Parallax

ISSN: 1353-4645 (Print) 1460-700X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/tpar20

The State, Concept not Object: Abstraction,

Empire, Cinema

Andrew Culp

To cite this article: Andrew Culp (2015) The State, Concept not Object: Abstraction, Empire,
Cinema, Parallax, 21:4, 429-447, DOI: 10.1080/13534645.2015.1086525

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Published online: 01 Nov 2015.

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 parallax, 2015, Vol. 21, No. 4, 429–447, Philosophy without an Object
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13534645.2015.1086525

The State, Concept not Object: Abstraction, Empire, Cinema

Andrew Culp

Nagisa Ōshima’s 1968 film Death by Hanging begins with the execution of an
ethnic Korean man, R.1 Miraculously, the hanging does not kill him; in fact,
the only effect of the hanging is that it erases his memory. Taken by
surprise, the officials argue about how to proceed. After frantic deliberation,
they decide that an execution is only just if a person realizes the guilt for
which they are being punished. They do not let R go, but rather endeavour
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to make him admit his guilt for a crime that he has no memory of commit-
ting. In one such attempt the officials simulate his crimes which only leads to
an absurd comedy of errors that exposes the racist, violent dimension of
nationalist law and history. R finally admits to the crimes in principle and in
practice, but only to protest the whole process. ‘Is it wrong to kill?’ R asks.
‘Yes’ they respond. ‘Then killing me is wrong, isn’t it?’ R replies. The official
rejoinder is a predictable one: ‘Don’t say such things! We’re legal execution-
ers! It’s the nation that does not permit you to live’. ‘I don’t accept that’ R
responds, and then summarizes the central question of the film, ‘What is a
nation? Show me one!’ (Figure 1), because ‘I don’t want to be killed by an
abstraction’ (Figure 2).2

R’s objection raises a series of questions: Does the state exist as anything but
an illusion? Can the existence of the state be perceived – empirically, philo-
sophically or otherwise? Is there a form of power unique to the state? And if
so, who or what is responsible for the actions done in the name of the state?

Governmentalizing the State

In his genealogical study of power, Michel Foucault echoes R’s frustrations.

Intellectually dissatisfied by the way in which ‘the representation of power
has remained under the spell of monarchy’, he claims that long after the rise
of the Republic ‘we still have not cut off the head of the king’.3 Foucault
chooses two targets for his criticism: Marxism and anarchism. The first of
which he charges with producing a functionalist account of the state – as an
epiphenomenal effect of a mode of production – while the second he accuses
of treating the state as a ‘cold monster’ to be universally feared.4 As such, he
suggests that political analysis should minimize the importance of the state.
For Foucault, ‘the state is only a composite reality and a mythicized abstrac-
tion whose importance is much less than we think. What is important for
our modernity, that is to say, for our present, is not the state’s takeover

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429
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FIGURE 1

Nagisa Ōshima, Death by Hanging, 1968. Film. Ó Criterion Collection.

FIGURE 2

Nagisa Ōshima, Death by Hanging, 1968. Film. Ó Criterion Collection.

[éstatisation] of society, so much as what I would call the “governmentaliza-

tion” of the state’.5

The Anglo-American social sciences have taken up Foucault’s challenge in

earnest. Interestingly, their primary inspiration comes from a single lecture
on governmentality excerpted from a much longer lecture series – entitled
Security, Territory, Population – in which Foucault completed a genealogy of
liberal rule.6 Nevertheless, this engagement has produced a highly original
methodology for Foucauldian state theory. This innovation comes from
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430
 taking seriously Foucault’s enjoinment to study ‘the governmentalization of
the state’. The resulting field of study, Governmentality Studies, is exemplary
in not analyzing the state as such. Instead, it studies ‘forms of power without
a centre, or rather with multiple centres, power that was productive of
meanings, of interventions, of entities, of processes, of objects, of written
traces and of lives’.7 The empirical bent of Governmentality Studies
effectively brackets the idea of the state altogether in contending that, to the
extent that the state exists as an object of investigation,8 it exists only in
‘governmental practices’9 and ‘state effects’.10 As Bob Jessop notes, ‘to study
governmentality in its generic sense is to study the historical constitution of
different state forms in and through changing practices of government
without assuming that the state has a universal or general essence’.11 In
sum, Governmentality Studies separates the concept of the state from the
material traces left as a result of acting on its behalf. Only these material
traces, it contends, provide the proper material for scholarly inquiry.
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The recent publication of Foucault’s three-part state genealogy provides

ample material to bolster this resistance to abstraction. In Birth of Biopolitics,
for instance, Foucault critiques ‘state phobia’ on both political and method-
ological grounds.12 In the political argument, he argues that state phobia
laid the groundwork for neo-liberalism. In the methodological argument,
Foucault argues that the ‘interchangeability of analyses’ that results from
state phobia contributes to a ‘loss of specificity’ that allows the opponents of
the state to evade possible empirical and historical challenges and thus ‘avoid
paying the price of reality and actuality’.13 Demonstrating the significance of
‘paying the price’ and proving Foucault’s political argument, Governmental-
ity Studies scholars have produced considerable scholarship that grants
neoliberalism a precise specificity. As a consequence, they have shown how
neoliberalism employs a discourse of contemporary liberalism, whereby the
state ‘governs best by governing least’, whilst simultaneously expanding the
scope and depth of governance through new means of control.14 Scholars of
Governmentality Studies have documented neoliberal expanded governance
in ways that reveal the hidden fist at work behind the invisible hand in pri-
vatized risk-management,15 the social engineering of community empower-
ment initiatives,16 and the governmental influence over market forces
exerted through entrepreneurship initiatives.17

