Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction

This is a general overview of my forthcoming book Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction. Last week I submitted the manuscript to Duke UP for the second round of reviews. If all goes well, the book should be out in 2014. In the next few weeks, I'll be posting brief, more theoretical excerpts from the book. Since the main argument goes beyond the places I explored in my fieldwork, it's fitting to illustrate this post with images from other ruptured spaces... 

Mankind is merely the experimental material, the tremendous surplus of failures: a field of ruins.

Fredric Nietzsche, Will to Power 

Only in traces and ruins… is there ever hope of coming across genuine and just reality.

        Theodor Adorno, The Actuality of Philosophy

The foothills of the Andes in northern Argentina were for centuries the theater of a violent confrontation between the state and the indigenous insurgencies that controlled the Gran Chaco, the tropical lowlands stretching toward the east. In 2003-2007, roughly a century after the state had finally prevailed, I conducted fourteen months of fieldwork in different areas of the former frontier; I wanted to analyze the myriad ruins that this conflict left in space and how the people living around them related to this spatial sedimentation of older histories. These older ruins confronted me, in turn, with debris created by more recent processes of state and capitalist decline and expansion, including the ruination generated by agribusinesses at the time of my fieldwork. In this book, I examine how my experience in this fraught geography unsettled not only my assumptions about “ruins” but also my understandings about space, its production, and particularly its destruction and generative afterlife. Those palimpsests of ruins revealed the extent to which the destruction of space had become sedimented in the texture of contemporary geographies and in local forms of collective life. And those ruins also brought to light the power of those places to affect the living in the present as well as the legacies of violence that the state and the Catholic Church seek to relegate to oblivion.

What, exactly, is a ruin? Can the material, historical, and affective ruptures congealed in the countless ruins strewn all over the world help us look at space differently? In this book, I argue that answering these questions requires, first, undoing the fetishism that dominates mainstream and elite views of ruins, which celebrate historic ruins as objects whose form should be revered while, at the same time, erasing the experience of the people living around them as well as much vaster and ongoing spatial destruction created by capitalist and state forces. The book analyzes how people at the foot of the Andes view ruins through what was to me an illuminating lens that, as Adorno and Benjamin would put it, revealed the historical constellations congealed in those objects and the tense processes that created them.

This book argues that the afterlife of ruins can only be understood through an affective view of space sensitive to the power of certain objects to affect living social actors, both through their presence in the materiality of the terrain and through the absences and generative ruptures they evoke. On the western edge of the Chaco, the constellations of debris I analyze have different levels of visibility and affective force. Some are famous throughout the region while others are only known locally; some generate apprehension, while others are disregarded. Yet most of these sites are haunted by past presence of the indigenous insurgencies that over several centuries were powerful enough to turn four Spanish cities and multiple missions and forts into ruins. And these ruins are also haunted by the violence unleashed by the state, which was so widespread that today this is the only region in the western edge of the Argentinean Chaco without a rural population that identifies as indigenous. This is why the state and the Church have sought to erase the memory of that violence through the topographic and affective modulation of what some of these ruins are supposed to mean, often involving massive religious processions and ceremonies. Yet the book also shows that the meaning of a peculiar type of ruin, human bones assembled in mass graves, is harder to control by the state because its material form exudes the violence that created it.

In short, this book seeks to critically examine one of the major tropes of modernity, “the ruin,” in order to reflect on a number of interrelated themes: the destruction of space, the sedimentation of processes of violence in the material and affective texture of contemporary geographies, and the ways in which ordinary people and institutional actors are attracted to and haunted by the presence of ruins. More broadly, the book is a call to look at space through a lens that is more attentive to the material and affective immanence of the ruptures that define it, seeking to translate into spatial terms Nietzsche’s observation that humanity is “merely the experimental material, the tremendous surplus of failures: a field of ruins.

Table Of Contents

Constellations                                                  

Part I: Ghosts of Indians

1. Old Walls in Gaucho Spaces

2. On the Edge of the Void

Part II: Lost Cities

    The Destruction of Space

3. Land of Curses and Miracles

4. The Ruins of Ruins

Part III: Residues of a Dream World

    Treks Across Fields of Ruins 

5. Ships Stranded in the Forest

6. Bringing a Destroyed Place Back to Life

7. Railroads to Nowhere

Part IV: The Debris of Violence

    Bright Objects

8. Topographies of Oblivion

9. Piles of Bones

10. The Return of the Indians

We Aren’t Afraid of Ruins                                                                                   

  

Overview of Chapters

This book is an ethnography that regularly delves into history in order to illustrate the processes through which particular places were destroyed to become ruins. Yet my analysis also draws on the historical and cultural specificity of these places to analyze conceptual themes about space, destruction, form, materiality, affect, negativity, haunting, violence, fetishism, memory, the void, and oblivion.

The book is divided up in ten chapters assembled in four parts, and preceded by an introduction (Constellations) that presents the main places and ruins to be analyzed in the book as they are entangled in “constellations” of objects (drawing from Benjamin’s and Adorno’s use of this concept) that reveal the processes that created them.

Three of the book’s four parts are preceded by brief intermezzos that examine conceptual problems central to my analysis and to anthropology, human geography, and critical theory: the destruction of space as central to understanding the production of space (The Destruction of Space), a re-reading of the dialectic through the ruin and what I propose to call an object-oriented negativity (Treks Across Fields of Ruins), and a discussion of the ways in which philosophies of negativity (such as Adorno’s, Benjamin’s, and Žižek’s) can learn from philosophies of affirmation (such as Spinoza’s and Deleuze’s), and vice versa, in order to examine processes of becoming through rupture, in particular to understand the affective force of the material and bodily debris created by violence (Bright Objects). While conceptual, these are explorations that do not see theory as a transcendental abstraction and, on the contrary, draw from anthropology’s strength: its everyday immersion in actual places and its engagement with ordinary men and women in their historical and cultural circumstances.

