#title Toward an Army of Ghosts
#subtitle Immanence, Conflict and Crisis
#author Tom Nomad
#date 2017
#source PDF provided by publisher
#lang en
#pubdate 2026-10-19T14:20:32
#topics immanence, conflict, crisis, Little Black Cart
#rights creative commons
#publisher Repartee (an imprint of LBC Books) (Berkeley, CA)
#cover t-n-tom-nomad-toward-an-army-of-ghosts-1.jpg

*** Dedication | ~~

<verse>
To Emma, the love of my life,
you’re amazing and you always will be.
</verse>

** Introduction

Almost four years ago, when <em>Master’s Tools</em> was released, I had embarked on a distinct philosophical and political project, one that had grown out of the lessons from past experiences, and that did not have a determinate destination. This project was born as much out of frustration and failure as it was out of a certain conceptual interest and political desire. What was clear at the beginning of this project were the fundamental flaws in the categories we were using to make sense of action, and in our relationship to the space where action occurs. Paradoxical structures, fanciful notions, illusions, and utopian portrayals of our social and political milieu formed the basis of a political practice that was as much separated from the terrain of activity as were the liberals that we decried. Clearly we needed to at least throw out the latencies of the activist era, which we were discussing. But, for all the pages written about this—the problem of activism, the problems of conceptually-driven conflictual practice—all too often we seemed to be replicating the same categories in our attempts at transcendence. This current book<em></em> is not some attempt to determine the way out of the morass of activism and ideology; it merely points out where some sparks may reside. <em>Master’s Tools</em> is largely a discussion of immediate questions surrounding tactics; on some level this is a companion text. Some of the ideas will seem familiar to those who have read other writings of mine, but what my earlier writing has not focused on is the larger conceptual context at the base of my previously published works. This has led to misunderstanding by some, and problematic readings by others—some going as far as to retreat into liberal concepts of the rejection of militarism as a form of superficial rejection. I hope that this text clears some of the air, and illuminates a different point of perspective on these earlier works. Though there will be some things in common (the structure of the state, the relationship of logistics to the collection of actions that we term the police) the structure of the discourse here functions in a different mode and exists for a different purpose.

These texts exist in relation to fundamentally different, yet intertwined, forms of life and tempos of existence. Previous texts were responses to an immediate question, one that was relevant when they were written. Specifically, they tried to articulate and address the failure of the tactics and methods that we were deploying. This mode of being was at a frenzied pace, with hectic risks, rewards, and activity. It was full of late night meetings, large distances traveled, and complicities formed: a life of immediacy. This formed a project to produce and distribute materials related to specific questions, first to a small group of people within direct proximity, which then leaked out into a wider, but still self-contained readership, and finally was compiled into <em>Master’s Tools</em> and became one of the foundations for the journal, <em>Insurgencies</em>. It was to cut a line between the current approaches of the time, which were firmly rooted in activism, and address questions relevant to that space, while at the same time critiqueing that paradigm and pointing out some possibilities of escape.

The text that you hold, on the other hand, reflects the time in between, a mode of life constructed around study, quiet music, and intimately engaged conversations, stepping back, looking beyond reactionary polemics on some immediate question, and forming foundations to think about the questions themselves. The second project, begun concurrently to the first and proceeding in parallel, was to articulate the grounding for <em>Master’s Tools</em>. Often relevant questions have emerged from those previously published writings, such as the rejection of utopianism, the rejection of activism, the rejection of political absolutism, morality, and the structure of absolute meaning. These questions are left open by much of the post-left literature written within the Western context. This book attempts to address a specific question—what are the implications of a distinctly materialist approach to the foundations of politics—without falling into the trap of pretending to understand some sort of truth about the material, nor rejecting the role or importance of thought as a functioning structure.

Previous texts have brought up this question implicitly, but always framed through a discussion of tactics, or of making sense of action-based conflictual dynamics. This text departs from that. First, while previous texts focused on action within events identified as political, and as a result was framed by activism-centered discourse, here we look to a larger context. Second, a number of arguments present in past texts are engaged with here in much more detail, and with more care and nuance. This depth positions these arguments within the wider framework, one between thought and activity, as well as one rooted in a discourse of the ontology of statism.

These distinctions aside, the most important and useful difference between this project and past writing is this discussion of thought, action, and the paradoxes of the state that lead to the structure of policing. This forms the basis of the initial sections of the text. Later sections depart from this discussion and address a connected question. The clear implications of the initial section of this text, and previous writings, are not just that the state is a logistical phenomenon attempting to impossibly construct material unity through force, but that this same structure would be necessitated by any attempt to manifest some conceptually total vision of existence within material space. In other words, the clear implication is that the entire structure of modernist politics, a paradigm based in concepts of utopian futures, ideological absolutism, and notions of social and political unity, all imply a structure of mobilized force in moments to structure the particularities of existence; all of them imply total war.

This is where previous projects have stopped, and left wide open the question of thought and its relationship to action within anarchist practice.

This book addresses the implications of this for those who engage in conflict with the state, or who approach the so-called political outside of the confines of modernist absolutisms and political platitudes about the future. The usual response with this discussion—a question I get asked time and time again—is, what is to be done. Entire anarchist publishing projects, specifically those more firmly rooted in the Left, are densely populated with efforts to answer this. The problem is that the question implies the framework of the answer. When we attempt to respond to this question we are not only accepting that something must be done, which is a problem in itself, but also that there is a unitary context for both the doing and the thing that something is being done about. This assertion of common dynamics already abstracts the question of action, and of how thought exists in relation to action, and the implications of ignoring the distinction between thought and action. This structures the same ontological conditions that enable the state to begin with. Later parts of this text will discuss how to approach questions of thought and action without replicating this dynamic, or the ways that we can think action without assuming that this thinking is total, or that space and time are unitary.

This text is difficult for a reason. When theoretical discourse became central among anarchists, there were two common responses. The first was an assertion that anarchists should be “understandable,” should speak a common language. Not only is this view incredibly presumptuous—the subtext is that those without formal education cannot understand complex text—but this tendency tends to obfuscate some of the more complex, difficult, and obtuse questions posed by the anarchist project: questions of existence, of being and activity, of possibility, none of which can be spoken of simply. The second tendency, and this is exemplified by Tiqqun, embraces a style that is simultaneously bombastic and overly obtuse, a sort of high energy complexity for the sake of complexity, or obtuseness for the sake of obtuseness. For a number of reasons, I am not interested in either of these expressive forms. Rather, here, the complexity stems from a series of intentional stylistic and conceptual choices that I make throughout the iterations of this text, choices that require some explanation.

For this text, much of the bombastic and declarative statements that populated earlier versions were eliminated. The reason for this elimination is simple. At its core this text revolves around some paradoxes: the paradox of the state, the paradox of the tension between thought and activity, the paradox of our concepts of existence and existence as a dynamic phenomenon. This eschews a declarative style. The paradox is a space in which the dynamics of those things in conflict— the components of the paradox—are always in flux, and in which our inert, static, and declarative statements always exist at a distance. The declaration becomes at best provisional, it explains (more or less persuasively) a shifting dynamic. Thus it does not seem proper, or useful, to speak with more authority or clarity than is actually present in the discussion.

Within discursive history of the West—and elevated to almost total absurdity in political discourse—the highest privilege is usually afforded the truth narrative, the narrative that explains existence definitively and clearly. Central to this discourse is a certain understanding of existence, one that is definitive, deterministic, inert, and defined, one that leads us to certain forms of conclusion that are anathema to the anarchist project. What we face within anarchist discourse is not only discursive actions in hostile terrain, but within a conceptual history that fundamentally binds us to a vision of the existence of definitive political forms. This must be resisted at all costs, the entire anarchist project is at stake in this resistance. This requires writing that recognizes paradox, and that, as a result, plays in the space between the artificial certainty of the concept and the necessarily speculative form that gives rise to the concept. This necessitates expression that embraces technical discourse, that works in the space between elements in conflict within a paradox, and that moves outside of both artificial and presumptuous concepts of simplicity and retreats into stylistic norms of pseudo-intellectualism. We must be comfortable writing outside forms that encourage self-targeted propaganda—texts meant to rile up the convinced— and embrace how little we actually understand, if we understand anything at all.

The second layer of difficulty in this text arises from the sometimes literal, and sometimes unique, usages of specific terms that are core to the text, and these require some additional explanation.

*** Co-immanence

This concept implies a number of dynamics between two or more entities that are parallel. Firstly, the entities within a co-immanent dynamic are discrete, they can be named and described as separate phenomena or concepts, entities with their own trajectories and dynamics. Secondly, these entities cannot be formed into a single entity. This is not the absolute conflict of something like a contradiction, but a separation akin to a paradox. In a paradox there are two or more entities that come into some relationship, but which never fuse into a singular thing due to fundamental differences and potentially opposing dynamics. Thirdly, co-immanent dynamics, even though they are separate and can never be formed into one another, influence the trajectories of the other entities in the dynamic. In other words, it is the dynamic of relation, combined with the inability to fuse into a singularity, that develops these dynamics over time.

*** Concepts

Concepts, on the other hand, exist as fundamentally different ontological objects. A concept is a notion, a mental construction, that attempts to explain moments. In this the concept eliminates the particularity, the uniqueness, of the moment or thing itself. A simple example: the concept of a chair. When we identify a particular object with the concept of chair we are not merely identifying the object with the concept but we are positing a commonality between that object and all other objects identified in that way, and then implying a consistency of their existence as common objects across time. If we are to extend this simple example and think through what it means to insist on a concept of history, or a concept of existence, we can see the implications of the concept. Concepts exist as transcendental objects, objects that transcend the complexities of the material and posit a discursive space devoid of activity, difference, change, and effects. As such they are fundamentally, ontologically separated from the moment.

*** Effects/Effectiveness

Effects, and its logical extension, effectiveness, are here used in a normal way, but there are some senses in which the usage here deviates from that in the contemporary lexicon. The effect is not merely the immediate result of an action, although it encompasses this, it is also the cascading impacts of an action as these impacts move into future moments. This is not just the case with actions that are defined as political, but apply to all actions. As we act the effects of these actions come to collide with other activities taken by others, which in turn generates effects and so on. The concept of history, discussed above, contains the totality of all things that have ever occurred, the effects of all actions, while the concept of effects attempts to name the impacts of a single activity. This is an artificial separation. Just as we cannot separate our actions from the contextual conditions of the actions we take, we cannot separate effects from one another, or discuss them in isolation. Effectiveness, then, becomes the category of a specific activity in a particular situation as it contributes to a delineated goal. This is not a discourse that can happen in the abstract, but only makes sense when attached to a complex and dynamic material space that is impossible to encompass in the discourse of effectiveness. The discourse of effectiveness, although the only way to measure activity conceptually, obscures the complexity of action. This is not a criticism of the discourse of effectiveness, just a recognition of limitation.

*** History

History here is not the discourse of historical narrative, but is more active and kinetic. In the framework of historical narrative the reader connects with a meta-narrative of events constructed from narratives of remembering, or retelling, a series of events. In this formation the historical narrative fundamentally undercuts the complexity, dynamism, and effects of actual historical events, and reduces these events to a linear narrative contained within a conceptual framework. What is important about history is that it is everything that cannot be contained in the narrative that we call history. It is not something that is only operative in some time that we call the past. Rather, history is the trajectory of all events that collide in the construction of each and every moment. It is in this sense, the sense in which all events participate in the construction of future presents, that Bakhtin claims that, regardless of our sense of the intensity of the resonance of our actions, we cannot opt out from the construction of history, even inaction contributes to the construction of the future.

*** Modernism

The term modernity is thrown around a lot; here it refers to the period of time after the rise of Rationalism in Western Europe, a time characterized by attempts to eliminate the hegemony of religious and abstractly spiritual thought. Working from concepts of individual morality and relationships to truth that emerged during the Protestant Reformation, Rationalist thinkers began to posit a paradoxical universe. On the one hand these thinkers were suggesting an absolute individual autonomy over thought, moral decision making, and action, and attaching this to a concept of responsibility, freedom, and accountability. On the other hand, this autonomy was eroded by the second claim, that it existed in relation to an idea of truth and reason at the core of existence. The task for the individual became understanding the totality of absolute truth: a universe that paradoxically posits absolute freedom and total determinism. Out of this paradigm emerged the paradox of American and French liberal democracy, based simultaneously on concepts of individual liberty and the universality of their political forms, typified by law/prisons and imperialism. Parallel to this rise of liberal democracy we also find the paradoxes of Leninism: action is within a historically deterministic context; and traditional anarchism: freedom can be the basis for some ideological and utopian planned existence that can be spoken about in platforms, and that is based on a concept of truth.

*** Moment

A moment is often associated with measurable and quantitative notions of time, notions attached to the concept of the clock. That is not necessarily how I use the word here. The moment is a term that is being used to mark some time, or an undefinitive present, not just as time but also as a time that is populated by objects, as they exist in that present, and the dynamics of action in that present. This does not mean that it necessarily marks the present, as in the present moment, but that it marks present moments, whether these are past present moments or contemporary present moments. In other words, the moment is some time, a place in time, without that being confined to the measurement of quantitative time, and to measure the moment quantitatively limits the concept of the moment. The moment is not something that can be spoken of definitively through the concept of the moment. It is a marker for the complexities that construct some present, complexities that far outstrip our capacity for understanding and perception. As such, the moment and the concept of the moment are separate objects.

*** Terrain

The concept of terrain is often identified with the physical features of a space. That is not how I’m using it here. Those familiar with contemporary US military thought will recognize the concept of terrain as akin to the term battle space, but without the militaristic connotations. “Terrain” here marks space in the same way that the concept of the moment marks time. It is the dynamics, objects, and activities, combined with the physical features of a space, that we act within. When terrain is discussed in this text it must be understood in a dual sense, as both terrain in a particularized and dynamic sense as well as terrain in a conceptual sense (the only sense that facilitates articulation in speech or text), and as with the moment and the concept of the moment, the concept of terrain and terrain exist separately.

This text has to be read as an interplay between these terms. It is not an exposition on the importance of some concept, nor a discourse that attempts to arrive at a definitive conclusion, as in most of the Western philosophical tradition after the rise of the Age of Reason. It has been constructed on a different grounding, one of dialectical process, tracing the conceptual implications of mutually exclusive concepts in relation to each other, rather than around the question of definitive conclusions, truth value, and concepts of reason. This sort of process necessarily involves paradox and the discussion of paradox. This constructs a very different sounding text, with a very different tempo and tone.

That means also a different way to read. This is no Tiqqunist tome, meant to arouse the senses and spur one to action, nor will it be read in a night, or a weekend, or even a week. It is not meant to exist within the odd conflation of propaganda and theory that often constructs the basis of what we call anarchist literature. It is meant to be read slowly, to be struggled with, to be analyzed and criticized. Of course, there is never a single right way to read a text. As Derrida argues, the text is an odd formation, one that takes an inert series of words, archives on physical medium, and propels them through time, only to collide with a reader at some moment, in some place. It is never a total exposition of some idea, it is never some grand narrative of all possible things, it is at most a snapshot of a person at some moment in time, taking their conceptual understandings of a question and imprecisely translating these into language, into the written form, only to have someone read these in their own way.

There is a tendency to fall back into a narrative grounded in discussions of systems, grand constructs, and singular enemies, without any attempt to trace, operationally, how these enemies function. What we lose is an understanding of the actual existence of a thing, the operations of that structure that we identify as an enemy, and approach an active project of changing the dynamics of history from a position of abstraction that eliminates the complexities of history. We forget that even Hobbes’ Leviathan is made up of constituent parts and functions through the interaction of these parts. In other words, we approach a material form of action from a completely conceptual space, and then wonder why it is that good ideas do not carry the day, and why we always come away feeling that there is something lacking.

This book aims to remedy this misjudgment, this reductionism of the political in the age of Modernity. The first of some possible pitfalls is a tendency to shift aesthetics, to change the ways that we understand Modernism, to change the platitudes that we rely on, and to craft a different narrative on the same meta-conceptual basis. We have been seeing this play out as reformed platformism, but also in the absolutisms of primitivism, deep ecology, and forms of individualism. In these attempts the ontology of the modern era is preserved, complete with the assumptions of conceptually true and total narratives, with nothing changed but the specifics of modernist appropriations. The second pitfall is post-modern cultural critique and the retreat to the academy. We see this with Zizek and the cleverness of post-modern critique. Frequently we end up with a narrative that abandons a promising point of departure—the almost nihilistic rejection of the concept of universal meaning—declawing itself by retreating to cultural critique and the academy. To avoid these pitfalls requires that we depart from initial ontological discussions, namely the relationship of concepts to moments, moments to history, and action to politics. Yet, this is impossible because of the ontology of conceptual universality. The concept always floats above the ground. It is always an interpretive attempt. Modernism, and the political attempts to appropriate Modernism, ignore this distinction and try to form the world around the narrative of the world, resulting in the state, concepts of political repression, and a world that requires a total elimination of chance, difference, and the dynamic effects of actions. It is not the concept itself that is destructive, but, rather, the attempt to frame the moment through the concept. We have to constantly attach the discourse to the moment, but to speak of the moment eliminates the complexity and dynamism of the moment.

To overcome these pitfalls this text not only recognizes that the concept is always ontologically separate from the moment, but that, at the same time, the articulation of the concept is an activity, one with effects. From this separation we can not only construct a discourse around the state—as an attempt to impossibly reconcile this infinite distance—but also reconceive of the political project by rejecting this reconciliation. It is from this point that we begin, and it is through this narrative that we will proceed. At the end there will be no answers, there will be no conclusions that can be latched on to and applied in some abstract scenario. All that is possible is a point of departure.

<quote>
<em>If someone today wants to open a profitable business, they should make guillotines.</em>

<right>
Text of the Three Imprisoned Members of Revolutionary Struggle
</right>
</quote>

** The Paradoxical Construction of Immanence

Within the discourse now called “political theory” there is a central problem, one that shapes not only the assumptions of the analysis, but also the categories and outcomes of analysis. Often this problem is framed as one of scale, of the global nature, the abstraction, the depersonalization of political analysis. Put another way, the problem of the political has tended to revolve around the territory of the political and the framing of that territory. In traditional forms of political discourse this space is populated by social groupings, demographic data, and statistics; forms of generalization, of commonality, and categorical analysis. Within this, the conclusions of narrative tend to revolve around questions of policy, of socially-scaled solutions, and global visions of different worlds, all of which avoid real complexity, kinetic movement, dynamics. These frameworks lead to replicating this global nature, even as the terms are increasingly recognized as insufficient, limited, and oblivious to actually existing phenomena.

The response to this global nature, to this totality, tends to center localism: concepts of the local, the community, the neighborhood and so on. But even if the scale is reduced to the somewhat more immediate, the tendency toward abstraction does not change. This response misses the central problem of political theory: it is not a question of scale but of space and time. All sorts of spatio-temporal leaps are made in the discourse around what we term the “political”. Sometimes these leaps are historical, drawing some coherent line between an interpretation of a current event and one of a past event. Sometimes these leaps are based on the narrative of the entire solution, an assumption of a singular and static situation that can be remedied by some eternal state of affairs. Often this leap is simply a projection of desire into a position that is despatialized, one arguing that this analysis can even begin to encompass the complexity of existence. In all of these leaps, what is missed is the role of complexity, the existence and temporality of the action.

The political is, at core, a discourse of activity. Without the tacit assumption that the future is indeterminate, that the universe is not deterministic, the functionality of action would be irrelevant, everything would already be determined. The political assumes that action is relevant, that actions and the effects of actions fundamentally alter the future, assume a world in which every moment exists as particular, with the moment that follows as product of the action of the present. The fundamental problem of political theory rises from a disjunction between this core assumption and the structure of the concept itself, the act of conceptualization, an act that we all engage in constantly. Philosophical discourse is littered with attempts to discuss this problem, from the pre-Socratics all the way to contemporary theory. The counter-narrative—the narrative that runs on different lines than the Aristotelian framework at the core of almost all of the Western philosophical canon—articulates a simple disjunction. It asserts the commonality of things and moments. To even define a thing as a thing implies a sameness between that thing in that moment, that thing in the next moment, and all other things that are named in the same way. When we name, we are labeling a thing that is particular to that moment, different from all things that we name in the same way, and that will fundamentally be different in the next moment. This problem is amplified in discourses like ethics, a problem widely recognized by Kant in his later works, in which our actions, to the degree that they are relevant, exist in particular moments in time, within complex dynamics of other actions. We determine abstract generalities about those actions based on conceptual frameworks that make total declarations about action.

The inability to recognize this disjunction is at the heart of what we understand as political analysis, or “political theory” around a paradox, trying to make sense of actions through a conceptually totalizing framework. This leads to frameworks like world systems theory, discourses of conspiracy theories, and political ideology, and also decreases our ability to make sense of the material dynamics around us in actual moments. This book attempts to embrace this paradox, while constantly recognizing its existence, to reframe political narrative around the act and the inability to speak of the act, around action as both concept and actuality. Speaking of actions subsumes the complexity and particularity of the action into the concept of action, and this is intentional. We often approach the paradox as an end point, as illegitimacy, as an irrelevant discourse. The paradox is always a place of conflict, of possibility, of indiscernibility, an open space where the future is undetermined, where things can occur and occurrences matter. In the Western tradition we always want answers, coherency, conclusions. This project is a call to suspend those desires, to live within the complexity of the analysis, within the complexity of events, without necessarily relying on an end point to anchor the experience.

To put it another way, to even speak of the here-and-now positions an analysis that eliminates both the stability of the object of analysis (in this case the question of the state), and the termination point, the cognitive-truth axiom, latent in so much of Western and Westernized thought. To approach the question of the state from the position of the here and now is not to mark the moment, to define it in spatio-temporal quantities, as much as it positions the particularity of events—the uniqueness, difference, and contingency of events, the molecularization of kinetic relations of conflict, the unknowability of the future, and the complexity of the present—at the core of analysis. Clearly, this raises an odd sort of problem, and it is this problem at the core of analysis here as well. Articulating the concept of action, the concept of the moment, to mark this as a conceptual category, is to make the moment inert, to make it definable, knowable, legible, while at the same time marking it as such in order to prevent this same dynamic from going unidentified. It is this problem that becomes all so important here, for it is this problem, the impossibility of speaking of the moment, of speaking of life, that forms the paradox of the state itself, a formation that exists simultaneously as conceptually transcendental, as defining life and existence, and as materially particular, as manifest through actions some sort of conceptually-defined goal. It is from this paradox that the analysis of the state begins, not from an analysis of the theory of the state through the modern age (this is the topic for another piece), but from the inability of conceptually transcendental frameworks to express the complex kinetic moments of the present, and the implications of trying to impose totalities in this space through the form of the state.

In this book I try to analyze political formations, ie the state, keeping in mind the unbridgable chasm between the moment and theory. It is in this chasm that the state is something other than a coherent entity, a unitary force, or a structure of singular action, where it can be seen as something more complex. The state is an attempt to close this chasm, to construct an operational and material totality through the form of the sovereign, and it is this impossible attempt that allows us to rethink the state in a different light, from a different point of departure. It is from this point that we tell this story, understanding the concept of the state not as unitary entity or even historical linearity, but as active force, as policing operation, as an attempt to eliminate the particularity of the action to construct a material, spatial, and temporal unity. In other words, this story is an attempt to tell how concepts— of universal law, of national identity, of immanent political forms and discourse of the social—operate, or attempt to operate, within the complexity of everyday life, within the dynamics of history. We discuss the implications of universal conceptual forms, the attempt to operate such forms as material actualities, and the inability of these attempts to accomplish what would guarantee their actualization, the elimination of the complexity of action and of the fluctuations of history.

The state is a paradoxical structure. It precedes actions in the form of an enforcement or judgment, as the thing that limits actions to itself, through coming into the action. It functions as both wildly abstract, as a universal narrative of existence based in conditions of possibility, yet at the same time maintains functionality and relevance to the degree that this conceptual narrative operates as an actual definition of material existence, which is particular in its materiality, which is constructed on the basis of a difference of moments and the kinetic effects of actions. The very structure of the universality of law, the very concept of judgment, exists at the pivot point of this disjunction between the moment and the concept. To the degree that the universality of the concept of the state, as a total definition of existence, functions materially there would be no reason for enforcement or judgment, all actions would exist within the limits of and as an expression of this conceptual definition of existence that is expressed in law, concepts of citizenship and so on. If the state were an entirely ideological structure then it would be purely conceptual, and action would not be relevant. In the riot, the police response to actions defined as crime, the prison system, and the collapse of regimes, we can see that this ideological structure is not enough. At most it precludes a concentration of crisis, as well as forming a conceptual basis for a concept of normality. The state exists, however, as a material functionality, as an enforcement, as a proto-military (and sometimes purely military) operation, as well as a bureaucracy that organizes particular people in particular moments through conceptual forms. It is in this constant activity, the deployment of force, the presence of the police, that we can glimpse the impossibility of the chasm that the state exists to bridge, of the impossibility of the attempt to contain activity, to define the conditions of possibility for activity, within unitary forms, and it is at this point, at this point of crisis, that we will begin our analysis.

