Riots and the State
Patrick Crogan, in his Theory of State: Deleuze, Guattari and Virilio on the State, Technology and Speed, writes that “according to Deleuze and Guattari in Nomadology, the State is concerned with capturing territory (and its contents), ‘deterritorializing’ it and ‘reterritorializing’ it as State property. In other words, the State is a machine for making interiority and for making it permanent.” The State isn’t synonymous with Government, the State is any apparatus that functions in the above-mentioned way. The State could be a movie, a handshake, a kiss, even one’s own Subjectivity. If it’s an apparatus that is attempting to capture human flows, then it’s the State.
The primary manner in which the State captures and contains human flows (whether sexual urges, urges to love, urges to destruction, etc.), is to represent humans. In the contemporary world that “representation” is the model that the Autonomous Individual. It may useful to think of the individual as a technology, a technology that functions to control urges and flow. The model of autonomous individual is of an isolated entity, a Subjectivity, that holds sovereign power over his or her body (like a tiny monarch) and is individually accountable for the actions and behaviors of that body. The State constructs this model inside one’s own experience, it is the experience that a contemporary Subject would recognize as its own “natural” self; the Subject must represent itself, and must be represented in and to the State. A representation of order.
This model is limiting, but no matter, as long as the State can coerce people into constructing themselves as Representations. Once one constructs their subjectivity as a Representation, a re-creation, rather than a wild, open flowing, anti-identity creation, the State can reduce its own control mechanisms, passing that job onto the autonomous individual, which is constructed to be a tiny State representation in its own head.
Which is to say, the State banks the control mechanism in its members by propagating and enforcing a certain Subject (a uniform psychological model of how human beings will contain themselves), which is the modern concept of the “Individual” or the “Individuated Being Responsible for Moral and Legal Decisions.” It is important to note that a reason we so readily clamor towards these Representations is that we’ve been convinced of the Rights Argument, which is the concept that there are certain inalienable rights the individual possesses. As long as the State secures these rights, we will gladly become Representations. The rights issue will become important later.
Whereas the State certainly wants to contain unregulated human flows by using the concept of Representation (“rational, moral, individuated”), there are moments when the State wishes to crack open the containment unit of the individual, to hack the technology of the individual, to dissolve the rational, moral individual, to harness the power of unregulated human flows. For example, war: when the State is ramping up for war it needs to incite a fervor of Nationalism in its members, one mechanism of this is that it needs to dismantle the representation of the individual, and restructure its members into a collective singularity, i.e. a state-sponsored mob that will look the other way when it comes to rationality and responsibility and accountability for the causalities of War.
When the concept of the Individual is dissolved there is no individual human, there is a “natural force,” a force of nature, an explosion of unregulated human flows, a human hurricane. Though, obviously, when the State wants to dismantle the model of the individual, it isn’t a totally unregulated situation, the State cannot afford that, it needs to control the explosion. That is, a state-sponsored mob is merely a representation of real, unregulated human flows. The State replaces the representation of order (isolated individual) with a Representation of Chaos (state-sponsored mob).
However, there do exists moments when the State can accidentally crack open the containment unit of the individual in a way which does not allow the State to regulate the flows of humans, all those libidinal creative and destructive urges; there are moments when the State accidentally unleashes real, unregulated humans flows; there are moments when the State puts so much pressure on the model of the responsible individual that the model fails, the software crashes, the containment unit cracks and the full power of unregulated human flows ignites and explodes into the world.
There are two recent cases where this accidental cracking open occurred, in the 2020 riots focused on Policing, and the January 6th 2021 insurrection at the Capitol. Without going in-depth into these cases, it if suffice to understand these two examples as moments when the State accidentally released unregulated human flows, and in both cases the pressure point was the issue of Rights: if an individual, as a sublimating technology, has Rights (again, these Rights are one of the primary coercive mechanisms for one’s complicity in becoming a Representation), and the State does not behave as if the individual has Rights, then the State, by applying too much pressure to the model, accidentally cracked open the Representation and released the Real.
If we are concerned with the responsibility of what occurred in these two examples, and countless others, and we place on responsibility on the rational, moral, individuated agency of individuals, it may be a misplaced accountability, or at least doesn’t spread the accountability as wide as it should be spread. For, the individuals did not crack open their own Representations, the State did. The State accidentally released Chaos.
As a sort of post-script: Of course, the State is very good at self-organization, as the fact that the State has pretty much been with us since the beginning can attest. Which is to say, revolutions are harnessed by the State. The State certainly grows (i.e. captures more members via its stabilizing mechanisms) both by construction individuals anew, and by opening up individuals in a controlled way (e.g. state-sponsored mobs, the fanaticism we witness with sports teams).
However, States also grow through more un-controlled opening up of individuals. For example, we saw this in the 1960’s with the State’s constant activating of the National Guard inside our nation’s cities, which primed and normalized the State’s citizens with the expectation of a more pervasive surveillance/regulation apparatus. As such, it’s no surprise that cameras became more and more a regulation tool after the 60’s than before, such that, today we readily tolerate (street cameras, etc.) and demand (identity protection software, police body cams, social media, etc.) more and more surveillance/regulation mechanisms imposed upon us, thus growing the State.
Augustus Fossly is an autodidatic deinstitutionalist dwelling in an (a)liminal non-representational space of immanance. His writings have been featured in the journal No Where. He spends his time as a gadfly. Follow him on instagram @augustus.fossly