Part I, “Ghost of Indians,” begins by presenting the main actors I examine in the book, the criollos of the southeast of the province of Salta, people of mestizo (racially mixed) background who work mostly as gauchos (cowboys) on cattle ranches in the Andean foothills at the western edge of the Chaco. In particular, I analyze how these men and women engage with the ruins that dot the region through a sensibility shaped by their gaucho habits and their participation in local expressions of popular Catholicism. And I show how many of the ruins in the region are for them haunted by the absence of the Indians those ruins were built to contain, and who also happen to be the ancestors of criollos (chapter one). I subsequently examine the historical emergence of the Chaco as an insurgent space that destroyed several Spanish cities and voided state territoriality over several centuries (chapter two). This section tells the history of the military conquest of the Chaco through an analysis of the recurring anxieties, among Spanish and subsequently Argentinean officials, about the vanishing of imperial ruins. The ghosts of Indians currently haunting the region, I argue, are the phantom evocations of the anti-imperial forces that once had the power not only to destroy state spaces but also make their ruins invisible.

In Part II, “Lost Cities,” I examine the contemporary afterlife of the ruins of two major imperial nodes of labor exploitation eroded and destroyed by those insurgencies, the two cities of Esteco. I focus, in particular, on the ruins of the second city of Esteco north of Metán, whose collapse in 1692 was so traumatic that it generated a legend that is to this day famous in northern Argentina and whose ruins have long been considered cursed. This is a curse that prompts massive ceremonies of conjuring annually organized by the Church in surrounding towns. Yet I also draw a counterpoint between these ruins and those of the first, and largely forgotten, city of Esteco a hundred kilometers to the east in the Chaco, which reveals some of the cultural legacies of the spatial ruptures generated by conquest (chapter three). The ruins of the cursed Esteco at the foot of the Andes are also notable because they made apparent, at a collective level, the ways in which criollo views of ruins challenge the elite fetishization of their form (chapter four).

Part III, “Residues of a Dream World,” examines some of the ruins of the project of progress imposed on the Chaco once this region was conquered by the state. These are the ruins of the promises of prosperity that the national elites claimed would pour into the Chaco after indigenous resistance was defeated. Drawing on Benjamin’s view of progress as a bourgeois dream world that mystifies the “wreckage upon wreckage” it leaves on its wake, these three chapters show that the dream elements of progress in this region coalesce in the physical residues of its recurring failures, often the product of new waves of progress equally presented as dreamlike —like the agribusinesses currently destroying forests and gaucho spaces. The first chapter of part III narrates my journey to the heart of the Chaco to examine the ghostly detritus of the steamships that failed to conquer the Bermejo River in the 1860s and 1870s (chapter five). I subsequently analyze the ruins of the first town that blossomed on the western Chaco frontier after Argentina’s independence and that annually attracts multitudes in pilgrimage that briefly bring it back to life (chapter six). The last chapter of Part III examines the now derelict railroads that, only a few decades ago, seemed to have brought to southeast Salta the prosperity of industrial modernity (chapter seven).

 In Part IV, “The Debris of Violence,” I examine the material detritus left behind in space by the centuries of violence required to submit the Chaco to state control. These are traces that because of their potential political repercussions have tended to generate myriad attempts by the state and the Catholic Church to modulate their meaning and significance, especially to conjure away the memory of state violence and the power of indigenous insurgencies (chapter eight). But the constellations formed by the debris of violence in rural areas, I show next, also elude affective capture by the state, particularly because the very form of the human bones and mass graves that dot the region have long made criollos and indigenous people aware of the extent of state terror (chapter nine). The last chapter focuses on another, qualitatively different debris of violence: first, the urban neighborhoods created by people of Wichí background who, in different waves throughout the 1900s, arrived in southeast Salta fleeing violence and destruction elsewhere and, second, the ways in which criollos seek to come to terms with and pay homage to, through repetitive performances, the fact that they descend from Indians.

As way of conclusion (We Aren’t Afraid of Ruins), I draw from some of the main analytic and ethnographic threads woven through the book to highlight why, as Adorno once wrote inspired by Benjamin, conceiving of a more just society requires confronting the ruins that surround us, and also the myriad places that are daily destroyed anew. 

Terrain as Medium of Violence

First, apologies for the long silence here at Space and Politics. I've been fully devoted to finishing a book manuscript that is now almost ready (Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction, forthcoming with Duke University Press). In the next few weeks, I'll begin posting on the blog brief theoretical sections from the book, hoping to get feedback from the blogosphere about my explorations of the concept of "the destruction of space." Meanwhile, I posted below a longer version of the paper abstract I wrote for Philippe Le Billon's and Simon Springer's panel on "Violence and Space" for the Association of American Geographers meetings in LA (April 2013). This paper (Terrain as Medium of Violence: The Politics of Verticality and the Voiding of Imperial Space) seeks to further analyze some of my preliminary ideas about "the terrain" first explored here and here, now in relation to violence, verticality, vision, and opacity. 

