Imperial Velocities & Counter-​Revolution

Just when the state velo­cit­ies of the Gad­dafi régime were out­pa­cing, out­man­euv­er­ing, and rout­ing the Libyan insur­gency, they were hit hard and slowed down by the much faster and more power­ful air velo­cit­ies of the imper­ial mil­it­ary machine. The waves of jets tak­ing off from European bases and unleash­ing viol­ence on a sov­er­eign nation across the Medi­ter­ranean mark a turn­ing point in the insur­rec­tions of North Africa and the Middle-​East: their trans­form­a­tion into revolu­tions with plan­et­ary reper­cus­sions that demand the dir­ect engage­ment of imper­ial fight­ing forces. The high-​speed weapons from North Amer­ica and Europe hit­ting North Africa are dra­mat­ic­ally expand­ing the spa­tial tra­ject­or­ies of the viol­ence involved in this upheaval. It is now clearer than ever that this mess is not (never was) an Arab affair. The geo­graph­ical elong­a­tion of the mil­it­ary theatre of these insur­rec­tions means that we are wit­ness­ing the start of the imper­ial counter-​revolution.

These revolu­tions caught the regional and global elites off guard and cre­ated a power­ful trans­form­a­tion in the affect­ive dis­tri­bu­tion of fear in myriad geo­graph­ies. In Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, or Bahrain pro­test­ers con­front­ing state viol­ence on the street emphas­ized over and over again that they were not afraid any­more. These expans­ive revolu­tion­ary res­on­ances, in turn, struck fear in the regional and global elites. This alarm is now the affect­ive fuel of an expans­ive counter-​revolution that seeks to re-​inscribe fear in now-​restive, emboldened mul­ti­tudes. North Africa and the Middle-​East are now tra­versed by con­tra­dict­ory affective-​political forces fight­ing for suprem­acy in ter­rains defined by insur­gent, state, and imper­ial pat­terns of speed.

Counter-​revolutions also expand in waves fol­low­ing bod­ily res­on­ances. And like revolu­tion­ary waves, they also need to cross a threshold to gain momentum, to stop being atom­ized local events and become spa­tially expans­ive forces. While counter-​revolutionary meas­ures star­ted with the first riots in Tunisia, this regional threshold was Gaddafi’s swift crack­down of the Libyan insur­rec­tion. His régime’s resolve to phys­ic­ally wipe out dis­sent in the streets res­on­ated among other equally threatened elites. It reminded them that revolu­tions can, indeed, be stopped and defeated. Counter-​revolutionary res­on­ances are, by defin­i­tion, of a fear­ful and reac­tion­ary kind, which seek to dis­perse res­on­ant mul­ti­tudes through viol­ent stri­ations and frag­ment­a­tions. While revolu­tions are neg­at­iv­ity (rup­ture of the real) as well as affirm­a­tion (the cre­ation of some­thing new), counter-​revolutions are pure neg­a­tion and are guided by one goal: the destruc­tion or con­tain­ment of insur­rec­tional neg­at­iv­ity (Ben­jamin Noys would prob­ably see this anti-​revolutionary neg­a­tion as part of the destruct­ive neg­at­iv­ity of cap­ital. But I think I prefer to dis­tin­guish, as Diana Coole does, between neg­a­tion as react­ive force/​Hegelian abstrac­tion and neg­at­iv­ity as crit­ical dis­in­teg­ra­tion of the pos­it­iv­ity of the real– a per­spect­ive that in fact agrees with Noys’ call to res­cue neg­at­iv­ity as part of critical-​radical polit­ical ruptures).

