McMilitarism to Go

What mutations in the circulatory logic of capital and spectacle have occurred since September 11th? In their 2005 book Afflicted Powers: Capital in a New Age of War, Bay Area collective Retort argue that neoliberalism has moved from an era of austerity programmes and agreements to one of all out war – over air, land, and media. Here Anustup Basu reviews their book and traces the demise of a Kantian modernity based on ‘enfranchisement and eternal peace’ and the rise of one based on ‘weak citizenship and perpetual conflict’

Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War is a timely polemic/intellectual tract authored by a collective that calls itself Retort. The project seeks to, and largely succeeds in disturbing certain ossified habits of thought, proposing such a disturbance as a necessary measure for anyone who wants to seriously think about the perils of our occasion. The book begins with a kinetic description of the unprecedented protest marches that animated the streets of the world, from San Francisco to Tokyo. For Retort, the event was not just a novel phenomenon of a war being opposed vociferously even before it had begun, but also a coming into being of a picture of monstrous energy. While within the immediacy of its contextual parameters this expressive power is that of a profound negation, it is also a manifest will of that which comes before the contractual, rights or representation-based formats of normalised polity. The artifices of the latter usually govern, regulate, and productively deploy these affective forces without, at any stage, being able to exercise a total control over them. This is precisely why modernity, or whatever we make of it, never ceases to relentlessly stage its devoutly desired endgames: spectres of the past and the future always come back to haunt certitudes of the present, history does not release its dead weight, the ‘repressed’ never stops returning. The task of thinking, of abstracting concepts from matter and movement carries on because even in this age of celebratory neo-liberalism, the dancer still cannot, with brutal and precise assurance, be separated from the dance. For the authors of Retort, the initial theoretical overture is thus to collide the event against our received ideas. That is, to insert it into two major diagrams of ideas, but not as a smug gesture directed to tame its insurrectionary powers. It is thus on one hand the singular coming into being of a ‘multitude’ of the new Spinozism of our times (4), perhaps most popularly promulgated by Hardt and Negri’s Empire. At the same time, it is reckoned as a ‘world historical event’ (3) by charting it in troubled Hegelian waters. This double gesture however does not end up forwarding us a positive meaning of the event, but in fact attempts to release its inscrutable energies. It is an invitation to take thinking ‘elsewhere.’

One has to thus begin with a series of questions. How can the multitude that filled the television screens of the world in the early spring of 2003 ‘be more than just another image-movement in a world of images’? How can a ‘world historical event’ be called as such when despite its awe inspiring powers of negation, in the so called autumn of history itself, it is no longer accompanied by the vision of a constitutive telos as communism was for Lukacs? What is the status of an event when it can no longer be mapped into an August metanarrative? Or is the event an event precisely because no such task is possible? As it was in the case of the anti-globalisation rioters in Seattle, who were impelled by different ideologies, forms of life, values, and religious tenacities, where communists fought shoulder to shoulder with the members of the ‘Anarchic Soccer League’; is it possible for one to harness and focalise such disparate energies and call an entirely alternate world into being? Is it desirable that the multitude should have its new age Lenin or intellectual vanguard? If the rampant war machine of the Bush administration has been answered by a thunderous clamour of being across the world, must the pluralities of the latter, while being heartening to a certain extent, be necessarily telescoped in time to a resuscitated project of constitutive modernity? What needs to happen in order to ensure that the uproar that has defied the unilateralism of an imperial behemoth is itself not informatised – engulfed into the circulating currents in a sea of images that in fact relentlessly restores the dead calm of things?

