First & Last Emperors: The Absolute State and the Body of the Despot [Paperback ed.] 0936756772, 9780936756776

Table of contents :
1. Introduction
2. The Elimination of Strength: Absolutism, the Body of the Despot, and the Rise of the Chinese Empire
3. Postmortem on the Presidential Body: or, Where the Rest of Him Went
4. First and Last Emperors: Conclusion

Citation preview

F I R S T & L A S T E M P E R O R S THE ABSOLUTE STATE A N D THE BO D Y OF THE DESPOT

KENNETH DEAN & BRIAN MASSUMI

jANO L

a s t EMPERORS

AUTO NO M ED IA N EW A U TO N O M Y SE R IE S Jim Fleming & Peter Lamborn Wilson, Editors

TAZ The T em porary Autonomous Zone, Ontological A narchy, Poetic Terrorism Hakim Bey

This Is Y our Final W arn in g! Thom Metzger

Friendly Fire Boh Black

Caliban and the W itches Silvia Federici

First and Last Emperors Kenneth Dean & Brian Mas.sumi

W arcraft Jonathan Leake

This W orld W e M ust Leave and O ther Essays Jacques Camalle

Spectacular Times Lariy Law

The N ihilist's D ictionary and O ther Essays John Zerzan

X Texts Derck Pell

The Lizard Club Steve Abbott

Invisible Governance Essays in African M icropolitics David Hecht and Maliqalim Simone

F ir st & L a s t Em pe ro rs The Absolute S tate and

the

Body

of the

K e n n e th D e a n

& BRIAN ^MASSUMI

A u to n o m ed ia

Despot

Anti-copyright 1992 Autonomedia, Kenneth Dean & Brian Massumi This book may be freely pirated and quoted. However, please inform the authors and publisher at the address below.

Autonomedia P O B 568 W illiam sburgh Station Brooklyn, N Y 11211-0568 U S A 718-387-6471 Printed in the United States of America.

CONTENTS

1 In

t r o d u c t io n

2

h e

T

E

.......................................................7

l im in a t io n o f

S tren g th

Absolutism, the Body of the Despot, and the Rise of the Chinese Em pire..................... 11 3

P o stm

o rtem o n t h e

P r e s id

e n t ia l

B

ody

or, W here the Rest of Him W e n t........................ 87 4

F

ir s t a n d

L

a st

E

m pero rs

Conclusion...................................................... 153 N otes.................................................................. 169 Bibliography.................................................... 195 Illustrations......................................................... 205

1 I n t r o d u c t io n

7

In

tr o d u c tio n

They come like fate, without reason, consideration, or pretext; they appear as lightning appears, too terrible, too sudden, too convincing, too 'different' even to be hated. Their w ork is an instinctive cre­ ation and imposition o f forms ... That is after all how the 'state' began on earth. - F rie d rich Nietesche

W hat, do you imagine that I would take so much trouble and so much pleasure in w riting if I were not preparing a labyrinth into which I can venture, in which I can move my discourse, opening up underground passages, forcing it to go far from itself, finding overhangs that reduce and deform its itinerary, in which I can lose myself and appear at last to eyes that I w ill never have to meet again. I ^ no doubt not the only one who writes in order to have no face. Do not ask me who I and do not ask me to rem ain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers ^ in order. - M ic h e l Foucault

8

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F r o m b lin d in g lig h t t o d is a p p e a r a n c e f r o m t h e ir r u p t io n o f t h e S t a t e to t h e e f f a c e m e n t o f it s s u b je c t . W e r e t u r n t o la t e - c a p it a lis t A m e r ic a b y w a y o f a n c ie n t C h in a f o llo w in g t h e s e lf - d is p e r s in g b o d y o f t h e D e s p o t. O u r fa c e w h ic h w e c a n n o t c o u n te n a n c e is h is . A f t e r a ll. L e a v e it to th e b u r e a u c r a ts . A h is t o r y o f t h e p r e s e n t f o r a le a d e r le s s f u t u r e th e s e e y e s w i l l n e v e r s e e . D o n o t a s k u s t o r e m a in t h e s a m e .

9

2 T h e E l im in a t io n OF STRENGTH A B S O L U T IS M , T H E B O D Y O F T H E D E S P O T , AND

t h e

R

is e

o f t h e

C

h in e s e

E M P IR E

U N IT Y AN D D O IV U X IO X The firsl unified dynosly of Chino wos founded in 221 B.C. Fifteen years later, ii fell. Bui ihe imperiol machinery it set in motion during that short lime wos to span the dynosties, running for over two thousand years until the procEomolion of ihe Republic in 1912. The Qin Dynosty wos the product of o century of militory expansion by o peripheral feudol stole of the some nome. The Qin slote overron its neighbors one by one, bringing ihe Worring Stoles Period (463-222 B.C.) ond ihe frogII

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menled Zhou Dynosly lo o close. The process began with for-reaching social reforms introduced by the Legolist philosopher Shang Yong, advisor to Duke Xiao of Qin {reigned 361-338 B.C.).1 II was completed by Duke Xiaa's descendont, Duke Cheng, the self-proclaimed First Emperor, under the lulelage of onolher Legalist, a disciple of Shong Yang named Li Si.* The cenlrol work in the Legalisl corpus is The Book of Lord Shang (Shangjun shu). Traditionally attributed to Shong Yong, as it now survives ii is the work of many hands.1II reads like o collective how-to manual for the absolute Stote. Legal documents recently discovered in the grove of o loco! Qin dynosly official display in ostonishing detoil the concrete workings of the empire, providing evi­ dence thot policies of the kind set forth in The Book of Lord Shang hod in foci become doy-to-doy reolity.* The oim of this chopter, however, is not to establish o couse-effect relotion belween the ideas of 'greot' men, texts, and subsequent events. These formations ore indeed understood to be reloted— but oll on the level of effect. All ore effects of o common dynamic thot is contoinedneither in the concepts, nor in the texts, nor in the events, but is located in their interslices, inhobiting the space of their inlerrelotion. The aim here is to chart that inter-dynomism: whol Michel Foucault would call the "strategies" of the absolute Stole, and Deleuze and Guottori its "obstroct machine." What we hope lo estoblish, ohernoting belween textuol analysis of The Book of Lord Shang and historical description, is a flow­ chart of despotic desire. L

ic e

"Rites and music. odes and history, moral culture and virtue, filial piety and brotherly love, sincerity and faith, chastity and integrity, benevolence and righteousness, criti­ cism of the arm y and being ashamed of fighting"— The "six lice" that threaten the state.

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"W hen these twelve gain an attachment, dismemberment ensues” [D 256/KH 13:106-7 (see Key to Citations at the beginning o f the Notes]/ N o sooner are they six than they are twelve. A n y count is conventional, for lice are legion.6 If they are, they are spreading, in geometrical progression. They are a contagion sapping the strength of the state. “ Longing for old age, (enjoym ent o f) eating, beauty, love, ^ b itio n , and virtuous conduct” [D 306/KH 20:159] — ”the things people desire are countless” [D 211/KH 5:57]. Attributes of lice: they are nondenumerable, and they are desired. The question is not so much what they are, as how they are. Lice are not particular things, or even particular actions. They are a mode which any thing or action may adopt. Lice grow naturally from the necessary functions of the body politic. “ Farming, trade, and office are the three per­ manent functions in a state. Farmers open up the soil, mer­ chants [im port] products, officials rule the people. These three functions give rise to lice” [D 306/KH 20:159]. A third attribute: lice are a departure. They are neces­ sary functions running away with themselves. The differ­ ence between a louse and a necessity is one not of nature but of degree and direction. If farmers produce more food than is needed for minimal health, then people eat for eat­ ing's sake. If merchants import more commodities than are needed for food production, then people own for the jo y of possession. If there is eating for eating's s^ce and possession

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for the joy o f it, then the officials who regulate production and consumption grow fat and rich, and begin to act in their own interests. Lice are excess: the overfulfilm ent of a need. Lice are a diversion: of energies away from the state. Lice are the threat of a realm of self-indulgence in which desires are fulfilled for their own sake. They are the threat of a realm o f self-interest in w hich desiring bodies act on their own behalf and on behalf o f their own (fam ily, caste). The feared dismemberment o f the state is the creation or continuation o f semi-autonomous social realms incompletely subordinated to the state and expending bodily energies the state could otherwise channel toward its ends. Correction: end.

1. W a n d e rin g S c h o la rs AM h a . The various "stotelels" of the Zhou dynasty were in conslonl bottle. Their leaders, faced with incessonl warfare and increasingly com­ plex inlernol hierarchies, turned lo ihe services of educoled bureaucrats and mili­ tary advisors called 'wondering scholars' (yousM. Beginning in the 5lh cenlury B.C., these wandering scholars became increasingly mobile, moving from one stotelet to another, offering advice and onafyses of current events and political philosophy. Confucius (551-479 B.C.) is the besl known example. Various schools of thought were generated by these men and their disciples, most notobly Confucianism, Mohism, legalism, ond Taoism. Each school delighted in attacking the others, exposing weaknesses in their logic or decrying iheir effect on policy.’ From the lime of its establishment in the 9th cenlury B.C. until the formation of lhe Empire most of ihe chancellors of Qin were scholars brought in from other

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states. But The Book o f Lord Shang and the legal documents express extreme suspicion obout such people: "When 'wandering scholars' ore staying somewhere without tallies, the prefecture where they stay will be fined one suit of ormour." [H104/C3/W7.9b]' A second stotute brings out the underlying rage of the slate at those it connol control: "Those who praise the enemy in order lo frighlen the mind of the populolion will be dishonored. Whal is to ‘dishonor'? To dishonor himwhen olive, ond when the dishonoring is over, lo cul him osunder— Ihol is what is meant." [H134/D41/W8.29o] The First Emperor pursued Ihese policies to their logical extreme. Few evenls in Chinese history hove hod on impact equal lo Ihe famous Burning of the Books begun in 213 B.C. and lhe massacre of 460 Confucian scholars who were tradi­ tionally said lo hove been buried olive in 212 B.C. Significantly, the Book o f lord Shang wos spored, along with medical and prognosticotory texts. Note that colendricol/ divinotory texls were included in the lamb of the Qin official al Yunmeng.’ 2. M ott Ltd a) Feudal lineages and peasant families. The suppression of Confucianism and olher morolisl schools of philosophy removed lhe ideological base of supporl of lhe feudal orislocrosy, whose lands themselves were opproprialed by the stole. The lerritoriol clans of the peosonlry were undermined lhrough reforms thot realigned land divisions and placed all land under centralized administrative con­ trol. (See "Unifying obslroction and the capture of lond" below). b) Merchants. The slate ollempted to control the flow of goods ond copitol. Officials inspected lhe morkelploces, checking people's posses and policing prices. In lhe Yunmeng slolules we find: “When a slronger hos nol yel presenled his possporl lo lhe officials and trodes with them, lhe fine is one suil of armour." [H174/D163/W8:33o] This was one of o number of mechanisms the cumulative effecl of which was lo prevent lhe emergence of copilolism:

16

F i r s t 8: L a s t E m p e r o r s

"The resources of the merchant," stales The Book of Lord Shang, "are in his personol fortune. Thus in a single house within the empire is sequestered person­ al fortune and [monetary] resources. A person's resources consisting of o weighty fortune, he [may] perverse^ rely an this pawer[ful condition] abroad, and gothering up great resources, return to his house;’5this would hove been a problem for [exemplary rulers] Yoo and Xun. Therefore Tong and Wu prohibited this, with the result thot their success was established ond their fome made." [D 220/KH 6:66] Merchants ond criminals were routinely exiled to border regions, where they would be absorbed into the rigid organization of the garrison colonies protecting the sedentary interior of the stole from nomadic attack from the steppes [Bodde 1938:171]. c)

Criminals and self-serving bureaucrats. Lorge groups of "fugitives, bonded

servants, ond shapkeepers" were deported in 214 B.C. to labor colonies in the South, where they were put to work on lorge-scole ogriculture-reloted projects [SJ 6:253/MH 2:1691 They were followed in 213 B.C. by "functionories who had not been upright in handling court coses," some of whomwere sent North instead to work on the Great Woll [SJ 6:253/MH 2:169] 3. S u m tr. Anyone whose actions did not conform to the pattern of movements prescribed by the stole was either immobilized ("erased" or hobbled by fines) or rechonneled (into forced service). The stole displayed on obsessive fear of undis­ ciplined movement of people ond ideas, carefully preventing the creation of spheres of interest outside ils direct control. In the vocabulary of the time, it destroyed the possibility of "perversely reying on one's own power and returning to one's house." That involved containing flows unleashed by its own policies, such os the movements of the new merchant doss necenary lo distribute the increased agricultural surplus created by government promotion of agriculture. It abo involved attacking preexisting semi-oulonomous formations: the feudal oristacrotic fomilies and the territorial dons.

the

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H o le

“A counny of a thousand chariots that keeps only one outlet (door) for its products w ill flourish, but if it keeps ten outlets it w ill be dismembered" [D 197/KH 4:42]." “The means whereby a country is made prosperous are agricul­ ture and w ar” [ibid.]. A g ricu ltu re is the source of energies, w ar their only allowable outlet. A ll activity must flow uninterruptedly from singular source to singular outlet. Law , the channelizer, is “an expression of love for the people" on the part of the ruler [D 169/KH 1:14]. A people subject to the law “w ill love th e ir ru le r” in return [D 192/KH 3:37]. T h e wise ru le r “ causes others to lo ve ” [D 293/KH 18:144]. H e makes the people “delight in w ar,” so that “they behave like hungry wolves on seeing m eat” [D 286/KH 18:138]. He “establishes what they desire” [D 241-2/KH 9:88]. Unless the people are made one, there is no w ay to make them attain their desire. Therefore, they are made one: as a result of this unification, their strength is consoli­ dated, and in consequence of this consoli­ dation, they are strong. ... A country that knows how to produce strength ... bars all

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private roads for gratifying their ambition and opens only one gate through which they can attain their desire ... I I can m ake th e people Jo u 'bat th e y bate in o rd e r lo reach w ba! they de.iire [D 211-12/KH 5:57]. A ll doors o f desire are closed save one. Behind the closed doors lie cultivated pleasures. These imply leisure. W hich in turn implies shelter from the most basic demands o f the state. Sheltered, a body is free to indulge. Its satisfactions, as listed among the lice, are o f three kinds: consumptive (having a physical object such as food, another body, or a material possession}, reflective (having an intellectualized object, as in the case of music and w it}, and preservative (m oral training, family ritual, the only object of which is reproduction). Consumptive and the preservative satisfac­ tions go hand in hand. The former, by their very nature, require constant replenishment. The latter assure the physi­ cal availability o f the necessary objects through the perpetu­ ation of an am enably sheltering social order. Combined, they mitigate the dangers posed by either in isolation: out­ right hedonism or utter stagnation. Reflective satisfactions contribute to this mutual control loop, but also present a danger of their own: a kind o f aesthetic hedonism that would be next to impossible to stop once it took off on its own, due to the slip p ery nature of its intellectualized objects. The closed doors lead to an arena o f more or less super-

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Ouous activity privileging repeated, object-oriented satisfac­ tion and reproduction. The open door leads directly to the predatory thrill o f pursuit and attack, a jo y so immediate that all concern for consequences disappears. “ Fo r the ^sake o f our superiors, we (the people) forget our love of life” [D 188^/KH 3:33]. Fo r the people, as desired by the ruler, there is no object, not even self-preservation. The process of coin­ ciding w ith the ruler's desire is its own reward. The prey— its specific attributes, the predator's enjoyment of them after the capture (in other words whether any given w olf eats the m eat)- is irrelevant. It is more the stimulus than the desti­ nation of a drive. The ruling drive with which the people coincide as they die is fueled by interim objects, but has no end. There is always another state to conquer, and when they all fall there are still seas to cross. The insanity of an infinite outward rush replaces the reasoned circularity of social reproduction attended by the petty satisfactions of p rivileg e. A 'b a rb a ric ,' u ltim ately objectless, one-time orgiastic expenditure replaces the limited excesses o f the repetition-compulsion of'civilization' and its contents. The channelization of energies toward w ar and aw ay from semi-privatized or fam ilialized satisfactions is not a repression, or even a sublimation, so much as an immediate conversion of investments that retain their directly libidinal nature. The people must be made to do what they hate — place themselves in bodily danger, forego the sophisticated pleasures of good food and w itty conversation, turn their backs to the sweet rigors o f morality and ritu al—in order to

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give themselves over to an intenser love, the life-consuming pull o f predation in fusion with the person o f the ruler as State desire in the raw.

1. Aeuanrnitc f o x \Ntst. The second chapter of the Book o f Lord Shang is entitled "Opening up the Wastelands." Of twenty measures proposed to expand cultivolion of wastelands and strengthen agriculture, nine involve restrictions on the movements of oristocrols, merchants, idlers, and criminols. The Yunmeng documents reveal o similar preoccupolion with agriculture ond. the control of resources: "Whenever the rain is beneficial and offecls the groin in ear, o report in wfting is to be mode concerning the crop that hos been benefited and the groin in ear, as well as the number of qing [I 5.13 acre units] of cultivated fields and areas without crops ... Likewise in coses of drought and violent wind or rain, floods, or hordes of grasshoppers or olher creolures which damage the crops, lhe number of qing concerned is always to be reported in writing. Nerirby prefeclures hove light-footed [runners] deliver the letter, distant prefeclures have lhe courier service deliver it." [H21/Al/W7.1a] The government granaries supplying the army and state laborers were closely policed (see "Regulated Stockpiling" below). The stole hod at its disposal two categories of laborers: carvee laborers and hord-lobor convicts. In the following dynasty, lhe Hon (206 B.C-220 A.DJ, all men except the higher levels of the (by then reconstituted) aristocracy hod to perform two years of military service and one month of corvee duties per year. In the Qin, men were enrolled on the registers ot age I 5 and left them at 60. Soldiers of the triumphant armies of Qin presumably served long periods in the army: bottles were fought almost continuous^ from 256 to 210 B.C. The length of time served by convicls hos been much debated. Hulsewe maintains lhal it wos

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under six years but other authorities disagree. In any case, there must hove been immense armies of prisoners of war working away their lives on the gigantic Qin hydrouhc and wall-building projects. Personal files appear lo hove been kept on laborers, noting which look were lent lo Ihem, whether they were delinquent al their duties, and even whether or nol lhe sections of pounded-eorlh wall they hod worked on hod collapsed within o year of their work on it. Efe clive measures were token lo ensure Ihol oll surplus-value was chonneled inlo wor, directly in the form of food and soldiers for the army, ond indi­ rectly in the form of lobor for forlificolions and for public works promoting inlensive agriculture. 2. MitnARJIAnou o f Soarr All of society wos reorganized occording lo o military model, lronsforming the Qin stole into an immense wor machine. The impetus for the opplicolion of the military model lo society al large appears lo hove been the prolonged conlocl between the Qin stole ond the 'borborions,' as groups outside the mainstream of Chinese culture were colled. (See “Nomadic Carriers” below.) o) Cell dnidure. The military practice of orgonizing troops inlo five-man squads was opplied to the entire populotion through household registration. Every five-family group had lo provide five men for the mililory droft and corvee lobor. Officials were punished for ottempling to draft more than one member of o family at the some time, bul they were also punished if they foiled lo register young men who hod come of age, or foiled to muster the conscripts, or ottempled to conceal those who should be conscripted by making them "retoiners." b)

Militarization o f rank. Ronk in civil administration wos pinned to military

exploits rather than aristocratic title. Specifically, it hinged on chopping off enemy heads. Anyone who took one head was promoted one rank, up to the fourth rank. Then one could be promoted ony if one become the leader of o mili­ tary squadron, and then only if one's squadron took 33 heads [Tu 1985]. Officerswere awarded special prerogatives, but were still kept in five-man mulual surveillance units.

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The specifics of the assignment of ranks, tax exemptions, and lands and estates in reward for heads token in bottle ore given in Chapter 19 of The Book o f la rd Shang, "Within the Borders.' The Han feizi[17:43.15] summarizes the sftuotion: "The low of the Lord of Shong said: 'Those who toke one head receive one degree in rank, and those who desire on office (instead), receive on office of SO piculs of groin; those who toke two heads, receive two degrees in rank'.’ [0 296, n.5]. "If the centurions and corporals toke over 33 heads, this is accounted ample.... (D297/KH 19:147).“ ‘ If in attacking a city or beseiging a town, (each general) con capture 8000 heads or more, it is accounted ample; if in a bottle in the open field, 2,000 heads ore accounted ample ...a [D297/KH 19:149]. c). Hierarchiiation. The entire social rtructure wos integrated into a twenty­ tiered hierarchy of ronks.11 This represented a significant extenoon of hierarchy by comparison to the eortier feudol social organization, in which the graduated ranks of the aristocrats set them off as a group from the undifferentiated 'moss­ es'. There was a corresponding development of specialized units within the mili­ tary. Ranks in the military were marked by badges and flogs, and in civil society by sumptuory regulations governing clothing, official lodging, and per diems.

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d). Pas system. The movement of the entire population was restrid- p ^ T j ed and organized along military lines, requiring lollies and passports lo move between cities and in some coses even from one port of a city to another [Yates 1980].

