Humanities on the Edge Presents: Andrew Culp

Humanities on the Edge Author

10/24/2024 Added

7 Plays

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"Toward an An-arkhé-ology of the State." Recorded at the Sheldon Museum of Art, October 16, 2024. Dr. Andrew Culp is Professor of Media History and Theory at the California Institute of the Arts.

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[00:00:00.000]Just as an early qualification, I currently work in a program where many of my colleagues
[00:00:06.900]are creative writers, and so I attend readings and creative writing events, and there's this
[00:00:11.520]wonderful sort of pacing and rhythm that you get with creative writers, where they talk
[00:00:16.180]a little bit, and they do some reading, and they sort of talk some more, and so for better
[00:00:20.760]or for worse, it sort of infected me, and so I'm hopefully going to do a little bit
[00:00:24.260]of that today.
[00:00:25.220]I have a draft of this new book that was mentioned, and I'm going to mostly read from it, but
[00:00:33.060]I want to create the connective tissue myself as I bridge things, and hopefully the images
[00:00:38.960]will help.
[00:00:39.560]Sometimes they're simply illustrating some of the points that I'm talking about, and
[00:00:42.940]sometimes they're more of a tentative connection, that if they're not obvious, I don't have
[00:00:47.480]to talk about after the piece itself.
[00:00:50.840]So,
[00:00:53.540]maybe just a short explanation.
[00:00:57.500]The archaic is like a less familiar romanization of a Greek word,
[00:01:02.380]archaic, that
[00:01:05.020]you might know through A-R-C-A-T, or art, like in hierarchy
[00:01:10.320]or something. And so, it's been rendered in this way
[00:01:14.160]to defamiliarize it a little bit, to encourage us to think a little bit more
[00:01:17.920]deeply about the word itself.
[00:01:19.280]So,
[00:01:23.300]we begin with existing conceptions of the state,
[00:01:26.300]at least in my rhetoric. So, against religious mythologies,
[00:01:30.540]or philosophical just-so stories, and other speculative accounts,
[00:01:34.200]which are often summoned to legitimize existing orders,
[00:01:38.120]for example, the tradition of Chinese legalism, the social contract
[00:01:42.880]for even the lawless theory of justice. My talk today
[00:01:46.400]in the subsequent book is informed by contemporary scientific work on state formation.
[00:01:50.460]As such, I have updated previous
[00:01:53.060]philosophies that are critical of the state to reflect new developments and
[00:01:57.000]this should also imply that as new developments occur, perhaps even the
[00:02:01.220]things I'm presenting today will have to be updated as well. So a central claim is
[00:02:08.160]that there has only been one state, because the state everywhere expresses
[00:02:14.820]the same uniformity of power. Of course, this demands a certain qualification as
[00:02:20.080]contemporary scholars agree that there's not one
[00:02:22.820]origin of the state, but many origins. It has sprung up at different times, in
[00:02:28.420]different places, and even independently of each one of those different species. Yet experts also agree that the state is not ubiquitous,
[00:02:37.740]having occurred only in certain societies. Of the last 300,000 years of
[00:02:44.120]anatomically modern humans, which is to say, people who have possessed the same
[00:02:49.680]intelligence, creativity, and complex thought that us, their
[00:02:52.580]contemporaries, the evidence indicates that they have only experimented with
[00:02:57.620]state forms since about 6,000 BC. An example: even then they were small, rare,
[00:03:04.580]fragile, and prone to collapse. An example: Southeast Asian kingdoms of the time, by
[00:03:11.600]the time I mean these in BC, those kingdoms rarely lasted for more than two or three reigns,
[00:03:22.340]say, generations, less than 100 years. And where the state does emerge, its operations
[00:03:27.800]have been categorically uniform. Here, quoting from Lawrence Prater, who's a famous commentator
[00:03:35.220]on Marx's anthropological work, "Controlling and directing the life of people under it
[00:03:41.940]by centralized social power in the hands of a few." That's our sort of first working
[00:03:47.400]definition, so let me repeat that a little slower. A categorically uniform operation
[00:03:52.100]state is controlling and directing the life of the people under a centralized social power
[00:03:57.740]in the hands of a few. Let me expand on this. There are two characteristics that political
[00:04:04.140]archaeologists identify at the origins of states. These are people digging in the ground
[00:04:08.900]and trying to identify what counts as a state and not a state. These two things are first,
[00:04:14.900]an administrative apparatus elevated to the point of generating impersonal power, and
[00:04:21.860]the second is enough stratification to support a high-status class that does not directly
[00:04:31.000]contribute to material subsistence. These open to at least three evolutionary paths
[00:04:37.220]to state formation, which is to say there are at least three different ways in which
[00:04:40.140]the state emerges in these six instances and subsequent ones.
[00:04:45.640]The first lies in the internal development of a political economics, that is to say,
[00:04:51.620]for channeling resources to build power by absorbing parts into a unitary whole.
[00:04:55.860]Edward Meyer has described the process as, quote,
[00:04:58.940]Among these groups, there is one which by its very conception dominates over the others.
[00:05:05.120]It is the one which considers all the smaller groupings as subordinate parts of a unity.
[00:05:10.180]It requires other groups to submit to its domination,
[00:05:13.740]constrains them by supporting it to its will, to the ends it seeks.
[00:05:19.380]This dominating form of social group is whose essence is comprised with the consciousness of a complete, self-dependent unity,
[00:05:28.320]and we can call this the state.
[00:05:30.300]Next are the second and third paths,
[00:05:33.860]which are either the internal or the external conquest
[00:05:39.560]in a reconfiguration of local alliances by submitting them to central rule.
[00:05:44.720]Here are quotes more.
[00:05:46.500]In the case of Egyptians, Mongols, Slavs,
[00:05:49.140]the state was first formed by internal expansion and internal conquest.
[00:05:53.720]Mongols first conquered their neighbors, Hulu Mongols,
[00:05:57.120]and other pastoral nomads, Asia.
[00:05:59.460]They then embarked on broader conquests.
[00:06:01.840]Russians and other Slavs likewise affirmed the area of central rule
[00:06:06.640]first within their area and then without.
[00:06:08.680]Thus stratification of society, both internal and external conquest,
[00:06:12.780]and integration of communities and allergic roles went hand in hand.
[00:06:16.120]Material evidence of intensified inequality
[00:06:19.120]serves as an indicator of the state,
[00:06:21.180]which is to say, you know, it's been successful
[00:06:22.820]and we now have a state because there is inequality.
[00:06:25.460]Physical archaeologists look for accumulated surpluses
[00:06:29.500]that sustain a non-productive class.
[00:06:31.320]So, in addition to anything that's used for subsistence,
[00:06:36.080]these are surpluses,
[00:06:37.940]which contribute to a status differentiation
[00:06:40.240]through feasting, luxury goods, prestige technologies,
[00:06:43.200]exorbitant marriages and marriage ceremonies,
[00:06:45.700]monumental architecture, and funeral rituals.
[00:06:48.160]Additionally, they look for controlled access to resources
[00:06:51.760]of socially significant powers,
[00:06:53.220]as in limiting access to land,
[00:06:56.300]restricting political to exemplary figures,
[00:06:59.020]exclusive access to the sacred, and similar things.
[00:07:02.260]And lastly, institutionalization of status through inheritance,
[00:07:05.980]such as land, property, wealth, title, office, rank, right, duty,
[00:07:10.040]or other privileges.
[00:07:11.000]Early state formation does not point to a single geospatial configuration,
[00:07:17.720]There are two types that are identified by archaeologists
[00:07:21.160]as regional states, such as Old Kingdom Egypt,
[00:07:23.920]and city-states, which are complex make-up
[00:07:28.680]for early dynastic southern Mesopotamia.
[00:07:30.680]Moreover, the state does not always coincide with a city,
[00:07:36.980]suggesting the possibility of states and non-urban
[00:07:39.780]and cities without a state, such as the Celts.
[00:07:43.080]There has been a mythological prejudice for six,
[00:07:47.440]so-called, states, such as the Celts,
[00:07:47.700]so-called pristine states of southern Mesopotamia,
[00:07:49.760]Egypt, Indus Valley, Northern China,
[00:07:52.080]Mesoamerica, and the Andes,
[00:07:53.200]and all other states are related to, quote,
[00:07:55.400]secondary states,
[00:07:56.320]indicating that they emerged
[00:07:59.480]only after contact with a state.
[00:08:01.460]In contrast, the argument of this book
[00:08:04.240]is that the state is better treated as a concept
[00:08:07.300]rather than an archaeological object,
[00:08:09.700]something that was thinkable by the earliest humans
[00:08:13.520]and even on the minds of those
[00:08:14.980]who never knew one's material existence.
[00:08:17.380]I'm going to repeat this point.
[00:08:19.420]I think we should imagine the state as a concept
[00:08:23.440]that maybe even existed in people's minds
[00:08:25.820]before they made one come into existence.
[00:08:28.320]And this is why there have always been people
[00:08:31.900]who anticipated a state and worded it off.
[00:08:34.040]There are a number of examples I could use,
[00:08:36.240]but one that I kind of like is in D&G's A Thousand Plateaus,
[00:08:41.040]they talk about youth gangs.
[00:08:42.620]It's not that we particularly love youth gangs,
[00:08:45.740]but they often kick out members at a certain age.
[00:08:48.980]And the idea is that if people were allowed to remain in an organization
[00:08:52.740]after a certain age, naturally a certain form of dominance
[00:08:57.260]and hierarchy would form.
[00:08:58.280]And so there are these internal mechanisms
[00:09:00.680]that are either consciously understood or even just socially understood
[00:09:05.340]in order to prevent the emergence of a group type or a state type,
[00:09:08.600]whether it's within explicitly state formation or other forms of groups.
[00:09:12.620]Let me continue.
[00:09:17.980]So now that we have a general sense of how people before us have defined states,
[00:09:28.040]I want to move to an anarchaeology.
[00:09:31.300]Let's begin with a quote from Foucault.
[00:09:35.180]The highlighting should draw our eyes to the most important parts.
