Clandestinity and Appearance

Is there more to the refusal of identity than the romantic escape fantasies of certain anarchist cells or the necessary survival tactics of the ‘illegal'? John Cunningham takes up the case of clandestinity and resistance in the age of biopolitics

Closedness and Openness

Sometimes the detritus and trash of contemporary commodity capitalism can reveal more than is intended. A recent advert for the BMW mini-convertible, plastered on billboards throughout London, carries the slogan ‘Closedness Bad' alongside its dualistic correlative ‘Openness Good.' Below ‘closedness' is a sealed book bearing the Monty Python approved title ‘The Meaning of Life' and, below ‘openness', a gleaming mini-convertible that's completed underneath by the advertising pay-off, ‘Stay Open'. Where Benjamin glimpsed a utopian trace of the classless society in ‘a thousand configurations of life, from permanent buildings to ephemeral fashions', this advert gives us a glimpse, underneath the infantilising language, of a hidden dichotomy within the culture of contemporary capitalism.¹ ‘Closedness' and ‘Openness' might be said to act as place-markers for the opaque and the transparent, clandestinity and identity, silence and communication. A trace of the clandestine emerges in the embodied dead labour and banal strap-lines of an advertising billboard, but where else might it be glimpsed?

Michele Sinapi, in an unpacking of the etymology of the term ‘clandestine', writes that whereas ‘a secret presupposes an almost absolute separation [...] what is clandestine is what is most [...] intimate.' She links the clandestine to ‘an interiority that cannot be appropriated, of a resistance to being seized.'² Clandestinity is intimate to the body politic of contemporary capitalism and different forms of the clandestine drift into discourse only to recede again out of visibility. These forms are in no way homogeneous. Worlds of difference separate the economic and political clandestinity of ‘illegal' migrants from the tactical appropriation of anonymity by the black bloc, the everyday as a form of resistance, or the clandestine exodus of ‘phantom organisations' and the self-exile of individuals from political and artistic milieus. Yet all these forms of clandestinity are ‘intimate' in the sense of being the object of dispositifs of surveillance and discipline, and the diffuse apparatuses that (re)produce identity and subjectivity within contemporary biopolitical capitalism. Another intimacy they share is in being subject to an economic appropriation of every human capability - the body, generic communicability - within the regime of biopolitical capital. The latter, as theorised by Foucault, Agamben and Virno amongst others, can be loosely defined as the management of life as such within capitalism. The desperate clandestinity of exclusion for economic migrants, wherein clandestine existence is imposed by capital's need for a reserve army of labour, is paradoxically mirrored by the refusal of productive subjectivity advocated within more radical anti-capitalist circles (the Invisible Committee, et al). Might an examination of clandestinity illuminate the apparatuses of subjectification and appearance as well as the potential forms of de-subjectification that arise through an oppositional clandestinity? Or is such an attachment to the game of disappearance nothing but romanticising an impotent resistance that's unable to escape the instauration of capital as a social relation?

Facial Apparatus

What, though, might there be to flee from in having a face, having a visage, in being (re)produced as an identity? Security state operations such as the ‘Green Scare' in the US and the Tarnac 9 ‘pre-terrorism' case in France point to obvious reasons for anyone engaged in anti-capitalist activism to evade all too easy identification within the current paradigm of manufactured terror.³ However, the (re)production of subjectivity within contemporary capitalism points to other, less immediately pressing reasons to desire invisibility. Agamben writes that ‘the transformation of the species [a term that originally meant to ‘make visible'] into a principle of identity and classification is the original sin of our culture, its most implacable apparatus.'⁴ Whereas I'd be tempted to say wage labour is the primary ‘original sin' and even then want to jettison the theological language, the post-autonomist professor is undoubtedly digging away at something in our contemporary biopolitical misery. Agamben suggests there are two sides to the compulsion within contemporary capitalism towards identity. One is overtly disciplinary, related to surveillance, biometric ID cards and the production of a state sponsored ‘zone of indistinction' wherein legal and illegal, citizen and criminal merge into one another.⁵ Related to this and equally imbricated within our everyday is the appropriation of our generic capability for communication and affective capacities that are not predicated upon identity - i.e. ‘species', ‘special being', ‘whatever singularity' - within the apparatus of spectacular capitalism. ‘Whatever singularity' is the immanent, non-specific potentiality that is compressed and constrained within current social relations - a pure means. Such a ‘pure means' in its essence is not based upon individual identity but is generic to humanity as such. This is appropriated through a more subtle, pernicious form of identification predicated upon making oneself visible and being made visible through various apparatuses.

