The State, the City and the Network; Beyond 7000 B.C.: Apparatus of Capture
by Ven Gist
The State as Apparatus of Capture
“It is the State that creates agriculture, animal raising, and metallurgy; it does so first on its own soil, then imposes them on the surrounding world. It is not the country that progressively creates the town but the town that creates the country. It is not the State that presupposes a mode of production; quite the opposite, it is the State that makes production a ‘mode.‘”
— A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze & Guattari
In D&G’s A Thousand Plateaus, the 13th plateau is 7000 BC, focusing in on the origins and various forms of the state. The archaic imperial state is shown to inevitably become an apparatus of capture, a social machine constituted by an invisibly large complex of networks (peoples, tools, animals, et al). The apparatus seems to form spontaneously to both create conditions for a surplus and to control it. The capture is then performed as such:
Territory becomes Land: The earth is deterritorialized through a monopolistic appropriation of land, abstracted to Rent.
Activity becomes Work: A monopolistic appropriation of labor that abstracts nicely into Profit.
Exchange becomes Money: With the issuance of currency a monopolistic appropriation of the means of comparison itself.
The capture materializes as a hyper-dance between two poles of sovereignty. The binding power of the magician-emperor and the law-making proclivities of the jurist-priest-king. The magician-emperor uses signs to bind, manifesting authority at will through presupposed forms that are by all means magical. The jurist-priest-king entrenches the binding with law, overcoding any previous codes of the non-state peoples, machining the state-form into smooth circulation, a legitimized magic-state.
From a presupposed state of nature, it is said that the power of violence was given to the state to avoid war between all, later becoming embodied as the War Machine, which necessarily exists in the exterior of either domain, interrelating with both sides of the poles of sovereignty as well as other states. Constituted by non-state peoples, the state appropriates the war machine, subordinating it as an institution of capture, thus subjugating war to political ends. However, the apparatus of capture can only capture what it creates, or has contributed to. All other resources, as well as associated resource generation capacities, are not entirely capturable. They existed before the capture, therefore can exist without. Because the state knows it cannot ever fully capture the war machine, an anxious equilibrium exists. This is also why states must engage in propaganda, to render dormant those energies that may not be captured.
The City and the State
“Thus the central power of the State is hierarchical, and constitutes a civil-service sector; the center is not in the middle (au milieu), but on top, because the only way it can recombine what it isolates is through subordination. Of course, there is a multiplicity of States no less than of towns, but it is not the same type of multiplicity: there are as many States as there are vertical cross sections in a dimension of depth, each separated from the others, whereas the town is inseparable from the horizontal network of towns. Each State is a global (not local) integration, a redundancy of resonance (not of frequency), an operation of the stratification of the territory (not of the polarization of the milieu).”
Much like the war machine, the City exists in the exterior of the state. States are said to behave vertically, the center and strata placed above the city, not in the middle. Where cities behave horizontally as part of a city-network. Their primary role is to act as a node, a circuit, distributing the production of the city along roads within and without the town. The state assumes control of the primary relation, the link between towns as well as country. Urban revolutions do not coincide with state revolutions.
Though not due to military might, the city has uncapturable properties as well – not least of which, the free will of every citizen in its territory. Though even if free will can’t be fully captured, its qualia may be rendered inanimate, immaterial, invisible; subjugated to a function of the state, just another ‘mode’ of its production. Cities may learn from primitive, or otherwise non-state peoples warded off the original binding. Though with the blinding velocity of the state’s deterritorialization, they’ve typically ended up captured anyway, abstracted to a part within the social machine that is the apparatus of capture.
“Primitive societies do not lack formations of power; they even have many of them. But what prevents the potential central points from crystallizing, from taking on consistency, are precisely those mechanisms that keep the formations of power both from resonating together in a higher point and from becoming polarized at a common point: the circles are not concentric, and the two segments require a third segment through which to communicate. This is the sense in which primitive societies have crossed neither the town-threshold nor the State-threshold.”
“We have already seen that capitalism proceeds by way of the State-form rather than the town-form; the basis for the fundamental mechanisms described by Marx (the colonial regime, the public debt, the modern tax system and indirect taxation, industrial protectionism, trade wars) may be laid in the towns, but the towns function as mechanisms of accumulation, acceleration, and concentration only to the extent that they are appropriated by States.”
“Recent events tend to confirm this principle from another angle. For example, NASA appeared ready to mobilize considerable capital for interplanetary exploration, as though capitalism were riding a vector taking it to the moon; but following the USSR, which conceived of extraterrestrial space as a belt that should circle the earth taken as the ‘object,’ the American government cut off funds for exploration and returned capital in this case to a more centered model. It is thus proper to State deterritorialization to moderate the superior deterritorialization of capital and to provide the latter with compensatory reterritorializations.”
