Developing their earlier discussion of news media's screening of global events, artist Alfredo Jaar and philosopher Simon Critchley consider how images can conceal, expose or recreate the reality we inhabit. This second installment of their dialogue is introduced by David Morris

The conversation continues from where it left off last time. To recap, Simon Critchley quoted Francis Bacon on violence:

When talking about the violence of paint, it's nothing to do with the violence of war. It's to do with an attempt to remake the violence of reality. We nearly always live through screens - a screened existence. And I sometimes think, when people say my work looks violent, that I have been able to clear away one or two of the veils or screens.

To which Simon himself added:

Existence seems to me ever-more screened and distanced, a shallow shadow world whose ideological patina is an empty empathy. None of us is free of this. Maybe art, in its essential violence, can tear away one or two of these screens. Maybe then we'd begin to see. Because the whole problem turns around what is seen and not seen. We think we see what happens ‘there' and make pronouncements about ‘them'. But we do not see as we are seen because we are wrapped in a screen. There are tyrants here too. Art might unwrap us a little through its violence.

Image: Michelangelo Antonioni, 'We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another [...]'

Alfredo Jaar, 18 March 2011:

To tear away one or two of these screens would certainly help, Simon, I agree, but it will not be enough. It is never enough as we cannot represent reality, we can only create new realities. That is what we do as artists or cultural producers: we create new realities. And these new realities that we create are not only a poor reflection of reality, they represent also, as Godard put it, the reality of that reflection.

Reality these days, as you know very well, is manipulated to an extreme that makes it virtually impossible for us to actually decipher what is real. Yesterday I was walking to my studio and a yellow cab passed me by at frightening speed. It had a police siren on its roof, obviously going after an emergency. A yellow cab! A student of mine had recently made a presentation in class about these under-cover cabs patrolling the streets of New York. We listened to him with curiosity, perhaps incredulity. Now I know his research was right.

This morning several European papers inform us of the most frightening manipulation being planned by the US military: Centcom, the US Central Command, is developing a software that will let it ‘secretly manipulate social media using fake online personas designed to influence internet conversations and spread pro-American propaganda.' Apparently a single military serviceman will be able to control up to ten separate identities at once. A Centcom spokesman, commander Bill Speaks said: ‘The technology supports classified blogging activities on foreign-language websites to enable Centcom to counter violent extremist and enemy propaganda outside the US.' Ironically, he explained that ‘none of the interventions was in English, as it would be unlawful to address US audiences with such technology.' General James Mattis, commander of Centcom, said that this program ‘supports all activities associated with degrading the enemy narrative, including web engagement and web-based product distribution capabilities.' The first chosen languages? Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Pashto. So now we know, we can be unlawful when using these languages as they belong to unlawful societies, inhabited by unlawful people...

In other words, the US military is developing false online personalities - what users of social media call ‘sock puppets' - to create a false consensus in online conversations, blogs, tweets, etc.

Under these circumstances, dear Simon, what do we get when we tear away a couple of screens? More screens. As Antonioni once said, ‘We know that under the revealed image there is another one which is more faithful to reality, and under this one there is yet another, and again another under this last one, down to the true image of that absolute, mysterious reality that nobody will ever see. Or perhaps, not until the decomposition of every image, of every reality.'

To create art then is perhaps to decompose a given reality and create a new one, and that new one is for me just a proposition, a model of thinking that given reality, a model of thinking the world.

But as you say correctly, Simon, ‘the whole problem turns around what is seen and not seen.' Artists make visible the invisible. At least we try. Or when we can't, we stage the invisible, like I tried to do in a work titled Lament of the Images. The title of this work was based on a magnificent poem by Ben Okri. This is how I described that work in some personal notes:

Lament of the Images is a philosophical essay on representation.

Lament of the Images is a poetic meditation on what is seen and what is not.

Lament of the Images is an attempt to make visible the invisible.

Lament of the Images is a search for light in the darkness.

Lament of the Images is a lament of the images.

Images are important. Very important. In creating this work I was trying to lament their loss, mourn their absence. In doing so, I ended up creating a new image, which is unavoidable. An image of an intense, blinding light that could possibly become the blank screen on which we project our fears and our dreams. An image that Roland Barthes would call ‘pensive'. In Camera Lucida, he wrote: ‘Ultimately, photography is subversive not when it frightens, repeals, or even stigmatizes, but when it is pensive, when it thinks.' In Lament of the Images, I was trying to create perhaps the ultimate pensive image. A space of resistance. A space of hope. If I may refer to your work, Simon, I was proposing an Infinitely Demanding space.

Simon Critchley, 25 March 2011:

Yes, Alfredo, pensive is the right word. Art thinks. Period. And it thinks in images, even when we are trying to lament them, as your piece so eloquently shows. By presenting us with an absence, something like thought is provoked through the image's attention to form. Dare one call such an image abstract? Or is that a hostage to the unfortunate history of modernism?

The question I'd like to attend to here, albeit briefly, is the issue you raise in response to me: namely, if art - as Bacon says - strips away one or two veils or screens, then do we approach something like ‘reality'. To be honest, I don't know. I guess the philosopher in me wants to respond, ‘it depends what you mean by reality', but that sounds cheap to me. I do not think that there is any cognitive access to the Kantian Ding an sich that lies behind the image. Yet neither do I think that we are condemned to never-ending inescapable forest of simulacra à la Baudrillard. To put this in a slightly different register, I accept the critique of what Wilfrid Sellars called ‘the myth of the given'. There is no hard kernel to reality behind images, or if there is, we can know nothing about it. We live in a world of our own making, and makings of the self are makings of the world. The meaning of the Copernican Revolution in philosophy after Kant is that makings of the world are makings of the self. And this is a melancholy recognition, in say the work of the Romantic poets like Coleridge (see his ‘Dejection. An Ode') or something that we lament, as you might say, Alfredo. Anyhow, let's put it this way: we live in a world of our own confection, a world where fact is artifact and artifice. The world is a plurality of fictions, and truth is one of them. Such is the inference that Nietzsche draws from the Copernican Turn. But does that inference exclude the possibility of what Wallace Stevens called - after his teacher Santayana - a ‘supreme fiction'? Namely, a fiction in which we can believe, or a fiction of the absolute? My mind remains open on that possibility. Namely, that the acceptance of the constitutively fictive or - in our case - imagistic constitution of ‘reality' does not condemn us to a cave of simulacra. The best that Stevens imagined in his poetry was that we might write ‘Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction'. What I think is best and most pensive in contemporary art might be conceived as contributing to a thinking of that infinitely demanding space of the possibility of the supreme fiction.

Image: Still from Pierre Huyghe's The Host and the Cloud, 2009-2010

Let me illustrate this - illustrate is the wrong verb - with an example - example is the wrong noun. I had the great good fortune to see Pierre Huyghe's The Host and the Cloud at the Marion Goodman Gallery shortly before his show closed, about three weeks ago. It is an audacious two-hour film, surrounded by accompanying aquaria with bug-eyed fish, and it is impossible to describe or summarise. To say that Huyghe's work is pensive is to risk massive understatement. He is really smart. But at the centre of the strange performative experiment of The Host and the Cloud - a work recorded over a series of three days in front of an audience in the disused building of the National Museum of Arts and Popular Television - are a series of repetitions and reenactments. We begin with the reenactment of one of the trials of the French ‘terrorist' group action directe from the early 1980s. This reenactment is then reenacted for a second time when actors pick up and read the script of the first enactors' speeches. Similarly, a (reenacted) scene of hypnoanalysis - that draws redolently on the work of Francois Roustang - is then reenacted by the ‘patient' with shadow puppets. The effect is poignant and funny. There is even a reenactment of Michael Jackson and a wonderful late 1970s disco reenactment with Kate Bush's ‘Wuthering Heights'. I could go on.

But at the centre of this work - an absent centre if you like, or a central absence that is the point of articulation for the work (its subjectivity) - is an animated white rabbit who wanders around the basement of the building. This is the host, one imagines, and the images that are reenacted are his cloud. You go down the rabbit hole of images, like Alice, and what do you find? A fucking rabbit. Who did you expect? God almighty?

But it seems to me that in Huyghe's film we are not presented with a cave of images or screens that we strip away to find another image in its place, but rather, as you said, Alfredo, in that wonderful quotation from Antonioni, a decomposition of the image and also of the reality that is composed of these images. What figures here - at least in my imagination - is a kind of descent towards the real which can only be adumbrated indirectly, sequentially and obliquely. But this is not nothing. Far from it.

Further, this affirmation of the question of the supreme fiction might also be linked back to forms of political association that have been figured in the last months in all their hopeful, resistant complexity. I see the question of radical politics as also animated by the question of the supreme fiction.

Forgive me if I'm not clear. I'm still figuring out what I think as I write.

David Morris <david.morris AT network.rca.ac.uk> is a writer and philosophy tutor based in London

In two recent books - Web Aesthetics and Interface Criticism - new media critics rescue the sensuality of digital aesthetics from the gnostic grip of communications theory. Review by Charlie Gere

The word ‘aesthetics' comes from the Greek for ‘to sense' or ‘feel', and originally referred to our sensory experience of the world. Most of us spend much of our lives in front of screens, whether at home or work. In the most literal sense, our aesthetic experience of the world is bound up with those screens. Yet the question of the aesthetics of our relationship to media is rarely discussed. Most of the discussions around new media concern questions of production, consumption, dialogue, communication, knowledge and community. The very idea of ‘new media aesthetics' is perhaps thus a kind contradiction since the term ‘media' itself indicates that, new or otherwise, media should have little to do with the whole business of giving us aesthetic experiences. Its proper role should be to convey directly what is supposed to be communicated.

The terms medium and media come from the Latin medius, meaning ‘middle'. The first recorded use of the word ‘medium' in the sense of a ‘means of communicating ideas', in English at least, was by Francis Bacon in 1605 in his The Advancement of Learning. Bacon quotes Aristotle to support his idea of words as a medium. ‘Words are the images of cogitations, and letters are the images of words'. Thus language is the paradigmatic medium, which transparently communicates ideas. In Of Grammatology, Jacques Derrida singles out Aristotle's model of language as an example of logo- or phonocentrism. Although Bacon is widely considered to be one of the fathers of modern scientific method, he was careful not to trespass on what he considered the domains of knowledge proper to God. In several of his publications he suggested that much as the rebel angels fell because they craved power equal to God's, man fell because he desired knowledge equal to God's.

Image: Inside Greg Lynn's Blobwall Pavilion at SciArt gallery during the Venice Biennial, 2008

Nonetheless our model of media can perhaps be thought of as angelic. The term ‘angel' derives from the Greek aggelos meaning, simply, ‘messenger'. Angels are disembodied, pure intelligences (thus not able to enjoy aesthetic experiences). The angelic model of communication still holds sway. Almost all modern information and communications technology relies on the theory of information transmission devised by the American engineer Claude Shannon in the 1940s. Shannon's concerns were to find the most efficient way of encoding a message in a particular coding system in a noiseless environment and to deal with the problem of ‘noise' when it occurred. ‘Noise' was Shannon's term for the elements of a signal that are extraneous to the message being transmitted. For Shannon the ideal system of communication is one in which the mediation of the message, its passage through media, is as untrammelled as possible.

Here one might think of the claims made about the coming world of ‘bits not atoms' or in the assumption that, in cyberspace, different identities can be assumed that have no relation to the body or embodied self, or the fantasy, noted by Deborah Lupton, of ‘leaving the meat behind'. ‘The dream of cyberculture is to leave the "meat" behind and become distilled in a clean, pure, uncontaminated relationship with computer technology'.¹ This can be seen in ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace', a document issued in 1996 by John Perry Barlow, one of the co-founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, an organisation devoted to the protection of ‘digital rights'. In this document Barlow declares:

[O]ur identities have no bodies, so, unlike you, we cannot obtain order by physical coercion [...] In our world, whatever the human mind may create can be reproduced and distributed infinitely at no cost [...] Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us. They are all based on matter, and there is no matter here.'²

Such rhetoric is positively Gnostic in its disgust of matter. It also occludes the real bodies that make up the new, supposedly weightless, economy. Not just those bodies sitting in front of computer screens all over the developed and developing worlds, but the largely invisible, often exploited bodies that actually produce the goods upon which such an economy relies. This repudiation of the body also involves a disavowal of the sensory experiences of embodiment and, by extension, of aesthetics. Barlow's declarations and Lupton's observations may now seem old fashioned, and both date back nearly two decades, but the legacy of such thinking may well be the comparative lack of interest in aesthetics. However two recently published books engage with this much neglected question of aesthetics in the web and new media: Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society by Vito Campanelli, and Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold.

Campanelli's book is a bold attempt to go beyond the discussion of the web and digital media that is conducted largely in relation to questions of communication and dialogue, and to delineate a comprehensive understanding of such media and spaces in terms of their aesthetics. Campanelli builds up his argument carefully, starting with a critique of the idea of the web as a communicative space. In his first chapter, he is particularly exercised by what he describes as the monadic, autistic and monolingual aspects of the web which all seem to militate against its supposed dialogical and open character. In the next chapter, he presents an overview of aesthetics, taken largely from the work of Polish philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, as well as John Dewey and others, from which he proposes a concept of ‘diffuse aesthetics'.

In order to further develop this notion, Campanelli invokes the idea of the meme, taken from Richard Dawkins and developed by Susan Blackmore and others, which he connects in an interesting manner to the work of art historian Aby Warburg. Though acknowledging the importance of Warburg's famous library and the fascination of his curious ongoing arrangement of thousands of images, known as the Mnemosyne Atlas, Campanelli sees Warburg's concept of ‘engrams' - his name for the ‘expressive images that have survived in the heritage of Western cultural memory, and that re-emerge irregularly and disjointedly' - as a precursor of the idea of the meme. The third chapter engages in a useful discussion of the antinomy between the haptic and the optic in relation to new media, while the fourth chapter moves around, engaging with, inter alia, notions of movement and travel on the web, technological forms of memory, P2P networks and the practice of ‘camming', producing bootleg versions of films by videoing actual cinema performances. I found Campanelli's defence of this practice particularly intriguing, if not entirely convincing, especially the idea that the noise of the audience, necessarily captured in the process, becomes part of the narrative of this recording producing a new form of artefact.

Campanelli's final chapter is the point at which he shifts from the descriptive to the proscriptive, and offers concrete proposals for a ‘remix ethics' or ‘remix as compositional practice'. To make his argument he presents a useful history of remix practices going back to the dub reggae experimentation of 1960s Jamaica, through to the work of DJs in the '70s and '80s and on to Paul Miller (DJ Spooky) and Danger Mouse. The final section of this chapter, and of the book, is entitled ‘Machinic Subjectivity'. It starts with an interesting discussion of architect Greg Lynn's concept of the ‘blob', the term which he uses to refer to architectural projects which can take on different spatial configurations according to use. Campanelli extends this to describe the whole of society or at least contemporary architecture, media, arts and so on as blobs, inasmuch as they are ‘flowing, hybrid, malleable spaces'.

He uses the ‘blob' to argue for the dissolution of the distinction between the human and the machine, resulting in a dual or ‘machinic' subjectivity. From this he proposes the emergence of a ‘technological hyper-subject', which he discusses in relation to the ideas of the theorist Mario Costa, who has proposed a new understanding of art in relation to technology as flux. Campanelli relates this to various artworks by, among others, Eduardo Kac and Cornelia Sollfrank. Finally Campanelli finishes with Leonel Moura and Henrique Garcia Pereira's ‘Symbiotic Art Manifesto' from 2004, in which it is claimed, firstly, that machines can make art, secondly that man [sic] and machine can make ‘symbiotic art' and that this is a ‘new paradigm that opens an entire unexploited field in art'. Thus the claim is that we can abandon the hand-touch sensibility in art, or ideas of personal expression and the centrality of the human/artist (though this is of course a desire that has been present in art from the early 20th century onwards, evinced in the work of the Constructivists, Russian and otherwise, Duchamp, and onto postmodern and posthuman ideas about art and subjecthood). Finally ‘any moralistic or spiritual pretension and any purposive representation can be abandoned'.

Image: Moura and Pereira's Jackson Pollock-alike, 11.05.04, 10 mbots, 2004

Moura and Pereira have put these ideas into practice with their ArtSBot project, described by Campanelli, in which small robots, fitted with sensors and pens, move around a blank surface and produce marks that begin to resemble, for example, works by Jackson Pollock. At the point where a human subject involved in the process recognises the image is ‘just right' he or she stops the robots. Campanelli quotes from Moura and Pereira.

Although the robots are autonomous they depend on a symbiotic relationship with human partners. Not only in terms of starting and ending the procedure, but also and deeply in the fact that the final configuration of each painting is the result of a certain gestalt fired in the brain of the human viewer. Therefore what we can consider ‘art' here, is the result of multiple agents, some human, some artificial, immersed in a chaotic process where no one is in control and whose output is impossible to determine.

Campanelli describes this as the basis for a ‘brilliant manifesto for the art of the future [...] art as the result of both human and artificial actants'.

The problem is that this is a fairly weak vision of the future of art; robots more or less randomly scribbling, with a human deciding when the scribbles are ‘just right'. In particular it is hard to see what ethical or aesthetic force such work might offer. It does not even really go beyond a fairly traditional conception of human subjectivity as the rather disingenuous reference to ‘a certain gestalt fired in the brain of the human viewer' indicates. This is just a rather coy way of reintroducing the human subject and placing it at the centre of the aesthetic process once more. The capacity for humans to see something interesting in supposedly random patterns is at the very heart of humanism itself. Leonardo da Vinci famously ‘saw' landscapes in the stains on his studio wall.

I think if it is going to be possible to produce a relevant aesthetics for a digital culture it needs to be a lot more convincing and exciting than Campanelli's proposal. It should also be a lot more engaged with pressing political and social issues, such as the relation between new technologies and pollution or the exploitation of labour in the developing world, that are not really addressed at all in the final work described. Nevertheless, his book is an enjoyable and engaging attempt to think through the whole question of aesthetics in our particular set of hyper-technological conditions. As the above may indicate, I preferred the journey to the arrival at the final destination, not least because of allusions to thinkers whom I had not heard of hitherto, including, for example, the Polish philosopher Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz, or the Italian philosopher of media and technology Mario Costa (though a quick google shows that, frustratingly, neither has been translated into English).

Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, edited by Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold, and published by the Aarhus University Press, offers some extremely rich and interesting takes on the question of new media aesthetics. The book comes out of Aarhus University's Digital Aesthetics Research Center (DARC) and the Center for Digital Urban Living (DUL), and is a beautiful object, with excellent graphics, and even a cover image by net artist Alexei Shulgin. As its name suggests, Interface Criticism takes as its cue the notion of the interface, meaning not just the literal apparatus by which we interact with digital machines, but the more general interface between culture and technology. In the introduction Andersen and Pold posit the need to develop a critical vocabulary, and an ‘interface criticism', and to avoid the traps of either ‘transcending the interface' or ‘finding the core of the computer'. The collection aims to do this by broadening and generalising what might be meant by ‘interface' and by taking a far longer historical view than might at first be obvious.

To undertake these aims the editors have assembled an excellent collection of contributions, some by writers who will be familiar to Mute readers, others by less well-known ones. The first section looks at ‘Displays and History' and the first chapter, by Erkki Huhtamo, extends the notion of interface back to 19^th century advertising and commercial publicity materials in the urban environment. In the next chapter, ‘The Haptic Interface: On Signal Transmissions and Events', Bodil Marie Stavning Thomsen looks back to 20^th century art history, in this case the work of artists such as the Whitney Brothers, Peter Campus, Nam June Paik and Les Levine, as well as more recent art works, the hapticity of which anticipates current mainstream media practices.

The notion of hapticity is also present in Lone Koefoed Hansen's chapter, ‘The Interface at the Skin', which starts the next section, ‘Sensation and Perception'. In this chapter she looks at some of the tropes of immediacy and telepathy, which she examines in relation to experimental dresses designed by researchers at the electronics company Philips that include communications technology. Disconcertingly, the dresses look like they come from the 1960s, but are in fact only a few years old. The final chapter in the section, Søren Bro Pold's ‘Interface Perception: The Cybernetic Mentality and Its Critics; Ubermorgen.com', takes as its subject some of the cybernetically-informed work of the Ubermorgen new media collective, in particular their GWEI (Google will eat itself) and Psych/OS, a series of works about Ubermorgen founder Hans Bernhard's experience of mental illness and psychopharmaceuticals.

The section that follows, ‘Representation and Communication' features Florian Cramer's ‘What Is Interface Aesthetics, or What Could It Be (Not)?'. In this chapter Kramer studies the GUI in terms of transparency and the sublime of the concealed code, while Dragana Antic and Matthew Fuller's ‘The Computation of Space' look at the expansion of the idea of the interface beyond the classic GUI to encompass new devices and new spaces of interaction. In the next section, ‘Software and Code', both Geoff Cox in ‘Means-end of Software' and Morten Breinbjerg, in ‘Poesis of Human-Computer Interaction: Music, Materiality and Live Coding', take as their object of analysis ‘live coding', while Christian Ulrik Andersen looks at what he calls ‘Writerly Gaming: Political Gaming', taking Barthes' notion of the writerly text as his cue.

The last section, ‘Culture and Politics', extends the range of analysis to cover the expanded role and reach of the interface. Henrik Kaare Nielsen's ‘The Net Interface and the Public Sphere' revisits Habermas to look at how the Internet might become a public sphere and what might cause such a move problems. Jacob Lillemose's chapter ‘Is There Really Only One Word For It? The Question of Software Vocabularies in the Expanded Field of Interface Aesthetics' compares Windows Vista with Daniel Garcia Andujar's X-Devian Linux OS, and deconstructs the different discourses they operate within. In ‘Transparent World: Minoritarian Tactics in the Age of Transparency', Inke Arns looks at the work of a number of artists who are staging a return to older notions of transparency in interface culture. Finally, in a coda, artist Christophe Bruno looks at how the candidates in the last French presidential election seemed to mimic his ironic interventions in Google and other network spaces.

Image: Cover art for Interface Criticism by Alexei Shulgin

This is terrific book, with great essays which combine historical material with contemporary discussion. It manages to avoid both the Scylla of utopian hyperbole and the Charybdis of negative reactionary critique that still seem to characterise much of the discussion of new media. The chapters also strike an appropriate balance between technical know-how and theoretical acumen, with each informing the other in useful and effective ways. In passing it is interesting to note the references to the work of Jacques Rancière, who is becoming an important figure in the theoretical understanding of new media, as well of art and culture more generally. Though this collection is not ‘Rancièrian' in its intentions, it can be understood as a contribution to our understanding of the politics of aesthetics, particular as understood in Rancière's terms, as a ‘distribution of the sensible'. This is what Rancière calls ‘the system of self-evident facts of sense perception that simultaneously discloses the existence of something in common and the delimitations that define the respective parts and positions within it'.³ Rancière's focus on the sensible in relation to politics is a good counter-move against the angelic Gnosticism that still pervades understandings and discussions of new media. Above all it is a reminder that, unlike angels who have no bodies and thus no experience of the sensible, we are embodied and therefore our relation to the world is always sensible and aesthetic.

Charlie Gere <c.gere AT lancaster.ac.uk> is Reader in New Media Research at the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Lancaster University

Info

Vito Campanelli, Web Aesthetics: How Digital Media Affect Culture and Society, Amsterdam: NAI Publishers, 2010

Christian Ulrik Andersen and Søren Bro Pold (eds), Interface Criticism: Aesthetics Beyond Buttons, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2011

Footnotes

1 Deborah Lupton, ‘The Embodied Computer/User' in Cyberspace/Cyberbodies/Cyberpunk: Cultures of Technological Embodiment, Mike Featherstone and Roger Burrows (eds.), London: Routledge, 1994, p.100.

2 John Perry Barlow, ‘A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace', 1996, https://projects.eff.org/~barlow/Declaration-Final.html

3 Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, London: Continuum, 2004, pg.12.

If the appetite to read comes with reading, then open text archive Aaaaarg.org is a great place to stimulate and sate your hunger. Here, Matthew Fuller talks to long-term observer Sean Dockray about the behaviour of text and bibliophiles in a text-circulation network

Sean Dockray is an artist and a member of the organising group for the LA branch of The Public School, a geographically distributed and online platform for the self-organisation of learning.¹ Since its initiation by Telic Arts, an organisation which Sean directs, The Public School has also been taken up as a model in a number of cities in the USA and Europe.²

We met to discuss the growing phenomenon of text-sharing. Aaaaarg.org has developed over the last few years as a crucial site for the sharing and discussion of texts drawn from cultural theory, politics, philosophy, art and related areas. Part of this discussion is about the circulation of texts, scanned and uploaded to other sites that it provides links to. Since participants in The Public School often draw from the uploads to form readers or anthologies for specific classes or events series, this project provides a useful perspective from which to talk about the nature of text in the present era.

Sean Dockray: People usually talk about three key actors in discussions about publishing, which all play fairly understandable roles: readers; publishers; and authors.

Matthew Fuller: Perhaps it could be said that Aaaaarg.org suggests some other actors that are necessary for a real culture of text; firstly that books also have some specific kind of activity to themselves, even if in many cases it is only a latent quality, of storage, of lying in wait and, secondly, that within the site, there is also this other kind of work done, that of the public reception and digestion, the response to the texts, their milieu, which involves other texts, but also systems and organisations, and platforms, such as Aaaaarg.

Image: A young Roland Barthes, with space on his bookshelf

SD: Where even the three actors aren't stable! The people that are using the site are fulfilling some role that usually the publisher has been doing or ought to be doing, like marketing or circulation.

MF: Well it needn't be seen as promotion necessarily. There's also this kind of secondary work with critics, reviewers and so on - which we can say is also taken on by universities, for instance, and reading groups, magazines, reviews - that gives an additional life to the text or brings it particular kinds of attention, certain kind of readerliness.

SD: Situates it within certain discourses, makes it intelligible in a way, in a different way.

MF: Yes, exactly, there's this other category of life to the book, which is that of the kind of milieu or the organisational structure in which it circulates and the different kind of networks of reference that it implies and generates. Then there's also the book itself, which has some kind of agency, or at least resilience and salience, when you think about how certain books have different life cycles of appearance and disappearance.

SD: Well, in a contemporary sense, you have something like Nights of Labour, by Rancière - which is probably going to be republished or reprinted imminently - but has been sort of invisible, out of print, until, by surprise, it becomes much more visible within the art world or something.

MF: And it's also been interesting to see how the art world plays a role in the reverberations of text which isn't the same as that in cultural theory or philosophy. Certainly Nights of Labour, something that is very close to the role that cultural studies plays in the UK, but which (cultural studies) has no real equivalent in France, so then, geographically and linguistically, and therefore also in a certain sense conceptually, the life of a book exhibits these weird delays and lags and accelerations, so that's a good example. I'm interested in what role Aaaaarg plays in that kind of proliferation, the kind of things that books do, where they go and how they become manifest. So I think one of the things Aaaaarg does is to make books active in different ways, to bring out a different kind of potential in publishing.

SD: Yes, the debate has tended so far to get stuck in those three actors because people tend to end up picking a pair and placing them in opposition to one another, especially around intellectual property. The discussion is very simplistic and ends up in that way, where it's the authors against readers, or authors against their publishers, with the publishers often introducing scarcity, where the authors don't want it to be - that's a common argument. There's this situation where the record industry is suing its own audience. That's typically the field now.

MF: So within that kind of discourse of these three figures, have there been cases where you think it's valid that there needs to be some form of scarcity in order for a publishing project to exist?

SD: It's obviously not for me to say that there does or doesn't need to be scarcity but the scarcity that I think we're talking about functions in a really specific way: it's usually within academic publishing, the book or journal is being distributed to a few libraries and maybe 500 copies of it are being printed, and then the price is something anywhere from $60 to $500, and there's just sort of an assumption that the audience is very well defined and stable and able to cope with that.

MF: Yeah, which recognises that the audiences may be stable as an institutional form, but not that over time the individual parts of say that library user population change in their relationship to the institution. If you're a student for a few years and then you no longer have access, you lose contact with that intellectual community...

SD: Then people just kind of have to cling to that intellectual community. So when scarcity functions like that, I can't think of any reason why that needs to happen. Obviously it needs to happen in the sense that there's a relatively stable balance that wants to perpetuate itself, but what you're asking is something else.

MF: Well there are contexts where the publisher isn't within that academic system of very high costs, sustained by volunteer labour by academics, the classic peer review system, but if you think of more of a trade publisher like a left or a movement or underground publisher, whose books are being circulated on Aaaaarg...

SD: They're in a much more precarious position obviously than a university press whose economics are quite different, and with the volunteer labour or the authors are being subsidised by salary - you have to look at the entire system rather than just the publication. But in a situation where the publisher is much more precarious and relying on sales and a swing in one direction or another makes them unable to pay the rent on a storage facility, one can definitely see why some sort of predictability is helpful and necessary.

MF: So that leads me to wonder whether there are models of publishing that are emerging that work with online distribution, or with the kind of thing that Aaaaarg does specifically. Are there particular kinds of publishing initiatives that really work well in this kind of context where free digital circulation is understood as an a priori, or is it always in this kind of parasitic or cyclical relationship?

SD: I have no idea how well they work actually; I don't know how well, say, Australian publisher re.press, works for example.³ I like a lot of what they publish, it's given visibility when re.press distributes it and that's a lot of what a publisher's role seems to be (and what Aaaaarg does as well). But are you asking how well it works in terms of economics?

MF: Well, just whether there's new forms of publishing emerging that work well in this context that cut out some of the problems ?

SD: Well, there's also the blog. Certain academic discourses, philosophy being one, that are carried out on blogs really work to a certain extent, in that there is an immediacy to ideas, their reception and response. But there's other problems, such as the way in which, over time, the posts quickly get forgotten. In this sense, a publication, a book, is kind of nice. It crystallises and stays around.

MF: That's what I'm thinking, that the book is a particular kind of thing which has it's own quality as a form of media. I also wonder whether there might be intermediate texts, unfinished texts, draft texts that might circulate via Aaaaarg for instance or other systems. That, at least to me, would be kind of unsatisfactory but might have some other kind of life and readership to it. You know, as you say, the blog is a collection of relatively occasional texts, or texts that are a work in progress, but something like Aaaaarg perhaps depends upon texts that are finished, that are absolutely the crystallisation of a particular thought.

Image: The Tree of Knowledge as imagined by Hans Sebald Beham in his 1543 engraving Adam and Eve

SD: Aaaaarg is definitely not a futuristic model. I mean, it occurs at a specific time, which is while we're living in a situation where books exist effectively as a limited edition. They can travel the world and reach certain places, and yet the readership is greatly outpacing the spread and availability of the books themselves. So there's a disjunction there, and that's obviously why Aaaaarg is so popular. Because often there are maybe no copies of a certain book within 400 miles of a person that's looking for it, but then they can find it on that website, so while we're in that situation it works.

MF: So it's partly based on a kind of asymmetry, that's spatial, that's about the territories of publishers and distributors, and also a kind of asymmetry of economics?

SD: Yeah, yeah. But others too. I remember when I was affiliated with a university and I had JSTOR access and all these things and then I left my job and then at some point not too long after that my proxy access expired and I no longer had access to those articles which now would cost $30 a pop just to even preview. That's obviously another asymmetry, even though, geographically speaking, I'm in an identical position, just that my subject position has shifted from affiliated to unaffiliated.

MF: There's also this interesting way in which Aaaaarg has gained different constituencies globally, you can see the kind of shift in the texts being put up. It seems to me anyway there are more texts coming from non-western authors. This kind of asymmetry generates a flux. We're getting new alliances between texts and you can see new bibliographies emerge.

SD: Yeah, the original community was very American and European and gradually people were signing up at other places in order to have access to a lot of these texts that didn't reach their libraries or their book stores or whatever. But then there is a danger of US and European thought becoming central. A globalisation where a certain mode of thought ends up just erasing what's going on already in the cities where people are signing up, that's a horrible possible future.

MF: But that's already something that's not happening in some ways?

SD: Exactly, that's what seems to be happening now. It goes on to translations that are being put up and then texts that are coming from outside of the set of US and western authors and so, in a way, it flows back in the other direction. This hasn't always been so visible, maybe it will begin to happen some more. But think of the way people can list different texts together as ‘issues' - a way that you can make arbitrary groupings - and they're very subjective, you can make an issue named anything and just lump a bunch of texts in there. But because, with each text, you can see what other issues people have also put it in, it creates a trace of its use. You can see that sometimes the issues are named after the reading groups, people are using the issues format as a collecting tool, they might gather all Portuguese translations, or The Public School uses them for classes. At other times it's just one person organising their dissertation research but you see the wildly different ways that one individual text can be used.

MF: So the issue creates a new form of paratext to the text, acting as a kind of meta-index, they're a new form of publication themselves. To publish a bibliography that actively links to the text itself is pretty cool. That also makes me think within the structures of Aaaaarg it seems that certain parts of the library are almost at breaking point - for instance the alphabetical structure.

SD: Which is funny because it hasn't always been that alphabetical structure either, it used to just be everything on one page, and then at some point it was just taking too long for the page to load up A-Z. And today A is as long as the entire index used to be, so yeah these questions of density and scale are there but they've always been dealt with in a very ad hoc kind of way, dealing with problems as they come. I'm sure that will happen. There hasn't always been a search and, in a way, the issues, along with alphabetising, became ways of creating more manageable lists, but even now the list of issues is gigantic. These are problems of scale.

MF: So I guess there's also this kind of question that emerges in the debate on reading habits and reading practices, this question of the breadth of reading that people are engaging in. Do you see anything emerging in Aaaaarg that suggests a new consistency of handling reading material? Is there a specific quality, say, of the issues? For instance, some of them seem quite focused, and others are very broad. They may provide insights into how new forms of relationships to intellectual material may be emerging that we don't quite yet know how to handle or recognise. This may be related to the lament for the classic disciplinary road of deep reading of specific materials with a relatively focused footprint whereas, it is argued, the net is encouraging a much wider kind of sampling of materials with not necessarily so much depth.

SD: It's partially driven by people simply being in the system, in the same way that the library structures our relationship to text, the net does it in another way. One comment I've heard is that there's too much stuff on Aaaaarg, which wasn't always the case. It used to be that I read every single thing that was posted because it was slow enough and the things were short enough that my response was, ‘Oh something new, great!' and I would read it. But now, obviously that is totally impossible, there's too much; but in a way that's just the state of things. It does seem like certain tactics of making sense of things, of keeping things away and letting things in and queuing things for reading later become just a necessary part of even navigating. It's just the terrain at the moment, but this is only one instance. Even when I was at the university and going to libraries, I ended up with huge stacks of books and I'd just buy books that I was never going to read just to have them available in my library, so I don't think feeling overwhelmed by books is particularly new, just maybe the scale of it is. In terms of how people actually conduct themselves and deal with that reality, it's difficult to say. I think the issues are one of the few places where you would see any sort of visible answers on Aaaaarg, otherwise it's totally anecdotal. At The Public School we have organised classes in relationship to some of the issues, and then we use the classes to also figure out what texts we are going to be reading in the future, to make new issues and new classes. So it becomes an organising group, reading and working its way through subject matter and material, then revisiting that library and seeing what needs to be there.

MF: I want to follow that kind of strand of habits of accumulation, sorting, deferring and so on. I wonder, what is a kind of characteristic or unusual reading behavior? For instance are there people who download the entire list? Or do you see people being relatively selective? How does the mania of the net, with this constant churning of data, map over to forms of bibliomania?

SD: Well, in Aaaaarg it's again very specific. Anecdotally again, I have heard from people how much they download and sometimes they're very selective, they just see something that's interesting and download it, other times they download everything and occasionally I hear about this mania of mirroring the whole site. What I mean about being specific to Aaaaarg is that a lot of the mania isn't driven by just the need to have everything; it's driven by the acknowledgement that the source is going to disappear at some point. That sense of impending disappearance is always there, so I think that drives a lot of people to download everything because, you know, it's happened a couple times where it's just gone down or moved or something like that.

MF: It's true, it feels like something that is there even for a few weeks or a few months. By a sheer fluke it could last another year, who knows.

SD: It's a different kind of mania, and usually we get lost in this thinking that people need to possess everything but there is this weird preservation instinct that people have, which is slightly different. The dominant sensibility of Aaaaarg at the beginning was the highly partial and subjective nature to the contents and that is something I would want to preserve, which is why I never thought it to be particularly exciting to have lots of high quality metadata - it doesn't have the publication date, it doesn't have all the great metadata that say Amazon might provide. The system is pretty dismal in that way, but I don't mind that so much. I read something on the Internet which said it was like being in the porn section of a video store with all black text on white labels, it was an absolutely beautiful way of describing it. Originally Aaaaarg was about trading just those particular moments in a text that really struck you as important, that you wanted other people to read so it would be very short, definitely partial, it wasn't a completist project, although some people maybe treat it in that way now. They treat it as a thing that wants to devour everything. That's definitely not the way that I have seen it.

MF: And it's so idiosyncratic I mean, you know it's certainly possible that it could be read in a canonical mode, you can see that there's that tendency there, of the core of Adorno or Agamben, to take the a's for instance. But of the more contemporary stuff it's very varied, that's what's nice about it as well. Alongside all the stuff that has a very long-term existence, like historical books that may be over a hundred years old, what turns up there is often unexpected, but certainly not random or uninterpretable.

Image: French art historian André Malraux lays out his Musée Imaginaire, 1947

SD: It's interesting to think a little bit about what people choose to upload, because it's not easy to upload something. It takes a good deal of time to scan a book. I mean obviously some things are uploaded which are, have always been, digital. (I wrote something about this recently about the scan and the export - the scan being something that comes out of a labour in relationship to an object, to the book, and the export is something where the whole life of the text has sort of been digital from production to circulation and reception). I happen to think of Aaaaarg in the realm of the scan and the bootleg. When someone actually scans something they're potentially spending hours because they're doing the work on the book they're doing something with software, they're uploading.

MF: Aaaarg hasn't introduced file quality thresholds either.

SD: No, definitely not. Where would that go?

MF: You could say with PDFs they have to be searchable texts?

SD: I'm sure a lot of people would prefer that. Even I would prefer it a lot of the time. But again there is the idiosyncratic nature of what appears, and there is also the idiosyncratic nature of the technical quality and sometimes it's clear that the person that uploads something just has no real experience of scanning anything. It's kind of an inevitable outcome. There are movie sharing sites that are really good about quality control both in the metadata and what gets up; but I think that if you follow that to the end, then basically you arrive at the exported version being the Platonic text, the impossible, perfect, clear, searchable, small - totally eliminating any trace of what is interesting, the hand of reading and scanning, and this is what you see with a lot of the texts on Aaaaarg. You see the hand of the person who's read that book in the past, you see the hand of the person who scanned it. Literally, their hand is in the scan. This attention to the labour of both reading and redistributing, it's important to still have that.

MF: You could also find that in different ways for instance with a pdf, a pdf that was bought directly as an ebook that's digitally watermarked will have traces of the purchaser coded in there. So then there's also this work of stripping out that data which will become a new kind of labour. So it doesn't have this kind of humanistic refrain, the actual hand, the touch of the labour. This is perhaps more interesting, the work of the code that strips it out, so it's also kind of recognising that code as part of the milieu.

SD: Yeah, that is a good point, although I don't know that it's more interesting labour.

MF: On a related note, The Public School as a model is interesting in that it's kind of a convention, it has a set of rules, an infrastructure, a website, it has a very modular being. Participants operate with a simple organisational grammar which allows them to say ‘I want to learn this' or ‘I want to teach this' and to draw in others on that basis. There's lots of proposals for classes, some of them don't get taken up, but it's a process and a set of resources which allow this aggregation of interest to occur. I just wonder how you saw that kind of ethos of modularity in a way, as a set of minimum rules or set of minimum capacities that allow a particular set of things occur?

SD: This may not respond directly to what you were just talking about, but there's various points of entry to the school and also having something that people feel they can take on as their own and I think the minimal structure invites quite a lot of projection as to what that means and what's possible with it. If it's not doing what you want it to do or you think, ‘I'm not sure what it is', there's the sense that you can somehow redirect it.

MF: It's also interesting that projection itself can become a technical feature so in a way the work of the imagination is done also through this kind of tuning of the software structure. The governance that was handled by the technical infrastructure actually elicits this kind of projection, elicits the imagination in an interesting way.

SD: Yeah, yeah, I totally agree and, not to put too much emphasis on the software, although I think that there's good reason to look at both the software and the conceptual diagram of the school itself, but really in a way it would grind to a halt if it weren't for the very traditional labour of people - like an organising committee. In LA there's usually around eight of us (now Jordan Biren, Solomon Bothwell, Vladada Gallegos, Liz Glynn, Naoko Miyano, Caleb Waldorf, and me) who are deeply involved in making that translation of these wishes - thrown onto the website that somehow attract the other people - into actual classes.

MF: What does the committee do?

SD: Even that's hard to describe and that's what makes it hard to set up. It's always very particular to even a single idea, to a single class proposal. In general it'd be things like scheduling, finding an instructor if an instructor is what's required for that class. Sometimes it's more about finding someone who will facilitate, other times it's rounding up materials. But it could be helping an open proposal take some specific form. Sometimes it's scanning things and putting them on Aaaaarg. Sometimes, there will be a proposal - I proposed a class in the very, very beginning on messianic time, I wanted to take a class on it - and it didn't happen until more than a year and a half later.

MF: Well that's messianic time for you.

SD: That and the internet. But other times it will be only a week later. You know we did one on the Egyptian revolution and its historical context, something which demanded a very quick turnaround. Sometimes the committee is going to classes and there will be a new conflict that arises within a class, that they then redirect into the website for a future proposal, which becomes another class: a point of friction where it's not just like next, and next, and next, but rather it's a knot that people can't quite untie, something that you want to spend more time with, but you may want to move on to other things immediately, so instead you postpone that to the next class. A lot of The Public School works like that: it's finding momentum then following it. A lot of our classes are quite short, but we try and string them together. The committee are the ones that orchestrate that. In terms of governance, it is run collectively, although with the committee, every few months people drop off and new people come on. There are some people who've been on for years. Other people who stay on just for that point of time that feels right for them. Usually, people come on to the committee because they come to a lot of classes, they start to take an interest in the project and before they know it they're administering it.

Matthew Fuller's <m.fuller@gold.ac.uk> most recent book, Elephant and Castle, is forthcoming from Autonomedia.

He is collated at http://spc.org/fuller/

Footnotes

1 http://la.thepublicschool.org/

2 http://telic.info/

3 http://re-press.org/

In the elegant and obscure Letters Journal, an anonymous collective traverses the black hole of nihilism to elude capitalism's all-encompassing ability to swallow resistance. Review by John Cunningham

Since its inception a couple of years ago Letters Journal - a self-described ‘Anti-Political Communist Journal' - has advocated the joys of doing nothing while retaining an impetus towards the destruction of capitalism.[i] However, part of the puzzle of Letters' critique is that this insurrectionist pleasure in negation exists in a tension with a pessimistic awareness of the constraints of contemporary capitalism. Imagine a strongly constructed box with a collection of weak, struggling human beings inside trying to break out. They actually built the box and now need to escape. However, even if they succeed there's just another tightly constructed box that constricts their possibility of movement, and so on. All the myriad inflections of capitalist social relations - alienation, work based exploitation, affective dysfunction - comprise a series of interlocking constraints. Rather than positing any 'outside' to this via acts of 'creative resistance', Letters' anti-politics posits resistance as being necessarily suspended within these constraints.

Melancholic claustrophobia, pessimism and nihilism all mark Letters Journal's terminal reflections on the limitations of anti-capitalist praxis and critique. This isn't, however, a journal that advocates any form of compliance with the cramped space of contemporary capitalism or a retreat into philosophical resignation. Letters retains a consistent tone of critical negation alongside a cheerful embrace of a nihilistic uncertainty in the face of capitalism's refusal to collapse into its own dead labour. This nihilism is jokingly referred to in a promo for Letters IV - Every Beggar is Odysseus that's posted on YouTube. Alfonso, a time travelling 1977 Autonomist, incoherently berates and threatens Letters while encased in a steel helmet and accompanied by a strangulated guitar solo soundtrack.[ii] Simultaneously, some masked-up guy holds up slogans such as ‘Nihilists, one less effort if you would be nihilists' and ‘Do Nothing'. This mobilisation of pessimism retains a playfulness, and Letters Journal's nihilism has nothing to do with punk cliché or the corpse-painted faces of black metal. It's more an expression of the absence of an exit from capitalism that Letters Journal glimpses in the present as well as a way of puncturing the balloon of self-importance attached to anti-capitalist endeavours and activist exertions. As Letters IV notes, ‘The first sin of the pro-revolutionary is to frame everything on a scale inversely proportionate to her significance. As she becomes more insignificant, her vision grows in grandeur.'

Image: Letters Journal IV unboxed

Letters Journal can be a difficult read for ‘pro-revolutionaries' or those in favour of revolution but without the agency to implement it whether Marxist, anarchist or whatever. The phrase ‘pro-revolutionary' was coined by the two-member 'Monsieur Dupont' collective, and both Le Garcon and Frére Dupont are in issue four. M. Dupont was partially formed out of a desire to mock the pretensions of revolutionary organisations with a similar membership ratio. Their tactic was to inject some ludic, nihilist realism into the anti-capitalist milieu by stepping out of the activist injunction to do something and instead 'Do nothing'. This wasn't necessarily an invitation to sit around and watch Bonsai trees grow but rather a critique of activist ‘urgency',  its ‘moral apparatus', and the ‘reproduction of authoritarian and capitalist forms within this (anti-capitalist) political milieu'[iii]. Both this, and their emphasis upon the stringent limitations imposed by economic structure upon the potential agency of anti-capitalist milieus, continue to be unerringly present within Letters. I'm sympathetic to this in that it identifies unacknowledged apparatuses - organisational and discursive structures that produce subjectivity - that are capable of deforming anti-capitalist politics. Political subjects (‘activist' or ‘militant'), organisations and even language often become invisible constraints clumsily locked in a cycle of self-valorisation. Such skepticism remains at the core of Letters Journal's anti-politics, but within its pages anti-political communism has developed into a much more speculative heresy.

Anti-Political Scission

Anti-politics as the tool for this particular work of the negative is loosely defined in issue one of Letters Journal as:

A rejection of representation and representatives... a refusal of activism and militancy [...] the embrace of human community and revolt [...] Anti-Politics is an open question usually expressed in inaction; a negation that we do not have the agency to realise.

'Politics' within capitalism can only be the management of what's possible within capitalism, the economic relations that lead to a repetition of the same in the form of a regime that extracts value or profit from labouring bodies. This is the first scission or division from the political that any communist anti-politics has to make. It's aptly summed up by Gilles Dauvé and Francois Martin in their statement made in the wake of the May '68 revolt that 'The communist movement is anti-political not a-political'.[iv] Resistance to capitalism is embodied in wild cat strikes and occupations that retain a distance from organisational representation and might even constitute an oppositional 'movement' immanent to capitalism. A non-state libertarian communism is also a rejection of the parties and unions that seek a continued management of capitalism even while proclaiming an opposition to it. Or, as Letters III notes, 'Who are the future policemen with red flags?'; a particularly pertinent question in terms of current anti-austerity resistance. This rejection of the management of the possible can still collapse into the unexamined subject roles of activist and militant that become a de facto representation of the proletariat, generic ‘humanity' or anti-capitalist revolt. This second division from the political is an engaged withdrawal that acts back upon the ground from which anti-political communism emerges and examines the presuppositions of agency attached to activist militancy. Much is contained in the term 'pro-revolutionary' which acknowledges the necessary limitation upon the actions of supposed radicals within capitalist constraints. 'Do nothing' also soberly questions what is perpetuated by doing anything political in the present. As Letters IV notes, '[T]he only means of successfully reproducing an organisation under capitalist conditions is to reproduce it as a capitalist organisation.'

French ultra-leftist Jacques Camatte identified the subtle contradictions that can entrap oppositional politics in his concept of 'repressive consciousness'. Camatte's influence in Letters is pervasive, and his own trajectory through the 1970s from relative Marxist orthodoxy to a fierce critique of 'rackets' and ultimately an (unfortunate) espousal of primitivism is worthy of note in itself, if little documented. Camatte writes that:

The object of repressive consciousness is the goal which it thinks it controls [...] consciousness makes itself the goal and reifies itself in an organization which comes to incarnate the goal.[v]

‘Repressive consciousness' reveals itself in how supposedly revolutionary Marxist theory and its attendant organisational forms take themselves as the embodiment of a revolutionary subject. They become more concerned with their own self-perpetuation and garnering of human and ideological capital than revolt. Camatte termed such organisations ‘rackets' of oppositional enterprise expressive of a fully subsumed ‘material community of capital' itself composed of such 'rackets' in the forms of business, state, media, etc. Much of Letters' anti-politics is concerned with undermining the ways anti-capitalist politics can operate as such a ‘racket', and how this can block the emergence of revolt by valorising itself as the agency of revolt. Maybe, a danger with anti-political communism is that it could become a purist sect that refuses any engagement with resistance that doesn't meet its own fairly exacting standards. Then anti-politics might degenerate into yet another ‘racket' even if expressed quietly through theoretical whinging at the inadequacies of every other ‘racket'.

How might the anti-political communism of Letters Journal attempt to avoid this? Partly through a questioning of the significance of anti-capitalist theory and milieus as opposed to the more indeterminate actuality of both capitalism and all those proletarianised 'others' who don't desire to constitute a 'movement'. This is the ‘open question' expressed by looking elsewhere for resistance, outside of any self-designated and self-referential anti-capitalist politics. Letters actively drifts away from either a simplistic anarchist valorisation of revolt or a more reductive 'scientific' Marxist certainty towards an evaluation of the limits of such anti-capitalist praxis. As well as speculation over how these limits might be transgressed, Letters' anti-politics is expressed through a constant interrogation of the boundaries of its own critical activity. It's this awareness of the potential insignificance of the theoretical murmurings of anti-political critique that's a check to any potential racketeering.

This further division from the political even casts doubt upon the theorisation of anti-political communism as constituting part of a social movement implicit within Dauvé and Martin's formulation. This is an involution of negation towards a (self)questioning of whether believing in an immanent agency of revolt might not ultimately block its realisation. Such a shift problematises the significance attached to anti-capitalist praxis in the present - which could just be a burnt-out sullenness, but arguably responds to factors that are simply present in the world. These include the decline of the 'old' workers' movement, the self-referentiality of 'radical' academics, the impotent banality of 1990s style 'creative resistance' and, more widely, class decomposition and the disappearance of the 'mass' worker. This is a scission from within the anti-political itself that's expressed frequently in Letters IV in a pessimistic and melancholy register, but also through a fragmentation of the forms critique might take. As the latest issue notes, social crisis is 'as indicated by the functional failure of organs of revolution as by failure of [...] any other social institution'. 'Social crisis' - the recurrent economic crises of capital - might also be expressed through the degeneration and failure of an 'anti-capitalism' all too intertwined with capitalism. Is such a failure to be welcomed? Is anti-politics a withdrawal from anti-capitalist milieus, a deliberate exile from (self-)certainty in order to accentuate critique as an indeterminate negation?

Every Beggar is Odysseus

The latest issue of Letters is packaged in a screen printed envelope replete with question marks and the enigmatic if erudite title ‘Every Beggar is Odysseus'. Such relative aestheticism immediately marks Letters off from similar products in the far left margins of the anti-capitalist milieu. The journal certainly looks good and the material packaging is a clue to the sensibility that informs Letters. As an (anonymous) author writes in Letters IV: ‘When I dream of print culture and a time when ideas meant something [...] I am dreaming of a society now decades in the past...'.

Image: The envelope for Letters Jounal IV

Letters in its printed form is as nostalgic in the midst of the digital information-dump dystopia as those radicals it takes to task for being tied to past forms of resistance such as the mass party. And it knows it. This raised the question for me of why printed material as such is produced, given how much information is accessible digitally. Printed matter like Letters does have an immediacy to it as an object which is often lost on the web. Nicholas Thoburn articulates something of this in his theorisation of the 'communist object' as an object that embodies a sensuous, 'intensive expressiveness'. Objects act through a combination of a 'fragmented circulation, emergent association, physical composition [and] ephemeral duration'.[vi] I wouldn't put all of this conceptual weight on Letters alone, but it does suggest the persistence of journals and pamphlets, etc. in anti-capitalist milieus as being more than a nostalgic affectation. There's a faint trace of less alienated social relations in the simple existence of a culture that disseminates such objects and in the forms they actually take. Even if, like everything, such a culture can become bloated and subject to the commodity form, as with artists' book fairs. Historical avant-gardes such as the Surrealists and the Situationist International used journals as a conduit for polemic, and the dissemination of ideas as well as being a physical expression of the 'movement'.

There's a resonance with this past, avant-gardist praxis in the way Letters is much more formally innovative than most anti-capitalist critique. Issue four is a heterogeneous assemblage of essays, anecdotes, short stories, decontextualised quotations, dialogues, interviews, letters and poetry presented in the main journal and attached literary supplement. If anything, there's an excess of material in Letters IV and a lot of speculation around such questions as the present (im)possibilities of communism, anti-productivism, the organisational redundancy of the 'Left' and the outmoded historical specificity of images of communist utopia. Letters has an iconoclastic edge but this iconoclasm is fairly nuanced. For instance, Marx's notion of a happily productive day spent fishing, writing poetry and so forth becomes, for Frére Dupont, 'an already obsolete future'. Marx's faith in the 'progressive' role of the productive forces in producing technological and material plenty to enable such a communism is analysed as both of its time and misguided. As Frére Dupont writes: 'Can we afford to suppose that the same factories which concretised exploitation yesterday could concretise socialisation tomorrow?'

