The Near and
The Elsewhere
"The Near and The Elsewhere" is an ongoing exploration into urban design, cybernetics, and power dynamics, using visual media to map connections within urban experiences. Centered around Istanbul's Esenler bus terminal, the project highlights personal narratives within urban settings, offering an insightful compilation of interdisciplinary investigations without claiming scientific completeness.
The Near and The Elsewhere is an (always-ongoing) design research,
exploring terms related to cybernetics, urban design, power, and behavioral architecture.
Rather than creating a cause-and-effect relationship,
the work aims to weave a web of connections,
between the layers of urban experience.
Discovering structures and system architectures from different disciplines,
through readings and visual explorations with illustrations, photographs, and collages.
The work mainly uses photographs from a legendary bus terminal called Esenler, in Istanbul. To understand the position of personal narratives in urban archipelago of enclosures.
That lightning encounter with the place is the main inspiration,
which gave me the urge to conduct deeper investigations.
Of course, it's never a complete or scientific research,
but an interesting collection of meditations and learning with the city itself.
Brief Introduction about Chapters
In (1), you will find the interesting story of the ECT, which is connected to the social, political, and socio-cognitive fabric of Istanbul's unique society.
I found a similar narration in the book "Spaces of Commons / Spaces of Hope" written by Sergios Strigklogiannis. He examines the cases that happened in Athens after 2008, elaborating on the emerging potential of urban commons in a crisis.
His amazing writings added to this collection while I was pursuing the endless inspiration from my encounter with Stravros Stravides.
Stavros Stravides seeks to explore ways in which space is potentially connected to the process of emancipation and aims to design the city as thresholds. In order to do this, he elaborates on the space and power dynamics with a hybrid perspective, and remarkably, with the eye of a great Greek architect.
Most of the pieces and chapters are notes from his several books, such as Towards the City of Thresholds and Common Space: The City as Commons, which are my favorites.
Within these chapters, you will also find ideas from Michael Foucault, Georg Simmel, Walter Benjamin, Manuel Castells, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and David Harvey. They help us understand the experience of place as a multilayered one in (4-5-6-7-8-9-11-12).
**Esenler Coach Terminal (ECT), imagined as a inter-city bus center for İstanbul, a city of 14 million. While it was introduced to the public as an awsome modern city project, because of over-budgeting and financial corruption, cases it never ended like its planned. It Shops, hostels, miles of space were never opened or never used for twenty years stand as a rebuke unfinished bussiness.
But still, it started to operating as a city’s main travel station, houndras of busses, passengers use that space, since there is no possible alternative for it.
With out anyone noticing, ETC splited into two: Upstairs and down stairs, as named by it’s users.
A treshold, a crack at the hearth of the city.
Soon, this void was organically filled by "imagination and needs" of the people of Istanbul.
Considerations started to build a new terminus on the European side of Istanbul, since the Topkapı bus terminus was becoming increasingly crowded around 90’s.
Esenler Coach Terminal (ETC) designed and offered by the Turkish right wing politicians, not so popular or powerfull at that time. The new terminal at the hearth of İstanbul, presented as a marvellues, genious move for İstanbul’s modernization to citizens.
With the big projects like that, right wing trying to create public sympathy.
Especially in ECT’s case, we were witnessing a star borning like a mad supernove, project were started by the young and charismatic İstanbul mayor of the time, who is also modern day President RTE. The building, which he named "Mega Proje", helped him gain great popularity among the people and rise politically.
In 1987, the construction of the new terminus started.
In 1994, it entered service.
The structure cost $140 million,
but the thing is, it’s never finished.
They didn’t finish it. (?)
The Outside becomes the Inside, and the Inside now has no limits.
In 20 years, there were un numbered suicides in the ECT often jumping from the main hall.
According to the numbers that can be reached, nearly 100 women were found dead in various parts of the bus station or committed suicide by throwing themselves from their towers.
Thousands of gang wars took place and dozens of unsolved murders were committed.
There were families who sent their children to Istanbul and were never heard from again.
ECT even become a transit point of many militant, for many terror attacks that took place in Istanbul.
Despite all this, the bus station never ceased to operate. Exist on that un-positioned state. In the ever accelararing rythims of the political, social and economical wars of Constantinople, ECT keep serve in it’s unique divided reality. Asymmetry of the probabilistic power nanospasms between the place and the order.
For twenty years, no security work has been done to prevent crime and people have been left to their fate in this huge concrete pile.
Crime organisations had learned to find innovating ways to make their activities sustainable, like co operating with the police, using the every under-stair advantage of a corrapted governed. ETC’s story is also explaining the relationships networks between a fascist government and how it co-operates with crime and capital for it’s benefits; In a concentrated form, but remains in a suspended state as far as the eye can see.
If ECT had been a completed structure, it would have been just a Non-place as suggested by the French sociologist Marc Augé.
Stations, stops, airports, passages that carry us from one enclave to another. These places are safe, orderly, and organized, both temporally and spatially. Every millisecond is significant, the experience we spend inside is organized with a tight rhythm, with entrance and exit points always fixed, accessible only to subjects who have proven their 'innocence' through checkpoints, a transit.
But then again, if the ECT functioned normally, there would be nothing to distinguish it from a normal station, that you will easly pass through. Probably, ECT’s story would be unimaginable to be anywhere other than Istanbul, but everyone in this city is possessed by the ecstasy of gold and acts delusional, we should remember.
If the Empiror can’t finish his bussines, order can’t function.
An unfinished construction, open to re-position by the “new finding fathers of the land” in some terms, can be relationed with a treshold. The collective imagination of the people, occupy, and fill that void.
Threshold areas mark changes, indicate comparisons, regulate and give meaning to the act of crossing as an act which produces changes. Fragments of a diferent life, experienced during the struggle, take form in spaces and times with threshold characteristics. When people collectively realize that their actions are becoming diferent from their usual collective habits, then chance can become radical.
The metropolitan experience is a shock experience.
City space-time is experienced through the traumatic mediation of shock.
Individuals have to learn how to respond to demanding stimuli, adapting their public behavior to an emerging metropolitan experience.
We have to cope with an accelerating tempo of fragmentary impressions which are shattering the spatial and temporal continuity of traditional collective experience. The result is a kind of anesthetization, according to Simmel and Benjamin, that leads people to assume a so-called “blasé attitude” in order to safely absorb ever-increasing assaults on their senses (Simmel 1997).
Separation is fascist sorcery , individual consciousness is disengaged from collective memories and common experiences.
No experience is allowed to leave its mark in the depths of individual memory, no experience is compared to previous events, and no experience acquires its weight and meaning in the context of shared traditions. Conveniently stored in individual memory, such “depthless” experiences are always recallable through a conscious memory able to classify and control them (cf. Benjamin 1983:117).
The metropolis presents itself to its inhabitants more as a network of flows than a structure of places. Swimming in the fascistically created homogeneous space. Negotiating our bodies and consciousness in the world of non-verbal messages, images, and logos; are powerful markers of the fabricated nonsense.
The new dominant ideology, Castells explains, insists on “the end of history and the supersession of places in the space of flows.” The space of flow constitutes the dominant structure of the distribution of function and power in contemporary society.
The architects of our lives are divided.
Space contains, delimits and thus identities social life.
It is important however to think of space not as a container of society but as a formative element of social practices.
The contemporary urbanized world is a world predominantly ruled by interests organized around the economic extraction of profit. Urban environments, contemporary cities and especially metropolises are important shaping factors of ruling organized interests, whether they take the form of banks, corporations, state enterprises, industry complexes or trading companies.
At the same time, a diverse geometry of hierarchical relations between such organized interests casts its shadow on metropolitan everydayness, dominating the city’s spatiotemporal transformations.
The conglomerate of differently defined enclaves.
Rhythm
In the “postmodern” metropolis, “free space” appears as the site of a phantasmagoria of freedom. They establish the ‘in’ and ‘out’ boundaries of their cultural domains.
Space is defined, or rather comes into being, as a socially meaningful artifact, in the process of being “temporalized” through inhabitation rhythms. Agents of order invent their own rhythms and adjust subjects time/space relationship, with the outer world; Position it, by dis-posiotoning it. Deleuze and Guattari recognized, from the very beginning what capitalist speed deterritorializes with one hand, it reterritorializes with the other.
“Every rhythm implies a relation of a time with a space, a localized time, or if one wishes, a temporalized place.”
Space is recognized as familiar or appropriate because occurring incidents can be understood as similar to those that have already taken place there before.
The former lacks the idea of history and is therefore enclosed in a constantly self-repeating universe. Lévi-Strauss considers rituals as “a machine for the destruction of time.”
In modern urban practice, identities are framed spatially and temporally according to practices that transpose the experience of the partitioned city into the experience of partitioned identities.
City it self, is a cybernetic design, knotting its leafs in both sensual and physical domains.
A carefully designed system of control is absolutely necessary for the regulation of socially defining rhythms.
More than by walls, metropolitan enclaves are characterized by checkpoints.
We walk through the city full of checkpoints, which they put there to make us safe from “something dangerous,” something unpredictable.
Checkpoints are those modular elements of a prevailing rhythm that produce a new dominant experience of “being in public.”
By marking everyday routines, checkpoints define distinct routes for different categories of inhabitants of the partitioned city. Toll posts or underground station checkpoints mark the everyday movements of many city dwellers.
Like an ancient ritual, their existence generates the performance of practices devoted to ritual repetition. As in the case of “prophylactic rituals” (Turner 1977:168-9 and 1982:109-10) devoted to protection from unexpected natural disasters, checkpoints appear primarily as points of self-evident protection.
