October 1996 Archives

The Holy Shroud, faciality and the scene of configuration

Benjamin Hoh, 1996

It doesn't have a nose, eyes and a mouth.
It's something else...
-- Frank Black, on surf music

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I first read Ian Wilson's The Turin Shroud (1978) as a child, when popular interest in Catholicism's greatest icon was running high. But besides evoking awe, this event also planted the seeds of a terrible fear in me. Wilson's book reproduces a faded painting of Christ, found in an old stronghold of the Knights Templar, that bears an uncanny resemblance to the Shroud: it is a bearded face with a calm, owlish stare. For some reason I found this portrait radically menacing. Even now, I can only look at it for moments at a time, and for years I have been haunted by the face of Jesus, hovering in the darkness outside my window. It still follows me as I write this essay, sometimes reducing me to a huddled mess. I thus feel a genuine sympathy for one Templar, Raoul de Gizy, whose testimony adorns Wilson's argument that the mysterious "head" that the Templars allegedly idolised was actually the Shroud:

INQUISITOR: What was its face like?

BROTHER RAOUL: Terrible. It seemed to me that it was the face of a demon, of a maufé [evil spirit]. Every time I saw it I was filled with such terror I could scarcely look at it, trembling in all my members.
(Wilson 1978: 203)

Wilson suggests that de Gizy's response could very well have been "hysteria" in the presence of a forbiddingly miraculous likeness of Christ. This possibility appeals to me. But such terror, like my own, and with its excesses keyed so particularly to a certain visual configuration, cannot be simply attributed to a simply submissive, monolithic or reactionary "fear of God". (The autonomous pleasures of S&M and horror movies are distilled proofs of this unassimilability into emotional literalism.) Instead, the traumatic moment of recognition might lead us ambivalently to a scene: the space and time in which the figure and ground of a system of meaning are still unfolding.

This essay is not, therefore, about the primal birth of the image, but instead approaches the continued situation of fundamental dilemmas. It sees how the Shroud can point to a negotiation of the politics of "form" through the schema of the face, or what Deleuze and Guattari call the "abstract machine of faciality" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 168).

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The Shroud of Turin is a piece of linen, 4.3 metres long and 1.1 metres wide, which bears the frontal and dorsal images of a man who has all the markings of Christ's Passion: the flogging, the crucifixion, the crown of thorns, the pierced side. Since its earliest recorded appearance in the mid-14th Century, it has been revered as the burial linen of Christ, and a physical representation and trace, not made by human hands, of God Himself.

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It is unquestionable that the face of the Leader is heavily imbricated in power; the Leader's face is the dominant medium of public expression, appearing everywhere: on posters, on television, in magazines and newspapers, and especially on coins. As John of the Apocalypse knew, nobody will buy or sell without the mark of the Beast, but this is merely a literalisation of the framing of transactions that occur in the economy of signs, or the general economy of flows. As Marie-José Baudinet notes, this applies especially to the image of Christ, the divine leader:

Economy, that is oikonomia, in Greek reads as ikonomia. To the Byzantine ear... the law of the icon and the law concerning the administration of goods are one and the same thing. In either case, the supreme administrator, the great economist, is God the Father who gave His essence in order that it be distributed in the visible world through His own image -- the natural image of His Son. (Baudinet 1989: 149)

How are we to handle the ikonomia of the Shroud, the ultimate icon? Basically, we must not mimic the prominence of the face on the Shroud by mistaking the (mystifying) anatomy of the face for its wider (economic) morphology. Against such literalisations, Deleuze and Guattari warn against attributing the origin of social power to the face itself: "Certain assemblages of power require the production of a face, others do not" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 175). They cite the Shroud as an archetypal product of faciality (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 167), a particular conjunction of semiotic configurations:

The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. ... Jesus Christ Superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function of biunivocalization, or binarization. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 176)

If the gaze pre-exists the eye, and if the phallus does not equal the penis, what makes the face the totalising locus of expression that we always look to? Deleuze and Guattari propose that the Christ-phenomenon was the point at which a fully integrated faciality emerged, leading them to title their discussion "Year Zero: Faciality" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 167-191).

This is an angular kind of analysis that some would call promiscuous... Deleuze and Guattari obliquely trace the multidimensional effects of flows and blockages within a general semiotic "geology", undercutting reifying analyses of the ideologies of "form" or "content". ...Or perhaps it engages with the volatile qualities of real semiotic effects.

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In the Shroud phenomenon we can discern the facial configuration of a whole apparatus of expression. The appearance of the Shroud-face undoubtedly features in this, but the "content" of such a fascination belies its broader faciality. For example, Ian Wilson attempts to give the Shroud an art-historical consistency that stretches back two thousand years, on the idea that the "universally known" face of Jesus -- the long hair, forked beard and owlish eyes -- has been derived from the Shroud's face (Wilson 1978: 112-119). Evading the easy explanation of 14th Century forgery, Wilson attributes the appearances of Shroud-like portraits of Jesus, in specific places and times, to the slow journey of the Shroud from Palestine to Europe, and vice versa. The sudden appearance of Shroud-like Christs in 10th Century Constantinople, congruent with the arrival of the Mandylion icon, suggests to Wilson that the Mandylion was the Shroud, which therefore influenced Byzantine religious art, which therefore means that the Shroud is not a 14th Century fake... The specificities serve a universal purpose: the history of Christian art is configured as a coherent presence of atemporal expression that is somehow affirmed by the deviances that occur in its absence. The Shroud therefore becomes, metaphorically and literally, the "face" of Christian art.

But the specificities of the Shroud's face do have telling affinities with the Byzantine mosaic portraits of Christ: the staring face seen startlingly flat from the front, without any kind of ambience. This points to the common function of the faces of the Shroud and the Byzantine code: they are both maps of the territory captured by the eyes of the despot (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 183-5). There is no slippage, only a centralisation. A sidelong glance would have introduced a line of flight.

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In 1898, the first photograph of the Shroud revolutionised the icon's fortunes. It was found that the Shroud's photographic negative does not resemble a mere imprint of a body, but has a sensitivity of shade and depth that resembles a photograph of a body; the face takes on a particular clarity and "presence". This creates a miraculous sense of immediacy: "[the photographer] found himself thinking that he was the first man for nearly 1,900 years to gaze on the actual appearance of the body of Christ..." (Wilson 1978: 33). Because of this phenomenon, the Shroud's natural image is claimed to be a photographic negative.

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The Byzantine reterritorialisation continues. In the last quarter of the 20th Century, this often involves our co-option into the technoscientific vision of the military industrial complex, culminating in our complicities as players of Desert Storm's Nintendo war on CNN in early 1991. And in the wake of the technological breakthrough of the vision of 1898, Shroud studies have tuned in nicely. In a recent television programme, a Catholic priest asserted that it was unfortunate that there was no video surveillance of Christ's tomb at the moment of Resurrection. "If there had been a video camera, we would have seen something." But all is not lost: "the Shroud is our videocamera". In 1976, John Jackson and Eric Jumper, both Captains in the US Air Force, used NASA image-enhancement computers -- some developed for the analysis of the Viking mission's photographs of Mars -- to show that there is a remarkable correlation between (a) the projected distance, from the cloth, of the relief of the presumed body, and (b) the relative intensity of the image (Wilson 1978: 259-261). Jackson and Jumper therefore extrapolated a three-dimensional model of Christ's body from the Shroud's image, which was concluded to be a sort of holographic projection of the Resurrection.

This is an almost archetypal example of how the obsessive mappings of crackpot/conspiracy theories must use a certain amount of scientifistic reason in order to fetishise the facts and establish the taste for totality that are both necessary for spreading circular networks of proof across the globe. Conspiracy produces a reified World, recoding the Earth in spite of its deterritoriaising capacities. Indeed, Jackson and Jumper's method has been revealed to be circular, since it involves the iterative modification of data, with the model of the probable body as an attractor (Picknett & Prince 1994: 143-144). Jackson and Jumper look to, and reproduce, a facialised Body. But it is not simply that paranoid, loopy fools appropriate (and dilute) a dose of monolithic "Reason" during their stay in the military; the very technoscientific existence of the military is a co-option of the war machine's "loopy" and "metallurgical" syntheses by the State's apparatus of capture (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 424-473). Everybody knows that all the cool stuff, like VR and the Internet, still comes from the military. The scopic fascinations of conspiracy theory, like fascism, therefore signal the crazy and pathologised return of the military's repressed (and damaged) war machine: witness the mania of Colonel Ardenti, the fascist treasure-hunter in Foucault's Pendulum (Eco 1989). All sensory apparatuses are unleashed ("scan for life-forms, Mr Data!"), spinning out of control in the search for Form.[1]

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As evidenced by his notes on fascism in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1970), Walter Benjamin was well acquainted with the macropolitical meanings of the militarist co-option and re-auratising of visual technologies of perception and reproduction:

In big parades and monster rallies, in mass sporting events and in war, all of which today are brought before the cameras, the mass looks itself in the face. (Benjamin 1970)

The links between envisioning the form of Christ and invoking the governing of the body politic are not particularly farfetched. Jacques Le Goff makes it quite clear that with the abandonment of the ancient Greek appreciation of the liver as a mediating nexus, Medieval Europe took a very particular step into nested hierarchies of the (political) body, in which the body of Jesus was the head of the body of the church, which was the head of the body of the people (Le Goff 1989). Of course, that particular relation of the head to the body involves the nested facialization of both, which leads to all the subsequent nestings (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 170). So to be a Christian is join the body of Christ, but as an obedient part, just as to be a citizen is to be a "participating" but sensibly governed subject -- a passive cell in the body politic. Such is "responsibility".

The macropolitical applications of this faciality were laid bare, in almost literal terms, by the 1978 Exposition of the Shroud, the largest in forty-five years. The Exposition, which led to the huge public profile of the Shroud in the late 1970s, was initiated by the new Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Ballestrero, who had, according to Wilson, inherited "Turin's considerable domestic troubles, among them a huge unwanted immigration into the city of Italians from the South; a Communist civic administration; and terrorism from the Red Brigade" (Wilson 1978: 266). The successful display of the Shroud to over three million people in forty-two days (Wilson 1978: 268), despite such problems, was achieved in terms so overcoded that is it is useful to quote Wilson in full:

For full-scale exposition of the Shroud, Turin needed to be made ready for visitors, streets and public buildings cleaned, signposting erected and special crowd-control barriers prepared. On the Cathedral steps special gantries needed to be built, and inside the Cathedral a special posse of security men needed to be on guard day and night to avoid the Shroud becoming yet another Red Brigade object of ransom. Ballestrero sought help for these requirements from the unlikeliest source, Turin's Communist administration. He succeeded to a greater degree than anyone could have believed, the Communist mayor agreeing to give Turin a total facelift for the exposition, embracing Ballestrero's requirements, and costing in the region of a million pounds. (Wilson 1978: 266, italics added)

Here, with help from Eurocommunism's Statist sympathies, the Shroud occupies the opposite position that was given to Richard Serra's Tilted Arc by the same kind of regulatory apparatus. As Douglas Crimp describes, Tilted Arc -- a huge, wall-like sculpture that spanned New York's Federal Plaza -- was eventually destroyed for obstructing the smooth functioning of State surveillance power within public space, and for conversely being a potential instrument of terrorist attack (Crimp 1993).[2] Conversely, the Shroud's appearance, as the face of politico-religious power, is a terrorist target, and prompts the remaking of the city within its parameters.[3]

Architecture positions its ensembles -- houses, towns or cities, monuments or factories -- to function like faces in the landscape they transform. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172)

The facial configuration of urban space by the State are also made explicit in Deleuzoguattarian terms by Sandra Buckley, for whom "the face of contemporary Japan" is approached as the maintenance of public flows and the pathologisation of shifting autonomous zones of deviant urban sexuality (Buckley 1996).

