Opaque Zones of Empire

The fact that NSA-whistleblower Edward Snowden was able to leave Hong Kong despite the planetary surveillance apparatus devoted to capturing him confronts us with the problem I explore in this essay: those opaque spaces that the panoptic regime cannot see (or see clearly) because of the textured, volumetric, non-representational multiplicity of the global terrain. I presented this paper, Opaque Zones of Empire: Notes Toward a Theory of Terrain, at the Association of American Geographers Meetings in Los Angeles back in April, at the panel “Space and Violence,” organized by Philippe Le Billon and Simon Springer. This is my first serious attempt to begin theorizing the concept of terrain, drawing from ideas previously posted here and here (and also here in relation to the spatiality of the Occupy movement). This is a draft of a longer article in progress.

The argument by Hardt and Negri that Empire is a globalized system of sovereignty in which “there is no outside” is non-metaphorically evoked in the cover of their book Empire, which is illustrated with a photo of the planet viewed from outer space. In this essay, I examine the idea of a planetary totality (which I explored in my previous post on The Imperial Presidency) not as a spatial endpoint but, rather, as a threshold that allows us to look at the outsides of a world without outside: that is, at those spaces that are politically within Empire yet, at the same time, beyond its reach. I propose a negative route to examining the panoptic regime of hyper-visibility by focusing not on the prying cameras of drones and satellites but on the rugged topographies they permanently scrutinize; not on what the panoptic regime sees but on what it cannot see, or what it cannot see clearly. This requires folding Hardt and Negri’s claims about an Empire without an outside to reveal the void that haunts this totality from within: the opaque zones of Empire. This opacity erodes visual capture due to multiple territorial obstacles but also because this opacity is constitutive of the non-representational multiplicity of space in its immanence, which is the lens I propose to use to analyze the concept of terrain.   

    My view of terrain draws from the growing body of scholarship that, as Stuart Elden has recently argued, has moved away from a view of space as a two-dimensional, flat area and toward a perspective that conceives of space as a three-dimensional configuration defined by volume (see the video of Elden's "Secure the Volume" presentation here). Studies on the spatiality of violence and in particular aerial warfare and verticality have played a leading role in this conceptual transition, led by the groundbreaking work of Paul Virilio, Peter Sloterdijk, Derek Gregory, and Eyal Weizman, among others. In this essay, I argue that this conceptual shift from area to volume should be explored even further and from an object-oriented perspective, or, more precisely, an object-oriented negativity. But this sensibility to the materiality of the countless objects that populate the spatial texture of the planet demands new conceptual tools to account for the volumetric physicality of space and for the ways in which its forms, folds, and multiplicity preclude vision and the deployment of violence. I believe that the concept of terrain is key to this theoretical shift because this is the only term that indicates that, indeed, space is made up of forms, folds, textures, depths, and volumes. Not surprisingly, this is the term, “terrain,” that drone operators use to name the opaque spaces they scrutinize from above. In what follows, I examine terrain as a conceptual (rather than descriptive) category in relation to violence, vision, and ontologies of multiplicity, and as the gateway toward an immanent ontology of space.

           The existence of a sophisticated machinery of vision that is permanently scanning the surface and infrastructure of the planet has cultivated among officials fantasies of a God-like transcendence able to submit the globe to an all-seeing Eye that seeks “total information awareness.” But research on the drone wars reveals that this panopticon is often overwhelmed by the densely-layered spatial immensity it seeks to visualize. Derek Gregory has shown that the visual information recorded by the drones scanning the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan is so vast that their sensors are permanently “drowning in data” ("From a View to Kill" p. 194). The regime of hyper-visibility, in this regard, is permanently confronted with the problem of how to analyze and interpret the textured density of the terrain. The gaze guiding the drones, Gregory shows, follows a binary logic that seeks to distinguish “normal” from “abnormal activity” from amid an extremely heterogeneous and complex spatial universe. And the pressure to see insurgent activity on this multi-layered ground has been a major factor in the many cases in which unarmed civilians were “erroneously” murdered by drones, after the operators and image analysts navigating them “saw” mundane objects as “rifles,” people praying as a sign that they were “Taliban,” or children as potentially hostile “adolescents.” “If seeing is believing,” Gregory observes, “it is also techno-culturally mediated” (p. 203) (see also Gregory's recent blog post on this topic over at his blog Geographical Imaginations).

            This reveals, first, the profoundly affective nature of these visual fields, in which vision is not an unmediated mechanical or optical process but a bodily-cultural perception, in which drone operators and analysts are affected and often disoriented by the opaque terrain they seek to interpret. But this also reveals what Allen Feldman, based on his materials on paramilitary violence in northern Ireland, has called “the core of blindness” that defines panoptic regimes: a blindness produced by the disassociation or gap between mechanical visual capture and receptive seeing. Yet the global panopticon faces a more profound core of blindness, which is constitutive not of the technologies of capture but of the sheer multiplicity of forms, objects, flows, and rhythms of the space it seeks to apprehend.

            Henri Lefebvre gave us important clues as to how to disrupt the very notion of a spatial totality. In The Urban Revolution, he argued that the urban phenomenon “can only be comprehended as a totality;” but he warned that this totality “cannot be grasped.” “It escapes us. It is always elsewhere” (p. 186). Likewise, the spatial totality of Empire is something that cannot be grasped because it is haunted by the multiplicity that escapes not only our analytic lens but also the panoptic gaze. And understanding this core of blindness, this opaque elsewhere, requires revisiting what is probably one of Foucault’s most groundbreaking contributions to a political understanding of space: that visibility is central to the operations of power. Foucault’s analysis of the vertical visual field of Bentham’s panopticon shows that seeing a body is a key dimension to controlling it. Paul Virilio examined a similar relation in regards to violence when he wrote, “For men at war, the function of the weapon is the function of the eye” (War and Cinema p. 26). Yet this exclusive focus on what the gazes sees, this purely positive approach to visibility, risks replicating imperial fantasies of global mastery by erasing those places and practices that evade visual capture. And this requires drawing from Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s analysis of visual perception, and especially his argument that the visual field of the body faces spatial limits. Beyond the edges of our visual fields, Merleau-Ponty argued, space becomes phenomenologically invisible: a virtual field we may know about (from memory, images, books, movies, etc.) but that escapes our direct sensory apprehension. The reach and technological sophistication of the imperial panopticon has dramatically expanded these fields but has not changed the fact that the visual field created by the human body is limited and always faces, as Lefebvre would put it, an elsewhere that cannot be grasped. Yet this negative route to the problem of visibility should avoid a dichotomy between visibility and invisibility and examine what the panoptic eye may see without seeing. The notion of opacity is important in this regard, for it focuses on those spaces of indistinction that the panopticon observes without grasping and without understanding. And the terrain remains opaque, even to technologies with planetary reach, because of the sheer heterogeneity of its forms and flows, especially in terrains defined by high levels of striation and multiplicity of folds such as forests, mountains, and cities: for millennia the natural havens of anti-imperial insurgencies.            

