Emily Apter

The late civil rights activist John Lewis spoke of the “soul-wrenching, existential struggle” that took hold in the wake of the Cruikshank ruling of 1876, which eviscerated the Fourteenth Amendment’s power to prosecute violations of civil rights by state governments and gave free rein to white terrorist attacks on the formerly enslaved. In the lead-up to and aftermath of the US 2020 election, we are experiencing another moment of “existential struggle” as the culture wars and protests against racial injustice take shape in the contours of extreme civil strife. They induce a state of soul-stress: somatic suffering, mortal fear, cynicism, pessimism, exhausted outrage, partisan disgust, and a range of feelings captured by the German term unruhig, an untranslatable term covering English concepts of restlessness, restivity, turbulence, agitation, fidgetiness, unease, angst, anxiety, peacelessness. This paralytic anxiety has been further exacerbated by the prospect—in the Biden era—of what Alain Badiou calls la recouverture—a re-covering, reupholstering, relapsing, or recursion to the status quo and to the condition of political impossibility linked to stalemate in the face of climate change, radical income inequality, and the relentless global affirmation of white sovereignty.The late civil rights activist John Lewis spoke of the “soul-wrenching, existential struggle” that took hold in the wake of the Cruikshank ruling of 1876, which eviscerated the Fourteenth Amendment’s power to prosecute violations of civil rights by state governments and gave free rein to white terrorist attacks on the formerly enslaved. In the lead-up to and aftermath of the US 2020 election, we are experiencing another moment of “existential struggle” as the culture wars and protests against racial injustice take shape in the contours of extreme civil strife. They induce a state of soul-stress: somatic suffering, mortal fear, cynicism, pessimism, exhausted outrage, partisan disgust, and a range of feelings captured by the German term unruhig, an untranslatable term covering English concepts of restlessness, restivity, turbulence, agitation, fidgetiness, unease, angst, anxiety, peacelessness. This paralytic anxiety has been further exacerbated by the prospect—in the Biden era—of what Alain Badiou calls la recouverture—a re-covering, reupholstering, relapsing, or recursion to the status quo and to the condition of political impossibility linked to stalemate in the face of climate change, radical income inequality, and the relentless global affirmation of white sovereignty.

Overlaying this sense of impasse is another: one emerging from the alt-right’s effective appropriation of disruption, sabotage, and interference. Tactics like the jam and the hack, signed in the days of Occupy Wall Street, the Snowden Affair, Arab Spring, and the ZAD by the Yes Men, Anonymous, Wikileaks, and the Invisible Committee (to name but a few), disappeared into the maw of industrial-strength hacks of financial data and state-sponsored cyberwarfare.

Cozy Bear malware, released into the bloodstream of social media in 2016, was subsequently matched with Trump’s “army of memes” and tweets, which virally distributed disinformation and subverted functional governance. Mastering the art of election interference, Trump’s followers and congressional enablers certified the Dada of alternative facts and instructions hailing from Q. They successfully gamed a system of corporate rewards harvested from algorithmically calculated hits on the grievance-validation keys. They managed end-runs around progressives with fake “fakenews,” producing a terrible state of mindfuck that compounded the politics-as-usual legislative obstructionism of Mitch McConnell or the brazen DOJ hack of the Mueller report.

This obstructionism is located in the entangled forms of obstruction endemic to the social life of politicking and the below-the-radar, ambient milieu of political life as it is apprehended phenomenologically and thermodynamically. These force fields, affectively experienced and enfleshed, may be identified in what Michel Foucault termed the “microphysics of power,” or what Félix Guattari referred to as the “micropolitics of desire.” These nonvisible materialities form clouds of influence that blur the heroic outlines of epic action and linear narrative structure, which anchor classical theories of the Political. They derail perceptions of what politics is or where it happens, and open up other ways of apprehending the “matter” of politics.1

