of telecommunications, organization in networks, “participatory” or project-based management, consumer panels, quality controls — all these were to contribute to upping rates of profit. For those who wanted to get out of the crisis of the 1970s without questioning capitalism, to “relaunch growth” and not stop it up anymore, would consequently need to work on a profound reorganization of it, towards democratizing economic choices and giving institutional support to non-work (life) time, like in the demand for “freeness” for example. It is only in this way that PEOPLE can affirm, today, that the “new spirit of capitalism” inherits the social critique of the years 1960–1970: to the exact extent that the cybernetic hypothesis inspired the mode of social regulation that was emerging then.

It is thus hardly surprising that communications, the realization of a common ownership of impotent knowledge that cybernetics carries out, today authorizes the most advanced ideologues to speak of “cybernetic communism,” as have Dan Sperber or Pierre Levy — the cybernetician-in-chief of the French speaking world, collaborator on the magazine Multitudes, and author of the aphorism, “cosmic and cultural evolution culminate today in the virtual world of cyberspace.” “Socialists and communists,” write Hardt and Negri, have for a long time been demanding free access and control for the proletariat over the machines and materials it uses to produce. However, in the context of intangible and biopolitical production, this traditional demand takes on a new aspect. Not only do the masses use machines to produce, the masses themselves become more and more mechanical, and the means of production more and more integrated into the bodies and minds of the masses. In this context, reappropriation means attaining free access to (and control over) knowledge, information, communication, and feelings/emotions, since those are some of the primary means of biopolitical production.” In this communism, they marvel, PEOPLE wouldn’t share wealth, they’d share information, and everybody would be simultaneously a producer and consumer. Everyone will become their own “self-media”! Communism will be a communism of robots!

Whether it merely breaks with the individualist premises about economy or whether it considers the commodity economy as a regional component of a more general economy — which is what’s implied in all the discussions about the notion of value, such as those carried out by the German group Krisis, all the defenses of gift against exchange inspired by Mauss, and ‘the anti-cybernetic energetics of someone like Bataille, as well as all the considerations on the Symbolic, whether made by Bourdieu or Baudrillard — the critique of political economy, in fine, remains dependent on economicism. In a health-through-activity perspective, the absence of a workers’ movement corresponding to the revolutionary proletariat imagined by Marx was to be dealt with by the militant labor of organizing one. “The Party,” wrote Lyotard, “must furnish proof that the proletariat is real and it cannot do so any more than one can furnish proof of an ideal of thought. It can only supply its own existence as a proof, and carry out a realistic politics. The reference point of its discourse remains directly unpresentable, non-ostensible. The repressed disagreement has to do with the interior of the workers’ movement, in particular with the form taken by recurring conflicts on the organization question.” The search for a fighting class of producers makes the Marxists the most consequential of the producers of an integrated class. It is not an irrelevant matter, in existential and strategic terms, to enter into political conflict rather than producing social antagonism, to be a contradictor within the system or to be a regulator within it, to create instead of wishing that creativity would be freed, to desire instead of desiring desire — in brief, to fight cybernetics, instead of being a critical cybernetician.

Full of a sad passion for one’s roots, one might seek the premises for this alliance in historical socialism, whether in Saint-Simon’s philosophy of networks, in Fourier’s theory of equilibrium, or in Proudhon’s mutualism, etc. But what the socialists all have in common, and have for two centuries, which they share with those among them who have declared themselves to be communists, is that they fight against only one of the effects of capitalism alone: in all its forms, socialism fights against separation, by recreating the social bonds between subjects, between subjects and objects, without fighting against the totalization that makes it possible for the social to be assimilated into a body, and the individual into a closed totality, a subject-body. But there is also another common terrain, a mystical one, on the basis of which the transfer of the categories of thought within socialism and cybernetics have been able to form an alliance: that of a shameful humanism, an uncontrolledfaith in the genius of humanity. Just as it is ridiculous to see a “collective soul” in the construction of a beehive by the erratic behavior of bees, as the writer Maeterlinck did at the beginning of the century from a Catholic perspective, in the same way the maintenance of capitalism is in no way dependent upon the existence of a collective consciousness in the “masses” lodged within the heart of production. Under cover of the axiom of class struggle, the historical socialist utopia, the utopia ofthe community, was definitively a utopia of One promulgated by the Head on a body that couldn’t be one. All socialism today — whether it more or less explicitly categorizes itself as democracy-, production-, or social contract-focused — takes sides with cybernetics. Non-citizen politics must come to terms with itself as anti-social as much as anti-state; it must refuse to contribute to the resolution of the “social question,” refuse the formatting of the world as a series of problems, and reject the democratic perspective structured by the acceptance of all of society’s requests. As for cybernetics, it is today no more than the last possible socialism.

VII

“Theory means getting off on immobilization… What gives you theoreticians a hard on and puts you on the level with our gang is the coldness of the clear and the distinct; of the distinct alone, in fact; the opposable, because the clear is but a dubious redundancy of the distinct, expressed via a philosophy of the subject. Stop raising the bar, you say! Escaping pathos — that’s your pathos.” Jean-François Lyotard, Libidinal Economy, 1975

When you’re a writer, poet or philosopher it’s customary to talk about the power of the Word to hinder, foil, and pierce the informational flows of the Empire, the binary enunciation machines. You’ve heard the eulogists of poetry clamoring that they’re the last rampart against the barbarism of communication. Even when he identifies his position with that of the minor literatures, the eccentrics, the “literary lunatics,” when he hunts down the idiolects that belabor their tongues to demonstrate what escapes the code, so as to implode the idea of comprehension itself, to expose the fundamental misunderstanding that defeats the tyranny of information, the author who knows himself to be acted through, spoken through, and traveled through by burning intensities, is for all that no less animated, when seated before his blank page, by a prophetic concept of wording. For me, as a “receiver,” the shock effect that certain writings have deliberately dedicated themselves to the quest for starting in the 1960s are in this sense no less paralyzing than the old categorical and sententious critical theory was. Watching from my easy chair as Guyotat or Guattari get off on each line, contorting, burping, farting, and vomiting out their delirium-future makes me get it up, moan, and get off only very rarely; that is, only when some desire sweeps me away to the shores of voyeurism. Performances, surely, but performances of what? Performances of a boarding school alchemy where the philosopher’s stone is hunted down amid mixed sprays of ink and cum. Proclaiming intensity does not suffice to engender thepassage of intensity. As for theory and critique, they remain cloistered in a typeface of clear and distinct pronouncements, as transparent as the passage ought to be from “false consciousness” to clarified consciousness.

Far from giving into some mythology of the Word or an essentialization of meaning, Burroughs, in his Electronic Revolutionproposed forms of struggle against the controlled circulation of pronouncements, offensive strategies of enunciation that came to light in his “mental manipulation” operations that were inspired by his “cut-up” experiments, a combination of pronouncements based on randomness. By proposing to make “interference/fog” into a revolutionary weapon, he undeniably introduced a new level of sophistication to all prior research into offensive language. But like the situationist practice of “detournement”/media-hijacking, which in its modus operandi is in no way distinguishable from “recuperation”/co-optation — which explains its spectacular fortune — “interference/fog” is merely a relative operation. This is also true for the contemporary forms of struggle on the Internet which are inspired by these instructions of Burroughs’: piracy, virus propagation, spamming… all these can in fine only serve to temporarily destabilize the operation of the communications network. But as regards the matter we are dealing with here and now, Burroughs was forced to agree, in terms inherited — certainly — from theories of communication that hypostatized the issuer-receiver relationship: “it would be more useful to try to discover how the models of exploration could be altered so as to permit the subject to liberate his own spontaneous models.” What’s at issue in any enunciation is not whether it’s received but whether it can become contagious. I callinsinuation — the illapsus, according to medieval philosophy — a strategy consisting in following the twists and turns of thought, the wandering words that win me over while at the same time constituting the vague terrain where their reception will establish itself. By playing on the relationship of the sign to what it refers to, by using clichés against themselves, like in caricatures, by letting the reader come closer, insinuation makes possible an encounter, an intimate presence, between the subject of the pronouncement and those who relate to the pronouncement itself. “There are passwords hidden under slogans,” write Deleuze and Guattari, “words that are pronounced as if in passing, components of a passage; whereas slogans mark points of stoppage, stratified and organized compositions.” Insinuation is the haze of theory and suits a discourse whose objective is to permit struggles against the worship of transparency, attached at its very roots to the cybernetic hypothesis.

That the cybernetic vision of the world is an abstract machine, a mystical fable, a cold eloquence which continually escapes multiple bodies, gestures, words — all this isn’t enough to conclude its unavoidable defeat. What cybernetics needs in that regard is precisely the same thing that maintains it: the pleasure of extreme rationalization, the burn-scars of “tautism” [tautological autism], the passion for reduction, the orgasm of binary flattening. Attacking the cybernetic hypothesis — it must be repeated — doesn’t mean just critiquing it, and counterposing a concurrent vision of the social world; it means experimenting alongside it, actuating other protocols, redesigning them from scratch and enjoying them. Starting in the 1950s, the cybernetic hypothesis has been the secret fascination of a whole generation of “critical” thinkers, from the situationists to Castoriadis, from Lyotard to Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. One might map their responses in this way: these first opposed it by developing their thought process outside it, overhanging it, and these second by thinking within the heart of it, on the one hand “a metaphysical type of disagreement with the world, which focuses on super-terrestrial, transcendent worlds or utopian counter-worlds” and on the other hand “a poïetic type of disagreement with the world, which sees the path to freedom within the Real itself,” as Peter Sloterdijk summarizes. The success of all future revolutionary experimentation will essentially be measured by its capacity to make this conflict obsolete. This begins when bodies change scale, feel themselves deepen, are passed through by molecular phenomena escaping systemic points of view, escaping representations of their molarity, make each of their pores into a seeing machine clinging to the temporal evolutions of things instead of a camera, which frames, delimits, and assigns beings. In the lines that follow I will insinuate a protocol for experimentation, in an attempt to defeat the cybernetic hypothesis and undo the world it perseveringly persists in constructing. But like for other erotic or strategic arts, its use isn’t something that is decided on nor something that imposes itself. It can only originate in something totally involuntary, which implies, of course, a certain casual manner.

VIII

“We also lack that generosity, that indifference to fate, which, if it doesn’t give any great joy, does give one a familiarity with the worst of degradations, and will be granted us by the world to come.” Roger Caillois

“The Imaginary pays an ever higher price for its strength, while from beyond its screen the possible Real shines through. What we have today, doubtless, is but the domination of the Imaginary, having made itself totalitarian. But this is precisely its dialectical and ‘natural’ limit. Either, even desire itself and its subject, the process of attaining corporeality of the latent Gemeinwesen, will be burnt away at the final stake, or all simulacra will be dispelled: the extreme struggle of the species rages on against the managers of alienation and, in the bloody sunset of all these ‘suns of the future’ a truly possible future will at last begin to dawn. Mankind, in order to truly Be, now only needs to make a definitive break with all ‘concrete utopias.” Giorgio Cesarano, Survival Manual, 1975

All individuals, groups, all lifestyles/forms-of-life, cannot fit into the feedback loop. There are some that are just too fragile. That threaten to snap. And there are some that are just too strong… that threaten to break shit.

These temporal evolutions, as an instance of breakage, suppose that at a given moment of lived experience, bodies go through the acute feeling that it can all abruptly come to an end, from one moment to the next, that the nothingness, that silence, that death are suddenly within reach of bodies and gestures. It can end. The threat.

Defeating the process of cybernetization, toppling the empire, will take place through opening up a breach for panic. Because the Empire is an ensemble of devices that aim to ward off all events, a process of control and rationalization, its fall will be perceived by its agents and its control apparatus as the most irrational of phenomena. The lines that follow here give a cursory view of what such a cybernetic view of panic might be, and indicate a contrario its effective power: “panic is thus aninefficient collective behavior because it is not properly adapted for danger (real or supposed); it is characterized by the regression of mentalities to an archaic, gregarious level, and gives rise to primitive, desperate flight reactions, disordered agitation, physical violence, and general acts of self- or hetero-aggressivity: panic reactions show the characteristics of the collective soul in a altered state of perception and judgment; alignment on the basis of the most unsophisticated behaviors; suggestibility; participation in violence without any idea of individual responsibility.”

Panic makes the cyberneticians panic. It represents absolute risk, the permanent potential threat that the intensification of relations between lifestyles/forms-of-life presents. Because of this, it should be made as terrifying as the appointed cybernetician himself endeavors to show it being: “panic is dangerous for populations; it increases the number of victims resulting from an accident by causing inappropriate flight reactions, which may indeed be the only real reason for deaths and injuries; every time it’s the same scenario: acts of blind rage, trampling, crushing…” the lie in that description of course is that it imagines panic phenomena exclusively from a sealed environment: as a liberation of bodies, panic self-destructs because everyone tries to get out through an exit that’s too narrow.

But it is possible to envision that there could be, as happened in Genoa in July 2001, panic to a degree sufficient to fuck up the cybernetic programming and pass through various social groups/milieus, panic that would go beyond the annihilation stage, as Canetti suggests in Mass and Power : “If we weren’t in a theater we could all run away together like a flock of threatened animals, and increase the energy of our escape with our movement in the same direction. An active mass fear of this kind is the great collective event lived by all herd animals and who save themselves together because they are good runners.” In this sense I see as political fact of the greatest importance the panic involving more than a million persons that Orson Welles provoked in 1938 when he made his announcement over the airwaves in New Jersey, at a time when radiophonics were still in early enough a state that people gave its broadcasts a certain truth value. Because “the more we fight for our own lives the more it becomes obvious that we are fighting against the others hemming us in on all sides,” and alongside an unheard of and uncontrollable expenditure, panic also reveals the naked civil war going on: it is “a disintegration of the mass within the mass.”

In panic situations, communities break off from the social body, designed as a totality, and attempt to escape it. But since they are still physically and socially captive to it, they are obliged to attack it. Panic shows, more than any other phenomenon, the plural and non-organic body of the species. Sloterdijk, that last man of philosophy, extends this positive concept of panic: “from a historical perspective, the fringe elements are probably the first to develop a non hysterical relationship with the possible apocalypse. …Today’s fringe consciousness is characterize by something that might be called a pragmatic relationship with catastrophe.” To the question: “doesn’t civilization have as a precondition the absence or even exclusion of the panic element, to the extent that it must be built on the basis of expectations, repetitions, security and institutions?” Sloterdijk counters that “it is only thanks to the proximity of panic experiences that living civilizations are possible.” They can thus ward off the potential catastrophes of the era by rediscovering a primordial familiarity with them. They offer the possibility of converting these energies into “a rational ecstasy through which the individual opens up to the intuitive idea: ‘I am the world’.” What really busts the levees and turns panic in into a positive potential charge, a confused intuition (in con-fusion) of its transcendence, is that each person, when in a panic situation, is like the living foundation of his own crisis, instead of undergoing it like some kind of exterior inevitability. The quest after active panic — the “panic experience of the world” — is thus a technique for assuming the risk of disintegration that each person represents for society, as a risk dividual. It is the end of hope and of all concrete utopias, forming like a bridge crossing over to a state of waiting for/expecting nothing anymore, of having nothing more to lose. And this is a way of reintroducing — through a particular sensibility to the possibilities of lived situations, to their possibilities of collapse, to the extreme fragility of their organization — a serene relationship with the flight forward movement of cybernetic capitalism. In the twilight of nihilism, fear must become as extravagant as hope.

Within the framework of the cybernetic hypothesis, panic is understood as a status change in the self-regulating system. For a cybernetician, any disorder can only come from there having been a discrepancy between the pre-set behaviors and the real behaviors of the system’s elements. A behavior that escapes control while remaining indifferent to the system is called “noise,” which consequently cannot be handled by a binary machine, reduced to a 0 or a 1. Such noises are the lines of flight, the wanderings of desires that have still not gone back into the valorization circuit, the non-enrolled. What we call “the Imaginary Party” is the heterogeneous ensemble of noises which proliferate beneath the Empire, without however reversing its unstable equilibrium, without modifying its state, solitude for instance being the most widespread form of these passages to the side of the Imaginary Party. Wiener, when he laid the foundation for the cybernetic hypothesis, imagined the existence of systems — called “closed reverberating circuits” — where the discrepancies between the behaviors desired by the whole and the real behaviors of those elements would proliferate. He envisaged that these noises could then brutally increase in series, like when a driver/pilot’s panicked reactions make him wreck his vehicle after he’s driven onto an icy road or hit a slippery spot on the highway. The overproduction of bad feedbacks that distort what they’re supposed to signal and amplify what they’re supposed to contain — such situations point the way to a pure reverberatory power. The present practice of bombarding certain nodal points on the Internet network with information — spamming — aims to produce such situations. All revolt under and against Empire can only be conceived in starting to amplify such “noises,” capable of comprising what Prigogine and Stengers — who here call up an analogy between the physical world and the social world — have called “bifurcation points,” critical thresholds from which a new system status becomes possible.

The shared error of Marx and Bataille with all their categories of “labor power” or “expenditure” was to have situated the power to overturn the system outside of the circulation of commodity flows, in a pre-systemic exteriority set before and after capitalism, in nature for the one, and in a founding sacrifice for the other, which were the springboards from which one could think through the endless metamorphosis of the capitalist system. In issue number one of the Great Game [Le Grand Jeu], the problem of equilibrium-rupture is posed in more immanent, if still somewhat ambiguous, terms: “This force that exists, cannot remain unemployed in a cosmos which is full like an egg and within which everything acts on and reacts to everything. So then there must be some kind of trigger or lever that will suddenly turn the course of this current of violence in another direction. Or rather in a parallel direction, but on another plane thanks to a sudden shift. Its revolt must become the Invisible Revolt.” It is not simply a matter of the “invisible insurrection of a million minds” as the celestial Trocchi put it. The force that we call ecstatic politics does not come from any substantial outsideness, but from the discrepancy, the small variation, the whirling motion that, moving outward starting from the interior of the system, push it locally to its breaking point and thus pull up in it the intensities that still pass between the various lifestyles/forms-of-life, in spite of the attenuation of intensities that those lifestyles effectuate. To put it more precisely, ecstatic politics comes from desires that exceed the flux insofar as the flux nourishes them without their being trackable therein, where desires pass beneath the tracking radar, and occasionally establish themselves, instantiating themselves among lifestyles that in a given situation are playing the role of attractors. It is known that it is in the nature of desire to leave no trace wherever it goes. Let’s go back to that moment when a system at equilibrium can topple: “in proximity to bifurcation points,” write Prigogine and Stengers, “where the system has a ‘choice’ between two operating regimes/modes, and is, in proper terms, neither in the one nor the other, deviation from the general law is total: the fluctuations can attain to the same heights of grandeur that the average macroscopic values can… Regions separated by macroscopic distances correlate together: the speed of the reactions produced there regulate one another, and local events thus reverberate through the whole system. This is when we truly see a paradoxical state, which defies all our ‘intuition’ regarding the behavior of populations, a state where the smallest differences, far from canceling each other out, succeed one another and propagate incessantly. The indifferent chaos of equilibrium is thus replaced by a creative chaos, as was evoked by the ancients, a fecund chaos from which different structures can arise.”