The begin­ning of the bomb­ing cam­paign now led by NATO marks a remark­able tor­sion in this counter-​revolutionary wave, in which loc­al­ized oper­a­tions to neut­ral­ize revolu­tion­ary upheaval have now been fol­ded upon an imper­ial man­date. And the para­dox is not­able. In Libya, the imper­ial counter-​revolution is present­ing itself as pro­tect­ive of an insur­gent pop­u­la­tion and is unleash­ing its fire­power on the forces that kicked off the counter-​revolutionary wave. But the para­dox, while real, fades upon closer exam­in­a­tion. The imper­ial counter-​revolution in Libya aims to crush the Gad­dafi counter-​revolution not to sal­vage the revolu­tion but to neut­ral­ize it more effect­ively and claim a moral high-​ground in the global pro­pa­ganda machine. It is an attempt to assert imper­ial sov­er­eignty in spaces torn apart by revolu­tions; an attempt to make sure that any post-​Gaddafi gov­ern­ment does not dare chal­lenge the imper­ial order of things.

Already inspired by the Libyan counter-​revolution, the rul­ing elites in Bahrain and Yemen were fur­ther emboldened by this mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion by their global pat­rons and weapons-​suppliers. Well-​aware that Obama’s calls for the respect of human rights are hol­low and do not apply to loyal US cli­ents, they joined this wave by unleash­ing mas­sacres on the streets at the exact moment when the first bar­rages of US, French, and Brit­ish mis­siles and bombs were hit­ting Libyan soil. That Saudi Ara­bia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emir­ates sent troops to con­trib­ute to the repres­sion of dis­sent in Bahrain also sig­nal that we are indeed wit­ness­ing a regional counter-​revolutionary wave involving inter­na­tional forms of cooper­a­tion. Tunisia and Egypt seem to be in a more lim­inal situ­ation, in which revolu­tion­ary res­on­ances on the streets are still strong enough to put some lim­its on cur­rent state attempts to con­tain them. Else­where in the region, this counter-​revolutionary con­ver­gence and its sub­or­din­a­tion to an imper­ial man­date was embod­ied by the United Arab Emir­ates and Qatar: send­ing mil­it­ary forces to Bahrain to help crush the revolu­tion and to Libya to help enforce the no-​fly zone. This wave may have dif­fer­ent and con­vo­luted local mater­i­al­iz­a­tions, but its pat­terns point in the same dir­ec­tion: res­tor­a­tion of imper­ial sovereignty.

My col­league Max Forte at Zero Anthro­po­logy has argued that the imper­ial mil­it­ary inter­ven­tion against Gad­dafi means that the Libyan Revolu­tion is now dead. I can­not really say that is the case, given the volat­il­ity and unpre­dict­ab­il­ity of everything we have seen so far in the region. But the revolu­tion is cer­tainly very ser­i­ously com­prom­ised, for the ideologically-​vague lead­ers of the insur­gency are now will­ing cli­ents of global powers and, as sev­eral reports indic­ate, are now receiv­ing assist­ance from CIA oper­at­ives on the ground as well as praise from the US neo-​cons.

But what interests me here is the sali­ence of imper­ial velo­cit­ies in the spa­tial form of the counter-​revolution. The same way that revolu­tions are move­ment and accel­er­a­tion (as Paul Vir­ilio has argued), counter-​revolutions are machines of de-​acceleration: they try to slow down and halt revolu­tion­ary fer­vors. These machines of de-​acceleration work at dif­fer­ent spa­tial scales: the deploy­ment of high-​speed weapons sys­tems that can out­pace enemy vec­tors, the pro­duc­tion of mil­it­ar­ized stri­ations in space to pre­vent the expan­sion of revolu­tion­ary unrest, and the cre­ation of stri­ations on the inter­net and in net­works of instant com­mu­nic­a­tion that aim to dis­sip­ate insur­gent affects. Imper­ial act­ors are act­ively work­ing on all these fronts.

The most appar­ent strategy of de-​acceleration is the dis­play of imper­ial mil­it­ary velo­cit­ies. The bomb­ing of Libya by jets and mis­siles is both an act of viol­ence set to slow-​down the Gad­dafi mil­it­ary machine and a global spec­tacle: a reminder that imper­ial speed and might can rap­idly dis­rupt the state velo­cit­ies of indi­vidual nation-​states. These velo­cit­ies, lim­ited to the smooth space of the skies, can­not defeat on their own well-​entrenched forces on the ground. As is clear after two weeks, the air strikes may not be enough to lead a dis­or­gan­ized insur­gency to vic­tory. But they have changed the tem­por­al­ity and spa­tial shape of the con­flict and cre­ated a marked de-​acceleration of revolu­tion­ary and counter-​revolutionary speeds on the deserts of North Libya.

