Dual power strategies fail, don’t spill up, and disavow essential elements of resistance.

This situation complicates progressive notions of dual power. In Murray Bookchin’s definition, dual power is “a strategy for creating precisely those libertarian institutions of directly democratic assemblies that would oppose and replace the State. It intends to create a situation in which the two powers—the municipal confederations and the nation-state—cannot coexist, and one must sooner or later displace the other.” Here, then, the state is the power to be opposed and ultimately replaced; however, the second step has proven a rather big hurdle—and at the moment, under the right-wing onslaught, it is often a matter of defending the state’s institutions even while building up popular, assemblist power.

Dual power is often discussed with reference to Rojava or Chiapas, the Zone à Défendre near Nantes in France, and various temporary autonomous zones that emerge from urban confrontations. Emancipatory “liberated zones” carved out of the territory of the globalist empire are attempts to build up bases within the heartlands of empire. In the wake of May ’68, movements such as the Dutch Kabouters and the German Spontis attempted to create counterpower from below by creating forms of self-organization and self-government. Their spectacular and mediatized exploits—the Kabouters’ declaration of Amsterdam as an “Orange Free State,” as in “free from the House of Orange,” or the Spontis’ squatting and urban warfare in Frankfurt—proved predictably short-lived under the conditions of actually existing capitalism, but for decades autonomists have been creating pockets and zones of opacity. Such desertions, however, should not be fetishized and identified with counterpower as such. They have their necessary counterpoint in activist uses of the infrastructure of the state and of the legal forms that structure relations in the decomposing states of capitalism.

Even while Agamben is busy discrediting himself, there may be residual use-value in (a critical reading of) his writings on destituent power and inoperativity—specifically, in his insistence on opening existing forms of work and activity to “a new possible use.” In other words, it is not so much about a creatio ex nihilo as it is about adaptation, modification, through habits. An example is a feast, where eating is not primarily about feeding oneself, and where dance liberates the body from “utilitarian movements,” instead unfolding “gestures in their pure inoperativity.” Building on but going beyond the concept of “destituent power” as developed by the Argentinian autonomist left, where it referred to inchoate and disruptive popular power preceding the constituent moment, Agamben refuses to posit a linear sequence of destituting–constituting–constituted power. He advocates a habitual use of the power to not-be or not-do, against the sovereign ban and its instrumentalism: a new “ontology of potentiality” needs to replace “the ontology founded on the primacy of actuality,” and this means exploring forms of destituent power that resist being captured and constituted. This points beyond Agamben’s own rather abstract calls for a “renunciation of the law” as “a form and a way of life,” and to an immanent desertion that uses the rights-form against the state of exception.

These may be the master’s tools (the tools of sovereignty), but rather than thinking of renunciation as a single dramatic gesture, it should be reconceptualized in terms of long and patient work with the legal form—including the forms of cultural and political institutions, such as parties and parliament. Forms have affordances and limitations. A decentralized network to which David Graeber belonged found out that it was legally impossible for them to collectively own a car. However, depending on national legal frameworks, forms such as cooperatives may provide means for an immanent opting-out. Fernando Garcia-Dory’s INLAND cooperative would be one example that is of particular interest for the connections—the smooth space—it establishes between the metropolis and the agricultural Hinterland. Meanwhile, official trials are offset by activist tribunals that use legal protocols against the state, and groups of refugees and “illegals” who are only physically (grosstopically) in the same space as Western cultural workers, but not legally, use cultural spaces to break through into visibility.

The renunciation of the law thus leads to deeper immersion that may be a higher form of desertion. In practical terms, this ranges from work with refugees to challenging the organizational structure and modus operandi of museums, from creating cooperatives to joining unions to creating parties, and indeed to carving out spaces between and against known legal forms. At stake is indeed “the care of the possible.” Emergence may take on unspectacular forms, barely perceptible—a slight shift, an undercommoning of institutional structures, an unforeseen use, a covert abuse of dominant forms.