March 2003 Archives

I started thinking about a few things in an email exchange with Shane, but these thoughts got so self-involved that they really belonged here... :-)

In the rambling conclusion to his book Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Fredric Jameson makes a vivid but troubling argument: that the oft-noted "nostalgia for [old-skool] class politics" in the face of the "new social movements" might actually be a "nostalgia" for politics tout court, and that calling this "nostalgia" is as useful as calling one's hunger before dinner "a nostalgia for food". Obviously, he's making an intervention against the fashionable claims of the 1980s that class had somehow disappeared, but I've always been appalled by the way he does this: by (i) levelling a myriad of struggles -- not unrelated to class in the very least -- to a pathetic kind of apolitical pluralism that provides an alibi for capitalist exploitation, and thus (ii) implicitly defending the authenticity of socialist "class politics" -- that potential grandaddy of unacknowledged and often authoritarian identity politics -- from any possible complications. I don't doubt the capacity for corporatist beytrayals amongst "new social movements", but it's probably as high as it is for Jameson's fond memories of "class politics". Just what is politics, tout court, to Jameson? In a recent debate with the SWP (via Steve Wright), Jameson's friend Michael Hardt nobly faces the problem of nostalgic (and necessarily exclusionary) visions of "the working class" with these words: "this is the very bad tradition on our shoulders". He also notes that these kinds of ridiculous choices -- between the programmatised identity of "the working class" and "difference" -- have finally bitten the dust with the recent rise of global anticapitalist networks, in which the practice of acting-in-common raises a kind of radical ethics above the tussles of mutually antagonistic identity-maintenance.

I have my own limited relationship with these questions. Yesterday, as I cleaned out our biohazardous fridge, I was reminded of a time, almost ten years ago, when I did the same at Kirsten's place in Newtown. (They had an eggplant that had somehow been reduced to a transparent and gelatinous shadow of itself. And that night, Tasj taught me how to make pesto, which I've been doing ever since with great gusto.) Fast forward to the recent weekend of Kirsten's wedding -- I don't remember a time in recent memory when I've seen so many old Left Alliance people. There was a bunch of old friends at the Iraq/Palestine fundraiser the night before, and at the wedding there was only a handful of people of our age who weren't old LA hacks. It was good to see them. I'm not fond of LA nostalgia, but a recent answer by Steve Wright to a query on an email list made me smile:

LA was Left Alliance, a national student organisation of the late eighties/early nineties. From it have come a range of interesting people prominent in many political activities here (in particular, around the detention camps, but also in the antiwar movement, the recently evicted social centre in Sydney etc). Former LA members have also been prominent in the publicity and discussion of Italian theory in Australia...

And last year, it was Sergio who wondered out loud why every other leftist cult churns out cadres who often eventually flee political engagement forever, while there are ex-LA people still out there, stubbornly engaging, and yet not so attached to their own political nostalgia, and open to new things. Obviously, this in itself is a mild form of nostalgia, but it raises some interesting questions. I think that despite its considerable faults, LA was boosted by a critical level of political agnosticism -- a general distrust of other people's structures that were obviously there for authoritarian control (e.g. various Leninist party apparatuses and programmes, despite the fact that some of us were actually Leninists), leavened by an appreciation of structures that could facilitate democratic processes; a distrust of easily labelled political identities for their own sake (paranoid Leninism, anarchism, etc.), leavened by a priority for feminism that was wary of the way issues of gender could easily fall off the map without a clear affiliation.

As for LA's relationship with the problematic that Jameson and Hardt dance out, and with more current questions brought by "autonomy", elements of our critical culture prefigured the current disgust at choosing between the identity of the "working class" and "difference" (which was always bizarrely paraded by the Leninist parties as the struggle between "identity politics" or "postmodernism" on one hand and "Marxism" on the other). But in our overestimation of policy as a "stage" for politics, and despite our commitment to various activist collectives, we only scratched the surface of how those insights could be given practical experimentation. And despite a vague enthusiasm for the general assortment of post-May '68 anti-authoritarian revolutionisms (Negri was read before he was hyper-fashionable, the ISO and DSP routinely written off with Situationist disdain), the most obvious impact this had on the organisation was our penchant for producing obscure propaganda, in the manner of various Semiotext(e) and Autonomedia productions, that made the Leninist cults angry.

Ensconced in our representative student organisations, there was no context for debates about how to organise on the ground in mass mobilisations. Our skills at factional maneouvering and delivering theoretically biting critiques of our enemies were great, but they also made us overwhelmingly academic; we had none of the often non-rhetorical skills needed for moving within other social spaces, to establish trust towards engaging in actions that didn't involve getting the numbers (no matter how nobly).