Enforcement only exists at the point of failure, when the impossibility of the moment’s conceptual subsumption is articulated, where immanence ceases to function directly (as with all materially particular moments) as a force of construction. Law and the limits constructed through the concepts of the state can not exist except materially. In other words, and this is my thesis, police exist only when and where it is impossible to impose conceptual definitions in material moments, and this is a function, therefore, in all moments. To put it another way, to the degree that moments exist as conjunction points of the effects of past actions, and to the degree that our actions generate effects— to the degree that they are relevant—the moment itself is a temporal particularity, a time that has never occurred before and will never occur again. If existence functions through this particular temporality, then it is impossible to structure a universal narrative, one that defines all moments. The police function in a temporal chasm, one that tries to manifest the transcendental totality of the concept, law, the state, national identity and so on, but through the manifestation of particular actions, in the attempt to limit the possibilities of other particular actions, all of which in their very existence resist the subjugation of the action within absolutist conceptual narratives. The conceptual transcendence of the state cannot be a material phenomenon, the concept comes from outside the moment of materialization, it is outside of the particularity of the moment of activity, yet attempts to operate through activity within moments of activity. On this level, the state is something ethereal, something conceptual and transcendent as a definition of territory, of life, of citizenship, law, etc. Yet, on the other hand, there are these very material manifestations of the state itself. People in uniforms with guns roll around and carry out kidnapping on a massive scale, riots result from police brutality as heating subsidies are cut. For those who have been on the other end of a baton, the state is oh-so-real. But these are nothing but momentary material actions occurring in innumerable ways in innumerable times and places; moments that exist as temporally separate—on a fundamentally opposing temporal plane—from the concepts that come to explain them. It is on these levels, these levels of momentary material manifestation, that an odd situation becomes manifest.

The attempt to bridge this gap, to make concepts function directly in the world, centers on a concept of material immanence. The state exists on the one hand as an entire universe of concepts: flags, uniforms, police, bureaucrats, courts, prisons, federal budgets and economic bailouts. On a certain level it is the operation of this entire universe of legibility, or assumed material transmission with the transcendental, that manifests as the state. In other words, it exists as content or doctrine, which is immanent in all moments as the possibility of the enforcement of this content. So, on the one hand it seems as if the content and the form are joined. The concept comes from the outside, from a transcendental , conceptual, position as that which enters into the moment to be of the moment. In the conceptual universe of America, for example, all moments are American before they occur. This is not just some relation of concept to moment. The movement of the concept into the moment is just a grasp at a particular manifestation of a transcendental thing. The problem is that in this ontological construction moments become both what they are (some material manifestation), but also removed from themselves, defined both before their manifestation, through the concept as condition of possibility, and also in the moment of their occurrence, as a manifest action—but only to the degree that certain material limitations are operative. At the same time the transcendental, atemporal, totality of the conceptual plane of consistency that forms the narrative of the state itself, has to somehow address the shifting, dynamic, kinetic aspects of the moment, the shifting winds of history, the fundamental flux of the event, and encompass this both conceptually and materially. All moments become total moments to the degree that they are nothing but expressions of this absolute conceptual projection but at the same time all moments themselves must be simultaneously eliminated in the concept. In the state itself there is this attempt to join an atemporal transcendence with the temporality of moments. The result is this concept of immanence, an absolutely temporal atemporality, a movement of the transcendent as manifested in every moment particularly; a content that is operated materially. “It has therefore a form correlated to contingencies of time and space; but it also has an ideal content which makes it an expression of truth in the higher region of the history of thought.” This paradoxical particularization of the transcendent concept, this immanence, only functions to the degree that the particularity of moments can be evacuated into conceptual transcendence while simultaneously manifesting in the evacuated moment. This is at the same time the content of the state itself, the conceptual content, as well as the manifestation of this concept as immanent definition of the material moments of our lives. “There can be no conception of the state which is not fundamentally a conception of life...”[1] The paradox of immanence is a temporal paradox, attempting to operate both transcendentally and materially, trying to be the possibility for time and manifest within time; both the particularities of life and the condition of possibility for life. The paradox focuses on movement, in what relation the movement of the moment comes to interact with the transcendence of the conceptual content of the state itself.

The state is constructed but it constructs. It is constructed through actions but only functions to the degree that this action exists within an attempt to construct immanence to the very moments of operation. This only functions to the degree that an impossible transmission can be constructed, to the degree that the moment becomes transcendental and the transcendental becomes particular, or to the degree that conceptual transcendence—this coming from outside as totality—and the particularity of the moment become co-immanent. This co-immanence is not conceptual, or an analytic framework in which we can argue that the contours of the development of two conceptual trajectories form one another without ever coming into direct contact or synthesis, but rather a co-immanence that implies that the moment actually exists materially along with and dependent on the movements of the transcendental and vice versa. In other words, for the state to manifest the conceptual totalities articulated in law and sovereign will, as both an absolute articulation of moments conceptually and a functionally operative condition of possibility for moments themselves, implies first that all moments are already constructed as manifestations of the transcendental and second that the transcendental has already encompassed all contingency including the total elimination of every moment. It implies the material history of total ahistoricism or the direct relevance of irrelevant moments within a transcendental total history that, for some reason, bothers to be constructed materially. We see a similar articulation, for the purpose of example, in absolutist concepts of religious ethics, where every action is both an isolated particular manifestation of the universal that is capable of being judged, but also nothing other than an expression of a conceptual totality that is always already true, and can never be changed, rendering the action both absolutely relevant in judgment, but ultimately irrelevant as an expression of a universal truth. The question here, and this is also the question of law, is how we can possibly make sense of this space?

What we term the state functions purely through this role as a “spiritual society,” a haunted social medium, a moment that has already been preceded and surpassed; an irrelevant moment. It is not so much that the moment can ever be eliminated—this would be the total catastrophe of non-action—but in the attempt to operate immanence in moments, the moment itself becomes irrelevant; our lives occur but in the attempt to function the state as an immanence, they become irrelevant. We function not as particular beings in a moment in time, but as citizens, who function to the degree that the state is the condition of possibility for existence. It is in this concept of immanence that we see the odd and paradoxical relation at the heart of the state. For on one level there is the state’s conceptual content, that which precedes and surpasses, the content of immanence as what is projected across all time and space as an always already. Yet, on another level, this immanence must be operated in every moment as a form constructed through particular material actions. The content and the form exist as always already separate, with the form—the attempt to define existence within conceptual limits—as constant, while the content—the operational contours or particularities of the conceptual terrain—is dynamic and particular. For example, Carl Schmitt defined liberal democracy as a construction based on dynamic content, the parliamentary discussion, with the form, the imposed necessity of the sovereignty of the will of parliament, being assumed and imposed through force. In other words, because the transcendental concept can never have a direct particular material manifestation, the state is not a matter of the content of the state (it is not a matter of a conceptual struggle on the plane of theory); it always exists as the material form trying to materially organize the impossible materiality of the concept or content, the operation of the conceptual plane, regardless of the content of the conceptual plane, as a definition of existence itself. In this the state is always simultaneously radically preventative and radically constructionist, attempting to prevent actions from existing as relevancies that construct history in their particular effects while simultaneously mobilizing actions to construct immanence in every moment. This is the co-immanence of the mobilization of police violence, which amplifies contingency, and the security operation, which exists as the attempt to immobilize all contingency, to cease all movement.

Often, within the so-called radical milieu, there is a tendency to conceptualize the state as a symbolic and unitary enemy, one that operates with absolute consistency, monolithic. This leads to symbolic engagements within a conceptual terrain, what we call activism. In the activist plane of conceptual consistency the particularity of the actions of the police, the impossibility of policing to always operate as an actual totality, the impossibility of actually defining moments, and the resultant kinetics of police operations in their particularities and dynamics, often go unnoticed, preventing any actual strategic engagement. To the degree that the state is an attempt to manifest immanence through the particularity of action the state itself functions not as a totality, but as a frantic and impossible attempt; an attempt to define moments in their totality and, in the impossibility of this, to attempt to impose totality anew in every moment, to impose an impossible unity of moments in all present moments. This operation, the attempt to construct immanence in moments, is nothing but the name for a collection of actions that appear to act in concert, and as materialized by action itself it is consequently modifying the entire terrain of action itself. The state is not just the frantic attempt to constantly construct unities as immanent in each and every moment but also attempts this through mobilizing actions that generate the very contingencies that make concepts materially impossible, that constructs the moment as historical and particular. In other words, the functionality of the state, as the deployment of action into space, constructs a process that is fundamentally active, one that through events changes the kinetic dynamics of a terrain of activity (and must do so to the degree that the state is not some form of material totality), but in doing so, in constructing events that create contingencies, always already undermines the ultimate unity of time, space, and concept—an inert and completely defined space, that the functionality of the state is premised on. So, it is never that the state operates directly, that it either exists or does not; rather, the state always exists as this attempt to contain contingency, to maintain the capability to operate immanence, as a tactical logistics, in the moment and into the future, as the future, as a definition of life itself.

In this active state, which exists as a mobilization in moments, we see the basic flaw in the traditional concept of the state as institution. Rather than the unassailable and stable state posited in political science, the state always exists only as an impossible momentary attempt, a constellation of actions that all create contingent effects, logistically organized in an attempt to define existence, so as to eliminate the contingent effects of action. This is how we begin to understand the structure of something like state intelligence, for example: not as the actions of a shadowy group of people constructing certain outcomes, but as a need for state operational logistics, born simultaneously out of the necessity of operational totality in the attempt to construct the state as a material form, and the recognition of a terrain of activity so dense as to make a totality of police operations impossible. In other words, for the state to function it has to function in all moments, and without generating any effects in the deployment of state action—an impossibility. As a result of this impossibility (to mobilize activity to construct inert space), the state functions in reference to this impossibility, but always as a logistics of force trying to operate as totally and consistently as possible without generating any contingencies. This narrative is not absent from state discourse: we see it forming the basis of both the discussion of surveillance (as a form of vision without generating immediate effects) and as counterinsurgency (the attempt to deploy action in occupation in such a way as to eliminate or minimize contingent effects).

Rather than a stable, autonomous state, what exists is a constant mobilization to manifest the impossible; an impossible attempt operating in total crisis. Just as the utopian dreamers of socialism tried to accomplish the impossible and fell into the traps of the worst forms of totalitarianism, the form of the state is always this attempt in each moment to overcome this impossibility. This operational coherence of time and space is also not something that exists only as an externally facing deployment from some logistical coherence. This sort of narrative persists in the radical milieu, wherein the state is inaccurately seen as without internal crisis. Historically there are plenty of moments of mutiny, disobeyed orders, and internal power struggles, none of which would be possible within an internally stable state. As clear as it may be that the grand unity of time and space posited in the concept of the state, functions externally as an operation, the same problems present themselves internally, in attempts to maintain command and control, to maintain operational efficiency, even to prevent clearly problematic practices like graft and corruption. The push toward community policing is not based on some change of heart on the part of the nation’s police forces, nor is the deployment of force always motivated by malicious intent (although overt racism is obviously no stranger to American police). Rather, the choice of tactics is both an attempt to maintain the most effective externally-facing deployments, while at the same time maintain internal operational capacities.

This construction of a dynamic in which the possibility for action—to the degree that the state operates—is through police action that comes from outside of the action, constructs an odd sense of suspension. Activity exists within history, as events that are thought of as relevant, but only to the degree that this activity exists within an ahistorical transcendental conceptual framework operated through actions themselves. The effect of this suspension is heightened in the modern liberal state, which constructs itself in line with what are supposed to be philosophically universal concepts. In this shift, accelerated through the use of contemporary technologies of circulation and communications, the state approximates this sense of globality. It is not a question of the security operation in isolation, but of the modern liberal state, the state that exists based on the universal definition of all possible actions, a question of the mechanisms of the attempt to universalize particular actions and particularize the universal through police force. We can see this in the global expansion of the US terrain of military action, not necessarily as occupation (although occupation is an element of this operation framework), but more through the use of surgical strike and surveillance within a wider context of security. The framework of security, which is often not analyzed outside of a security operation, does not focus an eye outside, to what is outside the limits of the projection of state power. Rather, the very concept of security implies an inside, inclusion. With the rise of the modern liberal state—the state based not on concepts of the nation but on concepts of universal philosophical forms—the territory of operation becomes total, with technological and logistical capacity being the primary limiting force.

** Conflict

The conceptual state always implies a form of universality yet can never actually become universal. In light of the impossibility of total operation the police—armed force—function in the gap between the atemporal, immaterial, and transcendental concept and the particularity of the moment: a deployment of warfare into the moment. We are seeing the rise of constant war between circulation in the ideal market, the market of economists’ reports, and the anarchy of particular moments. All around the planet police forces are trading tips on suppressing demonstrations and riots and how to manage runs on banks. It has become pretty clear over the years that not only is this crisis ongoing, but that the size of the security operation mobilized to secure global economic circulation is monumental. There are more and more cops every day who are brought out by the thousands if needed. Even so, there are never enough of them to control the “situation,” to mitigate conflict and rupture. Analysis of the constancy and scope of this conflict, of the necessity of constancy and projections in security operations that always must operate at each moment, shows us this paradox of war fought by the state. What we need to look at is how conflict is mobilized and suppressed, how actions are simultaneously mobilized and limited. It is in this paradox that we can begin to understand the dynamics of security and its relationship to actions. Because if actions are anarchic, if moments are particularities outside immanence, then the operation of containing actions within posited limits, that are themselves mobilized through actions, becomes completely convoluted. We need to pay attention to how the tactical logistics of policing work to maintain coherence even though it is organized and performed within, and as part of, an anarchic collisions of actions, all of which create other possibilities in other times and places.

The state seems to operate as a unit (the grand vision of fascism), but in reality it is an attempt to organize moments that are themselves particular, anarchic. This attempt at organizing the logistical operation of a terrain of action itself, is what is at stake when we speak of conflict. It is here that the question is posed: how does the state attempt to function? Again, we are not really asking in hope of some coherent answer. All too often, in discussing what has been termed “the political,” we get lost in this endless discussion of frameworks of understanding. What we need to push beyond is the illusion that the state exists as some coherent theoretical structure that functions in coherent ways. It is in the tactical mobilization of force that the state is attempted materially, and it is tactics here that we will focus on.

At the core of the concept of war is a dynamic of physical resistance “intended to compel our opponent to fulfill our will.” It is always mobilization and proliferation of conflict somehow joined with its auto-destruction, with its end.[2] In other words war exists within a paradox. The state makes of war a mobilization of conflict to end a conflict, to gain compliance. It is meant to end resistances and divergences from “will”. It needs to have a self-destruct mechanism inherent to itself; to the degree that war attempts to end conflict it always exists within a paradox: attempting to construct an auto-destructing conflict—the mobilization of conflict and the end of conflict as somehow co-immanent. It here that we see the crux of this impossible attempt, and see how military and police functions increasingly converge into a single dynamic. If action is to be ended through action, and this is a relationship of conflict, then not only is a military function there to crush organized resistance, it is also present to frame the limits and possibilities of particular actions constructing particular moments, to construct a materially immanent terrain of action in particular moments. In other words, we cannot see the terrain of action as one with definable forces that operate within frontal conflict. Rather, in the attempt to operate the transcendentally conceptual in the materially particular, this organization—this tactical mobilization—must attempt to eliminate particularity at all times in all spaces, through a mobilization of particular action. This attempt, this form of total projection across all time and space can only exist as a constant operation in crisis, in flux, as what we call occupation, total war, social war. Here is where this posited division of the military and police breaks down. In all attempts to construct the impossible unity of the state materially these dynamics, of expansion and enforcement, must always already attempt to converge at each moment.

This sets up a tension. On the one hand war is always shifting and changing due to the effects of actions and their convergence in particular moments. Actions have a resonance, they generate effects, which themselves modify the environment of a particular tactical dynamic in particular moments. To adapt to shifting circumstances the logistical organization of force (projected across time and space) needs to be deployed within a fluid tactical environment constructed by actions in moments. In other words, there is never “control of the streets” in any directly material way; as if the “streets,” or moments themselves, exist as static isolated expressions. The tactical terrain is always a medium of flux, always being constructed by the collision of actions in particular moments. The tactical attempt to eliminate tactics—the attempt to mobilize moments in the attempt to eliminate moments—always exists in crisis, is always failing to materially manifest, is always threatening to tear itself apart in its very operation. Paradoxically, the attempt to construct auto-destructing tactical mobilizations implies attempts at total projection and at elimination of the actions of total projection, to limit or contain the crisis of its impossibility. Yet on the other hand, war is conflict borne out of hostility and so tends to progress linearly to mutual annihilation, or the elimination of moments in total catastrophe. This total war, or this mobilization of a tactical logistics of conflict in particular moments, tries to contain the crisis of its own paradox. In other words, the goal is to use the least amount of force necessary in a given circumstance while holding in reserve the potential to adapt to circumstances and problems. War, in this statist framework, is fought to operate a certain tactical terrain that is in crisis, only existing as a transcendental conceptual terrain that is always materially impossible. What I mean by “capacity” is the maximum amplification of crisis that a certain structure can forcibly contain, to maintain a certain coherence of operation. It is not that the police are using all the force necessary to make the social, tactical, medium take on a certain content and form. Rather, they maintain the ability to constantly organize the logistics of their own attempted coherence to the degree that force can be deployed without actually escalating, to act without actually deploying action.

War, without the possibility of total victory or the elimination of the conflict (which would imply the elimination of action itself), is always a matter of magnitudes or concentrations. Never, in the attempt to tactically operate the state, can the deployment of conflict end; it is never that there is war and not-war or policing and not-policing. It is the mobility of conflict, this particularity of its collision in moments, that constructs a tension within all police and military tactical frameworks. In order to end resistances in a space the logistical mobilization of policing has to operate as a terrain of total occupation, as a projection across all time and all space. The projection of the conceptual in material time and space would actually have to be total, eliminating moments themselves. In order for total occupation to function, operations have some requirements. The first is that the space has become completely materially idealized, the ideal structures of the state must operate in a directly material way, occupying the moment in its evacuation. For this to be the case no actions can occur, because all actions generate sets of interactions, ruptures, and redefinitions of a medium. The medium must be preset, must be materially constructed around a conceptual immanence, as opposed to something that is constantly developing, implying the total catastrophe of the elimination of moments. The other possibility, in light of the material impossibility of conceptual immanence, is a complete spatial occupation in some total projection; not as what constructs terrain but as terrain itself. This implies the projection of policing across all time and space simultaneously and also the coherence of such a projection. It implies total occupation but also an impossible coherence of this occupation. This is what we saw in the bombing of Laos or sieges of Sarajevo or Misrata, Libya. The attempt was less to destroy the cities, and more to totally limit movement. Weapons of projection were used to eliminate the possibility of appearance; snipers shot everything that moved, streets were riddled with mortar holes. But this attempt at total deceleration failed, as the terrain shifted and the ruins, tunnels, and basements became the terrains of conflict.

But the daily reality for most of us is not one constructed around this operation, this attempt at total deceleration but, rather, is of attempts to deal with extremely limited forces deployed across huge swaths of space in particular moments. If we look at some of the most extreme police deployments in recent memory, times where thousands of cops were mobilized to occupy a space for a limited period of time—a trade summit for example—the limitation becomes clear. Even with 20,000 cops it is laughable to expect that there can be any direct and total material control over even part of a city.

Increasingly, organizing a coherent tactical terrain has meant increasing speed and movement (through faster transportation and communications, as well as surveillance) to project across more times and spaces, paradoxically attempting to accelerate operations to construct a terrain of deceleration. The police rely on a constant stream on information coming from networks of snitches and informants, cameras, 911 lines, programs like See Something, Say Something, and increasing mobility, to respond to situations that they cannot ever completely control. They project capacity into space as a fabric to prevent actions, through the possibility of projection into any particular time and space, but without ever being able to project totally. This means that there is never a space outside of war, outside of capacity and conflict. Even in times and spaces that may seem outside of direct presence there is an entire network employed by the cops to be able to mobilize and allocate force to those areas; capacity is way beyond what we can see. Capacity exists as this entire network of policing, of which the cops are just one component. Others are security guards and cops at schools, security cameras, snitches, traffic lights, wooden police barriers, etc. They culminate in structuring how we conceive of possible actions in specific moments. In other words the capacity of the state to deal with conflict is not limited to buildings and police cars, rather it is something much more than material: a social phenomenon. This network of injunctions, surveillance, and direct presence works to construct the conceptual as form itself. To put it another way, the tactical operations of policing escape the purely physical and extend into the organization of isolation as such, the social becomes a product of this interplay of resistances and capacity. It is capacity developed to deal with the crisis because the total operation of the state across time and space is impossible. Capacity exists as a constant operation to contain the crisis of the attempt to operate the state.[3]

War and conflict thus exist as a tactical medium of actions in particular moments at a complete disjunction from the conceptual frameworks used to make sense of this situation. There is a gap between the ideal projection of the situation and the particularity of actions that generate the situation. Victory in this sense is thus the inability of the circumstance to be modified, the total deceleration of tactics through tactical deployment, the total catastrophe of the elimination of moments themselves. Because victory is an impossibility, the goal becomes the ability to maintain an impossible coherence in the face of the crisis generated in impossible coherence. War is mobilized as a series of combats, individual tactical conflicts in particular moments that construct the medium of conflict itself. In other words, war is based on the chaos of conflicts, an unpredictable collision of actions in particular times and places with unpredictable results. These combats are mobilized by the units of the fighting force in particular times and places. But an interesting relation forms here. It is not the units themselves that operate conflict. The units are just a smaller part of the larger military machine, which is force as a capacity. The unit itself is the combat, the unit being a certain magnitude of a latent capacity for conflict. The very existence of the police, even if they never left their precincts and office buildings, is combat itself, conflict itself as a possibility. This mobilization, the tactical logistics of policing, is the attempt to store conflict or construct a capacity while limiting deployment. And this possibility is deployed to and mobilized at a certain time and place in order to cover gaps in coverage and to respond to situations.

This attempted compensation for the impossibility of the state as a total form brings tension to the deployment of force itself. To the degree that the state is about suspension of the possibilities of moments, to define existence, then the effects of actions, the contingencies generated in action itself, are problematic. The deployment of state force to compensate for its inability to determine the possibilities of actions, generates possibilities from the act of deployment itself. Every conflict generates something Clausewitz calls friction: the gap between the projection of an ideal form and the particularity of moments that generates crisis in the attempt to operate form. So the discussion can never be of deploying force to eliminate conflict and contingency—which is impossible—rather it is a question of containment, capacities, movement, and logistics. Innovations in weapons modify conflict by making it faster, more forceful, with better communication, more mobility, and greater range. But the reality of war is that it is still at its heart this interplay of conflicts between the ideal form and the particularity of moments. The cops (et al) can move faster, fire tear gas from blocks away, carry more and more varied weapons for different situations, all in response to shifting tactics used to fight them, all to channel the medium of conflict into given limits, or control it within a certain capacity. A capacity that they developed to understand “what occurred in the past” when similar efforts were attempted.

In conflict the relation and the forces of collision are modified, as well as the whole medium that this conflict exists within, and also the forces in conflict. Moments are formed by the dynamics of the conflict. The coherence of policing is always in crisis, with each moment amplifying that crisis to the point of tactical rupture. In other words, there is never a conflict of points—coherent, legible counter-forces—that find some definition and coherence outside of conflict itself. Conflict is always a tactical dynamic, a movement of movement, of collision: the very collision of actions in particular times and places, never some conflict of points, singular actions in isolation, singular targets. Conflict is always an energy that creates effects that cascade far outside of the conflict itself, participating in the construction of history, but also the force that modifies all the elements of the conflict. War creates something that escapes the relations of the actions. It is not just about shooting guns at each other or throwing rocks from the other side of a barricade, but more about the medium that conflict creates. It is only when looking at moments as the collision of conflicts, unfulfilled desires, lost opportunities, and chance that we begin to understand not only the material impossibility of the state but also the moment as a particular historical dynamic in flux.

However, we can plainly see in protracted conflict that the dynamic of conflict generates disorganizing effects within the logistics of the fighting force itself. These momentary actions that occur within everyday moments, generate contingencies that, over time, exhaust capacities. So the ability to continue a dynamic of deployment requires the functionality of rest, a moment of deceleration. This was the purpose of night in traditional forms of war and shift changes in the modern police force and is why war is never a completely mobile operation for the state. At moments of diffuse conflict, moments of deceleration, tactical logistics are able to reorganize. Battles unleash contingencies that amplify the crisis in the material impossibility of the form, and it is the point of rest that serves as the point of reorganization. It is why they can deal with us going on the offensive a few times a year in very select spots, but not when that form of attack becomes something that can occur everywhere at any time. Conflict exists as a trajectory of crisis and it is the breaks and stops that eliminate the resonance of accelerating speed and amplified crisis. Conflicts, or combats, exist as destructions, both material and on the level of the organization of a form. They open up possibilities to operate in more or less coherent forms, into something called a war or a police force, but only to the degree that the tactical organization of the operations of the form itself can deal with a certain magnitude of crisis in its own operation. This is the point of training within the police and military. It serves not only to teach skill but also to impart a certain content to actions and a sense of what brings actions and agents together, they build people not just soldiers. This form of training is developed to make it that the resonance of the actions deployed does not destroy the entire war machine itself. In other words, the state exists to the degree that the terrain of the actions of its agents can be organized as an impossible coherency across time and space. It has to unleash disorder in order to control disorder, the only way that this is possible is through the development of an entire medium of action that makes constant deployment unnecessary. In other words, the state needs to be able to operate within a framework that is not completely developed around conflict, it needs to create respite and rest among the ranks of its enforcers.