It would be naive to directly deduce, in this scientific description of the potential for disorder, a new political art. The error of the philosophers and of all thought that deploys itself without recognizing in itself, in its very pronouncement, what it owes to desire, is that it situates itself artificially above the processes that it is aiming to discuss, even when it is based on experience; something Prigogne and Stengers are not themselves immune to, by the way. Experimentation, which does not consist in completed experiences but in the process of completing them, is located within fluctuation, in the heart of the noise, lying in wait for the bifurcation. The events that take place within the social, on a level significant enough to influence fates in general, are comprised of more than just a simple sum of individual behaviors. Inversely, individual behaviors can no longer have, alone, an influence on fates in general. There remain, however, three stages, which are really one, and which, even though they are not represented, are felt by bodies anyway as immediately political problems: I’m talking about the amplification of non-conforming acts, the intensification of desires and their rhythmic accord; the arrangement of territory, even if “fluctuations cannot invade the whole system all at once. They must first take place within a particular region. Depending on whether this initial region has smaller than critical dimensions or not… the fluctuation will either regress, or, contrarily, it will invade and overtake the whole system.” So there are three questions, then, which require investigation in view of an offensive against the Empire: a question of force, a question of rhythm, and a question of momentum.

IX

“That’s what generalized programs sharpen their teeth on; on little bits of people, on little bits of men who don’t want any program.” Philippe Carles, Jean-Louis Comolli, “Free Jazz: Out of Program, Out of Subject, in Out Field”, 2000

“The few active rebels should have the qualities of speed and endurance, be ubiquitous, and have independent sources of provisions.” T.E. Lawrence, “Guerrilla” Encyclopedia Britannica, Volume X, 1926

These questions, seen from the neutralized and neutralizing perspective of the laboratory observer or of the chat-room/salon, must be reexamined in themselves, and tested out. Amplifying the fluctuations: what’s that mean to me? How can deviance, mine for example, give rise to disorder? How do we go from sparse, singular fluctuations, the discrepancies between each individual and the norm, each person and the devices, to futures and to destinies? How can what capitalism routs, what escapes valorization, become a force and turn against it? Classical politics resolved this problem with mobilization. To Mobilize meant to add, to aggregate, to assemble, to synthesize. It meant to unify little differences and fluctuations by subjecting them to a great crime, an un-rectifiable injustice, that nevertheless must be rectified. Singularities were already there. They only had to be subsumed into a unique predicate. Energy was also already there. It just needed to be organized. I’ll be the head, they’ll be the body. And so the theoretician, the avant-garde, the party, have made that force operate in the same way as capitalism did, by putting it into circulation and control in order to seize the enemy’s heart and take power by taking off its head, like in classical war.

The invisible revolt, the “coup-du-monde” [world coup] that Trocchi talked about, on the contrary, plays on potential. It is invisible because it is unpredictable in the eyes of the imperial system. Amplified, the fluctuations relative to the imperial devices never aggregate together. They are as heterogeneous as desires are, and can never form a closed totality; they can’t even form into a “masses,” which name itself is just an illusion if it doesn’t mean an irreconcilable multiplicity of lifestyles/forms-of-life. Desires flee; they either reach a clinamen or not, they either produce intensity or not, and even beyond flight they continue to flee. They get restive under any kind of representation, as bodies, class, or party. It must thus be deduced from this that all propagation of fluctuations will also be a propagation of civil war. Diffuse guerrilla action is the form of struggle that will produce such invisibility in the eyes of the enemy. The recourse to diffuse guerrilla action taken by a fraction of the Autonomia group in 1970s Italy can be explained precisely in light of the advanced cybernetic character of the Italian govern-mentality of the time. These years were when “consociativism,” which prefigured today’s citizenism, was developing; the association of parties, unions, and associations for the distribution and co-management of Power. This sharing is not the most important thing here; the important thing is management and control. This mode of government goes far beyond the Providential State by creating longer chains of interdependence between citizens and devices, thus extending the principles of control and management from administrative bureaucracy.

It was T.E. Lawrence that worked out the principles of guerrilla war from his experience of fighting alongside the Arabs against the Turks in 1916. What does Lawrence tell us? That the battle itself is no longer the only process involved in war, in the same way as the destruction of the heart of the enemy is no longer its central objective; a fortiori if this enemy is faceless, as is the case when dealing with the impersonal power materialized in the Empire’s cybernetic devices: “The majority of wars are contact based; two forces struggling to remain close to one another in order to avoid any tactical surprises. The war of the Arabs had to be a rupture based war: containing the enemy with the silent threat of a vast desert unknown to it and only revealing themselves at the moment of attack.” Deleuze, though he too rigidly opposed guerrilla war, posed the problem of individuality and war, and that of collective organization, clarified that it was a question of opening up space as much as possible, and making prophecies, or rather of “fabricating the real instead of responding to it.” The invisible revolt and diffuse guerrilla war do not sanction injustices, they create a possible world. In the language of the cybernetic hypothesis, I can create invisible revolt and diffuse guerrilla war on the molecular level in two ways. First gesture: I fabricate the real, I break things down, and break myself down by breaking it all down. This is the source of all acts of sabotage What my act represents at this moment doesn’t exist for the device breaking down with me. Neither 0 nor 1, I am the absolute outsider/third party. My orgasm surpasses devices/my joy infuriates them. Second gesture: I do not respond to the human or mechanical feedback loops that attempt to encircle me/figure me out; like Bartleby, I’d “prefer not to.” I keep my distance, I don’t enter into the space of the flows, I don’t plug in, I stick around. I wield my passivity as a force against the devices. Neither 0 nor 1, I am absolute nothingness. Firstly: I cum perversely. Secondly: I hold back. Beyond. Before. Short Circuiting and Unplugging. In the two cases the feedback does not take place and a line of flight begins to be drawn. An external line of flight on the one hand that seems to spread outwards from me; an internal line of flight that brings me back to myself. All forms of interference/fog come from these two gestures, external and internal lines of flight, sabotage and retreat, the search for forms of struggle and for the assumption of different forms-of-life. Revolution is now about figuring out how to conjugate those two moments.

Lawrence also tells how it was also a question that it took the Arabs a long time to resolve when fighting the Turks. Their tactics consisted basically in “always advancing by making small hits and withdrawing, neither making big drives, nor striking big blows. The Arab army never sought to keep or improve their advantage, but to withdraw and go strike elsewhere. It used the least possible force in the least possible time and hit the most withdrawn positions.” Primacy was given to attacks against war supplies, and primarily against communications channels, rather than against the institutions themselves, like depriving a section of railway of rail. Revolt only becomes invisible to the extent that it achieves its objective, which is to “deny all the enemy’s goals,” to never provide the enemy with easy targets. In this case it imposes “passive defense” on the enemy, which can be very costly in materials and men, in energies, and extends into the same movement its own front, making connections between the foci of attack. Guerrilla action thus since its invention tends to be diffuse. This kind of fighting immediately gives rise to new relationships which are very different than those that exist within traditional armies: “we sought to attain maximum irregularity and flexibility. Our diversity disoriented the enemy’s reconnaissance services… If anyone comes to lack conviction they can stay home. The only contract bonding them together was honor. Consequently the Arab army did not have discipline in the sense where discipline restrains and smothers individuality and where it comprises the smallest common denominator of men.” However, Lawrence did not idealize the anarchist spirit of his troops, as spontaneists in general have tended to do. The most important thing is to be able to count on a sympathetic population which then can become a space for potential recruitment and for the spread of the struggle. “A rebellion can be carried out by two percent active elements and 98 percent passive sympathizers,” but this requires time and propaganda operations. Reciprocally, all offensives involving an interference with the opposing lines imply a perfect reconnaissance/intelligence service that “must allow plans to be worked out in absolute certainty” so as to never give the enemy any goals. This is precisely the role that an organization now might take on, in the sense that this term once had in classical politics; serving a function of reconnaissance/intelligence and the transmission of accumulated knowledge-powers. Thus the spontaneity of guerrilleros is not necessarily opposed to organizations as strategic information collection tanks.

But the important thing is that the practice of interference, as Burroughs conceived it, and after him as hackers have, is in vain if it is not accompanied by an organized practice of reconnaissance into domination. This need is reinforced by the fact that the space where the invisible revolt can take place is not the desert spoken of by Lawrence. And the electronic space of the Internet is not the smooth neutral space that the ideologues of the information age speak of it as either. The most recent studies confirm, moreover, that the Internet is vulnerable to targeted and coordinated attacks. The web matrix was designed in such a way that the network would still function if there were a loss of 99% of the 10 million routers — the cores of the communications network where the information is concentrated — destroyed in a random manner, as the American military had initially imagined. On the other hand, a selective attack, designed on the basis of precise research into traffic and aiming at 5% of the most strategic core nodes — the nodes on the big operators’ high-speed networks, the input points to the transatlantic lines — would suffice to cause a collapse of the system. Whether virtual or real, the Empire’s spaces are structured by territories, striated by the cascades of devices tracing out the frontiers and then erasing them when they become useless, in a constant scanning sweep comprising the very motor of the circulation flows. And in such a structured, territorialized and deterritorialized space, the front lines with the enemy cannot be as clear as they were in Lawrence’s desert. The floating character of power and the nomadic dimensions of domination thus require an increased reconnaissance activity, which means an organization for the circulation of knowledge-powers. Such was to be the role of the Society for the Advancement of Criminal Science (SASC).

In Cybernetics and Society, when he foresaw, only too late, that the political use of cybernetics tends to reinforce the exercise of domination, Wiener asked himself a similar question, as a prelude to the mystic crisis that he was in at the end of his life: “All the techniques of secrecy, interference in messages, and bluffing consist in trying to make sure that one’s camp can make a more effective use than the other camp of the forces and operations of communication. In this combative use of information, it is just as important to leave one’s own information channels open as it is to obstruct the channels that the opposing side has at its disposal. An overall confidentiality/secrecy policy almost always implies the involvement of much more than the secrets themselves.” The problem of force reformulated as a problem of invisibility thus becomes a problem of modulation of opening and closing. It simultaneously requires both organization and spontaneity. Or, to put it another way, diffuse guerrilla war today requires that two distinct planes of consistency be established, however meshed they may be — one to organize opening, transforming the interplay of lifestyles/forms-of-life into information, and the other to organize closing, the resistance of lifestyles/forms-of-life to being made into information. Curcio: “The guerrilla party is the maximum agent of invisibility and of the exteriorization of the proletariat’s knowledge-power; invisibility towards the enemy cohabiting with it, on the highest level of synthesis.” One may here object that this is after all nothing but one more binary machine, neither better nor worse than any of those that are at work in cybernetics. But that would be incorrect, since it means not seeing that at the root of these gestures is a fundamental distance from the regulated flows, a distance that is precisely the condition for any experience within the world of devices, a distance which is a power that I can layer and make a future from. It would above all be incorrect because it would mean not understanding that the alternation between sovereignty and unpower cannot be programmed, that the course that these postures take is a wandering course, that what places will end up chosen — whether on the body, in the factory, in urban or peri-urban non-places — is unpredictable.

X

“The revolution is the movement, but the movement is not the revolution” Paul Virilio, Speed and Politics, 1977

“In a world of regulated scenarios, minutely pre-calculated programs, impeccable music scores, well-placed choices and acts, what puts up any obstacles, what hangs back, what wobbles? Wobbliness indicates the body. Of the body. This limping/wobbling indicates a weak-heeled man. A God held onto him there. He was God by the heel. The Gods limp whenever they aren’t hunchbacked. The dysfunction is the body. What wobbles, hurts, holds up poorly, the exhaustion of breath, the miracle of balance. And music holds up no more than man. Bodies have still not been properly regulated by the law of commodities. They don’t work. They suffer. They get worn out. They get it wrong. They escape. Too hot, too cold, too near, too far, too fast, too slow.”

Philippe Carles, Jean-Louis Comolli, “Free Jazz: Out of Program, Out of Subject, in Out Field”, 2000

People have often insisted — T.E. Lawrence is no exception — on the kinetic dimensions of politics and war as a strategic counterpoint to a quantitative concept of relations of force. That’s the typical guerrilla perspective as opposed to the traditional perspective. It’s been said that if it can’t be massive, a movement should be fast, faster than domination. That was how the Situationist International formulated their program in 1957: “it should be understood that we are going to be seeing and participating in a race between free artists and the police to experiment with and develop the new techniques of conditioning. The police already have a considerable head start. The outcome depends on the appearance of passionate and liberating environments, or the reinforcement — scientifically controllable and smooth — of the environment of the old world of oppression and horror… If control over these new means is not totally revolutionary, we could be led towards the police-state ideal of a society organized like a beehive.” In light of this lattermost image, an explicit but static vision of cybernetics perfected as the Empire is fleshing it out, the revolution should consist in a reappropriation of the most modern technological tools, a reappropriation that should permit contestation of the police on their own turf, by creating a counter-world with the same means that it uses. Speed here is understood as one of the important qualities of the revolutionary political arts. But this strategy implies attacking sedentary forces. In the Empire, such forces tend to fade as the impersonal power of devices becomes nomadic and moves around, gradually imploding all institutions.

Conversely, slowness has been at the core of another section/level of struggles against Capital. Luddite sabotage should not be interpreted from a traditional marxist perspective as a simple, primitive rebellion by the organized proletariat, a protest action by the reactionary artisans against the progressive expropriation of the means of production given rise to by industrialization. It is a deliberate slow down of the flux of commodities and persons, anticipating the central characteristic of cybernetic capitalism insofar as it is movement towards movement, a will to potential, generalized acceleration. Taylor conceived the Scientific Organization of Labor as a technique for fighting “soldiering/go-slow” phenomena among laborers which represented an effective obstacle to production. On the physical level, mutations of the system also depend on a certain slowness, as Prigogine and Stengers point out: “The faster communications within the system are, the bigger is the proportion of insignificant fluctuations incapable of transforming the state of the system: therefore, that state will be all the more stable.” Slowdown tactics thus have a supplementary potential in struggles against cybernetic capitalism because they don’t just attack it in its being but in its process itself. But there’s more: slowness is also necessary to putting lifestyles/forms-of-life that are irreducible to simple information exchanges into relation with each other. It expresses resistance of relations to interaction.

Above and beyond speed and slowness in communications, there is the space of encounters which allow one to trace out an absolute limit to the analogy between the social world and the physical world. This is basically because two particles neverencounter one another except where their rupture phenomena can be deduced from laboratory observations. The encounter is that durable instant where intensities manifest between the forms-of-life present in each individual. It is, even above the social and communications, the territory that actualizes the potentials of bodies and actualizes itself in the differences of intensity that they give off and comprise. Encounters are above language, outside of words, in the virgin lands of the unspoken, in suspended animation, a potential of the world which is also its negation, its “power to not be.” What is other people? “Another possible world,” responds Deleuze. The Other incarnates the possibility that the world has of not being, of being otherwise. This is why in the so-called “primitive” societies war takes on the primordial importance of annihilating any other possible world. It is pointless, however, to think about conflict without also thinking about enjoyment, to think about war without thinking about love. In each tumultuous birth of love, the fundamental desire to transform oneself by transforming the world is reborn. The hate and suspicion that lovers excite around them is an automatic defensive response to the war they wage, merely by loving each other, against a world where all passion must misunderstand itself and die off.

Violence is the first rule of the game of encounters. And it polarizes the various wanderings of desire that Lyotard invokes the sovereign freedom of in his book Libidinal Economy. But because he refuses to admit that enjoyments agree together on a particular territory to precede them and where forms-of-life can mix and move together; because he refuses to understand that the neutralization of all intensities is itself a kind of intensification — that of the Empire, no less — because he can’t deduce from this that while they are inseparable, life impulses and death impulses are not neutral relative to a singular Other, Lyotard in the end cannot go beyond the most cybernetization-compatible hedonism: relax, let yourself go, let out your desires! Enjoy, enjoy; there’ll always be something left! There’s no doubt that conduction, abandon, and mobility in general can heighten the amplification of deviations from the norm as long as they acknowledge what interrupts flows within the very heart of circulation itself. In light of the acceleration that cybernetics gives rise to, speed and nomadism can only be secondary developments beside the primary slow-down policies.

Speed upholds institutions. Slowness cuts off flows. The kinetic problem, properly speaking, in politics, thus isn’t about choosing between two kinds of revolt but about abandoning oneself to a pulsation, of exploring other intensifications besides those that are commanded by the temporality of urgency. The cyberneticians’ power has been their ability to give rhythm to the social body, which tends to prevent all respiration. Canetti proposes that rhythm’s anthropological genesis is associated with racing: “Rhythm is at its origin a rhythm of feet; it produces, intentionally or not, a rhythmic noise.” But this racing is not predictable as a robot’s would be; “the two feet never land with the same force. The difference between them might be more or less vast, depending on personal dispositions and moods. But you can also go faster or more slowly, run, suddenly stop, jump…” This means that rhythm is the opposite of a program, that it depends on forms-of-life, and that speed problems can be dealt with by looking at rhythm issues. All bodies, insofar as they are wobbly, have a certain rhythm that shows that it is in their nature to hold untenable/unholdable positions. This rhythm, which comes from the limping/wobble of bodies, the movement of feet, Canetti adds, is — furthermore — at the origins of writing, in the sense that it started with the tracks left by animals in motion, that is, of History in motion. Events are the appearance of such traces and making History means improvising in search of a rhythm. Whatever credit we give to Canetti’s demonstrations, they do indicate — as true fictions do — that political kinetics can be better understood as the politics of rhythm. This means, a minima, that the binary techno-rhythm imposed by cybernetics must be opposed by other rhythms.

But it also means that these other rhythms, as manifestations of ontological wobbliness, have always had a creative political function. Canetti himself also discusses how on the one hand “the rapid repetition by which steps are added onto steps gives the illusion that there’s a larger number of beings present. They do not move from place to place, they carry on their dance always in the same location. The noise made by their steps does not die, it is repeated and echoes out for a long time, always with the same resonance and the same vivacity. They make up for their small size in number by their intensity.” On the other hand, “when their trampling is reinforced, it is as if they had called for backup. They exercise a force of attraction on everybody in the area, a force that doesn’t stop as long as they continue their dance.” Searching for good rhythm, then, opens things up for an intensification of experience as well as for numerical increase. It is an instrument of aggregation as well as an exemplary action to be imitated. On the individual scale as well as on the social scale, bodies themselves lose their sense of unity in order to grow as potential weapons: “the equivalence of the participants ramifies out into the equivalency of their members. Everything mobile about a human body takes on a life of its own, each leg, each arm lives as if for itself alone.” The politics of rhythm is thus the search for a reverberation, another state, comparable to trance on the part of the social body, through the ramification of each body. Because there are indeed two possible regimes of rhythm in the cybernetized Empire. The first, which Simondon refers to, is that of the technician-man, who “ensure the integrative function and prolong self-regulation outside of each monad of automatism,” technicians whose “lives are made up of the rhythm of the machines surrounding them, and that connect them to each other.” The second rhythm aims to undermine this interconnective function: it is profoundly dis-integrating, rather than merely noisy. It is a rhythm of disconnection. The collective conquest of this accurate dissonant tempo must come from a prior abandon to improvisation.