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It's not a complete tragedy. Faciality is always an intersection of different semiotic axes, and there is thus no way of positing it as a monolithic Source of All Evil. I have already hinted at uncertainty; I am presenting its troubled scene, which may contain resistance. This brings up a crucial interpretive question for cultural studies: is the identification of resistances within majoritarian culture merely a substitution of revolutionary politics with the satisfactions of consumption? Not if we ensure that resistance never replaces revolution. Perhaps it has for most critics, leading to the commodification of virtuality. But embracing the historical materialist imperative to identify the prerequisites of revolution without moralist idealism, one can take a "scientific" approach to culture, and hence identify qualitative differences in semiotic forces that not yet even be ideologically differentiable. This is Deleuze and Guattari's mission: to outline philosophy as a physics of non-anthropomorphic relationality, of post-human sociality. It is not moral. They recognise that the breadth of Christian representation is able to shift Christ's faciality in bizarre directions (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 189), and they repeat the concerns of Anglo-American cultural studies by emphasising the black American experience of translating facialising languages into countersignifying semiotic systems (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 137).

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Against the masculinist totalisation implied in the body of the despot and its body politic, the body is precisely the site of contention and resistance in much contemporary feminist theory -- not as an oppositional essentialism or a subservient surrender to binarism, but as a radical negotiation of situated embodiment. If women are gendered as the Body that requires suppression, we must ask the obvious question: do the unregulable excesses of corporeality, strategically useful in the face of gendering, appear in the midst of the Shroud's overcodings? We must ironically return to the formal specificities of the Shroud as it appears to the "naked eye": it is the faint image, almost a mirage, of a pierced, tortured corpse, with blood trickling down its arms, across its brow, through its hair, from the hole in its chest. Given the endless black and white photographic reproductions of the negative image, the affective qualities of the positive colour image are often forgotten.

Look close into the relative imperceptibility of the image, and there is the rising heat of dripping horror. Besides the bloodstains, the image on the cloth has been proved to lack any pigment (Picknett & Prince 1994); instead, it has the properties of a scorch. The cloth hints at the characteristics of David Fincher's film Seven (1995), which injects film noir with dirty yellow light, nails, blood and fire, or Fredric Jameson's description of Days of the Eclipse: "We are in a yellow dusty world, the very camera's light is a faded, jaundiced orange so that its subjects look sick and feeble..." (Jameson 1992: 94). Besides the Byzantine surety, this too is the body of Christ on the Shroud. It is not without reason that Deleuze and Guattari note that "the body of the tortured is fundamentally one who loses his or her face" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 116). Escaping the terrestrial territoriality of Byzantine signifiance, "passional" faciality begins a line of flight (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 184) through pain and fear. Masochism and horror movies, anyone? Unassimilable.

Indeed, there is much evidence that in the middle of Medieval piety regarding the body of Christ, the multidimensional, polyvocal corporeality of the body cannot be fully assimilated into the univocal, facialised body of the despot. For example, note the approaches of Caroline Walker Bynum (1989) and Jennifer Ash (1990) to Medieval religious women's startling bodily excesses. Women mystics observed the most hideous tortures to join with the bleeding body of Christ -- a feminised object of adoration and identification that arrives as a sign of pre-ideological, strategic negotiation of the sex/gender system. Walker Bynum and Ash assert that there is substantial, expressive resistance and autonomy in the middle of the most reactionary Medieval dualisms and misogynies.

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In 1988, a carbon-14 dating of the Shroud found the cloth to date from the 14th Century. But regardless of this, fascination with the Shroud has not ceased. Neither have the objections of believers.

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In Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled (1994), Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince conclude that the Shroud is indeed a photograph, and that is a self-portrait by Leonardo da Vinci. While their proposed method of image-formation is the most plausible and interesting yet offered, Picknett and Prince's truly loopy conspiracy theories are more interesting in this context. After showing that the face of the Shroud is incompatible with the image of the body, they argue that Leonardo replaced the face of the original model with his own, in order to deliberately rupture the facialising configuration of Christian representation. For Leonardo was a Johannite, a believer in the Messianic primacy of John the Baptist (Picknett & Prince 1994: 178), and the sign of John the Baptist, who achieved martyrdom via beheading, is the figure of the headless man. Rather than indicating the facialising separation of the head from the polyvocal body, the curious space that Picknett and Prince notice between the Shroud's head and body is a symbolic decapitation.[4] Leonardo created a travesty. In a way, it also implies an unravelled calligram: the self-evident image of the body of Jesus, and the face that wryly announces "I am... not who I am". The faulty locus of expression, the facial failure, causes the declarations of the despot to fizzle out. In the gap of the severed neck is the unconscious that cannot be contained by the Ur-consciousness of Christendom.

In terms of the body politic, Picknett and Prince's intentionally subversive invocation of the headless man must inevitably recall Georges Bataille's journal Acephale, which also celebrated the headless, polyvocal body, which Bataille figured as "the sign of radical anti-statism". Bataille knew that one can ever totally repress the mutilating nature of signification, and that the sacrificial urge of the universe can only be captured and codified for so long by religion. This is what eludes Stewart Guthrie's meditation on the phenomenon of the face in religion (Guthrie 1993); Guthrie recognises a perceptual strategy behind the appearance of the face, but merely refacialises it, attributing religion to anthropomorphism, leaving the category of "human" uninterrogated, and erasing the possibility of any excess. Everything becomes mundane: resistance is futile -- you will be assimilated.

Regardless of whether Picknett and Prince are correct about the Shroud being a photograph, their literalising invocation of the Shroud's already-photographic discourse provides the perfect space in which we can locate the jittery, incomplete scene of faciality and its politics. Their major recoding, despite their subversive, anti-statist fantasies, is to excessively celebrate the first-ever photograph as a master work, a self-portrait by the great genius, Leonardo.

[C]ult value does not give way without resistance. It retires into an ultimate retrenchment: the human countenance. It is not an accident that the portrait was the focal point of early photography. The cult of remembrance of loved ones, absent or dead, offers a last refuge for the cult value of the picture. (Benjamin 1970: 227-228, emphasis added)

In a recent television interview, Lynn Picknett has asserted that "the Shroud is a masterpiece, a ‘Leonardo'; people have been praying over it for five hundred years when they should have been appreciating it in a gallery". This insistent re-auratisation dramatises the action of faciality within the general arena of corporeal semiotic configuration, unfolding despite the ambivalence at its core.

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What is to be done? While the Shroud fades into insignificance as a single work or a literal sign, the facialisation of the planet -- in the formal terms of the West, of Man, of Capital -- continues in crisis, but unabated. Here we are, as motes in God's eye. We must link with revolutionary statements of ambivalence, hope and strategy within the scene, the dilemma, the belly of the monster, the location of culture, and learn. The Manifesto of the Communist Party. A Manifesto for Cyborgs. Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. But it must not stop at "philosophy".

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ASH, Jennifer (1990) "The discursive construction of Christ's body in the later Middle Ages: resistance and autonomy", in Terry Threadgold & Anne Cranny-Francis (eds), Feminine/Masculine and Representation, Sydney: Allen & Unwin

BAIGENT, Michael, Richard Leigh & Henry Lincoln (1982) The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail, London: Corgi

BAUDINET, Marie-Jos&233; (1989) "The Face of Christ, The Form of the Church", in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Volume 1), New York: Zone Books

BENJAMIN, Walter (1970) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn), London: Fontana

BUCKLEY, Sandra (1996) "Contagion", in Cynthia Davidson (ed), Anywise, Cambridge: MIT Press

CRIMP, Douglas (1993) "Redefining Site Specificity", On the Museum's Ruins, Cambridge: MIT Press

DELEUZE, Gilles & Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

ECO, Umberto (1989) Foucault's Pendulum, London: Picador

GUTHRIE, Stewart (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press

JAMESON, Fredric (1992) The Geopolitical Aesthetic: Cinema and Space in the World System, Bloomington: Indiana University Press

KRAUSS, Rosalind (1993) The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge: MIT Press

LE GOFF, Jacques (1989) "Political Uses of the Image of the Body in the Middle Ages", in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 5: Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Volume 3), New York: Zone Books

PICKNETT, Lynn & Clive Prince (1994) Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled, London: Bloomsbury

WALKER BYNUM, Caroline (1989) "The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Late Middle Ages", in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body (Volume 1), New York: Zone Books

WILSON, Ian (1978) The Turin Shroud, London: Penguin

[1] On the necessity to be strategically phallogocentric:since one of Jackson and Jumper's NASA computers was originally designed to analyse the surface of Mars, it is quite appropriate that the Viking photographs eventually revealed what appears to be a huge, sphinx-like face on the surface of Mars, staring upwards towards us like a Byzantine portrait. There now exists the fascinating phenomenon of amateur investigators using commercial photo-manipulation programs like Adobe Photoshop to "enhance" low-resolution JPEG images of the Face obtained via the Internet -- images that are compressed using algorithms that cause data loss, and which are usually scanned from printed reproductions with equipment whose results, as most electronic publishers unfortunately know, usually require significant, gamma corrections and recalibrations that apply to a singular combinations of equipment. Earnestly reinvoking the set of practices that erased Trotsky and exulted the Stalinist despot-body, these investigators apply pretty Gaussian blurs and posterisations in order to determine the diameter of the Face's iris, or the width of its teeth. (The "teeth" were eventually found to be enlarged, exaggerated pixels of the low resolution image, which appeared after the application of tilting and resolution-enhancing functions.) Like fascism, which mobilises a suicidal war machine, of this wildness only leads towards more totalisation.

Perhaps more alarmingly, it must also be noted that Jackson and Jumper's famous "3D relief" images were obtained using "an ordinary three-by-five-inch transparency of the Shroud" (Wilson 1978: 259), as if the low quality of the sample material could increase the validity of the findings. The trouble doesn't stop: to theatricalise their (otherwise sound) debunking of Jackson and Jumper, Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince use Aldus Photostyler and a public domain ray-tracing package to "analyse" a 300 dpi flat-bed scan of an ordinary photograph (Picknett & Prince 1994: 141) -- a data source that is much worse than Jackson and Jumper's and which is unacceptable even for the naked eye of standard technical publishing.

[2] When explosions in Federal buildings do happen, it is notably without the aid of modernist sculpture. But the State, on the other hand, can always be relied upon to play its part; in Oklahoma, FBI investigations immediately turned to the nearest deviants from the great American facial structure: the local Arabic community.

