I begin this piece the day after my last post, to expand on a particular idea expressed there. I’ll probably end up picking at it a bit here and there on its way to posting, so you can expect it to be a bit uneven. I’m sorry about that.

Alexis de Tocqueville, painted by Théodore Chassériau.

Recently, I’ve been working through the Revolutions podcast. I realized I knew next to nothing of the various French revolutions and the anno mirabilis of 1848, so I sought to fill in that particular gap. Near the start of the series on that year in question, the host, Mike Duncan, quoted something that Alexis de Tocqueville said in a speech on January 29th of 1848:

I am told that there is no danger because there are no riots; I am told that, because there is no visible disorder on the surface of society, there is no revolution at hand.
Gentlemen, permit me to say that I believe you are mistaken. True, there is no actual disorder; but it has entered deeply into men's minds. See what is preparing itself amongst the working classes, who, I grant, are at present quiet. No doubt they are not disturbed by political passions, properly so called, to the same extent that they have been; but can you not see that their passions, instead of political, have become social? Do you not see that they are gradually forming opinions and ideas that are destined not only to upset this or that law, ministry, or even form of government, but society itself, until it totters upon the foundations on which it rests today? Do you not listen to what they say to themselves each day? Do you not hear them repeating unceasingly that all that is above them is incapable and unworthy of governing them; that the distribution of goods prevalent until now throughout the world is unjust; that property rests on a foundation that is not an equitable one? And do you not realize that when such opinions take root, when they spread in an almost universal manner, when they sink deeply into the masses, they are bound to bring with them sooner or later, I know not when or how, a most formidable revolution?
This, gentlemen, is my profound conviction: I believe that we are at this moment sleeping on a volcano. I am profoundly convinced of it.
(emphasis mine)

We often use metaphors to structure our view of the world. We talk about arguments as war, of ideas as money, of projects as plants to be tended as in a garden. One of the primary vehicles of social change, I believe, is the changing of metaphors.

Tell Barri, in Syria. Uploaded to Wikimedia commons by user Zoeperkoe and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

However, it seems to me that old metaphors still linger on, built atop like the layers of archaeological findings that form great Tells in the Near East. The one that I want to think about today is of society as being like a mechanical device – a steam or gas engine, more specifically.

Both of these apparatuses work by building up some kind of gaseous pressure and using that to drive an assemblage of parts. In a steam engine, a fire is used to heat water, which is forced through a narrow aperture creating pressure, which then works on a piston to drive some other machine. In a gas engine, aerosolized fuel is sprayed into a piston and ignited with a spark plug, which explodes and pushes the piston: some of the work from this drives parallel pistons back down, priming them to be driven in the same fashion (I’m not exactly a gear head, but I imagine this is why there’s always an even number of cylinders in an engine.)

A sketch of the Aelopile, the first rudimentary steam engine — the sphere is made to rotate by steam escaping through its angled nozzles.

Both of these are, effectively, systems that work by turning pressure into work. As such, they need to be engineered so that they can withstand a great deal of pressure and that said pressure can be transferred to where it can escape. Gas engines turn this pressure into work in situ, which obviates some of the need: steam engines need bleed off valves so that excess pressure can be safely vented (this, if memory serves, is where the steam whistle on locomotives originated.)

If you don’t have the ability to bleed off excess pressure – if you don’t have that safety valve, if the exhaust can’t escape from the gas engine, whatever – then what you have is a very different machine: a bomb.

Tocqueville’s volcano is a metaphor of a natural upswelling caused by a changing social formation: pressure trapped long underground finally breaking free.

What we have today is something else entirely: a steam engine – or pressure cooker – with the valve welded shut.

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Okay, so: in my pieces on ludo-analysis, I compared the way that society functions to a series of nested games. Each of these games is surrounded by an imaginary concept that Johann Huizinga referred to in Homo Ludens as a “magic circle” – for reference, see the chalk lines around a soccer pitch, the edge of a chessboard, the space defined by the # in which you play tic-tac-toe: one can’t simply draw an additional X or O outside the bounds of the board – celebrate all you want, but your opponent will think you’re an asshole, an idiot, or both. Participation within the game requires that you abide by the logic of the game within the magic circle.