            The pure multiplicity of the actually existing spaces of planet Earth is the foundational principle of a theory of terrain. Alain Badiou has argued that the question of being requires dissolving the fantasy of being-as-One through the figure of the pure multiplicity of being. To say that something is, Badiou argues, is to say that something is pure multiplicity. A theory of terrain is the spatialization of Badiou’s ontology. Terrain, I propose, is the name of the pure multiplicity of space. Or put it differently, the pure multiplicity of the terrain is the ontological condition of what space is. This is not a transcendental spatial ontology but an immanent one, not unlike the one Spinoza was after when he conceived of “Nature” as a universe indifferent to our presence. The best way to illustrate the multiplicity of terrain is by way of its opposite: space conceived of as pure homogeneity. The epitome of homogeneous space devoid of heterogeneity and texture is Newton’s absolute space: a matrix that can be measured in terms of points and positions. As Edward Casey has argued, this is space “empty not only of things but also of place itself” (The Fate of Place p. 139). This is the blank space represented in some scenes of the film The Matrix: a space devoid of forms in which Morpheus explains to Neo what The Matrix is, while they are fully immersed in the limitless nothingness of pure homogeneity. This is precisely how a rising European bourgeoisie conceived of the global geography it was eager to conquer and commoditize: space stripped off qualitative, sensuous dimensions and reduced to a quantifiable abstraction. And this is the homogenous space that the imperial panopticon fantasizes about as fully observable.         

   In the past few decades, a vast and sophisticated literature has criticized these abstracting spatial imaginaries, from the phenomenological argument that places are only conceivable through the body’s sensory orientation to Lefebvre’s emphasis on the destructiveness and violence that the “abstract space” of capitalism is founded upon. Yet I believe that this critique of spatial abstraction has not gone far enough, and that we have yet to develop a theory of space that takes to heart its tangible multiplicity and ruggedness. While we count on a rich, ever-growing literature on “space,” “place,” “landscape,” or “territory,” the scholarship on the one concept that hints at this material multiplicity, “terrain,” is remarkably thin (with the exception of an important article by Elden that I review below). The term “terrain” is more often than not treated as a flat, descriptive, vaguely defined term. But how the term is thus used is revealing of its power to account for multiplicity and volume, for "terrain" is regularly mentioned to refer to a space whose three-dimensionality and heterogeneity affects human mobility and visibility: for instance, in references to “the terrain” navigated by mountain climbers, skiers, and explorers or the “urban terrain” that involves counter-insurgency military operations. More importantly, the political salience of terrain is clear in that military strategists (and now drone operators) have been long aware of the importance of this concept in warfare. Sensibility to the multiplicity of forms, textures, materiality, and volume of the terrain has always been a decisive principle of combat, because it is through the manipulation of this multiplicity that you can increase your field of vision and, at the same time, increase your opacity in relation to the enemy’s visual field.

            One of the few authors who have examined the concept of terrain is Stuart Elden, who explores it in relation to “land” and “territory” (see his paper "Land, Terrain, Territory" here). Elden rightly notes that the term is used by geologists, physical geographers, and military strategists “with little conceptual precision” and that most references to terrain are “very vague” and tend to reduce it to “land form, rather than process” (p. 807). He subsequently examines the importance of terrain as land that has strategic, political, and military significance. Yet he also argues that terrain, together with land, should be subsumed to territory as a political technology of spatial control. Land and terrain, he concludes, “are necessary but insufficient to grasp territory” (p. 811). Elden’s analysis is crucial, first, because he identifies the salience of terrain in the spatiality of violence and territoriality, thereby opening up a field of research that has remained under-analyzed in the literature on space. But while it is certainly true that terrain is not enough to understand territory, it could be argued that terrain can help us better understand territory and, in particular, the politics of verticality.

            A key principle of a theory of terrain is that there is something about its material multiplicity that escapes political capture. A case in point are the rugged striations and folds of the mountains of Afghanistan, which have provided refuge for anti-imperial insurgencies in very different historical circumstances and in the face of different territorial regimes. For this reason, subsuming terrain to territory risks not only recreating the conceptual vagueness of the concept but also reducing, for instance, the densely layered materiality of those mountains to a dead, passive, fixed “land form” on which active political territories are built. The fact that the presence of those massive rock formations, in fact, can powerfully affect and constrain political processes tells us that an analysis of terrain requires an object-oriented theory of space, which does not reduce matter, its volume, and its forms to what humans make of them. My analysis of terrain draws, in this regard, from the object-oriented ontologies proposed in the past decade by authors like Latour, Harman, and Bryant, who have rightly argued that there is always something in the materiality of objects that escapes how they are socially appropriated and conceptualized. Likewise, the material objects and forms that make up the multiplicity of terrain ---mountains, cities, rivers, walls, tunnels, valleys, buildings--- are never exhausted by how they are linguistically appropriated or politically controlled. Yet a theory of terrain seeks to unsettle anthropocentric-constructivist views of space but without being “post-human,” in the sense that a political understanding of the “agentive force” of spatial forms requires that the main vector of our analysis is, still, the human body and its mobility. This also means that terrain and territory, as Elden observes, cannot be separated from each other. The volume, forms, multiplicity and temporality of terrain affect and channel human mobility and the spatiality of violence, and are thereby constitutive of territory, not as a determining force but as its plastic, ever-malleable and contested medium, without which human life is inconceivable.

           Eyal Weizman's notable work embodies like no other the political importance of an understanding of terrain. His analysis of the material spatiality of the Israeli occupation of Palestine is conceptually groundbreaking and the best example I know of a volumetric and political analysis of terrain. In Hollow Land, he shows with devastating detail how territoriality and violence operate through the material, rugged, and three-dimensional forms of the terrain and the built environment. Weizman analyzes, in particular, how the Israeli military treats the terrain as the medium of its domination, as a political plastic whose multiple material forms are permanently modified, calibrated, and observed through a dense maze of walls, fences, checkpoints, observation posts on hilltops, satellites, and drones that are guided by a simple goal: to keep millions of Palestinians relatively immobile and visible. Weizman’s work powerfully illustrates the power of a territorial analysis of terrain. But while he mentions the word “terrain” constantly in his writing, he does not analyze it as a conceptual category. A theory of terrain draws from Elden's analysis of territory as a political technology of spatial domination and from Weizman's work to argue that territoriality is created through the manipulation of the forms of the terrain. And because a theory of terrain is object-oriented, it is also sensitive to the power of spatial forms and objects to preclude vision and constrain political practices. Weizman reveals that the physicality of the topography imposes limits on regimes of hyper-visibility. Palestinians, he shows, also manipulate the terrain to create spaces of opacity, especially in one of the few spaces they count on to evade the panoptic eye: the underground. In Gaza, in particular, the construction of hundreds of tunnels across the Egyptian border has for years partly undermined the Israeli siege and has created zones of opacity in the one area of the terrain, the crust of the planet, that satellites and drones cannot penetrate.

