Impasses of the Post-Global: Theory in the Era of Climate Change, Vol. 2

13. Auto-Immunity

It might well seem, under the aura of Walter Benjamin, that history is doomed to fall a step behind the manipulations to the operating systems of technology, might, social organization, and commerce impacting directly on people’s lives; that an inevitable time-lag creeps between the exercise of power and where it can be picked up, on the street or superhighway, by critique’s fish-eye lens. Benjamin’s Angel of History has been summoned to his last-ditch mercy mission both by the collector, who looked longingly at childhood and its unaffected faculties and discernments, and by the avatar of shock, who knew that there was no turning back once people existed under the regimes of automation, unbridled extraction and acceleration, and clueless power and technology. Abject in his very orientation, the Angel of History must be pushed forward into the future over the mounting heaps of debris that accumulation and cultural striving emit as byproducts. He has been interned both ahead of his moment and behind it. There is a familiar pathos to this predicament of angelic (or messianic) exile: a similar wild-goose chase on the part of K. in Kafka’s The Castle looms, for instance, in the background of this image. If history is, ultimately, a tragedy for Benjamin, more precisely a Baroque stage-set strewn with the paraphernalia of death, its most prominent feature is the blind spot occasioned by an unavoidable time-lag between the acquiescence to power and new modifications to its delivery systems, whether at the level of bureaucracy, technology, or policing and military might, planned and implemented in the hub of strategic operations. History’s angels and other victims are fated either to overshoot their moment or watch hopelessly as it passes them by.

If social observers and critics could only catch up with the nexus of interconnected financial, military, and techno-administrative manipulations directly impacting on culturally diverse ways of Life, in the ‘hood, on the land, in the favela, and in the hutong, so runs the Trauerspiel, the outrages of ideological reaction, runaway extraction and accumulation, psychotic greed, and social injustice without redress or remediation, could be met preemptively. The delayed mission of mercy and redemption on the part of the Angel of History becomes, in the end, a brilliant figurative resignation to critique’s inbred inability to capture in timely fashion the new wrinkles in power’s delivery, undercover updates to the Prevailing Operating System (what we once might have called Weltanschauung, ideology, hegemony, metaphysics, or épistème).

Although its disclosures are invariably somber and unsettling, Naomi Klein’s recent journalism brings the long tradition of bewailing the inactivity occasioned by the constitutional delay between exploitation, apprehension, and articulation to an abrupt end. I say this in full respect to the inspiration and near-bewildering insight so many of us have drawn from the critical investigations of Walter Benjamin and allied historians of culture. Herself drawing on informational and communicative technologies of near-instantaneous velocity, Klein has morphed the Angel of History into a wide receiver, hurtling toward the end-zone, the game, miraculously, still up for grabs. A second or two remains on the time-clock, not much more. Irreplaceable casualties have in any event transpired; the toll of past negligence is irreversible. Under the aegis of a luminous master-narrative of global economic development and political domination over the past five decades, somehow assembled under her own drive and momentum, Klein legitimately claims the authority to analyze the categorical, fundamentalist outrages even while they happen.

A flow-monitor out of the pages of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia diptych, Klein is more than capable of the jarring, revelatory flashes fueling the critical community’s long run on Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Benjamin, for example, particularly in “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” is no stranger to the shock-effect that she most ingeniously gleans from the impact of unconstrained free-market economic policies on a global palette of economic systems that were once operative, albeit in fits and starts, bubbles and busts, on the basis of local histories, climates, monitoring devices, and correctives. The shock that Benjamin observed and tracked as it unrolled from the nineteenth century was above all an unassimilated energetic surge. “Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into the crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man ‘a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.’” [2]

It is out of this unprecedented and overwhelming resource of unbridled energy that Benjamin, in the essay on Baudelaire situated at the extreme of his inscriptive density and intensity, can pursue the nineteenth century’s characteristic mood and gesture: from the spasm that lights matches and clicks cameras to the robot-like movements of the assembly line to the playful “escape” from this regime through automatic gambling machines and dodgem cars.

