I am on a Roberto Bolano kick right now, so excuse this indulgence.

Go and read his books; and, will someone please translate his poetry into english.

Roberto Bolaño.

Roberto Bolaño belongs to the most select group of Latin-American novelists. Chile of the coup d’état, Mexico City in the 1970s, and the reckless youth of poets are some of his frequent subjects, but he also takes up other themes: César Vallejo’s deathbed, the hardships endured by unknown authors, life at the periphery. Born in Chile in 1953, he spent his teenage years in Mexico and moved to Spain at the end of the seventies. As a poet, he founded the Infrarealist movement with Mario Santiago. In 1999 he won the Rómulo Gallegos Prize, previously awarded to Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa, for his novel Los detectives salvajes [The savage detectives], for which he also received the prestigious Herralde Prize.

A prolific writer, a literary animal who makes no concessions, Bolaño successfully combines the two basic instincts of a novelist: he is attracted to historical events, and he desires to correct them, to point out the errors. From Mexico he acquired a mythical paradise, from Chile the inferno of the real, and from Blanes, the town in northeast Spain where he now lives and works, he purges the sins of both. No other novelist has been able to convey the complexity of the megalopolis Mexico City has become, and no one has revisited the horrors of the coup d’état in Chile and the Dirty War with such mordant, intelligent writing.

To echo Bolaño’s words, “reading is more important than writing.” Reading Roberto Bolaño, for example. If anyone thinks that Latin-American literature isn’t passing through a moment of splendor, a look through some of his pages would be enough to dispel that notion. With Bolaño, literature—that inexplicably beautiful bomb that goes off and as it destroys, rebuilds—should feel proud of one of its best creations.

Our conversation took place via e-mail between Blanes and my home in Mexico City in the fall of 2001.

Carmen Boullosa In Latin America, there are two literary traditions that the average reader tends to regard as antithetical, opposite—or frankly, antagonistic: the fantastic—Adolfo Bioy Casares, the best of Cortázar, and the realist—Vargas Llosa, Teresa de la Parra. Hallowed tradition tells us that the southern part of Latin America is home to the fantastic, while the northern part is the center of realism. In my opinion, you reap the benefits of both: your novels and narratives are inventions—the fantastic—and a sharp, critical reflection of reality—realist. And if I follow this reasoning, I would add that this is because you have lived on the two geographic edges of Latin America, Chile and Mexico. You grew up on both edges. Do you object to this idea, or does it appeal to you? To be honest, I find it somewhat illuminating, but it also leaves me dissatisfied: the best, the greatest writers (including Bioy Casares and his antithesis, Vargas Llosa) always draw from these two traditions. Yet from the standpoint of the English-speaking North, there’s a tendency to pigeonhole Latin American literature within only one tradition.

Roberto Bolaño I thought the realists came from the south (by that, I mean the countries in the Southern Cone), and writers of the fantastic came from the middle and northern parts of Latin America—if you pay attention to these compartmentalizations, which you should never, under any circumstances, take seriously. 20th century Latin American literature has followed the impulses of imitation and rejection, and may continue to do so for some time in the 21st century. As a general rule, human beings either imitate or reject the great monuments, never the small, nearly invisible treasures. We have very few writers who have cultivated the fantastic in the strictest sense—perhaps none, because among other reasons, economic underdevelopment doesn’t allow subgenres to flourish. Underdevelopment only allows for great works of literature. Lesser works, in this monotonous or apocalyptic landscape, are an unattainable luxury. Of course, it doesn’t follow that our literature is full of great works—quite the contrary. At first the writer aspires to meet these expectations, but then reality—the same reality that has fostered these aspirations—works to stunt the final product. I think there are only two countries with an authentic literary tradition that have at times managed to escape this destiny—Argentina and Mexico. As to my writing, I don’t know what to say. I suppose it’s realist. I’d like to be a writer of the fantastic, like Philip K. Dick, although as time passes and I get older, Dick seems more and more realist to me. Deep down—and I think you’ll agree with me—the question doesn’t lie in the distinction of realist/fantastic but in language and structures, in ways of seeing. I had no idea that you liked Teresa de la Parra so much. When I was in Venezuela people spoke a lot about her. Of course, I’ve never read her.

CB Teresa de la Parra is one of the greatest women writers, or greatest writers, and when you read her you’ll agree. Your answer completely supports the idea that the electricity surging through the Latin American literary world is fairly haphazard. I wouldn’t say it’s weak, because suddenly it gives off sparks that ignite from one end of the continent to the other, but only every now and then. But we don’t entirely agree on what I consider to be the canon. All divisions are arbitrary, of course. When I thought about the south (the Southern Cone and Argentina), I thought about Cortázar, Silvina Ocampo’s delirious stories, Bioy Casares, and Borges (when you’re dealing with authors like these, rankings don’t matter: there is no “number one,” they’re all equally important authors), and I thought about that short, blurry novel by María Luisa Bombal, House of Mist(whose fame was perhaps more the result of scandal—she killed her ex-lover). I would place Vargas Llosa and the great de la Parra in the northern camp. But then things become complicated, because as you move even further north you find Juan Rulfo, and Elena Garro with Un hogar sólido and Los recuerdos del porvenir. All divisions are arbitrary: there is no realism without fantasy, and vice versa.

In your stories and novels, and perhaps also in your poems, the reader can detect the settling of scores (as well as homages paid), which are important building blocks in your narrative structure. I don’t mean that your novels are written in code, but the key to your narrative chemistry may lie in the way you blend hate and love in the events you recount. How does Roberto Bolaño, the master chemist, work?

RB I don’t believe there are any more scores settled in my writing than in the pages of any other author’s books. I’ll insist at the risk of sounding pedantic (which I probably am, in any case), that when I write the only thing that interests me is the writing itself; that is, the form, the rhythm, the plot. I laugh at some attitudes, at some people, at certain activities and matters of importance, simply because when you’re faced with such nonsense, by such inflated egos, you have no choice but to laugh. All literature, in a certain sense, is political. I mean, first, it’s a reflection on politics, and second, it’s also a political program. The former alludes to reality—to the nightmare or benevolent dream that we call reality—which ends, in both cases, with death and the obliteration not only of literature, but of time. The latter refers to the small bits and pieces that survive, that persist; and to reason. Although we know, of course, that in the human scale of things, persistence is an illusion and reason is only a fragile railing that keeps us from plunging into the abyss. But don’t pay any attention to what I just said. I suppose one writes out of sensitivity, that’s all. And why do you write? You’d better not tell me—I’m sure your answer will be more eloquent and convincing than mine.

CB Right, I’m not going to tell you, and not because my answer would be any more convincing. But I must say that if there is some reason why I don’t write, it’s out of sensitivity. For me, writing means immersing myself in a war zone, slicing up bellies, contending with the remains of cadavers, then attempting to keep the combat field intact, still alive. And what you call “settling scores” seems much fiercer to me in your work than in that of many other Latin American writers.

In the eyes of this reader, your laughter is much more than a gesture; it’s far more corrosive—it’s a demolition job. In your books, the inner workings of the novel proceed in the classic manner: a fable, a fiction draws the reader in and at the same time makes him or her an accomplice in pulling apart the events in the background that you, the novelist, are narrating with extreme fidelity. But let’s leave that for now. No one who has read you could doubt your faith in writing. It’s the first thing that attracts the reader. Anyone who wants to find something other than writing in a book—for example, a sense of belonging, or being a member of a certain club or fellowship—will find no satisfaction in your novels or stories. And when I read you, I don’t look for history, the retelling of a more or less recent period in some corner of the world. Few writers engage the reader as well as you do with concrete scenes that could be inert, static passages in the hands of “realist” authors. If you belong to a tradition, what would you call it? Where are the roots of your genealogical tree, and in which direction do its branches grow?

RB The truth is, I don’t believe all that much in writing. Starting with my own. Being a writer is pleasant—no, pleasant isn’t the word—it’s an activity that has its share of amusing moments, but I know of other things that are even more amusing, amusing in the same way that literature is for me. Holding up banks, for example. Or directing movies. Or being a gigolo. Or being a child again and playing on a more or less apocalyptic soccer team. Unfortunately, the child grows up, the bank robber is killed, the director runs out of money, the gigolo gets sick and then there’s no other choice but to write. For me, the word writing is the exact opposite of the word waiting. Instead of waiting, there is writing. Well, I’m probably wrong—it’s possible that writing is another form of waiting, of delaying things. I’d like to think otherwise. But, as I said, I’m probably wrong. As to my idea of a canon, I don’t know, it’s like everyone else’s—I’m almost embarrassed to tell you, it’s so obvious: Francisco de Aldana, Jorge Manrique, Cervantes, the chroniclers of the Indies, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Fray Servando Teresa de Mier, Pedro Henríquez Ureña, Rubén Darío, Alfonso Reyes, Borges, just to name a few and without going beyond the realm of the Spanish language. Of course, I’d love to claim a literary past, a tradition, a very brief one, made up of only two or three writers (and maybe one single book), a dazzling tradition prone to amnesia, but on the one hand, I’m much too modest about my work and on the other, I’ve read too much (and too many books have made me happy) to indulge in such a ridiculous notion.

CB Doesn’t it seem arbitrary to name as your literary ancestors authors who wrote exclusively in Spanish? Do you include yourself in the Hispanic tradition, in a separate current from other languages? If a large part of Latin American literature (especially prose) is engaged in a dialogue with other traditions, I would say this is doubly true in your case.

RB I named authors who wrote in Spanish in order to limit the canon. Needless to say, I’m not one of those nationalist monsters who only reads what his native country produces. I’m interested in French literature, in Pascal, who could foresee his death, and in his struggle against melancholy, which to me seems more admirable now than ever before. Or the utopian naiveté of Fourier. And all the prose, typically anonymous, of courtly writers (some Mannerists and some anatomists) that somehow leads to the endless caverns of the Marquis de Sade. I’m also interested in American literature of the 1880s, especially Twain and Melville, and the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Whitman. As a teenager, I went through a phase when I only read Poe. Basically, I’m interested in Western literature, and I’m fairly familiar with all of it.

CB You only read Poe? I think there was a very contagious Poe virus going around in our generation—he was our idol, and I can easily see you as an infected teenager. But I’m imagining you as a poet, and I want to turn to your narratives. Do you choose the plot, or does the plot chase after you? How do you choose—or how does the plot choose you? And if neither is true, then what happens? Pinochet’s adviser on Marxism, the highly respected Chilean literary critic you baptize Sebastián Urrutia Lacroix, a priest and member of the Opus Dei, or the healer who practices Mesmerism, or the teenage poets known as the Savage Detectives—all these characters of yours have an historical counterpart. Why is that?

RB Yes, plots are a strange matter. I believe, even though there may be many exceptions, that at a certain moment a story chooses you and won’t leave you in peace. Fortunately, that’s not so important—the form, the structure, always belong to you, and without form or structure there’s no book, or at least in most cases that’s what happens. Let’s say the story and the plot arise by chance, that they belong to the realm of chance, that is, chaos, disorder, or to a realm that’s in constant turmoil (some call it apocalyptic). Form, on the other hand, is a choice made through intelligence, cunning and silence, all the weapons used by Ulysses in his battle against death. Form seeks an artifice; the story seeks a precipice. Or to use a metaphor from the Chilean countryside (a bad one, as you’ll see): It’s not that I don’t like precipices, but I prefer to see them from a bridge.

CB Women writers are constantly annoyed by this question, but I can’t help inflicting it on you—if only because after being asked it so many times, I regard it as an inevitable, though unpleasant ritual: How much autobiographical material is there in your work? To what extent is it a self-portrait?

RB A self-portrait? Not much. A self-portrait requires a certain kind of ego, a willingness to look at yourself over and over again, a manifest interest in what you are or have been. Literature is full of autobiographies, some very good, but self-portraits tend to be very bad, including self-portraits in poetry, which at first would seem to be a more suitable genre for self-portraiture than prose. Is my work autobiographical? In a sense, how could it not be? Every work, including the epic, is in some way autobiographical. In the Iliad we consider the destiny of two alliances, of a city, of two armies, but we also consider the destiny of Achilles and Priam and Hector, and all these characters, these individual voices, reflect the voice, the solitude, of the author.

CB When we were young poets, teenagers, and shared the same city (Mexico City in the seventies), you were the leader of a group of poets, the Infrarealists, which you’ve mythologized in your novel, Los detectives salvajes. Tell us a little about what poetry meant for the Infrarealists, about the Mexico City of the Infrarealists.

RB Infrarealism was a kind of Dada á la Mexicana. At one point there were many people, not only poets, but also painters and especially loafers and hangers-on, who considered themselves Infrarealists. Actually there were only two members, Mario Santiago and me. We both went to Europe in 1977. One night, in Rosellón, France, at the Port Vendres train station (which is very close to Perpignan), after having suffered a few disastrous adventures, we decided that the movement, such as it was, had come to an end.

CB Maybe it ended for you, but it remained vividly alive in our memories. Both of you were the terrors of the literary world. Back then I was part of a solemn, serious crowd—my world was so disjointed and shapeless that I needed something secure to hold on to. I liked the ceremonial nature of poetry readings and receptions, those absurd events full of rituals that I more or less adhered to, and you were the disrupters of these gatherings. Before my first poetry reading in Gandhi bookstore, way back in 1974, I prayed to God—not that I really believed in God, but I needed someone to call upon—and begged: Please, don’t let the Infrarealists come. I was terrified to read in public, but the anxiety that arose from my shyness was nothing compared to the panic I felt at the thought that I’d be ridiculed: halfway through the reading, the Infras might burst in and call me an idiot. You were there to convince the literary world that we shouldn’t take ourselves so seriously over work that wasn’t legitimately serious—and that with poetry (to contradict your Chilean saying) the precise point was to throw yourself off a precipice. But let me return to Bolaño and his work. You specialize in narratives—I can’t imagine anyone calling your novels “lyrical”— and yet you’re also a poet, an active poet. How do you reconcile the two?

RB Nicanor Parra says that the best novels are written in meter. And Harold Bloom says that the best poetry of the 20th century is written in prose. I agree with both. But on the other hand I find it difficult to consider myself an active poet. My understanding is that an active poet is someone who writes poems. I sent my most recent ones to you and I’m afraid they’re terrible, although of course, out of kindness and consideration, you lied. I don’t know. There’s something about poetry. Whatever the case, the important thing is to keep reading it. That’s more important than writing it, don’t you think? The truth is, reading is always more important than writing.

