On the 'Deep State'

Network Power

The Deep State: a term whose deployment in popular discourse has reached fever-pitch, uttered daily by a legion of commentators, pundits, streamers and activists. It has become something of a slogan with a particular reputation, tarnished in the eyes of the popular left by its association with the political right. Insofar as it has traction on the left itself, it remains marginalized, a conceptual enemy of the fringe. Above all, it is associated with conspiracy, serving as the signifier for a regime of unseen agents who, from behind closed doors and in the shadows of the world economy, dictate an unpredictable chain of events that shake the foundations of reality itself.

Who belongs to this 'deep state', what institutions incubate it, and when did its rise begin? Every faction has their version of the story. This is an attempt to add yet another tale into this ever-growing pile.

In a way it is a mistake to call the “deep state” a state or some variation of it. 'Deep state' implies a state within a state, an occult state. But even this description does not hone in upon its location and its reach: the 'deep state' is within and part of the state, but it is also above and beyond the state. It is hardly a centralized locus of power—there is not a centralized cabal wherein members are inducted into its arcane mysteries and plot out events years in advance of their execution. The 'deep state' is instead a network order or a regime of network power defined by relationship between particular technical instruments.

A state subordinated to the ‘deep state’ is a classic case of the reversal of means and ends, which in this case has established a new end: state as infinite machination.

In this movement, from the edifices of the state-form to the hybrid tendrils of the networks on the one side, and from the old concerns of the state to power, we’ve followed along a meridian of transition from the modern to the postmodern. Here, the sovereign is swamped by a system of power “organized not around one central conflict”, but instead expresses itself “through a flexible network of microconflicts”. Do not take the 'microconflict' as suggesting that conflict has become marginal or lost its historical content—what it means that the conflict has become generalized, omnipresent, a permanent state of tension.

As the contradictions and paradoxes underpinning the world system compound and multiply, this generalization will only become more and more apparent, and will take on the characteristics of an all-encompassing environment—the very ground we walk upon, the air we breathe.

A situation of generalized conflict means that the response on the side of this network power unfolds in a scale-free space. It might take the formation of financial war between economic blocs, while paramilitary battles and proxy wars rage on killing fields screened-out by the media apparatuses. But the real impetus is to drive conflict down to the most granular level.

A Foucauldian analysis of institutions anchored to the logic of power, the way it changes in time and place and exacts itself on the body—the political body, the social body and the individual body—is instructive here. Microphysics of power: this is the ultimate place of the ‘deep state’, even if the most overt manifestation of the deep state's power takes place on the geopolitical stage. The example of the sanction illustrates this clearly: what does the sanction target if not the general population of the country, as an intervention into the fabric of their everyday life as a slow-burning and horribly violent 'squeeze'.

(Sanctions, too, have followed an unsteady path of molecularization, a situation forced by the situation of globality itself. The initial rounds of sanctions proposed against Russia in early 2022 were a comical attempt at micromanagement, with 'harsh penalties' for certain economic sectors but a multitude of exemptions and 'carve-outs' implemented for energy payments, certain banks, etc. Only when the real limits of this molecularized sanction regime were confronted did the pivot back to a more broad-spectrum approach take place.

One can imagine a situation, in the near future, when central bank digital currencies (CBDC) are rolled out and institution-infrastructures like SWIFT bake in CBDC connectivity protocols, where sanctioning finally achieves its long-desired molecuralization.)

Generalized conflict means a differentiation must be made between the 'deep state' and the submerged affairs that played out in the shadows of the palace, culminating in what Peter Dale Scott would generally refer to as “deep events”. Court intrigue has a transhistorical character, but the 'deep state' and its network power is bound to a particular historical context.

The thing about networks is that they extend themselves. This is the great insight of the postmodernists, as they lose themselves in the delirium of assemblages, multiplicities, and in the most reified edges of things, fantastical visions of multiverses. Without falling into each of these traps, we can say that the deep state, as a network grounded in a particular social substrate, is always extending itself. It pushes its roots deep into a succession of states—the 'deep state', importantly, is supranational in character.

