An Ex Post Facto View of 2011
When we reflect upon the year 2011, especially the situations surrounding 3/11 and the global uprisings, everything that happened before appears to have been in preparation for these two extreme moments. All events in the recent past seem to have been proceeding toward or engulfed into these currents: radiation and revolution. This is mainly due to our habit of thinking itself that always thinks things ex post facto rather than ex ante facto. But at the same time this most deadly disaster and the insurrections across the globe, the extreme poles of despair and hope, are framing our present as the accumulation of all temporalities past and present and what they portend for possibilities we are confronting now. The impossible mix of the two currents is, as many of us are forced to experience, now causing a global turbulence whose dynamics and orientation are unpredictable.
For one thing there are unprecedented crises in the lives of the majority on the globe. All key components of the apparatus that capitalism and state power have been building up are now on the verge of collapse and are turning against and attacking the people with sheer violence, as a last resort for the maintenance of financial capitalism, industrial/military conglomeration and the governance: precarious labor conditions approaching either servitude or disposal (expendability), debt of various scales imposed upon entire populaces, genetically modified or poisoned food products widely distributed for daily consumption, environmental contamination by various production and mining affecting the locals everywhere, escalading joblessness and homelessness, budget cuts in every corner of public services, recurring racial and gender discrimination, police brutality or war against civilians in all nation-states, and the radiation-spread instigated by a government itself… Jobs, money, housing, energy, food, medicine and environment – everything we rely on as our lifeline turns into a weapon against us. This is a total war of those in power waged against the commoners.
The logic of the 99%, ambiguous as it may be, is appropriate at least in terms of describing the state of class war today where the oppressed are distributed beyond any class and identitarian territory, traversing and crossing all categories, and finally even include all life forms. This could be seen as a war of the apparatus against life itself [zoé] on a planetary scale. Meanwhile the 1% equals agents and guardians of (and of course, profit-makers from) the apparatus, who can no longer be considered as human subjects for they are too convoluted in the automatism of continuous operation. Automatic services for intricately interlinked interests are the main attribute of today’s ruling mechanism.
Even our thoughts and senses seem to have anticipated the 2011 events. On top of amassing problems from the disaster that must be solved layer by layer for years to come beyond the lifespan of any one of us, 3/11 is a marker for the expansion of the apparatus on the planet: the disaster broke out at the frontline of the expansion, where the human construct and the planetary movement collided, sending a signal of more and more disasters to follow. What capitalism has been building has been merging with the planetary body to the extent that the interconnectivity of everything has surpassed a condition that can be grasped in terms of dichotomies such as nature vs. man-made or environment vs. society. In other words, the framework of social construction and its outside or the other no longer works. It is necessary to grasp everything as One, either as a planetary apparatus or a planetary machine(1).
The emergence of a “new object-oriented philosophy” or a new “materialist ontology” is a way of tackling the interconnectivity in this increasingly desperate condition(2). This tendency of thought can be seen as an awareness of the critical drive of the world we are made part of. In this sense it has been prefigured by Felix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies in the late 1980s(3), an epochal work that analyzed the global situation where the signs of irreversibility of environmental changes began to surface hand in hand with an unprecedented expansion of “integrated world capitalism.” In Guattari’s work, ecology is no longer just a matter of environment in a narrow sense, but includes human subjectivity and social relations. This work was the primary attempt to approach the interconnectivity of the world from the vantage point of the anti-capitalist struggle.
What is ecology today? As Timothy Morton implies in his recent works(4), ecology is about everything and totality, involving all the negativities, limits and deviations (or mutations) we refuse to accept. It is a thought of extremity that we have to embrace. And in the socio-political context it speaks to our destiny of having to coexist in interconnectivity whether we like it or not.