And in hav­ing a trans-​continental reach that enables them to strike any­where on the planet (Libya, Iraq, Afgh­anistan, Pakistan), these speeds also affirm that the whole globe is under imper­ial sov­er­eignty: that there is no out­side of Empire, as Hardt and Negri have argued. But Derek Gregory would add that these imper­ial inter­ven­tions also pro­duce a new out­side: places of bar­bar­ism in need to be dis­cip­lined by civil­iz­ing viol­ence, the same way that the drone attacks in Afgh­anistan and Pakistan cre­ate those geo­graph­ies as opaque, bar­baric enclaves out­side of the civ­il­ized global order. This spa­tial fold­ing pro­duces spaces of excep­tion: spaces in which bod­ies become what Agam­ben called hom­ines sacri: bod­ies that can be killed with impun­ity by imper­ial forces. And to add a spa­tial dimen­sion rel­at­ively absent in Agamben’s ana­lysis of the state of excep­tion, these bod­ies can be thus killed because they are in a space of indis­tinc­tion, out­side and inside of Empire at the same time.

The clash of imper­ial, state, and insur­gent velo­cit­ies now tak­ing place in Libya also help us under­stand that the power of the lat­ter, which I examined in The Speed of Revolu­tion­ary Res­on­ance, depends on the spa­tial ter­rain in which they oper­ate. When the bomb­ing cam­paign began, the Libyan insur­gency was about to be crushed by rap­idly advan­cing armored columns encroach­ing on Benghazi. The rebels had been routed partly because they had con­fron­ted an arboreal, cent­ral­ized, and faster mil­it­ary machine in the open: in the smooth space of the desert. In that wide-​open, flat ter­rain with few places to hide they were easy tar­gets of tanks, artil­lery, rock­ets, and par­tic­u­larly jets.

There is a his­tor­ical para­dox in this weak­ness of a non-​state, mobile insur­gency in the smooth space of a desert. For many cen­tur­ies, smooth spaces such as deserts, prair­ies, and steppes were the most favor­able ter­rain for what Deleuze and Guat­tari called the nomadic war machine: the mobile mil­it­ary assemblages that his­tor­ic­ally chal­lenged state power in cent­ral Asia and parts of South and North Amer­ica. At that time, the max­imum speed of the nomadic war machine was the same of state-​run cav­al­ries: that of the horse. This par­ity in speed often allowed non-​state cav­al­ries to out­pace and out­man­euver reg­u­lar troops through rhizomic pat­terns of dis­per­sion, multi-​polarity, and swarm­ing. With the hege­mony of the state in the con­trol of high-​speed weapons and sys­tems of com­mu­nic­a­tion since the late 1800s, this old sali­ence of rhizomic speeds to con­front the state in smooth space has been shattered. Smooth spaces such as flat deserts are now ter­rains in which rhizomic insur­gences can be eas­ily out­paced and des­troyed by state mil­it­ar­ies. Yet it is also the space in which state velo­cit­ies are most vul­ner­able to imper­ial air power, as the Libyan tanks des­troyed on desert roads by French, Brit­ish, and US jets clearly illustrate.

It is not sur­pris­ing the only place where the Libyan insur­gents put up a more effect­ive fight was in their defense of the city of Mis­urata in the west, where they have man­aged to with­stand relent­less waves of attacks due to their dis­per­sion in a dense, stri­ated urban fab­ric. Mod­ern armed insur­gen­cies only stand a chance against reg­u­lar armies in stri­ated space: jungles, moun­tains, cit­ies, or rugged ter­rains. A major reason why the rhizomic velo­cit­ies cre­ated by the mul­ti­tude on the streets of Egypt out­man­euvered the state was that they took place in intric­ate urban ter­rains. This stri­ation allowed for mul­tiple pat­terns of dis­persal and multi-​polarity in response to police repres­sion that enhanced the multitude’s rhizomic speed. This is why reg­u­lar and imper­ial mil­it­ar­ies dis­like and fear counter-​insurgency oper­a­tions in opaque, rugged spaces. And this is why (as Eyal Weiz­man has ana­lyzed) the Israeli Army has drawn on Deleuze and Guattari’s ideas about smooth and stri­ated space to smooth out urban space in mil­it­ary oper­a­tions in Palestine, by open­ing large holes in walls and build­ings in their attempts to out­man­euver and dis­or­i­ent mobile clusters of Palestinian fighters.