This is why the 'deep state', in popular intuition, is always paired with the specter of the ‘globalist’ and ‘globalism’. The deep state operative and the globalist, a hideous double striding across the world with its hideous gait. The deep state, then, is the hidden dimension of the open society, and so the enemy that the deep state targets appears first and foremost as states that do not conform to the legal injunctions and value systems of the open society. These so-called 'closed societies' are designated as 'rogue states', who must first be excised from the system and then re-integrated after a process of purification.

To draw out the implications of these dynamics, and to search for the black germ of the deep state itself, I'd like to turn to two conceptual-cultural artifacts, each once the topic of endless discussion but now often derided (if not forgotten outright): certain aspects of the theory of unconditional acceleration (U/Acc) and patchwork.

Patchwork, in the broadest sense, is a privileging of 'exit' over 'voice', or the act of desertion over democratic proceduralism. In many respects, exit is a libertarian equivalent of what Deleuze and Guattari pursued in a high theoretical register with their concept of line of flight (and, to a certain degree, deterritorialization), and what the Autonomists and Post-Autonomists seized upon, via a study of labor conflict in the Italian context, with their notion of exodus. There is an immediate oppositional affinity between exit or exodus and the generalized conflict we currently face: “Exit”, wrote Nick Land in a long-lost Xenosystems post, “is a scale-free concept”.

U/Acc's relationship to the concept of patchwork was long and complicated. Where it becomes relevant for the current discussion is an early essay by Vince Garton titled 'Leviathan Rots'. There, Garton approached the issue of patchwork from an idiosyncratic angle, by confronting and drawing out a particular side of Hobbesian thought that has remained neglected and buried.

The Leviathan of Hobbes, published first in 1651, was an early articulation of state formation and provided a foundation for the emergent doctrines of modern political science. He held that man had existed in a state of nature, which is best understood to be a state of conflict. This is, of course, the famous 'war of all against all', where individuals are in free pursuit of their ends, but are ultimately prevented from achieving those ends. The state of nature comes to its close when individuals enter into a pact with one another and submit themselves to a newly-erected sovereign authority. This sovereign will allow individuals to fulfill their ends; the sovereign power is expressed through institutions that act as guarantors, and also as a form of protection against external threats.

The state of nature, however, is not temporally-bound and historically limited, something found only before the formation of the sovereign state. It floats across time, running alongside Leviathan as a dark potential. The most obvious example, given that Hobbes was writing against the backdrop of immense political turmoil, is that of civil war.

What Garton honed in upon, meanwhile, was the vexing problem that the figure of the Enthusiast posed for Hobbes. 'Enthusiasm' was the term given to describe the wild proliferation of sects, beginning with the Anabaptists, that challenged religious and political authority. The enthusiasts pursued alternative forms of life, spoke openly of prophecy, and claimed access to divine knowledge with any sort of mediation flowing from the Church or the State.

For Hobbes, the rapid spread of enthusiasm brought forth the specter of the ultimate danger—the collapse of the political order back into the natural state's swirling maelstrom. The enthusiast, then, had to be repressed wherever it arose. To quote Garton:

Over and over, Leviathan returns to the need to suppress the Enthusiast in all its guises: in chapter 7, chapter 8, chapter 12, chapter 32, chapter 34…. Casting his gaze over the vista of ruin wrought in seventeenth-century England by the enthusiastic sects, Hobbes could see all too well that this figure was the single most dangerous vulnerability of the commonwealth. Leviathan may be a terrible beast, a plated colossus impregnable to any human weapon, churning whirlpools of slaughter with its belly as it breathes the fire of reason from its mouth.

From this example, Garton drew out two different kinds of Enthusiasm, one reflective of the historical experience of the Enthusiast, and one that can only be found in the future. The first is the Relative Enthusiast, who ultimately acts as a counter-sovereign, a sovereign-in-waiting by claiming the same thing as Leviathan: mediation between God and the social order. The second is the Absolute Enthusiast, an enthusiasm that aligns with the decomposition of the body of Leviathan itself: an Enthusiasm-to-come.