In recent years we have watched the impacts of accelerated conflict. We witnessed Ferguson police disobeying orders and firing tear gas into crowds. We also saw police commanders in a number of cities try to regulate normal beat cops to reduce conflict, often in the form of so-called community policing, only for police unions to reject, and sometimes outright revolt against, such measures. With police riots we can see that they either succeed in dispersing concentrations of resistance and friction or generate so much disorder and chaos that crisis amplifies to the point of combats divorced from the attempt at their impossible organization. In the idealized framework of police tactics all riot lines are orderly and controlled, but the reality is that cops have emotional responses, disobey orders, make mistakes, and are sometimes overwhelmed with resistance. The police riot is a massive acceleration of action, the complete breaking of coherence in order to reimpose coherence, but if it fails then they fall completely into incoherence. Though there is a tendency to see the police as a unified force we cannot see something like the organization of a riot line as a form of order, rather it is a by-product of the attempt to organize a certain terrain of action within the paradox of contained crisis. The tactical organization of a terrain of action, because it is structured on actions mobilized to end action, are never orderly or coherent in some directly material sense. Rather, the impossibility of this attempt, and the paradox of its mobilization, always produces and amplifies crisis, both inside and outside its ranks. The operations of this attempt are particularities and cannot themselves be an object of study: there is no one way to organize that materially manifests across time and space. This attempt to mitigate the effects of the very force it deploys operates less like a structure and more like a fluctuating energy of action that is always limited and captured to the degree that the crisis of operation itself can be contained. Therefore it is an operation of capture that threatens to become inoperable at any moment. Conflict in this sense is a mutual dynamic of the amplification of crisis in the attempt to materially operate impossible unities, where the dynamics of crisis and containment form the medium itself, with crisis as something that is always cascading and multiplying.

We not only have to see warfare in a different light, we have to see the localized appropriation of warfare, policing, in a different light as well. Warfare cannot be seen, as it often is, as an activity by coherent forces in frontal conflict in some limited terrain. As the thinkers at RAND have pointed out, the fighting force is not only held together by a conceptual coherence, internally policed through rules and strategies of organization, but the lack of inherent coherence can be, and is, exploited in the very concept of warfare, in the crisis generated through actions and the contingent effects of actions. As the pace of action increases, as the terrain of action spreads, as the duration of conflict lengthens, the ability of the fighting force to maintain coherence or to contain this crisis, collapses. This is why, before the advent of modern wireless communications, there was a tendency to confine warfare to a limited space in a limited time with fighters in close proximity. This is also why deserters are shot. Within the modern liberal state, which functions to the degree that its universal claims operate in all moments, the terrain of conflict is total. In this we are beginning to see something very different, akin to the structuring of the fortress city. Not only is the cityscape a place where policing is concentrated, but also a space where the statistics of urban planners combine with the imperatives of police force and the constancy of the security operation.

Warfare is not necessarily a conflict on the level of material and frontal relationships of force, but the deployment of state force to compensate for an impossibility, both internally and externally, to structure terrains, both material and through activity that occurs within this material space. To the degree that anything is possible, to the degree that action occurs at all (and modifies the space and dynamics in which it occurs), policing is always partial. Policing always operates in a space generated by conflict and generative of conflict. It is this paradox that is the main focus of military theory at this point, and it is in this context that we begin to see the implications of police activity, as well as the central conflict at the core of the discourse of police action and deployment. Not only does the conflict unleashed by action construct the space in which policing occurs, but to the degree that policing operates as a material dynamic it also generates conflict. Sometimes this is not apparent, sometimes it seems as if police action proceeds uncontested. But the police exist to the same extent that they can be eliminated, the space of possibility that is action, and the terrain in which it exists.

** The Topography of Immanence

A topography of tactical operations, or a tactical terrain, is about more than just another way to say that the map is beginning to create the territory. We are speaking of two separate but simultaneous and interlocked processes. The first is attempting to map the energy that exists between points: things like social solidarity, political intensity, neighborhood fabrics. This is a widely documented process in the framework of FBI attempts to map and then exploit weaknesses in activist movements, as in COINTELPRO.[4] This process is a constant mapping and research conducted through complex categorizations, the gathering of information through interrogation, informants, and on the street patrols, and gathering data on things like crime statistics reports and patterns of arrest and conviction. The second process is taking this immaterial cartography and attempting to construct the terrain materially, for example a politician deciding policy based on polling data. This is done every time money is allocated to a police force by Homeland Security based on crime statistics. We see this every time they expand the prison-industrial complex, create a new anti-terrorism initiative, or operate the War on Drugs, organizations like Gang Task Forces, the installation of security cameras, the building of gated communities. This process of mapping, and operating these maps, constructs a territory built around this constant security operation.

Neighborhoods are gentrified or abandoned, police stations and prisons are built right next to project housing complexes, cameras are installed along the walls of a gated community. These are examples of the material enforcement of a process that begins with mapping. So much force and mobility is organized in the attempt to materialize these concepts that it sometimes seems impenetrable. The construction of territory in the dynamics of containment and crisis makes a tactical terrain material, but goes far beyond the material architecture of the metropolis. This is everything from cops standing in riot lines outside high schools in the inner city giving dispersal orders from a loudspeaker, to the enforcement of laws around private property. Attempts to construct a material terrain of the organization of isolation, the materiality of the attempt to operate capitalism, entails a paradoxical form of tactics. It is the construction of a unitary tactical terrain based in fragmentation and isolation. Snitches and informants break down social solidarities in communities that exist in so-called troubled or uncontrollable neighborhoods. We can no longer trust each other and always look at the “new kid” with suspicion. We have been infiltrated and had our own become their best tools. Remember, loose lips sink ships.

The operation of private property laws enforces the isolation and separation of each scrap of land and structure and of each and every person from each and every other, while constructing each isolation through the immanence of the concept of property. We are relegated to our hovels, our private cars, our office buildings and factories where we accomplish menial tasks that have no relation to our actual lives, then back to the car to drive to the home. Productivity is encouraged, where possible, by isolation: the premise being that one gets more done when not forced to interact with anyone. More and more we see people work from homes they rarely have to leave. The norm has become so directly atomized that self-help books sell right alongside business literature. But it is hard to live a life based on isolation. The organization of isolation, this process of mapping and materialization, is part of the formation and enforcement of certain spatial relations, meant to construct a certain terrain of movement, and the possibility of the circulation of abstract value as something called an economy.

Freeways are built through the middle of an inner-city troubled neighborhood and one side becomes gentrified. Everyone can see it coming when the police patrols double, when everyone is forced inside as the cops begin searching random people walking down the street, and when the gang task force comes around to take pictures of every youth that fits a certain police profile. News stories air about how bad the neighborhood is and how modifications are needed to revitalize the neighborhood. Housing Projects are requisitioned by the Neighborhood Development Corporation, the non-profit that oversees development, and sold to a developer who is going to tear them down to build what they say is affordable housing. The former residents get housing vouchers to give to private land owners to rent space on the same land as their former homes. Trendy coffee shops open in the neighborhood across from the park that used to be a home for the homeless on a warm summer night; now yuppies are living in the same houses the homeless used to live in before the jobs went away from the steel mill or the car plant. Neighborhood association protests against the gentrification are patrolled by riot police, there to protect local businesses against the small group of radicals who have shown up (funny how they let us take over empty downtown streets during protests against the Iraq War). Cameras are installed on all the corners of all the new businesses in the spaces where corner stores and community centers used to be, local efforts that held together the former, economically unprofitable, community. Slowly people move into the housing, still subsidized, but now by tax breaks instead of housing vouchers. In other places people are moving away, out to the suburbs, as the city is evacuated of former residents. Gated communities pop up in formerly rural areas as those who used to live in the inner ring suburbs move farther out from the city to have more space. The neighborhoods left in the city are increasingly hemmed by newly gentrified, increasingly fortified, communities, with intense police presence enforcing informal zoning. Ever notice that there are a ton of cops patrolling the streets around an art walk? Another example of the transformation of space to fit a certain model of productivity and circulation. It is the restructuring of what flows between points, what connects the isolated points in a newly fragmented social medium, enforced by police and constructed in space.

What these examples show is not only projection of police force, but a fundamental organization of space around definitive forms, a structuring of a legibility of space and action, and the use of force, or perceived possibility of force, to operate this. This initially is structured along the lines of the state’s gaze, as in the Hausmannian reconstruction of Paris—where wide boulevards were carved out of knotted working class neighborhoods—or in the structure of the diagonal streets of Washington DC to facilitate troop movements into the core of the city. We have also watched this occur in midwestern American rustbelt cities, where the contemporary attempt to engage in large scale urban development projects, sometimes covering multiple city blocks, is structured around the gridded streets and freeways that were built decades ago to facilitate the movement of goods within and between cities. In these environments everything becomes a metric, becomes tracked, traced, and mapped. These days companies like Palantir[5] exist solely to bring this data together to form more comprehensive statistical models, but this is just a refinement of a process that began with the rise of modern state bureaucracy—around both the standardization of land holding and the building of the taxation and public health regimes. This is a massive operation of categorization, numbering, organizing, and allocating. A whole nomenclature needs to be developed, an entire vocabulary, a whole conceptual universe, in order to make sense of the information derived from methodological attempts to track particular moments, the quantified data. Without this elaborate construction of this conceptual universe, without this massive structure of information gathering, the tactical operations of policing would have no coherence. What this nomenclature attempts to accomplish is applicability; the attempt to apply transcendental concepts to particular moments, to assume the immanence of the concept in the moment in the structuring of the logistics of its attempt to operate. Increasingly this statistical measurement, combined with the more militaristic appropriation of the same tactics in surveillance and relationship mapping, become the content that the state operates. In the post Cold War world, where ideological struggles are supposed to have been eliminated, the utilization of these measurements is already given, but the measurements have to be taken, and then operationalized through state action. We have seen this approach in frameworks like predictive policing and the gathering of detailed crime statistics.

This methodology of measurement is not only a product of technological innovation, or the possessing the means to engage in large data-gathering operations. Rather, the technologies themselves, from the creation of identification numbers to the sophisticated big data operations, are a response to a material necessity of total operation, derived from the philosophical space of universality in the concept of the modern state, combined with the very material limitations of operational capacity. As with all attempts to engage in thought, the framework of thought, the conceptual universe constructed within thought, comes into the moment from the outside, comes to function to the degree that its conceptual outlines can be inscribed into moments, with all moments and phenomena being nothing other than an isolated expression of a conceptual framework. The complexity of space is eliminated and reinscribed with a visibility that only makes sense within the conceptual universe that the measurement operations themselves are premised on. All phenomena, all space, becomes a point that is visible to the degree that it can be measured, that it can be seen within this universe. What this conceptual universe misses are the historical interactions of conflict and force that converge in particular, singular, moments. New practices are created, buildings are occupied, different groups of people form and dissolve, and every piece of new information that is not organized becomes one more gap in coverage.

Even with these sophisticated measurings of increasingly trivial and microscopic phenomena, this conceptual gap always exists. The state is always an impossibility, existing at a fundamental spatio-temporal disjunction from actual moments; always as something outside the moment that attempts, impossibly, to materialize in moments. This spatio-temporal gap is partially a product of the very practical hierarchy of the state structure; it takes time for information to travel up the hierarchy and then back down (in the form of orders). But more fundamentally this disjunction exists in the disconnect between actual moments and the attempt to insert moments into conceptual universes, or transcendental attempts to make sense of particular moments. Analysis is always retrospective; it can never happen in an actual moment, as a real-time response. Instead of attempting to modify on the spot, policing operates to the degree that it can predict the moment, that it can be immanent in the moments, through constructing a tactical terrain of coherence. To put it another way, policing exists to take retrospective analysis of occurrences, or dynamics made into static data points, and project those into the future as force allocations and patrol patterns. The ability to make sense of space, to map relationships and to operationalize this information, becomes paramount, not out of some abstract interest, but because large logistical forces cannot compensate in real time for the pace and concentration of actual action, or the dynamics of everyday life, particularly when facing active resistance. Something interesting emerges: the attempt to make sense of space gets tied to the attempt to construct space, and the degradation of either forms a cyclic relationship in which the illegibility of space degrades operational capacities, which increases illegibility.

In the wake of losses in Vietnam and a losing effort in Iraq, the analysis of military think tanks found that the US military was well equipped to fight a force that was easy to map, one with bases, columns, and supply lines. But when they fought against asymmetrical forces the sheer magnitude and speed of actions prevented any strategy from operating. In Vietnam the US military reverted back to just occupying as much space as possible through constant patrols, but these patrols stretched out the ability to concentrate force and they were easily picked off by ambushes. In guerrilla wars and social wars the space of the conflict multiplies constantly, making the battle field everything, in essence precluding certainty about any certain space, negating any effectiveness of mapping operations, and reducing all movements to temporary spatial occupation. This is something Che observed about Cuba and is the very thing that is causing the destruction of US forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, where these forces lack visibility and projection. Combatants cannot be divided from non-combatants, spaces and battle lines cannot be delineated, roads cannot be secured; in essence the flow of military forces becomes impossible. Thus the ability to control space is reduced to almost zero, not because of the amount of force mobilized by the resistance but because of the invisibility of the resistance. In the failure to operate conceptual content in particular moments, the conceptual universe itself fails. The attempt of think tanks like the RAND Corporation has shifted from making recommendations on force allocation and resource development, to redefining the gaze of the state.

Following the Gulf War and in anticipation of more decentralized conflicts, thinkers at the RAND Corporation[6] undertook a project called by many names, but most commonly Cyberwar and Swarming. The project focused on combining the strengths of various forms of warfare, from Mongol war tactics, global justice activists in Seattle, the Zapatistas, drug smuggling networks, and terrorist networks. In the much-cited text <em>Cyberwar is Coming!,</em> [CiC] they discuss a Mongol war machine in the thirteenth century, one that was destroying empires almost unopposed. They remind us that historically small, decentralized military forces will almost always defeat large, centralized opponents. They say the reason is simple: that the decentralized forces have the advantage of being fluid and able to interact with a situation as it changes and shifts, as conflict modifies the resistant medium. In other words, the forces that exist in the absence of some (impossible) immanent coherence are always operating in particular moments, tactically. They are able to saturate and modify an environment itself, as in an ambush or surprise attack. When a strike occurs in a gap in coverage the entire topography of policing operations has to shift to cover the gap, more variables enter the picture. If this process occurs quickly enough and in enough of a concentration then the operations of containment and projection verge on collapse. The RAND analysis describes the Mongol war machine as groups of fighters who would space themselves out, connected by long distance horse riders who would relay communications. Each group was largely autonomous and could come together in whole or in part to carry out strikes, and then disperse again. This tactic of “pulsing” (as it is called in later essays) is a set of tactics used to amplify crisis to create or increase incoherence for the opposing side. This approach to fighting deprives the opposing force of the time or ability to map the conflict. Using the Mongols as an example, they became the territory themselves, able to strike in force on a couple days notice. This rapidity was from first, the decentralization and autonomy of the units (allowing them to shift and change in reaction to shifts in the conflict, to concentrate magnitude at specific points) and second the fast communication from skilled riders. Mongols employed horse riders to quickly deliver messages to dispersed units, allowing them to form and disperse at points in a much faster way than any of their opponents. They formed a war machine through developing a form of fighting based purely on disorganizing the opposing side and accomplished this by being organized in a way that allowed them to shift with the terrain.[7]

This discourse of warfare as a process of the disorganization of the enemy, and the use of increasingly fluid organizational forms is mirrored in Delanda’s text <em>War in the Age of Intelligent Machines</em>, where he discusses the history of warfare as one structured by technological adaptation to the decentralization of conflict, the increasing speed of movement, the advance in forms of communication, and the ability to maintain command and control over distance. In the structure of the modern liberal state, which philosophically exists on a body of universal claims, the terrain of conflict becomes thought of as total. The concept of a universal state, as in the American Manifest Destiny and also in the writings of Robespierre and Madison, means that the state has no outside, everything is within it, with the only limits being operational ones. This totality stretches into everything and encompass all actions, including measurement of time, the discourse around speech, and so on. As with the spectral object of international terrorism, the question of terrain of conflict and state operation is not so much of isolated points, as it is a question of the ability to move within space. Clausewitz discussed this ability to move and the resistance to movement as friction, but this concept also appears in the literature of counterinsurgency, which centers around the inverse relationship between force projection (the ability to move through space), and resistance, which causes forces to concentrate in space for protection. Occupations, then, and policing in the modern liberal state, are not about conquest as much as they are about security. To put it another way, the maximum ability to project limited forces into space, and the inverse relationship this has with resistance to projection, are all framed within the capacity of a fighting force to maintain operational tempo and coherence. Warfare and domestic policing within the modern state cease to be about magnitude, and become a question of resistances and concentrations mapped in space.

Along with the spatial problem is a temporal one. The projection of force and the organization of force logistics necessarily rely on strategic projections into the future, based on some conceptual formation. However, in the discussion of the modern state, or the occupying force, the concept of security (the attempt to maintain the form of the state) necessarily implies a constant threat, or a potential threat, to make operations immediate. To approximate this particularity of conflict, to reduce this disjunction between the particular and the transcendental, a medium of operations known as “topsight” attempts to both generate coherence and accelerate the speed of operations. Topsight is a term that refers to analyzing and filtering vast amounts of real time data from conflicts, finding choke points and other problems, and responding to fix those problems quickly. It is defined in CiC as “a central understanding of the big picture that enhances the management of complexity.”[8] The goal is for armed forces to be able to respond to gaps in coverage through a combination of mobility and communication. It imposes a certain topography over a territory through rapid response to contingency.[9] This found expression later in a paper called “Swarming,” which makes material proposals from the concepts articulated in CiC.

Mobility is not enough, also at issue is how forces are deployed into space. According to Arquilla and Ronfeldt, the tactical operators of policing try to overcome their essential paradox by figuring out ways to channel the particularity of conflict into forms that can be operated through an entire network of internal controls. This is less about the form of force allocation or the methodology of analysis and more about the impossible: the construction of a doctrine of swarming that retains the organizational power of the centralized military while decentralizing the structure by making battle units smaller and more mobile. And all of this to be linked through a network constantly feeding information to a command post that determines general orders. Topsight is to hold the entire structure together, making sure that all information gets sent to the command post in order to map the shifting territory of the conflict, to modify operations, to reconstruct the terrain, to contain crisis. The other form of cohesion that ties this structure together is a concept of sustainability, making sure that enough actions are taken that an allocation of force that is far below capacity, so as to limit the amplification of crisis. A pulsing form of attack is one example of this sustainability. When a gap is identified the armed force will converge on the area, surround the target, attack, then disperse. This form of attack deprives the opposing force of the ability to counter attack. The concept is based in a spatial relation where the force is deployed through space but not at any specific points. It is always mobile and networked, able to respond to gaps in coverage. Instead of amplifying speed and magnitude, swarming uses mobility and magnitude to construct a fluid, mobile tactical terrain contained less through operations and more through capacity. They construct an entire territory, one that gets increasingly overlaid with mechanisms of containment, depending on the capacity of the occupying force to remain organized in the shifting medium of conflict.

After the failures of Vietnam, and increasing asymmetric conflict, military thinkers began reconceiving the vision of space. No longer could space be seen as areas occupied, to be moved within and in to. What the military thinkers are coming to terms with, and this is something that the radical milieu completely overlooks, is that conflict cannot make sense in either frontal forms (as a conflict between unitary and identifiable forces), or purely in the framework of conflict itself. Rather, conflict had to be understood as a complex dynamic, one operating through action and contingency, and one both existing within space and structuring space. The concept of occupation as something stable also must collapse. Instead Arquilla and Ronfeldt, and military thinkers after them, have argued that conflictual logistics cannot occupy space and preserve the ability to project into space. They argue that occupation and control is not a question of presence, but of the ability of an occupying force to move, to be potentially present, even if at any one moment, in any one space, they are absent. We are beginning to see this in our cities and on our streets, which are parts of whole networks of surveillance and monitoring. Cops are on patrol around every corner, and they might be called if anyone sees you do something. Response time can be extremely short, depending on what’s happening, and where. The police amplify this capacity by using similar methods of constant patrol, constant monitoring, and the use of force when necessary for them. The entire terrain becomes about preserving mobility, although it’s a contained mobility. This attempt to construct total occupation through total projection across time and space is, in this concept of swarming, synonymous with space.[10] I will call this the invisible occupation: the amplification of capacity to the point of metaphorical total coverage, to the point of structuring space itself. Actions become limited not due to physical force but due to the possibility of the use of force, through the projection of the cops out into space through the use of communications and vehicles. But it is still a constant security operation to make a certain topography operate though a shifting one. This deployment structure perfectly fits the neoliberal armed inclusion, as it controls nothing directly yet frames the limits, space, and channeling of the moments through a projection of the possible use of force.[11]

This constant construction and reconstruction of space happens around the management of constant crisis. Nothing is solid, everything is always shifting. This doctrine of swarming fits the goal of containing crisis, but it is also the fundamental operating principle of the modern police force. Over the past thirty years or so we have witnessed the development of an array of modern tactical police teams, from hostage negotiation to the DC Special Operations Division, which exists purely to contain potentially disruptive actions. This has accelerated since 2001 into security forces, federal agencies, private military contractors, new use-of-force rules, massive growth of both policing and prison industries. It has become almost too complicated to track, but this tangled web of security forces are what simultaneously construct this terrain but also engage in constant efforts to contain the crisis of this impossible operation. In the wake of rising resistance to police violence, police commanders are encouraging things like community policing, as more measured and targeted deployments of force based on data provided to police by people in neighborhoods. This shift is not only unsurprising, but predictable. It is useful both because it diffuses policing, by utilizing sympathetic members of a community as informants, and decelerates conflict through constant presence and public relations work. This constant operation is what separates “security” from defense; for security the threat is always unpredictable, constant, and internal, whereas defense assumes a coherent inside with external threat. Security implies attempts to completely contain crisis while eliminating this outside; everything becomes an internal crisis.

We live in a world in which the concept of the ideological struggle has disappeared (and with it the concept of the indeterminate future). What develops now is space constructed along the lines of conclusions derived from specific attempts to map an environment. The classic example is policing in New York City, in which statistics on arrests and reported incidents shaped police deployments. As the state gaze increased in certain spaces, the police made more arrests, which drove up crime numbers. This led to the concentration of police in an area, which led to more arrests and drove numbers up, leading to greater concentrations of police, and so on. Alongside this fairly unsophisticated attempt we also increasingly see surveillance based on specific metrics, shifts in neighborhood dynamics driven by economic metrics, and the use of community policing to intensify the gaze of the state to penetrate formerly blind spots. There are extreme examples of this dynamic in places like Sao Paulo, where the state tried to eliminate the favellas to make Olympic tourism more profitable. The imperative of the modern state has increasingly led to measuring space, shaping space around the results of measurement, and using state operations, either tax incentives or police force, to shape space along the lines of measurement itself, with the police participating in the shaping of this space to further enable their capacities. With this expanding capacity the spatiality of state operations becomes diffused, becomes the terrain itself, and the physical presence of the police becomes nothing but a response to the information gathered, either through measurement or community-based informant networks. It is no wonder that in many cities every new condo development comes complete with cameras.

** Amplification

This shift in the conceptualization of conflict is not confined to tactics and action, nor can it rely on formerly functioning concepts of resistance, with merely a shift in conclusions. Rather, we have to fundamentally rethink the conceptual structure of fighting, what it means to oppose. The question of whether one fights is simple. To the degree that the state is an attempt to impossibly unify time and space through constant security operations, the only question is what side we choose; the aesthetics are secondary. All events that we retroactively call revolutions—this is clear in the example of the Egyptian Revolution—function to the degree that conflict amplifies until the state fragments, disorganizes, and logistically collapses. It is not the seizure of buildings, the elimination of individual people, and so on. Rather, revolution, if that is still a relevant concept, must be thought of through a spatial and operational lens, one directly tied to the operational tempos and capacities of the enemy, regardless of what side of this conflict one is on. In other words, we tend to think of actions as isolated points, as historically relevant activities within wider trajectories of action, but is looking through a retroactive and historicist lens. Actions are always deemed relevant in retrospect, but in this analysis we tend to isolate these actions from their context and motivations, separate them from the reverberations of their effects, and completely miscalculate the scale of their resonance.

The spatialized state, one that tries to police all possible moments, and is based on the logistical capacity to contain contingency and crisis, necessitates a shift from the idea of defeating the linear and singular frontal enemy in some decisive engagement. It becomes a matter of making these logistical movements impossible, making the amplification of capacity impossible, through concentrating actions within terrain, as terrain. Up to now, culminating in the US with the Seattle model of direct action, resistance has focused on defined points, around the mobilization of force, whether disruptive or symbolic, in order to force a point, or series of points, to modify their interactions. What is missed in this approach is the construction of this space through its isolation from tactical dynamics. Influencing government decisions, unionizing one workplace, getting one coffee shop to use fair trade, and things like that, don’t actually affect the operation of capitalism. It is not about the Copenhagen Climate Agreement and the decisions of the G20. The WTO conference got shut down for a day, largely due to the force of surprise, but that force was easily dispersed when the cops escalated. But this single-day shut down was celebrated as a victory by protesters. Not only does the WTO still operate, kind of, but the very possibility of something like the WTO itself, the understanding of a need to organize economic trade globally, remains in full operation. As we have seen, actions can change the functioning of these institutions and sometimes collapse trade agreements, but institutions just develop and implement other means to fill the gap. The occupation shifts with divergences, and with the possibility of divergences. Patching holes and securing terrain is an on-going operation, but this is carried out in the face of a tactical medium that always threatens to amplify conflict and crisis to the point of logistical rupture. This is why the Seattle model of action fails; it remains isolated as points, already contained in its very deployment, in its very goal. The action is organized to stop one meeting of one organization, the deployments out into space are already decelerated once the target intersection is reached. We need to divorce our resistance from this use of action to communicate talking points about one thing or another. In this myth of articulation, that there is a unified “we” here for this unified reason, the action becomes just another point, just another groundswell that needs to be contained, but (luckily for the cops) it is already contained at the summit site. Traffic can just be rerouted while dozens are carried off to arrest vans, and the media buzzes around like so many vultures trying to get another story that will boost ratings. The point of the demonstration can be summed up in a talking point that is replayed over and over on CNN.