Towards the end of my time in LA, I'd developed an interest in affinity groups as a mode of organising (outside the orthodox anarchist ghetto), and a fascination with the way parts of the European far left were engaging in grass-roots fashion with questions of power in urban space. No doubt others were on a similar track. But I was really in another (tired) place, practically, and these questions were left hanging. I started working. Feh. And since I never wanted my politics to be framed by my work, I began working in the culture industry, while my politics went into writing naff metaphorical plays about the urban power relations of postapocalyptic zombie cities. And I still wonder if that's where they belong...

[I've redone this blog in Movable Type, mainly because Blogger simply wasn't working for me this week. Anyway, using MT means that commenting is now active for the, um, three people that read this thing... And yes, one day I'll make everything much sexier... Oh, and it displays badly if you're using Internet Explorer for Windows. And after all the Mac exclusion I practice at work every day, I don't give a shit.]

The image of Dead Girl gazing somewhat listlessly at her plate of four peas in the latest X-Statix has cheered me somewhat. So yeah, I was at the comics shop for the longest time today. Was sorely tempted to get the absolutely gorgeous X-Force hardback (which collects the current team's run before they changed the name to X-Statix), even though I've got most of the monthlies. The reason X-Force/X-Statix works so well is its stunning ambivalence. Too many people confuse irony with disdainful sarcasm, and while Peter Milligan and Mike Allred have obviously made X-Statix a biting play on celebrity culture (in which our fallible mutant superheroes are actually a dubious marketing franchise), the soap-operatics genuinely work, just like New X-Men, the other X-title I read. Like all good pop, it still engages, and still loves its own genre. Keepin' it, uh, unreal.

I was actually also tempted to get Ashley Wood's popbot collection, but was kinda put off by the self-conscious artsiness of it all, not to mention the slightly monotonous and fetishistic sexism (how many "kinky", "half-naked women + robot" pictures can one draw, even if they are so fabulously rendered?). He has an undoubtedly terrific technique, especially when he draws like early period Andy Warhol, but it's a little overbaked. He needs a breatheable framework for his talents -- maybe something like the excellent Weak Tea Man ("enemy of Tannin, champion of the subtle brew"), which ran in a Sydney student mag about fourteen years ago, and was full of trashy meditations on having a huge tea bag for a head, and the totalising perils of modernist architecture (I kid you not -- WTM has a tussle with Modulor Man, Le Corbousier's universalist model of human movement as function). At the moment Wood's art for Joe Casey's Automatic Kafka is gorgeous, but that book seems to be an interesting but perhaps unwise attempt to out-Morrison Grant Morrison. Another superhero-as-franchise story, Kafka isn't nearly as engaging as X-Statix, either.

On the weekend I finally got to tell Tanya that she reminds me of someone out of a Paul Pope book.

There, all the comics out of my system. Next.

Oh yeah, Channel Zero: Jennie One by Brian Wood has been rocking my world.

A strange, sad week.

Am having thoughts about how revolutionaries (and other people interested in direct action or other concrete interventions) need to get ourselves out of a slave mentality in relation to the right wing of the antiwar movement. Some of us go to these big rallies to show visible and offensive defiance to the conservative antiwar lobby, get frustrated by the lack of room to move in such spectacular spaces, and then get demoralised. Some of us avoid going to these big rallies, preferring to work in less coded spaces, but often cede ground to the right in the process, or disappear into the ghettoised social interstices, equating the dubious "need" to communicate to an imaginary "public" with the very necessary task of popular engagement. Both positions have honourable motivations (I've oscillated between them often enough), but I can't help but think that both unconsciously replicate an Oedipal relationship with the movement's (parental) leadership. Obsessing over those who would control us can distract us from the possible. The sometimes violent marshalling of the rallies is very real (on Sunday the leadership hired fuckin' private security to beat people up who stepped the barest fraction out of line), but it's also a trap. Can't we just sidestep the trap of reactivity that lurks behind these issues, and draw lines of flight? Can't we be truly autonomous? (And to make a point that needs underlining in this sometimes overly tribal era, "autonomous" needn't mean separate. Or absent. Or laissez faire.)

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I'm really cut up over leaving, on the weekend, a certain virtual community into which I've made huge emotional investments over the past year. In the middle of my recent thoughts about sidestepping reactivity, it was ironic that the issue that led to my tearful departure was the apparent "narcissism" and childishness of direct action, which seemed obvious to a lot of people there, some of them friends. The actions in San Francisco, in which people have been out in the streets continuously for days in an attempt to shut down the city, are in many ways a beacon of hope for me, a kind of proof that something good in the this world is still possible, that alienated kids organising together can still affect the smooth running of a war society. That people I respect had so much casual contempt for these actions was crushing. But it was the structure of that dismissal, that smug overeagerness (using whatever bankrupt or even protofascist justifications available) to construct oneself as the embodiment of the reasonable citizen, that made me leave. I couldn't stay in such an ethico-political arrangement where these are the standards of behaviour, and I believe that in the case of this community, they ironically are, despite people's best intentions. "Civility" was supposed to be the social lubrication of this place, and to my surprise it often worked, but as in the wider world, this has an unavoidable dark side: the compulsive and often repressive maintenance of our pretense of "civilisation". But this was one of the few places in the world where I could feel okay being vulnerable, and now that's gone. I feel cheated by liberalism. And I miss the friends I have there.