[3] Baudinet notes that canny iconoclastic governmentalists were cynically keyed into the relationship: "Traditionally, the iconoclasts were known to be as iconocratic as the iconophiles. For them, it was never a question of abolishing all images and governing without them. They were content to ban the representation of Christ's face and the Virgin's and to replace them with their own" (Baudinet 1989: 149).

[4] It gets weirder: Leonardo's Johannism is apparently a function of his Grand Mastership of the now infamous Priory of Sion. According to The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (Baigent, Leigh & Lincoln 1982), the Priory of Sion formed the Knights Templar, whose last Grand Master, Jacques de Molay, was burnt at the stake by the King Philip the Fair of France in 1314. Legend has it that when King Louis XVI of France was beheaded during the Revolution, an unknown man climbed on the block and shouted, "Jacques de Molay, you are avenged!".

Politics at the arrival of the figure

Benjamin Hoh, 1996

This essay was prompted by the differences that one can find in radical approaches to the politics of "form". Take the Baroque. In Against Literature (1993), Marxist literary critic John Beverly approaches aesthetics with a resolutely concrete "sociohistorical" hermeneutic, identifying the indulgent complexity of Baroque form as a mystifying incarnation of imperialist ideology. Against this one can contrast other Marxist theorists such as Deleuze and Benjamin, who find the Baroque to be politically useful. For Deleuze (1993), Baroque forms can stimulate a non-anthropomorphic engagement with materiality, while Benjamin notes that Baroque artifice can usefully corrupt the purity of the symbol (Eagleton 1981). At this abstract level of conceptuality, form does not become "primal", but is still eminently political and historical; we must thus forge critical practices that can approach the particularity of its happening, and its social fallout.

It is to such an end that this essay proposes an investigation into the politics of the face. What conditions lead to its formation or perception? How (far) does it extend, and what are its crises? The face provides an excellent example of the political particularities of the "fundamental" arrival of figure as a recognisable form. But what possible social fallout can this (seemingly very abstract) level of enquiry uncover? More than first appearances: in "The Unraveling of Form" (1996), Samuel Weber interrogates Kant's approach to form as the Gestalt that requires an outline -- an Abriß -- for its demarcation and recognition as a figure, but which is always haunted by its unavoidable unravelling. For Weber, this "microscopic" definition of "figure", and its enterprise of maintaining autonomous aesthetic forms, leaves a very immediate trace:

Since the notion of the modern academic "discipline" in general and in particular those disciplines that are traditionally concerned with questions of aesthetic form (literary and film studies, art history, etc.) owe much of their institutional legitimacy to the post-Kantian notion of a relatively autonomous "field" of enquiry, much more is at stake in this problem of form than merely "theoretical" or "aesthetic" questions. The structure and status of modern disciplines, as well as the cognitive model depends, are and remain neo-Kantian... This explains, at least in part, the passions and sense of urgency generated by recent debates on what would seem to be relatively recondite and local problems of what is called "critical theory". What is at stake is also, and not least of all, the future of the university. Large questions frame the question of the "frame". (Weber 1996: 24)

Indeed. And rather than evoking an undifferentiating, "postmodernist" (and basically ultra-leftist and/or crypto-liberal) fear of anything substantial, this critique should provoke questions of quality: just how do we figure the world, and how do we negotiate institutionality? Engagement is always preferable to disavowal.

Studying the very phenomenon of form also approaches disciplinarity from another angle, since it operates on the ground that much of the contemporary, "progressive" humanities has unwittingly ceded to (or dismissed as) "formalism", and alludes to a field that is implicitly disavowed in the discourse of the humanities: "popular science". With its technical expositions and grand syntheses written for the lay reader, popular science extends from the "hard" sciences to fields such as psychology, information theory, sociology and, increasingly, religious theory or theology. In the past twenty years, this vague "genre" has been remarkably "postmodernised" in ways that are perhaps more successful than the (still rather provincial) efforts of cultural studies, since its interdisciplinary syntheses are more accessible and "immediately" materialist than those of the rarified and textualist humanities. Indeed, recent works that draw on quantum physics, chaos theory and cognitive science all evince a firm fascination with the concrete social consequences of form's "abstract" arrival.

Of course, this is hardly a counter-valorisation, since it must lead to a consideration of further problems: without any questioning of the wider metaphysics of presence and representation, pop science's contemporary celebration of "post-Cartesianism" often leads to the positing of an uncritical, symbolistic holism in the place of mechanism, and thus some hairy political problems that compromise the whole affair.[1] This space must therefore be negotiated carefully. So if we are to look at the face as a "fundamental" form, pulling the rug out from under art history and displacing the ground of its neo-Kantian figurings, we must gingerly move towards the uncertain battleground of pop psychology...

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Naïveté. 1. When I was a small child, I thought that my fingernails looked like little faces. Although they had no facial features as such, their different shapes, repeated in a row of fingertips, suggested a kind of expressiveness that seemed "human". 2. Quite recently, I noticed something that I had always taken for granted: in Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader has a mechanical face that cannot change expression. And yet when his son Luke appeals to "that last vestige of humanity" within him, the camera lingers on his mask in closeup, and you can almost see the torn confusion in his face. The exaggerated act of looking to a face that lacks expressive features reveals that facial features are mere players in a wider field of expression that is nonetheless facially oriented.

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In A Thousand Plateaus (1987), Deleuze and Guattari describe the semiotic schema of the face, or what they call the "abstract machine of faciality" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 168). For a face to be significant as a face, its meaning must be produced.

The face is not a universal. It is not even that of the white man; it is White Man himself, with his broad white cheeks and the black hole of his eyes. The face is Christ. ... Jesus Christ Superstar: he invented the facialization of the entire body and spread it everywhere (the Passion of Joan of Arc, in close-up). Thus the face is by nature an entirely specific idea, which did not preclude its acquiring and exercising the most general of functions: the function of biunivocalization, or binarization. (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 176)

Faciality is a semiotic morphology, and cannot be limited to a literal anatomy. It is a configurative system that is specific, but which may or may not be literalised. Heads, bodies and continents can be facialised. Perhaps the best analogy would involve the vocabulary of psychoanalysis: the Lacanian "gaze" pre-exists the eye, since it structures the relations that "vision" works within; similarly, faciality "precedes" the face. Faciality is like the phallus, which is a coding mechanism that is connected to the penis, but which does not equal it; faces are "obviously" facial in the way that penises are "obviously" phallic. Morphology. Coding. Deleuze and Guattari warn against mystically attributing power itself to "concrete" faces, since they are products of a particular coding system that can be differentiated from others (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 175). No absolutes.

The crucial thing to remember is that the facial morphology has a historicity and a political particularity, in contrast to the tendency for psychoanalysis to create deterministic and ahistorical categories whose political import cannot be interrogated. Faciality is the real operation that makes the face a binaristic, gendering and racialising locus of expression that we always look to, and the literalisation of the template against which all differences are categorised. It would thus have a tangential kind of historicity, although Deleuze and Guattari propose that Christ was a well-known point at which a fully integrated faciality first seemed to emerge, leading them to title their discussion "Year Zero: Faciality" (Deleuze and Guattari 1987: 167-191). It is not magical: it arrives in the intersection of certain existent semiotic systems, and varies in particular combinations and emphases. Mixity.

This is an angular kind of analysis that some would call promiscuous, but which engages with the volatile qualities of real semiotic effects and productions, rather than blandly bringing a hermeneutic apparatus to bear on an apparition. Deleuze and Guattari obliquely trace the multidimensional effects of flows and blockages within a general semiotic "geology", undercutting reifying conceptions of one-dimensional ideological mappings. It is a Nietzschean approach to a universe in which meanings are fundamentally generated through accretion and fissure, which may precede any fantasy relation of the subject to its environment: "[faciality] is an affair not of ideology but of economy and the organisation of power" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 175). Ironically, our world of meaning works inhumanly, even when it produces Man everywhere, and as Brian Massumi notes, many political meanings are not necessarily ideological by nature, although they may indeed be given ideological investment (Massumi 1993). Deleuze and Guattari also dodge formalism: following Weber, there is no resignation to "primal form" as an absolutely pure category of aesthetico-political determination; instead, we have an autonomic machine that plays through and configures the semiotic elements -- the "white wall" and the "black holes" -- that American "hard" psychologists have identified in the basic navigational imagination of newborn children (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 169-170). Faciality -- that most "primal" of figures -- operates on levels of the political that escape traditional hermeneutics.[2]

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Deleuze and Guattari's emphasis on the face of Christ is not misplaced. Many of faciality's most far-reaching effects can be given a religious "face"; as Marie-José Baudinet notes in "The Face of Christ, The Face of the Church",

[e]conomy, that is oikonomia, in Greek reads as ikonomia. To the Byzantine ear... the law of the icon and the law concerning the administration of goods are one and the same thing. In either case, the supreme administrator, the great economist, is God the Father who gave His essence in order that it be distributed in the visible world through His own image -- the natural image of His Son. (Baudinet 1989: 149)

We negotiate the ikonomia all the time. Faciality codes faces, markets, cities. This range, which Deleuze and Guattari note in architecture and landscaping (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 172), is nicely demonstrated in the case of the Turin Shroud, whose formal specificities repeat what Deleuze and Guattari identify as the "despotic" aspects of Byzantine portraiture. In 1978, the new Cardinal of Turin, Anastasio Ballestrero, had inherited "Turin's considerable domestic troubles, among them a huge unwanted immigration into the city of Italians from the South; a Communist civic administration; and terrorism from the Red Brigade" (Wilson 1978: 266). He turned this around in the Shroud's 1978 Exposition.

For a full-scale exposition of the Shroud, Turin needed to be made ready for visitors, streets and public buildings cleaned, signposting erected and special crowd-control barriers prepared. On the Cathedral steps special gantries needed to be built, and inside the Cathedral a special posse of security men needed to be on guard day and night to avoid the Shroud becoming yet another Red Brigade object of ransom. Ballestrero sought help for these requirements from the unlikeliest source, Turin's Communist administration. He succeeded to a greater degree than anyone could have believed, the Communist mayor agreeing to give Turin a total facelift for the exposition, embracing Ballestrero's requirements, and costing in the region of a million pounds. (Wilson 1978: 266, italics added)

Social fallout indeed. Here, the face of Christ occupies the opposite position that was given to Richard Serra's Tilted Arc by the same kind of despotic apparatus.[3] But in the middle of all of this politico-formal fundamentalism, weird things do happen: defacialising resistances, like Kant's haunting by the unraveled outline, are always present in religion. This is what Bataille grasped in his valorisation of the acephale, the headless human, the defacialised body that is traversed by all sorts of untrammeled polyvocalities and urgencies (Krauss 1993: 19), channelling the sacrificial, excessive, deconfiguring religious impulse.