Translated by Margaret Carson

Anti-democratic nature of US capitalism is being exposed

NOAM CHOMSKY

Fri, Oct 10, 2008

Bretton Woods was the system of global financial management set up at the end of the second World War to ensure the interests of capital did not smother wider social concerns in post-war democracies. It was hated by the US neoliberals – the very people who created the banking crisis writes Noam Chomsky

THE SIMULTANEOUS unfolding of the US presidential campaign and unravelling of the financial markets presents one of those occasions where the political and economic systems starkly reveal their nature.

Passion about the campaign may not be universally shared but almost everybody can feel the anxiety from the foreclosure of a million homes, and concerns about jobs, savings and healthcare at risk.

The initial Bush proposals to deal with the crisis so reeked of totalitarianism that they were quickly modified. Under intense lobbyist pressure, they were reshaped as “a clear win for the largest institutions in the system . . . a way of dumping assets without having to fail or close”, as described by James Rickards, who negotiated the federal bailout for the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management in 1998, reminding us that we are treading familiar turf. The immediate origins of the current meltdown lie in the collapse of the housing bubble supervised by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, which sustained the struggling economy through the Bush years by debt-based consumer spending along with borrowing from abroad. But the roots are deeper. In part they lie in the triumph of financial liberalisation in the past 30 years – that is, freeing the markets as much as possible from government regulation.

These steps predictably increased the frequency and depth of severe reversals, which now threaten to bring about the worst crisis since the Great Depression.

Also predictably, the narrow sectors that reaped enormous profits from liberalisation are calling for massive state intervention to rescue collapsing financial institutions.

Such interventionism is a regular feature of state capitalism, though the scale today is unusual. A study by international economists Winfried Ruigrok and Rob van Tulder 15 years ago found that at least 20 companies in the Fortune 100 would not have survived if they had not been saved by their respective governments, and that many of the rest gained substantially by demanding that governments “socialise their losses,” as in today’s taxpayer-financed bailout. Such government intervention “has been the rule rather than the exception over the past two centuries”, they conclude.

In a functioning democratic society, a political campaign would address such fundamental issues, looking into root causes and cures, and proposing the means by which people suffering the consequences can take effective control.

The financial market “underprices risk” and is “systematically inefficient”, as economists John Eatwell and Lance Taylor wrote a decade ago, warning of the extreme dangers of financial liberalisation and reviewing the substantial costs already incurred – and proposing solutions, which have been ignored. One factor is failure to calculate the costs to those who do not participate in transactions. These “externalities” can be huge. Ignoring systemic risk leads to more risk-taking than would take place in an efficient economy, even by the narrowest measures.

The task of financial institutions is to take risks and, if well-managed, to ensure that potential losses to themselves will be covered. The emphasis is on “to themselves”. Under state capitalist rules, it is not their business to consider the cost to others – the “externalities” of decent survival – if their practices lead to financial crisis, as they regularly do.

Financial liberalisation has effects well beyond the economy. It has long been understood that it is a powerful weapon against democracy. Free capital movement creates what some have called a “virtual parliament” of investors and lenders, who closely monitor government programmes and “vote” against them if they are considered irrational: for the benefit of people, rather than concentrated private power.

Investors and lenders can “vote” by capital flight, attacks on currencies and other devices offered by financial liberalisation. That is one reason why the Bretton Woods system established by the United States and Britain after the second World War instituted capital controls and regulated currencies.*

The Great Depression and the war had aroused powerful radical democratic currents, ranging from the anti-fascist resistance to working class organisation. These pressures made it necessary to permit social democratic policies. The Bretton Woods system was designed in part to create a space for government action responding to public will – for some measure of democracy.

John Maynard Keynes, the British negotiator, considered the most important achievement of Bretton Woods to be the establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movement.

In dramatic contrast, in the neoliberal phase after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system in the 1970s, the US treasury now regards free capital mobility as a “fundamental right”, unlike such alleged “rights” as those guaranteed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights: health, education, decent employment, security and other rights that the Reagan and Bush administrations have dismissed as “letters to Santa Claus”, “preposterous”, mere “myths”.

In earlier years, the public had not been much of a problem. The reasons are reviewed by Barry Eichengreen in his standard scholarly history of the international monetary system. He explains that in the 19th century, governments had not yet been “politicised by universal male suffrage and the rise of trade unionism and parliamentary labour parties”. Therefore, the severe costs imposed by the virtual parliament could be transferred to the general population.

But with the radicalisation of the general public during the Great Depression and the anti-fascist war, that luxury was no longer available to private power and wealth. Hence in the Bretton Woods system, “limits on capital mobility substituted for limits on democracy as a source of insulation from market pressures”.

The obvious corollary is that after the dismantling of the postwar system, democracy is restricted. It has therefore become necessary to control and marginalise the public in some fashion, processes particularly evident in the more business-run societies like the United States. The management of electoral extravaganzas by the public relations industry is one illustration.

“Politics is the shadow cast on society by big business,” concluded America’s leading 20th century social philosopher John Dewey, and will remain so as long as power resides in “business for private profit through private control of banking, land, industry, reinforced by command of the press, press agents and other means of publicity and propaganda”.

The United States effectively has a one-party system, the business party, with two factions, Republicans and Democrats. There are differences between them. In his study Unequal Democracy: The Political Economy of the New Gilded Age, Larry Bartels shows that during the past six decades “real incomes of middle-class families have grown twice as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans, while the real incomes of working-poor families have grown six times as fast under Democrats as they have under Republicans”.

Differences can be detected in the current election as well. Voters should consider them, but without illusions about the political parties, and with the recognition that consistently over the centuries, progressive legislation and social welfare have been won by popular struggles, not gifts from above.

Those struggles follow a cycle of success and setback. They must be waged every day, not just once every four years, always with the goal of creating a genuinely responsive democratic society, from the voting booth to the workplace.

* The Bretton Woods system of global financial management was created by 730 delegates from all 44 Allied second World War nations who attended a UN-hosted Monetary and Financial Conference at the Mount Washington Hotel in Bretton Woods in New Hampshire in 1944.

Bretton Woods, which collapsed in 1971, was the system of rules, institutions, and procedures that regulated the international monetary system, under which were set up the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD) (now one of five institutions in the World Bank Group) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), which came into effect in 1945.

The chief feature of Bretton Woods was an obligation for each country to adopt a monetary policy that maintained the exchange rate of its currency within a fixed value.

The system collapsed when the US suspended convertibility from dollars to gold. This created the unique situation whereby the US dollar became the “reserve currency” for the other countries within Bretton Woods.

Noam Chomsky is professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His writings on linguistics and politics have just been collected in The Essential Chomsky, edited by Anthony Arnove, from the New Press. This article appeared first in the New York Times

© 2008 The Irish Times

Building Dwelling Thinking by Martin Heidegger

It’s Capitalism, Stupid!

Tuesday, September 23 2008 @ 07:03 PM CDT

Contributed by: Oread Daily

Oh the poor, poor rich.

Resistance to the Wall Street bailout is beginning to increase.

Some are asking, why do the rich get corporate socialism while the rest of us are stuck with the dregs of capitalist system in decay? Why is no one talking about welfare Cadillacs now?

IT’S CAPITALISM STUPID!

“The financial crisis on Wall Street has New York’s well-to-do reeling. The people who fuel the area’s economy with their spending on art, fashion, cars, restaurants, plastic surgery and other luxe goods and services are starting to cut back once-lavish budgets. As a result, those who cater to their every whim — from nanny agencies to jewelers to yacht builders — are seeing clients tighten their belts on expenses from the millions to the thousands.”
- By Ellen Gamerman, Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan and Francine Schwadel in Sep. 20, 2008, Wall Street Journal

Oh the poor, poor rich.

Resistance to the Wall Street bailout is beginning to increase.

Some are asking, why do the rich get corporate socialism while the rest of us are stuck with the dregs of capitalist system in decay? Why is no one talking about welfare Cadillacs now?

Already protests of the $750 billion proposed rescue of the rich plan have occurred from Los Angeles to Burlington, Vermont.

In LA Alvivon Hurd from ACORN told the local ABC affiliate, “I hope Congress does the right thing. I hope that they don’t okay it, and I hope they let them sink in their own muck.”

Trouble is all those Congress folks have been playing in the same much as the rich Americans they represent.

In Miami, site of another protest, Onial Merceus lost his North Miami home to foreclosure Tuesday. No one came to bail him out. At the protest Wander Adderly of Fort Lauderdale told the Miami Herald, ”If they can bail out AIG, they can help bail us out of the foreclosure crisis.”

Thing is Onial and Wander aren’t rich enough to get bailed out.

Truth of the matter is governmental and business leaders haven’t a clue as to what to do about the latest capitalist crisis. They are putting huge bandaids on a system in need of a complete overhaul at least, and elimination at best.

Wealthy Democrats and Republican leaders are lost in a quandary of bailout soup. They all tout the “free market” until it hits them and their rich buddies in their wallets, then suddenly the market is too free.

Gerald Celente Founder/Director, The Trends Research Institute, is well respected for his track record of picking business, consumer, political, and economic trends before they come to pass. Celente predicted an economic 9/11 more than a year ago (of course, my wife predicted it long before that). Celente says the worst is yet to come. He has little use for this federal bailout and writes about it in a piece in the Hudson Valley Press:

“On the evening of September 18th 2008, the American democratic system was replaced by a financial dictatorship.”

What was billed as a “Federal Bailout” was nothing less than a bloodless coup. The Wall Street Gang had taken over the White House and control of Washington. Congress promised not to resist, and pledged to pass legislation as demanded.”

…Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, spearheading the coup, sought unrestricted authority to spend the nation’s money as he saw fit. The first order of business by the Economic Czar was to take trillions of dollars of bad debt from crumbling investment banks and insurance companies and transfer it to the backs of already debt-burdened citizens.”

…In simple language, with cameras rolling, in broad daylight, the American public was robbed blind. This wasn’t a magic show. There were no hidden tricks or sleights of hand. “We want this to be clean, we want this to be quick,” demanded the Economic Czar. “We need to get this done quickly, and the cleaner the better,” intoned President Bush, with the urgency of his “smoking gun that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud” logic he used as a pretext to invade Iraq.”

…Presidential candidate Barack Obama promised to “fully support” the plan and called on Congress to take “immediate action.” Republican challenger John McCain said he would further review the proposal before passing judgment while Congressional leaders from both parties have signed on with their support.

Americans were told they would have to pay to rescue the very companies whose unregulated greed, fraud and recklessness had created the crisis in the first place. Considered nobodies by the authorities, the people had no voice and had no choice.”

Anybody heard tell of the long dismissed REVOLUTION lately.

The following is from Indypendent.

Get Out the Pitchforks and Lighted Torches: Protest at Wall St. This Thursday at 4 p.m.
By John Tarleton

There is a polite debate going on Inside-the-Beltway as well as on the presidential campaign about how exactly to give away the $700 billion that Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson is demanding as a bailout for the bankers and financiers who presided over last week’s economic meltdown. What hasn’t been visible is the shock and outrage that much of the public is feeling over this proposed looting of the public treasury. That, hopefully, will change on Thursday afternoon at 4 p.m. when protesters plan to gather (see announcement below) at Bowling Green Plaza, just south of Wall St.

With the world famous financial district as a prop and the eyes of the national and global media on us, those of us who live in New York can make visible the anger and concern so many people and we can do so at a strategic moment as Congress appears set to pass legislation by the end of the week before adjourning for the fall campaign season.

There is no central group organizing this event. But as the call to action that began circulating Monday afternoon noted, “Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?”

ANNOUNCEMENT FOR THURSDAY’S PROTEST

When: 4pm Thursday, September 25!
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.
Why: To say we won’t pay for the Wall Street bailout

Everyone,

This week the White House is going to try to push through the biggest
robbery in world history with nary a stitch of debate to bail out the Wall
Street bastards who created this economic apocalypse in the first place.

This is the financial equivalent of September 11. They think, just like
with the Patriot Act, they can use the shock to force through the
“therapy,” and we’ll just roll over!

Think about it: They said providing healthcare for 9 million children,
perhaps costing $6 billion a year, was too expensive, but there’s
evidently no sum of money large enough that will sate the Wall Street
pigs. If this passes, forget about any money for environmental protection,
to counter global warming, for education, for national healthcare, to
rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the
debate. Let’s demonstrate this Thursday at 4pm in Wall Street (see below).
We know the congressional Democrats will peep meekly before caving in like
they have on everything else, from FISA to the Iraq War.

With Bear Stearns, Fannie and Freddie, AIG, the money markets and now this
omnibus bailout, well in excess of $1 trillion will be distributed from
the poor, workers and middle class to the scum floating on top.

This whole mess gives lie to the free market. The Feds are propping up
stock prices, directing buyouts, subsidizing crooks and swindlers who
already made a killing off the mortgage bubble.

Worst of all, even before any details have been hashed out, The New York
Times admits that “Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it,”
and its chief financial correspondent writes that the Bush administration
wants “Congress to give them a blank check to do whatever they want,
whatever the cost, with no one able to watch them closely.”

It’s socialism for the rich and dog-eat-dog capitalism for the rest of us.
Let’s take it to the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this
Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park,
which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the
northern tip.

By having it later in the day we can show these thieves, as they leave
work, we’re not their suckers. Plus, anyone who can’t get off work can
still join us downtown as soon as they are able.

There is no agenda, no leaders, no organizing group, nothing to endorse
other than we’re not going to pay! Let the bondholders pay, let the banks
pay, let those who brought the “toxic” mortgage-backed securities pay!

On this list are many key organizers and activists. We have a huge amount of
connections – we all know many other organizations, activists and
community groups. We know P.R. folk who can quickly write up and
distribute press releases, those who can contact legal observers, media
activists who can spread the word, the videographers who can film the
event, etc.

Do whatever you can – make and distribute your own flyers, contact all
your groups and friends. This crime is without precedence and we can’t be
silent! What’s the point of waiting for someone else to organize a protest
two months from now, long after the crime has been perpetrated?

We have everything we need to create a large, peaceful, loud
demonstration. Millions of others must feel the same way; they just don’t
know what to do. Let’s take the lead and make this the start! 

new left review 49 jan feb 2008 29 

Alain Badiou

THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS 

There was a tangible sense of depression in the air in France 

in the aftermath of Sarkozy’s victory.1 It is often said that 

unexpected blows are the worst, but expected ones some- 

times prove debilitating in a different way. It can be oddly 

dispiriting when an election is won by the candidate who has led in the 

opinion polls from the start, just as when the favourite horse wins the 

race; anyone with the slightest feeling for a wager, a risk, an exception or 

a rupture would rather see an outsider upset the odds. Yet it could hardly 

have been the bare fact of Nicolas Sarkozy as President that seemed to 

come as such a disorientating blow to the French left in the aftermath 

of May 2007. Something else was at stake—some complex of factors for 

which ‘Sarkozy’ is merely a name. How should it be understood? 