“Lifting the curtain of words, improvisation becomes gesture, an act still unspoken, a form still unnamed, un-normed, un-honored. To abandon oneself to improvisation to liberate oneself already — however beautiful they may be - from the world’s already-present musical narratives. Already present, already beautiful, already narratives, already a world. To undo, o Penelope, the musical bandaging that forms our cocoon of sound, which is not the world, but is the ritual habit of the world.

Abandoned, it offers itself up to what floats outside and around meaning,

around words,

around the codes;

it offers itself up to the intensities, to reserve, to enthusiasm, to energy, in sum, to the nearly-unnamable. …Improvisation welcomes threats and transcends them, it dispossesses them of themselves and records their potential and risk.”

XI

“It’s the haze, the solar haze, filling space. Rebellion itself is a gas, a vapor. Haze is the first state of nascent perception and produces the mirage in which things climb and drop, like the movement of a piston, and men rise and hover, suspended by a cord. Hazy vision, blurred vision; a sketch of a kind of hallucinatory perception, a cosmic gray. The gray splits in two, and gives out black when shadow wins out or light disappears, but also gives out white when the luminous itself becomes opaque.” Gilles Deleuze, “Shame and Glory: T.E. Lawrence,” Critic and Clinic, 1993.

“No one and nothing gives an alternative adventure as a present: there’s no possible adventure besides that of conquering a fate. You can’t wage this conquest without starting from that spatio-temporal place where ‘your’ things stamp you as one of theirs.” Giorgio Cesarano, Survival Manual, 1975

From the cybernetic perspective, threats cannot be welcomed and transcended a fortiori. They must be absorbed, eliminated. I’ve already said that the infinitely renewed impossibility of this annihilation of events is the final certainty that practices of opposition to the device-governed world can be founded on. Threat, and its generalization in the form of panic, poses an unsolvable energetic problem for the holders of the cybernetic hypothesis. Simondon thus explains that machines with a high information outflow and control their environment with precision have a weak energetic output. Conversely, machines that require little energy to carry out their cybernetic mission produce a poor rendering of reality. The transformation of forms into information basically contains two opposing imperatives: “information is in one sense that which brings a series of unpredictable, new states, following no predefined course at all; it is thus that which requires absolute availability from an information channel with respect to all the aspects of modulation that it routes along; the information channel should in itself have no predetermined form and should not be selective… On the opposite hand, information is distinct from noise because information can be assigned a certain code and given a relative uniformization; in all cases where noise cannot be immediately/directly brought down to below a certain level, a reduction of the margin of indetermination and unpredictability in information signals is made.” In other words, for a physical, biological, or social system to have enough energy to ensure its reproduction, its control devices must carve into the mass of the unknown, and slice into the ensemble of possibilities between what is characterized by pure chance, and has nothing to do with control, and what can enter into control as hazard risks, immediately susceptible to a probability calculation. It follows that for any device, as in the specific case of sound recording devices, “a compromise should be made that preserves a sufficient information output to meet practical needs, and an energy output high enough to keep the background noise at a level that does not disturb the signal levels.” Or take the case of the police as another example; for it, this would just be a matter of finding the balance point between repression — the function of which is to decrease social background noise — and reconnaissance/intelligence — which inform them about the state of and movements in society by looking at the signals it gives off.

To provoke panic first of all means extending the background interference that imposes itself when the feedback loops are triggered, and which makes the recording of behavioral discrepancies by the ensemble of cybernetic apparatuses costly. Strategic thinking grasped the offensive scope of such interference early on. When Clausewitz was so bold as to say, for example, that “popular resistance is obviously not fit to strike large-scale blows” but that “like something vaporous and fluid, it should not condense anywhere.” Or when Lawrence counterposed traditional armies, which “resemble immobile plants,” and guerrilla groups, comparable to “an influence, an idea, a kind of intangible, invulnerable entity, with no front or back, which spreads everywhere like a gas.” Interference is the prime vector of revolt. Transplanted into the cybernetic world, the metaphor also makes reference to the resistance to the tyranny of transparency which control imposes. Haze disrupts all the typical coordinates of perception. It makes it indiscernible what is visible and what is invisible, what is information and what is an event. This is why it represents one of the conditions for the possibility of events taking place. Fog makes revolt possible.In a novel called “Love is Blind,” Boris Vian imagined what the effects of a real fog in existing relations. The inhabitants of a metropolis wake up one morning filled by a “tidal wave of opacity” that progressively modifies all their behaviors. The needs imposed by appearances quickly become useless and the city is taken over by collective experimentation. Love becomes free, facilitated by a permanent nudity of all bodies. Orgies spread everywhere. Skin, hands, flesh; all regain their prerogative, since “the domain of the possible is extended when one is no longer afraid that the light might be turned on.” Incapable of prolonging a fog that they did not contribute to the formation of, they are relieved when “the radio says that experts have noted that the phenomenon will be returning regularly.” In light of this everyone decides to put out their own eyes so that life can go on happily. The passage into destiny: the fog Vian speaks of can be conquered. It can be conquered by reappropriating violence, a reappropriation that can even go as far as mutilation. This violence consists entirely in the clearing away of defenses, in the opening of throughways, meanings, minds. “Is it never pure?” asks Lyotard. “Is a dance something true? One could still say yes. But that’s not its power.” To say that revolt must become foglike means that it should be dissemination and dissimulation at the same time. In the same way as the offensive needs to make itself opaque in order to succeed, opacity must make itself offensive in order to last: that’s the cipher of the invisible revolt.

But that also means that its first objective must be to resist all attempts to reduce it away with demands for representation. Fog is a vital response to the imperative of clarity, transparency, which is the first imprint of imperial power on bodies. To become fog like means that I finally take up the part of the shadows that command me and prevent me from believing all the fictions of direct democracy insofar as they intend to ritualize the transparency of each person in their own interests, and of all persons in the interests of all. To become opaque like fog means recognizing that we don’t represent anything, that we aren’t identifiable; it means taking on the untotalizable character of the physical body as a political body; it means opening yourself up to still-unknown possibilities. It means resisting with all your power any struggle for recognition. Lyotard: “What you ask of us, theoreticians, is that we constitute ourselves as identities, as managers. But if there’s one thing we’re sure of, it’s that this operation (of exclusion) is just a cheap show, that incandescences are made by no one, and belong to no one.” Nevertheless, it won’t be a matter of reorganizing a few secret societies or conquering conspiracies like free-masonry, carbonarism, as the avant-gardes of the last century envisioned — I’m thinking mostly of the College of Sociology. Establishing a zone of opacity where people can circulate and experiment freely without bringing in the Empire’s information flows, means producing “anonymous singularities,” recreating the conditions for a possible experience, an experience which will not be immediately flattened out by a binary machine assigning a meaning/direction to it, a dense experience that can transform desires and the moments where they manifest themselves into something beyond desire, into a narrative, into a filled-out body. So, when Toni Negri asked Deleuze about communism, the latter was careful not to assimilate it into a realized and transparent communication: “you ask whether societies of control or communication would give rise to forms of resistance capable of giving a new chance for a communism conceived as a ‘transverse organization of free individuals.’ I don’t know; perhaps. But this would be impossible if minorities got back hold of the megaphone. Maybe words, communication, are rotten. They’re entirely penetrated by money: not by accident, but by their nature. We have to detourn/misuse words. Creating has always been something different from communicating. The important thing is maybe to create vacuoles of non-communication, interrupters who escape control.” Yes, the important thing for us is to have opacity zones, opening cavities, empty intervals,black blocs within the cybernetic matrix of power. The irregular war waged against the Empire, on the level of a given place, a fight, a riot, from now on will start with the construction of opaque and offensive zones. Each of these zones shall be simultaneously a small group/nucleus starting from which one might experiment without being perceptible, and a panic-propagating cloud within the ensemble of the imperial system, the coordinated war machine, and spontaneous subversion at all levels. The proliferation of these zones of offensive opacity (ZOO), and the intensification of their interrelations, will give rise to an irreversible disequilibrium.

As a way of showing the kinds of conditions needed to “create opacity,” as a weapon and as an interrupter of flows, it is useful to look one more time to the internal criticisms of the cybernetic paradigm. Provoking a change of status/state in a physical or social system requires that disorder, deviations from the norm, be concentrated into a space, whether real or virtual. In order that behavioral fluctuations become contagious, it is necessary that they first attain a “critical mass,” the nature of which is clarified by Prigogine and Stengers: “It results from the fact that the ‘outside world,’ the environment around the fluctuating region, always tends to deaden the fluctuation. Critical mass measures the relationship between the volume, where the reactions take place, and the contact surface, the place of linkage. Critical mass is thus determined by a competition between the system’s ‘power of integration’ and the chemical mechanisms that amplify the fluctuation within the fluctuating subregion.” This means that all deployment of fluctuations within a system is doomed to fail if it does not have at its disposition a local anchor, a place from which the deviations that arise can move outwards, contaminating the whole system. Lawrence confirms it, one more time: “The rebellion must have an unassailable base, a place sheltered not only from attack but from the fear of attack.” In order for such a place to exist, it has to have “independent supply lines,” without which no war is conceivable. If the question of the base is central to all revolt, it is also because of the very principles on the basis of which systems can attain equilibrium. For cybernetics, the possibility of a contagion that could topple the system has to be absorbed/deadened by the most immediate environment around the autonomous zone where the fluctuations take place. This means that the effects of control are more powerful in the periphery closest to the offensive opacity zone that creates itself around the fluctuating region. The size of the base must consequently grow ever greater as proximity monitoring is upheld.

These bases must also be as inscribed in the space itself as in people’s minds: “The Arab revolt,” Lawrence explains, “was to be found in the ports of the red sea, in the desert, or in the minds of the men who supported it.” These are territories as much as they are mentalities. We’ll call them planes of consistency. In order that offensive opacity zones can form and be reinforced, there need to be planes like that, which connect deviations together, which work like a lever and fulcrum to overturn fear. Autonomy, historically — the Italian Autonomia group of the 1970s for example, and the Autonomy that is possible is none other than the continual movement of perseverance of planes of consistency that establish themselves asunrepresentable spaces, as bases for secession from society. The reappropriation by the critical cyberneticians of the category of autonomy/self-rule — along with the ideas deriving from it, self-organization, auto-poïesis, self-reference, self-production, self-valorization, etc. — is from this point of view the central ideological maneuver of the last twenty years. Through the cybernetic prism, giving oneself one’s own laws, producing subjectivities, in no way contradict the production of the system and its regulation. By calling for the multiplication of Temporary Autonomous Zones (TAZ) in the real world and in the virtual world ten years ago, Hakim Bey became the victim of the idealism of those who wanted to abolish politics without having thought about it first. He found himself forced to separate out a place for hedonistic practice within the TAZ, to separate out a place for the “anarchist” expression of forms-of-life from the place of political resistance, from the form of the struggle. If autonomy is here thought of as something temporary, it is because thinking about its duration would require conceiving of a struggle that merges with all of life; envisioning for example the transmission of warrior knowledge. Bey-type Liberal-anarchists are unaware of the field of intensities in which their sovereignty cries out to be deployed and their project of a social contract with no State at root postulates the identity of all beings since in the end it is about maximizing pleasures in peace until the end of time. On the one hand. On the one hand the TAZ are defined as “free enclaves,” places whose law is freedom, good things, the Marvelous. On the other, the secession from the world that they issue from, the “folds” that they lodge themselves in between the real and its encoding, would not come into being until after a succession of “refusals.” This “Californian Ideology,” by posing autonomy as an attribute of individual or collective subjects, deliberately confuses two incommensurable planes: the “self-realization” of persons and the “self-organization” of society. This is because autonomy, in the history of philosophy, is an ambiguous notion that simultaneously expresses liberation from all constraints and submission to higher natural laws, and can serve to feed the hybrid and restructuring discourses of the “anarcho-capitalist” cyborgs.

The autonomy I’m talking about isn’t temporary nor simply defensive. It is not a substantial quality of beings, but the very condition of their becoming/future. It doesn’t leave the supposed unity of the Subject, but engenders multiplicities. It does not attack merely the sedentary forms of power, like the State, and then skim over the circulating, “mobile,” “flexible” forms. It gives itself the means of lasting and of moving from place to place, means of withdrawing as well as attacking, opening itself up as well as closing itself off, connecting mute bodies as bodiless voices. It sees this alternation as the result of an endless experimentation. “Autonomy” means that we make the worlds that we are grow. The Empire, armed with cybernetics, insists on autonomy for it alone, as the unitary system of the totality: it is thus forced to annihilate all autonomy whenever it is heterogeneous. We say that autonomy is for everyone and that the fight for autonomy has to be amplified. The present form taken on by the civil war is above all a fight against the monopoly on autonomy. That experimentation will become the “fecund chaos,” communism, the end of the cybernetic hypothesis.

Tiqqun

[testinbeta]

The Spectacle of Disintegration

In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation.

The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.

The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society, and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation.

The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images.

Understood in its totality, the spectacle is both the result and the project of the dominant mode of production. It is not a mere decoration added to the real world. It is the very heart of this real society’s unreality. In all of its particular manifestations — news, propaganda, advertising, entertainment — the spectacle represents the dominant model of life. It is the omnipresent affirmation of the choices that have already been made in the sphere of production and in the consumption implied by that production.

Separation is itself an integral part of the unity of this world, of a global social practice split into reality and image. The social practice confronted by an autonomous spectacle is at the same time the real totality which contains that spectacle. But the split within this totality mutilates it to the point that the spectacle seems to be its goal.

In a world that is really upside down, the true is a moment of the false.

Considered in its own terms, the spectacle is an affirmation of appearances and an identification of all human social life with appearances. But a critique that grasps the spectacle’s essential character reveals it to be a visible negation of life — a negation that has taken on a visible form.

The spectacle presents itself as a vast inaccessible reality that can never be questioned. Its sole message is: “What appears is good; what is good appears.” The passive acceptance it demands is already effectively imposed by its monopoly of appearances, its manner of appearing without allowing any reply.

The spectacle is able to subject human beings to itself because the economy has already totally subjugated them. It is nothing other than the economy developing for itself. It is at once a faithful reflection of the production of things and a distorting objectification of the producers.

When the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings — dynamic figments that provide the direct motivations for a hypnotic behavior.

As long as necessity is socially dreamed, dreaming will remain a social necessity. The spectacle is the bad dream of a modern society in chains and ultimately expresses nothing more than its wish for sleep. The spectacle is the guardian of that sleep.

The fact that the practical power of modern society has detached itself from that society and established an independent realm in the spectacle can be explained only by the additional fact that that powerful practice continued to lack cohesion and had remained in contradiction with itself.

The root of the spectacle is that oldest of all social specializations, the specialization of power. The spectacle plays the specialized role of speaking in the name of all the other activities. It is hierarchical society’s ambassador to itself, delivering its official messages at a court where no one else is allowed to speak. The most modern aspect of the spectacle is thus also the most archaic.

The social separation reflected in the spectacle is inseparable from the modern state — the product of the social division of labor that is both the chief instrument of class rule and the concentrated expression of all social divisions.

In the spectacle, a part of the world represents itself to the world and is superior to it. The spectacle is simply the common language of this separation. Spectators are linked solely by their one-way relationship to the very center that keeps them isolated from each other. The spectacle thus reunites the separated, but it reunites them only in their separateness.

Workers do not produce themselves, they produce a power independent of themselves. The success of this production, the abundance it generates, is experienced by the producers as anabundance of dispossession. As their alienated products accumulate, all time and space become foreign to them. The forces that have escaped us display themselves to us in all their power.

Though separated from what they produce, people nevertheless produce every detail of their world with ever-increasing power. They thus also find themselves increasingly separated from that world. The closer their life comes to being their own creation, the more they are excluded from that life.

The spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes images.

Critical theory must communicate itself in its own language — the language of contradiction, which must be dialectical in both form and content. It must be an all-inclusive critique, and it must be grounded in history. It is not a “zero degree of writing,” but its reversal. It is not a negation of style, but the style of negation.

The very style of dialectical theory is a scandal and abomination to the prevailing standards of language and to the sensibilities molded by those standards, because while it makes concrete use of existing concepts it simultaneously recognizes their fluidity and their inevitable destruction.

This style, which includes a critique of itself, must express the domination of the present critique over its entire past. Dialectical theory’s mode of exposition reveals the negative spirit within it. “Truth is not like some finished product in which one can no longer find any trace of the tool that made it.” This theoretical consciousness of a movement whose traces must remain visible within it is manifested by the reversal of established relationships between concepts and by the détournementof all the achievements of earlier critical efforts.

Ideas improve. The meaning of words plays a role in that improvement. Plagiarism is necessary. Progress depends on it. It sticks close to an author’s phrasing, exploits his expressions, deletes a false idea, replaces it with the right one.

Détournement is the flexible language of anti-ideology. It appears in communication that knows it cannot claim to embody any definitive certainty. It is language that cannot and need not be confirmed by any previous or supracritical reference. On the contrary, its own internal coherence and practical effectiveness are what validate the previous kernels of truth it has brought back into play. Détournement has grounded its cause on nothing but its own truth as present critique.

The element of overt détournement in formulated theory refutes any notion that such theory is durably autonomous. By introducing into the theoretical domain the same type of violent subversionthat disrupts and overthrows every existing order, détournement serves as a reminder that theory is nothing in itself, that it can realize itself only through historical action and through the historical correction that is its true allegiance.

The point is to actually participate in the community of dialogue and the game with time that up till now have merely been represented by poetic and artistic works.

When art becomes independent and paints its world in dazzling colors, a moment of life has grown old. Such a moment cannot be rejuvenated by dazzling colors, it can only be evoked in memory. The greatness of art only emerges at the dusk of life.

The official thought of the social organization of appearances is itself obscured by the generalized subcommunication that it has to defend. It cannot understand that conflict is at the origin of everything in its world. The specialists of spectacular power — a power that is absolute within its realm of one-way communication — are absolutely corrupted by their experience of contempt and by the success of that contempt, because they find their contempt confirmed by their awareness of how truly contemptible spectators really are.

In the spectacle’s basic practice of incorporating into itself all the fluid aspects of human activity so as to possess them in a congealed form, and of inverting living values into purely abstract values, we recognize our old enemy the commodity, which seems at first glance so trivial and obvious, yet which is actually so complex and full of metaphysical subtleties.

The fetishism of the commodity — the domination of society by “intangible as well as tangible things” — attains its ultimate fulfillment in the spectacle, where the real world is replaced by a selection of images which are projected above it, yet which at the same time succeed in making themselves regarded as the epitome of reality.