[00:09:42.600]This is a lecture on the government of the living,
[00:09:44.400]in which Foucault had previously worked with the term archaeology in a very different context,
[00:09:50.560]sort of half-jokingly, but quite seriously proposes the term anarchaeology
[00:09:57.400]in the way that I'm going on it today.
[00:09:59.000]Quoting him, I actually rearranged it for it to make a little more logical sense.
[00:10:04.560]What I am proposing is rather a sort of anarchaeology.
[00:10:09.200]It is a matter of a theoretical, practical statement
[00:10:12.580]concerning the non-necessity of all power.
[00:10:14.780]You can see, therefore, that there is certainly some kind of relation
[00:10:19.940]between what is roughly called anarchy or anarchism and the methods I employ,
[00:10:24.140]but there are differences that are equally clear.
[00:10:27.840]First, it is not a question of having, in a view, at the end of the project,
[00:10:32.560]a society without power relations.
[00:10:34.840]It is rather a matter of putting non-power, or the non-acceptability of power,
[00:10:39.700]not at the end of an enterprise, but rather,
[00:10:42.560]at the beginning of the work, in the form of a questioning of all ways
[00:10:46.340]in which power is in actual fact accepted.
[00:10:48.640]Second, it is not a question of saying all power is bad,
[00:10:53.640]but it's starting from the point that no power whatsoever is acceptable by right,
[00:10:58.520]and absolutely and definitively inevitable.
[00:11:01.520]You can continue if you're interested.
[00:11:04.000]The idea here is giving space to critique
[00:11:09.320]in which we question assumptions that we take about power
[00:11:12.540]not necessarily meaning that we need to come with a doctrinaire
[00:11:18.220]political and practical response,
[00:11:20.120]but leaving space for us to constantly question
[00:11:23.820]so that if there are the right circumstances
[00:11:25.840]to usurp things that maybe have previously seemed inevitable or necessary.
[00:11:30.400]So in short, my project is to question everything in political thought.
[00:11:37.260]It's a bit ambitious.
[00:11:39.840]I only do a limited amount of it,
[00:11:42.520]and I invite you to join me.
[00:11:43.340]It works to unsell or receive political notions
[00:11:47.460]that are seen to be foundational,
[00:11:49.040]encouraging readers to reassess anything
[00:11:52.140]you yourself may have deemed acceptable,
[00:11:54.380]or even worse, inevitable.
[00:11:55.780]This involves critically examining
[00:11:59.600]even the most seemingly benevolent concepts,
[00:12:02.120]including peace, tolerance, justice,
[00:12:04.360]the importance of a people, democracy, equality,
[00:12:07.560]national liberation, and other ideas that are prevalent in the world today.
[00:12:12.500]This follows from a rather simple but crucial insight
[00:12:16.100]that all forms of authority are dangerous,
[00:12:18.380]but not in the same way.
[00:12:19.780]For instance, liberal capitalist societies
[00:12:24.440]have transformed warfare into a large-scale industrial enterprise
[00:12:28.020]and a total annihilation.
[00:12:29.280]But for them, or outside of them,
[00:12:33.080]in small, kin-ordered, non-state societies,
[00:12:36.840]war actually diffuses power,
[00:12:39.460]preventing dominance by any single group.
[00:12:42.480]But despite this and many other differences,
[00:12:45.200]I propose that all authoritarian political powers
[00:12:47.680]fundamentally express a shared structure and relational form
[00:12:50.800]that I'm calling the herstha.
[00:12:52.160]Perhaps betraying the ease in which the state
[00:12:57.820]might serve as a convenient target of our critique,
[00:13:00.740]my focus actually extends well beyond the state itself,
[00:13:03.860]and this is a crucial point.
[00:13:05.120]I introduce the state in order to sort of move beyond it conceptually.
[00:13:08.380]I tend to something even deeper,
[00:13:12.460]which subtends the state itself,
[00:13:15.200]and that is the authority that is assumed by all politics,
[00:13:19.720]its authorizing force.
[00:13:21.720]The Mycenaeans, a people previous to the group that they synchronized with,
[00:13:27.580]call it "Archene."
[00:13:29.880]Literally, the word for "origin."
[00:13:33.040]It is the beginning, the first principle,
[00:13:37.420]the highest place of power in which all order and authority is said to emerge,
[00:13:42.440]an example in the American Constitution,
[00:13:45.440]or really the Declaration of Independence.
[00:13:48.440]The most concrete "archi" is actually that of the ruler.
[00:13:52.440]This is what the Mycenaeans themselves called their "archon."
[00:13:57.440]It was a chief magistrate whose office was commonly decided by election or lottery.
[00:14:03.440]We also know them through the term "archive,"
[00:14:05.440]which is the Latinization of the archon's public buildings and town hall.
[00:14:10.440]And of course, "archi" serves
[00:14:12.420]as a suffix for types of ruling that we know: hierarchies, monarchies, patriarchies.
[00:14:17.420]And more generically, speaking of the "archi,"
[00:14:22.420]it's been a way of referring to the authorities.
[00:14:25.420]So "archi" can be used abstractly, but also in particular,
[00:14:30.420]to denote a sovereignty, an empire, or a realm.
[00:14:33.420]Or more broadly, it can be used as a synonym for sovereignty, dominion, and command.
[00:14:38.420]This is basic, kind of, etymological work here.
[00:14:42.400]To bring us back to the present, beneath all rule I command, there's an archi.
[00:14:48.400]What do I mean by this? It is a grounding,
[00:14:52.400]in that we find an authority that is more fundamental than any particular material instance of a state.
[00:15:00.400]And it is this archi, this conceptual grounding, that demands our attention.
[00:15:05.400]For archi points us to a unified template for power, a template that has been realized in a variety of forms,
[00:15:12.380]which include the state, but also include capitalism, the family, private property, and more.
[00:15:18.380]The Greeks themselves recognized this, as pre-Socratic philosophers like Maximander,
[00:15:25.380]subsequently used the term archi to refer to some primary substance from which the world is thought to be made,
[00:15:31.380]such as water or fire, and will then be abstracted by Aristotle into the grounding axioms of a science of first principles.
[00:15:42.360]As such, I proceed philosophically, employing an inarcheological approach to unearth an underlying archi of authority that binds together seemingly differing forms.
[00:15:53.360]There's a lot of other theoretical and set-up work that I do, but for you all, I think you'd probably enjoy a lot more of me starting to go into some things that get a little more practical or interesting.
[00:16:07.340]So I was talking to Louise previously. Let's start with writing, because here we are.
[00:16:12.340]Humanity is on the edge.
[00:16:15.340]So I contend that writing is an archaic magic of over-coding that favors exploitation over enlightenment.
[00:16:26.340]Let me actually start with a little comparative mythology. I love this screen so that we can all look at it.
[00:16:33.340]So this is from some old Middle Persian, the first kings. I'll just read the pink part.
[00:16:42.320]It's not going to put it together, but it'll show you the mythological constitution of sovereignty, but also origins of writing, as it's told by kings.
[00:16:52.300]So Hushong had an intelligent son, Tamrus, who was called the Binder of Demons.
[00:17:01.300]He sheared sheep and goats and spun their wool into fibers, from which he fashioned clothes. He also taught men how to weave carpets.
[00:17:12.300]And from the wild animals he confined them, to train them as hunters. He said that men should praise God, who had given mankind sovereignty over the earth's animals.
[00:17:23.300]I wanted to include this piece a little bit, this sort of like domination and dominion, not only because of the human-animal relations implied,
[00:17:31.300]but also because it's an essential part of the book where I talk about the Domus complex, which is to say the introduction of domestication, not only domestication of humans and animals,
[00:17:42.280]but also domestication of humans, which is to say slavery, and domestication of women, which is to say the introduction of the egos.
[00:17:52.280]Let's continue. The king bound Ahriman, which is just the personification of evil in this mythological world.
[00:18:02.280]So the king bound evil by spells and sat on him, using him as a mount on which to tour the world.
[00:18:12.260]There are many versions of this text. He writes them like a horse for 30 years.
[00:18:17.260]"When the demons saw this, many of them gathered in groups and murmured against him, saying, 'The crown and the far were no longer his.'
[00:18:24.260]But Tamurus learned of their sedition and attacked them, breaking their rebellion.
[00:18:29.260]All the demons and sorcerers came together in a great army, with the black demon as their leader.
[00:18:35.260]And their roars ascended to the heavens. But Tamurus suddenly confronted them, and the war did not last long.
[00:18:42.240]One of the demons was subdued by his spells, and the other third by his heavy mace.
[00:18:46.240]He dragged them wounded and in chains in the dust, and they pleaded for their lives, saying, "Don't kill us. We can teach you something new and highly profitable."
[00:18:55.240]The king granted them their lives on the condition that they reveal their secrets to him.
[00:18:59.240]And when he had freed them from the chains, they had no choice but to obey him.
[00:19:03.240]They taught the king how to write, and his heart glowed with the sun with this knowledge.
[00:19:10.240]They did not teach him just one script.
[00:19:12.220]They taught him almost thirty, including the Western, Arabic, and Persian ways of writing,
[00:19:16.220]as well as the Songdian, Chinese, and Qadlari, showing him how the letters are formed and pronounced.
[00:19:25.220]So this is one tale.
[00:19:29.220]Maybe more abstractly or technically, we can argue that the state production alters the functions of codes.
[00:19:35.220]What I mean by codes here, just parenthetically, this is sort of like the Bistrossian anthropology codes,
[00:19:42.200]and in an alliance are things like who you're allowed to marry, what is counted as clean or unclean,
[00:19:49.200]or what rituals you have to engage in in order to make something clean, or even what you can eat in terms of food,
[00:19:55.200]and how it must be prepared.
[00:19:57.200]So state production alters the functions of these codes, shifting them from direct bodily inscription to written decrees.
[00:20:06.200]And these decrees are disseminated far and wide, broadcasting the voice of a despot or sovereign everywhere
[00:20:12.180]in a symbolically present, but physically absent.
