Is salvagepunk sci-fi with left politics? Laptops with brass trimmings? Anything that looks kind of like Mad Max? At a recent event in London China Miéville and Evan Calder Williams discussed the term, its long pasts, its cursed present, and its uncertain future.  Camera by Hamish Heartnell. Sound by Rachel Baker and video Hamish Hartnell.

Salvage Punk from Mute Publishing on Vimeo.

SALVAGEPUNK IN THE BIRTHGRAVE

Launch of Combined and Uneven Apocalypse

Burial of salvagepunk

Took place at Limehouse Town Hall, London E14, Saturday 30 July, 2011 

'Sabotage the social machine'. 'Incinerate the documents!'. In the first contribution to a group of articles on logistics, workplace surveillance and national security, Alberto Toscano examines the anti-urbanist presuppositions of insurrectionary anarchism, speculating on how the catastrophic destiny of certain technological innovations might instead be turned to different ends

The Spontaneous Philosophy of Interruption

It is rare, in contemporary oppositional thought, to encounter the totalising temporal imaginary of revolution that so marked the visions and strategies of the modern left. When it hasn’t been victim to melancholy retreats from the teleology of emancipation, that encompassing horizon of social change and political action has come under attack, alongside the very idea of transition, for domesticating antagonism. Interstitial enclaves or temporary liberated zones, ornamented by discourses of withdrawal and difference, have widely replaced the reference to an advancing, unifying and largely homogeneous planetary movement of liberation. The space-time of much of today's anti-capitalism is one of subtraction and interruption, not attack and expansion.

Needless to say, any negation of the status quo brings with it spatial separation and temporal disruption, but the contemporary ideology, or spontaneous philosophy, of interruption appears – perhaps as a testament to the claustrophobia of our present – to make something of a fetish out of rupture. This cuts across theory and activism, laying bare a shared structure of feeling between the political metaphysics of events or ‘dissensus’ and the everyday tactics of struggles. Foregrounding interruption implies a particular understanding of the nature of contemporary capital, the capabilities of antagonism and the temporality (or lack thereof) of transformation.

Image: Alberto Toscano, Rotterdam (June, 2010)

The Coming Insurrection formulates, in a compellingly abrasive way, a widespread conviction that contemporary struggles against capital have shifted from the point of production to those of circulation, distribution, transport and consumption. In other words, that arresting the flow of this homogenised society is a conditio sine qua non for the irruption of non-capitalist forms-of-life:

The technical infrastructure of the metropolis is vulnerable. Its flows amount to more than the transportation of people and commodities. Information and energy circulate via wire networks, fibers and channels, and these can be attacked. Nowadays sabotaging the social machine with any real effect involves reappropriating and reinventing the ways of interrupting its networks. How can a TGV line or an electrical network be rendered useless? ⁱ

Behind this statement lies an anti-urbanism that regards contemporary spectacular exploitation and conformity as products of the capillary management of everyday life. Cities are stripped of any life not mobilised for the commodity and pre-empted from any behaviour at odds with a tautological drive for systemic reproduction:

The metropolis is not just this urban pile-up, this final collision between city and country. It is also a flow of being and things, a current that runs through fiber-optic networks, through high-speed train lines, satellites, and video surveillance cameras, making sure that this world keeps running straight to its ruin. It is a current that would like to drag everything along in its hopeless mobility, to mobilize each and every one of us. ii 

Until a moment before the clash […] the potential rebel lives in his house or his refuge, often with his relatives; and as much as that residence and that environment may be provisional, precarious, conditioned by the imminent revolt, until the revolt begins they are the site of an individual battle, more or less solitary. [...] You can love a city, you can recognise its houses and its streets in your most remote and secret memories; but only in the hour of revolt is the city really felt like an haut-lieu [a high place] and at the same time your own city: your own because it belongs to you but at the same time also to others; your own because it is a battlefield you and the collectivity have chosen; your own, because it is a circumscribed space in which historical time is suspended and in which every act has its own value, in its immediate consequences. v

The collective experience of time, and of what Jesi calls symbols (such that the present adversary simply becomes the enemy , the club in my hand the weapon , victory the just act , and so on), means that the revolt is an action for action's sake, an end (as in The Invisible Committee's reflections on the ethics of sabotage and the commune) inseparable from its means.