The world at once present and absent that the spectacle holds up to view is the world of the commodity dominating all living experience. The world of the commodity is thus shown for what it is,because its development is identical to people’s estrangement from each other and from everything they produce.

As long as the economy’s role as material basis of social life was neither noticed nor understood (remaining unknown precisely because it was so familiar), the commodity’s dominion over the economy was exerted in a covert manner. In societies where actual commodities were few and far between, money was the apparent master, serving as plenipotentiary representative of the greater power that remained unknown. With the Industrial Revolution’s manufactural division of labor and mass production for a global market, the commodity finally became fully visible as a power that was colonizing all social life. It was at that point that political economy established itself as the dominant science, and as the science of domination.

The spectacle is a permanent opium war designed to force people to equate goods with commodities and to equate satisfaction with a survival that expands according to its own laws. Consumable survival must constantly expand because it never ceases to include privation. If augmented survival never comes to a resolution, if there is no point where it might stop expanding, this is because it is itself stuck in the realm of privation. It may gild poverty, but it cannot transcend it.

Exchange value could arise only as a representative of use value, but the victory it eventually won with its own weapons created the conditions for its own autonomous power. By mobilizing all human use value and monopolizing its fulfillment, exchange value ultimately succeeded in controlling use. Usefulness has come to be seen purely in terms of exchange value, and is now completely at its mercy. Starting out like a condottiere in the service of use value, exchange value has ended up waging the war for its own sake.

Use value was formerly understood as an implicit aspect of exchange value. Now, however, within the upside-down world of the spectacle, it must be explicitly proclaimed, both because its actual reality has been eroded by the overdeveloped commodity economy and because it serves as a necessary pseudo-justification for a counterfeit life.

With the achievement of economic abundance, the concentrated result of social labor becomes visible, subjecting all reality to the appearances that are now that labor’s primary product. Capital is no longer the invisible center governing the production process; as it accumulates, it spreads to the ends of the earth in the form of tangible objects. The entire expanse of society is its portrait.

The spectacle, like modern society itself, is at once united and divided. The unity of each is based on violent divisions. But when this contradiction emerges in the spectacle, it is itself contradicted by a reversal of its meaning: the division it presents is unitary, while the unity it presents is divided.

Although the struggles between different powers for control of the same socio-economic system are officially presented as irreconcilable antagonisms, they actually reflect that system’s fundamental unity, both internationally and within each nation.

The sham spectacular struggles between rival forms of separate power are at the same time real, in that they express the system’s uneven and conflictual development and the more or less contradictory interests of the classes or sections of classes that accept that system and strive to carve out a role for themselves within it. By invoking any number of different criteria, the spectacle can present these oppositions as totally distinct social systems. But in reality they are nothing but particular sectors whose fundamental essence lies in the global system that contains them, the single movement that has turned the whole planet into its field of operation: capitalism.

Behind the glitter of spectacular distractions, a tendency toward banalization dominates modern society the world over, even where the more advanced forms of commodity consumption have seemingly multiplied the variety of roles and objects to choose from. The vestiges of religion and of the family (the latter is still the primary mechanism for transferring class power from one generation to the next), along with the vestiges of moral repression imposed by those two institutions, can be blended with ostentatious pretensions of worldly gratification precisely because life in this particular world remains repressive and offers nothing but pseudo-gratifications. Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity as soon as the economy of abundance develops the capacity to process that particular raw material.

Stars — spectacular representations of living human beings — project this general banality into images of permitted roles. As specialists of apparent life, stars serve as superficial objects that people can identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that they actually live. The function of these celebrities is to act out various lifestyles or sociopolitical viewpoints in a full, totally free manner. They embody the inaccessible results of social labor by dramatizing the by-products of that labor which are magically projected above it as its ultimate goals: power and vacations — the decision making and consumption that are at the beginning and the end of a process that is never questioned. On one hand, a governmental power may personalize itself as a pseudo-star; on the other, a star of consumption may campaign for recognition as a pseudo-power over life. But the activities of these stars are not really free, and they offer no real choices.

Spectacular oppositions conceal the unity of poverty. If different forms of the same alienation struggle against each other in the guise of irreconcilable antagonisms, this is because they are all based on real contradictions that are repressed. The spectacle exists in a concentrated form and a diffuse form, depending on the requirements of the particular stage of poverty it denies and supports. In both cases it is nothing more than an image of happy harmony surrounded by desolation and horror, at the calm center of misery.

The concentrated spectacle is primarily associated with bureaucratic capitalism, though it may also be imported as a technique for reinforcing state power in more backward mixed economies or even adopted by advanced capitalism during certain moments of crisis. Bureaucratic property is itself concentrated, in that the individual bureaucrat takes part in the ownership of the entire economy only through his membership in the community of bureaucrats. And since commodity production is less developed under bureaucratic capitalism, it too takes on a concentrated form: the commodity the bureaucracy appropriates is the total social labor, and what it sells back to the society is that society’s wholesale survival. The dictatorship of the bureaucratic economy cannot leave the exploited masses any significant margin of choice because it has had to make all the choices itself, and any choice made independently of it, whether regarding food or music or anything else, thus amounts to a declaration of war against it.

The diffuse spectacle is associated with commodity abundance, with the undisturbed development of modern capitalism. Here each individual commodity is justified in the name of the grandeur of the total commodity production, of which the spectacle is a laudatory catalog. Irreconcilable claims jockey for position on the stage of the affluent economy’s unified spectacle, and different star commodities simultaneously promote conflicting social policies. The automobile spectacle, for example, strives for a perfect traffic flow entailing the destruction of old urban districts, while the city spectacle needs to preserve those districts as tourist attractions. The already dubious satisfaction alleged to be obtained from the consumption of the whole is thus constantly being disappointed because the actual consumer can directly access only a succession of fragments of this commodity heaven, fragments which invariably lack the quality attributed to the whole.

Each individual commodity fights for itself. It avoids acknowledging the others and strives to impose itself everywhere as if it were the only one in existence. The spectacle is the epic poem of this struggle, a struggle that no fall of Troy can bring to an end. The spectacle does not sing of men and their arms, but of commodities and their passions. In this blind struggle each commodity, by pursuing its own passion, unconsciously generates something beyond itself: the globalization of the commodity (which also amounts to the commodification of the globe). Thus, as a result of the cunning of the commodity, while each particular manifestation of the commodity eventually falls in battle, the general commodity-form continues onward toward its absolute realization.

The image of blissful social unification through consumption merely postpones the consumer’s awareness of the actual divisions until his next disillusionment with some particular commodity. Each new product is ceremoniously acclaimed as a unique creation offering a dramatic shortcut to the promised land of total consummation. But as with the fashionable adoption of seemingly aristocratic first names which end up being given to virtually all individuals of the same age, the objects that promise uniqueness can be offered up for mass consumption only if they have been mass-produced. The prestigiousness of mediocre objects of this kind is solely due to the fact that they have been placed, however briefly, at the center of social life and hailed as a revelation of the unfathomable purposes of production. But the object that was prestigious in the spectacle becomes mundane as soon as it is taken home by its consumer — and by all its other consumers. Too late, it reveals its essential poverty, a poverty that inevitably reflects the poverty of its production. Meanwhile, some other object is already replacing it as representative of the system and demanding its own moment of acclaim.

The fraudulence of the satisfactions offered by the system is exposed by this continual replacement of products and of general conditions of production. In both the diffuse and the concentrated spectacle, entities that have brazenly asserted their definitive perfection nevertheless end up changing, and only the system endures. Stalin, like any other outmoded commodity, is denounced by the very forces that originally promoted him. Each new lie of the advertising industry is an admissionof its previous lie. And with each downfall of a personification of totalitarian power, the illusory community that had unanimously approved him is exposed as a mere conglomeration of loners without illusions.

The things the spectacle presents as eternal are based on change, and must change as their foundations change. The spectacle is totally dogmatic, yet it is incapable of arriving at any really solid dogma. Nothing stands still for it. This instability is the spectacle’s natural condition, but it is completely contrary to its inclination.

The unreal unity proclaimed by the spectacle masks the class division underlying the real unity of the capitalist mode of production. What obliges the producers to participate in the construction of the world is also what excludes them from it. What brings people into relation with each other by liberating them from their local and national limitations is also what keeps them apart. What requires increased rationality is also what nourishes the irrationality of hierarchical exploitation and repression. What produces society’s abstract power also produces its concrete lack of freedom.

Capitalist production has unified space, breaking down the boundaries between one society and the next. This unification is at the same time an extensive and intensive process ofbanalization. Just as the accumulation of commodities mass-produced for the abstract space of the market shattered all regional and legal barriers and all the Medieval guild restrictions that maintained the quality of craft production, it also undermined the autonomy and quality of places. This homogenizing power is the heavy artillery that has battered down all the walls of China.

The free space of commodities is constantly being altered and redesigned in order to become ever more identical to itself, to get as close as possible to motionless monotony.

While eliminating geographical distance, this society produces a new internal distance in the form of spectacular separation.

Tourism — human circulation packaged for consumption, a by-product of the circulation of commodities — is the opportunity to go and see what has been banalized. The economic organization of travel to different places already guarantees their equivalence. The modernization that has eliminated the time involved in travel has simultaneously eliminated any real space from it.

The society that reshapes its entire surroundings has evolved its own special technique for molding its own territory, which constitutes the material underpinning for all the facets of this project. Urbanism — “city planning” — is capitalism’s method for taking over the natural and human environment. Following its logical development toward total domination, capitalism now can and must refashion the totality of space into its own particular decor.

While all the technical forces of capitalism contribute toward various forms of separation, urbanism provides the material foundation for those forces and prepares the ground for their deployment. It is the very technology of separation.

In all previous periods architectural innovations were designed exclusively for the ruling classes. Now for the first time a new architecture has been specifically designed for the poor. The aesthetic poverty and vast proliferation of this new experience in habitation stem from its mass character, which character in turn stems both from its function and from the modern conditions of construction. The obvious core of these conditions is the authoritarian decisionmaking which abstractly converts the environment into an environment of abstraction. Urbanism is one of the most glaring expressions of the contradiction between the growth of society’s material powers and the continued lack of progress toward any conscious control of those powers.

The history that threatens this twilight world could potentially subject space to a directly experienced time. Proletarian revolution is this critique of human geography through which individuals and communities could create places and events commensurate with the appropriation no longer just of their work, but of their entire history. The ever-changing playing field of this new world and the freely chosen variations in the rules of the game will regenerate a diversity of local scenes that are independent without being insular. And this diversity will in turn revive the possibility of authentic journeys — journeys within an authentic life that is itself understood as a journey containing its whole meaning within itself.

The time of production — commodified time — is an infinite accumulation of equivalent intervals. It is irreversible time made abstract, in which each segment need only demonstrate by the clock its purely quantitative equality with all the others. It has no reality apart from its exchangeability.

This general time of human nondevelopment also has a complementary aspect — a consumableform of time based on the present mode of production and presenting itself in everyday life as a pseudocyclical time.

Pseudocyclical time is associated with the consumption of modern economic survival — the augmented survival in which everyday experience is cut off from decisionmaking and subjected no longer to the natural order, but to the pseudo-nature created by alienated labor. It is thus quite natural that it echoes the old cyclical rhythm that governed survival in preindustrial societies, incorporating the natural vestiges of cyclical time while generating new variants: day and night, work and weekend, periodic vacations.

Consumable pseudocyclical time is spectacular time, both in the narrow sense as time spent consuming images and in the broader sense as image of the consumption of time. The time spent consuming images (images which in turn serve to publicize all the other commodities) is both the particular terrain where the spectacle’s mechanisms are most fully implemented and the general goal that those mechanisms present, the focus and epitome of all particular consumptions. As for the social image of the consumption of time, it is exclusively dominated by leisure time and vacations — moments portrayed, like all spectacular commodities, at a distance and as desirable by definition. These commodified moments are explicitly presented as moments of real life whose cyclical return we are supposed to look forward to. But all that is really happening is that the spectacle is displaying and reproducing itself at a higher level of intensity. What is presented as true life turns out to be merely a more truly spectacular life.

While the consumption of cyclical time in ancient societies was consistent with the real labor of those societies, the pseudocyclical consumption of developed economies contradicts the abstract irreversible time implicit in their system of production. Cyclical time was the really lived time of unchanging illusions. Spectacular time is the illusorily lived time of a constantly changing reality.

The production process’s constant innovations are not echoed in consumption, which presents nothing but an expanded repetition of the past. Because dead labor continues to dominate living labor, in spectacular time the past continues to dominate the present.

The lack of general historical life also means that individual life as yet has no history. The pseudo-events that vie for attention in spectacular dramatizations have not been lived by those who are informed about them; and in any case they are soon forgotten due to their increasingly frenetic replacement at every pulsation of the spectacular machinery. Conversely, what is really lived has no relation to the society’s official version of irreversible time, and conflicts with the pseudocyclical rhythm of that time’s consumable by-products. This individual experience of a disconnected everyday life remains without language, without concepts, and without critical access to its own past, which has nowhere been recorded. Uncommunicated, misunderstood and forgotten, it is smothered by the spectacle’s false memory of the unmemorable.

The spectacle, considered as the reigning society’s method for paralyzing history and memory and for suppressing any history based on historical time, represents a false consciousness of time.

Behind the fashions that come and go on the frivolous surface of the spectacle of pseudocyclical time, the grand style of an era can always be found in what is governed by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution.

Examining history amounts to examining the nature of power. Greece was the moment when power and changes in power were first debated and understood. It was a democracy of the masters of society — a total contrast to the despotic state, where power settles accounts only with itself, within the impenetrable obscurity of its inner sanctum, by means of palace revolutions, which are beyond the pale of discussion whether they fail or succeed.

The dry, unexplained chronology that a deified authority offered to its subjects, who were supposed to accept it as the earthly fulfillment of mythic commandments, was destined to be transcended and transformed into conscious history. But for this to happen, sizable groups of people had to have experienced real participation in history. Out of this practical communication between those who have recognized each other as possessors of a unique present, who have experienced a qualitative richness of events in their own activity and who are at home in their own era, arises the general language of historical communication. Those for whom irreversible time truly exists discover in it both the memorable and the threat of oblivion:“Herodotus of Halicarnassus here presents the results of his researches, so that time will not abolish the deeds of men… .”

The victory of the bourgeoisie is the victory of a profoundly historical time, because it is the time corresponding to an economic production that continuously transforms society from top to bottom. So long as agrarian production remains the predominant form of labor, the cyclical time that remains at the base of society reinforces the joint forces of tradition, which tend to hold back any historical movement. But the irreversible time of the bourgeois economy eradicates those vestiges throughout the world. History, which until then had seemed to involve only the actions of individual members of the ruling class, and which had thus been recorded as a mere chronology of events, is now understood as a general movement — a relentless movement that crushes any individuals in its path. By discovering its basis in political economy, history becomes aware of what had previously been unconscious; but this basis remains unconscious because it cannot be brought to light. This blind prehistory, this new fate that no one controls, is the only thing that the commodity economy has democratized.

The bourgeoisie has thus made irreversible historical time known and has imposed it on society, but it has prevented society from using it. “Once there was history, but not any more,” because the class of owners of the economy, which is inextricably tied to economic history, must repress every other irreversible use of time because it is directly threatened by them all. The ruling class, made up of specialists in the possession of things who are themselves therefore possessed by things, is forced to link its fate with the preservation of this reified history, that is, with the preservation of a new immobility within history. Meanwhile the worker at the base of society is for the first time not materially estranged from history, because the irreversible movement is now generated from that base. By demanding to live the historical time that it produces, the proletariat discovers the simple, unforgettable core of its revolutionary project; and each previously defeated attempt to carry out this project represents a possible point of departure for a new historical life.

With the development of capitalism, irreversible time has become globally unified. Universal history becomes a reality because the entire world is brought under the sway of this time’s development. But this history that is everywhere simultaneously the same is as yet nothing but an intrahistorical rejection of history. What appears the world over as the same day is merely the time of economic production, time cut up into equal abstract fragments. This unified irreversible time belongs to the global market, and thus also to the global spectacle.

The irreversible time of production is first of all the measure of commodities. The time officially recognized throughout the world as the general time of society actually only reflects the specialized interests that constitute it, and thus is merely one particular type of time.

The class struggles of the long era of revolutions initiated by the rise of the bourgeoisie have developed in tandem with the dialectical “thought of history” — the thought which is no longer content to seek the meaning of what exists, but which strives to comprehend the dissolution of what exists, and in the process breaks down every separation.

This historical thought is still a consciousness that always arrives too late, a consciousness that can only formulate retrospective justifications of what has already happened. It has thus gone beyond separation only in thought. Hegel’s paradoxical stance — his subordination of the meaning of all reality to its historical culmination while at the same time proclaiming that his own system represents that culmination — flows from the simple fact that this thinker of the bourgeois revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought in his philosophy only a reconciliation with the results of those revolutions.

When the proletariat demonstrates through its own actions that this historical thought has not been forgotten, its refutation of that thought’s conclusion is at the same time a confirmation of its method.

The weakness of Marx’s theory is naturally linked to the weakness of the revolutionary struggle of the proletariat of his time. The German working class failed to inaugurate a permanent revolution in 1848; the Paris Commune was defeated in isolation. As a result, revolutionary theory could not yet be fully realized.

The theoretical shortcomings of the scientific defense of proletarian revolution (both in its content and in its form of exposition) all ultimately result from identifying the proletariat with the bourgeoisie with respect to the revolutionary seizure of power.

The only two classes that really correspond to Marx’s theory, the two pure classes that the entire analysis of Capital brings to the fore, are the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. These are also the only two revolutionary classes in history, but operating under very different conditions. The bourgeois revolution is done. The proletarian revolution is a yet-unrealized project, born on the foundation of the earlier revolution but differing from it qualitatively. If one overlooks the originality of the historical role of the bourgeoisie, one also tends to overlook the specific originality of the proletarian project, which can achieve nothing unless it carries its own banners and recognizes the “immensity of its own tasks.” The bourgeoisie came to power because it was the class of the developing economy. The proletariat cannot create its own new form of power except by becoming the class of consciousness. The growth of productive forces will not in itself guarantee the emergence of such a power — not even indirectly by way of the increasing dispossession which that growth entails. Nor can a Jacobin-style seizure of the state be a means to this end. The proletariat cannot make use of any ideologydesigned to disguise its partial goals as general goals, because the proletariat cannot preserve any partial reality that is truly its own.

This ideologically alienated theory was then no longer able to recognize the practical verifications of the unitary historical thought it had betrayed when such verifications emerged in spontaneous working-class struggles; instead, it contributed toward repressing every manifestation and memory of them. Yet those historical forms that took shape in struggle were precisely the practical terrain that was needed in order to validate the theory. They were what the theory needed, yet that need had not been formulated theoretically. The soviet, for example, was not a theoretical discovery. And the most advanced theoretical truth of the International Workingmen’s Association was its own existence in practice.

The historical moment when Bolshevism triumphed for itself in Russia and social democracy fought victoriously for the old world marks the inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class.

