Fake Empire; Or, Imperial Life Cannot Be Lived Rightly

The debate over possible U.S. intervention in Syria has brought to the fore a diverse set of U.S. anti-imperialist idioms. The right-wing idiom, as I understand it, is irreducibly linked to questions of expense: the expenditure of money, the expenditure of blood. The center-left idiom mobilizes considerations of expense, but these occupy a subordinate position in the general economy of its critique.  If the right worries over the loss of U.S. life and U.S. dollars, the center-left worries over the very construction of nonwhite life as losable and expendable, as well as the implication that non-NATO states’ enjoy but a tenuous sovereignty, one revocable at will by U.S. imperialists. What interests me here is that it is the nation-state that underwrites both the epistemology and political normativity of each idiom of critique. For both right and center-left, empire-building appears as a deviation from the natured (if not natural) course of being a nation—even if we know that hegemonic nations cannot not perform this deviation. But what if instead of casting empire as a (however inevitable) deviation from the script of the nation-state system, we understood empire in all its facticity, as something irreducible here and there in the world-system? To adopt this stance is already to begin asking why it is that empire can only appear as deviation. I want to suggest that the appearance of empire as deviation is an artifact of the deviousness of empire itself, a deviousness that corrupts our sense of the ontology of empire, a deviousness that constricts our understanding of the repertoires of power through which empire functions.

For, like, ever, empire has been the dominant state-form of the world-system. But in the mid-nineteenth century it became devious, was coded as deviant, and went into hiding. A wild claim, I know: the mid-nineteenth century witnessed extraordinary intensifications of empire-building on the part of both the U.S. and Great Britain. But the idiom of empire underwent a decisive shift, particularly in the realm of the emergent social sciences. This shift was long in the making, and if I had to mark a turning point—and, in my book, I do—I’d locate this point at 1776. Not simply because this was the year in which the 13 north American colonies declared independence, but because in this year Smith published his Inquiry into the Nature and the Causes of the Wealth of Nations. Smith was a keen observer of events in the colonies—he delayed publication of his tome so as to incorporate the latest news from north America—and his position, presented both in Wealth of Nations and in a minute he wrote for the Powers that Were, was an indictment of empire. Basically, the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze: the extractive mechanisms of mercantilist policies had negative effects on national economic growth, the costs of war and defense were too high, the effects of empire on colonists in the Americas and the colonized in both Indies were devastating, and so on. Smith did not dream that Britain would, in any real world sense, unilaterally institute a world of free trade or (because “free trade” necessarily entailed the dismantling of mercantilist structures, the putative raison d’être of empire) free nations. But this dream would become reality in the epistemic structure of emergent social-scientific thought from Smith on. Smithian political economy was not necessarily normatively against empire; Torrens, a somewhat heterodox Smithian, was broadly for empire, whatever that might mean. But, at a deeper epistemological level, empire was being recast as a form of polity that inherently lacked the substantiality or reality of the nation-state:

It was because the colonies were supposed to be provinces of the British empire that this expense was laid out upon them. But countries which contribute neither revenue nor military force towards the support of the empire cannot be considered as provinces. They may perhaps be considered as appendages, as a sort of splendid and showy equipage of the empire. But if the empire can no longer support the expense of keeping up this equipage, it ought certainly to lay it down. (my emphasis; Wealth of Nations, Book V, ch. 3)

All empire a fake empire.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Smith’s coding of empire as removable equipage had become commonsense among political economists, the metropole’s literati, and increasingly the broader populace. A whole set of middlebrow publications pumped out articles decrying the expense of sovereignty and the flawed economy of mercantilist policies—the Edinburgh Review, say, whose economics writing was under the control for a time of J.R. McCulloch, the dumbest person to ever get to be publicly dumb, or The Economist, a publication noteworthy for maintaining the same stupid truisms for 170 years. McCulloch's Descriptive and Statistical Account of the British Empire (1847) blithely slices off all of what we think of as the "empire" today from his two volume account of the polity. It was also the era of the Anti-Corn Law League, of Cobden and Bright running through provincial towns with the message of “Free trade or bust!” What is important here is the fact that, even as social scientists, their Gradgrindian popularizers, and free-trade activists were advocating reforms with potentially massive effects on imperial subjects in the colonies, the default unit of analysis through which these imperial-scale reforms were discussed was the nation-state. There were no Little Englanders quite as loud as the globalizers of the mid-Victorian era: indeed, they called themselves “anti-imperialists.” This anti-imperial normativity had cognitively dissonant effects. My favorite: Earl Grey, in his two-volume apology for The Colonial Policy of Lord John Russell’s Administration (1853), is forced into a bizarre position of having to explain how, as a committed free-trader, his office of Colonial Secretary should even have existed at all. Empire had become so deviant that the head imperial administrator could only discuss his occupation in a spirit of bad faith—or through a racist rationale of extending humanity to the black masses of the world, one that codes empire as gratuitous gift. My point here is that the anti-imperialism that underwrote social-scientific epistemologies was forged without reference to the actual political desires of imperial subjects. That's because empire had been re-coded as a deviant socio-politico-economic object—not as a tense and taut reality within which imperial subjects in the colonial periphery might hope to co-decide on their own political futures.

