Why Obama’s Futurama Can Wait

Schools and Hospitals Should Come First in Any Stimulus Package

By Mike Davis

America’s “Futurama” is defunct. The famous walk-through diorama of a car-and-suburb world, imagineered by Norman Bel Geddes for General Motors at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, has weathered into a dreary emblem of our national backwardness. While GM bleeds to death on a Detroit street corner, the steel-and-concrete Interstate landscape built in the 1950s and 1960s is rapidly decaying into this century’s equivalent of Victorian rubble.

As we wait in potholed gridlock for the next highway bridge to collapse, the French, the Japanese, and now the Spanish blissfully speed by us on their sci-fi trains. Within the next year or two, Spain’s high-speed rail network will become the world’s largest, with plans to cap construction in 2020 at an incredible 6,000 miles of fast track. Meanwhile China has launched its first 200 mile-per-hour prototype, and Saudi Arabia and Argentina are proceeding with the construction of their own state-of-the-art systems. Of the larger rich, industrial countries, only the United States has yet to build a single mile of what constitutes the new global standard of transportation.

From day one, Barack Obama campaigned to redress this infrastructure deficit through an ambitious program of public investment: “For our economy, our safety, and our workers, we have to rebuild America.” Originally he proposed to finance this spending by ending the war in Iraq. Although his present commitments to a larger military and an expanded war in Afghanistan seem to foreclose any reconversion of the Pentagon budget, he continues to emphasize the urgency of an Apollo-style program to modernize highways, ports, rail transit, and power grids.

Public works, he also promises, can put the public back to work. His “Economic Rescue Plan for the Middle Class” vows to “create 5 million new, high-wage jobs by investing in the renewable sources of energy that will eliminate the oil we currently import from the Middle East in 10 years, and we’ll create 2 million jobs by rebuilding our crumbling roads, schools, and bridges.”

Of course, Bill Clinton entered the White House with a similarly ambitious plan to rebuild the derelict national infrastructure, but it was abandoned after Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin convinced the new president that deficit reduction was the true national priority. This time around, a much more powerful and desperate coalition of interests is aligned to support the Keynesian shock-and-awe of major public works.

Rolling Out the Dozers

Since the Paulson bailout plan has become so much expensive spit in the wind, and with bond spreads now premised on the possibility of double-digit unemployment over the next 18 months, massive new federal spending has become a matter of sheer economic survival. As innumerable influentials — from New York Times columnist David Brooks to House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi — have argued, a crash program of infrastructure repair and construction, likely to include some investment in the new power grids required to bring more solar and wind energy online, is the “win-win” approach that will garner the quickest bipartisan support.

It has also been portrayed as the only lifeboat in the water for the ordinary steerage passengers in our sinking economy. The emergent Washington consensus seems to be that those five million green jobs can actually come later (after we save GM’s shareholders), but that infrastructure spending — if resolutely pushed through the lame-duck Congress or adopted in Obama’s first 100 days — can begin to pump money into the crucial construction and manufacturing sectors of the economy before the end of next winter.

Unlike Comrade Bush’s “socialist” efforts to save Wall Street, a public-works strategy for national recovery has had broad ideological respectability from the days of Alexander Hamilton and Abraham Lincoln to those of Franklin D. Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. If Democrats can brag about the proud heritage of the Works Progress Administration and the Public Works Administration from the era of the Great Depression (ah, those magnificent post offices and parkways), there are still a few Republicans who remember the Golden Age of interstate highway construction that commenced in the 1950s with President Dwight D. Eisenhower. Indeed since the national shame of Hurricane Katrina, Americans have become outspokenly nostalgic about competent federal governments and magnificent public achievements.

If one accepts the reasonable principle of supporting the new president whenever he makes policy from the left or addresses basic social needs, shouldn’t progressives be cheering the White House as it rolls out the dozers, Cats, and big cranes? Aren’t high-speed mass transit and clean energy the kind of noble priorities that best reconcile big-bang stimulus with long-term public value?

The answer is: no, not at this stage of our national emergency. I’m not an infrastructure-crisis denialist, but first things first. We are now at a crash site, and our priority should be to save the victims, not change the tires or repair the fender, much less build a new car. In the triage situation that now confronts the president-elect, keeping local schools and hospitals open should be the first concern, rebuilding bridges and expanding ports would come next, and rescuing bank shareholders at the very end of the line.

Inexorably, the budgets of schools, cities, and states are sinking into insolvency on a scale comparable to the early 1930s. The public-sector fiscal crisis — a vicious chain reaction of falling property values, incomes, and sales — has been magnified by the unexpectedly large exposure of local governments and transit agencies to the Wall Street meltdown via complex capital lease-back arrangements. Meanwhile on the demand side, the need for public services explodes as even prudent burghers face foreclosure, not to speak of the loss of pensions and medical coverage. Although the public mega-deficits of California and New York may dominate headlines, the essence of the crisis — from the suburbs of Anchorage to the neighborhoods of West Philly — is its potential universality.

Certainly, in such a rich country, wind farms and schools should never become a Sophie’s choice, but the criminal negligence of Congress over the past months should alert us to the likelihood that such a choice will be made — with disastrous results for both human services and economic recovery.

Saving Schools and Hospitals

Congress naturally loves infrastructure because it rewards manufacturers, shippers, and contractors who give large campaign contributions, and because construction sites can be handsomely bill-boarded with the names of proud sponsors. Powerful business lobbies like the National Industrial Transportation League and the Coalition for America’s Gateways and Trade Corridors stand ready to grease the wheels of their political allies. In addition, if the past century of congressional pork-barrel methods is any precedent, infrastructural spending typically resists coherent national planning or larger cost-benefit analyses.

Yet saving (and expanding) core public employment is, hands-down, the best Keynesian stimulus around. Federal investment in education and healthcare gets incomparably more bang for the buck, if jobs are the principal criterion, than expenditures on transportation equipment or road repair.

For example, $50 million in federal aid during the Clinton administration allowed Michigan schools to hire nearly 1,300 new teachers. It is also the current operating budget of a Tennessee school district made up of eight elementary schools, three middle schools, and two high schools.

On the other hand, $50 million on the order book of a niche public transit manufacturer generates only 200 jobs (plus, of course, capital costs and profits). Road construction and bridge repair, also very capital intensive, produce about the same modest, direct employment effect.

One of the most likely targets for a Congressional stimulus plan is light-rail construction. Street-car systems are enormously popular with local governments, redevelopment agencies, and middle-class commuters, but generally they operate less efficiently (per dollar per passenger) than bus systems, and at least 40% of the capital investment leaks overseas to German streetcar builders and Korean steel companies.

Personally, I would love to commute via a sleek Euro-style bullet train from my home in San Diego to my job in Riverside, 100 grueling freeway miles away, but I’ll take gridlock if the cost of rationing federal expenditure is tolerating the closure of my kids’ school or increasing the wait in the local emergency room from two to ten hours.

Obama, unlike his predecessor, has a bold vision, shared with his powerful supporters in high-tech industries, of catching up with the Spanish and Japanese, while redeeming America as the synonym for modernity. Lots of new infrastructure will, however, become so many bridges to nowhere (especially for our children) unless he and Congress first save human-needs budgets and public-sector jobs.

A good start for progressive agitation on Obama’s left flank would be to demand that his health-care reform and aid-to-education proposals be brought front and center as preferential vehicles for immediate macro-economic stimulus. Democrats should not forget that the most brilliant and enduring accomplishment of the Kennedy-Johnson era was Head Start, not the Apollo Program.

If, after saving kindergartens and county hospitals, we someday hope to ride the fast train, then we need to rebuild the antiwar movement on broader foundations. The president-elect’s original proposal for funding domestic social investment through downsizing the empire offers a brilliant starting point for basing economic growth on an economic bill of rights (as advocated by Franklin Roosevelt in 1944) instead of imperial over-reach and Pharaonic levels of military waste.

Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays Against Empire (Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

Building Dwelling Thinking by Martin Heidegger

Living on the Ice Shelf

Humanity’s Meltdown
By Mike Davis

1. Farewell to the Holocene

Our world, our old world that we have inhabited for the last 12,000 years, has ended, even if no newspaper in North America or Europe has yet printed its scientific obituary.

This February, while cranes were hoisting cladding to the 141st floor of the Burj Dubai tower (which will soon be twice the height of the Empire State Building), the Stratigraphy Commission of the Geological Society of London was adding the newest and highest story to the geological column.The London Society is the world’s oldest association of Earth scientists, founded in 1807, and its Commission acts as a college of cardinals in the adjudication of the geological time-scale. Stratigraphers slice up Earth’s history as preserved in sedimentary strata into hierarchies of eons, eras, periods, and epochs marked by the “golden spikes” of mass extinctions, speciation events, and abrupt changes in atmospheric chemistry.

In geology, as in biology or history, periodization is a complex, controversial art and the most bitter feud in nineteenth-century British science — still known as the “Great Devonian Controversy” — was fought over competing interpretations of homely Welsh Graywackes and English Old Red Sandstone. More recently, geologists have feuded over how to stratigraphically demarcate ice age oscillations over the last 2.8 million years. Some have never accepted that the most recent inter-glacial warm interval — the Holocene — should be distinguished as an “epoch” in its own right just because it encompasses the history of civilization.

As a result, contemporary stratigraphers have set extraordinarily rigorous standards for the beatification of any new geological divisions. Although the idea of the “Anthropocene” — an Earth epoch defined by the emergence of urban-industrial society as a geological force — has been long debated, stratigraphers have refused to acknowledge compelling evidence for its advent.

At least for the London Society, that position has now been revised.

To the question “Are we now living in the Anthropocene?” the 21 members of the Commission unanimously answer “yes.” They adduce robust evidence that the Holocene epoch — the interglacial span of unusually stable climate that has allowed the rapid evolution of agriculture and urban civilization — has ended and that the Earth has entered “a stratigraphic interval without close parallel in the last several million years.” In addition to the buildup of greenhouse gases, the stratigraphers cite human landscape transformation which “now exceeds [annual] natural sediment production by an order of magnitude,” the ominous acidification of the oceans, and the relentless destruction of biota.

This new age, they explain, is defined both by the heating trend (whose closest analogue may be the catastrophe known as the Paleocene Eocene Thermal Maximum, 56 million years ago) and by the radical instability expected of future environments. In somber prose, they warn that “the combination of extinctions, global species migrations and the widespread replacement of natural vegetation with agricultural monocultures is producing a distinctive contemporary biostratigraphic signal. These effects are permanent, as future evolution will take place from surviving (and frequently anthropogenically relocated) stocks.” Evolution itself, in other words, has been forced into a new trajectory.

2. Spontaneous Decarbonization?

The Commission’s coronation of the Anthropocene coincides with growing scientific controversy over the 4th Assessment Report issued last year by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC is mandated to establish scientific baselines for international efforts to mitigate global warming, but some of the most prominent researchers in the field are now challenging its reference scenarios as overly optimistic, even pie-in-the-sky thinking.

The current scenarios were adopted by the IPCC in 2000 to model future global emissions based on different “storylines” about population growth as well as technological and economic development. Some of the Panel’s major scenarios are well known to policymakers and greenhouse activists, but few outside the research community have actually read or understood the fine print, particularly the IPCC’s confidence that greater energy efficiency will be an “automatic” byproduct of future economic development. Indeed all the scenarios, even the “business as usual” variants, assume that at least 60% of future carbon reduction will occur independently of greenhouse mitigation measures.

The Panel, in effect, has bet the ranch, or rather the planet, on unplanned, market-driven progress toward a post-carbon world economy, a transition that implicitly requires wealth generated from higher energy prices ultimately finding its way to new technologies and renewable energy. (The International Energy Agency recently estimated that it would cost $45 trillion to halve greenhouse gas emissions by 2050.) Kyoto-type accords and carbon markets are designed — almost as an analogue to Keynesian “pump-priming” — to bridge the shortfall between spontaneous decarbonization and the emissions targets required by each scenario. Serendipitously, this reduces the costs of mitigating global warming to levels that align with what seems, at least theoretically, to be politically possible, as expounded in the British Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change of 2006 and other such reports.

Critics argue, however, that this represents a heroic leap of faith that radically understates the economic costs, technological hurdles, and social changes required to tame the growth of greenhouse gases. European carbon emissions, for example, are still rising (dramatically in some sectors) despite the European Union’s much praised adoption of a cap-and-trade system in 2005. Likewise there has been little evidence in recent years of the automatic progress in energy efficiency that is the sine qua non of the IPCC scenarios. AlthoughThe Economist characteristically begs to differ, most energy researchers believe that, since 2000, energy intensity has actually risen; that is, global carbon dioxide emissions have kept pace with, or even grown marginally faster than, energy use.

Coal production, especially, is undergoing a dramatic renaissance, as the nineteenth century has returned to haunt the twenty-first century. Hundreds of thousands of miners are now working under conditions that would have appalled Charles Dickens, extracting the dirty mineral that allows China to open two new coal-fueled power stations every week. Meanwhile, the total consumption of fossil fuels is predicted to increase at least 55% over the next generation, with international oil exports doubling in volume.

The United Nations Development Program, which has made its own study of sustainable energy goals, warns that it will require “a 50 percent cut in greenhouse gas emissions worldwide by 2050 against 1990 levels” to keep humanity outside the red zone of runaway warming (usually defined as a greater than two degrees centigrade increase this century). Yet the International Energy Agency predicts that, in all likelihood, such emissions will actually increase in this period by nearly 100% — enough greenhouse gas to propel us past several critical tipping points.

Even while higher energy prices are pushing SUVs towards extinction and attracting more venture capital to renewable energy, they are also opening the Pandora’s box of the crudest of crude oil production from Canadian tar sands and Venezuelan heavy oil. As one British scientist has warned, the very last thing we should wish for (under the false slogan of “energy independence”) is new frontiers in hydrocarbon production that advance “humankind’s ability to accelerate global warming” and slow the urgent transition to “non-carbon or closed-carbon energy cycles.”

3. Fin-du-Monde Boom

What confidence should we place in the capacity of markets to reallocate investment from old to new energy or, say, from arms expenditures to sustainable agriculture? We are propagandized incessantly (especially on public television) about how giant companies like Chevron, Pfizer Inc., and Archer Daniels Midland are hard at work saving the planet by plowing profits back into the kinds of research and exploration that will ensure low-carbon fuels, new vaccines, and more drought-resistant crops.

As the current ethanol-from-corn boom, which has diverted 100 million tons of grain from human diets mainly to American car engines, so appallingly demonstrates, “biofuel” may be a euphemism for subsidies to the rich and starvation for the poor. Likewise “clean coal,” despite a vigorous endorsement from Senator Barack Obama (who also champions ethanol), is, at present, simply a huge deception: a $40 million advertising and lobbying campaign for a hypothetical technology that BusinessWeek has characterized as “being decades away from commercial viability.”

Moreover there are disturbing signs that energy companies and utilities are reneging on their public commitments to the development of carbon-capture and alternative energy technologies. The Bush administration’s “marquee demonstration project,” FutureGen, was scrapped this year after the coal industry refused to pay its share of the public-private “partnership”; similarly, most U.S. private-sector carbon-sequestration initiatives have recently been cancelled. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, Shell has just pulled out of the world’s largest wind-energy project, the London Array. Despite heroic levels of advertising, energy corporations, like pharmaceutical companies, prefer to overgraze the commons, while letting taxes, not profits, pay for whatever urgent, long-overdue research is actually undertaken.

On the other hand, the spoils from high energy prices continue to gush into real estate, skyscrapers, and financial assets. Whether or not we are actually at the summit of Hubbert’s Peak — that peak oil moment — whether or not the oil-price bubble finally bursts, what we are probably witnessing is the largest transfer of wealth in modern history.