This excess, which always makes facial coding an incomplete gesture, is precisely what Stewart Guthrie fails to appreciate in Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion (1993), which is a mixture of anthropology, art history and cognitive science written for the lay reader. Guthrie's study has significant potential; he approaches the face as a fundamental form that is connected to a "strategy of perception" that marks a significant aspect of human sociality, and which is concretised most systematically in religion. But by drawing on Enrst Gombrich's elaboration of perceptual cognition as a kind of "betting" on the accuracy of representation, which can then be extrapolated to the enterprise of art as representation (Guthrie 1993: 131), Guthrie argues that the face-form becomes fundamental to social practice because of the pragmatic importance of resemblance in a condition of scarcity and survival. Everything unfolds from here. Unfortunately, Guthrie's conflation of resemblance, representation and configuration leads to a deterministic reading of the face-form and religion as solely an elaborate extension of anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism is perception. Religion is anthropomorphism. Religion is perception. The transgressive urges of finitude that religion attempts to legislate do not even make an appearance.

The status of "human" is never interrogated in Guthrie's use of anthropomorphism as a universalising explanation. The potential of Guthrie's identification of the strategy in perception is immediately reterritorialised by naturalisation of "creativity" as an overcoded "human response" to an anthropocentrically demarcated "environment". Transgression figures as something that the universe can only do to us.[4] In Faces in the Clouds, the machinic production of subjectivity, meaning, etc., is utterly collapsed, which is why "perception" is valorised but unable to be philosophically unpacked. To identify this reductionism is not to propose an equally reductive alternative of "total social constructionism", since semiotic effects are also materially grounded; the point is to identify the elisions that allow Guthrie to short-circuit the developmental psychology (that Deleuze and Guattari use) with theories of representation. This denial of semiotic production precisely what Deleuze and Guattari warn against when they describe faciality as a machine: "No anthropomorphism here" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 170). This leads to an endless and strangely prone archive of identifications: a list of faces in every possible context. One could say that while working on such a fundamental level of (political) form, Guthrie's elisions led to his surrender to (political) formalism.

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These days, the social fallout of these problems of "fundamental form" is not literalised under the banner of religion per se, but in contemporary mythologies of equally far-reaching political import. Take, for instance, Whitley Streiber's accounts of his alien abduction experiences (Streiber 1987, 1988). We all know the story: the mysterious, strangely humanoid visitors, with huge faces, dominated by eyes and dwarfing their bodies, come in the night to terrify us with both pleasure and pain. The outer-space face, in this time of global economy, is perhaps too iconic. How can we approach this? Notice that Streiber's story is a remarkable repetition of Medieval women's religious experiences, whose ecstatic physical encounters with Christ constituted a negotiated, pre-ideological resistance of the body to gendering facial codings of the despotic Church (Ash 1990, Walker Bynum 1989). In the middle of Christian representation, the passional face introduces a line of flight from faciality (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 185), initiated by the anchorite's becoming, which challenges the Church's imperialism (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 247).

We can perhaps engage with the alien abduction phenomenon as modestly marking the fundamental ambivalence of the technoscientific order's planetary configurations.[5] Or, we could unfortunately short-circuit the facial ikonomia, as Guthrie does, and cement its formalities via the flip identification of "anthropomorphism", producing a remarkably conservatising discourse, which could be contrary to expectations. This is what happens in Annalee Newitz's "Alien Abduction and the End of White People" (1993). Newitz sees the abduction phenomenon as a new, universal allegory of imperialism that challenges multiculturalism's "demonisation of white people":

[T]he alien abduction story... clues us in to the fact that most people on Earth aren't really convinced by the ‘official' position of multiculturalism. ... [W]hat we fear most is that white people are not the only people or beings who might try to take over and rule the world... Multiculturalism insists that white people are what is wrong with power today. But isn't this a little bit like the racial prejudice we became multicultural to fight against? If all races are equal and the same, aren't oppressive forms of domination something that non-white people can lay claim to as well?
(Newitz 1993)

This critique of essentialism is an alibi for a thoroughly liberal idea: that racial marginalisation can end in an historic "moment of recognition" of non-white people, which Newitz finds crystallised in the "natural" "victory" of the civil rights movement in the 1960s. Against such a backdrop, the contemporary rise of the alien abduction phenomenon is somehow "fitting". An non-human, non-white enemy means that anybody, in this "post-imperial" era, can now be an enemy. Australia's current public climate of ultra-xenophobia demonstrates how such a liberal framework can preside over surges of the most reactionary populism -- "they've had their moment of recognition..." Is this, too, a traumatic symptom of globalism's anti-essentialist political unconscious? Despite her erstwhile leftism, this is indeed suggested by Newitz's subsequent and explicit defense of the New World Order.

Here we have "recognition" as two kinds of naturalised formalism: paternalism and perception. For Newitz, we can recognise races like we recognise inkblots -- on our (natural, universalist and historically teleological) terms. (Human perception. Perception by humans. Perception of humans. Paranoid perception. Humanoid perception. Paranoia. Humanoia.) Resembling Guthrie's use of Gombrich, Newitz's "moment of recognition" unwittingly reiterates the racially differentiating logic of faciality:

If the face is in fact Christ, in other words, your average ordinary White Man, then the first deviances, the first divergence-types, are racial: yellow man, black man, men in the second or third category... Racism operates by the determination of degrees of deviance in relation to the White-Man's face, which endeavors to integrate nonconforming traits into increasingly eccentric and backward waves, sometimes tolerating them at given places under given conditions, in a given ghetto... (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987: 178)

Capitalist globalisation -- the widest ever scene for setting up a system of (political) figure and ground -- has made liberal democracy's technocratic humanist formalisms ever more dangerous. But drawing from historical materialism and the knowledge of faciality's unfinished operations, the answer is not nostalgia or defeatism, but strategy.

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If we are to forge a politics that can engage with the geologic (and pre-ideological) depths of semiotic configuration, it must involve a denaturing of the anthropomorphic "recognition" that is cemented in liberal perception. We must be in the middle of pop science's technoscientific materialities to be sensitive enough -- especially to our own unnaturality. This brings us back to my naïve examples: the fingernails and Darth Vader. We can take the lead from an incident related by science fiction writer Bob Shaw:

"Daddy, why are my fingernails made of plastic?"

The question came from my youngest daughter, then aged about four, who had just examined her hands, almost as though seeing them for the first time. I looked at her fingers and saw that the nails were indeed little translucent slivers, not much different in appearance from that shiny pink plastic which is used in making tiny dolls. I knew the true situation, but the child had accepted that she was a composite being -- part flesh, part Woolworths plastic... (Shaw 1989: 9)

I look at my own fingernails now, and they are not so natural, not so human. And in Return of the Jedi, Darth Vader is eventually unmasked, and revealed to be a surprisingly human-looking old man. We all groaned when we saw this as kids -- Darth Vader wasn't Darth Vader anymore. Meanwhile, Bob Shaw's daughter, as she matter-of-factly negotiates her configuration, is truly learning to become Darth Vader, a cyborg. Only a cyborg would stand a chance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

ASH, Jennifer (1990) "The discursive construction of Christ's body in the later Middle Ages: resistance and autonomy", in Terry Threadgold & Anne Cranny-Francis (eds), Feminine/Masculine and Representation, Sydney: Allen & Unwin

BAUDINET, Marie-José (1989) "The Face of Christ, The Form of the Church", in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Volume 1, New York: Zone Books

BENJAMIN, Walter (1970) "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction", in Illuminations (ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn), London: Fontana

BEVERLY, John (1993) Against Literature, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

BHABHA, Homi (1994) "Of Mimicry and Man: The ambivalence of colonial discourse", The Location of Culture, London: Routledge

BUCKLEY, Sandra (1996) "Contagion", in Cynthia Davidson (ed), Anywise, Cambridge: MIT Press

CRIMP, Douglas (1993) "Redefining Site Specificity", On the Museum's Ruins, Cambridge: MIT Press

DELEUZE, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque (trans. Tom Conley), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

DELEUZE, Gilles & Felix Guattari (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (trans. Brian Massumi), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

EAGLETON, Terry (1981) Walter Benjamin, Or Towards a Revolutionary Criticism, London: Verso

GUTHRIE, Stewart (1993) Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion, Oxford: Oxford University Press

HARAWAY, Donna (1991) "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century", Simians Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Free Association Books

KRAUSS, Rosalind (1993) The Optical Unconscious, Cambridge: MIT Press

MASSUMI, Brian (1993) "A Requiem for Our Prospective Dead, or, Towards a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power", unpublished version

NEWITZ, Annalee (1993), "Alien Abductions and the End of White People", Bad Subjects 5

PICKNETT, Lynn & Clive Prince (1994) Turin Shroud: In Whose Image? The Shocking Truth Unveiled, London: Bloomsbury

SHAW, Bob (1991) Dark Night in Toyland, London: Orbit

STREIBER, Whitley (1987) Communion, London: Arrow

STREIBER, Whitley (1988) Transformation, London: Century Hutchinson

WEBER, Samuel (1996) "The Unraveling of Form", Mass Mediauras: Form, Technics, Media, Sydney: Power Publications

WALKER BYNUM, Caroline (1989) "The Female Body and Religious Practice in the Late Middle Ages", in Michel Feher, Ramona Naddaf & Nadia Tazi (eds), Zone 3: Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Volume 1, New York: Zone Books

[1] Neo-Kantian assumptions appear to inform Rupert Sheldrake's formulation of the "morphic field" that encompasses any event or form, leading him towards a mushy sort of New Age theology. More concretely, there is the danger of valorsing romantic liberalism and simplistic relativism via impressionistic "social" readings of quantum theory. And while pop science's questing after the "essence" of events and bodies may end up in territories similar to those of post-representationalist philosophy, this has largely remained within the field of representational "paradoxes". For example, some cognitive scientists admit a fascination with the paintings of Magritte and Zen mysticism in their popular writings. More hopefully, perhaps, artificial intelligence researchers occasionally resort to explicating Heidegger to their lay readers in order to debunk both the mechanistic legacy of "strong AI" and its essentialising alternatives.

[2] Deleuze and Guattari's adventurous engagement with configuration marks a definite contrast to the relatively unsullied interpretive strategies of art history. This is because A Thousand Plateaus, whatever its elitist difficulties, is also pop-scientific philosophy. As Massumi notes in his translator's introduction, "[t]his is a book that speaks of many things, of ticks and quilts and fuzzy subsets and noology and political economy. It is difficult to know how to approach it" (Deleuze & Guattari 1987: ix). Interdisciplinary synthesis for ginger adventurers. Of course, this is not heroic, but merely situational. While "French theory" may have a well-documented literary addiction in comparison to Anglophone philosophy, it often makes its appearance through its appropriation by Anglophone critics who hail from comparatively exclusive institutions of reading: art history and literary theory. Despite its "literary bent", much politically incisive French philosophy still grasps an vital echo of predisciplinarity via the "history and philosophy of science". Also, the vivid discourse of contemporary psychoanalysis cannot be divorced from its clinical engagement: Guattari was a practicing analyst under Lacan, who was ever one to affect a bizarrely scientific aura. It is no wonder, then, that Deleuze and Guattari have been able to produce tools that work where "reading" cannot.

