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Title: Counter-Insurgency of the Eye Author: A.C. Jones Date: 11-27-2020 Language: en Topics: insurrection, conspiracy Source: Retrieved on 9-9-2021 from https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com/2020/11/27/counter-insurgency-of-the-eye-the-anti-ocular-conspiracy/ Notes: Text by Adam/Sankt Max from Acid Horizon podcast. Blog at: https://happyhourathippels.wordpress.com
Ocularity is both a space and a practice, insofar as the space of
ocularity must me maintained by a practice of force that maintains its
boundaries, divisions, and maintains it as an enclosure for what is
within the space or realm of ocularity. To be within the space of
ocularity is to be sensed—that is, to be impressed upon by the forms
embedded in ocular practice. The forms embedded in a practice of
ocularity, in the construction, development, and maintenance of an
ocular space, are forms of social recognition, they are the inscription
of meanings that allow for identification, and actively attempt to
prevent, expose, or to delimit in advance attempts at social, political,
or cultural disruption. The disruption it attempts to avert or subvert
is the disruption that can brew in the form of an insurgency, and the
space in which an insurgency can brew is a space of non-ocularity, of
escape from social forms of meaning that have not (yet, at least) been
recuperated by social meaning and hence was recognized by the
social-semiotic ‘eye’ of ocularity. This non-ocular space we call the
‘conspiratorial’. The conspiratorial is the womb of insurgency.
The ‘eye’ of ocularity is not a receptive eye, or at least, it benefits
it to partake more in its object as that which falls within its space.
The eye of ocularity sees and in seeing it projects force on to what it
sees, and it remakes the object—to the best of its ability—in its own
image, like a Kantian transcendental that encounters an affectation of
its sense organs, it captures it only in a form pre-determined. Insofar
as ocularity preserves itself via a monopoly on identity and
socially-recognized meaning it does great violence upon its object in
sensing it. It is a net of libidinally-enforced social axioms about the
limits of identity and what a body can do. It is at work everywhere, in
a sense the space of ocularity has one eye as its structural principle
in the eye of power, but much like the eye as it occurs in nature, the
creator was not quite ontologically parsimonious enough with its
quantitative distribution. Insurrection must defeat the eye, power has
too many eyes, there are too many eyes in our world.
The following text is an attempt; partially at theoretical fiction,
partly at reverse-engineering from the standpoint of ocular practice
itself. Its category of insurgency is not intended to invoke the
violence of what is considered ‘insurgent’ by normal means, but by means
of violence against concepts, against identity, it is violent in the
same way that any alternative and truly autonomous self-consciousness
would be.
Enucleate the State!
The essence of the conspiracy is that its presence is always already
withdrawing from the eyes of the investigator. The conspiracy withdraws
from sight, and yet its withdrawal is a continuous process rather than
an event. A good conspiracy understands the nature of the ocular, what
it means to be seen, in order to trace those lines that run counter to
the directions of visibility, be they lines occluded from the ocular
scope, or that these lines can be bent and refracted over and around the
body of the conspirator(s). At most, the presence of the conspiracy is
something presupposed by the investigative, Yet, in a successful process
of conspiracy, this presence is not captured by its seeking. The
investigative eye, fundamentally opposed to the conspiracy, is always in
a process of capturing that the conspiratorial aims to constantly
withdraw from. The conspiratorial is that which is always attempting its
withdrawal from ocular reception as well as ocular comprehension;
becoming incomprehensible—out of sight and out of mind. However, to have
the conspiratorial body or bodies out of the space of the ocular is
simply to leave the spectral imprint of its withdrawal and its absence.
This is why a true conspiracy invites the terror of an ocular paranoia,
through its own spectral capture of the eye that seeks to capture it.
