The differences are too substantial for me to loosely analogize here, but I will note that a version of the breakdown/insight form of thinking is also active in popular conceptions about how climate chaos and extreme weather could or should bring about an immediate political reckoning with the urgency of stopping fossil fuel use. As I’ve written elsewhere, what goes missing in this is the way that imagery or footage often used to transmit such a reckoning—what Günther Anders referred to as “warning images”—is itself heavily aestheticized, producing a perverse visual pleasure in surreal sights of the burning jungle’s pink haze or the house flooded up to its second story. Such images move under the sign of what is terrible, and yet, particularly when reinforced by which ones get clicked and reposted, end up normalizing what they depict. See my essay “Noon as Night,” for steirischer herbst, gathered in A Pleasant Apocalypse: Notes from the Grand Hotel Abyss (Hatje Cantz, 2020).
Cities Under Siege: The New Military Urbanism (Verso, 2010), 263.
When the Lights Go Out: A History of Blackouts in America (MIT Press, 2010), 70.
When the Lights Go Out, 81.
For a hugely influential text that advances this position, see György Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness (MIT Press, 1968). In his account, during a crisis, the “unity of the economic process moves into reach,” in a way that was blocked during “so-called periods of normality” (in which the unity can be glimpsed from a “class-standpoint” but “the gap between appearance and ultimate reality” is too great to properly grasp). In this account, the crisis therefore provides a crucial interval in which to move beyond what he sees as the “grave theoretical error” of bourgeois thought, which accepts a false vision of different parts of society as independent, and in a way that is “in harmony with the interests of capitalism” (74–75). With regard to cultural practice and art, this question of the relation between totality and apparent fragmentation is central to the debates over realism and expressionism in which Lukács was a central interlocutor.
This is one of the reasons why although the trope of paralysis bears a particularly close relation to sabotage, it should not be absolutely aligned with it. Rather, as the sources I cited in Part 1 show, it also was a central concept used in talking about blockades, pickets, and strikes, and most markedly with the threat/promise of a general strike.
With Spargo, I want to be clear to not reduce his critique to a moral denunciation of tactics of paralysis, or even to a flat anti-syndicalism. He was a longtime organizer, and indeed, in the preface to his Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism (B. W. Huebsch, 1913), he notes his close proximity to those who he critiques at length: “For I have faced the same problems as my Syndicalist brother, shared his struggles, his hopes and his fears. For I am of the proletariat, bone of its bone and blood of its blood. Strike, lockout, blacklist, overwork, unemployment, homelessness and hunger are all familiar phenomena to me. I have borne them in my person. They have shaped and marred my life. No Syndicalist has seen more clearly the difficulties, obstacles and dangers of parliamentary Socialism. I have both preached and practiced sabotage. I have looked with awe and fear upon the long road of pacific evolution by political methods, and found my courage and faith taxed to the uttermost” (n.p.). We can read this statement as a rhetorical move or an earnest statement of someone trying their damnedest to win over comrades he sees as fundamentally mistaken. Regardless, although in this essay I am trying to detect what I see as the implicit contours of what is unacceptable to him, and the ways that this indicates a trespass of some of the grounding conditions of what is taken as even radical political activity, it’s crucial to also read this document and his stance as shaped by long process of actual organizing and debate over strategy. That said, in a way that’s telling for a distrust of the possibilities of proletarian self-organization (and for his eventual drift to the right), he insists that one of the problems with teaching sabotage is that people will then sabotage your organization too: “Teach men and women in the labor movement to practice sabotage in the fight against their employers and it will not be long before they will practice sabotage within their own organizations to obtain factional or personal ends. Union men who practice sabotage against the employer to gain the ends of the union will sooner or later practice sabotage within the union to gain their own ends. A contempt for the will of the majority is developed, for ‘sabotage is peculiarly the weapon of the rebel minority’” (174–75). What goes unspoken here is the prospect that this may be one of the only ways to register dissent with unions which themselves can be indifferent to dissenting opinions.
Spargo’s critique of sabotage is central to his attack on revolutionary syndicalism, but it has a different tenor: he argues that it “destroys the moral force of the proletariat and unfits (sic) it for the great struggle. It weakens the sense of class solidarity already developed. It places the crucial and critical events of the struggle once more in the hands of individuals, not of the mass” (Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism, 173). In short, the core issue here is how it disrupts the way in which individual and collective action are understood to interface and the way that collective action is expected to appear as if collective, with a consequent prioritization of certain kinds of organizing.
Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism, 85.
Syndicalism, Industrial Unionism and Socialism, 123. I would put Spargo’s reckoning with this in dialogue with a very different enemy of insurrection, so to speak, Carl Schmitt, whose reading of class politics in The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy also captures a crucial aspect that has been anathema to more mainstream socialist or labor politics for much of the last century and a half. Schmitt writes that in the process of revolutionary organizing and a communist horizon, “the proletariat can only be defined as the social class that no longer participates in profit, that owns nothing, that knows no ties to family or fatherland, and so forth. The proletarian become the social nonentity. It must also be true that the proletarian, in contrast to the bourgeois, is nothing but a person. From this it follows with dialectic necessity that in the period of transition he can be nothing but a member of his class; that is, he must realize himself precisely in something that is the contradiction of humanity—in the class.” As for Spargo, for Schmitt this is a situation to be avoided, although for significantly different reasons. Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (MIT Press, 1988), 65.
This is one of the aspects central to the paralysis of networks and infrastructures as a military tactic, including cyberwar: there are not only the often disastrous material consequences of that lack of access to what is needed but also the cognitive disarray of lacking the systems that have become second nature.
Yuk Hui, “A Phenomenological Inquiry on the Emergence of Digital Things,” What Does a Chameleon Look Like?: Topographies of Immersion (Halem Verlag, 2011), 348. Hui’s reading of this aligns to a degree with what Adam Kotsko realized in terms of his pedagogy, in a blog post about the shifts in how he came to understand this example: “The actual point of the broken hammer example is to give us access to the world as such. When I confront a broken hammer, I don’t immediately reflect on the raw materials (except insofar as they might account for its brokenness, its unsuitability for its purpose)—instead, I reflect explicitly on the network of purposes to which the hammer belongs.” “The Broken Hammer,” An und für sich (blog), April 30, 2014 →.
My reference here is to the operational sequence (la chaîne opératoire) as theorized by André Leroi-Gourhan, which names the circuit of the processes enacted on and through a material that brings it not just into use but, as Hui suggests, into a familiarity of the already inherited and already coded. I think another useful touchpoint among theories of design and technics comes from Bernhard Siegert, through his account of “cultural techniques” (Kulturtechniken), which involve considering the complicated ways that symbolic functions often follow from, and then get dislocated from, a specific technical and yet always also cultural practice. For instance, he reads the practice of ploughing as follows: “Ploughing can be a symbolic act as well. If, as ancient sources attest, ploughs were used to draw a sacred furrow to demarcate the limits of a new city, then this constitutes an act of writing in the sense of Greek graphé. To plough is in this case to engage in symbolic work because the graphein serves to mark the distinction between inside and outside, civilization and barbarism, an inside domain in which the law prevails and one outside in which it does not.” Cultural Techniques: Grids, Filters, Doors, and Other Articulations of the Real, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young (Fordham University Press, 2015), 12.
See the scene from Ricardo Piglia’s 1997 novel Burnt Money mentioned in Part I of this essay.
I’m reminded here of San Michele Aveva un Gallo, a 1972 film by the Taviani brothers, in which a group of anarchists “free” a small Umbrian town, and throw the property documents out the courthouse window and set it aflame, like the money in Piglia’s novel, and fly a red and black flag—only to find that the village isn’t so sure what they think about this and if they wanted to be freed in the first place.
Public Sphere and Experience: Toward an Analysis of the Bourgeois and Proletarian Sphere (University of Minnesota Press, 1993).
I find this book useful now precisely because it emerges from reckoning with an earlier moment of digital networks, two decades back before all its terms and operations became so ubiquitous.
Although, these also need to be read as part of a wider context of calibration and monitoring that generates what AbdouMaliq Simone—reading Luciana Parisi—frames as the “uncertain betweens” of algorithmically shaped urban infrastructure and communications, ones that teeter on the edge of always exceeding control. Simone, “Afterword: Come On Out, You’re Surrounded: The Betweens of Infrastructure,” City 19, no. 2–3 (2015).