The shock that by Klein’s account has been a strategic factor in subjugating a vast range of national jurisdictions and cultures to corporate thinking and practice has been a far more sordid matter. Strategic shock becomes the primary delivery-system for an old time economic religion, reduced to a few unwavering tenets, crystallized by Milton Friedman and his Chicago School:

Klein’s scenario is of the ideological preparation, akin to seismic shock and the concomitant erosion of a given society’s social buttressing, for states of exception, referring the severe measures back to some identifiable catastrophe. The states of exception initiated under the shock regime, above all the widespread overt use of torture and the activation of a vast mercenary apparatus (“military subcontractors”) not fully accountable under military code or federal regulation, have become the stocks-in-trade of U.S. and Allied military, economic, and diplomatic policy.

Characteristic of Klein’s analysis in the introductory passages from The Shock Doctrine cited immediately above is the clean follow-through from ideological manipulation, propaganda, and theatricality to very specific technologies of military and social control. Not only can the minor, but telling revisions to the ideological sub-text be tracked from one scene of adventure to the next, almost on a monthly basis; the ideology is itself modular. Its three basic tenets, each with but very little wiggle-room for variation, amount to the litanies in a fundamentalist religion even starker and more unwavering than the culture prevailing in the hotbeds of terrorist aggression. Not unlike Freud’s schematic for the arrangement of mnemonic material at the end of Studies on Hysteria, [3] Klein inventively mobilizes concentric strata and epochs of U.S. cultural invention as backgrounds to the military and economic artifacts, above all of the George W. Bush presidency. The immediate pretext for the fire-and-brimstone rhetoric for Shock and Awe may well be the increasing prevalence in U.S. society of fundamentalist evangelists and their political sidemen and ideological operatives. But this is subtended in her analysis by the growth and prominence of such agencies as the World Bank and IMF over the past forty years and by an even deeper underpinning of imaginary terror extending back to the very stirrings of the Cold War, the scenario of the brainwashing and deployment of human drones in such a film as “The Manchurian Candidate,” as well as the culture of forced electric shock-therapy, the psychiatric practice on which the fantasy of brain-programming is based.

Klein narrates a sequential tale beginning substantially with the U.S.-engineered overthrow of Salvador Allende on 9/11/1973, and refusing to relinquish its detailed testimony until having pursued a filigree strand of structurally parallel destabilizations, in succession, in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Poland, China, South Africa, Indonesia, Malaysia, South Korea, Israel, and, most tellingly, on two separate grim occasions, Iraq. Klein orchestrates the global iteration of a regime that, while capable of making accommodations to certain differences in geography, economic activity, and culture, adheres rigidly to such core-tenets as were cited above, practices whose purism packs the deepest-seated political consequences, demanding decades to repair.

It can come as scarce surprise to members of the critical network, that Klein, in unmasking and articulating the programmatic subtext to a systematic strategy of unbridled exploitation and political repression under the banner of economic purism positions herself along the pathway of certain of Jacques Derrida’s most memorable destabilizations in the name of free inquiry and expression. Not only has Klein brought critique to the moment where it can, and is all the more so compelled to address eventualities unfolding in the moment—the core postulate of the IC³ project, if it admits of one. Klein’s narrative and her analysis furnish tangible proof, one certainly not limited to Derrida’s most overtly “political” works, say Specters of Marx or Rogues, that the battery of textual-environment based rhetorical gestures and reading strategies known as “deconstruction,” are, in the age of information-politics, as indispensable a contrapuntal political strategy and systematic release-valve as exists. Klein appeals, for example, to Keynesian economics as a mixed palette of interests and counterforces in which it was possible to arrive at subtle compromises and balances suitable to specific environments.

