antipopper

A message for Shane (my emails to you are bouncing): I was only whining.

Anyway, the thing about the culture jamming panel was that I’d constructed a subtle argument that I tried to elaborate by showing slide after slide, but which ended up going sideways for various reasons. I said all this stuff about moving away from slogans and rhetoric in radical visual work, which came off sounding like hippie liberalism. What got left behind was my argument that the demands of leftist sloganeering tend to reinforce a corporatist “public” in relation to the State, and that the uncanny disappearance of demands/slogans could herald a manifestation of political potentials that refuse mediation. Brian Massumi (quoting Negri at the end):

Toni Negri, responding to certain patterns he sees emerging from such disparate events as the French student movement of 1986, Tiananmen Square, and the upheavals in Eastern Europe in 1989, sees the emergence of a new mode of collective action for change — one this is radically anti-ideological and non-polemical (even silent: the French students not only refused to delegate media spokespeople or negotiators, but in their largest demonstration carried no placards and shouted no slogans): “Any reformist approach is impossible… Utopia is impossible… Only a void of determinations, the absolute lack of the social bond, can define an alternative. Only the practice of the inconsistency of the social bond is capable of revolution. Tiananmen and Berlin represent masses of disaggregated individuals asserting themselves, in untimely fashion, on the stage of power. They constitute a potential, void of positive determinations, presenting itself as a radical alternative. They have nothing to say… Pure potential… Democracy as the constituent power of the multitude.“

I was talking to my friend Tasj about this the other day, and she commented that being confronted with a multitude of French students who weren’t chanting slogans or making demands, but who were instead resolute in their rejection of the current system, would have been reason enough for absolute panic on the part of the State. Nothing to mediate. Indeed, this panic would have no doubt extended (in part) to student representative organisations and unions, confronted with a short-circuit in their mediating role. Similarly, Giorgio Agamben observes that the literality of the Tiananmen students’ demands and general rhetoric was inconsequential and indeed rather fluffy, and not the root of the Chinese State’s reaction. Rather, it was their unmediable demonstration of a desire to congregate in an unsanctioned way for fundamental social change to which the State responded with such paranoid ultraviolence. The Chinese students’ rhetoric was relatively unimportant, and not what was at stake. (The reservation I have about Negri and Agamben’s analysis is that it’s all too easy to prefer atomisation to any kind of social project that might happen to be tinged with corporatism.)

I’ve made similar observations about what happened at Woomera: the shit that went down — irrespective of much of the dubious rhetoric floating around about “getting political mileage” from the situation — was not only an escape from physical confinement, but also from representation, from pat political nominalism, from national narratives. That is why I chose to make placards for May Day 2002 that were just huge photos of people escaping from Woomera (and resisting the Israeli lockdown of Palestine), without any words whatsoever. Rather than transmit truths to the Masses or make clientilist demands of the State, I was trying to make palpable our invitation, suffused in “our” actions (the escape from Woomera, the blockade of the ACM offices), to get into he groove, as Madonna would say. An invitation to the state of emergency.

On a related note, one session of Electrofringe that I found really interesting was Jonah Brucker-Cohen‘s new-media art work on manifesting the virtual. Brucker-Cohen’s installations make the hidden actions of human-computer interactions physically and absurdly palpable. “Streaming media” means using water’s physical properties to build a computer network. “Search engine” means a lawnmower ripcord starter that you have to pull in order get the results that then seem to spew from a turbine. “Infrastructure” means an electric drill that damages the structure of an actual building every time you “hit” a certain website. Many would simply write this off as an exercise in punning literalism, but there’s something vital underneath the wordplay that lies in direct contrast to literalism: in making previously transparent transactions so clumsy and in-your-face, Brucker-Cohen is attempting a practical critique of HCI models that obsess about the endless nuances of the interface as a text that can simply be read in a disembodied manner. Rather accept the detached rhetoric of the interface, Brucker-Cohen’s work demonstrates to us how we are constantly imbricated in certain actions in the world. This kind of “manifesting the virtual” makes a mockery of the usual cyberwank ideas of “the virtual” being a predictable set of disembodied representations and equivalences; rather, the virtual is the reality that is unspoken. Thus, the question: how can we, like Jonah Brucker-Cohen, demonstrate the unspeakable, rather than going to disheartening “demonstrations”? How can we manifest the virtual? How can we make it happen? We have to make the desires that circulate amongst us palpable, often in absurd and unsettling ways.