It was a matter of acting once and for all, and the fruit of the action was contained in the action itself. Every decisive choice, every irrevocable action, meant being in accordance with time; every hesitation, to be out of time. When everything came to an end, some of the true protagonists had left the stage forever.^vi

Abiding with the interruptive paradigm of an intransitive and intransigent revolt, we can wonder whether, and if so to what extent, the historical space that revolt intervenes in inflects its character. It is no accident that the kind of sabotage envisioned in The Coming Insurrection is on lines and nodes of circulation, and not on the machinery of production itself.

The organisational and energetic resources required to reproduce the metropolis are formidable: 'like Alice's red queen, by great exertion and utmost speed the metropolis barely manages to remain in the same position'. ^viii The metropolis has the intensification and expansion of supply lines as its precondition, and logistics becomes its primary concern, its foremost product, and the basic determinant of its power:

The metropolis is in fact a processing centre, in which a vast variety of goods, materials and spiritual, is mechanically sorted and reduced to a limited number of standardized articles, uniformly packaged, and distributed through controlled channels to their destination, bearing the approved metropolitan label. ‘Processing’ has now become the chief form of metropolitan control.ix

Despite his systemic objections to the catastrophic ends of this amorphous machine for (capital) accumulation, Mumford also regards these control capabilities as potentially reconfigurable in a multi-centred and organic society. But, especially when it comes to the informational requirements attendant on such control-by-processing, manifest in the metastasis of a tentacular bureaucracy, he too is tempted by the possibilities of insurgent interruption – even recalling an anarchist slogan ( 'Incinerate the documents! ') to stress the ease with which such a system, founded on the circulation of real or virtual 'paper', could be ground to a halt.

But it is also possible, and indeed necessary, to think of logistics not just as the site of interruption, but as the stake of enduring and articulated struggles. Here there remains much to digest and learn from in the ongoing research of labour theorist and historian Sergio Bologna, an editor in the 1970s of the journal Primo Maggio , which carried out seminal inquiries into containerisation and the struggles of port workers.^x Countering those ‘post-workerists’ who have equated post-Fordism with the rise of the cognitive and the immaterial (and basically with the ubiquity of a figure of work patently traced on that of the academic or 'culture worker'), Bologna notes that the key networks that condition contemporary capitalism are neither affective nor simply digital, but involve instead the massive expansion and constant innovation in the very material domain of logistics – in particular of 'supply chain management', conceived of in terms of the speed, flexibility, control, capillary character and global coverage of the stocking, transport and circulation of services and commodities.^xi

Images: Alberto Toscano, Hamburg (June, 2010) 

Bologna underscores the military origins of logistics, namely in the work of de Jomine, a Swiss military theoretician working first under Napoleon and then under the Tsar. The 'original function of logistics', writes Bologna,

[...] was to organise the supplying of troops in movement through a hostile territory. Logistics is not sedentary, since it is the art of optimizing flows. … So logistics must not only be able to know how to make food, medicines, weapons, materials, fuel and correspondence reach an army in movement, but it must also know where to stock them, in what quantities, where to distribute the storage sites, how to evacuate them when needed; it must know how to transport all of this stuff and in what quantity so that it is sufficient to satisfy the requirements but not so much as to weigh down the movement of troops, and it must know how to do this for land, sea and air forces.^xii

Compared to carrying coal by rail, moving oil by sea eliminated the labour of coal-heavers and stokers, and thus the power of organized workers to withdraw their labour from a critical point in the energy system. … [W]hereas the movement of coal tended to follow dendritic networks, with branches at each end but a single main channel, creating potential choke points at several junctures, oil flowed along networks that often had the properties of a grid, like an electrical grid, where there is more than one possible path and the flow of energy can switch to avoid blockages or overcome breakdowns.^xiv

'Most contemporary cities', Davis writes, 'repress the potential environmental efficiencies inherent in human-settlement density. The ecological genius of the city remains a vast, largely hidden power. But there is no planetary shortage of ‘carrying capacity’ if we are willing to make democratic public space, rather than modular, private consumption, the engine of sustainable equality'.^xvii Such an assertion of the necessity of a drastic transition as against plural but ineffectual interruptions takes logistic and energetic dimensions of anti-capitalist struggle more seriously than the convergence of anti-urbanist visions of space and epiphanic models of revolt that – for evident and in many respects sacrosanct historical and political reasons – have come to dominate much anti-capitalist thought.^xviii It also does so by recognising what, by analogy with Marcuse, we could call the necessary alienation involved in complex social systems, including post-capitalist ones. As David Harvey has noted, against the grain of fantasies of a tabula rasa, unmediated communism or anarchism:

The proper management of constituted environments (and in this I include their long-term socialistic or ecological transformation into something completely different) may therefore require transitional political institutions, hierarchies of power relations, and systems of governance that could well be anathema to both ecologists and socialists alike. This is so because, in a fundamental sense, there is nothing unnatural about New York city and sustaining such an ecosystem even in transition entails an inevitable compromise with the forms of social organization and social relations which produced it.^xix

The question of what use can be drawn from the dead labours which crowd the earth's crust in a world no longer dominated by value proves to be a much more radical question, and a much more determinate negation, than that of how to render the metropolis, and thus in the end ourselves, useless.

In the second contribution to a group of articles on logistics, workplace surveillance and national security, Brian Ashton zooms in on the microscopic technologies surveilling and shaping working lives

You already have zero privacy. Get over it. – Scott McNally, Chief Executive of Sun Microsystems1

On 13 November, 1964, the acting chief constable of Liverpool announced the formation of a commando force of ‘just over 100 specially selected men and women from the city police force who would mix in disguise with the general public.’2 They would work in conjunction with television cameras that were ‘scanning the streets and transmitting pictures to a monitor in headquarters. Any suspicious behaviour would be passed on by radio to the commandos for quick action.’3 The two-way radios were the first to be issued to a British police force. And the use of cameras was watched with interest by police forces around the country. Of course they sometimes got it wrong.

Disguises were so successful at first that more than once, one team of commandos spent more than 45 minutes watching another team, whom they thought were acting suspiciously, and only found out their real identity when they tried to move them on.4

The powerful have always spied on us. They do it to exploit us, to control us and because they fear us.

With the advent of the modern industrial group in large factories in urban areas, the whole process of control underwent a fundamental revolution. It was now the owner or manager of a factory…The employer as he came to be called, who had to secure, or exact, from his employees a level of obedience and/or co-operation which would enable him to exercise control.5

In order to do this the boss man had to employ large numbers of supervisors and company spies, and the spies didn’t confine themselves just to the workplace. During the early days of the Ford Motor Company, the Five Dollar Day period, the company’s sociological department investigated the social lives of the workers, using 30 investigators to check that the workers were living moral lives. If it was found that the money was ‘more of a menace than a benefit to him’, that a worker had ‘developed weaknesses’, his bonuses would be lost for a period of six months. And if that didn’t bring him to his senses he was sacked.6 It was, perhaps, an early, if crude, attempt to connect mentally and emotionally with the workers. Like being called in for your monthly assessment. Ford also employed 3500 security men, whose jobs involved spying on the workers and, if necessary, physically intimidating them, usually by smashing them over the head with a baton. But in the end it was the Fordist mode of production that got beaten over the head with a working class baton. Some 70 odd years after the founding of the Ford Motor Company the death knell for Fordist methods was sounded by Gianni Angelli, patriarch of the Fiat organisation, when he described Turin’s Mirafiori factory as ‘The ungovernable factory’.

Image: Ford Motor Company security guards attack UAW union organisers, Detroit 1937

The defeat of the Fordist mode of production did not mean the death of scientific management; a system that had its genesis in the work of Andrew Ure and Charles Babbage, and whose most famous practioner was Frederick Winslow Taylor. Scientific management

is an attempt to apply the methods of science to the increasingly complex problems of the control of labor in rapidly growing capitalist enterprises. It lacks the characteristics of a true science because its assumptions reflect nothing more than the outlook of the capitalist with regards to the conditions of employment … It does not attempt to discover and confront the cause of this condition, but accepts it as an inexorable given, a ‘natural’ condition. It investigates not labor in general, but the adaptation of labor to the needs of capital.7

Scientific management takes technology as a given. And in this period it should be taken as a given that scientific management is an integral part of the technology that confronts us in our daily life. This article is an attempt to look at how capital tries to use technology to control us 24/7.

Image: Frank B. Gilbreth, Time Motion Study, circa 1914

Along the continuous supply chains of 21st century capitalism are technological apparatuses that have the capacity to gather information on you. You are policed in ways you may not be aware of, your work uniform could be telling tales on you this very minute, and if you are using your work's computer to read this article on the Mute website it may well be filming you doing so. Back to work, pal, now. And if you’re tardy in responding to that order your tardiness could well be recorded by that clock, up there on the wall. Because not only does it go tick tock it also films you and records your conversations. And can do so for up to 21 days.

