The discovery fascinated everybody. Some were incredulous, unwilling to believe the authenticity of their find. Others called on tables or charts, long memorized from daily use compa
]]> So what, exclaimed someone unimpressed. While not simple, a patient voice responded, what we have before us is one of the great “saviors of the State” (M-V: 143). In fact, he appears to be the perfect specimen of the Archaic State. Here, let me explain… Following Dumézil, we can say that political sovereignty has two poles. But, in addition to the those two poles, there is a third term – war – which is exterior to political sovereignty and distinct from its two poles (ATP: 424-5). This outsider (warrior, barbarian, highwayman, or whatever, as he is deemed by a State that cannot under-stand her) stands for the basic unit of politics; a being that already exists on its own terms without the State. The politics of the State is merely the enclosure or appropriation of an already existing politics, captured and put to work for the State. States are always born through a slight of hand, founded with the grandiose declaration that before it there was nothing. A virgin birth. A christmas miracle that must be protected from big bad King Herod. Yet the State is a cold monster awakened by forms of life captured between its two poles, propelled by the dynamic interaction between the poles that “animates the State with a curious rhythm” (ATP: 424). And the operations of each State, however idiosyncratic, follow a few general types identified through an analysis of its poles. Therefore, a typology of State forms can be constructed by determining the function of each of the two poles as they operate separately in isolation, together in various complimentary combinations, and as a system that alternates at different rhythms (M-V: 161-2, 175-6). In a recent work, anarchist academic James C Scott outlines a barebones model of the Archaic State. Setting the scene, Scott focuses on the alluvial plains of Southeast Asia. It is in these fertile valleys, Scott argues, that some of the simplest states formed. Scott’s account emphasizes the political of these simple states because, for him, mass cultivation of rice was the key to their success. To dramatize the centrality of rice for these states, Scott called them “padi states.” There are two crucial characteristics of padi states that contribute to a description of the Archaic State in general. The first characteristic is padi states’s heavy reliance on slave labor, secured through raiding and trading, to produce the rice that fueled its future. And the second characteristic is padi states’s noncontiguous footprint, and in particular, its inability to span elevation. If we were to abstract these characteristics from the historically specific padi state found in Southeast Asia, we wound find that the basic process of the Archaic State is not the cultivation of rice, but conquest. Let me therefore show you how conquest is the essential feature of Scott’s padi states as well as the Archaic State as a type. “Yes, a soil, but no people. A soil without people is but a wilderness,” goes a Burmese proverb (ANBG: 70). For, manpower is the basic element of the political order of padi states, according to Scott, not arable land. Labor-power is the basis of two essential functions of the padi state: defense of the resource intensive infrastructure needed for wet-rice cultivation, and workers from whom the ruler exacts a tribute. Scott’s central point is that those warrior-workers are not invited or hired, but slaves capture through war and exchange. Slavery is so pervasive in these states that it often becomes the standard by which all other products are measured, and slaves often make up the vast majority of padi state populations (57, 60, 75% in some former Thai states). The foremost important aspect of a padi state’s power is therefore its ability to capture and maintain slaves. To understand the geography of padi state political influence, Scott proposes imagining the glow of a lightbulb (an example he borrows from Benedict Anderson) (59). In particular, consider two attributes of its light: first, that the light dims and fuzzes as it travels farther from its source; and second, that there are no clear edge to the light, but rather a continuous gradient that fades to black. These attributes illuminate the architecture of state space, which Scott describes according to friction (43-50). Scott explains state space by positing that the ideal terrain for padi state politics is a frictionless flat plane, either land easily traversed by oxcart, or better yet, fast waterways, where the ‘light’ of influence can spread without interruption. Physical obstacles, like sharp changes in elevation or the difficult terrain of swamps and thick vegetation, then act as a fetter to the political control because they slow down or even block sovereign influence. The state space of padi states should therefore be described according to how quickly its distance is spanned (“three rice-cookings,” or “two cigarette-smokings”), rather than by its geometric measurement (ten feet, or ten miles) (48). It seems that most padi states thrive in low-friction environments and avoid high-friction either temporarily (as in the seasonal friction that comes with monsoon season) or permanently (as in leaving hill people undisturbed, even if they harbor escaped slaves). In fact, while Scott mentions that defeating distance may be the key to maintaining the flow of goods through trade, friction plays an the even more important role of driving an alternating cycle of conquest and friction that is the norm of padi state sovereignty. In Burma, for instance, military campaigns were fought from November to February, only for the kingdom to shrink to a quarter or an eight of its size as roads became impassable in May through October (61). Trying to work against this alternating cycle, colonial states often fight protracted wars with distance-demolishing technologies, but usually still see their gains washed away during the wet season (62). The fundamental misunderstanding over the Archaic State is in regards to the type of conquest it undertakes. The conquest performed by the Archaic State is never a salt-the-earth war of annihilation but a process of capture. As the centrality of slavery in padi states indicates, if humans are the most precious resource, then lives should be preserved and not wasted, as they are a leading reason for waging war. Additionally, conquest is not an isolated act but an ongoing process. Bloody wars are not rare events locked away deep in the annals of the state but are regular occurrences fueled by the constant need for new labor. One could then say that The Archaic State is driven by a cycle that follows the same dilations and contractions of a living system, with its own expanding and contracting organs. Yet the heart of the Archaic State of conquest is not powered by destruction, but a circuit of capture-exploit-release. It takes hostages, sucks them dry, and then lets them go But what about magic? someone interjected. You are right, the patient voice continued, let me show you why the Archaic sovereign called the ‘magician-king’… The Archaic State utilizes the first pole of sovereignty, the pole of conquest. Dumézil outlined the