By Michael Templeton
It is difficult to conceive of a mass movement that could genuinely resist the current order of the world. Not because we lack the will to make something different. There are millions of people who want nothing more than to settle into safe, prosperous, and happy lives that are not constantly disturbed by the violence of the State erupting in their streets, of the relentless insecurity of being two paychecks away from homelessness or a single medical emergency away from destitution. The problem is in a mass paralysis of humanity; a blanket mood of helplessness that pervades all of life, and is endlessly channeled into the same old things. We must vote, they tell us. Vote for a different order, and come November, the criminals will be dealt with in the correct ways. Vent your frustrations online in whatever way makes you feel like you discharged the negative energy. Then I see a tweet from someone like Bernie Sanders that is something like a rallying cry of opposition to the MAGA machine. Here is a primary representative of the opposition party posting on X that somebody ought to do something. The paralysis grips everything and everyone. The population of much of the Western world is fully captured and is now a mass of automatons who only know how to consume. The world has become the Bloom, made up of neutered and pacified nobodies: “The non-men, the no longer men, the Blooms, who no longer manage to think, as they once could, since thought was a movement within time, and the consistency of the latter has now changed. Moreover, the Blooms have renounced dreaming; they live in organized dystopias, placeless places, the dimensionless interstices of a commodity utopia. They are flat and one-dimensional since, unable to recognize themselves anywhere, neither in themselves or in others, they can’t recognize either their past or their future. Day after day, their resignation effaces the present. And these no-longer-men populate the crisis of presence” (“Theses on the Terrible Community”). The crisis of presence is that there is no presence, and time no longer passes. It is the time of a digital absence that stands in for experience and lived life. Every event, every word, every feeling—all is the pulped vomit of everything that has already happened offered up in a continuous feed of consumable images to take the place of life itself. We should be hard on the Invisible Committee for gendering this nobody that constitutes the Bloom because it is everyone.
Every time a politician uses the words “the people,” we should immediately recognize they are talking about something that no longer exists. There is no “the people” because the State that is the One has now become fully subsumed in something beyond the State, and that which would be situated against the State as One has degenerated into a diffuse and multiform set of populations who do not know each other, recognize each other, or speak the same language. While Virno speaks of the multitude, there is another term that would apply more readily to what the people have become, and that is simply the masses. The masses are a vast sea of nobodies who do nothing but comply even when they believe they are resisting. Hannah Arendt makes this idea of the masses abundantly clear when she tells us:
“Totalitarian movements are possible wherever there are masses who for one reason or another have acquired the appetite for political organization. Masses are not held together by a consciousness of common interest and they lack that specific class articulateness which is expressed in determined, limited, and obtainable goals. The term masses applies only where we deal with people who either because of sheer numbers, or indifference, or a combination of both, cannot be integrated into any organization based on common interest, into political parties or municipal governments or professional organizations or trade unions.” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 311)
Interests here should not be confused with hobbies and diversions. What Arendt means by interests are social, economic, and political investments—deep abiding interests in the meaning and management of life itself. In the absence of these kinds of shared interests, the mass of humanity that once coalesced into a singular entity of the people is now diffused (de-fused) into an indistinct and amorphous population that is ripe for manipulation in a way that is directly analogous the ways the masses were manipulated by the Nazis. When we see people talking about elections, judicial interventions, court orders, and Constitutional checks and balances, what we are watching is the non-movements of the masses as it is mesmerized by the images of things that no longer exist but can now be deployed as images in order to pacify and neutralize individuals, preventing anyone from doing anything at all. Nothing to see here. Just get back to work so you do not miss a minute of the show or fall behind on your debt payments lest you be excluded from complete participation in life due to bad credit. The masses are the empty shells of what were once living consciousness who occupy an empty world that is itself an empty shell. They are the passive receivers and users of images of the world who have been captured in still more linguistic systems of control that is biopower.
The dual forces of the spectacle and biopower have removed the masses from participation in life. They consume life in the forms of the images and commodities that stand in for real experiences, and their actions are determined in advance by the forces of financial capital that have instilled modes of discipline into the very souls of everyone who feels they need to live the middle-class dream. Consumption and having have taken the place of experience and being. To be a free subject in American democracy is to behave according to the rules of a debt relation that determines everything we do and say. Financial capital holds the reigns of individual sovereignty as much as it has overtaken the sovereignty of the nation-state. In America, the masses exist in a suspended world of the sprawling suburban cancer that has metastasized across the entire country, and has effaced all differences. It is one continuous mass encompassing both city and country and creating a no-place of complete homogeneity. Difference is marked by performances of difference while everything remains exactly as it is, even as they fight each other over things that do not even exist. Thus, the passivity manifested in someone like Sanders who is in his position specifically to enact difference. There is a firewall against change, and what is presented as difference is a feature of this firewall. Everyone is held in place either by the non-action of the spectacle or the enforced paralysis of biopower because access to this no-place, which is now every place, is enforced by debt. All economic existence is now situated entirely in debt, and even money, hard currency, is made manifest in the world by debt. To exist is to be a subject, to be subjugated, within the debt relations: “the production of subjectivity, of forms of life, of forms of existence, is not part of a superstructure, but rather an ‘economic’ infrastructure” (Lazzarato. The Making of Indebted Man. 34). This is to say that to exist is to be captured within specific kinds of economic relations which are not an over-arching system of power but rather the capillary makeup of one’s inner life. In this world, which is the world of middle-class suburban sprawl, “(m)oney is first of all debt-money, created ex nihilo, which has no material equivalent other than its power to destroy/create social relations and, in particular, modes of subjectivization” (35). To exist is to be indebted, and to be indebted is to be enslaved to the terms of one’s indebtedness. People are free only insofar as their financial obligations will allow. If you are on a northbound train, you are only free to head south for the length of the train.