In my own area of expertise, the British West Indies, the effects of the epistemic shift to anti-imperialism and the institutional shift to an anti-imperial free-trade empire were dramatic. In 1834/1838, Britain had built an emancipatory state, intending both to free enslaved humans in the colonies and, according to a particular modality, to incorporate ex-slaves into the empire as rights-bearing subjects; in 1846, Britain liberalized its sugar markets and instituted free trade with the massive slave economies of Brazil and Cuba, effectively tanking the economies of the colonies it had just emancipated. White and black creoles hated the turn to liberal globalization: they wrote novels and poems about it, they wrote scathing pamphlets and articles, and one Trinidadian mulatto even tried founding a socialist colony in Venezuela in response. But their concerns weren’t simply about economic effects. Rather, they were concerned that Britain’s understanding of empire through the watered-down, Economist-esque optic of political economy corroded the idea of empire as a polity—one in and for which they lived and labored, one that they had helped to build, one in which they considered themselves citizen-subjects. (Today, The Economist doesn't even remember that it once struggled to boot the West Indies out of the oikos of empire, and that this struggle was foundational to its identity. Four days ago, this on their website: "The Economist was founded in 1843 by James Wilson, a British businessman who objected to heavy import duties on foreign corn. Mr Wilson and his friends in the Anti-Corn Law League were classical liberals in the tradition of Adam Smith..." In the first issue, in fact, a critique of imperial structures supporting the West Indies preceded corn law talk. When Mr Wilson stood for Parliament, he was victorious against a quasi-creole, Matthew Higgins, who spent the better part of the '40s polemicizing against Mr Wilson's liberal ilk.) In a very real way, it was among colonial subjects that one can find explicitly pro-empire people in the era of liberal globalization (roughly, 1776-1888). Not because they couldn’t live autonomous lives, not because they did not desire to enjoy freedom, but because empire was the state-form through and in which autonomy and freedom materialized and made sense. In a world not yet entirely structured by the institutional form of the nation-state, why not stake a claim to empire? The index of nineteenth-century social science’s success in coding empire as deviant is the extent to which pro-imperial politics from subaltern subjects in the colonies still makes us squeamish. We want them to have wanted autonomy in nation-statist form, and so much of the scholarship I work with looks back on this period of creole history simply to find the roots of an emergent nationalism. The problem, though, is that so many of the good mid-Victorian British liberals wanted that too; even the arch conservative Disraeli could describe the colonies (the Canadas, in particular) as “millstones” about Britain’s collective neck, fit only to be cast off. Here, the nation-state was the form to which imperial subjects would devolve when empire flung them away.

The coding of empire as deviant was functional for an irreducibly imperial Britain. It enabled it to dismantle systems of support sustaining the economies of those in the peripheral zones of imperial formations past. It enabled Britain to proleptically code new sites of imperial incursion—which piled up throughout the anti-imperial era—as sites of imperial abandonment: we’re here just as long as it takes for us to get what we want, and, like, to civilize you too. It enabled Britain to avoid or neglect the claims made by subjects in the colonial world who felt entitled to a seat at the imperial table as co-deciders in the empire's future. When empire reappeared as a viable state-form with the close of the free-trade era and the dawn of neo-mercantilism, social-scientific epistemologies barely changed. There were some dissenters (like Sealy, maybe), but on the whole the nation-state continued to reign as the social sciences' durable, substantive, real object, its assumed reality, its a priori cognitive frame; empire continued to be posed as an aberration, even if it was an aberration coextensive with history itself. We still tend to see the 30 Years War of the 20th century as a war caused by imperialism, not as a war between empires. Empire was epistemically derealized even as it realized itself across the globe.