[3] As Douglas Crimp describes, Tilted Arc -- a huge, wall-like sculpture that spanned New York's Federal Plaza -- was eventually destroyed for obstructing the smooth functioning of State surveillance power within public space, and for conversely being a potential instrument of terrorist attack (Crimp 1993). Conversely, the Shroud's appearance, as the face of politico-religious power, is a terrorist target, and prompts the remaking of the city within its parameters. The facial configuration of urban space by the State are also made explicit in Deleuzoguattarian terms by Sandra Buckley's "Contagion", in which "the face of contemporary Japan" is approached as the maintenance of public flows and the pathologisation of shifting autonomous zones of deviant urban sexuality (Buckley 1996).

[4] Deleuze seems to pre-empt Guthrie in his elaboration of non-anthropocentric ecology: "the head of Christ we fancy in spots on a wall refers to plastic forces that wind through organisms that already exist" (Deleuze 1993: 8). The forces of materiality pervade everything, creating an economy in which the subject is not pregiven. Deleuze argues for what Guthrie uses as an error factor that excuses (an embattled) anthropomorphism: the increasing difficulty to differentiate life from inanimate matter.

[5] One of Streiber's alien-induced visions is of a vivid, abandoned, golden city that contains a single, sad building in which the truth about humanity is known (Streiber 1988). (Humanity is a tragic figure, whom Streiber continually portrays as simultaneously self-destructive and promising.) The coded city is at once like a scene of a crime.

Reclaiming Historical Materialism and Revolutionary Aesthetic Programmes

Benjamin Hoh, 1996

The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight. Then we shall clearly realise that it is our task to bring about a real state of emergency…

— Walter Benjamin, Theses on the Philosophy of History

Punk musician Howard Devoto was once told by a leftist acquaintance that he would be “shot by both sides”. Ironically, this is how the possibility of radical action must be feeling these days. In the public sphere, “progressive” positions in the controversy over “political correctness” have been so overcoded in the framework of the liberal democratic State that it is difficult to articulate credible and radical challenges to right-wing ideologues. The problem is also that right-wingers are often correct in their critiques of identity politics and the bureaucratic management of “public acceptability”. Everything seems stuck.[1] This situation makes it all the more urgent to conceive of resistant enunciations, in their already-existent and hypothetical manifestations. Thus, this proto-manifesto will explore abstract concepts that could form the basis for revolutionary aesthetic programmes.

In my “instrumentalist” leanings, I am somewhat sympathetic to Fredric Jameson’s insistence that the Left must reclaim art’s pedagogic function, and that such art must provide conceptual abstractions of how the social system is configured [Jameson, 1991]. But in light of Jameson’s over-medicalised diagnostic method (with its finger on the “true” pulse of capitalism), my approach to “pedagogy” will most likely be completely unrecognisable to him. Meanwhile, it is clear that in order to reinvoke it, the very idea of the “programme” must be rethought. Programmatically oppositional aesthetic strategies have always had a dangerously righteous history — the Stalino-Zhdanovist terror of “socialist realism” remains the case in point. And after those corny glories, the totalising impulse has survived in less centralised, more understandable and more “strategic” forms.[2]

In order to travel elsewhere, my project uses the speculative critical techniques of three visionary essays: Marx and Engels’ “Manifesto of the Communist Party” [Marx & Engels 1972], Walter Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” [Benjamin 1970b] and Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century” [Haraway 1991a]. To avoid aestheticising Benjamin and Haraway, I want to grasp their most “crude” aspects, by reading them as “properly” Marxist “modes of production” narratives that echo the Communist Manifesto. Rather than taking us back into determinism and teleology, this unfashionable move produces ways of engaging with crucial questions in oppositional aesthetics.

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Many commentators have noted that in the wake of the Old Left, there has been a “crisis of historical materialism”. The reputation of Marx’s theory of history has been tarnished by a general (and largely justified) scepticism about Enlightenment Reason, and by people’s experiences of the complex realities of historico-cultural determination. But the problem with most arguments about this crisis is their tendency to reactively “defend” or “denounce” Marxism; in each case, Marxism is given a positive identity or originary metanarrativity that it cannot possibly fulfil: a fantastic centralisation that even rivals its “self”-overcoding (by what Deleuze calls “state philosophy”) in the form of Stalinism — such is the irony of totalising critiques of totalisation.[3] It is also easy to over-periodise the crisis as a metahistorical turn: as the souring of the revolutionary project.[4] Besides being highly improbable in its symbolic fervour, such a move elides many histories of revolutionary contestation; feminist, postcolonial, anti-mechanistic and non-Leninist interventions have not suddenly appeared on the agenda upon the death of the Father. So rather than tragic narrative, we have continual antagonism.

Consider this picture of antagonism: some crazed Maoists crash the 1994 National Conference of Left Alliance — the leftist student organisation to which I belong — and luridly condemn our “New Left pap” about GATT and imperialism. Citing Marx as the master-scientist of unbridled, glorious and anthropocentric progress (and ruthlessly echoing Bill Warren’s imperialist apologia),[5] they condemn all opposition to market forces as backwardly protectionist, and insist that the Third World actually likes imperialism because it provides previously unavailable commodities and builds the proletariat.[6] Such phallocentric triumphalism can be contrasted with various postcolonial criticisms, which find Marx quite useless as a philosopher of history [MacCabe in Spivak 1987, Spivak & Harasym 1990]: if one juxtaposes the mode of production narrative’s Eurocentric conception of evolutionary progress with the reality of capitalism’s ruthless imperialising of non-capitalist countries, the result is a historical narrative in which imperialism is rendered unproblematic, or at least naturalised. Marxian history must then be jettisoned in favour of Marxism as a theory of exploitation and crisis.

But a provocative question remains: what has been effaced in such a move? One possible answer is historical materialism’s potential status as an abstract, contingent and experimentally applicable method of engaged historical modelisation and strategisation, which is often contained and obscured by Marx’s undeniable scientistic pretensions. This kind of Marxism recalls Deleuze’s formulation of philosophy as being like a tool box [Massumi 1992: 8], and is implied in Marx’s scepticism about universalist applications of his thought:

Marx … attacked Mikhailovsky, who ‘absolutely must metamorphose my historical sketch of the genesis of capitalism in Western Europe into a historico-philosophical theory of the path every people is fated to tread, whatever the historical circumstances in which it finds itself…’ and criticised any approach which tried to understand history ‘by using as one’s master key a general historico-philosophical theory, the supreme virtue of which consists in being supra-historical’.

[McLellan 1975: 48]

Although David McLellan’s move to recuperate “the real Marx” is limiting, his impartiality is refreshing: “The fact that Marx never used the expression ‘historical materialism’ (still less ‘dialectical materialism’) is not merely a linguistic point: it indicates the open-ended approach to history which he preferred to call ‘the materialist conception of history’” [McLellan 1975: 38]. Building on Engels’ revelation that the Marxian emphasis on “economic” determination was strategic [Engels 1972: 642], we can reread Marx’s investment in positivism as an intriguing negotiation of both the formal constraints of 19th Century criticism and the need to effectively counter various mystifying analyses of capitalism. But instead of conveniently excavating a mythical Marx who would always be impervious to criticism, I want to rescue an abstract approach to history that lives (with precise irony) in the faults of Marxism’s very own “teleology”: an ethics of the instant, an ambivalent engagement with capitalism’s flux, or a strategisation of the constitutive crisis that comes with capitalism’s capacity to simultaneously deterritorialise and reterritorialise the planet.

To appreciate this, we can follow Jameson’s turn to the Communist Manifesto to analogously explain his most useful thesis: that there cannot be a “moral outside” from which we can approach postmodernism as a historical phenomenon.

Marx powerfully urges us to do the impossible, namely, to think this development positively and negatively all at once; to achieve, in other words, a type of thinking that would be capable of grasping the demonstrably baleful features of capitalism along with its extraordinary and liberating dynamism simultaneously within a single thought, and without attenuating any of the force of either judgement. … We are somehow to lift our minds to a point at which it is possible to understand that capitalism is at one and the same time the best thing that has ever happened to the human race, and the worst. [Jameson 1991: 46-47]

Jameson unfortunately mystifies Marx’s ambivalence by invoking the dialectic’s capacity to sacralise or even transubstantiate contradictions,[7] but what he actually presents, in degraded form, is Marx’s practical ethics of decision. Rather than being a deterministic mapping or a “higher plane of thinking”, Marx’s mode of production narrative is a way of engaging with the potentials of a Now that is suspended in endless flux. It is located radically inside, and not above, this moment. (However, as a method, it is also paradoxically mobile.) And if one works with illegitimate potentials, one must take them from a necessarily tainted lineage. By tracing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the Communist Manifesto must identify the bourgeoisie’s history as a revolutionary class, to describe capitalism’s unprecedented productive capacity and its ability to create surplus, and the usefulness of its destructive aspects.

Although these kinds of acknowledgements can be reified as a naturalised narrative, Walter Benjamin and Donna Haraway refuse this. According to Peter Osborne, “The basic principle of historical materialism, Benjamin argues in the Passagen-Werk, ‘is not progress, but actualisation’” [Osborne 1994: 100].[8] Against faithful filiation to the lineage of technocapital, Haraway declares that “fathers, after all, are inessential” [Haraway 1991a: 151], and Benjamin links the logic of progress to the disaster of German Social Democracy, which fostered the illusion that it was naturally “moving with the current” of irresistible technological progress towards socialism [Benjamin 1970a: 260] — anticipating the tyranny of State socialism’s work ethic. Basically, the Social Democrats failed to appreciate the interventionary, freaky possibility that Lenin’s “electrified soviets” could have been. Freaky, indeed: in Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari present a Marxist typology of modes of production (or “social machines”) that specifically avoids evolutionism, thus allowing a clearer view of the strange rise of capitalism. Deleuze and Guattari see capitalism as being uniquely based on the decoding (or opening-up) of flows of (desiring-)production, rather than simply being a regime of recoding (or repressive systematisation). This means that under capitalism, deterritorialisation — the (amoral) action of uprooting the elements of a systemic context — occurs in a context in which possibilities for mobilisation and experimentation have unprecedented scope and scale:

All fixed, fast-frozen relations … are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind. [Marx & Engels 1972: 338]

Capitalism’s churning mutations present us with the opportunity to make a particularly bizarre mutation — Communism — that would not be just another overcoded system. Of course, this kind of potential exists within the characteristic bind of capitalist societies: “what they deterritorialise with one hand, they reterritorialise with the other” [Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 257]. Capitalist systems have an oscillating axiomatic:

Born of decoding and deterritorialisation, on the ruins of the despotic machine, these societies are caught between the Urstaat they would like to resuscitate as an overcoding and reterritorialising unity, and the unfettered flows that carry them toward an absolute threshold. They recode with all their might, with world-wide dictatorship, local dictators, and an all-powerful police, while decoding — or allowing the decoding of — the fluent quantities of their capital and their populations. [Deleuze and Guattari 1983: 260]

Revolutionary programmes must therefore negotiate this dilemma by acknowledging, after Brian Massumi, that “If there is a way out, it is right where we are: in the final constraint” [Massumi 1992: 140]. This is not the reformist project of “working within the system” for its own sake, but grasping the present to ensure its abolition.

