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TTAB 17 – Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, 6-21-2017, " Executive Coach Builders, Inc. v. SPV Coach Company, Inc.,” Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, https://casetext.com/admin-law/executive-coach-builders-inc-v-spv-coach-company-inc /$antiP/

SPV Coach Company, Inc. (“Applicant”) seeks to register the mark ARMBRUSTER STAGEWAY (in standard characters) on the Principal Register for “vehicles, namely, customized limousines” in International Class 12.1 Executive Coach Builders, Inc. (“Opposer”) opposes registration under Section 2(d) of the Trademark Act, 15 U.S.C. § 1052(d), asserting priority and a likelihood of confusion with its pleaded common-law mark ARMBRUSTER/STAGEWAY, which, as can be seen, differs from Applicant’s mark by the use of a forward slash, rather than a space, between the two words. Applicant, in turn, asserts as an affirmative defense that Opposer “has abandoned its ARMBRUSTER/STAGEWAY mark and is without valid rights upon which it may state a claim upon which relief can be granted.”2 The parties in this opposition are secondary manufacturers of the types of specialty vehicles at issue in this case – stretch limousines and hearses, for the VIP and funeral markets – made from vehicle chassis manufactured by others, such as Cadillacs and Lincolns.

TTAB 17 – Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, 6-21-2017, " Executive Coach Builders, Inc. v. SPV Coach Company, Inc.,” Trademark Trial and Appeal Board, https://casetext.com/admin-law/executive-coach-builders-inc-v-spv-coach-company-inc /$antiP/

Individually and collectively, we find that these isolated and de minimis uses of the ARMBRUSTER/STAGEWAY mark other than on vehicles are insufficient to constitute bona fide use of that mark in the ordinary course of trade.

Indeed, it was Man, the Rational Man in its genre-specific European construction, that socially instituted as “natural” the Negro the irrational body void of Being par-excellence, or as systematically placed at the bottommost regions of the new onto-epistemic hierarchy of Being[xxxii]. Therefore, the Black became the signification of “the qualitative discontinuity in the homogeneous universe of the ontological substructure of natural multiples,”[xxxiii] from within the set of Humanity. It is this ontological schema of natural multiples, or more simply, the metaphysics produced by Man and the now multicultural milieu of Man’s historically situated naturalism that provides the legitimating apparatus for the gratuitous exploitation of the Black body. The situation as such is such that, “The wager of infinity turns on this discontinuity,” for “a limit ordinal is the place of the Other for the succession of same-others which belong to it.”[xxxiv] Hence, the possibility of an infinite relation to anti-Black violence is imbricated in the actuality of the figure of Human and its successors. Alain Badiou writes:

In the limit ordinal, the place of alterity (all the terms of the sequence belong to it) and the point of the Other (its name, a, designates an ordinal situated beyond all those which figure in the sequence) are fused together. This is why it is quite correct to name it a limit: that which gives a series both its principle of being, the one-cohesion of the multiple that it is, and its ‘ultimate’ term, the one-multiple towards which the series tends without ever reaching nor even approaching it. This fusion, at the limit, between the place of the Other and its one, referred to an initial point of being (here, ∅, the void) and a rule of passage (here, succession) is, literally, the general concept of infinity[xxxv].

In the final chapter of The Eye of War we encounter a battlefield that is spatially and temporally boundless, what the author calls a “Global Imperium of Targeting”. What relationship between targeteer and target characterises this limitless battlefield? I will end by briefly introducing two alienating reference points that I have discussed elsewhere: the operational environment and the battle-rhythm as examples of a military modelling of space and time.

According to the military imaginary, the operational environment consists of: ‘the composite of the conditions, circumstances, and influences that affect the employment of military capabilities’ (see military doctrine). This term imposes a set of spatial relations that are conditioned through military concepts and functions: logistical routes and lines of communication, the range of weapon-platforms, perceived centres of gravity, the margining of targets, their weaponeering, and so forth. This spatial concept transmits relations through reductive doctrinal denominators such as “target-sets”, “undesirable systems” or “future end-states,” often visualised through PowerPoints.