Mastery of the terrain is a decisive factor in warfare. Military strategists have long been acutely aware of this basic principle in the spatiality of violence. Yet critical theorists of space have, paradoxically, paid scant analytical attention to the constitutive relation between violence and the concept of “the terrain”: the three dimensional forms that make up the immanent materiality of space as we know it (buildings, rivers, walls, mountains, forests, oceans, the sky) and that shape mobility, visibility, and therefore the form and intensity in which violence is and can be deployed. 

Eyal Weizman’s work on the control and transformation of the material forms of the terrain of Palestine by the Israeli military has opened a new horizon to investigate violence through the terrain. Rather than treating space as the fixed matrix on which violence is localized, Weizman shows that space is the most fundamental medium of violence. He painstakingly analyzes how the Israeli military controls millions of Palestinians through a huge, three-dimensional constellation of physical infrastructure and technology. This architectural arsenal includes the massive wall that seals off Israel as a besieged fortress as well as myriad networks of checkpoints, roads, settlements, observation posts, hilltops, tunnels, sewage systems, and bridges. And he highlights that violence is structured by what he calls the “politics of verticality”: the control of “the view from above” from hilltops and through unmanned drones permanently scanning the terrain below them. 

Paradoxically, Weizman writes about “the terrain” constantly in his work but does not analyze it as a conceptual category. In this paper, I draw from Weizman and also from Paul Virilio’s work on violence and vision and Derek Gregory’s research on aerial bombing and drones to examine a key principle of a theory of the terrain: the decisive importance of verticality in the deployment of state violence as a three-dimensional vector. The history of aerial bombing and the recent rise in the use of drones reveal that the control of the skies and the atmosphere —and the speed and global reach their spatial smoothness allows for— has become fundamental to imperial power. 

Yet the politics of verticality pose spatial paradoxes that can only be appreciated through the actual, tangible material-political terrains in which it operates. Contra the image of absolute deterritorialization it tends to evoke, the verticality created by drones is always-already subsumed to a spatial principle as old as warfare: that the ultimate aim of controlling a higher ground through towers, mountaintops, or the sky is to create a view from above to visualize, localize, and inflict violence upon targets located primarily on the ground. In short, drones patrol the skies not to control high altitudes per se but in order to control an opaque terrain below that limits the state field of vision. And despite their capacity for unleashing massive levels of destruction, drones reveal something else about the terrains of Afghanistan, Pakistan, or Yemen endlessly scanned by their cameras: that imperial ground forces do not control those spaces. This political voiding of imperial space by local insurgencies is made possible by another ancient principle of guerrilla warfare: the fact that the mastery of heavily striated terrain (mountains, forests, urban spaces) by flexible and mobile forces allows them to avoid visual capture by the state and, in the long run, wear down and defeat more powerful militaries. The verticality generated by drones, in short, reveals not only the vast spatial reach of imperial violence but also the profound spatial limits and opacities it encounters amid the political and material striations of the global terrain.

YPF y los golpes de timón kirchneristas

¿Qué clase de fenómeno político es el kirchnerismo? Mario Wainfeld lo suele analizar como un movimiento que avanza a los tumbos, improvisando, adaptándose de manera ecléctica a nuevos contextos pero manteniendo el control de la escena, siempre con el olfato y la mirada alerta para dar estocadas profundas en el momento preciso, que a menudo marcan nuevos rumbos. En palabras de Wainfeld, lo que ha definido la historia del kirchnerismo son “sus golpes de timón”: su creación abrupta e inesperada de trayectorias nuevas, que descolocan a adversarios y simpatizantes. Esta ha sido en buena medida la clave de su éxito político así como de sus profundas contradicciones.

La nacionalización de YPF es el último golpe de timón, pero que me interesa analizar no en sí mismo sino en contraste con golpes de timón previos. En su conjunto, estos abruptos cambios de rumbo revelan profundas tensiones irresueltas en el zigzageante devenir kirchnerista, que oscila entre polos que reproducen y erosionan viejas formas de dominación.

El más dramático golpe de timón fue la respuesta en 2009 a las derrotas frente “al campo” y en las elecciones parlamentarias, cuando, en vez de moderarse frente a una derecha fortalecida, el kirchnerismo giró a la izquierda y confrontó a poderes establecidos en varios frentes. Fue una apuesta riesgosa, pero cuyo efecto democratizador y expansivo de derechos colectivos fue claramente positivo: el matrimonio igualitario, la ley de medios, la nacionalización de las AFJP y la asignación universal por hijo, acoplados con una estrategia de alianzas con los gobiernos progresistas de América Latina. Lo definitorio de ese golpe de timón, y su fuerza, es que se apoyó en movilizaciones populares originalmente externas al PJ y al Estado. Del mismo modo que los derechos humanos y la heterodoxia frente al FMI se transformaron en banderas propias desde 2003, el kirchnerismo se abrió más hacia demandas de horizontalidad democrática que anteriormente le eran ajenas. En sólo dos años, esta fuga hacia adelante logró lo imposible: revertir una situación de debilidad política y hacer añicos a una oposición que, a pesar de contar con poderosas usinas mediáticas, fue desbordada en agilidad, oportunismo y astucia. Y en 2010 el kirchnerismo perdió a su máximo estratega pero ganó una poderosa arma afectiva: la memoria de Néstor Kirchner. Si el kirchnerismo como fuerza progresista tuvo su época dorada, donde “el relato” no fue una mera representación discursiva sino una realidad política, fue en su exitosa contra-ofensiva de 2009-2011.