* ® , * S£

■ »

f*9 H tf

3. U m r n A s m m ii

and

the CAPTURE of LAND. The entire empire was

i

•*

divided into administrative units modeled on the military commonderies,

,

or garrison colonies, that hod been established in frontier regions cap­ tured from the 'barbarians.' Thisinvolved the imposition of a unified sys-

*

tern of administration over whol hod been widely diversified feudal hold- ^ 9 » ings and porticulorislic communities. The crucial step in this process was Shong Yong's "destruction of the

b * g

well-field system [the legendary feudal tenant forming systemL and the

».

opening up of the pathways and roods belween the fields.” This removed the land from the control of the feudol fiefdoms and local dons. It took

*

the capture of land to a new level: land is now viewed abstractly as con­ sisting of quantifiable units by a stole which minutely surveys its producls, efficiently loxes ii, ond redistributes it for its own ends.” This 'slolislicol' method of governing was one of the major innovations chompioned by the Legalists, and entoded the first population censuses condud-

* lj~

ed in Chino." Shong Yong's land reforms appear lo hove opened the way for some form of private land-ownership ond the buying and selling

** * % wx£

of land. However, the stole maintained ullimole ownership and the peas­ ant's rights of possession was closer lo usufrucl. The break-up of lineol terriloriolilies hod the effect of 'nudeorizing' the family. Nothing would

*

stand belween the nowstondordized basic productive unit of society ond

J .* -

the central odminislrolion. The landed holdings of the feudal lords and the porliculoristic self-tontoined village communities were gathered up

,

and transformed into building blocks for the newedifice of empire. After the First Emperor's death, usurpers bypassed his eldest son

□ * □*** 19

.

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and installed o younger sibling as Second Emperor. They ordered the eldest son and General Meng nan to commft suicide, cynically charging themwith disloyalty toward the imperial house. Meng nan refuted the charges, but implied that his innocence concealed o guilt of o different nature: "Indeed I hove o crime to die for. Beginning al Untoo and extending to Uoodong, I hove made ramparts and ditches over more than ten thousand /i [one4hird milel and in that distance it is impossible that I hove not cut through the veins of the earth" [SJ 88:2570]. The veins of the earth refer to Chinesegeomontic principles, but also recall the close relationship between 'primitive' communities and the territories to which those communities hod religious aswell as lineal ties (see 'Divinity as the Fulfillment of Patriarchy” below). These territories ore cut loose from their traditional dividing lines, gathered up by the Stote, and recodified; this process may be called "over­ coding.” Meng nan's evocation of o crime againrt geomontic lines in relation ta o controversy surrounding the imperial line indirectly expresses the transposition from earth-based territoriality to a reterritoriolizotian an the imperial household as abstract unifying principle of o now centralized and hierarchical Stote. The First Emperor was of course guilty of similar crimes. One of the imperial progress­ es he undertook to mark the boundaries of his newly conquered realm was impeded by local goddeses. In retribution, he ordered 3,000 convicts to chop dawn all the trees covering the goddesses' sacred mountain and to paint the mountain red, a color associated with condemned criminals. [SJ 6:248/MH 2:154-156] This is o graphic example of imperial overcoding: the Emperor sweeps down ta impose his judgment, literally leaving his mark as he transforms the earth, usurping the powers associated with a local sacred site os port of a uni­ fying circuit around the reolm.15 4. TheLAWENTERS THt P a n t: m i SPYINC-MACRM. To ensure that the people pursued the single and correct poth, and to excise or block the development of any medioting lice, the state of Qin instituted a system of mutual responsibility. No seg­ ment of society was exempt. In the army, ronk-ond-file and officers alike were

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organized inlo five-mon unils. In civil sociely, peosonl families, merchonts, ond bureoucrots were oil broken down into fives. If one member of o cell wos found guilly of o crime, ihe other four received the some punishment. Several possoges in the Yunmeng legal documents suggest thot the spying system was a sociol innovation thot required repeated clorificotion, in porticulor the concept of mutuol responsibility. Notice the self-referential ond refledive nature of the text of the low: "Whot is the meaning of 'the four neighbors'? The 'four neighbors' means the group of five” [H146/D82/W8.30b]. ”[The Stotules soy thot in the case of] robbery ond oll other crimes 'those who dwell together' ore lioble to be tried. Whot is the meaning of 'those who dwell together'? The household is meont by 'those who dwell together.' Servonts ore tried for crimes [committed by the members of a household] but the [mem­ bers of the household] are not tried in those crimes committed by the servants: thot is the meoning." [H126/D19/W8.28o] The abstraction of the lond and the population and iheir recodtficotion by a centralized Stote opporotus mode it possible for the emperor's will to reoch inlo the people in the form of a self-policingbody of low. 5. TAXATIONANDS r n MoNff Monopoly. At the some time os the State abstracts the lond and asserts ultimate ownership over it, a system of taxation is created to obstract the flow of wealth. ‘The delivery of hoy and straw per q/ng is mode according to the number of fields bestowed. Irrespective of whether the fields are cultivated or uncultivated, per qing three busheh of hoy are delivered and lwo bushels of straw.... When delivering hoy and straw, conversion of the one into the other is permitted. [H23/A3/W7.1b] The reference to government bestowal of land is evidence agoinst outright private ownership [Hulsewe 1985:215-18]. The next step in the abstrodion of wealth wos also taken: the introduction of o general conversion stondord. In olher words, money. Severol passages in the

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Yunmeng materials refer to the payment of fines, fees, or taxes in cash. Currency consisted of round bronze coins and pieces of doth measuring B feel by 2 1/2 feet (equivalent in value ta 11 coins). An allusion ta the apprehension of counter­ feiters reveak that the Qin state kept a monopoly an money. In a particularly heavy-handed measure, the First Emperor intentionally made the coins weighty and cumbersome in an effort ta slaw dawn the flaw of capital unleashed by his own centralizalian policies. 6. S^UMr. By recodifying and redislribuling the territory, imposing conscription and carvee, reorganizing society inlo mutual spy celk, creating money, and inslituling regularized taxation, the State was able ta capture bath lobar and land as part of a generalized militarization of society. All resources followed an orderly flaw inward— into centrally administered food and weapon production, stockpil­ ing, and fortification— in order then to be discharged through the one and only hale of the State. Nol only was all of society subordinated ta war, it was explicitly reorganized an a military model. lice fell on hard times, as particularist desires for satisfoctian and preservation were converted into regimented collective pre­ dation carried out without concern for life or limb of the 'mosses.' O

n

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P

eo ple

A weak people means a strong state and a stron g state m eans a w eak people. Therefore, a country which has the right w ay is concerned with weakening the peo­ ple. If they are simple they become strong, and if they are licentious they become weak. Being weak, they are law-abiding; being licentious, they let their own ambi­

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tion g o too far; being weak, they are ser­ viceable, but if they let their ^ b itio n go too far, they w ill become strong. [D 303/KH 20:155] Lice

the people's strength. They give the people the

autonomy, will-power, and resources to pursue their own ends. Strength for the people is weakness for the State, w h ich has o n ly one end (w ith o u t en d ). The people's counter-State desires must be pared away to make all their energies available for service to the pared-down state of attack. “A country that practices knowledge and clevem ew w ill certainly perish” [D 201/KH 4:46]. “ A cou n try," on the other hand, “where the wicked govern the virtuous w ill be strong" [D 200/KH 4:45]. The right w ay to rule is to lavish torturous affections on one's subjects. “ If penalties are made heavy and rewards light, the ruler loves his people and they w ill die for him " [D 200/KH 4:46]. Desires w ill then flow in the right (“w icked ') direction. Loving violence toward the people begets loving violence for the ruler. A country which knows how to produce strength but not how to reduce it may be said to be a country that attacks itself, and it is certain that it w ill be dismembered. A co u n try th at know s how to p rod uce

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strength and how to reduce it may be said to be one that attacks the enemy, and it is certain that it w ill be strong. [D 202^/KH 4:47] A p ro liferatio n o f lice, because it opens doors and encourages an envigorated people to follow diverging paths, is a poison that undermines the unity o f the State and saps the strength o f the body politic as a whole. The poison can be tortured into dormancy, but is never eradicated. I f the country is strong and w ar is not waged, the poison w ill be carried into the te rrito ry™ B u t if the country thereupon wages w ar, the poison w ill be carried to the enemy, and, not suffering from rites and music and parasitic functions, it w ill be strong [D 199/KH 4:44]. A hydraulics of vigor and violence the goal of which is to flush dismemberment out of the State and into the enemy's camp, through the sole outlet o f war.

1. TheLAWAS INSTRUMENTOf TomE: The penal code of lhe Qin induded the follow­ ing types of punishments: death penalty, hard labor, banishment, cadration, and

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a variety of fines.11Reflecting the military obsessions of the Qin state, most fines were payable in shields or suits of armor. Dismemberment was a favored penal­ ty: criminals were perceived as dismemberers, and paid their debt to society in kind. There were at least four methods of carrying out the death penally: beheading, referred to os "costing away in the marketplace”; "being torn apart by carriages"; being cut in half at the waist; and drowning, for convicted lepers. The term "costing oway in themarketplace" makes on explicit equation between the undisciplined flows of trade and dismemberment. The inclusion of death by drowning for lepers suggests a connection between criminality and disease. There were five categories of hard labor: wall-builders (mole) and grain pounders (female), gatherers of firewood for sacrificial rituals (male) and sifters of white rice (female), bond servants and bond women, robber guards and watchmen. These punishments involved some form of mutilation. The moles of all five groups hod their beards shoved off (apparent^ regarded os a form of public humit.otion). The wall-builders olso had their heads shoved (a practice still used in contemporary China for criminals). Other mutilotions, in ascending order, included tattooing the face, cutting off the nose, cutting off the left foot, and cut­ ting off the right foot. Several of these mutilotions (particularly tattooing of the face) appear to hove been connected to the marking of the prisoner as o 'barborion' unfit for the Stole. 'It is a significant fact thot the first codes ore supposed to hove been promul­ gated during the hunt, that is to say, in the Marches which ore the home of the Barbarians. The penal code, while it exceeds simple famify jurtice, or the proce­ dure of the vendetta, is like martial low, or the right of war." [Gronet 1930:221] (See "Nomadic Carriers” below) The treatise on low in the History o f the Former Han Dynasty (Han Shu) remarks: "Qin put together Shong Yang's law of mutual responsibility and creat­ ed [under him] the execution of kindred to the third degree [i.ev including par­ ents, brothers, spouse and chddren]. In addition to bodily mutilation ond copitol punishment, there were the punishments of chiseling the crown, extracting ribs,

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and boiling in a cauldron.” [Bodde 1986:58, quoting Hulsewe 1975:332]. Several authors of the Legalist system ended their lives as ils vitlims. These include Han Feizi, who was poisoned by Li Si, in turn execuled by the Second Emperor. Shong Yang also died a victim of his awn principle of unbending applitolian of the low. He had antagonized the Heir Apparent by having his Tutor's nose cut off far a minor infraclian. When ShongYang's patron, ihe Duke of Xiao, died, Shang Yang fled. He oltempled to take refuge in an inn, but the innkeeper told him, "Anyone who atlempls la stay in an inn without proper credentials is a criminal.' The innkeeper was merely quoting the stotutes of Qin as seen in The Book of lo rd Shong. Shang Yang lried to flee ta the safety of his own fiefdom, but was captured, then tam la pieces by four horses in 338 B.C.” 2. P om ous Warn. The chapters an defenses against seige in the Moziinclude a discussion of rituals to be performed before doing battle wilh the enemy. They indicate lhal war was wewed by many of lhe statelets al lhe end of lhe Warring States period as an evil inflicted by an aulside aggressor which had to be exor­

cised by ritual magical and m'litary means [Yates 1980]. Qin employed ritualis­ tic curses against the enemy, as evidenced by the "cursing the Chu" inscriptions engraved in 313 B.C. by King Huiwenwang of Qin [Li Xueq'n 1986:239]. The enemy, however, was also within. The Yunmeng legal documents include

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a suit brought against a fellow villager for his "poisonous words.0 The man was found guilty and punished by ostrocizoton. The word "poison” appears to hove been token literally. [H206/E24/N.8.37b] Contentiousnes, or social disunity, was perceived as o bodily violation. 3. SUMtr. The reduction of the people's desires required the imposition of o vicious, physically mutilating system of punishment designed to transmit internal "poison” (disunity) to an outside enemy and to prevent the enemy from injecting poison bock into the State. Without such on enemy, the State could not work its mogic. As port of the process, the people were mode to experience punishment as on exprerion of the emperor's love for them. Waging war become their ony opportunity to express their love for him. Loving one's ruler meant leorning to love one's own dismemberment ond death. THE U

n if ic a t io n o f

W ORDS

The double vocabulary of the reduction or streamlining of energies and of their channeling for full utilization, expresses a paradox. The unity and maximum strength of the State can be assured only if dismemberment is evacuat­ ed; dismemberment, however, can be evacuated only if the people populating the State are reduced through torture. The body politic can only avoid accidental dism em be^ent by deliberately practicing it on itself. It can only prevent itself from attacking itself by attacking itself first, in order thereafter to attack another body politic which might have attacked it first, had it not already done so. To follow this preemptive logic, entire realms of activity and potential must be pared aw ay. The human body must

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be divested o f any pretence to wholeness and self-direction, becoming a unifunctional working part of a greater whole. In other words, a dedicated organ in a superorganism. I f objects come near, the eye cannot but see them; if words are insistent, the ear cann ot but hear them, for if objects approach they alter in appearance, and if w ord s d raw near th ey form coh erent speech. So with the organization in a wellgoverned state, people cannot escape pun­ ishment any more than the eyes can hide from the heart-mind (.Tin) what they see. In the disorderly states of the present time, it is not thus: reliance is placed on a multi­ tude of offices and a host of civil servants, but however numerous the civil servants may be, their afTairs are the s ^ e and they belong to one body. Those whose a fa irs ^

the ^same and belong to one body ^m-

not control one another. [D.320-21/KH 24: 175] There must be no distance between the ruler and the bodies of his subjects, who provide him with unmediated vision, comprehension, and judgment. The person of ruler is a double-faceted principle of desire (heart) and direction (m ind). The body politic's capacities for concerted vision,

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comprehension, and judgment flows from the ruler's person, and what is gleaned by them returns to it. There is a fundamental difference between this heartmincl!organ distinction and the Cartesian mincl!body duali­ ty. The state is not disembodied in the ruler, as transcendent seat o f rationality. The ruler is embodied in the State. Not only his senses but his faculty o f judgment is embedded in the body politic in the form o f the mutual spying machine.18 In the well-governed state, he is the source and destination o f a l possible sensation and thought, between which there ^can be no separation. I f a coherent body, sim ilarly combining sensation and thought, interposes itself between the ruler and his organs, the body p olitic is m utilated, rendered blind, deaf, and dumb. The emperor is no longer able to judge and rule. Not only is the ruler's sensation cut from his thought, but source and destination are no longer one. The ruler is still the driv­ ing principle by right, but in fact he is crippled, depleted, for what he brings forth is not returned. An interloping body diverts energies to its own ends. The presence o f such a mediating body cannot be toler­ ated. The law is the means by which the parasitic bureau­ cratic body is destroyed, and the mutilation it causes healed. It enforces nonseparation between the heart-mind and the organs. The law is the vehicle by which the source -th e ruler as desire or driving principle—is embodied in organs connecting the source to itself as destination. The law makes immanent what otherwise would be a piece apart, in the

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dark and impotent. It closes the State circle in such a w ay as to make it a line. It makes it po^ible for the spiralling ener­ gies o f the body politic to be channeled toward their one rightful outlet: war, the river o f no return. The law divides as it unifies. “ In a condition o f complete government, husband and wife and friends cannot dismiss each other's evil deeds and cover up each other's faults without causing harm to those close to them, nor can the men o f the people conceal each other from their superiors and government servants. That is because, although their affairs are connected, th eir interests are d iffe re n t" [D 321/KH 24:176]. Everyone's affairs are connected in their subordination to the aims o f the state, but each individual is assigned a special function distinguishing him or her from those around. Each is held responsible for the proper fulfill­ ment o f the other's duty. As the reference to government officials reveals, it is recognized that the total elimination of the bureaucratic caste is unattainable. Their numbers must be held to a minimum, their functions must be clearly differ­ entiated, and they must be subject to the same system of mutual responsibility as everyone else. The establishm ent o f strict divisions within the body politic constitutes the core o f the law. This is called the “uni­ fication of words." There can be no social order without it. W ords, slippery by nature, are the most fearful of lice. "A country that loves talking is dismembered" [D 188/KH 3:35]. W o rd s must be unam biguously pinned to a referent. That referent must be an unambiguous State function. That

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State function must c a rry w ith it unam biguous duties. W h e n the duties are fulfilled , the fu n ctio n ary must be u n ^ b ig u o u sly rewarded. W hen they are not, he must be un^ big uo usly punished [D , K H chapters 8, 9, 17]. Social divisions are just the beginning. The unification of words as applied to State functions can only succeed if other aspects of life are sim ilarly unified. Rewards and punish­ ments, not to mention taxation, cannot be systematized unless currency and weights and measures are standardized. Society cannot be effectively divided into mutual responsi­ b ility units unless the population is known. B irth s and deaths must therefore be registered. The land must be sur­ veyed and its divisions regularized. The products of the land must be painstakingly accounted for. The waters must flow where they

needed. Roads must connect the capital from

which order emanates to the countryside embodying it, like spokes in a wheel. An immense labor of organization, stan­ dardization, and recording must be undertaken. A ll of this necessitates clear boundaries for the state as a whole: the G reat W a ll and inscribed stone monoliths w ill mark its bor­ ders. The more unified the body politic becomes, the more dif­ ferentiated it is. The more undividedly its energies flow, the more rigidly they are channeled. In order to smooth, one must striate.

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1. STANrnDium OF IANGuAEf, W a rn , MEASURES, ANDROADS. U Siinlroduced stan­ dardized 'Small Seal” scripl farms for ihe Empire, suppressing the earlier Large Seal script as well as several regional sripls (such as the Chu "bird-script”). He reduced the number of choraders by twentytwentyfive percent by removing olternole characters and rare place-names. [Barnard 1978] His calligrophic style appears an surviving Qin inscriplions. "In ihe twenty-sixth year of his reign (221 B.C.) the First Emperor af Qin annexed all the feudal lands under heaven, brought peace to the black-heads [the 'mooses'! and proclaimed himself the sole ruler. Then, he issued a decree lo his ministers, ordering ihem to clarify and unify all lows and weights and mea­ sures which were perplexing or which were not uniform” [Cotterell 1981:75; LI Xueqin 1985:240-46]. This inscriplion hos been found an o large number of bronze and iron stan­ dard weights and measures (see illustrolion) dating lo the first empire, including a bronze pinl measure (sheng) which was originally cost in 344 B.C. and inscribed wilh Shong Yang's name. Whole seclians of the Yunmeng legal docu­ ments are concernedwilh the problem of standard weights, and lhe punishments la be allotted to those who dare tamper wilh the slondords. Extraordinary attention was paid to minor infractions. If a weighl deviated by less than 1%, heavy fines were levied on lhe culpable officioI. Melal currency was standard­ ized, as wos lhe gouge of vehicles. 2.

R e g u la te d

S td c k p ilin c .

Stockpiling was a chief concern of

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the state. Centralized granaries ore essential to the provisioning of o large-stole wor-mochine. The Yunmeng documents reveal o highly detailed and standardized granary administration system. Constant and careful inspections were conducted. State and regional granaries kept detailed accounts of groin received and rations iaued. There was on obsession with graft among officiok. Many regulatory and supervisory methods ore outlined, with itemized punishments for specific infrac­ tions. In o typical example, punishment is exacted for the discovery of poorly maintained granaries: we learn that when it comes to the Low, three mouseholes ore equal to one rothole. Weapons, shields, and armor were also stockpded. A large number of bronze weapons cost by the state of Qin hove been discov­ ered in every corner of lhe early Empire by Chinese archaeologists. Many of these ore inscribed wilh the dote of costing, the name of the prime minister who supervisedtheir production, and theplace of production (usually in regional gov­ ernmentfoundries or in central government institutions). Shong Yong's name appears on ot least two bronze weapons doting from 349 and 346 B. C [Li Xueqin 1985:234]. 3. MAUIH6 AND RECORDING: THE Im/PTON

of me LAw. Censuses, codostrol surveys,

fox aaegments, physical marking of prisoners, insignia of rank, lhe poss system, and registration ot inns (oil distussed above) were aspects of o generalized procea of moiking and recording undertaken to regularize implementation of the low.

