Re: War Culture
For ages we’ve lived under the proverb of “fight fire with fire”, but this scripture has had its day. Any adult knows that to kill a flame, one has to remove its oxygen.
These were the things that drew me back to Russia, which I saw first in its utterly darkest days. The heroism, the sacrifice, the comradeship, and the joy that went with it. The joy of pioneers who, in the midst of hardship, exult to believe that they are creating something new. I, too, had this sense that something new was being created. Something that had never been before in human history. I wanted to have a share in it, I wanted at least to understand it. Was it only the comradeship and joy of battle that always come to compensate for bitter times of struggle? Was it only the fellowship of suffering? Or was it really something new in the world?
— Anna Louis Strong, 1921-23, Soviet Union
East Village
Years ago, Samuel and I exchanged handwritten letters, the baby blue color of his paper still clear in my mind, the last name of his letterhead slashed out. We’re both romantics that way, but tonight our paths would finally cross for an innocuous dinner. When he texts me the pin of a restaurant and informs me that it’s Ukrainian, my eyes roll upon reading the message. As I enter Veselka in the East Village, it’s a near exact picture of what I had anticipated: blue-yellow flags are strewn along the ceiling; Ukraine-branded merchandise are scattered around; the waiters run frantically in shirts printed with “my heart beets for Ukraine;” and—the piece de resistance—an amateur painting indistinguishable from an Ai generated artwork illustrating Volodymyr Zelenskyy split down the middle between his two costumes: a presidential suit on the left and tactical gear on the right. All of this displaying allegiance to a national identity like it’s a sports team. Arriving late, Samuel immediately bursts into comments about his brother evacuating Gaza after his position at UNRWA was compromised due to its recent defunding. He talks quickly, exasperated. Over dinner, we discuss the genocide, Israel’s crimes, and other political or cultural developments (regressions rather). Later that night at home, I refer to his Instagram which I hadn’t seen in years, only to find he’s recently made a tribute post to Henry Kissinger following the warmonger’s death (this is after mentioning at dinner that he’s proud of his self-awareness for an older white man). The following week, Samuel texts me a movie poster for one Veselka—apparently, the restaurant is so exceptional that they need a biopic. It seems now that the only prizes we all take away from our endless wars, fights, and suffering are increased forms of media self-representation. Our social or political progress is negligible just give us more of ourselves in our content, feed us back into us.
So I guess this is where we begin: we’re adrift in a spectral field of the Imperial Subjects, the citizens of a crashing Empire, our lives algorthimed by cybernetic global regulation. The entire population of the planet is at war with one another and all political technology seems to become more austere with the passage of days. The United States and its intelligence partner in the United Kingdom cling onto whatever historic Imperialist power they still have, utilizing all of their proxies between Europe, South America, Australia, and the Israel Project to conjure war—and it’s bleeding them dry. This grouping makes up the unipolar Empire so-called “The West” with it’s a sea of three-letter organizations acting as tentacles. Opposing this global force is the multipolar architecture of the self-identified BRICS Empire. Their satellites are, more or less, the mass of smaller nations of the Non-Aligned Movement who maintain independence but may be economically inclined to follow the lead of BRICS, which operates a soft power in its foreign policy. While the citizens of all the globe’s nations are subject to whatever policy their overarching sovereign deems necessary, the Subject becomes a police-like agent of the sovereign. And then there are the billionaires who shape this world like Play-Doh. Because of the resulting sociopolitical and economic chaos of these systems, resistance guerrilla organizations and criminal mobs—petty to grand—spring up everywhere as fringe combatants (guns for hire, in many cases). Or the manifesto-to-propaganda of the deed pipeline—there have already been three cases of self-immolation since October 7 (that I’m aware of). Simple protest is now rendered criminal—or is simply futile. Lost in the midst of this are people like you or I, who in reading and writing this, seek to deactivate constituted power of all forms and return the sovereign to the body—either biological or socially organized. We seek an immediate diplomacy, and we’re tasked with creating it despite one Empire’s collapse in The West and its reconstituting between China and Russia. For those of us living within the Empire, our greatest risks are the globe-spanning surveillance technology and carceral matrixes of both Empires and their virtually ubiquitous law for dictating life—and, in many cases, capturing or killing it with impunity. Finding ourselves here, our greatest weapons become love, secrecy, counter-intelligence, and targeted “attack”. We operate with destitute power, an inherently decolonial political technology capable of positively reorienting our social world.
Nightlife
Yea, I had considered going down the security track—just for survival purposes—but never imagined it would actually happen. After getting back into hospitality the idea slipped my mind. Until that is, I burnt myself out on hospitality. Now, as I realize myself checking iD’s at a hookah lounge in Sheepshead Bay, I’m baffled. At the heart of Ukrainian Miami, the demographic is mostly Russian-speaking immigrants from outside of Russia (primarily Ukrainians followed by Uzbeks, Azerbaijanis, and Tajiks) with some White Jews and Black Americans. With the area being much more car-centric than other parts of the city, it’s fascinating to learn how important it is for people to flaunt their status in a way not quite so obvious in Manhattan—save for Park Avenue (While the owner of this humble lounge drives a roughly $200,000 Maybach-Mercedes SUV, his general manager drives a $100,000 BMW i7 coupe. Both with paper plates. One regular arrives in a new Bentley SUV, most show up in whatever high-end models that've been produced in the last few years. All this for what is quite an innocuous and roughly-assembled “luxury” environment. The president of the security firm, Sirhey, said “it’s a fancy spot, I think you’re gonna like it”). My therapist Evgeny, an older Belarusian, agreed that this was a common trait of immigrants from Eurasia who migrated to the US in search of more prosperous lifestyles (But these types of social games happen anywhere really. Back home in Texas, this same type of competition is about who drives the most souped-up truck to the hot, new “rustic” establishment). But this is all just part of my education here. There are some benefits to the job too, one of them being that I don’t have to perform the usual social roles—“you like it because you don’t have to be nice” Evgeny joked. And sure, I don’t have to be nice per se. But really, it allows me to be an outside party to social life in the Imperium—which now, to me, is totally flattened. Rather than this being a result of the job, I think it could be that I’ve ended up here by my internal work. This job is seemingly a natural fit, it allows me to remain beyond a certain social threshold and to operate politics from that position. So I’m a diplomat now—I’m called upon to resolve immediate social issues wherever it is that I’m stationed, the benevolent actor that I am. Neither police officer nor perpetrator nor victim, not even citizen, but something else.