La demoledora re-elección de Cristina en octubre de 2011 abría la posibilidad de que, ante una correlación de fuerzas más favorable, el gobierno empezara a revisar algunas de sus viejas y pesadas cuentas pendientes, entre ellas la devastación sojera-minera sobre la que se sustenta “el modelo”, las alianzas con capitalistas amigos en el manejo de los trenes e YPF, o las alianzas con gobernadores impresentables como Insfrán en Formosa o Soria en Río Negro. Tímidamente, los intelectuales de Carta Abierta apuntaron a esta deuda pendiente luego de las elecciones en aras, señalaron, de hacer del kirchnerismo un proyecto de mayor “igualdad”.

El nuevo gobierno de Cristina, sin embargo, dio un golpe de timón en la dirección opuesta, que se alejó de la horizontalidad de la calle y consolidó la verticalidad de la forma política Partido-Líder. El tono cambió notablemente, siguiendo de hecho una tendencia que se ha dado en países aliados como Bolivia o Ecuador, donde se incrementó la conflictividad entre el Estado y movilizaciones sociales. Gobiernos que fueron producto de las grandes insurrecciones populares contra el neoliberalismo que se dieron en América del Sur entre 2000 y 2003 empezaron a mostrarse cada vez más hostiles frente a las protestas que demandaban la aceleración de la promesa de mayor igualdad.

En la Argentina, esta nueva actitud hizo que muchos de quienes habíamos apoyado el anterior golpe de timón entráramos en un período de creciente zozobra. Uno tras otro, los anuncios del gobierno eran en su gran mayoría decepcionantes; en algunos casos fueron traiciones, como la sanción de La Ley Antiterrorista dictada desde Washington y el G-20, que marcó para muchos un punto de inflexión. El mismo gobierno que en años previos se había apoyado en formas de militancia democratizante ahora adoptaba marcos legales de corte imperial que podían ser usados contra esa misma militancia, usando el lenguaje del “terrorismo” en un país donde este término es sólo usado por los nostálgicos de la dictadura. La ruptura con el sindicalismo organizado y el fin de los subsidios a servicios públicos en nombre de “la sintonía fina” era otro síntoma claro de la introducción de políticas de ajuste light, disfrazadas con eufemismos del marketing neoliberal.

La expresión más clara de este nuevo golpe de timón fue la aceleración, ahora celebrada públicamente, de la expoliación minera-sojera en los Andes y en el norte. Ello marcó un quiebre en la anterior confluencia entre el kirchnerismo y las protestas de corte popular y anti-neoliberal creadas en espacios públicos, y que marcaron buena parte del pulso de la historia temprana del kirchnerismo. Hasta ese momento, Néstor o Cristina nunca habían atacado públicamente dichas protestas. La estrategia oficial había sido en años anteriores el silencio, como frente a la violencia en zonas rurales de Formosa o Santiago del Estero amparada por gobernadores amigos. A partir de febrero de 2012, la hostilidad se hizo oficial y Cristina descalificó en público a las protestas contra empresas mineras multinacionales y las trivializó como un “ambientalismo” preocupado “por la flora y la fauna”, como si no se trataran de luchas por derechos políticos y sociales. A ello se le sumó el ataque de Cristina a las protestas de los maestros, descalificados con argumentos propios del arsenal más rancio de la derecha que el kirchnerismo dice combatir (como vagos que trabajan "cuatro horas" y tienen largas vacaciones).

Este giro alejado de la calle y articulado en alianzas con sectores concentrados de poder hizo sin duda eclosión con la masacre en la estación de Once, cuando la política oficial de capitalismo de amigos subvencionado por el Estado colapsó de la manera más dramática y generó intensos debates y cuestionamientos al interior de simpatizantes progresistas del gobierno, cada vez más perplejos con el nuevo rumbo, lo que se reflejó fuertemente en muchos blogs. Poco después, se aceleraría la crisis con YPF-Repsol ante el fracaso de la política oficial de convocar a “la burguesía nacional” para generar una nueva política de hidrocarburos. Pero fue justamente este fracaso y tal vez el reconocimiento de que el gobierno necesitaba recuperar su vieja mística el que, en estos días, llevó a un nuevo golpe de timón.

La nacionalización de YPF marca un nuevo punto de inflexión en la contradictoria y zigzageante historia del kirchnerismo. Si bien retoma el lenguaje nacionalista desempolvado con el tema Malvinas, la expropiación marca una confrontación de otro tipo, para nada "simbólica": en el frente externo, una confrontación directa con la mayor multinacional española y con España y la Unión Europea. En el frente interno, implica desarmar uno de los núcleos neoliberales que persistían en la Argentina y uno de los mayores legados del menemismo, como lo fue la privatización de un recurso estratégico como los hidrocarburos. En el ámbito de los afectos políticos, la nacionalización ha repentinamente despertado fervor en el ala progresista kirchnerista, desinflado por el giro de los meses previos. En los medios privados y la derecha macrista, se ha despertado el viejo cuco del kirchnerismo como un castrismo-chavismo rioplatense que de repente desafía nuevamente a sectores concentrados de poder. Que Cristina confronte a un gobierno español claramente reaccionario e implacable en su compromiso con una agenda neoliberal no deja de favorecer este nuevo posicionamiento que vuelve a alimentar, al menos en estos días, la mística del kirchnerismo como proyecto anti-neoliberal.