The Stalin era revealed the bureaucracy’s ultimate function: continuing the reign of the economy by preserving the essence of market society: commodified labor. It also demonstrated the independence of the economy: the economy has come to dominate society so completely that it has proved capable of recreating the class domination it needs for its own continued operation; that is, the bourgeoisie has created an independent power that is capable of maintaining itself even without a bourgeoisie. The totalitarian bureaucracy was not “the last owning class in history” in Bruno Rizzi’s sense; it was merely a substitute ruling class for the commodity economy. A tottering capitalist property system was replaced by a cruder version of itself — simplified, less diversified, and concentrated as the collective property of the bureaucratic class. This underdeveloped type of ruling class is also a reflection of economic underdevelopment, and it has no agenda beyond overcoming this underdevelopment in certain regions of the world. The hierarchical and statist framework for this crude remake of the capitalist ruling class was provided by the working-class party, which was itself modeled on the hierarchical separations of bourgeois organizations.

The ruling totalitarian-ideological class is the ruler of a world turned upside down. The more powerful the class, the more it claims not to exist, and its power is employed above all to enforce this claim. It is modest only on this one point, however, because this officially nonexistent bureaucracy simultaneously attributes the crowning achievements of history to its own infallible leadership. Though its existence is everywhere in evidence, the bureaucracy must be invisible as a class. As a result, all social life becomes insane. The social organization of total falsehood stems from this fundamental contradiction.

Stalinism was also a reign of terror within the bureaucratic class. The terrorism on which this class’s power was based inevitably came to strike the class itself, because this class had no juridical legitimacy, no legally recognized status as an owning class that could be extended to each of its members. Its ownership had to be masked because it was based on false consciousness. This false consciousness can maintain its total power only by means of a total reign of terror in which all real motives are ultimately obscured. The members of the ruling bureaucratic class have the right of ownership over society only collectively, as participants in a fundamental lie: they have to play the role of the proletariat governing a socialist society; they have to be actors faithful to a script of ideological betrayal. Yet they cannot actually participate in this counterfeit entity unless their legitimacy is validated. No bureaucrat can individually assert his right to power, because to prove himself a socialist proletarian he would have to demonstrate that he was the opposite of a bureaucrat, while to prove himself a bureaucrat is impossible because the bureaucracy’s official line is that there is no bureaucracy. Each bureaucrat is thus totally dependent on the central seal of legitimacy provided by the ruling ideology, which validates the collective participation in its “socialist regime” of all the bureaucrats it does not liquidate. Although the bureaucrats are collectively empowered to make all social decisions, the cohesion of their own class can be ensured only by the concentration of their terrorist power in a single person. In this person resides the only practical truth of the ruling lie: the power to determine an unchallengeable boundary line which is nevertheless constantly being adjusted. Stalin decides without appeal who is and who is not a member of the ruling bureaucracy — who should be considered a “proletarian in power” and who branded “a traitor in the pay of Wall Street and the Mikado.” The atomized bureaucrats can find their collective legitimacy only in the person of Stalin — the lord of the world who thus comes to see himself as the absolute person, for whom no superior spirit exists. “The lord of the world recognizes his own nature — omnipresent power — through the destructive violence he exerts against the contrastingly powerless selfhood of his subjects.” He is the power that defines the terrain of domination, and he is also “the power that ravages that terrain.”

When the proletariat discovers that its own externalized power contributes to the constant reinforcement of capitalist society, no longer only in the form of its alienated labor but also in the form of the trade unions, political parties, and state powers that it had created in the effort to liberate itself, it also discovers through concrete historical experience that it is the class that must totally oppose all rigidified externalizations and all specializations of power. It bears a revolution that cannot leave anything outside itself, a revolution embodying the permanent domination of the present over the past and a total critique of separation; and it must discover the appropriate forms of action to carry out this revolution. No quantitative amelioration of its impoverishment, no illusory participation in a hierarchized system, can provide a lasting cure for its dissatisfaction, because the proletariat cannot truly recognize itself in any particular wrong it has suffered, nor in the righting of any particular wrong. It cannot recognize itself even in the righting of many such wrongs, but only in the righting of the absolute wrong of being excluded from any real life.

New signs of negation are proliferating in the most economically advanced countries. Although these signs are misunderstood and falsified by the spectacle, they are sufficient proof that a new period has begun. We have already seen the failure of the first proletarian assault against capitalism; now we are witnessing the failure of capitalist abundance. On one hand, anti-union struggles of Western workers are being repressed first of all by the unions; on the other, rebellious youth are raising new protests, protests which are still vague and confused but which clearly imply a rejection of art, of everyday life, and of the old specialized politics. These are two sides of a new spontaneous struggle that is at first taking on a criminal appearance. They foreshadow a second proletarian assault against class society.

As capitalism’s ever-intensifying imposition of alienation at all levels makes it increasingly hard for workers to recognize and name their own impoverishment, putting them in the position of having to reject that impoverishment in its totality or not at all, revolutionary organization has had to learn that it can no longer combat alienation by means of alienated forms of struggle.

The development of class society to the stage of the spectacular organization of nonlife is thus leading the revolutionary project to become visibly what it has always been in essence.

Revolutionary theory is now the enemy of all revolutionary ideology, and it knows it.

Guy Debord, 1973

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#AltWoke Hyper-C

There is no term more ubiquitous, obnoxious, and self-serving in our current lexicon as “woke.” Woke is safety-pin politics, masturbatory symbolism, and virtue signaling of a deflated Left insulated by algorithms, filter bubbles, and browser extensions that replace pictures of Donald Trump with Pinterest recipes.

Woke is a misnomer — it’s actually asleep and myopic. Woke is a safe space for the easily distracted and defensive pop culture inbred. Woke is the Left curled up in a fetal ball scribbling think pieces about Broad City while its rights get trampled by ascendant fascism, domestically and globally.

Woke is the easy button: it combats injustice by sharing videos of police brutality to an echo of outrage.

Woke is bereft of irony: it shares HuffPo articles about gentrification from condos in Flatbush and Oakland.

Woke is alchemy: it transmutes oppressed identities into advertising campaigns, trend reports, and new demographics to market towards.

Woke is poptimstic: it believes Jaden Smith becoming the face of Louis Vuitton is enough to qualify as a win for progress.

Woke is content with the status quo: it would be perfectly content if another economic collapse happened tomorrow, just as long as those who rigged it were sufficiently intersectional.

Woke is a sanctimonious grammar-nazi who critiques the bully’s phrasing of “stop hitting yourself,” through toothless gums. Woke is too ethical for its own good.    

Woke is the gospel truth of the new evangelical Leftist. Woke is the Left’s consolidated failures distilled into a monosyllabic buzzword. A whimper into the digital landscape prefixed with a hashtag, arriving at the same point each time: #Woke is the literal antithesis of progress.

CATALOGUE OF THE WOKE LEFT’S FAILURES

1. Moderate Liberal

The moderate Left misappropriated theoretical terms and concepts, divorced from any actual theory. Identity politics, despite its origins in academia, flourishes best on social media — it’s the most accessible concept for moderate liberals to grasp.

“Well, if identity is only a game, if it is only a procedure to have relations, social and sexual-pleasure relationships that create new friendships, it is useful. But if identity becomes the problem of sexual existence, and if people think that they have to ‘uncover’ their ‘own identity,’ and that their own identity has to become the law, the principle, the code of their existence; if the perennial question they ask is ‘Does this thing conform to my identity?’ then, I think, they will turn back to a kind of ethics very close to the old heterosexual virility. If we are asked to relate to the question of identity, it must be an identity to our unique selves. But the relationships we have to have with ourselves are not ones of identity, rather, they must be relationships of differentiation, of creation, of innovation. To be the same is really boring. We must not exclude identity if people find their pleasure through this identity, but we must not think of this identity as an ethical universal rule.” — Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power, and the Politics of Identity” (1984)

Identity politics became an albatross, however. Both the moderate and radical were too eager to evangelize oppressed identities. There was no room for discussion, no place for debate. Call outs, clap backs, and other reality tv patois replaced dialectics.

Representation is the de facto litmus of society’s progress for the moderate liberal — society appeared more inclusive and diverse because “Orange is the New Black” has a female lead and a multiethnic supporting cast. They inhabit a never ending, curated echo chamber of think pieces, listicles, notifications, and retweets.

Everyone within their algorithmic ghetto shares their sentiments about society. The algorithm makes their small corner seem far more vast than it actually is, and as a result, the moderate extends this myopia to society at large.

The moderate midwifed the birth of the Alt-Right through bipartisan compromises. Moderate liberals are basically content to vest trust in their vaunted Democratic Party as it slides further to the right, thereby underpinning a level of discourse friendly to the far-right. It’s worth remembering that the end of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries were a period of diehard cooperation between liberals and conservatives in crafting today’s authoritarianism.

Neoconservatism provided socio-political planning that complemented a neoliberal economic agenda. This is why the radical Left blames liberals as well as conservatives for “command and control policing”, mass surveillance and this century’s rationale for endless warfare.

Moderate liberals provided and adopted theoretical frameworks that explained away structural oppression but retained an appearance of caring about racism and equality across intersecting spectrums of gender and sexuality. This was an obvious farce that mystified progress and the far right took advantage of this because they actually suffered no serious political setbacks. Liberalism provided an incubator for the alt right to form by mollifying actual demands for change.

“If politics without passion leads to cold-hearted, bureaucratic technocracy, then passion bereft of analysis risks becoming a libidinally driven surrogate for effective action. Politics comes to be about feeling of personal empowerment, masking an absence of strategic gains.”  — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

2. Radical Left

If the liberal is the evangelical, pearl clutching apostle of the woke Left, the radical, then, is St. Augustine — the hierophant, the pedagogue. The radical is the vanguard inhabiting academia & activism, creating the language and atmosphere of critique.

Its ideologies trickle down from intellectuals at universities to moderate liberals on social media, and more recently, the Alt-Right (e.g. culture jamming by way of “meme magic” or the synthesis of identity politics and white nationalism by way of identitarianism).

Radicals scapegoated liberals to absolve themselves of any responsibility by being all critique with no tangible answers. The radical left in its current incarnation is somewhat fossilized in terms of strategies and needs an immediate remodelling.

The radical is too comfortable inhabiting only the periphery of academia & activism. Radical academics and activists are insulated not only by algorithms but also their obsolescence. The radical academic has failed to bridge the gap between intellectuals & larger society.

That is, intellectuals failed to subvert hegemony and normativity. Academics did not do enough to reach beyond universities and make positive reforms to public education. Intellectuals failed to politicize the natural sciences early enough. Intellectuals lost programming and hacker culture to neoliberalism & libertarians. Computer science transitioned from cyberpunk to Silicon Valley venture capitalism.

Had radical academics succeeded, there might’ve been more legitimacy in the fight to combat climate change. Or traditional journalism wouldn’t have been so easily defeated by the post-fact information economy. What we have now is a new Scholasticism of students & professors as clergy dominated by an agitated, anti-intellectual populist bloc.  

“Learning surrenders control to the future, threatening established power. It is vigorously suppressed by all political structures, which replace it with a docilizing and conformist education, reproducing privilege as wisdom. Schools are social devices whose specific function is to incapacitate learning, and universities are employed to legitimate schooling through perpetual reconstitution of global social memory. The meltdown of metropolitan education systems in the near future is accompanied by a quasi-punctual bottom-up takeover of academic institutions, precipitating their mutation into amnesiac cataspace-exploration zones and bases manufacturing cyberian soft-weaponry.” Nick Land, “Meltdown” (1994)

The radical activist lost its sense resistance. There are no radicals in Congress. There are no radical lawmakers. No radical judges. Community organizing is helpful, but it’s not sufficient. To remain relevant radicals have to widen their scope to adapt to the changing global climate.

“The idea that one organisation, tactic or strategy applies equally well to any sort of struggle is one of the most pervasive and damaging beliefs among today’s left. Strategic reflection – on means and ends, enemies and allies – is necessary before approaching any political project. Given the nature of global capitalism, any postcapitalist project will require an ambitious, abstract, mediated, complex and global approach – one that folk-political approaches are incapable of providing.” — Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, “Inventing the Future” (2015)

WHAT IS #ALTWOKE:

1. Theoria

AltWoke is a new awakening for the post-modern Left to navigate the protean digital era. Altwoke can be categorized as the new New Left. Or Second Wave Neo-Marxism. The Post- Truth Left. Anti-liberal postcapitalist left. AltWoke is antithetical to Silicon Valley techno-neoliberalism. AltWoke is not the cult of Kurzweil. AltWoke is not merely analogous to the Alt-Right. AltWoke injects planning back into left-wing politics. AltWoke supports universal basic income, biotechnology and radical energy reforms to combat climate change, open borders, new forms of urban planning and the liquidation of Western hegemony. AltWoke sees opportunity in disaster. AltWoke is the Left taking futurism away from fascism. David Harvey is #altwoke. Situationist International is #altwoke. Lil B is #altwoke. Jean Baudrillard is #altwoke. Kodwo Eshun is #altwoke, Mark Fisher is #altwoke, Roberto Mangabeira Unger is #altwoke. Edward Snowden is #altwoke. Daniel Keller is #altwoke. Chelsea Manning is #altwoke. Theo Parrish is #altwoke. William Gibson is #altwoke. Holly Herndon is #altwoke. Frantz Fanon is #altwoke. Alvin Toffler is #altwoke.

2. Poiesis

Anti-liberal, Left-accelerationism. Revolution is slow & gradual. Technology, media, the global market, and culture accelerate the process.

Alt-Woke embraces the post-fact information economy as a pedagogical tool.

Culture is more important than policy.

Trickle-down ideology; AltWoke embraces normalization & hyperreality.

Memetic counter-insurrection: culture-jamming is the weapon of choice to tilt normalization in the direction we’d like it to go.

Xenofeminism. Technology is the missing component of intersectional politics. Eurocentrism and phallocentrism are obsolete, despite the Right’s best efforts. Queer is a verb, not a noun. If nature’s oppressive, change nature. Normalize “deviance.”

Reappropriation of globalism as a personal lifestyle.

AltWoke is duplicitous, amoral, & problematic. But also conscientious. The ends always justify the means. The Right hits low, so we hit lower, harder, and without mercy.

AltWoke is cautiously optimistic about the future.

PREFACE TO PRAXIS

Why support Left-Accelerationism?

Accelerationism is a contested and obtuse term among the Left, so in order to understand what accelerationism is, it’s crucial to understand what it isn’t.

Accelerationism doesn’t propose letting capitalism expand and erode to such a degree that its corrosive contradictions become so unbearable that the oppressed and working classes have no choice but to revolt. #Alt-Woke doesn’t and wouldn’t espouse such a simplistic and foolish framework, either.

In its neutral alignment, accelerationism is the idea that neoliberalism facilitates so much growth — economically, technologically, and globally — that its social contradictions continue to expand to such a degree that its “collapse” is not only inevitable, but creates a vacuum for new integrated social platforms. That is, like feudalism before it, late capitalism is transitory and incubates other socioeconomic ideologies that will ultimately replace it, since it’s now reaching its limits.

In its Right alignment, accelerationism is a schism: Neoreaction (NRx) is a radical libertarianism accelerating toward neoliberalism’s ultimate conclusion: plutocratic corporate monarchism (e.g., man as nation). The second is the Alt-Right, which is white identity politics accelerating toward capitalism’s ultimate conclusion: techno-fascism.

Left Accelerationism insists the only way out of capitalism is through it. It’s become apparent that capitalism is reaching its limits, and it can’t sustain itself any longer. The marriage of capitalism and democracy has been a powerful roadblock in the Left’s struggle to combat structural power. In its late phase, this divorce of capitalism and democracy is imminent.

“But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade.”  —Karl Marx, “On the Question of Free Trade” (1884)

Left Accelerationism is a vindication of Marxism that synthesizes vertical tektology. It anticipates capitalism’s collapse, repurposing growth and technology against its progenitor and nudges that collapse toward a Leftist counter-hegemony. Capitalism provides the efficiency of integrated networks, it provides the tools to combat the inequalities of its rapacious growth. A post-scarcity, socialist society can sustain itself from the technologies capitalism produces.  

“The paradox of free-market communism is even more dramatic: the terms are strongly charged, ideological polar opposites, designating a kind of Mexican standoff between capitalism, on the one hand, and its archenemy and would-be grave digger, on the other. But the point of combining the terms free market and communism in this way is to deploy selected features of the concept of communism to transform capitalist markets to render them truly free and, at the same time, to deploy selected features of the free market to transform communism and free it from a fatal entanglement with the State.” —Eugene W. Holland, “Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike” (2011)

The process of acceleration is well under way and no one but the most dogmatic and naive beltway libertarian would argue contrary. Left Accelerationism in an alternative to traditional avenues like reform or revolution and attempts to reorganize power from within power. It does this without completely discarding avenues like reform or revolution, either.

Left-Accelerationism is a synthesis of Marxism with vertical-scale tektology. It’s Gramsci by way of Debord and David Harvey by way of Deleuze.

Why embrace a post-facts/post-truth information economy?

As it stands, narrative is more important than facts. Media and communications are so accelerated that both sides of the political spectrum are locked in a battle over consensus. Traditional pedagogy will not work in this instance. The Left hurts itself by not using this to its advantage.

“Sometimes people hold a core belief that is very strong. When they are presented with evidence that works against that belief, the new evidence cannot be accepted. It would create a feeling that is extremely uncomfortable, called cognitive dissonance. And because it is so important to protect the core belief, they will rationalize, ignore and even deny anything that doesn’t fit with the core belief.” —Franz Fannon, “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952)

Why is culture more important than policy? Why weaponize memetics? What is “trickle down ideology”? Why support hyperreality and normalization?

Culture is society’s barometer. From the meme unleashed by Marshall McLuhan’s too-oft repeated phrase “the medium is the message,” author Joshua Meyrowitz seems to have taken it most seriously. “No Sense of Place” is an analysis into how television changed society by altering society’s access to information.

Meyrowitz forms a clear theory on information-power systems and discusses ways in which television breaks those down. At the end of the book, Meyrowitz chooses three specific topics: the merging of childhood and adulthood, the merging of masculinity and femininity, and the lowering of the political hero through the demystification of power.

Meyrowitz fundamentally believes that many social groupings and hostilities exist due to access to and restrictions of information and space. When information and space are separated, then the boundaries between social groups relax. For example, the television show ‘The Jeffersons,’ brought white families in their living rooms to the living room of a black family; and news coverage of the war in Vietnam “brought the war home” in visceral detail.

Memes are ideologies distilled, repackaged, and ready for viral distribution. The internet is something of an AI: a communication network operating as its own sovereign entity. Social media platforms, and other communications technologies accelerate the flow of ideas, bypassing restrictions put in place by traditional media.

A journalist in New York may engage with a senator in Washington over Twitter. A misguided 17-year old from Wisconsin who received their political education from /Pol, Breitbart, or Reddit can also join that same dialogue, and disrupt it. This is the best case scenario, unfortunately. Ideology is a memetic virus. Memes are an insurgent medium. The internet is an insurgent technology.