Spying on workers is big business; the net abounds with companies producing and selling the tools to spy on you and keep you in line. The use of workplace technologies by workers for their own benefit is widespread and forces capital to seek the means to curtail it. One company, Spectorsoft, sells a piece of software called Spector CNE Investigator, it’s an employee investigation system. One of the case studies it uses to advertise the product explains how an electrical utility company used the system to control the use of its computer networks. It quotes the utility company’s information security officer:

 

Every company will have a need to investigate inappropriate behaviour from time to time. Spector CNE is the complete tool to obtain the needed information. If we ever have to go to court, CNE’s screen snapshots are irrefutable … Finding and weeding out a problem employee early, that really saves the company money … Now I know EXACTLY what an individual is doing. I get to see it like a videotape.8

 

The company mentioned here is in California, but such software is available globally. Last year in Liverpool three workers in a benefits office were sacked for inappropriate use of computers. Imagine such action being carried out across the entire Benefits Agency; it could save a lot of money from being paid out in redundancy packages. The companies that produce and sell surveillance equipment also make commodities that can stop such equipment working. Isn’t capitalism wonderful?

Image: Director of Deutsche Bahn, Hartmut Mehdorn, resigns 2009 

Spying on workers is widespread and in some cases it impacts on thousands of people. In 2009 companies in Germany were found to be spying on their workers. An employee at Deutsche Telekom had his mobile phone records checked by the company during an investigation into a leak of information to the media. The man was a union representative. On a much larger scale, the rail company Deutsche Bahn owned up to spying on its workforce. The spying included the monitoring of emails, checking on how many toilet breaks were being taken by individuals and prying in to the love lives of workers. In 2002/3 173,000 workers were screened, in 2005 the entire workforce of 220,000 was spied on. The head of Deutsche Bahn, Hartmut Mehdorn, was forced to resign over the issue. Perhaps they got the idea from the retail industry, because in 2008 two discount companies, Lidl and Schlecker, were exposed in the mainstream media for widespread spying activities. The German weekly Stern said it had obtained hundreds of Stasi-like logbooks that minutely monitored the movements and private conversations of employees.

What is happening now is that different aspects of technology are being linked up to produce overarching systems of surveillance. Global Positioning Systems (GPS) and Radio Frequency Identification tags (RFID) are technologies that are being used to spy on workers in and out of the workplace. GPS relies on satellites orbiting hundreds of miles above the earth. A GPS unit is fitted to a vehicle; this unit can correspond with a satellite and enable the tracking of a vehicle and its driver. In the USA there have been instances where GPS technology has been used to monitor workers involved in union recruiting campaigns. In one case, the only two company vehicles fitted with the equipment were the ones used by two workers believed to be organising such a campaign. The National Labour Relations Board (NLRB) recognised that the GPS technology would allow the company to interfere with its employees’ protected concerted activity by tracking the two worker-organisers’ every move in real time to immediately detect, for example, if they met at the same location or visited other employees at their homes during non-work hours.9 An RFID consists of a microchip and an antenna and is activated by radio waves transmitted by a reader/scanner. Some tags have minute batteries attached and can self-activate. Although GPS and RFID are technologically different they share some common abilities. Both can track the locations of individuals, company vehicles and cargos in real time and create electronic logs relating to location and movement, which can be used to generate detailed reports that could be used to discipline or sack workers. Both systems are out of sight, making them easy to forget. And we do forget. How many people remember the construction of the world’s largest road and vehicle surveillance system? The system that was put in place in Britain over a five-year period starting in 1999, and that resulted in the installation of thousands of number-plate recognition cameras. Cameras that can communicate with the Police National Computer in real time through microwave links and the telephone system.10

Spy cameras are now ubiquitous; they are an integral part of the modern architectural landscape. But don’t worry, they are there for your protection. Honest.