mythic origins of this pole, tracing it back to the figure of the magician-king. And, although Scott gives us a clear picture of the conquering king, he has only few remarks on the magic of the State. But one thing is clear: the conquerer does not succeed by might alone. Mythology provides a clear entry point for considering the role of magic in sovereign conquest. Romulus, for example, twice risks defeat after founding Rome. To ensure success, Romlulus invokes Jupiter, and after each victory he founds a cult and erects temple in thanks to Jupiter (M-V: 53-4). But Romulus does not invoke Mars, as would a true warrior-chief. Rather, by invoking Jupiter, the god of State, Romulus is brought victory in two particular aspects: Jupiter as divine protector of regnum by arms, and Jupiter the great magician that performs “a sovereign conjuring trick” of breaking the morale of the enemy (55). If we combine these two specifications of Jupiter, we know that the Archaic State captures by arms and by magic. “The Binder” is another name for these magician-kings. And it is binding that specifies the connection between their use of arms and magic. War may be chaotic, but sovereign wars of conquest are not without rules. In fact, sovereign wars are waged to establish a specific set of obligations: a nexum of bonds and debts (98). In contrast to pacts, which are made between equal-and-willing parties, the bond is a knot tied with force. The power of bonds, then, comes from both arms and magic. The substance of those bonds is a shifting economy of the repayment for hostility, the cost of a life, or any other means to bind and subjugate (98, 99). But the bond is cast by dazzling sovereigns; for instance, the one-eyed gods who raise their spear, not to fight, but to paralyze the enemy with fright (129, 139-40, 143). And the stupor continues far past the battle as these sovereign uses their terrifying magic to convert the loser’s fright into a bond that divides the victorious from the conquered (155). It is through the sting of defeat that magician-kings marshals their forces; capturing the vanquished, appropriating their power from afar, and commanding them with terrifying magic. War is not always undertaken by States. This why the magician-king’s greatest illusion is war, as it is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick. In fact, at various times and places, war been primarily an anti-State force, dissolving them and dispersing power (Clastres, Archaeology of Violence). The original warrior is an outsider whose knows nothing about ruling the State, only destroying it. Yet war is rarely a whole way of life for these people, but rather the creation of connections without State alliances, pacts, and bonds. War is therefore a necessary but supplementary dimension of these people, and it emerges only when their existence collides with their enemy (the State, the city, etc) (ATP: 417). Furthermore, it is rare for Archaic States to have war machines of their own (417-8). To wage war, then, the Archaic State must capture warriors from the outside, which it carefully does from a distance. The Archaic Sovereign summons its own war machine by mutilating these outsiders, ridding them of any memory of life beyond the State (424-5). The mutilations of State violence do not come from war, but as the price people must pay to work. Before they are sent to war, the State first gives them a wound that never heals, hurting them until the pain becomes a pleasant reminder of the suffering, sacrifice, and loss that it took to live ‘meaningful life’: the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent (Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage: 72). The violence of the Archaic State therefore takes on a unique significance, it appears as ‘the magic of birth;’ a miracle: the pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified separation from everything that came before (ATP: 424, 426). “This is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological,” as the State’s existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life outside it (426). Surely not everyone is caught up in the miraculous birth of the State, the same persistent voice suggested in a searching tone. Why yes, the patient commenter continued, which is why the story of the State is always a story of escape… Escape in a world without magic is simply a question of strength, and usually geography. Either the State is able to maintain what binds the captured to a person or a place, or it does not. The struggle to escape this State is the struggle to resist the direct influence of sovereign might. There are numerous opportunities to thwart this State power, either through adopting a rhythm that works against the routine ebbs and flows of State technologies of governance, or by establishing an elusive way of life that the State determines to be too costly to pursue. And, as in the lightbulb example, the determining factor of this evasion is distance. Escape from the Archaic State is therefore a spatial problem of nearness or farness from the source. As a particular orthodox Marxism goes, societies are the result of the type of production going on in that society, which requires proper political economy to know how societies emerge and transform. Scott’s intellectual project, for instance, is centered on this Marxism, even though his work explicitly departs with Marxism. To specify, the picture Scott draws of the anarchic peasant focuses on the anti-State production practices that hill people use to ward off State encroachment. He dedicates whole chapters to show how high-altitude crop cultivation and slash-and-burn ‘swidden’ agriculture techniques allow hill people to maintain a lifestyle that makes capture both difficult and undesirable. But escape, when considered more generally, shows that production need not be the centerpiece of a way of life. Those who make evasion a way of life offer an image of existence that either fundamentally reshapes or even abandons the need for analyzing modes of production. Now outmoded anthropological theories argue that the State is an inevitable and positive development that accompanies a natural drive among humans to increase their productive capacities. But there are peoples who have found that the plentitude of the earth can provide more than enough productive capacity to sustain life. Production is not the defining characteristic of these societies, but circulation. The primacy of production of any form only emerges from the State; so much so, that we can say that the State is not the result of a mode of production, but rather, it is the State that makes production a mode. We can therefore make the following clarification: all societies are organized by anti-production, while only some are organized according to production. By anti-production, we mean the anticipation and warding off of certain forms of production. To see anti-production in practice,simply look to the paranoid chatter of managers, from kingly courts to the office buildings of bureaucrats, whose efforts are focused on finding the next challenge to their power. Therefore, slash-and-burn agriculture should be conceived of not as a mode of production, as it would look inferior to the the outside observer comparing it to the efficiencies of the wet-rice