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Turbulence: a cartography of postmodern
violence
Steve Goodman, LLB(Hons) & Philosophy, M.Phil.
Thesis submitted for Ph.D in Philosophy
University of Warwick
Department of Philosophy, Social Studies Faculty
January 1999
Abstract
This thesis maps the end of the millenium in terms of the geostrategic flux of the post Cold War world system. Using the concept
of turbulence developed in the physics of fluids, and Gilles Deleuze
& Felix Guattari's liquid microphysics of the war machine, a
materialist analysis of violence is developed which cuts through the
binary oppostions of order/chaos, law/violence, war/peace to
construct a cartography of speeds and slowness, collective
compositions and power. Sector 1 defines postmodernity in terms
of cybernetic culture, delineating the distinction between Deleuze &
Guattari's concept of cartography and steering the problem out of
the remit of a juridico/politico/moral discourse telwards physics.
Sector 2 develops a fluid physics of turbulence and connects it to a
materialist analysis of social systems by mapping turbulent and
laminar flow onto Deleuze & Guattari's war machine and apparatus
of capture. A fluid dynamics of insurgency is then outlined with
reference to the geo-strategic undercurrent constituted by Chinese
martial theory. Sector 3 reconfigures social evolution in relation to
the non-linear social physics developed in Sector 2, unmasking the
racism and Imperialism of linear narratives of progress. Instead of
progression from one historical phase to another, the planet is seen
to be composed of a virtual co-existence of modes stretched out on
a continuum of war. This continuum connects the martial modes of
despotic states, disciplinary states and packs. These modes differ in
their degree of compositional laminarization. Sector 4 deploys the
cartography on the emergence of a planetary cybernetic culture and
its relation to a global machinery of war. Postmodern control is
designated as turbulence simulation or programmed catastrophe- a
runaway process of accident or emergency quantizing typified by
implosive turbulence in the core of the world system and its
overexposure. Sector 5 pushes the cartography towards an antifascist fluid mechanics otherwise denoted as an ethics of speed or a
tao of turbulence.
2
SECTOR MAP
Introduction
4
SECTOR 1 - Cartography
1.1 Machinic Postmodernism
1.2 Cartography
1.3 Violence
SECTOR 2 - Turbulence
2.1 Turbulence Simulation
2.2 Base Turbulence
2.3 Guerrilla Insurgency: sino-hydraulics & the nomad war machine
SECTOR 3 - War Continuum
16
31
43
58
58
76
89
109
109
3.1 Non-linear History
3.2 Planetary Co-Laminarization: the megamachinic skin & the 121
irrigation of turbulence
121
3.2.1 State Megannachines
126
3.2.2 Disciplinary Machines
131
3.2.3 Terror Machines
138
3.3 Cruelty Machines: routes to the jungle
SECTOR 4 - Programmed Catastrophe
155
155
4.1 States of Emergency
156
4.1.1 Channels of Security
161
4.1.2 The General Accident: liquidized reality
171
4.1.3 Ultraterrorism
186
4.2 Postmodern War: from the jungle to cyberspace
189
4.2.1 Flight Simulation: from chopper war to sim-copter
195
4.2.2 Desert Screen: the global war machine in effect
195
4.2.3.1 Soft War
201
4.2.3.2 Pure War
204
4.2.3.3 Stealth
4.3 Megalopian turbulence: the 'internal south' and the ecology of 207
fear
207
4.3.1 Welcome to the Jungle: hyperurban neo-medievalism
213
4.3.2 Programmed Catastrophe: thresholds to volatility,
turbulence simulation and population modulation
218
4.3.3 Flashpoint: street turbulence and overexposure
SECTOR 5 - The Tao of Turbulence
5.1 Hydrophobia
5.1.1 Speed, Metal & War: Virilio's Marinetti
5.1.2 Hydrophobia: Theweleit, floods and the fascist hard metal
body
5.1.3 Micropolitics of Fascism
5.2 War Hydraulics: non-fascist speeds
5.2.1 Landlocked
5.2.2 Woman and the War Machine: fluid mechanics
5.3 The Tao of Turbulence: machinic postmodernism as an ethics of
speed
5.3.1 Postmodern Impasses and Dams
5.3.2 Escape Velocity: the ethics of speed
Conclusion
Bibliography
224
225
225
230
237
246
246
249
258
260
261
267
275
3
ABBREVIATED REFERENCES
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1983) Anti Oedipus, London:
Athlone.
Deleuze, G. & Guattari, F. (1988) A Thousand Plateaus,
ATP
London: Athlone.
Clastre,
P. (1994) Archaeology of Violence, NY: Semiotexte.
AV
Sun Tzu, (1971) The Art of War, trans., S. Griffith, London:
AW
Oxford Uni. Press.
BA
Virilio, P. (1994) Bunker Archeology, Princeton University
Press.
CP
Canetti, E. (1984) Crowds & Power, trans. C. Stewart,
London: Penguin.
DP
Foucault, M. (1977) Discipline & Punish, trans. A. Sheridan,
London: Penguin.
DS
Virilio, P. (1998) 'Desert Screen' in The Virilio Reader, London:
Oxford.
F
Deleuze, G. (1988) Foucault, trans. Sean Hand, Minneapolis:
Uni. of Minnesota Press.
FLE
Massumi, B. (1992) First & Last Emperors, NY:
Autonomedia.
Baudrillard, J. (1991) The Gulf War did not take place,
GW
Sydney: Power.
H
Serres, M. (1992) Hermes: Literature, Science and
Philosophy. London: John Hopkins Press.
Guattari, F. (1984) `The Micro-politics of Fascism' in
MPF
Molecular Revolution, Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Wittfogel, K. (1967) Oriental Despotism, Mass: University
OD
of Yale Press.
Virilio, P. (1993) 'The Primal Accident' in B. Massunni, The
PA
Politics of Everyday Fear, University of Minnesota Press.
PDES Virilio, P. (1990) Popular Defense & Ecological Struggles,
NY: Semiotexte.
PW
Virilio, P. (1983) Pure War, NY: Semiotexte.
SP
Virilio, P.(1986) Speed & Politics, trans. Mark Polizzotti, NY:
Semi otexte.
UG
Massumi, B.(1993) A Users Guide to Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Camb, Mass: Swerve.
WA
Toffler, A. & H. Toffler (1993) War and Anti-War: Survival
at the Dawn of the 21 st Century, London: Warner.
WAI Da Landa, M. (1991) War In the Age of Intelligent
M
Machines, NY: Swerve.
ZO
Plant, S. (1997) Zeros & Ones, London: Fourth Estate.
AO
4
Introduction: unfolding the map
In the following text, an attempt will be made to map the dynamics
of flux in the contemporary world system. Specifically, this will be
done by focusing on turbulence as a means of conceptualising
social systems 'far from equilibrium'. The world system is framed
from the perspective of fluid dynamics in order to follow key
transitions along what I will term the continuum of war. This
continuum transects social systems, cutting from micro/local to
macro/global scales. On this continuum, it will be argued, can be
found parallel processes working on every scale suggesting
emergent signs of a radically new technological civilization, a
cybernetic culture, with a corresponding reconfiguration of violence
in humanoid populations.
The thesis is divided into 5 sectors which I will now briefly outline:
In Sector 1 Cartography, the parameters of the study will be
delimited, setting out why the focus of the thesis concerns a
cartography of postmodern violence. In the Sector 1.1 machinic
postmodernism, a functional definition of 'postmodernity' will be
framed with reference to the emergence of 'cybernetic control
society', understood as a fundamental shift in the material
condition of the 'human' in relation to the 'machinie and therefore
in bio-technical configurations of violence. This situates the
5
discussion between the work of Michel Foucault and his analysis of
disciplinary society [in e.g. Discipline & Punishsurveillance/enclosure/confinement] and Paul Virilio's outline of a
post-disciplinary dis-order [in e.g. Speed & Politicssimulation/circulation/speed]. The fluid dynamics of postmodern
violence can be mapped from a perspective rewired out of the their
abstract micro-physics of chaos. I will argue that the insights of
both perspectives are consolidated and pushed much further by
Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari [particularly in A Thousand
Plateaus]. Most importantly, using Deleuze & Guattari's writing, a
machinic postmodernism will be developed which moves beyond
the cultural nihilism, and the 'ethical impasse' which typifies the
melancholy of postmodern discourse. Machinic postmodernism will
be seen throughout the thesis to map onto what will be termed
'an ethics of speed', which simultaneously provides a critique of
fascism and its relation to speed outlined by Virilio, but further
constructs a pragmatics of collective libidinal destratification.
In Sector 1.2 cartography, Deleuze & Guattari's concept of
cartography is applied to postmodern violence and is therefore put
in the context of the digital mapping of control phase cybernetics
working on the logic of simulation, countering control cybernetics'
flattening of the distinction between nature and culture without
making recourse to a nostalgic anthropomorphism. In this section,
6
it will be argued that machinic postmodernism pushes this
flattening further, forcing cartography out of the representation of
territory into an active deterritorializing tool. The cartography
facilitated by machinic postmodernism, draws from Spinoza to map
diverse bodies as agglomerations of lines, ensembles of speed and
slowness (longitude- relation of composition) and power (latitudeaffective potential).
The perspectives on violence which I draw from all problematize
the concept of 'violence' and its moral/politico/juridical models,
opening out the problem to a more materialist analysis. Sector 1.3
violence, expands on this materialism, dissolving the problem of
violence out of State philosophy into a physics of speeds and
slowness, order, chaos and power. This will be achieved through a
discussion of Deleuze & Guattari's concept of the war machine in A
Thousand Plateaus, and its synthetic relation to violence. The
immanentism of their analysis allows the diverse usage of the term
violence (crime, struggle, police, punishment, war, revolution) to
be topologized, unfolded, or explicated on one material continuum,
here described as a war continuum but variously termed elsewhere
substance(in Spinoza's sense), the machinic phylum or the plane of
consistency. As is argued in Sector 5.2 this 'ethics of speed',
processed through Irigaray implies a critique of the philosophical
7
State/Man complex which has dominated Occidental thought
patterns and which in postmodernity collapses into nihilism.
In Sector 2 Turbulence, I will zoom in to the cartography outlined
in Sector 1 and focus on its fundamental dynamics of transition, of
flux and emergent pattern. The concept of 'turbulence' will be
tracked down to its emergence from chaos theory, fluid dynamics
and non-linear physics. In Sector 2.1 turbulence simulation, the
discussion of digital cartography initiated in Sector 1.2 is extended
so as to designate the abstract machine of cybernetic control
societies as the simulation of turbulence. The analysis of violence is
dissolved into a problem of physics and matter/energetic flow. This
will allow the mapping of population dynamics to be described in
terms which can understand insurgent behaviour in terms more
fundamental than law/order and violence/disorder binaries.
Conceptualising populations in terms of laminar and turbulent flow,
critical speeds and thresholds is fundamental to grasping Deleuze &
Guattari 's machinic postmodernism.
In Sector 2.2 base turbulence, Deleuze & Guattari's machinic
postmodernism is examined particularly through the mapping
which corresponds respectively laminar and turbulent flow with the
apparatus of capture and the nomad war machine. The primary
process of social systems are defined in terms of flow and its
8
irrigation/channelling, explaining Deleuze & Guattari's
differentiations between 'classes' and 'masses' and its connection to
Elias Cannetti's crowd dynamics. These tools are then used to
outline a conceptualisation of the 'nomadic potential' of the riot and
guerrilla warfare. In Sector 2.3 guerrilla insurgency, this fluid
dynamics is contrasted to key streams of Chinese martial theory,
particularly Sun Tzu, and which I designate as a "war hydraulics".
This evolves into a analysis of postmodern strategy in a turbulent
world system emerging from the shadow of the Cold War into the
volatility of system meltdown.
In Sector 3 War Continuum, the non-linear social dynamics
developed in Sector 2 are applied to history and social evolution,
setting the cartography in motion across time. Sector 3.1. nonlinear history, explains machinic postmodernism's critique of
teleology and thermal equilibrium in narratives of historical
evolution, Occidental triumphalism, technological progress and the
route from the jungle to cybernetic civilization. Using Deleuze &
Guattari's social topology to challenge the linear history of
evolutionary stages, social segmentarity, rigid and supple, is
mapped onto the war continuum, unfolding evolution into a copresence of modes, defined by the longitude and latitude of
collective bodies, their relations of speed and slowness and mode
of power. The ultimate purpose of this discussion is to illuminate
9
how in the world system of apparent equilibrium and nuclear
deterrence, 'perpetual peace' along the East-West axis served
merely as a camouflage for emergent turbulence along an intensive
North-South axis as discussed in Sector 4.
In Sector 3.2 Planetary co-laminarization, I follow Deleuze &
Guattari's examination of the State megamachine and fuse this
with the previous discussion of the State as a machine of
lanninarization, a side effect of base turbulence. I outline the
megamachinic components of the world system and map out the
abstract complimentarity between despotic hierarchies and flat
disciplinary machineries of modernity. With each mode of the
State, I attempt to map its configurational economy of violence. In
Sector 3.3 Cruelty machines, in a critical analysis of Pierre
Clastre's anthropology, I discuss the relation between supple
segmentarity, primitive social machines, non-hierarchical systems
and war against the state. The purpose is to abstract out the fluid
dynamical principles so that such meshwork social formations are
not just relegated to an idyllic or a barbaric past in a linear
narrative of history, but rather to underline that its longitude and
latitude are perfectly contemporary and testify to the increasing
significance of non-State modes of social consistency, their
tendencies to militarise or operate 'far from equilibrium'.
10
In Sector 4 Programmed Catastrophe, I will examine the
specificities of turbulence and its simulation in postmodernity. Flux
and transitions in regimes of violence are mapped with relation to
crime, punishment, terrorism and rioting. These phenomena are
analysed in relation to the volatile environment of cybernetic
control societies.
In Sector 4.1 States of emergency the concept of turbulence
simulation is developed through an articulation of programmed
catastrophe as its complementary process. Turbulence simulation is
an attempt to control the uncontrollable and programmed
catastrophe is the proliferation of accidents and system crashing as
a machinic protocol of risk society. The work of Virilio is
fundamental to understanding the concept of programmed
catastrophe as a mode of control and its malfunction. Particularly
central is Virilio's theory of accidents which against the traditional
conception of substance, takes accidents as primary in the same
way that base turbulence was conceived of as primary process in
Sector 2.
But Virilio's obsession with accidents reaches further. At the deep
end of the continuum along which perturbations of the social are
stretched, lies the accident of reality itself - virtual reality or
cyberspace as the digital simulation of the real is the threshold
11
catastrophe of the human which defines cybernetic culture.
Therefore I go onto discuss terrorism, a lower degree accident of
the social in terms of this general accident examining how
cybernetic urbanism and its media infrastructure control, simulate,
stimulate, dampen, addict and amplify diverse quantum of
turbulence. This becomes in turn a strategic question concerning
the possibility of insurgency against a megamachine complex
accelerated by a global war machine.
In Sector 4.2 Postmodern War, I trace components of this global
war machine out of the jungle into cyberspace, from Vietnam to the
Gulf War, through the emergence of flight simulation. Then, the
discussion of simulation and terrorism in Virilio and Baudrillard's
work is extended into their discussions of the Gulf War with their
respective emphases on speed (pure war) and hyperreality (soft
war). The infrastructure of the global war machine is mapped as an
electronic terrain of instantaneous information transfer, satellite
relay, digital display consoles and interfaces, autonomous selfguided weaponry/missiles and televisival coverage. The coming to
prominence of stealth tactics in electronic warfare is reconnected to
Sun Tzu's martial theory and its war hydraulics/fluid dynamics
introduced in Sector 2.3. The question of insurgency against a
machine which has returned the planet to a smooth space again is
raised.
12
In Sector 4.3 megalopian turbulence this question is routed
through a critical analysis of the LA riots, the emergent phenomena
of 'Internal Souths' i.e. implosive turbulence in the core of the
world system. In line with the earlier discussion of the war
continuum and the general accident, the world system and its
megalopian microcosms is conceptualised following Mike Davis as
an ecology of fear. This sector, following the earlier arguments
concerning terrorism ask whether insurgency in postmodernity is
overexposed- i.e. has it been terminally captured by perfected
control mechanisms and if not what mutations does insurgency
assume in the age of information warfare, in other words, what
manifestations are there of digital turbulence. For the cartography
of the LA riots the modulation protocol of programmed catastrophe
is explicated through non-linear modelling developments in
catastrophe theory and their application to carceral turbulence such
as prison riots, a brief outline of the impact of systems analysis and
risk assessment on the criminal justice and penal machines of
cybernetic control society. In Sector 5 The Tao of Turbulence,
the discussion of the possibility and morphological potential of
postmodern insurgency is examined through the conceptual
oppositions of rhizomania and rhizomatics, fascist speed and nonfascist speed, hydrophobic poliorcetics and fluid mechanics. It aims
at the designation of machinic postmodernism as an escape from
13
the impasse of nihilism, as an ethics of speed, of the production of
digital turbulence.
In Sector 5.1 Virilio's equation of speed with fascism is explored
through Marinetti's futurism. Marinetti's depiction of the
man/machine symbiosis and his aesthetics of violence is seen to
epitomise a 'suicidal body fortressing' addicted to discharge and the
'darkside of speed'. By contrasting Marinnetti's devotion to
militarized speed and Theweleit's discussion of the libidinal
dynamics of the German Freikorps, the link between this
consistency of speed and fascism will be underlined. Looking
behind this link, a masculinity under siege emerges in dread of all
that dissolves around him, of the ocean and its darkest abyss, of
woman, of blood, of flow, of communists. This fascist relation to
fluidity is referred to as a kind of hydrophobia and is seen to
saturate the technologies of modern subjection, individuation,
normalization and the production of interiority.
Machinic postmodernism here emerges out of Guattari's
micropolitics of fascism to describe the libidinal economy of fascist
speed. Guattari constructs a bottom up model of the proliferation of
fascist speeds, their distributed localized black holes and the
secondary process of their centralised industrial resonance. With
Deleuze, Guattari tracks speeds other than fascist ones, and follows
14
fascism out of the 1940s into the micro physics of everyday life as
specific bio-technical longitude and latitude, of relations of speed
and slowness, molecular composition and affective potential.
In 5.2 war hydraulics, by contrast, machinic postmodernism's
configuration of war and speed is examined as an anti-fascist fluid
mechanics and critique of the flow chart of the Man-State complex.
The previously mentioned fascist fear of the oceanic is developed
and machinic postmodernism's fluid mechanics is seen to map the
dread of female sexuality onto the State's dread of nomadism.
Implicitly here is the correspondence in Deleuze & Guattari's work
on the fluid dynamics of the nomad war machine (and its tao of
turbulence or compositional tuning) onto the work on fluid
mechanics by Luce Irigaray and Sadie Plant's use of both along side
a guerrilla cyber-feminism which draws from Sun Tzu to offer a
relation to speed, matter and machines which illustrates, counter
Virilio, escape velocities which do not climax in fascist masculinity.
This collection of theoretical overlays and conceptual adjacencies
can be loosely termed a tao of turbulence, a pragmatics of
production and survival in cybernetic culture.
In 5.3 the tao of turbulence, machinic postmodernism is finally
understood as an 'ethics of speed' which wages war on the nihilism
of postmodern culture. Machinic postmodernism is seen to follow an
15
escape velocity. Cartography's job is to sense those fissures and
breaks connecting them up, rerouting them in unforeseen ways,
maintaining flat consistency and operating in the manner of a fluid
system far from equilibrium, poised at the edge of pattern,
inhabiting the virtual of which cyberspace is only a contemporary
manifestation. For machinic postmodernism, the rhythms of this
ethics of speed are sampled out of Spinoza's materialist Ethics and
as we have seen a fluid dynamics tapped into from Chinese martial
theory, Irigaray and Deleuze & Guattari's own chaos theory of war.
16
sector 1. Cartography
"Order, the turbulent order of a dissipative structure, is a
tangential passage between two thresholds."(UG: 61)
1.1 machinic postmodernism
When seen through the transition in the mode of waging war l , the
seemingly interminal theoretical debates about the onset of
'postmodernity' constitute a series of strategic attempts to process
a landscape saturated by the technical machines of a global
military-cybernetics complex 2 . A microcosm of this material shift,
The dynamics of a postmodern configuration of violence has been widely
documented. 'Postmodern violence' is theorised by social theorist, Zygmunt
Bauman in his melancholy text, Life In Fragments. The phrase has the utility of
encapsulating a diverse body of literature, all of which indicates the mode of
warfare and social control in the cybernetic phase of capitalism. The new mode
has multiplicitous designations, to name just a few, Postmodern War (Hables
Gray 1997 London: Routledge), The Permanent War Economy (S. Me!man 1974
Simon & Schuster), Technology War (Possony & Pournelle 1970 The Strategy of
Technology, Cambridge, Mass: University of Cambridge), Iii-tec war (Edwards
Artificial Intelligence & High Technology War Working Paper no.6, Silicon Valley
Research Group, University of California at Santa Cruz), The Perfect War (Gibson
1986 Boston: Atlantic Monthly Press), Imaginary War (1987 in B. Smith & E.P
Thompson, eds., Prospectus for a Habitable Planet, Penguin), Computer War
(Van Creveld Technology War 1989, Free Press),
Cyberwar/Netwar/Information war (Cyberwar is Coming! Arquilla & Ronfeldt
1993 Journal of Comparative Strategy) Neo-Cortical warfare (Szafranski 1995 A
Theory of Information Warfare, Airpower Journal IX, no.1 Spring: 18-27) and
Third Wave War (A. & H. Toffler 1993 War & Anti-War, Warner Books.) By far,
the most theoretically far reaching is that of Paul Virilio's notion of Pure War and
Manual Da Landa's War in the Age of Intelligent Machines.
2 While most discussion of 'postmodernism' has been confined to the 'cultural
sphere', i.e. architecture, film, literature, music etc. it is not difficult to see what
this is built on; Frederic Jameson, for example, in the much discussed
'Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism' argues rightly that "this
whole global, yet American, postmodern culture is the internal and
superstructural expression of a whole new wave of American military and
economic domination throughout the world: in this sense, as throughout class
history, the underside is blood, torture, death and horror." For this very reason,
Jameson can be agreed with when he writes in the same essay that "every
position on postmodernism in culture- whether apologia or stigmatisation, is also
at one and the same time, and necessarily, an implicitly political stance on the
nature of multinational capitalism today." It will be argued, however, that
Jameson's analysis, for the `machinic postmodernism' developed here, remains
17
the critiques launched by Jean Baudrillard and Paul Virilio against
Michel Foucault revolve around the perception that those modern
'disciplinary' societies diagrammed particularly in Foucault's
Discipline & Punish are being machined into 'post-disciplinary'
systems based on cybernetic control and a dominant logic of
'simulation'. This phase shift is seen to rework the social on
practically every scale. It corresponds to a crisis of the world
economy, which following materialist historian Fernand Braudel, we
can conceptualise as a vast 'vibrating surface' composed of a
swirling system of nested cycles, economies, regimes and machinic
assemblages, roughly demarcatable into core, middle-zones and
periphery; late capitalism signifies, in his terminology of crisis, "the
beginning of a process of destructuration: one coherent world
system which has developed at a leisurely pace is going into or
completing its decline, while another system is being born amid
much hesitation and delay. This break with the past appears as the
result of an accumulation of accidents, breakdowns and
distortions."3 The world system in turbulence is no metaphor. Its
broadest tendencies are mapped by Deleuze & Guattari, in what
will be discussed later as their long-wave theory of capitalism;
"[The] centre-periphery axis is more important today than the
West-East axis and even principally determines it. . the more
equilibrated things become at the centre between East and West,
beginning with the equilibrium between overarm 4 rment, the
more they become disequilibriated and destabilised from North to
ultimately inadequate due to his persistent allegiance to dialectics, hermeneutics
and utopianism.
3 85 in Braudel Civilization and Capitalism, vol.3, The Perspective of the World.
18
South and destabilise the central equilibrium. . .it is also clear that
this destabilisation is not accidental but is a [theorematic]
consequence of the axioms of capitalism's functioning, principally
the axiom called unequal exchange which is indispensable for
capitalism's functioning. . .The more the world-wide axiomatic
installs high industry and highly industrialised agriculture at the
periphery, provisionally reserving for the centre so-called postindustrial activities (automation, information technologies, the
conquest of space, overarm(.L rrnent, etc.) the more it installs
peripheral zones of underdevelopment inside the centre, internal
Third Worlds, Internal Souths."(ATP:466-67)
A cartography of the `rhythre of the capitalist world economy, its
relations of speed and slowness (in time/space) is the crucial
starting point for understanding the reconfigurations of postmodern
violence. A political 'rhythm' underlies all conceptions of
postmodernity. But few are sufficiently tuned to the dynamics of
'order out of chaos' which characterize a bifurcating global system.
For this reason, our major guides through this morphologically fluid
landscape will be Deleuze & Guattari and their points of
convergence with chaos theory. It is their work, particularly A
Thousand Plateaus, which will provide the basic conceptual
distinctions to be deployed here, most notably 'cartography', their
distinction between the 'war machine' and the state or 'apparatus
of capture' and the corresponding dynamical concepts of
'turbulence' and 'laminar flow', 'smooth' space and 'striated' space,
and 'rhythm' and 'meter.'
4 As Deleuze & Guattari argue in A Thousand Plateaus, in On the Refrain, rhythm
is not just temporal but strongly related to space and territory.
19
After the Cold War bubbling undercurrents emerge to spiral and
combine throwing the world system deeper into disarray.
Futurologist Alvin Toffler points to a Third Wave s , a civilizational
revolution which was triggered in the midst of the World Wars.
Transforming the whole system, cybernetic culture 6 , a phase
change in symbiotic bio-technics brings with it a knowledge
intensive means of capital accumulation; "Everything in that
system is now mutating, from its basic components. . .to the way
they interrelate. . .to the speed of their interactions. . .to the
interests over which countries contend. . .to the kind of wars that
may result. . ."(WA: 319) The `megamachinie skin' of nation-states
that surrounds the planet, i.e. the basic components of the World
System of the last 3 centuries, is warping with the strain of its
displacement. Core, middle zone and periphery melt into each
other as the 'high-tech archipelago' surfaces. "In sum the old global
system built around a few neatly defined nation-state 'chips' is
replaced by a twenty first century global computer- a three level
5 The First Wave for Toffler was the agricultural revolution, the Second Wave the
industrial revolution.
6 This notion of cybernetic culture to be deployed here is double edged- on the
one hand, generally it defines the impact of computers on the militaryindustrial-entertainment complex since the end of the Second World War. A
narrower definition, in light of Deleuze & Guattari's universal history of
capitalism corresponds to 'flat', 'synergetic' or 'swarm' systems which emerge
`bottom up' and describes the dynamics of the 'nomad war machine' and its
relation to turbulence. In this second sense, cybernetic culture has no necessary
relation to technical machines at all, but corresponds just as much to Pantheistic
practical religions. This will prove an important point in my later discussion of a
'nomad ethics of speed' in terms of the Chinese martial arts.
7 Sampled from Lewis Mumford's work on technics and civilisation, Deleuze &
Guattari's usage of the term 'megamachine' in Anti-Oedipus can be taken as
synonymous with 'apparatus of capture' in the later A Thousand Plateaus- both
refer to the abstract mechanisms of the State, whether ancient or modern.
20
'motherboard', as it were, into which thousands and thousands of
extremely varied chips are plugged."(WA: 324) The bio-technical
assemblages of postmodernity are swept away by a socio-machinic
convergence towards "cyborgian dehumanisation, molecular
engineering systems, digital-format genomics, self-organising
telecommercial networks and artificial space", [in postmodernity]
"history is interfaced with the `machinic phylum' of hybrid
assemblages collapsing 2.5 millenia of transcendent authority into
schizotechnic runaway."'
A cartography of postmodern violence has to map this
transmutation in the midst of a 'black hole' culture of nihilismg,
sidestepping the reactive normativism of philosophies of the State
on one side, and its complementary idealism which culminates in
the micro-dialectics l ° of deconstructive textualism, 11 or the 'ethical
8 131 in Land, N. (1995) 'Machines & Technocultural Complexity: The Challenge
of the Deleuze-Guattari Conjunction', Theory, Culture & Society, Vol. 12, 131140, London: Sage.
9 Nietzsche is deeply prophetic about the meltdown of Occidental value systems
into nihilism, or in Deleuze & Guattari's terms, planetary schizophrenia. See
especially On the Genealogy of Morality (1994) Cambridge: Cambridge Uni.
Press; (1990) Beyond Good & Evil, Harmondsworth: Penguin; (1967) 'European
Nihilism' in The Will to Power, NY: Vintage, where Nietzsche makes the
important distinction between 'active' and 'passive' nihilism. It is Baud rillard who
most solidly makes the association between postmodernity and nihilism in his
essay 'On Nihilism' in Simulations & Simulacrum (1983), Semiotexte: New York.
On a different tack, Land (1992) The Thirst for Annihilation, London: Routledge)
chronicles the conjunction of Western Culture, thanatocracy and nihilism in
postmodernity.
° Deconstruction, it could be argued, is forced to resonate within the binary
oppositions it focuses on because, where it maintains textual enclosure, it wages
war with the outside which it persists in filtering through the 'funnel' of the
'other', facializing the outside of the subject, exteriority or the plane of
consistency. Deleuze & Guattari's geological theory of language accounts for the
21
abdication' of postmodern melancholy. Instead I will propose a
I machinic postmodernism', which takes its cues from material
developments in the modelling of dynamic systems 13 which flatten
the social into an all encompassing machinic nature14.
Theoretically, as William Bogard points out astutely in the
Simulation of Surveillance, this places the present discussion of
postmodern violence in the space between Foucault's analysis of
the modern power of the disciplinary state and Paul Virilio and Jean
Baudrillard's depiction of the postmodern society of simulation.
Where surveillance involves the recording, storage and coding of
material production of double-articulations, connecting them to a whole
landscape of stratification.
n Here, I am referring to Derrida's deconstruction of the law/violence binary in
Benjamin's Critique of Violence in 'Force of Law: the mystical foundation of
authority' which to a certain extent misses the radicality of Benjamin's
argument. Negri & Hardt can be agreed with when they propose an alternative
account of Benjamin's essay - • construiirenjamin's conception of
'divine violence' (distinct to the 'mythical violence' which makes and preserves
the law) through Spinoza's God "we accept Derrida's interesting suggestion that
divine violence be read primarily as a Judaic notion (as opposed to the Greek
character of mythical violence), we would choose to do so in line not with the
Judaism of Emmanuel Levinas, which Derrida seems to prefer, but the heretical
Judaism of Baruch Spinoza."(331) And run through Spinoza, what they have in
mind coincides with an 'ethics of speed', or the modus operandi of the Deleuze &
Guattari's 'nomad war machine', a constitutive power 'not separated from but
internal to what it can do; means and ends are posed in an internal relationship
of efficient causality.'(295) Negri, A. & M. Hardt (1994) The Labor of Dionysus,
Minneapolis: Uni. Of Minnesota.
12 This is Felix Guattari's denunciation of the postmodernism of Lyotard &
Baudrillard in 'The Postmodern Dead End' and 'Postmodernism and Ethical
abdication.' In The Guattari Reader (1996) London: Blackwell.
13 In The Postmodern Condition, Jean Francois Lyotard, discusses these
transitions with reference to postmodern science, referring even to the
reorientation to the mapping of 'turbulence in general.'(1986) Manchester:
Manchester University Press.
14 Hence the importance of Spinoza to Imachinic postmodernism,' particularly
The Ethics and the use made of that text by Deleuze & Guattari (especially
Deleuze's Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, [1988]City Lights) and Toni Negri (The
Savage Anomaly [1991] Minneapolis: Uni. of Minnesota)
22
information, the new "technologies of simulation are forms of
hypersurveillant control, where the prefix 'hyper' implies not simply
an intensification of surveillance, but the effort to push surveillance
technologies to their absolute limit. That limit is an imaginary line
beyond which control operates, so to speak, in 'advance' of itself
and where surveillance- a technology of exposure and recordingevolves into a technology of pre-exposure and pre-recording, a
technical operation in which all control functions are reduced to
modulations of preset codes."'
It will be argued that the issues both Virilio & Baudrillard raise
against Foucault's analysis of power complement Foucault's
cartography. That is to say, through Deleuze & Guattari's
conceptual machinery, an attempt will be made to understand the
co-existence of diverse abstract formations in time, a complex
topology of emergent patterns signalling systemic bifurcation and
turbulence. In a post-Discipline & Punish essay, Foucault
problematises the linear model of historical progression which his
sovereign-discipline model had been misread through; instead of
"the replacement of a society of sovereignty by a disciplinary
society and subsequently of a disciplinary society by a society of
government [control]; instead one has a triangle, sovereigntydiscipline-government, which has as its target the population and
15 4 in Bogard (1996) The Simulation of Surveillance, Cambridge: Uni. of
23
as its essential mechanism, the apparatuses of security " is This is
not to deny transition but to point, with Braude' , to its
discontinuous nature, its temporary rewinds, breakdowns,
accidents and phase shifts.
In his seminal Speed & Politics, Paul Virilio renames the phase shift
into modernity as a dromocratic revolution as opposed to the
democratic revolution of Enlightenment liberalism. Virilio's analysis
unfolds the normative discourse of juridico-moral philosophy into a
materialist map of flows, an analytic cartography of violence 17 . By
dromocratic revolution he means the revolution of movement,
tracking the concrete history of the co-evolution of humans with
the machines of capitalism and its darkside of war. State capture
shifts gears into overdrive. Virilio launches an attack on Foucault's
'disciplinary society' for underplaying the base dynamic of
circulation. Here Virilio concurs with Baudrillard that the
'productive' societies of modernity have been superseded by
societies of circulating consumer capital and commodity
cybernetics. Virilio zooms out so that the whole carceral
architectonics that materialised into history at the Great
Cambridge Press.
16 102 in `Governmentality' in (1991) The Foucault Effect, (ed) C. Gordon,
17 Typical of his predominantly negative characterisations, Virilio, in Pure War,
responds that "Speed is violence. The most obvious example is my fist. I have
never weighed my fist, but it's about four hundred grams. I can make this fist
into the slightest caress. But if I project it at great speed, I can give you a
bloody nose. . ." (31 1983 NY: Semiotexte) As we will see below, Deleuze &
24
Confinement' (or Great Bifurcation) becomes an axiomatic system
tuned to "solve a problem less of enclosure than of traffic. . ."; a
vast filter "acting as brakes against the acceleration of
penetration."(SP: 8) The rule of modern political philosophy has
been the primary operation of apology for the State. Even in its
critical and Marxist modes, the degree of idealism corresponds to
the degree of complicity with transcendent authority and power,
most importantly failing to understand the immanent operation of
cybernetic capitalism. Bourgeois juridical philosophy thereby
justifies 'capture' as the modus operandi of the State on the basis
of social contracts, the rule of law, rights and responsibility,
individuated, interiorized subjectivity and the chaining of thought
to a model generalised around the Oedipal neuroses of white
European masculinity. As Deleuze points out with reference to the
revolutionary legacy of modernity and its central party
organisations lg , "revolutionaries. . . only demand a different
legality which comes from winning power and installing a new
machinery of the State."(F:29) 2 ° A cartography of postmodern
violence run through `machinic postmodernism' becomes therefore
a critique of this Euro-centric, Imperialist, State-Man complex.
1 Machinic postmodernism' needs no transcendent criteria of
Guattari's conception is speed, while influenced by Virilio, is ultimately much
more nuanced.
18 Foucault, M. (1973) Madness & Civilization, New York: Vintage.
19 The implicit object of critique of post-1968 French theory.
25
judgement with which perform these tasks. No matter how
functional in actuality, transcendence is the 'illusion' which
capitalism itself dispenses with. The discourses of State philosophy
are revealed as a transfer medium between the abstract diagram of
power (the virtual) and their actual deployment. State philosophy,
in Virilio's words, would constitute therefore "no more than a series
of more or less conscious repetitions of the old communal
poliorcetics21 , confusing social order with the control of traffic (of
people, of goods), and revolution, revolt, with traffic jams, illegal
parking, multiple crashes, collisions."(SP: 14) In fact for Baudrillard
and Virilio, the 'social' as Foucault describes its production, is
superseded by the circulating flows of late capitalism. The
suggestion is therefore that Foucault's concentration on 'enclosure'
and 'confinement', the 'cellular' space and time of the extraction of
surplus value, neglects a more fundamental process.
But, this critique seems to miss the mark somewhat. For example,
in Discipline & Punish, Foucault is constantly opening the cells of
20 We shall see later how Deleuze & Guattari and Virilio prefer a Chinese
revolutionary theory which has as its primary operation the 'destruction of the
State itself.'
21 The term 'poliorcetics' is a useful one which most generally refers to the
general principles of fortress
and protective enclosure as actualized in ancient
siege warfare. Paul Virilio'5 14/04 r vihii a 1978 article where Althusser
questioned on the 'military aspect' of the French Communist Party- their
strategy of secrecy, their substitution of poliorcetics for politics: "The State's
political power, therefore is only secondarily 'power organized by one class to
oppress each other.' More materially, it is the polls, the police, in other words
the highway patrol, insofar as, since the dawn of the bourgeois revolution, the
political discourse has been no more than a series of more-or-less conscious
repetitions of the old communal poliorcetics,”. . .(PDES: 107)
26
confinement to the outside, mapping the transversal flows which
cut across the spaces of the interior. This is to say that like Virilio,
he perceives the permeability of the membrane to the dynamic
field of forces which it interiorized: the naval hospital, for instance
for Foucault, "must treat, but in order to do this it must be a filter,
a mechanism that pins down and partitions: it must provide a hold
over this whole mobile, swarming mass, by dissipating the
confusion of illegality and evil."(DP: 144) Speed, circuits and grids
set up in open space.
Despite what he may think, Virilio is not therefore Foucault's
adversary. Plugged together, the resultant theoretical hybrid has an
enhanced sensitivity to the 'catatonia and rush' of the planetary
system, the breaks and flows of global techno-capital. At the apex
of this enclosure flow complex stands the figure of the postmodern
city22, simultaneously regulator of flows and circulation, circuit
transformer or filter, in Deleuze & Guattari's words, "interior
spaces, which allow analysis, prolongation, or restitution of
movement."(ATP: 558) So instead of their conceptual schemas
excluding each other, it will be argued that the Virilio - Foucault
'hybrid' theoretical entity slides down a diagonal occupied by
Deleuze & Guattari's Capitalism & Schizophrenia, topologizing the
'carceral continuum', twisting seeming interiority into a form of
27
exteriority with "confinements and interiorizations being only
transitory figures on the surface of these forms."(F: 43) This
'machinic postmodernism' is primarily a counter-fascist strategy. As
Deleuze & Foucault point out in the conversation entitled
'Intellectuals and Power', theory does not feed down to practice but
rather accompanies it on a horizontal plane. Theoretical practice
and practical theory. More than any other aspect, it is this element
which brings these thinkers together. Virilio's Speed & Politics
attempts to problematize the thanatocratic elements of the descent
of Western Culture into nihilism by revealing the fascism intrinsic
to the 'militarized' conception of 'speed' which has dominated
Occidental strategic thought 23 . Meanwhile, Foucault's analysis of
dispersive power develops the molecular conception of fascist
libidinal investment and mini-despotism which emerged from
Deleuze & Guattari's Anti-Oedipus. In his Preface Foucault would
therefore refer to that book as an 'Introduction to the Non-Fascist
Life. 1(AO: xi ii)
Yet it will also be seen that Deleuze & Guattari go much further
than both, simultaneously prizing away 'speeds' of a non-fascist
nature and twisting the Foucauldian category of 'resistance' into a
22 following Mike Davis' analysis in particular, the postmodern city will be
examined as an 'ecology of fear' in Sector 4.
23 Sector 5 will examine Virilio analysis of speed and fascism through his
discussion of Italian Futurist, Marinetti. This will be contrasted to Deleuze &
Guattari's and Foucault's notion of microfascism and Theweleit's discussion of
28
productive 'schizopositive' process. It will be seen that through
their analysis of the 'war machine' Deleuze & Guattari produce an
'ethics' strongly convergent with Chinese martial arts, which microengineers discipline into rhythm in continuous variation (a haptic
tactics of speed). This, ultimately seems to sit uncomfortably with
Virilio's general concern, mentioned above, to politicize speed as
essentially fascist. However, for Deleuze & Guattari, whose analysis
of the 'war machine' leans heavily on Virilio, it is, they argue, his
description which makes it possible to differentiate distinct technopopulational velocities: they locate three: "(1) speeds of nomadic,
or revolutionary, tendency (riot, guerrilla warfare); (2) speeds that
are relegated, converted, appropriated by the State apparatus
[management of the public ways]: (3) speeds that are reinstated
by a world-wide organization of total war, or planetary
overarmament [from the fleet in being to nuclear strategy.]"(ATP:
559)
The transition from surveillance to simulation can be clarified
through Gilles Deleuze's short essay, 'Postscript to Societies of
Control'. Here Fouca u I t's Discipline & Punish is taken as
diagramming the phase shift from the abstract machine of
sovereignty, to discipline and finally to control. Each of these
modes corresponds to a machinic reality composed of the
the male 'mechanismo' poliorcetics. All the above will be flattened out to provide
29
predominance of specific technical machinery. Therefore, in the
sovereign systems outlined at the beginning of Discipline & Punish
in terms of the 'spectacle of suffering', the abstract dynamics
correspond with simple machines, levers, pulleys and clocks.
Disciplinary society entails a social mutation driven by the
emergence of industrial, thermodynamic machines. Finally the
'post-disciplinary' 'societies of control' are characterised by
cybernetic machines. If modern security complexes were
constituted by an 'enclosure' network consisting of the prison (the
analogical model of total enclosure), the factory, the hospital, the
school and the family, etc., then postmodernity pushes these to a
new extreme. As Deleuze describes it, "the various placements or
sites of confinement through which the individual can pass are
independent variables; we're supposed to start over again each
time, and although all these sites have a common language, it's
analogical. The various forms of control, on the other hand, are
inseparable variations, forming a system of variable geometry
whose language is digital (though not necessarily binary).
Confinements are molds, distinct moldings, while controls are a
modulation, like a self- transmuting molding continuously changing
from one moment to the next, or like a sieve whose mesh varies
from one point to another."'
a cartography or flowchart of fascist desire.
24 178-179 in Deleuze, Postscript to Societies of Control, in Negotiations.
30
From the perspective of the respective apparatuses of security,
each machinic mode of the state perceives its own specific dangers
or threats. So for example, for Deleuze, disciplinary systems have
as their "passive danger of entropy and the active danger of
sabotage," while transformed by the new information technology,
cybernetic control societies has as their "passive danger noise and
the active piracy and viral contamination"?' Umberto Eco perceives
this transmutation in his discussion of the left-wing terrorism of the
1970s. In directing attacks at the head of States, "modern
terrorism pretends (or believes) that it has pondered Marx, but in
fact, even if directly, it has pondered Norbert Wiener on the one
hand and science fiction on the other. The problem is that it hasn't
pondered enough- nor has it studied in sufficient depth,
cybernetics. . ." If it had, it would have, Eco argues, tuned
revolutionary tactics to "erroneous bit of information inserted here
and there, making work hard for the computers that run the
place."26 This failure, Eco concludes, signals that modern "terrorism
is not the enemy of the great systems, [but] on the contrary, it is
their natural counterweight, accepted, programmed. . . As it is
headless and heartless, the system displays an incredible capacity
for healing and stabilising."27
25 180 in ibid.
26 115 in Eco, U. (1987) Travels in Hyperreality, London: Picador.
27 Ibid. 116-117. Here Eco seems to converge with Baudrillard ( [1983] In The
Shadow of the Silent Majorities, NY: Semiotexte) whereby all guerrilla action is
31
1.2 cartography
In the late capitalist world system, the potential for conflict
displaced to the periphery returns to the centre with accelerating
velocity- the distinction between centre and periphery persist but
in continuous transmutation. The topology of thought warps under
the torque. 28 Instead of the 'equilibrial space of reason', turbulence
returns and the shock of its disturbance warps the spatial-temporal
order of 'conceptual peace' making it complex, forcing it to
bifurcate and unwind. Postmodern thought is composed of
unfamiliar and inexplicable folds, tears and gaps. In this situation
of flux, Jameson reconfigures the aspirations of theory in a way
convergent with the l machinic postmodernism' to be developed
below; "The political form of postmodernism, if there ever is any,
will have as its vocation the invention and projection of a global
cognitive mapping, and a social as well as a spatial scale.”29
Jameson's postmodernity is important for its materiality (being
embedded in Mandel's long wave theory of late capitalism) and
unlike many of his Marxist contemporaries, he seems at least to
understand the project of Capitalism & Schizophrenia. Yet, just as
subject to immediate recuperation. Virilio and Baudrillard discussion of
simulation society and terrorism will be critically examined in Sector 4 in relation
to Deleuze & Guattari's 'guerrilla war machines.' Baudrillard makes a
corresponding attack when he derides Foucault's conception of power and
Deleuze & Guattari's 'desiring-production' and 'molecular revolution' as
symptomatic of a modernity already outmoded, a socius already imploded, and
its patterns of critical thought.