As many have noted Baudrillard is first and foremost a ‘critic’ (Ranciere 2006, Grace 2000: 1). To Baudrillard it is not so much a theory of war that is lacking but a proper critique of war’s ontology. So what does his critique imply? Arguably he was well ahead of his time with regards to understanding how war related to advertisement, mass media, and the television. More than three decades before Ignatieff wrote about ‘virtual wars’, Baudrillard had already noticed how the virtual leaked into the real with regards to the Vietnam War. For example, in 1967 he claimed that the TV images of the war takes us away from human reality (and classical conceptions of war) towards a world of advertising (2001: 42). This was a time when, for Baudrillard, as for Marxism in general, war was mostly seen as an integrated part of the capitalist system (1975: 145 and 1998b: 55, 57, 121). In the beginning of the 1970’s, particularly after the book The Mirror of Production and his definitive break with Marxism, Baudrillard’s view on war changed. So what does this change imply? It might be easy to associate his thinking on war with what took place (or did not take place) in the Gulf in 1991, but to Baudrillard this was merely a symptom of other more complex underlying logics. Perhaps we might say that the most intriguing aspect about the Gulf War was not its build up, conduct, or media-coverage, but what this illustrated about war as such.3 He starts his essay ‘The Gulf War will not take place’, written before ‘the war started’ by stating that: ‘(f)rom the beginning we knew that this war would never happen’ (Baudrillard 1995: 23). It is therefore not a matter of whether the US starts bombing en masse or not (after a build-up phase of seven months) but something quite different: the Gulf War is about the ontological status of war itself (Baudrillard 1995: 32). Therefore, the impact of his thinking on war goes well beyond the Gulf. To grasp these logics we need to go back to his writings on the Cold War and particularly the notion of deterrence. Long before the Gulf War, Baudrillard had already identified deterrence as a key factor to understanding war. As he argues, ever since the end of World War II – when politics was still dependent on the distinction between war and peace – the world had been taken hostage to the logic of deterrence. This means that he sees deterrence, not as simply dictating behavior (through for example coercion or intimidation, as in Schelling 1966) but as something which makes the underlying principles of reality disappear. While traditional theory around military strategy would think of deterrence as something to manage through bargaining or rational behavior, Baudrillard sees it as something which puts an end to the possibility of military strategy and has severe consequences for our understanding of events, history, and politics: Deterrence precludes war – the archaic violence of expanding systems. Deterrence itself is the neutral, implosive violence of metastable systems or systems in involution. There is no longer a subject of deterrence, nor an adversary nor a strategy – it is a planetary structure of the annihilation of stakes (Baudrillard, 1994a: 32-33, my emphasis)…/…Everywhere where irreversible apparatuses of control are elaborated, everywhere where the notion of security becomes omnipotent, everywhere where the norm replaces the old arsenal of laws and violence (including war), it is the system of deterrence that grows, and around it grows the historical, social, and political desert. A gigantic involution that makes every conflict, every finality, every confrontation contract in proportion to this blackmail that interrupts, neutralizes, freezes them all. No longer can any revolt, any story be deployed according to its own logic because it risks annihilation. No strategy is possible any longer, and escalation is only a puerile game given over to the military. The political stake is dead, only simulacra of conflicts and carefully circumscribed stakes remain (Ibid.: 33-34). The consequences for war’s being are therefore severe. These consequences are perhaps best illustrated ‘in reality’ through the way the excess of high-tech weapon systems, so characteristic for the Cold War, participate in making war lose its character (Baudrillard 1989). During the Cold War countries like the US and the Soviet Union had enough nuclear warheads to destroy the human civilization many times over. With the introduction of intercontinental ballistic missiles (increasing range and effect) and atomic submarines (giving second strike capability), nuclear warfare reached a ‘hyperefficiency’ which also made it useless for waging war. Baudrillard sees this uselessness as part of a larger social context which indicates a: ‘disgust for a world that is growing, accumulating, sprawling, sliding into hypertrophy, a world that cannot manage to give birth’ (Baudrillard 1989: 31). The Cold war thereby helps to produce a ‘stillborn’ world with an excess of memories, archives, documentation, sophisticated weapon-systems, plans, programs, and decisions that does not lead to either wars or events (1989: 31). Therefore any war that is being waged as real is always circumscribed by the overkill-capacity of nuclear war, in turn becoming less and less warlike and more and more a simulation of war. As Baudrillard concludes in Cool Memories V: ‘(w)ar is impossible, and yet it takes place. But the fact that it takes place in no way detracts from its impossibility. The system is absurd and yet it functions. But the fact that it functions in no way detracts from its absurdity’ (2006b: 25). War has become absurd, but no less deadly for that matter. To Baudrillard the notion of war has therefore entered into a definitive crisis, best illustrated by how deterrence erases political stakes and supplant them with virtual stakes precluding events of war. The end of the Cold War does not put an end to deterrence but rather continues through new means such as drug wars, debt wars, or soft wars (1996: 87): The powerful of this world are gathered in Rome to sign a treaty ‘that puts a final end to the Cold War’. In fact they do not know they are starting a new war, of which they are the first victims: they remained parked on the tarmac, surrounded by armoured cars, barbed wire and helicopters – the whole panoply of this new cold war, the cold war of armed security, of perpetual deterrence and faceless terrorism (2006b: 45-46). Much of Baudrillard’s writings on war after the end of the Cold war grapple with these ‘new characteristics of war’ and its relation to history, politics, events, media, or economy (see for example Baudrillard 1995: 24-26, 65-68). If seen through the prism of real and virtual war we can appreciate the difference between Baudrillard’s account and Marxism. As stated in the previous part Marxism tends to consider war an integrated part of the capitalist system. Baudrillard on the other hand illustrates how war is the victim of a separation in kind as it is turned into an object without use-value but with simulation-value (1990:56) something which became all the more obvious during the build up for the war in Iraq 2003 and the WMD debate which was used as a rationale for invasion. If we accept that real war has disintegrated and lost its principles under the virtual catastrophe of total nuclear and orbital war (Baudrillard 1993: 29; 2002b: 21-22) – we are forced to reconsider what a theory of war implies: Traditional theorists of war must be…at a loss before the explosion of their object of study. For, paradoxically, it isn’t the bomb which has exploded, but the war-object, which has exploded into two separate parts – a total, virtual war in orbit and multiple real wars on the ground. The two have neither the same dimensions nor the same rules…(2002b: 22-23). Hence, to Baudrillard, war consists of two inseparable but incompatible forms with two kinds of logic. Moreover, through this virtual, simulated version of war, the ‘real’ war (just like ‘real’ production or ‘real’ economy) is also dislocated (Baudrillard 1993: 31, 1994a). The referent changes from being one of battles between armies to one of the simulation of this battle. Uncertainty seeps into war (‘is this really a war?’) and what used to be at stake in a war of violence (such as conquest or domination) are no longer the underlying principles of war’s ontology. This uncertainty spawns wars of ‘pure speculation’ waged as advertisement campaigns (Baudrillard 1995: 28-29). III. Symbolism, simulation, and war-processing In The Gulf War did not take place Baudrillard explicitly states that his take on the war relates to ‘deterrence and the indefinite virtuality of war’ (1995: 49). This helps us appreciate the way in which the rules of the game have changed and something new and uncanny has emerged: incidents and events without meaning (Baudrillard 2000: 47-48). To think “war” after the Gulf is, in Rex Butler’s words, to ‘speak against…simulation when there is nothing to which to compare it, when there is nothing outside of it or when that outside can only be imagined in its terms’ (Butler 1999: 24).4 It is within this context we can understand how the Gulf War, ‘a war stripped bare of everything that makes it a war’ (1995: 64) illustrates a change in the ontology of war. Let us look into Baudrillard’s argument on the Gulf War to see precisely what it lacks. William Merrin categorizes Baudrillard’s discussion of the Gulf War as three particular critiques: its lack of symbolic encounter (between friend and enemy), the simulated aspect of war, and war as processing and modelling (Merrin 2005: 83-84). The first aspect goes back to war being considered (in the classic, Clausewitzian sense) as an encounter between two opposing forces. To Baudrillard, this conception of war as a symbolic act is lost in the Gulf. Rather, the US wages war as if it is a business strategy, in a detached manner: ‘(t)his is the rule of the American way of life: nothing personal! And they make war in the same manner: pragmatically and not symbolically’ (Baudrillard 1995:39). And this is equally true for the war in the media: ’(t)he Americans fought the same war in respect of world opinion – via the media, censorship, CNN, etc – as they fought on the battlefield (Baudrillard 1994b: 63). They thereby miss the insight that traditionally war is a symbolic exchange between two counterparts that have a relationship (and might hate each other but still need each other). Instead the US wages a clean, surgical, mathematical, punctual and efficient war. A war in which the Other is denied his status as the Other as the United States refused to engage in a relationship or even recognize its enemy. This in turn humiliates and eliminates instead of creating an antagonistic relation (Baudrillard 1995: 40, 44, see also Behnke 2004, Holmqvist 2013b). Baudrillard’s point here is not so much that a war with symbolic aspects is better or more preferable than one without. The point is rather that the American way of waging it changes the underlying parameters for what war is and does. Therefore, it is not only that ‘the Gulf War did not take place’ in the sense that a classical war wasn’t waged. The two opponents (the US-coalition and Iraq) also viewed war differently – so that there was in a sense a war over the definition of war. This became obvious in 2001, when the Twin Towers were attacked through an event that the US could not anticipate, understand or properly respond to. The second aspect, the shift from real to virtual, has already been discussed to some extent in the previous part. So what is meant when one claims that the Gulf War was a ‘virtual war’? Paul Patton, James Der Derian and others have outlined various ways in which the virtual is being associated with how the military employ electronic technology and communication devices. The Gulf War displayed new kinds of virtual technology which not so much displaced actual war as it became an integral part of it. Training through simulators is one example of such a ‘virtualization’ which helps blurring the boundaries between the real and the simulated (Patton 1997: 124-126, Der Derian 2001: 116-117). Baudrillard discuss this with a focus on ‘new media’ such as real-time TV, CNN-effects, high-speed information. Arguably, it is helpful to understand his argument about the Gulf War not as a simple shift from something ‘real’ to something ‘virtual’. Rather, it should be thought of as an overwhelming (to use a term by William Bogard 1994: 319) implosion where the virtual in many ways appropriates the real and becomes ‘more real than the real’. This occurs in the same way as notions like the symbolic are appropriated by the semiotic (as outlined particularly in the ‘early-Baudrillard’) or illusion is appropriated by the transparency of simulation and modelling (as outlined particularly in the ‘later-Baudrillard’). Seen in this way it is possible to think virtual war, not in terms of a shift from one state to the next (as in Ignatieff), but rather as an implosion which severely challenges how we think social reality, as it saturates war with ambivalence and lack of distinction. War becomes reversible as it might mean anything and everything, evident in notions like (Orwell’s) ‘war is peace’ but also as a general implosion which affects the relationship between war and television, technology, advertisement, social media, and the economy. This implosion is by no means limited to a particular space (such as the Gulf) or a particular time (such as 1991) but is rather marked by a lack of distinction which also affects other things. For example in its relation to cinema, evident in how Baudrillard argues that the motion picture Apocalypse Now and the war in Vietnam were ‘cut from the same cloth’, and that the film is as much part of the war, as war is part of the film (1994a: 60). Or, by drawing upon Francois de Bernard, that the Iraq war is not so much ‘like a film’ but rather is a film: ‘with a script, a scenario that has been implemented without diversion’ evident in how ‘operational war becomes a gigantic special effect, cinema becomes the paradigm of war, and we imagine the “real” war as if it was only a mirror of its filmic being’ (Baudrillard 2007a: 119). Perhaps we might say that if the Iraq war was a motion picture, Ibrahim Al-Marashi played the lead. In an astonishing auto-biographical piece Al-Marashi (2014, this special issue) outlines how his doctoral research on Iraq’s history was plagiarized and used as a security dossier by the UK government in order to justify the 2003 Iraq War. The simulations of war appropriated him as a mediated persona which seriously affected not only his career but any prospect of having a ‘normal’ life. Untangling these webs of simulation Al-Marashi concludes that not only the 1991 Gulf War but also the 2003 Iraq War did not take place. Both Michał Kłosiński and Alan Shapiro’s articles in this special issue also deal explicitly with the war in the Gulf. The first mentioned asks what it means that particular wars “take, or do not take place” or whether war has, or can find, “a proper place”. He illustrates how Baudrillard plays with the notion of place in order to challenge its degeneration and displace it while “the place of war” is dissolving in favor of a global war (see part three in this introduction). Shapiro on the other hand contextualizes Baudrillard’s thinking on the Gulf War and makes a rare comparison with Albert Camus’ thought on the Algerian war. Shapiro argues that there are several overlaps between the thinkers regarding war suggesting that they might be well worth reading in relation to and against each other. The third point Baudrillard raises is how the (non-)events in the Gulf turns war into ‘war-processing’ (2005a: 30, 2008: 128). This term indicates how warfare drifts into rationalization and technicalization and becomes a force directed, not against adversaries, but abstract operations (Baudrillard 1995: 34, 45). In ‘war-processing’, warfare has been supplanted for the model of warfare. This turns war into a replica of its own simulated modelling, devoid of passions and contingency: a war we no longer believe in as it has become purely operational (Baudrillard 1994b: 16, 58; 1995: 61, 73, 77). Baudrillard argues: ‘for the Gulf War computers, there were no others, no Iraqis, no enemies (not even any Americans, in the end); the whole thing was played out in a closed circuit on the basis of calculation’ (Baudrillard 2002b: 162) with the result that ‘war itself is indefinitely postponed [since] it has to be tested first in all its possible consequences’ (Baudrillard 1990: 172). And we might add, in an era in which the military constantly strives to make warfare more comprehensive, networks more seamless and combined, targeting more efficient and effects-based, the notion of ‘war-processing’ might have particular relevance (see Nordin and Öberg, 2013). In conclusion, what might we say about war after its implosion into other modes? With regards to the Gulf the result is a war which becomes its own simulation (Baudrillard 1994b: 60, 65). Baudrillard’s infamous critique of Disneyland as being ‘a deterrence machine set up in order to rejuvenate the fiction of the real’ (1994a: 13) is therefore helpful in order to understand the impact of the Gulf War. Just as Disneyland is there to mask that the rest of America is in fact a Disneyland, the Gulf War helps to obscure that it is war as such which has disappeared. And, let us give Baudrillard the last word on this as he relates the two: (D)o you know how General Schwarzkopf, architect of the US Gulf War strategy, celebrated his “victory”? With a gigantic party at Disneyworld. Such revellings in the mecca of the imagination were surely a worthy conclusion to that virtual war…They are even rebuilding an exact replica of Disneyland Los Angeles at Disneyworld in Orlando. Like a kind of second-level attraction, a simulacrum raised to the second power. This is the same job as CNN did on the Gulf War – the prototype of the event which did not take place because it took place in real time, in the instantaneity of CNN. Today, Disney might well restage the Gulf War as a global attraction. Christmas at Eurodisney was celebrated with the Red Army choirs. Everything is possible, everything can be recycled in the polymorphous world of the virtual (Baudrillard 2002b: 151). IV. Fractal war and global policing Up to now we have seen that Baudrillard’s critique illustrates how the Cold War, due to nuclear arms and deterrence, the changing role of media and IT, and high-tech weaponry force war to split into a real and a virtual mode. One important example of this is the way the Gulf War, waged as a business or advertising campaign, enables simulated models and technological processing to appropriate war’s being. The end of the Cold War therefore signifies how particular aspects of deterrence continue through other means and in so doing give rise to new effects. To Baudrillard, one of the most important effects is a constant policing of singularities, events, or any kind of potential political subversion. Baudrillard first identified this tendency in the Vietnam War (see below) but a more recent example which is equally relevant is the alleged shift from ‘enemy centric’ to ‘population centric’ counter-insurgency (see Kilcullen 2007). This illustrates an overlap between his thought and recent discussions on policing in critical War Studies. This discussion has engaged with the way war and policing intersects in contemporary Western interventions. It particularly focuses on understanding war as ordering, othering, and spatializing logics which force the distinction between war and policing to break down (Holmqvist 2014 and Bachmann et.al. 2014). So what is Baudrillard’s take on war as policing in relation to this particular debate? Baudrillard identified the Vietnam War as a means to violently reshape the social (a “generative” aspect of war which has also been debated in critical War Studies, see Barkawi and Brighton 2011). To him the Vietnam War was interesting first and foremost in how it masked both a peaceful coexistence between two blocks (East and West) and how it aimed to liquidate ‘savage’ and archaic societal structures. He argues that the war took place as long as there was a wild subversive element to the uprising (illustrated by the Viet Cong). But as soon as Vietnam as a country ‘showed’ the world that it was no longer unpredictable, the war ended (Baudrillard 1994a: 36-37). Therefore, the war in Vietnam masks not only the status quo of the Cold war but also the fact that: (B)ehind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes, the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in war – and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social – the murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of labor between two adversaries…for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations (Baudrillard 1994a: 37, my emphasis). Baudrillard therefore reads the Vietnam War as one illustration of a kind of global policing which not so much revolved around the two adversaries opposing each other but rather on the way in which deterrence enabled liquidating, reshaping, and domesticating social relations. This is also evident in the Gulf War as the aim there was to ‘impose a general consensus by deterrence’ (Baudrillard 1995: 83) which is no longer the bipolar deterrence of the Cold War but a monopolistic deterrence ‘under the aegis of American power’ (Ibid.: 84). Such a policing through war works as a way to eradicate the possibility of subversion in everyday life and thereby police not only the Gulf but also the heart of Europe (Ibid.: 52). More than anything this is a matter of policing the simulation of democratic consensus as consensus. A matter which Baudrillard ominously invokes as a continuation of war through a violent conditioning of the social: ‘…(T)omorrow there will be nothing but the virtual violence of consensus, the simultaneity in real time of the global consensus: this will happen tomorrow and it will be the beginning of a world with no tomorrow’ (Ibid.: 84). And here we might pause and ask, are the Russian wars in Chechnya or Georgia, the second Israeli war in Lebanon or interventions in Gaza, the interventions in Afghanistan (2001-) and Libya in 2011, not possible to see in terms of such policing? This would indicate a breakdown of the distinction of peace and war in which the same police-style violence is evident in both (Baudrillard,1998a: 17). But also, it would indicate that these are wars which aim to police the simulacrum of liberal order itself. If seen in this way we might appreciate how Baudrillard outlines a type of policing which goes towards the spatial through controlling a population and an area (linking it to the debate on policing in critical War Studies). But, more importantly, Baudrillards critique of war as policing points to the way interventions attempt to (1) police the past by whitewashing events so as to justify them retrospectively and (2) police the future through policing the consensus. Baudrillard reads the invasions in Iraq and Afghanistan as having 9/11 as focal point and thereby becoming what he calls ‘rituals of exorcism’ which tries to justify the event and the trauma of the past. But also in the sense that interventions aim to police the future through a systematic reprogramming and neutralization of not only possible crimes (or subversive movements) but of every possible future friction that might challenge the order of things (2005a: 118-119; 2007a: 114, 118). If war continues through policing, one of its “side effects” – Abu Ghraib – also, perhaps, suggests that “war as policing” necessarily gives rise to “war as incarceration”. Andreja Zevnik’s ‘War Porn: an image of perversion and desire in modern warfare’ (2014, this special issue) picks up on Baudrillard’s analysis of Abu Ghraib and the images of torture which became overexposed in the media around 2005. She engages with Baudrillard’s essay ‘War Porn’ (2005b: 205-209) by looking at the way underlying ideologies and logics make such simulations possible, as well as help to reproduce them. By coupling notions of porn and obscenity with the Lacanian notions of law and perversion, the article illustrates how war’s violence has a tendency to perpetuate its own principle. And indeed, if we follow Baudrillard’s diagnosis, it is precisely as a mirror and an allergy to the violence perpetuated by this ‘unbearable power’ (Baudrillard, 2002a: 18, 5) that events like 9/11 occur. Terrorism would thereby be a virus caused by the sickness of globalism, indicating a type of war: ‘no longer between peoples, states, systems, and ideologies, but rather, of the human species against itself (Interview with Baudrillard in Der Speigel 2004). Baudrillard argues: With each succeeding war we have always moved close to a single world order. Today that world order, which has virtually reached its end, finds itself grappling, in all the current convulsions, with the antagonistic forces spread throughout the global dimension itself. A fractal war of all cells, of all singularities, rebelling in the form of antibodies. A clash so elusive that the idea of war has to be rescued from time to time by spectacular set-pieces like the Gulf War (Baudrillard 2003: 63, my emphasis).5 The suggestion that contemporary wars function as masquerades to obscure the fractal war against a “globalist” world order might be the most overtly political aspect of Baudrillard’s thought on war. If the appropriation of the real through the virtual indicated a shift in Baudrillard’s thinking from war as a derivative of the capitalist system (the Marxist view) to war as its own simulation (as outlined in part II of this introduction), this would indicate that this simulation hides a war which ‘haunts every world order, all hegemonic domination…for it is the world, the globe itself which resists globalization’ (Baudrillard 2002a: 12).6 Several articles in this special issue engage with this fractalization of war. William Pawlett (2014, this special issue) provides a reading of Baudrillard’s position on complicity and collusion particularly in relation to the notion of (and as a means to defy) hegemonic domination. Samuel Strehle (2014, this special issue) argues for a War Studies that take the undecidability of thinking (and the challenge to theory that this implies) as its founding principle, and in the epilogue Gerry Coulter (2014, this special issue) discusses Baudrillard’s war against cultural homogenization and sameness. Arguably Pawlett, Strehle, and Coulter all elucidate aspects of how to think ‘fractal war’ in relation to global policing of events and singularities. Moreover, Astrid Nordin (2014, this special issue) further investigates the implications of Baudrillard’s challenge as she inquiries into whether his thought might be extended to understanding the wars of “Others”. Engaging with China’s participation in the global “war on terror”, particularly the way contemporary Chinese rhetoric places itself as a (peaceful) alternative to the West and represents itself through war in relation to its neighbors, Nordin shows convincingly that there is no respite from our problems in the thought of ‘the Other’. Following Nordin and Coulter we realize that dividing lines between self and other do not run between the West and China, but rather in relation to the fractal particles at war in each and every one of us. As the texts illustrate, regardless of whether we agree with, or oppose Baudrillard’s critique against western globalism, it is important to notice (Coulter 2014, this special issue) that this critique is not a matter of simple ‘anti-Americanism’. William Merrin argues that Baudrillard in his challenge sets his eyes on a wider target: the entire Western semiotic culture (2005: 106). However, as Nordin convincingly shows this target might be less ‘Western’ than Baudrillard would acknowledge. Baudrillard is often read as being ‘neither for, nor against’ war, as his writing tends to question the possibility of reality rather than how it is conceived (Baudrillard 1995: 58, 67, see also Shapiro 2014 in this special issue). But perhaps we can find, in his notion of ‘fractal war’, a ‘deeper No’, not to war as such but to the virtual ordering of past, present and future consensus which contemporary war obscure: ‘(t)his no, which comes from the depths, should not be understood as a work of negation or of critical thought. It is simply the response of defiance against a hegemonic principle descending indifferently from a great height for the consent of the people’ (Baudrillard, 2006a). Where does this ‘no’ take us with regards to war? Perhaps we might say (with the risk of oversimplifying) that war, despite its disappearance as symbolic act due to virtualization and processing, returns as a radical challenge. This would be a war which has little or nothing to do with Clausewitzs’ “war as a continuation by other means” (or the Foucauldian reversal of this) but rather refers to a duel between a systematic and technocratic globalist challenge (often exemplified by, but never reducible to, Western interventions) and a radical refusal of this expanded as resistance and counter-violence. This duel should not be confused with a clash between the West and Islam but is rather one which potentially involves us all (Baudrillard 2010: 68-70): a duel beyond the end of war where the past, present and future of events and singularities are constantly at stake.

