Italo Calvino’s 1963 novella La Giornata d’Uno Scrutatore (translated into English as The Watcher) is the story of a low-level volunteer with the Partito Comunista Italiano (or PCI) who grows disenchanted with both his organization and the larger structure of parliamentary democracy as he makes a half-hearted attempt to serve as an elections monitor. Assigned to the infamous “Cottolengo Hospital for Incurables,” a Catholic institute run by nuns for the irredeemably disabled and disfigured, the protagonist Amerigo Ormea is assigned to contest ballots from residents who may lack the capacity to vote for themselves. He is more or less engaged in voter suppression, but not necessarily for unjustifiable reasons: “[E]ver since the vote had become obligatory in the period following the Second World War, hospitals, asylums, and convents had served as great reservoirs of votes for the Christian Democrat part, and at Cottolengo, above all, at each election instances were discovered of idiots being led to vote, or dying old women, or men paralyzed with arteriosclerosis, in any case, people unable to make logical distinctions.” This puts Amerigo in the bad-faith position of suppressing the votes of his society’s most marginalized in the interests of the workers’ party.

With only a small amount of information about the author’s background, it’s hard not to read Calvino himself as the titular watcher who critically examines both the practice of democracy and his own party. Calvino was a member of the PCI for the decade between 1947 and ’57, only to publish his resignation after Stalin’s invasion of of Hungary in 1956. The descent of the international communist movement in the 50′s into Stalinism disillusioned comrades all over the world, but perhaps nowhere more productively than in Italy. Just as Calvino left Turin for the Americas in ’59, Raniero Panzieri was expelled from the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) and moved to Turin, where he would, along with Mario Tronti, develop what would become known as operaismo (workerism), a heterodox current of Marxism that eschews the official labor movement and its parties. I can find no evidence that the novelist ever met or knew anyone within operaismo, so it is not my goal to insert Calvino into the historical narrative of the movement, but The Watcher stands on its own as one of the strongest and most developed operaismo critiques I’ve ever read.

Gail Day describes the basics of operaismo in her new book Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory: “Developed by Panzieri and Mario Tronti, workerist theory argued that the ideas of the established Left—the PCI and the PSI—had stagnated into static, objectivized, and economistic categories, which inflected how the Left operated within the capitalist state (for example, the means of trade union struggle adopted) and determined its idealization of the productivist ideals of Stalinist socialism. In their view, the mainstream Left too readily accepted the framework laid out within capitalism, failing to challenge categories such as work and production; accordingly, they argued, this old Left treated the working class as merely a defensive, ‘reactive’ element within the labor-capital relation. As central players in the New Left’s ‘return to Marx’ and in the recovery of the labor process as a site of theoretical and political activity, the Italian workerists place the working class as the active element.” Ben Trott in his talk at last year’s Historical Materialism conference in New York describes this process in Tronti’s thought as a “Copernican inversion”: it is capital that it dependent on labor, not the other way around. This “primacy of labor” meant that the left was playing into capital’s hands by accepting the forms of organization (trade unions, political parties) (re)produced by the system’s reaction to earlier rounds of revolutionary action.

The Watcher is a story about this inversion and the discovery of the the primacy of labor in the historical moment that would provide the basis for a whole line of workerist and post-workerist thought and terms. Throughout the first section of the story, Amerigo is overcome with a sinking fear about Cottolengo. When a priest working on behalf of the ruling Christian Democrats suggests the residents were voting out of gratitude to God, Amerigo undergoes a full-blown existential crisis:

“‘Gratitude to God.’ Gratitude for their misfortunes? Amerigo tried to calm his nerves by reflecting (theology was not his forte) on Voltaire, Leopardi (his arguments against the goodness of nature and of providence), and then -naturally – on Kierkegaard, Kafka (the acknowledgement of a god beyond man’s ken, a terrible god). The election, here, if you paid it some attention, became a kind of religious rite. For the mass of voters, but also for him: the supervisor’s concern with possible frauds was finally trapped in a metaphysical fraud. Seen from here, from the depth of this condition, politics, progress, history were perhaps not even conceivable (we are in India), any human effort to modify what is given, any attempt to elude the fate that falls to a man at birth, was absurd.”

His party is only the other side of the same coin, an agent of stultification nearly as bad as the church.

“In those years the Italian Communist party, among its many other tasks, had also assumed the position of an ideal liberal party, which had never really existed. And so the bosom of each individual Communist could house two personalities at once: an intransigent revolutionary and an Olympian liberal. The more schematic international Communism became, in those hard times, the more explicit its official, collective expressions became, the more the militant individual lost inner richness, to conform to the compact, cast-iron block, and the more the liberal, housed in the same individual, gained new, iridescent facets.”

Amerigo fears Cottolengo is the whole world, and all people its disfigured helpless inhabitants. The Communist Party – in the shadow of Stalin and the dogma of Diamat – can be nothing other than a second church, invested in the self-effacement of its congregation. As evidenced by the growth of operaismo as well as the PCI’s eventual adoption of Eurocommunism (which drew its reformist spirit from the liberal facets Calvino references), Amerigo’s crisis was somewhat common among (not just) Italian Communists at the time. What has gone merely implied to this point is that Calvino is a fantastic writer, and he doesn’t let the reader underestimate the turmoil he and other former Communists had to confront. Amerigo is shaken to his core opinion of humanity: the seeming inevitability of exploitative and dulling command structures must mean that’s all the race deserves. There may be no one more full of despair than the fallen Communist.

After the morning shift, Amerigo returns home on his break to console himself in a book. Here he preforms the literal “return to Marx” and reads from the 1848 Manuscripts, which Calvino quotes at length:

“Man’s universality appears, practically speaking, in that same universality that makes all nature man’s inorganic body, both because nature is (I) an immediate means of subsistence, and because it is (2) the matter, the object, and the instrument of man’s vital activity. Nature is man’s inorganic body precisely because it is not his human body. To say man lives on nature means that nature is his body, with which he must constantly progress, in order not to die.”

This passage has an immediately transformational effect on its reader:

“Swiftly, he was convinced Marx could mean also this: once outside the society that makes men become things, the totality of things–nature and industry–becomes human, ad even the handicapped man, the Cottolengo man (or, in his worst hypothesis, simply man), is restored to the rights of the human race as he makes use of this total body, this extension of his body: the richness of what exists (also ‘inorganic, spiritual nature,’ he read earlier, perhaps through a residue of Hegelianism, that is to say, reasoned nature, as in science and art), what has become finally a general object of human conscience and human life. Can it also mean that “Communism” (Amerigo tried to make the word sound as if it were being uttered for the first time, so that it would again be possible to think, beneath the noun’s husk of this dream of a death and resurrection of nature, a Utopia’s treasure buried beneath the foundations of “scientific” doctrine), that Communism will restore sound legs to the lame, and eyesight to the blind? Will the lame man then have many, many legs at his disposal to run with, so many that he won’t notice if one of his own is missing? That the blind man will have so many antennae to understand the world that he will forget he has no eyes?”