An initial factor was the way in which the outcome affirmed the mani- 

fest powerlessness of any genuinely emancipatory programme within 

the electoral system: preferences are duly recorded, in the passive man- 

ner of a seismograph, but the process is one that by its nature excludes 

any embodiments of dissenting political will. A second component of 

the left’s depressive disorientation after May 2007 was an overwhelming 

bout of historical nostalgia. The political order that emerged from World 

War Two in France—with its unambiguous referents of ‘left’ and ‘right’, 

and its consensus, shared by Gaullists and Communists alike, on the 

balance-sheet of the Occupation, Resistance and Liberation—has now 

collapsed. This is one reason for Sarkozy’s ostentatious dinners, yacht- 

ing holidays and so on—a way of saying that the left no longer frightens 

anyone: Vivent les riches, and to hell with the poor. Understandably, this 

may fill the sincere souls of the left with nostalgia for the good old days— 

Mitterrand, De Gaulle, Marchais, even Chirac, Gaullism’s Brezhnev, who 

knew that to do nothing was the easiest way to let the system die.

Sarkozy has now finally finished off the cadaverous form of Gaullism over 

which Chirac presided. The Socialists’ collapse had already been antici- 

pated in the rout of Jospin in the presidential elections of 2002 (and still 

more by the disastrous decision to embrace Chirac in the second round). 

The present decomposition of the Socialist Party, however, is not just a 

matter of its political poverty, apparent now for many years, nor of the 

actual size of the vote—47 per cent is not much worse than its other recent 

scores. Rather, the election of Sarkozy appears to have struck a blow to the 

entire symbolic structuring of French political life: the system of orienta- 

tion itself has suffered a defeat. An important symptom of the resulting 

disorientation is the number of former Socialist placemen rushing to take 

up appointments under Sarkozy, the centre-left opinion-makers singing 

his praises; the rats have fled the sinking ship in impressive numbers. 

The underlying rationale is, of course, that of the single party: since all 

accept the logic of the existing capitalist order, market economy and so 

forth, why maintain the fiction of opposing parties? 

A third component of the contemporary disorientation arose from the 

outcome of the electoral conflict itself. I have characterized the 2007 

presidential elections—pitting Sarkozy against Royal—as the clash of 

two types of fear. The first is the fear felt by the privileged, alarmed that 

their position may be assailable. In France this manifests itself as fear of 

foreigners, workers, youth from the banlieue, Muslims, black Africans. 

Essentially conservative, it creates a longing for a protective master, even 

one who oppresses and impoverishes you further. The current embodi- 

ment of this figure is, of course, the over-stimulated police chief: Sarkozy. 

In electoral terms, this is contested not by a resounding affirmation of 

self-determining heterogeneity, but by the fear of this fear: a fear, too, of 

the cop figure, whom the petit-bourgeois socialist voter neither knows 

nor likes. This ‘fear of the fear’ is a secondary, derivative emotion, whose 

content—beyond the sentiment itself—is barely detectable; the Royal 

camp had no concept of any alliance with the excluded or oppressed; 

the most it could envisage was to reap the dubious benefits of fear. For 

both sides, a total consensus reigned on Palestine, Iran, Afghanistan 

(where French forces are fighting), Lebanon (ditto), Africa (swarming 

with French military ‘administrators’). Public discussion of alternatives 

on these issues was on neither party’s agenda. 

1 

This is an edited extract from De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, Circonstances, 4, 

Nouvelles Editions Lignes, Paris 2007; to be published in English by Verso as What 

Do We Mean When We Say ‘Sarkozy’? in 2008. 

badiou: After Sarkozy 31 

The conflict between the primary fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ was set- 

tled in favour of the former. There was a visceral reflex in play here, very 

apparent in the faces of those partying over Sarkozy’s victory. For those 

in the grip of the ‘fear of the fear’ there was a corresponding negative 

reflex, flinching from the result: this was the third component of 2007’s 

depressive disorientation. We should not underestimate the role of what 

Althusser called the ‘ideological state apparatus’—increasingly through 

the media, with the press now playing a more sophisticated part than tv 

and radio—in formulating and mobilizing such collective sentiments. 

Within the electoral process there has, it seems, been a weakening of 

the real; a process even further advanced with regard to the secondary 

‘fear of the fear’ than with the primitive, reactionary one. We react, after 

all, to a real situation, whereas the ‘fear of the fear’ merely takes fright at 

the scale of that reaction, and is thus at a still further remove from real- 

ity. The vacuity of this position manifested itself perfectly in the empty 

exaltations of Ségolène Royal. 

Electoralism and the state 

If we posit a definition of politics as ‘collective action, organized by cer- 

tain principles, that aims to unfold the consequences of a new possibility 

which is currently repressed by the dominant order’, then we would 

have to conclude that the electoral mechanism is an essentially apoliti- 

cal procedure. This can be seen in the gulf between the massive formal 

imperative to vote and the free-floating, if not non-existent nature of 

political or ideological convictions. It is good to vote, to give a form to my 

fears; but it is hard to believe that what I am voting for is a good thing in 

itself. This is not to say that the electoral-democratic system is repressive 

per se; rather, that the electoral process is incorporated into a state form, 

that of capitalo-parliamentarianism, appropriate for the maintenance of 

the established order, and consequently serves a conservative function. 

This creates a further feeling of powerlessness: if ordinary citizens have 

no handle on state decision-making save the vote, it is hard to see what 

way forward there could be for an emancipatory politics. 

If the electoral mechanism is not a political but a state procedure, what 

does it achieve? Drawing on the lessons of 2007, one effect is to incor- 

porate both the fear and the ‘fear of the fear’ into the state—to invest 

the state with these mass-subjective elements, the better to legitimate 

it as an object of fear in its own right, equipped for terror and coercion. 

For the world horizon of democracy is increasingly defined by war. The 

West is engaged on an expanding number of fronts: the maintenance of 

the existing order with its gigantic disparities has an irreducible military 

component; the duality of the worlds of rich and poor can only be sus- 

tained by force. This creates a particular dialectic of war and fear. Our 

governments explain that they are waging war abroad in order to protect 

us from it at home. If Western troops do not hunt down the terrorists 

in Afghanistan or Chechnya, they will come over here to organize the 

resentful rabble outcasts. 

Strategic neo-Pétainism 

In France, this alliance of fear and war has classically gone by the 

name of Pétainism. The mass ideology of Pétainism—responsible for 

its widespread success between 1940 and 1944—rested in part on the 

fear generated by the First World War: Marshal Pétain would protect 

France from the disastrous effects of the Second, by keeping well out 

of it. In the Marshal’s own words, it was necessary to be more afraid of 

war than of defeat. The vast majority of the French accepted the rela- 

tive tranquillity of a consensual defeat and most got off fairly lightly 

during the War, compared to the Russians or even the English. The 

analogous project today is based on the belief that the French need sim- 

ply to accept the laws of the us-led world model and all will be well: 

France will be protected from the disastrous effects of war and global 

disparity. This form of neo-Pétainism as a mass ideology is effectively 

on offer from both parties today. In what follows, I will argue that it is 

a key analytical element in understanding the disorientation that goes 

by the name of ‘Sarkozy’; to grasp the latter in its overall dimension, its 

historicity and intelligibility, requires us to go back to what I will call its 

Pétainist ‘transcendental’.2 

I am not saying, of course, that circumstances today resemble the 

defeat of 1940, or that Sarkozy resembles Pétain. The point is a more 

formal one: that the unconscious national-historical roots of that which 

goes by the name of Sarkozy are to be found in this Pétainist configu- 

ration, in which the disorientation itself is solemnly enacted from the 

2 

See my Logiques des mondes, Paris 2006 for a full development of the concept of 

‘transcendentals’ and their function, which is to govern the order of appearance of 

multiplicities within a world.

summit of the state, and presented as a historical turning-point. This 

matrix has been a recurring pattern in French history. It goes back to the 

Restoration of 1815 when a post-Revolutionary government, eagerly sup- 

ported by émigrés and opportunists, was brought back in the foreigners’ 

baggage-train and declared, with the consent of a worn-out population, 

that it would restore public morality and order. In 1940, military defeat 

once again served as the context for the disorientating reversal of the real 

content of state action: the Vichy government spoke incessantly of the 

‘nation’, yet was installed by the German Occupation; the most corrupt 

of oligarchs were to lead the country out of moral crisis; Pétain himself, 

an ageing general in the service of property, would be the embodiment 

of national rebirth. 

Numerous aspects of this neo-Pétainist tradition are in evidence today. 

Typically, capitulation and servility are presented as invention and regen- 

eration. These were central themes of Sarkozy’s campaign: the Mayor of 

Neuilly would transform the French economy and put the country back 

to work. The real content, of course, is a politics of continuous obedi- 

ence to the demands of high finance, in the name of national renewal. A 

second characteristic is that of decline and ‘moral crisis’, which justifies 

the repressive measures taken in the name of regeneration. Morality is 

invoked, as so often, in place of politics and against any popular mobi- 

lization. Appeal is made instead to the virtues of hard work, discipline, 

the family: ‘merit should be rewarded’. This typical displacement of poli- 

tics by morality has been prepared, from the 1970s ‘new philosophers’ 

onwards, by all who have laboured to ‘moralize’ historical judgement. 

The object is in reality political: to maintain that national decline has 

nothing to do with the high servants of capital but is the fault of certain 

ill-intentioned elements of the population—currently, foreign workers 

and young people from the banlieue. 

A third characteristic of neo-Pétainism is the paradigmatic function 

of foreign experience. The example of correction always comes from 

abroad, from countries that have long overcome their moral crises. For 

Pétain, the shining examples were Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany 

and Franco’s Spain: leaders who had put their countries back on their 

feet. The political aesthetic is that of imitation: like Plato’s demiurge, the 

state must shape society with its eyes fixed on foreign models. Today, of 

course, the examples are Bush’s America and Blair’s Britain. 

A fourth characteristic is the notion that the source of the current cri- 

sis lies in a disastrous past event. For the proto-Pétainism of the 1815 

Restoration, this was of course the Revolution and the beheading of the 

King. For Pétain himself in 1940 it was the Popular Front, the Blum 

government and above all the great strikes and factory occupations of 

1936. The possessing classes far preferred the German Occupation to 

the fear which these disorders had provoked. For Sarkozy, the evils of 

May 68—forty years ago—have been constantly invoked as the cause 

of the current ‘crisis of values’. Neo-Pétainism provides a usefully sim- 

plified reading of history that links a negative event, generally with a 

working-class or popular structure, and a positive one, with a military 

or state structure, as a solution to the first. The arc between 1968 and 

2007 can thus be offered as a source of legitimacy for the Sarkozy gov- 

ernment, as the historic actor that will finally embark on the correction 

needed in the wake of the inaugural damaging event. Finally, there is the 

element of racism. Under Pétain this was brutally explicit: getting rid of 

the Jews. Today it is voiced in a more insinuating fashion: ‘we are not an 

inferior race’—the implication being, ‘unlike others’; ‘the true French 

need not doubt the legitimacy of their country’s actions’—in Algeria 

and elsewhere. In the light of these criteria, we can therefore point: the 

disorientation that goes by the name of ‘Sarkozy’ may be analysed as the 

latest manifestation of the Pétainist transcendental. 

The spectre 

At first sight there may seem something strange about the new President’s 

insistence that the solution to the country’s moral crisis, the goal of his 

‘renewal’ process, was ‘to do away with May 68, once and for all’. Most 

of us were under the impression that it was long gone anyway. What is 

haunting the regime, under the name of May 68? We can only assume 

that it is the ‘spectre of communism’, in one of its last real manifesta- 

tions. He would say (to give a Sarkozian prosopopoeia): ‘We refuse to be 

haunted by anything at all. It is not enough that empirical communism 

has disappeared. We want all possible forms of it banished. Even the 

hypothesis of communism—generic name of our defeat—must become 

unmentionable.’ 

What is the communist hypothesis? In its generic sense, given in its 

canonic Manifesto, ‘communist’ means, first, that the logic of class— 

the fundamental subordination of labour to a dominant class, the 

arrangement that has persisted since Antiquity—is not inevitable; it 

can be overcome. The communist hypothesis is that a different collec- 

tive organization is practicable, one that will eliminate the inequality of 

wealth and even the division of labour. The private appropriation of mas- 

sive fortunes and their transmission by inheritance will disappear. The 

existence of a coercive state, separate from civil society, will no longer 

appear a necessity: a long process of reorganization based on a free asso- 

ciation of producers will see it withering away. 

‘Communism’ as such denotes only this very general set of intellectual 

representations. It is what Kant called an Idea, with a regulatory func- 

tion, rather than a programme. It is foolish to call such communist 

principles utopian; in the sense that I have defined them here they are 

intellectual patterns, always actualized in a different fashion. As a pure 

Idea of equality, the communist hypothesis has no doubt existed since 

the beginnings of the state. As soon as mass action opposes state coer- 

cion in the name of egalitarian justice, rudiments or fragments of the 

hypothesis start to appear. Popular revolts—the slaves led by Spartacus, 

the peasants led by Müntzer—might be identified as practical examples 

of this ‘communist invariant’. With the French Revolution, the commu- 

nist hypothesis then inaugurates the epoch of political modernity. 

What remains is to determine the point at which we now find ourselves 

in the history of the communist hypothesis. A fresco of the modern 

period would show two great sequences in its development, with a 

forty-year gap between them. The first is that of the setting in place of 

the communist hypothesis; the second, of preliminary attempts at its 

realization. The first sequence runs from the French Revolution to the 

Paris Commune; let us say, 1792 to 1871. It links the popular mass move- 

ment to the seizure of power, through the insurrectional overthrow of 

the existing order; this revolution will abolish the old forms of society 

and install ‘the community of equals’. In the course of the century, the 

formless popular movement made up of townsfolk, artisans and stu- 

dents came increasingly under the leadership of the working class. The 

sequence culminated in the striking novelty—and radical defeat—of the 

Paris Commune. For the Commune demonstrated both the extraordi- 

nary energy of this combination of popular movement, working-class 

leadership and armed insurrection, and its limits: the communards 

could neither establish the revolution on a national footing nor defend it 

against the foreign-backed forces of the counter-revolution.