The simultaneity of two events in the month of July 1975 illustrated this in a striking manner: the linkup in space of the two American and Soviet supersatellites, apotheosis of peaceful coexistence - the suppression by the Chinese of ideogrammatic writing and conversion to the Roman alphabet. The latter signifies the "orbital" instantiation of an abstract and modelized system of signs, into whose orbit all the once unique forms of style and writing will be reabsorbed. The satellization of language: the means for the Chinese to enter the system of peaceful coexistence, which is inscribed in their heavens at precisely the same time by the linkup of the two satellites. Orbital flight of the Big Two, neutralization and homogenization of everyone else on earth. Yet, despite this deterrence by the orbital power - the nuclear or molecular code - events continue at ground level, misfortunes are even more numerous, given the global process of the contiguity and simultaneity of data. But, subtly, they no longer have any meaning, they are no longer anything but the duplex effect of simulation at the summit. The best example can only be that of the war in Vietnam, because it took place at the intersection of a maximum historical and "revolutionary" stake, and of the installation of this deterrent authority. What meaning did this war have, and wasn't its unfolding a means of sealing the end of history in the decisive and culminating historic event of our era? Why did this war, so hard, so long, so ferocious, vanish from one day to the next as if by magic? Why did this American defeat (the largest reversal in the history of the USA) have no internal repercussions in America? If it had really signified the failure of the planetary strategy of the United States, it would necessarily have completely disrupted its internal balance and the American political system. Nothing of the sort occurred. Something else, then, took place. This war, at bottom, was nothing but a crucial episode of peaceful coexistence. It marked the arrival of China to peaceful coexistence. The nonintervention of China obtained and secured after many years, Chinas apprenticeship to a global modus vivendi, the shift from a global strategy of revolution to one of shared forces and empires, the transition from a radical alternative to political alternation in a system now essentially regulated (the normalization of Peking - Washington relations): this was what was at stake in the war in Vietnam, and in this sense, the USA pulled out of Vietnam but won the war. And the war ended "spontaneously" when this objective was achieved. That is why it was deescalated, demobilized so easily. This same reduction of forces can be seen on the field. The war lasted as long as elements irreducible to a healthy politics and discipline of power, even a Communist one, remained unliquidated. When at last the war had passed into the hands of regular troops in the North and escaped that of the resistance, the war could stop: it had attained its objective. The stake is thus that of a political relay. As soon as the Vietnamese had proved that they were no longer the carriers of an unpredictable subversion, one could let them take over. That theirs is a Communist order is not serious in the end: it had proved itself, it could be trusted. It is even more effective than capitalism in the liquidation of "savage" and archaic precapitalist structures. Same scenario in the Algerian war. The other aspect of this war and of all wars today: behind the armed violence, the murderous antagonism of the adversaries - which seems a matter of life and death, which is played out as such (or else one could never send people to get themselves killed in this kind of thing), behind this simulacrum of fighting to the death and of ruthless global stakes the two adversaries are fundamentally in solidarity against something else, unnamed, never spoken, but whose objective outcome in war, with the equal complicity of the two adversaries, is total liquidation. Tribal, communitarian, precapitalist structures, every form of exchange, of language, of symbolic organization, that is what must be abolished, that is the object of murder in war - and war itself, in its immense, spectacular death apparatus, is nothing but the medium of this process of the terrorist rationalization of the social - the murder on which sociality will be founded, whatever its allegiance, Communist or capitalist. Total complicity, or division of labor between two adversaries (who may even consent to enormous sacrifices for it) for the very end of reshaping and domesticating social relations. "The North Vietnamese were advised to countenance a scenario for liquidating the American presence in the course of which, of course, one must save face." This scenario: the extremely harsh bombardments of Hanoi. Their untenable character must not conceal the fact that they were nothing but a simulacrum to enable the Vietnamese to seem to countenance a compromise and for Nixon to make the Americans swallow the withdrawal of their troops. The game was already won, nothing was objectively at stake but the verisimilitude of the final montage. The moralists of war, the holders of high wartime values should not be too discouraged: the war is no less atrocious for being only a simulacrum - the flesh suffers just the same, and the dead and former combatants are worth the same as in other wars. This objective is always fulfilled, just like that of the charting of territories and of disciplinary sociality. What no longer exists is the adversity of the adversaries, the reality of antagonistic causes, the ideological seriousness of war. And also the reality of victory or defeat, war being a process that triumphs well beyond these appearances. In any case, the pacification (or the deterrence) that dominates us today is beyond war and peace, it is that at every moment war and peace are equivalent. "War is peace," said Orwell. There also, the two differential poles implode into each other, or recycle one another - a simultaneity of contradictions that is at once the parody and the end of every dialectic. Thus one can completely miss the truth of a war: namely, that it was finished well before it started, that there was an end to war at the heart of the war itself, and that perhaps it never started. Many other events (the oil crisis, etc.) never started, never existed, except as artificial occurrences - abstract, ersatz, and as artifacts of history, catastrophes and crises destined to maintain a historical investment under hypnosis. The media and the official news service are only there to maintain the illusion of an actuality, of the reality of the stakes, of the objectivity of facts. All the events are to be read backward, or one becomes aware (as with the Communists "in power" in Italy the retro, posthumous rediscovery of the gulags and Soviet dissidents like the almost contemporary discovery, by a moribund ethnology, of the lost "difference" of Savages) that all these things arrived too late, with a history of delay, a spiral of delay, that they long ago exhausted their meaning and only live from an artificial effervescence of signs, that all these events succeed each other without logic, in the most contradictory, complete equivalence, in a profound indifference to their consequences (but this is because there are none: they exhaust themselves in their spectacular promotion) - all "newsreel" footage thus gives the sinister impression of kitsch, of retro and porno at the same time - doubtless everyone knows this, and no one really accepts it. The reality of simulation is unbearable - crueler than Artaud's Theater of Cruelty, which was still an attempt to create a dramaturgy of life, the last gasp of an ideality of the body, of blood, of violence in a system that was already taking it away, toward a reabsorption of all the stakes without a trace of blood. For us the trick has been played. All dramaturgy, and even all real writing of cruelty has disappeared. Simulation is the master, and we only have a right to the retro, to the phantom, parodic rehabilitation of all lost referentials. Everything still unfolds around us, in the cold light of deterrence (including Artaud, who has the right like everything else to his revival, to a second existence as the referential of cruelty). This is why nuclear proliferation does not increase the risk of either an atomic clash or an accident - save in the interval when the "young" powers could be tempted to make a nondeterrent, "real" use of it (as the Americans did in Hiroshima - but precisely only they had a right to this "use value" of the bomb, all of those who have acquired it since will be deterred from using it by the very fact of possessing it). Entry into the atomic club, so prettily named, very quickly effaces (as unionization does in the working world) any inclination toward violent intervention. Responsibility, control, censure, self-deterrence always grow more rapidly than the forces or the weapons at our disposal: this is the secret of the social order. Thus the very possibility of [eliminating] a whole country by flicking a switch makes it so that the electrical engineers will never use this weapon: the whole myth of the total and revolutionary strike crumbles at the very moment when the means are available - but alas precisely because those means are available. Therein lies the whole process of deterrence. It is thus perfectly probable that one day we will see nuclear powers export atomic reactors, weapons, and bombs to every latitude. Control by threat will be replaced by the more effective strategy of pacification through the bomb and through the possession of the bomb. The "little" powers, believing that they are buying their independent striking force, will buy the virus of deterrence, of their own deterrence. The same goes for the atomic reactors that we have already sent them: so many neutron bombs knocking out all historical virulence, all risk of explosion. In this sense, the nuclear everywhere inaugurates an accelerated process of implosion, it freezes everything around it, it absorbs all living energy. The nuclear is at once the culminating point of available energy and the maximization of energy control systems. Lockdown and control increase in direct proportion to (and undoubtedly even faster than) liberating potentialities. This was already the aporia of the modern revolution. It is still the absolute paradox of the nuclear. Energies freeze in their own fire, they deter themselves. One can no longer imagine what project, what power, what strategy, what subject could exist behind this enclosure, this vast saturation of a system by its own forces, now neutralized, unusable, unintelligible, nonexplosive - except for the possibility of an explosion toward the center, of an implosion where all these energies would be abolished in a catastrophic process (in the literal sense, that is to say in the sense of a reversion of the whole cycle toward a minimal point, of a reversion of energies toward a minimal threshold).