This is where the metaphor comes from -- I happened across this on social media and it's stuck with me.

Magic circles are not simply spatial: they can be temporal (the game is happening at this time) or marked by other means – only people wearing this particular uniform are participants, everyone else is off limits – and within the circle a certain set of rules apply.

So – and I realize that some people may disagree with me about the importance of things here – let’s consider traffic as a kind of game. The goal of the game is to arrive at your destination in a safe and timely manner. The goal of everyone else is – presumably – the same. There is an asymmetry of means between players: the bike courier with no fear of god or man is going to have a different experience than the soccer mom in a range rover or the pizza delivery driver in the twenty year old sedan. Their strategies for dealing with this game are going to differ based on their capabilities, but they all are expected to abide by the same rules (let’s leave out the asymmetry of enforcement of those rules.)

I would suspect that incidents of road rage are caused by the identification by a motorist of another motorist as that most hated of figures: the spoilsport. The spoilsport is someone who insists on participating in the state of play but does not acknowledge the validity of the game. Consider the opponent who marks an X beyond the bound of the game board and declares it a victory – that is the spoilsport. More traditionally, the opponent who flips the board upon seeing that they are losing is the spoilsport. Road rage – while it may not be identified as such by the person engaging in it – is a violent reaction to identifying a spoilsport (or, potentially, a cheater. Spoilsports, Huizinga notes, tend to get a more negative reaction.) It is an attempt to eject someone from the space of the game.

These extreme reactions, I have noticed, tend to come in games or game-like situations where there is a great deal of investment. Investment in the space of the game by the players or spectators lends it weight. I would also suggest that this causes a pressure to build up inside the magic circle. Let’s consider: what stereotypically happens after a great sports victory? A parade or other, similar public spectacle – or, alternatively, a riot. Sometimes both. People riot after a game in some cities – Philadelphia comes to mind – to blow off steam. A “libidinal pressure” has built up and it needs to be allowed to dissipate.

For more on games that aren’t necessarily fun to play, read the title piece in David Graeber’s *Utopia of Rules*, reviewed here.

The politics of a democratic or republican society proceed by this same mechanism: there are games of parliamentary procedure at the top, all the way down to the game of jury duty at the bottom. They aren’t necessarily fun games, but they partake of the same form.

I believe that one of the practical issues with American society – and I am suspending moral judgment to examine this practical issue – is that this libidinal pressure is not being allowed to dissipate.

For the past forty or so years, the American media apparatus has been the primary means by which this dissipation was achieved. Instead of allowing things to bleed off into the open, new magic circles were created through the production of Spectacles. However, at the same time, a certain sclerotic fragility has begun to set in: social media was perhaps the pinnacle of this – due to its decentralized nature, it could generate new magic circles (we tend to call them “bubbles”) quickly and automatically. However, without active management – and how could all of that be actively managed? – the result was what the Situationist Internationale called “Détournement”, the detour and redirection of energy. Much of this was benign as far as the Apparatus itself thought of it: I don’t know if there’s a hidden revolutionary dimension to skibidi toilet et al., but I’ll leave that for some other, more engaged scholar/crank to look into.

This image — a drawing of the pepper spray cop at UC Davis who hosed down a line of already-arrested protestors — is taken from Know Your Meme. The “US Davis Pepper Spray Incident” has largely been scrubbed from the internet — you have to *really* go looking for it, despite the fact that it was everywhere back in 2010, and the university at which it happened referred to the event as “objectively unreasonable”. Notably, due to the backlash, the officer in question — Lt. John Pike — received a larger payout from Worker’s compensation than any of the protestors did as remuneration after the incident.
Repression is profitable.

At the same time, pressures build, and not all of them are where you would expect. Sure, labor power was broken in the air traffic control strikes back in the 1980s. Sure, small businesses (and I don’t want to engage in small business apologia, I’ve worked for small businesses and they were often quite bad) have been on the back foot since the 1990s. Sure, we’ve all been surveiled since the Bush Administration and Obama didn’t stop the repression of Occupy in his first term. But have you considered that the shift towards a car-centric infrastructure is also pressure being built? The creation of hostile architecture to make it impossible to simply exist in public without spending money? Real wages dropping at the same time, meaning that your world is limited more and more and more?

