Are Prisons Computers?

August, 2022
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To be the prisoner of someone’s dream, this is possibly horror in its pure state.

-Gilles Deleuze, L’Abécédaire de Gilles Deleuze

As personal computers swiftly invaded homes, offices, and schools at the dusk of the 20th century—parsing and processing the world within the algorithmic churn of word processors, internet browsers, and desktop environments—visual culture overflowed with diverse images of computation that sought to make sense of the networked machines precipitously blinking to life all around. Inundated by the bundles of fiber-optics, flickers of monitors, and packages of software that ever more densely populated everyday life, each of these prophetic images struggled to glimpse the contours of a coming digital future by imagining it in ever more pixelated detail. Some hoped that this imagination would accelerate these futures’ arrival, while others hoped it would reveal opportunities to cut the cord before they had a chance to finish booting up and coming online.

The programmers, researchers, and managers of Silicon Valley dreamt of digital tsunamis that would wash over and erode the prevailing hierarchies, institutions, and categories of the analog world, and thus clear the way for the information superhighways, global villages, and online malls of a digital one. This Californian fantasy cohered around the vision of a programmable society built upon cybernetic regulation and compulsory transparency that would hurl the global economy into new cycles of networked capture and extraction, digitized dispossession and accumulation.1 A world of code and capital—of perpetual technological advancement and market expansion—seemingly had every reason to emerge as the hegemonic image of digitality, but it was ultimately another vision of computation that came to outpace the dreams of software companies and suffuse our cultural imagination instead.

Throughout a still-rising sea of visual culture’s objects, digital technologies have largely been imagined not as harbingers of connectivity, liberation, and speed, but as the architecture and infrastructure for new kinds of prisons built upon digitized capture, confinement, and control. Whether envisioning virtual worlds that imprison their users (Tron (1982), Cyber Vengeance (1995), The Matrix (1999), Black Mirror (2011-)) or prisons whose methods of confinement had been fully digitized (THX 1138 (1971), Fortress (1993), Cube (1997), Lockout (2012), Made For Love (2021), Oxygène (2021)), these works collectively developed a political theory of the digital which postulated that networked computers wouldn’t liberate us from but rather would only digitally update the analog forms of domination and control that had already been long at work subordinating and subjugating life. Emerging from a cultural aperture shaped by digital dreams and carceral nightmares, these works reflexively and anxiously posed the question: “Are computers prisons?

In tandem with visual culture, the theorization of the digital as a carceral technology was also being elaborated by theorists and philosophers. Most notable in this regard is the Postscript on the Societies of Control, a concise essay where Gilles Deleuze theorizes that spaces of discipline and confinement such as the prison would be eclipsed by spaces of control defined by computational “system(s) of variable geometry the language of which is numerical.2 Deleuze plotted the historical and political trajectory of a digitality that wouldn’t abolish prisons and other disciplinary institutions so much as it would translate them into a control paradigm built upon networked and algorithmic forms, echoing the cultural imagination of digitality as a nascent form of carcerality. The theorization of the digital as a form of capture would later arrive at its metaphysical extreme in the work of the philosopher Nick Bostrom, whose thought experiments advanced the theory that our lives are nothing more than the outputs of advanced computer-simulations.3 In imagining a pixelated Plato’s cave where computation ontologically precedes reality, Bostrom recuperated Silicon Valley’s fantasy of a perpetually advancing and expanding digitality by synthesizing it with the carceral imagination of the digital developed throughout visual culture.

Perhaps the question “Are computers prisons?” has been so numerously posed simply because it is asked in a world where prisons are already so numerous. At times it can even be tempting to conclude that the carceral imagination of the digital is less theoretical than it is descriptive, simply recounting the technical evolution of control and domination that has appended digital technologies to an already vast arsenal of otherwise analog structures, architectures, techniques, and forms.4

We could easily stop here, feeling somewhat satisfied with an imagination of the digital as a historical supplement to the carceral, but this would be to only draw a single dimension of a far more complex diagram of power. It is certainly clear that the question “Are computers prisons?” arises from the manifestly carceral texture of the networked present, from which the past can appear as a vast accumulation of prisons and the future can appear as a vast accumulation of digital technologies being installed throughout every one of them. However, by approaching the present as a collision between a carcerality with its own complex history and a digitality that flickers into existence without one, as if it were immaculately conceived in the suburban office parks of Silicon Valley, the question risks occluding more than it reveals.

If we wanted to begin to draw a more complete diagram, we would have to introduce a new temporal fold to this question by charting how the carceral twists and turns alongside the digital not only in the future but in the past as well, historically accounting not only for how electronic computers would come to express the logic of the prison in novel digital forms but also for how the prison was a formal expression of the digital long before the appearance of electronic computers. In other words, any meaningful response to the question “Are computers prisons?” requires that we ask “Are prisons computers?” as well.

What follows aims to draw a diagram of the historical relationship between the digital and the carceral and between discipline and control, and in so doing it will also strive to chart the new political methods and critical modes that might be gained along the way. This diagrammatic approach to carcerality and digitality is divided into four sections:

The Coils of a Prison rereads Foucault as a thinker of the digital, approaches Discipline and Punish as a work that theorizes disciplinarity as digital, and posits that disciplinary domination is premised upon digital separation.

The Acceleration of Discipline reevaluates Deleuze’s Postscript on the Societies of Control based upon the understanding that discipline was already digital, and posits that control power is nothing more than disciplinary power that has been automated and accelerated.

The Subjects of Automation plots the political consequences of the acceleration of discipline by focussing on the question of subjectivity in Foucault’s writing on panopticism and docility, retheorizes the panopticon as a network with communicative dimensions, and posits that both discipline and control share a political horizon of the automation of the subject.

The Abolition of Separation revisits Deleuze’s and Foucault’s political work in the Prison Information Group (Le Groupe d’information sur les prisons, or GIP) and reflects on a theory of prison abolition oriented against carceral digitality.

This text is ultimately invested in theorizing the formal continuities between digitality and carcerality in order to help clarify a history of the future. The past is more complex than the present, and any present alignment of power cannot capture, suppress, or neutralize all of the past expressions of revolt that persist as remainders of and threats to ongoing histories of domination. In this sense, consider what follows to be an exploration of a history in search of a future that does not resemble it.

 

The Coils of a Prison

For seven generations there had been nothing in the world more important than that wall. Like all walls it was ambiguous, two-faced. What was inside it and what was outside it depended upon which side of it you were on.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed

In Franz Kafka’s short story An Imperial Message, the Emperor dispatches a messenger to deliver his dying words to you, “a tiny shadow,” his most distant subject who lives at the empire’s periphery.5 The messenger has been granted free passage through the empire, but he nonetheless finds himself impeded by the innumerable dwellings, courtyards, and stairwells of palaces that encircle one another in a cascading, seemingly endless fashion. The Emperor’s power is in some sense communicative, relying upon his ability to send commands and orders to his imperial subjects, yet the palatial architecture over which his power rules also diminishes its effect: every addition to the palace only produces a need for additional communication, as every new imperial fold requires that the Emperor’s power be able to unfold slightly further. Each new division calls for further circulation. Regardless of how quickly the messenger flees he only finds himself surrounded again and again, “the royal capital city, the centre of the world, is still there in front of him,” and while he dreams that “if there were an open field, how he would fly along,” his fate is to spend the rest of his life swiftly circulating through the infinite enclosures of an infinite empire.6

Throughout Discipline and Punish, Michel Foucault’s theoretical account of confinement and discipline, a tension appears that formally and logically resembles the one that Kafka narrativized more than half a century before. Wherever Foucault locates disciplinary spaces (prisons, hospitals, schools, etc.) that confine their subjects, “enclosed institution(s), established on the edges of society, turned inwards towards negative functions,” he always unearths a corresponding circulation of disciplinary power that courses within and ultimately beyond the limits of those enclosures, “functional mechanism(s) that must improve the exercise of power by making it lighter, more rapid, more effective, a design of subtle coercion for a society to come.7 Foucault understands the formal inconsistency between a confinement that closes itself inward and a circulation that spirals outward as a productive one, culminating in “complex spaces that are at once architectural, functional and hier­archical … that provide fixed positions and permit circula­tion; they carve out individual segments and establish operational links…”8

This intimate relationship between hardened enclosures and accelerating circulations is threaded through all of the thinking in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault identifies instance after instance when discipline constitutes itself architecturally only to swiftly detonate into “a network of mechanisms that would be every­where and always alert, running through society without interrup­tion in space or in time.”9 The physics of disciplinary power is animated everywhere by this implosive-explosive synthesis, pushing Foucault to ultimately arrive at the conclusion that disciplinary institutions “​have a certain tendency to become ‘de-institutionalized’, to emerge from the closed fortresses in which they once functioned and to circulate in a ‘free’ state … broken down into flexible methods of control, which may be transferred and adapted…10

In each case, disciplinary institutions arise as architectural focal points of power’s operation and experimentation only so power can then reticulate out through all of social reality; the enclosure of each interior seamlessly manages to also unfold onto what surrounds it. In this way, every prison confines criminals only to project a diffuse criminality to be policed and documented on the streets beyond it, every school confines students only to produce the specter of delinquency that must be monitored and contained in neighborhoods and parks, and every hospital confines patients only to give rise to a sense of public health in need of pervasive surveillance and intervention. Discipline thus isn’t reducible to any particular “institution nor with an apparatus,” but rather branches out as a diffuse collection of “instruments, techniques, procedures, levels of application, targets … a technology” which infiltrates life generally.11

Reflecting on Foucault’s legacy following his death, Deleuze remarked that while “Foucault has often been treated as above all the thinker of confinement,” his theorization of disciplinary institutions such as the prison always referred back to a “flexible and mobile function, a controlled circulation, a whole network that also crosses free areas and can learn to dispense with prison” that plunge those institutions into crisis.12 Deleuze argued that Foucault had only been able to so comprehensively theorize disciplinary power because we were already departing from its grip, writing that Discipline and Punish described the “history of what we are slowly ceasing to be” and that we now must turn our attention instead towards the new forms of power “taking shape in attitudes of open and constant control that are very different from the recent closed dis­ciplines.13 In the circulating bits and bytes of networked computers, in the “coils of a serpent” that vertiginously undulated all around, Deleuze saw the twilight of discipline and the dawn of a computational, networked, and digitized form of power that he called control.14

If we hope to meaningfully reply to the question “Are prisons computers?” and begin to chart a divergent history of the future, we must contend with the ways in which the digital coils of a serpent envisaged by Deleuze are not entirely novel, but rather can already be discerned in what we might call the coils of a prison that wound through disciplinary societies. This will require reinterpreting Discipline and Punish as a theoretical excavation of a digitality that lurks everywhere in technologies of discipline and detention, and ultimately embracing Foucault as a thinker of the digital. This approach will not pursue the conclusion that everything was always already digital, an inversion of Silicon Valley’s promethean mantra that “everything is becoming digital” which would only depoliticize and dehistoricize digitality as such, but rather will aim to chart a political history of the carceral and the digital in Foucault’s thought as a means of plotting digitality’s and carcerality’s shared political future. This diagrammatic method aims to expose the ideological and material territory of the digital, and also to accentuate what cannot be neatly resolved within or totally integrated into such a diagram of power and thus remains a threat to it.

In tracing the lineaments of a digitality that runs interrupted through discipline and control, this analysis necessarily works against a periodization premised upon a definitive historical and formal break between discipline and control, that understands discipline as analog and control as digital, and that imagines discipline as obsolete and control as ascendant. This will instead explore a disciplinary power that was not rendered extinct by the digital technologies and networked computers that Deleuze identified as the technical infrastructure of control power so much as disciplinary power was itself an incipient realization of the digital forms that would later be materially instantiated as silicon processors, electronic storage, and network routers in the second half of the 20th century.

Foucault avoids explicitly using the digital as a concept in Discipline and Punish, and so this analysis must begin by unearthing a digitality in the subterranean currents of his project. In the exegetic underground, we can begin to discern a formal continuity between discipline and control that courses everywhere through the carceral machinery and political lexicon that populates Foucault’s thought. Throughout the 18th century, disciplinary technologies arise everywhere as digital technologies, taking form in what Foucault describes as vast networks of circuits, calculations, partitions, variables, communications, codes, and operations.

In the opening pages of the chapter that theorizes disciplinary power, Foucault outlines the linguistic, conceptual, and logical armature of a carceral digitality that facilitates “a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.15 Foucault notes that all disciplinary technologies are premised upon “a meticulous tactical partition­ing,” a technology of separation that parses, sorts, and organizes life into digital units—discrete, demarcated, discontinuous—that together constitute a new political project premised on the digital abstraction of life.16 This digitality facilitated by diverse forms of partition serves as the foundation for an analytical and manipulatable space that aims to “provide a hold over this whole mobile, swarming mass” of life, first disintegrating the social world into discrete entities and then reintegrating them within the coordinates and circuits of disciplinary power.17 This disciplinary digitality “found in the prison its privileged locus of realization,” where processes of “individualization and totalization” effectuated the carceral apprehension and codification of life in one gesture and the calculated computation and circulation of life in another.18

In disciplinary societies, detention is digital not only in the sense that prisoners and cells are literally numbered and managed on that numerical basis—organizing the day according to strictly regimented and programmed schedules, recording prisoner behavior in coded records and tables, transferring ranked prisoners between hierarchical cell blocks, and so on—but more fundamentally because a prison is a “mechanism that pins down and partitions” the world into individuated elements which it then “compares, differentiates, hierarchizes, homogenizes, excludes” on the basis of that uniform individuation.19 This “fixing, dividing, (and) recording” operates in spatial and temporal dimensions, sorting prisoners across secure control units as well as monitoring prisoners’ movements according to activity timetables as a means of calibrating punishments, dividing the day and the prison into standardized units so as to better impose a standardized order upon it.20 Life rendered digital by power is life that power can compute, record, and circulate on that basis.

The partitions of disciplinary power thus effectuate a digital separability that is the basis for a digital commensurability, in which an abstract equality imposed upon heterogeneous things allows them to be evaluated, organized, computed, and acted upon by diverse systems using shared sets of homogeneous codes. This digitality isn’t simply the digital of what we now refer to as digital media, but rather more fundamentally concerns the way in which the world can be divided into discrete entities on numerical and linguistic bases.21 Because partitions necessarily differentiate on binary terms—always including and excluding, discriminating between this and that territory, differentiating between these and those lives, or in set theory, demarcating between A and its complement A′—every partition contributes to the constitution of digital worlds that are segmented rather than smooth, divided rather than continuous, partitioned rather than open.22

Foucault notes that the digital commensurability which arises from disciplinary partitioning is “the first condition for the control and use of an ensemble of distinct elements” that capture “the moving, confused, useless multitudes of bodies and forces into a multiplicity of indivi­dual elements.23 Only after differentiating and partitioning lives on a digital basis can disciplinary power arise “as an intermediary between them, linking them together … making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant element” within the totality of a carceral network.24 Disciplinary technologies of partition divide and render life discrete only in order to subsequently subsume and reunify life within its own economies and taxonomies of power, individuating and isolating lives within a digital commensurability only so power can begin “circulating the same calculated, mechanical and dis­creet methods” from one life to another.25

Separation is thus the condition of possibility for the circulation of disciplinary power, in which every partition imposed between lives also acts as a conduit for channeling power over life. This process individuates and sorts “bodies by a location that does not give them a fixed position, but distributes them and circulates them in a network of relations,” determining a dynamically shifting “place one occupies in a classification, the point at which a line and a column intersect.26 Once incorporated into the tables and classes of carceral data, disciplinary power can begin to “set up useful communications” between lives as well as “interrupt others,” imposing itself as a network over lives that become fixed as nodal points.27 Disciplinary power further localizes itself and increases its resolution, fragmenting the world into smaller and smaller components like a particle accelerator, only as a means of generalizing its application, constructing “homogeneous circuits capable of operating everywhere, in a con­tinuous way, down to the finest grain of the social body.28 This contraction of power’s focus facilitates a corresponding expansion of power’s circulation, in which the digital partitioning of lives according to “ever more subtle variables” makes it possible to more totally capture life within the coordinates of a carceral system and exert power over life across the nodes of a carceral network.29

The carceral digitality that arises from the partition is the logical and formal engine of disciplinary power, forming the reticular filaments of a “subtle, graduated carceral net” that separates as it subsumes.30 Just as in Kafka’s short story, where every new discrete division of the palace only increases the totalizing reach of its circulatory capture, wherever the drowning tides of disciplinary power rise a digitality can be seen effervescently churning below as the compressed and confined pockets of what was once open atmosphere. Building upon an understanding of digital separation as the formal underpinning of disciplinary subjugation, we can now go on to diagram the technical elaboration of this digitality as it unfolds in the historical movement between discipline and control.

 

The Acceleration of Discipline

“‘It’s a peculiar apparatus,’ said the Officer to the Traveller, gazing with a certain admiration at the device … ‘Up to this point I had to do some work by hand, but from now on the apparatus should work entirely on its own.’”

-Franz Kafka, In The Penal Colony

While the prison has most often been the technology associated with discipline and the computer has most often been the technology associated with control, Deleuze clarifies in a conversation with Antonio Negri that “one can of course see how each kind of society corresponds to a particular kind of machine … but the machines don’t explain any​thing, you have to analyze the collective arrangements of which the machines are just one component.”31 If control societies are in some sense distinct from disciplinary societies, and technologies and machines do not ultimately determine different social structures, then we have to pursue a different method to account for the collective arrangements that Deleuze thought exemplified the historical difference between discipline and control.

Throughout the postscript, Deleuze identifies several features of control societies that he thinks formally set them apart from the disciplinary societies that preceded them. While disciplinary enclosures “are molds, distinct castings” that are analogical, control operates through numerical modulation, acting as a digital “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.32 Disciplinary power is “of long duration, infinite and discontinuous” while control power is “short-term and of rapid rates of turnover, but also continuous and without limit.33 Discipline extracts individuals from the mass, while control extracts dividual data from individuals.

Deleuze’s historical account describes life in disciplinary societies as moving serially through distinct cellular enclosures (from the hospital, to the home, to the school, and then perhaps to the factory, the prison, or the barracks, etc.), while in control societies life experiences the hospital, the school, the factory, and the prison continuously as computational processes running openly on networks. In each case, control pushes disciplinary institutions out of their enclosures into a “progressive and dispersed installation of a new system of domi­nation” where the prison is reimagined as wireless ankle monitors, the hospital as health tracking apps, and the school as endless online classes.34 The descriptions of life under discipline and control that appear in the postscript have been repeated almost verbatim in almost every subsequent theorization and periodization of control societies but, in placing all of its emphasis on the apparent formal novelty of control, Deleuze’s account fails to grasp control’s indebtedness to and continuity with a digitality that had already been instantiated historically as discipline.

While the postscript repeatedly comments that disciplinary institutions are in a generalized crisis and are “finished, whatever the length of their expiration periods,” here we must begin to set ourselves apart from Deleuze by taking the position that disciplinary power isn’t on its way to obsolescence so much as it is being instantiated in novel technical systems and forms as control power.35 If control emerges from and is continuous with discipline, then what remains new in Deleuze’s theorization? It’s not digitality, which arises from the profuse and diffuse partitioning of disciplinary power, nor is it computation, which was already being enacted everywhere in disciplinary apparatuses’ operations, circulations, abstractions, and calculations. Rather, what remains truly new about control and what ultimately distinguishes it from discipline is only a matter of speed afforded by the automation of the digital.

Electronic computers’ capacity to process, store, and retrieve information at far faster rates than human computers allowed for the disciplinary computation of life to be accelerated because it automated the data capture and processing which previously had to be done by hand. The manual procedures of writing, registration, and calculation that disciplinary power relied upon were time and labor intensive, and thus the speed of carceral society was economically and politically constrained by the number of police, prison staff, and bureaucrats that could be employed and put to use at any particular time.

At the historical advent of discipline, digital capture and computation were undertaken corporeally and thus moved at corporeal speeds, mobilizing procedures which were incredibly time and labor intensive in order to ensure disciplinary power was “coding (individuals’) continuous behaviour … forming around them an apparatus of observation, registration and recording, constituting on them a body of know­ledge that is accumulated and centralized.36 The automated speed of electronic computers accelerated this digital process dramatically in two fashions, both by exceptionally increasing the rate at which information could be captured and processed (and thus increasing the responsiveness and fidelity of power in the dimension of time) and by vastly multiplying and decentralizing the sites at which data could be collected, circulated, and stored (and thus generalizing the application of power across the dimension of space).

Prior to the automation of electronic computers, prison data was produced by guards and police and processed by courts and clerks as part of a centralized documentary system that included at a minimum a “description of the criminal … arrest warrants issued by the assize courts, a description included in prison committal registers, copies of the registers of assize courts and courts of summary jurisdiction … an alphabetical index con­taining summaries of these registers … (and) a system of individual cards or reports, which facilitated the integra­tion of new data…37 While the digitality imposed by discipline was the condition of possibility for disciplinary power, the rate and scope of digitization was infrastructurally constrained by its reliance on human labor. Following the automation of the digital, a range of technologies including surveillance cameras, digital certificates, smartphone apps, blockchains, social media accounts, biometric ids, and electronic payments could ever more finely capture and compute life as data with far less human labor, oversight, or intervention, shifting the execution of power from masses of humans to multitudes of machines.

The automation afforded by electronic machines also opened the way for an interoperability to be established through the use of protocols—shared digital languages which facilitate the automated communication between computers—which made it possible for heterogeneous forms of surveillance and control to be executed interchangeably and concurrently.38 While Foucault makes clear that “the circuits of communication are the supports of an accumulation and a centralization of knowledge” in disciplinary societies, this circulation was limited by the diverse observational practices and recording techniques of different disciplinary institutions prior to automation.39 While distinct forms of disciplinary power share a great deal formally—Foucault often noted the striking resemblance that could be observed between prisons, schools, hospitals, factories, and barracks—their coded records (pupils’ marks, medical records, prison conduct reports) were not standardized and thus could not easily circulate across or be analyzed between distinct disciplinary institutions which each had their own administrative economies and taxonomies.40

Networked machines communicating on the automated basis of shared protocols allowed for information to be circulated and analyzed without distinguishing between where data was coming from or what produced it, bringing heterogeneous technologies together into a networked unity achieved through interoperability. The interoperability of electronic computers is itself a consequence of their automation, in which the exchange of information can occur with comparatively little need for human oversight or intervention due to the automatic routing of packets facilitated by protocols. In other words, electronic computers allowed not only computation and data capture but communication itself to be automated, which had profound spatial and temporal consequences for the operations and expressions of power. This automation, and the resulting temporal acceleration and spatial multiplication of power’s operations, is precisely what Deleuze recognized as control.

Discipline arose as hegemonic regime of power not because of any sudden discovery but as a culmination of “a multiplicity of often minor processes, of different origin and scattered location, which overlap, repeat, or imitate one another, support one another, distinguish themselves from one another according to their domain of applica­tion, converge and gradually produce the blueprint of a general method.41 The brutal forms of domination imposed upon Western colonies, the policing of crime in cities, the control and management of factory labor, and the oversight and classification deployed in prisons all served as sites of dispersed experimentation for the elaboration of these forms of power which later came to be generalized, all of which were intimately shaped by their attendant racialized and sexualized forms. The acceleration of discipline into control took shape in an equally dispersed and complex way, arising as a result of technical developments that emerged throughout the economy and society in an unorchestrated yet progressive fashion built upon the formal logic of digitality.42 In order to continue tracing this acceleration, we can look to the historical policing of sex work as one site where this technical elaboration took place.

In the section on illegality and delinquency in Discipline and Punish, Foucault outlines how the policing of brothels was a central laboratory for the development of disciplinary power. Whereas sex work had taken place as an unregulated practice which occurred diffusely throughout social space as an open form of criminality, by legally prohibiting it in public and de facto tolerating its existence in the enclosed space of the brothel sex work could be policed in a “constant and uniform” fashion and “would not be able to escape surveillance.43 In the same manner as the prison, the brothel operates as a partition that confines sex work to its architectural interiority, providing a means through which authorities could police sex work within the brothel as well as sexuality more generally on the streets beyond it. In other words, the constriction of sex work to the brothel became a means of monitoring and regulating its economies and illegalities, just as it enabled broader mechanisms of surveillance and policing to be deployed to monitor and control sexual practices generally.44 This disciplinary control of sex work thus follows Foucault’s theorization of the implosive-explosive synthesis of disciplinary power, in which partition and discretization facilitate a corresponding reticulation and generalization across the whole social field, establishing vast nets of nodes and connections for the execution of power’s oversight and operations.