Letters' method is to deepen such aporias and not attempt to theoretically synthesise the antimonies of such problems. As I sit and write this on my laptop in the dysfunctional but highly technological (shit lifts, shit heating) machine for modern living I rent a space in, an anti-productivist communism seems impossibly far away. This is probably the point of Letters' consistent accentuation of the negative around such questions, since this underlines the (unimaginable) rupture or break that communism would actually be and opens up a space for further speculation. The main question this opens up, for me, is around the possibility of non-capitalist social relations and whether an anti-productivism that still refuses a naive primitivism is possible. Maybe, the dividing line between primitivism and communisation - understood as the destruction of the value form and the dissolution of the proletariat - is that a communising anti-productivism would be predicated on how exploitative a specific technology actually is.

Of the poetry I particularly liked ‘The Parrot Eater', a series of sketches on the jouissance of eating whole, live parrots, bones, feathers and all:

‘Passing lone judgments/ Feathers in his teeth/ Set his will/ The heir to no fortune.'

Whether about late capitalist eating disorders, an allegory of self-exile or some perverse kind of desire I'm really not sure. Self-exile seems the most likely. Letters Journal's acerbic anti-political critique breaks with anti-capitalist milieus. Within this break there's no guarantee of a return to theoretical certainty or a successful resolution of the problem of communism. This critique carries within it the hidden cargo of an alienating distance from those anti-capitalist milieus from which anti-politics emerged. ‘Lone judgements' that infect anti-capitalism from its margins might be the effect of a hyper-criticality willing to accept being the ‘heir to no fortune'. Also, poetry as a way of expressing this suggests that the language of critique is itself exhausted and reiterates the clichés of ‘rackets'. The poetry in Letters IV tends to revolve around more affective and imaginative registers, stretching language towards expressing something less quantifiable than theoretical certainty. Letters Journal's inclusion of poetry opens out the limits of critique while acknowledging the dead end(s) that anti-capitalism finds itself in and can sometimes constitute.

Much of the journal is presented as fragments, such as ‘Fate', ‘Novelty' and ‘Friendship' alongside a longer essay called ‘The Parallax Few'. This is a dense cybernetic deconstruction of how anti-capitalist organizations 'function like poorly programmed robots stuck in a feedback loop of self-perpetuation. Cybernetics - the study of systemic dynamics - provides a tool to underline the limited efficacy of anti-capitalist intervention to communicate outside of a charmed circle of acolytes. Anything that happens will be determined at a higher structural level than the efforts of the local anarcho-syndicalist federation. As an examination of the ‘pathologies of left groups' the 'Parallax Few' works well. It's really a deconstruction of the toxicity of anti-capitalist communication channels if used to cement in place fantasias of a mass movement and proletarian identity. This reflects back upon Letters' own (non-)praxis as being a self-critical intervention into the anti-capitalist milieus that it remains within, albeit as a dissident element.

The inclusion of different forms of writing doesn't come across as a novelty, but as an attempt to disrupt such feedback loops in the way dissent is expressed. Like a dadaist montage, the textual machinery of Letters is deliberately constructed as difficult to assimilate. None of this is to insinuate that Letters desires to reinvent aesthetic or political avant-garde praxis. If - as the military roots of the term ‘avant-garde' suggest - much of the production of journals in the 20^th century avant-garde was concerned with formulating an ideologically coherent offensive position, Letters is more concerned with decomposing any attempts to do so. For instance, in issue one of Letters the often derided expulsions from the Situationist International by Guy Debord are viewed less as a case of proto-Leninism than as an exemplary self-dissolution in order for the S.I. to avoid becoming a pitiful simulacrum of itself. Letters avoids disappearing into the black holes of 21^st century post avant-garde self-referentiality and formal experimentation that swallow up much contemporary literary or theoretical production. Instead, Letters employs language to dig away at the delusions of revolt.

Anti-Political Fragments

 

Voice Two: ‘All black, eyes closed to the excess of disaster.'

– ‘Howls in Favour of De Sade', Guy Debord.[vii]

 

Voice Two: ‘She never wore black. Her eyes closed to the excess of disaster.'

– 'Howls in Favor of Sadie', Letters Journal IV 

The affinity with past avant-garde practice is often expressed fairly irreverently, adopting a trash picker's aesthetic that sifts through the detritus of 20^th century revolt. ‘Howls in Favour of Sadie' in the Letters literary supplement is a detournement of Guy Debord's film ‘Howls in Favour of Sade' which unpicks the Situationist certainty of the original to express, I think, the unhappy suicide of the all too damaged subject Sadie who is unable to escape her own commodification whether through love or revolt. The 'excess of disaster' is nothing else but capitalism. Such an examination of the tension between the human collateral of capital and the structural constraints of existent social relations is a recurrent theme throughout Letters Journal. In this instance it also restores something of the anti-ideological import of detournement as an act of subversive and mimetic reversal, rather than simply adopting the terse aphoristic style of Situationist critique as is common in much anarchist and post-Tiqqun theorising.[viii] Letters' adoption of the method questions the reiteration of Situationist style as ideological bluster. Language - whether textual, visual or the embodied gestures of revolt - becomes boring as it's evacuated of context, meaning and import in our contemporary spectacle. It's not that flippant to think that the anti-politics of Letters is as much an expression of this boredom with the accepted norms of anti-capitalism as anything else.

But, there's more than nihilist ennui in this. The fragmentary forms of writing that Letters adopts suggest a radical indeterminacy and lack of closure to anti-politics rather than an attempt to establish the answer in the form of a particular ideology or organisational form. This openness is, then, much more than a formal exercise, though as with much incorporated in the notion of 'Do Nothing', there's a playfulness there. This playfulness inheres within the ambivalent potentiality of ceasing to act through the established channels or forms of resistance. Such a withdrawal might allow new possibilities to emerge and different forms of theoretical praxis. Or even the ability to admit that it's not a question of what is to be done but that - momentarily - there might be nothing to do. Also, Letters IV argues that 'Constituting an anti-political language is primarily a question of honesty.' This is often carried out in a way that's elusive, and sometimes rambling and opaque, if well written. To hazard a guess, this is probably a deliberate anti-political stratagem that seeks to reflect - through the inclusion of more literary, affective and anecdotal modes of address alongside the theoretical - something of the ways experience is broken apart and separated within spectacular capitalism.

Image: Photograph by John Mostrom, 2003

'Friendship' for instance forms a constellation of theorisations and anecdotes by differing authors that range from the subversive potentiality of friendship as a 'pure means', to its venal subsumption in capitalism and speculation around its happy dissolution in communism.[ix] Like much of Letters' anti-politics, the ghostly theoretical presence of famed Marxist pessimist Theodor Adorno animates this in the attention paid to the fate of the damaged subject within the capitalist productive relation. Also, the piece hints at the ambiguities of friendship being inscribed within the form of the writing - much like the spectral trace of non-capitalist relations Adorno glimpsed in art. Such experimentation could be a slightly ingenuous shift since it runs the risk of over-valuing the supposedly ‘intuitive' and real over the supposedly ‘abstract' and theoretical. Given that we dwell in the ‘real abstraction' of capital wherein abstract categories such as value and the commodity are actualised in the world, it's fair to say the abstractions of Marxism have a role to play in any critique of this. Also, used badly, such a technique might even lead to a micro-sub genre of nauseating anti-capitalist confessionals on Amazon.

In actuality Letters avoids these traps and the juxtaposition of different elements in the journal isn't to the detriment of any one of them. The scientific, philosophical, political, literary and everyday registers combine in an anti-political, self-reflective decomposition of the hierarchies of theoretical production that refuse any easy resolution while widening the scope of what might be considered within the speculative anti-political heresy of Letters. Blanchot, in an essay on Marx, writes of ‘communist speech' as being one ‘of incessant contestation [that] must constantly develop and break away from itself in multiple forms'[x]. Letters IV seems to be reaching towards something like this by allowing the experiential fragmentation of the present to shape critique rather than being pushed to the side as extraneous to the construction of political subjectivities such as the militant activist, Marxist theorist etc. More personal anecdotes are allowed to infect and destabilize an anti-political language that might just have been yet another autistic anti-capitalist enterprise in theoretical self valorisation or affirmation of resistance. This raises the question of how much the expression of critique should reflect its content. Much theoretically astute anti-capitalist critique ends up playing a game of valorising itself at the expense of the possibilities it might suggest. Letters' decomposition of theoretical hierarchy injects an element of fragility and risk to the expression of dissent that's both reflective and constitutive of its anti-politics. This restores an immediacy to oppositional critique through a sense of intimacy with the affective resonance of capitalism in the everyday. And this immediacy is characterised by the lack and absence of any glimpse of communism in the present.

Exit / No Exit

In all likelihood, communism is an unsolvable task. The conditions for its solution cannot exist or form in this world. For this reason, we are cautiously optimistic.

 

- Letters Journal IV

As fragmentary as Letters appears to be it's in no way random or ill thought out. Overall, the effect is of a cohesive assemblage happily indeterminate in its theoretical negation and intent on opening out anti-capitalist critique without locking into pre-existing models. This assemblage revolves around the absent object 'communism' more defined by its lack in the present than any latent immanence. As Letters IV notes, 'Whatever is possible in this world is not communism'. This lack is disruptive in its absence, forcing the anecdotal and literary fragments to revolve around it. But the notion of communism is also decomposed in that reflections upon it end up incorporating the everyday experience of its lack. This infects the certainty usually expressed in critique with an awareness of its own limitations and failure however embedded in critical science it may be. In Letters IV this is almost a negative theology with ‘G-d' replaced by a communism immanent in its very absence. Much like Kafka's parables of 'no exit' such as The Castle, this accentuates the negativity of the existent, with any kind of utopia only existing as the negative image of the accumulated debris of the capitalist present.[xi] This does run the risk of over-emphasising 'no exit' over any agency to change 'fate'. Emphasising 'no exit' can risk a reification of such structural constraints and the loss of any sense of the essential instability of capitalism due to its basis in that most unstable element of all - human labour. Generally though, this sense of 'no exit' is finely balanced between its destructive use as a way of accentuating the lack inherent in a world built around the needs of capital and a subsequent necessity of not simply retreating to the safety of theoretical certainty.

Letters organises its various anti-political fragments around the ‘absence and weight of absent community' and the apprehension that ‘[a]nother world does not exist anymore; nor the movement; nor the community.' As well as accentuating the restrained threat of negation that Letters carries - what would these anti-political communists do if they had the chance? - this melancholic appraisal of the present reduces it to a figurative ruin. Within this sense of present day 'no exit', Letters establishes a tension between revolt and an almost fatalistic awareness of the structural over-determination of contemporary capitalism. Part of the 'honesty' of Letters' anti-political language is a willingness to admit the failure of anti-capitalist milieus to raise consciousness, bring about social war or even slow down the continued instauration of the capitalist social relation. This sense of failure is utilised in a way that's more akin to Samuel Beckett's maxim: 'Try again, fail again, fail better' than as an attempt to elide the question of resistance altogether.

Or not so much 'try again' as to wager that the very dissolution of 'Left' certainties is an element in a wider structural crisis of capitalism. Given that the 'Left' has traditionally valorised prole identity or 'workers' control' rather than the dissolution of such, then it might be that class decomposition and lack of 'leftist' consciousness open up possibilities in the present. As the 'Parallax Few' argues, the lack of wider prole interest in the ‘Left' both reflects this and suggests proletarian ‘consciousness' is far in advance of any supposed ‘vanguard' movement. The proletariat's teetering ‘on the edge of its disengagement from the myths of the subject-worker' gives rise to a very nuanced questioning of the abstraction - and alienation - of proletarian experience that even underlies attempts to theorise capitalism. This casts into doubt the point of critique - to which the 'Parallax Few' suggests an alternative in the 'communising' form of organisation.

This isn't a pre-emptive strike to destroy and/or appropriate the production apparatus but critique as a remainder of negative intent that is simultaneously aware of its limitations, 'delights in its encounters with the human community' and is always on the 'far side' of what is being achieved in terms of anti-capitalist opposition. Such a form of critique would take a certain pleasure in undercutting itself through allowing what might be seemingly extraneous - affect, proletarian indifference, lack of efficacy - to shape pro-revolutionary activity. This is the 'communising' it suggests. Incorporating material - philosophical but also scientific, poetic and experiential - that opens out what's considered in (or as) critique and is usually viewed as extraneous to anti-capitalist critique.

One gets the sense that such a ‘communising' form is very adept at waiting for the contingent possibility that social crisis might lead to forms of opposition outside of present day ‘rackets'. This kind of speculation was the aspect of Letters IV I found most incisive and rewarding alongside the playful subversion of the writing of theory. The dividing scission of anti-politics in this issue suggests that the ‘open question' is also present day anti-capitalism and its perpetuation of the detritus of parties, unions and various leftist sects. Even self-organisation, while undoubtedly a response to other organisational forms, tends to be limited by a valorisation of proletarian identity in an oppositional anti-institutional form.[xii] Due to their basis in maintaining production and/or a proletarian identity, such forms of organisation elide the negation of capitalism and instead maintain it. Of course, the aporia to this is that there's no manifest suggestion that such forms won't be perpetually thrown up within capitalism and still act as a conduit for necessary and unavoidable dissent and resistance. As Letters IV notes, ‘The solution of self-management is obviously a false one [...] We have not even scratched the surface.' There's a suggestion at the end of this issue that any possible exodus from the 'desert' of the existent social relation depends upon this generation of anti-capitalism dying out. In its own self-reflective way Letters' anti-political negation is an astute contribution to this death and maybe anti-politics as a form of critique is also constitutive of this ‘desert'. That contemporary forms of anti-capitalism might decompose along with the past class compositions such as the 'mass worker' might, in actuality, be a reason for a cautious optimism. Our continued if unwitting participation in the ongoing disaster of contemporary capitalism continues to leave the possibility that as Letters IV notes, ‘An unsolvable task constantly provokes the anti-bodies that seek its solution.'

Idiot Savant

That there's no solution within the existent capitalist social relation makes Letters Journal ‘cautiously optimistic' that this ‘unsolvable task' will provoke presently unthinkable - if highly contingent - solutions. It's this determined, if uncertain, opening out through the impossibility of the present that prevents Letters Journal from collapsing into apolitical despair from a passively experienced nihilism. Letters' nihilism is the turning in upon itself of an ‘active' nihilism that would destroy the existent in an acceleration of the destructive capabilities of ‘will'. Usually in pro-revolutionary theory this is the form of nihilism invoked as with the situationist Raoul Vaneigem's ‘Nihilists, as De Sade would have said, one more effort if you want to be revolutionaries!'[xiii] The active nihilist, who delights in the decomposition of values and desires to accelerate the destructive potentiality of nihilism, needs herself to be subject to a detournement towards becoming a revolutionary subject. Letters Journal avoids this either/or trap by refusing the mantle of the radical subject who chooses the active nihilist role. Instead the aporia examined is of being trapped within the social relation but desiring a way out: ‘a negation we cannot realize.'

Communism and nihilism make for a particularly disjunctive synthesis given that the former has been linked to a redemptive teleology of history and the latter to a belief in nothing. This collapse of transcendent meaning in the face of scientific and philosophical enlightenment led to philosophical responses such as Nietzsche's ethical flailing towards the Übermensch. Letters' nihilism is more lucid because it inheres in the evacuation of meaning as it is produced through the domination of social relations by the real abstractions of contemporary capitalism. The qualitative and particular aspects of the world are dissolved in this (check out all those gentrified vegetables at the ‘farmers' market') but so are categories such as history and affect. Nihilism is less a problem of philosophy than a product of capitalism.

Such a nihilism is a mimetic transference of the emptiness produced through 'real abstraction' into a nihilist laughter at the sheer absurdity of 'no exit' and the failure of pro-revolutionaries to recognise it. But within this, Letters retains an all too human sense of the limitations of being trapped in capitalism. Thankfully, this is a nihilism of a broken down humanity rather than some anarchist Übermensch. My idiot savant question to Letters Journal is: ‘Why bother doing a journal if you're a nihilist communist?' My guess is that it's as good a way as any to not participate within an anti-capitalist milieu that's all too close to the imperative within contemporary capitalism to put any nascent potentiality to work. Maybe the central paradox of Letters is that its own activity suggests other possibilities that a too rigorous application of a sense of 'no exit' would close off. With 'Doing nothing' as a critique, it nevertheless retains mobility within the 'no exit' of the present and continues to pose difficult, often unanswerable, questions. Ultimately, Letters Journal's worth rests on a reiteration of this negating indeterminacy, anti-political critique as a negation that circulates and never rests except to do nothing. Exit/No Exit.

John Cunningham <coffeescience23 AT yahoo.co.uk> is a writer and researcher based in London

Footnotes

[i] See Letters Journal Blog, http://www.lettersjournal.org/blog/.

[ii] See, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PN_EObmyMXA.

[iii]   Monsieur Dupont, Nihilist Communism, , USA : Ardent Press, 2009, p. 199.

[iv] Gilles Dauvé and Francois Martin, The Eclipse and Re-Emergence of the Communist Movement, London: Antagonism, 1997, p.39. Originally published 1974 by Black and Red, Detroit, USA.

[v] Jacques Camatte, ‘The Wandering of Humanity', This World We Must Leave, Brooklyn: New York, Autonomedia, 1995, p.56.

[vi] Nicholas Thoburn, ‘Communist Objects and the Values of Printed Matter', Social Text 2010 28 (2 103), p.1-30.

[vii] Guy Debord, Howlings in Favour of De Sade, available here http://library.nothingness.org/articles/SI/en/display/90.

[viii]  At least the reduction of this style to something of a cliché has generated this: http://www.objectivechance.com/automatic_insurrection. Hours of fun.

[ix] As Giorgio Agamben writes: ‘this sharing without an object, this original con-senting that constitutes the political.'   See Friendship, What is an Apparatus, US: Stanford University Press, 2009, p.36.

[x] Maurice Blanchot, ‘Reading Marx',  Political Writings 1953- 1993, US: Fordham University Press, 2010, p.105.

[xi] As Michael Lowy writes on Kafka: 'The positive reverse side of the established world (libertarian utopia or messianic redemption) is a radical absence, and this is precisely what defines human life as demeaned, damned or void of meaning.' See Redemption and Utopia, Jewish Libertarian Thought in Central Europe, London: Athlone Press Ltd., 1992, p.93.

[xii] Theorie Communiste historicise the relation between self-organisation and proletarian identity here: http://libcom.org/library/self-organisation-is-the-first-act-of-the-revolution-it-then-becomes-an-obstacle-which-the-revolution-has-to-overcome.

[xiii] Raoul Vaneigem, The Revolution of Everyday Life, London: Left Bank Books and Rebel Press, 1994, p.182.

Concluding their three-part exchange for Mute, artist Alfredo Jaar and philosopher Simon Critchley contemplate how to keep on, artistically and politically, in the face of the spectacular violence that washed-up liberal democracy meets with daily indifference. This exchange was convened by David Morris

The conversation continues from where it left off last time, with Simon Critchley reflecting on the idea of the ‘supreme fiction', ‘a fiction in which we can believe':

...the question of the supreme fiction might be linked back to forms of political association that have been figured in the last months in all their hopeful, resistant complexity. I see the question of radical politics as also animated by the question of the supreme fiction. Forgive me if I'm not clear, I'm still figuring out what I think as I write.

Alfredo Jaar, 18 April 2011:

I forgive you, dear Simon, as I suffer the same problem, in a much more acute way than you do, I am certain. In your book on Wallace Stevens you asked us to ‘overcome epistemology', and you called epistemology the central area of philosophy. Not only do I agree with you but I think it is also a fundamental area of art, perhaps one of the central problems we face in our practice as artists. Because I believe that art is communication, communication requires a language, and language requires a vocabulary. Artists are limited not by imagination, which can be infinite, but by language, which is finite. That supreme fiction you are talking about is a product both of the imagination and the capacity of language to articulate it, to allow it to exist. And in my view, that supreme fiction, in order to work, requires imperatively a new language. As I believe our daily language is corrupted, disassociated from the truth. It was Blake who suggested that in order not to be enslaved by another man's system we must create our own system. I became an artist because I believed that in the realm of art I could create my own system, invent my own language. Create a new vocabulary of truth. Of course I have failed, miserably, but I have tried hard. I was condemned to fail, I am afraid. What is the truth of a genocide that claimed a million lives in Rwanda? What is the truth of the criminal indifference of the so-called world community? Is there an existing vocabulary to express that?

Image: Cover of Alfredo Jaar's Let There be Light: The Rwanda Project: 1994-1998

That is perhaps why I find refuge in poetry, from Ungaretti to Pasolini, from Cioran to Akhmatova, to name just a few.

This is Anna Akhmatova in Requiem:

So much to do today:

kill memory, kill pain,

turn heart into a stone,

and yet prepare to live again.

 

Earlier in that poem, she tells the story of spending 17 months in the visitors' waiting line of the Leningrad prison. One day a woman whispered into her ear: ‘And can you describe this?', ‘Yes, I can,' she answered. Well, we can and we must. However difficult it is. And it is difficult.

When you see the question of radical politics as also animated by the question of the supreme fiction, I could not agree more. It is precisely in the depressing lack of imagination that radical politics have failed us. And continue to fail us to this day, at least here, in this country. It is perhaps the reason why we have been swept away by the events in the Middle East, because we simply could not have imagined it using our existing political language. Because our generation has not been able to affect change the way it is happening now in Egypt or Tunisia or Libya. Even when faced with conditions infinitely less demanding than theirs. What do we call this failure?

I returned this morning from Helsinki where, last night, in Finland's general election, an ultra-nationalist, anti-immigration party captured 19 percent of the votes, meaning nearly a fifth of the electorate. They call themselves the True Finns. A Tampere University political analyst told the AFP news agency that the election outcome was astonishing: ‘The True Finns' victory, surpassing every poll and every expectation of a drop on election day... plus the total collapse of the Centre - the whole thing is historic,' he said. It is well known that ultra-nationalists have infiltrated the True Finns, as some of the party's candidates belong to Suomen Sisu, a xenophobic group that declares openly that ‘different ethnicities should not be intentionally mixed in the name of multiculturalism.' In the European Parliament, the True Finns form part of a group named Europe of Freedom and Democracy, which includes parties such as the Independence Party from the UK and Italy's Northern League. The True Finns are not alone, my dear Simon. I will not depress you with a full listing of parties like these in Europe.

It is Cioran that has captured best my state of mind in times like these. He wrote:

A feeling of emptiness grows in me; it infiltrates my body like a light and impalpable fluid. In its progress, like a dilation into infinity, I perceive the mysterious presence of the most contradictory feelings ever to inhabit a human soul. I am simultaneously happy and unhappy, exalted and depressed, overcome by both pleasure and despair in the most contradictory harmonies.

At moments like these, poetry offers air, a breathing space. We are the embodiment of that ‘contradictory harmony', it is in its impossible logic that we move through this world and grasp some air, wherever we can, sometimes in the wrong places.

Simon Critchley, April 30/May 7 2011:

I know that emptiness and I too find a refuge in poetry.

But I also see something else. Some other possibility.

Let me explain. There is a motivational deficit in liberal democracy, an increasing weariness, drift and disinterest in the institutions, habits and practices of liberal democracy. This is leading to an increasing disintegration of ‘normal' state or governmental politics. In the European context, the massive and manifest failure of the EU to have any political meaning, namely to be able to induce some sort of political affect of identification, is palpable. I met a former PhD student of mine from Belgrade yesterday, who now works in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Serbia and he was telling me that opposition to the EU is currently running at about 60 percent and in Croatia at about 80 percent. This is a massive shift that has occurred in the past couple of years. The failure of the Franco-Germanic fantasy of the EU has led citizens to fall back increasingly into atavistic forms of nationalism based on a politics of fear directed at immigrants, especially and most obviously those from the Muslim world. I know Finland well, and the example is extreme, but to me not that surprising. I work part of the year in the Netherlands and have watched as closely as I am able to spectacular rise of Geert Wilder's Freedom Party. Traveling around the provincial Netherlands where I work, you can feel the fear and racism that is induced by perceived ‘outsiders', who have often been there for two or three generations. We could tell a similar story about every European country I know, especially Denmark, France and Italy. I could go on.

Yet, I do not feel your Cioranian emptiness. It seems to me the discreditation and legitimation crisis of the state is good news, at least for those of us suspicious of the identification of politics with the state and the activity of government. The increasing dislocation and disintegration of governmental politics has led to something else, a massive remotivation in non-state based forms of politics. One could assemble a list of usual suspects, but you know what I'm talking about, right? Now, this remotivation of politics as a critique of the state can be reactionary, as in the case of the Tea Party Movement in the USA. But it needn't be. And this is the ground for the hope that I still have, the hope for forms of trans-state or non-state solidarity and alliance formation.

This also partially explains my delay in replying to you. I've been organising a big conference with limited resources at the New School for Social Research that finished yesterday called ‘The Anarchist Turn'. The aim of this conference is to argue for an anarchist turn in politics and in our thinking of the political. We wanted to discuss anarchism with specific reference to political philosophy in its many historical and geographical variants, but also in relation to other disciplines like politics, anthropology (where anarchism has had a long influence), economics, history, sociology and of course geography (why were so many anarchists geographers, cartographers or explorers, like Kropotkin? We need new maps). Our approach was firstly trans-disciplinary, a word I don't like, but secondly our approach also wanted to put theory and praxis into some sort of communication and that is why we had academics alongside activists, and we had many academics who are activists. By bringing together academics (like Judith Butler, Todd May, Miguel Abensour and others) and activists, activists in some case past (Ben Morea of Black Mask and the Motherfuckers) and in other cases very present (three representatives of the Invisible Committee from France), the conference tried to assess the nature and effectiveness of anarchist politics in our times.

Was the event successful? I don't know. We certainly had huge numbers of people in the room and much intelligent discussion of the history and theory of anarchism and acute discussions of tactics at the intersection of theory and praxis. But what I came away with was the feeling that the anarchist vision of federalism that one can find in Bakunin, the idea that the disintegration of the ‘normal' politics of the state has both negative and positive consequences, or perhaps better expressed, it has possibilities for action that can be cultivated and developed, and that - to go back to the original source and motivation for our conversation - perhaps something like this began in Tunisia last December with a simple and routine act of daily humiliation. The difficult issue is how to decouple such political articulations, such as the uprisings in North Africa, from the teleology of the state and logic of governmental representation, which is exhausted in my view. The goal of such political sequences is not a ‘better' form of state representation, that's for sure. The goal, in my view, should be the exit from the terrain of the state as the political territory par excellence. Empty utopianism is not the answer, I agree, but there is a ‘topianism', as Landauer would say, where new forms of political assemblage are taking shape, here and there. What should be imagined (a supreme fiction?) and promoted are local forms of politics linked together in federated, trans-local alliances. The question of politics today is the question of the formation of alliances outside the state.

I remember sitting in the back of a minibus outside Coventry and in early 1990s and Gillian Rose saying to me, ‘Keep your mind in hell and despair not'. It seems to me that we need an utterly clear-sighted, analytical diagnosis of the present that doesn't fall into a form of transcendental miserabilism, and which retains a sense of the possible, even and especially in circumstances where the impossible seems to face us and face us down.

David Morris <david.morris AT network.rca.ac.uk> is a writer and philosophy tutor based in London

Info

The Anarchist Turn was at the New School from 5-6 May 2011

http://www.newschoolphilosophy.com/arendtschurmann-symposium/

Demonology is not simply the study of demons, but of noise's assault on signal - a media theory avant la lettre, writes Eugene Thacker

According to Socrates, it was a demon that prevented him from entering a career in politics:

It began in my early childhood - a sort of voice which comes to me, and when it comes it always dissuades me from what I am proposing to do [...] It is this that debars me from entering public life, and a very good thing too, in my opinion, because you may be quite sure, gentlemen, that if I had tried long ago to engage in politics, I should long ago have lost my life, without doing any good either to you or to myself.'ⁱ

While we may thank Socrates for listening to his demon, the demon's presence is not some miraculous event, but an everyday phenomenon; the daimon is always by his side, and it obtains a strange intimacy, always keeping him company, and, in this case at least, providing good advice.

Image: Still from William Friedkin's The Exorcist, 1973

But aside from Socrates, we hear little about the demons of other philosophers. Perhaps this is because philosophers, being reliant on their principles of sufficient reason, have no need of a companion-demon. The second a demon appears to Descartes in the midst of his Meditations, it is just as quickly dismissed by him. With this in mind, let us begin with the following: while philosophers have spent much time debating the opposition between being and non-being, theology spends its time thinking about inbetween being, intermediary being, or being-in-the-middle.

For theologians such as Aquinas, such intermediary beings, such as angels, served an important function: they not only provided a conceptual and doctrinal guarantee that there was indeed a reliable connection between the earthly and the divine, but they also served to manage, govern, and mediate that boundary itself. While God may forever lie beyond the pale of human comprehension, and while human beings are, well, just all-too-human, it is in that middle zone of angels, demons, and other ‘spiritual creatures' that everything happens. Early Judeo-Christian theology, with its complicated amalgam of pagan and Neoplatonic influences, imagines a whole cosmology, a ‘celestial hierarchy' extending from the divine itself to the lowliest worm that feeds on corpses. Angels (angelos) are by definition messengers and mediators; sometimes they actually deliver messages from the enigmatic muteness of God to chattering, noisesome human beings, and at other times they simply serve to govern the boundary between earth and the heavens - an angel of protection, an angel of vengeance, a recording angel...

This is all well and good for the orthodox and the faithful. But what happens when the intermediary beings fail to mediate? Or when they refuse to mediate? What happens when they negate the very act of mediation, in a kind of negative mediation? This of course is the story of the fallen angels. So for every angel, upholding and governing the order of the cosmos, there is an anti-angel that perturbs, destroys, and disorders; for every angelology there is also a demonology. Demonology is, on a historical level, part and parcel of the long, dark history of persecutions, inquisitions, and witch hunts in early modern Europe. As a field of study it was less given to metaphysical speculation and more to the pragmatic task of defining, classifying, and demonising activities that were deemed heretical to the Church. That said, treatises of demonology - many of them written as how-to manuals by inquisitors - also contain within them a fascinating set of concepts concerning communication and noise, connection and disconnection, mediation and anti-mediation.

It is this context that I find Armando Maggi's book Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology of great interest. Maggi has written a great deal on demonology, and he can be counted among a current generation of scholars who are interested in the political and philosophical aspects of demonology.ⁱⁱ But I should also say that I'm ‘mis-reading' Maggi's book a little. His focus is on the way in which demonology treatises interpret demonic possession through the lens of language, rhetoric, and performativity. Maggi's over-arching question is deceptively simple: if angels are messengers of the word of God, then whose words do demons speak? For Maggi, demons do not deliver anyone's message; they do not speak anyone's voice. In the extreme example of demonic possession, the demon is the communication of noise, the mediation of nothingness:

Like a flame burning everything it encounters [...] demonic language utters chaos and annihilation [...] If a good angel is the linguistic statement connecting a speaker with his interlocutor, a devil is the memorial of a perennial exclusion from meaning.ⁱⁱⁱ

If divine beatitude is the culmination of religious subjectivity, ascending towards a union with the divine (that is, towards total immersion, total immediacy), then demonic possession is the dissolution of the subject, its scattering and dissipation (an absolute disconnect, total opacity, total inaccessibility). In this regard I read Maggi's emphasis on language, rhetoric and performance in a wider context - that of media, mediation, and the current obsession with global connectivity, the absolutism of sharing, and total accessibility.

Maggi's book also avoids the usual analyses of well-known texts, such as the Malleus Maleficarum, and the well-worn approaches to the topic based on race and gender. Instead, he focuses on equally important but underrated works, such as Sylvestro Mazzolini da Prierio's De Strigimagarum Daemonumque Mirandis (1521), the compendium book Thesaurus Exorcismorum (1608), and the ambivalent mystical experiences of Maria Maddalena de'Pazzi. Maggi may not realise it, but the treatises he discusses, with all their concerns over language, communication and connection with the supernatural, make for some very interesting media theories.

Image: Martin Schongauer, St. Anthony Tormented By Demons, ca. 1470-75

A case in point is Prierio's De Strigimagarum. Prierio was a Catholic theologian and Dominican monk. In the early 16^th century, he served as an inquisitor in Lombardy, during which time he was named Master of the Sacred, an appointment he held until his death. A papal favorite, Prierio was engaged in a series of attacks and criticisms against Luther. Like many demonology treatises of the time, De Strigimagarum is concerned with both theoretical and practical matters - formulating a coherent theory of demons and demonic activity, and outlining a series of procedures for the detection and punishment of such activity.

Maggi highlights this treatise because in it, demonic possession is not the mysterious and sudden eclipse of a human subject, body and soul. Instead, Prierio posits a method by which the demon possesses, or speaks through, the human being. Drawing on Augustinian theories of the speech of angels, as well as Thomistic theories on the analogy between angelic intelligences and human cognition, Prierio suggests that there is an order and a code to demonic possession in which the demon utilises logic as a way of invading the human being. For Aquinas, angels traditionally manifest themselves via certain signs that human beings can read. These include the apprehension of visions and voices, as well as the witnessing of unusual phenomena in nature. The movement is a unilateral one, from a God beyond speech and silence, to the mediations of angels, who produce a ‘language' that human beings can read, thereby indirectly connecting the human to the divine. By reading these signs backwards, with, of course, the right kind of scriptural and theological knowledge, one could affirm communication with supernatural creatures, while also decoding their divine messages.

The demon's logic is, of course, a perverted logic. For Prierio, demons are also concerned with communication with the human being, though their motives are quite different. Demons do make contact with the human, and they do attempt to express themselves through signs, codes, and symptoms. But while angels were understood to manifest the divine presence (‘messengers of God'), demons neither have a God whose message they are delivering, nor, for that matter, a coherent message that would benefit, assist, or caution the human subject. For the possessed, all that remains is the inability to speak, a mouth that doesn't utter words but that vomits, and a language of non-sense and babbling. In short, the mediation of demons is that of hyper-communication (babbling, nonsense, speaking in tongues), the unspeakable body (convulsions, vomiting, self-mutilation), or silence (melancholy, catatonic states). Demons do mediate, but in a negative or contradictory way.

As an inquisitor, Prierio was concerned with the pragmatic aspects of demonic activity, a concern already outlined in treatises such as the Malleus Maleficarum: how can one identify a case of demonic possession? What signs should one look for? If demonic activity is suspected but not proven, how can one bring out the demon into the open? As Maggi shows, Priero (borrowing from Aristotle and Aquinas), focuses on the syllogism as the way in which demons possess the human being. Just as the syllogism uses the conclusio to connect the universality of the praemissa maior and the concreteness of the praemissa minor (as in the famous ‘therefore Socrates is mortal...' example), so is it the function of the angels to connect the transcendence and unity of God to the fragmented and fallen nature of the human. As Aquinas notes, ‘to go from one extreme to the other it is necessary to pass through the middle.'

In Prierio's theory, demons intercept messages, re-direct and modify them, and sometimes mimic the language of both human and angel. One is tempted to say it: while angels ensure effective and clear communication, demons insert noise into the system; if angels are systems adminstrators, then demons are hackers. The picture Prierio creates is of a whole invisible layer between the earthly and the divine, with words, images, memories, prayers, and phantasms projected and directed between the human and God, with angels sorting and filtering the messages. It is in this middle layer, this preternatural ether, that demons intervene. In fact, Prierio even goes so far as to postulate that demons occupy the air, and this allows them to be formless and metamorphic, to be carried along on the wind and to become any form and any shape. Maggi concisely summarises Prierio's theory of demons:

The medium of the devil's conclusio is the air [...] The air signifies the devils' ‘ungroundedness' [...] a devil can either ‘move the air' to reproduce a specific human idiom, or he can ‘move the air' to shape a bodily figure through which he can have sexual intercourse with a creature.^iv

This strange mixture of corporeal (anti)communication is also found in another of the texts Maggi considers, the Thesaurus Exorcismorum, compiled and published in 1608. While the Malleus Maleficarum established demonology as an official practice in theological, political and juridical terms, the Thesaurus provided the blueprint for the central technique of inquisitors and priests - the exorcism. The Thesaurus is actually composed of a set of individual treatises, with titles such as Fustus Daemonum, Flagellum Daemonum, Dispersio Daemonum, and Fuga Satanae, all composed in the late-16^th century, and comprising an imposing tome of over a thousand pages.

Image: Vomit from beyond

The Thesaurus is first and foremost a practical manual, with the primary aim of making present that which is hidden. As Maggi notes, demons ‘speak in order to subtract presence from the world.'^v Demons manifest their presence only through negation, withdrawal, and obfuscation. It is because of this that the exorcism is significant - it aims to force the presence of an absence, to clarify the obscure. The inquisition itself, directed towards the suffering and tortured body of the possessed subject, also carried out its investigation on the level of language, signs and codes - names and incantations, remembrances and confessionals, cries and sobs. Speech must be substituted for silence.

The Thesaurus provides a framework for this spectacle of divine sovereignty, precisely situating the demonic vis-à-vis the divine. One of the treatises in the Thesaurus is clear on this point:

Threefold is language. The first kind is the language of deed; the second of the voice; and the third is of the mind. God speaks with the language of deed. Human beings speak with the language of the voice, and angels speak with the language of the mind.^vi

The level of voice (the human) becomes the battleground where the exorcist must separate human from non-human utterances, and distinguish authentic human language from the simulacra of the demon. Whether through external signs (strange behaviour, cold chills, sudden pain, convulsions) or through internal signs (strange thoughts, words, or phrases in the mind), the demon is adept at embodying and performing the language of the voice, and at performing the human itself. Indeed, sometimes the external and internal signs become one and the same, as with one exorcism Maggi mentions, in which the exorcist gives the possessed person a potion of herbs, vinegar and olive oil, exorcising the potion with the words ‘I exorcise you, natural blend, which is able to induce vomit, in the name of God the Almighty, creator of your healing virtue...' Drawing an analogy to the parable of Jonah and the whale, the exorcism commands the possessed human subject to enunciate the name of the demon in the act of vomiting. The demon's name is hurled forth, and, at least in this case, communication is synonymous with vomit. This is emblematic of many of the texts Maggi discusses - a form of demonic mediation that manifests itself at once through negation and absence (the demons never speak in their own voice, never show their face), and yet through what Georges Bataille once called a ‘base materialism,' one of bodily fluids and divine vomit.

Today, we no longer believe in demons. Our global, networked cultures are at once too religiously fanatical and too hyper-rational to allow for the kind of cosmologies thought up by early modern demonologists. We do, however, like to remind ourselves that demons once existed, and the franchise of the exorcism movie is a testament to this fascination with that in which we no longer believe - from silent film era ‘documenatries' such as Häxan, to Hollywood hits such as The Exorcist, to recent genre films such as The Last Exorcism. However, Maggi's treatment of the topic suggests something different. His analysis of demonology treatises shows us a detailed and nuanced theory of mediation and communication, set within the framework of divine sovereignty.

At its limit, the demon and demonic possession constitute a premodern form of anti-humanism: ‘For the devil, an act of knowledge is always equivalent to an act of annihilation'.^vii In Maggi's hands, demons are far from anthropomorphised and psychologised tempters or tricksters. They are identical with the elemental sphere, with the materiality of words, signs and codes, with the enigmatic, tempestuous and sometimes malefic non-human world. Demons and demonic possession in this sense are not about the subject and its always-fragile boundaries, and they are not about the human (or posthuman - the human through the side-door); instead demons are a stand-in for the limits of our ability to comprehend the world, either in terms of the human or the divine. ‘By reading natural signs (winds, clouds, animals' expressions), devils are able to bring about storms, plagues and floods. Moreover, by reading a human being's gestures, facial expressions, linguistic intonation, a devil can produce a ‘discourse' able to erase that human being's soul and body.'^viii

Eugene Thacker <thackere AT newschool.edu> is a New York based writer and the author of Horror of Philosophy (forthcoming from Zero Books). He teaches at The New School and is a scholar-in-residence at the Miskatonic University Colloquy for Shoggothic Atheology

Info

Armando Maggi, Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

i Plato, Socrates' Defense (Apology), trans. Hugh Tredennick, in Plato: The Collected Dialogues, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton University Press, 1989), 31D.

ii In this regard I mention works such as Alain Bourreau's Satan the Heretic, Stuart Clark's Thinking With Demons, Nancy Caciola's Discerning Spirits, and Maggi's In the Company of Demons, as well as the work of scholars such as Richard Kieckhefer and D.P. Walker.

iii Maggi, Satan's Rhetoric: A Study of Renaissance Demonology, p.5.

iv Ibid., p.35.

v Ibid., p.96.

vi From Complementum Artis Exorcisticae, cited in Maggi, p.109.

vii Maggi, p.41.

viii Ibid.

Placing the cross-hair of analysis over the postmodern notion that everything is language, Speculative Realism is a philosophy that instead considers the relations between objects. Here Graham Harman, one of the school's key proponents, discusses what such a non-anthropocentric description of reality allows. Interview by Diarmuid Hester

Coined for the purposes of a Goldsmiths conference in April 2007 as an umbrella term under which to group the disparate work of four philosophers (Ray Brassier, Quentin Meillassoux, Iain Hamilton Grant and Graham Harman), the term ‘Speculative Realism' quickly captured the imagination of many acquainted with the continental tradition of philosophy. Initially drawn to its practitioners' readiness to shed new light upon philosophical problems assumed to have been definitively solved since Kant, their mutual resistance to perceived anthropocentric and subjectivist biases in philosophy and their shared appreciation for the weird, the Speculative Realist ‘community' continues to multiply at an unprecedented rate. It has yielded offshoot movements like Levi Bryant's object-oriented ontology, Reza Negarestani's virulent vitalism of decay and Graham Harman's object-oriented philosophy (OOP). I had the opportunity to ask Harman about his past, the present incarnation of OOP and what the future might hold for the Speculative Realist.

Diarmuid Hester: I wonder if you wouldn't mind explaining, for the Mute audience, the central principles of your Object-Oriented Philosophy.

Graham Harman: Most activities deal with only a limited range of entities. Physicists are interested in fields and tiny particles. Chemists deal with slightly larger things. Politicians work with larger corporate bodies while ignoring molecules and artworks. Animals are interested mostly in food, mates and rival animals. But philosophy has always had a more global vocation, concerned with reality as a whole, though in rougher outline than the various special forms of human activity.

Image: Human object series, from left to right, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux & Ray Brassier

The first major principle of object-oriented philosophy (OOP) is that objects are the most universal topic. The universe is not just made of tiny micro-particles or mathematical structures that explain everything else. Nor is it made of a gigantic language or society that constructs everything else. No, reality is autonomous from us. And despite recent fashion it is not made up of process, fluxes, and flows - instead, it is made of individuals. In this sense OOP picks up and rejuvenates the Aristotelian tradition. Aristotle was not just the first Greek philosopher to take everyday objects seriously, rather than pulverising them into tiny physical elements or despising them as the corrupt shadow of otherworldly forms. He was also the first to recognise that the most important substances in the world are not necessarily eternal. For the pre-Socratics and Plato, it was always the case that air, fire, water, atoms, the boundless apeiron, or the perfect forms all had to be indestructible. But not for Aristotle, who knew that cats, horses and trees might be destroyed even though they count as primary substances.

But OOP is much weirder than Aristotle, and does a number of things he would dislike. First, OOP denies that substance must be either natural or simple. OOP can deal with complicated artificial objects such as airplanesarmy battalions, secret societies, art installations and so forth.

Second, at least in my version of OOP, objects cannot make contact directly but only through a mediator. Objects withdraw, to use Heidegger's term. Bruno Latour has a similar view that every relation needs a mediator, but the problem Latour runs up against is that there would also need to be mediators between the mediators, and so on to infinity, so that contact would never occur. This problem disappears for me, because for me there are sensual mediators which have no difficulty making direct contact with real objects. These mediators are the merely phenomenal entities we encounter in experience, and there are primitive versions of them even for inanimate beings. Two real objects never touch each other, but both can be in contact with the same sensual object, which allows for a form of vicarious causation. Whereas the occasionalists blamed all causation on God, and Hume and Kant rooted it all in the human mind, OOP holds that all entities are capable of causal interaction, but only in an indirect manner.

What real objects have in common is that all are inexhaustible by the relations into which they might enter. What all sensual objects have in common is that they exist only in the experience of other entities, and have no existence at all outside of this relation. What both kinds of objects have in common is that they exist in permanent tension with their own qualities. There are two kinds of objects and two kinds of qualities, and by analysing the rifts in this fourfold structure, fresh perspectives are generated on space, time, art works, jokes, literature, truth and perhaps even ethics and politics.

DH: In a recent article, Michael O'Rourke quite rightly observes that ‘right now, speculative realism is "hot" and the sheer pace [...] with which it has evolved, developed and extended its pincers into and across disciplines is nothing short of astonishing.'ⁱ Why do you think SR in general, and OOP in particular, has garnered so much popularity and interest? What would you say is significant about this historical juncture which has brought forth an interest in and a desire for OOP?

GH: Speculative realism (SR) is the name for a loosely affiliated group, and some of its founding members no longer wish to be associated with it. Yet the term has an undeniable staying power. SR refers to a type of philosophy working roughly within the continental tradition, but which rejects the continental tendency to turn all philosophy into a discussion of the human-world interaction. This regrettable process began with Kant, but was really cemented by Husserl and Heidegger (who are two of my heroes for other reasons).

The ‘realism' part of SR means that the world exists independently of humans, which is what continental philosophy likes to call ‘naïve' realism. The ‘speculative' part of SR means that the models of reality it generates are all notably strange. This is not the middle-aged sort of schoolmaster realism that likes to annihilate daydreams and turn everything into a bland acknowledgment of tables and cats on mats.

But the phrase ‘speculative realism' survives as a useful signal for a generalised revolt against the continental philosophy of the 1980s and 1990s, which turned everything into language games or power games. The new realist spirit wants to be open to a world beyond human influence, though in my philosophy this can only happen obliquely.

It's hard to say which brand of speculative realism is the most popular among philosophers (perhaps Quentin Meillassoux's), but in humanities fields outside philosophy there's no question that object-oriented philosophy is the dominant version. This is not surprising, given OOP's highly democratic approach to objects. Those forms of SR which claim that sociology is worthless compared with neuroscience are obviously not going to be useful to sociologists. By contrast, OOP is far less judgemental about the other disciplines and welcomes interaction with them. OOP makes room to an equal degree for electrons, medieval history, literary criticism, and musicianship, so it's little wonder that we've become a quick favourite across the widest variety of disciplines.

DH: What do you think of this proliferation of object-oriented theories and their extension to a variety of fields beyond philosophy (social sciences, art history, literary theory, political theory)?

GH: I love this proliferation, especially since it often occurs in fields I don't understand. Nothing makes me happier than to receive mail from people who say that they're doing work in anthropology that is inspired by my books, or doing an art installation named after one of my book titles. I don't believe in ‘purifying' philosophy, but in trying to let philosophy give and receive impacts in every direction.

My friend and fellow object-oriented philosopher Levi Bryant says that philosophies succeed when they give other people work to do. I agree with this formulation, and also suspect that it means the doom of most analytic philosophy as time passes, despite its long-standing dominance in the elite Anglophone universities. Analytic philosophy seems quite proud of the fact that it's read only by analytic philosophers. But I don't see the grounds for pride in writing in an arid jargon of interest only to narrow technical insiders.

There are so many brilliant and interesting people out there who don't do academic philosophical work: sculptors, geographers, chess champions. The more of these people you are able to address in some way, the more likely it is that you've reached the truly universal subject matter that philosophy was born to address. Otherwise, perhaps you're just trying to build a Fortress of Certainty from which to assault all possible opponents. What I want to build, instead, is a Fortress of Uncertainty. Socrates already began this project for us, and it's called philosophia: or love of wisdom, not wisdom. Philosophy was never meant to beat up the ignorant, since it was in many ways nothing but the systematic practice of ignorance.

DH: Towards Speculative Realism (London: Zero, 2010), your collection of essays and lectures, candidly charts your rise from upstart graduate student to tenured professor of philosophy at the American University of Cairo: do you find the confines of the academy conducive to your kind of work or were there advantages to being outside of the establishment?

GH: I'm not sure it's really possible to be an insider in the Western academic establishment while living in Cairo. In the wider world, if I'm known at all then it's through my books, which remain rather offbeat in flavour.

But within the university structure in Cairo, I suppose I'm now in the establishment. As of September 2010, I administer large research grant projects with a relatively sizeable budget, and as Associate Provost for Research Administration I am invited to important meetings where big decisions are sometimes made.

This is all purely accidental. As recently as 1999 I didn't plan to enter academia at all, for the simple reason that I hadn't enjoyed school since about age eight (I had enjoyed my undergraduate curriculum, at least, but not the student experience itself). In total, I spent 20 or more years as an alienated rebel in all academic settings.

What happened? First, I was offered a one-year professorship at DePaul University in Chicago where I had done my Ph.D. While filling that one-year post I thought ‘what the heck?' and looked at the job advertisements in philosophy departments. Cairo was one of the handful of fascinating opportunities that stood out, and I was lucky enough to get it. Initially it looked like this would be a four-year job at most, but one thing led to another, and it's now a tenured full professorship as well as an administrative post.

You ask whether there were advantages to working outside a university position. Maybe there are, but this one works well for me. There simply aren't many other careers at this stage in history that offer such leisure time and intellectual incentives for people lacking independent fortunes. Academia will probably be swept away by the forces of history at some point, but why rush that process? We won't necessarily end up with anything better.

DH: On reading your work, one is immediately struck not only by the clarity (and often welcome levity) of your style, but also by the persistence of - apparently random - objects: parrots, billiard balls and microbes often share space with cotton, sail boats and grapefruit. Is this a conscious decision on your part? Do you feel it is important that philosophy equally weigh the means and the matter of its expression?

GH: These lists of objects, which often appear in my writings, are not my own stylistic innovation. They can be found in any author who wants to reawaken our awareness of the particularity of individual things. Ian Bogost calls them ‘Latour Litanies' just because Latour does them so nicely, but they are far older than Latour.

In many cases I try to have the lists include one object from the sciences, one living creature, one machine, one compound entity, one human political unit and perhaps one fictional entity, just to enforce the notion of a ‘flat ontology' in which all objects are equally objects. So here's a sentence you might find in one of my books, though I'm inventing it right now: ‘The world is packed full with objects: neutrons, rabbits, radar dishes, the Jesuit Order, the Free City of Bremen, and Superman.' Generally readers enjoy such lists, though the usual cranky contrarians always pretend to be annoyed by them. They remain useful as a way of encouraging the idea that all objects must be granted the dignity of objects, without immediately reducing 500 kinds of objects to two privileged kinds such as quarks and electrons.

More generally, I think style is an utterly crucial question in philosophy. I doubt that any important philosopher has ever been a bad writer. There are difficult writers among great philosophers (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel) and even some relatively boring writers (Husserl, Whitehead). But all of them are capable to an unusual degree of extremely powerful metaphors and one-line formulations.

I've always agreed with Nietzsche's claim that the only way to improve your style is to improve your thoughts, but also believe that the best way to improve your thoughts is to improve your style. There is a tendency to think that philosophy is about explicit propositional content, and that style is merely pretentious ornament plastered on top of explicit propositions. Yet this assumes that correct representational statements about the world are possible, which is precisely what I deny. As I see it, truth is a matter of allusion, not of representational picture-drawing. To improve as a writer means primarily to improve one's allusive and suggestive power. We should not say ‘there is no truth', since this vapid relativism is irresponsibly empty. But we should also not demand a frictionless contact with the real, as many scientistic and absolutist philosophers do. Instead, approaching the truth requires something like insinuation or innuendo. That's precisely what style is: saying something without explicitly saying it. A style is the tacit background condition in which all explicit utterances are made. Philosophical breakthroughs are always rhetorical breakthroughs. And as Aristotle already knew, rhetoric does not mean ‘devious non-rational persuasion', but ‘establishing the tacit background conditions for later explicit statement.'

This is why truly bad writers cannot be good philosophers. All they can do is launch a salvo of explicit propositional statements, while the real action in philosophy is elsewhere, because philosophy is the investigation of backgrounds rather than of garrulous propositional figures. Here I am deeply indebted to Marshall McLuhan, who is in fact one of the most important 20th century figures in the humanities.

DH: You have stated in a recent article that ‘all philosophy should be grounded in aesthetics', and have even made initial sallies into an Object-Oriented Aesthetics when, in some beautifully rendered passages from the same article, you talk about ‘allure' as ‘the root of beauty'.ⁱⁱ Could you describe in more detail what this means for artistic experience?

GH: George Santayana notes that while aesthetics has usually been a minor sub-neighbourhood of philosophy, the sense of beauty plays a major role in the lives of both humans and animals. Every day we choose what clothing to wear and how to groom ourselves based on aesthetic principles. We avoid ugly streets when choosing a residence and going out for evening walks. We are stopped dead in our tracks by something mesmerising about the eyes or voice of a specific person, and may throw away everything to chase them for a while.

But aesthetics has an important role in my work for technical no less than temperamental reasons. The world is a set of polarisations in which the real exists in tension with the sensual and objects in tension with their qualities. Absolutely everything that exists, whether real or fictional, is dominated by these tensions. I've borrowed the mock term ‘ontography' from an M.R. James ghost story and turned it into a serious term for the systematic classification of these tensions. I call them time, space, essence and eidos, and place all four on an equal footing. There is also a special way in which each of these tensions breaks down, and I call them confrontation, allure, causation and theory. ‘Allure' is the realm of the aesthetic. It involves the tension between an absent real object and the sparkling surface qualities that seem to revolve around it while never quite belonging to it. For me this happens not only in art works, but in all experiences that involve any degree of shock or surprise. It would be interesting to compare and classify all the different forms of allure, and that's what I will do before long. For now, it is best to read my short book The Quadruple Object, which came out in French last year, and will appear in English in late July.

DH: You've become known, not only as a hugely productive thinker and author but also as a prolific blogger, and you have been quick to extol the virtues of the internet, stating in a recent interview that ‘anyone doing continental philosophy who isn't currently involved in the blogosphere (whether as a blogger or simply as a reader) is falling behind.'ⁱⁱⁱ How does OOP consider the rapid technologisation of modern society? Does the discrepancy between, on the one hand, orienting ones thought towards the insistent reality of objects and, on the other, communicating these thoughts through a hyper-abstract means ever impress itself upon you?

