The political in its contemporary form operates through both the transcendent totality of the political-as-political (the conceptual political-in-itself outside of its particular affective expression) and its particular application at the level of the actual production of control (interventions by various apparatuses such as the police, the clinic, the prison, etc alongside the imposition and acceptance of biopolitical norms at the individual level). The “task” of theorists both for and against the political has been to prioritize either totality or singularity as the “site” of either stasis or resistance. Theory has thus far only presented various views of the contingency between both milieus. Either the totality is produced as an artificial construction out of various singularities (a generalized concept or phantasm that then reinforces the very violence that produced it) or the totality through its autonomous operations constructs and determines the singularity (the specific instance of control). The latter produces a political Platonism through circularly establishing the political-in-itself as before all immanent materiality while the former cannot see the political-as-political, instead producing a theory of power based on a crude voluntarism, the idea that we can simply exit from the ideological existence of power through no longer accepting its metaphysical reality. This is true in a simple ontological sense, as it is absurd to posit power as metaphysically prior to its emergence at the level of singularity (the affective investments made into and producing of power at the level of concrete inter-subjective sociality), however it ignores cybernetic power’s inherent becoming-immanent or real.
Power is both produced by and produces subjects through the process of feedback, as the social formations produced by the affective investments of subjectivity then determine the given constructions of subjectivity-as-subject (Foucault’s subjectivation and the production of “lines in the sand”). This creates a feedback loop between totality and singularity, bridging the two milieus via a dual becoming-immanent and becoming-transcendent of power wich leads to power having the capacity to both reconfigure itself at the level of totality and determine singularities into a state of stasis. The various “bubbling ups” in intensity among the singularities (a state of popular crisis) have been endlessly recuperated through the self-adjustment of power-as-totality. This self-adjective tendency of power has two responses in the realm of radical theory: a politics of totality (usually marked either by a classical revolutionary approach to politics or an accelerationist theory of folding) or a politics of singularity (conceived either as a Deleuzo-Foucualdian minor politics or the tendency developing from the Stirner to the Situationists to Agamben and Tiqqun that looks at the affective vitality of the whatever-singularity). The latter operates through what has been called the unique (Stirner), inner experience (Bataille), the lived form (Foucault), the intensity (Deleuze), everyday life (the Situationists), the whatever-singularity (Agamben), the form-of-life (Tiqqun), etc. While radically different, each of these particular forms provide a basis for the site of politics and all anti-political potentialities. This is the site of exit, an insurrectionary secession of lived singularity from the capital-metaphysics of totality (secessionary critical metaphysics).
The logic of exit is not one of the literal secession of a given territory, the dream that we can simply occupy a space free from the contamination of capital and power. This “Californian Neo-TAZ” logic of occupation bases itself on a crude politics of the common, a naive attempt to recover any semblance of sociality within the barren desert of the contemporary socius. Within this milieu praxis is imagined as the occupation and re-appropriation of a given territory, the becoming-common of the once stratified and privatized zone. This form of praxis is seen in many modern struggles (two key contemporary examples being CHAZ and the pro-Palestinian student occupations), expressing a desire to simply sidestep the traditional apparatuses of the control (the state, capital, etc) and instead attack the sites of social reproduction (rather than the classic Marxist focus on the sites of production i.e. the factory). While this mode of struggle has emerged due to contemporary problematics (the monopoly on territorial control held by the police, the shift in the western world from production to social reproduction, etc), its posits itself in the form of the transcendent territory-as-territory rather than as an actual politics of singularity. It holds no vital impulse towards escape, only existing as a desperate, pacified attempt to recover traditional sociality and commonality (a sense of being-as-common wich can only be found outside the territory form of struggle). By contrast, the insurrectionary politics of exit operates through a metaphysical exit, a politics based on critical metaphysics as opposed to commodity-metaphysics (the becoming-ordered and becoming-exchangeable of every aspect of life). Perhaps the first theorist of this tradition of the singularity, Max Stirner, defines this movement quite aptly:
“Revolution and insurrection should not be looked upon as synonymous. The former consists in a radical change of conditions, of the prevailing condition or status, the state or society, and is therefore a political or social act; the latter indeed has a transformation of conditions as its inevitable result, but doesn’t start from it, but from the discontent of human beings with themselves; it is not an armed uprising, but a rising up of individuals, a getting up, without regard to the arrangements that spring from it. The revolution is aimed at new arrangements, while the insurrection leads us to no longer let ourselves be arranged, but rather to arrange ourselves, and sets no radiant hopes on institutions.”
