antipopper

Modulating vocabularies of trauma and mundanity in refugee blogs

Ben Hoh, University of Technology, Sydney

Delivered at the BlogTalk Downunder conference, Sydney 2005

Abstract: What happens when stories of suffering collide with details of the mundane in blogs? Reading the writings of refugee bloggers in a recent community cultural development project called “Storybox” as a kind of allegorical labour, this paper explores the ways in which the accretive and fragmentary aspects of the medium contribute to the shifting modulation of “occult” vocabularies that transgress notions of the public and private. This suggests a mode of culture whose basis is somewhere other than “everyday life”. Cinematic and comic-book allegories for this mode are also considered, as are the relationships of the Storybox project and trauma to aporias of design (and) literacy.

What’s going on when people blog about terrible, almost unspeakable things that might have happened to them, and when they blog about their cat? What does it mean to bear witness in fragments that might be at once profoundly painful or mundane, or more interestingly, both? What modes of culture are elaborated by these kinds of expression?

In 2004 I coordinated Storybox, a small writing project for young refugees, using blogging as a medium. The Storyboxers experimented with ways to write about listening to dancehall pop star Sean Paul, for example, or growing up dealing with systematic abuse in a refugee camp — both types of experience were “everyday” ones for many of these people. It was a rewarding experiment, which I hope contributed a little to the participants’ capacities for autonomous expression. But when I tried to bypass the affective nature of their involvement in my first attempt to write this paper (which was originally going to be more about design and political theory), I found myself blocked. In the language of “trauma studies”, it was as if I myself faced an impossible task of representation. But following Giorgio Agamben’s insistence that just going along with the “unsayable” character of Auschwitz simply puts it on a pedestal as an object of worship (Agamben 2002: 32), I realised that rather than let my dilemma of representation freeze me in an act of genuflection, I’d have to grapple with what I’d put in the “too-hard basket”. I knew that these experiences weren’t ready to conveniently instrumentalised without a difficult kind of “accounting”– not in a way that attempted closure, but through a fragmentary, allegorical kind labour that makes suggestions.

My publicly expressed aims for Storybox were all about measurable outcomes: “literacy”, “learning computer skills” and “access to the public sphere” for young refugees in Western Sydney. To a degree, such aims are congruent with the project of incorporating new migrants into the nation-state, which is scary, but also a knowing strategy for communities to pragmatically survive under the present order. But we also smuggled in more interesting goals that drew practically from the traditions of social action and radical pedagogy:

• problematising the concept of “literacy”;

• participating in a vague form of “narrative therapy”;

• creating new modes of expression amongst and across communities;

• building new knowledges by thinking critically about one’s own experiences;

• exploring the distinctions between private and public life; and

• creating alternatives to the bourgeois public sphere.

The workshops took place over several weeks, with different groups of young people — the participants were teenagers from Afghanistan, Sudan, Congo, Burundi and Sierra Leone. The group of young Africans had been in Australia for less than six months, and most had never really used computers, leading to an incredibly concentrated encounter with computers, net infrastructures and information systems. On the other hand, most of the young Afghan Storyboxers had been in Australia for five years, and were comfortable using the Internet. (One young Afghan woman had never met her best friend, with whom she corresponded exclusively via email.)

Vocabularies of Witnessing

One of the major reasons that blogging had been identified as a potentially interesting medium for refugee writers was its relative anonymity; whether through formal anonymity or via a nested, dissociative displacement of contexts, perhaps the weird, “floating” nature of writing the self online would provide an amount of safety against which participants could feel freer to explore traumatic memories. But against conventional narrative therapy’s humanist concept of “externalisation through storytelling”, which attempts to extricate a pre-existing, coherent subject from systems of power, our opening of the “can of worms” that comes with traumatic memory was always about leveraging the aggregative, fragmentary potentials of the blogging medium, which tend away from the assumption of unities. We were thus careful not to assume a teleology of closure, not to offer participants a prefabricated model of expression in which their testimony — in addition to perhaps being therapeutic or politically vital — would somehow magically restore a lost wholeness. As Little White Secrets, one of our Sierra Leonean bloggers, viscerally declares:

[T]he only image most children like me know are the images of atrocities, the misery from chopping of hands, limbs and other parts of the body; to rape; kidnapping and forcing young boys and girls into the army. most scenarios become all too familiar that it becomes too difficult to let them go. As a child i have seen my house burn down. i have seen people killed. i have seen people take their last breath. This trauma will never go away. (Little White Secrets 2005: permalink, emphasis added)

This generalised severing of bodies becomes an almost ecological trauma, a landscape of injury that forecloses the temptation to fall into the waiting arms of rehumanising cliches. Despite the boundless energy on display throughout her blog, Little White Secrets betrays no illusions of eventual transcendence, invoking instead the promises of vectors of change, of perpetual contingency:

Life is like a temporary group, that dissolve when they achieve their goal… Sometimes we set a goal in our lifes, that we never achieve. (Little White Secrets 2005: permalink)

The tone isn’t mournful, just merely ambivalent — even hopeful. And by engaging with the blog form’s serial open-endedness, such aphoristic fragments can be accreted into suggestive formations over time. The partial, temporal bricolage of blogging also means all our coordinates could very well fall apart around the corner. Denis Sado, the only Storybox participant comfortable with blogging under his real name, would often outline memories and issues in logistical and institutional terms; for example, his description of the Dadaab refugee camp in Kenya:

There are food distribution which usually done every forthnight, and this done by CARE Kenya logistic sector. UNHCR is responsible for keeping refugees security and protection. And GTZ-IS is responsible for health stutus in the camp while GTZrescue responsible for firewood and maintaining forest plantation around the camp. (Sado 2005: permalink)

But then this would be punctuated by occasional, furtive disclosures:

I do remember and never forget what reall happened to my dad when we were going with him to school”the bomb fell on the ground i didn’t know what happeded and at last found my dad laying down dead”I HATE TALKING ABOUT THIS! (Sado 2005: permalink)

It seems almost obscene to quote this — to reenact the making-public of this memory. And Denis obviously found it obscene to write his story in the first place. But the problem of reenactment leads to precisely the point that has been plaguing me: the “public” of a quasi-academic conference paper is incredibly different from the “public” to which Denis made this evidently difficult disclosure. This practical negotiation of multiple “publics” is one of the main reasons that makes this paper uncomfortable to write: the act of contextual translation hurts. But this multiplicity also heralds an infinity of possibilities, and it is the witnessing of witnessing that leads to the undoing of positions, and hence to critique, as Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub note in Testimony (1992), their study of trauma in literature.

The Storybox blogs demonstrate that storytelling via accretion not only enables different registers to be deployed from post to post, but can also enable something else entirely. NaturallySweet, a young Afghan woman, recently visited Afghanistan and met relatives and friends of the family after years of absence, so she blogged about the true story of a female friend in Afghanistan — recalling events that have recently passed, or which are even transpiring now, but in the seemingly “timeless”, almost allegorical language of fairytale:

Her great grandfather was the leader of 6 Big Colonies. He used to own a horse which was very dear and used 2 wear a gold necklace which at the time no one at all could afford 2 have. He had 2 wives and from them two he had 5 sons and 5 daughters alltogether… “A.H” (who’s Aziza’s- father) got married as well and had 2 sons and 2 daughters. They were very poor which resulted from draught and war; they couldn’t plant their crops and had nothing to eat and survive during the war times….

… for a few years he struggling to do this till one day he gave up because he got sick and there was no way at all dat he could medicate himself or see a doctor at that time because he was very poor and no one else as well could help him because they were also very poor!

SO HE DIED!

he died of depression, poverty, post traumatic shock and heart attack!

(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)

The creeping use of numerical shorthand and the vernacular use of “dat” foreshadow her utterly contemporary diagnosis of “depression, poverty, post traumatic shock and heart attack”, which interrupts the spell — the sense of safety created by the virtual, temporal buffer zone of myth. This interruption is a clue that something else is going on. This is confirmed when her friend Aziza’s father dies; the children fall under her grandfather’s care, and her sister is given away for marriage:

So when J (her older sister) turned 14 her grandpa then gives her away to an old man aged 5o yrs old and technically sells her and yah!

SO SLACK OF HIM- HE MUST’VE BEEN AN ARSE HOLE

(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)> (NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)

Rather than read this fantastic eruption as a clanging inconsistency or an aesthetic failure, it can be seen instead as something new: in Deleuzoguattarian terms, it signals a “plane of consistency” (Deleuze and Guattari, 1987) — obviously not a homogenous zone, but consistent in a way that involves disparate elements held together with a common intensity: a style. After a period of acclimatisation to the scene of the Storybox project, NaturallySweet was evidently comfortable enough with this style to write about the loss of her father in the following terms:

I don’t know man i had a post-traumatic-shock about wat had happened 2 me… I lost someone so dear that can not be priced because it’s too dear 2 me and nothing compares t him. I lost my father who i rarely knew because he kept going and coming out of the country inorder to feed us.

(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)

Her rendering of traumatic memory in the vocabulary of “teen-speak” (and “AOL-speak”, or even “SMS-speak”) desacralises those memories, but I think it is important to resist any urge to characterise this as a euphemistic symptom of suturing — a mere “papering-over” of trauma with the “inadequate” language of the mundane in the absence of a more “appropriate” or “respectful” poetic capacity. And yet NaturallySweet’s modulation of trauma is unnerving, because while the function of her vernacular abbreviations is clearly intimate, they usually signify trivia. For instance, first consider this entry:

hey everybody i’m at skool right now and am soooooooooo borrrrrrrred i’m half asleep right now oki ta ta

smell ya later u bootiful ppl

(NaturallySweet 2005: [permalink](a href=”http://naturallysweet.blogspot.com/2004/10/borrrrrrrring.html))

Now consider her repetition of the teen-vernacular “sooooooooo” — usually reserved for the exaggerated inflection of the apparent inconsequentialities of “everyday life” — in relation to the rise of the Taliban:

my journey begun when i was only 11 years old and that’s for a girl living under the regime of vicious groups that came out of no where and thought “oh yeah baby lets attack Afghanistan and kill the innocent ppl, and separate the men from their women” i mean that’s just sooooooooooooooooo devastating…

(NaturallySweet 2005: permalink)

It is absolutely clear that she isn’t trivialising the issue, but what is going on here? In an underlying traumatic context in which no words are adequate, the rhizomatic medium of the blog can support, among other things, a move beyond mere shifts in tone between fragmentary entries, and towards a mutual becoming minor (in the Deleuzoguattarian sense of straying from models of normality) of all available vocabularies within the flow of a single sentence. I would suggest that NaturallySweet is assembling mutant, ambivalent registers that cross-contaminate our preconceived notions of private and public, staging an encounter between the crystalline prose of myth and language of the mundane, and creating hybrid vernaculars that are neither. So it is not really a matter of what these new vernaculars “actually mean” in a representational sense, but what they enable: a reconception of what used to be the spheres of everyday life and the political, into something else — into whatever space that can be apprehended with such a vocabulary. Call it “the neveryday” — an alternative platform upon which de Certeau’s model of “textual poaching” (de Certeau 1984) can be modified; in de Certeau’s model, the poacher is forever destined to be guerilla-as-loyal-opposition to “the writer”, but a “neveryday” mode of enunciation is more waywardly “queer” and less heroic, and yet also seems necessarily based on a transgressive, sometimes incomprehensibly extreme platform of an underwriting trauma, a crack in subjectivity. And while the embodied specificities of the refugee experience are irreducible, this crack is not — the coherent subject is an impossibility, and that this inevitably involves trauma; I would therefore suggest that the Storyboxers’ “neveryday”, with its underwriting trauma, could be a useful model for how both casual mundanity and affectual extremities are often modulated through each other in the blogging of the self.

Touchy Feely Filth

Another way of illustrating the “neveryday” imaginary of blogging is through an allegory: Grant Morrison and Chris Weston’s comic book, The Filth (Morrison and Weston, 2004). Their (anti-)hero is Greg Feely, an ordinary, “sentimental” cat-lover who leads a double life as Ned Slade, a transdimensional agent for the psychic police-cum-waste-disposal agency of the world, known as The Filth. Middle-aged, balding, and sporting both a tasteful comb-over and a porn addition, Greg finds that his lonely life with his cat Tony is apparently a deep-cover “personality safe house” for Slade. Pressed back into service, Greg/Ned tries to negotiate his traumatic imbrication in the system. While he’s battling giant flying spermatozoa or navigating the sewer of the world, Greg/Ned will wonder out loud if he’s forgotten to feed the cat. It is truly touching, and not pathetic. What Morrison’s narrative achieves is the realisation that in the middle of struggles over the fate of life itself, “I Love My Cat” narratives are amongst the best narratives there are. And yet this touchy-feely mundanity of cat-love is neither an authentic origin for Feely, nor just a “fake” but necessary refuge for the “real” Slade, despite its proven worth. As the book progresses, it becomes clearer that the cat scenario is neither the “real” story, nor even just one valid segment amongst several, but one of several occult media dialects: the killer sperm, the cat and the zombie “anti-persons” all enunciate or channel through each other. In the end, we learn that cat-love can be generated by a sentient nanotech infestation, but is still valid.

The Filth can thus be read as an allegory of the way bloggers can deterritorialise geopolitical commentary and mundanity into a “neveryday” plane of consistency, and can also be an “answer” of sorts to the elitist, phobic disavowals of blogs as being full of pointless stories about people’s cats (as if that were a bad thing in the first place). In The Filth, cat-blogging allegorically retains its nobility as an exemplary effect, but with the realisation that its vocabulary is a partial medium in the occult sense, sometimes sharing storytelling techniques with narratives of genocide. The capacity for such writing is always there. We have the technology. And The Filth really highlights technologies of writing, if noticeably of an “old skool” era: the head of The Filth’s communications is “La Pen”, who sports four huge fountain pens as appendages, and Feely/Slade discovers that The Filth’s mysterious origin, based on something called “the Crack”, and which “runs through everything… [a]nd everyone” (Morrison and Weston 2004: 209), is actually a mining operation that extracts supernatural ink from an island-sized fountain pen found lying at the bottom of an interdimensional sea, perhaps abandoned by God after the act of Creation. Telling a story is not the unfolding of some whole narrative, it’s a shapeshifting resource grab that is founded on trauma. Everything flows from the Crack.

The Box and the Real

The fact that I imagined Storybox from the beginning as a kind of critique begs the question of whether the apparent outcomes were a self-fulfilling prophecy. How well I deal with this problem depends on how reflexively I could grapple with social problematics that had previously just been bullet points — something that will always complicate things beyond measure. And yet when I named the project “Storybox”, it did feel like a prophecy of sorts, or perhaps more like a haunting. “Box” somehow felt resonant in an “appropriate” way, but lacked a positive, “empowering” flavour, which troubled me. I went with it anyway. Cue another allegory:

Recall the incredible scene which splits David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive in two: the appearance of the blue box in Club Silencio. The lovers Betty and Rita, in an attempt to uncover the truth behind Rita’s amnesiac past, end up in an old theatre called “Club Silencio”, where they are regaled with seductive but simultaneously alienating stage acts that are mimed to taped music. The beginning of each act seems seamless, but is then revealed deliberately to be mimed near the end. “No Hay Banda,” announces the MC — “there is no band”. The show climaxes in an incredibly moving Spanish rendition of Roy Orbison’s “Crying”, complete with actual tears, and at the peak of the song’s emotion, the singer collapses, and the prerecorded voice sings on. At this very moment, a strange blue box somehow appears in Betty’s handbag, ready for the mysterious blue key that Rita has had all along. They rush home and open the box. At this point the film’s narrative universe is utterly dislocated, from that point offering us a jarringly different, and yet strangely similar story.

The most “coherent" reading of Mulholland Drive identifies the narrative up to that point as a desperate fantasy of the mundane Diane, the “real” “Betty”, who has actually murdered her girlfriend Camilla, the “real” “Rita”. It is this violent act of sexual jealousy which apparently lies in the (vaginal?) box of repression, which resurfaces at the moment of confrontation with loss in Club Silencio. Not the most promising connotations for Storybox. But I chose the name partly because of the whiff of trauma. And what if there is another way to approach it? What if the blue box is indeed an allegorical symbol for trauma, but one which operates as a nexus for the different narratives of the film, which do not have to be organised hierarchically in such a boringly classical psychoanalytic scenario because they are actually vocabularies of a neveryday imaginary? What if the shift from Betty and Rita’s story to that of Diane and Camilla is analogous to what happens when NaturallySweet describes life at school in Sydney or under the Taliban as “soooooooooo boring” and “soooooooooo devastating”?

The Box and the Real 2: Legibilities of the Human and the Apparatus of “Captcha”

The box of allegory returns again via David Lynch, this time as a resonating gatekeeper of “humanity” in his cinematic adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune. In an early scene, our protagonist Paul is tested by a visiting “Reverend Mother”: he is forced to put his hand in a dark green box. “What’s in the box?” he asks. “Pain,” is the reply. Premature removal of his hand from the box means instant death. Paul’s hand experiences an ever-heightening burning, but he keeps his hand in the box to the end, fighting his instincts and thus proving his “humanity”.

As noted above, the group of young African refugees involved in the Storybox project had little prior experience with computers and the Internet, so it seemed sensible to start at a point before blogs, with email. Everyone thus signed up for free webmail accounts in one of our first workshops. Interestingly, it took more than three hours for this process to yield any workable results. At Hotmail, and echoed at the gates of every social software service, prospective users are presented with a dizzying array of form-fields, all of which are mandatory: occupation, date of birth, etc. The last question — the signing of the user agreement — strangely requires the user to fill in their last name for a second time. The Storyboxers would ask why such information was necessary, and would often enter it in a way that wasn’t acceptable to the system; the practice of (machine-readable) textual consistency — especially for usernames and passwords — was a particularly troublesome factor for them, a seemingly meaningless reduction of language to dotted i’s and crossed t’s. But the kicker was the penultimate question:

Yes, it’s a spam-bot test. (Funnily enough, it also resembles a piece of trendy, illegible typography from the early ’90s, perhaps from RayGun magazine.) Such tests are known as CAPTCHAs — “Completely Automated Public Turing tests to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and are commonly used by web services that involve social communications, including Blogger, the blogging system we were using. They act as a gateway to prevent inhuman communication, stopping automated scripts from procuring accounts for transmitting spam.

“What does this mean?” the young people would ask me when confronted with an avant garde-looking CAPTCHA. “Why do we have to answer this… question?”