Image: Verichip RFID chip designed for human insertion

RFID is the technology that has the potential to be the most pervasive. It can be put anywhere, and that includes inside you. How does it work? They inject it in to your arm. This is the technical bit. It is a simple construction that consists of a coil of wire and a microchip hermetically sealed inside of a glass capsule. These devices are 11 millimetres long and about one millimetre in diameter, comparable to a grain of rice. The coil acts as an antenna and uses an RFID reader/scanner’s varying magnetic field to power the microchip and transmit a radio signal. The chip modulates the amplitude of the current going through the antenna to continuously repeat a 128-bit signal. Each chip has a unique identifying number that links to a database. A cap made from special plastic covers half the capsule. The plastic is designed to bond with human tissue and stop the capsule from touring around your innards once it has been implanted. Oh yeah! If you have one of these inside of you and leave the company that had it implanted then you will have to have an operation to remove it. An American security company that injected the tags into some of its workers went bust. That raises the question of who will pay to have the tag removed.

The tagging of human beings is on the increase. The proponents of tagging point to the perceived benefits of the technology; it can hold or link to information about the identity, physiology, health, nationality and security clearance of the person who carries the embedded chip. According to an American company, VeriChip Corp., a subsidiary of Applied Digital Solutions, as of 2007, 2000 people had had chips implanted. The go ahead for the tagging of human beings for medical reasons was given by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2004. In 2008 there was some discussion within the British Government about the possibility of implanting chips into prisoners. Following protests from Liberty the idea seems to have been dropped. In the States the external tagging of prisoners is fairly widespread. It enables prison authorities to know the location of a prisoner 24/7. And in 2004 the Attorney General of Mexico and 18 of his staff had chips implanted to gain access to high security areas. If you are a gambler there are casinos and nightclubs that will chip you; the facility is on offer in Holland, Scotland, Spain and the good old US of A. By the time you get to the bar they’ll have your favourite drink ready for you. VeriChip is pushing the technology to the American State machine; it is proposing a scheme for the tagging of military personnel as an alternative to metal dog tags. And its CEO, Scott Silverman, has proposed the chipping of guest workers entering the United States to assist the government in identifying them. Shortly afterwards, Associated Press quoted President Alvaro Uribe of Columbia as telling a US senator that he would agree to require Columbian citizens to be implanted with RFID tags before they could gain entry into the United States for seasonal work.11 And what of the workers who would have to face the prospect of being chipped? Would they have a choice, or would that old slave-driver poverty take choice away from them? And who would pay for the implanting?

Image: Verichip advertisment

RFID tags being implanted into people is the eye-catching use of the technology, but there are less obvious applications being used to track us. As I mentioned above, your work uniform may be spying on you. The process involves the weaving of metallic fibres into work clothes so that your jacket becomes the tag. They can also put tags into work boots. That plastic ID card you have hanging from a lariat around your neck may have more uses than just telling people who you are. The same goes for the swipe card that allows you access to your workplace. Both items could be carrying information about you that could be linked to various databases; it could contain your National Insurance number, your time-keeping record, your disciplinary record and union affiliation. The latter could certainly be possible in workplaces where the company deducts union dues from the wage packet. They can be used to track your movements around a workplace, thereby policing any union activity you might be undertaking. And if information is taken off your card you could find yourself locked out of the workplace. A few years back, when Ford sold the Halewood car plant to the Indian company Tata, a dozen workers were locked out on the first day of work under the new owners. Their swipe cards wouldn’t let them gain entry through the turnstiles. It is reckoned that they were identified as activists during the takeover negotiations between the two companies, and were thus surplus to requirements.

Computer monitoring, telephone management systems, hidden cameras and intelligent ID badges plus GPS and RFID are means to spy on us and keep us in line, but they are not the only means of surveillance used. There is a formidable array of other methods used to gather information about us. They include: drug tests, background checks, intelligence tests, medical examinations and psychological tests, sometimes called psychometric testing. Companies will also visit sites like Facebook to try and discover what you are really like, as opposed to how you sell yourself at a job interview. A psychometric test paper I saw contained the following: 'You are working as a supervisor in a sheltered housing project and you discover that one of the residents is selling drugs. What do you do? A. Ignore it. B. Report it to your supervisor. C. Have a word with the person involved. D. Inform the police.' Well, folks, you are out of work and you want this job, so what box would you tick?

Image: EPC RFID chip used by Wall Mart

The ‘War on Terror’ has been used as the reason to increase the surveillance of the general population. Terrorists live and work in the communities they are prepared to attack, ergo, spy on the communities. The state’s capacities for surveillance have been increased by the use of such systems as Echelon, a secretive project involving the intelligence agencies of the United States and other governments. Echelon monitors global electronic communications, including telephone, email and satellite communications.12 For the state, security overrides everything, so everything can be made subject to state surveillance. As those who participated in the riots during August will find out when their phone records are handed over to the ‘Feds’.

