These are from, respectively, the New York Times, CNN, and The Conversation, and represent only a tiny portion of this repeated language.
For Mansour’s full comments, see Farah Najjar, “Israel-Hamas War Updates: Netanyahu Rejects Ceasefire After Captive Video,” Al Jazeera, October 30, 2023 →.
Jeff Harper, “The 94 Percent Solution: A Matrix of Control,” Middle East Report, no. 216 (2001): 15.
In the 2005 words of Dr. Eyad El-Sarraj, founder of the Gaza Community Mental Health Programme.
“Gaza: Israeli Attacks, Blockade Devastating for People with Disabilities,” Human Rights Watch, November 1, 2023 →.
As a wider part of my work on these questions, I draw on a somewhat older sense of “communication,” which was used equally to speak about materials and symbols/language, rather than prioritizing the latter, as most familiar use in English now does.
As another example, MrBeast, the single most-subscribed individual YouTuber on the planet, speaks of “analysis paralysis” and the fear of not getting it right as what stops aspiring content creators from getting on with the business of making a steady torrent of videos.
This is a book that, for the record, not only thanks the pastors of the megachurch where the author is part of the flock, but that also bundles this idea of paralysis with a now-ubiquitous pairing, that of sabotage. Jimenez, Stop Fear! (AsAManThinketh.net, 2002), 11.
Quoted in Ruth Leys, “Death Masks: Kardiner and Ferenczi on Psychic Trauma,” Representations, no. 53 (Winter 1996): 56.
Spyros Papapetros, On the Animation of the Inorganic: Art, Architecture, and the Extension of Life (University of Chicago Press, 2012), 4.
Freud, Standard Edition, vol. 1, Pre-Psycho-Analytic Publications and Unpublished Drafts (1886– 99), 157–72. See also Katja Guenther, Localization and Its Discontents: A Genealogy of Psychoanalysis and the Neuro Disciplines (University of Chicago Press, 2015); and P. J. Koehler, “Freud’s Comparative Study of Hysterical and Organic Paralyses: How Charcot’s Assignment Turned Out,” Archives of Neurology 60, no. 11 (2003).
I am intentionally placing this in a framing that blurs the terms of psychoanalysis with those of cybernetics. This is in part because in the next installment of the essay, I will draw these closer together, but also because of Jacques Lacan’s own suggestion that the model of communication coming from cybernetics will have enormously significant consequences. In his 1955–56 seminar on psychosis, Lacan writes that “we have generalized the notion of communication. In the present state of affairs, it’s touch and go whether the entire theory of what goes on in living beings will be revised as a function of communication. Read anything by Mr. Norbert Wiener; its implications are huge.” The Psychoses, 1955–1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III (Norton, 1993), 48.
Fernando Berri, “Cinema and Underdevelopment,” in Twenty-Five Years of the New Latin American Cinema, ed. Michael Chanan (BFI, 1983); Julio Garcia Espinosa, “For an Imperfect Cinema,” Jump Cut, no. 20 (1979): 26.
Amilcar Cabral, “Presuppositions and Objectives of National Liberation in Relation to Social Structure,” in Unity and Struggle: Speeches and Writings (Monthly Review Press, 1979), 128. Among many other examples, we can also note how for Ivan Illich, counter-productivity rules the day, as autonomous social action is paralyzed by “a surfeit of commodities and treatments,” while for Lewis Mumford, it is automation and technics—particularly in the hierarchization and organization of human social life, made total in the “Megamachine”—that is to blame for having “crippled and paralyzed” contemporary personality. Illich, The Right to Useful Unemployment: And Its Professional Enemies (Marion Boyars, 2000), 67; Mumford, “Technics and the Nature of Man,” Technology and Culture 7, no. 3 (1966).
In the paraphrase of Susan Buck-Morss, “Aesthetics and Anaesthetics: Walter Benjamin’s Artwork Essay Reconsidered,” October, no. 62 (1992): 17.
Theodor Adorno, The Stars Down to Earth and Other Essays on Irrational Culture (Routledge, 1994), 166.
Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (Verso, 2005), 54.