In Klein’s parlance, viable economic practice is a rich tapestry of strategies variegated in their orientations and in the interests they are primed to serve. The economy is an ever-changing spectrum of investments, stopgap measures, and imaginary long-term strategies. To reduce all economies to one economy, to subjugate this one economy to the slogans of a complacent, unwavering economic theology, founded on the attribution of divine benevolence and equilibrium to the Market, is tantamount to the destruction of the environmental diversity whose immanent loss Gregory Bateson bemoaned at the very outset of the current ecological and climatic catastrophes. Bateson visualized this fatal simplification both as an anthropocentric drive to urbanize the human habitat in its entirety and as a fatal reduction of the biosphere:

Bateson’s rich insight here, that ecologies and systems can be driven as insane as the men who appropriate their output and specialize their elements and processes with monomaniacal zeal, sets the stage for Klein’s constitutional repugnance to the procrustean colonizing of free-market economic principles, implemented by such organizations as the World Bank and IMF. Bateson’s Lake Erie, in keeping with this volume’s overall drift, is a sink, a catchment area that, until saturated, performs invaluable ecosystematic service: such as by metabolizing and otherwise channeling waste and byproducts. [4] As the curtain rose on the present moment of ecological disaster and economic implosion, Bateson discerned the feedback loop circulating the madness as well as the pollution back and forth between humans and the environment. It’s not only the case that Lake Erie’s insanity precipitates our own. It’s a two-way street; our productivist preoccupation with resource shortages (resource as in raw material) leads to the foreclosure of recognizing that natural waste management facilities (“sinks”) are resources in their own right. This thought-occlusion is tantamount to a deficit in long-term attention. It precipitates Lake Erie’s insanity in the form of chemical saturation, which then, in a demented feedback loop, makes our inattention and flawed policy even crazier.

Lake Erie has attained a level of madness that even Bateson could not have foreseen. Bioinvasions by species such as the Asian carp have attacked biodiversity and weakened bio-resilience to previously unimaginable degrees. During the floods of the 1980’s, the Asian carp escaped fish-farms in Mississippi to colonize the entire Mississippi River basin and to slowly penetrate the Great Lakes habitat. This voracious fish devours a disproportionate amount of the plants and animals at the base of the Great Lake food chain. In this way, it decimates native fish populations, and will eventually outnumber all native species. This is merely one further shock to an already depatterned eco-mental system. Premonitions of the Asian carp have already prompted a number of electric barriers—purportedly non-lethal—along the Chicago Ship and Barrier Canal. Electrified steel cables now line the canal floor at strategic points, creating a deterrent electrical field. Such measures tangibly complicate the lines otherwise drawn between a Foucauldian biopolitics and an Agambenesque thanato-politics. The compulsive imperative to maintain the economic and economic “health” of the Great Lakes has resulted in, among other stopgaps, dumping tons of poison into the canal and an ensuing fish-kill of over 200,000 tons. Similar crossover between bio- and thanato-politics has taken place in Tanzania’s Lake Victoria, where the introduced species, the Nile perch, in similar fashion “occupied” the lake, sharply reducing its biodiversity. In this instance, conflict fought out at the ecological level prompted human conflict and economic disarray. The Nile perch was exploited as an “export crop.” As the documentary, “Darwin’s Nightmare” demonstrates, the airplanes delivering the Tanzanian perch to their European markets returned with the munitions that prolonging the military theater of regional strife aggravated by dire economic shortage.

Bateson’s rallying cry for eco-diversity in its broadest sense also antedates Derrida’s isolation of différence itself, perhaps the preeminent subunit of articulation and information in a text-centered complex of cultural production underscoring the arbitrariness, contingency, and tenuousness of systematic arrangements, whether legal, socio-political, or economic. In Bateson’s terms, the system installed in the Southern Cone (Argentina, Chile, and Brazil) by “the Chicago Boys and their professors” (102) in the 1970’s was an inert ecology devoid of the flex and diversity necessary for productive adaptation,

In contrast to what she observed while tracking the epic trajectory of a narrow-minded, self-serving economic theology, and in spite of her own reflex empathy toward the receiving end of the Shock Doctrine, wherever its operations happen to be mobilized, Klein is herself hardly an economic purist or naïve holdout for rigid Marxian economics:

Klein betrays herself here: she is as avowed a partisan of complexity in the field of economic arrangements as is Derrida on the always tenuous interface between the systems of exploitation and extraction and the conceptual embroideries, suturing public opinion to signifiers, both legitimating and implementing the Prevailing Operating System. Any ethics toward which the Derridean gloss on a bewildering multiplicity of cultural artifacts gravitates is an exhortation to complexity in the service of wiring release-mechanisms within the otherwise closed circuitry of philosophical solipsism, imperialist adventure, unconstrained economic development, and politico-administrative fundamentalism. Deconstruction’s deep-wired ethical slant places it in productive differential solidarity with the best of post-colonial and gender critique, with the systemic dismantling and rewiring undertaken, in different ways by Lacan, Deleuze and Guattari, and now two distinct generations of systems theorists. [5] Certainly as well with the dynamic, wide-angle panorama brought under acute analysis and critique by a committed journalist of Naomi Klein’s caliber.

The particular coordinate at which the present entry to an inherently multi-perspectival omnibus is situated pivots on the interface at which two seemingly antithetical discourses meet up only to discover substantial accord on specific points as well as analytical orientations. Derrida’s text is clearly philosophically concept-driven while constitutively literary in grain and weave. Klein’s is unabashedly in the service of the facts, the data emerging both from meticulous investigative archival work and unremitting tracking of trends. Derrida’s prose is by design stylistically elliptical and opaque; Klein’s lucid and sequential according to media convention and “the law of genre.” [6] I’ve argued in The Task of the Critic that disagreements in discourse are never substantive or “philosophical.” They are invariably matters of discourse design, the parameters of the screen or display on which they’ve been arrayed. Given the sharp discrepancies between the respective prose media that Klein and Derrida synthesize, their substantive mutual affirmation is all the more striking. It is no doubt grounded in nothing more overbearing than an ethics of the rigorous pursuit and adumbration of complexity to the full range of its implications. Indeed, to an increasing degree the only parameter in whose terms substantial disagreement on the issues, from foreign policy to healthcare and economic policy, becomes explicit is the palpable tension between complex and stripped-bare approaches.

On a substantive or thematic level, the deconstructive philosopher and the journalistic flow-monitor of exploitative and accumulative trends agree on a remarkable spectrum of recent phenomena, from the World Bank and IMF to the precipitous expansion of military forces serving corporate interests rather than those determined by sovereign entities.

Derrida here performs an extrapolative read-out of the apocalyptic beast or monster associated with those states and other political entities accorded “rogue” status (more on which below). As we’ve seen, Klein needs to take embedded politico-theological zeal as seriously as Derrida does throughout his ingenious exposes of Abrahamic rhetoric, imagery, metaphysics and eschatology. The global panorama through which he pursues the attribution of this status, an appellation making sense only within the sacrosanct closure of political fundamentalism, is in scale on a par with Klein’s documentary pursuit of the Shock Doctrine around the globe back to its sources in the U.S. economy. Her discourse, fact-driven as it is, relies on her ability to discern the imagistic continuity between the ideological pronouncements and rationalizations driving the global extractive adventure and the empirical trends, whether on the street or in the prison cell: “The shock doctrine mimics this process precisely [“softening up” populations to accept new eventualities], attempting to achieve on a mass scale what torture does one on one in an interrogation cell” (16). The teasing-out of key images, whether of wheels, torture, or loose cannons, is as indispensable to the wiring of journalistic focus and compression as it is to theoretical excursis.