When we talk about an object of desire, we are really talking about a cluster of promises we want someone or something to make to us and make possible for us. This cluster of promises could be embedded in a person, a thing, an institution, a text, a norm, a bunch of cells, smells, a good idea - whatever. To phrase 'the object of desire' as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what's incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation for our sense of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us while others not so much. In other words, all attachments are optimistic. That does not mean that they all feel optimistic: one might dread, for example, returning to a scene of hunger or longing or the slapstick reiteration of a lover or parent's typical misrecognition. But the surrender to the return to the scene where the object hovers in its potentialities is the operation of optimism as an affective form. In optimism, the subject leans toward promises contained within the present moment of the encounter with their object.' 'Cruel optimism' names a relation of attachment to compromised conditions of possibility whose realisation is discovered either to be impossible, sheer fantasy, or too possible, and toxic. What's cruel about these attachments, and not merely inconvenient or tragic, is that the subjects who have x in their lives might not well endure the loss of their object or scene of desire, even though its presence threatens their well-being, because whatever the content of the attachment is, the continuity of the form of it provides something of the continuity of the subject's sense of what it means to keep on living on and to look forward to being in the world. This phrase points to a condition different than that of melancholia, which is enacted in the subject's desire to temporise an experience of the loss of an object/scene with which she has identified her ego continuity. Cruel optimism is the condition of maintaining an attachment to a problematic object. One more thing: the cruelty of an optimistic attachment is, I think, usually something an analyst observes about someone's or some group's attachment to x, since usually that attachment exists without being an event, or even better, seems to lighten the load for someone/some group.^ But if the cruelty of an attachment is experienced by someone/some group, even in disavowed fashion, the fear is that the loss of the object/scene of promising itself will defeat the capacity to have any hope about anything. Often this fear of loss of a scene of optimism as such is unstated and only experienced in a sudden incapacity to manage startling situations, as we will see below. One might point out that all objects/scenes of desire are problematic, in that investments in them and projections onto them are less about them than about what cluster of desires and affects we can manage to keep magnetised to them. I have indeed wondered whether all optimism is cruel, because the experience of loss of the conditions of its reproduction can be so breathtakingly bad, just as the threat of the loss of x in the scope of one's attachment drives can feel like a threat to living on itself. But some scenes of optimism are clearly crueller than others: where cruel optimism operates, the very vitalising or animating potency of an object/ scene of desire contributes to the attrition of the very thriving that is supposed to be made possible in the work of attachment in the first place. This might point to something as banal as a scouring love, but it also opens out to obsessive appetites, working for a living, patriotism, all kinds of things. One makes affective bargains about the costliness of one's attachments, usually unconscious ones, most of which keep one in proximity to the scene of desire/attrition. This means that a poetics of attachment always involves some splitting off of the story I can tell about wanting to be near x (as though x has autonomous qualities) from the activity of the emotional habitus I have constructed by having x in my life in order to be able to project out my endurance as proximity to the complex of what x seems to offer and proffer. To understand cruel optimism, therefore, one must embark on an analysis of rhetorical indirection, as a way of thinking about the strange temporalities of projection into an enabling object that is also disabling. I learned how to do this from reading Barbara Johnson's work on apostrophe and free indirect discourse. In her poetics of indirection, each of these rhetorical modes is shaped by the ways a writing subjectivity conjures other ones so that, in a performance of fantasmatic intersubjectivity, the writer gains superhuman observational authority, enabling a performance of being made possible by the proximity of the object. Because this object is something like what I am describing in the optimism of attachment, I'll describe a bit the shape of my transference with her thought. In 'Apostrophe, Animation, and Abortion,' which will be my key referent bere, Johnson tracks the political consequences of apostrophe for what has become foetal personhood: a silent, affectively present but physically displaced interlocutor (a lover, a foetus) is animated in speech as distant enough for a conversation but close enough to be imaginable by the speaker in whose head the entire scene is happening.' But the condition of projected possibility, of a hearing that cannot take place in the terms of its enunciation ('you' are not here, 'you' are eternally belated to the conversation with you that I am imagining) creates a fake present moment of intersubjectivity in which, nonetheless, a performance of address can take place. The present moment is made possible by the fantasy of you, laden with the x qualities I can project onto you, given your convenient absence. Apostrophe therefore appears to be a reaching out to a you, a direct movement from place x to y, but it is actually a turning back, an animating of a receiver on behalf of the desire to make something happen now that realises something in the speaker, makes the speaker more or differently possible, because she has admitted, in a sense, the importance of speaking for, as, and to, two: but only under the condition, and illusion, that the two is really (in) one. Apostrophe is thus an indirect, unstable, physically impossible but phenomenologically vitalising movement of rhetorical animation that permits subjects to suspend themselves in the optimism of a potential occupation of the same psychic space of others, the objects of desire who make you possible (by having some promising qualities, but also by not being there).'' Later work, such as on 'Muteness Envy,' elaborates Johnson's description of the gendered rhetorical politics of this projection of voluble intersubjectivity.'^ The paradox remains that the conditions of the lush submerging of one consciousness into another require a double negation: of the speaker's boundaries, so s/he can grow bigger in rhetorical proximity to the object of desire; and of the spoken of, who is more or less a powerful mute placeholder providing an opportunity for the speaker's imagination of her/his/their flourishing. Of course psychoanalytically speaking all intersubjectivity is impossible. It is a wish, a desire, and a demand for an enduring sense of being with and in x, and is related to that big knot that marks the indeterminate relation between a feeling of recognition and misrecognition - recognition is the misrecognition you can bear, a transaction that affirms you without, again, necessarily feeling good or accurate (it might idealise, it might affirm your monstrosity, it might mirror your desire to be nothing enough to live under the radar, it might feel just right, and so on).'' Johnson's work on projection shows that scenes of impossible identity, rhetorically rendered, open up meaning and knowledge by mining the negative - projective, boundary dissolving - spaces of attachment to the object of address who must be absent in order for the desiring subject of intersubjectivity to get some traction, to stabilise her proximity to the object/scene of promise. In free indirect discourse, a cognate kind of suspension, the circulation of this kind of merged and submerged observational subjectivity, has less pernicious outcomes, at least when Johnson reads Zora Neale Hurston's practice of it.' In a narrator's part-merging with a character's consciousness, say, free indirect discourse performs the impossibility of locating an observational intelligence in one or any body, and therefore forces the reader to transact a different, more open relation of unfolding to what she is reading, judging, being, and thinking she understands. In Jobnson's work such a transformative transaction through reading/speaking 'unfolds' the subject in a good way, despite whatever desires they may have not to become significantly different." In short, Johnson's work on projection is about the optimism of attachment, and is often itself optimistic about the negations and extensions of personhood that forms of suspended intersubjectivity demand from the reader. What follows is not so buoyant: this is an essay politicising Freud's observation that 'people never willingly abandon a libidinal position, not even, indeed, when a substitute is already beckoning to them'.^ It comes from a longer project about the politics, aesthetics, and projections of political depression. Political depression persists in affective judgments of the world's intractability - evidenced in affectlessness, apathy, coolness, cynicism, and so on - modes of what might be called detachment that are really not detached at all but constitute ongoing relations of sociality.'" The politically depressed position is manifested in the problem of the difficulty of detaching from life-building modalities that can no longer be said to be doing their work, and which indeed make obstacles to the desires that animate them; my archive tracks practices of self-interruption, self-suspension, and self-abeyance that indicate people's struggles to change, but not traumatically, the terms of value in which their life-making activity has been cast." Cruel optimism is, then, like all phases, a deictic, a phrase that points to a proximate location: as an analytic lever it is an incitement to inhabit and to track the affective attachment to what we call 'the good life,' which is for so many a bad life that wears out the subjects who nonetheless, and at the same time, find their conditions of possibility within it. My assumption is that the conditions of ordinary life in the contemporary world even of relative wealth, as in the US, are conditions of the attrition or the wearing out of the subject, and that the irony - that the labour of reproducing life in the contemporary world is also the activity of being worn out by it - has specific implications for thinking about the ordinariness of suffering, the violence of normativity, and the 'technologies of patience' or lag that enable a concept of the later to suspend questions of the cruelty of the now.'^ Cruel optimism is in this sense a concept pointing toward a mode of lived imminence, one that grows from a perception about the reasons people are not Bartlehy, do not prefer to interfere with varieties of immiseration, but choose to ride the wave of the system of attachment that they are used to, to syncopate with it, or to be held in a relation of reciprocity, reconciliation, or resignation that does not mean defeat by it. Or perhaps they move to normative form to get numb with the consensual promise, and to misrecognise that promise as an achievement. This essay traverses three episodes of suspension - from John Ashhery, Charles Johnson, and Ceoff Ryman - of the reproduction of habituated or normative life. These suspensions open up revelations about the promises that had clustered as people's objects of desire, stage moments of exuberance in the impasse near the normal, and provide tools for suggesting why these exuberant attachments keep ticking not like the time bomb they might be but like a white noise machine that provides assurance that what seems like static really is, after all, a rhythm people can enter into while they're dithering, tottering, bargaining, testing, or otherwise being worn out by the promises that they have attached to in this world.

