Brief Thoughts on Harvey's The New Imperialism

In his book, The New Imperialism, David Harvey offers a post-classical Marxist account of what he understands to be the contemporary manifestation of imperialism. Harvey employs not only his theoretical greatest hit (the acclaimed ‘spatial fix’), as well as a couple of old Trotsky joints (‘uneven development,’ and ‘accumulation by dispossession’—though Trotsky is given credit for neither in Harvey’s book), but he also ‘develops’ two theoretical logics within the world-system (the ‘territorial’ and ‘capitalistic’ logics) in order to illustrate the spatial economy of imperialism (there is nothing really new about it). The case for imperialism is simple for Harvey: the (still) dominant U.S.—since it is in political-economic decline—must ‘accumulate through dispossession’ revenues from Middle Eastern oil in order to (1) buttress its military-financial position in relation to Europe and Japan, and (2) control the oil-spigot that is fueling a rapidly growing and threatening South-east Asia economic bloc, particularly China. One has to be careful when reading Harvey because he is masterful with his prose, and is very convincing despite his theoretical problems.

The restrictions in length with this blog entry unfortunately allow me to focus on only one of the theoretical problems of Harvey, though a thorough critical analysis of his oeuvre is a prescient book waiting to be written, especially given the scope of his ideas within the discipline. Nevertheless, I want to focus on Harvey’s ‘big Kahuna’: the spatial fix. The spatial fix is obviously the theoretical lynchpin for Harvey in this book, and it is clear that he wishes to employ it in order for the advanced reader to grasp the highlights of a geographical approach to (post)modern global politics. However, the question needs to be asked: would a ‘new imperialism’ make sense if the ‘spatial fix’ proved to be a largely inadequate theoretical concept?

Within the theoretical strains of economic Marxism, Harvey is situated within the ‘crisis theory’ school, particularly with those who emphasize a dynamic called the ‘tendency of the rate to profit to fall’ that was theoretically developed by Rosdolsky, Shaikh, Aglietta, and others from the French ‘regulation school.’ Harvey has accented the work of all these theorists in his books where he outlines in detail the mechanics of the spatial fix. Without getting into detail the complexities of and differences between these theorists, there is one common theoretical thread: that capitalists are incessant about seeking an appropriation of surplus value, and in order to ameliorate any pending crises of overaccumulation (i.e., the steadfast and essential contradiction in capitalism of the mode of production coming into contradiction with the relations of production) an investment into the primary (production), secondary (consumption), and tertiary (R&D; services) circuits must be made in order to temporally offset any crisis. It is with these investitures that new regimes of accumulation burgeon out of the spent infrastructures of the old (e.g., the shift from production-based Keynesian accumulation to consumer/financial-based flexible accumulation). It is upon this temporal fix that Harvey intervened with the spatial component by poignantly pointing out that molecular capital accumulates in clusters, and once it overaccumulates and exceeds its economy of scale, capital must, then, spatially reallocate resources—thus emphasizing the spatio-temporal side of the ‘fix’ equation. We can see that this is his basic premise in The New Imperialism: that there has been an overaccumulation of productive capital within the U.S. for the past twenty or so years (hence the need to export factories to the lowest paid worker sites), and the financial sector is now running into trouble, so there is a need to appropriate, or better, privatize through ‘dispossession’ those sectors that have remained outside of capital’s control, particularly those sectors that are critical for domestic interests: resources such as oil. This is where the intermingling and oft-contradictory logics of capital and territory—within the US—overlap in The New Imperialism, since capital wants the $$$$$, and politicians want happy constituents. One may ask, what is the engine behind all this, or that kernel of truth that is the essence of the spatial fix? Harvey says that we need to look no further than Marx for the answer (Marx has the answers for almost everything for Harvey): Accumulation for accumulation’s sake, production for production’s sake; or what Marx famously called the “Moses and the Prophets of accumuation and production.”