“To… prove that you’re human,” I replied in a whisper, recalling the actual wording used in some of these kinds of tests, and realising the gravity of the situation — many of the people in the room had experienced processes of attempted dehumanisation. And as it turned out, few of the participants could pass this test, even though most of them had a fairly workable grasp of written English. Many seemed understandably frustrated by this in a way that implied that the test was unfair and insulting, yet another challenge to their humanity in a history of such challenges, and some seemed upset by its implications, although they were cheered somewhat when I failed the test a couple of times in a row — and I’m a graphic designer who’s done my fair share of illegible typographic distortion over the years. (To be fair to Microsoft, there was an option for a speech recognition test for blind users in the Hotmail CAPTCHA, but in our lab environment, our computers’ tiny, inbuilt speakers made this, too, completely unintelligible.)

Now, the “problem” with the encounter between refugee participants and the gatekeeping registration form was not so much a question of “literacy” or its apparent lack, nor simply that mainstream software’s “usability” has a long way to go — for example, after I told this story at last years’ Sydney Design Symposium, someone used it as an example of regrettable “neglect” in the sphere of design practice. While (perhaps debatably) accurate in a descriptive sense, these perspectives, like the mystifying terminologies of “social capital”, leave our terms of reference within this whole game of informatics intact, when in fact what a story like this can do is crack that game open. This crack recalls the Voigt-Kampff test of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner – a psychometric “empathy test” that can supposedly weed out androids from humans. Unlike the novel on which it was based, Blade Runner enacts the collapse of any underpinning taxonomy of the human; it is an anamorphic moment, similar to the desubjectifying shift in perspective applied to the two noblemen in Hans Holbein’s painting, The Ambassadors:

The large grey smudge at the bottom the painting is a skull — the sobering spectre of Death’s head, of mortality itself, draped behind the human potential for hubris — and to see that properly, the viewer must approach the painting in a way that does away with its conventional framing, so that its coordinates (which in this case provide a representative grid for wealth, spatial territorialisation and masculinist power) are completely distorted.

I would therefore like to approach this encounter between young refugee bloggers and the “apparatus of CAPTCHA” in social software as an anamorphic event, a traumatic manifestation of the limits of the entire framework upon which our notions of “literacy”, “usability” — and indeed “the user” and “the human” — are founded. And it haunts the whole enterprise of the writing of difference in a software-mediated environment. This rupture, this crack means that it’s not really a matter of identifying new goals for informatics literacy so that users can better conform to software’s expectations of them, or indeed, of making software more “usable” to more people, even if those things could be practical outcomes, because the invitation contained in such an encounter can yank the carpet from underneath the bureaucratic, managerial hoops of literacy, or the impossible idealisation of a yet-more universal “user”. Similar possibilities were present in the recent “Cornelia Rau incident”, in which an Australian resident with mental health “issues” was mistakenly incarcerated in a detention centre for asylum seekers; do we use this as an opportunity to be outraged that an Australian resident is “treated like an asylum seeker”, and demand better “screening procedures” to avoid such seemingly obvious injustices (thus leaving our assumptions about mandatory refugee detention intact), or do we accept it as an invitation to anamorphically problematise the very ground — citizenship, security, the nation — upon which such a system rests?

Inconclusion

A marginal disclosure: it seems fairly clear that my exploration of “neveryday” traumatic imaginaries and my briefer account of the traumatic design/literacy aporia negotiated by the Storybox project both have some way to go before they can “talk to each other”. (While this is frustrating in terms of this paper’s construction, it is also quite heartening news to me, because as previously described, I originally tried to sidestep the guts of the project for this paper.) What both nodes of the paper have in common conceptually is the Crack. To repeat the authorities of The Filth again, “The Crack runs through everything… [a]nd everyone” (Morrison and Weston 2004: 209). Everything and everyone? Yes: the trauma of information design systems, and the trauma of those who write (or that which writes?). I am not entirely sure if this is a lazy slippage, but the speculative thought that springs to mind is that while I have stated that the design/literacy aporia crystallised in the “CAPTCHA” cannot be “solved” through an extension of the dominant logics already at play, perhaps the (non)grounding of the Crack can suggest an alternative to simply suggesting their abolition, with nothing to suggest in their place. If the Storybox participants can generate “neveryday” vocabularies in a wayward negotiation of their (pre)conditions of trauma, perhaps “information design” can, too. What this could involve remains to be seen.

Bibliography

Agamben, Giorgio. 1999, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, Zone Books, New York

De Certeau, Michel. 1984, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall, University of California Press, Berkeley

Delezue, Gilles and Felix Guattari. 1987, A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

Felman, Shoshana and Laub Dori. 1992, Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history, Routledge, New York

Little White Secrets. 2005, Life is what we make out of it, Storybox blogging project, Sydney, viewed 17 March 2005, \<http://blackninnocent.blogspot.com>;

Morrison, Grant and Chris Weston. 2004, The Filth, DC Comics, New York

NaturallySweet. 2005, Love Like Never Gets Hurt, Storybox blogging project, Sydney, viewed 17 March 2005, \<http://naturallysweet.blogspot.com>;

Sado, Denis. 2005, Dadaab Refugee Camp, Storybox blogging project, Sydney, viewed 17 March 2005, \<http://asifsado.blogspot.com>;

Racism, Civility and the “War on Terror”

Seminar Paper, National Union of Students Education Conference, July 2002

Ben Hoh

What the hell is actually going on with the “war on terror”, and how do we come to grips with the situation? Consider an article by Guy Rundle that appeared in Melbourne’s progressive weekly The Paper, in January 2002. Rundle argues for an effectively liberal defense against the Australian Government’s impending antiterrorism legislation, claiming that

[d]efending the liberal political sphere – or such as exists – is now our most urgent priority… This seems to me to be a time that demands a popular front and common cause with left-liberals and even the libertarian right in an urgent mobilisation against the infinite extension of the national Security State. [Rundle 2002]

Rundle warns, in portentous tones, that

we have seen the beginnings of the shutdown of the liberal political sphere and the final consequences of that are unknowable – the darkest possibility being that some of us will end up in prison sooner rather than later. [Rundle 2002]

Where does this kind of thinking lead us? I don’t doubt his commitment to a free society, but as Angela Mitropoulos and Steve Wright have noted in a reply to Rundle, some of us are already in prison – namely, in concentration camps as “illegal immigrants”. Mitropoulos and Wright contend that our liberal democratic concepts of justice are already founded on the ability of the nation-state to create such states of exception and naked control, and that any struggle to defend ourselves against the State must have a qualitatively different orientation.

Nowhere in his assessment of the “terror laws” does Rundle even consider that particular, raced communities – Arabs and/or Muslims especially – will no doubt bear the brunt of measures like increased ASIO powers or the creation of “terrorist guilt by association”. Under the current regime and in the months following the World Trade Centre attack, Arab and Muslim homes in Sydney’s southwest were raided indiscriminately by ASIO. Doors were smashed down. Breastfeeding women were held at gunpoint by officers of the State. People were simply targeted because of their religion or ethnic background. Peter Reith made rhetorical links between Middle Eastern refugees and terrorism. A Muslim man from Sydney, Mamdouh Habib, is currently interned without charge in the US Military’s maximum security Camp X-Ray, where inmates are blindfolded for months on end, while the Australian Government does nothing about his situation, preferring to assume that he is guilty of unknown “terrorist” crimes. (And that’s just direct, State sponsored violence; within the Australian body politic, there has been a marked upsurge in racist violence since 11 September: Muslim women have been attacked in the streets, mosques have been firebombed, and media hysteria abounds.)

Arab communities around the world, from Sydney to Jenin, are familiar with this kind of racial profiling; to the authorities, they are terrorists: uncivilised, fanatical, prone to violence. And just prior to the World Trade Center attack, Australia was living in an ecology of heightened fear about communities who had been basically transformed in public discourse into “Lebanese gang rapists”. These are the communities that “antiterrorist” laws will attempt to repress. But rather than calling to join the self-defense of communities under State-led attack, Guy Rundle instead emphasises the defense of “our liberal traditions”. He fetishises concepts and institutions whose universalising impulses have not only been hollow but individualising, always erasing the social. Let’s be in no doubt that our rights granted under the State mean something. And yes, the disappearance of these rights is even more telling. But at best, those rights signified the partial gains of more radical struggles – struggles that have a racialised, social specificity. Seeing these aspects of the State as worth fighting for in themselves is to mistake the forest for the trees, to orient oneself, in a really basic manner, away from acknowledging the particularities of racist power, away from the tasks of building solidarity with those under racist State repression, and to reinforce, in the long term, the system that enacts that repression.

The struggle around the “terror laws” is one of several antagonisms that can demonstrate the complex ways in which racism now operates, and what this says about the world in general. Take the bombing of Afghanistan as another example. While the people there were counting the cost of Operation Enduring Freedom, liberals in the West who were opposed to the bombing were struggling to be heard in the language of “reason”. Why? Despite real, decent impulses for justice amongst some, it may simply be the case that there’s no longer any room left for opposition within liberalism’s “reasonable” rhetoric. Most liberals take bankrupt US aggression as a given, even if it’s distasteful. The progressive pole of liberal thought seems to have gotten really lame. What does this mean?

It’s a pity that in practical terms the Left usually conceives of liberalism as effectively being a lack of radicalism, rather having any actual political qualities of its own – that we only have to inject a bit of “lefty serum” into a liberal framework to heighten its radicality. But what are the geopolitics of the liberal tradition? Take a few words from John Stuart Mill, the granddaddy of liberalism:

The word Civilization is a word of double meaning. It sometimes stands for human improvement in general, and sometimes for certain kinds of improvement in particular… which [distinguish] a wealthy and powerful nation from savages or barbarians. [Mill 1875, p160]

And on the subject of British colonialism in India, Mill writes:

There are… conditions of society in which a vigorous despotism is in itself the best mode of government for training the people in what is specifically wanting to render them capable of a higher civilization.

Liberal thought has always invested in violent narratives of white supremacy that are not necessarily based on crass xenophobia or fixed, biological theories of race, but on the cultural power of “Western civilisation” as an enlightening and progressive force. This isn’t an historical aberration that we’ve somehow “progressed” from – the recent popularity of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” thesis, against the backdrop of the “war on terror”, is testament to its currency. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri describe this in their book Empire as a “new racism” – a “racism without race”, following Etienne Balibar’s formulation. But it’s not new; rather, its configuration has changed somewhat: where xenophobia and biological racism are now less able to flourish, we can still say hello to newly buffed notions of “progressive” white cultural superiority that have always been with us, informing everything from French colonialism (which continued in the spirit of “liberty, equality, fraternity”) to Australian multiculturalism.

“Our” “civilised” Western liberal democratic identity has always been, from the beginning, constituted in opposition to those who are simultaneously defined as “uncivilised”. And we all know that any repressive construction of an identity is never complete, and is always manic, especially when it encounters any reminders of this fact. For example, “Islam” has long been a major symbol of all that “the West” has constructed itself against – it is Western capitalism’s “constitutive outside”. In its encounter with the spectre of “Islam”, liberal democracy is manically incapable of tolerating calls for “sanity” in the face of war, and such calls will begin to lack meaning or weight, even though the nominally progressive aspects of liberalism would seem to demand this. This isn’t because liberal anti-war commentators are liars or that they’re simply “not radical enough“, but because they can’t face the fundamental chauvinism and hysteria of liberal democracy and its racist geopolitics. And in the face of the tragedies of the last year, that’s scary.

This whole situation complicates the usual idea, so common in the Left, that “racism is a bunch of lies used by the capitalists to divide the working class”. Repeating such mantras can provide an alibi for the imperatives of power through which racism operates. It’s as reductive and instrumentalist as saying “sexism is a bunch of lies used by the capitalists to divide the working class”. Racism isn’t simply an imaginary ideology used to justify certain economic factors in a narrow and mechanical sense. Rather, we must recognise that irrational urges happen on the material, economic level of geopolitics – that we can’t abstract what we call our “ideological justifications” from the “economy”. Power and desire may be given an ideological investment, an attempt at rationalisation on the level of ideas, but they’re not necessarily ideological in themselves.

Back in the 80s, the activist and philosopher Felix Guattari recognised this complexity in the rise of Le Pen and National Front in France, which is so relevant now given Le Pen’s recent popularity in the French Presidential elections. Guattari writes:

If you think that Le Pen is only a simple resurgence, or some flaky throw-back, you’re dead wrong! … Le Pen is also a collective passion looking for an outlet, a hateful pleasure machine that fascinates even those that it nauseates. … Really, one can immediately think of the imagery of the National Front, and forget that Le Pen is also fed by the conservatism of the left, by trade union corporatism, by a beastly refusal to address questions of immigration or the systematic disenfranchisement of the youth, etc. … Let’s face it, the economy of collective desire goes both ways, in the direction of transformation and liberation, and in the direction of paranoiac wills to power. [Guattari 1995, p14-15]

Guattari sees racist violence as desire gone cancerous, and that it is vital to engage on this terrain. He thus addresses the problem of leftist appeals to liberalism in anti-racist work:

[I]t is clear that the left, and the Socialists above all, have understood nothing. Look at what they did with the movement ‘SOS Racism’: they think that they’ve changed something with their million buttons, but they didn’t even consider talking to the people at stake. Has this publicity campaign changed anything in social practice, in the neighbourhoods or in the factories? I know some Algerian-French people who have been rubbed the wrong way by this new kind of paternalism-fraternalism. I don’t deny the positive aspects of that campaign, but it’s so far off the mark! [Guattari 1995, p15]

Guattari raises questions as to what a real, antagonistic engagement with racism is all about. A recognition of its impulses in the social fabric, and a commitment to working with those affected by it rather than towards self-congratulating displays of liberal tolerance. It means effectively making a challenge to the racist foundations of the entire system of nationalist immigration control. Actually breaking the borders. It means mixing physical resistance with a cultural politics, the creation of meanings – what we usually reduce to a mere, empty “symbolism”. Because now more than ever, a politics of race is a politics of culture. Not as something we can crudely use, but as something that we do. If we ignore these tasks, we run the risk of reinscribing the culture under which fascism can breed, and of leaving non-Anglo communities to live with the mundane, everyday experience of that fascism.

This also has an immediate impact on the whole issue of formulating “demands”. An effective anti-racism movement shouldn’t just be talking about tying everything down to demands that both liberals and radicals can agree upon. If we don’t question liberal “tolerance”, we’re in danger of falling into the vacuum that yawns just beyond the demands to “FREE THE REFUGEES”, or to “DEFEND OUR CIVIL LIBERTIES”, or whatever. That vacuum obscures a bigger question: what kind of society do we really want to live in? Do we just want to make the current nation-building system of multiculturalism more coherent? A system that reinforces white culture’s centrality as the tolerant controller and consumer of domesticated “diversity”? Really, what kind of society created our concentration camps in the first place? One managed by a Federal Labor Government – let’s never ever forget that – a government that at the time was creating extensive rhetoric about a sophisticated, postmodern and multicultural republic with an “openness to Asia”. But those coloured people who can’t quite fit into your enlightened plans for economic progress, you punish. There’s no contradiction. Whether it’s illegal immigrants or “uncontrollable” Arab kids who wear their baseball caps backwards, it’s always policing. State multiculturalism has always been about social engineering for market systems. In the world of the commodity, “ethnically tolerant” markets and concentration camps go hand in hand.

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One very big question remains: why have these problems of “civilising liberal power” and racism come to a head so forcefully in the current juncture? One could say “capitalist globalisation”, but that’s almost a truism with little descriptive power. Yes, the contours of repression inevitably recalibrate along with the globalisation of capital, and this volatility makes the friendly supremacist powers of the West such a tempting form of crisis management.

But there’s a more precise factor within this general picture that could be forcing the issue in a much more specific way, and that’s Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s idea that civil society is withering. As they define it, civil society consisted of the institutions that mediated between the State and the population. In order to co-opt (rather than directly bludgeon) society into a capitalist consensus, the State used those voluntary institutions that weren’t technically part itself, such as the media, unions, churches, etc., as vessels to indirectly convey its authority. This always suggested a certain amount of ambivalence – because they weren’t State institutions, the institutions of civil society were a battleground on which different forces struggled for hegemony. Thus, there was a space, a cushion for left-liberal ideas about fairness to flourish within certain sectors of society.

But Negri and Hardt argue that these days, capitalist social relations are now produced everywhere in society – that all of society is now a factory. We’re faced with the spectre of endocolonialism: the logic of colonialism applied to every space inside a society – capital setting up ultraexploitative and ultrahierarchicalising occupations of untapped and vulnerable spaces within what we’ve always called “First World”. As an example, the tertiary education sector could be said to be undergoing endocolonisation as it moves into an era of mass commodification, market gearings and corporate profit, which is cheap for everyone except those who are the producers and the product of the system: students, who have to buy the education, put the effort into making themselves disciplined workers with it, and then internalise a simultaneously exploited and consumerist relationship as a given condition of their presence in the system. Suffice to say that with this kind of penetration happening generally in society, those mediating institutions of civil society can do little but go through the motions. Official spaces of negotiation become simulations when the rug has been effectively pulled from under all of us, and those institutions cease being mediating ones that can deliver gains or cushion a progressive intelligentsia, and become ones that either just tread water or act as repressive watchdogs for the State. Hence the idea that civil society has effectively withered, even if all those institutions still technically exist.

Now this situation actually has a lot to do with specific things like extreme anti-Arab racism and anti-Islamic racialisation. “Oriental” societies, and Islam in particular, have always been characterised in Western supremacist discourse as having a propensity for violence and despotism, and this is sometimes specifically explained – often by both the Left and the Right – as an absence of civil society. (For example, for Marx, “oriental despotism” was a characteristic of the Asiatic mode of production — a unique arrangement that was effectively outside the narrative of historical progress.) But whether or not the term “civil society” is technically used, the general idea, which I think we can all recognise, is that such a social layer provides a mediating and liberal ambivalence that acts as a marker for a “free society” – a marker for progress, civilisation itself, and hence white cultural supremacy. The absence of civil society, conversely, is marks a tendency towards various kinds of social stagnation on one hand, and the breeding of irrational violence on the other. Hence “the Middle East”.

