The New Dark Age
Episode 2: The Apparatic Sovereign
“Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.”-Schmitt
“Can you no longer see a road to freedom? It’s right in front of you. You need only turn over your wrists.”-Seneca
I often think of killing myself. In fact I would say the thought crosses my mind a few times a day. I believe this habit of mine began when I was younger; on the day I learned that my cat had just died by drinking antifreeze. Following this, every day, several times a day, I would ruminate on my own potential consumption of automotive fluids. It never was a revelation of desire, but rather was an intellectual exercise. I would try to imagine how I might procure antifreeze, what might motivate me to drink it, what might motivate a cat to drink it, was there a possible non-toxic solution,what it might be like to have my organs dissolve (as I was informed had happened to him), and sometimes I’d even subject myself to seeing how long I could endure the thought of him dying so horrendously underneath the hood of my mother’s minivan, alone. But above all else, I would take the opportunity to revel in the fact that I had yet to ever do such a terrible thing to myself.
I don’t think I have a problem, I don’t think there’s any problem with this at all. I think any functional mind will preoccupy itself with such things. Traffic’s bad? Work is boring? The pain of carrying on to the next day seems too much to bear? You spilled the food you just spent an hour cooking? The solution remains the same.
These fantasies quell a restless spirit (whatever the hell that is) and remind us of an important truth: to a certain extent and in some real capacity, there is still a part of us that’s in control. There is, for better or worse, still a part of you that hasn’t hurled your body over the bridge’s railing into the currents below. It’s not important which part of you this is (it might be love, fear, anticipation of horrors yet to come), what matters is that you still can take credit for your own continued existence as you are. Every breath you take is an allowance you give yourself (yet you keep spending it all in one place). And just like the reassurance I brought to myself with my reminders that I had yet to end my own life, I imagine that you too are prone to (at times) at least forgive yourself for not slamming the back of your skull into the faucet in your shower thus guaranteeing severe damage to your upper spine while still making it look like an accident so people can’t be mad at you for being dead.
This is all a long winded way to get to my main complaint: Donald Trump
Donald Trump, for those who don’t know, comes from a long-established, noble line of men who, when asked whether they’d rather fuck children or their relatives simply said “yeah, why not?” He was born and raised in the only city on the planet and, thus, loathes the world and all which is not him. He is the singularity which draws all light and sound into its event horizon, destroying everything it touches and rearranging it as holographic, ornate facsimiles on the surface of a grotesque and brutal blob. Anyone who has visited the big apple knows this force (Times Square is Trump made Ambient: pornographic).
Most importantly, however, he is America’s most successful television game show host. So much so, he managed to gamify the vivisection of American normality. He rendered the opera of mores and manners obsolete and ineffectual as the fascia which binds the organs of this machine together. While manners still exist and are sometimes even still (nauseatingly) imbibed upon by some who serve The Man, the rules of this new game dictate that they cannot be fully shared amongst every group that finds itself in contradiction. We must, as per the new law, each speak in minor and act as minority trying to overcome the endless, uniform tides of free-thinkers. Where there is overlap, harmony, peace between individuals and their respective systems of law, groups may persist, emerge, and transform according to this new age (most often we may achieve this peace through subordination or alienation). This new people that we all belong to, operates quite like our more ancient form. The companies, clubs, and parties we all avail ourselves of, likewise, function in mostly identical ways. But this identicality is 1:1 with internality; where the limit is reached, where we go beyond our self or the greater social body we are subject to, we go fucking crazy! Without some consistent standard of what is acceptable or unacceptable, what is normal or otherwise, or (god forbid) healthy or the other thing, within public discourse, the whole system breaks down. The once feared notion of taboo is not only proudly on display, it hopped out of the mud, took a stroll through a white house, hugged a flag, then shit its pants and lost an election to a man with tapioca between his ears. All the while this perverse mass of writhing suet and pustules was running his racket, he put us all beneath his rusty scalpel and asked to look at what he found, an undulating mass beneath increasingly translucent flesh.
The wise, woke, and well educated constantly wish to remind us that this wad of tendrils is negligible, if it exists at all. Meanwhile the deplorable and genuinely insane third of the American Nazion that has devoted their lives to the eminence of the golden boy insist, incessantly, that this polyp of ours actually burrows far deeper, and in fact has already taken control of the other organs within/out this rotted body of our State. In the end his greatest crime, his truest sin against the cohesion of this country, will end up being overlooked, overshadowed by the immediate death toll of his incompetence. But it was, nonetheless, his wanton disregard for the feigned ignorance of his “elite” in regards to this deep, underlying, and insidious structure. A structure the empowered classes were not only content, but desperate to let carry on unnoticed and unabated, which Donald Trump, in his desire to simply cut others, inadvertently ended up revealing.