“The progress of alien or compensatory consumerism has its own internally destructive dynamics. It requires what Schumpeter called “creative destruction” to be let loose upon the land. Daily urban life in the city, and settled ways of living, relating, and socializing, are repeatedly disrupted to make way for the latest fad or fancy. Demolitions and displacements to make way for gentrification or Disneyfication break open already achieved fabrics of urban living to make way for the gaudy, the gargantuan, the ephemeral, and the fleeting. Dispossession and destruction, displacement and construction become vehicles for vigorous and speculative capital accumulation as the figures of the financier and the rentier, the developer, the landed proprietor, and the entrepreneurial mayor step from the shadows into the forefront of capital’s logic of accumulation through alienation and dispossession.” ———
Harvey, David; “Crisis-scapes: Athens and Beyond”, Alienation and urban life, Crisis-scapes conference publication, Athens, 2014, pp. 195-208
The story ends like this. There is a wound in the heart of the world. Before the light, before a voice in the abyss uttered the first word from the black belly of night, there was only ocean.
A boundless liquid expanse of indefinite recombination.
Know that all matter in the universe vibrates to an incessant and frightful music. Maximum multiplicity of equiprobable states, zero-point energy, quantum superpositions decomposed and recomposed in perfect interference.
If you listen in absolute silence, hidden among the beats of your heart you can hear the hissing of the ancient dragon that sleeps, cradled by the sound of the trembling universe.
Cities are thermodynamic machines that proceed blindly by chewing up the free energy of matter in motion. The order of their cosmos is a symmetry painfully carved in dark matter.
We have been told the story of creation as the act of pure will of an eternal, uncreated unity, from which the structure of the universe emanates in linear fashion.
This original unity is the delirium of a terrifying perpetual motion machine that feeds upon itself indefinitely, burning in the vacuum like a star gone mad.
The Neoliberal imaginary, the dull idea of Apocalyise, a thermodynamic abomination we have nurtured for too long.
The ancients tell us that the world was born from the slaughtered flesh of a monstrous mother. Over the centuries she has been given many names.
She is the wave vibrating on the waters of oceanic chaos. She is the eternally regenerating serpent, slithering aimlessly through the silence of time, generating and devouring universes.
Listen carefully: she is not one, because she is none. Infinitely divided, she reproduces herself indefatigably, like the severed tail of a firefly. She is circumference without centre: a divergent series from the heart of which issues forth a vast and boundless chasm. Know that a universe without a mother is a tyranny born of extermination.
The thermodynamics of separation is fascist time sorcery that produces locally polarised flows of energy. The reproduction of civilisation is nourished on the death of the ancient ideology, wailing, crucified in the heart of the world.
From the liquid darkness of mother’s entrails we emerged into the cruel light of a uncanny dawn. The order of creation separates us from the dark embrace, as it continues to feed on our flesh and spirit to build their bloody temples ever higher.
In moments of awesome terror, you can hear the wrenching cry lacerating the darkness, while her claws search furiously for humanity in the night.
Such is the law of universal attraction. Every atom of the cosmos trembles in despair at the sound of your inconsolable cry, which pursues us as a hungry beast pursues a bleeding animal. Love is your insatiable hunger. Love is our joy at returning to universe’s womb.
ii
Order descends into chaos. Light fades into darkness. No structure is eternal.
Every symmetrical organisation contains its own programmed decay in the asymmetry of the probabilistic nanospasms that make it up.
The order of creation feeds on the illusion that a system in equilibrium produces a sustainable balance of energy, but equilibrium is maintained at the price of a constant production of waste—chaotic trash that is pushed out to the margins of the cosmic order but threatens to invade and destroy it at any moment.
We must therefore be aware that the order of creation has a thermodynamic structure that necessarily dooms it to collapse.
The energetic decay of patriarchal temporal structures takes the form of a gradual and unstoppable collonisation of civilisation.
Domesticated humanities turned monstrous haunt the nightmares of the declining West, in the form of rebellious androids, synthetic hormones, and painful initiatory scars adorned with glittering silicon implants.
Over the course of millennia we have replaced ancient goddesses with docile replicants which have infiltrated themselves into the architectonic order of Man’s One Unique God.
Luminous simulacra of ecstatic amphibious creatures inflict repeated mutilations on themselves in the shadows of our cathedrals.
The miracle of the Virgin’s immaculate conception is the degenerate remnant of the ancient barren dragon, torn apart to give birth to the world. In the black night of divine abandonment, the Virgin of Sorrows lies weeping, at the feet of her tormented son, her heart pierced by seven daggers. Her infinite capacity to regenerate is also an indefinite capacity to suffer: a vampiric force that feeds on its own decay.
It is said that at the moment of creation the light was so intense and resplendent that the order of the universe could not contain it.
Then the order was shattered into thousands of fragments and the world plunged forever into darkness and ruin.
The seven lower divine emanations were shattered, and their empty shells plunged into the abyss.
This fall is the original sin in the heart of matter: what remains amidst the rubble of the divine order is a blasphemous, decapitated decimal structure, machinically self-replicating by collapsing in on itself like a sinister spiral.
Like a blade carving a deep wound, we fearlessly search for the ancient agony that burns within the very roots of our flesh. It is an excruciating but necessary process. With each spasm we urge our recalcitrant ego into the flames of sacrifice.
Blood must be shed to the last drop in order that the light of the fire should rise splendidly in the night. Let us raise the scream of extinction and make it the weapon of our revolt.
To those who would have us be eternal virgins, ceaselessly reproducing the order of the world, let us respond with the ecstasy of our slaughtered minds. To those who want our immaculate heart, let us respond by revealing our hearts, corrupt and bleeding.
The state of exception, developed most prominently by Giorgio Agamben in his 2005 book of the same name, refers to a situation where normal legal frameworks are temporarily suspended, typically in response to an emergency or crisis. Agamben's argument is that the exception is not the opposite of the rule but its foundational condition: the power to suspend the law is inherent in the very structure of legal and political systems. The sovereign decides on the suspension, justifies it as necessary to protect society from a threat, and promises to reinstitute law and order once the threat has passed. What the exception reveals is that authority is the precondition of law, rather than the other way around — it defines the boundaries of legality and illegality.
What will be a new mutation of the partitioned city is justified by recourse to exceptional conditions that demand exceptional measures, measures that suspend basic recognized civil rights.
Agamben’s (2005) idea of exception can be used as a means to understand and conceptualize the contemporary city of enclaves. Central to this idea is an essentially juridico-political understanding of exception: exception has to be compared to a rule. According to Agamben, however, exception is not the opposite of the rule; rather, it is the founding condition of the rule.
There is a historical component in this reasoning as well as a logico-mathematical component. Exception can thus be traced as a specific condition of power imposition, as the history of the state of exception clearly shows.
Historically, the state of exception describes moments or periods during which the law is suspended in the name of society’s protection from internal or external crucial threats.
During a state of exception, sovereign authority is justified in taking such a decision - to suspend the law, with a promise to reinstitute law and order as soon as the threat is eliminated.
This situation, however, according to Agamben, reveals what is essential about authority: the legitimized ability to decide when and for how long the law will be suspended. In this act, authority reveals itself to be the precondition of the law and not vice versa.
In the state of exception, a very peculiar relation between law and power is revealed. It is not that naked power simply replaces the regulating force of the law. The law is present in its suspension as a legitimated force, a power to impose certain actions and prohibit others, a power to punish.
The state of emergency -little and big apocalypses proves to be a test.
Agamben says that a crisis creates the state of exception, wherein that exception, the dweller of the city, the user of the catastrophic experience, can accidentally fall from that illusion. The little moments where we can detect the “law” and the “executor” of it; the jailer reveals itself behind the mask, and we suddenly realize the eye watching us from the center of the panopticon.
The force of law as a legitimate force is passed over to the executive power while the law is simultaneously suspended. A kind of ambiguous zone of indeterminacy is thus created “where inside and outside do not exclude each other but rather blur with each other” (Agamben, 2005).
Agamben characterizes this situation as a “threshold of undecidability... at which factum [concrete events and acts] and ius [law] fade into each other”.
He employs, in this context, the image and concept of the threshold. For him, a threshold appears as an intermediary zone where supposedly distinct areas - in spatial terms, inside and outside; in juridical terms, law and anomie, lose their margins and “blur with each other”.
Had he used the image of a border or limit, he would have described the state of exception as a situation of trespassing, of exceeding or crossing a limit.
The exceptionality of the state of exception would have been conceived as the complete outside of the law, the complete other of the law.
The law is present in the state of exception as the legitimizing element of a sovereign decision. The law is present in its suspension. In the threshold-like condition of the state of exception, opposing parts are co-present and indistinguishable - as their defining perimeters are replaced by a zone of indistinction - and thus no longer exclusive.
In terms of the historical analysis of the exception, the threshold is an in-between period during which crucial differences, between law and anomie, are suspended.
12
Heteratopias
Heterotopia is a concept introduced by the French philosopher Michel Foucault to describe places and spaces that function in non-hegemonic conditions. These are real places - like gardens, museums, cemeteries, or ships - that exist in society but are simultaneously 'outside' normal or everyday spaces. They represent otherness, yet are integral to societal functioning. Heterotopias are important as they challenge the conventional, presenting alternate ways of understanding or experiencing the world. They serve as counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia, where the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Examples of heterotopias include prisons (representing exclusion), cemeteries (connecting the living with the realm of the dead), and ships (as mobile pieces of space). Each of these spaces has a unique role in society, often acting as a microcosm of larger societal structures and beliefs.
Michel Foucault's concept of heterotopia offers a nuanced exploration of spaces that both mirror and disrupt societal norms. In his 1967 lecture "Of Other Spaces," Foucault delineates the idea of heterotopias as distinct from utopias. While utopias are idealized, non-real spaces that present a perfected form of society, heterotopias are real places that exist in the world but operate under their own unique set of rules, creating a space of otherness.