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Thelow itself was inscribed. II wos Qin policy lo post the lows throughout the land, beginning as early as 513 B.C. with the inscription of the law on iron tripods. Prodicebooks found in Hon border garrisons suggest thol the army may have been instrumenlol in spreading literacy. Bui to most people, the offidol inscriptions were primarily awesome emblems of outhorily. Foremost among them were the imperial monoliths. The secret rituals and imperial progre51es of the First Emperor were marked by great stone inscriplions set atop the sacred mounloins and ot the borders of the Empire. Thetexls to these monuments have been preserved in the Shiji. In them we read that the progresses of the First Emperor “mork the end of human tracks...” 4. TE R m m Usmanon. Bodde [1986:61] estimates that Qin built imperial road­ ways totalling over 4250 miles, far more than the 3740-mile Romon road system (as estimated by Gibbon). According to a critical Hon dynasty memorial: °The First Emperor ordered the building of post-roads all over lhe empire, east to the ultermost bounds of Qi and Yon, soulh to the extremities of Wu and Chu, around lakes, and rivers, and along the coaslsof the sea; so that all was made accessible. These highways were fifly feel wide, and a tree was planted every lhirly feet along them_oll this was done so that the First Emperor's successors should not hove to lake circuitous routes" [quoted in Needham 1971:7]. The Great Wall built by General Meng Tion is soid to hove extended over 3,110 miles [Li Xueqin 1985:249; for another view, see Waldron 1990]. The Woll connected together earlier walls built by various northern stotelets. Kafka's picture of the frogmenlory work on the Woll hod more than a little truth [Kafka 1948]. Prior to the establishment of the Empire, Qin was involved in massive hydraulic engineering projetts. The Chengdu plains irrigation system was com­ pleted from 250.230 B.t, and to this day irrigates over 200,000 square miles. The Zhengguo canal was completed in 246 B.C., ond provided irrigation for half a million acres. "Thereupon the land wilhin the posses become o fertile plain ond there were no more bad years, Qin in this way become rich and powerful, and

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ended by conquering the various lords' [SJ 29:1408/MH 3:525). The Magic Transport canal was completed by 219. Joining the Wei and the Yellow River by means of a three-mile channel through mountainous terrain, the canal became o vital link in an inland waterway system'that eventually extended 1,250 mdes from the north lo the south. [Needham 1971:299-306). 5. SUMRY. Unification requires increasingly minute and regulated compartmentalization, enforced by ubiquitous mechansims of differentiating markings and vengeful recording. It is therefore inseparable from the dismemberment it is designed lo avoid. II is instructive to recall that Shang Yang, the mighty unffier, ended up in quarters. F

eet

L

ik e

F L O W IN G W A T E R

Stopping the soldiers of his (an exemplary ruler's) three armies was like cutting off their feet, (and) marching them was like flowing water.

[D 281/KH 17:130]

The soldiers in unified motion toward the unified aims of the State are like water flowing down a straight and n aro w channel. They melt into a liquid body, continuous and w ith­ out distinguishable organs. But the moment their ordered flow is stopped, organs appear and are in the s ^ e stroke ^ p u tated . W ater, however, does not naturally conform to straight and narrow channels, but has the lice-like tendency to flow "without preference for any of the four sides” [D 3 1 ^ ^ H 23:171]. Three of the four sides of natural water flow must

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have been stopped fo r the anny to have begun its onward march. That means that feet must have already appeared/ been ^ p u tate d . Even at its apogee, the moment of predato­ ry a^Mik, the war-machine's unity is predicated on the dis­ memberment which prevents it (and which it is meant to prevent). Consolidated organ-ization alw ays entails frag­ mentation. Maximum flow requires extreme rigidity.19 A B O L IT IO N "Abolish laws by means of the law " [D 254/KH 13:105]. "Abolish words by means of words" [ibid.]. G E N E R A T IO N "Depend on w ar for peace" [D 189/KH 3:35]. "G overn wisely: cultivate stupidity" [D 176-77^/KH 2:20]. "Inspire love through hate” [above]. "Bu ild strength on weakness." [ibid.] "Generally, there is no one in the w orld who does not base order on the causes of disorder. Therefore, to a limited degree of order corresponds a limited degree of disorder, and to a great degree of order corresponds a great degree of disorder" [D 322/KH 25: 179]. S P I ^ ^ ^AND L IN E To eradicate something, that very thing must be institut­ ed in its most extreme, condensed, functionalized form. To

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bring something forth, its very opposite must be made to flourish. Inhabiting the Legalist project is an inescapable double­ bind. The desire propelling the State designates as its only acceptable outlet an undivided outward torrent o f infinite conquest. To achieve that end, however, the State must tum against itself, and foster within it what it is intent on not having. To have no laws and words, it must have them with a vengeance. To have order it must have disorder. To have unity, it must hew out disciplined organs and in so doing dismember itself. To expand its domain, it must seal its bor­ ders. The Legalist state plays on the tension between rigidity and compartmentalization (striation), and fluidity and unity (sm oothing). Striation, in the form of the law, emanates from the ruler's body, source and center of the State. Its role is to levy: the capture o f energies to be channeled back to the source. Striation radiates in waves to the periphery, then bounces off the wall and returns to the center in the form of a smooth flow o f goods and bodies channeled uninterrupt­ edly into the arm y, which then flows out to meet the enemy. An oscillation develops between two contradictory dynam­ ics, each o f w hich covers the entire territo ry. A s both dynamics are carried to their extreme and any mediation that might exist between center and periphery is progres­ sively removed, the period of the oscillation shortens and the vig o r o f the outw ard flo w increases. The in te rio r becomes a quickening spiral o f centrifugal waves o f striation and centripetal smooth flows. A t the center, the spiral of

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capture is convened into a line o f fluid attack sent out in pulses. The aim is to accelerate the process to the point that the spiral melds with the line, and the pulses become contin­ uous. At that ideal point, feet are liquid and dismemberment is wholeness. Legalism is a blueprint for a synthesis of antagonistic social dynamics. It is not a dialectic. Although the d y n ^ ic s are com bined in such a w ay as to produce a concerted effect, their antagonism is never overcome and the mix is highly unstable. The synthesis is functional and has material limits. The only ideality involved is the virtual point of abso­ lute synthesis that can never be attained. The more explosively the State pushes outward, the more intensely it implodes. It is destined to self-destruct. The Legalist state is a suicide state. In this, and in the nature o f the frenzied synthesis it attempts, it is quintessentially fascist. A t dead fascist center lies the ruler: source and destina­ tion o f the State spiral, capturer of energies, converter of spiral to line, creator and destroyer. To the extent that

-

al point o f absolute dynamic synthesis can be actualized, it is actualized in the person o f the em peror. The em peror embodies the generation o f abolition that is State desire in its purest expression.

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A c c C ilm TIMWNE. The stole of Qin hod ils begiMings in o minor fiefdom locat­ ed on the western frontier of the Zhou feudol reolm in modern-day Gonsu, 190 miles wert of the eventual imperial capitol of Xionyong (contemporary Xian). II was given to Feizi, "a petty chiehoin and dever horsebreeder," in the 9th century B.C As o rewanUor protecting the Zhou rulers from the Rong 'barbarians' inhab­ iting its region, Qin was mode a principality in 770 B.C The early years of the

Qin rtate were primarily concerned with bollles against the Rong and Di peoples. The lost record of a Rong attack comes in 430. From then on, Qin was on the offensive. In 315 it captured 25 wolfed-towns from the Rong. Once Qin hod colo­ nized the Rong, ii was able to direct its energies against the central Chinese rtotelels. From the seventh lo the fourth centuries B.C. the capitol moved east­ wards into central Chino in five stages. It reached what was lo become the impe­ rial capitol (Xionyong) in 350 B.C, simultaneous to the implementation of many of Shong Yong's reforms. Shortly thereafter, the Qin ruler declared himself to be a 'king,' and initiated a series of conquests against the seven principal tfatelels of Chino. Qin defeated Bo and Shu in the Sichuon region in 316. II destroyed the remnants of the Zhou slate in 256. The proceos of conquest then began to occel-

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erote. Qin defeoted Hon in 230, Zhao in 228, Wei in 225, Chu in 223, Yon in 22, and finally Qi in 221. The State was ot lotf One. To mark the event, the ‘king" asumed the title of 'emperor" ihuangd, literally “ august god“ ).11 The timeline of social transformation also followed on accelerating trajectory. A brief combined chronology: 350

Shong Yong begins his program of mjltorizing society. Qin is divided into 31 counties on the commondery model Qin completes pacification of Rong and Di, then confrants the nomads of the steppes. Qin moves its capitol East. The first step in the rush to conquest.

316

First ottocks successful

256-22

Seven states succesively ovemhelmed ond submitted toQin odminstrotionis expanded. Vost irrigationprojectscoordinated.

221

Empire proclaimed. Work on Greot Woll begun. Attacks on the Xiongnu nomads. Stondordizotion of words, calenders, weights, and meosures. Finol reorganization of Empire into 36 commonderies.

216

Masive census and registration of goods ond men.

213

Burning of Books

212

Mossocre of Confucians

210

Huge public-lobor projects well under way (highwaysystem, Great

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Wall, palaces, tomb). Imperial progreses begin. Rrst Emperor dies. 207

The argons revolt: convict armies rise up ogoinst the State. Second Emperor compelled ta commit suicide. Qin dynasty ends.

Tremendous bottles were fought throughout Chino in 1OS oul of 141 years from 363 to 222. Traditional figures for the wor casualties inflicted by the Qin armies from 360 to 234, before the final push lo empire, lalolled 1,489,000 [Hsu 1977:647, Badde 1986:99-1 01]. The Qin army was said ta number 600,000 men. In o bottle against the state of Zhoo in 260 B.C., S0,000 enemy soldiers were killed and then the remaining 400,000 men who hod surrendered were massacred. 21 The Qin slale's occeleroling time-line morks on exocerbolion of the contra­ dictory tendencies of the State discussed in the preceding sedion. Thot tension is expressed in the losks assigned ta the prindpal Qin general, Meng nan, by lhe Rrsl Emperor as recounted by Jio Yi in his essay, "The Faults of Qin": "the First Emperor.... crocked his long wh'p ond drove lhe universe before him, swallowed up the eastern ondwestern Zhou, and averlhrew the feudol lords.... In the soulh he seized the land of the hundred lribes of Yue.... Then he senl Meng nan ta build the Great Wall and defend the borders, driwng bock the Xiongnu over seven hundred li, so thol the barbarians no longer venlured ta come south to posture their horses and lheir men dared not toke up their bows to vent lheir hatred.' In olher wards, Meng nan was ordered lo simultaneously build the Great Wall— in order to set the boundaries of the Slate— ond to strike against the nomads in order ta expand lhe boundories.12

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The law, by necessity disseminated throughout the territory, must nevertheless have a separate existence, a jeal­ ously guarded body o f its own. The B ook o f L o rd S ha n I/ specifies that a complete record of it must be kept in a forbidden a rch ive in the ca p ita l [D 329/KH 26:187]. A fter the foundation o f the Q in Dynasty, weapons from throughout territory were brought to the capital and m elted dow n. T h e y w ere cast into giant guardian statues in 'barbarian' dress and stationed inside the imperial palace at Xianyang [ S J 6: 239­ 40, 240n6/MH 2:134-35, 134n l]. Upon unification o f the empire, a reported 120,000 dispos­ sessed feudal lords were forced to move to the capi­ tal. The m ightiest among them received prim e accommodations: replicas o f their home palaces built in the vic in ity o f the im perial palace [ S J 6:239/MH 2:137-38). Toward the end o f his reign, the First Em peror built a new palace o f unrivalled splendor for himself. It was surrounded by an elevated circular road for cere­ monial processions. A straight road ran from the front o f the palace to the summit o f a hill, upon which an arch was erected. Another road led across the W e i river to the town of Xianyang. The arch was the palace door, open to the sky. The circular

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road was an expression of the Em peror's elevation. The road across the water bridged the distance between the emperor on high and his low ly sub­ jects, duplicating the hanging bridge of s t ^ which, in Chinese astronomy, spans the M ilk y W a y [ S J 6: 257/MH 2:174-75]. The F irs t Em peror subsequently built covered roads con­ necting his new palace to the 270 replica palaces. He would circulate among them at w ill, disguised so no one would know where he was at any given time [ S J 6: 257/MH 2:177-78]. Eleven years before the emperor’s death, hundreds o f thou­ sands of co n scrip ts w ere set to w o rk on the Em peror’s tomb. Precious objects o fe very descrip­ tion were brought to the site. Models o f palaces, towers, and official buildings were constructed, as were mechanized waterarays reproducing the rivers and seas in miniature. Painted on the ceiling was a chart of the heavens. O n the floor was a map o f the land. W hen the tomb was closed, the artisans who had built the machinery were executed and buried alongside their creations, so that no one would be left alive to divulge the secrets o f the emperor's last whereabouts. [ S J 6:265/MH 2:194-95]. The area around the tomb was sealed off by two concentric walls [Cotterell 1981:18]. Recent archeological excavations have unearthed portions of the funerary complex. A pit containing an army

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o f thousands o f life-sized terra cotta soldiers and horses in battle formation was found on the eastern flank. O ther pits have been found in each o f the three other directions [L i Xueqin 1985:251-62].

A t the pulsating heart-mind o f the empire, point o f con­ version between the spiral of State order and the line ofoutw ard attack, lies the em peror's body. A singular phe­ nomenon occurs there. An increasing portion o f the cap­ tured bodies and goods destined for the outlet o f w ar are diverted. Rather than being flushed out, more and more of the “ poison” in the body politic continues to eddy, ever inward. Energies are diverted from the straight and n aro w path of attack, but not into a controlled m ini-spiral, or reproductive cycle perpetuating the privilege o f a mediating caste o f lice, whether mercantile, feudal, or bureaucratic. These energies take a th ird route, neither productivedestructive (agriculture to w ar) nor reproductive (consump­

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tive, preservative, reflective). The centripetal flow pattern is pushed to its extreme, swirling into a centralized sink-hole of ant/productive expenditure. The excess that had been ^ ^ ^ a te d from the State returns, entirely defunctionalized and in absurdly exaggerated dimensions. W h at the de-loused but unmilitarized energies spiral in toward is a microcosmic doubling. The country, its inhabiand products, the earth and its waters, the sky and the s t ^ , the entire universe, are sucked into the center, toward the emperor's body. Duplicated in miniature, they mark the site of that body's disappearance. Disappearance.*. A maze o f palaces produces invisibility in life, in a rehearsal for the tomb. A doubling o f the world, within which a double disappe^arance occurs. There are varieties of void. The first disappearance is of a different nature from the second. Palatial invisib ility is oneness. The emperor's live disappearance is a fusion with the universe in its microcosmic expression. It is a symbolic unification of the empire, its cosmological foundations, and its reigning principle, in a blaclt hole of exalted anonymity. Death is the ultimate amputation. It equals dismemberment. The double disappearance o f the emperor's body is a recapitulation of the antagonism between unity and dismem­ berment constituting the overall dynamic of the empire. The site of the disappearances is itself a recapitulation o f the s ^ e antagonism: the symbolic unification of the imperial microcosm is only possible in a highly artificial, strictly seg­ regated realm o f doubling. Imperial unity is predicated on

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separation from the empire it unifies. The empire only exists as a whole apart from itself (the empire as a whole only exists as a part of itse l). The centrifugal outflux of law and striating order returns as a centripetal influx o f smoothed, captured energies, which is then diverted into an eddying reflux o f excess dis­ appearance. The outward spiral of embodiment is answered by an inward spiral of disembodiment. The becoming imma­ nent to the body politic of the emperor is accompanied by a proportional transcendentalization of his body at dead cen­ ter. Corresponding to the explosive channeling of energies out of the' State spiral into w ar is an equal and opposite implosive diversion of energies into its heart-mind. The more the law striates, the smoother things flow. The smoother things flow, the closer the centrifugal spiral comes to coinciding with the centripetal. The closer the centrifugal spiral comes to coinciding with the centripetal, the closer the source of all State flow comes to coinciding with its des­ tination. The closer the source o f State flows comes to coin­ ciding with its destination, the more concertedly the State explodes through its only outlet. The more concertedly it explodes, the more forcefully it implodes. The antagonism between unity and dismemberment can never be overcome, only recapitulated. It can (and must) be contracted into a smaller and smaller space, in an infinite regress of transcendence (doubling and disappearance: the concentric symbolic circles revolving around what in rela­

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tion to the present-day avatar o f despotic desire-O edipal su b jectivity-is called the “signifier o f signifiers").M It can also (and m ust) be concretized in a line o f destructive expansion o f the sustaining field o f immanence (the appear­ ance o f a one-way growth vector of physical attack; today it is in suspense, having assumed a peculiar form o f perpetual w ar called "deterrence" [V irilio 1976, 1986]). The simul­ taneity o f the two movements is the end o f state- in both the chronological and metaphysical meanings of the word. The absolute state is an impossibility, a virtual point of synthesis that is never attained. The State is an Idea.

1. The JaioUSr of THi LAW. ‘ Should anyone dore to tamper with the text of the Law, ta erase or odd one single character, or more, he shall be condemned to death without pardon. Whenever government officiak or the people have ques­ tions about the meaning of the laws, [the officer who presides over the law] should, in each case, answer clearly according to the laws and mandates about which it was originally desired to ask questions ... Should the officers who preside over the Law not give the desired information, they should be punished according to the contents of the law; that is, they should be punished according to the low obout which the government officials or the people hove asked information" [D 328/KH 26.186). The law is on animal— it octs like a defensive organism thot strikes back when and where it is stricken. It is to be treated os though it hod a body. The Yunmeng documents echo the quos-senlient vengefulnes of lhe low described in the preceding quote from the Book ofLordShang: "When a member of a group of five denounces another member, hoping

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thereby to ewope punishment, {and lhe denunciation is) corelen, (the denunciotor) is lo be punishedwith the punishmenl he hod hoped to ewope. (The Stotute) also soys: 'When one is unoble lo delermine the criminol ond denounces onother person, this is {o cose oh being corelen in denouncing.' NowA soys, 'lhe mem­ ber of my group colled 8 hos Uled o personwith murderous(intent). B is immediotely orrested, but questioning shows thot he did not kill a person. Whot A reported is corelen. Is he worronted to be sentenced for carelenness in denounc­ ing, or for what he (hod hoped) lo e»ope? To sentence him for whot he (hod hoped) to escape is filting.'"[HM5.D80.W8.30o] Gronel olso remorked upon the jeolousy of the low, which he notes wos inscribed on the cauldrons used to boil criminals. 2. TheM m M O F THi

The Yunmeng documents stole thot oll inquiries concern­

ing the meoning of lhe low ore lo be corefully recorded ond odded to the archives, becoming port of the body of the low itself [Hl 45.D80.W8.30o]. If the low is o body, it is a body-memory. Any impingement from lhe outside is o potenliol troumo, ond is permonently registered— exoctly like the Freudion unconscious, which registers o permonent, physicol troce of every extilolion [see Derrido 1978]. Only this structure is coUedive ond monifest, seeming to confirm Deleuze ond Guottorfs theory [1983] thot the Freudion unconscious is on individuolizolion of o despotic politicol structure (rother than despotism being the result of o proiection of o personol unconsciousstructure). 3. The hiding o f the law. "Forbidden orchives ore to he built for the laws, which ore loded with o lock ond key to prevent odmittonce, ond ore lo be seoled up; herein should be seoled one set of the lows ond mandates. Inside the forbidden orchives they should be seoled with o seol forbidding their opening. Whoever ventures unouthorizedly lo breok the seols of the forbidden orchives, lo inspect the forbidden lows and mondotes or lo lomper with one or more choroders of the forbidden lows sholl, in ony of these coses, be [sentenced lo] deoth without pordon° [D 229/KH 26:190].

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The low must be hidden. But lo function, ii must be broodcoSl-G— on every­ thing from cauldrons to imperial monottths. Even in its shynes, ii is self-replicoting. The Yunmeng legal documents were found inside the lamb of o locol officio! named X^ buried on top, olongside, ond underneoth him, os if appendages to his body (see note 4). They appear to hove been his personal copy, and his tomb become their forbidden archive. The most importont doublings of the low— those providing it wHh o local seat from which to meet the people— ore oko disoppeoronces mimicking thot of the forbidden archives in the capitol in their relotion to the body of the emperor. The low os o whole is o repeat performance of lhe emperor's ocl, and is struck with lhe some centripetokentrifugol tension os his body is: it is embedded in the tenitory ond ot the some stroke recedes into the center, which once ogoin becomes unlocolizoble, for by dint of doubling it is everywhere ol once. The low also repeats the unification-dismemberment dilem­ ma. It must be forever sealed, but in order to be implemented it must open itself to copying, and to defend itself must open itself to ond register excitations. It is at once absolutely singular and esentiolly double, open and dosed, whole and traumatized, hidden and manifest. Moteriolly so. As before, these ore les meta­ physical controdictions than o dynomit of occeleroting physical alternations. The low, like the emperor, is inevocobly body-bound. There is one way the low cannot be replicated: by speech. "If above the ruler of men makes lows, but below the inferior people discus them, the lowswill not be definite ond inferiors will become superiors." [D 333/KH 26:182] Only supe­ riors con speok the low. TheAugust Superior. Underlying the writing of the low is the invisible voice of the despot, which cannot be doubled but does disappear. D M N IT Y W hat makes the Son of Heaven noble (in the eyes o f his people) is that they hear only the sound (o f his voice). and none of

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the subjects can obtain a view o f his coun­ tenance. Thus he calls himself divine. [ S J 87:2558/Bodde 1938:44] This explanation of the Em peror's transcendence was given after his death by his closest advisor, L i Si, to his heir, eager to le ^ ^ how to emulate his father. It was in response to the question: "H ow can I give .free play to m y impulses and broaden my desires, so as to enjoy the empire for a long tim e to come w ith o u t harm to m y se lf?” [ S J 87:255354/Bodde 1938:38] "A ll talented rulers," says L i Si, “ must be able to oppose the w orld and to grind usages {to their own liking), destroying what they like and establishing what they desire .... The intelligent ruler makes decisions solely him­ self... so that w ithin the palace, he alone sees and listens.... Therefore he is able for himself alone to follow a mind of complete unrestraint.... O nly in this w ay can one be said to be capable of... practising the laws o f Lord Shang” [ S J 87:2557/Bodde 1938:42]. The ruler alone w ill rule in the empire, and w ill be ruled by none. He w ill succeed in reaching the apex o f pleasure .... To possess the em pire, and y e t not th ro w o ff a ll restraints, is called making shackles {fo r oneself) out of the empire. [ S J 87:2554 / Bodde 1938:39]

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W h a t is embodied in the unified territo ry, and in its organ-ized bodies, is the ruler's desire made law. If the absolute state is an idea, the idea is a desire. It is the despotic desire to be one in order to dominate the other, to infuse in order to transcend all outside limitations. O r is it to dominate the other in order to be one, and to transcend in order to infuse? It amounts to the s ^ e thing. Eith er way, despotism overlooks the fact that for there to be one through domination there must be an other to be dominated. That makes two. Once the second is subjugated, another other must come for the unification to continue: three. Oneness reposes on multiplicity. This fu n d ^ en tal paralogism of the absolute-state desire for unity in no w ay militates against its status as idea. On the contrary, it constitutes its ideality. It defines it as a seri­ alized drive to overcome a contradiction that is resolvable only at an ideal point of synthesis. In other words, not at all. The absolute state is the Law of nonresolution behind the voice behind the law. It is the exaltation of a recurrently embodied but nonetheless impossible idea. The double-bind of the one and the m ultiple and the manic quest to overcome it is common to many social forma­ tions, a ll of which could broadly be termed fascist. ."Oriental despotism” is perhaps the first, perhaps the most extreme, but by no means the last embodiment of fascist desire. It would be a mistake to attribute fascist desire to an individual body. The idea returns, eternally. W herever the ideology of unity is, there is fascism, in one form or another.