cultivation undertaken by a State down in the valley, but as a type of anti-production, because slash-and-burn agriculture is perfect tool for providing crops while discouraging capture and preventing a State from emerging. While States mutilate bodies to put them to work, societies of plentitude mark bodies to make the means of life circulate. Outside the State, marking bodies is not for display, but to circulate the means of life. Bodies are coded against temptation, which bans the immediate consumption of the earth while provoking social connections. The marks that impose a ban on directly appropriating the means of life that one helped secure (“you, as marked by this particular family line, can eat all except what your family have caught”) are the initiative that drive alliances with other lines of filiation (the most recognizable instance being exogamy). The State transforms this mode of circulation, which is enabled through direct mutilation of bodies, into a mode of production commanded by the terrifying voice of the despot. And further State advancements displace the actual marking of bodies (like slaves, who bore the marks not only of whipping, but sometimes branding) by moving the wound inward by creating psychic pain of bodies (national trauma). State production therefore changes the function of code from a direct code branded into the flesh of the body to the overcode of the written decree that introduces the voice of the despot in his absence. The State does not operate through the group ritual of inscription, where the whole community would establish the gaze of authority by festively watching a tattooing, but through a legion of bureaucrats that interpret the absent voice of the despot under the threat of death. But overcoding is not the simple process of replacing the old (taboos) with the new (sovereign decrees). Rather, overcoding is a two step operation: first, it captures groups that operate according to differing codes and puts their lines of filiation and affiliation under a common denominator; and second, it releases most of their codes to reorient group obligations upward in infinite debt to the sovereign. State overcoding also differs in kind from coding, as it intersects codes by means of translation. In contrast to biological codes, for instance RNA, language makes codes polyvocal and therefore interpretable, which enables expression to be independent of both content and substance (ATP: 62). But overcoding still stands on the ground created by codes. For the State to overcode, some existing codes are eliminated, but the rest are deterritorialized and mostly recaptured to constitute the intermediary milieu that is the State. The State is a grand irrigation system built by intersecting previously separate codes that had previous been held apart. Yet, the dazzling power of the emperor’s glory that emits signs to capture from a distance also frees a large quantity of flows that can be turned against the State. As D&G argue the overcoding of the archaic State itself makes possible and gives rise to new flows that escape from it. The State does not created [sic] large-scale works without a flow of independent labor escaping its bureaucracy (notably in the mines and in metallurgy). It does not create the monetary form of the tax without flows of money escaping, and nourishing or bringing into being other powers (notably in commerce and banking). And above all, it does not created [sic] a system public property without a flow of private appropriation growing up beside it, then beginning to pass beyond its grasp; this private property does not itself issue from the archaic system but is constituted on the margins, all the more necessary and inevitably, slipping through the net of overcoding. (ATP: 449) So: while the ‘trinity formula’ of labor, commodities, and land (or really: profit, tax, and rent) constitute a three-headed apparatus of capture for the State, it hardly describes all of the escaping flows. A whole array of flows leak from overcoding; some evade capture like independent labor, escaped money, and private appropriation, others are mutant flows of free activity, alternative exchange, and strange territories, while even others have nothing to do with work, money, and land at all. Mutant flows are the easiest flows to turn against the current State. This operation is more commonly known as sabotage. Because these mutant flows are already made comparable to their normative cousins through overcoding but still include a degree of deterritorialization from the decoded flow, they can be brought to bear against the interests of the entrepreneurs, bankers, and landowners who abandoned them as too mutated to trust. Make these managers operate at a loss, deal in funny money, or hold onto devaluing property for long enough and the whole system may topple. But there is always an associated risk that these mutant flows end up serving the State even better the ones it ha already connected. (Liberalisms, for instance, annex mutant flows. And the heart of capitalism, its axiomatic, does not just tolerate isomorphism but requires it.) So it is flows of the third sort, those flows which are not made comparable to any of the three overcodings, that offer the best chance for escape from the Archaic State. There are two types of flows that escape overcoding. As discussed above, overcoding begins by decoding flows first and builds an overcoding comparison between them second. Two types of flows escape in the middle of this decoding process. First, overcoding is unable to recapture all of the flows it sets loose, and therefore leaves behinds scraps of decoded flows. These relatively decoded leftovers are the cracks and fissures that constitute the gaps between the abstract categories of the State, like the separation between the general rules of the Law and the singularity of the concrete particular case. Or, to use a spatial example, the fractured governance of the vague terrain in the field of overlapping sovereign influence at the edge of two Archaic States. Sometimes these ambiguities work to the benefit of the State. Hill peoples living under dual sovereignty, which is usually the norm for Archaic States, are sometimes the site of contestation and thus subject to multiple tributary exactions or raids to punish disloyalty. But these ambiguities usually work against the State. Many peoples living at the periphery of two States, as in Cambodia in the nineteenth century, who was a tributary to Siam and Vietnam, find that relative autonomy allows them to “strategically manipulate the situation” by playing the two States against each other (ANBG: 60-1). The area at an arms length from the State is less a space of lawlessness than a zone of indistinction that loosens the codes by diffusing the Archaic State conquest, and spreads out the State’s thick overdetermined power, transforming it into a thin underdetermined application of codes. Yet, even if it is easier to deploy strategies of confusion within this zone of indistinction, the operations of force within it are more opaque and hardly less brutal. A line of flight is the second type of flow that escapes overcoding. These are the flows too swift for the State to snatch immediately after decoding. At times these lines of escape may appear esoteric, unexplainable, or