Rather than advocating revolution (the classical transformative politics at the level of totality), Stirner advocates a “rising up” of individuals, a change in the metaphysical regard towards systems such as the state and capital. It is a sidestepping that does not exit only to reestablish itself within a politics of the transcendent territory-as-territory, but instead calls on us to not let ourselves be arranged. In Stirner’s eyes, the power of any apparatus is contingent in its becoming-transcendent, its existence as an idol bought into by individuals. Thus, much in the same regard as what Agamben would come to label as destituent power, there must be a denial of the metaphysical validity of these systems and a return to a direct confrontation of singularities (Stirner here evokes the Hobbesian “war of all against all,” directly anticipating the theory of civil war constructed by the likes of Foucault and Tiqqun). This metaphysical exit is not then an escape towards a virtual mysticism (as Hallaward characterized the Deleuzian theories of immanence and difference), a naive attempt to ignore the realities of political struggle, but rather an elaboration of a micro-politics of the singularity. Despite this clear material, political focus, various critics of these militants of singularity fashion themselves as the saviors of reality against the naive voluntarism of the “petty-bourgeois individualists.” There is of course Marx’s famous tirade against “St. Max” in The German Ideology, from which Marx developed his theory of historical materialism, but also more recently the critique of the “neo-TAZ Tiqqunist” Invisible Committee offered by Endnotes. In the 2012 article “What Are We to Do?,” they write:
“Communization is a movement at the level of the totality, through which that totality is abolished. The logic of the movement that abolishes this totality necessarily differs from that which applies at the level of the concrete individual or group: it should go without saying that no individual or group can overcome the reproduction of the capitalist class relation through their own actions. The determination of an individual act as ‘communizing’ flows only from the overall movement of which it is part, not from the act itself, and it would therefore be wrong to think of the revolution in terms of the sum of already-communizing acts, as if all that was needed was a certain accumulation of such acts to a critical point… Thus the ‘TAZ’, the alternative, the commune etc., are to be rethought, but with a critique of alternativism in mind: we must secede, yes, but this secession must also involve ‘war’. Since such supposedly liberated places cannot be stabilised as outside of ‘capitalism, civilization, empire, call it what you wish’, they are to be reconceived as part of the expansion and generalization of a broad insurrectionary struggle.”
While certainly an adequate critique of the politics of the transcendent territory-as-territory (which they are right to characterize the ideas of Call and many other post-Tiqqunisms as, a milieu that has sadly lost the critical-cybernetic edge the original group had towards politics), it holds an explicit call towards a becoming-totality within all insurrectionary situations, a call to generalize the struggle. In this respect they share the concerns of Tiqqun, evoking a vision of war that is directly comparable to the Foucauldo-Agambenite conception of civil war. However, where Tiqqun looks to civil war as implying a metaphysical secession (a call towards outsideness), Endnotes sees only the traditional conception of the molar conflict between two classes at the level of economic and political totality. In this sense their project becomes perpetually haunted by the death of the worker’s movement, positing a political environment in which the only subject possible of undoing the endless process of reproduction and valorization, the proletariat, is unable to express its power except through an exit from its existence as proletarian. Yet even in this theory of exit, it can only see exit at the level of totality, forever wishing that the tendency of lumpenization becomes transcendent through some identifiable political movement. As such Endnotes (and the entirety of the “Marxist Wing” of so called communization theory) posits an agency-without-agency, a Leninism-without-Leninism, a workerism-without-workerism, etc. It is a theory of political struggle that is paralyzed by the lack of any concrete struggle among the classes, refusing to think through the actuality of the critical metaphysics of exit.