28 M y description here, mapping the global system onto the machinery of
thought is intended to run alongside Deleuze & Guattari's notion of
'geophilosophy' in Ft.1.#4 of What Is Philosophy (1994) London: Verso.
32
he remained skeptical of Foucault's 'totalizing' conception of power
(the standard misreading of Discipline & Punish which perhaps only
Deleuze avoids fully, noting its convergence with topological
science) he remains nostalgic for some lost critical distance. But
most abstractly this 'continuum of war' and its machines can be
described through Foucault's analysis of force and power.
This reluctance to let in` radical immanence crucially marks the
point of divergence between his concerns and Deleuze & Guattari's.
And the theoretical orientation of this cartography is more attuned
to that which has been outlined by Deleuze & Guattari in their
complex text, A Thousand Plateaus. As one commentator describes
it, their "materialism is characterized by an horizontal interaction
with empirical researches, deploying new syntheses to subvert
transcendent epistemology and metapositionality, and thereby
attuning itself to the computer-driven experimentation which is
dissolving science and politics into bottom-up cultural engineering
processes, with a concomitant thematization of complexity (farfrom-equilibrium dynamics) and an initiation of intelligent war
against dirigiste institutions."30
A cartography of postmodern violence could never stop at the
deconstruction of texts. It must involve a rigorous mapping of flows
29 Op cit. Jameson 1984 93.
33
of matter-energy without normative reification. This is why Deleuze
& Guattari employ Spinoza. It is because, as Deleuze points out, an
ethics in Spinoza's sense is completely distinct from a morality; in
fact any assessment of Spinoza in moral discourse (eg. egoism vs.
altruism) misses the profundity of his philosophy.' This is not the
place to give a full account of Spinoza's thought, which will receive
further treatment in Sector 5.3, except to mention the most
important aspects taken up by Deleuze & Guattari are used for this
cartography. What Deleuze & Guattari take from Spinoza's Ethics is
a sense of radical immanence. Since for Spinoza there is only one
substance, his thought offers a subterranean escape route, through
parallelism, from the legacy of a Cartesian dualism which has
subordinated matter to thought.32
Spinoza strips his investigation down to an abstract cartography
whereby the anthropomorphic is treated like "an investigation into
lines, planes or bodies" 33 on a single plane called 'Substance',
'Nature' or 'God'. Deleuze & Guattari term this univocal topological
surface the 'plane of consistency', the 'machinic phylum' and the
'body without organs'. Along these lines, Deleuze describes the
operations of mapping as "untangling these lines within a social
3 ° Op cit. Land 1995 133.
31 See Deleuze's work entitled Spinoza: Practical Philosophy especially chapter 2.
32 Hence Deleuze for example points to a subterranean undercurrent of modern
philosophy, from Spinoza through Nietzsche. For Negri, this underground river of
thought runs through Machiavelli, Spinoza and Marx.
33 103 in B. Spinoza (1992) The Ethics, London: Hackett.
-34
apparatus, is in each case, like drawing a map, doing cartography,
surveying unknown landscapes. . .one has to position oneself on
these lines themselves, these lines which do not just make up the
social apparatuses but run through it and pull at it, from North to
South, from East to West, or diagonally." 34 At their most Spinozist,
they provide the tools for a planetary cartography of violence on
the body of the earth. A 'body' can take on a variety of meanings,
it "can be anything; It can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind
or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body, a
collectivity." 35 A planet? A body in this sense correlates to what
Deleuze & Guattari term an 'assemblage' and can be defined in the
Spinozist sense as an agglomeration of vectors of speed and
slowness, a dense point in a complex of lines. In the fluid
landscape of the 'plane of consistency' or 'nature', a body stands
only as a transitory figure of relative solidification. This background
explains why the laboured issues of moral and political philosophy,
become for 'rnachinic postmodernism', fundamentally questions of
practical fluid mechanics or an 'ethics of speed'.36
"A body is not defined by the form that determines it nor as a
determinate substance nor by the organs it possesses or the
34 159 in M. Foucault: Philosopher, trans. T. Armstrong, Harvester: Wheatsheat
from M. Foucault Centre Conference, Paris, Jan. 1988.
35 128 in Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
36 This will be the topic of Chapter 5 which develops an ethics for `machinic
postmodernism' through Irigaray's fluid mechanics, Spinoza's ethics and Taoist
martial philosophy.
35
functions it fulfils. On the plane of consistency, a body is defined
only by a longitude and a latitude."(ATP: 260) It is necessary to
specifically delineate what is meant by these terms 'longitude' and
'latitude'- they do not correspond to 'geographical' axes as such,
although their relation to these is a complex and interesting area.37
Rather they are tools for mapping radical immanence, and as such
allow this cartography to side-step the epistemological trauma
which seems to characterize most depictions of postmodernity- it
seems, for example, that Jameson's call for 'cognitive mapping' or
'social cartography' contains a mournful tone. For him it seems the
only possible task in a postmodern condition of semiotic flux,
offering a minimal degree of navigation through turbulence.
Deleuze & Guattari's cartography, however seems to move towards
a much more positive notion of cartography as a creative and
37 Deleuze & Guattari refer to a geographical longitude and latitude, one which
has arisen out of the possibility, pragmatics and striation of global navigation
and orientation. ". . . before longitude lines had been plotted, a very late
development, there existed a complex and empirical nomadic system of
navigation based on the wind and noise, the colours and sounds of the seas;
then came a directional, preastrononnical or already astronomical system of
navigation employing only latitude, in which there was no possibility of 'taking
one's bearings,' and which had only portmanteaus lacking 'translatable
generalisation' instead of true maps; finally, improvements upon this primitive
astronomical navigation were made under very special conditions of the latitudes
of the Indian Ocean, then of the Elliptical circuits of the Atlantic (straight and
curved spaces). It is as if the sea were not only the archetype of all smooth
spaces but the first to undergo a gradual striation in one place then another, on
this side then that. The commercial cities participated in this situation, and were
often innovators; but only the States were capable of carrying it to completion,
of raising it to the global level of a 'politics of science'. A dimensionality that
subordinated directionality or superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly
entrenched."(ATP: 479) On this map, navigational possibilities are demarcated
by the subdivision of territory into nation states, which taken together form a
megamachinic skin which surrounds the planet, striating continental surfaces,
oceanic surfaces and depth, and atmospheric altitudes which extend to the
orbits of satellites and which suck in remote-sensed data feeding it into (GIS)
36
connective practice 'in itself'. Perhaps the most important reason
for this is that they place themselves in a lineage of thought for
which transcendence was only ever an illusion, even if it is an
illusion enforced by a whole complex of power.
'Longitude' and 'latitude', then, provide a method for mapping the
materiality of a body as variously defined above. As Deleuze &
Guattari illustrate; "Latitude is made up of intensive parts falling
under a capacity, and longitude of extensive parts falling under a
relation."(ATP: 257) Together, these 'axes' constitute a plane which
is "always variable and is consistently being altered, composed and
recomposed, by individuals and collectivities."(SPP: 128) Stripped
down to these base dynamics, there is "nothing but affects and
local movements, differential speeds."(ATP: 260) They expand
further. The longitude of a body is the "sum total of the material
elements belonging to it under a given relation of movement and
rest, speed and slowness."(ATP: 260) It constitutes the "set of
relations. . .between particles that compose it from this point of
view, that is, between unformed elements. . ."38 The longitude is
the "aggregates belonging to that body in a given relation; these
aggregates are part of each other depending on the composition of
the relation that defines the individuated assemblage of the body. .
."(ATP: 256-7)
Geographical Information Systems programmed to pattern recognize turbulence
37
The latitude, on the other hand, is the "sum total of the intensive
affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential," it is
'the set of affects that occupy a body at each moment, that is, the
intensive state of an anonymous force (force for existing, capacity
for being affected)"(ATP: 260) It is that which a body can do, its
modal power within the limits of that degree.
These are difficult notions to grasp in the abstract. However, as a
point of clarification, it is important that 'longitude' and 'latitude' as
defined above should not be conceptualised as Cartesian axes
which map points or co-ordinates on a `striated' grid-work. Rather,
the question should be pushed further back. It then becomes an
issue of how 'striated' or controlled space is produced, i.e., what
diagonal is forced to undergo a bifurcation whereby it is split into
two poles in reciprocal presupposition. In A Thousand Plateaus,
'latitude' corresponds to the intensive and 'longitude' to the
extensive. But these relations of speed and slowness, motion and
rest undergo further differentiation as the level of scale shifts.
Moving in from the 'plane of consistency', through its attributes to
the modifications which are its expression, the concept of longitude
bifurcates maintaining the trans-scalar self-similarity essential to
Deleuze & Guattari's chaos physics of war. The distinction made is
in geophysical, biochemical and socio-technical tectonics.
38
between 'speed' and 'movement'. While longitude is extensive at a
more fundamental level, within the concept, speed is intensive and
motion extensive.
Again it becomes the difference between an
abstract line of speed, and point to point movement. Movement
here, is in a sense measurable speed. On a Cartesian axis
designating space-time, where the vertical y-axis traces distance
and the horizontal x-axis time, speed is measured by dividing the
distance covered by the time taken. This measured speed, Deleuze
& Guattari wish to designate movement. This is an important point
because, in their analysis of the 'war machine', to be detailed in the
next section, they argue that its fundamental essence is its relation
to speed. And in distinguishing this from what Virilio pinpoints as
the 'fascism of speed', it becomes crucial to understand that for
them, "a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it
speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still
speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement
designates the relative character of a body considered as 'one', and
which goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes
the absolute character of a body whose irreducible part (atoms)
occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the
possibility of springing up at any point."(ATP: 381)39
38 128 in Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
39 The vortical dynamics of smooth or topological space will be discussed in
Sector 2. This distinction between 'speed' and `movement' will prove crucial in
Sector 5 in demarcating nomadic speeds from fascist speed and speeds of the
state. As we will see, for Deleuze & Guattari, the nomad war machine is
characterized by 'intensive speed' and opposed to 'extensive movement'- hence
39
Instead of points on a grid-work (closer to what they call a 'tracing'
than a map), Deleuze & Guattari always emphasise the lines of
process. For them, cartographic immanence is always generated
from within lines, "one slips in, enters in the middle: one takes up
or lays down rhythms."' In this way, Jameson's apparent nostalgia
for 'critical distance' is sidestepped, substituted by an immanent
critique of interiority, of the modern rational subject and state
apparatus whose transcendental orientation involves information
processing through a surveillance grid along the axes of space and
time- the tracing. The operation of the State and its technologies of
control would function more in this way, like "a photograph or Xray that begins by selecting and isolating by artificial means such
as colourations or other restrictive procedures, what it intends to
reproduce. . .[it] has already translated the map into an image; it
has already transformed the rhizome into roots and radicles. It has
organized, stabilized, neutralized the multiplicities according to the
axes of significance and subjectification belonging to it. That is why
the tracing is so dangerous. It injects redundancies and propagates
them. What the tracing reproduces of the map or rhizome are only
their term, 'voyaging in place'. Virilio's discussion of speed and fascism quite
clearly focuses on a glorification of extensive speed, the 'faster and faster' of
Marinetti and his automobile obsession.
"123 in Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy.
40
impasses,
blockages,
incipient
taproots,
or
points
of
structuration."(ATP: 13)41
For Deleuze & Guattari, then, cartography topologizes the
interiority of State and subject. It is an 'active' process as opposed
41 One contention of this cartography is a critique of simulation as mode of
postmodern social control. In other words the deployment of digital cartography
in control systems, GIS visualized data sets and techniques of hazard mapping
(see for example Mark Monmonier's Cartographies of Danger [1997 London:
University of Chicago Press] in which he discusses simulations of tornadoes,
floods, volcanoes and crime patterns) remain in a framework of representation
which the Spinozist emphasis on immanent cartography attempts to bypass. We
can see clearly, in the following example, how striation functions in cybernetic
societies. Aerial views of megalopian core zones digitalized, superimposed with a
couple of keystrokes by isopleth maps arrayed over the street scape- three
dimensional map whose undulating ridge normally illustrate levels of rainfall in
a given area. While criminological research boasts its reflexivity with more
sophisticated statistical probability software packages, the computer state has
been dragged into the virtual, with emergency literally internalized and
perpetual in high resolution chaos management graphic simulation systems.
Before the development of geographic profiling systems, computer mapping
applications in police work had been limited to graphically displaying the site of
crimes such as armed robbery and car theft in a given city or neighbourhoodthese were essentially elaborate pin maps helpful for throwing simple crime
patterns into relief and deciding where to allocate police resources. In
geographically profiling systems however, flows of criminality are tracked across
the irrigated grid of state space. Noise and turbulence in channelled flow feed
the strata, which, processing the excitation as a clear signal, produces what is
consumed, i.e. and abstract and projected flow of criminality; the productive
aspect of power generates new objects for the deployment of power. The local
glows with the traces of short-circuits. At first glance the spots look randomly
distributed, illustrating the geographical pragmatics of the offender. The
computer first draws a box around the area of the crime sit and divides it into a
grid. Starting with a randomly chosen point on a grid, it determines the distance
from that point to the first crime site. Using an equation that takes into account
criminological research on average distance from residence to crime, the
program calculates the possibility of that point being the offenders home. It then
repeats the process for every point of the grid and every crime site. The result is
a three dimensional tracing expressing the probability of offender residence. Or
instead of the isopleth image, the same information can be transformed into a
chloropleth image covered with coloured bands used on geothermal maps to
show extremes in temperature. These hot zone tracking systems have
particularly been developed for serial killer manhunts. In the phase transition
from the traditional theopolitical authorization or legitimacy to an impersonal,
cybernetically automated efficiency, the 'psychopathic murderer is both the final
justification of law and the point of transition to pathology, from the criminal
soul of political societies to the software disorder of commodity phase population
cybernetics."(115 in N. Land (1991) 'After the Law' in A. Norrie (ed) Closure or
Critique, Edinburgh University Press.
41
to a 'passive' tracing; "what distinguishes a map from a tracing is
that it is entirely orientated toward an experimentation in contact
with the real. . .[t]he map does not reproduce an unconscious
closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious. It fosters
connections between fields, the removal of blockages on the body
without organs onto a plane of consistency."(ATP: 12) As should be
obvious from this description, 'cartography', for Deleuze & Guattari
is a pragmatic process as opposed to a representation of a terrainit is in this conceptualisation co-extensive with the field of forces to
be mapped; "the map is open and connectable in all its
dimensions: it is detachable, reversible, susceptible to constant
modification. It can be torn, reversed, adapted to any kind of
mounting, reworked by an individual group or social formation. It
can be drawn on a wall, conceived of as a work of art, constructed
as a political action or as a meditation. . .A map has multiple
entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to
the same."(ATP: 12)
This methodology now will be deployed specifically to mapping the
surface of the earth, the configurations of postmodern violence and
turbulence in the global system. In what way does Deleuze &
Guattari's notion of 'cartography' provide the instrumentation for
this mapping? Most importantly, it is finely tuned to tracking
systemic fluctuations from order to chaos to order, the dynamics of
42
change and continuity. As we will see later, in its connection to the
'war machine', their cartography is a diagram of turbulence,
emergent order from chaos. This orientation is crucial for two
reasons. Firstly, the space of war is intrinsically unpredictable, so
any normative reifications in the diagram can only produce
unnecessary, unrealistic and idealist rigidity to the map. Following
Deleuze & Guattari's cartography, there is a real distinction
between Spinoza's Ethics (and Deleuze & Guattari's appropriation of
this in terms of the 'longitude' and 'latitude' detailed above) and
moral discourse. Any criteria for action remain strictly immanent to
the cartography as opposed to hardening its content into a
selective representation. Secondly, the space of postmodern
violence, and simulation society in general is radically complexified
by the invention of the computer and its concretisation of virtual
reality. If postmodernity is characterised by a blurring of the actual
and the virtual, this is the case nowhere more than in military
cybernetics. As Jean Baudrillard describes it, in his controversial
text on the Gulf War "the space of war has become definitively
non-Euclidean."(GW: 50)
As will be seen later, the space of war, for Deleuze & Guattari is by
definition always aligned to dark zones escaping the eye of power.
As such, the history of war is simultaneously the history of the
43
desert, the ocean, the atmosphere and now cyberspace42.
Cyberspace is not the promised land but a battleground. The
movement of 'bodies' in these 'uncontrolled spaces' are dictated by
a dynamics of 'emergent order from chaos' or the vortical dynamics
of turbulence. Therefore, a cartography of postmodern violence
views the surface of the earth as scattered by eddying patterns
among populations, from the micro-scale of interpersonal violence,
through the street disorder of rioting, to guerrilla conflict and
interstate military operations. It is these processes which Deleuze
& Guattari's cartography of war is tuned to map.
1.3 Violence
In mapping 'postmodern violence', use will be made of Deleuze &
Guattari's conception of the 'war machine', a complex notion which,
in its explication, constitutes what I will refer to as a 'continuum of
war.' This 'war machine' has the explanatory power of being able to
topologize practically everything referred to as 'violence', moving
beyond a mere deconstruction of the law into the specific
designation of modes of bio-technical consistency. As Deleuze &
Guattari point out in relation to the theoretical importance of their
conception, "the war machine has many varied meanings, and this
42 Disturbing this rigid planetary tracing run transversal flows. Modern capitalist
investment in technology involves several phase shifts as the war machine locks
onto a plateau across which it slides. Sea space is gridded into longitude and
latitude. Air space demands the vertical extension of the fractal coastline of geopolitical glacis. In cybernetic postmodernity, the instantaneous information
44
is precisely because the war machine has an extremely variable
relation to war itself. The war machine is not uniformly defined and
comprises something other than increasing quantities of
force."(ATP: 422) This machine or continuum of war is strung out
between two poles: "at one pole, it takes war for its object and
forms a line of destruction prolongable to the limits of the universe.
But in all shapes it assumes here- limited war, total war, worldwide organization- war represents not at all the supposed essence
of the war machine but only, whatever the machine's power, either
the set of conditions under which the States appropriate the
machine, even going so far as to project it as the horizon of the
world, or the dominant order which the States themselves are now
only parts. The other pole seemed to be the essence; it is when the
war machine, with infinitely lower "quantities", has as its object not
war but the drawing of a creative line of flight, the composition of a
smooth space and the movement of people in that space. At this
other pole, the machine does indeed encounter war, but as its
supplementary or synthetic object, now directed against the State
and against the world-wide axiomatic expressed by States."(ATP:
422)
The first step, then, in configuring the relationship between
postmodern violence and Deleuze & Guattari's 'war machine' is to
processing gives the war machine the ultimate fuel injection. Pure war. Pure
45
explicate its particular relation to violence. This will entail a brief
and selective run through of this conception of the 'war machine' in
A Thousand Plateaus. As we will see this relationship is complex.
'War', in their use, is not simply synonymous with violence but
involves a dynamical interaction between a bio-technical
assemblage and the space in which it operates. This is why, in its
most general terms, their definition of the 'war machine' involves
its abstract relation to two connected issues- 'speed' and the
'constitution of a smooth space' both of which have already been
mentioned above. Taking the emphasis on 'speed' from the work of
Paul Virilio, their analysis of violence is strictly materialistdissolving the moral, political and juridical problems which have
occupied State philosophy since Plato into a cartography of
movement, flows of matter-energy, the modes of composition of
social assemblages, their power relations and degrees of
stratification. In this sense, and although both Deleuze & Guattari
and Virilio take it much further, both follow the profound insight of
ancient Chinese war theorist, Sun Tzu, who emphasised over two
millenia ago that "speed is the essence of war"(AW: 134). 43 This
will lead Virilio, in Speed & Politics to formulations such as the
following; "The time has come, it seems, to face the facts:
revolution is movement, but movement is not revolution. Politics is
only a gear shift, and revolution only its overdrive: war as
speed.
46
'continuation of politics by other means' would instead be a police
pursuit at greater speed, with other vehicles."(SP: 18) We see here
how the operations of the State and its branches of the military,
police, prisons, courts etc. can be viewed in terms of their
regulation of the movement of bodies in space. Moreover, in this
depiction, revolutionary action becomes an intervention into the
flows of a regulated system, an attempt to release certain vectors
perhaps locked into closed circuits. But most importantly here,
Virilio here concurs with Deleuze & Guattari and Foucault by
reversing the famous Clauswitzian formula that 'war is a mere
continuation of politics by other means.' War for Clausewitz was
"an act of violence intended to compel our opponent to fulfil our
43 Sun Tzu diagrams a flow chart of war which will be fundamental to the
analysis in Ch.2.
44 C. V. Clausewitz (1968) On War London: Penguin. In fact one crucial factor of
this cartography of postmodern violence is the replacement of Clausewitz's
outlook to that of Sun Tzu, a transition which is evident in any military or
business academy. "After many centuries of inspiring kingmakers, general and
spies, Sun's message was lost on the nineteenth century's Clausewitz, Moltke,
and the iron generals of Total War, who were to fascinated by industrial
technology, military hardware, logistics, and sheer destructive power. .
.Nevertheless, much of what Clausewitz admired about Napoleon's use of
paramilitary units, surprise and evasion probably came from the Corsican's early
reading of the first Western translation of Sun Tzu by JJ Amiot, a French Jesuit
scholar in China, which was in circulation in Paris when Napolean was a young
officer. This preference for cleverness over brute force has earned Sun Tzu a
prominent place ever since on the bookshelves of diplomats, generals and
corporate planners. Filled with terse and provocative aphorisms, the Art of War
is as closely studied by Asian investors and businessmen today as it was earlier
by Mao Tse- Tung, Ho Chi-minh and Vo Nguyen Giap. The Japanese say 'politics
is business.' If the market place is a battleground, requiring strategy and tactics,
Sun Tzu wrote the Bible."(Sterling Seagrave, Lords of the Rim, 1995, 45-46) A
much more sympathetic reading of Clausewitz's version war dynamics is that of
Alan Beyerchen in 'Clausewitz, Nonlinearity and the Unpredictability' (in
International Security, Vol. 17, No.3, Winter 1992/93, pp59-90) who
emphasises strains of complexity in Clausewitz's abstract machine which
problematises a simple opposition between political rationality and the chaos of
war. However, unlike Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault and Virilio, the 'real'
47
will" and violence here is defined as "physical force (for there is no
moral force without the conception of States and Law)" 45 This
definition has much in common with the basic definitions of war
and violence in State philosophy, where violence or physical force
serves as a means subordinated to rationally codified objectives,
thereby constituting a whole tracing of the socius in terms of the
imperative of the State to 'order' the 'chaos' or war. In this way as
Deleuze outlines, "as the postulate of legality, State power would
express itself in law, where the latter is conceived either as a state
of peace, imposed upon brute force or as the result of a war of
struggle won by the stronger party, but where in either case law is
defined by the forced or voluntary cessation of war, in contrast to
illegality, which it defines by way of exclusion/'(F: 29) Now, as we
shall see, for Deleuze & Guattari, Foucault and Virilio, in
postmodernity, once nation-states have become merely
components in a planetary nuclear-cybernetic complex, this
formula of Clausewitz's is inverted so that politics become the
continuation of war by other means.
Clausewitz runs an "ideal' concept of war distinct from actuality in
the sense that 'overthrowing' the enemy is tantamount, irrelevant
of any socio-economic or political factors. War, here, is like an
abstract charge or current, "like tensions of two elements still apart
implications of the concrete reversal of the Clausewitzian formula remain
48
which discharge themselves in small partial shocks. But what is
now the non-conducting medium which hinders the complete
discharge? Why is the philosophical conception not satisfied?"' In
actuality, Clausewitz remarked that war is subordinated to the aims
of the political State, which gives war its 'object' or aim, or in
Deleuze & Guattari's terms, appropriates it to its own ends. They
reframe this argument as follows; "States are better or worse
'conductors' in relation to absolute war and condition its realization
in experience."(ATP: 420) Within the parameters of politics, for
Clausewitz, the conduction of this war 'charge' can tend towards
that 'absolute" or 'pure' concept with the annihilation of Total war.
Or where the conduction meets more resistance, the absolute
concept is limited and is manifested merely in armed posturing.
The 'continuum of war', along one axis anyway, is composed of
ascents and descents, escalations and de-escalations.
The Clausewitzian formula remained hegemonic throughout
modernity. But now, there seem little reason to concur with its
theoretical formulations. In particular, there seems little reason to
accept the premise that the essence of war is to 'overthrow' the
enemy. The fully abstract cartography provided by Deleuze &
Guattari, which like Sun Tzu, seems to emphasise the 'lines of
unsatisfactorily explicated.
45 Ibid. 101.
46 Ibid. 369.
49
hydraulic intricacy'47 thereby dissolving war, as Toffler mentioned
above, out of the solid-state stand-offs of a Newtonian physics of
nation states. However, what Deleuze & Guattari wish to maintain
from Clausewitz's analysis, is this 'pure' notion of war. But instead
of an ideal charge which requires States for its actualization or
'conduction', Deleuze & Guattari want to give it a concrete reality
independent of States, even fundamentally in opposition to their
mode of composition. It is only through the conduits and dams of
State politics and law that war could solely consist of 'square-offs',
'head to heads' and confrontation in the manner of billiard balls
colliding with each other.
In their topology of this continuum of war, Deleuze & Guattari
unfasten its teleology in three stages, with each step moving it
towards a kind of 'ethics' of collectivity". (i.e. the cartography of
the 'war machine', its relations of speed and slowness and its
power, lies fundamentally in opposition to the State and its mode
of hierarchical social relations (stratification), its appropriation and
militarization of war, its constitution of individual ego-centred
subjects (interiorization) and its control over space (striation and
reterritorialization). Firstly, Deleuze & Guattari address whether
war necessarily takes 'battle' as its object. They give the examples
of guerrilla warfare, the war of movement and nuclear deterrence,
47 150 in N. Land (1992) The Thirst for Annihilation, London: Routledge.
50
all martial modes in which both 'non-battle' and 'battle' can be the
object of war. But zooming out from this they ask whether 'war' is
necessarily the 'object' of the war machine. But as they go on to
describe, what they mean by the war machine is an assemblage
that is only given violence as its object; it has a 'supplementary',
'synthetic' or 'second-order' relation to war. In fact if the `war
machine' has an essence, it is the constitution of a 'smooth space'
as opposed to the 'striated' space of the city or State, the 'polis'.
This is to say, for Deleuze & Guattari, the essence of the 'war
machine' is the "occupation of this space, displacement within this
space, and the corresponding composition of people: this is its sole
and veritable positive object."(ATP: 417) So they push the question
of the relation between the 'war machine' and 'violence' back even
further to ask the degree to which the 'war machine' is the 'object'
of the State apparatus. Here, we eventually get to the heart of the
matter; it is only after it has been given its negative object, 'war',
that its system is pushed towards the pole of actual battle. And this
makes the destruction of obstructive stratification a secondary
process, the primary one concerning the adherence to 'smooth
space'. The State, or in their terms, the `apparatus of capture'
constitutes a spatial system of brakes and amplification; this
means that "it is at one and the same time that the State
apparatus appropriates a war machine, that the war machine takes
48 This 'ethics' will be the focus of Sector 5.
51
war as its object, and that war becomes subordinated to the aims
of the State."(ATP: 418)
Their analysis of the 'war machine', therefore primarily points to a
mode of collective composition without transcendent authority, a
centre of power or social stratification. It is a fluid formation, flat
with its terrain, turbulent in dynamic. It is almost as if the
operation of the State, in its attempt to solidify fluidity, triggers
reactions in the 'war machine' which we might commonly recognize
as violence. But as they continuously emphasise, such collective
movements, "make war only on the condition that they
simultaneously create something e/se."(ATP: 423) It is in this way
that Deleuze & Guattari's critique of violence proceeds. As in their
depiction of 'cartography', the 'war machine' as a concept contains
within its elucidation, a collective pragmatics, not a moralistic
critique of violence, but rather and more fundamentally, a critique
of the State-form and all of its microcosms of normalization.
Indeed, one could argue that their analysis of desiring-production
in Anti-Oedipus works in a parallel manner to that of the 'war
machine' in the sense that it is, in itself, a threat to late capitalist
social organization. 49 Anyway, the status of this claim about
49 In fact it is Deleuze & Guattari's notion of the revolutionary nature of desire
which will ultimately lead to Baudrillard, for example in Forget Foucault (1987)
NY: Semiotexte, to attack them for remaining caught within a modern
framework of liberation, production, representation. . .
52
revolutionary desire and its opposite, fascist desire, which will be
the focus of Sector 5.
As mentioned above, the cartography of violence which can be
extracted from Deleuze & Guattari's work, requires them to engage
a variety of concepts to encapsulate immanence, in particular 'the
plane of consistency' and the `machinic phylum'. Moreover, in his
text on Foucault, Deleuze develops the important and parallel
notion of 'topology' which does similar work. These radically
Spinozist concepts, make it possible to think abstraction in a
materialist manner, and this is fundamental to this above
discussion. This is because for the inversion of the Clausewitzian
formula to be anything more than evidence of the reversibility of
linguistic signs, that is, for it to have real content, a conception of
an 'idea' which is both 'real' and non-actual or 'virtual' is required.
In this sense, when Deleuze & Guattari discuss the 'nomad war
machine' as a 'war machine' which does not have war as its object,
what is meant is not just one type of realization of the pure idea of
war, but on the contrary, the content adequate to the Idea, the
invention of the Idea, with its own objects, space, and composition
of the nomos." (ATP: 420) The nomads in this sense constitute an
abstract but real immanence. The inversion of the Clausewitzian
formula does not signify a crisis of representation which allows
signifiers to float and oppositions to reverse. It strictly corresponds
53
to a real movement which sees the reversal of the relationship
between the 'aim' and 'object' of war. In this sense what drives the
reversal of the statement is the modern history of capital
accumulation and acceleration and its wholesale investment in the
means of destruction. This exponential gradient which charts the
migration of war into the instantaneous 'silicon-time' of electronics,
brings us back to the two poles between which the continuum of
war is strung. The emergence of the modern European nation-state
(in Foucault's terms, disciplinary societies) involved, most
importantly the monopolization of force. Internally this involves the
productive pacification or 'policing' of populations through
analogous but distributed mechanisms of power- the military camp,
the prison. . .But what this operation presupposes was a massive
operation of legal codification not just of bodily activities within the
state territory but regimentation of how war could be waged
between states. Mercenary 'war machines' were not just hired by a
central bureaucratic organization but 'appropriated'. The distributed
'war machines' of medieval Europe were 'appropriated' by the
State, given war as their permanent object. The State took control
of strategy or aim simultaneously restraining, through legal
codification, the 'war machine' to limited war, and injected
unprecedented amounts of constant and variable capital. Within the
phase space of the State, war intensifies swinging towards the
attractor of total mobilisation, thereby realising the full potential of
54
the captured war machine. At this pole, the aim of 'bringing down
the enemy' is surpassed to total annihilation of not just the
enemy's military, but its civilian population and economic
infrastructure. This is Total War. But it is the advent of fascism,
particularly in the form of German National Socialism, which
constitutes the crucial turning point in the history of the 'war
machine.' Here, according to Deleuze & Guattari, annihilation
becomes suicidal; in an irreversible nose dive, the object of war
becomes unlimited and its takes no aim other than itself- war for
wars sake. The global system passes through an irreversible
threshold. The Imperial Occident implodes in a black hole of
genocide. As Guattari writes in acidic tone, "How moving it was to
see the banners of capitalism and socialism intertwined against it!
They would have us believe that there was a real antagonism
between the fascist Axis and the Allies. In fact, what was really at
issue was the selection of the right model. The fascist recipe got off
to a bad start, and it must therefore be eliminated and replace with
something better"(MPF: 225) Meanwhile, elsewhere the shock of
two global wars and the corresponding capital investment in
military science, pushes the human species past its limit point of
total annihilation. The 'war machine' ceases once more to be a
mere component of the State. In fact for Deleuze & Guattari "the
appropriation has changed direction, or rather the States tend to
unleash, reconstitute, an immense war machine of which they are
55
no longer anything more than the opposable parts. . .the postfascist figure is that of a war machine that takes peace as its object
directly [nuclear deterrence] as the peace of Terror or Survival. . .it
forms a smooth space that now claims to control, to surround the
entire earth. . .[it] has taken charge of the aim, world-wide order,
and the States are now no more than objects or means adapted to
that machine. . .[the] war machine. . .assumes increasingly wider
political functions. . .(421). . .[it] takes on a specific
supplementary meaning: industrial, political, judicial."(ATP: 466)
Politics becomes war by other means. Pure war. As Michel Foucault
states, this reversal "consists in seeing politics as sanctioning and
upholding the disequilibrium of forces that was displayed in war.
But there is also something else that the inversion signifies,
namely, that none of the political struggles, the conflicts waged
over power, with power, for power, the alterations in the relations
of forces, the favouring of certain tendencies, the reinforcements
etc. etc., that none of these phenomena in a political system
should be interpreted except as the continuation of war. They
should, that is to say, be understood as episodes, factions and
displacements in that same war."5°
Planetary capitalism is therefore shadowed by a multi-scalar
'military-industrial-cybernetic' complex, a continuum of war cutting
5° 90-91 in Foucault, Power/knowledge.
56
through force fields on every strata, from micro to macro,
expressed as localised chaosmosis or turbulence. Deleuze &
Guattari point to four generally distinct economies of violence, the
'war machine' (in its nomadic sense), the State (monopolised force,
legal violence, the police), struggle (inter-group conflict) and
crime51.
51 In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari distinguish between these four, at
least abstractly distinct economies or regimes of violence. These differentiations
will be elaborated on in the coming chapters. "Struggle would be like the regime
of primitive violence (including primitive 'wars'): it is a blow-by-blow violence,
which is not without its code, since the value of the blows is fixed according to
the law of the series, as a function of the value of the last exchangeable blow, or
the last woman to conquer, etc. Thus there is a certain ritualization of violence.
War, at least when linked to the war machine, is another regime, because it
implies the mobilization and autonornization of a violence directed first and
essentially against the State apparatus (the war machine is in this sense the
invention of a primary nomadic organization that turns against the State). Crime
is something else, because it is a violence of illegality that consists in taking
possession of something to which one has no 'right', in capturing something one
does not have a 'right' to capture. But State policing or lawful violence is
something else again, because it consists in capturing while simultaneously
constituting a right to capture. It is an incorporated structural violence distinct
from every kind of direct violence. The State has often been defined by a
'monopoly of violence', but this definition leads back to another definition that
describes the State as a 'state of Law'. State overcoding is precisely this
structural violence that defines the 'law', 'police' violence and not the violence of
war. There is lawful violence wherever violence contributes to the creation of
that which it is used against, or as Marx says, wherever capture contributes to
the creation of that which it captures. This is very different to criminal violence.
It is also why, in contradistinction, to primitive violence, State or lawful violence
always seems to presuppose itself, for it pre-exists its own use: the State can in
this way say that violence is 'primal', that it is simply a natural phenomenon the
responsibility for which does not lie with the State, which uses violence, against
'criminals' - against primitives, against nomads- in order that peace may
reign."(ATP 447-448) As opposed to deconstruction's dialectic driven obsession
with the 'other', Deleuze & Guattari's theory of violence is based on a extended
discussion of 'nomadism' as a mode of collective composition, pure multiplicity,
which takes violence only as a second order object. Primary process, as
discussed above and below, is crucially extra-textual, topological and asignifying
and rhythmic. Their differentiation of these regimes of violence, as we will see
later, maps onto their attack on uni-linear histories of progress which
characterize Occidental State philosophy. In chapter 3, we will see how models
of social evolution which suggest progressions out of primitive chaos are
reworked by Deleuze & Guattari's non-linear universal history of capitalism.
57
The global condition begins to reconfigure distinct regimes of
violence. It is the disorder thrown up by this transition which an
abstract cartography of postmodern violence attempts to map. We
are now in a position to examine these specific configurations
which swirl on this war continuum, outlining their abstract
dynamics, their differential speeds, their modes of composition and
their
assemblages
of
power.
58
sector 2. turbulence
2.1 turbulence simulation
"The landscape of contemporary war is that of a hurricane
projecting and dispersing, dissipating and disintegrating
through fusion and fission as it goes along."(Paul Virilio)52
As noted in Sector 1, Alvin and Heidi Toffler in their book War &
Anti-War argue that postmodern violence can best be understood
through what they call its 'Prigoginian' characteristics. In their
seminal work Order out of Chaos to which Alvin Toffler wrote a
wide-ranging, connective preface, physicists Illya Prigogine and
Isabelle Stengers theorise the active matter of systems 'far from
equilibrium', drawing out some of the implications of a conception
of positive chaos, a patterning which does not just constitute the
negative of order, but rather the emergent properties of dissipative
structures, i.e. turbulence. As they write in an oft quoted moment,
"For a long time turbulence was identified with disorder or noise.
Today we know this is not the case. Indeed, while turbulent motion
appears as irregular or chaotic on the macroscopic scale, it is, on
the contrary, highly organized on the microscopic scale. The
multiple space and time scales involved in turbulence correspond to
the coherent behaviour of millions and millions of molecules.
52 BA: 39.
59
Viewed in this way, the transition from laminar [i.e. nonturbulent
or calm] flow to turbulence is a process of self-organization".53
The concept of 'turbulence' points to the problematic outlined in
Sector 1 concerning the consolidation of simulation as the dominant
mode of control in cybernetic societies. This cartography prefers to
denote that mode of control more specifically as 'turbulence
simulation' in accordance with the insight that the "modern Human
Security System might even have appeared with Wiener's
subliminal insight that everything cyberpositive is an enemy of
mankind. Evolving out of a work on weaponry guidance systems,
his was an attempt to enslave cybernetics to a general defence
technology against alien invasion. Cybernetics was itself to be kept
under control, under a control that was itself not cybernetic. It was
as if his thinking were guided by a blind tropism of evasion, away
53 Prigogine & Stengers, Order out of Chaos 1985 41. As Swinney & J.P. Gollub
put it, "Until recently, the practical definition [of turbulence] has been the
appearance of apparent randomness in photographs of flows containing
materials which permit visualisation of streamlines or other features. However,
this approach omits the possibility of complex flow patterns that are
nevertheless highly ordered." Hydrodynamic Instabilities and the Transition to
Turbulence [New York: Springer-Verlag, 1981] p.1. Indeed recent turbulence
theory agrees that turbulence is indeed not random, does not have infinite
degrees of freedom and is not merely "structureless meandering" but rather "a
well defined structure", an "order in the midst of chaotic motion." Trevor H.
Moulden, "An Introduction to Turbulent Phenomena," in Walter Frost and Trevor
H. Moulden, eds., Handbook of Turbulence, vol.1, Fundamentals and Applications
[New York: Plenum, 1977], pp.25-26; Alexandre Chorin, "Lecture II: Theories of
Turbulence," in A. Dodd and B. Eckmann, eds., Lecture Notes in Mathematics:
Turbulence Seminar, Berkeley 1976/1977 [New York: Springer-Verlag, 1977], p.
41. For a similar conclusion, see Trevor H. Moulden, Walter Frost, and Albert H.
Garner, "The Complexity of Turbulent Fluid Motion," in Frost & Moulden,
Handbook of Turbulence 1:3-4.
60
from another, deeper, runaway process: from a technics losing
control and a communication with the outside of man."54
Turbulence simulation as systemic imperative emerges precisely at
the point at which Clausewitz's formula that 'war is the
continuation of politics by other means' is reversed relegating the
component states of the planetary system into mere conduits for a
military-cybernetic machine. Turbulence simulation, or
'programmed catastrophe' as Deleuze & Guattari and Virilio phrase
it, constitutes a war against positive feedback "quantizing it as
amplification with an unvariable metric. . .[and]. . .establishing a
cybernetics of stability fortified against the future." 55 And in one of
the clearest statements of turbulence simulation, Virilio points out
that in cybernetic society, "ecological catastrophes are only
terrifying for civilians. For the military, they are but a simulation of
chaos, an opportunity to justify an art of warfare which is all the
more autonomous as the political State dies out. At this point, all
civilian populations are helpless victims of the scam, of this
ransacking of the world's resources."[PDES: 65-66]
"Violence is still- and always- in physics."[H: 124]
54 Sadie Plant & Nick Land, `Cyberpositive' in Matt Fuller, [ed] Unnatural. For an
insightful discussion of Norbert Wieners Cybernetics in the military context see
P. Galison [1994] `The Ontology of the Enemy: Norbert Wiener and the
Cybernetic Vision' in Critical Inquiry #21.
55 Sadie Plant & Nick Land, 1 Cyberpositive' in Matt Fuller, [ed] Unnatural.
61
A cartography of postmodern violence at the level of primary
process is a physics. This machinic postmodernism, as will begin to
emerge in this chapter is also a war hydraulics. That is to say, it
maps the continuum of war in terms of a 'generalised theory of
swells and flows'. The outside of juridical-moral codification which
cartography maps is a dynamic field of forces. Any differentiations
of forces depends only on immanent consistencies and speeds of
bodies, in the Spinozist sense described in Sector 1.2. If the
primary process of the 'nomad war machine' for Deleuze & Guattari
is not violence, then we need to be able, in terms of a physics, to
illustrate the thresholds of collective assemblages over which they
are pushed into supplementary conflictual dimensions. We need to
be able, without mere recourse to an ideological analysis, to
differentiate between general force fields and their local
precipitations of violence. For this purpose we can make use of
Michel Foucault's micro-physical cartographic tools and Virilio's
dromology injected by the insights of chaos theory and complex
fluid dynamics.
The emphasis in Foucault's physics is a differentiation between
power, force and violence. Against a hegemonic structuralist
Marxism, power for Foucault is not a mere symptom of ideology,
carving up the population through violence and repression. Power is
62
distributed, dispersed and pervasive, flowing as a variable current
through a capillary system or network of traffic flows. Power is the
relational tension in a flowchart of forces. Violence signifies only a
sub-selection of the vortical pockets in the parallel streams of
micro-stratification, as Deleuze describes it, "violence expresses
well the effect of a force on something, some object or being. But it
does not express the power relation, that is to say the relations
between force and force, I an action upon an action'."[F 28] What
Foucault's productive power, for Deleuze, shares with Marx and
Nietzsche is a base materialismn `force is never singular but
essentially exists in relation with other forces, such that any force
is already a relation, that is to say power: force has no other object
or subject than force. . . violence [is] a concomitance or
consequence of force, but not a constituent element. . . the relation
between forces greatly exceeds violence and cannot be defined by
the latter. Violence acts of specific bodies, objects or beings whose
form it destroys or changes, while force has no object other than
that of other forces, and no being other than that of relation. . ."[F:
70]
Coupled to Foucault's physics of forces, we shall engage Virilio's
physics of speed which he repeatedly sets out as fundamental to
understanding questions of violence. Virilio sets out a technical
56 the term 'base materialism' derives from Bataille and his general solar libidinal
63
definition of speed as "a transfer of energy; we can summarize this
in two words: 'stability-movement' and 'movement-of-movement'.
Stability: I don't move, I am still. Movement: I am in motion. I
speed up: movement-of-movement. The passage from 'movement'
to 'movement-of-movement' is a transfer of energy, what we also
call an 'accident of transfer.' Once you start thinking in terms of
energy, the problem of violence is immediately present."[PW: 33]
It is all too common for the discourse of war and violence to be
saturated with metaphors of disorder and commotion. James
Rosenau in his field stretching if uninspired book, Turbulence in
World Politics57 makes the case for 'turbulence' as an analytic
concept as opposed to merely a suggestive metaphor. Compelling
as it- WO be an analogical use of 'turbulence' proves, he argues,
J
only a hindrance to the enterprise of mapping postmodern violence.
As a more concrete alternative, Rosenau points to the various
branches of physics in which the sciences of turbulence have
recently emerged and which recognize the omnipresence of
turbulent dynamics across the continuum of the cosmos 58 . As
economics.
57 (1990) Princeton: Princeton University Press.
5a Most flows occurring in nature and in engineering applications are turbulent.
The boundary layer in the earth's atmosphere is turbulent. The boundary layer
in the earth's atmosphere is turbulent [except possibly in very stable condition];
jet streams in the upper troposphere are turbulent, cumulus clouds are in
turbulent motion. The water currents below the surface of the oceans are
turbulent; the Gulf Stream is a turbulent wall-jet kind of flow. The photosphere
of the sun and the photosphere of similar stars are in turbulent motion;
interstellar gas clouds. . .are turbulent; the wake of the earth in the solar wind
is presumably a turbulent wake. Boundary layers growing on aircraft wings are
64
Tennekes and Lumley remind us, the dynamics of turbulence can
be abstracted out of researches into liquid instabilities because
"turbulence is not a feature of fluids [only] but of fluid flows
[generally]." 59 Some historical and theoretical background is
therefore required to understanding the analytic application of
'turbulence' to Deleuze & Guattari's conception of the war machine.