These are only some of the urgent queries that Afflicted Powers brings to the table. Chapter one begins with three very pertinent ones: in what way did the events of September 11, 2001, usher in a new era, in terms of the fundamentals of calculus and operations in advanced capitalist societies? Must the subsequent activation of the imperial behemoth be considered a historical regression, by which micropunctual measures of social control, characteristic of a ‘truly modern state system’, are abandoned in favour of a ‘new/old era of gunboats and book-burning?’ (18). Do the concepts of the ‘society of the spectacle’ and ‘colonisation of everyday life’ help us understand the present situation? These questions are not answered in isolation, but located at that very zone in which the differences between the state and civil society, between industrial and military establishments, between the camera and the bomb disappear. Just as the modern state has come to need weak citizenship, the society of the spectacle is possible only when the ‘public’, as an ideal, reason exercising Kantian entity, is missing. It is precisely because of this that the grotesque telegenic power of 9/11 should not be understood purely in terms of symbolic or representational logic. It is always already a ‘well executed…specific and effective piece of statecraft.’ The image is matter in movement, not a reflection of it; it does not telecast war; it is a part of it. The heartlessness of the suicide bombers lay precisely in the fact that they were not trying to rupture the logic of spectacle and capital but violently embracing it, founding their act as a cataclysmic turn in an immanent global field where politics has given way to alternate, fearfully symmetrical movements between pictures of terror and pictures of security.

Chapter two deals with the status of oil in the present dispensation of the world order. Retort reminds us that a proper consideration of oil as a commodity, as Marx taught us, would entail an analysis of the matter itself as well as the ‘metaphysical subtleties’ and ‘theological niceties’ that invest it. It is not just the combustible and pragmatic industry of oil, but also an occult love for it that drives our world. Hence the question: to what extent can the present wars in the Middle East be understood as a necessary end of the day search for black gold – something that the high western powers simply cannot do without? In a theoretically balanced and historically nuanced argument, the authors suggest that the vituperative religiosity of oil acolytes like Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld notwithstanding, and despite the dominance of petroleum products and corporations in modern life-worlds and markets, a proper study of oil is possible only by a return to its commodity character – an analysis of its material career, as well as the materiality of its mystic aspect. The authors set themselves the task of proving that the ‘spectre of scarcity’ is more the result of managerial rarefactions, pricing, military and market speculations than concrete shortages. Similarly, the casting of oil as the very soul and necessary lifeblood of modern life and production is shown to be more of a spectacular theologism than an unavoidable technological reality. Consequently, both the cynical post-Hobbesian scenarios of the ‘last drop’ and the last man, and the pious liberal melancholia over the ‘stuff’ that has to ‘unfortunately’ happen for oil (the military coups, the weapons market, the tin pot dictatorships, the client regimes, export of ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’, and creation of illiberal and failed states) spectacularly obfuscate what Retort calls the primary indicators of our times. First, the diagram of oil and its planetary machinations must not be seen in splendid isolation, but as part of the overall abstract diagram of global capitalism itself. ‘So it is about Chevron and Texaco, but also about Bechtel, Kellogg, Brown and Root, Chase Manhattan, Enron, Global Crossing, BCCI, and DynCorp…..the intersection of work, energy, and war’ (71). Secondly, and more importantly, what the signifier Oil ultimately stands for in our occasion is a stage in which ‘neoliberalism [is] mutating from an epoch of ‘agreements’ and austerity programs to one of outright war; the plural and unstable relations among specific forms of capital, [are] always under the banner of some apparently dominant mass commodity; and [presently what we are witnessing are] those periodic waves of capitalist restructuring we call primitive accumulation’ (52).

