You can think of the current social order as something akin to this artificial light: another kind of power that fails in disaster. In its place appears a reversion to improvised, collaborative, cooperative and local society (Rebecca Solnit)

As a Detroit Judge joins with the pricks at Nestle in declaring access to water isn’t a right. How do you respond to that? Do you use rights discourse against power by demanding recognition of something that is simply a fabrication of jurisprudence? What is at stake in this isn’t juridical rights but the relationship of biological bodies to infrastructural ones. The demand for drinking water is also the demand for the continued operation of the infrastructure that allows the flow of drinking water to those bodies. But it is also a corporeal demand for the capacity to reproduce one’s life. The planned water shut-offs, which form part of a strategy of the privatisation of water systems across the United States, immediately put lives in danger.

It takes 1-2 days for dehydration to take effect and not much more time for this to result in deliriums, seizures, unconsciousness and death as vital metabolic processes are disrupted.The human body can last about 7 days without any water intake, although in catastrophic conditions, such as high temperatures and a lot of physical exertion, this can be reduced to about 7 hours. And here we’re talking about relatively healthy bodies. The water shut offs exacerbate the risks of dehydration for everyone affected but the existential threat is especially acute for the the very young and older adults. Infants, kids and older people are more likely to experience illness than most adults and that can mean diarrhea and vomiting, diarrhea that could potentially join the rest of the fecal matter that people without proper sanitation have no means of getting rid of. Human shit contains hundreds of thousands of viruses, bacteria, spores and parasites and if it gets into your food you could be looking at typhoid, cholera or hepatitis. In Detroit capitalism is cooking up the perfect conditions for disease, and if it comes to that the infectious agents aren’t about to respect city or state lines devised by human beings. Detroit is potentially ground-zero for an epidemic created entirely by capitalism.

So far the reasons given for the Detroit shut-offs are that people who refuse to pay their bills have no right to free water. The so-called “refusal” to pay has also been called delinquency, a concept that Michel Foucault investigated in his Discipline and Punish where it was described as

…an open illegality, irreducible at a certain level and secretly useful, at once refractory and docile … a form of illegality that seems to sum up symbolically all the others, but which makes it possible to leave in the shade those that one wishes to –or must—tolerate (1975; 276-277).

In Foucault’s analysis the delinquent is the one who is constitutionally incapable of living within the norm as a form of life that exists as subjectivity ‘representing a type of anomaly’ (1975, 254) that must be examined by social scientific means. To the old anarchist observation that it is prison’s the produce criminals Foucault puts a shift in emphasis so that we understand the full sense of this as the carceral system producing a new kind of moving category that is attached to bodies. Foucault suggests that there is a “non-corporeal reality of the delinquency” that simultaneously denotes that delinquency both as abstract in the sense of ideological and in the sense of being a unique quality of the soul. If the prisoner was defined in relation to incarceration, the delinquent is defined in terms of her constitutional being. The delinquent just can’t live by the same rules of society as the rest of us. In Detroit we pay our bills; the delinquent refuses to pay their bills because there is something essentially abnormal about them.

In Detroit these delinquents are largely people of colour with the 2010 census showing that the ethnic composition of the city as being 82.7% black, 2.2% being of mixed ethnicity, 1.1% as “Asian”, and 0.4% being indigenous people. Many of the people who will have their water supplies cut off are precisely PoC who have been associated with delinquency in the American political and popular discourse over and over again, usually in order to conceal the complex causes of black insurrections and militancy that tend to have their proximate causes in the combination of black people’s socio-economic situation and police brutality. When it comes to black bodies the “inability” to live within white norms has always comes down to a culture of delinquency rather than the refusal of segregation and subjugation. There is more than a hint of racism at work in the deployment of the discourse of delinquency here. While its also true that white bodies are also being caught within the “delinquency” net we can reasonable suggest that it is the ethnic composition that has allowed this to pass as some kind of bullshit justification. 150,000 people unable to pay their bills are being put into immediate danger and calling them delinquents only reveals the extent to which the White Man couldn’t give a fuck.

There have been attempts to do something. There was the application to the UN to have this declared a breach of human rights and petitions to the courts. More importantly there have been corporeal efforts made as the bodies of those affected have produced conjunctions with one another, forms of knowledge and techniques of resistance. Bodies have come together in rallies, blockades, and cars have been parked over access hatches to prevent shut-offs being undertaken, while a full fledged mutual aid organisation has attempted to disseminate more knowledge and skills among those facing shut-offs. The Detroit Water Brigade has been stockpiling drinking water, purifying rain water, providing warm clothes for people without hot water, warm food for people unable to heat up vegetables, a neighborhood water sharing program, as well as spread information on how to insulate homes and bodies and continued agitation for the shut-offs to be stopped and reversed.

It’s hard to know how to feel about this direct action. On the one hand it means that the working class in Detroit is once again organising itself and therefore gaining in confidence and skill, but on the other hand this is organising for survival. The indebted and unemployed workers of Detroit are being held to ransom by capital, the state and a municipal authority intent on disciplining them and attempting to bleed them dry of what little they have in order to recoup something of Detroit’s bankruptcy. It is more than tempting to speak of this as a fascist restructuring of an entire city in which the infrastructure is being reterritorialised in the direction of businesses and away from human bodies. Some might be tempted to talk about the production of third world archipelago within the United States, but that kind of talk doesn’t make sense anymore.