The second sequence of the communist hypothesis runs from 1917 

to 1976: from the Bolshevik Revolution to the end of the Cultural 

Revolution and the militant upsurge throughout the world during the 

years 1966–75. It was dominated by the question: how to win? How to 

hold out—unlike the Paris Commune—against the armed reaction of 

the possessing classes; how to organize the new power so as to protect it 

against the onslaught of its enemies? It was no longer a question of for- 

mulating and testing the communist hypothesis, but of realizing it: what 

the 19th century had dreamt, the 20th would accomplish. The obses- 

sion with victory, centred around questions of organization, found its 

principal expression in the ‘iron discipline’ of the communist party—the 

characteristic construction of the second sequence of the hypothesis. The 

party effectively solved the question inherited from the first sequence: 

the revolution prevailed, either through insurrection or prolonged popu- 

lar war, in Russia, China, Czechoslovakia, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, and 

succeeded in establishing a new order. 

But the second sequence in turn created a further problem, which it 

could not solve using the methods it had developed in response to the 

problems of the first. The party had been an appropriate tool for the 

overthrow of weakened reactionary regimes, but it proved ill-adapted 

for the construction of the ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’ in the sense 

that Marx had intended—that is, a temporary state, organizing the 

transition to the non-state: its dialectical ‘withering away’. Instead, the 

party-state developed into a new form of authoritarianism. Some of these 

regimes made real strides in education, public health, the valorization 

of labour, and so on; and they provided an international constraint on 

the arrogance of the imperialist powers. However, the statist principle 

in itself proved corrupt and, in the long run, ineffective. Police coercion 

could not save the ‘socialist’ state from internal bureaucratic inertia; 

and within fifty years it was clear that it would never prevail in the fero- 

cious competition imposed by its capitalist adversaries. The last great 

convulsions of the second sequence—the Cultural Revolution and May 

68, in its broadest sense—can be understood as attempts to deal with 

the inadequacy of the party. 

Interludes 

Between the end of the first sequence and the beginning of the second 

there was a forty-year interval during which the communist hypothesis 

was declared to be untenable: the decades from 1871 to 1914 saw impe- 

rialism triumphant across the globe. Since the second sequence came 

to an end in the 1970s we have been in another such interval, with the 

adversary in the ascendant once more. What is at stake in these circum- 

stances is the eventual opening of a new sequence of the communist 

hypothesis. But it is clear that this will not be—cannot be—the con- 

tinuation of the second one. Marxism, the workers’ movement, mass 

democracy, Leninism, the party of the proletariat, the socialist state—all 

the inventions of the 20th century—are not really useful to us any more. 

At the theoretical level they certainly deserve further study and consider- 

ation; but at the level of practical politics they have become unworkable. 

The second sequence is over and it is pointless to try to restore it. 

At this point, during an interval dominated by the enemy, when new 

experiments are tightly circumscribed, it is not possible to say with cer- 

tainty what the character of the third sequence will be. But the general 

direction seems discernible: it will involve a new relation between the 

political movement and the level of the ideological—one that was prefig- 

ured in the expression ‘cultural revolution’ or in the May 68 notion of a 

‘revolution of the mind’. We will still retain the theoretical and historical 

lessons that issued from the first sequence, and the centrality of victory 

that issued from the second. But the solution will be neither the form- 

less, or multi-form, popular movement inspired by the intelligence of the 

multitude—as Negri and the alter-globalists believe—nor the renewed 

and democratized mass communist party, as some of the Trotskyists 

and Maoists hope. The (19th-century) movement and the (20th-century) 

party were specific modes of the communist hypothesis; it is no longer 

possible to return to them. Instead, after the negative experiences of the 

‘socialist’ states and the ambiguous lessons of the Cultural Revolution 

and May 68, our task is to bring the communist hypothesis into exist- 

ence in another mode, to help it emerge within new forms of political 

experience. This is why our work is so complicated, so experimental. 

We must focus on its conditions of existence, rather than just improv- 

ing its methods. We need to re-install the communist hypothesis—the 

proposition that the subordination of labour to the dominant class is not 

inevitable—within the ideological sphere. 

What might this involve? Experimentally, we might conceive of finding 

a point that would stand outside the temporality of the dominant order 

and what Lacan once called ‘the service of wealth’. Any point, so long  

as it is in formal opposition to such service, and offers the discipline 

of a universal truth. One such might be the declaration: ‘There is only 

one world’. What would this imply? Contemporary capitalism boasts, 

of course, that it has created a global order; its opponents too speak of 

‘alter-globalization’. Essentially, they propose a definition of politics as 

a practical means of moving from the world as it is to the world as we 

would wish it to be. But does a single world of human subjects exist? The 

‘one world’ of globalization is solely one of things—objects for sale—and 

monetary signs: the world market as foreseen by Marx. The overwhelm- 

ing majority of the population have at best restricted access to this world. 

They are locked out, often literally so. 

The fall of the Berlin Wall was supposed to signal the advent of the single 

world of freedom and democracy. Twenty years later, it is clear that the 

world’s wall has simply shifted: instead of separating East and West it 

now divides the rich capitalist North from the poor and devastated South. 

New walls are being constructed all over the world: between Palestinians 

and Israelis, between Mexico and the United States, between Africa and 

the Spanish enclaves, between the pleasures of wealth and the desires of 

the poor, whether they be peasants in villages or urban dwellers in fave- 

las, banlieues, estates, hostels, squats and shantytowns. The price of the 

supposedly unified world of capital is the brutal division of human exist- 

ence into regions separated by police dogs, bureaucratic controls, naval 

patrols, barbed wire and expulsions. The ‘problem of immigration’ is, 

in reality, the fact that the conditions faced by workers from other coun- 

tries provide living proof that—in human terms—the ‘unified world’ of 

globalization is a sham.

A performative unity 

The political problem, then, has to be reversed. We cannot start from 

an analytic agreement on the existence of the world and proceed to 

normative action with regard to its characteristics. The disagreement 

is not over qualities but over existence. Confronted with the artificial 

and murderous division of the world into two—a disjunction named 

by the very term, ‘the West’—we must affirm the existence of the single 

world right from the start, as axiom and principle. The simple phrase, 

‘there is only one world’, is not an objective conclusion. It is perfor- 

mative: we are deciding that this is how it is for us. Faithful to this 

point, it is then a question of elucidating the consequences that follow 

from this simple declaration. 

A first consequence is the recognition that all belong to the same world as 

myself: the African worker I see in the restaurant kitchen, the Moroccan 

I see digging a hole in the road, the veiled woman looking after children 

in a park. That is where we reverse the dominant idea of the world united 

by objects and signs, to make a unity in terms of living, acting beings, 

here and now. These people, different from me in terms of language, 

clothes, religion, food, education, exist exactly as I do myself; since they 

exist like me, I can discuss with them—and, as with anyone else, we can 

agree and disagree about things. But on the precondition that they and I 

exist in the same world. 

At this point, the objection about cultural difference will be raised: ‘our’ 

world is made up of those who accept ‘our’ values—democracy, respect 

for women, human rights. Those whose culture is contrary to this are 

not really part of the same world; if they want to join it they have to 

share our values, to ‘integrate’. As Sarkozy put it: ‘If foreigners want 

to remain in France, they have to love France; otherwise, they should 

leave.’ But to place conditions is already to have abandoned the princi- 

ple, ‘there is only one world of living men and women’. It may be said 

that we need to take the laws of each country into account. Indeed; but 

a law does not set a precondition for belonging to the world. It is simply 

a provisional rule that exists in a particular region of the single world. 

And no one is asked to love a law, simply to obey it. The single world 

of living women and men may well have laws; what it cannot have is 

subjective or ‘cultural’ preconditions for existence within it—to demand 

that you have to be like everyone else. The single world is precisely the 

place where an unlimited set of differences exist. Philosophically, far 

from casting doubt on the unity of the world, these differences are its 

principle of existence. 

The question then arises whether anything governs these unlimited dif- 

ferences. There may well be only one world, but does that mean that 

being French, or a Moroccan living in France, or Muslim in a country 

of Christian traditions, is nothing? Or should we see the persistence of 

such identities as an obstacle? The simplest definition of ‘identity’ is 

the series of characteristics and properties by which an individual or a 

group recognizes itself as its ‘self’. But what is this ‘self’? It is that which, 

across all the characteristic properties of identity, remains more or less 

invariant. It is possible, then, to say that an identity is the ensemble of 

properties that support an invariance. For example, the identity of an art- 

ist is that by which the invariance of his or her style can be recognized; 

homosexual identity is composed of everything bound up with the invar- 

iance of the possible object of desire; the identity of a foreign community 

in a country is that by which membership of this community can be 

recognized: language, gestures, dress, dietary habits, etc. 

Defined in this way, by invariants, identity is doubly related to dif- 

ference: on the one hand, identity is that which is different from the 

rest; on the other, it is that which does not become different, which 

is invariant. The affirmation of identity has two further aspects. The 

first form is negative. It consists of desperately maintaining that I am 

not the other. This is often indispensable, in the face of authoritar- 

ian demands for integration, for example. The Moroccan worker will 

forcefully affirm that his traditions and customs are not those of the 

petty-bourgeois European; he will even reinforce the characteristics of 

his religious or customary identity. The second involves the immanent 

development of identity within a new situation—rather like Nietzsche’s 

famous maxim, ‘become what you are’. The Moroccan worker does not 

abandon that which constitutes his individual identity, whether socially 

or in the family; but he will gradually adapt all this, in a creative fashion, 

to the place in which he finds himself. He will thus invent what he is—a 

Moroccan worker in Paris—not through any internal rupture, but by 

an expansion of identity. 

The political consequences of the axiom, ‘there is only one world’, will 

work to consolidate what is universal in identities. An example—a 

local experiment—would be a meeting held recently in Paris, where 

undocumented workers and French nationals came together to 

demand the abolition of persecutory laws, police raids and expulsions; 

to demand that foreign workers be recognized simply in terms of their 

presence: that no one is illegal; all demands that are very natural for 

people who are basically in the same existential situation—people of 

the same world.

Time and courage 

‘In such great misfortune, what remains to you?’ Corneille’s Medea is 

asked by her confidante. ‘Myself! Myself, I say, and it is enough’, comes 

the reply. What Medea retains is the courage to decide her own fate; 

and courage, I would suggest, is the principal virtue in face of the diso- 

rientation of our own times. Lacan also raises the issue in discussing 

the analytical cure for depressive debility: should this not end in grand 

dialectical discussions on courage and justice, on the model of Plato’s 

dialogues? In the famous ‘Dialogue on Courage’, General Laches, ques- 

tioned by Socrates, replies: ‘Courage is when I see the enemy and run 

towards him to engage him in a fight.’ Socrates is not particularly satis- 

fied with this, of course, and gently takes the General to task: ‘It’s a good 

example of courage, but an example is not a definition.’ Running the 

same risks as General Laches, I will give my definition. 

First, I would retain the status of courage as a virtue—that is, not an 

innate disposition, but something that constructs itself, and which one 

constructs, in practice. Courage, then, is the virtue which manifests 

itself through endurance in the impossible. This is not simply a matter 

of a momentary encounter with the impossible: that would be heroism, 

not courage. Heroism has always been represented not as a virtue but as 

a posture: as the moment when one turns to meet the impossible face to 

face. The virtue of courage constructs itself through endurance within 

the impossible; time is its raw material. What takes courage is to operate 

in terms of a different durée to that imposed by the law of the world. The 

point we are seeking must be one that can connect to another order of 

time. Those imprisoned within the temporality assigned us by the domi- 

nant order will always be prone to exclaim, as so many Socialist Party 

henchmen have done, ‘Twelve years of Chirac, and now we have to wait 

for another round of elections. Seventeen years; perhaps twenty-two; a 

whole lifetime!’ At best, they will become depressed and disorientated; 

at worst, rats. 

In many respects we are closer today to the questions of the 19th century 

than to the revolutionary history of the 20th. A wide variety of 19th- 

century phenomena are reappearing: vast zones of poverty, widening 

inequalities, politics dissolved into the ‘service of wealth’, the nihilism  

of large sections of the young, the servility of much of the intelligentsia; 

the cramped, besieged experimentalism of a few groups seeking ways 

to express the communist hypothesis . . . Which is no doubt why, as 

in the 19th century, it is not the victory of the hypothesis which is at 

stake today, but the conditions of its existence. This is our task, during 

the reactionary interlude that now prevails: through the combination 

of thought processes—always global, or universal, in character—and 

political experience, always local or singular, yet transmissible, to renew 

the existence of the communist hypothesis, in our consciousness and 

on the ground.

NAVIGATING MOVEMENTS 

When you walk, each step is the body’s movement against falling — each 

movement is felt in our potential for freedom as we move with the earth’s 

gravitational pull. When we navigate our way through the world, there are 

different pulls, constraints and freedoms that move us forward and propel us 

into life. But in the changing face of capitalism, media information and 

technologies — which circulate the globe in more virtual and less obvious ways 

— how do the constraints on freedom involve our affective and embodied 

dimensions of experience? That is, how do we come to feel and respond to 

life and reality itself when new virtualised forms of power mark our every 

step, when the media and political activity continually feed on our 

insecurities — for instance, when a political leader can deploy overseas troops 

to make a country feel safe and secure in the face of ‘terror’. Our beliefs and 

hopes can be galvanised for this ‘good’, and as a tool for orchestrating attacks 

on ‘evil’ and threats to national security. Against this framework of despair 

that enact our relations to the world — violence, terror and the virtual lines 

of capital flow — what are the hopes for political intervention? 

Philosopher Brian Massumi explores the hopes that lie across these fields of 

movement; the potentials for freedom, and the power relations that operate 

in the new ‘societies of control’. These are all ethical issues — about the 

reality of living, the faith and belief in the world that makes us care for our 

belonging to it. Massumi’s diverse writings and philosophical perspectives 

radicalise ideas of affect — the experiences and dimensions of living — that 

are the force of individual and political reality. His writings are concerned 

with the practice of everyday life, and the relations of experience that 

engage us in the world, and our ethical practices. He is based in Montreal. 

Movements — hope, feeling, affect

I’d like to think about hope and the affective dimensions of our experience — 

what freedoms are possible in the new and ‘virtualised’ global and political 

economies that frame our lives. To begin, though, what are your thoughts on 

the potential of hope for these times? 

