And Then Theory Wept: Precarity Talk and Miley's Sadness

* Who better to reveal our generalized inability to find joy in autonomy than Miley Cyrus? I was at a bar with some friends after a day of MLA and “We Can’t Stop” came on and I was drunk and relieved.  It’s our party we can do what we want / It’s our party we can do what we want. It was like us! So I had more Jameson and was happy to be away from work and with old friends and with silly pop. I began gushing about the Miley of that song as a nouveau phalansterian. “A pre-critical socialist!” I think I said—but a socialist nonetheless. Bodies creeping into a scene away from wherever, sweating in mad high contact. Bodies doing whatever, embodying pure whateverness. Miley the Queen of Quodlibet!

            -----“But it’s a really sad song,” my friend said.

            And he’s right. The repetition, the minor key, the desperate wailing at the end, the generalized sense of Fuck, we can’t stop!—it’s a really sad song. The best party in the world, the party of pure whatever-being, the party where want is act and “we run things / things don’t run we”—this party’s anthem is a dirge that cuts out right before the tears kick in.

            If Miley can’t revel in her autonomy, people, we’re fucked.

* It’s like so much theory today is just another weapon in a growing arsenal of less lethal weapons, the emotechnics and lachrymators set to work by the state. The theme of this year’s MLA was “Vulnerable Times,” and a torrent of terms flow from the title like so many tears: abandonment, precarity, bare life, dispossession… And then theory wept. My problem isn’t that states of existential depletion, vital neglect, and necropolitical pulverization aren’t real. They are. Nor is my problem that some thinkers haven’t thought through the exposure of abandonment to the kinds of lives that get lived when bareness is what you got, when dispossession augurs an entrance into an undercommon sociality from which something new might come. They have. Even the MLA program wanted to see vulnerability “not as weakness or victimhood but as a space for engagement and resistance emerging from a sense of fundamental openness, interdependence, and solidarity.” Exposed in and through the implosion of liberal governance, vulnerability appears as an ontological condition (“fundamental openness”) that is always already post-liberal.

But what’s the payoff in recognizing that bodies can’t sustain neoliberalism, that the current iteration of the world effects an unworlding? We already knew that liberalism cannot be lived; we’re just proliferating new figures for its unlivability. Given that so much of this precarity talk is premised on narratives of the state’s devastating withdrawal, its neglect of its redistributive promise or project, theory’s tears produce an affective reinvestment in a state we will never have. But more: the functionality of much precarity talk for statist imaginaries is best evident in the fact that we rarely think of the state as such as vulnerable or abandonable. We never figure precarity as the state; we imagine that, somehow, the cold monster will endure long after it has abandoned you and me and everyone.

So this is how theory is an emotechnic of the state:  We think we’re weeping for populations abandoned by the state. We never ask: what if we’re weeping as the state abandoned by the populations it thought it had abandoned? Crying tears that Hobbes’ frontispiece sovereign might cry if it suddenly found its body depopulated by the bodies that once filled it? Crying the tears of an old lonely abandoned monster?

* Remember that crying cop, sad that he had to club kids eager to make a break for it back into the state’s arms?

* I’m writing this in the wake of the acquittal of Kelly Thomas’ murderers, the homeless ill man killed twice or thrice or countless times by the state. I’m writing this out of a feeling of fecklessness and sadness, an acute consciousness of not having done anything and not knowing what could be done. I’m writing this because abandonment is a fact, because vulnerability and precarity are differentially distributed and embodied. But I’m mostly writing it because, in the syncope of consciousness separating my recognition of the maldistribution of bodily vulnerability and my awareness of the disembodied nature of my response to this fact, I will have already forgotten what our bodies—yours and mine—can do. I’m sad that I’ve lived this forgetting as a concession to the specularity of merely witnessing what we all already know. I’m sad that I haven’t tested my bodily competency, my bodily power, that we haven’t tested our bodily competency, our bodily power, to do something about this, to fuck shit up, to go somewhere else or make something new. And I’m sad—though you might laugh at this next sadness, finding it an inevitable sadness, citing thesis 11 to tell me to get over it—that that most contemporary theory, the kind of theory that yields “Vulnerable Times” thematics, the theory I read with love everyday, hasn’t enjoined us to enjoy this power. I’m sad that one of the most important theoretical texts of our moment is frequently read as an incitement to participate in sadness rather than as an attempt to measure our capacities to unbind ourselves from it. I’m sad that theory won’t help my sadness resolve into a great burst of embodied laughter or turn into a kind of anarchist wake where we remember the dead but fight like hell for the living—and, yes, of course, always, the dead.