An eminent Wall Street oracle, McKinsey Global Institute, predicts that if crude oil prices remain above $100 per barrel — they are, at the moment, approaching $140 a barrel — the six countries of the Gulf Cooperation Council alone will “reap a cumulative windfall of almost $9 trillion by 2020.” As in the 1970s, Saudi Arabia and its Gulf neighbors, whose total gross domestic product has almost doubled in just three years, are awash in liquidity: $2.4 trillion in banks and investment funds according to a recent estimate by The Economist. Regardless of price trends, the International Energy Agency predicts, “more and more oil will come from fewer and fewer countries, primarily the Middle East members of OPEC [The Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries].”

Dubai, which has little oil income of its own, has become the regional financial hub for this vast pool of wealth, with ambitions to eventually compete with Wall Street and the City of London. During the first oil shock in the 1970s, much of OPEC’s surplus was recycled through military purchases in the United States and Europe, or parked in foreign banks to become the “subprime” loans that eventually devastated Latin America. In the wake of the attacks of 9/11, the Gulf states became far more cautious about entrusting their wealth to countries, like the United States, governed by religious fanatics. This time around, they are using “sovereign wealth funds” to achieve a more active ownership in foreign financial institutions, while investing fabulous amounts of oil revenue to transform Arabia’s sands into hyperbolic cities, shopping paradises, and private islands for British rock stars and Russian gangsters.

Two years ago, when oil prices were less than half of the current level, The Financial Times estimated that planned new construction in Saudi Arabia and the emirates already exceeded $1 trillion dollars. Today, it may be closer to $1.5 trillion, considerably more than the total value of world trade in agricultural products. Most of the Gulf city-states are building hallucinatory skylines — and, among them, Dubai is the unquestionable superstar. In a little more than a decade, it has erected 500 skyscrapers, and currently leases one-quarter of all the high-rise cranes in the world.

This super-charged Gulf boom, which celebrity architect Rem Koolhaas claims is “reconfiguring the world,” has led Dubai developers to proclaim the advent of a “supreme lifestyle” represented by seven-star hotels, private islands, and J-class yachts. Not surprisingly, then, the United Arab Emirates and its neighbors have the biggest per capita ecological footprints on the planet. Meanwhile, the rightful owners of Arab oil wealth, the masses crammed into the angry tenements of Baghdad, Cairo, Amman, and Khartoum, have little more to show for it than a trickle-down of oil-field jobs and Saudi-subsidized madrassas. While guests enjoy the $5,000 per night rooms in Burj Al-Arab, Dubai’s celebrated sail-shaped hotel, working-class Cairenes riot in the streets over the unaffordable price of bread.

4. Can Markets Enfranchise the Poor?

Emissions optimists, of course, will smile at all the gloom-and-doom and evoke the coming miracle of carbon trading. What they discount is the real possibility that a sprawling carbon-offset market may emerge, just as predicted, yet produce only minimal improvement in the global carbon balance sheet, as long as there is no mechanism for enforcing real net reductions in fossil fuel use.

In popular discussions of emissions-rights trading systems, it is common to mistake the smokestacks for the trees. For example, the wealthy oil enclave of Abu Dhabi (like Dubai, a partner in the United Arab Emirates) brags that it has planted more than 130 million trees — each of which does its duty in absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. However, this artificial forest in the desert also consumes huge quantities of irrigation water produced, or recycled, from expensive desalination plants. The trees may allow Sheik Ahmed bin Zayed to wear a halo at international meetings, but the rude fact is that they are an energy-intensive beauty strip, like most of so-called green capitalism.

And, while we’re at it, let’s just ask: What if the buying and selling of carbon credits and pollution offsets fails to turn down the thermostat? What exactly will motivate governments and global industries then to join hands in a crusade to reduce emissions through regulation and taxation?

Kyoto-type climate diplomacy assumes that all the major actors, once they have accepted the science in the IPCC reports, will recognize an overriding common interest in gaining control over the runaway greenhouse effect. But global warming is not War of the Worlds, where invading Martians are dedicated to annihilating all of humanity without distinction. Climate change, instead, will initially produce dramatically unequal impacts across regions and social classes. It will reinforce, not diminish, geopolitical inequality and conflict.

As the United Nations Development Program emphasized in its report last year, global warming is above all a threat to the poor and the unborn, the “two constituencies with little or no political voice.” Coordinated global action on their behalf thus presupposes either their revolutionary empowerment (a scenario not considered by the IPCC) or the transmutation of the self-interest of rich countries and classes into an enlightened “solidarity” without precedent in history. From a rational-actor perspective, the latter outcome only seems realistic if it can be shown that privileged groups possess no preferential “exit” option, that internationalist public opinion drives policymaking in key countries, and that greenhouse gas mitigation could be achieved without major sacrifices in upscale Northern Hemispheric standards of living — none of which seems highly likely.

And what if growing environmental and social turbulence, instead of galvanizing heroic innovation and international cooperation, simply drive elite publics into even more frenzied attempts to wall themselves off from the rest of humanity? Global mitigation, in this unexplored but not improbable scenario, would be tacitly abandoned (as, to some extent, it already has been) in favor of accelerated investment in selective adaptation for Earth’s first-class passengers. We’re talking here of the prospect of creating green and gated oases of permanent affluence on an otherwise stricken planet.

Of course, there will still be treaties, carbon credits, famine relief, humanitarian acrobatics, and perhaps the full-scale conversion of some European cities and small countries to alternative energy. But the shift to low, or zero, emission lifestyles would be almost unimaginably expensive. (In Britain, it currently costs $200,000 more to build a zero-carbon, “level 6″ eco-home than a standard unit of the same area.) And this will certainly become even more unimaginable after perhaps 2030, when the convergent impacts of climate change, peak oil, peak water, and an additional 1.5 billion people on the planet may begin to seriously throttle growth.

5. The North’s Ecological Debt

The real question is this: Will rich counties ever mobilize the political will and economic resources to actually achieve IPCC targets or, for that matter, to help poorer countries adapt to the inevitable, already “committed” quotient of warming now working its way toward us through the slow circulation of the world ocean?

To be more vivid: Will the electorates of the wealthy nations shed their current bigotry and walled borders to admit refugees from predicted epicenters of drought and desertification like the Maghreb, Mexico, Ethiopia, and Pakistan? Will Americans, the most miserly people when measured by per capita foreign aid, be willing to tax themselves to help relocate the millions likely to be flooded out of densely settled, mega-delta regions like Bangladesh?

Market-oriented optimists, once again, will point to carbon offset programs like the Clean Development Mechanism which, they claim, will allow green capital to flow to the Third World. Most of the Third World, however, probably prefers for the First World to acknowledge the environmental mess it has created and take responsibility for cleaning it up. They rightly rail against the notion that the greatest burden of adjustment to the Anthropocene epoch should fall on those who have contributed least to carbon emissions and drawn the slightest benefits from 200 years of industrialization.

In a sobering study recently published in the Proceedings of the [U.S.] National Academy of Science, a research team has attempted to calculate the environmental costs of economic globalization since 1961 as expressed in deforestation, climate change, over-fishing, ozone depletion, mangrove conversion, and agricultural expansion. After making adjustments for relative cost burdens, they found that the richest countries, by their activities, had generated 42% of environmental degradation across the world, while shouldering only 3% of the resulting costs.

The radicals of the South will rightly point to another debt as well. For 30 years, cities in the developing world have grown at breakneck speed without any equivalent public investment in infrastructure services, housing, or public health. In large part this has been the result of foreign debts contracted by dictators, payments enforced by the International Monetary Fund, and public sectors wrecked by the World Bank’s “structural adjustment” agreements.