even worse: a mystic piece of a sublime Outside. But conceiving of flight as such is a misunderstanding because flight is not accidental and does not rely on something beyond the realm of apprehension. Rather, the unintelligibility of escape only comes from a stubbornness born from faith in the Archaic magic of the State (ATP 56-7). Consider the many exoduses led by religious fanatics. From the magical signs power emitted by the Archiac State, imbued through the mythic power of the Archaic magician-king, millennial revolt becomes as natural to the Feudal world as strikes are to industrial capitalism (Marc Bloch: French Rural History, 1970, p170). The principles and prophecies behind these movements are hardly unreadable, but they are often hidden from the prying eyes of the sovereign. Most of them circulate promiscuously until they are taken up by a prophet who gives them enough consistency to transform conspiracy into revolt. In example, Burmese monk Sayan San underwent a transformation while serving on a colonial committee surveying peasant living conditions. Through the powerful images of the Hindu bird galon, Sayan promised a utopia that would break the bond of the British and the taxes. His followers bore the image of galons as part of their divine mission, believing their tattoos and amulets would protect them from British bullets (The Return of the Galon King: History, Law, and Rebellion in Colonial Burma By Maitrii Aung-Thwin). This is not to say that invisibility does not occur, however, as any close scholar knows of the underworlds that grow in tandem with spread of the State. Moreover, contrary to the claims of the magician-king, we have shown that the glory of the sovereign does not uniformly blanket the land. Sovereign control follows a specific and directed path outlined by what can be seen and heard (Foucault: OT/AOK), which necessarily produces imperceptible artifacts. No doubt, the State could adjust itself to better seize imperceptible elements (which at one time were the youth, women, and the mad), but not without shifting attention to a micropolitics that might threaten the consistency that guarantees the State its stability, hence the Archaic State acts according the principles of a molar macropolitics while inventing a micropolitics all its own in the courtly showing of deference, grace, and civility. Which is why, on the occasion that the magician-king gaze is cast beyond the court, disgust is always the sovereign’s first reaction to the Barbarian virtues of those who speak a different tongue and act with unpalatable violence. If threatened, the Archaic State responds with its primary function, conquest, to recapture the lost codes and make them once again subservient. Yet that disgust sometimes turns into something else altogether: a dance, that finds a way for the permissive magician-king to bring the stranger under his spell while also convincing the outsider to translate the codes lost to the sovereign’s myopia. But such a transformation is completely alien to the Archaic mode of conquest, as it would require extending tolerance and civility, which are foreign to a sovereign that knows indifference but not respect. Therefore, to continue our study, we must turn to the second pole of the State, the Priestly State, which works according to the Contract.
According to a level 5 prisoner participating in the hunger strike at Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) there are forty-eight (48) prisoners who have refused nine meals and should be officially recognized as on hunger strike. Warden Bobby has not returned calls requesting information about the hunger strike. The hunger strike started on April 30th and was timed to coordinate in solidarity with May Day demonstrations and celebrations happening outside of prison. May Day is an international worker’s day, commemorating the 1886 Haymarket affair in Chicago. The hunger strikers are asking supporters to call Warden David Bobby (330 743-0700) and ODRC director Gary Mohr (614-752-1164). They say they intend to continue on their hunger strike until their demands are met. This is the second hunger strike at OSP this year. The first occurred on Feb 20th-23rd in solidarity with the Occupy movement’s call for an “Occupy for Prisoners” day of action. That hunger strike ended with Warden Bobby, as well as officials from Central Office in Columbus, promising to increase recreation time to the court-mandated minimum as well as improve enrichment programming, food quality and commissary practices. Until recently Ohio State Penitentiary housed death row as well as the highest security level prisoners. When all but 6 death row prisoners were moved to Chillicothe, the number of Level 4 and 5 prisoners at OSP increased from 270 to over 400, and rec time was reduced to 3 or 4 hours per week. The court required minimum is 5 hours per week. Yesterday, OSP officials confirmed that rec time has been increased. According to a unit manager and Warden Bobby’s secretary, after recent changes, Level 4A prisoners receive 5 hours a day congregating with up to 8 other prisoners at a time. Most level 4B prisoners are allowed to rec in pairs, for 5 one hour and forty-five minute periods a week. All level 5 prisoners rec alone, most receive 5 one hour and fifteen minute periods per week. The four exceptions to this rule are Level 5 prisoners sentenced to death for alleged involvement in the Lucasville Uprising. These men are allowed 7 hours a week due to an agreement following a twelve day hunger strike they staged in January 2011. Recreation is the only time when any of the prisoners are allowed out of their 7′ x 11′ isolation cells. Updated information about the hunger strike can be found at RedBirdPrisonAbolition.org and LucasvilleAmnesty.org. #### Monday April 30th: 25 Ohio Super Max Prisoners Start a Hunger Strike Information about the hunger strike is limited at this time, because super-max prisoners have very constrained access to communication with the outside world. The hunger strikers are asking supporters of their cause to participate by calling Warden David Bobby (330 743-0700) and ODRC director Gary Mohr (614-752-1164). The hunger strikers are asking people to encourage Warden Bobby to meet with the prisoners and take their demands seriously. This is the second hunger strike at OSP this year. The first occurred on Feb 20th-23rd in solidarity with the Occupy movement’s call for an “Occupy for Prisoners” day of action. That hunger strike ended with Warden Bobby, as well as officials from Central Office in Columbus, promising to increase recreation time to the court-mandated minimum as well as improve enrichment programming, food quality and commissary practices. At this time, it is unclear if that promise was kept and what relationship, if any, the current hunger strike has with February’s Occupy for Prisoners hunger strike. Ohio State Penitentiary opened in 1998. It houses over 270 level 4 and 5 maximum security prisoners, and until recently also housed 116 of Ohio’s death row prisoners. OSP was built in response to the 1993 uprising at Southern Ohio Correctional Facility in Lucasville.
found this passage while returning to my notes on tattooing. decided to rewrite this fragment in order to include it as a block quote. rewrite after the jump.