Global interconnectivity had been emphatically observed within the so-called human world as well. That is, the globalization of economy has been undermining not only the autonomy of local and national economies but also state sovereignty. Around the turn of the century, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri called the resulting world of network power “empire.” Some of the tendencies spelled out in their book are sound, except that the image of the imperial world described therein appears now to be rather quiet and peaceful as compared to the real world we have been living in. The globalization we have experienced since has been much more chaotic, brutal, cruel and monstrous with shifting power centers, omnipresent warfare, financial collapse, progressing contamination, more pronounced immiseration of the global south, and accelerating disasters caused by climate change. This world forces us to abandon any idea of history that develops in stages. Rather it seems to inscribe all temporalities that humans have experienced in the past, each of which surfaces independently in its proper moment to let its implication be known: often with violence, brutality, inequality, discrimination and servitude, ancient elements return in newer contexts. Our history is a gigantic chimera of all we know from the past, precisely as the earth itself enfolds all of its previous activities into stratification. We are in the interconnectivity of a spatio-temporal complex in the planetary machine.
Around the years 2009 and 2010, some sectors of the counter-globalization movement transferred to the environmental justice movement. COP 15 in Copenhagen and the following World People’s Conference on Climate Change and the Rights of Mother Earth in Cochabamba involved this tendency, which was significant in entailing possibilities of a coalition between the anti-capitalist-inclined environmental justice movement from the north and the indigenous movements who stand forefront against the capitalist expropriation of bio-diversity and the cultures that keep direct connection with it. The process through which the counter-globalization movement since Seattle 1999 began to show its limitations in form and scope and its shift toward the environmental problematic coincided with the rotation of the world toward turbulence in 2011.
Our body as part of the planetary machine must know in its existence the fact that 3/11 and the global uprisings are interconnected. But our recognition and struggles have not been able to make the interconnection into a strategy. The current article is written with a hope to be a step toward that goal.
Genealogy of the Nuclear Sublime
3/11 has been the darkest manifestation of this coexistence and interconnectivity, through its uncontrollable radioactive dissemination that is still ongoing and expanding. Unfortunately for everyone on the planet, now, the radioactivity embodies the dark side of being-in-the world. In a broad sense, this situation is the real end of Romanticism, as we have known it: the socio-cultural mechanism to reassure the existence of the domain external to our industrialized everyday life, either as an object of nostalgic admiration or awe to an unknown power – and at the same time the endless source of capitalist exploitation and commodification. The indiscriminating power of radioactivity is affecting the entire ‘environment,’ which is physically equal to the thin layer of atmosphere on the planet where most life forms reside. That is, now another artificial sublime is with us, more and more introduced into our own bodies. Air, water, the green, mountains and blue sky can no longer full-heartedly embrace us with their sources of nourishment (or consumption), nor can they challenge us with their own subliminal presence. For they are now infected by and doubled with the nuclear sublime.
All conduct of the Japanese government in the wake of 3/11
has proven that the state would choose continuation of capitalist operation and its own sovereignty over the well-being of the people. It has been consistently blurring information about present risks of radiation and critical conditions of the power plants. It has been allowing distribution of food products from the contaminated zone, seeking to export them to third world countries, and asking prefectures across Japan to accept rubble from the stricken areas. It has not even given up exportation of its nuclear technology, after the horrendous accident due to its ineptitude. The priority here is the reconstruction of the area for the sake of economic survival. The spatial, informational and psychological strategy of the pro-nuclear state is the most dreadful form of modern bio-politics, that is, the necro-politics of radiation. While bio-politics would close off the contaminated zone and relocate the residents to different areas, this necro-politics is accepting, measuring and controlling illness and death of the people not only in Fukushima and Japan, but across the world.
In The Nuclear State (1978)(5) the Austrian writer Robert Jungk warned against the society of internal armament and of extreme civilian control emerging within the regimes that embrace nuclear power. In many senses, his words were prophetic for our world. He traces how scientists, state bureaucrats and capitalists worked in collaboration to create the apparatus of nuclear power by joining their fantasy for unprecedented power and prosperity – as a utopian project made possible by the nuclear sublime. In reality, however, there is a problematic match between the extreme danger of nuclear fission itself and the actual vulnerability in operating these facilities due to technical and human factors. On top of that, for both military and civilian uses, the secrecy and control required for maintaining nuclear facilities have been creating a shadowy regime of surveillance and punishment.
Thus nuclear power gradually hostages all populations and lives on the planet.
