There are citizens, the citizens of empire. And then there is us. Us- it is a heap of worlds, of subspectacular and interstitial worlds, whose existence is unmentionable, woven together with the kind of solidarity and dissent that power cannot penetrate; and there are the strays, the poor, the prisoners, the thieves, the criminals, the crazy, the perverts, the corrupted, the overly alive, the overflowing, the rebellious corporealities. In short, all those who, following their own line of flight, do not fit into Empire’s stale, air-conditioned paradise. Insofar as we stay in contact with our own potentiality, even if only in thinking our experience, we represent a danger within the metropolises of Empire. We are whatever enemy against which all the imperial apparatuses and norms are positioned against. Conversely, the resentful ones, the intellectual, the immunodeficient,the humanist, the transplant patient, the neurotic are Empire’s model citizens. From these citizens, THEY are certain there is nothing to fear. Given their circumstances, these citizens are lashed to a set of artificial conditions of existence, such that only empire can guarantee their survival; any dramatic shift in their condition of existence and they die. They are born collaborators. It is not only power that passes through their bodies, bual also police. This kind of mutilated life arises not only as a consequence of Empire’s progress but as its precondition. The equation citizen = cop runs deep within the crack that exists at the core of such bodies. Everything allowed by Empire is for us similarly limited: spaces, words, loves, heads, and hearts. So many nooses around the neck. Wherever we go quarantine lines of petrification spring almost spontaneously all around us; we feel it in how they look and act. The slightest thing is all it takes to be identified as a suspect by Empire’s anemic citizens, to be identified as a risky dividual. There is a never ending haggling over whether we will renounce the intimate relationship that we have with ourselves, something for which THEY have give us so much flak. And indeed, we will not hold out forever like this, in this tormented role of the domestic deserter, of the stateless alien, of such a carefully concealed hostis. -TIqqun, Introduction to Civil War
Posted on: Sat, 25 May 2013 17:30:12 +0000