GH: On the whole, I think the blogosphere hasn't fully matured as a medium of philosophical expression. Levi Bryant is the only blogger I know who does some of his very best philosophical work while blogging. He has pioneered the blog mini-treatise in philosophy, a genre that no one else seems able to practice so far.

As for my own blog, I treat it as an intellectual snack bar. It's a place for quick observations that would not fit in a book or article, and also a place for the rapid dissemination of news or reports on what I am reading.

I do think it's a mistake not to be involved in the early days of this new medium. Things happen so quickly in the philosophy blogosphere, and a certain degree of progress is made towards consensus about various topics, or developing fault-lines that cannot immediately be bridged. Some critics mock this link of philosophy with speed of transmission. But the great periods of philosophy have all been periods of rapid invention and sudden shifts, unfolding in relatively short periods of time. The fact that speculative realism went from non-existence to global recognition in four years is a point in its favour, not incriminating evidence: it shows that the world was hungry for something new, and found it.

Meanwhile, the slow, sober, incremental approach to philosophy is more characteristic of derivative periods of scholarly compiling and collating. These periods have their virtues as well, but I would rather run with the cheetahs. The past five years have been the most interesting period in continental philosophy in decades.

DH: Continental philosophy has a history of giving sporting endeavour fairly short shrift - yet in your previous incarnation, you have been a sports journalist, and your blog regularly devotes days to developments in the NBA, MLB etc. not to mention your absorbing coverage of the 2010 world cup. Do you think your philosophical outlook makes you particularly sympathetic to the world of sports?

GH: I do love sports, but I'm not sure I can make an immediate connection between my sporting interests and my philosophical interests. Actually, there may be a purely biographical way to do it, and I mention this only to put an interesting name on the table.

The first ‘philosophical' author I read was at the age of fourteen: a well-known American baseball writer named Bill James. If you were to interview everyone in my age group in America who writes in any genre, I think you would find that a surprisingly high percentage were influenced by James, who is not so old and now works as a valued consultant for the Boston Red Sox.

There were two things James always did well. The one for which he is most famous is analysing statistics in quirky ways leading to unusual insights. This has become more common in various fields: we now have Freakonomics, things like that. But in those days it was fairly rare, and it came as a revelation to see the genius of James at work, shedding intellectual light on the inner workings of baseball, which had seemed like mere entertainment.

The other thing he did very well was write. James wasn't a polished high-literary stylist, perhaps, but informal, often folksy, friendly, and blunt. This was a mind on its own path, and James knew how to reach the most paradoxical conclusions about the simplest topic. He once wrote a mini-essay about a promising young player named Juan Samuel who never really flourished despite abundant potential. The problem, as James saw it, was the ‘What do you with him?' problem. Samuel had plenty of talent, but none of it fit into any particular, available role on a baseball team; no matter what role he was placed in, his deficiencies for the task dragged down his talents. This led James to a more general philosophical reflection on how certain friends can't fit into our lives for the same reason, certain employees can't work for us, certain lovers are impossible on the very same grounds, and so forth.

At this point I'm expecting readers to be either bored or sceptical, since I'm addressing a non-baseball nation here. But I always wanted to be the Bill James of metaphysics. It won't happen; my skill set is too different from his. Yet once in a while I find myself editing or deleting a sentence because I've just written something in James's voice rather than my own. The influence of this baseball writer on my philosophical work is that powerful, nearly 30 years after I first read him.

DH: Whither OOP?

GH: There are three things that OOP must do.

First, there are numerous technical issues still to be addressed. This is the sort of work I like to do, and it will ultimately result in a big systematic treatise of the sort that all philosophers want to write. Now that I've just turned 43, youth is no longer an excuse and I just need to sit down and try to write it. But I first need to finish off some intermediate commitments before I get back to writing Infrastructure, as it is called. An infrastructure is different from a system. A system lays a geometrical grid over the universe and tries to explain everything with it. But an infrastructure limits itself to a small number of existing population centres, gradually extending itself as a city develops by nature or by plan. The point is that philosophers are never brilliant on every issue. We have perhaps 10 percent original thoughts, and the remaining 90 percent are simply the typical platitudes and biases of our era, nation, age, and gender. It follows that if we expect philosophers to address all issues on demand, we will mostly be hearing vapid clichés. Instead, we should follow the method of building infrastructure, focusing only on those few points where we do have something original to say, linking them together by a sort of light rail system that can gradually be expanded to incorporate future insights.

Second, OOP will want to say more about numerous concrete topics. Here I'm not as worried, because other people are doing much of the work for us already. It's not my job to tell anthropologists and video artists how OOP should affect their work. That's their job. They're supposed to tell me what they learned, and maybe it will have a retroactive effect on my philosophy.

Third and finally, one of the hidden advantages of OOP over other forms of SR is that we have perhaps the deepest roots in the tradition of Western philosophy. With our focus on the power of individual things, we are heirs to the long Aristotelian tradition, whose stock price is badly undervalued at the present moment. No major philosopher is greeted in continental philosophy with a more jaded sense of ennui than Aristotle. But I tend to agree with the Spanish philosopher Julian Marías that the greatest moments in Western philosophy have generally come from a serious engagement with Aristotle. My programme for the next few years involves lectures and writing projects connected with Aristotle and his tradition. Here I'm talking not about the supposedly ‘middle-aged' Aristotle described by Alasdair MacIntyre. I don't recognise that figure. For me, Aristotle is among the weirdest of jokesters, and we are going to make him even more weird, since the task of philosophy is always to make things a lot more weird than we ever believed they were.

Graham Harman is Professor of Philosophy and Associate Provost for Research Administration at the American University of Cairo. His Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the Making (Edinburgh: Edinburgh U.P) and The Quadruple Object (London: Zero) will be published in July 2011. The Prince and the Wolf (London: Zero), co-authored with Bruno Latour, will also appear in July.

Diarmuid Hester <diarmuid.hester AT googlemail.com> is a graduate of the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy and blogs at schoolboyerrors.wordpress.com .

Footnotes

i‘Girls Welcome! Speculative Realism, Object Oriented Ontology and Queer Theory', Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism II, 2011, p. 277.

http://www.publicpraxis.com/speculations/?page_id=326

ii'A larger sense of beauty', http://dialogicafantastica.wordpress.com/2011/02/01/a-larger-sense-of-beauty/

iiiInterview with Peter Gratton, Speculations: Journal of Speculative Realism I, 2010, p.85.

http://www.publicpraxis.com/speculations/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/Interviews.pdf

The art of our financialised times often resembles the weightless mobility of capital. But how does the unbearable lightness of certain art works differ from the loaded lightness of 'precarious' art? - asks Anna Dezeuze

Up in the Air

‘How much does your life weigh?' With this question, inspirational speaker Ryan Bingham, played by George Clooney in the 2009 film, Up in the Air, introduces his lecture on the need to travel light - both literally and metaphorically. Bingham is the caricature of today's expert consultant who revels in the perks of first-class air travel and high-end hotel accommodation. He aspires to a weightless life, always on the go, free of care or commitment. ‘[M]ake no mistake', Bingham dramatically concludes in one of his talks, ‘moving is living'. Bingham has to travel all the time for his job because he is hired by companies across the United States to fire their employees. Throughout the film, we see him using the same discourse of weightlessness to convince workers that losing their jobs represents an opportunity for change, the freedom to pursue their true dreams. It is of course much easier for Bingham to deploy this vacuous rhetoric than the employees' own bosses - he knows that he will shortly jump on a plane and disappear.

Clooney's Ryan Bingham embodies a new form of capitalism that has emerged in the last 20 years. We now live in a weightless world, Diane Coyle announced in 1997.ⁱ Weightless outputs such as services, information and communication technologies make up for the most important growth in a new economy dominated by dematerialised products. Like the financial derivatives that are largely responsible for today's financial crisis, these weightless products do not, in fact, exist anywhere. As Jeremy Rifkin explained in 2000:

If the industrial era was characterized by the amassing of physical capital and property, the new era prizes intangible forms of power bound up in bundles of information and intellectual assets.ⁱⁱ

That same year, sociologist Zygmunt Bauman described this dominant form of capitalism as ‘fluid', ‘liquid', ‘lean' and ‘buoyant'. ‘Capital can travel fast and travel light and its lightness and motility have turned into the paramount source of uncertainty for all the rest.'ⁱⁱⁱ Outsourcing, downsizing, short-term contracts and leases are all familiar features of our new ‘liquid modernity'. Constant change and transformation, evasion and escape are the new capitalism's weapons of choice. It is those who travel lightest, this ‘nomadic and extraterritorial elite', who are the winners.^iv The rest of us have to learn to live with uncertainty and precariousness, since governments can no longer protect us against the destructive flows of liquid modernity - capitalism today only tolerates regulations ‘with a light touch'.

Up in the Air is also the title of an installation created in 2010 by American artist Tom Friedman that was, in part, a response to the economic crisis of 2008. This open-ended, suspended arrangement of disparate everyday objects and shapes - mainly comprising painted polystyrene trompe l'oeil replicas of everyday objects and cartoon symbols - occupies the whole exhibition space; it's part floating encyclopaedia of the artist's favourite themes, part exploding consumer universe. According to one critic, the installation reminds us that ‘the only certainty in the journey of life is uncertainty: we can count only on change and volatility.' Charlotte Eyerman is, however, quick to add that, ‘At the same time Friedman's work reminds us that if we let go of the illusion of stability and embrace the firmament of the imagination, great realms of liberation and dynamism are possible.'^v With Up in the Air the lightness and playfulness of Friedman's early work becomes a celebration of the artist-as-alchemist able to transform uncertainty into an opportunity for delightful displays.

Image: Tom Friedman, Up in the Air, installation at Magasin 3, Stockholm, 2010

Up in the Air was also included in a multi-exhibition programme dedicated to Casanova, the famous author, risk-taker and libertine traveller. While Friedman acknowledges the modernity of Casanova as an author who turned his life into an artwork, curator Emmanuel Latreille celebrates Casanova's mobility, his openness to adventure and opportunities.^vi Casanova's credo, according to Latreille, could be simply summarised as ‘Moving is living' (Bouger, c'est vivre) - the very same motto used by Clooney's Ryan Bingham.^vii Indeed, Casanova, a precursor for contemporary artists, can also be seen as a model for today's entrepreneurial capitalist who prides himself on the boundlessness of both his mobility and creativity. If, as Rifkin informs us, wealth today ‘is no longer vested in physical capital but rather in human imagination and creativity', then the alchemical virtuosity of the artist has never been more desirable.^viii

Like Friedman, Francis Alÿs and Gabriel Orozco, both recently honoured with major touring mid-career retrospectives, started to develop a pictorial language in the 1990s which privileges a light touch, an openness to uncertainty and a playful creativity. If Friedman remains a sedentary artist practising his sleight of hands in his studio, however, the two Mexico-based artists took the road of a peripatetic practice early on. Their dematerialised art objects and openness to chance encounters are part and parcel of the flâneur's light baggage and aimless wanderings. As early as 1997, art historian James Meyer expressed his reservations regarding the relation between the wandering practices of artists such as Orozco and the unimpeded flows of globalised capital and technology.^ix Referring to Bauman's study of ‘liquid modernity',^x Marcus Verhagen re-iterated Meyer's concerns in a 2006 article, ‘at a time when capital itself is nomadic the travelling artist might more aptly be characterised as a liquid insider.' Hopping from city to city, do Orozco, Alÿs and other global flâneurs not risk being identified with the nomadic elite who has also come to ‘cherish the transient'?^xi

‘Semionauts' and ‘Symbolic Analysts'

Nicolas Bourriaud's 2009 study of ‘an aesthetic of globalization', which includes examples drawn from Orozco's and Alÿs's practices, and refers in passing to Bauman's and Rifkin's studies, appears to address just such questions.^xii In Radicant, the French curator and critic celebrates the wandering, nomadic artist who refuses to be identified with any fixed roots or identity, in favour of a series of journeys. Bourriaud acknowledges that the space inhabited by this figure is that of global capital, and he repeatedly tries to situate in this specific context what he calls ‘radicant' art practices. (Bourriaud borrows the term ‘radicant' from botany, where it apparently describes plants, like ivy, which develop their roots as they move along, rather than being rooted in a single location.) From the passing observations scattered throughout his study emerge two inter-connected strategies available to the artist today. On the one hand, the artist should capture globalised ‘fluxes, movements of capital, the repetition and distribution of information' in order to make visible such ‘furtive forces'.^xiii By presenting this reality as an arbitrary ‘construct', Bourriaud argues, artists suggest other ways of living. It is in this sense that they are ‘altermodern', in the way that some anti-globalisation movements have described themselves as providing an ‘alter-globalisation' (altermondialisation), an alternative to globalisation.^xiv On the other hand, however, simply presenting these global fluxes may end up replicating the very logic that such practices seek to reveal. If ‘global capitalism' seems to have ‘hijacked flux, speed, nomadism', Bourriaud warns, we need to ‘be even more mobile'. If the ‘global imaginary is dominated by flexibility', we need to ‘invent new meanings' for flexibility by introducing slowness and duration at the very heart of speed.^xv

While I agree with Bourriaud that it is impossible for artists to escape the omnipresent flows of global capital, I find his descriptions of how this can be achieved problematically vague. If his emphasis on travel and nomadism in contemporary practices since the 1990s ultimately fails to engage directly with the critiques formulated by Meyer or Verhagen, the formal ‘patterns in precarious aesthetics' that he has singled out are even more ambiguous.^xvi Bourriaud sets up a kind of equation between nomadic practices and the ‘formal nomadism' involved in such devices as ‘transcoding, flickering' and ‘blurring', highlighting for example the way images by Kelley Walker or Wade Guyton ‘are instable' and ‘perpetually transcoded', or focusing on ‘the total equivalence between different modalities of making visible' embodied in Wolfgang Tillmans' work or Thomas Ruff's Jpegs series.^xvii Bourriaud seems to be returning here to the arguments that he developed in his 2002 Postproduction, in which he compared the activities of artists to those of djs and web surfers. All are ‘semionauts', he explained, who ‘navigate' the world of available signs, and recombine them ‘in original scripts'.^xviii Bourriaud's account privileges translation and transfer, the way signs are inscribed into chains of signification that link one medium to another, one place to another, in a potentially endless series of reversals, ‘extensions and declensions'.^xix

This conception of art as ‘an editing computer' appears to me to resonate with economist Robert Reich's description of the new, powerful elite that has emerged in the weightless economy of the last 20 years: those he calls the ‘symbolic analysts'.^xx These ‘symbolic analysts' are engineers, lawyers, consultants, managers, advertisers and ‘other "mind workers" who engage in processing information and symbols for a living'. As Reich explains,

Symbolic analysts solve, identify, and broker problems by manipulating symbols. They simplify reality into abstract images that can be rearranged, juggled, experimented with, communicated to other specialists and then, eventually, transformed back into reality.^xxi

If artists have long been in the business of manipulating symbols, the light-footed semionaut excels at it. In the Jpegs series, Ruff adds value to an image by blowing up its pixels until it is barely legible; in a work such as Black Star Press (2006), Kelley Walker rotates an image by 90° and silk-screens pseudo-expressionist toothpaste or chocolate drips on it. Do such interventions in the flows of image production and distribution constitute interferences and breaks, or extensions of this symbolic traffic? Bourriaud explicitly aligns ‘postproduction' practices with the ‘age of access' described by Rifkin, in which value lies in the use of content, rather than any material object. One of the inherent features of weightless products is that more than one user can access them at once - as economist Danny Quah put it, they are characterised by an ‘infinite expansibility', which also appears typical of the potentially endless chains of signification created by artists in Bourriaud's account.^xxii

If I do not agree with Bourriaud that practices such as Ruff's or Walker's can be described as precarious - unlike those of Alÿs, Orozco or Thomas Hirschhorn, also mentioned in Radicant - it is because they err, in my eyes, on the side of abstraction, and thus can easily be subsumed within the symbolic analysts' playful systems of value. Whereas the precarious artwork is an ‘object of negotiations', as Bourriaud suggests, I cannot see anything that needs to be ‘negotiated' in Ruff's or Walker's works, as the symbols they create and exchange, like those of the symbolic analyst, flow freely and easily (from the internet to the gallery, from the maker to the viewer...).^xxiii The ‘real' in Bourriaud's account is often paired with the virtual, and with the fictional, and I agree that this dialectic is necessary today. I also agree that precariousness is a central term for contemporary practices responding to ‘the precarisation of our experience' today. But how precisely can we define precariousness, and where exactly can we locate the cracks that precarious works can open in the weightless surface of liquid modernity?

Image: Thomas Ruff, jpeg, 2007

Articulation, Appearance, Precariousness

Translation is a key model in Bourriaud's Radicant, since it embodies for him a nomadic aesthetic that could resist the abstractions of global capital. The ideal translation is attentive to the singularity of the original, while addressing itself to a new, expanded audience. Bourriaud does not, however, remark on another feature of translation: the self-erasure or voluntary invisibility to which it aspires, which gives the illusion that the content has not been affected by the change of linguistic codes. It is in part because of this characteristic that Sandro Mezzadra has likened the very operations of capital to that of translation. As global capital encounters a ‘multiplicity of languages (that is, of forms of life, of social relations, of "cultures")', it constantly needs to impose its own language of value.^xxiv These moments of articulation are, according to Mezzadra, the locations of resistance - it is in the refusal to be translated, rather than in the act of translation, that resistance can be found.

These moments or spaces are those that display heterogeneous features that do not adhere to the abstractions of capital. These articulations are points of transition where ‘homolingual translation' struggles to impose itself. Rather than a formal language of transfer and transcoding, which facilitate translation, I would like to propose here a vocabulary for precarious practices that would resist it, by emphasising futility and absurdity as well as waste - of time, effort and materials. Francis Alÿs, for example, has explored the relation between ‘maximum effort and minimum result' by asking 500 volunteers to move a sand dune by around 10 cm in When Faith Moves Mountains.^xxv Elsewhere, he tested the dynamics at play when doing something (like pushing a block of ice along the street) leads to nothing, or in the futile attempt to drive a Volkswagen Beetle to the top of a steep and sandy hill (paired with the efforts of a brass band rehearsing a piece of music).^xxvi

These are moments that are both suspended in time and lost in the quicksand of inefficiency - they offer a break from, and an alternative to, the smooth operations of the symbolic analysts. Wasted time and effort are literalised by Alÿs as actual unrecycled waste in Barrenderos/Sweepers, which involved a line of street-sweepers in Mexico City pushing garbage down the street ‘until they are stopped by the mass of trash'.^xxvii However hard we try to keep the streets clear for the efficient circulation of goods and people, however hard we try to erase the traces of the garbage we produce, the stubbornness of trash has the last word, thus revealing its resistance to translation. By focusing on the inertia of the real, artists such as Alÿs are not trying to show that ‘the world in which we live is a pure construct, a mise-en-scène, a montage, a composition, a story' (in Bourriaud's words).^xxviii Rather than a vast container of signs to be re-arranged, the world according to Alÿs is already full of stories, inconsistencies, resistances and failures - those points of friction in the fluid passages of liquid modernity. Interrupting given narratives of progress and efficiency, Alÿs wants to create ‘a space for the survival and the creation of an identity that is not imposed by modernity and globalization'.^xxix

Bourriaud cites the etymology of the term ‘precarious' (‘that which only exists thanks to a reversible authorization'), mainly in order to bring out the transitoriness of contemporary nomadic practices.^xxx By contrast, I would like to shift the emphasis away from the indeterminate state of the precarious work and underline instead its fundamental dependence on the ‘authorisation' of others. As Thomas Hirschhorn has explained, the difference between the ephemeral and the precarious is that the ephemeral is subject to the laws of nature, whereas the precarious is dependent on the decisions of other human beings.^xxxi This distinction denies the inevitability of cyclical time and introduces crucial notions of responsibility and solidarity. In her 1958 discussion of the modern ‘human condition', Hannah Arendt divided human activities into three categories - work, labour and action.^xxxii In an analysis that prefigures Bauman's study of ‘liquid modernity', she observes that labour - the cyclical sequence of production and consumption of perishable goods for the survival of the human body - is fast becoming the dominant model for capitalist society, as planned obsolescence has turned even the most durable products into disposable objects of instant gratification. In such a society, according to Arendt, ‘the space of appearance' in which action can occur ceases to exist, because individuals are more focused on satisfying their (ever-growing) needs than on coming together ‘in the manner of speech or action'. This vanishing ‘space of appearance' is necessary for action because it ‘precedes [...] the various forms in which the public realm can be organized'.^xxxiii It is, however, very fragile - it ‘does not survive the actuality of the movement which brought it into being, but disappears [...] with the disappearance or arrest of the activities themselves.' Above all, it exists as a potentiality, to be actualised through action. This kind of space of appearance, I would suggest, cannot exist when the symbolic analyst feeds information back into the frenzied loops of consumption and production, and the networked flows of data that direct them - this is, perhaps, why it is so easy for these creative minds to lose any sense of responsibility. The irreversibility of action (one of its central characteristics according to Arendt) breaks with the ‘infinite expandability' of weightless products.

Image: Francis Alÿs, When Faith Moves Mountains, 2002

Many artistic practices, developed from the 1990s onwards, seem to actively convey this sense of a shrinking space of appearance. Staring at the empty walls of their studios, Tom Friedman and Martin Creed shared in the 1990s a playful resignation at being unable to say or make anything new - this ‘feeling of total limitation', for Creed, came out of an acute awareness of the responsibility, and difficulty, of making choices.^xxxiv Creed's desire to ‘balance the making of something and the not making of something' also echoes Alÿs's ‘paradox of practice': ‘sometimes doing something leads to nothing' and ‘sometimes doing nothing leads to something'.^xxxv As long as this ambivalence between something and nothing, between appearance and disappearance, lies at the heart of the artwork, I would argue that such practices can be described as precarious. It is in this case only that I would agree with Bourriaud that precariousness ‘inscribes itself into the structure of the work'.^xxxvi Conversely, when in Up in the Air Friedman replaces, with private experiments in alchemy, the algorithmic connections that had linked object, material and process in his earlier work, his practice seems to lose any sense of precariousness, leaving us instead with a form of escapism.^xxxvii

Precarity and (Un)translatability

By creating precarious artworks, artists can open a space of appearance within the endless flows of capitalism. Crucially, action, according to Arendt, can only be understood retrospectively, through the stories that are told about it, just as many precarious works only survive through stories and documents. (Alÿs often favours the format of the fable, and is interested in the ‘rumour' as a vehicle for his work.) Though Arendt clearly opposed action to labour in The Human Condition, her descriptions suggest that both fields of activity share one common feature: the inherent inability to produce any durable object. As works such as Alÿs' weave together wasted efforts and futile gestures, they reveal this point of intersection, in which action and labour become somehow confused. It is in this sense that such precarious practices resonate with Giorgio Agamben's re-reading, in the 1990s, of Arendt's writings on labour. The Italian philosopher agreed with Arendt's prescient formulation of labour for contemporary capitalism - indeed Agamben's concept of ‘bare' or ‘naked' life is closely related to Arendt's definition of labour - but he expressed his belief that the balance between labour, work, and action at the heart of her study of the human condition has been forever lost in today's political context.^xxxviii ‘We can no longer distinguish [...] between our biological life as living beings and our political existence', explains Agamben.^xxxix Precarious works, in my eyes, seem to venture into ‘this opaque zone of indistinction' in which Agamben urges us ‘to find the path of another politics'.^xl They bring together the biological dynamics of labour (or naked life) and the ‘space of appearance' required by action - in order to explore a definition of politics as ‘the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end'.^xli

Precarious artworks reflect, in their very structure, what Bauman has called the ‘friability, [...] brittleness, [...] transience [...] of human bonds and networks' today, as they are ceaselessly being dismantled by the homolingual translation of ‘global powers' bent on achieving ‘continuous and growing fluidity'.^xlii The human bonds and networks conjured by precarious practices range from collaborations and collective efforts to symbolic alliances forged between artists and those living in, or responding to, adverse circumstances.^xliii Parallels can be found between the type of alliances established by such practices since the 1990s and contemporary political discussions of ‘precarity' - a Europeanised version of the word precariousness that has been used to rally different communities in a critique of the increased job insecurity characteristic of global, liquid capitalism.

Looking back on the general failure of the anti-precarity discourse as an activist project in the last ten years, Brett Neilson and Ned Rossiter have recently suggested that the shared experience of precarity can nevertheless serve as a starting point for political organisation, as long as the differences between each situation within this alliance are acknowledged.^xliv Neilson and Rossiter draw on Sandro Mezzadra's discussion of capitalism as translation in order to underline those irreducible differences between, say, a freelance web designer, an immigrant working as a cleaner and the nomadic artist. ‘Nobody would deny that some forms of precarity cannot translate into others', they explain. ‘But the deeper question concerns how this untranslatability is constituted.'^xlv By probing, through empathy and solidarity, these contingent alliances, artists creating precarious artworks may be able to make visible these untranslatable nodes. Particularly relevant among those nodes is the relation between those whose precarious circumstances are endured as a matter of survival and those who voluntarily subject themselves to precarious conditions as a matter of choice - an articulation between futile labour and free action which can help us shed light on the central articulation of our identity today: between ‘our biological life as living beings and our political existence' in Agamben's words. Both T. J. Demos and Marcus Verhagen have similarly engaged with issues of translatability as they have sought to complicate Bourriaud's model of the semionaut by relating it to other contemporary wanderers such as the exile, the immigrant or the refugee.^xlvi Indeed, Demos' reference to Agamben's writings points to these figures as crucial ciphers of the same ‘opaque zone of indistinction' between biological and political life.^xlvii

If ‘moving is living' for Ryan Bingham and Casanova, for the refugee, the formula is inverted: ‘living is moving'. Living on the move, for the refugee, is of course a necessity rather than an aspiration. In this context, we can follow Agamben and start recognising ourselves in the figure of the refugee; recasting lightness as action, rather than as the weightlessness of capital, we can envisage precarious practices as potential spaces of appearance for dialogues, alliances, and a new form of politics emerging at the cross-roads of labour (as naked life) and action. I believe that there is room for poetics and humour as well as antagonism and despair within these fragile spaces, as long as lightness and play can be mobilised to create ‘means without ends' (in Agamben's words), rather than to feed the voracious means-ends logic of capital.^xlviii Most importantly, by entrusting this light, brittle, precarious space to us, artists seem to be involving us in the responsibility of keeping it alive.

Anna Dezeuze <anna_dezeuze AT hotmail.com> is an independent art historian and critic. Her edited book, The ‘Do-it-yourself' Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media, was published by Manchester University Press in 2010. She has written about 1960s practices, including Fluxus, assemblage and ‘junk' art, kinetic art, and the work of Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, and Bruce Nauman. She co-curated the 2009 touring exhibition 'Subversive Spaces: Surrealism and Contemporary Art', and regularly contributes to Art Monthly. Her current book project is entitled The ‘Almost Nothing': Precariousness in Art since the 1960s.

Footnotes

iDiane Coyle, The Weightless World: Strategies for Managing the Digital Economy, Oxford: Capstone, 1997

iiJeremy Rifkin, The Age of Access: the New Culture of Hypercapitalism, Where All of Life is a Paid-for Experience, New York: J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 2000, p.30.

iiiZygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity, Cambridge and Malden: Polity Press and Blackwell, 2000, p.121.

ivIbid, p.13.

vCharlotte Eyerman, ‘All that is Solid Melts into Air: Tom Friedman at Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall', 2010, http://www.magasin3.com/en/blog/exhibitions/tom-friedman/?postTabs=6

viTom Friedman, ‘Up in the Air' (interview with Christophe Golé), in Emmanuel Latreille (ed.), Casanova Forever, exh. cat., Montpellier, Fonds Régional d'Art Contemporain, Paris: Editions Dilecta, 2010, p.160.

viiEmmanuel Latreille, ‘Où est le cul? Questions de méthode', in ibid, p.23.

viiiRifkin, Age of Access, op. cit., p.5. Friedman speaks of his interest in alchemy in ‘Up in the Air', op. cit., p.159.

ixJames Meyer, ‘Nomads: Figures of Travel in Contemporary Art', Parkett 49, May 1997, reprinted in Alex Coles (ed.), Site-Specificity: The Ethnographic Turn, London: Black Dog Publishing, 2000, pp.10-26.

xMarcus Verhagen, ‘Nomadism', Art Monthly, 300, October 2006, p.9.

xiBauman, Liquid Modernity, op. cit., p.14.

xiiNicolas Bourriaud, Radicant: Pour une esthétique de la globalisation, Paris: Denoël, 2009. The book has been translated into English (Presses du réel/ Sternberg Press, 2009), but I will be using my translations from the French.

xiiiIbid, pp.66-67.

xivAltermodern was the title of the Tate Triennial curated by Bourriaud at Tate Britain, 3 February - 26 April 2009.

xvBourriaud, Radicant, op. cit., pp.59-60.

xviNicolas Bourriaud, ‘Precarious Constructions: Answer to Jacques Rancière on Art and Politics', in Open 17, 2009, special issue on A Precarious Existence: Vulnerability in the Public Domain, p.33. This article summarises some of the arguments developed in Radicant.

xviiBourriaud, Radicant, op. cit., pp.33, 35.

xviiiNicolas Bourriaud, Postproduction, Culture as Screenplay: How Art Reprograms the World, New York: Sternberg Press, p.18.

xixBourriaud, Radicant, op. cit., p.157.

xxBourriaud, ‘Precarious Constructions', op. cit.,p.35; Robert Reich, The Work of Nations: Preparing Ourselves for 21st Century Capitalism, New York: Vintage, 1992.

xxiReich, ibid, p.178.

xxiiDanny Quah, cited in Coyle, A Weightless World, op. cit., p.xiii.

xxiiiBourriaud, ‘Precarious Constructions', op. cit., p.32.

xxivSandro Mezzadra, ‘Living in Transition: Toward a Heterolingual Theory of the Multitude', Transversal, June 2007, http://eipcp.net/transversal/1107/mezzadra/en

xxvhttp://www.francisalys.com/public/cuandolafe.html . For a critique of this futility, see Grant Kester, ‘Lessons in Futility: Francis Alÿs and the Legacy of May ‘68', Third Text, 23:4, July 2009, pp.407-420.

xxvihttp://www.francisalys.com/public/hielo.html

xxviihttp://www.francisalys.com/public/barrenderos.html

xxviiiBourriaud, ‘Precarious constructions', op. cit., p.36.

xxixInterview with the author, Mexico City, 23 September 2008.

xxxBourriaud, ‘Precarious constructions', op. cit., p.32. For another perspective on precariousness as a concept to describe the art of the first decade of the 21st century see Hal Foster, ‘Precarious', Artforum, December 2009, pp.207-209, 260.

xxxi‘Alison Gingeras in conversation with Thomas Hirschhorn', in Benjamin Buchloh (et al.), Thomas Hirschhorn, London: Phaidon, 2004, p.24.

xxxiiHannah Arendt, The Human Condition, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1958, 2nd edition, 1998.

xxxiiiIbid, p.199.

xxxivMartin Creed, video, London: Illuminations, 2001.

xxxvIbid.

xxxviBourriaud, ‘Precarious constructions', op. cit., p.32.

xxxviiFor an overview of Tom Friedman's work, see Bruce Hainley (et al.), Tom Friedman, London: Phaidon, 2001.

xxxviiiSee Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (1995), trans. D. Heller-Roazen, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, pp.10, 105.

xxxixGiorgio Agamben, ‘In this Exile (Italian Diary, 1992-4)', in Means without End: Notes on Politics (1996), trans. V. Binetti and C. Casarino, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000, p.138.

xlIbid, p.139.

xliGiorgio Agamben, ‘Notes on Politics' (1992), in Means without End, p.117. Although Agamben never explicitly addresses Arendt's concept of ‘action' in this book, I detect her influence in his emphasis on ‘potentiality', ‘appearance' (in his essay on ‘The Face' in particular), and ‘means without end'.

xliiBauman, Liquid Modernity, op. cit., p.14.

xliiiSee my ‘Thriving on Adversity: the Art of Precariousness', 5 September 2006, www.metamute.org/en/Thriving-On-Adversity.

xlivBrett Neilson and Ned Rossiter, ‘Precarity as a Political Concept: New Forms of Connection, Subjectivization and Organization', in Open 17, 2009, pp.48-61.

xlvIbid, p.59.

xlviT. J. Demos, ‘The Ends of Exile: Toward a Coming Universality,' in Nicolas Bourriaud (ed.), Altermodern: the Tate Triennial, exh. cat., London, Tate, 2009, n.p. Marcus Verhagen, ‘The Nomad and the Altermodern: The Tate Triennial', Third Text, 23:6 (November 2009), pp.803-12. Demos discusses Alÿs' work in relation to the figure of the nomad in ‘Vanishing Mediator', in Mark Godfrey (ed.), Francis Alÿs: A Story of Deception, exh. cat., London: Tate, 2010, pp.178-80.

xlviiDemos quotes Agamben's essay ‘Beyond Human Rights', from Means without End. Anthony Downey uses Agamben's term as the title for his discussion of these figures in contemporary art: ‘Zones of Indistinction: Giorgio Agamben's "Bare Life" and the Politics of Aesthetics', Third Text, 23:2 (March 2009), pp.109-125.

xlviiiFor a discussion of antagonism, in response to Bourriaud's earlier writings, see Claire Bishop, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics', October, No. 110 (Autumn 2004), reproduced in Anna Dezeuze (ed.), The ‘Do-it-yourself' Artwork: Participation from Fluxus to New Media, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2010, pp.257-80. Foster refers to different types of precarious practices, describing them as ‘mournful', ‘desperate', ‘poetic' or ‘outlandish'.
Foster, ‘Precarious', op. cit., pp.209, 260.

The recursive forms of feedback made strange bedfellows out of cold war cybernetics and tripped-out psychedelia. In a reworking of a talk given at the Showroom gallery's Signal:Noise event, Lars Bang Larsen reads counter-cultural ‘good vibrations' literally and politically

Cybernetics may seem like an unlikely source of influence for psychedelia, if by this one understands plasmatic visual styles and a pastoral ethics that revolved around inner truth. Perhaps for this reason it remains under-theorized aspect of the '60s. However one need only consider that LSD clichés such as ‘turning on' and ‘tuning in' are machinic figures of speech. There is also anecdotal testimony, of course, such as how Apple founder Steve Wozniak conceived of the PC on an acid trip and tested the first microchips in Grateful Dead light shows.

Beyond this, feedback became a composite figure of life, self-organisation and shared listening in psychedelia's anti-disciplinary politics. The concept of the anti-disciplinary juxtaposes the anti-authoritarian and the interdisciplinary, following Michel Foucault's observation that May '68 questioned politics in ways that weren't themselves inscribed into political theory. As Julie Stephens observes, it is a useful way of conceptualising a new language of protest that refused rigid distinctions and on which familiar paradigms of the '60s are founded: New Left/counterculture, activists/hippies, political/apolitical. ‘In short,' writes Stephens, ‘what was rejected was the "discipline" of politics' - doctrine, ideology, party line.ⁱ

Image: Lou Read in a positive feedback loop, c.1975

To approach psychedelia through cyber-netics may bring back some of the strangeness and chaotic potential that the counterculture has lost along the way. The psychedelic is associated with an exuberant imagination in which the next moment, as with Bergson's durée, is incommensurable with the present one. Why, when we read its history, is psychedelia subject to the compulsive repetitions of a cultural memory that bleeds into the present and that we must push ahead of us? Why is it so difficult to leave Abbey Road and Fillmore West and meet, say, the The Psychedelic Aliens in Accra or Flower Travelling Band in Tokyo? Why are Huxley and Leary hailed like Columbus, when anybody can turn on? Why this monotonous insistence on origin when the psychedelic is - has the potential to become - a logic and an art of radical openness, reconstruction, and metamorphosis? There is a counter-intuitive inertia in the psychedelic, a reluctance to let go that tends to let imagination go to the dogs. 'Sex is boring', Foucault said. In the same way, drugs are boring.ⁱⁱ

It has long been a staple of the critical reception of the countercultural '60s that they form a continuation of Enlightenment paradigms. Today this genealogy can be revisited after the moment of a post-modern critique of the Enlightenment has passed, and the latter's values of tolerance, civic rights and political self-determination are now directly or indirectly cast into doubt by contemporary politics and economics. It is also worth noting that it is in relation to instrumental reason that a cybernetically inspired psychedelia is thus involved in a family argument with modernity's rationalist and scientifice episteme; something which opens it up to a post-humanist Enlight-enment. Psychedelia can perhaps be considered a deliberate continuation of the Enlightenment's incessant self-destruction, as Adorno and Horkheimer put it; a destruction undertaken by the counterculture in order to show how reason in the post-WWII era had failed historically, yet how it must be pursued in order to guarantee social freedoms. Of course, psychedelia cannot be called a cult of facts, and philosophy hardly played a role in it. But I would argue that an impulse to a radical Enlightenment can be detected here in the attempt to bring life back into reason; a reason that has not been formalized and instrumentalised, and whose goals therefore haven't become illusory. Thus the pleasure of audio feedback whine would be that of beating existing civilisation with its own weapons: rather than psychedelic - mind-manifesting - protest, a socio-delic critique that divorced technological and societal tendency.

Sound in the Paleo-Cybernetic Era

Apart from Luddite resistance against what Timothy Leary called a world full of stinking machines, Aquarian Arcadias were also conceived of with a view to embracing more sophisticated technology.ⁱⁱⁱ For Gene Youngblood, author of Expanded Cinema (1970), cybernetic technology had opened up an evolutionary horizon in relation to which humankind still only found itself in a ‘paleo-cybernetic' era. Youngblood observed that ‘Mysticism is upon us: it arrives simultaneously from science and psilocybin.'^iv However, cybernetic knowledge can also be considered as more reflexive mode through which the subculture can be seen to depart from mysticism and harmonic myth.

With feedback, media boundaries were transcended in the visual arts. Pioneering media artists such as Nam June Paik employed it as a distortion effect, and Hans Haacke's installations dealt with environmental feedback as participation, understood in terms of ‘agency conferred on your every action.'^v Haacke used feedback in his 1968 installation Photo-Electric Viewer-Controlled Coordinate System, where the beholder's movements would turn light bulbs on and off by interacting with a grid of infrared beams. Haacke described this as, ‘Environmental feedback. Agency conferred on your every action. You're participating. You're making the art.' Haacke deconstructed this cybernetic position in a later work called Norbert. All Systems Go, (1971), in which he attempted to teach a Mynah bird named Norbert, after the cybernetics' founding father, to parrot the phrase ‘All systems go', in what appeared to be a parody of Norbert Wiener's optimistic feedback-steered path of progress. As an unintended twist on Haacke's satire, Norbert refused to comply with his instructions.

Feedback, of course, is a signature effect in acid rock, defined by Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead simply as ‘what you listen to when you are high on acid.' It was also used as a visual effect in posters where form is made to mutate through its repetition. But it was a less of a dynamic effect in graphic design than in real-time deployments in electronic media where it achieved its full potential. Thus feedback noise was a marker of the counterculture, but also represented a dep-arture from the harmonic, spectacular and style-oriented forms of psychedelic rock and visual production. To the artist Woody Vasulka, the West Coast psychedelic poster exemplifies a visuality that ‘gives the trip a handle' through certain recognisable styles; or simply becomes a counter-cultural form of advertising. The San Francisco Diggers, an activist network at the time, similarly criticised the counterculture for producing ‘bags for the identity-hungry to climb into.'^vi

Anti-disciplinary feedback, on the other hand, resists identification and style because it breaks the mimetic mold. As we know from Jacques Attali, this is the nature of noise, its association with ‘the idea of the weapon, blasphemy, plague' and how it has been experienced as ‘destruction, disorder, dirt, pollution, and aggression against the code-structuring messages.'^vii But as Steve Goodman dryly notes, many of these avant-gardist formulations of noise as a weapon in the war of perception ‘fail time and time again to impress.'^viii Indeed, what is relevant here is noise in excess of itself as a perceived negativity.

Audio feedback is a loss of order, a turb-ulence that became a desired effect in acid rock, where musicians would amplify already amplified sound in order to produce distortions, or to ‘play' on or with the sound effect itself. It was typically used in controlled ways, to give the sound texture and spatial volume; that is, as a synaesthetic effect in which sound touches on space and tactility, nudging the whole system of the senses into play. To this end an arsenal of apparatuses was used which could manipulate electric sound, from fuzzboxes and flangers, to the Echogeräte that Krautrockers Guru Guru listed among their instruments. Jimi Hendrix, of course, excelled in overdriven sound, making frequent use of feedback as a colouring effect, as well as a way of building up an atonal climax at the end of gigs. To some, this qualifies him as a cybernetic musician, rather than a guitar god: he played from inside the machine.^ix The ‘pure' or autonomous feedback noise belonged in the context of live music. Thus the band Red Krayola began their concerts with half an hour of feedback, The Grateful Dead devoted a brief section of their live shows to a feedback-driven composition, and many bands - including the Velvet Underground and The 13th Floor Elevators - would finish their gigs with their instruments leaning against the amps, playing on their own after the band members had left.^x The instruments would ‘feedback forever, like they were alive', explains Lou Reed.^xi

Circuit-bending acid rock feedback became a kind of sonic meta-strategy. As a disaster of melody it fulfilled negative characterisations of rock'n roll as ‘just noise', as the proverbial parental complaint goes, producing an anarchic sense of freedom for those who stayed and listened. Of his feedback-only double album from 1975, the conceptual apotheosis of experiments started with Velvet Underground in the 1960s, Lou Reed said, ‘Once you hear Metal Machine Music it frees you up. It's been done - now you can do anything.'^xii A sonic Eden of electric force fields.

Other transgressions were also performed in this way. As a pure noise effect, feedback tended to subvert the individual band's particular sound. Even if the guitarist can attain some level of control of the feedback's frequency and amplitude (by ‘filtering' the feedback path with the strings, or manipulating it by shaking the instrument in front of the amplifier), the musician is reduced from being a prime mover to a listening agent in a soundscape in which intentionality and self-expression are dethroned. The feedback effect is, in this way, comparable to those dialectical visual art forms of the 1960s - Concrete Poetry and Destruction Art, Earth Art and Conceptualism - that were characterised by anonymity, randomness and processual automation.

The Organisation of Living Systems

Cybernetics operates with two definitions of feedback. The one describes the preservation of circulation in a system by aiming to maintain equilibrium through maximum adaptability. This is negative feedback as it works in the thermostat, for example, that functions through a non-linear (hence negative) causal relation. Positive feedback, on the other hand, is also typically conceived as non-linear, but it works against adaptability. To attain positive feedback, one quite simply removes the control functions that are otherwise located where the information loop would meet itself to control its dynamic behaviour. Manuel De Landa:

The turbulent dynamics behind an explosion are the clearest example of a system governed by positive feedback. In this case the loop is established between the explosive substance and its temperature. The velocity of an explosion is often determined by the intensity of its temperature (the hotter the faster), but because the explosion itself generates heat, the process is self-accelerating. Unlike the thermostat, where the arrangement helps to keep temperature under control, here positive feedback forces temperature to go out of control.^xiii

The principal characteristic of negative feedback in the thermostat is its homogenising effect; deviations are filtered and eliminated. This is unlike positive feedback that, as De Landa explains, ‘tends to increase heterogeneity, as small original differences are amplified by the loop into large discrepancies.'^xiv

Clearly audio feedback's explosive, increased heterogeneity is an example of positive feedback. But because of its self-generative properties it can also be described as a kind of organism. So beyond being noise, anti-disciplinary feedback is also autopoietic - meaning self-creating, self-producing. This is the term coined by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela in their work Autopoeiesis and Cognition (1973). Autopoietic organisation is here defined as ‘necessary and sufficient to characterise the organisation of living systems.'^xv Thus machinic and organismic definitions of life overlap in autopoiesis, as do the individual machine or organism and its larger ecology. Maturana and Varela consider cognition to be ‘effective action, an action that will enable a living being to continue its existence in a definite environment as it brings forth the world. Nothing more, nothing less.' Thus Maturana and Varela hold that learning is ecological, defined by proportionality and correspondence with a changing environment.^xvi By contrast, Norbert Wiener's idea about learning, which he connects directly to feedback phenomena, is internal to the system, characterised by the machine's ability to change its performance.^xvii In other words: the audio feedback, whether intentional or unintentional, is the sound of the amplifying system cognising or learning, and coming alive (or ‘learning about learning', to use W. Grey Walter's phrase). ^xviii

In his novel about Ken Kesey's LSD-activism, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe describes feedback as the production of a total environment, a nervous system that is not the property of the individual subject. Here Ken Kesey and his group of Merry Pranksters prepare their school bus for a stateside trip which took their acid tests on the road, ‘barrelling across America with the microphone picking it all up.'^xix

Sandy went to work on the wiring and rigged up a system with which they could broadcast from inside the bus, with tapes or over microphones, and it would blast outside over powerful speakers on top of the bus. There were also microphones outside that would pick up sounds along the road and broadcast them inside the bus. There was also a sound system inside the bus so you could broadcast to one another over the roar of the engine and the road. You could also broadcast over a tape mechanism so that you said something, then heard your own voice a second later in variable lag and could rap off of that if you wanted to. Or you could put on earphones and rap simultaneously off sounds from outside, coming in one ear, and sounds from inside, your own sounds, coming in the other ear. There was going to be no goddamn sound on that whole trip, outside the bus, inside the bus, or inside your own freaking larynx, that you couldn't tune in on and rap off of.^xx

The very movement of the Merry Prankster bus became an all encompassing, ever renewing, mobile loop of sound-events, synchronising everybody on and off the bus in the ‘Now Trip'. Their audio system would hook up several vibratory surfaces and structures: the inside and outside of the bus, the space between people, and the insides of their bodies, all of which would be compressed and stretched and fed back to the space they passed through. The result was phantasmagoric, understood ecologically or topo-graphically rather than as something spectral. For Gilles Deleuze, the phantasm is an effect that ‘transcends inside and outside, since its topo-logical property is to bring its internal and external sides into contact, in order for them to unfold onto a single side.'^xxi In such phantasmagorical sound, different sources and manifestations of sound unfold side by side, rubbing against each other in a dense materiality.^xxii

Questions of control and counter-conditioning are not far away in the Merry Pranksters sound ecology. William Burroughs conceived of a viral version of feedback that he called playback: his idea was to play incongruous, out-of-place tape recordings in public spaces in order to break mental lines of association laid down by mass media. He saw this version of feedback as a ‘biological weapon', a re-coding of psychological patterning from which a psycho-acoustic virus would emerge. But Burroughs' playback is again close to the avant-garde idea of noise as weapon, and it may be worthwhile approaching the ‘low-church psychedelic'of Kesey and the Pranksters with the sophistication of contemporary theory. Jean-Luc Nancy argues that in the sonorous register, sensing offers itself as an open structure that is ‘spaced and spacing' in the movement of an infinite referral that puts subjectivity into play. In his own words,

When one is listening, one is on the lookout for a subject, something [...] that identifies itself by resonating from self to self, in itself and for itself, hence outside of itself, at once the same and other than itself. One in the echo of the other, and this echo is like the very sound of its sense.^xxiii

Spaced-out sound that addresses itself by sending itself back to itself opens up the phenomenology of listening until individual and collective subjectivity is fluid.

To be listening is thus to enter into tension and to be on the lookout for a relation to self: not, it should be emphasised, a relationship to ‘me' (the supposedly given subject), or to the ‘self' of the other (...), but to a relationship in self, so to speak, as it forms a ‘self' or a ‘to itself' in general, and if something like that ever does reach the end of its formation.^xxiv

The feedback commune is truly a whatever community as it passes through space that is turned inside out.

Events-Effects in Aion

Audio feedback also generates unstable temporal effects. According to Wiener, feedback is the ability to adjust future conduct by past performance. We know that the cause-and-effect relation in negative feedback forms a closed loop in a circular causality, but what about the positive feedback? Here future conduct adjusts past performance as the feedback continuously re-generates the input signal. We can say with Deleuze that the audio feedback is the sound of the event in its own time, Aion, an ‘essentially unlimited past and future.'^xxv Aion is the time of ‘events-effects', and it ‘retreats and advances in two directions at once, being the perpetual object of a double question: what is going to happen? What has just happened?'^xxvi In a Deleuzian perspective, then, the audio feedback is not a loop but a ‘straight line and an empty form', a process of unfolding that has an ‘agonizing aspect'. The French word sens can mean either meaning or direction, and the audio feedback is hence not without direction and meaning, but rather producing a double direction, double sens; a simultaneity that exerts a contradictory, agonising pull on the listener and her temporal orientation.

Image: Lithograph by Sture Johannesson

The paradoxical nature of the effect is set to work by an initiator or effector that withdraws in order to let it unfold. The effect can be self-generating to the point that it comes alive and thereby it can become something as strange as an autonomous supplement: it is supplementary to its cause or its initiator, yet free, acting on its own. In this way effects flicker between essence and attribute, control and chance, purpose and redundance, nature and artificiality. This instability is in itself life affirming and life generating, a machinic vitalism that can be understood in terms of Norbert Wiener's notion of irritability as a fundamental life phenomenon: a lower limit of stimulation, friction and excitement, or other ways in which tolerance is pushed and the general equilibrium disturbed.^xxvii

We can speculate - anachronistically - that the psychedelic use of feedback testifies to the subculture's Wille zur Wirkung (or ‘will to effect'), to use the delightful concept of the philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder, writing in Kalligone (1800). In this work, Herder took Kant's aesthetics to task for spreading a ‘transcendental flu' among the young and he instead emphasises the role of the senses in the aesthetic experience with regard to a fusion of spirit and matter that strengthens existence. In this context, ‘will' should not be understood as muscular intentionality but as a potentially variable relation of forces, including external forces outside of the subject's control. With a concept that resonates with psychedelic art forms, Herder predicates sound on elasticity, which he takes to indicate the refinement of hearing, and the way that it is receptive to the subtlest of impressions. Through their sound, succession and rhythm (Klang, Gang und Rhythmus), tones are ‘vibrations [...] of our sensations'.^xxviii In sound (or Klang), not only the ear, but the entire inside of the moved body speaks out. This bodily vibration - based in the way all bodies are more or less elastic - calls ‘the voice of all moving bodies forth from within them [...] loudly or softly proclaiming the excited state of their powers to other harmonic beings'^xxix Through the ear's receptivity and through sound's bodily reverberation, an intensive or more deeply sensed truth can be experienced, in an immersion in outer reality. Herder connects hearing's elasticity to a primary truth in invisible and tactile worlds (with sculpture as hearing's privileged equivalent, rather than the deceit of painting's decoration of surface). Accordingly, true perception is like the soul touching in the dark, and hearing's capacity for sympathetic sensation is at its strongest when it is set in vibration by, and resonates with a voice from a similar being; so Herder has it that it is the human voice that touches the human being most deeply.^xxx The intention to put subjects, or beings, in sympathetic vibration with each other is the Wille zur Wirkung, the will to effect. In short, good vibes.

Herder's rejection of the mind-body distinction is symptomatic of the way sound escapes the virtual-material divide, and the properties it has for bringing forth new worlds. Thus the concept of feedback comprises transformative as well as stabilising functions. It is a concept that can rehearse stimulus and response in order to maintain a system's ability for recognising itself through already established codes or procedures, but it can also push the processing of signals in a system to the point where they may oscillate out of control and possibly end up destroying the system-or start creating new life. It is important to an understanding of psychedelic art and counterculture to recognise that it articulated a form of critique by appropriating a trope meant for system preservation. Of course it is unimaginable for anti-disciplinary feedback to have existed on its own, without being embedded in the melodic acid rock and the culture industry, but it prevails as a highly conceptualised and experimental ‘will to effect'. It is the story of how the electric circuit produced sound by itself, and hence began to learn and to generate sonic organisms and autonomous nervous systems - something that it wasn't supposed to do at all.