From my own point of view, the way that a concept like hope can be made 

useful is when it is not connected to an expected success — when it starts to 

be something different from optimism — because when you start trying to 

think ahead into the future from the present point, rationally there really 

isn’t much room for hope. Globally it’s a very pessimistic affair, with 

economic inequalities increasing year by year, with health and sanitation 

levels steadily decreasing in many regions, with the global effects of 

environmental deterioration already being felt, with conflicts among nations 

and peoples apparently only getting more intractable, leading to mass 

displacements of workers and refugees … It seems such a mess that I think it 

can be paralysing. If hope is the opposite of pessimism, then there’s precious 

little to be had. On the other hand, if hope is separated from concepts of 

optimism and pessimism, from a wishful projection of success or even some 

kind of a rational calculation of outcomes, then I think it starts to be 

interesting — because it places it in the present. 

Yes — the idea of hope in the present is vital. Otherwise we endlessly look to 

the future or toward some utopian dream of a better society or life, which 

can only leave us disappointed, and if we see pessimism as the nature flow 

from this, we can only be paralysed as you suggest.  

Yes, because in every situation there are any number of levels of organisation 

and tendencies in play, in cooperation with each other or at cross-purposes. 

The way all the elements interrelate is so complex that it isn’t necessarily 

comprehensible in one go. There’s always a sort of vagueness surrounding the 

situation, an uncertainty about where you might be able to go and what you 

might be able to do once you exit that particular context. This uncertainty 

can actually be empowering — once you realise that it gives you a margin of 

manoeuvrability and you focus on that, rather than on projecting success or 

failure. It gives you the feeling that there is always an opening to experiment, 

to try and see. This brings a sense of potential to the situation. The present’s 

‘boundary condition’, to borrow a phrase from science, is never a closed 

door. It is an open threshold — a threshold of potential. You are only ever in 

the present in passing. If you look at that way you don’t have to feel boxed in 

by it, no matter what its horrors and no matter what, rationally, you expect 

will come. You may not reach the end of the trail but at least there’s a next 

step. The question of which next step to take is a lot less intimidating than 

how to reach a far-off goal in a distant future where all our problems will 

finally be solved. It’s utopian thinking, for me, that’s ‘hopeless’. 

So how do your ideas on ‘affect’ and hope come together here? 

In my own work I use the concept of ‘affect’ as a way of talking about that 

margin of manoeuvrability, the ‘where we might be able to go and what we 

might be able to do’ in every present situation. I guess ‘affect’ is the word I 

use for ‘hope’. One of the reasons it’s such an important concept for me is 

because it explains why focusing on the next experimental step rather than 

the big utopian picture isn’t really settling for less. It’s not exactly going for 

more, either. It’s more like being right where you are — more intensely. 

To get from affect to intensity you have to understand affect as something 

other than simply a personal feeling. By ‘affect’ I don’t mean ‘emotion’ in the 

everyday sense. The way I use it comes primarily from Spinoza. He talks of 

the body in terms of its capacity for affecting or being affected. These are 

not two different capacities — they always go together. When you affect 

something, you are at the same time opening yourself up to being affected in 

turn, and in a slightly different way than you might have been the moment 

before. You have made a transition, however slight. You have stepped over a 

threshold. Affect is this passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of 

the change in capacity. It’s crucial to remember that Spinoza uses this to talk 

about the body. What a body is, he says, is what it can do as it goes along. 

This is a totally pragmatic definition. A body is defined by what capacities it 

carries from step to step. What these are exactly is changing constantly. A 

body’s ability to affect or be affected — its charge of affect — isn’t something 

fixed.  

So depending on the circumstances, it goes up and down gently like a tide, or 

maybe storms and crests like a wave, or at times simply bottoms out. It’s 

because this is all attached to the movements of the body that it can’t be 

reduced to emotion. It’s not just subjective, which is not to say that there is 

nothing subjective in it. Spinoza says that every transition is accompanied by 

a feeling of the change in capacity. The affect and the feeling of the 

transition are not two different things. They’re two sides of the same coin, 

just like affecting and being affected. That’s the first sense in which affect is 

about intensity — every affect is a doubling. The experience of a change, an 

affecting-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the experience. 

This gives the body’s movements a kind of depth that stays with it across all 

its transitions — accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in desire, in 

tendency. Emotion is the way the depth of that ongoing experience registers 

personally at a given moment. 

Emotion, then, is only a limited expression of the ‘depth’ of our experience? 

Well, an emotion is a very partial expression of affect. It only draws on a 

limited selection of memories and only activates certain reflexes or 

tendencies, for example. No one emotional state can encompass all the depth 

and breadth of our experiencing of experiencing — all the ways our 

experience redoubles itself. The same thing could be said for conscious 

thought. So when we feel a particular emotion or think a particular thought, 

where have all the other memories, habits, tendencies gone that might have 

come at the point? And where have the bodily capacities for affecting and 

being affected that they’re inseparable from gone? There’s no way they can 

all be actually expressed at any given point. But they’re not totally absent 

either, because a different selection of them is sure to come up at the next 

step. They’re still there, but virtually — in potential. Affect as a whole, then, 

is the virtual co-presence of potentials. 

This is the second way that affect has to do with intensity. There’s like a 

population or swarm of potential ways of affecting or being affected that 

follows along as we move through life. We always have a vague sense that 

they’re there. That vague sense of potential, we call it our ‘freedom’, and 

defend it fiercely. But no matter how certainly we know that the potential is 

there, it always seems just out of reach, or maybe around the next bend. 

Because it isn’t actually there — only virtually. But maybe if we can take 

little, practical, experimental, strategic measures to expand our emotional 

register, or limber up our thinking, we can access more of our potential at 

each step, have more of it actually available. Having more potentials 

available intensifies our life. We’re not enslaved by our situations. Even if we 

never have our freedom, we’re always experiencing a degree of freedom, or 

‘wriggle room’. Our degree of freedom at any one time corresponds to how 

much of our experiential ‘depth’ we can access towards a next step — how 

intensely we are living and moving. 

Once again it’s all about the openness of situations and how we can live that 

openness. And you have to remember that the way we live it is always 

entirely embodied, and that is never entirely personal — it’s never all 

contained in our emotions and conscious thoughts. That’s a way of saying it’s 

not just about us, in isolation. In affect, we are never alone. That’s because 

affects in Spinoza’s definition are basically ways of connecting, to others and 

to other situations. They are our angle of participation in processes larger 

than ourselves. With intensified affect comes a stronger sense of 

embeddedness in a larger field of life — a heightened sense of belonging, with 

other people and to other places. Spinoza takes us quite far, but for me his 

thought needs to be supplemented with the work of thinkers like Henri 

Bergson, who focuses on the intensities of experience, and William James, 

who focuses on their connectedness. 

When you were just talking about Spinoza and the way you understand 

affect, I don’t want to put a false determination on it, but is it a more 

primal sense of the capacity to be human and how we feel connections to the 

world and others? That’s almost natural to a certain extent … 

I wouldn’t tend to say it’s primal, if that means more ‘natural’. I don’t think 

affective intensity is any more natural than the ability to stand back and 

reflect on something, or the ability to pin something down in language. But I 

guess that it might be considered primal in the sense that it is direct. You 

don’t need a concept of ‘mediation’ to talk about it. In cultural theory, 

people often talk as if the body on the one hand, and our emotions, thoughts, 

and the language we use for them on the other, are totally different realities, 

as if there has to be something to come between them and put them into 

touch with each other. This mediation is the way a lot of theorists try to 

overcome the old Cartesian duality between mind and body, but it actually 

leaves it in place and just tries to build a bridge between them. But if you 

define affect the way we just did, then obviously it includes very elaborated 

functions like language. There’s an affect associated with every functioning of 

the body, from moving your foot to take a step to moving your lips to make 

words. Affect is simply a body movement looked at from the point of view of 

its potential — its capacity to come to be, or better, to come to do. 

Like I said, the directness I’m talking about isn’t necessarily a self-presence 

or self-possession, which is how we normally tend to think of our freedom. If 

it’s direct, it’s in the sense that it’s directly in transition — in the body 

passing out of the present moment and the situation it’s in, towards the next 

one. But it’s also the doubling of the body in the situation — its doubling over 

into what it might have been or done if it had contrived to live that transition 

more intensely. A body doesn’t coincide with itself. It’s not present to itself. 

It is already on the move to a next, at the same time as it is doubling over on 

itself, bringing its past up to date in the present, through memory, habit, 

reflex, and so on. Which means you can’t even say that a body ever coincides 

with its affective dimension. It is selecting from it, extracting and actualising 

certain potentials from it. You can think of affect in the broadest sense as 

what remains of the potential after each or every thing a body says or does — 

as a perpetual bodily remainder. Looked at from a different angle, this 

perpetual remainder is an excess. It’s like a reserve of potential or newness or 

creativity that is experienced alongside every actual production of meaning in 

language or in any performance of a useful function — vaguely but directly 

experienced, as something more, a more to come, a life overspilling as it 

gathers itself up to move on. 

What immediately comes to mind is something like anger. It’s a very strong 

bodily experience, a heat of the moment intensity — it doesn’t seem to have 

a positive charge in some ways, you know, because it is often a reaction 

against something … 

I think affective expressions like anger and laughter are perhaps the most 

powerful because they interrupt a situation. They are negative in that sense. 

They interrupt the flow of meaning that’s taking place: the normalised 

interrelations and interactions that are happening and the functions that are 

being fulfilled. Because of that, they are irruptions of something that doesn’t 

fit. Anger, for example, forces the situation to attention, it forces a pause 

filled with an intensity that is often too extreme to be expressed in words. 

Anger often degenerates into noise and inarticulate gestures. This forces the 

situation to rearray itself around that irruption, and to deal with the intensity 

in one way or another. In that sense it’s brought something positive out — a 

reconfiguration. 

There’s always an instantaneous calculation or judgment that takes place as 

to how you respond to an outburst of anger. But it’s not a judgment in the 

sense that you’ve gone through all the possibilities and thought it through 

explicitly — you don’t have time for that kind of thing. Instead you use a kind 

of judgment that takes place instantly and brings your entire body into the 

situation. The response to anger is usually as gestural as the outburst of anger 

itself. The overload of the situation is such that, even if you refrain from a 

gesture, that itself is a gesture. An outburst of anger brings a number of 

outcomes into direct presence to one another — there could be a peace- 

making or a move towards violence, there could be a breaking of relations, all 

the possibilities are present, packed into the present moment. It all happens, 

again, before there is time for much reflection, if any. So there’s a kind of 

thought that is taking place in the body, through a kind of instantaneous 

assessment of affect, an assessment of potential directions and situational 

outcomes that isn’t separate from our immediate, physical acting-out of our 

implication in the situation. The philosopher C.S. Peirce had a word for 

thought that is still couched in bodily feeling, that is still fully bound up with 

unfolding sensation as it goes into action but before it has been able to 

articulate itself in conscious reflection and guarded language. He called it 

‘abduction’. 

Right, right. Oh, that’s like a kind of capture … 

Yes, I think you could say that sensation is the registering of affect that I 

referred to before — the passing awareness of being at a threshold — and that 

affect is thinking, bodily — consciously but vaguely, in the sense that is not 

yet a thought. It’s a movement of thought, or a thinking movement. There are 

certain logical categories, like abduction, that could be used to describe this. 

I think of abduction as a kind of stealing of the moment. It has a wide range 

of meanings too — it could be stealing or it could be an alien force or 

possession … 

Or it could be you drawn in by the situation, captured by it, by its 

eventfulness, rather than you capturing it. But this capture by the situation is 

not necessarily an oppression. It could be … 

It could be the kind of freedom we were just talking about … 

Exactly, it could be accompanied by a sense of vitality or vivacity, a sense of 

being more alive. That’s a lot more compelling than coming to ‘correct’ 

conclusions or assessing outcomes, although it can also bring results. It might 

force you to find a margin, a manoeuvre you didn’t know you had, and 

couldn’t have just thought your way into. It can change you, expand you. 

That’s what being alive is all about. 

So it’s hard for me to put positive or negative connotations on affect. That 

would be to judge it from the outside. It would be going in a moralising 

direction. Spinoza makes a distinction between a morality and an ethics. To 

move in an ethical direction, from a Spinozan point of view, is not to attach 

positive or negative values to actions based on a characterisation or 

classification of them according to a pre-set system of judgment. It means 

assessing what kind of potential they tap into and express. Whether a person 

is going to joke or get angry when they are in a tight spot, that uncertainty 

produces an affective change in the situation. That affective loading and how 

it plays out is an ethical act, because it affects where people might go or 

what they might do as a result. It has consequences. 

Ethics, then, is always situational?  

 Ethics in this sense is completely situational. It’s completely pragmatic. And 

it happens between people, in the social gaps. There is no intrinsic good or 

evil. The ethical value of an action is what it brings out in the situation, for 

its transformation, how it breaks sociality open. Ethics is about how we 

inhabit uncertainty, together. It’s not about judging each other right or 

wrong. For Nietzsche, like Spinoza, there is still a distinction between good 

and bad even if there’s not one between good and evil. Basically the ‘good’ is 

affectively defined as what brings maximum potential and connection to the 

situation. It is defined in terms of becoming. 

Navigations 

This makes me think of your idea of ‘walking as controlled falling’. In some 

ways, every step that we take works with gravity so we don’t fall, but it’s 

not something we consciously think about, because our body is already 

moving and is full of both constraint and freedom. I found it interesting 

because, in some other ways, I’ve been trying to think about another 

relationship — between perception and language — and it seems to me that 

‘affect’ and this notion of body movement can provide a more integrated and 

hopeful way of talking about experience and language. 

I like the notion of ‘walking as controlled falling’. It’s something of a proverb, 

and Laurie Anderson, among others, has used it. It conveys the sense that 

freedom, or the ability to move forward and to transit through life, isn’t 

necessarily about escaping from constraints. There are always constraints. 

When we walk, we’re dealing with the constraint of gravity. There’s also the 

constraint of balance, and a need for equilibrium. But, at the same time, to 

walk you need to throw off the equilibrium, you have to let yourself go into a 

fall, then you cut it off and regain the balance. You move forward by playing 

with the constraints, not avoiding them. There’s an openness of movement, 

even though there’s no escaping constraint. 