The automation of the digital allowed for the policing of sex work to be accelerated and generalized further, where in addition to the brothel the online platform became a site for partitioning, facilitating, and policing sex work. Web sites and applications which allow sex workers to stream live videos, arrange paid encounters, and sell products both multiplies the spatial dimensions of sex work while also facilitating an intensification of the forms of observation and control that are imposed upon it. The technical multiplication of the partition coincides with a multiplication of the circulation of controls and surveillance, both freeing it from the enclosure of the brothel while magnifying the degree to which it is surveillable, manipulatable, and policable.45 As sex work is spatially partitioned on the basis of the brothel and informatically partitioned on the basis of the platform, the “generalized policing that it authorizes, constitutes a means of perpetual surveillance of the population: an apparatus that makes it possible to supervise, through the delinquents themselves, the whole social field. Delin­quency functions as a political observatory.46 The control and surveillance of sex work online in this sense comes to facilitate the control and surveillance of everything that happens online in a digitally partitioned and automated fashion.47

The automation of the digital produced a new spatio-temporal arrangement of power which Deleuze identified as control because it accelerated the computational and communicative processes of discipline. In the temporal register, the automated collection and processing of information transformed the long durations and distinct castings of discipline into the rapid refreshes and self-deforming casts of control. In the spatial register, the automated communication and circulation of information transformed the discontinuous and localized application of disciplinary power into the continuous and generalized application of control power. Control thus wasn’t the consequence of digitization or computation, but of digitization’s and computation’s execution at the speed of silicon microprocessors and network switches. Tied together by a digitality that stretches from the cells of the prison to the cells of database tables, control is nothing more than discipline effectuated at automated speeds.

 

The Subjects of Automation

“In a dream, God declared to him the secret purpose of his life and work; Dante, in wonderment, knew at last who and what he was and blessed the bitterness of his life. Tradition relates that, upon waking, he felt that he had received and lost an infinite thing, something that he would not be able to recuperate or even glimpse, for the machinery of the world is much too complex for the simplicity of men.

-Jorge Luis Borges, Inferno, I, 32

In order to begin mapping the political consequences of the digitized acceleration of discipline into control, we can follow the historical development of different forms of subjection and subjectification in Foucault’s theorization of panopticism. Reflecting on Jeremy Bentham’s architectural plans for the panopticon, a circular prison which allows guards to observe every prisoner at will but where prisoners are not able to discern if they are being observed, Foucault notes that the carceral gaze was intended to compel prisoners to surveill and discipline themselves, and thus remake themselves as disciplinary subjects. In this sense, the panopticon was designed to produce prisoners that are both objects and subjects of power, in which the imprisoned subject is compelled to supervise themselves as an object of the prison.

This conjunctive objectification and subjectification functionally integrates prisoners into the prison’s operations of power, an arrangement where “the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact.48 In the panoptic prison, the digital partitioning of life effectuated by disciplinary technologies is expressed again as a digital partition within each life, in which each prisoner “becomes the principle of his own subjection,” neatly integrating the objective mode of policing lives into the subjective mode of lives that police themselves.49

Conceptualized as a design for prisons, the panopticon was actually only very rarely used as an actual architectural plan for prison construction.50 The historical importance of the panopticon thus does not lie in its material instantiation, but rather in the ways that it has emerged as an ideal model and conceptual structure which was then imposed upon many material dimensions of social life, working as an eminently flexible technology that was “polyvalent in its applications … Whenever one is dealing with a multiplicity of individuals on whom a task or a particular form of behaviour must be imposed, the panoptic schema may be used.51 This schematic and formal polyvalence is what allowed for panopticism “to spread throughout the social body” and “become a generalized function,” escaping the spatial limits of any particular architectural form and percolating through all of social life.52 Panopticism is thus not a technology of incarceration as much as it is a form of power that “programmes, at the level of an elementary and easily transferable mechanism, the basic functioning of a society penetrated through and through with disciplinary mechanisms,” reshaping subjectivity and social relations as it is increasingly installed and integrated within them.53

Reflecting on Jeremy Bentham’s writings, scholarship on the panopticon has almost always described it exclusively in terms of observation, characterizing it as a technology structured by visual exposure and concealed oversight. What has been fatally missed in these characterizations were Bentham’s plans for a network of speaking tubes that would allow for a guard to audibly communicate with each prisoner at will. The panopticon thus would act not just as an observatory, but also as a network of communication where Bentham noted that: “(orders could be) circulated instantaneously, with the utmost facility, to the greatest distance. Even the intervention of the local inspector is not necessary: a call from a speaking trumpet brings the remotest prisoner to the front of his cell, where he may be seen by the customer, as well as heard. Under each speaking-trumpet hangs a list of the prisoners to whose cells it corresponds. The names are on separate cards, which are shifted as often as a prisoner happens to be shifted from cell to cell…54

While the panopticon has been principally understood as an architecture premised upon optical supervision, Bentham’s plans for a network of speaking tubes in the panopticon significantly complicates this picture by introducing a communicative dimension to the prison that should push us to substantively reevaluate the conceptual limits of panopticism.

Whereas the panopticon’s observational structure is premised on the unidirectional flow of visual information from the prisoner to the guard, in which the imprisoned subject can be seen by the guards but cannot see the guards watching them, the prison’s communicative structure facilitated by its speaking tubes allows for information to flow back and forth between the prisoner and guard in the form of spoken messages, and thus creates the possibility of implementing more responsive and elaborate forms of intervention and control.55 The communicative architecture of the panopticon forms a centralized network of circuits between the central guard tower and each prisoner, in which the prisoner is subjected to persistent surveillance but also must persistently remain ready to respond and reply to a guard’s messages. The digital partitioning of prisoners into cells thus not only drives prisoners to supervise themselves because they are visually exposed, but also compels them to remain receptive and responsive to commands and queries because they are communicatively exposed as nodes of a carceral network.56 Disciplinary power thus facilitates a form of subjectification structured by both observation and communication, facilitating a recursive informatic capture and networked control which would later come to be theorized as the science of cybernetics.57

The communicative dimension of the prison to some degree resembles the forms of informatic domination which were present elsewhere in disciplinary societies—exemplified as the confession of crimes to the court, the confession of sins to the priest, the confession of symptoms to the doctor, or the confession of dreams to the psychoanalyst—in which subjects were compelled to reveal their inner selves so their behavior could be modified on the basis of what they had divulged. The true technical innovation of Bentham’s design was thus not the imposition of observation or communication as such, but the articulation of observation and communication as centralized networks, a distributed form which Foucault noted “makes any apparatus of power more intense” as a result of “its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanisms.58 The panopticon was appealing as an ideal model not only because of its subjectifying function but also because of its efficiency, allowing fewer guards to exert power over greater numbers of prisoners in a network of observation and communication. By rendering power never always and everywhere at work but always and everywhere present as a potential, networks made the exercise of power more efficient and more diffuse.

Bentham wrote that while the observational power of the panopticon was intended to negate the prisoner’s opacity and render them wholly transparent to observation, its communicative power was intended to negate the prisoner’s capacity to think, noting that “action scarcely follows thought” and that a quicker “execution might here be made to follow upon command.59 Prisoners who were expected to surveill themselves still needed time to contemplate their relation to the panopticon in order to fully constitute themselves as the disciplinary subjects of panoptic surveillance, and thus the need to think represented a barrier to power’s efficiency. Bentham thus imagined that the elimination of contemplation in favor of communication would render power more immediate, imagining prisoners not only as subjects that surveill themselves as objects but as objects that are subjected to the communication of networks.60

The communicative structure of Bentham’s design should lead us to retheorize the prison and disciplinary power more generally as not only being structured by a panopticism, but by what we can call a panreticularity, in which everything is persistently subsumed within and exposed to the communication of networks. Just as earlier we had to depart from Deleuze in order to properly theorize the digital continuity between discipline and control, here we have to begin to depart from Foucault in order to fully theorize the way in which the disciplinary subject was not simply the subject of observation, but the subject of communication as well.61 In so doing, we will be able to outline the panoptic and the panreticular as complementary modalities of a shared historical movement that began as discipline and then accelerated into control, a movement which above all else pursues the automation of politics through the automation of the subject.

In order to begin diagramming panreticular power and the automation of the subject, we can again turn to Discipline and Punish and explore Foucault’s theorization of the docile body in order to chart how docility emerges not simply as a result of observation but of networked communication and computation. Foucault defines the disciplines as “projects of docility,” noting that a “body is docile that may be subjected, used, transformed and improved.62 Disciplinary power is thus interested in “the formation of a relation” that makes life “more obedient as it becomes more useful,” just as it con­versely makes life more useful as it becomes more obedient.63 Through the production of docile life, discipline aims to “obtain the exercise of power at the lowest possible cost, … bring the effects of this social power to their maximum intensity and to extend them as far as possible, … (and ultimately) increase both the docility and the utility of all the elements of the system.64

Docile technologies are digital and disciplinary technologies that subordinate life by dividing it into ever more minute elements, having as their horizon the goal of becoming an “infinitesimal power” which nonetheless operates upon all things.65 This focus on the infinitesimal is applied to the body as well as its gestures and actions, transforming power into a form of “uninterrupted, constant coercion, super­vising the processes of the activity rather than its result … according to a codification that partitions as closely as possible time, space, movement.66 As a result of these transformations, discipline and docility emerge as “an economic or technical rationality” that facilitates the “calculus of the infinitesimal and the infinite,” operating upon the smallest fragments of each particular life while expanding as a totality that is intended to encompass all life.67

Above all else, a docile life is a life that has been subjected to a “precise system of command” that places “bodies in a little world of signals to each of which is attached a single, obligatory response.68 This little world of signals treats each life not as a subject but simply as a component of a larger system within which a life’s value does not arise from its “understanding” but only from “perceiving the signal and reacting to it immediately, according to a more or less artificial, prearranged code.69 In other words, what Foucault calls a docile life is perhaps better described as a reticulated life, a life reimagined as communicatively receiving and responding to the commands and codes of networks in an automated fashion. Just as we saw in the panopticon, corresponding processes of observation and communication join “the analysable body to the manipulable body” in a network of power, in one gesture capturing and partitioning life digitally and in another corresponding gesture subjecting that life to a networked power.70

This “machin­ery of power that explores (life), breaks it down and rearranges it” desires to produce a subject that is capable of undertaking its own productive activity, but which remains subordinated to the communicative domination and dynamics of the larger system.71 This form of power thus does not aim to simply exert itself upon life, but rather aims to technically integrate it totally as simply another functional component of its operations, “making power relations function in a function, and of making a function function through these power relations.72 In other words, the imposition of the network form aspires to produce automated subjects, subjects that are subordinated to the networked world of signals they are subsumed with, that are “punctuated and sustained by injunctions” in which each order “does not need to be explained or formulated; it must trigger off the required behaviour and that is enough.73

The digital continuity between discipline and control, the acceleration of discipline into control, and the automation of the subject can be traced in the historical development of policing more broadly, which was shaped by a technical evolution that began with the prison and arrives today in the nascent field of nanotechnology. In the 18th century, Foucault notes that police power emerged conjunctively with prisons to transform “the whole social body into a field of perception: thousands of eyes posted everywhere, mobile attentions ever on the alert, a long, hierarchized network.74 By patrolling space and tracking individuals’ behaviors, police observations were “accumulated in a series of reports and registers; throughout the eighteenth century, an immense police text increasingly covered society by means of a complex documentary organization.75 Police acted in this way as the sensors of a carceral computer, capturing data about individuals and populations which could be analyzed and processed, and also acted as the executors of carceral programs, following orders and performing operations on a coded population based on the data that had been produced.

Foucault noted that at their advent police were meant to “bear ‘over everything’,” both observing and acting upon the totality of social life, bearing everywhere over “the dust of events, actions, behaviour, opinions – ‘everything that happens.’76 This policing of dust has recently found a new technical expression in experimental research into smart dust, a networked powder of nanocomputers and nanosensors that can be diffusely spread over the surface of environments in order to imperceptibly capture and circulate data.77 The modes of computation and circulation effectuated by police in the 18th century, manifest as “thousands of eyes posted everywhere,” is thus presently being experimentally redesigned as a perceptual and communicative system that can be installed across the whole surface of the material environment and social world, enabled by the digitized automation and interoperability of emerging nanotechnologies.78

Smart dust can be understood as a particular moment of a technical and historical evolution which brings the practice of policing and the objects of policing ever closer together, perpetually racing towards the fantasy of a world that is composed only of police watching over only themselves. Power’s desire to automate the subject is thus ultimately a desire to make the subject and object of power converge totally, to force the map and territory to wholly bleed into one another, producing a situation in which power’s resolution has grown so fine and its operation has grown so immense that it recursively subordinates itself for the rest of time.79 This is the telos of both discipline and control: the technical integration and political unification of the guard and the prisoner.

Here at the conclusion of this section of the text, we are finally prepared to respond to the question “Are Prisons Computers?” with a concise yes. We might even rewind to where we began and suggest that visual culture saw the carceral in the digital so vividly because it already unconsciously understood the digitality that coursed through disciplinary power long before the arrival of electronic computers. On this basis, it’s even possible to imagine new approaches to films such as Zero For Conduct (Zéro de conduite, 1933), The Hole (Le Trou, 1960), or The Battle of Algiers (La battaglia di Algeri, 1966) which theorize them on the terms of power’s inherent digitality. However, drawing out the digital continuities between discipline and control is fruitful only so long as it tells us something new about resisting and revolting against disciplinary and control power. In the postscript, Deleuze notes that within every regime of power “liberating and enslaving forces confront one another,” and that the task always remains not to “fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons.80 How might an understanding of the prison as a digital technology help inform our search for new weapons? What has drawing this diagram of power exposed about what remains explosive in society?

 

The Abolition of Separation

“Dr. Gibbs: What we plan to do is to turn something into nothing, and then back again … ‘Here goes something; here comes nothing!’

-Steven Lisberger, Tron

In Deleuze’s book on Foucault, he notes that “there is no diagram that does not also include, besides the points which it connects up, certain relatively free or unbound points, points of creativity, change and resistance … it is on the basis of the ‘struggles’ of each age, and the style of these struggles, that we can understand the succession of diagrams or the way in which they become linked up again above and beyond the discontinuities.”81 Everything that follows here is invested in precisely this project of understanding what remains creative and free (and thus dangerous), even as the conjunctive historical movement of the digital and the carceral suffocates and strangles all around. One place we can begin to search for some of these free and unbound points, and begin to link them together with our present context, is in the work of the Prison Information Group (Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, or GIP) which was active in France between 1970-80.

In the wake of several prison riots and the global revolts of 1968, the GIP was formed to investigate the conditions of prisons, publicize prisoners’ writings, support prison struggles, and theorize prison abolition. Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, Hélène Cixous, Simone de Beauvoir, and Jean-Paul Sartre were all involved, writing texts, visiting prison facilities, smuggling out texts and questionnaires from prisoners, and going to demonstrations. The GIP undertook their investigations not simply as a means of elucidating the carceral apparatus but more importantly as a means of pursuing its abolition. As Foucault makes clear in an announcement that accompanied the launch of the GIP’s first inquiry, their work intended to link up various prisoner struggles with one another as well as link prisoners with those struggling beyond the prison walls: “we want to enable (prisoners), through our in­quiry, to communicate among themselves, to transmit what they know, and to speak from prison to prison, from cell to cell … These experiences, these isolated revolts must be trans­formed into common knowledge and coordinated practice. We do not conduct our inquiry in order to accumulate knowledge, but to heighten our intolerance and make it an active intolerance. Let us become people intolerant of prisons…82

Foucault’s Discipline and Punish was first published in French in 1975, about half way through the course of the GIP’s existence, and can be read as being tightly bound theoretically and politically to the group’s investigations and actions. What is distinct about the GIP’s writings however is that they emerged from engagements between members of the GIP and prisoners (rather than between Foucault and his various archives), and thus offers a more complex diagram of prison life and struggles of the period. Across the texts produced by the GIP that are collected in the anthology “Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group (1970- 1980),” we can trace a collectively articulated theory of abolition being developed across a constellation of essays, interviews, statements, and communiques, a theory that addresses both the formal role of separation in carceral society and the abolitionist and insurrectionary practices that developed in response.

As we’ve already diagrammatically theorized earlier in this text, the carceral is constituted by a series of digital partitions which are the condition of possibility for the realization of carceral networks, beginning in the regime of discipline and then accelerating (through the automation of the digital) into the contemporary regime of control. Drawing upon the GIP’s writings, we can introduce additional historical specificity and formal detail to our understanding of how these digital partitions were articulated architecturally, subjectively, and politically, working to separate lives profusely as a means of subsuming society generally.

In an interview with Foucault conducted following his visit to Attica in the United States, he describes the separation that formally defines prison life: “what appeared most terrifying to me at Attica was the strange re­lationship between the periphery and the inner part. I mean the double game of bars: those that separate the prison from the out­side and those that, inside the prison, set apart each of the indi­vidual cells.83 This doubled separation, between prisoners as well as between prisoners and society, is reflective of the digital structure of the carceral we explored earlier, in which each new partition effectuates a new form of reticulated domination premised upon what has been partitioned. Here and elsewhere we don’t see a singular binary split being drawn, but rather a persistent multiplication of digital separations as the modality through which power is elaborated and expanded historically. Separation unsurprisingly emerges as the essential form of the carceral for the GIP, who note that “order in prison does not lie in the hands of the guards. It rests in the division that the administration maintains between the prisoners.84

The divisions between prisoners, and between prisons and society, were reflected also informatically in the production, preservation, and circulation of criminal records which allowed for forms of policing and repression to extend beyond the delimited space and time of formal incarceration.85 In the preface to GIP’s first publication, we find out that after circulating thousands of questionnaires within France’s prisons they learned that “among the immediate demands of prisoners and their families, the abolition of criminal records assumes first rank … With a criminal record, there is no release, there are only reprieves,” and thus decided that “the abolition of criminal records will be the theme of our next campaign.86 Even in this early stage, the GIP already began to identify the informatic separations that extended beyond the architectural domination of the prison system, imposing forms of carceral hierarchy, order, and division upon the population as a means of dominating it more supplely and particularly.

In addition to these architectural and informatic separations, the GIP also analyzed the forms of subjective division which emerged within prisons and prison struggles that helped to sustain carceral power. Foucault identifies the “separation between the common-law offenders and political prisoners” as a limit imposed upon prison struggles, a form of separation produced by labor unions and Maoist groups who held a position that Foucault summarized as: “We do not want to be assim­ilated with the common-law criminals, we do not want our image to be mixed with theirs in the opinion of people, and we ask to be treated like political prisoners with the rights of political prisoners.87 This subjective identity of the political prisoner established a category of prisoner still aligned with the bourgeois order and distinct from the forms of common criminality (sex work, drug use/transaction, theft, etc.) that were morally denounced by it, a subjective division which was reproduced by prison authorities who imposed different forms of domination on political prisoners than they did upon the general prison population. The subjective separation between the political prisoner and the common one reinforced and normalized carceral violence by defining only recognizedly political forms of domination and violence as unjust, and effectively divided (and thus effectively neutralized) prison struggles.

The partition that is ultimately most central to the operations of carceral digitality are the divisions constituted on the basis of race, which the GIP identified principally in the repression of Blacks in the United States and Algerians in France. The GIP was founded in the wake of and deeply informed by an Algerian-led prison revolt at La Santé which was violently repressed in 1967, and the GIP wrote extensively about the Attica prison revolt and George Jackon’s murder in the San Quentin Prison in the United States as well.88 The GIP understood colonial and racist partitions as being central to the operations of prisons and carcerality more generally, leading Daniel Defert to simply state: “The foundation of the penitentiary regime is racism, division.89 The GIP identified antiblack racism’s centrality to policing in the United States, the repression of southern workers in Northern Italy’s factories, and the colonial repression of Algerians in France as all part of the generalized logic of the carceral that extended far beyond the architecture of the prison itself. Racism was the form of separation which suffused all other separations in society.

Building upon this analysis, the GIP concluded that the carceral world, the colonial world, and the capitalist world were all bound together in their racialized and sexualized modes of separation that always tended to express themselves in more particular and more total fashions. The marginalization and separation of prisoners was understood as only one expression of a carceral logic that imposed itself across all of society on the basis of the separations that composed it. From the very beginning the GIP had been organized around such an analysis, stating in their manifesto that “none of us is sure to escape prison. Today less than ever. Police con­trol is tightening its grip around day-to-day life: in the street and on the highways; around foreigners and youths; the crimi­nalization of free speech has resurfaced; and antidrug measures only increase arbitrary constraints.90 In a statement published by Foucault after a demonstration outside of La Santé was violently repressed by police, he noted that “the street is in the process of becoming a do­main reserved for the police … The prison begins well in advance of its gates. The minute you leave your house.91 This generalization of policing across all of space should not be read as a claim that everyone is equally policed, but rather that the hierarchies that structure all social life and which are maintained by police necessitate the policing of all of society.

Reflecting on a prison revolt in the Toul prison in 1971, an event which also deeply influenced the GIP’s theoretical and organizational work, Foucault saw a new struggle forming that did not simply seek to escape from the forms of separation that had been imposed upon prison life but rather was oriented against the forms of separations themselves, aiming to undo the divisions between prisons and society as well as between groups of prisoners.92 Foucault wrote that the prisoners in Toul “did not jump the wall; they formed a barricade. They con­fined themselves within a prison of which they were now masters, and from which they chased the administration: no one could enter without their express permission. They occupied it like one occupies a factory, a place of struggle … They inverted the functions of the wall, the bars, and imprisonment itself.93 Locating this revolt as part of a constellation of revolts in the United States, Italy, and France, Foucault concludes that by undoing the separations between prisoners who had been divided along the lines of race, criminal offense, and class, those who had revolted in Toul “became a collective force … and it is in this way that they entered into a struggle” oriented against the logic of partition that is the formal basis of carcerality.94

All of these collected observations on the nature of carceral separation—along with insights drawn from the contemporaneous work of the Women’s Liberation Movement (Mouvement de Liberation des Femmes), the Homosexual Front for Revolutionary Action (Front Homosexual d’Action Revolutionnaire), the Black Panthers, and the revolutionary group Continuous Struggle (Lotta Continua) in Italy—led the GIP to conclude that the struggle against prisons could not simply focus on the prison itself but must extend across all of society, aspiring to abolish all “sites of police control, (the) seizure of delinquents, (and) the judicial apparatus’s differential treatment based on social dif­ferences.95 While the prison was thus one architectural expression of a carceral society, reforming or dismantling prisons alone would not be sufficient for dismantling the carceral logic that expresses itself polyvalently across many diverse forms.

When asked to reflect on the question of an ideal prison (a notion he rejected along with prison reform), Foucault wrote that “currently, in our system, marginalization is effected by prisons. This marginalization will not automatically disappear by abolishing the prison. Society would quite simply institute another means.96 The GIP thus concluded that the abolition of prisons involves nothing less than the abolition of the society that produced them, as perhaps most clearly expressed by Jean-Marie Domenach when he wrote that prison abolition is not only a question of tearing down prison walls, but of “destroying the carceral universe.97

Across the archive of GIP’s work, an analysis steadily builds of a carceral digitality that aspires to perpetually establish new forms of partition—architectural, informatic, subjective, and otherwise—in order to increase its resolution and express itself more totally in networked fashions. There are also a set of abolitionist practices that emerge within the GIP as well as more broadly in conversation with adjacent movements and prisoners. Drawing upon this constellation of analyses, prison actions and revolts, and the GIP’s militant research and organizing, how might we begin to move from theorizing this carceral universe to theorizing its abolition, from theorizing a society constituted as a dense matrix of separations to theorizing its destruction?

We could begin by briefly returning to Deleuze, who speculatively proposed several models of revolting against control in the postscript. Based upon his formal analysis of control as numerical and modulatory, Deleuze notes that revolts against control may take shape in “jamming … piracy and the introduction of viruses.98 These forms of revolt respond to the informatic and circulatory structure of control, but are lacking in two significant ways. First, Deleuze’s proposals fail to address the logic of separation that underpins carceral technologies, and thus respond to the circulation and acceleration of discipline but not the formal digitality that underpins the partitions of both discipline and control. Second, Deleuze’s postscript overinvests in the formal novelty of control as well as its imagined capacity to supersede the forms of power that preceded it, disciplinary and otherwise, and thus overlooks the persistence of other forms of domination and thus the continued relevance of forms of struggle against them.99 The historical appearance of wireless ankle-monitors has not meant the historical disappearance of prisons, after all.

In their theorization of cybernetics, the collective Tiqqun proposes their own repertoire which they propose can undo the circulatory and recursive structure of power. Tiqqun’s theory of revolt is expressed across two forms, panic and opacity, which are conjunctively oriented towards facilitating escapes from and attacks upon systems of cybernetic power. For Tiqqun, panic produced situations within which “communities detach from the social body conceived as a totality and want to escape from it. But since they are still its captives physically and socially they are obliged to attack it.100 This form of escape which necessitates an attack is oriented towards cultivating what Tiqqun calls zones of opacity, where life can “circulate and experiment freely without conducting the Empire’s information flows … to recreate the conditions for a possible experiment, an experiment that is not immediately squashed by a binary machine.101 The cultivation of opacity is described as a means of withdrawing from power and making possible new offenses, of creating zones that “will be at the same time a nucleus on the basis of which to experiment and a cloud that spreads panic in the whole imperial system.102 Tiqqun’s work here brings us much closer to a theory of what abolishing a carceral digitality would formally resemble, but because they don’t address carcerality or the history of separation explicitly in The Cybernetic Hypothesis we here must try to carry their thought in new directions.