State-forms and the rise of the Capital-State
Following the archaic state, its capture based on social subjection, came the city-state and its machinic enslavement. With the introduction of capitalism, these two forms become complimentary, and complexify into a third form, the modern nation-state, with capitalism serving as a global relation of production.
“But the relation is a reciprocal one: if it is the modern State that gives capitalism its models of realization, what is thus realized is an independent, worldwide axiomatic that is like a megalopolis, or ‘megamachine’ of which the States are parts, or neighborhoods.”
Capital exists as a global phenomenon, exterior to any local territories. Its domain is neither inside or outside, but everywhere. Its center continuously becomes more ordered, as its periphery is left outside. Capital has shown an aversion to the ways of the state, and the drive and means to overcode it. This affectuates as an innate force of deterritorialization globally, creating a strong drive to inhabit this role of capital-emperor. It’s well-known that independent, international capital forms lobbies to bend policy, the codes of the state, toward favorable conditions, both nationally and supranationally across states.
“Today we can depict an enormous, so-called stateless, monetary mass that circulates through foreign exchange and across borders, eluding control by the States, forming a multinational ecumenical organization, constituting a de facto supranational power untouched by governmental decisions. … capitalism marks a mutation in worldwide or ecumenical organizations, which now take on a consistency of their own: the worldwide axiomatic, instead of resulting from heterogeneous social formations and their relations, for the most part distributes these formations, determines their relations, while organizing an international division of labor.”
In today’s post-modern capitalist nation-state, the superior deterritorialization of capitalism, facilitated by its theology of numbers, has continued to shred social contracts, giving way to a new territory of abstracted capture, situated above even the intensely vertical hierarchy of the state. Is it inevitable that a new state-form emerges to ensure the stabilization of capital’s rising power; its own unity of composition as an oligarchal utopia? Has the state already been captured by itself, through its submission to capital? A capital-state ruled by a capital-emperor upon a levitating throne, reality suspended by the laws of capital. The state relegated to a part of the everwhere capital machine, the axiomatic.
Further, with the rapid increase in automation displacing the need to extract from human labor, both material through factories/robotics and intellectual through AI, the constant capital generation of automation relegates humans to data-producer parts in the machine. When the majority of flows are dictated by algorithms (driven by blind-profit), and any choice we thought we made pre-determined by the complex interactions of the engagement machine, how might we reach the parts that exist beyond the axiomatic?
The Inverted City and the Weapons of Becoming
By understanding how the apparatus of capture comes to be and operates, we gain perspective on how to ward off its advances. Following the advent of the distributed ledger, the City has some new spells to cast toward the warding off of capture. In both capital and social formation, functional decentralization can ward off the rise of the magician-emperor’s claims of the necessity for central power. Smart Contracts and legal engineers can ward off the capture of the jurist-king with their peer-to-peer resolution sets. War machines would still wander the exterior, but likely in an entirely different mode, with multiplicities now more free to expand, and the state not creating conflicts simply to stabilize its own relative unity of composition. Perhaps these tools could’ve staved off the current iteration, but are these tools enough with the archaic state having powered up into a capital-dripping machine of runaway control.
What of an inverted relation between town and country? A lot of the current cultural battles enlivened between town and country can be seen as abstractions of the dissatisfaction both feel toward the apparatus of capture. Like in the case of the freed war machine, a freedom of new relation may occur with less divisional overcoding from the state. What tools do we have to ward off the capture of Capital? What does this new relation look like, between city, state, and capital? Could the Inverted City locate a point of healthy codeterminism between City/State/(Capital)?
The Inverted City conjures a subterranean mode of becoming. One that does not confine its presuppositions to the catacombs, but instead shares its weapons of becoming to its edges, increasing the body’s capacity to adapt to the constant capture pressure of the state. It would be fruitless, and self-defeating, for the City to attempt capture as a mode; And if thou gaze long into an abyss, the abyss will also gaze into thee. The cybernetic relationship between city and state systems, ensures that any updates to the City will necessarily affect the future State-form (and of course always the other way as well). Instead a more mutualistic coexistence could emerge from a point where these pressures in balance, as opposed to either dominating as a form of capture. The base inversion of capture is freedom from capture. Wide angle degrees of freedom of flight, without undue exploitation. The immovable spatio-temporal structure of the state rendered merely a practical device at times. New worlds allowed to stretch out and feel into the smooth spaces between; a ‘distribution of heterogeneity in a free space’.
“Some people invoke the high technology of the world system of enslavement; but even, and especially, this machinic enslavement abounds in undecidable propositions and movements that, far from belonging to a domain of knowledge reserved for sworn specialists, provides so many weapons for the becoming of everybody/everything, becoming-radio, becoming-electronic, becoming-molecular.. ,… Every struggle is a function of all of these undecidable propositions and constructs revolutionary connections in opposition to the conjugations of the axiomatic.”