   And this takes me to a final point as to why my view of terrain draws from theories of negativity. Badiou argues that the figure of the pure multiplicity of being, precisely because this multiplicity cannot be represented, is the void. The void is, indeed, the figure of the terrain. This void should be read not as an abstraction but in its spatial and bodily immanence: through the vertigo that the vast, opaque, three-dimensional, and not fully visible geographies of the planet create in the human body. This is the void graphically represented, for instance, in Tim Hetherington’s documentary Restrepo, where US soldiers stationed in an outpost in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan felt haunted by the terrain they were immersed in (see my review of the film here). In the film, those soldiers make it clear that those opaque mountains, forests, and valleys were for them a hostile immensity that turned insurgents into a ghostly presence. Those mountains constitute a tangible void within Empire: one of the countless outsides of a world without outside.

The Imperial Presidency

            The confirmation that everything we write, say, or do electronically is being "recorded" and stored in giant databases indicates that the aggressive expansiveness of the planetary surveillance apparatus does not tolerate the existence of places beyond its reach. This is precisely how Hardt and Negri define the globalized system of sovereignty they call Empire: as a spatial totality "without outside." Empire marks, in this regard, not just a new territoriality that overrides national territories but the planet-as-territory. And while Empire began forming two decades ago with the global triumph of neoliberal capitalism, it has only coalesced as a mature political entity under the Obama presidency. This presidency is not simply the heir to the old, nationally-based US imperialism; it presides over something much larger and planetary in scope, forged in alliance with military-political nodes from all over the world: a spatially expansive project to make the totality of the planet observable, controllable, and subservient to a neoliberal ontology of profits.

            The Obama presidency has further consolidated Empire by removing the last political and spatial obstacles that prevented an unrestrained deployment of imperial violence and surveillance on the totality of the planet and the whole of humanity. The constitutional protections from abuse of power by the sovereign that were enshrined by the bourgeois revolutions of the late 1700s (the right to trial, the right to privacy, etc.) managed to create for a few generations a relative spatial sanctuary from the terror that imperial forces regularly unleashed overseas. This relative sanctuary exempted US citizens from what imperial forces have always done directly or by proxy in places like Vietnam, Guatemala, or Afghanistan: detaining people without trial, assassinating them, or having their homes and personal communications submitted to permanent surveillance. These privileges enjoyed by a few hundred millions of people (among the billions of the whole of humanity) have now been terminated by an imperial sovereign that no longer tolerates limits to his capacity to decide who must die. The "kill lists" regularly approved by Emperor Obama, in short, have no bounds and no restraints, and are solely dependent on his own will as absolute sovereign power. A legion of imperial assassins and drones are being permanently dispatched to all corners of the world following Obama's "thumbs down" signal. The best expression that we are witnessing not simply a transition but a rupture in global geographical configurations is the fact that recent TV shows like The Wire (with cops seeking warrants from a judge to set up a wire) and movies like The Bourne Ultimatum (with US intelligence officials going to jail for ordering the assassination of US citizens) have become quaint, disjointed relics from another era. Old forms of racial, class, and imperial privilege will not vanish overnight, for it is easier to “take out” civilians in the mountains of Pakistan than it is in New York City. But the violent repression of the Occupy movement in New York and in the rest of the United States submitted many white, middle-class US citizens to the type of police brutality (coordinated by the FBI and involving 8,000 arrests and hundreds of people injured while in police custody) that in previous years was usually restricted to poor African-Americans. This erosion of liberal notions of citizenship marks a key threshold, and a rupture, toward the historically novel and totalizing territoriality of Empire.

            The rise of an imperial architecture of surveillance and militarization is a major project of counter-revolutionary engineering. While official propaganda seeks to distract the public by insisting that the current hyper-surveillance is a response to “Islamic terrorism,” the latter poses no existential threats to Empire. In fact, the main impact of "terrorist attacks" has been to empower the global elites and make a fearful public more amenable to their will. The internet and mobile communication networks are being militarized because they have become the channels of much more threatening forces: multiple anti-imperial, anti-elite, and anti-neoliberal movements that have appropriated and politicized the open-ended spatiality of communication networks to disrupt, challenge, and interrupt the material currents and flows of Empire. This anti-elite appropriation of the internet had a profound political impact on the streets (in North Africa, southern Europe, North America) and in the breaching of the secrecy of the security apparatus (Wikileaks, Anonymous). The attempt by the Obama presidency to tame the internet and turn it "into the largest and most powerful surveillance system ever created" (as Julian Assange rightly puts it) is not simply an effort to curb political dissent, as in China or Bahrain; it is a profoundly imperial gesture that seeks to expand its controlling gaze over the totality of the globe. The fact that the Obama presidency has consistently supported state terrorism against demands for democracy and social justice from Bahrain to Honduras and that it has expressed open hostility against countries marked by grassroots, egalitarian, and anti-capitalist sentiments like Venezuela confirms that Empire is, above all, a machinery guided by the ontology of profits of the global capitalist elites. The main vector that reproduces this spatiality with no outside is violence in its material capacity to destroy and mutilate human bodies. “Imperial sovereignty means that no point of space or time and no element of the biopolitical tissue is safe from intervention” (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, p. 157).  

 

While acknowledging the immense power of the surveillance apparatus of Empire enthusiastically co-generated by corporations and state agencies, we must not lose sight of the political weakness that its existence reveals. The global panoptic reveals that the bourgeois elites of Empire are fearful of the opacity that is constitutive of the planet (I examine this opacity in my post Opaque Zones of Empire). The panicked, knee-jerk reaction by the many pundits who demonized NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden also reveals that the elites’ fear of the opacity of the world is proportional to their fear of losing the opacity they feel entitled to. The articles by Jefreey Toobin at The New Yorker and David Brooks at The New York Times, for instance, reveal, first, that these elites are lying through their teeth and therefore seek to destroy the message by killing the messenger. Most tellingly, they consistently defend their Orwellian imperial state with an Orwellian double-speak. Both Toobin and Brooks argue that Snowden is an “enemy of transparency” for demanding transparency and that he “broke the law” for revealing that the Obama presidency has systematically violated the US Constitution. Orwell’s 1984 is not simply an allegory of the present: it is the present of a planetary machinery obsessed with making every space observable while waging war in the name of peace. The fact that the presidency that regularly approves "kill lists" was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize is not, strictly speaking, a contradiction. This is how the global elites see imperial terror: as a civilizing campaign of pacification. Yet we should resist the techno-fetishized aura of God-like inevitability that the media projects onto this powerful Imperial Eye. All empires in human history, after all, are sooner of later reduced to rubble. And the paranoid Imperial Eye that is obsessively scanning the whole world fears the planetary and human immensity that it will never be able to fully visualize, control, and apprehend. 