I introduce Garton's two enthusiasms here only to draw out the conceptual difference between U/Acc and its cousin, Right Accelerationism (R/Acc)—and R/Acc's brother, Neoreaction (NRx). R/Acc and NRx found themselves concerned with state formation through the multiplication of states, as political units would splinter outwards into a fantastic tapestry: this is their vision of the empirical world as ever-multiplying patchwork.

What Vince was pointing to, by contrast, was a different phenomena: the existence of an “infectious patchwork within the state”, a swarm of heterogeneous elements rising up from the decomposing body of the immortal Leviathan.

It was by lucky coincidence that it would later be discovered that Deleuze himself had deployed the term patchwork in a not dissimilar manner. He used the patchwork to draw out how the smooth space discussed at length in A Thousand Plateaus and elsewhere was not empty, but teeming with heterogeneity. In a historical-political register, Deleuze described nothing less than America itself as a patchwork. Yes, it was a nation, but one “swarming with nations”. In his comments on the American author Walt Whitman, Deleuze wrote that

Europeans have an innate sense of organic totality... Americans, on the contrary have a natural sense for the fragment... The world as a collection of heterogeneous parts: an infinite patchwork or an endless wall of dry stones... The society of comrades is the revolutionary American dream—a dream to which Whitman made a powerful contribution, and which was disappointed and betrayed long before the dream of the Soviet society.

That the persistence flight of Americans into the wilderness of the frontier cannot be reduced to commercial imperative, but was frequently motivated by religious divergences and prophecy, communal experimentation and labor exodus shows the validity of this articulation of the American character. This patchwork shouldn't be equated with the secessionist gambit of the Confederacy: taking American communal experimentation as an example, it was in the Union where these creative explosions, be they religious or socialistic (or both) had their greatest numbers.

In A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and Guattari returned to the patchwork to draw out the ways in which their concept of the smooth space was not simply an abstract and empty plane, but a space teeming with heterogeneous elements. The relationship between the patchwork and America was likewise rekindled:

Patchwork, for its part, may display equivalents to themes, symmetries, and resonance that approximate it to embroidery. But the fact remains that its space is not at all constituted in the same way: there is no center; its basic motif ("block") is composed of a single element; the recurrence of this element frees uniquely rhythmic values distinct from the harmonies of embroidery... An amorphous collection of juxtaposed pieces that can be joined together in an infinite number of ways: we see that patchwork is literally a Riemannian space, or vice versa. That is why very special work groups were formed for patchwork fabrication (the importance of the quilting bee in America, and its role from the standpoint of a women's collectivity). The smooth space of patchwork is adequate to demonstrate that "smooth" does not mean homogeneous, quite the contrary: it is an amorphous, nonformal space...

Amy Ireland would take up this line of inquiry, pointing out that for Deleuze and Guattari, the 'smooth space of patchwork', and its opposite, striated space, were deployed not only to assess questions of spatiality. Both are actually “configurations of space-time” that are “integral to social—and specifically—modernistic development”. Related to this, each also expresses a kind of multipliticity, which gives rise to different types of political ontology.

Striated space is an extensive multiplicity, meaning that every element added only alters the set quantitatively. Smooth space, by contrast, is an intensive multiplicity, and so concerns itself with qualitative transformation. 'Intensity', one of the most misunderstood concepts in Deleuze's philosophy (often taken as the term's most base, colloquial meaning), described points in the continuum of this intensive qualitative change. Or, as Ireland puts it: “each intensity is itself a difference”.

As extensive and intensive multiplicities, smooth and striated space(-times) provide us with particular ways to think through relations of identity. The side of striated space takes “identity first, and draws an extended configuration of difference in which every separate part necessarily refers back to this primary anchor in conceptual sameness”. The side of intensive smooth space presents a “shifting, complex, intensive ‘identity’ premised on the molecular, secret machinations of primary difference”.

What is at stake, in other words, is the fundamental problematic of the so-called ‘French turn’, which is the position of the primacy of difference. If we pivot to the dialectic of Mao, we have a similar maneuver: the “division of the One into Two”.