This explanation seems simple enough, what could possibly be the problem? As mentioned above, Harvey’s convincing prose can often hide the theoretical problems that are at work. However, for Harvey, there is no room for contingency in the spatial fix. The moment the spatial fix is employed may be contingent, but the spatial fix embodies a paradoxical determinism; i.e., it is historically necessary that accumulated capital be spatially fixed (particularly in mechanized infrastructure/space), since it apparently has no other function or outlet. As Bruce Norton (2001: 35) has pointed out, there is an assumption at work of a historically necessary agent—properly known as ‘the agent of history’: the capitalist who exploits (appropriates surplus value) and expands (reinvests). Workers are largely irrelevant in falling rate of profit theorists’ writings, because they have no sincere agency; i.e., they are always working for the interests of capital. Workers have no agency, which postmodernists seem to not understand, and we must wait for the contradictions of capital to resolve themselves, which postmodernists naively avoid. We can see line of thinking in Harvey (63) when he boldly claims, “A wave of labor militancy swept the advanced capitalist world during the late 1970s and the 1980s as working-class movements [that is all they can be] everywhere sought to preserve the gains they had won during the 1960s and early 1970s. In retrospect, we can see this as a rearguard action to preserve the conditions and privileges gained within and around expanded reproduction and the welfare state, rather than a progressive movement seeking transformative changes [i.e., ‘they,’ all of them, were blindly working in the interests of capital].’ There is thus a necessary telos: appropriation that must be fixed. According to Harvey, there is no other dynamic of capital. Produce. Accumulate. Crisis. Fix. Produce. Accumulate. Crisis. Fix. Produce. Accumu… That’s it.

There are two problems with this formulation. First, is the assumption that capital is necessarily (re)appropriated and expands in order to reproduce itself. The work of Reznick, Wolff, Norton, and Gibson-Graham have all stressed ad nauseum that capital is not deterministic, and is allocated in ways where it does not reproduce itself, particularly in the multiplicity of class formations that are contingent and ever-changing (they focus on vols. 2 & 3 of Capital). This is something that needs to be dealt with at length in geography, and if I could do it all over again, this would be my thesis topic (maybe there is still time!), because it would insinuate that spatial fixes are not necessarily necessary. Secondly, there is the problem of agency, since it clear in Harvey’s work that the capitalist (TNC) is the dominant agent, and the State is the other (albeit secondary) agent. Again, Gibson-Graham have responded to this formulation at length. But, what would this non-historically-necessary spatial fix mean for Harvey’s new imperialism? In other words, what do we learn if the spatial fix is really only a minor, or even marginal feature in global affairs (assuming that all ‘molecular’ factors can miraculously align in order to produce an agency called a spatial fix on such a grand scale: that is a one big miraculating machine!)? There is a large bit of truth to Harvey’s formulation: the U.S. did invade Iraq and Central Asia in order to secure resources and control the growth of China. One would be naïve to think otherwise. But what Harvey seems to miss when he elides the ‘postmodern movements’ is the limits to his own formulation. It is now obvious that the U.S. has no power (in the traditional sense) in Iraq, and certainly never did. The government in Iraq has no power, and never did. The U.S. military is one militia among many (not even the most powerful) in a landscape were power is wielded literally on a neighborhood level. The so-called ‘Iraqi government’ (which is no doubt a fiction) has absolutely no power outside Baghdad, and certainly no power to speak of within Baghdad that would merit it as a ‘government’—Prime Minister Maliki (who has no militia) is completely reliant upon Sadr’s Mahdi Army. The Iraqi government has the limited power of words, since they have partial control over the media. What does all this mean? It means that one needs to seriously reconsider the way logics of capital and territory, along with their agents of history (the capitalist and worker), are represented in a world where they have increasingly declining power as proper categorizations of the social scene, especially when faced with the ‘molecular’ ‘multitude’ (if you will) that is being confronted on the streets of Baghdad. In other words, there needs to be a reorientation of ‘scale’ away from these grand schemas, to the actual molecular level: that level that Deleuze and Guattari understand to be the intensities on the BwO; that level that concerned Foucault; and that level that Hardt and Negri have identified as the multitude (though I hate this word as well). It is on this level that we can escape the historical necessity of Harvey, and instead grasp the contingencies that are playing out today.

Divine Violence: A Life...