Bringing the Paris Commune Back to Life

Aux morts de la Commune, Mai 21-28, 1871

Laughter alone, the eternal prerogative of man, survives, splendid, invincible, in a world in ruins.

Villiers de I’Isle-Adam, Paris, May 1871

A day like yesterday in Paris a hundred and forty two-years ago, the French state was finishing off the massacre of 30,000 men, women, and children who had dared to challenge the hierarchies of the global order. When the people of Paris rose up demanding equality and took control of the city for over two months, the state responded with swift ferocity and turned the city into a field of rubble and mass graves. All the global elites from the United States to Argentina had demanded the massacre in the press, and cheered at the slaughter of those "feral" creatures. The corpses were buried, the city was rebuilt, and Paris became, once again, the global capital of bourgeois splendor, as it is still seen today. The difference is that today Paris competes in glamour with the hyper-vertical, aggressive masculinity of Dubai’s skyscrapers, the new material pinnacle of what Walter Benjamin aptly called the capitalist phantasmagoria. These new neoliberal "evil paradises" in the petro-states of the Gulf, as Mike Davis calls them, are also built, like Paris, upon the disregard for destruction, clear in that those fetishized totems of capitalism are built by the quasi-slave labor of South Asian workers.

Next May, now that my book Rubble is coming to an end (it enters production with Duke in a week), I hope to begin an ethnographic research on the afterlife of the Paris Commune in today's Paris. I want to explore what the Paris commune created in the texture of the city and to what degree Paris is haunted by the revolutionary event that once destroyed it. But the Paris Commune also reveals, in a totally different context, some of the main arguments I have tried to make in Rubble about ruins, destruction, affect, and the ways in which destruction is disregarded through forms of ruin-fetishization that make massive piles of rubble and mass graves invisible. This essay draws from a section of the conclusions of Rubble that reflects on the intimate relation between revolution, rubble, and the elite fear of ruins.

The Commune took place not just anywhere but in Paris. It cannot be overemphasized what a radical political rupture the appearance of a powerful insurrection in the heart of Paris was at the time. This was the place that Benjamin saw as the phantasmagoric world capital of the bourgeois dream-world, today constellationally entangled with the verticality cultivated in Dubai or New York. This is a phantasmagoria that fears the broken objects and cracks that may erode the impression that these are full, positive objects. In tacit response to the elite fear of their own ruptured places, Spanish Anarchist leader Buenaventura Durruti said in 1936 in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, before he was killed in Madrid by a Stalinist sniper: We aren’t afraid of ruins. His disregard for ruins was an assertion of the defence of the life of those who were already living amid rubble. "We are not afraid of ruins" was the implicit cry of the Paris Commune, as it was slaughtered by the class that fears ruins the most.

As Benjamin documented, in the nineteenth century Paris was made, destroyed, and remade by a violent duel between barricades built by the working-class and boulevards built by the bourgeoisie. The number of barricades peaked in the 1848 insurrection, when 3,000 saturated the medieval, narrow, and winding streets of working-class Paris and made state repression slow and costly. In the 1850s, the Second French Empire responded to this spatial-political threat with Baron Haussmann and the most ambitious project of counter-revolutionary spatial engineering ever sought. Haussmann’s goal was to radically change the form of the whole city. Hundreds of urban blocks were demolished to create an urban space that was easier to police: smooth space without major obstacles built on straight and wide strips that facilitated the movement of troops and expanded the range of artillery. This was a military gesture: an attempt to master the terrain of future combat by changing its form. This also reveals that the terrain is a material plastic, whose form is permanently modified. The boulevards were born. Benjamin wrote, “The true goal of Haussmann’s projects was to secure the city against civil war. He wanted to make the erection of barricades impossible for all time” (Paris, capital of the 19th century). But the boulevards also played a key affective function: these were to be the positive places that would impress and dazzle. The places of bourgeois spectacle were formally made. This rendered the in-doors arcades obsolete. Commodities were now displayed in the flow of the streets. The World Exhibition of 1867 turned Paris into the world capital of the booming, dazzling capitalist-imperial spectacle: the cultural, ideological, and affective core of global capitalism and European imperialism.

The appearance of the Paris Commune shattered the phantasmagoria of the commodity-fetishism that Haussmann had rendered in stone. It was an abrupt awakening from the bourgeois dream triggered by the humiliating French defeat in the hands of the Prussian army at Sedan in September 1870 and the subsequent collapse of the Second Empire. With Paris under siege by German troops and most of the population feeling betrayed, the French national guards protecting the city rebelled against the state in alliance with the local population, especially after the failed attempt by the French government, led by Thiers, to capture the canons held by national guards on the hill of Montmartre on March 18, 1871. While Thiers fled to Versailles, the Commune made itself as constituent power through elections held a few days later. Marx wrote, “The great social measure of the commune was its own working existence” (The Civil War in France, p. 65). This was sovereignty that asserted itself from the bottom-up: through universal suffrage and a military force made up of working men, the national guards.

Under control of an armed insurgency, the form of Paris changed. Multitudes permanently claimed and occupied the streets and saturated them with red flags, the new symbol of universal emancipation and anti-imperialism. Witnesses described that a non-hierarchical effervescence took over the city, “the carnival of the oppressed.” Barricades went up all over Paris as federal troops began surrounding the city in collaboration with German troops. As a communard put it, the barricades were not shelters but intentional striations of space: material obstacles “to prevent the enemy forces from circulating, to bring them to a halt” (Edwards, The Communards of Paris, p. 167). These barricades were not just numerous: they were the largest ever built in the history of Paris. Benjamin wrote, “The barricade is resurrected during the Commune. It is stronger and better secured than ever. It stretches across the great boulevards, often reaching a height of two stories” (The Arcades Project, p. 12). The form of the barricades adopted and colonized the form of the boulevards.  The members of the Commune also altered the form of the city by destroying monuments that celebrated bourgeois-imperial oppression. The Vendome Column, built by Napoleon I to celebrate imperial conquest overseas, was brought down to the cheers of large multitudes. Claiming continuity with the French Revolution, communards tore down the Chapel of Atonement built in expiation of the execution of Louis XVI. Yet they also negated Jacobin terror by publicly destroying the guillotine. The communards did not see the guillotine as a tool of revolutionary justice but for what it really was: an instrument of terror and state oppression.

