BY BRIAN MASSUMI
»We have met the enemy and he is us« (Pogo). The enemy is no longer outside. Increasingly, the enemy is no longer even clearly identifiable as such. Ever- present dangers blend together, barely distinguishable in their sheer numbers. Or, in their proximity to pleasure and intertwining with the necessary functions of body, self, family, economy, they blur into the friendly side of life. The Cold War in foreign policy has mutated into a state of generalized deterrence against an enemy without qualities. An unspecified enemy threatens to rise up at any time at any point in social or geographical space. From the welfare state to the warfare state: a permanent state of emergency against a multifarious threat as much in us as outside.
Society's prospectivity has shifted modes. What society looks toward is no longer a return to the promised land but a general disaster that is already upon us, woven into the fabric of day-today life. The content of the disaster is unimportant. Its particulars are annulled by its plurality of possible agents and times: here and to come. What registers is its magnitude. In its most compelling and characteristic incarnations, the now unspecified enemy is infinite. Infinitely small or infinitely large: viral or environmental. The Communist as the quintessential enemy has been superseded by the double figure of AIDS and global warming. These faceless, unseen and unseeable enemies, operate on an inhuman scale. The enemy is not simply indefinite (masked, or at a hidden location). In the infinity of its here-and-tocome, it is elsewhere, by nature. It is humanly ungraspable. It exists in a different dimension of space from the human »here« and in a different dimension of time: neither »now» of progress, nor the cultural past as we traditionally knew it, nor a utopian future in which we will know that past again. Elsewhere and elsewhen. Beyond the pale of our accustomed causal laws and classification grids. The theory that HIV is the direct »cause» of AIDS is increasingly under attack. More recent speculations suggest multiple factors and emphasize variability of symptoms. AIDS, like global warming, is a syndrome: a complex of effects coming from no single, isolatable place, without a linear history, and exhibiting no invariant characteristics.
»Scary« does not denote an emotion any more than »terrorist« denotes an ideological position or moral value. The words are not predicates expressing a property of the substantive to which they apply. What they express is a mode,the same mode: the imm(a)(i)nence of the accident. The future anterior with its anteriority bracketed: »will have (fallen).« Fear is not fundamentally an emotion. It is the objectivity of the subjective under late capitalism. It is the mode of being of every image and commodity and of the groundless self- effects their circulation generates. Capitalist power actualizes itself in a basically uninhabitable space of fear. That much is universal. The particulars of the uninhabitable landscape of fear in which a given body nevertheless dwells vary according to the socially- valorized distinctions applied to it by selective mechanisms of power implanted throughout the social field. An urbanized North American woman dwells in a space of potential rape and battering. Her movements and emotions are controlled (filtered, channeled) by the immanence of sexual violence to every coordinate of her socio-geographical space-time. The universal »we,« that empty expression of unity, inhabits the in-between of the gunman, his victim, and the policeman. »We» are Marc Lépine, at the same time as »we» are the fourteen women of the Polytechnique, and the police official whose daughter has just died. »We« are every subject position. »We» extraordinary ordinary people are men or women without qualities, joined in fear. The mass media, in their »normal» functioning, are specialized organs for the inculcation of stupidity. Stupidity is not a lack, of information or even of intelligence. Like fear, it is an objective condition of subjectivity: a posture. Stupidity is the affect proper to the media, the existential posture built into the technology of the broadcast apparatus and its current mode of social implantation. The media affect--fear-blur--is the direct collective perception of the contemporary condition of possibility of being human: the capitalized accident- form. It is the direct collective apprehension of capitalism's powers of existence. It is vague by nature. It is nothing as sharp as panic. Not as localized as hysteria. It doesn't have a particular object, so it's not a phobia. But it's not exactly an anxiety either; it is even fuzzier than that. It is low-level fear. A kind of background radiation saturating existence (commodity consummation/ consumption).
The mass media works to shortcircuit the event. It blurs the event's specific content into an endless series of »like« events. (Stupidity may also be defined as perception and intellection restricted to a recognition reflex; difference subordinated to an a priori similarity-effect.) »Like« events rush past. No sooner does one happen than it is a has-been. The who? what? when? and where? become a whatnot? (»anything can happen«) and what's next? (»what is this world coming to?«) The externalization and objectification of memory and the infinite repeatability of the event distances cause from effect. The event floats in mediasuspended animation, an effect without a cause, or with a vague or clich?d one? The jarring loose of cause and effect does not, as has often been argued from a Baudrillardian perspective, make power mechanisms obsolete. Quite the opposite, it opens the door for their arbitrary exercise.