[00:20:16.180]You know this, I'm speaking in kind of high language here, but this is literally a king making an order,
[00:20:23.180]and then his functionaries and magistrates going around and telling people what that order is,
[00:20:28.180]because he can't be everywhere in all places, and that's the function of the writing initiative.
[00:20:33.180]Regarding writing, Claude Lévi-Strauss states that "it is the one phenomena which is invariably accompanied in formations of cities and empires.
[00:20:42.160]The integration into a political system, that is to say, of a large number of individuals into a hierarchy of castes and classes."
[00:20:50.160]This is how we can say writing, although sometimes associated with science and the arts, primarily serves the purpose of exploitation.
[00:20:58.160]Continuing, what writing does is it replaces group ritual inscription on bodies, such as tattoos or scarification that demonstrate group membership.
[00:21:12.140]I don't have any of that specifically here, but here's early writing.
[00:21:17.140]That's in Babylonian mythology, but the city of Ur, which is one of the earliest cities ever settled in Mesopotamia,
[00:21:25.140]this is a religious ziggurat that was founded, and a temple where writing occurred within its walls, no doubt.
[00:21:32.140]In the middle is some of the earliest physical writing artifacts that we have, and this is actually a labor accounting system from the city of Ur.
[00:21:42.120]from probably around 2900 BCE, and in it I chose one that actually has more to do with women's labor arrangements,
[00:21:50.120]so there are various equivalences and indebtedness and things like that written on it.
[00:21:54.120]On the right, if you don't recognize it, that's the Hammurabi Code, which is a legal code,
[00:21:58.120]and one thing that's very distinctive of the time is when it's monumentalized,
[00:22:03.120]there's usually both an iconographic header to it as well as text below it, and this has not been sort of sufficiently theorized.
[00:22:12.100]How the image and text go together, but I'm being a little technical here.
[00:22:18.100]So, while not always the most preferable professions, those with the capacity to read and write gain the right to interpret the absent voice of a king and despot.
[00:22:28.100]And in doing so, they're often under the threat of death.
[00:22:32.100]Words become medium for public spectacles of punishment, where the sovereign voice accompanies whipping, stoning, mutilation, or burning, which are the consequences of legal judgment.
[00:22:42.080]And the publicity of these acts is vital for large empires, which impose a web of social obligations on top of a variety of customary laws,
[00:22:50.060]such as the monetary equivalents that you see in the Code of Ur-Namun, or the Lexis-Telonis of the Hammurabi Code, this Roman one, or social equivalents that we get in Sharia law.
[00:23:02.060]And so this is how we can say that writing is a form of imperialism, that not simply replace old codes, it overcodes, and it's a two-step operation.
[00:23:12.060]First, a seizure, which captures groups that are operating according to their own differing codes.
[00:23:18.060]And second, a superimposition, which is the introduction of a single unified system on top of these divergent lines of affiliation, creating apex.
[00:23:27.060]I guess that's why I included the ziggurat.
[00:23:31.060]Above these divergent and horizontal group obligations, replacing systems of reciprocity with an infinite debt owed to a transcendent tsar.
[00:23:40.060]So the city of Uruk.
[00:23:42.040]Uruk supervised a transition from writing's precursors, which included a token system, numerical tablets, tags, and potter's marks.
[00:23:49.040]So actually the first form of pre-writing that we have in archaeological form are these boula balls that there's not a complete consensus on.
[00:23:59.040]But there are these clay balls that in the inside have a sort of tag on them, which usually has an icon image of some sort of object, let's say cattle, and then a sort of program number.
[00:24:12.020]And they look like bills of landing when you ship goods. So you'd ship it along with this ball, and by the time you'd arrive, you'd give it to the person who's owed it, and they would break the ball open.
[00:24:23.020]And the goods better match the thing that's represented on the token, or else something happened in the process and they have to explain themselves.
[00:24:31.020]So anyway, that becomes product in a form, as we say here. And it's overseen by a managerial elite.
[00:24:42.000]And as we get to the Third Dynasty Ur, it's a system that's used to tightly manage tens of thousands of people living within the walls of their city-state.
[00:24:51.000]And the completeness of their subjugation made it evident as they are pictorially referred to in product in a form as gendered cattle.
[00:24:58.000]So just laborers. The symbol for laborers is like gendered cattle. That's how it's sort of evolved.
[00:25:06.000]And it's common from linguistic imperialism as to colonizing projects. You know, overcoding is not limited to linguistic science.
[00:25:11.980]So like Christianity, for instance, offered new life to polytheism by creating a pantheon of minor saints.
[00:25:17.980]It's a syncretism that happens in Latin America or even, you know, a funny place in Europe, Catholicism.
[00:25:24.980]As long as they agree to dedicate themselves to one true God.
[00:25:29.980]I could go on for a little bit more about writing, but let's keep moving.
[00:25:37.980]So we've already talked about this a bit, but I'm currently working through
[00:25:41.960]mythological epic and dramatic and games.
[00:25:44.960]It's a little bit ancient, but it's a mode that is quite tightly associated with everything here.
[00:25:49.960]I didn't include it, but my current obsession with all this are these seals
[00:25:55.960]that the English royalty as well as many Europeans during the medieval period used to sign documents.
[00:26:01.960]So many of them didn't know how to write.
[00:26:05.960]Like if you go back to Roman culture or whatever, the people who write are actually like a minor professional class.
[00:26:11.940]They probably know how to read themselves, but they get things written through dictation.
[00:26:15.940]And so, you know, you get this long document, let's say, you know, the Magna Carta.
[00:26:20.940]And then King John signs it by affixing a wax seal to it.
[00:26:25.940]But the most remarkable part about all of this is that, at least in the English tradition, the seal always has two sides.
[00:26:33.940]On one side, the sovereign has a scepter in which they're ruling over justly, and the other side, they're usually mounted on
[00:26:41.920]a horse with a sword. And so war and peace are not two separate things, but in fact two sides, and they always come together.
[00:26:51.920]Let's go here. This is one of the oldest artifacts of the state that we have. It was found in the city of Ur, and it's called the Standard of Ur.
[00:27:02.920]And it has two sides. It's held in the British Museum, if you ever want to see it. It's not terribly large, it's not too much bigger than this podium.
[00:27:11.900]It's an illustrated version of them. And you just look carefully, and you can see why people call them a war and a peace side.
[00:27:18.900]At the top we see war with all these war wagons, but we also see war slaves and war captives, and people being just literally on the bottom register of the top three.
[00:27:29.900]People being ridden over by war carriages. And in the bottom, we have peace. But peace doesn't look so great for most people, because they're here giving goods.
[00:27:41.880]And there's a very clear caste or hierarchical system that's being presented here.
[00:27:47.880]There might be some foreigners in towards the bottom. There's a sort of productive class, and there's things being sort of extracted from them and given to the higher orders.
[00:27:57.880]So, let me sort of describe this a bit. Ancient Ur, from where this is found, was more than a city. It remains the embodiment of primordial Urstat,
[00:28:11.860]taken to be an archetypal state. The city was one of the first urban centers in Mesopotamia, and it exemplifies a sudden emergence of the state.
[00:28:21.860]It has a grand ziggurat, as well as luxurious royal tombs, and it represents a rapid crystallization of architectural, cultural, and administrative operations.
[00:28:32.860]The French philosopher Stélus and Gautierino, he was not fully formed in progressive stages, but appears fully armed in a masterstroke, executed all
[00:28:41.840]at once, serving as the eternal model of everything the state wants to be in designers. Even self-professed evolution of the state bears
[00:28:51.840]mythic traces to it. Nowhere is this clearer than with the standard of o'er. Unearthed from a grave, its original wooden frame, long decayed,
[00:29:03.840]however it offers a window into the horizon of all states. The box is adorned with two sloping panels and end pieces, and it narrates a tale of the society
[00:29:11.820]already stratified. The divisions come with organized violence, domestication, and priestly subjugation, evidenced iconographically. Its materials include lapis lazuli, shell, and red limestone, and it's set in the bitumen, which showcases not only specialized work of skilled artisans, but also hints at an extensive trade network, which must have stretched at least as far as Afghanistan and India. The two sides of the standard are war and peace, which broadly displays
[00:29:41.800]the two fundamental operations of all states, as I argue. The war side of the standard illustrates
[00:29:47.540]a campaign. There are three horizontal registers, and they work almost like siloed panels depicting
[00:29:53.800]battle scenes. The climax of the battle has an outsized sovereign, you know, he's actually
[00:29:59.880]literally larger than all the other figures there, who towers above wounded prisoners
[00:30:05.160]as well as an army. And the rhythmic patterns of color and material victory is realized
[00:30:10.020]through a procession of nude and slain prisoners.
[00:30:11.780]The strips of a disciplined phalanx and a speeding battle wagons anticipate something
[00:30:17.740]even like Lenny Riefenstahl or Selma Gardner out of Gallup, their 5,000 years previous.
[00:30:23.200]In a seemingly stark contrast, there's the peace panel, and it portrays a ceremonial
[00:30:29.180]banquet, dominating the scene once again as a ruler, depicting himself on a grand scale,
[00:30:34.640]and he's ensconced among his subjects, surrounded by an array of bountiful offerings.
[00:30:41.760]Similar to that of the Uruk base, in which a king serves as a mediator between heaven
[00:30:45.940]and earth.
[00:30:46.360]His prayers and actions are taken to ensure man's fertility, and by extension, prosperity
[00:30:50.920]of his people.
[00:30:51.460]Some scholars have warned against calling the two sides war and peace.
[00:30:56.140]The so-called peace side is, while not militaristic, not very peaceful, and it trades in the visual
[00:31:02.720]grammar of prestige, simply as a public face of domination, and as such, both sides of
[00:31:08.680]the standard could be read together as, quote, a manifestation of claims of
[00:31:11.740]command over a course of power networks, military, ideological, and economic.
[00:31:15.960]So the standard of Urb reveals a distinct social hierarchy where the elite class,
[00:31:21.200]visibly supported by artisans, musicians, and laborers, sits at an apex of society.
[00:31:26.240]And the social stratification is mirrored in the standards of design, where the ruler's
[00:31:31.160]elevated position not only highlights supremacy, but also symbolizes the role as a bridge between
[00:31:35.520]earth and divine.