We live with this derealization today. Indeed, many of our critiques of a possible U.S. intervention into Syria rely upon this derealization. For many of us, empire reveals itself in the deviant excess of a positive act of power—a cruise missile, a bomb, boots on the ground. For others, it equally reveals itself in the architecture of the global economy—the WTO, the IMF, and so on. But imperial sovereignty engages other forms and tactics of power, too. Today, the mode of abandoning sites of incursion precedes the very act of incursion: empire forms an exit strategy before it even enters, as Randy Martin points out. Imperialism does not simply destroy forms of life; it also produces them while always already unbinding itself from them. I’m trying to locate but can’t find an article of Iraqis who lived near U.S. bases upon the beginning of the U.S. withdrawal. The affective ranges are complicated, but they map this dynamic of power. We didn’t fucking want you here, one Iraqi boy essentially says, but now that you’re here, now that you’ve produced a form of life to which I’m bound and in which my livelihood is bound up, what gives you the right to leave? Empire is the production of a state-form in which the complexity of that question cannot get any traction, in which its articulation has no institutional effects, in which the norms and epistemes underwriting U.S. culture can only transform that question into an alibi for empire at worst or as collaborationist bargaining at best. It is as much a form of inaction as action, of abandonment as incorporation, of neglect as making the world hyper-intelligible.

My point, basically, is that no matter what Obama does, empire is real. It is a fact, one that saturates imperial inaction as much as action, one that structures imperial intervention as much as non-intervention. We cannot possibly elaborate a radical political position vis-à-vis Syria if we do not see that any decision is already bound up within an imperial calculus, bound up within a world-system in which empire is a durable, structured, and decidedly not deviant fact. We need to get that bombing or not-bombing are both positively imperial acts. This might make U.S. passport holders pessimistic, hopeless even, and in certain ways it should: Imperial life cannot be lived rightly. My point isn’t to create an apologia for bombing—I’m against it wholeheartedly, whatever my good intentions or big heart mean here. Nor is my point to dissolve the real violence of empire into some kind of night where all the imperial cows are grey (which is how works like Burbank and Cooper’s on the historical facticity of empire are being perversely taken up). My point, rather, is that to code as deviant one response to the U.S.’s perennial question—to bomb or not to bomb?—is to disavow the falsity of imperial reality itself. It is at the moment of impossible choice—one U.S. citizens are all now making, at least in their heads—that the unbearable falsity of reality reveals itself. But we can only attune ourselves to this impossibility, feel this unbearability, and let the unliveability of the real charge us to realize new worlds if we are willing to ascribe to empire the substantive, non-deviant reality that it less-than-obviously possesses.

The Good Worker, Property Destruction, and Trayvon Martin

Even before the city street fully absorbs the resonant sounding of shattering glass, the press—mainstream media or citizen journos, it doesn’t matter which—introduces us to a stock figure whose words are nonetheless accorded a special status. You’ve met him or her before. We’re now all old friends with The Worker Who Doesn’t Like Property Damage. The prolie who picks up the shards after the anarchists have had their smashy-smashy fun.  The employee who tells us he is sympathetic to the anger, but there must be another way. Days after Trayvon Martin suffered his second death—the juridico-political death that retroactively strips him of property in himself, the juridico-political death that came after but always came before, the juridico-political death that laid down the path that Zimmerman would follow—media outlets have dusted off the Good Worker and set her to work to chastise those whose outrage at Martin’s second death has taken the form of smashed windows, burning dumpsters, courthouse graffiti admonishing us to kill all the pigs.

The Good Worker knows that property damage is no way to protest the fact that Martin had no property in himself. The Good Worker knows that violence dishonors Martin’s memory. Of course, everyone already knows that; this is the USA, after all. But the Good Worker knows something special, something more. She possesses a particular knowledge derived from a quotidian detail of her life. She is the one who has to sweep up the glass. He is the one who has to wash off the paint. After the party of anarchy, the Good Worker appears on the scene and, with a sigh, dispenses his special knowledge: the infantile leftism of the anarchists and the outraged hurts no one but those whom they claim to defend.