Again, this was a meandering route to get me to the point of being able to say it is nothing short of mortifying that the average American’s first clear experience with the Deep State is when Its candidate lost an election to a guy who hosted a show on television dedicated to firing Meatloaf.
The State, and It(’)s Depth
How may one begin this attempt? How do I lay the foundation for as unbearable an ordeal as this? An apology is in order, firstly. An apology for the whiplash of transitioning from a murky, dense, and nonsensical prose, to the clunk and drone of tin-tongued materialism. Like wading through fen waters to feel rough cement beneath your soles. From one exhaustingly mendacious trek to the sterile embrace of fluorescent-tinted office air. One must try to keep this brief, and brutal.
But one must be concrete and speak in material terms if one wishes to define the political. Politics is, in short, the means by which contradictions in material conditions are generated, exaggerated, resolved, and regenerated (if only there was a word for this process). All things which arise from this process bury their tendrils in the material soil. And so, in short, when one thinks of The State, please think (not in terms of elections, and parades, and parties, and ballots, and rights, and departments, and monarchs, and parliaments, and politicians, and people, and life, but) in terms of assets, and resources, and kraft and macht, and death [given life].
The intrinsic nature of the political is a concern with the process of distribution. This concept is completely useless bullshit when applied to the minutiae of daily political life, which all humans engage with. Rather, it requires a step backwards, to understand the exact ways in which these minutiae, these daily conflicts and choices, are given opportunity to arise. The inevitable politics of human life are merely the ripple, the end result of the breaches in our lives by the underlying structures of our world. Our hopes and dreams, choices, opinions, fights and loves and overjoyous triumphs (in short, our desire) are but the final tweaks on the conveyor belt of the world-building political industries.
Rather, the politics of these structures (the inhuman from the human) is not one concerned with appearance and norms, but with matter and power. It is the distribution of resources that creates opportunities, the distribution of merit that creates choices, the distribution of experience that creates community, the distribution of violence that creates law, and so on and so on and so on and so on. Most people are lucky (read “sane”) enough to never have the mortifying privilege of examining this actual process of distribution; they are faced, instead, with the blunt and benumbing end results. So much freedom, so many options, unlimited potential, all here behind the radiant glow in the palm of my hand.
The politics have happened, you’re late to the show, what do you think of the curtain call?
It is here that we arrive, albeit circuitously, at the focus of this attempt: the nature and functionality of the state (as the highest manifestation of the political sphere). A sordid and nauseating labor, to be sure, but a labor which opens countless new avenues to new potential frustrations (are you not excited?). It is the nature of the state, of course, as it arises from the complex and intertwining flows of macht that are result from the labor of everyday human beings which, at a local level, fails to make any significant change but, when factored alongside the ever expanding networks of production, administration, transport, training, etc., becomes the social tapestry from whence “society” may rench itself forth. It is the final flourishing of our productive relations (which first and foremost generate power: the means by which later production is achieved) and it is conversely the force by which these same relations are controlled.
The state, fittingly, is the structure which acts to dominate and discipline the forces that give rise to it in our civilization. (Again, I wish somebody had made this observation already)
It is the superstructure, designed, both deliberately and by quirk of the system itself, to whip the base into shape. It is a material phenomenon, which masquerades by submerging itself in norms, statutes, policies, the qualities of creatures of discourse. Power is drawn in, the culmination of the relations that connect human to human and human to nature. It is the process of extraction, refinement, assembly, distribution, consumption, et cetera. It is by these means that the natural is rendered social, the social further to the virtual, serving to maintain current (and develop new) means of these processes. The state, therefore, cannot be understood as purely “public,” purely political, but rather as the melding of public with private, political with economic. The state has, historically, determined the means by which society may maintain itself, consume itself, and advance.
The state is not purely disciplinary, it is gluttonous in nature, it expands and takes-in. Its borders, along a social cartography, are always shifting, prioritizing extension above all else. It must devour the world and refine it, to spit it back out as new and appeasing. We create the state so that we may be remade in our own self-selected image. It is a cruelty that we inflict upon ourselves. It is our universal sorrow.
