Nomad Citizenship: Free-Market Communism and the Slow-Motion General Strike

265 Pages·2011·3.155 MB·English

by  Eugene W. Holland

NOMAD CITIZENSHIP

Nomad Citizenship
FREE-MARKET COMMUNISM AND THE
SLOW-MOTION GENERAL STRIKE
Eugene W. Holland
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Portions of chapter 1 were previously published as “The Utopian Dimension of
Thought in Deleuze and Guattari,” in Imagining the Future: Utopia and Dystopia,
ed. Andrew Milner, Matthew Ryan, and Robert Savage, 217-42 (North Carlton,
Australia: Arena, 2006); “Studies in Applied Nomadology: Jazz Improvisation
and Postcapitalist Markets,” in Deleuze and Music, ed. Ian Buchanan and Marcel
Swiboda, 20-35 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004); “Affirmative
Nomadology and the War Machine,” in Gilles Deleuze: The Intensive Reduction,
ed. Constantin Boundas, 218-25 (London: Continuum, 2009); and “Schizoanalysis,
Nomadology, Fascism,” in Deleuze and Politics, ed. Ian Buchanan and Nick Thoburn,
74-97 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008). Portions of chapter 2 were
previously published as “Affective Citizenship and the Death-State,” in Deleuze and
the Contemporary World, ed. Adrian Parr and Ian Buchanan, 161-74 (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2006). Portions of chapter 4 were previously published
as “Nonlinear Historical Materialism and Postmodern Marxism,” Culture, Theory’
Critique 47, no. 2 (2006): 181-96.
Copyright 2011 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
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publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
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Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520
http://www. upress. umn.edu
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Holland, Eugene W.
Nomad citizenship : free-market communism and the slow-motion general strike /
Eugene W. Holland,
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8166-6612-6 (he : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8166-6613-3 (pb : alk.
paper)
1. State, the—Philosophy. 2 Citizenship—Philosophy. 3. Communism—Philosophy.
4. Utopias—Philosophy. I. Title.
JC11.H645 2011
320.01— dc23
2011028083
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer.
18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
To Eliza, nomade par excellence

Preface ix
Introduction: Assays in Affirmative Nomadology xv
1 From Political Philosophy to Affirmative Nomadology 1
2 Death-State Citizenship 31
3 Nomad Citizenship 65
4 Free-Market Communism 99
Conclusion 141
Appendix: Nomadological and Dialectical Utopianism 165
Notes 175
Bibliography 211
Index 227

This book is a creature of circumstance. It has been said that genuine think­
ing begins with a scream—not of fear, but of outrage. (And if you’re not
outraged, so another saying goes, you’re simply not paying attention.) If
thinking does begin with a scream of outrage—outrage at all that is in­
tolerable in this world—then there is plenty to scream about. This book
was born of outrage at the presidency of George W. Bush. Who would
have believed that a U.S. government, supposed global beacon of freedom
and democracy, would resort to preemptive war, rendition and torture,
the suspension of habeas corpus, domestic wiretapping, and innumerable
presidential signing statements to circumvent federal and international law
and consolidate practically unchecked power in the executive branch? Of
course, the abrupt turn to militarism and authoritarianism was justified in
the name of restoring national honor after the shock and humiliation of
the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
But this in turn justified considering the Bush regime as a latter-day vari­
ant of palingénie populist ultranationalism—the category utilized in cur­
rent scholarship to characterize the popular program of nation rebuilding
in response to a humiliating defeat that was instituted in Nazi Germany
after World War I. But that was only part of the cause for outrage: there
was also blatant disregard for the looming environmental catastrophe; a
general disdain for empirical evidence and scientific findings; a massive
transfer of wealth to the already wealthy, coupled with record federal
budget deficits; an unholy electoral and policy alliance with religious fun­
damentalism—the list could go on and on.
And yet, had this book been written a decade earlier, there would have
been plenty of cause for outrage at the Clinton presidency, too—callous
disregard for the damage to progressive causes stemming from sexual
impropriety being the least of it: passage of global trade pacts favoring
transnational capital over American workers; refusal to finally deinstitu­
tionalize homophobia in the military; capitulation to the pharmaceutical
and insurance industries in the abandonment of health care reform; the
evisceration of welfare and its transformation into work-fare—this list,
too, could go on and on.
So the book is not partisan in that sense: once the screams subside, both
regimes are understood to be variants of neoliberalism, the latest stage of
global capitalism. But the differences between the two varieties—the neo-
Conservative and the neo-Liberal, as I label them—turn out to be signifi­
cant, for they reveal a fundamental bipolarity of the modern State-form.
Deleuze and Guattari and Foucault (among others) distinguish analytically
between an apparently more archaic, “despotic” or “sovereign” form and
an apparently more modern, “civilized” or “biopolitical” form of State
power. The temptation, and the danger, would be to consider them stages
in a historical progression replacing the archaic with the modern. For what
if they more closely resemble business cycles of boom and bust (to which
they may not be unrelated)? What if the contemporary State oscillates
between the two forms, without ever leaving the less desirable (presum­
ably the older) one definitively behind? This is the view propounded by
Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (especially when read as a
corrective to Anti-Oedipus) and registered in my psychohistorical study
of Baudelaire (see especially the preface to Baudelaire and Schizoanalysis).
Comparison of the neo-Liberal Clinton regime with the neo-Conservative
Bush regime confirms this view and lends it added urgency: if history
can no longer be conceived in linear fashion as evolving from one stage
to the next, nor thought of dialectically to accommodate backsliding or
steps backward in the course of a process that nonetheless leads inexora­
bly forward, then it must be conceived in nonlinear fashion as oscillating
between two (or among several!) basins of attraction in an open process
that has no single predictable direction or final outcome. The sovereign
or neodespotic State-form represents one basin of attraction, into which
Nazi Germany fell between the wars while the United States (narrowly)
avoided it; the biopolitical or axiomatizing State-form represents another
basin of attraction, which Germany now occupies, while the United States,
at least under George W. Bush, moved closer to the neodespotic form.
Bush’s immediate successor, perhaps because of constraints imposed on
him by the two wars and banking fiasco he inherited, has not moved the
country appreciably closer to the axiomatizing State-form, but neither
has he wielded executive power as neodespotically as Bush did. Yet even
if Obama or one of his successors were to succeed in repositioning the