Through the Good Worker’s resigned affect—“I’m the one who has to clean up”—liberals convert dependence on capital into an alibi for capitalism, transform the worker’s binding to the propertied as property’s normative basis. Relations between capital and labor never seem so free from compulsion as when the Good Worker laments the extra work imposed upon her by…other workers, maybe, but more likely dropouts and nogoodniks. The discordant symphony of shattering glass resolves itself in Careyite harmonies. One is encouraged to imagine that the Good Worker’s Good Boss never demands a little overtime, never subjects her to work that go beyond the parameters of the job. But that is precisely what is happening, and not just because he is sweeping up a window: the very articulation of the lament is itself a form of surplus extraction. After all, the political geography of smashy-smashy and political economy of U.S. cities ensures that the Good Worker’s skills will tend toward the communicative, the affective. He doesn’t work in a factory, but in a shoe shop, a restaurant, a boutique cheese store. And she possesses the corresponding skills: she can read inchoate desires and conduct them toward an object, respond to pressing demands, defuse awkward situations. After the windows come smashing down, the general capital exploits these affective competencies. It shoves a microphone, recorder, or someone with a Twitter account in his face and asks him to work a little bit longer, to piece the shattered norms of capitalist society back together with his words. And she does, bearing tidings that an assault on property is an assault on workers, because workers have nothing but the property of others. To harm property is to harm ourselves. The Good Worker’s stoic acceptance of her lot is converted into a quasi-proprietorial care that simulates a property in something that could never be hers.

This equation has been literalized in the case of the Oakland protests over the juridical fact that Martin had no property in himself. In an article entitled “Waiter attacked, freeway blocked in 3^rd Oakland protest,” the reader is informed, “As the night wore on, violence grew. About 11 p.m., a masked protester hit a waiter at Flora Restaurant and Bar on Telegraph Avenue in the face with a hammer as he tried to protect the restaurant, whose windows were broken two nights ago.” That this happened is undeniable, terrible, and has been condemned by pretty much everyone (minus some with what I think are fantasies of an agent provocateur). I can’t think of any anarchist who would approve non-defensive violence, particularly against a worker, during a demo; we’d gladly leave a window untouched so as to not harm a human. As the masked protestor’s action strikes us all as aberrant and abhorrent, what intrigues me is the description and naturalization of the waiter’s (named Drew Cribley) act. The causal determination of the worker’s intention is established—windows had been broken before. The deeper emplotting of the event comes at the end of the sentence, and retroactively accords his action—tensed with “as he tried…”—a drawn out, durational quality where one might only read temporal simultaneity or, indeed, spontaneity.

Yet, as another article reveals, the waiter’s defense of the restaurant was indeed spontaneous:

Cribley said his black-masked attacker passed him on the sidewalk, then started pounding on windows with a hammer when Cribley turned and told him to stop. "I kind of instinctively pushed him away," Cribley said. "That's when he turned back at me and cracked me in the cheekbone."[…] "Looking back on it, it was a really stupid thing if you thought I was going to interfere," he said.

Strikingly, Cribley didn’t think he was going to interfere, he didn’t intend to, not consciously, but a “kind of instinct[]” drove him to “turn…and [tell] him to stop.” It is as if the thump of the hammer on the window sounded out like Althusser’s policeman’s hail: Cribley can’t not turn, even if he doesn’t know what he’s turning toward, turning for. With its direct access to the habits of head and heart of liberal capitalism, the newspaper reveals why. Cribley turned to “protect the restaurant”—not himself, not a window, but the corporate/fictive entity of the restaurant. According to the paper, he wasn’t protecting an object so much as the idea of property itself.

It seems perfectly natural, even laudable, that a worker’s body would absorb the blow intended for a capitalist’s window. Indeed, the article establishes a striking fungibility between (capitalists’) objects and (workers’) bodies. Both are, in effect, absorbed into the fictive person of the firm and, indeed, are little more than the business’ precipitates, the accidental bearers of capital’s personhood. (The assault on Cribley doesn’t even make it into the lede; it is only reported after destruction of other property is detailed.) After the windows come smashing down, the press impresses the Good Worker to restore the commensurability of bodies and objects, people and things.