The irony of this critique is then that it characterizes the use of the subjects “we” and “insurrectionary” by the Invisible Committee (themselves derived from the quasi-Stirnerite imaginary party) as “perfectly Stirnerite,” following from Marx in the labeling of the Stirnerite line as a voluntarist, idealistic, deviation. The Marxist critique of Stirner (and the entire tradition of the politics of singularity), consists of an apparent lack of social agent that could present any semblance of material change outside of a voluntarist “withdrawal” from institutions (a withdrawal that, to Marx, ignores the real material forces of capital alongside the contingency and determination of social agents based on class position). In this sense Marx posits the primacy of the economic and class above the anti-foundational uniqueness of Stirner, claiming that the proletariat in its existence as a class are the only agents with the capacity to overturn class society. While there is a thread of voluntarism running through Stirner’s theory of insurrection, the claim that Stirner ignores material forces or engages in philosophical idealism are largely misrepresentations constructed by Marx and Engels to juxtapose their narrow materialism of class conflict (as opposed to the more Bataillean base materialism of Stirner).
Endnotes expands on this critique of Stirner by, as was said, characterizing “the insurrectionary” and the “we” in The Invisible Committee as lacking in any concrete material agency, instead simply hand waving away the issue of class consciousness and the problem of valorization. According to Endnotes, texts such as Call and The Coming Insurrection give an account of escape without any account of a material agent that escapes, instead falling back on a supposedly Stirnerite voluntarism. While the two texts listed are not without their flaws and are certainly products of the moment in which they were produced (the post-9/11 desire for escape and the occupations of the 2010s), Endnotes is simply projecting their own impasse, their own inability to move beyond the narrow economic notion of the proletariat as the only entity capable of undoing class society. Rather than truly thinking through a critical metaphysics actually capable of resisting capital’s reproduction, valorization, etc (the overall process of becoming-immanent) or positing out of the death of the workers movement an actual materialism of resistance (the imaginary party), Endnotes simply critiques these “Tiqqunists” for reflecting the metaphysics of struggle our time posits. It is not that the “Tiqqunists” are too Stirnerite for this world, but that this world is too Stirnerite for Endnotes (in the sense of the “anarchic” ontology of civil war and the dual cybernetic becoming-immanent and becoming-transcendent of power).
The other response to the politics of singularity (besides the last gasps of the twentieth century revolutionary politics of totality found in Marxist “communization”), or rather the totality-oriented counterpart to singularity oriented ontology, is found in accelerationism. Acceleration posits a politics of totality grounded in a singularity based metaphysics, a becoming-transcendent of Deleuzian ontology (this is not to say that Deleuze does not focus on totality, but that accelerationism posits a Deleuzian minor politics based at the level of totality). No matter what political program is associated with the process of “acceleration,” each operates through a hyperstitional strategy of folding in which an outside (whether it be the cold machinic outside of the CCRU or the “non-capitalist forces” of Fisher and l/acc) goes “through” the interior, radically transforming said interior in a general “acceleration” of its deterritorial tendency. This produces a becoming-singularity of all systems of totality, not in the sense of the Deleuzo-Agambenite notion of the pre-virtual singularity but rather as the purely immanent intensity of the technocapital singularity or any systemic equivalent of said singularity (such as Fisher’s technological singularity “beyond capital”). This “absolute” deterritorialization of capital (or any other cybernetic system) produces the end of all social regulation at the level of totality, producing a politics of radical “newness.” The bureaucratic left “accelerationists” make this strategy abundantly clear in their manifesto, with Williams and Srnicek writing:
“We believe the most important division in today’s left is between those that hold to a folk politics of localism, direct action, and relentless horizontalism, and those that outline what must become called an accelerationist politics at ease with a modernity of abstraction, complexity, globality, and technology. The former remains content with establishing small and temporary spaces of non-capitalist social relations, eschewing the real problems entailed in facing foes which are intrinsically non-local, abstract, and rooted deep in our everyday infrastructure. The failure of such politics has been built-in from the very beginning. By contrast, an accelerationist politics seeks to preserve the gains of late capitalism while going further than its value system, governance structures, and mass pathologies will allow.”
