Common and Uncommon Fear

The securitized lives in fear of a combination of punishments and external threats. Fear of the ruling powers and their police is a factor but more important and effective is fear of dangerous others and unknown threats - a generalized social fear. In some ways those who are in prison have less to fear; rather, even though the threats they face from the carceral machine, the guards, and other inmates, are severe, they are more limited and knowable. Fear in the security regime is an empty signifier in which all kinds of terrible phantoms can appear.

--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration 

But let's not overlook the formal equivalence between fearful situations by favoring one totalization of concrete experiences over another. Whether you are in prison or outside of it, there is always an Outside to your experiences.

Here, however, Hardt and Negri interiorize the prisoner's Outside within the experiences of the securitized, sheltering the prisoner from an Outside not his own, debasing his fear to accentuate the fear of the securitized.

But does the securitized know true fear? Does he fix his gaze on the Outside with frozen fascination? Hardly. The threat of "terrible phantoms" appearing is an amenity interior to his experiences, an excuse for resuming normal activities which now include the seamless integration of surveillance. The threat of annihilation is a buried nightmare.

Hardt and Negri would turn that nightmare into reality. They would awaken the securitized to true fear, the fear of God, the fear which only a prisoner can know - not to appreciate what he has, but to prove that what he has can be destroyed.

Fear Factory

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live in a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

--H.P. Lovecraft, "The Call of Cthulhu"

The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.

--H.P. Lovecraft, "Supernatural Horror in Literature"

There is no contradiction here. Knowledge is the necessary precursor to fear of the unknown. Correlating all the world's contents awakens the mind to the horror of an absolute unknown, because it leaves the totality itself unaccounted for, an arbitrary emanation from the nameless abyss attesting to a demonic will. 

Debt Factory

The movement we are tracing from exploitation to indebtedness corresponds to the transformation of capitalist production from an order based on the hegemony of profit (that is, the accumulation of the average value of industrial exploitation) to one dominated by rent (that is, by the average value of the exploitation of social development) and thus by the accumulation of the value socially produced in an increasingly abstract form. Production thus relies, in this passage, increasingly on socialized, not individual, figures of work, that is, on workers who immediately cooperate together prior to the discipline and control of the capitalist.

--Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Declaration

Sometimes is pays (!) not to be a team player.

The Gates of Heaven Are Closing

When a rich person looks down on a poor person and denounces him as the source of his own poverty, he's not wrong, he's just following a different protocol for inscribing subjectivity. The person - the subject - is an assemblage of multiple forces; the individual is only its avatar. But it would be a mistake to think of those forces as purely social; the assemblage is not a class (the rich, the poor). It's less human, more elemental, more demonic. There are occult forces at play in every gesture, all too easily dismissed under the rubric of chance or coincidence.

A subjective act can be any event whatsoever, understood as an irruption of surplus reality into the world. In this sense, winning the lottery is a choice as surely as any kind of wage labor: the numbers fall into place as uncannily as the neurological impulses directing muscular contractions.

All of this adds a new spin to Matthew 19:24: "Again I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God." A rich person, in so far as he is alleged to create his own wealth, is an inflated subject encompassing not only the individual - the avatar - but also the entire legacy of conditions enabling his prosperity, up to and including other individuals from generations past, and all of their numerous bequests. He is a vast, pulsating mob bottle-necked at the gates of heaven.

The paradoxical flip side of this view is that when a poor person, as an individual, blames society for his own misfortune, he unwittingly accepts his own denunciation. He chooses to be poor by relinquishing himself to the subjectivity of his disabling conditions, and likewise becomes too unwieldy to pass through the gates.

Rich or poor, it is better to be so immeasurably.