It was this form of commensuration that killed Trayvon Martin, and killed him twice. The trial of Zimmerman briefly extended to Martin something that could never be his—a proper claim to himself, a juridico-political identity that did not position him as some bizarre thing midway between object and person. If the court’s decision confirmed Martin’s status as a being that could be killed but not murdered, the discourse surrounding property destruction in Oakland confirms neoliberal capitalism’s commitment to reproducing and repairing that order. Through the Good Worker, it first indicts those who actively refuse this commensuration with the charge of exposing its ugliness, for directing conversation from Trayvon Martin to smashed windows (as if anarchists are to blame that the media cannot control its vulgarity, as if anarchists are to blame that the media can’t not stop a conversation about Martin because a violated property hails). It then tells us that Martin would not approve of this violence, that violence against property is no way to honor Martin. Indeed, it posthumously transforms Martin into the Good Worker, someone who knows that to harm property is to harm ourselves. Someone who knows that because we have no property, because the property of others has subsumed any claim to property in ourselves, we have to identify ourselves with it. Someone who knows that our being can be exchanged with objects and things and that, indeed, we should be prepared to “protect” windows—even if we risk extreme bodily harm in so doing.

Feigning outrage, the media is hard at work restoring the logic of racial, neoliberal capitalism that killed Trayvon Martin twice. But there’s grumbling in the ranks: the Good Worker isn’t complying. The follow up article on Cribley concludes with the paper asking him to play his appointed role.

Cribley said he sympathized with protesters and their right to voice outrage, yet feared the violence would overshadow their goals. "It sucks for the people who are really trying to be heard because it starts to take away from their message," he said. "People around the country look at Oakland and feel like there's a bunch of vandalism and violence rather than intelligent people with an actual cause they believe in. Instead of talking about that, you're talking about the guy who got hit in the face with a hammer."

Note the striking disparity between the paper’s gloss and Cribley’s words. Cribley’s final quote is introduced as if what follows is pure Good-Workerism. He’s sympathetic to the protestors, sure, but, like, he wonders: this couldn’t be the right way. But, as his words actually reveal—his words, what he thinks when his personality is not subsumed into the indirect discourse of capital’s mouthpiece—he does not disavow property destruction. He does not oppose “vandalism and violence” to “an actual cause.” Rather, “people” do, people who “feel” a certain way about Oakland because the reporter, instead of talking about the cause of the demonstrators, is busy “talking about the guy who got hit in the face with a hammer.” Cribley is basically asking the reporter, the you of his address, to write about something else, to write about the actual cause of the violence, the actual meanings it conveys. Cribley refuses to be the Good Worker, to simulate investment in an order of property, of proper being, that left him with a hammer to the head, that left a black boy twice dead in Florida.

But the propertied order has the last word: “Cribley said he'll return to work Thursday.” And the windows will be repaired by then, too.

Antebellism II: Rove, Ahab, and the War on Terror

In a previous post, I tried coming to grips with antebellism, a form of pop political sense-making that has dominated U.S. public discourse for the duration of Obama’s administration. Locating the origins of antebellism in the doubled movement of neoliberalism and globalization, I stressed that antebellist imaginaries are a compensatory mechanism that enable populations to relate to apparatuses of governance as democratic forms of politics. Antebellism recodes the withdrawal of the political into neoliberal administration as the antagonistic intensification of the political—an antagonism that opens onto a civil war that will never arrive. The problem with my reading is that its focus on questions of imagined relations to neoliberal governance leads it to privilege a nation-centered unit of analysis; I downplayed how Yankee globality affected and induced the antebellist imaginary. Neoliberalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for the emergence of antebellism; after all, we’ve lived with and through the former without the aid of the latter for some time. As I noted, Bruce Holsinger argues that U.S. culture during the Bush-Cheney years developed a neomedievalist imaginary to make sense of the U.S. global military adventurism. While this neomedievalist imaginary of course persists—culture is the graveyard of symbolics past—I want to suggest that it has been absorbed by antebellism, and that this absorption indexes an exhausted, post-Bush withdrawal from globality.