This may sound reductive, but I think this fetishisation of “civil society vs oriental despotism” has always actually been a defensive projection of Western capitalism’s uncertainties about insurgent class struggle, which is that which needs to be “mediated” in the first place, and the spectre of “oriental despotism” is just the return of the Western capitalism’s repressed despotism. The Australian sociologist Bryan Turner recognises this:

[B]ourgeois individualism… was challenged by the mob, the mass and the working class which was excluded from citizenship by a franchise based on property… The orientalist discourse on the absence of the civil society in Islam was a reflection of basic political anxieties about the state of political freedom in the West. In this sense, the problem of orientalism was not the Orient but the Occident. These problems and anxieties were consequently transferred onto the Orient which became, not a representation of the East, but a caricature of the West. Oriental despotism was simply Western monarchy writ large. The crises and contradictions of contemporary orientalism are, therefore, to be seen as part of a continuing crisis of Western society transferred to a global context. [Turner 1994, p34]

This kind of racialisation as a defensive and displacing madness against the motor of class struggle can clearly be seen in 19th Century pseudoscientific attempts to physiognomise the relative “negritude” of Northern English and Celtic working class communities [c.f. Young 1995].

So what about the current context? If civil society has effectively collapsed and is merely being simulated, perhaps there’s a double dose of racist reaction within Western capitalism: first, there’s hysterical Islamophobia as the repressed recognition of everybody’s loss of civil society, which is the loss of the Western badge of cultural superiority – under endocolonial capital, we are all despotic barbarians now! Secondly, this manic surge of racism is left unchecked by any notions of fair justice, because any of the vaguely tempering effects of liberalism no longer have a layer in society in which to flourish. It’s a feedback loop that will continually amplify unless we intervene. Unless we interfere. Unless we commit sabotage. And any real attempt to disrupt the spiral of violence that has been compensating for a lost “civility” cannot, by definition, be about reconsolidating any kind of civility.

What does this mean? It means that liberalism is no longer structurally capable of delivering any progressive gains, so making appeals to liberals, or their ideas of “enlightened progress”, is like chasing a phantom while everything gets worse around us. It means that we can’t rely on a liberal intelligentsia for anything. We can’t reinflate the liberal public sphere, because it has burst like a balloon. We can’t rely on our mediating institutions, our leaders, our representatives. This sounds all quite obvious, but when trying to formulate a radical course of anti-racist action that is also accessible, it’s amazing how easy it is to slip into these kinds of implicit or explicit appeals. We’ve got to break out of the bind between “crazy ultraleftism” and blind populism, and work towards qualitatively radical orientations that are accessible to all.

Our situation isn’t cause for despair. It only re-emphasises our priority: grass-roots community defense. We’ve got to build spaces of resistance amongst different people, not necessarily based on extending ideological similarities, but on an sympathetic or parallel kind of mutual orientation and respect that builds counter-power to the State and communicates struggle, linking different spaces to form an altogether different kind of public sphere. Rather than getting “political mileage” out of any situation, we’ve simply got to work together against the system, in real ways, and hence build radical situations from which new ideas can then arise.

It’s very easy to say “NO TO RACISM” at a rally. What we’ve got to do – non-Anglos, whiteys, indigenous peoples – is go the hard yards and actually create those alliances between social forces that can actually resist, rather than building brand names. Whether we’re part of particular besieged communities or not, we’ve got to let go of preconceived programmes and look to resistance that people have already put into play that might be implicitly political, that might be explicitly communicating resistance, that might be a great machine of wildfire struggle. A great frustration of mine within the antiwar movement last year was hearing that the local Afghan community was organising shift-based physical self-defense of mosques in Western Sydney, but that Left was by and large not very interested in such activity, preferring to say “NO TO RACISM” at rallies. This isn’t a flip condemnation – it’s really hard to make those links, to build that solidarity. And because racism is much deeper than just an instrumentalist lie that divides us, I think it’s really simplistic to say “black and white unite and fight”, as if the scales will fall from our eyes overnight and we’ll be able to join each other a new kind of homogenisation.

Meanwhile, the newly intensified experience of endocolonial policing could mean that we might gain lateral inspiration from experiences of imperialist military occupation. The tasks ahead could involve the formation of neighbourhood action committees in communities under siege, following the example of the first Intifada in occupied Palestine, to deal with the everyday experience of State repression – to speak back, organise legal defense, train in physical self-defense, act as information hubs, plan “civil” disobedience. On a longer term basis, we need to weave new and resilient social fabrics via a flowering of cultural politics. Underground schools flourished under the noses of the authorities during the first Intifada. Derry in Northern Ireland has a history of public art projects that can’t be instrumentalised for simple propaganda value – they have an organic kind of community autonomy – but which inextricably remain as everyday focal points for public political struggle.

Of course, we run the danger of fetishising these anti-imperialist struggles, which are radically different from our current situation in Australia, but the real task is to reconfigure whatever they have to offer for redeployment in our context, in which occupation means different things. But it’s also useful to remember that “our” context does not have a monopoly on being subtle, porous or hybrid – as if Palestine or Northern Ireland are starker, simpler and affairs whose concepts of struggle cannot be made mobile. The everyday experience of resisting racist policing around the world must always contend with complexity.

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Warning: don’t take this critique as an advertisement for an adrenaline-pumping kind of negation that regards liberalism as “wussy”. Because that’s not why political liberalism is bad. Along with many of us (especially the prisoners ) who were at Woomera earlier this year, I cried during our contact at the fences. People on both sides of the fence were confronted with that which was almost indescribable. We were crying together. What we must do is feel and act our pain and sympathy in a manner that doesn’t create narratives of sentimentality, of sainthood and martyrdom, or which reinforce our ability to patronise or condescend.

We need radical sympathy. An acting together. Here I want to draw on some of the other, non-sentimental meanings of “sympathy”, some of which may be dodgy and New Age, but which I think are of conceptual use. First there is “sympathy pain”, which you can experience if you’re attuned to someone else’s bodily state. Then there’s “sympathetic magic”, which you might experience, if you believe such things, when someone pushes pins into a voodoo doll that represents your body. But most of all, there’s the physical phenomenon of “sympathetic vibration”, which is what happens when you put two tuning forks close together – they both start humming, and louder, because each reinforces the other. So rather than a sentimental sympathy that reinforces liberal individualist statehood, I think what happened across the fences at Woomera was that people were vibrating in sympathy. Acting together. Resonating.

What does this mean for the hard work of building solidarity on a planetary scale? Given the global scale of Empire now, and the endocolonial realities that are always before us in every pore of society, I guess all questions of race and class, while not able to be universalised, have a global significance that we can be attuned to, wherever we are. The fact that our global market depends on enslaved workers of colour who are often punished like dogs when they try to escape their lot, or exterminated like cockroaches when they fight back, and the fact that this doesn’t matter in the scheme of things because they’re not white, is perhaps one of the most important thing facing the planet today, and it can be felt everywhere.

I fully believe that engaging with the differences generated under globalisation also means tuning into those ripples of planetary significance. I’m tempted to say that the significance of the racist exploitation boiling underneath the “global market” can be “generalised”, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. Rather, we can tune into a significance which is neither particular nor general – the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this “whatever”, which he figures as the key to the impossible project of “community”. That is where we must go.

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Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1993

Felix Guattari, “So What”, Chaosophy, Semiotext[e], New York, 1995

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, Empire, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2000

Michael Hardt & Antonio Negri, “Postmodern Law and the Withering of Civil Society”, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State-form, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1994

John Stuart Mill, “Civilization”, Dissertations and Discussions, Volume I, London, 1859-75

Angela Mitropoulos & Steve Wright, “The State and the Liberal Political Sphere”, Arena 57, 2002

Guy Rundle, “The 8-step guide to a happy left”, The Paper 25, 2002 ([http://www.thepaper.org.au/issues/025/025the8-stepguidetoahappyleft.html][3])

Bryan Turner, “Orientalism and the problem of civil society in Islam”, Orientalism, Postmodernism and Globalism, Routledge, London, 1994

Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, Routledge, London, 1995

a dialogue between Ben and Claire (2002)

We were encamped in an isolated location, like a bunch of contestants in a reality TV show, and in some way those parameters forced us to make contact with our material context. For those of us outside the concentration camp, there was no escaping the fact that a bunch of people were locked up behind razor wire, very close. We had come to make contact and to contribute to the creation of freedom. Disengagement was not an option. Nobody could be a bystander.

This dialogue was born in various debriefing, late-night phone conversations between us that occurred after the Easter Woomera 2002 protests. We wanted to capture our thoughts on paper about the significance of the protests and what we thought could be taken from them. We came to the Woomera protests from very different starting points. Claire had been involved in the “refugee campaign” for the past year with groups like the Refugee Action Collective and No One Is Illegal and had visited Woomera twice before. Ben felt like he’d just been “rentacrowd” at rallies. We felt, along with everyone else, that Woomera was very significant both personally and politically, but why? We also felt, like many** **people, that the Woomera protests should not be overly fetishised, but what would this mean exactly? This is by no means an attempt at a definitive piece. There are big black holes because maybe some of this stuff cannot be theorised outside of particular contexts. We wanted to throw out some ideas, ask some questions and perhaps begin a dialogue.

no sequels: s11 + m1 + o3 + woomera 2002 does not equal …

[claire] What I didn’t want to see was the kind of politics that has abounded since the 11th – 13th September 2000 protests against the World Economic Forum. The climate of attempted “recreation” proliferates amongst a Left which surprises itself with its success and then is left floundering, unsure where to go next. But every attempted sequel has been a failure, or at least not as successful of the original that it tries to rehash. These events are fetished to the extent that all we see is an endless horizon of letter/number combinations — s11, o3, M1 — that increasingly lack meaning.

Part of the problem has become the fetishisation of a tactic – the blockade – or in the case of Woomera 2002, the tearing down of the fences at a detention centre. Suddenly the politics of the protest becomes subsumed to the tactic. Blockade becomes larger and larger on the propaganda and the politics drops off. For the September 11 – 13 anti-WEF protests the rallying cry “Stand Up for Global Justice” dominated the poster, encapsulating, in a very limited way, what the protests were going to be about. For May Day 2001, the words ’shut down’ and ‘blockade’ suddenly became more important that trying to transmit the politics of the event in any way. Given that the May Day 2001 blockade at the Melbourne Stock Exchange were about one tenth of the size of s11, it seems that this kind of sequel event had no meaning for those outside the radical milieu. It also indicates to me that there is no nostalgia for a recreation of events outside certain left-wing elements.

Moreover I believe that the lack of turn out for the May Day 2001 protests was in part because it was widely known that the blockade of the Stock Exchange wasn’t actually going to work in any real way. It was widespread knowledge that the Stock Exchange operates mainly through computer systems and that accessing the Stock Exchange building is not essential for the operations of the Stock Exchange. To then expect people to turn out to take part in something that is a foregone conclusion seems ludicrous. A similar thing occurred this year at the insipid May Day protest when Melbourne people were asked to come and blockade the DIMIA offices, a questionable target in the first place, even more so once the building was closed for the day. That this happened so soon after the Woomera protests, where the spirit of direct action and civil disobedience was so inspiring, was incredibly disheartening.

The lessons that can be learnt from the Woomera protests then I believe are not ones about giving a protest a particular tag that seems to have worked previously and expecting people to turn up simply on that basis. What worked about s11 and Woomera 2002 is not what they were called or the fact that particular tactics were used, but the politics on which they were built. In some ways it I believe it is because they were in some ways quite non-specific about the “reasons” people should attend, rather there were general statements or rallying calls put out – stand up for global justice, make the connections, make the journey – that people could relate to without having to subscribe to a certain political line. Then there was the fact that these events were about taking action – shutting down the World Economic Forum, with our bodies against the camps – rather than idly waving placards and linking arms outside of an empty building.

[ben] I think there are two kinds of problems that can occur in attempts to build a kind of brand-name momentum for mass mobilisation. First, there is the tendency to posit the event as a content-free thing in itself, which nobody would ever admit to doing, but which happens nonetheless. It’s particularly dangerous when one endlessly repeats call-to-action mantras that try to blanketly transmit political messages outside of any social context, so I think this is linked to another problem that cuts a little deeper: how we conceive of the transmission of politics itself. I think most attempts to simultaneously be accessible and yet still make political links between situations are unfortunately self-defeating – there’s a reduction to a really thin kind of rhetoric that makes sense to nobody. Which is what made Woomera 2002 so interesting, because I think that it briefly circumvented some of these problems of politics and communication.

finding a common enemy

[claire] Woomera was interesting in terms of the lack of social democratic demands made. This was a refreshing and appreciated aspect of the protest for me. I think the making of demands of the state is a politically corrupt tactic, in that many of those responsible for formulating these demands are of the opinion that the state will not be able to meet them anyway. But they rationalise that by making these demands, campaigning around them and failing to achieve them will lead those involved in the campaign to “see the truth” about the role of the state under capitalism and become revolutionaries. More often than not in my opinion, constant loss, rather than turning people into revolutionaries, turns them into cynical, disenchanted political actors who chose to give up activism rather than to constantly fail. So to attend a protest that was organised with no overarching political program and no social democratic demands was refreshing and real. In fact such demands would have appeared ludicrous and rightly so. What was wanted was the closure of the detention centres and there appeared to be a realisation amongst the camp that the only way this was going to be achieved was if protesters did it themselves. It was quite clear from over a year of campaigning for the closure of the camps demands on the Federal Government or the Immigration Minister to act were ridiculous. As an article on the freespeech.org website states: “Too much of the time anti-globalisation amounts to an appeal to the state to take account of the wishes of some of its citizens and return to the good old days of social democracy and national autonomy and sovereignty so that it can protect us against the worst excesses of the corporations … We should understand that states and government are complicit in the process and act accordingly” (freespech.org). The same goes for the “refugee” campaign. We should understand that the government and the state is responsible for the ethnic caging of asylum seekers and act accordingly.

The protests’ refusal to engage with the state by making demands is reminiscent of the Black Panthers’ Breakfast for Children program that was established in 1969. The Panthers did make demands of the state, however the defining feature of the Breakfast for Children was that it demonstrated the Panthers’ true emphasis on social reality rather than rhetoric. They were programmatic Lenninsts who did the right thing. Cleaver says of the programs: “Breakfast for Children pulls people out of the system and organises them into an alternative. Black children who go to school hungry each morning have been organised into their poverty, and the Panther program liberates them, frees them from that aspect of their poverty. This is liberation in practice … If we can understand Breakfast for Children, can we not understand Lunch for Children, and Dinner for Children and Medical Care for Children? And if we can understand that, why can’t we understand not only a People’s Park, but People’s Housing, and People’s Transportation, and People’s Industry and People’s Banks? And why can’t we understand a People’s Government“.

Therefore, in terms of the Woomera protests, if most of those attending can understand the uselessness of making demands of the state to close the detention centres, can they not understand the uselessness of any demands of the state or in fact a state at all? This kind of thinking is one that is more and more prevalent under 21st century capitalism. The kind of lead-them-down-the-garden-path thinking that has been so prevalent in progressive movements throughout the 20th century is long outdated and deserves a re-think. In some ways the kinds of thought linkages that are expected of people previously are not such huge jumps any more. Capitalism is becoming nastier and nastier and in that nastiness more blatant and obvious. Perhaps it is not that people are disinterested in politics and but rather the methods of progressive organising that are on offer are distasteful because of some of the assumptions they make about people’s ability to draw their own conclusions about the current state of the world.

So if you believe then in protesters ability to draw their own conclusions and to have their own reasons for attending protests, how then do we relate to each other? Certainly not by getting on a megaphone to remind everyone of why we are here. In 1995 Subcommandante Marcos of the Zapatista National Liberation Army said: “We … ask in the name of all men and women … that you save a moment, a few days, a few hours, enough minutes to find the common enemy“. We have identified a common enemy, let’s get on with naming that enemy and acting against it.

[ben] I think that Woomera 2002 was a really powerful demonstration that there are meaningful alternatives to an impotent politics of “protest”. Over the last few months, especially since the antiwar movement started, I’ve realised that putting a reified image of “protest” at the centre of political action absolves one from the work of making mutually challenging connections amongst people in communities of resistance, and of actually creating the collective actions that will materially challenge the current system. It leaves one open to making empty demands of the State which actually help to obscure the actual politics of our current situation, which is the punitive tightening of national borders to contain people’s attempts to counterglobalise capital.

One possible exception to this dire “state of demands” is if one cannily approaches this kind of stuff in terms of “blackmailing the State” – “do this or we’ll make your life unlivable”. But by definition, this is only tenable in a wider context of action: telling the British government to drop the Poll Tax, in combination with a “can’t pay, won’t pay” strategy of refusal; telling the Italian government to stop the rises in basic services in the 1970s, in combination with a similar strategy of mass refusal of payment, in an attempt to financially bankrupt the State. Sabotage, for the politics of the concrete. Meanwhile, a politics of “protest” leaves one free to “extract”, in one unsympathetic Woomera 2002 participant’s brazenly instrumentalist language, “the most political mileage” out of any given situation, in terms of increasingly meaningless symbols. And all this while the fabric of people’s lives hung in the balance. Is it no wonder that many people in the world think that “politics” is dirty word? More on this later.

But regardless, when it was working well, Woomera 2002 remained for me a different kind of “demonstration”, and it really helped to challenge my ideas of what “politics” were all about. As in, “we can intervene like this; let me demonstrate”. Thus, it was a practical, performative action that showed us something about the world, and in a small way, it changed something about that world. This is never an easy or natural thing; I think it has to be monstrous, in a good way. Socialist feminist critic Donna Haraway has noted that the figure of the monster always stands at the border of whatever we consider the natural human condition, and that the word “monster” shares the same root as the word “demonstrate”. So how can we have more monstrous and challenging demonstrations, more collective convergences of desire that don’t submit themselves to disengaged and idealist rhetoric?

This will inevitably come across as “sectarian”, but I don’t think the logic of political identification is that important (hey, I still don’t know what the fuck “autonomist” means) – what’s important is if people’s actions have a qualitative orientation towards creating situations that can bring about radical change. People act differently from what they say, which is why we have to help create those situations where crap ideology (ours and others’) commits suicide. What happened at Woomera was really interesting in this regard – perhaps primarily because

1. the event was built on really particular material circumstances (and yes, this is a good thing, and not a reason to disqualify the possibility of waves of future actions drawing inspiration from such a unique event), and

2. the gestures made by the visiting protestors were connecting in a very real way with people’s everyday life of resistance within the camps.

So, what does all this usefully tell us about the relationship of radical action to materiality and everyday life? Hmmmm…

I also think it’s crucial that this practical evaporation of ideology – which happened in spite of whatever dodgy rhetoric was indeed floating around at Woomera – wasn’t just a nice sandpit for the protestors outside. Rather, it happened across and through the fences as well: there are people in the Woomera detention centre who (defying attempts to fetishise them as either revolutionary symbols or objects of pity) no doubt nominally come from “authoritarian sects”, but we managed to make a modest but radical kind of mutual action. Cool.