Following Foucault, Agamben defines an apparatus as

literally anything that has [...] the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control or secure the gestures, behaviours, opinions, or discourses of living beings.⁶

The apparatus might be institutional such as the prison, factory, or internment centre, a space of consumption such as a shopping mall or orders of relation like advertising campaigns or social networking sites. An apparatus is composed of bodies, technologies and discourses, traversing the traditional materialist categories of the economy and ideology while incorporating less quantifiable aspects such as affect. As much as value is extracted from my body by the tools I use at work (computers, languages, numerals) and the structures and strictures of an economic system (capital), the (re)production of myself as a subject is also mediated through aspects of an apparatus such as workplace training courses around topics such as interpersonal skills. Such attempts to induce and quantify particular subjective traits can induce little but cynicism and dread, but this is not an argument against their efficacy. Affect, personality and individuality are put to work even in my spare time, as I gaze at the individuating apparatus of a dumb car advert or signpost my identity on Facebook.

The latter serves as an example of one apparatus among many that will aid an examination of some of the hegemonic traits of possessing a face and being a subject. A myth of anonymity recurs around social networking sites, the notion that they produce a play of identities. However, a recent psychological study suggests that what you see is what you get, a book of faces that are purely transparent and less opaque than the traditional CV.⁷ The subject is constructed through the appropriation of ‘pure means', a generic human creativity and opening onto the world. This is then articulated through the dissemination of self-images, providing useful pointers for marketing, potential employers and ‘friending'.

Within biopolitical, spectacular capitalism an oddly mutable, normalised and separated self is (re)produced that comfortably dwells within alienation.⁸ While much of this can sound like a humourless primitivist denunciation or paranoid ranting, it's worth underlining that an apparatus, such as a social networking site, is purely impersonal and functions structurally as the machinic operation of biopolitical capitalism. Furthermore, apparatuses are not confined to media or Web 2.0. If this was so it would be relatively easy to disconnect and buy into the mythology of deep green primitivism.

Multiple processes and apparatuses of subjectification are present within contemporary capitalism - factories, universities and discourses of identity around class, race and gender also (re)produce subjects and affects and have been around much longer than new media. However, without falling into the cyber-Marxist trap of placing too much emphasis upon technology, the self-marketed ‘me' of Web 2.0 captures something of contemporary capitalism's ideal of a flexible, highly visible self. A self-endorsed brand that stares back at us as an embodiment of a real abstraction operative in the world. As Paci notes

The fundamental character of capitalism [...] is revealed in the tendency to make abstract categories live as though they were concrete. Categories become subjects, or rather, even persons, though we must here speak of person in the Latin sense, that is, of masks [...] The abstract, in capitalist society, functions concretely.⁹

These ‘abstract categories,' such as value and wage labour are present in the (re)production of commodified forms of subjectivity and identity. Attempting to delineate the processes of subjectification can end up sounding like notes from a particularly lucid depression, but it's worth emphasising that the real ‘subject' operative in this is capital. The ‘concrete' is composed through the abstractions of capital and any positing of an external subject to this is left searching for an irreducible remnant that can reside only within the breakdowns of various forms of ‘human strike' or Dupont's theorisation of ‘species being' as almost unwilled affective revolt.¹⁰