It’s similar with language. I see it as a play between constraint and room to 

manoeuvre. If you think of language in the traditional way, as a 

correspondence between a word with its established meaning on the one hand 

and a matching perception on the other, then it starts coagulating. It’s just 

being used as a totally conventional system for pointing out things you want 

other people to recognise. It’s all about pointing out what everyone can agree 

is already there. When you think about it, though, there’s a unique feeling to 

every experience that comes along, and the exact details of it can never be 

exhausted by linguistic expression. That’s partly because no two people in the 

same situation will have had exactly the same experience of it — they would 

be able to argue and discuss the nuances endlessly. And it’s partly because 

there was just too much there between them to be completely articulated — 

especially if you think about what was only there potentially, or virtually. But 

there are uses of language that can bring that inadequation between language 

and experience to the fore in a way that can convey the ‘too much’ of the 

situation — its charge — in a way that actually fosters new experiences. 

Humour is a prime example. So is poetic expression, taken in its broadest 

sense. So language is two-pronged: it is a capture of experience, it codifies 

and normalises it and makes it communicable by providing a neutral frame of 

reference. But at the same time it can convey what I would call ‘singularities 

of experience’, the kinds of affective movements we were talking about 

before that are totally situation-specific, but in an open kind of way. 

Experiencing this potential for change, experiencing the eventfulness and 

uniqueness of every situation, even the most conventional ones, that’s not 

necessarily about commanding movement, it’s about navigating movement. 

It’s about being immersed in an experience that is already underway. It’s 

about being bodily attuned to opportunities in the movement, going with the 

flow. It’s more like surfing the situation, or tweaking it, than commanding or 

programming it. The command paradigm approaches experience as if we were 

somehow outside it, looking in, like disembodied subjects handling an object. 

But our experiences aren’t objects. They’re us, they’re what we’re made of. 

We are our situations, we are our moving through them. We are our 

participation — not some abstract entity that is somehow outside looking in at 

it all. 

The movement in language is important and it opens another door or window 

to perception. But I suppose, as intellectuals, there is the problem of the 

codification of language within critical discourse and theoretical writing — 

where that language can stop movement and it can express everything in 

particular terms or methods that cut off the potential of understanding 

freedom or experience … 

‘Critical’ practices aimed at increasing potentials for freedom and for 

movement are inadequate, because in order to critique something in any kind 

of definitive way you have to pin it down. In a way it is an almost sadistic 

enterprise that separates something out, attributes set characteristics to it, 

then applies a final judgment to it — objectifies it, in a moralising kind of 

way. I understand that using a ‘critical method’ is not the same as ‘being 

critical’. But still I think there is always that moralising undertone to critique. 

Because of that, I think, it loses contact with other more moving dimensions 

of experience. It doesn’t allow for other kinds of practices that might not 

have so much to do with mastery and judgment as with affective connection 

and abductive participation. 

The non-judgmental is interesting, you know, because you are always 

somehow implicated in trying to make judgments … To not make judgments 

in critical thought is a very hard thing to do. It takes a lot courage to move in 

that direction, because otherwise… 

Well it requires a willingness to take risks, to make mistakes and even to 

come across as silly. A critical perspective that tries to come to a definitive 

judgment on something is always in some way a failure, because it is 

happening at a remove from the process it’s judging. Something could have 

happened in the intervening time, or something barely perceptible might have 

been happening away from the centre of critical focus. These developments 

may become important later. The process of pinning down and separating out 

is also a weakness in judgment, because it doesn’t allow for these seeds of 

change, connections in the making that might not be activated or obvious at 

the moment. In a sense, judgmental reason is an extremely weak form of 

thought, precisely because it is so sure of itself. This is not to say that it 

shouldn’t be used. But I think it should be complemented by other practices 

of thought, it shouldn’t be relied on exclusively. It’s limiting if it’s the only or 

even the primary stance of the intellectual. 

A case in point is the anti-globalisation movement. It’s easy to find 

weaknesses in it, in its tactics or in its analysis of capitalism. If you wait 

around for a movement to come along that corresponds to your particular 

image of the correct approach, you’ll be waiting your life away. Nothing is 

ever that neat. But luckily people didn’t wait around. They jumped right in 

and started experimenting and networking, step by step. As a result, new 

connections have been made between people and movements operating in 

different regions of the world, on different political levels, from the most 

local grass-roots levels up to the most established NGOs, using different 

organisational structures. In a very short period of time the entire discourse 

surrounding globalisation has shifted. Actually, not only surrounding it but 

inside its institutions also — it’s now impossible for an international meeting 

to take place without issues of poverty and health being on the agenda. It’s 

far from a solution, but it’s a start. It’s ongoing. That’s the point: to keep on 

going. 

The constraints of freedom 

The idea of ‘controlled walking’ is a good example of what you were just 

talking about in terms of the limitations on the self and the freedoms that 

are possible. But I am also thinking about it as relating to the idea of 

‘societies of control’ — which you have written about. We now live in 

societies of control, so how do control and power in this new age also offer 

the possibility of freedom? 

In physics there is a very famous problem that heavily influenced the 

development of chaos theory. It’s called the ‘three-body problem’, where you 

have completely deterministic projectories of bodies constrained by 

Newtonian laws. For example, if you have two bodies interacting, through 

gravity for example, everything is calculable and foreseeable. If you know 

where they are in relation to each at one moment, you can project a path and 

figure out where they were at any given moment in the past, or at a time in 

the future. But if you have three of them together what happens is that a 

margin of unpredictability creeps in. The paths can’t be accurately 

determined after a point. They can turn erratic, ending up at totally different 

places than you’d expect. What has happened? How can chance creep into a 

totally deterministic system? It’s not that the bodies have somehow broken 

the laws of physics. What happens is interference, or resonation. It’s not 

really discrete bodies and paths interacting. It’s fields. Gravity is a field — a 

field of potential attraction, collision, orbit, of potential centripetal and 

centrifugal movements. All these potentials form such complex interference 

patterns when three fields overlap that a measure of indeterminacy creeps in. 

It’s not that we just don’t have a detailed enough knowledge to predict. 

Accurate prediction is impossible because the indeterminacy is objective. So 

there’s an objective degree of freedom even in the most deterministic 

system. Something in the coming-together of movements, even according to 

the strictest of laws, flips the constraints over into conditions of freedom. It’s 

a relational effect, a complexity effect. Affect is like our human gravitational 

field, and what we call our freedom are its relational flips. Freedom is not 

about breaking or escaping constraints. It’s about flipping them over into 

degrees of freedom. You can’t really escape the constraints. 

No body can escape gravity. Laws are part of what we are, they’re intrinsic to 

our identities. No human can simply escape gender, for example. The cultural 

‘laws’ of gender are part of what makes us who we are, they’re part of the 

process that produced us as individuals. You can’t just step out of gender 

identity. But just maybe you can take steps to encourage gender to flip. That 

can’t be an individual undertaking. It involves tweaking the interference and 

resonation patterns between individuals. It’s a relational undertaking. You’re 

not acting on yourself or other individuals separately. You’re acting on them 

together, their togetherness, their field of belonging. The idea is that there 

are ways of acting upon the level of belonging itself, on the moving together 

and coming together of bodies per se. This would have to involve an 

evaluation of collective potential that would be ethical in the sense we were 

talking about before. It would be a caring for the relating of things as such — 

a politics of belonging instead of a politics of identity, of correlated 

emergence instead of separate domains of interest attracting each other or 

colliding in predictable ways. In Isabelle Stengers’ terms, this kind of politics 

is an ecology of practices. It’s a pragmatic politics of the in-between. It’s an 

abductive politics that has to operate on the level of affect. 

So what does this political ecology involve?  

To move towards that kind of political ecology you have to get rid of the idea 

as power or constraint as power over. It’s always a power to. The true power 

of the law is the power to form us. Power doesn’t just force us down certain 

paths, it puts the paths in us, so by the time we learn to follow its constraints 

we’re following ourselves. The effects of power on us is our identity. That’s 

what Michel Foucault taught us. If power just came at us from outside, if it 

was just an extrinsic relation, it would be simple. You’d just run away. In the 

1960s and 1970s that’s how a lot of people looked at it — including myself. 

Drop out, stop following the predictable, straight-and-narrow path, and things 

like sexism will just disappear. Well, they didn’t. It’s a lot more complicated 

than that. Power comes up with us from the field of potential. It ‘informs’ us, 

it’s intrinsic to our formation, it’s part of our emergence as individuals, and it 

emerges with us — we actualise it, as it in-forms us. So in a way it’s as 

potentialising as what we call freedom, only what it potentialises is limited to 

a number of predictable paths. It’s the calculable part of affect, the most 

probable next steps and eventual outcomes. As Foucault says, power is 

productive, and it produces not so much repressions as regularities. Which 

brings us to the ‘society of control’ and to capitalism … 

I was just going to ask you about that … 

It is very clear that capitalism has undergone a major reconfiguration since 

the Second World War, and it’s been very difficult to think through what that 

has been. For me the most useful way of thinking about it comes from the 

post-Autonomia Italian Marxist movement, in particular the thought of 

Antonio Negri. The argument is that capitalist powers have pretty much 

abandoned control in the sense of ‘power over’. That corresponds to the first 

flush of ‘disciplinary’ power in Michel Foucault’s vocabulary. Disciplinary 

power starts by enclosing bodies in top-down institutions — prisons, asylums, 

hospitals, schools, and so on. It encloses in order to find ways of producing 

more regularity in behaviour. Its aim is to manufacture normality — good, 

healthy citizens. As top-down disciplinary power takes hold and spreads, it 

finds ways of doing the same thing without the enclosure. Prisons spawn half- 

way houses, hospitals spawn community clinics and home-care, educational 

institutions spawn the self-help and career retooling industries. It starts 

operating in an open field. After a certain point it starts paying more 

attention to the relays between the points in that field, the transitions 

between institutions, than to the institutions themselves. It’s seeped into the 

in-between. At this point it starts to act directly on the kinds of interference 

and resonation effects I was just mentioning. It starts working directly on 

bodies’ movements and momentum, producing momentums, the more varied 

and even erratic, the better. Normalcy starts to lose its hold. The regularities 

start to loosen. This loosening of normalcy is part of capitalism’s dynamic. It’s 

not a simple liberation. It’s capitalism’s own form of power. It’s no longer 

disciplinary institutional power that defines everything, it’s capitalism’s 

power to produce variety — because markets get saturated. Produce variety 

and you produce a niche market. The oddest of affective tendencies are OK — 

as long as they pay. Capitalism starts intensifying or diversifying affect, but 

only in order to extract surplus-value. It hijacks affect in order to intensify 

profit potential. It literally valorises affect. The capitalist logic of surplus- 

value production starts to take over the relational field that is also the 

domain of political ecology, the ethical field of resistance to identity and 

predictable paths. It’s very troubling and confusing, because it seems to me 

that there’s been a certain kind of convergence between the dynamic of 

capitalist power and the dynamic of resistance. 

The flows of capitalism 

For me, this raises a question about the way capitalism does capture 

potential and organises itself. There are two issues I want to address: firstly, 

in relationship to the question of hope — human aspirations and hopes are 

directly related to capitalism today. The natural or ‘potential of hope’ is 

seized upon and is tied very much to a monetary system, economic 

imperatives or questions of ownership. Secondly, the relationship between 

hope and fear in capitalism. I think that hope and fear are part of the same 

equation … 

I think they definitely are. It would help to try to talk a little bit more about 

the change in capitalism and what that constitutes, and then go back to that 

question. Thinkers like Negri say that the products of capitalism have become 

more intangible, they’ve become more information- and service-based. 

Material objects and physical commodities that were once the engine of the 

economy are becoming more and more peripheral, in profit terms. For 

example, the cost of computers keeps plummeting. It’s difficult to make a 

profit from their manufacture because there’s a mass of basically identical 

versions from different companies, and they’re all pretty interchangeable. 

Is that mass production in a sense or a different notion of mass production? 

It is a mass production but it leads to a different kind of production, because 

what can someone sell if they can’t make a profit from the object? What they 

can sell are services around the object and they can sell the right to do the 

things you can do through the object. That’s why copyright is such a huge 

issue. The capitalist product is more and more an intellectual property that 

you buy a right to use, not an object you buy outright. If you buy a software 

package, often you’re not supposed to even make copies of it for yourself, 

like one for your desktop and one for a laptop. If you buy a book, you own an 

object. You can resell it, or lend it, or rebind it, or photocopy it for your own 

use. If you buy a software package, you’re not so much buying an object, 

you’re buying a bundle of functions. You’re buying the right to use those 

functions, with all sorts of strings attached. You’re basically buying the right 

to be able to do things, ways of affecting and being affected — word- 

processing capacities, image-capture and processing capacities, printing 

capacities, calculation capacities … It’s at the same time very potentialising, 

and controlled. The ‘cutting edge’ products are more and more multivalent. 

‘Convergence’ is the buzzword. When you buy a computerised product, you 

can do a lot of different things with it — you use it to extend your affective 

capacities. It becomes a motor force of your life — like a turbo charge to your 

vitality. It enables you to go farther and to do more, to fit more in. The way 

even older-style products are sold has something to do with this. You don’t 

just buy a car, the dealers tell us, you buy a lifestyle. When you consume, 

you’re not just getting something to use for a particular use, you’re getting 

yourself a life. All products become more intangible, sort of atmospheric, and 

marketing gets hinged more and more on style and branding … 

More meaningless? 

Possibly, possibly but not necessarily, because, if you think of style or 

branding, it is an attempt to express what we were talking about before as 

the sense of vitality or liveliness. It is a selling of experience or lifestyles, and 

people put themselves together by what they buy and what they can do 

through what they can buy. So ownership is becoming less and less important 

per se. Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, or just to signal the ability to 

accumulate — ‘conspicuous consumption’ — belongs to an earlier phase. It’s 

this enabling of experience that is taking over. Now, that enablement of 

experience has to be tended. Companies work very hard to produce brand 

loyalty. ‘Fidelity programs’ involving things like rewards points are 

everywhere. The product becomes a long-term part of your life, you’re 

brought into a relationship with the company through fidelity programs, 

service networks, promises of upgrades, etc. The way you use the product is 

also more and more oriented towards relationship — the most seductive 

products produce possibilities of connection. ‘Connectibility’ is another 

buzzword. When we buy a product, we’re buying potential connections with 

other things and especially other people — for example, when a family buys a 

computer to keep in touch by email, or when you get a computer for work 

and end up joining on-line communities. What’s being sold more and more is 

experience, social experience. The corporation, the capitalist company, is 

having to create social networks and cultural nodes that come together 

around the product, and the product gets used more and more to create 

social networks that radiate out from it. ‘Networking’ was the buzzword in 

the 1980s, when this new kind of capitalist power was just coming into its 

own. 