Whilst Governmentality Studies has provided a wealth of scholarship on the

‘governmentalitization of the state’, has it come any closer than Marxism and
anarchism to cutting off the head of the king? A forced choice between these
approaches may not be needed; in the thirty years since Foucault’s critique,
numerous scholars have squared Foucault with Marxist and anarchist
thought (already in the ‘70s and ‘80s Foucault’s work was incorporated into
structuralist Marxism and Italian autonomist Marxism and more recently
Foucault’s theory of power has inspired the creation of post-anarchism).18 In
choosing to heed Foucault’s advice, this scholarship provides an exemplary
critique of actually existing neoliberalism. However, as that work is already

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 robust, I believe it is time for a renewed defence of the two things which
Foucault criticized: state phobia and the false.

Resistance to the Present

My defence of state phobia is political. What Governmentality Studies lacks is

resistance to the present. As Karl Mannheim has convincingly argued, right-
wing and left-wing state phobias are structurally distinct. Classical anarchism,
for instance, grows out of the Anabaptist chiliastic imagination whereby the
existing order is ‘one undifferentiated whole’ that is all ‘evil itself’ and must
be completely overturned.19 Governmentality Studies suffers from the oppo-
site problem: it paints the present as such a complexly differentiated whole
that it refuses to think the outside. As a result, it analyzes power only accord-
ing to its own self-professed aims. Absent something like Derridian decon-
struction or Adornian immanent critique, these studies are not political but
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descriptive.20 Indeed, leading governmentality scholars admit this commit-

ment to description, saying that their studies ‘are not hardwired to any polit-
ical perspective’ and ‘are compatible with other methods’.21 Such a refusal to
think outside the current social order empties scholarship of its utopian
dimension – and utopia is the politics of the outside. Utopia is what emerges
from the ‘relative sense’ of that ‘which seems to be unrealizable only from
the point of view of a given social order that is already in existence’.22 It is
with the same distinction – object and concept – that Governmentality Stud-
ies separates reality from utopia. Mannheim’s concept of utopia does not
split this way. For him, utopia combines reality and unreality; utopia is at
once the reality of current challenges to the existing order and the currently
unrealizable futures projected by those challenges into the present. Samuel
Butler captures this double character by naming his imagined utopia
Erewhon, which is simultaneously no-where and now-here.23 Consequently,
utopia is actually absent in space but virtually present in time. From the
perspective of utopia, the difference between right-wing and left-wing state
phobia is clear: one seeks the restoration of lost authority, while the other
pursues the revolutionary triumph of a classless society. It is unclear where
Governmentality Studies stands between restoration and revolution.

My defence of the false is also methodological. Methodologically, I disagree

with those scholars within Governmentality Studies who argue for a shallow
definition of the state, which they justify through ‘brute’ empiricism. For
these scholars, governmentality is strictly ‘an empirical mapping of govern-
mental rationalities and techniques’ which ‘turn[s] away from grand theory,
the state, globalization, reflexive individualization, and the like’.24 The type
of empiricism they invoke is associated with social scientific research methods
that use sample surveys, number crunching and the statistical subject.
Despite their criticisms of governmental techniques which utilize similar
methods, Governmentality Studies participates in a larger disciplinary project
within sociology that relies on a particular configuration of realism, empiri-
cism and scientificity.25 This social scientific approach has strong allies within
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432
 certain strands of contemporary philosophical realism.26 Echoing the
concerns of Ōshima’s character R and Governmentality Studies, these ‘object-
oriented’ thinkers are similarly sceptical of abstractions.27 Objects, they hold,
are slices of the real world that gives rise to qualities, relations, events, and
powers that are independent of humans’ ability to perceive them.28 A com-
mon move is modelled by Manuel DeLanda, who suggests that concepts such
as ‘the state’ or ‘the market’ are mere reified expressions of concrete entities,
as in ‘market-places or bazaars’ located in ‘a physical locale such as a small
town or a countryside’.29 The object-oriented approach also shares Govern-
mentality Studies’ penchant for reality, turning to ontology to explain the
origin of thought. The associated ‘political ontology’, such as that outlined by
Jane Bennett and William Connolly, proposes a project of re-enchantment
with the matter and things already of this world.30

Many of these writers draw upon the ‘empiricism’ of a philosopher whose

thought will inform my own, alternative, approach: Gilles Deleuze. The exact
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status of this empiricism is, however, a strong point of contention within the
secondary literature. By his own definition, Deleuze uses a reworked version
of philosophical empiricism whereby ‘empiricism is a philosophy of the imagi-
nation and not a philosophy of the senses’.31 Demonstrating the importance
of the imagination, he readily draws upon the literary works of Anglo-
American writers to demonstrate its principles.32 In his strictly philosophical
work, it appears as the paradoxical formulation of a ‘transcendental empiri-
cism’ as a philosophical alternative to Kant’s transcendental idealism, in which
the transcendental field is separated from its empirical givenness to bypass
the personal, individuated world of the subject.33 In the recent secondary
literature, many writers have departed from the object-orientated camp by
following Deleuze’s claim that this empiricism ‘treats the concept as object of
an encounter’.34 They clarify that Deleuze’s empiricism is strictly concerned
with the real conditions of thought and thus fundamentally uninterested in
an empirical tracking of the habits of thought expressed in lived experience
[vécu].35 Taking seriously Deleuze’s separation of the transcendental from the
empirical, these thinkers focus on concepts and not ethnography or personal
reflection (‘for the data of empirical lived experience doesn’t inform thought
about what it can do’).36 Shifting the focus to concepts is part of their wider
move to claim that ‘there is no “ontology of Deleuze”’.37 They appeal to
Deleuze and Guattari’s suggestion in the introduction of A Thousand Plateaus
to ‘overthrow ontology’ by substituting what ‘is’ for Hume’s ongoing series of
interacting exterior relations ‘and… and… and…’.38 The philosophical conse-
quence of the concept-based approach is an engagement with the outside as a
relative exteriority beyond sensory givens.39 Interestingly, this is also how
Foucault defines the experience of thought.40