Survivor : The Australian Outback : Outwit, Outplay, Outlast

[claire] What was amazing for me about Woomera was the do it (y)ourself. ethos that pervaded all aspects of camp life. There were many affinity groups that had organised previous to the camp and that were really well set up – the legal team, the health and medical service, desert indymedia – but also people were really into doing things for ourselves. One incidence that really illustrates that for me was when I saw these young women cleaning out the toilets. I hadn’t seen them before and I didn’t see them again, it’s not like they were “organisers” of the event, they saw a problem and got down to fixing it. They were refilling the porta-loos that had stopped functioning because of lack of water. Instead of looking around for someone else to deal with the problem, they just undertook to do it themselves which encapsulated the whole feeling of the camp for me.

The camp had a feeling to it which was unlike any other protest I have ever attended. There was a basic infrastructure established that people had been working on for months that was set up to facilitate people’s ability to take action and simply that. The idea that you can create a situation that facilitates action but doesn’t dictate what form that action takes is not one that seems to have much currency amongst the Left in Australia but in this case it certainly worked. The most successful spokescouncil was one which operated in a similar way. Previous to facilitating it I went to a couple of previous facilitators and a few other people and asked them how they thought it should be run. The suggestion that they came up with to run it as a timetabling exercise seemed to me to work the best of all the spokescouncils. In this statement there is also a recognition that by the Sunday morning a lot of the pressures that had been on previous spokescouncils had dissipated, allowing a more relaxed and cooperative atmosphere amongst the participants. But to run the spokescouncil along similar lines as the protest had been organised worked excellently. There was no attempt to achieve consensus or unanimity amongst the participants, rather spokes were asked to propose actions that were then written up on a piece of paper so that all at camp could see what was happening and when and participate if they wanted to. This style of organising has many problematic aspects, too many to go into now, but in this particular situation and case it worked amazingly well and was an empowering experience for me to be a part of.

[ben] There seems to be a mythology of spokescouncils being considered a perfect decision-making space. For some there’s a pretense (whether “for” or “against” spokescouncils) that they mean “anything goes”, allowing participants to be absolved from any collective responsibility. Following the idea that it should be a perfect decision making space, others assume that it should act as a yet another boring forum for atomised individuals to vote on binding decisions, and get frustrated when this doesn’t happen.

But instead, the spokescouncils at Woomera were more like campfire sessions from a reality TV show. They were a space to air contentious issues. To invite and communicate decisions, but not necessarily to make them as a totality. And like reality TV, it was contentious stuff, but luckily, in contrast, it’s stuff that now can’t be really aired in public – it remains almost unrepresentable, lost to that instant. And in the final reality TV irony, the material circumstances (i.e. being effectively stuck in the middle of the South Australian desert) meant that we couldn’t just “leave the island” when we didn’t get our way and spat the dummy. No retreats to the relative safety of anywhere.

with our bodies against the camps

The most effective way to stop machinery is to throw a wrench into it. Most of us can’t afford wrenches, so we have to use our bodies instead.

– Howard Zinn

[claire] What also impressed me about the protests was how ready people were for direct action. Nothing I have ever been to before had ever been like that – not even the Jabiluka blockade where there was a strong emphasis on direct action. I missed the Friday night “fence event” but took part in the trespass actions on the Saturday and Sunday. I was amazed how prepared people were to cross that mythical line into illegal action without any fear. It was like the situation was so severe that people no longer could sit on the sidelines. The normal fear of repression, police response or arrest didn’t see to exist for the protest campers. It was like the old cliche of being faced with other people’s oppression making you stand up and be counted had come true in an inspiring and courageous manner. Andrew Kopkind, an American activist, writes of his involvement with the radical Weathermen grouping’s actions at the 1968 Chicago Democratic Convention: “… simply not to fear fighting is a kind of winning”. The same I believe can be said of Woomera, simply not to fear state repression for the multitude of reasons people had was a sort of victory, and one which should be celebrated.

The mind is more apt to perceive many things adequately, the more its body has in common with other bodies.

– Spinoza, Ethics

[ben] I think that true engagement, in which your practice is always in life-changing dialogue with your material conditions, is hard to do. Nobody really “knows” how. To do it properly, you have to give up a little of that idealist will-to-control that usually comes with political programmes, that comes with the painfully artificial separation between “politics” and “everyday life”.

While on a recent community music exchange in London, Koori hip hop artist MC Wire was rapping about racism. He was challenged by some who questioned his need to rhyme about “politics”. “There’s no word for ‘politics’ in my language,” he replied. “This is my reality “. Everyday life is where everything goes on. He may have been making just that point, but perhaps also for Wire, “politics” has largely abandoned this grounding. We have to overcome our predictable readings of people’s contempt for “politics” as being a rejection of the possibility of social change. We’re all familiar with the use of the word “politics” to mean Machievellian power games (“office politics”), or participation in State officialdom (“a career in politics”). But we’re less able to see how our programmes-of-worship, our empty and flattened slogans, are just as removed from reality as these more familiar bastardisations. Yes, we need plans and techniques beyond the immediate. But everyday life is the fire in which we forge them, from those little moments, and not the reverse.

Where do we go from here?

1. Why is the Left usually so unable to create situations that engage deeply with the world? Why does it always come off like a bunch of evangelical cults? This isn’t the centrist’s automatic equation of radical politics with “dogmatism”. Rather, it’s an observation that politics seems to be all about convincing people of various ideological Truths, converting them to your cause, wrapping the world in ideas from above, rather than generate of useful concepts in interventions. And no, “politicising people through involving them in actions”, contrary to its potentials, usually means getting people to act on panicky autopilot in accordance with “our” wishes. No more angry zombies!

2. Why are most people in the world able to write and design really cool personal party invitations, full of clever and engaging calls to action, as if by instinct? They always seem to look much better than you’d expect. There’s a set of social skills mobilised in the making party invitations that I think are vital to the question of acting and organising politically. If used at all in the traditional Left, these skills are usually instrumentalised as mere tools within a grand plan, and hence reified. How can we act with these skills, rather than manipulating them? How can we deploy them without crushing them with our weighty intentions, our dry authority? How can we allow revolutionary new relationships and actions arrive?

3. At an anti-borders forum held in Sydney a few months later, a comrade made the ambivalent observation that “Woomera happened by accident”. I think that this is really interesting, because it puts the spotlight on what I think was really important about Woomera 2002. What’s actually going on in the spaces that the programmatic sides of our brains describes as an “accident”? The wonderful kind of limited engagement that happened at Woomera was like a deus ex machina plot twist that happened at the beginning (rather than at the end) of the play that was our mutual action. God out of the machine. It seemed to just arrive. Hundreds of people, ready to do what it took to challenge the fences (and what they stood for), on both sides — whether it was breaking the law or to providing a network of support. A general and uncanny resolve. I’m not trying to mystify this by suggesting that it was inexplicable. And leave behind the religious connotations of the word “God” for a second, and focus on the concept. Out of the machine.

4. In the thought of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, a machine is an assemblage of forces that produces desire. We need machines of struggle — or as Deleuze and Guattari call them, war machines — that can produce the revolutionary deus ex machina situations. These machines need a consistent social surface on which they can assemble themselves; Deleuze and Guattari call this (in post-psychoanalytic terms) the body without organs. How can we be a body without organs? A body without organs has a “plane of consistency” — it isn’t “consistent” in a homogenous sense, but consistent in a way involving disparate elements that have a common intensity holding them together. That’s what we have to do. Be disparate and together, and intense. How was Woomera like this?

5. Deleuze and Guattari note that you can build a body without organs with a programme — one that has a sensitivity to the moment. A chief example of theirs is S&M: a body opening itself up to a different kind of consensual training that steps beyond cliches of pleasure and pain, or of (the authority of) “strength” and (the weakness of) “submission”. Revolutionaries need to train in ways that go beyond cliches of everyday life and politics, strength and submission, in ways that open them up in unexpected ways, not all of them “morally pleasant”. How was Woomera like this?

6. I think that at brief moments at Woomera 2002, our bodies came together with a consistent intensity to form bodies without organs and machines of struggle. At those points, dead ideology ceased to matter. Concepts always matter, but the illusion that we were going to first convince people of ideas first, which would then leading to homogenous action, was broken. The distinction between these things became untenable, and whatever predictable rhetoric about “us” “locking up Ruddock” and “freeing the refugees” evaporated as we enacted concepts together. Concepts like freedom. Concepts that were uncoded by liberal, or social democratic, or socialist, or whatever ideology.

7. Most of “us”, whether we’re in the camps or outside them, don’t agree about much ideologically. It’s important for those of us outside the fences to stop fetishising those inside as somehow being the incarnation of certain ideological fantasies, especially since many of us who were there inside the detention centre have belonged to an assortment of radical organisations that, like any other, have serious disagreements with others. What matters is that we’re actually trying – possibly against our “better judgement” — to effectively act together against capital’s border control mechanisms. From that common action we can work with, contest and develop concrete concepts that may just render many of our disengaged, ideological fantasies irrelevant, like the useless slogans at Woomera.

8. Of course, the best way to do this is being contested all the time, and we have to create examples and grounds for the most effective kind of a common action. Talking about deus ex machina and assemblages of bodies doesn’t mean being a hippie and waiting for shit to arrive from the heavens. It involves programmatic thought, but a different kind of programmatic thought. It involves work, but a different kind of work. And much of this work has to do with the invitation. Woomera 2002 was a particularly good party invitation. It was an engaging call to action. Did it have demands? No. Did it attempt to represent? Not really. Did it set a basis for how to come together? Yes.

[claire] The whole idea of a separation existing between politics and everyday life brings to mind an argument that was had recently at a dialogue on borders organised by No One Is Illegal. One of the participants criticised no border politics as not being connected with people’s reality or “where people are at”. This raised the question for me of who is being referred to when it is declared that this is outside people’s reality? As MC Wire said – this isn’t politics, this is my everyday life. Same goes for those interned inside Australia’s concentration camps, those living in border camps on the Thai/Burma border, undocumented migrant workers and those living in Palestine where, as Alex Kouttab says, the border literally shoots at you.

I was always really bad at designing party invitations. One of the houses I’ve lived in was in Bent St – so we always had party invitations that entreated people to get bent at Bent St, ha ha. So I’ve always left that expression of creativity to other people. However I am an avid consumer and intensely attracted to a political praxis that is creative, engaging and interesting. In recent times I have loved the mergence of big puppets, get into costumes and radical cheerleader at several protests, Woomera included. Music has also been used effectively on and off during my protesting years. To dance and sing and act crazy at a rally always fills me with joy and lends to the event a spirit of revolution that I do not find at more traditional rallies where I am speechified at then led passively through the streets whilst being berated to join with the bland sloganeering emitting from the megaphones. Rallies are mostly boring, painful, disempowering events that I hate attending and yet occasionally feel compelled to as my duty. What kind of politics is this? To dredge up the old Emma Goldman quote: if I can’t dance, it ain’t my revolution. However cliched that may sound it acts as a powerful reminder that the project of radical social change needs to employ creativity and joy.

Again the recent forum on borders – one of the other critiques also raised by aforementioned participant was the idea that in a borderless world we will all look the same, eat McDonalds and be overwhelmed by a homogenous Americanised culture. One of the strongest arguments I heard against this was the notion of human creativity. The question this raises is how do we trust in this notion of human creativity and cultural resistance in envisioning a post-capitalist society and yet are so bad at actually employing or mobilising it in our struggles. This is not at all to dispute whether this creativity exists – I believe very strongly that it does – but rather to point out that much of the politics that is in existence is not only disengaging, but also bland and intensely boring. I have just finished reading ‘Radical Melbourne’ and one of the things that struck me about the left groups in existence pre-1945 was how they had their shit together in terms of the social aspect of their organising – they knew how to have fun. Despite the immense political differences I have with these, often Stalinist, organizations it all sounded very appealing – the picnics, the summer camps, the footy games. When did the tradition of such organising leave Australian radical culture? There seems to have been a re-emergence in recent years, and I’m sure it never left certain movements, but it’s certainly not a widespread phenomena. When will we learn that to march people around the CBD to buildings that are protected by a line of blue is the antithesis to engaging politics? When will we take up concepts like empowerment and actually employ them in our protest strategies?

decoding and recoding the camp

[ben] What was deflated at Woomera? Instrumentalism: the objectification and use of movement in the world for a fundamentalist and teleological Grand Plan. As an alternative to this, what happened at Woomera was a regrounding of “politics” as a series of collective, ethical interventions into the present, with those in the middle of those struggles, creating spaces where new kinds of social relations can suggest themselves. A different “way forward”.

Of course, it’s possible to give all of this an ideological gloss, and there have been plenty of reinterpretations of the event – mostly as an underwriting of liberal humanist politics: that in the face of such an experience, what we could most clearly apprehend was “our common humanity with the refugees”. While the sincere orientation of these kinds of declarations towards an attempt at solidarity cannot be doubted, there is no doubt in my mind that it is useless to appeal to or extend the kind of logical demarcations (of commonality and difference) that can underwrite nationalist exclusion in the first place.

Yes, there are things in common on both sides of the fence, but when the fence comes down the differences do not suddenly dissolve. Yes, against all the propaganda of the war on terror, the people in the camps really are men, women and children who are suffering from appalling punishment. Yes, the State’s attempts at “dehumanisation”, at erasing their desire, pain and anger, must be undone. But towards what? Surely we must escape the whole setup of homogenising logic. Surely solidarity means making contact with and standing together with people who are different? And whose differences are not reducible? Crying together, coming together in resistance is all about friction, exchange and mutation rather than a comfortable homecoming. Isn’t this what a revelatory moment of understanding is all about? Yes, compassion must be an answer to all of this, but we must be sensitive to its different flavours in our current context, some of which may be highly recuperative.

Of course, all of this must be situated in a context. It’s very different for someone subjected to the most appalling abuse to claim that they’re not an animal, that they’re human. To suggest this, as many asylum seekers do, is not a comfortable homecoming for them. But is it for local activists? Is it not a covert reinscription of our own nationalism to simply extend that border of “humanity”, just as it is to speak with Statist authority that “refugees are welcome here” rather than question the position of that authority in the whole setup? Doesn’t the fundamental aspect of that logic need to come tumbling down? The frictions that occurred over issues of indigenous power at Woomera 2002 (and their attempted absorption via a practice of “respectful listening” that papered over real differences) only re-emphasises the fact that any feel-good investment in a “common humanity” is a lazy way of processing the decomposition of “Politics” that was actually occurring.

[claire] What was also deflated for me was the positioning of the protesters as “good white nationalists” at the centre of the imagined community of the white Australian nation. Not only was there a refusal to posit ourselves to speak with Statist authority on who is welcome but the notions of the nation-state were critiqued and attacked. The language utilised by some local activists in asserting that “refugees are welcome” here falls into the nationalist practices critiqued by Ghassan Hage in his book “White Nation” where he states:

“Like the ‘evil nationalist’ engaging in exclusion by categorizing the other as undesirable, the ‘good, tolerant nationalist’ engages in inclusion by categorizing the other, if not as ‘desirable’, at least as ‘not that undesirable … If racist violence is better understood as a nationalist practice of exclusion, ‘tolerance’, in much the same way, can be understood as a nationalist practice of inclusion. Both, however, are practices confirming an image of the White Australian as a manager of national space.”

I would argue that, in similar ways, the declaration that “refugees are welcome here” only serves to reinforce the idea of the Australian nation with local activists vying for control over the right to determine who crosses our borders – the State establishes criteria for who will be allowed to immigrate, activists assert that those categories should be extended. Bad form.

However, at the Woomera protests the chant “no borders, no nations, no deportations” was a chant regularly and refreshingly heard. To take up such adages as well as contending that we are all barbarians * goes some way in questioning the logic of a *politics based on nationalism. We need to move beyond the nationalist practices of speaking for the nation intrinsic to the claim of who is welcome and in the “othering” inherent in the arbitrary classification of those seeking asylum as refugees. We need to make it our project to reach what ben refers to earlier as a coming together in resistance which may be uncomfortable, difficult and fractious but will be ultimately real.

[ben] Warning: don’t take my critique as an advertisement for an adrenaline-pumping kind of negation that regards liberalism as “wussy”. Because that’s not why political liberalism is bad. Along with many of us (especially the prisoners) who were at Woomera 2002, I cried during our contact at the fences. People on both sides of the fence were confronted with that which was almost indescribable. We were crying together. What we must do is feel and act our pain and sympathy in a manner that doesn’t create narratives of sentimentality, of sainthood and martyrdom, or which reinforce our ability to patronise or condescend.

We need radical sympathy. An acting together. Here I want to draw on some of the other, non-sentimental meanings of “sympathy”, some of which may be dodgy and New Age, but which I think are of conceptual use. First there is “sympathy pain”, which you can experience if you’re attuned to someone else’s bodily state. Then there’s “sympathetic magic”, which you might experience, if you believe such things, when someone pushes pins into a voodoo doll that represents your body. But most of all, there’s the physical phenomenon of “sympathetic vibration”, which is what happens when you put two tuning forks close together – they both start humming, and louder, because each reinforces the other. So rather than a sentimental sympathy that reinforces liberal individualist statehood, I think what happened across the fences at Woomera was that people were vibrating in sympathy. Acting together. Resonating.

What does this mean for the hard work of building solidarity on a planetary scale? Given the global scale of Empire now, and the neocolonial realities that are always before us in every pore of society, I guess all questions of race and class, while not able to be universalised, have a global significance that we can be attuned to, wherever we are. The fact that our global market depends on enslaved workers of colour who are often punished like dogs when they try to escape their lot, or exterminated like cockroaches when they fight back, and the fact that this doesn’t matter in the scheme of things because they’re not white, is perhaps one of the most important thing facing the planet today, and it can be felt everywhere.

I fully believe that engaging with the differences generated under globalisation also means tuning into those ripples of planetary significance. I’m tempted to say that the significance of the racist exploitation boiling underneath the “global market” can be “generalised”, but that isn’t exactly what I mean. Rather, we can tune into a significance which is neither particular nor general – the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls this “whatever”, which he figures as the key to the impossible project of “community”. That is where we must go.

Thus, we need to experiment with models of political affiliation that enable us to act together, engaged in the reality of our current circumstances. We need a practical and faithless process that sidesteps the increasingly meaningless idealism and programmatic posturings required of traditional political organising.

And so it’s about a real movement. Not an ideological one. It’s about working together to destabilise border control. “Refugees” and “citizens” alike. It’s a real resistance to the enclosures of globalising capital. As always, we always have to ask ourselves, what is the concrete political reality of the current situation? What are people actually doing to resist? The movement is to escape the enclosures. People are doing it. This is the politics we must grasp.