Yet the weak­ness of the Libyan insur­gency is not reduced to the ter­rain. Most observ­ers on the ground agree that this is an enthu­si­astic but inex­per­i­enced, poorly armed and trained force, which reminds us that res­on­ant bod­ies alone are never enough to topple the state. His­tory is full of examples of extraordin­ary revolu­tion­ary upheavals that were des­troyed. Old ques­tions of organ­iz­a­tion, train­ing, and coordin­a­tion are decis­ive in the trans­form­a­tion of massive con­glom­er­ates of res­on­ant bod­ies into an affect­ive polit­ical force. But another weak­ness of the Libyan insur­gency is that it does not seem to have exploited its rhizomic form. By and large, its main actions seem to be reduced to cara­vans of pick-​up trucks with moun­ted machi­ne­guns and rocket launch­ers mov­ing up and down the main road along the coast of the Medi­ter­ranean, both char­ging ahead and retreat­ing at high-​speed. Theirs has been a mobil­ity and speed fixed in the nar­row space of a single road: vis­ible and pre­dict­able. But the power of insur­gent rhizomic velo­cit­ies, as the case of Egypt shows, has always been multi-​polarity, spa­tial sat­ur­a­tion, dis­per­sion, opa­city, and unpre­dict­ab­il­ity. In fact, it is the Gad­dafi régime that seems to be rap­idly adapt­ing to the aer­ial power of imper­ial velo­cit­ies by incor­por­at­ing some of the rhizomic moves that have defined seasoned guer­ril­las. The Inde­pend­ent, for instance, repor­ted the recent use of “guer­rilla tech­niques” by small pro-​Gaddafi units that ambushed and des­troyed vehicles of revolu­tion­ary fight­ers and promptly disappeared.

Else­where in the region, the counter-​revolutionary de-​acceleration is appar­ent in the cre­ation by the state of mul­tiple spa­tial stri­ations that aim to slow down the spread of unrest. An emblem­atic case is Bahrain, where the recent crack­down has included set­ting up myriad mil­it­ary check­points and the sat­ur­a­tion of the rel­at­ively small national space with mil­it­ary forces. The mil­it­ar­ized stri­ation of roads has long been favored by states fight­ing insur­gen­cies (from El Sal­vador to Iraq) and is ulti­mately a strategy of de-​acceleration and con­trol over move­ment. An infam­ous example of the slow­ness these check­points cre­ate is the maze of Israeli check­points in the West Bank, examined by Derek Gregory and Eyal Weiz­man. And in Bahrain and else­where, this attempt to restrain, slow down, and con­trol the move­ment of bod­ies is fur­ther enforced by massive arrests, curfews, and bans on demonstrations.