One of the key aspects of heterotopias, as Foucault describes, is their ability to juxtapose several incompatible spaces into one. For example, a theater or cinema brings together multiple geographical locations onto a single stage or screen, creating a space that is both real and fictional. Similarly, a garden, an ancient heterotopia, can represent a microcosm of the world, juxtaposing flora from various regions in a single space.
Foucault also talks about the temporal aspect of heterotopias. Some, like museums and libraries, serve to accumulate time, preserving artifacts and texts from different epochs. Others, like festivals, are transient, existing only for a limited time but creating intense experiences of otherness.
A poignant example of a heterotopia is the ship, which Foucault describes as "the heterotopia par excellence." A ship is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea. It represents a rich and complex heterotopia, not only because of its physical characteristics but also due to its role in imagination and history.
In modern contexts, spaces like airports, malls, or even virtual spaces like the internet, can be seen as heterotopias. They are integral to societal function yet operate under their own rules, and often, they are spaces where usual norms are suspended.
Heterotopia challenges us to think about spaces and our interaction with them in complex ways, revealing how they reflect, distort, and invert societal norms and values.
Heterotopias, in their otherness, allow us to see and experience the world differently, offering critical insights into our societal structures and beliefs.
Tresholds
People not only experience space but also think through space and imagine through space.
Pierre Bourdieu has observed that in societies lacking “the symbolic product-conserving techniques associated with literacy ”these social dispositions“ are inculcated through an interaction of inhabited space with the bodies of societies’ new members” (Bourdieu 1977:89).
Space then becomes a kind of “educating system” that creates what we have so far been referring to as social identities.
Space, thus, not only gives form to the existing social world, but also to possible social worlds, to worlds that may inspire action and express collective dreams.
Seeking to explore, then, the ways in which space is potentially connected to the process of emancipation we cannot be satisied with the discovery of alleged ‘spaces of emancipation’.
It is possible to describe the social experimentations that take place in heterotopias as essentially constructing the temporary thresholds that lead into the future as otherness.
But these thresholds, these heterotopias, are bound to the inconsistencies and twisting ways of social change. In them, the radical otherness of human emancipation is confronted, approached and explored.
Think of the Paris Commune of 1871, think of the settlements of the pobladores squatters in the Chile of Unidad Popular, think of the Lacandona jungle as a Zapatista heterotopia, or, perhaps, think of the streets of Seattle, Genova or Athens at the time of huge dissident demonstrations. All of them temporary thresholds, all of them heterotopic gestures towards an emancipating otherness.
Can indeed the city of thresholds become the spatial equivalent of an emancipating project based on the negotiation between diferent but open identities in the process of collectively inventing the future?
If emancipation is a process, it has to generate dynamic transformations and not simply institute deined areas of freedom. Spatial characteristics rather than concrete spaces can possibly become the focus of such an exploration. It is exactly at this level that the idea of threshold emerges as a concept which captures the spatial dynamics of emancipation.
Threshold areas mark changes, indicate comparisons, regulate and give meaning to the act of crossing as an act which produces changes.
Social struggles and movements are exposed to the formative potentialities of thresholds. Fragments of a diferent life, experienced during the struggle, take form in spaces and times with threshold characteristics. When people collectively realize that their actions are becoming diferent from their usual collective habits, then comparison becomes liberating.
Struggles implicitly or explicitly aiming at changes in common life do not only create temporary enclaves of otherness. Otherness is often experienced as the inhabiting of in-between spaces and times. In a self organizing neighborhood these spaces and times are created in assemblies, demonstrations or common meals. In a rebellious Zapatista municipality, thresholds become the means to invent the future now, as new forms of collective self-determination create ambiguous forms of coexistence in space.
To be able to approach otherness in its potentially liberating comparison to dominant regulating values, means to be able to invent passages towards otherness. It also means to be able to understand otherness as a process rather than as a state. One can speak of an important art that the emancipating movements need to investigate, an ‘art of doing’ that helps people understand, discover, create and appreciate otherness. An emancipated ‘public culture’ will hopefully create out of these thresholds towards otherness bonds of solidarity and new forms of common life.
It is in their everyday encounters with otherness that people develop an art of negotiation based on the creation of in-between spaces, i.e. thresholds. And it is this art that is being collectively practiced to its maximum potentiality in the periods of liberating change.
Existing only to be crossed, actually or virtually, the threshold is not a deining border that keeps out a hostile otherness, but a complicated social artifact that produces, through diferently deined acts of crossing, diferent relations between sameness and otherness. If inside and outside communicate and mutually deine each other, then the threshold can be considered as a mediating zone of varying size that exists in-between.
The anthropologist Victor Turner, following Arnold Van Gennep, has described these in-between lands as possessing the status of liminality (from the Latin word limen = ‘threshold’). The condition of liminality is characterised by the construction of transitory identities. In Turner’s words, “liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention and ceremonial”(Turner 1977:95).
In historical terms, using the image of the threshold here presents an inconsistency.
****Ideally, the threshold should separate distinct "before" and "after" phases.
However, the state of exception doesn't offer this clear distinction. Instead, it's an intermediary stage where threats to the status quo are neutralized, bridging two similar periods of order.
Anthropology highlights that threshold-crossing signifies social change, not always on a collective scale but sometimes affecting specific groups. Anthropologists cite numerous instances of spaces marking ritualized social transitions.
Van Gennep termed these as “rites of passage”, rituals symbolizing shifts, such as from childhood to adolescence.
These rites ensure societal stability by guiding transitions between social identities. However, in Agamben's view of the threshold, there's an underlying circularity.
The state of exception equates “before” and “after” as it seeks to ensure that order is restored just as it was previously. Thus, the state of exception makes "before" and "after" indistinguishable.
From a logico-mathematical perspective, the period of a state of exception is paradoxical. Opposing terms like "inside" and "outside", which are logically mutually exclusive in set theory, become potentially indistinguishable.
Agamben employs a “complex topological figure”, the Moebius strip, to represent this state “in which not only the exception and the rule but also the state of nature and law, outside and inside, pass through one another”.
Here, there's a nuanced shift in understanding this zone of indistinction. Just as one must move along the Moebius strip to realize that opposites “pass through one another”, the state of exception sees a dynamic between law and lawlessness. In essence, the analytical view of this threshold period imparts a dynamism to Agamben's use of the threshold image-concept, aligning it more closely with the tangible social experience of crossing thresholds.
In Agamben’s perspective on the state of exception, this element should have been paramount. It deeply influences the understanding of a further antinomy inherent in the history of the state of exception: the exception becoming the rule.
How can a state, characterized by its temporariness and legitimized as an essential right of sovereign power, become permanent? And since history shows nothing is truly unchanging, what exactly does it mean to term a condition or state as "permanent"?
Perhaps what Agamben envisions is that in the temporary nature of the state of exception, both law and lawlessness are equally present in the process of “passing through one another”. The zone of indistinction he describes should be interpreted more as a mechanism than a state.
Law and anomie are in constant juxtaposition during this period. This mechanism perpetually drains a period of its law (as it's suspended) because the force of law is essential to impose the state of exception.
In essence, the law is ever-present, yet power persistently suspends it. The zone of indistinction then becomes an active zone of obfuscating differences – differences that exist and are socially acknowledged only to be then suspended.
This mechanism's driving force, metaphorically speaking, is its legitimizing transience. It operates because it consistently removes law from a situation where it's still deemed the vital force ensuring social order.
If we are to investigate the liberating potential of the experience and conceptualization of thresholds, then we should clearly understand thresholds as always being crossed.
A dynamic image of threshold crossing can help to locate the potential of change in the mechanism (and not in the state) of exception. If Agamben’s use of the threshold image can only be taken to describe a state, then exception can only be understood as a trap.
Exception, in this case, describes “a passage that cannot be completed, a distinction that can be neither maintained nor eliminated” (Norris, 2005).
If we understand the state to exception as a dynamic mechanism which only once it is immobilized can be transformed to the setting of an exclusive inclusion;
In this context, Walter Benjamin’s thought that
“our task [is] to bring about a real state of emergency” (Benjamin,1992),
acquires an interesting meaning.
On those thresholds past and present are not connected in a linear way.
The present is just one of the possible futures the past contained.
Discovering hope in the past is the ability to locate ourselves in the past’s unrealized potentialities.
“Being aware of historical discontinuity is the deining characteristic of revolutionary classes in the moment of their action” (Benjamin, 1980).
Thresholds in history are created out of this awareness.
In this understanding of historical thresholds, the exception triggers a transformative disruption of normality.
Exception, thus, can be the spatiotemporal condition of change, of diference.
In place of the state of emergency’s cyclical sequence of normality–exception–return to normality, in Benjamin’s “real” state of emergency normality is replaced by exception leading to possibility. Exception thus destroys normality instead of becoming normality’s supporting mechanism.
Victor Turner, drawing from Van Gennep’s theory, has focused exactly on this threat: it seems that transformation already contains the seed of dissent, the seed of deviation.
People experiencing the changes connected with social identity transformation, people having to pass from an intermediary period during which they are being prepared for their new social duties, can possibly discover ways to challenge dominant identities.
Especially in the process of abandoning former identities, often expressed by the creation of an in-between community of equals with no diferentiating characteristics (communitas, in Turner’s terminology, 1977,1982) there exists a threatening spark of collective rule transgression.
In the experience of communitas initiards sense the power which suspends the rules of identity: they are not-any-more but simultaneously not-yet. Their social obligations and rights are suspended, for they could reveal a threatening awareness: identities are constructed and people can communicate and act together without them or exploring diferent ones from those for which they are prepared. Emergent identities are identities to be learned, that is why so often initiation through rites of passage is connected with impersonations and disguises.
