Rubble (in 300 Words)

This is the blurb I just sent to Duke University Press for the back cover of Rubble: The Afterlife of Destruction (I posted a longer summary of the book here, but this is a much more succinct version).

At the foot of the Argentine Andes, bulldozers are destroying forests and homes to create soy fields in a geography already strewn with rubble from previous waves of destruction and violence. Based on extensive fieldwork in the region where the Gran Chaco lowlands meet the mountains, this book proposes to examine space through the rubble that is part of its materiality. Rubble seeks to rethink the very idea of “ruins” by asking: Can the spatial, historical, and affective ruptures congealed in the debris scattered all over the world help us look at space differently? The book explores this question by leading the reader on a journey through lost cities from the seventeenth century, derelict train stations, overgrown Jesuit missions and Spanish forts, steamships stranded in forests, mass graves, abandoned towns, razed forests, and bulldozed ruins, as they are entangled with each other and with the towns, cattle ranches, farms, and annual collective events that exist around them. For the rural poor, these palimpsests of debris evoke —rather than dead relics from a distant past— the latent and ongoing presence in the living geographies of the present of the processes of violence that created them. The book shows that this experience is at odds with, and often challenges, the fetishized views of ruins embraced by the regional and scholarly elites. The subaltern experience of the people who live in areas disrupted by agribusiness reveals that the modernist, elite infatuation with ruins is based upon the disregard for the rubble generated by capitalist and imperial forms of destruction. Drawing from anthropology, history, geography, philosophy and the exploration of constellations of debris from multiple eras on the scarred edges of the Gran Chaco, this ethnography brings to light the salience of a spatial, conceptual, and political analysis of rubble. 

The All-Seeing God

The NSA is so enthralled with its technological prowess that it’s seeking to create what in the Judeo-Christian tradition is the exclusive prerogative of God: having total awareness of what happens on every single corner of the planet. The Bush administration made this goal transparent when it named its program of generalized electronic surveillance “Total Information Awareness” and represented it with a God-like Eye submitting the totality of the Earth to its visual capture. The name may have been dropped in 2003, but Obama's imperial presidency has only radicalized this effort to create the all-seeing God described in the Old Testament. “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God’s sight” (Hebrews 4:13). Edward Snowden has shown that the goal of the imperial Eye is, indeed, that nothing is hidden from its sight. NSA officials, in his words, “are convinced that not knowing everything about everyone could lead to some existential crisis.” This zeal “to know everything about everyone” seeks total awareness of spatialized information: that is, of who is doing what where. Total spatial awareness is the primary goal of the Orwellian state, for in 1984 the state apparatus observed the novel’s main character even in those seemingly private places (a corner in his home, the room where he met his lover, a forested area in rural England) that he thought were beyond the reach of cameras, sensors, and microphones.

          While imperial dispositions have long been defined by fantasies of omnipotence, we are witnessing the rise of a historically-novel imperial hubris defined by a techno-theological fetishism. This imperial sense of all-powerfulness is cultivated by the undoubtedly impressive spatial reach of satellite surveillance, online spying, and assassinations by drones or death squads. What Donna Haraway called playing God’s trick, the assumption that it's possible to have a disembodied vision “from anywhere and everywhere equally,” is an imperial disposition guided by the zeal to create a technocratic, heavily militarized, human-made God. As a drone operator cited by Derek Gregory admitted, “Sometimes I felt like a God hurling thunderbolts from afar” (From a View to Kill, p. 192). US troops in Afghanistan, likewise, are often dazzled by the God-like aura of the laser targeting markup used by drones. “When the troops put their night vision goggles they will just see this light that looks like it’s coming from heaven. It’s quite beautiful.” The soldiers call it The Light of God (see the notable short-film Five Thousand Feet is the Best). Not surprisingly, a recent article on Wired calls General Keith Alexander, the chief of the NSA, The God of War.

            The idea of “total information awareness” draws from an old, and earthly, military concept: “situational awareness.” Situational awareness in combat depends on two basic principles: the identification and location of the actors fighting on a battlefield. Situational awareness is awareness of the terrain and of its vectors of mobility: of where the forces identified as “hostiles” and “friendlies” are located and awareness of the three-dimentional forms and volumes (hills, buildings, walls) that shape their mobility and field of vision. The NSA seeks to create situational awareness at a planetary scale. Its complex algorithms have a simple goal: to identify and locate "threats" so that they can be neutralized and eventually destroyed. As Jeremy Scahill shows in his book Dirty Wars, the death squads and drones commanded from the White House are guided by the “find, fix, finish” principle, which Grégoire Chamayou has analyzed as the manhunt doctrine. And finding elusive preys demands, indeed, spatial awareness.

            But total spatial awareness is, needless to say, a utopian and unreachable goal. As I argued in my previous post (Opaque Zones of Empire), the planetary surveillance machine is haunted by what it cannot see, or cannot see clearly, because of the immanent multiplicity, immensity, and non-representational nature of the planetary terrain. But there is something else that the techno-theological ideology of “total spatial awareness” cannot see: politics as the realm of sheer contingency and unpredictable interruptions and ruptures. The militarized fetishization of hyper-visibility is, ironically, blind to politics. Its techno-theological lens assumes that political control is a technocratic maneuver. The planetary panopticon is undeniably very effective in finding and finishing off people labeled “terrorists” all over the world, most of them unarmed men, women, and children (as Scahill shows). But this killing machine only creates the forces it seeks to destroy by generating anti-imperial rage and new waves of blowback. As Nick Turse argues in The Changing Face of Empire, the “special forces” that the media portrays as made up of super-human, unbeatable soldiers are very ineffective at defeating the poorly-armed insurgencies that continue controlling much of Afghanistan, Yemen, or Somalia (see Ian Shaw's reviews of Scahill's and Turse's books here and here on his blog Understanding Empire).

         
         Spinoza famously argued that God is an infinite substance devoid of will that is indifferent to our presence. He argued, in other words, that God is devoid of total spatial awareness. For this reason, he was expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam and condemned by the Vatican. Furthermore, Spinoza argued that the idea of an all-seeing, judgmental God (“hurling thunderbolts from afar” like drone operators) seeks to inculcate obedience. This is clear in the lines of the Old Testament that argue that nothing escapes God’s sight: “Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of Him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13).
            In the early 21^st century, the Eye “to whom we must give account” is not a transcendental, infinite, and disembodied force; it is, rather, an immanent, material, finite network made up of hundreds of thousands of nodes grounded in actual computers run by breathing human beings based, for instance, in hyper-militarized places such as the NSA centers in Maryland or Utah. And the fact that, as Snowden put it, the NSA fears that not knowing “everything about everybody” could lead to an existential crisis tells us that the planetary panopticon embodies, ironically, the affective disposition of a fearful God: fearful of the void that will always-already escape His prying eyes. The most damning “existential crises” that the imperial panopticom has faced were created, ironically, by its incapacity to see and control two seemingly insignificant human appendices to its own surveillance apparatus, Bradley Manning and Edward Snowden. By the mere act of disobeying and revealing from within the secrets and crimes of the imperial machinery, they confirm that God-like pretensions are built upon contingent, earthly, finite, perishable elements. And Manning's and Snowden's all-too human disobedience is a gesture of subtraction and freedom that reminds us of another biblical theme: that the all-seeing God of the Old Testament felt nothing but contempt for those humans who fantasize about playing God on earth.            

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.