Turbulence is treated as one of the grand challenges of high
performance computing at the end of the millennium. This is due to
the massive complexity involved in simulating turbulent structures,
where a flow behaviour at the most molecular scales can produce
disproportionate effects over large distances. Coveney & Highfield
intricately set out the problematic of turbulence simulation in
physics whose abstract dynamics equally map onto a cartography
of postmodern social control and its play of smooth and striated
space;
.,.
• .Navier-Stokes equations describe the flow of continuous
fluids; digital computers are inherently discrete, however, so they
necessarily approximate these equations by dividing space and
time into a grid and only take into account fluid behaviour at
points on this grid. Thus, the computational fluid dynamicist faces
a dilemma: if she subdivides space too far, then the time taken to
turbulent. Most combustion processes involve turbulence and often even depend
on it; the flow of natural gas and oil in pipelines is turbulent. Chemical engineers
use turbulence to mix and homogenize fluid mixtures and to accelerate chemical
reaction rates in liquids or gases. The flow of water in rivers and canals is
turbulent; the wakes of ships, cars, submarines, and aircraft are in turbulent
motion. The study of turbulence clearly is an interdisciplinary activity, which has
a very wide range of applications. . .[Furthermore,] many turbulent flows can be
observed easily; watching cumulus clouds or the plume of a smokestack is not
time wasted for a student of turbulence." H. Tennekes and IL. Lumley, A First
Course in Turbulence [Cambridge: MIT Press, 1972], p.1.
59 ibid. p3.
65
obtain a solution to the equations will be prohibitively long
because she has a very great number of points to consider; but if
she settles for a cut-off that is too coarse,. Then she will omit
important details that affect fluid behaviour such as eddy
structures. In fact, the time taken to perform a fluid simulation
increases as a high power of the Reynolds number, a measure of
propensity for apparent mayhem of turbulence. [The
dimensionless Reynolds number is defined as the ratio of the
inertial to the viscous forces: the weaker the viscous forces, the
greater the tendency to turbulence. At values of the Reynolds
number of order 100, flows are usually laminar; at values of order
1,000,000, flows possess fully developed turbulence; intermediate
values indicate the transition regime between the two states- the
onset of turbulent motion.[374]] At sufficiently high Reynolds
values, the flow becomes turbulent and the Navier-Stokes
equations are then a major headache to solve. Even though this is
not, technically speaking, an intractable [NP] problem, for any
reasonably sized problem on any existing computer it is impossible
to consider Reynolds numbers above around 10,000, a value
corresponding merely to the onset of turbulence, rather than the
fully developed form."6°
Fundamental for 'turbulence simulation' were the initial moves of
the computerised weather forecasting which emerged out of the
general wave of control orientated cybernetics at the end of WWII,
sweeping across the devastated flood plane of global warfare. Still
overcoded by a Newtonian dreamscape of predictable and therefore
controllable systems, chaos research remained confined in its
implementation to controlling the newly accessed plane of positive
chaos and becoming. With the prospect of machines capable of
repeating huge numbers of calculations quickly, military driven
research raced against the bomb clock in simulation war games
which facilitated the warding off of massive thermonuclear warfare.
6 ° 67 P. Coveney & R. Highfield, [1991] Frontiers of Complexity, London:
Faber.
66
For von Neumann, early computing held the key to a future of
climatic warfare; "Geodesic domes would cover cornfields, airplanes
would seed the clouds. Scientists would learn how to make rain and
how to stop it."61
The computerised complex system modelling initiated by Edward
Lorenz in 1960, registered patterns that ebbed and flowed in the
atmosphere, eddy clusters and cyclonic assemblages which always
obeyed numerical rules concerning their immanent relationships of
temperature, pressure and velocity but never repeated themselves.
62 Gleick describes how "To make the patterns plain to see, Lorenz
61 Gleick (1987) Chaos, London: Cardinal p18.
62Let us track this atmospheric or fluid turbulence into digital code so as to be
concrete about the processes involved in the onset of turbulence and its
simulation. We can take cyclones as a strong example. As one commentator
describes them, cyclones "are atmospheric machines that transform latent
energy into angular momentum in a feedback process of potentially catastrophic
consequence. Their condition of emergence are a warm water surface, a latitude
of at least five or six degrees deviation from the equator, a pronounced
instability in the air column or a low surface pressure, and the absence or virtual
absence or wind shear. When these conditions coexist a cyclone can develop,
over a period that normally lasts from four to eight days. A large cyclone
transfers 3.5 billion tons of air an hour from the lower to upper atmosphere, and
releases energy in the order of 10 25 ergs every second. At the centre of the
cyclone is a still zone of low pressure known a the 'eye' or 'core' which registers
no radar echo and which functions as the immobile motor of the storms angular
momentum or expressed energy. "62 The actual movement of air particles
involves crowded flows in and out of each eddy around the eye just as particles
of water flow in and out of a wave and moisture in and out of a cloud, whirlwinds
in general arise from the meeting of two opposite or nearly opposite currents of
air, the struggle for adjustment causing an eddy. A cyclone is a complicated
vortex, similar to an eddy of water but different in the sense that the later
'sucks down', while the air-vortex 'draws upward.' A huge irregular funnel of
rotating air. Whether slight or strong, they always revolve around an axis of
comparative calm, spiralling like a corkscrew inward and upward. A cyclone has
two distinct motions. As the earth journeys through space, the cyclone travels
across the earth's surface. As the solid body of the earth revolves upon its axis,
so the winds of a cyclone revolve around its axis. The two movements of a
cyclone may be illustrated by the two movements of a top. As the top spins
upon its point, it also travels forward. It may spin fast or slowly; and it may
travel fast or slowly. Each movement is independent. Within the cyclone, the
67
created a primitive kind of graphics. Instead of just printing out the
usual lines of digits, he would have the machine print a certain
number of blank spaces followed by the letter A. He would pick one
variable- perhaps the direction of the airstream, gradually the A's
marched down the roll of paper, swinging back and forth in a wavy
line, making a long series of hills and valleys that represented the
way the wind would swing north and south across the continent.
The orderliness of it, the recognisable cycles coming around again
and again. But never twice the same way, had a hypnotic
fascination. The system seemed slowly to be revealing its secrets
to the forecasters eye." 63 Because his numbers were rounded off
decimals, Lorenz found that the small errors fed into his system at
initial stages cascaded catastrophically. The butterfly effect. Microlocalized singularities spiralling into multi-scalar turbulence. Chains
of events constantly skirt points of crisis that could amplify small
fluctuations. In weather systems, sensitivity to initial conditions
accompanies the tight intertwining between small and large scales.
Fast forwarding to the high resolution satellite imaging of
contemporary planetary climatics, swarms of alphanumeric data
print-out melt into vortices, whirlwinds, tornadoes and vast
direction of air circulation is dependent on global position. In the northern
hemisphere, cyclones rotate around their axes in a counter-clockwise direction
and clockwise in the southern. These rules are reversed in the case of the anticyclone. Here again we have an eddy or vortex or winds rotating round an axis,
though the rotation is sometimes so languid as to be imperceptible. But the
direction of the winds is exactly the other way from that of cyclones. Moreover,
the spiral movement or the suck of an anti-cyclone is downward, like a water-
68
transcontinental cyclone systems. Digitized cyclones spin around a
virtual globe. "The sun beat down through a sky that had never
seen clouds. The winds swept across an earth as smooth as
glass."' If postmodern control is based on the abstract machine of
turbulence simulation, then the primary cybernetic interface in this
condition is the computer screen. In conjunction with chaos
physics, computerised simulation has been described by Da Landa
as a 'window onto the machinic phylum.'' Indeed the precarious
eddy, instead of upwards in the cyclone. This results in a piling up of the air
which helps cause a high barometer.
63 15-16 in Gleick.
64 11 in Gleick.
65 Da Landa describes the abstract dynamics of modelling; "The machinic phylum
remained largely invisible until the advent of the digital computers, or rather,
considering how pervasive non-linear behaviour is throughout nature (it could
hardly have escaped everyone's attention), we had to recognize it. Bifurcating
sequences leading to complex behaviour had been 'observed' by mathematicians
such as Henri Poincare as early as the 1890s- although those early glimpses into
the wild spaces of the machinic phylum horrified most who saw them. Those
passing glimpses have, with the proliferation of computers in mathematical
investigation (giving rise to 'experimental mathematics'), opened onto vast
landscapes- computers becoming our 'window' onto the machinic phylum in
more than a figurative sense.
If computers have emerged as windows onto this world, it is because the nonlinear mathematical models of bifurcation processes can be given a visual
representation, a 'phase portrait.' The first step in creating a phase portrait is to
identify the relevant aspects of the behaviour of the physical system to be
modeled. It is impossible, for example, to model an oven by considering each
and every atom of which it is composed, but one can consider the single aspect
of the oven that matters; its temperature. Similarly, in modeling the behaviour
of a pendulum, only its velocity and position are important. In technical terms,
the oven has 'one degree of freedom,' its change in temperature; the pendulum,
in turn, has two degree of freedom. A bicycle, on the other hand- taking into
account the co-ordinated motion of its different parts (handlebars, front and
back wheels, right and left pedal)- is a system with approximately ten degree of
freedom.
The next step is to create an abstract space (called a 'phase space') that has as
many dimensions as the system to be modeled has degrees of freedom. In this
way, everything that matters about the system at any given moment in time
can be condensed into a single point: A point in one -dimensional space (a line_
for the oven, a point in two-dimensional space (a plane) for the pendulum or a
point in ten-dimensional space for the bicycle. Moreover, as the system changes
in time (the oven heats up or the bicycle makes a turn), this point in phase
space will also change, thus describing a trajectory. This trajectory, in essence,
will contain all the information that matters about the history of the modeled
69
nature of postmodern violence, [whereby smooth space is
orientated towards control] is captured in the image conjured by
Deleuze & Guattari of the entranced control operative reduced to a
mere switch in a planetary military cybernetics complex ; "When
examining the new professions, or new classes even, now can one
fail to mention the military technicians who stare into screens night
and day and live for long stretches in strategic submarines (in the
future it will be satellites), and the apocalyptic eyes and ears they
have fashioned for themselves, which can barely distinguish any
more between a natural phenomenon, a swarm of locusts, and an
'enemy' attack originating at any point?"[ATP: 480]
In physics, predictability has conventionally been based on
Newton's equations of motion. Given the forces, specific initial
conditions lead to specific well-defined orbits in a corresponding
coordinate phase space. Laminar flow implies predictable behaviour
in that stream lines which start off near each other, remain near to
each other. Knowledge of motion at one point in the flow at one
point in time implies knowledge of the motion at neighbouring
points in space and time. However in the fluid dynamics of nonsystem. For example, if the system under study tends to oscillate between two
extremes, like a driven pendulum, its trajectory in phase space will form a
closed loop, which represents a system whose `movement' consists of a
repetitive cycle. A free pendulum, on the other hand, which eventually comes to
a standstill, appears in a phase portrait as a spiral. More complex trajectories
will be represented by more complex trajectories in phase space." 136-137, M.
Da Landa, s Nonorganic Life' in Incorporations, NY: Zone. Simulation modelling
70
linear systems, actual fluid movements exhibit both orderly and
chaotic flows, with the nature of the flow changing from laminar to
turbulent as some parameter or combination of parameters
increases through some critical value. In turbulent motion,
knowledge of the motion at one location at one time conveys
nothing about the motion at nearby points at the same time or at
the same point at later times rendering prediction fundamentally
impossible.
In such a system, as Deleuze & Guattari phrase it, "one no longer
goes from the straight line to its parallels, in a lamellar or laminar
flow, but from a curvilinear declination to the formation of spirals
and vortices on an inclined plane: the greatest slope for the
smallest angle."(ATP: ) Here we see the importance for Deleuze &
Guattari's turbulence physics of war of the dinamen or the swerve.
On this notion they rely on Michel Serres' reading of Lucretius' On
the Nature of the Universe where the seeds were nurtured for a
conception of 'creative' or 'animated' matter [nonorganic life] as
opposed to its inert caricatures in philosophical hylomorphism.
Serres describes how Lucretius perceived the angular momentum
of nature; "The minimal angle of turbulence produces the first
spirals here and there. It is literally revolution. Or it is the first
evolution toward something else other than the same. . .The first
through such procedures, it is contended here, is the basic principle of
71
vortices. . .pockets of turbulence scattered in flowing fluid, be it air
or salt water, breaking up the parallelism of its repetitive
waves."(H: 100-101)The atomists Democritus, Epicurus and
Lucretius unlike the initiators of Occidental State philosophy Plato
and Aristotle 66 , set out to map the cosmos without introducing any
conception of purpose or final cause and injecting it as essence of a
thing. Lucretius outlines the importance of the clinamen as not
merely deviation from order, but rather primary process eg. 'When
the atoms are travelling straight down through empty space by
their own weight, at quite indeterminate times and places they
swerve ever so little from their course, just so much that you can
call it a change in direction. If it were not for this swerve,
everything would fall downwards like rain-drops through the abyss
of space. No collision would take place and no impact of atom on
atom would be created. Thus nature would never have created
anything."67.
As Deleuze argues, the clinamen is more than the insurgence of
contingency into an ordered universe. Instead, idealism must be
inverted so that order becomes a subset of diverse multiplicity.
Again for Deleuze in the Logic of Sense, the clinamen is primary;
postmodern control.
66 Virilio conception of programmed catastrophe as we shall see later rests on a
critique and inversion of Aristotle's physics of substance.
67 66 (1951) London: Penguin.
68 (1990) London: Athlone.
72
"It is tied in a fundamental manner to the Epicurean theory of
time and is an essential part of the system. In the void, all atoms
fall with equal velocity: an atom is no more or less rapid with
respect to its weight than other atoms which more or less hinder
its fall. In the void, the velocity of the atom is equal to its
movement in a unique direction in a minimum of continuous time.
This minimum expresses the smallest possible term during which
an atom moves in a given direction, before being able to take
another direction as the result of a collision with another atom.
There is therefore a minimum of time, no less than a minimum of
matter or a minimum of the atom. In agreement with the nature
of the atom, this minimum of continuous time refers to the
apprehension of thought. It expresses the most rapid or briefest
thought: the atom moves 'as swiftly as thought'. But, as a result,
we must conceive of an originary direction for each atom, as a
synthesis which would give to the movement of the atom its
initial direction, without which there would be no collision. This
synthesis is necessarily accomplished in a time smaller than the
minimum of continuous time. This is the clinamen. .•" 69
This minimum points to the inter-dimensionality of the fractal.
Most importantly for Deleuze, this means that "The clinamen or
swerve has nothing to do with an oblique movement which would
69 269 in Deleuze (1990).
73
come accidentally to modify a vertical fall. It has always been
present: it is not a secondary movement, nor a secondary
determination of the movement, which would be produced at any
time, at any place. The clinamen is the original determination of
the direction of the movement of the atom. It is a kind of conatusa differential of matter and, by the same token, a differential of
thought [my emphasis]. . •'o
line of fluid escape, line
of flight, primary diagonal. The swerve.
So rather than an accident in the substance of flow, turbulence
and self-organisation becomes the mode of composition out of
which order is only a derivation. Order out of Chaos. In A
Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari map out this process of
self-organization. "From turba to turbo, in other words, from bands
and packs of atoms to the great vortical organizations. The model
is a vortical one; it operates in an open space throughout which
things-flows are distributed, rather than plotting out a closed
space for linear and solid things, it is the difference between a
smooth [vectorial, projective or topological space and a striated
metric space; in the first place 'space is occupied without being
counted,' and in the second case 'space is counted in order to be
occupied'."[ATP: 361-362] The turbulent dynamics of the
mechanosphere on this topological surface are mapped by Deleuze
74
& Guattari from an array of interlocking but never completely
corresponding angles producing a whole discursive network of
cartographic equipment- Smooth and striated space; Rhythm and
meter; Self-consistent aggregates and strata; Rhizomes and trees;
The plane of consistency and the plane of organisation; The nomad
war machine and the state; Turbulent and laminar flow.
The common processes which make it possible to describe
anthropomorphic dynamics alongside those of, for example, a
flowing liquid or cyclone cannot be captured through linguistic
representations alone. What brings seemingly diverse processes
together is their abstract machine or their engineering diagram.
Manuel Da Landa gives a concrete example to help clarify what is
at stake in the move made by machinic postmodernism beyond
metaphorical analogy. "When we say [as Marxists used to say] that
'class struggle is the motor of history' we are using the word
'motor' in a purely metaphorical sense. However, when we say that
"a hurricane is a steam motor" we are not simply making a
linguistic analogy: rather we are saying that hurricanes embody the
same diagram used by engineers to build steam motors, that is,
that it contains a reservoir of heat, that it operates via thermal
differences and that it circulates energy and materials through a
[so called] Carnot cycle. Deleuze & Guattari use the term 'abstract
mibid.
75
machine' to refer to this diagram shared by very different physical
assemblages. Thus, there would be an 'abstract motor' with
different physical instantiations in technological objects and natural
atmospheric processes."71
Typically, likenesses are drawn between war and environmental
disturbance. Again while such discourse remains at the level of
analogy, its cartographic utility remains limited. For this reason,
Deleuze & Guattari in both volumes of Capitalism and
Schizophrenia develop neo-materialist strategies for
conceptualising the virtual continuum which underlies the
nature/culture, environment/man dichotomies which have
permeated anthropocentric thought. In Anti-Oedipus, for example,
the key connector is their machinism and emphasis on production;
"we make no distinction between man and nature: the human
essence of nature and the natural essence of man become one
within nature in the form of production or industry, just as they do
within the life of man as a species. . .man and nature are not like
two opposite terms confronting each other- not even in the sense
of bipolar opposites within a relationship of causation, ideation, or
expression [cause and effect, subject and object, etc.]; rather, they
are one and the same essential reality, the producer-product."[AO:
4-5] Similarly, in A Thousand Plateaus and as we shall see below,
71 p2. Manuel Da Landa, The Geology of Morals: a neo-materialist interpretation,
76
the `machinic phylum' is a term which cuts through continuum of
cosmic self-organizing processes, from geological tectonics to the
paranoid neuroses of philosophers of the State. Massumi clarifies
the issue further; "The physical and cultural worlds are an infinite
regress of interlocking levels. Each level or stratum recapitulates
mechanisms from the last on a larger scale, and adds new ones of
its own. Every bifurcation to a new level has an essential element
of randomness, giving our universe the diverging symmetry of a
fractal figure."[UG: 54] In this way, perhaps the most fundamental
question in mapping postmodern violence concerns the relation
between order and disorder. It is the perspective of turbulence
theory in this very issue that makes it so significant. It provides a
new way of dealing with what Prigogine calls one of science's basic
questions; "The famous law of the increase in entropy describes
the world as evolving from order to disorder; still, biological or
social evolution shows us the complex emerging from the simple.
How is this possible?. . .We know now that nonequilibrium, the flow
of matter energy, may be a source of order."72
www.t0.or.at/delanda/geology.htm
72 xxix Prigogine & Stengers op cit.
77
2.2 base turbulence
"Strategy is not only a form of dynamics or energetics but
first of all a topology."[H:107]
In the first volurne of his Trilogy, Civilization and Capitalism,
Fernand Braudel describes the nomad invasions of early modern
Europe;
"they represented speed and surprise at a period when
everything moved slowly. . .fortresses had to be equipped and
stores laid in, and if there was still time, guns supplied,
horsemen mobilized and barricades set up. . .The nomads
strength also lay in the carelessness and relative weakness of
the men who held the approaches to the civilizations. . .a
physical law drew them now westwards, now eastwards,
according to whether their explosive life would ignite more
easily in Europe, Islam, India or China. Eduard Feuter's classic
work drew attention to a cyclonic zone, an enormous vacuum
in 1494 over the fragmented Italy of princes and urban
republics. All Europe was attracted towards this storm creating
area of low pressure, in the same way hurricanes persistently
blew the peoples of the steppes eastward or westwards,
according to the lines of least resistance.[WAIM 96]
The materialist cartography of war developed by Da Landa
demarcates 4 strata which cut across the continuum of war. We
shall build upon our definition of the continuum of war by adding
here that it constitutes an abstract material surface which connects
the machines of war and their dissipative structures; "the level of
weapons and the hardware of war; the level of tactics, in which
men and weapons are integrated into formations; the level of
strategy, in which the battles fought by those formations acquire a
78
unified political goal; and finally the level of logistics of
procurement and supply networks, in which warfare is connected to
the agricultural and industrial resources that fuel it."[WAIM 5] Each
of the simultaneously interconnected yet autonomous levels
function as a vortex, holding its rough shape despite being
submerged in an irregularly moving fluid. As Da Landa writes in
relation to command systems in battle, it "must form an island of
stability amid the surrounding chaos, an island created by the
same forces producing the turmoil around it"[13]. Like turbulence
in fluid dynamics, "the machines produced as the output of each
level [weapons, battles, wars etc.] may be seen as the units of
assembly for the next level up the scale."[23] The function of the
dissipative system is to drain off entropy [disorder, noise, heat,
friction] by carrying it down to distributed local components,
warding off its accumulation. So what brings a cartography of
turbulence together with war is a shared abstract machine.
In a short essay in the science periodical Nature n , Alvin Saperstein
has outlined one way in which chaos theory has been applied to
war. He develops a non-linear model of an arms race tracking
institutions from stability to instability, from an arms race itself to
war in terms of the transition from a laminar to a turbulent flow.
Countering deterministic accounts of the outbreak of war,
79
Saperstein argues that "war can be viewed as a breakdown in
predictability: a situation in which small perturbation of initial
conditions such as malfunctions of early warning radar systems or
irrational acts of individuals obeying orders lead to large
unforeseen changes in the solutions to the dynamical equations of
the model"74 Saperstein asserts that there are thresholds which cut
across spirals of escalation. As we have seen, such thresholds while
being gateways into chaos should not merely be understood as
random mess [the negative of order] but a zone of unpredictable
innovation in which only the transcendental limits or degrees of
freedom can be outlined.
In a similar vein, Deleuze & Guattari offer a `nomad physics' of the
war machine. Literally a perturbation to the homeostasis of State
philosophy and its complementary physics of order, this 'nomad
physics' is of a radically different nature. It provides a complex
fluid dynamics less interested in forecasting than mapping lines of
least resistance for pragmatic insurgency, following the clinamen,
the swerve, lines of deviation and escape. It is a "a physics of
packs, turbulences, 'catastrophes' and epidemics corresponding to a
geometry of war, the art of war and its machines."[ATP: 490]
73 Alvin Saperstein [1984] 'Chaos- a model for the outbreak of war', Nature, Vol.
309.
74 303.
80
State philosophy, state physics, state epistemes, stasis. The "state
needs to subordinate hydraulic force to conduits, pipes,
embankments which prevent turbulence, which constrain
movement to go from one point to another, and space itself to be
striated and measured, which makes the fluid depend on the solid
and flows proceed by parallel, laminar layers."[ATP 363] By
understanding social dynamics from within the operating system of
niegamachinic complexes, i.e. the policed zone of interiority
constructed on a fluid molecular field of exteriority, the
programmatic imperative normalises order, being and identity as
opposed to positive chaos and becoming. As Michel Serres puts it,
"the world is in order, according to the mathematical physics in
which the Stoics are met by Plato up the line and by Descartes
further down, and where order reigns supreme over piles of
cadavers. The laws are the same everywhere; they are
thanatocratic. There is nothing to be learned, to be discovered, to
be invented, in this repetitive world, which falls in parallel lines of
identity. Nothing new under the sun of identity."75
The codificatory operations of the state and its forms of expression
constitute an abstract irrigation plan. Intricately, Serres describes it
as follows, "Classing is a succession of dams, a complicated
arrangement of wickets, hierarchy is semiconductive, the gaps
75 Serres 1982 100.
81
between subsets prohibit crossings, classing is there to disarm, to
slow momentum be it creative or destructive, who can tell, to cool
down its heatedness or slacken its celerity, complex classing
encumber the bed of violence, or else. . .classing is formed by
violence and the disorderly course of its flux, violence deposits it as
a river lays down in passing its heavy or fine alluvial deposits, it
deposits it, codes it, structures it, makes it, it looses some of its
virulence along the circuitous route of its products. The gravel
comes to a standstill in the gravel. Violence makes the classes and
the classes unmake violence."76 The State is built on its violence, a
violence thrown up in the friction between flat modes of social
composition and latent tendencies unleashed by capitalism towards
absolute decoding and deterritorialization.
We can take a concrete example of the concept of 'turbulence'
applied to violence and social unrest. This will place us in better
position to understand the specificities Deleuze & Guattari's
'continuum of war'. When they take up Paul Virilio's conception of
speed and differentiate its diverse manifestations, it is to distil
certain modes out of Virilio's equation of speed with fascism. In
light of this claim, it is necessary to probe some of their most basic
claims about the morphology of the war machine. Importantly,
Deleuze & Guattari state that "each time there is an operation
76 Serres 1995 94.
82
against the State- insubordination, rioting, guerrilla warfare, or
revolution as act- it can be said that a war machine has been
revived, that a new nomadic potential has appeared, accompanied
by the reconstruction of a smooth space or a manner of being in
space as if it were smooth [Virilio discusses the importance of the
riot or revolutionary theme of holding the street]."[ATP: 3861 In
this quote, they are pointing to Virilio's discussion in Speed &
Politics where he makes reference to the revolutionary importance
of 'holding the street.' "The revolutionary contingent attains its
ideal form not in the place of production, but in the street, where
for a moment it stops being a cog in the technical machine and
itself becomes a motor [machine of attack] in other words a
producer of speed."[SP: 3]
To clarify this, let us first briefly map out a 'socio-cyclonics' of the
riot". There is perhaps no better resource with which to achieve
this than Elias Canetti's fluid population dynamics diagrammed in
his book, Crowds & Power. We see in this text self-organizing
population dynamics and the vortical particles mechanics
definitional of smooth space. Deleuze & Guattari draw from
Canetti's work to distinguish various types of fluid collectivity, most
notably the mass [crowd] and the pack. But it is important to
recognize that there two distinct definitions of a population mass
44 (V
83
at work in A Thousand Plateaus. The two uses of a population
mass concern firstly the relation of a class to a mass, and secondly
of a mass to a pack. This first conception, as they underline is not
to be understood through Canetti.[ATP 214] We shall deal with
each in turn.
Instead of the 'motor of history', classes for Deleuze & Guattari are
conceived as forms of social segmentarity operating by binary
organization. They compose solid or rigidified 'molar' aggregates
through relations of "resonance, conjugation or accumulation"
through an "overcoding favouring one line over the others."[ATP
221] For Deleuze & Guattari, therefore, to argue that class conflict
is the motor of history is to valorize the very binary oppositions of
rigid segmentarity which set up contradiction as the base dynamic
which is set in motion dialectically through a series of reactive
manoeuvres. In a different context Land makes a similar point,
arguing that between rigidity and fluidity, there is no dualistic
opposition or structure; "There is no elemental duality at stake
here, since this would involve a rigid difference transcending and
dominating its terms, as if a typology, signifying system, or
patchwork of language-games were extrinsically organizing base
flows, in the manner of Wittfogels hydraulic bureaucracies 78 . The
77 This `socio-cyclonics' will be used in Sector 4 to construct a cartography of the
Los Angeles Riots.
78 Wittfogels' hydraulic thesis will be discussed in Sector 3 as a flow chart of
total power.
84
savage truth of delirium [in this context population turbulence] is
that all ossification. . .is a unilateral deviation from fluidity, so that
even bones, laws and monuments are crumbled and swept away by
the deep flows of the Earth."79
For Deleuze & Guattari, this first sense of mass provides a complex
fluid model for base population flow. They set this out in
Micropolitics & Segmentarity; "A social field is always animated by
all kinds of movement of decoding and deterritorialization affecting
'masses' and operating at different speeds and paces. These are
not contradictions but escapes. At this level, everything is a
question of mass."[ATP 220] As opposed to the 'molar conjugation'
of flows whereby they are stratified into hierarchical organizations
and treated to generate "relative stoppage, like a point of
accumulation that plugs or seals the lines of flight, perform[ing] a
general reterritorialization" we have the primary process of
'connective, molecular multiplicity.' "At this level, everything is a
question of mass"[220]. Of a more supple composition, the fluid
escape of the mass from the class while looped up with channels of
normalization is a more basic process. The fluid line of escape or
the clinamen, is, as we have seen is only deviation if taken from
the perspective of the norm. The important point is that it is the
underlying mass which facilitates transversality between the
79 Land 1992 128.
85
parallel channels of solidified identification and stability. "Mass and
class do not have the same contours of the same dynamic, even
though the same group can be assigned both signs. The
bourgeoisie considered as a mass and as a class. . . The relations of
a mass to other masses are not the same as the relations of the
'corresponding' class to the other classes. Of course, there are just
as many relations of force, and just as much violence, on one side
as the other. The point is that the same struggle assures two very
different aspects, in relation to which the victories and defeats
differ. Mass movements accelerate and feed into one another. .
.but jump from one class to another, undergo mutation, emanate
or emit new quanta that then modify class relations, bring their
overcoding and reterritorialization into question, and run new lines
of flight in new directions. Beneath the self reproduction of classes,
there is always a variable map of masses."[ATP 221]
In other places however, Deleuze & Guattari make use of Canetti
to, in a sense perform the same critical operation, the critique of
the hierarchical population composition of the State form as
opposed to more dynamic modes of collectivity. It is for this reason
that the distinction is made between the mass or crowd in Canetti's
sense and the pack. In a sense the two senses of mass reside at
different zoom scales; if we zoom into the mass which we saw
opposed to a class, we see a further differentiation of composition
86
into relative solidity and fluidity along a continuum of population
velocity and density. In this way we can understand the dual use
by Deleuze & Guattari of the concept of a molecular population
mass. To be more exact, we can zoom in precisely on the very
motor of angular momentum in masses of the first sense, the lines
of fluid escape around which swarm collectivities of the pack type.
We can also observe here, at this lower level of abstraction how
such vortical pockets of activity dissipate and are absorbed by
thickets of bodies. At this scale of content/expression, the mass
describes zones of relative solidity while packs surf escape
velocities. Framed as a question of speed we can see how neither
the class and the mass or the mass and the pack are correctly
conceived as binary oppositions. The mass and the pack in
Canetti's terms are merely two types of interpenetrable
multiplicity, the mass here being a molar one and the pack a more
supple molecular one. This molar multiplicity bears the
characteristics of the mass; "large quantity, divisibility and equality
of the members, concentration, sociability of the aggregate as a
whole, one way hierarchy, organization of territoriality or
territorialization and emission of signs." This contrasts starkly with
those of the more liquid pack whose traits provide it with a flat,
self-consistency; "small and restricted numbers, dispersion,
nondecomposable variable distances, qualitative metamorphoses,
inequalities as remainders or crossings, impossibility of a fixed
87
totalization or hierarchization, a Brownian variability in directions,
lines of deterritorialization and projection of particles."[ATP 33]
Understood in this way as a dynamic liquid, a flow of population
displays traits of vortical patterning. However, for Da Landa, "more
important than turbulent behaviour itself is that special, singular
moment at the onset of turbulence. A liquid sitting still or moving
at a slow speed is in a relatively disordered state: its component
molecules begin to move in concert to produce highly intricate
patterns. Transition points like these, called 'singularities'. . .points
or thresholds in the rate of matter and energy are referred to as
singular because they are rare and special."[WAIM 15] As we will
see in Sector 4, in the era of 'turbulence simulation', complex social
cybernetics opens out the array of such critical thresholds. It can
also be seen how in our conception of the modern history of war
through economic cyclesn , the role of technological innovation
contains this critical potential for initiating cascading bifurcations in
the planetary system. For just now, we will concentrate on Deleuze
& Guattari's postulation of the 'released nomadic potential of the
riot'.
Past a certain critical velocity threshold and compositional
intensity, the collective assemblage swarms to attack its enclosure,
80 See Chapter 3.
88
stratification and traffic regulation. So, for example, when Canetti
describes the bodily mass turned destructive, he points to the
destruction of material obstacles and containers, walls, boundaries
as well as semiotic outcrops of a system of capture; "I designate as
eruption the sudden transition from a closed into an open crowd.
This is a frequent occurrence, and one should not understand it as
something referring only to space. A crowd quite often seems to
overflow from some well-guarded space into the squares and
streets of a town where it can move about freely, exposed to
everything and attracting everyone. But more important than this
external event is the corresponding inner movement: the
dissatisfaction with the limitation of the number of participants, the
sudden will to attract. . ."[CP: 23] The onset of street turbulence.
"A hive about to swarm is a hive possessed. It becomes visible
agitated around the mouth of its entrance. The colony whines in a
centreless loud drone that vibrates the neighbourhood. It begins to
spit out masses of bees, as if it were emptying not only its guts but
its soul. A poltergeist-like storm of tiny wills materializes over the
hive box. It grows to be a small dark cloud of purpose, opaque with
life. Boosted by a tremendous buzzing racket, the ghost slowly
rises into the sky, leaving behind the empty box and quiet
bafflement. "81
81 Kelly 1995 7.
89
Michel Serres also describes the turbulent motion of mob
dynamics; "In the middle of the demi-cone or at the center of the
vortex, lies the object of hate, the subject of proscription.
Multiplicity shoves its noise onto the one. It crystallizes the noise.
No longer a multiplicity, no longer noisy, it is one, globally, it is a
single chorus, it is one locally, the center, the midpoint, the navel
of the vortex: the eye. The eye of the storm." 82 This turbulence
theory of population disorder also has some important
correspondences with guerrilla strategy which seeks to sustain the
emergent order of turbulent populations onto a plateau of
protracted insurgency against the State without irrigating out the
energies of destratification.
2.3 Guerrilla insurgency:
sino-hydraulics and the nomad war machine
"The physics of the vortex is revolutionary" (H: 121)
"The hydraulic model of nomad science and the war
machine.. .consists in being distributed by turbulence across
smooth space, in producing a movement that holds space
and simultaneously affects all of its points, instead of being
held by space in a local movement from one specified point
to another."(ATP: 363)
"The transfer from Empire of China to Empire of the Self is
never ending"83
82 1995 60.
83 Victor Segalin quoted in p153 Dean & Massumi (1992) First &. Last Emperors,
NY: Autonomedia.
90
The concept of war hydraulics which can be extracted out of the
Treatise on Nomadology plateau of A Thousand Plateaus is an
orientation developed with the intention of de-dialecticizing our
cartography of violence. It will be contended that it pushes the
investigation of the social topology of war towards a conjunction of
Chinese martial philosophy (in its cosmic context) and our
discussion of turbulence. It therefore opens Deleuze & Guattari's
`nomad war machine' onto a body of guerrilla literature and
strategy manuals, an alignment which any concrete analysis of
their pragmatics, must take seriously- war against the state. In this
chapter, fluidity has been emphasised as base dynamic in a general
theory of swells and flow. An attempt has been made to provide a
means of understanding emergent order out of chaos, relative
solidity in liquid flow and therefore proceeds with the topology of
war congruent with the reversal of Clausewitz's dictum; that is to
say, our topology of war unfolds the dialectics of interstate conflict
onto a fluid material continuum whereby politics is a second order
symptom of a planetary war machine. In this discussion, the
nomad war machine as a machine tuned to/ surfing on turbulence
is run through an analysis of strategy of guerrilla insurgency of Sun
Tzu and Mao Tse Tung.
91
If the nomad war machine has an essence, as we have been
arguing especially above, then it is relative fluidity. As Massumi
explains, "Fluidity is Unity minus the dictate to form a single body,
and separated from the unidirectional drive to Dominion. It is the
unity in fluctuation of a collection of disparate elements whose
disparateness is not denied. . .It is unity liberated from the organic
ideal of the State-extreme. . .A unity that does not preclude
divergence. . .If the counter-ideal of the Nomadic-Extreme is
impossible, it is not due to a contradiction in its logic but to
resistances inherent in the materiality of its constituent elements
(even the sea has a shore). Fascism marches duplicitously toward
transcendence, nomadism undulates superficially toward
immanence: channelling versus wave propagation."(FLE: 75)
If Deleuze & Guattari's nomad war machine is to converge with the
base turbulence of Chinese martial arts, then its occurs in the
abstract machine of a mode of composition cosmically tuned to the
destruction of the State form. "Martial arts and state-of-the-art
technologies have value only because they create the possibility of
bringing together worker and warrior masses of a new type. The
shared line of flight of the weapon and the tool: a pure possibility,
a mutation) (ATP 403) guerrilla swarmachines whose vernacular
gelte/09
cybernetics surf the vortex of postmodern global capital. The
mutation of guerrilla war into electronics morphs the hi-tec carceral
92
continuum into a digital jungle. Routes back round the Moebius
strip into the jungle warfare of post-Conrad ian endo-colonisation. 84
Both Virilio and Deleuze & Guattari make the crucial distinction
between 2 strategic orientations. Virilio's eerie text in Bunker
Archaeology which introduces his collection of black and white
photographs of the disused concrete bunkers of Nazi oceanic
vigilance, tracks the speed obsession of the Occidental military
machine; "In the Occident, the time of war is disappearing;"(BA:
21) Despite the modernity of the molar organization of war and the
appropriation (militarization) of the war machine by the apparatus
of the state, a molecular conception persists which is of an
altogether different nature to that which stoked the furnaces of
Total War. In fact the prospect of species annihilation, Virilio
argues, has forced the Occidental military elite to take heed of this
alternative approach to war. In the stalemate or surface
equilibrium of Total Peace, new flexible responses re-emerge.
Turbulence develops in the cracks of the permanent arms economy
of US hegemony. Core strategy mutates to counter-insurgency and
becomes guerrilla war machine programming insurgency by
simulation. As Virilio describes, subversion analysis signals the
fluidification of control chasing orphan lines of decoding and
84 We could follow the emergence of this digital jungle through key
texts/phenomena of postmodern violence; the purr of the helicopters from
Apocalypse Now through into Ballards Drowned World, the LA riots, the
catastrophe simulators of Sim-City and the net-war of the Zapatistans.
93
deterritorialization. Occidental strategy looks east to simulate
Chinese war hydraulics to surf the streams of decoded flows with
their pockets of turbulence; "the Orient is not something to be
imitated; it only exists in the construction of a smooth space"(ATP:
379) Reel war.
Virilio describes the key characteristics of this Sino-hydraulic
strategy appropriated by the planetary technocracy of war to
counter balance the acceleration towards mutually assured
destruction; "Prolonged warfare never loses its rights; Chinese
tactics revolved around prolonging the time of war as opposed to
the extreme shortening of that time in the Occidental apparatus.
This duality, this conceptual duel, organizes the new strategic
thought of technologically advanced armies; subversion analysis,
the overt respect of the Occidental military intelligentsia for the
theorists (from Sun Tse to Mao Tse-Tung, not to mention Giap Vo
Nguyen) 85 of this combat mode show us that, to really understand
recent evolution of the military, the establishment cannot help but
refer to other types of philosophy of armed intervention."(BA: 22)
This different time of the guerrilla war machine and now the global
85 See the seminal work by Robert Taber (1970), The War of the Flea: Guerrilla
Warfare Theory & Practice, London: Paladin in which the trajectory of
revolutionary thought into sixties radicalism is traced back to the thought of Sun
Tzu.
94
war machine constitutes a smooth space and takes peace as its
object- pure terror. 86
This strategic orientation which Virilio tracks down into the
"Oriental military-rural apparatus . . .[which] tends to increase the
time of war by mobilising the population around active or passivedirect or indirect- survival objectives, natural catastrophes,
accidents, and restrained conflicts seen as part and parcel of the
same war- class struggle extending in the end into all dimensions
of everyday life."(BA: 22) As a vortical population composed
around lines of least resistance, the nomad war machines flows
down towards, connects with and surfs natures' non-linearity, fine
tuning emergent vectors against stratification on the most
contiguous scale.
Like Virilio, Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus contrast two
modes of revolution relating to the Occidental and the Oriental.
Because of their distinct relations to stratification, the Occidental
and Oriental state apparatus stand vulnerableto different modes of
attack. Due most significantly to geographical considerations, "In
the Orient, the components are much more disconnected and
disjointed, necessitating a great immutable Form to hold them
together: "despotic formations," Asian or African, are rocked by
86 It attains critical velocity of both virtualization and actualization in the Gulf
95
incessant revolts, by secessions and dynastic changes, which
nevertheless do not affect the immutability of the form. In the
West, on the other hand, the interconnectedness of the
components makes possible transformations of the State-form
through revolution. It is true that the idea of revolution itself is
ambiguous; it is Western insofar as it relates to a transformation of
the State, but Eastern insofar as it envisions the destruction of the
State. The great empires of the Orient, Africa and America run up
against wide-open smooth spaces that penetrate them and
maintain gaps between their components (the nomos does not
become countryside, the countryside does not communicate with
the town, large scale animal raising is the affair of the nomads,
etc.): the oriental State is in direct confrontation with a nomad war
machine"(ATP: 385) Here Deleuze & Guattari fuse the vector of
nomad war with the history of Chinese guerrilla swarmachines and
its strategic background.
Paul Virilio's dynamic flow chart of war is underscored by a diagram
carved out in ancient China. Pure war even in its postmodern
configuration constitutes the 'art of fighting without fighting.'87
War which will be examined through the writings of both Virilio and Jean
Baudrillard in Sector 4.
" In Virilio's most general sense, "Pure War is neither peace nor war; nor is it as
was believed, "absolute" or "total war". Rather, it is the military procedure itself
in its ordinary durability"(PDEC: 35) In cybernetic society however, pure war
resides specifically in the digitalisation of base turbulence. "Cyberspace is not a
promised land but a battle ground." "Pure War is speed and military population.
96
Through Virilio's lenses, "Sun Tzu asks that we never confuse Pure
Power (the military thing) with Domination (the State). What he
means by pure power is equally clear, and he often comes back to
it: the essential thing is to make the enemy submit without
combat, 'to avoid setting off the mechanism.' Open warfare must
be a constant allusion to primordial camouflage, and its only
consistency must be constant change, in which no one element
takes precedence for too long. . .This could not be the case in war
begun as a perpetual mechanism of pure power. Thus, what Sun
Tzu designates as a "war machine" (chapters II, V, XI) is not the
'minimum potential' from which any military organization can exact
enormous results, but the joint dialectic that contains all of the
opposing parties' operations. . ."(PDEC: 22-23)
Underlying the vision of war of strategist Sun Tzu 88 and hence
convergent with Deleuze & Guattari's abstract physics of the nomad
war machine lay a notion of war as a hydraulic system. Comparing
the force-field of war to a water-course, it was recorded that "an
army may be likened to water, for just as flowing water avoids the
heights and hastens to the lowlands, so an army avoids strength
and strikes weakness"[AW: VI 27] But it misses much to take this
It is thus the population of time, the ultimate metaphysical figure of 'projected'
societies."(PDEC: 102)
88
see also the classic Taoist commentaries on Sun Tzu compiled in Zhuge Liang
&. Liu Ji (1995) Mastering the Art of War, trans. & ed. Thomas Cleary, London:
Shambala.
97
purely at the level of analogy, likeness or metaphor. Sun Tzu
testifies fundamentally to the liquid unpredictability of warfare,
never more clearly the case in the postmodern era of military
computation, complexity and simulation. Sun Tzu's `tao of war' can
be run literally as a fluid mechanics; "as water shapes its flow in
accordance with the ground, so an army manages its victory in
accordance with the situation of the enemy"[VI 28] laying the path
for a chaos theory of conflict in the insight that "as water has no
constant form, there are in war no constant conditions."[VI 29]. As
Virilio puts it, "from the beginning, military intelligence has
struggled against the badly-defined collection of freedoms, risks
and uncertainties, the chaos of the natural environment and the
spontaneous movements that can occur within it. This is its
primary definition which founds the coherence of the realization of
the concept of war- its conductability- in time and space."(PDES:
14) In fact it is Sun Tzu who invents Virilio's notion of Pure War.
Moreover, the reason why The Art of War by Sun Tzu is a tool box
for the cutting edge of cybernetic capitalism, from business 89 to
military strategist, is that it contains an abstract flow chart of a
fluid physics for survival 'far from equilibrium,' a tactics for
turbulence. This orientation on the Art of War, this darkside base
hydraulics guides a whole current of insurgency theory against the
state. It corresponds to the strategy of `fighting without fighting' of
89 The field of management strategy, business tactics, trading and guerrilla
98
the 'soft' martial arts'. Hence the nomad war machine's synthetic
relation to violence. In its hydraulic diagrannnnatics and guerrilla
fluid mechanics, it constitutes the plane of consistency through the
Chinese martial arts from Sun Tzu, through the tao drenched
practices of T'ai chi, Kung Fu, to Mao's guerrilla writings and
Vietnamese strategy during what Jameson calls the 'first
postmodern war'gl . The emphasis on fluidity maps the decoding
and deterritorializing influence on the strata and the terrain of
hierarchical flattening in the distributed systems of information
warfare. Phase Change: neo-cortical warfare- turbulence
simulation, programmed catastrophe- pure war.