I quote this section at length, not only for its beauty, but to forestall the complaint that I’m stretching to read Calvino’s story as a piece of Marxist, and indeed, operaismo, theory rather the simply “political literature.” But Amerigo’s return to Marx is not only narratively, but substantially similar to the turn in Tronti and others. By going back to the source (which is, interestingly, in contrast to the religious behavior of prayer that Calvino uses to characterize voting), Amrigo can reimagine what it might mean to be a “Communist” outside the institutions that (re)produce people as helpless and dependent. The lame and blind at Cottolengo always stand for a whole broken humanity, and the resources (material and immaterial, Calvino takes care to mention) that belongs to/is them “outside the society that makes men become things” is a central idea for much of contemporary (post-)operaismo* thought as the “common”. But this is not yet the “Copernican inversion” that makes The Watcher a workerist parable. For the final turn, Amerigo must return to Cottolengo.

He sympathizes with the residents at the end of the first section, recognizing a nobility in the peasant who comes to visit his blind son, and Amerigo even begins to identify with the dwarf who knocks against a glass window at a visiting member of parliament, forcing the representative to recognize the dwarf’s non-voting (and non-representable) existence. But it isn’t until he meets a man without hands who votes by himself with a pencil, and proceeds to draw a cigarette from a pack and light it without assistance, that Amerigo understands the residents of Cottolengo (and by extension, humanity) differently:

“Amerigo though: Man triumphs even over malign biological mutations; and he recognized in the man’s features, in his clothes and manner, the traits that mark working humanity, also deprived–symbolically and literally–of something of its completeness, and yet able to build itself, to affirm the decisive role of homo faber.” (emphasis mine)

Whereas before Amerigo feared that the residents of Cottolengo stood for a whole blighted humanity, he begins here to see them as portraits of potential, of species-being. Homo faber is man the builder, man the creator. Making is not only what people do, but the mas-as-worker in this broader sense is his decisive role. This is what allows Marx to write in the first volume of Capital: “Labor, then, as the creator of use-values, as useful labor, is a condition of human existence which is independent of all forms of society; it is an eternal natural necessity which mediates the metabolism between man and nature, and therefore human life itself.” As “independent of all forms of society,” labor precedes the capital relation, it is the use of one’s organic and inorganic body, the “richness of what exists.” The use of “working humanity**” is an audacious choice by an author so clearly steeped in Marxist philosophy and no doubt exposed to a surfeit of texts in which the set of “workers” has a much more specific referent, one that would relegate the handless man to the lumpen class.

The inversion allows Amerigo to critique the institutions that constrain and distort that primary force of labor and see Communism as more than another church or factory:

“Homo faber‘s city, Amerigo thought, always runs the risk of mistaking its institutions for the secret fire without which cities are not founded and machinery’s wheels aren’t set in motion; and in defending institutions, unawares, you can let the fire die out.”

There’s an antagonism here, between the fire of human creativity the institutions that would put it out while claiming to be its source. Calvino’s warning is about mistaking the ways in which institutions manage (or rather, command) labor for the existential human practice of labor itself. This is the part of Marx that, although it would ultimately be a centerpiece of his thought, Tronti writes of in “Struggle Against Labor,” as “a question which we cannot yet answer.” But Calvino had.

What is most remarkable about The Watcher is not that Calvino developed an understanding of the “Copernican inversion” and the primacy of labor before Tronti did (although, according to my reading, he did***), it is the way he not only prefigures, but integrates, so much of contemporary Italian Marxist theory. The common is there, which has been the focus of much of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri‘s recent writing, as are Paolo Virno’s theories on human nature as defined by man’s incompleteness and potential. We can glimpse Tronti’s critiques of the practice of democracy, and the beginnings of the multitude or organization without institutions. The workers’ “fire” is a component of what Alberto Toscano calls capital’s double bind, that the boss must exploit workers while making use of (and therefore cultivating) the same capacities that workers use to organize and resist****. I believe there’s even more to be gained from The Watcher as a piece of workerist theory; Calvino’s focus on subjects below democracy, like the residents of Cottolengo, could be particularly fruitful*****. Perhaps there’s even a solid critique of Giorgio Agamben’s category of “bare life” — to which the handless man stands as defiant retort.

The task is to read Calvino in the present-tense, to be reminded of the secret fire that builds society at a time when we glimpse it breaking free from its smothering institutions around the globe, to stoke that flame and remain fidelitous to its damaged human hearth. Indeed, to live something called Communism.

“Will the lame man then have many, many legs at his disposal to run with, so many that he won’t notice if one of his own is missing?”

*The odd construction here is important because it indicates the speed at which societies have been changing under late capitalism. The “post-” here doesn’t represent so much a departure in the group putting forth the theory – after all, the best known post-operaismo writer, Antonio Negri, was a leading theorist of the original operaismo group – but a departure in the world to be understood. Writers in this line often focus on post-fordist or affective labor as well as a host of other subjects that didn’t exist in the 60′s and 70′s when it was first developed. Operaismo began as an analysis primarily of the fordist factory, but, along with capital, has moved far beyond it.
**If a comrade has an Italian edition and wants to let me know whether Calvino uses operare or lavorare here, that would be awesome.
***It’s entirely possible that I’m wrong on this, but I don’t think so…
****A point I really wish I had included in my review of Adam Kotsko’s Awardness for The New Inquiry.
*****If anyone is really interested in this. you can read more of my thoughts in the sub-section of my senior thesis “They The People” (p.69-74).

“The multitude can speak hundreds of thousands of languages, but the language that enables it to function as an integrated whole is that of the economic automatisms embodied in technology. Seized in a game of mirrors of indeterminacy and precariousness, the multitude manifests its dark side and follows automatisms that turn its wealth into misery, its power into anguish and its creativity into dependency.”

“The effective exercise of politics (that is to say of political government) presupposes a conscious possibility of elaborating of the information collectively shared by the social organism. But the information circulating within digital society is too much: too fast, too intense, too thick and complex for individuals or groups to elaborate it consciously, critically, reasonably, with the necessary time to make a decision. Therefor the decision is left to automatisms, and the social organism seems to function ever more often according to evolutionary rules of an automatic kind, inscribed in the genetic cognitive patrimony of individuals. The swarm now tends to become the dominant form of human action.”

As the ultimate horror, Berardi looks to a biotechnological post-humanism as described by Bill Gates. The idea of a literal hive-mind, a freely flowing general intellect, is too much for Berardi; he offers the only solution he can think of to this dangerous acceleration of affective communication: slow down. In a more recent article, he calls, in the middle of the largest wave of global youth insurrection in over forty years, for a process of growing old. “[T]he process of senilization may open the way to a cultural revolution based on the force of exhaustion, of facing the inevitable with grace, discovering the sensuous slowness of those who do not expect any more from life than wisdom—the wisdom of those who have seen a great deal without forgetting, who look at each thing as if for the first time.” The assumption underlying this call to inaction is that the system of semiocapital is nearing its inevitable collapse. Berardi sounds like an aged and depressive Saint-Simon when he writes a hopeful narrative in which the machines will make stuff for us which, combined with income delinked from employment, will give us all the necessary time we need to play mahjong and dominoes, which is the goal of life. Actually, to be fair, Berardi never ceases to use sex as the goal, the time necessary to fuck is what we must carve away from capitalist control.