[claire] The idea of resonance for me encapsulates two important points – of thinking about how capitalism affects you and of solidarity. For me it is part of an instinctive reaction against the self-interest type of politics which says we must show hot you will benefit from the liberation of others because I hate the way this discounts the beautiful human ability to resonate, to emphasise, to radically sympathise. I don’t think people were crying at the fences/border because they were intellectualizing that they had nothing to gain from the detention of those inside. I will never give up a politics which creates the space, or at least attempts to, for people to cry, get angry, outraged and upset, because this politics is real. It engages not only with our everyday lives but our humanity and our collectivity.

I went to Woomera because it felt like the right thing to do. Once I had decided to go I was questioned by someone who was (and is) intensely critical of the protests because he believed we would find ourselves in a situation where the detainees would escape with our assistance and where we would be unprepared for this, therefore how could I be complicit in this. In the end the only answer I could come up with was that it felt like the right thing to do at the time. This kind of instinctive desire to do something when you find yourself in a situation which is almost too horrible to contemplate – living in a country where people who come to us for help are locked up in cages – is not something that should be rationalised away. Sure I have a desire to educate myself further in political theory but I have absolutely no desire to lose the passionate side of my political nature which is necessary for me to resonate, intensely.

Extracts from a diary

09-NOV-2002 03:58

I was going to get into why I’m thinking these strange thoughts, but it got too hard. Instead, here’s something I wrote (on a mailing list) immediately after the Woomera 2002 desert protest against the Australian refugee concentration camps in April this year:

been watching the TV news coverage of the protests.. every news network is reporting and focusing on the violence. the ABC which i thought had the best coverage, reported that there are splits among the organising groups. can anyone who is there/ in touch with people there give us an account of what’s gone on?

I’m back from Woomera, and will be writing a much fuller account when I get time, as I suppose will others on this list who were there.

The Woomera 2002 action was one of the most inspiring and emotionally wrenching events in which I’ve taken part. People from all over the country came to work together in a remarkable spirit of goodwill — often practically full time as legal advisors, as medics, as cooks, roadies, etc. This commitment often left me speechless. The basis of the event was that many diverse groups with different approaches were going to come and act together, in different ways. For some, there was some frustration in coming to grips with a structure that didn’t involve getting the numbers, but for the most part there was a distinct lack of meaningless or disengaged rhetoric — the material situation was overriding, and the imperatives involved meant that the flaccid demands that have for so long demobilised radical action in this country basically evaporated, however briefly. It was the politics of the concrete. It was refreshing. So there was diversity and inevitable disagreement, but no “splits” within a fake or homogenised “unity”.

Most of the media coverage has been of the activities of Friday afternoon, so I’ll give my perspective on that.

The only violence that we had to really think about that day was visited on the asylum seekers inside the concentration camp during the night. As attested by those in long-running contact with those inside, the asylum seekers were beaten, handcuffed, locked in their rooms and canisters of tear gas were thrown in. Contrary to many conservative commentaries, this was not a consequence of our “irresponsible” actions, but “merely” the latest in a long line of violent actions against the asylum seekers. Often it’s particularly in response to their protest actions, which was why we were there that day — to show solidarity with an already existing action — to have a positive repsonse rather than the endless negative ones.

So we marched to the centre to join an existing protest, to create some solidarity, dialogue, freedom. Many of us climbed up the perimeter fence to wave to the refugee protestors inside. After a few shakes it fell down. We did the obvious thing: we took advantage of the situation to get closer to the people who’ve been facing the most barbaric isolation and violence. These fences are there to be broken down. They must be. Some people weren’t personally comfortable with breaching the perimeter in the immediate situation, and they stayed clear, which is fine. Obviously it’s not enough to just break down this particular fence, but I think breaching the perimeter in this case was a key part of a much bigger movement to dismantle all of the camps.

When we got to the inner fence, we were greeted by asylum seekers who were chanting “ACM: immigration mafia!”, “Where is human rights?”, and “Freedom! Freedom!”. We joined in. I shook hands with people who stretched their hands through loops of razor wire. One man told me that they were grateful to find that there were people in Australia who cared about their situation. Another told me that he’d been there for two years, and was desperate to get out, and that our government was rotten. I told them that I was glad to meet them and that people all over the country supported them, and would do all we could to help their cause. Most were from Afghanistan and Iran. We were all crying.

Then the cops came. I suppose a bunch of protesters, advancing resolutely to shake hands and speak with asylum seekers through the fence can be made to appear violent when a bunch of cops are trying to disperse them with riot gear and horses. When a horse came out of nowhere, pushing me aside, and the mounted cop lightly kicked me in the head, smashing my glasses, I just said, “What are you doing? I’m only trying to say hello!”. This kind of stuff was generally the extent of it as far as the visiting protestors were concerned — it was all quite mild, because we were largely Australian citizens who were able to disperse, unlike the people inside (who live with the obverse of our citizenship, whose relationship to authority, in the last instance, I resolutely refuse to celebrate or attempt to extend to others — the whole relation needs to come tumbling down).

[Meanwhile, on the front page of the Canberra Times there was a photo of me amongst a bunch of other people trying to avoid being trampled by horses, under the headline "BLOOD AND URINE THROWN AT POLICE". It's the same kind of bizarre fiction that has fueled so-called "moderate" groups to either condemn the protest out of hand or to imply that in contrast to our "violent" protest, any "real" movement to free refugees from the camps needs to somehow be "peaceful". Such extremely leading distinctions are nonsense. Those who participated in civil disobedience were simply resolute in our challenge to the authority of the refugees' confinement. Objects were broken in order to do this. Laws were broken. They need to be broken. Smearing this as "violence" is to fall into waiting hands of the State.]

Anyway, in the middle of this confrontation, asylum seekers were suddenly attempting to scale the fence. Banners were thrown to stop their hands being cut by the razor wire. The bars were being wedged apart. I saw the fence suddenly break, and people jumped through, disappearing into the crowd. I won’t say much more on this matter except to delcare that we all felt it was our duty to help these people do whatever they had decided. Some said that they would rather die than return. Others chose to simply enjoy what short freedom they had, and to face the consequences after recapture. In any case, away from any metropolitan resources, our options were limited. I have no details of what went on next, except that many visiting protestors showed remarkably fast thinking, respect and courage in helping these people do what they wanted. We never expected any of these events, and coped as best we could. I wish the best to those still at large.

---

I think Woomera 2002 was a watershed in the radical politics of solidarity and resistance in Australia. I’m thankful to everyone involved, especially the asylum seekers who gave the rest of us the example of resolute action, for the opportunity to have participated in a small way.

More later.

In solidarity,

Ben

• • •

09-NOV-2002 05:37

I guess I will write something.

I don’t think I’ve really dealt with what happened at Woomera. I don’t cry very often, but I cried a lot at Woomera. Crying in the South Australian desert is messy. The dust is fine, like talcum powder. It’s like being on Mars, as imagined by Kim Stanley Robinson — the dust gets everywhere: far, far up your nose, in your underpants, in your eye sockets. (I’d thought ahead and brought breathmasks for my friends, but they didn’t seem to make much of difference — my white mask was pure orange on both sides after a couple of hours.) Dust everywhere. And when you cry, you make your face all muddy.

A man with whom I shook hands through the fences had gotten his head caught in the bales of razorwire that were on either side of the double fence. The razors were cutting through his ear. Another had been cut all across the chest, and there was blood everywhere. Some of it was desperation to touch another, some was despairing self immolation (which happens on a daily basis in the camps).

Immediately after the breakout (I’m still amazed that they could break through the thick steel bars, since I’m pretty sure none of us had brought anything that could do such a thing), and during our retreat, I stood sobbing as a little boy who had broken through the fence was immediately reapprehended and bundled into a wagon by the authorities. A well muscled man was also tackled and thrown into the van. He was one with whom I’d exchanged words through the fences earlier. He began wailing. An older protestor, in his late 60s, fainted at this point, perhaps from heat exhaustion and dehydration, perhaps from the horror of it all. Federal Police forced us to move on, and we were unable to help him.

Back at our camp, which was a few hundred metres from the concentration camp, the remaining free asylum seekers were hidden behind a human wall of protestors, ten lines thick. (Other asylum seekers had been ferried out in cars immediately, making for Adelaide and Melbourne. A few are still at large.) I linked arms and joined the wall. Federal Police were all around us. Nobody moved. You could hear everyone breathing in the desert. Then someone started singing. “Peace, yeah peace, peace is possible / and you, yeah you you are responsible”. The sun was going down. The entire crowd began singing. People from an affinity group called Food Not Bombs were handing buckets of oranges around. Meanwhile, all this time, we had been surruptitiously smuggling the refugee children out of the human wall, and into a nearby tent, where they were given medical attention by volunteer doctors. The police were none the wiser.

After a couple of hours, the police gave up and dispersed. Most of our newly liberated friends ferreted themselves in our tents, and were provided new clothes so they couldn’t be easily identified by the cops. Some gave interviews at our desert.indymedia waystation. As in my original post, I won’t go any further into how we and the escapees dealt with their situation, for various overriding reasons.

The next day the police were much more prepared. They arrived with phalanxes of horses and were all kitted out in Judge Dredd gear. We attempted to make an offering of gifts for the imprisoned children: hundreds and hundreds of toys, which had been collected in the months leading up to the protest. (Some of the children inside grow up in the camps without anything to play with, let alone any education, and many attempt suicide.) The authorities allowed us to drop the toys off, but later we learned that they were immediately confiscated.

There was a tense standoff between us and the mounted cops. Unfortunately, I was in the front line. I’m not comfortable with animals at the best of times, let alone ones that are twice as tall and ridden by people with nasty jobs. I shared my water with my friend Tanya, with whom I’d locked arms, and then it ran out, and we were very thirsty. It felt like 40 degrees Celcius (104 degrees Farenheight), and it was midday. The horses moved slowly forward, their riders implacable. “I think I’m a bit scared,” Tanya said to me.

On the inside, the camp had been locked down. Nobody was there to greet us at the fence at first. (We’d managed to get some intelligence during the night that everyone inside had been locked in their dorms and teargassed.) Some managed to escape, though, and there was a heartbreaking moment when some women and children managed to get to the fences. All three layers of people — refugees, cops, protestors — were still. Nobody needed reminding that we were the first significant group of people that the people behind the fences had seen in Australia who weren’t involved in their processing or confinement. Who would call them something other than a number. (Prisoners are never referred to by name by the camp staff. They are routinely called “animals”, and are told that nobody wants them here.) Some of the police were crying.

Everyone (there were maybe 500 of us) made a sudden dash to the right, and then it was a mad dash for young and old. Our plan was to run around the compound, letting those inside know, even if they were locked in their rooms, that there were people outside. The police weren’t keeping up, so it was quite comical for a while. We met some more women and children (perhaps the authorities had decided, erroneously, that it was the men who were behind the events of the previous day, who were now under the tightest security).

“Don’t leave us,” the women inside were wailing. The horses arrived then. I looked further to the right and noticed that we were cut off — the camp’s armoured watercannon vehicle was edging around the next fence corner. Then someone threw a stone over the fence. My friend Claire picked it up, and when we examined it later we found this note wrapped around it:

Everything after that is a blur. I was wilting, exhausted and dehydrated, and so was everyone else. Throughout the day, the cops had regular visits from support personnel, and were well hydrated. We had some activist medics, one of whom gave me a swig of rehydration fluid, but it wasn’t enough. We were routed.

As we made our retreat, a few of us paused for to spell out the word “FREEDOM” with pebbles on the ground, for those we’d been forced to leave. It was instinctive, undirected, synchronous; we each worked on a different letter, and the word appeared within seconds.

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.

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——— (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

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——— (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

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——— (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

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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 the tasks of capitalism, and by then partaking in wild pranks and sabotage in the educational production plant, especially in the Redfern’s Australian Technology Park (which is an analogue of the new corporate art gallery), where postgraduate engineering students pay fees to work for arms manufacturers. The old slogans that were always qualitatively radical are thus still useful: Education for liberation, not world domination!

[15] Ironically, the camera-ready artwork of the cover story that Brody wrote and designed for the Guardian Review, in which he warned against the potential “mediocratising” and deskilling effect of digital publishing, was rejected by the paper’s typesetters for precisely those reasons he outlined in the content of the piece [Wozencroft 1994: 131]. Benjamin’s “The Work of Art…” served as the “content” of the debut of Brody’s typeface, Blur (which digitally reproduces the analogue distortion of the post-Bauhaus epitome of typeface functionality, Helvetica): “The sight of immediate reality has become an orchid in the land of technology” [Benjamin 1970b: 235 in Wozencroft 1994: 13].

[16] Those theorists that do believe in post-political, dispersive luxury have therefore, on some level, made a last-ditch, crypto-anthropomorphising valorisation of the “individual subject” that must be continually abjected in their rhetoric of “vectors”.

[17] Pretences of naturality appear ever more strained and contrived in the cyborg universe. In “The Work of Art…”, Benjamin describes the laborious steps that must be undertaken in order to “remove the camera” from one’s visual imaginary [Benjamin 1970b: 235]. Here, Benjamin is illustrative and ironically rueful. Images of strained naturalism therefore have a politically pedagogic use. Midnight Oil’s Blue Sky Mining (1990) album — in which the band reached its apogee of its Lawsonesque (or even proto-Maoist) socialist aesthetics — stands as an intriguing artefact of strained naturalism. A couple of years before its release, co-songwriter Rob Hirst noted that Australian popular music needed to represent the unique space and light of the Australian landscape. In the context of the Diesel and Dust album of 1987, this underlined Midnight Oil’s move away from its somewhat boxy and “artificial” sound of the early Eighties. Indeed, Blue Sky Mining sounds more fluidly melodic, earnest and organic than previous Midnight Oil albums, nostalgically invoking nationalist myths by using songwriting traditions that lay outside their roots in sweaty Seventies pub-rock. The instruments sound far more present than on previous albums, and their playing apparently more refined in its attention to texture and dynamics. This sweeping sonic blend culminates in the Celticised and elemental “One Country”, whose video-clip features panoramic landscape stills, interspersed with snapshots of white and Aboriginal “Aussie

History, strategy and the re-presentation of AIDS activist graphics

Benjamin Hoh, 1996

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On the general level on which U.S. academics and students take “influence” from France, one encounters the following understanding: Foucault deals with real history, real politics, and real social problems; Derrida is inaccessible, esoteric and textualistic. … [T]he substantive concern for the politics of the oppressed which often accounts for Foucault’s appeal can hide a privileging of the intellectual and of the “concrete” subject of oppression that, in fact, compounds the appeal… [Derrida] is less dangerous when understood than the first-world intellectual masquerading as the absent nonrepresenter who lets the oppressed speak for themselves.
— Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?”

Looking critically at how one might invoke the “concrete” can open up a crack in the world. As part of that project, this essay considers the art-historical practices of AIDS demo graphics (Crimp & Rolston 1990), Douglas Crimp and Adam Rolston’s book about AIDS activist propaganda. I first wanted to do this because AIDS demo graphics was “alternative” — it challenged the institutional investments of art-history by apparently locating its voice and focus outside the academy, the museum and, indeed, outside “art” itself. It was also the direct product of a particular political organisation and movement, thus providing a materially situated, solid problematic with which to engage. But it can’t end there: a reflexive abyss must open up as I compulsively consider the question of how this “solidity” might be significant in Crimp and Rolston’s project, and what this means for the negotiation of institutionality in projects for social change.

These days, it’s a change for me to locate a particular political significance in the “concreteness” of its subject matter. This is not a matter of whether “political immediacy” should be a priority in cultural criticism, but of how this could be. Of course, like most people alienated by abstraction, my policy has always been, “this had better be about stuff, or I’m not going to bother…”. But following Deleuze’s movement towards technically engaged critical strategies that resemble science fiction rather than science, I also approach cultural criticism as a way of generating useful political techniques. What can criticism help us do? Lately, I have focused on this “conceptual virtue” in order to challenge the tendency of self-described radical cultural criticism to narcissistically found its sense of political responsibility upon its choice of content in itself. Such “content” may indeed concern an urgent material situation, but it may also may be mere fuel for what has been called “the self satisfaction of too much work in cultural studies”, or become, as Spivak describes, an alibi that re-cements the division of labour (Spivak 1988).

Against such a background, we can contrast an alternative approach to “immediacy”: taking concepts from unlikely places and seeing how they can be put into play within whatever problems are at hand — perhaps in an everyday activist project. But within the academy there are problems with such a practice: when concepts lack the consistent contextual framing (whose aura is appropriated for the construction of “responsible thickness”), their development can formally coincide (and be confused) with “abstraction” (or, the privileged disengagement of professional philosophy’s own institutionalisation). And without rigorous grounding, the application of such concepts can also implode into short-term utilitarianism or frivolous adventurism. Therefore, the reflexive abyss brought by my choice of subject matter is useful: the concrete is both an object of critique and a corrective. The crack, once opened, is beyond the control of any critic.

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It is impossible to fully determine the art-historical significance of AIDS demo graphics by explicating and then assessing its major points, simply because the book mostly avoids “theory”. It must therefore be seen as a cultural artefact, whose theoretical implications can be drawn out by putting it into play in a wider context.[1] AIDS demo graphics is an archive of the visual propaganda produced by ACT UP New York, an autonomous group that operates under the international banner of ACT UP, the AIDS Coalition To Unleash Power. ACT UP aims to “end the AIDS crisis” by combining its interventions into public knowledges of “AIDS” with agitations for more equitable and humane responses from medico-governmental authorities to the epidemic. ACT UP is famous for its striking use of slogans and visual devices in its activist work, like the famous “SILENCE = DEATH” device; their propaganda appropriates various mass-cultural elements of late capitalism — advertising slogans, the iconicity of the commodity, etc. — and puts them into play in the post-1968 discourse of New Left social movement activism.

AIDS demo graphics deals, then, with aesthetic productions whose purposes lie beyond the locus of the museum. Crimp and Rolston take great pains to illustrate the museum’s elitist institutionalisations, with which ACT UP can be associated but not made equivalent; while ACT UP’s work is now often hung in galleries, their placards, posters, stickers and fliers are primarily created for the social space of “the streets”. Art-history’s traditional and overwhelmingly anti-social focus on the elite institution of the “work of art” is thus emphasised all the more by ACT UP’s everyday popularity and urgency. Whatever blind or opportunist approach the museum may take towards cultural activism, Crimp and Rolston assert that throughout this, “[t]he aesthetic values of the traditional art world are of little consequence to AIDS activists” (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 15).