* I’m sad that theory never tells us what my comrades do—except that theory, that is, that doesn’t count as theory, the kind of theory read by rad grads and the odd prof, the kind of theory that you can’t even really cite, the kind that keeps faith with the possibility of radical autonomy, the kind that is less concerned with what the state does to us than what we can do to the state and more importantly with one another, the kind of theory that tells us that, when this shit happens, “we go”:

So we go. To the streets. To the occupations. To the marches – the seemingly banal and the potentially-insurrectionary alike. We go. To the barricades. Together. And if we have questions or doubts – we’ll figure it out when we get there. But we have to go. A las barricadas!

We go because we can, because we have that power, because we are abandoning as much as abandoned, and we live and act this doubleplay of refusing and being-refused together, in the joyous collective autonomy we might share after and through and within the bonecrunch of abject heteronomy.

* Nothing heroic. No Vince Lombardi speeches. That’s not what I want. Just a recognition that we still don’t know what our bodies can do, that our exposure to violence or our dispossession or bareness doesn’t exhaust or even begin to describe our potential, that we can run, walk, and wheel from a world that crushes (our very faith in) our collective autonomy because, well, we still got it, it’s still there. At this point, there’s more revolutionary value in reading descriptions of people getting up from chairs than in continuing to write power’s autobiography. Getting up from chairs: philosophy’s oldest standup routine. Kant, the third antinomy:

When, for example, I, completely of my own free will, and independently of the necessarily determinative influence of natural causes, rise from my chair, there commences with this event, including its material consequences in infinitum, an absolutely new series…

I’m not invested in a metaphysics of the will or whatever. I’m just laughing with Kant, at Kant, through Kant, at the amazing fact that some of us get up from chairs, at the amazing fact that freedom is right there—a freedom that, if not a “first beginning,” is nonetheless absolute, part of an “absolutely new series.” We run things / things don’t run we.

* So Kant goes. No doubt through Königsberg on one of his clockwork walks. But how might we rethink the current scene of social theory if we put Kant in his chair in the space of our abandoned present, and followed him from the spontaneity of a freedom that can’t be exhausted to the demo or occupation? Kant a las barricadas? What if we learned, with Kant, to take a kind of pleasure in the inherence of freedom in the ordinariness of our variegated and differentiated bodies’ praxis? I’m engaging the unfortunately ableist metaphorics of getting up from a chair not to promote a paradigm of action but to generate a new attunement of thought, one that gets up and over our contemporary inability to find joy in our autonomy.

* While the MLA vulnerability theme was playing out, a subconference of vulnerable people gathered autonomously to share and develop technologies of autonomy. I couldn't make any of it, but I heard it was a brilliant blast. 

* So, the minimal demand: Not a theory that reflects reality, that informs us of the shittiness of our present, that calculates the infinite modes by which power decimates us. We all know how shitty it is, how wasted and depleted. We want a theory that works to empower us to remake the real, that acts in the present as a force of and for affective recalibration, a theory that puts us into joyous contact with the bodily fact of inexhaustible—and therefore endlessly shareable—autonomy. A theory that puts us on the go. To the occupation, the demo, the barricades. To Miley’s party to tell her that it doesn’t have to be so fucking sad. To the MLA to tell them we get enough tear gas, thank you much, and we want a theory that joys in autonomy, the glimmers of it that remain—which might mean, sure, that for the present we just talk about vacating chairs. To the state to tell them that we’re going away for a while, probably forever, with one another. We will carry our wounded with us; sometimes they’ll carry us. We’ll pool our bodily resources and go along, laughing and dancing. We’ll let the state do the crying.

Going My Way? Anarchist Inclinations and Lorde

(I’m writing this in the wake of and as a way of thinking through a Twitter spat between a well-known blogger/postdoc and a very well known anthropologist who practices anarchism.)

It begins with a question, one rarely asked and so rarely responded to. Neither articulated nor answered, the question persists as an inchoate feeling for and vague orientation toward another. If we were to give voice to this question, to make it explicit, we would thematize the mystery of this orientation, this feeling-for-another that puts us in hesitant proximity with one another. The question might be phrased as “Going my way?” What this question inaugurates through its inarticulation is the astonishingly robust and ridiculously fragile collectivity that we are, whoever we are. In not asking this question explicitly, we refuse to ask it once and once only, we refuse to thematize a foundational orientation that would determine, once and for all, who we are. We’re not a party, no arche or nomos secures to us our identity as ourselves, and in refusing to ground our collectivity through an inaugural determination of who we are and what we want, we commit ourselves to the tense and uncertain work of feeling toward and with one another. We are nothing but the uncertain feeling that we’re oriented toward one another in our orientations toward something else. That we’re inclined toward one another in the multiplicity of our inclinations.