Ignore here Deleuze and Guattari’s hasty dismissal of Mao’s twist (“what we have before us is the most classical and well reflected, oldest, and weariest kind of thought”—such arrogance!). The destabilizing of the One into the Two isn’t simply a persistent game of binary opposites being played out in new guise, in the sense of ‘two Ones’. It is instead the recognition of the multitude that courses before and beneath the One, the fundamental division within it. From the position of social relations, it is the traumatic upswell of something repressed by modern politics. In this sense, the white-hot flood unleashed by the Chinese revolutionary war, as objective reality, is being registered philosophically in the French turn, even if Deleuze and Guattari  find their own most direct expression in the quasi-aborted dimensions of the American experiment(s) (the patchwork).

What does all of this have to do with the ‘deep state’? The answer lies in what exactly the deep state is, and more importantly, from where it arises.

America and the Civil War in the Heart of Modernity

In the narrowest sense, the deep state was used to designate a structural unity buried deep in the Turkish state, a mixing-together of certain state appendages, the military, intelligence agencies, and organized crime networks that was necessitated by Turkey’s leg of Operation Gladio. Similar ensembles can be found in the other countries that Gladio touched: the infiltration of the Italian state, banking system, military and paramilitary right by the infamous Propaganda Due masonic lodge, the “Nebula” uncovered in Belgium, etc. This already illustrates the network organization of the deep state, as well as its supranational character. Gladio was a counterinsurgency machine-in-waiting carried out under the auspices of NATO, an internationalist military organization of which the United States had ultimately set in motion.

In a broader sense, ‘deep state’ has referred to the permanent, unaccountable state bureaucracy. This is a more generic understanding of the deep state, and it is clear how one can pass easily from the limited understanding—the Gladio apparatus—to this.

Let’s go back to that strange image, the patchwork internal to the state—or, the intensive heterogeneity of the smooth space. Take seriously the vexing question about America in this context: if America embodied this, on a foundational level, as a 'nation swarming with nations', how did it put in motion a planetary imperial machine that expresses itself not only in the blood-drenched onslaught of neoconservative nation-building, but in liberal odes to humanitarianism and the rule egalitarian law. Or, how did the society that cast off the shackles of the British empire help to re-establish it and give it a new, solid basis?

There are many routes one could go. An appealing—and not at all inaccurate—path could be the imperial Anglophilia, grounded in the practicality of commercial ties, financial flows, and familial relations, that bound both the Confederate South and leading Northeastern capitalists to the Empire.

Or, if one prefers, we could go to the aftermath of the Second World War, when the US emerged with an unmolested industrial base, powerful reserves, and a cunning that allowed it to weld the dollar to the new Bretton Woods agreement (over the trade settlement schemes of Keynes). Both of these approaches lodge us, productively, in the vertigo found in the crevice between base and superstructure, and they are essential movements for developing a general theory of the Metacartel. But they do not tell us much about the molding forces of the deep state organizational network.

Instead, I think that the best path is to understand the answer to Why America when it comes to the power of the deep state is precisely in the side of America that is a patchwork or smooth space, with a bleeding western edge of advanced deterritorialization—a zone of differences that are not reducible to a One that measures and assesses them.

If you want, this is America, as something that is historically and conceptually distinct from the United States. This isn’t to say that they are fundamentally separate: the unity, as the United States of America, is the setting in motion of a process long in search of an answer. However farcical such a suggestion might be, what is playing out in such a polarity is an iteration of a fundamental immanent contradiction, an irreconcilable crisis, that typifies the era of modernity as such.

The Janus-faced soul of modernity is the battleground between two counterposing tendencies. One face of modernity is the revolutionary force of the people themselves, having been uprooted from their peasant soil and made mobile in a strange new world (the proletarian as nomad) filled with technological and scientific advancement, capable of transforming themselves into a 'molten mass'. The other face is the unrelenting drive to restore and/or impose order on the world.

What makes the immanent crisis of modernity unique for America is that, unlike Europe, it did not suffer the heavy weight of history and the necessity of tearing away the feudal remnant. The very space-time in which the immanent contradiction played began on a radically different footing, one where potential and difference—the intensive multiplicity of the American patchwork—were primary. It was born of revolution; revolution was not a break in its world (or it was at least a very different kind of break). There were no retrograde politics of restoration of the European sort to be found.