Agree as Klein and Derrida substantially do on the drift, scale, rationale, and impact of shock capitalism, the wiring of their respective purviews on global politics becomes a shared (or shorted) circuit on this far more intriguing and profound register, in the engine-room of figuration and rhetoric. For Klein, the ultimate consummation of the universal Shock Doctrine is a far-cry from the “end of history” declared by Francis Fukuyama. [7] It is, rather, the attack on the U.S. domestic economy by the very draconian measures by which it, in collusion with the World Bank, IMF, and, at least in Derrida’s account, the U.N., have subjugated and depleted a bewildering array of the world’s local ecologies. The plot of a fundamentalist spirit of economic severity coming home to haunt the overheated system that launched it, a vengeful and repressive trajectory, torques and structures Klein’s presentation in far-reaching ways. It is no accident that the section of The Shock Doctrine devoted to Iraq, in many ways a consummate one, is titled “Iraq Full Circle: Overshock.” Or that a pivotal section of the definitive first chapter is called “Shock Therapy Comes Home.” This sub-section begins with an uncannily prescient epitaph to the current economic meltdown—one revealing a shocking dearth of economic and labor diversity, an irreversible displacement of production and opportunity hors système. “Friedman’s Chicago School Movement has been conquering territory around the world since the seventies, but until recently its vision had never been applied in its country of origin” (11). The elements of the economic system set into motion when the evangelical fundaments of the Shock Doctrine entrenched themselves at home comprise a terse summation of the current status quo, one that will not be rectified by emergency infusions of TARP capital alone:

Drawing on a very different archive of resources, Derrida can still hone in on the self-destructive consequences of solipsism (itself trapped in its “ipseity”), self-aggrandizing strategy, and logic when they circulate back to the Homeland. Throughout Rogues, Derrida’s talisman for this casuistry is the wolf’s irrefutable circular reasoning in La Fontaine’s “The Wolf and the Lamb.” He deploys this logic, for example, in explaining the exception made in the Charter of the United Nations empowering its two primary powers at the time, the U.S. and U.S.S.R., to defend themselves against an armed attack, “until the Security Council has taken the necessary measures to assure peace and security” (99).

In Derrida’s parlance—with a glance backward to the foundations of philosophical solipsism and to the dynamic of auto-affection that he isolated early on, in the Husserlian phenomenology, an intense philosopheme encapsulating the decisiveness of linguistic contingency to modernist aesthetics and discourse [8]—the end result of the battery of violent, invasive, and exploitative economic measures condensed and put forward with such lucidity by Klein is a systematic immune-reaction. Embroidering on nothing more formidable or high-tech than a movement, turning, and the geometrical figure of the wheel, roue, predicated by it, Derrida accounts for a disastrous feedback loop within a system that cannot always be just, but that might, under optimal conditions, be ameliorated by diversity and critique, out of respect for the complexity both of its intrinsic workings and of the lives implicated by it. The wheel turns. Within its etymological compass, the roué is profiled as an outcast, to be punished on the wheel. His scapegoating, with the impunity elaborated by Giorgio Agamben with such lucidity in Homo Sacer, [9] becomes the basis for the rogue status conferred on states purportedly behaving as loose cannons. The suffering inflicted as the wheel rotates becomes a figural as well as etymological basis for torture.

Even while disavowing wholesale shifts in direction or “turns” that have been attributed to deconstruction, in this passage Derrida encapsulates the by no means intuitive follow-through that could link democracy, not as the module for specific governments but as the deliberative field of open-ended possibility (much akin to “the experience of the impossible”) [10] to writing as the inscription or scoring of diversity, the incommensurable, as différance itself. The trace is the merest instance, the “trace-element,” of writing, or in Agamben’s terms, “bare writing.” By means of turnings and veerings, the operational possibilities of “the democracy to come,” never a specific instance in its name, are tied to the practice, persistence, registration, and critical reception and embellishment of writing. Any politics of deconstruction, Derrida gestures here above all figuratively, will be enunciated by writing in the political traces, turns, and variants that it assumes: the mark of the scapegoat or undesirable, the spasmodic and elliptical twists attributed to the rogue or voyou, the undecidable duplicity of autoimmunity, making it impossible to determine whether an act of aggression strikes the designated enemy or the power mobilized to lash out, the torture meted out by the circular machine of punishment and humiliation.