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It could be asked o f the F irs t Em peror if he had an empire, or if the empire had him . And o f the em peror's O edipal son, in his many reinc^roations throughout the course of history: did you inherit y o u r Father's desire, or did yo u r Father's desire inherit you? Ruler and empire, father and son, are united by the H oly Ghost of fascist desire. One, if not two - in which case it is three - is double dis­ appearance. W h y have you abandoned me? cries the son of heaven at the height of his Passion.

1. IttDWIDtUAUTY?The Qin state constituted the “individuol" os o standardized unit enslaved in a megamachine of war, a process precluding individuality in the modern Western sense of the word" The parameters of social existence the Qin state established were wilhaut exception supra-individual.This is most clearly vis­ ible in the five-mon or five-family units— a kind af collective superego.” The reduction af the people's drives to imperial predation in the name of the Low of the emperor's desire can be seen os o collective id. There was no individuality as we know it because these mechanisms not only did not require the people to internalize them, but actively discouraged them from doing so: internalizing the Low leads to the formation of a semi-autonomous command post that con "per­ versely rely on itself and return to its own house/ This fosters exactly the kind of louse-like moroUsm the Qin stole strove to stomp out. The practical effect of the forbiddenness and perpetual doubling of the ever-receding low wos precisely to prevent internolizotion. The fact that the West would invent 'Oedipal' mecha­

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nisms to miniaturize this kind of strudure and (in Deleuze and Guallori's terms) "apply" ii to the individual human body does not necessorify mean that ii was part of on internalization process in Chino. On the contrary, it calls into question whether Western individuality effectively constitutes an interiority. The emperor's objectification of his subjects could be seen as on attempt lo retain a monopoly on individual subjectivity for himself. But he disappeared into his own black hale. It may be recalled, however, that modern Western thought, from Hegel [see Kojeve 1947] to Nietzsche to Sartre to most forms of poststructurolism [in particular Lacon and Foucault] places the emergence of self-con­ sciousness squarely in the comp of the "slave," not the "master." If there is no individuality among the people, it is certain that there will be none on the side of the emperor. Desire as we ore using the term is not contained in on individual body or mind. It is nolhing other than the "inter-dynamism" we set out to find: o pattern of interrelationship that con onfy be thought of as the in-between of bodies and concepts (and texts and events). 2. DIVINITY AS THi FuirmEJIr of PATRIARCH/. According lo Marcel Granel [19301 it was nol until the Qin dynasty that potrilineol descent coupled with effective paternal power in the home and lhe public sphere was firmly established in Chino. He relates the transition to polriorchy to religious changes culminating in the divinizotion of the emperor. Gronel offers o highly imaginative reconstruction of earfy Chinese society organized around a motrilineol kinship system.11According to Gronel, the primory lie, however, was not one of blood but of territory. All of the inhabitants of the some village, he soys, bore the some family name, and were united as o don by their religious bond to the presiding mother-goddess. When men married, they joined the household of their wives, whose name and don affiliation they adopt­ ed. Lineage therefore passed from mother ta daughter. It was forbidden to marry relatives (fellow don members, even if unrelated by blood), bul also to marry

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complete strangers. The custom was morriage between cousins:-since brothers and sisters ended up in different dons after marrying, lheir childrenwere consid­ ered unrelated and could marry one another. The resuh was.o permanent alliance between two clans who exchanged their sons generation ,after genera­ tion. (In anthropological terms, lhe kinship system was based on exogamous clans joined by endogamous molrilineol cross-cousin marriage alliances.) The fab­ ric of regional power consisted of two-clan ollionces in rivalry wilh similar alliances in lhe vicinity. Within each clan, kinship termswere collective, designal­ ing not individuals bul cohorts: "ihe word 'molher' itself applies lo o large group of people: if it be taken in an individual sense, ii is used to name, nal lhe woman who hos given one birth, but the most respected woman of lhe generolion of mothers ... lhe offinilies of relationship have a universal character” [1930:155]. The system of cross-cousin marriage meant that fathers and maternal uncles belonged to the some cohort and shored the some appelolion, as did sons and nephews, and brothers and cousins. Marriage itself was collective: ceremonial group marriages apparently took ploce during seasonal fertility festivals of "com­ munions, orgies, and games" [1930:160-701 ries was profoundly conservative, favoring social ond political stasis. Moreover, since they "recagnized neither personal lies nor an hierarchy” [1930:155], they were incompatible both wilh the family as we know it ond with slate organiza­ tion. The stole could only have been imposed from outside. An adequate summa­ ry of Granel's theory of slate developmenl is beyond the scope of lhis chapler. Briefly, he theorizes that male corporalions developed parallel to the kinship and polilical system described above, evenlually orrogaled ta Ihemselves lhe super­ natural properties of the lutelory spirits ond holy places, then superimposed their fundamentally different syslem of alliances and rivolries upon the lerrilorial clans. The progression wos as follows: the formolion of froternilies based an mole oclivilies (such as metalworking, in particular the manufacture of weapons); rivolries omong frolernities, expressed lhrough "jousts," other campelitions, ond

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rituol worfore; hierarchies bosed on the results of the competitions, which dis­ place the fertility feslivols; the head of each hierarchy assuming mythic stature by usurping the powers of mother-goddesses and other nature deities; formation of a tributary kingship serviced by court aristocrats. The tronsformolion of the symbolic leadership of the tributary king into effective administrative control look place in border regions, in particular in Qin, and was directly related lo changes in military orgonizalion brought about by contact with 'barbarians' [1930:220-24]. (See "Nomadic Carriers" below) The feudal kings went the mother-goddesses one better, claiming not only to embody the powers of the earth but of the skies as well: the king was the "Son of Heaven." Men's usurpation of divine powers, which took the form of male oncestor worship, favored potrilineol descent, but remnants of the old clan order inter­ fered with the transmission of either fomUy name or social position from fother to son (they tended instead to skip a generation) [1930:209-211, 312-20; also Chong 1977b:179-81]. "The feudol and agnolic order came into being as soon as the military codes hod permeated the relations between families and cities. .•. Neverthelea, as long as the feudol order lasts, the notions of domestic authority and filiotion do not arrive ot a combination sufficiently close to produce the idea of paternal authority." The son hod lo establish his right to be his father's inheri­ tor. This he did by establishing a vossal-lord relationship with him [Granet 1930:320-43]. The father-son relationship is a derivative of a political-religious structure. "It is precisely the absence of kinship [between father ond son] which makes it possible for [the son] to infeudote himself” [1930:320]. The final ascendency of the Father hod lo wail until male hierarchy, mole religious aulhority, mole descent, and mole political oulhority fused into a solid structure at all levels of society. This fusion was achieved by the FirsI Emperor: "he gave the rule of the separation of the sexes a significance favorable lo the development of marital ond paternal authority ... He aimed al making the authority of the father the sole basis of domestic order in all clases of society° [1930:417]. The monoliths he erected at the borders and atop sacred moun­

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tains— rising pointedly heavenward from a mother earth now overlaid by polriarchy— broadcast the new sexual politics: ”He conclusively separated the interior from the exterior,” they boasled. "Man and woman conform to certain rites” (i.e., the fertility festivals have been suppressed and the man no longer moves into hiswife's household, under threal of banishment). ”He has forbidden and suppresed debauchery ... Everylhing has its station.1121

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A Perfected Being enters the w ater w ith­ out getting wet; he goes through fire w ith­ out getting burned; he rides the clouds and through the air; he is as eternal as the sky and the earth [ S J 6:257/MH 2: 177]. The emperor, explains the Taoist sage, should be such a godlike being. B u t not until he disappears w ill he attain that state o f eternity. N ot until his whereabouts in the palace are concealed from all w ill the elixir of im m ortality be his [ S J 6:257/MH 2:177]. The emperor was willing, for "he could not bear talk of death" [ S J 6:264/MH 2:191].28 The palaces w ere connected, the em peror hid, and divulging his whereabouts was made a capital crime. But the elixir was not found. A shooting star fell from the sky he should fly through without falling. A carved inscription appe^^d on it: “W hen the First Em peror dies, the territory w ill be dismembered" [ S J 6:259/MH 2: 183]. The emperor had a dream in which a “human fish” rose up from the water he should swim through without getting wet. H e slew it with a mighty cross-bow. "The gods of the sea," explained the scholars, “are invisible but may talte the form of giant fish.” Earlier expeditions to the Eastern sea had been prevented by sea monsters from crossing to the

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isles o f immortality, and had therefore failed to obtain the elixir. E v il spirits were standing in the emperor's w ay to eternal life. The obstacle would have to be removed. He ordered a mighty crorc-bow made, then traveled to the sea where, as predicted, he encountered a giant fish. He shot it, promptly fell ill, and died [ S J 6: 263/MH 2:190-91]. O n the long trek back to the capital, his body began to decompose. To disguise the stench of death, dried fish were heaped in his coffin [ S J 6: 264/MH 2:193]. W hen his body was sealed in the tomb, it was lit b y long-burning torches fueled by "hum an fish ” o il (p resu m ab ly seal o il) [ S J 6:265/MH 2: 195]. Fish are to the ocean as feet are to the army. Fish are pre-^putated sea organs. Their identity with emperors is exprerced b y their fragrance and shared place of final rest. Em perors are human land-fish. The elements o f smoothness promising the im m ortality of absolute union speak death and dismemberment through meteors and sea monsters. W hen the emperor strikes forth into smoothness to find eternal life, he encounters his death in the form o f his own evil fish-twin, ultimate enemy of the State. The sea-god met by the would-be land-god is follow­ ing an equal and opposite trajectory to his: from invisibility to the rigidity of organic existence. Their paths cross at the shore. The emperor slays his death, but dies nonetheless. H aving pre-disappeared, like his mirror-image twin, he did not have a leg to stand on. True to the oracle, when the First Em peror died, the

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empire crumbled, taking his son down with it. He was not equal to his father [ S J 6:267/MH 2:198]. Unable to contin­ ue his work, he joined him in death.

A Fish Is a Foor. The First Emperor's foleful bollle with lhe fish involved lhe firing of one of lhe most extraordinary machines of war of his day. He is the first man known to hove fired on orcuballisla. This was a massive crossbow mounted on on eighty pound brass slond. The weapon simultaneously shol len ten-foot harpoons, fitted with ropes. The harpoons were loaded onlo the crossbow wilh a winch, and were pulled bock in wilh lhe some winch ofler firing [Yoles 1980:43-44]. The foolsoldier's crossbow wos one of lhe machines of war used by lhe emerging empire lo fighl ils archenemy, the nomadic mounled archer, whose melhods lhe stole odopled lo ils own eastward campaigns of conquest Here ol lhe end of his spiral of self-destruclion, lhe Firsl Emperor fires upon lhe greol fish, on organ of lhe sea, ond a wolery nomad. F

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The Qin empire was a vector of conquest sweeping into the striations of sedentary space from the smooth expanses of the western steppes. The absolute state corresponded to the reinvention of sedentary space b y a nomad-derived w ar machine that entered it as if entering a foreign medium. Unable to traverse it as it found it, the w a r machine rein­ vents it and is itself reinvented, in a process of mutual con­ version that carries the striations of sedentary space to such

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an extreme that they reach the point ofsmoothness. O ut the far end o f the State spiral is emitted a singular vector of con­ quest akin to the nomadic one that entered it—but increas­ ingly weakened b y the siphoning off of energies into the transcendence necessary to achieve the forced becoming im m anent o f s tria tio n to sm oothness. W h e n the w a r machine, reborn as a restless imperial ^army, finally swallows up all o f sedentary space and reaches the next smooth space, it does not have the strength to launch into it. It has poi­ soned itself as the price o f its own success. It dies by the contradiction it lived by, in an interim that surreptitiously assumed the face of eternity. W h y did the empire fall? Because it failed to rea liz e ... that the power to attack and the power to retain w hat one has thereby won are not the same [ J ia Y i (201-169 B .C .) 1965]. No state ever fully comes to that realization. The unified state is alw ays a moment in the trajecto ry o f a foreign d y n ^ ic , a w a r machine originating outside it and against it, and destined to destroy it. If the end of the state does not come from without, it w ill come from within. In the most extreme cases, in states approaching the absolute, it w ill come from both directions at once. An insatiable black hole at the center combines with the ever-presence of an insistent enemy at the periphery to bring the empire to the brink. The

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end comes when the black hole at the center (land-fish) and its fraternal enemy at the periphery (sea-fish)

joined at

the shore. Fascist absolutism is the purest expression o f the unity-in-division o f the State desire for dominion. Fascism promises an oceanic experience on land. In fact, the only h^armony it can deliver is atmospheric: a mingling of odors o f death.

1. N om tc G u m s . The stole opporolus thot wos to toke the unification of Chino to the seo arose at its opposite edge. Artuolly, ot the edge of thot edge. Not only wos the conquering stole of Qin a western border state, bul the odministrotive model ii imposed on the empire was eloboroted at its outermost borders, in the military garrison colonies or commonderies set up lo protect sedentory sociely from 'barbarian' attack from the steppes.” The machinery of the unified stole originated on ils margins, and moved inword. (The eostword displacement of the Qin capitol was described above in 'AcceleratingTimeline.") It is significonl thol before the founding of the empire, the people of Qin, although technically Hon people or 'civilized' Chinese, were themselves scoffed at by the central stoles as 'borborion.' They not only lived in close proximity to 'borhorions' but even shored certain habits of dress ond religious beliefs, and fre­ quently intermarried [Creel 1970o:201, 210-217]. "Qin hos the some cusloms os lhe Rong and the Di," complained o minister of a neighboring stole in 266 8.C. “ it hos the heart of a liger or a wolf...' [SJ 44:1857/MH 5:179]. From the very beginning, the empire-to-be exhibited the predatory proclivities of the wormochine. "Rong,' in fact, meonl 'military" [Creel 1970o:198]. Qin directly acquired elemenls of the military opporotus it would later use lo conquer Chino

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from the Rong ond the Di (and their descendents the Hu and the Xiongnu). Other elements it acquired from them indirectly, in interaction with them and ogoinsl them. In the firs! category ore the crucial militory odvonces thol mode the conquest of Chino possible. Chief among them was the shih from the ritualized, fixed-position, chivalric chariot bottles of the Spring ond Autumn Period to the strolegic mobility of armies composed of mounted archers and foot soldiers— 'borborion' ideas both. In Qin in 541 B.C. squadrons of foot soldiers were used insleod of chariots in difficult mountain terrain to fight 'borborions' who did not ploy by the rules of 'civilized' warfore. By the 4th century, old-style chariot bottles were o thing of the posl [Mospero 1978:242; Hsu 1977:chop. 3; Shaughnessy 1988]. But Qin olone hod fully divesled ils ormy of its chivalric trappings. "Qin hod orga­ nized o light ond mobile ormy in which horse ond foot soldiers predominated. The other sloles continued to make use of chariots, ond conducted wor according to the rules of feudol todies. They mode great demonstrations of strength then disbanded their troops. Qin mode wor relentlesly” [Gronet 1930:95]. The mobility ossocioted with the nomads of the steppes ("lhey swoop down like o flock of birds, but when they find themselves hord preyed and beaten, they sconer and vonish like the mist” [SJ 110:2892/RGH 2:165]) wos porodoxicolly used lo forlify the Slate. When sedentary society shakes ilself from its torpor long enough to otlock, it marks the place with o subslontiolly more rigid, smollscole version of itself: the border garrison. Increased mobility occomponied by hardening of the arteries. The commondery con be viewed os o concretion, o kind of precipitote, marking the spot where sedentary society meets its nemesis. It is o new formation carrying the stole that gave rise to it and to whose protection it is dedicated to on incomporobly higher power. Its internal organization is o virulent hybrid combining the hierorchicol leonings of the sedentary proto-bureoucrocy and the flexible-response capabilities of nomadic military organization: the fiveby-five cell structure of the Qin dynasty was o direct descendent of the five-man squadron intfituted in slate armies when the covolry-infontry configuration was

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adopted. The commondery, cel struclure, and o host of olher mililorisl mechonisms (described earlier in this chopler) represented o volatile mix: Miration circle plus line of attack: o uniquely unstable formolion thol sprang up on the margins ond then spiralled inward: o unificotion machine ihol swallowed up everything in its poth, beginningwilh the state of Qin itself, ihen its neighboring states, then all of Chino, ot which poinl ii shot out the for side into the olher nonsedentory space, the sea. The obsolute stote is the form the nomadic wor-mochine ossumes when ii enlers sedentory space ond tronsforms ii— and is tronsformed by ii. The imperial war-machine is the sedenlory tronslolion of nomodism. The covolry, the single most imporlont instrument of the Qin conquest ond cenlrolizolion [Gronel 1930:411; Lattimore 1962: 422; Shaughnessy 1988], was o sorl of nomadic cor­ ner infecting the lerritory of Chino. II broughl wilh ii o nomad germ Ihot muloted ol the fronlier, inducing o monslrous rebirlh of ils new host body. II is simplifying things lo explain the militarist cenlrolizotion of Chino by the Note's need lo protect itself from on oulside enemy. First, because nomadic attacks, while o constont irritont, never fundomentolly threotened the slobility of the stote [Lattimore 1962:441]. Secondly, and more suggestively, lhe nomads themselveswere creations of the stole. The Rong and Di 'borborions' were probably not lo begin with racially dis­ tinct from lhe Hon [Chong 1977b:397]. They were dislinguished by their mode of subsistence and political orgonizolion. The racial divergence was the result of their being squeezed out toword the sleppes os Qin consolidoled its hold over the 'wastelands' within its borders in order to expand food produclion based on stoteconlrolled intensive ogricullure [Lottimore 1962:39, 167-68, 328, 453]. Although Simo Qion's Records o f the Grand Historian and olher historicol records ore not dear on lhe distinctions belween lhe 'borborions' indicoted by the lerms "Rong0 ond "Di,” ond lhe loler "Hu" and "Xiongnu," ii appears thol lhe former were remnont populotions of mixed ogricullurolisls or posturolists within the Qin territory, while lhe lotter were Ihose some populotions ofler toking lo lhe sleppes

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and transforming from sedentaries and transhumants into true nomads. After adapting ta their new environment— inventing a mode of social organization with technologies all its own-— the nomads turned back againrt the centralizing sedentary space of the state fromwhich they were expelled. The Qin confronted the newly-arisen nomads around the 4th century B.C., at the point that its westward territorial expansion reached the edge of the Central Asian steppes [Lattimore 1962:168-69]. Despite Chinese fartKicotians the frontier areas never farmed an imperme­ able shell, but continued to be a porous site of two-way exchange of people, goods, and techniques [Lattimore 1962:468; SJ 110passim]. The frontier should be seen les as a limit between territaries than as the crucible and mutual conver­ sion site of two social vectors moving in opposite directions* This is graphically illustrated by the fact that the feudal aristocrats who were exiled by Qin to the border— and often deserted to the nomads— were replaced in the interior by hardened border troops and re-sedentarized nomads in the direct service of the state [Lattimore 1962:420-21, 433; SJ 110 recounts numerous instances of desertion to the nomads in the early years of the Han Dynasty]. The two-way movement was not limited to people. The nomads' technical contributions to the stole we're returned in the form of metallurgical innovations such as the crucible steel sober (the favored instrument of imperial dismemberment, which was retransmined by the nomads ta other stoles, moving from its birthplace in the Qin dynasty to Indio, Persia, and Arabia by way of the Scyths [Mozoheri 1958:678-80]). The commonderies were also o hose of trade with the nomads, and across their lands with Europe and the Middle Eatf. According la Lattimore [1962:174, 492], such trade, culminating in the fabled Silk Rood, must be seen as the result rather than the cause of Chino's imperial policies since ii primorily concerned luxury items (which were anathema ta the Qin but a natural aulgrowlh of its economic consolidation). When on abject of sedentary origin remained in the hands of the nomads (and vice verso), it was converted, rein­ vented to fit its new milieu. For example, the use of gold in nomadic art is so dif­