"The silicon links were already there"(ZO: 253)
Cyberwar is not just about technical machines. Information warfare
does not just take place in cyberspace. Its fundamental element is
virtual reality, but an array of practical religions have been surfing
it for many nnillenia. In addition to the militarized reality of science
vvill
fiction, this is one explanation .,the new sciences of complexity
ceaselessly converge with the Chinese martial arts. Situated on this
continuum, information warfare is stripped down to a war of
perceptions, hacking, jamming and stealth tactics in the nervous
marketing is saturated with leadership manuals plugging Sun Tzu and Lao Tzu
into the eddies and vortices of turbular international finance.
9° See H. Reid & M. Croucher (1987) The Way of the Warrior: The Paradox of the
Martial Arts, London: Century Publishing.
99
system, whether it be planetary telecommercial networks or the
human organism.
"Chaos and solitons have become the yin & yang of the new
physics"92
Implicitly, Massumi's depiction of machinic postmodernism's
conception of virtual reality unfolds the Hegelian version of the yinyang through a turbulence physics of strange attractors, phase
spaces and transcalar parallelism of self-similarity. "The virtual and
the actual are coresonating systems. As the actual contracts a set
of virtual states into itself at a threshold state, the virtual dilates.
When the actual passes a threshold, bifurcates towards a specific
choice, and renounces the other potential states, the virtual
contracts them back and the actual dilates. When one contracts
(resonates at a higher intensity), the other dilates (relaxes). Each
side has its own internal local-global correlations: resonances and
tensions between nucleating subpopulations that respond
individually and together. The local-global correlation of the actual
and that of the virtual interact as subpopulations of a single
individual. The universe is a double faced supermolecule, each face
of which is a supermolecule in its own right. They peacefully
resonate together, or, if the tensions on one side or the other reach
91 See Chapter 4.
92 p2 in Alwyn C. Scott, (1989) "Introduction", in Peter Christiansen & R.D.
Parentiert, (eds), Structure, Coherence and Chaos in Dynamical Systems,
Manchester: Manchester University Press.
100
turbulent proportions, they clash. In that case, the turbulent side
sends shock waves of crisis that amplify the other, which is forced
to infold the disturbance into its local-global correlation as best it
can. The universe as cosmic dissipative system."(UG: 65-66) In the
era of planetary computerisation, as will be detailed in Sector 4,
the virtual accident is pure revolutionary intensity immanent to the
technological complexity of the system. It forces a reorientation of
postmodern insurgency around system malfunction, a sidestepping
of agency towards an acceleration of systemic tendencies outlined
by Deleuze & Guattari in Capitalism & Schizophrenia towards
decoding and deterritorialisation.
The most important convergence with Deleuze & Guattari's theory
of the war machine with Chinese strategy is related to a mode of
becoming which only takes war as an object, but is constituted in
the primary process of the constitution of a smooth space. Much
can be illuminated concerning Deleuze & Guattari's nomad war
machine and what will later be conceived in terms of a "collective
ethics of speed'. In this sense it is more conducive to a Taoist
practical philosophy rather than the organicism of Confucianism.
Like Sun Tzu's The Art of War, in Lao Tzu's Tao Te Ching this war
hydraulics is outlined as a theory of flows;
"Highest good is like water. Because water excels in benefiting the
myriad creatures without contending with them and settles where
none would like to be, it comes close to the way. . .112]
101
"In the world there is nothing more submissive and weak than
water. Yet for attacking that which is hard and strong nothing can
surpass it. . . 185]
"The reason why the River and the Sea are able to be king of the
hundred valleys is that they excel in taking the lower position. .
.„[73]
We may assert that the tao corresponds to the pragmatics of
smooth space- in Bruce Lee's words, the tao comprises "a
formlessness, it can assume all forms."' constituting the plane of
consistency and as we shall see later roughly equivalent to
Spinoza's materialist God, Substance or Nature 94 . One can point
also to key notions such as the 'stationary voyage' 95 of the nomad
(intensive speed) which converges with Taoist notions such as
'keeping still'- both constitute an ethics of survival in the eye of the
storm. Conceptions of 'chi' or energy in Taoism already offered an
acupunctural diagrammatics of the body in an era of cyborgian
dehumanization. We get a map of what a body can do, a map used
experimentally, an ethics to navigate "a body charged with
electricity, with pure intensity"(ATP: 378)
93 24 in Lee, B. (1975) The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Santa: Clarita: Ohara.
94
see Chapter 5.
95 We can say of the nomads, following Toynbee's suggestion: they do not
move. They are nomads by dint of not moving, not migrating of holding a
smooth space that they refuse to leave, that they leave only in order to conquer
or die. Voyage in place: that is the name of all intensities, even if they also
develop in extension ."(ATP: 482)
102
The Taoist techniques of 'voyaging in place' and 'sticky hands' 96 in
their emphasis on passivity and submission might on one level
suggest a mode of masochism 97 . However once it is noted that both
involve the construction of a plane of immanence on which the
relation between players is flattened onto the circuit known by
Deleuze & Guattari as the body without organs, then the smooth
continuity between apparent passivity and activity become5
clearer. Further consolidating the correspondences, Massumi also
pushes the intensive towards the virtuality of the uncarved block of
the Tao 98 , in a sense twisting Freud's Beyond the Pleasure
96
see the description of the T'ai Chi practices of 'Whirling Arms & Hands' in Chee
Soo's The Chinese Art of T'ai Chi Ch'uan, (1984) London: Harper Collins.
97 In the plateau, 'How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?', Deleuze
& Guattari discuss the divergence and convergence of Taoism and masochist
practices; "We see in it the formation of a circuit of intensities between female
and male energy, with the woman playing the role of the innate or instinctive
force (Yin) stolen by or transmitted to the man in such a way that the
transmitted force of the man (Yang) in turn becomes innate, all the more
innate: an augmentation of powers. The condition for this circulation and
multiplication is that the man not ejaculate. It is not a question of experiencing
desire as an internal lack, nor of delaying pleasure in order to produce a kind of
externalizable surplus value, but instead of constituting an intensive body
without organs. Tao, a field of immanence in which desire lacks nothing and
therefore cannot be linked to any external or transcendent criterion. It is true
that the whole circuit can be channelled toward procreative ends (ejaculation
when the energies are right); that is how Confucianism understood it. But this is
true only for one side of the assemblage of desire, the side facing the strata,
organisms, State, family. . a is not true for the other side, the Tao side of
destratification that draws a plane of consistency proper to desire, the Tao side
of destratification that draws a plane of consistency proper to desire. Is the Tao
masochistic? Is courtly love Taoist? These questions are largely meaningless.
The field of immanence or plane of consistency must be constructed. This can
take place in very different social formations through very different assemblages
(perverse, artistic, scientific, mystical, political) with different types of bodies
without organs. It is constructed piece by piece, and the places, conditions, and
techniques are irreducible to one another. The question, rather, is whether the
pieces can fit together, and at what price."(ATP: 157) -
98 "There are religious noma g isms both Eastern & Western (Daoism with its
spiritual journeys, versus the Confucian obsession with ancestors and origins. .
."(FLE: 77)
103
Principle99 into a libidinal nomadology; ". . .the only end the actual
world has is the constraint to rejoin the plane of immanence. It is
destined, as the Taoists say, to pace the void. . .(or as the
mathematicians say, to take a random walk)."(UG: 66)
The nomad war machine has a synthetic relation to violence, its
primary process being concerned with speed rather than conflict.
But as was argued in Sector 1, its affinity with speed concerns an
intensive continuum rather than mere extensive rapidity- it is
speed coupled to bodily intelligence; "The martial arts have always
subordinated weapons to speed, and above all to mental (absolute)
speed: for this reason, they are also the arts of suspense and
immobility. The affect passes through both extremes." As a martial
pragmatics, "the martial arts do not adhere to a code, as an affair
of the State, but follow ways, which are so many paths of the
affect; upon these ways, one learns to l unuse i weapons as much as
one learns to use them. Learning to undo things, and to undo
oneself, is proper to the war machine: the 'not doing' of the
warrior, the undoing of the subject' A movement of decoding
runs through the war machine, while overcoding solders the tool to
99 Here Freud describes the gravitational tendency of all life towards death.
"°"In the smooth space of Zen, the arrow does not go from one point to another
but is taken up at any point, to be sent to any other point, and tends to permute
with the archer and the target."(ATP: 377) See also E. Herrigel (1985) Zen In
the Art of Archery, trans. R.F.0 Hull, London: Arkana &. the Japanese Samurai
classic, A Book of Five Rings, (1984) M. Musashi, trans. Victor Harris, London:
Flamingo.
104
an organization of work and of the State (the tool is never
unlearned; one can only compensate for its absence)." (ATP:400)
And while "[it] is true that the marital arts continually involve the
center of gravity and the rules for its displacement. . .[that] is
because the ways are not the ultimate ones. However far they go,
they are still in the domain of Being, and only translate movements
of another nature into the common space- those effectuated in the
Void, not in nothingness, but in the smooth of the void where there
is no longer any goal: attacks, counterattacks and headlong
plunges." (ATP:400)
"If nothing within you stays rigid outward, things will
disclose themselves. Moving, be like water."°'
We can follow this cosmic art of war into modernity, mapping the
influence of Sun Tzu's thought on Mao Tse Tung's guerrilla
strategy, thereby facilitating a perhaps unconventional way of
contrasting Deleuze & Guattari's machinic postmodernism and
dialectical materialist strateg y102, bringing out the innovation of
1 °1 7 in Lee, B. (1975) The Tao of Jeet Kune Do, Santa: Clarita: Ohara.
102 This general contrast which can be made between Deleuze & Guattari's
nomad war machine and Mao's guerrilla warfare can be consolidated with
reference to the theory of games. In A Thousand Plateaus Deleuze & Guattari
discuss the game of Go, or W'ei Chi as it is known in China, and compare it with
chess in relation to game pieces, "relations between the pieces and the space
involved."(ATP: 352) As they outline, Go pieces "are pellets, disks, simple
arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective or third person
function. 'It' makes a move, 'It' could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant.
Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no
intrinsic properties, only situational ones. . .A Go piece has only a milieu of
105
Deleuze & Guattari's cosmic physics of war. In his Introduction to
Mao's treatise On Guerrilla Warfare, Samuel Griffith points to the
convergence of Mao's theory to the Chinese symbol for the "unity
of opposites", the yin-yang. Emphasising the often made
correspondence between the yin-yang and the dialectic, with the
'endless', 'opposite', 'elemental' 'polarities' they may be likened to
the thesis and anti-thesis from which the synthesis is derived.
Griffith notes that "[a]n important postulate of the yin-yang theory
is that concealed within strength there is weakness, and within
weakness, strength. It is a weakness of guerrillas that they operate
in small groups that can be wiped out in a matter of minutes. But
because they do operate in small groups, they can move rapidly
and secretly into the vulnerable rear of the enemy. . .In
conventional tactics, dispersion of forces invites destruction in
guerrilla war, this very tactic is desirable both to confuse the
enemy and to preserve the illusion that the guerrillas are
ubiquitous."'
exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations, according to
which it fulfils functions of insertion or situation, such as bordering, encircling,
shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation
synchronically. . . But what is proper to Go is war without battle lines, with
neither confrontation nor retreat, without battles even; pure strategy. . .In Go, it
is a question of arraying oneself in an open space, of holding space, of
maintaining the possibility of springing up at any point; the movement is not
from one point to another, but perpetual, without aim or destination, without
departure or arrival.(ATP: 352-353) The same game, emphasises Scott A
Boorman in his book The Protracted Game, is fundamental to understanding
Maoist revolutionary strategy from the Kiangsi Period through the Sino-Japanese
wars to the civil war. (1969) New York: Oxford University Press.
103 22 in Mao Tse-Tung (1978) On Guerrilla Warfare, Anchor Books.
106
From the point of view of the `yin-yan' as dialectic, Mao's guerrilla
theory becomes a balance between the light and the dark forces.
So, for example, when Mao discusses the relation between
command and the environment in the essay On Protracted War he
notes that "[no] one denies that even a plan valid for a given
period is fluid; otherwise, one plan would never be abandoned in
favour of another. But it is fluid within limits, fluid within the
bounds of the various war operations undertaken for carrying it
out, but not fluid as to its essence; in other words, it is
quantitatively but not qualitatively fluid. Within such a given period
of time, this essence is definitely not fluid, which is what we mean
by relative stability within a given period. In the great river of
absolute fluidity throughout the war there is relative stability at
each particular stretch- such is our fundamental view regarding war
plans or policies."'" But processed through the complex fluid
dynamics of our war hydraulics, we can see how Mao's theory can
be understood without recourse to dialectics but rather as a
'unilateral deviation from fluidity' without elemental duality.
Refusing to submit to a dialectical strategic thought, Deleuze &
Guattari prefer a tactical rhizomatics. With the elemental duality of
dialectics, "One becomes two: [but] whenever we encounter this
formula, even stated strategically by Mao or understood in the
most 'dialectical' way possible, what we have before us is the most
104 170 in Mao Tse-Tung (1967) 'On Protracted War' in Selected Works of Mao
107
classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought.
Nature doesn't work this way: in nature, roots are taproots with a
more multiple, lateral, and circular system of ramification, rather
than a dichotomous one. Thought lags behind nature."(ATP: 5)
In conclusion, we see through these examples some ways in which
Deleuze & Guattari's fluid cartography of war is not just a map as
representation or tracing, but conjoined with a war hydraulics
constitutes an active orientation against social stratification making
the cartography an experimental practice applicable on a variety of
scales. It has been seen that in a crucial sense, the theoretical
'tool-boxes' of Capitalism & Schizophrenia to a certain extent
converge with a history of guerrilla strategy manuals. It is
important to point out however the tension between Deleuze &
Guattari's anti-dialectics and the Chinese thought of the yin-yang.
Where the yin-yang has emerged as a cultural menne in the
Occident it has normally been processed through a mode of
thought to which Deleuze & Guattari oppose themselves. We have
therefore sought to go beyond this tension, to what is arguably a
deeper convergence which becomes visible when the dialectics of
war is topologized into a continuum of war, the plane of
consistency or smooth space. And it is the fluid composition of such
Tse-Tung, Vol.II, Peking: Foreign Language Press.
109
sector 3. War Continuum
3.1 non-linear history: The social topology105 of War
"history skids over matter"(Michel Serres)106
"eddies and vortices nested inside more eddies and
vortices"(Manuel Da Landa)107
"History is the ordered creation of chaos through the
realization of a theory of war as the geometric basis of all
reality, the stabilization of all the variable magnitudes that
founded and balanced the universe. .."(Paul Virilio)"8
In this section, Deleuze and Guattari's cartography will be deployed
to map non-linear social evolution, thereby piecing together the
back-drop of our discussion of postmodern violence. If the
implications of the collapse of the modern project is subject of
endless theoretical debate, then the intersecting manoeuvre of
machinic postmodernism is an engineering project to unpick any
remnants of teleology, statism, exclusivity, idealism and
paternalism. As we have seen, the aim has been to adopt a
105 Discussing the rupture of continuity through the concept of topology, Greg
Lyn gives a useful outline; "Topological geometry in general, and the
catastrophe diagrams in particular, deploy disparate forces on a continuous
surface within which more or less open systems of connection are possible. This
diagram is catastrophic because it can represent abrupt transformation across a
continuous surface.
Topology considers superficial structures susceptible to continuous
transformations which easily change their forms, them most interesting
geometric properties common to all modification being studied. Assumed is an
abstract material of ideal deformability which can be deformed, with the
exception of disruption.
These geometries bend and stabilise with viscosity under pressure."125 in G.
Lyn, Folds, Bodies and Blobs, (1998) Books-by-Architects. This chapter maps a
social topology so as to provide the tools for discussing the co-existence of
diverse social formations in postmodernity.
106 H: 120.
107 WAIM 8
1"PDES: 30
110
rigorous definition of turbulence. The appreciation of non-linearity
which this facilitates dismantles, most importantly for a
cartography of postmodern violence, any conception of human
history as the progressive victory of the Occidental State-Man
complex as telos or l end of history'. Once machinic history is clearly
understood as a complex interrelation between desiring machines,
technical machines and social machines then the non-linear physics
of civilisations opens the terrain for stripping teleology of its face in
order to deal with the realities of non-linear history manifested in
the late capitalist meltdown of human and machine. Machinic
postmodernism recombines what is identified by Deleuze & Guattari
as the 19 th century nexus between physics and sociology in light of
chaos physics and a topology of the social. 109 In this chapter, a
brief outline shall be constructed of their discussion of social
physics and its implications for non-linear history.
The orientation towards non-linear history has most recently and
most comprehensively been developed in Manuel De Landa's A
Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, a work which is heavily
inspired by Deleuze & Guattari's A Thousand Plateaus, even if De
Landa retains a relatively uncritical attitude, often refusing
conceptually to admit to an entity known as 'capitalism'. On the
positive side, De Landa's work rigorously moves beyond Euro1 "This nexus lies at the base of Deleuze & Guattari's discussions of Marx's
111
centrism and anthropomorphism, and more than any other author,
has developed in his works, a general orientation to the driving
force of multi-scalar turbulence. De Landa forces the insurgency of
physics into history in order to problematize the obviously
widespread common sense notion that human history evolves in
stages. Rather than stages or "progressive developmental steps,
each better than the previous one and indeed leaving the previous
one behind" 11 ° De Landa, following Deleuze & Guattari and as we
will develop here, proposes a coexistence of different phases
alongside each other, interrelating through tension and friction,
rquifications, solidifications and crystallizations. De Landa
immerses human history in a much broader cosmic context,
mapping the flows of matter-energy and information which
traverses it. 111
'tendency of the rate of profit to fall' and its correlation to the co-development of
capitalism and the war machine.
110 16 in De Landa, A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History.
in. The general cartography performed by De Landa in this work maps the
following flows; "Human History has involved a variety of Bodies without Organs.
First, the sun, that giant sphere of plasma whose intense flow of energy drives
most processes of self-organization on our planet and, in the form of grain and
fossil fuel, of our civilizations. Second, the lava 'conveyor belts' that drive plate
tectonics and are responsible for the most general geopolitical features of our
planet, such as the breakdown of Pangaea into our current continents, and the
subsequent distribution of domesticable species, a distribution that benefited
Eurasia over America, Africa, and Oceania. Third, the BwO constituted by the
coupled dynamics of the hydrosphere and atmosphere and their wild varieties of
self-organized entities: hurricanes, tsunamis, pressure blocks, cyclones, and
wind circuits. As we saw, the conquest of the wind circuits of the Atlantic (the
trade winds and the westerlies) allowed the transformation of the American
continent into a cast supply zone to fuel the growth of the European urban
economy. Fourth, the genetic BwO constituted by the more or less free flow of
genes through micro-organism (via plasnnids and other vectors), which unlike
the more stratified genetic flow in animals and plants, also avoided human
control even after the development of antibiotics,. Fifth, those portions of the
flow of solar energy through ecosystems (flesh circulating in natural food webs)
which have escaped urbanisation, particularly animal and vegetable weeds, or
112
As outlined in Sector 1 and detailed here, disciplinary modernity is
underpinned by a basic energetic diagram or abstract machine, one
which is fundamentally thermodynamic. And as we will see in
Sector 4, postmodernity or the period which has been characterized
above as one of turbulence simulation or programmed catastrophe
is fundamentally mapped by an abstract cybernetics. Through these
energetic phase changes our non-linear history changes its
morphology. The accelerated flows triggered by modern capitalism
force states into a history of new deals. Despotic capture,
energetically inefficient, collapses first into disciplinary, industrial,
thermodynamic social machines and cybernetics-control systems
and their novel strategies for channelling swerving vectors into the
integrated circuits of hypercapital. Capture becomes intelligent to
survive. Turbulence simulation.
The social machines which compose Deleuze & Guattari's discussion
of history are primitive systems (cruelty machines), despotic States
(terror machines) and civilised capitalist states (disciplinary
machines). The phase space of a social machine is always plugged
into the future, and with the limit points of explosion and implosion
rhizomes (the BwO formed by an underground rodent city, for example). Finally,
our languages also formed a BwO when they formed dialect continua and
circumstances conspired to remove any stratifying pressure, as when the
Norman invaders of England imposed French as the language of the elites,
allowing the peasant masses to create the English language out of an
113
warded off, they simultaneously feed back, steering machinic
trajectories. The various economies of violence of these social
machines configure populations and technical machines in specific
martial modes; each machine regulates implosion and explosion
according to a dynamic diagram which undergoes phase shifts
when singular thresholds are crossed. A cartography of such social
systems makes differentiations through permutations of longitude
(relations of speed and slowness in extension) and latitude
(affective potential, relations of power, magnitude of intensity). In
this way Deleuze & Guattari's social topology is stretched across a
rhythmic continuum of composition; detailing this continuum, they
write - "the nomads do not precede the sedentaries; rather,
nomadism is a movement, a becoming that affects sedentaries,
just as sedentarization is a stoppage that settles the nomads,
Griaznov has shown in this connection that the most ancient
nomadism can be accurately attributed only to populations that
abandoned their semiurban sedentarity, or their primitive
iteneration, to set off nomadizing. It is under these conditions that
the nomads invented the war machine, as that which occupies or
fills nomad space and opposes towns and States, which its
tendency is to abolish. Primitive peoples already had mechanisms
of war that converged to prevent the State formation; but these
mechanisms change when they gain autonomy in the form of a
amorphous soup of Germanic norms with Scandinavian and Latin spices." Ibid
114
specific nomadism machine that strikes back against the States.
We cannot, however, infer from this even a zigzagging is not
successive but passes through the loci of a topology that defines
primitive societies here, States there, and elsewhere war machines.
And even when the State appropriates the war machine, once again
changing its nature, it is a phenomenon of transport, of transfer,
and not one of evolution. The nomad exists only in becoming, and
in interaction; the same goes for the primitive. . . And collectivities
can be transhumant, semisedentary, sedentary, or nomadic,
without by the same token being preparatory stages for the State,
which is already there, elsewhere or beside."(ATP 430-431)1'
261-2.
112 DefLanda extends this by drawing from the abstract social physics of Arthur
Iberall who has developed a model of human history in which societies are
pictured as an ensemble of fluxes and reservoirs driving those fluxes: water,
metabolic energy, bonding pressures, action modes, population, trade,
technology. . .to stress the role of flows and phase transitions in determining
social field stability.(WIAM 22) In his essay, A Physics for the Study of
Civilization IberaII outlines the components of such a cartography; "I view the
discontinuous social change manifested by the appearance of food processing
societies [eg. from hunter-gathering to horticulture to settled agriculture] as
evidence of internal rearrangements, new associations and configurations, and a
new phase condensation- as if a gaslike phase of matter were becoming
liquidlike or solid state like. . .At his beginning, modern man apparently lived in
hunting-gathering groups operating in a range appropriate to human size and
metabolism. . .If, as appropriate to size, man had the typical mammalian
metabolism and roaming range of about 25 miles/day, cultures separated on the
order of 50 miles would have little interaction. . .The 70 to 1000 mile separation
of populations, as empirically found is highly suggestive of a system of weak
force, `gaslike' interaction. . .The diffusion of an early, small population could be
considered nearly a gaslike motion. . .I surmise that decreases in the levels of
the required potentials [temperature, water, food] caused condensation
[liquification] of small bands on fixed centers of population. . .The nature of the
social phase condensation, however, depends on the amplification capability of
the technological potential. Associated with those two chief potentials- water
supplies and technology [tools]- came changes in modes of living, improvement
in the use of water resources, and localized social development through the
domestication of plants and animals. . .[with state civilizations these `fluidlike'
social formations 'crystallized' into stratified systems]. . .From the archaeological
record I conclude that civilization began when there was extensive trade
[convective flow] among population concentrations [condensations]. The urban
115
Non-linear history is fundamentally anti-humanist. It locates social
assemblages immanently to nature instead of through a
transcendent anthropocentrism. In this way, an energetic account
of the history of violence is more concrete than any humanist
explanation based on the breakdown of state policy. For this
energetic account, the emergence of machines is central, signalling
singularities and dissipative structures in the flow of matterenergy. This orientation, developed by Deleuze & Guattari and
taken up by Manuel De Landa moves between the dualism of
means and ends or instruments and planning into a bottom-up
multi-scalar cartography of turbulence.
The importance of a non-linear conception of history lies in the
n
unNi I j of racist and genocidal Occidental humanist narratives of
progress b nd civilization. As Virilio argues, such meta-narratives
constitute the canonic legacy of modernity; "Was not the
nineteenth century's positivist euphoria over the 'great march of
progress' one of the most insidious forms of the bourgeois illusion,
the effect of which was to provide a cover for the fearsome military
and industrial progression of the mode of scientific destruction? Or
more precisely still, to mask the political and philosophical
inversion brought about by this absolute accident, which renders
centers held cumulative populations greater than 2500 and were composite
116
henceforth relative and contingent all 'substances' natural or
produced."(PA: 213)
The connotations of a linear, successive, equilibrating conception of
historYQ% usefully dealt with in terms of its implied social physics
and it relations of speeds and forces, of order and chaos; of
turbulence. The reformulation of social physics in light of
turbulence theory and its deployment by Deleuze & Guattari
against the State-form strips any remnants of teleology 113 from the
project of modernity- in this respect, their cartography merely
tracks the non-linearity of the capitalist planetary system and its
trajectory of immanentisation. As we shall see, their machinic
history which underlies their machinic postmodernism attempts to
dismantle the imperial evolutionary models of civilization
constructed upon a myth of a primitive degree zero.
groups. The threshold size can be estimated from the absence of complex
cultures of smaller population." (Iberall pp531-33)
113 The dismantling of the teleology of State violence extricates thought from the
circular logics of liberalism. As Nietzsche writes; "So people think punishment
has evolved for the purpose of punishing. But every purpose and use is just a
sign that the will to power has achieved mastery over something less powerful,
and has impressed upon its own idea of a use function; and the whole history of
'thing', an organ, a tradition can to this extent be a continuous chain of signs,
continually revealing new interpreting and adaptations, the causes of which need
not be connected even amongst themselves, but rather sometimes just follow
and replace on another at random. The "development' of a thing, a tradition, an
organ is therefore certainly not its progressus towards a goal still less is it a
logical progress, taking the shortest route with least expenditure of energy and
cost, - instead it is a succession of more or less producing, more or less mutually
independent processes of subjugation exacted on the things, added to this the
resistances encountered every time, the attempted transformations for the
purpose of defence and reaction, and the results, too, of successful
countermeasures. The form is fluid, the 'meaning' even more so. . ."55 in F.
Nietzsche (1994) The Genealogy of Morality, Cambridge: Uni. of Cambridge.
117
aLfv1
One
of the critique
tetANA
I y Deleuze & Guattari involves 1-2
differentiatiation of their machinic conception of history from the
linearity of dialectical materialism; they "define social formations
by machinic processes not by modes of production (these on the
contrary depend on the processes). The primitive societies are
defined by mechanisms of prevention-anticipation: State societies
are defined by apparatuses of capture; urban societies by
instruments of polarisation; nomadic societies by war machines and
finally international, or rather ecumenical organisations are defined
by the encompassment of heterogeneous social formations. But
precisely because these processes are variables of co-existence
that are the object of a social topology, the various corresponding
formations are co-existent."(ATP: 435) In Anti-Oedipus, their
machinic postmodernism assumes the morphology of a mutant
functionalism or political catastrophe theory, mapping the
productive accidents which drive history. In A Thousand Plateaus,
they maintain that "[a]ll history does is to translate a coexistence
of becomings into a succession."(ATP: 431) Their reformulation of
history is a tendential system running from the territorialized and
coded earth through the decoded and deterritorialized planet of
capitalism. Capitalism is seen to retrochronically rework the whole
of history which is composed of a co-existing continuum of rigid
lines, broken lines and lines of becoming, with their corresponding
118
modes of social segmentarity, regimes of signs, modes of
numeracy and relation to speed (space-time). It constitutes not
historical resolution but a descent into the maelstrom, down the
Od- tap& spbx50,
spiralling slopes into the matrixA Postmodernity as the New World
Disorder does not represent a substitute telos standing in for the
l end of history' in neo-liberal perspectives.
As Goldstein writes in relation to the evolutionary rhythm of the
world system, "the long wave' is not a mechanistic or
deterministic process."' Braudel perceives a subtle, almost
imperceptible "tendency for these great waves rolling in from the
deep to become shorter in length. Should one attribute this to a
speed up in the pace of history, a sort of snowball effect?"(PW: 78)
Rather in the core of the world system mere repetition would be
energetically impossible, due to the accelerating, escalative and
non-linear tendencies in capitalism. Hugging the iterations of great
power wars at the core, slides the trajectory of a planetary war
114 In terms of the economic conjuncture as noted by Braudel and its nested
patterns and cycles, we can cite an array of rhythms stretched out across the
scale of time. The slowest rhythms of the world system are known as the secular
trend and Kondratieff waves. The importance of these waves for constructing a
non-linear history concerns their cyclic discontinuity. For Braudel, if the
Kondratieffs map the cyclic undulations of prices of periods of roughly 50 years,
then the secular trend constitutes "the baseline from which prices as a whole
take off."(PW: 76) Braude! identifies 4 successive secular cycles for European
history; "1250 [1350], 1507-1510; 1507-1650, 1733-1743; 1733-1743 [1817]
1896; 1896 [1974]. . .The first and last date in each case represents the
beginning of an upward movement and the end of downward one; the middle
date in square brackets indicates the peak, the point at which the secular trend
begins to go into decline, in other words the moment of crisis."(PW: 77)
115 434 in J. Goldstein, "Kondratieff Waves as War Cycles", International Studies
Quarterl y , 1985, 29.
119
machine whose destructiveness is mapped upwards by an
exponential curve. What fundamentally attacks the linear histories
seeking the enlightenment of perpetual peace is a tidal wave of
absolute deterritorialization, constituting for Deleuze & Guattari,
planetary schizophrenia- the blurring of virtual and actual reality
through the runaway of the military-cybernetics complex. 116 This
116 Frederic Jamesons' mapping of postmodernity is a zoom in on this wave
pattern of capitalism outlined by the Mandan economist Ernst Mandel,
particularly in his Late Capitalism. This pattern of the long wave as it is kgiwl in
the world system theory of eg. Wallerstein, diagrams the vibratory of
modern core economies. The long wave consists in upswings and downswings,
each cycle demarcating one phase space, or loop parameter. Upswings
correspond to periods of rising prices and robust growth in production. In
downswings prices and production either fall or rise less rapidly leading, for
example, to stagnation. Several strands of long wave theory, eg. Goldstein, have
mapped this wave pattern onto the rhythms of major core wars during
capitalism.
In the chapter of Late Capitalism entitled the 'Permanent Arms Economy, Mandel
analyses the relation between arms production and Marx's famous 'tendency for
the rate of profit to fall'. We can use this analysis as a starting point for
understanding Deleuze & Guattari's conception of cybernetic capitalism in which
the "distinctions between constant and variable capital, and even fixed and
circulating capital [become] increasingly relative."(ATP: 492) In cybernetic
capitalism, control in the form of reterritorialization and recoding fluidifies and
on a planetary scale reaches its "absolute speed, based on machinic components
rather than the human components of labour."(ATP: 492) In Marx's Capital
9Vol.3), he pins the trajectory of capitalism, or the `tendency to changes in the
organic composition of capital so that a "gradual growth of constant capital in
relation to variable capital must necessarily lead to a gradual fall of the general
rate of profit."(212) Or put another way, "the drop in the rate of profit,
therefore, expresses the falling relation of surplus-value to advanced total
capital."(214) Mandel provides some clarification of this general definition of the
'organic composition of capital'; "the technical or physical, relationship between
the mass of machinery, raw materials and labour necessary to produce
commodities at a given level of productivity, and the value relationship between
constant and variable capital determined by these physical proportions."(LC:
595) Mandel, as a long wave theorist, is interested in what counteracting
tendencies are generated within capital to resist the falling rate of profit. The
permanent arms economy is examined in these terms, i.e. as a capitalist
strategy to increase general surplus value through heavy investment in militaryindustrial sectors. Mandel reaches the following conclusions; "historically the
permanent arms economy speeds up rather than brakes intensive technological
innovation and hence the growth of the organic composition of capital."(304)
Also he underlines that it is inevitable that his technological innovation will
spread to non-military sectors of the economy. Most importantly, Mandel notes
that "in the long-run the 'permanent arms economy' cannot eliminate any of the
120
pattern, Goldstein points to the irreversible energetic trajectory of
the world system; "The war cycle cannot continue to repeat
indefinitely while wars become exponentially more destructive.
Nuclear war would be the logical outcome of the old rules of world
politics. Thus, the system must either change its operating rules of
self-destruct." 1,7 The new rules are the axiomatics of turbulence
simulation.
pressure towards crisis inherent in it. Even its temporary buffering of the
contradictions and pressures towards crisis only occurs at the expense of their
transfer from one sphere into another- above all, from that of actual
overproduction to that of inflation and overcapacity."(306)
117 Ibid. 434.
121
3.2 Planetary Co-Laminarization:
the megamachinic skin & the irrigation of turbulence
3.2.1 State Megamachines
"The State was not formed in progressive stages; it appears
fully armed, a master stroke executed all at once."(AO: 217)
"The State was first this abstract unity that integrated
subaggregates functioning separately; it is now
subordinated to a field of forces whose flows it co-ordinates
and whose autonomous relations of domination and
subordination it expresses."(AO: 221)
In the postmodern world system, states as models of realization of
the axiomatics of capitalism, do not take on a uniformity of form. If
there is a similarity then it is merely in the opening out of diverse
state systems onto the same planetary economy. The states of the
center provide the model for this isomorphy. Bureaucratic socialist
states while residing in this world economy still impose a
heterogeneity on their systems based on an abstract machine of
planning rather than capital as such. Along the North-South axis,
the relation of core to periphery (again located within the flows of
global capital) speaks to the polymorphy of the margins of the
world system.
For Deleuze & Guattari, late capitalism as the contemporary
configuration of these components constitutes a transition in the
power dynamics of the world system away from East-West
confrontation towards the North-South axes. The East-West
system, while describing the dynamics of the Cold War and its
122
functionality to the single capitalist planetary economy, opens out
onto an historically broader tension between distinct modes of the
State, of social stratification, hierarchy and capture. The Cold War
dissolves into a more fundamental issue of a complementary
planetary co-stratification strung out between the 2 poles of the
State. Although never in actuality mapping precisely in terms of
geography, for Deleuze & Guattari, East-West corresponds to the
distinction between Oriental Despotism (and its
totalitarian/socialist iterations) and the modern capitalist state. In
agreement with their non-linear conception of history, Deleuze &
Guattari warn that between these two abstract modes, with their
numerous concrete mixtures, there is no necessary progress in
terms of the disappearance of violence. As their hydraulics of war
underlines, war in its morphological fluidity deposits State systems
along its way, leaving one configuration here and another there like
patterns in layers of sedimentation sorted by the base flow. For
example, the monopoly of violence of the modern state differs in
disciplinary, totalitarian, fascist and socialist models even though
all lie on the continuum of capture. This continuum also
encompasses the mini-despotism of Oedipalised familial culture
and the godfathered crime syndicates which globally compete with
State systems in the general economy of violence. Together, they
form a planetary megamachine complex, a skin of extortive
stratification. This whole continuum is the dynamic field which we
123
are attempting to formulate in terms of turbulence- the war
continuum and its capture.
The components of planetary co-stratification contain the futurehistory of the capitalist world system. Answering the question of
why capitalism did not emerge in 13 th century China despite
existant techno-scientific competencies, Deleuze & Guattari
proclaim that "the answer lies in the State, which closed the mines
as soon as the reserves of metal were judged sufficient, and which
retained a monopoly or a narrow control over commerce. . ."(AO:
197) Perhaps more fundamental is the degree to which these
clusters of States operated 'far from equilibrium.' Following
Braude!, Da Landa suggests that "nomad societies existed in a
more or less 'solid' state until a singularity in the weather caused
them to 'liquify' and flood their sedentary neighbours. Conversely,
the Europe of 1494 was in a process of 'solidification' as if the
different political entities that comprise Europe has existed in a
fluid form and were now crystallizing into a solid shape. In contrast
with rival empires [Chinese, Ottoman] which for reasons of
geography and religion had developed into a mostly uniform
'crystal'. Europe never solidified into one piece, but rather into a
broken conglomerate with shifting boundaries. As 'stress' built up
along those cracks and fissures, it was relieved in the form of
armed conflict following the lines of least resistance. And it was
124
indeed the dynamical nature of this `broken crystal' that allowed
western societies to surpass China and Islam in the competition to
conquer the world."(WAIM: 21-22)
The State represents, in whichever formation and to whatever
degree, the simultaneous lock-up and amplification of a martial
potential- this is why the most `civilised' Westernised State
possesses the most enormous explosive potential. In their use of
Dumezil's analysis of Indo-European mythology, Deleuze & Guattari
contrast the `terror' machines of the despotic state against the
modern rule of law and its 2 faces of aestheticized violence and
pyrotechnical extremity; in modernity we "should not be too hasty
in speaking of a softening, a humanisation; on the contrary, this is
perhaps when the war machine has only one remaining object, that
of war itself. Violence is found everywhere, but under different
regimes and economies. The violence of the magic emperor; his
knot, his net, his way of `making moves once and for all'. . . The
violence of the jurist-king; his way of beginning over again every
move, always with attention to ends alliances and law. . .All things
considered, the violence of the war machine might appear softer
and more supple than that of the State apparatus because it does
not yet have war as its `object m(ATP: 425)
125
As with the relation between primitive machines and States, the
question of the relation between different modes of State cannot
properly be understood in terms of an evolution but rather in terms
of reciprocal presupposition. The components of States may be
products of an evolutionary process, but the State itself, as a mode
of consistency, a way that the components are brought together
and set in motion, has no lineage. Following Nietzsche, the Urstaat
is said to occur all at once like lightening. Moreover, it is not just
left at the origin but is reactivated everyday as immanent essence.
The Urstaat is the "original abstract essence that is not to be
confused with a beginning."(AO: 198) If as is commonly
understood, there is an evolution of the State form, then the
"second pole" i.e. modern distributed power, "the evolved pole
must be in resonance with the first", the despotic pole, and "must
continually recharge it in some way" since "the State must have
only one milieu of interiority. . .a unity of composition in spite of all
the differences in organization and development among
States."(ATP: 427) Instead of progressive stages, Deleuze &
Guattari see the machinic enslavement and the transcendent
formal unity of the Despotic State as coexistent with the immanent
axiomatic and social subjection of modern capitalist states.
126
3.2.2 Disciplinary Machines
"Western States are much more sheltered in their striated
space and consequently have much more latitude in holding
their components together; they confront the nomads only
indirectly, through the intermediary of the migrations the
nomads trigger or adopt as their stance."(ATP: 385)
The modern nation state mutates in both its explosive and
implosive dimensions. Capitalism forces the collapse of
transcendent law into the immanent axiomatics of disciplinary
normalization. The rule of the despot abstracts into the empty
formalizations of the rule of law. Actualised as an irrigation system
of power, Foucault's capillary network, the war machine passes
from mere encastment into appropriation proper, accelerating
through phase shifts to Total Mobilization, Total War and the
Absolute Peace of nuclear deterrence. From the mercenary and clan
markets of war into the anti-market of State monopolisation and
megamachinic protection rackets. The whole disciplinary complex
begins to resonate with the industrialisation of the war machine
with its transformations of simple machines into thermodynamic
engines.
To return to the initial problematic, what is at stake in Deleuze &
Guattari's discussion of the physics-sociology nexus is a critique of
'work' as a production of the energetic irrigation of the State
through the extraction of surplus value. As they put it, "During the
nineteenth century, a two-fold elaboration was undertaken: of a
127
physicoscientific concept of Work [weight-height, forcedisplacement], and a socioeconomic concept of labour-power or
abstract labour [a homogenous abstract quantity applicable to all
work, and susceptible to multiplication and division]. . .society
furnished an economic standard of measure for work, and physics a
'mechanical currency' for it. The wage regime had as its correlate a
mechanics of force."[ATP: 490] Foucault's discussion of disciplinary
microphysics details this precisely as the stratification of 'what a
body can do', its 'power', into a space-time grid which finely
subjects individual bodies into the machines of industrial society.
Indeed for Foucault, this 'tactical' microphysics ['tactical' because it
offers combinatory procedures in which the composition of forces
exceeds the sum of their parts thereby supplying a reservoir for the
extraction of surplus value] brings together a 'cellularized spatial
distribution', and 'organic coding of activities' and a 'genetic
accumulation of time' into the 'highest form of disciplinary
practice.'[DP: 167] As Foucault, Deleuze & Guattari and Virilio all
agree, this process of normalization was the basis of the military
proletarianisation of the modern nation-state. This work-model
does not, they argue derive from the war machine itself but is
rather evidence of its appropriation and organization into the
apparatuses of the State. Deleuze & Guattari give two basic
reasons for this physicosocial model of Work; "First, because labour
appears only with the constitution of a surplus, there is no labour
128
that is not devoted to stockpiling; in fact, labour [in the strict
sense] begins only with what is called surplus labour. Second,
labour performs a generalised operation of striation of space-time,
a subjection of free action, a nullification of smooth spaces, the
origin and means of which is in the essential enterprise of the
State, namely, its conquest of the war machine."[ATP: 490-491]
The morphology of violence of the European State is mapped out
by Michel Foucault in Discipline & Punish. In detailing the
parameters and permutations, Foucault takes us round the
Sovereign-discipline-control circuit of power. Departing from the
monolithic top-down conception of power, he emphasises the
productive edge of processual power over the repressive. When the
spectacular optics of the sovereign phase penality of torture
involutes into the generalised surveillance of the Panopticon, the
Prison proliferates less for the purpose of punishing crime than in
the exercise of a new bio-power- a productive power invested in
the very production of delinquency.
Hence the particular character of State violence; it "creates or
contributes to the creation of that which it is directed against, and
thus presupposes itself."(ATP: 447) This essence of State violence
is not local to capitalism itself but instead testifies to the existence
of an apparatus of capture which pre-dates the capitalist mode of
129
production. Hence what Marx terms the 'primitive accumulation'
and the actualization of the virtual attractor immanent to primitive
social machines. This attractor is a point which "already exists in
the convergent wave that moves through the primitive series and
draws them toward a threshold at which, after passing their limits,
the wave itself changes direction."(ATP: 447) The State "overcodes
the primitive codes, substitutes sets for the series' steering the
flow of power, forcing its direction into to a convergence towards
the despot.
It is in this way that State violence is always reformulated as a war
against the criminal, the nomad or the primitive. It is a violence
that "posits itself as preaccomplished, even though it is reactivated
every day. . .the invitation is prior, pre-established.(ATP: 447) As a
productive power, State or lawful violence "always seems to
presuppose itself, for it pre-exists its own use."(ATP 448) The
aggression which continually re-energizes the law is the echo of an
original lamination of social flows, their comparison and
appropriation. In capitalism the violence of the State is not
"reducible to theft, crime or illegality. . .what is taken away from
the worker is not something surface level; the capitalist 'does not
limit himself to taking away or stealing, but extorts the production
of surplus value, in other words, he first contributes to the creation
of that from which he takes away. . .A part of the value created
130
without the labour of the capitalist can be appropriated legally by
the capitalist, in other words, without violating the corresponding
right to exchange of commodities.'"(ATP: 568, n.39)
131
3.3.2 Terror Machines
"Asiatic' production, with the State that expresses or
constitutes its objective movement is not a distinct
formation; it is the basic formation on the horizon
throughout history."(AO: 217)
In China, it is not only the history of insurgency theory which
generated a hydraulics of war. The State itself, in appropriating the
war machine, and giving war its object of violence, has its own flow
chart. "Either the State has no war machine (and has policemen
and jailers before having soldier) or else it has one, but in the form
of a military institution or public function."(ATP: 427) In the
appropriation of the swarmachine of nomadism, vortical hydraulics
is channelled into the militarized irrigation system of the state. In
his discussion of the pure State form of Oriental Despotism in
Chinese Legalism, Massumi notes the State hydraulics of war in an
economy of Total Power. Quoting an ancient legalist text;
"Stopping the soldiers of his (an exemplary ruler's) three armies
was like cutting off their feet, (and) marching them was like
flowing water."(quoted in FLE 39) Massumi runs this through
Deleuze & Guattari's base hydraulics of war; "The soldiers in
unified motion toward the unified aims of the State are like water
flowing down a straight and narrow channel. They melt into a liquid
body, continuous and without distinguishable organs. But the
moment their ordered flow is stopped, organs appear and are in the
132
same stroke amputated. . .Water, however, does not naturally
conform to straight and narrow channels, but has the lice-like
tendency to flow 'without preference for any of the four sides'. .