Inasmuch as a diffuse discourse can be invented or pinned down to a punctual scene of origins, Karl Rove invented antebellism. Days after Obama was sworn in as the 44^th President, Rove appeared on Fox News’ O’Reilly Factor to defend himself from John Conyers, the Democratic chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. Conyers had subpoenaed Rove to give testimony for the possible “politicization” of the Bush Justice Department. During his interview, Rove fumbles for an analogy that would adequately render the illegitimacy of Conyers’ subpoena. Rove first considers calling Conyers’ investigation a “witch hunt,” only to decide that the label is not quite right, because “I don’t think of myself as a witch.” While Rove is uncomfortable analogizing his situation to that confronting a witch (and note, incidentally, that Rove assumes that to be subject to a witch hunt one must have been a witch, as if only guilty subjects will have been hunted and prosecuted), he is perfectly comfortable comparing himself to a whale. Drawing upon the U.S. literary canon, Rove likens himself to the sublime and eponymous object of Melville’s Moby-Dick (1851): “He’s sort of like Captain Ahab and I’m the whale.” 

The analogy is ridiculous. Rove is himself uncertain of its value; the analogy only “sort of” makes sense. For one, who finishes Moby-Dick and thinks, “Yo, that whale gets me”? Moreover, Rove’s strange identification with that which resists identification’s imperium, the “inscrutable thing” of the whale, is a crazy symbolic inversion, the product of a wonderful disavowal. After all, was not Rove himself one of the many Ahabs steering Bush’s crisis-ridden Pequod? Isn’t Rove’s paranoia, his investment in the dramatics of a possible persecution, a continuation of the Ahabian paranoia constitutive of the xenophobic populism of Bush’s Terror Era? Was it not Rove who, like Ahab, garnered widespread popular support for a globe-scaling mission (the “war on terror”) that lacked a coherent aim or endpoint? And did not Rove, like the crazy captain’s biblical namesake, precipitate a war through the fabrication of a casus belli?

Yet, if Rove’s analogy is preposterous, it was also prescient. After all, Moby-Dick is not simply the narrative of a crazy Quaker seeking revenge against a whale with a taste for human limbs. It is fundamentally an allegory (and more than an allegory) of political transition, transformation, and crisis. Scholars have long understood Moby-Dick as allegorizing the sectional crises of the antebellum U.S., a crisis that could only resolve itself in the splintering of the U.S. ship of state. And thus the prescience of Rove’s analogy. Rove’s reference to Moby-Dick anticipated not so much an actual crisis as a the emergence of a discourse that wraps itself in the symbology of national scission, the emergence of a national commonsense that draws upon antebellum history to develop an allegory of impending crisis.

There’s a key difference, however, between Melville’s allegory of the antebellum and the antebellist allegory that Rove’s reference establishes. Melville’s book is a massive piece of (what Marx would call) Yankee universality: it ranges to-and-fro across the globe in order to gather symbolic resources through which to think the national. Antebellism works differently: it looks back to history to nationalize the global, to domesticate it, even to forget it. Consider the figure Rove chose alongside the wealth of alternative figures that were popular during the Bush era, figures that compose the discursive resources of neomedievalism. No one would have been surprised if Rove called Conyers a jihadi, if he said that the Dem representative was on a crusade—but he didn’t. He instead drew a figure from Moby-fucking-Dick, the U.S.-American novel.

Antebellism’s displacement of neomedievalist rhetoric tracks the absorption of the global framing required to map the Bush-era U.S. by the national-domestic. We can see this absorption of globality into nationality, of neomedievalism into antebellism, in the plot of Homeland. Homeland domesticates the figure of the terrorist, making a U.S. Marine (and then congressperson—Homeland plots like a Tom Clancy novel) the scariest jihadi around. More importantly, it aligns the scene of his operations with the cartography of the Civil War: Brody picks up his suicide vest in Gettysburg, treating the viewer with a supplementary spiel about honor or something. Homeland fights the War on Terror on the Civil War’s battlefield and, in so doing, transforms the set of references required for making sense of the former. Bush’s rampage against the world appears as an internecine struggle, a domestic squabble. If the Pequod’s voyage of revenge allows Melville to think the national through the global, Homeland simply asserts that the global never happened, not really. It transmutes Bush’s global military adventurism into a national fight pitting brother against brother, North against South, Red state versus Blue state, Brody against the bro who slept with his wife. The War on Terror tore our country apart!