A crucial feature of the contemporary media system (and its accompanying global circulation of images) is oversaturation. This oversaturation of media is characterized by so-called viral patterns of production, dissemination, and consumption of content, often achieved through globally networked digital platforms. Enabled by a seemingly exponential growth of networks and by ever-widened thresholds of social connectivity, digital technologies have ushered in an unprecedented intensity of information production. Today’s global mediascape is perhaps best defined by its immeasurable volume of communicative activity, constituted by an interminable accumulation/circulation of representational images (thus, it may be more apt to call it a global media circuitry). In order to theorize the relevance of the accumulative/circulatory effects of representation taking place throughout contemporary media processes, we turn to Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation. According to Baudrillard’s theory of simulation, images have a tendency to “exceed” their original or intended function to represent, reflect, or describe some facet of reality. Images eventually overtake, overwhelm, and erase the possibility of originality or referential certainty. For Baudrillard (1983b), this takes place over the course of four “successive phases of the image” (p. 11). The first stage corresponds to the representational function of the image in its most ideal form. It describes a moment in the development of western thought—less likely an actual historical moment than one retroactively imposed on or assumed by western thought itself—whereby any reality can be perfectly reflected by an image. A second stage emerges as a response or opposition to the notion of representational faithfulness. It introduces the possibility of representational malfunction (often deployed intentionally), and it relates to what Baudrillard (1993) refers to in Symbolic Exchange and Death as “the counterfeit,” something that, Baudrillard claims, is “the dominant schema in the ‘classical period’” (p. 50). With the counterfeit, the image does not accurately represent anymore but rather “masks or perverts a basic reality” (Baudrillard, 1983b, p. 11). Representation gives way to distortion. Or, to put it somewhat differently, representation as distortion can now mislead, hide, cheat, dissimulate, or facilitate the production (and valuation) of lies and untruths (or counter-realities). In a third stage, Baudrillard (1983b) theorizes that the image now “masks the absence of a basic reality” (p. 11). The third stage marks a radical break from the first and second stages, and from representation in general. Representation becomes more or less a ruse or a lure; it can no longer be trusted (it cannot even be trusted to spread lies or falsehoods). In the third stage, the image’s “true” function is neither to reflect nor to distort, but rather to mask the impossibility of representation. Baudrillard (1996) conceptualizes that a crater has been left in the wake of a reality whose referentiality/representability has been “murdered” by the image itself, by the lure of representation, and by the desire to over-signify by way of the image. This third stage is marked by an over or hyperactive global (re)production of images and meanings in a panic mode eager to restore reality/referentiality at all costs. The demands that the real always be meaningful are everywhere in excess. “There is a proliferation of myths of origin and signs of reality; of second-hand truth, objectivity and authenticity. […] there is a panic-stricken production of the real and the referential, above and parallel to the panic of material production,” writes Baudrillard (1983b, pp. 12– 13). A panic-driven sense of reality’s radical absence generates a crisis about the capacity of verifiable truth and representable meaning. Still, according to this (il)logic, it is not enough to say that the absence of the real creates a void of meaning and truth inside which the entirety of western thought and its belief-systems disappear. Frantically, this void also stimulates and simulates reproductive effects driven by disappointment (that the real is no more) but also by desire (that the quest for the real produce more and more reality). Thus, this stage of “representation” or of reality-production also inevitably turns toward proliferation and saturation of all the signs that can stand for the real itself. The less reality is present, the more its signs, as substitutes for the real, proliferate. As Baudrillard (2005) puts it: “We live in terror both of the excess of meaning and of total meaninglessness” (p. 134). Demands on reality to be exponentially re-enacted, displayed, and proliferated (the new modalities of representation in this third phase) further deepen the absence of the real. Demands for evermore meaning (everything must make sense, be meaningful) exacerbate a general loss of certainty. Meaning, too, is about the exponential production and display of signs, signs that stand for what is meaningful. As Baudrillard (1988) writes, “Everywhere one seeks to produce meaning, to make the world signify, to render it visible. We are not, however, in danger of lacking meaning; quite to the contrary, we are gorged with meaning and it is killing us” (p. 63). Lastly, Baudrillard (1983b) arrives at a fourth stage of the image/simulation. Here, the image, indebted to the effects of absence-proliferation resulting from the third stage, “bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum” (p. 11). This stage of the image relates to a phase of the “real” in which the effects of representation (or what formerly could be called representation) can now be conceptualized as a series of independent operations. Images now circulate and reproduce in more or less complete abstraction from the demands of referentiality. In effect, the “real” has been hollowed out by its own representations (as we saw in the third stage). Nothing is left of the real but its simulacra, its sign-images that circulate and are exchanged indiscriminately throughout a global mediascape. At this stage, when we point to a “real” object in the world, we actually point to a hyper-mediation of the object and of its sign-function, often to manifold images, void of originality by virtue of having been hyper-circulated. The mediation of reality has led to the disappearance of the real and representation, and we find instead a hallucinatory complex of “hyperreality” whereby things appear and in fact are “more real than the real” (Baudrillard, 1983a, p. 99). Baudrillard’s diagnosis about representation, reality, and their fateful (hyper)- mediation is reflected through many of the operations of contemporary media, particularly those that involve the proliferation and saturation of inputs and outputs in the global circuitry. The immeasurable volume of hyper-produced digital contents seems to have overwhelmed the global circuits of communication, representation, and meaning/signification. The globalized world is faced with an irreducible complexity of interdependent transmissions, exchanges, and always expanding and morphing communication channels occurring between a multitude of networked actors/actants, interests, and media across the shifting realms of speculative finance, statecraft, international intelligence, the management of political processes, journalism, news-reporting/making, publishing, academia, or “scientific” expertise, and everyday consumer practices, on and on, ad nauseam. There occurs a widespread hyper-generation, hyper-distribution, and hyper-signification of causality and connectivity that, in turn, become virtually indistinguishable categories, excreted by digitally mediated social exchange, and often emerging as a series of signs or symptoms of the boundless growth of an implosive global system. As the system grows, all meanings, certainties, and truth-claims implode. Within this implosive global system, mediation of the true and the real may remain operative, but only according to a logic of functional contradiction. Indeed, the promise of certainty is continually (re)produced concomitantly with its disappointment or deferral. This is perhaps the fateful or fatal strategic extension of the culture industry’s logic of domination and libidinal exploitation that had once been outlined by Horkheimer and Adorno (2002). As Horkheimer and Adorno put it, [t]he culture industry endlessly cheats its consumers out of what it endlessly promises. The promissory note of pleasure issued by plot and packaging is indefinitely prolonged: the promise, which actually comprises the entire show, disdainfully intimates that there is nothing more to come, that the diner must be satisfied with reading the menu. (p. 111) Today, however, the operationalization of promise-disappointment functions beyond the strategic scope of consumer marketing and the culture industry. The mediatized subject is constantly hit by a barrage of direct and indirect promissory notes about various forms and versions of certainty, security, and truth emanating from multiple news media pundits, commentators, ideologues, technocrats, politicians, community activists, and fellow “digizens.” Increasingly, the reality of power (social, political, economic, etc.) is being scrambled by a hyper-real overproduction of conflicting “truths” and “untruths,” “reals” and “unreals,” “facts” and “alternative facts,” or “news” and “fake news” that exacerbate the implosion of ideologically incoherent and semantically fragmented images purporting to represent some sort of social/ political/economic reality (Artrip & Debrix, 2014). Put differently, in seeking to diagnose and represent the true and the real, media today often produce a series of “undecidable symptoms, and an assortment of vague and contradictory diagnoses” (Baudrillard, 1995, p. 48). Even mainstream news commentaries today echo a vaguely postmodern concern that we have somehow entered a dangerous “post-truth” era of mediated social and political reality (Davies, 2016; Flood, 2016). One widespread sentiment in response to this “posttruth crisis” is to fetishize “fact-checking” technologies and related epistemic media/ truth policing practices. This sentiment commonly implores that countermeasures be taken in response to “fake news” proliferation. Yet, the machineries that produce and disseminate the true and the untrue are one and the same. Both involve the same conditions of reproduction, the same thirst for reality, and the same system of operationalized promise/disappointment. The imperative to “fact-check” suggests that media need to fight against a threat to their own legitimacy and against the endangerment of truth. But journalists and pundits who tout “fact-checking” as some panacean form of political/social resistance appear to do so in complete ignorance or denial of the hyper-real effects of today’s global media. They fail to see that, in the words of Baudrillard (2005), “[t]he excess of information engenders undecidability of facts and confusion of minds. […] The excess of transparency engenders terror” (p. 193). The ethos/pathos of “factchecking” assumes that the immediacy of truth is still possible, or that media can or must remain neutral conduits for the transmission of reality. Thus, the fetishization of “fact-checking” does not care to address (or cannot make itself address) the more difficult situation, but one that is arguably at the root of the so-called post-truth condition: truth is always already mediated. Truth is always already vulnerable to the challenges of “alternative” forms of reality assessment and representation. The viral form of today’s media simultaneously demands and prohibits a hegemonic instantiation of truth. Perhaps this simultaneous and contradictory demand for and prohibition of epistemological hegemony has always been a central feature of liberal democracies and their quests for truth. The devout faith in the “marketplace of ideas” in (neo)liberal democratic designs—rooted in the virtues of transparency, freedom, and competition—promises that (like the infamous invisible hand of the market, perhaps) it will eventually always be able to sort out fact from fiction. But the radical equivalency and universal fungibility of all ideas make it such that each attempt to instantiate a hegemonic truth tends only to energize an oppositional or contradictory attempt. In the domain of news and political media, the user-subject’s search for truth resembles a shell game, the plight of which is perhaps nowhere more evident than with Counselor to President Trump Kellyanne Conway’s insistence on “alternative facts” in opposition to the seemingly more measured, documented, quantitative, and conventional facts reported about public attendance at Trump’s presidential inauguration (Bradner, 2017). The new U.S. executive’s blatant disregard for referential reality, made evident by the continual torrent of images, signs, and contradictory truth-claims disseminated from the state apparatus (or via the president’s Twitter account), reflects a stage of simulation in which the lie operates as a self-sustaining simulacrum. The lie is no longer a “counterfeit” (as it was in Baudrillard’s second phase of the image), but rather a free-floating signifier. The lie no longer antagonizes truth or the real. Rather, the lie makes sense only in relation to other lies that do not even care anymore to appear truthful. The lie mirrors the hyper-real condition and operations of media because it functions according to a framework of “truth” that assumes no weight about reality, assigns no inherent value to the real, and makes no referential claims. There is no certainty left when it comes to truths and lies. What is left is an unending play of symptoms emanating from the oversaturation (an oversaturation of images, signs, statements, and “realities,” once again) of an undifferentiated global system. Everything becomes uncertain (Baudrillard might say that it is indifferent), reduced to the universally fungible mode of information/news. As Baudrillard (1995) intimated, “everything which is turned into information becomes the object of endless speculation” (p. 41).

