These colors still don't know how to run correctly

Ten Years Later

IEF | On a Day of Remembrance for Fallen Heros

9/11, ten years later. Ten years of terror and counterterror—ten years of innocent blood—and the nightmare finally appears to be over. Osama is dead, the war is won[1], and most importantly, a new wave of resistance is sweeping the globe, a resistance that has nothing in common with the terrorists or their enemies. If the most nightmarish aspect of the last decade was its unreality—a dream-world corpse-machine—today's struggles are striking because they are real. This is the moment we have waited for: a moment without distractions, a moment ripe for revolution. And yet, perhaps there is a lesson still to be learned before we close the chapter.

At one level, at least, the terrorists did win. Nobody today thinks of exporting democracy. Not only democracy, but the whole idea of a smooth space of cultural exchange has been thrown into confusion. Without this idea, which was always utopian, it is difficult to believe in the neutrality of the market; at an intuitive level, the "economy" loses its self-evidence. Not that this implies any sort of anticapitalist groundswell. It simply generalizes the knowledge that capitalism is sustained only by continual war. One must be willing to die for the economy. And if not, one must find something else worth dying for. There are a thousand mechanisms for suppressing this knowledge—the attempted reconstruction of the soldier as a computational nexus, the surgical precision with which Osama was eliminated—but they cannot erase it. We saw it on TV.

The dirty wars of the eighties, like the terrorist attacks of the same era, were maintained at a subliminal level, as real events that could be represented or misrepresented, discussed or brushed under the rug by politicians and commentators. One saw the smiling face of Arafat or the Gipper, but not their hands. In our era—which revolves around 9/11 but began some years before—the opposite has been true. The events are their own representation. This was as true for the Seattle black bloc as it was for the embedded journalists in Afghanistan. The magic of 9/11, the sorcery that gave a symbolic act material consequences, was that it took this truth to its conclusions. By becoming a perfect image, it broke the stream of images, and thus broke the stream of events—of nonevents—as no mere event could do. The reluctant nihilist's apology for Al Qaeda, "At least they did something," reveals an unconscious understanding of this fact.

If propaganda is a visible lie pointing towards an invisible truth (if only the truth of consolidated power), pornography is a visible truth pointing towards nothing. The great propaganda event of our century was not propaganda at all. It was a pornographic nightmare that swallowed the world.

Towards the end of the decade, we active nihilists began to catch on. Against a depleted anarchism preaching "back to the community, back to the real," we radicalized the most unreal aspects of the summit protest. It began as secession from activism: do not seek affinity on the basis of political abstractions and their associated imperatives, but on the basis of shared conditions and the desires that inhabit them. Plan B was above all an organizational proposal, a proposal to establish affinity through the immediate gesture of attack. 100-200 = 1000. The exact texture and meaning of the gesture was ambiguous at first; eventually, through experimentation, it revealed itself as the pornographic. Invisibility did not mean merely evading detection, refusing communication; it meant a communication of meaninglessness. Although we did not find strangers spontaneously joining us in the street, we observed a certain resonance among worlds that seemed to make us stronger. This was the second secession: the social terrain of insurrectionary generalization became the image-world, in which spatial and temporal fragmentation mean nothing. "Shared conditions" ceased to mean physical or even social proximity; it meant the universal emptiness that our gesture revealed as act.

The difference between the terroristic strategy and our own had less to do with our squeamishness than with our rejection of professionalization. A central criterion for action: is it reproducible, does it promote or inhibit spontaneous antagonism? We articulated this tactical distinction as a matter of strategic principle, a gulf between ourselves and the theocrats. In retrospect, this was an exaggeration.

September 11 was a Hollywood production, with an executive producer and a massive corporate staff; with the advent of YouTube, Hollywood is passé. Ours is the age of participatory spectacle. Therefore, the tactical departure (or resuscitation) that we attempted was, rather than an internal development of the anarchist milieu, a selective reactivation of possibilities in adaptation to the times. A new iteration of capitalist sociability made a certain theoretical hypothesis realistic, and so we took the torch held out to us. Held out to us by terrorism. We were not the only vector of this historical transmission, but we were one of them. The result, which we witness in London as much as Athens, is a diffuse pornographic intelligence: Osama Spontex.[2]

Our own experiments eventually ran aground on the difficulties of sustaining a project that expresses itself only as emptiness. The secret thread of revolutionary commitment running from event to event did not matter at the level of our social reproduction or our material support base, for the simple reason that it was secret. We dispersed in various directions. Some formed communes, some got serious about Marx, some returned to building the anarchist movement. In every case, we took a step back from the extreme hypothesis. Without abandoning the insurrectionary strategy of rupture, we reinscribed rupture within a logic of continuity.