The problem, of course, is that the War of Terror actually tore other countries, other lives, other bodies apart—countries that continue to mourn, lives that remain shattered, bodies that are marked by Ahabian violence. The antebellist absorption of globality, however, allows Yankees to ignore the persistence of this violence, both in terms of its aftereffects and of its continuation. Soldiers like Homeland’s Brody might be coming home, they might all come home, but the drones will remain. Military telekinetics relieve the public of the burden of bodies and, indeed, of the burden of thinking globality itself. (A Yankee peculiarity: the inability to think globality save through gunboats.) And that’s what antebellism does: it relieves an exhausted population of the affective weight of our neoliberal overlords’ Ahabian quest by means of an Ahabian allegory, it liquidates the recent past by drawing upon another history. And it liquidates this past even before it is past, as this past unfolds as our present and, indeed, our future.

Antebellism stylizes the neoliberal ordinary by conducting affect toward a political future that will never come and by sapping investment in a past that we can’t leave behind. Like Ahab’s crew, we invest in this allegory, certain that the capitalist ordinary has more to offer than capitalist accumulation, certain that we coast through the world, harpoons a-ready, for reasons explicable and intelligible from the intimate, domestic perspective afforded by a missing leg, an isolated ship, or a provincial nation. False memories of a civil war past replace flawed impressions of a global war present ensuring that, when the whale finally sinks the ship, Yankees will be as shocked as Ishmael was.

Prism, Surplus Sociality, and the Crisis of Semio-Capital

The recent revelations regarding the intensity and extension of state surveillance are scandalous, but I’ve been consoling myself with one fact: the state isn’t exactly a brain trust. A cursory look at the texts produced by the FBI and DHS in their surveillance of Occupy, for instance, reveals that intelligence gatherers so frequently have no fucking clue what they are looking at. Of course, the state needn’t be smart to make its sense of reality right. Indeed, the scandal of sovereignty isn’t that the state might know too much (or, in yesteryear, too little), but that the power of sovereignty is realized in the capacity of the state to absolve itself from epistemological or normative bindings. States do not need to be right to do shit, and states of stupidity are frequently weaponized. So, in stressing the stupidity of the state, I’m not at all suggesting that an augmentation of state power like Prism is somehow irrelevant. I do want to stress, though, that in our critiques of Prism we would do well to avoid conflating the state’s gathering of intelligence with the state’s becoming intelligent, of conflating its aggregating big data with its becoming an attuned and sovereign close reader. Such a conflation, I’m going to suggest, abets a neoliberal reconstitution of the modality by which citizens appear before the state (and helps explains the detestable contortions over Prism by people like David Brooks and David Simon). To get there, I want to trace out the incredibly fragile structure of state and capitalist power that organizes contemporary logics of governance.

States emerge, grow, and maintain themselves by capturing flows of capital, and this means that the material and formal constitutions of states to some degree derive from the modalities of capitalist production that they encounter. As many have argued (from autonomist oriented people like Marazzi, Bifo, Hardt & Negri, to vanguardists like Dean), today the production of information, affects, and social communicability is the paradigmatic form of capitalist production. Capital has become semio-capital (Bifo’s term), and the semiotization of capital means that producing or capturing value entails the production or capture of information.  This production is not localized to individual firms; rather, it takes place across the broad fabric of the social. As you’re doing cheeky things on Twitter or Facebook or YouTube, you’re also producing value for capitalists. (“Remember when we used to make things?” laments the television character of one cop-loving Prism apologist.) One effect of the transformation in the value-form marked by semio-capital is that value is increasingly and directly functional for the enhancement of state power. Capitalist and statist modalities of securitizing the social blur together: each needs to produce or capture the information produced by social subjects. The predominance of for-profit, private security firms in the current fabric of Yankee intelligence gathering in part indexes the fact that the contemporary form of semiotic value has created the possibility of a tendential identity between capitalist and state power. There is little substantive difference between, say, Google’s data collection and the NSA’s (meta)data (meta)collection. The former intends profit, the latter security, but the modality of achieving both is roughly identical.

But one hiccup: semio-capital has been in crisis since day one. The eyes of info-capitalists are bigger than their stomachs. They know that the sociality unleashed—or simply re-presented—by the semiotization of capital possesses a value of nearly unlimited extent. Every capitalist knows that the information contained on the Internet has value. And it does. But semio-capital is just godawful at monetizing and profiting from this value.  This disparity becomes legible in the disproportion between stock values for semio-capitalist firms and their actual revenues. Such disproportions are not simply the effect of a mistaken valuation. Rather, the disproportion indexes, in a language that capital understands, the exorbitancy of sociality to the value-codings of capital. The potential value that Facebook or Google commands will always exceed its capacity to realize that profit. Capitalism’s attempt to monetize sociality as such had as a consequence the uneasy recognition that the social possesses an infinite value—or, functionally, no value. Through semio-capitalism, capital confronts a surplus of sociality that it cannot contort into realizable surplus value. Semio-capital inhabits a perpetual realization crisis, routinely confronting the impossibility of transforming product into profit.