[00:31:36.240]And the death pits of Urb, where these were found, further underscores the point that
[00:31:41.720]there was mass sacrifice of people and valued items.
[00:31:45.180]For those of you all not familiar with this sort of thing, whenever archaeologists go
[00:31:52.200]and find things, often it's tombs where they find it, because those people would have enough
[00:31:56.540]money and quality and surplus to bury some people in the library fashion.
[00:32:00.740]What was absolutely overwhelming about Urb is there would be death pits in which there
[00:32:11.700]would be at the same time be buried with the sovereign, as if they're simply extensions
[00:32:14.900]of them and their body.
[00:32:16.980]And so indulgently dispatching luxury goods and servants to the underworld serves as the
[00:32:23.380]grandest baby, not only of piety, but of power.
[00:32:26.100]And so this dual role of a ruler, both as a warrior and a provider, resonates with artistic
[00:32:33.540]representations from various cultures around the world.
[00:32:36.180]So we can look at the sarcophagus of a pot called the Grave, a Mayan king, and in it it places him as
[00:32:41.680]the center of the cosmic world, linking his people to the material substance of maize,
[00:32:46.720]as well as the rhythmic cosmology of the sun and the underworld.
[00:32:49.920]Or we can look at the Parthenon, which similarly brings together martial and fertility themes,
[00:32:53.920]reflecting two sides of sovereignty.
[00:32:56.080]Okay, we've sort of gone to these ancient moments.
[00:33:02.960]I'll just show you a couple more things because I'm not going to read about them.
[00:33:06.320]These two sides we also see in sort of older iconography.
[00:33:08.960]Some of you might be familiar with the Egyptian Book of the Dead.
[00:33:11.660]And here, as you see, justice is not this sort of grand gesture of survival.
[00:33:21.900]It's this very harsh process in which it reaffirms the difference between the divine and everyone who gets judged.
[00:33:30.220]And in the right is the more warrior mode in which this is a picture of a Mesopotamian king
[00:33:37.340]who trades his war captors to Ishtar for
[00:33:41.640]power and authority.
[00:33:43.400]Here's the Mycenaeans who I mentioned who have the archi.
[00:33:49.720]There are two cups you can go see in a museum in Athens.
[00:33:54.760]And what's interesting is they both have scenes of trying to capture a bull, but the bottom
[00:33:58.720]one's very pacific.
[00:33:59.720]So I'd say this sort of matches the just peace sign.
[00:34:04.060]The top one is, you know, the hunters are trying to capture it with nets and spears
[00:34:08.020]and things.
[00:34:09.020]But funny enough, the bulls kind of seem to be winning that one.
[00:34:11.620]But let's move forward.
[00:34:15.540]Actually it's only maybe about a fifth or a quarter of this book that I spend before
[00:34:19.080]the modern era.
[00:34:20.080]We get much more current in it.
[00:34:22.560]So I want to take us to some of those moments.
[00:34:30.200]So here we are looking at the absolute estate.
[00:34:33.040]This was a waterworks project that was installed outside of Versailles under King Louis XIV.
[00:34:41.600]I'm not going to read this section, I don't think, but Louis XIV was obsessed with automata.
[00:34:48.220]So before industrialization, we had things like robots and machines, but they were mostly
[00:34:55.640]used for amusement.
[00:34:57.680]And so they were like wind-up toys or cuckoo clocks.
[00:35:00.140]Many of them could be found in churches and that sort of thing.
[00:35:03.480]So a land works project like this is actually kind of interesting, and some people call
[00:35:08.320]Louis XIV a clockwork king because of this.
[00:35:11.580]It's also the dawn of Descartes and rationalism, so there's a completely new way of thinking
[00:35:16.200]that happens.
[00:35:17.200]And I'm going to argue that this extends to what state-making looks like at that time.
[00:35:23.020]So there is a despotic archi that codifies thought into a rational tyranny of administrative
[00:35:29.340]machinery for which philosophers can be molded into bureaucrats of reason.
[00:35:34.260]The triumph of the rational mind was seen as proof of its ability to organize space,
[00:35:41.560]and reduce it to measure, order, and to extend limits of magnitude, embrace extremely distant
[00:35:47.880]and extremely minute, and finally to associate space with motion.
[00:35:52.060]It is a world where the public presentation means everything, and where power manifests
[00:35:58.720]itself through representation.
[00:36:00.720]As such, its formula could be representation equals power.
[00:36:05.920]Views of rationalization of government often look anything before the French Revolution,
[00:36:11.540]however, the despotism of Louis XIV provides us with a remarkable example: his absolute
[00:36:18.880]estate simultaneously instigated rationalization through science of government, while concurrently
[00:36:25.100]indulging in the grandeur of culture.
[00:36:29.040]Huge displays of wealth and obscenity, and in a striking demonstration, he combines two
[00:36:41.520]forces: high court and modern government, showing that they can co-exist or even converge.
[00:36:47.300]Ceremony and science distil something crucial about political power: it operates on two
[00:36:51.900]levels of management, that is, the material and imaginary.
[00:36:56.620]Politics proper involves the administration of a country by a prince, who assembles ministers
[00:37:00.960]and servants to provide knowledge about various material forces, which is to say they invent
[00:37:06.620]levers, pulleys, counter-forces, and other tools to govern.
[00:37:11.500]Policen actually called at the time "police," which labor terms in the policy.
[00:37:16.380]I don't do this sort of work here, but I'm just curious to look back at the invention
[00:37:20.920]of the word "police," which is a deformation of "polis," as in "city."
[00:37:25.760]But it's first used as a form of management that looks much more like economics than it does, you know, guys with hats in the street beating up people.
[00:37:34.870]And that's what they do now, right?
[00:37:37.390]So there's a concrete ideology that's simultaneously constructed while it's aesthetically organized.
[00:37:45.430]Much later, we might just call this the spectacle, and sort of turn back the work.
[00:37:53.350]Understanding the police in this context requires, quote,
[00:37:55.970]stifling one's initial impulse to equate police with an image of a group of men in uniform.
[00:38:00.430]Oh, I do do the etymology. We'll read this, sorry.
[00:38:03.310]Before 1970, the word police referred to, or 1750, excuse me, before 1750,
[00:38:09.930]the word police refers to a set of functions around a specific entity or body of people.
[00:38:14.610]As such, the police were, quote, a rough synonym for control or administration,
[00:38:19.490]a way of referring to all government,
[00:38:23.170]what it might do in addition to making war, settling legal disputes, and collecting taxes.
[00:38:27.270]It was about control, about governing a republic.
[00:38:30.950]And grafted onto that control is a reference to the effects it aimed to generate,
[00:38:36.650]namely harmony and order that comes from constant management.
[00:38:39.790]As such, in a dictionary from the era,
[00:38:43.330]it defines the police as, quote, the opposite of barbarism,
[00:38:46.310]and equates it with religion and civilization.
[00:38:50.310]That dictionary goes on to,
[00:38:53.070]characterize Native Americans as living, quote, like beasts,
[00:38:56.090]with, quote, neither faith nor police,
[00:38:59.470]while portraying China as the most policed
[00:39:03.030]and therefore most harmonious and civilized 18th century society.
[00:39:06.730]It's also worth noting that the French at that time
[00:39:10.150]imported the word laissez-faire from China,
[00:39:13.150]thinking that it was a form of good management,
[00:39:17.290]and it wasn't about freedom, letting things flow.
[00:39:20.530]So there's a lot of interesting deformations
[00:39:22.970]that happened.
[00:39:23.310]The public spectacle of the king is produced
[00:39:26.490]through two images of his body.
[00:39:28.030]First, his body that's his fleshly existence,
[00:39:30.510]and in that, it's finite, it's burdened by the same
[00:39:33.970]necessity for material management as his subjects.
[00:39:36.050]And further, it served as a constant source
[00:39:39.470]of speculation.
[00:39:40.050]Quote, was the king ill?
[00:39:41.730]Did he drink too much?
[00:39:42.830]Did he suffer from impotence?
[00:39:44.370]Was he too promiscuous?
[00:39:45.570]And it's actually if you read court documents
[00:39:48.330]at the time.
[00:39:48.850]Like, Louis XIV is never alone.
[00:39:51.970]He has people.
[00:39:52.910]People sitting by him at every moment
[00:39:54.650]monitoring every little thing about him
[00:39:57.030]because they think that any change
[00:39:59.330]in his bodily behavior is an indication
[00:40:01.230]about the health of the realm
[00:40:02.450]in addition to just him,
[00:40:03.490]as well as an expression of his power.
[00:40:05.290]So in addition to that fleshly existence,
[00:40:09.370]he also has a symbolic body
[00:40:10.790]that is established in Christian law.
[00:40:12.590]It's the law of someone who governs subjects
[00:40:14.710]through their libidinal impulses.
[00:40:16.330]These desires are just a pale imitation
[00:40:19.170]of his own.
[00:40:19.770]And as such, he appears as a reincarnation
[00:40:22.850]of the sacred,
[00:40:23.690]just as with the glorious body of Jesus,
[00:40:26.510]he is raised from the dead and set to control
[00:40:28.750]all earthly desires for eternity from heaven.
[00:40:30.770]So this is
[00:40:32.750]constituted in an imagining world of images
[00:40:34.570]and serves as a model for both forbidden
[00:40:36.450]and what is to be imitated.
[00:40:37.650]His symbolic body serves as an anatomical
[00:40:41.090]metaphor for the organization
[00:40:42.790]of the nation. Following an
[00:40:44.690]anatomical understanding of the time, the body
[00:40:46.550]is taken to reflect divine creation.
[00:40:48.210]And so anatomically, the king
[00:40:50.650]is the head, the clergy is the brain,
[00:40:52.790]nobility is the heart, and the third
[00:40:54.650]estate is the liver. And this
[00:40:56.690]anatomy relates to his subjects
[00:40:58.450]quote, not as individuals
[00:41:00.770]but members of his symbolic body.