Chapter three, on ‘Permanent War’ and chapter four, on ‘The Future of an Illusion’ qua the creation and high maintenance of the state of Israel, are elaborations on the themes of a ghostly afterimage of a Kantian modernity that is predicated neither on enfranchisement nor eternal peace, but on weak citizenship and perpetual conflict. The post Cold War global age of information seems to be a differential flow of affective images. The scenario is more of a diffuse ecology of visibilities and passions, in which the carnivalesque elations of miracle economies are interspersed with abject formalisms of laws and rights, or the paranoia of state of siege societies. But between the grand images of piety – that of Israel being a site of a permanent struggle of Biblical proportions, and the millennial picture of ‘making the desert bloom’ – lies the inhuman imperative of financialising the globe. Indeed, the American state’s obsession with Israel can often not be explained in terms of military or financial strategy (or with crude theories of a Zionist take over of the corridors of power in Washington). It pertains more to the materiality of the images themselves. The small state of Israel serves as an enthralling metaphor for the imperial behemoth of the West precisely because within its body politic it has two disparate ideas yoked together with violence – it is ‘an exemplar of a society in which total militarisation and spectacular modernity were fully compatible’ (110). It is also that which encapsulates within its profile the dual onto-theologies of being – the final, millennial achievement of McJerusalem. The shining Oasis awaiting to engulf the desert and make it bloom is thus an image that illuminates its obverse – the wilderness that lies beyond. The latter is a site for the exertion of the surplus energy produced relentlessly by the American military-industrial complex. This is precisely why under the auspices of what Retort calls ‘military neo-liberalism,’ distinctions are always blurred between information and surveillance, between civic enterprises and military ones, between freedom and empire, between war and peace, between extending markets, and dropping bombs. The principal aspect of ‘primitive accumulation’ pertains to the fact that, unlike the assiduous dreams of humanism, casting state-of-the-art tentacles of profit extraction in such a wilderness may not be accompanied by the ‘organic’ creation of a modern pedagogy, civil society, democratic institutions, or public spheres. If they are instituted at all, they are so in states of gross and abject formalisation (much like the elections in Iraq) that add up to client regimes or constable states. Meanwhile, as Retort points out, the governing logic of military neo-liberalism and primitive accumulation seems to be that circulation of capital is to remain uninterrupted at all costs; when the arms of Lockheed corporation are temporarily withdrawn, Haliburton enters to build on the rubble; when that task is accomplished, Chase Manhattan is expected to step in for investment purposes; if that fails, it is back to Lockheed once again. Military neo-liberalism is thus a grotesque and spectacular aspect of an overall capitalisation of planetary social life in and of itself.

The fifth chapter, ‘Revolutionary Islam’ is an interesting historical analysis of the rise of what is called ‘political Islam’. This probably is one of the more illuminating sections of the entire book. Beginning with the western misconception of Islam as a homogeneous, totalising impulse that seeks to percolate all political and cultural avenues of life, Retort seeks to re-affirm Islam as a plural, multifarious firmament of belief. In doing so, the authors attempt to provide a historical relief of Islam’s complicated encounters with what can be called modern institutions of the civil society and the state. Ironically, the story of how the many armed traditions of reasoning and interpretation (ijtihad) can be telescoped into a singular edifice of Islamic dogma or ‘tradition’ is searched out in this terrain. Retort takes the official left to task for being largely silent or tepid on a crucial question of our times – what must critics of a rampant, unilateralist military neo-liberalism do about the ‘Muslim question’ itself? Must it be passed over with a silence bordering on embarrassment and complicity? Beginning with the observation that historically ‘Islam never bonded with the state like Christianity’, the authors try to pose the question in a historical field of problems and considerations of power. The story of a pluralistic discursive terrain and its engagements with modern state structures thereby emerges as actually a remarkably familiar one in which the multiple impulses of the former are violently translated into a singular monotheism of the latter. Statist Islamism is thus much like many secret theologies of the modern Christological state and its imperatives of being. It seeks to either recode the diverse discursive energies of a historical situation into its ardent psychobiography; in affixing itself to cardinal questions of statehood and sovereignty, it attempts to emerge as a total resonating chamber (for that is how Deleuze would have described the state) where the language of a singular being is rendered global. It is precisely because of this that strange affinities and mirrorings can be noted in dogmatic articulations of a pan Islamic ‘self’ and its war with western liberalism. Hence, in Retort’s elaboration, the project of Sayyid Qutb, the ‘Lenin’ of revolutionary Islam and his Islamic vanguard (haraka), has striking genealogical similarities with the very metanarratives of liberation that it contends with. The crisis precipitated by the rise of political Islam thus points to an evacuation of the core of idealist modernity itself, and the global imperial career of capital. The task of thinking in our times has to engage with that fact; conscientious liberalism and an increasingly atrophied and conservative left cannot piously distance themselves from it.

Afflicted Powers: Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War, Retort(Iain Boal, T. J. Clark, Joseph Matthews & Michael Watts), Verso, 2005