Baudrillard’s critique of Foucault and Deleuze that Berardi revives was prescient in some ways. He saw the appropriation of affirmation by capital coming, and he asks essentially how we can stand to read Deleuze while wearing Nike. “Affirm your desires” is an advertising slogan, and it could handle even the queer negation of Gregg Araki which it transformed into Hot Topic. In the final scene of Araki’s breakout film The Living End, two HIV-positive lovers are entangled half-fighting half-fucking in the desert. While one sucks off a pistol, the other yells at him to “just do it!” –  four years after it became a shoe slogan. Berardi thinks we’ve been overtaken and the only solution is switching into reverse. (Which is going to happen whether we like it or not because semiocapital is collapsing anyway.) Always already co-opted, the multitude has no choice but to break down its constitutive links and start over. The only thing left is catastrophe: made by us, but not done by us.

Okay, my issues:

1. Berardi should be the last one to think a brain of any sort is univocal. He’s horrified by Bill Gates’s idea of business at the speed of thought, but what is the speed of thought really? Brains can be and are used to produce value for the market, but any friend of Felix Guattari should know brains are chaotic. They produce ideas for the boss, but they inevitably produce jokes and nightmares as well. Just because capital has organized a social brain – transcending more spatial and interpersonal barriers than ever before – doesn’t make it the hive’s necessary owner.  The processes that Berardi outlines (“wealth into misery, power into anguish, creativity into dependency”) present the possibility that it could be otherwise, that there could be a reverse movement. What capital offers is this impoverished multitude, but we ought not treat this as an offer to be either accepted or refused.

2. I feel pretty derisive about this fear of speed. Certainly a lot of his critiques about the schizogenic nature of contemporary knowledge-work are valid, but the worry that society is not able to deliberate “reasonably” at these speeds is misplaced. The swarm has been empirically capable of making decisions contrary to its instructions in Egpyt, Tunisia, The UK, Wisconsin, etc., and these actions have been successful to the degree that they’ve been fast and unreasonable. Crisis calls on creativity and innovation, and sabotage requires the multitude to seize the boss’ networks. In Madison, WI, the Capitol occupiers are engaged in the sabotage of the labor of citizenship, which is, as Tahrir Square was/is in Egypt, productive of new relations and subjectivities. Berardi points to the role of prescription drugs in pacifying and anesthetizing young people as intrinsically related to the speed technology requires, but I’m willing to bet there are a bunch of students in Madison who may be on Twitter, but haven’t needed to take their ADD meds.

3. Berardi is old. Besides the “you kids need to slow down” crap, I object to the way he describes sex as something that requires withdrawal from the (sometimes literal) circuits of production. One need not go to Damn You Autocorrect to know sexting provides more potential for the play of libidinal flows than a room with two sets of doors gave Moliere. He assumes post-humanism means the death of sensuality rather than its queering, which doesn’t seem right to me. I think of Jeanette Winterson’s novel The Stone Gods, in which a corporate -state produces a robo-sapien, a concrete post-human. But by programming the robo-sapien with human bioanthropological constants like creativity and a taste for alterity and potentiality, they inadvertently produce a robot who can’t wait to be used as a lesbian sex toy and join a vegan feminist collective.  I sure hope Berardi doesn’t count vibrators as tools of estrangement. Sex (as I endeavor to have it, at very least), is an innovative act because, like Wittgenstein’s example of the required height of a shot in tennis, it is neither against nor within the rules, a practice of normality rather than norms.  David Sedaris writes in his memoir Naked of losing his virginity as a process of production: “‘You kids think you invented sex,’ my mother was fond of saying. But hadn’t we? With no instruction manual or federally enforced training period, didn’t we all come away feeling we’d discovered something unspeakably modern?” If we can reject the shitty scripts we get from men’s and women’s magazines as well as bad porn, sex can be productive as, well, fuck. It’s important not to confuse fooling around with revolutionary praxis -despite what Andreas Baader may have said, fucking is not the same as shooting – but the exploration of unknown and unnamed potentials in the bedroom (or wherever) need not stop there. Sex can potentially serve as a model for innovative action that, unlike Berardi’s automaton-swarms, doesn’t follow instructions. Instead of a retreat from, sex can be an act of sabotage against and appropriation of capital’s machinery of subjective production.

Hell, even riot police can be used as a sex toy.

The Megazord is a microcosmic form of the general will, in which the rangers come together to form a single hand capable of wielding the sword. This movement is analogous to the formation of the civil state (personified as the Megazord avant la lettre leviathan) out of the crisis-state of nature in Hobbes, the abstraction of many into a unity with the collective strength to hold evil at bay.

What, then, to make of Wisconsin?

Faced with the near-certain passage of a bill depriving state workers (with the exception of police officers *cough*) the right to collectively bargain for anything other than pay, rank-and-file members along with supporters have swarmed upon the capitol building in Madison. In the State Senate, where Republicans hold a slimmer majority than in the Assembly, Democratic have fled for a hotel in Illinois, depriving the chamber of quorum.** Texas Democrats used the same tactic a few years ago to fight a partisan redistricting bill, but I think the instance in Madison is more interesting for a number of reasons. What we see in Wisconsin is the tactical suspension of representation in the face of the governor’s declared state of exception. A large number of Democrats in Wisconsin have, in practice, recalled their delegates to the State Senate, appearing in person instead. This is the reverse Megazord: when crisis hits, the abstracted will dissolves into its constituent parts. The representatives flee the state and are replaced by the hordes they represent. An irony of the situation is that the protesters are there en masse to protect their right to be collectively represented.

Demonstrator signs and reports from an organizer friend on the inside indicate Egypt has been on the lips of protesters frequently, and I see some compositional similarities between the invasion and overnight occupation of the Capitol and revolutionary subjects in the Maghreb. The unions no doubt brought their members out, but the organization has ceased to act as a mediating buffer between the workers and their government. Unions and parties performed a similar function in Egypt, as social networks but not as leviathans. Look at the variety of sign messaging in Madison, everything from union pride to critiques of the division of wealth to a plea for hemp legalization; despite the color coordination, Madison isn’t swarmed by the disciplined trade-union militias of yore. The power of the workers collected in their representatives – either union or state – is demonstrably less than the bodily power of the workers and supporters. What the last-ditch demonstrations show is that worker collective bargaining through representatives is no longer strong enough to protect itself. High unemployment and an extended sequence of compromises has left the official labor movement without enough bargaining power to defend its ability to bargain.

Unions developed in response to organization of labor by the industrial factory, an organization that’s gone:

“Classical industrial labor and specifically the organized form of the Fordist factory had no relation with pleasure. It had no relation with communication either: communication was actually thwarted, fragmented and obstructed as long as workers were active in front of the assembly line . . . Therefore industrial workers found a place for socialization in subversive working communities, political organizations or unions where members members organized against capital. Workers’ communism became the main form of good life and of conscious organization for the class that capital forced (and still forces) to live a great part of its existence in inhuman conditions . . . There is no more workers’ communism, since workers no longer belong to a community.” – Franco Berardi, The Soul At Work

The age of cognitive labor is post-Megazord.