This expansion, however, is not purely lateral. The state does not merely wish to expand to new geographic boundaries, nor does it purely seek to subsume conventional social structures; it also seeks to incorporate anti-social ones. The state is drawn to power, drawn to the structures of socialization that enable production and, through production, discipline. There is no violence too grand, no corruption, however sordid, that does not twinkle in the eye of the law. The state penetrates deeply into the social strata, burrowing its tendrils into the primordial sludge of criminality, the brutality from which it first found its foot. The notion that the American state, for example, finds kinship with The Mafia, or al-Qaeda, or the mythicartels, is not as absurd as it may appear at first glance. In fact, it takes only a cursory understanding of geopolitics, a logically deductive mind, or an annoying-know-it-all-left-liberal-cousin who wants to tell you about that Michael Parenti essay he misunderstood the point of, to know that these organizations are deeply entwined with conventional systems of power, up to and including their founding(s).
Indeed, if the state may be defined as the entity which has monopolized violence, then it stands to reason that the unhindered and ubiquitous nature of violent action within our society is, at the very least through deliberate ignorance and willful complicity, the result of the state in its most technical sense. A violence of a complex and often subtle nature. The violence of the bomb, the tank, the irradiated soil of Fallujah, yes. But also the violence of foreclosure, food shortages, barricades, prison labor, corporate bailouts, drug trafficking and enforcement
The Deep State, as some brilliant lunatics, more aptly equipped than I to discuss it, have come to call it, is this exact coordination of violent structures within and without civil society. It is, in simple terms, the melding of the criminal, the corporate, and the anti-democratic forces of our the private sector with the criminal, corporate, and anti-democratic forces embedded within our public, socipolitical structures. It is Allen Dulles heading the CIA, it is Luciano at the docks, it is Halliburton in the White House, it is Gladio, it is Brabant, it is Northwoods, it is Tower 7, it is Mossad connected pedophiles embedding themselves in political and media circles, it is power made apparent at the deepest and most depraved levels of our society for the purpose of control, discipline, and production.
Yes, I’m crazy, fuck are you?
He Who Decides The Exception
It has been, throughout all of its historical manifestations, the paramount responsibility of the state to determine conditions which may be deemed “exceptional” to the normal, legal applications of political power on the part of the state writ large. Within these exceptional conditions, which extend both spatially and temporally, preconceived notions of rights, liberties, protections, and limitations in regards to the application of force within political contexts are deemed null and void. The “states of exception” are not merely pragmatic and mundane moments in political history whereby the disparate elements of liberal society are rallied behind a common good or for the purpose of overcoming a great hurdle. It is not merely the nationalization of industries for war efforts or the large scale operations surrounding disaster relief. It is politics made its most theatrical, it is the conflicts which are ingrained in political dynamics brought to their most critical and dramatized in shows of sublime force by which one is crushed by the state on behalf of the other. It is politics stripped of nuance and complexity, a binary which comes only in times of crisis and demands of each member that they choose the life they wish for themselves, and the death they wish for their enemies. Nobody can escape the exception, as the first way of life that is smashed in the conflagration are the morons who cling to the status quo, lacking the vision and cruelty to embrace the wicked paradise of the dawning of their kali yuga.
The exception is hot as fuck. It is eroticized violence inflicted upon the citizenry for the sake of (again) disciplinary production. It is recreation of our world, whipped, restrained, and beaten into a new shape, for a new purpose, for new play with new rules. While it is revolutionary each time in that it removes continuing, stultifying notions of cohabitation among mutually contradictory elements within our lives, it is more importantly thrilling and cerebral. It is a shift in the sensuality of our day-to-day experience that riles us up and drives us, passionately, into new stations and social orientations. The state dominates us all equally and, if we’re lucky, decides that the other team are the naughty little pigs that need to be punished and deprived and that we’re the good little pigs that deserve to continue to be disciplined. It is the sadomasochistic state that enacts our own brutal will upon ourselves.
But by what means is this state of exception determined? This phenomenon that is fluid, strange, and historically dependent as the state itself? The stupid asshole shithead Nazi genius who is most famous for having coined the term (and never renouncing his gleeful-eunuch ideology) found that these conditions are best enunciated by the mythical figure of The Sovereign. The Sovereign, of course, used to be quite literal: the masters, the king, the local lords, the pope, etc. But gradually, with the advent of modern industry and trade, power was rested from the harsh and archaic forces of antiquity and given to the harsh and novel forces of modernity. As capitalism takes hold and the Dutch East India Company unleashes unrelenting holocausts upon the global south so as to guarantee the average European nation state unfettered access to paprika, The Sovereign is also spread, and in this spreading, is made as ubiquituous as capital.