Here, we are in the realm of what I call “Bartleby politics,” based on the famous riposte “I would prefer not to” deployed by Herman Melville’s impassive Wall Street clerk when asked to perform a task. “Bartleby politics” designates ways in which the brute impact of sovereign force is blunted by discursive disruptions. It could be identified in acts of physical occupation, civil disobedience, passive resistance, conscientious objection, and dismissal of “the system” in the name of “real” democracy. But it could also be associated with the stasis of stuckness; the obstinacy of will affirmed outside institutional frameworks of political agency and decision, the vacuity of political speechifying, which (think the abusive filibuster) normalizes sabotage and ruts of governmentality, or the baffling of rational deliberation by means of bait-and-switch. QAnon, one could say, involves flipping the switch from fact-based logical connectivism to conspiratorial dot-connecting. This is not exactly a changing of the signal, but more of a short-circuit or glitch that opens the gates to unchecked projective identification. Suddenly, apophenic visions of monsters—child-molesting Satanists—figure forth from the pizza parlors of Washington, DC and the halls of Congress, spurring pursuit of the shiny lures of revenge-porn, occult righteousness, and murderous sedition.

Micropolitical tactics of interference, interruption, refusal, and systems derailment (including the insertion of gender-variant bodies into heteronormative social structures) can be recaptured to combat Q’s sabotage of reality and the checkmate logistics masterminded by the Mitch McConnells and William Barrs of this world on behalf of Trump. The power of social interferon embodied by Michel Serres’ microbial parasite comes to mind, spirited along by rats that crash the dinner party and symbolize the enigmatic political category that Serres dubs “interrupted meals.” Notes Serres,

The parasite invents something new. He obtains energy and pays for it in information. He obtains the roast and pays for it with stories.…He speaks in a logic considered irrational up to now, a new epistemology and a new theory of equilibrium. He makes the order of things as well as the states of things—solid and gas—into diagonals.…He invents cybernetics. 2

The refusal to choose to be a gender, or an individual human, or a one-of-a-kind object, or a discrete form of information points us in the direction of imagined communities of animated things (robots, cyborgs, statues made out of utility equipment, prosthetics of the senses, bodies that improvise with objects or architectures at hand). This underclass of tool-beings expresses political demands for new labor practices, new uses for technology, the abolition of racist, sexist boardroom culture, better spaces of pedagogy, new training programs, nonextractive sources of intersectional energy—in short, systems of social relation rising up from technoculture’s failures and effecting an end-run around political impasse by using that very condition of impasse to generate new political assemblages.

Impasse in French is often used interchangeably with engouement, referring to a word that gets stuck in your throat (a gag) or a route full of hurdles. A prime example is the road nicknamed La Route de la Chicane, playing off the multiple associations of the verb chicaner, to haggle with or cheat someone, that leads to the ZAD, the acronym designating the area squatted by the airport protesters in Notre-Dame-des-Landes. Transformed into what the architect Léopold Lambert terms a “merciless topology,” consisting of a makeshift obstacle course forcing vehicles to zigzag and swerve on a serpentine path strewn with car carcasses, refuse heaps, mounds of old clothing, and remnants of shelters, La Route de la Chicane recalls the images of smoking cars-wrecks and human debris in the endless tracking shot of Godard’s film Weekend.3

From 2010 to spring 2018, the ZAD occupied roughly 1,600 hectares of an ecologically sensitive zone in the Loire-Atlantique where three major rivers come together. The ZADistes, a loose confederation of local farmers, artisans, anarchists, and environmental activists, turned the art of the impasse into a hack on government planning agencies. Their long, drawn-out protest movement was anti-evental and unexceptional insofar as it relied on feats of duration and endurance that extended to free-form ways of living: seminars, speakeasies, performances, and artful uses of “what’s in the air.” In Alain Damasio’s ZAD poem “P for power,” politics is literally pulled from the air. Gusts of wind bearing grains and germs infuse every inhalation of breath. It is the atmosphere itself, an ethereal substance at once immersive and incorporated, that imparts the power of powerlessness (impuissance) to the ZAD.4 Damasio quotes the Invisible Committee: “The world does not surround us, it traverses us. What we inhabit, inhabits us, not as form but as force.”5

The squatting protesters at Notre-Dame-des-Landes also came up with strategies of resistant jardinage that mobilized the full resources of les Noues. These are humid zones, natural shelters of vegetation, valleys, or cavities in the landscape, characterized by Marielle Macé as “a lucky find of the ZAD.”6 Macé treats these silty wetlands as micropolitical infrastructure, impeding the march of ecological destruction as they block construction of an airport. Les Noues, one could say, offered themselves as nature’s glitch, allowing the ZADistes to meet impasse with impasse, to hack the hack. They afford access to what Guattari, under the rubric of schizo-analytic micropolitics, hailed as counter-institutional practices aimed at rejecting oppressive organizational complexes and allowing for inhabitation of another headspace.7