An expedient conspiracy is one that births insurgencies by provoking
martial-political overreactions—the iron fists of the paranoiac
state—that themselves often provoke the eruption of insurgent force and
a corresponding popular support.[1] From the standpoint of
counter-insurgency studies, this is not necessarily a bad tactic, given
the ‘iron fist’ method of counter-insurgency has proven to be a
notoriously hit-and-miss method.[2] As such, it is paramount for the
security of any nation that faces the threat of insurgency that it
understand its own ocularity, the ability to not merely see
conspiratorial forces, but to recognize them, to place them under
clearly defined and substantial schemas or identities through this
recognition. In doing so, the intent is to capture these forces within a
counter display of force such that this dispels them of their
conspiratorial—and hence proto-insurgent—character. It is also the
intention of the authors of this text that in understanding our current
mechanisms of ocularity and ocular capture, we may better understand our
own counter-conspiratorial—and hence counter-insurgent—limits.
Particularly, when it comes to our schemas of recognizing, identifying,
capturing, and finally—dissolving proto-insurgent conspiratorial units.
As such, this text will attempt to lay out a brief outline of the
practice and possibilities of ocularity as a concept of
counter-conspiratorial counter-insurgency.
Conspiratorial Space, and Recognitive Categorization
Contemporary counter-insurgent thought takes as its theoretical basis a
wide variety of conceptual tools for its analysis of ocularity as a
social and political phenomenon. We understand that the essential
function of mechanisms that practice and produce ocularity is to capture
the sense or meaning of an individual or group of individuals, and to
recognize them by placing them under a certain identity category. This
is not simply a passive practice of recording the identities that are
seen and ‘capturing’ them within tables of data, demographic
distributions, or within the judicial bounds of legal or illegal
identities. Rather, ocular is a practical and active social process of
inscriptive force. The activity of ocularity is not only to record
identities, but also socially mandate the thought of such identities as
substantial, as fully real and non-contradictory, and to engineer
compliance to the sense of this identity. The sense of such an identity
can be something that is conformed to via social disciplinary mechanisms
such as medical prescription, martial training, or education. However
such ocular conformity can also be engendered by more subtle
restrictions on the actions of those so-identified such as restrictions
applied to social and private space i.e. educational spaces, cultural
spaces, forms of employment, territorial-political boundaries and within
a systematically limited transport infrastructure.
The sense of an identity is something that is constituted and impressed
upon the bodies of those identified as such. Identification is a process
of impressing the ocularity-prescribed social meaning onto the body of
the recipient through the ‘forces’[3] of the ocular, by which they are
seen. Force imposes and holds onto the social meaning of a body when it
becomes a subject enclosed in ocular space. Ocular apparatuses record
people’s bodies under certain schemata at the same time that it writes
these identifications upon them. Ocularity—by which we mean, good ocular
practice—leaves nothing hidden to conspiracy, it aims to identify every
enemy and occlude the possibility of the enemy escaping into an
unidentified and unregulated novel form.
Ocularity must not be understood as a nomadic force external to the
mechanisms of state and society, and hence as a counter-insurgency
mechanism it cannot be seen as a machine of war such as in the
formulations from the COIN department the French College of
Post-Lacanian Anthropology.[4] Ocularity does not ‘smooth out’ the space
of the conspiracy. The conspiratorial space is always smooth,
undifferentiated, at once everywhere and nowhere in space, counting down
the days until its plan comes to fruition. Ocularity ‘striates’ space,
regiments it, establishes clear lines and gradients of identity,
practices of recognitive conformity, and exclusivity. This was the
conclusion of our fellow COIN theorists from the Tiqqun think tank who
concluded as part of their ‘civil war theory’ of proto-insurgent
conspiratorialism that
“To be recognized is to be seized and positioned in relation to over
social bodies and for this positioning to be striated and asserted as a
finality.”[5]
Ocular recognition delimits the possibilities of identity in advance and
applies a constant stream of force to maintain the senses of these
identity-recognitive categories. This force must be maintained in order
to consistently occlude the possibility of a smooth i.e. conspiratorial
space.
What can be concluded from this is that ocular recognition is not simply
an immediate cognitive act of receiving that which is seen by the ocular
mechanisms. Rather, as the psychologist and recognitive-engineer G.W.F.