Agamben writes that the individual is produced from ‘the relentless fight between living beings, and apparatuses.'¹¹ This constant reference to ‘living beings' , while having the virtue of emphasising the universality of the operation of apparatuses of subjectification irrespective of class, race or gender, can also obscure the central component of contemporary biopolitics - that it is the effect of capital. More specifically, as Virno notes,

The living body becomes an object to be governed not for its intrinsic value, but because it is the substratum of what really matters: labour- power as the aggregate of the most diverse human faculties...'¹²

For both Virno and Agamben the locus of biopolitical capital is in capturing the generic potentiality or potenzia of the human, a potentiality that Virno more lucidly ascribes to labour-power as the repository of the sum total of human capabilities that can be utilised within wage labour. Emphasising ‘labour-power' underlines the continued centrality of wage labour and is a necessary corrective to Agamben's tendency to view contemporary biopolitics as a confrontation between a generic humanity and various apparatus of subjectification. Virno, in locating labour-power as the locus of biopolitics, is essentially making the point that capital was always already biopolitical, concerned with the management of ‘life' as such. Biopolitics is historicised without falling into the trap of too strict a periodisation or Agamben's too diffuse emphasis upon sovereignty and the (re)production of bare life as the ahistorical, originary form of domination. While Virno, like most post-autonomists, emphasises cognitive labour as being the hegemonic form of contemporary capitalism, his location of labour-power as the originary biopolitical site reminds us that expropriation takes different forms, but its primary form is the extraction of value - even if expressed within the ‘social factory'. The extraction of value from labour is the only constant, whether from affect, communicativity or physical labour. There is nothing especially new in this. Against the post-autonomist claims of novelty, what Negri terms ‘the biopolitical context of the new paradigm', is just another expression of capital's invariance, another way of maintaining itself as a social relation.¹³ What might be viewed as new are the forms of what Foucault termed ‘governmentality', the (re)production of self-regulating subjects through apparatuses and the careful administration of state power that encourages and guides market ‘freedom'.

Agamben's image for generic potentiality is literally the human face, a face that is the site of a conflict wherein potentiality is subject to appropriation by the apparatus of spectacular capitalism. He writes that it is ‘...only in the sphere of the human face that the mechanism of exhibition-value finds its proper place'.¹⁴ ‘Exhibition-value', a concept Agamben extrapolates from the work of Benjamin on art and mechanical reproduction, is neither exchange or use value but the capture and expression of ‘pure means' within spectacular capitalism. Faciality is both an emblem and literal expression of such a ‘pure means', a deliberate poetic slippage that can make Agamben's critique of spectacular capitalism more than opaque, though this might also be an attempt to avoid recuperation. For Agamben ‘the task of politics is to return appearance itself to appearance, to cause appearance itself to appear.'¹⁵ The ‘face' is the locus of a ‘pure means', an exposition of a potentiality not constrained by identity and expressive of the collective ‘general intellect'. As well as being accumulated ‘social knowledge' that can be utilised within production, ‘general intellect' is a sensual corporeal form that ‘appears in the materiality of corporeal processes [and] habitual ways of life no less than in theory.'¹⁶ Similar to what Marx presciently termed ‘species being' as an ‘objective sensuous being', this formulation also underlines what's at stake in the struggle around ‘appearance' and its appropriation by spectacle.¹⁷

As Agamben writes, ‘capitalism (is) not only [...] directed to the expropriation of productive activity, but was also and above all directed to the alienation of [...] the communicative nature of human beings'.¹⁸ Appearance is appropriated within spectacle, work, commodified roles and identities by the apparatuses of biopolitical capitalism. Appropriated is almost the wrong term. Whereas Debord's concept of the spectacle describes a social relation mediated through images that are congealed capital and induce passivity, Agamben emphasises the active communicative nature of subjectification within contemporary spectacular capital. No longer projecting desire onto a celebrity or commodity, we are instead encouraged to individuate as an entrepreneurial project that can be facilitated through Web 2.0, the self-help industry or any apparatus that can be (self)productive. Such a mode of subjectification is central to contemporary capital's governmentality. If ‘the face', generic potenzia, is appropriated as a commodity then might certain forms of clandestinity provide a (non)identity that escapes the faciality of capital and allows potenzia to appear?