On the level of international power relations, at the end of the cold war, the bi-lateral deterrence system between the West and the East was cancelled out and production of nuclear weaponry slowed down; but the age of multiple atomic regimes also arrived, accompanied by spreading possibilities of atomic warfare. Since then, it seems that the presence of the nuclear sublime was forgotten, buried under the unconscious of civilian life. At the same time, the act of waging war has been continuously proclaimed by the US and its allies in order to prohibit new nuclear regimes from appearing.
In the context of the labor movement in nuclear facilities, there is a fundamental difficulty of even voicing disputes on the part of workers. Nuclear industries demand of their workers not only extreme secrecy but also extreme dedication, sometimes even by employing violent measures. The only thing desperate workers can do has been to ‘whistleblow’, despite the possible retaliations instigated upon them by these electric companies. There have also been cases where workers on strike had to give up their struggle for the sake of preventing accidents that would affect a tremendously large amount of the population(6). In these instances, it is the workers who decided to terminate their struggle based upon their own humanitarian consciousness and the ethics of Life.
In everyday life, the presence of the nuclear regime as well as the potential disaster had been buried under the spectacle of prosperous consumerism and citizens’ unconscious, up until some alarming accidents took place, whose ultimate manifestation was 3/11. Since then, the people in Japan have been questioning everything about the politics, society and their lives under the postwar nuclear regime. But at the same time, the invisibility of radioactivity and the irregularity of its effects on the body are producing a number of sub-discourses, which are -- as if trying to detour or escape from the material effects of radioactivity itself -- mostly shifted toward the morality of being good Japanese during a state of national crisis. Here exists the complexity of the politics of the post-nuclear disaster society of control.
One of the crucial lessons from what has been happening since 3/11 is that nuclear power is not only the worst kind of energy production that must be replaced by something else, but that it is also the ultimate stronghold of the power that has been determining and ruling the way of society. The concentration of power specifically required for nuclear operation is a tacit but most dreadful and irrevocable way of rule. As many have pointed out, nuclear technology is essentially military technology. And we should remember that historically its civilian application for power generation – as promoted by Eisenhower’s “atoms for peace” slogan in 1953 – came only after the nuclear attacks of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, that is, it followed the genocidal performance of the destructive power showed off to the rising socialist bloc as well as the world.
That is to say, by US global strategy, nuclear power has been employed always in duality: civilian and military. It has always controlled our existence including both its conscious and unconscious layers, like carrots and sticks, as a double bind. On the one hand, we have always remembered the experience of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and imagined the possible disaster that could be caused by energy production -- subliminal destruction. But on the other hand, we have been living the consumerist everyday life that has been driven by the fabricated need for more and more energy, by the phantasmagoric image of the good life based upon wealth and convenience -- the supreme happiness. Thus we have been existentially trapped by the double bind of the nuclear sublime, in Guattari’s three domains of ecology, from subjectivation to social construction to the environment.
Since 3/11 it has been revealed how the existence of nuclear power for both civilian and military uses has been behind the rule of capitalism and the state. The nuclear sublime has always been behind global power, before and after the cold war, during both Fordist and neoliberal phases of capitalism.
Information Warfare on the Planetary Body
The year 2011 was year zero, that is, the beginning of the process through which the 99% were awakened about war having been waged against them by the 1%, and began to fight back across the world. Now everything that grounds our everyday life and lifeline attacks us. Among other things, especially radiation and money are two ultimate weapons that are attacking us in different ontological dimensions. This is a planetary war, which can be conceptualized as information warfare in both material and immaterial senses.
In terms of radiation, it has been attacking us since Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but in the wake of 3/11 the assault has widened further across the country and beyond. In terms of money, it has always been attacking us as debt in the confines of a smaller economy, but it was the so-called Nixon Shock in the early 70s that money really began to show its fangs as a pure force that bites our existence on a global scale – as neoliberalism hand in hand with the US global hegemony, especially after the end of the cold war.