I’ve been thinking a lot about inclination recently. My thinking got started, believe it or not, with Lorde—or, rather, with a critique of Lorde that was making its rounds on the internet. It was a critique of the function of racial signifiers in Lorde’s “Royals,” concluding with a claim about Lorde’s functionality for a white supremacist patriarchal world. I didn’t have any problem with the specifics of the reading; it’s correct, as far as it goes. But I had the nagging suspicion that the critique was true to the extent that it was false, that the adoption of a hermeneutic of suspicion vis-à-vis Lorde was somehow inadequate. This, because I felt like the Lorde of Pure Heroine is, in some way, inclining toward me, toward us—that the speaker of the album is, in some way, a comrade-in-formation. Really truly. There’s too much class hatred and refusal in the lyrics that I can’t not. Silly stupid utopian perhaps. Culture industry people are free to laugh at me. But at stake for me here is the need to rethink the modes by which we orient ourselves to our cultural objects—and, in turn, to one another. (Let me keep talking about Lorde, but with the understanding that inquiry into cultural relations here functions as a propaedeutic for a consideration of political relations.) My worry is that we’re increasingly conflating the necessity of critique with the production of allergies, that critique has given way to simple criticism, that our critical performances are ultimately functional for liberalism’s pulverization of the political. The point here isn’t that Lorde’s lyrics in “Royals,” say, aren’t fucked up; they are, and should be treated as such. But to what end? What’s at stake in this critique? It’s striking to me that, while honest-to-Jesus political white supremacist movements are treated with a smirk, Lorde provokes outrage. It’s easy to ignore white supremacist movements or mock them away for the simple reason that we can’t imagine a world in which we would enter a political relation with them—that is, a political relation constituted by amity. (I would argue that liberals can’t really imagine a political relation of enmity with white supremacists either, and thus the predominance of irony in liberal approaches to these formations.) Simply put, we don’t share a world with white supremacists. For me, Lorde poses a different political and interpretive challenge, insofar as I can imagine sharing a world with her. (CLR JAMES READING GROUP WITH LORDE!) This possibility of world-sharing and world-forming, of politics, requires the adoption of an interpretive-critical mode that can simultaneously keep in view what I take to be the sincerity of her refusal of the given and the violence of the idiom through which she codes this refusal. We need, I think, a critical practice primed by the feeling of co-inclination.

And not just so we can read Lorde differently. Our impulse to critique, and our conversion of critique into mere criticism, is fucking us up. Sometimes I feel like we’ve imported modes of cultural critique subtended by a hermeneutics of suspicion into our relations with one another with the effect that we listen to one another to hear why we shouldn’t listen to one another. When I was thinking about the response to Lorde, I had this dream that we could shift the imagined scenography of cultural critique—that we could treat her less as an analysand rehashing symptomatic dreams on a Freudo-Marxian couch and more as a well-meaning subject who has found her way into a meeting of a radical collective but whose lack of an adequate idiom led her to mobilize a messed up metaphorics. What do we do—ideally—in these situations? As I understand the discourse ethics of such collectivities, the aim isn’t to reveal the fucked-up-ness of the person as an end in itself or in order to boot the person out, but to engage a practice of critique and correction with the assumption that there’s a commitment to the maintenance and flourishing of the relationship. Good intentions for bad actions don’t excuse anything, but remaining mindful of the former allows for the composition of a scene in which the latter can be refused and then repaired. It’s only our willingness to foster such scenes that distinguishes friends from enemies: we repair the fucked-up-ness of our friends, whereas we resist it in our enemies.

The decision to repair instead of reject, to treat as flawed friend rather than infallibly flawed enemy, to (re)produce a fraying relation instead of developing an allergy, is ultimately organized by fictions of intention, sincerity, possibility, and so on. We feel that we’re inclined toward one another, that we’re going the same way, and this basic affect/orientation makes non-allergic critique both possible and necessary. We imagine we’re going the same way even if we sometimes decline from one another or swerve away into terrible things. We survive through these fictions. We live on them and through them for the simple reason that we are all too wounded by this world to not carry fucked-up-ness with us in ways we can’t even know without the rigorous, critical, sustaining, and enriching help of our revolutionary friends. If you read this blog, you’ve probably experienced the extraordinary act of love that is getting called out by a comrade. I can recall vividly each time I’ve been so called out, and I’m deeply grateful for all of them—even if thinking about what precipitated them makes me shudder in embarrassment. We don’t need to worry that this fiction makes us stupid, less-than-critical; there are obviously firm limits to the fiction of co-inclination. I read with Lorde, for instance, whereas I wouldn’t read with Miley Cyrus. In terms of real people doing real things, there probably wasn’t an Occupy encampment in the U.S. that didn’t have one figure (almost certainly a white guy) so resistant to others’ labor of critique and repair that the fiction of co-inclination dropped and this figure converted into an enemy. We need to trust our feelings, to prioritize in practice the weird orientations toward others that we can’t fully explain or thematize. It’s this feeling of co-inclination that prevents every critique from becoming a collective crisis, that allows critique to become a means of collectivity formation.

