population – Infrapolitical Reflections

Immediately after the end of the Second World War, the historian Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring published a thin book in Havana with the title Weyler en Cuba: un precursor de la barbarie fascista (Páginas, 1947), which made a direct connection between twentieth century political movement fascism and the lurking shadow of the Spanish general Valeriano Weyler, who commanded the intense colonial pacification against pro-independence insurrection at the end of the nineteenth century in Cuba. It is to Roig’s credit how he managed, toward the end of the book, to capture the actuality of what he called “weylerism” of full-fledged totalitarian and imperial wars against populations that did not come to an end in spite of international law and the several peace agreements of the Second War victors. For Roig the structural positionality of politics even in the years 1945-1947 was still maximalist, all encompassing the total conditions of living of populations, and thus a direct instrument of capitalist rent through war making. What he termed “weylerism” or the new fascist barbarism was a new qualitative leap in terms of conducting war, which now realized itself in terms of population control and the veneer of “order”: “Todo lo que Weyler representó y practicó está vigente en la posguerra” [1].

The idea of “peace” (the United Nations was settled in the fall of 1945 with the active participation of Cuba, something that Roig would not have ignored) could only signal the continuation of an extreme form of extermination and the dispensation of cruelty. In fact, the Weyler model (weylerism), was very much an administrative form of pacification of population through encampment and survival. In his memoirs, Weyler himself justifies “reconcentraciones” of the population as a martial solution to answer insurrectional arson activity, in the form of an exclusionary space within the territory even if this meant mass starvation [2]. As Roig does not cease repeating in his postwar essay, the actuality of Weylerian command is not an image of the past, but something that is already an essential part of the world of today and surely of tomorrow.

Today we are living Roig’s historical future, and we can say that his Weyler en Cuba: un precursor de la barbarie fascista (Páginas, 1947) has become as current as ever before. Just a few days ago we heard the Secretary of Homeland Security of the United States claim that Immigration Detenter Center in Florida’s Everglades could become a model for detention centers across the nation thanks to its spatial efficiency near airport runways that facilitate deportation flights and extraditions without due process. As observed by Stephen Bonsal as early as 1897, the Spanish reconcentraciones in the island of Cuba enacted by Weyler’s military command were all deployed near key military strategic sites of the colonial army [3].

It comes to no surprise that in the current public discussion about Immigration Detention camps in the United States, the discussion always pivots towards health and sanitary management of the centers, and not in the “dislocating localizations” of these evolving zones d’attentes that now are propping up near airports, shipping ports, and hinterlands of American metropolises [4]. If the camp, or reconcentraciones, is the sharp image of ongoing domestication of human beings, as a great twentieth century writer observed, it might very well be that the current metamorphosis of Weylerinism has become victorious because it has been rendered acceptable by an increasingly indolent and dormant Society.

Notes

1. Emilio Roig de Leuchsenring. Weyler en Cuba: un precursor de la barbarie fascista (Páginas, 1947), 216.

2. Valeriano Weyler. Memorias de un general (Ediciones Destino, 2004), 257.

3. Stephen Bonsal. The real condition of Cuba today (Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1897), 112.

4. Giorgio Agamben. Homo sacer (Stanford University Press, 1995). 175.

The rhetoric of “decadence” now prevalent in United States has reached such heights that, regardless of political orientation, it is clear that it has become a pretext for a desired take off and accession from the objective stagnation and paralysis. Paradoxically, the assumption that there is “decadence” is revered as a moment of forthcoming light and rejuvenation; and, thus, as a “crisis” that can be identified and managed through the end. As it is well-known, for some critics of decadence the Golden age of American life was the landing on the moon and the population boom of the 1950s; technology and family. The elements are self-serving: to accelerate the reproduction of the human species, and to lead technological gigantism against new geopolitical competitors (AI, chip wars, Green economy, etc).

In the early twentieth century Americanism was a benefactor of private Fordism (everyone could enjoy his or her car, that is, their increasing isolation), but in principle things have not changed much a century later in terms of the outlook and the techno-administrative power. But the one thing that has changed is that the age of increasing productivity and formal production is no longer the objective coordinates of social relations; rather, depopulation and stagnation are the new variables that public powers that must be governed through its effective processes. Ultimately, this also implies that the waning of the high-modern state is no longer effective, and so the established discussion about “race to the bottom” fails to understand that there is no bottom. Hence, the only race is toward planetary destruction.

And what is curious to note is that even those that have identified the epochal crisis of Liberalism can only exacerbate and contribute to the acceleration of the ongoing destruction with cultural and rhetorical veneers notwithstanding. The ‘postliberal’ commitment to the fantasy of a “new policy of re-industrialization” cunningly allows the autonomy of state-sovereign capacity as the main orientation within the growing desert of administrative functions. In fact, this is a fort da moment in which policy makers can be in favor of empowering the nexus between executive power and the federal bureaucracy; while, at the same time, the mouthpieces of these policies can promise a dismantling of the administrative state in a post-Chevron era. This schizophrenic position is not a symptom of mere anachronistic derailments of a political movements, it is also an expression of the desperate attempts of American failed (and to a large extent non-existent) political elites to find a formal mediation between state, administrative coordination, and constituent power, precisely because this nexus is broken and in shackles.

And truth be told, no piecemeal or nudge-driven re-industrial protectionism is “enough” to cure the social angst and despair of contemporary American subjectivity at all levels of human experience. It has been two honest economists, Anne Case & Angus Deaton in the book Deaths of Despair and the Future of Capitalism (2021), who taken noted that what they call “deaths of despair” is the central social affection of contemporary America, which fuels the slow but steady self-annihilation of the life that no longer truly lives (and paralyzes the economic framework as well). And, in turn, what outlives the hegemony of social domination is the regulation of pain and despair as the last dispensation of this unliving.

The necessary oblivion of the social production of the deaths of despair is what remains necessary so that a pseudo-theological framework of imperial “decadence” can retain its competitive narratives in the abyss. The end of real forces of autonomous production have led the way into the production of pain, which as Gianni Carchia clearly saw in his reading of Michelstaedter (Retorica del sublime, 1990), is a form of active ethical communication between souls. For all the alleged talk about spiritualism, theology, and instrumentalized Christianity in times of “decadence”, the high point of Americanism remains a techno-administrative apparatus that can only produce and conceal the prolongation of social pain. Precisely, “the parabola of the impossible so that any notion of the ‘good’ fails to be affirmed in this world”.