This runs counter to a familiar tendencies in the Marxist use of paralysis, where the strength of the proletariat gets posed as a natural health ruined by the subjective structures accompanying capital. This conception splits into two divergent political tendencies: on one side, the celebration of labor and pride in work, as the innate “wealth” of the proletariat; on the other, a strength that does not affirm the natural tendency of work but instead is a strength only produced by consolidation and refusal as a class. For an example that splits between the two, see Anton Pannekoek’s work, where “the tactical problem is how we are to eradicate the traditional bourgeois mentality which paralyses the strength of the proletarian masses.” Pannekoek, “World Revolution and Communist Tactics,” 1920 →.
Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton University Press, 1947), 137.
Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, American Negro Slave Revolts (International Publishers, 1983), 26–27.
“The Paris Commune and the Idea of the State,” 1871 →.
Although I am not focusing on this here, we can also find instances of this language and trope used to talk about the consequences of bureaucracy on commerce, as in Max Weber in The Agrarian Sociology of Ancient Civilizations: “The paralysis of private economic initiative through bureaucracy is not limited to antiquity. Every bureaucracy has the tendency, by virtue of its expansion, to achieve the same effect.” Quoted in John Farrenkopf, “Weber, Spengler, and the Origins, Spirit, and Development of Capitalism,” Comparative Civilizations Review 27, no. 27 (1992): 22.
Quoted in David Cohen, “Tuberville ‘Paralyzing’ Pentagon, House Foreign Affairs Chair Says,” Politico, September 10, 2023 →.
“What Does the Spartacus League Want?,” December 1918 →. For the further deployment of this term and trope in Luxemburg, see the Junius Pamphlet, which suggests that “the blood-letting of the June days (1848) paralyzed the French workers’ movement for a decade and a half.”
“Imagination in Painting,” in Art in Theory, 1900–2000 (Blackwell, 2003), 32.
“The Death Agony of Capitalism and the Tasks of the Fourth International,” 1938 →.
We can add to this Guy Debord’s account of separation in The Society of the Spectacle. He reads Bolshevism as the “inauguration of the state of affairs that is at the heart of the modern spectacle’s domination: the representation of the working class has become an enemy of the working class.” Society of the Spectacle (Rebel Press, n.d.), 54. Emphasis in original.
“The Commune of Paris,” 1880 →.
To be sure, the lines between the two are blurry, especially when we consider that strikes can bring about the inability of critical infrastructure to function, and attacks on railways or oil pipelines can have dramatic effects on the speed and cost of shipping.
Amory B. Lovins and Hunter Lovins, Brittle Power: Energy Strategy for National Security (Brick House Publishing, 2001), 208.
I address this in part 2 of this essay series, particularly in the context of how it relates to a Heideggerian understanding of technics and what goes missing if we focus on the broken alone.
Stephen Graham, Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, 2010), 263.
The primary figure in this thesis and history is arguably Colonel John Warden. See Barlow, Strategic Paralysis: An Airpower Theory for the Present (Air University, 1992).
As Ro’i Ben-Horin puts it, quoted in Graham, Cities Under Siege, 244.
Quoted in Justin Joque, “Cyber-Catastrophe: Towards a Pedagogy of Entropy,” in Pedagogies of Disaster, ed. Vincent W. J. van Gerven Oei, Adam Staley Groves, and Nico Jenkins (Punctum Books, 2013), 375.
Wei Jincheng, “New Form of People’s War,” Jiefangjun Bao (The People’s Liberation Army Daily), June 25, 1996, 6. Quoted in Chinese Responses to U.S. Military Transformation and Implications for the Department of Defense, a 2006 RAND corporation volume, 84–85.
A survey of the intelligence literature and military theory of the United States, for instance, reveals just how clearly a century of trying to understand insurgency—and a century of never being able to truly stop it—becomes, in more recent decades, a mimesis of its fundamental strategies.
Quoted in Joan Martinez-Alier, The Environmentalism of the Poor: A Study of Ecological Conflicts and Valuation (Edward Elgar, 2002), 104.
Cabral, Presuppositions and Objectives, 231–32.
Louie Adamic, Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in America (1934), 29.
Beverly J. Silver, Forces of Labor: Workers’ Movements and Globalization Since 1870 (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 47.