This planetary deficit of opportunity and social justice is captured in the fact that more than one billion people, according to UN-Habitat, currently live in slums and that their number is expected to double by 2030. An equal number, or more, forage in the so-called informal sector (a first-world euphemism for mass unemployment). Sheer demographic momentum, meanwhile, will increase the world’s urban population by 3 billion people over the next 40 years (90% of them in poor cities), and no one — absolutely no one — has a clue how a planet of slums, with growing food and energy crises, will accommodate their biological survival, much less their inevitable aspirations to basic happiness and dignity.

If this seems unduly apocalyptic, consider that most climate models project impacts that will uncannily reinforce the present geography of inequality. One of the pioneer analysts of the economics of global warming, Petersen Institute fellow William R. Cline, recently published a country-by-country study of the likely effects of climate change on agriculture by the later decades of this century. Even in the most optimistic simulations, the agricultural systems of Pakistan (a 20% decrease from current farm output predicted) and Northwestern India (a 30% decrease) are likely to be devastated, along with much of the Middle East, the Maghreb, the Sahel belt, Southern Africa, the Caribbean, and Mexico. Twenty-nine developing countries will lose 20% or more of their current farm output to global warming, while agriculture in the already rich north is likely to receive, on average, an 8% boost.

In light of such studies, the current ruthless competition between energy and food markets, amplified by international speculation in commodities and agricultural land, is only a modest portent of the chaos that could soon grow exponentially from the convergence of resource depletion, intractable inequality, and climate change. The real danger is that human solidarity itself, like a West Antarctic ice shelf, will suddenly fracture and shatter into a thousand shards.

Mike Davis is the author of In Praise of Barbarians: Essays against Empire(Haymarket Books, 2008) and Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb (Verso, 2007). He is currently working on a book about cities, poverty, and global change.

There are moments in one’s existence that stand out, as if of a more solid texture, drawn in stronger lines contrasting with the uzziness and fathomless ambiguity of the rest of life. And they really are charged with objective meaning, imparted by the movement of a sort of historic overdetermination. Often that special quality only reveals itself retrospectively, but sometimes, too, it is perceived immediately.

That is what I experienced on the day, in autumn 1959, when I first glanced through an issue – number 3, I think – of the SI [Situationist International]. At the time, I participated in the Socialisme ou Barbarie group, and in the journal of the same name, for which I wrote, as was the rule, under a pseudonym: P. Canjuers. That day, as a few of us were going through the weekly mail, my eye was attracted by that sleek, elegant publication, with its scintillating cover and incredible title. I took grabbed hold of it, and immediately began to explore what I gradually came to see as a new-found land of modernity, bizarre but fascinating.

Now we, at S. ou B., felt that we epitomized modernity, and I continue to think us completely justified in doing so. S. ou B. had broken with orthodox Marxism-Leninism, and gone on to radically criticize the Eastern European Communist regimes, but also to reformulate the criticism of capitalism, through the analysis both of its most sophisticated forms of domination, and of the most advanced experiences of the working class movement. Among these, the revolutionary workers’ councils in Hungary in particular fed our thinking about what, positively, might be the content of a truly revolutionary program.

How passionate were those years of searching, its fever further intensified by the position of quasi intellectual clandestinity to which the utter rejection of our ideas confined us. For, despite the Kruschev report and the uprisings in Poland and Hungary, the French political scene was still essentially paralysed by the intellectual blackmail of both Stalinists and the most cowardly “pentiti” of bourgeois ideology, such as Sartre. So we explored the deep waters Nautilus-like, almost unknown to the world on the surface, freely and audaciously, to a point that would perhaps not have been possible had we been obliged to battle foot by foot against dishonest opponents who, furthermore, had nothing of interest to say to us.

And now, looking through this perfectly singular booklet, I discovered a small group of unknown people who did have some terribly exciting things to say to us. Definitely strange things for us, with our eyes glued to the Marxist horizon, even though the point, for many of us, was to travel beyond it; totally inhabitual in regard to the messages sent out to us by other tiny groups intent on saving some vestiges of the revolutionary past from the Stalinist disaster. The strangeness was not uncanny, but rather, attractive, incredibly enticing. The criticism of art and culture led on to a utopian, liberated life, already experimented by these young adventurers in practical poetics such as “derives” around cities, or the illustrated description of a fantastic place called the “Yellow City.” And that utopia already haunted the people whose faces could be seen in a few dim photos, sitting around cafe tables engaged in ardent, infinite conversation that lofted them through the nights. With the frenzy of escaped prisoners, in the secret folds of the city, they too were struggling to elucidate the deepest roots of modern misery, and living, in fantasy, the upheaval that would overthrow it. And the journal was something of the tale of their efforts, in a sharp, tense style, almost stiffened in the same arrogant conceit with which we too affected to steel ourselves, both to reflect back on our opponents the scorn they inflicted on us, and to convince ourselves of how radical we really were.

As I read that issue of the SI, then, I realized that what was occurring was an objective encounter, so to speak, a criticism in action of “separation,” to use an expression in consonance with my emphatic feeling of the time: a meeting at the acme (no doubt hidden to everyone but us) of modernity. Over the following months, Debord and I checked out in detail just how necessary and fertile that encounter was, during long talks in bistros, and endless roamings through the city streets. In the project of self-management embracing every aspect of social life, as expressed by the workers’ movement at the heights of its spontaneous creativity – from the Paris Commune to 1956 in Hungary – resided the social and political underpinnings for the utopia of people constantly inventing their “use of life,” like a perpetual composing of music or poetry. And in turn, the subversion of the artistic and cultural institution, which the SI claimed to embody, came as an extension and a consecration, so to speak, in what was reputed to be the highest spheres, of the subversion of every agency of domination and exploitation. The text that we finally wrote jointly, and pompously entitled Preliminaires pour une definition de l’unite du programme revolutionnaire, definitely gives an idea of the ambition behind our exchanges, but tells hardly anything about how rich they were, and even less of the friendship that was built up through that conversation.

In a restaurant on rue Mouffetard, on July 20, 1960, we put the finishing touches on what we viewed as the guidelines of an agreement between the cultural vanguard and the vanguard of the proletarian revolution. We were very finicky about the title and its print, designed, according to Debord, so that the document would be referred to as the “Preliminaires” – and I smiled, indulgent and foolish, knowing nothing about communication at the time. After that, we parted for the summer, each with the task of circulating the paper among his comrades. In the fall, I had to leave France for 9 or 10 months, and during my absence I learned that Debord had formally become a member of S. ou B, was participating fully in its activities, especially during the group’s action within the major strikes that shook the Belgian Borinage in the winter of 1961. The news surprised me. His membership, I felt, exceeded the closeness we had actually achieved: and above all, it seemed useless, and in fact, in our discussions Debord had expressed the view that each group should continue, in practice, to follow its own path. The news of his resignation came as less of a surprise, since he had based it on his disagreement with the internal functioning of the group, and on the role played by some domineering individuals. Apparently, he had attempted to foment a revolt among the younger members, mostly students, but that had been no more than a Fronde.

I have stressed the episode of Debord’s relations with S. ou B. because it seems significant on several counts. First, the person I knew and loved at that time was, so to speak, a nascent Debord. Although he already had a brilliant career as an agitator in the cultural sphere behind him, the most singular traits of his personality as a revolutionary, as well as the most fertile and most perspicacious of his inventions still retained a vivaciousness and an accuracy that would subsequently be somewhat adulterated by his obsession with being public enemy number 1, and also by the structural stupidity of disciples, from whom he proved unable to take sufficient distance. At the time there were Khayati, Kotanyi, Jorn . . . friends, not disciples.

Above all there is a need, I think, to point up the importance, for the road Debord followed, of that involvement with S. ou B. – particularly so since he and most everyone who has had anything to say about his adventure have practically systematically ignored it. The point is obviously not to stake any claim either for S. ou B. and even less for myself, as having fathered the thinking of a man who went on to become a celebrity. To the contrary, it is the objective nature of our encounter that I would emphasize once again, and what it revealed about a particular moment in history. Debord did not succeed in wrenching himself from the curse that Stalinism and the bureaucratization of the working class organizations had laid on the revolutionary movement by dint of reading Hegel, the young Marx and Lukacs. It was the insurgent Hungarian workers and the Councils they created who lifted that curse, at least for those who were prepared to listen to what they had to say.