Naturally, this is a primary contributor to that social flattening. The other has been my deteriorating social life aided by my bad experiences in NYC’s techno underground. For a moment I worked at Basement—one of the city's largest techno venues with a big chink in its armor: its liberal management team and aggressive security system. While their house rules condemn discrimination of any kind, while they keep a Ukrainian flag hanging above the club’s entrance since Russia initiated its “special operation” in 2022, they’d silently remove me from the company Whatsapp group without explicitly terminating my employment after a month on the job. When I inquired with a manager, he informed me that “our team is moving in a different direction.” Asking for clarity, he doubled down on the vague statement. It was obvious that my life was worthless to them—as if being fired on a moment's notice isn't disastrous in every case. After I recovered, I’d continue going out only to eventually feel an overwhelming sense that NYC’s underground circuits are little more than fashion-art-advertising business conferences dressed in radical clothing. You find the young artists and writers there too and it’s been the one link that keeps me involved. Yet this is outweighed by the flat, market-oriented culture we find everywhere within this Imperial core. Here, only cool kids are in. But I’m not interested in being cool. Despite all of this, I still, and always will, love techno. Only now, it’s less of a social exercise for me. At least in New York, and at this current hour. My nightlife as of late has been reserved almost exclusively for my performance as security guard.
One night back in Sheepshead Bay, right at midnight as we were closing, a group of three young Jewish boys haggled with the host and demanded entry because their friends were already seated. One of them, wearing a grey Nike Tech tracksuit and white Air Force 1s couldn’t have been older than 15. The other two, hardly older than 20, wore suits. All three of them wore kippah. After finding their friends, a group of girls all in gowns, they hung out and refused to leave, “y’all close at midnight? ahh, come on.” The girls quickly left without a fight, but the two boys in suits began to press. One stood in place, blankly staring ahead at two paintings on the wall, and as I gently pulled on his shoulder urging him to move along, he firmly pushed back against my hand, holding his position. “Strong. Immovable. I like that,” I delivered smoothly. He couldn’t help but crack a smile. “Who’s the manager? I want to buy these paintings,” he remarks smugly. “Come back tomorrow and you can see about buying the paintings,” I reply to no avail, he continues to persist. The manager approaches and informs the boy that he will not sell the paintings to him, to which the boy reacts, “oh, yea? Well, tomorrow I’ll stop by with my dad and we’ll see about that.” Then the two boys in suits began to circle around me like jackals to prey, asking invasive questions, “So where are you from? What’d you say your name was? Where did you go to college? Where do you live?” Staring at them, I mock their malicious curiosity. After about 10 minutes of urging them to exit the lounge, they finally began to leave. Not before the art enthusiast yells to me, “This is your last night on the job! My dad will make sure of that!” Undoubtedly the offspring of zionists, I thought to myself this must be the kind of encirclement tactics that Israeli settlers use on Palestinians to drive them off their land. Later, one of the waiters tells me, “yea, you should have said ‘you and your dad can suck my dick.’” This same waiter who, when talking about a few other Jewish patrons one night told me that “one day I’m going to lose it and kick them.” The Them in his phrase was alarming because it was the distinct kind of Them that implied not only the patrons but Jews as a people.
One night a week I work as a barback at a hip spot in Brooklyn, and here we never speak of political phenomena—it’s incredible how much we can talk without ever acknowledging what’s going on in the wider world. That is until I met Ladi, a young financial analyst who just started a job at Morgan Stanley. From Punjab, he immigrated here to New York to escape the internal conflicts in India between Punjabis and the rest of the nation. Not religious and seeking a more modern way of life in the US, he told me that most of his brothers and cousins back home are either dead or gun-wielding gangsters. When he sits at the bar, we discuss political economy in a break from the tawdry norms of the millennial high-dive culture in Williamsburg (where I’ve heard the Mexican construction workers who are tasked with renovating the bar referred to as a “herd”). And I enjoy Ladi, his style and enthusiasm when he speaks, his dark sense of humor. On occasion, when I see him sitting alone browsing dating apps between pool shots, I’ve considered asking him out for a drink. But he’s straight, and I anxiously talk myself out of it. He’s outgoing, always talking with the other regulars, but I guess he doesn’t have much luck with the local women—who are, for the most part, white inclined toward white. The one Indian woman he did meet here, a sales rep for a beer company, told him that she “hates Indians,” then did a bump of coke and asked if he wanted to fuck. This was the first time they’d ever met and it was only 5 pm. One night after asking a regular what he does for work, he mentions digital infrastructure and how he just got back from an assignment in Hawaii. When I asked who he worked for, he replied vaguely with “a government subcontractor.” No doubt some form of Military Intelligence technician, I quietly replied “ah, ok” as we gave each other inquisitive stares, and I kept on with my work. Such is the condition of the millennials in this post-gentry neighborhood, one which feels to me like a Start-Up in decay.