One might read this experience as a transitional phase in a continuing revolutionary progression. A nihilist moment was needed to clear out the vestiges of liberal, pacifist, and socialist compromise, so that a fighting movement could be reborn, a movement ready for the coming struggles. From a tactical perspective, the militant potential of the antiglobalization movement needed to be isolated and developed so that it could enter into new configurations: anti-austerity and anti-police struggles as the two fronts of tomorrow's class war. Maybe.

On the other hand, this return to bread and butter seems to resonate with a broader trend: the pacification of the image-world. When Greece burned in 2008, it was the European media, not the rioters, who talked of the "700 euro generation." The Greeks called themselves an image, an image from the future—and the generalization and success of the revolt (among Greek cities and towns, and also globally), was achieved at the level of images. In this respect, the more recent Egyptian insurrection was conservative, not only for its rapid recuperation by democratic demands and regime change, but also for its representation as secret, subliminal: everyone knows that what mattered is what happened in the street, away from the cameras; everyone knows about the media blackouts, the inaccessibility of truth. This gives credibility to an equally subliminal strategy for revolution, which limits attack to the real, to the explicable, to the truth suppressed by lies, to the antipornographic—a strategy that meshes seamlessly with the endgame of the counterterrorist decade. Namely, the return to normalcy of a system that digests and commodifies even the abnormal.[3]

The terrorisms will continue, with or without us, ever more diffuse. Certainly, the strategy of subliminal struggle will bear fruit, as surely as the activist strategies of the past. It will find its limit, though, in constructing a social body that can only normalize or exclude the spontaneous nihilism of our time. We do not want to repeat the spinelessness of our earlier excursion, nor do we want to democratize terrorism. But we are not content with this limit.

1 The continuing hostilities in Afghanistan have become yet another multilateral police action, more like Belgrade than Fallujah.

2 Mao Spontex denotes the attempt in post-68 France to elaborate the theory of revolutionary guerrilla warfare without reference to a centralized party-apparatus. Its intellectual expression is exemplified by writers like Deleuze, Foucault, and Guattari. Practically, it is supposed to have influenced (and learned from) the Italian Autonomia. The ideas seem to have affinity with the Invisible Committee's idea of the Party, which (incidentally) also references anomic violence in the terrorist manner.

3 "We didn't do it for the lulz." Anti-austerity is a political abstraction inviting a new activist imperative. It differs from the old anarchist abstraction only in presenting itself as concrete, economic, specific to the times. Anti-austerity action without an anti-austerity ideology might be another matter. Whether or not that's a good idea is another question.

Something More Terrible Than Fight Club: The Girlfriend Experience and the Coming Human Strike

“In the early 1970s there was an advertisement shown in Paris movie theaters that promoted a well-known brand of stockings, “Dim” stockings... Anyone who watched even a few minutes of its images, however distractedly, would have a hard time forgetting the special impression of synchrony and dissonance, of confusion and singularity, of communication and estrangement from the bodies of the smiling dancers...Each dancer was filmed separately and later the single pieces were brought together over a single sound track. But the facile trick, that calculated asymetry of the movement of long legs sheathed in the same inexpensive commodity, that slight disjunction between gestures, wafted over the audience a promise of happiness unequivocally related to the human body.”