Hegel has noted, sensing a body is never immediate nor purely receptive,
it is always involved in the active process of mediating the data
received under universal linguistic categories.[6] The recognition
conducted by ocularity is, of course, one undertaken as an expression of
the forces and apparatuses of that society and state whose ocularity is
being deployed, and hence the recognition, or sensing of individuals and
groups by ocularity is itself the mediation of these individuals and
groups such that each is forced into the linguistic categories that make
up the language of that society in terms of its customs and norms, and
hence ocularity is not simply a department of social management, an
institution, but is entirely interwoven into the fabric of a society’s
actual culture.[7]
Ocularity should therefore aim to be the practice of generating an
‘ocular culture’ that can preserve, manage, and proliferate patterns of
recognition and identification that ‘always keep the lights on’ to avoid
the conspiratorial. This culture maintains a language of identity and
categorization that is constantly striating the space of society by
impressing onto individuals and groups an identity which is promoted by
societal and cultural institutions as substantial and authoritative.
These ocular impressions must be taken by those within this culture as
non-contradictory (although not non-intersectional), and this
non-contradictory substantiality is what maintains the legitimacy of
those social institutions and apparatuses that perpetuate the ocular
culture by removing these mechanisms themselves from being represented
as contradictory insubstantial. This is the essence of McGowan’s theory
of ocular impression in liberal-democratic societies.[8] Ocular
societies and ocular cultures recognize individuals as being subjects
impressed with substantiality by a substantial recognitive authority,
whilst repressing the inherent contradictions in both sides. Wholly
un-speculative, substantiality is given and taken as given.
In his phenomenological experiments regarding simulated ocularity, Hegel
himself noted that the collapse of Robespierre’s regime during the
French Revolution was tied to the very absence of ocularity that was
inherent to the regime’s ideological language. Under this regime, the
language of identification was entirely vague, purely universal,
abstractly negative, non-intersectional, and yet actively
anti-conspiratorial. The subject brought under ocularity was entirely
absent apart from the undefined category of ‘the people’ and their
entirely vague and un-identifiable ‘General Will’ adapted from
Rousseau’s democratic theory. As such, Hegel notes that this level of
ocularity was itself suicidal in its incompetence, and as such could not
identify or comprehend its own ocular deficiencies as its greatest
threat; leading Robespierre to be executed under the auspices of his own
ocular dissolution mechanism—the guillotine wielded by the
conspiratorial forces of the Thermidorian insurgency.[9] They had no
identity, they remained in the shadows of the eye that could only see
the blur, and hence the ocular state stabbed in the darkness until its
terror had created the regime’s own executioners. A vague ocularity
widens the scope of those who fall under the cloak of the
conspiratorial. If the single category of your ocularity is the notion
‘the people’ without sufficient regimentation, striation, or recognitive
practice, then every person can—and eventually will—conspire against
you.
The conclusion that the field of ocular counter-insurgency has drawn
from these cases of successful conspiratorialism—of which the Thermidor
is taken to be an exceptionally salient paradigm case—is that the
intensity of recognitive capture-power within in an ocular space is
directly proportional to the multiplicity of ocular categories within
said space. Put simply, the more cells in said space, the greater the
number of potential insurgents can be situated within before they can
follow their paths of escape into the smooth space of the
conspiratorial. Robespierre’s low-intensity ocular practice recognized
only two categories as exhibited in the practices of his government;
‘the people’ and ‘the counter-revolutionary’, and famously the vagueness
and indeterminacy of these categories made identifying either an
arbitrary and capricious practice through which concrete threats were
left undetermined, and hence conspiratorial.