In one of my final gigs as a doorman for hookah lounges, before my company reassigned me to a new role, I’d spend a long night at a lounge off Avenue U on the N line. While not too far from Sheepshead Bay, the difference was that this lounge was primarily made up of Black clientele. Were it not for a young Asian manager who was very persistent about my checking IDs, even when patrons were clearly over the legal drinking age, I would have sat down most of the night waiting for a situation to arise that might need my attention. That moment came as a group of eight began to trickle out and I hear a waiter ask in panic, “Did they pay?!” Shrugging my shoulders, the waiter informs the manager who then runs out to chase down the group with me not far behind. As he approached them shouting, “Hey! Come back! You need to pay!” One of the aggressive young men in the group begins shouting in response, “Nigga’s talking to us like we’re kids. Fuck out of here! I’ll choke his Chinese faggot ass!” He continues to shout obscenities, insisting to his friend that she shouldn’t pay. Reluctantly, the young woman hands her card over to the manager while grumbling insults. Looking at me, the guy continues, “and he brought his mans out here. You good, bro?!” To which I purse my lips and nod, looking at him in a way to attempt to show that I wasn’t here to fight. “That’s what I thought. Fuck out of here.” Having received payment, I follow the manager back inside and he immediately returns to the flow of service, seemingly unphased by what just happened. Later, another group arrives and the manager asks all of them to present their IDs. When I make it to this coy, young Black woman, she hands me her ID on which I notice a picture of, presumably, her mother. Immediately cracking a smile and looking up at her, she shyly smiles looking back. We both understand the message, and I return the card without a word. At 4 am as the place is closing, three drunk Italian men linger on a sofa finishing the last of their drinks. One of them informs me that they own and operate the meat dealer next door and that they came to the lounge after closing the shop only to be opening yet again in two hours to serve the Easter Sunday rush.
Our societies are intellectual shanty towns. Our beliefs about the world and each other have been created by the same system that has lied us into repeated wars that have killed millions […] Our civilization is only as strong as its ideas are true
Upper West Side
Pulling up to 72nd street, the train car doors open and I step out only to be in immediate proximity to a police officer who’s casually chatting with a colleague and has NYPD COUNTERTERRORISM embroidered on the back of his bulletproof vest. What’s supposed to make me feel safe only reminds me that danger is imminent, if not by this officer then by whatever novel forms of terrorism that are invented all the time—either by Empire’s manufacture, meddling, or psyop. The terrorists du jour are migrant gangs passing through the immigrant flood at the borders of Texas. What makes the situation in New York so absurd is the pure contradiction of Governor Hochul and Mayor Adams promoting their Sanctuary City only to deploy National Guard and counter-terror units to combat the social fallout. It’s the kind of contradiction that only spells dirty money and corruption—there is a lot of capital flowing through this issue, after all. This is also true for the War on Drugs whose protracted failure has stuffed pockets of the security, police, and cartel systems since 1971, whose destabilization creates those gangs. For the citizens here who direct their frustration toward migrants, they fail to call this out as an issue of policy and negligence. All blame lies at the head. And of course, this all masks itself as a racial issue as well. To certain ears, “migrant” is the new dog whistle term for economically poor non-white foreigners. Just like “terrorist” is the dog whistle for Muslim Arabs abroad (or, domestically, for anyone who shows the slightest non-conformity—whatever, and whoever pushes back against all neutralizing forms of regulation. In simple terms, whoever protests).
On Easter Sunday, I decided to attend the Church of the Holy Trinity on 65th—a Liberal Lutheran congregation—simply because they host Bach concerts each Sunday at 5 pm (and the program for this holy day was BWV 4, a cantata which includes one of my favorite pieces Jesus Christus Gottes Sohn. Well, just the Stokowki transcription really). It's the first time I’ve been to church in years and I didn't expect to also sit through a traditional service, so you can imagine my surprise as a young, flamboyant reverend begins delivering his prepared sermon. It's a rather unusual telling of the Jesus story sprinkled with Gen-Z slang and phrasing that eventually ends with a strong “Christ does not negotiate with terrorists!” Funny only in the most tragic sense, I huff quietly and my body is immediately filled with despair. Growing up in the Houston evangelical scene, I’m accustomed to the Republican-style demonization sermons. But in a church that prides itself on “welcoming all persons in Christ’s name regardless of sexual orientation, race, ethnic origin, gender, class or other possible exclusionary distinctions,”1 it’s bizarre to see a Liberal demonization sermon play out before my eyes. With this sermon taking place in the Upper West Side to a mostly affluent, older, white congregation it’s impossible to ignore the association between this reverend’s use of the word terrorist and its inherent link to the Palestinian genocide. The demographic here is, in fact, the primary supporter of the Israel Project—and the primary viewership for media platforms who favor the words Hamas and Terrorist, who dare not risk humanizing Gaza with Palestinians. As the musicians finish their last song, the ushers walk to the front of the aisle with their copper bowls and I quietly slip out exchanging a nod and glance with one of the ushers by the door. He understands.