In other words, resistance is not about unity— which always remains an impossibility that only partially materializes through deceleration—but about a tactical multiplication that short-circuits the construction of topographies by violently exceeding the police capacity to contain crisis. We see this with police crowd-control tactics, entire operations based in the development of overlapping maps. For example, the actions in Seattle are always visible to the degree that they are articulable and based at a point, but something like a riot or an insurrection amplifies crisis specifically because it cannot be defined, because it makes impossible the construction of a topography. Resistance becomes about effectiveness instead of success; it ceases to be about accomplishing isolated goals and is instead about interrupting and eliminating the functioning of this terrain, a constant operation of the amplification of crisis. We need to shift away from understanding the magnitude of an action as a geographical concentration of force, easily contained and definable. How many black blocs have we been in that operate as one huge group, parading through the streets with a “police escort” surrounding the entire march? Forces based in concentration are forces that leave gaping holes in coverage, they are logistically heavy, notoriously unable to shift with circumstances, and easily definable. Through the dynamics of conflict, and various unworkable attempts to make sense of these dynamics and deploy those notions of sense as modifications in logistical tactics, policing has come to operate in a different way, as a force of projection and convergence, movement and swarms. There are police stations and depots, but the force itself is always dispersed and mobile, with capacity amplified—beyond the points that are directly controlled—through the networking of dispersed, advanced communications and surveillance. The police are able to construct the terrain to the degree that they remain mobile, as a constant presence, or at least to the degree that people think they could always be present. The attempt to contain crisis becomes possible to the degree that it is constantly being projected into gaps, to the degree that everyone who is exploring an abandoned set of train tracks is worried about the cops coming. It is never about their actual presence but the possibility of their presence; control ceases to be about articulation but is about self-control reinforced through the ability to concentrate force in fluid ways. In this policing is still limited by the need to concentrate force to eliminate a certain possibility, and so are always limited to the use of force at points of response and concentration. They always respond to a call in force, but on the street itself they are incredibly dispersed and therefore unable to immediately organize force. There is always a gap and this gap is the inability of the cops to operate completely, there are always situations where we have an advantage, always a space that they are not completely occupying, always a bank that they are not watching, and these gaps widen to the degree that action exists as a movement, as a rapid amplification of crisis.[12]

This inability to remain mobile is the failure of every underground organization that has attempted to serve as the catalyst of a revolution. Trying to maintain invisibility they end up creating a gap in coverage, but one that is already closed and isolated as a point. We see this dynamic with the Weather Underground and the Red Army Faction; they were limited by the very idealized discourse that motivated their formation. Unable to shift with the terrain of conflict, they became self-referential. The Weather Underground became a group that just bombed a target, and the Red Army Faction was reduced to defending their prisoners and educating about their struggle, reduced to a support structure for an idea. Resistance has to engage non-directly, as the strike of a specter on the accepted world. Instead currently actions are framed around and directed at the movement, which is divided from the dynamics that it exists within and is part of. Actions of resistance call attention to something or motivate a certain action and become defined by the instrument of the action, completely defining the action as the articulation of an argument. As a result of this separation, attacks begin to occur at points, and the containment at the point just replicates itself. The construction of the terrain is reduced to a constellation of targets, of physical points, as the constancy and concentration of actions is eliminated by the necessity of evasion constituting a primary activity. Organizations operating invisibly, avoiding direct confrontation is not necessarily a problem. The best part of guerrilla fighting is that guerrillas become just another point to be contained, to the degree that they exist as a self-contained organization separated from the tactical terrain. They infrequently hit at points without ever engaging with the amplification of crisis in policing—just damaging them a little bit. So clearly, these organizations are not to be thrown away. But we have to learn from their mistakes. Their separation and goal orientation was their downfall: everything became defined, nothing was left to contingency, and they positioned themselves in a dynamic that had incorporated them, that could control and contain them. They ceased to be a threat because they were not structured for a dynamic that was already present, the anarchy of what flows between particular moments in a tactical terrain. They defined themselves as a reduction to another argument, but failed to interfere with the circulation of capitalism in any lasting way. They created disruptions but failed to catalyze a crisis.

We need to amplify crisis, the crisis constant in the impossibility of the materiality of the state, not create it as something coming from some otherworldly ether of “the political.” This is not just through the attack on material implements. Outside of the material limit on the mobilization of concentrated forces, the topography created by the operations of control themselves are self-referential and exist at a fundamental disjunction from the particularity of moments. These controls serve to organize points within a framework of analysis. But this analysis is generated through the gathering of information—which is always partial—and the filtering of that information to generate orders. In the process of filtering, and because the entire operation of policing is based in the ability to decelerate conflict through the projection of the possibility of conflict, the gaps in coverage become part of a topography over which their control is tenuous at best. Whenever the terrain shifts, gaps open up between the topographical map and the tactical medium that forms as cause of, and also result of, the gap. The topography changes but the map remains the same, and suddenly the terrain is formed of the conflict between resistance and containment.

To amplify crisis is to resist the operation of topography, not by smashing it but by making topsight impossible. The tactical terrain constructed by conflict in every moment is constantly in flux, and thus unfilterable. The speed of flux, borne of the concentration of actions, generates an always shifting terrain, one that is impossible to categorize and contain within a nomenclature or topography. Externalities proliferate as gaping holes open in coverage, the police crumble as normal people are faced with choosing between life or following police orders. The Albanian uprising in the late 1990s shows what this process looks like when it takes off; it burns like a wildfire. This invisibility does not exist as an outside, not something modifying a terrain, that could then infect a terrain. Unlike the guerrilla who creates an isolated parallel tactical medium, the generation of crisis is an invisibility borne of the multiplication of actions, thus the multiplication of spaces generated by these actions. The amplification of crisis is the proliferation of a shifting territory through the destruction of the possibility of the coherence, of containment, in a space. This is what we see in riots. It is not that everyone is moving in one direction, rather there is such are so many actions in the gaps—generated when capacity is exceeded— that the space becomes one in which nothing can be defined, nothing could be described as the actions of a group. It is when action is multiplied to the degree that capacity ruptures, that the impossibility of control opens a window, one that we can jump through if we only get the right angle.

As we can see in military theory, or in the discourse around security (which mirrors the British discussion of the connection between imperialism and civilization), the calculus driving the whole projection of force recognizes something that most within the anarchist milieu fail to understand. It is not that, as Galleani says, “Anarchy Will Be!” It is more that anarchy already is. It is the way that we structure our lives. To the degree that we approach actions as relevant, to the degree that our actions have effects, to the degree that the future is not determined, the state remains an impossibility, a constant attempt to define existence, to police moments within an operational form. I am not saying that moments exist within archic forms necessarily, unless we assume a deterministic universe, but, rather, the archic is an operation that constantly fails. So, resistance and fighting do not require the destruction of one definitive form to construct another definitive form, as much of the anarchist milieu seems to assume (this just reconstructs the same ontological conditions that exist within the state). Rather, possibilities must be unleashed, the operational limits imposed through police operations must be eliminated, we must exceed the capacity of logistical forms to define life, within space and within time.

Multiplication is not merely a reconception of action, or of the relationship of action to the terrain of that action. Also at stake is self-identified political space, or space that reserves for itself the possibility of action. Over the past several years there has been a mourning, a sense of loss, for the times in the past when it seemed as if the anarchist milieu was finally becoming effective. But, as effective as some of these activities may have seemed, they always existed as isolated actions perpetuated by a self-selecting group, a conflict that existed within space but parallel to the dynamics of that space, and easily containable because of it. The question of multiplication, of exceeding capacity and expanding spatial projection, is not merely a question of what we do, but also of the dynamics of this doing, the spaces in which doing occurs and the particularities of these spaces. It is a question of regrounding action in the time and space of activity, in the immediate, in the shifting terrain of everyday life, not through some vague concept of community organizing, but through an elimination of categories of resistance that center around political identity, issues, and of movements.

Multiplication is an expansion of the scope and space of resistance to such a degree that it begins to construct another topography, one invisible to the state. This can take the form of a trajectory of conflict, but ultimately these ruptures are just expressions of a much broader tactical medium. And this is not some thing that looks like the mass movement, completely defined and predictable, controlled in its very form of organization. It is the generation of another world, one in which throwing rocks at a cop car is something everyone does as a matter of everyday life. It is the generation of a space where, if some kind of centralized control is maintained at all, it is merely as a matter of proximity devoid of projection. It is the generation of a terrain where containment exists purely because they can mobilize force quickly to a spot if they need to, but containment as the organization of a tactical terrain has completely broken down. And this terrain is the result of a variety of struggles and approaches converging and constructing another space. This is not just an academic reality. In many places, not only cities in the US, but globally, capitalism has completely abandoned spaces, and cops are at most tolerated. These are also the discarded places, the dangerous places. But these places where communities come together can also be the most saturated with policing efforts to contain and project. Cops literally occupy the streets, cameras coat the landscape, usually on the corners of every building. Whole streets lie abandoned as generations of resistance have been fought back to a certain point. During the Great Lakes Blackout there were reports of block parties going on in the streets as people cooked off the meats and other foods from their refrigerators and freezers on grills that were rolled out onto the road. And it is here that the cops declared that all gatherings of five people or more were not permitted to gather; they went around the city busting up gatherings and forcing people to go back inside in some ill-conceived attempt to disperse the street. And this is just one space in a tiny corner of the Rustbelt. They manifest and they disappear, and in the process the terrain is altered.

Invisibility is both a tactic and a goal. It is resistance that breaks out of isolated groups, that breaks out of the isolation of the political, and becomes a force that participates in the construction of a new terrain in its very actions. It is the concentration of conflict to the point that containment becomes impossible and the space created becomes impossible to map, and therefore impossible to contain. It is a multiplication of different possibilities and openings to the point where any single attempt to control the space cannot be organized; the resistance becomes the terrain. This is what has happened during insurrections, and even in brief moments throughout history. Blanqui after the Paris Commune said that next time the insurrectionists needed to knock out all the stairwells in all the buildings except one or two, and occupy the top floors while restricting access from the lower floors so that every building becomes a gun turret. This would literally reconstruct the terrain, as they began to during the Commune when war statues were knocked down all around the city as the barricades were falling. But in that time, when the cops have been run off the streets, in those moments new worlds are created, even if only briefly.

Invisibility is also not something to consider merely through the framework of revolution. Within the terrains that populate everyday life, spaces multiply that are invisible to the state. From the streets where no one calls the police, or gives them information when they come poking around, to the rapidly expanding space of the internet, they are found wherever we turn. These spaces exist outside of the gaze of the state, away from the state’s topsight capacity, not only do these spaces exist as a sort of autonomous zone, though they are very much still within the possible operational terrain of state action, more to the point, it is in these spaces that we can function, plot, exist in a way that allows proliferation of more invisible spaces. In invisibility we make our escapes, just as it is from invisibility that action can manifest. Most importantly, these spaces exist against the logistical capacity of the state to function, and it is these spaces that take great investment of that capacity to get rid of.

** Toward an Army of Ghosts

There is a series of six videos on Youtube[13]—showing the riots at the eviction of Ungdomshuset[14]—by a random Copenhagen resident who shot the video from the windows of his apartment. These videos have an interesting pace to them, mostly they’re shots of intersections with barricades, and it might be on fire, and then a couple anarchists will come into the shot and then duck down an alley. There is a long shot of the intersection and then the cops would come driving by, lights on, and some might get out of the van and fire something off down the street, and then pile into the van and go down the street. Then another shot of the intersection and someone comes out of an alley and throws something on the fire. It goes on like this for five videos, a total 16 plus minutes of footage spaced out over two days. What is interesting about these videos is neither the barricade nor the rotation of bodies that move through the gaze of the lens. Rather, it is the way that the impacts of activity modify the physical terrain of the activity, morphing a normal space into a space for the denial of territory against the state. It also demonstrates the centrality of movement, and the unimportance of presence within the ebbs and flows of conflict, how the ability to move through space, and the ability to operate within space, far outweigh the importance of holding ground, of being physically present within space. The actions became part of the terrain, and were invisible. Anarchists intentionally dispersed in Copenhagen which made mapping impossible, the terrain itself became uncertain, the police had to go everywhere in riot gear, in vans, and were pushed off the streets and into mobile fortifications, even if these fortifications were strapped to their bodies.

This was not some mysterious plan of action or something planned over long conspiratorial meetings in dark basements, it was a form of action that did nothing but multiply contingencies and open up gaps. Barricades were built, lockdowns occurred, marches, more barricades, this form of action spread throughout the cityscape to disrupt large parts of the city. And it did not look like a takeover, rather it was the complete impossibility of the operations of containment for a certain period of time. Nothing was seized (which would have allowed for insertion into another attempt to define the particular), but everything became resistant and fluid. This didn’t happen through some unitary form of action. Invisibility was why these actions were as powerful as they were. Without sight, without some empirical data to make sense of conceptually, the state is blind, the terrain becomes invisible, unsure, the disjunction between the conceptual universe attempted tactically and material particularity becomes more apparent. In their blindness, tactical operations become a matter of proximity, the situation is shifting so rapidly that the projection becomes impossible, a break down of the silent occupation. These momentary ruptures seem to be happening more and more frequently, and are increasingly shaping spaces as resistance is escaping the usual suspects. This escape of the limits of the organized political group that may or may not be a catalyst or participant, defines invisibility. It is anonymity in action. Tactically it is the amplification of crisis that opens gaps in coverage and the construction of possible terrain where action itself constructs the space outside of total war, in the materialization of the impossibility of total war.

Anarchists have been been on an interesting trajectory of conflict, at least in the case of US. Since 2005 or so, there has been a move toward deploying decentralized and mobile tactics. It took years to develop, and came out of wider tactical developments. This move toward decentralization came out of increased understanding of force and uses of force. The tactical sets employed in 2005 were largely based on large scale, singular blocs of anarchists moving down a street, essentially a militant street march. These actions were easily contained and in their isolation contained themselves. They existed as isolations from the tactical terrain. They were identifiable, static, and generally immobile. In response to these problems came actions like October Rebellion—the October 2007 demonstrations against the IMF and World Bank meetings in DC—where this idea of massing numbers became mobilized with some serious effects. Gauging events from then to now, when things are escalating in the streets, we seem to have found more effective forms of actions and those past demonstrations are seen as failures. But those demonstrations redefined what anarchists of the time could accomplish in the streets, especially during the March on Georgetown where 400 militant anarchists confronted 1,200 cops who were forced to fully occupy the entirety of the richest and most powerful neighborhood in DC (some argue one of the most powerful in the world). This is home to World Bank and IMF trustees, politicians, lobbyists, corporate executives, and ambassadors, known as the seat of power for many of those in power in DC , and a notoriously racist neighborhood (founded around a slave trading block). The social space of Georgetown, a space so powerful that it is allowed some semblance of particularity, was completely disrupted: hotels were evacuated of delegates; bars and restaurants closed; stores boarded up their windows; cops flooded the streets. All this was punctuated with images of an anarchist block with shields marching down the main strip of shops throwing rocks through windows and vandalizing corporate property. What was effective was not the march itself, it was that the neighborhood’s response of boarding up and largely shutting down (including for three days afterwards). Normalcy was completely interrupted. But this was not effective to the degree that we remained contained, projecting ourselves out of the police cordon in the trajectory of the rocks thrown through the windows of boutique shops and corporate chain stores. And while this action definitely threw the police strategy into disarray, it was only because of the surprise at the amount of force we were able to mobilize in this one space.

Moving forward to the RNC in 2008, we see another dynamic forming. Many of those who were present saw the creation of an entirely different world running parallel to and sometimes converging with the normal flow. People were opening up squats, bike shops operated almost round the clock, health clinics began helping residents from around the clinics, people hung around coffee shops talking to the regulars. In this parallel world, everyone seemed to be on a mission all the time, different missions for each. Huge logistical undertakings were set up in a matter of weeks, people gathered food from farms in teams to feed the thousands who were descending on the city. Planning interacted with relaxation time in an environment that, as the time approached, looked more and more like a game of cops and robbers. You would walk to the corner to get ice cream and see an FBI agent parked in the parking lot. Cameras are installed downtown as an anarchist chats with a bus driver—who supports shutting down the convention—while returning from the convergence space. And then the day came. The strategy was to hold blockades at key points for as long as possible, but those blockades were dismantled relatively quickly. Just when it seemed like the actions were coming to an end, groups of people—away from the blockades—began to converge downtown, in the streets around the Excel Center, and to use marches to blockade roads. As the marches moved around the streets, the cops would gas one, break one up with vehicles, sometimes arresting some or most of the people involved. But actions just kept projecting onto the space. Marches would converge and disperse into smaller groups as the entire downtown area became blocked. It wasn’t any one action that made this successful concentration of actions. It was the fact that, almost by accident, we had stumbled across something that we had been articulating for a while. Anarchists pamphlets for years and years before 2008 expressed an understanding that concentrated actions were always going to fail against a police force always capable of bringing more force to a point than possible for a group of anarchists. These older tactics were isolating us as points to be mapped and contained whereas our fluidity in the streets in St Paul resisted the topography of the police. It was an invisible form of action, because of the multiplication of contingencies; they could not map us. The police maintained control only to the degree that they were close to us. We learned that defeating the police, even for a short time, is definitely possible, and also that this defeat is not from direct confrontation but from movement through and redefinition of all the spaces where they are not present. In the generation of a terrain, the projection of capacity becomes impossible. Policing relies on the ability to constantly maintain a materially impossible coherence, through invisible occupation or projection, but when projection breaks down the impossibility of this coherence ruptures capacity. The police are an isolated unit trying to operate a certain tactical medium, a tactical medium that is materially impossible and exists at a fundamental disjunction from the material tactical medium of conflict. Because they can’t maintain occupation completely there are always divergences occurring in the gaps of their coverage. And it is the multiplication of these gaps, till the gaps become the terrain, that disorganizes the police, not by “smashing the cops” but by creating terrain that makes policing impossible.

In September 2009, actions happened against the G20 meetings in Pittsburgh. To keep anarchists from entering downtown, the cops had assembled the largest police force ever on American soil. For weeks beforehand they were attempted a tenuous balance between projecting capacity out through the media and encouraging businesses to stay open, simultaneously projecting their intention to use all necessary force to maintain the functioning of capitalism during the summit, and that they had the capacity to do so. In an unprecedented move, reporters were brought around to tour the police central command. Police held press conferences about their training to defeat lockdowns. They were also promoting the summit to the people of Pittsburgh. Countering this, local organizers knocked on thousands of doors handing out newspapers about the G20 and the demonstrations, primarily in working class neighborhoods that actions would be departing from. These conflicting messages generated a tension from the start. This tension was exacerbated by the depressed economy of Pittsburgh, as part of the Rustbelt, which—contrary to the media representation of recovery generated by the “Pittsburgh Model”—still had only isolated pockets of development (mostly around the hospitals and universities, built on top of land that used to house working class neighborhoods that were now displaced).

The cops seemed to assume that the large direct action march was going down to the convention center, but among the activists there was far from consensus about where the march should go. Downtown was a trap; it was completely occupied (a move that was unpopular with many residents of Pittsburgh), and the path there was lined with columns of cops waiting in alleys. When the march finally left its origin point, Arsenal Park, it was larger than any radical march that many of us had seen in a while, and there were groups of residents on their porches and sidewalks cheering us on. We approached the intersection of 34<sup>th</sup> and Liberty, and that is the first time that we heard the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD). The LRAD is an incredibly expensive weapon that is mounted on the top of an armored vehicle. It emits a highpitched noise meant to disorient targets. The march began to break up and move down a series of alleys, trying to find a hole in police coverage. Barricades were built to cut off streets from police movement, and we eventually ended up down a side street where we were blocked once again. At this point there were groups moving through the area in diverging trajectories, and more barricades were being built away from the large visible group. Even this early there were groups away from the gaze of the police, as all attention focused on the large group of anarchists trying to move toward another major road. At the second police blockade, police tried to disperse the crowd using pepper gas, concussion grenades, and another blast of the LRAD. At this point the march split up into smaller groups moving in various directions. The gaze of the police completely broke down as groups moved away from concentrations of police coverage and into the gaps, barricading off more streets. When it became clear that the cops had lost control of the situation people came out from their homes, anarchists took off their masks and hung around in coffee shops talking to people on the street, and more and more people joined in. Cops were split between the disruptive Bash Back! March (which wrecked a lot of the commercial strip), and simultaneously trying to control a college campus. This led to massive gaps in coverage. They used military vehicles and large numbers of National Guard troops and chemical weapons to close those gaps, which led to the complete suspension of normalcy. Students took the streets chanting “We Love Pittsburgh, Fuck the G20” while they were being tear gassed in the streets of their campus. Cops were chasing groups of students into their dorms and tear gassing the lobbies to prevent people from getting out. Pepper spray and dogs were used on people trying to get back to their homes. Every police action seemed to generate more and more crisis in their operational capacity, until they had deployed every available unit to the area and run out of gas for their vehicles. It became clear that a line had been drawn between the police and the neighborhood. Another world was created that night as masked anarchists threw bottles at the cops alongside frat boys in togas. It was suppressed after a few hours, but you could still hear people in the coffee shops the next morning talking about how their lives will never be the same after that. This happened in a very short period of time. After decades of suppression, with a police apparatus that seems unbeatable, a movement that was confused about tactics, in only a few years we are a movement that can catalyze large-scale ruptures in the streets, even if only for short periods of time.

Obviously this is not enough. What we saw in the streets of Pittsburgh was just a glimpse into something else. We have rediscovered the possibility of fighting back, the possibility of possibility. These momentary outbursts are of insurrection, meaning the forcible suspension of normalcy or intentional amplification of crisis. What we saw in Pittsburgh that day, and we should always see that day as a glimpse rather than some victory, was the dual aspect of invisibility, of becoming ghosts. On the one hand becoming ghost is a very material resistance to the gaze of the state. From masks to barricades, the use of invisibility is mobilized as a tactic. Barricades create spaces outside of direct police projection, spaces of rupture, spaces of possibility, and whole new worlds are created beyond barricades. Insurrection has no guarantees, it promises nothing. It is only this rupture that divorces terrain, even momentarily, from containment, and creates the possibility for another world to be constructed in a localized space. It is hitting in the gaps, widening the gaps, and multiplying gaps; it is the complete reconstruction of the terrain, not spatially, but through generating situations that break down the organization of isolation, where a neighborhood can find itself again.

It is about resisting definition, not about making demands or holding space in some static way. The gaze of the state relies on a discourse, and on some functional definition of the divisions of space and groups, and absent all of this it is impossible to negotiate the resistance. In Greece, during the uprising in December 2008, government ministers were complaining that there was no way to control the violence because there were no groups to suppress, no space taken that provided a point to concentrate force, no demands made that could be mitigated. The streets themselves ripped open, the streets themselves became a resistant medium, and this was not only the product of evasion from the gaze of the state but also generated terrains that were invisible to the state.

We see similar dynamics in the discourse forming around computer hackers and the use of encryption. Hackers generate a fear that is not merely based on technical sophistication, or a fear of the technical; most actions purportedly undertaken by hackers are not especially complicated. Nor is it a question of financial loss. Rather, in contemporary discourse the hacker represents— and this is becoming more and more the case all the time—a disruption in an increasingly networked world, a disruption that cannot be placed or understood, mysterious and ubiquitous as part of the digital terrain. We can attribute the fear that hackers generate to the fear generated by NSA operations, which undertake state functions through digital forms, through the use of breaching systems, engaging in reconnaissance and so on. This back and forth within digital space had created a problem in relation to the attempt to construct topsight. The terrain of conflict is not only disconnecting from space, but also expanding and moving in ways that are completely beyond the state’s ability to keep up with. This creates two problems for it. First, it is well documented that the amount of information is significantly higher than intelligence gathering entities can process and make sense of.[15] The tools they use inevitably generate both false positives and false negatives. Secondly, much of the information entails obfuscation that is either not mathematically breakable, or so resource intensive as to make impractical the clarification of messages. Just as in material forms of action, preserving the space in which action becomes possible, in which possibilities proliferate, is about obfuscation and multiplication, not of unified approaches.

Effective invisibility is not merely about hiding identities, using black blocs or other means, but functions to the degree that it becomes part of the terrain. It is almost trite to acknowledge that the kid in the bloc with the patches always stands out, or that Tor users can be identified as Tor users (even if this does not lead to identifying the source of the traffic). So invisibility is not so much a question of a hiding, or withdrawal, more one of proliferation, a multiplication of difference, a generation of static, and being embedded in space. Identifying as an anarchist does not separate us from the the dynamics of particular moments or elevate us into this space of the political faction at war with the state. To say that something is invisible to the state describes both the impossibility of the state’s physical gaze, and the breakdown of its ability to categorize or generalize actions and materialize it. It is not just the disorganization of the state but the disorganization of the state at each and every moment. This disorganization of the state can never come through a parallel attempt to legibly unify the movement, existing as some sort of separate politics, complete with its own forms of policing. It is in legibility that we always find our isolation and our defeats; somehow, along the way, we forget that we are just people living in moments.