– Giorgio Agamben, Dim Stockings

“The young girl makes love in the same way she washes her car”

– Tiqqun, First Materials for a Theory of the Young Girl

"The Spectacle is capital accumulated to the point that it becomes image"

– Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle

This is not a time for fight club, is it? The cynicism of the '90s appeared to have reached some sort of apex of anomie near the end of the decade. We could no longer choke down our own image as bored consumers, pathetic workers, and depressed youth. The course of action became disturbingly clear: one could either kill everyone in their vicinity, or learn how to fight with others. With some dumb luck, the anti-globalization movement made an appearance and gave so many bullied children, computer nerds, and petty sociopaths a new collective house alongside the indigenous people of wherever, the left, and the lesbian avengers. Then, as goes the activist version of Revelations, Osama Bin Laden came long and ruined all our fun—returning the image of darker skinned people who believe in stuff to a more scarier position than people with masks breaking stuff. The banality of cinema (exceptions included: Children of Men, JCVD, Let the Right One in, and Paradise Now) analogizes this trite world of false good vs false evil. In the bad ol' days, we didn't know it could be better, we tried to believe in things, and now, silence.

Steven Soderbergh's new cinematic trauma, The Girlfriend Experience, captures the world after the world ended—and History is as banal and horrifying as ever. The Obama election and the economic crisis are a less than subtle background to an everyday life that reflects each and every shameful ounce of the emotional and material poverty of our times.

Sasha Grey, self-described existential porn star in “real life,” stars as Chelsea, a high-end escort. We follow her lukewarm calculated performances through all echelons of bourgeois society. We can thank Soderbergh for the most amazing, boring, and frustrating scenes of something like sex. Chelsea spends scene after scene talking to her agents and her website and brand development teams. Questions of anonymity are brought up alongside meaningless gestures of affect: “hows the family?”

We are reflected our own image—running into an old friend, a business acquaintance, a sister, having an interesting conversation, performing being-amicable. We press the “hows the family” button, a response. We press the “Ha! Remember when you...” button, a response. We poke fun at one friend's less than charming qualities, multiple responses from the crowd. Others come to dine or get drinks at such a charming, lively, or “funky place.” This isn't simply the shameful cultural habits of late capital, it is capital. Chelsea knows this, and would prefer to get paid for it.

The relationship between immaterial labor, care taking, and sex work, is illuminated in The Girlfriend Experience. Shoderbergh, oscillates between scenes of Chelsea talking to men about their financial predictions, Google-ratings, and Obama as they undress revealing underwear with diaper-like qualities and scenes of her boyfriend, Chris, working as personal trainer with men and women in a gym, referred to as a “boutique.”

Nothing new to the seasoned craigslist whore, there is still an element of provocation in Soderbergh's elucidation of the current postionality of workers in our biopolitical hell. The incredibly wealthy men with families could not function as such without their high-end escorts who play at being-the girlfriend. The friendly performances of Chris follow succinctly. The gay men need someone to hit on at the gym to function as gay men, the petty bourgeois woman needs someone to touch her, and encourage her to do her best. These John's and Janes don't even desire the sex-object anymore; they desire “the real thing.”

Chelsea and Chris as images being-images, are able to perform their way across the bridge of fiction into a whole regime of playing at being. In one montage, Chelsea negotiates with a web developer about how to increase her rates and hits. She poses questions in a pseudo-web speak, referencing “that thing that makes me show up in Google searches” which are fielded by the developer playing at being professional, who makes up pay-rate on the spot. He is clearly doing this labor through an expropriation of his work's facilities which we see in the background. Chris, on the other hand, is searching around to increase his rate as well. He talks with a miserable gym owner about its faculties using synergy and nu-speak. They share laughs. The next scene he is trying to use his subtle transgression as leverage to get a raise. He's been shopping around. The economic crisis is an ace card for Chris's current boss, and of course, some blabbering about being a team player. Unfortunately Chris is not a “t-shirt kind of guy” By the end of the scene it, would appear Chris's Boss's sentimental maneuver—“you've been working here for years, man”—pays off.

The liberal project of neutralization is made no more clear than in the non-violent communication between workers and bosses, employers and potential employees, and contractors and who ever the fuck pays them. Only one thing can be communicated: a gesture in every direction, the total domination of capital. We can hear anyone of our assistant managers “If you have any problems, just come talk to me, as two individuals. Nothing is more pathetic than facing an enemy alone, as an individual.

At some point in the film Chelsea's mystical “personology” books inform her that a John, a happily married John with children, might be the one. She is invited to go away with him for the weekend. Chelsea is perhaps confused about “this feeling that I have, ya know.” She's convinced “it's just something she has to do.” We wonder if she has never had a crush or if we have said such dumb shit in our lives too. Unfortunately, its probably both. It proves to be a surefire way to defeat her boyfriend's hold on their previous positions about dating Johns. She goes. Rupture. Fizzle.