Benjamin made clear why the Commune was key to this investigation of nineteenth-century Paris: it was a collective awakening from the nightmare of the dream-world. The people of Paris reduced the bourgeois phantasmagoria to rubble. Lefebvre and The Situationist International went further: what made the Paris Commune an extraordinary historical event is that it created a radically new, previously-unseen type of urban space: an egalitarian, participatory, and resonant “carnival of the oppressed.” Class and gender hierarchies collapsed, women asserted a powerful leadership role in the organization of space, and the very idea of “public space” was dissolved because the streets were democratized and turned festive. All observers noted the festive resonance that dominated Paris during the Commune. “Our laughter comes easily. We feel quite at home in our childish and dangerous world of make-believe” (Edwards, p. 14). The effervescence did not subdue even when, by early May, people knew that the Commune was besieged, doomed, and about to be crushed by the federal army. Villiers de I’Isle-Adam published the following lines in one of the papers of the Commune, Le Tribune du People, right before the slaughter was unleashed on Paris: “Would you believe it? Paris is fighting and singing! Paris is about to be attacked by a ruthless and furious army and she laughs!” Villiers concluded, “Laughter alone, the eternal prerogative of man, survives, splendid, invincible, in a world in ruins” (Edwards, p. 141-142). This is a Nietzschean laughter: celebrating the joyful and “invincible” power of life even amid the negativity of widespread destruction.

On May 21, troops began to enter the western areas of Paris. Many communards put up a fierce resistance. But many others preferred to engage in acts of self-immolation rather than killing or surrendering. There were many cases of national guards killed when they were trying to speak to soldiers and convince them to join them. Women took a leading role in performing self-less assertions of control over their life. Many federal soldiers were shocked in facing the same sight in many parts of the city: women who calmly climbed to the top of the barricades to make themselves killed. Marx wrote, “The Paris people die enthusiastically for the Commune in numbers unequal in any other battle known to history. … The women of Paris joyfully give up their lives at the barricades and on the place of execution” (p. 76). Self-destruction, Deleuze wrote in his book on Nietzsche, is the most affirmative form of negation: the moment when the negative illuminates and “shoots out like lightning.”

Amid the generalized wave of massacres known as “the bloody week,” the flames engulfed Paris for several days. The federal troops led by Thiers executed close to 30,000 men, women, and children. Dozens of thousands were sent to prisoner camps and 7,000 were deported to the Pacific. Marx noted that in order to find a massacre of similar proportions in a large European city one needs to go back to the times of the Second Triumvirates in the Roman Empire. The main difference, he said, is that the massacres in Paris, unlike those in Rome, were done “in the name of civilization” (1998:75). The Argentine ruling classes were greatly inspired by the civilizing violence that the French elites unleashed on those feral savages. Their goal would soon afterwards be to turn Buenos Aires into “the Paris of South America,” looking up to the city built upon the rubble of the Commune. In those days, President Sarmiento was dealing with the feral creatures of the deserts of the Gran Chaco and Patagonia with equal savagery.

The smoldering ruins of Paris in late May 1871 marked, first, the destruction of a revolutionary city that for over two months had created a qualitatively novel type of place. This destruction added to the destructive production of a bourgeois city begun two decades earlier by Haussmann’s boulevards. Benjamin aptly wrote, “The burning of Paris is the worthy conclusion to Haussmann’s work of destruction”. The rubble and mass graves of the Commune were thereby the ruins that the French and global elites celebrated. Marx noted that Bismarck, who defeated the French army in 1870 only to collaborate with it to crush the Commune, “gloats over the ruins of Paris” (p. 79). Shortly before the Commune was obliterated, The New York Herald pleaded, “Make Paris a heap of ruins if necessary, let its streets be made to run rivers of blood, let all within it perish…” (Gluckstein 2011:158). Thiers complied and said after the slaughter, “The ground is strewn with their corpses. May this terrible sight serve as a lesson.” 

Yet the ruins of Paris were also the ruins of two cities folded into one and thereby also the rubble of bourgeois Paris. The elite that disregarded the blood-drenched rubble of the Commune was thereby horrified by the destruction of the positive architecture of its city, the capital of the nineteenth century. Marx was quick to point out this hypocrisy, and emphasized that the bourgeois veneration of the integrity of objects is directly proportional to the bourgeois contempt for life: “The bourgeoisie of the whole world, which looks complacently upon the wholesale massacre after the battle, it convulsed by horror at the desecration of brick and mortar!” (1988:77). Notably, Marx identified the profoundly affective and bodily nature of the bourgeois reaction at the sight of its own ruins, which triggered a horror that made elite bodies “convulse” at their fear of the void.

The prompt reconstruction of the bourgeois city and its boulevards was thereby founded upon the erasure of the fact that Paris was once reduced to rubble amid a powerful anti-capitalist revolution that was brutally destroyed. This elite fear of ruins demanded making the mass graves invisible. It also required treating the Commune, as Trouillot said of the Haitian Revolution, as a “non-event”: as something that never took place. Some of the largest mass graves are currently underneath splendid areas of Paris like Notre Dame or the Luxembourg Gardens; others are at the cemeteries of Montparnasse and Père Lachaise, where the last 147 communards were executed against a wall. This wall holds a plaque “To the Dead of the Commune, May 21-28, 1871.” On the last Saturday of May, every year the plaque becomes a bright object that attracts a multitude of several thousands who come to pay tribute to the human debris of the Commune buried underneath. The foot of the plaque is showered with flowers and messages of thankfulness to those executed in the streets of Paris.

In May 2012, I talked in Paris with activists from The Association of Friends of the Paris Commune. Their actions and voice resonated with my experience at the foot of the Argentine Andes. They highlighted, first, that the Commune was not dead but alive. And not unlike the Wichí leaders of Santa Rosa in the heart of the Argentine Chaco, they were trying to mark the ghostly presence of invisible mass graves in space, attracted by a material brightness of vast fields of bones that official narratives had turned dim and dark. For now, activists in Paris are placing plaques to bring the negativity hidden in the petrified architecture back to life. The plaque they placed behind the Hôtel de Ville, steps away from Notre Dame, now informs the largely indifferent passerby that underneath those placid sidewalks the materiality of the city is made up of mass graves that contain between 2,000 and 3,000 bodies. Back in May 1871, those bodies had helped turn Paris into a city that resonated to an assertive, life-affirming disregard for rubble.

Los árboles de La Argentina Blanca

En la década kirchnerista se ha consumado la mayor devastación de árboles de la historia argentina. Sólo en el año 2012, más de cuarenta millones de árboles han sido destrozados por topadoras y sus restos quemados para crear campos de soja con el apoyo entusiasta del gobierno nacional y los sectores más conservadores de la oposición anti-K. Esta hecatombe se suma a los restos de cientos de millones de árboles carbonizados en años previos. En el Chaco salteño, en el norte de Santiago del Estero y en las tierras bajas de Jujuy he visto cómo opera la destrucción del espacio de los agronegocios: mandando topadoras y matones con la actitud que Hollywood presenta como ficción en la película Avatar, donde topadoras seguidas de hombres armados destruyen árboles gigantescos y remueven a sus habitantes originarios a la fuerza por ser obstáculos para el maximización del lucro.