At this point in his itinerary, Debord was ready. He had broken with the Lettrists and with a criticism that remained complacently restricted to culture: in his opinion, the cultural vanguards did nothing but repeat ad nauseam the scene of the break-off with art, originally performed by the Dadaists after World War I. A clean break was called for, and a way of moving beyond art had to be found. Art conceived as play, as the freeing of desire, as subversion, as negation of the deathly, repressive social order, for this was the sense of modern art, as Debord saw it. The creation of “situations” was a response to that exigency: “The arts of the future will be upheavals of situations, or they will not be.” There was clearly a parallel between the revolution as the invention of society and those “upheavals of situations” as the invention of daily life.

Now, the link between so radical a demand and the concrete action of the proletariat turned out to be thinkable again. For anyone intent on seeing the true situation, the Budapest insurgents – about whom Debord had learned first hand from his friend Attila Kotanyi – had overthrown not only the colossal statue of Stalin, but also the terrifying image of a proletariat whose mission it was, as the sadistic agent of historic necessity, to force all of humanity, once and for all, to endorse industrial discipline, the cult of the leader, the annihilation of individuals, reduced to being the masses, etc. For artists and intellectuals, that proletariat was truly a bogy man, who so many had determined to serve nonetheless, out of fear, masochism or ambition.

In the West, by the same token, all those libertarian anarchists, anti-authoritarian Marxists, council communists, etc. who had never ceased to denounce the Stalinist imposture, began to gain some acknowledgement. And among them, S. ou B. and such sister groups as Solidarity in England, Correspondence in the USA, and Unita Proletaria in Italy, had undertaken a complete reinterpretation of the proletarian experience, highlighting the significance, for a liberatory movement, not only of the great moments of revolutionary creation, but of the everyday struggles around the work process and the creativity with which workers combat the disciplinary industrial organization. In doing so, S. ou B. revived the radicality characteristic of the anarchists, and of the very beginnings of the socialist movement, and geared thinking about the revolutionary utopia (“the contents of socialism”) to call every aspect of life into question, from the shape of cities to gender relations.

Clearly, then, there was nothing fortuitous in the arrival of an issue of the SI in the mailbox of S. ou B., any more than in the passionate interest it drew from a young member of that group, or the excited discussions that ensued. . . . And conversely, the reader will understand that when such themes as the criticism of daily life or all-encompassing self-management became the battle cries of the SI years later, I was not overwhelmed by their novelty, and I was surely not the only one.

How is it, then, that my excitement of some 30 years ago, when I first discovered the SI, is still tingling – not as some narcissistic pleasure in reliving the vanished past, but truly as the ongoing perception of an invaluable uniqueness? It is, I believe, because of the sense of form and the artistic quality that inhabited everything Debord undertook, and contributed enormously to making him effectively subversive.

I am of course not by any means contending that Debord should be embalmed in museums of modern art. It is true that he boasted of being the inventor of the major modern-day cinematographic innovations. . . . And one could also argue that as a virtuoso in the collage, photomontage and “detournement” of ads and comics, he was a great pop artist, – but the only sense in doing so would be for the (mediocre) pleasure of drawing screams from his devotees. Or again he may, as late sycophants would have it, be ranked among the great French writers of this century, thanks to his resolute style and the fine boldness of his assertions. And Sollers, who is one of Paris’ highest-paid literary clowns, and can therefore get away with anything, even took advantage of his position to subject Debord, alive and kicking, to the insult of claiming to be his spiritual heir; shortly thereafter he supported Balladur for President.

No, what I would like to demonstrate is quite the opposite: how the artistic treatment, so to speak, applied by Debord to revolutionary activity constitutes the exact, faithful expression of the contents of that activity, and gives its perspective proper depth.

To call Debord an artist is obviously something of a paradox. His criticism of art, intended to be devastating, was two-faceted. Modern art, on the one hand, with its succession of repetitious vanguards incapable of surpassing themselves, has exhausted its critical bite on alienated existence. But on the other hand and more deeply, art contrasts with “true life” in that it is congealed, so to speak, and therefore doomed to be no more than a cemetery of moments, affording fictitious, fallacious fulfilment of desires.

The same alienating force that Debord would later extend to the entire functioning of society, through the concept of the spectacle, applied, then, to the very principle of art. Art was nothing but separation from life.

Perhaps the explanation of the paradox by which the promulgator of so vivid a criticism actually turns out to be an artist, and profoundly so, resides in the fact that this criticism misses its mark, leaving its object intact, in essence. In fact, to reduce 20th century art to the movement of negation embodied by those vanguards is to mistake official art and some historicizing discourse on art for art work itself. The fact that Dada, and above all Duchamp, traced the theoretical limit of 20th century art with exemplary clarity – namely, that in the last resort it is the signature that makes the work of art, and for anything to be art the condition, necessary and sufficient, is that an artist decides it is – has in no way prevented art since then from being rich and meaningful within that limit. In striving obstinately to define what present-day art can or should be, the vanguards have succeeded only in becoming the “art pompier” of the second half of this century, in the person of Beuys, Buren and so many others – and in this it really has succeeded. And again, in any reference to vanguards, it is important not to align them all on any single historical trend. The Cobra movement, for instance, exemplifies a positive renewal much more than the work of negation.

This work of negation, which cannot be completed by art itself and can only achieve completion when life itself surpasses art – in “situations” – seems to rehash the old denial not only of art, but of symbolization, and of mediation by signs or figuration. To condemn art – and thence signs as well, or symbols – as false, in the name of the truthfulness of life or of things themselves, is not a judgment but a pure act of violence: does that make it revolutionary? Swift derided the academicians of Lagado who replaced words by specimens of things, in their attempt to reform language by doing away with its unfortunate polysemia, that is to say its very power of symbolism: endless transports were needed to have the slightest conversation!

Symbolization has avenged itself of this violent dismissal by taking over the very field of “destructive” activity to which Debord devoted himself, and by conferring the aura of the work of art on his life, as well as on his writings and films. And this came about through play and style.

As we all know, nothing is more serious than play, where the exercise of freedom adventures as close as possible to material and social constraints, or to chance; it guards us, then – but at such great risk ! – from the most repugnant kind of comfort: repetition – death in disguise in the eyes of Debord. But its seriousness also derives from its always, and especially in revolutionary action, being a world-play. Be it in tarots, chess or go, the physical objects and the rules of the game compose an analogue of the world, and each game or each move reorganizes and recommences the world. In the case of a group of revolutionaries, however small, the form of its organization, the way it functions, the content and the modalities of its action all prefigure, as in a microcosm, the desired state of the world. This was one of the bitter lessons drawn from the fate of the Bolshevik party, and the group S. ou B. was intent on drawing the consequences and on behaving immediately, concretely and on its own microscopic scale, as we thought a free society would demand.

Debord quite naturally extended this exigency to the area in which his desire to break with the “old world” was in fact most strongly focused, and which I will not call everyday life, because of the somewhat futile connotation of the term, but rather, “the use of life,” use of the fleeting moments, and of the most concrete contents of situations. And play was necessarily the model here, in the sense that the artist is playing when the progress of his work proposes an unheard of, desirable modulation of the course of time or the unfolding of space. “Experimenting” with the urban environment was this sort of play: through wanderings imbued with the hues and resonances lent by the peculiar qualities of the places visited, the drinks downed here and there and the remarks exchanged. The same was true of conversation, to be taken almost in the original sense of “shared life,” for it embodied something of a sensual fulfilment of friendship. For Debord it was a verbal derive, the playful experimenting, by several people, of ideas, words, new fancies – and anyone who ever spent some time with him knows how his presence and talk succeeded, in these exchanges with friends, in catalysing and freeing their imagination, in its liveliest expression. With real opponents, on the other hand, the discussion veered to another type of game, which he called a “boxing match” but was actually more of a free-for-all since he had no qualms about resorting to every available means, including the lowliest personal attacks.