In a 1990 dialogue with Guattari published in the essay collection Qu’est-ce que L’Ecosophie? [What is Ecosophy?], Antonio Negri raised the concern that micropolitics dissipates the force and possibility of the revolutionary event. The emphasis on ceaseless mutation, proliferating subjectivities, and nongenealogical epistemologies gives rise, he fears, to the postmodern formalism of shifting surfaces.8 Guattari opposes genealogical thinking: it leads to progressive models of history endemic to capitalism, as well as to Marxism, Freudianism, and Structuralism. All fixate on the event as saving grace, as “gift from God,” as last-ditch defense against “the immense phobia of finitude.” (E 298). Negri remains unconvinced: “I know your passion for the event, the pleasure you take in life. But when you philosophize, you seem to detach yourself from all that….How do we imagine not the process, but the revolutionary event itself, not the conditions of revolution, but its constitutive power?” (E 299). Sidestepping the queries, Guattari insists on micropolitical processes, and their inception at the juncture of environmental and mental ecologies. This process is given the name ecosophy, broadly designating an intersectional ontology attuned to planetary ethics (E 300-1).

Flushing the threadbare vocabulary of environmentalism with his characteristic jargon of complexity—chaosmosis, informatics, terrestrial coexistence, deterritorialization—Guattari applies the term ecosophy transversally across differences in genera and modes of existence. In an essay on the artist David Wojnarowicz, it becomes a way of describing Wojnarowicz’s “rendez-vous with death,” which entailed writing with the AIDS virus as if it were a cipher, a live material that could be mobilized against society’s deathly passivity towards HIV (E 274). In another piece on Pierre Lévy’s book Technologies of Intelligence, ecosophy refers to “cognitive ecology,” which builds out Gregory Bateson’s “ecology of mind” into a kind of biome where affects, phantasms, and machinic thought processes coalesce. For Guattari, the form of micropolitics labeled ecosophy becomes a wayof transcending bipolar politicization (left-right,Jacobin-federalist); it pushes for something trans-ontological, which is to say, towards modes of existence that move across species, animacies, and atmospheres.9

Micropolitics sometimes receives a bad rap in political theory, attributable perhaps to an assumed distance-taking from Marxism. But this view underestimates recourse to the micro in undermining control societies at the level of unconscious reproductions of structures of domination. Guattari uses the example of the radical feminist who becomes the oppressor of her lesbian partner to underline class struggle in the “microdimensions” of freedom and desire’s “coefficients.” Combat against “microfascisms” occurs on this intimate plane and has renewed traction today. Consider Antonio A. Casilli’s dissection of microlabor [microtravail], digital labor outsourced to machinic taskers like Amazon Mechanical Turk, Clickworker, or the robotic tasking of humans. Casilli is interested in subordinate formations elicited by “clickwork,” where subjects are summoned to link in by a thousand triggers to follow prompts, notifications, alerts, and commands.10 Similarly, Grégoire Chamayou returns us to the “micropolitics of privatization,” an expression coined in the 1980s for the tactic by which the parlous Thatcherite state put modes of ungovernability to neoliberal ends. Micropolitics—and the modes of critical intervention brought along in its train—is constitutive of other contemporary political categories as well: Sara Ahmed’s “atmospheric walls” of social inclusion and exclusion; Achille Mbembe’s force fields of “nanoracism;” Kris Manjapra’s “colonial entanglements” which focus on political alignments sidelined in grand narratives of imperial domination; or the late Hayden White’s historical construct of “the practical past,” which refers to tactics of living, archived memories, affects, and dreams. Whether it is in post-Occupy or Black Lives Matter group associations that reorganize socioeconomic relations in the context of labor, education, and care, or in the practice of listening, questioning, and struggling to find a voice (a crucial narrative of racial justice movements as well as feminist consciousness-raising, from Second Wave feminism to #metoo), or in some version of glitch aesthetics (indebted to Legacy Russell’s manifesto11) that detourns the parasitic host and masters the art of hacking the hack, micropolitics, and the sublunary forms of activism it imagines, has been introduced into the system.