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ferent from that of sedentary society that it must be considered a different cultur­ al element [see Deleuze ond Guottori 1987:492-99]. (The some could be soid of horse riding ond the stirrup, regardless of which side of the cultural divide they originated on.) Of the scholars who hove written on eorly Chino, it is Lottimore's work that is closest in spirit to our own in its relentless attention to moleriol detoiP' ond simul­ taneous insistence that there is no odequole empirical explonotion for hisloricol events. He steodfostly moinloins thot both the future nomads who refused to sub­ mil to the empire-in-the-moking and the sedentories who ejected them chose their destinies.” Ultimotely, it was o question of ‘ lifestyle," or whol we would reinlerpret in terms of supro-individuol desire. Two modes of desire, two sociol machines, found themselves in the some geogrophicol space and enlered into conflict. Bolh were radically transformed in the process, one spinning outward from their common crucible and continuing conversion site, the other inward. Simultaneously ottrocted ond repelled by the other, both were energized by the tension of their inleroction, impelled by it to carry the logic of their respeclive desires to its exlreme conclusion. Both founded empires. An empire of the steppes slretching oll the way across Asia arose in slricl simultoneily with the Chinese empire: two mutually determining mirror-image megamochines al oppo­ site extremes of lhe range of possibility of human social organization— and of terrain. Both found (created) their ultimole geosociol space. The smooth versus the striated. In on external tension which is endlessly recapiluloled within the borders of the unified state, in a conlinuing tribute lo ils bastard pasl.” 2. LANDCHANNELS and OPEN Sru. Simo Qian remarked thot Qin was moinloined by the Waler Element: "The First Emperor ... believed that the outhorily of Zhou hod been supplanted by Qin because Qin's element wos water ond Zhou's fire. So began on era of lhe Power of Waler. •.. He renamed the Yellow River the Powerful Woter" [SJ 6:237]. Although he was able to harness the flow from wesl to east across the land, the Firsl Emperor wos at o loss when confronled by

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unchannelable expanse of the sea. The cascade toward imperial perfection had run its cour5 e. 3. REVENci of THEh a . The Qin dynasty did not long survive ils founder, wilh whose body it was so intimately bound. II fell four yeors inlo the reign of the Second Emperor, after a massive revolt by escaped conscripts joined by remnants of the feudal aristocrosy.11 4. M odified H rouuua. The next dynasty knew how to separate the power to attack and the power lo retain: by accepting bounds, by accepting a degree of inlernal striation and the exislence af semi-autonomous, yet corefully circum­ scribed, realms af interest The Han resurrected the louse of morality from the

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ashes of Confucian wisdom, ond with it the feudal oristocrasy from which it sprang. The Hon injected o stote-subordinated feudal family morality into the structure bequeathed by Qin. The Han did not fundamentally redraw the logic of the Qin flow-chart, only added measured impediments to its reaching its extreme conclusion. It coaled the Qin dynamismdown with gentleman scholars and aristo­ crats, freezing it ot o lower level of virulence, moderoting it to create a sustain­ able, if imperfectly liquid, imperial apparatus. 5. WATER Cun. All of the working pieces whose interaction would shape China for the next two thousand years were in place. Chinese history would be o series of dynasties drowned by sudden takeovers originating at the edge of the steppes or destroyed from within by rising tides of peasant rebellion. In every case, ofter arriving ot the eye of imperial power, the conquerors would become the con­ quered. The imperial apparatus would invariably convert its enemies to it, suck­ ing them into its freeze-frame whirlpool. The eternal return of the outside of the State, fromwhich the State arises. The empire would always resuscitate, largely intact only under different management. Until 1949. The internal nomadismof the Long Morch would final­ ly deal a decisive blow to the old machinery, thirty-seven years after the empire formally died. The spiralling stopped. Or did it? When the Cultural Revolution wos losing momentum in the mid-1970s the debate on whether to continue it wos couched in terms of an alternative between the Legalism of Lord Shang and the Confucian Middle Way [Li Yuning 1975, 1977]. Mao died, ond the Cultural Revolution ended. Confucian ‘ moderation" was back. The Great Helmsman, pick­ led to eternity, lies dead-center in the Square of Heavenly Peace, within earshot of the Forbidden City. 'Square of Heavenly Peace': Tiananmen. The events of June 4, 1989 show that even o "moderated" imperial apparatus does not renounce the use of brute force against democratic "lice.” Has the spiralling stopped?

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STA TE-E^XTREM E, E X T R E M IS T ST A T E The path o f Lord Shang's despotic desire has led us in a vortex to the center o f Empire, in an arrow out to sea, caravaning back across the steppes to Europe and the Levant, and forward in time to the Cultural Revolution. Questions inevitably arise as to the range ofapplicability of the mecha­ nisms we have charted, and in particular the nature of what we have variously called "absolutism ,” “ despotism,” "fas­ cism,” and the “ State Idea.” Some preliminary suggestions:55 1.

S ta te -E x lre m e . The motor of the move toward empire

w as a collective drive for a synthesis of the disparate ele­ ments of the social and physical environments into a unified whole belonging to a single body. Since that goal is constitu­ tionally impossible, it must be treated as Id eal—provided that ideality is not understood as a final cause inhabiting a realm apart from physicality. The only transcendence we saw (that of the emperor's divinized body) was the result and not the cause o f the drive to empire. The emperor's transcendence, like the process it culm inated, was irreducibly body-bound. The impossibility o f the drive that it brought to its apogee was materially figured in a dialectic of manifestation and disappearance. It was less transcendence as traditionally understood than a m anically accelerating alternation o f bodily states striving to blur, like the spokes of a wheel, into an optical illusion of unity overcoming dis­ memberment. That optical illusion is the “ State Idea," or,

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expressing its reality as a limit-state never attained, the "Sta te - Ex trem e " (w h a t D eleuze and G u a tta ri call the "U rs ^ a t” [1983:217-221]). The drive constituting it ^can be called many things. "Absolutism" would do fine, or “despo­ tism ," or "fascism.” As long as these are understood not as empirical modes of production or political systems but as a desire common to many formations. Best for our purposes would be the term “State desire.” That desire is material, but not em pirical, since it can express itself only in the inbetween of a m ultiplicity of things and states o f things in motion. It is a W ay: the w ay in w hich disparate elements hold together, and the road they travel together, their mutu­ a lly d eterm ined d ire ctio n . C o n sisten cy p lu s ve cto r. Although State desire may tend toward transcendence, its functioning is always immanent to the parts it tries to over­ come. State desire can be resolved into two contradictory d rives: for U n ity and for D om inion. The contradiction resides in the fact that for there to be dominion there must be an other, in w hich case there is no unity. The StateExtrem e is the logical outcome toward which that anta^> nism tends, but which it never reaches. It is the expression of a tendency in the Bergsonian sense: a self-propelling drive inscribed in matter. The despotic drive whose vicissitudes we have charted played itself out on the level of an entire society, gathering up ^ o n g other things conscripts, horses, weapons, and grains to produce a state formation. The State-Extreme may

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manifest itself on other levels, affecting different materials. Fo r e x ^ p le , it may gather up wood and nails to produce a m onotheistic religion (C h ris tia n ity). O r phonemes and penises to produce a form o f interiority (the Oedipal sub­ ject). Empire, heavenly kingdom, legislating subject: phases o f the ^same fascist dynamic. 2. & tr e m i.J t .ita te. Any state formation approaching the State-Extreme may be called an extremist state, regardless of its mode of production or political structure. The extrem­ ist state is the State-Extreme as inc^nated in a concrete his­ torical context, in other words as it exists within a realm of possibility. It is a pre-limit state moving to its impossible conclusion. Examples are state formations commonly classi­ fied as "despotic” [W ittfogel 1957]. "absolutist” [Anderson 1979], "totalitarian,” and "fascist.” Proposing a common rub ric for these w id ely divergent form ations in no w ay implies that they are economically or politically identical. The aim is not to equate them, but to understand why their trajectories, in many ways so different, lead to the ^same end. If allowed to take their logic to its ultimate conclusion, they self-destruct. The extremist state is a suicide state. N azi Germ any stands w ith the Q in dynasty China as models of perfection of State desire. The Fuhrer's final bunker is a modern-day translation of the First Em peror's palace and tomb. H itler's blow to his evil twin was more direct: his cross-bow shot a bullet through his brain. 3. N o m a d ic -fa tre m e . There exists a countervailing tenden­ cy to that expressed b y the State-Extrem e: the W a y of

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nomadism. It too follows a path toward an impossible Ideal. T h at ideal is not dialectic but rather fluctual: Flu id ity. Flu id ity is U n ity minus the dictate to form a single body, and separated from the unidirectional drive to Dominion. It is the unity in flu c tu a tio n of a collection of disparate elements whose disparateness is not denied (drops of water...). It is unity liberated from the organic ideal of the State-extreme (...are not feet ... ). A unity that does not preclude divergence (...and may stream to different seas). If the counter-ideal of the Nomadic-^Extreme is impossible, it is not due to a con­ tradiction in its logic but to resistances inherent in the mate­ riality of its constituent elements (even the sea has a shore). Fascism m arches d u p licito u sly tow ard transcendence, nomadism undulates superficially toward immanence: chan­ neling versus wave propagation. N om adism , lik e its statist counter-extrem e, is not reducible to a particular economic or political system. It is a mode of being in geosocial space that may assume many fo ^ s , a l of which nevertheless share a common d y n ^ ic . Nomadic formations are those which value motion over fix­ ation, variation over order; which afumn the spaces between stops rather than bee-lining to a promised land; which reach a resting point only to use it as a relay to a future move; which have no finality, only process; which skim the surface rather than implanting a symbolic edifice or superimposing a code or statistical grid; w hich "occupy space w ithout counting it” rather than "counting space in order to occupy it” [Deleuze and Guattari 1987:477]; which involve “ w a y -

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ing oneself in an open space” rather than h a n g in g a closed space around oneself, fortress fashion [ib id . 353, 380]; which smooth without striating. In itself, nomad.ism is m orally n eu ral. A society embody­ ing the Nomadic-Extreme may practice unspeakable cruel­ ty. Its violence w ill nonetheless be of a different nature than that of the State. So much so that it w ill appear utterly senseless from the State perspective. It is. N ot because it is disproportionate in q u an tity or in ten sity (it can come nowhere near rivalling the State on that % fro n t), but because strictly speaking it has no object. The

nom adic

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machine does not funda- ‘ mentally make w ar on an enem y. It fig h ts stasis (running in place, the State spiral and its ^ perpetual wheel­ s p in n in g ). V io le n ce for i nomadism is not an end in itself, or even a means to an end. It is simply a means: a stop along the way, pause enough to hew an opening, like clearing a path. Nomadism is a warmachine hecaUJe w ar is not its end [Deleuze and G uattari 1987:416-23].

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The societies o f the Inner Asian steppes were in^carnations o f nomadism. They were not, however, entirely free either o f the drive to dominion (w hich is w hy their w ar machine was so easily converted to State ends, and w hy they founded a mirror-image empire answering to the Q in), or o f the dictate to fuse into a single body (that of the khan). E x ^ p le s o f nomadism closer to the Extreme are provided by recent movements of basically anarchist orientation (situationists, Kabouters, yippies in the sixties; autonomists and political punks in the seventies and eighties). Nomadisms, like despotisms,

found on m any levels. There are reli­

gious nomadisms both Eastern and W estern (Daoism with its spiritual journeys, versus the Confucian obsession with ancestors and origins; alchem y and w itchcraft w ith their m ultiple transformations, versus one-way Christianity), as w ell as modes o f nomadic individuation (schizophrenia as defined b y Deleuze and Guattari [1983]: a pr^agmatic dereg­ ulation that opens the body to the world in such a w ay as to intensify its sensations and m ultiply its potentials; n o t the pathological condition of disablem ent resulting from a blockage o f that process). Nomadism, w hile moi;-ally neutral and often cruel, offers at least the glimmer o f a possiblity excluded by the State Id eal: a collective existence that ^^rm s difference as such and fosters creation, unbounded. 4. M ixe 'iJ Fo^rmationJ. N o social formation

ever effec­

tively reach either extreme. Even the nomads o f the steppes, even the superfascist Q in state, were mixed form ations. They stand out as ^^m ples of societies that followed their

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desires to a point unusually close to their respective ideals, but were in no w ay pure of opposite ^ ^ ^ tio n s (in fact, the State-Extreme by definition includes its opposite, nomadic smoothnera, translated as organic unity). M ost social forma­ tions fall more toward the middle range on the continuum between the Nomadic and the State Extremes. The dynas­ ties follow ing the Q in backed aw ay from the lim it, and lived. The tributary-state dynasties preceding the Q in (see notes 20 and 29 b e lo w ) w ere even fa rth e r from that extreme, and dissipated. Feudal states (the W arring States period, medieval Europe), city-states, socialisms, and capi­ talist 'democracies' can be seen as essentially different mixes combining the s ^ e two tendencies in various ways. W h at form a m ix w ill take is determined by the social and physical materials at hand, and by the relative strength of the consti­ tutive desires.

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The flow-chart of State desire traced by Q in calls into question some common assertions about the nature of the State and its formation: 1. iTHe t o n IS THE OUTCOME of AH OIDERED E m m H ? II is true that the elements that combine lo form a rtale are the praduds of gradual evolution. However, the Stole itself Is without lineage. It is a consistency, o way in which elements hold together ond move in concert. All the elements may be present without taking on State consirtency. LaHimore's assertion that the peoples who were expelled to the tieppes chose la resirt induction into the stale is seconded by the onlhropologicol studies of Pierre Oaslres [1987], according lo wham the social organization of 'primitive' societies includes mechanisms that actively block the emergence of centrotized power. The absence of a flate is not o simple lack. It is the presence of a counter-desire. The taking on of stole consistency is always an imposition an the elements inducted into the slate. The Stale always arrives from without, and imposes itseff by force [Nietzsche 1967:86-87]. When a stale happens, if hap­ pens instantaneously: if the parts of the tiate farm an organic unity no one port is logically prior lo any other. The elements either consist os State desire, or they do not. The Stale is an empirically uncaused irruption of desire that does not pre­ exist its object (both in the sense of the adual political apparatus it institutes and the ideal of the Stole-Extreme towardwhich that apparatus tends). The instanta­ neousness of the arrival of Stale desire is ahen marked by the assumption of a title (king, fuhrer) or the issuing of o decree (an act of law-giving like that of Romulus). This does not mean that the State has on identifiable origin. Us arrival con be placed in lime, but its point of departure cannot. For the outside fram which the State arrives is an unlocalizoble in-between, on interrelating, an inter­ val from which a will-to-power surges forth as if by magic. The spatial point of departure o\ Stole desire is also unspetilioble. \l may appear to 5W eep in horn o separate sphere (the steppes), but upon closer inspection the situation always

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proves for more complex, to the point that it becomes impossible to distinguish which come first, the within of the borders or the without, conquerers or con­ quered. Thot the outside is an in-between means that it is the border, or better the a d of bordering. If it con be placed its place is on the margins— which may be interior to the state in geographical terms (taking the form of a revolutionary movement). The bordering that is the State is on unlocalizable inlerface between desires. State desire may appear to isue from a single individual. In fact, it moves toward one. That State desire moves in the direction of o transcendental concentration in the body of a more or lea divinized leader does not belie the immanence of its functioning, which is always collective. 2. IThe S u n GROWSROMTHE (ENrER OmwARD?The State proceeds hom the margins in toward the center, marks the spot (os a capital usually with sumptuous ritual, and often with a change in title for the leader, for example from king to emper­ or). Only then does it expand centrifugal^. Imperialism is the second moment of State desire. It is always a rebirth, a second founding, a doubling of the origin corresponding to a change in direction of the State vector os it begins its move­ ment toward the oulside from which, this time, its death will come. 3. iThe HUMAN B o b ib SUBSUMED sr THE S m A R E N A nliE A m m o IJS iHDWIom? The 'individual' in a despotic stote is a working port in o megamachine— or rather, a megaorgonism. The people of the empire ore organs of the emperor's body. The orgonidty of the sytfem is supra-individual. In other words, body ports hove been abstracted from individual bodies and recast as social functions. One of those functions, the dialectic of unity and dismemberment (presence and absence, transcendence and becoming-immanent) so fundomentol to the erection of the Empire, is attached to the penis abstracted as phallus. In the despotic state, the phallus is the emperor's whole body. Since thot body is coextensive with the realm, which is coextensive wilh the low, oil three ore struck by drange convul­ sions and mulliple disappearances— not the leost of which is the disappearance

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ofwomen from official existence in ony other copocily than that of reproducers of men. To say that organs ore obstroded is not the some os saying that they ore projected. Projection anumes the prior existence of on autonomous individual functioning as o unKied organism— precisely what despotism tokes (and gives) pains to prevent. Limbs and other physical body ports of course preexist their imperial obstrodion, but their orgonicity does not.JI As we hove seen, the Ideal of organic unity is the protlud of on imperial obstrodion procen. An organ is meaningles without on organism. Organs ore to the organism as the stole is to Stole desire: they arise in strid simultaneity, and on the some coRedive level. Organs and despotism ore not only analogical, they go phallus in hand. This is what Artoud meant when he launched the bottle cry for o return to the "body without organs” ond on end to ‘ the organization of organs colled the organism,” which he damned os the judgment of god." In Deleuze and Guonori's terms, organism is o despotic ‘ overcoding” of the physical body. With the Emperor ore invented the organism, argons, and the master argon, the phallus, all in one fell sober swoop. This invention is often expresed as o newJiliotion. In ancient Chino there was superimposed upon the horizontal network of territorial don alliances ond arirtocratic families o dired vertical filiotion between every body in the date and the emperor, and through him, the gods: the emperor as miraculous procreative principle, Father of the terrilory ond all its people. The individual os modern western civilization understands it is o minioturizolion of the orgonicity of despotic desire to fit the contours of o single human body. Adually, to fit the confines of the family. Western organs may seem to coincide with the octuol limbs and other physical body ports of on individual body, but it is only opporenlly so. The Oedipal process that defines the modern wertern individual requires o differential, and this entails the participation of more than one body (conveniently grouped into o single household). The phallus as differenliol marker in the family context denotes less the penis as body port than on interbody dioledic— the some dialectic of presence and absence that

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finds ils synthesis in lhe lhe oplicol illusion of the unily-in-dismemberment thot was Empire. The phallus is on ofter-image of the emperor's body (not the reverse). It is o scaled-down Stole Idea plotted bock onto the body port ii ancient­ ly obstroded. The lotter-doy phollus is the penis transformed into a penonolized orgon of the Stote by o miniaturizing overlay onto the fomily of o sociely-wide function. Biology is o destination (for State desire), not o destiny (for the sexed body, which moy or moy not ossume the desiringposHion aligned ii according to which side of the penile divide it folk on). Oedipus is o reincarnation of Empire, by way of God. The monotheistic god represents the completion of the spirituolizotion tendency of despotism (the per­ fection of the trick of simultaneous absence ond omnipresence; pure tronscendence). This spirituolizotion is o necesary condition for the opplicotion of Stote desire to the individual body (in which the Low loid down by the emperor-god lokes the form of o conscience or superego: mind over body). The development of the superego is a necessorycondition for copitolism, whose fluduotion require­ ments necessitate o complex scottering of ground-level command centers throughout the social field-locol autonomy, but within bounds (unconstrained by conscience, copitolist bodies would slip toward the Nomadic-Extreme, and risk dissipating into onorchy). Thus begins the reign of self-didotorship known as 'democracy.' The tronsition to capitalist democracy is unwittingly effected by the Christion obsolute monarchy, the stoted gools of which were to embody God's empire on eorth ond to revive the glory of Rome's [on the opplicotion of Stote desire to the individuol in the context of the French monarchy, see Elias 1983 ond Morin 1989; on the king of Fronce as Christ figure ond presumptive succes­ sor to the Romon emperors, see Apostolides 1981:66-92]. Although the implontotion of o colledivelyderived superego in the individual body wos o condition of copitolism's emergence, it is not o necessary element of its subsequent function­ ing. In fod, the superego os understood by Freud is destined to disolve under lote copilolism, which requires ever-increasing sociol fluidily. The following Cop­ ter examines the woy in which thot dissolution is ployed out in relotion to Reagon ond Bush's body imoges.