Marketing itself is starting to operate along those lines. There is a new kind of 

marketing called viral marketing where specialised companies will surf the 

web to find communities of interest that have spontaneously formed. It 

started in the music industry, around fan networks for bands. They find a 

group of people who have a very strong affective attachment to a band or a 

performer that is very central to how they see themselves and to what they 

perceive as the quality of their life. They will network with them, offer them 

tickets or inside information, or special access, and in return the members of 

the group will agree to take on certain marketing tasks. So the difference 

between marketing and consuming and between living and buying is becoming 

smaller and smaller, to the point that they are getting almost 

indistinguishable. On both the production side and the consumption side it is 

all about intangible, basically cultural products or products of experience that 

invariably have a collective dimension to them. 

So as consumers we are part of the new networks of global and collective 

exchange… 

Individual consumers are being inducted into these collective processes rather 

than being separated out and addressed as free agents who are supposed to 

make an informed consumer choice as rational individuals. This is a step 

beyond niche marketing, it’s relational marketing. It works by contagion 

rather than by convincing, on affect rather than rational choice. It works at 

least as much on the level of our ‘indeterminate sociality’ as on the level of 

our identities. More and more, what it does is hitch a ride on movements 

afoot in the social field, on social stirrings, which it channels in profit-making 

directions. People like Negri talk about the ‘social factory’, a kind of 

socialisation of capitalism, where capitalism is more about scouting and 

capturing or producing and multiplying potentials for doing and being than it 

is about selling things. The kind of work that goes into this he calls 

‘immaterial labour’. The product, ultimately, is us. We are in-formed by 

capitalist powers of production. Our whole life becomes a ‘capitalist tool’ — 

our vitality, our affective capacities. It’s to the point that our life potentials 

are indistinguishable from capitalist forces of production. In some of my 

essays I’ve called this the ‘subsumption of life’ under capitalism. 

Jeremy Rifkin is a social critic who now teaches at one of the most prestigious 

business schools in the US (talk about the capture of resistance!). Rifkin has a 

description of capitalism that is actually surprisingly similar to Negri’s. And 

he’s teaching it to the next generation of capitalists. It centres on what he 

calls ‘gatekeeping’ functions. Here the figure of power is no longer the billy 

club of the policeman, it’s the barcode or the PIN number. These are control 

mechanisms, but not in the old sense of ‘power over’. It’s control in Gilles 

Deleuze’s sense, which is closer to ‘check mechanism’. It’s all about 

checkpoints. At the grocery store counter, the barcode on what you’re buying 

checks the object out of the store. At the automatic bank teller, the PIN 

number on your card checks you into your account. The checks don’t control 

you, they don’t tell you where to go or what to be doing at any particular 

time. They don’t lord it over you. They just lurk. They lie in wait for you at 

key points. You come to them, and they’re activated by your arrival. You’re 

free to move, but every few steps there’s a checkpoint. They’re everywhere, 

woven into the social landscape. To continue on your way you have to pass 

the checkpoint. What’s being controlled is right of passage — access. It’s 

about your enablement to go places and do things. When you pass the 

checkpoint you have to present something for detection, and when you do 

that something registers. Your bank account is debited, and you and your 

groceries pass. Or something fails to register, and that’s what lets you pass, 

like at airport security or places where there’s video surveillance. In either 

case what’s being controlled is passage across thresholds. 

Society becomes an open field composed of thresholds or gateways, it 

becomes a continuous space of passage. It’s no longer rigidly structured by 

walled-in enclosures, there’s all kinds of latitude. It’s just that at key points 

along the way, at key thresholds, power is tripped into action. The exercise of 

the power bears on your movement — not so much you as a person. In the old 

disciplinary power formations, it was always about judging what sort of 

person you were, and the way power functioned was to make you fit a model, 

or else. If you weren’t the model citizen, you were judged guilty and locked 

up as a candidate for ‘reform’. That kind of power deals with big unities — 

the person as moral subject, right and wrong, social order. And everything 

was internalised — if you didn’t think right you were in trouble. Now you’re 

checked in passing, and instead of being judged innocent or guilty you’re 

registered as liquid. The process is largely automatic, and it doesn’t really 

matter what you think or who you are deep down. Machines do the detecting 

and ‘judging’. The check just bears on a little detail — do you have enough in 

your bank account, do you not have a gun? It’s a highly localised, partial 

exercise of power — a micro-power. That micro-power, though, feeds up to 

higher levels, bottom up. 

And this power is more intangible because it has no ‘real’ origin… 

In a way the real power starts after you’ve passed, in the feed, because 

you’ve left a trace. Something has registered. Those registrations can be 

gathered to piece together a profile of your movement, or they can be 

compared to other people’s inputs. They can be processed en masse and 

systematised, synthesised. Very convenient for surveillance or crime 

investigation, but even more valuable for marketing. In such a fluid economy, 

based so much on intangibles, the most valuable thing is information on 

people’s patterns and tastes. The checkpoint system allows information to be 

gathered at every step you take. You’re providing a continuous feed, which 

comes back to you in advertising pushing new products, new bundlings of 

potential. Think of how cookies work on the internet. Every time you click a 

link, you’re registering your tastes and patterns, which are then processed 

and thrown back at you in the form of flip-up ads that try to get you to go to 

particular links and hopefully buy something. It’s a feedback loop, and the 

object is to modulate your online movement. It’s no exaggeration to say that 

every time you click a link you’re doing somebody else’s market research for 

them. You’re contributing to their profit-making abilities. Your everyday 

movements and leisure activities have become a form of value-producing 

labour. You are generating surplus-value just by going about your daily life — 

your very ability to move is being capitalised on. Deleuze and Guattari call 

this kind of capitalising on movement ‘surplus-value of flow’, and what 

characterises the ‘society of control’ is that the economy and the way power 

functions come together around the generation of this surplus-value of flow. 

Life movements, capital and power become one continuous operation — 

check, register, feed-in, processing, feedback, purchase, profit, around and 

around. 

So how do the more ‘traditional’ forms of power operate? I mean they don’t 

disappear — they seem to gather more momentum?  

Yes, this situation doesn’t mean that police functions and the other old 

disciplinary forms of power are over and done with. Disciplinary powers don’t 

disappear. Far from it. In fact they tend to proliferate and often get more 

vehement in their application precisely because the field that they are in is 

no longer controlled overall by their kind of power, so they’re in a situation of 

structural insecurity. There are no more top-down state apparatuses that can 

really claim effective control over their territory. Old-style sovereignty is a 

thing of the past. All borders have become porous, and capitalism is feeding 

off that poracity and pushing it further and further — that’s what 

globalisation is all about. But there have to be mechanisms that check those 

movements, so policing functions start to proliferate, and as policing 

proliferates so do prisons. In the US they’re being privatised and are now big 

business. Now policing works more and more in the way I was just describing, 

through gatekeeping — detection, registration and feedback. Police action, in 

the sense of an arrest, comes out of this movement-processing loop as a 

particular kind of feedback. Instead of passing through the gate, a gun is 

detected by the machine, and a police response is triggered, and someone 

gets arrested. Police power becomes a function of that other kind of power, 

that we were calling control, or movement-based power. It’s a local stop- 

action that arises out of the flow and is aimed at safeguarding it. The boom in 

prison construction comes as an off-shoot of the policing, so you could 

consider the profits made by that new industry as a kind of surplus-value of 

flow. It’s a vicious circle, and everyone knows it. No matter how many prisons 

there are, no matter how many people they lock up, the general insecurity 

won’t be lessened. It just comes with the territory, because for capitalism to 

keep going, things have to keep flowing. Free trade and fluidity of labour 

markets is the name of the game. So no matter how many billions of dollars 

are poured into surveillance and prison building, the threat will still be there 

of something getting through that shouldn’t. Terrorism is the perfect 

example. 

Yes. In thinking about this now — after our initial conversation and in this 

revision of it, post-September 11 — it adds another dimension to this 

surveillance. 

All the September 11 terrorists were in the US legally. They passed. How 

many others might have? With this stage of capitalism comes territorial 

insecurity, and with territorial insecurity comes fear, with fear comes more 

checkpoint policing, more processing, more bottom-up, fed-back ‘control’. It 

becomes one big, self-propelling feedback machine. It turns into a kind of 

automatism, and we register collectively as individuals through the way we 

feed that automatism, by our participation in it, just by virtue of being alive 

and moving. Socially, that’s what the individual is now: a checkpoint trigger 

and a co-producer of surplus-values of flow. Power is now distributed. It 

trickles down to the most local, most partial checkpoint. The profits that get 

generated from that don’t necessarily trickle down, but the power does. 

There is no distance anymore between us, our movements and the operations 

of power, or between the operations of power and the forces of capitalism. 

One big, continuous operation. Capital-power has become operationalised. 

Nothing so glorious as sovereign, just operational — a new modesty of power 

as it becomes ubiquitous. 

At any rate, the hope that might come with the feeling of potentialisation and 

enablement we discussed is doubled by insecurity and fear. Increasingly 

power functions by manipulating that affective dimension rather than 

dictating proper or normal behaviour from on high. So power is no longer 

fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms, it’s affective. 

The mass media have an extremely important role to play in that. The 

legitimisation of political power, of state power, no longer goes through the 

reason of state and the correct application of governmental judgment. It goes 

through affective channels. For example, an American president can deploy 

troops overseas because it makes a population feel good about their country 

or feel secure, not because the leader is able to present well-honed 

arguments that convince the population that it is a justified use of force. So 

there is no longer political justification within a moral framework provided by 

the sovereign state. And the mass media are not mediating anymore — they 

become direct mechanisms of control by their ability to modulate the 

affective dimension. 

This has all become painfully apparent after the World Trade Center attacks. 

You had to wait weeks after the event to hear the slightest analysis in the US 

media. It was all heart-rending human interest stories of fallen heroes, or 

scare stories about terrorists lurking around every corner. What the media 

produced wasn’t information or analysis. It was affect modulation — affective 

pick-up from the mythical ‘man in the street’, followed by affective 

amplification through broadcast. Another feedback loop. It changes how 

people experience what potentials they have to go and to do. The constant 

security concerns insinuate themselves into our lives at such a basic, habitual 

level that you’re barely aware how it’s changing the tenor of everyday living. 

You start ‘instinctively’ to limit your movements and contact with people. It’s 

affectively limiting. That affective limitation is expressed in emotional terms 

— remember we were making a distinction between affect and emotion, with 

emotion being the expression of affect in gesture and language, its 

conventional or coded expression. At the same time as the media helps 

produce this affective limitation, it works to overcome it in a certain way. 

The limitation can’t go too far or it would slow down the dynamic of 

capitalism. One of the biggest fears after September 11 was that the economy 

would go into recession because of a crisis in consumer confidence. So 

everyone was called upon to keep spending, as a proud, patriotic act. So the 

media picks up on fear and insecurity and feeds it back amplified, but in a 

way that somehow changes its quality into pride and patriotism — with the 

proof in the purchasing. A direct affective conversion of fear into confidence 

by means of an automatic image loop, running in real time, through 

continuous coverage, and spinning off profit. Does anyone really believe Bush 

stands for state reason? It doesn’t matter — there are flags to wave and feel- 

good shopping to do. Once the loop gets going, you’ve got to feed it. You can 

only produce more pride and patriotism by producing more fear and insecurity 

to convert. At times it seemed as though US government officials were 

consciously drumming up fear, like when they repeatedly issued terrorist 

attack warnings and then would withdraw them — and the media was lapping 

it up. 

Yes. 

Affect is now much more important for understanding power, even state 

power narrowly defined, than concepts like ideology. Direct affect 

modulation takes the place of old-style ideology. This is not new. It didn’t 

just happen around the September 11 events, it just sort of came out then, 

became impossible to ignore. In the early 1990s I put together a book called 

The Politics of Everyday Fear. It dealt with the same kind of mechanisms, but 

it was coming out of the experience of the 1980s, the Reagan years. This post- 

ideological media power has been around at least since television matured as 

a medium — which was about when it took power literally, with the election 

of Reagan, an old TV personality, as head of state. From that time on, the 

functions of head of state and commander in chief of the military fused with 

the role of the television personality. The American president is not a 

statesman anymore, like Woodrow Wilson or Franklin Roosevelt were. He’s a 

visible personification of that affective media loop. He’s the face of mass 

affect. 

Transitions 

It is really important to understand affect ‘after a society of ideology’. 

Ideology is still around but it is not as embracing as it was, and in fact it does 

operate. But to really understand it you have to understand its 

materialisation, which goes through affect. That’s a very different way of 

addressing the political, because it is having to say that there is a whole 

range of ideological structures in place. Then there is that point you were 

talking about, the transitional passages that you pass through that capitalism 

is part of and manipulating — but it does have the possibility of freedom 

within it. It seems to me that to express how those affective dimensions are 

mobilised is the main ethical concern now … 

It seems to me that alternative political action does not have to fight against 

the idea that power has become affective, but rather has to learn to function 

itself on that same level — meet affective modulation with affective 

modulation. That requires, in some ways, a performative, theatrical or 

aesthetic approach to politics. For example, it is not possible for a 

dispossessed group to adequately communicate its needs and desires through 

the mass media. It just doesn’t happen. It wasn’t possible for marginal 

interest groups like the anti-globalisation movement before the Seattle 

demonstration to do that simply by arguing convincingly and broadcasting its 

message. The message doesn’t get through, because the mass media doesn’t 

function on that level of the rational weighing of choices. Unfortunately the 

kind of theatrical or performative intervention that is the easiest and has the 

most immediate effect is often a violent kind. If windows hadn’t been broken 

and cars hadn’t been overturned in Seattle, most people wouldn’t have heard 

of the anti-globalisation movement by now. That outburst of anger actually 

helped create networks of people working around the world trying to address 

the increasing inequalities that accompany globalisation. It was able to shake 

the situation enough that people took notice. It was like everything was 

thrown up in the air for a moment and people came down after the shock in a 

slightly different order and some were interconnected in ways that they 

hadn’t been before. Dispossessed people like the Palestinians or the people in 

Irian Jaya just can’t argue their cases effectively through the mass media, 

which is why they’re driven to violent guerilla tactics or terrorism, out of 

desperation. And they’re basically theatrical or spectacular actions, they’re 

performative, because they don’t do much in themselves except to get 

people’s attention — and cause a lot of suffering in the process, which is why 

they spectacularly backfire as often as not. They also work by amplifying fear 

and converting it into group pride or resolve. The resolve is for an in-group 

and the fear is for everybody else. It’s as divisive as the oppression it’s 

responding to, and it feeds right into the dominant state mechanisms. 