It is no good to throw our hands in the air as some of the commentariat has done in order to declare Detroit a “distinctively capitalist failure”; Detroit is succeeding in something that the liberal mode of thought is unable to comprehend. It would be more accurate to say that what is going on in Detroit today is itself a kind of accelerationism. The bodies the inhabit Detroit are undergoing a deliberate acceleration of the conditions of catastrophe. This goes beyond the shock doctrine insofar as it isn’t simply about the production of a site of capitalist destructive reconstruction for profit, although it certainly is that. The commodification of water and its destruction as commons (how about the water in my body? could that also be commodified?) in this city should also be viewed from the perspective of the catastrophe that has already taken place. Detroit has become a laboratory of the future in which a synthetic temporal short-circuit has been generated so that certain conditions of our climactic future are induced into existence in present moment. The cost of this is potential deaths of thousands, even of millions, in a way that makes this less a rehearsal and more an enaction of catastrophe. In Detroit there is the concerted effort to render slogan “no future” as clear and distinct reality. Detroit is being exists so that it can be murdered.

This is to suggest that Detroit is a time-machine. In discussing the idea of templexity Nick Land cites the Terminator films in which every time someone tries to stop Skynet they only ensure its rise to sentience and the elimination of humanity. Land seems primarily to be interested in talking about Oedipus but to talk too much about Oedipus is to make sure he never leaves the stage (just as orthodox psychoanalysis proceeds by inducing speech in such a way that nothing is ever resolved and the chain of significations keeps on going, finding source material anywhere it can). In a post entitled ‘Anarchonistic Oedipus‘ Land talks about ‘templex auto-production’ a process by which

Any nonlinear dynamic process, in direct proportion to its cybernetic intensity, provides the explanation for its own genesis. It appears, asymptotically, to make itself happen. Cybernetic technicity — epitomized by robotic robot-manufacture — includes a trend to autonomization essentially. Pure (or idealized) capitalistic inclination to exponential growth captures the same abstract nonlinear function. As it mechanizes, capital approximates ever more close to an auto-productive circuit in which it appears as the ‘father’ of itself (M → C → M’).

The catastrophe is just such a templex phenomena insofar as it provides the explanation for its own genesis. The catastrophe produces itself regardless of what we do to prevent it and, as has been speculated in relation to geoengineering, any attempt to halt it actually becomes the very conditions of its realisation. This doesn’t mean that the cause of catastrophe is the catastrophe but rather that we have undergone so many interventions, geological and climatological, that the original origin of the catastrophe has been erased, rewritten, and autonomised. In a sense this is the meaning of the Anthropocene which despite having anthropos in its title is the era in which the full autonomy of the planetary from the anthropic lifeworld is registered conceptually and nonconceptually. Anthropogenic climate change produces for us a fully independent ecology in which we are enmeshed and of which we are a part- and thus over which we can have no mastery- but which nonetheless exists and is capable of existing without us and in perfect indifference to us. Once set in motion anthropogenic climate change becomes irreversible and its processes emancipate themselves from full human control. The runaway of Capital once described by Camatte becomes the runaway of Climate.

The cybernetics of climate imply that a large enough feedback event leading to a deterioration in the ecological machinery produces other events that also operate as similar feedback mechanisms. This complex mechanics could equate to warming events producing more warming, as is predicted on our current trajectory. Climate has a lot of “cybernetic intensity” in that there are multiple interactive feedback mechanisms at play. This templexity is illustrated by Detroit, as city in which the potential for industrial collapse is greedily summoned like some kind of capitalist hallucination of a nightmare future. But the future is made present and all those bodies caught up in it can do is survive. The catastrophe causes itself, leaving us behind; but we live in an era of survival and suffer a thousand sicknesses because of it.

Wherever we turn, there is the same nagging paradox: on the one hand, the continuous development of new techno scientific means to potentially resolve the dominant ecological issues and restate socially useful activities on the surface of the planet, and, on the other hand the inability of organised social forces and constituted subjective formations to take hold of these resources in order to make them work.

There remains the possibility that the direct action evident in Detroit- not enough to prevent what is going on- is also part of the future that has slipped back in time to our present. It also remains that this direct action is the start point rather than the end of the attempt to take the city back from those who have plunged it hurtling into temporal delirium. With the very present risks of death from dehydration, disease and destitution Detroiters are already living under the kinds of conditions that produce the kinds of disaster communities that could foster a disaster communism. If worker’s control in solidarity with people is likely to emerge anywhere then it could very well emerge in Detroit, a city with a radical history that now stands now on the precipice but in the freefall that follows it. If Detroit is a time-machine it might well be one that is capable of supplying some of the answers to Guattari’s nagging paradox by putting the techno-scientific infrastructure in to the service of vulnerable bodies while it still stands. Maybe the templexity of Detroit is less about the rise of an evil Cyberdyne and more about the rise of an improvised, cooperative, collaborative society. After all, from the perspective of capital wouldn’t we appear as Terminators? Or maybe I’m riding on a wave of inexplicable optimism without justification. There is never any justification.