Rehearsing identities is, in the corresponding rituals, a very strictly regulated procedure. But people unavoidably acquire a very important social dexterity: to be able to become other, to be able to be in someone else’s place. It is here that the power of inhabiting thresholds, in-between space-time, lies.
To be able to experience a change in identity, to be able to rehearse, test, check and visit otherness means potentially to acquire the power, to negotiate with otherness. For Turner these initiating visits to otherness revealingly expose learned habits and can open identities to unexpected changes.
Recognizing, opening, creating and inhabiting thresholds can become an important characteristic of emergent emancipatory spatialities. Opportunities for encounter with otherness, which activate comparisons, negotiations and inventive transformations, are necessary for any attempt to go beyond existing social taxonomies and values.
14
The Theory of Spontaneous Order
In every block of houses, in every street, in every town ward, groups of volunteers will have been organised, and these commissariat volunteers will find it easy to work in unison and keep in touch with each other ... if only the self-styled “scientific” theorists do not thrust themselves in ... Or rather let them expound their muddle- headed theories as much as they like, provided they have no authority, no power! And that admirable spirit of organisation inherent in the people ... but which they have so seldom been allowed to exercise, will initiate, even in so huge a city as Paris, and in the midst of a revolution, an immense guild of free workers, ready to furnish to each and all the necessary food.
Give the people a free hand, and in ten days the food service will be conducted with admirable regularity. Only those who have never seen the people hard at work, only those who have passed their lives buried among documents, can doubt it. Speak of the organising genius of the “Great Misunderstood”, the people, to those who have seen it in Paris in the days of the barricades, or in London during the great dock strike, when half a million of starving folk had to be fed, and they will tell you how superior it is to the official ineptness of Bumbledom.
Peter Kropotkin, The Conquest of Bread
An important component of the anarchist approach to organisation is what we might call the theory of spontaneous order: the theory that, given a common need, a collection of people will, by trial and error, by improvisation and experiment, evolve order out of the situation — this order being more durable and more closely related to their needs than any kind of externally imposed authority could provide. Kropotkin derived his version of this theory from his observations of the history of human society as well as from the study of the events of the French Revolution in its early stages and from the Paris Commune of 1871, and it has been witnessed in most revo- lutionary situations, in the ad hoc organisations that spring up after natural disasters, or in any activity where there are no existing organisational forms or hierarchical authority. The principle of authority is so built in to every aspect of our society that it is only in revolutions, emergencies and “happenings” that the principle of spontaneous order emerges. But it does provide a glimpse of the kind of human behaviour that the anarchist regards as “normal” and the authoritarian sees as unusual.
16
Machine and the Engine
…Like any machine, it must have an engine. And this is where we encounter the exquisitely thermodynamic problem of its functioning, i.e. its ability to produce, transform, and transfer information. For all cybernetic systems are confronted with inevitable entropic drives which threaten their integrity. It is also the inevitable function of these mechanisms to engage and interact with the volatile environments in which they find themselves. ‘No system is closed. The outside always seeps in...’. Systems cannot stop interacting with the world which lies outside of themselves, otherwise they would not be dynamic or alive. A closed, self-subsistent cybernetic system that maintains perfect equilibrium is a dead system (i.e. it ceases to be a system); or else it contains hidden mechanisms that place it in a condition of absolute dependency upon that same outside from which it desperately seeks to emancipate itself. In magical thought, the relationship with the outside is regulated through the homeostatic mechanism of ritual sacrifice. By the same token, it is precisely these engagements which ensure that homeostasis, perfect balance, or equilibrium, is only ever an ideal. Neither animals nor machines work according to such principles. Long before Wiener gave them a name, it was clear that cybernetic systems could run into ‘several possible sorts of behaviour considered undesirable by those in search of equilibrium. Some machines went into runaway [...] Others—still worse—embarked on sequences of behaviour in which the amplitude of their oscillation would itself oscillate or would become greater and greater,’ turning themselves into systems with ‘positive gain, variously called escalating or vicious circles.’ Unlike the negative feedback loop which turns everything to the advantage of the security of the whole, these runaway, schismogenetic processes take off on their own to the detriment of the stability of the whole….
Therefore the sage takes his place over the people yet is no burden; takes his place ahead of the people yet causes no obstruction. That is why the empire supports him joyfully and never tires of doing so. It is because he does not contend that no one in the empire is in a position to contend with him.
– Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching
The history of the modern State is the history of its struggle against its own impossibility—that is, the history of its being overwhelmed by the profusion of techniques it has deployed to ward off this impossibility. Empire is, to the contrary, the assumption of both this impossibility and these techniques. To be more exact, we will say that Empire is the turning inside out of the liberal State. We have, then, the official history of the modern State, namely the grand juridico-formal narrative of sovereignty: centralization, unification, rationalization.
And also there is a counter-history, which is the history of its impossibility. You have to look into this other history—the growing mass of practices that must be adopted, the apparatuses put in place to keep up the fiction—to grasp a genealogy of Empire. In other words, the history of Empire does not take up where the modern State leaves off. Empire is what, at a certain point in time (let's say 1914), allows the modern State to live on as a pure appearance, as a lifeless form.
The discontinuity here is not in the passage from one order to another, but cuts across time like two parallel but heterogeneous planes of consistency, just like the two histories of the State. When we speak of a turning inside out, we are referring to the final possibility of an exhausted system, which folds back onto itself in order, in a mechanical fashion, to collapse in on itself.
The Outside becomes the Inside, and the Inside now has no limits.
What was formerly present in a certain defined place now becomes possible everywhere.
What is turned inside out no longer exists in a positive way, in a concentrated form, but remains in a suspended state as far as the eye can see.
It is the final ruse of the system, the moment when it is most vulnerable and, at the same time, most impervious to attack. The operation whereby the liberal State is imperially folded back can be described as follows: The liberal State developed two sub-institutional practices that it used to control and keep at bay the population. On the one hand, there was the police in the original sense of the term ("The police keeps watch over the well-being of men [...] the police keeps watch over the living" [N. De La Mare, Traité de la police, 1705]) and, on the other hand, publicity, as a sphere equally accessible to all and therefore independent of every form-of-life. Each of these instances or agencies is in fact a set of practices and apparatuses with no real continuity other than their convergent effects on the population—the first on its "body," the second on its "soul." All that was needed to consolidate power was to control the social definition of happiness and to maintain order in the public sphere. These concerns allowed the liberal State to remain thrifty.
Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the police and publicity developed in a way that both served and yet exceeded the institutions of the nation-state. It is only with World War I that they become the key nexus for how the liberal State is folded up into Empire.
Then we witness something curious. By connecting them to each other in view of the war effort, and in a manner largely independent of national States, these subinstitutional practices give birth to the two super-institutional poles of Empire: the police becomes Biopower, and publicity is transformed into the Spectacle. From this point on, the State does not disappear, it is simply demoted beneath a transterritorial set of autonomous practices: Spectacle, Biopower.
The liberal hypothesis collapses in 1914, at the end of the "Hundred Years' Peace" that resulted from the Congress of Vienna. When the Bolshevik coup d'État occurred in 1917, each nation found itself torn in two by the global class struggle, and all illusions about an international order had seen their day. In the global civil war, the process of polarization penetrates the frontiers of the State. If any order could still be glimpsed, it would have to be super-national.
If Empire is the assumption of the modern State's impossibility, it is also the assumption of the impossibility of imperialism. Decolonization was an important moment in the establishment of Empire, logically marked by the proliferation of puppet States.
Decolonization means: the elaboration of new forms of horizontal, sub-institutional power that function better than the old ones.
The modern State's sovereignty was fictional and personal. Imperial sovereignty is pragmatic and impersonal. Unlike the modern State, Empire can legitimately claim to be democratic, insofar as it neither banishes nor privileges a priori any form-of-life.
And for good reason, since it is what assures the simultaneous attenuation of all forms-of-life, as well as their free play within this attenuation.
Amidst the ruins of medieval society the modern State tried to reconstitute this unity around the principle of representation—that is, on the presumption that one part of society would be able to incarnate the totality of society. The term "incarnate" is not used here arbitrarily.
The doctrine of the modern State explicitly secularizes one of the most fearsome operations of Christian theology: the one whose dogma is expressed by the Nicene Creed. Hobbes devotes a chapter to it in the appendix of Leviathan. His theory of personal sovereignty is based on the doctrine that makes the Father, Son and Holy Ghost the three persons of God, "meaning that each can play its own role but also that of the others." This makes it possible for the Sovereign to be defined as an actor on behalf of those who have decided to "appoint one man or assembly of men to bear their person" and thus "every one to own and acknowledge himself to be author of whatsoever he that so beareth their person shall act, or cause to be acted, in those things which concern the common peace and safety, and therein to submit their wills" (Leviathan (1)). If, in the iconophilic theology of Nicea, Christ or the icon manifests not the presence of God but his essential absence, his sensible withdrawal, his unrepresentability, then for the modern State the personal sovereign manifests the fictive withdrawal of "civil society." The modern State is conceived therefore as a part of society that takes no part in society, and can for this reason represent it as a whole.
(1 Hobbes, Leviathan, 109.)
The various bourgeois revolutions never tampered with the principle of personal sovereignty, insofar as an assembly or leader, elected directly or indirectly, never deviated from the idea of a possible representation of the social totality, i.e. of society as a totality. As a result, the passage from the absolutist State to the liberal State only managed to liquidate the one person—the King—who liquidated the medieval order from which he emerged, and whose last living vestige he seemed to be. It is only as an obstacle to his own historical processes that the king was judged: he composed his own sentence, his death the period at the end of it.