A retreat from the square in order to form coalitions and an institutional apparatus for the long haul hasn’t been strategic in Egypt or Madison. Media reports out of Wisconsin have expressed surprise so far that the crowds have kept growing, but that’s what’s supposed to happen in an occupation. Harry Brighouse at Crooked Timber writes about his 14 year old daughter testifying before the assembly at 5:20 a.m. after staying overnight, and makes it sound like a party, a really good party. My organizer friend tweets “Occupation has become the new normal at the #WI Capitol,” where protest has become a carnival. This celebratory element is only one part of why Mehdi Belhaj Kacem called Egypt the “première révolution situationniste de l’Histoire.” The situation in both cases is one of (in the terms of Paolo Virno) “normality without norm.” He writes in Multitude: Between Innovation And Negation: “[T]he state of exception, far from resembling an unformed void, is the occasion in which the essential web of human life earns an unexpected importance. Or better: it is the occasion in which the warp of human life gains unexpected prominence. The suspension of the norm permits the surfacing of normality of practices, customs, relationships, inclinations, conflicts.”

Virno cites the multitude as the force that pushes back against the state of exception; if the juridical apparatus isn’t going to play by its own rules, then neither will the people. The suspension of “regular” law as justified by crisis – as Egypt was under for years and Governor Walker’s withdrawal of the state’s traditional relationship with the official labor movement for emergency budgetary reasons constitutes  -  is a tool for the state’s use against traditional organizing models like unions and parties. The state can quash organizations and subject them to emergency restrictions in the name of security; the state can refuse their premises. But by emerging as a multitude, the state must confront the dissidents at the bodily level – as we’ve seen in Bahrain and Libya. As if we needed to ask why Governor Walker protected the police union.

Innovation and creativity, essential human capacities that we use mostly for our bosses these days, see their expression in the linguistic games on occupation signs and the ad hoc kindergartens and sleeping barracks. Tahrir Square has emerged as more than just a site of glorious antagonistic collision; for a portion of Egyptian revolutionaries, it has become a model of society. As Mahmoud Salem (the blogger Sandmonkey) tweeted “What if we create a democracy model similar to Tahrir, based on social engagment & collaboration without forcing anything on anyone?” These spaces are sites of self-valorized labor, innovation by and for each other. In the preceding decades, the corporate state didn’t blink as common space disappeared, while the general intellect has been so incorporated into the circuits of capital that perspective employers want to know how many “friends” applicants have. By attempting the dual move of suppressing common bonds that are inconvenient for profit and cultivating profitable “social networks,” capital may have mixed itself a lethal dose. For governments and bosses, the biggest worry should be the hijacking and appropriation of the affective networks they’ve developed. Twitter doesn’t exist as a tool of liberation, it exists to link people as employees and consumers, so that we can constantly advertise to our friends and use the index of our personal relationships as an extension of our employers’ mailing lists. When the state possesses an “off” switch, it’s clear to whom these technologies belong. But revolutions always seize roads. The market attempts to construct a cognitive hive, but bees are unpredictable.

So what can the Democrats do? Stay gone. What can the official labor movement do? Order pizzas. When strike funds run low, sell your representative’s office furniture. No student is getting a better education than those in Madison, lined up should-to-shoulder with their teachers. No workers are getting better representation than the workers in Madison who stand for themselves and each other.

And if this doesn’t scare congressional Republicans into avoiding a federal government shutdown at all costs, then we’re headed for what could be a very good year.

*Which made some of us as children wonder why the rangers insisted on being knocked around for a bit before remembering about that big sword that seems to make them invincible.
**No one check me on this, but doesn’t there have to be a quorum call for quorum to matter? That is, if the Dems don’t leave one behind, can’t the Republicans, with enough sinister party discipline, simply pass the bill without calling for a quorum call? Although it seems likely at least one Republican could be shamed into it.

Columbia University professor Bruce Robbins’s review of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s trilogy-completing Commonwealth in Issue 10 of N+1 was unsurprising at the time, but fewer than two months after its publication, has become indefensible. Titled “Multitude, Are You There?,” Robbins’s piece repeats the standard critiques of the Empire series that have been in heavy intellectual circulation since the first book became a surprise best(ish) seller:

“Hardt and Negri’s problem with love is also their problem with organization: they don’t much like either in any of their actual forms. And this same problem underlines the structural flaw at the heart of their concept of the multitude. On the one hand, what they call ‘organization’ is, as they say, the necessary criterion for any would-be agent of revolution; as they say, it is what they ‘must establish.’ On the other hand, Hardt and Negri don’t actually believe in organization. That is, they don’t think it’s a good thing: ‘traditional organizational forms based on unity, central leadership, and hierarchy are neither desirable nor effective.’ But since these are the only forms of organization that can count as organization (an organization without unity or leadership is one hand clapping), what they’re really saying is that they recognize the multitude only when it is not organized, when it is an anarchic array of singularities. If they see the multitude, they do not see organization. If they see organization, they do not see the multitude.”

Is this a crisis of terminology, imagination, or some Wittgensteinian combination of the two? Like a single hand clapping, Robbins finds, as many have before him, the multitude riddled with contradictions; it is the organization of the disorganized, the productive labor of those who refuse work, the people of no state. Such a nebulous and dialectical concept makes it easy for the skeptics to demand the multitude appear before them so that its existence might be demonstrated. If the multitude is the phoenix that might restart history out of the ashes of neoliberalism, then the cynics have taken the eventless pile of dust as proof negative. But already in this young year, even the most world-weary and jaded among us has been forced to see something that looks new. In Tunisia first and now in Egypt, people clap with one hand.

They have burned the police stations and party offices, they have attacked and appropriated from the wealthy neighborhoods, they have co-opted the army, battled the police in the streets, and brought an entrenched (and U.S.-backed) regime to its knees. And who are they? Or perhaps: what is this they? The descriptive term I’ve heard used most often in news interviews, Twitter reports, and from a friend on the ground is “everyone.” The government has shrunk to the size of more or less one, and it has demonstrated no ability to enforce the mandated curfew: perhaps the primary requirement of a security state. What, then, does exist? If we speak of “the people” as a bounded political concept, it is insufficient to describe the marchers. Though it can exist without a nation, “the people” is by definition a sovereign unity that shares the ability to delegate authority. So far – and this is not necessarily to say it won’t happen – we haven’t seen the expected coalescing around opposition leaders or parties. Even with the support of The Muslim Brotherhood, opposition leader Mohammed ElBaradei seems a long way from becoming a transitional prime minister. (I read a number of reports of protesters yelling “You’re late!” as he arrived to address the crowds.)