[00:41:02.930]And through this imaginary,
[00:41:04.730]he transmutes existence across
[00:41:06.890]all groups, the bourgeois, the
[00:41:08.810]feudal, the others, neutralizing
[00:41:10.750]the opposition, making it an
[00:41:12.730]object of hasty speculation.
[00:41:13.970]Yeah. Let me go to some more,
[00:41:18.670]even more contemporary examples. Give us a little
[00:41:20.790]more flavor.
[00:41:22.730]So this is a chart
[00:41:25.390]for and about
[00:41:27.990]London.
[00:41:28.430]And so in the 19th century,
[00:41:34.010]London was gripped by a series of severe
[00:41:35.910]cholera epidemics that left victims
[00:41:37.930]struck with violent nausea,
[00:41:39.550]diarrhea, and vomiting.
[00:41:40.670]Dehydration
[00:41:42.890]was so rapid and intense that it caused
[00:41:44.710]the blood to thicken and turn
[00:41:46.590]the skin blue, and it makes them
[00:41:48.550]resemble death.
[00:41:49.250]Symptoms could onset so
[00:41:52.670]quickly the victims might die within a few hours.
[00:41:54.670]This is often referred to
[00:41:56.530]at the time as, quote, the Asiatic
[00:41:58.650]Cholera, and the
[00:42:00.590]disease was perceived to be an invader from
[00:42:02.530]the colonies of India and beyond.
[00:42:03.970]The conventional response was quarantine,
[00:42:06.530]but the British, clinging to
[00:42:08.550]their international trade, sought
[00:42:10.570]other means to control it.
[00:42:11.690]With no known cure, some doctors hastily
[00:42:14.470]labeled it, quote, a social disease
[00:42:16.430]caused by poverty and perhaps untreatable
[00:42:18.590]through moral uplift.
[00:42:19.530]The prevailing theory was Mayas,
[00:42:22.610]causing as the foul smells of decaying
[00:42:24.870]matter. This belief
[00:42:26.890]drove a sanitationist assault
[00:42:28.710]on dirty streets, poor ventilation, and
[00:42:30.630]bad-in-the-face cemeteries.
[00:42:31.790]Physician John Strode published
[00:42:34.930]a short pamphlet, quote,
[00:42:36.010]on the mode of communication of cholera
[00:42:38.750]to little fanfare in 1849.
[00:42:40.450]In it, he argued that it was
[00:42:42.810]containment water, not foul air,
[00:42:44.710]or contaminated
[00:42:46.830]water, excuse me, not foul air, that caused
[00:42:48.590]the disease. He largely
[00:42:50.730]ignored, and he
[00:42:52.550]his publication was largely ignored until
[00:42:54.670]the next outbreak.
[00:42:55.470]So finally he was able to persuade the Soho
[00:42:58.570]authorities to remove the contaminated water's
[00:43:00.710]pump handle. His
[00:43:02.630]evidence included a black mark map
[00:43:04.690]in which the greatly expanded
[00:43:06.810]second edition on cholera,
[00:43:08.450]and in this edition outlines a description
[00:43:10.570]of its mode of communication, quote,
[00:43:12.450]stated in general way. I won't read it.
[00:43:14.710]But what
[00:43:16.730]it provides is an insight into the birth
[00:43:18.770]of what we now call biopolitics.
[00:43:20.390]Not just a union of bio
[00:43:22.490]and politics, but rather as a mature biological
[00:43:24.850]mode of power as communication
[00:43:27.130]or really communicable.
[00:43:28.470]Communicability
[00:43:30.810]contains a whole epistemology of power.
[00:43:32.750]It moves away from static views
[00:43:34.850]and instead offers an environmental view
[00:43:36.890]as a collection
[00:43:38.670]of distinctive processes working together
[00:43:40.690]to sustain an organic whole.
[00:43:42.090]This represents the stories of a biopolitical
[00:43:44.710]perspective that shapes the social
[00:43:46.470]governments and interventions.
[00:43:48.190]Transmission reframes power
[00:43:50.550]as a mutable force that circulates,
[00:43:52.430]proliferates, and spreads through proximity and contact.
[00:43:54.610]It does not look for
[00:43:56.510]individual failings to explain
[00:43:58.110]things like criminality,
[00:43:59.910]immorality, or deviance,
[00:44:02.450]but instead considers them as
[00:44:04.410]communicable conditions spread through the soul.
[00:44:06.590]It is exemplified by
[00:44:08.510]Cesare Lombroso, who likens
[00:44:10.690]criminality to a pathological condition.
[00:44:12.530]Philosophically,
[00:44:14.050]this form of transmission signifies a shift
[00:44:16.510]from simple linear causality
[00:44:18.090]to nodes within a network of influences
[00:44:20.730]characterized by propagation.
[00:44:23.310]So it has three
[00:44:24.430]characteristics. I won't read all of them because it will get a little
[00:44:26.410]too detailed. But
[00:44:28.330]there's a notion of independence,
[00:44:29.910]where power is a manifestation
[00:44:32.490]through a combination of forces.
[00:44:34.290]There's a notion of adaptation,
[00:44:36.570]where a power is
[00:44:38.370]ongoing, evolutionary,
[00:44:39.970]and goes through metamorphoses.
[00:44:41.690]And ultimately, contagion
[00:44:43.770]describes power of things to spread faster
[00:44:46.370]than they can be sustained, often on a grand scale
[00:44:48.670]to large groups
[00:44:50.170]or an entire population.
[00:44:52.310]What I go on to explain is how this then gets used
[00:44:54.850]at the time.
[00:44:55.490]The biggest example that I use was
[00:44:58.750]the Contagious Disease Acts
[00:45:00.870]of the 1860s in
[00:45:02.790]England,
[00:45:04.030]which were
[00:45:05.730]hygiene and statecraft
[00:45:08.470]that we still have today.
[00:45:09.310]For instance, whenever encampments,
[00:45:12.030]like let's say Palestine,
[00:45:13.810]or even previous Occupy encampments
[00:45:16.290]were raided,
[00:45:16.810]the justification
[00:45:19.830]that's always given is for hygiene.
[00:45:22.250]And so these pro-hygiene initiatives
[00:45:24.450]are a way to make things
[00:45:26.130]non-political, and give a non-political
[00:45:28.470]excuse for engaging in a political action.
[00:45:30.270]And that's exactly the sort of
[00:45:32.450]logic that happens here.
[00:45:33.350]Okay, let's do one last one
[00:45:35.570]in the college time.
[00:45:37.190]So here, I argue that
[00:45:40.090]something that's probably most typical of what we live in
[00:45:42.470]right now is not so much the organic
[00:45:44.610]model or a metabolic one like I just
[00:45:46.570]talked about, nor is the one
[00:45:48.470]of a clockwork or a billiard ball
[00:45:50.330]even in the international
[00:45:52.190]relations, I still want to think that way
[00:45:54.530]or even a
[00:45:56.270]statistical one that I've been dealing with previously
[00:45:58.410]but rather it's this one
[00:46:00.470]that's partially even corporeal
[00:46:02.430]it's more about vectors and flows
[00:46:04.530]than it is about fixed points
[00:46:06.130]and often it's just about speed
[00:46:08.390]and accumulation through a series of
[00:46:10.530]overlapping
[00:46:12.730]connections and fluxes
[00:46:14.330]than it is about
[00:46:15.190]stopping to get a complete
[00:46:17.770]and pure picture of something
[00:46:19.230]and I'm going to just read some
[00:46:22.130]of the prescriptive portions of this
[00:46:23.930]and then end with some words
[00:46:26.270]of the Milton group
[00:46:27.170]because that's my last word here
[00:46:29.530]so surviving
[00:46:32.530]our cybernetic imperial
[00:46:34.490]metropolitan world necessitates
[00:46:36.650]what I call asymmetrical tactics
[00:46:38.610]which will leverage
[00:46:40.710]the power of non-existence
[00:46:42.210]differential events and ungovernability
[00:46:44.790]as we advance into a cybernetic abyss
[00:46:48.410]driven by the unceasing development
[00:46:50.490]of technology
[00:46:52.070]we find ourselves in a dire need
[00:46:53.670]of a political strategy
[00:46:54.690]that can navigate this digital terrain
[00:46:56.450]relentless machinic feedback loops
[00:47:00.070]programmed to speak and see
[00:47:01.390]in narrow sets of predefined parameters
[00:47:03.150]increasingly set the cadence of our lives
[00:47:05.990]in this uncharted territory
[00:47:08.430]a graphological topos
[00:47:11.030]or topography of digital networks
[00:47:12.750]becomes a formidable force
[00:47:14.310]that can shape the context
[00:47:17.130]of revolutionary politics
[00:47:18.430]so amidst our transformations
[00:47:22.010]of guiding principles could emerge
[00:47:23.610]those guided by asymmetry
[00:47:26.070]expresses difference
[00:47:28.010]as a form of inequivalence
[00:47:29.950]instead of a dialectical
[00:47:32.270]strategy of sharpening contradictions
[00:47:33.870]it embraces
[00:47:35.610]a logic of conflict through separation
[00:47:37.770]and at least three tactics can be derived
[00:47:39.930]from this asymmetry
[00:47:40.770]first, against compulsory visibility
[00:47:44.270]it proposes non-existence
[00:47:45.730]or anti-ontology
[00:47:46.850]which challenges the
[00:47:49.490]persistent demand for constant presence
[00:47:51.950]and the commodification of identity
[00:47:53.490]against subjective difference
[00:47:56.130]it offers instead a differential event
[00:47:58.210]or non-resemblance
[00:47:59.330]which celebrates moments of rupture
[00:48:01.510]rather than individual forms of appearance
[00:48:03.270]and third, against
[00:48:05.810]metropolitan management, it stands for
[00:48:07.790]ungovernability or anti-solutionist approaches
[00:48:10.110]which problematize
[00:48:11.950]the notion of problems themselves
[00:48:13.430]simply as something to be managed or solved
[00:48:16.070]these asymmetric maneuvers
[00:48:18.230]provide a glimpse of what lies behind
[00:48:20.010]the tomfines of what we live in today
[00:48:21.890]demonstrate that even a world flooded with images
[00:48:24.470]and dominated by powerful systems
[00:48:26.110]the unseen and unimagined can still exist
[00:48:28.550]and in taking a note
[00:48:32.630]from the historic failures of revolutionary
[00:48:34.390]collectives
[00:48:35.170]we can illuminate just as much from their failures
[00:48:38.350]if not more than their successes
[00:48:39.930]it's certainly the case with
[00:48:42.170]revolutionary selves
[00:48:43.370]whose decentralized structure and experimental
[00:48:46.390]tactics set them apart from others
[00:48:48.130]in Germany's moment
[00:48:49.410]and there are valuable insights
[00:48:51.830]we glean from their dissolution in 1992
[00:48:53.990]in their final words
[00:48:55.670]before they're dissolving as a group
[00:48:57.230]they offer a sober analysis of how to confront
[00:48:59.110]the neutralizing forces of our present
[00:49:00.670]what revolts or processes of adaptation
[00:49:05.290]will emerge in the metropolis of the future
[00:49:07.630]and where the fault lines will lie
[00:49:09.410]is still largely undefined
[00:49:11.610]the struggles
[00:49:14.910]the forms of appropriation
[00:49:17.390]in the proletarian spectrum
[00:49:19.490]in the subclasses of migrant youth
[00:49:21.770]socially disenfranchised women
[00:49:23.330]or the victims of the deregulation
[00:49:25.550]in East Germany seem so far
[00:49:27.370]inscrutable to us because we are confronted
[00:49:29.530]with images in which we do not recognize
[00:49:31.490]the essence of the emancipation of the class
[00:49:33.590]because our analytic tools
[00:49:35.410]are not sufficient to decode the meaning
[00:49:37.190]of the struggles behind the forms of appearance
[00:49:38.930]therefore there is nothing left
[00:49:41.330]but to face the historical process
[00:49:43.350]without resorting to hierarchical
[00:49:45.470]patriarchal anti-communist
[00:49:47.250]political patterns and organizational
[00:49:49.310]models and without hastily producing
[00:49:51.710]new ideologies that would already
[00:49:53.390]adjust to a straitjacket
[00:49:54.910]completely open to the situation
[00:49:56.890]and smoothing out existing contradictions
[00:49:58.910]in favor of a non-causal worldview
[00:50:00.790]notably, the RZ
[00:50:03.270]acknowledges the futility in trying
[00:50:05.390]to precisely predict or shape the future
[00:50:07.190]instead they advocate a negative move
[00:50:09.530]of opening up space for the unforeseen
[00:50:11.470]to emerge. They understand that
[00:50:13.330]each era is burdened by an onslaught of
[00:50:15.190]spectacular images that obscure more
[00:50:17.410]than they reveal. So the best we can do
[00:50:19.290]is ease the burden of those anticon.