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4. i The STATEIS H em '? The stale opporalus in nal a neulrol instrument. II is gen­ dered: masculine. Slale desire is by nalure polriorchol. This is nol the some os saying lhat men by nolure have Slole desire. Men ore hod by Slole desire (and women ore just plain hod). Slole desire, all desire, is always artificial, arriving os it does from wilhoul (deslinolian versus dertiny). The near-universal affinity belween men and despalism is mare o symbiosis (belween o morphology and o made ofsocial functioning) lhon lhe expression of an esenliol mole nalure. Thal Slole desire is gendered masculine does nol mean ihol ils counler-desire is gen­ dered feminine. Gender is onorganic concepl ihot hos no meaningfor lhe modes of individuolion implied by the Namodic-Exlreme (lhe opposilion between lhe lwo Ideok is asymmelricol: they constilule o physical divergence, nol o melophysical duality). Mosculinily and femininily ore Slole concepts foreign to the "nonhumon” sex of nomodism.' 5. ,T he STATEISa (oNSaous AND Logiol k m m m

of a

T m s m m A L Pm

o m of

OiDER? State order is the product of on unconscious transpersonol drive that con only be described os o mania. Any tronscendentol principles used to justify it ore second thoughls, not founding inspirations. 'Because it is jurt' comesyears ofter 'because I desire it: "I represent the stole” comes long oher "I om the state.' Churchill and Roosevelt ore kid brothers to Louis XIV. 6. i Tm Eno of me STATE IS PEAa, HAPP/HESs AND me PRESERVATIONof I.JFE? Count the wars. ! • iT h [ STATEis BASED oh A (OHSEHSUS o i SOCIAL Ca1 1 a? Without exception, the low constitutes o system of torture imposed by brute force [Nietzsche 1967:57-911 the goal of which is to separate the human body from the greater portion of the potentiols inherent in it and to highlight the remaining ones: to reduce the body's desire (orgon-ize ii). Sometimes lhe mutilotion is subtle. In the 'democratic' copitolist stole, the mutilation often posses unnoticed since it occurs before birth, tak­

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ing the form ofthe "inolienoble* "right” to vote (i.e., lhe didole to refroin from dired porlicipolion in decisionmoking) ond lo sell one's lobor (the dictote to limit one's productive octivities to thosemonetordy profftoble for others). 8. 1A u SrAm NAwIAUr DEVELOPTOWARD WrAIJSM UNUS men GROWTHISSinnrtEDby AH INSmOENr E w m ic l n ^ m m E ? Copitolism, like lhe Slote itself, is o mode of desire. Since copitolism requires o complex pattern of independenl Hows (fluduo­ tion), the desire ft embodies miftftotesogoinst the State-Extreme. For thot reason, on extremist stole (ond oil slotes ore extreme in origin) will toke octive meosures to prevent fts emergence. All of the elemenls of copitolism may be present, with­ out copitolismorising. 9. lA t S u m llAJIJIAUr OPIBBf tow w D r n r n a UNUS r n GIOWTHt IS S w m tr SiUMJSNE E m m OR

^LEADm?'Democrocy' isolso on ofterthought. II is a limi-

tolion of Stale desire imposed by the rise of o copftolisl counter-desire in spite of the measures token ogainst ii. Dictatorship is not on obuse of stole power. It is the essence of the Stote Ideo. 9 o) Corollory: liN

a

Df!dowcr '/Hc{m m tm is F I E IndMduols in o democrocy

ore os free os the dictatorship of their consdence, the dicotolorship of the other minioturized despotisms their conscience directs them to enter (fomify, school, ormy, office), ond lheir premulilofions ollowthemto be.

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In a 1984 foreign policy media blitz across China, the 'G reat Communicator' evidenced an affinity for the 'Great U nifier,' Q in Shi Huangdi, the brutal First Em peror of the unified Chinese state. Ronald Reagan found the G reat W a ll built b y the Q in Em peror "awe-inspiring.” "Im agine c h a r­ ing boulders up here,” he said wistfully. W ould he like to have a Great W a ll of his own? "Around the W hite House,” he joked, drawing circles in the air. H e would later pose ^ o n g the ranks of the terra cotta soldiers protecting the Em peror's tomb, playfully substituting his own head for that o f a decapitated im perial guard. Reagan w as never more serious than when he was joking.1 The Reagan presidency reintroduced the body of the leader as an effective mechanism in U S politics. W ith it resurfaced rem inders o f a despotic past, attitudes and 87

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images that would seem more at home in ancient China or Rome, or in the France o f Louis than in late-capitalist Am erica. Fo r all his archaism, Reagan worked. And to a surprising extent, he worked through the vehicle o f his body. It wiU be maintained that he is still a t work, even after his practical withdrawal from the political scene; and that he w ill continue to be at w ork, even after his belated death. United States policy under Bush mimed the political course set b y Reagan blow by blow, P a n ^ a for Grenada, S a d d ^ Hussein for Khomeini. Bush staged an even more crowd-. pleasing M iddle East hostage drama than his mentor had, escalating from threats to open w ar as he m errily set about trying to bomb his w ay to the mother of all reelections, in bloody one-upsmanship over the behind-the-scenes negotia­ tions with Iran that had crowned Reagan's first term inau­ guration [G a ry Sick, “The Election Sto ry of the Decade,” N e w Y o rk T im e j, 15 A p ril 1991, A l5 ]. The point is that Reagan's ghost is in the patriotic machine. The goal o f this chapter is to identify the remains. Question: how can the evident archaism o f Reagan's withdrawn body be reconciled with the unfortunate fact o f its contempo^rary functioning? Reagan, like the F irst Em peror, made unification his political mission. In Reagan's case, it was a ^unification, of a 'sp iritu al' rather than territorial nature. The 1960s had torn Am erica apart at the s e ^ s . Ronald W ilso n Reagan would heal the 'wounds' of V ie tn ^ .

C L O SE -U P T O "The story begins with a close-up of a bottom.” That is the opening line o f Reagan's first autobiography, 'written in 1965 for use in his cam paign fo r the governorship o f

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^California. A t the dawn of his political career, Reagan sign­ posts the body that would serve him so well. "M y face was blue from screw in g , m y bottom was red from whacking, and m y fath e r claim ed a fte ^ a r d th at he w as w h ite " [Reagan and H ubler 1981:3]. Reagan points to his body, and it is familial. H is body is one with his family, and both one with the country. B y virtue of their color scheme. Red, white, and blue. Re^agan habitually draped himself in the flag. It was a constant of his career. One need only think of the decor at Republican conventions. Individual body, f^amily, and co u n ty are presented as having a common sub­ stance: the fabric o f the flag. Their combined strength is embodied in it. It is their sum. Their sum, plus some. Fo r there is a remainder to the equation. Body, family, country add up to a whole greater than the sum o f its pans, just as a pattern o f stars and stripes adds up to more than a doth. The flag is not only a materialization o f unity; it is the fabric o f ^^atness. In it, three are one. N ot just any one: Number One: 'the greatest nation on earth.' The flag is the repository of an excess attributed to terms in an equation. Outside of the equation, the s ^ e terms would be noticeably lacking. They would have only an incomplete, more or less brutish existence. The flag elevates and animates them. It is the material embodiment of their 'spirit' -th e 'American spirit' inc^^ate. Those it enthralls attribute it almost magical powto bring forth and replenish. It is the objectified 'presence o f the subjective essence shared by three interrelated terms in the patriotic equation. As such, it is more precious than the merely mortal terms it brings together. " I don't give a damn," said the veteran, "whether it's the protester's civil right or not. I fought to protect the American flag, not to protect him" [NewMveek, 3 Ju ly 1989, p. 18].

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Body, fam ily, country share a common substance that unites them but at the ^same time seems to exist on a higher plane than they. The substance that unifies paradoxically inhabits a world apart. One, two, three, plus unity makes four: body, family, country, flag. M u ltiplicity is a stubborn thing. N o problem. Four, I and m any more, w ill be I as one, in a second kind I o f unifying substance. " I I have h e a rd ," R e ag an 's I autobiography continues, I “more than one psychia-| trist say that we imbibe I our ideals from our moth­ er's m ilk. Then, I must I say, m y b reast feeding I w as the home o f the I brave baby and the free I bosom.” The motherland. N o w body/family/coun-l try not only have a com-1 mon substance, but shared energetic principle I or generative fluid: moth­ er's m ilk (five). The flag I brings forth and replen-l ishes because m other’s I m ilk soaks its fabric like I blood flowing in the veins I o f the new-born baby. The nation's procreative fluid is not seminal. It is maternal. and the maternal is presented as sexless. Nations reproduce by non-sexual means.

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M ore than four: the flag is not the only common substance pumped w ith procreative fluid. The mother land g ot a 'fa c e lift' fo r A m erican Independence D a y in 1986: school ch ild ren across the country were asked to con­ tribute their lunch money to V*. scrub and refurbish another > spirit o f America, chaste 'M iss % L ib e rty.' The unveiling o f the** new and improved Statue o f Liberty coincided with one of the peaks in Reagan's popularity. Reagan himself was the prime-time master o f ceremonies for one o f the most expen­ sive and self-indulgent displays o f patriotic fervor in living memory. “ W O W !," ran a cover of Newsweek announcing a "Po^rtrait of Lib erty on H er Birthday Bash" [14 Ju ly 1986]. In this and countless other exultant press stories, every alleged American virtue and victory was described as Liberty's personal accomplishment. Reagan, a kind of spiritual bridegroom bathed in a fountain ofyouth of flood­ lights and fireworks, stood faithfully b y her side —when he w asn't standing on her pedestal. A N ew Y o rk Time.1 illustra­ tion of a statuesque Reagan wearing M iss Liberty's crown was a typical image o f the period.’ at first seemed to be a simple, stable structure of three homologous terms turns out to be much more compli­ cated. The would-be substance o f unity takes its place in a proliferating series. It is as though the structure were under^mined by an imbalance it could not permanen ly correct. A in the brute materiality of the three base terms is com­ pensated

b y a suppknuMtary te rn < * « . * . , " “ M

r

dimension. The s u p p le m e n t term >u“ ~ * m r Jl“ 5 ^

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lack: but it overfills it, turning it into an excess. The imbal­ ance is still there, but has changed signs, from a negative to a positive.3There is always a remainder o f spirit that cannot be contained in a given substance of unity, and must there­ fore be absorbed by another: from flag to statue. The excess haunts the reunification series, turning up again at each suc­ cessive term. Its omnipresence is acknowledged in an image o f a life-giving fluid suffusing all solid states o f unity, acting as the energetic principle o f their serial progression. The

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minus sign of brute human existence has become a series of pluses embodying the flow of the American spirit in fateful p r o g r ^ tow ^ d the pinnacle of history. Pro g re^ as a se^alized redundancy of Number Ones. Plus, double plus. Trip le plus. Reagan's own body functioned as a sub­ stance of unity. H e was not content to ^ ^ e his place as one in the m ultiplying series. H e would be the preeminent term. Sim ply b y virtue of his greater mobility. A man can stand on a statue's pedestal, but a statue can never fill a man's shoes. If Reagan stood on every pedestal presented, and draped him self in every flag in sight, the entire series of national icons would converge toward him. H e would be catapulted out of their already elevated plane to an even higher one: he w ou ld be the substance of the substance o f u nity, the essence o f the essence o f subjectivity. H e would be what made mother's m ilk wet. A ll he had to do w as remain in per­ petual motion, circulating from one hallowed site to another, not just ^rogating to himself their life-giving powers but raising them to a higher power. N ow it is no longer one sub­ stance o f unity being added to another; they begin to multi­ ply exponentially. The foundation provided b y embodiment of the national spirit is in continual slippage. It begins to recede from the three material terms it purports to ground into loftier and loftier dimensions. The substance of unity becomes a sub­ stance o f the substance o f unity, in a potentially infinite regress that can be controlled only by transforming the pro­ cess o f exponential m ultiplication back into one of sin:c1 le addition: in other words by finding a w ay of managing the ever-excessive virtue of the American spirit by continuing to move laterally between terms on the s ^ e level instead of moving up into ever higher powers or dimensions. Above Reagan, the only personifiable unifying substance left to

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appeal to is God, and H e r^^lly gives photo opportunities. Once Reagan's body had circulated long enough for the magic o f all earthly national icons to rub o ff on him one rafter the other, after he had become their subjective sum, he had only tw o choices: ascend to the heavens, or begin circu­ lating ^ o n g himself. The ^ ^ ra a l reproduction o f the coun­ try culminates in the mechanical reproduction of the image o f its leader. The most striking instance o f this proces was Re^agan's legendary acceptance o f the presidential nomination at the 1984 Republican Convention. His image was piped in larg­ er-than-life on a huge video screen suspended above the podium. The imposing screen presence created a feeling o f im perial aloofness that only highlighted Reagan's bodily absence. A heroic Nancy tried to compensate b y hailing his ^ ^ ^ g head as if he could see her—as if they occupied the ^same space and level of reality. The image on the screen was repeated countless times around the red-white-and-blue bedecked convention hall in portraits held aloft by the ador­ ing' crowd. The giant screen. Nancy, and the proliferating close-up o f the leader were united on the surface o f the home viewer's screen. So there is a unifying substance higher than Reagan but not quite God: ^ V . But the promised land is nowhere. It is eve^where. The screen uni­ fies incommensurable dimensions—portraits, Nancys and delegates, other screens w ith giant talking heads, political discourse, adve^ismg. But it does it by the millions. In his moment o f triumph, at the height o f his unifying powers, Reagan is diffused to infinity. H e disappears into an infinite­ ly fragmenting video relay.

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STU M PED Reagan's body is struck with the s ^ e inescapable con­ tradiction as that of the First Emperor. It is trapped in a dialectic of immanence and transcendence that ^can have no synthesis. The doser the nation comes to embodying its own unifying subjective substance, the farther that substance recedes into another dimension, until it approaches the van­ ishing point. The more exalted the unifying substance, the more ethereal it is; the more ethereal it is, the more painful­ ly inadequate it proves in unifying the heterogeneous mate­ rial terms for w hich it strives to provide a common sub­ stance. The unification drive leads only to disappearance and fragmentation: the physicality of the unifying body dis­ appears, leaving only its image, w hich is then relayed to in fin ity, composed, decomposed, re-membered, and dis­ membered. Each move to a higher unifying substance requires the new Num ber One to subsume all preceding terms. That substance must therefore subsume in one w ay or another its own conditions of emergence. Eve ry image o f unity contains within it a trace o f the dialectic o f immanence and transcen­ dence that produced it. Since the dialectic takes the form of an alternation between a lack and an excess inscribed in the unifying substance, images of that subs^^ce w ill also alter­ nate between those two poles. Reagan's body was lacking in a big w ay. Reagan was a w alkin g am putation. A pream putation. H e w as alw ays already l^ e . It is interesting, and more than a bit wo^ying, to find that the First Em peror's preoccupation w ith feet recurs in Reagan's first autobiography. The title was taken from the movie King'.! Row. In Reagan's words, he played the

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p art o f a "g ay b lad e” named D ra k e "w ho cu t a sw athe am ong the lad ies.” D ra k e , it seem s, took to d atin g the daughter o f a prom inent doc­ tor, who was not at a l pl^^ed w ith the ^^^^em ent. One day Drake was injured in a ra^road accid en t. W h e n he regained consciousness his legs w e re gone. The father o f the woman he was d atin g had been the d octor assigned to treat him . “ Where j the re J t o f m e ? ’’ D rake Where’s I.heRelt ofMe? cries. Reagan presents this scene R O N A 1 J REA G A N as his most challenging role and ftiili ti. HitlM'r the acme o f his acting career. "A whole actor would fine such a scene difficult; giving it the necessary d r ^ a tic impact as h alf an actor was murder­ ous. I felt I had neither the experience nor the talent to fake it. I simply had to find out how it really felt, short o f actual ^ p u ta tio n ." So he consulted physicians and commiserated with cripples. But, he says, " I was stumped.” In the end, he manages. "I had put myself, as best I could, in the body o f another fellow;” in becoming a good actor " I had become a semi-automaton.” He is now a real-life ^ p u te e . And at that point he realizes that h alf of him has always been m ining, he was always just limping along through life repeating his lines. H e finds the rest of him in the mother's m ilk o f patrio­ tism and conservative ideals. W h at he does not say is that for the analogy to be complete this second, real-life healing would logically take the same form as the first: he would

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become whole by taking over "the body of another fellow.” N o w the other body a p re s id e n t w ould have take over to make him self w hole is - e v e r y body. The body p olitic. verges on saying outright that the political magic he would work is ^akin to national possession: countless bodies unified b y the s ^ e Am erican spirit, one glorious body p o litic repeating in unison an old actor's favorite lines. he reminisces about his father, a shoe salesman who "spent hours analyzing the bones o f the foot.” It comes as little surprise later on when we l^earn that after being deliv­ ered w ith divorce papers by his ^ret wife, Reagan went out and promptly broke a leg. And that what attracted him to his second w ife, Nancy, was hearing that her father was a prom inent surgeon. Y e a rs later, the most positive thing biographer K itty K elly would find to say about N ancy was that she had the “ ab ility to embrace physical deform ity” [K e lly 1990:358]. W here / j the R u t o f M e ? ends with a quote from Clark Gable: The most important thing a man can know is that, as he approaches his own door, someone on the other side is listening for the sound o f his footsteps.”4 H k better half. N ancy would keep Reagan whole [“M rs. Reagan Defends her Role As the President's Protector,” S an C hronicle, 10 Ju n e 1988]. But the series of minuses proliferates at a pace with the pluses. A ny anti-^putation device is no more than a stop­ gap measure. The Reagan era was a theater of bumbling and ill-health punctuated by his prostate gland and polypbeseiged rectum. Being shot got him one o f the highest rat­ ings in the polls he ever achieved.* The most visible press

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coverage given him in the months after he left office was for having hand surgery [Ja n u a ry 1989], falling o ff a horse [ J u ly 1989], and h avin g water drained from his brain [S e p te m b e r 1989]. E v e n in the best of tim es, any in ad eq u ately p l a n n e d close-up revealed that h is supposed­ ly ageless face looked like it was rotting on its bones, a fact not lost on the manufacturers of a hideous Reagan squeeze doll [© 1984, Spitting Image Productions]. Reagan, like the First Emperor, manifested his ^ p u ta tional nature by disappearing into his ceremonial residence. His mode of being in the W hite House mimicked the tran­ scendental nature o f the substance of unity he continued to be despite his tendency to lose bits and pieces o f himself. H is comment about building a Great W all ^^und the W hite House was directed at the press corps, which he was liken­ ing to invading Asian hordes-bothersom e 'lic e .' But it could just as w ell have referred to the ground-to-air m i^iles and elite combat units ringing the W hite House to w ard off attacks b y terro rist lice. O r to his increasing deafness ["Reagan's N e w Hearing A id Has a Remote Control,” S an F ^ w u a > C hronicle, 11 February 1988] and the hearing aid he would shut o ff to avoid reporters' questions (as much a technological cure for hypochondria as a political ploy:

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"Reagan Feigns L a ry n g itis to A vo id Q u e ry " ran a pre-hear­ ing aid headline, N e w Y o rk T im e j, 3 M arch 1985). O r to his overall lack o f accessi­ b ility to the p re s s - d e s p ite his rep u ta tio n fo r being a media president, he had few e r press c o n fe r­ ences than any president since the a d ve n t o f radio ["The Disappearing Presidential N ew s Conference," N e w Y o rk T im e .i, 17 O ctober 1988, A 20]. O r to his everincreasing aloofness and lack o f engagement in the everyday running of the country ["President 'Strangely Passive,"' The A U J tra lia n , 10 M a y 1988; "M em o Suggested 'In atten tive' Reagan Be Removed: Book,” M o n t n a l Gtazelle, 16 September 1988, A lO ]. O r his tragi-comic propensity to nap during meetings and international crises and his growing inability to distinguish politics from film scripts.6 W hen the body of unification is not being cut up, it is cut off, separating itself from that which it unifies. Reagan repeatedly drew attention to a structural homol­ ogy between his body and the body politic ["Reagan's Nose Could Change the W hole Face o f the W o rld ," In te rn a tio n a l

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H^erald Tri/Junei, 10 August 1987]. A n y d ifc u lty he encoun­ tered w as apt to be expressed in somatic t e ^ s . H is tri­ umphant ffust address after his as^ sin atio n centered on a m etaphor lin k in g his reco very to that o f the econom y ["R eag an Appeals to Congress for His Econom ic Plan, Saying He Is Recovered but U S Isn't,” N e w Y o rk T^im u, 29 A p ril 1981). Criticism struck him physically, w ith hysterical regularity if not anatomical accuracy ["Reagan Lashes Out: 'There Is B itte r B ile in M y T h ro a t,"' T im e , 8 Decem ber 1986, cover]. A consequence o f the structural homology between the body o f the unifier and the body politic it unifies is that the country sets up a defensive self-other boundary analogous to the skin. A n y uncooperative element appears in one of tw o ways: as a riva l body attacking boldly from without, threatening to pierce the body's protective shield; or as a disease that slips in through the pores to enter the country's b lo o d stre^ and sap its strength from within. The militaryindustrial complex under Reagan strove to produce a tech­ nological skin. S ta r w as to be a skin prosthesis made of lasers. The concept o f subversion so central to Reagan's think­ ing as a kind o f somatic threat converter. Through sub­ version, the rival body that attacks from without becomes a disease that saps from within. Perhaps it's not N ancy on the other side o f the door. M aybe it's a communist, or an illegal im m igrant who got in through the ‘back y a rd .' Reagan droned an unending litany o f modern-day lice. Communists, illegal immigrants, drug users, gays, fem inists, ‘60s diehards, computer hackers, and welfare cheats. Reagan lice ^came in an astounding variety o f forms. But their dominant mode was less p^arasitic than viral. It was the age o f A ID S . N a tio n a l u n ity o s c illa te s betw een p a ra n o ia and hypochondria. It is in any case a sickness. The hypochon­

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dria is w ritten into the paradox o f the substance o f unity described earlier. A sex less whole has to have parts, other­ wise it would have nothing to totalize; but it cannot have them, o th e ^ is e it w ould not be a s e x le s s whole. The whole is continually undermined by its parts. The body politic is always under attack by its own organs in one form or another. That is why it has such a pronounced tendency to want to cut them off. PA T C H W O R K P^R ESID EN T It was a common assertion that Reagan owed his influ­ ence to his appearance o f youth and vitality. B u t Reagan was in fact so closely associated with illness and injury that one of the favo rite w ays his d e tra cto rs found to p a ro d y him was to depict him as he was supposed to appear: young and strong/ A vulgar-Freudian co ro ll^ y to the “youth and vitality” theory had it that Reagan was a charismatic leader who presented the nation w ith an image o f self­ assurance, wholeness, and health: the perfect ego ideal.* It is difficult to see, on close inspec­ tion, what there was to identify with.