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Listening to: a whole bunch of angsty, broody music. The Manic Street Preachers' Know Your Enemy. Yes, I know they're embarrassing, but I can't listen to shiny R&B pop when I'm this depressed. I need that earnest lack of poise that only bombastic white boys with guitars can deliver.

For five years, we always avoided having yum cha at the Chinese restaurant up the road, mainly because My Mother Said So. Yesterday we transgressed that dictum with Bobbie and David, and for hours after our delicious feast, our heads were exploding with what must have been megatons of MSG. I felt like taking off my Darth Vader breath-mask ("but you'll die!" "nothing can stop that now...") and sighing with my last breath, "tell my mother, she was right about them... she was riiight..."

I haven't really warmed to much humour about the War on Everything, but this wonderful abuse of Homeland Security's information graphics made me laugh so much the tears pinned me down to the floor and I was unable to get up.

Lena and I felt a bit ill last night, and couldn’t sleep, so we decided to watch a Buster Keaton video I bought at a $2 shop over Christmas. The man walks on water! I hadn’t seen any of Keaton’s stuff for ages (a few years ago we saw Our Hospitality with a live bluegrass accompaniment — unbelievably good), and I had my mouth open the whole time. (Lena sometimes has to reach over and physically close my jaw when I watch movies.)

We saw Sherlock Jr, which has the most incredible movie-within-a-movie sequence, which gets carried away with itself and runs for half the film! Keaton plays a movie projectionist, wrongly accused of pickpocketing his beloved’s father. Dejected, he falls asleep on the job, into an astral-travelling state. He walks up the aisle of the cinema, towards the screen, onto which is projected a quickly intercut sequence from the movie he’s been projecting. In the middle of that sequence, which in the wider shot is continually framed by the “real” cinema location, he jumps into the on-screen world. If that weren’t enough, he’s unprepared for the shot-to-shot cuts. {Bang}, he’s in the middle of a busy street. {Bang}, he’s in a garden. All seamlessly done, with his position tracked accurately. Each shot gets successively heterotopic, too — a forest, the ocean — and felt like the meditative, “aspect to aspect” panel cuts in manga that Scott McCloud studies in Understanding Comics).

Watching this work of intense playfulness, I realised that the usual, bankrupt, highbrow dismissals of “contemporary” Hollywood blockbusters — that movies have recently become a thin excuse for action setpieces and showcases for visual effects — could all be appallingly applied to Keaton’s work in the 1920s, which really is about setpieces and effects, rather than character development and coherent plot. The thing is that Keaton’s work, like a lot of excellent contemporary Hollywood blockbusters — lives through those “superficial” things to brilliant effect. Which is what a lot of the experience of film should be about. Then I realised that Lena was alseep.

Okay, so my last post was an utter wankfest. To make up for this, I'll make an admission: straight after Solaris, we snuck into another movie. It was Maid in Manhattan. (Alas, there was only one good moment: getting to see a Republican politician's advisor say, in response to a question about his boss's relations with the Latin community, that "he speaks Latin".)

Lovely day with Lena and her cousins. On Kirsten’s recommendation we saw Solaris, which was wonderfully meditative and crystalline, if lacking in viscerality. I perversely enjoyed the over-the-top ranting by one of the scientists about how the Visitors, those alien reanimations of missing loved ones, Weren’t Human and that she wanted the Humans to Win, by any means necessary, even if it meant disintegrating the Visitors, who have no apparent agenda. Rather than overindulge in Star Trek-style moral conundrums, which only occurred to me later, the film brought oblique thoughts of the Turing Test, of the ever-shifting project of artificial intelligence, of the many Evil Demons of philosophy.

The movie has substantively little to do with AI per se, but a lot of its practical, everyday questions – how do we recognise each other as human? how do we make the gestures that signify ourselves as human? – turn nicely with that discipline’s changing brief and fortunes. Despite its loaded objective – to determine what is adequately sentient – the Turing Test is never transparently definitive, and is echoed by the wonderful dictum of one of the Visitors: “there are no answers, only choices”. The Test hinges on an interviewer deciding whether a remote interviewee is sentient, based on a comprehensive conversation. However dodgy, it is all about the practical ethics of decision, rather than a checklist of internal, known, structural requirements for intelligence. And while the Visitors in Solaris are assumed to be sentient, the debatable anthropocentric value of “humanity” in the film nevertheless resonates with the discourse of AI.