There are specific political stakes for the disagreement over objects and con-
cepts. Governmentality Studies, Object-Oriented Ontology, and political
ontology suffer from the self-imposed limitation of the imagination invoked
by Foucault: the ‘price of reality’. Concepts do not always pay such a price;
utopia does not exist as such, as discussed above, but is necessary for politics
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433
 – conservative, revolutionary, and otherwise. The historical consequence of
this limitation is specific, as state phobia is an anticipation-prevention mecha-
nism that stateless peoples have used to anticipate the real potentials of an
emergent state and prevent its arrival.41 Key here is that which is antici-
pated. Deleuze and Guattari do not theorize the state as arriving through a
perverse internal transformation of forces, but they instead follow Nietzsche’s
claim that the state is brought from the outside by conquering beasts.42 For
prevention to be possible, empiricism must provide more than the experi-
ence of an object and its potential transformations, it somehow must antici-
pate threats from the outside that have not yet materialized. Deleuze
provides one such ‘image with two sides’ in the duality of the ‘actual and vir-
tual’.43 I argue that the project of amending the study of governmentality to
include abstractions of the outside requires revising its methodology to focus
on philosophical concepts and not just objects.
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The State as Virtual Concept

Contrary to Foucault’s shallow governmentalized definition of the state,

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari treat the state as a ‘virtual concept’. For
them, the state is neither an ideological effect nor solely repressive – thus
avoiding the ‘inexact’ terms of Foucault’s brief argument from the classic
governmentality lecture.44 Through a broader typological survey of the State
in the two volumes of Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Deleuze and Guattari show
that the state is evinced in more than its institutions. For them, the state is
found in a whole cultural history of sovereignty that constitutes a dominant
strand in the philosophical anthropology of becoming.45 The state, Deleuze
and Guattari hold, is an apparatus of capture that is both actualized in its
state-effects, as studied by Foucault, as well as a virtual abstraction of power.
The ontology of the state is not an empirical object of study, as studies of
governmentality would have it, but a philosophical concept. I am not the
first to suggest this – Mitchell Dean suggests the importance of the Deleuzian
concept in the new introduction to the second edition of Governmentality, yet
he calls for empirical-scientific concepts and not philosophical ones.46 Dean’s
insistence exemplifies the political-methodological separation of object from
concept.

What Governmentalty Studies’ object-based approach delimits is philosophy.

Critical here is that philosophy is itself a special area of inquiry; it ‘has its
own raw material that allows it to enter into more fundamental external rela-
tions with these other disciplines’.47 An exclusive focus on verifiable objects
results in an inability to think what is unique to philosophy, as it cannot be
studied ‘through structure, or linguistics or psychoanalysis, through science
or even through history’.48 For that reason, the philosophical concept of the
state remains beyond the purview of Governmentality Studies. The effect of
such a deficit is demonstrated in Death by Hanging. The state officials are
unable to cure R’s amnesia by drawing on the routine tools of evidence-
based education. They jog his memory through crude recreations of the
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434
 crime, which they follow up with a crude re-enactment of his family environ-
ment. Each state representation is utterly insufficient, as they lack the ability
to define basic terms, such as the ‘carnal desire’ that makes rape different
from sex, and are unable to explain what makes the Japanese different from
Koreans. It is only in the concept of the state, which arrives in a flash of light
from the outside, that R finally understands the state and its power.

Defining the state as a virtual concept requires an explanation of the virtual

in Deleuze’s work. Deleuze does not mean simulated, as in ‘virtual reality’.
In fact, ‘the virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual’.49 The virtual
and the actual together make up two mutually-exclusive sides of the real.50
The actual is a given state of affairs that is populated by bodies. The virtual
is a ‘pure past’ of incorporeal events and singularities that have never been
present, which have ‘the capacity to bring about x, without (in being actual-
ized) ever coming to coincide or identify itself with x, or to be depleted and
exhausted in x’ while ‘without being or resembling an actual x’.51 In this
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sense, the virtual includes all potential worlds, everything that inhabits them,
all of their really-existing potentials, and their every potential to differ that
coexists with the actual.52 To illustrate the complex character of the virtual,
Deleuze is fond of quoting Jorge Luis Borges, whose ‘The Garden of Forking
Paths’ includes a fictional book of Chinese philosophy that creates an open-
ing ‘to various future times, but not to all’.53 ‘In all fiction, when a man is
faced with alternatives he chooses one at the expense of others’, he writes,
‘in the almost unfathomable Ts’ui Pên, he chooses – simultaneously – all of
them’ and thus ‘creates various futures, various times which start others that
will in their turn branch out and bifurcate in other times’.54 In fiction, the
book is able to depict the virtual as ‘an infinite series of times, in a dizzily
growing, ever spreading network of diverging, converging and parallel times’
that creates a ‘web of time’ – ‘the strands of which approach another,
bifurcate, intersect, or ignore each other through the centuries’ and thus
‘embraces every possibility’.55