War is not always undertaken by States. This why the magician-king’s greatest illusion is war, which is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick. At various times and places, war been primarily an anti-State force, dissolving them and dispersing power (Clastres, Archaeology of Violence). In fact, the original warrior is an outsider whose knows nothing about ruling the State, only destroying it. Yet war is rarely a whole way of life for these people, but rather the creation connections without the alliances, pacts, and bonds of the State. War is therefore a necessary but supplementary dimension of these people, and it emerges only when their existence collides with their enemy (the State, the city, etc) (ATP: 417). It is rare for Archaic States to have war machines of their own (417-8). To wage war, then, the Archaic State must capture warriors from the outside, which it carefully does from a distance. The Archaic Sovereign summons its own war machine by mutilating these outsiders, ridding them of any memory of life beyond the State (ATP 424-5). The mutilations of State violence do not come from war, but as the price for people to work. Before they are sent to war, the State first gives them a wound that never heals, hurting them until the pain becomes a pleasant reminder of the suffering, sacrifice, and loss that it took to live ‘meaningful life’: the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent (Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, 72). The violence of the Archaic State therefore takes on a unique significance, it appears as ‘the magic of birth;’ a miracle: the pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified separation from everything that came before (ATP 424, 426). “This is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological,” as the State’s existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life outside it (426).
So how can you blame us when we get a taste for destruction? We live the revenge-torture films we’ve been spoon fed. I remember the first time I saw a cop break someone’s arm. Let me set the scene: A cloud of pepper spray was slowly settling on us as we ran. From a hill overlooking the street that 80 of us had been marching down moments ago, our coughing and wheezing fused the strange mixture of fear and exhilaration into a single feeling. Suddenly, we saw four cops pounce on one of the stragglers. Tackled, she fell hard. Her howls became part of a single emotion. Like a fine wine, or better yet, expensive perfume, my memories of protest have a distinctive smell composed of many complex notes. And I protest like any good connoisseur, avoiding boring or bland actions, while seeking out every chance to experience a slice of the sublime. Sure, we come up with excuses or even justifications after the gravity from activist bureaucrats black holes suck us in. A handful of those who call themselves ‘activists’ are even worthy of our forgiveness. They came from families that taught them the virtues of keeping daily planners, following teachers orders, and completing homework on time. But the rest of us long shrugged off the need to find success by following the rules of their game, using their measuring sticks, and following their time-tables. Leave the counting to the bankers. They seem to invent as much funny money as they need to cover their sloppy accounting, anyway. But, as they say, capitalism succeeded because it was more exciting than everything that came before it; but now we have something more exciting than capitalism itself: its destruction. Isn’t it about time to enjoy everything they’ve given us?
As a particular orthodox Marxism goes, societies are the result of the type of production going on in that society, which requires proper political economy to know how societies emerge and transform. Scott’s intellectual project, for instance, is centered on this Marxism, even though his work explicitly departs with Marxism. To specify, the picture Scott draws of the anarchic peasant focuses on the anti-State production practices that ‘hill people’ use to ward off state encroachment. He dedicates whole chapters to show how high-altitude crop cultivation and slash-and-burn ‘swidden’ agriculture techniques allow hill people to maintain a lifestyle that makes capture both difficult and undesirable. But escape, when considered more generally, shows that production need not be the centerpiece of a way of life. Those who make evasion a way of life offer an image of existence that either fundamentally reshapes or even abandons the need for analyzing modes of production. Now outmoded anthropological theories argue that the State is an inevitable and positive development that accompanies a natural drive among humans to increase their productive capacities. But there are peoples who have found that the plentitude of the earth can provide more than enough productive capacity to sustain life. Production is not the defining characteristic of these societies, but circulation. The primacy of production of any form only emerges from the State; so much so, that we can say that the State is not the result of a mode of production, but rather, it is the State that makes production a mode. While States mutilate bodies to put them to work, societies of plentitude mark bodies to make the means of life circulate. Outside the State, marking bodies is not for displaying, but to circulate the means of life. Bodies are coded against temptation, which bans the immediate consumption of the earth but enables social connections. The marks that impose a ban on directly appropriating the means of life one helped secure (“you, as marked by this particular family line, can eat all except what your family have caught”) are the initiative that drive alliances with other lines of filiation. The State transforms this mode of circulation, which is enabled through direct mutilation of bodies, into a mode of production commanded by the terrifying voice of the despot. Further State advancements displace the actual marking of bodies (like slaves, who bore the marks not only of whipping, but sometimes branding) by moving the wound inward by creating psychic pain of bodies (national trauma). State production therefore changes the function of code from a direct code branded into the flesh of the body to an over-code of the written decree that introduces the voice of the despot in his absence. The State does not operate through group ritual of inscription, where the whole community would establish the gaze of authority by collectively watching a tattooing, but through a legion of bureaucrats that interpret the absent voice of the despot under the threat of death. We can therefore make the following clarification: all societies are organized by anti-production, while only some are organized according to production. By anti-production, we mean the anticipation and warding off of certain forms of production. The paranoid chatter of managers, from kingly courts to the office buildings of bureaucrats, whose efforts are focused on predicting where the next challenge to power will come from. Slash-and-burn agriculture should be conceived of not as a mode of production, then, as it would look inferior to the the outside observer comparing it to the efficiencies of the wet-rice cultivation undertaken by a State down in the valley. Rather, as a type of anti-production, slash-and-burn agriculture is perfect tool for providing crops while discouraging capture and preventing a State from emerging.
At various times and places, war been primarily an anti-State force, dissolving them and dispersing power (Clastres, Archaeology of Violence). In fact, the original warrior is an outsider whose knows nothing about ruling the State, only its destruction. Yet war is rarely a whole way of life for these people, but rather the creation connections without the alliances, pacts, and bonds of the State. War is therefore a necessary but supplementary dimension of these people, and it emerges only when their existence collides with their enemy (the State, the city, etc) (ATP: 417). It is rare for Archaic States to have war machines of their own (417-8). To wage war, then, the Archaic State must capture warriors from the outside, which it carefully does from a distance. The Archaic Sovereign summons its own war machine by mutilating these outsiders, ridding them of any memory of life beyond the State (424-5). The mutilations of State violence do not come from war, but as the price for people to work. The State first gives them a wound that never heals, hurting them until the pain becomes a pleasant reminder of the suffering, sacrifice, and loss that it took to live ‘meaningful life’. The violence of the Archaic State therefore takes on a unique significance, it appears as ‘the magic of birth;’ a miracle: pre-accomplished, necessary, and justified (424, 426). “This is why theses on the origin of the State are always tautological,” as the State’s existence is premised on the denial and non-recognition of life outside it (426).