Lars Bang Larsen <larsbanglarsen AT yahoo.com> is an art historian, curator and writer. He recently curated A History of Irritated Material at Raven Row, London and is writing a P.h.D. on '60s psychedelic art and culture at the University of Copenhagen

Info

Signal: Noise was a two day event at the Showroom gallery, London, 13-14 January, http://www.theshowroom.org/research.html?id=161,363

Footnotes

iJulie Stephens, Anti-Disciplinary Protest. Sixties Radicalism and Postmodernism, Cambridge University Press 1998, p.23.

iiMichel Foucault, On the Genealogy of Ethics: An Overview of a Work in Progress, (1983), quoted from Paul Rabinow, Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954-1984. Ethics, vol. 1, Penguin, London 1997, p.253.

iiiGene Youngblood, Expanded Cinema, New York: Dutton & Co., 1970, pp.3-4. The counter-culture's fascination with cybernetics thus predates Leary's post-psychedelic writings on artificial intelligence in the 1980s. Inconsistent with his attacks against stinking machines, he exalts the turned-on human brain in his 1966 book Psychedelic Prayers After the Tao Te Ching as a ‘13-billion cell computer'.

ivYoungblood, op.cit., p.138.

vHans Haacke, ‘Photo-Electric Viewer-Controlled Coordinate System' (1968). Quoted from Luke Skrebowski: ‘All Systems Go: Recovering Hans Haacke's Systems Art', Grey Room No. 30, Massachusetts: MIT Press 2008.

viDiggers.org and Woody Vasulka, in conversation, Santa Fe June 2007 http://www.diggers.org

viiJacques Attali, Noise, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985, pp.343-344.

viiiSteve Goodman, Sonic Warfare: Sound, Affect and the Ecology of Fear, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2010, p.7.

ixBoth the artist Robert Horvitz and the film-maker Neville D'Almeida have confirmed this in private conversations.

x See for example Keven McAlester's You're Gonna Miss Me: A Film About Roky Erickson, Sobriquet Productions, 2007. The first use of feedback on a commercial recording is probably the phasing intro to The Beatles' ‘I Feel Fine' from 1964. The same year the composer Robert Ashley brought feedback effects to avant-garde prominence in his 20 minutes long composition The Wolfman Tape. This consisted of a high frequency ‘full room feedback': The sound equip-
ment would be tuned to a pitch where it would encompass the entire space and the listeners in it. A purely spatial feedback, Ashley says, ‘allows even the smallest sound at the microphone to take on the illusion of moving around the room, depending on frequency and other aspects of the microphone sound.' This is unlike the feedback in rock music that is ‘localised to the guitar amp and deafens only the guitar player.' http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/cutandsplice/wolfman.shtml#top

xi David Fricke, Metal Machine Music, liner notes for the Buddha Records CD re-issue (2000).

xii David Fricke, Metal Machine Music, ibid.

xiii Manuel de Landa, A Thousand Years of Non-Linear History, New York: Zone Books, 1997, p.68.

xiv Ibid.

xv Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living, Dordrecht and London: Reidel, 1980, p. 82.

xvi Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela, The Tree of Knowledge, Boston: Shambhala Publications, 1992 (1987), p.170.

xvii Wiener writes, ‘Feedback is a method of controlling a system by reinserting into it the results of its past performance. [...] if the information which proceeds backward from the performance is able to change the general method and pattern of performance, we have a process which may well be called learning. (Norbert Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings. P.15.)

xviii Chapter 6 of The Living Brain is called ‘Learning About Learning', pp.119-38.

xix Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, p.66. London: Black Swan 1989 (1968).

xx Ibid., p.80.

xxi Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, London: Continuum, 2004 (1969), p.242.

xxii For example ‘Feedback from Watergate to the Garden of Eden', in William S. Burrough's Electronic Revolution. Bonn Expanded Media Editions, 2001 (1970). Friedrich Kittler makes a similar point, asserting that if ‘control, or as engineers say, negative feedback, is the key to power in this century, then fighting that power requires positive feedback. Create endless feedback loops until VHF or stereo, tape deck or scrambler, the whole array of world war army equipment produces wild oscillaitons. Play to the powers that be their own melody.' Friedrich Kittler, Gramophone, Film, Typewriter. Stanford University Press 1999, p. 110.

xxii Jean-Luc Nancy, Listening, Fordham University Press, 2007 (2002), p.9. Nancy's italics.

xxiv Ibid., p. 12. Nancy's italics.

xxvDeleuze, op. cit., p.72.

xxvi Op. cit., p.73.

xxvii Norbet Wiener, Cybernetics: or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine (2nd edition). Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1965 (1948/1961), p.11.

xxviii J.G. Herder, Sämtliche Werke, 1877-1913, Vol. 22, p.326. Quoted from Friedrich Ostermann in, Die Idee des Schöpferischen In Herders Kalligone, Bern und München: Francke Verlag, 1968, p.56. My translations.

xxix Ibid., p.18.

xxx Ibid., p.19.

In the first of a blog series aiming to deepen and politicise understandings of the revolts across the Arab world, L.S. kicks off with an anatomisation of the distribution of power, wealth and resistance in the Libyan ‘rentier state'

After the awesome momentum and massification of the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, toppling their autocrats with surprising speed, the Libyan revolt stalled in the East following a key, hard won victory in Benghazi, the country's second city. Some towns in the West rose up, (notably Misurata, still in rebel hands), and protests developed in Tripoli, but these were swiftly crushed. Although the Gaddafi regime may eventually fall apart under the pressure of NATO bombings, for a while at least it seemed possible that he would be able to consolidate his hold on the West and that a partition of the country was a possible solution to the conflict. The following notes hope to use some of the insights of rentier state theory to elucidate some aspects of the Libyan revolt and its failure to spread, whilst glancing at other similar politico-economic formations in the region along the way.

Image: A Libyan stamp printed for the 13th anniversary of the First September Revolution, 1982

Famously, in a rentier economy the state doesn't stand above and mediate the web of relationships and transactions of a grounded domestic process of production and accumulation, but rather controls and distributes the revenue from one primary commodity sold on the world market - the key example of course being oil. There is no separation between political and economic power, and the state therefore 'embodies' economic wealth as well as pursuing its other functions such as ensuring internal and external security etc.

Rentier state theory describes how the state becomes relatively ‘autonomous' from society. With its control of the externally procured oil rent, it is free from the need to collect taxes for its revenues, and so free from the need to bargain with the various sectors of society over the collection of taxes, and from struggles over the appropriation of internally produced surpluses. According to the model, since the development of democracy is centrally involved with the growth of the state and its need to collect revenues from society (‘no taxation without representation'), there is no powerful political spur to develop representative institutions. Furthermore, to forestall any such spur, the state strives to depoliticise the population, which is generally compliant as long as it is the beneficiary of the state's largess. With regards to Libya, the formation in 1977 of the Jamahiriya - the stateless state in which citizens were to rule themselves without institutions or political parties, yet with all real economic power remaining in the hands of the governing elite - should be understood in this context, rather than simply as a kooky utopian political experiment dreamed up by an eccentric dictator.

Patrimonialism becomes the norm of business interaction and social advancement in rentier states. Individuals with political power have immediate, real economic power so that personal relationships of dependence hold sway and inequality within society is experienced in fractured, segmentary ways, based on the relative proximity of the vertical patronage networks to the centre of power. Wealth is passed down from the top via various relatively favoured channels. People tend to look for social advancement as individuals, as they attempt to build economically fruitful personal relationships, rather than as part of a group based on productive power or professional identity.

However, the state's dependency on external forces becomes clear when the oil price declines on the world market and the revenues needed to meet material expectations and ensure social peace dwindle. Some of the inherent vulnerabilities of rentier states then become apparent. The ‘flatness' of societies with a lack of effective political organisations make mediation more difficult, and Islamists have tended to fill the hole where politics should be, as happened in Libya in the early 1990s. Furthermore, the state may become coup prone as those less favoured in whatever new patrimonial arrangements now hold sway, see the source of both political power and material wealth as one central, and capturable, apex. A new emphasis on instability and state violence has emerged in the rentier state literature as the oil states experienced increasing unrest from the1980s onwards. Saudi Arabia faced a violent anti-royalist, Islamist threat and also the formation of broad though loose civil society alliances demanding substantial reform. Iraq, meanwhile, with its relatively large and heterogeneous population and more diversified economy, has seen high levels of political violence and state repression throughout its modern history, and has never fitted the classic rentier model, whose central theoretical concern was to explain the possibility of consent and social calm in the absence of political rights.

Image: Another stamp glorifying the Great Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya

The latent instability of the rentier state means that, by reinforcing the effects of patrimonial 'corruption' based on personal relationships, it will also tend to strategically disinvest, underdevelop, forcibly control and repress certain sectors of society, certain institutions and certain population centres, which could become power bases for the capture of the state and the state rent. The marginalisation of the Shia in the oil rich, eastern Hasa region of Saudi Arabia would be an example here. The area's neglect is due precisely to its economic importance and the Shia's potential power in becoming active economic agents; of disturbing the top-down distributive nature of the economy centred around the royal family. With regards to Libya, the relative neglect of Benghazi - the heart of the revolt and the historical ‘capital' of the eastern province of Cyrenaica - perhaps has similar causes. Much of the oil wealth lies in its interior to the South and key refineries and terminals are situated in nearby towns.

The deliberate weakening of the Libyan army is another example. As a key institution with potential national, universalising appeal, and as a threat to Gaddafi (as it has proved to be in various coup attempts) it has been progressively impoverished and undermined, such that Libyans now regarded it as little more than a social club. All real military capacity is concentrated in elite units close to the centre of power such as the brigade run by Gaddafi's son Khamis. This also explains why the defecting army in Benghazi hasn't become a real fighting force for the rebel side.

Following this line of thinking, one could also suggest that in some ways the authoritarian, rentier state builds its whole infrastructure of control upon its fundamental vulnerability. The army is needed to discipline or socialise the population, but that begets the need for elite units to watch over the regular army. If these get too powerful then another more dependably loyal elite unit is needed as a counterweight to the first. Add on top of that the secret police, and other layers of secret police to watch the first shadow state etc., (cf. Iraq before the 2003 invasion with its huge army, powerful Republican Guards, then Special Republican Guards, then Fedayeen Guards, each getting closer to the 'palace', plus its panoply of competing secret police agencies). At the apex is the set of tight relationships around the leader based on blood ties and/or personal obligation, i.e. the close 'courtly' bonds that hold the centre against the potentially unstable, segmented society. At the same time, all this is a way of spending money and creating employment in the narrow, or narrowing, rentier economy. In Libya, a confusing variety of ineffectual popular legislative and consultative bodies, created by the Jamahiriya to destroy the old professional institutions and political parties, are watched over by the Revolutionary Councils and its thuggish regime stalwarts, whilst Gaddafi plays divide-and-rule between various elite factions, his powerful sons and the various tribal structures, which have been reinforced by the regime in the bad times.

Image: A Libyan army tank manned by soldiers opposed to Gaddafi is surrounded by protesters in the city of Zawiy, 4 March 2011

In the straitened circumstances of the oil price slump of the 1980s, worsened by the US-imposed sanctions regime, the Libyan state faced an increase of popular dissatisfaction as subsidies and state employment were cut, inflation on prices of basic goods increased dramatically and various well placed businessmen, regime insiders and Gaddafi family members were able to exploit new opportunities for legitimate business activities following partial economic liberalisation, as well as for corruption and profiteering. Large sections of the Libyan population found themselves increasingly marginalised and impoverished. In response, some amongst the youth sought opportunities in petty, semi-illicit trading activities opened up by piecemeal reform, thus finding themselves in conflict with state rackets at customs and elsewhere, run by state employees resentful of their declining living standards. Infrastructure, schools and hospitals, whilst still free, suffered from neglect, and a severe housing shortage became a major grievance. Following the slump and with a decline in productivity in the oil sector due to sanctions, and spurred by the chastening example of regime change in Iraq, the Libyan elite sought to ‘come in from the cold' by dumping its WMD programme, resolving compensation for the victims of its terrorist attacks, and by presenting itself to the West as an ally in the ‘war on terror'. Thus the way was opened for rehabilitation and renewed investment in its oil fields. The reformists in the regime, led by Gaddafi's powerful son Saif Al-Islam, have also, following the lead of the Gulf kingdoms, worked to expand Libya's investments abroad, financialising the rent and developing their own business interests, thus leaving less for distributive purposes domestically.

However, as the oil state retrenches, it aims to consolidate the patronage networks closer to the centre of power as others wither. Hence perhaps the lack of widespread revolt in Tripoli, the key centre of power, and its large metropolitan area, since enough Tripolitanians may be suspicious of a new Libya with the centre of patronage and power now in oil rich Benghazi, with its potential leadership obviously keen to make concessions to the NATO powers' oil interests in exchange for military support. At the same time, the high level of regime violence is perhaps testament to the narrowness of the state, with no institution being able to step into the fray to build a new bourgeois order, as the army did in Tunisia and Egypt. Therefore the sense for the ruling group of being involved in a life-and-death struggle, expressed in Gaddafi's seemingly crazed, apocalyptic rants. It is within this uneven process of restructuring - the denuded Jamahiriya in the reformed, post-sanctions era - that the Libyan revolt exploded and found its difficulties.

The feminist film archive housed and animated by the collective Cinenova poses many perplexing questions about how the gender politics and aesthetics of the recent past relate to our present moment. Mira Mattar went to meet two of the collective’s members – Emma Hedditch and Marina Vishmidt – during Cinenova's recent show Reproductive Labour at The Showroom gallery

She speaks (as a woman) about everything, although they wish her to speak only about women's things. They like her to speak about everything only if she does not speak ‘as a woman', only if she will agree in advance to play the artist's role as neutral (neuter) observer. She does not want to speak (as a woman) about anything, although they want her to. There is nothing she can speak of ‘as a woman'. As a woman she cannot speak.

- Susan Hiller, Ten Months (Six), 1977-79

Cinenova, a not-for-profit, volunteer run organisation which distributes and preserves feminist films and films made by women, set up camp at The Showroom gallery for a six week stint earlier this year. During the show - which included screenings selected by guest curators, talks and reading groups - Cinenova's rich and often rare library of films was available for viewing by the public. I talked to Emma Hedditch and Marina Vishmidt during the exhibition about Cinenova's history, its future, and its current incarnation as Reproductive Labour.

Mira Mattar: Cinenova was formed in the early '90s through a merger between Circles and Cinema of Women; can you tell me how that happened?

Emma Hedditch: Well, the BFI (who store many of our 16 mm and 35mm films) used to fund both organisations, but in the late '80s/early '90s the funding was cut by 50 percent and they were forced to merge, and formalised as Cinenova which emerged in the early '90s. It does depend on who you talk to, there's evidence that there was a campaign against the merger from both organisations.

Image:  A selection of paper materials on display at Cinenova's show Reproductive Labour at The Showroom, photograph courtesy of Kaisa Lassinaro

MM: Why is that? Can you say more about the differences between the two organisations and where Cinenova stands in relation to those histories?

EH: Cinema of Women focused more on documentary and educational films with a very broad range of content and Circles had more artists' and experimental films many of which came out of the London Film-makers' Co-op (1966 - 1997), which tried to combine screenings, writing and performance in addition to distribution.

MM: Can you tell me a bit more about the Co-op?

EH: It started in the late '60s and was originally based near Regent's Park, then it moved to Camden and existed there until the late '90s. Eventually it became Lux - the historic archive that Lux has is a combination of the London Film-makers' Co-op and London Video Art. The Co-op was a social space, both a workshop and an educational space but relatively autonomous from institutions such as the BFI or Arts Council. A lot of people who were involved in Circles were artists interested in structuralist/formal film-making. The London Film-makers' Co-op had facilities where you could work with the physical material of the film, there were optical printing and processing facilities. People could go there and use the equipment and make work which they could then screen and distribute through the organisation. Cinenova's distribution works in much the same way as Lux's distribution: a film-maker leaves their material with us, it's effectively on loan, then we're responsible for it, if an organisation or individual wants to screen something they can do so through us. Usually we come to an agreement with the artists, we become a central point where programmers can find out about a film or video. Unfortunately a large amount of the films and videos are never seen, but the whole collection is here and it's an extraordinary situation to be able to see them. Under normal circumstances you have to pay a fee to be able to screen a work, which is an obstacle to many people, but we also rely on these fees to sustain the organisation.

MM: I guess that's the point of the show...

EH: Exactly. We want to ask how it can be a sustainable practice not just in financial terms and not one based on just a few works. It also creates a culture around those film- and video-makers and at different times the organisation has operated with more of a social function, and as a support network. It's not about individual films, it's more about building a language and as they're all made by women, some of the work is much more explicitly feminist.

MM: Is there a criteria for the type of films you take on in terms of where you situate yourselves within feminism?

EH: It's obvious to me that it's not just any women's films, but because we haven't acquired any new films since we've been working with the organisation (acquisition stops at 2000 when most of us started to get involved) we need to re-think what kind of films we want when we start re-acquiring. We're asking ourselves how we understand the terms ‘women' or ‘feminist'. The material we have already is a historical object in a way. It's about this organisation, about the idea of it being women only. But within that are always misconceptions, for example several film-makers have changed their gender since they made the films, there are also films made in collaboration with male film-makers. The term ‘women's films' was pertinent in a certain moment but perhaps it's changed.

Within this working group we're inclined to a feminist/queer perspective. We're interested in what the historical position of women is and the queer/feminist discussion surrounding it. As for selection, in the past a small committee would meet every so often and watch films and discuss what might be appropriate to distribute, then of course there was the question of whether the artist wanted to be distributed by Cinenova. We used to have a lot more speculative submissions but more films are likely to have been acquired from film festivals - if there was something we thought people would like or was really important then the decision was made based on that. There were a lot of factors to consider, mainly the question of whether we could really promote it.

MM: Do you think the fact that Cinenova is a women-only organisation may put some women off? Do you find it hard to defend that position sometimes?

EH: I think women-only spaces make explicit what already exists in terms of a sense of exclusion within certain practices. In Cinenova we're trying to work with race and class issues and the politics of labour; things that aren't just women's issues. There are many film and video works included in Cinenova that have been excluded in other contexts, which is why we consider it an important collection.

MM: I noticed that you chose women and men to select films for the programme. Can you tell me a bit about how you came to that decision?

Marina Vishmidt: I think it was a good idea to invite people to make selections to the programme, it provided a tangible way in. We had a meeting yesterday with a group of feminist film-makers and film academics who have been meeting as a discussion/action group, and they had some suggestions for the Cinenova site to enhance and expand these ways into the collection, which would be great if we had the resources or time to put into practice, like having a blog with commissioned essays on selected films from the collection. This could be one way of sharing material and drawing attention to the collection from a new public.

MM: How does the working group work and are there any people who have been part of either Cinema of Women or Circles that are now part of Cinenova? If so, what's their perspective on the changing nature of the project?

EH: We came together at different times. At the moment two of us are working on this four or five days a week, but usually it's one person one day a week, it should be more if we want to make it a more functioning organisation. The more work you do, the more you generate. One of our board members, Elaine Burrows, was involved in Circles, she's the thread. Lis Rhodes, Jo Davis, Felicity Sparrow and Annabel Nicolson are responsible for starting Circles and we met with Felicity very early on to discuss this exhibition. Felicity has been very supportive of the exhibition as have many other film- and video-makers in the collection.

Image: Installation shot of Reproductive Labour, The Showroom Gallery 2011

MM: What was the thinking behind this exhibition aside from the making available of the collection?

EH: Emily [Pethick], as the director of The Showroom and a member of Cinenova's working group, suggested the collaboration and we started to talk about what that would mean for us. In terms of the distribution itself, we have things we have to maintain and the exhibition has activated more work. So we are asking ourselves how are we going to deal with this? How can we cope with the actual labour?

MV: In making it public on a certain level and creating other dynamics of communication, and of course in calling the exhibition Reproductive Labour, we're gesturing towards some of the themes and politics within the films and some of the histories that are accessible through those films and documentaries. Also, as Emma said, it's about the activity of thinking how to proceed as an organisation and thinking about this in public. So, in this sense any kind of mediation of work is its own work and also the work of the working group.

MM: Do you think you're going to want to do more projects like this (public projects)?

EH: I think this has been quite a big scale venture, it's shown us lots of things, like what it means to do this kind of work and to try and be as open as possible. It has been really surprising in terms of how much it's generated in the way of discussions, and how many people have been coming and our interactions with them. It's been interesting in that way, to try and harness some of that energy or interest - we need to figure out how that translates into how we and the audience work with this material and not just consume it?

MM: How do you think you will harness that energy in terms of potential ideas for future projects?

MV: There's different levels even to that kind of question. For instance how will Cinenova continue into the future? On what basis will it operate? And we have to consider physical, practical and structural questions. Also having this opening into people's interests, research and practices has generated lots of things - interviews, presentations to students, and just people wanting to find out. That can take lots of different forms and temporalities.

The last ten years or more of Cinenova's existence as an organisation and its various activities have not been funded so while the idea of entering into collaborations with other organisations wasn't something we'd originally conceived of, it may help in some practical senses but might also have potential impacts on Cinenova's autonomy. We'll see what happens. An advantage to staying here at The Showroom [which is a possibility] is that people have been coming here so think of Cinenova as based here, and we've started a lot of projects with women's groups in the area. But there are a number of practical and institutional issues militating against that option.

MM: Can you tell me more about some of the work that has been produced as a result of your being here? Was it always on the cards?

EH: We've worked with a local organisation, the Marylebone Women's Refuge; they worked with Louise Shelley (from The Showroom) to select some appropriate, relevant materials to screen for their art and culture night. The exhibition has acted as a meeting and social space, we've met a lot of people and the films act as a starting point for discussion.

MV: Yesterday we were discussing the idea of a publication about Cinenova with a group of female academics. Not only to redress the gap in the UK's history of experimental cinema and the moving image - which is mostly dedicated to white men and is perhaps unintentionally patriarchially inflected (which is a huge omission in education) - but also to think about strategies of history writing so they're not just slotting ‘a piece' of history in, but rather trying to articulate the writing of history through making work. They've also been meeting and discussing the ideas stemming from the initial provocation.

MM: The idea of Cinenova functioning in part as a social space seems really pertinent. What would you want it to do?

MV: I guess it would depend on how we function as a collaborative organisation, what our borders are, how this ‘we' is constituted on an everyday basis and what kind of time and activity our relationship to Cinenova can contribute.

EH: We would want it to be a place where people could work, meet, organise events - something with enough of a structure for people to connect and communicate.

MM: What was your experience of the Shulamith Firestone day? [On 12 March Cinenova held a group reading of Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex. What was read was also simultaneously transcribed. Interjections and discussions were also transcribed to create a live record of the attempted reading of the text (we got to the end of chapter one...). Simultaneously, another member of the group was laboriously copying the text by hand from the book itself (she didn't get much further). This was followed by a screening of Shulie - a shot by shot re-make of a little known student film about Firestone from 1967. Marina read, transcribed and copied at various points].

MV: It felt very different when copying it from the book than it did when transcribing while people read. Either way it wasn't so much about really paying attention to the text of the book, I was writing mechanically and listening to the words. It became a direct activation. I had a lot of thoughts which were mostly triggered by the film Shulie. The fact that the actress playing her was wearing a very obvious wig really stuck with me. Shulamith Firestone came from a very Orthodox Jewish background so there's an interesting connection between the assumption of gender - or the assumption as in ‘costume' of gender - and then how she denaturalised gender. The wig acted as a gesture of that in a way.

MM: It seems like religious identity is a possible thread in Cinenova's history. Do you see any other prevalent topics? And if so what is their relation to global feminism?

MV: We do have a lot of films about Jewish and Middle Eastern identities. We are documenting certain struggles, thinking about generations of feminism also in relation to labour. Also there's a strong thread of problematising the researcher. Some of the more documentary, or docu-fictional films in the collection, use reflexivity and performance to problematise the relationship of researcher and object of research, and relate that to the production of subjectivity in feminism, but also the splits occasioned by the multiple roles women have to occupy in everyday life. Bred and Born is a good example of this kind of work.

EH: The screening on Saturday was interesting, both speakers - Karolin Meunier and Cecilia Wendt - were presenting things with a strong emphasis on technology and the body, and the production of subjectivity through the use of a camera, the use of camera as self-declaration. A lot of the work functions more as a document of a particular moment of an ambition - like multiculturalism, or the UN Decade of Women (1976 - 1985) - there are a lot of films from around that time that took an internationalist approach to women's issues.

MM: How do you tread the line between personal and political? Do you see a difference? Do you have very personal films in the collection and are they necessarily political?

MV: Films were probably placed with us because they are both personal and political. A lot of the films deal with issues of identity and self-representation. They were probably submitted to Cinenova because there was a political intention behind them, even if they seem very personal.

EH: Some people would say all decisions and choices are political. I would say the films that seem for example at first very much about style from the late '80s early '90s - even the way I'm saying it dismisses it in a way - but at the time there was a reason; they were being made during the Thatcher era when sexuality and pleasure were a very difficult subject, sexual expression was almost a luxury because of laws like Section 28. There was a moment when there were a lot of films that felt very personal in a way, but also used a conventional narrative structure about heartbreak or romance. Lots of films documented those experiences and struggles and there is quite a big section of intensely lesbian romance films. It was interesting as a moment when that kind of expression was first able to happen.

Coming back to the idea of reproduction, a lot of film-makers are influenced by each other and working together. That's the case in many of these more personal films. You can't view them as just names, many of the women were in relationships together. A lot of films from that time feel slightly embarrassing, posed even, but taken within the moment of history in which they were made, they make sense. They don't look like political films, they're not films as protest, but they're still about certain choices people had to make about content, production values and where the work is shown.

Ten years ago there weren't many museums that showed films in exhibition spaces, people were showing work in small cinema spaces or dedicated single screen spaces. It is interesting to see what communities those films were shown in. In politically very conservative times, an affirmation of identity was important.

MV: It's also very important to take into account where these images circulate, as Emma said, in what aesthetic or political contexts. It is quite interesting that these films seem glamorous or frivolous, and these differences really need to be historicised both in terms of production and distribution. Those films were also quite nostalgic so it's always fascinating for new generations. But I guess what's so interesting about this collection of films is that they're always acting at the same time as documents, as visual mediations of much broader or systemic forces as well as modes of self-fashioning that can seem romantic or arcane to us now, if no less fascinating.

MM: Yes, particularly given that there are so many different types of film in the collection. The juxtaposition of art films, video art, documentaries and educational films is really interesting.

EH: It creates a question for Cinenova structurally; how can we present this work in an art space? Even if people consider themselves artists or writers or curators, nobody has taken specific roles; or rather there have been no particular struggles for these roles. But perhaps we've held back from our inclinations.

Image: Cinenova's animated GIF file from The Showroom website, http://www.theshowroom.org/programme.html?id=46

MM: Do you think that smoothness of operation is related to the fact that the working group is only women?

EH: Maybe, but more than that we were aware of those issues early on in the project and didn't want to bury them, so we addressed them. Lots of discussions were about how to continue to be engaged and what was interesting to us, and what could each person do. I'm not sure if that's because we're women only or because we're honest about our own situations and material conditions.

MV: But in a larger more abstract sense that's an interesting point also because, again going back to the idea of reproductive labour and the questions contained in that, what is women's work, whether we're talking about the material in a film and video collection, or the maintenance, selection, mediation, administration, representation, etc. activities performed on its behalf, but also as part of a thinking about how to organise and de-individuate as a group of people involved in this process, bounded by practical and temporal constraints, what kinds of work are involved in ‘reproducing' such a mutable ‘institution'? You could say it's Cinenova, or feminism in general, in some respects, and political projects mediated in the art field. The idea of women's work in the collection creates a problem around the question of roles and gender. How does the fact that it's only women affect the work and what we do together?

EH: That is interesting because we started the discussions with those questions. Maybe at certain points you lose attention and those questions get lost. It's been a while since we talked about it.

MV: Economic conditions entered very much into our thinking of how we presented ourselves as a working group and how we relate to each other in the process. We didn't want to assume a purely negative identity by taking on a curatorial group identity - we wanted to produce something else, not just give, not to stage or perform our curatorial or political subjectivity.

Emma Hedditch is a London-based artist

Marina Vishmidt is a London-based writer currently conducting PhD research at Queen Mary, University of London on ‘Speculation as a Mode of Production in Art and Capital'. She is co-editor of Uncorporate Identity (2010) with Metahaven, and Media Mutandis: Art, Technologies and Politics (NODE. London, 2006). She is a frequent contributor to Mute, Afterall, and Texte zur Kunst. She also takes part in the collective projects Unemployed Cinema, Cinenova and Signal:Noise

Mira Mattar <miramattar AT gmail.com> <twitter.com/miramattar> is a freelance writer and contributing editor to Mute and 3:AM. She lives in South London. She blogs at http://hermouth.blogspot.com/

Info

Cinenova's show Reproductive Labour was at The Showroom from 9 February - 26 March 2011

View Cinenova's archive listing at http://www.cinenova.org.uk

Afterall's coverage of Cinenova [http://www.afterall.org/online/ cinenova/ ] features eight exclusive and rarely-seen video clips released from their  archives, including works by Pratibha Parmar, Lizzie Borden and Joanna Davis among others. The piece also features an introductory text and individual commentaries for each video clip by curator, writer and artist George Clark

This is a regular blog with the latest developments from the popular assemblies, the streets, neighbourhoods and workplaces.

There was a virtual blackout in international media about the escalation of popular resistance in Greece since May 25th. As soon as violent clashes started taking place in demonstrations started on the 15th June general strike, the silence was lifted, to cover them somewhat inaccurately. In Athens and numerous other cities and towns, too many to mention, there have been square occupations and daily demonstrations of up to hundreds of thousands of people. These were inspired by the square occupations in Spain, but have taken a different direction, one that favours direct democracy against parliamentary democracy and representation.

The focal point is the people's assembly at Syntagma square in Athens - the Parliament square with all its political significance - where decisions are taken about forms of struggle and demands, and ideas and practice are developed for alternative organising and politics. Thousands gather to discuss and deal with the most urgent problem - extreme austerity, the debt, and now the impending sell-out of all the assets of the Greek state imposed by the 'troika' - the IMF, the European Commission, and the European Central Bank. Discussions on the economy and possible solutions frequently take place. The possibilities considered are stopping interest payments; declaring the debt unpayable; the establishment of an audit team to examine the legitimacy of loan agreements; exiting the eurozone; completely reorganising the economy around needs, and other ideas. The other issue discussed is Greece's loss of sovereignty under the terms of the bailout signed with the troika (without it even being ratified in parliament) which contains terms that guarantee the primacy of the rights of lenders, violating several articles of the Greek Constitution. Nationalism anf the far right is a constant troubling element within all this but the extent of its influence is unclear. It certainly doesn't dominate the assemblies, but it is still there... And of course there are various political groups within the assemblies attempting to pass their own line...

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Saturday, 30 July 2011

Today at 4am in the morning the square was evacuated by riot police together with municipal security. The public prosecutor came and stated that the occupation of the square was an offence and asked the occupiers to leave peacefully. Riot police and security then wrecked anything that was not voluntarily removed. They were particularly eager to take down banners, damage tents and the medical centre and they arrested eight people who will be in court on Monday. Here are some videos.

There was a warning by the mayor in the previous days that this would happen and there were allegations that drugs were being distributed in the square.

The Friday assembly discussed this issue but it was largely consumed by infighting between certain speakers, including the moderator, who wanted to make sure whoever distributes (hard) drugs is evicted. There was also a proposal to remove the tents prior to any riot police attack. The tent residents reacted very intensely to that, so the proposal was withdrawn and a tent residents group established which had a meeting late at night to discuss planning the way in which the tents were laid out in the square. They also agreed to stay put. These discussions however were missing the point as a suprise attack was imminent and there were not enough people there to defend the square by now.

At 6pm a realtively small number of people gathered at the square to protest while riot police were encircling the square to prevent them from going out into the street.

The assembly that started at 9pm was the biggest since those of the few days after 28-29 June. This gave a positive feeling and there are now discussions, not of setting up tents again, but of being mobile, continuing to hold daily assemblies and organising actions through August. There were also debates about things that were not discussed in a while, such as (good old) violence and the role of people who belong to political parties within the assemblies. They decided to hold a protest march at the courts on Monday in support of those arrested and against the evacuation. It was also decided to occupy a nearby public building in order to store equipment, and to organise to prevent a reposession at Exarchia in 19 days' time.

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Sunday, 24 July 2011

I may have not posted updates here in a while but this does not mean that the Syntagma occupation is over, neither is the one in Thessaloniki. The groups and assemblies are still continuing discussions, although with fewer people. Assemblies still take place every evening and there are several ideas on how to regroup. The feeling in the square was very positive for me at least, despite some concern about the low numbers, and the only way I see the occupation ending is by force.

It is very clear now that the politics coming out of the square up until recently was strongly influenced by 'incognito' Radical Left Coalition (SYRIZA) groups who tried to guide the political line from the beginning by proposing new thematic assemblies which they populated with their people. For more details on this see the really good report by TPTG, who have been active in the assemblies since the beginning:

Preliminary Notes Towards an Account of the “Movement of Popular Assemblies”

Now, however, most of the SYRIZA people have left the square and the dominant politics is often more to the left, but there are still leftist 'panels of experts' being invited, so a degree of influence still remains. The assembly audience tends to get excited whenever someone speaks about class, the role of capital and the state, of popular power, of the role of political parties of the right and the left in serving the interests of the bourgeoisie etc. The discussions on organising non-payment campaigns and other self-organised practices from below have been continuing and the group on 'resistance to the Midterm' is organising actions to disrupt the sale of assets. There have also been discussions on resisting the new education bill that is pushing through the Bologna agreement regulations and abolishes the university asylum.

There are a lot of people willing to organise resistance over the summer, although it is really hard because there is a wider social expectation that there are no protests in late summer, so it is hard to mobilise. The artists' group have proposed a caravan that would tour through the biggest towns to promote the message and organise events, but this will depend on gathering funds. All in all, taxi drivers have been the only ones able to organise a long-term strike and well attended demonstrations through Athens (in taxis honking their horns) in the past week, protesting the opening of their profession.

Another proposal that has been made, which I personally felt is a little out of time, was to organise a day of direct democracy to draft our own constitution on the 3rd September, the anniversary of when the first constitution of Greece was established. There were some objections to this idea - that the constitution would have to be something that emerges from our struggle, if and when we are able to establish and institute some sort of alternative form of power to the current state, that we are not petitioning that the current parliament implements what we are proposing. There was agreement on that, but those promoting the idea insisted that our 'constitution' would be needed to express out basic political principles so that we know what we are fighting for.

My feeling is that over the summer there will be low level resistance and regrouping taking place, and from September student resistance to the education bill is likely to spark a new round of protests and trouble around Greece. In many regions residents could organise resistance to asset sell-offs, and there will probably be new strike actions.

As regards the new 'deal' for Greece decided by the EU Summit, this does not seem to have been discussed very much or to make any difference to the movement. This is seen merely as a deferral of debt, but it makes no difference to all the impoverishing government measures that have already been voted in and are starting to be implemented.

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Saturday, 9 July 2011

The Mayor of Athens yesterday stated that he intends to remove the 'slums' from Syntagma square. At the moment policing in the square is still low key...

On Friday the movement's self-analysis ended. The main self-criticisms mentioned were that the mobilisation on the 28-29th was not as massive as it should have been, which partly means that the government has been successful in convincing the public that the Midterm/bailout is the only way possible, that there is no realistic alternative worth fighting for. It is has also been a problem that the assembly made many decisions that it was then unable to put into practice. The issue that concerns the assembly the most now is how to keep the fight going over the summer. Summer and particularly August is a difficult period, as that is the time most people go on holiday. The numbers have already dwindled in the past week, but this is as much to do with having specific targets over this period as with the holiday season. In terms of actions, apart from those already mentioned on previous days, there has been a proposal for organising a large mobilisation on 3rd September.

On Saturday, delegates from assemblies around the country and Athens neighbourhoods gathered in Syntagma for a general nationwide assembly. They were invited to describe their activities so far, the positions they have developed, and an assesment of the past month. Delegates from 34 assemblies spoke. Most assemblies were in the same tune as Athens. Their actions involved occupations, demonstrations (mostly against local politicians), protests about local privatisations and private contracts for public services, anti-fascist campaigns, film screenings, support for workers' struggles. Many have also decided - and some undertaken - to organise mutual support among those affected by the crisis, those unemployed, evicted, destitute, unable to get healthcare etc. This is associated with an initiative that began back in February, 'Nobody Is Alone In The Crisis'. I should also note that such activities had already begun in several pre-existing assemblies dating back to December 2008. The speaker from Lamia presented a particularly thoughtful self-assessment that pointed out the need to inform and attract a wider public, the need to be realistic about the movement's ambitions, and to focus on daily achievable actions, instead of aiming for the ultimate overturn of the system in a matter of weeks, in a haphazard fashion. He pointed out that the movement should have made it clearer to the public that the mid-term programme was not the main aim of this movement, but only a battle, that this is going to be a long fight.

Sunday is the second day of discussions for the next steps of the movement around the country, and I will be in Athens for that.

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Tuesday, 5 July 2011

The atmosphere in Syntagma is not all that calm yet. Teargas and stun renades were thrown on Sunday to rescue a 'secret agent' who had been uncovered and was being assaulted by people in the square. Small scale confrontations between demonstrators and police have also taken place. On Monday night a firebomb was thrown at a riot squad protecting the headquarters of the governing party, PASOK. Apparently Greek Police officials have had a meeting on toning down the situation, and decided to relax policing on the square.

In the past couple of days there have been demonstrations against police repression, as well as outside the courts in support of those arrested. The assemblies seem a little slow in their reactions, however, to my eyes at least, considering that right now the government is aiming to arrange sell-offs and pass new austerity bills over the summer. The first is the education bill, which transforms Higher Education almost in line with the British model (3-year programmes, quality control, flexibilisation of academics, but without the fees so far), recommending the 'exploitation of the HE Institutions' assets', while abolishing the university asylum which has plays an important role in social struggles and was won through the students' rebellion against the collonels' regime. The government has also pledged to the troika that it will submit to parliament a second 'implementation law' for the midterm, which contains details about reduced public sector salaries, public sector layoffs, and reductions in social security and pensions. Up to mid-August, 7000 public sector workers risk being made redundant, as 11 public companies will be closed down or merged. In the next couple of days the full list of 350 lots of real estate for sale will be announced, with the sale to be managed by impartial and dependable organisations such as the National Bank of Greece, Alpha Bank, Eurobank, Investment Bank, Emporiki Bank and others.

In response to this, I have to say I get a little impatiend with speakers at Syntagma who talk about how the assembly needs to 'clarify its principles on the kind of society it wants', to 'clarify its position on violence', to 'make a plan on how to institute direct democracy', etc. Some people even talked about organising all-night parties and tours to the islands. I am not against these things in principle but they are far from a priority!

Fortunately there have also been some proposals for taking action as well, the most potentially effective of which I consider the organised non-payment of tax, bills and debts. Information campaigns have also begun that will send the message that the government's measures are not the only solution. Others are proposing networks of solidarity in neighbourhoods similar to the Argentinian model, as well as organising with students to resist the education bill. A group has been created for reappropriating public space, especially unused space, to turn it into social spaces, children's playgrounds, or use it for cultivation. The actions group is also working on organising actions and 'committees' against reposessions.

An uplifting statement was that by an immigrant on Sunday, which was greeted with cheers and slogans of solidarity: "On the 48hr strike demonstrations, we also saw, beyond the teargas, how fascists were protected by police who rescued them from an angry mob and took them into the Parliament grounds. And today and yesterday these guys burnt the mosques in Evelpidon St. They are trying to divide us between Greeks and foreigners, to isolate us in our struggles, because migrants and refugees were present on 28-29, we fought together with Greeks and we will continue to be here. Syntagma square should take a clear position on this, participate in antifascist organisations, organise antifascist events as has already been done, and I support the respective discussion on Wednesday. Because a common enemy requires common action."

From Tuesday onwards the assembly is involved with evaluating its work in the past month, so there are enough sobering remarks as well as cries of victory…

And something that had escaped my attention. In the town of Trikala protesters intervened on a local TV channel on June 30, as the PASOK MP Soula Merentiti was being interviewed. Here's a video.

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Saturday, 2 July 2011

Syntagma is moving towards becoming a centre for wider struggle, not simply targeting the mid term programme, but about wider resistence and self-institution. There is a wider desire to discuss actions and make connections with workers and students affected by the mid-term measures and with similar movements around europe. To organise actions that will have an impact and hit the system where it hurts. However, so far, proposals so far focus less directly on the everyday than such a desire would suggest.

What has been decided so far :

- Continue practically resisting the measures of the mid-term programme, to stop their implementation.
- Continue campaigning for and organising a long-term general strike. Work to help increase participation.
- The team that focused on the mid-term will continue to work as a group of action/overturn of the mid-term so as to address and fight against the implementation of the measures.
- Creating an international day of action for blockading stockmarkets (unclear if this involves a physical blockade, nonpayment of banks or withrawing money...)
- Organising an action group that will inform people in neighbourhoods using loudspeakers.
- Discussion day on Higher Education - New measures have been proposed reducing work security for lecturers, reducing staffing levels, and threatening public free education.
- March ouside the offices of the two main political parties, PASOK and New Democracy on 6 July
- Send a letter to the government that declares we don't recognise this government, this system, this debt. Demanding opening of the bank acounts of all former and present MPs
- A motorcycle march to the building where George Papandreou is having a working dinner with Socialist International leaders
- Paneuropean day of action on 3 July
- Every Wednesday a round-up where all teams will give an account of what they have been doing, what obstacles they have had, whether ideas are feasible etc.

- Creating a team for 'unorthodox defence' for addressing crises and for self-defence, against attacks on the square. There have been proposals to coordinate the mass of people against the police, since usually the police are grossly outnumbered.
- Collective lawsuits agaist C. Papoutsis, the Minister of 'Citizen's Protection', and against the Police. Demanding the immediate arrest of C Papoutsis as the mastermind of the murderous police attacks on demonstrators.
- Demanding the release of all arrestees including those falsely accused of carrying explosives (typical Greek police practice).
- Demonstration outside the Courts where arrestees are being tried.
- Create a fund to collect money for those arrested, to help bail them out
- March and demos outside the houses of the Minister of 'Citizen's Protetion' and the Police Chief on Sunday.
- Demand the abolition of 'pretorian mercenaries', of police special forces, of the use of chemical weapons.

- Distribute a text defending the freedom flotilla to Gaza, condemning damage to boats, demanding that boats are allowed to sail, demanding freedom for the american captain who was arrested for disobeying the ban, an end to searches of flotilla passengers as if they were terrorists.
- Mass demonstration to the Syrian embassy in collaboration with the Syrian community, who asked for help because they are not allowed to demonstrate, and if they do this alone they risk deportation. They were invited to set up a stall in the square and give information about the struggle in Syria.

Other topics proposed for discussion at a more abstract level:

- How the people will take hold of power
- What economic model to advocate

It seems that what happened on the 29th did not put an end to the violence/nonviolence debate… Those who took part in clashes and stayed in Syntagma when everyone else had left are offended because their contribution in warding off police is not recognised by everyone. They are branded as 'troublemakers' by some, while others see it merely as a matter of tactic… This partly reflects the difficulty of political coexistence in Syntagma of anarchists and other leftists, most of whom belong to left political parties. But there is also a split among those who don't belong to any of these groups. The best statement I heard out of this debate was "I don't want the specialists of declarations, neither do I want the specialists of violence".

Meanwhile, a legal precedent that can enable personal debts to be written off took place today. An Athens court decided that a pensioner's debt of 200,000 would be written off, based on Katselis Law on over-indebted households. This will encourage more debtors to request debt write-offs.

*-*-*-*-*

Thursday, 30 June 2011

The square is back, fully reoccupied.

Video of the return march to the square, at 3am last night.

Despite everything, people went back into the square among the ruins and rebuilt everything, set up their tents and stalls, washed the pavement to get rid of the teargas, and by evening it was all like before. The smell of teargas was still lingering in the air, even more so inside the metro station. A lot of anger and fearlessness. Photos [rebuilding - and finding CS canisters from 1979... | populous assembly]

In the evening there was a well-attended demo in front of parliament again, and a populous assembly, which gave out a melodramatic feeling. Pretty justified. Police thuggery had no mercy. About 200 people were hospitalised, some in a serious condition. To make things worse, the Minister of 'Citizen's Protection' is justifying the violence, spreading ridiculous conspiratorial scenarios about a secretly-formed 'guerrilla army' in Greece that started from Keratea residents' protests against a landfill in their area. People talk about living in a regime that is extremely scared of public discontent - some speak of it as a 'junta'. It is almost taken for granted that this movement can't stop here. Everyone has invested so much of themselves in it, and are amazed by the solidarity and resilience everyone has shown. Some talk about strategy, that it is important to regroup, rethink, assess the power of the beast, and think of alternative ways of confronting it. Some even say - if we continue to be pushed like this, we will pick up arms! I see this as a temporary extremism, flared up by events just now...

Another positive thing about today was that the square was totally free of fascists and the far right for the first time ever.

There is little point in talking about the decisions of the assembly today. When the voting started, it was a real anti-climax because a few proposals were made that were out of place (such as, let's make a silver Greek currency) and alienated most people. But they did decide to create a group that discusses 'defence tactics' for the square occupation, and a non-payment campaign on the banks…

Here's another video from yesterday, showing the mass of demonstrators having crowded in the metro station, escaping police violence and teargas, shouting slogans: 'Hellas of Hellene Police*, Ruffians, Murderers and Torturers' 'Passion for Freedom is Stronger Than All Prison Cells'. Then more teargas is thrown into the station… [*Riff on 'Hellas of Hellene Christians', a motto introduced by the dictator Georgios Papadopoulos]

Regarding the rioting, this much is clear to those who were present at the demo: That in the face of extreme and unprovoked police violence, on top of economic hardship, unemployment, homelessness and a political elite who voted to make things even worse, anyone could have picked up a stone.

*-*-*-*-*

Wednesday, 29 June 2011

By 1pm today, the demo in front of parliament is as normal, no clashes, no reports of numbers yet as some neighbourhood blocs had trouble joining Syntagma because of street blockades by police... There have been some clashes in streets around town. A young woman was hit on the leg by police and was taken to hospital.

9:30 Police attack on bloc at Hilton video

Syntagma is resounding with jeers and and all the known anti-IMF, anti-parliament, anti-Memorandum slogans.

The Guardian has a live blog - please note times on that blog are GMT - add 2 hours for Athens time. The vote is due at 2pm

It is expected the mid-term austerity programme will pass as most governing PASOK party MPs will vote for it. However everyone is saying that this is when the real struggle begins...

1:30pm People have broken the police cordon in front of parliament and are walking towards it. Lots of cheering and clapping. Teargas and stun grenades thrown but people not leaving. It is as if a stage for fighting has opened up in front of parliament.

1:45pm The great mass of demos has now withdrawn away from Amalias in front of parliament, some into square, some into other streets, as teargas continues to be thrown. This was not 'provoked' by anything more than some people getting closer to parliament than police wanted them to. Now they are poisoning the square again endlessly. The place is resounding with 'cops pigs murderers' 'bread education freedom the junta didn't end in '73'. ... 10 minutes later... Looks like people are returning into Amalias. Still lots of teargas.

2pm Even Paul Mason now admits this attack was unprovoked on a peaceful crowd. Of course, the crowd is now throwing stones and firebombs. What did they expect? Riot police is trying to push people further to the other side of Syntagma.

2:23 Teargassing continue. Great mass of demonstrators remain in other side of Syntagma. Live stream camera focuses on young women breaking a small wall to gather ammunition.

2:27 Police now throwing teargas further into the crowd. They are relentless. They obviously want to evacuate the entire area. Fire set to skips to break the teargas cloud, and young people are carrying objects for barricades.

2:47 Situation continues with more teargas thrown, beatings, and demonstrators throwing stones in a back nad forth movemement as the demonstrators' 'front' is trying to retake the space. Some demonstrators claim that this is not teargas but asphyxiation gas, and Maalox doesn't work with it.

3pm Live stream reporter confirms that a very large number of people is now clashing with police that is unrelated to the anarchist scene. That the demonstrators leave to take a breath and come back, they are not withdrawing. The live stream journalist needs to take a break because even from high up where he is located the air is suffocating. Police have also assaulted journalists. Teargas even thrown inside Metro station. Rebetico now playing through the megaphones - Vamvakaris: 'All those who become prime ministers, they will all die - The people are after them for all the good they're doing'

The police has failed in both dispersing the demo, and averting clashes with youths. The former is obstinately still there, ready to return in front of parliament, and the latter has been escalated by their provocation. The square has received 4 or 5 attacks by police but they have withstood them, many people are sick and fainting from teargas.

Town hall occupations in Chania and Komotini, trade union offices occupied in Kozani.

3:20pm Police assaulting people with stun grenades trying to evacuate the space in front of Grande Bretagne Hotel. Police are also throwing stones at demonstrators. The megaphone in the square is shouting against the Memorandum and the mid-term programme.

Video a group of demonstrators runs to escape police attack. One man is injured.

The livestream commentator mentions an event he witnessed yesterday during the day: Demonstrators blocked the street to riot police bikers (DIAS team). They came off the bikes and with the help of riot police they tried to get them out of the way but they weren't having it. The DIAS team finally left.

3:30 Police have pushed demonstrators out of the streets surrounding the square, clashes continuing.

3:40 Group of demonstrators trapped between two riot squads in Phillelinon street, who throw teargas at them from both sides.

3:50 Demonstrators have come back into Amaliast street and things are calmer now. Still teargas but not as frequent.

3:53 A young demonstrator hit a policeman. In response 7-8 riot police beat him up and drag him around.

4pm Police reports 26 people taken into custody 3 arrested, 19 injured police. Clashes in Philellinon street. People seriously injured in the Metro. Megaphone calling on Police to step back. Disagreements between those wanting to throw stones and those wanting to stop them. Megaphone says to police if you step back we will step back. They did... They need the air to be cleared and things to calm down so that those who are injured can be treated or taken to hospital. Things calmer for a few minutes.

The Mid-term programme has passed in parliament, as was expected, 155 for 138 against.

4:38 In Phlillelinon street youths start throwing stones again and police respond with rounds of teargas. Same stuff all over again.

In Chania, protesters broke into and vandalised PASOK offices.

4:48 Phiellinon emptied and riot police have entered the square, throwing teargas... Someone was arrested and police threw teargas spray and pushed away photojournalists taking photos of the arrest.

4:53 Police and protesters throwing stones at each other... Teargas is thrown in front of parliament at Amalias which was now full. The Demonstrators have now all crowded inside the square and the lyra is playing.

5:03 The square is attacked with tons of teargas, between tents, cloud of smoke everywhere. Many left, unclear how many people remaining and how long they can persist. Stone throwing between demonstrators and police in the square. Police pushing people to get them to leave on Amalias. Police throwing teargas and demonstrators shout back: "more! more!" People falling down because of the fumes. They need medical supplies. Teargas thrown even at people making a human chain to allow the injured to get to the Metro station. Video

Violent attack on square occupiers video

5:19 Youths throw stones at police. Police responds by throwing teargas not at the stone throwers, but at the people in the square.

Police throwing stones at demonstrators video 1, video 2

Riot police attack on grocery store video

5:30 People have been trapped into the square and gassed from all sides. Someone still playing the drum while poeple in urgent need of oxygen, medical support, while police teargassing unstoppably, including the medical team. People don't have the power to defend themselves, this is relentlessly brutal.

The young stonethrowers made a concerted counterattack on police forces and forced them to withdraw. When they tried to come back they had stones thrown at them and some were injured.

5:42 There is an official complaint from the Ambulance Service that police is preventing them from getting to patients. Meanwhile in Syntagma police continue to throw paving stones at demonstrators... Not only prior 'troublemakers' but everyone today have lost their patience with police, stone throwing is generalised...

Things being said on twitter "Don't be surprised, the next time a riot cop is torched even the trees will be celebrating"; "The only thing they are achieving by throwing so many chemicals is people's genetic modification - the sheep will become wolves!" "What we have here is STATE TERRORISM in all caps. Until yesterday I thought troublemakers were making a mistake, provoking riot police. I no longer believe this." "Arseholes! Cops ONCE AND FOR ALL! No excuses from cops' mothers any more! The are NOT doing their job! THEY ARE TORTURERS!" "SInce they are not letting people demontrate peacefully nobody can say anything now for anything that happens from now on" "You who take away my right to demonstrate peacefully and throw chemicals at me for hours, don't you talk about democracy. Bloody FASCIST!" "And for me composure has ended. The police are cops. The MPs who voted next door to chemical suffocation are subhumans" "Let's say it: throwing stones, bottles etc towards riot police is no longer 'troublesome' behaviour. It is generalised"

5:54 A man has been beaten on the ribs, hardly conscious, another beated on the head by a baton... They need urgent medical support

6:15 Teargassing of the square and stone throwing bt police and protesters continued. Now police encircling Syntagma possibly in order to arrest all the remaining demonstrators. Still teargas. Police were still too few and disorganised so they departed from the square.

Meanwhile inside the metro stration there are many injured crowding for help. Police throws teargas inside the station. video

6:22 Riot police have attacked an Ambulance worker. Reported on SKAI TV

6:28 Lots of people still holding the square while police seems to have withdrawn and things seem quieter for a while.

6:30 Police now hitting protesters in the square. In Romvis and nearby streets Delta team terrorising random people with stun grenades. Reported that earlier in Plaka Dias team threw rocks and chased protesters.

6:36 Riot police destroyed first aid station in the square. Urgent need for medical support.

6:50 Still 100 injured in metro station, with opened heads, breathing problems, suffering from teargas thrown inside the station. Police is not allowing ambulances into Syntagma. A PASOK MP was assaulted by crowd that threw water at him. Police is running after 400 people into Monastiraki and Psyrri. Medic reports over 150 injured seeking help. People are not leaving yet, scattering out when chased but then coming back.

7pm More teargas thrown into the square. Lots of Dias biker riot police arriving to evacuate Syntagma. Desperate call for medical support. Another injured on Ermou needs an ambulance.

7:16 Serious clashes in Monastiraki reportedly where the artists' group had escaped to 'demonstrate peacefully'. Riot police threateningly approached people who had been dancing, and threw a stun grenade and teargas. They then attempted to take people into custody. People spitting blood from teargas in Syntagma.

Dias riders squad invades pedestrianised area in Mitropoleos terrorising people in cafes and restraurants - pretty shocking.

Dias riders throw teargas into cafe.

7:45 People tweeting that they are going to Syntagma... Others already there that their face is burning and they feel like they will die.

MP H. Protopapas states: 'We won't let them stop us from entering the Parliament. This only happens in fascist regimes'

7:59 Fire brigade rescued 3 people from inside Acricultural Bank that had caught fire. Riots continue, while others seemed to be walking leisurely on Amalias earlier... It's a back and forth by rioters and police.

8:14 Injured still in Syntagma metro station. Young rioters play drums on empty bins

8:24 Chemical toilet has been set to fire. Another fire inside Syntagma square. People in the square now are in the hundreds, including rioters.

8:30 Meanwhile riot police squads ran after demonstrators into Dyonisios Areopagitis Street, where they sought refuge in a residential block. The police broke in as the residents tried to get the demonstrators into the basement. Police got hold of them and beat them brutally - one was taken by an ambulance. (from tvxs)

9pm Riot police has entered the square again, in standoff with protesters. They encicled the square. The more tactical protesters got in front of the rioters, and walked towards the police lines with their hands up. The police lines withdrew, exiting the square.

9:30 Things seem quiet now. There is slogan shouting inside the square but no clashes. Those who have endured all this are worthy of unreserved admiration...
Just as I said it - more teargas thrown. They threw loads of teargas into the square from several sides

10:30 Those that had remained in the square came out in one large group. unclear why. Not that many people left but lots of teargas still. One riot squad threw teargas at a group of protesters in a nearby street. Another riot squad let another group of protesters pass them by... The metro station is like a war shelter. Injured protesters are still being brought in every other minute. Doctor report over 600 injured of whom 40 are in a serious condition. A priest has brought food and water. Riot police has also assaulted and teargassed people in the Acropolis metro station. In Exarchia there are barricades and teargas has been thrown

Reports that biker riot police have been swearing, and batoning old ladies, children and tourists.

