GAE, Unironically

The more someone insists that the security services and various elites, operating through obscured and camouflaged channels, have in fact artificially produced what we take to be the history of the last couple of centuries (at least), the more likely that person is to arrive (pre-arrive, really) at the conclusion that we must throw off this entire insidious infrastructure and return to some form of national and political transparency, so that things will in fact be something like what they have so far only seemed to be—that is, determined by identifiable and intelligible social agents and goals, whatever we might think of those agents and goals. In fact, the motivation behind discovering layer after layer of conspiracy is exactly that—to get to what is assumed or projected to be at the core of social relations, once all the obfuscating layers have been peeled back. But the problem here is obvious—we have landed in Baudrillardian territory, in which the latest portrayal of “nature” is simply the most advanced simulation.

I don’t mean to denounce conspiracy theories, beyond the obvious observation that one could never really know which level one is at—the thing that exposes one conspiracy might simply be the leading edge of the one replacing it—we don’t really have any epistemological frame here. But, in fact, there are spy agencies, and closed elite societies, and regular circulation on the part of individuals across various institutions and they’re obviously doing something; and, since these people also occupy posts in the institutions that let us see or prevent us from seeing things (the media, the universities, the government), it stands to reason that we don’t know a lot of things they don’t want us to know, and that “knowing” might not be the best word for what they do let us know. So, that the appearances comprising “history” are artificially constructed and maintained to a great extent, and in a variety of ways, should be the opening presupposition. But it doesn’t follow that once we get all this exposed, and “the people” see what has really been going on, it will be swept away and we will return to the true nation, or republic, or whatever. This is a very familiar movie plot, and we all know who makes those movies… In fact, exactly the opposite follows. Since we can’t imagine (or, to be broadminded, until we can imagine) a social order without a government, or a government without intelligence agencies, or intelligence agencies that don’t conduct covert activities involving both information gathering and infiltration of perceived threats, it is the completely infiltrated system that should be taken as the historical norm, which liberal politics (another product of infiltration) has obscured. (For that matter, don’t you conduct a little google search when you encounter someone new, especially someone you’re considering collaborating with?) One way or another, there will be eyes and ears everywhere, what is gathered by these eyes and ears will be preserved, analyzed, and used so as to slant conditions in directions the intelligence agencies (and, to be “optimistic,” their civilian overseers) would prefer. Contemporary technology, or planetary scale computation, makes this fact even more inescapable—as just about everyone has noticed. If we are first of all neither free nor unfree, but infiltrated, we should explore the implications of that.

In that case, wouldn’t the best default option be to just to assume everyone’s a fed, at the very least potentially? If you make paranoia complete, it becomes something else. Don’t do or say anything you wouldn’t want on your permanent record, any detail of which could be strategically broadcast at any time—that’s not bad axiom to live by, except insofar as there’s nothing approaching a consensus regarding what counts as damaging information, and how damaging it should be. If you’re in your 30s, you would probably deserve a bit more of a (still not indelible) black mark if it were discovered that you serially cheated on your high school girlfriend than if you once scrawled a swastika in your notebook, but that’s not the way things would play out. In that case, though, the real problem is not the ubiquity of surveillance and permanence of data storage but the incoherent, selective and malicious nature of information dumping. Including the transformation of that process in your political programming is more daunting and complex but also more productive than trying to redraw yet again the liberal categories of privacy and free speech. If your default assumption is that we’re all feds, that includes you, so, what kind of fed would you be?

Making yourself uninfiltratable is a good maxim of self-discipline. It would not mean you can prevent infiltration, just that it wouldn’t matter. This maxim would apply to all the groups you belong to but also to yourself: train yourself not to be baited. Such discipline would result in you infiltrating others, simply in order to prop them up and make them worthy collaborators and interlocutors. You’d learn how to continually create double binds for others, in which they’d have to involuntarily reveal themselves as evading something constitutive of their social condition—in this case, though, not to exploit but to contribute to the disciplining of their own practices. All this is much more interesting and realistic than freedom, autonomy, consent, etc. You produce compelling models by working, not in the belief in vast Newtonian vacuums in which discrete objects move and occasionally collide, but in the assumption that all order tends towards a center, toward increasingly dense self-referentiality, towards the conferring of meaning on everything. Imagine the arrangement of a house of worship—everything is situated and adorned so as to magnify the glory due to the worshipped being. Imagine one corner of that house of worship that came to be experienced as “just there,” without being integrated into the ritual order—how long would it take for the priest to make it meaningful and commemorate the act of making it meaningful (or the parishioners to protest if he didn’t)? Vacuums and blank spaces are invitations to evil, which is to say, mimetic crisis, to rush in—they will not be tolerated. The social order, or the idiomatic intelligence, is no different—there will be a hectic rush to paint over any blank space. There’s always room for blank spaces, which is to say, ambiguities, but only as carefully curated, as objects, spaces and events meant to remind us of the care to be taken in commemorating the world.

This, to take a pressing contemporary example, is why the continual extension of civil rights law—more precisely, civil rights prosecution—into every nook and cranny (I almost wrote “every crook and nanny,” which would be more accurate) of our lives cannot be resisted by insisting on restoring the blank spaces wherein we allow each other to exist as unmarked individuals in homogeneous space. I also don’t think anything is served by taking the bait and saying something along the lines of “if you want to talk constantly about race, well we can talk constantly about race…” It is pretty obvious, by now, that the civil rights movement was dictated by imperial priorities: ousting the British and French colonialists and replacing them with non-racist national liberation under American-set economic conditions, on the one hand, and neutralizing Soviet charges of racism in competing for allies in the post-colonial world (ultimately leading even further, towards the possibility of using international human rights agreements to subvert the Soviets). If you want to contest and replace one imperial agenda, necessarily bound up with all domestic arrangements, you need to propose another imperial agenda, which will be bound up differently with all domestic arrangements. You can say you’re not interested in foreign policy but, as someone once said, foreign policy is interested in you—in fact, responses to external threats are likely to be a lot more knee-jerk and off the handle if they come as a surprise and cause shocked outrage, rather than made intelligible through a tradition of strategic reflection.