Throughout the writings of Agamben, the reader encounters what can properly be understood as his ‘liberatory’ programme: a call for categorical ‘divine violence.’ But, before we can discuss the implications of such a programme for geography, we must first take a quick Benjaminian detour into the nature of such a violence. The term ‘divine violence’ originates in Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘Critique of Violence,’ whereby he confronts the problem of violence inherent to the matrix of law. By reflecting on the historical constitution of Western juridical structures (particularly those based in Germanic law), Benjamin discusses at length the traditional juridical distinction between natural law (a tradition concerned with justified ends despite the means), and positive law (a tradition that emphasizes justification of means despite any high-minded and potentially justified ends).

In a testament to Benjamin’s genius, it becomes clear that he is not interested in choosing between a juridical false opposition of natural and positive law, but rather in disclosing the ‘ultimate insolubility of all legal problems:’ namely their juridical foundation in ‘law-making’ and ‘law-preserving’ violence; i.e., law is founded [in/on?] violence. ‘Among all the forms of violence permitted by both natural law and positive law,’ Benjamin writes (1996: 247), ‘not one is free of the gravely problematic nature, already indicated, of all legal violence.’ But Benjamin is not concerned with alleviating a liberatory programme from violence. On the contrary, it is simply impossible, according to Benjamin, to ‘conceive of any solution to human problems, not to speak of deliverance from the confines of all the world-historical conditions of existence obtaining hitherto… if violence is totally excluded in principle (1996: 247).’ The ‘revolutionary task’ for Benjamin is to tap into those ‘kinds of violence [that] exist other than all those envisaged by legal theory;’ i.e., to employ a violence that is neither law-making or law-preserving, but rather ‘law-destroying.’ This ‘law-destroying’ violence is divine violence. Unlike the jurdicial violence inherit to natural and positive law, divine violence—pure violence—is a ‘mediality without ends’ (Agamben 2005: 62). Why a ‘law-destroying’ violence? Because, the bloodshed that results from legal violence, argues Benjamin, is the ‘symbol of bare life (1996: 250).’ In other words, the dissolution of legal violence, of sovereign juridical structures, is coetaneously the dissolution of bare life.


It is this dissolution of bare life that leads Agamben down the path originally set by Benjamin; i.e., for Agamben, divine violence becomes an immanent ‘true political action (2005: 88).’ Divine violence, or to use Agamben’s metonymic annotation ‘pure violence,’ is a relational action: ‘pure’ by its differentiation to juridical means, which in its violence, always has an end (law-making, and law-preserving). Pure violence, according to Agamben, ‘is that which does not stand in a relation of means toward an end, but holds itself in its relation to its own mediality… pure violence is attested to only as the exposure and deposition of the relation between violence and law (Agamben 2005: 62 our emphasis).’ Unlike legal violence, where ‘blood is the symbol of bare life,’ divine/pure violence is bloodless violence. What does this mean? The ‘true political action’ to Agamben is the ‘dissolution of the between the relation between violence and law (2005: 63);’ i.e., pure violence (i.e., pure means) is that which ‘severs the nexus between violence and law (2005: 88).’

To a word that does not bind, that neither commands nor prohibits anything, but says only itself, would correspond to a [political] action as pure means, which shows only itself, without any relation to an end. And, between the two, not a lost original state, but only the use and human praxis that the powers of law and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception (2005: 88;).

What does such a ‘pure’ political action mean for geography, or the theorization of space? Before answering this question, we need to re-address the topological nature not only of sovereignty, but divine violence as well. How should we understand the topological? According to Agamben, it can only be understood as potential. Potentiality: A central element in Agamben’s writings on sovereignty is a sovereign power that is at once topological and potential—a state of exception that captures zoe, naked life. Agamben understands potentiality to be ‘the presence of an absence; that is what we call “faculty” or “power” (Potentialities 1999: 179).’ Potentiality, according to Agamben, is intimately related to the ability—the faculty—to say ‘I can,’ without the action being materialized. To have a faculty, argues Agamben, means ‘to have a privation,’ i.e., the potential not to be. A central tension for Agamben in Homo Sacer is how the constituting/constituted power become indistinguishable, and Agamben looks to Aristotle’s two potentialities—the potential to be actual, and the potential to be im-potential—as central for understanding sovereign power as topological.

If potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynamia) (Homo Sacer 1998: 45).

This potentiality, argues Abamben, ‘maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality (1998: 45).’ Thus, the ban, that sovereign rationality of power that marks the exception is topological in that it has the ability not to be: it is potential; it is the zone of indistinction between constituting and constituted power.