The Italian theorist Paolo Virno’s definition of the multitude (one of the best, in my opinion), offers a different kind of collective subject:

“Even the many need a form of unity, of being a One. But here is the point: this unity is no longer the State; rather, it is language, intellect, the communal faculties of the human race. The One is no longer a promise, it is a premise. Unity is no longer something (the State, the sovereign) towards which things converge, as in the case of the people; rather it is taken forgranted, as a background or a necessary precondition. The many must be thought of as the individualization of the universal, of the generic, of the shared experience. This, in asymmetric manner, we must conceive of a One which, far from being something conclusive, might be thought of as the base which authorizes differentiation or which allows for the political-social existence of the many seen as being many.”

Although it may only last for a moment, we can glimpse the many as many in Egypt right now. The ad hoc safety committees are not the rich protecting themselves and their property from the proletarian mobs let loose, hoping Mubarak will hold on, they are Egyptian neighbors who have taken it upon themselves (and each other) to organize and protect. Where Robbins was able to write derisively of Hardt and Negri “They dislike socialism more than they dislike the corporations,” we can now see the kind of resistance the authors outline. He associate their desire for openness and fluidity as a reckless gesture toward anarcho-capitalism, but this crisis has called into being the kind of organization Robbins, caught between models of the state and the corporation, refuses to imagine. The safety patrols are neither state, party, nor corporation, their composition worries those on the traditional right and left, who imagine them as either a prelude to Jacobin terror or a looting mob. But as the lede to this Times article makes clear, we’re not witnessing the rise of the Egyptian Tea Party; the analysis of the Tunisian revolution as a popping of the education bubble is much closer to reality.

What Hardt and Negri (and others, [like Virno, who often do so better] on the post-operaismo ultra-left) offer is a theoretical understanding of the events in Egypt that isn’t dismissive of their novelty. Where some see Iran in ’79 or France in ’89, post-operaismo recognizes that the Egyptians have no mediating entity adequate for channeling their struggle. No opposition party (or invading state – notice how Bush isn’t on Fox celebrating the wave of democracy through the Arab world) could have planned and executed the revolution as successfully as the multitude has. From the selection of targets to its militant will, the protesters (surely we can call them revolutionaries?) have demonstrated strategy and organization that some on the traditional left believe shouldn’t be possible without dozens of plenary meetings and thousands (hundreds?) of sold newspapers. From where does this insurrectionary knowledge issue? Robbins would have us believe that Hardt and Negri hope naively for a coincidence of joy and rainbows and sunshine, that they think the multitude will just know what to do because that’s what makes it happy. When the reviewer refers to the authors’ “anarchist silliness,” the caricature supposedly unfounded faith in the crowd’s knowledge might be a good example. But that would be to ignore the foundations of Negri’s concept of immaterial labor – perhaps the theoretical move for which he has faced the most criticism. The claim in Empire that all labor is immaterial labor strikes a lot of critics as abstract at best and classist at worst, but we can trace this argument back to Negri’s early work, before he has even picked up the term “multitude.”

In the pamphlet “Domination and Sabotage” (1977), Negri draws the immaterial aspect of all work out of the practice of sabotage. The fact that workers know how to reverse the work they do into the appropriative non-work of sabotage reveals  the implicit knowledge-work. We can see the same principle at play on the streets of Egypt where citizens are sabotaging their state. The Egyptians know the critical points of the security structure because they are the ones who have been performing the cognitive labor of citizenship. If they knew where they could find the police stations that now lay in ashes, it’s because they have had to avoid or be bailed out of them. They have reversed their place in the police apparatus, rather than use their knowledge-work to reproduce the system, they have repurposed it for sabotage.

I don’t think Egypt will be the domino that starts the global revolution, but I will be surprised if this new decade doesn’t include more insurrections of the same character. The world is young, educated, connected*, and dispossessed. There are no institutions adequate for their grievances, no parties, unions, or states. And yet, the Egyptians haven’t left the streets. Reaffirming my belief in poetic justice and the use of grandiose terminology in theory books, one of Robbins’s most unfair critiques of Commonwealth was on the concept of “exodus.”

Here’s what Robbins wrote:

“In part perhaps because of Negri’s time in prison**, escape becomes an explicit motto of their politics. ‘The multitude must flee the family, the corporation, and the nation . . .’ Some, they note, will be ‘reluctant to accept a notion of class struggle as exodus.’ Well, they’ve got that right. However unglamorous, it makes more sense to think of the task of politics as staying to fight, and it makes more sense to think of the common as what is fought for.”

Here’s what Hardt and Negri wrote:

“By exodus we mean, at least initially, a process of subtraction from the relationship with capital by means of actualizing the potential autonomy of labor-power. Exodus is thus not a refusal of the productivity of biopolitical labor-power but rather a refusal of the increasingly restrictive fetters placed on its productive capacities by capital. It is an expression of the productive capacities that exceed the relationship with capital achieved by stepping through the opening in the social relation of capital and across the threshold. As a first approximation, then, think of this form of class struggle as a kind of maroonage. Like the slaves who collectively escape the chains of slavery to construct self-governing communities and quilombos, biopolitical labor-power subtracting from its relation to capital must discover and construct new social relationships, new forms of life that allow it to actualize its productive powers. But unlike that of the maroons, this exodus does not necessarily mean going elsewhere. We can pursue a line of flight while staying right here, by transforming the relationship of production and mode of social organization under which we live.” (emphasis added)

From two different NY Times articles:

“‘These big guys are stealing all the money,’ said Mohamed Ibraham, a 24-year-old textile worker standing at his second job as a fruit peddler in a hard-pressed neighborhood called Dar-al-Salam. ‘If they were giving us our rights, why would we protest? People are desperate.’
He had little sympathy for those frightened by the specter of looting. He complained that he could barely afford his rent and said the police routinely humiliated him by shaking him down for money, overturning his cart or stealing his fruit. ‘And then we hear about how these big guys all have these new boats and the 100,000 pound villas. They are building housing, but not for us — for those people up high.’”

“‘We want to show the world that we can take care of our country, and we are doing it without the government or police,’ said Khalid Toufik, 40, a dentist. He said that he also took shifts in his neighborhood watch, along with students and workers. ‘It doesn’t matter if one is a Muslim or a Christian,’ he said, ‘we all have the same goal.’
‘I am glad, that they are all on the streets to protect us from robbers,’ said Hannan Selbi, 21, a student. ‘We are sure that it’s in the interest of the government to create chaos.‘
Soon after Mr. Mardini’s first tentative steps, committee members were recognizable by the simple white armbands they wore, often just strips of fabric. They created logos and distributed fliers asking for more help from the public. Some wear photocopied pieces of paper on their chests like marathon runners’ numbers. Mr. Mardini wore a badge that read simply People’s Committee in red Arabic. But the way people walked up to him and began talking, it appeared he needed no introduction.
The civic enterprise is now divided into four branches: traffic, cleanup, protection and emergency response.
Though others refer to him as the head of the committee, Mr. Mardini said: ‘We don’t have a leader. This is our country, and we all have to protect it.‘” (emphasis added)

Against sizable odds and the derision of at least one Columbia University professor, there looks to be exodus again in Egypt. I’m excited to see where they’re going.