The left accelerationists, like their pseudo-Landian counterparts, posit an end to capital’s process of self-regulation and stabilization, i.e. the production of stasis. In their eyes the cybernetic processes of recuperation operate through capital’s production of excess or “non-capitalist forces” that it then pacifies in order to maintain stability. Their program then is the production of “new subjectivities,” new non-capitalist forces that can form a semblance of an outsideness-against-capital through a becoming-independent of the non-capitalist-force-in-itself (this largely conflates the program of Fisher and the left accelerationists for simplicity’s sake, however it should be noted that Fisher’s position is far more advanced and nuanced). As such, rather than positing outsideness as the cold inhumanity of capital itself, the bureaucrats of totality posit the outside as being continually produced by the excesses of capital-as-pure-interiority. Through a hyperstitional folding these non-capitalist forces force the interior “limits” of capital’s deteritorial tendency (which, rather than being defined as an intensification of capital’s “speed,” is an increase in the “velocity” of capital’s excess “outsides” and the deactivation of their recuperation) to their breaking point, enabling a self-mutation of capital beyond capital through its cybernetic process of self-adjustment. It is a cybernetics-against-cybernetics, a neoliberalism-against-neoliberalism, etc. Putting aside the largely managerial and biopolitical tendency found within this milieu, which largely arises from its dismissal of the politics of singularity, its politics is grounded on both an improper use of “outsideness” and folding wich only views cybernetics from the perspective of the traditional fold (outside-coming-in), rather than as the dual tendencies of becoming-immanent and becoming-transcendent (wich can now be seen as becoming-singularity or affective and becoming-totality or symbolic political-as-political).
Rather than the narrow minded politics of totality, which despite claiming to transcend an old Leninist politics remains trapped within its problematics, a politics of singularity-as-singularity without a voluntarism of totality (which ignores the cybernetic nature of power and its becoming-transcendent or code) must be advanced. Despite clear differences in both construction and intentionality, the insurrectionary anti-cybernetics of Tiqqun and the Lovecraftean proto-accelerationism of the CCRU both attempted to face this task head on. While basing their practices within opposing sides of the increasingly opaque dialectic of totality and singularity, each seeks to address and either deactivate or transcend the totality of cybernetic actuality (beyond the simple, supposedly contingent, one-sidedness of the majority of cybernetic analysis). Rather than the notion of the “non-capitalist-force” (which either through a contingency or a non-capitalist-force-in-itself cannot function as a proper outside due to its existence as an interior to cybernetic power, i.e. there is no functional independence of the non-capitalist force due to its existence at the level of totality), both groups base their notion of “outsideness” (though the term does not appear as a central concept throughout Tiqqun’s work it appears as a thematic grounding point so to speak) on either the lived affectivity of “presence” (used in an Agembenite post-Heideggerean manner) or the cold inhumanity of capital-in-itself (defined through Land’s idiosyncratic reflections on Kant). The interactions with both “outsides” define both the general conception of political relations (the numogram and the apparatus respectively) and political strategy. Strategy operates through a folding which brings the outside in, allowing the destabilization and eventual collapse or transcendence of capital and power. Their respective strategies, metaphysical secession and hyperstition, each look to harness the power of the outside to find an exteriotity by which they can confront cybernetic problematics.