Pero la metáfora del timón, claro está, tiene sus límites. Un gobierno no es un barco, un objeto que se mueve en una misma dirección, sino un entramado de prácticas y políticas diversas y contradictorias que se mueven y avanzan a distintas velocidades y pulsos. La nacionalización de YPF, que celebro, coexiste con las políticas de los meses previos y no necesariamente se contradice con ellas. Y es muy temprano como para saber cómo estas políticas se entrelazarán en el mediano plazo. Los que apoyamos la reconstitución de una YPF con dominio estatal y cuestionamos, al mismo tiempo, el entusiasmo oficial por el avance sojero-minero lo hacemos porque el adversario es en ambos casos el mismo: multinacionales con una dinámica de acumulación capitalista hostil al interés público. El nuevo golpe de timón cambia una vez más la escena política y reabre, abruptamente, espacios sobre los que es posible profundizar la expansión de lo público por sobre intereses corporativos. Pero ello no debe oscurecer las señales de alerta que, al mismo tiempo, contradicen la idea de un proyecto de igualdad. El kirchnerismo es la consolidación política, a largo plazo y con un devenir contradictorio, de las energías colectivas creadas en la insurrección de diciembre de 2001. Su éxito dependerá de la consistencia con la cual se posicione, en la práctica, frente a ese legado.

The Human Chain as a Non-Violent Weapon

One of the main weapons of non-violent uprisings are human chains. The latter's power is, as with all chains, its continuous physical form: a line of protesters interlocking arms and blocking the mobility of state agents. This is the breathing, striving material form of a collective body unified in its aim to wrest space from the control of the state. Paul Virilio wrote that “a place changes in quality according to the facility with which it can be crossed” (Bunker Archaeology, p.19). Human chains qualitatively transform and politicize space because they make it hard for state agents to move, cross that space, and control it. This striation explicitly made against the state may in most cases be purely local and temporary; but it can disrupt the fake smoothness of corporate space deeply enough to expand, as it happened at Davis, the spatial reach of insurrections.

The pepper-spraying of protesters sitting on the ground with their interlocked arms at the UC Davis campus made apparent the physical and affective power of this bodily weapon. This is a form in which bodies are no longer dispersed but become interconnected nodes within a physically continuous assemblage. Only a few days earlier, the police had tried to violently disarticulate the solidity of exactly the same type of assemblage at UC Berkeley, recurrently hitting it with batons. In both Davis and Berkeley, individual bodies on the chain were hurt and the chain was briefly shaken. But the spatial striation was not broken. Furthermore, the affective shock generated by the images of violence on bodies that were in no position to cause harm provided the insurrection with a formidable media weapon.

The images of the UC Davis police officer calmly pepper-spraying human bodies as if they were insects went viral because the most defining feature of the human chain is that it is defensive in nature (see this great piece by Rei Terada). By interlocking and immobilizing the main parts of the human body that can be used to cause physical harm, arms and hands, this is an assemblage that because of its form cannot be a source of violence. And human chains that sit on the ground make this defensiveness even more apparent, for even the legs of protesters are purposely immobilized.

Few images affect more than images of violence inflicted on people who are clearly unable and unwilling to inflict harm. And this power is enhanced when those people offer their bodies to be targets of the violence of the state without intention to strike back. The courage and discipline of the bodies making up the chain at UC Davis reveal the determination that guides the occupy movement. But that the pepper-spraying backfired does not mean that the chemical violence against the human chain was random or irrational. The police officer, following orders, attacked the chain because of its power to prevent the state from having full control of the local terrain. Those interlocked bodies partly diminished the state’s capacity to act and move. It is therefore not surprising that the UC Berkeley Chancellor argued, in a brilliant illustration of Orwellian double-speak, that the formation of a human chain at Berkeley was “not non-violent” and, therefore, that it was violent. Officials are often keen to redefine violence not as the production of bodily harm but as the interruption of the mobility of state agents and capital. For the state, anything that disrupts its spatial flow is framed as “violent” and therefore in need of eradication by state violence.

Human chains have a long historical genealogy. In being created by people firmly grabbing each other’s bodies, this form materializes the multitude as a physically interlocked entity made up of multiplicities. This collective chain was made famous in the United States by Martin Luther King claiming space from state repression. Human chains were also central to the 1999 anti-WTO protests in Seattle, where protesters created more solid, hard-to-break assemblages by protecting their inter-locked and chained arms with long tubes. The relative resilience of this form was key in its power to shut down key street intersections and access to the buildings hosting the WTO on the first day of the protests. And some of the images of police officers calmly pepper-spraying human chains sitting on the ground in Seattle anticipate the spatial and bodily composition we now see recreated, twelve years later, at Davis.

The physical fragility of the form of the human chain is certainly that of the human body. Its efficacy is therefore lower in authoritarian political contexts. Under conditions of state terror, the state can easily destroy human chains and turn them into lines of corpses. If the human chain at UC Davis had been formed in Cairo, it is likely that some of those students would be now dead or severely wounded. The over 30 deadly victims of state violence in Egypt in the last few days speak volumes of the uneven terrains in which the global insurrection unfolds. Yet both cases differ in degree, not in substance. The teargas and weapons used to hurt and kill protesters in Egypt are “made in USA.” And in both Egypt and the US the state is determined to suppress dissent by dispersing those collective bodily forms that prevent the state from controlling space. The shock and disbelief that many Americans have expressed at the surge of police violence against the occupy movement (“This can’t happen in America!”) also reveals that they have been affectively secluded from the fact that the US government has always been ready to unleash deadly violence to protect capitalist interests, at home and abroad. It is to be seen, given the growing unrest, whether state violence in the US streets remains non-deadly for too long. The Obama administration, it should not be forgotten, recently declared that it has the right, using its sole discretion, to kill citizens deemed enemies of the state in the name of the state of exception.