Utilitarian’s will consider everyone equally; this does not mean that they will treat everyone equally. Suppose that there is a racial minority in a society. This minority does not harm anyone else in the society, nor does it do anything particularly good either. However, the other citizens, who make up the majority, have prejudices against this minority, and consider their presence very disagreeable, and proposals are put forward to remove this minority. (Woolridge 2019, p. 138) Woolridge is not clear on what would be involved in “removing” the minority but where Woolridge falls short, scholar Noah Levin provides insight to what it could mean. “The removal of the minority need not involve murder, although it could. It might involve, for example,6 removing them from society by forcing them to leave the society” (Levin 2019, p. 139). Again, this clearly raises moral and ethical questions. Bentham is also known for his views on criminology and on policing, the topic of this thesis, and indeed is seen as one of the main proponents of modern policing. Writing at a time of high crime in the United Kingdom stemming from urbanization and social upheaval, and considering the reliance at the time on coercive methods employed by the military and local and private forces, Bentham felt that the public good (and protection fo property) would be better served by establishing a civilian-controlled and state funded police force that would focus on methods of “preventative” rather than punitive policing (Cote 2021; Jacques and Schofield 2021). Preventative policing could be defined by three components: First is situational crime prevention, [in which police] broadly distribute information to the public so they can avoid being victims of crime. The second encompasses what is now referred to as “intelligence-led” policing and “predictive policing”, where police gather and process information to be used in proactive interventions. Third and arguably the most important to Bentham was the deterrent effect of successful reactive policing (i.e., the detection and capture of offenders). (Jacques and Schoefield 2021, p. 215). “Broken Windows” Theory as adopted by New York City in the 1990s was a variation of utilitarian-based policing, but as will be described, rather than situational crime prevention, became a channel for “zero policing” which harmed minorities and did little to contribute to the overall public good.7 Broken Windows Theory Broken Windows Theory, as described in 1982 by James Wilson and George Kelling, extrapolated on earlier research by Stanford University psychologist Philip Zimbardo. This theory in essence posits that no matter how rich or poor a neighborhood, one broken window would soon lead to many more windows being broken: “If the first broken window in a building is not repaired, the people who like breaking windows will assume that no one cares about the building and more windows will be broken. Soon the building will have no windows” (Wilson and Kelling, 1982, para. 22). The idea here is that serious crime will evolve from minor infractions. However, there is no foundational basis that indicates that minor infractions directly cause serious crime. In a critique of punitive preventative justice, Columbia law professor Bernard Harcourt concludes that, Taken together, the wealth of research provides no support for a simple disorder-crime relationship as hypothesized by Wilson and Kelling in their broken-windows theory. What I have come to believe is that the broken windows theory is really window dressing, and it masks or hides more profound processes of real estate development and wealth redistribution. (Harcourt 2012, p. 14) On that note, attorney, activist, and writer Andrea Ritchie makes a similar observation, recognizing that “Broken Windows” policing is nearly identical to the ways in which vagrancy laws were implemented in the past. “These laws were explicitly created to criminalize and control the movements of people deemed undesirable throughout U.S. history: Indigenous peoples, formerly enslaved people of African descent, immigrants, women, and homeless and8 poor people” (Ritchie 2016, para. 13). In his 2015 defense of “Broken Windows,” Kelling himself directly acknowledged the lineage, stating in reference to his 1982 essay, that …the Black Codes’ vague loitering and vagrancy laws passed in the South immediately after the Civil War were of special concern for us (police.) Under these laws police arrested African Americans for minor offenses and, when they could not pay the fines, courts committed them to involuntary labor on farms, in a sense, extending slavery for many into the 20th century. (Kelling, 2015, para. 7) As will be discussed in the following sections, after the Broken Windows theory was applied in New York City, there were similar analyses of the impact on poor people, Black people, and people of color. Nevertheless, the New York City experience was borrowed by policy makers in various parts of the world, based on the city’s success in reducing crime. In Section 4, the New York City case is elaborated further, followed by the application of a similar theory in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. It should be noted that the largest city in NSW is Sydney where more than half of NSW’s 8.1 million people (2020) live. Policies applied in NSW were particularly relevant to this large city. 4. Case Studies: New York City and New South Wales New York City