This is why, per C. Wright Mills, social antagonism has tended to take a very different form in America, which is all too often treated as crude individualism, naive unionism or some form of petite-bourgeois or otherwise utopian socialism. Yes, the class struggle has coursed across the dizzying development of American capitalism, but it has found its keenest expression—to quote Paul Piccone in his reflections on Mills—in the struggle against

institutional rationalization and the centralization of power which denied the capacity of the individual and the public to link means and ends, to work as craftsman with integrated work-leisure lives, to have control over those decisions that effected their lives, and to have access to reasoned opinion and communication.

Social antagonism, in other works, takes shape in America not in competition with forces that restore the dead regimes of old, but as the opposition to forces that would seize, block, or regulate the sovereign power to act in the world. What is often taken today as the stubborn cantankerousness of backwards rubes, hayseeds and dwellers on the margins is the echo of this fight, as is the icy condescension coming from the 'progressives'. This is because the progenitor of today's progressive politics—which is really just a dilution of politics, the end of politics as technocratic administration—was the constellation of social forces that crystallized in the heyday of the so-called 'progressive era'.

Behind the well-meaning platitudes and frantic solutionism of the progressives was a mass campaign to eliminate the specific and the particular. Reform movement, social sciences, temperance, eugenics—these were all rolled out to help tame the 'unruly masses', a purifying social hygiene. The genesis of this campaign was tangled up with a series of interrelated dynamics, acting as the double expression—social conscience and technical organization—of an underlying techo-organization transformation.

These dynamics included:

1. The  passage towards a highly socialized form of production that tended towards economic stagnation (and thus required special mitigation efforts to sustain itself)—call it monopoly capital(ism).
   

2. The formation of a continental-scale “national market”, where goods could be sold in locations far removed from their point of production.
   

3. The increasing importance of the 'technostructure', or the advanced, scientifically-inclined managerial strata within enterprises that serviced such economies of scale.
   

Because of America's unique circumstances, with the particular (or the different) taking primacy—nomadic movement over sedentary life—the rationalizing drive was a war of annihilation, but it was conflict that was launched on the back-foot. The intended outcome was to forge from the froth of a decentralized and dis-aggregated social matrix a modern, unified public and accompanying regime of public opinion, mediated by experts and regulated by enlightened managers. What made this public distinct from the political formations that proliferated across modernity was that it was to be one suitable for living life under monopoly.

Hence the supreme importance of the Lippmann-Dewey debate. On the one hand, John Dewey, the pragmatic thinker of the small, self-governing community where individuals would engage in self-cultivation through public participation. On the other hand, Walter Lippman, an elitist of the European (Fabian) socialist mode, saw the individual under protracted assault by the complexity of the new world, leading to the individual's incapacity for sound judgment. Dewey saw the ability to act socially and politically as deriving from the continued transmission of social “tools and techniques” across time—tradition—while Lippmann derisively wrote that “In the helter-skelter which we flatter by the name of civilization, the citizen performs the perilous business of government under the worst conditions”.

But for the sort of regime that Lippmann's position exemplified to be become actualized, it required a sweeping pacification program that choked-out divergent lines wherever they appeared, overcoded disparate community formations with a majoritarian identity, and set in motion a managerial regime to ensure the production and reproduction of economic relations. The old tools that Dewey privileged were replaced with a toolkit of abstract techniques (industrial relations, industrial psychology, public opinion research, so on and so forth).

Bringing these things to bear required an immense expansion of bureaucracies, scattered across the various scales of government, within corporate entities and universities, and in the creation of an unending parade of foundations, research institutions, think-tanks, and so-called 'charitable' organizations. It is this matrix, erected under the banner of progressivism, that the seed-bed of the 'deep state' can be found.

The Open Society and Its Unspecified Enemies

But that historical pivot was not the historical realization of the deep state. It existed only in faint hints and ghostly outlines. Its concrete instantiation was still decades away. Across that short chasm of time was the supersession of high national progressivism by the emergence of a global 'civil society'. The foundations of this were laid in what progressivism, despite its inward-facing character, was always wedded—international political activism, of the sort pursued by the League of Nations and the many advocates of a 'Just and Durable Peace'.