Potentiality is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding it or determining it other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself (1998: 46).

In the denouement of his essay ‘On Potentiality,’ Agamben closes by stating that ‘the greatness of human potentiality is measured by the abyss of human impotentiality.’ What could Agamben possibly mean by such a provocative statement? This is a return to Agamben’s concern with ‘true political action’ (i.e., divine/pure violence), since Agamben understands the ‘root of freedom’ to be found in the ‘abyss of potentiality.’ To be free, argues Agamben ‘is not simply to have the power to do this or that thing, nor is it simply to have the power to refuse to do this or that thing.’

To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation. This is why freedom is freedom for both good and evil (Agamben 1999: 183).

Both the sovereign and the ‘purely violent,’ yet bloodless human praxis that refuses to be captured in the state of exception are found in the abyss of potentiality. But Agamben poses the following question: how is it possible to consider the actuality of the potentiality to not-be? This is the axial, the paramount question for Agamben’s revolutionary programme. If a potential to not-be, Agamben argues, ‘originally belongs to all potentiality, then there is truly potentiality only where the potentiality to not-be does not lag behind actuality but passes fully into it as such. This does not mean that it disappears in actuality; on the contrary, it preserves itself as such in actuality (1999: 183).’ In other words, the preservation of potentiality within actuality is the contingent kernel of the ‘mediality without ends’ of divine violence—or to put it quite simply, the abyss of potentiality/impotentiality is means without end; a praxis that cannot be captured. For Agamben, this is ‘freedom’ without a nutshell.

It should come as no surprise that Agamben gives an affirmative nod to Gilles Deleuze in his chapter ‘Absolute Immanence’ in Potentialities, since the relation between immanence, divine violence, and ‘freedom’ are clearly entangled in Agamben’s writings. The importance of both Deleuze (and Foucault) for Agamben are their tantamount contributions to what Agamben calls ‘the coming philosophy’ on the concept of life, which weighs so heavily in his own works. Agamben’s concern in this chapter is Deleuze’s essay ‘Immanence: A Life…’, where Deleuze briefly outlines before his death what could—in more-or-less vulgar terms—be called a ‘liberatory moment.’ Following on his earlier life works on the historical tension between immanence and the transcendent, ‘immanence,’ Deleuze postulates without hesitation, ‘is the very vertigo of philosophy (1990: 67; quoted in Agamben 1999: 226).’

Immanence is immanent only to itself and consequently captures everything, absorbs All-One, and leaves nothing remaining to which it could be immanent. In any case, whenever immanence is interpretated as immanent to Something, we can be sure that this something reintroduces the transcendent (1994: 47; quoted in Agamben 1999: 227).

Agamben is compelled to turn to Deleuze in order to unfold the relation of potential divine violence and ‘a life.’ For Deleuze, Agamben writes, ‘we can say that between immanence and a life there is a kind of crossing with neither distance nor identification, something like a passage without spatial movement (1999: 223).’ This crossing, this ‘passage without a spatial movement,’ is a matrix of infinite desubjectification (1999: 232).

While the specific aim of the isolation of bare life is to mark a division in the living being, such that a plurality of functions and a series of oppositions can be articulated (vegetative life/relational life; animal on the inside/animal on the outside; plant/man; and at the limit, zoe/bios, bare life and politically qualified life), a life [the figure of absolute immanence] thus functions as a principle of virtual indetermination, in which the vegetative and the animal, the inside and the outside, and even the organic and the inorganic, in passing through one another, cannot be told apart (1999: 233).

Absolute immanence—in other words, potential, bloodless pure violence in actuality (‘mediality without end’)—is call for Benjamin’s barbarians: those law-destroying lives that cannot to be captured in a sovereign’s state of exception. It is a life… whose principle is ‘infinite desubjectification,’ that cannot be striated into a subject. It is this life, a life… of immanent desire to itself, a radical desubjectification that runs counter to the potentially subjectified bare life of biopower—that succubus that currently haunts our political landscape. ‘Pure immanence, a life…’ Agamben states, ‘is pure contemplation beyond every subject and object of knowledge; it is pure potentiality that preserves without acting… a life… is potentially, complete beatitude (1999: 234).’