In contrast, a high-intensity practice of the ocular would embody in its
cultural, legal, and political practice a well-defined set of
recognitive categories. These categories aid the identification of
potential insurgents and hence occlude their escape into the
conspiratorial by re-situating their sense of themselves and how society
sees them (and each seeing is actualised in their social activity)
within the ocular field of vision, the striated spatial field of state
power. A higher plurality of ocular categories is a lower flow of
smoothness within and across the ocular space. The production of said
categories—or in some cases, their discovery, where an ocular ‘cataract’
has been removed by sufficient scientific advancement—has been aided
significantly by the dawn of intersectionality. That is, insofar as
ocularity maintains the intersection between a plurality of its own
categories as itself a determinate section within that space.
This is not to say that contemporary developments in social justice
movements from the late 20^(th) century onwards have been beneficial to
ocularity. Indeed, the production of new identities outside of ocular
production harbour their own danger that researchers of our own as well
as those of similar organizations have attempted to address.
of producing Recognitive-Conforming Affects in Social Reasoning
In our current era of technological and political acceleration—one
exacerbated by plague, economic collapse, and geopolitical
insecurity—the counter-insurgent science of ocularity has had to make
its own leaps into new fields of scientific knowledge. The ultimate goal
of ocular practice is not only to see into people’s heads, but to
organise their heads into that which ocularity recognizes. Contemporary
Spinozist turns in neurology have recently begun to make this possible.
The revelatory promise of neuro-plasticity and its Spinozist deployments
have now opened up new possibilities for an ocular understanding of how
recognitive forms can be cognitively, physically, be implanted. This
possibility is explored most notably in the work of neuro-technician C.
Malabou when she invokes the Spinozist-neurology of Demasio to explain
the indifferent coldness that occurs when a person’s identity is
severely traumatised or destroyed, leaving them indifferent to the
emotional or affective concerns when tackling social decisions around
conflict and risk—the social decisions that are themselves crucial in
any question of conspiratorial allegiance and practice.
The hypothesis deployed in Malabou’s analysis is Demasio’s conception of
the “somatic markers” in the brain that give certain kinds of emotional
weight to certain options in decision making.[10] This
weight-distribution is governed by the Spinozian-axis of ‘joys’ and
‘sorrows’, where the former expresses an expansion of an individual’s
capacities and the former expresses a dampening.[11] The capacities
under such a regime of affective governance are that of high-level
cognitive functions necessary for social life and decision making;
memory, language, attentiveness, and reasoning.[12] Whilst we lack the
current medical capacities to engineer ocularly-aligned somatic markers
within the brain from birth or infancy, the dual function of the
neuro-plastic is that which grounds our potential to ocularly re-mould
and distribute these markers to fit ocular-compliant schemas of social
language, self-identification, norms of rationality, and the affective
pull that ocular culture has on the attention of individuals. The goal
of ocular culture is to occlude the capacities of the individual
post-birth within whatever ocular recognition-pattern they are sensed,
and to shepherd the distribution of somatic markers towards an affective
weight into ocularity-compliant distributions.
Above all, the attentiveness to one’s own plasticity must be avoided if
ocularity is to be maintained. In extreme circumstances, the potential
for ‘destructive’ plasticity must be deployed, in the sense that the
individual must be made indifferent to their possibility of being other
than within an ocular schema—a totally negative deployment of a
traumatic severing of those affective distributions that exceed the
ocular schemata. There must be no outside of ocularity, that is the
smooth space of the conspiratorial. The ocular subject must be prevented
from distributing emotional weight towards any non-ocular affectivity at
all costs. They must not even “lack lack” when it comes to their sense
of themselves in ocularity,[13] but must be wholly indifferent to the
outside, to any escape from ocular space.