The September 11 terrorists made Bush president, they created President 

Bush, they fed the massive military and surveillance machine he’s now able to 

build. Before Bin Laden and Al-Qaïda, Bush wasn’t a president, he was an 

embarrassment. Bin Laden and Bush are affective partners, like Bush Senior 

and Saddam Hussein, or Reagan and the Soviet leaders. In a way, they’re in 

collusion or in symbiosis. They’re like evil twins who feed off of each other’s 

affective energies. It’s a kind of vampiric politics. Everything starts happening 

between these opposite personifications of affect, leaving no room for other 

kinds of action. It’s rare that protest violence has any of the positive 

organising power it did in Seattle. But in any case it had lost that power by 

the time the anti-globalisation movement reached Genoa, when people 

started to die. The violence was overused and under-strategised — it got 

predictable, it became a refrain, it lost its power. 

The crucial political question for me is whether there are ways of practising a 

politics that takes stock of the affective way power operates now, but doesn’t 

rely on violence and the hardening of divisions along identity lines that it 

usually brings. I’m not exactly sure what that kind of politics would look like, 

but it would still be performative. In some basic way it would be an aesthetic 

politics, because its aim would be to expand the range of affective potential 

— which is what aesthetic practice has always been about. It’s also the way I 

talked about ethics earlier. Felix Guattari liked to hyphenate the two — 

towards an ‘ethico-aesthetic politics’. 

                                                               * 

For me the relationship you were discussing earlier, between hope and fear 

in the political domain, is what gets mobilised by the Left and Right. In some 

ways the problem of more leftist or radical thinking is that it doesn’t 

actually tap into those mobilisations of different kinds of affects, whether it 

be hope, fear, love or whatever. The Left are criticising the Right and the 

Right are mobilising hope and fear in more affective ways. The Right can 

capture the imagination of a population and produce nationalist feelings and 

tendencies, so there can be a real absence of hope to counter what’s going on 

in everyday life, and I think the Left have a few more hurdles to jump … 

The traditional Left was really left behind by the culturalisation or 

socialisation of capital and the new functioning of the mass media. It seems 

to me that in the United States what’s left of the Left has become extremely 

isolated, because there are fewer possibilities than in countries like Australia 

or Canada to break through into the broadcast media. So there is a sense of 

hopelessness and isolation that ends up rigidifying people’s responses. They’re 

left to stew in their own righteous juices. They fall back on rectitude and 

right judgement, which simply is not affective. Or rather, it’s anti-affective 

affect — it’s curtailing, punishing, disciplining. It’s really just a sad holdover 

from the old regime — the dregs of disciplinary power. It seems to me that 

the Left has to relearn resistance, really taking to heart the changes that 

have happened recently in the way capitalism and power operate. 

Connections — belief, faith, joy 

In a way, this conversation makes me think about the relation of ‘autonomy 

and connection’ that you’ve written about. There are many ways of 

understanding autonomy, but I think with capitalism’s changing face it is 

harder and harder to be autonomous. For instance, people who are 

unemployed have very intense reactions and feelings to that categorisation 

of themselves as unemployed. And, in my experience, I’m continually 

hounded by bureaucratic procedures that tend to restrict my autonomy and 

freedom — such as constant checks, meetings and forms to fill out. These 

procedures mark every step you take … So to find some way to affirm 

unemployment that allows you to create another life, or even to get a job, is 

increasingly more difficult and produces new forms of alienation and ‘dis- 

connection’ … 

It is harder to feel like getting a job is making you autonomous, because there 

are so many mechanisms of control that come down on you when you do have 

a job. All aspects of your life involve these mechanisms — your daily 

schedules, your dress, and, in the United States, it can even involve being 

tested for drugs on a regular basis. Even when you are not on the job, the 

insecurity that goes with having a job and wanting to keep it in a volatile 

economy — where there is little job security and the kind of jobs that are 

available change very quickly — requires you to constantly be thinking of your 

marketability and what the next job is going to be. So free time starts getting 

taken up by self-improvement or taking care of yourself so that you remain 

healthy and alert and can perform at your peak. The difference between your 

job life and off-job life collapses, there are no longer distinctions between 

your public and private functions. Being unemployed creates an entirely 

different set of constraints and controls but it is not necessarily completely 

disempowering. For example, a lot of creative work gets done by people who 

are unemployed or underemployed. 

Yes, but it is also the intensity of those experiences that get categorised in 

one particular way — you either work or don’t work. But the way it’s lived 

out isn’t like that at all. I’m not just thinking of myself here and my 

experience of unemployment. The feeling of despair doesn’t have a way of 

being expressed in our cultures, except with the feeling that you’re not doing 

the right thing, or you’re not part of the society. It is about the relationship 

to commodities, really, because in a sense you are no longer in a position to 

market yourself or consume. 

There is definitely an imperative to have a job and to be able to consume 

more and consume better, to consume experiences that in-form you and 

increase your marketability for jobs. There’s definitely an imperative to 

participate, and if you can’t you’re branded, you don’t pass anymore, you 

can’t get by the most desirable checkpoints. 

Yes, like getting a credit card — or simply having money in your bank 

account. 

But what I was trying to say is that there is no such thing as autonomy and 

decisive control over one’s life in any total sense, whether you have a job or 

whether you don’t. There are different sets of constraints, and, like we were 

saying before, freedom always arises from constraint — it’s a creative 

conversion of it, not some utopian escape from it. Wherever you are, there is 

still potential, there are openings, and the openings are in the grey areas, in 

the blur where you’re susceptible to affective contagion, or capable of 

spreading it. It’s never totally within your personal power to decide. 

Is that what you mean by autonomy and connection? 

Well, there’s no such thing as autonomy in the sense of being entirely 

affectively separate. When you are unemployed you are branded as separate, 

unproductive and not part of society, but you still are connected because you 

are in touch with an enormous range of social services and policing functions 

that mean you are just as much in society — but you are in society in a certain 

relation of inequality and impasse. It’s a fiction that there is any position 

within society that enables you to maintain yourself as a separate entity with 

complete control over your decisions — the idea of a free agent that somehow 

stands back from it all and chooses, like from a smorgasbord platter. I think 

there can be another notion of autonomy that has to do more with how you 

can connect to others and to other movements, how you can modulate those 

connections, to multiply and intensify them. So what you are, affectively, 

isn’t a social classification — rich or poor, employed or unemployed — it’s a 

set of potential connections and movements that you have, always in an open 

field of relations. What you can do, your potential, is defined by your 

connectedness, the way you’re connected and how intensely, not your ability 

to separate off and decide by yourself. Autonomy is always connective, it’s 

not being apart, it’s being in, being in a situation of belonging that gives you 

certain degrees of freedom, or powers of becoming, powers of emergence. 

How many degrees of freedom there are, and where they can lead most 

directly, is certainly different depending on how you are socially classified — 

whether you are male or female, child or adult, rich or poor, employed or 

unemployed — but none of those conditions or definitions are boxes that 

completely undermine a person’s potential. And having pity for someone who 

occupies a category that is not socially valorised, or expressing moral outrage 

on their behalf, is not necessarily helpful in the long run, because it maintains 

the category and simply inverts its value sign, from negative to positive. It’s a 

kind of piety, a moralising approach. It’s not affectively pragmatic. It doesn’t 

challenge identity-based divisions. 

Well that is the problem of charity. When you have pity for someone it 

doesn’t actually change the situation or give them much hope. But the other 

side of that is what you were talking about before, the idea of ‘caring for 

belonging’. There is such a focus on self-interest and the privatised idea of 

the individual (although this is changing through the new fields of capitalism 

and the economy) — the valorisation of the individual against more collective 

struggles. This project has been trying to think about different notions of 

being, and collective life. In your ideas of autonomy and connection there is 

also another understanding or different notion of care — ‘belonging’ and our 

‘relations’ to ourselves and others. It involves some other idea of being that 

is anti-capitalist, and also different notion of caring … 

Well if you think of your life as an autonomous collectivity or a connective 

autonomy, it still makes sense to think in terms of self-interest at a certain 

level. Obviously a disadvantaged group has to assess their interests and fight 

for certain rights, certain rights of passage and access, certain resources — 

often survival itself is in the balance. But at the same time, if any group, 

disadvantaged or otherwise, identifies itself completely with its self-interests 

it’s living the fiction that it is a separate autonomy. It is missing the potential 

that comes from taking the risk of making an event of the way you relate to 

other people, orienting it towards becoming-other. So in a way you are 

cutting yourself off from your own potential to change and intensify your life. 

If you think of it in terms of potential and intensified experience then too 

much self-interest is against your own interests. You have to constantly be 

balancing those two levels. Political action that only operates in terms of the 

self-interest of identified groups occupying recognisable social categories like 

male/female, unemployed/employed have limited usefulness. For me, if they 

are pursued to the exclusion of other forms of political activity they end up 

creating a sort of rigidity — a hardening of the arteries! 

Which leads to a heart attack or death doesn’t it! 

So it seems to me there needs to be an ecology of practices that does have 

room for pursuing or defending rights based on an identification with a certain 

categorised social group, that asserts and defends a self-interest but doesn’t 

just do that. If you do think of your life potential as coming from the ways 

you can connect with others, and are challenged by that connection in ways 

that might be outside your direct control, then, like you are saying, you have 

to employ a different kind of logic. You have to think of your being in a direct 

belonging. There are any number of practices that can be socially defined and 

assert their interest, but all of them interact in an open field. If you take 

them all together there is an in-betweenness of them all that is not just the 

one-to-one conflict between pairs, but snakes between them all and makes 

them belong to the same social field — an indeterminate or emergent 

‘sociality’. So I’m suggesting that there is a role for people who care for 

relation or belonging, as such, and try to direct attention towards it and 

inflect it rather than denouncing or championing particular identities or 

positions. But to do that you have to abdicate your own self-interest up to a 

point, and this opens you to risk. You have to place yourself not in a position 

but in the middle, in a fairly indeterminate, fairly vague situation, where 

things meet at the edges and pass into each other. 

That’s the ethics isn’t it? 

Yes, because you don’t know what the outcome is going to be. So you have to 

take care, because an intervention that is too violent can create rebound 

effects that are unpredictable to such a degree that it can lead to things 

falling apart rather than reconfiguring. It can lead to great suffering. In a way 

I think it becomes an ethic of caring, caring for belonging, which has to be a 

non-violent ethic that involves thinking of your local actions as modulating a 

global state. A very small intervention might get amplified across the web of 

connections to produce large effects — the famous butterfly effect — you 

never know. So it takes a great deal of attention and care and abductive 

effort of understanding about how things are interrelating and how a 

perturbation, a little shove or a tweak, might change that. 

Yes, and there is a relation between this ethics, hope and the idea of joy.  If 

we take Spinoza and Nietzsche seriously, an ethic of joy and the cultivation 

of joy is an affirmation of life. In the sense of what you are saying, even a 

small thing can become amplified and can have a global effect, which is life 

affirming. What are your thoughts on this ethical relationship in everyday 

existence? And in intellectual practice — which is where we are coming from 

— what are the affirmations of joy and hope? 

Well I think that joy is not the same thing as happiness. Just like good for 

Nietzsche is not the opposite of evil, joy for Spinoza (or ‘gaiety’ in Nietzche’s 

vocabulary) is not the opposite of unhappy. It’s on a different axis. Joy can be 

very disruptive, it can even be very painful. What I think Spinoza and 

Nietzsche are getting at is joy as affirmation, an assuming by the body of its 

potentials, its assuming of a posture that intensifies its powers of existence. 

The moment of joy is the co-presence of those potentials, in the context of a 

bodily becoming. That can be an experience that overcomes you. Take 

Antonin Artaud, for example. His artistic practice was all about intensifying 

bodily potential, trying to get outside or underneath the categories of 

language and affective containment by those categories, trying to pack vast 

potentials for movement and meaning in a single gesture, or in words that 

burst apart and lose their conventional meaning, becoming like a scream of 

possibility, a babble of becoming, the body bursting out through an opening in 

expression. It’s liberating, but at the same time the charge of that potential 

can become unbearable and can actually destroy. Artaud himself was 

destroyed by it, he ended up mad, and so did Nietzsche. So it is not just 

simple opposition between happy and unhappy or pleasant or unpleasant. 

I do think, though, that the practice of joy does imply some form of belief. It 

can’t be a total scepticism or nihilism or cynicism, which are all mechanisms 

for holding oneself separate and being in a position to judge or deride. But, 

on the other hand, it’s not a belief in the sense of a set of propositions to 

adhere to or a set of principles or moral dictates. There is a phrase of 

Deleuze’s that I like very much where he says that what we need is to be able 

to find a way to ‘believe in the world’ again. It’s not at all a theological 

statement — or an anti-theological statement for that matter. It’s an ethical 

statement. What it is saying is that we have to live our immersion in the 

world, really experience our belonging to this world, which is the same thing 

as our belonging to each other, and live that so intensely together that there 

is no room to doubt the reality of it. The idea is that lived intensity is self- 

affirming. It doesn’t need a God or judge or head of state to tell it that it has 

value. What it means, I think, is accept the embeddedness, go with it, live it 

out, and that’s your reality, it’s the only reality you have, and it’s your 

participation that makes it real. That’s what Deleuze is saying belief is about, 

a belief in the world. It’s not a belief that’s ‘about’ being in the world, it is a 

being in the world. Because it’s all about being in this world, warts and all, 

and not some perfect world beyond or a better world of the future, it’s an 

empirical kind of belief. Ethical, empirical — and creative, because your 

participation in this world is part of a global becoming. So it’s about taking 

joy in that process, wherever it leads, and I guess it’s about having a kind of 

faith in the world which is simply the hope that it continue … But again it is 

not a hope that has a particular content or end point — it’s a desire for more 

life, or for more to life.

LIFE OF DIOGENES

OKLAHOMA CITY—The depression is endangering patriotism. Here this week “there breathed a man with soul so dead,” or with stomach so empty, that he gave a silk American flag for $2 to a pawnbroker.

Proprietors said during the past few months persons have pawned dogs, false teeth, and almost every other possession imaginable, but this was the first flag.