Before living here, I didn’t feel as if I were actually living in New York City. Brooklyn, for all its good, just isn’t Manhattan. Sure it’s expensive here but I got lucky with my room, and now I can walk to wherever it is that I might need to go within just a few minutes—hardware, quality food, shoe repair, banks, transportation, postal and office centers. Although, I still can’t afford any of the neighborhood gyms. En route to the local Fairway, I always pass below an industrial scaffolding with large pillars, and plastered on each of these pillars are the now infamous KIDNAPPED propaganda featuring the portraits of captive Israelis. These posters are a kind of sacred symbol for certain reactionary citizens—made evident by the viral video of Mohamad Khalil who attempted to take one down, was assaulted, and then arrested for it.2 One morning as I pass the posters, I notice all of the faces have been blotted out with black spray paint. An older woman, hunched over her basket, looks up and notices the same letting out “Now that’s just mean,” and I laugh perversely under my breath thinking “Mean? This is war.” Another morning I pass by and all of the posters have been replaced with fresh ones.
Bensonhurst
While on the subway toward Brooklyn after a night playing drag bingo at Boxers in Chelsea, one of my early New York City playmates Nathaniel reveals to me that he’s a fifth-generation Syrian Jew. He’s a scruffy, handsome 67-year-old and a real funny guy, spends most of his time looking for new jokes or telling his favorite. What was cute on our first hookup quickly became annoying as he entrenched himself into a one-way emotional connection with me over our subsequent sessions, texting me memes and links to Facebook reels every day. But my personality has been updating recently, transgressing into new territory. As time goes on I find funny people, humor-as-genre, less attractive. Online, I come across some screenshots from an interview with Andrei Tarkovsky where he remarks “It’s true that funny people annoy me and I can’t stand them. Only impeccable souls have the right to cheerfulness - either children or old people.” One could argue the conditions of impeccability here, and of course, all old people do not have impeccable souls—look no further than the sheer number of aging politicians in Congress. The first time visiting Nathaniel’s place in Bensonhurst, I observed all of the Jewish-branded trinkets and religious tokens: Mezuzahs, Menorahs, Torahs, framed Hebrew texts, and Star of David branded merchandise. Being non-affiliated to religions, I acknowledged all of these objects and was not moved by them. Then a thought comes that because he’s a descendant of Syria, paired with Israel’s ongoing attacks on Syria, perhaps he'd sympathize with the oppressed. But I'm proven wrong. Back to tonight, on the piss-scented subway car with a houseless person sleeping on a bench at the other end of it, we somehow end up on the subject of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians—he calls it the Hamas War, naturally. We exchange the usual “Well, Palestine…” and “But, Israel…” His worst belief being that Palestinians voluntarily migrated during the first Nakba—something so deranged I cannot fathom how one comes to believe it. As if there has ever been a case in nature where life is expelled from its home voluntarily. Later I find an article by Ilan Pappe countering the seemingly popular Zionist myth.3 Even though Nathaniel doesn’t necessarily read, I send it to him anyway. He ignores it and replies hours later with a link to a Facebook reel captioned “JOKE OF THE YEAR.”
By vocation and by design conceptual language places us in a position of attack.
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During its long course, the pattern of domination by conceptual objectification is perhaps challenged only by the henologists
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The step that the henologists took to transgress the metaphysical domination by some ultimate representation can teach us something for transgressing the technological domination by global regulation.
— Reiner Schürmann in Neoplatonic Henology as an Overcoming of Metaphysics, P. 37 & 39 [pdf]
Lisbon
I first met Stewart in Berlin at the end of 2018. He was a charming musician of British origin and our first few dates over the months were all very dandy. In early 2019, I left Berlin but we kept in touch, and by the autumn of 2021 we made things official when I carted myself over to Lisbon where he had relocated during the pandemic. Naively having ignored all the red flags and misalignments early on, things became real when he consistently made reference to his nostalgia of growing up in occupied Hong Kong—the indentured servants whose names he can’t remember felt “like family”, his Royal Navy Officer of a father defined his standard of a gentleman. Because it was the Brits who indeed created the gentleman, a false consciousness that has penetrated the world so deeply that those who were oppressed by this gentleman now try to appropriate its colonial affects. Any man wearing a suit is a Gentleman no matter how egregious his personality or bankrupt his politics. Stewart had dreams of going to China—“going home”—and he’d often joke about his desire for Chinese boys to carry him on a litter when he arrived. We got into small arguments all the time. One night that argument was over an ongoing civil case Lanier v. Harvard—as detailed in Ariella Azullay’s moving article.4 Stewart found no fault in Harvard’s perceived ownership of images captured of the Lanier family during their enslavement, images that French colonists made to prove the inferiority of the Laniers. After a heated discussion, I began to weep—partly because of the frustration of the argument, but mostly because I hated that I’d given my life up to be with someone so cruel—and as I lay crying, he poured himself another glass of whiskey while looking down upon me. As an Englishman in Portugal, he often referred to himself as an expat—sometimes satirically, other times in earnest. By July of 2022, we moved to Ho Chi Minh City where he quickly abandoned the expat identity as he learned of its harsh segregation within the city and the gross presence of the so-called “sexpats” there. He didn’t want to be lumped in with them. But he still couldn’t help objectify Vietnam and her people through an orientalized view, always making sweeping, romantic references to “them.” By September, I organized myself to leave him.