Many of us, in the US especially, have experienced social movements based in an odd relationship of representation and unity, one also paradoxically based in smaller localized actions. The entire model of the antiwar movement was separation and isolation from the tactical medium. There were the cops, the activists trying to communicate something to the people at large, the media as the conduits of this message, the press liaison who talked to the press and communicated the generalized message about how the Iraq War was wrong for Iraqis. A whole series of separations and isolations—isolation from the social through the appeal to and focusing on politicians; the isolation from the Iraqis who were stand-ins for those who thought they could make statements for others; the separation from particular actions in the absurd attempt to construct a unified movement; the positioning of the war as separate from other political dynamics; the isolation of the activists from the public that they were trying to reach through the media; finally the separation of anger from actions that were largely approved by the cops and policed by unofficial marshals who enforced what they called a nonviolence code.

Invisibility, becoming ghost, is the group of kids who go around and slash police car tires or set fire to their schools just because they hate cops and school; it is the factory worker who calls in sick because they don’t feel like working that day; it is every college student who would rather starve than use their education to work for Lockheed and Goldman Sachs. In this separation of the political from the dynamics of moments we have tragically forgotten that crisis is nothing but the dynamics of actions coming into conflict with the unattainable attempt to construct the materialized immanence of those moments. Resistance is literally everything, everywhere; friction is constantly fluctuating, conflicting with other frictions that structure our moments, and yet we go on and on about our pithy little political movements, so legible and definable. The invisibility of resistance is the basic reality that every action is a rupture with the past, that every action creates other possibilities, that any night may be the night where riots break out. And these outbursts are, again, just an expression of this invisible yet constant interference that is endemic in the economy and the state. All constructions of an impossible material immanence are through the mobilization of anarchic actions, and that anarchy is the very particularity of those moments and actions, the particularity of conflicts that cannot be tracked and mapped. It is rampant absenteeism, scamming the social services system, theft, the black market—as well as taking steps, breathing, eating. It is the interference that is a part of every action.

This may look like community organizing, riots, or just actions made by groups of people, but it is all the construction of a terrain. Remember, terrain is not constructed unilaterally, rather it is the result of projecting capacity into gaps in coverage, that comes into conflict with crisis, and it is in these gaps that resistance can manifest. The terrain becomes constructed in this interplay of containment and interference, and it is this interplay that forms trajectories of conflict, and this trajectory brings greater possibility of catastrophic ruptures and collapses. The mechanisms of containment are based in a topography that is moving in increasingly axiomatic directions, moving towards the total projection of the state and the market, gaps between tautological structures of topography and tactical mediums that are always in flux now continually widen. The more that they become self-referential, the less their topographies respond to the flux of the tactical medium, and this process is almost total at this point. Politics becomes nothing but debates about how to best secure a form, and the economy the content of the form, manipulating numbers within categorizations that were developed to analyze the economy itself. Invisibility exists within and as these gaps, and the gaps are widening every day.

We are continually relegated to an anonymity that we need to learn to mobilize. We become successful to the degree that we destroy the possibility of containment and disorganize the materialization of the state, which is not about accomplishing direct goals defined in position statements. This rupture is the generation of possibility through the destruction of topsight. It’s not complicated, it is something we have known for a while. It is an embrace of the particularity that is unleashed in action itself, not purely a tactical move but the generation of terrain that we are connected to, well as the realization that for once we can live in a world where we exist, where our actions make the world spin. It is talking to the people on your block because you live on the block, not in order to recruit people for the struggle. It is about making organized political action something that stops being removed from our lives. This is what it means to destroy activism; it is the destruction of this positioning of the political time and the political people away from the social medium as an identity. It is about embracing our rage once again and acting because we want to. It is about becoming the terrain and thus becoming invisible. But mostly it is about creating terrains where containment is impossible, where the anarchy of the tactical medium can bubble out from the cracks and knock down the walls that have attempted to contain us for so long. But it is also the basic realization that when we are dancing on the ruins of the banks and police stations, we always need to be looking at each other and reminding ourselves that anarchy is only the beginning, it is only generating the possibility of possibility, the possibility of existence, the possibility of life with no guarantees and so, full of potential.

<quote>
<em>The</em> <em>car is on fire, and there’s no driver at the wheel/</em>

<em>And the sewers are all muddied with a thousand lonely suicides/ And a dark wind blows</em>

<em>The government is corrupt/ And we’re on so many drugs/</em>

<em>With the radio on and the curtains drawn</em>

<em>We’re trapped in the belly of this horrible machine/</em>

<em>And the machine is bleeding to death</em>

<em>The sun has fallen down/ And the billboards are all leering/</em>

<em>And the flags are all dead at the top of their poles It went like this:</em>

<em>The buildings tumbled in on themselves</em>

<em>Mothers clutching babies Picked through the rubble</em>

<em>And pulled out their hair</em>

<em>The skyline was beautiful on fire/ All twisted metal stretching upwards/ Everything washed in a thin orange haze</em>

<em>I said, “Kiss me, you’re beautiful — These are truly the last days”</em>

<em>You grabbed my hand / And we fell into it</em>

<em>/ Like a daydream / Or a fever</em>

<em>We woke up one morning and fell a little further down/ For sure it’s the valley of death</em>

<em>I open up my wallet/ And it’s full of blood</em>

<right>
Dead Flag Blues, Godspeed You! Black Emperor
</right>
</quote>

** The Impossibility of Philosophy

Philosophy is impossible. This is not the least of its virtues. Somehow philosophy is always insufficient; insufficient to describe a moment, insufficient to describe transcendence. It is always lost, attempting to speak a language that is always escaping, never complete. Whenever I write I feel the material consequences of this paradox, that my language is always coming up short, that there is always something more to say, but also that saying anything is over-determination, that it always ruins a moment. Philosophy tries to take pictures of atoms, to describe a moment that always is escaping us. It seems like an attempt to describe the fleeting, to capture some compression of thought over time remembered inaccurately. For as much as philosophers try to be prophets, pretend to be priests, they are nothing but creators of concepts, generating possible ways of speaking of a moment. But the concept, though always positioned within a moment, can only be constructed through an impossible comparison of moments, a comparison that creates a concept as an odd sort of temporal constancy. There is always the feeling of being alive while disappearing into the compression, shrinking to the point of becoming almost invisible. The attempt to abstract the moment is always an expression of existence as well as a conflict with the limits of the symbolic order of theory, always impoverished. To anyone who has ever been in a riot and attempted to describe the feeling of being alive, the feeling of being the territory, the feeling of existing, words always seem like a violence against the event itself.

I’ve been addressing the question of the logistical, tactical, and spatial construction of the state, and the failure of traditional activist forms that are rooted in conceptual engagement, symbolic action, and frontal confrontation. But the problems that are latent within the anarchist milieux are not merely a product of an incapacity to effectively engage, or even to understand the terrain of conflict. The problems also lie in the conceptualization of the we, what this we is doing, and the role of the so-called political theory in evolutionary events. This second question addresses our failures, and also the failure that is a result of our successes, the failure of revolutions. Within the framework of the revolutionary milieu in the modern era, there is an odd assumption, one running counter to other, more superficial, claims. This assumption revolves around a strange relationship posited between philosophy and the world, one that strongly replicates the assumptions at the foundation of the modern state. Within this conceptual universe the philosophical becomes something simultaneously expressive, total, and transferable. Expressive in the sense that it actually expresses the world, as both a critique of the moment, but also as an articulation of universal abstract concepts that are true in all possible moments. Total in the sense that these concepts express some sort of historical totality, or even a concept that exists outside of history, that is constant and universal. Transferable in the sense that for some reason, this conceptual totality has somehow failed to manifest in the moment, that somehow this absolute truth is something that has thus far never actually existed, but that governs moments nonetheless. Not just transferable in time, or through time, or outside of time, but into time, and also transferable between particularities, between particular moments and the things, people, and phenomena that occupy those moments. It is a concept of the world that is empty, static, absent, without movement, without possibility. Within this concept the theorist, the thinker, the revolutionary plays the role of an outside and enlightened observer, the one who knows the world, and who would be successful in their mission if only others could see. This conceptual universe disappears the world in its complexity, forgets the limitations of perspective and time, and makes the world an inert place complete with correct strategies and conceptual purities. Anarchists critique communists for taking this approach, but often we are the worst perpetrators. We often forget that within any attempt to conceptualize the world as a totality we are attempting the same task as the state, to somehow, impossibly, eliminate the infinite chasm between theory, a conceptual totality from some particular position within time and space, and moments, the complex dynamics of activity formed through time.

Some theorists (Badiou, Agamben) have pointed out this impossibility, but unlike them I do not fetishize the newness of it. I would argue in fact that this is a thread that runs through the history of theory. It always seems, from its so-called originary point, that philosophy tries to construct its own relevance. In other words, there have always been efforts in the professionalized philosophy to make its discourse central, to make philosophy do something. And this fear, this anxiety, is not something that disappears in some answer, some self-assurance. Everywhere within theory we witness recent people constructing theory as something that does something. There are many examples, but a main one is Zizek’s attempt to revive an irrelevant old politics while maintaining its impossibility, in the construction of a new ideal in anarchist communities that are in a full flight back to critical theory, and in the rationalization of the state in radical theory by ignoring political possibilities. But what typifies these attempts is the assumption that, at some level, the philosophical still applies to moments, that we should abstractly describe and structure actions. The basic problem raised by Marx in <em>Crisis Theory</em> has been ignored.[16] What is the relation of thoughts to moments, the impossibility of expression? It always returns to philosophy’s attempt to construct its own relevance, to make it mean something directly while simultaneously fighting the inclination that theory is best as speculation. These attempts to construct a relevance for philosophy, to make philosophy materially active in a direct sense, forget or gloss over the very basic question of philosophy, the relation between the conceptual and material.

The real brilliance of Socratic philosophy, and the starting point for the discussion of the concept in “What is Philosophy?” was not the Socratic process but the delineation of philosophical space. We can see this in the famous Meno dialogue, which shows not just a discussion of virtue or geometry, but an entire discourse of the possibility of philosophy. The dialogue, through the discussion of virtue and then the geometric, relates the concept of virtue not as something that can be directly taught or learned from action, but as knowledge of concepts that proceeds from recollection. Socrates argues that in order to know truth, to construct some conceptually total understanding of all possible things, knowledge would have to come completely from the outside of existence. For the truth to be knowable would require something like divine intervention, at which point we would not be able to understand truth, even if it were imparted. This is not only due to the limitations of perspective (or something like), but that our notions of sense, the ways that we construct conceptual generalities in the forms of categorical language, depart from and are an expression of this limitation. So the theoretical, the conceptual, is a form of making sense of the world, but can never be an expression of the totality of the world. At the same time that it cannot be an expression of the world, it also must exist as something outside of the moments it tries to make sense of, as something occurring in a moment. Thought exists as an action, but functions as a formation contrary to the dynamics and particularity of moments in its basic form. Theory itself, the conceptual itself, can never directly express a moment, it is always an outside.

The conceptual exists separate from the material and by implication cannot be drawn from the action of theory. It always exists above and beyond the actual moment, positing some conceptual abstract value to the moment itself. We can see this in the relation of value to moments in the financial collapse; but the relation escapes this economic space. In Socratic dialogues the space of philosophy is conceptual, and bears no relation to reality but rather consists of long attempts, through interlocution, to make sense of concepts in order to make sense of the world. It is in this impossibility that the philosophical must occupy another space. Without the possibility of actually determining concepts materially, or directly seeing the material manifestation of concepts, the space of theory is where one tries to make sense of what is inaccessible. The construction of concepts becomes nothing but an unsuccessful shaping of concepts in order to describe, from a particular time and place, a transcendental and immediate space that remains inaccessible. In other words, from the Greek point of departure, the philosophical, or theoretical, consists in constructing, analyzing, and shaping concepts to make sense of something called “the world.”

To speak of the philosophical is to speak of the conceptual, of the construction and interrogation of concepts. The philosophical always exists in a singular moment, yet the construction of the concept exists in an entirely different temporal space. In the construction of the concept, even the simple concepts of the understandability of language itself, a constancy of moments is constructed. There is the consequential construction of a trajectory of certain moments, sectioned off from the context in which they occur, even though these moments are both singular and not the moment of conceptualization. To put it another way, even though the concept exists in a singular moment it simultaneously expresses all moments within a constancy of moments simultaneously, through and as the moment of the concept. We see this in something as simple as a word, which is used to posit a constancy of things across time even though materially all of the named things are particular, and change over time. We make sense of objects through words, and the definitional content of these objects changes, is constructed anew every time we invoke the concept, but even in this shifting conceptual context a commonality is posited that exists in direct contrast to the particular objects subjugated in the concept. For example, to say that the Earth is round is to say that from a particular time and space we can say that in all times and spaces the Earth is round. What we are speaking of here is not the validity of the claim that the Earth is round but rather the construction of the concept of a round Earth from the expression of the concepts of round and Earth across time and space, being conceived of from a particular time and place. This <em>is</em> constructs a conceptual transference. It is not that the claim that the Earth is round is something verifiable. What is being claimed is that the concepts of the Earth and round express the existence of a certain object at a certain time and place transcendentally. The claim of the round Earth can never express the reality of the moment of this object now but rather constructs a certain way to make sense of this object now that comes to apply as a definition of this object across time and space. Here is the paradox: while theory happens in a singular moment, the conceptual tries to make sense of moments by constructing discourses of a certain constancy of moments. So on the one hand all concepts are new, all are generated in a moment of which the potentiality of the concept in this moment has never occurred and will never occur again. Yet, the philosophical itself exists in and through concepts constructed to bridge moments. In other words the philosophical can only speak of material moments as collections of abstract values.

While philosophy exists in a moment, it occurs, it is constructed on the delineation of a legible constancy of moments. It tries to construct some similarity of moments, to map points of departure and lines of flight. The very things that we are attempting to make sense of, moments, the world, the universe, existence, disappear in their very naming, in the idea of these things that extracts them from their particular existence, and inserts them as abstract values into a conceptual notion of sense. In this paradox, the philosophical is an attempt to make sense of a world it can never speak of. The philosophical comes to its limit points in both directions of analysis. Thought, the philosophical, is paradoxically always already both of a moment that it can never speak of, due to the construction of concepts as transcending the moment, while simultaneously being incapable of speaking of some existential totality due to its existence as a momentary act carried out in a particular time and space.

All concepts are singular. They are constructed in singular moments and do not transcend the moment of their construction, even if that construction assumes that transcendence. In other words, all concepts are generated singularly in a moment that will never occur again, and as such exist in particular momentary worlds while attempting to speak of concepts that transcend time and space. In the construction of conceptual constancy the moment becomes eliminated. The concept can never speak of the moment, it can only impart abstract value to the moment. Economics is one manifestation of this relation between concept and moment. We also see that in the becoming-abstract of the moment, all that can ever be spoken of is the existence and dynamics of the conceptual construction; concepts can never speak of moments even though they are constructed in a moment; all concepts exist as universes without crisis. In the conceptual universes that we construct, everything is smooth and defined, nothing ever changes. At least that stasis is the what we project in the articulation of concepts.

Even though the concept is singular it is never alone, it is never isolated, the possibility of constructing concepts requires other concepts. This is the one of the odd paradoxes of the concept itself: even though each concept is a singular construction in a moment it must also exist as a multiplicity, as a constellation of concepts that construct concepts. The construction of simple concepts relies on the existence of some other constellation of concepts that contextualizes this individual concept, with all of these concepts also relying on constituent concepts. This construction of a conceptual universe—or as Deleuze and Guattari would call it, a plane of consistency—exists as a tenuous connectivity between concepts that are always shifting, always being rethought and modified. With these modifications (sometimes minor, sometimes major), the relationships of the concepts, and the contours of the conceptual universes that we construct, fundamentally change form as well. So, even though conceptual universes exist contrary to the complexity of moments, and construct frameworks in which we can speak of abstract worlds without crisis, smooth conceptual spaces that are constant across time, in which action never occurs, the concepts that we are basing these conceptual universes on are fundamentally momentary. They are always in a complex structure of flux and reconfiguration. Concepts do not exist isolated from parts, rather they exist as a resonance between fragments of a conceptual universe in which the concept makes sense or is constructed as a result of, and as an expression of. We are engaging in this constructive act all the time, when we form structures that allow our world to make sense (even though our concepts do not express the world), while at the same time forming a framework that allows the concepts within that framework to make sense. Often we critique others for having self-referential frameworks of thought, removed from the world, in which arguments always relate back to some central assumption. Not only is this central claim something that in itself implies a complex universe of ideas, it is also the case that all formations of thought are fundamentally self-referential, tautological structures of sense. For all of this, for the impossibility of philosophy, it is something that we nonetheless have to engage in; it is something that we must do. This is not an aspirational statement, rather, it is a necessity of sense, and is present in all concepts of sense, from the simple projections of the effects of our actions that we make everyday, all the time, to the assertion of our existence as a thing in a universe in which we can act.

So we begin to see the movements of philosophy in a different light. Instead of a linear progression of concepts that more or less express the actual world, the philosophical is a relation of concepts, a movement. Rather than asking of the truth of a concept we see the philosophical as a movement and dynamic that exists between concepts; this is one of the things we can take away from the experiment of deconstruction. But this is also the reality posited by the dual injunctions in formal logic: to be able to construct any possible conceptual universe, but only to the degree that this universe exists without contradiction. The conceptual universe always constructs its own validity as a non-contradictory singular concept as a relation between the fragmentary aspects of the concept itself, and thus without contradiction. To read the philosophical as a relation of intensity between the fragmentary conceptual existence of a singular concept, to read philosophy as a movement or dynamic of concepts, admits another striking element of philosophy; in the construction of a conceptual universe around a concept, all concepts become axiomatic and self-positing within that universe of concepts that construct the relevance of the concept. So theory is never a question of the right concept, true explanation, or pure understanding, it is, rather, a much more precarious articulation of forms of sense. These forms are analyzed upon projection into the world in writing and speech, not through the particular lens of the theorist or thinker, but from the collision of these articulated concepts with the conceptual universes of a recipient, a listener, a reader. Far from the lauded position of theory in modern political milieus—as a form of articulating the world, and of planning future worlds—theory always only exists as nothing but a precarious, tenuous, speculative way of making sense of the world through shifting ideas in a framework that is at least conceptually consistent.

What occurs in the absence of this recognition, the absence of the absolute separation between concepts and moments, is an odd sort of discourse, one rooted in the notion that discussing concepts conceptually, or discussing philosophy philosophically, enables us to more clearly understand the actual world. That assumes not only some sort of absolute transference between concepts and moments, but also that the concepts are understood in the exact same way between the positions and times occupied by interlocutors, which would eliminate the particularity of thinkers and thought. In this loss, this absence of particularity, the thinker and thought becomes some sort of categorical occupation, a space that one occupies regardless of the dynamics that led them to this occupation, or that formed thought. The impossibility of this condition, unless we of course want to assume a limited series of existences that bodies float between, requires restructuring how we understand the conceptual and the discourse around conceptual questions. The impossibility of equivalent conceptual universes posited between moments and spaces means the philosophical constructs its own possibility. We already spoke of the axiomatic construction of the concept, but here I claim that the very possibility of positing concepts, of constructing discourses conceptually, lies not in some semblance to an actual moment but in the construction of the transcendental concept in a moment. In other words, it may be the case that we have to structure conceptual understandings, and the relevance of thought, not around its supposed truth-value axiom, or around conceptual discourse as such, but rather around the actual occurrence of thought, of thought as a thing that happens in a moment, as an action.

The concept always exists within a certain idealistic positivism, it attaches content to the moment by exceeding the moment itself. Philosophy constructs definitions, conceptual conditions of possibility, which eliminate the moments of construction in their very construction. It always exists with a dual temporality, both absolutely temporal and atemporal simultaneously. On the one hand, the conceptual universe constructed philosophically is always entrenched in the moment of its construction. In other words, the construction of the philosophical concept in a moment is a possibility of a moment that is a singular moment constructed from the dynamics of everything that has ever occurred. It is radically historical. Without this historicity the positing of the concept would become impossible in itself, it would always occur in a moment that never occurs. On the other hand, the philosophical concept is itself completely atemporal. In the construction of the concept as a projection across time and space, as the construction of a virtual constancy of moments, temporality is completely eliminated. The self-positing of the philosophical concept, like the auto-projection of abstract value in the circulation of the commodity, constructs the concept as eternal, as something coming into the moment as a content expressed as an immanent condition of possibility. For example, take the discourse of radical subjectivity that has become so popular in anarchist circles in the last series of years. In part, this is a response to the collapse of traditional prefigurative politics, especially with the collapse of Marxist and anarcho-communist politics. But in the positing of a specifically radical subjectivity we can see this dual temporality play out. The concept of a radical subjectivity is formed through so-called radical action, and therefore claims a closeness to a moment of action. It is formed in the construction of the concept itself. It does not transfer times and spaces, to say that it does is to admit that it was never constructed immediately and is eternally constructed transcendentally, that the action of theory never occurred. At the same time the concepts of a radicality and a subjectivity are projected across time and space, as static categories, as definitions of some constellation of things and events that are conceptually common. They come from the outside of the moment as a content of more or less subjective, more or less radical. The moment itself, the very possibility of the “radical” action becomes eliminated in the concept of radicality, and gets isolated as an ahistorical magnitude of a transcendental radicality and subjectivity. We have seen this in innumerable pointless debates about the radicality of certain actions. The moment of action itself gets isolated from history and becomes the expression of some degree of radicality.

This is a problem endemic in anarchist theory currently, in debates I myself have engaged in. Anarchists (among others) have a tendency to isolate actions to determine their expression of certain types of abstract content. This is almost constant in the discourse of tactics. Rather than speaking of tactics conceptually as a dynamic of force in moments, the moment gets isolated as an expression of more or less abstract value. For example, there is the raging debate about how community-oriented summit demonstrations are, or the abstract value of breaking windows or starting infoshops. The problem here is not that the theories surrounding these discourses are wrong, but that the positing of an abstract value to a moment isolates that moment from the dynamics of its possibility and eliminates the actual action, and any possible effects, through expressing it as an abstract value: the abstract value of community, radicality, etc. As within Kantian ethical frameworks, for this analysis to persist we have to assume the existence of some transcendental value, one present in all moments to some magnitude or another, and then isolate the moment from its possibilities, categorize the moment within a concept of certain types of actions, and finally value that moment as in common with other actions defined in the same way. This has found its most absurd manifestation in the discussion of the affects of an action. The action is portrayed as an isolated incident that may be more or less affective, that the outcomes of the act are affective, for the person taking the action, the goal of course to maximize affectiveness. People have been known to say that they focus on “affect not effect” as a result of their actions. First, the concept of a pure affectivity absurd—primarily in the separation posited here between affect and effect, subjective affectivity and social effects that constructs a notion of the self akin to the self-interested individual of classical capitalist economics. Second, the goal here is the maximization of a certain subjective profit from the action itself; how capitalist in its logic. It is not capitalist because of the profit motivation that is obvious in the total separation of affect and effect in a world of the isolated, subjective agent (in the attempt to derive surplus value through the consumption of the act). Rather it is capitalist in the assumption of the flow of the differential relation. In other words, in the discourse of the maximization of affectivity as a condition of possibility for action itself, surplus enjoyment (to steal a Lacanian term) is derived to the degree that a projection across time and space comes from possible affective effect in the future that serves as both condition of possibility for the action, and result. The concept of the maximized affectivity is projected across time and space as constant while being simultaneously compressed into the action. The action becomes commodified, not a moment in itself but a moment in the chain of circulation between concretized moments and abstract value even if the act is an act of destruction (smashing a bank window for example). But the problem here is not the capitalist attempt to derive abstract value from the action but rather the absurdity of the projection and compression of abstract value in a moment that exists as fundamentally untouchable by the concept itself yet comes to form its trajectory, its possibility as more or less affective. In this move the action is removed from the tactical dynamics of action and inserted into a discourse of abstract value and the static history of predictable outcomes. “Every statement to the effect that subjectivity ‘is’, no matter what or how, includes the objectivity which the subject, by means of its absolute being, claims to have yet to establish.”[17] Bigger cages, longer chains indeed. The concept only functions to the degree that it is realized in the concretization of a transcendental action, with predictable affects, that could never occur in a moment itself. It is this dual movement of compression and projection that typifies the function of abstract value, the co-immanent shift of moment and the inscription of an impossible concept.

The relation between the moment and the concept remains complicated by the paradox of the philosophical. We cannot separate the moment from the construction of the conceptual. This is not to say that the concept is of the moment, that the concept exhausts the moment. We can never explain a moment that exists singularly. If the moment is what has never occurred and will never occur again, if it is the product of everything that has ever occurred, yet a rupture with history, then we can never conceptually explain a given moment except as an abstraction within a constancy of moments with a constructed conceptual content, or abstract value that the constancy of moments is structured around. We must say that conceptual and material moments occur co-immanently; theory occurs in a moment, is in a moment, but is never the moment. This relation becomes odd in Kantianism where the separation is posited directly between the noumena and phenomena but only to the degree that each contains the other in its possibility. We see this in the categorical imperative, but it is to be repeated in all attempts at moral philosophy. In the construction of the moral imperative, even just in the injunction to do one’s duty where duty itself is a determination of the moment, there is an attempted transmission between conceptual transcendence and material actuality and particularity. It is not that they exist absolutely separate, but rather in separate sites of the same constancy of transmission between the conceptual and the material. But the immediacy of the concept itself—the construction of the concept in a moment—is not a pure concept. It becomes conceptual to the degree that we conceptually attempt to speak of the moment. But even in the conceptual elimination of the moment, the moment of the construction of the concept is never eliminated. If it were, we would be at great pains to talk about what is this thing called a concept exactly, or how it arises. The complication of the problem of philosophy is in this dual relation with the moment of its construction.