We are captured and controlled. By the terms of the debt relation. This means we are captured entirely by the language of contractual obligations which are now the beginning of and the limit to our being. The language of the terms of the financial obligation is now the fabric of the soul. No longer beings of language, we are subjected to language; language pins us to a taxonomic table of validation and invalidation, and if you do not measure up to the prescriptive language of a qualified subject of debt, you are excluded from life, consigned to an existence of precarity at best and complete immiseration at worst. At the same time, subjects find the image of themselves that is the complete opposite of their material existence. Actions like voting and community demonstrations allow for the escape of social energies within arrangements of confined and policed spaces, both real and digital, which achieve nothing other than the satisfaction of having “done something” even as the something one has done is the interpassive performance of the roles one is handed and learned by rote. Witness the floods of empty slogans that get circulated continuously on the internet, written on signs and stickers plastered to street signs, and the circles of people gathered outside city halls everywhere while the billionaire class ignores everything and continues on with the AI takeover of virtually every facet of life. Billionaires will never hear a word you say, but they will issue you a credit card that promises to plant a tree when you spend a requisite amount of money. All action is the empty action of what Raoul Vaneigem consigned to “roles” such that one never resists power. Quite the opposite: “The role is a consumption of power. It locates one on the representational hierarchy, and hence in the spectacle: at the top, at the bottom, in the middle—but never outside the hierarchy” (The Revolution of Everyday Life. 115). The key terms here are “representation” and “the spectacle.” We are never engaged with materiality, of the world as it unfolds in all of its chaos and unpredictability. We are only ever engaged with the images of the world as they are prefabricated by digital mechanisms that exceed our thoughts before we think. Again, individuals are subsumed by linguistic forms which supersede living bodies and lived existence. Slaves of language rather than living beings who engage language.
Language does in fact supersede individual consciousnesses, but it exists as the vast and infinite totality within which we are meant to be active participants. It is the infinite with which a consciousness is created and with which a consciousness engages its world. To be an individual consciousness is to be one miniscule instance of an infinite language of which one plays only a finite part. It is Klossowski who tells us that an individual consciousness “forms with language a whole of which it is only the isolated part,” and this consciousness is a mortal and finite part of consciousness in its totality which is infinite insofar as “consciousness is immortal because it is already dead. It is immortal because it resides in the immortality of language, maintained by the infinite whole of individual consciousnesses that succeed one another” (Such a Deathly Desire. 75). There is a dialectic to Klossowski’s presentation of consciousness and language. Language is the external entity that precedes and exceeds all individual consciousness. To emerge as an individual consciousness is to engage and to be engaged by language in its externality. To this end, we are negated as individuals within the infinite totality of language, which we must remember is immortal because it is already dead. Yet, as in any dialectic formation, the negation is negated as individual consciousness interiorizes parts of the infinite within their finite being as individual consciousnesses. The synthesis grants us the open and incomplete being of individual consciousnesses who continuously engage the world and each other; constantly coming into contact with language and things, which are functions of language. We are always already, to use a tired turn of phrase, open and incomplete, death is introduced into our body by language in order thereby to obtain our unity and completion” (76). To be a living being is to actively engage the world in its materiality, to engage each other in our living bodies, to exist in any meaningful sense of the term. To be pinned down under the terms and conditions of linguistic forms which exceed every dimension of life, and to only ever engage the world through pre-digested language in the form of the mediation of the image that is the spectacle—all of this is to be a dead form that is a linguistic formation, not a living individual consciousness that engages linguistic formations. To be the masses is to be nothing but a bare life that is an expression of forms of language which remain permanently exterior to being. One is never a living individual consciousness; one is always already an empty form to be dispensed with by forms of language which serve the empty exchanges of debt and spectacularity, absence and image, never presence or present. This is what is meant when we are told that “these no-longer-men populate the crisis of presence.” No longer living bodies; dead, empty bodies that make up the masses of pacified, immobilized, and captured beings who move with the empty illusions of action and the empty promises of something different—anything different.