.Three of the four sides of natural water flow must have been
stopped for the army to have begun its onward march. That means
that feet must have already appeared/ been amputated. Even at its
apogee, the moment of predatory attack, the war machine's unity
is predicated on the dismemberment which prevents it (and which
it is meant to prevent). Consolidated organ-ization always entails
fragmentation. Maximum flow requires extreme rigidity."(FLE: 3940)
Following Wittfogel in his infamous Oriental Despotism 118 when he
"shows the degree to which modern capitalist and socialist States
take on the characteristic features of the primordial despotic
State."(AO: 220), Deleuze & Guattari in Anti-Oedipus term the
State-Extreme the machine of terror. This social formation and its
economy of violence is given a machinic diagram; it is a "functional
pyramid that has the despot at its apex, an immobile motor, with
the bureaucratic apparatus as its lateral surface and its
transmission gear, and the villagers at its base, serving as its
working parts."(AO: 194)
118 Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power, (1967) Yale
University Press. Wittfogers hydraulic despotism thesis has a controversial
history in Marxism; this is outlined and critiqued in the relation to the Occidental
113
The technologies of pain of the primitive cruelty machine become
integrated into the megamachine of the State which channels it,
reduces it or amplifies it into unprecedented terror depending on
the drift of the despot and his operations of legal overcoding.
"Overcoding is the essence of the law, and the origin of the new
sufferings of the body. Punishment has ceased to be a festive
occasion [as in the cruelty machine and sacrifice] from which the
eye extracts a surplus value. . .Punishment becomes a vengeance.
• ."(AO: 212) As Deleuze & Guattari point out in their critique of
State civilization and the self-evidence of the technologies of law
and order, the "law's opposition or apparent opposition to
despotism comes late - when the State presents itself as an
apparent peacemaker between classes that become distinct from
the State, making it necessary for the latter to reshape its form of
sovereignty."(AO: 212) Taking up Nietzsche from the Genealogy of
Morality, ". . .the law is the invention of the despot himself. . .it is
the juridical form assumed by the infinite debt."(AO: 213) It is only
later that the law becomes allegedly "a guarantee against
despotisms, an immanent principle that unites the parts into a
whole that makes of this whole the object of a general knowledge
and will whose sanctions are merely derivative of a judgement and
an application directed at the rebellious parts."(AO: 212) As an
Imperialist conceptual history in Asiatic Mode of Production: Science & Politics
134
economics of intensity-irrigation the pyramidal despotic machine
now takes "[a]ll the coded flows of the primitive machine. . .[and
forces them] into a bottleneck, where the. . .[it]. . . overcodes
them. Overcoding is the operation that constitutes the essence of
the State, and that measures both its continuity and its break with
the previous formations."(AO: 198) The channelled building blocks
of clans, tribes and packs do not disappear but persist, undergoing
swerving mutation as components of the now much more extensive
system of organization- they are "transected, superseded or
overcoded by the despotic State. . .the territorial machine. . .[is
reduced]. . . to the state of bricks, of working parts henceforth
subjected to the cerebral idea. In this sense the despotic State is
indeed the origin, but the origin as an abstraction that must include
its differences with respect to the concrete beginning."(AO: 219)119
As the gear which prevents/anticipates the implosion of
megannachinic enslavement, punitive vengeance as expression of
Imperial barbarian law is "exercised in advance" crushing "the
whole primitive interplay of action and reaction. . .Passivity must
now become the virtue of the subjects attached to the despotic
(1981), (eds) A. Bailey & J. Llobera, London Routledge.
lig Rather than just one formation among others, "the despotic State is the
abstraction that is realized. . .only as an abstraction (the overcoding eminent
unity). It assumes its immanent concrete existence only in the subsequent
forms that cause it to return under other guises and conditions. Being the
common horizon for what comes before and what comes after, it conditions
universal history only provided it is not on the outside but always off to the side,
135
body."(AO: 213) Punishment rivets bodies into the massive molar
organization of flows, spreading ripples of terror through the
machinically enslaved (obedience, prostration and fear) population
through at one extreme spectacular violence and on the other,
according to Wittfogel, the perhaps more effective "routine terror in
managerial, fiscal, and juridical procedures that caused certain
observers to designate the government of hydraulic despotism as
`government by flogging'"(OD: 143) Total power is the StateExtreme morphing into as a suicidal war machine, the 'pure
violence' of fascism.
The State dissolves into the momentum of a war machine taking
violence as its object and turning it against everything in its
course. By the original differentiation from the turbulent force-field
of war, into the striated space of peace, the state forces an
acceleration to extremity and hence the fluidification of
technologies of total annihilation. It is again Massumi who provides
the abstract flow chart of violence; "The more the law striates, the
smoother things flow. The smoother things flow, the closer the
centrifugal spiral comes to coinciding with the centripetal. The
closer the centrifugal spiral comes to coinciding with the
centripetal, the closer the source of all State flow comes to
coinciding with its destination. The closer the source of State flows
the cold monster that represents the way in which history is in the 'head', in the
136
comes to coinciding with its destination, the more concertedly the
State explodes through its only outlet. The more concertedly it
explodes, the more forcefully it implodes. . .The simultaneity of the
two movements is the end of the State- in both the chronological
and metaphysical meanings of the word."(FLE: 50-51) The
impossible attainment of pure unity or Oneness is the time-bomb
of any State system. Massumi maps this trajectory of the State in
terms of a mega-vortex with its simultaneous divergent and
convergent waves, looping the future with the past, hot-linking
source of law with destination into an idealised flow of pure
identity.
The terror machine is energised by the tension between striated
and smooth space, between rigid segmentarity and lines of escape,
between social unity and social division. In the despotic State,
overcoding or striation masked as law, emanates from the
immobile motor of the body of the despot, the eye of the storm.
Waves of legal codification tax the social field, deterritorializing the
collective property of the cruelty system into the public property of
the Imperial bureaucracy, re-routing the flows back to the center.
The population is loaded into the now organised war machine; as
Massumi describes it; "Striation radiates waves to the periphery,
then bounces off the wall and returns to the center in the form of a
'brain'- the Urstaat."(AO: 220-221)
137
smooth flow of goods and bodies channelled uninterruptedly into
the army, which then flows out to meet the enenny."(FLE: 41) This
tension between deterritorialization and reterritorialization,
between flux and re-flux animates the whole social field across
which pulse the waves of sameness. As this oscillation approaches
its limit with the corresponding disequilibrium between core and
periphery, the rhythm of the oscillation accelerates and the
intensity of its martial discharge surges. Massumi paints the Total
state as a fusion reactor; "The interior becomes a quickening spiral
of centrifugal waves of striation and centripetal smooth flows. At
the center, the spiral of capture is converted into a line of fluid
attack sent out in pulses. The aim is to accelerate the process to
the point that the spiral melds with the line, and the pulses become
continuous. As that ideal point, feet are liquefied and
dismemberment is wholeness. . .The more explosively the State
pushes outward, the more intensely it implodes. It is destined to
self-destruct. The Legalist state is a suicide state. In this, and in
the nature of the frenzied synthesis it attempts, it is
quintessentially fascist."(FLE: 41-42)
118
3.3 Cruelty Machines: routes from the jungle (and
back)
The double bind in which the primitive is caught in modern
political theory entailsj on the one pincer, the harmonious origin of
Rousseau or on the CAP,r the chaotic state of nature of Hobbes. It
can generally be said that modern European thought organizes
history around these two alternatives.
In the first case, if one subtracts the homeostatic teleology of
social order and demystifies the idyllic autarky of the primitive,
prioritising base turbulence, then "what is called history. .
.[becomes]. . .a dynamic and open social reality, in a state of
functional disequilibrium, or an oscillating equilibrium, unstable
and always compensated, comprising not only institutionalised
conflicts but conflicts that generate changes, revolts, ruptures and
scissions, then primitive societies are fully inside history, and far
distant from stability, or even from the harmony, attributed to
them in the name of a primacy of a unanimous group."(AO: 150151)
"We're tired of trees. . . they've made us suffer too
much."(ATP: 15)
In the second case, we can take, for example, Immanuel Kant's
essay Perpetual Peace. In order to justify the modern disciplinary
apparatus of capture, he is forced to go tree planting; "Since, like a
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tree, each nation has its own roots, to incorporate it into another
nation as a graft, denies its existence as a moral person, turns it
into a thing, and thus contradicts the concept of the original
contract, without which a people has no rights.(PP 108) In this
classic statement of the arborescence which transects the scales of
molarity of the Man-State complex 120 , the ground is constantly
dissolving, ominous with latent turbulence, with tendencies to selforganise. Into these dynamics State civilization through the rule of
law is built, emanating a root structure to solidify the savage flux
of colliding bodies, and allow the erection of order; "Just as we
view with deep disdain the attachment of savages to their lawless
freedom- preferring to scuffle without end rather than to place
themselves under lawful restraints that they themselves constitute,
consequently preferring a mad freedom to a rational one and
consider it barbarous, rude and brutishly degrading of humanity, so
also should we think that civilised peoples (each one united into a
nation) would hasten as quickly as possible to escape so similar a
state of abandonment."(PP: 115) In such narratives, history is
merely the history of the State, of the victory of civilization tending
towards the normative equilibrium of perpetual peace. Molarity is
"th e imposition of whole attractors 121 on a far more complex
See Ch.5 for the woman-war complex.
As Massumi explains, a "whole attractor can be visualised as a distinct point
at the end of a line. At both ends, actually; in classical thermodynamics,
molecular instability departs from an entropic equilibrium and eventually returns
to it. The process is reversible. The attractor state is virtual in so far as the
instability that departs from it and tends toward it is concerned, but in theory it
120
121
140
reality."(UG: 64) Modernity resides in the radiating waves of
sameness which ripple through the multiplicitous planetary field,
stimulating decoding and deterritorialization and an increasingly
cybernetic recapture. Produce or die. The colonial West propelled
forth from the tension between markets and Euro-states acquired
an unlimited ethnocidal capacity. Capitalism is fuelled on the
perpetual consumption of frontiers, the digestion of primitives; "At
capitalism's limit the deterritorialized socius gives way to the body
without organs, and the decoded flows throws themselves into
desiring production. "(AO: 139-140)
As Deleuze & Guattari point out in their critique of linear metanarratives of history, "[a]ll we need to do is combine these abstract
evolutions to make all of evolutionism crumble. . ."(ATP: 430) But
they do more than merely deconstruct these meta-narratives of
progress and civilization or simply discard them as ideology.
Journeys from the jungle is the Occidental State's story of
Co
civilization. Yet the deconstruction of this tale,A point
to the
founding violence of law aAd excavate the ghosts of every 'other' is
/
on one level, ethnocidal State philosophy's last stand. In A
Thousand Plateau's Deleuze & Guattari side-step the hypermorality
of post-structuralism, writing that "European racism as the white
is actualizable. A fractal attractor, by contrast. Must be visualised as a mixed
set of points- 'dense points', infinitely dense points. Each point corresponds to a
potential global state of equilibrium (stable or metastable, classical or
dissipative).(UG: 64)
141
man's claim has never operated by exclusion, or by the designation
of someone as Other: it is instead in primitive societies that the
stranger is grasped as an 'other." (ATP: 178) They go further,
dragging non-state formations out of an idyllic or chaotic past into
a virtual co-existence of social machinery based on a non-linear
social physics. In relation to supple group formations, which from
the perspective of State thought will always reside lower down the
evolutionary scale, "superseded by the State or familial societies",
Deleuze & Guattari argue that "[o]n the contrary there is a
difference in nature, The organization of packs is entirely different
from that of families and states, they continually work them from
within and trouble them from without, with other forms of content,
other forms of expression."(ATP: 242) History is flattened and
becomes one vast dissipative system. Primitive violence is no
longer unregulated chaos but "a special regime, even with respect
to violence. For even violence can be submitted to a marginal ritual
treatment, that is, to an evaluation of the 'last violence' in so far as
it impregnates the entire series of blows (beyond which another
regime of violence would begin."(ATP: 439) Primitive violence
holds its own dynamic equilibrium, its own supple relations of force
and power.
In a loop, any point is always secondary to the topological circuit.
Therefore when Deleuze & Guattari take the primitive socius in
142
their historical topology as the first mode of social machine, it
should not be taken to undermine their critique of evolutionism.
The primitive territorial machine, has as its immobile motor the
earth. The contrast between a technical machine and a mega or
social machine is important: the technical machine implies an
engagement between a human force and non-human force, a
conjunction which extends human force; a social machine
alternatively "has men for its parts, even if we view them with
their machines. . .Hence the social machine fashions a memory
without which there would be no synergy of man and his technical
machines." In Anti-Oedipus it is constantly reiterated that the
social 'machine' is not merely a metaphor, it is in actuality a
machine in that it "exhibits an immobile motor and undertakes a
variety of interventions, flows are set apart, elements are detached
from a chain, and portions of the tasks to be performed are
distributed. Coding the flows implies all these operations."(AO:
141) Exchange and circulation are not the key aspects of the
primitive societies. Rather for Deleuze & Guattari, as their label,
`socius of inscription' suggests, the crucial thing is to mark or be
marked- to envelop those organs capable of producing/breaking
flows in a collective investment.
Rather than a progress from primitive segmentarity, in State space
the segments become bricked in, rigidified, forced to resonate
143
hierarchically but continue to function horizontally on the molecular
plane as self-organizing fluid masses rather than classes. "Supple
segmentarity cannot be restricted to primitive peoples. It is not the
vestige of the savage within us but a perfectly contemporary
function. . ."(ATP: 213) Or rather, twisted up in a topological loop
or Moebius strip, "one no longer really knows what comes first, and
whether the territorial machine does not in fact presuppose a
despotic machine from which it extracts the bricks or that it
segments in its turn."(AO: 220)
In the primitive machine, as conceptualised by Deleuze & Guattari,
prohibitions therefore deprive a specific group/individual the right
to indulge a collectively invested organ; they constitute "a system
of evaluations possessing the force of law concerning the various
members and parts of the body. Not only is the criminal deprived of
organs according to a regime of collective investment; not only is
he the one who has to be eaten, eaten according to social rules as
exact as those followed in carving up and apportioning a steer; but
the man who enjoys the full exercise of his rights and duties has
his whole body marked under a regime that consigns his organs
and their exercise to the collectivity."(AO: 144) In ceasing to
become a biological being served by biological memory, the socius
creates a new collective memory, a memory of words and signs.
The primitive territorial machine constitutes what Nietzsche calls a
144
rnnemotechnics, a system of cruelty which inscribes its signs
directly on the body. This cruelty is not some kind of pre-social
barbarity or natural violence which the routes from the jungle story
relates. Because a single internal act of violence can through
vengeance, escalate to divisive catastrophe, the primitive machine
employs the mechanism of sacrifice 122 to prevent contagion, to
code the flow of impure blood. In contradistinction to the
dampening systems of state capture systems, primitive social
machines have no surefast function for dealing with an outbreak of
violence, no efficient techniques of re-equilibration. The social
technology of sacrifice plays the essential role in the sense that it
is preventative. Sacrifice, or the production of the sacred, involves
rtes which displace the violence of the community onto the one.
Ritual codes the flows of violence, purifying the blood of the
122 Anthropologist Rene Girard makes the connection between the socio-religious
machinery of sacrifice, cultural disorder and chaos. His theory of the scapegoat
maps an undulating terrain populated by swirling cyclones and twister, which
emerge surrounding points of strange attractions. Serres processes Girard
through his social physics so that the theory of the scapegoat morphs into
eddies and vortices; "in the middle of the demi-cone or at the center of the
vortex, lies the object of hate, the subject of proscription. . .Multiplicity shoves
its noise onto the one. It crystallizes the noise. No longer a multiplicity, no
longer noisy, it is one globally, it is a single chorus, it is one locally, the center,
the midpoint, the navel of the vortex: the eye. The eye of the storm."(60) For
Girard the function of sacrifice is to restore order to the community, to restore
the social fabric. This is based on what he terms a fundamental truth about
violence; if left unappeased, it will accumulate until it overflows it confines and
floods the surrounding area. The role of sacrifice is to stem this rising tide of
indiscriminate substitution and redirect violence into proper channels. Girard
1977 10. The bifurcation of an initial flashpoint, for Girard, brings forth the
potential of a cascade effect whereby a chain reaction occurs tending towards
catastrophe due to reciprocal acts of revenge. The substitution which is enacted
by machinery of ritual sacrifice to break the chain, codes the nonsacrificable in
distinction from the sacred; "between these victims and the community a crucial
social link is missing, so they can be exposed to violence without risk of
vengeance."(130) And this escalating chaos, checked by sacrificial practices is
manifested by inter-tribal vendettas and blood feuds.
145
arbitrary scapegoat, so as to quash the spreading fire of
vengeance. Controlled implosion; "it is the bad debtor who must be
understood as if the marks has not significantly `taken', as if he
were or had been unmarked. He has merely widened, beyond the
limits allowed, the gap that separated the voice of alliance and the
body of filiation, to such a degree that it is necessary to reestablish the equilibrium through an increase in pain."(A0:191)
Again following Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morality, for Deleuze &
Guattari the category of debt is crucial to understanding economies
of violence. At the heart of power relations is indebtedness. In
relation to the primitive chiefs obligation of generosity, there is
profound inequality of society and the chief in that his obligation of
generosity is, in fact, a duty, that is to say, a debt. The leader is in
debt to society precisely because he is the leader. It is to refuse
the separation of power from society that the tribe maintains its
chiefs indebtedness; it is society that remains the holder of power
and that exercises it over the chief. Power relations exist in the
form of debt that the leader must forever pay. Clastreiadds that the
nature of society changes with the directions of the debt. If debt
goes from the chieftanship towards society, society remains
undivided, power remains located in the homogenous social body.
If on the contrary debt goes from society toward chieftanship,
power has been separated from society and is concentrated in the
146
hands of the chief, the resulting heterogeneous society is divided
into the dominating and the dominated. This rupture is produced
when the directions of debt is reversed, when the institutions turn
power relations to its profit against society, thus creating a base
and summit towards which the eternal recognitions of debt climbs
ceaselessly in the name of tribute.' The despot and infinite debt.
'Striking like lightning' the State comes from outside, overcoding
the supple segmentarity of the primitive machine. Pushed far from
equilibrium, the band formation fluidifies and attains pure
volatility. Massumi explains the physics of this transition; "In the
presence of a disturbance, or 'noise, the supple structure will either
move toward a new order or back to its disordered past. A double
bifurcation: life or death, and if life, this state or that. The path
selected is a function of the interaction between the particular
disturbance and the particular correlations the liquid has
developed. In other words, it is a function of its past as enveloped
in its locally-globally correlated substance and the future arriving
from outside."(UG: 62)
The primitive machine is framed by Pierre Clastre, in his
ethnography of Amazonian Indians, as a society against exchange,
against economy, and against the State. Primitive war is the
principle mechanism warding off the State in that it maintains the
123 116 Clastre 1994.
147
opposition and dispersion of small segmentary groups. Primitive
war uses violence as a resource and hence it does not become
autonomous as a machine, even when it is comprised of a
specialised body. Primitive war is not caused by a predatory
economy of pre-sociality, poor economy or exchangist economy.
The naturalist reduction of the aggression of primitive war to that
of predatory animals, to hunting elides the fact that even in
cannibal tribes, war enemies are not necessarily primarily killed for
consumptionilfikunhelpful is the historical materialist story which
sets primitive economy at degree zero of technological and
productive development in order to reduce primitive war to a result
of scarcity. But primitive war is not a result of poverty. Clastre3
emphasises that `primitive society is a machine of antiproduction'(AV: 118) to show that there is a virtual-potential of the
production of surplus, but since it is a society against social division
or against accumulation, economy is merely a political tool to
satisfy needs.
Contrary to structuralist anthropology which points to 'commercial
exchanges as potential wars peacefully resolved and war as the
outcome of unfortunate transactions,' neither can primitive war be
reduced to exchange. To set up the binary opposition between an
essence(exchange and non-essence(war) of primitive machines is
to strip war of any positive function. While Hobbes underplayed the
148
role of exchange, Levi-Strauss neglects the positive role of war(AV:
152). Crucially, for Clastr6 t because of the autarkic domestic mode
of production, the insecurity of territory is not fundamental to war
until there is an agricultural surplus worth fighting for. By not
engaging the potential to accumulate, the primitive machine wards
off the threshold of the State, of social division. Indeed primitive
war is clearly seen by Clastre5as the primary mechanism warding
off this machinic death. To lock in its warrior gear, the primitive
machine uses a logic of prestige. This is necessary because
machinic mutation to continuous and actualised warrior mode,
Clastre5argues, threatens the social non-division, it wards off the
danger of being dragged behind an emergent nomadic engine of
war. Such a mutation threatens its self reliance since in warrior
mode, the production of children by women drops off and the
economy becomes increasingly dependent on the spoils of pillaging
and looting (of goods, equipment and children.)
While conservative, the primitive territorial machine is not inert.
Conversely, the primitive machine is in perpetual movement. Its
dynamism is apparent as it open itself to the outside in the
extreme intensity of war. The possibility of war is inscribed in the
being of primitive society. Primitive machine coding envelops an
equilibrium and disequilibrium, "it is a blow-by-blow violence,
which is not without its code since the value of the blows is fixed
149
according to the law of the series, as a function of the value of the
last exchangeable blow, or of the last woman to conquer, etc. Thus
there is a certain ritualization of violence."(ATP: 447-8)
This centrifugal logic, a logic of the multiple, which effects the
segmented distribution of groups has as its opposite a centripetal
force, the logic of unification the logic of one. By remaining under
the sign of its own law, it refuses the logic which would lead it to
submit to an exterior law. It is opposed to the exteriority of the
unifying law. The legal power that embraces all differences in order
to suppress them, that exists precisely to abolish the logic of the
multiple and substititute it with he opposite logic of unification is
the State, the apparatus of capture.
The State is therefore the total sign of division of society in that it
is a separate organ of political power. Social division and the
emergence of the State mark the death of the primitive socius.
External segmentation internal non-division are two faces of a
single reality. Refusal of the State is the refusal of submission, of
exonomy, of exterior law, of alienation. The more war there is, the
less unification there is, and the best enemy of the State is war.
War attacks the State and the State captures war. The error is to
believe that a society which persists in a virtual perpetual war is
not a society.
150
The primitive/State threshold effect makes continuous, progressive
development unthinkable for Clastrej Rather than a continuum of
history, the key questions become for Clastr,"why does primitive
society cease at a certain moment to code the flow of power? Why
does it allow inequality and division to anchor death in the social
body which it had until then warded off?" (AV: 116)
i
Deleuze & Guattari depart from Clastr e3 position in the
Archaeology of Violence and Society against the State, indicting
him for an ironic oversight. They indict him for his neglect of
archaeology. However, Clastre5 i work is important for his break
with evolutionist paradigms. Firstly, Deleuze & Guattari agree with
Clastre3that the State is not explainable with reference to what it
presupposes i.e. a development of productive forces and a
differentiation of political forces. Rather, "the State seems to rise
up in a single stroke, in an imperial form, and does not depend on
progressive factors"(ATP: 359) Secondly, they agree that the war
machine is directed against the State, potential or actual. But the
war machine is properly the discovery of `barbaric' assemblages of
nomadic warriors rather than 'savage' assemblages of primitive
societies. Since the war machine is organised against the State,
war, as with politics and economy, can only give a reductive
account of State formation. So Clastrei locates a rupture between
'primitive' counter-State societies and 'monstrous' State societies.
151
Considering the mechanisms primitive societies had at their
disposal, he probes the question of why the State arose in terms of
the problem of 'voluntary servitude'. But it is in his attempt to deal
with is crucial issue that Deleuze & Guattari believe Clastre$
remains an evolutionist postulating a state of nature (even though
his state of nature was a fully social reality instead of a pure
concept, the evolution being a sudden mutation rather than a
development). In insisting on the autarky, the self-sufficiency and
equilibration of primitive societies, "he made their formal
exteriority into a real independence."(ATP: 359) For Deleuze &
Guattari, Clastre$ two propositions are correct; "on the one hand,
the State rises up in a single stoke, fully formed, on the other, the
counter-State societies use very specific mechanisms to ward it off;
to prevent it from arising."(ATP 359) But while, as Clastre5shows,
bands or clans are no less organised that empire/ kingdoms,
evolutionism is not escaped by positing the sudden emergence of
the State.
Rather, drawing from archaeology, Deleuze & Guattari point out
that there has always been a State, the Urstaat; "the State itself
has always been in a relation with an outside and is inconceivable
independent of that relationship. The law of the State is not of All
or Nothing (State societies or counter-State societies.) but that of
interior and exterior. . .The outside appears simultaneously in two
152
directions: huge world-wide machines [commercial, industrial or
religious] branched out over the entire ecumenon at a given
moment, which enjoy a large measure of autonomy in relations to
the States. . . but also the local mechanisms of bands, margins,
minorities which continue to affirm the rights of segmentary
societies in opposition to the organs of State power."(ATP: 360)
Crucial to this analytic cartography is the principle of 'reverse
causality'; it testifies "to an action of the future on the present, or
of the present on the past. . .which implies an inversion of time.
More than breaks or zig zags, it is these reverse causalities that
shatter evolution."(ATP: 431) Given this, one can say that the
State was "already acting before it appeared, as the actual limit
these primitive societies warded off, or as the point towards which
they converged but could not reach without self-destructing. These
societies simultaneously have vectors moving in the direction of
the State, mechanisms warding it off, and a point of convergence
that is repelled, set outside, as fast as it is approached. To ward off
is also to anticipate. Of course, it is not at all in the same way that
the State appears in existence, and that it pre-exists in the
capacity of a warded-off limit; hence its irreducible
contingency."(ATP: 431)
153
It is then, contrary to dialectical materialism the State that makes
production a mode, that generates agriculture, the division of
labour and not vice versa. The primitive machine while firmly
territorialized is a dynamic system operating within a phase space.
Defining the boundaries of the phase space of a pendulum, for
example, are the attractors of its limit cycle and fixed point. If the
pendulum is sustained by an exterior force, it repeats converging
towards its limit cycle. If no exterior force is applied, if its motion is
not sustained it converges toward a fixed point. Consolidating the
Deleuze & Guattari/turbulence theory nexus, Massumi explains that
the "potential tensions and trajectories defined by that set of dense
points is the system's plane of immanence or consistency; its level
of virtuality. Scientists express the phenomenon's plane of
consistency as the its 'phase space': the sum total of the systems'
movement and moments contracted into the same set of diagram
co-ordinates. Each co-ordinate axis corresponds to independent
variable, and each co-ordinate to a potential state combining those
variable co-ordinates around which potential states cluster and
dense points or attractor states."(UG: 67) Within this space its
future movement is only statistically diagrammable because it is
contained in the attractors. "Complete, predictive knowledge is a
myth. The perpetual invention called 'history' paces a void of
objective indeterminacy."(UG: 67) A phase space is always
anexact, indeterminate and fractal. Similarly, the relation between
154
the State and the primitive socius is thus understandable in terms
of two inverse 'moments' or `waves'- one prior to the rise of the
State in which the hunter-gatherers are brought to a point of
convergence destabilising the prevailing socius, the other
subsequent to its manifestation whereby the State apparatus
generates agriculture, the division of labour and animal farming.
Primitive war acts as a mechanism to ward off that point of
convergence, the bifurcation of an autarkic undivided socius. In
order to take history out of a narrative of succession, Deleuze &
Guattari engage the notion that events from the future are in some
sense active in the present, that social machines anticipate their
outside, navigating through chaotic fields of bodies and points of
unpredictable convergence known in chaos theory as fractal or
strange attractors. By 'attractor state' we mean, following Massumi
a "state toward which a system tends."(UG: 61)
This is a crucial move in that it peels away State teleology to give
an energetic account of these processes of ordering and
hierarchalization without recourse to the normative discourse of
politics, law and morality. The social topology therefore allows us
to understand the flux of postmodern violence, to the components
and velocities of the world system, without the State philosophical
imperative to legislation which in European thought has guided
theoretical analyses of violence.
155
sector 4. Programmed Catastrophe:
ultraterror, machinic postmodernism and
political catastrophe theory
"Stability is always metastability, a controlled state of
volatility."(UG: 60)
4,1 States of Emergency
If turbulence simulation is the abstract dynamic of cybernetic
control, then programmed catastrophe is control loosing control,
unintended consequences feeding back to disturb the order of
populations in postmodernity. It corresponds to C31 or the militaryscientific complex which proliferates the cybernetic concretisation
of 'pure war'; it is as Deleuze & Guattari describe it, "a new
conception of security as materialised war, as organized insecurity
or molecularized, distributed, programmed catastrophe."(ATP: 467)
The ambivalence of the concept of simulation is a crucial feature in
understanding cybernetic control societies. This chapter will map
out the openness of simulation through a discussion of Virilio's
perspective on contemporary terrorism and the Gulf War and its
tensions and convergences with Jean Baudrillard's theorisation of
simulation and his analysis of postmodern violence. For Virilio the
base logic of programmed catastrophe consists of an accelerating
convergence between control and control malfunctions; as he
writes in one essay, "the simulators of a new society organized
156
entirely around the requirement to react to catastrophe with the
greatest possible speed. . ."(PA: 217) A race against the clock, the
"new laws of the State will be wholly inspired by the operation of
rapid engines: a succession of prohibitions and limitations the aim
of which is to avoid accidental hazards, in the exact manner of the
nuclear countdown."(PA: 217) We will firstly briefly examine the
social tracings which are produced by the apparatuses of security,
zooming into systems of capture 'far from equilibrium', i.e. states
of 'emergency' in the broadest sense of this phrase. To understand
this general concept of emergency, Virilio's theory of the accident
and its relation to simulation will be outlined. Concluding this
section, it will be seen that both Virilio and Baudrillard's discussions
of terrorism can most profitably be situated along this continuum of
emergency.
4.1.1 Channels of Security
The forces of postmodern law and order perceive turbulence as
varying magnitudes of accident, degrees of deviation, and at its
extreme, forces the mutation of the State into the 'state of
emergency'. For this reason, Virilio seems to base his examination
of control in cybernetic states on the relation of the accident to
system stability in the axiomatics of late capitalism. As we noted
earlier, Paul Virilio defines the base function of the police, or the
anti-implosive affects of the State as highway patrol, an overcoding
157
of transport and communication channels, an overcoding of the
social flow of bodies, substances and machines.
As Nick Land puts it, this Human Security System consists of a
multi-scalar system of striated space run on a logic of boundary
policing which stretches from the flow of chemicals into an
individual or population's nervous system to the illicit flow of
weaponry across police jurisdictions. Land terms these fortresses of
varying sizes, 'PODS' or 'Politically Organized Defensive Systems'.
They are, he continues, "modelled upon the polls, pods
hierarchically delegate authority through public institutions, family
and self, seeking metaphorical sustenance in the corpuscular
fortification of organisms and cells. The global human security
allergy to cyberrevolution consolidates itself in the New World
Order, or consummate macropod, inheriting all the resources of
repression as concrete collective history. " 124 The megamachinic
skin discussed in Sector 3 is a planetary carceral continuum.
Just as Michel Foucault argues that properly speaking, the prison is
a modern invention, Pasquino contends that the police, as it is now
known, emerged out of a more basic function born in conjunction
with the modern disciplinary form of power as it is described by
Foucault. Complementing the appropriation of the war machine by
124 471 (1993) N. Land, Machinic Desire.
158
the modern nation state comes a science of police, a science
targeted at the "maintenance of order and prevention of
dangers."' This notion of police is a relatively late invention,
dating from the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century,
engaging productive strategies of regulation of the social field,
synchronising with wider processes of stratification and their
experimental excursions of the State. For as Pasquino writes, "one
can picture the field of intervention of police regulations as like the
vacant lots of the city, the formless provinces of a vast kingdom, a
sort of no man's land comprising all those areas where the feudal
world's traditional customs, established jurisdictions and clear
relations of authority, subordination, protection and alliance cease
to rule. Within the formless 'monster', the police thinkers called the
Holy Roman Empire, there are indeed still islands of order and
transparency; not everything in the ancient society or orders and
estates requires regulating; but does not what escapes it cry out
for intervention?"1-26 Disciplinary governmentality, in Foucault's
terms, emerges to meet this need.
Governmentality takes as its object the population as an abstract
statistical ensemble of individuals, and that ensemble's health and
prosperity. Governmentality is the political technology of modern
machinic subjection. As Foucault argued, this power stretches far
125 p109 in P. Pasquino in C. Gordon (ed) (1991) The Foucault Effect, London:
159
beyond a purely juridical conception. Law becomes only one among
several assemblages of control. Through the general transition to
disciplinary power, law is dragged behind the base turbulence
unleashed by capitalism's tendency towards decoding and
deterritorialization. It is now no longer a law handed down from the
top of the pyramid but the distributed power of the carceral
continuum. Again Pasquino; "The prescriptions or regulations of
police are instruments of this work of formation, but at the same
time they are also products of sort of spontaneous creation of law,
or rather of a demand for order which outreaches law and
encroaches on domains never previously occupied, where hitherto
neither power, order nor authority had thought to hold sway." 127
This experimental nature of the police components of the State is
most clearly seen when States mutate to an emergency function.
The captured and militarized war machine emerges through the
striations of law and order, short circuiting slow motion macropolitics into an autonomy of means. Giorgio Agannben argues that
"whereas the sovereign is the one who, in proclaiming a state of
emergency suspending the validity of the law, marks the point of
indistinction between violence and law, the police operate in what
amounts to permanent 'state of emergency'. The principles of
'public order' and 'security', which the police are under obligation to
Harvester.
160
decide on a case-by-case basis, represents a zone of indistinction
between violence and law perfectly symmetrical to that of
sovereignty."128 Agamben's argument is that the police function is
revealed more than any other time in the State of emergency.
Extending Virilio's notion of police as highway patrol, we could say
that the street, as surface of population flow, is the fluid terrain
which serves as the primary object of security. However in
postmodernity, the primacy of the street as contested terrain of
transfer is questionable. In a recent interview with Mark Dery in
Mute magazine, the Critical Art Ensemble attack what they see as
Deleuze & Guattari's (and therefore implicitly Virilio's argument in
Speed & Politics) alignment between nomos and the street, and
correspondingly of the logos with the State. They contend, and this
point will be discussed later, that in postmodernity there persists
examples of emergent, nomadic urban potential, for example,
Tiananmen Square or the LA Riots. However, from the mid-80s,
"the streets were no longer a seething pool of potential resistance,
but relative to the environment of the virtual class, a low-velocity
sedentary structure."' They suggest that while Deleuze & Guattari
were correct in showing how there is a logos and an anti-logos,
126 P111 ibid.
127 p111 ibid.
128 p62 in 'The Sovereign Police', (1993) in B. Massumi (ed) The Politics of
Everyday Fear, University of Minnesota.
129 CAE in mute issue 10 p.33.
161
militarized discipline against oppositional militarized discipline,
they neglect to show how there is a nomos and anti-nomos.
The direction of the Critical Art Ensemble point is valid but they fail
to pick up on Deleuze & Guattari's discussion of micro-fascism,
particularly how there is nothing necessarily revolutionary about
smooth space. They maintain throughout A Thousand Plateaus, for
example that a rhizome can function for control as much as escape
or becoming. Just as much as advocating rhizomatics as a nomadic
strategy, they warn of rhizomania. Moreover, Deleuze & Guattari's
discussion of the State should be understood more like Foucault's
capillary network of distributed power instead of the centralised
conception of macropolitics. In this way, their cartography can
provide the tools to mapping the dynamics of cyberspace,
particularly how decentralisation now has a control function.
11,0
.
15
Control far from equilibnum4 the dream of postmodern security
experts and the peculiar logic of programmed catastrophe.
4.1.2 The General Accident: liquid reality
Virilio's theory of the accident can be usefully coupled with Deleuze
& Guattari's machinic postmodernism. Stripping away the remnants
of transcendence, they state that "it is in order to function that a
social machine must not function well."(A0:151) In this mutant
neo-functionalism, megamachines function by breaking down; "Far
162
from being a pathological consequence, the disequilibrium is
functional and fundamental."(AO: 150) Turning the perspective of
State philosophy upside down to reveal the libidinal infrastructure
which deposits the social, function is dismantled shifting the focus
on accidents as productive singularities driving the futureshock
braking system 13 ° of the strata. Social systems, both of the
hierarchical and meshwork variety emerge from the bottom up
haphazardly, accidentally. In Anti-Oedipus they perceived this of
primitive machines but it is extended to the coexistent continuum
of social segrnentarity so that in their formulation, the "social
machine's limit is not attrition, but rather its misfiring; it can
operate only by fits and starts, by grinding and breaking down, in
spasms of minor explosions. The dysfunctions are an essential
element of its very ability to function, which is not the least
important aspect of the system of cruelty. The death of the social
machine has never been heralded by a disharmony or a
dysfunction; on the contrary, social machines make a habit of
feeding on the contradictions they give rise to, on the crises they
provoke, on the anxieties they engender, and on the infernal
operations they regenerate. Capitalism has learned this and has
ceased doubting itself, while ever socialists have abandoned belief
in the possibility of capitalism's natural death by attrition." Again
attacking a dialectical model of history evolution they conclude that
'3° Kodwo Eshun invents the concept of the 'futureshock brake' as cultural
163
"No one has ever died from contradictions, And the more it breaks
down, the more it schizophrenizes, the better it works, the
American way."(AO: 151) As was argued in Sector 3, machinic
postmodernism opts for a fluid cybernetics of history rather than
dialectics.
Programmed catastrophe is control acknowledging non-linear
feedback processes and attempting to harness them to a higher
order global equilibrium. It feeds a New World Disorder which
needs controlled chaos. As Virilio puts it, it "is no longer a question
of hiding an accident or failure, but of making it productive. . ."(PA:
215) Virilio demands that we reassess the traditional philosophical
tenet which holds that the "accident is relative and contingent and
substance absolute and necessary. The word accident, derived from
the Latin accidens, signals the unanticipated, that which
unexpectedly befalls the mechanism, system or product, its
surprise failure or destruction. As if the failure were not
programmed into the product from the moment of its production or
implementation. . ."(PA: 211)
In his writings about the Gulf War, Baudrillard extends the same
point into a discussion of virtual reality and simulation; "The most
widespread belief is in a logical progression from virtual to actual,
dampening system in More Brilliant than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction,
164
according to which no available weapon will not one say be used
and such a concentration of force cannot but lead to conflict.
However, this is an Aristotelian logic which is no longer our own.
Our virtual has definitively overtaken the actual and we must be
content with this extreme virtuality which, unlike the Aristotelian,
deters any passage to action. We are no longer in a logic of the
passage from virtual to actual but in a hyperrealist logic of the
deterrence of the real by the virtual."(GW: 27)
Pointing to the nexus between the mode of production and the
mode of destruction, Virilio importantly maintains that the
"production of any 'substance' is simultaneously the production of a
typical accident. . ."(PA: 211) It follows from this that "breakdown
or failure is less the deregulation of production than the production
a specific failure, or even a partial or total destruction."(PA: 211)
Corresponding to Virilio's critique of the speed culture of militarized
capitalism which has generated the species accident of total
nuclear annihilation, he calls for a realignment of investigation
from progressive technological development to what he calls a
"prospective of the accident." If the accident is embedded virtually
within every technological innovation, Virilio suggests that "we
could reverse things and directly invent the accident in order to
determine the nature of the renowned 'substance' of the implicitly
(1998), London: Quartet.
165
discovered product or mechanism, thereby avoiding the
development of certain supposedly accidental catastrophes."(PA:
211)
In his discussion of accidents, Virilio holds onto a dialectical model
of production and destruction, the State and the war machine,
substance and accident. However, from the perspective of base
turbulence, Virilio's analysis as a positivization of the accident can
be plugged into Deleuze and Guattari's rnachinic postmodernism.
Virilio writes that this "inverse perspective on the primal accident
which recalls certain myths and cosmogonic hypotheses 131 ( Big
Bang, the Flood etc.) seems in fact to be the dialectic of war, in
other words of weapon and armour; the dialectic arises with the
strategic emergence of the 'war machine' in the immediate vicinity
of the ramparts of the ancient Greek 'citadel State' which gave rise
to another innovation at the same time as Athenian politics poliorcetics, the new science of attacking and defending fortified
cities, which lies at the origin of the art of war', in other words of
the evolution of the production of mass destruction through the
ages, but especially through progress in weapons techniques. As
with his critique of speed, Virilio traces the darkside of the Occident
through a succession of accidents.
131HS Paz puts it "Christian morality has given its powers of repression over to it
[the accident], but at the same time this superhuman power has lost any
pretension to morality. It is the return of the Anguish of the Aztecs, without any
celestial signs or presages." 111 Conjunction & Disjunctions.
166
But when he describes the confrontation of the State and war
machine, this can be abstracted to the collision of smooth and
striated space inhabited by turbular and laminar flows of bodies
and technics. The fractal coastline which separates the State from
the war machine perpetually ripples with the emergence of
dissipative structures in the flow of matter-energy. On the machinic
phylum, what Virilio terms the dialectic of weapon and armour can
be thought of a non-linear game of escalation - it is more helpful to
place weapon and armour in a system, since the most intelligent
art of war opens itself to the fluidity or the landscape mapping the
system's energetic flow chart. Turbulence simulation attempts for
C31 through the modelling on nonlinearity, to capture the feedback
processes with which a dialectical frame cannot deal. Virilio is
certainly correct when he peels back the megamachinic skin of
scientific and industrial production to see its own process of
production from the darkside.
For Virilio therefore, scientific capitalism is in a sense "fallout', of
the development of the means of destruction of the absolute
accident of war of the conflict pursued down through centuries in
every society, irrespective of its political of economic status - the
great time war that never ceases to unexpectedly befall us time
and again despite the evolution of morals and the means of
167
production and whose intensity never ceases to grow at a pace with
technological innovations, to the point that the ultimate energy,
nuclear energy makes its appearance in weapon that is
simultaneously an arm and its absolute accident of History."(PA:
213) The 'great time war', the 'race against the clock' plummets
postmodernity . towards not just the accident of History, but as
Virilio later explains,
the accident of reality itself132.
When Baudrillard touches on the logic of the accident in Symbolic
Exchange & Death, he relies on the thoughts of Octavio Paz whom
132 As Virilio notes in an interview; "One may surmise that, just as the
emergence of the atomic bomb made very quickly the elaboration of a policy of
military dissuasion imperative in order to avoid a nuclear catastrophe, the
information bomb will also need a new form of dissuasion adapted to the 21st
century. This shall be a societal form of dissuasion to counter the damage
caused by the explosion of unlimited information. This will be the great accident
of the future, the one that comes after the succession of accidents that was
specific to the industrial age (as ships, trains, planes or nuclear power plants
were invented, shipwrecks, derailments, plane crashes and the meltdown at
Chernobyl were invented at the same time too. . .)
After the globalisation of telecommunications, one should expect as generalised
kind of accident , a never-seen-before accident. It would be just as astonishing
as global time is, this never-seen-before kind of time. A generalised accident
would be something like what Epicurus called " the accident of accidents."[and
Sadam Hussein surely would call the 'mother of all accidents" trans] The stock
market collapse is merely a slight prefiguration of it. Nobody has seen this
generalized accident yet. But then watch out as you hear talk about the
'financial bubble' in the economy; a very significant metaphor is used here, and
it conjures up visions of some kind o cloud, reminding us of other clouds just as
frightening as those of Chernobyl.
When on raises the question about the risks of accident son the information
(super) highway, the point is not about the information in itself, the point is
about ht e absolute velocity of electronic data. The problem here is interactivity.
Computer science is not the problem, but computer communication, rather the (
not yet fully known) potential of computer communication, .In the United
States, the Pentagon, the very originator of the Internet, is even talking in
terms of a 'revolution in the military' along with a 'war of knowledge', which
might supersede the war of movement in the same way as the latter had
superseded the war of siege, of which Sarejevo is such a tragic and outdated
reminder."(Speed & Information: Cyberspace Alarm)
168
in an extensive quote explains how w [m]odern science has
eliminated epidemics and has given us plausible explanations of
other natural catastrophes; nature has ceased to be the depository
of our guilt feeling; at the same time, technology has extended and
widened the notion of accident and, what is more, it has given it an
absolutely different character. . .Accidents are part of our daily life
and their shadow peoples our dreams. . .The uncertainly principle
in contemporary physics and Godel's proof in logic are not
equivalent of the Accident in the historical world...Axiomatic and
deterministic systems have lost their consistency and revealed an
inherent defect. But it is not really a defect: it is a property of the
system, something that belongs to it as a system. The Accident is
not an exception or a sickness of our political regimes; nor its it a
correctable defect of our civilization: it is the natural consequence
of our science, our politics and our morality. The Accident is part of
our idea of progress. . .The Accident has become a paradox of
necessity; it possesses the fatality of necessity and at the same
time the uncertainty of freedom. The non-body, transformed into
materialist science, is a synonym for terror: the Accident is one of
attributes of reason we adore." 133
C31 is the name for a global war machine which inhabits not just
the smooth space of the oceans, the desert and the sky but now
133 Paz 111-113 Conjunctions & Disjunctions quoted in). Baudrillard (1993)
169
also cyberspace. It is cyberspace or virtual reality which both Virilio
and Baudrillard, in their discussion of simulation, describe as the
accident of reality. For Virilio, with his Catholicism too
overpowering to resist abject melancholy, "[virtuality] will destroy
reality. So, it's some kind of accident, but an accident of a very
different nature. . .The accident is not the accident.; For instance,
if I let his glass fall is it an accident? No, it's the reality of the glass
that is accelerated, not the glass itself. The glass is certainly
broken and non longer exists, but with a flight simulator, what is
accidented is the reality of the glass, and not the glass itself; what
is accidented is the reality of the whole world. Cyberspace is an
accident of the real. Virtual reality is the accident of reality
itself/1134 Virilio believes that Baudrillard's discussion of simulation
is misleading. Instead of simulation which he takes to be outdated
conceptually, Virilio prefers a notion of 'substitution'; "I hold a
virtual glass with a data glove'', this is no simulation, but
substitution. . .As I see it, new technologies are substituting a
Symbolic Exchange & Death, London: Sage.