How might we begin to build upon Tiqqun’s theorization of an escape that necessitates an offensive, and of an opaque form of offense that is itself a line of flight, considered in light of Foucault’s theorization of a carceral digitality and the GIP’s work on separation?103 In a conversation between Deleuze and Foucault, they consider the formal modes and processes involved in revolting against the carceral system. At the end of their exchange, Foucault describes the way in which a struggle that emerges against a particularized form of domination and separation can take on an insurrectionary and abolitionist character directed against all of society: “Women, prisoners, conscripted soldiers, hospital patients, and homosexuals have now begun a specific struggle against the particularized form of power, the con­straints and controls that are exerted over them. Such struggles are actually involved in the revolutionary movement to the de­gree that they are radical, uncompromising, and nonreformist, and refuse any attempt at arriving at a new disposition of the same power.104

While general and totalizing in its application, carceral digitality always expresses itself in highly particularized forms, operating on the basis of sexualized, racialized, classed, and other forms of differentiation produced and sustained by its reticulated matrix of formal partitions. Foucault suggests here that while struggle may arise initially against the particularized forms of power that one finds oneself subjected to, that people must in some sense fight from where they are and from within the forms they live, the lurking tendency of all struggle is nonetheless to turn towards the abolition of power as such. For Foucault, every struggle against a constituted power thus always threatens to spill uncontrollably into a struggle to destitute power.105 Deleuze responds to and builds upon Foucault’s insight by adding that “we are unable to approach (power) in any of its applications without revealing its diffuse character, so that we are necessarily led—on the basis of the most insignificant demand—to the desire to blow it up completely.106 This path from resisting a particular expression of power to detonating the general logic of power suggests a way to add additional dimensions to Tiqqun’s theory of revolt.

As explored earlier, disciplinary power develops as an implosive-explosive synthesis, through which partitions subdivide and implode the world into ever more compact nodes, cells, and enclaves which then ignite a corresponding explosion of techniques and forms of power that percolate and combust throughout the entirety of the social world. Everything collapses into discrete points before reticulating out into the flows and circuits of networked computation and communication. Between Tiqqun, Foucault, and Deleuze, we see something like a formal inversion of this process being proposed and theorized, in which the implosive-explosive synthesis of discipline and control is undone by an explosion of the partitioned world and an implosion of networked communication. This explosive-implosive revolt is a formal inversion of the implosive-explosive synthesis of the carceral universe, but also retains an asymmetry to it. The transformation of the world into something digitally discrete and reticularly subsumed is interrupted and undone by explosive assaults on separation and implosive escapes from communication, but those assaults and escapes also suggest the potential of a form of life beyond the separation and communication of the carceral universe which are not found in the formal composition of discipline or control.

This explosive-implosive revolt against implosive-explosive domination emerges as a kind of synthesis of Foucault’s and Deleuze’s thought. While Foucault’s analysis always in some sense privileged power as a means of exposing possible modes of revolt, Deleuze privileged revolt as a means of exposing the operations of power. After Foucault’s death, Deleuze explained in an interview that “what surprised Foucault was that faced with all of these powers, all of their deviousness and hypocrisy, we can still resist. My surprise is the opposite. It is flowing everywhere and governments are able to block it. We approached the problem from opposite directions.107 Between these two thinkers we thus see the forms of flight that power bears down upon and the forms of domination that life flees from, revealing the philosophical and practical necessity of escape and attack described by Tiqqun.

If we accept Foucault’s and Deleuze’s theorization of revolt which they developed based upon their work in the GIP, and thus understand that every form of struggle necessarily opens a path towards more generalized insurrectionary forms and creates opportunities for asymmetric attacks, how might we imagine these struggles linking up with another in a way that doesn’t allow them to be so quickly and readily captured within the circuits of communication and technologies of separation that are everywhere at work in a carceral digitality?108 Here we can return again to the revolt in Toul as a model, which the GIP was drawn to precisely because it managed to interrupt the flows that characterized prison life and carceral power while also remaining open and thus breaking apart the logic of the digital formalized in the separations of the prison.

Foucault understood the revolt at Toul as being linked up with other revolts such as the Algerian-led uprising at La Santé and the Attica uprising, and also as creating new linkages with the abolitionist movements that worked outside of the prison walls: “something happened, passing from prisons to the outside and from the outside into prisons” placing groups such as the GIP among “this whole ensemble” of abolitionist struggle.109 This passage opened between and beyond prisons was a form of communication that did not become subsumed by the communicative networks of power that suffused society, but rather generated the conditions for a circulation to occur that emerged as a threat to the circulation of power. In other words, Toul represented the possibility of a connection and a circulation that was not totalizing, and thus remained formally distinct to the totalized power it opposed.

In his conversation with Foucault, Deleuze notes that “practice is a set of relays from one theoretical point to another, and theory is a relay from one practice to another. No theory can develop without eventu­ally encountering a wall, and practice is necessary for piercing this wall … (the goal is) a system of relays within a larger sphere, within a multiplicity of parts that are both theoretical and practical.110 He then builds upon this analysis by clarifying that “as soon as a theory is enmeshed in a particular point, we realize that it will never possess the slightest practical importance unless it can erupt in a totally different area.111 This relay cultivated between theories and practices as well as the necessity to continue erupting suggests a method of communicating the explosive-implosive revolt without allowing it be captured in the totalizing processes that define carceral digitality, creating the conditions for what Tiqqun describes as an “intensification of their relations” that “will bring about an irreversible disequilibrium” that threatens the totalized organization of power.112

The explosive-implosive revolt always emerges against the background of the total automation of the subject, which remains the horizon of disciplinary and control power and aspires to implode life into discrete elements and nodes so that an explosion of networked commands and controls can be executed upon it. As an assault on the carceral digitality that structures discipline and control, the explosive-implosive revolt thus involves two corresponding gestures. The first gesture is an attack on the partition itself as the form which organizes carceral society as a discrete series of spaces, data points, and subjectivities. This is not an assault upon the difference of life as such (a difference which is ineradicable and infinite), but rather upon the digital forms of difference imposed as partitions upon life which facilitate the perpetual identification, subjectification, and domination of carceral digitality. As theorized by the GIP and put into practice by the prisoners at Toul, the attack on the partitions of carceral digitality is typically expressed first against the particularized expressions of power life finds itself living within, in their racialized and sexualized forms, but that these struggles must always be understood as means of opening the way towards the project of an expanding insurrection and abolition.

The second gesture is a flight away from communication and into the autonomy that composes all life. This is the autonomy of creativity, desire, and thought, the autonomy that is opposed and asymmetric to life’s automation. This flight must remain always out of communication with carceral digitality, lest it find itself subsumed and captured within processes of partition, subjectification, and circulation that sustain the carceral universe. It is a form of flight that, as Deleuze writes, must remain an active flight “in the political sense, like George Jackson, where one doesn’t flee without looking for weapons, without attacking.113 Most crucially, it is a form of flight that must generate its own communications and circulations which constitute zones of opacity apart from carceral society, a form of flight that must search for, cultivate, and multiply new forms, collective and autonomous, to live within.

This is what ultimately distinguishes resistance and reform from revolt and abolition: resistance and reform are struggles waged against power on the basis of the partitions power has imposed, while revolt and abolition desire to flee from and attack the partition itself as the form that organizes the carceral universe. Abolition, understood in this way, is thus not only a project of ridding the world of prisons and all of the digital partitions that compose it, but of cultivating a life that intensifies and multiplies an incommensurability with the separations it aspires to escape and destroy. Abolition entails nothing less than an uncompromising separation from the world of digital separation.

 

Bibliography

Bentham, Jeremy. The Panopticon Writings. Verso, 1995

Browne, Simone. Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness. Duke University Press, 2015

Chun, Wendy Hui Kyong. Programmed Visions: Software and Memory. MIT Press, 2013

Deleuze, Gilles. “Postscript on the Societies of Control.” October, vol. 59, 1992, pp. 3–7

Deleuze, Gilles. Foucault. University Of Minnesota Press, 2016

Deleuze, Gilles. Two Regimes of Madness: Texts and Interviews 1975-1995. Semiotext(e), 2007

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Vintage Books, 1975

Galloway, Alexander R. “Golden Age of Analog.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 48, 2022, pp. 211-32

Galloway, Alexander R. Protocol: How Control Exists after Decentralization. MIT Press, 2006

Galloway, Alexander R., and Eugene Thacker. The Exploit: A Theory of Networks. University Of Minnesota Press, 2007

Thompson, Kevin, and Penny Zurn, editors. Intolerable: Writings from Michel Foucault and the Prisons Information Group, 1970-1980. University Of Minnesota Press, 2021

Tiqqun. This Is Not a Program. Semiotext(e), 2011

Tiqqun. The Cybernetic Hypothesis. Semiotext(e), 2020

Notes


  1. See Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis for a theorization of this political fantasy.  [return to text]

  2. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 4 [return to text]

  3. See “Are You Living in a Computer Simulation?” https://www.simulation-argument.com/simulation.pdf [return to text]

  4. The cultural imagination of the digital-as-carceral moves beyond description into theory only when it, in the same critical spirit as Deleuze’s postscript, strives to exceed the present and conceptualize the movement between what held power over life yesterday and what may hold power over life tomorrow. [return to text]

  5. An Imperial Message, https://www.kafka-online.info/an-imperial-message.html [return to text]

  6. An Imperial Message, https://www.kafka-online.info/an-imperial-message.html [return to text]

  7. Discipline and Punish, pg. 209 [return to text]

  8. Discipline and Punish, pg. 148 [return to text]

  9. Discipline and Punish, pgs. 116, 217, 216 [return to text]

  10. Discipline and Punish, pg. 211 [return to text]

  11. Discipline and Punish, pg. 215 [return to text]

  12. Foucault, pgs. 42-3 [return to text]

  13. Two Regimes of Madness, pgs. 345-6 [return to text]

  14. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 7 [return to text]

  15. Discipline and Punish, pg. 137 [return to text]

  16. Discipline and Punish, pg. 198 [return to text]

  17. Discipline and Punish, pg. 144 [return to text]

  18. Discipline and Punish, pg. 249 [return to text]

  19. Discipline and Punish, pgs. 183, 144 [return to text]

  20. Discipline and Punish, pg. 313 [return to text]

  21. See the Golden Age of Analog by Alexander R. Galloway for a more thorough exploration of the formal specificities of the digital where he notes “The digital is the capacity to divide things and make distinctions between them. Thus, the digital appears to be quite explicitly a form of abstraction, if not simply abstraction as such.” (229) [return to text]

  22. In Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker’s book The Exploit, they note that all data is instantiated only through individuation, digital cuts that separate on a quantitative basis so that what has been separated can be integrated uniformly in systems of computation: “The process of instantiating and defining data is better understood as a process of individuation … certain artifices are used to ‘sculpt’ undifferentiated data into discrete units or words, the most basic of which is the convention of collecting of eight binary bits into a byte. And beyond this, computer languages are designed with detailed technologies of individuation whereby specific mathematical values, such as a segment of memory, are given over to artificially designated types…” (46) For more on digital (as opposed to analog) computation, see Wendy Hui Kyong Chun’s Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, where she notes that digitality always arises against the noise of the analog world, in which “the digit, in other words, often treats a quantity as a discrete number, its accuracy resulting from a cut in a signal.” (142) [return to text]

  23. Discipline and Punish, pgs. 149, 170 [return to text]

  24. Discipline and Punish, pg. 216 [return to text]

  25. Discipline and Punish, pg. 303 [return to text]

  26. Discipline and Punish, pg. 145-6 [return to text]

  27. Discipline and Punish, pg. 143 [return to text]

  28. Discipline and Punish, pg. 80 [return to text]

  29. Discipline and Punish, pg. 101 [return to text]

  30. Discipline and Punish, pg. 297 [return to text]

  31. “Control and Becoming,” https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-control-and-becoming-a-conversation-between-toni-negri-and-gilles-deleuze [return to text]

  32. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 4 [return to text]

  33. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 6 [return to text]

  34. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 7 [return to text]

  35. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 4 [return to text]

  36. Discipline and Punish, pg. 231 [return to text]

  37. Discipline and Punish, pg. 281 [return to text]

  38. Protocols allow for heterogeneous systems to communicate with one another in shared languages on networks. If in control societies the tendency is always to increase communication, transparency, and feedback, protocols are the technical means through which that tendency is realized. In Protocol, Alexander R. Galloway notes that “the ultimate goal of the Internet protocols is totality. The virtues of the Internet are robustness, contingency, interoperability, flexibility, heterogeneity, pantheism. Accept everything, no matter what source, sender, or destination.” (42) [return to text]

  39. Discipline and Punish, pg. 217 [return to text]

  40. Foucault notes in Discipline and Punish that disciplinary power relied upon “the physical code of signalling, the medical code of symptoms, the educational or military code of conduct or performance. These codes were still very crude, both in quality and quantity, but they marked a first stage in the ‘formalization’ of the individual within power relations.” (189-90) [return to text]

  41. Discipline and Punish, pg. 138 [return to text]

  42. Even though it won’t be possible to fully articulate this theory in this text, it nonetheless remains worthwhile to suggest that colonial and capitalist world history is a digital history, manifest as the experimentation with and imposition of new forms of partition that cut the world into ever smaller enclaves that serve as stores of accumulation and sites of capture. In this sense, the walls of the prison, the fortifications of the colony, the borders of the nation state, the class divisions of the economy, and the metadata of online platforms could all be understood as particular technologies of a common system built upon digital abstraction, partition, and subjugation. [return to text]

  43. Discipline and Punish, pg. 322 [return to text]

  44. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault also notes that the toleration and enclosure of illegalized delinquent practices such as sex work created new forms of economic exploitation and profit through the regulation of their illicit economies as well as new forms of control: “the existence of a legal prohibition creates around it a field of illegal practices, which one manages to supervise, while extracting from it an illicit profit through elements, themselves illegal, but rendered manipulable by their organization in delin­quency. This organization is an instrument for administering and exploiting illegalities.” (280) [return to text]

  45. In This is Not a Program, Tiqqun notes that an ideal apparatus ensures that “nothing moves that isn’t both incontestably ‘free’ and strictly classified, identified, individuated in exhaustive files of digitized registrations.” (151) [return to text]

  46. Discipline and Punish, pg. 281 [return to text]

  47. Throughout this text I’ve neglected to address the economic operations of discipline and control in favor of exploring their political dimensions. Both discipline and control share efficiency as their horizon, in which political domination is a means through which capitalist accumulation is ensured. For example, in Discipline and Punish Foucault notes that discipline always aims to “establish a direct proportion between ‘surplus power’ and ‘surplus production.’,” in which the means of production are balanced with the means of control. (206) Furthermore, Foucault argued that prisons developed as a response the economic costs of repressing revolts and insurrections, that “(the prison was invented) to ultimately obtain a differential result, namely, prisons permitted them to eliminate, as dangerous, a select portion of the population, yet without this elimination having catastrophic economic consequences, as in the case of in­vading insurgent regions” (Intolerable, 268). For more work in this area, see Tiqqun’s “Critical Metaphysics as a Science of Apparatuses in This Is Not a Program and Jason Read’s “Postscript as Preface: Theorizing Control After Deleuze” which approaches debt as a convergence of political and economic power: https://coilsoftheserpent.org/2020/11/postscript-as-preface/ [return to text]

  48. Discipline and Punish, pg. 206 [return to text]

  49. Discipline and Punish, pgs. 202-3 [return to text]

  50. In Dark Matters, Simone Browne theorizes the development of the panopticon as being tied to the colonial slave trade, where she notes that the fact that “somewhere along a journey that ends in The Panopticon; or, The Inspection House Jeremy Bentham traveled with ‘18 young Negresses (slaves)’ guides me to question the ways that the captive black female body asks us to conceptualize the links between race, gender, slavery, and surveillance. In other words, how must we grapple with the Panopticon, with the knowledge that somewhere within the history of its formation are eighteen ’young Negresses’ held ‘under the hatches’?” (32) The colonial process has always served as a laboratory for new technologies of domination and control, and one could certainly look to Palestine or to the Spanish enclaves Ceuta and Melilla where networked technologies are being developed as a contemporary extension of these histories of colonial violence. [return to text]

  51. Discipline and Punish, pg. 205 [return to text]

  52. Discipline and Punish, pg. 207 [return to text]

  53. Discipline and Punish, pg. 209 [return to text]

  54. The Panopticon Writings, pg. 112 [return to text]

  55. Bentham’s design for the panopticon’s speaking tubes was inspired by an invention of his contemporary John Joseph Merlin which allowed masters to mechanically transmit orders to their servants in their houses. Modeled on the pantograph, by moving a marker over a tablet containing a list of orders in one room a corresponding marker in another room would move as well which would allow servants to receive their master’s commands at a distance. Bentham noted in The Panopticon Writings that this technology was “limited to the few orders (each tablet) can be made to hold” and that the communication between master and servant was “not reciprocal,” which is why he decided to implement a network of tubes instead. (110) [return to text]

  56. While elaborating on Foucault’s writing of panopticism, Deleuze notes in Two Regimes of Madness that “each apparatus has its regimen of light, the way it falls, softens and spreads, distributing the visible and the invisible, generating or eliminating an object…” (339) This is certainly true in the panopticon, where light moves from the periphery to the center in order to expose prisoners to the gaze of the observant guard, but it is equally true of the computer networks which Deleuze theorized would be central to the enactment of control power, where light circulates as discrete pulses across fiber-optic lines in far more diffuse, circuitous, and relentless fashions. [return to text]

  57. See Tiqqun’s The Cybernetic Hypothesis. [return to text]

  58. Discipline and Punish, pg. 206 [return to text]

  59. The Panopticon Writings, pg. 112 [return to text]

  60. This integration of a life into a machine has been theorized by Deleuze and Guattari as a form of machinic enslavement, which Maurizio Lazzarato explicates in this way: “The individual and the machine are sets of elements, affects, organs, flux and functions, all of which operate on the same level … The functions, organs, and strengths of man are connected with certain functions, organs and strengths of the technical machine and together they constitute an arrangement.” https://transversal.at/transversal/1106/lazzarato/en [return to text]

  61. I’ve chosen not to address the debates concerning the distinction between individuality and dividuality that Deleuze theorized as a formal distinction between discipline and control. Here however it is worth noting that under both discipline and control lives are simultaneously constituted as individual subjects (coherent, stable, coded) and decomposed into dividual elements (sampled, circulated, banked), the only difference being the speed through which these processes are executed. Machinic enslavement can again prove useful in clarifying the conjunctive logic of individuality and dividuality, in which a life can have its subjectivity reinforced even as it is being dividually integrated as a component of a larger machine. [return to text]

  62. Discipline and Punish, pg. 136 [return to text]

  63. Discipline and Punish, pg. 138 [return to text]

  64. Discipline and Punish, pg. 218 [return to text]

  65. Discipline and Punish, pg. 137 [return to text]

  66. Discipline and Punish, pg. 137 [return to text]

  67. Discipline and Punish, pg. 140 [return to text]

  68. Discipline and Punish, pg. 166 [return to text]

  69. Discipline and Punish, pg. 166 [return to text]

  70. Discipline and Punish, pg. 136 [return to text]

  71. Discipline and Punish, pg. 138 [return to text]

  72. Discipline and Punish, pgs. 206-7 [return to text]

  73. Discipline and Punish, pg. 166 [return to text]

  74. Discipline and Punish, pg. 214 [return to text]

  75. Discipline and Punish, pg. 214 [return to text]

  76. Discipline and Punish, pg. 213 [return to text]

  77. DARPA funded research into Smart Dust technology at UC Berkeley, resulting in the publication of Emerging Challenges: Mobile Networking for Smart Dust that notes that “Smart Dust may be deployed for stealthy monitoring of a hostile environment … (and) could be used for perimeter surveillance, or to detect the presence of chemical or biological agents on a battlefield.” https://ee.stanford.edu/~jmk/pubs/jcn.00.pdf [return to text]

  78. Discipline and Punish, pg. 213 [return to text]

  79. While smartdust remains experimental and is not being actively deployed, it nonetheless is a technology which reveals the subordinating logic of carceral digitality. [return to text]

  80. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 4 [return to text]

  81. Foucault, pgs. 37-8 [return to text]

  82. “On Prisons,” Intolerable, pg. 66 [return to text]

  83. “On Attica,” Intolerable, pg. 294 [return to text]

  84. “Pleven Eliminates the Detainees Christmas Packages,” Intolerable, pg. 221 [return to text]

  85. For an analysis of the visual economy and technical production of criminality in France, see Allan Sekula’s indispensable essay “The Body and the Archive.” [return to text]

  86. “Intolerable l: Investigation into Twenty Prisons,” Intolerable, pgs. 91-2 [return to text]

  87. “On Attica,” Intolerable, pg. 299 [return to text]

  88. It’s quite difficult to overstate the theoretical and political importance of George Jackson, the Black Panthers, and the Black radical tradition more generally for the work of the GIP, as well as for Deleuze’s and Foucault’s thought. The GIP had screened films about Attica and the Soledad prison where Jackson was held, and published an extensive text critically analyzing Jackson’s murder where they noted that he had helped to organize an abolitionist and revolutionary movement where “from both sides of the walls, the prisons’ army and the people’s army are preparing themselves for the same war of liberation,” noting that within the prison Jackson had “put his theory of communism into everyday practice.” (“The Assassination Coverup, After the Assassination, and Jackson’s Place in the Prison Movement,” Intolerable, pgs. 156-57) [return to text]

  89. “On What Does the Penitentiary System Rely?,” Intolerable, pg. 216 [return to text]

  90. “GIP Manifesto,” Intolerable, pg. 64 [return to text]

  91. “The Prison Is Everywhere,” Intolerable, pg. 68 [return to text]

  92. The revolt in Toul was waged against the prison warden Georges Galiana, who had previously overseen prisoners in colonial Algeria. [return to text]

  93. “To Escape Their Prison,” Intolerable, pg. 234 [return to text]

  94. “To Escape Their Prison,” Intolerable, pg. 235 [return to text]

  95. “The Second Front (The Neighborhoods),” Intolerable, pg. 327 [return to text]

  96. “The Great Confinement,” Intolerable, pg. 277 [return to text]

  97. “To Have Done with Prisons,” Intolerable, pg. 342 [return to text]

  98. “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” pg. 4 [return to text]

  99. This critique was echoed quite clearly by Jasbir Puar in a recent exchange with Ezekiel Dixon-Román: “Many have concerns about privileging only a Deleuzian perspective, given that Deleuze pronounced some thirty years ago that hacking is replacing striking.” https://www.e-flux.com/journal/123/436945/mass-debilitation-and-algorithmic-governance/ [return to text]

  100. The Cybernetic Hypothesis, pg. 124 [return to text]

  101. The Cybernetic Hypothesis, pg. 161 [return to text]

  102. The Cybernetic Hypothesis, pg. 162 [return to text]

  103. Tiqqun note in The Cybernetic Hypothesis that “the effects of control are more powerful in the periphery nearest to the zone of offensive opacity that is created, around the fluctuating region. Consequently, the size of the base will have to be all the larger as the control is increased.” (164) The centrality of zones of opacity, and their vulnerability to intensifying controls and their attendant digital partitions and cybernetic mechanisms, is why the GIP’s theorization of the partition and a theorization of carceral digitality more generally is so needed. [return to text]

  104. “Intellectuals and Power,” Intolerable, pg. 289 [return to text]

  105. For more on destitution, see “Destituent Power: An Incomplete Timeline” https://destituencies.com/2020/destituent-power-an-incomplete-timeline/ [return to text]

  106. “Intellectuals and Power,” Intolerable, pg. 289 [return to text]

  107. “Foucault and Prisons,” Intolerable, pgs. 389-90 [return to text]

  108. In a conversation with Antonio Negri on control, Deleuze notes that communication itself has become captured by power, and thus revolt requires that we “hijack speech. Creating has always been something dif­ferent from communicating. The key thing may be to create vacuoles of noncommunication, circuit breakers, so we can elude control.” This particular section was also cited by Tiqqun in their conceptualization of opacity. https://thefunambulist.net/editorials/philosophy-control-and-becoming-a-conversation-between-toni-negri-and-gilles-deleuze [return to text]

  109. “Struggles Around Prisons,” Intolerable, pg. 371 [return to text]

  110. “Intellectuals and Power,” Intolerable, pgs. 279-80 [return to text]

  111. “Intellectuals and Power,” Intolerable, pg. 282 [return to text]

  112. The Cybernetic Hypothesis, pg. 163 [return to text]

  113. “On the Letters of ‘H. M.’,” Intolerable, pg. 192 [return to text]

Living and Dying Together, Apart

july 2022

Of the many images that circulated widely in the early weeks of the pandemic, few were as affecting as those of ICU patients struggling to breathe their final breaths not beside loved ones, but beside screens that displayed live videos of them. Capturing overwhelmed hospitals’ efforts to ameliorate the solitude of medical quarantines with the assistance of digital streams, these scenes assumed their emotional gravity not only because of how concisely they depicted the somber reality of dying alone in a volatile pandemic, but because of what they exposed about our experience of living through it as well. As we each struggled to avoid spreading or catching the virus by living networked but lonely lives, how could we all not see something of ourselves in these networked but lonely deaths?