[00:50:21.650]Thank you.
[00:50:22.650]Come on, a map of everything that was going on here.
[00:50:31.510]Here it is. I only talked about small slivers,
[00:50:35.210]but if there's anything in it that interests you,
[00:50:36.730]I'd be more than happy to chat about it.
[00:50:39.030]Some of them have been sort of modified
[00:50:40.710]since I made this, but it was the easiest
[00:50:43.290]person I've had to let go.
[00:50:44.650]I see a hand in the back.
[00:50:49.890]- Uh, what if it was hot?
[00:50:51.590]- Um, I was wondering if,
[00:50:55.430]I think this is a little off topic,
[00:50:57.490]but maybe it's also kind of off topic.
[00:51:00.610]This summer, the Olympics occurred,
[00:51:02.950]and on July 26th, a group of individuals
[00:51:06.650]who hadn't been found or identified
[00:51:09.890]by the French police attacked a number of rail lines
[00:51:13.230]in a way that was sort of reminiscent
[00:51:16.250]of a group of anarchists in the early 2000s
[00:51:19.550]who were known as the Karnak Nine.
[00:51:21.530]They supposedly wrote the Invisible Committee books,
[00:51:25.150]like the coming insurrection and all these things.
[00:51:27.210]And I was wondering if you could speak a little bit
[00:51:29.950]to sort of, I guess, responses to the state
[00:51:36.050]in this sort of systematic imperial hell
[00:51:39.830]that they've kind of...
[00:51:40.850]Yeah, great questions.
[00:51:42.730]And, you know, this is stuff that I've written on
[00:51:44.790]and made stuff about before, so I have a lot to say,
[00:51:47.930]so I'll just try and condense it now
[00:51:49.270]that there's a lot out there.
[00:51:51.470]And actually, my collaborator on a Clou computer film
[00:51:57.830]was interviewed by the press for the French sabotage event.
[00:52:02.650]I mean, look, maybe the easiest approach to this
[00:52:11.410]is to say I think there's a rising tide
[00:52:13.290]of anti-development politics going on in France
[00:52:17.050]that has a particular valence to it
[00:52:18.690]because of their sort of peculiar history of urban
[00:52:21.410]urbanization that only really kind of happens after the war
[00:52:24.650]and they have a sort of romance with the undeveloped in a way
[00:52:30.990]that maybe we don't have in the US.
[00:52:32.490]We have this weird wilderness discourse instead.
[00:52:35.730]But across a number of regions there,
[00:52:43.230]like I'm thinking Italy, there was
[00:52:45.170]an anti-high speed rail development politics
[00:52:48.410]for a while.
[00:52:49.550]In Germany, there's anti-Tesla plants.
[00:52:51.350]There's anti-volcano plant stuff happening.
[00:52:53.230]That group named itself and wrote a communique.
[00:52:55.230]They call themselves the Volcano Group.
[00:52:57.230]I looked it up.
[00:52:59.230]If you're curious, you can just go on Google Maps
[00:53:01.230]and you can click around long enough,
[00:53:03.230]you can figure out exactly the electricity
[00:53:05.230]pylon that they burned down that shut off
[00:53:07.230]the electricity to the giga plant outside Berlin.
[00:53:10.230]And the thing before the Olympics.
[00:53:15.230]I mean, look.
[00:53:17.230]There's actually some text in here
[00:53:19.230]that I took out.
[00:53:21.290]About the original Roman games.
[00:53:24.230]And the old adage about bread and circuses
[00:53:27.230]is as relevant now as ever.
[00:53:30.230]These games, the Olympics in particular,
[00:53:34.230]are nationalist ways of trying to boast
[00:53:38.230]on the international scene about just
[00:53:40.230]how much money you have to waste.
[00:53:42.230]You never make it to just show off your symbolic power,
[00:53:45.230]but building a whole bunch of stadiums
[00:53:47.230]that never get used again.
[00:53:49.230]Parenthetically, LA is trying to say
[00:53:51.230]that you can build stadiums and develop something
[00:53:53.230]that will keep you in use.
[00:53:55.230]But that's rarely ever the case.
[00:53:57.230]I mean, we can go to Georgia Tech right now, too,
[00:53:59.230]and see how much we like living
[00:54:01.230]in the old Olympics housing buildings.
[00:54:03.230]And so there are always these just, like,
[00:54:06.230]awful symbolic spectacles.
[00:54:08.230]And so for anarchists or other far-left groups
[00:54:11.230]to sort of make a deal out of it, no surprise.
[00:54:14.230]I mean, when they were in Canada,
[00:54:16.230]I think the no-Olympics people there
[00:54:18.230]also hooked up with indigenous protesters.
[00:54:21.170]Maybe you're just not going to see in France in the same way.
[00:54:25.170]And I think the current ongoing struggle like that
[00:54:30.170]in the United States right now is stop cop city.
[00:54:33.170]But it's really in a larger circuit
[00:54:36.170]that connects to something like Standing Rock
[00:54:39.170]and is really trying to pull the curtain back
[00:54:44.170]and look at what these proposed job creation,
[00:54:48.170]development options really are.
[00:54:51.110]Like the one stop cop city is in this unincorporated area
[00:54:55.110]outside Atlanta where the police are going to create
[00:54:58.110]a whole fake city to use for urban operations training.
[00:55:05.110]And if you actually look at the receipts of all this,
[00:55:08.110]it's really obscene stuff.
[00:55:11.110]If you haven't seen Riot School USA,
[00:55:13.110]it's a somewhat recent documentary that picked up
[00:55:16.110]old US anti-riot training footage.
[00:55:21.050]It's really wonderful.
[00:55:22.050]In part, you can do that because the US did all this training
[00:55:27.050]under the auspices of the army and the military,
[00:55:29.050]and so all their archival film materials are open and available
[00:55:32.050]to the public, which you can remix them into a documentary.
[00:55:36.050]And this is really at the height of Johnson's anti-urban revolt
[00:55:42.050]initiatives, too, in which most of the urbanization at that time
[00:55:48.050]is more about how to control protesters,
[00:55:50.990]but also racialize populations in a really extreme sort of way.
[00:55:54.990]And so Cop City is right outside Atlanta,
[00:55:59.990]and it's an old-growth forest, if I remember correctly.
[00:56:02.990]And they're trying to stop the creation of this, basically,
[00:56:05.990]like, police training facility.
[00:56:07.990]But I think the coordinate-- the, like, particular coordinates
[00:56:11.990]of struggle, people are running into some problems that didn't
[00:56:15.990]work the same way that they did in France.
[00:56:17.990]And the sort of, like, best case scenario happened there.
[00:56:20.930]And this place, which was an old sort of, like, farming area
[00:56:24.930]that the French state has been trying to build an airport in
[00:56:27.930]since the '70s.
[00:56:29.930]And the farmers just were like, no, we don't want that.
[00:56:31.930]It's going to change our quality of life.
[00:56:33.930]It's going to move us from one type of place
[00:56:35.930]to another type of place.
[00:56:37.930]And so they started resisting it.
[00:56:38.930]And they had some local political support.
[00:56:40.930]And then during the anti-globalization movement,
[00:56:42.930]some poppers basically found out that living in the forest
[00:56:46.930]and swatting there, they could do it no problem.
[00:56:50.870]And they developed a sort of friendly relationship with the farmers
[00:56:52.870]and kept helping them and preventing the airport from being put in.