A pesar de ser la responsable política de no poner coto a la inmolación de millones de árboles, Cristina Kirchner declamó hace poco, con tono épico, que “no vamos a tirar un sólo árbol”. Y agregó: “Los árboles no se tocan, son sagrados”. Los árboles sólo podrán ser cortados “sobre mi cadáver”, remató, en la afirmación más surrealista que haya hecho en todo su mandato. Después de todo, Cristina ha sido todo este tiempo la conductora de una topadora gigantesca que arrasa con multitudes de árboles tan vastas que su inmolación deja columnas de fuego y humo que se pierden en el horizonte. También fue surrealista pero también emotivo el ensayo cargado de afecto por los árboles que Ricardo Foster, talentoso filósofo oficialista y miembro activo de Carta Abierta, escribió en estos días en Página/12. Allí Foster proclamó su "amor" incondicional por los árboles por su "bondad y lealtad" así como su "odio" hacia quienes los destruyen. Foster agregó: "Siento en ellos cómo brota lo esencial, lo que perdura, aquello que sortea la frivolidad de los portadores de falsa eternidad". 

La repentina pasión y amor por los árboles de Cristina y su vocero filosófico, claro está, fue generada por una coyuntura política particular: las protestas que generó en Buenos Aires la tala de algo más de cien árboles en la ciudad por parte de líder máximo del anti-kirchnerismo nacional, Mauricio Macri. Pero lo que define a estas intervenciones fuertemente emocionales en contra de la destrucción de los árboles no es tanto su obvio oportunismo sino la forma en que su notable selectividad por defender ciertos árboles, y no otros, expresa una geografía afectiva particular, definitoria de lo que propongo llamar La Argentina Blanca. Esta es una categoría compleja, evasiva, que es importante analizar justamente porque la blanquitud y sobre todo su naturalización en percepciones afectivas del espacio es uno de los grandes temas hechos invisibles y tabú en las narrativas dominantes de la Argentina. El viejo argumento, que ya no convence a nadie, de que “acá no hay problemas de racismo” es el mejor ejemplo de que La Argentina Blanca tiende a tener una actitud negadora de su propia existencia y de su racismo constituyente. Pero valga aclarar que no concibo a La Argentina Blanca como un objeto acotado reducible a la gente argentina que es “blanca” o descendiente de europeos. De la misma manera que hay argentinos rubios y de ojos celestes como Osvaldo Bayer que siempre han luchado contra La Argentina Blanca, hay argentinos con sangre indígena como el ex-gobernador de Salta Juan Carlos Romero que siempre han sido sus grandes defensores. La Argentina Blanca es un proyecto político-espacial y una postura espacial y afectiva que han sido definitorios de la historia nacional: el intento de hacer del país un lugar blanco y libre de indios-mestizos-negros, o por lo menos un lugar donde no se note demasiado que la mayoría de la nación es morocha. Este es un proyecto utópico y acosado por el vértigo (y sobre todo el asco) que le genera la imposibilidad de su realización ante la realidad de las multitudes con rasgos indígenas (“esos negros de mierda”), pero que ha definido a las elites nacionales desde las masacres de gauchos lideradas por Sarmiento en Cuyo y las masacres de indios lideradas por Roca y Victorica en Pampa-Patagonia y el Gran Chaco hace ya más de un siglo.

 La gran paradoja es que el kirchnerismo, montado del contra-poder popular constituido en las calles por la insurrección de 2001, ha sido el primer proyecto político desde Perón que le disputa poder, de igual a igual, al ala más reaccionaria y racista de La Argentina Blanca. De allí el profundo odio que el núcleo duro de La Argentina Blanca expresa por el “populismo zurdo” de La Yegua y por esos "negros de mierda" que la votan "por un plan y zapatillas". Ese es, sin duda, el gran mérito histórico del kirchnerismo: haber desafiado a los viejos dueños de la Argentina, que crearon su riqueza sobre el saqueo capitalista del "desierto". Pero la voluntad de Cristina de desafiar tiene claros límites. Aliándose con lo peor de los feudalismos provinciales, el kirchnerismo ha apretado el acelerador de la maquinaria destructiva con la que La Argentina Blanca, la misma que lideró las protestas de "el campo”, está arrasando con espacios mestizos-criollos-indígenas en zonas rurales. El que Cristina y Foster digan sentirse afectados y emocionados por la destrucción de árboles como si millones de árboles nunca hubieran sido destruidos por el modelo sojero que ambos promueven confirma algo importante, y que el ala izquierda del kirchnerismo (o lo que queda de ella) sólo puede seguir tolerando a su propio riesgo. Lo que el silenciamiento de la incineración de los árboles del norte hace transparente es cómo el gobierno ha abrazado como propio, con su retórica progre y sus planes sociales financiados con el saqueo rural, el proyecto espacial y afectivo de La Argentina Blanca: el hecho que no los afecte la devastación de millones y millones de árboles igualmente vivos y e igualmente nobles en nombre del progreso (siempre el progreso), pues esos árboles son sentidos como que no cuentan por ser parte de una geografía lejana al ideal europeo de La Agentina Blanca. Esas zonas pobres de árboles sin valor que alimentan, como hace un siglo, formas aceleradas de despojo.

Pero es necesario hurgar más detenidamente en los parámetros raciales y espaciales que se esconden detrás de los recientes llamados a inculcar un afecto con los árboles como seres nobles que son parte viva de nuestra tierra. Foster aclara de entrada que su “elogio y defensa de los árboles” está geográficamente delimitado. Su ensayo es un homenaje a “los árboles de Buenos Aires”: esto es, los árboles de La Argentina Blanca. Esta localización hace invisible esos otros árboles: los sacrificados en el altar del modelo extractivo kircherista. Macri, desde ya, cultiva exactamente la misma geografía afectiva y con la misma selectividad. El líder del PRO, puesto contra las cuerdas por meter motosierras en plena Avenida 9 de Julio, replicó que el gobierno nacional había destruido más árboles que él. Los árboles se volvieron, de repente, armas políticas incluso para un miembro de la elite de La Argentina Blanca. Siendo justamente la Gran Esperanza Blanca de la vieja guardia de La Argentina Blanca, claro está que Macri no se refería a esos millones de árboles devastados en tierras mestizas cuya destrucción él también apoya con entusiasmo (después de todo, el delfín del PRO en Salta es el “Rey de la Soja” Alfredo Olmedo, destructor de cientos de miles de hectáreas de árboles y feroz expropiador de tierras criollas e indígenas). Al igual que los árboles de Foster y Cristina, los ejemplares vegetales cuya destrucción Macri denunció están en la gran urbe de La Argentina Blanca: los que, según él, tiró abajo el gobierno nacional para hacer la exposición de Tecnópolis. Abanderada de una nueva causa, Cristina respondió con un gran despliegue, mostrando fotos satelitales del predio de Tecnópolis antes y después de la feria que “demostraban” que tal destrucción de árboles no había existido. Estos cruces verbales en defensa de los árboles están marcados por una misma mirada que está sesgada en su espacialidad. Esto nos muestra que Macri, Cristina y Foster comparten, a pesar de sus peleas, el mismo paradigma espacial y afectivo de una nación que está tan racializada que ni los árboles escapan a la obsesión no del todo conciente de hacer invisibles a los espacios indios-mestizos, como espacios que cuentan menos que aquellos celebrados por La Argentina Blanca. Dime qué tipos de árboles te preocupan y cuáles ignoras, y dónde está cada uno, y te diré quién eres.