Zones of Opacity?

Becoming clandestine, or more accurately the impetus towards clandestinity, could be such an attempt to escape subjectification as a productive form. Agamben writes that the individual can be ‘the place of multiple processes of subjectification' and argues for a ‘profanation' of apparatuses through which they could be made common and returned to non-instrumental use.¹⁹ Becoming (in)visible, the refusal of identity, could be one such counter-appropriation of apparatuses. Strands within contemporary insurrectionist anarchism, such as the Crimethinc, Ex-workers Collective and the Invisible Committee view clandestinity as both a tactic to simply avoid identification and a way to articulate a refusal of spectacular biopolitics and initiate a different form of (de)subjectification predicated upon becoming anonymous and imperceptible; the refusal of the face as spectacular identity. As the Invisible Committee stated recently - in The Coming Insurrection - ‘Flee visibility. Turn anonymity into an offensive position.'²⁰

The most visible sign of such an anonymity, at least in anti-capitalist circles, has been the various black blocs that have formed a masked, tactical presence in most large scale mobilisations since the 1980s. Much of this anonymity is necessary since as the N30 Communiqué put it after the 1999 protests in Seattle:

Let's face it (with or without a mask) - we aren't living in a democracy right now. If this week has not made it plain enough, let us remind you - we are living in a police state.

Not to mention the emphasis on property damage for which the black bloc is fairly infamous. Without getting into the ethics of smashing windows, the black bloc highlights the uneasy equivocation of a publicly illegalist clandestine politics between tactical necessity and the potential (re)production of a vanguardist political identity. Sometimes, judging by the number of images the tactic of the black bloc accumulates, it can become appropriated into the spectacle to be consumed like any other lifestyle. Even so, the black bloc suggests the tactical advantages of anonymity and the related refusal of the faciality of capitalism as well as suggesting ‘what a body can do.' As art collective Claire Fontaine says

The term black bloc alludes to a manifestation of desire for collective opacity, a will not to appear and to materialise affects that are increasingly hard to take.²¹

Maybe the illegalist masks of the black bloc shade into an exodus from the quantitative commodified identities of biopolitical capitalism. This mask has two faces. One is aristocratic and disdainful of those unable and unwilling to wear it, and the other is anonymous and generic - it could be anyone.

Clandestine Bartleby

The figure of Bartleby is emblematic of such a refusal. Melville's scrivener refuses any assigned role as worker with the phrase ‘I would prefer not to', and any welfare or Christian charity from his bemused but liberal boss.²² How might this figure inform a clandestine politics of foot dragging non-conformity? For Agamben, Bartleby is a figure of potentiality, a quality that is encapsulated in his ability to not enact the gestures expected of him by his employer and - to extend Agamben's analysis - to not allow himself to become a subject defined through wage labour.²³ Bartleby represents an exodus from the appropriation of generic potentiality or ‘whatever singularity' by the apparatuses of capital, and it's in this gap that forms of appearance less appropriatable within biopolitical capital might appear. Just as ‘pure means' is appropriated, it's also immanent to biopolitical apparatuses as dysfunction and the expression of a non-instrumental refusal. Such a form of refusal underlines the non-coincidence of body and apparatus that can open out into a refusal of wage labour and its attendant subject-forms of worker, consumer or self-mediating identity. It's clandestine in the sense of being most ‘intimate' to capital and takes many forms. These are often involuntary, arising from proletarian dysfunction, depression and work shirking as much as the more voluntarist secession as advocated by the Invisible Committee or active acts of sabotage.