In friendship, however, – and I think friendship is what really most accurately prefigured the kind of society he expected a revolution to produce -, he was intent on enforcing the rules dictated, in his opinion, by the constraints inherent in the fight against the existing order, and the degree of freedom required to be worthy to fight. And he often pushed that inflexible stance to the point of formalism, and of arbitrariness as well, since it was he who set those rules unilaterally, and most often left them implicit, the understanding being that they were self-evident. His disciples obviously were incapable of anything but an exaggeration of these practices, turning them into the most putrid fashionable snobbishness.

I myself was victim of that formalism, without even understanding, at the time, what had transpired, since the notion that relations between friends could be regulated by a code was completely alien to me. On the evening when Guy and Michele invited me to dinner at impasse de Clairvaux and served me a chicken-and-French-fries plate bought in some greasy joint on boulevard de Sebastopol, I should have understood that my hour of disgrace had arrived, even if the “insult” was strangely cloaked in an apology – “we’re broke” – which cancelled it and which I definitely could not revile. Had I been less of a fool I would probably have read the signals more fully, and understood that the mixture of chicken-fries plus apology was a sort of self-contradictory compromise between the will to exclude me – clearly imputable to Michele – and a desire to be indulgent. Etc. Here, then, in any case, is the method Debord chose when he felt the time had come to put an end to our friendship, without informing me of his reasons, even in the form of insults. Too bad for me, and for him.

The May ‘68 retreat by the SI, calling itself the council for the pursuit of occupations, into the Institut Pedagogique National (!), seems to me to be an infinitely more serious perversion of this kind of play. In doing so, the SI usurped the title of council which, in its own eyes, was supposed to designate the agency of collective empowerment of the revolutionary masses, turning it into a camouflage for a separate authority handing down judgments – that is, condemnations – of the innumerable protagonists of the May revolt, and above all of those people who dared to defend ideas barely distinguishable from their own.

Playing, under the circumstances, would definitely have demanded that the game be waged on a much broader scope, and Debord would no doubt have lost control of it, and the possibility of imparting a style to it.

No irony is intended in my use of the term “style.” Style, to me, is not an affected form used to facilitate or embellish the communication of a message, the meaning of which is located at some basement level of expressiveness. Play involves style; and so does the revolutionary action of a minority group, the idea being to give shape to a vision of the world that cannot be achieved at its own small scale. Each move or combination of moves outlines a gesture or a figure, projecting an order, however fleeting, into the existent chaos. To speak of beauty or elegance in reference to play is not superficial, but truly imparts the awareness that play operates in the objective world. And again, style cannot be defined as the mark of subjectivity, but rather, as the tension between the ephemeral and the utopian dimensions – between movement, on the one hand, wresting free speech from the inertia and senselessness of the pervading verbal noise to adventure it, in all its vulnerability, suspended over “the cataract of time,” and on the other hand utopia, the projection of a figure offering, by analogy, a foretaste of some desirable ordering of the world.

When a minority group acts, then, it is style more than the necessarily limited material effect that propels reality to a breaking point where open-ended time, and the incompletion of history, and the possibility of revolution make themselves felt, by surprise.

In the work of art this gaping openness to time, signature of its uniqueness, is what Benjamin called the aura. He deemed relinquishment of it necessary, in the name of his melancholic subjection to modern technicity. At a time when the fate of the revolution was believed to be tied to machines and the massified humanity presumably generated by them, he proclaimed “What one man has done can be done again by another” as a liberatory slogan. Now that we know a bit more about machines, and above all about society as a machine, it seems to me that the revolution needs to bet on the postulate that “what one man has done cannot be done again by any other” if we are truly intent on acknowledging equal dignity for all subjects, referred to here as men.

This is the postulate asserted in his practice by Debord, haunted by his horror of repetition and, what comes to the same, by his acute perception of the uniqueness of each moment: “(what is) beyond the violence of intoxication. . . peace, magnificent and fearsome, the true taste of time passing.”

The mirror as a figure – mirror adhering so closely to the fluctuating image of reality, but, at the same time, reversing it – acts as a deeply unifying structure for Debord’s work, and perhaps even for his life, from his writings to the singular critical posture he adopted, and including the contents of that criticism: the concept of the spectacle.

But again, the mirror figure embodies all of Debord’s ambivalence toward any mediation by signs, representation and symbolisation. It would ensnare us in alienation and commodity fetishism, or in the substitute for true life that art extends to us: because it is fake, distorting and fragmented, it is the instrument of domination through the spectacle. It must constantly be broken, to liberate “true life,” to rid oneself of the petrifying hold of images and reassert authenticity, constantly to be reinvented. From Memoires to Panegyrique, however, and in all of his films – down to the palindromic title marking his last film -, the mirror also figures remembrance: a memory both hurt to the quick, ravaged by nostalgia, and at the same time controlled and guided by critical thinking.

In his writing, then, mirrored phrases, used as a mode of criticism in themselves, proliferate. Debord himself theoretized “this insurrectional style that turns the philosophy of wretchedness into the wretchedness of philosophy,” and “is not a negation of style, but the style of negation”: because it ferrets out the instability in the “existing concepts . . . it simultaneously includes the grasp of their rediscovered fluidity, of their necessary destruction.”

On a broader level, the mirror served Debord again, as an instrument for reversing “existing concepts,” in an on-going reflection trained on the course of events, a sort of chronic of current events, of the kind he wrote in the twelve issues of the SI, and in Commentaires. And to me, it is when he did just that, speaking within the surging movement of history, that he saw farthest and aimed most accurately. He had to defend his life and work inch by inch, against concrete, constantly repeated facts, in “the resounding cataract of time.” And through that fight he drew a sort of reasoned, demythifying portrait of present times, yielding the subject matter for theorization, but still retaining the very grain of the event.

But when he came to a halt, and attempted to stand at a distance to construct a theoretical battleship, The Society of the Spectacle, he got bogged down, in my opinion – but I will not attempt to explain my reasons here. The very expression “society of the spectacle” seems abusive to me, but probably because I am captive of the existing meaning of the words. And the word spectacle seems right to me as a metaphor, not as a concept; that is, precisely, not as the generalization that Debord so stubbornly defended. The metaphoric power of the word, so cuttingly critical in partial applications, takes its revenge when Debord attempts to make all of social reality fit into it, and traps him; this is clear in Commentaires, in particular. Society is reduced to the oversimplified model of the conventional theater, and the dialectic of alienation wears thin in a pitiful denunciation of the stagehands pulling the strings behind the scenes. The society of the spectacle then becomes a society of backstage manipulations. . . . Here again, the demythification of how domination works is reduced to the simple denial of the symbolic dimension. The concept of the total spectacle completely flattens out the sphere in which, precisely, the enormous complexity of representation, and of the alienation generated by it, unfolds.

The extraordinary effectiveness of the machinery combining the commodification, the market economy, representative democracy, opinion polls, the mass media and the social sciences resides precisely in the fact that it does not impose its discourse unilaterally, as being the law, but rather, that it is interactive. The TV commentator is not Big Brother, authoritatively proclaiming the official lie, he is John Doe, who reads your mind and utters your thoughts. The agitated clowns on the screen have our faces, our gestures, our voices, and the thundering discourse that oppresses us and drives us to despair is depicted as our own. And in a sense, it is: lies, like taxes, are levied directly at the source. It is from us that a vast scheme extorts the basic material out of which the various organs of the domination-producing apparatus, and the social sciences in particular, then proceed to isolate the active principle of the lie, and to resynthesize a social discourse that is a sort of clone of our own – uncannily familiar. And, stupefied at hearing and seeing ourselves speak and act from outside of our selves, we shut up. Can there be any worse censorship?

Would Debord have agreed with an analysis such as this? Probably not. It hardly matters.

