<underfire> Counter-Disappearance, 'Stealth Democracy, ' Picnolepsy

[sdv at krokodile.co.uk]

Irving/all

I enjoyed your reply and  found it very useful and helpful in clarifying 
what look like being useful concepts.

I recognize that I am raiding the Deleuze and Guattari toolbox and am 
suggesting that we can use it in the current socio-historical context, 
within the context of  the work you are describing. In the context what 
constitutes a 'rhizomic' tactic has to be able to address the relation 
between the (islamists/anti-colonial fighters) of the 
reactionary-multitiude and the latter day imperialists, (two loathsome 
reactionary ideologies in struggle) which cannot be understood solely in 
relation to a positive vitalism.   One way of offering the origins of 
this different reading is the work on the event in the logic of sense 
which cannot be reduced  to some positive order of being, 'dark 
impenetrable being and the surface of pure fluidity the becoming of the 
event....' As Zizek described it making sense for once. The act of 
suicide bombing explodes the chain of being as understood in the west. 
This may be an obvious way of opening out the concept of 'contemporary 
war machines' whilst remaining within the mainstream of Deleuzian 
thought, but I would also remind you that the origins of my logic are 
also within D&Gs brief notes on terrorists and the anti-colonial 
struggles, the support for Italian 'Terrorists' (negri etc), the 
comments on Arafat (accidentally and shamefully 'deleted' from the 
recent book). But also and more importantly it is clear that the use of 
"suicide bombings" are not actions that simply destroy themselves in the 
process but become a profound statement on the enemy and what it offers. 
It should be said (i suppose) that it is not auto-nihalistic to die for 
a cause, even if the cause is one that is reactionary.

With regard to the second response 'becoming-imperceptible" - that makes 
perfect sense.  I missed the intended rhetorical inflection, a bad 
misreading on my part. For the moment ignoring the necessary globalized 
nature of the resistance to capital, I'd suggest that two areas of 
resistance that might be related to your response are the resistances 
developing within the 'control-society' itself and those that are more 
directly related to the resistances of the multitude to global capital. 
I suppose to counter this whilst remaining within the ever fluid present 
you might argue that you are less interested in the surface responses 
and more in the immanent and non-transcendental-human subject however it 
is the surface which shows the existance of the imperceptible.

The state/UAS re-statement does help my understanding of what you were 
saying,  (nicely put by the way). The 'militarization of  civilian 
spaces' connects rather well with the 'control society' phrase used 
earlier.  (Interesting that I read your note whilst also reading the 
'Evangelical Internationalisation' posts, with the implicit connection 
between the militarized democracies and the religious expansionism...).  
The dialectic of disappearance which has been sketched out is 
fascinating,  especially so given that the "order of disapperance"  is 
so fragile,  with people appearing and disappearing constantly,  before 
this was accepted as normal. Whereas in the fluid/liquid present the 
panic that disappearance creates grows all the time ( e.g young people 
going missing,  money disappearing , the disappearance of order as the 
technology fails and the absent terrorists)...

Perhaps democracy is a concept that has become so corrupted that it is 
past its sell-by-date and we should discard it, and work on a total or 
pure critique of democracy, (kantian and marxist references intended) ?

best wishes
steve

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