[00:56:56.870]And it escalated to a point where they were sending in, like,
[00:57:00.870]1,000-plus riot cops every year or so to try and, like, finally clear the area.
[00:57:05.870]It came to a head under Macron where the farmers started, like,
[00:57:10.870]even using old tractors and burning them out and, like, disrupting the pathways.
[00:57:20.810]Protesters were, like, pretty militant and they knew what they were doing too.
[00:57:24.810]And it just so happened to rain around that time too, so it was super muddy.
[00:57:28.810]So they had these great pictures at the time of the riot cops in all of their gear just getting weighed down by all the mud
[00:57:35.810]and even get splattered on their, like, visors and screens and stuff.
[00:57:39.810]And it's almost sort of, like, rematerialized, sort of, like, nature is revolting sort of way, you know.
[00:57:45.810]And Macron is like, "We give up. We're going to stop."
[00:57:50.750]"We've been trying this for 50 years and it's over. We're not going to do it anymore."
[00:57:53.750]And so once that happened, it was almost like sending a flare out to everybody that, like,
[00:57:57.750]"Anti-development politics can win. You can do this. Here's a book or a guide to strategies on how to do it."
[00:58:04.750]I don't think it's being reproduced in as effective a way as they thought.
[00:58:08.750]So I think we're going to have to go back to the drawing board on that one.
[00:58:11.750]You know, the thing that got the TORNAC 9 nabbed is that if they were the people who do it,
[00:58:20.690]they found that if you just bend some wrought iron, like using reinforcing concrete, into
[00:58:28.230]this very specific hook pattern, it will short-circuit the electrical wires for the French high-speed
[00:58:35.390]national train line.
[00:58:37.410]And the story that people were circulating at the time is that some German green anarchist
[00:58:44.130]eco-people had known that those rail lines were being used to move some of the nuclear
[00:58:50.630]waste from French nuclear power facilities, and because there's this great sort of German
[00:58:55.690]anti-nuclear movement that's been around for a million years, they just let their comrades
[00:59:01.190]in France know, they'd already figured out this sort of hook thing and put it in enough
[00:59:05.090]places.
[00:59:06.090]No one got hurt, but the French state freaked out because their trains, which were carrying
[00:59:10.590]nuclear waste, were just sitting in the middle of nowhere, and they were afraid that people
[00:59:15.670]could steal it or something bad could happen and all this other stuff, and so they created
[00:59:20.570]this completely wild, trumped-up anti-terrorism stuff, they raided their farmhouse, I think
[00:59:26.550]Julian was under prosecution for over 10 years or something like that for it, and it became
[00:59:32.810]this huge spectacle.
[00:59:33.810]Unfortunately, the French state kind of made fools of themselves, this is like a classic
[00:59:38.350]movement in which the sovereign overreacts, and suddenly that's the thing that does them
[00:59:43.590]in.
[00:59:44.590]This was true in the Arab Spring, it happens in campus protests a lot too, and if they
[00:59:50.510]were to reinforce or securitize themselves, it probably wouldn't have been anything at
[00:59:55.590]all.
[00:59:56.590]I don't know, sorry it's a little meandering, but that's sort of like the core that's
[00:59:59.610]lasting there.
[01:00:00.610]You were telling how pro-hygiene has historically been used for like, under the
[01:00:07.350]guise of being non-political, but it's typically being used for political purposes, I think
[01:00:13.650]of COVID-19 and how China specifically has like, utilized their security state to manage
[01:00:20.450]their own crisis. So I guess my question is, how do we interpret, or how does like your
[01:00:25.490]anarchist lens view certain usages of the security state for like, pro-hygiene purposes,
[01:00:33.770]even when they're clearly being used to like, securitize the population?
[01:00:38.410]Yeah. I mean like, the easy answer for all this is feminism, in which the standard we
[01:00:44.370]should use to relate to each other is care, rather than let's say hygiene.
[01:00:50.390]And that COVID-19 was a time in which we could have really had a big discussion over what
[01:00:55.290]does it mean to care for each other, and instead it led to this silver bullet, let's make a
[01:01:00.570]vaccine sort of approach, which, you know, don't get me wrong, you know, I took my vaccine,
[01:01:04.810]it's very important. But like, these larger questions of like, how do we live in society
[01:01:09.930]together, and how do we relate to our neighbors, there's little pockets of it. Los Angeles,
[01:01:14.890]we have a mutual aid society that I think is still going in a few neighborhoods.
[01:01:20.330]There was a reevaluation of like, what are necessary goods for survival and should be
[01:01:24.510]provided for free, no question. There's a little bit more of that. But these like, the
[01:01:30.650]severe lockdown, you know, I did it because it was one of the few options provided to
[01:01:36.170]us that, you know, was being coordinated in an effective way. But like, some people think
[01:01:41.390]that like, China worked, and it didn't. It's like, it's pure tanky doctrinaire dog
[01:01:50.270]dogma. And there's a really great book and group that you can look up that, that discusses
[01:01:58.470]this in a lot of detail. The group's called, sorry, I'm like, after giving the lecture,
[01:02:04.370]I'm blanking on it. They have a Chinese name. The book is called Social Contagion. It was
[01:02:20.210]a Chinese collective of largely anonymous people, both stateside and in China, who are
[01:02:31.810]really interested in what labor organizing and labor looks like in China, given that
[01:02:36.110]it's completely censored and prohibited there. And so, you know, of course they have to be
[01:02:40.390]anonymous, because if they get their name out, they'll just be put in jail immediately.
[01:02:44.190]But those people did a very concrete on-the-ground analysis, not only in Wuhan,
[01:02:50.150]but across China, about what the lockdown policies actually did. And a large part of
[01:02:55.730]it is they just censored doctors. I'm sure you saw the news about that. They often jailed doctors who were
[01:03:00.650]talking about COVID. And instead they just tried to do complete information control.
[01:03:05.510]So it was basically like, if you can't, if you don't hear about it, then it's not going on.
[01:03:10.310]Which like, okay, echoes to how the Trumpian response was going on here as well, right?
[01:03:15.170]And so the Chinese lockdown was ultimately not terribly effective, because
[01:03:20.090]it was repressing people, and it wasn't actually giving people medical resources in the way that they needed.
[01:03:26.670]And so I think this gets back to my initial point, where it's just like,
[01:03:30.130]these hygienic measures are always political.
[01:03:33.670]They're rarely actually about, like, understanding the circumstance enough to make it better.
[01:03:39.170]And they're usually meant to create a very particular, like, social effect.
[01:03:43.950]That's meant to be about censorship and quality and that sort of thing.
[01:03:48.410]It makes me think of
[01:03:50.030]Foucault and Discipline and Punish.
[01:03:52.270]You know, I don't know who revisited that in and after the pandemic, but it's actually, like, really interesting.
[01:03:58.310]Because in this famous Panopticon chapter, like, the most important thing is not the Panopticon.
[01:04:03.310]At least right now it's not the Panopticon anymore. It's the plague city and the leper colony.
[01:04:08.110]Agamben's written about this a little bit. I mean, Gahn was, like, way out of the luncheon code.
[01:04:11.890]I don't know why that happened, but, like...
[01:04:16.190]Like, the leper colony is this logic where if there's something that you don't like,
[01:04:19.970]you just exclude it. You put it beyond the city walls.
[01:04:23.770]And you let it fend for itself.
[01:04:26.870]But the Plague City was this weird question of rebuilding the social from the ground up
[01:04:34.070]in this very strange, urbanist way, in which everyone was locked in their homes,
[01:04:38.170]as if it was a cell in a prison or something.
[01:04:40.470]And then they re-established certain lines of communication, like, putting in food.
[01:04:46.870]But they also had attendants going from, like, door to door
[01:04:49.910]to check on people and do, like, a visual illness inspection.
[01:04:55.470]And that whole system is, like, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old.
[01:05:03.170]And Foucault is already talking about this.
[01:05:05.810]And obviously, it is just as political as it is medical and all these other things.
[01:05:11.590]And it's so wild to me that that's kind of where we're still stuck at.
[01:05:16.090]And we can't ask these other questions about mutual aid
[01:05:19.850]about rethinking what care is, all this other stuff.
[01:05:23.130]I mean, there are some doctors and medical professionals who are doing this.
[01:05:26.910]But we're really stuck in this medicated, give it an injection, one shot sort of approach
[01:05:34.010]to things rather than rethinking the social context in which health is even defined
[01:05:38.090]and how we work together.
[01:05:40.890]The alphabet is Shuang, by the way.
[01:05:42.950]What is that?
[01:05:43.510]Shuang, by the way.
[01:05:44.870]Oh, Shuang, yeah.
[01:05:46.210]Shuang, yes.
[01:05:47.030]Yeah, C-H-U-A-N-G. Look them up.
[01:05:49.790]They're amazing.
[01:05:50.630]They're some of the only people doing
[01:05:52.430]really detailed, interesting, insightful stuff
[01:05:55.130]on China in these days.
[01:05:57.630]Yeah, please.
[01:05:58.130]Yeah, I had a kind of observation
[01:06:00.590]or you were thinking about something
[01:06:02.050]I wanted to bounce over into about this.
[01:06:04.030]You might address this kind of thing already.
[01:06:07.690]But I was thinking about your observation
[01:06:10.570]about the invention of writing sort of accompanying
[01:06:13.690]the state and state power.
[01:06:16.410]And there seems to be a difference
[01:06:19.730]between that certain kinds of writing
[01:06:23.290]that embodied early or maybe like origin story type
[01:06:27.350]state power, like you have the Code of Hammurabi,
[01:06:30.150]which you can think about like the tablets of Moses
[01:06:33.970]or the American Constitution even,
[01:06:36.970]that as documents can be singular in existence,
[01:06:41.970]like they have ritual value more than use value, right?
[01:06:47.990]Like they need to exist somewhere
[01:06:49.670]as this kind of magical ritual embodiment of the word,
[01:06:53.710]but they don't need to exist everywhere
[01:06:56.470]as proliferation of that.
[01:06:58.630]It's like it's a unilateral decree
[01:07:01.750]onto the population from the sovereign.
