The original article is in Spanish, this translation to english is done by a locally hosted chatbot.
The political philosophy, within the framework of Deleuze and Guattari, defines the State as a form of sovereignty that operates through stratification: the systematic creation of layers, borders, and hierarchies [1]. Historically, the capture of the War Machine (an external, nomadic, fluid force) allowed the State to institutionalize conflict in the format of the army.
This process has undergone transformations since D&G reviewed it: the State itself is experiencing a dismemberment and deterritorialization that transforms it into a subordinate infrastructure. Business conglomerates, investment funds, and venture capital networks exert systemic influence, conditioning legislation, strategic acquisitions, and electoral processes through the deployment of financial incentives and technical pressure on national apparatuses.
Or maybe that was always the state and I have to read Mil Materas again? Maybe the state has not transformed but rather displaced, or enlarged, to also encompass these other mechanisms? Perhaps D&G have another name for what I wrote in the paragraph above.
Whatever it may be, it is more useful for me that they take that context (more than that certainty) out of the paragraph above in order to elaborate that this dismemberment, that of the state, constitutes the platform upon which the "Indiscreet War" unfolds.
The martial transcends its institutional channels to become the ontological substrate that informs the management of everyday life. War operates as a process of symbiogenesis where logistics, hierarchy, and market strategy inform all human practices.
This evolution responds to a noopolitics that, beyond biopolitical control, focuses on the colonization of memory, attention, and perception [2]. The martial constitutes a common language of the current reality: human practices coevolve with warlike foundations, integrating architectures of confrontation and logistics that orbit around battle, to technical management interfaces.
As what constitutes a resource evolves, the objective of conquest becomes stratified. While physical competition for minerals and land persists, critical abstract resources now also operate: attention, biometric data, and behavioral predictability. The concept of the State manifests in digital "states" —states of connection, mood, and opinion—. (It's a basic play on words, overlaying State as described by D&G with a Facebook status, but it helps a lot to illustrate.)
In this scenario, as analyzed by Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, the battlefield is financial and media-based [3]. Corporations dictate the conditions of legislative and technical operability, segmenting and dragging managed populations as data flows. The war on drugs, for example, operates as a territorial and chemical conflict, fought in the altered state of the subject to maintain a structure of economic control. Now, just because it is called a "war" on drugs does not mean that it is, just as not every woman named Esperanza is by default filled with hope.
Martial homogenization materializes in institutions that operate with surveillance structures under the guise of care. Following Michel Foucault, the hospital, the school, the prison, the office, etc., are related structures whose logistics of occupation are delegated to private management [4].
The body is the theater of operations. Health is a construct scaffolded in martial symbols; institutional victory consists of the faith placed in the process. The algorithm categorizes individuals according to their predisposition to surrender to symbols devoid of foundation—those that still carry the weight of historical significance—ensuring that resistance is reinvested in the data system [5]. In Foucauldian terms, resistance to this would not even be resisting treatment, or not filing lawsuits against health care providers and insurers to claim necessary treatment, or refusing antibiotics and chemotherapy... but rather contaminating the very system that dictates how medicine is practiced in this theater of operations of the human body. How is that done? Buying someone else's urine when we are asked for a urine sample for work? There are ways.
This indiscreet war is financed through its own visualization. The modern theater of operations incorporates bookmakers and resellers, turning suffering into a real-time financial risk event. Paul Virilio identifies war as a logistics of perception, where conflict is sustained as a media spectacle [6]. Tactics like "flooding the well" of disinformation control the narrative of the broadcast, where truth becomes collateral damage in the need to maintain ratings and betting promotions. Digital biometric verification and control of morality operate as weapons of occupation, where identity is the conquered territory for financial speculation. Put on the jersey. Watch the championships of all those organized sports, which are all facades of cartels and mafias.
There is no directed power project nor a captain at the helm. The institution regurgitates the land, processing resources and bodies through an operational logic that no longer requires state sovereignty to survive. After being dismembered and emptied of its mediating function, the State implodes, leaving a martial operability that no longer needs the nation to justify its existence. The nation-state operates as a sub-branch of a corporate ecosystem that self-perpetuates through a headless axiom of survival.
Sources:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Thousand_Plateaus
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maurizio_Lazzarato
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unrestricted_Warfare
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discipline_and_Punish
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Esposito