As such, we can conclude that an optimal situation the subjects of an
ocular culture, would be that their indifference would be conditioned
into them as a total absence of imagination when it comes to the
outside. We understand that under certain clinical rubrics that these
ocularity tactics may be recognised as the induction of trauma, and as
such bear the possibility of counter-ocular healing (especially in such
a highly speculative and experimental field that us and other
counter-insurgency operators are working in). However, others in our
field have made great strides in acting to prevent this psychological
rejuvenation. The most notable of all these is the method of re-imposing
ocularity when it comes to the identity of the psychologically
alienated. Famously, Deleuze and Guattari identified and refined this
method in its Freudian and Kleinian formulations in their theory of
‘oedipalization’, in which all attempts at understanding psychological
trauma become confined in the familial triangle of Freud’s oedipal
complex, everything is tied to one’s relation within the triangular
identity of daddy-mommy-me, from the private to the public, to the
personal to the political and ever more.[14] The ocularity of
oedipalization, if we are to draw upon the myth, is to prevent oedipism,
or the removal of one’s eyes. Deleuze and Guattari hence leave us with a
term for an anti-ocular practice that we shall develop further through
an examination of recent trends in conspiratorialism.
If we are to take further examples of ocular practices in current use,
the phenomenon of ‘Capitalist Realism’ identified by the hyperstitional
entity known as ‘K-Punk’ shows itself as an imperfect ocularity that
ocular science aims to improve on. Nonetheless, the CR-division of
ocular science over in the UK has made substantial strides in developing
‘post-historical’ methods of shifting affective weight away from the
notion of the outside in the form of an ‘alternative’ to capitalist
economic systems [see the Affect-Distribution Module-‘TINA’ (There is No
Alternative]. This has been achieved through a collaboration of
journalistic, educational, and entertainment-media apparatuses. Each has
done their part in the generation of an affect of “reflexive impotence”
by which individuals identify across a multiplicity of identity
categories; all delimited within the recognition that alternative social
relations—and hence social ways of life that would constitute identities
outside of ocular culture and space—are a priori impossible.[15]
However, the reflexivity of this impotence itself has generated a
self-consciousness of this lack, and as such has created a
desire-formulation that whilst seemingly a ‘lack’, is actually a
productive line, one that looks for an exit, and hence a line of flight
with conspiratorial potential. We nonetheless remain confident in our
abilities to effectively block the flows of conspiratorial desire when
it comes to the contemporary information era—the self-conscious
capitalist realists have only ever romanticised about an image of the
possibility of an outside, they as yet lack the imagination to believe
it can be possibly reached, and remain as effectively and affectively
hopeless as before.
The intersection of ocularity, psychology, and neurology is the
awakening and management of the dormant forces of plasticity; both the
creative in the sense of giving form to affective markers that determine
social cognition, and the destructive plasticity required to accelerate
the neurological deterioration of those affective capacities that resist
ocular capture—that resist the eye.
Ocularity draws its self-differentiation from its own plasticity, where
an eye can become a hand that writes on a bureaucrat’s form, a tongue
that proclaims with signifying authority the identity of its target, the
ear that may expose the conspiratorial by hearing over the plotting of
insurgent ways of escaping. The ocular eye is an organ, but it is an
implanted code diffused across the bodies that comprise their own
enclosure within ocular space. If conspiratorialism were to truly become
eyeless, one would hardly be able to see if they had any organs at all.
[1] U.S. Army Field Manual FM3-24/MCWP 3–33.5: Insurgencies and
Countering Insurgencies, (2014) Chapter 7 Section 7.
https://fas.org/irp/doddir/army/fm3-24.pdf
[2]
C. Paul, C.P. Clarke, B. Grill, and M. Dunigan, Paths to Victory,
(RAND, 2013), 173.
[3]
G. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, (Athlone, 1983), 3–4.
[4]
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, (Bloomsbury, 2013),
421–422.
[5] Tiqqun, Introduction to Civil War, (Semiotext(e), 2010), 205.
[6] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford, 1977), Section 109.
[7] Ibid, Section 490.
[8]
T. McGowan, Emancipation After Hegel, (Columbia, 2019), 135.
[9] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford, 1977), Sections
589–595.
[10]
C. Malabou, Ontology of the Accident, (Polity, 2012), 23.
[11] Ibid, 22.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Ibid, 90.
[14]
G. Deleuze, F. Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, (Minnesota, 1983), 78–79.
[15] K-Punk, Capitalist Realism, (0, 2009), 21.