During the 1980s and into the early 1990s, New York City was experiencing very high crime rates. During this time residents were leaving at a high rate, government mismanagement caused near bankruptcy of the city, and the introduction of crack-cocaine had devastating impact on communities causing a wave of drug abuse and violence. The city was in turmoil and a9 solution was desperately needed. This political climate provided a perfect opportunity to redesign New York City policies and strengthen the powers of police, and frame it as a solution to the heinous reality that was going on outside. Former mayor Rudolph Giuliani framed Broken Windows Policing as the only viable option to fix New York City’s crime problem by appealing to the public fear. “Under the leadership of former Republican Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and bolstered by right-wing media like the New York Post and right-wing think tanks like the Manhattan Institute, the city put Kelling and Wilson’s theories into practice, with an internal police memorandum” (Ritchie 2016, para.6). Based on the common political tactic of fear mongering, this solution was implemented in areas known as “hot spots” throughout New York City immediately. In 2003, a report from the National Bureau of Economic Research found that under the Broken Windows policy violent crime declined by more than 56 percent in New York City. More specifically, the research concluded: The police measure that most consistently reduces crime is the arrest rate. Felony arrest rates (except for motor vehicle thefts) rose 50 to 70 percent in the 1990s. When arrests of burglars increased 10 percent, the number of burglaries fell 2.7 to 3.2 percent. When the arrest rate of robbers rose 10 percent, the number of robberies fell 5.7 to 5.9 percent. (Francis 2003, para. 7) Figure 1 below shows that the “Broken Windows” policy was successful in reducing crime.10 Figure 1 Crime Reduction in New York City under the Broken Windows Policy Source: T. Chronopoulos. (2017). Broken Windows Policing and the orderly city: New York since the late twentieth century New York: The Gotham Center for New York City History, p.2. It is important to note while analyzing this data that these are merely snapshots into very specific times and spaces, with other varying factors also contributing to the decline in crime in New York City. In particular, New York City experienced economic growth and development during the implementation of Broken Windows. But Holtzman (2016) points out: From the start broken windows has been inseparable from policies to promote economic development and gentrification. The policy has not only accelerated the criminalization of people of color, but also worked hand in hand with pro-development schemes that make more and more New York City neighborhoods un-affordable. (2016: para. 12) He is acknowledging the inseparable connection between the development of a city and the degradation of a minority group. Sofia Kwon substantiates Holtzman’s claim by stating: “history11 indicates that gentrification and real estate development are not simply the effect of over- policing but a motivator, with the real estate industry working hand-in-hand with police to displace Black residents and accumulate wealth for its stakeholders” (Kwon 2020, para. 17). Many scholars and policy makers have noted the disproportionate impact of zero tolerance policing on minority groups. Broken Windows had a major impact on the Black community in New York City. Harcourt and Ludwig found that broken windows, albeit indirectly, led to a disproportionate number of drug arrests for blacks. The New Republic reported that from 1993 (the year that Broken Windows took hold) to 2000, misdemeanor arrests for smoking marijuana in public jumped from 10 per year to 644. At only 25% of the city’s population, blacks accounted for over half of the arrests. (Sternbenz 2014, para. 12)

In the second chapter of Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill fails to defend his moral system against the suspicion that it is too cold and calculating. According to Mill, those who make this criticism charge utilitarians with being too impersonal in their moral evaluations, and too exacting in their principles. Holding this objection myself, I must clarify that the words “cold and calculating'' do not refer to a lack of sympathy in utilitarian applications. They rather explain a kind of diffused, managerial calculus where a colorful moral compass should be. Consequentialism does not rob its advocates of their sympathy; instead, it muddies the concept of intrinsic human value, and robs individuals of unified moral feeling altogether.

Mill begins his defense against the “cold and calculating” objection by stating that it cannot be applied to utilitarianism’s treatment of action. He assumes that his system is offensive to critics only because it measures right and wrong against an objective principle, rather than a set of personal qualities. In light of his response, it seems necessary to say that I do not reject theories of universal justice when I criticize utilitarianism. Actions must be weighed against objective standards: an action is not inherently “right” if it is done by a benevolent man, or “wrong” if it is done by an abhorrent one. This is not a point of contention – to frame it as such would misrepresent the objection.

The main principle of utilitarian moral theory, the principle of utility, states that the right action is the one that produces the most overall . John Stuart Mill adapted Jeremy Bentham's theory, and stated that happiness is pleasure and the absence of pain. However, Mill clarified that there are higher and lower pleasures. The higher pleasures are the pleasures of the intellect, and the lower pleasures are the pleasures of the senses. The upshot is that morally speaking, it is not just the quantity of pleasure that matters to the utilitarian, but the quality as well.

On the positive side, if we applied this theory to our lives we might become more unselfish, and many of the problems we face might be alleviated. This is because everyone's happiness counts the same. Prejudice and  have no place here, because each individual counts the same when calculating the happiness produced by our actions. Mill himself fought for women's rights, against slavery, and for fair labor practices, which is consistent with his utilitarian convictions.

Yet, it also more narrowly reflects a crisis of democracy itself: a democracy that in the eye of many is no longer able to live up to its promise to make us co-authors of our own future – or at least not equally for all citizens, for hope (and its absence) are by no means homogenously distributed both across and within societies. As Stockdale (2021) has shown, systems of privilege and oppression based on various features of social difference structure our lives in important ways and hence the availability of hope. For instance, while those living in the most affluent parts of the world may (still) have reasons hope that they will not be too seriously affected by climate change, many others are already in the midst of having their livelihoods destroyed, with the worst yet to come. This, however, is only one of two dimensions of hope’s crisis. For at the same time, there is a backlash, particularly from within activist circles, against hope itself, a challenge to the idea that hope (even if it were to be available) can play a productive role in politics in the first place. The more radical parts of the climate movement in particular – from Greta Thunberg’s (2019) famous exclamation ‘I don’t want your hope, I want you to panic’ to Extinction Rebellion’s (2019) slogan ‘Hope Dies, Action Begins’ – worry that hope leads to passivity and wishful thinking. Alternative attitudes such as fear or panic, they suggest, are more appropriate to convey the urgency of the radical action required to at least attenuate the climate catastrophe. In a similar vein, proponents in the fight against racial injustice worry that hope is an ideological tool to keep systemic discrimination in place. For instance, ‘Afropessimists’ such as Calvin Warren (2015) or Frank Wilderson (2020) have argued that we should embrace ‘black nihilism’, because a politics of hope preserves the metaphysical structures that sustain black suffering. Hope, on his account, is nothing but the illusion that we come incrementally closer to what is actually impossible, racial justice. Someone like Obama, who promises (and appears to himself embody) incremental progress toward a ‘post-racial era’, in fact masks the continued reality of racial inequality. In putting their hope in these charismatic figures, people of colour are distracted from the hard realities they continue to face in the contemporary US and ultimately led to affirm the oppressive structures that keep them in their predicament

Meanwhile, several scholars have taken up the calls of Brockman and Durack to consider patents as technical documents requiring rhetorical skill to navigate. In a separate article, Brockman details the challenges nineteenth-century inventor Oliver Evans faced in getting his patents renewed, demonstrating how Evans’s applications failed because of the language he used to describe his innovations (“Oliver Evans”). In his well-known study of Thomas Edison’s development of electric light, meanwhile, Charles Bazerman presents a successful patenting scenario, in which Edison and his companions wielded patents strategically in an effort to maintain their favorable position against competitors. As Bazerman argues, Edison’s skill with patents was inextricable from the “heterogeneous symbolic engineering” that makes up the rhetorical work of invention. Bazerman recognizes the outsized power of the patent within the early twentieth-century ecosystem of American innovation, observing that “patents sit on top of complex contexts, giving order, meaning, and certainty to arrangements of benefit to particular parties,” (239). To this ongoing discussion, I add a third, critical perspective that considers how patents, sitting atop these “complex systems” as Bazerman describes, have distorted our histories of both invention and technology, contributing to these systems’ well- documented gendering (Oldenziel) and racializing (Fouche) through their “arrangements of benefit to particular parties” (Bazerman 239). As I suggest, the genre as a whole functions, through the social acts it enables as well as through its features, to materialize and naturalize capitalist innovation rhetorics: particular ways of understanding, describing, and experiencing the means, ends, processes, and participants of innovation.