We, whoever we are, are constituted by felt fictions of co-inclination. Without these felt fictions, we are probably little more than the gaggle of isolated and auto-isolating idiots that Yankee Leninists take us to be when we say things like “Check your privilege” or “That’s fucked up.” Critique can only be the antonym of collective corrosion when we recall that we’re going to get in one another’s way as we go on our way, together, maybe. Indeed, critique is a mode of collective augmentation when its animated by a commitment, however vague, to maintaining the world that we co-produce, that we’re on the way toward. So, let’s rewrite the dictum of Kant, the one he put in the emperor’s mouth, the one that serves as a mantra for liberals and Leninists alike, the one that goes, “Argue as much as you like about whatever you like, but obey!” Let’s rewrite it as, “Argue as much as you like about whatever you like, but incline!” Critique and critique hard. But never suppress the felt possibility that we, whoever we are, are going one another’s way.

A Brief Note on Why We’re Not in the Streets

The government “shut down,” and where are we? Not in the streets. My Twitter and Facebook feed are filled with people puzzling over this fact. We know the effects of the shutdown could be devastating for precarious populations—the poor, the food insecure, the sick. We know that the worst effects of the shutdown will be absorbed by raced, gendered, and classed subjects. We know that we’re angry. And we know that we’re not in the streets.

We’re being scolded for not being in the streets. We’re being told that Millennials aren’t serving their world-historical function of maintaining the liberal-capitalist state. We’re informed that we “should be vigorously protesting as the House GOP holds the state and the economy hostage.” We’re even offered a script: “It’s our government, they ought to declare.” We’re told that we are making “it harder for the progressives who do hold public office to do their jobs.”

But what if our puzzled self-descriptions index a political consciousness that all these pious prescriptions can’t want to think? What if we know something, we who don’t go out into the streets, what if we know something that we ourselves almost can’t let ourselves know, a knowledge that we can only become conscious of in the form of a half-shocked self-assessment: “We’re not in the streets?!”

What if we know that we Millennials were born into an already abandoned world? What if we only know the welfare state of yesteryear as a myth? What if we can only laugh when someone encourages us to declare, “it’s our government”? What if we only know a world of de-pegged dollars, of flexible production, of fast-moving finance? What if we only know a world in which the state at every turn functions to stack the world against us? What if we only know a world in which the state’s primary mode of being is as an agency dedicated to the proposition that black and brown people around the world should be incarcerated or killed? What if we only know a world in which our most “progressive” president was the one who gave us the horrible, racist Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act? What if we only know a world in which liberals justify the maintenance of the state by rhetorically gesturing to the very raced and gendered populations that the state only cares to fuck over? What if we know that the devastating abandonment to which precarious populations are now subject as a result of the “shutdown” is simply the agonizing materialization of an already established fact?

What if we’re not cruel optimists because we were never optimistic in the first place.

We want to be in the streets. We showed that. We want nothing more. We want to be in the streets. Dancing, laughing, arguing. Feeding one another, caring for one another, defending one another against the organs of the state that never shut down.  Shattering windows, tearing down fences, making the world our commons. We want to build worlds where the hungry can eat, where the sick can repair. Where black skin isn’t a marker of disposability and where bodies can embody as they like. Where the forms of ableism at times implied in the political shorthand of “the streets” are annulled.

For us, the streets are an impossible actuality. The streets are a place where the fantasy of contact and care becomes concrete. A place where we realize that we are abandoned to one another.  Where we hold on and hold together and, in so doing, get in touch with something new.

Why aren’t we in the streets? We’re already there, already in them, in and through our very withdrawal from them. We’re in them in our recognition that the state has always already abandoned us, that it has created a world in which speech cannot become act and our presence doesn’t matter. We’re in them in our decision to abandon the state in turn, in our refusal to participate in the statist scenography that congregates a crowd in order to re-ground itself.

We know this—vaguely, hazily, inchoately. The question, then, is not, “Why aren’t we in the streets?” It is, rather, “What will happen when we realize we’re already there?”

And we know this, too.

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.