Scattered throughout the pandemic’s visual economy were also the appearance of the far less arresting heaps of cardboard boxes that were haphazardly piled on stoops and at doorsteps, jitteringly arriving here and there according to the algorithmic rhythm of global just-in-time logistics. As storefronts shuttered and Amazon stocks soared, online clicks sent avalanches of packages to be prepared and dispatched under the automated gaze of warehouse surveillance systems before they finally materialized in front of our eyes as delivery workers unloaded them from the backs of vans and trucks.1 A bulky box of surgical masks at the base, a package stuffed with a laptop and webcam standing in as a plinth, and a bag of groceries hastily balanced on top, these impromptu sculptures assembled at the thresholds of domestic life were the visual ephemera of a networked society that coordinated the movements of essential commodities and expendable workers so that those with the means could remain online, uninfected, and at home.2

There is an inconspicuous symmetry between these two pandemic scenes, between the moving images of hospital patients digitally streamed over fiber-optic networks and the moving packages digitally choreographed by corporate logistics systems. Not only are video streaming services and global package deliveries both dominated by the same corporation (Amazon), they also both rely upon the same communication protocols, database architectures, and telecommunications infrastructures that constitute the technical core of our increasingly digitized society. If we are able to sense a formal correspondence between content delivery and package delivery, it is only because of a far broader networked correspondence that is now reflected ubiquitously in each of our social, economic, and political lives.3

Networks have come to be so intimately and intricately integrated into the ways that we meet our needs and sustain ourselves—emotionally, socially, economically, intellectually, sexually, culturally—that at times they can feel nearly imperceptible, just as the extraordinary details of dreams can feel entirely intuitive and innate as we dream them. Whether scheduling online deliveries, logging onto remote therapy sessions, attending livestreamed funerals, taking online exams, or dressing up for virtual work meetings, the exchanges and encounters between many lives that cumulatively make it possible to sustain each particular life have progressively come to be translated into, managed by, and subsumed within the interoperable bits and bytes of the networks that facilitate them. From within the maw of this pixelated vertigo that only accelerated during the pandemic, it has become increasingly difficult to distinguish between the interdependencies and commonalities that are the foundation of all of our lives and the protocols and platforms that are the buzzing pulse of network life.

Through the swells and crests of the pandemic’s planetary waves, what we need from one another has largely come to be organized on the basis of our networked separation from one another. This contradiction is the consequence of a profound dispossession of the worlds and relations upon which all life depends, a digital and distributed partitioning of what is common into arrays of private enclaves where only a network connection is shared. Under these conditions of generalized and communicative separation, our individual incapacity to fulfill our needs on our own is formally balanced with the network’s promise to fulfill all of them, at an algorithmically set price. Like a surgeon who incises apart and stitches together in a single continuous gesture, networks intimately bind lives to what only further separates them, in which the domination of networked separation is underpinned by a corresponding liberation of networked communication. The cardinal promise of pandemic life, and consequently of social life far more generally, has been that we can all go on living and dying together, apart.

The panicked mapping of a networked digitality onto all forms of relationality in the anxious and exigent depths of the pandemic was not the expression of a technocratic authoritarianism or the imposition of a totalitarian matrix of control, but was rather simply another expansion and elaboration of a capitalist and colonial rationality that was already at work everywhere in society, totalizing in reach and isolating in practice. In this sense, even while marketing itself in the image of promethean creativity and glistening novelty, the networked separation of the pandemic is best understood as being only the most contemporary technical expression of the economic, social, and political partitions that have been steadily developing over centuries. These partitions share a uniform binary logic (this, not that) that is differentially expressed across complex matrices of distinct sexualized and racialized forms, resulting in a separation so total that separation itself has assumed its place as both the means and ends of our economy and society.4 In the pandemic and under capitalism, every technology is ultimately a technology of making separations.

Despite their acolytes’ promises of an imminent decentralization and deverticalization of society, digital networks haven’t undermined but rather have only formally restructured the economic division of classes, the sexualized division of (re)productive labor, and the racialized division of policing and legal status in networked forms, where network addresses that are assigned to users and their devices serve as the modality through which subjects can be addressed as such.5 Within these distributed modes of address and subjectification, networks can both provide and restrict—and thus modulate, calibrate, and control—access to work, visas, intimacy, housing, food, credit, education, and healthcare in radically unequal and differentiated fashions according to the digitized hierarchies and distributions of networked subjects. The network is above all else an apparatus that captures only to partition, that subsumes only to separate. Everything is digitally brought together in a networked unity only so it can be better identified and differentiated, and then dominated on that basis.

Imposed through a technical marriage of connection and alienation, networks dominate life and—as a consequence of being dominated—lives come to depend upon, invest in, and attach themselves to networks. This contradiction runs like a fault line through each of our lives, in which every new networked division that is established between us is ultimately expressed again as a subjective division within us. When what we need from one another can only be realized through the forms of separation that have been erected between one another—whether by national borders, economic markets, or digital networks—our common interdependencies come to be experienced principally as personal vulnerabilities and private responsibilities. From within the networked relation, the good life is technically reimagined as the connected but solitary life, struggling to survive by flexibly adapting to every new difficulty, adeptly planning for every new contingency, ruggedly weathering every new tragedy, manically working to crawl out of every new poverty, and calmly swallowing every new anxiety online and on its own.

Networks are thus not addendums to otherwise already coherent, defined, and realized lives, but rather facilitate networked forms of dispossession that steer lives towards networked forms of life. Following the networked forms of displacement, exploitation, and deprivation that dispossess life of its commonality and leave it fundamentally solitary, separated, and precarious, life necessarily comes to rely upon networked forms of relationality that both sustain life and sustain life’s precariousness. In this sense, networks become a matter of life and death not because they make some live and let others die, nor because they let some live and make others die, but because they produce a networked vulnerability to death before inviting all to connect, work, and live online.

The disintegration of our commonality into a turbulent sea of personal plights, and the reintegration of those plights into the informatic flows and exchanges of networks, cause us to experience and perceive the world (as well as our dependence upon it) as the cause of all of our vulnerability, and thus as a threat that must be kept at maximal distance. In this way, the reality of our interdependence is translated into the anxiety of a networked loneliness, pushing lives everywhere to retreat from their commonality into the nodes of networks. Everything becomes more communicative and less communal, more informatic and less intimate, more programmed and less poetic, more fragmented and less free. This networked capture of our commonality and impoverishment of our lived experience thus transforms the reality of our interdependence into a dense field of power where life is subordinated. As a result, practices of revolt and resistance find themselves necessarily enacted within and against this network paradigm, struggling to contest and transform the modalities through which our interdependence is lived.

In a society so enveloped within this networked totality, all social activity necessarily emerges and formalizes itself first online. This does not mean, however, that life obediently remains there. During the pandemic, there were moments in which lives broke away from their networked form and found one another within something that we could call common. Consider for example the way in which buildings coordinated during the pandemic to deliver groceries and medicine to vulnerable neighbors and organized eviction defense and rent strike actions against landlords. Many of these activities undoubtedly emerged online in social media groups, or at the very least took shape in conversation with online guides and campaigns which circulated widely in the early weeks of the pandemic. But these actions’ online genesis didn’t stop them from quickly abandoning the network, bringing people into common situations and struggles that could not be so easily subsumed by communicative technologies that aspire to capture and neutralize them. A knock on a neighbor’s door, a building meeting in the garden, a conspiracy planned between friends on a rooftop, these are all practices that require transgressing the networked separations at the heart of contemporary society and remind us of other ways of living.

Consider also the George Floyd revolts, in which the video of his brutal murder by police propagated across various social media platforms and initiated a profound chain of protests and rebellions. What began online in the circulation of a cell phone video uncontrollably exploded into contagious street actions across several continents that overcame the communicative logic of the networks that catalyzed them. This collective escape from the network, in which people did not allow themselves to be simply captured within the cycles of performative rage and posturing debates that so densely populate online life, allowed for people to build something common in the streets that had a fundamentally different form than the connections and protocols that they had fled from. In this sense, the revolts that began to formulate themselves online in event postings and group chats quickly realized that the first limit they must overcome was the network itself, and thus put into motion collective practices that essentially left networks defunct and inoperative. Marches, occupations, encampments, and solidarity projects are all forms which depart from networks while revealing our lack of need for them. All revolt, whether taking form in insurrectionary bursts of activity or patient practices of resistance, should aspire to leave networked and capitalist relations plainly obsolete in this way.6

While the historical violence of capitalism and colonialism that is now facilitated by network technologies should be recognized as nothing less than a desolation of our lives and of the common, it nonetheless remains constituent in nature, constructing and sustaining the networked forms that render our exploitation, alienation, and dispossession possible just as they possibilize novel forms accumulation, partition, and extraction. The desolation of the commons is simply the product of a networked and capitalist world being historically constituted again and again, a recursive constitution that drives history itself. The progress of contemporary society, and the desolation of this progress, can be measured in the number of separations it produces and sustains, in which each new division serves as a new means of managing its accumulating disaster. Network technologies should thus be approached as nothing other than the distributed automation of the partitions that have historically sustained the capitalist and colonial world, those separations whose constitution has represented nothing less than a catastrophe for life. Each expansion and intensification of the networked world is only a further eradication of our common one.

Emancipation thus cannot arise from parallel constituent measures that aim to replace the partitions of the network form with other sets of more favorable or comparatively just partitions, as the partition itself is the binary technology through which the violence of capitalist domination has been and continues to be realized historically. Destituent measures on the other hand, those practices and gestures that aim to dismantle the logic of partition as such, offer a path towards the common that cannot be so easily rerouted and reprogrammed within the cycles of dispossession-accumulation and alienation-subjectification that circulate all around.7 In network society, we can think of the destituent as whatever renders life less compatible with, less dependent upon, and less capturable by the networked world of capitalist separation, as a way of life which tactically retreats from and opportunistically dismantles networked forms of life.

No one is in the position to definitively say what life would be like without networks or without capitalism, simply because our lives have been so formally subsumed by them. The ways we sustain ourselves, care for one another, struggle against domination, and even dream of better lives together are all intimately integrated into and contoured by the networked and capitalist world they take place within, and thus can’t help but reflect their technical forms and partitions. As our lives are only possible today due to the sets of possibilities offered to us by the world in its present structure and form, it is simply not possible to rewind the clock to a time before the network or before capitalism. Everything depends instead upon our collective willingness to dispossess ourselves of what has historically dispossessed each of us, dismantling and destituting the capitalist and colonial world node by node, partition by partition, piece by piece. The connectivity and commensurability of the network form must ultimately be confronted by what has not yet been entirely subsumed by them, by those fragments of our lives that still struggle to live in common with, rather than apart from, one another.

 

Notes


1. While Louis Lumière’s 1895 silent film La Sortie de l’Usine Lumière à Lyon (Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory in Lyon) is considered to be paradigmatic of the many entanglements between visual and economic production in industrial societies, today a video of an Amazon delivery worker leaving their van with a box, recorded and then uploaded to the internet by an Amazon Ring doorbell camera, would speak most clearly to the harmony between our digitally surveilled society and logistically driven global economy. An appropriate title might simply be: Workers Arriving with Packages from Bezos’ Warehouses.

2. For a theorization of the relations between the domesticated/connected consumer and the disposable/mobile delivery worker, see my earlier text The Corona Reboot: “It appears that at least two new kinds of subjectivity have already begun to take shape, both of which are mutually constitutive, intimately dependent upon, and shaped by the informatic infrastructures and apparatuses that now run through and organize much of our planetary society. On the one hand, we have the domesticated/connected subject, who in being confined to their home is pushed to invent new ways to reconnect to and participate in a virtualized economy. On the other hand, we have the mobile/disposable subject that serves as the circulatory system of the pandemic, a subject that becomes increasingly vulnerable and precarious as it is compelled to move at ever greater velocities.” ( https://www.ianalanpaul.com/the-corona-reboot/ )

3. Networks aim to establish an abstract commensurability between anything that can be stored, processed, and circulated numerically as data, just as price establishes an abstract equivalency between all commodities in markets. This equivalency/commensurability is the computational basis for the automated forms of exchange, analysis, and control that define networks, whose tendency is always to multiply their connections and realize themselves as systems that oversee, mediate, and manage all other systems.

4. The partition is a paradigmatic technology of capitalism through which various forms of dispossession and accumulation (dis/reintegration and de/reterritorialization) are made possible. Ariella Azoulay concisely theorizes the ways apparatuses of all kinds divide and conquer as part of capitalist/imperial history in this way, writing in Potential History: “The matrix of history operates in two registers: it literally organizes the shared world into processable slices of papers—with the help of borders, weapons, property certificates, treaties, and so on—and is in charge of accounting for this world, already partitioned and shredded.” (287)

5. For more on the subject of life’s addressability, see my earlier text Notes on Ungovernable Life: “Governance is the form of power that takes life’s multiplicity as its object, imposing fields of difference upon which its capture is effectuated, partitioning the difference of life into different classes of lives. This manifold classification of life, the definitive formal structuring of selves and their worlds, is the means through which all governance is instantiated and enacted … Imbricating regimes of identification, calculation, organization, stratification, algorithmization, inspection, and administration all aspire to render life immanently addressable in these ways, producing variously classed lives that are both subjected to and subjects of the address of governance.” ( https://www.ianalanpaul.com/notes-on-ungovernable-life/ )

6. In both the case of building organizing and the George Floyd revolts, we can glimpse an ethics that directs us beyond the separation of networks, an ethics premised upon two complementary poles. On one end, we have the value of a life, which is not reducible to an individual life, even if it continues to become exceedingly difficult to think of life beyond the individual. Rather, a life is recognized in its indispensable creativity, potentiality, and autonomy, or in other words, in its singularity. In his essay Immanence: A Life, Gilles Deleuze reflects on a life that exceeds any individual life, a life that is virtual and only actualized as singularities (an expression, a thought, a gesture) that is irreducible to the subjectivities and predicated forms of life that society produces in the form of individuals. On the other end, we have the interdependencies which radically shape all life, the commonality upon which networks effectuate their capture and upon which all life depends. When considered together, life’s singularity and interdependency points us towards ways of living that arrive not in the terminus of a rugged individuality nor in the administrative state—both of which presuppose the separation of life—but in a commonality that understands autonomy and solidarity as being necessarily tied to and dependent on one another.

7. It’s worth emphasizing that the vast majority of the popular revolts that have occurred at the beginning of the 21st century (Occupy Wall Street, 15M, the Arab Spring, Standing Rock, the George Floyd Rebellion, the Hong Kong student movement, and many more) have been destituent in nature, aiming to depose power and leave nothing in its place. This turn from revolution to insurrection is reflective of a historical development of power that has successfully dismantled the global workers’ movement and other subjectively-driven forms of struggle, transforming revolt from something that arises from within the emancipatory potential of this or that subjectivity into something that arises against the apparatuses and structures that produce capitalist/colonial subjectivity in the first place. Walter Benjamin’s Critique of Violence is perhaps the most helpful text in making the distinction between constitutive and destitutive violence, where he writes: “If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them.” (296) For an overview that examines the development of destituent power as a concept, see “Destituent Power: An Incomplete Timeline” ( https://destituencies.com/2020/destituent-power-an-incomplete-timeline/ )

The Israeli Landscape

The Israeli Landscape, 2021, Digital Inkjet Print, 34″ x 238″

The Israeli Landscape is a collage composed of hundreds of figures and flowcharts taken from Israeli security companies’ patents. When arranged together as a landscape, these images diagram the Israeli imagination of Palestine, a territory populated entirely by autonomous vehicles and drones, surveillance equipment, guided weapons, foreign targets, missile interception systems, image recognition algorithms, hostile intruders, classified databases, and digital sensors.

The intimate financial and political relationships between Israeli security companies (such as Israel Aerospace Industries and Elbit Systems) and the Israeli state are documented visually in the form of intellectual property, expressed as a growing number of patented technologies and weapons that help implement, enforce, and profit from the apartheid system in Palestine. These figures and flowcharts should ultimately be understood as part of a colonial design practice directed not only against Palestinian life, but against all lives who live under regimes that purchase these technologies and weapons from Israeli companies.

The whole print can be downloaded as a jpg, and can be explored online at the website https://www.ianalanpaul.com/theisraelilandscape/

Click below to view work details:

The Fascist Simulation

In the United States, fascism presently unfolds as a simulation. The fascist simulation constitutes itself as a pixelated sea of livestreams, images, posts, and comments, circulating widely as its own networked, autonomous model of reality. It is enacted as an ensemble of people, social media platforms, presidential tweets, superspreader events, confederate flags, television chyrons, informatic infrastructures, automatic rifles, toxic masculinities, MAGA hats, racist hashtags, and video game servers. It is fascist ideology reified through consumer technology.

The fascist simulation most recently spilled into reality on January 6th, when armed groups overwhelmed police forces and briefly occupied the capitol building only to (re)discover and (re)affirm that their power actually rests elsewhere. Rather than militantly attempt to seize state power as many feared they would, those who had stormed the building instead were reflexively and irresistibly drawn back towards the glowing screens of the networked devices that had organized and brought them all together in Washington in the first place. In fleeting states of mediated ecstasy, those running free in the capitol, armed with rifles and cell phones, spent their time urgently uploading videos from politicians’ hastily abandoned offices and staging meme-ready photos in evacuated congressional chambers, ultimately choosing the logic of the computer over the logic of the coup.

The fascist simulation proceeds as a model of the world that is so complete that it becomes formally indistinguishable from the world itself. It is a shared, affective experience that is lived and propagated by its participants. Within the fascist simulation, subjectivities are given form, metanarratives are articulated, and repertoires of action and violence are incentivized and justified. The fascist simulation offers its own nuanced sets of emotional registers, aesthetic sensibilities, semiotic traditions, sexual regimes, and political antagonisms. Every encounter with and experience of the world can be wholly subsumed by and neatly organized within the fascist simulation’s assimilative and digestive structure.

The fascist simulation’s way of knowing the world, its epistemology, flows and loops through closed circuits, recursively reconfirming its fascist assumptions more completely. In the fascist simulation, America was always great, has been made great, is great, will be made great, and can always be made great again. Built upon a digitized foundation of networked media objects—images, profiles, videos, groups, apps, chats, forums, texts—all that is needed to sustain and grow the simulation are the contents of the simulation itself. Its self-referentiality is, like a database, combinatorial yet inescapably circular. While Trump’s narcissism can be likened to an ouroboros, the participatory and networked form of the fascist simulation resembles a tangled mass of serpents competing to swallow one another’s tails. The storming of the capitol was never intended to be a definitive climax, but rather was only another looped, networked iteration of a simulation that desires only to circulate ever more sweepingly and at ever greater velocities.

The fascist simulation is structured by conspiratorial fantasies—a flexible assemblage of theories concerning stolen elections, pedophilia rings, jewish/globalist plots, homosexual subversions, salaried anarchists, and vaccine microchips, each its own unique crystalization of white/male/hetero anxieties and paranoias—but it matters little whether they correspond with anything real at all. Conversely, as the distance between a simulation and reality increases, so do the simulation’s durability and potency. Simulated norms also simulate their corresponding abnormalities, and the simulation’s technical and epistemological protocols happily capture and redirect any dissenting signals. The more radically a thing comes to contradict the simulation, the more facilely and unthinkingly it can be recuperated.

The fascist simulation’s raison d’etre is ultimately to produce, sustain, and multiply fascist lifeworlds. To these ends, the fascist simulation cultivates its own immune systems, its own modes of neutralizing whatever aspects of reality fail to correspond with its models of the world. The fascist simulation is structurally organized to subsume and capture every lived experience—sexual, cultural, economic, political—within fascist regimes of meaning. In the digital recesses of its manichean worlds, every other life is encountered only as a friend or enemy that must either be eternally embraced or entirely exterminated. The affective regimes of the fascist simulation, the binary couplings of total love of the same and total hatred of the other, render its means and ends indistinguishable: the simulation fights only for itself, and every tender caress of or violent clash with reality only confirms and heightens the felt momentum of the simulation’s procession.

The fascist simulation unavoidably collides with reality as it expands, always thirsting for more stimuli upon which its models and measures can be imposed. It desires only to multiply its networks, to subsume more and more data as a means of becoming more refined in its detail and commanding in its force. Whether coded as MAGA, QAnon, Blue Lives Matter, Proud Boys, or Militias, every encounter is interpreted and then enshrined as a confirmation and substantiation of the fascist simulation. Progressing as a networked machine that connects and parses the world according to fascism’s totalitarian logic, every militant demonstration, livestream event, campus debate, sponsored podcast, and media spectacle cultivates and sows the computational territories of the simulation, producing and instilling its own autonomous modes of reasoning and regimes of sensibility that ward off all contrasting forms of reason and sense.

The fascist simulation is not invulnerable, and when it is in some way threatened—when parts of its infrastructure collapse, when its internal consistencies begin to disintegrate, or when its edges bleed into lines of potential flight—its response is always to dramatically amplify and intensify itself. The affects that course through the fascist simulation oscillate between totally operative power and totally compromising vulnerability; any acceleration, expansion, or connection is experienced within the simulation as a totally messianic conquest, while any deceleration, contraction, or disconnection is experienced within the simulation as a totally existential threat. Regardless of stimuli—whether Trump triumphs or is trounced, or whether the Proud Boys take over the town or are chased out of town—the simulation generates the collective desire to lash out only more desperately and frenetically, to explode in a volatile synthesis of joyous and humiliated fury, the logic of which is inescapably suicidal. The fascist simulation, ultimately, desires only to annihilate everything as a means of annihilating and putting an end to itself.

The fascist simulation must be defeated—these past years have taught this to us again and again in manifold ways—but it cannot be meaningfully confronted without also confronting the enmeshed, adjacent simulations that sustain it. We all live in some version of a simulated world, perhaps in one where climate change is not actively accelerating beyond return, where colonial and genocidal pasts no longer shape and determine the present, where sexual violence is consistently denied refuge, where capitalism doesn’t subjugate and dispossess all of life, or where police don’t regularly execute Black people in the streets. In the networked present, it is crucial to understand that the fascist simulation isn’t simply an irregularity or anomaly that has strayed from an otherwise amiable and equitable reality, but is rather built upon the legacies and inheritances of profound, incomprehensible violence that actively structure each of our social, political, and economic lives.

The fascist simulation is built upon many other dimensions of domination—capitalist, patriarchal, colonial, racist—that also impose themselves in simulated fashions, grafted to and underpinning one another, that cannot simply be disentangled and addressed one by one. If there is any hope of breaking down the fascist simulation before it breaks all of us, those simulations must also be terminated as well, in a continuous, destituent gesture. Undoing the fascist simulation, quite simply, requires undoing the world which sustains it, which nurtures it, which is its substrate. This, and nothing less, is the work required of us.

Notes on Ungovernable Life


[ pages 91 and 96 of Alphonse Bertillon’s album of photographs, assembled
at the Paris Police Prefecture at the start of the 20th century ]

 

Every life that lives today is lived as governed. And yet, the lived experience of being governed, from our first to final breaths, suggests that while all lives may be governable to some degree, life itself cannot ultimately be governed once and for all. The reality that a life must be subjected to relentless governing in order to remain governed evinces that all life shares an inexhaustible resistance to governance, an ineradicable ungovernability, in common. Ungovernable life is the name we can give to this lived resistance, to life’s enduring fugitivity and immanent insurgency.

~

The struggles between life and governance are waged on the terrain of life’s multiplicity, an infinite set of formal potentials that do not reside in any particular life but rather arise from the encounters and relations between immeasurably diverse lives and worlds. Lives are always lived as becomings of this multiplicity, as creative expressions of a difference in itself that is fundamentally prior to all classification, subjectification, and individuation.

~

Governance is the form of power that takes life’s multiplicity as its object, imposing fields of difference upon which its capture is effectuated, partitioning the difference of life into different classes of lives. This manifold classification of life, the definitive formal structuring of selves and their worlds, is the means through which all governance is instantiated and enacted. In this respect, governance is a form of violence that presupposes itself, forever reaffirming and rediscovering its own assumptions more concretely in the lives and worlds it concurrently acts upon and gives form to.

~

Governance’s classification of life has as its horizon the multiplication and maximization of life’s addressability. When governed through address, lives endure two complementary forms of violence: lives must live through violence that has been addressed to them, and also must live as they have been addressed. Consider a life that has been addressed by governance as an illegal, migrant life. Not only is this life now targeted for police harassment, beatings, and arrests, but also must live as an illegal migrant (as a predicated compound of the “migrant” and “illegal” classes), avoiding areas where there may be document checks or where facial recognition technologies are deployed, working only in unregulated jobs, speaking in native languages always guardedly, and enduring sleepless nights when immigration agents begin knocking on doors in the neighborhood. Imbricating regimes of identification, calculation, organization, stratification, algorithmization, inspection, and administration all aspire to render life immanently addressable in these ways, producing variously classed lives that are both subjected to and subjects of the address of governance.

~

Capturing life as addressable lives is the precondition of governance’s differential distribution of violence. Subordinate classes of life—Black, female, indebted, queer, disabled, criminal—can have social, economic, juridical, political, ecological, and technical forms of violence addressed to and thus directed upon them, while dominant classes of life—White, male, wealthy, heteronormative, healthy, citizen—can benefit from their position in the hierarchies that follow. The address of life within dense matrices of difference culminates in lives that are lived as combinatorial and at times contradictory compositions of their many classes, allowing the violence of governance to be topologically distributed across life in exceedingly uneven yet eminently tailored fashions.