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Sometimes Reagan seemed to beg for psychoanalysis. " I was the hungriest person in the house,” he writes in W here /j the R u t o f M e l, “ but I only got chubby when I exercised in the crib; any time I wasn't gnawing on the bars, I was w or­ rying m y thumb in m y mouth—habits which have symboli­ cally persisted throughout m y life.” Identify with that, and you get a nation of thumb-suckers. H ardly a w orthy advers ^ y for the "E v il Em pire." B u t then there was always the anal option. On the for­ eign policy front, Reagan's libidinal economy was on a per­ manent w ar footing that could be described as anal-a^^essive. His body, like that o f the First Emperor, sucked atten­ tion and energies inward toward the government and its architectural seat, then redirected them outw ard at the enemy. W hen Reagan disappeared into an increasingly retentive W hite House, he was disappearing into the black hole o f his own anus. Never was he closer to that ul^rnate immaterial state of godlike transcendence than in his role as Prim e Sphincter.9 H is p h allu s w as fuzzy. Reagan c o u ld play the role of a father figure. B u t when he did, he was more like every­ body's uncle than a m ighty patriarch. And as we saw at his home b irth , he had a p ro p en sity to em body the m otherland. As a m atter o f fact, he did not custom arily have a p en is. D u rin g his prostate saga, the N e w Y o rk Time.J published an anatomi­ cal chart o f the presidential

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body [18 December 1986]. Despite the proxim ity o f that gland to his alleged genital apparatus, the executive organ fails to appear. Reagan does get both an anus and a rectum, suggesting a tendency o f the phallic to disappear into the anal. Reagan agenitality, however, just as often veered toward the vestal virgin roles o f the Statue of Liberty genre. In anti-genital mode, he did not even tolerate the sexual activity of others ["Ardent Dogs Killed as R isk to Reagan,” S an FranciJco fe a n u 'n e r, 19 October 1987]. If the citizenry indulged in phallic phantasies in relation to Reagan's body, it was not likely to take the form of them im agining him having w hat they w anted. R ath er, they became w hat he laclied. W henever his anthem played, they would pop up proudly erect and pledge allegiance to his m agic fab ric. I f dangerous m arauders (like G ren ad a) loom ed on the horizon, they would shoot oIT their missiles in eager defense of M ra Liberty. Reagan's fol­ lowers, like H itler's, .tlood in for his phallus, w hich w as detached from his body and m u ltip lied , as scattered as his T V image. R e a g a n 's v ita l body p arts w ere d istrib u te d across the social field, as were the F irst Em peror's. Bu t his were in different, always changing, constellati o ns. H is body w as in fin ite ly decom posable and recomposable. It could

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not only bridge the gap between the individual and the col­ lective; it could travel across age and gender boundaries w ith postmodern ease. A postcard marketed at the begin­ ning o f the first t e ^ shows Ronnie and N an cy wearing each other's heads, and looking eerily comfortable in them. Reagan amfd be the virile father o f the nation, as when he bombed Libya; but he could just as easily be its favorite daughter (despite having killed Khadafy's). H is political effectiveness did not depend on sustaining any particular sym bolic configuration. A n y one w ould do — as long as attention remained focused on his body. That was the bot­ tom line. It didn't matter what symbolic connections were made to his body—only that .Jome connection to it be made. C B S News correspondent Lesley Stahl recalled receiving a phone call from the W hite House press secretary thanking her for doing a highly negative story about Reagan. It didn't matter what the content was, he said; broadcasting images o f Reagan, any images, could only help him.10 The W h ite House press corps itself seems to argue against any theory o f Reagan's political success being based on citizen identifi­ cation w ith positive qualities associated w ith his visual image. If we give in to Reagan's invitation to psychoanalyze we miss the novelty of how his body effectively functioned on the political level. As substance of unity, his collectivized body guaranteed a structural homology between the three fundamental terms o f individual body, family, country. In a system o f homologies where each term mirrors every other, no term is central and no event can be deemed originating. A system of equivalences is set up vertically between the part and the w hole and h orizo ntally between parts or wholes on the s ^ e level. This authorizes an infinite circuit of symbolic relays that can be travelled any number of times

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in any direction: this the famous structuralist principle of reversibility. W h a t it means is that every possible symbolic permutation is an a priori o f the system. A symbolic inter­ pretation can at most activate a t e ^ that is already present. It cannot critique. It can only fill pre-designated gaps. Speculation on whether Ronnie and N ancy still "did it” and jokes about Reagan's virility and its sublimation in displays of m ilitary prowess were commonplace during his presiden­ cy. In spite of the fact that they invariably accompanied crit­ icism o f his policies, they expreMed complicity with Reagan rather than resistance: they accepted the basic equation between his body and the body politic that was to be the hallmark of his rule and safeguard of his administration's popularity across many a scandal, foreign policy defeat, and the economic hardships o f his first term. A traditional psy­ choanalytic interpretation, w hether it saw Reagan as a father figure or as pregenital and regressed, would get us lit­ tle farther than dirty jokes. It would triumphantly unearth a series of risque ^ o ciatio n s, ignoring the fact that they were already on everybody's lips. In the age of Reagan, Oedipus ^came out. W h at was once repre^ed was now on the surface. It is precisely as a Jwface that Reagan's body functioned. There was no depth to it for an unconscious to hide in. The 'teOon president': a l shimmering surface. As we have seen, a substance o f unity functions by combining in a homoge­ neous medium heterogeneous te ^ s drawn from a multiplic­ ity of levels. It does that by extracting or abstracting ce^aln qualities and not others, and projecting them onto a single surface. In Reagan's case, the qualities were predominantly visual, and the ultimate surface was the screen. That particular surface is almost omnipotent in its combinatory powers. Logical and sym bolic associations pertaining to what psychoanalysis calls the seco n d ly proce^es get equal

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billing w ith what norm ally would be considered prim ary processes. The p r im ly proce^es become visible. Reagan's public pronouncements consistently displayed distortions characteristic o f the dream-work. Nica^ragua, for ex^nple, was displaced to a threatening position just south o f the T ^ ^ border. Film and residue from past viewings were condensed into present perceptions, such as when Reagan called his dog Lucky 'Lassie,' or when he told a story about a heroic fighter pilot drawn from a movie he had seen as though it were a true story. In Reagan's America, the psy­ choanalytic distinction between the unconscious and the conscious, and the ideological distinction between the fake and the real, ce^^d to be pertinent. Everybody knew that Reagan couldn't or w ouldn't tell the difference between them. But it didn't matter. H e simply did not operate on that level. Fantasy, logical contradiction, and fraud were autho­ rized. That did not make Reagan psychotic or even cynical. He operated on a level at which those terms have no mean­ ing. O n that level. he was perfectly functional. His presiden­ cy worked. Reagan almost single-handedly turned the ideo­ logical direction o f the country around. He was able to pro­ duce ideological or Oedipal e fje c tj by non-ideological and non-Oedipal means. Supra-ideological and supra-psychoanalytic might be better terms, because he did not forego the ideological or the psychoanalytic. He subsumed them in a larger mechanism. The plasticity and manifestness of Reagan's body unbal­ ances not only a traditional Freudian approach, but more recent paradigms as well. It is difficult to see him, following the suggestion o f a Baudrillardian critic, as a hyperreal male who "could always satisfy our iconic interests." He can only be perceived as a “satisfying” simulation o f masculinity (a “ hologram” o f the American male} if vast stretches o f his

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image production are ignored.11 A Lacanian analysis might find him the embodiment of the phallus, constituting subjec­ tivities b y distributing plenitude and lack, all the w hile rem aining tragically absent to itself. This interpretation would privilege his amputational aptitudes, placing them under the sign of castration. Bu t the cut o f the scalpel can as easily be seen a positive power of plasticity as the playing out o f a primordial lack. Given Reagan's organs' ability to regenerate and mutate, amputation could actually be consid­ ered an enablement: a precondition for migration and recon­ nection on a surface of variation. It is perhaps less useful to say that Reagan was neither a father figure, a phallus, nor a simulation, than to recognize that he was all of these things. He was not fu n d a m e n ta lly an actor in a fam ily romance projected on a nation, nor the constitutive agent o f an intersubjective structure of lack-inbeing, nor a hyperreal optical effect. He was a surface on which all o f these processes had equal play, like different channels to which a viewer's brain could turn as at a press o f the remote control. His screen-body was the interface in a many-dimensioned interactive medium. ^ ^ C T IC G EO G RA PH Y O F T H E Q UASI-CO RPO REAL F o r all the fluidity, there was one constant. “ U n ity .” U n ity in neutral, in itself non-psychoanalytic, non-ideological, non-simulatoiy. M ore abstract than any of these modes. Sim ply topological. B u t if, as was asserted earlier, a unity always exists in a d d itio n lo and a lo n gside the m ultiplicity it unifies, then it stands to reason that there is something more inclusive than unity, and more abstract than the sim ply topological: an in te rco n n e ctin g m echanism th at d efines the rela tio n

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betw een the u n ify in g substance and w h at it u n ifie s. Subtending and surrounding the body and body image o f the national unifier and the bodies and images they bring together, there is another kind of body that has no image— that can never have one because it is only ever in-between. There is a body without an image that inhabits the gaps. It occupies the spaces under, above, and between bodies and images, residing in the interrelation of all that is. It does not ^ ^ ^ t (dismember) or abstract (unify). It is effectively allinclusive. T he interactive medium: the 'body politic' in its fullest extension, at once infra-concrete and super-abstract. A void where no anus can go. But where the proper n ^ e "Reagan" ^can, and does. It has taken me many ye^rc to get used to seeing m yself as others see me, and also seeing m yself instead of my mental picture of the character I'm playing. First, very few of us ever see ourselves except as how we look directly at ourselves in a mirror. Thus we don't know how we look from behind, from the side, walking, standing, m oving n orm ally through a room . It's quite a jo lt [Reagan and Hubler 1981:79]. To see yourself as others seeyou. Bu t not as in a mirror. N ot an inversion or reversal. A surrounding—o f the body in motion. From a ll angles simultaneously, and in all qualities of movement, front, back, walking, standing. To leave "m y” self-perspective, but not for "yours." Not for the Other's I; for other,/ eyes. To see oneself as "one" would see one: an impersonal (objective) perspective conceivable only as the sum total o f subjective perspectives. To be the division, not

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only between the " I" and the "you," but between all I's and all you's at once. To be "one"—in all its m ultiplicity. U nity as a supertopological overlay o f all possible inter-geogra­ phies of bodies in motion. Subsumed by a n ^ e . A nagging question is how “Reagan" could produce a wholeness- or wellness-effect in spite of his evident mental and physical deficiencies, what his so-called 'charisma' con­ sisted of. A t first, what seemed to be the most plausible hypothesis was that it was his hairdo. But it b e c ^ e increas­ ingly clear that the 'magic'13 "Reagan" worked did not have to do with his body itself, or any o f its organs, natural or dyed, whole or incised, or any power of interpersonal mag­ netism they had. It seemed to have to do w ith two quite mundane things. First, his gestures. O n a good day, Reagan was a master of the smooth move. Like the circle he drew in the air to illustrate the Great W all, his movements drew pleasing fig­ ures in space. It was as if his entire body were a cartogra­ pher's pen drawing an invisible map of some atmospheric utopian realm. He surveyed an invisible space o f well-being that was attached not to its body, but its movement, its tran­ sitoriness, its fluidity. The body would some day rot, per­ haps was rotting already, but 'Cam elot' would remain in the traces of his passing. Wholeness and wellness was not on his body; it was not in his body. It was a ro u n d it, in his walte. It was like a negative trace o f his body: his body grasped not as an object or an image o f an object but as a set of ordered motions between unlocalizable points suspended in the air. "W holeness" and happiness could be had b y inhabiting the '^same' virtual space as Reagan. W e could make our personal space coincide with his by going through the 's ^ e ' motions. O f course, any repetition of the 'same' passages between points that by nature unlocalizable w ill be different, a

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translation, an im-personation (a personification o f the unpersonifiable subsumed by the Reagan name). Repeating "Reagan's” gestures with a difference, we actualize a quad­ rant of his virtual geography in our personal neighborhood, overlaying his super-abstract kinetic map on our terrain, like an invisible image of all w e could be (were w e as inhu­ man as he). Second, the "Reagan" 'm agic' seemed to inhere in his voice, his rea^uring, mellifluous voice. H is voice also drew patterns. O r rather, it set down rhythms, wrote musical notes in tune with the national anthem. Reagan's brain, body, and body-image were supplement­ ed and subtended by a iu tm c t figuJY.J: gestures and trajecto­ ries; and rhythms. These were w ith o u t content, n o n v L u a l, and JupraperJonal. The word "figure" is therefore misleading. them proce.1 ju a llin t.J . “Reagan's political effectiveneu was to be found on that pre-symbolic, pre-logical, q tta ji-c o rp o re a l level, in his ability to construct a body w ith o u t a n im a ge : to "meld image and body in a space where they cannot be sep­ arated" [Agamben 1990:54-55].

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(A F A B L E )

Adapted from J.G. Ballard It is 1995. Ronald Wilson Reagan has been reelected for a third term, the necessary constitutional amendment having wan swift passage toward the dose of his hapless succesor's term. Taking advantage of the political asset represented by the President's bodily functions, the White Hause staff decided ta issue weekly medical bulletins. Not only did Wall Street respond positively, but opinion palls showed a strong recavery by the Republican Party as a whale. By the time of the mid-term (ongrettional elections, the medical reports were issued doily, and succettful Republican candidates swept ta control of bath Hause and Senate thanks ta on eve-of-election bulletin on the regularity of lhe Presidential bowels. This was only the beginning. During the next few weeks, the nation's TV screens became a scoreboard registering every detail of the President's physical and mental functions. Soon, the trace of his heartbeat ran below all other pro­ grams, accompanying sit-cams, basketball matches and old World War II movies. Uncannily, its quickening beat would sometimes match the audience's own emo­ tional responses. A third of the notion's TV screens were now occupied by print­ outs of heartbeat, blood pressure and EEG readings. The threat of a third world war hod the ill luck to coincide with a slight down­ turn in the President's health. News flash: "...the President's physicians have again expressed their concern over Mr. Reagan's calcified arteries and cardiac valves. Hurricane Ooro is now expected to bypass Puerto Rico, and the President hos invoked the Emergency War Powers Act. After the break we'll hove more expert analysis of Mr Reagan's retrograde omnesio„." Amid the chaos to which the farmer Soviet republics of Central Asia hod been reduced fallowing the foll of the Evil Empire, someone preses the button. A

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nuclear warhead inherited from the Kremlin speeds toward US territory. The Americans reciprocate. “_.the President's physicians report dfloted pupils and convulsive tremor, but neurochemicol support systems ore functioning adequately. The President's brain metabolism reveals inueosed glucose production. F-16s of the 6th Fleet hove shot down seven MiG29s over the Bering Stroil. Scattered snow-showers ore fore­ cast overnight...” The bombs foil on unpopulated areas of Alaska and Eastern Siberia. Peace is quickly restored. The third world war hoscome ond gone and nobody noticed. Reagon gels over his cold. In tribule to his recuperative powers, the linear Iroces of his vital function will continueindefinitely to notch their way ocros the screen. The identificolion of the President and the screen is complete. At his next public oppeoronce, before the assembled veterans of the American legion, a shot rings out. On the

screen, the President's blood pres^

sure line coUopses. The pulse flonens into on unbroken horizontal line. Ten minutes later, vilol signs reod normal. Hod the President died, perhaps for a second time? Had he, in o strict sense, ever lived? Will some animated specter of himself still parode acros our TV screens, go on to yet further terms, unleashing fourth and fifth world wars, whose secret histories will expire within the interstices of our television schedules, forever lostwithin the ultimate urinalysis, the last great biopsy in thesky?" R E P E A T .^AFrER M E God bless Am erica... I understand you r heartbeat. —George Bush [M o n lr r a t G ^ l l e , 20 Ja n u ^ y 1992, B3] George Bush has the distinction o f being the first candi­ date to win an election with a slogan he never spoke. “ Read my lips" (*NO NEW TAXES’) . Bush, lacking his predecessor's 'charisma,' resorted to reading his lines. It was Reagan who

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fust rejected a tax increase by quoting Clint Eastwood (in 1985). A quote of a quote whose speaker remains unidenti­ fied: free indirect discourse. The 1988 c ^ p a ig n Bush, with his annoyingly squeaky voice and staccato, windm ill-like gestures at the podium, was not a rousing orator. He had no choice but to be Reagan's "other fellow ," to let himself be possessed o f the spirit o f Reagan-^merica, giving free indi­ rect voice to it like a ventriloquist's puppet turned ventrilo­ quist. It was the voters who sounded the words. The most d r ^ a tic stage-event of his inauguration celebrations was a variation on Reagan's Statue of Liberty unveiling. As ^re­ works lit the sky, 40,000 picnickers on the Washington M a ll brandished miniature flash-lights at an oversized statue of A b ra h ^ Lincoln (the " 1000 points ofligh t" of Bush's nomi­ nation acceptance speech of the summer before). Bush encored by singing along to a rendition o f an obscure patri­ otic song b y a second-rate singer (Lee Greenwood doing

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Go'J B l u j the U SA ). Barbara stood faith fu lly by her hus­ band's side, w earing an Am erican flag as a shawl. 'O ld G lo ry ’ had figured prom inently in the campaign. B u sh ’s most successful issue after taxes was the pledge of allegiance to the flag. The biz^re but almost universal American ritual o f forcing students to begin every school day by reciting, in unison with a recorded message piped into cla^room s over a loud-speaker system, a pledge to give themselves over body and soul to the flag had been declared unconstitutional by a disloyal Supreme Court. Bush rose to the defense of the fabric the outgoing president had worn so well ['M o re Flags W aving, as Bush Encourages Patriotism and the Pledge,” N ew Y o rk Time.1 , 20 September 1988]. Ventriloquism , lipsynching. Rites of possession. Bush made a career of repeating Reagan's moves. That is where the ^ t o f “ Reagan” went. Into Bush's body. Bush strove to make his personal space coincide w ith Reagan's virtu al geography. Had Bush stood on his ground, he would never have had a chance. He was not 'presidential m aterial.' So rather than trying to stand on his own two feet, he became "Reagan ”s better half, patiently waiting by the W hite House door for the footfalls of his master's missing limbs. But Reagan's ghost deserted him in the fall of 1990 when he voiced his most famous ventriloquist phrase, almighty in its negativity but now flipped into the ^afrmative: “new taxes. “ Bush had just le^roed to talk in complete sentences and con­ trol his spastic oratorial style. He had become a man. A mere mortal, with an image problem. In other words, with an image. He lost his connection to the Reagan body with­ out an image. He fell into direct speech in the first person singular. As a consequence, his popularity plummeted to historical lows from which only a well-timed enemy, oblig­ ingly supplied by Saddam Hussein, could rescue him, how­ ever temporarily.

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Learning to talk had actually robbed Bush o f his one rec­ ognizable characteristic: the singular oratorial style known as 'Bushspeak.' The lack of symbolic or ideational cohesion evident between Reagan press sessions, or even from one phrase of Reagan's discourse to another, was telescoped into a single sentence o f Bushspealt, as though Bush were ^ying to master his master by condensing his pennutational power into the smallest possible space. And the look on his face, as the man who was in jail and dying, or livin g —whateve r—for freedom, stood out there, hoping against hope, for freedom [“Run That One B y Us Again George," A^ri.:na fa p u b lic , 10 August 1990].