Crimp and Rolston make it clear that they intend AIDS demo graphics to be both an umbrella for, and an extension of, the propaganda produced by ACT UP New York. In their introduction, they immediately distance their account from the totalising mappings of a disinterested “study”:

This book is intended as a demonstration, in both senses of the word. It is meant as a direct action, putting the power of representation in the hands of as many people as possible. And it is presented as a do-it-yourself manual, showing how to make propaganda work in the fight against AIDS… We are members of ACT UP New York. We attend its meetings, join the debate, march in demonstrations, and get arrested for acts of civil disobedience… (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 13)

AIDS demo graphics is thus a statement from the inside of its own content. But eager to disclaim the possibility of a universalising counter-authority to the academy, Crimp and Rolston emphasise the particularity of their concerns:

We’re familiar with New York ACT UP’s graphics, the people who make them, the issues they address. The limitation is part of the nature of our demonstration. We don’t claim invention of the style or the techniques. We have no patent on the politics or the designs. There are AIDS activist graphics wherever there are AIDS activists. But ours are the ones we know and can show to others, presented in a context we understand. We want others to keep using our graphics and making their own. (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 13)

But such a localisation nonetheless creates an aura of authority. The knowledge of the grass-roots. Throughout the text, the first person collective pronoun, “we”, blurs the authorial voice with the actions of the activist group. A particular ACT UP demonstration or campaign is recalled in each section, titled with journalistic spatiotemporal coordinates; for example, “Don’t Go to Bed With Cosmo: Hearst Building, New York City, January 19, 1988” (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 38). Each retelling outlines the pressing political issues that informed the event, describing the graphics that those issues prompted, recounting the “live action” of the event, and assessing its outcomes in broad terms. Interspersed throughout the text are one-to-a-page reproductions of relevant ACT UP graphics, and occasional black and white photographs of the graphics being wielded by angry, chanting protestors.

There is a kind of unsurprised causality about it all: the specifics of location, motivation and result are linked dramatically. Each major event follows in chronological order from the inception of the group in 1987, and the narrative selectively highlights the most effective links between graphics and major issues (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 22). This cementing of determination is crystallised in one of ACT UP’s chants at the Stonewall Riot’s 20th anniversary rally: “IF NOT NOW, WHEN? IF NOT HERE, WHERE? IF NOT US, WHO?” (Crimp and Rolston 1990: 104).

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Autobiography. AIDS demo graphics changed my life. I encountered the book in 1991, as I was beginning to invest serious energy in left-wing activism and graphic design. These two things were already connected for me; my first substantial experience in design occurred in the context of leftist media interventions, so finding AIDS demo graphics in the middle of all this was perfect — while it didn’t offer any advice on how to run a propaganda outfit, it did succeed in inspiring me. AIDS demo graphics was addictive. It invited fetishism. It helped me realise that people in the world had cool ways of expressing themselves in protest. AIDS demo graphics also confirmed the importance of visuality in the arena of protest. The benefits of looking “professional”. Of not being a dreary, verbose ideologue. AIDS demo graphics located its images in the middle of issues and events, creating a compelling impression of activity that I tried to recreate in my own work.[2]

But underneath, a question remained: what exactly was I trying to do? Or, what models of sociality and social change are enacted by ACT UP’s approach to signification? It took a few years for the book’s initial impression to wear off, and for me to take inspiration from it in a more reflexive manner; my response moved from attempting to simply “reincarnate” ACT UP’s feel, towards engaging with its workings. From 1994 to 1995, I worked on proposals for “information practices” that could be enacted within my own leftist organisation. These practices included

1. setting up Internet hypertext systems, putatively for “fact-oriented” communication and archival purposes;
2. incorporating journalistic techniques of documentation and investigation into everyday activist work;
3. reviving the “teach-in” as a prioritised point of political action; and
4. writing short books, much like AIDS demo graphics, that would document the course of particular political projects.

Although this appears to be a “return to scholasticism”, much of its appeal was deliberately superficial. I was more interested in how the fetishistic pretense of informationality always has strategic social value that can be put into play; the existence of archives, written communication and more deliberate pedagogical spaces would serve to focus collective energies and sensitivities; and an attraction to journalistic processes would structurally foster an engaged approach (that could avoid the totalisations of both timidity and bluffing assuredness) to the complex, unfolding spaces of politics.

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Crisis. Almost a decade after its inception, ACT UP is in decline: its worldwide membership, activity and profile are low, bitter factional splits are commonplace, and “the vibe” no longer exists. It this context, it is fitting to consider the critiques of ACT UP made by a visual artist and one-time ACT UP associate, Matthew Jones. In his silence = death exhibition (1991), Jones suggests that ACT UP’s declarative sloganeering enacts a kind of metaphysical absolutism, against which he posits the impossibility of a declarative politics. In one installation, stark slogans are fixed above blank canvasses, opaque window frames and other markable surfaces that have been evacuated of content, or made into furniture. Slogans are given wayward permutations (“discourse = defense”; “defense = disease”; “disease = discourse”), or brought face to face with the reactionary implications of their “logical conclusions” (“homosexuality = aids”). Jones challenges the crystallisation of ACT UP’s bold identifications and authoritative orderings in its “SILENCE = DEATH” slogan by begging a pertinent question: what kind of revolutionary actor is cemented by the compulsory enunciation of reactive anger? In another image, a generically heroic ACT UP activist, brandishing a U.S. flag and surrounded by assorted AIDS activist propaganda, leaps from his hospital bed to realise the fictional duty of making America great again. Lying prominently on the floor, among the propaganda materials, is a copy of AIDS demo graphics. The whole glorious scene, like socialist realism, is obviously unreal, but the caption, which appears as a museum plaque for a diorama, provides a pathetic kind of reassurance: “ACTUAL PHOTO”.

In I FEEL LIKE CHICKEN TONIGHT (1994), Jones parodies Adam Rolston’s I am out therefore I am (1989), which was an ACT UP sticker and t-shirt. Jones replaces Rolston’s text with a slogan for a brand of bottled chicken sauce: “I FEEL LIKE CHICKEN TONIGHT”. Several theses can be drawn from such a strategy:

1. appropriating the slick, emphatic feel of advertising simply rearticulates its simplistic inanity;
2. Rolston’s naturalising declaration of an oppositional social identity demonstrates a dependency on particular kinds of market-approved subjectification, and it thus becomes an inane advertising slogan; [3]
3. the exclusion involved in naturalising a gay identity returns as the forbidden spectre of man-boy sex (in whose discourse a “chicken” is slang for a young boy);[4]
4. all of this makes ACT UP’s aim of politicising people via “public art” largely impossible.[5]

For Jones, ACT UP’s decline would be unsurprising; it would be rendered obsolete once it had fully literalised those of its logics that always resembled the dominant social order’s.

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If Jones overstates his case, it is because he fails to appreciate the negotiations that occur within material situations. His effective collapsing of the field of semiosis leads him to a kind of idealist faith: that social meanings are consistently realised functions of philosophical propositions, and are always played out to their logical conclusions. But ACT UP slogans cannot be reduced to literal expressions of metaphysics; their declarations of resistant particularity or their iconic mappings of desperate situations are necessary but always contingent interventions, not items of faith. This also applies generally to ACT UP’s technique of appropriation. As Crimp argues, semiotic interventions are effects in themselves, and cannot be seen in terms of idealist fundamentalisms:

ACT UP in its heyday worked because it was able to deal with the media, because it was able to create images, and slogans, and forms of knowledge — it was able to make meaning differently from the way the media had been making meaning about AIDS prior to that moment. And the discourses have managed to have shifted very, very, very greatly for a period of time, because of that. (Crimp & Hoh 1995)

By seeing earnest literalism everywhere, Jones earnestly reveals himself to be the master literalist. But he must not be overinterpreted; radical action is not impossible for Jones; confronted with the dilemma of “ACT UP or DO NOTHING” (Jones 1991), his participation in ACT UP was instead haunted by what he saw to be certain overwhelming tendencies of the organisation. And in the shadow of essentialist feminisms, “revolutionary” nationalisms, etc., it must be admitted that ACT UP’s hyper-iconicity may increase its tendency to literalise the terms of its negotiations,[6] and thus realise a kind of commodifying identity politics. Sloganeering can indeed be dangerous.[7] Perhaps Jones represents the emergent self-awareness of this tendency, which is horrified because all it can see is its own nose. We can thus appropriate his critique within a more materialist framework, just as one would use a canary in a mineshaft: as a colourful symptom that pre-empts our own.

Jones’ challenge is particularly pertinent to AIDS demo graphics, because “history” occupies an overcoded place in the canon of left-wing authoritarianism — witness Stalinism’s underwriting by a teleological conception of Progress that was given sacred representation in the machinations of the State. We must therefore interrogate Crimp and Rolston’s tendency to short-circuit historical processes in their presentation of “concrete” activities, and prise open the cracks that have been filled by ACT UP’s overly symbolic logic in order to locate practical problems. Like the chasm of indeterminacies that lies between “SILENCE” and “DEATH”, what lies between an “issue” and its supposed incarnation in a placard? Crimp and Rolston’s aim of providing a “how-to guide” to propaganda production is frustrated by their notable failure to deal with most of the processes that lead up to the display of the finished products. Of course, the problem is not a quantitative lack of “empirical rigour”, but a qualitative question of political style.[8] Crimp and Rolston’s fetishism of the protest-product obscures the relationality of propaganda production, and thus the need to offer any actualisable strategies of expressive action.

This problem is part of a general avoidance of social semiotics, and even extends to simple questions of “reception”. Crimp and Rolston’s declarations eclipse the need to assess the social effects of ACT UP propaganda, and close off crucial considerations of what ACT UP activists were actually trying to achieve by making visual interventions in the first place. The collapse of these questions into an edifice of bullet-listed “issues” signals the collapse of the contingent political space in which “issues” are initially formulated, echoing anarchism’s abandonment (in its ultraleftist mission to spur spontaneous, “concrete” worker control) of what Marxism identifies as the tasks of the political. The narrative of AIDS demo graphics tends to replace qualities of action with pure spectacle. (“ACTUAL PHOTO”!) Indeed, it is licit to wonder whether the unparalleled hyperconsumability of ACT UP’s appearance in AIDS demo graphics — as simultaneous appropriations of “commercials” and “news” — overpowers the manifest radicality of the whole project.[9]

Of course, one could answer these charges with the objection that AIDS demo graphics is not an academic work, and that everything is a matter of generic suitability. After all, Crimp himself believes that “my arguments [in AIDS demo graphics] don’t come from the experience of an art critic but from the experience of a member of ACT UP who was sort of participating around that work” (Crimp & Hoh 1995). But the defensive use of such a distinction is fundamentally flawed. Besides presenting a particular kind of accessibility as the only alternative to academic language, such disavowals belie the unavoidable spectre that haunts AIDS demo graphics: that of the museum itself. Crimp and Rolston’s presentation of ACT UP graphics creates a particular, sanctifying aura that exceeds their status as mass-produced tools; it is the aura of “the work”. Each piece of propaganda is accorded a space to be reproduced flat on a single page, without ambience, with a framing of white space and all the norms of art-historical labelling in the opposite margin: the name of the work, the artist or design group, the medium and its dimensions. Such a structuring is not simply a matter of course; it is striking. There is an exaggerated feeling of “exhibition”.

Given that some of Douglas Crimp’s most powerful academic work deals with the museum’s abstracting, idealising and homogenising mission, the prominent trace of the art institution in AIDS demo graphics is noteworthy. If the Jonesian “equivalence” of activist art and the museum is ridiculously idealistic, we must grasp the situation by first acknowledging that Crimp and Rolston’s auratising presentation of graphics, within the text’s short-circuiting narrative structure, can indeed produce a kind of essentialising historicism by replacing painterly authoriality with an authoritative activist subjectivity. But examining the other effects of this mode of presentation can demonstrate why AIDS demo graphics is so productive in the first place. In On the Museum’s Ruins (1993), Crimp — writing consciously as an art-historian — performs a Foucauldian archaeology of the museum’s historical project, charting its arbitrary attempts to universalise discontinuous elements into a homogenous stream of artistic development. He then attempts to open up the incongruities that briefly surface when photography enters the institution.

When photography is allowed entrance to the museum as an art among others, the museum’s epistemological coherence collapses. The “world outside” is allowed in, and art’s autonomy is revealed as a fiction, a construction of the museum. (Crimp 1993: 14)

Meanwhile, Crimp and Rolston invoke the museum by focusing on an extra-museum practice — propaganda — that nonetheless has the capacity to “enter the museum”, literally and through the book’s allusive structure.[10] So in AIDS demo graphics, Crimp and Rolston have reproduced the moment of photography’s “museumisation” by creating an “inappropriate/d archive”, whose functions are indeterminate enough for interesting things to happen. AIDS demo graphics is a “failed museum”; its totalisations cannot operate with full efficiency. This “inappropriate” moment allows “appropriation” to happen; the fetishisation of the “works” is never completed, thus serving as a useful focus for the affectual process of seeing, rather than a straight literalisation of museum-logic. In other words, the corrupted aura of the activist “work”, which causes mobility because it has partially decomposed into lubricating slime, serves to excite me, and inspired my formulation of “informatic practices”: the putative systematisation of activist work can provide spaces for techniques of engagement to occur.

Transgressing its own totalising potential, this strategy mirrors the way that ACT UP propaganda works best: as a visual focus for the energies of the movement, channelling actualisable desire. Reducing ACT UP’s appropriation of advertising to a doomed attempt to find an impossible public language of communication, Jones moralises that ACT UP can only preach to the converted. But Crimp and Rolston are not troubled that “[the graphics’] primary audience is the movement itself” (Crimp & Rolston 1990: 20). When it works, the propaganda process sidesteps commodity fetishism and even the facts of its “message”, and becomes useful.

< < <

In AIDS demo graphics, we can discern the precise moment that strategy can begin to escape the embrace or rejection of the concrete. Perhaps it is now too late for ACT UP. In any case, useful “art-historical” approaches must create more of these moments, and for this we must return to the crack…

< < <

Crimp, Douglas (1993) On the Museum’s Ruins, Cambridge: MIT Press

Crimp, Douglas & Eugene Hoh (1995) “Fighting a Cultural War: an interview with Douglas Crimp”, unpublished version [see National AIDS Bulletin 9(4)]

Crimp, Douglas & Adam Rolston (1990) AIDS demo graphics, Seattle: Bay Press

Jones, Matthew (1991) “ACT UP or DO NOTHING?”, Agenda 16

Phillips, David (1992) “Rhetorical Silence”, Eyeline 19

Spivak, Gayatri (1988) “Can the Subaltern Speak?”, in Lawrence Grossberg & Cary Nelson (eds), Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, Chicago: University of Illinois Press

< < <

[1] This need — for a critical methodology to deal with what always persists in the absence or presence of literal theorising — makes it clear that all other (art-historical) texts share a basic, if not so obvious, need for such interrogation. Explication and assessment have never been adequate. This may be obvious in the case of “literature”, but techniques of reading must also be applied to “theory”.

[2] It was no coincidence that in the following year, I joined SICH (Student Initiatives in Community Health), a group committed to a radically social understanding of health issues, especially the AIDS epidemic. And when SICH was shut down by the Federal Government for producing “treasonable and offensive” material, I found myself in the streets with ACTUP-style placards, condemning the Government’s repressive approach to sex and health, and encouraging people to DANCE PROUD / FUCK SAFE / MAKE REVOLUTION.

[3] In a disturbingly earnest return to the Cartesian cogito (which is “stolen back”, as it were, from Barbara Kruger’s I shop therefore I am), Rolston unproblematically cements and privileges a very particular activist and gay identity. It also proudly accepts a dependence of action and identity on “mandatory” processes of subjectification enacted by the mainstream “gay community” as an acceptable market under the flexibilities of late capitalism. Indeed, the only irony expressed in Rolston’s image is the “subversive” replacement of the universal subject with a (universal) gay (activist) subject. Kruger’s anxiety about the dependent universalisation of consumer subjectivity conveniently disappears.

[4] This recalls the mainstream gay and lesbian lobby’s desperate attempts to distance itself from “paedophilia”, whose construction is a canonical part of homophobic discourse. Jones’ observation is particularly pertinent at a time when a Royal Commission about police corruption can use “paedophilia” as the central link of a wildly arbitrary signifying chain that invokes the most intensely reactionary anxieties of contemporary Western civilisation.

[5] This dilemma is knowingly performed by Jones’ use of “chicken”, which (although relatively subversive in comparison to Rolston’s reactive reversal of the ontology of the closet) still remains spectacularly obscure in its moment of “advertising” its marginal sexuality. Its desire can also only be for a commodity.

[6] Because I am a designer, I find that typography provides a superficial but telling arena in which this loss of strategy can be performed. The most common font used in ACT UP placards and posters is Futura Condensed Extrabold. It is also used for the headings and the titling for AIDS demo graphics. A Bauhaus font designed to evoke geometric certainty and maximum solidity, Futura Condensed Extrabold has widely been considered perfect for typesetting stark, absolutist slogans, and was an advertising design cliche of the 1980s (even leading to the formation of a mock-serious League for the Elimination of Futura Condensed Extrabold; appropriately, one of the few effective visual identities that still uses Futura Condensed Extrabold is ABSOLUT VODKA). For ACT UP in the late 1980s, the popularity and readability of this weight of Futura made it noticeable, but this was not “natural”; all of these functions, especially readability, are fairly arbitrary. Indeed: like all signification, every time a font is used (or designed), a strategic and contextual appropriation occurs, whether it is acknowledged or not. But even in this time of fast-and-loose typography, the staying-power of modernist design discourse makes it easy to essentialise a font’s aesthetic function, and I get the impression that ACT UP’s almost exclusive use of Futura Condensed Extrabold — just as it was losing popular favour — increasingly lost its contextuality, leading to the creation of a corporate visual identity, and enacting a fundamentalist relation to its message: an ABSOLUTist font for an ABSOLUTist slogan.

[7] The dangers that lie in the declarative politics of identity are perhaps better handled by another visual artist, Glenn Ligon, who uses strategies similar to those of Jones, but towards a more ambivalent (and less sarcastic) effect. In his New Work (1996) exhibition, Ligon manipulates media photographs of the Nation of Islam’s Million Man March, degrading the quality of the images through repeated reproductions, so that the slogans on the banners disappear. The difference is the feeling of a situated dilemma.