In the global context, this supersession paved the way towards what is described as the Open Society. The term is most associated with the man who acted as its ideological fountainhead, the Austrian-British philosopher Karl Popper. In his book The Open Society and Its Enemies, written while the fires of World War 2 still raged, Popper unleashed a defense of liberal democracy against the horrors of fascism and Soviet collectivism.

Instead of Popper, I would like to focus on a different thinker to assess the development of the Open Society: Austrian legal philosopher and jurist Hans Kelsen.

There are several reasons to focus on Kelsen rather than Popper and his protege, George Soros, in assessing the mechanics of the Open Society. The first is that Kelsen functions as something of a forefather—if not intellectually, then spiritually—of Popper (by twist of history, the two had met, and it was through the intervention of Kelsen that Popper was able to meet F.A. Hayek). Robert Schuett, in his intellectual biography of Kelsen, even notes that

One might say he [Kelsen] was already living the open society ideal, soon to be made famous by Popper and Soros, which is not to say that Kelsen pre-empted these men and their ideas, but rather that he was an intellectual streetfighter for a set of ideas that make an open society: rule of law, human rights and individual freedom.

The second reason is that Kelsen was the thinker most closely associated with the birth and development of the United Nations—not that he was the mover-and-shaker for the formation of the institution, but that he reflected critically on it, and drafted the texts that would be treated as the universal standards for understanding it. In this sense Kelsen was a self-reflection of the forces that propelled the United Nations forward, rendering this historical juncture ideological legible and priming it for reproduction.

The United Nations itself is essential because it marks a pivot point, an institutional signal for the profound passage from an international arrangement of economic and political relations to a transnational state of affairs. A move of relations between and among states to an organization of relations that cuts across states and soars beyond them. Or, in other words, the subsumption of Leviathan into globality proper.

In Kelsen's legal theory, an international legal order is formed through a community of states equipped with equal rights. This legal equality is, importantly, first and foremost an ethical idea that is independent from historical conditions and social context, a position he draws out from the natural law tradition. But a specter immediately haunts this crystalline image: that of the state's sovereignty, and so Kelsen must banish any hint of a relationship between the sovereign and legal equality.

The way out of this polarity is the synchronization of national legal equality and international legal equality, based in a pure form of law grounded in the ethical idea capable of binding both together. This theory of legal monism translates into a question of systematic ordering: the “organization of humanity... would therefore be one with the supreme ethical idea”.

Schmitt's critique of Kelsen covers a number of points, including the point-out of the obvious: the concrete reality of such an order, utterly divorced from context, becomes a global regime on commands executed downwards from above, and would thus constitute little more than the end of politics as such. Or, as Piccone described it (lapsing again into the traumatic kernel of Marxism that he was forever incapable of truly banishing), Kelsen's approach exhibited a unseen class character that “hypostasized” “legal agents” to the “level of de facto rulers”.

Here one begins to get an inkling of the 'deep state' itself. Take the prototypical deep state institution: the CIA. Was its organizational mastermind, Allen Dulles, not first and foremost a 'legal agent', a clandestine soldier with a storied career as a powerful corporate attorney at Sullivan & Cromwell?

Beyond the legal agents that would administer Kelsen's community of nations lay the real non-ground of globality, which is little more than the absolute densification of fictitious capital through a series of key nodes—and black holes (the offshore system)—scattered across the earth.

The meta-structure of this system is best illustrated in the research of Stefania Vitali and Stefano Battiston, which sought to uncover the hidden webs linking corporate ownership at the transitional level. What emerged from their excavations was the existence of a network structure with a clear 'core', where control of the majority of major corporate entities exists. Yet within the core itself exists what the researchers dubbed a 'super-entity', a tightly-woven cluster of corporate entities that exerted control over much of the extended network.

In later studies, Vitalia and Battiston determined that the dominant corporate control networks were focused in two distinct—but interrelated—geographical locations: the United States and Great Britain. This is a predictable outcome. Vitali and Battison discovered that financial institutions played an outsized role in their 'core' structure, and the geographical distribution of corporate control aligns roughly with the two primary financial centers: New York City and the City of London.