Think about the conditions under which young people have been growing up: criticized for being on their phones constantly but simultaneously barred from being unmanaged in public. It’s a social equivalent of the Elizabethan cell of Little Ease – the chamber in the Tower of London that’s a mere 3 feet, 11 inches to a side, making it impossible to sit, stand, or lie down.

All of this places an incredible strain on individuals and – as difficult as it is to be around other people from time to time – I think that, generally, people want to be around other people. We may not always want to be observed or bothered, but we want to know that other people are there, we want to be able to be in community.

But we’re all stuck in these atomized bubbles: living in our little boxes, traveling to work in little boxes, staring into little boxes while waiting in line to be told nothing can be done, and we all turn out just the same. Anxious and lonely and locked in.

So what happens to this pressure when the system gets a shock?

This pressure has been building for years and years and years and now there’s a crack?

Naomi Klein, in Shock Doctrine (reviewed here), proposes that the outcome of shock is a lack of social cohesion. The prior institutions of a society fail and people are left directionless and confused, ready to have a new social logic written upon them. She traces this line of thinking from South America in the 70s, starting with Chile, domestically in England in the 80s, then through East Asia and the Post-Soviet states until its final fruition under the Bush administration in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Louisiana. She also notes that this doesn’t work: while the “new logic” can be temporarily inscribed, it doesn’t hold. It just produces trauma, and it quickly decays.

Rebecca Solnit offers a different view in A Paradise Built in Hell (reviewed here). She suggests that new structures can crystallize quickly in the face of crisis. She points to a longer history than Klein, though generally not to intentionally inflicted crises. When allowed to self-direct, she notes that communities tend to do well and some people find meaning and peace in moments of crisis. A Briton who was a nervous wreck in peacetime becomes an ambulance driver with nerves of steel beneath the thunder of the blitz, an auto dealer in 1906 San Fransisco gave away his stock of vehicles without any thought of being compensated simply because his neighbors needed to escape.

Reading Klein through Solnit and Solnit through Klein suggests to me that a system, when shocked, can shatter, and a society, when shocked, can thrive. Despite this, I am not in any way advocating for the generation of shocks (I have described myself as an accelerationist, but that sort of vulgar accelerationism is detestable.)

Shock isn’t necessarily an external thing, though: since occupy, the American system has suffered a number of endogenous shocks, problems emerging from within the system as the pressure grows too great for the enclosing magic circles.

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This is not, of course, *limited* to Generation X temporally, it’s simply that the attitude is most common among them — I view a certain similarity between it and the attitude of the narrator of *Catcher in the Rye*.

I view this Apparatus as a massive engine for extracting wealth and power from the places where its “working parts” are rooted. Wealth is extracted from the global periphery – South America, South and East Asia, Africa – and shuttled into the metropole. The end result has been to create a kind of weightlessness in the metropole: as a certain kind of scarcity is obviated, a state of nihilism proliferates, best viewed – I feel – in the dominant affect of cynicism that reigned through the 1980s and especially in the 1990s: observe the cultural products that surrounded Generation X around their emergence into adulthood. There was the form of rebellion, in favor of an imagined “authenticity” (the pinnacle of this is most likely to be found in the music of Nirvana and the film Reality Bites) but this could not be articulated as a real material demand. It could only be put forward as a cri de couer that boiled down to “none of this actually matters!”

And after the end of the 90s and rupture of 9/11, this moved on to its next phase: all of the wealth extracted from the rest of the world into the metropole began to be extracted into enclaves within the metropole, being consolidated into fewer and fewer individuals. Take, for example, the sickening statistic that, in 2019, the 26 wealthiest people had as much wealth as the poorest half of the world’s population according to Oxfam, down from 43 in 2017.

This extraction is the Apparatus working as it’s intended. The monetary dimension is only the easiest one to quantify, because it comes pre-quantified. Other forms of power and extraction exist that are not so easily measured.

To ensure that the system continues to function for a time, repression is used to force further work. Protest is criminalized. Speech is limited (oftentimes moving from the first to the second kind of game, as mentioned up above – not forbidden legally but in a de facto fashion). Being in public without money is criminalized. Housing prices go up and this pumps people into gentrifying new areas from which they will be displaced in several years.