Just as the fictional book The Garden of Forking Paths is ‘a picture, incomplete
yet not false, of the universe’, science and philosophy also create images of
the virtual.56 These images are made by intersecting the virtual, much like a
plane sections a cone, to isolate a workable section. Science and philosophy,
however, differ in their approaches. Science descends, which it does by
isolating variables and laying out patterns that predict change – so when
physics is used to determine the potential changes in a physical system, sci-
entific functions are used to describe an actual state of affairs and its virtual
potential to transform.

Philosophy ascends. This ascension starts from a concrete present and ends
at concepts that reside in the virtual. Philosophy is not a representation of
reality but a fresh orientation that poses new problems about this world that
open up other possible worlds that are already present in the contemporary
moment. Philosophy, like utopia, thus connects ‘with what is real here and
now in the struggle against capitalism’ for the purpose of ‘relaunching new
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435
 struggles whenever the earlier one is betrayed’.57 This philosophy may be
practical but it does not address any particular historical event for the philo-
sophical concept ‘does not refer to the lived’ but consists ‘in setting up an
event that surveys the whole of the lived no less than every state of affairs’.58
Philosophy therefore undoes the certainty of science by thinking the world
‘without losing anything of the infinite’, in the service of renewing the drive
for creation.59 Unlike science, philosophy remains utopian as it breaks
through the limits of this world and ‘turns it back against itself so as to sum-
mon forth a new earth, a new people’.60 Philosophy is thought as the act of
creation. It is not reality reflecting back on itself – this becoming like that –
but thought speeding beyond the present, whereby the future is introduced
into the present to undo the past.

Many of Foucault’s most respected contributions do not ‘pay the price of

reality’ because they are philosophical.61 Two well-known examples are the
concepts of the archive and the diagram. In The Archaeology of Knowledge,
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Foucault proposes the archive as ‘the general system of the formation and
transformation of statements’.62 The archive is not a crudely empirical object,
and it is not a sum of texts – it is an image of the surface of discourse that
‘reveals the rules of a practice that enables statements both to survive and to
undergo regular modification’.63 Foucault goes on to explain archaeology,
the method for studying the archive, as an abstraction. Archaeology is, in
sum, the philosophical activity of mapping the virtual structure of a system
that exists at the boundary of thought. Foucault’s subsequently developed
method, genealogy, is similarly a virtual mapping. In completing his geneal-
ogy of modern power, Foucault creates the concept of the diagram. The dia-
gram appears in Discipline and Punish, where Foucault describes Bentham’s
panopticon as a diagram of power.64 He carefully outlines what he means by
diagram, writing that it is ‘a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form’,
‘abstracted from friction’ to become a representation, ‘a figure of political
technology… detached from any specific use’.65 In other words, the diagram
is too abstract to be a model because it combines two things: 1) a function –
the anonymous and immanent observation of subjects to individualize and
classify them without their knowledge, independent of any particular spatial
arrangement, and 2) matter – any human multiplicity made countable or
controllable by confinement, independent of their qualification.66 Each of
these philosophical concepts, the archive and the diagram, are virtual and
have corresponding actual states of affairs: the archive and the statement, the
panopticon and disciplinary institutions. From this, it seems clear that
Foucault himself was not allergic to approaching power through virtual con-
cepts, as he granted them a philosophical existence independent of their
actualization.

The State’s Abstract Power: Incorporeal Transformation and Empire

How might we then conceptualize the state as real but not actual? If it con-
tinues in the same way that Deleuze and Guattari conceptualize capitalism,
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436
 then conceptualizing the state begins with a negative move. This move is to
‘do away with the judgment of God’, which means affording the state a speci-
fic and not universal status – tearing it down from the heavens of natural fact
and show how it is a thing of this world, though without denying that it may
be a nearly omnipresent figure today.67 The method Deleuze and Guattari
specify for this task is a détournement of Hegel’s universal history (by way of
Marx) that is retrospective, contingent, singular, ironic, and critical.68 And
on this point, such an approach is not in conflict with the study of govern-
mentality, which similarly disarticulates the state through critical history.
Where we part ways with Governmentality Studies is in the positive task I
propose here: the construction of a virtual concept of the state. In particular,
I contend that the state is an abstraction that induces incorporeal
transformations.69

As an abstraction, it is ‘what is not actualized or of what remains indifferent

to actualization’ that includes but exceeds the material state effects, ‘since its
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reality does not depend on it’.70 And the state is capable of producing incor-
poreal transformations, which are qualitative transformations (in kind not in
quantity) not directly accessible through experience, although they produce
effects that are empirically measurable. The classic example of an incorporeal
transformation is the performative speech act, for instance ‘I pronounce you
husband and wife’, which transforms two people from being engaged to
being married without changing their material existence (their bodies).71
These incorporeal transformations may appear as natural attributes, as they
lie at the heart of social segmentations – ‘gender, race, class, work, family’
and now ‘debt and credit’ – though as much as we experience them, these
transformations are not themselves material, it is only their effects that are
material.72 Deleuze does not ascertain the ontology of virtual concepts and
instead says that they ‘insist’, ‘subsist’, or ‘persist’, leaving only their effects to
ontologically ‘exist’.73