Jeremy Brecher, Strike! (South End Press, 1997), 259; Allen Wastler, “West Coast Paralysis: Some Winners … Sort Of,” CNBC, February 20, 2015 →. See also Timothy Michell’s Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2011), where the word “paralysis” appears again and again as the way to think about what strikes do to cities or energy systems. For example: without “linkages that connected coal to large centres of industrial production within the country, these actions could not have paralysed local energy systems and gained the political force they enjoyed in northern Europe and the United States” (22).
James Boyle, The Minimum Wage and Syndicalism (Stewart and Kidd Company, 1913), 91; John Spargo, Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism (B. W. Huebsch, 1913), 85.
Emile Pouget, Sabotage (Charles Kerr, 1913), 78.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, “The Truth About the Patterson Strike,” in Rebel Voices: An IWW Anthology (PM Press, 2011), 217. In another instance, she writes how after taking “a vital part of the train engine away the train does not run at all. So human life is not in danger. They make it a practice to strike such a vital blow that the service is paralysed thereafter.” Flynn, Sabotage (IWW Publishing Bureau, n.d.), 20–21.
Quoted in Claire Fontaine, “Human Strike Within the Libidinal Field,” in Human Strike Has Already Begun and Other Writings (Mute, 2013), 44.
As for the effect of that agency, its social consequences are dramatically split, from the collapse of civil infrastructure brought about by bombing campaigns to the interruption of circuits of shipping that only take shape in order to exploit an uneven geography of wages and regulations.
As for the mass version of this, consider Kracauer’s framing of the “collective paralysis of the soul” that details a historically specific foundation of inactivity, a grounding of nonresponse that will sabotage any effort to organize substantive change because the basic circuits of expected reaction have already been decoupled and thwarted.
This is epitomized by the “listen to all sides” mode typified by the New York Times and centrist liberals, replete with fantasies of neutrality, lucid communication, gradual empathetic understanding, and subsequent negotiation, with earnest perspective-expanding and mainstreaming of fascists along the way.
I have written previously on the notion of threatscape in relation to the distribution of surveillance and transmission throughout lived space. See “Figures in a Threatscape,” in Shard Cinema (Repeater, 2017).
See, for instance, Martin Sullivan’s “Subjected Bodies: Paraplegia, Rehabilitation, and the Politics of Movement” for not only a reckoning with some of what that can entail but also his account of the production of a paraplegic subject position/subjectivity. In Foucault and the Government of Disability (University of Michigan Press, 2015).
That is, even in literature, journalism, film, and political discourses that do not focus primarily or even explicitly on disability, we can recognize how they nevertheless rely upon both specific representations and general tropes of disability—blindness, crippling, etc.—in order to produce the negative ground against which the nominally normal can shape itself. See David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse (University of Michigan Press, 2000).
We should note here just how crucial this sense and image of the less-damaging and less-lethal is to the public appearance and ideology of paralytic warfare, because in targeting infrastructure and the mechanisms needed not only for making war but also for the basic maintenance of any social reproduction, it distributes its lethality out ahead in time. (While not unique to American military operations, this has become an absolute hallmark of them.)
Consider, for instance, how the problem of physical localization is answered in Freud’s massively influential 1915 essay “The Unconscious”: “Every endeavour to think of ideas as stored up in nerve-cells and of excitations as travelling along nerve fibres, has miscarried completely … Our psychical topography has for the present nothing to do with anatomy.” In The Freud Reader (Norton, 1989), 579.
Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage (Fordham University Press, 2012).
Ricardo Piglia, Burnt Money (excerpt), trans. Daniel Balderston, Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, 8, no. 1 (1999): 5.
Piglia, Burnt Money, 5. And though this is not central to this passage, I think we’d be right to see the way in which the senseless and seemingly perverse burning of money gets mapped onto the fact of the protagonists themselves as queer, setting them up as figures posed against the guarantee of a reproducible future.
Piglia, Burnt Money, 5.
Piglia, Burnt Money, 5–6. This opens onto a rich history of blame and category blurring, which in part 2 of this essay I will return to at length through the category of the “deodand.”
Piglia, Burnt Money, 6.
The full passage is: “Just after the act that had paralyzed them all, the police seemed to react, beginning a brutal offensive as if the time during which the nihilists (as they were now called by the newspapers) completed their senseless act had readied them, blinded them, prepared them for the final act of repression” (6).