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INDIVIDUATION AND EMPIRE

BY CODY
On Society and Context
When the hostis is no longer a portion of society - the bourgeoisie - but the society as such, the society as power, and when, therefore, we find, ourselves fighting not against classical tyrannies but against biopolitical democracies, we know that every weapon, just like every strategy, must be reinvented.

FOR THE REFINED CONNOISSEUR OF ANTI-POLITICAL NEGATION THEORY

Empire, as I have come to recognize it, is a system of apparatuses that constitutes a certain power within the social context. The power behind the subjugation of society is not simply its ability to assert dominance over a populous, but the way in which the populous works to reproduce the society. The life of standing in line, of counting ones hours, of selling ones time, the life of the mass. It is no wonder that we mill about so quickly, yet go nowhere. The bohemians convince themselves that their lifestyle choices create a liberatory situation, that their preference for multiple partners is somehow less riddled with social normalcy than that of their monogamous peers, or that their dietary choice of only plant -based life is preferable to whatever normal people eat. It is this illusion of personality, of unique position, that perpetuates the mediocre monstrosity that we have come to call society. The taking on of nuance, of superficial qualities, allows for these bodies without life to continue and persist. Within the context of the mass society it makes sense that those who could never be big personalities inside of the larger macro-social relationship simply shrink their worlds. The larger-than-life world of globalized society doesn't seem to matter when one learns to be satisfied with the most minute and acute moments of happiness. But then again this does say something about that which we may desire.

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Identity and Desire

of them? So long as they remain still. The images are not the projections of the children seeing them. It is not the children that have these dreams that appear on the screen, but it is the dreams that have, or create, the children. Every little girl wants to be a princess, and every little boy dreams of being a super hero. Everyone is made to dream of being something, but what is lost is that being itself is the end result of a productive method. Identity, the commodity relationship, the Spectacle, these are all things that do not exist outside of the participatory relationships that they require. It is not Capitalism that reproduces capital, it is workers going to work, people producing. These are social processes, they are not mystified entities. Society could never be of the Spectacle if there was not a concentrated mass that constituted society, and the society could never continue on if it didn't produce subjects that answered to the identity roles that had been forced onto them. It is awe inspiring to witness the efficiency of identity, to see how quickly even the most militant revolutionary yearns to be a revolutionary. I think therefore I am. It says everything about the process of thought, what the I is doing, but it says nothing as to HOW the I exists. Because we understand that there is a social situation to all of this. There is an environment that we traverse, other bodies that we interact with. So this I we speak of is one that cannot be removed from the situation, the space that it inhabits. When I say I what is inherent in the use is a body and a position. I am. Think acts as nothing more than an impediment to the immediate act of the I.

Do we truly want those things that we say we do? Is it so simple? I would think not. You see, these bodies that are ours, these things that are us, they exist in relation to one another and it is within this space that bodies manipulate one another. Despite our best efforts, we do carry the socialization of this world around with us, and this socialization will inform those things that we desire, but all is not lost. While we do carry around the burden of being indoctrinated into such a monstrosity it is important to recognize that the apparatus that is society is not perfect. The process through which Empire spreads is individuation. This process names all things in order to assess its value. This process of identification must create universal labels for all things. This is where all things that one writes upon is to be called a desk, where all things that smash become hammers, and for bodies, where non-penised beings become Women. It is not by a simple process that a body with a penis becomes a Man, and the process is even more complex to turn a body with a penis and dark skin into a Black Man. The hardware for this process has been called the dispositif, which is not only the institutions and formations that make up society, but the relationship between all of them. It takes into account not only that police exist, but what they exist for. It takes the seemingly benevolent institutions that exist (schools, hospitals etc.) and it links them to the larger methods of social domination. The dispositif has as much to do with policing as it does schooling and as much to do with gender as it does with class. It is the name for the subjugating relationship between all of the forces of society that seek to identify and dominate all things. The societal implication of each of these molar identities is not lost upon us. While the imperial nature of the social formation of named bodies continues its onslaught, it should not be surprising that there are those bodies that are pushed out of this process. There are those of us that have been socialized inside of the world of identities, yet we never felt quite comfortable, or maybe one day we just became disenchanted, but either way we find ourselves outside of the social system of value. It is this process that creates the Nothings, which not to say that our existence is zero, but that we are no singular thing. We become No Thing. It is through this act of rejection that one begins to find themselves in a new position, a position that can only be asserted and held. This should not be assumed to be a diametrically opposed position to Empire, but as a non relational existence. The most ardent rejection of Empire exists in the movement away from the militaristic conflict and towards experimentation with other Nothings, because it is at this point of conflict that my position is most reliant on the existence of Empire. It is not that I live to destroy society, but it is that I live to live and Empire is in my way. War is not the primary function of the war machine, but movement is.

On Control

The television acts as a babysitter while parents work, while bills are being paid, while serious talks are being had, but in its relational function, children are still staring at a box. Why would children dream of fairy tales and far off places when those images can be flashed in front

Following this, what can be determined is that the position that a body takes defines how the body is. This is important because Empire imbues us with a certain individuation, which is not to say an individualism. The difference being that individuation is a point that we must begin from, as this era of late capitalism and Empire has successfully individuated and mediated every form of social interaction. This interaction has been sufficiently cemented by the ability of Empire to quell hostility. It is the existential liberal ideal of everyone getting along, the illusion of peace. The peace is held only so long as war is maintained. You see, it was not peace that was really created, it was narcosis, the dream like state that could only be induced and continued through the individuated citizen's receptiveness to the advances of Empire. The individuated bodies become the machinery that merely reproduces the ethics of each of the assemblages that make up Empire, and in this way the citizenry is now the perfectly dominated subject. The process of individuation is a gross and reducing movement. It requires the grouping of bodies together into rigid identities, into cages that we now call class, race, gender etc. It is, after all, the continued adherence to these identities that requires us to use the logic of Empire on ourselves. This is because, much like the I think of individuation, what these identities describe is WHAT we may be (a body that thinks), but it does not succinctly describe the lived

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experience of the different bodies that it is so crudely identifying. It is of little interest to me as to what I may be, but it is of the utmost importance as to how I am. But there are points of secession. It does seem that those who I find myself drawn to, and those who seem to be drawn to me, have found ways in which to withdraw from this individuation. To find ones position a certain type of existential desertion must occur. This moment exists as the anti-social withdrawal from the spectacular social sphere. This gazing inward cannot stop at merely recognizing ones self, because, after all, the self which has been built within the confines of Empire is the very apparatus that must be overcome. In this conflict comes the assertion of a new force, not of the chronically weak and ever compromising I of individuation, but of the war-like entity that simply assumes the hostility to Empire. The movements of a body that seeks no justification, but that simply does. It is when we become these positions of war, when force asserts an open hostility to all forms of Empire, we find ourselves amongst friends, and it is amongst those friends that we begin to build.

And in the end that is the hardest thing to understand: that effect of a negation depends on the positivity of a common, that our way of saying I determines the force with which we say no.

FOR THE REFINED CONNOISSEUR OF ANTI-POLITICAL NEGATION THEORY

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