The Girlfriend Experience will not seduce everyone to smash windows across the world. It is not an action movie. Life is not action packed. However, intentionally or not, the film lays the terrain for some of the biopolitical conflicts of our time. If the concept of history as a history of social war is going to mean anything it must be understood as an elaboration of a concept of the history as class struggle. Soderbergh's film presents us with just this cinematic gift. Through our lens of insurrection we can make total sense of the banal and horrifying life presented in The Girlfriend Experience. And perhaps, through our proletarian techné, we can profane the film's status as a philosophical commodity form. If Sasha Grey wishes to make existential porn, and ruminate on yet another meta-character in a movie, so be it. It is her real positionality, played by Chelsea, that ought interest us. It is in the fact that the so-called existential porn-stars of the alt porn genre cannot be made separate from the material worlds they are attached to. Thus, Sasha Grey, alongside some Senator, alongside our high-school friend, share in a practice of increasing their facebook rates by any means necessary. The youth in France and Greece use their social capital the wrong way, and territories light up. Mousavi declares a stolen election from twitter and accidentally becomes complicit in a revolt against the fabric of theocratic society. And Oakland? Make hyphy a threat again? Social war.

“they're doing...being totally of control”

– a police officer speaking over police radio about rioters in St. Paul at the Republican National Convention

Capitalism is a system of the flows of capital. It dominates all relationships. All relationships become relations of the flows of the capital. Capitalism is tautological. Everything is included, even the excluded. Capitalism functions by each circuit of capital having its proper place. If something severs or impedes the flows of capital, in any relationship, then capitalism can begin to not-function. If humankind, like a vegan slop of multiculturalism, constitutes a whole (a subject, a multitude, whatever), then it is how we produce a whole, how we function which must be examined, and interrupted.

To block any given artery of the metropolis, to block a road with burning objects, we interrupt the flow of capital from the center of the metropolis (the city) with its margins (rural areas) and in-betweens. After the fire goes out, the metropolis functions again, and perhaps prepares itself to manage such interruptions in the future. However, what is interrupted is not merely the relationship of commodities flowing through the metropolis, but the relationship between us and commodities. The generation of affects and sharing of complicity is of far more interest to an isolated and disempowered proletariat, than the imposition of punishment on this or that evil business.

The new subjectivities of the metropolis are just as miserable as the old ones: the high-end escort, the bike messenger, the craigslist whore, the anarchist, the graphics-designer, the web programmer, the hip hop artist, the DJ, the personal trainer, the private mercenary, the alt-porn artist, the transfeminist academic, the gay landlord. Our task is to locate these subjectivities, locate our being, and practice an ethics beyond suicide.

Self-abolition is realized as the pure means of the human strike. Positioned as high-end escorts to the super rich, we can imagine how such biopolitical assaults could interrupt the economy. In Q.libet's upcoming essay “The Heart of War” a form of combat dubbed “heartwar” is theorized. Its means, the heart; its object, the heart. Imagine if, rather than merely taking money from elites for a job well done, Chelsea's character, alongside others, practiced the same destructive love we practice with each other, ambitiously. Collective emotional strikes, either through disruptions of the normal structure of the family and escorts, or through a refusal to do care labor, can cause rifts that would stretch out in their affects. One can imagine making demands, or just expropriating and making attacks. A well situated group of escorts can gain access to far more resources and capital then currently situated insurgents in the anarchist milieu. Escorts can find common desire with other sex workers or care workers. The beautiful can go on strike against being beautiful—become disfigured. The streetwalkers can do being-in-love with entire police precincts. The entire industry of care and desire, can go on strike against their very being. Human strike after human strike.

Being well positioned, means being well positioned to interrupt. The revolts of '68 taught us that even the privileged have become decomposed by capital. The revolts of today, will show us what life which has endured all the horrors of psychology, medicalization, miserable wages, irreversible time, rape, policing, war, biotechnologies, and cybernetics is capable of. The modern subject is dead. May we be so fortunate that subjectivity can finally be undone as well. Our being is on life support. Unplug it.