~

The regimes of addressability imposed upon life, typically realized in processes of individuation and subjectification but also increasingly at dividual scales, are unthinkable absent the apparatuses that produce, facilitate, manage, police, and sustain them. The prison, the school, the hospital, the border, the factory, and the colony have long been exemplary of the apparatuses used to render life addressable, but of course also increasingly at play are the database, the smartphone, the bank/credit card, the network, the “smart” city, the virtual classroom, and the multitude of biometric tracking technologies that hastily accumulate in all kinds of places and on all kinds of bodies. All of these apparatuses are semiotic technologies—each with their own codes, methods of capture, and storage and organizational structures—that formally unify life within the universal translation of governance’s address.

Colonial expansion, capitalist dispossession, and sovereign domination each produce their own distinct regimes of addressability and corresponding distributions of violence, but together—as modalities of governance—they partake in a shared history of apparatuses. The mass branding of enslaved bodies during the colonization of Africa and the Americas, the recording and archiving of fingerprints in British-colonized India, the use of currencies and markets as a decentralized mode of economic address through the abstraction of price, the sequencing and archiving of DNA, the network and hardware addresses of the internet, global police databases, the international passport and visa system, cryptographic blockchains, and, of course, languages, cultures, and laws are all exceedingly heterogeneous yet fundamentally interoperable regimes of address that contribute to and thus help constitute the larger continuum of planetary governance.

~

The appearance of each new apparatus, and thus new mode of address, represents nothing less than an increase in the power of governance, and thus an increase in life’s governability and its exposure to violence. Nonetheless, lives and life’s multiplicity remain fundamentally irreducible to and incommensurable with the regimes of addressability that are intended to govern them.

Consider the lives that appear in Paul Mpagi Sepuya’s photography, persistently eluding the capture of the lens, aperture, and shutter, becoming illimitably multiple. Those things that we manage to recognize in Sepuya’s images—an arm, a mirror, an embrace—are awash in turbulent fields of expressivity that are beyond recognitive closure. Many of the contours are suggestive of particular formal histories—of musculature, of the studio, of color—that threaten to enfold the work within tidy pockets of legibility and apprehension, and thus capture it within delimited modes of interpretation and systems of address. However, in each image there is always a reservoir of indecisive and unresolved multiplicity, of what remains fugitively living and thus fundamentally beyond classification and address.

Every manifestation of governance, and each apparatus, dedicates itself only to the endless reregistration of lives that persistently explode into multiplicity.

~

Life persists as ungovernable to the degree that it escapes being determined by the forms of address, and thus the forms of classification and subjectification, imposed upon it by governance. There is no such thing as a class or subject opposed to governance in this sense, but only classes and subjects that desire to escape and become oriented by the insurrectionary potential of their own eventual abolition. Bartleby’s “I would prefer not to” perhaps only needs to be amended to “I would prefer not to be.”

~

In Phillip K. Dick’s novel A Scanner Darkly, the protagonist is an undercover police agent that uses a technology called a scramble suit to maintain his anonymity. Worn as a thin shroud, a computer projects images of millions of formal differences that have been saved in its memory—bone structures, eye colors, nose geometries, hair styles—across the surface of the suit, producing a cascading visual metamorphosis and scrambling the wearer’s identity. Algorithmically expressing each of its stored differences in randomized sequences, the suit is a technical realization of the difference of governance, of difference as it has been reduced to classes.

While life’s multiplicity is by definition infinite and undefined, the difference of governance is a multidimensional, yet ultimately finite set of classes that are used to address life. The difference of governance is in this sense the difference of recognition and representation, a formal subordination of life’s multiplicity that recursively captures it within the objective unities of class difference. The differences arbitrarily displayed on the scramble suit in Dick’s novel are always already part of the set of formal differences that have been classified and cataloged by governance, sets of differences that are used to parse life into particularized, predicated, governable lives.

A life addressed through the difference of governance is in this sense not approached as being truly different at all, but rather is always perceived and acted upon as being self-similar and formally equivalent to whatever class of difference is being used to address it. This artificial similitude, through which lives can always be assumed to be indistinguishable from—and thus reducible to—their classed selves, is the condition of possibility of governance’s address. The recognition and representation of life is thus always already the recognition and representation of life as it has been governed, while what remains ungovernable in life is that which manages to escape and remain imperceptible to such epistemic capture.

~

If governance could dream, it would dream of the total addressability of life, of lives made wholly receptive and subservient to every action, command, program, order, plan, and instruction addressed to them. A totally addressed life would of course no longer be a life at all, having become indistinguishable from the mechanisms, instruments, and apparatuses used to govern it. For this reason, life and governance are fundamentally counterpoised: the more life lives the less it is governed, and the more life is governed the less it lives. This inverse symmetry entails that a total realization of governance would correspond only with a total cancellation of life, just as a total realization of life would correspond only with a total cancellation of governance. Consequently, what is ultimately at stake in life’s ungovernability is life itself.

~

In Regina José Galindo’s video performance La Sombra (The Shadow), she is chased in circles by a colossal German tank in a seemingly endless game of mechanized, militarized cat and mouse. Galindo stumbles forward, gasping for breath with a terrified exhaustion on her face. The tank noisily and steadily follows close behind, its treads indifferently crushing and flattening the earth below. The image of this performance is the image of a sexualized and racialized governance, invoking the incomprehensible violence of the conquest of the Americas, the forced disappearances of dictatorships, the global arms trade, and state-sponsored femicide.

The machinery of the state, casting its geometric shadow over Galindo, promises to eradicate her if she were to momentarily stumble, collapse from fatigue, or dare to turn around and confront it, just as it has indifferently eradicated so many before. Its looming, heavy, metal violence relentlessly steers her forward, just as cattle are driven to slaughter. There is no chain of events, just one single catastrophe manifest as the tank’s progress.

The structure of the performance suggests that the chase will go on until either Galindo is killed or the tank breaks down. There is no negotiating with the tank after all, no possibility of a truce or democratic compromise, and no way to vote away its violence. Galindo’s only hope lies not in learning to live with the tank or in aspiring and plotting to drive it one day, but in the dream of its total destruction. The end of the tank, and of the machinery of the state, would be nothing less than apocalyptic, an annihilation of the world of pursuit and flight, of capture and escape, of governance and its address.

~

Ungovernable life is not an a priori state of living that remains immaculately untouched by governance, nor is it an a posteriori ideal that lives must perpetually fail to live up to. Ungovernable life is simply the lived, collective destitution of whatever presently governs.

~

Whenever the collective expression of life’s multiplicity begins to outpace the address of governance, the most generic classes of life are imposed as a means of enacting the most blunt and desolating of assaults. In all of the numerous insurrections of the early 21st century, lives have been routinely addressed in the most flexible of ways—as anarchists, antifascists, infiltrators, terrorists, communists, rioters, enemy combatants, hostis humani generis—in order to project the maximal expression of violence onto life in general. As life’s multiplicity is incommensurable with governance’s address, and even more intensely so during periods of insurrection, governance produces classes of life that can blankly address governance’s constitutive excess, facilitating the subjugation, and in extreme moments extermination, of whatever lives.

Alfonso Cuarón’s Children of Men is among the clearest narrative articulations of this structure. The film’s premise, humanity’s loss of its ability to give birth, precipitates the total securitization and carceralization of the precarious life that remains. The pervasive hunt for migrants and terrorists in this world, undertaken in the name of defending what is left of life, has only left all life hunted. As the characters traverse urban enclaves, refugee camps, and luxury skyscrapers, and are regularly interrupted by militarized police raids and probing checkpoints, we are haunted by a mise en scène populated by overflowing detention cages that appear over and over and over again in the background of train platforms, public squares, and highways, a spatial multiplication and formal dispersion of the camps historically found in Guantánamo Bay, Moria, and Auschwitz. Cuarón’s film stages the thesis that the governance of the world, approaching life always as a finite, discrete, and classifiable object to be managed, policed, and addressed, necessarily positions itself in opposition to the lives that populate it.

~

Governance separates the world into ever finer enclaves—colonies, territories, properties, nations, extractive zones, theaters of war—and then reunites what has been separated within the singular addressable world of governance. The refined division and subsequent reunification of the world within governance’s regimes of address is not a technique of governing space, but a technique of governing lives as they can be spatially addressed. Consequently, ungovernable life is not lived within the world, but always within multitudes of worlds.

~

History is nothing other than a vast accumulation of apparatuses, each rendering life more immanently addressable, and thus immanently governable. Today, the accumulation of apparatuses has grown so profuse that even the act of shopping, among the most banal and sanctioned activities of the metropolis, nonetheless involves dozens of regimes of address—metrocard swipes, smartphone tracking, credit card purchases, face-recognition cameras, aerial surveillance—that are not managed or operated by any singular corporation, bureaucracy, or police force but, through their technical interoperability and shared political allegiances, help constitute and reinforce the unified addressable world of governance. The organizational decentralization and technical dispersion of apparatuses, and thus modes of address, always already anticipates their ex post facto unification.

Nonetheless, the massive accumulation of these apparatuses cannot ever totally capture and subordinate life’s multiplicity. Any increase in control and in the classification and address of lives also formally calls into being the corresponding set of limits that define its capture. Just as colonists set out to partition and civilize the wild only to find themselves perpetually surrounded, engulfed, and threatened by it, there can be no increase in governance and its regimes of address that does not also increasingly expose its frontiers to invasions from beyond and its captured territories to insurrections from within. This topological structure that facilitates the constitutive inclusion and exclusion of life is the geometry of power that sustains governance, and is thus what ultimately must be broken and torn asunder.

~

In the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art there is an album of photographs that was assembled by the Paris Police Prefecture at the dawn of the 20th century. The images were all taken or directed by Alphonse Bertillon, the officer who was instrumental to the development of police forensics and anthropometrics, although he remains most known for having invented the mugshot. Flipping through the album, worn pages fitted with photographs of suspects, corpses, and crime scenes are turned over one by one, many accompanied by scribbled observations and brief notes. Perhaps more striking than the photographs themselves are pages 91 and 96, which are left blank. All that’s available to examine and inspect are the grain of the paper, the minor stains that float here and there, and, on page 91, a thin strip of tape used to repair a minor tear.

The vacant space of these two pages is like a trap that has been meticulously set, but has yet to capture any prey. Each page is at once a materialization of the apparatuses of governance, a constructed territory within which new lives may be catalogued, documented, investigated, measured, and classified according to Bertillon’s systems, and a testament to the fugitivity of life, to all who managed to elude Bertillon’s investigations through whatever means of escape, to those who invented practices of living that could not be folded into the album’s heavy bindings.

~

If anarchism is the word we use to describe the collective struggle to escape and destitute the address of governance, communism is the word we can use to describe the collective struggle to most fully express life’s multiplicity. Each struggle anticipates and entails the other.

~

As life’s addressability corresponds with its governability, defeating and dismantling the apparatuses of governance should also be embraced as a defense of life. René Carmille, considered to be among the first hackers, can be taken as exemplary in this regard. Tasked with overseeing the census of Nazi-occupied France using the state’s Hollerith punch card computers, Carmille and his assistants clandestinely modified and sabotaged the machines so they were no longer able to punch the hole used to designate religion, thus preventing the fascist deportation and extermination of tens of thousands of Jews. Innumerable actions of the same insurrectionary spirit populate all of history, although rarely are they remembered by it for reasons that should be obvious. The mass incineration of city records during the Paris Commune, the destruction of migrants’ passports in the EU, and the mass burning of draft cards and records during the Vietnam War are each gestures that rendered lives unaddressable to particular modalities of governance, and thus warded off their violence.

It is difficult to resist imagining how many more lives may have been spared from the historical violence of governance had more regimes of addressability been destroyed or, even better, prevented from ever being implemented in the first place. Would the Egyptian Revolution in 2011 have followed a different future if the revolutionaries had burned down the Mogamma, the labyrinthine building on Tahrir square where the state’s voluminous paper records are stored, instead of the ruling NDP headquarters that was incinerated only a few blocks away? What number of lives could be liberated from debt if financial documents were hacked or destroyed, as the student activist Francisco Tapia successfully did in 2014 when he clandestinely stole and burned $500 million worth of student debt records in Chile, rendering them uncollectable? How many might have been saved, and might still be saved, if surveillance technologies along the world’s militarized land and sea borders could be disabled or permanently sabotaged? The destruction of governance’s apparatuses should be understood, in the language of Spinoza, not only as an increase in life’s potential, but also as a pure expression of joy.

~

What constitutes life is relentlessly multiple and expansive, and thus resists any resolution or definition. Anyone who undertakes the task of enumerating and itemizing all of the things that compose just a particular life—cities, languages, concepts, foods, films, currents of air, songs, plants, housing, memories, birds, clothes, poems, and of course other lives—will immediately find themselves in need of endless wells of ink. Lives and their worlds mutually constitute and indiscernibly bleed into one another, and lives routinely become more than themselves in acts as ordinary as reading a book or falling in love.

Just as no life ever lives alone but rather is always already lived conjunctively and interdependently with other lives and worlds, so too must each life rely upon countless other lives to cultivate, defend, and more fully express life’s multiplicity. Each life, living as a cascade of expression, cannot possibly express all of life’s difference, and so the expression of life’s multiplicity thus requires nothing less than an unruly ensemble of lives, each enriching and being enriched by, sustaining and being sustained by, lives that live differently.

Constellations of subversive friendships, irrepressible solidarities, seditious intimacies, wild creativities, compassionate insurgencies, brilliant refusals, and militant imaginations—in expressing, defending, and expanding upon life’s multiplicity—each help ensure that lives remain irreducible to and undetermined by however they might be governed. Against governance’s privation, dispossession, and cancellation of life, there is little sense in appealing to an ungovernable life in any singular sense, but only to the potential of ungovernable life in its manifoldly common form, and of becoming ungovernable in its irreducibly collective register.

 

 

 

 

Ten Premises For A Pandemic

Translations: Português (Link) Italiano (Link) Ελληνικά (Link)

1. A pandemic isn’t a collection of viruses, but is a social relation among people, mediated by viruses.

Nothing is inevitable, inescapable, or immutable about the coronavirus pandemic unfolding everywhere around us, simply because the pandemic is social. The endless posts and announcements marshalling us to help “flatten the curve” are at least enough to make clear that the historical consequences and human costs of the pandemic entirely depend on the ways we collectively choose to live in relation to it. Because the pandemic doesn’t simply happen to us but is instead something we partake in, a first step forward in these times is to refuse to curtail our thinking to how each of our individual lives may be particularly impacted by the virus and to begin to contemplate the potential we collectively share to change the course of the pandemic as well as to shape the new society that emerges from it.

2. At the very least, the expanding suspension of social, economic, and political norms and laws provides each of us with a unique opportunity to question the pre-pandemic world we had all grown accustomed to living within.

What is the value of work? How might we allocate resources differently if we didn’t have to consider price? Is privatized healthcare defensible? Are prisons truly necessary? As we witness the cancellation of utility, mortgage, and rent payments, the public takeover of private healthcare systems, the cessation of arrests for low-level offenses, and the calls for the cancellation of all debt, what else might we call into question and, perhaps more importantly, imagine taking hold in their place? If those in power are so willing to upend social, economic, and political norms and laws in the interest of defending the world they upheld, then we must be equally willing to upend them and spread the imagination of something otherwise. In this short time, we can already see that the only truly certain thing in the pandemic is that nothing will ever be the same again.

3. As nation states prove unwilling and/or incapable of supporting life, our immediate and urgent priority must be to organize mutual aid, solidarity, and care using whatever means necessary.

It truly didn’t take long for the specters of pandemic darwinism and viral malthusianism to surface, finding support in politicians around the world who tell their citizens that they are on their own. If the state and the market economy prove to be unable to provide the diverse forms of care upon which all life depends, we must find ways of providing that care without concern for who owns what or whether it is legal. In this sense, the struggle to defend life in the pandemic will at times necessarily take shape as a direct struggle against the logic of capital, the violence of law, and the abstraction of price. We must learn about our own needs and the needs of those we are capable of caring for, find ways of producing, expropriating, and distributing goods that satisfy the needs of interconnected and interdependent communities, and be willing to simply take what is needed whenever it is denied to us.

4. As capitalism’s market economies fail us in every way, we must dare to imagine ways of organizing social life beyond the logic of price, competition, and profit.

Organizing a society based upon satisfying the needs of all rather than defending the wealth of the few isn’t simply an ideal in the pandemic, but is a practical and popular necessity. As this new common sense continues to proliferate and take hold, we must begin to materially reorganize society on that basis by making sure people get what they need first and worrying about profit never. Any new practices of care that arise will be immediately challenged by the infrastructural and logistical power of digital capitalism, which is already seizing upon the pandemic as a means of wholly conquering and networking what remains of a collapsing global economy. If Amazon, already hiring thousands of new workers to keep up with skyrocketing demand, becomes the means people rely upon to survive the pandemic, then our post-pandemic world will become increasingly indistinguishable from the exploitation, inequality, and precarity that define Amazon’s organizational model. Quite simply, if we fail to break the logic of market-driven supply and demand, of price and profit, it may in the end simply break us.

5. Our networks of care and solidarity necessarily must begin from the specificites and immediacies of the situations we live within, but rapidly must multiply their bonds with diffuse and diverse communities.

No life ever lives truly alone, and no act of individuation or privation can ever alter the fact that every life constitutively depends upon innumerable other lives. As such, truly caring for ourselves and for those with whom we share intimate ties effectively necessitates implementing care for everyone. Over the next months, we should inventively and imaginatively practice social distancing in ways that cultivate and proliferate, not diminish, social solidarity. If we must practically begin by organizing care for those who are already proximate and intimate—for ourselves, our families, friends, neighbors, and loved ones—then part of that effort necessarily implies continuously expanding the organization and coordination of care to whatever scales are required. These inclusive and open modes of care must escape the logic of the state and the market by constituting themselves on the basis of diverse yet common precarities and interdependencies.

6. Caring and acting in solidarity with one another within and beyond the pandemic will necessitate the constitution and defense of new forms of commons.

As we struggle to organize care, capitalism may very well rely upon all of our compassion and solidarity to survive the pandemic before returning at full force and plunging us all into only more intense states of precarity, into more uncaring forms of work, and into deeper and deeper debt. While a great deal depends upon the ways we are able to act in solidarity with one another, practicing kindness and generosity and compassion and courage in equal parts, if those solidarities are not constituted in new kinds of commons that render capitalism and the state effectively obsolete, they will not be able to endure the exigencies of the pandemic nor withstand inevitable measures meant to conquer and capture whatever follows the pandemic. In other words, if our capacity to care for one another fails to be instantiated in qualitatively different forms, they may very well simply be reintegrated into novel expressions of privation, dispossession, and precaritization in whatever new legal and economic systems that may attempt to establish themselves.

7. Caring for one another will equally involve militantly opposing those who intend to further instantiate already-existing forms of domination in the turbulences and uncertainties of the pandemic.

While hospital workers still struggle to get enough protective gear, new footage already circulates of immigration agents outfitted with new breathing masks arresting undocumented migrants. Xenophobias are magnified, welfare programs are marked for cuts, and Palantir signs new contracts with the state to implement facial recognition and cell-phone tracking technologies. We must not underestimate the new cruelties that may arise in these times, preying upon communities that can no longer substantively defend themselves or protest on the streets, much less congregate together. What new kinds of solidarity and struggle might we invent in order to counteract the new intensities, practices, and forms of violence that will surely arise? How might we maintain social distances but nonetheless find ways of acting decisively and concertedly together?

8. The pandemic, as a phenomenon that differentially affects all of the planet at once, must push us all to live our lives definitively beyond the logic of borders and nations.

Health officials have long noted that viruses don’t respect borders. Neither should we. So much of what presently threatens our lives—climate change, financial capital, the coronavirus pandemic—is now expressed at a planetary scale. We have little hope of defending life anywhere if we are unable to act in concert with life everywhere, acknowledging the dignity that is common to all life, on the one hand, and the material inequalities which continue to differently impact the way life is lived, on the other. The violence of the pandemic will be expressed differentially, at different intensities, and in different forms across historically differentiated bodies, and our ways of living and organizing will not only have to account for that but will have to organize on that very basis. Defending life in New York City will mean something different than defending it in Mexico City, or in Ramallah, or in Hong Kong, but these struggles must find ways of resonating and reverberating with one another across borders, continents, and oceans, just as capital and pandemics are able to.

9. Because life in the pandemic is the way it is, life in the pandemic will not stay the way it is.

The pandemic is a world-historical process, leaving nothing on Earth unchanged and acting as a temporal fold between a planetary before and after. While we cannot change what happened before the pandemic, we must nonetheless learn from the past as a means of bringing to life, sustaining, and defending the possibility of different futures. Diverse histories of struggle against various forms of oppression and domination must inform the ways we ourselves continue to struggle, even if new struggles that arise in the pandemic present cannot formally resemble the ways of struggling we’re accustomed to. The past is never settled, and all past events can always come to mean something new in the ways we learn from and draw upon them. In this sense, how might past struggles against sexism, racism, fascism, ableism, and capitalism inform struggles in the pandemic? Resistance is to some degree always a fundamentally speculative endeavor, a collective wager that something may be possible before that possibility has been realized. Now is a time for imagination, invention, and experimentation, leveraging each as a means of producing new kinds of knowledge about our situation and new modes of struggle within it.

10. We must collectively, courageously, and compassionately decide what new ways of living we desire to live in the pandemic and the times that follow, or it will be decided for us.

The ways in which human life is presently threatened on a planetary scale should push us all to consider not only the generic value of life, but also the value of distinct forms of life and ways of living. The worth of life in the abstract does little to help inform the ways we might choose to live our own particular lives, while imagining and dreaming of what kinds of lives may be worth living can clarify everything. The pandemic offers us all an opportunity to engage in a kind of critical aesthetic experience, allowing us to not only see lives as they are, but also to see how lives came to be lived in a particular way, and thus how lives could live otherwise. Taking this opportunity seriously requires nothing less than a total abandonment of everything that governed and organized our lives up to this point. Only then will we be capable of beginning the interminable process of learning to live, think, care, act, love, struggle, and build new lives and ways of living together definitively beyond the logic of the pandemic and the world that preceded it.

The Corona Reboot

Translations: Español (Link) Italiano (Link) Ελληνικά (Link) Português: (Link) Slovak (Link)

A decade from now, historians may very well call the coronavirus pandemic the great deceleration. The bodies that had been endlessly propelled through cities on metros, buses, bicycles, and freeways now sit in self-imposed isolation at home, the international flights that had been relentlessly criss-crossing continents now are increasingly grounded, and the container ships that had been churning steadily back and forth across oceans now drift idly beside coastal ports, buoyed by their lack of cargo. Chinese factories lay serenely still without their workers as if they were relics of a bygone industrial era, while environmentalists post online about the substantial reduction in global carbon dioxide emissions. The relentlessly accelerating velocities of capitalism appear, quite unexpectedly and abruptly, to be grinding, lumbering, and lurching into a languid slumber.

Following from the desertion of offices, factories, universities, restaurants, and other places of work, the historical suspension of the planet’s economy has given us all time for long conversations in living rooms and on phones, for cooking intricate recipes and reading long-forgotten books on shelves, for bringing groceries and medicine to neighbors in need, for playing in baths with children sent home from school, and for watching films that had been put off for years. People sleep, write, cry, dance, play, exercise, have sex, and laugh in the new pause we find ourselves within. The fragility, vulnerability, and interdependency of life come to be more intensely felt and drawn more acutely into focus as the virus spreads, opening the way for new intimacies, solidarities, and creativities. Even when surrounded by crisis and fear, fragile but utopian moments nonetheless find life.

And yet it already appears that, after only a few days of a planetary interlude characterized by an unprecedented deceleration of life on every continent where people have begun questioning the social order that had defined their lives up to this point, immense accelerations have been set into motion in an attempt to socially, economically, and politically compensate for the velocities that had been lost elsewhere. The shutting down of our planet’s systems appears to have already been answered by a system reboot meant to capture the unactualized potentials of so many newly immobilized bodies, to economically put to use the many bodies that have rather unexpectedly found time to experiment with the multiplicity of life’s uses.

If a system reboot, what we might simply call the corona reboot, can be said to be taking place, it is only because power now understands society as being wholly integrated as a vast computer that can be programmed and reprogrammed as needed in response to whatever disruption, contingency, or event. In this sense, the deceleration of so many bodies appears to have opened the way for the cybernetic reorganization and reacceleration of planetary life, where social distancing has justified the implementation of the most intense forms of digitized connectivity and control technically realizable in our present. This text is ultimately an attempt to think through the possibility that the shutting down and subsequent rebooting of the planet presently underway may not in fact be a collection of ad-hoc measures that will fade as the contagion does, but that the coronavirus may come to serve as the catalyst for a new kind of society built upon the forms of digitized subjectivity that are forged within the unique historical circumstances of the pandemic.

At the very minimum, in this moment we must all struggle to understand the rapid transformations of social life, of work, and of politics presently underway not only in the interest of surviving this together and defending our common humanity, but also in hopes of establishing a different kind of society than the one presently imagined by power. If this planetary reboot takes form as a total recalibration of social, economic, and political life in the interest of preserving the continuity of the social, political, and economic order of capitalism, how might we begin to imagine social life differently in this trying moment?