Which leads us back to the question posed earlier: what does a potential ‘pure violence,’ a principle of absolute immanence, mean for geography?
To Be Continued...

Ritual Lies

Scar tissue torn back to ribbons
Gnawed by memory, I sit alone
Skin talk, speaking in tongues
You

My shelter,
My gilded cage
My pit of despair
It becomes ritualized,
becomes ritual lies
It takes all you have to break away
To end the compromise,
And to realize
You are going to carry your secrets
To the grave
Through the gauntlet of
revilers and despisers
For the rest of your life
Opium of cheap affection-
bought and paid for by infection

Never tear us apart
Never break us apart
Never let them come between us
Never throw it away
Tear us apart
Break us apart
Never let them come between us
Throw it all
Away

I Corinthians 1:18-29

Through the confusion
You see an illusion:
In this world, of sex and leprosy;
God never said a word to me-
Your Eternal Soul,
reduced to flesh in disease
Run the race alone
between
the
soil and the sky
An echoing silence
to answer your cries;
I have one question to ask Him,
I know I've only got so much time…

Went out in the desert,
dragged myself through Hell,
Bent every muscle,
every nerve
to the cause
Only to come face to face with:

Everyone gets what they deserve,
Every gets their just deserts
Everyone gets what they want
Everyone's going to die
God wants some suffering,
God hates your lies
God grinds under heel when you try to survive
"So relieved to discover God loves you?"
Nailed to the cross of your hate for this life-
That's your faith?
Do you feel deserted?
You dragged yourself through Hell,
Believed in every word,
But in Death
Only come face to face with
Yourself.

The Kingdom of Heaven is Flesh,
To the ends of the earth and no more;
Every shudder,
every shivering night
Until the maggots come to carry you home
When your heroes are slaughtered
Your lovers are raped, in this world of shit:
No one gets out alive,
no escape
It's not hard to believe, is it…
That in death you will be Saved?
I Went out in the desert
Dragged myself through Hell
I have a growing suspicion
That there's no secret to tell

Reap what you sow
in blood red sex
Deathblood red and needle tracks
As your illusions kick the last nail in
You plead for mercy
Plead to just stop wanting
(But I)
Once waited to return to claw
Now transfigured in the fire I pray:
If nothing else is left for me,
To exalt in pain
I choose to bleed
To bleed

Born again O
ut in the desert
Walking in God's steps;
Whispered the secret to me-
Silence as sure as death
Knocking at Kafka's gate
I only come face to face with
Myself.

Treatise on Nomadology

There was nowhere to sleep,
so I wandered the night
Saw the wreckage of life
to which we have been led
And all of the factories
that had ground to a halt
By the side of the ocean
boiling with blood

We are corpses
in their loving hands
Sleepwalking through a never-neverland
And when we wake
from dreams
there will be nothing left
Are you satisfied in your cage?
Feeling nothing
no love or hate or pain?
Will you settle for nothing?

There are those in our ranks
who would lull us to sleep
As they wrap the whole planet
in a skin of
concrete
They are the wolves
in shepherd's clothing
They sent
your sons to the tomb
put a flag on the moon
The stakes are the very
soul of humanity

When she drew back the shroud
from the remains of our age
She fled through the streets gripped by hideous fear
Until she knelt
at the foot of the sky
where it touches the sand
In the twilight
it felt like she was the last one alive
Choking on the ashes
borne in on the wind

When our flesh
fills the air and
falls
softly like snow
And a red cloud rises
behind the earth
It blots out all the stars
and the sufferers below
That's the mere antechamber
of Their paradise
As we
breathe
in our death

Every Man for Himself; God Against Them All

Sacrificed yourself to the gods did you?
I'll cut out
your mother tongue,
sow salt
in the fields of the fatherland.