The dismantling by the police of the node of resonance in Liberty Park in New York only seems to have accelerated the spread of the rebellion and its adoption of even more rhizomic, mobile, unstable, unpredictable lines of spatial expansion. This expansion is leading to the creation of myriad human chains to protect encampments, to prevent families whose homes are foreclosed by banks from being evicted by the police, and to shut down banks, corporate offices, and university buildings. The occupation of everywhere is no longer just a slogan but an actual physical struggle for the control of myriad nodes of the national and global space. And one of the main weapons the insurrection relies on to challenge the police in public space has been the human chains that striate the smoothness of state space. The other fundamental weapon have been the images of state agents trying to violently disrupt these collective spatial occupations. The police attack on the human chain at UC Davis has triggered a massive call to occupy the whole of the spatial fabric of the University of California system on November 28. And yesterday in New Hampshire, protesters were able to reach the body of the President for the first time: by interrupting his morally empty speech with a "mic check!" and by handing him a note telling him that his silence condones state violence on peaceful protesters. The occupation of spaces on the terrain continues unabated and has even reached the tightly secluded, scripted eyes and ears of the Head of State.

The most important moment of the pepper-spray incident was not the act of chemical violence now immortalized in popular culture; it was the reaction of the multitude that surrounded the human chain and was deeply affected by an attack that they could personally see, hear, smell, and touch (it is worth watching the video of the whole sequence in detail). For several minutes and without interruption, the whole of the space was saturated with screams, cries, and chants of “shame on you! shame on you!” aimed at the cops. The chants gained momentum and made an indignant yet composed multitude slowly move onto the space held by the police. At one point, the cops could not but slowly begin retreating. But they did not retreat orderly, in a straight line and facing ahead, following formal training procedures. They backed away gradually but in relative disarray, looking nervous, intimidated, confused. Many moved their heads left and right, as if waiting for an unexpected attack. A few raised their guns, as if they were fearful soldiers on an imperial patrol chased by savages, moving in a terrain made hostile by a sonic and bodily saturation they did not understand. But the protesters were only armed with myriad filming devices pointed at them, the resonance of their chants, and the physical form of their massive numbers occupying space. After the police had been slowly retreating for several minutes, the chants shifted to "Whose university? Our university!" The final chant was the coup de grace. And it was an order: "You can go! You can go! You can go!" The police officers promptly obeyed the loud command to abandon that space that emanated from the multitude. They turned around and went away, relieved it was over. The students cheered and chanted, "Whose quad? Our quad!" They had secured, with the help of the human chain, the occupation of UC Davis.

The Corpse of The Sovereign

The global circulation of the images of Gaddafi’s corpse and the long lines of people eager to see it in person reveal, rather than a generic fascination with gore, that this cadaver embodied a state that had been destroyed. The power of Gaddafi’s corpse to affect millions reveals that the state itself is a bio-political assemblage. A man who saw the corpse on display articulated how he was affected by it. “Before, when we watched him on TV, he always seemed so strong. Now he looks so weak.” It’s that simple. The sight of the corpse of the sovereign shatters, even if briefly, the idea of the state as an all-powerful, transcendent force; it brings to light the immanence of the state, a human-made and therefore perishable political contingency that in Libya acquired bodily form. Bio-politics is not a regime of power generated by a state immune from it. Bio-politics also involves the breathing tissue that makes up the body of the sovereign. This is why, as Giorgio Agamben reminded us, the public execution of Louis XVI in 1793, and the exhibition of his head, was a turning point in the history of European modernity.

The power of Gaddafi’s body when he was alive was apparent in the political liminality of the two months that followed the fall of Tripoli. His elusive body and the resilience of his last military forces in Sirte were enough to erode the power of the new regime, despite the latter's control of the vast majority of the Libyan territory and despite the military and financial support of its imperial patrons. The collapse of the Gaddafi regime, first announced back in August, only became real when the body of its sovereign suddenly appeared in public as a corpse. The Libyan NTC announced that the appearance of the corpse signaled that the Gaddafi state was at last finished and that celebrations of victory were now in order. The new state, therefore, inadvertently admitted that it had been weakened by the spatial elusiveness of the body of a sovereign.

Spinoza famously argued that all bodies have the capacity to affect and be affected. Yet corpses mark the threshold after which bodies can continue affecting without being affected. And few objects affect the bodies of the living more powerfully than a corpse. This is why the display of images of corpses, as Alan Klima argued in The Funeral Casino, releases affective energies that are often hard to master. And the same way that different bodies have different capacities to affect, some corpses can affect more viscerally than others. Being the embodiment of the state, the corpse of the sovereign generates affective excess that spills over the attempts to control it.


The insurgents who captured and executed Gaddafi sought to channel the affects released by the corpse of the sovereign through the language of revenge. The mood of many Libyans was not only one of exultant celebration at the death of the sovereign but also of indignation at the asymmetry of the affects they had exchanged with him. As a living body, Gaddafi had profoundly affected their lives for over forty years. The way his body had been affected by insurgent violence seemed, in comparison, insignificant. The corpse was turned not just into a trophy on display but also into an object of communication to highlight an unpaid debt. A remarkable number of the people who entered the improvised morgue to see the corpse expressed a strong urge to communicate with it: insulting it, gesturing toward it, talking to it, affected by the presence of a cold mass of dead tissue that could not be affected. This was a communicative practice performed in front of other bodies and cameras but aimed at the petrified carcass of the state. And in attracting so many living bodies eager to communicate with it, this dead organic form revealed its afterlife; it also affirmed the corpse's ongoing power as a fetish.