At this early stage, it appears that at least two new kinds of subjectivity have already begun to take shape, both of which are mutually constitutive, intimately dependent upon, and shaped by the informatic infrastructures and apparatuses that now run through and organize much of our planetary society. On the one hand, we have the domesticated/connected subject, who in being confined to their home is pushed to invent new ways to reconnect to and participate in a virtualized economy. On the other hand, we have the mobile/disposable subject that serves as the circulatory system of the pandemic, a subject that becomes increasingly vulnerable and precarious as it is compelled to move at ever greater velocities. In order for domesticated/connected subjects to materially sustain themselves, they must be coupled with the mobile/disposable subject that fulfills the minimum material needs of society while ensuring the social possibility of isolated yet networked domestic life.

The domesticated/connected subject is horrifically cut off from social life in their home yet is intimately plugged into an increasingly networked economy. They are as docile as they are productive, integrated with society but integrated only as separate. Office workers, university professors, programmers, reporters, and cultural workers, among others, are all ordered to stay home, but to stay logged on. Video streaming platforms struggle to handle the new volumes of traffic while raking in profits, and everyone undergoes online training so they can continue to collaborate and work on a domesticated network. The isolation of the home corresponds with its degree of connectivity. The domesticated/connected subject can avoid the risk of being proximate and promiscuous with other possibly-infected bodies by simply connecting to the office meeting on Zoom, streaming culture on Netflix, ordering food on Postmates, venting on Facebook, and purchasing more hand sanitizer on Amazon, while Trump has announced that if you do end up with symptoms of the coronavirus all you must do is visit a site designed by Google to schedule a remote test. As the mobility of bodies becomes restricted to domestic spaces, computer keyboards dance with frenzied kinetic activity in service of slowing the contagion and keeping the economy stumbling along through waves of turbulent market volatility.

Emerging as a refrain to the domesticated/connected subject, the mobile/disposable subject moves at ever greater speeds and at ever greater risk so no one else has to. The interruption of public life is overrun by the feverishly accelerated mobile/disposable subject that is connected and subservient to the same informatic networks that connect domesticated/connected subjects to planetary economies. Commanded by smartphone apps delivering endless streams of pings and alerts that steer them from one gig to the next through nearly vacant streets, migrant workers on electric bikes have never been in higher demand, carrying food boxes from restaurants, bags of groceries from supermarkets, and miscellany from pharmacies, bodegas, and liquor stores to all of the salaried domesticated/connected workers who, now confined at home, create vast deluges of online orders. Amazon truck drivers speed across neighborhoods, always over capacity and behind impossible-to-meet computationally-generated schedules, carrying boxes filled with diapers, batteries, bleach wipes, laptops, and breathing masks. Ambulance drivers are asked to simply never stop driving, while garbage workers haul larger and larger bags of trash filled with larger and larger volumes of domestic refuse. All of these workers are expected to go increasingly fast to keep up with increasing demand, and thus increasingly expose themselves to the contagion and other forms of risk associated with their embodied acceleration. The massive containment and isolation of the domesticated/connected subject has as its twin the mobile/disposable subject that constitutes the system of distribution for a new pandemic economy.

Both the domesticated/connected subjects working from home and the mobile/disposable subjects racing through the streets are ultimately brought together not only by the immense interconnected apparatuses of the digital economy but also by the blanket waves of social abandonment that now affect all life. When bodies of all kinds can be connected as isolated nodes on a network, remaining deeply reliant upon and subject to shifting algorithmic command and demand structures, the value of any single body approaches zero as every node on the network can be algorithmically swapped out and replaced with any other. The cybernetic management and distribution of labor and commodities allows for the economy to draw on the population only as needed, while effectively abandoning the waste that is the remainder. When a domesticated/connected subject gets sick with the coronavirus and can no longer work, the still-healthy occupants of another house are ready to log on and fill their place, just as when a delivery worker breaks their leg after falling off of their bike, another can be pinged and made to run out the door. The emerging economic system doesn’t spare any time thinking of what may happen to all those who for whatever reason cannot manage to stay connected and working in this economy.

The massive deterritorialization of labor spurred on by the pandemic response has allowed for the implementation of a newly flexible organization of work that frees capitalism and the capitalist state of any responsibility for life in general as long as the economy survives. Providing adequate testing for the virus, guaranteeing universal access to healthcare, and ensuring monetary relief to newly impoverished populations are seen as unnecessary as long as everyone remains willing to connect, log on, and answer the relentless call of capitalism’s networks. The management of the population has become synonymous with the management of waste, excess, and trash, and only those who have the ability to accelerate will be sustained and supported by the larger logistical and infrastructural systems of a new post-pandemic cybernetic economy, which in reality is just a more extreme and refined form of the capitalism we had all already been accustomed to living within.

In this moment it is crucial that we insist that the reterritorialization of our society, the corona reboot, that is presently underway is not inevitable nor undefeatable. In the interlude of the pandemic there is an opportunity to refuse the imposition of digitized commands and coercive connections while defending and cultivating different kinds of human relation and interdependency. There is a chance now for all of us to consider how we might restart society differently rather than allow the logic of capital to unthinkingly do it for us. We’ll likely be in these pandemic circumstances for many months, so let’s use this time to disconnect from the pressures, exigencies, and demands of the economy and to reconnect with others in ways that do not conform or submit to the new kinds of acceleration and abandonment that are already being implemented everywhere around us.

The coronavirus pandemic marks the first time in our history that a planetary disruption of this kind and scale has occurred in a networked society such as ours, but that does not mean that we have to let the logic of capitalist networks be what ultimately reorganizes our ways of life. Already, we see mutual aid networks being constituted, new forms of digital labor being subverted, carceral structures being dismantled, and market logics being refused. We must think of this as just a beginning. How freely, wildly, and courageously will we allow ourselves to dream in this moment? What new practices of living and relationalities will we dare to put into practice? How can we overcome the domestic paranoia that sends people sprinting to supermarkets, the fear that keeps us away from neighbors, the depression that follows from reading the news, while also keeping one another safe and caring for one another as the virus spreads? How can we begin to find one another to act compassionately and collectively together in a struggle to arrive on the other side of this pandemic in a world not structured by abandonment, isolation, and acceleration but by the inextinguishable dignity and value of life itself? Each of us must dedicate ourselves to begin not only articulating but living answers to these questions in all of the varied situations we find ourselves living within.

Climate, Capitalism, Control


[ This version is optimized for online viewing. To request an exhibition/screening copy, please contact the artist. ]

“Climate, Capitalism, Control” (2019) is an experimental video essay that aims to diagram the conjunctive power of planetary-scale computation, commodification, and climate change.

Over the duration of the ~30 minute project, a détourned montage of YouTube videos including data visualizations, drone recordings, defense industry promotions, corporate advertisements, news reports, Silicon Valley product demonstrations, protest documentary, and machine learning research is swiped through in order to visually survey the technical, political, and aesthetic dimensions that compose our disastrous present. Voice-over narration is algorithmically performed by the synthetic voices of Google’s WaveNet deep neural network, tensorflow performs live object detection and recognition on the video montage, and a soundtrack is streamed on an Amazon Alexa.

Inspired and informed by diverse revolts, militant research, and contemporary anarchist and communist thought, the project aims to explicate the entangled operations of climate, capitalism, and control as well as to speculatively propose methods of bringing about their eventual undoing.

In addition to its formalization as a video essay, “Climate, Capitalism, Control” is also presented as a standalone text which can be read and/or downloaded as a pdf by clicking here.

Climate, Capitalism, Control

Ian Alan Paul, 2019

[ “Climate, Capitalism, Control” is an experimental video essay produced by Ian Alan Paul in 2019. Below is its script, which can also be downloaded as a printable pdf by clicking here. If you’d like to watch the film, it can be viewed online here. ]

01. Dispersed across the surface of Earth, computer clusters electronically hum in vast air-conditioned rooms. One models sea level rises, precipitation rates, temperature increases, and property values in coastal metropolises over the coming thousand years. Another runs simulations of various military strategies designed to respond to the ensemble of armed insurgencies and mass migrations that are predicted to accompany expanding droughts and crop failures. This cluster runs affect recognition algorithms on videos streamed from malls, schools, bridges, beaches, cafes, prisons, subway cars, and stadiums in order to forecast the spatial distribution of criminal activity in a bustling financial district. That cluster hosts a seemingly endless grid of lush virtual gardens that users digitally water by periodically tapping on their phones while commuting to work. These clusters compete with one another to mine cryptocurrencies while quantitatively speculating in weather derivatives markets. All of this silicon only senses, analyzes, and simulates the planet in order to grow as a more total power over it.

02. All of Earth is mediated by climate, capitalism, and control, three assemblages that have come to be entangled with one another at planetary scales. Climate, as a planetary ontology, decomposes and decodes the way Earth has historically been ordered by political, ecological, cultural, economic, and geological processes. Capitalism, as a planetary economy, captures and subsumes the disintegrating wreckage of climate in planetary markets by speculating about and commodifying it in ever finer spatial and temporal resolutions. Control, as a planetary governmentality, modulates between the deterritorializing forces of climate and the reterritorializing forces of capitalism while cybernetically regulating whatever anomalous hostilities inevitably emerge. Exposed to weather, abstracted by price, and processed as data, all life on Earth is now propelled towards exhaustion, exploitation, and eventual extinction by the conjunctive force of these three planetary assemblages.

03. The planetary mediation of life’s domination is facilitated by a multiplicity of interoperable systems composed of technical, economic, cultural, biological, ecological, and political components that disintegrate and reintegrate the planet as a means of recursively reinstantiating themselves ever more intensely and totally. A relentless deluge of molecular and recombinatorial forces inundate Earth, rendering it ever more programmed, securitized, privatized, surveilled, polluted, networked, militarized, and alienated. Whether in the halls of government, in financial markets, in global logistics systems, or in military war rooms, what already exists has become operationally and strategically superseded by what could possibly be instead. Construction sites and ruins are proliferated in a recurring planetary gesture, remaking all of Earth into a disastrous bricolage of fragile storm shelters, camouflaged military outposts, makeshift tent cities, fortified server farms, mobile border checkpoints, abandoned suburbs, improvised barricades, sprawling concentration camps, luxury compounds, squatted high-rises, radioactive trash dumps, plastic oceans, hyperactive distribution hubs, and flooded subways.

04. Every disastrous cycle that churns through the present is interrupted by the arrival of the next, their frequency accelerating and their momentum accumulating to the degree that it has become difficult to discern the actual from the virtual. Chaotic disorganizations and reorganizations of matter unfold simultaneously over and across one another as everything solid melts into the turbulent storm systems and buzzing drone swarms that gather in the air all around. To be alive today is to live many different times at once, to be saturated by the immense accumulated violence of unresolved pasts and to be swept up within the wild potentialities of innumerable futures that flood the present together. The postmodern, postcolonial, postnational, postdigital, and postindustrial are each fragmentary descriptors of this nonlinear, heterogeneous, and volatile temporality that simultaneously unfolds so imperceptibly that it seems to stretch out to eternity and arrives so suddenly that it threatens to snap each of our necks. Even the angel of history can no longer witness all of the accumulating wreckage, having drowned within the circulating debris that concurrently disassembles and reassembles all around.

05. As the planet is subsumed within the process of its own formal disintegration and dissolution, it is also interminably being reintegrated and refabricated into a billion different versions of the same digital screen: always more expensive, always more surveilled, always more luminous, always more connected, always already more obsolete, disposable, and toxic. Recalculated, rerendered, and refreshed as the smallest and thus most controllable elements of a planetary screen, more and more of Earth is recursively captured and displayed as pixels so that more and more of Earth can be algorithmically acted upon. Planetary power swipes in every direction across the responsive surface of our pixelated reality, dominating and commanding an increasingly programmed present where steady increases in resolution always correspond with steady increases in control. People equipped with arsenals of glossy, networked, and responsive phones, tablets, and watches act as sensors for planetary power, and thus are also tenaciously sensed. Neither microsequences of DNA, nor city-wide protests, nor continental-scale sandstorms escape the relentless scanning of this planetary digital capture.

06. As the assemblages of climate, capitalism, and control become integrated within a singular planetary logic, the planet’s epistemological structures will produce greater and greater volumes of data as a consequence of the planet becoming more and more intimately dominated. In other words, we will come to more totally know Earth as planetary power more totally facilitates its destruction. Networks of planetary sensing technologies capture higher and higher volumes of data about ocean temperatures only in order to protect carbon-emitting global supply chains from threatening storms, while data that tracks planetary deforestation will also be used to recalibrate the distribution of border technologies intended to control the movement of climate refugees. In increasingly high resolution detail, we will be presented with evidence of accelerating extinctions, deepening corruption, collapsing ecosystems, multiplying drownings, sharpening inequalities, and melting ice shelves while financial markets move in tight dances with weather systems and social networks algorithmically parse the latest planetary disasters into a billion personalized, tracked, and monetized feeds.

07. As planetary cultures struggle to digest the catastrophes that arise all around, the aesthetic regimes of ecological nostalgia, of immersive realism, and of universal alienation will each emerge as ways of making those catastrophes sensible. The aesthetics of ecological nostalgia will be concerned with what can still be sensed and experienced, but can only be sensed and experienced as already disappearing and vanishing. The taste of clean water, the sound of a wild untamed forest, the sight of dazzling insect colors, the feeling of a cool summer breeze, and the smell of fresh fruit will all be central to this aesthetic. The sanctity of each species will be sensually coupled with the sublimity of its impending extinction. The aesthetics of immersive realism will aim to mimetically reproduce the most extreme planetary environments for those who remain most sheltered and distant from them. Business executives at self-actualization summits will strap on headsets so they can virtually stand on tropical beaches as the latest record-breaking hurricanes make landfall, while families on vacation at militarized resorts will pay to pilot recreated migrant boats across holographic Mediterranean waters. The experience of the immersive realist aesthetic will principally be cathartic, but nonetheless it will be marketed and advertised as authentic, ethical, participatory documentary. The aesthetics of universal alienation will abandon the frame of the planet altogether as it gestures instead towards the referenceless void of deep interstellar space. Zero gravity sex, vacuum-packed meals, starless skies, seamless space suits, and sterile sleeping pods will each symbolize a liberation from planetary constraints, and those who can afford it will pay exorbitant amounts to ride in privatized rockets where all earthly references, relationships, and responsibilities fleetingly evaporate in the surrounding vacuum until gravity violently drags them back into the atmosphere. Our planetary catastrophe will only be outpaced by its manifold aestheticization.

08. Climate, capitalism, and control are located nowhere in particular because they are differentially expressed everywhere at once. A car, an ocean, a battlefield, a city, an economy, a forest, a university, a refrigerator, a living room, an atmosphere, a factory, and a body are all equally subsumed within the abstract flatness of a digital universality and interoperability as Earth itself comes to serve as the material substrate for, as well as the object of, programming. Adversarial geoengineering, additive manufacturing, atmospheric modeling, and artificial intelligence multiply in every direction as the means of production become indistinguishable from the means of control, while life finds itself reproducing and being reproduced by innumerable orders of personal and planetary cybernetic processes. The movement of commodities, the management of populations, the maneuvers of security forces, the measurement of global temperatures, and the modulation of affects are all processed within networked media technologies that unify all things, but unify them only in vast reservoirs of atomized data points. This discrete unification of Earth ultimately has the effect of neutralizing it, as the force of life is computationally curtailed to its dividuated circulation within the digitized circuits of planetary apparatuses. As a consequence of this networked mediation, the totalization of power is only matched by a corresponding totalization of human alienation and technical isolation.

09. The planetary assemblages of climate, capitalism, and control shape and command the present to the extent that they are able to conjunctively mediate it. Torrential storms, televised spectacles, armed conflicts, package deliveries, police patrols, traffic backups, grocery purchases, intimate conversations, academic research, casual sex, and art markets are all captured, analyzed, and acted upon by networked systems that do not differentiate between planetary and personal scales. The macro-logistics of global supply chains are technically and infrastructurally indistinguishable from the micro-logistics of everyday life, and across every node of the planet’s networks maximum circulation coincides with maximum control. The same kinds of algorithms that digitally capture biometric identifiers from social media photos also help predator drones locate targets on the landscapes they survey below, just as the same kinds of systems that store data about consumer behavior also store data about prison populations and extinction rates. The mediated domination of the present is equally plotted on scientists’ charts, aggregated by data brokers, speculated about in financial markets, streamed on digital platforms, encrypted in surveillance databases, and simulated for high-budget video games.

10. Power is no longer oriented towards establishing rigid orders over this or that territory, but instead is only concerned with proliferating, intensifying, steering, and contouring greater and greater degrees of planetary disorder. In every instance, indecision and indeterminacy are cultivated as a means of cultivating permanent crises where exceptional measures are made to be permissible in perpetuity. A hurricane makes way for a complex choreography of police raids, refinery construction, and market speculation, while persistent flooding provides the context for forced evacuations, mass demolitions, and infrastructure privatization. The automation of the workforce takes place alongside the automation of warfare, generating unrelenting economic disruptions and diffuse yet persistent offensive operations, while expanding crises only expand the territory upon which power desires to act. Every enduring state of being comes to be overwhelmed by programmed processes of perpetual becoming as the order of things gives way to a growing plurality of planetary disordering and ordering processes. All that was fixed comes to circulate in the regulated and calibrated turbulences of transcontinental flows.

11. The forces of climate, capitalism, and control disperse, disintegrate, and dissolve stable territories into multiplicities of imbricated molecular confrontations that unfold at multidimensional scales and speeds. Violence that was enacted extensively across the delineated interiors and exteriors of bordered space has taken on new form as intensive violence that is topologically and differentially expressed across all of the planet at once. A devastating heat wave, a mutating cyberweapon, a cascade of drone strikes, an overwhelming flood, a contagious financial crisis, and a debilitating power outage all wash over any attempt to contain or curtail them. Borders that were once rigid and fixed become mobile and modular. The entanglement of climate, capitalism, and control has unified the expression of violence at a planetary scale, intensively saturating all of Earth. The theater of war and the agora of politics have been blown away by the atmospheric pressure of a billion hybrid conflicts. Cause and effect, here and there, possibility and potentiality, and yesterday and tomorrow all decompose and bleed together.

12. The manifold violence of planetary power is expressed everywhere always differentially. Legacies of capitalist accumulation, colonial expansion, and sovereign domination all steer, filter, and technically rearticulate sexualized and racialized inheritances and hierarchies in arrays of cybernetic apparatuses that recursively command the intensive present. The mass incarceration of black populations in panoptic prison architectures is infrastructurally reinstantiated as dispersed networks of ankle monitors that stream location data and audio to police databases. Counterinsurgency operations, counterterrorism interventions, and countermigration measures are potentially expressed anywhere at any time yet inevitably are enacted across a dynamic series of algorithmically shifting somewheres. Queers are surveilled, outed, and entrapped on state-infiltrated hookup sites, while women have their fertility monitored and monetized on menstrual cycle tracking apps. Toxic mines multiply in impoverished areas so solar panels and microprocessors composed of rare earth metals can be shipped to wealthy ones, and only exclusive beach resorts are repaired after devastating hurricanes pass over colonized islands. Entire regions are rendered uninhabitable by unprecedented droughts, while otherwise uninhabitable regions have profuse water resources channeled towards them. In all of these ways and many more, the planetary expression of power in the present is entirely continuous with past historical violence, a molar inheritance made increasingly molecular.

13. Climate, capitalism, and control all contribute to a generalized intensification of Earth, energetically accelerating carbon, commodities, and communication as the entire planet literally heats up. The pulses of light that stream between server farms on fiber optic cables, the GPS signals used to track the movement of shipping containers between continents, and the beams of sunlight radiating through an increasingly carbon-dense atmosphere are all luminous lines in an increasingly catastrophic planetary poem. Autonomous electric cars will reroute trips around flooded highways while filtering carcinogenic particulates from the air and playing cli-fi audiobooks for their passengers. Smart speakers will answer questions about record heat waves as digital home security systems send data to police forces during regular episodes of social unrest and political revolt. The drifting smoke from enormous wildfires will send people sprinting to 3D printers to reassemble spools of toxic plastic into disposable breathing masks. As photos of climate refugees detained in concentration camps circulate and go viral, users will be prompted to tag each distressed face and verify the image’s location. As protesters are bluntly beaten with police batons and densely coated in pepper spray outside of environmental policy summits, they will be pinged with reminders to update their status so their networks can click and comment upon their situation. As police drones patrol above flooded neighborhoods in search of looters while streaming crisp HD footage framed with colorful ads, online audiences will be asked if they’d like to post the algorithmically suggested comment “So Sad! #ClimateChangeIsReal” in the video’s group chat. This profound alienation, which is at once technical, economic, cultural, political, and ecological, both produces and pacifies the cybernetic subjects of the disastrous present.

14. As molecular forces more energetically ripple across and through Earth, the planet will come to overflow with innumerable derivative fantasies of what it must become instead. Nation states will oscillate between ever more extreme parliamentary expressions of the Left and Right, generating an endless call and response of increasingly intense rhetoric while climate, capitalism, and control only intensify one another. Whether these fantasies take on the form of a militant ethnonationalism, cybernetic socialism, fatalist accelerationism, technocratic managerialism, suicidal fascism, or green authoritarianism, the instantiation and enactment of planetary power in the present, and of the scale and intensity of violence that making planetary life conform to planetary power necessarily entails, will only ever culminate in a planet made totally uninhabitable. Ultimately, the question upon which the possibility of living itself depends is: How can life grow not as a power, but as a growing cancellation of it?

15. We live in a historical moment when the domination of life has become irrevocably coupled with the destruction of all of the social, economic, technical, and ecological conditions that make life possible. As a consequence, living a pacified and neutralized life in the present disaster, a life that is lived only as a sum of its digitized predicates and the operations of power enacted upon them, will mean committing to dying along with the planet. In contrast, the forms of life that in some way exceed the present, the lives that arise from within the waves and folds of present forces but nonetheless imminently contain the forceful possibility of the present’s negation, the lives that are born within and against the present, may be the only remaining possibility of a future Earth with any life at all. Perhaps the only virtue of our disastrous present is that there are no political programs, parties, or platforms that offer even a modicum of hope. In their absence, however, remain the ineradicable possibilities negatively afforded by collective acts of refusal. A repertoire composed of blockades, glitches, cuts, disruptions, leaks, riots, hacks, strikes, slowdowns, and sabotage can each in their own way help disconnect life from the planetary violence of climate, capitalism, and control. Perhaps more urgently, this negative repertoire can also generate opportunities to find one another, to concentrate and gather together, to care for and cultivate something beyond the reach of planetary power, and to produce places to live, speculate, dream, love, and conspire, places from which counterattack becomes possible.

16. Life must become attractively drawn towards destroying the infrastructures that dominate the planet and planetary life just as it is towards constructing, defending, and proliferating the infrastructures that cultivate the otherwise of a planet and planetary life beyond domination. An internet outage has more potential to spoil a political summit than a thousand of the most militant rioters do, while blocking highways and thoroughfares or setting up an encampment in the heart of a metropolis can slow an economy just as it creates an urban commons that isn’t dependent upon the circulations of planetary power. A sabotaged construction project can produce space for a garden, and a computer virus can give everyone a day off from work. Being on the side of life entails actively undoing the many ways in which death now accumulates and gathers all around. Whether in the form of borders, prisons, banks, camps, factories, mines, or distribution warehouses, this will require not only attacking the ways death is concentrated in architectural forms but, more importantly, the ways death circulates on highways and railways, across seas, underground, and through the air, and within and between data centers. The more we research and become familiar with the technologies, processes, and flows of planetary power, the more effective our strikes will be. In almost every instance, blocking infrastructure clears the way. Every channel and flow can be a potential target, every disruption both a wound for power and an opening for life.

17. Social networks, search engines, and digital platforms of almost every kind are above all else algorithmic techniques of governing thought, affect, and social relations, and thus of governing life itself. As such, the most liberating and dangerous potential of revolt is unquestionably that it can produce times and spaces for practices of thinking, experiencing, and relating which aren’t already captured by planetary power in advance of their enactment. Thinking with others outside of the algorithmic domination of thought, sharing experiences which do not circulate within and are not reliant upon the connectivity of social networks, and strengthening relationships which are imperceptible to, and incompatible with, cybernetic power are all urgently necessary tasks. Living a militant life entails destituting whatever power dominates life on Earth just as it entails living a life with others as part of a planetary otherwise that refuses the procedures, processing, and programming of planetary power.

18. If life is to act as a growing negation of the planetary power conjunctively produced by climate, capitalism, and control, it will have to continue to collectively experiment with new forms of solidarity, refusal, kinship, compassion, militancy, care, and thought, practices which will then have to be cultivated and materially instantiated in a growing constellation of liberated zones, infrastructures, ecosystems, hideouts, commons, and refuges. Those fleeing the intensities of planetary violence must be embraced and fought alongside with. Learning how to salvage will be just as essential as learning how to farm. Fending off capture will entail communizing everything, and the autonomy of creativity will find an accomplice in the potency of refusal. The circulatory flows of planetary power have to be swept away by incommensurable circulations of a qualitatively different kind.