*It’s worth noting that social media technologies, rather than enabling these insurrections, are produced by the same social forces.
**Cheap shot, especially if you’re going to call him “silly” and he did hard time for writing about joy.

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
These five kings did a king to death.

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
A goose’s quill has put an end to murder
That put an end to talk.

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
And famine grew, and locusts came;
Great is the hand the holds dominion over
Man by a scribbled name.

The five kings count the dead but do not soften
The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
Hands have no tears to flow.

From Wired‘s Danger Room:

“The award for best — and creepiest — military name of the week? No contest, that’s “Gorgon Stare,” the Air Force’s $150 million project to outfit its latest spy drones with super high-powered cameras.

By next year, 10 Reaper unmanned aircraft should have a Gorgon Stare sensor, which will film an area, two-and-a-half miles around, from 12 different angles.

‘Gorgon Stare will allow a combat controller on the ground, a commander at headquarters and an intelligence officer back in the U.S.
all to choose a different angle from the same Reaper,’ according to Air Force Times‘ Michael Hoffman.

The Reaper – and its little drone brother, the Predator – already have video cameras, of course. Gorgon Stare won’t replace those sensors. Instead, it’s meant to supplement the full-motion video with a jumpier, but wider, view.  That’ll allow airmen to “see the bigger picture” and have a better idea where to point full-motion video sensors,’ Hoffman notes.”

1. As stain. From The Washington Post “Maj. Gen. James O. Poss, the Air Force’s assistant deputy chief of staff for intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance. ‘Gorgon Stare will be looking at a whole city, so there will be no way for the adversary to know what we’re looking at, and we can see everything.’” The idea of more cameras is to better understand a situation’s complete reality as it occurs, but there’s a reason that for Jacques Lacan reality is “not-all.” The drone, with all the cameras the Pentagon’s best minds could possibly glue on, would still miss something. When it cruises over a population snapping surveillance photos the drone can never see itself, except as a stain on its split-screen high-definition recording. It will forever record one half of a war movie. Even if the Reaper flies above human sight, those for whom the device is named know the sky belongs to someone else. The drone knows it’s being watched, it knows it’s the reaper for someone else, and it searches for prey.

2. As honesty. When it comes to the names the United States uses for its drone projects, there’s an acknowledgment that we are the bad guys. Predators armed with Hellfire missiles, Reapers equipped with Gorgon Stares. Perhaps there’s something so cowardly about this form of war that the population would be repulsed by noble names. Birds and snakes, the animals of the underworld.

3. Toward completion. There’s this particularly post-modern idea that, through technology, we can “solve” the world. The next project camera project, “Argus” has 92 cameras, and next? 100? 200? Cameras until we reach an asymptote and the many becomes the single eye of the lord. Knowledge of a population is the first ingredient of biopower, the full realization is a camera and a bullet of Damocles for every man woman and child. Through the view of a drone camera, the choice is no longer to kill, but to let live, and once we are all equally in its sight, the world will be completed. The bad will be dead and the good alone, the rapture here on Earth brought to you by advances in military technology.

4. As Phallus. To paraphrase Freud, if the penis were the phallus, it wouldn’t need all the bells and whistles. The wings, cameras, and missiles don’t make the drones less dick-like, they render them inescapably phallic. How curious for a weapon whose main job is to receive rather than fire. Thus Medusa, whose snakes Freud could never handle – a castrating mockery of the penis (many where there should be one), and yet phallic in their magisterial strength and power. The drone is a queer bird indeed.

5. Ironically. From Matt Yglesias: “If you take current Air Force surveillance technology and ask ‘in what ways does this differ from the gaze of a gorgon’ the natural response is ‘when you look into a gorgon’s eyes, you turn to stone, whereas today’s USAF surveillance has no petrification powers whatsoever.’”

6. As altitude. As if only by elevating ourselves to the height of god will we know how to use his bolts of lightning, as if the fog of war is something you can fly over at 25,000 feet, hi-def photos from a mile high combine distance and proximity in a way we might call “I can’t believe it’s not omniscience!” Some really can’t.

7. As expensive. As a fraction of the total cost, we’re talking $15 million per camera here, which is over $1 million per sub-camera. It makes me think of the Josh Lyman approach to foreign policy: “Couldn’t we just pay them the money not to attack us?” But it’s not called “the military-industrial complex” for nothing.

8. As a game. Growing up, my mom never allowed video games in the house. She may not be willing to admit this, but there was always a 60′s-peace-movement conspiracy element to it, she was at least partly convinced video games were a military-industrial plot to desensitize kids to killing. This made little sense to me when I was a 12-year-old who just wanted to play Super Smash Brothers, but it makes a lot more now. The Gorgon Stare will produce images from twelve angles, like four game-systems’ worth of teenagers playing Halo. We can now switch the perspective on war from human eyes to a camera behind and above, mediated through screens. Drone warfare doesn’t just reproduce the same distance from the task of killing present in video games, it reproduces the same perspective.

9. As indicative of a larger literacy problem within the DoD. No seriously, did any of the people naming these things even read this? The only time the Gorgon’s stare is used by someone who’s not the kind of monster the U.S. government would pal around with is when it’s attached to a severed head. The snakes are a punishment from Athena, who according to one legend, killed the Gorgon and wore its skin. And Argus? Argus gets tricked by Hermes, killed, and his eyes are scattered to the feathers of peacocks. Not that there’s any important lesson that the U.S. military could learn from Greek history and myths . Nope, keep ripping off Magic Cards.

10. As a black/green instant for four mana.

I want to point out that this came out after I stopped collecting Magic Cards (like, many years after), but I knew it or some variant had to exist based on the game’s naming conventions. This probably says something important about the Department of Defense.

11. As tragic-poetic. The stare that reduces its object to stone. Or rubble.

12. As pain. “I never heard a corpse complain of how it got so cold.” – Richard in The Lion in Winter. Metal is metal no matter what the composition, so with fire, so with pain. An M-16, a Hellfire, a claw hammer: makes no difference to a body. For whom do we write on the sides of bombs? For whom do we name weapons systems? Who reads the words stenciled onto their handsome metal bodies? Not their targets.

This is a graph of the appearance of these phrases in English-language books from 1940 to 2008.*

There’s an easy way to read this chart, and it goes something like: “Wonk wonk wonk wonk decline in monogamous relationships wonk wonk kids these days wonk decline in values wonk wonk sluts.” One (of many) problem with this theory is that the best stats we have on teen sexual behavior don’t back it up. According to the National Survey of Family Growth (which actually has a pretty strong methodology as these things go), between 1995 and 2002, the only teen sub-group whose sexual activity didn’t decline was African American women. There was a staggering (almost disturbing, to be frank) nine percent drop in sexual activity among teenage men. Yet on the graph, this is where the discursive shift is, where “hooking up” overtakes “going steady.” I don’t think this a case of mere substitution – use of the term “dating” has stayed more or less constant since the early 80′s. If teen sexual activity has actually decreased, then the change in descriptive terms describes something other than society’s moral degeneration. What the graph does give us is somewhere to look, namely 1994-95, when the two lines cross. Luckily, I have a virtually encyclopedic knowledge of one cultural product of the time in question: Boy Meets World.