Patents, which Durack defines as “special grant[s] of monopoly power for a limited time in exchange for public disclosure of an invention” (491), have, since 1836, been conferred in the United States by a board of paid, full-time examiners trained to assess patent applications according to rigorous prearranged guidelines. At the time Baker was writing, these included two categories of analysis: usefulness and novelty.6 Then as now, patent examiners combed through previous patents for similar novelties, considering the specific language and illustrations used to describe both function and design in order to assess whether an idea [was] truly “novel.” Then as now, applicants had to attend very carefully to these documents. As Durack argues,

Far too unknown in black studies, ethnic studies, and critical theory and continental philosophy, Long rigorously argued that a “new archē” of being and knowing, of ontology and epistemology—indeed, a unique mythos and cosmology— had come to structure or organize the present.10 This new archē emerged with and through the contacts, commerce, and exchanges that took place in the Atlantic World from the mid-fifteenth century forward in what is often called the Age of Discovery and Conquest. Differently put, a new archē of (human) being and knowing emerged with and through the simultaneous appearance of a people who would be called black and something that would be called black religion in the Atlantic World. Modernity is of this natal occasion. It was the occasion of the imposition of a racial capitalist cosmology upon the earth. Long contended that animating that natal occasion is a colonial archē that, through the emergence in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of a series of “sciences” intent on understanding Man, or “the human,” extended or mutated into a system of knowledge about what counts as real, about “the world as such.”11 We’ve been subjected to the colonial idea(l) of “the world,” made its conscripts, its uncomfortable denizens, undergone its process of “genesis.” Sylvia Wynter names what I am talking about “the coloniality of being and knowing.”12 Founded in a colonial archē, or a principle of being, to use the language afforded us by Long, who is of Wynter’s generation, modernity would in due course come to articulate a philosophical or “Enlightenment archē,” a knowledge of the human being as a certain kind of Subject in a certain kind of world. What I am trying to communicate here is that these terms—the human, the Subject, and world (or as we often so easily and casually say, the world)—and the practices that carry them are neither self-evidently given nor innocent.

This invites a question: What manner of Subject, what manner of Man, or rather human, or rather hu/Man, is this? This is a Subject who in being, supposedly, self-determined, self-possessed, and of autonomous mind claims rationality for itself. As such, this Subject (rendered with a capital S to signal its imagined, which is also a brutal, magnanimity), can subject other things to itself. It can rule. It can own things, beginning with itself, though this properly self-possessed and self-determining Subject cannot be subjected to another. In rationally owning itself as the basis of owning things, including the capacity to lay claim to the earth itself, it declares itself to be the veritable embodiment of “freedom.” And yet, it is also the case that within this cosmology, within this imagination of “the world,” Man’s freedom expresses a capacity of self-rule for the sake of ruling over other things. Within the world, or more precisely within such a cosmology, this is what freedom means. Freedom is a function of sovereignty and sovereignty is a function, an expression, of freedom. This is, to introduce another term, sovereignty.

Trademark law responds to completely different needs than those of copyright law, due to being addressed to different beneficiaries and being built upon different policy goals. Trademark refers to a registered mark that distinguishes the goods and services of a business enterprise from those others. 1086 Unlike copyright (or patent), trademark law does not require the mark to be original (or novel), but to be distinctive. 1087 Thus, it serves to protect consumers by enabling market transparency regarding the origins of the goods and services. 1088 Furthermore, it minimizes the consumer search cost and reduces the risk of consumer confusion regarding the provider of the goods and services available in the market. 1089

Although the consumer interest is at the center of trademark law, the actual beneficiaries of trademark law are the market actors who engage in trade and offer goods and services to the marketplace. 1090 Indeed, trademark law vests the exclusive right to use the registered mark in business transactions and the right to prevent third parties from using identical or similar marks for identical and similar goods and services for which the trademark is registered. 1091

Since its early beginnings, IP law, and particularly copyright law, had an intricate relationship with power. Benedict Atkinson and Brian Fitzgerald present this concurrence as the governance of information by ‘a hierarchy of authority' 602 that prevailed until the enactment of the first copyright statute, namely the Statute of Anne of 1710.603 Notwithstanding with these statements, it is asserted herein that the reciprocity of copyright and power was not limited to maintaining control over the exploitation of information. Neither this mutuality ceased with the codification of copyright as an authorial right by the aforementioned Statute. Per contra, it was institutionalized, along with the main structures of White dominance, in IP law, which echo, if not prevail to rule, the contemporary IP law domain.

Though the genesis and the maturation of the idea of 'IP' and 'copyright' pre-date the construction of race, ,604 the ideology and the structures of (inherently White) dominance that had been interwoven into the fabric of IP law in general, and copyright in particular, catalyzed the construction of racialized modes of creatorship and creativity within a paradigmatic (White and non-White) binary in the latter stages of the Western (European) history.

Bell's reading of the American legal culture and order has been further investigated by Cheryl I. Harris in her renowned journal article, entitled 'Whiteness as Property 543. Harris' work in question constitutes the centerpiece of CRT's 'Whiteness' studies. 544 It aspires to present ‘the historical and continuing pattern of [White] racial domination and economic exploitation’ United States. 546 Thus, by adopting a deconstructionist interpretation of the legal and social history, 545 in the Harris examines the predicaments of race and law in general, and property law in particular. 547 In doing so, she emphasizes the manipulative use of law by the ruling-elite, or the ones in power, in order to entitle the members of their own racial group with legally protected and exclusive rights, while subordinating people of color. 54

Although Harris focuses on the validation of ‘Whiteness' as an immaterial value and explains how it was gradually infused in the scope of (the right to) ‘property', her line of argumentation therein applies to the racially-motived power clashes and cultural valorization schemes inherent in IP law. In fact, and as already mentioned in the previous chapter, Anjali Vats and Deidré A. Keller have employed Harris' approach to the engagement of race and property in their paper, entitled 'Critical Race IP'.549 Vats and Keller even analogized Harris' phraseology and coined the term 'Whiteness as IP 550 to refer to the racialized baselines of the domestic and international legal frameworks of IP.551 Though it may seem to be merely literary, Harris' contribution to the Critical Race IP discourse is exquisite: In light of Harris' theory, Vats and Keller reach the conclusion that '[W]hite racial identity confers not only a bundle of property rights but also intellectual property rights.'552 This dissertation, and particularly this chapter, unfolds and substantiates this argument, with the guidance of Harris' scholarly piece.

This leads us to a discussion on how the appropriation and commodification of Black culture have served to enact white supremacy, capitalism, and patriarchy as interlocking systems of oppression. In the introduction of The Black Culture Industry, Ellis Cashmore (1997) writes the following:

Any residual menace still lurking in African American practices and pursuits has been domesticated, leaving a black culture capable of being adapted, refined, mass-produced, and marketed. Whites not only appreciate black culture: they buy it. A great many blacks have become rich on the back of it. An even greater number of whites have prospered. (p. 1)

The regulating terms of the dominant grammar of representation (re)produce black(ened) mater as always and already trapped within immanence, burdening black (maternal) female figures in particular with functioning as a signifier that points to what Sylvia Wynter (1990) terms ‘demonic ground’ or what is foreclosed from representability: the nonrepresentable beyond dividing what is sensible from what is nullified and precluded from representability. Thereby, the modern grammar of representation imposes the inhumanity it presumes[xxv].

These axiomatic circulations of representation, the unspoken grammar behind what it means to see and be able to speak “Look! A Negro,” structurally positions the Black as “the negation of the generic ‘normal humanness.”[xxvi] Or rather, from within the set of Humanity/Humanism, under the axiomatics of Man’s infinite multiplicity, the Black functions as the limit ordinal which Alain Badiou, French philosopher and set theoretician mentions, “is essentially different from that of a successor ordinal.”[xxvii] Badiou describes the limit ordinal to be “inaccessible via the operation of succession.”[xxviii] The operation of succession is important because each successor operation – understood as the basis through which something can present itself as different yet remain categorically the same from with a set – is defined by a rule of passage that sets it either within the set or outside the set. The limit ordinal comes to define the absolute boundary within the rule of passage. Thus, if the operation of succession functions according to the recognition of “still one more,” the limit ordinal functions as the “second existential seal,”[xxix] by closing the additive value of the multiple within the borders of its alterity. Thus, if mathematics is ontology and “[o]ntology—once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside—does not permit us to understand the being of the black man [and woman],”[xxx] then one should think of Blackness and Non-Blackness when Badiou writes:

If we have understood nihilism as the entrapment (and misery) of metaphysics, the reduction of Being to value circulation (axio-ontology) and Being’s forgottenness, and the neutralization of various hierarchies of existence and legitimacy (Vattimo), then Black nihilism would sug- gest that time is not a natural right or intrinsic resource. Time is a su- preme onto-metaphysical value that traffics in anti-Black violence, sub- jugation, destruction, and must also be reduced to myth, fantasy, and displaced. Rather than providing the resource for creativity and power, time is a racial privilege that embeds itself in Being and metaphysics—

Amst 66.1 (2021): 247-51 249