All of this raises the pressure.

Without a means of bleeding this pressure off, it is going to lead to an eruption of some kind. The apparatus will break. Maybe not for good, maybe not permanently, but it won’t be pretty.

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New York’s Grand Central — an example of the type of opulence that was common in public buildings at the time. It’s so distant from the type of construction that we normally see that there are conspiracy theories about it.

This happened before – in the so-called Gilded Age and up through the 1930s. Because militant groups within the system pushed back, those who extracted wealth began to perform public works, attempting to stave off the rough music they anticipated through charity that would at least allow them to retain some control of their wealth.

What put an end to this was the post-war economic boom: after World War II, the United States had half of the world’s official gold reserve, 574 million ounces. This would be worth more than 1.3 quadrillion dollars in today’s money, which is an inconceivable amount of wealth. It’s fundamentally meaningless to quantify it at that point: it’s better to take a qualitative approach. If you have that much of a fungible, valuable commodity, it’s better to say that you have control over the price of it than that it is worth a certain amount.

The post-war prosperity that my grandparents enjoyed and their children grew up under was the result of this wealth transfer. We should view the economic shocks of the 1970s as a two-pronged response: the natural world beginning to give up the ghost due to our farming practices and the nations of the global periphery attempting to transfer some of that wealth back through one means or another.

The neoliberal consensus that followed was a response, and the shortened list of beneficiaries is the end result.

I cannot help but see the present moment as the apparatus, and the people who make it up, desperately looking for another source of a similar wealth infusion while slapping down the hands of the people who are trying to make them do the right thing, for once.

This is why we are hearing such statements as “dissent doesn’t mean disorder.” You’re allowed to disagree, legally, you’re not allowed to disrupt anything. You’re not allowed to let the horror drive you to – as Mario Savio said -- “put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and . . . make it stop!”

You’re allowed to feel bad about it. You’re not allowed to do anything about it.

You’re just supposed to bottle it up.

That sound you’re hearing isn’t approaching thunder, it’s your own pulse thrumming in your ears. Does it seem to be growing louder?

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Rates of anxiety and depression are increasing. The number of people disabled by migraines is increasing. Rates of violent crime may be falling but you wouldn’t know it to hear anyone talk about it. You do hear quite a lot of rhetoric about how the world is dangerous.

People are stressed. The libidinal pressure is increasing and all of the avenues to bleed it off are closed down for one reason or another. This increased repression, I feel, is bad and not simply because of the steam engine metaphor I’m using. I happen to think repression is bad in general.

Practically speaking, though, I want you to ask yourself: if something that you have to do is made illegal, would that not consequently make it easier for you to cross the line and do further illegal things? If your lawful dissent is met with riot police, if you are physically assaulted for carrying a sign but the moral outrage that led you to protest in the first place is not corrected, is there not a good chance that you might then arm yourself for the next protest or engage in some other, similar action?

When we say that crime is socially constructed, we don’t just mean that what is considered a crime is a constructed category. If a law has already been broken, then we find ourselves playing a different game altogether: it changes from “don’t break the law” to “don’t get arrested”.

As a somewhat doughy individual who hasn’t been in a real fight in a very long time, I am not advocating for this: I am pointing out that repression doesn’t increase the general level of order. Repression, oftentimes, just increases the pressure I’m talking about. It increases the ambient stress levels.

It will, at some point explode.

Personally, that’s what I’m always afraid that a pressure cooker is going to do. Image taken by wikimedia user Hustvedt and used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.

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I’ve predicted myself out. I don’t know what form the Rupture is likely to take. I’m not going to waste my time trying to predict it.

But whatever it is will be messy. It will be frightening. It will hurt.

I don’t know if what I refer to as the Apparatus – society, the spectacle, the government, whatever – will be whole or broken on the other side. I’ve got my own hopes for the kind of society I would like to live in, but my own hope is that, whatever terrible thing is about to happen, as few people as possible, on whatever side, are hurt by it.

But the more I watch current events the more it seems that this isn’t necessarily everyone’s goal and that worries me.