• • •

If the above exposition seemed a little too removed, let me disclose some of its margins. I never really understood anything about historical materialism until a couple of years ago, when most of my thinking was haunted by the question of how a politics of “difference” could relate to Marxism’s apparent privileging of class. I had read, but not fully appreciated, Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, which encourages the productive acknowledgment of late capitalism’s creation of “post-human” ontologies, or “cyborgs”, through the blurring of organic and machine-based systems. I was trying to use Haraway in order to make a simple case against “crusty Marxist” scepticism about new technologies, and frustrated by the hypothetical questions begged by my own techno-fetishism, I finally declared that Haraway’s valorisation of the cyborg was just as materially strategic as Marx’s identification of the proletariat as the actor of the revolution. It was a two-way moment of revelation: Haraway was like Marx, Marx was like Haraway, and both were strategically invoking categories of identification and subjectivity that engaged with shifts in the mode of production. Haraway became less superficially fetishisable, and Marx appeared much more daring.

I had a similar revelation about Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, which had always been presented to me as simply a meditation on film’s formal specificities. So when Patrick Crogan recently (and so logically) framed it in terms of Benjamin’s controversial enthusiasm for a technologised mass-culture of lost innocence (via capitalism’s technical capacity to create new forms of perception), it was shocking. The destruction of the aura rightfully assumed its historical materialist mantle, and everything suddenly became vitally important, tantalising and disturbing.

Of course, reading Benjamin and Haraway as mode of production narratives is not an attempt to simply appropriate them for the defensive and imperialising camp of Unrepentant Marxism. Rather, it places all of them in a productive constellation…

• • •

Theses on the Style of Historical Materialism. To formulate an ethical basis for revolutionary aesthetic programmes, it is clear that one must not look for the overcoded certainty of particular symbols, but for concepts that have a style. These concepts encompass the techniques one may employ in aesthetic productions, and one’s image of the sociotechnical status of “aesthetic production” itself.[9] Indeed, Benjamin’s logic of actualisation folds the former into the latter.

1. We must reclaim “objectivity”. In order to get anywhere, the alternative to the patriarchal tyranny of overarching scientism cannot be a self-defeating irrationalism. We must instead create anti-totalising “objectivities” by pragmatically and collectively engaging with our situation, and making as many links with other situations as is possible; this modelisation is contingent and partial, and never a framework-as-belief-system. In this vein, the Cyborg Manifesto fuels Haraway’s further conception of “situated knowledges” [Haraway 1991b] — a socialist feminist dream of objectivity that counters the reactionary nature of radical feminism’s disengaged dreams.

From an oppositional position, historical materialism is most uncompromisingly “scientific” when it grapples with the uncontestable freeing up of material and semiotic elements under capitalism, and identifies openings of revolutionary potential without recourse to preset moralisms. But what could a historically materialist ethic of “scientific objectivity” in aesthetic production entail? Not a lot more, actually— especially if one is interested in thinking in terms of action rather than representation. As a “natural” principle of “objective representation”, realism has proved dangerously short-circuited. On the other hand, Benjamin’s version of aesthetic objectivity has no representative pretensions to short-circuit; from the outset, it is radically collapsed into a qualitative action of historical materialism: “Rather than ask, ‘What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?’ I should like to ask, ‘What is its position in them?’” [Benjamin 1986a: 222].

Like “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, this collapse could be misread as being blandly and deterministically hermeneutic; however, while Benjamin would not deny being “crude”, he is not mapping ideological closure in the expression of objective class interests, but is merely grasping that infinity of mobilisations that could make use of one’s specific, sociotechnically constitutive conditions. Technique: a method of signification that puts a conception of its own apparatus to work. Revolutionary film “correctly” strategises cinema’s objective relation to the deterritorialisation of symbolic ritual; the stubbornness of this relation, whose potential (like the power of labour) exists regardless of its attempted co-option,[10] explains why its description in “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” is “completely useless for the purposes of Fascism” and “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands” [Benjamin 1970b: 220].[11]

2. Revolutionary action hovers on the frontier of destruction. In his “Remarks on Authorship”, McKenzie Wark somewhat disingenuously dodges criticism of his collusion with Rupert Murdoch’s populist media machine by declaring that “[t]he demolition of the bourgeois public sphere is not something I’m inclined to mourn” [Wark 1995: 90]. Wark correctly identifies destruction as an uncoded event that cannot be grasped by reactive morality; the judgement of reactionary violence must therefore arrive in the assessment of more complex and coded actions.[12] Meanwhile, “destruction” leans towards the abstract concept of deterritorialisation. With the latter, Deleuze and Guattari have developed a kind of pure and abstract physics of non-anthropomorphic relationality (i.e. a combination of what used to be called “sociality” and “the world”). For instance, it is objectively desirable to deterritorialise blood clots in the brain. But one would not wish a tornado or flash flood on a small town, though that, too, would deterritorialise. Physics.[13] Or philosophy’s finest instant.

Benjamin grasps the pure motion of deterritorialisation in “The Destructive Character” [Benjamin 1986b], which features a breathtakingly flattened, darting and bullet-headed characterisation (like Nosferatu’s arrival in England). Its implications for revolutionary action pervade “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”:

[T]heses about the developmental tendencies of art under present conditions of production… brush aside a number of outmoded concepts, such as creativity and genius, eternal value and mystery — concepts whose uncontrolled (and at present uncontrollable) application would lead to a processing of data in a Fascist sense. [Benjamin 1970b: 220]

As the distillation of these mystifications, the aura is (in Deleuzoguattarian terms) a “neo-archaic recoding”, and is helpfully destroyed by capitalism’s progressive capacities as they are enacted in cinema: “[Film’s] social significance, particularly in its most positive form, is inconceivable without its destructive, cathartic aspect, that is, the liquidation of the traditional value of the cultural heritage” [Benjamin 1970b: 223]. Culture is finally pulled into line by mass production and commodification, and is thus deterritorialised, echoing capitalism’s “daily destruction” of pre-bourgeois forms of art and property [Marx & Engels 1972: 346-347].

But in the 1930s, Benjamin seemed strangely lonely in this application of Marxian methods. In “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art”, Andre Breton and Leon Trotsky could only enunciate “free art” in terms that resurrect liberal rhetoric about “art for art’s sake” and authoriality [Breton & Trotsky 1968]. Attempting to escape Stalin’s dictates, they are blocked by those of the aura. So while revolutionary aesthetics must fight the effects of the commodity system, it cannot presume to simply reject it: revolutionary aesthetics constructs its radicality by riding over the crushed nostalgia of the artist, by way of mass culture. And if reviving the cult of the artist takes us back into capitalism’s neo-archaisms (or perhaps something worse), we must then follow the lines traced by flattened, bullet-headed impulses…

3. Objectivity is jittery, delirious and dangerous. We cannot simply become the Destructive Character; this would confuse a quality with a kind of subjectivity. Instead, we need a necessarily more complex conceptual aesthetic of simultaneous foreboding and tantalisation. Consider this shifty-eyed meditation in the Communist Manifesto:

The bourgeoisie, wherever it has got the upper hand, has put an end to all feudal, patriarchal, idyllic relations… and has left remaining no other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest, than callous “cash payment”. It has drowned the most heavenly ecstasies of religious fervour, of chivalrous enthusiasm, of philistine sentimentalism, in the icy water of egotistical calculation… In one word, for exploitation, veiled by religious and political illusions, it has substituted naked, shameless, direct, brutal exploitation. [Marx & Engels 1972: 337]

In such jittery language, the utopian-socialist comfort of rejecting the age is rendered inoperable as the sure prose of belief systems to brought to crisis. This is why Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto is “faithful to feminism, socialism and materialism”, but “more faithful as blasphemy is faithful” [Haraway 1991a: 148]. Historical materialism’s scientific objectivity is not realised in boredom, but bizarrely horrifying but compelling delirium:

modern production seems like a dream of cyborg colonisation work, a dream that makes the nightmare of Taylorism seem idyllic. And modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication-intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget. [Haraway 1991a: 150]

This is where things are at. This is “scary” [Haraway 1991a: 161], ­because while horrible, these networks of domination also elicit a childish thrill at their possibilities [Penley & Ross 1992]. Our response to such an apocalyptic lineage cannot be utterly earnest fright, which is why Haraway’s vision for socialist-feminism is an “ironic myth” [Haraway 1991a: 149]. It is deadly ironic that oppositional categories are products of the military industrial complex; as Marx and Engels knew,

not only has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that being death to itself; it has also called into existence the men who are to wield those weapons — the modern working class — the proletarians. … The other classes decay and finally disappear in the face of Modern Industry; the proletariat is its special and essential product. [Marx & Engels 1972: 340-344]

Thus, the proletariat’s apt and yet boldly illegitimate strike from the heart of “soulless”, industrialised alienation — rather than from the supposedly resistant “outside” of the petty artisan’s fetishised craft — can never be reduced to a mechanical determination of capitalism’s inevitable end.

Coping with this kind of irony is not always easy. I once reviewed a dinosaur exhibition at the Australian Museum, which dressed-up a selection of rare skeletons with snippets of Jurassic Park (available at the local video store, but pared down to some tame scenes that wouldn’t upstage the skeletons) and a bunch of multimedia workstations featuring Microsoft Dinosaurs software (available at the local computer store, but featuring interactivity that couldn’t help but upstage the dinosaurs). Generally, people ignored the skeletons. Based on this dispensability of the exhibition’s foundational basis, I judged it a failure, declaring the death of the museum and the shift of the exhibitionary complex from its traditional and paternalistically authoritarian institutional home to the virtuality and omnipresence of commodity capitalism. Through my philistinist revolt against the archaic institution, I had emerged in a scary new place.[14] A similar feeling emerges if one reads the career of graphic designer Neville Brody as a kind of theatre. Brody’s sceptical but groundbreaking use of digital graphics technology mixes abstract, affectual euphoria with unrepentantly modernist allusions to postmodern capitalism’s “communications breakdown”.[15] If Benjamin uses Duhamel’s cinephobia to theatricalise the controversy that is cinema [Benjamin 170b: 241], Brody just uses his own phobias. Modernist anxieties replayed, and read knowingly. Of course, the irony is that underneath his reactionary demonisation of cinema, Duhamel is objectively correct about its distracting capacity to replace contemplation with actualisation, which is, of course, why Benjamin uses him. Because cinema really is scary.

An obvious criticism of Haraway and Benjamin is that they are “politically desperate”, and are clutching at fanciful interstellar straws. In spite of their dismissive intent, and like Duhamel, such criticisms are correct; Haraway and Benjamin’s narratives exist in the crisis that historical materialism lives in every instant — it is a “critical” method, in every sense. Situation critical. Our aesthetic production must, on some level, be methodologically desperate. This kind of desperation is what separates Haraway and Benjamin from apoliticising techno-utopianism, which can be found wide-eyed and blinking in Marxism Today’s New Times project, which conveniently grabbed the “colourful variety” of commodity capitalism in order to present a shiny, happy and “modernised” alternative to Thatcherism. The power to be your best. All too human, the “desperation” of New Times, which needs to hide itself rather than draw out intrinsic crisis, is reactively and superficially based on the marketability of socialism rather than being a fundamental and objective operation on a subhuman level. In the thrall of everything that had already made Marxism Today feel out-dated, New Times — in serious want of some attitude — affected a cool politeness in the middle of the planetary postmodern firestorm, exuding vacuous (rather than disturbed) enthusiasm.