134
Cyberwar, God S. TV. Elsewhere Baudrillard describes Virilio as "an analyst of
a king of catastrophic time, of speed. But he remains an optimist. . .mnnmn. . .
Well, he is a Christian. He is a Christianl(laughter) This is not an argument, no. .
."(SW: 91-92)
135 A problem with Virilio's discussion of cyberspace here is that it is based solely
on the simulation of visual stimuli - For Virilio "the accident is shifting. It is no
longer occurs in matter, but in light or in images. A cyberspace is a light show.
Thus, the accident is in light not in matter. The creation of a virtual image is a
form of accident. This explains why virtual reality is a cosmic accident. It's the
accident of the real."(Cyberwar, God & TV) Hallucinations are not just visual but
can be sonic, tactile etc. A satisfactory discussion of the accident of the real
must take the other dimensions of cyberspace which make it more than just the
extension of 2000 years of Occidental idealism.
170
virtual reality for an actual reality. And this is more than a phase;
it's a definite change. We are entering a world where there won't
be one but two realities: the actual and the virtual. Thus there is
no simulation but substitution."136
Virilio helps to clarify what Deleuze & Guattari understand by the
relation of capitalism to schizophrenia. For Virilio with this accident
of the real, 'everybody is wounded' by the warping of reality. "The
mad person is wounded by his or her distorted relationship to the
real. Imagine that all of a sudden I am convinced that I am no
longer Virilio, but Napoleon. My reality is wounded. Virtual reality
lends to a similar de-realization. However, it no longer works only
at the scale of individuals, as in madness, but at the scale of the
world."137
Perpetually troubling the planetary carceral continuum and its
psychic crusting is a fluid outside. Programmed catastrophe
attempts to model this dynamic exterior, it attempts to control the
uncontrollable, to shape the future. Postmodern control
consolidates as continuous risk assessment exercises on a scale of
danger. As Francois Ewald argues, societies organized around risk
cannot be understoodAtrie binary logic of modern juridical thought.
Rather, "[a]ll it knows is the endless chain of discrete quantities. .
136 Ibid.
171
.The moment a population is identified as a risk, everything within
it tends to become - necessarily becomes - just that. . .prevention.
• .exists in a virtual state before being actualized in an offence,
injury, or accident. • .For a long time, the domain of risk was coextensive with that of the insurable. By its very nature, however, it
tends to exceed the limits of the insurable in two directions: toward
the infinitely small-scale (biological, natural, or food related risk),
and toward the infinitely large scale (major technological risks or
technological catastrophes. . .) At first glance, these two extremes
have nothing in common. What brings them together, is that unlike
insurance risks, they not only affect a life or a body as capital, but
also have an impact on the body's biological existence, its ability to
reproduce."138
4.1.3 Ultraterrorism
A cartography of postmodern violence zooms into the megalopian
core zones which ring the planet. These 'ecologies of fear', to use
Mike Davis's term, constitute precariously balanced systems of biotechnics, with rhythms easily knocked out of synch by the minutest
accident or interruption to networks of communication and
transportation. Axiomatic systems of capture reterritorialize on the
most deterritorialized element, the most uncertain, unpredictable
bit of information drives the control logic. The base circuit of
programmed catastrophe emerges as, the "war machine finds its
137 (Cyberwar, God & TV)
172
new object in the absolute peace of terror or deterrence. It is
terrifying not as a function of a possible war that it promises us, as
by blackmail, but on the contrary, of the real, very special kind of
peace it promotes and has already installed. It no longer needs a
qualified enemy but, in conformity with the requirement of an
axiomatic, operates against the 'unspecified enemy,' domestic or
foreign (an individual group, class, people, event, world."(ATP:
467) Assembled under the shadow of nuclear deterrence,
programmed catastrophe stretches beyond the historical period of
the Cold War.
This forms the infrastructure of the modalities of postmodern
violence constantly perturbing the programme grids of telematic
culture astutely described by 1G. Ballard as the Atrocity Exhibition
hence converging with Virilio's depiction of television as a `museum
of accidents'. Programmed catastrophe is power as simulation
working at its very limit, it is simultaneously the most
sophisticated and far reaching way to mould the future, to ward off
catastrophe through perpetual exposure to simulated and mediated
disaster. Programmed catastrophe is the unintended consequences
of a mode of power which here has been termed turbulence
simulation. "the orbital, interstitial, nuclear, tissual network of
control and security which invests us on all sides and produces us,
138 P221-222, Ewald, 'Two Infinities of Risk' in (!993) Massumi (ed) The Politics
173
all of us as a silent majority."(ISSM: 50) The attempt to shape the
future brings rushing in, the general accident of reality, with its
accompanying paranoiascape of pure terror. Postmodernity as a
techno-cultural mutation changes interfaces of power and violence
and their distributed emergence, velocity of dissipation, dampening
or escalation. The carceral continuum, "a machine for making
emptiness. It is a bit like the real danger the nuclear power
stations pose; not lack of security, pollution, explosion but a
system of maximum security that radiates around them, the
protective zone of control and deterrence that extends, slowly but
surely, over the territory- a technical, ecological, economic, geopolitical glacis. What does the nuclear matter? The station is a
matrix in which an absolute model of security is elaborated, which
will encompass the whole social field and which is fundamentally a
model of deterrence (it is the same that controls us globally, under
the sign of peaceful coexistence and of the simulation of atomic
danger."(SS: 61)
Umberto Eco maps the shift into a postmodern terrorism, a shift
from attacks against the head of state, to the military-industrial
elite and finally to this headless infrastructure in an attempt at
systems crashing, information overload, hacking.
of. . .
174
The use of terror has always been fundamental to the State and its
guerrilla opponents in their respective protection rackets. Imminent
to the cybernetic social machines of advanced capitalist states lies
what they can only perceive as a programming malfunction, an
accident, turbulence in the channelled flow. But the program has to
break down to move; the accident is the glowing attractor
emerging from outside, pattern recognised as chaos, the masses
converge on the epicentre. The connection between terror and
media machines was virtually always there as a technique of
accumulation of revolutionary momentum.
Anarcho, bio, socio, ethno, myth°, narco and state. Different
threads which weave the network of terror. Gears and engines of
an interconnected machinery. The global war machine, wired,
unpicks the locks of an increasingly precarious megarnachinic
capture complex, disengaging regulatory brakes and releasing
darkside flows of incendiary intensity from the lock-in of nuclear
proliferation. A molten planet, inhabited by pockets of turbulence
emerging from the virtual fuse wires which hug the contours of
population irrigation systems of control phase cybernetics.
It is not coincidental that Total Peace emerged in conjunction with
global media. The planetary communications network born of the
logistical requirements of several waves of military conflict since
175
the late nineteenth century makes high velocity pure war possible;
the emergent transnational terror network does not primarily go
through Moscow or Libya or Iran as in the Pentagon' s paranoid
projection, but through a `fibrespace' which converts the heat of
terrorist pyro-technics into the energy of networked electron
swarms.
Sounding increasingly archaic in its ideological soundbiting, 1970s
and 1980s terrorism which claimed to strike at the heart of the
state or the military-industrial complex ignored the fact, recognised
by Umberto Eco, that it was no longer "the enemy of the great
systems, but their natural counterweight, accepted programmed
(TIH: 116); interjecting into the segmentarity of scheduled
television, "erroneous bits of information inserted here or there,
making work hard for the computers that run the place."(TIH: 115)
Failing to mutate to the bio-technical specificity of spectacular
society, the Red Brigades in Italy were forced into a suicidal
discharge of martial potential in an escalation which forced a state
of emergency and reterritorialization of the smooth spaces of the
autonomia movement. A black hole which marks the demise of
Occidental revolutionary strategy on the model of modern industrial
machines. As Virilio notes "At a time when the old Communist
parties of southern Europe, in the middle of a nuclear deadlock,
compromise themselves historically for the benefit of the political
176
State, the "Brigadists" reaffirm the permanence, in History, of the
concept of Pure War, the independence of that great Western
current of nihilist thought. This thought aims precisely, to disrupt
the social and political field of nations by abusing the illegality of
armed forced, the exercise of pure power."(PDEC: 42)
But if programmed catastrophe signals the onset of the cybernetic
state of emergency then terrorism is no longer the preserve of
opposition movements but lies imminent to the postmodern
ecology of fear making it impossible to distinguish the violence on
either side. For Baudrillard, "the same acts of violence, of pillage,
the same undermining, the same suspension of the 'social order"
would ensue. Baudrillard goes as far as stating that terrorism is no
longer most importantly a step of violence, but is everywhere the
"normality of the social such that form one moment to the next it
can be transfigured into an inverse absurd, uncontrollable
reality."(ISSM: 57)
In the age of information warfare, terrorism is exposed as a system
of communication. Channelled through television, mangling
meaning and representation, terrorism assumes a hypereal glow
forming with the masses, a circuit which inverts the modern
categories of 'law and order; instead of the rational channelling of
violence, random lightening attack; instead of participation,
177
hyperconformity. With this implosion of the West into
indeterminate systematics it is not surprising that legitimate
violence and terror, offender and victim oscillate in novel
reversibility. If the modern state opposed its monopoly of violence
to terror, then as this economy gets distributed there becomes "no
head of state in the world. . .who is not in virtuality a criminal."139
Terrorist activity against C31 as an orbital system stretched out
between satellites along telecommunication networks into the
electromagnetic spectrum itself. In this new planetary smooth
space, the war machine can emerge and operate at any point
through a remote control of unprecedented 'accuracy', speed and
lethality.
With the Gulf War C31 synergizes, fusing flight simulation modules
into an electronic complex which, in Virilio's terms substitute
virtuality for actuality in a terminal accident of the real - signs of
the general accident as psycho-geographies warp into a world-wide
'ecology of fear'. In postmodernity, power fluidifies and
decentralises, as it attempts to stratify the emergent oceanic
expanse of virtual reality. There is nothing necessarily liberative
about processes of self-organisation - just as there exists a
guerrilla mode of rhizomatics, rhizomania inhabits smooth space in
a postmodern fascism where the global war machine drives an
139 p63 in Agamben, in Massumi (ed) (1993).
178
experimental futurist orientation of the secret services and the
military technocracy.
Whilst deferring atomic conflict, control
programs fear into the microphysical fabric, reinforcing it though
eternal catastrophe simulations. The megalopian accident is
channelled by the security state dissipating its energy
ambivalently; while it is immediately packaged into the spectacle,
it leaks, it makes real catastrophe arrive, baiting the invisible
violence of security into an escalating implosion, infecting the
systemic logic of slow death with kamikaze suicide. A multiplicity of
new bio-technical combinations, ". . .the very conditions that make
the State world war machine possible, in other words, constant
capital (resources and equipment) and human variable capital,
continually recreate unexpected possibilities for counterattack,
unforeseen initiatives determining revolutionary, popular, minority,
mutant machines."(ATP: 422)
So a cartography of postmodern violence points to the liquid
instability of the world system as it mutates away from head to
head mega-state conflicts towards the dominant mode of conflict as
orbital counter-insurgency against virus attacks both digital and
actual, renegade nuclear detonation and hyperurban biological
warfare. March 20 1995 - Deep in the circuits of Tokyo's
communications infrastructure, planetary terrorism crosses a
threshold into ultraterrorism. Holy terror as Pure War. Awn Shinri
179
Kyo's sarin attack on the Tokyo subway and the streets of
Matsumoto became the first attack by a relatively small group on a
mass population using chemical warfare. As one commentator
described it; "We've definitely crossed a threshold. This is the
cutting edge of high-tech terrorism for the year 2000 and beyond.
It's the nightmare scenario that people have quietly talked about
for years coming true." 14 ° The dominant feature of postmodern
violence lies in this network of terror which stretches between
State megamachines with massive winding down arms economies
and a darkside out of which emerge a whole array of non-state
entities and collectivities of varying degrees of micro-fascism141.
Pure terror is part of the same logic as turbulence simulation. Both
attempt to accelerate the accident of the species. While turbulence
simulation through programmed catastrophe attempts to simulate
catastrophe in order to ward it off (thereby bringing the general
accident ever closer by programming it into the micro-physic urban
fabric) pure terror brings disaster directly, unleashing the virtual
140 Bruce Hoffman of the Center for the Study of Terrorism and Political Violence
at Saint Andrew University in Scotland quoted in D.W. Brackett, (1996) Holy
Terror: Armageddon in Tokyo, NY: Weatherhill.
141 As Brackett describes it, "Prior to both sarin attacks, Aum's public activities
included a strident doomsday philosophy; vitriolic anti-American rhetoric;
extraordinary purchases of chemicals and sophisticated laboratory equipment
from around the world; extensive connection with former Soviet weapons
scientists, politicians, military figures; unusual interest in acquiring data and
research on weapons of mass destruction; the acquisition of conventional
weapons technology and the machinery needed for weapons production; the
purchase of a civilian version of a military helicopter and several drone aircraft;
the lease of a ranch in a remote location of Australia where it mined for uranium
and conducted sarin tests on sheep; the arrest of a number of Aum members for
burglaries of weapons-research centers in Japan; plus numerous other criminal
complaints made to the Japanese police, including murder. . .despite this
180
terror imminent to the carceral continuum in its reterritorialization
of the anti-city.
Despite the widespread depiction of Baudrillard as champion of
postmodern nihilistic passivity, a strategic orientation seems to
emerge occasionally from his perspective. Baudrillard harbours a
minor interest in Oriental martial theory. In the Ecstasy of
Communication for example, he writes of a "strategy of absence, of
evasion, of metamorphosis. . .To divert, to set up decoys, which
disperse evidence. . .to slightly displace appearances in order to hit
the empty and strategic heart of things. . .never aim straight at
your adversary or his weapon, never look at him, look to the side,
to the empty point from where he rushes and hit there, at the
empty center of the weapon."(EC: 68) Indeed Baudrillard's move
beyond Foucault and Deleuze & Guattari could be thought in such
fluid strategic terms; the interview between Baudrillard and
Lotringer entitled Forget Baudrillard opens with a quote from
Foucault; "As in judo, the best answer to an adversary manoeuvre
is not to retreat, but to go along with it, turning it to one's own
advantage, as a resting point for the next phase."(quoted in FF:
65)
disturbing list, Aum Shinri Kyo as a terrorist organization remained undetected indeed largely unknown- for most of its active life."11p55.
181
Converging with Eco's critique of revolutionary terrorism for not
understanding cybernetics, Baudrillard holds in Symbolic Exchange
& Death that the system will not be destroyed by a "direct,
dialectical revolution of the economic or political infrastructure.
Everything produced by contradiction, by the relation of forces, or
by energy in general, will only feed back into the mechanism and
give it impetus, following a circular distortion similar to a Moebius
strip. We will never defeat it by following its own logic of energy,
calculation, reason and revolution, history and power, or some
finality or counter-finality."(36) Forewarning of the suicidal vector
of terroristic escalations of discharge, he continues that the "worst
violence at this level has no purchase, and will only backfire
against itself. We will never defeat the system on the plane of the
real : the worst error of all our revolutionary strategies. . . "(36)
At moments, Baudrillard seems to celebrate the insurgency of the
symbolic into the sterile white magic of rationality and the security
systems of the 'human'; the terrorist act "aims at threat white
magic of social abstraction by the black magic of a still greater,
more hazardous abstraction."(ISSM: 53) Information overloads; It
is a "silence mesmerised by information; [terrorism] aims at that
white magic of the social encircling us, that of information, of
simulation, of deterrence, of anonymous and random control, in
order to precipitate its death by accentuating it."(ISSM: 53)
182
In these moments, terrorism is situated on an 'accident
continuum' unleashing the savage panic which he suggests
perpetually threatens, through its sidestepping of representation,
the carceral continuum's status as perfected control. For
Baudrillard, this 'accident' continuum would consist of "[f]ires,
wars, plague, revolutions, criminal marginality, catastrophes; the
whole problematic of the anti-city, [and] has some archaic relation
to its true mode of annihilation."(SS: 70-71)
Despite this, his nihilism concerning the cultural condition of
postmodernity and its logic of simulation overrides his restrained
enthusiasm for anything which forces the system to face death; in
Simulations he questions despairingly whether "any given bombing
in Italy the work of leftist extremists, or of extreme right-wing
provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme
into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it
a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security? All
this is equally true, and the search for proof, indeed the objectivity
of the fact does not check this vertigo of interpretation. We are in a
logic of simulation which has nothing to do with a logic of facts."'
For Baudrillard also, terrorism converges with the general accident
of reality. In postmodernity, the only possibility for the real to
142 31-32 in J. Baudrillard, (1983) Simulations, NY: Semiotexte.
183
reassert itself is through interruption or accident and the stakes of
such accidents increase with every technological advance. There is
an accident immanent to every technological moment.
Emanating from the model of deterrence, simulation is a model of
"planned infallibility, of maximum security and deterrence" which
radiates across social systems in a kind of fallout here termed
programmed catastrophe. It is programmed in the sense that
"nothing will be left to chance" thereby accelerating the control
project of modernity "towards a limit people imagined would be
explosive (revolution)". Catastrophe feeds in however because this
striving to shape the future breeds an "inverse, irreversible,
implosive process: a generalised deterrence of every chance, of
every accident, of every transversality, of every finality, of every
contradiction, rupture or complexity in a sociality illuminated by
the norm and doomed to the transparency of detail radiated by
data collecting mechanisms." 143 This implosion forces Baudrillard
to move beyond the concept of the 'social'. Like Virilio, Baudrillard's
conclusions about terrorism are closely tied, along with their
interest in Palestinian high-jackings, to activities in Europe during
the 1970s, particularly Italy and Germany. As he argues that
terrorism and the state "are accomplices in a circular set-up."(SW:
121) Explaining this violent complicity, he contends that "events
143 Ibid. 64.
I 84
are played out on a conscious level of adversity, of war, of
irreconcilable, incompatible ideologies, but in reality what's
happening underneath it all? Who would dream that the situation
can become so totally terroristic that in fact it joins its other
extreme? I don't see how all this can end. It is not objectively
representable. "(SW: 121) This critical threshold which Baudrillard
perceives both in the deterrence of Total Peace and the stand-offs
of terrorism is the moment at which the social implodes.'"
For Baudrillard, the circuit is not just between media and terrorist.
It is not just that the logic of the media is violence feeding back
into terrorist escalation. Perhaps more importantly, for Baudrillard,
are the masses as driving force. "The masses are a void, a political
void. They put a path our of the system. They act, not by adding
something to the system, but by subtracting something from the
system. They create a void, and this void coincides - or resonates with the masses as a void."'
144
Here Baudrillard in heavily influenced by both Nietzsche and Canetti .
Baudrillard's postmodernity seems to correspond to what Nietzsche describes in
the Will to Power as the `last form of nihilism', a "disbelief in any metaphysical
world and forbids itself any belief in a true world. Having reached this
standpoint, on grants the reality of becoming as the only reality." 13 in F.
Nietzsche (1967) The Will to Power, New York: Vintage. Following Nietzsche's
current, Canetti says that "It is as if, at a certain point, history was no longer
real. Without noticing it all mankind suddenly left reality: everything happening
since then was supposedly no longer true; but we supposedly didn't notice. Our
task would be to find that point, and as long as we didn't have it, we would be
forced to abide in our present destruction." 69 in E. Canetti (1978) The Human
Province, Trans. by Joachim Neugroschel. New York: Sea bury.
145 290 in E. Johnson(ed) `Baudrillard Shrugs: A Seminar on Terrorism and the
Media, with Sylvere Lotringer and Jean Baudrillard' in W. Stearns & W.
Cha lou pka (eds) (1992) Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art & Politics,
London: Macmillan.
'
185
"Terrorism can have a visible, a spectacular form. It is still part of
the dramatic, practicality in the historical realm. So it can be
succeeded by a kind of negotiable terror. The term 'hostage', as I
have used it, would then qualify not only the visible dramas of the
taking of hostages, but rather the hyper-reality of everyday life
which is situated well beyond negotiable terror. It's the same as for
deterrence. It's not the actual terror of the orbiting bombs' power
of destruction. Virilio says that very clearly. War having also
become an impossible exchange, the hostage would only qualify a
situation in which all exchange has become impossible."(SW:117)
186
4.2 Postmodern War: from the jungle to cyberspace
"The social and political fluidity of late capitalism has not
been accomplished by a withering away of state violence. On
the contrary, state violence has also been fluidified and
intensified. The rapid deployment force is the model of late
capitalist state violence, on all fronts: the ability to descend
'out of nowhere', anywhere, at a moment's notice- the
virtualization of state violence, its becoming immanent to
every coordinate of the social field, as unbounded space of
fear."(IF: 29)
In his discussion of postmodernity, Frederic Jameson points to the
emergence of a new war machine. Citing Vietnam as the first
postmodern war, he notes how existing discursive techniques
proved inadequate for mapping the pyschogeographical
perturbations of mega-imperial hi-tec jungle warfare. "The first
terrible postmodernist war cannot be told in any of the traditional
paradigms of the war novel or movie- indeed that breakdown of all
previous narrative paradigms is, along with the breakdown of any
shared language through which veteran might convey such
experience. . ." Pointing to Michael Herr's Dispatches as capturing a
new mode of writing in the "eclectic way in which its language
impersonally fuses a whole range of contemporary collective
idiolects, most notably rock language and black language. . .[in
order to capture the turbulence of fluidifying structures perpetually]
in motion"146
146 F. Jameson, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.
187
Herr's Dispatches forms part of a cultural complex mapping the
shellshock of postniodernity as Occidental endocolonization, a
return to the jungle, either tropical or urban. The complex runs
parallel to the cartography composed here and consists of films
such as Apocalypse Now based on Herr's text (both of which owe
much to Conrads Heart of Darkness), the sci-fi cyberpunk of the
Predator movies and the apocalyptic hyperrealism of contemporary
hiphop and jungle/drurn'n'bass music. Each relays a narrative of
jungle tactics imported into the megacity, torn apart by a
redistribution of the hardware of violence, narcotics, and mutant
information technology. The city like the jungle, a zone of
imperceptibility, camouflage, surprise and devastation churned up
by the planetary vortex of the war machine, goalessly swirling
bodies around the system engineering them each as a "movingtarget-survivor subscriber, a true child of the war, because except
for the rare times when you were pinned or stranded the system
was geared to keep you mobile, if that was what you thought you
wanted. As a technique for staying alive it seemed to make as
much sense as anything, given naturally that you were there to
begin with and wanted to see it close; it started out sound and
straight but it formed a cone as it progressed, because the more
you moved the more you saw, the more you saw the more besides
death and mutilation you risked, and the more you risked of that
the more you would have to let go of one day as a 'survivor'. Some
188
of us moved around the war like crazy people until we couldn't see
which way the run was even taking us any more, only the war all
over its surface with occasional, unexpected penetration. As long as
we could have choppers like taxis it took real exhaustion or
depression near shock or a dozen pipes of opium to keep us even
apparently quiet, we'd still be running around inside our skins like
something was after us, ha ha, La Vida Loca. In the months after I
got back the hundreds of helicopters I'd flown in began to draw
together until they'd formed a collective meta-chopper, and in my
mind it was the sexiest thing going; saver destroyer, providerwaster, right hand-left hand, nimble, fluent, canny and human; hot
steel, grease, jungle-saturated canvas webbing, sweat cooling and
warming up again, cassette rock and roll in one ear and door-gun
f re in the other, fuel, heat, vitality and death, death itself, hardly
and intruder."147
Following World War 2, a swarm of technological innovations
emerged constituting the components of the cybernetic war
machine which proceeded to surround the planet; satellites, jet
aircraft, helicopters, electronics and automation applied to fire
control, communications, countermeasures and logistics,
simulation, meteorological radar and self-guided weapons. With the
addition of each new component, the informational tasks became
147 M. Herr, Dispatches, 15-16.
189
more and more complex. Van Creveld estimates that perhaps 20
times the amount of information that was required to coordinate
the US military in 1945 was needed in 1963(1985). Hand in hand
with this increase in complexity came a specialisation of bodies and
their centralised co-ordination; machines and their humans webbed
up in the information skin of the planet forced to resonate from the
Pentagon. In this way, Vietnam served as a laboratory whose
results were not properly operationalised until Desert Storm in
1991 when digital interfaces smoothed out the consistency of the
system 148
4.2.1 Flight Simulation: from chopper war to sim-copter
"A helicopter clattered overhead, a cameraman crouched in
the bubble cockpit. It circled the overturned truck, then
pulled away and hovered above the three wrecked cars on
the verge. Zooms for some new Jacopetti, the elegant
declensions of serialized violence. Travers stated the engine
and turned across the central reservation. As he drove off he
heard the helicopter climb away from the accident site. It
148
A war machine undergoes information stratification through regulations,
procedures, order and reports sucked up to and emanating from a central
processing unit - in postmodernity it is known as C31. The US displayed the
characteristic signs of a global power on a down wave, aggression and
impatience. The information structure was stretched horizontally in relation to
specialisation but also vertically in terms of chains of command,. Such a
stretching was only made possible by electronic control-command, systems
analysis developed at RAND, cost benefit system meshing and integration of
date processing. The 1950s also saw a preoccupation with fail proof positive
control system for the accidental outbreak of nuclear war. Together, they
increased decision threshold of the system as frictional information finally
drained up to senior officials. Remote control decreased speed de-forming the
rhizomatic network of the jungle where the micro-deployments were locally coordinated through multi-channel radio. This appears anomalous when the
surplus value of the helicopter, radio and electronic communication are taken
into account, i.e. their structure flattening potential. But it took the next 30
years for such friction tin the war machine to be tuned out as insurgent
intelligence as Oriental martial technique swept across the military, the economy
and the populations at large - downsizing.
190
soared over the motorway, the shadow of its blades
scrambling across the concrete like the legs of an ungainly
insect."(Ballard 1979 87-88)
One of the key signs of this jungle/cyberspace complex or
interaction can be seen in the relation to flexible deployments in
both terrains, through the vehicle of the helicopter with its peculiar
relation to space 149 , emergency, simulation and clusters and
clearings of tropical rainforest and urban cores. An imminent
vortical machine of emergency magnetises the helicopter to
turbulence in the anthropomorphic skin of the planet- no other
vehicle could match their movement around tangled jungle
terrains. The helicopter is swept away by the same wave which
pulsed under the dark shadow of nuclear annihilation, forcing
insurgency and counter-insurgency to become the predominant
forms of conflict. The war machine lies dimensionally exterior to
localized conflict so the interaction between conventional and
jungle forces constitute learning experiences and simulation games
for electronic war intelligence.
149 In contrast to the linear projectile trajectory of the airplane the
manoeuvrability of the helicopter gives it special status when appended to the
sockets of megamachinic capture. Its potential for smooth terrain hugging flight
immediately sucked it down into cyclonic planetary spaces, as the vehicle most
conducive to tracking emergency through the parallel channels of state space.
Following Deleuze & Guattari, Da Landa (1991) notes that the war machine
emerges from singular physico-chemical traits in the flow of matter-energy, the
machinic phylum which we discussed in Chapter 2. Beyond these thresholds
order emerges out of chaos. When Leonardo Da Vinci noted the elemental
fluidity of both water and air (2-3 in C. Gablehouse (1970) Helicopters &
Autogiros, London: Frederick Muller Ltd.)he affirmed the affinity of fluids to
smooth space and hence anticipated a future plateau of the war machine, at the
time only occupied by projective explosives.
191
The helicopter occupied an ambivalent role in this new electronic
military environment, simultaneously allowing information
extraction and body/weaponry insertion into previously inaccessible
zones while paralysing action due to information overload, time lag
and 'atroci-tv i news reels telescoped back to the American
population often quicker than official channels could inform
command. Van Creveld describes one situation of redundancy in a
kind of aerial Panopticon. "A hapless company commander engaged
in a fireflght on the ground was subjected to direct observation by
the battalion commander circling above who was in turn supervised
by the brigade commander circling a thousand or so feet higher,
who in his turn was monitored by the division commander in the
next highest chopper, who might even be so lucky as to have his
own performance watched by the Field Force commander."15° Now,
the helicopter is not just part of a system of panoptic surveillance
but functions as a component of a wider headless system operating
at the level of code, strung out between remote sensing satellites,
geographical information systems, and the numerical climatics of
the statistical population.
The point is illustrated well by looking at computer games.
Monsters, fires, air crashes, earthquakes, riots and tornadoes. In
192
the urban arcology of Sim City 2000, various mutually exciting
disasters can be deployed on the digital slabscape, injecting panic
virus through the Sim population and inducing crowd dynamics
flocking like ghouls around the hot zone of emergency. The Twister
cuts a diagonal course through the concrete and mirrored glass
conduits and damms of megalopian downtown irrigation; a
helicopter hovers over the rim of the cyclone, peering down the
slopes of spiralling air particles, brick twisted glass and steel into
the calm eye of the storm. The helicopter sends out a spacious
epileptic rhythm which repeats through the ocean of noise, the
breakbeat of mechanospheric overdrive..
Simulation of flight involves hacking into the code of human spatial
equilibrium mechanisms'', and then producing environments to
15 ° 255 in M. van Creveld (1985) Command In War, Mass: Harvard University
Press.
151
In the helicopter, moving wings create a "vortex system (air moving to a circular
pattern) which deflects the air downward. This in turn produces a reaction on
the wing in the opposite direction, the lift force that supports the aircraft."151
Due to the difficulties of flying in open space dimensional space, the cybernetic
man-machine assemblages were designed to lock onto the calm at the eye of
the storm; "all the part want to go their own way." Hence, bodily immersion in
the cockpit controls functioned in the manner of a flying gyroscope, "a device
containing a disc rotating on an axis that can turn freely in any direction so that
the disc resists the action of an applied couple and tends to maintain the same
orientation in space irrespective of ht movement of the surrounding
structure." 151 The abstract diagram of the helicopter places the body at the apex
of intersectional rotational planes, the cockpit stands poised on a torque
diagonal; "The force that rotates the main rotor system clockwise as seen from
the cockpit also tries to rotate the fuselage under it in the opposite direction. .
.The way it is controlled is with the anti-torque rotor, the tail rotor located at the
end of the tail boom. When it is spinning, it pushes the tail sideways against the
torque. The amount of push, and therefore the direction the nose points, is
controlled by pushing the foot pedals." 24 in Mason (1983) Chickenhawk,
London: Corgi
193
generate a 'stationary voyage' through the virtual actuality of
'frequency scapes' - sonic vibration simulators, gravitational pull
and vision all co-ordinated by a chip to bring the body up to speed
with interfaces into the virtual; training bodily components of the
war machine while simultaneously smearing the virtual into the
actual; catalysing a military-industrial-entertainment complex,
operating at the microphysical level as the Central Nervous System
melts into the console. The convergence between the machinic
phylum and the human signals a co-evolution between weapons
technology and biology. The cyborgian warrior forms one
component of a distributed information system, which can replay
and practice coded scenarios in endless simulation.
While for Virilio television serves as the 'museum of accidents' the
simulator is much closer to cyberspace, not just housing a series of
real time accidents but constituting the accident of reality itself,
perhaps the most basic definition of cyberspace. Tracing their
emergence from the US Air Force flight simulators which were
initially used "to save gas on real flights by training pilots on the
ground. Thus there is a cyberspace vision: one doesn't fly in real
space, one creates a poor cyberspace, with headphones, etc. . .it is
a different logic. In a way, the simulator is closer to cyberspace
than television. It creates a different world. So, of course, the
simulator quickly became a simulator of accidents, but not only
194
that: it started simulating actual flight hours, and these hours
became equivalent, and this was cyberspace, not the accident but
something else, or rather the accident of reality:4-52
For Virilio the dimension of simulation is closely tied to the learning
process, so that for example, "when one learns how to drive a car
or a van, once in the van, one feels completely lost. But then, once
you have learnt how to drive, the whole van is in your body. It is
integrated into your body. Another example: a man who pilots a
Jumbo Jet will ultimately feel that the Being is entering his
body."(4) Virilio's discussions of the relation of the metabolism to
the machine owes much to Marinetti's futurist vision of speed as we
shall see in Sector 5. Virilio critiques this notion of speed as
intrinsically fascist but sees an apocalyptic abyss into which the
earth plummets- the substitution of the virtual for the actual will
take us, he argues, towards the "disintegration of the world. Real
time `live' technologies, cyberreality, will permit the incorporation
of the world within oneself. One will be able to read the entire
world, just like during the Gulf War. And I will have become the
world. The body of the world and my body will be one. Once again,
this is a divine vision; and this is what the military are looking for.
Earth is already being integrated into the Pentagon, and the man in
the Pentagon is already piloting the world war - the Gulf War - as if
152 1 in Virilio, Cyberwar, God & TV. . .
195
he were a captain whose huge boat would have become his own
body. Thus the body simulates the relationship to the world." 153
4.2.2 Desert Screen: the global war machine in effect
"To command, it is necessary to be in control. And to be in
control, it is necessary to be capable of communicating.
Without intelligence, any operation is destined to
failure."(Colin Powell, Chief of General Staff of US army, DS:
170)
More than most critical theorists on the planet, the theories of both
Jean Baudrillard & Paul Virilio stood poised to receive the singular
event of the Gulf War'', and therefore contribute to a cartography
of the unfolding of postmodern violence. The global war machine,
for the eyes of millions is finally seen in its full orbital and
electromagnetic extremes. For both, it served as the clearest
evidence of the reversal of Clausewitz's formula with technological
mean driving politics, the onset of the turbulence
simulation/programmed catastrophe topological continuum.
4.2.3.1 Soft War
In his typical controversial style, Jean Baudrillard's perspective on
the Gulf War was delivered in 3 articles before, during and after the
war; entitled simply 'The Gulf War will not take place', 'The Gulf
War: is it really taking place?' and 'The Gulf War did not take
153 4 in Virilio, Cyberwar, God & TV. . .
154
196
place'. Each one twists a blade in the flesh of those ardent antipostmodernists such as Christopher Norris, amusingly inciting them
out of their weighty burden with the gravity of reality. 155 More
interestingly however than the modernist/postmodernist debate156
is Baudrillard's dialogue with Virilio, between the soft war of
hyperreality to the hyperspeed of pure war. For example, in one
telling interview, Baudrillard tells how he was invited to cover the
war. In his characteristic manner, he opted for the CNN coverage;
"I live in the virtual. Send me into the real, and I don't know what
to do?"(SW: 188) Describing him as more of an 'operational
tactician' that himself, Baudrillard suggested that Virilio would have
been more suited to the task. As Baudrillard notes, he shares with
Virilio an analysis of the Total Peace of deterrence, the difference
being Baudrillard's obsession with softwar(e) and Virilio's obsession
with hardware and geo-strategy.
Against Norris' facile reading of Baudrillard, we can see clearly that
Baudrillard denial of the 'reality' of the Gulf War is not some kind of
155 William Merrin's essay on Norris's criticisms of Baudrillard's Gulf War writings
can almost be completely be agreed with when he notes that "Norris's claims in
Uncritical Theory concerning Baudrillard should never have been given credence
in the first place. The question of where or not Baudrillard denied the existence
of the Gulf War should never have been asked. That it was is indicative of the
standard of criticism his work has all too often received, and of a perhaps
intentional policy by some to discredit his status as a thinker. . ."445.
156 Machinic postmodernism as it has been deployed here takes as a starting
point the redundancy of this debate in light of material transitions of cybernetic
society. As will be seen towards the end of Chapter 5, the more profitable
theoretical tension lies not between modernity or postmodernity but rather in
postmodernity between nihilism and an what shall be called an ethics of speed.
197
insidious revisionism but rather part of his broader theory of the
precession of simulacra. If the Gulf War for Baudrillard lacked
'reality' it is because it constituted, for him, a good example of a
'synthetic object'. As he notes, this "does not mean that damage
and destruction didn't take place. There is violence, but it is not
real, it is virtual. There is also violence in the virtual but it's like a
simulation model, a parachuted war that does not take place. It is
already programmed and takes place as it was programmed. But
this one didn't even go as planned because in the end it went
completely off the rails. Therefore, there aren't even any
consequences. Nothing has been solved. On the contrary, the
situation is perhaps even worse than before. So it was a simulacre
of a war, the only consequence of which is a simulacre of
negotiation."(SW: 207) War in the age of programmed catastrophe
relegates politics to depthless reiterated games. As his articles on
the war reiterate, politically the war did not happen. Typically
despairing, Baudrillard complained of the "impotence in the face of
the total political debility on both sides. There remain only that sort
of policy one calls deterrence, that is to say a consensual system of
mutual terror. And you can be sure I've got my feeling about that!
But above all, what is really happening on the ground there, in
Iraq, it's so vile. It's enough to drive you either into depression or
into a rage! It arouses feelings you can neither describe nor
transpose. What can a writer say about this heap of cowardice and
198
stupidity?"(SW:116) Baudrillard seems to have deployed his writing
machines to process his ambient misery. Describing himself as a
`melancholic' rather 'depressive' and depicting himself as a kind of
postmodern survivalist, Baudrillard adopts a transformative writing
strategy. 157
As with his discussion of terrorism, Baudrillard wanted to
emphasise the implosion of the real rather than Virilio's discourse
on the supplantation of geo-strategy by chrono-strategy.
Baudrillard, instead of talking of the 'revolution' of real time as
Virilio does, suggests that the dynamic is "an involution in real
time; of an involution of the event in the instantaneity of
everything at once, and of its vanishing in information itself. If we
take note of the speed of light and temporal short-circuit of pure
war (the nanosecond), we see that this involution precipitates us
precisely into the virtuality of war and not into its reality, it
precipitates us into the absence of war. Must we denounce the
speed of light?"(GW: 48) Baudrillard, betting on `deterrence and
the indefinite virtuality of war', here opposes his perspective on the
157 As he puts it, "[f]aced by an event like that war, which I see as a non-event,
a product of deflation, you either share that depression, the depression of
military violence, or you transform the non-war by writing. And that is how it
happened with me during those six weeks. If the war doesn't do to extremes,
then writing must be allowed to, one way or another. That is its role. It's as
description of a society in a state of undifferentiation, of neutralisation,
implosion, entropy, etc. But it is obviously a transfiguration brought about by
writing. It is writing's 'fatal strategy' to go to extremes. And that strategy is a
happy one, vital. That is my vitality, and that is why I will always survive."(SW:
180)
199
war to that of Virilio whose narrative of acceleration of pushed
towards a vision of 'apocalyptic escalation'.
However for both, as Baudrillard himself admits, postmodern war is
non-Euclidean and actually contains the two apparently
contradictory tendencies simultaneously. Pure war is a vicious
circle. The Gulf War illustrates more than anything the
complementarily of escalation and deterrence. The 'non-Euclidean'
space in which post-modern war resides for Baudrillard & Virilio
constitutes a topological space of movement in which "the forms
we consider the most contradictory can exist at the same
time."(SW: 186)
In the essay, 'The Gulf War: is it really taking place' Baudrillard
notes how the "war's programmed escalation is relentless and its
non-occurrence no less inevitable: the war proceeds at once
towards the two extremes of intensification and deterrence. The
war and the non-war take place at the same time, with the same
period of deployment and suspence and the same possibilities of
the de-escalation or maximal increase. . .What is most
extraordinary is that the two hypotheses, the apocalypse of real
time and pure war along with the triumph of the virtual over the
real, are realized at the same time, in the same space-time, each
in implacable pursuit of the other. It is a sign that the space of the
200
event has become a hyperspace with multiple refractivity, and that
the space of war has become definitely non-Euclidean. And that
there will undoubtedly be no resolution of this situation: we will
remain in the undecidability of war, which is the undecidability
created by the unleashing of the two opposed principles. Soft war
and pure war go boating."(GW: 49-50)
They converge again in their perception of capitalism as a
catastrophic non-linear system. Programmed catastrophe, for
Baudrillard, is defined as the pure terror of an involutionary,
implosive actuality, 'Past a certain threshold of inertia, forms start
snowballing, stampeding and terror is unleashed in an empty form.
. .When effects go faster than causes, they devour them. I could
easily see the 'speed-up' analysed by Virilio from this angle, as an
attempt to accelerate faster than linearity. can. . .(SW: 118) In
places Baudrillard merely paraphrases in his own terms Virilio's
calculation of Pure war, morphing it into the argument of Symbolic
Exchange & Death whereby the greatest threat to global capitalism
is the perfection of its system of control; in this way Baudrillard
describes Virilio's tactics as extrapolating "the military to a kind of
extreme absolute of power, which can only ultimately cause its own
downfall, [to] place it before the judgement of God and absorb it
into the society it destroys. Virilio carries out this calculation with
such an identification or obsession that I can only credit him at
201
times with a powerful sense of irony; the system devours its own
principle of reality, inflates its own empty forms until it reaches an
absolute and its own ironic destiny of reversal."(SW: 116)
4.2.3.2 Pure War
In Desert Screen, Virilio's text on the Gulf War, he tracks what
Deleuze & Guattari would term the trajectories of the war machine
through spatio-temporal modalities: from land, the ocean and
airspace to cyberspace. Postmodern war consolidates in 1991 when
the Iyairms of communications prevail for the first time in the
history of combat over the traditional supremacy of arms of
destruction; the 'offensive' and 'defensive' themselves lose all
value to the advantage of manoeuvres of global interdiction. .
."(170) forcing a tighter convergence of the arm with the eye which
Virilio points to in his text War & Cinema - "first look first
kill."(169) The uniqueness of the Gulf War comes mostly therefore
from the technological components of the war machine deployed
but the very process of de-realization of the war started in 1945
with the swarm of media innovations which underwent global
proliferation with the Marshall plan.'
158 Discussing the origins of cyberwar, Virilio notes how most "video-technologies
and technologies of simulation have been used for war. For example, video was
created after the Second World War in order to radio-control planes and aircraft
carries. Thus video came with the war. It took twenty years before it became a
means of expression for artists. Similarly, television was first conceived to be
used as some kind of telescope, not for broadcasting. Originally, Sworkin, the
inventor of television, wanted to settle camera on rockets so that it would be
possible to watch the sky."(cyberwar, God & TV 2)
202
Virilio points out that when contrasted to the Second World War159,
the Gulf War was extremely local when considered in terms of the
battlefield. However, more significantly, it was global in terms of
the logistics of perception due to satellite targeting and remote
command. "I am thinking of Patriot anti-missiles which were
commanded from the Pentagon and from a satellite positioned high
above the Gulf countries. On the one side, it was a local war, of
little interest, without many deaths, without many consequences.
But by contrast on the other side, it was a unique field of
perception. For the first time, as opposed to the Vietnam War, it
was a war rendered live, world-wide with, of course the special
effects, all the information processing organized by the Pentagon
and the censorship by the major states. In fact, it is a war that
took place in the artifice of television, much more than in the
reality of the field of battle, in the sense that real time prevailed
over real space."(Der Derian interview 18)
Postmodern war signals the prevalence of the `fourth front' in
cyberspace over those in airspace, sea space and land. Virilio terms
it the 'fourth dimension' of war, "a purely temporal dimension, that
159 "The Gulf war was the first `live' war. World War Two was a world in space. It
spread from Europe to Japan, to the Soviet Union etc. World War Two was quite
different from World War one which was geographically limited to Europe. But in
the case of the Gulf War, we are dealing with a war which is extremely local in
space, but global in time, since it is the first 'live' war." (3 Cyberwar, God & TV)
203
of the real time of ubiquity or instantaneity. A dimension less
physical than microphysical itself typifies, or nearly so, the fourth
front of the supremacy of the arms of communication."(174)
Generally In his own commentaries on the Gulf War, Virilio
emphasises his divergences from Baudrillard, criticising his articles
on the Gulf War as 'negational'. Virilio argues contra Baudrillard
that even though the war "may not have occurred in the actual
global space. . . it did occur in global time. And this thanks to CNN
and the Pentagon. This is a new form of war, and all the future
wars, all future accidents will be live wars and live accidents"(3
Cyberwar, God & TV) on television, the media of crisis, the museum
of accidents.