It's very difficult to think through our contemporary predicaments without accepting the basic reality of imperialism—nationalist and populist frames are far more satisfying narratively, but ultimately just gnosticize liberalism: the “real people” will, once we get to some globalist outrage that finally breaks the camel’s back, emerge and reveal themselves as the real people by driving out the parasites and sweeping out the rot. If you think along these lines there will always be some bait you’re taking, because responding authentically to bait is the way you embody true peoplehood. But the world will be organized in the way and to the extent that the technologies are available to organize it. So, if the civil rights formula, leading all the way to globohomo, has made a complete mess of things, what is the other of that imperial agenda, and how would it be enacted? The formulas I originally learned from Nrx and neo-absolutism seem to me valid: all thinking and action should be geared toward bringing names into accord with realities, or formal power into accord with actual power. If someone is the “president,” he should be the president. If he’s not “really” the president, all you can do is treat him as the president in such a way as to surface all the ways in which his occupancy of that office empties the office of its meaning. And in doing so, you occupy a kind of newly created office that awaits its formal designation. This is the meaning of the maxim to have power united with responsibility. And the problem with the civil rights agenda, in its multifaceted extensions and resonances, is that it eviscerates this unity and systematically sets power to work against its formalizations. So, the lines are drawn quite clearly.

Imperialism provides a useful frame for formalizing power because it operates on the level of states and the imperial power can simply begin with some objective assessment of the actual power relation between countries in different regions as it pertains to imperial priorities (access to energy, commercial stability, freedom of transport, etc.). The default starting point for the imperial power is preserving and employing those power relations, and this starting point should be departed from only for very specific reasons, to the extent necessary, and with compensatory actions that restore intelligible relations. It’s possible that the way a particular regime treats its own people will be a relevant question, insofar as disgruntled elements of the population can be seized upon by other powers for subversive purposes, but it will never be an independent, much less determining, factor. Right now, vassal states have irresistible incentives to use the various unaccountable levers of American power to shift imperial policy in directions they favor; under the easily restorable conditions I’m describing here, there would be little incentive and little opportunity for such machinations.

The righting of imperial power, then, is the most promising approach for America First political action, because it is most likely to leave the levers of American power to Americans. Not all Americans, equally, but those Americans who have successfully infiltrated institutions with an imperial formalist mindset. Such infiltrators will be offering solutions to and eventually become those being offered solutions as those within the “deep state.” But it’s also very clear that such infiltration must coincide with the infiltration of a political party, and turning it into, if you like, an American First party, but that will have to be an American First party that puts America first by properly husbanding all the means of exercising imperial power available to the US. Making America weaker is not patriotic. Such a political party would take on as its core mission the recruitment, defense and cultivation of such infiltrators, and the creation of the legal, educational and ideological means of doing so. (A policy towards corporations, which will essentially evaporate as a political force once the compulsion of wokeness is removed, is implicit here.) And here’s an impeccable, clearly workable and easily understood imperial principle of action: ruthlessly suppress any action (or incitement or incentive to action) that would revive the honor system (domestically and internationally), especially those that would lead to its revival by leaving the kinds of crimes once covered by the vendetta unpunished. The positive formulation: relentlessly promote those who have shown themselves willing and able to ruthlessly suppress… Which kinds of actions imply or lead to the revival of the honor system? That field of inquiry is what replaces “Critical Race Theory.”

One starting point of these reflections was a blog I came across, courtesy of the blogger and publisher Vox Day, which made a case for seeing literary modernism as an artifact of the British and American intelligence agencies—Pound, Joyce, Stein, Hemingway, pretty much all of them, some more tangentially. Maybe! But the conclusion drawn from this is that the goal of the intelligence agencies was to destroy art, for the fairly vague reason that art empowered the people, and the emergent imperialist order couldn’t have that. That the blogger presented Dickens, who basically wrote cartoons, as the gold standard of art, points to the weaknesses in this argument. If he’s right, wouldn’t precisely those modernists and postmodernists he considers anti-artistic frauds who presented reality as a texture of opaque and totalizing power mechanisms (like, e.g., William S Burroughs) be much more important and valuable than traditional novelists who create “rich” characters and “deep insights” into “human nature,” etc.? Shouldn’t traditional standards of beauty be replaced, for as long as is necessary, by forms of creation that uncompromisingly expose the unseen infrastructures of global existence? What if—to stick with the example—Burroughs was a fed exposing his operations in subtle ways so as to enable us to detect the various forms of infiltration? Or, for that matter, what if we just read him and others that way, so as to conduct such exposures ourselves? Consider how important it would be, once a certain threshold of organization was reached, to be able to disseminate disinformation—do you have any idea of the kind of “aesthetic sense” required to do that effectively? Positions within the infrastructure will be more important than ideas and beliefs, but the study of human event-making, anthropomorphics and anthropogenics, will be the precondition for effective use of infrastructure. And the study of human event-making is itself event making. Be an interface between power and the user.