The media shortcircuiting of the specificity of the event opens the way for mechanisms of power to reset social boundaries along roughly historical lines. In other words, in favor of traditionally advantaged groups (whites, males, heterosexuals). It is only an apparent contradiction that these are the very groups in the best position to profit from the socio-economic fluidity of late capitalism. Fluidity and boundary-setting are not in contradiction, for two reasons. First, the boundaries themselves are as easily displaceable as the perception of risk. »The family» is a code word for an immensely complex set of laws, regulations, charity campaigns, social work, medical practices, and social custom that varies locally and is under constant revision. The boundaries of »the family» fluctuate as welfare, abortion, and tax laws change, as church influence and temperance movements rise and recede ... »The family«- -any bounded social space--simply does not exist as an effectively self-enclosed, self- identical entity. »Bounded« social spaces are fields of variation. The only thing approaching a structural invariant is the high statistical probability that wherever the boundary moves, the (im)balance of power will move with it (the advantaged group will stay advantaged, in one way or another). The second reason is that the nature of the »boundary« has changed. The individual is defined more by the boundaries it crosses than the limits it observes: how many times and with whom has one crossed the boundary of the family by growing up, getting married/living together, and divorcing/ breaking up? how many times has one been in and out of prison, and for what? how does one negotiate the everyday yet elusive distinction between work and leisure? how many jobs or professions has one had? how many sexual orientations? how many »looks«? how many times has one gone from consumption to self-production by buying to be?
The self is a process of crossing boundaries. The same could be said of the state. With the transnationalization of capital and the proliferation of world trade and political organizations (IMF, World Bank, World Court, UN, EEC, US- Canada free trade) a state is defined at least as much by the way in which it participates in processes greater than itself--none of which exercises full sovereignty over it, or »encloses« it in an all-encompassing higher power on the nineteenth-century nation-state model--as by the way it exercises its own brand of partial sovereignty over processes smaller than it (in the US, domestic apparatuses of power operating on a »checks and balances« principle). The generalization of the capitalized accident-form has virtualized the boundary, which now exists less as a limit than an immanent threshold. Every boundary is present everywhere, potentially. Boundaries are set and specified in the act of passage. The crossing actualizes the boundary--rather than the boundary defining something inside by its inability to cross. There is no inside, and no outside. There is no transgression. Only a field of exteriority, a network of more or less regulated passages across thresholds. What US president will not push the jurisdictional limits of the executive branch? Particularly as regards war powers. What country will the US not invade if it sees fit? And what country invaded by the US will not open the war on the US home front through the threat, implied or stated, of terrorism? The borders of the state are continually actualized and reactualized, on the domestic side by constant fluctuations in jurisdiction, and internationally by regular flows of people and goods (customs and trade regulations) and exceptional flows of violence (invasion, terrorism).
»This will not be another Vietnam.« --George Bush The capitalist relation cannot unify without at the same time dividing. It cannot optimize and globalize the capitalized flow of people and goods without producing local rigidifications. It cannot fluidify without concretizing here and there, now and again. It was inevitable that the end of the Cold War and the opening of the »Soviet bloc» to the world capitalist economy would multiply regional »hot» wars. The political-economic expression of the capitalist accident-form (generalized deterrence) cannot actualize itself without simultaneously alienating itself in the often horrendous content of a local disaster. There will be more Vietnams. Any number of them, in any number of guises. Crime »war«, drug »war«, »battle« for the family ... Wherever there is a perceived danger, there is deterrence; wherever there is deterrence, there are immanent boundaries; and wherever there are immanent boundaries, there is organized violence. For having boundaries that are actualized by being crossed is a very precarious way to run a world. It leaves little space for negotiated crisis management. Either the crossing trips established regulatory power mechanisms into operation as it actualizes the boundary, and the traditional imbalance of power holds; or the crossing eludes or overwhelms regulatory mechanisms, and the only ready response to the threat to the privilege of the traditionally advantaged groups is »offering« the enemy a »choice« between unconditional surrender and maximum force (this could be dubbed the George Bush »Saddam Hussein theory» of political free will). The social and political fluidity of late capitalism has not been accompanied by a withering away of state violence. On the contrary, it has also been fluidified and intensified. The rapid deployment force is the model of late capitalist state violence, on all fronts: the ability to descend »out of nowhere,» anywhere, at a moment's notice--the virtualization of state violence, its becoming-immanent to every coordinate of the social field, as unbounded space of fear. Rapid deployment is a correlate of deterrence. The ever-ready exterminating SWAT team is as characteristic of late-capitalist power as productive mechanisms tied to surveillance and probabilization, which virtualize power as control. The virtualization of power as violence through rapid deployment is accompanied by a displacement of command. Command is depoliticized, in the sense that it is not open to negotiation through elective or administrative channels but remains fully in the »untied« hands of delegated »experts« (Bush: »I will not tie the generals' hands«). Command turns absolute and unyielding. War, crime, drugs, sexual, educational or artistic »subversion«: on every front of the capitalist warfare state a rapid deployment force will enter into operation, if not officially then on a vigilante basis. To each »enemy» its custom-tailored SWAT team. Media watch groups are examples of how rapid deployment operates in the cultural sphere: the absolute vigilance of obsessive surveillance, then the second an offending image sneaks past, a preemptive strike against future incursions in the form of instant boycott.
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