The primary unit of international relations is the state. The state forms with the monopolization of legitimate violence in an area. The concept of legitimacy is imagined here as the Deleuzian concept of a body-without-organs. The organs form the structure of how legitimacy is used as a function. The organization of organs upon the body, I call a monad, borrowing from functional programming. Sites of mobilization, I define as separate bodies but as part of legitimacy as a body as a whole, in a more coherent sense, such as race, gender, religion, and so on.

The monad arises from sites of mobilization, such as may be created by sudden power vacuums, or a line of flight, and finds in it a potential for mobilization and subjects them to the monad. The subject in turn gives to the monad the capability to mobilize it as well as a certain subjectivity. It is the function of the organ that sets the narrative of the body’s organization, that limits either the immediate material expansion of that body or its abstract virtual expansion to an extent. There is also a degree of gravity from material flow in that organ on sites of mobilization, by which more subjects on the body are drawn to it. Note that without the flow on the body, it is free to give way to new organs and new subjectivities.

The modern state is an amalgam of interworking and self-supporting sites of mobilization, which it has chosen to engage in and abstracted out a certain shape outward to embody. It is interworking and self-supporting in the sense that it often pushes to allow for a greater degree of coherence to the capability and capacity of the body, which is how nationalism, as an organ functions. Subjectivity is borne out of these pre-existing bodies, individually and organizationally. It makes a great deal of sense then that states will engage in sites that afford them the most capability and capacity. Similarly, the states must also be careful to balance their material flow onto these sites and for the potential of subjects themselves to project a virtual abstraction of the body, a way in which it may be organized, from which a new subjectivity can arise materially.

A site of mobilization of limitless size in virtuality may push the organization to behave in a way each of its organs would not in isolation. For example, the American state, through its claim to universality has derived an immense amount of legitimacy historically, and from its historical legacies still continue to hold the material gravitational pull. But if there is to be strategic solvency in American material flow commitments there must also be a solvency in which sites the state chooses to engage in where legitimacy exists as a body. Past American failures in the Middle East can be characterized by huge lines of flight, such as an invasion disrupting the pre-existing order of legitimacy conferral, without an accompanying organ to organize the now-open spaces of legitimacy, at the same time using weak sites of mobilization on miniscule parts of the open body, such as that of women’s autonomy, allowing for a rhizomatic rise of monads on the now open-spaces on the body. In the case of ISIS, as a monadic group, it is a subjectivity formed out of pre-existing sites of mobilization in revolutionary Salafism, but more broadly, as a current against the projected universality of the Western subjectivity embodied in that of the nation-state on the body. It is a subjectivity formed more out of negation of an organ than an affirmation.

Universality is too broad a space on the body for any one set of organs to occupy, and in its negation of its organs, the entire subject comes under threat. The U.S. state in its belligerency may not lead to its own collapse on the body, as attacks on its organs might, but also threaten the international system, back to a rhizomatic form, if its negation succeeds.

Last modified on 2024-04-10