The Sovereign is not a universal, ahistorical position or entity. It is an ontological category, into which a variety of entities may be inserted. It is the locus where the various forces that manifest, deriving from historical coordinations of social structures, at a given historical point may coagulate and solidify around a new ethic of authority. A new sovereign is born following the necessarily anarchic final collision of the mutually-destructive forces of a given historical period, from which new forces arise, new contradictions are made, new law is created, new order asserts itself, and all things come together under the banner of the new and improved The Sovereign, reborn from the ashes of its forebears.
Despite our best efforts, crucially, there has always been a sovereign, and (should present conditions reflect future ones) there always will be. There will always be someone on top, as long as there is a top to be on. There will always be Law as long as there is law. Power will always seek to coalesce, so long as it is allowed to.
We Who Decide The Exception
Not every sovereign is born of the straightforward, convenient violence of revolutionary terror. In fact, to the contrary, most revolutions (especially so-named “failed” ones) have nothing to do with establishing new conditions of subjugation via a new sovereign, rather they act as a means of reaffirming the authority of the true sovereign as it exists in that moment. The breakup of the Roman empire into its constituent kingdoms solidified the truth that any peasant in the field could tell you regarding who was in charge in their lives; the American revolution reaffirmed the nascent power of the landed mercantile owners of the country, the ones who “ought to govern it” according to John Jay; the Taliban sweeping through Kabul was but the final nail in the coffin of fiat loyalty to imperial power in that nation. Instead, sovereigns are born strangely and surreptitiously alongside new technologies (from literal machines, to new social arrangements, to new vocabularies), new means of control, as nothing more the natural tendency of these means; the master arises from the technology of the cage and the whip, the king results from the technologies of theological jurisprudence and patrilineal authority, the president from private ownership and republicanism, and we to must come to terms with The Sovereign of our age, and our role as its technological predecessor. We are the technology of the self, for that is all we produce.
Our sovereign is not some mythic overlord, some shadowy cabal, some vampiric master hiding in the shadows calculating the ends of some occluded plan, nor is it the meek progeny of parliamentary processes. The Sovereign exists now as it has always existed, a full manifestation of the totality of the state, which is the totality of violent forces within a society. Therefore, in the decentralized, digital age, The Sovereign has spread itself across our strata and embedded itself not in social structures, our machineries, our technologies, in themselves, but rather in the tendencies and movements of ourselves within those phenomena. That is to say, The Sovereign no longer exists as a separate entity from the individual and the collective, overseeing and exerting foreign power upon us, but rather exists as the apparatus which facilitates and enables the socialization of the population along new lines of power. The Sovereign is no longer atomistic or molecular, The Sovereign is now molar. It is the ambient force that binds and divides us continually and reorients towards our desires and designated necessities. It so evidently has our best interests at heart as it arises from these very interests, devouring us in our animality. Through This Apparatic Sovereign, nothing is left wanting, for all desires have been articulated and quantified before being satisfied to the point of excess.
The Sovereign of old was geographically limited: a capital, a palace, fortresses and held territories. Even His enemies, first and foremost those who transgress from within, were determined and maintained by geographical limitations: prisons, camps, hospitals, ghettos, and borders. But now, The Sovereign has been perfected, it has reached a point of total ubiquity, an all-assuming network of power that weaves between individuals and presses inward upon them. The Apparatic Sovereign has embedded itself not in architecture of historical significance, but rather in the architecture of our social strata. It has become the very network (yeah, literally too) through which human interaction may be mediated. This essay is written at the point of the most recent revolution of sovereignty, and it has never been clearer exactly how this machine grinds. Has it not seemed that the masks became universal so rapidly? Have the barricades not risen out of the pavement of the Walmart parking lot? Do the determined social distances not seem overly-determined? This is not accidental, nor coincidental, nor arising from the ether; I do not wish to convey this idiotic sentiment. The labor is there, I know this, the coordination exists, we know this. Never neglect the work that goes into serving the designated needs of the machine, of taking the pre-existing materials at our disposal and arranging them in accordance with the evolving demands of the society, that themselves seem to arise spontaneously. The Sovereign has become quantum, it is the fundamental force, the apparatus which holds within it all the potentiality of contemporary human (in)action.