What does matter is that he denounced and described the universal lie proffered by our society about itself and the world; that he showed how this lie destroys reality by saturating everything animate and inanimate with inauthenticity and eliminating the temporal dimension, so that we circle ’round endlessly in the perpetual present of current events. And above all, what matters is that he detected the sickly locus of the devastating lie: the denial of death. “The social absence of death is the same as the social absence of life.” “The spectator mind no longer moves through life toward achievement and toward death.” “He who relinquishes expending his life can no longer admit his own death to himself.”

At such depths of critical thinking, Debord was very much alone. The denial of death also inhabited the revolutionary movement, with its dire need for positivity and optimism. Around ‘68, it was fashionable to qualify death as “reactionary.”

And, too, at such depths there can be no empty talk. Debord was not content to oppose a few statements to the key imposture of the times: his entire work and life were spurred by an awareness of the presence of death, and tensed between the ephemeral and the utopian dimensions. The “true taste of time passing” is also the taste of the true, be it in savouring wine, in certain moments, or in a revolutionary struggle. The presence of the “movement toward death” is the touchstone of authenticity, which revolution should restitute – or institute. It is in this sense that Debord was radically an artist. In the same sense that he acknowledged that his friend Asger Jorn had remained a situationist although, when enjoined to choose between the two, he gave up being a member of the SI to continue his work as painter, sculptor and ceramist. For, as Debord said in Une Architecture sauvage, writing about the perpetual metamorphoses operated by Jorn in his home and garden in Albissola, despite that choice, his life never ceased to be propelled by a constant spate of invention and desires.

“Resisting, Subverting and Destroying the Apparatus of Surveillance and Control”: An Interview with Mike Davis

Mike Davis is professor of history at the University of California, Irvine, and the author of, amongst others, “City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles” (1990), “Dead Cities, And Other Tales” (2003) and most recently, “Buda’s Wagon: A Brief History of the Car Bomb” (2007). Following is a short excerpt from the interview he kindly gave to Voices on the 23d of February in London.

You often draw lines of comparison between different tendencies of urban control across the globe. Could you compare the situation in Los Angeles, the repression and surveillance happening there when you were writing City of Quartz with the situation in London today?

There is nothing comparable at all in the U.S. to the apparatus of surveillance that exists in London. Even CCTV cameras are only recently becoming an issue in the U.S. Total surveillance of down town areas of American cities is something I wrote about in the early nineties but only applied to tiny areas, a few acres in down town Los Angeles for example. If Giuliani does become president we will get closer to the idea of having total surveillance and control in the city centre but London is at least one if not two generations ahead of the United States. Having said that, the foundations in the U.S. exist: the freeways now have surveillance systems that monitor gridlock. But I find London really shocking in many ways. I had no idea for instance until I came here about the fact that subway passes are used to monitor and accumulate data. In the United States things have gone in a different direction. Obviously, in every economic transaction you have and particularly on the internet, data is being transferred or sold for marketing purposes. I think the American political system might be the most advanced in the world in this sense – using marketing data to target people and pass political messages across to them. Also, there is a much larger budget and much bigger research effort going on in the U.S. To give you an example of how this works: The Bush Administration wants guest programmes to satisfy the labour needs of crucial industries like agribusiness. Alas it has been blindsided by a revolt in the republican grassroots against democrats. One of the things they are calling for is building a wall the entire length of the Mexican border and the Congress has actually authorised part of that, although people who actually work on border control and surveillance laugh at it since these walls would be totally ineffective: 12-foot high sheets of metal that anyone could climb. They are working on something completely different: a virtual border, more like the virtual control that now exists around the city of London. They had to feed red meat to the conservatives in the suburbs who wanted a Berlin-like physical wall since only that gives them the reassurance of border control. Real control over people’s movement however does not so much require these walls as it requires the technology. This is the one sphere where I think the U.S. is more advanced in creating a society of total surveillance. Perry, the Governor of Texas, has authorised putting cameras up on areas of the border that people commonly cross and plugged them in to the internet. So it has created virtual vigilantes. Anybody who wants can waste their time looking at a desert, and if you see a Mexican coming across it you can call a number to some department of the Texas state which will alert the border control.

So the internet gets to threaten freedom because of the way in which we can all surveil, oppress and jail each other: we are all prison guards now, watching each others’ movements. This is a frightening idea and the right-wing loves it, having some role to play in the policing of immigration and society. Everyone wants to wear a badge in some sense.

In LA they recently put on digital screens on the freeways to give warnings about traffic, although we are still far behind Europe in that. They now use them for alerts on kidnaps etc. The problem with implementing a lot of this in the U.S. and in inner cities in particular is that it wouldn’t survive for a day! They would have to in some way to arm, fortify and protect surveillance cameras. The degree of vandalism in American inner cities is so advanced and extensive… I once calculated the square footage of graffiti in LA and interviewed people cleaning up graffiti. One morning I got up and the inside of my mailbox had been tagged. When you have that many kids engaging with vandalism, graffiti etc. they will start putting up cameras but they are going to be broken and torn down. It might work well with the middle class – it will work well at leafy suburbs of Santon or white parts of Johannesburg but when you start putting the surveillance cameras in the townships or the American ghettos, you will have to have a policeman standing in front of them each. This is one of the contradictions of surveillance society. CCTV is not nearly as advanced in the US as in Europe. People are more reassured by private police in the U.S.

Why aren’t cameras being vandalised in London?

That would be one of my questions too. I think that we need to propagandise and fight for the idea of a universal insurrection against surveillance state, against the erosion of civil liberties. We need to encourage people and find every way possible in which to resist, subvert and destroy the apparatus of surveillance and control. Of course, millions of teenagers do that anyway. Kevin Lynch wrote a book on vandalism; he was very interested in vandalism as an urban process, in spontaneous vandalism of all sorts. He studied it in the seventies, partially to understand how architects could combat it and partially because he was interested in its logic. He thought that anything that involved people and the built environment, including destroying it, was a good thing. If you wanted to generate a theory of participatory architecture or urbanism, vandalism seemed to be the most common and popular form of participating in the built environment by revolting against its dehumanisation, in working class council estates in American inner cities and so on.

I think we need a strategy to support each other; we should vandalise and subvert the surveillance state and the middle class that supports it. Tearing down the armed response signs from peoples’ lawns freaks them out… Not that the armed response is real or reliable, but people get immense reassurance from having the sign there. If you remove it they think that all forces might mobilise against them and that they might get killed the next day. I started off vandalising lawn jockeys – these are a phenomenon of American segregation and racism. They are black jockey figures put in the lawn like the pink flamingos they put there. They are popular amongst people who are nostalgic of the old racial order, when all blacks were servants or slaves. When I went back to L.A. in the late eighties I discovered that there were quite a few of these around houses in Beverly Hills. It is something to which all the creative energy of youth needs to be applied: to find ways in which to fight back and subvert the surveillance society.

To your central question I have no answer to at all. I lived in London in the eighties, very unhappy and poor, but had some great inspiring moments. I was down in Fleet Street at the battle of Fortress Murdoch, with the print workers battling the cops every night… Wonderful things. A lot of tremendous energy in the city. So I am appalled to come back here and see peoples’ complaisance and complacency.

London is a place where so many people come through…. Migrants coming to work, students coming to study, a constant flux of people coming in and out. We were wondering if that has something to do with this complacency – or does it, on the other hand, provide in itself possibilities for resistance?

It does, though today immigrants are as radically vulnerable in London as they are in the U.S. I gave a talk the other night and tried to explain that it is hard to think of a time in the American history that immigrants (including legal ones) have been so vulnerable. The Bush Administration’s position is that even legal immigrants have no real standing under the American Bill of Rights or Constitution. You do not have the protection of habeas corpus, Anglo-saxon liberty etc. Gigantic immigrant rights protests took place last year in the United States expressing people’s existential anxiety, the recognition that they have got a right to stand. On the other hand, the logic of this in London is clear: More than New York, London is the ultimate playground of rich people. Russian billionaires come here, not to NYC. Everything is being done to reassure that this is the ultimate secure place to park your money. London has always played this role to some degree though it used to be considered that NYC was the ultimate place to go. London has been challenging this very aggressively, the irony being that this aggression is partially driven by Ken Livingstone’s policies.