In a sense both are equally ‘involuntary' since they are immanent to the social relations of a biopolitical capitalism and structured within it. However, the Invisible Committee and insurrectionist anarchism in general run a risk of confusing resistance with a purely subjective voluntarism that draws a distinction between those who refuse and plebs still interpellated within capitalism. It's difficult to maintain this distinction when the lines of exodus and refusal always start from the middle of a social relation maintained by capital and are constantly undercut by it. Bartleby is configured by the abstractions of capital and reacts accordingly by stopping. This mirrors the refusal of work as an almost involuntary act and is absolutely generic - Bartleby is no-one special. However, Bartleby is not just self-exiled, but ultimately completely destitute and excluded from society - a danger that pursues anyone who is unable, unwilling or excluded from participating in the regime of appearance.

It is noticeable that Bartleby makes no demands and retains a strict anonymity - he does not become a face or identity and repeats ‘I am not a particular case'. The refusal of roles and identities in favour of anonymity and pseudonym is a recurrent tactic within anarchist and ultra-left pro-revolutionary milieus. It was practised by Bordiga and Camatte amongst many others as any browse through a radical bookshop's shelf will testify. While much of this is tactical, Camatte links such an anonymous, oppositional subjectivity to the refusal of all existent forms of political organisation as being ‘rackets' defined by the logic of capital. For Camatte such a disaffiliation represented ‘the correct sense in which anonymity is posed rather than as the negation of the individual (which capitalist society itself brings about).'²⁴ Effacing oneself sometimes means secession from the apparatuses that reproduce an identity as activist or a particular form of politics that can also instrumentalise and appropriate gestures and face.

Bartleby is also a proponent of what Deleuze termed ‘the formula'. This is the twisting of language that the phrase ‘I would prefer not to' performs through its repetition and the way it then insinuates itself into the language of the other clerks and his boss. Deleuze describes it as ‘(carving) out a kind of foreign language within language.'²⁵ In a way Camatte's disaffiliation and ‘phantom organisations' such as the secessionist Imaginary Party advocated by Tiqqun or more playfully Frère Dupont's secretive Earthen Cup perform a similar task in pro-revolutionary milieus. By insinuating themselves into the linguistic and organisational form(s) of a redundant leftist politics they perform a clandestine, mimetic act of destruction pointing out the limits of supposedly radical politics, the ways it can mirror the (re)production of subjectivity within capitalism. In a similar way collective cultural production that retains the relative anonymity of its participants such as the Luther Blissett Project or the collectively produced Bernadette Corporation's novel Reena Spaulings do away with the spectacular face of the creative class by a form of mimetic shadowing that restores something of a collective potenzia to cultural production.²⁶ Also, like the scrivener, cultural producers could just stop producing.

The clandestine as irreducible remnant and remainder finds its figuration in Bartleby in several ways. The world he walks in is one of the everyday that he haunts like a ghost, in offices and stairwells, as an opaque figure of refusal. If the clandestine is an intimate of spectacular biopolitical capitalism then the everyday is where this intimacy is most exhibited. Blanchot writes, ‘The everyday escapes. Why does it escape? Because it is without subject.'²⁷ The ‘everyday' is an opaque, usually urban, space constantly (re)produced within capital but exceeding it.²⁸ The billboard might promise a regime of ‘openness' and transparency but it's located in the midst of an ‘everyday' that's replete with material detritus that undoes attempts to regulate it. However as Blanchot recognised alongside other theorists of the everyday such as Lefebvre and the Situationists, the everyday is always already subject to capture by spectacular capital and regimes of surveillance and classification.