The debates in the media about the appropriateness and ethics of displaying the image of Gaddafi’s corpse silence that the western media has always been eager to show corpses as long as they are not white. We regularly consume images of lifeless dark bodies from Haiti to Iraq and from Rwanda to Afghanistan, but the taboo to show corpses of “people like us” remains in effect as if it were law. Imperial forces learned their lesson in Vietnam: the image of the corpses of US soldiers on TV affected too many people at home and eroded the support for the war. Even the flag-wrapped coffins that hide those corpses from view were deemed by the Bush administration as having too much affective power, and were banned from being visually represented. The differential affects generated by corpses racialized as different are not unlike the old unwritten rule according to which showing the breasts of indigenous women on National Geographic was not real nudity. Those non-white bodies, after all, affect us differently. Similarly, the western media has socialized its public to be relatively disaffected by the images of non-white corpses. The widespread presence of the corpse of an Arab sovereign on the cover of myriad western media outlets is part of this racialized imperial genealogy.


The affective power of this corpse has elicited the predictable hypocrisy of the imperial powers that regularly send death squads and drones to execute countless people without due process, including their own citizens, yet expressed outrage at the fact that Gaddafi was executed. In Libya, not surprisingly, these hollow calls have been met with scorn. “Did anyone complain when the Americans shot Osama bin Laden in the head?” asked a rebel leader to The Guardian, reminding us that the shot in Gaddafi’s head simply followed the standard operating procedure established by imperial forces.

The insurrections of North Africa have now toppled three different regimes. Yet the spatial trajectories followed by the bodies of the three deposed sovereigns have been markedly different. The first toppled dictator abandoned the national space of Tunisia to avoid popular wrath and lives in exile; the second did not leave Egypt, yet popular pressure has been strong enough to force the military to put him under arrest and begin his prosecution; only in Libya the insurgent forces killed the sovereign on the streets after having captured him bloodied but alive. The execution of the ruler highlighted the insurrection’s power but also, inadvertently, empowered the ruler’s corpse. They did so, first, by fulfilling Gaddafi’s pledge to die in his country. The affective force released by this particular corpse may not be easily dispelled.

Spinoza famously said that we don’t know what the body can or cannot do. This is probably more so with corpses. What makes corpses affectively unpredictable is that their power to affect is liberated from the capacity to be affected. This gives corpses, and especially those that embody the state, a potent political afterlife. Gaddafi’s corpse was buried secretly in the depths of the desert, the same way that the cadaver of Bin Laden was thrown into the depths of the ocean, because their executioners don’t really know (and hence fear) what a corpse can do.

Occupy Wall Street and the State of Exception

On Friday, September 30, 2011 the United States announced it had legally murdered two US citizens without due legal process in Yemen. The following day, the police kettled and arrested 700 anti-corporate protesters who were marching peacefully on the Brooklyn Bridge in New York City. Seemingly unrelated and spatially distant from each other, these events nonetheless reveal that the US citizens taking to the streets to challenge the capitalist looting of the commons are also confronting a state that has just declared that it can assassinate, without recourse to courts, citizens deemed hostile to the state.

The Bush administration's abandonment of due process to torture and assassinate non-citizens, allegedly because of the “exceptional” nature of the war on terror, is well documented. Obama has now extended this principle to US citizens by suspending the Fifth Amendment, the one that says “no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” Further, Obama seems to have ordered to put an end to the torture and rendition of suspects under Bush so that those suspects could be executed. This is an extraordinary turning point, for the murder of citizens without due process of law is now decreed legal. The same way that for George Orwell the clearest examples of authoritarian double-speak under Big Brother were the slogans “war is peace” and “slavery is freedom,” now the motto under the Bush-Obama paradigm is “ignoring your constitutional rights is legal.” As Giorgio Agamben has argued, this state of exception also defined the Nazi state, which in its twelve years of existence was under a constitution suspended by Hitler in the name of defending the German nation. The political regimes of North America and Europe seem to be moving in a similar direction, ruled by constitutions that are recurrently suspended because the state of the exception, as Walter Benjamin once argued, is no longer the exception but the rule.


“Imperial sovereignty means that no point of space or time and no element of the bio-political tissue is safe from intervention” (Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, p. 157). The bio-political tissue of US citizens was never safe from imperial intervention, yet this intervention was at least partly regulated. In the 2007 film The Bourne Ultimatum, a secret CIA program is shut down, and its directors prosecuted, when Jason Bourne revealed that its hit-men had assassinated US citizens without due process. The movie, and its message of accountability for state terror, represents a paradigm of the past. The last obstacle that put limits to the reach of imperial death squads, US citizenship rights, has been declared void. Now the bio-political tissue of every single human being on the planet can be destroyed with impunity through an executive order based on classified evidence.

This de-facto dissolution of the distinction between citizens and non-citizens also means that the very nature of the global geographies under imperial sovereignty is shifting. In extending the reach of the state of exception, imperial formations are also creating globalized political subjects that are equally vulnerable to state terror irrespective of nationality. While imperial violence continues being racialized and directed largely at non-white bodies, we are moving toward a paradigm of sovereignty in which all human bodies on the planet are potential expressions of what Agamben calls “bare life,” bodies that can be killed without breaking the law.