The counter-​revolution is also fought on the inter­net: a space that is indeed, as Julian Assange recently put it, “the greatest spy­ing machine ever cre­ated.” This global machine exposes bil­lions of the devices to soph­ist­ic­ated tech­no­lo­gies of state-​corporate sur­veil­lance scan­ning the web, like the eye of the pan­op­ticum, for signs of sus­pi­cious activ­ity (a real­ity cap­tured by a good num­ber of Hol­ly­wood movies). In the Middle-​East, Face­book has been a double-​edge sword that has allowed for rapid coordin­a­tion among act­iv­ists but also revealed to the state the iden­tity of act­iv­ists, lead­ing to myriad arrests from Egypt to Bahrain. Secondly, as ana­lyzed by Jill­ian York, fil­ter­ing tech­no­logy (Web­sense, Smart­Fil­ter, Net­sweeper, Cisco, man­u­fac­tured by cor­por­a­tions in the United States and Canada) is used by mul­tiple states in the Middle-​East to block-​off access to par­tic­u­lar sites, erod­ing the rhizomic speed allowed by the inter­net through the cre­ation of power­ful stri­ations ori­gin­at­ing from arboreal nodes. And the counter-​revolution has also involved using these nodes to inund­ate the rhizomic chan­nels of the inter­net with pro­pa­ganda: from dis­sem­in­at­ing mes­sages on Face­book (as the Mubarak régime did), to devel­op­ing soft­ware that allows a single per­son to cre­ate mul­tiple fake iden­tit­ies and post pro-​US com­ments on dis­cus­sion boards (as revealed by The Guard­ian), to the recent rise of sus­pi­cious tweets in Eng­lish with false inform­a­tion seem­ingly com­ing from Libya (ana­lyzed by Max Forte).

Max Forte rightly observed in a com­ment on this blog that while North Africa and the Middle-​have been engulfed since Janu­ary in high-​speed insur­rec­tions, many parts of the world are still defined by “the still­nesses of every­day life, the non-​moving grain of local cir­cum­stances.” And indeed, mul­tiple stri­ations and local polit­ical cir­cum­stances cre­ate very diverse pat­terns of polit­ical speed in dif­fer­ent parts of the world. The counter-​revolutions now gain­ing momentum in the region aim to cre­ate a sim­ilar still­ness, to roll-​back the insur­rec­tions to the days when polit­ical slow­ness dom­in­ated the pub­lic spaces of Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, or Syria. But polit­ical and affect­ive ter­rains have shif­ted too dra­mat­ic­ally to allow for a uni­lin­ear res­tor­a­tion. It was pre­cisely the clos­ure of the streets as a space of protest by the state, Armando Sal­vatore recently observed, that pushed many Egyp­tian act­iv­ists to cre­ate affect­ive con­nectiv­it­ies on the inter­net that even­tu­ally allowed them, years later, to reclaim the streets and wrest them from state control.

A par­tic­u­larly potent moment of the counter-​revolution in Bahrain was the destruc­tion by the state of the Pearl Monu­ment, the focus of huge demon­stra­tions against the régime and the main node of revolu­tion­ary res­on­ance in the nation. “We did it to remove a bad memory,” said the For­eign Min­is­ter of Bahrain, can­didly reveal­ing the fear­ful affects that inform their counter-​revolution. The bad memory that the Bahrain elites tried to con­jure away by tear­ing the monu­ment down is the power of that place to attract and inspire res­on­ant mul­ti­tudes. It is also the bad memory of Tahrir Square, the spa­tial node of the Egyp­tian Revolu­tion that haunts these elites like a night­mare. Yet in turn­ing the monu­ment into ruins, they have now pro­duced a power­ful absence, a ghost: a neg­at­iv­ity that has charged the square with even more affect­ive and polit­ical power. A sim­ilar neg­at­iv­ity has haunted Tianan­men Square in Beijing since the 1989 mas­sacres, which requires that the Chinese régime keep a tight secur­ity appar­atus on the square around the clock. In his book The Funeral Casino, Alan Klima asked how long must the Chinese police occupy Tianan­men Square to con­tinue sup­press­ing com­mem­or­a­tions and demon­stra­tions. “Forever,” he answered. And he added, “No one can con­trol forever.” Con­tin­gency and unpre­dict­ab­il­ity are part of the nature of polit­ics. But it is very likely that the day mul­ti­tudes force the regimes in China and Bahrain to loosen their grip on the streets, Tianan­men Square and Pearl Square will be both reborn again as nodes of polit­ical resonance.

Gaston Gor­dillo

Tags: Revolution

This entry was posted on 14 April 2011 at 6:00 am and is filed under Political Philosophy, Radical Politics. Published under Creative Commons (CC) Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License: You are welcome to share and remix this content for non-commercial purposes. Kindly acknowledge and hyperlink the source.