Death is the defining feature of existence in the current order of things. The fascist powers which have taken hold of the United States have committed themselves to dealing in death over and above any other purpose. Unlike the Nazis with their cult of youth, the current iteration of fascism is characterized by the veneration of a dying, demented, and slobbering old man who shits his pants on live television. The U.S. and Israel have laid waste to an entire population of people while the world looks on powerless and even indifferent because death is the order of their lives. Living within a dead world of the living dead, people see nothing truly amiss as other people are slaughtered, burned alive, raped and beaten. It is no accident that Trump changed the name from the Department of Defense to the Department of War. The United States itself is embroiled and immersed in a civil war that few seem to recognize because it is indistinguishable from everyday life. Unlike the civil war of the imagination, which people watch on television and the internet courtesy of Ken Burns, this civil war is everywhere at all times. It is our every movement. It is Ring cameras and the snitch next door. It is ICE on American streets beating, kidnapping, disappearing, and murdering people in front of the entire world. Ian Alan Paul calls it when he explains:
“The degradation of life has saturated society so completely that it now appears as just another unremarkable feature of the scenery, entirely predictable and completely accounted for in advance, widely documented and circulated for all to see, glued like decorative wallpaper onto the inside of every eyelid. In a society whose common sense involves the perpetual degradation, devaluation, and destruction of the living, no one bothers anymore to deny or dissimulate the reality that child laborers are buried among the cobalt they dig from the earth by hand, that families of migrants collapse and die at the border beneath the desert sun, or that distressed and depressed workers jump from the upper story windows of iPhone assembly plants. The affluent and the impoverished alike swipe between videos of military jets bombing refugee tents, of riot police spraying chemical weapons into crowds, and of people being dragged off the street and sent to camps, all of which serve as high resolution reminders of just how superfluous and disposable capitalism has made life to be.” (“Fascism and the Spectacle of Death.” May 10, 2025)
All of life has become nothing but “the Spectacle of Death.” No one sees real death because it is the spectacle of death, and no one can engage the materiality of death because they are already dead. They are at least, as the masses, a form of bare life that has nothing of the form-of-life which makes itself in what it does, the form-of-life as a human consciousness that engages the material world as a living being engaged with and engaged by language towards making meaning and creating from the meanings generated by actively working with the living world. As bare life, the shell of the individual consciousness of the masses is simply the physiological fact of being alive, and it lacks any qualifying feature of a lived life. This is the bare life of the brain-dead patient who cannot be legally pronounced dead because their living body can be sustained by machines. The difference is that now, “(b)are life is no longer confined to a particular place or definitive category. It now dwells in the biological body of every living being” (Agamben. Homo Sacer. 140). As bare life, the masses live only so far as they do not live anymore. The civil war rages all around them as they go to the grocery store, all while they experience the world through smartphones, deploy their social energies in digital form, and fulfill their obligations and debt enslaved consumers. They paid their taxes and voted. What more could anyone ask of them?
Even as this is the dominant form of life, the fragmentation of the people has created systems of mass exclusion, of exile that have placed large portions of the population in a quasi-external relation to the fascist state and Empire. Those who do not qualify for being a valid subject of financial capital, and every other identity that cannot be made to square up with an ever dwindling definition of what constitutes a human, everyone outside the narrow confines of the middle-class suburban heterotopia has now begun to coalesce into other forms-of-life. We see this clearly in the explosions of resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and now New Jersey. One of the most glaring and important lessons from these battles is that resistance does not come in the form of electoral politics (Democratic Governors have cooperated with the Trump fascists at every turn), nor is found in the empty, interpassive non-action of digital sloganeering. Finally, resistance does not come in the form of peaceful legal protests which are always approved by the fascist powers which are the problem in the first place. Real meaningful resistance to fascism is violent, it is explosive, and it is never completely formed ahead of time. Meaningful resistance comes in situations wherein knowledge, which is to say language, as it is taken into living individual consciousnesses, is deployed in relation to real material conditions such that knowledges “are coherent systems that measure aspects of the real and, as such, their instrumental value as neither universal nor eternal” (Colectivo Situaciones. 19 & 20. 66). This is to say that resistance comes about when living consciousnesses, as forms-of-life rather than bare life, coalesce around common understandings of situations as they exist in the world and not as they are presented by rules of behavior and mediated images. In short, it is forms-of-life that actively engage life and not dead empty forms that refuse life.
Works Cited:
Agamben Giorgio. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-
Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995.
Arendt, Hannah. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, Inc., 1976.
Klossowski, Pierre. Such a Deathly Desire. Translated by Russell Ford. Albany: State University
of New York Press, 2007.
Colectivo Situaciones. 19 & 20: Notes for a New Insurrection. Translated by Nate Holdren and
Sebastián Touza. Brooklyn: Common Notions, 2021.
Lazzarato, Maurizio. The Making of Indebted Man: An Essay on the Neoliberal Condition.
Translated by Joshua David Jordan. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e) Intervention Series 13, 2012.
Paul, Ian Alan. “Fascism and the Spectacle of Death.” Ill Will. May 10, 2025.
https://illwill.com/fascism-and-the-spectacle-of-death.
Vaneigem, Raoul. The Revolution of Everyday Life. Translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith.
Oakland: PM Press, 2012.
Hyperspekulation 
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