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri have a useful illustration of a similar

abstraction in their book Empire.74 According to Hardt and Negri, colonial-
ism works as an abstract machine (a term roughly synonymous here with
abstraction or virtual concept). The abstract machine of colonialism, they say,
creates a dialectic of identity and alterity that imposes binary divisions on the
colonial world.75 The identity of the European Self, for instance, is produced
through the dialectical movement of its opposition to and power over a colo-
nial Other. The prevailing critique of colonialism in the early 20th century
responded dialectically by revealing that the differences and identities cre-
ated by colonialism appear ‘as if they were absolute, essential, and natural’
but are in fact incorporeal and therefore function ‘only in relation to each
other and (despite appearances) have no real necessary basis in nature, biol-
ogy or rationality’.76 Hardt and Negri name two conclusions to this dialecti-
cal critique: first, that the European Self must continually use material
violence against its Other to sustain the dialectical appearance of corporeal
power, and, second, that such a negative dialectic of recognition is hollow
and prone to subversion. But reality itself is not dialectical, only colonialism
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 is, Hardt and Negri contend.77 And because dialectics is only one mode in
which abstract machines operate, they suggest that the effective response to
colonialism is not a negative antithesis, such as the negative project of négri-
tude or Sartrean cultural politics.78 An effective response, they say, is the
reciprocal ‘counter-violence’ of Frantz Fanon and Malcolm X, which pro-
duces a separation from the movement of colonialism. Such violence is not
itself political, yet the violent reciprocity of ‘a direct relation of forces’ that
breaks the abstract bond holding together incorporeal colonial power and
poses a disharmony that arrests the colonial dialectic while opening a space
in which politics can emerge.79

As Hardt and Negri go on to describe Empire, they do not call it an abstract

machine, but perhaps we should. Customary definitions of Empire usually
focus on a polycentric sovereignty of global governance as it intersects with
the postmodern production of informatized, immaterial, and biopolitical
products.80 In contrast, I contend that Empire arrives as an entirely incorpo-
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real entity that lacks its own body and is deprived of a material existence to
call its own.81 However devoid of existence, Empire persists as whatever
collection of forces rallies behind a concept for organizing and directing the
capitalist world market. As a result, Empire operates through management
and circulation, but it is not extensive with its products.

Opposing Empire surely includes the tasks used by the Governmentality

School: outlining its material practices, its effects on behaviours, and its
shared logic of governance. A philosophical definition of Empire, however,
would also typologize it as a virtual concept. In determining Empire’s mode
of operation, the task would be to abstractly identify how it produces incor-
poreal transformations in the open ecology of contemporary power. Consid-
erable research already mixes the concrete and virtual aspects of Empire
while studying the feedback and capture of cognitive capitalism, the free
labour of the digital precariat, the anonymous networks of computerized cor-
porate control, and the ballooning surveillance assemblage of states.82 Within
this work, however, the Governmentality School’s strict materialism and
Deleuze’s philosophy of the virtual cause tension: one is motivated by scien-
tific certainty, and the other, utopian creation. While science may descend
onto a state of affairs to detail objects that give a truer picture of contempo-
rary power, philosophy ascends to create images through abstraction that
are just as real. The key difference is that only philosophy, like Fanonian
counter-violence, creates a formally asymmetric relationship with the world
as it is presently constituted.

The Powers of the False

The powers of the false are what cause the science of governmentality and
the philosophy of abstraction to part ways. Deleuze, following Nietzsche,
argues that ‘the “true world” does not exist, and even if it did, it would be
inaccessible, impossible to describe, and, if it could be described, would be
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438
 useless, superfluous’.83 This critique is in part historical, much like Hardt
and Negri’s depiction of colonial dialectics, as time ‘puts truth in crisis’.84
Derrida explicates how time can subvert truth, whereby the legal order is
founded through a violence that is illegitimate under the law.85 It is not
enough to simply recall the bloody history dried in the codes. Denouncing
states, nations, or races as fictions does little to dislodge their power, however
untrue the historical or scientific justifications for them might be.86 Deleuze
is intrigued by these ‘not-necessarily true pasts’, and in particular, the founding
mythologies that fictionalize the origin of states and nations of people.87
Such power arises from the indistinguishability between the true and false.
Between the true and the false, Deleuze does not find emptiness or illusion,
as in the devaluation of value or the discrediting of the world as a sham; in
place of the model of truth, he poses the real. Put in these terms: disputing
the truthfulness of an abstraction does not limit that abstraction’s power; in
fact, it confirms the real capacities of even false abstractions (to name two:
that illegal violence can and has been used to found new legal orders, and
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that now-debunked science once justified eugenics and that scientific para-
digms currently used in social policy will inevitably be invalidated by new
research). To draw a sharp boundary between the state as a historical set of
practices on the one hand and ‘a mythicized abstraction’ on the other – as
Governmentality Studies does – is to turn a blind eye to the dual reality of
the state.88 This is why Deleuze and Guattari insist that the utopian chal-
lenge to the state is ultimately philosophical; and following Nietzsche, they
urge us to ‘overthrow ontology’ through the creative power of the virtual.89