The absolute separation of concepts from moments, with the absolute connection between the concept and the moment of its construction, form a potentially dangerous and volatile mixture. This is not in thought, or in the moment, but at the point when the subjugated moment in the concept starts to actualize as an actual world. This absolute atemporality as absolute temporality, this fascist time, is the paradoxical manifestation of the moment to the degree that its particularity is eliminated; yet the negation can only function particularly or momentarily. In other words, the very elimination of the moment, the very point of elimination, can only be the elimination of a particular moment; or to word it differently, because the concept does not actually project itself through an absolute time, yet functions simultaneously as an absolutely temporal and atemporal phenomenon, the very moment of the elimination of the moment is something that must be inscribed in every moment. The concept is constantly constructed as the condition of possibility for each and every moment, action, occurrence, event, even though its possibility lies in the total inscription of moments with abstract value to the point of eliminating moments themselves. We need to look at theory in its relation to the material moments of its own generation. This odd space of theory, this zone of indiscernability between totality and particularity that attempts to make everything legible, only exists to the degree that the very legibility it constructs. The very abstract value imparted to things and moments, exists as a speculation in constant crisis. Theory always falls short, it is an absolute conceptual atemporality that cannot function directly as a constancy of moments. In other words, theory never can be said to “be” materially, it can only be said to function. It is in this functioning, this attempt to become material, and the constancy of crisis that this implies, that we cannot only see the construction of the state, and the existence of the police, but that we can also gain a glimpse into our worst tendencies within the revolutionary milieu: the tendency toward elimination; to police through the creation of smooth conceptual worlds, which ends in preventing revolutions; to unleash possibility in conflict only to tie this possibility to an eternal future in the form of positivistic political vision.

The question of philosophy can’t be answered conceptually. It is not a question of the truth of concepts—all concepts are true and false in their impossibility—but one of the material functioning of concepts, the relation between concepts and actual moments. The question of philosophy is therefore not one of philosophy itself, nor one of philosophy as something positing its own possibility, but rather one of the operation of philosophy, analyzing the relation between philosophical projection and compression, and actions. This reading of the philosophical eliminates the moment of theory. It constructs a theory that never occurs, and one that has always already occurred in some static absolute moment of theory. The question of theory is a question not of theory but of the operation or functioning of theory in a moment; of the relation between the moment of philosophy and its transcendence in the construction of the concept. In other words, it is the question not of what philosophy is but what philosophy does, of the politics of philosophy.

It is this complicated and paradoxical structure of the conceptual that we need to analyze in order to understand what it means for philosophy to function, what it means for crisis to occur. Because, in the conceptual, there is neither crisis nor functioning, neither action nor disruption. The concept posits its own possibility. In the construction of the constancy of moments in conceptual transcendence the moment of theory is eliminated. The conceptual can never speak of the moment of its generation. The concept posits itself as a possibility, and that is all theory can ever accomplish in relation to the moment. In the construction of the concept in a moment, in the relation of the moment to the concept, the concept can only exist as a form of content or an attempt to speak the content of the moment in indirect and speculative forms. As speculation, theory takes on a relation to its functioning that is never direct. To put it another way, concepts can neither speak of a moment nor directly manifest in a moment. To manifest directly would be to eliminate the transcendence of the concept itself, to move from a discourse of the abstract value of the moment to being this abstract value in this moment, arbitrary and without constancy or continuation. In concretization the concept becomes eliminated just as in the concept the moment evaporates.

This raises an interesting problem. If the philosophical never manifests directly, if it can never speak moments, then what are the possibilities of the philosophical outside of the traditional discourse of the validity of concepts in relation to other concepts? As already mentioned, discussing philosophy in some direct sense becomes impossible to the degree that concepts cannot transmit themselves across time and space in the same way that the concept occupies an absolute atemporality. Abstractly, the conceptual universes constructed in the philosophical can only operate in a relation of speculation to the moment. But to say this is only to say that the best that philosophy can do, in the absence of being able to determine truth and essentialness, is to construct speculative explanations of moments. For example, we may build a concept of the solidity of something called “the ground” in order to take a step forward. But all that we can hope for in this equation is to say that we can speculate, for any of an infinite variety of reasons, that the ground will be there when our foot lands, that it is unlikely that a hole will open in space-time and suck us into oblivion. Yet if we listen to any of a number of theoretical physicists this claim is dubious at best (and nothing but a hope in chance at worst). It is not that we can say for certain whether either position is correct in the transcendental sense, that either rips always occur or never occur. All that can be constructed is a speculation on the solidity of the ground, and no conceptual universe constructed around this speculation can be said to be more or less valid; this applies to all conceptual universes including the one constructed in this text. The very possibility of the philosophical is in speculation, but that is only a relation of concepts to some abstract reality principle. All the claim on speculation can say is that philosophy can neither speak reality nor construct it directly. This is just discussing the impossibility of philosophy. To take this further, the question here is not the conceptual as a self-positing phenomenon but rather the relation of the conceptual to the material, it is a question of politics or the possibility of philosophy relating to or existing in material moments.

We cannot just leave the discussion at the claim that the philosophical bears no direct relation to material moments, that it always exists as speculative. For, even though the philosophical exists only in the self-constructing projected concept, the act of philosophy occurs in a moment as an action. As much as the conceptual universe constructs a self-projecting space across time and space in a relation to time that eliminates the moment, the philosophical is always constructed at a certain time and place. It is its own exception as well as its own possibility. The concept constructs itself, yet the act of this construction destabilizes the concept’s ability to directly apply to moments. It is this convoluted relation between the transcendent concept and the material action of the construction of the concept in which politics exists. Even though the moment exists abstractly at a separation from the concept, the possibility of the concept is in the moment materially. Philosophy exists in moments, some call this moment discourse, but that description is too limited as well. The discussion needs to leave the concept in itself, the conceptual universe as a self-positing phenomenon, and look at this odd relation between the conceptual and the material. The possibility of philosophy exists in the moment that is eliminated conceptually, but never actually eliminated. No matter how hard some theorists have tried, the moment of theory cannot evaporate into air. Theory always exists as an action in relation to its concept, and at the same time within the impossibility of the concept existing at the moment. This relation takes on the form of a politics.

On one hand the political has been traditionally framed as a conflict over the form of collectivity, or matters of the State. In other words, the traditional form of the discussion of politics, as policy or platforms of parties or groups, operates completely within this discourse of validity. But within this discourse the philosophy of politics takes on a paradoxical form. To discuss political philosophy is to conceptualize conflict, to speak of conflict in a singular sense. This may be the reason that political philosophy has always been a science of states. The construction of political theory eliminates all conflict within the smooth eternal space of the conceptual universe. We see this in all these ridiculous think-tank reports about global relations or the current discussion of the revolts in Northern Africa. They try to develop a cause and effect relation between infinite sites of conflict, each of which shifts all the dynamics of the conflict. Within this situation, which is always tactically fluid, they discuss demands in a singular sense, to discuss which actions, taken in isolation spawned which other actions, and the similarities between the internal dynamics of different countries, etc. What gets lost here is the conflict, as it evaporates into the concept.

We have already explored the concept constant construction of positivist content to the moment, the way it posits a definitional and definitive content to the moment which is complex, dynamic and undefinable. It is in this sense that we can begin to outline the first possibility of philosophy, the attempt to function directly to mitigate its own impossibility, or the attempt to shape the world in the smoothness of its image. To discuss political theory in the traditional sense is to engage in the essential forms of politics. In other words, in the very discussion of political theory the conceptual universe needs to be applied across time and space conceptually. But again, this projection only exists conceptually. The real function is to materially construct the very possibility of this universe. We see this very clearly in the founding of the United States, or of any state entity. The theoretical universe is not only constructed in documents but also in the concept of the state, borders, national identity, and now political identity and so on. But in order for this nightmare called America to be anything but really bad, immersive fiction, the unbridgeable chasm must be bridged—to make philosophy function as politics. In liberal democracy and Maoism this takes on its absolutely most destructive form, the conflict becomes ossified within the structure of the state; in liberal democracy this occurs through the parliamentary form and the election process (the subjugation of so-called representationalism), while in Maoism it is through the embodiment of conflict within social forms connected to the state, or some party body. I am not saying here that conflict is eliminated conceptually but rather that it becomes defined as a type of conflict, different from socalled illegitimate conflicts, and channeled into the eternal atemporality of the state itself. One example of this was in the Cultural Revolution, where the discourse and dynamics of class war were defined by the state, but it also occurs in every election where the totality of conflict is defined as a conflict of representational validity, complete with the innumerable claims by liberals that the only legitimate conflict is one that goes through politicians; a logic taken to its extreme in the 2008 Obama campaign where the injunction was to channel all unfulfilled desires into the presidency.

But in this possibility another odd paradox occurs. In the construction of so-called political theory, or political philosophy, the very possibility of politics becomes about eliminating politics through the material realization of the transcendental concept inscribed into moments as immanent. The traditional form of political theory attempts to posit a material world in which politics does not occur, in which conflict is either absent (as in visions of utopia), or channeled into non-conflictual forms, as in the form of the liberal state. In the liberal state the form is universalized with shifting content, and the possibility of functioning abstract value is eliminated in the moment of functioning. The attempt here is to turn the conceptual projection of the concept across time and space into the material construction of the universe, to realize the end of history. In other words, this fascist possibility of philosophy focuses on a direct transmission between conceptual transcendence and the moment as a time that becomes atemporal in moments that never occur. All moments must operate with this compression and projection, but only to the degree that the moment is necessarily eliminated. This remains impossible, with the notable exception of total annihilation of everything that has ever occurred in some absolute cosmic catastrophe that escaped politics: a final action. This was also posited as the dilemma facing authorities in Algeria when Islamist parties, which had vowed to end elections after their election, gained electoral support. But what was missed here was that it was not Islamism that was to end politics in Algeria. Liberal democracy had already attempted to end politics through its own conceptual universe. On the one hand, fascism is the attempted projection of the concept materially across actual times and spaces, independent of the content of the concept. This is impossible, but also the attempt of this fascist projection eliminates politics in the concept itself. In the construction of the conceptual universe there is no conflict, no politics, no crisis. This (pointed out by Marx), is the realization that, at its core, there is no such thing as political philosophy, or a philosophy with politics.

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Politics exists as a material conflict in a moment. And here we see the other possibility of philosophy. The conceptual is constructed in a moment, and as an action it exists in relation to a certain effectiveness: namely, that actions have effects and the totality of the effects of all actions that have ever occurred that is called history. In other words, rather than this absurd party-Marxist attempt to have a philosophy of history, all we can say is that in the action of theory philosophy is profoundly historical to the degree that history is conceptually inexplicable. It occurs as an action with effects, but only to the degree that it can never come to fruition, that conceptual universes devoid of action and effect never come to be. Philosophy remains historical and relevant—thought exists as an action—to the degree that its materialization is impossible. Rather than philosophy being the discourse of actual moments or something that actualizes in moments, the philosophical can only exist materially to the degree that it is effective, that it has effects and constructs contingencies. This brings us back, for the moment, to the impossibility of philosophically critiquing philosophy. The force of theory can never reside in the destruction of moments, in the clash of competing theories, a completely ethereal and pointless discussion. Rather the force of theory is in amplifying the paradoxes of the conceptual to the point of manifesting the impossibility of theory materially escaping its moment, its existence as a speculation. It is never about what theory can do, in the direct sense, but rather how effective theory can be. This position philosophy within material effectiveness requires some clarification.
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We cannot speak of effectiveness in a definite sense. Whether a philosophical construction is more or less effective is about taking that concept, making it static, and projecting it across time and space within some discourse of effectiveness, as a form of abstract value. Even in the discussion of the effectiveness of theory we eliminate what we claim is effective, we try to operate an absolute effectiveness as immanent in the act itself. In other words, we can never speak of the effectiveness of the action in a definitive sense, we can only speak of effectiveness conceptually. In the possibility of theory, in the manifestation of theory as a materially effective moment—as something manifesting directly in moments—becomes impossible, or manifests its impossibility. This politics of philosophy, or the construction of philosophy as the manifestation of its own impossibility, is the destruction of conceptual necessity in philosophical speculation. This disruptive and destabilizing possibility of philosophy is the anarchic possibility of philosophy, the politics of philosophy manifesting the impossibility of political philosophy. This anarchic possibility is the potential of anything occurring in a particular material moment, in the elimination of conceptual projection materially.

The conceptual frameworks that we generate around moments themselves are nothing but speculative tenuous notions of sense. But in this tenuousness of the philosophical, in the impossibility of its realization in moments, we should not see an end. Rather we should see the force that the conceptual can have. As we try to actualize theory we pacify our own thoughts—make them voices into the abyss—thoughts that can never act, even in the moment of their own generation. Don’t we see this everywhere? From Leninists to the disillusioned youth to the beaten down insurrectionist, all saying, “this is not the time, the police are too strong.” This is nothing but a cop-out, literally in the sense that the police are seen as a stop-gap on action but more significantly in the sense that in this attempted conceptual transmission between moment and theory we embrace the total non-action of the conceptual universe. If we can learn anything from Egypt and Tunisia in Arab Spring, it is that actions with a certain magnitude tend to have a way to make the cops disappear off the streets faster than we could possibly imagine. We need to understand that theory in itself, as an action, can be dangerous, very dangerous, but only if we embrace a dual reality of our own conceptions about our dreams and our conceptual revolutions. On the one hand the theoretical realities that we create—no matter how much work we put into them—can never come to fruition; our moments and our concepts of sense in moments will never unite. But at the same time we can see the real danger in theory. At the end of the day, when the wreckage is cleaned off from the street in front of the Interior Ministry in Cairo, or the Athens Stock Exchange in Greece, or the banks at the corner of Craig and 5<sup>th</sup> in Pittsburgh, it becomes clear that this chaos is the result of innumerable actions motivated by innumerable notions of sense carried into materiality indirectly, tactically. We need to find the danger in our voice, to see our voice as a tactical attempt in itself. Concepts without actions are nothing but academia, closed off, self-referential, completely mediated. But in the streets we see so many efforts to act based on conceptual understandings of the moment. It is not theory that is revolutionary. But theory as a tactic can have any number of effects, all of which, in their mobilization, amplify the crisis. It is this tactical theory, this theory in a moment, that is a force, one with actual effects. And it is in this that philosophy can realize its other possibility outside of its historical collusion with the state.

Here the concept takes on a different form, one closer to the intervention than to the discourse, and for this, we must outline a different position of thought and the thinker. Within the traditional concepts of thought we find a number of dynamics resulting from a form of discipline in thought itself. The primary dynamic within this constellation centers around the position of the one who thinks, in relation to the object of thought. In this model, common in academia and officialdom, the thinker is a body that is separate from its object, and tries to derive generalities from this object. This position presumes not only the existence and constancy of a generalized object—and so a time and space that would allow this object to exist through the elimination of particular things and moments—but also a form of topsight, the ability to see this object and render some general analysis. In this model the thinker occupies a space of analytic certainty, one in which the only possible concept of intervention is one in which the validity of claims are challenged through the same ontological position as the claims that were initially rendered. This is the very positionality critiqued by Ranciere in his criticism of Althusser, the positionality of the academic who sits outside of a static world. It is this positionality that constructs the think tank, the policy institute, the courts, and the prison; it is this positionality that is the basis for the conceptual form of the state, and it is this positionality that forms the core of not only state philosophy, but also much of radical politics. Contrary to this positionality is another pointed to by Ranciere, one of intervention, the positionality of thought and theory as something other than a form of removed analysis of static objects. As Adorno also points to in <em>Negative Dialectics</em>, this alternate possibility is based first on the recognition of the horizontality of thought—that it is an act carried out in particular ways by all persons—and second that this is an action carried out in particular ways, that it is of, and within, the moment. In other words, this positionaliy, this anarchic possibility of thought, rests on the recognition of the positionality of the one who thinks, as a particular thing existing in a dynamic of other actions and things in a particular moment. As such, the presumptions behind thought take on a fundamentally different tone. No longer can thought be considered as outside an object, one identified directly through concepts, but rather must be understood as speculation, as the thinker’s deployment not only to make sense of things, but an action serving as a framework to understand other possible actions.

So from the discussion of thought in the material, in the tactical, we can focus now on the role that thought plays within that space. Through an immediacy of thought, in which the question is no longer the correctness of concepts, and is instead the effectiveness of analysis, we begin to realize a project that was undertaken within post-structuralism, the erosion of the foundations of the state, the elimination of the conceptual ground on which the state stands. To do this we have to overcome one simple obstacle, the assumption that the grounding of the state lies in the conceptual content of the state form, rather than the state form itself, and how theory colludes with this form. For way too long conceptual discourse in the anarchist milieu has centered around the niceties of theoretical claims. For way too long the discussion of fighting, resistance, and activity has been confined to prefiguration and concepts of moral purity, both of which replicate the same analysis at the basis of state ontology. It is past time to outline the ways that thought exists as an intervention, as an action, as a form of particularity with effects. It is only through this discussion that we can begin to address some of the worst excesses of the radical milieu, and its greatest failures.

** Constant Crisis

It is pointless to discuss the conceptual in isolation from the impossibility of the materialization of concepts. We have had too many discussions of how many angels fit on the heads of pins. The real question, again, is not about philosophy as such, but about the impossible attempt to operate concepts materially and the implications thereof. This impossible attempt is a momentary mobilization. The question of philosophy is never one about the internal dynamics of concepts (an impossible question to approach), concepts have no internal movement. Rather, the question remains, raised by Marx in <em>Crisis Theory</em>,[18] one of tactics or the mobilization of force to accomplish the impossible construction of the conceptual universe as materially immanent. While this remains an impossibility, concepts can still function towards a logistical limiting; this is called policing. To put it another way, the attempt to operate transcendental concepts in material moments requires the material construction of limits to moments (as with private property for example), and that possibility only functions to the degree that policing is organized and tries to construct the concept as a material terrain. But this is always only the logistical attempt to paradoxically mobilize action to prevent moments, to operate in moments to prevent the existence of moments to stabilize the resistant tactical medium around a certain legibility.

The direct operation of the conceptual in moments, the actualization of concepts, requires the material manifestation of a temporality that in itself is impossible. On the one hand the concept exists as a transcendental positing of a constancy of moments. Yet, on the other hand, for concepts to function directly would mean for that concept to exist as an immanence that comes to the moment directly. In short, it would require not only god but an interventionist god. (Given the state of the world today this god would be a remarkably cruel one, but it was Mussolini who emphasized the spirituality of the operations of the state.) As already discussed, the state relies on an almost-secularized theology, a form of transcendental immanence that defines the conditions of possibility for all moments, and the logistics of policing when this fails (as it always must). It is in this sense, on this plane, that the state can be combated—not as a conceptual formation, but as an ontology that attempts to become material, and on this level of material operationality. What becomes clear in Mussolini thinking, as well as that of Schmitt (in a different way), is that fascism is not the content of the fascist regime and history but the possibility of the regime, the rising to primacy of the material logistics of the police, of the form of the state. What is being articulated in modernist totalitarianism—what we refer to as fascism—is not some new concept of the state, as many liberal critics of fascism would have us think, but a rise of the concept of the state to primacy, or as Schmitt puts it in <em>Political Theology</em>,[19] the necessary implications of sovereignty, of the state itself. The argument articulated in both Schmitt and Mussolini is that the state always and necessarily attempts to function as a totality, but that the operation of state force is compensation for the impossibility of ever achieving this totality, or the ability to define all moments directly. They describe the operation of fascism as a structuring of the immanence of the transcendent in the moment. This can clearly be seen in the discussion of American exceptionalism, specifically in the Trumpian variant, in which the presence of American military power and the constancy and reach of security operations is an attempt at stability and an ontology in itself, the ontology of the military primacy of America, a contentless and diffuse empire. However, it is in seeing the state through the lens articulated by such widely-varied thinkers as Schmitt and Marx, through this lens of the impossibility of the material manifestation of the concept’s time and space, that we begin to understand the plane of intervention. It is not that we fight against a singular, logistically-static, symbolically-arrayed state, it is that we intervene against a state that is diffuse, constantly attempting to subsume the crisis generated in its very attempt to create itself, mobile and spatially limited; a logistical operation, not a monolith.

In order to manifest, an entire terrain needs to be organized—to indirectly construct the universe of the operations of the concept—to structure a certain sort of immanence to actions separate from their historical possibilities. Take for example the construction of private property. It is not that someone has a deed and then that piece of the world becomes sectioned off from its historical possibilities. Private property is not constructed through texts and theories. It is the enforcement of private property that constructs private property, and that is not limited to the police arresting trespassers and squatters. The construction or materialization of private property exists through gates and fences, guns to shoot the unwanted, cops that enforce the exclusion of this space from history, the construction of individuated housing units, etc. What we can say about concepts is that they require an entire universe of concepts to structure their relevance. The structure of this universe centers around the world structured as the expression of some abstract value. In Mussolini this point is clear. Fascism is not just a conceptual apparatus but is the effort to bridge the gap between this conceptual universe and the materiality of moments themselves to express an abstract value that exists outside of their particularity. But what we need to look at here is the dynamic of the attempt to link immanence to moments within the material operations of concepts or how the attempt to project abstract value across time and space as a condition of possibility is at the same time the momentary operation of the separation of moments from historical possibility. The word for this attempt is policing.

This separation of moments from the totality of historical possibility is not just a semantic point but the entire condition of possibility for policing. We see this in the case of theft. It is always possible to take something off a shelf and leave with it. The limit to this possibility must be structured through the immanence of an entire universe of property and enforcement, not just the prohibition on theft but the content of the meaning and possibility of the concept of theft; there must be a concept called property as a segmented object imposed through material limitations for the concept of theft, and the reality of its prohibition, to be materialized. It is here that we can see an oddly tautological form emerging. On the one hand the concept is only operated through policing but on the other hand policing only exists as a function of a concept that is self-positing and axiomatic; it can only be considered theft if there is the attempt to materially construct objects as property. So, policing only functions to the degree that concepts manifest materially across time and space but the ability of the concepts functioning at all, for concepts to exist materially, requires policing. In other words, the very ontological structure supported by the existence of policing is operated through policing; policing is both the result and generation point for the materiality of the state, it becomes a form of its own self-justification and autogeneration. Outside of this form policing is literally nonsensical. This is reflected in the structure of police forces themselves. It it is not that the police are just people with uniforms (though obviously they are this), but that they are a manifestation of this attempt to separate moments from the totality of their historical potential to construct immanence. They come from outside of the moment and enter the moment as a form of immanence; they show up at a house and begin ordering people around and taking control of the moment. The result is that someone may be kidnapped, removed from that moment and injected into a parallel immanence, the ability to be judged by those who operate transcendental law. We are all equal in policing to the degree that all policing operates an immanence that eliminates the very particularity of moments themselves; we are all equal in the projection of constancy across time and space, in the sense that the very structure of law, policing, the state, entails the fundamental elimination of the particularity of moments and things, the transformation of moments and things into points of state action and conceptual definition.

Police function not only to beat people and shoot them in the back, but these actions—and the general movement towards the militarization of the police—combined with the projection of policing across time and space, serve to construct the normalization or terrain of policing. As a logistical and strategic operation we need to see policing—the materiality of the attempt to operate the state—through the lens of two dynamics, projection and constancy. On the one hand the police are projected across time and space as spatially limited forces. Currently this takes the form of ever-faster projection of weapons, communications, and transportation across space. Again, policing is an impossibility numerically and logistically; there are never enough of them to cover all spaces; the very attempt to project across time and space mobilizes a movement in a moment to cease movement. Therefore, to understand policing it is not enough to merely understand a numerical institution with equipment and the tendency to kidnap people off the street and throw them in steel cages. Rather the police function to the degree that they project themselves across time and space, into spaces outside of physical presence; they must structure themselves around the eternal possibility of their immanence in any moment and any space. It is not direct enforcement but the construction of the constant immanence of the presence of police, and a presence that comes with force and magnitude.

On the other hand, policing cannot function without projecting. They must move, which shifts all of the historical possibilities of the moment, amplifying the crisis in the impossible constancy of their operation. In other words, their absence creates space outside of immediate presence, and their actions generate contingencies in the very moments that they are attempting to define. We can see this in the streets during riots, for example, consistently during the Pittsburgh G20 riots. The police moved into a space and people left that space. When the cops went to another space, anarchists just moved back in. Projection does not function without constancy. Without the ability to simultaneously move and entrench the total immanence of that movement in spaces outside of physical presence the only projection is immediate, is direct presence; police operate only in physical presence only as uniformed people with guns. Without conceptual projection—the idea that the police can always be present—the materiality of policing is limited to the immediate presence of the police and the range of weapons. This can be seen in spaces of active insurgency, where force has to be concentrated in order to move defensively, which limits their projection. In these spaces the limited ability to move is coupled with the breakdown in the assumption of inevitable presence, to make space wherein the state is operationally limited in both projection and constancy. Projection cannot exist only in the conceptual universe of police, it is not something that exists in police journals and the advertisements of communication equipment contractors. Policing can only be understood as the attempt to materialize conceptual limits to the historical possibilities of particular moments. To put it another way, the projection of policing across time and space cannot function materially if the operation does not function in every moment and space. Without projection constancy cannot function to construct itself materially across time and space but without constancy projection becomes nothing but a movement which amplifies crisis in their impossible operations.

