A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal

224 Pages·2022·1.239 MB·English

by  Andrew Culp

A Guerrilla Guide to Refusal
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A Guerrilla
Guide to
Refusal
Andrew Culp
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
The University of Minnesota Press gratefully acknowledges the financial
assistance provided for the publication of this book by the California Institute
of the Arts School of Critical Studies.
Portions of chapters 1 and 2 were previously published in “Confronting
Connectivity: Feminist Challenges to the Metropolis,” Communication and Critical/
Cultural Studies 13, no. 2 (2016): 166– 83; copyright the National Communication
Association; reprinted by permission of Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor &
Francis Group, www.tandfonline.com, on behalf of the National Communication
Association; all rights reserved. Portions of chapter 3 were previously published
in “Afro- Pessimism and Non- Philosophy at the Zero Point of Subjectivity, History,
and Aesthetics,” in The Big No, ed. Kennan Ferguson (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2022).
Copyright 2022 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written
permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401– 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
ISBN 978-1-5179-0522-4 (hc)
ISBN 978-1-5179-0523-1 (pb)
Library of Congress record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021054543.
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
UMP BmB
Contents
Introduction: Underground Philosophy 1
Part I. Anonymity 31
1. The Guerrilla Force of Liberation 35
2. Propaganda of the Deed 47
3. The Voice of Bullets and Bombs 51
4. Messages without a Sender 54
5. The Sprawl 60
6. The Politics of Asymmetry 64
Part II. Criminality 75
7. Society with Sexual Characteristics 79
8. Excitement and Exposure 83
9. A Heart That Burns and Burns 92
10. We Are Bad, but We Could Be Worse 94
11. We Don’t 101
12. Making Illness into a Weapon 103
Part III. Fugitivity 109
13. Uprising 113
14. Self- Abolition 117
15. Searing Flesh 129
16. Captive Media 132
17. Black Out 139
18. Trapped between Withdrawal and Hypervisibility 144
Conclusion: Communism at the End of the World 155
Acknowledgments 169
Notes 171
Index 205
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Introduction
Underground Philosophy
The most important movements now pose no demands. In their
midst are those who refuse labels. Joining them together is the no-
tion that there can be no political solution. Their ranks swell in
the riots that now fill the streets, reverberate through the prisons,
and simmer in refugee detention centers. The passion is felt in the
red hot rage of radical queers who respond by bashing back. It has
spread like wildfire before. Just a decade before, the movements of
the squares toppled many governments. And it continues daily in
those who insist that Black lives matter. What is most curious of all
is that, in the midst of so much refusal, so many of their hearts are
still moved by the language of “revolution.”
Change is coming. But as Gil Scott- Heron said, the revolution
will not be televised. It will not ask for time at the next presidential
debate. It will not be interviewed on the front page of your favor-
ite news site. Though they might try, it will not be included in any
party’s platform. Even those grassroots organizations “working at
the neighborhood level” will not recognize it. It is the politics of
the unseen. This book is for them.
Chaos Reigns
We live in an era of dissolution. As with any period, its social char-
acter is defined largely by its media forms. Whereas a century ago
the world was taken to be a cinematic projection of a strip of indi-
vidual celluloid frames, today we are blown to bits, thought to be
acting out the programming of hidden codes. Time is now tracked
to the 1/705,600,000th of a second, each division called a “flick,” a
portmanteau of the cinematic frame and computer- instruction- cycle
1
2 Introduction
tick. All user actions are tracked, fed into an adaptive system to
maximize certain outcomes (demographics, geography, behavior,
virality, attention, retention, revenue). This obsessive cutting up
and tracking of time is done for a very specific purpose: prediction.1
As a consequence, the future is colonized through a whole range of
technical mechanisms, from financial capital to securitized gover-
nance.2 Everyone now suffers its combined effect (though, as always,
unevenly). While the modern era was plagued by misery and early
consumerism bred boredom, today “We Are All Very Anxious.”3
As the French collective Tiqqun argues, the motivating fiction of
our age is cybernetic, enraptured by the idea of biological, physical,
and social behaviors as all “integrally programmed and reprogram-
mable.”4 A dream born during the Second World War, it imagines
the world through the screen of a mechanical dialectic of recogni-
tion, approximating Henri Saint- Simon’s utopia of “replacing the
government of persons with the administration of things.”5 The
politicians are replaced by the managers, who in turn see them-
selves as pilots, transforming the art of government from the guid-
ing of souls to a science of navigating inhuman forces.6 Charles
Babbage dubbed his forerunner to the computer the “difference en-
gine.” Indeed, today’s difference engines operate a control grid that
runs the new information society: “Every real integration is based
on a prior differentiation. . . . The homogeneous, the mélange, the
syncretic, is entropy. Only union in diversity is creative. It increases
complexity, it leads to higher levels of organization.”7
Social solidarities are being strained to their limit by a digital
system that disaggregates identity. Categories of social belonging
like race, gender, and class are now treated as a matter of psycho-
logical perception to be surveyed and charted. For example, pio-
neering cybernetician Karl Deutsch used the race riots of 1968 to
spearhead the transformation of politics into data science: race was
merely a set of communication differentials residing in wealth, ge-
ography, language, and attitudes.8 So, even in an era of resurgent
identity politics, their success remains reported through “objec-
tive measures” of public opinion that say less than nothing. All the
while, the world has become transfixed by figures who delight in
cynical piety, who use words frivolously to influence public percep-
Introduction 3
tions or simply troll, leaving it to their opponents to feel obligated to
use words seriously.9 No wonder faith in solutions has dissolved.10
The few who still present solutions are self- professed “disruptors”
hawking a technical fix. Crisis serves as the motor for both the state
and capital now more than ever.
The social categories of identity were sliced up for a purpose: so
they could be synthesized higher up. With the rise of information-
alization, computer- driven capitalism was able to promote integra-
tion of even some of the most unwanted subjects.11 The digital logic
of differentiation has fueled an overall shift of the leading capital-
ist economies toward strategies of flexible accumulation since the
1970s. This regime of accumulation builds on the already- existing
infrastructure of capitalist modernization that used the architec-
ture of the factory as a diagram for all sectors of society. But in-
formationalization provoked a passage in the leading architectures
of society away from the self- contained walls of the factory to the
open system of the network.12
The effects have been drastic. Rather than a small set of institu-
tions determining the direction of the whole in the last instance
(“as goes the military, so goes the nation”), every part is now gov-
erned according to whatever patterns emerge from the distributed
system. Yet the managers of society are not so cold- hearted mathe-
maticians as to let whatever comes out the other side of their dif-
ferential equations rule us all, argues Gilles Châtelet; they wield it
offensively in a microphysics of obedience that “dissolve[s] certain
global entities defined through solidarities which are refractory to
homogenization.”13 After being split into a thousand points of light,
society is reconstituted through the seemingly “self- organizing”
differential relations of politics, economics, and communication.14
The first is a political arithmetic registering citizen- panelists through
their joyous expression of an “average opinion” to be surveyed
through polls and the ballot (black) box. 15 The second is the eco-
nomics of mercantile empiricism, which slices the social body into
numbers and thinly disarticulates it until it is nothing but a fluid
mass of particles that obey the laws of envy and attraction.16 Third,
a neurocratic behaviorism floods the communication channels of
humans, animals, and machines, understanding them as nothing