Deleuze turns to cinema to theorize the powers of the false. As such, his
philosophical conceptualization of cinema extends well beyond the purview
of the ‘state-effects’ surveyed by Governmentality Studies.90 This is because
Deleuze is interested in how cinema ‘takes up the problem of truth and
attempts to resolve it through purely cinematic means’, and not how it is
sometimes taken to simply represent the concept of truth through metaphor
or analogy.91 In the history of cinema, he finds a shift after World War II
whereby films break from the clichéd calls to action characteristic of classic
cinema, and instead increasingly produce new realities. Some retain a refer-
ence to the true, such as the ‘clairvoyant eye’ of Italian neo-realism era films;
others, such as 1960s new wave films, escape the usual function of the
senses.92 This cinema’s realism is not a simple mimesis, but a presentation of
what is not directly perceivable – not different worlds but realities that exist
in the present, though not currently lived, which confirm but also weaken
reality.93 The elusiveness of truth in post-war cinema does not, however,
prevent the existence of a ‘truthful man’; one who Deleuze identifies as the
figure that seeks the moral origins of truth and the return of judgment.94
Brecht and Lang are his two foils; he charges both with returning morality
through the judgment of the viewer, and against whom he poses Welles,
whose films make judgment impossible.95

Ōshima’s Death by Hanging may open with a Brechtian form of truth that
challenges the legitimacy of the state to legally condemn people to death.
parallax
439
 And in a call to judgment, the film opens with a long intertitle sequence
silently presenting the printed question ‘Do you support or oppose the aboli-
tion of the death penalty?’, continuing with statistics on public support for
the death penalty, and finally challenging the viewer’s experience, ‘Have you
ever seen an execution chamber?’ and ‘Have you ever seen an execution?’.
Yet this form of truth fractures with the botched execution, which forces
truth to split into contradictions. Actually-existing governmentality occurs in
the space of the false. When the clichéd documentary presentation of the
hanging breaks down and the law appears woefully abstract and inadequate,
the officials perform an exercise in governmentality: they each limit the func-
tions of the state by individually disavowing authority, as each delineates
their own functions so as to disavow responsibility for violence and defer to
another for re-founding the law. In turn, R, the amnesiac protagonist, grows
to have even more vitality than Josef K. of Welles’s The Trial.96 Rather than
being ambiguously tied to history like Josef, ‘the body of the condemned
man R refuses execution’; neither an individual weighed down by his past
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crimes nor collectively tied to the ethnic ressentiment offered by a fellow

Korean, R breaks with truth and replaces it with ‘the power of life’,
unqualified.97

Ultimately, Death by Hanging stages a conservative utopia as the restoration of

power. In the conclusion, R continues to make judgment impossible. Once
again facing execution, he asks the officials to show him a nation so he can
name his executioner. Perhaps it is the Public Prosecutor or the Security
Officer, as they represent the nation? No, they respond, they are only ‘a
small part, not the whole thing’. R continues his line of questioning, telling
the prosecutor, ‘If you were the whole thing, you would be evil for killing
me. The next prosecutor will kill you, and he’ll be killed in turn... and finally
no one will be left’. The prosecutor becomes frustrated enough by R’s decon-
struction of the law that he offers R freedom. As R opens the door to leave,
however, an intense light compels him back into the courtroom. It is at this
moment that the law’s outside returns; the state, itself an abstraction rather
than simply a collections of practices, behaviours, and local truths, is finally
depicted in its real virtual existence. And in this case, the light is also the
reality that R, as a Korean, will never be fully accepted in Japanese society.
The conclusion is startling: truth does not challenge the virtuality of the
state, and even when its actions are inept, it is still capable of producing
incorporeal transformations. Perhaps the most powerful example of the
incorporeal transformation is the transformation that occurs when a judge
declares the accused to be guilty of their crimes – transforming an alleged
criminal into a real one.98 Back in the room, R submits to being hanged, to
which the prosecutor declares that even if the nation is invisible, R now
knows the nation, because ‘the nation is in your mind, and as long as it exists
there, you feel guilty’. In spite of this, R still maintains his innocence by pro-
claiming ‘[a] nation cannot make me guilty’, which leads the officials concur:
‘with such ideas [he] shall not be allowed to live’. They then hang R – not
for his initial crimes, but for his dangerous and treasonous ideas. In a final
shot of a hanging noose, the prosecutor thanks the Education Officer ‘for
Culp
440
 taking part in this execution’ and then thanks the Security Officer ‘for taking
part in this execution’, and then he thanks ‘you’, ‘and you’, ‘and ‘you’, ‘and
you’, and then finally ‘you, dear spectators, thank you for taking part in this
execution’. Then the screen goes black – leaving only the after-effect of con-
servative utopia. Our own task remains: after overthrowing the ontology of
the state, how do we create the revolutionary utopia of a stateless society?