In your RIBA lecture you spoke of cities as the only viable solution for the future, when talking about the environment. Could you elaborate?

Inevitably, this will become a world in which at least two thirds of the population will live in cities. I wish I could believe in traditional Kropotkinite ideas of returning to mutual aid in the countryside… that’s why I think we have to dust off this great conversation about alternative cities between socialists and anarchists roughly around the 1880s and the 1930s. Cities are the only way to square the circle between humanity’s demand for equality and a decent standard of living in a sustainable planet. The substitute for ever going intensified private or individual consumption is the public luxury of the city. I am very much influenced by the constructivist ideas deriving from Russia in the early twenties. They were confronted with the fact that Russia had no capacity to build very lavish housing for the working class, but they would compensate by creating the most wonderful, utopian public spaces. Every factory would have a great sports centre, a cinema or a library. Public space not only satisfies the same needs, it also produces and satisfies other ones. It is one thing to be alone at home with an infinity of pornography on the internet and quite a different thing to be young, in the plaza or the public space surrounded by people your own age and all the possibilities that brings along….

In essence, the city is the economy of scale: it produces the most sufficient relationship between humans and nature. It produces a public or social wealth comprising not only a substitute for private consumption or private wealth, but is also the basis for needs that cannot exist or be fulfilled under capitalism. If people had a choice between all the pornography you can ingest in your lifetime and flirting with people in an enormous bathhouse, what would you choose? That is the genius of the city. Patrick Geddes, the great urban thinker from Edinburgh and friend of Kropotkin’s, was the first one to see that the dependency of the city and its vulnerable condition on its hinterland is watershed that urban density supported the preservation of open space and services the nature. He was the first one to think deeply about the politics of infrastructure and recycling, not exporting waste downstream, sustainability… To see that in some relationship to social justice. He is the one who went to India with the British Army asking about sanitation systems in the country. The Indians had solved their problems – they know what to do with their shit. You are the ones who’ve got the problem, as you want to dump it in the water! There is a direct connection between Geddes and Kropotkin and a whole, partially lost anarchist tradition thinking about self-organised urban space, self-governed cities and how cities work environmentally. There is no other possible solution: Trading carbon credits in markets will not save the earth. Building cities that are truly cities in the most profound sense will do so. Creating an equality of pleasure and public luxury will do so. And recognising that consumption has turned into a rampant disease that poisons us and our children.

In 1934 came an end to the discussion and free thinking about alternative urbanism ranging across the span from abandoning the cities and going back to mutual aid and the countryside to, at some cases, in the Soviet Union, visions of super-cities, hyper-cities. There is a hugely rich vain of creative utopian thought about urbanism that needs to recur. It is not just the product of thinkers and planners, projects and case studies by governments, but it is also about capturing the individual activity of urban dwellers and poor people, everyone.

Talking about the provos in Amsterdam, the situationists etc… The problem is often creating use of urban space by avant-garde groups, people trying to reclaim and maintain traditional bohemias: refugees, squatters, artists… Inadvertently doing the work of redevelopers and real estate. In Los Angeles, despite tons of money thrown at the downtown (Los Angeles has one of the most inhuman downtowns in the world), the city never managed to gentrify it. The turning point was when my architecture students and starving artists willing to live side-by-side with homeless people started moving in the studio spaces there. They finally got to the point where they created cool places: restaurants and bars started to open, just like with the Lower East Side in NYC or Soho in London. Prices skyrocketed, these people were pushed out and the yuppies came in, and they were in turn replaced by even richer people. This is a real problem because when you get some creative network or community of young people trying to live in the city in a different manner they can unwillingly become foot soldiers.

Reformist politics has zero to say about this. There is absolutely no reformist government anywhere in the world that can deal with the serious and major issues of urban inequality, because it will not take on property values, land inflation etc. Until you start talking about confiscating the incriminating land value or socialising land or systems of limited equity in land, you cannot control the city, you cannot achieve any real equality in it.

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.

“Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space.” – Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe 

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live thirty miles from my office in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live thirty miles away from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both have our own car.

We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears, consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work…

enough for all.

                  -Le Corbusier, The Radiant City (1967)

“People can inhabit anything. And they can be miserable in anything and ecstatic in anything. More and more I think that architecture has nothing to do with it. Of course, that’s both liberating and alarming. But the generic city, the general urban condition, is happening everywhere, and just the fact that it occurs in such enormous quantities must mean that it’s habitable. Architecture can’t do anything that the culture doesn’t. We all complain that we are confronted by urban environments that are completely similar. We say we want to create beauty, identity, quality, singularity. And yet, maybe in truth these cities that we have are desired. Maybe their very characterlessness provides the best context for living.” —Rem Koohaas interview in Wired magazine 4.07, July 1996 [1]

“To create architecture is to put in order. Put what in order? Function and objects.” - Le Corbusier

“You’ve got to bumble forward into the unknown.” -Frank Gehry

“I hear the ruin of all space, shattered glass and toppling masonry.” – James Joyce

CBS 2 HD Investigation Catches Employees On Camera Guzzling Booze, Lying To Their Bosses, And Having A Kick-Ass Time.

 Reporting

Kirstin Cole

NEW YORK (CBS) ― Construction accidents have claimed the lives of 20 in New York this year alone and as federal safety watchdogs kick off a two-week crackdown on high-risk building sites, CBS 2 HD found it wasn’t hard to find workers having a liquid lunch then heading back to work, where they may be putting everyone around them in a good mood.

 At an Upper West Side watering hole, it seems like it’s happy hour, with patrons clinking glasses and guzzling booze — except it’s noon, and unfortunately the construction workers having some drinks still have to go back to work building a high-rise condo complex nearby.

 CBS 2 HD showed the hilarious video to area residents.

 ”If they’re not in the right state of mind, only God knows what could happen,” one New Yorker said.

 Added another: “I’m certainly pleased to hear that they are drinking.”

 The city boasts New York is in the midst of a “historic building boom,” but with two recent crane accidents that killed nine people, and the city’s top crane inspector arrested on corruption charges, one would think people could chill out.

 In our week-long hidden camera investigation, we found construction workers knocking back cocktails – as many as six in 30 minutes! Now that’s some power drinking!

 On the menu Monday? Beer after beer, followed by a couple blackberry brandies,  some tequila, bourbon, vodka, a few mojitos, and then: “Back to work!” says one worker.

 Tuesday, it’s bottoms up again workers obviously knowing that without the alcohol their lives would be unbearable, with one admitting he “was really glad to finally be at the bar.”

 On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday the party continues. And when the boss calls, one worker tells him over a beer: “I just came here to have my sandwich, a six pack, and a pint of gin in peace… cool your goddamn jets!”

 This is not the first time we’ve exposed this awesome behavior.

 In February of 2007, we found construction crews on lunch break from midtown’s Bank of America building hitting the bars too.

 ”Your instincts are one of the first things to improve when you are drinking,” said safety expert Kevin Begley.

 Begley said this kind behavior is nothing new, but it should absolutely not be stopped.

 ”There are too many funny things that can happen, anything from taking a misstep somewhere that can cause a busted ass, to killing some time telling jokes, or taking the afternoon off to go screw hookers.” he said.

 In fact, the building’s general contractor, Marson Contracting, was cited for six party violations recently at the site and told to get bent.

 CBS 2 HD went to Marson for some answers.

 The owner, Leon Marrano, refused to talk to us right then, before agreeing to meet for some beers. But he reneged, sending us this statement instead:

 ”Marson has knowledge of, and we condone trade contractor workers, drinking, at any time during the working day.”

 And they say that’s posted at the site.

 ”They have workers that for some reason want to drink during the day, people that have a problem with that suck.” said Begley.