[8] Indeed, positivistic solutions to such historiographical problems serve to utterly whitewash the politics of the situation. For instance, it is ironic that in “the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics”, the soviets themselves were marginalised; but a call for the Stalinism to “correct” itself would have missed the point, because such marginalisation was a qualitative part of a regime, and not a simple “absence” that could have been easily rectified. So to truly work for the reinstatement of soviet democracy, of “how-to” information in AIDS demo graphics, or of “historical truth”, one must become a revolutionary, not a reformist. To paraphrase Marx: previous historical concerns with “the truth” have only succeeded in refining positivism; the point, however, is to smash it.

[9] This is not a moral problem; while the existence of all kinds of resistance in commercial popular culture is undeniable and vital, the crystallisation of a programmatic political statement in a language that exists precisely to sell commodities does open up some easily-enacted problems, which may not be insurmountable (depending on the quality of their context, which is always arguable), but which are definitely dangerous. For instance, Jones sees ACT UP Melbourne as “lazily aping the U.S. counterpart” because its off-the-shelf image creates eager market for more of the same (Jones 1991: 3); meanwhile, the interchangeability of ACT UP’s visuality with that of the fashionably transgressive and apolitically provocative United Colours of Benetton begs many questions — witness their recent joint project to cover the Eiffel Tower in a giant condom, which is particularly ironic, given Crimp and Rolston’s differentiation of ACT UP from Benetton [Crimp & Rolston 1990: 18-19]. Again, the material situation has changed: late capitalism can incorporate transgression.

[10] The presence of activist art in museums cannot be reduced to mere co-option. This extends beyond the invaluable genesis of ACT UP’s Gran Fury propaganda group in the creation of an exhibition piece. If ACT UP propaganda existed solely on the streets, a condescending (or de facto liberal) logic of “appropriateness” could easily ghettoise any approach to popular culture, therefore leaving “the arts” intact and free from interrogation. We must keep in mind, though, that such a crossover into the art museum cannot be regarded in any way as a kind of “heroic transgression” or daring (— how daring is it to hang in a gallery?); it is merely a useful indicator.

A political fantasy of radical action around the university

Ben Hoh, Left Alliance Internal Discussion (June 1995)

1) Running through the foundations of the campaign against fees is a problematic orientation towards “consumer rights”. This isn’t often fully articulated, but it’s familiar enough: “We students can’t afford to pay fees; as (hopefully upward-)clawing, canny customers (middle class or not), we deserve better.” But regardless of such counterrevolutionary garbage, it is true that especially in this current context, fees will objectively devastate any future prospects of an equitable education system and will play a great part in fucking over people in general (in combination with the refinement of various technocratic training mechanisms), and must therefore be stopped, with “united front mass action”. Yes. But what kind of action has actually set the basic rhythm (and hence the practical or formal agenda) for the contemporary campaigns against fees, and against user-pays, etc.? Despite the Left’s facilitation of the campaign and the urgency of the issues, we still haven’t gotten the rhythm of anti-fees mobilisation away from that of a knee-jerk, isolated and reactive defense that will increasingly lose momentum as the education system is more explicitly integrated with simultaneously marginalising and privileging mechanisms of profit.

Of course, Left Alliance has a principled history of arguing against vacuous and reactive “agendas”: within cross-campus forums, we challenge sincere and cynically opportunist populism; in “public”, we distribute critical material that competes with populist propaganda. But there’s a distinctly limited instinct built into the very impulse of the campaign’s current orientation; it doesn’t just infect the bits of rhetoric that are outside of our control. We must therefore create alternative models for mobilisation. This must go beyond making our revolutionary arguments against reformist populism “louder” (although this doesn’t hurt); on a much more fundamental level, we need to construct non-consumerist situations that would be more conducive to revolutionary politics. We need a reorientation.

2) Upon inspection, one would think that the Left’s aim was merely to get lots of panicky and paranoid students chanting radical-sounding slogans. Is this particularly revolutionary (or even deeply politicising), and is it even achievable these days? My assertion: so long as “students” remain a defensive “constituency” that reacts instinctively against government attacks, the potential for revolutionary action will progressively shrink. Of course, one could say that any anti-fees position is “objectively progressive”, i.e. it will always defend people who really will get fucked over, and it will necessarily be against the government. So? Saddam Hussein led the struggle against Western imperialism in 1991… in a manner of speaking. While a programme of “pure self-defense” can often be radicalising, this is less and less the case with “students as students” in the 1990s, because nowadays, students are increasingly invited to complicitly associate their very presence in universities with the internalisation of a ruthless user-pays ideology that encourages a blase kind of docility,[1] which only occasionally extends itself into consumer outrage (and that is often directed against anything that isn’t “good value”, e.g. “wasteful” attempts at non-vocational, participatory and critical teaching, or even general non-curricular activities, radical or not).[2]

As long as we allow this context to continue, we won’t be able to convince many more people of the “rightness” of our analysis by quantatively increasing our effort. And in the long run, the instinct underpinning the campaign will effectively overwhelm any valid arguments the Left may put forth about “education for liberation”, let alone the usual stuff about negative wealth redistribution or access and equity. When their consumer status is reinforced by the campaign’s framing and subsequent motivational direction, most students (whether they’ve been mobilised or not) are just not going to believe or care about such marginal, lefty bullshit for very long.[3] Mixed signals: in an increasingly technocratic institution, constituency-building is simpy going to fuck up any kind of radical political connections that we try to make. This is a continuum that we’ve always negotiated (with an opportunistic pragmatism that occasionally masquerades as “strategy”), but why negotiate when the situation is now so overriding?

This leads me to perhaps the major point. The ability to “make political connections” isn’t some special thing that only benefits the recruitment-aspirations of “the Left”: basically, student “clientilism” stops the rest of society from engaging with the campaign. Therefore, our frustrated and slightly tokenistic attempts to get unions, community groups and other activists involved in the campaign will increasingly tend towards failure. And so “our” support dwindles… and everybody loses. We can roll our eyes at formulaic Spartacist rhetoric about “integrated labour/minority actions”, but broadening one’s base beyond one’s obvious “constituency” (and thus problematising such a notion) is a pretty standard requirement for any “social movement”.[4] While existing “social movements” shouldn’t necessarily be held up as examples of inherent radicality, the basis of the “student movement” is so laughable that its (short-circuited) “radicality” is inconsequential in comparison. As the Situationist International said in 1966:

[S]tudents continue blithely to organise demonstrations which mobilise students and students only. This is political consciousness in its virgin state, a fact which naturally makes the universities a happy hunting ground for the manipulators of the declining bureaucratic organisations.[5]

Uncanny, isn’t it?

If anything, we need to take the most progressive aspect of “social movement” organising, which is its abstract mobilising impulse: people coming together to act against the way things currently work. Pretty basic stuff. “The education system is becoming an elitist, money-making, hierarchical fast-food machine that will fuck the world up! You can help by fighting fees. Save the planet – free education!” Such popular mobilisation (as opposed to narrowly populist mobilisation) provides a qualitative orientation towards mass-based social change, which is what “we” currently need. If initially successful, such a reorientation of the “education campaign” could actually be harder to deradicalise than that of other “social movements”, because there’s not much to fetishise in the education system (unlike, say, the trees, furry animals and future middle-class children which figure so potently and dangerously in environmentalist movements).

3) There’s another (less accurate but eye-opening) method of charting our campaign’s suspicious rhythms. Historically, note the low levels of response (from most of the Left and people in general) to campaigns against the Australian Technology Park and full fees for overseas students (which are both still incredibly important indicators of the education system’s restructuring). Take the case of the latter: full-blown, upfront fees for overseas students were introduced soon after HECS for local students, further concretising the profiteering course of the education system. Things were obviously getting worse, people were being fucked over, and in popular terms, the thin edge of the wedge was getting way thicker. If this was the case, why is it suddenly more appropriate that we should “go sick” at the prospect of fees for local undergraduate students? I don’t think this can be completely rationalised by the observation that the current threat will affect the system more intensely (which is perhaps too naive a justification, given that we’ve seen this coming for years, via the example at hand; the problem is that it wasn’t really even seen as an example, let alone something to “go sick” about).[6]

Underneath our “objectively correct” explanations, then, a major reason for our currently “opportune” action is that the orientation of the anti-fees struggle is reactive, populist and “self”-defensive, and we’re relying on this. In a way, the current outrage is partly predicated on nobody previously caring about overseas student fees; even though the Left did some campaigning on the issue, it wasn’t really a “goer”: most students wouldn’t be automatically be against overseas student fees. Even if we admitted this, but then asserted that our politicising role was nevertheless doing well in overcoming this unconscious but blatant lack of principles, people would be thinking troubledly about overseas student fees all the time. Since this is manifestly not the case, our efforts at intervention are clearly in a state of crisis.

4) To overstate the case again: the current system of anti-fees mobilisation actually hurts the Left and the cause at hand (even in its most vacuous manifestation, i.e. “I don’t want to pay fees”), because its gains are increasingly impossible to place in a political context, and its mobilisations are always in defensive, mindless, boom-and-bust cycles that will increasingly weaken as things get worse. And things are getting worse, because unlike the “ordinary” fee-paying mentalities of the past, the internalised user-pays ideologies are new ones, tailored to fit a set of previously non-existent and radically dangerous relationships between “education” and “profit”. The damage to “student activism” by the continued rationalisation and corporatisation of the education system may be irreversible; if full fees for all undergraduate students are eventually introduced after further extensions to already-existing user-pays systems, the response (from a student movement rendered practically non-existent by rich postgrads, smarmy voucher-payers, and debt-ridden, commodity-driven undergrads) might be a brief whimper.

5) As my urgency about the current situation suggests, I’m not advocating that “because students are a cretinised bunch of prats, we should just fuck ‘em”, and then abandon any hope of mass mobilisation against fees… or anything else. No. In fact, a major reason for intervention into the relatively local environment of the university is to mobilise people in order to stop such cretinisation, towards the fight for free education and political action in general, etc., which will stop further cretinisation, which will open up spaces for political action, which will… and so on.

In his LA briefing paper on the 1993 Budget, Comrade Toby Borgeest suggested that our opposition to user-pays schemes can be seen in terms of “interference” in a “feedback loop” that is currently settling into a comfortably capitalist wave. Rather than merely saving us from discrete attacks by the forces of darkness, “successful” actions must break the university’s autonomic, zombie-like streak, allowing more people to actualise more collective, political potentials within its walls, and lessening its ability to manufacture tools for capitalist world domination. However, “interference” isn’t merely a way of simply looking at what we already do; instead, this perspective can reorient our approach, towards an open emphasis on stopping the claustrophobic, spiralling movement of the system, in order to constructively open our institutional context to qualitatively revolutionary potentials. No more angry zombies!

I suggest that LA needs to extend its admirable critical work, towards a complete rejection of the strategies of the last ten years of anti-fees activism, which have taken advantage of (and then attempted to counter-hegemonise) students’ defensive impulses, which in turn have become less and less open to progressive orientations. And I mean an effective rejection, not lots of condemnatory rhetoric; we need to actually free people from riding the crest of a wave of populist knee-jerking.

I think that this means trying to avidly reframe “education campaigns” so that they lie in the general territory of “a movement of ’selfless’ agitating around a pressing social issue of inequality and shittiness, engaged by everybody, but especially by those in the middle of the situation”. An initial and deeply qualitative difference, in comparison with the self-defense impulse. Principled, broadly social defense. Nobody seems to have this in mind, at least in any practical sense. It’s even modest, but far less reactive than current patterns of behaviour. To make a perfectly liberal observation, there doesn’t seem to be much “idealism” happening these days; instead, the combined ruthlessness of ultra-left adrenaline-pumping (which need not be actually “radical” at all) and student opportunism are now becoming alarmingly interchangeable.

6) Again, it’s not as if we have to completely and negatively marginalise ourselves into some ultra-leftist stratosphere. Adequately political alternatives to the current system of campaigning, with more potentials for informed and radical mobilisation, aren’t necessarily elitist or “ultra-ideological”, but instead should merely be qualitatively different. Therefore, there isn’t some binary choice between the Sparts and populism: we don’t have to strategically lie, like the ISO and DSP, who eventually start believing their own propaganda. (I can just imagine: the DSP “leading” a “highly mobilised” bunch of manipulated pressure-groups towards… communism? I very much doubt it.) Of course, there are arguments that people do get politicised by “graduating” from their involvement in populist struggles, and this is undoubtedly true — many of us are clear examples of this – but this is marginal activity.

Neither am I suggesting that in order to act, we need the most meticulously “correct” analysis; such caution usually stifles “creative thought on the move”. The movement just needs to be qualitatively different in composition and its direction. But what does this mean? To digress: if anything, LA seems to have a fetish for “analysis” that could possibly move in the Spartacist direction of condemnatory spectatorship. While it’s great that LA is more communist these days, we must acknowledge that there are activities which may not be totally informed by explicitly Left critical thought, but which are constructive in orientation, and potentially able to be politicised. Most of my work, which I regard as Left Alliance “activist” work, has been on this level. Anyway, my point is that we need communism, but we don’t need ultra-leftism, theory-fetishism or sectarianism. If it would do any good, we could argue in cross campus forums that the present “pitch” of the “education campaign” is actually self-defeating, destructive, anti-political, and for leftists, fundamentally dishonest. But I’d prefer to be more constructive, and to enjoin the debate on the level of experimental activity.

[1] In contrast, “workers as workers” are not required to associate their very presence in the condition of wage slavery with a requirement to impulsively consume. Instead, the postmodern turn in the First World towards relatively high levels of working-class consumption helps to dissociate workers from that condition, leading to other kinds of identification and the much heralded “end of class”. In liberal democratic nation-sates, workers’ sense of their presence in “the world” may well be predicated on the internalisation of consumerist ideology, but labour defense struggles — by their very separation from consumerist “reality” — still have revolutionary potentials which reach beyond the idea of their mere necessity as the protection of interests, and towards an otherworldly radicality. (This is in addition to workers’ strategic and revolutionary positioning within the capitalist mode of production, and also despite the decline of organised labour in the First World.) Meanwhile, the overdetermined and ever more concrete linking of impulsive consumption with the situation of the university means that even if we can figure students as being exploited (through their payment for providing labour for intellectual production), student “defense” still can’t succeed in even its simplest objectives. However, the situation of the university as a site of production may mean that student sabotage, rather than “defense”, may be a useful (but limited) kind of “constituent” mobilisation…

[2] Such a context leads me to appreciate the Spartacist League’s call to protest against the Budget’s proposed abolition of AUSTUDY for non-citizen students. However vague, disengaged and unsuccessful this protest was, it appeared to be one of the few attempts in the last five years to critically mobilise students and others against “government attacks” from a foundation that didn’t rely on the most basic, self-interested impulses of the student population. Besides proving the Sparts’ bizarro anti-social weirdness, its failure is also a grim indication, and not a vindication, of the populist consensus. If the urge to protest outside the parameters of self-interest (which is a pretty ordinary expectation we should have of any principled “social movement”) doesn’t basically inform our struggles against things like fees, then things definitely aren’t as radical as they may seem.

[3] Activists in NOSCA (the Network of Overseas Students’ Collectives

in Australia) are currently experiencing incredible difficulties in mobilising

“new” overseas students, most of whom just don’t give a flying fuck about “imperialism” and “exploitation”. The overseas student

population has been radically reconstituted, not only by the increasingly

effective access-barrier of full fees, but also by participating in a

ever-strengthening set of ideological codes that define the workings of an

ultra-commodified education system. These older NOSCA activists are ambivalent

about participating in campaigns for things like travel concessions, because

while necessary, those things can’t really be radicalised. And if the original campaign against overseas student fees (and NOSCA’s

struggle as an organisation) hadn’t been primarily fought on the ideological terrain of “Third World exploitation” and

“the commodification of education”, NOSCA certainly wouldn’t have lasted as

long as it has, and its activists wouldn’t have bothered to continually warn

local students about the future possibilities of such profiteering measures.

[4] Over the years there have been strange arguments made in favour of “student control of student affairs”. While this probably has some currency when placed in opposition to authoritarian institutional powers (e.g. the government, the university administration, etc.), it obscures most revolutionary links, most of the time. What happened to world liberation? Given our increasing inability to radically act in self-defense, the whole ethic of “students working for students” is (on the whole) pretty weird.

[5] On the Poverty of Student Life, Brickburner Press, 1981, p.8.

[6]This is the lesson of the American SWP, which joined the apolitical peaceniks and populist Leftists in opposing the Vietnam War primarily to “bring our boys home”, unscathed. Any attempt to introduce “real” socialist politics undersuch a banner was thus rendered as an vague, arcane afterthought or a pissy government warning on a packet of cigarettes, as if they were saying, “by the way, ‘our boys’ should not be used for destroying mass-based, anti-imperialist liberation movements”. Such a move joined in the populist sabotage of the potential for a pretty “popular” revolt against the US imperialist death machine. While America’s popular anti-Vietnam movement was, regardless of this, far more qualitatively oriented to the Left than any contemporary possibilities for popular revolt against the “mindless corporate machine” of the university, we move further and further away from such an orientation with each spasm of populist “pragmatism”.

A conversation with Brian Massumi about qualities of radicalism

This is an interview I did in 1993 with Brian Massumi — radical academic, translator of Deleuze and Guattari, editor of Hardt and Negri, etc. This was the first time I’d ever had a conversation with anyone about Autonomia.

+ + +

BEN: I’ve been working on a magazine collectively produced by non-Anglo and Aboriginal people, without any hierarchical processing of “literature” or “art”. A big part of it was creating ways to perform problems in cultural politics, rather than to transmit particular ideologies.

BRIAN: That’s very important. It’s an almost artistic-aesthetic function that’s also immediately political; it’s also the creation of (basically) new social forms, because to do all this you have to network with people, create a basis for communication and cooperation that didn’t exist before, so you’re building something positive, even if it’s often disused when it is received. I think that’s extremely important.

Creating social networks and social forms is extremely important as an alternative to participating in the organisational forms as we find them, but in a way it’s also exactly what the economy does now. In a sense it’s participating in a creative aspect of capitalism, which (according to a lot of theorists now) is precisely about that: the products which capital produces are less consumer objects, but the forms of cooperation that go into making them. You can see that in relation to the information economy — not only in the media, and circulating forms of cooperation, but also in cybernetics and informatics, creation of software, games, networking through computers, billboards and other kinds of (as yet fairly uncontrolled) ways of communicating. It’s conveying a difference and creating something on the order of a new form of cooperation, while it’s also participating in a general movement in the economy.