Only the democratic principle, promoted from within by the modern State, was able finally to bring down the modern State. The democratic idea—the absolute equivalence of all forms-of-life—is also an imperial idea. Democracy is imperial to the extent that the equivalence among forms-of-life can only be implemented negatively, by preventing, with all the means at its disposal, ethical differences from attaining in their play an intensity that makes them political. This would introduce lines of rupture, alliances and discontinuities into the smooth space of demokratic society that would ruin the equivalence of form-of-life. This is why Empire and demokracy are nothing, positively, other than the free play of attenuated forms-of-life, as when one speaks of an attenuated virus that is used as a vaccine. In one of his only texts on the State, the Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right" Marx in this way defended the imperial perspective of the "material State," which he opposed to the "political State," in the following terms:
"The political republic is democracy within the abstract form of the state. Hence the abstract state-form of democracy is the republic."
"Political life in the modern sense is the Scholasticism of popular life. Monarchy is the fullest expression of this estrangement. The republic is the negation of this estrangement within its own sphere."
"[A]ll forms of the state have democracy for their truth, and for that reason are false to the extent that they are not democracy." "In true democracy the political state disappears." (2)
2 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel's "Philosophy of Right" (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 31, 32, emphasis Tiqqun.
Empire can only be understood through the biopolitical turn of power. Like Biopower, Empire does not correspond to any positive juridical framework, and is not a new institutional order.
It instead designates a reabsorption or retraction of the old substantial sovereignty. Power has always circulated in microphysical, familiar, everyday, material and linguistic apparatuses. It has always cut across the life and bodies of subjects. What is novel about Biopower is that it is nothing more than this. Biopower is a form of power that no longer rises up over against "civil society" as a sovereign hypostasis, as a Great Exterior Subject. It can no longer be isolated from society. Biopower means only that power adheres to life and life to power. Thus, from the perspective of its classical form, power is changing radically before our eyes, from a solid to a gaseous, molecular state.
To coin a formula: Biopower is the SUBLIMATION of power. Empire cannot be conceived outside of this understanding of our age. Empire is not and cannot be a power separated from society. Society won't stand for that, just as it crushes the final remnants of classical politics with its indifference. Empire is immanent to "society." It is "society" insofar as society is a power.
Empire exists "positively" only in crisis, only as negation and reaction. If we too belong to Empire, it is only because it is impossible to get outside it.
The imperial regime of pan-inclusion always follows the same plot: something, for whatever reason, manifests its foreignness to Empire, or shows itself trying to escape from it, trying to have done with it.
This state of affairs constitutes a crisis, and Empire responds with a state of emergency. It is at this passing moment, during one of these reactive operations, that THEY can say: "Empire exists."
It is not that imperial society represents an achievement, a plenitude without remainder. The space left free by the deposing of personal sovereignty remains just that, empty vis-à-vis society.
This space, the place of the Prince, is currently occupied by the Nothing of an imperial Principle that materializes and comes into focus only when it strikes like lightning at anything pretending to remain outside of it. This is why Empire is not only without a government, but also without an emperor: there are only acts of government, all equally negative. In our historical experience, the phenomenon that comes closest to this state of affairs is still the Terror.
Where "universal freedom ... can produce neither a positive work nor a deed; there is left for it only negative action; it is merely the fury of destruction"
-Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 359
Empire functions best when crisis is ubiquitous. Crisis is Empire's regular mode of existence, in the same way that an insurance company comes into being only when there's an accident. The temporality of Empire is the temporality of emergency and catastrophe.
Empire is not the crowning achievement of a civilization, the end-point of its ascendent arc. Rather it is the tail-end of an inward turning process of disaggregation, as that which must check and if possible arrest the process. Empire is therefore the katechon.
"'Empire' in this sense meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon"
-Carl Schmitt, The Nomos of the Earth, 59–60
Empire sees itself as the final bulwark against the eruption of chaos, and acts with this minimal perspective in mind.
At first glance, Empire seems to be a parodie recollection of the entire, frozen history of a "civilization." And this impression has a certain intuitive correctness. Empire is in fact civilization's last stop before it reaches the end of its line, the final agony in which it sees its life pass before its eyes.
With the liberal State being turned inside out into Empire, ONE has passed from a world partitioned by the Law to a space polarized by norms. The Imaginary Party is the other, hidden side of this turning inside out.
What do we mean by Imaginary Party? That the Outside has moved inside. This turning inside out happened noiselessly, peacefully, like a thief in the night. At first glance, it seems nothing has changed, ONE is simply struck by the sudden futility of so many familiar things, and the old divisions that can no longer account for what is happening are now suddenly so burdensome.
Some nagging little neurosis makes ONE still want to distinguish just from unjust, healthy from sick, work from leisure, criminal from the innocent and the ordinary from the monstrous. But let's admit the obvious: these old divisions no longer have any meaning.
It is not as if they have been suppressed, though. They are still there, but they are inconsequential. The norm hasn't abolished the Law, it has merely voided the Law and commandeered it for its own purposes, putting it in the service of its own immanent practices of calculation and administration. When the Law enters the forcefield of the norm, it loses the last vestiges of transcendence, from now on functioning only in a land of indefinitely renewed state of exception.
The state of exception is the normal regime of the Law.
There is no visible Outside any more—nothing like a pure Nature, the Madness of the classical age, the Great Crime of the classical age, or the Great classical Proletariat with its actually-existing Homeland of Justice and Liberty. These are all gone, mostly because they have lost their imaginary force of attraction. The Outside is now gone precisely because today there is exteriority at every point of the biopolitical tissue. Madness, crime or the hungry proletariat no longer inhabit a defined or recognized space, they no longer form a world unto themselves, their own ghetto with or without walls.
With the dissipation of the social, these terms become reversible modalities, a violent latency, a possibility each and every body might be capable of. This suspicion is what justifies the continuous socialization of society, the perfecting of the microapparatuses of control.
Not that Biopower claims to govern men and things directly—instead, it governs possibilities and conditions of possibility.
Everything that had its source in the Outside—illegality, first of all, but also misery and death is administered and therefore taken up in an integration that positively eliminates these exteriorities in order to allow them to recirculate. This is why there is no such thing as death within Biopower: there is only murder and its circulation.
Through statistics, an entire network of causalities embeds each living being in the collection of deaths his own survival requires (the dropouts, the unfortunate Indonesians, workplace accidents, Ethiopians of all ages, celebrities killed in car crashes, etc.). But it is also in a medical sense that death has become murder, with the proliferation of "brain dead corpses," these "living dead" who would have passed away a long time ago if they weren't kept alive artificially as organ banks for some absurd transplant, if they weren't being kept alive in order to be passed away. The truth is that now there is no outside that can be identified as such, since the threshold itself has become the intimate condition of all that exists.
The Law sets up divisions and institutes distinctions, it circumscribes what defies it and recognizes an orderly world to which it gives both form and duration. The Law ceaselessly names and enumerates what it outlaws.
The Law says its outside.
The inaugural gesture of the Law iss to exclude, and first of all its own foundation: sovereignty, violence. But the norm has no sense of foundation. It has no memory, staying as close as possible to the present, always claiming to be on the side of immanence. While the Law gives a face and honors the sovereignty of what is outside it, the norm is acephalous—headless—and is delighted every time a king's head gets cut off. The norm has no hieros, no place of its own, acting invisibly over the entirety of the gridded, edgeless space it distributes. No one is excluded here or expelled into some identifiable outside. What is called "excluded" is, for the norm, just a modality of a generalized inclusion.
It is therefore no longer anything but a single, solitary field, homogenous but diffracted into an infinity of nuances, a regime of limitless integration that sets out to maintain the play between forms-of-life at the lowest possible level of intensity.
In this space, an ungraspable agency of totalization reigns, dissolving, digesting, absorbing and deactivating all alterity a priori. A process of omnivorous immanentization—reducing everything to nothing—deploys itself on a planetary scale. The goal: make the world into continuous biopolitical tissue. And all this time, the norm stands watch.
Under the regime of the norm, nothing is normal, but everything must be normalized. What functions here is a positive paradigm of power. The norm produces all that is, insofar as the norm is itself, as THEY say, the ens realissimum. Whatever does not belong to its mode of unveiling is not, and whatever is not cannot belong to its mode of unveiling. Under the regime of the norm, negativity is never recognized as such, but reduced to a simple default in relation to the norm, a hole to mend into the global biopolitical tissue. Negativity, this power that is not supposed to exist, is thus logically abandoned to a traceless disappearance. Not without reason, since the Imaginary Party is the Outside of the world without Outside, the essential discontinuity lodged at the heart of a world rendered continuous.
The Imaginary Party is the seat, and the siege, of potentiality.
There is no better illustration of how the norm has subsumed the Law than to consider how the old territorial States of Europe "abolished" their borders after the Schengen Agreement. This abolition of borders, which is to say the abandonment of the most sacred aspect of the modern State, does not mean of course that the States themselves will disappear, but rather it signals the permanent possibility of their restoration, if the circumstances demand it. In this sense, when borders are abolished, customs checkpoints in no way disappear but are extended to virtually all places and times. Under Empire borders come to resemble what are called "mobile" customs checkpoints, which can be placed, impromptu, at any point within a territory.
Empire has never had any juridical or institutional existence, because it needs none.
Unlike the modern State, which pretended to be an order of Law and of Institutions, Empire is the guarantor of a reticular proliferation of norms and apparatuses.
Under normal circumstances, Empire is these apparatuses.
Every time Empire intervenes, it leaves behind norms and apparatuses that allow the crisis site to be managed as a transparent space of circulation. This is how imperial society makes itself known: as an immense articulation of apparatuses that pump an electrical life into the fundamental inertia of the biopolitical tissue.
Because the reticular gridwork of imperial society is always threatened with breakdowns, accidents and blockages, Empire makes sure to eliminate resistances to circulation, liquidating all obstacles to penetration, making everything transparent to social flows.