This played out worldwide as we sat glued to screens watching the revolutions in North Africa play out in real time on Al Jazeera. What we have seen in both Tunisia and Egypt, as well as in the insurrectionary dynamics in Greece in the recent past, is the focus of the demonstrations and the crisis of the state never looking like stormed buildings (although buildings are stormed and burned along with all the police vehicles in any vicinity). But in these cases that main target has been the police, the material manifestation of the state itself, the very attempt to function concepts materially. To attack the police is to attack the regime; the police are the very possibility of something called the regime just as the regime is the very possibility of the police. It is no wonder that anti-police brutality movements are so thoroughly suppressed. Mubarak sat in a presidential palace making decrees that no one listened to, no one enforced, all while people defended their own neighborhoods, structured their own communications, took over workplaces and streets, cleaned parks, and directed traffic. The state exists in concept, but the confrontations with the police generated political possibilities through confrontation, not as the attempt to function a certain philosophical concept—in both Tunisia and Egypt the opposition parties have been marginalized—but as a confrontation that amplified crisis. In both situations massive rioting was followed by the seemingly immediate absence of police from the streets. It is here that we can see the real existence of the state, the fascist possibility of philosophy, laid bare. It is at the point where the logistical movement of the police is disrupted, when the very operations of police come to manifest its impossibility, that the state itself crumbles and becomes conceptual only. This also goes to explain the US response, demanding that new states are formed immediately, orderly transitions are made, the police continue to function, and the revolution ends. They are demanding that immanence function once again across time and space constantly, that the state function, regardless of content.

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The attempt to construct conceptual universes materially as a terrain of movement only functions to the degree that actions, or movements, are logistically organized to prevent movement and possibility. This sometimes manifests very literally, as in the Palestinian Occupied Territories, where movement is segmented, tracked, and limited by the apartheid wall and checkpoint structure, while the movement of the military and the police is protected. It is only in movement, both in its limitation and its facilitation within a terrain structured by policing, that this logistical attempt can function. In other words, the police only operate tactically. What we call the police, in the singular sense, is actually the attempt to coordinate movement among actions in innumerable particular times and spaces, always moving, always generating the possibilities of movement. Police are always operating in particular moments in particular ways in particular times and places, which are all held together through loose structures of command and control. Regardless of the transcendence that structures the possibility of policing, the concept of the legitimacy of the state or the legal sphere across time and space for example, this always manifests in innumerable different forms in innumerable particular times and spaces. It is never a question of police in liberal democracy, for example, but the functioning of police to stabilize a social immanence around a particular concept of liberal democracy in a particular time and place. In the face of the materially impossible concept the attempt to project this impossibility across time and space requires the attempted organization of movement to prevent movement, action to structure a transcendent immanence to action, which eliminates the moment of action itself, inserting it into the totality of the conceptual transcendence of abstract value. The existence of the police both exposes the impossibility of the state as a universal totality (as it exists in conceptual ontological form), and also generates the contingency that would have to be eliminated for the state to actually function as a materially total form. The logistical movement of the police is what exists between the impossibility of philosophy and the attempt to operate that impossibility. Policing always exists as a movement. It cannot be said that the state is, that the state bridges the gap between concept and moments. All we can say is that the state functions as the attempt to structure the immanence of moments around conceptual, transcendent abstract value; it is a deployment of actions in particular moments in the effort to eliminate the particularity of moments.
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This is not the operation of ideology in the traditional sense of an idea made manifest, but rather a series of tactical attempts to construct a legible terrain of action that is always in motion and thus in crisis. If the attempt is to construct the universe of theory’s relevance and operation, and that universe can never speak of actuality, then the construction of the territory of the operation of theory is constant inscription that constantly comes up short. Regardless of how thoroughly this operation constructs space, the construction is never total and always exists parallel to actual moments, as something that can only try to contain and channel actions. To argue the contrary, to argue that this mobilization of force is not constant, is not a movement but a reality, is to argue that the cosmic catastrophe has already occurred at the point where the state is founded, that action itself has ceased. This is what we see in the traditional forms of political theory; there are these conceptually static forms grafted onto moments, defining these moments, and that these moments, often framed as historical or originary moments, define a terrain. We find this in the mythology around the founding of the nation, where the originary act and the writing of documents, the setting up of some governmental body, defines the totality of a space. If this vision holds true, if this is actually the case, then we must carefully describe the process of the collapse of regimes, the volatility of street politics, the presence of dissent. To see the state through the lens of materiality, to see it as a material attempt to compensate for the impossibility of its totality, we need to see the it through the lens of movement and deployment. We also need to see this movement not within the context of explanation or as an effort to make direct sense of it, but rather as a tactical reality. When the aesthetics of the state collapses, when all the social programs have collapsed in privatization, when the myth of the passive population falls apart in the fires of molotovs, when the reality of policing terrain collapses, when the operation of the conceptual universe as the state itself comes down, we can clearly see, at the final moments, raw force organized to prevent action itself. Organizing the materiality of the conceptual universe is not just an impossibility but requires the police as a movement to prevent movement, and sometimes those police look like ruling party thugs with knives. It is at the moment of acute crisis, when the aesthetics of the state have collapsed, that we can clearly see the logistics of force that are central to the construction of the state, and the use of this logistical organization to contain crisis. This crisis does not only appear at these moments, however. This crisis is always perpetual, always present, in the contingency that exists with every action, in the contingency generated by every action, in the possibilities that construct history.

The term “crisis” originated in medical jargon as a point of possibility, a pivot point in the function of disease: when the patient’s body either disorganizes itself and dies, or makes the opposite turn and comes to some stasis. At its core the concept of crisis, in this medicalized reading, fundamentally implies an important phenomena, the contingency of any moment, the impossibility of prediction, the non-linearity of the functioning of dynamics and effects. It is on this terrain that the concept of state fails, and that crisis always perpetuates. If crisis names the moment, the possibility latent in the moment, then it is crisis that the state attempts to mitigate; the world could never operate through the conceptual unity of the state form without the total and absolute elimination of all possibility. But it is at the same time—due to the impossibility of this attempt (without literally ending all history and action)—that the state comes to function through action, realizing itself in the very same moment that its existence precludes. All moments, as particularities, present crisis as a perpetual phenomenon in the impossibility of equilibrium or theoretical transcendence particularly applied or operated. It is not that there is crisis and not-crisis, that some moments have effects and others do not, that some participate in the construction of the totality of history as a rupture with history and others do not. If moments can never be eliminated outside of the absolute catastrophe that would destroy the state with everything else, action cannot be ceased, peace can never function, moments can never evaporate into air. And, thus, the operations of the police, as a constant motion, can never manifest constancy either in a moment or across time and space—to the degree that the particularity of times and spaces can never be materially eliminated. This is contrary to the general reading of the political (which is as an inert world in which defined forces enter into frontal conflicts), or the realm of socalled revolutionary strategy (which hinges on the definitions of forms of actions conceptually and the discourse around forms of action). It is in this concept of crisis that we can name the terrain of engagement, but only to the degree that we embrace the necessity of contingency, the presence of possibility in any and all moments, and the inadequacy of concepts.

Crisis is perpetual to the degree that the immanence of moments that policing attempts must always function as a series of actions in a moment, all with their effects and conflicts. Therefore, we need to see the police in a different light. It is not that they maintain the functioning of the state, or stabilize situations and institutions that already constantly immanent. Rather, the police mitigate perpetual crisis that exists in the attempt to project conceptual universes across time and space constantly; this is what we call capacity or the material capacity to mitigate material conflict. This operation is always in crisis; the impossibility of operating philosophy generates the crisis in operational logistics. No matter how many cops flood the streets, how many snitches they have, how much tear gas they launch, how many people they gun down, the perpetual crisis in the attempt to operate philosophy through and as The Police generates conflict and crisis. It is not that we have won when the cops are run off the street. There is no defeat of police, no necessary total end to the attempt they represent; so-called victory is not confined to a form of area denial. Rather, the police only cease to function through the amplification of a crisis that is perpetual in their very logistical operations. We are not speaking here of the process of revolution, that would be impossible and arrogant. All that can be said is about tactics. All that can be discussed is the conditions of possibility for resistance itself, to look beyond resistance is only to attempt an arbitrary prophecy, an attempt to predict a world in which events have caused all of the categories that we use to make sense of existence, cease to function.

For anyone who has ended up on the wrong end of a baton charge, or witnessed the overwhelming violence that cops use to disperse the threat from people standing on corners, or lived through a raid, had to see your family and friends cuffed and held on the ground at gun point, or been on the other end of a cop’s bad day, it may seem like the functioning of the police is this powerful, overwhelming reality of everyday life. But the fundamental functioning of the police is not enforcement, which is only one part of what they (claim to) do. The core of the operations of the police revolves around the tactical deployment of tremendous violence into everyday life to mitigate the crisis of their functioning, in a terrain constructed through possibility, contingency, and crisis. They move frantically to make the impossible occur, to make an armed inclusion of total tactical stasis, of the immanent definition of moments. This is not just the crisis that is presented by kids standing on corners, the meetings of underground political groups, the actions of street gangs and regular people operating under the economic radar, the walls of silence that police encounter when they go looking for snitches. This is a crisis generated through their very attempt to operate. The constant operations of the police to attempt to construct immanence in all moments across all time and space must be increasingly total and violent, to mitigate the crisis that is born from their very movement. Every house they raid, everyone they kidnap off the street, every kid patted down in order to go to class... every operation of the police generates increasing antagonism. This is clear to anyone who has gone into one of their target areas, neighborhoods subject to almost total police occupation, places where SWAT teams carry out armed raids in broad daylight to detain minor drug offenders. In these places the friends of the police are few and lay very low. This is also clear in the increasing adoption of encryption by people even outside of technical, political, and hacker milieus, a self-defense directly responding to revelations about the scale of surveillance. Surveillance methods have expanded the war in material space into digital space and the networks and means of communication. The attempt to operate the state as an ontological form, to define existence, comes in the form, not of long dissertations and policy papers, but of a constancy of warfare that always tends toward totality. Something that many anarchists forget around election time, but that we must remember, is that every articulation of policy by any politician is always only directives within the constant, perpetual warfare that characterizes everyday life in the attempt to materialize the ontology of the state.

We cannot opt out of this constant war. The functioning of the police constructs this perpetual attempt at stability as normalcy, as an immanent reality in everyday life. These functions can neither be simplified to police brutality, nor to police reformability. It is not a question of better police, worse police, violent police, and/or communityoriented policing. All of these trajectories involve the same ontological condition. It is not a simple question of running the police off the streets, the zones supposedly created in demonstrations that we all know are actually just contained and concentrated spaces of conflict. Policing is not a question of whether police are people, or what weapons they have acquired, nor a question of a form of life, one that is constantly incipient, one that leverages force in its effort to come into being. Policing is social war, and it functions to the degree that this war becomes total, infused into every aspect of existence, into every moment, into all spaces. Social war is not a choice, we don’t choose to engage or not engage in it, though we have some options in how we engage. Social war is every cop that rides down your street, every baton charge, every attempt of the US state to force neoliberal economics into a space, every threat of arrest or jail, every bombing from the sky. It is the attempt to construct total stasis, complete purgatory, a world with no movement, no hope, no future and no past as well as no present. It is the attempt to disallow conflict, and thus, the absence of difference, contingency, possibility, change. Social war is the reality of the attempt to operate abstract value in moments; to make the existing world correspond to conceptual categories, to make philosophy function as a definition of the possibilities of life itself.

This is not about any single outcome of the operation of policing, whether it is violent or not, whether its overtly racist or sexist, etc. This is about the on-going operations of social war itself, and so it is about operational capacity, deployment, and the crisis generated by this operation. The anarchist milieu tends to think of crisis as created through the activities of those who have a form of political identity, as undertaken in isolation from the social terrain as a whole, as the actions of a group, and as something created from nothing, an inertia that springs up from nowhere, in defiance of the principles of physics. It is thought of as identifiably political, defined through superficialities of aesthetics and specificity, the articulation of positions, the call to action, the identifiability of some sort of politics or cause. We see this in texts like Nihilist Communism, which describes working-class resistance to capitalism as the production of crisis. I find this important to the degree that production is based in action, but this claim deserves more thorough interrogation. This statement can be taken in two ways. On the one hand it is surely the case that all production is the production of crisis in the operations of capitalism. Marx is attempting to understand this in Crisis Theory. The conclusion leaves a lot to be desired: that the best approach is to read conditions, not to directly intervene but to passively observe, hoping that crisis will be generated from a moment in which it is not latent. In other words, this argument, that crisis emerges from a moment of absolute stabilization, is to somehow hope, and watch for, some condition that will somehow cause to collapse what was previously stable. But, as we have seen with the Trump campaign, Trump did not create white nationalism out of nothingness, white nationalism was already present—it was already a force, but a quiet and often unspoken force. In the same way, just because the concentrations of crisis are not apparent, that does not mean that all is stable, that all is quiet. This is a view that—though this text (and many others) departs from these assumptions—there is still some latent framework grounded in a modernist conception of revolution, that crisis is apparent, identifiable with political tendencies, and explodes from moments steeped in the political wilderness. This is where problem lies, and the articulation here infects much of the discourse of political change. There is a tendency to reduce political activity to activism (or, if not activism then identifiable trajectories of resistance defined as such through a conceptual framework). This reduces the entire terrain of conflict to a symbolic one, in which everything is aligned with political tendencies, reducing the action, targeting, and activity to simple calculations of acts of a group against symbolic enemies, which are understood as unitary bodies or conceptual formations. Did workers realize their role as the revolutionary subject? This is nothing but conceptual hogwash wrapped in an absurd assumption of a transcendental positionality. Separating crisis from the impossibility of actualization of philosophical constancy in moments is the basis of these ridiculous readings of history. It is in this conception of crisis—as generated through action from a position of absence—that we begin the separation of actions from the dynamics of action that they exist within, a position in which action comes into the moment to create something that has no possibility before the action, or a position of action that exists as a something that comes from outside the very same conditions of history that are being discussed as leading to this present moment of total stability.

Regardless of the appropriation or position among these concepts of the production or temporality of crisis, the result is the separation of crisis and moments; crisis becomes something to be generated from nothing or something realized as some discovery of a teleological trajectory. At its core, this separation of crisis from moments, this focus on revolution as a generation of a crisis of destabilization at a period of time, does nothing but try to join concepts and moments. The argument rests on the ability to have true readings of history, which will be judged through the conceptual reading of events and events themselves fusing into a single formation. Even in our attempts to theorize crisis we turn crisis into an inert object, one that can be generated from nothing, one that exists on a terrain of symbolic action analyzed through conceptual lenses. We turn crisis—the existence of contingency and possibility, the absence of the ability to define the moment—into a discursive tool to attempt to define moments as more or less advantageous within a context of action, and in this, eliminate the possibility that allows moments to be acted within, history to be formed, and these actions to have effects and be relevant. There are a number of very interesting attempts within the body of insurrectionist and post-insurrectionist theory, but most of them end by defining crisis and action in certain terms, to posit solutions or answers to the questions of our current impasse. It is telling that many of these texts arose when many of us felt lost, directionless, and cast adrift from a world that at one moment seemed all too understandable. In this context people tried to find answers that acknowledged that the traditional answers did not correctly analyze the situation. But it is in this seeking of answers (and, along with answers, definitive questions), that the rejected dynamics (symbolism, ideology, the presence of a certain removed revolutionary milieu) became replicated. This illustrates a more fundamental problem with the philosophical. For as much as we want theory, in its very structure, to be able to say something, to be able to do something, theory itself always remains nothing but the impossible and paradoxical attempt to construct concepts to make sense of the world. Theory itself, the doing of theory itself, can never actualize, it can never bridge that gap between itself and the world itself. Rather theory itself is only effective as an action in a moment that escapes the boundaries of the writer or speaker into the reader or witness. This vain attempt to determine the “correct time for action” implies that someone somewhere has been able to construct a transcendent constancy of moments, deemed the “correct time”—an odd transcendental moment— that can be read and interpreted in a particular moment, or that we are in the presence of god. But the end effect is the same as other discourses of the “right time,” all action becomes defined by some theological construct, it all gets fitted into a universe premised on this theology, and the theology itself only operates to the degree that it mitigates its own crisis, that it can actually mobilize force to construct territory in a determinate way, that is, to the degree that it implies police.

In this construct of the identifiable moments of crisis, the topic of action is reduced to a conceptual question, the material dynamics of action disappear, and theory again gets removed from the dynamics of activity. What is lost, as in the constructs at the conceptual base of the ontology of the state, is the presence of action, effects, and contingencies, and just as in the construct of the state we produce a conceptual world that exists without crisis, dynamics, activity. Just as in traditional forms of activism, we’re left with a clash between conceptual frameworks making sense of the world, between conceptual universes, and lose a view toward the perpetual aspects of crisis generated purely through actions and effects, the shifts and flux of a dynamic material world. Moments are sectioned off into correct or incorrect times, actions either produce conflict or don’t, the act is removed from the generation of potential in some absurd attempt to determine the effects of an action. To posit revolutionary or productive content to the act is to say nothing of the moment itself, it is only to speak of the retroactive abstract value imparted to the action, but a retroactive content that functions before the action exists. If crisis can be generated, and does not occur, then the very process of resistance becomes a mystery, a game of guessing the right moment or the most productive action. The amplification of crisis, the disorganization of the police, is no longer a matter of material resistance but a matter of realizing some abstract value, always immanent but unrealized, in and through actions. And it is this that guts action, that removes it from the material conflicts that are generated in each moment. Aside from presenting the police as less tenuous than they actually are, this understanding of action tries to make only philosophy matter, to make insurrection something that can be spoken of in a legible form in such a way as to not ever speak of insurrection itself. But really good theory is not what helps us identify our destiny or our productive capacity within the flows of a crisis that have not been realized. It is not the endless, and useless, discussions of the correct framework or concept, abstract organizational form, and posture toward action spoken of in a general and disembodied sense, that allow us to act or determine success. It is the perpetual presence of crisis in the impossibility of policing that is the basis for the disorganization of the police through action and conflict itself. Insurrection is never a matter of theory; it is a tactical attempt that is present in the crisis of each moment. It is an abyss, an illegibility that exists outside of conceptual transcendence. It is what is illegible, what is unable to be spoken of, what is unable to be eradicated in actual moments. What we call insurrection is the tactical amplification of crisis in the tactical logistics of the impossible attempt to operate the fascist possibility of philosophy.

Banksy tells a story in the middle of <em>Cut It Out</em>. He/she/they are wheatpasting ironic posters of Che on a London bridge above the site of an openair market that has been known to sell Che t-shirts. (The obvious message is about commodifying revolutionary figures; regardless of the attempts to turn radical history into so many objects and history texts it will always fail, there is something that consumerism cannot eliminate.) While this is happening (about 4 am), a car speeds down the street, parks in front of a cell phone store, and then with the squeal of tires it backs right through the front glass of the store. Six people in black ski-masks run out and empty the entire store in under a minute, then speed off into the night. The only thought going through our adventurer’s head, after “oh shit, the cops are going to be everywhere”, was how ironic it was. Here stood a prominent street artist putting up a piece that had taken days to conceive of and prepare in some vague attempt to incite people to action, and just down on this street, in the middle of the night, people were doing it. Under radical street art, insurgent actions were occurring in the gaps in police coverage that are generated in the impossibility of the police...

In moments like this two things become clear. The first is that we spend so much of our energy and time encouraging people to be not just angry, but a certain kind of angry, a radical angry. Outreach to the public puts us in a particular position. Suddenly there is this certain active entity, and a public, portrayed as some inert matter, which a message is to act upon. We construct a concept of what we do, as radicals, which isolates us and our acts. We become the site of resistance, isolated from the outside, from what is not radical; and in this we construct the very abstract value that isolates us. The second lesson is that for all the puffed-up rhetoric, for all the posturing and propaganda, anarchists are not shit compared to your average criminal. Everyday schools get burned down in the middle of the night, banks get robbed, jewelry stolen in broad daylight. Every day cops get assaulted in attempts to evade arrest, people refuse to give information, police cars get vandalized. Of all the cop cars I have seen with smashed windows, very few have been by the political milieu. We fail to see both the everyday crisis that exists as things occurring, and the actions carried out everyday by regular people. If the so-called anarchist movement were as good at not snitching on people and disrupting the functioning of the police as the same working class that we tend to valorize, we might be in a very different place right now. It is telling that in most instances of massive political ruptures the established political groups play a relatively minor role (the obvious exception being developments in Greece). The Muslim Brotherhood, the “largest opposition group in Egypt,” played a minor, moderating role in the crisis there, a role that led it to a position of power—not through participating as an organized group in the revolution, but through capturing and ending the revolution. We can also see this in the almost complete absence of established groups in the Rodney King Uprising and most of the 1960s riots in America, except for the Black Panthers, who played support roles. And in the riots that are breaking out today across the US, established political groups lag behind. While these were not political uprisings in the traditional sense (or in the sense that many within the radical milieu tend to see uprisings), as results of the actions of a radical milieu. These unleashings of anger come from confrontation rather than some form of organization.

Something else is driving these events, and it is certainly not having some articulated political goal that one wants to project across time and space as a material reality in some dangerous dance with the fascist possibility of philosophy. These uprisings project a politics of their own; they exist in the collision between everyday life and the impossible attempt to simultaneously operate a conceptual universe as a material immanence while running around frantically putting out every fire. These events are the spaces that are forgotten both by the ontological construction of the state (spaces that are either ignored or eliminated), and also by the revolutionary milieu, spaces that fall outside of the clean, neat, crisis-less world of theoretical universes and their construction. What I am suggesting here is that we need to look beyond the traditional categories of the identifiable and legible politics that have held us back for too long. We need to look beyond the traditional limits of politics and begin to see actions themselves, beyond conceptual politics. We need to look at the very possibility that is named politics itself. In other words, we need to stop talking a big game about smashing the state and actually begin to look at how action, and conflict as action with magnitude, unleashes a speed of movement that in itself makes the state impossible; a movement that departs from the constant crisis that exists in the operation of conceptual constancies in singular moments and amplifies this crisis to logistical ruptures in the operations of the police.

We need to look beyond our own dreams and wild theories, beyond the romance of the radical standing up to authority, and focus on the resistance that is present in everyday life. Every day thousands of things are stolen from stores, arrests are resisted, cops get punched in the face and people get away with it. Hell, at a riot over Lebron James in Cleveland, a cop car got set on fire (and we valorize our comparatively minor interventions). The actions that we consider “political” are not the only, or even most meaningful, areas of politically relevant activity. We have to reject the tendency to isolate political movements from their context, to impose a unity of concepts of singular movements onto many actions and speak of this isolation as something acting on a separate public. This is not just a naïve vision of a reductionist and legible social movement that can be entirely grasped from a particular time and place but also the basis of the idea that social movements accomplish something. We have this idea that somehow the isolated social movement, as an entity in itself, through the virtue of using the correct tactics becomes a major social force in its own right and with some static defining coherence. That, somehow, the message gets across and the public jumps on board. Somehow we were always right and this attempt at political recruitment is nothing but the process of others discovering their fate through our words and actions. This view is not just naïve but arrogant and dismissive. Beyond this another, much more troubling, dynamic constructs itself: what we are doing is attempting to construct a movement around our ideas, to develop a conflict that in itself becomes constructive, the core of the positivist, constructivist, prefigurative concept of politics.

This is an odd and paradoxical vision of how politics happens, one centered in a confusing relationship to conflict and to action. On the one hand, people try to incite action, to generate a conflict, to produce crisis. But on the other hand people try to use this conflict to end conflict. The conflict exist with a zero limit, a point of closure already constructed within itself. It is the attempt to “produce” revolution, through what is essentially a glorified marketing campaign, that attempts to end itself when certain goals have been achieved. But how is a goal achieved? Usually, this question gets one of two answers. There is the reformist answer: at some point social conflict will reach such a point that certain demands must be attained. This is a completely reactionary form of politics totally mediated through the state itself, and also creates the action as one that is already completed, as one that aims at its end. In this scenario, demands are made to politicians and then, maybe, met; but the construction of the immanence of the content that the state has taken on through policing remains unchanged, fascism is still a possible attempt. The other answer is some pipe dream of people coming to some logical end point together, that at some mysterious point conflict just ceases after goals have been met and a mysterious transcendental unity somehow begins. This is not just purely fictional in its impossibility, but also a laughable attempt at prophecy.

These constructions of the problem don’t acknowledge that confrontation can never exist within a situation that is stabilized through conflict. In the very mobilization of actions, contingencies are generated that change the totality of the medium of action. Nothing can be directly constructed in some unitary sense through conflict; action is always a rupture with history that generates nothing but the possibility of a future. Constructions that can project across time and space, things like political organizations, only exist to the degree that action itself becomes impossible, to the degree that political forms becomes immanent as a condition of possibility for moments, to the degree that revolution is ended and possibility is eliminated in the inscription of the conceptual universe constructed in political dreams magically becomes the totality of lived existence. This does not just manifest in mass movements but is fundamental to the concept of the mass movement itself, the concept of a coherent political entity that moves in a more or less singular way. This singular form, the definitions of the regions of this form, posit a content that defines the possibilities of acting within that form. For example, we see this in the formation of ideological unity in organizations, but also in the limiting of tactical possibilities, both through pacifism and the attendant protest police, but also the confinement of action to the category of so-called political action. These assumptions bleed into tactical limits in the campaigns that we work on, from the limited political position that we claim for ourselves. I’m not talking about essential limitations of the term anarchism or anarchy, or whether it is more or less liberatory to declare oneself an anarchist. Such conversations are the aimless arguments of completely different relations to some conceptual abstract value. It is not a question of arguing about identification with a political tendency and movement, which also becomes a certain form of identification, and thus separation from the terrain of action itself. No, this is about the implications of answering the question at all, outside of some personal relationship to a concept at a particular time and place. This obsession with definition, just like philosophy’s obsession with its own relevance, accomplishes nothing but a lot of pointless debates, and the schisms that come along with them. This has led to absurd focus on direct messaging, of telling people what we want (and by extension what they should want), and thus destroying the possibilities unleashed in conflict itself; we declaw our actions before they begin.