19. Centuries of power’s consolidation have brought us to a point where the mediated process of totally alienating us from ourselves, from each other, and from the planet is nearly complete. It is here, at the stage of near total separation and dividuation, that the possibility of a planetary otherwise nonetheless persists. As the planetary entanglement of climate, capitalism, and control threatens to suffocate not only the possibility of life’s flourishing but of life itself, the violent intensity of the planetary situation will give rise to increasingly militant and desperate forms of revolt. Those revolts will only have a chance to persist, endure, and grow in strength if they manage to resonate and reverberate ever more widely and intensely with one another, just as they must manage to assist one another in escaping and eluding the always encroaching capture and control of planetary power. Life itself will come to depend upon fostering, nurturing, defending, and tending to all of the intimate bonds formed across social difference and geographic distance that constitute an adversarial otherwise to all of the disastrous present.

20. The planet must become a planet where many different planets can flourish beyond the regulation of planetary power, where life persists as radically multiple, heterogeneous, and indeterminate, and thus persists to some degree as ungovernable. The question of revolt is principally a formal question, and those who are already most impacted by the forces of climate, capitalism, and control, those who have been ecologically expelled, economically dispossessed, and algorithmically commanded, will also be those who can most intimately give form to the collective project of dismantling and destroying planetary power. Migrant caravans, refugee squats, smuggling networks, pipeline saboteurs, rescue vessels, indigenous blockades, safe houses, anarchist hackers, militant flotillas, tree sitters, and maroon encampments must be understood as historical actualizations of a planetary ungovernable potential, as expanding reservoirs of militant solidarity, of loving insurgency, and ultimately of a future unlike the present.

21. Just as power is no longer concentrated in palaces or parliaments but instead is technically distributed in diffuse networks and architectures of mediation, so too does resistance and revolt become immanent to, and thus possible within, every avenue, channel, intersection, junction, and flow. Distribution warehouse workers sabotaging automated sorting equipment, sex workers striking against corporate and state surveillance, delivery drivers blockading highways, informal encampments defending themselves against state eviction, undocumented migrants occupying airport terminals, the coordinated looting of supplies following climate catastrophe, the hacking and erasure of biometric databases and financial records, and the cutting of fiber optic cables between border fences and data centers can each become cacophonous notes in the discordant harmonies of a planetary revolt.

22. As the possibility of life on Earth is more forcefully called into question, life will more forcefully be called to revolt in ways that offer not the promise but the possibility of canceling the ongoing planetary cancellation of life. The accelerating intensification of climate, capitalism, and control has made the question of our collective survival indistinguishable from the question of our finding, assisting, and militantly acting with one another as a planetary destituent force that can bring ruin to planetary power and decisively leave nothing in its place. In the creases between Earth and its computation, between life and its coded predicates, between collective fugitivity and algorithmic domination, life must become totally ungovernable to be able to grasp the possibility of annihilating what presently threatens to annihilate everything.

[ In addition to circulating as a text, “Climate, Capitalism, Control” is also formally expressed as an experimental video essay which can be downloaded and viewed online by clicking here. ]

BDS Statement for the Haifa Museum of Art

Dear Curators at the Haifa Museum of Art,

In response to your inquiry about the possibility of exhibiting my artwork at your museum, I must refuse due to my commitment to the cultural boycott of Israeli institutions and solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for freedom and dignity. As part of the global Boycott, Sanctions, and Divestment (BDS) Movement organized and called for by Palestinians, the cultural boycott is intended to exert pressure on the Israeli state and its affiliated institutions until it ends its military occupation of Palestine, ceases to impose apartheid policies, and promotes the Palestinian right of return.

When I was teaching at a Palestinian university and living in the West Bank in 2016-17, I personally encountered and witnessed the oppressions and controls that my students were regularly subjected to and forced to endure, intimately affecting every aspect of their lives. The diverse forms of state-organized violence that were routinely enacted against the student body, including but not limited to invasive checkpoint searches, arbitrary road closures, military raids of the campus, soldiers’ attacks on student demonstrations using tear gas and other potentially lethal projectiles, and the pervasive use of indefinite administrative detention were not the exception, but rather defined the norms of university life. The prospect of exhibiting my work in Haifa, a place where the large majority of my former students would be prevented from attending due to the unjust and discriminatory restrictions placed on Palestinians’ freedom of movement, is clearly unacceptable and plainly unjustifiable in this context.

While the cultural boycott stakes out a position of withdrawal and refusal, I find it important to note that it is also purposefully undertaken as a creative gesture intended to cultivate what Eyal Weizman has called “co-resistance.” In this case as well as in others, refusal is not exercised solely as a negative measure but also aspires to produce novel political and cultural communities across borders as a direct consequence of refusal and the practice of solidarity more generally. In this sense, I am also committed to the cultural boycott in hopes of participating in the formation of global alliances of artists, activists, and scholars that are committed to the unconditional struggle against racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and all forms of oppression wherever and whenever they arise. It is my closely-held belief that in order to possibly overcome the manifold injustices of the present we must all persistently remain willing to engage in dignified refusals, imaginative solidarities, and diverse struggles, a collective political project that ultimately aims to make freedom and dignity more possible for all.

I sincerely hope that one day we will find ourselves in a time and place where it will become possible to collaborate with one another and show my work in Haifa, a time and place where Palestinians are no longer subjected to unjust treatment, military occupation, and apartheid and where other kinds of worlds can find expression and life.

       Best,

             Dr. Ian Alan Paul

October, 2018

The Dis/Appeared

[ This version is optimized for online viewing. To request an exhibition/screening copy, please contact the artist. ]

“The Dis/Appeared: 25 Notes on Colonial Regimes of Perception” (2018) is an experimental video essay that examines the totalizing imposition of colonial perception in contemporary Palestine. The project theorizes the Israeli state’s establishment of perceptual regimes that confine the colonized to the liminal thresholds of view, never allowing Palestinians to entirely appear or disappear but instead perpetually rendering them dis/appeared.

Through narration and a montage of images that are at once ordinary and unsettling, the video essay gives an account of settler-colonial instantiations of power while also proposing a tactical repertoire to be taken up against colonial rule. The project was produced over the course of 2017 while the artist was living and teaching in the West Bank of Palestine, and is the first part of a series of films, installations, and texts that examine the conjuncture of coloniality, governmentality, and memory in global contexts.

The film’s script can be downloaded as a pdf here.

Negative Monument


Full Color Offset Poster (18″ x 24″)

 

“Negative Monument” (2018) is an open invitation to engage in the participatory yet imperceptible negation of a monument. As a speculative proposal, practical intervention, and anti-monumental gesture, the work aims to unsettle the privileging of publicity over clandestinity, preservation over defacement, and consensus over dissensus that have structured contemporary debates concerning the role of monuments in political and everyday life. When installed in a space, visitors are invited to take a copy of “Negative Monument” to disassemble, disseminate, and disperse the work into a range of unanticipated contexts.

 

 

“Negative Monument” is inspired and informed by recent examples of anti-monumental practices such as the widespread toppling of dictators’ statues during the Arab Spring, the defacement of fascist monuments throughout Spain, and the tearing down of confederate monuments in the United States. Additionally, the work draws upon the notion of destituent power and insurrectionary thought more generally, traditions that are interested in vacating and abolishing power while opposing its reconstitution or reinstantiation.

 

No We Can’t

No We Can’t
Ian Alan Paul, 2018

While “Yes We Can” fueled a particular historical sequence, unquestionably it is “No We Can’t” that is more explosive today.

As landscapes turn to tinder and melting ice sends sea levels rising, as police departments arm themselves to the teeth and states organize to wage war upon the same people they claim to represent and govern, as ethno-nationalists and politicians share cocktails and trade policy notes, and as more and more of life is made to be illegal, indebted, and ultimately disposable, calls to get involved in the political system, to organize and agitate for this or that reform, or to simply preserve a modicum of hope for a less brutal tomorrow increasingly come to be answered with the austere clarity of “No We Can’t.”

The collective turn towards “No We Can’t” is not apolitical, but rather is an orientation that is directed beyond politics as they are normatively circumscribed. Within the feverish enthusiasm of “Yes We Can,” political forms of belonging and practices of living were entirely recuperated into positive identifications with parties, politicians, and platforms. In contrast, the negative collectivities of “No We Can’t” aggregate together not because they identify with anything in common, but only as a consequence of their shared opposition to the entirety of the present.

The attraction of “No We Can’t” is felt whenever things begin to boil over, wherever constraints strangle and asphyxiate too tightly, and in whoever simply can’t stomach any more. “No We Can’t” is cultivated in the joyous wildness of a riot, the irresistible contagiousness of a wildcat strike, the liberating relief of desertion, the militant romance of a blockade, and the clandestine pleasure of sabotage.

“No We Can’t” is not the opposite of “Yes We Can,” nor can the former be reduced to the absence of the latter. Rather, “No We Can’t” is the sum of “Yes We Can” and its cancellation. It is all of the potential, hope, and idealism of “Yes We Can” and its failure, negation, and extinguished actualization. “No We Can’t” will always contain more than “Yes We Can” simply because “No We Can’t” is born into a world where “Yes We Can” has already been defeated and exhausted of possibility.

“No We Can’t” emerges in relation to a neoliberal democratic order that has fully entered into the process of its own formal disintegration, crumbling within the turbulence of capital’s global intensification while fully embracing and becoming one with its own descent. Whatever meager welfare that had been sheltered is now defunded, slashed, and pilfered at every opportunity, corruption festers at all levels of the state and transnational corporate economy, entire territories are turned into deserts or become inundated with ever more powerful storms, autonomous military drones fill the skies and the whole of the Earth’s surface is made into a potential target for bombing, and the machine-sharpened blades of freshly laid razor wire at migrant concentration camps in the desert slice through the skin of whatever modest allocation had been reserved for human dignity. Ours is a world that has grown fascinated with and drawn towards its own death, and as a result to refuse death today is also to refuse the world.

“No We Can’t” looks towards the persistently renewed promises of salvation and the increasingly severe threats of authority and calls both of their bluffs. It declares that whatever follows from mass collective refusal could be no worse than the catastrophe that is already the everyday, and stakes out a position not based on the claim that “Another World is Possible” but on the increasingly apparent fact that our world cannot be allowed to remain possible for any longer. “No We Can’t” is not afraid of ruins in a world that already so enthusiastically proliferates them.

“No We Can’t” adopts ungovernability as the point of departure for all political life. Revolt is taken up as the foundation for a fundamentally negative form of praxis that aims to unmake the world as it has been made, to disorder the entire order of the world, to unravel the present that presently is engaged in a calculated and measured process of existential, social, and planetary dispossession.

“No We Can’t” is destituent power put into practice, aiming not to take, but to abolish power. It conspires to make all of the world inefficient and unproductive, simply because what is efficient and productive in a world bent towards destroying itself only more efficiently and productively facilitates that destruction. “No We Can’t” makes things useless and inoperative so other uses and operations can possibly be invented and put into practice. An encamped roundabout in Cairo creates space for an outdoor cinema, just as a student walkout in Mexico City creates time for a dance party.

“No We Can’t” inherits all of what remains unresolved and unfinished from past revolts, and the force of “No We Can’t” in the present depends upon its ability to adequately answer the infinite and indeterminate call and cry of that involuntary and unruly inheritance. The collective refusal of work, of the regimentation of time, of the built organization of space, of sovereignty and the state, of religion, of gender constraints, of capital and the economy, of patriarchy, of identity, of extractivism and ecological devastation, of empire, and of coloniality have all contributed to the ever growing repertoires and oeuvres of “No We Can’t.”

“No We Can’t” is necessarily a collective project because of one obvious fact: individual refusal, escape, subversion, disobedience, and withdrawal have all already been accounted for and defused in advance. Power, after all, is flexible, attentive, and responsive. It bends before it breaks. Power listens and lets you vent. It watches and lets you act out. Only after you’ve exhausted yourself does power again fully exert itself, only now all the more intricately and intimately after having come to know you better. “No We Can’t” is necessarily a collective project because power must be destroyed and destituted all at once or not at all. Its grip must be entirely broken or it will continue to discover new ways to hold on.

“No We Can’t” has no appetite, hunger, or taste for the ideals, dreams, and desires of this world. There is no future and no utopia waiting for “No We Can’t,” and as long as there is no justice to be found there will be no peace either. “No We Can’t” offers no escape. It makes no demands and no requests, and instead just takes whatever is needed. It declares that there is no consent of the governed, that no means no, and that no is final.

“No We Can’t” can be translated to “No Pasarán,” “Ni Dieu, Ni Maître,” “لا للتحرش,” “Diguem No,” or simply “No!” which has the advantage of being understood in many different dialects and languages.

“No We Can’t,” of course, is also a form of survival. “No We Can’t” creates pause, breaks routine, and lets you catch your breath. It is a means of interrupting whatever interrupts our ability to respond to and care for one another, a means of nurturing sensibilities and sensitivities that exceed neoliberal common sense, and a means of starving the systems and structures that so often threaten to devour our relationships and ourselves whole. “No We Can’t” is an uncompromising defense of life that is otherwise persistently compromised by the indifferent rationalities and merciless cruelties that now give order to and organize our world.

“No We Can’t” is boredom and disinterest in the attention economy, congestion and friction in the logistics of global capital, and default and insolvency in neoliberal finance. It is a blocked freeway in Oakland, a burning limousine in Washington D.C., BDS in Jerusalem, the ZAD in Notre-Dame-des-Landes, Stonewall in New York, a camp at Standing Rock, a night march in Ferguson, a feminist strike in Barcelona, and an occupied airport terminal in Seattle. It is monkey wrenched pipelines, hacked databases, cut border fences, obstructed ports, antifa, and the black bloc. The coalition of “No We Can’t” is founded on an intimacy that arises not from any common affirmation or affiliation, but from the shared experience of attempting to abolish what subjugates you in common.

The dream of the general strike is “No We Can’t” dreamt in its most total form.

As social media billionaires spend their days trying to connect the world to their platforms, “No We Can’t” severs the fiber optic line. As I.C.E. agents grab parents picking their children up from school, “No We Can’t” surrounds their trucks. As fascists in polo shirts preach the virtues of the white race for television cameras, “No We Can’t” throws a punch. “No We Can’t” is a burning tire on the highway, a torn down monument in a park, and a tear gas canister being thrown back over lines of riot police.

To the world it refuses, “No We Can’t” clamors: No we can’t be reasoned with. No we can’t be sensible. No we can’t be patient. No we can’t stay out of it. No we can’t move along. No we can’t be civil. No we can’t be controlled. No we can’t be negotiated with. No we can’t be pacified. No we can’t be bought. No we can’t calm down. No we can’t get out of the way. No we can’t return to business as usual. No we can’t let this go on any longer.

No we can’t.

_________________________________________________________
“No We Can’t” is excerpted from the preface of the forthcoming
“No: Destituent Power and the Practice of Refusal”

La Orilla Infinita

La Orilla Infinita (The Infinite Shore)” (2018) is a photo essay that explores the entanglement of three histories on the Canary Islands brought together by the surrounding sea: The Spanish colonization and genocide of the indigenous communities in the 15th century, the fascist coup that was initiated from the islands in 1936 while Francisco Franco was stationed there, and the mass arrival and drowning of migrants coming from West Africa in the present.

Through the use of a formal approach that draws upon the history of tourist photography, travel slideshows, and experimental documentary, these three historical conjunctures are approached as being expressive of three distinct yet interconnected regimes of power (colonial, fascist, & neoliberal) that were/are accompanied by three forms of revolt (indigenous, anarchist/communist/republican, & undocumented).

The Dis/Appeared (Script)

The Dis/Appeared: Twenty-Five Notes on Colonial Regimes of Perception
Ian Alan Paul, 2018

[“The Dis/Appeared” is an experimental video essay produced by Ian Alan Paul in 2018. Below is its script, which
can also be downloaded as a printable pdf here. If you’d like to watch the film, it can be found online here.]

 

01. To appear is to come into view. For anyone to possibly appear at all, they require a view into which they can arrive.

Views are visual territories, perspectives that are actualized from fields of possible vision, optical enclosures into which things appear and from which things disappear. Views render particular aspects of the world visual, and visuality is simply another word for the accumulated aggregate of many distinct views. Views can have their edges refashioned, their focus shifted, their sensitivities calibrated, their positions translated, and their ranges adjusted. These are among the many different thresholds that constitute the limits of any particular view, the spectral boundaries that trace the phenomenological, ontological, and political distance between appearance and disappearance.

02. When someone is appearing or disappearing they aren’t entirely in or out of view, but rather are passing through one of a view’s many thresholds.

At the seamless precipices of visuality, the perceptible and imperceptible bleed together. Within the thresholds that constitute the perceptual, spectral, and optical limits of view, things only exist in states of lucid undecidability. To be in the thresholds of view is to have definition yet escape resolution, to be blindingly bright and swallowingly dim, to be in the infinite passage between definitive states and as a result to be definitively stateless. To be in the thresholds is to find oneself on the liminal battlefields of perspective and perception, to be caught along the phantom shorelines between totalizing recognition and vanishing invisibility, to inhabit the indeterminate discord between figure and ground. Life in the thresholds is simultaneously in and out of view, seen and unseen, noticed and overlooked, recorded in the finest detail and yet absolutely indiscernible from its surroundings.

03. Colonial power weaponizes the thresholds of view in order to police, control, and manage the lives of the colonized.

The view of the colony produces visual territories, boundaried zones of perception that delimit ranges of possible appearance and disappearance. The colony’s territorialization of visuality inaugurates a colonial regime of perception where practices of perceiving become subjected to colonial rule. While sovereign power is predicated upon the view’s capacity to establish and subsequently police the limits of appearance and disappearance, the consequential innovation of colonial power is its weaponization of the view’s thresholds. The birth of the colony, the historical elaboration of sovereignty’s expansion, relied upon its capacity to arrest bodies within the expansive thresholds of the colonial view, superposing bodies as concurrently present and absent, existent and null, perceptible and imperceptible, apprehended in and out of view.

04. Captured within the thresholds of the colonial view, Palestinians find themselves indefinitely suspended within the carceral liminalities of forced dis/appearances.

Never entirely in or out of view but perpetually detained in the spectral thresholds between the two, Palestinians are made to be both apparent and transparent, signal and noise, conspicuous and concealed, evident and obscure, appeared and disappeared. Because Palestinians cannot decidedly and finally appear within view, Palestine can be perceived as a pristine landscape, a blank slate, an untouched surface, entirely vacant of Palestinians and inviting of ever-expanding Israeli settlements and colonization. Because Palestinians cannot decidedly and finally disappear from view, they remain perpetually available for increasing intensities of Israeli oversight, management, surveillance, policing, and control. If Palestinians manage to escape from the thresholds of Israel’s colonial regime of perception, the subsequent recognizability or clandestinity, transparency or secrecy, are all perceived by Israel as pure hostility.

05. Refused both publicity and privacy, visibility and obscurity, Palestinians are only apprehended in the terms of their simultaneous fugitivity and invasivity.

To escape from view as a Palestinian is to be viewed as a fugitive threat. The proliferous destruction of civilian architecture in Gaza is preemptively and retroactively justified with claims that enemy combatants and weapon caches are being hidden inside of them, every bomb destroying the conditions for life and the conditions of concealment with the blinding exposure of its blast. Inversely, to enter into view as a Palestinian is to be viewed as an invasive enemy. In the West Bank, Palestinian demonstrations filled with cameras, banners, portraits of martyrs, and flags are made to vanish within toxic obfuscating clouds of tear gas. Attempting an escape from the view of Israel is to be marked as a hostis and fugitive in need of surveillance, capture, and elimination, while entering into Israel’s view is to be marked as an invader and as an infiltrator in need of exclusion, eviction, and expulsion.

06. On Israel’s colonial horizons of visuality, every appearance and disappearance is paired, coupled, and superposed with its inverse.

Israel makes use of a diverse repertoire of techniques to dis/appear Palestinians in the thresholds of view in order to maintain their colonial spectrality. In the middle of the night, an Israeli soldier arrives at a Palestinian home with an order demanding that someone inside appear in front of an Israeli judge, the first step towards their eventual disappearance in indefinite administrative detention. A drone circles overhead while recording, encrypting, and transmitting its aerial view to a nearby operations center, and then deploys a missile to erase what it has just observed. Along the separation wall in Bethlehem, in refugee camps outside of Ramallah, at checkpoints at the edges of Jerusalem, and beside army outposts across the West Bank, a watchtower is also a sniper’s perch. Israel often accomplishes its aims by taking aim, and the shot of the surveillance camera is always interchangeable with the shot of the rifle.

07. Dis/Appeared by Israel’s colonial regime of perception, Palestinians are fundamentally dispossessed of their own spectacular relations.

In an important sense, to be colonized is to exist only on the perceptual horizons of the colony, to become dis/appeared as a body phantasmatically suspended between the heavens and earth. This perceptual superposing of appearance and disappearance is a colonial technique of power that scrutinizes, surveys, and examines as it conceals, dissimulates, and obscures. Assemblages of visual technologies cultivate and impose the colonial view, subjecting Palestinians to the spectral in-between of the thresholds, refusing them any place of their own in the spectacular relations of the colony while denying them any definite flight from it. The enclosure of the colony’s interior and the ceaseless assault on its exterior means that the colonial partition impinges upon all life everywhere. Palestinians are entirely captured from within the surround of Israel’s colonial regime of perception.

08. As a consequence of Israel’s colonial regime of perception, Palestine ultimately never appears within or disappears from view; Palestine is the threshold.

Satellite imagery is used to map the Palestinian landscape in sophisticated detail, and then Israel lowers the imagery’s resolution so Palestinian bodies cannot be differentiated from the surrounding geography, digitally vanishing an entire people within the abstracting space of the pixel. Proliferous checkpoints appear across the landscape in permanent and makeshift installations in order to disappear Palestinians in interrogation rooms. Israel cuts the electricity to Gaza, shrouding the entire territory in a thick blanket of darkness, and then deploys brightly burning aerial flares over entire neighborhoods when illumination is needed for periodic military incursions. The thresholds of Israel’s colonial view expand to encompass all of Palestine, immersing it entirely within the turbulent depths of an indefinite perceptual indeterminacy.

09. As a means of surviving Israel’s colonial violence, Palestinians learn how to improvise their lives within the liminal spaces of the colonial view’s thresholds.

In the spectral landscapes of Palestine, survival depends upon an ability to differentially appear and disappear in diverse and shifting contexts. Any failure to follow the densely policed choreography of the colony’s spectacular relations is met with unrestrained and unaccountable violence, and to endure means to remain endlessly flexible, agile, and responsive to the always shifting thresholds of the colonial view. Over the course of any given day, Palestinian survival depends on being able to adapt without notice as a shifting constellation of Israeli checkpoints, patrols, and raids blink in and out of existence across Palestine, a feat which is as indispensable as it is impossible. To appear or disappear too fully in any context is to risk being subjected to the abundant violence of colonial forces that expectantly lay in wait.

10. As the colony’s repertoire of visual operations extensively and intensively multiply, Palestinians’ views also come to be affectively colonized.

Within an inverted panopticon, Palestinians are haunted not only by their dis/appearance but also by the possibility of Israeli soldiers forcefully appearing within view. As part of a strategy that the Israeli military refers to as “making their presence felt,” specialized units raid groups of homes in the dark of night in order to photograph their inhabitants and sketch architectural layouts, projecting the violence of colonization onto Palestinian perception. These incursions intimately, unpredictably, and repeatedly enact a form of spectacular and sensual violence, leaving behind affective residua that haunt Palestinian vision with the always potential reappearance of Israeli soldiers. Unable to view the lands from which they were displaced, refused a view of anything other than the colonizers, the perceptions of the colonized are, in turn, colonized.

11. Colonial regimes of perception territorialize vision, producing stages for the militarized choreography of organized viewing and organized violence.

In occupied Palestine, Israel establishes visual territories in order to prepare them for the enactment of diverse combinations of actions, formations, deployments, maneuvers, exercises, operations, and campaigns. Visual territories, most prominent among them the theater of war and the agora of politics, are the products of organized acts of viewing that parse and delimit the world into views and their accompanying thresholds. Both actual and virtual, the power that is established within any particular visual territory emerges as a result of its perceptual singularity, its totalizing enclosure bound on all sides by an infinite proscenium that must be defended and reproduced, and so the colony must not only continuously territorialize all vision but also must perpetually smother every emergent potential to view differently.

12. Israel systematically extinguishes any possibility of viewing that deviates or drifts away from the totalizing views of Israel’s colonial regime of perception.

Whenever a Palestinian is detained at a checkpoint, is shot at a demonstration, or is attacked by a settler, the optics of the situation are dismantled, disassembled, and destroyed by whatever means necessary. Camera lenses are shot through by live bullets at demonstrations, footage from nearby surveillance cameras is seized, curfews are imposed, entrances to villages are sealed off, and social media is purged of “inciteful material.” To view the violence of colonization is to possibly set into motion the emergence of different practices of viewing, and so the act of witnessing itself becomes another target for colonial forces. In order for Israel to maintain its monopoly of violence it must also maintain a monopoly of vision, and so it represses, extinguishes, blinds, and destroys whatever or whomever views differently.