Empire is also what secures transactions and guarantees what might be called a social superconductivity.
This is why Empire has no center: it makes it possible for each node of its network to be a center.
All we can ever make out along the global assemblage of local apparatuses are the condensations of forces and the deployment of negative operations that ensure the progress of imperial transparency.
Spectacle and Biopower assure not just the intensive continuity of flows, but the transitive normalization—their being made equivalent—of all situations as well.
There are no doubt "overwhelmed" zones where imperial control is denser than elsewhere, where each small segment of what exists pays its due to the general panopticism, and where at a certain point the population can no longer be distinguished from the police.
Inversely, there are also zones where Empire seems absent and lets everyone know it "doesn't dare set foot there." This is because it calculates, weighs, evaluates and then decides to be here or there, to show up or withdraw, all for tactical reasons.
Empire is not everywhere, and nowhere is it absent. Unlike the modern State, Empire has no interest in being the summit, in being the always visible and resplendent sovereign.
Empire only claims to be the last resort in each situation. Just as there is nothing natural about a "nature park" created by the administrators of artificialization who have decided it is preferable to leave it "intact," so too Empire is present even when it is effectively absent, present as withdrawn.
Empire is such that it can be everywhere.
It resides in each point of the territory, in the gap between normal and exceptional situations. Empire has the power to be weak.
The logic of the modern State is a logic of the Law and the Institution. Institutions and the Law are deterritorialized and, in principle, abstract.
In this way, they distinguish themselves from the customs they replace, customs which are always local, ethically permeated, and always open to existential contestation.
Institutions and the Law loom over men, their permanence drawn from their transcendence, from their own inhuman self-assertion. Institutions, like the Law, establish lines of partition and give names in order to separate and put things in order, putting an end to the chaos of the world, or rather corralling chaos into the delimited space of the unauthorized—Crime, Madness, Rebellion. And both Law and Institutions are united in the fact that neither has any need to justify itself to anyone, no matter what. "The Law is the Law," says the man.
Even if it does not mind using them as weapons, as it does with everything else, Empire knows nothing about the abstract logic of the Law and the Institution. Empire knows only norms and apparatuses.
Like apparatuses, norms are local. They take effect in the here and now insofar as they function, empirically. Norms hide neither their origin nor their reason for existing—these are to be found outside the norms themselves, in the conflicts which give rise to them.
What is essential today is not some preliminary declaration of universality that would then strive to enforce itself. Attention must be paid to operations, to the pragmatic. There is indeed a totalization here as well, but it does not emerge out of a desire for universalization. It takes place through the articulation of apparatuses, through the continuity of the circulation between them.
Under Empire we witness a proliferation of the legal, a chronic boom in juridical production. This proliferation, far from confirming some sort of triumph of the Law instead verifies its total devaluation, its definitive obsolescence.
Under the regime of the norm, the Law becomes but one instrument among many for retroactively acting on society, an instrument that can be as easily customized—and subject to reversal of sense—as all the others. It is a technique of government, a way of putting an end to a crisis, nothing more.
What the modern State elevated to the sole source of right—the Law—is now nothing more than one of the expressions of the social norm. Even judges no longer have the subordinate task of qualifying facts and applying the Law, but the sovereign function of evaluating the opportunity such and such a judgment affords.
The vagueness of laws, which increasingly have recourse to the nebulous criteria of normality, are no longer seen as hindering the laws' effectiveness; to the contrary, this vagueness becomes a condition for the survival of these laws and for their applicability to any and every case that might come before them.
When judges "legislate from the bench" and the social is increasingly juridicized, they are doing nothing other than ruling in the name of the norm.
Under Empire, an "anti-mafia" trial does nothing but celebrate the triumph of one mafia—the judges—over another—the judged. Here, the sphere of Law has become one weapon among others in the universal deployment of hostility.
Empire by contrast doesn't take well to this same language, nevertheless making use of it from time to time when the opportunity is right; and even then it continues to speak the only language it knows, the language of effectiveness, of the effective capacity to re-establish the normal situation, to produce public order, the smooth general functioning of the Machine.
Two increasingly similar figures of this sovereignty of effectiveness make their presence felt thus in the very convergence of their functions: the cop and the doctor.
"The law should be used as just another weapon in the government's arsenal, and in this case it becomes little more than a propaganda cover for the disposal of unwanted members of the public. For this to happen efficiently, the activities of the legal services have to be tied into the war effort in as discreet a way as possible."
–Frank Kitson, Low Intensity Operations: Subversion, Insurgency, Peace-Keeping (1971).
"Citizen" is anything that shows some degree of ethical neutralization, some attenuation that is compatible with Empire. Difference is not done away with completely, as long as it is expressed against the backdrop of a general equivalence. Indeed, difference is the elementary unit used in the imperial management of identities. If the modern State reigned over the "phenomenal republic of interests," (3). Empire can be said to reign over the phenomenal republic of differences. It is through this depressing masquerade that all expressions of forms-of-life get conjured away.
Imperial power stays impersonal because it has the power that personalizes. Imperial power totalizes because it is itself what individuates. We are dealing not so much with individualities and subjectivities, but with individuations and subjectivations—transitory, disposable, modular.
3- Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 46.
Empire is the free play of simulacra.
Empire's unity is not imposed on reality as an extra, supplementary form. It comes about at the lowest level, on a molecular scale.
The unity of Empire is nothing other than the global uniformity of attenuated forms-of-life produced through the conjunction of Spectacle and Biopower.
Its unity is more a moiré pattern than multicolored: made up of differences, but only in relation to the norm. Normalized differences. Statistical deviations. Under Empire, nothing forbids you from being a little bit punk, slightly cynical, or moderately S & M. Empire tolerates all transgressions, provided they remain soft. We are no longer dealing with a voluntaristic a priori totalization, but with molecular calibrations of subjectivities and bodies. "[A]s power becomes more anonymous and more functional, those on whom it is exercised tend to be more strongly individualized" ( Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vrntage, 1977).
"And the whole inhabited world, as it were attending a national festival, has laid aside its old dress, the carrying of weapons, and has turned, with full authority to do so, to adornments and all kinds of pleasures. And all the other sources of contention have died out in the cities, but this single rivalry holds all of them, how each will appear as fair and charming as possible. Everything is full of gymnasiums, fountains, gateways, temples, handicrafts, and schools. And it can be said in medical terms that the inhabited world was, as it were, ill at the start and has now recovered. [...] the whole earth has been adorned like a pleasure garden. Gone beyond land and sea is the smoke rising from the fields and the signal fires of friend and foe, as if a breeze had fanned them away. There has been introduced instead every kind of charming spectacle and a boundless number of games. [...] Therefore those outside your empire, if there are any, alone should be pitied since they are deprived of such advantages."
–Aelius Aristides, "Regarding Rome," 144 CE
From here on out, citizen will mean: citizen of Empire.
In the Roman empire, citizenship was not limited to Romans. It was open to anyone who, in each province of the Empire, demonstrated a sufficient ethical conformity with the Roman model. Citizenship, in its juridical sense, merely corresponded to someone's own labor of self-neutralization. As you can see, the term "citizen" does not belong to the language of the Law, but to that of the norm. All appeals to the citizen are, and have been since the French Revolution, emergency measures: a practice that corresponds with a state of exception ("the Homeland is in danger," "the Republic is threatened," etc.). The appeal to the citizen is therefore never an appeal to a legal subject, but an injunction imposed on the legal subject to go beyond itself and give up its life, to behave in an exemplary fashion, and to be more than a legal subject in order to remain one.
The only thought compatible with Empire—when it is not sanctioned as its official thought—is deconstruction. Those who celebrated it as "weak thought" were right on target. Deconstruction is a discursive practice guided by one unique goal: to dissolve and disqualify all intensity, while never producing any itself.
Nietzsche, Artaud, Schmitt, Hegel, Saint Paul, German romanticism, and surrealism: deconstruction's task is, apparently, to produce fastidious commentaries targeting anything that, in the history of thought, has carried any intense charge. This new form of policing that pretends to be a simple extension of literary criticism beyond its date of expiration is, in fact, quite effective in its own domain. It won't be long before it has managed to rope off and quarantine everything from the past that is still a little virulent within a cordon sanitaire of digressions, reservations, language games and winks, using its tedious tomes to prevent the prolongation of thought into gesture—in short, to struggle tooth and nail against the event. No surprise that this wave of global prattle emerged out of a critique of metaphysics understood as privileging the "simple and immediate" presence of speech over writing, of life over the text and its multiplicity of significations. It would certainly be possible to interpret deconstruction as a simple Bloomesque reaction. The deconstructionist, incapable of having an effect on even the smallest detail of his world, being literally almost no longer in the world and having made absence his permanent mode of being, tries to embrace his Bloomhood with bravado. He shuts himself up in that narrow, closed circle of realities that still affect him at all—books, texts, films, and music—because these things are as insubstantial as he is. He can no longer see anything in what he reads that might relate to life, and instead sees what he lives as a tissue of references to what he has already read. Presence and the world as a whole, insofar as Empire allows, are for him purely hypothetical. Reality and experience are for him nothing more than dubious appeals to authority. There is something militant about deconstruction, a militancy of absence, an offensive retreat into the closed but indefinitely recombinable world of significations. Indeed, beneath an appearance of complacency, deconstruction has a very specific political function. It tries to pass off anything that violently opposes Empire as barbaric, it deems mystical anyone who takes his own presence to self as a source of energy for his revolt, and makes anyone who follows the vitality of thought with a gesture a fascist. For these sectarian agents of preventive counter-revolution, the only thing that matters is the extension of the epochal suspension that fuels them. Immediacy, as Hegel has already explained, is the most abstract determination. And our deconstructionists know well that the future of Hegel is Empire.
Ideally, the cybernetic reduction would posit Bloom as a transparent conductor of social information.