“The spectacle presents itself simultaneously as all of society, as part of society, and as instrument of unification. As a part of society it is specifically the sector which concentrates all gazing and all consciousness. Due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is the common ground of the deceived gaze and of false consciousness, and the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of generalized separation. The spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images.” —Guy Debord, “Society of the Spectacle”, (1967)

What is xenofeminism?

Xenofeminism is a form of Left-Accelerationism and, by extension, can be read as AltWoke’s answer to identity politics. Or, more accurately, it critiques liberal “privilege”-based identity politics and re-situates Left “critical theory”-based identity politics into a technological framework.

Innovation is a consequence of capitalism’s growth, hence it’s irresponsible not to recognize how power operates not only through structures like capitalism, but also its incarnations like racism, colonialism, and heteronormativity.

When looking at history, it’s imperative to ask questions about how technology changes and affects the ways in which people communicate, disseminate, and process information. This should always be taken into consideration from an intersectional frame of reference.

AltWoke isn’t opposed to identity politics so much as it’s opposed to reductionist, two-dimensional, representation as the crux of liberal identity politics. This mode of thinking lacks nuance and oftentimes devolves into inconsequential arguments over single phrases and who gets to participate. Bad politics comes in all forms of representation.

Hegemony operates in such a way that it permeates every aspect of social life in late capitalism, yet this isn’t always apparent — its existence must be revealed. Culture’s more dubious incarnation tells society who is and isn’t worthy of praise, admiration, and, ultimately, life. The White Man™ is still the dominant conduit through which capitalism operates.

However, there’s a cultural shift happening that is impossible to deny. The chauvinism of Western exceptionalism, essentialism, and the central cornerstone, “whiteness” are sociopoitical dead ends. It confines itself within impossible paradigms, even while, nonwhite, non-Western, non-binary identities are accelerating the process. The West crumbles as China accelerates toward superpower status. It’s no coincidence that pop music is now synonymous with R&B. Hip hop, techno, house, and footwork bridge the gap between the avant garde and pop by accelerating language, form, timbre, and aesthetics to alien plateaus.

Is it any wonder why “cuckold” is the Alt-Right’s pejorative of choice? The old guard justifies oppression and inequality as immutable and “natural.” The deviant Other threatens this “natural” hierarchy. The normalization of deviance is the ultimate culture-jam. Cuckoldry is deviant, and deviance is the vanguard. #BlackPopMatters.

Why embrace and reappropriate globalism?

AltWoke perceives the “nation” as an information network and citizen –> user. The governance structure of the internet creates the subjectivity of power, the user, in the same fashion as the invention of the state created the subjectivity of citizens. Global scale computation has built a new governing rhizomatic architecture. All systems have integrated into platform stacks, and by extension, nations and governments are but another component in the Internet of Things (IoT).

People should be allowed in all physical spaces as a fundamental right. Politics has nothing to do with physical territory. AltWoke accelerationism fully separated land from politics once it realized that political groupings are aspatial networks: informational, cybernetic.

The old paradigm was political grouping by blood, land, and then language. These were all networks. Cyberspace is an artificial network same as blood, land, and language. It’s better, too, as it is instantaneous. Those who hold politics to be the defense of land, nation, ethnicity, or linguistics are the old-guard; they are demonstrably incorrect and stand between people and their liberty.

“Geology is sensible of itself in so much as it has an ordering logic, if it is articulate in its stratifications, reading pebbles, rocks, various kinds of matter, sorting, organizing (Roger Caillois calls this agency ‘computational’), folding, compacting the biological slime of the earth into its various layers.” Kathryn Yusoff, “Anthropogenesis: Origins and Endings in the Anthropocene” (2015)

The American nation was formed by the economic activities of the thirteen colonies as they functioned with common standards, such as shipping timetables and commercial infrastructure, developing into a consciousness of togetherness and assumed similarity between participants in the network.

Nations are coextensive with land, not that the land has ties to blood or biology (the misstep of historical fascism and contemporary nationalism, to glorify the soil) but the physical geography of land determined the networks superimposed over it.

Europe, for example, has for so long been balkanized into nationalities and peoples separated by mountain ranges, seas, and long distances, and brought together by modifications to this physical geography (see: Spain’s hegemony over Europe and its fantastic road system prior to 1648).

Now, pan-Europeanism burgeons on the fact that highway systems, shipping, and a porousness of state borders has reduced or annihilated these impediments to a common access to the European network. It fails because it does not see that the same forces that drive Pan-Europeanism point towards a global society.

The separation of the information network from place thus reduces the determination of place upon network, of place upon user, of place upon that user’s conception of themselves interacting with others, to the point that in a globalized world the user will interact with their physical neighbor in the same network as they will interact with someone in a different (city/state/nation/region), such that planetary consciousness necessarily forms.

Why is #AltWoke amoral?

Short answer: Politics is amoral. Long answer: As it stands, the political infrastructures of Western governments are collapsing. The Right solidified its stranglehold on structural power. Right Accelerationism is several steps ahead of its Leftist counterpart.

In America, the GOP is imploding and the Alt-Right is slowly replacing this obsolete party. The Right is vulgar, so we’ll stop taking the moral high road and be even fouler. The Left has no structural power, and the stakes are far too high. We truly stand to lose everything.

Traditional means of Left praxis are ineffectual against this ascendant superstructure. Asking that every individual respect the humanity of ethnic, racial, and sexual minorities is naive. It will take more deceptive and subversive methods for the political Left to affect any change. #Alt-Woke praxis is, if anything, a reappropriation of Vladislav Surkov’s idea of ‘nonlinear warfare.’ We don’t fight fair. We won’t be civil. We don’t resist power, we seize it.

3. Praxis

The question of AltWoke Praxis is also the question of Left-Accelerationist Praxis: How does one organize politically? AltWoke Praxis has two modal structures: Right Hand Praxis & Left Hand Praxis. Or, The Hand That Strikes & The Hand That Repurposes. RHP takes advantage of the cracks within the Alt-Right, disrupting any roadblocks to clear a path so LHP can shift the Overton Window. LHP repurposes existing technologies, networks, and power structures to initiate a counter-hegemony. LHP advances AltWoke’s core tenets without ever explicitly espousing as such. Privacy is crucial to Left Hand Praxis, so it won’t be listed, but appropriating multinational corporate identity is a crucial first step.

Right Hand Praxis

Alt-Right countersurveillance. Invade their spaces, disrupt their safe space. Break out of your filter bubble, learn their language. Learn who they are, and what they believe. Befriend them only to spy on them. Dox the doxers.

Exploit the right’s paranoia and affinity towards pseudoscience. If they believe that supplements will boost their testosterone or tin foil nets disrupt phone signals, exploit that market.

Direct action hacktivism. Penetrate the SEO. Make #altwoke viral. Twitter bot agit prop.

Appropriate post-fact culture. Conspiracy theories are memetically powerful. The Left does itself a disservice by not making its own. Speak their language to make it compelling: “Peter Thiel is a member of the Bilderberg Group!”

Exploit their contradictions: Human biodiversity is incompatible with Traditionalist Catholics. White nationalists think Identitarians are ineffectual Third Positionists. Drive them further into their own filter bubbles and out of voting booths.

Agitate Leftist demonstrations. The more the Woke, horizontal Left marches, the better. It takes any potential attention away from Left Hand Praxis.

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Postscript on the Societies of Control

In this short essay Deleuze looks to move beyond Michel Foucault’s historical understanding of ‘disciplinary societies’, where power is exercised within discrete institutions, towards the concept of 'societies of control'. In many ways it parallels the ideas of the Italian radical left around the concept of the ‘social factory’, providing an intersection between post-structuralist philosophy and autonomist Marxism.

1. Historical

Foucault located the disciplinary societies in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; they reach their height at the outset of the twentieth. They initiate the organization of vast spaces of enclosure. The individual never ceases passing from one closed environment to another, each having its own laws: first the family; then the school ('you are no longer in your family'); then the barracks ('you are no longer at school'); then the factory; from time to time the hospital; possibly the prison, the pre-eminent instance of the enclosed environment. It's the prison that serves as the analogical model: at the sight of some labourers, the heroine of Rossellini's Europa '51 could exclaim, 'I thought I was seeing convicts.'

Foucault has brilliantly analyzed the ideal project of these environments of enclosure, particularly visible within the factory: to concentrate; to distribute in space; to order in time; to compose a productive force within the dimension of space-time whose effect will be greater than the sum of its component forces. But what Foucault recognized as well was the transience of this model: it succeeded that of the societies of sovereignty, the goal and functions of which were something quite different (to tax rather than to organize production, to rule on death rather than to administer life); the transition took place over time, and Napoleon seemed to effect the large-scale conversion from one society to the other. But in their turn the disciplines underwent a crisis to the benefit of new forces that were gradually instituted and which accelerated after World War II: a disciplinary society was what we already no longer were, what we had ceased to be.

We are in a generalized crisis in relation to all the environments of enclosure - prison, hospital, factory, school, family. The family is an "interior," in crisis like all other interiors - scholarly, professional, etc. The administrations in charge never cease announcing supposedly necessary reforms: to reform schools, to reform industries, hospitals, the armed forces, prisons. But everyone knows that these institutions are finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods. It's only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking at the door.

These are the societies of control, which are in the process of replacing disciplinary societies. "Control" is the name Burroughs proposes as a term for the new monster, one that Foucault recognizes as our immediate future. Paul Virilio also is continually analyzing the ultrarapid forms of free-floating control that replaced the old disciplines operating in the time frame of a closed system. There is no need to invoke the extraordinary pharmaceutical productions, the molecular engineering, the genetic manipulations, although these are slated to enter the new process. There is no need to ask which is the toughest regime, for it's within each of them that liberating and enslaving forces confront one another. For example, in the crisis of the hospital as environment of enclosure, neighbourhood clinics, hospices, and day care could at first express new freedom, but they could participate as well in mechanisms of control that are equal to the harshest of confinements. There is no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.

2. Logic

The different internments of spaces of enclosure through which the individual passes are independent variables: each time one us supposed to start from zero, and although a common language for all these places exists, it isanalogical. One the other hand, the different control mechanisms are inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry the language of which is numerical (which doesn't necessarily mean binary). Enclosures aremolds, distinct castings, but controls are a modulation, like a self-deforming cast that will continuously change from one moment to the other, or like a sieve whose mesh will transmute from point to point.

This is obvious in the matter of salaries: the factory was a body that contained its internal forces at the level of equilibrium, the highest possible in terms of production, the lowest possible in terms of wages; but in a society of control, the corporation has replaced the factory, and the corporation is a spirit, a gas. Of course the factory was already familiar with the system of bonuses, but the corporation works more deeply to impose a modulation of each salary, in states of perpetual metastability that operate through challenges, contests, and highly comic group sessions. If the most idiotic television game shows are so successful, it's because they express the corporate situation with great precision. The factory constituted individuals as a single body to the double advantage of the boss who surveyed each element within the mass and the unions who mobilized a mass resistance; but the corporation constantly presents the brashest rivalry as a healthy form of emulation, an excellent motivational force that opposes individuals against one another and runs through each, dividing each within. The modulating principle of "salary according to merit" has not failed to tempt national education itself. Indeed, just as the corporation replaces the factory, perpetual training tends to replace the school, and continuous control to replace the examination. Which is the surest way of delivering the school over to the corporation.

In the disciplinary societies one was always starting again (from school to the barracks, from the barracks to the factory), while in the societies of control one is never finished with anything--the corporation, the educational system, the armed services being metastable states coexisting in one and the same modulation, like a universal system of deformation. In The Trial, Kafka, who had already placed himself at the pivotal point between two types of social formation, described the most fearsome of judicial forms. The apparent acquittal of the disciplinary societies (between two incarcerations); and thelimitless postponements of the societies of control (in continuous variation) are two very different modes of juridicial life, and if our law is hesitant, itself in crisis, it's because we are leaving one in order to enter the other. The disciplinary societies have two poles: the signature that designates theindividual, and the number or administrative numeration that indicates his or her position within a mass. This is because the disciplines never saw any incompatibility between these two, and because at the same time power individualizes and masses together, that is, constitutes those over whom it exercises power into a body and molds the individuality of each member of that body. (Foucault saw the origin of this double charge in the pastoral power of the priest--the flock and each of its animals--but civil power moves in turn and by other means to make itself lay "priest.") In the societies of control, on the other hand, what is important is no longer either a signature or a number, but a code: the code is a password, while on the other hand disciplinary societies are regulated by watchwords (as much from the point of view of integration as from that of resistance). The numerical language of control is made of codes that mark access to information, or reject it. We no longer find ourselves dealing with the mass/individual pair. Individuals have become"dividuals," and masses, samples, data, markets, or "banks." Perhaps it is money that expresses the distinction between the two societies best, since discipline always referred back to minted money that locks gold as numerical standard, while control relates to floating rates of exchange, modulated according to a rate established by a set of standard currencies. The old monetary mole is the animal of the space of enclosure, but the serpent is that of the societies of control. We have passed from one animal to the other, from the mole to the serpent, in the system under which we live, but also in our manner of living and in our relations with others. The disciplinary man was a discontinuous producer of energy, but the man of control is undulatory, in orbit, in a continuous network. Everywhere surfing has already replaced the oldersports.

Types of machines are easily matched with each type of society--not that machines are determining, but because they express those social forms capable of generating them and using them. The old societies of sovereignty made use of simple machines--levers, pulleys, clocks; but the recent disciplinary societies equipped themselves with machines involving energy, with the passive danger of entropy and the active danger of sabotage; the societies of control operate with machines of a third type, computers, whose passive danger is jamming and whose active one is piracy or the introduction of viruses. This technological evolution must be, even more profoundly, a mutation of capitalism, an already well-known or familiar mutation that can be summed up as follows: nineteenth-century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property. It therefore erects a factory as a space of enclosure, the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker's familial house, the school).

As for markets, they are conquered sometimes by specialization, sometimes by colonization, sometimes by lowering the costs of production. But in the present situation, capitalism is no longer involved in production, which it often relegates to the Third World, even for the complex forms of textiles, metallurgy, or oil production. It's a capitalism of higher-order production. It no-longer buys raw materials and no longer sells the finished products: it buys the finished products or assembles parts. What it wants to sell is services but what it wants to buy is stocks. This is no longer a capitalism for production but for the product, which is to say, for being sold or marketed. Thus is essentially dispersive, and the factory has given way to the corporation. The family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an owner - state or private power - but coded figures - deformable and transformable - of a single corporation that now has only stockholders.

Even art has left the spaces of enclosure in order to enter into the open circuits of the bank. The conquests of the market are made by grabbing control and no longer by disciplinary training, by fixing the exchange rate much more than by lowering costs, by transformation of the product more than by specialization of production. Corruption thereby gains a new power. Marketing has become the centre or the "soul" of the corporation. We are taught that corporations have a soul, which is the most terrifying news in the world. The operation of markets is now the instrument of social control and forms the impudent breed of our masters. Control is short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit, while discipline was of long duration, infinite and discontinuous. Man is no longer man enclosed, but man in debt. It is true that capitalism has retained as a constant the extreme poverty of three-quarters of humanity, too poor for debt, too numerous for confinement: control will not only have to deal with erosions of frontiers but with the explosions within shanty towns or ghettos.

3. Program

The conception of a control mechanism, giving the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant (whether animal in a reserve or human in a corporation, as with an electronic collar), is not necessarily one of science fiction. Felix Guattari has imagined a city where one would be able to leave one's apartment, one's street, one's neighbourhood, thanks to one's (dividual) electronic card that raises a given barrier; but the card could just as easily be rejected on a given day or between certain hours; what counts is not the barrier but the computer that tracks each person's position - licit or illicit - and effects a universal modulation.

The socio-technological study of the mechanisms of control, grasped at their inception, would have to be categorical and to describe what is already in the process of substitution for the disciplinary sites of enclosure, whose crisis is everywhere proclaimed. It may be that older methods, borrowed from the former societies of sovereignty, will return to the fore, but with the necessary modifications. What counts is that we are at the beginning of something. In theprison system: the attempt to find penalties of "substitution," at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours. For the school system: continuous forms of control, and the effect on the school of perpetual training, the corresponding abandonment of all university research, the introduction of the "corporation" at all levels of schooling. For the hospital system: the new medicine "without doctor or patient" that singles out potential sick people and subjects at risk, which in no way attests to individuation--as they say--but substitutes for the individual or numerical body the code of a "dividual" material to be controlled. In the corporate system: new ways of handling money, profits, and humans that no longer pass through the old factory form.

These are very small examples, but ones that will allow for better understanding of what is meant by the crisis of the institutions, which is to say, the progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domination. One of the most important questions will concern the ineptitude of the unions: tied to the whole of their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of the coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing? Many young people strangely boast of being "motivated"; they re-request apprenticeships and permanent training. It's up to them to discover what they're being made to serve, just as their elders discovered, not without difficulty, the telos of the disciplines. The coils of a serpent are even more complex that the burrows of a molehill.

Originally published in the journal OCTOBER 59, Winter 1992, MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, pp. 3-7.

Gilles Deleuze

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Fragment on Machines

The labour process. – Fixed capital. Means of labour. Machine. – Fixed capital. Transposition of powers of labour into powers of capital both in fixed and in circulating capital. – To what extent fixed capital (machine) creates value. – Lauderdale. Machine presupposes a mass of workers.

Capital which consumes itself in the production process, or fixed capital, is the means of production in the strict sense. In a broader sense the entire production process and each of its moments, such as circulation – as regards its material side – is only a means of production for capital, for which value alone is the end in itself. Regarded as a physical substance, the raw material itself is a means of production for the product etc.

But the determination that the use value of fixed capital is that which eats itself up in the production process is identical to the proposition that it is used in this process only as a means, and itself exists merely as an agency for the transformation of the raw material into the product. As such a means of production, its use value can be that it is merely the technological condition for the occurrence of the process (the site where the production process proceeds), as with buildings etc., or that it is a direct condition of the action of the means of production proper, like all matières instrumentales. Both are in turn only the material presuppositions for the production process generally, or for the employment and maintenance of the means of labour. The latter, however, in the proper sense, serves only within production and for production, and has no other use value.