In keeping with the succinct solidarity between any possible democracy and writing in its deeper philosophical sense that he underscores in the citation immediately above, Derrida pursues the circular reasoning and autoimmune implications of contemporary shock capitalism both in their philosophical roots and over the vast spectrum of national and regional cultures that Klein has “covered” in multiple senses of the word:

Derrida’s work on ipseity here, with the seal or closure that it applies to entities and agencies, whether of the singular or collective variety, plumbs to the deep roots of will, selfhood, self-centeredness, high-handedness, one is tempted to add narcissism (for those who might tolerate this rhetoric), whether in the singular or plural, in philosophy’s very engine-room, the khōra where its most basic parts throb and murmur. Sealed by unilateral momentum, volition, assertion, the entity is primed, at the most basic level, for the “reason of the strongest.” In the Lacanian universe, narcissism is the isolation allowing individuals to think, behave, and express themselves like planets (no doubt, also to feel like them). [11] Derrida’s take on blind or completely cynical self-assertion is both more physical (as in grounded in physics) and more etymologically vibrant than what is ultimately a Romantic figure of “sublime isolation.” To his quest both backward and downward in philosophy’s history and architecture to ipseity, arising among the elementary forms of kratos and cracy, Derrida adds one of his most fanciful and productive etymological fugues, one in which the physics of turning morphs wildly, implicating the turrets of absolutist feudal power as well as the wheels plied by potters and executioners. Yet there is a philosophical gist to the open-ended drift of words related to turning: the figure of the unmoved mover at the heart of Western approaches to politics and power as well of theology.

The grounding of Klein’s reportage in the day-by-day accretion of information, in actuality in the full senses of the term, might not allow her a tour de force of linguistic steeping and associative virtuosity such as the one demonstrated in the two extracts immediately above. How absolutely astonishing and even hopeful, then, that in a very different way, Derrida’s exposition could be as resolutely dedicated to disclosing the violence, oversimplification, and self-serving rapacity and greed in shock capitalism as she is. Furthermore, as suggested above, that her account, a bravura performance in its own right, could rely in pivotal instances as much on imagistic suggestion and shorthand as Derrida’s. Derrida can buttress the Western fundament of ipseity as the “deep structure” of self-assertion and repetition over time by invoking formats of alternation culled from Plato and Aristotle. Klein is left with an appeal to the World Court of decency and common sense, as they have evolved within the current configuration of politics and information.

Yet where both Klein and Derrida end up, whether in tracking the Shock Doctrine across the globe or in accessing the very philosophical roots of obtuse and self-serving power, is a profound repugnance toward, and irresistible compulsion to expose and debunk torture, yet another turn in the figuration and performance of ipseity:

Be assured, the torture that Derrida laments here, even having derived it from a tropolgy set deep within the battery of philosophy and its languages, is every bit as tangible and destructive, delivered with increasing impunity in sites all over the world, as the one tracked and monitored by Klein, “a system designed to force them [prisoners] to betray the principle most integral to their sense of self” (112). Torture is surely the most concrete, in the Lacanian idiom, Real turn of the wheel whose most complex articulation is the reversals and intangibles of the autoimmune system. Like the wheel in its full nuance of complexity, autoimmunity is an absolutely capital scenario for Derrida to have extracted and derived, in a development-project of signification far more salutary than shock capitalism. It achieves such soaring pertinence, in a deconstructive meditation that has always acknowledged the lack of any clear demarcation between the “insides” and ”outsides” of systems, because of the fluidity and volatility with which stimulus morphs into allergen, ally into enemy and vice versa, and, as we have seen, aggression against the enemy mutates into an insidious intrinsic system-virus.

Derrida goes to some lengths to demonstrate that the subtly in-turning or autotropic figure of autoimmunity is not isolated, either as a dynamic or a figure, in the battery of virtual conceptual and exegetical turnings that deconstruction has perforce accessed and harnessed. Indeed, in the citation immediately below, the cloud-chamber of autoimmunity is sutured to no less than two long traditions of conceptual and interpretative indeterminacy: the Kantian antinomy, whose constitutional double-vision is, indeed, also reproduced at certain moments when Hegelian dialectics stops dead in its tracks, “crashes,” shorts itself out. But to the extent that the autoimmune system (or non-system) can issue forth, at any moment, in the mutually counteracting messages of a double bind, Derrida places it also in the wake of the seminal thinking performed by the first generation of avowed systems and communications analysts, above all Gregory Bateson and Anthony Wilden. Autoimmunity, to invoke Derrida’s own favored word for this logical and communicative meltdown, is an aporia with wide-ranging political (among other) implications.