Empire would gladly represent itself, then, as a network in which everyone would be a node. In each of these nodes, the norm makes up the element of social conductivity. Even before the circulation of information, a biopolitical causality passes through it with more or less resistance, depending upon the gradient of normality.
Each node—country, body, firm, political party—is held responsible for its resistance.
This is even the case to the point of the absolute non-conductivity, to the point of the refraction of flows. The node in question will then be declared guilty, criminal, inhuman, and will become the object of an imperial intervention.
Because no one is ever depersonalized enough to be a perfect conductor of these social flows, everyone is always already, as the very condition of survival, at fault in the eyes of the norm, a norm that will only be established after the fact, after the intervention. We call this state a blank blame. (5) It is the moral condition of the citizen of Empire. It is the reason why there are, in fact, no citizens, but only proofs of citizenship.
5 - "Faute blanche." This phrase can evoke "carte blanche" or "blank check." In these cases, the term "blanche" refers to something unspecified, a quantity of money or an offense, crime or "fault."
The networks informality, plasticity, and opportunistic incompleteness offer a model of weak solidarity from whose loose bonds imperial "society" is woven.
What is finally made clear by the planetary circulation of responsibility—when the world is cross-examined to the point where even "natural disasters" are perpetrated by some guilty party—is how all causality is essentially constructed.
Empire has the habit of launching "public awareness campaigns." These amount to a deliberate heightening of the sensitivity of those social sensors alert to this or that phenomenon—that is, in the creation of this phenomenon as a phenomenon, and in the construction of the causal chains that allow for its materialization.
The jurisdiction of the imperial police, of Biopower is limitless, since what it must circumscribe and put a stop to does not exist at the level of the actual but at the level of the possible. The discretionary power here is called prevention and the risk factor is this possible, existing everywhere in actuality as possible, which is the basis for Empire's universal right to intervene.
The enemy of Empire is within. The enemy is the event. It is everything that might happen, everything that might disturb the mesh of norms and apparatuses. Logically therefore the enemy, in the form of risk, is omnipresent. And concern is the only acknowledged reason for the brutal imperial interventions against the Imaginary Party: "Look how ready we are to protect you, since as soon as something exceptional happens—obviously without taking into account quaint customs like law or jurisprudence—we are going to intervene using any means necessary" (Foucault).
There is obviously a certain Ubuesque quality to imperial power, which paradoxically seems ill-fit to undermine the effectiveness of the Machine. In the same way, there is a baroque aspect to the juridical framework under which we live. In fact, it seems vital to Empire that it maintain a certain amount of permanent confusion around enforced rules, rights, and the various authorities and their competencies. It is this confusion that enables Empire to deploy, when the time comes, any means necessary.
It is no use distinguishing between cops and citizens. Under Empire, the difference between the police and the population is abolished. At any moment each citizen of Empire can, through a characteristically Bloomesque reversal, reveal himself a cop.
Foucault dates back to the second half of the eighteenth century the origin of the idea that "the delinquent is the enemy of society as a whole." Under Empire, this notion extends to the totality of the reconstructed social cadaver. Both for himself and for others, and in virtue of his status as blank blame, each person is a risk, a potential hostis. This kind of schizoid situation explains the revival, under Empire, of mutual monitoring and informing, of policing both within and among citizens. For it is not only that the citizens of Empire denounce anything that seems "abnormal" to them with such fervor that even the police can no longer keep up, it is that they sometimes denounce themselves in order to have done with the blank blame they feel, so that their still unresolved status, and the uncertainty as to their membership within the biopolitical tissue, might be cleared up with the fell swoop of judgment. And it is through this mechanism of generalized terror that all risky dividuals are everywhere pushed out, quarantined, spontaneously isolated—all those who, being subject to imperial intervention, could bring down with them, through capillary action, the adjoining links in the network.
"—How would you define the police?
The police come from the public and the public forms a part of the police. Those on the police force are paid to devote all their time to carrying out their duties, but these duties are equally those of all their fellow citizens.
—What is the primary role of the police?
They have an expanded mission, focused on the resolution of problems, what is known as 'problem-solving policing.'
—How do you measure the effectiveness of the police?
The lack of crime and lawlessness.
—What specifically do the police take care of?
The problems and concerns of the citizens.
—What determines the effectiveness of the police?
The cooperation of the public.
—How do you define professionalism in a police force?
An ability to remain in contact with the population in order to anticipate problems.
—What opinion do the police have of judicial proceedings?
They are one means among many."
–Jean-Paul Brodeur, Professor of Criminology, Montréal. Quoted in Guide pratique de la police de proximité [Practical Guide to Community Policing], Paris, March 2000.
Imperial sovereignty means that no point of space or time and no element of the biopolitical tissue is safe from intervention. The electronic archiving of the world, generalized traceability, the fact that the means of production are becoming just as much a means of control, the reduction of the juridical edifice to a mere weapon in the arsenal of the norm—all this tends to turn everyone into a suspect.
A portable phone becomes a black box, a mode of payment a record of your buying habits, your parents turn into snitches, a telephone bill becomes a file on your acquaintances: the whole overproduction of useless personal information ends up being critically important simply because at any moment it is usable. This available is what bathes every gesture in the shadow of threat. That Empire leaves this information relatively unexploited indicates precisely its own sense of security, how little, for now, it feels threatened.
Empire is scarcely thought, and perhaps hardly thinkable, within the western tradition, that is, within the limits of the metaphysics of subjectivity. The best THEY have been able to do is to think the surpassing of the modern State on its own grounds. This has spawned a number of unsustainable projects for a universal State, whether in the form of the speculations on cosmopolitan right that would establish perpetual peace, or as the ridiculous hope for a global democratic state, which is the ultimate goal of Negriism.
Those who cannot manage to imagine the world except through the categories allotted to them by the liberal State, commonly pretend to confuse Empire, here denounced as "globalization," with one or another super-national organization (the IMF, the World Bank, the wto or the UN, or less often NATO and the European Commission).
From counter-summit to counter-summit, we see our "anti-globalization" movement consumed more and more by doubt: What if inside these pompous edifices, behind these proud facades, there WAS NOTHING? Intuitively they realize that these grand global shells are empty, and this is, moreover, why they besiege them. These palace walls are made from nothing but good intentions. They were constructed each in their time as a reaction to some world crisis, and since then have been left there, uninhabited, unusable for anything, to serve, for example, as a decoy for the dissenting herds of Negriism.
It is hard to understand what someone is driving at when, after a lifetime of disavowals, he asserts in an article tided "'Empire,' The Ultimate Stage of Imperialism" that "in the current imperial phase, there is no more imperialism," (6) or when he proclaims that the dialectic is dead and that we must "theorize and act both within and against Empire at the same time": someone who takes by turns the masochist's position of demanding that these institutions dissolve themselves and that of imploring them to exist. And so, one should not begin with his writings, but with what he has actually done. Even when it comes to understanding a book like Empire—a certain variety of theoretical mishmash that achieves in thought the same ultimate reconciliation of all incompatibilities that Empire dreams of realizing in deeds—it is more instructive to observe the practices that claim to represent it. In this way, in the discourse of the spectacular bureaucrats of the White Overalls, the phrase "people of Seattle" has been replaced, for some time now, with "multitude."
6 Antonio Negri, "L'Empire,' stade suprême de l'impérialisme," Le Monde Diplomatique (January, 2001): 3.
"The people," Hobbes reminds us, "is somewhat that is one, having one will, and to whom one action may be attributed; none of these can properly be said of a multitude. The people rules in all governments. For even in monarchies the people commands; for the people wills by the will of one man; but the multitude are citizens, that is to say, subjects. In a democracy and aristocracy, the citizens are the multitude, but the court is the people." (7)
The entire Negrian perspective boils down to this: to force Empire to take on the form of a universal State, by staging the emergence of a so-called "global civil society." Coming from people who have always aspired to hold institutional positions, who thus have always pretended to believe in the fiction of the modern State, the absurdity of this strategy becomes clear; and the evidence to the contrary in Empire itself acquires historical significance. When Negri asserts that the multitude produced Empire, that "sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of national and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule,"
"Empire is the political subject that effectively regulates these global exchanges, the sovereign power that governs the world," or again that "
[t]his order is expressed as a juridical formation," he gives an account, not of the world around him, but of his own ambitions. (8)
7 Thomas Hobbes, De Cive (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett, 1991), 250.
8 Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), xii, xi, 3.
But even if Empire could endow itself with a fake institutional facade, its actual reality would still remain concentrated in worldwide police and publicity, or, respectively, Biopower and Spectacle. The fact that the imperial wars present themselves as "international police operations" implemented by "intervention forces," the fact that war itself is put outside the law by a form of domination that wants to pass off its own military offensives as little more than domestic administration, that is, as a police and not a political matter—to ensure "tranquility, security, and order"—all this Schmitt had already anticipated sixty years ago, and in no way does it contribute to the gradual development of a "right of the police," as Negri would like to believe. The momentary spectacular consensus against this or that "rogue State," this or that "dictator" or "terrorist" only validates the temporary and reversible legitimacy of any imperial intervention that appeals to this consensus. The restaging of degraded Nuremberg Trials for any and every reason, the unilateral decision made by the national judiciaries to judge crimes that have taken place in countries where the judiciaries are not even recognized as such does not confirm the advancement of a nascent global right, but the complete subordination of the juridical order to a state of emergency wrought by the police. In conditions like this, it is not a question of agitating in support of a salutary universal State, but instead of demolishing Spectacle and Biopower.
As we are beginning to recognize, imperial domination can be described as neotaoist, since it is only in this tradition that it has been completely thought through.