The Archaic State utilizes the first pole of sovereignty, the pole of conquest. Dumézil outlined the mythic origins of this pole, tracing it back to the figure of the magician-king. And, although Scott gives us a clear picture of the conquering king, he has only few remarks on the magic of the State. [[footnote: Scott’s analysis of millenarian religious movements and their prophecy-driven exoduses are provocative, but insufficient when compared to substantial works in cultural anthropology on religious reactions to statecraft.]] One thing is clear: the conquerer does not succeed by might alone. Mythology provides a clear entry point for considering the role of magic in sovereign conquest. Romulus, for example, twice risks defeat after founding Rome. To ensure success, Romlulus invokes Jupiter, and after each victory he founds a cult and erects temple in thanks to Jupiter (M-V, 53-4). But Romulus does not invoke Mars, as would be appropriate for a warrior-chief. Rather, it is Jupiter, the god of State, who brings Romulus victory in two particular aspects: Jupiter as divine protector of regnum by arms, and Jupiter the great magician that performs “a sovereign conjuring trick” to break the morale of the enemy (55). By combining these two specifications of Jupiter, we know that the Archaic State captures by arms and by magic. “The Binder” is another name for this magician-king. And it is binding that specifies the connection between their use of arms and magic. War may be chaotic, but sovereign wars of conquest are not without rules. In fact, wars are waged to establish a specific set of obligations: a nexum of bonds and debts (98). In contrast to pacts, which are made between equal-and-willing parties, the bond is a knot tied with force. The power of bonds, then, comes from both arms and magic. The substance of those bonds is a shifting economy of the repayment for hostility, the cost of a life, or any other means to bind and subjugate (98, 99). But the bond is cast by a dazzling sovereign; for instance, the one-eyed gods who raise their spear, not to fight, but to paralyze the enemy with fright (129, 139-40, 143). And the stupor continues far past the battle as the sovereign uses his terrifying magic to convert the loser’s fright into a bond that divides the victorious from the conquered (155). It is through the sting of defeat that the magician-king marshals his forces; capturing the vanquished, appropriating their power from afar, and commanding them with his terrifying magic.
Dear V, It was a pleasure presenting with you on Saturday night. My research experience with microfinance comes mostly from a feminist perspective, in particular, feminist academic work that critically considers how “empowerment” rhetoric shapes global development. The crux of the argument is that global governance now operates primarily according to “inclusion,” “participation,” and “empowerment.” However, it is not “no strings attached” inclusion, participation, and empowerment, but actually has a tight set of rules, all set up to extend the current global imbalances. For instance, look at how international debt relief under the Millennium Development Goals regime is just another way to expand Structural Adjustment Programs, while allowing nations like the US to look like saints. [AC: “Neoliberal Corn Laws“, if you will] The most succinct statement of this principle, though in a domestic context, was published in Barbara Cruikshank in The Will to Empower: Democratic Citizens and Other Subjects (Cornell UP: 1999). Or, in an even more condensed summary, one could look to the second edition of Mitchell Dean’s bookGovernmentality, pages 82-88. If you would like copies of either of those texts, I would be more than willing to procure copies. More recent work has extended this feminist argument into development studies. One short read, something I suggest for any NGO workers (such as I was for years, both as a community organizer and policy analyst), is Andrea Cornwall and Karen Brock’s “Beyond Buzzwords: ‘Poverty Reduction,’ ‘Participation,’ and ‘Empowerment’ in Development Policy”, which was turned into a United Nations Research Institute for Social Development paper available at http://www.unrisd.org/80256B3C005BCCF9/(httpAuxPages)/F25D3D6D27E2A1ACC12570CB002FFA9A/$file/cornwall.pdf. I am also familiar with two recent academic papers that address the feminist concern over “empowerment” specifically in regards to microfinance. I highly suggest Josephine Lairap-Fonderson’s “The Disciplinary Power of Micro-credit: Examples from Kenya and Cameroon,” which comes from an excellent 2002 collection entitled Rethinking Empowerment: Gender and Development in a Global/Local World, but have misplaced my version so I am unable to attach a copy. And more recently, University of Minnesota Press has published an excellent feminist critique of microfinance in Bangladesh: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/microfinance-and-its-discontents On a more positive note, while further economizing the lives of poor people is a dangerous path an unlikely to end poverty, there is hope in microfinance if it were to produce commonly-held resources that could slowly eclipse the currently existing pillars of privatized economic power. There are numerous examples of this sort of thing happening in the United States, most of them religious communities like the more fundamentalist variants of Mormonism, who hold their assets in common trust. [AC: A critical appraisal of the lasting political dimensions of American religious socialism is long overdue] If you would like to chat about this, or any else, let me know. Sincerely, [There was bit a pushback after I called microfinance “greedy” “selfish” and “narcissistic” in my talk, a bit polemical I admit.. V asked me to provide her with my perspective on microfinance, because as a poverty activist she as so-far seen microfinance as one of the leading paths to poverty alleviation.] Emotional Politics, or “Solidarity Not Charity: Radical Responses to Poverty”
Emotional Politics, or “Solidarity Not Charity: Radical Responses to Poverty” Emotional Politics, or “Solidarity Not Charity: Radical Responses to Poverty” In our modern world, poverty is not natural, but the result of institutions that are set up to benefit a few at the expense of the many. Relief efforts are currently failing because they do not address the root causes of poverty. These causes are not mystical or hard to identify, as the most important ones are global property law, international debt, unfair trade, top-down privatization programs, corporate tax shelters, the those problems are social and political. Furthermore, there is a history to these problems, and poverty will not be addressed until this history is reversed. HISTORY The colonial conquest of the New World, Africa, the Middle East, and Asia, by European powers set up the structure of our current economic system. History books have done a good job depicting the brutality of this period. In many places, Europeans wiped out 99% of the native populations. In places where the natives did survive, many of them were captured and made to do hard labor. In Potosi, Bolivia, for instance, native Bolivians were forced to work silver mines that snaked deep into the