Here I would also include work that focuses on the logic of care and the threat of disrepair/failure that looms behind the suspension of unrecognized and unexpected maintenance. See the work of Shannon Mattern, for instance, particularly where she picks up on Steven Jackson’s “Rethinking Repair” (from 2014): Mattern, “Maintenance and Care,” Places, November 2018 →. That said, I’d note that there is a widespread tendency—one not present in Mattern’s lucid work—to treat the revelation of, or attention to, “care” itself as an automatically political insight, in ways that have become especially visible and acutely banal in contemporary art institutions and discourses.
Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Duke University Press, 2011).
This is one of my most-hated tropes, one that verges easily into a green-fascist imaginary of a return to the purity of earthly bonds. For a weapons-grade version of this kind of historical temporality and the fetishization of “going backward,” see the title credits of Wall-E, which I wrote about in Combined and Uneven Apocalypse.
When the Lights Go Out, 132.
“Are Blackouts Landscapes?” American Studies in Scandinavia 39, no. 2 (2007).
The English version has the far less compelling title Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth, which they comically chalk up to an act of sabotage itself: “At baptism, our book changed its name. This was the fault of our publisher, who, in presenting its title page to the printer’s ink—the baptismal font for books—shamelessly committed an act of sabotage.” Pataud and Pouget, Syndicalism and the Co-operative Commonwealth (New International, 1913), xviii.
The excellent passage continues: “The intense blackness that enwrapped the city was pierced here and there by bright gleams. It was the glimmer of those establishments, which making their own light,—electricity or acetylene,—were not affected by the strike. Now the pulsations of the great city began to get slower; it seemed as though the darkness which invaded it was an omen of death. The theatres and all other places were emptied in a roar of conversation, and amidst exclamations which told of anxiety and panic” (37).
The text continues: “Looting stores, as in Argentina, has its limits; as large as the temples of consumption are, they are not bottomless pantries. Acquiring the skills to provide, over time, for one’s own basic subsistence implies appropriating the necessary means of its production. And in this regard, it seems pointless to wait any longer. Letting two percent of the population produce the food of all the others—the situation today—is both a historical and a strategic anomaly” →.
My reference here is to Charles Perrow, who in his research impelled by the Three Mile Island disaster understands tight coupling as generative of “multiple failures” resulting when “different parts of a system are quite dependent on each other.” Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (Basic Books: 1984), 8.
Timothy Mitchell offers an excellent gloss on this quote: “A coal-fired steam locomotive could deliver three megawatts of power (about 4,000 horsepower), or thirty times the motive power of the first reciprocating steam engines of a century or so earlier. The new effectiveness of sabotage derived from this vast concentration of kinetic energy in a mechanism that a single operator could disable.” Carbon Democracy: Political Power in the Age of Oil (Verso, 2013), 22–23.
Syndicalism (T. C. & E. C. Jack, 1912), 37. Crucially, this is immediately followed by the turn to sabotage: “But now the invention of fresh weapons of offence was a paramount preoccupation in the mind of the workers. ‘Sabotage’ became a name of dread in France.”
Guerrilla Warfare: A Historical and Critical Study (Routledge, 2017), 324.
A copy of it with English subtitles can be found here →.
Joris Ivens, The Camera and I (International Publishers, 1969), 57. He notes also that the film was itself bought by the Soviet state for distribution, two hundred prints.
Ivens has a fascinating account of how he envisioned the multiple cameras used to shoot the film’s footage, which was subsequently edited together. Each camera, he writes, embodied and was “emotionaly attached to a different element,” each of which struggle against the others: the “sea-camera,” the “land-camera,” and the “man-camera.” The Camera and I, 95.
The Camera and I, 94.
The Camera and I, 96.
The Camera and I, 97.
The Camera and I, 94.
It is in the retelling of this that Ivens details an episode I’ve found hugely important, that of his collective and informal training in montage by “borrowing” commercial newsreels that he was in charge of (in his role organizing film programs). I describe this in an interview available on e-flux Education →.
The tone bears a striking echo too of Kluge’s Biermann-Film (1983), another film that takes what might have originally been just leftover footage and makes something furious and dizzying from it.
The Camera and I, 95.
The Camera and I, 95.
The Conscience of Cinema: The Works of Joris Ivens, 1926–1989 (Amsterdam University Press, 2016), 163–64.
Waugh notes a fascinating formal detail that lies behind this feeling: the relation to synchronization and coming out of synch, and the way that at one “point in the climactic closing sequence, the score’s rhythm is patently faster than that of the cutting, creating a feeling of urgency and tension.” Conscience of Cinema, 170.