Back in Lisbon, we had a French neighbor who owned a small plot of land that he had turned into an agricultural zone. After a couple of visits to his land, he invites me to a garden party of sorts—saying that many of his friends will be there hosting a fundraiser for their “group”. On the day I return, and before entering the garden, I pass by two young Black parents and their child using a grill just beside the gate. Uninvited guests, residents of the assemblage of small shacks that housed the other impoverished neighbors in the alleyway behind our apartment block. While we enjoyed the community garden the young family looked on, enjoying a cheap barbecue. I met several members of that group—mostly French—who turned out to be an “anarchist” situation that assembled in a large residential building not far away. A building they operate within the aesthetics of a slum not because they have to but because it's more authentic to their anarchist-punk identity—rather than politics, a punk rock concert in the basement was of the most pressing issues. Later I learned that some wealthy friend purchased the building for them. Much later someone tells me that the French man who owned the small plot of land was able to purchase it after his parents sold a local hotel for several million Euro. He bought land, his sister bought a house, and his parents returned to France—meanwhile, we were all active participants in a gentrification shock felt throughout Portugal. 500 years after taking the world, Europe now re-takes itself from itself. Colonialism—call it gentrification—now more down to earth wearing ripped jeans and speaking in a cool, enlightened cadence. And so my tenure with this group would end after we activated a small graffiti on a popular street in the neighborhood, something denouncing Portugal’s mistreatment of Black immigrant women in prisons. After asking when we’d organize the next one, the group seemed less than enthused to keep the ball rolling. My friend Fia, a native Lisboner, would mock them when I told her these stories.
I wouldn’t understand until years later that there was a reason why, for example, Fia didn’t consider me a neocolonist. Or why in Lisbon I was interested in working with the Unions, or in Vietnam studying Political Science at their communist universities. When I moved internationally, I never did so as an Imperial Subject seeking to carve out a colony of sorts but as a non-subject engaged in material struggle. Things are always clearer in hindsight. There was this Tasca I would stop by often, Robelo e Alfonso, right on a street corner in Graça—they weren’t online, they had no brand. It was opaque. The neighborhood was besieged by French settlers and the locals were quickly being priced out of the market, so I’d drink there wondering how long they’d last. Silently drinking too timid to make my presence loud. Drinking silently as I watched the regular patrons do their thing—old drunks stagger in and out the door onto the cobblestone footpaths; mothers and grandmothers meeting for an afternoon lunch; working men having a beer and a meal while watching a soccer game; or, noticing the old couple who ran the place and how they’d leave a dried piglet on the counter top all day long, carving off meat for the sandwiches they offered. In this place, I chose to be part of it, and they welcomed me by proximity. No one made a fuss about my being there, even when they took notice of my frequency. I would try my best not to let the owner—a strong, chubby man in his 60s—know that I was checking him out, even though he knew. It’s also where I saw one of the greatest paintings I’ve ever witnessed: a little brown and white dog curled up and sleeping on the floor inside of a home, its eyes gently closed. Probably made by the child of someone here, it hung crooked directly above the cafe door. The image still comes to mind often. I always told people about the place, how it was my favorite bar in the city, but only two others ever joined me: Fia, who loved it, and Stewart, who complained about the lack of hygiene.
When all human political capacities are subsumed into a cybernetic worldview, there is no way to engage in political critique from the point of view of a subject, as a political body which exists outside this worldview. It can only be engaged from the point of view of an object totally within a cybernetic society, as information reflexively feeds back into the process. Petitions must be signed, funds must be divested, and protests must present themselves at cybernetic society's doorstep and negotiate on its terms. Critiques of capitalism, and so too critiques of all aspects of postmodern society subsumed into it, become incapable of suggesting external alternatives.
— M.Y.B, Where Does A Body Begin, p. 99-100
Imperial Subjectivity
The modern Imperial Subject has now reached its summit with the Zionists who occupy Palestine and arrogantly boast of their crimes on Social Media. These Zionists and their acolytes have, suffice to say, killed in themselves all sense of humanity—the term “Soul Loss” has been circulating on social media recently. Having flipped through the book Negative Ethnicity: from Bias to Genocide, this example is fresh on my mind too.5 Adhering to the claim that they’re “fighting terrorism” like a bad song that’s been playing ever since the World Trade Center fell, Empire maintains a stronghold over language therefore legitimizing Zionism, sanitizing Israel as “the only democracy in the Middle East” (the recent weaponization of the term anti-semitism used for character assassinations on anyone who disagreed with Israel, is another prime example of this conditioning). Empire prefers things to be clean, touting the chauvinist ”international rules-based order.” And despite the material facts about the destructive Israeli project or the bloodlust of its Imperial Subjects, they maintain a mythical self-narrative of their cleanliness. Setting the linguistic and ideological limits, Empire conditions thought within “the flatly positive as a given configuration of things […] a configuration that has been given to [us]. A configuration that has already been thought.”6 This is the area where Emilie Carrier begins her book Technically Man Dwells Upon This Earth, it’s 70 odd pages I’ve turned to countless times since its release last summer. “Thought must first annihilate the dispositive if it is to think beyond the positive. But there can be no critique involved; thought cannot be allowed to founder into negativity. The positivity that would condition thought—what just is—is precisely nothing, and so it is not overcome by negation, but only by that annihilation through which thought strives back toward its own, the unconditioned.”7 And it’s exactly this process of de-conditioning thought—or Vandalizing the Subject as Carrier put it in another text8—that leads us to a new political zone beyond Imperial Subjectivity, even if we were born, bred, and still live within Empire.