Notes state he presents in these lectures. In

addition to Security, Territory, Popula-
1
Death by Hanging. Dir. Nagisa Ōshima. tion, Foucault’s other lectures on mod-
2
For clarity, I will refer to the nation- ern government are Society Must be
state as simply ‘the state’. Central to Defended, The Birth of Biopolitics.
6
my argument is that the state’s cul- Foucault, “Governmentality,” 5–21.
7
tural history is essential to its nature. Rose and Miller, Governing the Present,
While every state has a cultural 9.
8
dimension, however, the concept of Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 2.
9
nation holds a distinctly modern con- Mitchell, “Society, Economy, and the
notation that emerge from forms of State Effect,” 76–97.
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10
right new to medieval Europe. When Mitchell, “The Limits of the State,”
understood philosophically, the right 77–94.
11
of an abstract nation to execute crimi- Jessop, State Power, 150.
12
nals – as used by R in Death by Hang- Foucault, Birth of Biopolitics, 75–77,
ing – is contained within the notion of 189–92.
13
the state as concept. For a genealogy Ibid., 188.
14
of the nation, see Foucault’s Society Rose and Miller, “Political Power
Must be Defended. Beyond the State,” 173–205.
3 15
Foucault, The History of Sexuality, 88– O’Malley, “Risk and Responsibility,”
89. 189–207.
4 16
Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Cruikshank, The Will to Empower.
17
109, 114. Rose, Inventing Ourselves.
5 18
Ibid., 109. Despite the recent accep- In regards to structuralist Marxism,
tance of Foucault’s theory of the state Althusser’s students cite Foucault gen-
as an essential part of his oeuvre, its erally favorably from the 1970s
status deserves comment – after the onward, in particular Balibar,
success of Discipline and Punish and the Macherey, Lecourt, Pêcheux, and
first volume of The History of Sexuality Rancière. The Italian reception is less
Foucault suffered from a ‘silent’ seven clear, as Franco Berardi and others
years. In that time, he ceased publish- claim that Foucault’s work was not
ing books although he meticulously widely circulated within Potere Oper-
constructed book-length genealogies aismo until the 1978 translation of The
of liberalism that chronologically History of Sexuality, although there was
moved through sovereignty, early a small group of scholars associated
modern statecraft, and 20th century with the movement who had read
economics, which he presented as lec- Foucault, including Antonio Negri,
tures to the Collège de France. The who cites Foucault in the famous 1977
famous ‘governmentality’ essay was a essay “Domination and Sabotage”; for
lecture in the Security, Territory, Popula- that essay and Berardi’s reflections,
tion series. These lectures have been see Negri, ‘Domination and Sabotage’
released in full in the last decade, but and Berardi, ‘Anatomy of Autonomy’.
their unfinished quality and Foucault’s Post-Anarchism was founded as the
decision not to publish the material union of post-structuralism philosophy
raises methodological questions – in and contemporary anarchism, making
particular, whether or not he ulti- the works of Michel Foucault, Gilles
mately agrees with his own claim on Deleuze and Félix Guattari, and
the significance, comparative prefer- Jacques Lacan canonical.
ence, and veracity of the theory of

parallax
441
 19
Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, presence, and heeding their indiffer-
177–78. ence’. Cole, “The Call of Things,”
20
One response is that ‘empirical studies 106–118.
31
and genealogies of government are Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity,
full of accounts of conflicts and strug- 110.
32
gles, although resistance seldom takes An excellent demonstration of the
the form of a heroic meta-subject. wider constellation of thought can be
Thus, Rose’s account of the emer- found in Flaxman, “A More Radical
gence of advanced liberal rationalities Empiricism,” 55–72.
33
is at pains to stress the role of those Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 143,
who opposed government through 143.
34
the social; but there was, here as else- Ibid., xx.
35
where, no single movement of resis- Zourabichvili, Deleuze: A Philosophy of
tance to power, but rather a conflict the Event, 130.
36
of rival programs and strategies’. Ibid., 211.
37
O’Malley, Rose Valverde, “Govern- Ibid., 36.
38
mentality,” 100. Absent from this Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand
defence is the Nietzschean spirit of Plateaus, 25.
39
writing untimely histories against the Flaxman, “Coda,” 292–324.
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40
present that would give life to new Foucault, “Maurice Blanchot,”
becomings, and for this, they avoid pp. 7–60.
41
playing the most persistent note of Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Pla-
Foucault’s politics. teaus, 431, 437, 437–448.
21 42
Ibid., 101. Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus,
22
Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia, 177. 351–356.
23 43
Deleuze returns to Butler’s Erewhon Deleuze, Cinema 2, 68. It is also worth
often. See, for example, Deleuze, Dif- noting that the encounters with the
ference and Repetition, xx–xxi, 285–88; ‘non-external outside’ are not simply
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philoso- to ward off threats, but is the motor of
phy?, 100. utopian fabulation necessary for art,
24
O’Malley, Rose, and Valverde, science and philosophy.
44
“Governmentality,” 101. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population,
25
Ticiento Clough, “The Case of Sociol- 109.
45
ogy,” 627–641. The cultural dimension of sovereignty
26
The loose collection of philosophers is so integral to Deleuze and Guattari,
associated with ‘Speculative Realism’ that they open the apparatus of cap-
share a starting point: the rapport ture plateau with a formal definition
between the givenness of the world of the state derived from comparative
(‘the real’) and the thought of that mythologist Georges Dumézil’s study
givenness (‘truth’). of Indo-European sovereignty within
27
Numerous object-oriented approaches a tri-partite conception of society,
are included in The Speculative Turn: Mitra-Varuna. Deleuze and Guattari
Continental Materialism and Realism. accept the tri-partite structure but
28
Harman, “On the Undermining of define the state as two complementary
Objects,” 24. poles – one authoritarian, the other
29
DeLanda, A New Philosophy of Society, liberal – while holding that the third
17–18. part, the warrior-as-nomad, is the
30
Bennett, Vibrant Matter and Connolly, state’s incommensurate outside.
46
The Frailty of Things. Andrew Cole puts Dean, Governmentality, 13–14.
47
forth a rather convincing argument Deleuze, Negotiations, 89.
48
that these object-based approaches Ibid., 89.
49
mirror the idealism of Fichte because Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, 208.
50
‘these newer philosophies exhibits a I borrow this formulation from Boun-
very strong humanism and a rather das, “What Difference,” 397–423.
51
traditional ontology in that they Ibid., 399.
52
claim to hear things “speak,” record- Deleuze, Difference and Repetition,
ing things’ voices, registering their 81–82.