10:51 Teargas continues to be thrown in Syntagma. Clashes in Exarchia.

11:15 The square has ben been flattened. The tents have been trampled on and equipment has been destroyed. More teargas clashes in the square. Assembly now taking place in Monastiraki square for reorganising

11:20 Monastiraki assembly march through city neighbourhoods and mightlife areas in Gazi calling on more people to join, in order to reoccupy the square.

01:20 400 Syntagma square people, sprayed and beaten, attempt to make an intervention on Athens 984 municipal radio station. Riot police arrived but people negotiated with radio stration to get their message through. It seems that the station has been distorting what happened. They did not allow demonstrators through, and they gave up.

02:17 The 400 heading back to Syntagma. Tomorrow there will be a demonstration at 6pm against the executive legal framework for the midterm. Meanwhile riot police is still in Syntagma where the few remaining people are risking arrest.

Chios town hall was occupied.

2:30 The 400 join the remaining people at Syntagma and are greeted with cheers. Riot police did not attack this time.

Video "This doesn't even happen in wartime" Doctors outraged about riot police throwing teargas inside the first aid centre despite pleas that they were doctors and that they were treating injured demonstrators. They even set fire to the roof of the medical centre, refusing to listen to any pleas. Doctors and patients were trapped inside as teargas was being thrown constantly on the first aid centre for at least an hour.

Video "Teargas attack in the square medical team

Photos on the Direct Democracy site [1] and [2]

Live stream

Photos in the Guardian do show police violence.

More photos on Flickr and the photo of the day...

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Tuesday, 28 June 2011

It was a bit of a battle in Syntagma today. To say the least... The number of demonstrators has been relatively small (up to 20,000) including the strikers, despite the fact that Metro workers finally decided not to go on strike to help everyone join the demo. The communist party march was very large in the morning. It came through Syntagma and blocked off the streets around Parliament. The marches from local neighbourhoods were arriving at around 11:30pm.

Meanwhile a motorcyclists' demo began in Thessaloniki, gathering groups from all over Northern Greece, to ride down to Athens for the 29th.

The CP march only remained at Syntagma temporarily, soon heading towards the columns of the Temple of Zeus (the CP doesn't support the squares movement)...

Demonstrators shouted angrily against foreign journalists and cameramen. Dancing with drums started in the square, while riot police numbers were increasing and putting on riot gear.

At around 2pm demonstrators smashed a surveillance camera at Citibank. Soon there was tension around the square between riot police and demonstrators. Teargas was thrown while demonstrators ran after riot squads. Again clashes between anarchists and Golden Dawn fascists. At some point fascists took out knives and stabbed a man (this is what many say). The crowd cornered them into an alley and the riot police soon rescued them and responded with teargas and stun grenades. Gradually they encircled the square trying to evacuate. Street battles with police again... People threw trash at riot police, who responded with even more teargas... Parasols were set to fire as shops, McDonalds and others, on the south side of the square were being vandalised. A mobile telecommunications van was vandalised and burnt too, and some skips were set to fire (some said the fire clears up the air from chemicals?).

However this time the square occupiers did not leave. Like before there was music by the Cretan lyra player and encouragement on the mike and despite the suffering from the tons of teargas they managed to defend the square, from about 4 riot police attempts to evacuate it, dancing, playing football, shouting anti-police slogans and forming human chains. The more 'militant' sections of the demo (the ones you will see in mass media almost exclusively, e.g. in this Al Jazeera video) threw molotov cocktails and pieces of paving stones pushing riot police out of the square into nearby streets.

Many other demonstrators left, however, or crowded inside the Metro station, avoiding the teargas. This was a much larger amount of teargas than that thrown on the 15th. About 270 people have sought first aid help for breathing problems, and 6 were taken to hospital.

By 5:30pm Athens time, the numbers seemed relatively small in Syntagma, lots of stun grenades heard but things looked pretty quiet and relatively empty for a 48hr strike. A gig to start soon with a long line-up of well-known musicians. Suddenly riot police push people out of Amalias Street in front of parliament.

5:45 Large crowd appears to be leaving towards nearby streets, although the square is still full of people. Things seem quiet but the riot police is still throwing teargas and stun grenades, attacking a small group of people out of the blue and beating up one demonstrator.

5:50 Demonstrators managed to break the police line and have flooded the street in front of parliament again, which had been evacuated. Numbers still small but growing. ?earsay account: an 'indignant' riot policeman threw away his shield, baton and helmet. As soon as his colleagues realised, they got hold of him and started beating him.

6:50 The square is now clear from teargas and it's being prepared for the concert. Things are calm, and will probably continue to be until tomorrow. Tomorrow is the 'big day' and the demo is expected to be much larger.

8pm The streets in front of Parilament are packed with demonstrators again. Some people trying to break the fences put up by police at the parliament entrance, and others throwing some bottles at riot police but were held back by the Communist Party demo guards. People started jeering against the CP demo, which again headed towards their meeting point at the Temple of Zeus.

The Athens Police Department reports 17 people apprehended, 5 arrests, 21 police injured 12 of whom are in hospital.

In Patras and Naxos town halls have been occupied.

The Syntagma assembly has published a press release about today condemning police repression and saying 'the situation is in our hands ... we will not stop until we win"

Photos this evening by the Leftwing Mechanics.

8:30 The motorcycle demo has arrived at Syntagma. Deafening noise resounds in central Athens as hundreds of bikers honk while driving to parliament.

9pm A group of anarchists made an unanticipated attack and managed to break the fence in front of parliament, while the concert is taking place. Riot police responded with teargas and stun grenades. People in the demo that had become very large by now, running away into nearby streets, while others throw missiles at riot police.

9.30 Group of helmeted far-right nationalists with flags now taking part in the tension. Meanwhile the concert continues with people shouting slogans in between songs...

A request was made for everyone to stay at the square even though the Metro station is now closing down at 10 even though they had announced it would stay open this morning.

10pm The crowd seems big and it has held the space won earlier...

10:30pm Riot police threw teargas again and has again evacuated Amalias in front of parliament. People still there in the square, megaphone 'we will not leave no matter what they do'.

11pm Tergassing continues while solidarity concert continues. Many injured and a man in his 60s taken to hospital shot by a teargas grenade. 'gas chambers in city centre'. Call on everyone to come down.

11:40pm Clashes continue, with about 200 people throwing stones. Teargassing like rain continues, stun grenades, more parasols burning. Every time teargas is shot: 'cops, pigs murderers'. Punk band now playing. Police moving to surround Syntagma.

12am People are convinced this is all hapening in order to evacuate the space for the MPs soon coming out of parliament. The core of the crowd attending the concert is still in the square while some have withdrawn into a nearby street waiting for the trouble to stop.

12:15 New round of teargassing inside the square now. They need first aid support. Police not letting those who withdrew to return to the square.

12:30 Several arrests being made, the arrestees are being beaten badly (as is common). Some people are saying that less than 30 demonstrators are causing the 'trouble'. Others say they are hundreds, angered by this attack. Police threw 30 rounds of teargas within a few minutes. Meanwhile similar clashes right now happening in Tahrir square...

1am It looks like this situation will continue until the morning. Bombardment of teargas, but people not leaving. Reports that riot police beat a nurse from the medical team.

1:30 Things seem to have become quieter now, but there are many injured. First aid team trying to help. The Metro workers finally kept the stations open until late to allow people to leave.

The minister of economics has invited 'indignants' into the ministry to talk... Thought it was a joke, but no, he did say it.

Timeline of events (in greek) with photos and videos.

Storify timeline of events

A pretty good article about today by Michelle Chen on In These Times.

Live streaming here

Some photos and more here, of people dancing in front of a rather apathetic riot police line.

Another detailed timeline & photos on the Occupied London blog.
And another one from ContraInfo with information from other towns as well.

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Monday, 27 June 2011

It's few hours before the 48-hour strike, two days of conflict and repression that everyone has been preparing for... The parliament is due to ratify or reject the mid-term programme on Wednesday evening. One factory was already picketed and blockaded by Monday night, the livestock co-op in Arta, where management had been putting a lot of pressure on workers not to go on strike. Meanwhile, EU leaders have prepared a plan B in case the mid-term is not passed, so the threats of immediate default and catastrophe by Greek politicians are shown to be just that.

Demonstrators from several towns and cities of Greece are already on the way to Athens.

In Syntagma, a large anarchist group attempted to challenge the nationalists who are said to almost excusively populate the area in front of parliament, by distributing a text regarding clashes with police and the presence of fascists in the square. They started shouting anti-nationalist slogans such as 'national unity is a trap, proletarians have no country' among the crowd expecting some sort of confrontation. To their suprise, most people also chanted with them, clapping and asking to read their texts, while those who complained were a minority. I suppose that is an indication that the far-right is a minority in Syntagma, at least by now, at least on a Monday?

The assembly had a variety of speakers, some of whom wanted to form a party, elect new leaders, do a Spanish-style sitting demonstration and denounce all forms of violence. Others spoke against them, pointing out that this movement doesn't need leaders, again emphasising the importance of continuing to fight whether the mid-term programme is passed or not, the idea of class struggle and conflict, the importance of self defence and the interpretation of the word violence ('our occupation is already "violent" according the logic and order of things our rulers uphold'). The proposals to find new 'worthy' representatives are the ones that consitently fall on deaf ears. On the other hand the assembly moved even closer to the attitudes of the anarchist / far left contingent on the question of 'violence'.

Passed:
- To devote coming assemblies to discussing what to do after the midterm vote - what we do the next day.
- ?? ?rganise the defence of our demo to keep out fascists, especially on the corner of Amalias x Queen Sophia St. [where fascists and anarchists clashed on the 15th]
- Tomorrow should not be a battle but a celebration, with music around Syntagma.
- To be tolerant towards the violence of those who clash with riot police. The megaphones should not speak against them.
- Call on everyone to wear masks, glasses, and take Maalox for teargas protection [n.b. on the 15th the media talked of masked/hooded 'troublemakers'. The assembly seems to have finally abandoned this narrative, although even today someone spoke against wearing masks. Masks are pretty essential if you are thrown tons of teargas...]
- To make a stamp which will be used to stamp Euro notes to spread our message. It is an idea initiated by fellow protesters in Berlin.
- To set a new date for discussion of the proposed political texts that will represent the popular assembly.

Rejected:
- To elect representatives among our movement and to work towards forming a 'government of personalities'.
- To stop having assemblies at Syntagma and move the assemblies to the neighbourhoods.
- To have Sunday local assembles instead of daily ones and to communicate their decisions via the internet.
- To condemn all forms of violence.
- All of us should wear white clothes so that we can see who wears black and wants to provoke us with violence.
- To organise using mobile phones around Greece, so as to synchronise and shout the same slogan at the same time.

I have to apologise for yesterday's account, in which I prejudged the political affiliations of those who complained at the assembly about ANTARSYA's intervention on the vote [text now changed and comments removed]. I should have been more careful. It now turns out that some of those who complained were from the Antiauthoritarian Movement, as they stated on Indymedia Athens. I won't get any more into this, but what does need to be said is that the method followed in the thematic assembly on politics of choosing between long texts writen by small groups, as opposed to composing one based on ideas agreed on by the assembly is just another attempt at imposing a ready-made representation on the movement of Syntagma, regardless of whether the allegation is true or not.

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Sunday, 26 June 2011

Day of Denunciations…

Denunciation 1
Today the thematic assembly for politcs was meant to present three texts for discussion in order for the movement to make a political declaration before Tuesday. Sounded interesting, crucial even, but this was not meant to be. A group of 16 people denounced the thematic assembly saying that the voiting process was 'rigged' by the revolutionary left party ANTARSYA who had 'brought 50 of their people to get their text voted in'. As would be expected, that caused a huge mess with lots of shouting and indecision. The tension stalled the discussion and it was decided it would be done another day.

Denunciation 2
The assembly denounced the decision of the public transport drivers union to go on strike on the 28th and the 29th, which comes counter to the decision of all the other public transport unions not to go on strike in order to provide transport for strikers and demonstrators. The unions had been under pressure by the state and police to close down the stations that day for 'security reasons'.

Denunciation 3
A member of the Syntagma technical support team created his own stall in Athens city centre supposedly representing the 'Indignants at Syntagma'. He is part of a group who have appeared in the media as representatives of the movement, and make demands that are similar to those of right wing parties, while asking for unions to go back to work (!) and for secret ballots for strike decisions. Their website is full of nationalist hysteria…

Denunciation 4
In the north part of Syntagma, right-wing nationaiists have set up a stall recruiting their own 'guards' for the demo on Tuesday. It is likely that far-right 'guards' will again provoke anarchists, and there will be clashes.

Denunciation 5
One of the first denunciators came back screaming to complain that ANTARSYA had distributed their text even though it had not been agreed on. The person who distributed it said it was done for people to read while it was being read out, and apologised for it giving a different impression. The shouting continued...

Depressing… Well that was just the negative side of it all because there were a few pretty good speakers who were outraged by the Deputy PM Theodoros Pangalos' 'dillema' posed today that if the medium-term programme is not passed "the military will have to take tanks out into the streets, to protect the banks and prevent people from withdrawing money"… Especially the younger speakers sounded like they were really up for a fight. There were also several pleas for concrete plans on the day after the vote.

The assembly unanimously supported a pretty good anti-racist text of solidarity with migrants which culminated in the statements 'free movement for all instead of Europe as a fortress and Greece as a detention centre' … 'Immediate deportation of government, troika, memorandums.'

They also unanimously supported a new call to the 2-day demo on the 28th & 29th, which also specified the way in which a few hundred cars would cause a severe traffic jam in order to prevent MPs from reaching the parliament.

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Saturday, 25 June 2011

It was an intense day today in the squares, which have been occupied for exactly one month now.

In Thessaloniki, a Golden Dawn (fascist extra-parliamentary party) protest march was planned to pass near the White Tower square, protesting against the construction of a statue of Alexander the Great in Skopje, Macedonia. There was a decision to defend the square with the support of the anti-fascist organisation 'United Against Racism and the Fascist Threat in Thessaloniki'. They blockaded the main street to stop the fascist march going through. Soon riot police arrived, and on the pretext of preventing the groups clashing, charged against demonstrators at the camp, throwing enough teargas and stun grenades to make everyone run away frantically (video). Later, the Golden Dawn marched through Ladadika, Thessaloniki's nightlife area, shouting anti-immigrant slogans, escorted by a riot squad. Apparently things calmed down later, and people returned for the scheduled assembly.

In Syntagma, it was the day against racism and xenophobia. In daytime, migrants' groups set up stalls in the square to spread info, and organised games for children. Teams of Pakistani immigrants played cricket in front of parliament, and Pakistani women made henna tattoos for demonstrators. The Black Thieves band and Back Desk group played a gig entitled 'A Song for Ahmad'. I guess such events may smack of superficial 'cultural' acceptance of immigrants, but giving them space for a cricket game directly in front of parliament, an ares which until yesterday was full of Greek flags and nationalist slogans, I think was a pretty good move. After these events there were talks from the African Women's Association, Action Congo, the Pakistani Community of Greece, and Lahsan Karza, one of the 300 hunger strikers.

An open discussion followed, where, finally, more immigrants' voices were heard. They had to respond to a Greek guy who said that 'we like you as people and we want you to live well but we don't want so many immigrants here'. They reminded that Afghani immigrants are escaping wars in which Greece participated, and Syrians are escaping a repressive murderous regime. They criticised with clarity, using stories and examples, the misguided idea that immigrants, the poorest of the poor in the country, are 'taking away jobs and money', speaking of class solidarity against the state and employers. They also described how they are being exploited as workers, and how impossible the Greek bureaucracy has made it for them to gain legal permits to stay. Many of them did not even state their country of origin, saying 'I came from the earth' or 'I came from my mother's womb'...

Meanwhile, the far-right 'Citizens' Movement' (tending more towards national socialism) that has been calling on 'Greek citizens to protest in Syntagma with Greek flags' spoke on their website of 'parasites' that 'have set up assemblies and have as point of reference the equality of "gender and race"', 'a circus of the political decay that has corrupted our society and many students.' Scary stuff. It's unlikely these types will now leave Syntagma once and for all, but I hope they've been discouraged…

The main assembly itself today again voted in favour of blocking the streets around parliament with vehicles on the 48-hour striike. They also supported a statement in favour of the conflictual nature of their movement, in favour of self-defence, but against 'self-described warriors', those who fetishise the fight against police lines as an end in itself. Not clear what such a decision would mean in practice. They also condemned the anti-terrorist law that criminalises wearing a hood, and created a group that will organise legal support for those who were arrested on the 15th.

A question that split the assembly, and on which there was no conclusion, was whether they would allow security forces strikers (the police, coast guard & fire brigade) to speak in the assembly. Their union yesterday had a big march in Syntagma, which was jeered heavily, but they still managed to send their message to the assembly that they support its principles because they face the same problems. Some saw this as a victory, suggesting that the security forces are divided, some others said that their solidarity can only be proven by actions - if they also go on strike on the 28th. I suppose lumping together the police and fire brigade can be a little problematic, but nobody seemed to pick up on that...

Other proposals passed were to organise a feminist event with speakers from Greek and African women's organisations, an LGBT event, and to set up a group that would organise a network of direct exchange between agricultural producers and city residents.

They sent messages of solidarity to those in the Gaza flotilla and to Syrian political protesters and prisoners (many Syrian political refugees are in Syntagma frequently).

After the assembly, the artists' group presented a giant one-month 'birthday cake' to the movement and sang 'happy birthday' in several languages while dancing to african drumming…

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Friday, 24 June 2011

Both the assembly of Syntagma in Athens and of the White Tower in Thessaloniki today had 'consultation & discussion' days. Thessaloniki's was on debt, with Manolis Glezos, Spyros Marketos (Lecturer in Politics specialising in the history of social and political ideas) and Petros Stavrou, an economist.

I have read a text by Spyros Marketos on the crisis and I felt his analysis was rather misleading. He argues that private banks should not have the exclusive right to print money, and that this is what has created the bubble (displacing the issue away not only from the wider crisis in capitalism but also from the logic of derivatives and trading on debt). Still, his proposal to write off the state debt and institute 'Seisachtheia' for private debtors could be a first helpful step in the current situation… I imagine that those who mention 'Seisachtheia' do not mean protection from debt bondage - fortunately as far as I know debt bondage is already illegal - but the protection of the debtor's basic assets and belongings, so as to stop reposessions, for example.

In Syntagma it was a day of consultation on the EU summit and the new Treaty on the Euro. The speakers invited were Kostas Vergopoulos (lecturer in Political Economy), Apostolis Kapsalis (researcher on industrial relations at the GSEE-ADEDY trade unions research institute), Giannis Kimbouropoulos (leftie journalist) and Vasilis Minakakis (writer, member of NAR - New Left Current). The discussion was not broadcast, but having read some of the speakers' texts, all of them, with the exception of the more liberal Vergopoulos, point to a non-patriotic, anti-capitalist stance - although not one that would go into a critique of waged labour. Following the discussion there was no assembly, but a poetry event…

At least I managed to learn that the fascist group's tent was evicted today. Tomorrow is a discussion day against racism, with cultural events and speakers from immigrants' organisations, as well as one of the 300 hunger strikers who won their demands in March, so I hope that will clear the air even more.

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Thursday, 23 June 2011

Syntagma was rather depressing today… but I'll leave the depressing bit for the end…

The assembly started more than an hour late, because the preceding 'consultation and discussion' about alternative eco-communities lasted longer than expected. The speakers invited talked about time banks, 'economic solidarity' with and without money, the transition towns movement, and agrotourism. I will not go into a critique of these ideas here. It is good that they are being discussed I guess. Ideas about agriculture seemed to attract the most attention, since much of the countryside is being rapidly depopulated, a process that is associated with EU agricultural policies that did not support the kinds of products cultivated in Greece. Various ideas about boosting agriculture were discussed, but those who had experience of the difficulties of that kind of life sounded more realistic than the ecologists… While a woman from Karpenisi even suggested that 'we should organise our own tourism, by dressing up in ancient greek garms and selling our craziness … why should we be going hungry?' Definitely more faith in the power of entertainment than that of agricultural products to draw people in!

A proposal was made today to send a text to the police forces - as a response to the police union protest march attempting to join the Syntagma demo today - writen in a warning tone: 'Don't you dare become an obstacle to the popular will'. The text follows a nationalist logic, metioning 'the political rulers, who have given up the country to foreign centres of power.' A couple of speakers criticised the nationalist wording ('separation is not between nations but between exploiters and exploited') and also pointed our that the police cannot possibly join the side of the people. The text was finally approved with just removing the word 'traitors'.

Another topic was how to practically surround the parliament, how to support private sector workers who are not supported by their unions in striking, especially those near the square, and how to attract more people in the square. A speaker proposed to organise a popular music gig every evening, which they agreed on.

What became clearer than the previous days today, however, is that everyone interprets what is happening at the square, what the protest is for, in their own way, no matter how divergent… I suppose too much is left open. First, the rather nationalist text to the police, which is out line with other texts by the assembly, gets voted through. Then there is an announcement that a fascist group has been seen to come in and out of a tent in Syntagma with crowbars and bats, attacking immigrants, and shouting racist slogans.

The assembly had voted from the second day to not tolerate fascists and racists in the square, however it turns out they have tolerated them in practice. Many people have been speaking of fascist groups in the square. I was under the impression that they were peripheral, and that the ones who had attempted to influence the assembly in the first week had been kicked out. Apparently not so. This tent had been noticed a while ago, but there has been a tendency to silence this, to maintain 'peace' and 'unity' by avoiding confrontation, or to say that the group of fascists is so small that it can be 'ignored'. Now it turns out that a group of up to 40 fascists have been launching anti-immigrant attacks and ultra-chauvinist campaigns around the square from a tent in the Syntagma occupation.

This 'tolerance for difference' seems pretty racist I must say. I cannot imagine how someone would tolerate the presence of such a group in there if they are not a little racist themselves, just enough to think it is OK to strech our 'tolerance for different attitudes' a little bit, to include those that are 'nationalist' - because this is what they call themselves as they stab immigrants in the streets of Athens on a daily basis!

This attempt to silence things even extended to someone proposing yesterday that ALL tents should be evacuated from Syntagma because 'we do not know who is in them and it is a security concern' - without even mentioning the motives behind such a proposal. Now it turns out that some would prefer to silently get rid of ALL occupiers in the square instead of raising the issue and getting rid of that particular one! Fortunately the idea was rejected, twice, after it was proposed again today for a second time, and there was a call to collectively confront the fascists instead.

At that point a young man came to speak saying he is homeless because his father's home was reposessed; that he sleeps in a tent in Syntagma and begs by day. His next statement was that he supports the protest, that he is 'nationalist, not racist' and that he doesn't like to see Pakistanis around. The jeers where too much and he was forced to go… Extremely sad situation.

*-*-*-*-*

Wednesday, 22 June 2011

The government's ministers today approved the implementation framework for the medium-term programme. It is to be rushed through parliament on Friday, possibly together with the medium-term programme itself, using emergency procedures.

This means that the squares movement, the unions, and everyone else who has pledged to fight against the programme may not be able to organise a concerted action in time. In the Syntagma assembly today there was still confusion as to what date they are preparing for, and with things so unclear, speakers resorted to repeating encouraging messages and pushing for better organising. On the other hand, some praised the spontaneous actions of demonstrators on the 15th, pointing out that it is not necessary to coordinate every single action, but that it might be enough to be ready to respond to challenges as on the 15th.

On a more positive note the Syntagma 'actions group' has been talking with the unions and there is agreement for concerted action on the days of the general strike. Unions have called on workers to join square demos on a daily basis, and union demonstrations will participate in defending the square from evacuation attempts. At the same time the obstacles posed by trade union bureaucracies that are friendly to the government are clear to everyone, and one of the aims is to find ways to bypass them.

The electricity workers' union GENOP, who began a series of repeat 42-hour strikes on Tuesday against the privatisation of the Public Electricity Company (DEI), today occupied the Ministry of Infrastructure & Networks and turned off its power supply. It does seem that at least GENOP are prepared for actions that go beyond the ordinary.

Workers in the metro have not gone on scheduled strikes in the past weeks to allow people to join square demonstrations, but they are having to resist pressure from their management and police, who say the stations must close for 'security reasons'.

A pessimistic view was also heard in the assembly, that the parliament is very likely to vote in favour of the medium-term programme, and that the real question is what the movements do next, how they could gain control of their lives despite that.

The pessimistic view may also be realistic, given European pressure not only on the government, but also on opposition parties, to support the massive austerity and privatisation plan… And if this happens, what next...?

*-*-*-*-*

Tuesday, 21 June 2011

The demonstration against the vote of confidence to the government today was not very big. About 10,000 people gathered in the evening, blocking the streets around Syntagma square in front of Pariament. They painted the word 'thieves' on the walls of Parliament with lasers… Some said the low number is a sign of how little influence the assembly has.

A banner in front of riot police read: 'Your mum and dad are down in the demo. Throw them some more chemicals to make history'

In Thessaloniki there was a demo of around 4000 people (it's a city of 1 million).

Meanwhile Wall Street rallied in anticipation that the vote would be positive They were not mistaken. The right-wing parties, New Democracy and the far-right LAOS, were called by the PM to show support, and they did. The final vote was 155 for, 143 against. Yet other investors were getting ever more convinced of a default, with the cost of Credit Default Swaps rising steeply.

After the vote, at around 2:15am, the remaining demonstrators were in an agitated mood. They threw water bottles towards MPs exiting the parliament, and riot police imediately responded with teargas. More squads soon arrived and gathered at the top entrance of the square trying to push in, with protesters trying to keep them out. It looked like an evacuation plan. The speaker on the mike was asking the police to leave, while anit-cop hip hop was blasting through the speakers… The pushing continued, and some demonstrators barricaded one street wiith wheelie bins. The Cretan lyra band then started playing for courage (it still is playing as I write), 'to cast away the evil spirits and the bloody disappointment!' as someone said. After positioning themselves through the streets surrounding the square, and clearing up some rubbish from the barricades, the riot squads finally returned to their positions, with people going after them to make sure they don't come back… And the lyra party continued with dancing… 'This square will never be emptied, until the parliament is dissolved, until we achieve what we want...'

Video of riot squads leaving. The sound of lyra playing, singing, and statements on the mike cannot be heard, sadly.

And a statement from yesterday's assembly:

"Our end goal is not just the fall of the current government, not even the revocation of the Memorandum. We declare that we are determined to remain here, to continue discussing and developing our vision, until we build a society that is just, without exploitation, and until we win a life of freedom and dignity."

The only hope now seems to lie in organising together all the sections of society that have staged powerful protests in the past year, together with strikers and the popular squares movement, and orchestrate a barrage of attacks and disruptions using a variety of tactics... Because this vote of confidence suggests that the government might have a chance of passing the extreme austerity measures and privatisations outlined in the medium-term programme, unless it meets serious resistance.

*-*-*-*-*

Monday, 20 June 2011

Tomorrow is the vote of confindence for the "new' government, and the Syntagma assembly has called for a demonstration to send a clear message of rejection (see call below). They will focus on actions so there will be no assembly tomorrow.

One of the most interesting topics raised today was: 'will our struggle be over if they give us jobs and better salaries? What is our end goal?' Not only today, but also on previous days, the answer to this question has been that the aim is to generalise the people's assemblies as a new form of politics in every neighbourhood and every workplace. In this sense, participants in direct democratic procedures would never leave the public space and collective decision making to return for good to their private lives. A speaker promoted the idea of a "popular constituent assebly" as opposed to elections. Others reminded the demand that public wealth is not privatised, that sovereignty over the country is regained, and talked about self-management of the means of production and taking over factories as was done in Argentina.

Out of the call for self management the assembly agreed on two proposals. One was to create groups that would organise together with public sector workers to take over and self-manage their workplaces so as to prevent their sell-off. A second proposal was for students to occupy and self-manage their universities.

It would be interesting to see if there is the will for such takeovers to happen in a wide a scale right now. The seeds for this exist, since there have been increasing numbers of factory occupations in the past 4 years, and university occupations across the country went on for a year in 2007-8. However, these were protests that did not establish self management. So, will there now be a turn from disruption to production? If taking over production and social reproduction does not also challenge the rules of the game, self-management can become a form of self-imposition of labour according to the laws of the market and capital… But I'm probably jumping far too far ahead.

For now, the immediate actions planned for the day the Medium-term programme is put to the vote involves maximum disruption. Not only a 42-hour general strike (and pushing for longer) but also to "blockade the parliament together with any means we can: cars, taxis, lorries, tractors, garbage trucks, buses etc." Again, this is not unprecedented as farmers and lorry drivers have blockaded highways around the country for long periods of time in the past 2 years; lorry drivers even blockaded the roads in front of parliament last September. It will be interesting to see this being done by multiple groups and unions, if this call is taken on board...

Tonight, they also voted in favour of stopping payments on household debts (I guess this will have to be organised in some way?), while the assembly in Heraklion in Crete has decided to occupy local branches of the Bank of Greece, Inland Revenue, public sector organisations, Social Security, and payment points for services such as electricity and telephone, in order to disrupt the flow of revenue to the State.

*-*-*-*-*

Sunday, 19 June 2011

This is the Syntagma call issued yesterday, which shows that there is no confusion by the offer of new representatives. Indeed discussions in the assembly are pretty clear that this is not about electing new, better, representatives (anyone who's read this blog this should be clear about this by now) but about power from below, beginning with popular assemblies.

"On Tuesday 21 June, the Prime Minister is asking for a vote of confidence for his 'new' government. Manolios changed - he put his clothes on inside-out [Greek proverb]. Yesterday, the vice-president of the government said that we are "shedding leaves", but there are more of us every Sunday.

On Tueday at 19:00, we cast our our own vote into our own ballot box at Syntagma, a vote of 'NO CONFIDENCE'. Those who created the problem cannot solve it, however many cabinet reshuffles they make. However many chairs thay change, it does not concern us. The medium-term programme will not pass.

We call all our friends and comrades to fill up the squares across Greece. We call on all first-level unions to find us in Syntagma. We call on all peasants, workers, unemployed, small business owners and freelancers, Greeks or immigrants, mothers and children, grandmothers and grandfathers.

To their violence we respond: our weapon is our solidarity and our courage, and we tell them that "next to their shots, there's also the lyra player". [This is in Cretan dialect, alluding to the square being assaulted by riot police with teargas on the 15th, while people had been dancing the Pentozalis dance to the music of a Cretan lyra player - see video]

Everyone in Syntagma on Tuesday 21/6 from 19:00 to shout out loud: We will not go until they go, govenment - troika - the debt."

Today's statement hasn't been published yet, but it is a call for all workers, migrants, assemblies and protesters from Athens neighbourhoods and from around the country to come and demonstrate at Syntagma and surround the pariament on the day the Memorandum is put to the vote (still unclear when as the Gov is moving the dates around tactically. For the moment it's still the 28th). Local assemblies, e.g. the one from Thessaloniki, have decided to demonstrate in Athens that day. That day is also important as there has not been a 48-hour general strike in Greece for 20 years now. However, the Syntagma assembly wants to push it more, so it also decided for groups to go to unions and push the idea of a long-term general strike (if I remember well that was the action agreed, or something similar). Several speakers pointed out that the lesson from the 15th is that uniting the striking workers with the mass movement developing in the squares can bring on an overthrow of the regime. Promoting a long-term general strike has been voted on several times but it seems that it hasn't really been put into practice because of the objective difficulty of getting unions to support the idea. Another proposal was for all those who are union members to push to discard current union leaderships, which was turned down. (Possibly because it was read as leadership replacement, the proposal was unclear). Many also mentioned the problem that many workers in the private sector are unable to go on strike because they are not unionised and would risk losing their jobs...

The Legal and Economic thematic group's analysis of the Memorandum agreement is interesting to read. It makes clear the way in which the Memorandum violates the Greek constitution, and why it is necessary to cancel the national debt. The equivalent team from the assembly in Thessaloniki also pointed out that it was the EU's Lisbon Treaty that gave the EU the power to impose economic policies in Greece and not the Memorandum itself. Also that the loan agreement follows British Law, which gives the lenders the right to confiscate Greek assets, but that this is not valid in International Law, so it holds little weight. They say that Greece could legaly stop paying without any sanctions. Of course such a thing would begin a wave of crisis across Europe, but as a speaker said in the assembly today, this is another bubble that would burst sooner or later since this debt is unpayable… he said that this makes resistance in Greece all the more important, sending the message across Europe that the lower classes are not the ones who should carry that burden of debt.

The solidarity thematic group made some decisions today. An immediate issue they deal with is homeless families living in the square. They are organising providing first aid medical support for them by calling health organisations and doctors' associations to create a first aid station at Syntagma. Also they are organising basic support lessons (reading and writing) for their children who have been unable to go to school.

Here is a video showing the I WON'T PAY movement (yellow flags) blocking Syntagma metro station validation machines today, together with Syntagma protesters. "Workers! come down to the metro station to show them! don't pay them! We don't owe to them, they owe to us!". Their slogans are: "We've paid enough, we pay no more. The small fish will eat the big one" "Go, [common] people. Don't bow your heads. The only way is insurrection and struggle" "You sell and you sell off, you're gonna get a beating" "The Junta didn't end in '73" "A helicopter for every minister, and a whaler for Pangalos" "Did we spend it together? - No" "Attention, attention, little Boboles [Bobolas is a media magnate] in uniforms" etc… Is this video extremely funny or is it just me?

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Saturday, 18 June 2011

Today discussions surrounded the vote of confidence for the Government next Wednesday, how to stop it, and how to support and connect with the strike of DEI (National Electricity Company) workers (the same ones that were booed on May 25th!) starting on Monday. A 48-hour general strike also starts the following Tuesday and it was decided to push for it to continue for longer, making clear the popular rejection of the Medium-Term programme and the second Memorandum, and demanding the repeal of the first Memorandum. The are also inviting strikers and demonstrators from other cities to come to Athens to demonstrate. Some speakers' ideas:

"We need to call on all workplace unions and small businesses to go on a long-term general strike, to picket shops around the city and call them to go on stike "
"We should call on unions to come down with cranes and trucks and block the streets on the general strike"
"On Tuesday we should blockade the parliament again, and not allow any MP to get in and give a vote of confidence to the Government"
"We should block the streets with our cars"
"We should organise uplifting art and music events around the square"

The anti-capitalist nature of the movement is starting to become apparent after yesterday's discussion about direct democracy and the parliamentary system. A speaker summed it up: "direct democracy also means a rupture with capitalism". There was also a conservative speaker however who complained "everyone here speaks about capitalism. But I want a mixed system, why doesn't anyone speak about that?" and another who called the audience to "remember that you are Greek, that our country is in danger". The latter was far more positively received than the former… I feel that in Greece there is a very clear new tendency towards a patriotic kind of anti-capitalism, which may not be that popular in the assemblies, but is probably rather dominant elsewhere…

The discussion on violence continued again today. Some speakers emphasised self-defence: that the occupation in the square must be defended; that people should come down to the next demo wearing masks to protect themselves from the chemicals and hold bin shields to protect themselves from the riot police. Others insisted on a sitting protest and holding white flags… The point was made that the sitting protest in Zappeio was assaulted with teargas anyhow, without any provocation. But an older man made a point that I thought was particuarly apt, that "the revolution will not come with 400 people fighting riot police but when millions come down to the streets", meaning that the black-bloc-style youth that acted as 'defenders' of the demonstration, counterattacking police with sticks and stones, were unnecessary; that a big enough crowd can learn to defend itself without that kind of 'support army'.

A young immigrant, however, spoke in their defence: "Those 'hood-wearers' that many of you condemn are the only ones who have supported us against racist attacks in this country, and in Syntagma they were not 'stopped' by members of this movement as is often said, but in fact they were provoked into a fight by fascist groups."

The assembly later also voted to invite all immigrant workers' unions and collectives to join the square.

Thematic assemblies:

The thematic assembly for gender equality has released statements pointing out that all the 'expert' speakers invited to Syntagma have been male, and that the audience is often addressed in the male gender. They also alerted speakers to be aware of the sexist and localist nature of Athenian 'democracy', which excluded women and immigrants, and that it cannot be mentioned unproblematically as an ideal. Their other statement that listed what they are fighting against (sexual harrassment, violence against women, the silencing and non-persecution of violence) is a reminder of how sexist Greek society still is, and what the women there are up against…

The group for social solidarity has put forward several proposals, mostly to do with providing support (nutritional, medical, educational) for people who are homeless, unemployed, or without an income, by inviting them to speak about their problems and needs. Also to invite reps from all thematic groups and support teams or relevant organisations that provide social support in the city to discuss their needs. Their initiative really is about creating support networks from inside the square. All this reminds me of the big society a bit. The proposal to demand immediate benefits for those who are homeless, deistitute, or unemployed, seems to have been faced with some scepticism, reading the minutes, which probably is the result of scepticism towards any attempt to make demands from the government (i.e. we no longer trust you to sort it out for us, we'll do it ourselves). Interesting point to think about in such a situation, and it is scheduled for discussion in the coming days.

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Friday, 17 June 2011

So the government 'reshuffle' is done and there is not much worth mentioning about it. Just certain ministers moved to different ministries, some promoted, some demoted.

Meanwhile the GSEE (Greek Trade Unions Confederation) announced a 48-hour strike on the day the Medium-term programme is put to the vote (unclear when, last announced date was June 28th).

On Al Jazeera finally there is a more well-rounded article on Greece written by Hara Kouki and Antonis Vradis of Occupied London - while the Independent's Sean O'Grady sees a catastrophe in a potential default.

Meanwhile at Syntagma today was a day of discussion on 'direct democracy'. Speakers were invited and a discussion followed. I wasn't able to (remotely) attend it, but I'm reporting from what info I've got so far…

The most well-known speaker was Manolis Glezos, legendary for his involvement in anti-nazi resistance in WWII. Photo. Some quotes:

"We need a comprehensive review of the Constitution in favour of the people"

"What we do here must be done everywhere - in workplaces across the country …"

Other speakers debated on representation and parliamentary democracy. Some discussed about a from of political representation that would confront established power/authority. Others spoke against Parliamentarianism as
"a system of govenment that serves the interests of capitalism" and which
"essentially cedes the rights that belong to those who have voted"

"Direct democracy cannot be won through constitutional reform"

There was talk of self-education through involvement in assemblies and gaining self-confidence to move forward.

When the minutes go up I will add more details of the discussion.

Another video emerging from the 15th:
A very clear aerial view video of the Syntagma square cleansing-teargassing.

This article on Occupied London is a very good account of how assemblies are organised and the kind of progress they have made over the past 3 weeks. It was published a few days ago but hadn't seen it. Essential reading…

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Thursday, 16 June 2011

So, the 'carrot' the Prime Minister, George Papandreou, is now offering is not a resignation, but a cabinet reshuffle (to be announced tomorrow at 9am) which will then ask for a vote of confidence in Parliament. Today he organised a long series of MPs speeches, some of whom asked him to give up his own position. The PM also tried to appeal to popular sentiments by saying he is 'open' to forming a 'government of broad cooperation' between parties that would 'renegotiate' the terms of the bailout. He also mentioned potential changes to the political system, the electoral law, changes to laws about party funding and parties' relationship with the mass media, laws regarding MPs' remuneration and responsibilities, even changes to the Constitution. Such a 'government of cooperation', he said, would promote sell-offs "in terms that are favourable to the people" - rather than question the sell-offs themselves of course...

The most important of those appeals was his suggestion for holding referendums on such changes. But do protesters buy such an appeal? Well first of all it would depend on what the referendum would be on, and he does not seem to want to risk much. In the Syntagma assembly again many speakers said that the point is to continue until 'they all' go, until all 'anti-popular' measures are withdrawn, until the people can establish a new order of things. There is a feeling that they have had a victory and they have to continue, but that there is still a lot of work to be done.

The assembly's 'thematic group' on economics stated that there are 3 possible 'ways out' now. 1. The Memorandum, which people have rejected; 2. 'Hard' debt restructuring with issuing a common 'eurobond' to finance european state debt (proposed by political economist Henrik Enderlein and others on the FT), which the group thinks is utopian; and 3. A radical redistribution of income, the nationalisation of banks, writing off the debt, and popular democractic control on the economy and production, which is the solution they favour. The vote on their text was favourable.

The text states: "We know the road we have chosen is hard and that we will face threats and blackmail. They will tell us about the default, the isolation of the country, even about the danger of derailment of democracy. We know we will go through tough times, but the road they are taking us down, with consecutive Memorandums, will be worse. [...] With popular self-organisation and direct democracy everywhere, in squares, places of work and study, with faith in our abilities, we will win our future!"

So I guess they are in favour of a form of popular/participatory socialism, which can look exceptionally radical under current dire circumstances. But even that is not set in stone...

Another speaker wanted to discuss about the form of money and possible alternative methods of exchange, and it was agreed that a day's assembly would be allocated to that. Other assembly speeches again were about the question of 'violence' and tended towards showing solidarity to all those who were involved in confrontations with police, asking for the release of those who had been arrested. 'the guilty party is elsewhere' said someone. They again voted against the idea that demonstrators 'violence' legitimises state repression and in favour of condemning the mass media for misinforming the public and covering up murderous attacks by riot police.

Syrian immigrants demonstrating against state repression in their country were invited to Syntagma, and the assembly (at last!) decided to allocate a day on discussing xenophobia and racism. Finally, They decided to translate all banners into English to gain more international understanding and support.

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Wednesday, 15 June 2011

22:30
The Syntagma assembly is over. They voted on a statement to continue fighting. There was no agreement over adding statements about a 'long-lasting general strike' (unclear why), and they didn't favour a condemnation of violent 'hooded provocateurs'. Some quotes from speakers: "A big thank you to the Metro workers who kept its doors open and provided medical support to those who were hurt by teargas" "We will not tolerate another government of technocrats" "The only solution is in our hands, we are the only solution and we must be ready to provide it" "Those rogues (Dias riot police team) are hooligans and we should vote to condemn them"...

What to make of all these stories about provocateurs? I guess there are a few of them but that's not to say that there wasn't a "real" fight between demonstrators and police as well, it's not to say that there is no black bloc. Are they being provoked and used to legitimise mass teargassing? Maybe that's what those who hired the infiltrators think they are doing. That they cultivate the delusions of those who still believe that if they are peaceful the state won't dare repress them. Today it seems however that this delusion was damaged... Few in the assembly blamed anyone for the teargas and violent repression but the riot cops themselves, and it seems that there was a 'no blame' attitude since 'hooded provocateurs' are virtually indistinguishable from other demonstrators fighting against police lines. When a man asked "who were those people throwing stuff" some in the audience responded "it was us!"...

An account from Occupied London - The last hours of Pompeii

Photos & videos from today's demo Preza TV, Demotix, Indymedia Athens, Commentators Without Borders (the best timeline blog I've seen for today, far more informative than my tweets, but in Greek), B.T.dk

Occupied London also have a timeline of events here

Protesters dancing video

Man taken to hospital after getting beaten by police today pics Preza TV

And a video of the riots on Al Jazeera which seems to me like pretty stereotypical demo coverage.

20:30
The people's assembly has started. Thoughts on police violence and resistance. Proposals on continuing the fighting, not buying the 'carrot'. Just back from work - been tweeting updates since the morning. Here is a timeline:

19:00
teacherdude: @ThraxAnarmodios "Oh joy, two parties full of people suspected of corruption get ready for joint rule" #greekrevolution

Vasilis Papakonstantinou sings revolutionary songs at #Syntagma. Very positive climate.

@ThePressProject LIVE on the press project What Greek Police do to those who are not their mates (for those still having doubts) here and here

Cops hanging out with their mates. here and here. How Greek Police "protects citizens' freedoms"

Paul Mason: Papandreou offering "unity government" with or without himself as PM, as his majority evaporates. Who is the EU now dealing with? #newsnight

teacherdude: Greek PM's resignation marks final act of Greece's political Ancien Regime. 2 main parties are economically & morally bankrupt

teacherdude: According state run NET TV news Greek PM's decision has surprised cabinet as much as everyone else. #greekrevolution

RT @antiz Thessaloniki motorcycle march passing through the city photo

RT There are 30 injured #Syntagma protesters who were taken to hospital today article

Good, altho I saw too many reports of provocateurs & random police violence to just blame 'anarchists'... @paulmasonnews blog

DentNEWS.net: #greekrevolution (VIDEO) Police in Athens attacks with tear gas, people that were dancing in the square #15J video

16:00
Things calmer now at #Syntagma. Everyone is invited to go down. The demo is scheduled to continue late into the night

15:00
Stacy Herbert: More syntagma square: here and here Uploading video now

Missing the point: RT @BBCWorld 'Greek PM willing to step down & make way 4 unity government on condition it supports EU/IMF bailout plans'

Breaking SF News: Greece debt worries send stocks down sharply: (06-15) 06:43 PDT NEW YORK, (AP) -- Stocks are falling sharply in... article

@Manjalyian all happening in Athens, Greece Syntagma (Parliament) Square and surrounding areas.

teacherdude: Scenes of police attacking demonstrators in Athens has potential to spark off new round of civil unrest on scale of 2008 #greekrevolution

teacherdude: Video of Greek police beating handcuffed man. #greekrevolution

Haramoun Hamieh: video #police brutality in #Athens #GreekRevolution teacherdude: Doubt if change of govt will defuse protests, lot of anger directed at political system and not just 1 party #greekrevolution

teacherdude: Greek PM says he's willing to quit to let opposition leader A. Samaras form coalition govt. #greekrevolution

news More people returning to Syntagma square. Soon those who couldn't strike will join...

Riot police of Dias team assault demonstrators sitting in the National Gardens nr the Parliament. Elsewhere they made arrests.

14:00
Many injured and many w breathing problems in #syntagma. Medical team asks for supplies. Even the Metro station was teargassed.

teacherdude: "Difficult time for those in Syntagma Sq, police firing tear gas into tents" @ThePressProject #greekrevolution #15jgr Occupation of the Town Hall by demonstrators in Volos

teacherdude: Despite repeated police attacks and extensive use of tear gas protesters refuse to abandon Syntagma Sq. #Greekrevolution

13:00
The centre of the square has been kettled by riot police. Throwing lots of teargas even onto the medical team. They need support

Greek TV confirms Molotov throwers were police online stream @guardian_world

Police now beating a man in front of Great Britain hotel

Anne Boleyn Énot: Athens, Greece: Policemen dress as anarchists and cause trouble to dissolve peaceful protest and create violent incidents #greekrevolution Riot police have attacked the Cooking team of the square. Teargassing continues. That's 'protecting Parliament' @guardian_world

Guardian headline is 'petrol bombs'. Offensive. Do you only ever publish police reports? article @guardian_world

Many groups of demonstrators blocked by police throwing teargas. Ppl determined to remain in Syntagma despite teargas

12:00
Many injured and passed out in the square. Ambulance has difficulty getting through. Lots of teargas.

NET Tv news finally reports it: Golden Dawn fascist stabbed a demonstrator in the ear. Those guys were against Syntagma from outset.

Photo evidence of provocators preparing. TV says it's 'anarchists'. Anarchists say known fascists jumped on them. photo

teacherdude: Video which seems to show people arming themselves with clubs will next to them are riot police units who look on video

Thessaloniki demonstrators still blockading the ex ministry of Macedonia & Thrace despite torrential rain

teacherdude: Big turnout in anti-govt march in Thessaloniki, Greece, but torrential rain prevented people from surrounding ministry bld. #greekrevolution

11:00
Tv channels keep showing the clashes repeatedly but all is calm now. Assembly ppl on mike calling on everyone to stay at #Syntagma.

Outside Ministry of Economics ppl throwing plastic bottles (!) police throwing teargas. Teargas all over Syntagma it seems

Large demos and occupations of Municipal HQs in Heraklion, Crete & Syros island.

Clashes bt anarchist & far right blocs continue in Syntagma. Police throwing lots of teargas. Excuse to break the demo?

Crowd caught and kicked out hooded provocator who threw a Molotov bomb. He had a police ID

Some clashes bt far left & far right groups at south side of #Syntagma

10:00
It appears the strikers' march from the Museum can't reach #Syntagma because it's already too crowded

PASOK Politicians already making tv statements about 'violent demonstrators' how surprising

All the streets leading from Kolonaki to Parliament are flooded by demonstrators

Riot cops now pushing the crowd away from parliament

The 10 arrestees were released earlier. Teargas at Queen Sophia St blockade that the crowd was trying to break.

Around 10pm 10 demonstrators arrested and 2 injured at Rizari / Vas Konstantinou blockade. At Rigillis they obstructed MPs' cars

In Thessaloniki the Ministry for Macedonia & Thrace surrounded by thousands of demonstrators

#skg Huge crowd outside Parliament already, many streets blocked by demos & workers' pickets in Athens city centre

RT @gfek303 Photo taken 8:30am. They put up walls on Queen Sophia St #m25gr #syntagma #15Jgr photo

09:00
Paul Mason: Massive demo now by PAME, communist union fed, filling Stadium St, at least 100k. Wide demographic: lots of men with superthick flagstaffs Crowd is attempting to climb the police fencing around parliament

Parliament surrounded. Copcorridors 4 MPs Deadzone bt political class &popular base. Bourgeois democracy in its best RT @galaxyarchis

Journalists called off their strike today in order to broadcast what is happening. Appeasing popular hostility this way? Hmm

Riot police are trying to separate the crowd vertically in front of parliament, creating tension @ThePressProject

08:00
Paul Mason: On syntagma: chant - bums, grasses, journalists - xtreme hostility to all media, accused of "supporting big capital"

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Tuesday, 14 June 2011

Tomorrow is a general strike and an important day of action for the 'squares' movement. It is seen as a testing ground of their power before the 28th, when the Medium-Term budget is put to the vote. This budget outlines cuts to services, wages, pensions and (what little exists of) benefits, and public sector layoffs, along with a long list of privatisations - the first step towards the total sell-off demanded by the Troika. An interesting 'innovation' is that workers and pensioners will be charged an extra 'unemployment solidarity tax' to pay for the one-year benefit given to the increasing numbers of the unemployed. Adding to this, it foresees that after all these measures are taken, in 2015 Greece's external debt will only have been reduced by a tiny fraction.

The assembly at Syntagma today mainly focused on responses to repression and there was a debate (or rather opposing positions - peaceful vs militant) on the question of violence. The positions were familiar: 'let's remain peaceful so that they won't have an excuse to attack us and we keep the public on out side' vs 'the system is violent, the state is violent, the Memorandum is violent, we must stay here by any means'. 'Violence' as such was thankfully not put to the vote: they stayed with the default position of keeping the word 'peaceful' in the call to the demonstration, but voted against doing a sitting protest or waving white flags, or making a brotherly call to the police to join them. Instead there was a lot more agreement with repeating their call to all the striking unions to join them and stay in the square tomorrow.

This is in contrast to some Thessaloniki 'indignants' who were giving out flowers to riot police tonight (the cops weren't having it, living up to their reputation). Thessaloniki is known to be a rather conservative place so not so suprised. However, I don't see any more conservatism in what comes out from Thessaloniki assemblies in comparison to Athens. Their calls and statements are extremely similar. Tonight they also attempted to make an intervention into the local TV channel ET3 while the evening news was being broadcast, but they were stopped by security.

Very similar calls and resolutions to those of Athens have been released today by assemblies in Korinth, Ermoupoli in Samos, the neighbourhood of Vyronas in Athens, and I presume many more that aren't published in the main website. They call for occupations and blockades in local public buildings and services. The difference in how different assemblies refer to themselves stands out. Some call themselves 'citizens' while others, e.g. Vyronas refer to themselves as 'workers, pensioners, unemployed, immigrants...'. The call from Vyronas also clearly states: 'We declare that we do not want new saviours, technocrats, entrepreneurs, to come in the place of these ones.'

Here is a list of the announced strikes taking place tomorrow. Many unannounced strikes are also expected.

Paul Mason now writes a blog on what's going on in Syntagma. I'd object to the equation of political parties with politics that his guide seems to take for granted, calling the whole thing 'non political'. This is a phrase right-wing Greek journalists use to describe the whole thing. How can a mass desire to bring down the government, to stop paying for the state's debt, and a demand to change the political system - while beginning to enact that change - be non political?

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Monday, 13 June 2011

There is a lot of worry but also a lot of optimism in the Syntagma assembly about Wednesday: Will the police attack and how to respond? How to organise and reoccupy if evicted? How to spread the message to make sure the strike is truly generalised and combined with a mass blockade of parliament?

There were several ideas, including one to collaborate with the journalists' union in order to occupy the premises of ERT (Greek Broadcasting Corporation) and broadcast messages from the assemblies and news from the demonstrations. This was not decided upon today, unclear why...

Around the topic of 'what next? what if we take the parliament?' two speakers raised the issue of money as commodity, that it must be abolished or used only for the simple exchange of goods. This was put to the vote and the vote was in favour of abolishing public limited capital, interest and stockmarkets, and establishing a ceiling to individual property. I am not clear if this shows popular distaste just towards debt and financial capital or against capital as such!

They also voted to demand the abolition of political parties, and to hang banners that say 'all the power to popular assemblies' and 'Greeks and immigrants united'.

Almost every day, a change of procedure is voted in. Today it was decided to discuss fewer topics each day, based on written proposals submitted to the secretarial team, and that any vote must be preceded by collective discussion in the assembly. Seems obvious but with a format that tries to accommodate as many speakers as possible it is extremely hard to have a 'discussion' as such.

A little kid also turned up and sang a song, 'I wish I could fly with you and see the sky'...

It seems there might be something on the BBC about all this soon. Paul Mason of Newsnight is off to Athens today and was asking for contacts... Will be interesting to see what comes through.