Contrary to historical precedents, The Apparatic Sovereign is not to be understood by what it does, but what it facilitates, what it allows. No longer is it a violence of activity, it is a passive violence, a violence of ambience. It is not the beautifully obvious cruelty of the riding crop, it is the cold, indifferent allowance of the interstate highway. It binds and restricts without demanding, it limits the capacity and invites them to extend themselves to the boundaries it has given them. The Apparatic Sovereign does not compel, it does not demand obeisance, rather it oversees the flows and borders of social interaction, it is responsible for the maintenance of barriers and the facilitation of social interaction. It is the blending of the stock exchange with cryptocurrency with social media with government policy with terrorist opium trades with “democratic” “freedom” fighters. It is the seamless way by which exceptions begin to be rendered, spontaneously, in response to ground-level shifts in behavior, regardless of space: dynamic exceptions to conventional norms and laws (initially predicated on political practicality of the application of force (no longer a concern for a the force itself as it spread across all strata and topographies)).
So when one errs to grant praise to a Musk or a Bezos when they attain their theoretical capital through their legal stewardship over their respective corporate entities, the breaches from below the depths, know that this is as mistaken as it initially appears. Instead, one must understand the algorithm as the true source of this “wealth,” the alkahest which dissolves all boundaries and allows coordination along new lines of production. They, as individuals, lack the power to produce in a society that is determined by divided labor and virtual, rather than material commodities (as the virtual lies in the social). Therefore, they can only be known as harnessing The Apparatic Sovereign, seizing, momentarily, localized control over its macht, directing them towards their own ends. They’re the machinic Saturn, devouring their own byproducts. In short: they fuck the machine and eat what comes out.
This is the only hope that’s left for those at the top. But at least they get a nut and a meal.
So What Remains?
I no longer wish to be cerebral here, rather I seek to remain limbic, to embrace instinct and passion. This is nothing more than an essay of the body, a refuge from the cold calculations of the disciplined mind. Were I to appeal to you now in terms of reason and rationality, I would fail as I have felt myself begin to succeed already (to overcome the great enemy).
I am attempting to articulate that which I do not know to be articulable.
It haunts me
It escapes me
Yet I cannot escape it
Yet I cannot escape myself
yet.
We can never escape that which defines us.
I feel it on my skin–at every turn–around every corner–
I do not know that I am ever truly free from this
Sensation.
It surrounds me and it lays out my path and follows every step. From Har Megiddo to Golgotha, and back again it walks me and is walked. I fear even now I may still work within its bounds. It has demarcated my life, measured it in coffee spoons and all other tawdry and overbearing poetics I cleave to. The State of Things has transcended us; it has become the apparatus and continues to expand with no room left in the petri dish. We are crushed by this expansion, this warm embrace, for it feeds on us and feeds us back to ourselves. Our labors are subsumed and retransmitted, through the foul alchemy of the state, back to us as pleasures and desires. We toil and work, and we are given back the sweet fruits of our labors, virtual and abstracted, this Sensation.
It is the great neurosis, the hyperfixation, the itch that cannot be scratched or even located. It is the obsession that keeps us awake and drives us into the land of dreams. We are possessed of it.
Should we seek to break free, a calculus no doubt embedded in this thing, then it is not to be achieved through overthrow. There is no coming conflict that, through its energy, can truly break out of the apparatus, the algorithm, The New Sovereign. Rather it is withdrawal that we must strive for. We must reject the world, engage in some complete destruction (violence of divine nature and proportion, breaking beyond the mythic barriers). We must shatter the world as it exists, break it apart and scatter it to the wind. We must render the world, as we understand it, as beauteous and schizoid as the world beyond our understanding. I have said before that the only way out is apart (in not so few words); that schizophrenia, the breaking of the apparatus of the cohesive mind, of ontological discipline, is a way to be free from control. Free from even the control we impose upon ourselves, for the self becomes the greatest enemy of all in the war against The Apparatic Sovereign, the self gives and takes all that He subsists on. We must either break apart the relations that give rise to the apparatus, the power that produces the algorithm that produces the power that (you get the idea), or shatter every bond that localizes on our being, that gives us life, meaning, purpose, and all other prisons. Madness before you, madness behind, and death, for death’s self, the only alternative. You must not fear. You must not cling to what was, for it was never for you.