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Maybe I’m wrong, maybe I’ve got one of those mutant epistemologies that I was talking about, and like Matthews and Dec I’m seeing machines at work everywhere. I don’t see them as manipulating my behavior, though, and perhaps that makes me as crazy as they were. A certain amount of self-doubt is necessary: maybe my writing this, here, is part of the pressure spiking. Maybe people someone will look back at it after the fact and misinterpret my attempt to diagnose as a call to some kind of action.

And sure, I do think that some kind of action should be taken. I just happen to think that, whatever it is should be aimed at deescalation: more and more, though, I see that everyone who should be in the driver seat is turning the dial all the way up and then snapping it off, opening up the throttle all the way and lodging something in place so that it’s simply locked where it is.

Allow me to summarize my main points:

Herbert Marcuse put forward the idea of “repressive desublimation” in his book One-Dimensional Man. This was the theory that capitalist societies survive the energies that try to attack them by dissipating them: people get angry at injustice but then that raw libidinal force of outrage gets detoured into other things – it is in this way that sex, drugs, and pleasure can be turned to the end of preventing any actual change, just as faith, family and tradition do (that would be repressive sublimation, however). What we are talking about for domestic social change also holds true for calls for broader justice internationally.

I am using the metaphor of a machine – a great engine designed to pump the world’s wealth into the imperial core and then concentrate it more and more into the hands of an ever smaller group. The mechanism of this machine is what I call “libidinal pressure” – the investment, pleasure-seeking, and general desire of the people who make up the society of the imperial core. On some level, we want to be doing what we’re doing – either because we believe in it, because we’ve been duped into thinking that we can be inside that ever shrinking line of beneficiaries, or because (ultimately) we will suffer violence directly or indirectly for not taking part – but there are also other dimensions to this pressure. This pressure pushes the machine to work, and pumps wealth, in its most abstracted sense, from the periphery to the core (the work of Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak would be useful here – Edgar has more knowledge of her work than I do, though). The purpose of the people managing the apparatus is to keep the pressure all pushing the same direction.

You can see the aforementioned “other dimensions” in things like fandom – no fandom is truly anti-capitalist, but the enthusiasm of the fans is ambivalent to capital: it readily submits to have money extracted, but it also leads people to engage in intricate and labor-intensive flights of creativity that are then just given away. There is a subaltern anti-capitalism that persists, tapeworm-like within the capitalist superstructure: people feel the desire to create and so they do.

You also see this in protest movements around issues such as the ongoing genocide in Gaza. I am not placing this next to the point on fandom because the two are of similar levels of importance (ending the Genocide is far more important, in case that’s unclear) but they are similar in that it’s a diversion of this libidinal pressure in a way that is not expected by the management of the apparatus.

For more on how all of its boosters thought capitalism would die horribly, see David Graeber’s *Debt*.

This is all achieved through a variety of repressive tools. Up until World War II, it was assumed by the people managing the machine that this would fail, and then material plenty unlike anything they had ever dreamed of flowed in – enough to keep two generations of workers and management working together because there was enough. Now, the management thinks that the workers should always go along with things, because two generations of neoclassical orthodoxy said that they would. Unfortunately, the bribe money ran out and so there’s no carrot, only stick. You can’t get investment by the stick, though, the workers aren’t going to buy into it because there’s no reward for doing so.

Since there’s no benefit to going along, the pressure within the machine is building, and instead of letting the pressure off, they’re trying to squeeze it tighter. More rules, more penalties...and that’s not how you deal with pressure. They’re doing this because letting the pressure off is expensive, but repression, comparatively speaking, is cheap. Not just in terms of actual capital, but in terms of political capital, because repression is what the orthodoxy says should work.

Unfortunately, this is just a death-spiral. The harder they squeeze, the higher the pressure goes; the higher the pressure goes, the bigger the rupture when it happens.

I am leaving aside in this piece whether or not I think this should happen. I am not saying that those who labor should be bought off with a social safety net or anything – I am saying that, during what they call the “good times” that’s what they did. I am also saying that they’re too brainwashed to understand that’s what they need to do, and possibly too broke to do that should they not be sufficiently brainwashed.

I am not saying what should happen.

I am explaining for those who read this after what it looks like from before, and I’m hoping that those of you who are looking at this around the same time as I am can look at this and derive something useful from it.

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The Pressure Cooker