In an interview with James Der Derian, Virilio points out that the
novelty of the war was its degree of miniaturisation fusing the
molecular with the planetary. For Virilio the war constituted a
'scaled-down world war', simultaneously 'miniaturising the
world/(167). Virilio follows this movement to extremes, examining
how the increase in speed of weaponry delivered and the digital
infrastructure which made this possible forces war into the
electromagnetic spectrum of cyberwar. From geo-physics to
rnicrophysics. The global war machine functions as a planetary
vortex, fusing global and local scales into a single, spiralling,
204
orbital assemblage. As Virilio describes it "The war on the ground is
tied to the tactical control of the real space of the battle, while the
terminals of strategic control are dedicated tot he management of
the real time of exchanges."(173) Satellites fuse together the local
with the global, casting a digital cartography across the surface of
the earth producing the real-time global vision of turbulence
simulation.
4.2.3.3 Stealth
Correlating to the technologies deployed, the Gulf War stood, for
Virilio, as "the first stealth war of history"(DS:167) consolidating
Sun Tzu's emphasis on 'deception' and 'detection' as the critical
issue in postmodern war; "with the unceasingly augmented
precision of intelligent munitions. . . that which is seen is already
/ost."(DS:167) This triumph of the virtual over the actual is seen
through what Virilio terms the 'necessities of icodynamics', of
maintaining a 'low radar signature', of a "low probability of
detection during approach".(DS:168) With the stealth bombers a
conflict arises between movement in virtuality and actuality; "The
image in real time of the supersonic aircraft prevails from a
distance over the form of lest aerodynamic resistance; in other
words, over the real space of the design of its cockpit and
ai rfoi I ."(DS: 168)
205
To an unprecedented degree, virtuality feeds into the actual
confusing the "immediate and remote presentations of the flying
object. . . The radar induces the geometry of the weapon, of the
aircraft, giving it its very form, its electromagnetic signature on a
'terminal' determining the profile, the mass and even the very
nature of the absorbent coating of the war machine. . .'(DS: 168)
Virilio tracks the importance of information warfare tactics such as
jamming in the lead up to the war. He describes how during the
preliminary grey/fuzzy period of the war, entitled Desert Shield
allied global war machine lay coiled, poised waiting for the UN
checkpoints and locks and damms to give way, enabling the
massive discharge which was entitled Desert Storm, the
foundations were laid "assuring orbital control of the Iraqi territory
by approximately 20 American satellites allocated to the allied
forces."(DS: 171)160
160 "the United State will bring into play the whole of their satellite panoply, from
the weaponry of optical and radar reconnaissance, to telecommunication
satellites (TDRS) including their electronic listening satellites (FERRET) which
intercepted, throughout these many months, all Iraqi radio exchanges. The
electronic intelligence (ELINT) establishing the charting of the frequencies and
wavelengths employed by the adversary. These operations, which began as early
as the summer of 1990 and were duly completed by the high altitude aerial
reconnaissance by U2's of the Iraqi-Kuwaiti territory, led inevitably, in January
1991 to the systematic jamming of the communications of the Iraqi military
forces.
Consequently, this vast data collection would lead, once the UN ultimatum
expired to the jamming of the electromagnetic environment and the anti-aircraft
Defense system of Iraq. This jamming, unique of its kind by virtue of its
amplitude, affected the whole range of frequencies, from the HF to UHF (ultra
high frequency) and even to Radio Baghdad which, according to some listeners,
became inaudible. . ."(171)
206
The "massive jamming barrage" of Desert Shield essentially aimed
to take out Sadam Hussein's communications infrastructure.
Stealth facilitates the optimal strategic fluidity, imperceptiblity and
flexibility. In the era of the overexposure of planetary satellite
surveillance stealth war becomes the priority of electronic martial
arts.
207
4.3 Megalopian turbulence: the 'Internal South' and
the Ecology of Fear
"The more the world-wide axiomatic installs high industry
and the highly industrialised agriculture at the periphery,
provisionally reserving for the centre so-called postindustrial activities (automation, electronics, information
technologies, the conquest of space, overarmourment etc.),
the more it installs peripheral zones of underdevelopment
inside the center. Internal Third Worlds, internal
Souths."(ATP: 469)
4.3.1 Welcome to the Jungle: hyperurban neo-medievalism
"Crime 'war', drug 'war', 'battle' for the family.. .wherever
there is a perceived danger, there is deterrence, whenever
there is deterrence, there are immanent boundaries, and
wherever there are imminent boundaries there is organised
violence. For having boundaries that are actualised by being
crossed is a very precarious way to run a world."(IF: 29)
"Metrophage tunes you into the end of the world. Call it Los
Angeles. Government is rotted to its core with narco-capital
and collapsing messily. Its recession leaves an urban
warscape of communication arteries, fortification, and freefire zones, policed by a combination of high intensity LAPD
airmobile forces and borderline-Nazi private security
organizations. Along the social fracture-lines multimedia
giga buck tangle sadomasochistically with tracts of dynamic
underdevelopment where viral neoleprosy spreading
amongst ambient tectonic-tension static. Drifts of densely
semiotized quasi-intelligent garbage twitch and stink in
fucked-weather tropical heat. Throughout the derelict
warrens at the heart of darkness feral youth cultures splice
neo-rituals with innovated weapons, dangerous drugs, and
scavenged infotech. As their skins migrate to machine
interfacing they become mottled and reptilian. They kill each
other for artificial body part, explore the outer reaches of
meaningless sex, tinker with their DZA, and listen to LOUD
electro-sonic mayhem untouched by human feeling . ”161
161 19 N. Land, Meltdown, abstract culture, swarm 1, issue 1.
208
The internal south designates an urbanism of emergency, planning
on the edge of catastrophe. It is the postmodern city in its various
monstrous mutations with its cyberspatial climatics changing the
weather on the street. As was discussed in Sector 1, Virilio's
complaint about Foucault concerns whether the postmodern city
can best be understood in terms of the confinement of the
disciplinary mode or the circulation of control phase modulation.
Through concepts such as the carceral continuum, turbulence
simulation and especially programmed catastrophe, an attempt has
been made to show the coexistence of both modes of power, power
of enclosure and of transverse flow. Programmed catastrophe
emphasises those urban elements far from equilibrium and
digitalizes them, runs them through simulation models and feeds
information back into the turbulent milieu, simultaneously
dampening irregularity while shunting the eddies and vortexes up
one level.
In this section the Critical Art Ensemble's (CAE) point mentioned
earlier in this Sector will be expanded upon in a discussion of
programmed catastrophe in relation to the singularity of the LA
riots of 1992. The CAE suggested that Deleuze & Guattari fail to
elaborate the shift from street nomos to digital turbulence. This
argument will be developed to show that with the control modes we
have been discussing, i.e. programmed catastrophe and turbulence
209
simulation that street turbulence in the 1990s suffers perhaps from
a fatal overexposure in light of global television and planetary
digital cartographies of danger which depict the anthropomorphic
flows of the planet as an abstract weather system.
"Hyper-urban neo-medievalism is high rise meltdown."162
The urban jungle of the postmodern megalopolis blurs with
cinematic imagery of all those dystopian sci-fi movies with their
neo-medieval paranoia-scape of robber-barons, pirate corporations,
conspiracies and covert operations; as urban theorist Mike Davis
describes, the "images of carceral inner cities (Escape from New
York, Running Man), high-tech police death squads (Blade Runner),
sentient buildings (Die Hard), urban Bantustans (They Live),
Vietnam-like street wars (Colors). . .only extrapolate from existing
trends."163 It is the city-as-warzone, of snipers, man-traps,
ambushes and drive-bys of hip-hop and jungle music. Urban
militarization begins to saturate street level- grills, bars, bulletproof acrylic turnstiles all driven by the risk assessment
imperatives of insurance companies attempting to avoid big riot
payouts.
"Turbulence in the Burgess model of the megalopian
military-industrial-entertainment complex."164
162 15 in S. Goodman, (1998) Darkcore, abstract culture, swarm 3, issue 13.
163 P222, Mike Davis, (1990) City of Quartz.
164 15 in S. Goodman (1998) Darkcore, abstract culture, swarm 3, issue 13.
210
This hyper-urban medievalism is detailed by the Italian geographer
Giuseppe Sacco; "A series of minorities rejecting integration, form
clans, and each clan picks a neighbourhood that becomes its own
center, often inaccessible. . .The clan spirit dominates also the
well-to-do classes who, pursuing the myth of nature, withdraw
from the city to he garden suburbs with their own shopping malls,
bringing other types of microsocieities into existence." 165 This
meltdown of social integration, this slow motion riot, is what Sacco
termed the Vietnamization of territories. Perpetual civil war in the
urban jungle, clashing opposing minorities and guerrilla warfare.
Endo-colonisation along shifting internal jungle frontiers. The
destruction of the modern city is totally consistent with military's
need to maintain a clear field of operations, making over the earth
in a form which denies cover to any resistance.
Mike Davis' futurological cartographies of Los Angeles map the
emergent scenarios for the planets urban virtual futures. Like
Jameson, postmodern geographer Ed Soja and late modernist
geographer David Harvey, LA is postmodern urban meltdown
scenario extraordinaire; in Davis' words, his analysis is a kind of
'Marxism for cyberpunks'166 Taking Burgess' classic urban
concentric model generated in the Chicago School of Sociology,
165 This is Eco's (1987: 76) summary of Italian Geographer Giuseppe Sacco.
211
Davis examines the postmodern city in terms of an 'ecology of
fear. F167
In his careful essay on LA and the Ridley Scott film Blade
Runnel-168, Davis is extremely exact in avoiding the modernist
double-bind of historical projection of utopia or dystopia following
the cyberpunk diagonal of William Gibson in Neuromancer, to learn
how "realist, extrapolative science fiction can operate as
prefiguartative social theory, as well as an anticipatory opposition
politics to the cyber-fascism lurking over the next horizon."(3);
"Los Angeles in 2019 will be the core of a metrogalaxy of 22-24
million people in Southern and Baja Californias. Together with
Tokyo, Sao Paulo, Mexico City and Shanghai, it will comprise a new
evolutionary form: mega-cities of 20-30 million inhabitants. It is
important to emphasise that we are not merely talking about larger
specimens of an old familiar type, but an absolutely original, and
unexpected phyla of social life."169
166 ibid. 3.
167 In this sense, Davis' essay is complemented by Massumi's Introduction to the
Politics of Everyday Fear as cartographies of the psychogeography of pure terror,
the ambient paranoiascape which accompany the turbulence simulation of
cybernetic control societies.
168 Mike Davis, (1993) Beyond Blade Runner: Urban Control & the Ecology of
Fear, www.nnediamatic.nl/Magazine/8#2/Davis-Urban.html.
169 ibid. 6. Davis compares Los Angeles with Tokyo, with the former being a
predominantly suburban form and the latter a high urban - the fact forces a
strange convergence between LA and peripheral urban sprawls and hence
explains why one may refer to megalopian configuration as 'internal souths' or
'internal Third Worlds'.
212
The human species in these new techno-ecological assemblages,
mediated by windows onto the abstract machinic phylum of
deterritorialized panic culture, by television screens hot-linking
transcontinentally into the accidental cores in real time. But TV, or
what Virilio terms the museum of accidents, is only the shallow
end. As Mike Davis comments, the key development concerns the
digital cartographies of postmodern violence which we have
described here as turbulence simulation; "I've been going to
meeting about Geographical Information Systems or GIS. Now
geographers and urban planners, as well as traffic engineers and
developers are enthralled by the imminent prospect of basing the
management of complex urban systems- traffic flows, zoning, and
so on- on LANDSAT satellites linked to GIS software. Since the
image resolution capabilities of commercial satellites are now
approaching the threshold of distinguishing individual automobiles,
and perhaps even people and their pets, it will be possible to
monitor the movements of entire populations. As one GIS expert at
UCLA pointed out to me, this will quickly revolutionise the policing
of inner-city areas. . .We shall soon see police departments with
the technology to put the equivalent of an electronic bracelet on
entire social groups."17°
1 " p149 in Davis (1993), 'Uprising & Repression in LA', in Gooding-Williams
(ed).
213
4.3.2 Programmed Catastrophe: thresholds to volatility,
turbulence simulation and population modulation
Television monitoring of global emergency, GIS digital
cartographies of danger, technological accidents showing
exponential potential for proliferation, urban biowarfare, militarized
neo-tribal racist pack assemblages, systems hacking and jamming.
This is the infrastructure of programmed catastrophe. An attempt
to control this escalation itself, every perturbation to the Human
Security System facing a general accident of reality. Computer
techniques of modelling nonlinearity have, as megamachinic
intelligence has accumulated, been adopted by agencies of control
and security in the hope of warding off the threat of social
turbulence. Detailing the work done on chaos theory and war, Da
Landa describes how "the outbreak of military conflict is
mathematically speaking related to the events at the onset of
turbulence. Critical points in weather patterns, in the size of urban
masses or in the distribution of political and economic forces, could
be among the contributing factors in the self-assembly of different
of different armies in history. . .Thus, in the case of the nomads
(the Mongol invasion referred to earlier) a cyclic singularity in the
weather (called a `periodic attractor) signalled the onset of their
turbulent behaviour."(WAIM 21)
214
Based upon a similar orientation of turbulence simulation, of the
application of mathematics to social modulation, in a controversial
project conducted by Christopher Zeeman in the 1970s at Gartree
Prison near Glasgow, an attempt was made, using insights from the
postmodern science of catastrophe theory 171 to develop a model to
help predict' and so prevent the ignition of institutional rioting.
171 In his discussion of postmodern science in The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard
summarises the insights of catastrophe theory, normally associated with Rene
Thom (Lyotard quotes Thom "The catastrophe model reduces all causative
processes to a single one, easy to justify intuitively: conflict, the father of all
things according to Heraclitus.") with the following example; "Take
aggressiveness as a state variable of a dog; it increases in direct proportion to
the dog's anger, a control variable. Supposing the dog's anger is measurable,
when it reaches a certain threshold it is expressed in the form of an attack. Fear,
the second control variable, has the opposite effect; when it reaches its
threshold it is expressed as flight. In the absence of anger or fear, the dog's
behaviour is stable . . .But if the two control variables increase together, the two
thresholds will be approached simultaneously: the dog's behaviour becomes
unpredictable and can switch abruptly from attack to flight, and vice versa. The
system is said to be unstable: the control variables are continuous, but the state
variables are discontinuous."(59)
' 72 In a convergent analysis of architecture entitled Folds, Bodies & Blobs, Greg
Lyn discusses the uses made in architectural design of Rene Thom's Catastrophe
Theory. Drawing from Thom's Structural Stability and Morphogenesis (1975)
trans. D.H. Fowler (Reading, Mass., 1975). , Lyn argues that "where one would
expect that an architect looking at catastrophes would be interested in conflicts,
architects are finding new forms of dynamic stability in these diagrams. The
mutual interest in Thom's diagrams point to a desire to be involved with events
which they cannot predict. The primary innovation made those diagrams is the
geometric modelling of a multiplicity of possible co-present events at any
moment. Thom's morphogenesis engages seemingly random events with
mathematical probability.
Thom's nets were developed to describe catastrophic events. What is common
to these event is an inability to define exactly the moment at which a
catastrophe occurs. The loss of exactitude is replaced by a geometry of multiple
probable relations. With relative precision, the diagrams define potential
catastrophes through cusps rather than fixed points. Like any simple graph,
Thom's diagrams display X & Y forces across two axes of a gridded plane. A
uniform plane would provide the potential for only a single point of intersection
between any two X & Y co-ordinates. The simple topological surface of Thom's
diagram is capable of infolding in multiple dimensions. Within these folds, or
cusps, zones of proximity are contained. As the topological surface folds over
and into itself multiple possible points of intersection are possible at any
moment in the Z dimension. These co-present Z-dimensional zones are possible
because the topological geometry captures space within its surface. Through
proximity and adjacency, various vectors of force begin to imply these intensive
event zones. In catastrophic events there is not a simple fixed point at which a
215
We see in Zeeman et al. an application of Catastrophe theory to
institutional disturbance, an orientation towards control which
permeates the non-linear sciences from weather forecasting to
economic modelling. Disturbance is mathematized in relation to 1)
tension (frustration, distress) and 2) alienation (division, lack of
communication, polarisation). Two crude axioms are asserted
corresponding to these variables - "1)The more tension, the more
disorder. 2) The more alienation, the more sudden and violent are
the outbreaks of disorder." It is argued by the authors that even
though these axioms are crude and simplistic, they facilitate
sufficient mathematical information to construct the graphical
shape of `cusp catastrophe' of a prison riot. Their hypotheses
contend that in an institution there is a tendency to avoid the
attractors of 'quiet' and 'disturbance' "the institution may be said to
have to an overall homeostatic tendency to keep within a
'moderate level of disorder". But as the authors admit, with this
contention the model still remains deterministic. Within their model
therefore, giving it a sensitivity to contingent reality, "External
events, or internal incidents within the institution can be
represented as stochastic noise." This case study is strongly
catastrophe occurs but rather a zone of potential events that are described by
these cusps. The cusps are defined by multiple possible interactions implying,
with more or less probability, multiple fluid thresholds. Thom's geometric plexus
organizes disparate forces in order to describe possible types of
connections."(125-126)
216
emblematic of the imperative of programmed catastrophe and
turbulence simulation. Its emphasis on predictability, on the
insights to be fed into institutional decision making processes is
typical of postmodern control's attempt to 'run the future', warding
off critical cusp points where laminar flow begins to self-organise
thereby threatening the parameters of organisation.
From discipline to control
In their heavily Foucauldian discussions of postmodern penality173,
Feeley & Simon point to the transformation of the US criminal
justice machinery to a mode of cybernetic governmentality which
they describe as actuarial justice. Emphasising the rational
management and regulation of the population as a statistical
aggregation, actuarialism 174 marks a general transition to the
transcarceration of what Deleuze terms control societies, to the
strategic interchangability and continuous control of the carceral
continuum, "Indeed the distinctiMs claim of operations research'
173 Specifically, Jonathon Simon analyses 'postmodern penality' in his book Poor
Disciple: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990, Chicago:
uni. of Chicago Press.
174 Simon, with Malcolm Feeley introduce the notion of 'actuarialism' in their
essa y entitled 'Actuarial Justice: the Emerging New Criminal Law' in D. Nelken
(ed) The Futures of Criminology, (1994) London: Sage.
175 Operations research otherwise known as systems theory and analysis
emerged out of the post-war period in the disciplines of electrical engineering,
mathematics and physics. "It was first introduced into the practice of
government in the early 1960s by US Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamera,
to rationalise Pentagon procurement practices. It was quickly applied to a host of
other areas, including the criminal process. This step was bold and deliberate; a
group of 'whiz kid' consultants to the Department of Defense were appointed to
217
is that it offers generic insights and techniques for managing
seemingly different phenomena and systemic processes- airports,
communications, manufacturing, criminal justice." 176 Feeley &
Simon argue that this systems approach adopts a 'funnel of justice'
flow chart with the new primary protocol the efficient management
of danger; it is an orientation "that invites us to think about the
elimination of bottlenecks, pre-trial diversion, 'early case
assessment' bureaus to weed out 'junk cases', 'fast track'
prosecution bureaus to go after career criminals, use of probation
and parole revocations to avoid the 'trial loop', 'selective
incapacitation' to deploy limited prison space more efficiently. .
rf177
From welfare to warfare.
A similar Foucauldian emphasis on urban enclosures is delivered by
Mike Davis's depiction of 'Fortress LA'; but the hyper racialized
carceral city is inscribed will all the signals that such institutional
formations are simultaneously consolidating in a logic of
simulation, just one example being in advanced criminal justice
machinery's urban cartographies of ecologies of fear.
staff a Task Force for the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and
Administration of Justice, and subsequently published the Task Force Report:
Science & Technology (1967) which became one of the Commission's most
widely read reports. In the midst of an escalating war on crime, modern systems
analysis, the latest Defense Department technique, gained instant credibility and
appeal." 'Actuarial Justice' p187.
116 'Actuarial Justice' p187.
171 'Actuarial Justice' p188.
218
4.3.3 Flashpoint: street turbulence and overexposure
"So-cal becoming minoritarian. 1992 prime time. Judicial
rubber stamping of video captured micro-fascism ignites
urban turbulence. The anti-black counter-insurgency of 'the
dream city of free circulation' programmed to irrigate afro
futurist hydraulics. Discard population or resort to
modulation, integrate or exterminate."178
"the wind of violence, unleashed, mastered, lost, retaken,
delerious, and disciplined. It subsides and swells like action,
disorder and danger, to be controlled.. from bodies to the
collective, in a lightening short circuit without language,
through the groundswell of violence and pandemoneum."1"
In a collection of essays published shortly after the LA Riots of
1992, the discontinuity of this global media singularity was
underlined. All agreed that comparisons with the Watts Riots of
1965 were only partially justified. All agreed that the complex
intertwining of media technologies webbed through the event,
marked it off as a key threshold of postmodern violence and
marking key shift from discipline to control, from welfare to warfare
and from surveillance to monitor.180
178 18 in S. Goodman (1998) Darkcore, abstract culture, swarm 3, issue 13.
179 35 in M. Serres (1995) Genesis.
180 "The defence tactics relied upon resetting the video footage of the beating in
a larger temporal frame (what happened prior to the time that the camera was
turned on), slowing down the speed of the video and freezing different moments
of it (so as to give plausible alternative interpretations of the spatial relations
and the movement so the various viewed person), and repetition of the video
during the course of the trial (so as to habituate the jurors to the use of force).
All of these tactics were techniques for disciplining the viewing of the jurors so
that they plausibly see from the eyes of the officers."(186)
219
From surveillance to monitor describes the shift from the singular
'eye' to the plural 'eyes', the singular vision of panopticism with its
idea of an objective vision of control through visibility, to the
stereoscopic vision of more pluralistic techniques of observation
that have emerged in the twentieth century."(86) Monitor, signals
the distribution of and crack up of techniques of panoptic
observation. As a more modest task, monitor "provides partial
coverage of dangerous spaces, not to pretend to make surveillance
perfect, but only to ensure that in protected zones defensive
actions might be taken in response to invasions."(186)
"Lamination- the capture of decoded flows using LAPD
rhizomaniac vortices sent through South Central searching
and sucking up all amateur footage of the riots, the fear of
an unmeasurable speed. Naked LAPD, slooshing down media
meme pool flumes entangled with the Kings' other body,
Rodney King. In South Central the memes go swimming in a
flashpoint to urban turbulence."181
In Thomas Dumm's essay, "The New Enclosures n,182 he describes
the racialized matrix which the event was processed through. This
matrix inscribed Rodney King's black body within a semiotic regime
of danger. Dumm places the event at the apex of modern and
postmodern violence marking the transition form Foucault's
181 19 in S. G Goodman (1998) Darkcore, abstract culture, swarm 3, issue 13.
182 From Dumm's essays we can derive useful depictions of post-disciplinary
power. Ultimately, Dumm's analysis seems flawed for its "typically American"
Foucauldian analysis more attuned to a radical humanism rather than staunch
anti-humanism. Secondly, and relatedly, Dumm's post-structuralism forces his
analysis of media 'representations' and 'discourse' rather than a more materialist
'machinic postmodernism' which Deleuze & Guattari's Foucault connects to.
220
disciplinary society of surveillance to the post-disciplinary society
of 'monitor'. With Rodney King, Dumm argues, we move into a
neo-archaic scenario of simulated sovereign phase penality - it
"returns the relationship of criminal and sovereign power to an
earlier moment in the history of crime, when the role of the
spectacle of public punishment a was crucial to determining the
meaning of crime and its punishment. But there is one difference.
Now, instead of a liturgy of punishment in front of the assembled
crowd," the torture flows through as information through a mediascape of the society of the spectacle.
As Dumm points out, "The move from surveillance to monitor is
consistent with the emergence of the spectacle in the twentieth
century. The politics of the contemporary spectacle as opposed to
the classical spectacle of the scaffold, are strongly influenced by
the fact the contemporary spectacle is mediated by cinematic and
electronic technologies. . ."(187) not just as technologies of
capture, but more importantly in their machinic surplus value and
the unintended consequences of their (ab)-use. From the point of
view of control, "the real scandal of the King affair might be that it
began as a spectacle not controlled those powers [i.e. the state and
corporate entities which filter image content into the programming
grids of network T.V.] The privately shot video was a new
phenomenon, and not yet subject to the scrutiny of the sort of
221
editorial judgements to which such videos are likely to be subjected
in the future. In the proper order of things, the police would be
able to monitor public places with their helicopter, patrol cars, and
video cameras. The appearance of a video which monitored the
monitors, resonated as a latter-day instance of the Carnivale of the
European Middle Ages."(187) Again, following Foucault, Dumm
points out that the "techniques of surveillance which gave rise to
modern police forces were designed to individualize even as they
normalised. They accompanied a regime of rights."(187) However
in post-disciplinary monitor "a move is made from the correction of
individuals to control of populations, rights become
anachronistic. "(188)
"Ultra-real video capture dissolves nostalgia. LA Law edits
Kings beatings to generate bizarre retrospective lubrication
for control machinery. Digital cut ups of the video, freeze
framing, stretching and looping the baton swings in order to
saturate Kings black body in signs of danger, fight and
flight." 183
Through digital sensing, monitor as turbulence simulation feeds
back into the actual as with Davis' description of remote control
security during the LA riots; "By flicking a few switches on their
command consoles, the security staffs of the great bank towers
were able to cut off all access to their expensive real estate. Bulletproof steel doors rolled down over street-level entrances, escalators
183 19 in S. G Goodman (1998) Darkcore, abstract culture, swarm 3, issue 13.
222
instantly stopped and electronic locks sealed of pedestriation
passageways. A the Los Angeles Business Journal pointed out in a
special report, the riot-tested success of corporate Downtown's
defence has only stimulated demand for new and higher levels of
physical security. u184
"Riot coverage shot from helicopters doubles as news
footage indicating a shift from the ubiquitous vision of the
sovereign to the stereoscopic partial coverage of monitor.
Z0000m lense technology advances since Watts'65 engage a
regurgitative potential. The eye converges with the arm.
Visibility is death. Lasered futures. Absolute speed."185
For Davis programmed catastrophe inhabits the 'virtual scanscape
of the electromagnetic spectrum in moving beyond mere
surveillance when the eye watching is the Al of a sentient
skyscraper (eg. Die Hard). In fact postmodern control moves
beyond Foucault's analysis of the visible; "The sensory system of
the average office tower already includes panoptic vision, smell,
sensitivity to temperature and humidity, motion detection and in
some cases, hearing. u186
In the period of turbulence simulation and programmed
catastrophe, as Davis notes "The contemporary city simulates or
hallucinates itself in at least two decisive senses. First, in the age
of electronic culture and economy, the city redoubles itself through
184 Davis 1993 4.
185 19 in S. Goodman (1998) Darkcore, abstract culture, swarm 3, issue 13.
186 Ibid. 7.
223
the complex architecture of its information and media networks. .
.a luminous geometry of this mnemonic city where data-bases have
become 'blue pyramids' and 'cold spiral arms'. . .Urban cyberspace.
. .will be experiences as even more segregated and devoid of true
public space that the traditional built city. South Central LA, for
instance is a data and a media black hole." 187 The other side of this
hyperreality is the safe-havens and simulations of the theme parks,
the postmodern cliché disrupted by the persistance of microfascism.
1" Ibid. 6.
224
sector 5. The tao of turbulence
"How can I speak to you? You remain in flux, never
congealing or solidifying. What will make that current flow
into words? It is multiple, devoid of causes, meanings,
simple qualities. Yet it cannot be decomposed. These
movements cannot be described as the passage from a
beginning to an end. These rivers flow into a single,
definitive sea. The streams are without fixed banks, this
body without fixed boundaries. This unceasing mobility. This
life- which will perhaps be called our restlessness, whims,
pretences, or lies. All this remains very strange to anyone
claiming to stand on solid ground."(Luce Irigaray)188
"When you have come to grips and are strung together with
the enemy, and you realise that you cannot advance, you
'soak in' and become one with the enemy. You can win by
applying a suitable technique while you are mutually
entangled."(Miyamoto Musashi)'89
188 215 in 'When Our Lips Speak Together', L. Irigaray (1985) The Sex Which Is
Not One, NY: Cornell University Press.
189 75 in M. Musashi (1974) A Book of Five Rings, London: Flamingo.
225
5.1 Hydrophobia: fascist speed
5.1.1 Speed, Metal & War: Virilio's Marinetti
"One must persecute, lash, torture all those who sin against
speed."(F.T. Marinetti)'9°
To a large extent, when Paul Virilio concludes his analysis of speed
with reference to its essentially fascist character, his judgement
resides on his view of the futurism of Marinetti 191 . In several
places, Marinetti is given as an illustration of Virilio's argument
concerning transport, movement and technology and the archetype
of the ocean as the model of smooth space. In Speed & Politics
Virilio describes how speed "as a pure idea without content comes
from the sea like Venus, and when Marinetti cries that the universe
has been enriched by a new beauty, the beauty of speed, and
opposes the race car to the Winged Victory of Samothrace, he
forgets that he is really talking about the same esthetic; the
esthetic of the transport engine. The coupling of winged woman
with the ancient war vessel and the coupling of Marinetti the fascist
190 95 in Marinetti, Selected Writings.
191 As way of background, for the discussion of Marinetti's futurism in relation to
this cartography, it is useful to point to the influence of Sorel's philosophy of
violence. Explicating his line of development also connects the philosophies of
Nietzsche and Bergson to Marinetti, making it easier to extricate Deleuze &
Guattari's anti-fascist neo-futurist speeds from the singularity of Italian fascism
in which Marinetti gets submerged. George Sorel's Reflections on Violence
constitutes a rant against parliamentary socialism of the early 20th century
advocating a mythic violence taken up by Marinetti in his war as hygiene. Sorel,
combines a Marxist reading of Nietzsche's will to power and Bergson's elan vital
into a proletarian epic. His ideas, taken up across the political spectrum, have
been noted as a key germinal theorization taken up by Italian fascism. All full
discussion of the background connections of Marinetti's futurism can by found in
226
with his race car, "ideal shaft crossing over the earth," whose
wheel he controls, emerge from this technological evolutionism
whose realization is more obvious than that of the living world. The
right to the sea creates the right to the road of modern States,
which through this become totalitarian States."(SP 43)
Later in the text, Virilio makes the central connection between
speed, war and futurism describing how in 1921 "Marinetti
metaphorizes about the armoured car: the overman is overgrafted, an inhuman type reduced to a driving- and thus deciding
principle, an animal body that disappears in the superpower of a
metallic body able to annihilate time and space through its
dynamic performances. Vain attempts have been made to fit
Marinetti's works into various political categories; but futurism in
fact comes from a single art- that of war and its essence, speed.
Futurism provides the most accomplished vision of the
dromological evolutionism of the 1920s, the measure of
superspeed! In fact, the human body huddling in the "steel alcove"
is not that of the bellicose dandy seeking the rare sensations of
war, but of the doubly-unable body of the proletarian soldier.
Deprived, as he has always been, of will, he now requires physical
assistance from a vehicular prosthesis in order to accomplish his
historical mission, Assault. The dromomaniac's kinetic superpower
Gunter Berg ha us' The Genesis of Futurism: Marinetti's Early Career and Writings
227
is suddenly devalued."(SP 62) But Virilio could be more explicit
about the different speeds on the war continuum. Marinetti
celebration of speed, for example and its corresponding
configuration of the man-machine interface seems very different
from Deleuze & Guattari's intensive nomadic speed. For Marinetti,
speed is militarized, forced into rank and file, channelled only to
explode even more violently, purging the world of the dead weight
of resentiment culture. Marinetti in his misogynism goes as far as
glorifying war as "the world's only hygiene- militarism, patriotism,
the destructive gesture of freedom-bringe rs, beautiful ideas worth
dying for, and the scorn for woman."' The modern world is graced
by a new divinity, its "magnificence has been enriched by a new
beauty; the beauty of speed" 193 Picking up where Nietzsche's'
critique of slave morality left off and constructing the ubermensch
as the iron man or Terminator, Marinetti stood as a priest of the
'The New Religion Morality of Speed'; "One must kneel on the
tracks to pray to the divine velocity. One must kneel before the
whirling speed of a gyroscope compass. . .one must snatch from
the stars the secret of their stupefying, incomprehensible speed. .
.Wars in which the stars, being both missiles and artillery, match
their speeds to escape from a greater star or to strike a smaller
one."194 In dionysian fashion, he notes how "Christian morality
1899-1909 (1995), Leeds: The Society for Italian Studies.
192 42 Selected Writings.
193 40 Selected Writings.
194 96.
228
defended the physiological structure of man from the excesses of
sensuality. It moderated his instincts and balanced them. The
Futurist morality will defend man from the decay caused by
slowness, by memory, by analysis, by repose and habit. Human
energy centrupled by speed will master Time and Space."195
Marinetti's speed often appears purely extensive and instrumental;
"Tortuous paths, roads that follow the indolence of streams and
wind along the spines and uneven bellies of mountains, these are
the laws of the earth. Never straight lines; always arabesques and
zigzags. Speed finally gives to human life one of the characteristics
of divinity; the straight line."196
With a typical emphasis on catharsis, war purges the world of the
enemy of futurism;
"Speed, having as its essence the intuitive synthesis of every force
in movement is naturally pure. Slowness, having as its essence the
rational analysis of every exhaustion in repose, is naturally
unclean. After the destruction of the antique good and the antique
evil, we create a new good, speed, and a new evil, slowness.
Speed = synthesis of every courage in action. Aggressive and
warlike.
Slowness = analysis of every stagnant prudence. Passive and
pacifistic.
Speed = scorn of obstacles, desire for the new and unexplored.
Modernity, hygiene.
Slowness = arrest, ecstasy, immobile adoration of obstacles,
nostalgia for the already seen, idealization of exhaustion and rest,
pessimism about the unexplored. Rancid romanticism of the wild,
wandering poet and long-haired bespectacled dirty philosopher:497
195
196
95.
95.
197 95-96.
229
And of course Marinetti's true love was a car which served as a
mobile church in which he could worship rapidity by disappearing
into the tunnel of the straight line in a blur; "The intoxication of
great speeds in cars is nothing but the joy of feeling oneself fused
with the only divinity."' The flaneur of the 19 th century mutates
into the driver cocooned within the cockpit, fortressed against the
turbulent outside, aghast at the sublimity of remixed nature viewed
through cinematic windscreens; "The practice of visual
foreshortening and synthesis created by speeding trains and
automobiles looking down upon cities and the countryside. Horror
of slowness, trifles, analysis and minute explanations, love of
speed, abbreviation and summary."' That feeling described by
Freud as 'oceanic', of fusion with the cosmos for Marinetti shreds
the modern subject into a tangle of shooting tracers. In an essay
entitled 'Destruction of Syntax - - Wireless Imagination- - Words in
Freedom' he succinctly summarizes the impact of machines of the
human; "Acceleration of life to today's rapid rhythm. Physical,
intellectual and sentimental balance upon a tightrope of speed
stretched between contrary attractions. Multiple, simultaneous
consciousness in a single individual."' He is drugged by the
emerging new windows onto the machinic phylum, at the sight of
multi-scalar parallel processes of nature. Speed for Marinetti seems
to be accompanied therefore by rushing dissolution of the ego and
198
96.
210
the speed war is a fight against "the obsessing 'I' which poets have
described, sung, analysed and vomited up to this day. To get rid of
it, we must abandon the habit of humanizing nature by attributing
human passions and preoccupations to animals, plants, water,
stones and clouds. Instead we must express the infinitely tiny all
around us, the imperceptible, the invisible, the agitation of atoms,
the Brownian movements, all the passionate hypotheses and
dominating explorations of high-power microscopes."201
Marinetti bows down to the dark side of speed, where id gets
scientific transforming into the predatory machine; "Man multiplied
by the machine. A new mechanical sense, a fusion of instinct with
the efficiency of an engine and conquered force", producing an
"earth made smaller by speed"202
5.1.2 Hydrophobia:
Theweleit, floods and the fascist hard metal body
Perhaps the clearest example of this fascist speed critiqued by
Virilio who perceives it at play in Marinetti's aesthetic is given by
Klaus Theweleit in his analysis of the fascist masculinity of the
Freikorps or Stormtroopers of pre and early Nazi Germany.
Theweleit maps out the rigid, contorted and paranoid dynamics
evident in the discourse of the soldiers. Like Marinetti, Theweleit
199 47.
45.
201 49.
200
231
unveils an aesthetic of speed and explosion emanating from the
intensity of the battle field, which continues to resonate in the cold
steel body poliorcetics of fascist libido. Metabolic projectile fuses
with vectors of speeding metal bullets in a thanatocratic nose-dive.
It is a libidinal mechanics of fortressed desire exploding as massive
discharge projected outward, "bullets hurtling from the military
machine toward their body-targets. At these moments, they
anticipate the most intense possible sensation; but it is their own
velocity they continuously evoke to legitimise their movement of
eruption and penetration into the body of the enemy. . . Speed is a
key category for the soldier body. It needs to heat up, rev up, and
race physically, before charging physically toward the site on which
it expects to experience itself in the streaming of pleasure."'
Speaking specifically of Marinetti, Theweleit shows how "To escape
from one's own boundaries, and attain the object of pleasure by
way of violent, intoxicating acts is a need the armoured body has,
one expressed using the technological concept of speed."'
Importantly, Theweleit is careful to point out contra Fromm, that
Marinetti, in his deification of speed and machines is not a
technologist as such, but rather appeals to the dark side of
technology, the darkside of speed; Marinetti appeals to the
"untechnological side of technology", it is a conception of the
machine which is quite "untechnical."
202 46.
232
In his discussion of 'Floods, Bodies and History' in Male Fantasies
vol.1, Theweleit attempts to clarify a reading strategy for the
images of 'flow' in fascist texts. He therefore tries to contextualize
the soldiers' attraction to speed, rushes and torrents. In a different
way from De Landa, Theweleit also follows Deleuze & Guattari's
machinic postmodernism and its attempted sidestepping of
metaphor. Theweleit sets out to avoid an ideological, interpretative
approach to the texts, to the discourse of the fluid. Theweleit
argues that one response to the texts would be depict them as
reactive for their naturalisation of political processes. He suggests
however that this is merely to suggest the natural images of flow
used are ideological veils disguising reality thereby testifying to the
fascists false consciousness. "In other words, this interpretative
reflex reacts to sentences of that kind simply by proclaiming them
'lies' or 'nonsense,' adding perhaps, as a corrective that politics are
not nature, and those fascists should be ashamed of
themselves. ,,205
However, for perhaps similar reasons to De Landa's materialism,
Theweleit appears to want to read the metaphors of flow literally,
to ask how the discourse works as opposed to its meaning. He
argues that it is the specific use to which the texts are put which
203 Theweleit vol.2 181.
233
causes everything to flow. The "soldiers, conversely, want to avoid
swimming at all costs, no matter what the stream. They want to
stand with both feet and every root firmly anchored in the soil.
They want whatever floods may come to rebound against them;
they want to stop, and dam up, those floods. . .Nothing is to be
permitted to flow, least of all 'Redfloods' If anything is to move, its
should be the movement (i.e. oneself) - but as one man; in
formation: on command as a line, a column, a block; as a wedge, a
tight unit. Death to all that flows." 206 Fascist speed is tightly
entwined therefore to a tracing of the solid earth as inert surface
for active flow.
The primary process which Theweleit maps is the flows of desire of
these fascist men. The features of this map, mark the dynamics of
a body poliorcetics or body fortressing, a reterritorialization of
desire with the implied threat of exteriority flooding in and
implosion from within as internal dam rupture. For Theweleit the
"flood is abstract enough to allow processes of extreme diversity to
be subsumed under its image. All they need have in common is
some transgression of boundaries. Whether the boundaries belong
to a country, a body, decency or tradition, their transgression must
unearth something that has been forbidden. . .This is when the
2 ° 4 452.
205 230 in Theweleit vol.l.
206 230.
234
flow begins, inside and out, exciting and frightening at the same
time. The closer the flood is, the more dangerous it seems."207
All affective charge is invested in the precise moment of discharge
"when the dam bursts, the moment when the liquid crashes up
against the solid and destroys it. It is as a result of this act that
something really begins to flow; the blood of whoever has been
killed. To collide with a redflood meant death; the solid dissolves
(whether the flood come from within or without)"208
In order to find the source of these flows which Theweleit maps in
fascist discourse, he engages in a broader discussion of 'flow' in
human history, ultimately mapping it onto the opposition between
man and woman. He follows the cosmic materialism of Deleuze &
Guattari when they ask "Who does not feel in the flows of his
desire both the lava and the water?"(AO: 67) deepening his
discussion of flow by moving towards the notion and history of
libidinal streaming. Theweleit notes that Reich for example,
conceptualises the orgasm as streaming along a model of tension
and release. Bodily flows drift with the latest developments in the
physics of fluid mechanics. Following Starobinski's work, Literature
and Psychoanalysis, Theweleit gives the example of flows of desire
as operating in a dynamic magnetic field; for some this is a
207
233.
235
dynamic of interiority, for others it melds interiority onto the
outside so that flows traverse bodies. In the opposition between
'endo-fluidism' and 'exo-fluidism', Theweleit registers that
psychoanalysis is built around a 'restricted model of fluidity,'
concerned as it is with policing interiority.
The late Freud of Civilization and its Discontents testifies to the
psychoanalytic irrigation of flow through the unwillingness to admit
that the ego has highly permeable and unstable boundaries facing
beyond the individual boundaries, facing beyond the individual
body. In complaints typifying his bourgeoisie intellectualism, Freud
moans "I cannot discover this 'oceanic' feeling in myself. It is not
easy to deal scientifically with feelings. One can attempt to
describe their physiological signs. Where this is not possible - and I
am afraid that the oceanic feeling too will defy this kind of
characterisation- nothing remains but to fall back on the ideational
content which is most readily associated with the feeling. . .it is a
feeling of an indissoluble bond, of being one with the external
world as a whole. . .From my own experience I could not convince
myself of the primary nature of such a feeling."209
As Theweleit points out, "Freud strives to go upward, for him that
whole oceanic business is somehow under water, dark and
208 234.
236
threatening. sr.21° Theweleit expanding on Anti-Oedipus denotes this
libidinal irrigatio n system as the triangular network of channels
which constitutes for Deleuze & Guattari, the Oedipus complex,
prioritising a kind of theatrical representation over a viscous
production system. Deleuze & Guattari's move is to connect that
which is 'deep inside', the unconscious to that beyond individual
boundaries; desire as primary process is always social. This
connection pulls the inside onto a plane of exteriority. It is
concepts such as the body without organs or as we have seen
earlier, the plane of consistency which allows this topology of
interiority, folding it always onto the outside, revealing interiority,
an individualising circuit of subjection working on a higher level.
Rather than start from a notion of the whole, whether it be the
social of human organism, Deleuze and Guattari build up from the
bottom so that the body constitutes an assemblage of potential
connections, plug-ins couplings or switches traversed by the
rhythm of the break-flow.
The body without organs211 , pre-socialised matter serves as a
surface for the flows of desire produced in the unconscious.
209 Freud 252 in Civilization & its Discontents.
210
211
253.
In perhaps one of the most interesting secondary discussions of the body
without organs, architectural theorist Greg Lyn conceptualises the bwo as a blob.
He traces the history of blobs from B-movies to cyberpunk classics such as
Terminator 2's T-1000 liquid metal machine. This latter example starkly
contrasts the crude power of the muscled man or man of steel as opposed to the
alien wet intelligence of the mercury like fluid.
237
5.1.3 Micropolitics of Fascism
"One must always keep 'on the subject' and 'in line'. But
desire by its very nature keeps tending to get 'off the
subject', to wander away."(Felix Guattari )212
The importance of distinguishing fascist speeds from nomadic
speeds is intensified by the fluidification of power in postmodernity
into the modes which we have referred to as programmed
catastrophe or turbulence simulation. Mobile power, not just tied
down to the roots of the State, but escaping the State in the
service of higher order deterritorializations and reterritorializations,
of a global war machine, which everywhere releases its flows
through the checkpoints of national jurisdictions. As has been
reiterated here, smooth space is not a promised land and does not
stand in a binary opposition to striated space. Smooth space in
postmodernity is the site of a contest between nomos and fluid
logos. We need a further description of conflict in smooth space.
This is provided by Deleuze & Guattari's molecular analysis of
fascism, of how it constitutes not just a singular event in the
history of European nation states but rather exists on a continuous
plane stretched no doubt into the 21 st century. The plane is the
microphysics/politics of desire, the intricate libidinal infrastructure
to the great molar organizations of states and corporate entities.
This micropolitics helps distinguish fascist speeds from nomadic
speeds, rhizomania from rhizomatics.
238
For Deleuze & Guattari, the endocolonisation of Europe which
Hitler's National Socialism stood for, thrust the world system into a
new phase space. Out of the black hole of the concentration camps,
demolished cities and mortuary trenches emerged a new peace
even more terrifying. In their universal machinic history, Nazism is
retrospectively understood, most importantly as a challenge to
international capitalism in its suicidal collective magnetism to
death. From the point of view of international capitalism, with its
twin megamachinic components at the despotic and democratic
poles, Nazism could only be dealt with once the system had
consolidated a more effective stratificatiory machine to irrigate and
dam mass desire, thereby making possible allied pacts including
Stalin against Hitler's regime. Capitalism as an experimental
axiomatic system selects and discards models of actualisation, of
state regulation of decoded and deterritorialized flows on a logic far
more basic than the projection of the upholding of civilization.