I’m reminded by Phoebe Sengers’ idea that the work of creating “agents” via “artificial intelligence” can never be some transcendent, Tower-of-Babel-type enterprise, and is always a reflexive, interpretive kind of cultural work in itself, whether we like it or not. Every attempt to create an effective, socially interactive agent is a grounded, knowing story about our own milieu. Every agent is a question: what does this construct say about us? And what does this approach say about our attempts to live our lives? Upon his apparent return home in Solaris, George Clooney’s character reflects on how he “rebecomes human” by successfully participating in the contextual gestures that constitute society. I guess the real ending ups the ante on how much those gestures float in suspension, so “inessential” and yet so necessary.

Perhaps the unexplained heavenly body that is Solaris is really like a dense point in a crystal solution of our ideas about sociality. When humans are introduced to that space, our loving memory of the gesture cannot help but solidify and grow like crystals at that point. In a sensory deprivation tank, we float in salty water to re-experience the womb, to put the ego to rest, to temporarily re-establish the polymorphous. Perhaps Solaris is an unabashedly “mutant womb”, a critical, concretising tank of solution that perversely builds (inter-)personality-simulations as a dramatic theatre of the social, a testing ground for social models, a prototyping space. “Hard fax” tanks, in which actual 3D objects can be reproduced by congealing a solution via the intersection of lasers, are now a reality, and are employed in real prototyping processes. And it’s hardly a coincidence that the space station orbiting Solaris is the Prometheus, named for the Titan who shaped humans from clay (that tried and true prototyping substance) in Greek mythology. And it was Prometheus who, as punishment for bringing fire to humanity, was chained to a mountain for an eagle to feast on his liver, which would then magically regenerate the next day, just like the Visitors, who reappear when sent away and who are mysteriously resurrected after (self-inflicted) mortal injury. And for the Greeks, the liver was the seat of consciousness, not the brain. Perhaps this is where the movie’s missing viscerality can be found...

The Past = Another Planet. The plenty-reviled (but actually truly excellent) Plunkett & Maclean may have attempted such a formulation with a good dose of irony, but Gangs of New York, which I caught this afternoon, is an earnest stab at making a historical drama as if it were postapocalyptic science fiction. It doesn't always work -- as a "human story" it fell rather flat -- but what does succeed is the uncanny ambience, which makes everything feel familiar and yet simultaneously mutant, as if we were in an alternate universe. I wonder what comics creator Paul Pope, who makes New York-based science fiction as if it were a period piece, thinks of Scorsese's film. I think he'd be into the clothes. I certainly wouldn't mind a pair of Daniel Day-Lewis' drainpipes...

I feel barely human after the killer deadline (hence my short posts of late). All the madness, just for this: the silly Lee Jeans website. Hours and hours of late night digital photography, DV camerawork, endless Photoshopping, video editing, Flash crises... I guess the best thing about the site is that you can abuse it by sending naughty graffiti postcards of defaced photos from the catalogue to all your friends. I started doing this as soon as we sent it live. Picture of a boy and girl humping on top of a fridge = "FUCK THE WAR, LET'S FUCK". Picture of a boy with gold chains = "YOU HAVE NOTHING TO LOSE BUT YOUR CHAINS". Etcetera.

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Am absolutely furious with the latest issue of Adbusters. I've said this elsewhere before, but while I'm obviously sympathetic to the whole anti-corporate culture-jamming mission, I'm somewhat dubious about the tendency for anti-consumerist types to fetishise "brands" as being the ultimate evil -- a move which I think is a tragic misattribution of the way power operates in culture and the wider material world, which leads to an impotent politics of product boycotts and the like. This kind of phobic disavowal of mass culture is actually quite reactionary, I find, and is a covert form of commodity fetishism, deflecting analysis away from how society is actually organised.

But nothing prepared me for the amount of self-righteous, moralistic bile in this current issue. So much smug, self-satisfied sneering at people too ordinary to be enlightened, bicycle-riding vegetarians. An almost religious (and certainly feudal) mythology of "Nature" being the antidote to all that is "artificial". The branding of anyone who wears products with logos on them as corporate zombies and whores who love to exploit people in the Third World. Hell, I'm a corporate whore with the best of them -- I even work at a company that does PR work for Nike, ferchrissakes -- and even I can tell, from a revolutionary perspective, that this is moralistic nonsense.

Don't get me wrong, Adbustery types: I think any revolt against alienation must include some enjoyable smashing of the commodities that often dull us, and which certainly paper over the material relations of production. Just be prepared for the idea that the people who most often do this kind of thing in everyday life are the unenlightened, Nike wearing zombies you so despise.