antipopper

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.

• • •

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

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

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

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

[McLellan 1975: 48]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[Deleuze 1989: 216]

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

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

Bibliography

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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