Cristina agregó un detalle no menor sobre cuáles son las geografías del país donde los árboles sí tienen valor. Cuando dijo que los árboles son “sagrados”, aclaró “por lo menos aquí en El Calafate”. La Patagonia ha sido un espacio neurálgico en el proyecto de blanquear y por ende de-indianizar el espacio de la nación. Las elites nacionales siempre han hecho grandes esfuerzos por europeizar la Patagonia y hacerla parecer física y arquitectónicamente a los Alpes suizos o alemanes, como lo demuestra cualquier visita al centro de Bariloche, donde la estatua de Roca está rodeada de una arquitectura que remite a los Alpes. Y ello ha significado presentar a la numerosa población mapuche originaria de la Patagonia como “extranjeros chilenos”, como lo hace regularmente en La Nación Rolando Hanglin, uno de los voceros más desinhibidos del racismo de La Argentina Blanca. La inclusión de Cristina de los árboles patagónicos dentro de aquellos a los que sólo se podría talar “sobre mi cadáver” confirma cuál es, y dónde está, el tipo de árboles que ella nunca destruirá.   

Los centenares de millones de árboles igualmente argentinos que han sido hechos pedazos y siguen siendo devorados por la voracidad despiadada de “boom sojero” no cuentan para Cristina o Macri como realmente existentes porque no están en Buenos Aires o en la Patagonia sino en los espacios más mestizos e indígenas del territorio argentino: Santiago del Estero, Salta, Chaco, Formosa. Estos son reductos de las poblaciones rurales que descienden de aquellas personas que ocupaban el país antes de que llegaran los barcos huyendo de la miseria de Europa, y que ahora están siendo sometidas a un acelerado proceso de saqueo y expropiación. En la escala de valores de La Argentina Blanca, en estos lugares de calor, polvo y pieles oscuras el valor degradado de sus árboles es equivalente al valor degradado de sus gentes . Esos son árboles y personas que, como diría Jacques Ranciere, no cuentan: un conglomerado de maderas de algarrobos, quebrachos, palos borrachos y de carne de seres humanos wichí, criollos, tobas que conviven bajo una misma geografía desgarrada. Este amalgama humano-vegetal siempre ha sido mirado con desprecio y de reojo desde Buenos Aires, Rosario o El Calafate como esa zona exótica, extraña, distante, no-blanca de la Argentina.

Mientras en los centros de poder se cantan loas contra la destrucción de los árboles de La Argentina Blanca, todos los días miles de árboles en Santiago del Estero o Salta caen bajo las topadoras de quienes promulgan, como diría Foster, "la frivolidad de los portadores de falsa eternidad". Si estos árboles de piel oscura que son despojados de valor, nobleza y bondad sobrevivirán en el futuro, en espacios cada vez más reducidos, no será por la sensibilidad de las elites urbanas sino porque la gente que vive a su alrededor le pone el cuerpo, desde hace años y con crecientes formas de organización y solidaridad, a las topadoras y a los matones armados que los acechan. Y ellos saben mejor que nadie de qué lado está Cristina: defendiendo en público a los gobernadores de las provincias donde campesinos e indígenas son asesinados cada vez con mayor frecuencia, como si estuviéramos en esa Argentina despiadada de hace un siglo donde (como escribió Sarmiento) la sangre de gauchos e indios era barata y desechable: la época dorada del “granero del mundo” a la que La Argentina Blanca, esta vez de la mano de la soja, siempre sueña con volver.

World Revolution Z

The trailer of the Hollywood blockbuster World War Z forthcoming this summer is characterized by the dramatic appearance of huge masses of zombies that take over public space at staggering speed. Amid the rapid collapse of state power, the leaderless zombie multitude forces the global elites to retreat behind high walls or to flee on helicopters onto ships out in the ocean. In the final scenes, Israeli soldiers shoot at massive avalanches of bodies that charge against them as if forming a flood of indistinct physical forms. The zombie multitude becomes particularly ominous in the trailer’s closing images, when it forms a protuberance that steadily climbs up the Wall of Separation protecting Fortress Israel. Yet what makes the trailer particularly eerie, and revealing, was the timing of its online release. At the exact time the gripping images of Israeli troops murdering crowds of zombies was going viral on YouTube in mid-November, the Israeli military was murdering and mutilating men, women, and children in Gaza and treating them, as in World War Z, as if they were part of a not-fully-human, dangerous horde that ought to be crushed at all costs.

 “Everything in World War Z is based in reality,” said Max Brooks, the author of the book the movie is based on. “Well, except the zombies. But seriously, everything else in the book is either taken from reality or 100% real.” Maybe we should take Brook’s insistence about the reality of the zombie multitude seriously, and thereby examine in more depth what’s behind the growing obsession with a zombie apocalypse in popular culture. And this may require exploring this genre’s popularity as expression of anxieties about a world revolution. Am I reading too much into yet another zombie movie? Perhaps. Yet the fact that insurrections are mystified as the result of a “contagion” triggered by a “virus” that abruptly turns humans into uncontrollable crowds of zombies should not totally surprise us. This is how elites have always regarded insurrections: as pathological events inexplicably created by irrational hordes blinded by primitive, unsophisticated, impulsive desires. This is how Gustave Le Bon, the father of the “sociology of crowds,” responded to the uprising of the people of Paris in 1871: by claiming that radicalized multitudes are nothing but zombie-like, scary “hordes.”

Scholarly analyses of zombies tend to focus on the historical origins of this figure in Haiti, where the zombie as the living dead symbolized the body of the slave. As David Graeber reminds us, slaves are usually treated throughout history as humans that are already dead: as bare life that could be killed without breaking the law. In popular culture, zombies indeed often represent a state of un-freedom. But isn’t the zombie, in an ironic twist, also a body that cannot be affected and is, therefore, utterly indifferent to power, ranks, and hierarchies and unbearably ungovernable and free? Isn’t this affective dimension key to any political reading of the current popularity of zombies? The author of World War Z emphasized that what terrifies him the most about zombies is, indeed, that they don’t obey rules and cannot be “shocked and awed.” “They scare me more than any other fictional creature out there because they break all the rules,” Brooks said in an interview. And he argued that this disobedience makes of zombies irrational beings comparable to terrorists. “The lack of rational thought has always scared me when it came to zombies, the idea that there is no middle ground, no room for negotiation. That has always terrified me. Of course that applies to terrorists. … Any kind of mindless extremism scares me, and we’re living in some pretty extreme times.” Brooks, on his own admission, is very scared of the world in which we live. He wrote his first book, The Zombie Survival Guide, as a call to arms to get ready for the coming planetary insurrection. His first lesson is, “Organize before they rise!” And “they,” lest we forget, are actually us: ordinary human beings that abruptly become something else: something profoundly menacing.  