We become concerned about how the public will react to one thing or another. We have frivolous, pointless conversations about what an anarchist is—at best these are a waste of time and at worst they are remarkably fascist forms of political purges like what occurred during the red versus green debate in the 00s, and is now occurring against insurrectionists (or “anti-organizationalists” as some anarcho-communists would say). What gets lost here is that in these arguments all we ever speak of, is so much fiction. It is not merely that visions of the revolution are ill-conceived and naïve attempts at prediction, it is that the very possibility of the future lies in action and conflict. Constructing the concept of revolution as something that auto-destructs, as a certain revolution with certain goals, is attempting the impossible: to mobilize politics to end politics. Our failures lie in this odd attempt to unite conflict with construction and conflate both with end-points and peace. Real resistance is in innumerable acts of refusal, theft, downright rejection of authority, in the throngs of those who would rather run than be caught, rather fight than die a slow death, rather put themselves on the line now than languish away in quiet defeat for the rest of their lives. But these moments do not exist as plants rising through the concrete, as rays of light within a materially frozen, cold, drab life. It is not that these actions exist as a mistake, as some sort of short circuit in the monolithic police structure or cosmic disaster. These actions exist as a manifestation and amplification of crisis simultaneously; they exist in the space generated by the impossibility of policing as well as the amplification of that crisis.

Of course there is resistance to this concept of a prefigurative politics. Unfortunately it has taken on this form loosely called Plan B, as well as resorting to forms of action that revolve around spectacular acts of property destruction and resistance to police within the confines of the controlled terrain of the identifiable political demonstration. The arguments around the concept of Plan B tend to go as follows. The traditional form of action in the streets has failed for a variety of reasons. Primarily they have failed due to a naïve reliance on majoritarian approaches to social conflict where a political transference must occur to generate a political space stabilized around a specific concept that then enters into conflict with its outside. In more militant sectors this has manifested as direct confrontations with the police, as in the 1970s and 1980s in Germany and recently in the black bloc around the world. But this has been a trap; the form of action and the preparations for actions of this sort have drawn us into a self-replication that limits our possibilities in the streets while remaining ineffective in itself. Therefore, so the argument goes, we need to expand action outside the borders of movements and concentrations of police that tend to gather in predictable places (like the cities that host trade summits). So to maintain a certain space of action we need to simultaneously expand some aspects of black bloc tactics, namely anonymity and the intentional unleashing of conflict, but do this by expanding action into spaces that exist in the gaps in policing. On the surface this all sounds great, but there is a fundamental problem underlying this outlook. It does recognize something that our old-school, Kropotkinist, anarcho-communist friends have all but ignored for over a century, that the state in itself is an attempt that never comes to actuality and that the operations of the police are structured in a frantic attempt to contain the crisis that is the attempt to operate the impossibility of the state. Plan B tactics recognize that the possibility of action exists in this crisis, but it stops there. In this stoppage actions can occur but only to the degree that they exist singly, away from the cops, outside and intentionally in avoidance of conflict itself. This results in a bunch of kids in black running around smashing windows, usually out of sight of the line of police that may be blocks away. It posits this absurd dichotomy between a) completely legible mass confrontation with the state, as a frontal clash, and b) the complete evacuation of conflict itself.

Similar are generalizations of confrontations in the context of demonstrations. Following the collapse of Occupy there was a positioning away from late 2000s insurrectionism. This position that held that the failure of these forms of action (ones like Occupy camps and summit demonstrations) were based on the centrality of the action. To take the given examples then, summit demonstrations are weak because they are where the police are the strongest, and Occupy camps failed because they were easy to watch, contain, and ultimately eliminate (especially through coordinated police action and the co-opting of various pacifist and liberal elements within Occupy). Again, this analysis is correct on a lot of levels. However, people concluded from this, that the solution is to engage in confrontational action at every demonstration, with the hope that somehow this will stretch operational capacity and ultimately break the ability of the police to control a situation. But, as with Plan B, and also the urban guerrilla, there are two problems, evidence of not taking the arguments to their logical conclusion. First, these forms of confrontation are still firmly entrenched in traditional forms of political action centered around symbolic enemies and symbolic terrains; namely either the downtown area and the police conceived of as a single entity fought by identifiable political action, or the small guerrilla band acting against symbolic targets. Second, in confining action to these traditional categories and, as a result, approximating just a militant form of activism, the terrain of conflict remains identifiable, isolatable, an easily containable aberration. This thinking is still grounded in misunderstanding the tactical logistics of policing, the existence and pacing of conflict, and the relationship of policing to movement and logistical capacity, not more accurately, in a concept of the state as a constantly-functioning logistical phenomena.

Rationalizations have been posited—from affective profit for some revolutionary subject to the spectacular effects of the disruption of semiotic normalcy—but all of them come up short. What gets disregarded is that actions are not conflicts in themselves, that actions do not necessarily amplify the crisis in policing just because they are illegal, spectacular, and make us feel good (and they do feel good, there is an entire Dead Kennedys track about it). The problem is that, when the crisis in policing is taken as a point of departure, crisis becomes a static quantity that provides opportunities and gaps in which action can occur, but in which the action is isolated from the dynamics of crisis. The cops cannot cover space so we spread out and smash things while escaping into the night; this is really fun but really... this is the best we can do? It is not that this is a weak tactical framework that understands nothing about how police function but that it entrenches a certain defeat. The assumption underlying all of these frameworks relies on the assertion of an isolated and marginal space of that action, only in specific moments and within specific opportunities that are identified as political action. These frameworks are constructs of conceptualized tactical responses and answers to current impasses, while at the same time embracing many of the elements that have led to the concept that there is an impasse to begin with, the failure of and attempt to revive some sort of confrontational political action. They are analyses that require the recognition that there are gaps in police coverage, that the state is not total, but then that confine these gaps either to the framework of the demonstration, or the framework of the underground that emerges at times in which action is taken.

This is not just aesthetics; it is a tactical set that is based in spectacularized and fetishized notions of the importance of singular actions that become isolated from concentrations in the tactical terrain. And it goes much deeper. It is also a problem of the conception of the relation of action and conflict, action and crisis. Actions in themselves are not conflicts; rather, conflict always exists in the relation of the trajectories of actions coming into collision. In other words, conflict is always a movement, a motion, a collision. The focus in the recent rise of protestbased confrontations in the anarchist milieu, the rise of the concept of the urban guerrilla and the concept of Plan B, posits that the value of the action resides in the action itself, in isolation, rather than through the dynamic and effects of actions in time and space. The impact is conceived of as one of the action, rather than the effect. Rather than attempting to tactically understand how to amplify crisis through the generation of conflict through confrontation, rather than attempting to think tactics as a dynamic that always has openings and mobilities within a terrain or dynamics of tactics, people try to take action while evacuating confrontation or confining it to the traditional forms of political action. Plan B enshrines action in the isolated act, action becomes this isolated static site, devoid of motion and thus devoid of conflict; the amplification of crisis is abandoned in favor of broken glass. We come to circulate within a world of very risky actions between static quantities, in which the players are well known and the terrains of action are equally predictable. It is not that these tactics do not have a role, that they are not relevant, but that in their confined understanding of terrains and methods of confrontation, they do not go far enough, they do not take their critique of traditional movement and activist politics and the confined terrains of activist activity to its logical extent, one which implies tactical fluidity and constant adjustment in a dynamic terrain that we are constantly surrounded by and exist within.

We seem to be stuck between the necessity of making sense of things, and action; between action and the constant relegating of action to absence in our attempts to define it. Increasingly, as prefigurative politics fades into the background, becomes shown to be reductionistic, abstract, and separated from the materiality and complications of the world, we have become mired around thought and action in a way that comes from the justified rejection of definitive political future and utopian visions. In rejecting prefigurative modes of politics, with their visions of utopian futures and limited possibilities of action, the response has tended to either argue for some form of determined revolutionary subjectivity (in which we become-revolutionary, we become the figure generated by revolution, a very scary possibility), or that we reject the meaning behind action at all and aim purely for maximum destruction. Both of these possibilities carry their own problems. In embracing revolutionary subjectivity we must either embrace a naïve concept of revolution—in which we only exist as empowered beings that never suspend ethics for the expediencies of action—or become monstrous beings, the embodiment of the potentially awful things that often occur in revolutionary situations. To reject meaning at all is equally naïve, a misunderstanding of the temporalities of meaning, and the forms through which meaning is posited, assuming that all meaning must be thought of through universal forms. We don’t need to embrace the impossibility of meaning in resistance when we reject prefigurative politics, and the attendant police logic that always comes in the next breath. Nor do we need to avoid conflict in the attempt to avoid the failures of mass, static forms of confrontation, or confine it to situations in which we are comfortable: the demonstration or isolated direct action. We are not stuck in a choice between the fascist implications of prefigurative and constructivist politics or the attempt to understand and stabilize the rejection of conceptual unities projected across time and space in some conceptual valorization of the act, isolated from tactical dynamics. We don’t need to, when rejecting traditional politics, enshrine our defeat or relegate the thought around action to isolated or definable political space. Rather, we need to look at both theory and action in a different light; not as things in themselves, legible, understandable, but as tactical movements, as motion.

We have been asking the wrong question of political action. Traditionally this question has invited pointless conversation about which actions are political and which are not. The problem here is not that the conversation is completely based in arbitrary value judgments and aesthetic choices. The stakes of this question are much higher than that. Really, it is this approach to the question of action that underlies many of the issues that have arisen in the relation between concepts and action. In addressing this question we have chosen, by and large, to attempt to determine what is, within the immanent definition of a conceptualized politics, expressed in action. Not only is the action itself eliminated in this approach, evaporated within the immanence of conceptual politics, but politics is eliminated also, the conflict presented in moments as an inertia of action coming into collision with other inertias. We need to look at what is political in action itself. It is not a question of immanent politics but about the possibility of politics itself.

We have to make a choice here between traditional politics and the amplification of conflict. Traditional political models—operating in the possibility that there can be something political in theory—always try to change the forms of the operation of social immanence to ones that they call non-coercive. This is a concept of revolution as a temporary state aimed at its own end, revolution without revolution, or a crisis that ends with a certain form of order. This is not just a matter of reductionist politics that end at the elimination of politics in the realization of conceptual political structures. It is a dangerous innocence, a complete aversion to talk about the stakes and risks of actively engaging in social war. Active risk here means more than the almost certainty that people will be hurt, imprisoned, and killed, and that many of these will be known and close to us. No, I am speaking of an almost total aversion to looking into the abyss of the act itself, to acknowledge that actions generate possibilities to the degree that they necessarily entail risks, unpredictable consequences and effects, and contingencies that can never be legible (or they would evaporate). To act at all we must come to terms with the reality that our goals will never be directly met, that theory can never actualize, and that—within the abyss of politics itself—we have to face the impossibility of political theory and the possibility of almost total failure. Rather than resisting this realization through laughable prefigurative politics, we can reject traditional models, which exist not as an attempt to unleash action merely to contain it in some impossibly “stabilized” stasis later, not as political action in the traditional sense, but as an action in itself, as a politics that takes theory as one tactic among others.

Generating conflict to resolve conflict is only possible to the degree that antagonism and conflict become resolved, that the inertias of all actions act in total concert with each other as in the machine. This would mean total uniformity, the construction of a direct immanence to moments, to the degree that conflict can be continually suppressed, mitigated, or incorporated into self-policing logistics. Conflict, the collision of the inertias and effects of actions, exists within crisis but also constructs the form of this antagonism; it can be said that conflict never ends but exists to more or less of a magnitude and concentration. Conflict is always an amplification through tactics, without the attempt to logistically organize movement to end movement. It can only exist as an amplification of crisis and, therefore, can never be proscriptive and constructive of forms that operate across time and space. Conflict can never lead to solutions and answers, let alone structures. And this call to violence exists not as some conceptual limit to action, or some injunction to be violent, but only as a rejection of the auto-stabilization of pacifism. Only in amplification and multiplication, in the rejection of autodestructive attempts to mobilize conflict to end conflict within traditional positivist concepts of revolution (typified by the Jacobins and Leninists but also in any vision of a peaceful post-revolutionary future), can crisis manifest the impossibility of the police. In conflict the antagonism between the singularity of moments and the transcendental constancy of the concept are amplified to the point of rupture or the impossibility of operation and legibility. This is both tactical, in that it is always a result of actions and conflicts in moments, and the very possibility of politics itself. So we have to approach the concept in a different way, not as a concept of conflict, or one of revolution, but one that has effects in itself, is deployed as an action, and as such, is a concept that can never come to be materially actualized. Conflict can only exist as an amplification through tactics; the generation of a multiplicity of possibilities in the amplification of crisis. Yet, it can never be spoken of directly as some theory of conflict as a static, non-dynamic, object of theory but only as an amplification of crisis that makes multiple possibilities, as politics itself. In other words, one can never speak of conflict and the future as a necessary result of conflict, as somehow connected to a future, without also either preventing or channeling action itself, without the police. This is a problem with movement bureaucrats and prophets as well as the cabal of total negation. All attempts to connect conflict to the necessity of a certain future are either pure propaganda and thus completely speculative prophecy, or a warning of the coming police operation that will attempt to end conflict itself.

But it is only in considering the unbridgeable gap between theory and moments that we can grasp the insurgent possibilities of theory itself, a politics of theory rather than an impossible political theory. Theory can never speak of moments without also constructing their evaporation into immanence. The question then becomes not what is the correct theory, but what it means to do theory. If theory can never speak directly of conflict, then we need to reorient our understanding of theory from the attempt to construct legibilities to theory as an action itself, as a tactical phenomenon. Here, the space of theory, and its connection with rhetoric, becomes clear. Sorel speaks of this as the actualization of the theory of the general strike. It is not that the general strike ever occurs in a form that directly follows from the concept of the general strike. Rather, in the construction of the concept of the general strike, divorced from the predictions of the future, the purpose becomes entirely tactical, to incite and amplify crisis. “The myth must be judged as a means of acting on the present.” In other words, lofty naïve concepts of the utopian future after the revolution may make good, effective, propaganda (I think it makes for really consumerist propaganda but that may just be me), but at base all we are ever doing in theory is organizing tactical attempts to amplify crisis in the operations of the state to generate other possibilities, ones that will never manifest theoretical concepts.

Rather than engaging in traditional politics, to actualize some ideal which either exists co-immanently with policing or as nothing but a pipe dream, rather than engaging in movements based in the marketing’s transmission of ideas directly into others (which eliminates others in the transcendental truth posited by the platform), we can embrace the other possibility of philosophy. This means abandoning the idea that theory can do anything directly. It means taking on theory as only a tactical attempt and reconstructing this thing that we call politics not as an expression through action but as something generated in action. It means existing as a tactical phenomenon, as the intentional attempt to mobilize conflict to disrupt the operations of policing. The traditional models of politics are based in this attempt to materialize concepts. For all the movements, all the campaigns, all the protests and pickets, it is not political messaging that prevents the state from operating.

Social movements and conflicts don’t construct anything. The very attempt to materially construct conceptual structures necessarily implies ending conflict, and thus policing. Rather we need to see that it is conflict itself that makes politics possible. If the state is always only the attempt to materialize a conceptual universe, if the state itself is the attempt to end politics, then attempting to engage in politics as a defined form is in itself an impossibility. It is not that we need to engage in politics in the traditional way, debating the best form of social organization, but that it is politics itself that we need to make possible. It is only through conflict, through the amplification of the constant crisis in the attempt to materially define moments, that the possibility of possibility is generated, that the possibilities of politics itself multiplies.

We are not doomed to exist in a political wasteland, oscillating between prefigurative politics and evacuation of conflict, fetishizing defeat or its confinement to legible forms articulated in chosen times and spaces. We are not limited to some historical destiny through ending politics in the end of history and toothless, pointless, affective actions. But to escape this trap we need to see politics not as something that is, that exists necessarily in one or another form across time and space—as a politics without politics—but as something that can only exist as tactical conflict and amplification of conflict. In the rejection of mass prefigurative politics, based on the construction of an immanent “destiny” outlined conceptually but operated materially, and action always already confined to a militant but activist space generated through self-imposed isolation, we see that all revolutions, all bursting forth of insurgent crisis, are concentrations of actions, not necessarily confined spatially, that destabilize the operations of police logistics. It is in this sobering observation—that revolution is not a grand historical moment but a name for an illegible series of actions—that we can move beyond constructing immanence as some transcendental political destiny, that we can move beyond attempting to mobilize politics to construct something through the end of politics. We can move beyond the paradoxical politics of destiny as some abstract realization of politics and begin to understand what is actually entailed in the tactical amplification of the crisis of the state.

This task, this attempt or series of attempts, is not the engagement of action with abstract systems, political forms, concepts, and so on; these are all terms that only try to describe moments that we need to make sense of. Rather, the crisis of the state occurs not in classrooms and reading groups but only through a tactical and material engagement with the materially organized operations of concepts across time and space, the logistics of police action. To fight the State is to mobilize tactical actions that disorganize the logistics of social war. To fight capitalism is to fight against a concept materially operated through the logistics of social war. We do not fight systems (it is impossible to fight a concept), but only engage in actions that more or less amplify the crisis of the logistics of policing, disrupting the operation of a more or less coherent police apparatus (regardless of the political or conceptual interpretations that we may ascribe to these actions).

There are a number of implications to come to terms with, to avoid the repetition of our past failures and the constant re-emergence of supposed impasses (which are more of a product of our reliance on traditional political forms than actual end points). First, we have to think through the absence of the assumed connection between actions-that-we-term-revolution and some definitive future, due not only to the complete impossibility of predicting the future, but also the necessity of these forms to replicate the ontological structure of the state. Second, we must consider the functionality of the state through the medium of material actions, vs simplified frameworks grounded in linear relationships between defined spaces of resistance and unitary state structures. Most importantly, we have to take on a new point of departure, one not grounded in concepts of defined futures, correct concepts of tactics, and limited political spatiality defined through legible political forms. We have to embrace the absolute separation that exists between our concepts of existence and existence, between how we make sense of the world and the world itself. We have to reconceive thought and action as more or less effective, thought as valuable to the degree that it is effective, and action to the degree that it has effects within a material terrain. For too long we have understood the material logistics of the state through the concept of the unitary form, the monolith, the leviathan. We have to abandon these ideas, these limiting concepts of the state and the resultant limitations in the conceived terrains of action, along with the aesthetics and glorification of revolution. To use this lens, to begin to think the state as a materiality, as a thing that operates, is not to take on goals of clear conclusions and definitive ends of conflict. It is specifically to see which conclusions are at best momentary, temporary and speculative, crisis as perpetual. It is to see intervention is always possible, but not always equally effective, ethics as limitations (not necessarily useless limitations), and dynamics of the functioning and collapse of the state as localized, dynamic, and tenuous.

Politics is another name for the multiplication of possibilities generated by conflict; the attempt to make moments and conflict legible occurs to the degree that conflict, politics, moments themselves evaporate, to the degree that social war is mobilized to construct immanence to the moments of our lives.The attempt to define moments through the construction of a material immanence, embodied in the necessity or truth of one or another political structure, is always an impossible police logic. Let’s stop attempting to operate destiny, stop embracing the fascist possibility of politics, and stop trying to explain our way out of the impasse. Rather than entrenching our defeat through non-confrontation or limited traditional forms of action appropriated through different tactics, we can realize another possibility. We can recegonize that, though this may be a sobering revelation, the attempt to do politics in the traditional sense always leads only to the attempt to end politics in the definition of life in any given moment. Instead, we can take a long look at what it means to amplify the crisis of the state, what politics itself is, what it means to generate possibility without legibility. That is, we can embrace conflict as a tactical phenomenon, not as some end point (this is always a fascist dream), but as nothing more than a beginning, a possibility. For it is only in conflict and confrontation itself that we can actually begin...

** Bibliography

<biblio>
Adorno, Theodore. <em>Negative Dialectics</em>. New York, NY. Continuum. 1973

Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. <em>Cyberwar Is Coming!</em> Santa Monica. RAND Corporation. 1993

Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. <em>Swarming and the Future of Conflict</em>. Santa Monica. RAND Corporation. 2000

Bonanno, Alfredo. <em>Armed Joy</em>. Baltimore. Firestarter Press. 2003

Clausewitz, Carl von. <em>On War</em>. London, New York. Penguin Books. 1982

Greenwald, Glenn. <em>No Place to Hide</em>. New York, NY. Metropolitan Books. 2014

Marx, Karl and Engels, Freidrich, ed. Tucker, Robert. <em>The Marx- Engels Reader</em>, Second Edition. New York, NY. WW Norton and Company. 1978

Massumi, Brian. <em>Ontopower</em><em>: War, Powers and the State of Perception</em>. Durham, NC, Duke University Press. 2015

Monsieur Dupont. <em>Nihilist Communism</em>. San Francisco, CA. Ardent Press. 2009

Mussolini, Benito. <em>The Doctrine of Fascism</em>. New York, NY. Howard Fertig. 2006

Plato, ed. Cooper, John. <em>Plato, Complete Works</em>. Indianapolis, IN. Hackett Publishing Company.

Ranciere, Jacques. <em>Althusser’s Lesson</em>. New York, NY, Continuum. 2011

Schmitt, Carl. <em>Political Theology</em>. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press. 1985

Sorel, Georges. <em>Reflections on Violence</em>. Mineola, NY.

[[https://www.youtube.com/user/jonasfromm][www.youtube.com]]

Dover Publications. 2004 [[http://www.youtube.com/user/jonasfromm#p/u/10/819UrazJUp4][www.youtube.com]]
</biblio>

[1] 7, Mussolini, Benito. <em>The Doctrine of Fascism</em>. New York, NY. Howard Fertig. 2006

[2] 101, Clausewitz, Carl von. <em>On War</em>. London, NY. Penguin Books. 1982

[3] 118, Clausewitz, Carl von

[4] COINTELPRO was a secret FBI program that officially ran between 1956 and 1971. This program existed to suppress dissent, break up organizations deemed subversive, and gather intelligence. It used means that were often extralegal or outright illegal. The program was exposed when the Citizens’ Commission to Investigate the FBI broke into the FBI offices in Media, Pennsylvania and stole thousands of documents, which they then leaked to the press.

[5] Palantir Technologies, founded by Peter Theil, specializes in particular forms of big-data analysis. The Palantir Gotham suite is widely deployed by police, intelligence, and military units. It allows state entities to input and store large amounts of data, ranging from arrest reports to intelligence gathering products to code enforcement reports. These data are then compared across the Palantir storage matrix to draw correlations used by police, intelligence entities, and military units to target actions and groups.

[6] The RAND Corporation was founded in 1945 by Curtis LeMay, some other military leaders and private industry figures. It was tasked with thinking through infrastructural and military problems connected to the Cold War, with a specific focus on quantitative analysis. It is largely credited with popularizing the concept of mutually-assured destruction during the Cold War, as well as being an incubator for thought around dynamic and kinetic warfare since the Cold War.

[7] 23–25, Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. <em>Cyberwar Is Coming!</em> Santa Monica. RAND Corporation. 1993

[8] 30, Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. <em>Cyberwar Is Coming!</em>

[9] 30–32, Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. <em>Cyberwar Is Coming!</em>

[10] 39–44, Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. <em>Swarming and the Future of Conflict</em>. Santa Monica. RAND Corporation. 2000

[11] 39–44, Arquilla, John and Ronfeldt, David. <em>Swarming and the Future of Conflict</em>. Santa Monica. RAND Corporation. 2000

[12] 1–27, Bonanno, Alfredo. <em>Armed Joy</em>. Baltimore. Firestarter Press. 2003

[13] [[http://www.youtube.com/user/jonasfromm#p/u/10/819UrazJUp4][www.youtube.com]]

[14] Ungdomshuset (Danish for <em>Youth House</em>) was a squatted social center in Copenhagen. When the city government threatened to evict it in 2007, there were large-scale demonstrations protesting that eviction threat. These became riots that lasted many days, which drew a large number of international participants, and came at a pivotal time in US anarchism, when many of the past approaches to mass street actions were being questioned. The events at Ungdomshuset inspired some within the anarchist milieu in the US to explore more confrontational, more asymmetric, and mobility-centric tactics.

[15] The funnel effect occurs when the amount of information being gathered outpaces the ability to analyze the information, leading to filtering processes and analytic backlogs. Matthew Aid, James Bamford and Fred Kaplan have discussed this effect, though not all of them use the term.
<br>
<br>Greenwald, Glenn. <em>No Place to Hide</em>. New York, NY. Metropolitan Books, 2014, 90–170

[16] 446, Marx and Engels, ed. Tucker, Robert. <em>The Marx-Engels Reader</em>, Second Edition. New York, NY. WW Norton and Company. 1978

[17] 185, Adorno, Theodore. <em>Negative Dialectics</em>. New York, NY. Continuum. 1973

[18] 126, Sorel, Georges. <em>Reflections on Violence</em>. Mineola, NY. Dover Publications. 2004

[19] 5–16, Schmitt, Carl. <em>Political Theology</em>. Chicago, IL, University of Chicago Press. 1985