Taken together, we can offer the following schematization: Globality results from the transnationalization of fictitious capital, with a twinned set of lead positions acting as its vanguard. Hegemonically, this is expressed as unipolarity, which finds its legal articulation and self-justifying social conscience in the framework of the 'Open Society'. What presents itself as a flattened and abstract 'equality of nations' disguises a global system that, while having assimilated sovereign states into itself, is based on an economically-motivated hierarchies of states.

The role of the 'deep state' in relation to the Open Society is two-fold: it is an instrument of ideological reproduction, and it is a security apparatus. Most specifically, it is concerned with counter-insurgency (and here we can drop down to the limited, original historical deployment of the term—'deep state' as a material ensemble set in motion by Gladio, which was the superstructure for a continental counter-insurgency strategy).

These two elements might seem like very different things. Counter-insurgency appears at first as localized military—or paramilitary—operations, while the production and reproduction of ideology concerns the socius as a whole. That the socius can never truly be captured by representation, much less programmatic conditioning, matters little at this stage, but becomes of supreme importance down the road...

In reality, counter-insurgency had always aimed itself at the social totality, and its ideological work extends far beyond basic propaganda pushes. The historical deployment of counter-insurgency saw it utilized in tandem with modernization theory, which utilized a carrot-and-stick approach to try and jump-start capitalist social and economic relations in so-called underdeveloped societies susceptible to peasant agitation and rebellion. Later, modernization was swapped for democratization theory—a liberal 'science' of 'political transition' to democracy—which helped move counter-insurgency towards “democracy promotion” techniques—the color revolution model.

Behind all of these elements, ever-present at each step of their development, buzzes a hive of think-tanks (and in the latter period, NGOs and non-profits, posing as the 'conscience of civil society') attached like glue to the national security apparatus and complete with a byzantine web of financing flows and personnel interlocks. This web reaches through philanthropic foundations (the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations, and in later iterations, the Open Society Institute of George Soros), the CIA, and major universities (Harvard, Yale, etc). What emerges is not so much 'revolving door' but an infinite curve of circularity linking together the intelligentsia, the policy-making arena, and the black substrate for covert action.

These are precisely the mechanical byproducts of the general tendency towards “bureaucratic rationalization” that so troubled American sociologists like C. Wright Mills, who saw this as the essential target of antagonistic social forces. Here is the underlying hypothesis: the 'deep state' emerges when the historically-determined pacification program underwent a transformation at the point where globalism began to assert itself. In this new form, it directed itself inward and outwards simultaneously, moving against any threat, regardless of reason or orientation, that was antagonistic to the emergent Open Society.

In a global world order, this dangerous particularity, from the point of view of universal legality and social norm, is abstract and non-localized.

The problem, however, is that the different, the particular and the specific, is an energetic substratum that can never be fully discharged. It is the foundation on which the new sovereign order attempts to forge itself, while also acting as the outside essential for the continual expansion of the system. It is thus a paradoxical formation to which power must somehow respond—and so it presents itself to the dominant regime as a horrifying excess, a howling social ectoplasm or contagion haunting the sinews of empire.

It's no coincidence that visions of excess stalked the psyche of managerial-monopoly capitalism. Bataille's The Accursed Share, published in 1949, took the Marxist theory of overproduction crisis to its extreme conclusion by putting excess and abundance, not scarcity, as the beginning of economic analysis (and here Bataille becomes an important philosopher of Cornucopia Earth). In the mid-1960s, Baran and Sweezy struck an odd echo of Bataille's 'general economics' by suggesting that monopoly capitalism generated, through its immense profits, a strange excess—their surplus, as distinct from Marx's surplus value—that could never be fully cycled back into the system through reinvestment.

The vital insight that Bataille bestows is that for an ordered system—for any system—excess is the (un)ground(ing) that makes catastrophe possible. There is an ironic twist, then, that Vince in 'Leviathan Rots' had discerned the popularization of the term 'catastrophe' as exhibiting a particular political valence, having proliferated in the “prophetic upheaval of the Hobbesian era, the English Civil War”. In other words, catastrophe bears a spiritual relationship to the figure that Leviathan must always suppress, the Enthusiast.