The conceptual style of postmodern ambivalence is noisy, not polite; postmodern radicality is a rhizomatic, cyborgasmic, anti-assimilationist, hybrid-indigeno-migrant monster attack, rather than a pleasant advertisement for the “ethnicity”, “robotics” and “networking” of “New Times”. To displace the latter, I would read the Cyborg Manifesto as far more chillingly gothic than many would suggest. The image of the cyborg is unavoidably rooted in the horrors of “Women in the Integrated Circuit”, and is a profoundly disturbed vision: faithless to Father Technocapital, the cyborg is a dangerous, screwed-up motherfucker that has, like most post-human monsters on contemporary TV, a tendency to wise-up quick, display terrifying powers and kill its creator. Haraway’s emphasis on the Informatics of Domination and Women in the Integrated Circuit is not, therefore, simply a superficial warning for women to “start using technology before it uses them” [Penley & Ross 1992], but is an invitation to get down to the business of their own “dangerousness”.

4. Actualisation happens when we confront our affinity with the post-natural. It is possible to refigure the last thesis in more concrete terms of subjectivities: marginalities of gender, race, class, sexuality. So, if one mistakenly makes the Destructive Character into “the subjectivity one has when one is not having a subjectivity”, the paradoxical result is what many critics call the “dispersive” effect of post-humanist thought. Deterritorialisation then becomes the luxury-mode of bourgeois, First World, techocratic subjectivity, for which “everything can go everywhere”, and the whole enterprise becomes a caricature.[16] But if one avoids this easy slip, differential politics still matters.

For such politics, Benjamin and Haraway’s historical materialism provides critical, post-natural models for affinitive subjectivity. Haraway’s cyborg and Benjamin’s vision of the distracted, technologised masses (who have plugged into the desiring impulses of their optical unconscious) are categories of subjectivity that are strategically viable to valorise in the capitalist mode of production. They are constitutive categories of subjectivity, to which people must fully actualise their affinity in order to act effectively: “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” [Haraway 1991a: 150]. Benjamin’s interest in technically produced shifts in perception occasionally leans towards explicit cyborganicism; for instance, he notes that “Even in times of narrowly prejudiced thought there was an inkling that life was not limited to organic corporeality” [Benjamin, quoted in Conay 1994: 290], and also gives a tantalising glimpse of what he means by “actualisation” in his essay “On Surrealism”:

Only when in technology body and image so interpenetrate that all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective innervation, and all the bodily innervations of the collective become revolutionary discharge, has reality transcended itself to the extent demanded by the Communist Manifesto. [Benjamin 1986c: 192]

In being “post-natural”, cyborgs are not based on organic wholes or origin myths, which have been deterritorialised by the conditions of their existence. As in Marxism, this decoding deterritorialisation is an opening for effective, perverting action: “The cyborg skips the step of original unity, of identification with nature in the Western sense. This is its illegitimate promise that might lead to subversion of its teleology as star wars” [Haraway 1991a: 150-151]. This knowing basis in contingent artificiality gives essential nature no chance whatsoever,[17] but by strategising the cyborg and the cinephillic masses, we still have banners to fight under. In some ways, this represents an advance over Marxism’s valorisation of the proletariat and Gayatri Spivak’s concept of “strategic essentialism”. Given its crucial position as a social group in the relations of production, the proletariat is open to convenient overcodings as an identity. “Class” politics as the grand-daddy of all identity politics. (In the face of such overcodings, the proletariat must always remember its mission of self-destruction.) The cyborg, which strategises wider qualities of capitalism, is definitely less prone to the convenient closure of a social group’s mechanical locus in the relations of production.

Meanwhile, “strategic essentialism” is forged in the realisation that endless deconstruction does not enable the survival of raced and gendered bodies, and that identities still require pragmatic assertion. But when does it end? Spivak proposes a “deconstructive moment” in which a Third World anti-imperialist revolution disables its own “revolutionary” nationalism. But how does this moment arrive? Such questions need to be “unasked”; against those who dismiss the “obvious” anti-materialism of Benjamin’s last thesis — that “every second of time was the strait gate through which the Messiah might enter” [Benjamin 1970a: 266] — I would argue that Benjamin was mystically allegorising the kind of historical materialism that I have attempted to outline in this essay.

Strategic essentialism has a politics of time that resembles creative accounting, in which stop-gap, temporary measures extend into bad habits. But rather than collapsing it into fascism, as do some deconstructivists (who for various, luxurious reasons, have never felt its pull), we must treat strategic essentialism like smoking under stress — “a not-very-useful measure”. Like New Times, it attempts to avoid or assuage its superficial desperation by voluntaristically resorting to marketing strategies. All too human. Instead, strategic survival requires resistant categories towards which our specificities can actualise a qualitative affinity, and must thus be engaged in a methodology of unashamed and subhuman desperations that can create a “rhizomatic, cyborgasmic, anti-assimilationist, hybrid-indigeno-migrant monster attack”.[18]

• • •

If the above theses seem simple minded and repetitive, so is their applicability. But this is not to suggest that all of these concepts simply happen in capitalism’s sociological unconscious; I will therefore conclude by showing how the stylistic concepts of historical materialism reappear in the need to create a practical “programme” for a radical collective art project.[19]

I want to start a film project that concentrates on developing explicitly oppositional material on the politics of race. Provisionally called “Third Space”, it would build on the work to which I contributed in Collage, which was a collective magazine for non-Anglo people that tried to do interesting things with cultural difference: no editors, no preconceived rules, the disintegration of canonic literature, a confusing emphasis on respect, juxtaposition, self-determination, hybridity and cultural drift/exchange/dialogue. But Third Space is also designed to challenge the de facto pluralism of Collage, which had no explicitly radical direction. Third Space will draw the best elements of Collage into a deliberately more radical plan. And why film? Because it engages people’s attention. It is exciting. It is a lot more intense than reading. And these qualities literalise Collage’s most useful aspect.

Someone from the Ecodesign Foundation once told me that there are two models of social change: the ontological and the epistemological. The epistemological model is bankrupt, because it relies on teleology, instrumentalism and monolithic identification. The only viable alternative, therefore, is to work with ontology. This was merely an excuse to reductively ridicule oppositional politics, but in any case, I stole the ideas for myself. Most revolutionaries know that political action cannot be generated by simply running around with their Little Red Books, screaming revolution. This is mired in what Benjamin calls the “logocracy” of contemplation, which we can contrast with “actualisation”. Like the Ecodesign Foundation, Collage rejects logocratic epistemology, but as the practical activity that makes it radical in the first place.

When the Collage collective creates systems of graphics and text together, they are performing problems in cultural politics. Collage is not “about” certain issues, and nor does it simply “empower” its participants; rather, it is the friction and the movement of their politics. By dealing their inhuman (i.e. what used to be called “individually interior” and “socially exterior”) differences in a collective relation, and set against the backdrop of mainstream ethnic commodification, uncertain identity, alienation and suppression, the participants realise and work their identity crisis, in their functioning as a group, and on paper. A social relation is immediately actualised: the creation of the mongrel collective as an affinitive model. The post-naturality of this situation disables cultural nationalism as an answer to the horrors of “dehumanising racism”. We cannot rehumanise. We have practical experience in this matter.

A cyborg project, Collage can be seen as a performative cultural technology. I do not mean “performance” in a metaphorical or theoretical way (i.e. speech act theory and Judith Butler’s work on the discursivity of gender); performance simply actualises one’s engagement with one’s post-natural constitution, and plays through the jittery sub-aesthetic that results, using the wreckage of deterritorialisation as its fuel.[20] It reminds me of the radical psychotherapy that Félix Guattari pioneered at the La Borde clinic in France.

The aim at La Borde was to abolish the doctor-patient hierarchy in favour of an interactive group dynamic that would bring the experiences of all to full expression in such a way as to produce a collective critique of the power relations in society as a whole. “The central perspective is … to promote human relations that do not automatically fall into roles or stereotypes but open onto fundamental relations of a metaphysical kind that bring out the most radical and basic alienations of madness or neurosis” and channel them into revolutionary practice. [Massumi, 1992: 2-3]

It is not demeaning to compare projects of cultural difference to psychotherapy; the entire point of the cultural politics of race is working with people’s crisis of constitution. We should not be saying “we’re nicely adjusted citizens too, thank you very much”; dealing with the critical moment of raced subjectivity expressly allows the political to arrive. Deleuze recognises this:

[I]f there were a modern political cinema, it would be on this basis: the people no longer exist, or not yet… the people are missing. No doubt this truth also applied to the West, but very few authors discovered it, because it was hidden by the mechanisms of power and the systems of majority. On the other hand, it was absolutely clear in the third world, where oppressed and exploited nations remained in a state of perpetual minorities, in a collective identity crisis.

[Deleuze 1989: 216]

The ambivalent enaction of this “state of perpetual minorities” is Collage’s unconsumable beauty, which works through and beyond “representation” — indeed, often beyond the individual ideologies of its participants. This focus on the relational actions of bodies resonates with the collapse of method into structure outlined in my theses on conceptual styles, and recalls Randy Martin’s work on “ordinary” performativity as a way of reconceptualising political action, and his realisation that mass culture helpfully reintroduces the idea of the desiring body under capitalism.

As my Third Space project unfolds, and following my historical materialist concepts, I want to set this mass-cultural return of desire to work on the specifically masochistic qualities of film, especially the horror/action/thriller film. Enter Deleuze and Guattari: we could connect my formulation of subhuman, non-reactive “desperation” with their concept of “desire”, and figure the cyborg’s “affinitive category” as the image of a “plane of consistency”, and the “objective conceptual image of the sociotechnical apparatus of enunciation” (in its virtuality, waiting for actualisation) as a “body without organs”. Deleuze and Guattari use this terminology to assert that masochism is an art of time and desire that creates an engaged programme of suspense [Deleuze & Guattari 1987: 155]. The action thriller, ever masochistic, does the same. And what is a political programme but a kind of suspense for a qualitatively different, freaky society? People, holding their breaths for capitalism’s end. Perhaps we could scare them into Communism with the spectre of the “rhizomatic, cyborgasmic, anti-assimilationist, hybrid-indigeno-migrant monster attack”… Just kidding.