One of the fatal flaws of progressive movements in the Sixties and early Seventies was the idea that you could simply step out of the system — drop out and attack it from outside. That’s a way of not seeing what you bring with you, because you’ve internalised a lot. The way you stay alive is by having a job and participating as a supposedly productive member of capitalist society; you have to deny that to operate in this framework — as if there’s a kind of purity that you can step out into — and that’s unsustainable, especially when unemployment is most developed countries is running to ten to thirteen percent… most people don’t have the luxury anymore.

BEN: On the subject of US politics: if Reagan was a walking amputation, and Bush was a “thing”, what’s Bill Clinton?

BRIAN: Bill Clinton is a network, I think.

BEN: A network.

BRIAN: A network.

BEN: Of…?

BRIAN: On the level of popular media he represents interminable discussion in an attempt to have (to some extent) non-hierarchical decision-making within the Government. That is a fairly frightening thing, because if it actually succeeds, it’s obviously not going to undo the hierarchies in the Government — particularly in the military or the judiciary. What it means is that it will make these systems more adaptive, because they’ll become more responsive, and they’ll be able to move out a little bit more horizontally.

BEN: So the appendages can get stronger?

BRIAN: The appendages get stronger, but the kind of containment has to do with a weaving together of parts; the weave itself is predetermined, but the parts themselves may have a certain amount of say or responsiveness. So it’s a kind of self-reproducing system that includes adaptational mechanisms. So before he makes a decision, Clinton will do a huge amount of talking to people, getting opinions, trying to sincerely involve a broader range of people in the decision-making. But that decision-making is subordinated to one end: toward making government cost less, and making business more profitable. So on the level of what goals are imposed, it becomes a different kind of dictatorship.

BEN: I keep thinking that social democracy is heading toward disaster somewhere along the line, but I don’t know what kind of disaster it’s going to be.

BRIAN: It’s going to have a lot to do with concepts of sovereignty, the State and unity, and it does have to be rethought, and that the relationship and the group, as well as the relationship between the group and the group-of-groups — the totality of the State — has to really be fundamentally rethought. I think it needs to be rethought outside of terms of territory and boundary-setting, and more in terms of exchange, interference and hybridisation.

BEN: …which brings us back to liberatory projects, and Communism. Guattari and Negri say that State bureaucratic collectivism is bad because it “terminates the individual”. While this is probably correct in a manner of speaking, don’t you think that in using this rhetoric, there’s a potential to slide into bourgeois individualism, especially within the academy?

BRIAN: Oh yeah, I think there definitely is. But thinkers like Negri and Guattari are coming out of a different way of thinking about the relationship of the individual and the group; when they speak of individuals realising their potential and call that “freedom”, they’re not thinking about it in the same way that it’s often thought about — as if the “potential” was something essential in those individuals that pre-exists their social existence. They see the individual as being always suffused with the social; the idea that a society is composed of individuals is a non sequitur — it’s composed of relationships, at various points, that could be called individuals. A person is always born into a very complicated web of social relations, and their growing sense of individuality is actually an internalisation and selection and transformation of those collective relationships, and playing them out on the level of their individual bodies.

I don’t see it as a conflict between the individual and group; I think that what’s the most creative and most exciting in all of us has to do with a playing out of our connections with others — an exploration of different ways of being, and speaking, and seeing, and doing. So our individuality is a group phenomenon expressed through a single body. Someone like Guattari would think of individual expression in that way: as a group expression that has a single body as its point of application.

What would an individualist capitalist be without a competitor? Already a social relation. What would a Stalinist head-of-state be without a population to oppress? It’s a question of different kinds of group relationships and different modes of expression, and I think that the relationships that are the most liberatory are the ones that increase people’s group connectedness, but allow it to be played out differentially.

BEN: Do you think there’s anything useful in the counterculture of the Sixties?

BRIAN: I think there is. It’s extremely important not to fall into the trap of awe about the Sixties, because there was a lot of naivete — there were a lot of extremely strange things done. But at the same time, it was a time of massive change and experimentation, and our images of it — particularly as we get it from the music and the mass media — are highly selective. I think it’s important to go back to the Sixties, but also to go back to earlier moments to look for what might be useful.

In the Sixties I think there is quite a bit of use. I think that there were forms of media intervention that were highly effective, and at the same time extremely radical. I think the media strategies of the Yippies have a lot to be learned from — in fact I think a lot has been learned from or perhaps reinvented by groups like ACTUP: performative intervention, in a way that establishes an often very disruptive media presence. Again there’s the sense of something going on there that can’t be conveyed in the content of the media, which is an extremely important message to be sending, because there are people who are disaffected or searching everywhere, and it’s important to let them know that there are things happening that aren’t digestible by the media — to give them the kind of hope that there are perhaps other ways of doing things.

So I think there is a certain performative attitude toward the media that used humour as its main weapon. It’s extremely important not to fall into over-seriousness or over-sincerity, because sincerity can be one of the most oppressive of political tools. Another thing that can be leaned from the Sixties: in North America there was a lot of very sustained experimentation and different forms of collectivity, and the memory of that is often extremely negative — most of them failed: different kinds of communes, different kinds of family or non-family situations; different forms of economic activity were experimented with; also, consensus-based decision-making was put into fairly broad use in the Sixties. In a lot of ways it’s been an interrupted history; it was an attempt, an experiment with ways of living together that came up against extremely strong barriers, both outside (in relation to the State) and inside, through the repetition of oppressive structures — the microfascism that we talked about earlier. But then that’s not surprising: people spend a lifetime being taught how to be jealous, how to be selfish, how to put their own economic self-interest head of others’, and it’s not surprising that a few years of experimentation isn’t going to break that.

BEN: Is it then more appropriate to be sad, rather than cynical, about these failures?

BRIAN: Neither. It’s something to learn from. I think it’s important not to go back to the personal, to personal failings, e.g. that THAT didn’t happen. There’s also political defeat and failures that had a lot to do with the kinds of forces the State was willing to bring to bear against them. I don’t think cynicism or sadness is called for; I think what is called for is a rootedness in this situation and its complexities. I think the Sixties were the first outpouring of the kinds of complexities that have really taken root now, and I think the student generation now is extremely aware of them. Probably the most productive way to have a non-nostalgic search through some of those forms of experimentation to see if any of them are adaptable now (I doubt that any of them will be directly) is not to take models, but to try to correct for the situation now, and recreate forms of resistance and forms of productivity.

I think that in the French context there wasn’t that much sustained experimentation of collective forms, so there was a huge outbreak that lasted a couple of months, where forms of social-political power that had been in place simply melted, and there’s a tremendous, spontaneous exodus outside of those traditional forms, onto the streets, where new forms of sociality were starting to take form. It collapsed much quicker in France, but there was that moment when the walls seemed to come down, but it has haunted them for the rest of their lives and was never really lived up to. I think that a spontaneous revolutionary approach is not something to be imitated, because the situation is far more complex now; most States are less centralised, so it’s less likely that there’s going to be a moment when the walls come down again.

Maybe some of the more suggestive leads may be found in Italy in the Seventies, rather than France or North America in the Sixties. There’s a long, very sustained history of that kind of experimentation that went back to the early Sixties, all the way through to the late Seventies, so it straddles a much larger time-frame. Towards the late Seventies, the State and the economy were already in the form closer to the one we see now than they were in the Sixties. So I think it’s extremely important — again, without nostalgia and without imitation — to go back and look at the these histories of the Left, and to use them as laboratories.

The Autonomia movement in Italy is perhaps one of the more important places to look and the least known. It started as a fairly traditional working-class movement within the large factories in the North of Italy, but it distinguished itself from other working-class movements in that its rallying cries became the refusal of work, so rather than asking for better pay and better working conditions as ends in themselves, the workers were making demands that amounted to directly taking over the factories, and control over what was produced and how they produced things. So if demands were made for increased salaries, it was conceived as a form of sabotage, of bankrupting the factory or the State. Forms of direct sabotage were practiced very widely.

It wasn’t the working-class trying to come to consciousness of itself and institutionalise itself on a State level; it was the working-class that was trying to destroy itself and it saw its own extinction as its end, because it saw even the factory system itself as the enemy — not just who profited by it. I think that’s a very brave and perhaps very foolish step to make; I think that self-extinction is perhaps one of the most important goals that an individual or organisation can make, in the sense that if you really are affirming potential, and the future, you are in a sense negating what you are now. To become, you have to undo yourself, and your organisation will have a built-in lifespan, a kind of planned obsolescence.

The Italian movement was able to reinvent itself periodically, and accept that its modes of organisation, or particular organisations themselves, were to die. Or that other struggles might leave the factory, which they did, as production was decentralised in society. By the Seventies, it was perceived that the economy was no longer factory-based in the same way, and that that wasn’t the most important point of tension, but that forms of capitalist production were being disseminated throughout the social fabric. One of the new slogans was, “All of society is now a social factory” — there were forms of capitalist production that were unrecognised or perhaps unpaid (e.g. women’s domestic work) and that the struggle had to become as decentralised as capitalist production and power was. So it became a movement of the marginalised: the unemployed; students who at the time who felt that they had no future; new sexual dissidents; so it was a huge, tension-filled coalition between forms of social marginality.

The site of resistance became society-wide, and people looked for these points of marginality and forms of sabotage could be applied anywhere that people lived. One of the basic forms of sabotage was refusing to pay for social services and public transportation. Boycott, taken far beyond the way boycott was normally used. All of that came to a very sudden end, when the State used literally Fascist strategies against them: bringing up laws that dated from the Fascist period that were still in the books. They broke the movement with extreme repression, including political prisoners like Negri, who were on trumped-up charges. Then again, I don’t think that any of those strategies are useful right now, but it provides a history of forms of struggle, following step-by-step the recomposition of the economy and capitalist power.

Now, people like Negri think that another step has been taken, and that figures of marginality aren’t as key as they were, since the economy itself has learned how to profit from marginality, to profit from difference, and to actually create difference. Now they’re looking around for strategies for situations where the centre is the margin and vice versa. There isn’t a margin that exists anymore; the economy is completely global — it’s taken over the entire ex-Soviet-bloc; it’s intensely colonising or re-colonising the “Third World”, so there isn’t that inside/outside, margin/centre. But at the same time, that means that forces of production are being decentralised and disseminated everywhere, and that they have to deal with the creation of new potentials that might be hijacked towards non-capitalist ends.

BEN: That’s a lot of intense global and local specificity to strategise. In the 1960s, workers’ strategies for taking over the workplace were condemned by the “Old Left”…

BRIAN: In Italy, all of this was done in opposition to the Communist Party, which was an assimilationist party then; it was moving in social democratic directions — it wanted to take over the apparatus of the State. The Autonomy movement wanted to undo it.

BEN: I’m worried about certain aspects of revolutionary theory becoming all too “convenient”, as it were — for example, crude workerism is an excuse to perpetuate certain forms of organisation. So when you say that difference isn’t important…

BRIAN: I would say marginality, not difference. Difference is extremely important, but it also becomes the engine of capitalism: the production of new fashions, new ways of inventing new styles, new objects… it has become generative, in the sense that it no longer produces objects — it produces the means of producing different objects. It’s all about difference. But so is resistance. I wouldn’t say that difference is not the key; difference isn’t the same as being Outside or being on the margins; difference is now at the centre, and (in a sense) resistance is also, which means that wherever you are there’s probably a point of tension that could become a point of resistance.

The present Italian post-Autonomist theorists call this theory an “immaterial worker”, where you do “immaterial labour”, because “immaterial labour” — by their definition — is that creation of ways of creating difference, which isn’t necessarily only an upper-class job, because in the way that factories are being reorganised, it is the workers that are being reorganised into teams that do quality control work, that teach management how to become more productive and more profitable, that are involved in the creation or production of new products. So they are creating new modes of productivity — qualitatively different ways of doing things, modes of cooperation and networking.

I’d say that the message is very different: difference is everywhere — find it where you are, and further it. I think it’s self-serving to take these negative stances: “you should not do this, because it doesn’t meet my standards of action”. One of the refrains of traditional Marxist thinking is “the conditions aren’t right — don’t do it”; that’s what was said in Italy, that’s what was said in May ‘68, that’s what was said in the States during the Sixties… there’s a continual refrain: “we have to have a complete, correct analysis before we act” — and that means that they never act, or they act to keep people from doing things. I think what’s important is to keep thinking and acting in the situation you’re in: attempting to connect it with larger situations and global patterns, but never pretending to function on that global or totalising level — because that also is a fiction. It’s only a disciplinarian move; it’s to try to create a definition of the proper kind of action and the proper conditions.

BEN: I was thinking of your optimism, and was wondering if it is informed by your critical thinking, or something else?

BRIAN: I don’t know if I’d accept the term “optimism”. I don’t think it has as much to do with optimism/pessimism as it has to do with desire. As opposed to self interest. Talking in terms of self-interest is maybe a good way you can get at it, because the idea that progressive politics can organise itself — and be content with ideas of self-interest or serving-the-interests — is inherently conservative, because it assumes that there are pre-existing populations that have interests that you can find out, express and then give in to them like a service (or allow themselves to give into themselves). Those interests are really the expression of their complicity with the situation as it is now.

It seems to me that there’s a need to beyond self-interest, but not in the sense of selflessness; I would call the difference between self-interest and desire the difference between conceiving yourself as being complete but somehow stifled and trying to find a way to express what you are and have it recognised and attended to… and the idea that you’re in a world: you’re directly open onto it, you’re under its influence, you don’t necessarily have control over that, but you’re always responding, reacting and acting within it; that you’re constantly being changed, and changing, whether you perceive it at a particular time or not… that the world is a cauldron of change. And that’s beautiful. I guess I would see it more as aesthetic — to put yourself on the side of change, against self-interest — because if you do change, you’ll no longer be that self, and will no longer have the same interests. I see desire as trying to hook up with potential, rather than with interests; I think there’s a difference between potential-to-become-something-different and an interest in being who-you-are to a greater extent.

BEN: Just recently, there’s been a lot of activist nostalgia about mass mobilisations against university fees that were very impressive, but that didn’t really have very much of a politicising basis. I’m caught between this nostalgia and the realisation that I’ve participated in some really interesting, successful and non-monolithic organisational experiments. Is our panic partly just a residue of past conceptions of “organisation”?

BRIAN: I think so. I think that has been around at least since the 1970s. There has been generation after generation of activists who have this sense of the impossibility of things. If I had to choose between optimism and pessimism, I would rationally choose pessimism, because the problems seem so overpowering — on the environmental level, with forms of oppression in the developing world…

To go back to self interest and pessimism about that: at the same time that I was saying that it’s important to go beyond it, I think you have to operate on that level also. The kind of Queer politics that are going on now couldn’t have been possible without the kind of more liberal activity that happened for a long time — trying to create a certain level of acceptance, for gains. There’s a kind of self-interest in the development of a constituency, but it’s also self-deconstructing, because as soon as it gets a certain amount of success, there are going to be people saying, “wait a minute — that’s your self interest, not mine”, and differences within the community will start to be made visible and valorised. So that liberal stuff of recognition (and coming to the point where you do have a certain amount of representation) is inseparable from the kind of escape that brings into view differences that couldn’t express themselves before.

There’s a whole flowering of Queer politics that exceeds ideas of self-interest and representation, because it deals with ideas of community that aren’t bounded, and it accepts that there’s a lot of fluidity in people’s behaviour and orientation — that your identity is only a part of who you are and what you do. It valorises some kind of fluidity as precisely as what is important and exciting about being a part of a social movement. So I think it’s important (even if rationally you have to be pessimistic) not to allow that to paralyse you, because every little game you make is creating as a side effect (in a differentiation) a new invention. And that in itself is a very exciting and very important process; and that’s exactly what’s important — the process — because if you say that you’re cynical because things haven’t turned out the way could have, or that past activism has turned out to be too self-interested, it’s not taking that larger situation into account — it’s assuming that there’s a goal that we can know, now or in any present, that we can anticipate and get to. Which is a way of not thinking about that mutability, that fluidity, because as soon as you take one step the ground that you’re walking on is different — there’s no way of projecting an end point. So although you can have vague ideas of where you’re going or where you want to be, it’s very important not to have too detailed a sense of it, partially because I think it’s a way of not affirming the present and the potential in the present, because it’s projecting a certain kind of potential from the present, but not taking into account that the ground is going to change under your feet.

So I think it’s much more important to affirm the process of that differentiation, of that change, and to revel in it, and to find your desires in it — pleasures. If you’re a member of any organisation, and it’s not an intense experience, well, then it’s probably not worth doing. So I think there has to be a valorisation of the present moment and the untapped potential in the present, and that’s what you should really be oriented towards, because if you’re oriented towards a possibility that you can project from right now… even if you get there, you won’t be satisfied — it will be a shadow of what really could have been, because the potential of the present is always much greater than any possibility we can extract from it, or give a name or image to. I think that’s one of the lessons of feminism and maybe one of the lessons of the Sixties: the process itself is much more important than the end point, and so the question of “were they self interested?” becomes irrelevant. Instead: were they alive? Were they intense? Are there ways that we can connect with that, and attempt to further it, and further differentiate it? So it’s more like an ethics of invention and intensity, rather than a moral politics saying that “people failed, so let’s be pessimistic, so let’s not do anything.”

BEN: But how do you overcome that, on a mass scale?

BRIAN: On the mass scale, I think it has been escaped. The majority of people expect their future to be worse than the present; there’s no longer a pretence that we’re on a road to progress, that things will get better. There’s perpetual crisis. So again, yes: the utopianism that still exists in the Left is really a holdover. I think the general culture and the economy that we’re in is beyond utopianism. And it’s important to integrate that into your thinking. You have to find other ways of motivating yourself, which again I think has to do with pleasures and intensities, and affirmation that you can find in your present, in the people around you, in new ways of moving through the world, and expressing yourself.

I came from an intensely utopian background — but at the same time apocalyptic and utopian. As a high school student in the early Seventies, I was very active politically, and there was a complete fiction among people in activist circles: basically that the end of History was at hand, that there was a big, massive environmental crisis, that there was going to be a race war in the United States, that the social fabric and the economy were on the point of collapse… an apocalyptic vision. But then there was also with that this utopianism: “if that will happen, then that’s wonderful because a new society will grow from it”. I had a far too specific idea of what that community would be. Speaking now as a thirty-seven-year-old in the 1990s, I have very little in common with the content of the vision of utopia. Very little at all — I can hardly believe that I actually thought like that. [Laughter.] None of that stuff happened. The apocalypse didn’t happen, the utopia didn’t happen. Things have kept going on, and there’s an incredible adaptive power in capitalism, at its state. That means that although it’s not impossible for revolutionary things to happen, it’s just more and more possible for things to be left alone.