Back in September, I met the man that I now consider to be my significant other. It wasn’t love at first sight, in the fairytale sense, but a rather quick and mutual understanding of our shared affections. I’d been single for a year since leaving Stewart in Vietnam and looking back over my first year in New York, I do see a much more nihilistic, sarcastic, and depressed figure than who I am today—or even, who I was before New York. And so it seems that a few of my friends had grown accustomed to who I was in a post-breakup moment of subconsciously heightened hedonism. Meeting my S.O. influenced me toward, what I believe is, the better. During breakfast one morning, we discussed my drug use at the raves—cocaine, ketamine—and he expressed his concerns regarding the fentanyl-laced powders going around, or the drug trade and its destructive supply chain issues. At that moment, we made a pact that I would kick those drugs. In my mind, a small sacrifice for what seemed a promising new relationship. At dinner with the above-mentioned friends, this issue caused a fissure, “he sounds controlling, you should dump him. You’re an adult and can do whatever drugs you want.” To say the least, our trajectories split from that moment onward in a rather unspoken vibe shift. When I had first mentioned this budding relationship to one of these friends, their first question was “Is he a zionist?” After our brief exchange on the topic, they finished with a rather decisive “I don’t want to meet him.” And it’s this kind of thinking that has long made it difficult for me to keep friends with people of my generation, and reversely what keeps my relationships with older men so singular. While I may be able to transgress social boundaries and meet anyone where they are, this is often not the case across varying social planes within the Imperium. Bias is perhaps the second fascistic tendency of Imperial Subjects. Preceding that is probably a social “imperative of clarity, transparency, which is the first imprint of imperial power on bodies.”9
At the last protest I attended in November, beginning at Bryant Park and concluding outside of Penn Station, I followed the march from the periphery. In the sense of being there as a watchdog, I straddled the march waiting for “immediately political problems”10 to arise and beg my action. It was odd to watch the protestors, so impassioned, juxtaposed with pedestrians who, in a moment of cultural tourism while carrying shopping bags, laughed and captured the scene with their phone cameras. Suddenly, this crowd of no more than 1000 people felt quite small, a flash in the pan of New York City, microscopic against the reach and influence of the AIPAC-ADL and weapons lobbyists in DC who are entirely unmoved by this activity, along with the rest of the Capital Hill’s Jewish Mega-Doners11 who shape this policy against Palestine. And all of this action of the protest was then reduced to social media posts, or excerpts in the daily news roundups. In the periphery along with me and the other watchdogs were the NYPD who marched along to contain the protest to its city-approved limits, blurring the lines between protestor and police. While a protest against genocide is just, pro-Palestine positions are already absorbed into the imperial Left—who disguises itself behind liberatory rhetoric. In a similar operation to the capitalization of George Floyd’s murder by the BLM movement organizers eventually funding their real estate aspirations, my trust in this American Left is tried. While the early part of my 20s were defined by my queer leftist position, the fascistic takeover of identity politics and censorship through Cancel Culture saw me quietly avert myself from that camp. It’s through all of this that I understood “the police is not just an organ of power, but also a way of thinking.”12 Growing up within Empire, we are bred with this ideology of war and policing, but I could never realize in myself a Subject who operates within Empire’s austere logic. Yet, my brother is an Army veteran along with his wife’s brother, and our brother-in-law is on active duty in the Navy (the last time we spoke he was considering taking a new role at ICE). My first toys were plastic green soldiers, Nerf guns, and G.I. Joe. In one neighborhood growing up, we kids played a game called “drug dealer.” When I was a teen, I’d simulate being a mass shooter at a Russian airport killing hundreds of civilians in the game Modern Warfare II. While controversial at the time of release, it has subsequently faded into cultural memory and infamy. Most war-based video games now, especially the Call of Duty franchise storylines, generously offer their players a chance at torture and various forms of grotesque murder—“it’s just a game” after all. For my brother, his Afghanistan shell shock is real—he recently shared a photo of the Glock he keeps within arms reach while driving, years ago he opened the trunk of his car revealing to me a shotgun that he keeps there as a lifeline.
Contemplation and Inoperativity
During a few nights as a security guard at the Ukrainian hookah lounge, I passed the time by listening to Anna Louise Strong recant her time in the Soviets following the revolution. Without going into a tangent on the book, it laid out innovative, early communist economic and social experimentation that I'd not quite understood until making contact with Strong.13 It re-invigorated me not toward "communism" in the juvenile sense, but like the opening quote of this article, that sense of creating something new. Yes, the works and behaviors of my contemporary artists cut through the status quo and breathe new life into the matrix—as cultural erosion, evolution, or archive. But it’s thinking politics as an overhaul of political embodiment and ecology that really gets me off. I’m no longer thinking art as a mode of revolution (most of it is just subsumed into capital anyway. For me, it’s personal). I’m thinking thought and behavior, of pioneering politics through bodies and systems—especially as it relates to our immediate social surroundings. An immediate politics as Tiqqun put it and a Systems Biology the way M.Y.B theorizes in the finale of Where Does a Body Begin?14 And it was reading Giorgio Agamben’s What is Destituent Power? that brought things together in this place of contemplation and inoperativity where we use politics to, ultimately, shift the site of its activity.15 Those of us who are impassioned, who contemplate the present and learn from history, who break from conditioned thought and return to thinking thought itself, really must know that we are creating something new. While the old Empire celebrates its imperialist pioneers of the past who sought to create a clearing of land to construct a new colony, it is the non-imperial pioneers of today who are clearing thought to activate a new mode of politics itself—one of truth, comradeship, and cooperation. Let me be slow to speak, averse to fight, and compassionate when disagreement arises. With this in mind, I do maintain a shred of faith in the development of BRICS or Non-Aligned Movement for its emphasis on a non-imperial, global, cooperative political architecture. And because politicians from China and Russia who lead the charge do exhibit intellection, unlike those in The West who play us all for fools. Although intellectual, that is still no reason to give up my trust. China, Russia, and its cohorts will still exercise illegal state power against an individual body when they deem it necessary, their political economies still operate under the same cybernetic logic of life regulation.