In 1971 US President Richard Nixon decided to abandon the Bretton Woods system and rescind the rules on the convertibility of the dollar into gold. This meant that the dollar was now unhooked from every gauge of objectivity and that the self-referentiality of the American standard was unilaterally imposed upon the world economy. Certainly this initiated the path toward today’s collapse of the finance-led capitalist operation. According to the Italian philosopher Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, money thus became a pure act of language(7). What does this mean? It means that the main object of capitalist valorization shifted from physical products and their use value to immaterial signs that dominate the products and their use value. Now the goods that circulate in the economic domain are informational, and as such they penetrate the world of labor, mind and body. This metamorphosis has begun a total commodification of our earthly existence.
With 3/11, however, we become aware that this process has coincided with that through which the nuclear sublime as power operation has been disseminated and introduced more and more into our everyday life, and finally into our bodies as radioactive substances that will continue to destroy our genetic information for years to come.
Therefore we have two dark matters of the interconnectivity or the immanence of the world: money and radiation as informational weapons against us. On the one hand are semiotic signals that dominate our minds and society by the power of valorization; on the other hand are energetic signals that destroy DNA by the power of ionization. The signal-sending acts both material and immaterial assume the preemptive assault of information warfare across the globe. Once affected by these signals, anything and everything turns into a weapon against us. Such is the power of information in interconnectivity. It is no accident that today both capitalist and government operations rely on strict secrecy or the classified act, which turns out to be the main form of rule and oppression, while the most effective assaults against power -- the capitalist/state conglomeration or the military/industry complex -- are varied forms of information action by anonymous hackers.
From a different perspective, this is the new phase for ‘the commons,’ namely, the common resources for life, community and production -- that it has developed its negative side to the extent that it is threatening the survival of its positive side. The commons in a broad sense -- or the environment or the earth ultimately -- is the basis for not only human world but also life world. It has always nurtured our existence and production, while it has from time to time destroyed human constructs and life environment in the form of natural disasters. It has always two faces from which all life forms cannot escape. The term ‘common’ is Janus-headed: it embraces and destroys us. But after the industrial revolution, human production came to add a new massive and concentrated negativity to the commons, significantly, some damages of which are no longer recoverable and whose ultimate form is radiation.
While capitalism privatizes natural resources, land, labor, mind and the body, it creates negative by-products of its operation: servitude, violence, discrimination, debt and waste, and furthermore it socializes or imposes upon us the negative as the new commons. These effects are precisely what appear as immiseration of life and environmental destruction.
2011 year zero announces a kind of limit that has been reached, the limit that has appeared as an over-exhaustion of the positive commons by the imposition of the negative commons. In the broad picture the crisis of capitalism is due to the exhaustion of the positive commons or the resources for capitalist expropriation, exploitation and commodification. However, since capitalism cannot and will not stop its operations, it is taking hostage the positive commons including ourselves and all life forms into its suicidal journey. This is what is happening as the war of the 1% waged against the 99%, the information warfare whose main weapons are money and radiation.
In the year 2011 a struggle broke out across the world. “We cannot go back to a normal life any longer.” – This is the word commonly heard in the occupation movement, global uprisings, and the everyday life under radiation. In different contexts the people are at the bottom of their life crisis and seeking to develop a new form of life. That is the basis of the struggle. In this process, the occupiers are saying: “We don’t need government and bankers,” while “we don’t need excessive electricity” is the desperate cry of the people who are fighting for the de-nuke process in Japan. These enunciations embody the will of the 99% to refuse the informational signals transmitted from the “semio-capitalism” and the nuclear sublime, and develop their own informational interconnectivity. These embody the process of de-subjectivation within the capitalist society based upon excessive (energy) consumption and of re-subjectivation in the unknown world in formation.
These struggles are different from any movement that has appeared in the global north in the past. They are neither born out of any political slogan, nor organized according to any party platform. They are assemblies of forces that come into existence out of individual life necessity. Some parts of these struggles still consist of the movements, socialist or anti-nuke or whatever, but they are only part of them and not leading the orientation. No movement – no matter how powerful and effective it is – can exist in and of itself; every movement can only coexist with other movements, groups or individuals in interconnectivity. In this sense, the struggles might be considered as an impetus rather than a movement.