The wages of sin are freedom,
and though the wages of freedom
may be death
Is it not better
to live
with uncertainty
than to fear to draw an honest breath?
So scrape
the veil of faith
from your eyes
Your prayers ascend
like black smoke
to the empty skies
Under your
carnivorous god of deceit,
maybe
just maybe
do you feel incomplete?
A wheel of knives is spinning in me,
here
always up to our eyes in disease
Crawling through our darkest hours
Slow funeral march to the end
We've been led astray
once again
But I will serve a different master _______,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done
In heaven
as it is
Down here

Under the burnt out skull
of a sky that once shined
The snuffed out stars
aren't missed by the blind
And all of man will burn in your heaven,
eternal wretched life divine
But it's a minute to midnight in my mind, s
trike now
or hold your peace for all time
(For there is nothing I hate more than the stench of lies)
ACT 10:2 He and all his family were devout and God-fearing; he gave
generously to those in need and prayed to God regularly.
Lies in your head!
JOB 33:26 He prays to God and finds favor with him, he sees God's face and
shouts for joy; he is restored by God to his righteous state.
Lies in your head!
Will you ever dare to take a breath?
Will you ever dare to take back your
freedom?
We've been led astray once again
But I will serve no gods
or masters
my kingdom come
my will be done
In heaven
As it is
Down here.

Pariah

Cast out of so-called paradise,
I awoke among the dead
Sought in vain to scrape the
nightmares from my weary head
It ever so happens
that what I am inside
Is everything you call ugly, every love you despise
Now that you've laid me in the lowest pit,
shall I praise you from down here?
Am I to chant,
among the vermin,
prayers to fall upon deaf ears?

Take me in your arms,
take me to your bed
Set me a place at your table,
let me in your head
And I will betray you, I will desecrate you
I will be your worst fears
realized and brought to life
I will teach your withered nerves to writhe,
I will make you feel alive

When you have nothing,
you have no right to hunger
or to thirst,
to starve or
to suffer at all
Those who have what you have not will gather around to watch you crawl
When your heart's desires are unforgivable crimes,
blasphemous to the castrates and the voyeurs
They will parade your disgrace,
and spit back in your face
all the loves you held sacred
and pure
As a slave's only right is
rebelling
As a thief's only right is
deception
As a whore's only revenge is
contempt
If you are innocent
I will heap up enough sin
To buy the Kingdom of the Condemned

And I will walk among the dead
Fighting to scrape your nightmares
from my poisoned head
I will betray you
I will violate you
I want be your worst fears realized
Spend a night inside this cage,
and you will learn to hate the hand that feeds you
I will steal your heart,
I will steal your soul
your very nerves
So I can make you feel
ALIVE

The ones you thought beneath you
stand over you now
The ones you thought behind you
stand before you now
The ones you thought could not hear
are not deaf to you now
And the eyes you thought blind
are following your every move
The homeless will sleep warm tonight
The starving will be fed tonight
The cast outs come back to haunt tonight
The have-nots will get theirs tonight
The hopeless will have hope tonight
The worthless will have worth tonight
The weary will rest well tonight
The Holy sleep in Hell tonight
The first will be the last tonight
The last will be the first tonight
The mighty are brought low tonight
The have-nots will get
ours
Tonight.

Potentiality, or the Agamben/Deleuze Connection

In the movie The Matrix, there is a predominant tension between Neo (who disbelieves he is ‘The One’) and Morphius’s crew (who believe Neo to be ‘The One’). The augury provided by the Oracle concerning the ‘One’ is a prophesy about a hybrid being: essentially a human, who has surpassed the threshold of machinic enslavement and social subjection; a human that has become one with the enslaving computer program, the Matrix: a human that has become immaterial machine. The Matrix tows its audience through the conventional cinematic tropes of doubt, frustration, surprise, and eventually triumph on the part of Neo—how can one forget the scene where Neo finally surpasses his limit: he becomes raining code: his optifiliation to the program is realized: Neo now has eyes.

Indeed, I now have eyes as well: I now see raining code: my theoreticofiliation is becoming realized. Realized = real eyes. Theory can become ritualized, but what becomes ritualized becomes ritual lies. Maybe ‘lie’ is a strong word, since I mean misunderstood. I misunderstood, but now I see raining code. I can no longer see theory as ritual.

In an interview, Michel Foucault once said, more or less in these words, that, like physicists who see little or no need to cite Newton in their work, he saw little need to cite Marx in his work because Marx was all pervasive—‘Marx’ wrote through Foucault. Most contemporary theorists, particularly Giorgio Agamben, obviously feel the same way towards Deleuze and Guattari; why cite when Deleuze and Guattari when they write through you? Paradoxically, the importance of Agamben becomes apparent is amplified only after reading D & G.