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Sunday, 12 June 2011

This Sunday's 'peak day of struggle' was significantly smaller than last week's at Syntagma, but with thousands of demonstrators still there blocking the streets. One of the reasons might be Monday's bank holiday, when many residents leave the city. At the assemblies, preparations are being made to organise actions for the general strike of 15 June. The Syntagma assembly decided among other things to:

- invite popular assemblies from all Athens neighbourhoods to blockade the parliament
- ask the General Electricity Company (GENOP) workers to cut off electricity to the Parliament building on 15/6 - demand that Unions call a 48 hour strike on 23-24 June
- demand that Public Service companies go on repeat strikes and close down services
- occupy municipal buildings
- create and distribute a manual for resisting police repression
- make a plan for reoccupying the square in case they are evicted

The popular assembly at Syntagma is streamed every evening at The Press Project site.

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Saturday, 11 June 2011

Resolution of the People's Assembly of Syntagma Square

24 hours in the streets!

We give our own RESPONSE to the MEDIUM TERM AUSTERITY PROGRAMME

June 15th, we encircle Parliament

Now that the government is putting to vote the Medium Term Austerity Programme, we encircle Parliament, we gather and we stay at Syntagma. All together, we continue and strengthen the mobilisations that began on May 25th. Our first stop is the General Strike of June 15th. We won't stop until they withdraw it.

We support by all means the General Strike and we demonstrate peacefully.

On June 15th, we do not work and we do not consume. We coordinate with all citizens who want to express their disagreement to the Medium Term Austerity Programme, with the strikers and their unions, with the people's assemblies, with all those who participate in mobilisations and occupations across the country.

We call artists to support the mobilisation, to take to the streets with us and to give it their own touch.

We will have three staging points: Everyone on Wednesday June 15th, at 7 am:

1. In front of the Parliament building
2. At Evangelismos metro station
3. At Panathinaiko Stadium (on Vasileos Konstantinou Avenue)

Until June 15th we will be leafletting all around Athens to make sure that the call of the People's Assembly of Syntagma is spread everywhere. We promise to meet again to struggle the day that the Medium Term Austerity Programme is put to vote. Let's make our own voice heard loud:

THE MID-TERM AGREEMENT SHALL NOT PASS

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Thursday, 9 June 2011

Statements are great, the problem now is how they move to action... The 'medium-term' budget was submitted in parliament unexpectedly today ahead of time, and it will be voted on the 28th rather than the 15th as originally planned. The assembly failed to act on what had been decided (to surround the parliament) because of an extremely messy assembly with lots of screaming and shouting... There had been a decision to rotate the facilitator by selecting a new one by lottery. The woman who turned up to facilitate was not aware of prior decisions and suggested that the question of whether they encircle parliament or continue with the assembly is put to the vote. That sparked a lot of shouting and attempts to grab the mike from those who thought this was an overturning of a prior decision already taken. And more shouting came from those who thought those who had intervened were not following process... The mess continued until midnight and no decision making or a demonstration took place... But there weren't enough people there to 'flood the squares' from what I could gather anyhow. Maybe tomorrow...

The process is tough, and discussion is made difficult, because everyone has only 1.5 minute to speak, and can only speak when their 'ticket number' is called. This was decided to deal with the large number of potential speakers. Decisions are made by voting and not by consensus like in Spain which means that things move fast but sometimes they are rather rushed as proposals are hardly ever developed at length (even though on several occasions speakers have angrily disrespected the time restriction). There have been several objections to this rule but there doesn't seem to be a broad desire for it to change... Popular boredom with long speeches? Annoyance at party acolytes who turn up to read their manifestos? Yes but the only people given the freedom to speak at length so far were specialists: Economists, experts on the Constitution and the like.

Another note: Workers from the occupied milk products factory Dodoni are distributing milk for free at Syntagma. Nice... Dodoni makes the best feta cheese...

Background: Dodoni was founded in 1963 as a cooperative by cattle-breeders. They all contributed 500 drachmas. They took a 30 million dr. loan from the Agricultural Bank of Greece, which, instead of money, acquired 60% of the shares. The cooperative members now argue that the bank holds the shares illegally, and have taken it to court. Meanwhile the Agricultural Bank of Greece is now planning to sell its share of the company, as it is going through a rationalisation process. Dodoni is a profitable company while maintaining good payments for cattle breeders, but this would not be guaranteed if it is sold. The Bank is already attempting to reduce payments for producers. Workers and cattle-breeders have repeatedly occupied the factory premises demanding that it is sold back to cattle-breeders cooperatives at a symbolic price.

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Wednesday, 8 June 2011

This statement I think demonstrates how far the square's radicalism can (and cannot) go. On one hand they say "we want to stop working for the bosses" and on the other they want "work with dignity" and "work for all". It is quite evident they tried to incorporate both far left and more social democratic voices...

08/06/2011 RESOLUTION OF THE PEOPLE'S ASSEMBLY OF SYNTAGMA SQUARE
ON THE PROPOSAL BY THE THEMATIC ASSEMBLY OF WORKERS & UNEMPLOYED

We are unemployed, flexible workers, permanent but by now precarious workers in the private or public sector, here at Syntagma square. We are those who produce wealth, but are not able to live. Regardless of how differently we express ourselves, we are united by a common problem: exploitation. We know who our enemy is: employers, the government, the Troika, the IMF and the Memorandum, who, allied with the mass media, are trying to divide us, turning us against each other and assaulting us all, with the so-called "debt crisis" and the financial crisis as the pretext and bogeyman. *

Starting now, and setting as benchmarks the dates of strike on 9th and 15th June, we want to take a big step forward, to make a counterattack against those who have waged war on us, creating and expanding solidarity networks and centres for struggle of workers and unemployed in all neighbourhoods and workplaces.

*We want to stop working for the bosses. We want to work for society, for the fulfilment of our needs, taking hold of our lives.
* This political and economic system that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer can no longer decide for us without us and must be overthrown. We meet to discuss, to decide together and to execute our decisions ourselves, against those who all these years have been living off our lives. We call on all workers and the unemployed to come to Syntagma so that we can join forces, fight together, and develop a solidarity network.
* We oppose any attempt to give us the blame. We refuse to fall into inertia and misery. We break the isolation. We are searching for a new kind of world through forms of struggle that we will invent ourselves. We meet at Syntagma and at squares in all neighbourhoods.
* We will fight in every possible way for work with dignity, social security, fewer hours of work, work for all. We call on all workers to press on trade unions for a Long-Lasting General Strike; to take hold of the Unions, away from the sold-out leaderships of GSEE (General Confederation of Greek Workers) and ADEDY (Civil Servants' Confederation); to get ready to occupy closed-down businesses; to reappropriate the means of production. We point out that this prospect is no longer utopian and unfeasible, but necessary and fundamental to our dignity, equality and freedom.
* We will organise actions and fight for:

- Reduction of working hours - work for all
- Free transport for all
- The excemption of the unemployed from debt repayments and payments for public services.
- Full health and medical cover for all - social security for all

- Unemployment benefit equal to the most recent salary

On Thursday, 9/6: distribution of the text to striking workers who will be demonstrating. Meet at 11:45 at the metro station entrance, Korai square.

On Friday, 10/6: blockade of the metro ticket validation machines at 5pm (the organising meeting is at 4:30pm at Syntagma square). Daily blocking of validation machines for as long as we remain at Syntagma square (this will be reconsidered daily depending on numbers of people).

We call on 'I WON'T PAY' committees to participate. Actions and local assemblies at OAED (Organisation for the Employment of the Labour Force) and IKA (Social Security Institute) to demand that booklets are stamped and unemployment benefit payments are issued. For this reason we invite all workers and the unemployed to take part in the assembly of the group for workers and unemployed on Tuesday, 14/6, 6pm at Syntagma. People's Assembly of Syntagma Square

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Monday, 6 June 2011

Today was allocated to talks and Q & A from economists and specialists on the constitution. There have been complaints about the 'compromised' political affiliations of the speakers, and various speakers said that they were disappointed the popular assembly had to bring 'experts' in while the rest of the 'commoners' are never allowed to speak long enough. The speakers were:

Giannis Varoufakis, Economist (associated with Kouvelis' Democratic Left)
Efklidis Tsakalotos, Economist (member of the Radical Left Coalition party)
Dimitris Kazakis, Economist (ex-member of Spitha - Theodorakis' 'movement')
Giorgos Katrougalos, Lecturer in Constitutional Law

I was not able to attend the speeches from the beginning but all speakers agreed that Greece must remain in the EU. Kazakis is the most well-known of the speakers, and his position is that Greece should return to the drachma, that would refrain from currency trading, and reform the economy by nationalising banks, producing gold and other minerals and confiscating the assets of large corporations. He believes that these policies would prevent currency devaluation and hyperinflation... His proposal does look like a single-state socialism sort of model. You can hear some of his views on this interview on Athens International Radio.

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Sunday, 5 June 2011

Another huge demo at Syntagma today (parliament square), again they talk of over 100,000 people. Indymedia reported water cannons being parked on streets leading to the square but so far they have not been used. Outside parliament, police have placed metal fencing to prevent attempts to get nearer the building. For other recent minutes, calls and resolutions see the english translations forum. Some interesting stuff in there including a call for an 'unemployed square' in Pireaus with ex-workers from Perama Shipyard Zone. http://real-democracy.gr/el/forums/en-english-texts

Here's a brief video from the popular assembly.

Reuter's finally wrote something about today, typically undermining the size of the demo... Greek austerity plan draws 80,000 to Athens square

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Saturday, 4 June 2011

The latest assembly resolution:

Resolutions of People's Assembly

04.06.11 SUBMISSION DATE FOR MEDIUM-TERM PROGRAMME - END DATE FOR THE GOVERNMENT.

Over the next few days they will again try to decide for us without us. They will submit the medium term programme for budgetary policy, an even tougher memorandum, to make the poor poorer and the rich richer and to sell off whatever remains of public wealth. The moment they submit it we will take to the streets, we will flood the squares so they don't pass it, and until all those who rob our lives are gone - governments, troika, memoranda, banks and all those who exploit us. Now we take our lives into our hands and carry on.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY NOW
PEOPLE'S ASSEMBLY OF SYNTAGMA SQUARE 04/06/2011 IN FAVOUR

Every decision by the P.A. of Syntagma Square should be typed up and handed out the following day. IN FAVOUR
Demonstrations should be held outside buildings such as the offices of SEV [Association of Greek Industrialists] and the headquarters of the Bank of Greece. The campaigns team should make specific proposals at the next popular assembly. IN FAVOUR
The P.A. calls on residents of local neighbourhoods who organise their struggle through popular assemblies to march to Syntagma each day at 18:00. IN FAVOUR
The P.A. calls on the homeless to join the struggle in the square and for us all to organise together in order to address our common problems. IN FAVOUR
To form a human chain around parliament during the discussion of the medium term program. IN FAVOUR

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Thursday, 2 June 2011

Resolutions of the People's Assembly of Syntagma Square 2/6/2011

1. Now it's us doing the talking! Call for pan-European uprising on June 5 Since May 25th, thousands have flooded the squares across the country to attempt to take our lives back into our own hands. We have different ideological backgrounds, but we share a resentment of what is happening and a longing for justice, equality and dignity. We are different, but we will stick together, united! Simultaneously, similar movements are happening everywhere in Europe. On Sunday, June 5 we are synchronizing our steps with the whole of Europe, and meetings will take place at 6:00 at Syntagma, in all the squares of the country and throughout Europe. They should hear our loud voices everywhere: - Because they can not sacrifice whole nations to avoid penalizing lenders, the debt is not ours and we will not pay,

- Because this political system that makes the poor poorer and the rich richer can no longer decide for us without us, and must be overturned.
- Because we want to live with dignity from our work without the constant terror of unemployment.
- Because they should punish those who looted the public wealth.
- Because free public health and education are the inalienable rights of everyone.
- Because the Medium-term Program must not pass.

Organized disinformation does not frighten us. We will stay in the squares until they leave and to make sure they do not return in any other form, those who created the current deadlock: The IMF, The "Memorandum", The Troika, the governments, the banks and any of those who exploit us. We will continue to march, united and together until "Turmoil shall fall on Hades, and the planking shall sag under the great pressure of the Sun."

Direct Democracy Now!
Popular Assembly of Syntagma Square, June 2, 2011

2. Future People's Assemblies of Syntagma Square, until Sunday, June 5 should address the following question: How to organise the demonstrations starting early morning on June 15 in all the squares of the city with posters explaining the terms of the Medium-term Program. Following this to organise protest marches that will encourage everyone to participate, ultimately leading to Syntagma Square for the occupation of the square and the blockade of parliament.

3. Syntagma occupation Radio "intensity" 100.1: Proposed suspension of scheduled radio programs, in order to come to the square and to broadcast from Syntagma Square.

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Wednesday, 1 June 2011

Resolution of the People's Assembly on June 1st We call all workers to a long-lasting general political strike. We urge and support all the strikes that are announced (including those of June 9th and 15th).

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Tuesday, 31 May 2011

Just watched the final 2 hours of the assembly in Athens Syntagma Square, which was streaming live on ThePressProject website. That was up to 2am local time, but despite the tiredness, problems, conflicts etc., it gave me a positive feeling. Main points:

- Tomorrow there will be a decision on how to promote a long-lasting general strike. There have been worries that the assembly can't just 'call' a strike, and that this might fail to generalise. It has to promote it in some way, and make sure there is support for it to be successful and not result in victimisation of participants. Ideas ranged from occupying the GSEE offices to going into unorganised/ununionised workplaces to encourage this. It's all still in progress...

- It has been decided assemblies should expand to neighbourhoods and workplaces. The first neighbourhood assemblies have already formed. There is a lot of discussion on how to achieve this.

- A lot of people talked about the urgency to expand action beyond the square, and to not make demands that validate representative power (the parliament), that we don't want a new government but to take things over instead while being aware that this is extremely hard.

- Regarding the national debt, the point was heard that we will not become the State's consultants, and our aim is not to manage the debt (although there is a working group on the economy to consider scenarios) but to defend our lives as workers, pensioners etc against the imposition of debt.

- They sabotaged the ticket validation machines in Syntagma metro station.

- There is continuous self-criticism regarding process, how to make it direct and fair but also functional, the role of working groups, and how to unite the assembly with the 'other half' of the square that until now has largely consisted of demonstrators who did not participate, and who appear more patriotic (more on that below).

- There is constant awareness of the issue of immigrants and possible attacks against them. Looking at recent minutes it does look like some immigrants started to participate in the assembly and make proposals.

- The community organising at the square is resolutely against using money, they operate by announcing what is needed for organising and people bringing and sharing stuff. There is free food and water.

- There is also a self-organised group by homeless people bringing their voice to the assembly.

Earlier, in front of Athens University, which is not far from Syntagma Square, a new old wannabe leader had made his appearance. Mikis Theodorakis. (see Wikipedia entry for biog) Now, if this was the 'old' Mikis, the one who rebelled against the colonels' junta and was tortured in exile, it would have been alright. But that side of his personality is long gone. Over the years he has moved to the right, and now he has reemerged with a new nationalist "independent citizens' movement" called Spitha (Spark).

So Mikis Theodorakis turned up for his campaign, together with one other member of his movement (who declared, "do not fear, we, the intellectuals at the universities, are here to guide you!") and some priests (Orthodoxy couldn't be missing from this!). He attracted a vast flag-waving crowd, and made a speech about kicking out 'foreign dependency', that the 'system of power' and capital is to blame. He mentioned the 'foreign' overseeing body that will sell off Greek assets to 'foreigners', and developed scenarios, for our vigilance, that the buyers could be 'Turks' or 'blacks from Tanganyika' (!!). He said the solution is to go beyond 'left and right', to be neutral, to follow the 'Delphic ideal' and the 'olympic spirit' and create a patriotic popular front. Then they all sang Theodorakis' revolutionary songs from the 70s, and he commented that 'our movement has great music'...

Well, I was pretty scared when I saw that on video. Theodorakis is planning to turn Spitha into a political party, and is the ONLY politician who was not just tolerated but cheered passionately by this 'Indignant' crowd. He turned up as an 'artist/intellectual' who showed his support, but everyone knows he is planning to start a nationalist party (which also supports 'participatory democracy' - accountable to the party leader of course - and is against immigration because 'only capital benefits from it'). Yes, he is very old, and the crowd that surrounded him was a lot older than that seen in Syntagma generally. But still, the whole thing seems rather worrying. The assembly just viewed Theodorakis' speech as a farce and denounced it afterwards. But I fear this may not be as negligible as they seem to think. So here we go... things are far from a daydream situation... Syntagma is definitely split, politically, as well as spatially...

On a more positive note, the Parliament's main exits were blocked by crowds by the evening, so the MPs had to escape through a back door...

Check out news and discussion about tonight on Occupied London

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Sunday, 29 May 2011

Decisions of the Popular Assembly in Syntagma, May 29

Upcoming mobilisations and call-outs

- Monday, May 30th at noon, Stadiou and Sofokleous str: Support of the workers at the Post Bank against its privatisation
- Monday May 30th, Mars Field (Alexandras and Patision Ave): Demonstration through neighbourhoods to end up at Syntagma square
- Tuesday May 31st, Karaiskaki square, Piraeus: Support of the dockworkers fighting against the sell-out of the port
- Call for popular assemblies in neighbourhoods aiming at the spread of the popular uprising and the coordination of assemblies. Monday June 1st, cooking pan demonstration toward Syntagma square.
- Thursday June 2nd, Klauthmonos square, 11 am: Support of the Telecommunications workers who have a strike and national protest.
- June 2nd, Propylea: At the same time, education demonstration
- Saturday June 4th, 11 am, Klauthmonos square: Worker demonstration and support of ATHENS PRIDE
- Call-out to the assemblies of students in schools and universities on Tuesday and Wednesday for their demonstration to end at Syntagma square
- Sunday June 5th, call for the repetition of the European-wide day of rising up, or if possible, a global one.Call for the creation of a banner of the popular assembly and its placement in front of parliament.
- Call for participation in all workers' mobilisations in the coming days.
- Call to everyone and all groups for the organising and coordination of anti-fascist action in the following days. - Call for actions at the Syntagma metro station.

DIRECT DEMOCRACY NOW
EQUALITY JUSTICE DIGNITY
The only defeated struggle is the one never fought

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Saturday, 28 May 2011

1. The Occupied London blog has the translated the 'Resolution of the Popular Assembly at Syntagma'. They have changed their slogan from 'real democracy now' to 'direct democracy now', in line with the general disgust towards political parties and the Parliament. Among other things they are calling on striking workers to join the demonstration at Syntagma.

2. I have read brief updates from yesterday's assembly that there have been proposals of a long-term general strike, with cheers from the audience. The 'real democracy now' online forum contains such proposals but there are also those who attempt to create 'tangible' demands that 'the public can understand' such as 'the creation of an audit committee for the debt (i.e. to emulate the Ecuadorian tactic suggested in the popular Debtocracy documentary); the voting out of the new measures; to stop the selling out of public property; the state should never give money to banks again without getting shares back'É Those are usually the 'more knowledgeable' 'specialists'É The general feeling of the dialogues though is more utopian, more about self-determination and acting collectively, the values of solidarity and mutual respect, justice, about completely changing politics and societyÉ The assemblies have been described as 'group therapy of the people'É

There is still concern about the insistence on lack of political identification, about the forgetting of the struggle made by the left, the unions and the anarchists historically and more recently in Greece, the recent demonstration where police almost killed one person and injured many. But from what I see there is only a small, clearly rightist and not very influential minority that creates trouble in this respect, attempting to exclude associations with the left, even in its independent, extra-parliamentary guisesÉ

Much of the conservative media continue to be extremely enthusiastic about the Square occupationsÉ Going on about how they should never allow the left militants 'co-opt' them because they would then 'lose their humour'É! So I guess from the establishment point of view all this still looks like some sort of frivolous festival of resistanceÉ?

This is an interesting diary account of an anarchist who is very enthusiastic about what's happening... His political viewpoint is pretty clear through the text, and I suppose it colours his critique... I don't like the 'Greek Tahrir' thing (if anything it sets it all up for defeat! - and maybe that is the truth of it...) but some interesting anecdotes in there. The Wonderful Nights of Syntagma Square

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Friday, 27 May 2011

Today it was raining heavily in Athens but the momentum was still there. Numbers not as large but very good considering the weather. Been reading reports in indymedia, where anti-authoritarians/anarchists are either extremely sceptical of events or find some hope in them and call on everyone to take part. Their main fear is the presence of far-right nationalists in the demo, but the good news is that nationalists are usually booed down when they turn up to speak, and if any kind of separation is made between Greeks and migrants. Their numbers are rather small (about 30 someone said) and are conspicuious by their carrying Greek flags and occasionally abusing the migrants who are present in the demo selling stuff. What is rather problematic is the tolerance for the Greek flag only. This was actually discussed in the assembly tonight, and there was talk of the national flag being a bourgeois symbol. There was a call for not having any flags at all, or a new flag if they must. At some point someone (who was described as known not to be very sane) took out a 4th International flag, and was pushed out of the demo by those standing around him. But really, fair enough if no parties are tolerated. He later came back to protest about it and he again had no support. I suppose patriotism is also an unavoidable element when you have a large mass of not so politicised demonstrators who are only just starting to think about what is happening to them.

Apart from all that, things sound rather positive in terms of a communal spirit being created, and people helping each other to get things done. Tents were brought in today, working groups have been set up for various affairs and it is just a matter of being there to get involved. (I only found out after translating yesterday's minutes that they had been written by a friend of mine who happened to be standing there). There is also talk of writing a manifesto expressing their main aims.

And another account of the slogans heard...:

Take the Memorandum and get out of here!
The people don't forget, they hang traitors
Aah! Ooh! And I fuck the IMF
Liars, rats, come and get us
It must burn, it must burn, the brothel that is Parlament

Police were again today very relaxed...

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Thursday, 26 May 2011

These are the minutes of the first open meeting in Syntagma Square. Proceedings were held from 10.00pm to 1.00am. Overall, there were 83 speakers. Among them, there were unemployed, students, public and private sector workers, self-employed, journalists, artists, students and teachers, homeless people, housewives and many others. The minutes are presented in a chronological order, without giving the speakers' personal details, which were often not mentioned anyhow. There have been suggestions for organization, cries of agony, cries of condemnation, but opinions were always respected and were formulated in a process of direct democracy.

The minutes of the first Assembly.

- The other day the far right were beating and stabbing immigrants, those immigrants from countries that pioneered and taught the rest of the world the insurrectionary actions taking place in recent months.
- We should set up camps in all open spaces around Greece; we should set up working groups with clear tasks and obligations.
- We have beauty with us against baleful bankers and bad politicians.
- Every politician who does injustice, every politician who does not respect the popular mandate must go home or go to jail.
- This is an open demonstration, a congregation where I quiver with excitement as I speak.
- Their Democracy does not guarantee equality or justice.
- We should stay in Syntagma Square, until we decide how we will solve our problems.
- When all of us out here discuss without fear, fear grows in their hearts up there in the House of Parliament.
- Right now words in Greece have lost their meaning. We say Hellas and mean EL. AS. (the Greek Police), we say LAOS (= the common people) and mean Karatzaferis' party (LAOS is a far right party). We should build momentum, find the strength, the words should regain their meaning.
- We should keep Syntagma Square and the streets shut down tonight, and every evening from now until a solution is found.
- We should not find pleasure in being consumers or customers; we should find pleasure in being proper, responsible citizens.
- The Cyclists, on their riding demonstrations on Friday, won their right of movement, they won their space. Let us follow their example.
- We should recognise our power and understand our common problems.
- The plutocratic political system must collapse; we should overthrow it with revolutionary actions.
- We should understand the issue globally, the problem of our plundered lives. We should unite with equivalent movements around the world.
- We should invite academics and lawyers to enlighten us on how to get rid of the Memorandum.
- We should organize cultural events, film screenings and concerts in our camp at Syntagma Square.
- Do not just blame the politicians; we the Greeks are to blame with our individualistic mindset.
- Let's begin with our personal change, the change within ourselves. Let's address our fellow student, our fellow worker and ask them to change their mindset. And we must all contribute.
- Let's carry forward the revolts in the Arab world. Let's rise above motherlands and nations.
- The basic problem in the foundations of democracy is indifference. Democrats are those who respect themselves and their fellow humans.
- Let's look into the eyes of our neighbours. Indifference arose from consumerism. Let's stop being indifferent.
- The system benefits few and oppresses many. Let's create groups and meetings for discussion in every neighbourhood.
- In Syntagma, this evening, I feel happy. Let's make a good start, turning off our televisions. And let's start organising.
- We have become conscious and we now ask for the return of democracy to its base, that is to all of us. There should be no symbol or flag. And let's all dethrone ourselves from our comforts and get organised.
- Let's make a blog for information and coordination.
- We participate the best we can to change our lives, to judge Democracy by the correct measure, the measure of human life and dignity.
- In Pnyx, in ancient times, meetings founded the Republic. Let's change our lives, change our history. In the company where I work, they changed up, hired those unemployed, and gave them a job.
- Let's throw out those who are mortgaging our future. Let's keep strong and vibrant our organising from below.
- This evening, our faces were lit by a smile. We are all emotionally uplifted. Let's keep up it and let's move forward.
- We must punish the politicians and fight for this punishment.
- Every evening at 6.00pm we should congregate, and hold a meeting at the 9.00pm.
- The mainstream media and politicians are fearful right now. The protest is too big, the assembly is too big. Let's not allow them to co-opt us.
- Let's begin to formulate our demands. Politics must change, the government must be ousted, we must formulate our own proposals.
- To hell with the debt they are offloading on us. There should be a radical political transformation of words and acts, with assemblies at its base. We must resist vehemently.
- The Health System is collapsing, there no are supplies, people are at risk in hospitals, they are robbing us and leaving us to our fate.
- I took the microphone to apologize to the young kids, the many young people here, to apologize for Greece and the politics we are handing over to them.
- Let's begin a process of self-determination and self-institution, restoring our relationship to politics. We must work for this tenaciously, to build a better world.
- Let's give strength to all of us, citizens, artists, ordinary people who today took a deep breath.
- Let's exercise our right to civil disobedience; let us proclaim it with passion and strength. Let's make history from the start.
- Democracy began here in Athens. Politics is not a bad thing. For our own improvement, let us take it again in our hands.
- The dissemination and broadcasting of everything going on here is an important step for informing and coordinating, let's seek that in every way.
- Let's bring a saucepan with food, to help us endure the long meetings. This can be the small but significant contribution of those of us who cannot spend many hours here.
- Our problems are common and they are what unites us. Let's not let labels, partisanship or any individual choices of ours separate us.
- People, do not be afraid. Stay calm, this is what I will also convey to my students. You should know that the economics are simple; they were only made complicated by cunning predators.
- It will be a victory when all the young people come to Syntagma Square.
- Self-organization is the only solution. The sooner we realize this, the better for everyone.
- They have brought us to our knees with their contracts. Those plutocrats, Latsis, Vardinoyiannis, the ship-owners, don't have the same interests and the same rights as us. We produce their wealth, our wealth, let's take it back in our hands.
- Debt has degraded our lives.
- The Spaniards gave us the idea and the primer. Let's coordinate with the rest of the heavily indebted South, let's mobilize. The Spaniards showed us the way.
- That we live affects us all: us, the Spaniards, the Irish, all peoples. Make that saucepan 10 saucepans, so that we can organise lawyers, economists, students, all of us, to contribute what we can with our knowledge, but mainly to spread the message, to pass on what happened here in to our family, friends, colleagues.
- Life is precious to us all.
- Young people, take your destiny in your hands. They are taking us back to Middle
-Age conditions of slavery. The current struggle is a struggle against barbarism.
- The politics are also many tools. One of them is coordinated with other rebels. Currently, Spain, on a giant screen broadcast what is happening here.
- For now, we are many; let's start thinking as one; to put it another way, all for one, one for all.
- It would be very nice, if as I speak, I could be translated into other languages, or for there to be a sign interpreter for the deaf.
- It will be a great moment when we rip off the straitjacket they have tied us in. From today we start to renegotiate the balance of power in Greek society and politics, a balance that now weighs to the side of the government.
- They are taking away the social and political gains made over centuries. They are taking away our hope, which we have to regenerate.
- Let's overturn the relations of political and social power.
- A good move for socialisation and discussion would be if we brought here, to the public space, those activities we would have carried out in our private spaces.
- They are slandering civil servants, teachers, lecturers, doctors. Justice is not to be flattened down to 500 Euros. They deprive us of our dignity.
- Politics is an affair that concerns us all. Society is bankrupt. Let's change that.
- My generation, of around 50 years old, is in there in the House of Parliament, and I apologize for what it has led you to endure.
- I am 24 years old, sick and tired of hearing about -isms and a wooden language. I want something to change, through appreciating and recognizing our own responsibilities.
- We are here to find the true Democracy.
- Let's begin with addressing each other like we were brothers.
- What is needed is to live with dignity and with heads held high. To revolt against the mockery. We don't legitimise any Memorandum.
- Greece is on the precipice and the country's money is outside the country. They have robbed us and continue to rob us.
- They promise us equality in social degradation. We must fight for equality in social advancement.
- The first question is to know why we do what we are doing here. I have AIDS and cancer, I am homeless and I'm not ashamed to say it. We all need strength, and to know why we are doing this.
- The isn't a more timely act, with a deep political meaning, than taking our lives into our hands.
- Let us all become servants of and accountable to the people.
- Let us move to defend the Constitution and Greece, as is mentioned in article 120 of the Constitution.
- Here, we are instituting the new political power, and we are crushing fear and misery.
- The message of rebellion must travel everywhere. Let's work for us. All the unemployed must get mobilised and organised.
- Nothing can work without us, without our own hands. Start general strikes everywhere, we must become a fist.
- Let's become a virus and scatter everywhere.
- There are publishers such as Kouris who owe money everywhere, and terrorize and coerce employees.
- The tax system is not the same for industrialists and the big property owners. Same rights and obligations for all.
- It is wrong to think that it is also our fault, wrong to turn a knife against each other. Unity, solidarity and commitment of all of us to our common struggle.
- They are selling off energy, and make great fortunes with their underhand deals.
- Let's start with structures of self
-organization, a collective kitchen, some cultural events, let's find producers to give us their products. Syntagma Square must become a central example of the struggle for the whole of Greece.
- We must safeguard what is taking place here. It is our own affair and must remain so.
- Youth is coming out with heart, with faith, peacefully, not like in December 2008. We have all grown up.
- After 'Velos', and the Polytechnic, this is the first act of direct democracy and moral uplift in Greece. (Refers to ÔVelos', the warship that defected from military exercises with NATO, and the Polytechnic rebellion, both associated with the fall of the colonels' junta in Ô73)

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25 May 2011

Today 20,000+ people gathered in Syntagma Square in Athens following the Spanish example, following a call on FB and Twitter, and large numbers have also come out in squares in Thessaloniki, Patras, Volos, Larisa, Heraklion, Chania, Rethymno. The slogans mentioned are 'sell out, sell out, you're gonna get a wallop', 'we are awake, what time is it? Time to go', 'shame on you'... The call was to come out and express indignation away from political parties. A lot of people came out who hadn't joined demos before, because it's almost compulsory you go out 'with' a certain organisation. They are now coming out against representatives of any kind, although this can easily fall prey to nationalism and bland types of demands.

Here are some photos

One of the banners here says 'I can't live with unemployment, or with going to Australia'...

In English from Athens News.

People are staying overnight at Syntagma indeed, planning to put up tents. There's just been a meeting among those remaining in the square about what to do, but also with young people talking about their experiences of unemployment and disillusionment with voting (Zougla.gr is broadcasting live from the square). Earlier on when a trade union march of the DEI (National Electricity Company) workers passed near the square they were booed away. The main reason was not so much that the unions did not represent them well but that the call was explicitly to come down without a flag or banner, as people, not as a group of workers making demands for themselves (which is what civil servants are increasingly seen as). That of course is not miles away from nationalist / rightist anti-strike discourses but it is also something different.

At another point when a group of anarchists turned up, part of the crowd stood between them and the police to prevent any confrontation. The point was to keep things peaceful because street war with police is seen as counterproductive. I suppose this is based on the imaginary of rebuilding the public sphere within the square...? The police has been very hands off so far.

Judging from comments on right wing papers, they did not particularly like what happened, going on about 'how many of those demonstrators are corrupt tax evaders...'

The media emphasise the nationalist and more compromised elements of the congregations but it's not to say they don't exist. The ubiquitous references to 'citizens' and 'Greeks' have attracted some ultranationalist elements within this. At the same time there is also talk of it not just being about Greek citizens. But things are still open ended and it's a question of what will prevail. There is mistrust of the received discourses so it would definitely not help for anyone to turn up now and preach about communism (they'd think they are being patronised by the communist party!) the most hopeful thing would be for assemblies to generate discussions about politics & economics from scratch and to practice relating to each other differently, these are the possibilities opened up by such square occupations...

Thanks to the pervasive logic of cybernetics and the planetary roll-out of digital networks, feedback has come to determine the behaviour of post-war capitalism and culture. Expanding on a talk given at The Showroom gallery's Signal:Noise conference, Benedict Seymour considers the uncomfortable parallels between the avant-garde and post-Fordist harnessing of 'free inputs' within networks of production

‘There is no such thing as an empty space or an empty time. There is always something to see, something to hear.' So said John Cage in his 1958 lecture, ‘Experimental Music'. This article argues that the aesthetic or cultural transformation of absence into presence, the revelation, by subtraction, of new raw materials or free inputs, bears a relation to the logic of accumulation in an era of financialised capitalist self-cannibalisation. What Cage valorised in the aesthetic sphere, developing concepts of feedback and self-regulation formulated in cybernetics, anticipated the innovations of modern finance and the production - by subtraction - of empty/full spaces of accumulation.

Image: Hans Haacke, Condensation Cube, 1963

The term ‘feedback' originates from the inter-disciplinary science of cybernetics. Cybernetics is concerned with regulation within closed systems. It looks for and exploits circular causal relationships, ‘feedback', within these systems. Negative feedback is a process in which action and its effects are fed back to the actor in order to better coordinate aim and result. The loop proceeds from action (e.g. firing a machine gun at an enemy plane in order to shoot it down), to sensing (how is the target affected?), to comparison with the desired goal (has the plane been shot down?), to action (shoot again, a degree to the right), and so on. The circle of action, monitoring, correction and further action, integrates error in order to regulate and improve performance. Incorporating indeterminacy and recursive logic enables an automation and expansion of control. On the other hand, as we will see, this virtuous circle of negative feedback can also invert into its opposite. ‘Positive feedback', from the perspective of control, is not positive at all, but represents a spiralling disorder or perturbation of the system. A vicious circle.

It is no accident that the circular causality of the feedback loop resembles the cycle of capital accumulation described by Marx (Money - Commodity - more Money). Information feedback has played an increasingly important role in the larger loop of capital accumulation for decades, if not centuries. The cybernetic revolution simply radicalises solutions to capitalist crisis proposed by Ford, Taylor and Keynes, expanding the ambit of control by flattening the world into a single dimension of information. Tiqqun claim in their essay ‘The Cybernetic Hypothesis', that the internet has become a global cybernetic system, enabling capital to manipulate and monitor consumer preferences. Consumer behaviour, for example, is subject to the management of financial markets: ‘Each actor in capitalist valorization is a real-time back-up of quasi-permanent feedback loops.'

We may disagree that the information society has brought about a new form of value creation in which information is wealth. Nevertheless the rise of the information society certainly coincides with the installation everywhere of feedback loops which monitor and regulate consumption, production and distribution. Capital strains to reduce its overheads by outsourcing labour to consumers - witness the rise of social networking - and subjects all social processes to measurement and quantification. Through privatisation, marketisation and the destruction of earlier modes of welfare, society is subsumed under the commodity form. Like good students of cybernetics, New Labour set about installing forms of performance measurement and modification across the public sector, primarily in health and education, imposing value as a dominant metaphor on all areas of social reproduction. This indexed a need to generate growth, no doubt, to find substitutes for industrial production and to increase the pressure on workers of all kinds. The deepening penetration of informational feedback loops contributes to an extension of the working day and a breakdown of limits to exploitation. The ‘efficiency' of this process was predicated on another order of feedback, however: the continued rise of the UK as a global centre for the creation and retail of fictitious capital. The production of a specific form of ‘information', credit and debt, is crucial. The UK's health and education sectors, not to mention the UK's other ‘unproductive' services, could only deliver a facsimile of ‘growth' in relation to the City's siphoning off of the global value product.

To understand the larger feedback loop in which the circuits of ‘information society' function, then, we need to look at the feedback loops of finance capital. An increasingly large proportion of this information represents claims on non-existent value, i.e. credit and debt, as well as the plethora of financial instruments - derivatives, Collateralised Debt Obligations, Credit Default Swaps, etc. - that dominate the global finance market. In this process information does indeed become hegemonic - not as value, but as fictitious capital. This does not amount to an actual process of valorisation, merely the ever-increasing generation of claims on future, as yet non-existent (or no longer existent) value. In order for these claims on value to be made good, supported and sustained, an anterior process of valorisation and expropriation remains necessary. As in Marx's day, there remains no substitute for the expenditure of human labour in the creation of value.

Fictitious capital comes to function as a kind of effective, but precarious, surrogate for value which both depends on and is undone by the financial feedback loops that constitute it. In David McNally's excellent 2008 essay, ‘From Financial Crisis to World Slump', he describes how the becoming-pervasive of value as the form of measurement of all social activity coincides precisely with its becoming tenuous and volatile as a measure of... value. Its absolute triumph is predicated on its increasing shakiness as a claim. McNally writes, ‘With the end of dollar-gold convertibility in 1971 and the move to floating exchange rates (rates that literally fluctuate all day each and every day according to values determined on world markets), currency values, especially for the dollar, became much more volatile. As a result, the formation of values at the world level became much more uncertain and less predictable.'

The growth of finance is predicated on an actual decommodification of (world) money. To put it another way, the commodification of everything else stems from the decommodification of the dollar as global reserve currency: ‘The measure of value property of money - the capacity of money to express the socially necessary (abstract) labor times inherent in commodities - was rendered highly unstable.'

The suspension of value as measure is, paradoxically but logically, expressed in a new over-accumulation of forms of measurement, beginning with those most influential forms of measure - the financial instruments called derivatives.

In essence, derivatives set out to measure and price risk. As McNally says, the increased uncertainty of value relations put an increased emphasis on risk assessment and monitoring for all capitalists, but especially those who, in a globalised market, have to deploy multiple currencies. These currencies themselves became more volatile because of the suspension of dollar-gold convertability. The basic loop of financialisation is thus the movement from the suspension of dollar-gold convertability to the increase in volatility of currencies to the proliferation of mechanisms (derivative contracts) for monitoring and insuring against these fluctuations. But a further cybernetic spiral immediately arises from the growth of derivatives as risk measure and hedge. Derivatives become themselves a source of risk. Because one can buy insurance against risks to assets one doesn't actually own they can function instead as forms of financial speculation. For instance, a Credit Default Swap [CDS] against the risk of GM defaulting can be purchased even if one owns none of GM's stocks or bonds. Speculators can win by shorting the circuits of value they feed on.

Whether gambling on currency movements or exploiting value gaps between markets (arbitrage), the same logic applies. Tools originally conceived as a way to measure and so more precisely price risk, and so master volatility, become themselves a source of fluctuations in prices as their use en masse gives rise to new forms of financial feedback. As well as impacting on the material world immediately through the devaluation of currencies and drastic price changes, the diffusion and networking of risk enabled by derivatives displaces risk from the local to the systemic level. The virtuous circle (‘negative feedback') of debt creation, becomes ever more likely to invert into a vicious circle (‘positive feedback') of depreciation. Guaranteed returns based on risk-managed revenue streams prove to be fictitious.

There isn't space here to properly go into the workings of Value at Risk (VaR) and other measures and models of risk. It should be noted, though, that such forms represent the repetition at a higher power of the basic reifications of capital. Homogenising and objectifying particular socially and politically determined risks as ‘abstract risk', they are the financial sphere's cognate of ‘abstract labour' in the sphere of production. Markowitz's ‘Portfolio theory' of risk management and the VaR measure depend on this abstraction of risk to automate and autonomise the assessment of specific investments. Once achieved this becomes an industrial process. Human oversight and investigation of particulars is displaced by ‘black boxes' computing homogenised variables.

These phenomena are not alone sufficient to explain the systemic crisis of capital, however. The growth of speculative finance is inseparable from the larger process of social reproduction and the productivity of capital as a whole. To put it crudely, a crisis of over-production and under-consumption arising from massively increasing technical productivity dictates the expanding destruction of both exchange and use values in order to reproduce the conditions for capital accumulation.

If information does not produce as much value as is claimed, then not only fictitious claims but also productive assets must be cancelled for accumulation to continue. As fictitious values, previously treated as if they were real assets, went into freefall during the credit crunch, real capital began to be wiped out, too. McNally: ‘factories are mothballed, corporations go bust and sell off their buildings, machines, land, customers lists and so on at bargain basement prices.' This process of destruction is still in its early stages, with many more forms of financial feedback yet to begin unwinding.

Here we see the real signature of cybernetic capitalism: not infinite growth through deregulated feedback but rather an intensified and expanding destruction of value. The zero growth ideology was first enunciated in a report, ‘The Limits to Growth', by a group of MIT cyberneticians commissioned by the capitalist think-tank the Club of Rome in 1972. From this set of scenarios for capitalist ‘sustainability', published at the very moment the dollar was being decoupled from gold, to Thatcher-era deindustrialisation and privatisation, the feedback loops of finance have been intimately linked to the driving down of social reproduction (the sustenance of humans, infrastructure and environment) at a global level. As McNally notes, the imposition of the value form - ‘value logics' - across every sphere of social existence simultaneously reflects unprecedented financial volatility and impels an epochal attack on proletarian reproduction through dismantling of subsidies to subsistence goods, removal of wage protections, welfare and privatisation of public services, etc. All this contributed to the further rise of financialisation, and such accelerated value destruction is visibly the telos of ‘cybernetic' capital again now that the financial feedback loops have begun to unwind, in our current phase of aggressive and open austerity.

Before and After Feedback: Culture, Politics and Finance

There is poetry as soon as we realize that we possess nothing.

- John Cage

What then of culture, not to mention politics, in this by no means completed era of financialisation and cybernetic self-regulation? Long before the rise of derivatives, feedback was being explored as key to new artistic forms and practices. If, as Tiqqun claim, network society is a kind of massive global cybernetic system, and the social/cultural structures of feedback (internet, social networks, workplace monitoring of performance, logistics, meta-finance, etc.) possess distinctive political and economic characteristics, how does culture anticipate, reflect or resist these?

We can begin by considering how the cultural and social structures of feedback, like the financial ones, today mesh with capital's major feedback loop. Capital is now compelled by its own logic to destroy an increasing amount of the means of production it commands. It needs to devalue labour-power and avoids paying for reproduction of other forms of capital. So today we see expanding forms of ‘non-reproduction', including: the annexation of labour-power outside the advanced capitalist countries through globalisation; the bolstering of profits by paying workers less than the cost of their reproduction; the non-maintenance of infrastructure; the non-replacement of natural resources, etc.

Image: The programme of the première concert of John Cage's 4'33", August 29, 1952 

Considered from this perspective, feedback - both financial and cultural - is not just about abstraction. Rather the growth of the network form, and the measuring and monitoring of all areas of social existence, extends the scope of non-reproduction exponentially. The annexation of ‘free inputs' - environmental, infrastructural, and re/productive - is enabled by the network. At the theoretical level cybernetics' collapse of the distinction between man and nature, between states (and between States) subsumed under a universal set of feedback loops, anticipates the unified field of (self-)regulation and ‘self-reproduction' to use editorial collective Midnight Notes' term, imposed in neoliberal capitalism.

Cybernetics' higher order of abstraction implies an expanded field of increasingly ‘extractive' accumulation, in which both waged and unwaged labour are available. Mute readers will no doubt be familiar with the idea of ‘free labour' as precondition of the social network. Both fictitious claims (finance) and social networks (culture) require ‘free inputs' - unpaid labour and unpaid for assets - to perform. Derivatives' performativity as claims on value assumes and commands unpaid and non-reproductive labour - for example, through their effect on the price of commodities and labour in ‘low GDP' countries. Networked cultural production solicits ‘plabour' and ‘prosumer' activity and individual capitals are able to reduce their overheads, if not increase their rate of exploitation, by the outsourcing of content production to the end-user. ‘Paying attention' may not create value directly but clearly the formerly ‘passive' consumer has been activated. Both terms - culture and finance - are increasingly interchangeable; finance is aestheticised as it claims become absurdly fictitious, culture is reduced to finance as its fictions become absurdly monetised.

I would like to suggest here that the rise of such a culture of ‘free inputs' and financial feedback is anticipated and prepared - if not foreseen or desired - in the neo-avant-garde of the '50s and after. Seeing feedback as a route to a more autonomous and egalitarian cultural and social existence, a way of dissolving the hierarchical structures of a bureaucratised mass society, the pioneers of cybernetic and network culture generally failed to target the Ur-form of feedback, that is, the value form per se.ⁱ Both counter- and corporate culture converged on a more ‘liberated', technocratically enlightened, form of circulation (and re/production), which, ironically, presupposed the deregulation of money and the looting of those subject to the diktats of decommodified wealth.

John Cage's ethos of impersonality in artistic production shares, by no means accidentally, something of cybernetics' flattening of the man/nature (organism/environment) distinction.ⁱⁱ Conceived as an aesthetics of Buddhist self-abdication, the shift from subjective intention to aleatory process has structural similarities to the outsourcing of evaluation and decision later seen in black box trading and other forms of financial feedback. Rather than creating finished works, the (post-)cybernetic artist or composer becomes a programmer of cultural software, setting up self-regulating, ideally self-executing systems or processes. From La Monte Young to Phillip Glass, Sol LeWitt to Hans Haacke, the implications of processual feedback as form are manifold but an overall shift in orientation is apparent. The Duchampian readymade, the ultimate, or rather foundational ‘license to loot' already implicit in Fordist artistic production (and productivism), becomes ‘for-itself' with the post-Cageian phenomenologists of feedback.ⁱⁱⁱ Cage makes the audience into producers with 4'33", his own production being confined to a minimal instructional score. La Monte Young seeks ways to let the untreated raw sonic material resonate without intervention - ‘we must let the sounds be what they are'. Rather than working on the world in instrumental fashion to shape it, we must find ways to give it back its independence and listen to it better. This may be a higher-level ‘reskilling' of the deskilled listener set free from their traditional interpretive duties, but it could also be read as a miniature manifesto of non-reproduction.

The composer's (non-)work shifts from the creation of teleological musical narrative to the precipitation and harvesting of psycho-acoustic ‘free inputs'. These are catalysed by the creation within interacting streams of sound-data, of virtual or ‘gestalt' musical lines (Young's ‘combination tones', Steve Reich's ‘resulting patterns', etc.). Phillip Glass, whose additive compositional process eschews a goal-directed temporality or offers ‘recombinant teleologies' (in Robert Fink's phrase) discovered a similar unplanned qualitative ‘plus' while listening to a performance of one of his works in a concert hall, deciding to consciously incorporate such psycho-acoustic effects in future works. Unplanned outputs become new inputs within an infinite, responsive, musical feedback process. Notoriously, musical Minimalism synced opposing temporalities to a single pulse, in the process becoming ‘crossover music'. As in financial derivatives, which align existing revenue streams to produce more than the sum of their parts, it is enough to bring two repeating musical patterns into coordination to produce a virtual third. The temporality of the derivative is also anticipated in the split or schizoid time of minimalist composition, in which ceaseless activity at the molecular level produces stasis and stability on the macro scale, simultaneous acceleration and deceleration.

Both financialisation and Minimalism can be described as ‘machines for the suppression of (historical) time', and with some justice have been criticised as exhibiting the positivist/mystic drive to master and suspend temporal succession, to preempt and overcome history by application of self-correcting models. (Stockhausen is overtly anti-historical in his pronouncements, while Glass and Reich seem to want to tap into a secular eternity that mirrors the reticulated flow of advertising and TV). Musical feedback can signify as a dream of perpetual motion, as growth without excess, as a regained cosmic balance. Whatever the ideological orientation or intentions of the individual composers, many aspects of systems-influenced music seem to dream capital's subsequent involutions as a utopian exit from it. The creation of musical feedback loops yields a form of sonic (sometimes spiritual) ‘added value' that is attributable to neither composer nor performers, but depends on their environment (the concert hall or studio) and the reverberations released, or captured, by the unfolding musical material. In this magical aesthetic gift economy there is nevertheless an echo of the larger restructuring of production, and contraction of social reproduction, in which such cultural forms were discovered and developed. Call it ‘unmediated adjacency', but Downtown New York Minimalism was certainly born somewhere between Madison Avenue and Wall Street. The suspension of dollar-gold convertibility and of linear musical development in Minimalism certainly occur at the same point on the historical score. As does the bankruptcy, and then gentrification, of New York...

Whatever one makes of this brief exercise in cultural-economic isomorphism, it does seem worth urgently asserting the currency (or rather, bankruptcy) of certain post-cybernetic conceptions of culture. An ethos of self-limited and self-sustaining activity, freed from the hubris of modernist telologies of growth, linked to a notion of ‘generosity', ‘gift economy' and ‘DIY' emancipation may (still) seem appealing. Yet, however militant the refusal of instrumental reason, linear time, progression, etc., this ethos predominantly operates by bracketing out the dull compulsion of the value form. This leaves it hostage to the kind of reappropriation now being conducted by the capitalism of the Big Society. In many counter-cultural products and processes the commitment to dissolution of the work into the flow of negative feedback and free-floating (non-consumerist) desire coexisted with a project for the creation and replication of enclaves or islands outside the sphere of consumerism or ‘capitalism' conceived as a bureaucratic regime of unfettered development. Today we see the reductio ad immiseration of this larger trajectory into an ethics of ‘doing more with less' (famously dissected in season 5 of The Wire's extended montage of the restructured institutions of news and policing). Architects and theorists such as Rem Koolhaas and artists such as Marjetica Porti? encourage us to embrace the self-organising, self-regulating ‘creativity' and ‘improvisation' of the ‘entrepreneurial' slum dweller, hymning the efficiencies of outsourcing former state services to the absolutely destitute. Policy wonks such as Charles Leadbeater eulogise the mendicant refuse collectors of Recife Brazil, with their supermarket trolleys and contract-free labour. Networked creativity can be read as a euphemism for the harvesting of ‘free inputs', which the eulogists assume will add up to sufficient savings and value creation to keep the financialised system in motion.

All this is the consummation of the cybernetic capitalist tendency to ‘activate' potential by removing means of support and subsistence, letting the raw (human) materials resonate to the newly opened up environment of non-reproduction. The dead hand of the state or over-arching structure of welfare and services is withdrawn to facilitate the free play of the system's molecular constituents. Capitalism as open system is increasingly dependent on the annexation of the ‘outside' in all its forms, and where this outside is definitively assimilated it must be recreated endogenously by the subtraction of existing social reproduction.

Rather than recycling forms of cultural feedback developed more or less consciously as a subversion of the (Fordist, statist and bureaucratic, etc.) social order - a project that was always, at best, ambivalent in its implications for the majority of the population - perhaps we should shift our focus, both culturally and politically, to the ways financial feedback has laid the ground for today's era of struggles around subsistence in a society subsumed under an ever more volatile value form. As an expanding global proletariat confronts contracting social reproduction, the question for cultural producers is whether one (solely) serves an extended programme of value destruction or (at least) contests it.

Revolts catalysed by Twitter and Facebook, alongside the offline networking of all those put into contact with, and forced ever closer to slavery by, financialised systems are the positive feedback loops beginning to resonate after years of controlled deregulations and informatisation. The accelerating repetition of ineffective financial moves generates an ever greater financial contradiction which is transposed across the social scale from banks to states to populations. As subsidies are withdrawn and barriers to capital dismantled, this contradiction is translated into food and fuel price inflation, in turn triggering riots and a proletarian music of revolt ripping through once stable states. With the socialist - and now fundamentalist - control circuitry torn out or severely compromised by financialised capital itself, perhaps an unregulatable feedback will ensue.

An unprecedented coordination of class decomposition and social non-reproduction has made systemic risk, in every sense, far greater than it has been for decades, greater than in the entire history of capitalism, perhaps. If the spiral of feedback leading from financial bubble to insurrectionary wave that now seems possible is fulfilled, then we may yet have to revise our opinion of the long era of financialisation. It will have been more than just a fiction of wealth - the imposition of the value form as a volatile but empty claim to value creation. In a final spiral of cyber-capitalist feedback, finance may prove to have been the amplifier par excellence of the noise that abolishes the capitalist signal, that is of the signal which is value - the one, supremely abstract, supremely material thing it always must communicate, send and receive. An exponential positive feedback in class struggle should not be assumed, however, any more than the teleological projections of cybernetics (e.g. inevitable planetary death by overpopulation, etc.). But one would have to be more myopic than a risk analyst, or middle-eastern CIA operative, to miss the current potential for the destructive cycle of financial feedback to invert into an unprecedented global cycle of struggles against capital per se.

Benedict Seymour <ben AT kein.org> is a contributing editor to Mute and is currently working on a film treatment about a popstar who survives a serious car crash to discover that he can suddenly see the price of everything he looks at

Thanks to Hannah Black for additional editorial assistance

Footnotes

iThere were important exceptions of course, such as Henry Flynt who has a strong sense of music as class struggle, and a gift for mathematics. And La Monte Young remained immune to the allure of a music industry undergoing its own immediate form of restructuring and non-production.

iiA recent article by John Brockman is suggestive about the influence of cybernetics on Cage. The composer gave ‘an ongoing seminar about media, communications, art, music, and philosophy that focused on the ideas of Norbert Wiener, Claude Shannon, and Marshall McLuhan. Cage was aware of research conducted in the late 1930s and 1940s by Wiener, Shannon, Vannevar Bush, Warren McCulloch, and John von Neumann, who were all present at the creation of cybernetic theory.' Cage also appreciated McLuhan's idea that, as a result of communications technology, ‘"There's only one mind, the one we all share." We had to go beyond personal mind-sets: "Mind" had become socialized.'... ‘a "collective consciousness" that we could tap into by creating "a global utilities network."' See, ‘The Edge Annual Question 2010: How Is the Internet Changing the Way You Think?', The Huffington Post, March 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-brockman/the-collective-conscious_b_418453.html

iiiOf course the readymade is not necessarily only this, but as an artistic technology it can be deployed in different ways, one of which includes a kind of asocial, uncritical annexation of available resources; much neo-conceptualism would hardly be possible without such a (mis)use of the readymade.