Zombies are menacing not only because they cannot be affected but also because they are not totally devoid of affects; after all, zombies are not dead but undead. Their lifeless bodies move, moan, and are guided by one raw appetite: the desire to eat living flesh, which magnetically attracts them to living bodies. In Brooks’ book, this desire makes zombies aggregate to form truly gigantic multitudes: “mega swarms” that roam the continents and are visible from outer space: “Truly massive, miles across, like the American buffalo must have once been.” These zombie multitudes are what Deleuze and Guattari would call uncoded desiring machines: lines of flow guided by desire, even if this is desire of a rudimentary nature. In Spinoza, Deleuze argued that a tick is guided by three basic affects: it is attracted to light, it is sensitive to the smell of mammals, and digs into the animal’s skin. The zombies’ rudimentary affects are very similar. Yet this affective condition makes them immune to the state and thereby has profound political implications. In the eyes of the state, zombies form insurgent multitudes because their undomesticated desires threaten the very fabric of state power.

            While heir to a long legacy of movies about zombie epidemics, the film World War Z is already being hailed as “The Mother of all Zombie Movies,” and rightly so. The film stands out, first, because of its planetary reach, which makes previous films about zombie outbreaks look purely local or regional (England in 28 Days or Atlanta and rural Georgia in The Walking Dead). But what is most distinctive about the zombie multitudes in the film is their staggering speed. This speed, in fact, sets the movie apart from the book, which follows the genre convention of presenting clumsy, slow-moving zombies, the walking dead. To the dismay of some of the book’s fans, on the film’s trailer the zombie multitudes charge at an overwhelming velocity, forming massive avalanches in which the zombies’ individual bodies create an undifferentiated torrent, an unformed thing-in-motion that overruns everything on its path. This vortex makes the allegory of revolution more haunting than it is in the book. Paul Virilio has long insisted that revolutions are processes of acceleration whose speed is qualitatively different from that of capital. “Revolution is speed, but speed is not revolution” (Speed and Politics). We got a taste of that insurgent speed in the staggeringly fast-paced wave of insurrections that shook North Africa and the Middle East in 2011, which in a matter of weeks engulfed multiple countries thousands of kilometers apart from each other. Some of the long-shot images of urban unrest on the trailer of World War Z, indeed, look like images of the Arab Spring.

Zombie epidemics and revolutionary situations share a similar spatiality: a territorial disintegration through which multitudes that do not take orders from the state dissolve state-controlled spaces. In World War Z and also on the hugely popular TV show The Walking Dead, the zombie multitudes create, through this territorial dissolution, an overwhelming spatial void that is first generated in urban centers and subsequently expands outwardly. As Lefebvre insisted, in an increasingly urbanized world the most radical insurrections are (and will be) urban phenomena. This is why the panoptic surveillance of urban space is a key priority of the imperial security apparatus, as Stephen Graham demonstrates in Cities under Siege. In The Walking Dead, the urban nature of the zombie insurrection is particularly apparent in the opening episodes, when the zombie takeover of the city of Atlanta forces survivors to flee to rural areas. In one scene, attack helicopters bombard the city with napalm, the epitome of counter-insurgency weapons. In subsequent episodes, the spatial voiding created by the collapse of the state acquires a particularly haunting presence. For months on end, the small band of survivors lives on the run, in hiding, always on the edge and with their weapons at the ready, suffocated by the spatial emptiness that surrounds them ---a voiding not unlike the one experienced by imperial troops in terrains controlled by local insurgencies, be that of the jungles of South America in the 1600s or the mountains of Afghanistan today.

In both The Walking Dead and World War Z, a key strategy to cope with this territorial disintegration is the production of walled, fortified spatial enclaves. Yet whereas in The Walking Dead these walled enclaves are created locally by scattered survivors who have no idea what is going on elsewhere, in World War Z they are largely the product of a globally-coordinated policy of counter-insurgency. Nothing makes Brooks’ conservative anxieties more transparent than the fact his book presents South Africa and Israel as the world leaders in containing the zombie insurrection because of their Apartheid-style policies. In South Africa, Brooks writes, the author of the successful plan to contain the zombies through fortified spatial enclosures was a former official of the Apartheid regime who originally devised this plan to combat a human insurrection. “It was a doomsday scenario for the country’s white minority, the plan to deal with the all-out uprising of its indigenous African population.” In short, in World War Z a human rebellion against an oppressive regime is practically indistinguishable from a zombie outbreak, thereby confirming that the zombie is the figure through which Brooks affectively reads the bodies of rebellious humans. In an effort to whitewash Israeli Apartheid, Brooks presents Israel as a humanitarian nation that opens up its hyper-militarized borders to all uninfected Palestinians fleeing the zombies. And the book and the movie rebrand The Wall of Separation as the object that protects generic humans from the spatially expansive zombie apocalypse. The recent bombing of Gaza by the Israeli military disrupts this fantasy of humanitarian colonialism to remind us that the current Israeli state would never act so kindly toward Palestinians, for The Wall was built to contain not zombies but millions of Palestinian men and women who have for decades lived under foreign military occupation. The images on the film's trailer of Israeli soldiers machine-gunning crowds of zombies that seek to breach The Wall are therefore, indeed, "100% real." 

The genre of a zombie pandemic is quite distinct within the larger genre of end-of-the-world scenarios that currently fascinates popular culture. This is the only apocalypse created not by natural cataclysms but, rather, by human bodies that abruptly stop obeying the state. Zombies are human bodies that have been freed from hierarchies, conventions, consumerism, and indoctrination by the media; and this un-coding creates a collective, leaderless, expansive occupation of space that makes the state crumble. The zombies' unique power to destroy the state is, in this regard, based on a distinct bodily affect: the power to be free from fear. Brooks was asked why he thinks we are witnessing a growing fascination with zombies, and he candidly replied that they represent anxieties about a world in turmoil and about “chaos in the streets.” The fascination with zombies, in short, is the fascination with fearless multitudes. The phrase “we are no longer afraid” was one of the most recurring sentiments uttered during the 2011 insurrections of North Africa and the Middle East. Those were, indeed, multitudes that could no longer be “shocked and awed” by the state. That is the affect that terrifies Brooks and that made him fantasize about a global campaign of indiscriminate state violence against rebellious crowds.

But the fear of the coming zombie insurrection may also be a tangential, not-fully-articulated recognition of the zombie-like conditions that capitalism has long cultivated at a planetary scale. After all, the global grinding machine depends on turning billions of people into passive, depoliticized bodies guided (like ticks and zombies) by just a few rudimentary affects: working, consuming, and obeying. Maybe what makes World War Z truly terrifying is the hidden recognition that the insurgent multitudes presented as lifeless hordes have woken up from their zombie nightmare to become unbearably alive and human.