[01:07:05.010]And I was thinking that the kind of form that contrasts
[01:07:08.650]that maybe most strikingly to me,
[01:07:11.630]more so than a map or a graph, is the blank form, right?
[01:07:16.090]So like the invention of the
[01:07:19.610]the form that has blanks to be filled in by, you know,
[01:07:24.610]lower mid-level government or state employees
[01:07:28.910]that accompanies disciplinary power.
[01:07:31.390]And the critical difference is not just that the form
[01:07:33.650]exists everywhere, but that it's not declarative,
[01:07:35.930]it's consumptive.
[01:07:37.270]It's that the structure of the form asserts what is
[01:07:41.490]to be collected, what is of use about the population,
[01:07:45.610]and then it gathers in to the state rather than
[01:07:49.550]declaring out the way that, say, a proclamation
[01:07:53.010]or constitution or something like that might be.
[01:07:56.110]But it's kind of radical, and I could go on about
[01:08:00.590]what that means in the age of, say, AI.
[01:08:02.870]That just consumes everything, everything that,
[01:08:06.290]you know, that first kind of, I think there might've been
[01:08:09.570]earlier exemplars of that, maybe in the Renaissance,
[01:08:12.010]but it really takes off under job printing,
[01:08:14.650]right in the 19th century, where everybody's making
[01:08:17.430]little forms and receipts books.
[01:08:19.490]- Yeah, something like that would be awesome.
[01:08:20.570]- Yeah, I know, love that genre question.
[01:08:23.710]Like, yeah, I think the two forms of the oldest writing
[01:08:27.610]that, you know, this is at least archeological,
[01:08:29.670]there could've been all kinds of ways in which
[01:08:31.210]people are using the word that they just don't have
[01:08:33.850]evidence of 'cause they have different material culture
[01:08:35.850]that doesn't preserve, are both a, just like,
[01:08:40.850]weird spreadsheet logic of the accounting tables,
[01:08:45.650]which some people say is the first one,
[01:08:47.450]but it's almost exactly co-extensive
[01:08:49.430]with the origin story as well.
[01:08:51.030]So like, Epic of Gilgamesh.
[01:08:52.850]So there's one or two places in here where like,
[01:08:54.670]I just reproduce all that because before they even get
[01:08:57.050]to the legal code, they have to have this like,
[01:09:00.950]enormous three-paragraph preamble to say,
[01:09:03.670]so-and-so, son of this other, victor in this,
[01:09:06.830]defeater of the other one, seen as, you know,
[01:09:09.530]divinely inspired by so-and-so,
[01:09:11.350]and it's just this long sort of like, list of things.
[01:09:14.610]And that's kind of its narrative mode,
[01:09:16.230]as opposed to the, I don't know, relational table of the,
[01:09:19.370]of the kind.
[01:09:20.630]And when I think of the empty form,
[01:09:24.350]I have to think about the sort of like,
[01:09:25.890]weird thing about the birth of statistics,
[01:09:29.110]in which the people who made statistics,
[01:09:31.790]and parenthetically, it's statistics,
[01:09:34.910]it's about states collecting information on their people,
[01:09:37.190]and it's literally where the word comes from.
[01:09:39.870]That the people who are the sort of like,
[01:09:42.070]partisans for statistics,
[01:09:43.550]don't have the calculating power to actually realize it,
[01:09:46.310]for probably like 50 years after they're sort of like,
[01:09:48.510]debating its importance.
[01:09:49.310]And trying to make sure it gets incorporated into policy,
[01:09:51.770]and all this other kind of stuff.
[01:09:53.390]And so, I think there's this ideology,
[01:09:55.390]and this allure of this ability to like,
[01:09:57.870]have the complete picture, or the form, or whatever,
[01:10:00.650]in which it sort of like,
[01:10:01.810]suddenly makes things work for you.
[01:10:03.810]And that's definitely what's happening
[01:10:05.430]at my school right now.
[01:10:06.830]We've gone from paper to digital.
[01:10:09.290]And so there's just all of these like,
[01:10:10.710]form stack things that are coming my way constantly.
[01:10:13.930]And I've really been trying to figure out like,
[01:10:16.290]what's going on with these?
[01:10:17.350]Are these more effective, are they like,
[01:10:19.250]you know, if you just take an economic logic to a word,
[01:10:21.750]is it saving me time, is it more efficient?
[01:10:23.870]And I'm not sure it really is.
[01:10:26.250]And so then if it's not, like,
[01:10:27.530]what else is going on with this?
[01:10:29.130]And I think it's about like,
[01:10:31.010]this other form of power that's become
[01:10:33.830]really alluring these days about like,
[01:10:35.210]data visualization, or analytics,
[01:10:38.130]or like, thinking that there's some like,
[01:10:39.930]higher level that you can synthesize things on,
[01:10:42.490]and then once you get that picture,
[01:10:44.010]suddenly you can operate better.
[01:10:45.970]And I think that's maybe why the 19th century
[01:10:48.070]is such an important,
[01:10:49.190]place to go back to,
[01:10:50.030]'cause maybe it's related to a colonial,
[01:10:52.170]geographical way of thinking, right?
[01:10:54.250]In which you mean resource management,
[01:10:55.810]and you're trying to map a place
[01:10:57.790]according to what is worth spending your time and resources
[01:11:00.710]and sort of extracting,
[01:11:01.910]and who are the people and things that are crucial numbers
[01:11:04.550]that you need to sort of manipulate and that sort of thing.
[01:11:06.530]But yeah, it's like a different table-based logic
[01:11:09.650]than there's the accounting one, I think.
[01:11:12.210]- Is that interesting?
[01:11:13.050]Is that where you're going with it?
[01:11:15.470]- One more question.
[01:11:19.130]- Final question.
[01:11:19.810]- 3.1.
[01:11:21.310]- Okay, yeah, it is related.
[01:11:24.250]It has to do with writing and secrecy.
[01:11:27.710]There was something that I mentioned at some point
[01:11:30.630]that made me think about writing as associated to secrecy.
[01:11:35.010]And how does that foment power or state power?
[01:11:41.550]Now, how does that relate to state power?
[01:11:44.310]- Oh, God, this is such a great question.
[01:11:46.970]Because like, okay, if you just read your handout around,
[01:11:49.070]or whatever, you'd be like, states operate through secrecy,
[01:11:52.510]and like, secrecy is just a state thing.
[01:11:55.270]But I think that if you open up the aperture,
[01:11:57.170]you're gonna see a lot of other different things.
[01:11:59.610]Like, Ian Hacken's really good on this
[01:12:02.930]in his Taming of Chance book,
[01:12:04.230]which is his sort of like social history
[01:12:05.970]of the introduction of statistics in the statecraft.
[01:12:09.010]And so he says, you know, if you go back
[01:12:11.310]to the really early times in which states
[01:12:13.570]start collecting, you know, just like tables
[01:12:15.990]and lists of its resources,
[01:12:19.010]so under like Louis XIV, his minister Colbert
[01:12:21.550]starts doing this, who's like obsessed with libraries.
[01:12:23.890]And people say he's like the first modern person
[01:12:26.290]who starts like having libraries
[01:12:27.630]and truly understanding the modernization of government.
[01:12:30.670]And what he'd do is he'd just like send people out
[01:12:32.850]to collect information about the realm.
[01:12:34.450]He thought that if he had this information,
[01:12:35.910]it would be power.
[01:12:36.550]But they didn't make it public
[01:12:38.210]because they thought that they needed to keep it private.
[01:12:41.590]And it gave them a competitive edge against everyone.
[01:12:43.710]So the first couple hundred years of this,
[01:12:46.130]everyone was very protective of their statistics.
[01:12:48.950]They didn't want to put them out there.
[01:12:50.330]I mean pro-statistics and not put them out there.
[01:12:54.070]But then there becomes this switch that happens,
[01:12:57.870]at least in the European version of it,
[01:12:59.950]where everyone wants to boast about it
[01:13:02.110]because it becomes a different way of competing
[01:13:04.390]in a different level.
[01:13:05.370]And so in that way, the game sort of changes.
[01:13:08.630]And so then the question of what needs to be a state secret or not
[01:13:15.310]becomes very...
[01:13:18.890]strange.
[01:13:21.090]I mean, it's still tied up in operations of sovereignty.
[01:13:23.350]We saw this under the Bush administration,
[01:13:25.090]in which they're just arguing, like,
[01:13:26.370]we need to be torturing a hell of a lot of people,
[01:13:28.190]but not having anyone know about it,
[01:13:30.190]which is kind of like a bizarre contradiction in my mind,
[01:13:33.950]because the whole idea of when you torture people
[01:13:35.450]is to make people know about it.
[01:13:36.810]But there's also this history of how secret knowledge happens
[01:13:44.130]in religious settings.
[01:13:46.350]So like in the Ziggurat and Ur,
[01:13:48.830]Ur, normal people were not allowed there.
[01:13:51.250]In fact, there are questions over whether or not
[01:13:54.230]the sovereign is allowed.
[01:13:55.350]Sometimes the sovereign is associated with religious order,
[01:13:57.690]and so they're allowed in.
[01:13:58.570]But they hold a form of knowledge
[01:14:01.530]that is usually divinely inspired.
[01:14:04.150]So it means that that is one way
[01:14:08.470]that they're able to distinguish themselves from other people.
[01:14:10.630]And this goes on in sort of clerical orders,
[01:14:13.570]but also secret societies for labor organization
[01:14:17.230]and some of this other stuff.
[01:14:18.770]And so it becomes like a membership in and out thing.
[01:14:22.250]But I think it can also be utilized by leftists
[01:14:25.790]and political people and stuff too.
[01:14:27.830]Because I think secrecy is under liberals
[01:14:31.930]and we've assumed that it's only for bad people.
[01:14:34.150]But I think it's very important as a question of our time
[01:14:37.950]where we're being oversaturated
[01:14:38.990]and everything's sort of being monitored and surveilled.
[01:14:40.950]Cool. Thanks, everybody.
[01:14:48.710]Thank you.

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Humanities on the Edge Presents: Andrew Culp

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