The recent edition of the Netaudio festival, staged in London, posed the question of the sonic and musical properties specific to the internet. Multimedia artist and musician Eleonora Oreggia went to see if it twiddled all the right knobs

In his 339 year-old work Phonurgia Nova, Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher - often described as 'the last renaissance man' - theorised a future in which the union of the mechanical and physical arts and nature would produce machines able to transmit sound to remote places.¹

This projection entailed the rebirth of acoustics in connection with architecture, sound, interactivity and machinery. The book, whose title (which is Greek transliterated into Latin) means 'a new method of sound production', has only recently been rediscovered. Kircher embodies the syncretic and multidisciplinary range of interests typical of renaissance erudition and the Baroque vision of the 'marvellous', in which science, magic and the arts play together in order to amaze, create, deceive and surprise. The meraviglia (‘wonder') of such experiments used to be explained at the end through a mixture of calibrated hermetism and exact science. The figure of the renaissance scientist, blurred with that of the artist and the inventor, closely resembles the archetypal contemporary new media artist. Ideally an artisan and hacker, s/he is also musician and programmer, as well as poet and painter.

Image: Illustration by Athanasius Kircher of the construction of a statue able to emit both articulated and inarticulated sounds,

Phonurgia Nova, 1672

Kircher, who was dreaming of incredible machines and architectures which embedded non-electronic amplifiers avant la lettre, described diverse solutions to the transmission of sound at a distance, or of music to a different room, or for devices which could amplify voices rendering every word, even whispers, distinctly audible (delectationes).² He also analysed the phenomenon of echo and other effects of sound architecture, finally planning the construction of a talking statue with moving eyes and mouth, connected to a spiral tube inserted into a building which gave onto a public space. The tube, acting as conductor, distorter and amplifier, would transform the wind into breath, and the sounds of the public space into human or animal voices. Kirchner, through his conception of sound as amplifiable signal, was probably beginning to consider noise - its propagation and gain - as possible material for the production of music and artefacts.

Continuing a related discourse many years later, Netaudio - the international festival dedicated to the sounds of the internet, first showcased in Switzerland and Germany in 2005 - took place in London between 13-15 May 2011.

The opening concert at Café Oto featured two special names in contemporary European electronic music: Valerio Tricoli and Robert Piotrowicz, who performed in solo and duo. Tricoli performed with his inseparable Revox tape recorder. His acousmatic music recalls the spatialisation of an inner vision, where memory and dream project an imaginary dimension over the present, allowing the site of listening to mutate and deform, structuring the development of a partially abstract narrative. Their incredible duo struck an elegant and literate note, initiating the festival's program.

The night continued at Apiary Studios in Hackney, where a sequence of house and deep techno sets - including Dave Congreve, Alex Fisher, Leif and Chris Box - allowed festival artists and attendees to meet and interact, slipping from one room to the dance floor to the yard, drinking a beer or burning yet another fag.

On Saturday at the Roundhouse the Sonic Maze art exhibition opened up its circular labyrinth of small rooms, each dedicated to a different work. The themes of memory in relation to time and languages (of codification), and that of sound in relation to space and individuation (or the subjective listening experience), emerged as central motifs recurring throughout the festival, especially in the case of real-time music production and diffusion.

Monomatic's gentle response to the era of the iPod's development was Modular Music Box, a series of interconnected devices creating a beautiful electro-magnetic carillon, a clockwork musical instrument whose shape and function narrate the poetic and stormy relationship between digital and analogue, memory and object, reproduction and execution.

The theme of memory was also present in No Numbers by Andrew Black, where John Foxx's electronic music track Mr No was transformed into a sequence of numbers, the digital codification of the sample. The visitor was invited to copy with pencil and paper the sequence of strings, facing an impossible task which addressed and differentiated human and machinic capabilities.

Image: Installation shot of the Sonic Maze exhibition for Netaudio, Roundhouse, London 2011

In the next room, the work Listen In by Dan Scott shifted the focus from systems of notation to the materiality of the signal's transmission and its intrinsic fragility: 20 portable radios were reproducing the experience of listening to radio Heart FM from 20 different locations across London. Each broadcast occupied a 1Mhz range running across the FM spectrum from 88Mhz to 108Mhz, locations and listeners ranged from a man listening via his mobile phone on the bus to a mother in a living room to a carpenter in a Peckham workshop. These 20 radios, all playing identical content which sounded slightly different according to the device and its context, revealed both the central role of the listener and the characteristically plural identity of live signals, which can be simultaneously equal and diverse if the reproducing system or listening modality changes.

Robertina Šebjani? and Luka Frelih's Pufination went one step further, abstracting the concept of the net as a mythical tale: there is a sensitive network of artificial biospheres ready to emit music and sound by incorporating the visitor into its ecosystem. There is no completion without external interaction, and the sensor interface becomes the point of contact between radically different entities: humans and biospheres. Through their conjunction Pufination can speak, becoming a hybrid instrument of hard and flesh-ware.

Duelling Fans was another gesture of re-appropriation of everyday industrial sounds, objects and commodities which produced an aesthetic interpretation of listening. Two fans, posed one in front of the other like two guitars in a rock ‘n' roll band, were presented like musical instruments. Noise was also the subject of Jody Rose's Singing Bridges, an installation which uses bridges as musical instruments; the sound of vibrations in bridge cables is recorded over a nine-year period, in various locations around the world. Time and space are contracted, and architectural elements again become musical instruments.

On Sunday afternoon, in the centre of the maze, B Channel Audio Programme, organised in collaboration with Call & Response, was an 8-channel immersive event playing pieces by Sarah Boothroyd, Eric La Casa, Robert Van Heumen, Jeremy Keenan, Matt Lewis, Kaffe Matthews, Tom Slater, Ralf Steinbrüchel and Jacob Kirkegaard in rotation, all specifically created for an 8-channel spatial listening experience. While the sound become tactile, the listener's movement through space was central, and this subjective listening built a relative, mutable and active experience.

At the same time, the Netaudio Open Platform animated Roundhouse Torquil's bar with an afternoon of live music showcasing emerging artists selected by public submission. The community chose London based Cuntbucket, Regolith, Preslav Literary School, Jan Liberbarek, Jo Thomas and Tidy Kid.

Netaudio also offered a number of free workshops to explore the thematics emerging from the festival. Procedural Audio by Andy Farnell was a 90 minute high-speed introductory tour to Pure Data, an open source graphical programming environment for real-time audio, video and interactive systems. The Los Apps Workshop with RJDJ, held by Robert Thomas and Joe White, focused on the process of delivering interactive music projects using mainstream applications for mobile phones. The Soundcloud Workshop, 'Giving the Web a Voice' looked at SoundCloud, a platform for audio self-publishing and sharing. Among the few respectable social networks that Web 2.0 has produced, SoundCloud allows musicians to share, upload and listen to each other's music in a fast and simple way, offering the possibility to comment on specific points of the track's time-line. The workshop focused on Airtime, a free open source software for remote radio station scheduling and management.

Netaudio, in trying to reflect and convene discussion alongside staging performances and an exhibition, gave the Sunday conference at the Roundhouse a central position. The core theme, subdivided into three main sections, was the exploration of the internet's intersection with other technologies and cultural practices.

The morning panel, Politics, Protest and Sound, looked at music as a form of resistance, a left-wing way of making politics. In fact, according to keynote speaker Matthew Herbert - who wrote a manifesto in 2000 titled 'Personal Contract for the Composition of Music' - music is political all the time. Aiming at a radical shift in musical forms, he enumerated a number of crises: those of technique, synthesis, distribution, listening, the philosophy of musicians and of confidence and context. iTunes music presents no credits and no context, and there is a lack of ambition behind the capitalist mode of consumption. According to Herbert, the politics that inform practice must come from elsewhere, as an example he discussed an appeal he had addressed to the Palestinian and Israeli witnesses of the conflict, an invitation to collect and share recordings of 10 good and 10 bad sounds, which became material for composition. The question of ‘what to do next at the forefront of music production?' emerged, as well as the perceived need to stop recording in studios and to stop using pre-existing samples, to which could be added the supercession of the loop as the basis of electronic compositional structure.

Mark Fisher, blogger, academic and writer for The Wire, looked at what's happening to music culture during the shift towards a ‘post-capitalist' world; a world where capitalism is not understood as the only possible alternative and neoliberalism has failed to satisfy those desires whose promise of fulfilment had once driven its widespread acceptance. Now that technological development allows new forms of social collectivity there is, he argued, a new space for refining the formal qualities of that utopian dimension which was, once upon a time, lost in history.

Anthony Iles, co-editor of the anthology Noise and Capitalism and contributing editor to Mute, defined the two terms of the book's title: 'capitalism' is understood as a social relation, it refers to a system of production based on exploitation. 'Noise', besides referring to a genre of music, is everything that is not part of the original message in information theory and the physics of signals transmission. ‘Noise' is that which is not apparently relevant, a redundancy or interference, disturbance or effect of encoding and decoding. In times of turbulence, the sound of disturbance becomes the encrypted answer to the practice of music as commodity.

So what is a musical commodity now that music is virtually free?

Seeking an answer to this question beyond the much touted and fetishistic return to the object, another question comes to mind: is virtually free music really free? In a platform such as the net, hardware and software can also assume an ethical and political value. The widespread use of proprietary formats and codecs, outdated forms of licenses and closed software and hardware for the creation and reproduction of music can still bind virtually free music to the idea of commodity.

Image: Liliane Lijn on the Digital Futures and Analogue Survivals panel, Netaudio, 2011

A speaker from UK Uncut, the last panelist of the morning, narrated the story, of the campaign's multi-directional conversations through which they tried to raise consciousness over the cuts using Twitter and other not-necessarily-political online tools. At the root of these experiments was the urgent need to modify and create alter-spaces, as well the occupation of spaces.

After some consensual applause, the panel continued as a conversation with the public, which raised a number of key issues such as a general reflection on the use of silence, as much as noise and music, as a way of creating awareness and expressing protest. Matthew Herbert reminded us that recorded sound has only existed for a relatively brief time, but every other conflict produced its politics through sound - sound which we can now only imagine.

The conversation turned towards the production of music today and the relation between sound and noise, which imply each other. At the end the key question of sustainability was broached, considering open publishing, file sharing and free transmission on the one hand, and the problem of distribution on the other. What's happening to the market? And also, how do collaboration and creativity relate to each other and what new frontiers and modes of creation are opened today by current technology?

In the afternoon the panel entitled Creativity and Collaboration in the Internet Era continued the discussion with Michel Bauwens' presentation on different domains of openness, as in the practice of openness, open movements and all that can influence our consciousness. Bauwens, founder of the Foundation for Peer-to-Peer Alternatives, spelled out a message more or less as follows: let's try to envision the future in a way that allows us to change it!

Artist Tamara Barnett-Herrin presented her collaborative work 'Calendar Songs' from 2006. In this project, she used the internet to involve ‘users' in the process of creation and remix, surpassing the idea of sharing towards a more imaginative method of composition. Her tracks, uploaded monthly, could be downloaded, reworked and successively uploaded on her website. At the end of the process there were 400 remixes with eight included in the final CD. Sharing became a process of liberation, with the creative process ceasing to be a secret and isolated activity, and the work becoming public without being finished, allowing future listeners to contribute. Her project questioned the passive television-like attitude to internet use so often treated as a pool of downloadable content, and legitimated the practice of remixing.

Matthew Fuller's presentation reminded us that, although it is common opinion that the main impact of the internet on music (industry) has been piracy, it has also generated new peculiar forms of network economies. He presented and commented on two projects: Flattr - a social way to get paid online and donate money to projects you like - and Bitcoin, the peer-to peer virtual currency. Whereas Flattr's centralised system transforms the traffic on a person's site or weblog into potential profit and, counting the amount of clicks on a special button, literalises a 20th century concept of audience as a more actual and voluntary declaration of support, Bitcoin is a new revolutionary approach to the production of currency and symbolic value. It is a digital currency system based on the open source software developed by Satoshi Nakamoto in 2009. Using a distributed database spread across nodes of a peer-to-peer network, new coins are generated by a network node each time it finds the solution to a certain mathematical problem. As the number of people attempting to generate new coins changes, the difficulty in creating new coins increases.

Whereas a fiat currency acquires value through government regulation or law, Bitcoin experiments with the nature of belief in the simulation of value. Its non-centralised structure makes it unfeasible for any authority to manipulate the quantity of Bitcoins in circulation, and its value is horizontally produced by people's willingness to accept it in exchange for goods. Although some questioned the potential security of this encrypted system, what Fuller wanted to underline was the possibility of money's reinvention, approaching the idea of currency in a different and creative way.

Christoph Brunner from SenseLab tried to translate into philosophical terms his analysis of the internet and its characteristics: the internet includes more than one mode of expression and, while the subject is a collectivity, and this collectivity is built by a system of relations, through the development of digital networks the production of subjectivity becomes both collective and trans-individual.

The last panel, Digital Futures and Analogue Survivals, began with artist Liliane Lijn, whose multimedia work emphasises the relation between matter, light and energy. She gave an overview of her career and the transformation of her practice from Moon Neme, her first digital work, to Power Game. This latest one, a gambling game, was translated into an online game for Netaudio as a response to a commission by Resonance FM. Using Twitter as a platform, she discovered hidden rules that were not declared in its terms and conditions.

Andrew Blake, Professor of Media and Cultural studies at University of East London, analysed the transformation of listening and recording devices in relation to their function, use and integration into people's life and living habitats. If the high-fi unit was assimilated into domestic design, the Personal Computer didn't make its way into the living room, and the exposure to music became individualised. When the CD began to die, the manufacturers engaged with internet and began to approach streaming technologies.

Olga Goriunova closed the conference reading a text which develops around the questions ‘what is "avant-garde"?' Avant-garde - she answers - is a recurring phenomenon that has to do with time and change; time is always a projection of the future in the past, change is related to technology and technique. Looking at the history of video processing, for example, from the analogue object to the generated flow of a real-time patch, she suggests a parallel with Guattari's definition of being and becoming: a materialist ontological revolution is taking place in the production and reproduction of video. Avant-gardism only exists in the future, and this doesn't mean it's utopian, rather it presents a special relation with time, creating a line of differentiation and demarcation with the present, which has a special relation with duration. The future and the past of the avant-garde are not circumscribed by the now, they offer a multiple dynamic becoming, something that happened but did not yet really happen. There is always something that did not happen and still remains a potential of the future, in this sense avant-gardes are multiple. Goriunova's research, starting from this reflection, will look into software and its special relation to time.

From this perspective, we may add, the phenomenon of Steampunk can be explained as an opposite mechanism: the projection of the past becomes the image of a future which doesn't exist anymore, subsumed by the sentiment of a progressive, as yet unrealised, apocalyptic end of time.

A short discussion on the binomial relation culture vs avant-garde brought the panel to a close. If in a discursive context such as cultural studies it is provocative to talk about 'avant-gardism' rather then 'culture', Liliane suggested that within fine art the opposite is true, substituting avant-garde with culture could be a way of generating interesting new thoughts.

So what is avant-garde in the net, and how can we define its ontology in relation to time, especially considering that music and sound are time-based phenomena? Somehow the footprints of this conference only approached the very edge of this topic.

If a calendar is an attempt to possess the fourth dimension we live in, rendering it comprehensible, controllable, subject to determinate annotation and definition, URLs could be said to create a structured grid where the abstract space of the net can be dominated and locations can be recognised by a multiplicity of entities, including humans, bots and machines.

The internet's pseudo-spatial structure can be compared to real-world abstract time structures. Similar to our need to orientate ourselves within abstract temporal schema through our use of calendars and clock time, the net flattens past, present and future into the abstract form of the archive. The difference here is that technology doesn't distinguish between past, present and future; it doesn't know about the future.

Walter Benjamin, in his essay 'On the Concept of History', describes the historical materialist vision of present and future. If the present is the zero hour where time originates, and

 

 

History is the object of a construction whose place is formed not in

homogeneous and empty time, but in that which is fulfilled by

the here and now (Jetztzeit)³

then the future is empty time, in contrast to the messianic future which is defined by the constant potential for something to happen - something which has not yet happened.

Similarly and in parallel, in the net the here and now is the static time which includes present and past and can be interpreted as history or archive, whereas the real-time dynamic present is the only actual future possible.

Goriunova's ontological revolution is taking place because there are two types of time: static and dynamic. Static time refers to being, whereas dynamic time - that of live streams, generated pages and other ephemeral phenomena, is the time of becoming, and it's only in that becoming that there's space for a potentiality which makes it the only possible present and future.

Image: Andrew Liles from Nurse with Wound at Koko, for Netaudio, 2011

If the conference seemed to focus mostly on the static manifestations of sound in the net, it is in its becomingness that the internet's avant-garde can be found, because an intrinsically different way of making music is developing through the use of simultaneous streams and dislocated performances.

Back to the chronology, the final concert at Koko featured the elegant sound palette of Radian, the eclectic performance by Nurse with Wound and a special collaboration between Mika Vainio (ex-Pan-Sonic) and Bruce Gilbert (ex-Wire) commissioned by Netaudio.

Whereas Nurse with Wound's long career and experience did not erase the experimental and hybrid flavour of their music and the eclecticism of their performance, Mika Vainio and Bruce Gilbert's performance, despite being beautiful and masterfully executed, lacked a certain hazard and emotional charge to make it unforgettable.

Although many of the experiments conducted at Netaudio concerned memory, actualisation, the spatialisation of sound and the sonification of space and architecture, nevertheless the ubiquitous sounds of the internet remain - enigmatically - a matter for the imagination. They are as obscure as Athanasius Kircher's fantasies of marvellous machines or the sounds heard and produced throughout time, before recording technologies were introduced.

The internet, like a mysterious alien instrument, offers more than a new system of fruition and distribution, and the encounter of sound and the internet is still generating new perspectives and possibilities for musical creation because, echoing Spinoza's words about the human body, we don't know (yet) what the internet can do.

Eleonora Oreggia <root AT xname.cc> is a multimedia artist based in London, UK, http://xname.cc

Footnotes

1 Athanasius Kircher, Phonurgia nova, sive conjugium mechanico-physicum artis & natvrae paranympha phonosophia concinnatum, 1672.

2 L. Tronchin, I. Durvilli and V. Tarabusi, ‘The Marvellous Sound World in the "Phonurgia Nova" of Athanasius Kircher', in: AA.VV., Proceedings of Acoustics '08 Paris, PARIS, SFA, 2008, pp. 4183-4188 (atti di: Acoustics '08, Paris, 29-6; 4-7-2008).

3 Walter Benjamin, ‘On the Concept of History', Gesammelten Schriften I:2., Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974.

A recent study-day on Motherhood, Servitude and the Delegation of Care at Birkbeck University provoked two writers to examine the politics, pieties and pain clustering around reproductive labour. Madame Tlank contests the premise that carers must care, however subversively framed, while Mira Mattar cuts into the modern Master-Servant dialectic of the Gumtree ‘au pair wanted' ad. Finally Tlank assembles careworn voices in a multi-cautionary verse

The family is the basic unit of government

- Michele Bachman, US presidential aspirant

MaMSIE is a fairly new journal (three issues in the past two years) published under the Birkbeck umbrella, attempting to explore and propagate a new discipline of 'studies in the maternal' - MaMSIE stands for 'Mapping Maternal Subjectivities, Identities and Ethics'. This informal study day (participants almost all female and white, plus two screaming babies, N.B., no creche was provided!) attempted to bring together several perspectives on the subject of servitude and the delegation of care.

Image: Still from Ken Loach's Poor Cow, 1967

The atmosphere was very good, with people actually listening to one another and trying to expand on what they heard rather than competitively showing off individual research. It was starkly different from other conferences, which are often male-dominated. But even so, the study day didn't quite come together. Although the philosophical, historical and sociological perspectives all focused on the same subject, they dealt in observation rather than analyses and investigation, failing to ask some very basic questions. At worst it felt like mothers discussing their personal experiences of motherhood.

An exception was Stella Sandford's philosophical enquiry into 'Maternal Labour', which served as the opening keynote talk. Her attempt to think 'the maternal' within a Marxist framework was interesting if problematic for several reasons, some of which Sandford herself was well aware of and sought to address. She thought that the 'lived contradiction' at the heart of the concept of 'maternal labour' (that I will come to shortly) might help rethink Marx's concept of labour and, more speculatively, that it might be a sign of an inherent non-subsumability of the 'maternal' under capital.

Although she articulated this in a beautiful trajectory of thought and was also well aware of the thin line she was treading, I can't help but ask: 'why'? Why would it be desirable to come up with such a concept of 'maternal labour' and such a conclusion? Why locate the 'maternal' outside of capital, outside of history, so to speak? As though some deep-seated pre-capitalist residue attached itself to the mother, implying 'traditional' models of maternity? Does it not make it even harder to analyse materially a mother's or carer's position vis-a-vis capital, and render it impossible to tear at capital's tentacles from this presumed 'outside'? Does it not delegate to some higher plane the subjective investment in labour which is well known to have been demanded increasingly of workers of all kinds over several decades?

The lived contradiction within the concept of 'maternal labour' according to Sandford is that the mother/carer is both a capitalist subject and a 'maternal' subject. But the 'maternal' clashes only with the crudest caricature of the Marxist understanding of 'labour'.¹ Sandford points to Marxist feminist analyses of domestic labour, but sets the work of child-rearing apart from cleaning, cooking etc. due to the emotive investment in and arguably more rewarding nature of the work. Yet the work of child-rearing has the same reproductive agenda as these things: it quite literally replenishes the work force, or reproduces labour power. Childcare is either directly waged, or unwaged and 'paid for' by a wage (be it a man's or the mother's own) or by state benefits (the 'social wage'). The carer's work cannot be separated from the capitalist labour relations that make up her life and measure out her subsistence.

No matter how much 'caring' there is in care work, no matter how much love is invested in the work of bringing up a child, these emotions do not arise in some pure vacuum free of the imperatives of capital. Furthermore these emotions are channelled and redirected through state intervention in order that their object - the child - may 'mature' into something meeting labour market specifications. The state is more receptive than ever to business lobbying on the form of reproduction and training.²

The 'maternal' referred to in this study day and by Sandford is quite a recent concept to begin with: the loving, caring mother is a product of, and expectation within, the nuclear bourgeois family. Throughout most of modernity, mothers were by no means automatically expected to be caring for their children, no matter what class they belonged to. As Shulamith Firestone showed in ‘Down with Childhood', in Europe up until the 19^th century (and in some areas even the 20^th) a poor mother's children were given to wet nurses almost right after birth; they played in packs in the village squares and started working life as soon as they were physically able, doing work (in factories, shops, on the streets) that today would be called 'child labour', or learning trades as apprentices.³ Rich mothers would give birth and then pass their children on to wet nurses and tutors and not have very much to do with them. The presumption of the caring, protective mother is itself a product of fairly advanced capitalist society. And it goes hand in hand with the concept of the child as an unfinished creature, in need of protection, control and care. The emergence in the 19^th century of 'childhood' as a separate stage of life and children as separate (not yet) human beings, reinforced through the eventual separation of children from the ‘adult world' by mass primary schooling, developed into what can be called 'abstract childhood'. ‘A child possesses (or rather is possessed by) childhood for the sublimely tautological reason that the subjectivity ascribed to her is determined more by the single, shared attribute of being-a-child than by all the particular differences between herself and other children.'⁴

From the 19^th century onwards, the child is treated as an incompletely formed subject, requiring special care and proper guidance towards the eventual attainment of serviceable 'adult' identity, until which time precocious 'adult' (i.e. individual) traits are a matter for discipline or therapy, according to various kindergartens of thought.⁵ The requirement to care for and 'shape' the vulnerably deficient or 'innocent' child pushes the mother into the work of mothering, i.e. she is made into a carer, with her role and that of the child reinforcing one another.⁶

Subjective deficiency is also ascribed to the disabled and the elderly in particular, but at the same time it is projected in general across an ever more provisional 'adulthood'. A decades-long drive (supply-side Thatcherism, the Third Way, the Big Behavioural Society) to hold individuals 'responsible' for whatever economic, legal or medical position they find themselves in has been shadowed at every turn by the assumption that the same individuals are incapable of making the 'right choices' without psycho-managerial 'nudging' or outright institutional coercion.⁷ This presumption is applied with particular ferocity to mothers/carers and their ability or otherwise to care 'appropriately'. The extension of 'abstract childhood' to mothers and other adults whose job it is to provide care is evident in their subjection to continuous training and retraining, surveillance and expectation.⁸

The historical papers presented by Kate Pullinger and Lucy Delap on the study day showed how something similar played itself out in Victorian times: as a rule, servants were subject to infantilisation, their assumed place was on a level with the employers' children.⁹ The employer had ultimate control over both groups and directly controlled the servants' care of the children. Economically speaking, children and servants were both completely dependent on the master of the house. Sadly there are few incidents known where servants and children ganged up together against their infantilisation and oppressive lives. Firestone's call for mothers to gang up with their children has likewise gone unheeded.¹⁰

Rather than arguing as Sandford does that 'maternal labour' is distinct from other labour because of the element of 'caring' for the object of this labour, might it not be a stronger feminist argument to say that a care worker may be just as indifferent to the object of her care as a factory worker to the product of their labour? Care work does not need to be done with care, and often can't be done with care, even if workers wanted to. With some of the lowest wages in the labour market and a workload to kill a (wo)man, there wouldn't be much time to invest in care. The assumption that the work needs be done with care is moralistic and unhelpful at best, but at worst it forms an oppressive imperative: in waged labour, care workers are expected and under pressure to care (and control where applicable) under dismal conditions. This pressure usually comes directly from the (private and/or state) employers or the 'customers'. In unwaged maternal labour, mothers are put under pressure to exert a certain level of care (and control) over their children. If this is not done 'well enough', the child might be taken 'into care'. State management of reproduction is more ambitious than ever.¹¹

The institutional care of old people in the UK provides clear empirical evidence against the argument that maternal - or, by Sandford's own extension, more broadly 'caring' - labour might somehow contain a remainder that is not subsumed under capital. Recent events make it painfully obvious that the whole form of 'caring' - not just its financialised background but the way the everyday labour is performed - is directly determined by capital transactions of the most abstractly speculative kind.

Leveraged capital started flowing into the care homes sector around five years ago when ‘investors and lenders' thought the value of the businesses could only increase as the population aged.¹² Banks were ‘happy to lend' to companies with ‘steady income streams from government contracts' (50 percent of care home places are municipally funded) and plenty of real estate; all the more so because the debt could immediately be sold on in securitised form. ‘It was a bit like the internet bubble' or ‘the economic surge generally', said the CEO of Care UK (Bridgepoint Capital). Meanwhile the private equity owners would sell the underlying real estate at a premium obtained by signing up to automatic annual rent increases, using the proceeds to expand the businesses through more buy-outs and sell them on for 12 or 14 times projected earnings. This model left little reason to invest in labour and facilities while the boom continued, but investment became impossible altogether for second or third-generation owners as rents continued to rise automatically after credit dried up in 2008 and state payments were subsequently frozen or cut.

And this non-investment is no abstract matter. Long before Southern Cross (bought, inflated and sold on just in time by Blackstone) collapsed and the FT noticed the story, Private Eye had spent years reporting each case of patients dying dehydrated, stuck to the bed by untreated pressure sores and covered in their own piss and shit. This is not a situation that 'care workers' (paid less than £7 an hour at 'senior' level in the private sector or as much as £8.90 in those homes not yet divested by councils) can improve through a supplement of uncapitalised 'love'. Not when a ratio of seven 'carers' to 89 'high maintenance' patients is normal, or when work schedules, available supplies of food and medicine and all aspects of the physical environment depend on the financial position of over-leveraged 'owners' and the state. One telling common experience of 'carers' and residents in these institutions, according to the FT, is that neither would dare report conditions to the regulator's inspectors: ‘they're scared, because they're dependent.'

Image: Still from Allan King's 1967 film Warrendale documenting the care of emotionally-disturbed children in a Canadian group home

The 'private' market in care for the elderly is mediated throughout by the state, most obviously as wholesale purchaser of services and source of pension income, but also, particularly in the UK, due to years of legislation cultivating a private pensions 'industry' and asset price inflation in private equity and real estate.¹³ And in the end, the state will probably have to bail out 'care homes' just like other branches of finance capital before them. (It's also worth noting that government plans for the future delegation of wider NHS services closely resemble the private care home model, slow and predictable crash notwithstanding.)

The state likewise does much to define the form of 'maternal' labour in the narrow sense, albeit less visibly and with the emphasis more on policing than financial brokerage. ‘Welfare' state services supposedly supporting single and some other mothers are inseparable from control and surveillance mechanisms, to be endured in exchange for a meagre cash payment. Education increasingly incorporates employers' qualitative demands for future labour power, building the desired psychosocial ‘training' into curricula.

To a degree connected to their individual level of state dependency, mothers and other unwaged carers are faced with the imperative to make sure their children become suitable future labour power (The middle classes, meanwhile, internalise these same imperatives and hold themselves responsible for achieving ‘desirable outcomes for their children'). At the same time private capital permeates the 'frontline'¹⁴ provision of welfare services, with delegation of medical, benefit and housing functions to PFI-type contractors (paid by 'results'!) conditioning the relation between mother and child in manifold ways.

Motherly work means having to make sure your child adjusts to reality as constituted by capital. Women who depend on the state for money are more exposed than others to state interference (itself often subcontracted to private capital) to this end. Motherly love can change just as much according to questions of rent (for example) as a commercial care service will. Low levels of state financial support - or low wages part-funding 'unwaged' care - are just as much of a hindrance to the subjective investment in care as is an hourly wage of £8. Single mothers (along with disabled recipients of 'care') are pushed back into competing for work, widening the labour pool at employers' disposal and thereby dragging wages and conditions downwards. This hits mothers on benefits especially hard as it is yet another pretext to control what they do and how they care; it also requires them to take part in capitalist labour relations from the opposite side, effectively becoming employers themselves by sending their children either to a nursery or a to paid carer. All these instances show 'maternal labour' to be subsumed, but none of them stops a mother (or child) being in and against capital.¹⁵ 

Sandford's theoretical attempt to show a romantic revolutionary gap in the capital relation, to show 'the maternal' not to be fully subsumed under capital, may arrive at something quite opposed to what she was hoping for.

If the mother's or carer's full involvement in capital as a social relation is not acknowledged, then how can we analyse and understand it in order to ultimately fight and break it? (Not even to speak of the counter-productive effect of setting the mother/carer apart from other workers.) And the same holds for the state's role in private capital. Reformists' calls to enlarge the role of the state completely ignore the fact that rather than some 'temperate player regulating the wild excesses of capital' the state is a co-player, it writes the rules and facilitates the cash flow for a smooth ride on the wild exciting seas of people's bloody lives.

Looking for a real-life Mary Poppins!

Dear Au Pair

I am Andrea and my partner is Christopher. We have two boys, Seb who is 7 and Barnaby who is 5. They both attend the local primary school which is a ten minute walk from our lovely home in Hampstead, North London. After school they keep busy with numerous activities - football, swimming, gymnastics, music and street-dance. Christopher and I are lawyers and work full-time. When we're not working we love nothing better than to spend time with the family. We are a very warm and welcoming family who have loved having an au pair. Our last au pair was with us for more than a year, she became part of the family within days and will be a lifelong friend.

Image: Still from Ken Loach's Poor Cow, 1967

As I said, our house is lovely and very close to the city centre. There are lots of buses and tubes and we even provide a bicycle. Christopher and I cycle everywhere. Ideally we'd want a fit, sporty au pair who feels confident cycling on London's busy streets. A helmet is a must! So no vanity please ladies! I should say here we're only looking for female applicants.

It is also important that you can take on extra hours in school holidays which we will, of course, pay for, though we do try to take as many of their holidays off as we can which means that you should get plenty of holidays yourself! We never work in August, always take two weeks off at Christmas and a week at Easter - so that's seven weeks already. Your normal working day would be 08:00 to 19:30.

Your duties with the children:

• wake, feed, dress the children and take them to school (20 minute walk)

• collect them from school and activities

• help the children with their homework

• take them swimming at the weekend

• cook healthy, simple meals for the children (we provide recipe books)

Other duties:

• clean and tidy the house

• do the family's washing and ironing

• provide me with an extra pair of hands

• feed and walk the dog

What we can offer you:

• a large room

• a private bathroom (to share with the children, your rooms will be linked via the bathroom)

• wi fi access throughout the house (if you don't have your own computer you are welcome to share with us and the children, but I should warn you they do like their computer games!)

• We do not provide a television in your room because we want you to feel at home as part of our family and use the TV or watch a DVD in the living room.

• You can use the telephone anytime you want (if you write down your calls on the pad next to the phone we can easily deduct the cost of your international calls from your weekly wages)

• wonderful food

• international travel with us on holidays

• £120 per week

You must be:

• between 20 - 40 years old

• fluent in written and spoken English

• a confident driver

• energetic, sporty and have a sunny disposition (even in London's wet weather!)

• flexible (sometimes we come home late from work and need you to be there, we will pay for extra hours)

• quiet, neat, clean and showers at least once a day (you'd be surprised!)

• an enthusiastic but tidy cook, all our meals are cooked from scratch!

• will love our children and help them discover the world

• a non-smoker

Ideally we want someone who is:

• confident but not domineering

• not embarrassed to sing and read with funny voices

• warm, patient, supportive, perceptive

• creative with their own ideas of things to do with the children that they will all enjoy

• a dog lover

• at home in museums and galleries. With London's wealth of cultural life we don't want our little rascals to miss out! It will be fun for you too.

• a modest dresser, with strong family values

• child-free and single as we have found emotional ties at home can be distracting

Yes, we have high standards and yes, such people exist because we have had them in the past! It is one of the most important jobs a person can do. It will be very rewarding for you. We are looking for more than just someone to care for our children, we want you to be part of the family. Please send a CV and covering letter telling us a little about yourself and your background and why you think you'd be right for the job to the following address...

(As you can imagine these positions are very popular so we will only contact you if we want to arrange an interview).

Image: Still from Ken Loach's Family Life, 1971

Dear Host Family,

My name is Martina and I would like to be your family's au pair. I am from a good neighbourhood in Košice, a big city in The Slovak Republic. My mother is a nurse, my father is an engineer and my sister Lenka is studying to be a doctor. I myself have studied at the Academy of Education and Social Science and have taken A-Levels in Slovakian language and English language. I also speak German. As you can see we are a very hard working family who takes studying very seriously.

I also love to have fun, especially with sports. I love tennis and running and to ride bikes. I look forward to cycling on the exciting streets of London.

But please, do not worry, I am very clean. I shower daily and use deodorant twice a day. I also change my panties and socks every day. I change my bra once a week. I have a different bra for sports. I wash this after every use. I am very sporty and would like to ride a bicycle with a helmet. I have short, easy hair.

I love children and would like one day to have my own - but not soon so please do not be concerned about this. If you are worried let me tell you I have been taking the pill named Microgynon 30 for 12 years with zero problems. I can assure you also that my menstrual cycle will not affect my moods or behaviour, I am very stable and happy. If you are worried still I can have the IUD fitted which the doctor says is more effective than sterilisation. But let me tell you I take strong anti-depressant pills which means I suffer almost no sexual urges whatsoever so I can promise you I will be 100% abstinent during my stay with you (and I do not find the English style of man is for me!). Even still I can take pregnancy tests every six months as many of my friends do in their host families. Just to be sure.

I will love your children very much. I wake up early and like to get out so taking the children and the dog to school sounds great and believe it or not I like the rainy weather too! So this is not a problem. I have a small problem with something called OCD but it allows me to clean very well, so if you leave your home in my hands it will always be spotless. Ironing relaxes me. I love to cook, it is my secret dream to cook in a good restaurant so please allow me to make fun and healthy meals for the lovely children, and even the parents too!

Also because I am a Leo I am a very loyal girl. I will be totally devoted to your children. I will not even look at another child. If another child falls over and damages itself in the park, and blood gushes outside, I will not help it. I will quietly monitor the friends the children have to see if any of them are taking advantage of your clever boys! I do not like copy-cats.

I will not be too emotional when it comes to missing my own family. I will be in silent, almost physical pain because of the distance but due to modern technologies like Skype I can keep in touch with them. It is ok for me that you can never meet eyes on Skype. My loneliness will be hidden from the children very well. I am a keen swimmer.

I love to look at art and old things in museums and am so excited to see London and all the beautiful things. Do you know much about Slovakian art? I will be happy to tell you if we meet!

I have heard from my friend of the Ikea style of furniture you favour. I know this type is easy to clean with a dry cloth or rag. I can provide my own rag/s. I look forward to ample storage.

To me, being an au pair will be fun and a challenge and I want to see the world and how other families live. My English is very good but I want it to be perfect, just like your children will be if they have me as an au pair!

I am looking forward to hearing from you, thank you.

From

Martina.

P.S. I see you say the bathroom is shared, this may be a problem for me. I do not want to be un-ladylike but I need to tell you I suffer from IBS so I need an en suite toilet. My movements are painful and I have also a flatulence. This will be made worse by the change in my environment. I hope you understand my need for private toilet facilities. If this is not possible perhaps the children and I can arrange a rota.

---

‘LABOUR' cries child cries labour cries tears

push push!

that's not labour, that's nature, darling

help me, look after me, it hurts!

here pills, must move on, next mom

‘Mom' cries child cries it it

must dry tears - this the object of my labour?

maths exercise (you child, must succeed, try once more)

count hours x 0 pounds x stopped heartbeat

this the value of my labour

‘labour labour' I will pay you to perform

on the object of my affective labour by the hour in time to run

with the school run run flow forward why, you ran?

ah the grandmas count their hours well then you may earn.

change your standing participate in the accumulation chaaaain

wait - are you the reason I don't get paid?

but I do - the state throws some goodies at me

and wants some names dates and cleanest of clothes.

good behaviour, watch what parents are up to... outside the accumulation

chain? for you maybe, well-bred few. not those who bear and bear and bear

and feed and feed and feed and fuck had enough of producing your pension

or take it away, hah

this, dear, threads itself through the ages. the workhouse, the servant,

childcarer, and you (no clue). as long as you don't try to have them too.must

be on one standing with them helpless little lots. I have power to pay you or

if I wish not. neither the little ones nor old ones get cash. you're all of the

same lot, no power, not not. but go ahead fighting amongst your old selves.

it's called reproduction of the capitalist relaaaations. hah.

there's nothing idyllic in this kind of shit. now I can afford it I delegate it.

and yous will keep doing the crap. so your littl ones grow big. become like

me and pay the likes of yous for the same old doubletrick.

outside of the sphere you say? all data proves you wrong, dear. whose

property are children? not yours, they're the state's to throw into the dirt pit

whenever seen fit

yous, you, your little tiny shrieks. don't you know your greatgrandma was

an immigrant too. The asylum saw the last of her, past caring indeed. just

cause you can buy yourself out/ don't be so sure now about your little

emotive clout.

Mira Mattar <miramattar AT gmail.com> **<twitter.com/miramattar> is a sometime governess, freelance writer and contributing editor to Mute and 3:AM. She lives in South London. She blogs at http://hermouth.blogspot.com/

Madame Tlank continues to stir up the <s> in front of care

1 The very fact that Marx finds it necessary to qualify waged/unwaged, productive/unproductive etc. labour as such should be enough to establish that the category of 'labour' in general is not identical to the waged and productive.

2 Impersonate an employer and submit your wish list at, http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1086319141&type=ONEOFFPAGE. The Browne Report on higher education is one high-profile product of this kind of receptiveness, see http://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/8058285/The-Browne-report-in-full.html

3 Shulamith Firestone: ‘Down with Childhood' in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for a Feminist Revolution, London: Paladin Press, 1972.

4 The Bio-Power Digest, ‘Endless Youth', 2004, privately circulated.

5 A prime examples of this can be found in the ‘Letting Children Be Children' report by the Mothers' Union (sic), http://www.themothersunion.org/letting_children_be_children.aspx

6 Cf. the proliferation of child-rearing manuals on how to best ‘improve' children especially during the first three years of their lives.

7 For a succinct account of Richard Thaler's 'Nudge' theory and its adoption by the UK government's Behavioural Insight Team, see Michael Fitzpatrick's ‘Public health and the obsession with behaviour', Spiked, May 2010, http://www.spiked-online.com/index.php/site/article/8785/

8 ...whose talk gave this article its title

9 See, ‘Down with Childhood', op. cit.

10 See Mme Tlank, ‘The Battle of all Mothers', Mute Vol2 #9, July 2008, http://www.metamute.org/en/The-Battle-of-all-Mothers

11 Financial Times, special reports, May 31 June 1 2011.

12 For a comprehensive account of this see Rob Ray, ‘The 3 Ps - PFI, Private Equity, and Pensions', Mute Vol2 #6, Living in a Bubble: Credit, Debt and Crisis, http://www.metamute.org/en/The-3-Ps

13 See Mme Tlank, op. cit.

14 A rare example of professional jargon actually proving 'fit for purpose', to the extent that it acknowledges the war waged every day in benefit offices.

15 The question of struggle 'in and against' capital is taken seriously in the feminist work of Big Flame (1970-1984), now archived at, http://bigflameuk.wordpress.com/

Two recent books focusing on the Situationist International, Expect Anything Fear Nothing and The Beach Beneath the Street, salvage the plurality of the group's activities, laying an emphasis on art, friendship and life praxis, rather than the usual theory and splits. Review by Christopher Collier

One of Guy Ernest Debord's major achievements was to know with both admirable poise and impeccable timing, the importance of a doctrinal earnestness, but likewise the value of a certain tactical expediency. Debord already? And its only the first paragraph. Are we not bored with Debord? As the Situationist International (SI) somewhat paradoxically maintained, boredom is counter-revolutionary, and yet it was boredom, they informed us, that was integral in the production of a contemporary revolutionary subjectivity. Boredom they said, produces a more generalised and generalisable alienation, emerging not from a proletariat alienated from the products of labour power, but from all those who would create life itself, alienated precisely by labour from their species-being, as playful, creative, collective subjectivities, as homo ludens. Perhaps then, the situationist slogan, if any, that we might take up today could be to 'live without dead time', to refuse the categorisations of work and play, not as the outsourced members of a multi-tasking cognitariat, rather as the creators of our own time, of our own situations, our own history. Two recent books on the situationist project, Expect Anything Fear Nothing and The Beach Beneath the Street, may constitute one of the best efforts yet at using the experimental praxis of the SI as a spark for the creation of our own time.

Image: Gordon Fazakerley in the yard of Drakabygget, Nash's farm and artist commune in Southern Sweden, 1961

These are two books that attempt to tell the relatively untold stories of the SI, leaving the commentaries on Debord and the spectacle aside and drawing our eyes towards the broad, dynamic, incongruous, 'real life' of the movement - a real life that was elsewhere. Perhaps, it could be argued, such self-consciously non-Debordist engagements with the SI simply represent the downward curve of a product life-cycle graph for an SI industry, mining some of their less well explored, less easily accessible terrain for additional material and squeezing some additional droplets of surplus value from under-exploited intellectual territories. Possibly, but perhaps it would instead be more generous to discover in them a well-judged reappraisal and a strategic liberation of the situationist project from the straitjacket of academic categorisations, opening it once more to praxis, as a collective venture whose fundamentally collective achievements may inform new syntheses in whatever tactician's toolboxes.

In light of this, both of these books must be cautiously welcomed for largely looking beyond the discourse of spectacle that has been so used and abused, including those polemic misreadings by certain well established and apparently all too wilfully ignorant schoolmasters in recent times. Spectacle was, for years, usually taken up as the central tenet of the situationist legacy, in no small part thanks to the postmodern turn exemplified by the likes of Baudrillard. Today, much of the spectacular critique of capitalism is simultaneously dismissed as overly simplistic or perhaps simply bad theory, and yet it is conversely taken as such self-evidently common knowledge that it is barely worth talking about. This is not to say there isn't real force in the notion of spectacle, and indeed Richard Gilman-Opalsky has recently gone some way towards rescuing the concept from its own spectacularisation as the straw man of art theory. Nevertheless, these books are a welcome acknowledgement that there is more to the situationists than merely spectacle.

As the misappropriations of the spectacle (read that which ever way you wish) teach us, passion for the SI is often the love that dare not speak its name, not least because it goes against all of their anti-heroic proclamations. A major achievement of these texts is daring to speak it. It is true that in recent years a number of influential voices from the the art-theory nexus have been quick to espouse anti-situationist credentials, and yet the fascination remains, even in the negative, as a provocation to the present. As McKenzie Wark reminds us, quoting the Letterist Gil Wolman: 'there is no negation that does not affirm itself elsewhere'. An uneasy flirtation with the SI runs through contemporary art and academic theory, somewhat embarrassed to admit an affinity, quick to fall back on cliché. For contemporary artists the situationist legacy can be an unspectacular bore, often misconstrued as some kind of proto-relational aesthetics. For academic high theorists it is often regarded as a superficial misdemeanour: misdirected youthful romanticism, glamour, drink, sex and rebellion, a 1960s idealism that is far too earnest for cynical times. The SI has become weighed down by cliché, but perhaps cliché is merely a boredom with truisms, and boredom is negation, its affirmation appears in unlikely places.

Expect Anything Fear Nothing is a notably earnest book, a book that feels like it gets close to the praxis of the SI, striping back the layers of mythology with matter-of-fact description, rigorous engagement with primary material and numerous contributions from ex-members. It de-heroicises the individuals of whom it speaks and if it historicises the SI it also demystifies, it somehow brings the original contingency of the group back into play. Such a group was not, one could conclude, particularly unique, singular, remote or messianic, but was rather ordinary, if still fascinating, radical whilst remaining generalisable. In opening up the historical discourse on the situationists towards their rather shamefully overlooked Scandinavian manifestation, such a book is an importantly pluralistic act; the texts with which Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen and Jakob Jakobsen present us are a true potlatch of sources and interpretations. They de-spectacularise the SI on their own terms, opening their praxis onto contemporary situations, not prescriptively, but by offering some tentative analogies, opening up the texture of the movement to us with a far fuller richness, gifting to us translatable practices, not as generalised mythology but as detailed and often highly personal engagements.

Image: Page from The Situationist Times, No.3, January 1963, p. 11

Rasmussen and Jakobsen present us with a book that appears to promise an important contribution to situationist discourse. Drawn from presentations made to a seminar at People's House, Copenhagen in March 2007, it appears as the first serious treatment of its kind in English of the situationist project in Scandinavia (although we should acknowledge perhaps Jakobson and Howard Slater's joint research project on the subject from a decade earlier)¹. Broader and more pluralist than most engagements with the situationist movement, this collection of essays, transcripts and other materials attempts a fundamental rebalancing of the situationist legacy away from Debord. Whilst acknowledging his influence, it seeks to direct attention more towards a collective appraisal of the movement's activities, particularly focusing on the contributions of the those associated with the Scandinavian section, of Asger Jorn, Jørgen Nash, J.V. Martin, Jacqueline de Jong and Jens Jørgen Thorsen amongst others. Stories abound that the historical overlooking of the Scandinavians is down, in no small part, to Debord's rigid control of the SI's legacy and presentation. This is perhaps partially true but the caricature is unhelpful since it is no doubt also due to the geography of the cultural industries and academia, to linguistic barriers, to the relative inaccessibility of Jorn's writing and to the opportunistic and self-publicising tendencies of Nash, which arguably proved counter-productive. Superficially Debord perhaps has appeared as an earnest character, while Nash, the supposed forger and petty criminal, certainly has not. What emerges here however is far more complex, both were in fact more than open to the strategic interplay of earnestness and tactical presentation - and from theorists and practitioners of the spectacle what else should we expect?

At one stage this book bypasses that most fraught of points, the largely Debordian insistence that there could be no such thing as 'Situationism', by talking, perhaps more accurately, of Siuationisms. It is therefore the case that we find here engagements with many disparate and occasionally contradictory endeavours. There is discussion of the Drakabygget movement (roughly equal to the Second Situationist International); an artist commune run at Nash's farm in Southern Sweden, descriptions of which include disarmingly frank and detailed first-hand accounts from de Jong. We learn of the experimental filmography of the Drakabygget artists, and elsewhere several of the contributions deal in depth with the valuable transdisciplinary work of the Situationist Times across the fields of visual culture, science and mathematics, particularly through its engagements with topology. Jorn's fascination with topology is likewise brought out and convincingly analysed in another essay from Fabian Tompsett. Indeed, one of the main successes of this essay, and of the wider book, is to expose just what a vital role Jorn played, both intellectually and not least financially, not only in defining and developing the original situationist programme, but in many ways holding the International together and subsequently defining much of the course of the Second International as well. For its breadth and detail and for its plethora of new angles on situationist praxis, centred on, but not limited to the Scandinavian and artistic trajectories, this book lives up to the importance it initially promises. In its non-evasive willingness to apply this praxis to turbulent, contemporary political events, in the midst of which the conference took place, the book also proves that the situationist legacy is too important to be left solely to academia.

Throughout this collection, to adopt the title of one of its transcripts, persists 'a maxim of openness', not only opening up the legacy of the situationists historically, but opening itself up to the present, for détournement and for praxis. This is a facet that Rasmussen's detailed analysis of the 1963 RSG-6 exhibition in Odense illustrates through the way in which he challenges and reappraises the accepted, polemic narrative of the SI's 1962 split between 'artists' and 'politicos', analogously perhaps drawing attention to Michèle Bernstein's rewriting of history in her work Victories of the Proletariat. It is worth noting that the methods utilised by the RSG-6 activists which the SI chose to publicly champion - the leaking of secret military information and mass 'denial of service' attacks (by telephone in those days, rather than internet) - demonstrate the situationists' keen sense of tactical awareness, particularly in the field of communications, and indeed as we have seen over recent times, such tactics remain relevant and useful in today's struggles.

Expect Anything Fear Nothing is a serious and thoughtful book, it could have easily fallen into a pointless polemic against Debord, and indeed I would argue that its least successful contribution comes in the form of Stewart Home's return to his apparent vendetta against what he has termed the Specto-situationists. Whilst he offers some valuable context of the SI's place in a broader ecology of counter-cultural and pseudo-criminal gang culture in Britain and the US in particular, he advances little on the provocative characterisations made in his earlier work on the situationists in The Assault on Culture and What is Situationism?: A Reader.

Rasmussen and Jakobsen's collection thankfully does not take the route of turning the political infighting of the situationists into some kind of spectacular soap-opera substitution for the substance of their practical and theoretical contributions. It neither diminishes nor over-dramatises these internal conflicts, rather it places them firmly where they belong, as an often trivial, occasionally comedic diversion amongst serious people.

If this book makes a broad argument it is the argument for the amateur, for the non-academic, for low theory. It contains all of the passion and seriousness of a dedicated amateur historian, unpretentious yet rigorous, perceptive and unsentimental. Without attempting a total sweep of history, without the urge to present a unified picture, this work remains open and inquiring and ends up yielding so much more practical insight that the mythologising tendencies it no doubt would have succumbed to should it have attempted a more 'objective' historical narrative. It is telling that such a book should ultimately emerge from the legacy of the Copenhagen Free University, a project that offered a glimpse at some of the many aspects that a broadly 'situationist' praxis might take on within a relatively contemporary context. At the heart of the book lies one-time SI member Hardy Strid's text Everyone Can Be A Situationist, a short and frank statement serving to open the situationist project beyond organisational structures, beyond hierarchy, even beyond the intricacies of terminology and outwards, essentially as a spur to creative discovery in the politico-aesthetic field. Such a text is perhaps then an apt sentiment for the book's editors to orientate the wider collection of materials around, for it is a sentiment echoed strongly across the book's disparate contributions.

 Image: Dagbladet Fyn article about a dispute between J.V. Martin and Tom Lindhardt: 'Also Ideological Dispute in Odense'

If Expect Anything Fear Nothing could be characterised as earnest, McKenzie Wark's offering on the other hand could perhaps be labelled strategic and performative. The Beach Beneath the Street self-consciously and paradoxically strives to defend the continuing value of the SI as laying outside of, and resistant to, commodification or academic subsumption; an argument valid and well made, and yet it takes an academic in a book that is an especially attractive example of the commodity form to make this point. A sexy book for a sexy movement perhaps - after all the SI never shied away from high production values - but this is not the only unease that we as readers and all those that write on the SI habitually grapple with. It has become a cliché that books on the SI begin with apologies, usually for the impending contradiction between the tactics espoused, occasionally heroicised, and the implications inherent in the act of publishing a book about them. This is the curse of recuperation, just one of Debord's delicious tactical jokes bequeathed to subsequent generations of hero-worshippers and detractors alike.

Ostensibly a very different book from Expect Anything Fear Nothing, Wark's prose is exuberant, laced in true SI style with hundreds of détourned soundbites and one-liners, not just from the situationists but also from Marx and many more mined from the mountains of subsequent critical theory.

Just as arguably there are many situationisms, this is perhaps many books. As an introduction to the SI it is a novelistic, anecdotal roller-coaster through the European avant garde and radical bohemia. To the non-specialist, vaguely familiar with the SI, the book is an immensely valuable opening onto the bit parts that defined the whole political drama that was the International, playing up the collective effort, playing down the heroic (and yet conversely heroicising through style: structuring the narrative primarily by personage as opposed to concept). To the specialist or the 'pro-situ' (categories the SI would have denounced), the book is a thousand speculative insights, within which those under the influence of the SI might find an affirmation of the analyses that they continue to apply to numerous contemporary situations.