Potentiality: A central element in Agamben’s writings on sovereignty is a sovereign power that is at once topological and potential—a state of exception that captures zoe, naked life. Agamben understands potentiality to be ‘the presence of an absence; that is what we call “faculty” or “power” (Potentialities 1999: 179).’ Potentiality, according to Agamben, is intimately related to the ability—the faculty—to say ‘I can,’ without the action being materialized. To have a faculty, argues Agamben, means ‘to have a privation. And potentiality is not a logical hypostasis but mode of existence of this privation (1999: 179; my emphasis).’ Thus, as Deleuze and Guattari argue, the faculty is immanent, anticipated, potential. Potentiality is reverse causality without finality: ‘it is not at all in the same way [what] appears in existence; it preexists in the capacity of a warded-off limit; hence its irreducible contingency. But in order to give a positive meaning to the idea of a ‘presentiment’ of what does not yet exist, it is necessary to demonstrate that what does not yet exist is already in action, in a different form than that of existence (D&G: 431; my emphasis);’ i.e, it is the existence of a privation.

How does this relate to the problem of sovereignty? Agamben and D&G are fundamentally concerned with constituting and constituted power as political/ontological concepts. The central tension for Agamben in Homo Sacer is how the constituting/constituted power become indistinguishable, and Agamben looks to Aristotle’s two potentialities—the potential to be actual, and the potential to be im-potential—as central for understanding sovereign power.

If potentiality is to have its own consistency and not always disappear immediately into actuality, it is necessary that potentiality be able not to pass over into actuality, that potentiality constitutively be the potentiality not to (do or be), or, as Aristotle says, potentiality be also im-potentiality (adynamia) (Homo Sacer 1998: 45).

This potentiality, argues Abamben, ‘maintains itself in relation to actuality in the form of its suspension; it is capable of the act in not realizing it, it is sovereignly capable of its own im-potentiality (1998: 45).’ Thus, the ban, that sovereign rationality of power that marks the exception is topological in that it has the ability not to be: it is potential; it is the zone of indistinction between constituting and constituted power.

Potentiality is that through which Being founds itself sovereignly, which is to say, without anything preceding it or determining it other than its own ability not to be. And an act is sovereign when it realizes itself by simply taking away its own potentiality not to be, letting itself be, giving itself to itself (1998: 46).

This formulation plays through ‘Apparatus of Capture.’ Capture, knotting, and nets are potential. A point of similarity between Agamben and Deleuze and Guattari is their conception of threshold. For Deleuze and Guattari, there is an intimate relation between limit and threshold, with the function of threshold being the moment when what is potentially anticipated taking on ‘consistency or fails to, and what is conjured away ceases to be so and arrives (D&G 432). D&G discuss threshold in two instances (both interrelated): (1) the macro convergence or emergence of forms of agglomeration/central power (States, towns, international markets, etc.) that were in tension with groups that sought to ward off such thresholds; and (2) micro overcoming of a limit, which leads to a change of assemblage, accumulation of stock, and eventually gives rise to the macro convergences of (2). After outlining the ‘three headed apparatus of capture’ (land, labor, money), D&G determine capture to be the ‘difference or excess constitutive of profit, surplus labor, or surplus product (446).’ What is interesting about this section on capture is that it is immediately followed by a brief discussion of state violence.

We have a moment when the mechanism of capture constitutes the aggregate of land, labor, money, which is transcended (in both the imperial and modern formations) by the State (which taxes and partitions). Deleuze and Guattari argue the ‘naked’ worker is faced with a violence that ‘posits itself as preaccomplished’; i.e., potential, and is signified by the master-signifier of the State (450). Law, in this sense, becomes tactical: it consists of ‘organizing conjunctions of decoded flows’ (451). But why would this be violent? It is precisely in the capture, the potentiality of topological violence on the part of a sovereign, that keeps the worker in line, disciplined, and ultimately leading to a ‘society of control’ predicated on violence. This is how law becomes indistinguishable from life, but we could never get this out of Agamben unless we understood the tactical/tactile law of D&G: a law that organizes but lacks content; a law in force without significance; with nomos, the presupposed power of the sovereign/State, ‘precisely the law beyond the law to which we are abandoned.’ I now see raining code: ‘I’ now have eyes.