Culp
442
 53 80
Borges, “The Garden of Forking See, for example, Barkawi and Laffey,
Paths,” 98. “Retrieving the Imperial,” 109–27;
54
Ibid. Jean L. Cohen, “Whose Sovereignty?”
55
Ibid., 100. 1–24; Bowring, “From the Mass
56
Ibid., 100. Worker to the Multitude,”101–32;
57
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philoso- Borón, Empire & Imperialism.
81
phy?, 100. This is a position shared with Tiqqun,
58
Ibid., 33–34. Plan B Bureau, and other recent theo-
59
Ibid., 42. rizations of Empire, see Plan B
60
Ibid., 99. Bureau, “20 Theses” and Tiqqun,
61
To be absolutely clear, philosophy is Introduction to Civil War.
82
real. The point is that reality does not Hagerty and Ericson, “The Surveillant
exact the same toll from philosophy as Assemblage,” 605–22; Terranova, Net-
it does from science. work Culture; Galloway, Protocol; Dean,
62
Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, Blog Theory.
83
130. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 137.
63 84
Ibid., 130. Ibid., 130. Deleuze poses this in the
64
Foucault, Discipline and Punish , 205. modified terms of the classic philoso-
65
Ibid., 205. It should also be noted that phy problem of future contingents
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Deleuze makes this comparison in that considers the truth of the state-
Deleuze, Foucault, 31–34. ment ‘there will be a sea-battle tomor-
66
Ibid., 72. An additional reason why it row’. He has particular ire for
must be an abstraction and not a philosophy founded on such proposi-
model, according to Deleuze, is that tional logic.
85
the actualized content and expression Derrida, “Force of Law,” 3–66.
86
bear neither resemblance nor corre- Rahita Seshadri, Desiring Whiteness.
87
spondence, and so must have a com- Deleuze, Cinema 2, 131. The ‘miracu-
mon immanent cause. Ibid., 33. For lating power’ of the state is dealt with
further information on this point, see extensively in Deleuze and Guattari,
Bogue, Deleuze and Guattari, 130–35. Anti-Oedipus and Deleuze and Guat-
67
Deleuze, “To Have Done with Judg- tari, A Thousand Plateaus.
88
ment,” 126–35. Foucault, Security, Territory, Population,
68
Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 109.
89
163–64. For an elaboration on these Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Pla-
concepts, particularly as it relates to teaus, 25. Deleuze also call this process
Althusser, see Read, “A Universal His- fabulation. See Flaxman, Gilles Deleuze
tory of Contingency”. for further information on this point.
69 90
Foucault explicitly describes his phi- Previous theorists have studied cin-
losophy as ‘incorporeal materialism’ in ema’s capacity to produce new politi-
two places: his inaugural Collège de cal realities by balancing their
France lecture, “The Order of Dis- authority as scientists with the ener-
course” and “Theatrum Philosoph- getic philosophy of cinema. To this
icum,” his review of The Logic of Sense. end, none seem to have retained the
70
Deleuze and Guattari, What is Philoso- Nietzschean spirit of fabulation. See
phy?, 156. Shapiro, Cinematic Political Thought;
71
Austin, How to do Things with Words, 5. MacKenzie and Porter, Dramatizing the
72
Buchanan, “Deleuze and the Inter- Political; Lisle and Pepper, “The New
net”. Face of Global Hollywood,” 165–92;
73
Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 52–54. Shapiro, Cinematic Geopolitics; Reid,
74
Hardt and Negri, Empire. “What did Cinema do”; Lorimer,
75
Ibid., 128–29. “Moving Image Methodologies,”
76
Ibid., 129. 237–58.
77 91
Ibid., 128. Lambert, The Non-Philosophy of Gilles
78
The keystone examples are Cesaire, Deleuze, 93.
92
Discourse on Colonialism and Fanon, The Ibid., 22. It is also worth dwelling on
Wretched of the Earth. the distinction between reality and
79
Hardt and Negri, Empire, 131–32. truth, which can be used to restate

parallax
443
 95
Foucault’s desire to exact the ‘price of Ibid., 138–39.
96
reality’. State theory must pay the The Trial. Dir. Orson Welles
97
price of reality but not with truth. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 135. A similar
93
To clarify this understanding of the argument can be found in Agamben’s
real, Flaxman makes reference to Homo Sacer regarding Kafka’s “Before
Cameron’s Avatar and Kubrick’s 2001: the Law” and “Bartleby the Scrive-
A Space Odyssey. Flaxman, “Out of the ner”.
98
Field,” 119–37. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Pla-
94
Deleuze, Cinema 2, 137. teaus, 80–81.

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 Andrew Culp is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Rhetoric Studies at Whitman
College. He specializes in theories of power. In his current project, Metropo-
lis, he explores the apathy, distraction, and cultural exhaustion born from
the 24/7 demands of an ’always-on’ media-driven society. His work has
appeared in Radical Philosophy, Affinities and Angelaki. Email: andrew.culp@
gmail.com
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