Today, our wars primarily present themselves materially in the sheer volume of death and destruction caused either by Empire’s global conflicts or in the fatal daily struggles that result on the local level—the genesis of war-oriented political economies. But the seeds of war’s propagation, the channels of substance floating through it, are intelligence and info-distribution. Assange is jailed for one reason: information and his pioneering approach to it. The targeting system Habsora (or, The Gospel, because Israel has a special way of degrading everything it touches) which identifies Palestinian targets faster than Israel can destroy them,16 operates through the 8200 Intelligence wing of the State. Beyond Palestine, Empire gathers Intelligence for use in cyber weaponry against both its citizens and adversary nations. While Empire’s war profiteers are just several thousands of people going about their business, dealing under as much secrecy as possible, it’s the hundreds of thousands of people working in the Intelligence State globally who are merely technicians that keep it running. When technicians destitute is when we get whistle-blowers (Snowden, Manning, etc). But not all of us will be whistleblowers, computer hackers, or create the next Wikileaks; we may have other callings, strategies, and tactics. The recent propaganda methods of chasing down politicians and shouting at them or trespassing onto ships laden with weapons cargo are great local acts that create mass awareness. But there are dozens of other avenues of operating Intelligence—my sister calls herself an activist of Love. In the US, Tiqqun’s ideas of diffuse guerilla action and the invisible revolt are materialized in the Stop Cop City resistance, with one of its agents publishing anonymously that “Many people have already embraced elements of clandestine guerrilla organization: meeting in private, using encrypted communications, handling cash, practicing operational security and discretion. Without making a qualitative rupture, there is much more that can be done immediately to prepare our movement for the coming months and years.”17 What about diplomacy through potenza distituente? What do I say of influence and subterfuge into cybernetic society’s channels? Not to trick, acting in bad faith with secret desires to overthrow and reconstitute power for personal gain. What if I operate within power to disable it? In the book of Genesis, isn’t it the knowledge of good and evil that is the departure point of biblical politics? Perhaps Intelligence and the responsibility of knowing is the first mode of power.
What is a diplomacy of the immediate? How can we learn from the innovative programs of the first two years after the October Revolution; from organizing resistance to imperial tactics by the Non-Aligned Movement; or in educating ourselves to govern,18 for example? Because when The West finally crumbles (and it will very soon), what social and political ecology that I embody will effortlessly superimpose itself onto the post-dissolved locality? It couldn’t be a constituted party of the mythical people or masses, but something that we embody within ourselves. Agamben notes that
“if revolutions and insurrections correspond to constituent power, that is, a violence that establishes and constitutes the new law, in order to think a destituent power we have to imagine completely other strategies, whose definition is the task of the coming politics. A power that was only just overthrown by violence will rise again in another form, in the incessant, inevitable dialectic between constituent power and constituted power, violence which makes the law and violence that preserves it.19
We don’t have forever to figure this out—economic pollution is making the planet less habitable, hyper-production and use of technology is using up too much of our water and precious metals (strong emphasis here on the outrageous material consumption of war, or the “radical” billionaires who are blindly leading us into hell). It’s a matter of this moment and perhaps the next one maybe two generations. For ages we’ve lived under the proverb of “fight fire with fire”, but this scripture has had its day. Any adult knows that to kill a flame, one has to remove its oxygen.
Finding myself born into antagonistic play with Empire’s cybernetic capitalist governance logic, it is inherent to my political urge that I must necessarily disable its system. In some ways, I already have. When showing a photo of my new work uniform to a friend, zooming in on the security firm’s Thin Blue Line branded patch on my arm, I jokingly said “I’m behind enemy lines!” Am I really? When I applied for the job, sitting down in the small industrial office of a Coney Island apartment building and filling out the paper application, I checked the box NO under the question about communist, nazi, or socialist political ties. I figured it was unnecessary to write, “I’ve read Lenin, Tiqqun, and Agamben.” My interview that day was with Serhiy, the president—a massive Ukrainian man with 30 years of US Army service behind him. He was very stern and we exchanged only a few words. Just after a month in the firm, he met me on the first day of my new assignment; as our meeting ended, he winked and smiled at me while shaking my hand. On our last phone call where he requested me for a night shift at a soccer arena in Queens, speaking in a very familiar and friendly tone, he called me “brother” just before hanging up. Knowing what I know about men at this point, I know that there is now a latent sexual economy that we will likely never speak or act on. But this sexual tension will affect the material world—it always does. It is a mark of our species that men are always at war with other men. Perhaps loving men, and teaching them to love other men, has been my first operation in destituting power. Or rather, was it the act of disabling my Imperial Subject? As for the rest, I’m only getting started.
Only a power that is made inoperative and deposed is completely neutralized.
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Constituent power, which destroys and always recreates new forms of law, without ever completely destituting it, and destituent power, which, in deposing law once and for all, immediately inaugurates a new reality.
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The ‘as not’ is a destitution without refusal. To live in the form of the as-not means to deactivate every juridical and social property, without establishing a new identity. A form-of-life is, in this sense, that which unrelentingly deposes the social conditions in which it finds itself living, without negating them, but simply using them.
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Contemplation and inoperativity are, in this sense, the metaphysical operators of anthropogenesis, which, freeing the living being from every biological or social destiny and from every predetermined task, renders it open for that particular absence of work that we are accustomed to calling ‘politics’ and ‘art’
— Giorgio Agamben, What is Destituent Power?