Bibliography

Benjamin, Walter (1970a) “Theses on the Philosophy of History”, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana

——— (1970b) “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”, in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn, London: Fontana

——— (1986a) “The Author as Producer”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Shocken

——— (1986b) “The Destructive Character”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Shocken

——— (1986c) “Surrealism”, in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms and Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz, trans. Edmund Jephcott, New York: Shocken

Breton, Andre & Leon Trotsky (1968) “Manifesto: Towards a Free Revolutionary Art, 1938”, in Chipp (ed), Theories of Modern Art, University of California Press

Deleuze, Gilles & Félix Guattari (1983) Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Helen Lane and Mark Seem, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

——— (1987) A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Deleuze, Gilles (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

——— (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson & Robert Galeta, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Friedrich Engels (1972) “On Historical Materialism”, in Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton

Gabilondo, Joseba (1995) “Postcolonial Cyborgs: Subjectivity in the Age of Cybernetic Reproduction”, in Chris Hables Gray (ed), The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge

Guattari, Félix (1995) Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, trans. Paul Bains & Julian Pefanis, Sydney: Power Publications

Haraway, Donna (1991a) “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Routledge

——— (1991b) “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”, in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, London: Routledge

Hoh, Ben and Brian Massumi (1993) “Extremely Important: A Conversation About Qualities of Radicalism”, unpublished version

Jameson, Fredric (1991) “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism”, in Postmodernism, Or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, London: Verso

McLellan, David (ed) (1975) Marx, London: Fontana

Martin, Randy (1990) Performance as Political Act: The Embodied Self, New York: Bergin & Garvey

Marx, Karl & Friedrich Engels (1972) “The Communist Manifesto”, in Tucker (ed), The Marx-Engels Reader, New York: W.W. Norton

Massumi, Brian (1992) A user’s guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia: deviations from Deleuze and Guattari, Cambridge: MIT Press

——— (1993) “A Requiem For Our Prospective Dead: Towards a Participatory Critique of Capitalist Power”, unpublished version

Osborne, Peter (1994) “Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politics of Time”, in Andrew Benjamin & Peter Osborne (eds), Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience, London: Routledge

Penley, Constance and Andrew Ross (1991) “Cyborgs at Large: Interview with Donna Haraway”, in Penley and Ross (eds), Technoculture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

Sandoval, Chela (1995) “New Sciences: Cyborg Feminism and the Methodology of the Oppressed”, in Chris Hables Gray (ed), The Cyborg Handbook, New York: Routledge

Sivanandan, A. (1992) Communities of Resistance: Writings on Black Struggles for Socialism, London: Verso

Spivak, Gayatri (1987) In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics, foreword by Colin MacCabe, London: Routledge

——— & Sarah Harasym (1990) “Negotiating the Structures of Violence”, in Harasym (ed), The Postcolonial Critic: Inteviews, Strategies, Dialogues, London: Routledge

Wise, Christopher (1995) “(Post)Modernity/(Post)Coloniality: Mark Poster’s ‘A Second Media Age?’”, in Arena Journal, 5, 1995

Wozencroft, Jon (1994) The Graphic Language of Neville Brody 2, London: Thames and Hudson

[1] Although Trotskyism helped the Surrealists distance themselves from the bind of “Stalin versus capitalism”, it cannot help to create radical meanings, especially today. Leftists influenced by Trotsky’s Transitional Programme still try to teach the masses that social democracy is “not enough” by conspiring to lift their hopes, which will then be suitably disappointed by capitalism. Trotsky as the vacuum-cleaner salesman of Communism. It’s not surprising that for the (ex-Trotskyist) majority of the organised Left, the sales demonstration hasn’t even started. Meanwhile, the unorganised, postmodern-republican Left, taking its cues from Barry Jones and the Fabian Society, appears mired in the crypto-(clerical-)nationalist intellectual space typified by Eureka Street and endlessly incarnated in Arena, Pacifica, Meanjin, 21C and other ostensibly progressive versions of Quadrant. In our post-civil society, this fetishism is nothing more than unmoored window dressing for social democracy’s shift to neoliberalism [Guattari 1995]. However, this is not to say that such window dressing is insignificant; indeed, its unmoored status may be particularly potent and dangerous.

[2] The absence of “dictates from above” does not necessarily entail an escape. For example, many popular liberation movements in “the Third World” use molarising images of folk-culture to facilitate the “re-spiritualisation” of the masses. I mention this not as a dismissal, but to join a questioning that is already vigorously played out within revolutionary Third World art practices. Meanwhile, in “the First World”, the project of critiquing racist, patriarchal and capitalist representations of marginalised “identities” can run the danger of literalising the reified limits of the cultural commodity — veering into consumerist demands for properly utopian images, and promoting a seemingly-radical reformism of falling expectations by demanding the symbolic empowerment of represented subjects (as if cultural capital were still some object to be exchanged and redistributed, instead of a relation to be abolished). Here we can echo provocative Communist critiques that demonstrate the “latent Stalinism” of social democracy: crypto-consumerist criticism can be seen as the mirrored twin of socialist realism — another symbolic welfare state that manages the corporatist aestheticisation of the People. And the social democratic quagmire is precisely what we need to escape.

[3] For me, this kind of debate is most “clearly” enunciated (that is, in academic terms that also relate directly to partisan manoeuvrings) between student activists at university. For instance, the organisation of the Network Of Women Students in Australia (NOWSA) Conference in 1994 was centered on sectarian scuffles between the Leninists of the Democratic Socialist Party (who condemned “postmodernism” and “difference” as being antithetical to “united social movements”) and those who resisted totalisation. (When one considers the DSP's cheerful image as a colourful and multiple-issue-based organisation, factors of power and representation become critical.) In retrospect, many of the so-called “postmodernists” now regard the vitriol as farcical… and in the anti-DSP-popular-front, just how often was “difference” just an expression of plain old liberal pluralist anti-communism?

[4] In such a climate, it is not surprising that poststructuralist critics who wish to maintain a link to radical politics often abandon the grounding that makes radical action possible. The resultant “microscopic ultraleftism” — unwilling to lend its services to the totalising “massification” of oppositional projects — is liable to end up locating its radicalism-of-the-interstice within innovative projects of Capital. (I am specifically thinking here of Tony Fry's Ecodesign Foundation, for whom there are problematic politics everywhere… except BHP.) Bypassing even nihilistic abstentionism, this direction crystallises what many sceptical British critics have identified as the “left-wing Thatcherism” of Marxism Today's New Times project. See A. Sivanandan’s “All That Melts Into Air is Solid: The Hokum of New Times” [in Sivanandan 1992].

[5] See A. Sivanandan’s “Warren and the Third World” [in Sivanandan 1992]. Pro-imperialist theories of “progress” can be distinguished from other Marxist scepticisms about certain anti-imperialist projects that sincerely proclaim “national restoration” or a simplistic withdrawal from the international economy [cf. Deleuze and Guattari, 1983: 239].

[6] An excerpt: “So you just want more and more industrialisation?”; “Yes!”; “So you can build more and more steel mills?”; “Yes!”; “And so there’ll be steel mills everywhere?!”; “Yes!”; “And there’ll be nothing left, and we’ll be full of steel!?”; “Yes!!”; “Well that’s retarded!”…

[7] Indeed, perhaps Jameson’s Hegelianism is an awe-inspiring, pseudo-religious alternative to those idealist moralisms that attempt to sidestep the material imbrications of history. (Here, I would contrast religion with theology, the former having more to do with hierarchical systems of faithful movements.)

[8] The direction of Benjamin’s contribution to these theses is crystallised by Osborne when he detects a series of oppositions in Benjamin’s essay on Surrealism: “image/metaphor, action/contemplation, body/intellect, politics/morality, proletariat/bourgeoisie” [Osborne 1994: 67].

[9] This “imaging” reminds me of Jameson’s “cognitive mapping”, but the latter tends to suggest a crypto-humanist system of reflection and voluntarism that I wish to avoid.

[10] The apparent negation of Benjamin and Haraway’s enthusiasm by the experience of co-option does not mean that they were naïve or that their time has past, as Joseba Gabilondo sadly asserts in “Postcolonial Cyborgs: Subjectivity in the Age of Cybernetic Reproduction” [1995]. If this were so, then “labour-power” was superceded by “Capital” at the victorious instant of the wage system’s institution — an impossible event, given that exploitation, by definition, must harness powers that it lacks. Thus, Benjamin’s heady comment that “[t]he distinction between the author and the public is about to lose its basic character” [Benjamin 1970b: 234] is qualified by his realisation that “the capitalistic exploitation of the film denies consideration to modern man’s legitimate claim to be reproduced” [Benjamin 1970b: 234]. (Similarly, to appreciate the revolutionary possibilities of the Internet’s productive conditions in no way forecloses the common observation that “the Internet” itself is not only a replication of various institutional evils, but also usually a disappointing waste of time.) Reducing cinema to its commodity-identity merely reinforces the totalising. fetishistic logic of capitalist reification.

In this context it is instructive to note that not even the staunchest critics of historical materialism’s supposed metanarrativity would read Marx as being naîvely “pro-capitalist”; for Marx, the institution of capitalism must clearly be smashed, especially in the frustrating light of the revolutionary capacities that it makes possible. So by analogy, arguments against acknowledging the revolutionary possibilities of certain technologies are also arguments against “economies”, “production per se” and, by extension, the possibility that people are capable of creating satisfying lives for themselves. “Hope” is not self-deluded optimism or a mindless insitence on maintaining “morale”; rather, its desire — indeed, “desire” itself — is the ability to productively and realistically engage with the world… thus locating one’s capacity for correct analysis within praxis.

[11] Please note that the typesetting of “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” in the 1973 Fontana edition of Benjamin’s Illuminations contains a grievous error. Instead of being “completely useless for the purposes of Fascism,” and “useful for the formulation of revolutionary demands” [Benjamin 1970b: 220], this particular edition figures Benjamin’s theses as “completely useless for the formulation of revolutionary demands”, and thus completely counter to his meaning. Given that earlier, expurgated versions of “The Work of Art…” have already lead some commentators to completely misread Benjamin on the loss of the aura, please pass on this warning in any future references to the essay.

[12] And, perhaps unfortunately for Wark, this kind of (non-reactive) assessment is free to be applied to the style (but probably not the blank fact) of his entanglement with commerciality.

[13] This elemental quality is what Christopher Wise misses when he accuses Deleuze and Guattari of crypto-imperialism by juxtaposing “deterritorialisation” with Third World experiences of dispossession and atomisation [Wise 1995]. To be provocative: would Wise have let someone die of gangrene in Qing Dynasty China because amputation was, at that time and place, the pure incarnation of State violence? When Deleuze and Guattari advocate a revolution of “absolute deterritorialisation”, then, they are not calling for natural disasters, but for the atomisation of liberal democracy’s totalising capacities [cf. Conley, in Deleuze 1993] through Communism.

[14] This death of the museum is the death of its archaic concept and the viability of institutions built solely on such concepts; in this death agony, witness the proliferation of flexible, hi-tech and politically correct corporate art galleries and museums. Also, making such analyses in no sense means siding with capital. Take, for instance, the case of the tertiary education system, which is being further streamlined for the interests of capital, to which many protestors respond with cries for the defense of “the university”. These kinds of protestations, which ignore the question of whether we want a qualitatively different society, are exactly why education activism, regardless of much of its ultra-oppositional rhetoric, has remained reactive and qualitatively non-Communist, though many organised Left groups may conveniently appropriate the movement’s reactive energies. In contrast to this farce, but not appreciating the political complexities of this dilemma, my acquaintance Oliver Feltham recently declared that “we should not mourn the death of the university”, meaning the collection of repressive archaisms that is being destroyed by capital. While this is correct, it is easy to then misread oneself and thus identify with capital by default (which could be why Oliver works for the Ecodesign Foundation). Instead, student cyborgs must fight “oppositional” neo-archaisms and rage against the machine, by first questioning how and why they are being made conveniently and quietly competent for th