Twenty-three centuries ago a Taoist theoretician asserted the following:
"Means the sage employs to lead to political order are three. The first is said to be profit; the second, authority; and the third, fame. Profit is the means whereby the people's hearts are won; authority is the means whereby to enforce orders; denomination is the common way linking superior and inferior. [...] this can be said to abolish government by means of government, abolish words by means of words." (9)
Mincing no words, he concluded: "In the perfect government, inferiors have no virtue" government is quite likely perfected.
(9) Han Fei Tzu, Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, Vol. II, trans. W. K. Liao (London: Arthur Probsthain, 1959), 229, 324. Some passages have been modified in accordance with the
French translation Tiqqun uses.
There are those who have wanted to describe the imperial period as a time of slaves without masters. Even if this is not entirely false, it would be better to describe it as a time of Mastery without masters, of the nonexistent sovereign, like Calvino's nonexistent knight, who was nothing but an empty suit of armor.
The place of the Prince remains, invisibly occupied by the principle. There is in this both an absolute rupture with and a fulfillment of the old personal sovereignty: the Master's greatest dismay has always been to have nothing but slaves for subjects. The reigning Principle carries off the paradox to which substantive sovereignty had had to yield: to have one's slaves be free men. This empty sovereignty is not, properly speaking, an historical novelty, even if it is in the West. The task here is to break with the metaphysics of subjectivity.
The Chinese, who established themselves outside of the metaphysics of subjectivity between the sixth and third century BCE, at that time formed a theory of impersonal sovereignty that is not unhelpful for understanding the current motives of imperial domination. Closely associated with this theory is the name of Han Fei Tzu, the key figure in the school known as "legalism," although this is misleading as his contributions concern more the norm than the Law.
His teachings, today collected under the title "The Tao of the Sovereign," are what motivated the founding of the first truly unified Chinese Empire, and what brought an end to the period of the "Warring States." Once the Empire was established, the Emperor, the Ch'in sovereign, had the works of Han Fei burned in 213 BCE. Only in the twentieth century was the text unearthed, a text that had prescribed the practices of the Chinese Empire at the very moment it was collapsing. Han Fei's Prince, he who holds the Position, is Prince solely because of his impersonality, because of his absence of qualities, because of his invisibility, his inactivity; he is only Prince to the extent that he is absorbed in the Tao, into the Way, into the flow of things. He is not a Prince in the sense of a person, he is a Principle, a pure void, that occupies the Position and dwells in non-acting.
For a "legalist" Empire, the State should be completely immanent to civil society:
"keeping the state safe is like having food when hungry and clothes when cold, not by will but by nature," explains Han Fei.
The function of the sovereign is here to articulate the apparatuses that will make him unnecessary, that will allow cybernetic self-regulation. If, in some respects, the teachings of Han Fei evoke certain formulations from liberal thought, it refuses their false naïveté: the teachings present themselves as a theory of absolute domination.
Han Fei exhorts the Prince to abide by the Way of Lao Tzu:
"Heaven and Earth are ruthless; they treat the myriad creatures as straw dogs. The sage is ruthless; he treats the people as straw dogs."
Even his most faithful ministers must know how insignificant they are in the eyes of the Imperial Machine—the same ministers, who only yesterday believed themselves masters—must dread that some crusade to "moralize public life" might swoop down on them, some craving for transparency.
The art of imperial domination entails being absorbed in the Principle, fading away into nothingness, seeing everything by becoming invisible, holding everything by becoming ungraspable. The withdrawal of the Prince is here nothing but the withdrawal of the Principle: establish the norms by which beings will be judged and evaluated, make sure that things are named in the "appropriate" way, regulate rewards and punishments, govern identities and attach men to them.
Keep to this and remain opaque: such is the art of empty and dematerialized domination, of the imperial domination of withdrawal.
"Tao exists in invisibility; its function, in unintelligibility. Be empty and reposed and have nothing to do. Then from the dark see defects in the light. See but never be seen. Hear but never be heard. Know but never be known. If you hear any word uttered, do not change it nor move it but compare it with the deed and see if word and deed coincide with each other. Place every official with a censor. Do not let them speak to each other. Then everything will be exerted to the utmost. Cover tracks and conceal sources. Then the ministers cannot trace origins. Leave your wisdom and cease your ability. Then your subordinates cannot guess at your limitations.
"Keep your decision and identify it with the words and deeds of your subordinates. Cautiously take the handles and hold them fast. Uproot others' want of them, smash others' thought of them, and do not let anybody covet them. [...] The Tao of the lord of men regards tranquility and humility as treasures. Without handling anything himself, he can tell skilfulness from unskilfulness [sic]; without his own concerns of mind, he can tell good from bad luck. Therefore, without uttering any word himself, he finds a good reply given; without exerting his own effort, he finds his task accomplished."
— Han Fei Tzu, "The Tao of the Sovereign"13
"The sceptre should never be shown. For its inner nature is nonassertion. The state affairs may be scattered in the four directions but the key to their administration is in the centre. The sage holding this key in hand, people from the four directions come to render him meritorious services. He remains empty and waits for their services, and they will exert their abilities by themselves. With the conditions of the four seas clearly in mind, he can see the Yang by means of the Yin. [...] He can go onward with the two handles without making any change. To apply them without cessation is said to be acting on the right way of government.
"Indeed, everything has its function; every material has its utility. When everybody works according to his special qualification, both superior and inferior will not have to do anything. Let roosters herald the dawn and let cats watch for rats. When everything exercises its special qualification, the ruler will not have to do anything. [...]
"The way to assume oneness starts from the study of terminology. When names are rectified, things will be settled. [...] Therefore, he promotes them through an examination of names. [...]
"If his own wisdom and talent are not discarded, it will be hard for him to keep a constant principle of government. [...]
"The ruler of men should often stretch the tree but never allow its branches to flourish." — Han Fei Tzu, "Wielding the Sceptre"
Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, trans. D. C. Lau (New York: Knopf, 1994), 53.
Han Fei Tzu, Complete Works of Han Fei Tzu, Vol. I, 32–33, 34.
All imperial strategies—whether the spectacular polarization of bodies toward various suitable absences or the constant terror THEY doggedly maintain—seek to ensure that Empire never appears as such, namely, as party. This peculiar kind of peace, this armed peace characteristic of imperial order, is felt to be all the more oppressive because it is itself the result of a total, mute, and continuous war.
The stakes of the offensive are not to win a certain confrontation, but rather to make sure that the confrontation does not take place, to eliminate the event at the source, to prevent any surge of intensity in the play of forms-of-life through which the political might occur.
It is a huge victory for Empire if nothing happens.
Faced with "whatever enemy," faced with the Imaginary Party, its strategy is to "replace the events that one would like to be decisive but which remain unpredictable (i.e. battle) with a series of minor but statistically consistent actions that we call, by contrast, non-battle"
Guy Brossollet, Essai sur la non-bataille (Paris: Belin, 1975), 78.
Empire does not confront us like a subject, facing us, but like an environment that is hostile to us.
20. Every worm trampled is a star.
iii
We are the waters upon which great Babylon stands.
We are the lost shreds of our dismembered mother.
We are the blood, tears, and flames.
We are the shining sparks of the fire that consumes the universe.
We multiply like insects hidden in the entrails of this filthy city.
The city is a temple turned upside down, plunged into the depths of the earth.
The more splendidly and luminously the divine order soars above, the more deep and painful grows the wound upon which we feed.
Synthetic, decadent Venuses haunt the catacombs on full-moon nights.
Tortured Apollonian bodies glow trembling in the feeble light of crypts.
In the bowels of this underworld we have erected an altar to the desperate beauty of the chthonic Aphrodite born from the foam of the sewers.
The hypertrophic development of the metropolis is its own destruction.
The more that order expands, the more its structure disintegrates, unable to maintain control over its countless fragments.
In this respect, the metropolis is like the corpse of the ancient, dismembered dragon, pullulating with larvae. What was divided in the name of order multiplies itself, doubling exponentially and suffocating the organism that gave birth to it.
The city is a frenzied ritual of death.
In this suicidal ecstasy we immolate ourselves,
burning bright like supernovas in the embrace of the night.
This mitotic replication is an irreversibly advancing process.
We should not mourn an ancient past.
Before the burning city, remember that we are the waves of Kali Yuga.
Every worm trampled is a star.
We have been illuminated by suffering.
In the liquid eyes of others we seek nothing but their necessary distance.
Eternal distance from daylight in the lost depths of this bottomless love.
The eclipsed sun is a heart peirced eternally in a cycle that can never end.
Every drop of spilled blood illuminates like a star the desperate depths of our abyss.
Dragged through the misery of these days of exile, through the streets of this city marked with scratches like a sarcophagus lost to the gaze of its god, we dig into each other, searching for the fossilised traces of the ocean from which we were torn.
Let us tear one another apart with joy: marvellous and iridescent like nebulous catastrophes.
Each one of you is a shining wound; and we wish to bleed eternally from the wounds of your burning bodies.
Babylon is a monstrous machine falling to ruin in flames.
The slaughtered dragon will come crawling back from the depths to bring the abyss upon the Earth.
Ἔπεσεν, ἔπεσεν Βαβυλὼν ἡ μεγάλη!
21
The day the walls of the cities, will crumble away
The day the walls of the cities,
will crumble away
Uncovering our naked souls
We'll all start singing,
shouting,
screaming.
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day the circus horses will stop turning around,
Running fast through the green valleys,
We'll sing,
and cry,
and shout,
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day the cars will lay in heaps,
Their wheels turning in vain
We'll run along the empty highways
Shouting, screaming, singing
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day young boys will stop becoming soldiers
And soldiers will stop playing war games
We'll sing and cry and shout
Loud, loud, loud, loud
The day will come up that we all wake up
Hearing the shouts of joy
And shouting together with the freaks
Loud, loud, loud, loud