earth. So many miners died, that a popular saying goes “enough silver was taken from the mine in Potosi to build a bridge to Madrid, Spain, and if the bones of the dead miners were pulled from the bowels of the mine, one could build a bridge all the way back.” Inside America, the deepest legacy of this colonial economic structure is an astronomical wealth gap between whites and blacks. The number to remember is 8%. For two-hundred years, when you stack up the average free black to the average white, the black only has 8% the wealth of the white. The number goes up, sometimes to 15%, and it goes down, like after the 2008 financial crisis, the average black household lost over half their collected wealth. Abroad, the numbers are even more stark. The rich/poor gap has widened between both the global rich and the global poor. The ratio between the richest 20% and poorest 20% people was 30 to 1 in 1965, 41 to 1 in 1980, 60 to 1 in 1990, and 90 to 1 in 1997. The gap has also widened between the affluent countries and the poor countries. The ratio between the richest and poorest countries was 3 to 1 in 1820, 11 to 1 in 1913, 35 to 1 in 1950, 44 to 1 in 1973, and 72 to 1 in 1992. Partly, this is because colonialism locked the status of certain countries in place. So, even as countries in the Americas, Africa, and Asia were able to win political independence from European colonial powers, they were not freed of colonial economic obligations. The most notable example is Haiti, site of the world’s first successful slave revolution. To punish Haiti for winning the war, France demanded that the Haitians had to pay reparations to their oppressors, French slaveholders, for loss of profit. Haiti has been the poorest nation in the Americas ever since. One-by-one, nations who fought hard to win against European domination became economically indebted to their oppressors in return for their independence. The countries of sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, currently fund European development to the tune of $25,000 per minute, in loan repayments. ADDRESSING THE PROBLEM Given that few of us are influential policy makers, I would like to propose a more unconventional approach to addressing poverty. In particular, it addresses the essence of our lives as social and political beings: emotion. Three basic human emotions motivate the current response to poverty. They are greed, fear, and pity. Let me explain each one, beginning with greed. Most of us try to consciously avoid being greedy. We offer to watch our neighbor’s kids, at the dinner table we let others go first, and we may even work jobs that pay less but feel more fulfilling. Yet, the prevailing economic theories presume that everyone acts greedy when it comes to money. And so goes the models behind policies of poverty alleviation: they appeal to people’s bald self-interest. Fear is the next emotion. Fear may be the most primal of human emotions, and it is the emotion most played by governments. Be afraid of “so-and-so”, they say, and we are. Economics has taken fear to a new level by categorizing things according to risk. Either risk for the investors, risk to the proprietors, or risk to the economy itself. Poverty relief even makes sense to these fearful individuals, because second to being afraid of losing their money and becoming a poor person, they are afraid of poor people themselves. Poverty relief for them, is insurance to keep people from threatening them or their investments. And the last emotion is pity. Pity is probably the most disgusting of human emotions. It is more self-serving than greed, and more patronizing than fear. When humans act out of pity, it is rarely for the benefit of the other person, but mostly to feel the rush of “being a good person.” As Oscar Wilde once wrote of the ‘man of great conscience’: “They try to solve the problem of poverty, for instance, by keeping the poor alive; or, in the case of a very advanced school, by amusing the poor. But this is not a solution: it is an aggravation of the difficulty. The proper aim is to try and reconstruct society on such a basis that poverty will be impossible. And the altruistic virtues have really prevented the carrying out of this aim. Just as the worst slave-owners were those who were kind to their slaves, and so prevented the horror of the system being realised … charity degrades and demoralises. They are perfectly right. Charity creates a multitude of sins.” Rather than denouncing the “multitude of sins” found in current poverty alleviation found in micro-loans meant to play to one’s sense selfishness (what Americans entrepreneurship) or the indignities of charity drives like Live 8, let me suggest a few interesting avenues to alleviate poverty today. 1) solidarity economics There is a growing variety of alternative economic approaches that fall under the umbrella title “solidarity economics.” They all follow the basic principle of cooperation rather than competition, and work to slowly transform the basic structure of economic activity without trying to immediately subvert it. You all have heard of the most famous form of solidarity economics, which goes under the name “fair trade.” In addition, to fair trade, there has been a rising tide of cooperatives for working, buying, and selling; like cooperatively owned businesses, food coops, and farmers coops. In fact, the amount of worker-owned coops in the US has grown steadily, and a coop in Spain that employs over 80,000 workers has been around since 1956. Even more common are small community-absed services where little-to-no money is exchanged. In some cases while no money is exchanged, they still measured work by labor, where anyone’s hour is worth the same as anyone else’s (MOMS SHARE), or community services. The general principles are “share, swap, barter” for collective living situations, toll-shares and barter clubs for clothing and consumables, and community resources like gardens and community-supported agriculture. The leading criticism of this approach is that these communities are motivated primarily by fear, and in particular, fear of the other. that it creates small self-enclosed communities. For this approach to be truly successful, they have to grow from small sectors into a global network. Because, relocalized communities quickly become shelters for the residents, blocking out global problems but also global allies. Or to say it another way, how can we keep these small communities from being groups of people who have benefited from centuries of colonialism that have “cashed out” and secured themselves from dealing with the problems that face the rest of the world. [FEAR] I therefore propose the “1 billion person” test. There are currently 1 billion people living in global slums, and there are currently 1 billion unemployed people. Any solution we come up to help ourselves must in some way also help those 1 billion people (and I don’t just mean the pitiful ‘we donate 1% of our proceeds to poverty relief”). If our solutions doesn’t bind us closer to those 1 billion people, then we are acting from positions of greed. Ultimately, I think the 1 billlion test brings us to my most radical position. Rather than putting more of us to work (because, as Nietzsche says, “there’s no better police