The sitcom about the Matthews family began in 1993 and ran until May 2000, capturing the segment on the graph of convergence and divergence. I’m going to look at a particular episode, “Pairing Up” in season two (1994), in which the brothers Cory and Eric learn “important lessons” about dating.

The problematic of the episode is this world of dating Cory discovers, girls are suddenly there in a new way. When Cory’s best friend Shawn suggests he ask out “the new girl,” I understand the character, who isn’t given a name until much later, as a synecdoche for all girls. The “new girl” is a recurring character in the show, but with the constant play of identities (Shawn telling the substitute he’s a 21 Jump Street style cop, later in the series Topanga shows up at a dance pretending to be a French exchange student), she may not be geographically novel so much as new as an identity. There’s something carnivalesque to the way the young characters experience their budding sexualities and developing personas at the same time.  It’s a story that is at least as old as Proust, but as a sitcom devoted to a particular episode structure, Boy Meets World gives us a nice view of the ideological elements at play.

When Cory asks out Topanga, she rejects him ostensibly because of their friendship, but she leans in explanation toward novelty – “Is there someone else?” “There’s everyone else.” Dating, she explains, is best practiced with people you don’t already know, because of the contradictory emotions involved. It’s her way of saying she’s not looking for anything long-term, but what then is she looking for?

These relationships are described as extremely fragile and short-term. Rebecca, older brother Eric’s date, goes from trying to get him alone to not wanting to see him at all because Cory walks in on them making out. Even though she turns from aggressive to icy, such a flighty response is portrayed as simple bad luck for Eric, not in the misogynistic rape-culture way we’ve all become accustomed to hearing (“What a crazy bitch, tease” etc.) in the decade and a half since. Her decision is not quite to put an end to something constituted, but rather ending her participation in a game. Rebecca chooses, basically, not to call him back. Nowadays we see this as a gendered pseudo-contractual violation, a mean thing that men do to women, rather than an understandable curiosity about “everyone else.”

The dating advice Eric gives Cory sounds absurd and vaguely douchey (not having to be actually interested in her, the corny adoration, etc.), but grounded in his reactions to Rebecca’s abrupt departure, it’s clear he recognizes girls as active players in the same game, not objectified prey. There’s a distinction between charm and trickery; when Cory asks out the new girl, she’s aware he doesn’t know her a bit (she is, after all, defined by her novelty) but doesn’t mind being told her hair looks nice anyway**. His hyperbole (“The most exquisite hair”) is more akin to flailing than deceit, but it works. She wants to go out with him too, because why not? (“Sure.”)

When Cory explains Eric’s dating strategies to their parents, they are disappointed that he would ask out a girl he doesn’t even know, which is quite the contradictory message. Eric is chastened and made to feel bad for making out with a girl he doesn’t know well, even though we remember that he was just planning on studying in the first place. It is the parents who identify the date with sex. Cory seems to learn the episode’s lesson here, that affection is something you can only honestly feel for people you already know. When he shows up for his date with the new girl, Cory confesses that he (now) feels weird about it being a date, and she agrees and asks if he wants to call it off. But he doesn’t. That is, he still wants to go somewhere and spend time getting to know her, exactly what they were planning to do in the first place, only without the label. The end result is a validation of Eric’s adventurism, despite the moralistic protestations of their parents. Cory learns Wendy’s name on the date, there’s nothing tawdry about it.

The consequence of the anxious parental intervention is Cory’s removal of the label “date.” Their outing becomes, in the dialectical parlance of my friend from the first paragraph, a non-date, impossible to describe in positive terms. If dating becomes something constituted, then teens may engage in basically the same behaviors but describe them differently. If the Eric-Rebecca date were to happen today (she comes over to “study,” they make out instead, she leaves), we’d call it a hookup. I don’t quite have the time to borrow my sister’s collection of teen movies from the late 90′s and early 2000′s, but I have a hunch there’s a move toward seeing relationships in the parents’ terms – people who break up, don’t call back, or talk to attractive strangers are villains, while the good character is the one who “really” knows his or her beloved. Better the obsessive stranger than the charming one***.

Back to the chart: The decline of “going steady” doesn’t necessarily reflect a decline in steady relationships, it could be an indication of the opposite. If casual dating – a constituent process rather than the marriage-modeled “steady” relationship – declined as such, then there’d be little use for the term that describes its alternative. That is, there would be no need to differentiate, going steady becomes the whole of dating. Gradually, any non-steady relationship becomes so illegitimate that it ceases to exist discursively. (Who wants to be the jerk/slut who goes out with a different person every week? Who will admit to it?) Think of how Facebook alone eliminates the discursive space of casual dating. In its place we have “hooking up” the shamed version for teens with a lot less time and lot fewer public spaces than the ones who came before them.

This all strikes me as a rotten shame. Casual dating is, in a lot of ways, much healthier for young people than the intense contractual model. Not being tied to the relationship as object makes it easier for teens to get only as involved as they feel comfortable doing without being made to think of themselves as unloving or insensitive failures. There’s also good evidence that the “boyfriend story” about the one person who knows and loves you puts young women at elevated risk of dating violence. But perhaps most importantly, casual dating as showcased in this episode is more about exploring the world than defining it, about trying on different selves rather than settling into one. It seems unfair, almost cruel, to privilege the latter over the former.

*Of course this is a ridiculous quantitative basis for the speculations that ensue, but if people like graphs, then they can have some graphs.
**There’s something terrible in the way we have constructed unsolicited compliments as socially inappropriate, as if kids didn’t hear enough unsolicited insults to balance it out anyway.
***”You’re on the phone with your girlfriend, She’s upset
She’s going off about something that you said
She doesnt get your humor like I do
I’m in the room, its a typical Tuesday night
I’m listening to the kind of music she doesn’t like
And she’ll never know your story like I do“

Every trial is a state conspiracy, and this one very much so. I am uninterested in the trial and legal proceedings. I don’t care what Sweden’s laws are, I care if Assange coercively and sexually used someone’s body without her participatory consent. The recourse to legal defenses by Assange and co. indicates the lack of a solid ethical argument.

Let’s imagine a scenario, an absolutely generic rape accusation. A woman accuses a man of rape, he denies it, you have no other information. Who do you believe? This may seem like a painfully abstract question, and it is. But it is also the situation in which we often find ourselves when we hear rape accusations. The partial information that we use to make that decision in real life (what she was wearing, her reputation, his reputation, whether she reported it, their comparative size or attractiveness, whether she stayed over after or saw him again) is more confounding than helpful. Rapists, survivors, and the incidents themselves don’t share enough in common for partial specifics to be indicative. We know certain populations are more vulnerable, but the chilling truth is that rape happens so much that knowledges about what kind of person rapes or is raped and under what circumstances are more a reflection of our rape-apologizing culture than the realities of victimization.