Originally, when we examined the development of value into capital, the labour process was simply included within capital, and, as regards its physical conditions, its material presence, capital appeared as the totality of the conditions of this process, and correspondingly sorted itself out into certain qualitatively different parts, material of labour (this, not raw material, is the correct expression of the concept), means of labour and living labour. On one side, capital was divided into these three elements in accordance with its material composition; on the other, the labour process (or the merging of these elements into each other within the process) was their moving unity, the product their static unity. In this form, the material elements – material of labour, means of labour and living labour – appeared merely as the essential moments of the labour process itself, which capital appropriates. But this material side – or, its character as use value and as real process – did not at all coincide with its formal side. In the latter,

(1) the three elements in which it appears before the exchange with labour capacity, before the real process, appeared merely as quantitatively different portions of itself, as quantities of value of which it, itself, as sum, forms the unity. The physical form, the use value, in which these different portions existed did not in any way alter their formal identity from this side. As far as their formal side was concerned, they appeared only as quantitative subdivisions of capital;

(2) within the process itself, as regards the form, the elements of labour and the two others were distinct only in so far as the latter were specified as constant values, and the former as value-positing. But as far as their distinctness as use values, their material side was concerned, this fell entirely outside the capital's specific character as form. Now, however, with the distinction between circulating capital (raw material and product) and fixed capital (means of labour), the distinctness of the elements as use values is posited simultaneously as a distinction within capital as capital, on its formal side. The relation between the factors, which had been merely quantitative, now appears as a qualitative division within capital itself, and as a determinant of its total movement (turnover). Likewise, the material of labour and the product of labour, this neutral precipitate of the labour process, are already, as raw material and product, materially specified no longer as material and product of labour, but rather as the use value of capital itself in different phases.

As long as the means of labour remains a means of labour in the proper sense of the term, such as it is directly, historically, adopted by capital and included in its realization process, it undergoes a merely formal modification, by appearing now as a means of labour not only in regard to its material side, but also at the same time as a particular mode of the presence of capital, determined by its total process – as fixed capital. But, once adopted into the production process of capital, the means of labour passes through different metamorphoses, whose culmination is themachine, or rather, an automatic system of machinery (system of machinery: the automatic one is merely its most complete, most adequate form, and alone transforms machinery into a system), set in motion by an automaton, a moving power that moves itself; this automaton consisting of numerous mechanical and intellectual organs, so that the workers themselves are cast merely as its conscious linkages. In the machine, and even more in machinery as an automatic system, the use value, i.e. the material quality of the means of labour, is transformed into an existence adequate to fixed capital and to capital as such; and the form in which it was adopted into the production process of capital, the direct means of labour, is superseded by a form posited by capital itself and corresponding to it. In no way does the machine appear as the individual worker's means of labour. Its distinguishing characteristic is not in the least, as with the means of labour, to transmit the worker's activity to the object; this activity, rather, is posited in such a way that it merely transmits the machine's work, the machine's action, on to the raw material – supervises it and guards against interruptions. Not as with the instrument, which the worker animates and makes into his organ with his skill and strength, and whose handling therefore depends on his virtuosity. Rather, it is the machine which possesses skill and strength in place of the worker, is itself the virtuoso, with a soul of its own in the mechanical laws acting through it; and it consumes coal, oil etc. (matières instrumentales), just as the worker consumes food, to keep up its perpetual motion. The worker's activity, reduced to a mere abstraction of activity, is determined and regulated on all sides by the movement of the machinery, and not the opposite. The science which compels the inanimate limbs of the machinery, by their construction, to act purposefully, as an automaton, does not exist in the worker's consciousness, but rather acts upon him through the machine as an alien power, as the power of the machine itself. The appropriation of living labour by objectified labour – of the power or activity which creates value by value existing for-itself – which lies in the concept of capital, is posited, in production resting on machinery, as the character of the production process itself, including its material elements and its material motion. The production process has ceased to be a labour process in the sense of a process dominated by labour as its governing unity. Labour appears, rather, merely as a conscious organ, scattered among the individual living workers at numerous points of the mechanical system; subsumed under the total process of the machinery itself, as itself only a link of the system, whose unity exists not in the living workers, but rather in the living (active) machinery, which confronts his individual, insignificant doings as a mighty organism. In machinery, objectified labour confronts living labour within the labour process itself as the power which rules it; a power which, as the appropriation of living labour, is the form of capital. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery, and of living labour into a mere living accessory of this machinery, as the means of its action, also posits the absorption of the labour process in its material character as a mere moment of the realization process of capital. The increase of the productive force of labour and the greatest possible negation of necessary labour is the necessary tendency of capital, as we have seen. The transformation of the means of labour into machinery is the realization of this tendency. In machinery, objectified labour materially confronts living labour as a ruling power and as an active subsumption of the latter under itself, not only by appropriating it, but in the real production process itself; the relation of capital as value which appropriates value-creating activity is, in fixed capital existing as machinery, posited at the same time as the relation of the use value of capital to the use value of labour capacity; further, the value objectified in machinery appears as a presupposition against which the value-creating power of the individual labour capacity is an infinitesimal, vanishing magnitude; the production in enormous mass quantities which is posited with machinery destroys every connection of the product with the direct need of the producer, and hence with direct use value; it is already posited in the form of the product's production and in the relations in which it is produced that it is produced only as a conveyor of value, and its use value only as condition to that end. In machinery, objectified labour itself appears not only in the form of product or of the product employed as means of labour, but in the form of the force of production itself. The development of the means of labour into machinery is not an accidental moment of capital, but is rather the historical reshaping of the traditional, inherited means of labour into a form adequate to capital. The accumulation of knowledge and of skill, of the general productive forces of the social brain, is thus absorbed into capital, as opposed to labour, and hence appears as an attribute of capital, and more specifically of fixed capital, in so far as it enters into the production process as a means of production proper. Machinery appears, then, as the most adequate form of fixed capital, and fixed capital, in so far as capital's relations with itself are concerned, appears as themost adequate form of capital as such. In another respect, however, in so far as fixed capital is condemned to an existence within the confines of a specific use value, it does not correspond to the concept of capital, which, as value, is indifferent to every specific form of use value, and can adopt or shed any of them as equivalent incarnations. In this respect, as regards capital's external relations, it is circulating capital which appears as the adequate form of capital, and not fixed capital.

Further, in so far as machinery develops with the accumulation of society's science, of productive force generally, general social labour presents itself not in labour but in capital. The productive force of society is measured in fixed capital, exists there in its objective form; and, inversely, the productive force of capital grows with this general progress, which capital appropriates free of charge. This is not the place to go into the development of machinery in detail; rather only in its general aspect; in so far as the means of labour, as a physical thing, loses its direct form, becomes fixed capital, and confronts the worker physically as capital. In machinery, knowledge appears as alien, external to him; and living labour [as] subsumed under self-activating objectified labour. The worker appears as superfluous to the extent that his action is not determined by [capital's] requirements.

The full development of capital, therefore, takes place – or capital has posited the mode of production corresponding to it – only when the means of labour has not only taken the economic form of fixed capital, but has also been suspended in its immediate form, and when fixed capitalappears as a machine within the production process, opposite labour; and the entire production process appears as not subsumed under the direct skillfulness of the worker, but rather as the technological application of science. [It is,] hence, the tendency of capital to give production a scientific character; direct labour [is] reduced to a mere moment of this process. As with the transformation of value into capital, so does it appear in the further development of capital, that it presupposes a certain given historical development of the productive forces on one side – science too [is] among these productive forces – and, on the other, drives and forces them further onwards.

Thus the quantitative extent and the effectiveness (intensity) to which capital is developed as fixed capital indicate the general degree to which capital is developed as capital, as power over living labour, and to which it has conquered the production process as such. Also, in the sense that it expresses the accumulation of objectified productive forces, and likewise of objectified labour. However, while capital gives itself its adequate form as use value within the production process only in the form of machinery and other material manifestations of fixed capital, such as railways etc. (to which we shall return later), this in no way means that this use value – machinery as such – is capital, or that its existence as machinery is identical with its existence as capital; any more than gold would cease to have use value as gold if it were no longer money. Machinery does not lose its use value as soon as it ceases to be capital. While machinery is the most appropriate form of the use value of fixed capital, it does not at all follow that therefore subsumption under the social relation of capital is the most appropriate and ultimate social relation of production for the application of machinery.

To the degree that labour time – the mere quantity of labour – is posited by capital as the sole determinant element, to that degree does direct labour and its quantity disappear as the determinant principle of production – of the creation of use values – and is reduced both quantitatively, to a smaller proportion, and qualitatively, as an, of course, indispensable but subordinate moment, compared to general scientific labour, technological application of natural sciences, on one side, and to the general productive force arising from social combination [Gliederung] in total production on the other side – a combination which appears as a natural fruit of social labour (although it is a historic product). Capital thus works towards its own dissolution as the form dominating production.

While, then, in one respect the transformation of the production process from the simple labour process into a scientific process, which subjugates the forces of nature and compels them to work in the service of human needs, appears as a quality of fixed capital in contrast to living labour; while individual labour as such has ceased altogether to appear as productive, is productive, rather, only in these common labours which subordinate the forces of nature to themselves, and while this elevation of direct labour into social labour appears as a reduction of individual labour to the level of helplessness in face of the communality [Gemeinsamkeit] represented by and concentrated in capital; so does it now appear, in another respect, as a quality of circulating capital, to maintain labour in one branch of production by means of coexisting labour in another. In small-scale circulation, capital advances the worker the wages which the latter exchanges for products necessary for his consumption. The money he obtains has this power only because others are working alongside him at the same time; and capital can give him claims on alien labour, in the form of money, only because it has appropriated his own labour. This exchange of one's own labour with alien labour appears here not as mediated and determined by the simultaneous existence of the labour of others, but rather by the advance which capital makes. The worker's ability to engage in the exchange of substances necessary for his consumption during production appears as due to an attribute of the part of circulating capital which is paid to the worker, and of circulating capital generally. It appears not as an exchange of substances between the simultaneous labour powers, but as the metabolism [Stoffwechsel] of capital; as the existence of circulating capital. Thus all powers of labour are transposed into powers of capital; the productive power of labour into fixed capital (posited as external to labour and as existing independently of it (as object [sachlich]); and, in circulating capital, the fact that the worker himself has created the conditions for the repetition of his labour, and that the exchange of this, his labour, is mediated by the co-existing labour of others, appears in such a way that capital gives him an advance and posits the simultaneity of the branches of labour. (These last two aspects actually belong to accumulation.) Capital in the form of circulating capital posits itself as mediator between the different workers.

Fixed capital, in its character as means of production, whose most adequate form [is] machinery, produces value, i.e. increases the value of the product, in only two respects: (1) in so far as it has value; i.e. is itself the product of labour, a certain quantity of labour in objectified form; (2) in so far as it increases the relation of surplus labour to necessary labour, by enabling labour, through an increase of its productive power, to create a greater mass of the products required for the maintenance of living labour capacity in a shorter time. It is therefore a highly absurd bourgeois assertion that the worker shares with the capitalist, because the latter, with fixed capital (which is, as far as that goes, itself a product of labour, and of alien labour merely appropriated by capital) makes labour easier for him (rather, he robs it of all independence and attractive character, by means of the machine), or makes his labour shorter. Capital employs machinery, rather, only to the extent that it enables the worker to work a larger part of his time for capital, to relate to a larger part of his time as time which does not belong to him, to work longer for another. Through this process, the amount of labour necessary for the production of a given object is indeed reduced to a minimum, but only in order to realize a maximum of labour in the maximum number of such objects. The first aspect is important, because capital here – quite unintentionally – reduces human labour, expenditure of energy, to a minimum. This will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation. From what has been said, it is clear how absurd Lauderdale is when he wants to make fixed capital into an independent source of value, independent of labour time. It is such a source only in so far as it is itself objectified labour time, and in so far as it posits surplus labour time. The employment of machinery itself historically presupposes – see above, Ravenstone – superfluous hands. Machinery inserts itself to replace labour only where there is an overflow of labour powers. Only in the imagination of economists does it leap to the aid of the individual worker. It can be effective only with masses of workers, whose concentration relative to capital is one of its historic presuppositions, as we have seen. It enters not in order to replace labour power where this is lacking, but rather in order to reduce massively available labour power to its necessary measure. Machinery enters only where labour capacity is on hand in masses. (Return to this.)

Lauderdale believes himself to have made the great discovery that machinery does not increase the productive power of labour, because it rather replaces the latter, or does what labour cannot do with its own power. It belongs to the concept of capital that the increased productive force of labour is posited rather as the increase of a force [Kraft] outside itself, and as labour's own debilitation [Entkräftung]. The hand tool makes the worker independent – posits him as proprietor. Machinery – as fixed capital - - posits him as dependent, posits him as appropriated. This effect of machinery holds only in so far as it is cast into the role of fixed capital, and this it is only because the worker relates to it as wage-worker, and the active individual generally, as mere worker.

Fixed capital and circulating capital as two particular kinds of capital. Fixed capital and continuity of the production process. – Machinery and living labour. (Business of inventing) While, up to now, fixed capital and circulating capital appeared merely as different passing aspects of capital, they have now hardened into two particular modes of its existence, and fixed capital appears separately alongside circulating capital. They are now two particular kinds of capital. In so far as a capital is examined in a particular branch of production, it appears as divided into these two portions, or splits into these two kinds of capital in certain p[rop]ortions.

The division within the production process, originally between means of labour and material of labour, and finally product of labour, now appears as circulating capital (the last two) and fixed capital [the first]. The split within capital as regards its merely physical aspect has now entered into its form itself, and appears as differentiating it.

From a viewpoint such as Lauderdale’s etc., who would like to have capital as such, separately from labour, create value and hence also surplus value (or profit), fixed capital – namely that whose physical presence or use value is machinery – is the form which gives their superficial fallacies still the greatest semblance of validity. The answer to them, e.g. in Labour Defended, [is] that the road-builder may share [profits] with the road-user, but the ‘road’ itself cannot do so’ (Hodgskin, p. 16).

Circulating capital – presupposing that it really passes through its different phases – brings about the decrease or increase, the brevity or length of circulation time, the easier or more troublesome completion of the different stages of circulation, a decrease of the surplus value which could be created in a given period of time without these interruptions – either because the number of reproductions grows smaller, or because the quantity of capital continuously engaged in the production process is reduced. In both cases this is not a reduction of the initial value, but rather a reduction of the rate of its growth. From the moment, however, when fixed capital has developed to a certain extent – and this extent, as we indicated, is the measure of the development of large industry generally – hence fixed capital increases in proportion to the development of large industry’s productive forces – it is itself the objectification of these productive forces, as presupposed product – from this instant on, every interruption of the production process acts as a direct reduction of capital itself, of its initial value. The value of fixed capital is reproduced only in so far as it is used up in the production process. Through disuse it loses its use value without its value passing on to the product. Hence, the greater the scale on which fixed capital develops, in the sense in which we regard it here, the more does the continuity of the production process or the constant flow of reproduction become an externally compelling condition for the mode of production founded on capital.

In machinery, the appropriation of living labour by capital achieves a direct reality in this respect as well: It is, firstly, the analysis and application of mechanical and chemical laws, arising directly out of science, which enables the machine to perform the same labour as that previously performed by the worker. However, the development of machinery along this path occurs only when large industry has already reached a higher stage, and all the sciences have been pressed into the service of capital; and when, secondly, the available machinery itself already provides great capabilities. Invention then becomes a business, and the application of science to direct production itself becomes a prospect which determines and solicits it. But this is not the road along which machinery, by and large, arose, and even less the road on which it progresses in detail. This road is, rather, dissection [Analyse] – through the division of labour, which gradually transforms the workers’ operations into more and more mechanical ones, so that at a certain point a mechanism can step into their places. (See under economy of power.) Thus, the specific mode of working here appears directly as becoming transferred from the worker to capital in the form of the machine, and his own labour capacity devalued thereby. Hence the workers’ struggle against machinery. What was the living worker’s activity becomes the activity of the machine. Thus the appropriation of labour by capital confronts the worker in a coarsely sensuous form; capital absorbs labour into itself – ‘as though its body were by love possessed’ (Goethe’s Faust).

Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development. Machines etc.

The exchange of living labour for objectified labour – i.e. the positing of social labour in the form of the contradiction of capital and wage labour – is the ultimate development of the value-relation and of production resting on value. Its presupposition is – and remains – the mass of direct labour time, the quantity of labour employed, as the determinant factor in the production of wealth. But to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose ‘powerful effectiveness’ is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. (The development of this science, especially natural science, and all others with the latter, is itself in turn related to the development of material production.) Agriculture, e.g., becomes merely the application of the science of material metabolism, its regulation for the greatest advantage of the entire body of society. Real wealth manifests itself, rather – and large industry reveals this – in the monstrous disproportion between the labour time applied, and its product, as well as in the qualitative imbalance between labour, reduced to a pure abstraction, and the power of the production process it superintends. Labour no longer appears so much to be included within the production process; rather, the human being comes to relate more as watchman and regulator to the production process itself. (What holds for machinery holds likewise for the combination of human activities and the development of human intercourse.) No longer does the worker insert a modified natural thing [Naturgegenstand] as middle link between the object [Objekt] and himself; rather, he inserts the process of nature, transformed into an industrial process, as a means between himself and inorganic nature, mastering it. He steps to the side of the production process instead of being its chief actor. In this transformation, it is neither the direct human labour he himself performs, nor the time during which he works, but rather the appropriation of his own general productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over it by virtue of his presence as a social body – it is, in a word, the development of the social individual which appears as the great foundation-stone of production and of wealth. The theft of alien labour time, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation in face of this new one, created by large-scale industry itself. As soon as labour in the direct form has ceased to be the great well-spring of wealth, labour time ceases and must cease to be its measure, and hence exchange value [must cease to be the measure] of use value. The surplus labour of the mass has ceased to be the condition for the development of general wealth, just as the non-labour of the few, for the development of the general powers of the human head. With that, production based on exchange value breaks down, and the direct, material production process is stripped of the form of penury and antithesis. The free development of individualities, and hence not the reduction of necessary labour time so as to posit surplus labour, but rather the general reduction of the necessary labour of society to a minimum, which then corresponds to the artistic, scientific etc. development of the individuals in the time set free, and with the means created, for all of them. Capital itself is the moving contradiction, [in] that it presses to reduce labour time to a minimum, while it posits labour time, on the other side, as sole measure and source of wealth. Hence it diminishes labour time in the necessary form so as to increase it in the superfluous form; hence posits the superfluous in growing measure as a condition – question of life or death – for the necessary. On the one side, then, it calls to life all the powers of science and of nature, as of social combination and of social intercourse, in order to make the creation of wealth independent (relatively) of the labour time employed on it. On the other side, it wants to use labour time as the measuring rod for the giant social forces thereby created, and to confine them within the limits required to maintain the already created value as value. Forces of production and social relations – two different sides of the development of the social individual – appear to capital as mere means, and are merely means for it to produce on its limited foundation. In fact, however, they are the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high. ‘Truly wealthy a nation, when the working day is 6 rather than 12 hours. Wealth is not command over surplus labour time’ (real wealth), ‘but rather, disposable time outside that needed in direct production, for every individualand the whole society.’ (The Source and Remedy etc. 1821, p. 6.)

Nature builds no machines, no locomotives, railways, electric telegraphs, self-acting mules etc. These are products of human industry; natural material transformed into organs of the human will over nature, or of human participation in nature. They are organs of the human brain, created by the human hand; the power of knowledge, objectified. The development of fixed capital indicates to what degree general social knowledge has become a direct force of production, and to what degree, hence, the conditions of the process of social life itself have come under the control of the general intellect and been transformed in accordance with it. To what degree the powers of social production have been produced, not only in the form of knowledge, but also as immediate organs of social practice, of the real life process.