This is a somber reminder that the protesters on Wall Street are challenging not only corporate America but also a state that has fully embraced the regular use of death squads in the name of national security. As we know all too well, in the imperial order of things the difference between non-violent activists and terrorists is often a question of language and labels, as was apparent when Joe Biden argued that Julian Assange is a “high-tech terrorist.” But the official announcement this past Friday that the state of exception has entered a new political phase also confirms what the Occupy Wall Street protesters have been saying all along: that ordinary US citizens have been reduced to a disempowered underclass whose democratic rights are recurrently overrun, and made meaningless, by the hijacking of the political system by corporate power. And that they have been inspired by similar protests in Egypt and Spain reveal that they see themselves as part of a global multitude striving for universal forms of justice. The same way that the state of exception tends to equalize all humans as potential targets irrespective of their citizenship, the protesters on Wall Street are responding in kind and embracing a more universal political subjectivity, embodied in their slogan "We are the 99%."

The Revolution Is Not Being Televised

During the Egyptian insurrection, the Mubarak regime tried to counter the multitudes on Tahrir Square by avoiding mentioning them on the state-run TV. The so-called liberal media in the United States highlighted that this authoritarian media blackout brought to light the freedom of expression we enjoy in “the West.” This is why the US media silencing of over a week of protests on Wall Street reminds us that New York City and Cairo, despite the different scale and tone of the unrest, are not that different from each other after all. Further, the power of the media in the United States to silence political events that may disrupt the status quo is comparatively vaster and probably more widespread and effective. And in the nation that defines itself as the land of the free, media blackouts are created not by the state but by that peculiar branch of corporate America that, with the full support of the state, profits from the creation of what qualifies as news.

For the past eight days, a remarkable grassroots movement against the capitalist looting of the commons inspired by similar protests in Spain, Greece, and Egypt has disrupted Wall Street, the spatial core of the global financial system. A crowd has camped out in public spaces, staging protests, and organizing assemblies to debate the social devastation created by the bankers based in the surrounding buildings. From day one, the blackout of the protests in the US media was eerie. Whereas a handful of wacky Tea Party activists always receives widespread coverage, “occupy Wall Street” was treated by all major corporate media outlets as a non-event (with a few exceptions that highlighted the media blackout, like Keith Olbermann). On Friday, September 23, as the protests entered their first week, The New York Times confirmed where its priorities are in the production of what is (and what is not) newsworthy by running on its front page an article about the worrisome rise in the theft of pigs in rural Illinois.


On Saturday, September 24, The New York Times was finally forced to partly lift its Pravda-esque silence. But this only happened because protesters became dangerously mobile and began marching uptown spreading their noisy anti-capitalist message and were arrested by the dozens for no other reason than protesting. The article trivializes the protest as a quasi-hippie gathering led by “noble” but confused and misinformed youths who “say” that the financial system “favors the rich and powerful over ordinary citizens.” The abrupt and unambiguously hostile coverage reflects the shift from what Michel-Ralph Trouillot called a formula of erasure to a formula of banalization, which are both operations of silencing. The silencing is the mandate by corporate America to treat potentially threatening political movements as non-events.

In other entries, I analyzed how the spatial spread of the insurrections of North Africa and the Middle followed a process of resonance expansion, through which thousands of people coming together on the streets created politically affective messages that resonated with countless other bodies elsewhere, often through alternative media that evaded state censorship. This is why counter-revolutionary efforts in those countries sought to contain the expansion of those insurgent resonances by all possible means, including violence, censorship, and the transformation of the official media into a machinery set out to prevent the spatial expansion of those resonances. In the United States today, more so than in any other country on the planet, the political machineries that work tirelessly to prevent anti-corporate resonances from expanding are owned by the same corporate forces that profit from the devastation that is wreaking North America and Europe. As Michael Parenti forcefully put in the film The Panama Deception, “The media is not associated with or allied with corporate America. The media is corporate America."


As in Egypt or Tunisia, the protests in New York are spreading and growing through alternative media and the internet. But this expansion has so far been largely contained by the media blackout. Maybe it is time for the protesters in NY to follow the lead of protesters elsewhere in the world and challenge the blackout not only by calling and emailing news stations (as many are doing) but also by protesting at the gates of those stations’ buildings. In Egypt, the multitudes in Cairo eroded the censorship of the state-run TV by simply surrounding its main building and demanding to be heard. Hours before Mubarak fell, these multitudes forced those inside the TV station to turn their cameras onto the streets and change the tone of the coverage. The same happened in Caracas, Venezuela, on April 13, 2002, when millions of people took to the streets to oppose the US-sponsored coup against Hugo Chávez. As protests raged all over Venezuela, the private TV stations that were involved in the coup and controlled all airwaves played movies and soap operas. This Orwellian erasure of the insurrection by the corporate media only came to an end when thousands of protestors surrounded the stations demanding that their opposition to the coup be shown on TV. Indeed, The Revolution Will Not be Televised, as Gill Scott-Heron wrote in the 1970s. Except that we should probably change the tense of the verb in this now famous phrase, for this is not a silencing that will happen sometime in a distant and abstract future but is happening right now, in the year of the beginning of the globalized insurrections against the imperial order of things.


The popular insurrections in Cairo and Caracas remind us that the seemingly deterritorialized power of media conglomerates is ultimately grounded in the actual spaces where a select group of individuals manufacture and disseminate “news.” And those events reveal that under conditions of media censorship it is ultimately in those spaces that these actors are politically most vulnerable and, in the US, most sensitive to their public image as sources of news. Any such protest at the gates of The New York Times will no doubt trigger, aside from aggressive tactics by the NYPD, predictable accusations that it involves “fascist thugs” trying to curb the media’s “freedom of expression.” But the past eight days in New York have made apparent that this is just the freedom of corporate America to shut down the growing grassroots opposition to its ongoing looting of public wealth.