Infrapolitical Passages by Gareth Williams;

Author:Gareth Williams;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2020-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

Facticity, or the Question of the Right Name for War

It is at this point that we confront the question of how to determine a path for thinking from within the register of decontainment, as opposed to against it or in spite of it. In the following pages I address what I consider to be the most rigorous sociological scholarship carried out thus far on the contemporary order of narco-accumulation as a particular form of post-katechontic conflict, though neither of the two books I foreground below uses those terms specifically.

I am referring in particular to Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism (2014) and Guadalupe Correa-Cabrera’s Los Zetas Inc.: Criminal Corporations, Energy, and Civil War in Mexico (2017). The intention in my approach to these two works is to highlight the question of facticity, that is, the problem they raise regarding the meaning of the mode of violence and, consequently, the meaningfulness of the existence of beings immersed in and subsumed by the extension of global capital in its supposedly illicit forms. This will then allow us to address the conceptual implications of post-katechontic violence in the epoch of the end of epochality.

Dawn Paley’s Drug War Capitalism is without doubt a committed and extensively researched book. It is also an essential point of departure for highlighting some of the limitations inherent in interpreting contemporary force from within an essentially modern political and cultural matrix. In this work the violence of narco-accumulation is portrayed correctly as an amalgamation of intracapitalist conflicts unleashed from within the context of the generalized collapse of postrevolutionary sovereignty in Mexico. These intracapitalist conflicts owe their existence to the devastating social effects of decades of domestic austerity policies, militarized territorial and commercial control, and foreign financial investment guaranteed and protected by a counterinsurgency-styled social conflict. Since the financial crisis of 1982 and the passage toward the definitive institutionalization of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1994, all of this has been achieved within a context of formal neoliberal democracy that, in its legal framework, supports the cross-border movement of products and goods but, due to US-Mexico transnational military integration and the construction of an increasingly apartheid-like border architecture since 1994, limits the cross-border movement of people.

In its illegal framework, however, this very same democracy strives to guarantee the cross-border flow of illicit consumer goods and people, in the process ensuring and intensifying the exploitation of migrant proletarians hailing originally from within Mexico, increasingly from Central America, and now even from parts of eastern and sub-Saharan Africa, India, Afghanistan, etc. “Security” is the watchword for the legitimization of an official language of economic growth and stability, foreign investment, business, and energy development. This same word is also used to lend legitimacy to a (false) relation of equivalence between security and the prosperity of all, in which if we are all “secure” we are all “prosperous.” The fallacy is clear for all to see.

Meanwhile, paramilitary security is accompanied by an economy built on the patterns and forms of transnational corporatism, financialization, transportation, and market accessibility.

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