Nate Silver argues that the circumstances around Assange’s prosecution, both the prosecution’s unusual zeal and the obvious interests that various states have in discrediting Wikileaks, suggest that we ought disbelieve the allegations, or at least be skeptical of them. But if instances of rape share the negative commonality “not circumstances,” that is, if the circumstances of rape are so varied that the only abstraction we can make is “not,” then whether or not the circumstances are convenient doesn’t tell us anything about whether or not the rape occurred. Skepticism as to the state’s motives for prosecuting so zealously? Of course. But anyone who thinks criminal prosecution is generally apolitical is delusional and naive.

I think this use of partial specifics and faulty abstractions is a really bad idea, but what else do we have? The “assumed innocent until proven guilty” line doesn’t work for me, if Wikileaks has taught us anything it’s that the state produces truths about which we should remain skeptical and vigilant. Not to mention that for survivors who allege rape, the legal standard means “assumed lying until proven otherwise.” I am not a magistrate and have no pretensions of agnosticism. I propose an answer to the abstract question above: I believe her.

I’m not talking about at the gut level; like a lot of men, at the gut level I hardly believe any rape accusations. Unless I’m there to see it or its a really obvious case, my own horrific impulse is toward denial and apology. These responses are second nature in a rape culture like ours, especially for men. Think about the depictions: no one had to stretch to imagine a CIA “honeypot” plan against Assange, we’ve probably seen more of these scenes represented in media than powerful men (who aren’t “villains”) raping women. Which do you think happens more in real life? The same thing goes for false accusations: I’ve had friends accused of rapes that I knew first-hand did not occur, it does happen. However, whenever it does happen, we hear about it a lot. False accusations always happen out loud and knowledge of them spreads quickly and widely, so if the total volume looks comparable to rapes that occur, that assessment ignores the huge iceberg below the surface of unreported or undiscussed rapes. Statistically, I have female acquaintances, friends, and family members who have been raped and not told me about it. Rape culture doesn’t only excuse sexual assault, it makes it disappear.

The question we have to ask, especially men, is why our first reaction to an instance of rape, a social phenomenon that we know to be disgustingly prevalent, would be disbelief. That question, which nags in my head rather than my gut, leads me to a place where I can answer the abstract scenario. Rape denial is an illogical proclivity that indicates a deep ideological tampering; when it comes to rape, men (at least) don’t see clearly. It is the very existence and dominance of rape denial in the face of rape’s widespread existence that should make us pause and consider why we would, as a gender, think something so clearly dumb. Sometimes this kind of counter-hegemonic thinking makes me wrong and/or beat unconscious on the street in Oakland for failing to assume that a group of young black men would jump me, but blank empiricism and the prejudices we’ve been given (more or less the same thing at the end of the day) are wrong more often.

So I tend to believe rape accusations. I believe these ones. Truths are tactical, and until we accept that rape is outrageously common and that our culture and media obscure that, we’re all helpless to stop it.

I also think it is possible for rape to occur with only one partner’s knowledge, that is, a rapist can not realize what he’s doing. That doesn’t make it less rape or even necessarily less detestable, but it does highlight the problems with locking one person up for a social crime. As Dostoevesky puts it, “We are guilty of all, before all, and on behalf of all,” and as all is the only way we can stop rape. Any society that locks someone away causes itself more damage than any criminal ever could. No bars ever. For anyone. Not for Assange, not for Bradley Manning, not even for the perpetrators of the much bigger state crimes revealed in the Wikileaks documents. It’s not worth it.

On another note, I think it’s interesting that the argument that works for me is so cerebral. I’ve had some really important conversations with female comrades about the way men use academic knowledges (to which we have more access for a number of reasons) to dominate discussions and marginalize women. Here I can certainly finish the Dostoevesky quote: “We are guilty of all, before all, and on behalf of all, and I am the guiltiest of all,” and it’s something I’m always working on, but I find it interesting on a personal level that my most radically feminist positions come through analysis (like this post) that comes off as coldly intellectual. I think this is at least partly because our society is set up to confirm sexism in men through experience. The very way we see the world is distorted, patriarchy is supposed to “feel right” or seem natural or unavoidable to men (at least), and that’s how it keeps itself around. I’ve heard the argument from women that lived experience is more important than books or philosophy in developing a feminist pattern of thought, which I certainly believe about their lives, but as a cis class-privileged white guy, my lived experience is a really faulty position from which to understand rape and rape culture.

Several times this ploy actually succeeded in sparking revolts.”
- Hakim Bey, The Temporary Autonomous Zone

First of all, it’s definitely a stretch to say Fisher “advocates” police violence, he certainly never encouraged officers to beat students. I would say he probably “advocates” the police’s immediate surrender to the glorious student revolutionaries, unfortunately Mark Fisher has seemingly little-to-no control over any police department. This is what’s silly about the whole argument: riot cops don’t need the advice of a Marxist professor to attacked demonstrators. The tactics that resulted in police aggression are either strategic or not, and looking at the momentum these students have built, I’m going to have to agree with Fisher and say they have been. A blanket condemnation of tactics that lead to police confrontation would be silly and blind, and I don’t think that’s what Ads is saying. Which means Fisher is being critiqued for making the uncouth connection between success and violence, for thinking it out loud.

The intermediate value theorem states that a line connecting two points passes through every one between them. Anyone who thinks that, between the origin (current material conditions) and the goals of a revolutionary left, there is not a point of open state violence is either naive, delusional, or both. There isn’t a liberal capitalist democracy in the world that wouldn’t rather not beat its children in the street, not because they care a bit about us, but because that sort of violence is not supposed to happen here.  Beating protesters is for authoritarian regimes teetering on the edge of historical irrelevance, not for nations where history has already ended. The open use of police violence, especially against school kids, lays bare the lines of antagonism, it reveals an exteriority on the ground that’s always hard to be sure of otherwise. If they’re hitting you with sticks, it means they’re worried. If they’re worried, it means you’re doing your job well. Sure, the police’s collective surrender would be a better sign, but I don’t think today you get to one without the other.

I don’t know a committed leftist who hasn’t looked at a police line and, deep down somewhere we don’t all like to talk about, hoped it would charge. Not because of some macho desire to find a representative of capital and the state to punch in the face, but simply because it would mean you’re worth beating. Babysitter cops are usually far more demoralizing than aggressive ones, and they know it. Without confrontation, marches become pageants to the state’s security and restraint, complete with smiling police escorts. There’s nothing worse than feeling planned for, internal to the structures you protest. State violence is a sign of the struggle’s escalation, and is thereby validating.

When activists render the state’s deliberative mask unwearable, they move closer to open conflict and the possibility of bigger victories. As the comrades at the UCs have put it, “Behind every fee increase, a line of riot cops.” The connection between tuition increases and police batons already exists, and it unfortunately falls on the brave to make that relationship present in order to see it fractured. It isn’t Accelerationist to recognize this is where we are now, and as Greg Graffin might say: “It’s a dangerous stage/But the show must go on.”

Which isn’t to say anyone has to or ought to or can stand still and take it. One way or another, a one-sided fight doesn’t last long. When the reality is get knocked out or get shields and barricades, I’m all for the latter. Especially if they’re those Italian book-shields, the design for which really ought be online somewhere…