Throughout the text Wark deftly weaves a sustained engagement with the themes of situation, potlatch, détournement and dérive across an array of semi-biographical accounts of the main actors. In doing so he elegantly rebuts those mainstream, somewhat apolitical treatments of dérive and psychogeography from the likes of Rebecca Solnit, Merlin Coverley and Simon Sadler, whilst locating notions of situation and potlatch within their extended existential and anthropological discourses respectively. In this Wark achieves something not to be under-estimated, producing a coherent and yet inherently pluralist work on the legacy of the SI and particularly their less well-known predecessors the Letterist International. Indeed, it is worth noting that in his relative concentration on Letterist and early SI concerns, Wark appears somewhat dismissive of the group's latter stages, the major texts of Debord and Vaneigem (who is conspicuously absent throughout) barely get a look in. The lengthy engagement with letterism and its context is welcome and Wark re-articulates its key tactics of dérive and psychogeography, not merely as quaint precursors to a more sophisticated critique of consumer capitalism and functionalist urbanism (often identified as belonging to the theories of spectacle and the architectural endeavours of unitary urbanism), but as important practices in their own right, deeply integrated into a unified critique of contemporary ontology via the notion of the construction of situations.

He ranges widely, devoting some much appreciated discussion to the sexual politics at play in the bohemian love stories of Michèle Bernstein's novels and the ambitious and prescient visual essays of the Jacqueline de Jong edited Situationist Times. He acknowledges the pivotal role of Asger Jorn and his original and under-explored ideas on creativity, arising in a pseudo-Marxist critique of value but on the basis of quality and difference, rather than the homogenising critique of abstract labour. Drawing upon Bataille's notion of surplus, Wark contrasts and compares it not only with Jorn's concept of value production, but perceptively with the utopian, ludic cities of Chtcheglov and what he less convincingly paints as the non-utopian cybernetic détournements of urban form and mechanised production to be found in the vision of Constant's obsessive architectural project New Babylon. He addresses the experimental form of Alexander Trocchi's Project Sigma, always drawing acute analogies with the contemporary era, as in this case by relating it to the field of new media technologies. Not the least of his achievements is to undertake a valuable (if inevitably brief) contextualisation and reappraisal of Henri Lefebvre's important relation to the situationist project, but concentrating on the notion of everyday life perhaps at the expense of the equally fruitful avenue of Lefebvre's work on space.

This is a beautifully written, exciting and broad study, one that may perhaps become a definitive introduction to the SI for many, defining them more comprehensively and more collectively than most others who have gone before. Wark's engagements here are not hugely in-depth, theoretically at least, but given the book's range this is more than understandable and indeed forgiveable, as although not an especially radical book, it is by no means superficial or uncritical either and as a strategic intervention it might just succeed. Such is its allure as a general overview to many of the multidimensional strands of the SI, that it might do valuable work in drawing readers towards more radical and more in-depth personal engagements with the material that it points up: to learn from the tactics and even the stylistics of such a movement as a tool for contemporary, self-directed, self-organised analysis. In this sense it triumphs, not in prescribing the applications of a situationist praxis in the 21^st century, but doing all it can to open the possibility that such applications might occur. It entices the reader to translate the material into their everyday life, to select from the array of weaponry laid out before them and to détourn the gifts of the SI potlatch, represented here in more accessible and dynamic form, into the tools of a new, radical, even revolutionary praxis.

Image: Jacqueline de Jong, Attila Kotányi, Raoul Vaneigem and Jørgen Nash at the conference in Gothenburg, 1961

These studies emerge into a climate in which situationist-tinged ideas seem particularly opportune, more so perhaps than for a generation. Around us unfolds a backlash against neoliberal austerity, urban segregation, accelerated privatisation and privation of resources In advanced capitalist states we find a growing poverty of everyday life, intensified by an increasingly unstable trend towards enforced precarity and the cracking of vacuous official narratives of both individual aspiration and popular entertainment. Bread is too expensive and circuses are wearing thin.

We see the legacy of the SI manifested in the growing deployment of direct action tactics and the spatial politics of occupation increasingly adopted by anti-austerity and education activists alike. In illuminating the antecedents of the current vogue for 'flashmob' protest (often caricatured in lazy journalistic shorthand as 'situationist') in the aesthetico-political stunts of Nash and others, perhaps these texts also offer a potential reorientation of such tactics away from their frequently moralising tendency to merely make reformist demands for a more 'ethical' capitalism. As such, these powerful re-articulations of the situationist legacy might offer the chance to both contextualise and renew the movement's achievements, not for interpretation, but for praxis.

The continuing value (if perhaps ultimate inadequacy) of situationist influenced tactics within contemporary struggles has become increasingly evident. Such value is evinced in a radicalism that is not co-opted by mere resistance; a certain playful exuberance, of adventure and of low theory, the détournement of the mass media and the importance of autonomous working class action, all of these are trajectories that the books seek to open up. Such a legacy is not that of Debord, any more than that of Nash, or Jorn, or Lefebvre, or Viénet or any of them - it is a collective legacy, a potlatch, a tactical gift bequeathed collectively to the present. Both Wark's text and Rasmussen and Jakobsen's collection are intensely worthy of being read in their own right, however to read them together is to complement the strengths of each. To do so is to bring both the earnest and strategic into play once more, in our consideration of the important situations that these writers skilfully depict, and the still more important situations that we continue to create.

Debord once spoke of light-heartedly being at war with the whole world. These texts rejoin the battle, but perhaps also with heavy weaponry: a tactical weaponry which not unlike Bernstein's Victories of the Proletariat, makes a call to redefine the struggles of the past, and in so doing, to influence the struggles of the present.

Christopher Collier <christophercollier7 AT gmail.com> is an artist, writer and postgraduate student, currently conducting research into the notion of place within the SI corpus and its relation to both contemporary social movements and aesthetic practices. He is a founding member of The University for Strategic Optimism, http://universityforstrategicoptimism.wordpress.com/, and the Dérivelab collective

Info

Mikkel Bolt Rasmussen & Jakob Jakobsen (Eds.), Expect Anything Fear Nothing: The Situationist Movement in Scandinavia and Elsewhere, Nebula in association with Autonomedia, 2011

McKenzie Wark, The Beach Beneath the Street: The Everyday Life and Glorious Times of the Situationist International, Verso, 2011

Footnote

1The joint research project by Howard Slater & Jakob Jakobsen conducted in various Copenhagen archives culminated in a website of translated materials (http://www.infopool.org.uk/situpool.htm), a discussion event in London and Slater's important 2001 essay Divided We Stand, reviewing the Scandinavian situationists, that was published as the pamphlet Infopool #4.

All over the world, the capitalist states are taking austerity measures to slow the growth of their debts. It is obvious that this policy, since it slows consumption, can't in itself sustain the growth required for capital accumulation. Where, then, can the necessary economic stimulus come from? For lack of alternatives, eyes are turning eastward. It seems that history, the supreme ironist, has chosen ‘communist' China as global capitalism's saviour

What Crisis?

The current crisis is more than a mere cyclical occurrence in the process of capital accumulation, it's the result of the obsolescence of the very basis of the capitalist mode of production, the value-form^*. It is the value-form which forces capitalists to continue to use abstract labour time^** to measure wealth, while the creation of real wealth has become less dependent on the amount of labour time used than on general knowledge and its application in production. This prediction of Marx (in the Grundrisse) is fully realised today. It is in this developing contradiction that he saw the historical limit of capital. It has become absurd for humanity to base decisions on what to produce, how, how much, where and for whom, on the law of value. This absurdity manifests itself in the simultaneity of generalised overproduction and extreme poverty, in the increasing incapacity of capital to exploit the labour power at its disposition, causing an accelerating expulsion of workers from production, while money seeks a false security in financial bubbles. It manifests itself in efforts to impose an artificial scarcity of goods that would otherwise be abundant and of no value (such as digital goods). It manifests itself in the inability of capital to stop the destruction of the environment, although it knows that the resulting disasters are becoming ever more threatening. It manifests itself in its inability to overcome its own crisis. It manifests itself ever more clearly, but the capitalists, and others who view the world through their own window, do not see it. They cannot see it. Capital is subjected to the law of value like an animal is subjected to its own nature. It cannot solve a problem whose solution calls for its abolition. It therefore can do nothing against its crisis except fight its symptoms, blow hot and cold, alternate stimulus measures and austerity measures and delay the inevitable descent. That these efforts could produce recoveries, we never doubted. Moreover, irrespective of the measures taken, the capitalist economy always follows a cyclical course, even when the general trend is towards deepening crisis. It is hardly necessary to argue that this is the case today. The crisis is worsening and recovery has a hard time hiding it.

The Metamorphosis of Value

The accumulation of capital is going through cycles in which value morphs from money into commodities and from commodities back into money: M - C - M'. Money, M (abstract value), is the starting point. It buys commodities, C, the means of production whose value is transmitted in the commodities resulting from their productive use. These new commodities are sold which transforms the value again into money, M'. The only reason why the initial money, M, was transformed into C, is that M' is greater than M. The transformation is profitable.

Marxist analysis reveals that the source of profit is surplus value, the difference between the value of the living labour power that the capitalist buys (which, like for all commodities, is equal to the quantity of abstract labour necessary to reproduce it) and the value it creates for him (the quantity of abstract labour performed). The higher the productivity, the less labour time is needed to produce the equivalent of wages, thus the greater the part of the workday that produces surplus value. But this surplus value can never arise from more than a part of the workday. The technological development which increases productivity also decreases the value of living labour in production relative to that of past labour (technology, equipment, infrastructure). Of this living labour, surplus value is only a part and it therefore must decline with it. Since profit = surplus value, this is a problem, especially in a world that operates more and more on automated processes. Productivity does not save capitalism, on the contrary, it ripens and further accentuates its contradictions. The more it increases and the more these increases become widespread, the more the value of what is produced declines relative to the value of the capital invested in production.

Image: By Sander

It creates another problem in the next phase of the cycle of value, the transformation of commodities back into money, C - M'. This does not happen automatically. The increase of productivity slows the production of value, but accelerates the production of use values. Unproductive consumption can always be expanded, but productive consumption remains limited to the use values needed for production. These do not increase because the ability to produce them increases. The essential market consists of the demand for capital goods and consumer goods necessary for the reproduction of labour power. It's their expansion that makes the expansion of value in the next cycle possible. It's this market that, over time, is incapable of following the acceleration in productivity. The general overproduction of technology (visit cities like Detroit if you need proof) and especially of labour power (nearly 2 billions of unemployed) testify to it.

No Value Without a Hoard

When these bottlenecks reappeared in the 1970s, after ‘the thirty glorious years' made possible by the war and the expansion of the global market under the aegis of the dollar, the general tendency was to inflate, to support demand, to stimulate M - C. The law of value punished this cheating with accelerating inflation.

Attempts to get it under control on the back of the working class faced intense resistance. The growth of fictitious capital^*** in the circulation of commodities devalued money and thus encouraged it to leave circulation. It discouraged M - C, productive investment, because inflation made the real value of future prices unpredictable, and encouraged speculative investment. M preferred to stay M, instead of transforming itself into commodities. But it couldn't.

Capitalism cannot survive without a 'treasure'; money must be able to be withdrawn from circulation without losing its value to be re-injected at the right time. But money, abstract value, is not stable. Its power lies in its ability to transform itself into other commodities. Therefore the value of the monetary hoard remains dependent on real valorisation, on value creation, which can only happen in the phase C , in production. Otherwise, it becomes paper or less. Inflation signals that this valorisation decreases relative to the money in circulation. If hoarded money is dragged down by the loss of value of money in circulation, panic ensues. Accumulation loses its purpose. Money desperately seeks refuge in gold or old paintings and tries to protect itself with exorbitant interest rates that are strangling the already crippled production ... it's one of the possible paths to breakdown.

Value is an objective abstraction, that is, a social construction that has taken on the appearance of being objective, to be an intrinsic feature of things. It is not. In the end, it is a belief system that collapses when money cannot be hoarded.

The restructuring of capital that began in the 1980s brought inflation under control, boosted the rate of surplus value and thus the rate of profit, and restored confidence in hoarding. In other texts we have analysed in greater detail how this was done.ⁱ Amongst other things, we pointed to the crucial role played by globalisation: the global integration of production chains and markets, deregulation and globalisation of financial capital, the emergence of post-Fordist production in advanced countries and the massive displacement of Fordist industry to low-wage countries.

China to the Rescue

China was by far the country most transformed the most by this restructuring. In a few decades, it has changed from a failed attempt at autarkic state capitalism into the second largest economy in the world and the largest industrial producer. In 1990 it produced 3 percent of the world's industrial output, 20 years later 19.8 percent, overtaking the US who has held that position for 110 years.ⁱⁱ China's dramatic expansion has benefited the advanced capitals in several ways: its cheap products were the main reason why inflation remained low, the combination of its low wages and modern technology brought huge profits to Western and Japanese investors, and the realistic threat to move production to China helped to curb wages in the advanced countries. On the expansion of the world market, its impact has also been crucial: less by the opening of its domestic market (which is certainly large and growing, but limited by the extreme poverty of the majority of its population) than by its indirect and paradoxical effect on the market of its customers. Because its expansion was driven by external trade, and because the state kept the lid on Chinese wages and thus on the consumption of the working class, since their low level is its main competitive weapon, each year China obtained a growing trade surplus. As in other countries before it (especially Japan), whose industrial development depended on the US market, China used these profits to accumulate a hoard consisting of dollars, public debt and US securities.

By hoarding these dollars, China withdraws them from circulation, and thereby keeps the dollar stronger than it otherwise would be. That's the main reason why China does this: to defend its competitive position on the market towards which its industry is essentially oriented. For the same reason it buys American public debt, thus giving the Fed the means to stimulate demand by lowering interest rates. China's strategy, whether it likes it or not, is based on its confidence in the US dollar as the guardian of value.

By selling commodities under the value they would have if they would be produced locally, and by accepting a payment that is largely hoarded instead of demanding an immediate equivalent, China, and other countries in a similar position, not only directly stimulate the purchasing power of their export markets, but also do so indirectly by facilitating an inflation of their assets. American capital led the dance. With its interest rates approaching zero (which wouldn't have been possible without the demand of China and Japan for its debt) its tax giveaways, its deregulation, privatisation, the commodification of services and finances, it inflated the demand for its real estate and securities and thus their price. The trust in the capacity to hoard value was fully restored. In 2004 the economist Stephen Roach estimated that 80 percent of the net-savings of the world flowed to the US. A growing part of the global profits were siphoned away from general circulation into the American hoard. After the crisis erupted, the ‘neoliberal' policies which had stimulated this arrangement came under heavy fire, since the crisis had revealed its speculative essence. But what was the alternative from a capitalist point of view? The measures that should have been taken according to the capitalist left, more productive investment, if necessary directly by the state, and higher wages to stimulate demand, surely would have meant that the threats of overproduction and accelerating inflation would have returned much sooner.

The ‘neoliberal' arrangement at least had the advantage of holding back these threats for a while. It counteracted the tendential overproduction, by giving money other destinations than productive investment. It counteracted inflation by sucking money out of general circulation. And it made the rich even richer - especially the traders in money and everything that can be easily monetised. ‘The real profits are not made by producing,' said a Wall Street man, ‘they're made by buying and selling.' Or even by doing nothing, since the prices of shares and real estate rose every day. It became quite rational to go into debt, since the rise of ‘values' more than compensated for the low interest obligations - if you had money. If you didn't it was still expensive to run up debt; but for the rich, it paid for itself and then some. No surprise then that the illusion took hold that capital can accumulate in the form M - M', without having to pass through that annoying phase C.

But in reality, it is only in this phase that value is created, that the value invested in means of production C and labour power V transforms into C+V+S (surplus-value), that abstract labour is added to the value of capital. Thanks to the inclusion of China and other low wage countries and thanks to the relative decline of wages in the advanced countries, the creation of value grew, but not at the dizzying speed of the hoard.

The value of the hoard is not an objective fact but an article of faith. To defend the faith in its hoard is the primary objective of the capitalist state. That is the faith for which the crusades of our days are waged: to project power; to reassure the shareholders.

The False Promise of Austerity

When the crisis pierced the bubble and showed that the apparent enrichment was to a large extent due to the insertion of fictitious value in the cycle of value, the capacity to hold value once again became doubtful. It took an historically unprecedented acceleration of spending, and thus of debt-creation, on the part of the strongest countries to support the financial institutions, to avoid a collapse of faith in the private hoard. Faith in the state is what saved them. But, to confront the consequences of the growth of fictitious capital, much more fictitious capital was created. And it continued. With its ‘quantitative easing' policy the Fed continued to support the prices of public debt and mortgages by buying them for hundreds of billions from the banks with money it created out of thin air. Recently, the EU (European Union) created hundreds of billions of euros to save its most indebted member-states from bankruptcy. Even the countries where draconian austerity measures are imposed didn't stop creating more debt. They can't function without it; at the very least they need to refinance their old debts. None of them has a budget without a large deficit. More often than not, their deficit is increasing, only at a slower pace than earlier. So public debt keeps swelling, while austerity undermines the expansion of the market and the creation of new purchasing power and therefore also the receipts of the state so that more debt must be created ... in this way, the crisis of confidence in the capacity of private capital to hoard value is transformed into a crisis of confidence in the state as guardian of value. This crisis already severely affects the weakest competitors and is moving towards the centre of the system.

Those trillions of new debts are commodities, which must compete with all other commodities to find buyers. Their growing supply demands a growing portion of the purchasing power, so less remains for other commodities; this increases the saturation of markets, which discourages productive investment and thus the creation of new value.

Austerity serves to improve the brand image of the country, to inspire trust in its future ability to pay its debts. The growth of public debt means that the competition between them for capital is intensifying on the basis of that trust. The larger the supply of debt of the ‘save havens' like the US, the more countries whose debts are more risky are forced to try to improve their ability to pay with austerity measures to remain competitive in the debt market and avoid becoming the victim of a flight of capital.

So the goal of austerity is to convince the capital markets that it is profitable to buy its public debt, that its capacity to hoard value remains intact. But this strategy remains based on the illusion that M can become M' without an expansion of value in the C phase. It bets that the economy can pay for exponentially growing debts without a corresponding growth of production. It's a short-term strategy: the savings create space to pay the creditors but they don't stimulate the creation of new value. On the contrary, they reduce it and thereby reduce the future capacity to re-pay debts.

In the sphere of production, the emphasis is on cost reduction as well: savings are made on employment, wages, materials and unproductive costs. Especially the first two have made the recovery possible. In this recovery, however, the lost jobs have not come back: more is now being produced by fewer workers than before. This reflects an increase in the rate of exploitation (S/V), but also an increase in the organic composition of capital (C/V). This was not a result of a boom in technological investment. A reduction of V (labour power) was already technically feasible earlier but it took the excuse of the crisis to impose it. This trend further diminishes the demand for consumer goods on the part of the working class, thereby sharpening the problem of the realisation of value; and it diminishes living labour in relation to past labour in production, thereby sharpening the problem of the creation of value.

For capital, there is just one way to defend itself against the devalorisation that the law of value demands: make the working class pay for the crisis. But the unprecedented wave of strikes in China and other Asian countries last year, the massive revolt this spring in Arab countries, the strong resistance against austerity by the proletariat in Greece and other European countries, show that this will become increasingly difficult - and risky too. States are constrained by their fear that a point will be reached where social control escapes them. Already, young proletarians who occupy the plazas of Spain are beginning to wonder whether another world is possible than the world of value.

But for capital, there is no alternative. None of the scenarios that its apologists invent offer an escape from the iron cage in which the law of value imprisons it. In other texts, we analysed why ‘green technology' will not save it, and why information technology, monopolisation and artificial shortages will not save it.ⁱⁱⁱ Then there is the hope placed on China. China seems rich and in dire need of just about everything: the perfect market to revitalise the global economy.

The Limits of the Chinese Locomotive

Will China save capital from drowning? To a large extent, it already has done so during the last quarter of a century, as we saw earlier. But evidently, its beneficial effect for global capital has not prevented capital from descending into its worst crisis since the 1930s. So to get it out of this crisis, this beneficial effect would have to increase. But the opposite is happening. Both as a source of surplus value, and as a market, China's beneficial effect is diminishing: the former because of the rising value of labour power, the latter because of its own growing indebtedness and inflation.

The Rise in the Value of Labour Power

China's beneficial effect was primarily based on its abundant supply of dirt cheap labour power, well disciplined with the help of Confucius and Stalin. It's weakening because the development of China has changed its society and this is pushing the value of labour power higher.

The majority of the workers who make all these cheap products that keep inflation down in the West are migrants (that is the case for 80 percent of the miners, 70 percent of the construction workers, 68 percent of the industrial workers and 60 percent of service employees). They are between 150 and 200 million strong and they came from the vast interior of the country, in a huge but well orchestrated exodus, aimed at providing the necessary labour power for the ‘global assembly line.' The first generation of migrants consisted of peasants and other villagers who never knew anything else but a world of poverty. The value of labour power is determined by its cost of reproduction, but they differ from one society to another. In the interior of China, as in India, where the society has been characterised by general poverty for many generations, the consumer goods that are socially considered necessary for the reproduction of labour power are minimal. That's what makes the value of its labour power so low for capital.

The way in which Chinese capital has managed the labour force clearly shows that its aim was to prevent this from changing. For this, it used the ‘Hukou' registration system that ties the worker to the place he/she comes from. That means that the migrant worker has no right to benefits such as health insurance, except ‘at home' (where they often don't exist), no right even to stay when he/she becomes unemployed. There is a strong resemblance to the ‘homeland' system under South Africa's Apartheid regime, and with the treatment of undocumented workers everywhere. The Hukou system is designed to meet several objectives: the artificial determination of the value of labour power on the industrialised coast by the conditions of the hinterland; the creation of division within the working class; to make workers vulnerable to intimidation; and prevent the migration from the interior becoming an avalanche.

The sons and daughters of the first generation are still considered ‘migrants' under the Hukou system, but they live in a different world than their parents and have few links with their place of origin. They are urbanised young people who live in an environment that is much more technologically developed, complex and rich. An environment that is also transformed by the extravagant consumption of all those newly rich they see around them.^iv The emergence of an industrialised society implies a change in the value of its labour power: the consumer goods seen as necessary for its reproduction inevitably expand. The young generation no longer accepts the Hukou system and the conditions that stem from it.^v Because of its pressure, this system was already decomposing and the strike wave of last summer may have delivered it a fatal blow. Wages were already rising considerably in the industrialised coastal regions, even for migrants (between 2003 and 2009 by almost 80 percent). And it has continued: in the last two years wages in the coastal regions rose by 50 percent.

There are already capitals that are leaving these regions to set up shop where wages are still lower, as in Vietnam or Bangladesh, or in China's interior. But there too, the changes in living conditions resulting from industrialisation are pushing wages higher. Furthermore, the growing combativity of the Chinese proletariat has had an impact on the consciousness of workers in the region. In Vietnam and Bangladesh, the number and intensity of workers' struggles has shot upwards in 2010. Today, borders are less and less capable of preventing such contagion. News travels fast outside of the controlled media, as the events in the Maghreb have shown. In Vietnam, wages are rising as fast as in China. In Bangladesh, the minimum wage was increased by 85 percent last year. In China's interior wages are still considerably lower than in the coastal provinces, but they are rising at a faster pace.^vi

So it appears that capital's capacity to combine modern technology with ever-lower wages, which sustained its rate of profit for at least two decades, has reached its limit. It's true that there are still places on earth where the value of labour power is lower (in particular in India) but there, other factors, such as the lack of infrastructure (roads, ports, power, etc.) poses severe limits. So the hope that the cheap labour power of China and similar countries will revitalise global capital is not based on perceivable trends in the real economy. It's true that this could change if Chinese capital were to succeed in pushing the price of its labour power far under its value, but for the moment conditions are not in its favor.

The Stimulus Policy Created a Bubble

The vertiginous growth of its exports in the past decade made it possible for China to reduce the share of wages in the GNP dramatically, while conceding a rise of wages at the same time. The expansion of the pie was large enough to accommodate a growth of the purchasing power of workers even though wages became a smaller part of the pie. Today, that's no longer the case.

The Chinese economy, as it is structured around its export sector, obviously suffered huge losses when its markets shrank after the crisis burst open. The state, concerned about the social consequences of a slowdown of the economy, reacted with an ambitious stimulus programme. Only the US spent more. But while the US created money to back up its treasury, American assets, China did so in the first place to stimulate investment. State-run banks unleashed a lending spree which led to a construction boom of unprecedented proportions. Spending on fixed-asset investment is now equal to nearly 70 percent of the nation's gross domestic product. It is a ratio that no other large nation has approached in modern times (in the US, the figure has hovered around 20 percent for decades). But did this exponential growth of credit lead to a corresponding growth of value? Apparently not: more and more debts are no longer paid off. The money that was created in their name is fictitious, yet it circulates. Debt, speculation and inflation, are forcing China to end, or at least sharply reduce, its stimulus policy. The hopes of those who see in China a market that will continuously expand will be rudely disappointed.

China's stimulus measures have helped significantly to soften the crisis of advanced capitalism. When China buys, day after day, billions of dollars, it gives the Fed the flexibility to create money at a faster pace. China does it to curb the devaluation of the dollar vis-à-vis its own money, the Renminbi (RMB), also known as Yuan, in order to protect its competitive position on the American market. More precisely: many companies in the coastal provinces which produce for the external market already operate with a razor-thin profit-rate. Their contracts are in dollars but they pay their suppliers in RMB. A sharp devaluation of the dollar would be a fatal blow to them.

So it's not surprising that China used its stimulus program to reduce its dependence on Fordist production, by trying to become a producer at the cutting edge, where profits are less derived from the low value of labour power than from technological rent (i.e., a market advantage). The efforts it has made towards this goal, such as the modernisation of its infrastructure, were beneficial for the exports of the advanced countries, especially for Germany, the leading producer of modern technology. Its exports to China have increased by 40 percent since 2009. From a country with antique trains, China became an importer of HSTs (high speed trains). But now it is becoming an exporter of HSTs. That changes the game. The privileged sectors are becoming crowded. China becomes an exporter of green technology, while its factories vomit poison into the air as if there were no tomorrow.

A Cursed Treasure

At first sight, it seems so simple. China has huge needs and huge financial reserves. Just do the math and everyone benefits. But it is only simple if you think money and value are the same. If China decides to become a cutting edge producer in all areas, using its financial reserves to buy the best technology in all sectors, it would be for a time - before this ends in gigantic overproduction - a huge market of the last resort for the rest of the world. But it can't.

These financial reserves are debts and money of other countries, especially the US. To what degree does this money represent real value or only fictitious capital? Its partially fictitious character remains hidden in the hoard, as long as the faith in it remains intact, but it would appear clearly as soon as China attempted to bring the amount of dollars needed to realise that plan into circulation. By taking huge reserves of dollars out of the sterility of its coffers where they can do no harm, to throw them into the global economy, China would achieve the opposite of what it wants: a sharp devaluation of the dollar which would destroy the profit rate of its export industry and would devalue its own financial reserves, with a worldwide acceleration of inflation to boot. And if it were to use its hoard not for massive investments but to finance a general rise of purchasing power, the consequences would be equally catastrophic: the price of labour power, which remains its main competitive weapon, would shoot up, inflation and speculative investment, which already have reached alarming levels because of the accelerated monetary creation, would become unstoppable. It's as if there was a curse on China's hoard: these trillions of dollars will keep their value only as long as they remain untouched.

The Fear of a Human Avalanche

There is another reason why China cannot make this 'easy sum'. It could, for example, raise its agricultural sector to a point where it would be as productive as that of the US. Technically, nothing stands in its way. But instead of doing this, China is prospecting Africa and Brazil to buy land to start modern capitalist farms there, far away from home. Because doing this at home would mean the expulsion of hundreds of millions who would flee to the cities. That is the social nightmare that the ruling class wants to avoid at all costs. The same is true in many other sectors. China can't be reduced to an industrial zone in the south and subsistence farming in the interior. The majority of companies, employing a majority of the working class of the country, are capitals of a low organic composition (C/V); that is, employing lots of workers but at low productivity. They have survived, thanks to the low value of V, labour power (reinforced still by Maoist rule, when the value of labour power meant enough to survive just until tomorrow, the ‘iron bowl' and nothing more), and thanks to the fact that China's internal market is only partially opened to outside competition. But also thanks to loans from the banks, that is to say, from the state.

During the last three decades, the state has stopped supporting many thousands of those companies. This not only in order to cut expenses but also to feed - not too much, not too little - the stream of labour power needed by the rapidly expanding Fordist industry in the south. But there are still millions of them. To support them was the main goal of China's stimulus program. This has not prevented thousands of them from going under, but it kept alive many others. It did so by giving them orders (infrastructure projects, of which a principal goal is to be able to move large numbers of migrants to and from the industrial zones) and especially by giving them loans of which it is clear that a large part will never be repaid.

According to the IMF, China's rate of debt/GDP is 22 percent, a lot lower than that of the US or the EU. But this figure does not include the debts of the thousands of investment companies formed by local governments that invested in infrastructure projects but also in the survival of companies that, from the point of view of value, no longer have a reason to exist. These investment companies are, like all capitalist entities, engaged in a ferocious competitive battle between them to attract capital. According to the calculations of the economist Victor Shih of Northwestern University, their debts amounted to 11.4 trillion RMB (1,7 trillion dollars) by the end of 2009, or 35 percent of China's GDP. Taking into account the open credit lines already assigned to them, they would rise by another 12.7 trillion RMB by the end of this year, to a total of 3.7 trillion dollars. Already 28 percent of these loans are ‘non-performing'. A recent report by the investment bank UBS predicted that the local government investment companies would generate $460 billion in loan defaults over the next few years. ‘Most of the government entities that borrow can't even make the interest payments on the loans', Shih recently said to The New York Times . When these debts are included, China's rate of debt/GNP was 75 percent at the end of 2009 and would be 97 percent by the end of 2011, higher than that of the US today (94 percent).^vii So the hope resting on the assumption that China can play the role of locomotive because it doesn't have to carry excessive debts which force the other large economies to austerity policies, seems unjustified. Like elsewhere, in China the state desperately tries to compensate for the lack of creation and realisation of value by accumulating debts and we can see that its capacity to do so is eroding. Its efforts have led to excessive indebtedness, an inflation-rate (officially still below 6 percent, in reality at least double that) that threatens its capacity to monetise value, and speculative bubbles, especially in real estate.^viii

For these reasons, China has decided to end its stimulus program. Since last fall, the state has ordered the banks to drastically tighten their loans, and has begun to consolidate - i.e liquidate - thousands of local investment companies. Its economy is beginning to cool. At the same time, the pressure for higher (or less low) wages continues. Workers in transportation, services and white-collar jobs who did not get the raises that the industrial workers obtained, claim it's their turn now.

Some China-watchers think that the anti-inflation measures that China is taking now are too little and too late to get inflation under control; and that a climate of ‘stagflation' would make it very difficult for the state to maintain its grip on society. It's not up to us to predict whether China will make a ‘hard' or ‘soft landing'.^ix But in both cases, the high hopes invested in its market will land hard.

China will continue to grow, but less than before. Like elsewhere, this growth will create fewer jobs than it will destroy. Out of fear of social convulsions, China tries to limit this tendency, but this is becoming increasingly difficult. In China, like elsewhere, the great worry of the ruling class is: how will we manage all this superfluous variable capital. Not just the migrants and other refugees from rural poverty, but also the millions of graduates for whom there is no more place in the economy.^x

We see the same thing elsewhere. Everywhere, the nightmare of capitalism becomes, what will we do with all those people? Where can we stockpile them, how can we keep them quiet? How to separate the superfluous from those we need? How to prevent them from engaging in revolt? How to make them disappear?

For the moment, capital is focusing on reducing their cost. It is well aware of the impossibility of creating new debt to replace the old non-performing ones endlessly, or, in other words, of the impossibility of continuing to hide, with fictitious capital, that the capital in the hoard is (to a growing extent) fictitious. So by reducing its costs, it seeks to create the financial space to defend the confidence in the capacity of its debts to hold value. In the past three years, trillions of dollars, euros, yens and RMBs have been created to support the private hoard undermined by bad debts, and trillions more to impede a deflationary spiral towards depression. Never has so much money been created in so much time. This has put a brake on the deflationary pressure without however eliminating it. It remains a bubble economy. Capital, M, continues to skip the phase C to get to M' and by doing so, it undermines M'. All the money creation, the tax breaks and other presents to the possessors of capital can hide this only for a limited time.

So the pendulum swings from stimulation to austerity. China is ending its stimulus program, the US has ended its ‘quantitative easing' policy and in Congress, the emphasis is on cutting expenses, the EU's willingness to bailout its most debt-ridden members seems to have reached a limit and everywhere central banks are taking measures to restrict loans, to defend their hoard.

At the same time, the proletariat, the population that has only its labour power to sell in order to survive, neither in China nor elsewhere is in the mood to sacrifice itself and is discovering new ways to fight, to communicate, to resist.

A collision is inevitable. As Bette Davis said: ‘Fasten your seatbelts. It's gonna be a bumpy ride.'

Sander <sander_abroad AT hotmail.com> is a New York-based journalist who uses this pen-name for articles he couldn't possibly get published in the mainstream-press

A Short Glossary of Marxist Concepts

All of the Marxist categories, e.g. value, the commodity, capital, wage-labour, abstract labour, are historically concrete, in contrast to the metaphysical categories of political economy, which are eternal, a-historical, and universal.

* Value-Form

Value is the socially established form that the products of human labour assume as commodities, goods and services produced for exchange, in contrast to the tangible use that the same objects may have. In present-day capitalist society, the value-form has spread beyond the immediate process of production and exchange to penetrate virtually the totality of human social relations and thought processes, to the point where social relations based on the value-form, on commodity exchange, appear largely self-evident, normal, and ‘natural'. What makes the exchange of commodities possible is that they are all commensurable in terms of the labour that it takes to produce them, which permits the establishment of their value, which appears as an intrinsic property of the good or service.

** Abstract Labour

Abstract labour is what establishes the value of a determinate commodity, in contrast to the concrete labour that produces it as a use value. Abstract labour, then, is labour stripped of its specific, concrete, qualitative, features - though it is neither just a social average nor a substance that is physically contained in the commodity itself, the ‘product' of the burning of so many calories expended in its production by the worker. It is, rather, a real abstraction, not a mental abstraction, contained in the actual social relations of production, in which the concrete labour of masses of workers is transformed into a social labour, objectified in commodities as expressions of value, and assuming a thing-like, reified social existence.

*** Fictitious Capital

In one sense, all financial capital is fictitious since its value, its power to represent real commodities, ultimately depends on fiction, on ‘faith in money-value as the immanent spirit of commodities' (Marx). But money is also ‘only a different form of the commodity' and must therefore expand together with the value of the commodities it represents. To the extent that financial capital's expansion is disconnected from the expansion of value of the commodities it represents, it is fictitious. More specifically: fictitious capital is capital neither invested in the physical means of production, infrastructure, or the wages of workers, but rather in assets (stocks, bonds, securities) that are expected to yield profits at some future time. It constitutes claims to future production and the profits that this may generate - paper claims to wealth. While the existence of fictitious capital is inherent in the development of a capitalist banking and credit system, its actual development in present-day capitalism in the form of both public and private debt necessary to sustain economic activity constitutes a huge and unsustainable burden on future earnings that may never be repaid or which creates credit bubbles the bursting of which constitutes a formidable threat to the very stability of the capitalist system.

Footnotes

i. See, amongst other texts, ‘Value Creation and the Crisis of Capital' , Internationalist Perspective 49 Spring/Summer 2008, http://internationalist-perspective.org/PI/pi-archives/pi_49_value.html

ii But the US produces almost as much, 19.4 percent, with almost a tenth of the labour force: there are only 11.5 million industrial workers left in the US. So the productivity-gap remains considerable. See, Financial Times, 13 March 2011.

iii See ‘Capitalism, Technology and the Environment', Internationalist Perspective 50 Winter 2009, http://internationalist-perspective.org/PI/pi-archives/pi_50_environment.html; Sander, ‘Artificial Scarcity in a World of Overproduction: An Escape that Isn't', Mute Vol2 #16, http://www.metamute.org/en/content/artificial_scarcity_in_a_world_of_overproduction_an_escape_that_isn_t

iv Of the 15 largest economies, China is second in income inequality, after Brazil. It's a sad irony that the greatest inequalities of the world are managed by the ‘Communist Party' and the ‘Party of Workers'.

v Mary E. Gallagher who interviewed young migrants at different moments described the change this way:

The iconic figure of a young, shabby farmer making his way to the city for a limited amount of time with limited ambitions and expectations for his time there is giving way to young people who see the city as their future and, if not their birthright, as something that they have earned. Unlike their parents or elder siblings who compared their fortunes to what ‘would have been' if they had stayed in the countryside, these younger migrants compare themselves to their urban counterparts. Differences in treatment are no longer as readily acceptable. Their expectations for the future are wider and different than earlier generations. Future plans rarely include returning to the countryside as farmers.

See, ‘We are not Machines: Teen Spirit on China's Shop floor', in The China Beat, 23 August, 2010 http://www.thechinabeat.org/?p=2538

vi New York Times, 31 May 2011.

vii His conclusions are of course challenged by Chinese economists loyal to the state whose principal argument is: ‘Given that the Chinese government has commenced its exit from the stimulus policy, Shih's extrapolation that the debt will continue to balloon in the next two years makes little sense.' Xu Yisheng's ‘How Victor Shih Gets China's Debt So Wrong', China Stakes, 25 March 2010, http://www.chinastakes.com/2010/3/how-victor-shih-get-chinas-debt-so-wrong.html

To the degree that this is correct, China's public debt will rise less than Shih thinks but its growth and its imports will slow and bankruptcies will spread.

viii The last one is in part instigated by the state. It inflates the bubble because it profits from it: ‘Through taxes, fees and property sales, local governments are raising more and more at the expense of the household sector's income and purchasing power. Local governments are essentially on a treadmill of raising more and more revenue to fund fixed investment. So it needs land prices to rise higher and higher, resulting in a massive and nationwide property bubble.'

Andy Xie, ‘Rebalancing cannot wait', Caixin Weekly, 11 March 2011, http://english.caing.com/2011-03-11/100235531.html

ix According to a recent poll of investors, a ‘hard landing of China' is seen as the greatest risk for the financial markets today. ‘China hard landing is biggest threat', Financial Times, 20 March 2011. http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/332ca33a-5194-11e0-888e-00144feab49a.html#axzz1PJs7gyOt

x In 1998 the higher education institutions delivered 830,000 graduates, in 2009 6 million. Between 1982 and 2005, the number of graduates rose sevenfold while the number of white collar jobs rose from 7 to 13 percent.

The phone-hacking scandal hasn't only revealed the true sleaziness of Britain's establishment, but also the resounding hollowness of a post-ideological elite held together by little more than self-interest - writes James Heartfield

• 60 Metropolitan Police officers have widened their investigation of News International to take in the rest of the national press.

• The Government has appointed the Right Honorable Lord Justice Leveson to enquire into standards in the Press, and proposals include a licensing system for journalists and newspapers.

• Rupert Murdoch, Chief Executive of News Corp, and his son James, were called to explain themselves before a Parliamentary select committee.

• Rebekah Brooks, Chief Executive of News International, was forced to resign, and later arrested by police.

• Metropolitan Police Chief Sir Paul Stephenson resigned after questions about his links with News International journalists.

• Assistant Commissioner John Yates resigned after he was accused of dragging his heels over the enquiry into News International.

• The Prime Minister continued to face questions about his ex-press secretary Andy Coulson.

• Police said there were ‘no suspicious circumstances' after News of the World whistle-blower Sean Hoare was found dead.

• Britain's best-selling newspaper, The News of the World, published since 1843, was closed on 10 July 2011.

The News of the World made many enemies for its muck-raking and reactionary campaigns, even before it was investigated for breaking into the phone accounts of hundreds of politicians, celebrities and even murder victims and their families. It was by July 2011, in Rebekah Brooks' words, ‘a toxic brand'.

Image: The News of the World takes its gracious leave of the media stage

Still, those who take pleasure in the police investigation into and closure of The News of the World, or who look forward to a ‘reform of the press' coming out of Lord Leveson's Committee of Enquiry, are missing the point. However reactionary News International's role in the British political scene has been up until now, the working through of the scandal can only lead to a much more state-regulated and unfree press. Those looking forward to the end of the Murdoch dynasty at News Corp might be glad to see it bend to the ‘rules of corporate governance' - only to find that the de-personification of capital makes it no more human. The resignations of senior police officers might seem like good news, but as we can see, police involvement in the media has been greatly expanded under the current series of investigations and forthcoming inquiries. Nor, indeed, is the outcome of the current scandal likely to be a more open political process, but rather one that is hidden behind judicial inquiries, police investigations and official procedure while the public is distracted by a succession of manufactured scandals that blow up and pass like storms.

A Breakdown in Ruling Class Solidarity

The trigger to the reopened investigation into News International was evidence in the trial of Levi Bellfield for the murder of Milly Dowler. Before this, the Metropolitan Police Force had resisted calls to re-open the investigation. As is now clear, though, the Met had been holding extensive evidence of illegal phone-hacking since long before 2009. Whatever the trigger, the heightened drama of the investigation has been driven by a breakdown in the close relations among the establishment, in particular between News International, the Metropolitan Police, the ‘political class' - Number 10, the opposition and MPs on the Culture Select Committee and the Judges. What had been for many years a close-knit establishment broke down as each attacked the other. That was how the chairman of News Corp ended up being pilloried by MPs alongside senior Police chiefs as they were bundled out of office, while a hastily revived operation Weeting trawled through The News of the World's computer records as hacks turned out the lights for the last time.

Image: All work and no play - Rebekah Brooks at the coal-face

Contrast those scenes with what had been happening only a year earlier. The new Prime Minister David Cameron appointed ex-News of the World editor Andy Coulson as his Press Secretary, and, like his predecessors Margaret Thatcher, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, held a succession of private and social, meetings with Rupert Murdoch, James Murdoch and Rebekah Brooks. Just last year Cameron stood down his Business Secretary Vince Cable from looking at News International's bid for a 61 percent share in satellite channel BskyB after the Liberal Democrat was secretly recorded by Telegraph journalists saying he might not back the sale. At the same time Met Commissioner Stephenson and Assistant Commissioner Yates held regular meetings in a wine bar to discuss how to manage news stories. At that time the Metropolitan Police employed 69 press officers, about a third of whom had been or were working for News International. Police officers regularly sold information to journalists at News International, and at other newspapers. The police officer who had been in charge of the phone-hacking investigation, Andy Hayman, was working for News International, writing in The Times that there was no real problem.

There were a few testy arguments leading up to the point that this den of thieves truly fell out.

In 2007 Assistant Commissioner John Yates had the Prime Minister Tony Blair interviewed under the Cash for Honours investigations, which arose out of allegations published in The Sunday Times (the £773,177 investigation ended without charges).

In 2008 Metropolitan Chief Police Commissioner Ian Blair, who had been closely associated with Prime Minister Blair's ‘War on Terror' and the shooting of Jean Charles De Menendez, was forced out by the new Tory Mayor of London, Boris Johnson.

Shortly afterwards, Ian Blair's replacement, Sir Paul Stephenson, had shadow Home Office Minister Damien Green arrested and his offices in the House of Commons searched, investigating official leaks (no charges followed).

The same year the Lord Justice Latham and Mr Justice Blake at the High Court ruled in favour of a Freedom of Information request by Heather Brooke for the publication of MPs' expenses - before The Telegraph newspaper published a complete record it had bought from a civil servant.

News International's News of the World and The Sun newspapers followed the Telegraph's lead, creating a press feeding frenzy over MPs expenses that led to MPs Elliot Morley, David Chaytor, Eric Illsley, Margaret Moran and Jim Devine being charged with criminal offences.

News International Journalists warned Labour life peer Tom Sawyer that he would never be forgiven for leading moves to unseat Prime Minister Tony Blair, and that Rebekah Brooks would go after him. Then News International's Sun newspaper pulled its support from Prime Minister Gordon Brown with the headline ‘Labour's Lost it'.

In these public scandals the code of trust that binds the British establishment together has been eroded. To dodge the criticisms, players tried to shift the blame onto others. Different players hoped to ride the scandals, leveraging their own position. The major political parties tried to embarrass each other, drawing in the press and the police - and also the judiciary. The judges sought to increase their own authority with ever wider rulings encroaching on the historic sovereignty of parliament. The police, too, finding themselves under much closer scrutiny, had an interest in pushing back against the politicians.

And in most of these public scandals, the MPs, ministers, police chiefs and public officials all suffered exposure in the popular press, led by the News International papers, The News of the World and The Sun. Of course the problems with MPs expenses or the shooting of de Menendez were not created by the newspapers, and indeed The News of the World was not alone, but backed up by The Mirror, The Daily Mail and other papers. Still, well-known public figures knew and dreaded the newspaper feeding frenzy, and the biggest shark in the pool was The News of the World.

Why the Thieves Fell Out

The reason that the British establishment are struggling to keep up a united front is that they are no longer faced with a common enemy. The British political establishment was forged in the years of class struggle, as a way of making sure that the working class never took power. Behind the mask of parliament, the police, judiciary and civil service made sure that real power was kept in the hands of the elite. Newspaper barons made their fortunes selling to the masses, but always kept on the side of the powers-that-be. The long Cold War era gave the elite a common mission that made sure that they would not be tempted to break ranks in the face of the enemy.

Political engagement has been in decline for many years, and mass political parties, allied to trade unions or to big business, and other mass civil society organisations, are history - class struggle is the one thing the political elite are agreed they want no part of. And as they have relaxed their guard against outside threats, the elite have discovered that less binds them together than they thought.

The Myth of News International

Rupert Murdoch's British media holdings grew as he took advantage of the changed political climate. He bought The Times in 1981 after journalists went on strike. Later he forced through the new print technology with a transfer to a new plant at Wapping that destroyed the printers' union in Fleet Street. Then later he bought up British Satellite Broadcasting and broke the monopoly of the major broadcasters. In all of these conflicts Murdoch cemented a friendship with the Conservative government committed to ‘deregulation' of the media. ‘I speak as more than an admirer of Margaret Thatcher, I speak as a person grateful for the opportunities this nation has given me - and the opportunities she has created', Rupert Murdoch said at the first Margaret Thatcher inaugural lecture on 21 October 2010.

Image: Murdoch removes his jacket at the parliamentary phone-hacking hearing after eating humble pie

Murdoch's business strategy was echoed in the editorial stance of his newspapers, which pitched markedly to the right, beginning with the traditionally Labour Sun's support for Margaret Thatcher in 1979. The Labour Party's defeats in the general elections of 1983, 1987 and 1992 and the support News International gave the Conservative Party cemented the myth that it was ‘The Sun wot won it' (a 1992 headline) - that is, that no political party could win the election without the support of News International.

The News International Myth grew because of the fealty that British Prime Ministers paid to Rupert Murdoch, most notably Tony Blair, whose visit to Murdoch in Australia symbolised a political sea-change in his party. It was not only David Cameron's office that followed Blair in making obeisance to News International. The corporation's muscle meant that almost all public figures had to suck up too - by employing News International people, or giving them exclusive stories and insider tips. The police, having been exposed to unexpected criticism since the Stephen Lawrence Enquiry of 1999, got much more interested in press management. All kinds of public authorities and private companies massively expanded their public relations departments out of a fear of being engulfed in scandals.

It seemed as if the media ‘feeding frenzy' could descend upon anyone who did not pay attention to their public image. Trade Union leaders were mercilessly ridiculed, as were BBC chiefs and later ‘Greedy Bankers'. In 1994 even the Conservative government was sucked into a quagmire of ‘Tory Sleaze' as MPs affairs with researchers and lobby payments were exposed in The News of the World and elsewhere.

The key to understanding the Myth of News International's power is that the political class - indeed the entire establishment - felt pointedly out of touch with the masses. Cameron, Brown and Blair put up with the harsh judgements of Campbell, Coulson and Brooks because they thought they had their finger on the popular pulse. An inner doubt that maybe they just did not have the brute instincts to talk to the common man led the most powerful in the land to bow down before News International.

News International's Weakness

As News International's power was artificially inflated, the day it would burst open approached. The strident right wing editorial line followed by The Sun, The News of the World, Sky News and by News Corps' holdings in the US, Fox News and The New York Daily News in earlier days, can sound hysterical today, an echo of a Cold War politics. News International's popular touch is only relative. All print journalism sales have declined, and even broadcasting is struggling. Promoting a move to pay-per-view internet publishing, Rupert Murdoch said ‘we are moving from news papers to news brands' (‘Moving Beyond Dead Trees', Boyer Lecture, 2008). Insiders say that Rupert Murdoch still believes in newspapers, but his children, James, Elizabeth and Lachlan all see the future in broadcasting.

In the 1980s News International newspapers fed a growing cynicism towards party politics. By 2011 the same papers were operating in an era shaped by just that cynicism. Politicians were hardly even news anymore. Instead the papers were filled with celebrities, and with crimes stories, ideally with photogenic child crime victims. In the shrinking pool the hacks had to work harder for the big scoops, and were under pressure to get results. Blanket phone hacking was one way to try to garner stories.

Image: 'Who? Bent? Me?', Former Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner Andy Hayman practices his panto routine

The News of the World was used to the game of knocking down celebrities after building them up and thought it could handle the hostility of hacking-victims Sienna Miller and Hugh Grant. More difficult, given the paper's campaign for Justice for Milly Dowler, was the discovery that they had hacked into the murdered girl's phone. Rebekah Brooks' Midas touch was about to go into reverse, turning gold into shit.

The accumulated hostility News International had garnered in its rise to power was about to burst out. This time it was The News of the World that was at the centre of the Feeding Frenzy. Rebekah Brooks found out that there was no top people's club left to protect her - she had helped to rip it apart. But just as the old elite turned on each other, a new elite is in the making, and it is banding together in outrage at News International. The company that so symbolised 20th century entrepreneurialism was beginning to look like an old-fashioned family firm.

Outrage

Tragically, the scandal that has engulfed News International can only lead in one direction, towards greater state control of the press. Just as The News of the World used to manufacture scandals, creating folk-devils out of migrants and paedophiles, the current scandal around The News of the World has made a folk-devil out of Rupert Murdoch himself. And just as those scandals could only be (momentarily) satisfied by the introduction of new laws to contain the problem, this scandal is to be addressed by a new regulatory framework for the press.

The Guardian newspaper is rightly proud of journalist Nick Davies' exposure of The News of the World phone-hacking scandal. It showed that investigative journalism is a powerful lever for the truth. But strangely, The Guardian is in two minds about the virtues of a free press: ‘The stampede to find tougher forms of regulation is understandable and, indeed, right.'(Guardian editorial, 8 July 2011). The Guardian's sister paper the Observer editorialises:

we must urgently consider radical reforms of the existing regulatory framework: [...] enhancing the investigative powers of the new body which is properly staffed and funded; and providing sanctions, including the power to levy substantial fines and insist upon prominent retractions of false claims. (Editorial, The Observer, Sunday 10 July 2011)

 

The willingness to accept greater press constraints comes about because of the scandal-mongers' contempt for the public - in particular those who bought the Murdoch press. On Newsnight, Carl Bernstein said this is not about the quality press, it is about the sewer and the ‘British public lapped it up' (19 July 2011).

The New Elite

One man who was delighted by the scandal at The News of the World was Lord Chief Justice Igor Judge. At the annual judges' dinner at Mansion House on 13 July 2011 he complained about MPs and newspapers encroaching on the power of the judges, thinking in particular of the ‘superinjunctions' judges made that were broken under parliamentary privilege:

This year there has been a steady flow [of attacks on the judiciary], sometimes by those who should know better and sometimes by those who choose to ignore what they know ...

Revelations about the phone-hacking scandal had created a crisis embroiling the police, politicians and the press, he said: ‘And now, notwithstanding the constant criticism of judges, public revulsion has led to the demand for a judge-led inquiry,' because judges ‘can deliver a carefully considered, honest but above all an independent answer'.

Image: The new elite?

The Lord Chief Justice is right that the outcome of the phone-hacking scandal is a move towards greater power for ‘independent' authorities over what we will be allowed to read. But the judiciary is only one of the independent authorities that are standing in for the absent political process. To get an idea of what the emerging new elite might look like, you could do worse than to look at the people sitting on Lord Leveson's inquiry.

• Shami Chakrabarti CBE - the civil liberties campaigner and Director of Liberty
• Sir Paul Scott-Lee - former Chief Constable of the West Midlands
• Lord (David) Currie - former Chairman of OFCOM
• Elinor Goodman - radio presenter and former Political Editor of Channel 4 News
• George Jones - former Political Editor of The Telegraph
• Sir David Bell - former Chairman of The Financial Times

Eight years ago, Lord Falconer outlined the change that was taking place in British public administration:

What governs our approach is a clear desire to place power where it should be: increasingly not with politicians but with those best fitted in different ways to deploy it. Interest rates are not set by politicians in the Treasury, but by the Bank of England. Minimum wages are not determined by the Department of Trade and Industry, but by the Low Pay Commission. Membership of the House of Lords will be determined not in Downing Street but in an independent Appointments Commission. This depoliticisation of key decision-making is a vital element in bringing power closer to the people. (Falconer, 2003)

The ‘depoliticisation of decision-making' and the creation of a technocratic administration was well under way in the last decade - but it has little to do with bringing power closer to the people. With the election of the Cameron government it did seem that trend would be pushed back, and many anticipated a new outbreak of class conflict over public spending cuts. However, Labour leader Ed Miliband has made it clear that class struggle is not an option for the opposition, and any parliamentary challenge will be over the personnel and scope of the ‘depoliticised decision-making'.

James Heartfield's <Heartfield AT blueyonder.co.uk> history, The Aborigines' Protection Society: Humanitarian Imperialism in Australia, New Zealand, Fiji, Canada, South Africa, and the Congo, 1836-1909, has just been published by Hurst, and is available here: http://www.hurstpub.co.uk/BookDetails.aspx?BookId=637