A full circle has now been made, but it is one that reveals both the origins of the 'deep state' and the answer to the question Why America? The 'deep state' is the infrastructure of a permanent repression of the swirling social excess that ever-troubles the gilded cage of bureaucratic rationality; it derives its idiosyncratic character from an American experience of a primal internal heterogeneity, the intensive smooth space, that runs ahead of political consolidation. Through the escalating logistic curve of expanding circuits of capital, which takes the body of the earth itself as its domain, the bureaucratic machinery we call ‘the deep state’  reaches an absolute velocity of its own and seizes its clandestine universality.

On a final point to draw some of these implications out, consider the following passage from A Thousand Plateaus:

Doubtless, the present situation is highly discouraging. We have watched the war machine grow stronger and stronger, as in a science fiction story; we have seen it assign as its objective a peace still more terrifying than fascist death; we have seen it maintain or instigate the most terrible of local wars as parts of itself; we have seen it set its sights on a new type of enemy, no longer another State, or even another regime, but the "unspecified enemy"; we have seen it put its counterguerrilla elements into place, so that it can be caught by surprise once, but not twice.

Set outside the complicated genealogy of Deleuze and Guattari's concept of the 'war machine' and instead focus on this peculiar term, the 'unspecified enemy'. Two additional turns bracket the introduction of this figure: first, the specter of a terrifying, post-fascist peace, and second, the reappearance of counterinsurgency programs. Indeed, Deleuze and Guattari drew this term, 'unspecified enemy' from the new French counterinsurgency doctrines that were being drafted in the wake of technologically-advanced cybernetic warfare.

The terrifying post-fascist peace, meanwhile, is the global 'peace' of the Open Society.

One would be very correct in demanding a clarification of this passage in the 21^st century, as we stand teetering on the precipice of a double catastrophe—world war and civil war—that the machinery of the deep state does target states and regimes (Russia, China, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Libya, North Korea... the list is endless). But one could make the counterpoint that from the point of view of the Open Society, 'rogue states' are really not states at all. This is why fantasies proliferate in online spaces, where NATO-sponsored infowarriors swap ill-conceived maps proposing outlines of a forcefully balkanized Russia.

Regardless, the nature of the unspecified enemy is drawn out by Deleuze and Guattari elsewhere in the pages of A Thousand Plateaus. Describing once again this “real, very special kind of peace”, they note that while there is no longer a need for the war against “a qualified enemy” there must be persistent operations “against the 'unspecified enemy,' domestic or foreign (an individual, group, class, people, event, world)”.

The unspecified enemy, in other words, is not unspecified because it is invisible and hard to discern. It is unspecified because it is an abstract enemy, an abstraction that designates the excess that threatens the unipolar world order, both internally and externally, in circumstances, times and location that vary.

In the 21^st century, the unspecified enemy designates emergent political subjectivities, born through the alchemical transmutation of the social excess into a concrete antagonism. In the permanent present pursued by the unipolar empire, these subjectivities take on the character of paradoxical time-signatures: they seal an “occult pact between the future and the past”, without simply being a conservative politics of restoration or progressivism's infinite process of leveling. Like Marx's “resurrected Romans”, they are untimely, and for that reason they are only regarded with horror.

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A few additional links that might be of interest with respect to some of the discussion above:

Strange America Round-Up; a collection of blog posts on the American Particular (and Peculiar) from my original Reciprocal Contradiction blog

Patchwork: A Reader; a collection of various writings on Patchwork, assembled by the original U/Acc crew.

Postmodern Populism; an essay by Paul Piccone of the Telos journal on the conflict between populist currents and bureaucratic rationalization. Piccone effectively discovers what we might call Maoism with American Characteristics, a topic for future posts.

A semi-old Outsideness (Nick Land) tweet on economies of scale.

Movement in the Dead Lands; an essay I contributed to ŠUM, issue 14 (2020) on NSK and catastrophic spirodynamics & myth.