Specula 1: "The Plague is America"
An introduction to postamerican.ist
This document is a specula: a shout down from a lookout high on a watchtower, a looking glass that can cast our gaze far over the horizon or back onto ourselves in excruciating detail, a reason for hope–however slight.
specula, speculae
A. “Watchtower, lookout” from speciō. Cf. scopulus, through Ancient Greek, from the same root.
B. “Mirror, looking glass,” derived from the plural of speculum.
C. “A slight hope” from the diminutive form of spēs: spēs + -culus.
« أمريكا هي الطاعون والطاعون أمريكا »
– Mahmoud Darwish, ‘In Praise of the High Shadow’
Imperialism leverages speculation like no other force in human history.
Its numerous departments of state and boards of directors—and their attendant priests and economists, literateurs and scientists—have invested countless resources in worldbuilding seminars. What it sketches out first on paper—in novels and resolutions, screenplays and procedures—it etches into the surface of the planet with hecatombs and logistics hubs, gardens and deserts.
It workshops its ideas through mass ritual, publishes its manifestos through mass graves.
A Great Satan.
A phoenix.
A cyclone.
A gladiator rampaging through the jungles of Cambodia and El Salvador and the streets of Fallujah and Khan Younis.
The capitalist epoch: this convulsive, compulsive crescendo of class struggle, this “extreme promontory of centuries,” with it’s “eternal, omnipresent speed”1 has gobbled up the future and the past both.
From the 16th century, the great arteries of the Mississippi, the Amazon, the Congo, and the Ganges were sliced open and the vastness of the tricontinental interior was drained of its blood, embalmed and repackaged in the image of capital.
This enclosure foreclosed the possible futures and possible histories of hundreds of millions of human beings.
This is a process not simply of accumulation by dispossession, but an ontological attack on our collective relationship to history and progress, time itself.
The crusaders, conquistadors, and settlers, those cowboys, rangers, and rogues, saw themselves not as the horsemen of the apocalypse they truly were, but through the lens of chivalric romance and utopian fantasm.
It is a gnostic dream: to inherit and reshape a fallen world—lands without peoples—in one’s own image with nothing more than individual will.
Terra Nullius, Mare Tranquillitatis, or Valles Marineris awaiting terraformation, a New Atlantis in the image of those with the messianic power to both imagine it and build it.
To commodify something—land, labor, culture, peoples—is to make it speculatable, fungible.
To reduce space and time, matter and energy, into value and potential value, to quantize and predict all requires imposing on the world a network of lines interlaced.
The Jeffersonian grid.
The Starlink constellations.
The deep sea cables and pipelines and container ships.
It is a nightmare of a world system, a cybernetic zombie shuffling through an eternal present of apocalypse and holocaust.
As of writing, Tufan al-Aqsa has shattered that decadent antediluvian delusion of the end of history.
The struggle of the Palestinian people for national liberation has revealed the contours of global class struggle and world war in the 21st century. The fate of Palestine is the fate of the world’s working and oppressed peoples.
Palestine is also significant in that there is perhaps no better example of the weaponization of speculation for class war than Zionism.
“If you will it,” Herzl wrote in his 1902 novel ALTNEULAND, “this shall not be a legend.”2
The entity was prefigured through literature and revisionist theology, and is in large part maintained by this grand ontological operation that projects its fantasy map onto the world, deploying as many U.S.-made bombs, New York Times bestsellers, Hollywood blockbusters, and congressional hearings as necessary to preserve its fictive overlay.
“Israel’s media campaign is not a mere passing raid;” writes Ghassan Kanafani, “This is a conquest upon well trodden terrain, striking deep into the consciousness of an audience that has long been deceived.”3
Even as we witness this project breaking apart as the material base for its supremacy is eroded, it is undeniable that the overall “success” of the Zionist ontological operation is staggering. It is not, however, historically unique. Zionism is an articulation of Americanism.
“I have never felt safe,” writes poet Mohammed el-Kurd:
“not in Santa Monica, the American Tel Aviv;
not in New York, the American Tel Aviv;
not in Tel Aviv, the American Tel Aviv.”4
It is a cultural hangover that will remain with us long after the dissolution of these temporary entities.
A feedback loop has emerged as the conquest of the Americas transmuted into the conquest of the world and beyond.
The enduring hegemony of Americanism is in its culture, in its ways of imagining the future and the past, which have saturated every crack in every society it can reach.
This is the danger for us who find ourselves in struggle in this long epoch of counterrevolution. It is clear in the third decade of the 21st century that Fukayama’s fantasm has buckled under its own weight, but what will replace it must be contested.
The specter of an aborted past (and latent future) is haunting the present, a present which grasps with increasing desperation to draw some solidity from the turbulent flows of fog.
Postamerican.ist is an autopsy of this moment as much as it is a call to imagine a way out.
Marinetti, Filipo Tomaso; Manifesto del Futurismo, 1909.
Herzl, Theodor; Altneuland, 1902.
Kanafani, Ghassan; On Zionist Literature, 1967.
El-Kurd, Mohammad; Anti-Biography, 2022.