The rise of private semio-intelligence firms, then, should be understood as an attempt of collective semio-capital to manage the realization crises that it cannot not encounter. It’s not an accidental scandal that private intelligence firms are so bound up with the state; it is an effect of the immanent logic of capital. I don’t have the data (or the competencies required to produce it), but I’m willing to bet that the rate of profit for private intelligence firms generally exceeds that of other firms invested in semio-capitalist production. The value-form of semio-capital will always shatter against the infinite surplus of sociality it attempts to capture; collective semio-capital thus looks to the state to cohere and realize this value. Infinitely valuable and so entirely worthless, sociality as such becomes capitalist value through its functionality for statist command. Because it wants to rule the social directly but cannot achieve this aim through the value-form of capital, semio-capital necessarily becomes state-capital.

Let’s be clear about what all of this means: to the extent that the state fosters the growth of semio-capital, the state immediately enhances its own power. This is the dialectical flipside of the apparent waning of the presence of the state—the dismantling of social protections, the increasing privatization of state functions, the diminishing capacity of citizens to interact meaningfully or effectively with apparatuses of power… By fostering the growth of immaterial and infomatic modes of production, neoliberal policy becomes a tool for the augmentation (not dismantling) of the state. Indeed, the very modality by which the state approaches the social has transformed. The state and civil society no longer engage in a virtuous dialogue mediated by a public sphere. The state doesn’t locate the truth of the social in missives that are addressed to it—a petition, a newspaper article, even a vote. Semio-capital has created a condition in which mediated forms of state/social engagement have been absorbed by the immediate presence of the social to the state. The state can listen in on civil-social auto-representations that in no way intend acceding to the rationality of the public or political sphere. Once (according to bourgeois ideals) an interlocutor, the state has become a silent reader, a mere listener, one frustratingly proximate and distant, one intimate but terribly remote.

Neoliberal semio-capital has thus produced a new phenomenology of being a phenomenon: the citizen will never know if her words have gained power’s ear, if she has in fact achieved political phenomenality.  The state listens, listens to everything, but we will never know what it hears, if it has heard, if it can hear.

The scandal of Prism consists, then, not simply in what the state might know about its citizens, but that becoming (meta)data is all that remains of citizenship. A journalistic cohort of White Liberal Dudes have intuited this fact, and I think this accounts for the contortions they’ve undertaken to defend Prism (and engage in absolutely horrid, shitty, stupid psych profiles of Snowden). In scrutinizing the politico-ethical propriety or technological means of intelligence gatherings, liberals have always assumed that the state is (or could be) intelligent—that, at the end of the day, the data that they are will have been an object of state intentionality, that they will have appeared before the sovereign’s caring (albeit suspicious) gaze. The “Obama’s Reading Your Email” tumblr communicates a white liberal fantasy of immediate appearance before the font of power. The state’s current kind of caring is creepy, but hey, at least it’s care. Obama might be reading my email! As neoliberalism destroys the state’s accountability for social upkeep, the best liberals can hope for is that the state will continue to take account of the social, in however slim and de-semanticized a fashion. The fear that the state might overreach, that it might come to know you all too intimately, becomes an apology for neoliberalism insofar as it maintains the bygone fantasy of citizenship: that power intends to capture one in its firm embrace, that one can enter into a positive relation with instituted power—even if you don’t know it has happened.

We need to recognize that there is no guiding intellect gathering the social together, no intelligence that donates sense to metadata, no intentionality that coheres the the sociality we semiotize through communicative media. We aren’t achieving political phenomenality before a Dad in Chief or a Big Brother. The value-form of capital cannot even adequately realize the sociality we live. It can at best pass us off as a mass of data for the intellectual mediocrities staffing the NSA and Booz Allen to work over. But that’s it. That’s what remains of the connection between the state and its citizens. The connection between the transcendence of the state and the immanent plane of the social has never been slimmer.

Liberalism begins with the fear (which will always imply the desire) that Obama is reading our emails. Anarchism begins with the knowledge that he isn’t, even when he tries.