The key problematic both groups confront, alongside the associated lines of thought they would come to be associated with (so called “anarchist communization” and accelerationism respectively), has been the mapping and utilization of the outside for political strategy. The former places its hopes within “the imaginary party,” a product of the death of the workers movement that no longer bases its plane of consistency on any identifiable subsection of the wider socius. Instead it is a plane of escape, a being-as-common of its members based on a collective refusal of the grounding metaphysics of the world i.e. commodity metaphysics. Following from Foucault, Tiqqun does not wish to speak for the imaginary party or represent its position within discourse, rather it wishes to map its activities while seeking for points in which the party’s libidinal energies can spring up as sites of insurrectionary intensity. These “bubbling ups” of intensity are to be harnessed into a generalized front within the ever present state of civil war. The question then becomes who harnesses this libidinal energy? Who will transform these brief insurrectionary sparks at the level of singularity into a generalized front? Perhaps these are the wrong questions, as the diffusion of power into the dual tendencies of becoming-immanent and becoming-transcendent makes any social agent capable of reteritorializing the libidinal energies and confrontive potentialities into a defined, molar, agent impossible and indeed undesirable. Tiqqun is right to critique the old Leninist questions “what is to be done?” and “who is to do it?,” instead replacing them with a question of their own: “how is it to be done?” The question then becomes not one of agents but of mapping, of the harnessing of the outside.
The latter group, the CCRU, instead puts its “hopes” (if hope could ever be an adequate word to describe the CCRU’s activities) in the cold inhumanity of capital-in-itself, the outside wich grounds the operations of capital-time. Unlike the Situationist and later Deleuzo-Foucauldian question of “how can we find an outside to capital?,” the CCRU instead considers current capitalist social relations as not “truly” capitalist, instead being a series of regulations and territorialities placed upon said capital. Capital is, following from the work of Deleuze and Guattari, a schizo-revolutionary force which destabilizes cultural forms only to be reteritorialized into a new social ordering. Land looks at this tendency and describes its being-towards-singularity or meltdown, its inevitable push towards absolute deteritorialization across the body of capital. As such the “liberatory” (again, if such a word could ever describe any of the CCRU’s thought) path is to lose oneself within the cold inhumanity of capital, to abandon all hopes of a politics of authenticity and embrace the expanding “revolutionary” potentialities of capital and its post-human alienation. Despite the attempts of various groups after the CCRU’s dissolution (left accelerationism, right accelerationism, neo-reactionaries, patchwork, gender accelerationism, what have you) to construct a hyperstitional program capable of utilizing this towards some concrete politics out of the techno-capital, or rather simply technological, singularity, the capital-in-itself at the level of totality has fully divorced itself from the human chains of capital exchange (M-C-M’) from wich it was born. Though there are certainly tools the CCRU offers us, namely hyperstition and lumerian “time sorcery,” capital-in-itself cannot be treated as a simple political apparatus that can be manipulated by human agency. It is rather radically inhuman, lacking any concern for human politics or programs. The CCRU’s task then becomes, much like that of Tiqqun, the mapping and pragmatics of outsidness.
The key point of differentiation between the two groups, who share a common theoretical background within “postmodern” French theory and cybernetics, is the characterization of capital as either an interiority or pure exteriority, from which a “Deleuzian” politics becomes centered upon either the fold or the counter-fold (while not necessarily discounting the other, as the narrow cyberneticians do). An affective accelerationism (the potential answer to the key question posed by both Tiqqun and the CCRU) must work through the dual convergence of these two manners of folding into what could be called the plane of politics or the political. It must base itself in a form of outsideness to the cybernetic process that does not simply exit or secede into the real of politics, into the affective confrontation of singularities and their forms-of-life. Rather, it must make affective investments back into the political-in-itself (wich converges with the CCRU’s Lovecraftean capital-in-itself) in order to produce what could be called a non-capitalist-force, an agent or subjectivity capable of undoing the the very axiomatics of capital and biopower. This is conducive to a hyperstitional critical metaphysics, a metaphysical secession from capital-metaphysics at the level of the very totality itself. Tiqqun contained the basis of this vision in their original elaboration of critical metaphysics and the economy of “presence” (here put in quotes due to a coming commentary on the one as lived experience in relation to Tiqqun’s post-Heideggerian notion of presence), writing:
“Each apparatus possesses its own little music, which must be put slightly out of tune, incidentally distorted, pushed to decay, to destruction, to become unhinged… To turn the imposed schizophrenia of self-control into an offensive conspiratorial instrument. To become a sorcerer.”