than work,” and most of us work too hard anyway), we should create a plan to free more and more of us from work. Only when humans live accordingly to truly free association and have no obligation to work will we triumph over pity and have created a form of freedom worth fighting for. 2) reparations & debt forgiveness The historical imbalance left over from colonialism is making the world more unequal by the day. And, just as solidarity economics won’t work if only small groups do it, debt forgiveness, or worse yet, charity programs, are ineffective unless they wipe the slate clean. Strangely enough, or less strange to those faith-based folks in the audience, the best example of debt forgiveness is from biblical jubilees. According to the historical materials, there are routine cycles of forgiveness, where no matter how bad your crime, debtors records gets wiped free every 7-15 years. International debt forgiveness has been on the agenda many times before, and is being addressed piece-by-piece, but remains a low priority on the international agenda. Let’s look to Jubilee/ Jubilee 2000 (“millennium development goals”). Unfortunately, these initiatives are pursued as the grossed example of “greed” on the international scene. Countries looking to have their debts forgiven are seen as developmentally disabled countries that have had their growth stunted because they have fallen behind the United State and Europe. This narcissism, which assumes that the rest of the nations of the world will succeed if they look like us, is assured by putting massive restrictions on nations looking to have their debt forgiven, designed to always keep the rich nations on top. 3) reconsideration of property itself Even if the slate is wiped clean, centuries of privation have upset the balance. The concentration of wealth and land has disrupted long-standing norms of reciprocity, ripping apart the social fabric of most of the world, replacing society with corporate and state-owned monopolies. Even if those monopolies forgive the rest of our debts, we would still exist as a large global class of the dispossessed. I therefore propose a rethinking of property itself, and the social relations that they endanger. To begin, consider the three main versions of property, private, public, common. I think we all know what private property is. Public property is where resources are controlled by a state or institution that grants general access to a “public,” but with rules, and restrictions, and is still constituted on the basis of scarcity, which has to be carefully managed. Lastly, common property is property that is accessible to all and virtually inexhaustible. This may appear utopian, but there is an easy example. The human faculty of communication is held in common. No matter how much language is censored or trademarked, we find a way to use communication without exhausting to it, and actually adding to it in every instance of use. Following this model, we need to find out how to constitute our other social relations on the basis of a Common. It may begin with land reform, but it needs to end with detaching access from contribution, and making the whole basis of society on something Common. Thank you for having me.
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They found the first body tucke
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from redbird prison abolition
1. Lower commissary prices. One striker writes: “Commissary items are permitted to be marked up.to 35% above retail, while many of us receive only $8 a month.”
2. No more indefinite terms. Prisoners on the highest security level at OSP (level 5) currently have little prospects for reducing their security level and increasing privileges. “We are taken in front of a privilege review board every 90 days, yet can expect no [increase in] privilege for a year or longer” the hunger striker says of prisoners on Level 5B. Men on Level 5A have a privilege level review every six months, but there has been no increase in their privileges in recognition of good conduct for some time.
3. Healthy and nutritious food. According to the hunger striker, “austerity cuts have allowed our food portions to be shortened.”
4. Access to educational and enrichment materials. ”There has recently been a major ban on books and music” the hunger striker said.
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the mutilated individual is removed from the common mass of humanity by a rite of separation (this is the idea behind cutting, piercing, etc.) which automatically incorporates him into a defined group; since the operation leaves ineradicable traces, the incorporation is permanent (Arnold Van Gennep, Rites of Passage, 72).
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We are a generation raised on zombie movies. Of the 5,000 ads each one of us saw today, explosions punctuated more than a few.
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War is not always undertaken by States. This why the magician-king’s greatest illusion is war, which is the result of his most masterful conjuring trick.
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But what about the poles? someone interjected. You are right, the patient voice continued, let me return to the poles…
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presented on April 14, 2012, as part of a joint Occupy/Justice Action Ministries panel discussion on poverty entitled “The Poor Can No Longer Afford the Rich.” [for my previous pieces of public scholarship i/r/t Occupy, look to Nightmares and Ghost Stories]
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The fundamental misunderstanding over the Archaic State is in regards to the type of conquest it undertakes. The conquest performed by the Archaic State is never a salt-the-earth war of annihilation but a process of capture. As the centrality of slavery in padi states indicates, if humans are the most precious resource, then lives should be preserved and not wasted, as they are a leading reason for waging war. Additionally, conquest is not an isolated act but an ongoing process. Bloody wars are not rare events locked away deep in the annals of the state but fuel the constant need for new labor. The Archaic State is driven by a cycle that follows the same dilations and contractions of a living system, with its own expanding and contracting organs. Therefore, the heart of the Archaic State of conquest is not powered by destruction, but a circuit of capture-exploit-release. It takes hostages, which it releases after they are used up.
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Thursday, May 3: Ohio Super Max Hunger Strike Continues and Expands
The prisoner’s demands include the following:
. Today at least twenty five prisoners at Ohio State Penitentiary (OSP) began a hunger strike. They are demanding that the Warden meet and negotiate with them for improved conditions in Ohio’s super-max prison. These hunger strikers say they intend to continue to refuse food until their demands are met. Another, larger group of prisoners will show symbolic solidarity with the hunger strikers, and workers outside of prison by also refusing food on a one-day fast tomorrow, for May Day, the international day of worker solidarity and resistance.