Epilogue
The doors open and a man enters the mostly empty train car—he’s in his 50s wearing a Carhartt jacket, blue jeans, and white New Balance sneakers. We're sitting perpendicular as he turns to notice me staring and immediately I look down, as does he. Then I peek once and peek again from below the brim of my baseball cap to see him resting his hand across his mouth, staring ahead with his left eye anxious to meet me. Holding my gaze just a bit longer, he catches me with a side-eye and again jolts his gaze away. Looking down then back at him, he’s pretending to observe the train car, first away from me then slowly turning his head toward me while still looking around until finally, he lands directly on my eyes. We hold our gaze for a second and both confirm our suspicions, then quickly look away. My lips grow into a wide smile that I try to hide by looking down, but if he’s looking over then my amusement is obvious. Looking back up, I’m still smirking and he’s staring intently at me when a gentle smile breaks his serious face. We arrive at Atlantic Avenue, and I get up walking toward him. Standing by the door, I look down upon him and he looks up at me gently. As the doors open he rises and I walk out among the small crowd going toward the stairs, checking over my shoulder I can see he’s not far behind. We walk inconspicuously together through the station, both by chance toward the same platform. While waiting for the train, we continue to exchange a few glances while I pace and he stands with both hands hidden in his jeans. The R arrives and he boards, we watch each other as the doors are about to close, and just before they do, he quickly gets off. Now we’re both waiting for the D (of course). When it arrives, we find seats across from each other giving us a face-to-face view. As we depart, and begin looking around to make sure no one is privy to our game, we begin giving each other approving looks. It’s real now. And if a moment of privacy were to present itself, we’d jump on each other without hesitation. One of the times I look over at him, he’s staring between my thighs and looks up at me with a furious, red gaze. My eyebrows lift slightly. Moving my hand into my thigh, I begin to feel myself growing and he takes particular pleasure in it now finding it difficult to break away his gaze. He’s staring right at the cock growing below my cargo pants when I slide my hand up and move my thumb along the head. I do this a bit, rubbing my head and pulsing, which pushes against the fabric. He might at well be salivating now as he’s switching view between my thighs and my face. Suddenly, I begin to pull at the shirt tucked into my waistband and expose a little bit of my belly, giving it a good scratch of my fingers—his eyes nervously bouncing between various erotic points and away to make sure we’re not compromised. After some of this, we arrive at a busy station, and several people sit nearby. After a beat, he uncrosses his legs into a wide straddle and sweeps his hand slowly across the bulge between his thighs while staring at me. As the train pulls into Times Square, we look at each other to gather if this is our stop. When I stand, he continues to sit, and we realize our defeat. Exiting slowly, I turn to see him staring at me, then I give him a half-smile and a little nod—he returns it. All of our desire and promise of intimacy to no avail. A total despair. And still yet sublime. We will both have this moment forever, this connection we cannot describe as anything other than human or something deeply animal.
Some later day, while sitting on a bench at the Holocaust Memorial on the edge of Sheepshead Bay, I contemplate my now decisive relationship to eye contact which is, to my current knowledge, the act of establishing or interjecting oneself. In most cases, it’s extremely intimate. Lack of eye contact in moments where it’s expected also speaks volumes. Consider how it says much more in a moment than words could describe in pages or how we might use it to flirt, to acknowledge, to disarm, or to initiate a fight. It’s how we actually introduce ourselves, and in relationships, it’s how grow. Sometimes the act of looking at and into someone can be a catalyst for too much. After understanding this, I began to avoid it with strangers on the train, on the pavement, or with colleagues during work. It’s my resistance to seeking more, or to opening up needless questions. Because there is always more to discover, and as civilization progresses, we seemingly continue to increase in us this desire for more. A pure excess. But recently I’ve just been wanting less. Much less. To love my family, do the works that I enjoy, and cherish the moments of love, contemplation, joy, or refuge lost between the Total War. Perhaps one day—and maybe this is too idyllic a thought—we might all learn what is right, remove power from those who abuse it, and transcend our sapient dilemmas. In the meantime be smart, stay free, and do your best not to be duped, captured, or killed.
—
March-April, 2024
(a) Video (b) “Anti-Israel activists tearing down Hamas hostage posters is ‘antisemitism at its deepest level,’ NYC leaders say,” in New York Post, 1 November 2023 (in a short article that needed the dedication and hard work of, glaringly, five NYPost staff writers)
“The Captive Photograph”, Areilla Azullay in The Boston Review, 23 September 2021
“Negative Ethnicity: from Bias to Genocide” Koigi Wa Wamwere, 2003.
“Technically Man Dwells Upon This Earth” Emilie Carrier, 2023. Becoming Press. P.1
Ibid P.2
Volume Two, Tiqqun, 2001, P.270
Ibid P.267
“These Are the Jewish Megadonors Helping Fund Biden's Reelection Campaign,” Ben Samuels in Haarets, 9 February 2024 (paywalled)
Tiqqun, P.204
“The First Time in History: Two Years in Russia’s New Life,” Anna Louis Strong, 1923. Foreign Languages Press. (Opening quote at 12:20 or P.15) [audiobook]
“Where Does a Body Begin? Biology's function in Contemporary Capitalism” M.Y.B, 2024 Becoming Press
“‘A mass assassination factory’: Inside Israel’s calculated bombing of Gaza,” Yuval Abraham in +972 Magazine, 30 November 2023
“Educated to Govern” The Advocators, 1971. Foreign Languages Press. [audiobook]
Agamben, P.70