The apparatus, through the affective investment here made analogous to musical distortion (wich is itself associated with musical intensity in genres such as punk and metal), is pushed to an undoing of its nature and with it a reclamation or “communization” of its functioning. This repurposing or becoming-distorted-as-common of the apparatus stands in contrast to the popular politics of occupation wich refuse to distort, to undue the apparatus at the expense of their own territoriality. This distortion and repurposing of the apparatus is the only proper “accelerationist” program which could unleash the fabled non-capitalist forces of the left-accelerationist. The question from there becomes what could be an “outsidneness” to the cybernetic process? What could be the base of that potential social manifestation of affective vitality? It cannot be the communist community of the imaginary party, which lives always in the gaps and can never manifest outside the simple scenes of singularity by which it is grounded. The Stirner-Tiqqun line (the buying-out of apparatuses and thus the deactivation of their legitimacy) must set its sights at the broader cybernetic operation wich manifests and constructs these very situations by the continual cycle of feedback. This is not for lack of effort on their part, however for the total vital deactivation of the cybernetic becoming-passive of all bodies there must be the construction of a true outside and out of it the mass deployment of affective, warring, investments. Any outside to an inherently codified and spectacular plane of politics (becoming-transcendent or codified through the fold) must base itself in the real of affect-as-affect, in the lived lived experience of everyday life. This was demonstrated quite clearly by the SI, who through their notion of the situation proposed not an exit but instead a fractal politics of the event not as the event but instead as a lived existential milieu.
This is done by the SI both as visionaries and as somewhat naive artistic intellectuals, as they miss the key cybernetic problematic that develops out of their notion of Spectacle. The recuperation of spectacle does not stop at the mere recuperation of artistic practices, but instead goes onto recuperate the very basis of human experience itself. Human experience is determined by a subjectivation which makes one passive and individuated as a subject within an apparatus. The creative nothing of Stirner is robbed of its subjective “agency” (if Stirner could ever be called a theorist of agency), instead replaced by what Deleuze calls “life within the folds.” Perhaps then it is Deleuze’s ethical vision that can escape this inherent folding in of direct experience? He writes in his text on Foucault:
“The most distant point becomes interior, by being converted into the nearest: life within the folds. This is the central chamber, which one need no longer fear is empty since one fills it with oneself. Here one becomes a master of one's speed and, relatively speaking, a master of one's molecules and particular features, in this zone of subjectivation: the boat as interior of the exterior.”
This reversal of the folds and the reclamation of the control over one’s “speed,” itself suggests the potential, through vital affective investments, for the reclamation of capital’s acceleratory process. Deleuze suggests the potential for an ethics of subjectivity, a third pole beyond knowledge and power that holds the potential for the deactivation of the disciplinary and biopolitical dimensions imbued in the other two poles. It is a break from experiance-as-power and an ethical rediscovery of experiance-as-itself, the proper deactivation of cybernetic transcendence and becoming-immanent and with it the discovery of a life as pure immanence. Pure immanence as a life, or experiance-as-itself, is the ever-present auto-impression of affects that is “forgotten” (if we are to use the terms of the phenomenologists) through the subjectivation of life into experiance-as-power (the life of a docile and determined body). There must then, in order to fold the intensity of this experiance-as-itelf (vitality or joissance of the one as Laruelle calls it) back into the broader cybernetic totality by way of affective investments and what could be called a “vital strategy” (as opposed to the fatal strategy found at the level of becoming-transcendent), an acting through this experiance or affectivity in order to deactivate the production of experiance-as-power or experiance-as-capital (depending upon which side one takes on the Tiqqun-CCRU debate over the contingency of capital and power, a topic that is largely irrelevant here). It is the distortion and “communization” of apparatuses without simple secession or a narrow politics of singularity without totality. It must rely on what could be called an acting-through-the-one or “outsideness,” a hyperstitional form of what will be called non-praxis wich opposes itself to institutionalized praxis and goes beyond while building upon the unconditional accelerationist idea of anti-praxis.
Holy SHIT this is amazing, I'm gonna translate it to spanish ASAP.