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T h e hero o f dem ocracy (in this case V aclav H avel, first post-Communist president of Czechoslovakia} is alive and dead, at liberty in jail, standing on his face for freedom —a l in a single sentence, of sorts. A residual homology between country and body is detectable in the face that begins to reflect the soul of the people, before suddenly metamorphos­ ing into a foot. And how w ill the "education president" improve education, a high school student innocently asks? 'W e ll, I'm going to kick that one right into the end zone o f the secretary of education" [ibid.]. W hen the well-being of the body/well-being o f the nation equation is successfully made, it is not only with the wrong body but with the wrong end of it, as the President nonchalantly takes his leadership and kicks it up an educated ass.ls Bush gave it up. H e borrow ed another tactic from Reagan: he got scripted. W hen his aids began to pre-plan the questions and responses at as many of his press sessions and meetings w ith the public as possible, Bush's grammar improved markedly. But that left nothing to identify him by. Renouncing Bushspeak meant losing his only media-worthy characteristic: his spectacular lack of personality, popularly referred to as the "wim p factor." Bushspeak is a form o f agram m atical self-effacem ent. A ccording to a N e w Y o rk T i m u analysis ("N o t Pretty. Seems to W o rk, Though," 9 M arch 1990], it is marked b y an almost complete avoidance D oon etbu ry

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of the first person pronoun T and a tendency to drop active verbs. Non-Bushspealt Bush speak is a g r^ m a tica l version of the s ^ e disappearing act. The stated policy of his press officials was that less is better, in stark contrast to the Reagan t e ^ 's "any image, even a bad image, is good by definition.” A successful Bush press meeting consisted in issuing "nonwords,” phrases that would be ca rie d on T V or in the print media but would be so slight in meaning and lackluster in character as to escape notice ["From Bush, a Few Choice N onw ords,” I n t e r n a tio n a l H e r a ld T rib u n e , 31 August-I September 1991]. Voice low. Voice getting lower. Doctors tell me it can go even lower still. —S a/Juday N ig h t L iv e comedian Dana ^ ^ ve y, as quoted in the N e w Y o rk Ti^imu, 9 M arch 1990. Becoming imperceptible. The Bush body followed in its voice's footsteps: “ Read M y H ip s” he said, jogging away from reporters ["A Case of Doing Nothing,” Tune, 7 Ja n u a ry 1991, p. 29, reporting on events of October 1990]. H is public image became so lowkey that it left the impression that he was on full-time paid leave—in Bush's nonwords, he began "vacating” regularly [,In te rn a tio n a l Hemrald Tribune, 31 August-I September 1991]. H is preferred public pose w as no longer in suit and tie behind a podium, but in leisure wear with golfclub. Bush all but disappeared from the media gaze and microphone, only in order to reappear transformed, reconnected in his own unique way to the body without an image.

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Like Reagan, Bush withdrew into an audio-visual relay. But where Reagan had disappeared into his own self­ aggrandizement, receding flag-bedecked into an infinite feedback loop provided by television as political apparatus of entertainment, Bush took the country with him on a one­ w ay ride to oblivion. The Bush relay consisted in a video­ mounted missile superimposing its point of view on the home-viewer's set as it zoomed in for the kill, followed by b lackn ess, the mark o f efficiency, as the target blew. Reagan d is a p ­ peared in t o the d is s e m in a t in g e n t e r t a in m e n t screen, m u ltip ly­ ing h im se lf be­ yond measure in a b u rst of co lo r. Bush stepped aside from it, m aking room for another screen, a targeting screen, fatal in its mono­ chrom e ftnitude. O f co u rse, the oblivion that was screened was not Bush's or America's per se, but that o f the “enemy," the tastelessly moustachioed Arab. But in a w ay it wac1 Bush's: the missile screen was his proxy body, a graphic incarnation of the willingness to kill in the name o f all that

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^America stood for (in this case, the "dem ocratic" principle of non-intervention that he had not long before flagrantly vio­ lated in Panam a). Bush missile vision: the look of ^America at war, standing, living and killing, whatever, for "freedom." The old Bush spent the better part of the G u lf W a r qui­ etly vacating. Em ploying a technological body double had allowed him to melt along with "Am erica" into the mili^tary apparatus, while sim ultaneously putting his genteel w ay across the green. The President reappeared after his early troubles w ith Bushspeak and the wimp factor transformed. He had split. Tune magazine dubbed him “M en o f the Year," dividing its cover between two half-images of his face. "A Tale of Tw o Bushes," went the title. “One finds a vision on the global stage; the other still displays none at home" [7 Ja n u a ry 1991]. It has been revealed that his boyhood nick­ name was “ Have H a lf' [“Trumpeting V ictory in Retreat," Tune A u s tra lia , 2 December 1991, p. 63]. It would be a mistake to take this "schizophrenia" too seriously as a diagnosis, as if it corresponded to a pathologi­ cal condition suffered by Bush “the man” or even collective­ ly b y his constituency. Bush's condition was every bit as slippery (m ulti-functional) as Reagan’s. One article diag­ noses Bush as a hysteric, a masochist, a transvestite, and an overcom pensating macho male, all in the space o f three pages, w ithout noticing any contradiction [Rubenstein 1990:256-58]. W hich makes perfect sense. As with Reagan, the question of contradiction simply does not arise, at least not on the level of being or meaning. The Presidential ques^ tion is not "W hat ails him (u s )?” —the obvious answer being "everything you like” —but rather “W hat does he do b y act­ ing that w a y? W here does it get him (u s)'!" . B u s h 's sp littin g must be seen in the same w a y as Reagan's infinite cut, his fracturing to infinity: as an enable­ ment. Reagan's fracturing enabled reconnection, disappear­

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ing him into the omnipresence of his v ^ y in g image. Bush's splitting alow ed him to become imperceptible on the home &ont while reappearing on the w ar front as principled oblit­ eration. If the Bush-Am erica spirit was embodied by the missiles, it was so most intensely at the moment o f impact when the screen went blank and the home-viewers cheered. Blankness was Bush's hallmark o f effectiveness on every &ont. W h at does our latter-day Commodore P e n y do at the climax of his mock-dramatic, pre-reelection c^npaign trip to open Japanese mar­ kets to the W est? A t an imperial banquet, he collapses on c^am era into the lap o f the Japanese prime m in iste r, vo m its, then sinks ou t o f sig h t to the flo o r [ “ Stunned Japanese O ffe r Sym pathy as Some are Struck by S y m b o lism ,” New Y o rk T im e . 1, 9 Ja n u a ry 1992, A S]. R eag an had bec^ne immanent to the social field in spite o f himself, as a side-effect o f an impossible quest for ^transcendence that left his audio-visual image proliferating endlessly across the country he had tried to elevate to his lofty plane. After leav­ ing office, Reagan made millions o f dollars providing photo opportunities for the Japanese imperial fam ily and highranking functionaries. Bush rolled at their feet. He just didn't have the right stuff. H e had no choice but to dispense with transcendence, to sink into his own self-effacing imma­

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nence. Image faint. Getting fainter by the course. Doctors say it had. the flu. "I was only trying to get some attention” [A B C evening news, 8 Ja n u ^ ^ 1992]. Fade to black. If a frog had wings, he wouldn't hit his tail on the ground. Too hypothetical. — George Bushu O ld G lory's magic dust didn't stick to Bush's lapels. T ry as he might to pledge himself to it, it fell from his shoulders like dandruff. W henever he drew attention to himself, it was in a w ay that highlighted his inability to rise above, or even remain seated — to maintain his presence at all. Fo r example, Bush could never garner for himself the kind o f political capital Reagan did w ith second-hand w ar stories, even though he had a true one to tell. Bush actually was a fighter pilot in W orld W a r II. The story he tells is about being shot down. It ends with him floating aimlessly in a little yellow raft thinking w istfully about his fam ily as he waits for res­ cue. In his hour of danger, a raft aw ay from death, the thought of fam ily did not unify the Bush substance(lessne^) with that o f the nation, as it had for Reagan reminiscing about his birth; rather, it led him to reflect on "m y faith, the sep aratio n o f ch u rch and s ta te ."i7 C hu rch /state ... mind/body, spirituality/m ateriality, self/other. This split, which Reagan tried so hard to overcome, was a given for Bush, his "faith.'' It was his ultimate element, his destiny, it was to Bush what the sea was to his doomed fighter plane. The Bush-body goofs, his voice gafes. Bush-mind and Bush-body are never completely in h^armony, however c^are fully scripted. He lacked a unifying w ill. His speaking style was always distracted. Despite his Iv y League past, Bush is painfully, embarrassingly, vomitously, down-to-earth. He's an ordin^y Jo e . The director of A B C 's docu-dr^a of the

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G u lf W ar, "H eroes o f Desert Storm ,” said that he asked Bush to appear because the film (w hich bom bed) "w as m eant to be a salute to the o rd in a ry people w ho did extraordinary things” in the war, and he "thought having the president would be a nice touch” [T h e A riz o n a D a ily S ta r, 6 October 1991, A4]. "O n e o f us." A hero o f the ordinary. Floating in the Patriot sea. Immersed in separation, the perceived separa­ tion o f mind and body, the absence of a strong persona. The inevitability o f goof and gaffe engulfing Reagan's hapless successor condemned him to abject immanence in the fam il­ iar, imperfect, everyday world. When Bush did manage to rise above, he did it by temporarily reversing the direction o f the slide into immanence without, however, transforming it into a climb to transcendence. The colors of the ReaganAmerican flag ran in all directions. The G u lf W a r Bushbomb went air-borne. But it rose only in order to zoom back in, converging explosively w ith the vanishing point at the center o f the m ilitarized home-viewing screen. A t which point it became blankly apparent that Bush had missed his own ride, that he was at no time any less earthbound for having fired his body-double missile than he was for piloting a plane. Although glory did burst forth in Bush’s general vicinity, it did not adhere to his disappearing person, and was o f an explosive kind that leaves little trace. Bush's G ulf-W ar glory was as self-expiring as the blast and accompanying clapping of hands. It did not last him even to the beginning o f the reelection cam paign. Bush is incapable o f accum ulating prestige in the w ay Reagan did. General Schwarzkopf was the Reaganoid glory hog at this trough. It was his body w hich gave a visual image to m ilitary prowess, his voice which expressed the appropriate bluster and sentiment.

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Bush, for his part, continued to putt. H e let Schwarzkopf stand in for him on the stage o f gloiy. The General retired soon after to hefty speaking fees and speculation about p o litic a l am bitions. It d id n 't seem to m atter to Bush. Schwarzkopf was merely his human proxy. One o f many. Time magazine's reelection campaign coverage referred to Bush's propensity for body-doubling in an in a d v e rta n tly oxym oron ic h ead lin e: "B u s h M akes it P e rs o n a l: The President Counters a R ig h tis t C h allen g e w ith a Stream o f S u rro g a te s " [6 Ja n u ^ y 1992, p. 48]. It w as his in h u m a n surrogate, the hightech hardware of war, that summed him up most singularly. M

ystery o f t h e

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glossy pictures and bland words o f the unremarkable dayto-day goings on on the W hite House lawn. The n^ration chronicles “ with characteristic modesty” [jacket] the cir­ cuitous path that brought the F irs t D og to the W h ite House, against all odds. M illie ,” you see, is a downhome pup who, like the man she shadows through a "^ ^ ical day,” "shuns hounding media attention.” "One dog's life as Presidential best friend”: or as Presidential p roxy? Y e t another? M illie ',i Book [1990] outsold Reagan's second auto­ biography (which would seem to prefigure an impending second death) by many tens of thousands o f copies, confirm­ ing that Bush immanence had in fact superseded Reagan transcendence as the dominant political dynamic, Storm in' Norm an and his travelling w ar show aside ["Bush's Dog Outselling Reagan,” M ontn!aal Gazette, 28 November 1990]. Schwarzkopf was a reminder that “Reagan” was v e iy much alive, again and as always, but the balance ofquasi-corporeal power had at least temporarily shifted Bushward. As if to underscore the difference between the two presi­ dents, George fell sick after the cessation of hostilities, per­ haps spent by the effort of golfing in wartime. He did not even manage to be original at illness. The major health event of his presidency was the onset of Graves' disease, a condi­ tion that had already been diagnosed in Barbara. Although lacking in originality, Bush's malady did have an element of m ystery to it. The exact cause of G ra v e s ' disease is unknown. The statistical chance oftw o people unrelated by blood developing the disease is infinitesimal, so even though it is generally accepted that it is not contagious, the press of late M ay-early Ju n e 1991 was filled w ith rumors about a hidden carrier. Suspicion im m ediately fell upon M illie . Som e argued for the First Dog's innocence, blam ing an unknown environm ental factor at the Vice Presid ential mansion (w hich, incidentally, raised the specter o f Dan

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Q uayle being sim ilarly stricken). The insistent protest by doctors explaining that Graves' was not due to environmen­ tal factors any more than it was contagious went unheard. In other words, Bush was not suffering from his eight y e ^ playing second fiddle to Reagan any more than from over* f^n iliarity with his dog. The disease had no meaning and no cause. Reagan's infirm ities, b y contrast, had a surplus of meaning and multiple yet specifiable causes. "Reagan” is a dirty joke. Bush, at best, is a banal mystery. L a s t w eek, [B u s h 's p erson al d octo r, Burton J . Lee 3rd] said he learned o f a syndrom e in clu d in g left-handedness, autoimmune disorders and certain otherr problems. The President, who is left-hand­ ed, has been treated for Graves' disease, an autoimmune disorder. Some people w ith the syndrome are dyslexic and D r. Lee speculated that M r. Bush's well-known problem s w ith syntax m ight be linked somehow to the other conditions. [ "E ve ry Time Bush Says 'A h ,' Second-Guessers of His Doctor C ry 'A h a'," N ew Y o rk T im u , 18 February 1992, C3.] Bush, the unnamed syndrome: an incoherent voice low­ ering to the point o f inaudibility, sounding from a body sapped by derisory or uncaused ailments: disappearing only to reappear as a dog, a general, a missile, all the while never ceasing to be a golfer. Autoimmune-deficient Bush could indeed be as protean as Reagan, in body and in words; his boundaries w ere too weak, or sim ply not o f the kind, to endow him with a diagnosable form.19 Protean Bush could be, but he was more basically split, just as Reagan was basi­

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cally fractured. For that is how Bush function. 1. The missile split is the most telling. It is the Bush equivalent of Reagan's 1984 Republican Convention speech. The video relay of the missile approaching its target provides the most condensed expre^ion of what Bush was 'doing by failing to be and mean what he said he meant he was, or what he meant he said he was, or something like that. F o r example the "education p resid e n t." O r was it the "en viro nm ental p resid e n t"? W hatever. Bush is the whatever-president, the man without qualities who nominated other men without qualities to top positions (Suprem e C ourt nominees D avid So u ter and Clarence Thomas, who won confirmation by virtue of hav­ ing no documentable opinions). The excess of unity after which Reagan strove so energetically and which drove his many metamorphoses, supplying his political career w ith a continual surplus of meanings and symbolisms, was beyond Bush from the start. The closest he came to it was the "thing”-thing of his early Bushspeak period. This is how he explained that "vision-thing" (b y which he meant his spiritu­ al vision for the country, not missile sights): "W e need to keep Am erica what a child once called 'nearest thing to heaven.' Lots of sunshine, places to swim, and peanut butter sand w ich es" [“ Run T h at O ne B y Us Again, G eorge," A ri:o n a R rp n h lic, l 0 August 1990]. R e a ^ n set course for the promised land, paradise on earth. Wingless Bush would set­ tle for the next best thing—another swim in banality. H is w a r story long ago established that that w as the nearest he would get to heaven (too hypothetical). The "thing"-thing was his feeble attempt to grasp what always stayed just out o f his rea ch — fullness o f being, m eaning, in sp iration , panache. It designated vaguely, from a distance (“that th in g w ay over there," that th in g that keeps receding even as we speak) what Reagan habitually rubbed up against: political prestige, spiritual glory, symbolic overabundance. It was the

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residual presence in Bush's discourse o f the Reagan excess.39 Reagan was the president of the exponential multiplication o f pluses enabled b y cuts (minuses). Bush was a singular minus sign, designating no "thing"-thing more convincingly than his own continually reenacted im perceptibility. W h at dogged Reagan was his propensity to lose bits and pieces of himself. Bush's problem, and his power, was his propensity to lose himself in his surroundings. W hen Reagan disap­ peared, he did so ubiquitously and in style. Bush sunk, Bush blended. W hat he blended into explains what he was doing through all o f this. If Reagan's reign marked the coming out o f the unconscious, Bush's term marks the coming out o f the m ilitary machine in all its technocratized glory, in all its human horror, for the first time since the V iet Nam W ar, the wounds o f which Reagan had “healed." W h a t Bush did —or rather, a long-term process that cul­ minated during his presidency—consisted in enabling a split between the leader's body/mind and the technological appa­ ratus with which they meld but which continued to double them. Reagan's fracturing was an attempt to overcome just that split. H is vision-thing was to personify the nation, to embody it, to give it voice—an unattainable goal in pursuit o f which he lost himself in his chosen apparatus, the mass media. Bush, on the other hand, lost himself in a technologi­ cal apparatus embodying an im p e rs o n a l c o m m a n d fu n c tio n : computer-operated m ilitary hardware. It was not a sideeffect of pursuing a higher goal; it w a j the goal. " I w ill not tie the expert's hands," Bush p ro u d ly and rep eated ly declared during the G u lf Crisis and ensuing w ar. Political leadership cedes to technocratic control. Sch w arzko p f stands as testimony to the fact that this command function can be personified. B u t only peripherally. Even Schwarzkopf had to stand aside when the videos came in, passing center stage to the high-tech equipment upon which his credibility

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rested in this push-button w ar headquartered hundreds of miles away from the front. The President turns control over to the experts, who turn it over to the machine. Bush's splitting image allowed this inhuman, essentially impersonal, command function to come into its own. Tw o thousand years after it swept in off the steppes to be cap­ tured by empire, the nomadic w ar machine returns to the desert. A vector of destruction and disappearance dans out the far side of the now senescent State, into a smooth space sleeker than sand or sea, now only a picturesque backdrop: milit^arized cyberspace. The impersonality of the command function animating the G u lf W a r was underlined by the macabre lack of affect palpable throughout. The cheer-full explosions of the mis­ siles reaching their anonymous targets were durationless outbursts punctuating excruciatingly boring hours of antici­ pation. The G u lf W a r was a waiting war. News was slow, and when it did come, it was disappointingly incomplete. People were glued to their screens, waiting for something to hap­ pen. W ould a chemi­ c a l Scud hit Is ra e l and w iden the con ­ flic t? W o u ld the ground w ar begin? If it did, would the U S be mired in Iraq for months? W as the Iraqi front ringed by oil-filled moats? D id they have crude nuclear capability? W hen something did happen, it never measured up to all the things the untied tongues o f the 'TV experts had already established c o u ld have happened. It almost went too smoothly for the Am erican

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hardware. The hours o f blurry-eyed ,waiting and endless repetitions o f the few images and tidbits o f intelligence available made every m ilitary event an anti-climax back home before it even had a chance to transpire on the battle­ field. Ju s t one thing stood out: zoom in and explosion. Blankness. Those amazing Am erican missiles. W h en the w ar was over and the yellow-ribbon celebrations wound down, it started to become apparent just how little h a d hap­ pened in geopolitical terms. K u w ait was still ruled by a greedy royal fam ily whose idea o f dem ocracy was easy access to domestic help. Saudi Arabia w as if an^^ing less democratic than before. And Saddam Hussein was still in possession o f his moustache, doing the things he does so well, such as butchering his own people. It was as if the event o f the w ar had "expired within the interstices o f our television schedules, forever lost” in the video relay linking home-viewing screen to army computer. M uch, o f course, had happened to the Iraqis. The G u lf W a r was not Ballard's W o rld W a r III. It was simultaneous­ ly less grand and a great deal bloodier than the fable: anoth­ er difference between Reagan and Bush. Bush's splitting image freed him to kill with impunity on a much more mas­ sive scale num erically, but in a m arkedly less grandiose geopolitical frame than Reagan's mock-epic battle w ith an E v il Em p ire that b arely outlasted his term in o ffice. According to Pentagon estimates, a minimum o f 350,000 Iraq is died during the w ar or in its afterm ath, o f which 200,000 were civilians [“Taking Stock,” M o n tre a l Gaazette, 9 M ay 1992, B 3 ]. It never sank in. Not even the haunting images of what Storm in' Norman called his "turkey shoot," when defeated Iraqi soldiers fleeing the rout in prim arily civilian cars and trucks were picked off as they inched their way up the "highway of death” leading out o f Kuwait. M iles

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o f twisted wrecks dotted the landscape as far as the c ^ e r a could see. Charred bodies were slow ly covered b y w ind­ swept ^ ^ d , after being picked at by dogs with le u discrimi­ nating tastes than modest M illie. No reaction. It was all on ^ V . ^ ^ er and over again. At least as many times as missile vision. S till no reaction. No sadness. No second thoughts. N o s h ^ e . N o guilt. N o sympathy. Is this the final solution that Bush and his commandfunction double could deliver were they to respond to postchalf criticism by turning their attention inw ard to domestic problems such as the "w ar" on drugs and alcohol? A taste of that was on T V , too: in the wake o f the G u lf W a r, the Rodney K ing video showed how the untied hands o f experts like the L A ch ief o f police deal with "substance abusers" who also happen to be Black. There was a reaction to that. It was clear where the real abuse was. The co u n ty was not ready for the other face of the Bush-thing. A fter the riots, it was. Bush's deployment of the U .S. arm y to Los Angeles, "in what some aides are now c a llin g a dom estic P e rsia n G u lf c ris is " ["B u s h Moves to Respond to S tro n g T est from R io ts ," Ne 111 Y o r k Tim e. 1, 4 M a y 1992, A l l ] , recast him in the role of comman­ der-in-chief. The police were declared innocent, as if in principle, irrespective ofthe evidence. Attracted by this pre­ mium of a priori innocence, commander-in-chief segued into chief of police. The command function had come home, in a small way, but with impunity.

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A Bush without a G u lf W a r is like a pilot without a raft. Less than one year after the foreign Persian G u lf Crisis, on the eve of the election season that was to feature its homefront reprise, Bush’s popularity rating had plunged from a record-breaking 90 percent to a m iserable 37 percent [CBS-Nei