Significance of the development of fixed capital (for the development of capital generally). Relation between the creation of fixed capital and circulating capital. Disposable time. To create it, chief role of capital. Contradictory form of the same in capital. – Productivity of labour and production of fixed capital. (The Source and Remedy.) – Use and consume: Economist. Durability of fixed capital

The development of fixed capital indicates in still another respect the degree of development of wealth generally, or of capital. The aim of production oriented directly towards use value, as well as of that directly oriented towards exchange value, is the product itself, destined for consumption. The part of production which is oriented towards the production of fixed capital does not produce direct objects of individual gratification, nor direct exchange values; at least not directly realizable exchange values. Hence, only when a certain degree of productivity has already been reached – so that a part of production time is sufficient for immediate production – can an increasingly large part be applied to the production of the means of production. This requires that society be able to wait; that a large part of the wealth already created can be withdrawn both from immediate consumption and from production for immediate consumption, in order to employ this part for labour which is not immediately productive (within the material production process itself). This requires a certain level of productivity and of relative overabundance, and, more specifically, a level directly related to the transformation of circulating capital into fixed capital. As the magnitude of relative surplus labour depends on the productivity of necessary labour, so does the magnitude of labour time – living as well as objectified –employed on the production of fixed capital depend on the productivity of the labour time spent in the direct production of products. Surplus population (from this standpoint), as well as surplus production, is a condition for this. That is; the output of the time employed in direct production must be larger, relatively, than is directly required for the reproduction of the capital employed in these branches of industry. The smaller the direct fruits borne by fixed capital, the less it intervenes in the direct production process, the greater must be this relative surplus populationand surplus production; thus, more to build railways, canals, aqueducts, telegraphs etc. than to build the machinery directly active in the direct production process. Hence – a subject to which we will return later – in the constant under- and overproduction of modern industry – constant fluctuations and convulsions arise from the disproportion, when sometimes too little, then again too much circulating capital is transformed into fixed capital.

The creation of a large quantity of disposable time apart from necessary labour time for society generally and each of its members (i.e. room for the development of the individuals’ full productive forces, hence those of society also), this creation of not-labour time appears in the stage of capital, as of all earlier ones, as not-labour time, free time, for a few. What capital adds is that it increases the surplus labour time of the mass by all the means of art and science, because its wealth consists directly in the appropriation of surplus labour time; since value directly its purpose, not use value. It is thus, despite itself, instrumental in creating the means of social disposable time, in order to reduce labour time for the whole society to a diminishing minimum, and thus to free everyone’s time for their own development. But its tendency always, on the one side, to create disposable time, on the other, to convert it into surplus labour. If it succeeds too well at the first, then it suffers from surplus production, and then necessary labour is interrupted, because no surplus labour can be realized by capital. The more this contradiction develops, the more does it become evident that the growth of the forces of production can no longer be bound up with the appropriation of alien labour, but that the mass of workers must themselves appropriate their own surplus labour. Once they have done so – and disposable time thereby ceases to have an antithetical existence – then, on one side, necessary labour time will be measured by the needs of the social individual, and, on the other, the development of the power of social production will grow so rapidly that, even though production is now calculated for the wealth of all, disposable time will grow for all. For real wealth is the developed productive power of all individuals. The measure of wealth is then not any longer, in any way, labour time, but rather disposable time. Labour time as the measure of value posits wealth itself as founded on poverty, and disposable time as existing in and because of the antithesis to surplus labour time; or, the positing of an individual’s entire time as labour time, and his degradation therefore to mere worker, subsumption under labour. The most developed machinery thus forces the worker to work longer than the savage does, or than he himself did with the simplest, crudest tools.

‘If the entire labour of a country were sufficient only to raise the support of the whole population, there would be no surplus labour, consequently nothing that could be allowed to accumulate as capital. If in one year the people raises enough for the support of two years, one year’s consumption must perish, or for one year men must cease from productive labour. But the possessors of [the] surplus produce or capital... employ people upon something not directly and immediately productive, e.g. in the erection of machinery. So it goes on.’ (The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, p. 4.) As the basis on which large industry rests, the appropriation of alien labour time, ceases, with its development, to make up or to create wealth, so does direct labour as such cease to be the basis of production, since, in one respect, it is transformed more into a supervisory and regulatory activity; but then also because the product ceases to be the product of isolated direct labour, and the combination of social activity appears, rather, as the producer. ‘As soon as the division of labour is developed, almost every piece of work done by a single individual is a part of a whole, having no value or utility of itself. There is nothing on which the labourer can seize: this is my produce, this I will keep to myself.’ (Labour Defended, p. 25, 1, 2, XI.) In direct exchange, individual direct labour appears as realized in a particular product or part of the product, and its communal, social character – its character as objectification of general labour and satisfaction of the general need – as posited through exchange alone. In the production process of large-scale industry, by contrast, just as the conquest of the forces of nature by the social intellect is the precondition of the productive power of the means of labour as developed into the automatic process, on one side, so, on the other, isthe labour of the individual in its direct presence posited as suspended individual, i.e. as social, labour. Thus the other basis of this mode of production falls away.

The labour time employed in the production of fixed capital relates to that employed in the production of circulating capital, within the production process of capital itself, as does surplus labour time to necessary labour time. To the degree that production aimed at the satisfaction of immediate need becomes more productive, a greater part of production can be directed towards the need of production itself, or the production of means of production. In so far as the production of fixed capital, even in its physical aspect, is directed immediately not towards the production of direct use values, or towards the production of values required for the direct reproduction of capital – i.e. those which themselves in turn represent use value in the value-creation process – but rather towards the production of the means of value creation, that is, not towards value as an immediate object, but rather towards value creation, towards the means of realization, as an immediate object of production – the production of value posited physically in the object of production itself, as the aim of production, the objectification of productive force, the value-producing power of capital – to that extent, it is in the production of fixed capital that capital posits itself as end-in-itself and appears active as capital, to a higher power than it does in the production of circulating capital. Hence, in this respect as well, the dimension already possessed by fixed capital, which its production occupies within total production, is the measuring rod of the development of wealth founded on the mode of production of capital.

‘The number of workers depends as much on circulating capital as it depends on the quantity of products of co-existing labour, which labourers are allowed to consume.’ (Labour Defended, p. 20.) In all the excerpts cited above from various economists fixed capital is regarded as the part of capital which is locked into the production process. ‘Floating capital is consumed; fixed capital is merely used in the great process of production.’ (Economist, VI, 1.) 4 This wrong, and holds only for the part of circulating capital which is itself consumed by the fixed capital, the I. The only thing consumed ‘in the great process of production’, if this means the immediate production process, is fixed capital. Consumption within the production process is, however, in fact use, wearing-out. Furthermore, the greater durability of fixed capital must not be conceived as a purely physical quality. The iron and the wood which make up the bed I sleep in, or the stones making up the house I live in, or the marble statue which decorates a palace, are just as durable as iron and wood etc. used for machinery. But durability is a condition for the instrument, the means of production, not only on the technical ground that metals etc. are the chief material of all machinery, but rather because the instrument is destined to play the same role constantly in repeated processes of production. Its durability as means of production is a required quality of its use value. The more often it must be replaced, the costlier it is; the larger the part of capital which would have to be spent on it uselessly. Its durability is its existence as means of production. Its duration is an increase of its productive force. With circulating capital, by contrast, in so far as it is not transformed into fixed capital, durability is in no way connected with the act of production itself and is therefore not a conceptually posited moment. The fact that among the articles thrown into the consumption fund there are some which are in turn characterized as fixed capital because they are consumed slowly, and can be consumed by many individuals in series, is connected with further determinations (renting rather than buying, interest etc.) with which we are not yet here concerned.

‘Since the general introduction of soulless mechanism in British manufactures, people have with rare exceptions been treated as a secondary and subordinate machine, and far more attention has been given to the perfection of the raw materials of wood and metals than to those of body and spirit.’ (p. 31. Robert Owen: Essays on the Formation of the Human Character, 1840, London.)

Real saving – economy – = saving of labour time = development of productive force. Suspension of the contradiction between free time and labour time. – True conception of the process of social production

Real economy – saving – consists of the saving of labour time (minimum (and minimization) of production costs); but this saving identical with development of the productive force. Hence in no way abstinence from consumption, but rather the development of power, of capabilities of production, and hence both of the capabilities as well as the means of consumption. The capability to consume is a condition of consumption, hence its primary means, and this capability is the development of an individual potential, a force of production. The saving of labour time [is] equal to an increase of free time, i.e. time for the full development of the individual, which in turn reacts back upon the productive power of labour as itself the greatest productive power. From the standpoint of the direct production process it can be regarded as the production of fixed capital, this fixed capital being man himself. It goes without saying, by the way, that direct labour time itself cannot remain in the abstract antithesis to free time in which it appears from the perspective of bourgeois economy. Labour cannot become play, as Fourier would like, although it remains his great contribution to have expressed the suspension not of distribution, but of the mode of production itself, in a higher form, as the ultimate object. Free time – which is both idle time and time for higher activity – has naturally transformed its possessor into a different subject, and he then enters into the direct production process as this different subject. This process is then both discipline, as regards the human being in the process of becoming; and, at the same time, practice [Ausübung], experimental science, materially creative and objectifying science, as regards the human being who has become, in whose head exists the accumulated knowledge of society. For both, in so far as labour requires practical use of the hands and free bodily movement, as in agriculture, at the same time exercise. As the system of bourgeois economy has developed for us only by degrees, so too its negation, which is its ultimate result. We are still concerned now with the direct production process. When we consider bourgeois society in the long view and as a whole, then the final result of the process of social production always appears as the society itself, i.e. the human being itself in its social relations. Everything that has a fixed form, such as the product etc., appears as merely a moment, a vanishing moment, in this movement. The direct production process itself here appears only as a moment. The conditions and objectifications of the process are themselves equally moments of it, and its only subjects are the individuals, but individuals in mutual relationships, which they equally reproduce and produce anew. The constant process of their own movement, in which they renew themselves even as they renew the world of wealth they create.

Karl Marx, 1857

Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Penguin/New Left Review, 1973), pp. 690-712, Translation: Martin Nicolaus

[testinbeta]

Futureloop : Black Bedlam

Cut to 1920: the dream of univocal representationism has shattered in the face of modernity's greatest paranoia trip to date. The orgasmic intensities of mass suicide have laid bare the 'nightmare condition of self-domination' . 8 million dead...this is only the beginning. Modernity seeks salvation - a new vision, an eternal myth - to redeem us from 'the formless universe of contingency’ .

'By order bring about freedom' screams Le Corbusier. Technological efficiency and machinic production is the path to salvation. White heat will cleanse the defiled soul of modernity. The fascist war-machine is replenished.

'We declare that the splendour of the world has been increased by a new beauty: the beauty of speed... Beauty exists only in struggle. A work that is not aggressive in character cannot be a masterpiece... We want to glorify war - the world's only hygiene - militarism, patriotism, the destructive act of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas for which one dies..."

Cut to 1935: The thirst for machinic efficiency is by now unquenchable. Ezra Pound engages in a quest to command meaning within an ordering machine of language. Everything can be called by its right name and 'has one place only, and no place is occupied by two things at the same time' . But as the machine launches into overdrive, as order-construction intensifies, the waste piles up - putrefying and formless. But '[n]othing at all may remain outside, because the mere idea of outsideness is the very source of fear.' As long as it remains stubbornly elusive waste will corrode machinic beauty. It must be given its right name. 'Jew slime', 'morass of high kikery', sewers of Pal'stine', 'the vague stinking pea soup', 'crowling slime of a secret rule' .

'The gasp of surprise which accompanies the experience of the unusual becomes its name. It fixes transcendence of the unknown in relation to the known, and therefore terror as sacredness... Man imagines himself free from fear when there is no longer anything unknown.'

Cut to 1943: Modernity's soul is cleansed in Bauhaus-inspired death camps.

Cut to the future (4600 BC): Remixing Genesis - '[F]irst, the moon separated from the earth. Then, the first humans, Original Man, were black people.' . The renegade black scientist, Yacub, created the white, 'devil' race.

Serial time never makes it to the future. The present, however, must always mythologise beyond itself - how else can it survive? Alie-n-ations dissipate these linear memory tracks - re-learning the past as future. The future feeds into the past-present.

Cut to 1920: 'Wake up Ethiopia! Wake up Africa!...Let Africa be a bright star among the constellation of nations' . Garvey invokes a being-african in order to re-learn the future as past - but being-african can only ever be present. Being-african has (literally) no future.

'I'd rather call myself an alien 'cause I don't understand society.'

Becoming-african - 'is bodily thought, beyond the realm of possibility, in the world of the virtual. At once superabstract and infraconcrete, it grasps the environment of molarity common to different bodies from the perspective of the potential curtailed.' 'Even blacks, as the Black Panthers said, must become black.'

Cut to the future: Le Son'y Ra (Sun Ra), born of Saturn, trips out of linear time at escape velocity. 'Space is the Place, Space is the Place, Space is the Place'. And Coltrane, 'terminally impatient with limits, with the trivial categories and opposites within Earthly language' , purges all traces of vestigial fictionism in Interstellar Space.

'..only real humans would want to become robots'.

Cut to the future: Technological speculation - 'syncretic belief systems such as voodoo, hoodoo, santeria, mambo, and macumba, function very much like the joysticks, Datagloves, and Spaceballs used to control virtual reality.'

'The emergence of machine intelligence coincides with the discovery that machines are complex systems, and complex systems are everywhere...assemblages "at the edge of order and chaos"'

Cut to 1964: McLuhan envisages a total prosthetics - 'an electronic skin' engendering macrocosmic Man. The modernist fantasy of machinic domination is re-enforced - the fascistic fantasy of transcendence.

Contra - Harraway's Cyborg is located 'in the belly of the monster, in a technostrategic discourse...According to the Human Genome Project we become a particular kind of text which can be reduced to code fragments banked in transnational data storage systems and redistributed in all sorts of ways that fundamentally affect reproduction and labor and life chances and so on.'

Cut to the future (1990): 'Armageddon bin in effect' - slavery has already distributed the black genome - code is fragmented into catastrophic 'modalities of identity without hope of resolution' - what does it mean to be human now?

'Afrikan we is all Afrikan'

Cut to 1997: Predator remixes - the authorial voice is slowed down and its attendant ocular is irradiated. Predator learns to decipher complex codes. 'Not a book, only libidinal instalments.' - can you feel it?

Cut to the Future: Black technology - sampler methodology. Voodoo transformers turn molar passivities into molecular intensities - the fascist fantasy putrefies into the hallucinogenic nightmare of the darkside. Corbusian clean space is disfigured - demolished - by wall scrawl. 'Bleeper culture' networks the black economy. The howls of atomic dogs pierce the bourgeoisified calm of radiostate FM. Black box technology is oppositional art...'a specific miss-use and conscientious desecration of the artefacts of technology' .

Cut to 1992: Los Angeles - video-capture - Black Planet bin in effect.

Cut to the future: Black technology - CCTV surveilance, ECT shock therapy, lo-cost bodies authenticate transnational profit. Hi-tech prisons over-capacitate (critical limit 2020), slow-release contraception - court-enforced.

Cut to the future: no future, no future, no future, no future...

BLACK [BEDLAM]

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man, You cannot say, or guess, for you know only A heap of broken images, where the sun beats, And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief, And the dry stone no sound of water. Only There is a shadow under this read rock, (Come in under the shadow of this red rock), And I will show you something different from either Your shadow at morning striding beside you Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you; I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

T.S.Eliot, The Waste Land

_________________

Eliot's invitation to behold the darkside is emblematic of a modernity that is always already putrefying. The darkside is not modernity's shadow, not its Other, the darkside cannot be reclaimed at sunset. The 'Son of man' cannot reference that for which he is not pivotal, that which eludes his regulative framework. Beyond there is only fear, modernity's fear - fear, loathing, contempt - Welcome to the Terrordome.

In the Waste Land 'the dead tree gives no shelter, no relief, no sound of water. Arboresence is death. The tree is ever more burdened - the White Man's burden - the centre must be reinforced - pathological state consumption is the only response. And as if obeying some logarithmic formula, the distinction between the centre and its burden becomes imperceptible. And the shadow - albeit astride - is recovered at dusk with elemental regularity. But paranoia and neurosis are by now endemic - something eludes totalisation - it can only be known by fear - by now, that fear is almost uncontrollable. Welcome to the Terrordome. Identity is photographic image - positive and negative film - transparencies overlaid dissolve into blackness - blackness is Self-immolation. The roots of blackness are strangulating. Predatory war machines accelerating through the jungle - uprooting arboreal sedimentation - mongrelising 'authenticity'. Feral improvisation displaces arboreal code with a revolutionary - almost cataclysmic - velocity. Speed kills! - the war machine invents absolute speed (Deleuze and Guattari: 386).

Accelerate through the de-industrialised cyberia of Detroit, Michi(ne)g(u)n. All that remains of the motor city are decaying monuments to the Rustbelt. Sedimentation is suicide. But sedimentary death is slow and lingering - the centre screams ever louder, ever more anguished - desperate to replenish - to reterritorialize - through violence and coercion. But blackness always eludes this moment - its is always already beyond sedimentation. Blackness is not a state of being, only of doing.

Blackness refuses ontology - refuses the photographic moment of subjugation. That moment is always past. The centre territorializes the past in the present. But always the present is past. The future is all there ever is. There is only ever t+1 - and only blackness exists here. No beginning, no end, no directional impulse - only ever movement in time.

"What will make that current flow into words?" asks Irigaray, "It is multiple devoid of causes, meanings, simple qualities. Yet is cannot be decomposed...There rivers flow into no definitive sea. These streams are without fixed banks, this body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This life - which will perhaps be called our restlessness, whims, pretence, or lies." (Irigaray: 215)

The sedimented identarianism of the Self-Other is always already past - deconstruction has no place in the future. In the future there is only noise. Mongrelised noise - re-mixed and re-spliced into epileptic intensities that are never known - only encountered. Thought is stretched/ reversed/accelerated noise - fu(n)cked-up schizo.

Arborescence demands silence - anti-cult de-programming techniques must be executed. Delete the future - surrender to the centre - postpone Armageddon. Yet, as Baudrillard says, "Everything has already become nuclear, faraway, vaporised. The explosion has already occurred:

What more do you want?" (Baudrillard). Slavery, imperialism and brutalising racism is always in effect. This is the future...

The future is black.

— Rohit Lekhi, 1996

works cited

Baudrillard, J (1989) 'The anorexic ruins' [trans. D.Antal] on D.Kamper and C.Wulf (eds.), Looking Back at the End of the World, New York: Semiotext(e)

Deleuze, G and Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia [trans. B.Massumi], Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Irigaray, L. (1985) This Sex Which is Not One [trans. C.Porter w/ C.Burke], Ithica, New York: Cornell University Press