Foucault writes that from the 17th century, ‘a whole political network became interwoven with the fabric of everyday life.'²⁹ Now that would include the biopolitical regime of spectacular capital with its over-determination of identity and classifications, as anyone caught in the entrails of welfare, work, medical and leisure apparatuses could probably testify. Yet this very over-determination also leads to the need for a (de)subjectification. Witness the account of an anarchist forced into clandestinity in the book Incognito:

I've never agreed with comrades who consider living in clandestinity as the worst thing that could ever happen to you; on the contrary I've always [...] perceived it as a stroke of luck and a chance to be grasped at once.³⁰

(S)he also adds ‘you only need to become one of the many, nothing more or less...'³¹ This might just be bravado but it also touches on the continued possibilities of the ‘everyday' as a site of the anonymous, potentially oppositional subject that Blanchot glimpses and the existential potentiality that can be grasped through it.

That Bartleby dies in the workhouse also makes him a remnant in the sense of being homo sacer, the passive residue of ‘bare life' identified by Agamben as the hidden foundation of sovereignty that is subject to the decisions of sovereign power within the contemporary state of exception. The clandestine emerges as an inclusive exclusion within the circuits of a biopolitics predicated upon labour power and the extraction of value. The paradigmatic example of this is the illegal migrant or the refugee. Sinapi, relating the way the use of the term shifted in France, writes that it begins to be used most ‘insistently' in the 1930s as ‘a synonym for the recurring expression ‘undesirable foreigners' and causes the term ‘emigrants' to disappear entirely.'³² This both undercuts the persistent romanticism of clandestinity and underlines the difficulties inherent for any oppositional forms of political agency it might take. As an anonymous Algerian migrant says in Incognito,

It seemed to me that your condition as an immigrant, more than that of clandestinity, affects your life day after day [...] Being an immigrant affects every aspect of your life...³³

However, the same text also indirectly calls into doubt the activities of NGO groups such as ‘Strangers into Citizens' that campaign for a legitimisation of ‘illegal' migrants justified by a combination of human rights discourse and almost Victorian ‘deserving poor' rhetoric.³⁴ The same Algerian migrant, after documenting an experience of black economy labour and clandestine everyday life says, ‘if once I was scared I might be discovered as a clandestine and face deportation, my fears doubled after I had papers.'³⁵ This is because ‘there is this closure, this invisible encirclement that is the fear [...] of being deported [...]. In fact the stay permit is nothing; it is just a way for the authorities to control you.'

Image: Mongrel, Untitled, 2000

Appearance remains controlled within the circuits of biopolitical capital even and especially when the object is legitimacy and the granting of human rights by the state within the current state of exception. No rights that are granted can be worth that much since they can be taken away again. While Agamben's concept of the inclusive exclusion of homo sacer is useful for conceptualising this and captures much of the current biopolitical paradigm, there's a disturbing passivity to it and too sharp a disjunction between homo sacer and ‘form-of-life', the self positing (anti)political agency that emerges with the negation of ‘forms-of-life', our identities as worker, consumer, migrant, etc.. The gap is ‘labour power' as a way of recognising the way that appearance might manifest itself as a ‘form-of-life' less encumbered by the biopolitical apparatuses of spectacular capitalism. Such a form-of-life would be an emancipatory politics of non-identity that negated identities and representations such as worker, migrant, (self)consumer, etc.

This need not be some valorisation of productivity or worker's identity. ‘Labour power' is a potentiality and could also be a refusal and even destruction of wage labour and the extraction of value in favour of an expression of a social relation that's an exodus from capital. ‘Pure means' as a means without end, a non-instrumental assemblage of qualities and potentialities immanent to the subject would be expressed in a non-commodified faciality or ‘appearance' in the non-instrumental usage of these qualities and potentialities as in friendship, the ‘sharing without an object [...] that constitutes the political'.³⁶ Bartleby is solitary, but another configuration of the clandestine suggests a community of Bartleby's. This is the notion of an ‘unavowable community' developed by Blanchot through the work of Bataille who spoke of ‘the negative community: the community of those who have no community'. Such a ‘negative community' is the immanent prefiguration of a community that refuses the exigencies of value and all existent forms of ‘appearance' in favour of a becoming predicated upon ‘the possibility - beyond any utilitarian gain - of a being together.'³⁷ While this retains the romanticism of much clandestine discourse it also might prefigure communisation as a form of appearing.