Impetus is not something that can be led or controlled by an institution or a concentrated human intention, but a fluid body that affects and is affected by all the forces in and around it. It involves the entire environment that it is part of. It is a magnet field of information, in other words, it is an attractor for actions and events as well as memories and experiences of all constituencies. It is a dynamic assemblage of spatio-temporality. Its confrontation with the enemy is not symmetric as the enemy wants it to be, because it is ontologically different from the monolithic organ of the enemy. Its front is multi-dimensional and omnipresent. It is, as it were, a turbulence created by encounters between different temperatures and intensities, consisting of innumerable small whirlwinds.
In these struggles, what coordinates or assembles spatio-temporalities is ‘collective intelligence,’ which is an aggregate of information in a social network, and as such realizes a knowledge-building that cannot be subsumed into individual subjectivity and property; as such it realizes a decision-making beyond leadership. Its premise is the “wisdom of crowds.(8)”
General assemblies that coordinate the occupation movement, though they often internalize misunderstandings, discrepancies and conflicts or precisely thanks to these noises, produce a fluid body of a new sociality within themselves; and these processes are supported by information exchanges by the internet and media. Here we cannot discount the crucial role played by the anonymous hackers who have instigated remarkable assaults against the power for the benefit of the entire impetus.
People living under radiation are researching levels of radioactivity contaminating their living environment and seeking to find ways of surviving varying degrees of internal exposure. Informal and formal groups are making networks to exchange information and knowledge about nuclear technology, nuclear science, nuclear capital and politics as well as medical practices to counter the effects of radioactivity. Therein we can observe the birth of ‘popular science,’ a collective body of intelligence constantly developing and expanding.
For the formation of collective intelligence, what is maximally indispensable is the Body.
General assemblies are the gathering place for mass corporeality, where the building of collective intelligence can take place only by the physical comingling of bodies. Anti-authoritarian politics based upon horizontal decision-making or the space that allows it is made possible only by the massive body taking over the public space in opposition to urban privatization. Central here are the bodies that struggle in concurrency, as a turbulence.
In the space contaminated by radiation, the core of people’s concern is their body. Nobody can overcome radiation, which penetrates through (external exposure) and goes into (internal exposure) anyone’s body indiscriminately. But in the actual socio-political context, age, class, gender, lifestyle and regionality discriminate amounts and effects of radiation, which ultimately involve varied possibilities of illness and death. Here exists the main problematic concern for the struggle against the necro-politics of radiation. Under the apocalyptic crisis of everyday reproduction, the goal of popular science is to share a longer and healthier life among the people themselves. In this context, the body means both individual body and the Body, both individual life and the Life. It is from the experience of extreme negativity, namely, possibilities of illness and death that the common understanding of the Body and Life is emerging.
The Body and Life are ephemeral and limited, but for this precise reason they know an eroticism of solidarity in opposition to the eternity obsessively promoted by capitalist valorization and state sovereignty. It is the Body that knows the absolute interconnectivity of the world, and that every issue is related with every other on the planet. Therefore, in the domain of somatic intelligence, all the struggles could be interconnected and forming a Turbulence, whose orientation is unknown, whose battleground is everywhere -- in our bodies and minds, across the human apparatuses, over the contaminated atmosphere, on the horizon constantly shaken by the activities of tectonic plates.
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(1) A planetary body or a planetary machine – this distinction needs to be further scrutinized.
(2) Graham Harman, Towards Speculative Realism, Winchester, Washington: Zero Books, 2010. New Materialisms – Ontology, Agency, and Politics, Edited by Diana Coole and Samantha Frost, Duhram, London: Duke University Press, 2010. And others.
(3) Felix Guattari, The Three Ecologies, translated by Ian Pindar and Paul Sutton, London, New York: Continuum, 2000.
(4) Timothy Morton, Ecology Without Nature, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2007, and The Ecological Thought, Cambridge, London: Harvard University Press, 2010.
(5) Robert Jungk, The Nuclear State, translated by Eric Mosbacher, London: John Caldar, 1979.
(6) Jungk, Ibid.
(7) Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi, After the Future, edited by Gary Genosko and Nicholas Thoburn, Edinburgh, Oakland, Baltimore: AK Press, 2011.
(8) Harry Halpin, “Foundations of a Philosophy of Collective Intelligence,” which can be acquired in the internet.