National Socialism was not a blip on the evolutionary wave pattern
of Occidental democracy, but rather was generated from within the
bio-technics of bourgeois capitalism. As Guattari notes, "Whatever
else it may have been, the alliance between the Western
democracies and Stalin's totalitarianism was never directed to
`preserving democracy'. Its prime aim was to destroy a lunatic
212 (MPF: 221)
239
machine that posed a threat to their own system of
domination."(MPF: 226) Rather than the red flood of the October
revolution, Italian and German fascism crystallized despotic
systems far more threatening. In fact, for Guattari, they threatened
both Western capitalism and Stalinism through the unprecedented
unleashed suicidal war machine. "By re-territorializing their desire
upon a leader, a people, a race, they were destroying, in a
phantasy of catastrophe, a reality they hated- a reality that the
revolutionaries either couldn't or wouldn't grapple with. Virility,
blood, Lebensraum and death replaced for them a socialism too
respectful of the prevailing values - and this despite the intrinsic
dishonesty of fascism, its fake challenges to the absurd, its whole
theatrical display of collective hysteria and feeblemindedness which
brought them back again to those same values."(MPF: 226)
Following this line of inquiry, Deleuze & Guattari in A Thousand
Plateaus mark off the specificity of fascist megamachines from
merely totalitarian ones. They are conceptualised here as distinct
modes because of the sheer quality of fascist economies relation to
a war economics, both domestic and foreign, its suicidal character
and therefore its unsustainability. Discussing Daniel Guerin's
Fascism and Big Business, Guattari asks why German capitalism,
after loosing WW1 and suffering the depths of the 1929 economic
crisis, do not merely settle for military dictatorship. But the answer
240
is clear when the acceleration of the Nazi system is tracked.
Paraphrasing Guerin, Guattari answers that "big business hesitated
to deprive itself of such an incomparable, irreplaceable means of
penetration into every cell of society as the fascist mass
organizations.' Indeed, no military dictatorship could have
succeeded in controlling the people as effectively as a party
organized along police lines. No military dictatorship could mobilise
libidinal energy like a fascist dictatorship, even though many of
their end results might appear identical, even though they might
resort to the same repressive methods, the same tortures, the
same concentration camps and so on."(MPF: 224)
This being said, it is quite clear that Guattari's aim is to complexify
his analytic cartography of fascism. He seeks to molecularise his
object as far as possible to avoid the crude comparisons and oversimplifications which make a mockery of analyses of fascism.
Guattari puts forwards a social chemistry' alerting us to its
213 "We have to try to analyse its 'machinic composition' - which is a bit like
analysing something's chemical composition, but in this case it is a social
chemistry of desire running not only through History, but also through the whole
expanse of society."(MPF: 223) "The historical transversality of the desire
machine on which totalitarian systems are based is inseparable from their social
transversality. The analysis of fascism cannot be left just to the historian,
because the processes established by it in the past are, as I say, still
proliferating in different forms throughout the entire expanse of society today.
There is a totalitarian chemistry at work in our State structures, our political and
trade-union structures, our institutional and family structures, even in our
individual structures - in the sense that one can, as I have suggested, talk of
guilt-feelings and neurosis as a kind of fascism of the super-ego."(MPF: 223) In
Guattari's social chemistry of fascism Hitler serves as a catalyst; "The
conjunction in the person of Hitler of at least four different strands of desire
resulted in crystallizing among the mass of the people the mutation of a new
desire machinism:
241
composition and its relations of speed and slowness. In terms of
cartography he maps the longitude and latitude of fascist bodies
(see 5.3). Most importantly he recognises how the continuity of
modes, under different guises, of the very same configurations of
desire.
The moment one looks at machinic composition, all the multiplicity
of sub-components, then the assemblages which we know as
fascist, Stalinist or democratic appear to share and differ in
unexpected ways. If we focus on industrial machines, military
machines, politico-police machines, state techno-structures,
banking machines or churches, then, as Guattari notes, there can
- a certain plebeian style, which enabled him to get the support of all who were
to any extent affected by the social-democrat and Bolshevik machines;
-a certain army veteran style, symbolised by his Iron Cross from the 1914 war,
which enabled him to neutralise the military, even if he could not gain their
entire confidence;
-a shopkeeper-style opportunism, a yieldingness, a pliability, that enabled him
to negotiate with the magnates of finance and industry, while giving them the
impression that they could easily control and manipulate him;
- finally, and perhaps most importantly of all, a racist mania, a crazy paranoiac
energy that was in tune with the collective death instinct let loose in the charnel
houses of the First World War. . .the local conditions that made the Fuhrer's
'irresistible ascent' possible, producing that extraordinary, machinic
crystallisation of desire in Hitler, were anything but negligible."(MPF: 224-225)
"The role of Hitler, as an individual with a specific ability, was of course
negligible; but his role, as crystallizing a new form of that totalitarian machine,
was, and still is, fundamental. For Hitler still lives. He is still active in dreams, in
delusions, in films, in police torture rooms, and among the young who value
mementoes of his even though they know nothing of Nazism."(MPF: 224) "The
micro-politics that created Hitler concern us, here and now. . .in as much as
new micro-crystallizations of fascism have replaced that old on the same
totalitarian, machinic phylum. On the ground that the part played by the
individual in history is negligible, we are advised to stand idly by while local
tyrants and bureaucrats of all sorts perform their hysterical antics and paranoid
double-dealing. The function of a micro-politics of desire will be to denounce
such passivity, to refuse to countenance any expression of fascism at any
level."(MPF: 225)
242
be more diversity of modes within fascism itself,214 than for
example between fascism and Stalinism. Under stood
on
a
continuum of war suffering varying degrees of stratification then "it
is impossible not to accept the continuity of one and the same
totalitarian machine, worming its way through all the structures of
fascism, Stalinism, bourgeois democracy and so on. . .The different
totalitarian systems have produced different formulae for
controlling the desire of the masses, to suit the changes in the
productive forces and production relations."(MPF: 223)
Guattari's micropolitics of fascism which underpins the analysis of
fascism in the 2 volumes of Capitalism & Schizophrenia attempts to
instate a fluid dynamics of desire which deviates from even the
Frankfurt School's attempts to bring together Marxism and
psychoanalysis. With Guattari, there is no need for a notion of a
dialectic between structure and agency, between macro and micro.
Rather the micropolitics of desire takes desire as always already
social and builds its cartography bottom up, pointing to self-similar
processes which constitutes the planes of organization of all social
214 As Guattari notes, 'There was not just one Nazi Party: not only did the Nazi
Party change and develop, but at every period it had different functions
depending on the areas in which it was active. Himmler's SS machine was not
the same as the SA, and both were very different from the kind of mass
organizations envisaged by the Strasser brothers. And even inside the SS
machine one finds elements of quasi-religious inspiration - remember how
Himmler wanted the SS to be trained along lines similar to the methods of the
Jesuits - alongside the overtly sadistic practices of a man like Heydrich."(MPF:
222)
243
and sub -social systems 215 . "The despotism so often prevailing in
marital or family relationships grows out of the same type of
libidinal engagement as despotism in society. Similarly, it is far
from absurd to consider quite a number of large scale social
problems - such as those of bureuacratism or fascism - in the light
of the micro-politics of desire." (MPF: 218)
Obviously it is inconceivable to think of fascism without the
totalitarian state. However, Deleuze & Guattari's point is that while
fascism perfects this mode of molarity, it is more basically
entwined in a whole array of molecular nodes, distributed across
the libidinal field of the socius. It is only as a second order process
that these forces resonate in what is known as the National Socialist
State. 'Rural fascism and city or neighbourhood fascism, youth
fascism and war veterans fascism, fascism of the left and fascism
of the Right, fascism of the couple, family, school and office; every
fascism is defined by a micro-black hole that stands on its own and
communicates with the others, before resonating in a great
generalized central black hole."(ATP: 215) Each black hole, has a
gradient down which the surrounding milieu is drained into its
whirlpool of power. The decline down the gradient varies in terms
of speed. The synchronisation of fascistic speeds across the social
surface, "a war machine is installed in every hole, in every niche. .
244
_flows capable of suffusing every kind of cell."(ATP: 215)
Microfascism as rhizomania is a fluid mass movement- it is in this
that its very danger lies, its ability to escalate exponentially.
Microfascism is closer to a "cancerous body rather than a
totalitarian organism." It is the danger against which Deleuze &
Guattari warn most strongly, the danger of the "reversion of the
line of flight into a line of destruction" which drives "the molecular
focuses of fascism and makes them interact in a war machine
instead of resonating in a State apparatus. A war machine that no
longer had war as its object and would rather annihilate its own
servant that stop the destruction. All the dangers of the other lines
pale by comparison."(ATP: 231) To ask how the line of flight turns
into the line of destruction is to question how desire is forced to
vent its energy against itself - "how can desire desire its own
repression?" For Deleuze & Guattari all standard answers miss the
point- "The masses certainly do not passively submit to power; not
do they 'want' to be repressed, in some kind of masochistic
hysteria; nor are they tricked by an ideological lure. Desire is
inseparable from complex assemblages that necessarily tie into
molecular levels. . .It's too easy to be anti-fascist on the molar
level and not even see the fascist inside you, the fascist you
yourself sustain and nourish and cherish with molecules both
personal and collective."(ATP: 215)
245
And so as Guattari concludes in the Micropolitics of Fascism, "the
problem is not one of linking up disparate domains that fully exist
in their own right and are separate from one another, but of setting
up new theoretical and practical machines capable of sweeping
away earlier stratifications and creating the conditions necessary
for desire to function in a new way."(MPF: 218) To this end, an
alternative account of speed and its machines, of war and its
weapons, of desire and its investments will be developed in the
following sectors. The preceding fluid mechanics which sets our
analytic cartography in motion will now be pushed further out to
sea, to provide a counter-fascist ethics of speed, a tao of
turbulence and a war hydraulics all of which, form the submachines of what has generally been framed here as a machinic
postmodernism.
246
5.2 War Hydraulics: non-fascist speeds
5.2.1 Landlocked
"These are the fantasies of a man fearing to advance over
the sea, which gave birth to the last West Wall, the Atlantic
Wall, looking out over the void, over this moving and
pernicious expanse, alive with menacing presences; in front
of the sea Hitler rediscovered ancient terrors: water, a place
of madness, of anarchy, of monsters, and of women too..."
(Paul Virilio)216
"On the western front, on the open sea and the liquid plains,
there are no possibilities for colonies."(Paul Virilio)217
In his Bunker Archaeology, Virilio depicts the low profile concrete
monsters that lurk sunken into the beaches of Western France.
Built by the Nazi's during WW2 to protect the Western Front of
Fortress Europe, the network of embattlements testifies to the
hydrophobia of fascism discussed in the previous section. As Virilio
astutely notes, a reterritorializing sense of home land, an
arborescence of solid roots implanted in the soil is intrinsic to
Nazism and conjoins with an impoverished maritime strategy as
Hitler Reich attracted the whole of Europe into its abysmal black
hole of collective suicide. Virilio points out that according to "Nazi
doctrine, strangely enough, there is only one element, the
lithosphere, the earth, blood. Despite the war in the air and under
the sea, the offensive of the first space weapons, the atmosphere
and the hydrosphere remain foreign to Hitlerian ideology. And the
216
BA: 30.
217 BA: 29.
247
feeling of being limited to the earth translates directly into the
sentiment of vital space, the Lebensraum."(BA: 30)
Strategically landlocked into continental deployments, the German
war machine was swept aside by innovations in weaponry which
turned the most solid matter at least to viscous consistency. "The
possibilities of weapons had become so great that the mineral
element became part of the fluidity of fluid; with the exception of
rock, all the earth is a part of the movement of the ocean, a
mutation of physical territory, in fact the first type of
'disintegration' before the arrival of clear arms."(BA: 38) As smooth
space encroached in multi-dimensional invasions, Fortress Europe
as a striatory system was flooded by the components of a war
machine sliding in from the hydrosphere, the atmosphere and
decrypting activities cutting through the electromagnetic spectrum.
Virilio evokes the despair of a defeated siege mentality, of a
territorial poliorcetics; "The orientation facing the ocean, facing its
void, the mythic character of this watchman's wake before the
immensity of the oceanic horizon were not distinct from the
anguished waiting of populations for the arrival of bomber
squadrons in the darkness of the sky at night. From then on, there
was no more protective expanse or distance, all territory was
totally accessible, everything was immediately exposed to the gaze
and to destruction. This marked the disappearance of the battle
248
ground and of peripheral combat; the Fortress Europe was three
dimensional. . . "(BA: 40)
For Deleuze & Guattari, as was implicitly noted in Sector 2, the
open sea is the archetype of smooth space and "was the first to
encounter the demands of increasingly strict striation. The problem
did not arise in proximity to land. On the contrary, the striation of
the sea was a result of navigation on the open water."(ATP: 479)218
In its gridding and escape, the oceanic epitomises the most
important properties of fluid dynamics and smooth space, i.e. the
swerve as angular momentum at the onset of vortical liquidity, line
of deviation or line of flight as seepage or escape velocity from
laminated organisation of striated space. Deleuze & Guattari write
how "in the aftermath of striation, the sea reimparts a kind of
smooth space occupied first by the 'fleet in being', then by the
218 Deleuze & Guattari refer to a geographical longitude and latitude, one which
has arisen out of the possibility, pragmatics and striation of global navigation
and orientation. ". . . before longitude lines had been plotted, a very late
development, there existed a complex and empirical nomadic system of
navigation based on the wind and noise, the colours and sounds of the seas;
then came a directional, preastronomical or already astronomical system of
navigation employing only latitude, in which there was no possibility of 'taking
one's bearings,' and which had only portmanteaus lacking 'translatable
generalisation' instead of true maps; finally, improvements upon this primitive
astronomical navigation were made under very special conditions of the latitudes
of the Indian Ocean, then of the Elliptical circuits of the Atlantic (straight and
curved spaces). It is as if the sea were not only the archetype of all smooth
spaces but the first to undergo a gradual striation in one place then another, on
this side then that. The commercial cities participated in this situation, and were
often innovators; but only the States were capable of carrying it to completion,
of raising it to the global level of a 'politics of science'. A dimensionality that
subordinated directionality or superimposed itself upon it, became increasingly
249
perpetual motion of the strategic submarine, which outflanks all
gridding and invents a neonomadism in the service of a war
machine still more disturbing than the State, which reconstitute it
at the limit of their striations. The sea, then the air and the
stratosphere, become smooth spaces again, but in the strangest of
reversals, it is for the purpose; of controlling striated space more
completely. The smooth always possesses a greater power of
deterritorialisation than the striated."(ATP: 479) In the service of a
global war machine, smooth space, as we saw in Sector 4 in
relation to cyberspace, is taken over by a power which fluidifies,
becomes mobile and nomadic, roaming in search of the
imperceptible, the unspecified enemy whose 'emergency', whose
insertion of information into an already overloaded co-ordinate
system, constitutes a fatal threat.
5.2.2 Fluid mechanics: woman and the war Machine
"This domain is an island, enclosed by nature itself within
unalterable limits. It is the land of truth- enchanting name! surrounded by a wide and stormy ocean, the native home of
illusion, where many a fog bank and many a swiftly melting
iceberg give the deceptive appearance of farther shores,
deluding the adventurous seafarer anew with empty hopes,
and engaging him in enterprises which he can never
abandon and yet is unable to carry to
completion."[Immanuel Kant]219
entrenched."(ATP: 479) See also D. Sobel, Longitude, London: Fourth Estate on
the relation between cartography and time.
219 III 267-8.
250
This tactics of insurgency and of turbulence which we have been
outlining is a mode of fluid dynamics not just conveyed by Deleuze
& Guattari in the conception of the nomad war machine but also in
the mode of fluid feminism which characterises the work of Sadie
Plant and Luce Irigaray 220 . Providing a positivization of the
'oceanic', i.e. that which Theweleit brilliantly describes as the
central dread of fascist masculinity, the aspects of Plant's and
Irigaray's work which will be focused on here, do to male desire
what the nomad war machine does to the State-form in A Thousand
Plateaus. While nomadism is primarily a way of life, it is, as a
higher level function, an implicit critique of the State and a
perpetual engine of its erosion. The argument to be developed here
is that Sadie Plant and Luce Irigaray, through a fluid mechanics,
engage a parallel operation on the body fortressing of male desire,
and most keenly provide the basis for understanding the counterfascist speeds and flows so reviled by the Freikorps. And Plant and
Irigaray's work will be seen to provide the general orientation to
220 In a recent article by Elana Gomel entitled `Hard and wet: Luce Irigaray and
the fascist body' (Textual Practice 12(2), 1998, 199-223) the relation between
`fluidity' in Irigaray's work and TheweleitVascist men is discussed isl totally
divergent manner from the present examination. Gomel treats `fluidity'
completely metaphorically, and uncritically. Correctly Gomei points out that
Irigaray's fluid body is the fascist body turned inside out but suggest5that
this gives Irigaray a complicity with fascism and acts to essentialize a feminist
hydraulic utopia. It is by connecting Irigaray into Plant and Deleuze & Guattari's)
/ work thatMis entrapment of feminism intoilv essentialism vs. constructionism
de0e, 0 c(ii,',1,1eit e Gomei does not fully explore the extent to which Irigaray's fluid
mechanics maps onto a flow chart of insurgency as applicable to gender war as
any other stratum. Hence Gomei conclusions are glib and completely miss the
point.
251
the "ethics of speed", the discussion of which will conclude this
thesis.
In her text Zeros & Ones, Sadie Plant conjoins the fluid dynamics of
Irigaray, the turbulence of Deleuze & Guattari's nomadism and Sun
Tzu's war hydraulics into an liquid cartography of smooth space,
cyberspace and information warfare. This conceptual patchwork
provides a powerful contrast and critique when allowed to seep
over the discussion of fascist masculinity in the previous sector.
The preamble to Plant's book ends with a quotation from Sun Tzu;
"Subtly, subtly, they become invisible; wondrously, wondrously,
they become soundless - they are thus able to be their enemies'
Fates." The extended discussions of liquid intelligence and woman
pervade the book like an extended revelation of the 'end of man' as
more than just a linguistic peculiarity of postmodernity, but rather
a biotechnical tidal wave rolling in from the future. Plant's analysis
of turbulence corresponds most tightly with that of Irigaray who
writes in her essay, 'On the Mechanics of Fluids' that "it is already
getting around - at what rate? In what contexts? In spite of what
resistances? - that women diffuse themselves according to
modalities scarcely compatible with the framework of the ruling
symbolics. Which doesn't happen without causing some turbulence,
we might even say whirlwinds, that ought to be reconfined within
252
solid walls of principle, to keep them from spreading to infinity. . .a
confusion of boundaries that it is important to restore to the proper
order."(FM: 106)
For Plant, fluid dynamics maps onto a guerrilla tactics convergent
with that outlined in Sector 2.3 and emerges out of Sun Tzu's war
hydraulics. Quoting Mary Montagu, Plant forges the connection
between woman and the war machine; "The military art has no
mystery in it beyond which Women can not attain to. . .A woman is
as capable as a man of making herself by means of a map,
acquainted with good and bad ways, the dangerous and safe
passes, or the proper situation for encampment. And what should
hinder her from making herself mistress of all the stratagems of
war of charging, retreating, surprising, laying ambushes,
counterfeiting marches, feigning fights, giving false attacks,
supporting real ones. . ."(quoted in ZO:138) Plant here points to a
fluid mode of war, "not the Western way of confrontation, stratified
strategies, muscular strength, testosterone energy, big guns, and
blunted instruments, but Sun Tzu's art of war; tactical
engagements, lightening speeds, the ways of the guerrillas."(ZO
138)
Building on the woman/war machine nexus developed in Monique
Wittig's text, les Guerilleres, in this strategic mode, "the objective
253
is not to gain ground but to destroy the greatest number of the
enemy to annihilate his armament to compel him to move blindly
never to grant him the initiative in engagements, to harass him
without pause. Using such tactics, to put an enemy our of action
without killing him. . .is the best way to sow disarray." (quoted in
ZO: 138) In a cluster of sections entitled wetware, dryware and
silicon, Plant reaffirms the dominance of the 'oceanic' over
terrestrial civilization, pointing to the dynamic zone of transition
where land becomes sea and vice versa and the fractal coastline
which intricately rides the boundary. 221
Plant cites how in Irigaray's Marine Lover, where she ambivalently
enters into a game with Nietzsche, man longs to "think of the sea
from afar, to eye her from a distance, to use her to fashion his
higher reveries, to weave his dreams of her, and spread his sails
while remaining safe in port."222 In her essay 'On the Mechanics of
Fluids", Luce Irigaray engages in information warfare against the
'huMan' security system whose primary modus operandi in
postmodemity with increased computational power, as I have
argued, is reciprocal orientations of turbulence simulation and
programmed catastrophe. Irigaray allies herself with a fluid nature
which perpetually threatens to 'jam' the working of science's
221 Here Plant is drawing on recent work in biology such as Hypersea: Life on
Land (McMenamin, & McMenamin, NY: Columbia University Press 1994) in which
an oceanic plane of consistency is mapped out between the sea and its creatures
and terrestrial creatures as water carriers.
254
phallogo-centric theoretical machinery. Irigaray's argument can, for
the purposes of this analysis be divided into 2 moves. Firstly she
launches a critique of the alliance of scientific rationality with a
theory of solids and secondly a critique of this theory of solids as
masculine, thereby pointing to (in a convergent manner with
Deleuze & Guattari's analysis of nomadism and turbulence) a
productive conjunction between woman and fluid mechanics.
Making clear the complicity of Man and the State, and the
alignment of woman and the war machine, Irigaray offers a 'theory'
of fluids which flees "a complicity of long standing between
rationality and a mechanics of solids" and closed hierarchical
classification. This elucidation of Irigaray's essay constitutes the
most fatal attack on the flow chart of fascism and male desire
outlined in sector 5.1. Moreover, it promotes an interesting
correspondence, as just mentioned, between woman and the war
machine in hacking the theories of the State-Man complex.
Woman, like the turbulence of the war machine, have served as a
"projective map for the purpose of guaranteeing the totality of the
system- the excess factor of its 'greater than all" functioning as
"geometric prop for evaluating the 'all' of the extension of each of
its 'concepts' including those that are still undetermined."(FM: 108)
Moreover, "Solid mechanics and rationality have maintained a
222 Iriga ray, Marine Lover 51.
255
relationship of very long standing, one against which fluids have
never stopped arguing."(FM: 113)
Irigaray complains about the inadequacy of sciences treatment of
fluids, a gulf which leads to physics constructing an illusory reality
around an idealist model of solidity. She describes how "what is in
excess with respect to form. . is necessarily rejected as beneath or
beyond the system currently in force. . ."(FM: 110-111) It is not
just a matter of science better representing viscous nature;
Irigaray alerts us to this when she writes that "physical reality that
continues to resist adequate symbolisation and/or that signifies the
powerlessness of logic to incorporate in its writing all the
characteristic features of nature. . ."(FM: 106-107) The inadequacy
of pure logic to capture fluidity maps for Irigaray onto the dynamics
of the "rational subject" unwittingly casting normative assertions
on a world which always escapes his attempts to understand and
control. So Irigaray asks, what linguistic composition or consistency
could begin to map the mechanics of fluids without striation,
thereby cracking open a "complicity of long standing between
rationality and a mechanics of solids. . ."(FM: 107)
It is this gap which a 'watercourse' of escape testifies to, that
Irigaray complains is filled in scientific rationality by a "symbol of
universality", a transcendent 'plug' functioning to create the illusion
256
of totality on an incomplete multiplicity. As she argues, "the 'all'- of
x but also of the system - has already prescribed the "not-all" of
each particular relation established, and that 'all' is such only by a
definition of extension that cannot get along without projection
onto a given space-map whose between(s) will be given their
value(s) on the basis of punctual frames of reference"(FM:108)
This striated space must be finite or else science would not be able
to determine order and value. The 'all', (God) stands in for the 'notall' of rationality(feminine pleasure). So we move onto the second
stage of Irigaray's argument which points to the complicity
between a theory of solids and the capture of feminine pleasure. As
liquid infrastructure between the points of solid geometrical reality,
"awoman serves (only) as a projective map for the purpose of
guaranteeing the totality of the system - the excess factor of its
"greater than 'all'; she serves as a geometric prop for evaluating
the 'all' of the extension of each of its 'concepts' including those
that are still undetermined, serves a fixed and congealed intervals
between their definition in 'language', and as the possibility of
establishing individual relationships among these concepts."(FM:
108)
Irigaray's general attack therefore suggests that in the same way
that science has inadequately understood the properties of real
fluids, the male subject of science and his libidinally invested
257
discursive frameworks of identity stratify the fluid realities of
female pleasure. Ideal fluids without reference to concrete
dynamics of friction, pressure and perturbation leads us only to the
dead end of mathematical Itheo-logic'. This theory of ideal fluids
must make do with laminar predictable flows and co-ordinatable
points in this flow, at the expense of real fluids and thereby
continues to give precedence to solids.
Both Sadie Plant and Luce Irigaray contribute therefore to the
formulation of a war hydraulics, to a fluid mode of warfare tuned to
surfing the turbulence of cybernetic society submerged in an ocean
of information. Despite some tensions, which for the present
purposes it is not necessary to detail, it could be said that Plant,
Irigaray and Deleuze & Guattari all converge in this imperative to
engineer an active cartography, an orientation to warfare which
takes as its secondary protocol, the erosion of postmodern capture
complexes.
With this in mind, we can now conclude this sector with a
discussion of abstract cartography as informed by fluid mechanics,
turbulence theory, Chinese martial arts and Deleuze & Guattari's
deployment of Spinoza as a materialist cartographer.
258
5.3 The Tao of Turbulence:
machinic postmodernism as an ethics of speed
In this final sector, the insights of sections 5.1. and 5.2, i.e. the
critique of the nexus of fascist speed and the solid dynamics of
masculinity, will be formulated into what will be suggested
constitutes machinic postmodernisms' attack on nihilism. This
attack on what Guattari terms the "postmodern impasse" takes the
shape of an "ethics of speed" which runs alongside the active
cartography delineated in Sector 1 and is developed throughout the
thesis as a nomad fluid mechanics. This ethics, following Deleuze's
vector through Spinoza's practical philosophy will be differentiated
from the morality which according to Nietzsche's Genealogy has
fallen into degradation, revealing itself as the habitual illusion of
Occidental theo-culture, as a technique of micropolitical
stratification and the irrigation/delimitation of the liquid potential
of 'what a body can do'.
Sector 5 has implicitly been concerned with the longitude and
latitude of bodies, the cartographic components outlined in Sector
1. In particular, 5.1 involved an extended discussion of bodies
swept away by fascist speeds, with the corresponding delimitation
of corporeal potential as libidinal circuits were hardwired into a
male aggression built on top of a foundational dread of liquid
reality and its correspondences with woman, communism, judiasm
259
etc. This body fortressing simultaneously provides a protective
shell from the outside and channels all interaction with exteriority
into the rush of explosive projectile violence. It was seen that this
seemed to correspond closely with Virilio's critique of speed as
fascist in Sector 1. Pushing further the argument made throughout
this thesis that Deleuze & Guattari's conception of speed in A
Thousand Plateaus makes visible counter-fascist speeds which
render Virilio's wholesale rejection unsatisfactory, in 5.2 an attempt
was made to expose aspects of such speeds and affective potentials
through elucidation of the `fluid mechanical' critique of the
restricted velocity repertoire of the dominant masculine biotechnics. Convergent with Plant and Irigaray's fluid feminism,
Deleuze & Guattari's analysis can be seen to move beyond at least
the Virilio of the 1970s and 80s which in this period seems
transfixed by a wholesale depiction of the fascist character of
speed. Sidestepping Baudrillard's nihilism and Virilio's Catholic
mourning, machinic postmodernism as an ethics of speed plugs
cartography into a pragmatics of bio-technical interaction and
destratification. Not attempting to rely on an Orientalism or
renewed archaism, this ethics of speed situated in contemporary
global cybernetic culture may simply be termed the Itao of
turbulence.'
260
5.3.1 Postmodern Impasses and dams
For Felix Guattari, the `ethical abdication' of the postmodern
impasse is a reaction to a condition whereby "we are condemned to
remain helpless before the rise of the new order of cruelty and
cynicism that is about to overwhelm the planet, an order that
seems determined, it would seem, to persist? It is to this
regrettable conclusion that a number of intellectuals and artists,
especially those influenced by postmodernist thought, have
arrived."223 Criticising identity politics as potential microfascisms
clipping the waves of deterritorialization and schizophrenization
escaping from late capitalism, Guattari shows distaste at the
submissive posturing of the likes of Lyotard and Baudrillard. As
Guattari writes: "As the deterritorializing revolutions tied to
development of science, technology, and the arts, sweep aside
everything before them, a compulsion toward a subjective
reterritorialization also emerges. And this antagonism is heightened
even more with the phenomenal growth of communications and
computer fields, to the point where the latter concentrate their
deterritorializing effects on such human faculties as memory
perception, understanding, imagination, etc."224
As Guattari's critique develops, the implicit critique of textualism in
post-structuralism by machinic postmodernism becomes clearer,
223 109 in 'The Postmodern Impasse', The Guattari Reader.
261
revealing an underlying rationale of idealist discourse obsessions;
"where does the idea that the socius is reducible to the facts of
language, and that these facts are in turn reducible to binarizable
and "digitalizable" signifying chain, come from?. . .[it] is directly in
keeping with the modernist tradition of structuralism, whose
influence on the human sciences appears to have been a carry over
from the worst aspects of Anglo-Saxon systemisation. The secret
link that binds these various doctrines, I believe, stems from a
subterranean relationship - marked by reductionist conceptions,
and conveyed immediately after the war by information theory and
new cybernetic research." 225 Machinic postmodernism therefore is
an information war against the control cybernetics of programmed
catastrophe and the logic of turbulence simulation. In its
materialism it attempts to 'depose the signifier form its
transcendent position.'
5.3.2 Escape Velocity- and ethics of speed
Against these postmodern impasses, an ethics of speed can be
proposed which mediates an over rapid acceleration away from the
strata of the human (so as to ward of the black holes of suicide and
fascism) while engaging a rigorous engineering programme to
unpick the stratification of corporeal potential. The analysis which
gives Deleuze & Guattari's conception of speed more complexity
than Virilio's wholesale depiction of it as fascist comes, I shall
224 110 in ibid.
262
argue, from their deployment of Spinoza. As we noted in Sector 1,
cartography, run through Spinoza, consists of the mapping of
bodies in terms of their longitude and latitude, where longitude
relates to the composition of the body in terms of its relations of
speed and slowness, and latitude concerns that bodies affective
potential or power. Spinoza's Ethics as it is appropriated by Deleuze
& Guattari constitutes therefore an 'ethics' of speed. It is this ethics
of speed which in A Thousand Plateaus serves to maintain a line of
flight, warding off its paranoid reversion into a suicidal line of
destruction; or to put it differently, the ethics of speed consists of a
pragmatics, which keeps things liquid, holding a nomadic speed
without getting sucked into a fascist dynamic of body fortressing
and violent libidinal discharge. It is speed on a rhythmic plateau of
continuous variation and cyclic discontinuity. This ethics is a
survival mode for a global cybernetic culture poised far from
equilibrium. In short what is being referred to as an ethics of speed
could be simply termed the tao of turbulence.
In his text on Spinoza aptly subtitled Practical Philosophy, Deleuze
forges a connection between Nietzsche's critique of moral culture
with Spinoza's Ethics, pointing to the main lines of flight which
make for a crucial and radical distinction between what is meant by
an 'ethics' as opposed to a 'moral' system. These 3 deviations
225 111 in ibid.
263
consist of materialism, immoralism and atheism, comprising
respectively of denunciations of transcendent consciousness, of
moral values and of the reactive or sad passions.
What Deleuze & Guattari take from Spinoza's Ethics is a sense of
radical immanence. Since for Spinoza there is only one substance,
his thought offers a subterranean escape route, through
parallelism, from the legacy of a Cartesian dualism which has
subordinated matter to thought.
Spinoza basic level of cartography dissolves the anthropomorphic
into "an investigation into lines, planes or bodies"226 on a single
plane called 'Substance', 'Nature' or `God'. Deleuze & Guattari term
this univocal topological surface the 'plane of consistency', the
'machinic phylum' and the 'body without organs'. For Deleuze
cartography unravels these lines within a tangled milieu,
disconnecting wires here, plugging them in here, forging new
conjunctions and disjunctions, tearing up maps and pasting them
together in way which open up new routes, experimentally
burrowing into uncharted territories. The radical imminence of this
cartography places the cartographer 'on the line' not above it in
some kind of panoptic viewing tower of subjectivity. Rather the
cartographer `gets wet', is immersed in the flow, is only
226 103 in B. Spinoza (1992) The Ethics, London: Hackett.
264
differentiable from flow by a relation of speed and slowness, a
degree of viscosity, a chemical composition. Machinic
postmodernism provide the tools for a planetary cartography of
violence on the body/bodies of the earth. A 'body' can take on a
variety of meanings, it "can be anything; It can be an animal, a
body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a
social body, a collectivity."(SPP: 128) In this thesis the planet has
been conceptualized as such a body. A body in this sense correlates
to what Deleuze & Guattari term an 'assemblage' and can be
defined in the Spinozist sense as an agglomeration of vectors of
speed and slowness, a dense point in a complex of lines. In the
fluid landscape of the 'plane of consistency' or 'nature', a body
stands only as a transitory figure of relative solidification. The
laboured issues of moral and political philosophy, tied to a logic of
judgement and legislation, the logic of the State, becomes for
machinic postmodernism, fundamentally questions of practical fluid
mechanics or an 'ethics of speed'. The key questions become how
does a collective body maintains a plateau of consistency without
facing on the one hand capture, reterritorialization and
stratification into hierarchical irrigation systems or on the other,
plummet into a fascist black hole of escalations of violence,
kamikaze nose dives and suicidal high velocity destratification.
Between these poles of order and chaos is where the tao of
turbulence works, encouraging a collective consistency 'far from
265
equilibrium', I liquidarity l , optimal liquidity, flexibility, dynamism
and experimentation. The tao of turbulence consists of sustaining
the volatility of a collective population, tuning the group to
intensity production as opposed to the dampening systems and
everyday nihilism of postmodern culture. Such fluidity is required
of populations not just due to the escalating turbulence and rate of
change in late capitalist culture, but specifically because of
irreversible species mutations relating to nnachinic intelligence and
cyborgian dehumanization.
Machinic postmodernism is in this sense a neo-futurism,
celebrating speed not in the same way as Marinetti which as Virilio
correctly pinpoints, contains heavy doses of speed fascism, but
rather intense speed, which has no necessary relation to that which
we consider fast in extensivity. To repeat, Deleuze & Guattari point
out that "a movement may be very fast, but that does not give it
speed; a speed may be very slow, or even immobile, yet it is still
speed. Movement is extensive; speed is intensive. Movement
designates the relative character of a body considered as 'one', and
which goes from point to point; speed, on the contrary, constitutes
the absolute character of a body whose irreducible part (atoms)
occupy or fill a smooth space in the manner of a vortex, with the
possibility of springing up at any point."(ATP: 381) The tao of
turbulence
consists of speed in this sense as an aesthetic of
266
intensification, multi-dimensional rhythm and cyclic discontinuity.
In this it constitutes a tactics of insurgency against the dampening
systems of postmodern nihilism.
"You don't reach the BwO, and its plane of consistency, by
wildly destratifying. . .If you free it with too violent an
action, if you blow apart the strata without taking
precautions, then instead of drawing the plane you will be
killed, plunged into a black hole, or even dragged towards
catastrophe. Staying stratified - organized, signified,
subjected - is not the worst that can happen; the worst that
can happen is if you throw the strata into demented or
suicidal collapse, which brings them back down on us
heavier than ever. This is how it should be done: lodge
yourself on a stratum, experiment with the opportunities it
offers, find an advantageous place on it, find potential
movements of deterritorialization, possible lines of flight,
experience them, produce flow conjunctions here and there,
try out continuums of intensities segment by segment, have
a small plot of new land at all times.. . "(ATP: 160-161)
267
Conclusion: refolding the map
This cartography of postmodern violence has attempted to map a
dynamic landscape, which, it has been argued, is overridden by the
protocols and technological discharge of a military cybernetics
complex. The main argument was that this landscape is
intrinsically unstable, 'far from equilibrium' and can best be
understood through an exploration of the concept of turbulence as
developed in computer modelling, chaos theory and the non-linear
physics of the later half of the twentieth century.
This argument can be maintained for two reasons. Firstly, it zooms
straight to the heart of cybernetic control societies, to the attempt,
through digitalisation to control, modulate and simulate the
uncontrollable, the catastrophic, the accidental and the turbulent.
Therefore the thesis has referred to the fundamental operation of
control in postmodernity as turbulence simulation or programmed
catastrophe. Perhaps the more fundamental point however, is that
control is always driven by base turbulence. If in cybernetic
society, control appears to near perfection, with digitalisation
constituting the most minute operations of micro-stratification right
down at the level of code, escape velocities proliferate, mutating
military technology in recombinant assemblages which demand
tuned conceptual tool kits in order to open up their potential
interactivity. The most important thinkers for this task, it is
268
contended here, are Gilles Deleuze & Felix Guattari whose A
Thousand Plateaus in particular is seen to steer Michel Foucault &
Paul Virilio's work away from the 'postmodern impasse' of nihilism
into a `machinic postmodernism' which is guided by an 'ethics of
speed' convergent with Luce Irigaray's `fluid mechanics', the
Chinese martial thought of Sun Tzu and Spinoza's Ethics.
Each sector of the thesis featured a zoom-in to a conceptual milieu
opened up in A Thousand Plateaus. The main feature of Sector 1 is
Deleuze & Guattari's concept of cartography itself. Sector 1 in its
coverage of this concept and its application to a systemic analysis
of tension and flux in the world system in postmodernity, cast its
own perspective over the other sectors, defining the historical
period under study as a series of compressive phases triggered by
the World Wars and accelerating through the Cold War into
cybernetic culture of bio-technical convergence. On the surface of
the earth, the history of war is mapped in relation the hydrosphere,
the desert, the jungle, the atmosphere, the stratosphere and in
postmodernity, cyberspace as various manifestations of what
Deleuze & Guattari refer to as smooth space. This illustration is
then extrapolated into the dissolution of the 'problem of violence'
into a material discussion of turbulence.
269
Sector 2 tracked flows across the surface of this system, zooming
in to provide a molecular analytic cartography of social systems in
terms of turbulence. The relation between the State and warfare
is given a microphysical treatment. Differentiations are made
between the fluid dynamics of modes of war in terms of system
speeds and consistencies in line with the cartographic criteria set
out in Sector 1 and the dynamic criteria of turbulence. In order to
access the liquid undercurrents which throw up Deleuze &
Guattari's physics of the war machine, the science of positive chaos
and turbulence was coded into the cartography of violence. In this
discussion of order and chaos, laminar and turbulent flow, a fluid
dynamics of war were developed. This involved an elucidation of
Deleuze & Guattari's concept of the machinic phylum, its relation to
their other concepts such as the plane of consistency (converging
with Spinozan substance/ god/ nature which served as a catalyst in
Sector 1 to machinic postmodernism as a mapping technology).
These conceptual tools, it was argued, produce a cartography which
cuts through the philosophical distinction between nature and
society and produce a diagram of self-similar processes across
scale, diagonalizing the local and the global into the complex. A
terminological equipment emerged from the above operations,
producing a discourse of non-linear phenomenon to map
postmodern violence, of cyclones, vortices, storms and floods taken
270
literally as the abstract dynamics of rioting, insurgency and
infiltration in social systems treated as molecular populations.
Sector 2 concluded with an examination of the philosophical
trajectory of strategic intelligence, particularly tracing the roots of
the indirect warfare of the cybernetic period to ancient Chinese
martial thought and conceptions of the cosmos. In this way, an
attempt was launched (to be picked up again in the Sector 5) to
connect Deleuze & Guattari interest in Spinoza's ethics to the
immanent ethics of practical cartography which allows machinic
postmodernism's ethics of speed to be framed as a Tao of Taoism,
as a pragmatics of anti-fascist speed.
Sector 3 arranged the historical background of postmodern
violence in terms of Deleuze & Guattari's conception of a war
continuum is explicated through a social topology of co-existant
population consistencies. The particular approach to social
involution was in terms of the co-stratification of the planet through
archaic Despotic state formations and modern European ones and
actualized the abstract diagram of tribal warfare developed in
Sector 2. This involved the outline of Karl Wittfogel's flow chart of
the Despotism State form and Pierre Clastre I ethnography of band
warfare. From this, and in terms convergent with Deleuze &
Guattari and Manuel De Landa, a social topology or a non-linear
271
history emerges which attacks the Occident's racist myths of
civilization, progress and historical equilibrium. In other words, the
perpetual peace of the Cold War, of nuclear deterrence is given an
energetic account, revealing the base escalation in the military
industrial complex which produces postmodernity as planetary
cybernetic culture. Moreover, a social topology provides an account
of the co-existence of population consistencies across history, and
therefore opens space for a non-linear understanding of
postmodern violence as a correlate of neo-tribalism plummeting
into the vortex of a techno-medievalism tracked in Sector 4.
Sector 4 examined postmodern violence through the concept of
programmed catastrophe surveying contemporary developments
in cybernetic culture, from globally mediated riots, terrorism and
electronic warfare. The developments of non-linear modelling
drawn from in Sector 2, were in Sector 4 critically examined in
relation to their adoption for the social hazard mapping of
postmodernity. The concept of turbulence simulation developed in
Sector 2 is extended to emphasise the effects of feedback in social
cybernetics through Deleuze & Guattari's and Virilio's notion of
programmed catastrophe. Here, the conceptual tools developed
were applied to an examination of the postmodern state and its
relation to accidents, emergency, risk, simulation and the
'unspecified enemy'. This involved a discussion of Baudrillard and
272
Virilio's conceptions of terrorism through the further elucidation of
Deleuze & Guattari's notions of the Global War Machine and Mike
Davis's postmodern urbanism through which he depicts the
turbulence of social implosion as immersed in an `ecology of fear'.
Deleuze & Guattari point in A Thousand Plateaus to dynamics which
hold a nomadic potential which they demand be distinguished as
differential velocities in their complexification of Virilio's
politicisation of speed. In Sector 4 the global war machine,
through Virilio & Baudrillard, is mapped through a trajectory of
flight simulation from the US conflict in Vietnam (for Jameson, the
first postmodern war) and the Gulf War, illustrating the transition
of information processing systems in the military industrial
complex. The speeds of urban guerrilla warfare were run through
Virilio & Baudrillard's analysis of terrorism and global media and
information systems. Sector 4 concludes with a critique of the
logic of simulation at work in cybernetic control society exposed by
Virilio & Baudrillard, the concept of turbulence in programmed
catastrophe was applied to provide a cartography of the LA riots
of 1992. Here the notion of overexposure was introduced as a way
of illustrating the phase shift from street turbulence as primary site
of insurgency in the postmodern period of hyper-urbanism
characterized by endo-colonisation in the internal south, i.e. the
implosive core of the world system.
273
In Sector 5 by means of conclusion, it was argued that Deleuze &
Guattari's machinic postmodernism in its critical examination of
(
Paul Virilio)equation of speed with fascism, provides Wanti-fascist
neo-futurism, an ethics of speed here termed the Tao of
Turbulence as the modus operandi for insurgency in the virtual
reality of the military-cybernetic complex. Firstly Virilio's equation
was traced to his analysis of Marinetti's futurism as an aesthetics of
violence. This was then connected to Theweleit's analysis of fascist
masculinity and its orientation to speed, explosion and generalised
dread of flow which I depicted in line with the fluid dynamics of this
cartography as a hydrophobia. Treating populations as molecular
assemblages, it was seen how this hydrophobia forces a
reassessment of the escalation of mass fascism such as the
micropolitical cartography initiated by Guattari and further
developed in A Thousand Plateaus.
To then get at what machinic postmodernism's ethics of speed
might look like, the notion of the oceanic is followed, untangling a
cultural complex caught in a capture complex of misogyny. It was
argued that the materialist feminism of Irigaray's fluid mechanics
and Sadie Plant's neo-futurism positivises the fluid to provide an
z
insurgent critique of fascist speed in the same way as Deleuze &
Guattari's conception of the nomad war machine is tuned to the
destruction of the State-Form. Together they comprise, it is
274
argued, a machinic postmodernism as pragmatic critique of the
Occidental State-Man complex and together positively comprise an
ethics (in the sense of Deleuze's amoral remix of Spinoza) of
speed, a tao of turbulence in the sense in which they converge with
the war hydraulics of Chinese marital arts as introduced in Sector
2.
275
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