Once again, in two juxtaposed citations from Rogues, we are party to the incredibly smooth and powerful follow-through between the dynamics of autoimmunity as a figural and exegetical phenomenon and its tangible, often tragic repercussions in the sphere of global as well as local politics. If autoimmunity encapsulates the full craziness initiated in the multiple conditions of ipseity and the circular reasoning and self-interest extending from it, it is a counterpart to the insanities of giving, receiving, obligation, constraint, and reciprocity embedded in the conventions and practices of hospitality. [13] As Derrida reminds us, the step from formal-logical indeterminacy to blunt and irreversible acts of sovereignty on the world-stage is an incredibly brief one.

The allegorical figure in whom the aporias of autoimmunity are embedded and concentrated is, of course, the rogue himself (voyou). By a logic of the scapegoat going back in Derrida’s exposition all the way to “Plato’s Pharmacy,” [14] the rogue is the volition or agency that the sociopolitical system has turned out, in Agamben’s rhetoric, banned. [15] In another display of balletic etymological and conceptual virtuosity akin to his work on the tour, one just preceeding the citation immediately below, Derrida derives the figure of the voyou from a series of usages and puns all having to do with the thoroughfare or way (voie).

The voyou is a composite figure of deviation from the way. In a turn of stunning inventiveness even for himself, Derrida extrapolates the parameters of the system of deviance, the voyoucracy emerging from the culture of street-deviance. Ever the systems theorist, though his links to this particular discursive subspecialty are rarely rendered explicit, Derrida points out the momentum by which even resistance or “counterpower” can be placed under bureaucratic administration.

The environment, milieu, catchment area, or natural habitat of belligerent deviance, whether the scattered acts of voyous or the regime of voyoucracy, is invariably the street, the thoroughfare. We do not know in what continent, city, or backwater the street that Derrida conjures forth in the above extract happens to be located. But it is virtual, tangible, Real: as much so as the capitals and sites of violence assembled so adroitly by Klein into the shock narrative. The virtual place where Klein and Derrida eventuate is a shared one, defined by its commitment to resistance and disclosure. If Klein and Derrida share in a certain constructive belligerence, it persists in the face of otherwise crippling and neutralizing autoimmunity and double bind. There are no winners in the “battle of proper names” [16] devolving on the appellation of singular or collective rogues. No one could put this impasse as eloquently as Derrida:

In the face of this zero-sum and zero-outcome game, engulfed and punctuated in violence as it may be, it remains incumbent on those of us with the capacity to persist in the acts of inscription, registration, and critique, regardless of how shocking or anomalous the new catastrophes, with whose “breaking” we’ve managed to catch up, happen to be. As Derrida beautifully orchestrates in the virtual street-scene that he summons forth as the homeland of the voyous, the quickly breaking argot of the actual, of what transpires today, remains dynamically anchored in the langue of long-standing cultural articulation, categorization, classification, figuration, logic, and taxonomy. That Klein and Derrida find themselves on so many of the same pages gives us an indication of how varied, in script, medium, acceleration, style, and impact the current tablets and display-screens of cultural notation happen to be.

The diverse qualities, dimensionalities, stylistics, timeframes, and spatializations of the media in which we participate, far from being leisure pursuits or interactions with techno gimmicks or appliances, are in fact the conditions of our knowledge, the very possibility of our expression and political enfranchisement. Our selection and familiarization with those media and inscriptive tools allowing our fullest responsiveness to the unfolding catastrophe of events are acts bearing the most tangible political as well as aesthetic implications. As draconian as the measures that shock capitalism currently implements may be, as unimpeded the incursions of corporate armies and shadow-corporations, the picture will not improve if the investigative and critical “noise of the system” is silenced. Klein and Derrida open up a spectrum of writing media, displays, styles, temporalities, shelf-lives, audiences, and impacts of definitive significance to our own possibilities of expression and participation in whatever democracy remains yet to come.