John Cunningham <coffeescience23 AT yahoo.co.uk> is a sometime writer and occasional wage labourer who lives in South London

Footnotes

1 Walter Benjamin, cited in Gary Smith, (ed.), Benjamin: Philosophy, Aesthetics, History, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989.p. 218.

2 Michele Sinapi, ‘The Displacements of the Shadow Line', Social Science Information Vol.47 (4), Los Angeles: Sage Publications, 2008.

3 See http://greenisthenewred.com/blog/ and http://tarnac9.wordpress.com/

4 Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, New York: Zone Books, 2007, p. 59.

5 See Agamben's response to this at http://egs.edu/faculty/giorgio-agamben/articles/

6 Giorgio Agamben, What is an Apparatus, US: Stanford University Press, 2009, p.14.

7 http://sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/56735/title/Facebook_users_keep_it_real_in_online_profiles

8 The Agamben influenced ultra-left journal Tiqqun configured such a subject as the ‘bloom', emptied out of experience and commodified. While there's an acerbic nihilist accuracy to this, there's also a certain disdain towards others' experience and the valorisation of an impossible, voluntarist secession out of the social relation of capital. For ‘Theory of the Bloom':

http://zinelibrary.info/theory-bloom-tiqqun

9 Quoted in Alberto Toscano, ‘Real Abstraction Revisited', available here http://www.le.ac.uk/ulmc/research/cppe/pdf/toscano.pdf

10 See, Tiqqun, ‘How is it to be done' available at http://zinelibrary.info/how-it-be-done-zine-tiqqun and Frére Dupont, ‘Species Being and Other Stories', US: Ardent Press, 2007.

11 Agamben, What is an Apparatus, ibid., p. 14.

12 Paolo Virno, Grammar of the Multitude, LA, Semiotext(e), 2004, p.83.

13 Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, Empire, Cambridge Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001, p.26.

14 Agamben, Profanations, ibid., p.90.

15 Giorgio Agamben, Means Without End, Minneapolis-London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p.94.

16 Agamben, ibid., p.11.

17 Karl Marx, Early Writings, UK: Penguin, 1977, p.390.

18 Agamben, Means Without End, ibid., p.95.

19 Agamben, What is an Apparatus, ibid., p.14.

20 The Invisible Committee, The Coming Insurrection, LA: Semiotext(e), 2009, p.112.

21 See http://fendersen.com/black_bloc.htm

22 Herman Melville, Bartleby, available here http://gutenberg.org/etext/11231

23 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities. US: Stanford University Press, 1999.

24 Jacques Camatte, This World We Must Leave, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 1995, p.33.

25 Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, London: Verso, 1998, p.71.

26 See http://lutherblissett.net/ and http://bernadettecorporation.com/novel.htm. The latter also performs a mimetic deconstruction of the apparatuses of self-alienation and marketing in its narrative.

27 Maurice Blanchot, The Infinite Conversation, US, University of Minnesota Press, 1993, p.244.

28 Henri Lefebvre, Everyday Life in the Modern World, London: Athlone Press, 2002.

29 Michel Foucault, ‘Power: Essential Works Vol 3,' UK: Penguin, 2002, p.168.

30 Anonymous, translator Barbara Stefanelli, Incognito, London, Elephant Editions, 2008, p. 86.

31 Ibid., p.90.

32 Sinapi, ibid., p.534.

33 Anonymous, Incognito, ibid., p.75.

34 See Camille Barbagallo and Nic Beuret, ‘Bang to Rights', at http://metamute.org/en/Bang-to-Rights

35 Anonymous, Incognito, ibid.,p. 74.

36 Agamben, What is an Apparatus, ibid., p. 36.

37 Maurice Blanchot, ‘The Unavowable Community', Barrytown, NY, Station Hill Press, 1988, p. 30.