13. The colonial administration of dis/appearance extends to a range of archival practices, strategically remembering and forgetting as a means of dis/appearing.

The use of identification cards fragments Palestine into a colonial archipelago structured by complex regulatory and security measures, and to be identified as Palestinian is to be managed, documented, and excluded in various forms and to varying degrees. Palestinian identity is endlessly documented and archived only so it can be better subjected to the power of the police. As Palestinians are reduced to another digit in the vast calculations of biometric governmentality within Israel’s colonial administration, they simultaneously are expunged from archival memory as historical records of Palestinian land use, habitation, and ownership are made to be lost, misplaced, or illegible. The permanent and perpetual policing of Palestinian identity coupled with the permanent and perpetual erasure of Palestinian history means that Palestine and Palestinians are both excavated and buried, remembered and forgotten, dis/appeared within an ever-expanding colonial archive.

14. The archival dis/appearance of Palestinians obliterates their past and future in order to bound them within the minute finitude of the present tense.

The foundation of the Israeli state in 1948 was premised on the erasure of multiple and plural pasts in the interest of producing and maintaining the appearance of a singular Israeli history and future. Israel must continuously attempt to extinguish other histories in order for it to maintain the spectacle of its singularity, and the potential appearance and disappearance of Palestinians is so threatening to the Israeli state first and foremost because appearing and disappearing take time. To appear or disappear is to have duration, to pass through the threshold, to have grammar, and thus necessarily to have historicity and futurity. As a consequence, simply appearing or disappearing as a Palestinian is enough to bring total ruin to Israel’s historical singularity. In an attempt to annihilate the unannihilatable multiplicity of the past and future and their accompanying forms of difference, Palestinian and otherwise, the colonial regime indefinitely attempts to halt the passage of time itself.

15. Colonial regimes of perception culminate in the dis/appearance of death, as corpses are both displayed as trophies and repressed as repositories of evidence.

The perceptual warfare waged by Israel reaches its apogee when Israeli soldiers photograph themselves with Palestinian corpses, capturing souvenirs to bring home with them after they’ve completed their time in the military. These necrotic images circulate within and between various soldiers and units, a visual confirmation and celebration of their enduring ability to view the dead body that can view no longer. On the other extreme, when a Palestinian body lays dying in the streets, cameras are pushed away and kept at a distance, and when that body dies it is often abducted from Palestinian hospitals and morgues by Israeli soldiers before it can be examined or given a funeral and burial. Even in death, Palestinian bodies are dis/appeared in the thresholds, denied the possibility of finally appearing as evidence or as a life to be mourned, and refused the chance of finally disappearing from the colonial necroexhibitionist view.

16. Politics and War, like twins, do not take place within a singular visual totality, but within contested series of totalizing visualities.

As particular modalities of colonial power, politics and war produce visual territories that are structured primarily by their luminosity, the degree to which they can be flooded with or drained of light. They visually parse the world into regions, landscapes, frontiers, horizons, surfaces, and targets and operate as if they each were their own universal totality. In one modality, politics establishes and defends the limits and thresholds of a view in order to determine what can and cannot appear or disappear within its delimited, illuminated, and policed spaces that render particular forms of recognizability, legibility, and publicity possible. In another modality, war produces its battlefields by redefining the limits of various views, expanding, contracting, and reshaping the contours of fields of vision in order to expand, contract, and reshape the luminous scope of its violence. While formally distinct, both politics and war are primarily concerned with entirely determining the conditions of possibility for appearance and disappearance as such.

17. Within the colonial regime of perception, the initial instinct may be to attempt to escape from or violently sabotage the colonial perceptual apparatus.

Escaping visually, disappearing within dense fogs of obscurity and clandestinity and becoming imperceptible, has been a vital resource within the tactical repertoire of those who desire to live outside of and beyond the reach of sovereignty and coloniality. The perceptual fugitivity of the ruled, the governed, and the colonized has also at times taken on a more insurrectionary character, as flight has been coupled with improvised attacks on the perceptual infrastructures of power. As part of the experimental choreography of resistance, surveillance cameras are smashed, identification cards are shredded, computers are hacked, security forces’ windshields are smeared with paint, fingerprints are erased, and archives are burnt to ash. While individual evasion may remain fleetingly possible within colonial regimes of perception, disappearance is always already anticipated and disarmed within the thresholds of the colonial view, preemptively rendering it insufficient for the collective project of escape.

18. To be dis/appeared is also to be tempted by the prospect of appearing fully as political subjects on the illuminated battlefields of representation.

Representative politics are curtailed to the perceptual spaces of politics as they are already delimited, to what was already made to be recognizable and thus representable within any particular regime of perception. In such circumstances, to become political or to coercively become a subject of politics, a body must appear or disappear or, alternatively, be forced to within the structures of representation as they are constituted in advance. The fantasy of being recognized in the form of representation, of being grasped fully as something-in-particular, as something radiant, is pursued in hopes of inhabiting the social and political power of that position. In colonial regimes of perception, representative politics are political only insofar as they preclude and exclude the dis/appeared who have been made to be unrecognizable and thus ultimately unrepresentable.

19. The possibility of a political end to the colony is maintained yet endlessly deferred, perpetually reconstructed as an alluring yet illusory simulation.

As Israeli settlements populate the tops of valleys across the West Bank in ever-greater numbers and Palestinians continue to be systematically expelled from their homes in Jerusalem, the vision of a two state solution imperceptibly evaporates into a mirage. As the Palestinian population grows at a proportionally faster rate, a one state solution becomes buried beneath the rubble of a permanent apartheid. In such a conjuncture, any politics that seem to arise within the colony are in actuality only simulated by it. While Israel’s colonial regime of perception organizes for a future that resembles only the perpetual present of the colony, it must also perpetuate the fantasy that the colonial situation is merely provisional. Ultimately, the simulated movement towards a political solution is reproduced ad infinitum as another means of indefinitely detaining Palestinian life within the colonial world.

20. Colonial regimes of perception establish order over all forms of perception as a means of ordering the entirety of the world as a colony.

Standing guard at the thresholds of appearance, digging the spectral trenches of perceptual warfare, the colonial regime of perception strives to define and rule over all of what is phenomenal and spectacular about the world. Being organized by the colonial regime of perception in this way is to have the present battlefield determined for you in advance, to be captured within an occupied optics, to be composed and interpolated entirely within the colonial order of spectacular relations. If the colonial regime of perception and the colonial project more generally are ultimately defined by the enforcement and management of order, it follows that the decolonial project is necessarily a project of disorder, an undoing and unsettling and unraveling of the colonial world. Revolt cannot take shape within the world as it already is ordered by the colony, but only within the improvised art of relentlessly disordering the colonial world.

21. As the order of the colony and the order of the world become increasingly indistinguishable, the end of the colony entails the end of the world.

The world in which we live, the one we were all born into, is the world of sovereignty, the world of capital, and consequently, the world of the colony. Everything of and within our world is entangled with these shared histories, an inheritance structured by a colonial interiority that continues to capture and wage war upon what it makes exterior. Between the inside and outside, white and black, civilized and savage, good and evil, across gender, class, sexuality, and nationality, the colony splits the world in order to subject it entirely to the singularity of its order. As a result, there is no outside of the colony because the colony is the world. To call for the abolition of the colony is to call for the abolition of its world, our world, the world, because only then could other worlds ever possibly find ground.

22. The first step towards the abolition of the colonial regime of perception and the colonial world itself can be taken in the search for whatever refuses its order.

What is the colony’s otherwise? What threatens to transform the colony’s necessity into its contingency? What is radically irreconcilable with the world as long as it is ordered by the colony? While the real foundations for new forms of revolt cannot be predicted or perceived in advance of their arrival precisely because prediction and perception have already been organized in advance by the world which is the object of that revolt, the looming dusk of this world nonetheless persists in the teeming accumulation of its exception, of that which is always in the process of being eradicated but is ultimately ineradicable, of the recurring arrival of the remainder, of all that precedes and exceeds the organizing and ordering potential of the colony, the inextinguishable and ever-growing past and future reservoir of what the colony is not and cannot be.

23. The colonial regime of perception offers no escape routes, and consequently the only possible way out of the colonial situation rests in its total imminent negation.

The only virtue of the colonial situation is that it makes clear that no reform and no superficial compromise is possible. In place of the seduction of obscurity or the clamor for visibility, the cultivation of negativity, disorder, and refusal could serve as a tactical orientation for the colonized. Whether finding expression in boycotts, divestment, sanctions, blockades, sabotage, disobedience, strikes, or a multitude of other forms, the fuel of negation can be accumulated in whatever interrupts, refuses, cancels, nullifies, or disorganizes the order of the colony. From within the colonial world, the uncompromising and the ungovernable can coalesce into negative collectivities that become a growing exception to it. To be negative together is to be for nothing and against everything, because only when everything is over can the nothing that follows threaten to become something else, something otherwise.

24. Becoming negative together doesn’t require a shared political program, but only a contagious willingness to refuse the present.

The memory of a time before and the dream of a time after the colony, the felt possibility of what lingers just beyond what is already actual, can be one of the catalysts for the making-impossible of the colonial present. Far from a naive nostalgia for an unsullied past or a feverish vision of a perfected future, an understanding that everything is perpetually unfinished, most importantly the colonial world which tries to extend its present infinitely, can be a subtractive and negative force that produces new antagonistic distances and, as a consequence of the creation of those distances, new loving intimacies with those that have traversed those distances with you. The latent impossibility of the colony can be found in the otherwise of a difference that has been deferred but not totally defused, the intransigent differential memory and dream of another world than this one. To refuse the present is to insist upon its enfoldment with inexhaustible pasts and futures, to attempt to cancel out and negate the now in the interest of making room for what could otherwise arrive again or anew.

25. For the dis/appeared, the only thing worth beginning in the colonial world is its end.

The infinite distance between I and We is not contracted by the formation of a set of political principles as much as it is by the concerted experimentation with what can only be done collectively in concert. For the colonized, the colonial world offers no homes for rest and no escape routes on which to flee. As long as the interiority of the colony entraps its other in its exterior, the dis/appeared will remain perpetually within the all encompassing thresholds of the colonial order. For Palestinians, who have have been radically dispossessed of their future and past in the perpetual present of Israel’s colonial order, only uncompromising ungovernability presents itself as a means of negating the world that ensures only their perpetual suspension. Beyond the radiant glow of representation, elusive escape of obfuscation, and dis/appearances of the colonial regime of perception, only total refusal, only unmediated negation, in every and any form, can threaten to bring an end to the totality of the colony, an end where something otherwise might finally be glimpsed.

 

10 Preliminary Theses on Resistance

10 Preliminary Theses on Resistance
Ian Alan Paul, January, 2017

1. Resistance against Trump will first become manifest in radical acts of negation.

Sabotage this. Slow down that. Undermine a process. Raise questions. Draw lines. Flood systems. Destroy records. Overwhelm institutions. Withdraw your consent. Waste their time. Blockade everything. As Trump tears down the world around him in order to build his own from the wreckage, resistance will necessarily take shape first in spontaneous and audacious refusals. That which cannot be stomached, that which weighs too heavily, that which becomes in too many ways too much will be the gasoline for the fires to come. Pure negativity will be the initial attractor that draws us onto the streets, urgently gathering together beneath banners emblazoned simply with the word “NO.”

2. In collective acts of refusal, opportunities will arise to find in one another something which is not yet present but could be.

Behind burning barricades, in occupied lecture halls, on blocked highways, at shut-down airport terminals, in riotous street parties, at lock-downed bank entrances, in striking ports, online and on the streets and, for some, in jail cells, people will one by one accumulate and aggregate into something else, something otherwise. Even the best of friends will be met again as if for the first time, encountered anew within the tumult and turbulence of a multiplicity of struggles. Acts of negation will establish the conditions of possibility for new forms of affirmation, and every opportunity to refuse Trump will also be an opportunity to discover in each other the possibility of becoming a force together.

3. Our resistance will require the playful invention of new repertoires, always differentially improvised in concert with others.

Every practice enacted in the present will require wildly speculative adaptation, elaboration, and experimentation. A march, an occupation, a blockade, and an infinite number of other techniques known and unknown, will all necessitate continuous reinvention as power responds, refashions, and reorganizes itself. The opportunity to put something new into practice must be cultivated, prepared for, and proliferated across complex, diverse, and inconsistent coalitions, alliances, conspiracies, and crowds. Resisting Trump will require new forms of choreography that set into motion destituent and constituent forces, maneuvering, defending, and attacking, tearing apart as they assemble. The only question that should preoccupy us in this moment is not the singular “What is to be done?” but rather the always multiple and shifting “What works?”

4. Success will depend on an ability to take cues from those who are already most affected by power.

Power is most intimately known by those who have lived their lives beneath it, and this intimacy will be what will orient, navigate, and guide us through the coming struggles. A constellation composed of the memories of Ferguson and Stonewall, of Standing Rock and Zuccotti Park, of Oscar Grant and Tamir Rice, among a great many others, can also be a map that reveals potential routes through the present catastrophe. Those who have historically been most affected by power will be most familiar with the character, complexities, and challenges of the fights to come.

5. Differentiating between companions and collaborators will simply be a matter of observing who refuses alongside you.

The present makes accomplices of us all. The only remaining thing to be settled is who you will choose to be an accomplice to. As lines of riot police and make-shift barricades cut the world into a billion different sides, which one will you stand on? Failing to choose is to have the choice made for you by whatever power presently governs, and complicity threatens to follow from anything but a total rejection of the powerful. Ultimately, a line will be drawn between those who currently (or seek to) govern, and those who desire to be and insist upon being ungovernable.

6. Resistance, like life, will be defined by moments of indescribable joy and tremendous despair.

In the fray of the coming confrontations, inspiration will flow from the courage of those close to us and exhilaration will accompany any victories that follow. However, these will emerge alongside the loud knock at the front door late at night, the swing of the police club, the spinning tear gas canister, the burst of pepper spray, the gliding bullet, the cold jail cell, and the felt absence of lost friends. Neither joy nor despair will wholly define resistance, but rather resistance will depend upon the capacity to experience these things together, to be moved collectively by both joy and despair.

7. Our endurance as a force will rely on refiguring the limits of our responsibility and ability to respond to one another.

Capitalism, as a system, ceaselessly encroaches upon every atom of the world to ensure that survival is only possible on its own terms to the point where the possibility of life itself is called into question. Interrupting this process won’t depend on any brilliant maneuver or tactical success as much as it will on our ability to redefine the limits of care and compassion, to reimagine the form and distribution of our interdependencies so we can move towards a world in which it may be possible to endure differently. In the coming years, our solidarity must become a weapon so sharp that it will cut straight through cages, borders, and walls, seeing in variably distant and different others the possibility of survival.

8. As everything is increasingly occupied, refused, and blockaded, the time will quickly arrive to produce the infrastructure for the otherwise.

Whenever and wherever power crumbles, there will always be forces anxious to replace what has been demolished. Power can never finally be destroyed, but can only be indefinitely warded off by insistent and persistent refusal. Resistance, undertaken as a practice, understands that power must be defeated continuously if anything different has a chance of emerging. The infrastructure of the otherwise, that which could lead us towards a time and place unlike the present, is not something we build but is something we enact in consistent and patient repetition.

9. The crisis has already arrived, and whoever is best able to shape the chaos that ensues will produce what has yet to arrive.

There is no going back, no way to retreat onto solid ground, no possibility of rolling back time, except perhaps while dreaming. The sheer entropy of the present means that there is little to hold on to, but it also means that it has become possible to speculate more radically than ever before. Watching the world around us rise and fall at an accelerating rate, those who prevail will be those who grasp the risks worth taking, those who are able to clearly and vividly see the world as it exists and as it can exist. What will come is in no way determined, but will depend on a series of leaps that produce their own ground to land upon.

10. The greatest virtue of our resistance is that it is entirely absent of any promises and guarantees.

Never trust anyone who tells you about “the future” in the singular. The most powerful in the world expend all of their energy to maintain even the faintest appearance of order, and even the most extremely regulated and controlled corners of the world are constantly threatened by the arrival of any number of unknown, improbable but possible futures. Hope in the present arises from the insight that the unknowability of futurity is perpetual and ineradicable. To not know precisely where we are headed is to remain open to the possibility of arriving where we couldn’t possibly have planned to, and in refusing the present we also invite what cannot presently exist within it.

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Postscript: This piece follows from a previous post: “10 Preliminary Theses on Trump

10 Preliminary Theses on Trump

10 Preliminary Theses on Trump
Ian Alan Paul, January, 2017

1. Trump’s power is fundamentally virtual in form.

Propose this, suggest that, lie about yesterday, declare the inevitability of that which is yet to come, retreat from one position while advancing on two more, contradict oneself, tweet about the greatest possible number of arbitrary things, attack, provoke, feign movement, never apologize or restrain oneself, hint at gesture, sound the dog whistle, appear still, expand interpretations, proliferate noise, introduce turbulence, obscure predictability in dense fogs of possibility. Trump’s power arises not from any individual act but from the multiplication of possible acts.

2. Defending truths against Trump is to mistake the present battlefield entirely.

Journalists and politicians alike are unable to meaningfully respond to, resist, or rebuke Trump because they approach him as something singular and consistent, whereas he acts multiply and chaotically. They aim to pull down something which already is, whereas Trump has already departed from the here and now towards any number of things that could possibly be instead. While everyone keeps busy defending fragile shelters of truth, Trump has moved into his golden palace built on a foundation of a glistening “what if?”

3. As Trump proceeds, what is imaginable, permissible, and ultimately doable for the Right will multiply in every direction and across every axis.

In the back of a bus, like a little schoolboy, Trump can barely contain his excitement as he describes how he can “grab them by the pussy.” Words that used to only be whispered slowly reappear in everyday conversations with a dangerous allure. Young men on college campuses complain about white genocide. Swastikas are sprayed on barn doors. A family sits down for breakfast at a diner with camouflage assault rifles strung over their shoulders. The Right, feeling liberated at last from liberal political correctness, feminist shaming, white guilt, academic criticism, media reporting, and any kind of scrutiny in general, go on to dream of the birth of new worlds that resemble imaginary old ones.

4. The Left, sensing fascism on the horizon, retreats to defend the walls of a liberal democracy hallucinated in the fever of the present.

Don’t normalize this! Investigate Russia! Organize for the midterms! Start the impeachment process! Release the taxes! The constitution must be defended at all costs! These will be the rallying cries of the liberal Left that finds solace in the fantasy of an uncompromised past, the inverse mirror of the Right’s “traditional America.” This is an America without Guantanamo Bay. An America where drones have never seen flight. An America without police executions. It is an American democracy that irresistibly arcs towards justice. It’s an America that doesn’t exist. In the terrifying shadow of Trump’s virtuality, the Left seeks out security in the same institutions that enabled his appearance.

5. Trump’s virtuality is the virtuality of capital.

Trump is the avatar of a neoliberal insurrection against the liberal forces that have historically attempted to soften, slow, humanize, and manage capitalism. He is the bleeding edge, the frothing crest of a wave of deterritorialization, the spray-tanned frontier of global capital. He is the combed-over contagion that will finally bring the capitalist crisis that has so far largely been contained in the Global South to the Global North. For both Trump and capital, limits are only there to be overcome, success means success at any cost, and everything that exists only exists for the taking by those with the courage and ingenuity to dare to. It is never a question of whether something is possible, but rather of what new transgression needs to be performed to make it so.

6. Only those parts of the state that are absolutely necessary to defend wealth will remain.

The police and army will become increasingly indistinguishable and will find support while the extraneous is slashed, cut, and left to decompose in the heat of rapidly rising global temperatures. As more and more is secured for capital, everything will become less so. When everything becomes property, simply being alive constitutes trespassing, and as the rich accumulate impossibly large sums of wealth they will find that they have no safe place to keep it. The distinction between politics and war, if there ever were a meaningful one, will become impossible to see in the clouds of tear gas that will persistently hang in the air of financial centers.

7. The reterritorializing forces of capital no longer keep up with the accompanying forces of deterritorialization, unavoidably leading us into new intensities of capitalist crisis.

The disciplinary power of jails, hospitals, schools, checkpoints, and border fences now do little to ward off riots and waves of migrants and refugees. Closed bank branches in Athens burn while the bottom of the Mediterranean and the deserts of Arizona become ever more populous graveyards. Markets flash-crash as algorithms detect something that humans cannot. Energy corporations that endlessly lobby against environmental restrictions now simultaneously make pleas for responses to climate change. The flows unleashed by the global economy are spilling over the dams meant to profit from them, and even those at the top find themselves in the floodplains below. The possibilities of the new threaten to wholly extinguish life in the now.

8. As lived reality becomes ever more precarious and ultimately unsustainable, life will require more and more mediation to be managed.

Images will accelerate and proliferate at rates unimagined as possible before. Pepe the Frog will be remixed, reinterpreted, recaptioned, and reuploaded by every political tendency and faction, while videos of Richard Spencer being punched by the black bloc will be synchronized with every song to ever appear on Billboard Top 100 charts and uploaded to a playlist on youtube. Presidential press conferences will be accompanied by applause tracks, while social network executives will prepare to become politicians. Everyone will retweet Trump and Trump will retweet everyone. Writers in Eastern Europe will make up news stories for websites in Mexico to undermine trade deals with China. Everything will become more recognizable and less distinguishable as the deepening poverty of reality is compensated by ever more sophisticated forms of media.

9. When the present has fully entered into its own formal disintegration, Trump’s virtuality will necessarily become our own.

As a life becomes less possible, it will increasingly have to resort to what it can become instead. Sometimes this will only become manifest as pure fantasy: in the American dream, in shiny skyscrapers that effortlessly and gracefully float above the chaos below, on a rural commune, in outer space, on The Apprentice, in the wild wildernesses beyond civilization that fill survivalists’ minds. At other times, this will become manifest in radical experimentation in the streets that find themselves in direct confrontation with Trump’s storm troopers. Either way, the present will overflow with many different versions of what must become possible instead.

10. The present crisis being virtually ushered in by Trump must be met with a crisis of our own making.

As things increasingly disintegrate, it will not be possible to remake what has become undone. Awash in a world without limits or meaning, a place where the possibility of life itself has become threatened by the possibilities unleashed under capitalism, the only way out may be to introduce a crisis of a different kind, one that posits a fundamentally different register of possibility. In the playful invention of new repertoires, in the forging of new collectivities, in the experimentation with new practices of living, perhaps something else, something otherwise can begin. In the coming years, it will be our task to make possible that which cannot be under capitalism.

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Postscript: There is now also the accompanying piece “10 Preliminary Theses on Resistance” available.

The Conditions of Possibility

The Conditions of Possibility (2016) is an online documentary that explores and theorizes the January 25th Revolution of 2011, the July 3rd Coup of 2013, and the period of military rule that has followed in Cairo, Egypt. Equal parts critical ethnography, aphoristic reflection, political philosophy, essayistic autobiography, and experimental documentary, the project examines the political, ontological, and affective conditions of possibility in the city. Based on fieldwork undertaken between 2013 and 2015 in Cairo, the project draws upon myriad conversations with revolutionaries, artists, writers, activists, and others, as well as on tactical explorations through the streets of Cairo. The project is organized into drifts that reflect upon particular historical con/disjunctures following the revolution while elaborating on concepts that help orient within their dynamics.

The project makes use of cryptographic practices and can be thought of as a form of cryptodocumentary. Etymologically, a “crypto” (hidden) “document” (lesson/evidence) is a form of hiding that instructs, or is evidence that counterintuitively reveals through the way it hides. All of the photographs featured in this project were captured clandestinely using a cell phone that automatically shot images on a timer during situationist-inspires explorations of the city. Using cryptographic algorithms, the photographs were encrypted as they were captured, and were only decrypted after the artist had left the country. Due to the escalating forms of repression in Egypt, images of the conversations that were included in the project are abstracted (using lossy compression) beyond visual and technical recognition, and have had their content mixed together and altered to obscure potentially identifying details. Additionally, the online platform has been programmed so that each time the project is viewed, different conversation videos are algorithmically rearranged and shuffled around, erasing the subject-in-particular in favor of a collective-in-general. Several people that were interviewed for this project are now in Egyptian jails, and the others remain at risk of arrest. As a result, this project hides away information as a means of allowing their experiences and insights to have expression without increasing their vulnerability. This approach emulates similar cryptographic practices developed/adopted by the documented communities, which continue to find ways to endure together by obscuring their relations in various fashions.

The Conditions of Possibility is transdisciplinary in thought and approach, and draws from a large range of philosophers and theorists which typically aren’t brought together within a singular project. The project proposes a “thinking with” diverse bodies of thought rather than an explicit “thinking about” them, an attempt to experimentally produce conjunctive resonances and syntheses between distinct fields, disciplinary and otherwise, by favoring inclusion and connection over exclusion or contradiction, the “and” over the “or.” In other words, the project practices a maximal amount of generosity and flexibility in its mobilization and deployment of concepts from different traditions, while also recognizing that frictions and dissonances necessarily persist and remain as part of any transdisciplinary approach.

The project can be viewed online at: http://www.ConditionsOfPossibility.com