As I’m finishing this article the BBC news is telling me that over a hundred people have been arrested in Liverpool for involvement in the riots, figures for London, Birmingham and Manchester are much higher. Surveillance cameras, phone records and photos from people’s mobile phones have been used to gather the evidence for prosecution. And those prosecutions are being rushed through with indecent haste. As the welfare state model of social control is being dismantled, the need for other forms of control increases. The hegemonic structures are there to encourage us to interiorise the control mechanisms – the prison, the factory, the asylum and the school, for example. As sketched out in this article, capital and the state are using technologies like GPS and RFID to back up the already existing mechanisms of control.

The ‘police’ appears as an administration heading the state, together with the judiciary, the army, and the exchequer. True. Yet in fact, it embraces everything else. Turquet says so: ‘It branches out into all of the peoples conditions, everything they do or undertake. Its field comprises the judiciary, finance, and the army.’ The police includes everything.13

We have to resist the internal and external policing of our lives.

Brian Ashton <brian.ashton00 AT gmail.com> is an ex car-industry shop steward who developed an interest in the logistics industry while doing support work with the sacked Liverpool dockers in the mid-'90s. He is currently researching the global supply chains of the clothing industry

Anxious subjects are also docile and self-absorbed subjects. The neoliberal state's production of generalised anxiety through non-stop risk preemption and contingency planning produces subjects that fit perfectly with the needs of capital – writes Mark Neocleous. This is the concluding article to Mute's short series on surveillance, national security and logistics-driven production

I sit in one of the dives

On Fifty-Second Street

Uncertain and afraid

– W.H. Auden, ‘September 1, 1939’

The bombs, bullets and gas that were to be launched across the world would prove that in September 1939 W.H. Auden was right to be anxious, but his uncertainty and fear never quite left him. In 1947 he published what was to be his final book-length poem. It follows the lives of four characters, beginning as a conversation between them in a bar and exploring personal issues and western culture in the context of the defeat of Nazism and the rise of the Cold War. In so doing it unravels the ways that everybody these days ‘is reduced to the anxious status of a shady character or a displaced person’. It is called The Age of Anxiety.i

Auden was hardly alone in thinking about the contemporary moment as an age of anxiety – in 1949 one Cold Warrior, Arthur Schlesinger, would declare in The Vital Center that ‘anxiety is the official emotion of our time’ and in 1950 Rollo May would publish The Meaning of Anxiety as a response to what he saw as a growing post-war condition. But the republication of Auden’s book in the spring of 2011 might make us wonder: why now? Why republish a 1947 book-length poem on the ‘age of anxiety’ in times which, we are told, are so very different from the years after WWII?

The republication of Auden’s book could possibly be an attempt by the publishers to tap into what has become one of the central cultural tropes of our time. In 1996 Sarah Dunant and Roy Porter edited a collection of essays on the ‘age of anxiety’ and, since then, the idea of such an age has become part of our cultural common sense, being used to think through questions of crime (Fear of Crime: Critical Voices in an Age of Anxiety, 2008); conspiracy theory (The Age of Anxiety: Conspiracy Theory and the Human Sciences, 2001); corporate management (Global Firms and Emerging Markets in an Age of Anxiety, 2004); parenting (Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, 2005; Worried all the Time: Overparenting in an Age of Anxiety and How to Stop It, 2003); religions of all sorts (Hope Against Darkness: The Transforming Vision of St. Francis in an Age of Anxiety, 2002; For Our Age of Anxiety: Sermons from the Sermon on the Mount, 2009; Ancient Wisdom for an Age of Anxiety, 2007); language (At War with Diversity: US Language Policy in an Age of Anxiety, 2000); drugs (The Age of Anxiety: A History of America’s Turbulent Affair with Tranquilizers, 2009; A Social History of the Minor Tranquilizers: The Quest for Small Comfort in the Age of Anxiety, 1991); new age claptrap (The Road Less Travelled: Spiritual Growth in an Age of Anxiety, 1997); sex (Mindblowing Sex in the Real World: Hot Tips for Doing It in the Age of Anxiety, 1995); food and drink (Consuming Passions: Cooking and Eating in an Age of Anxiety, 1998); and just plain old hope (Hope in the Age of Anxiety, 2009). This list could go on, but mention must be made of Haynes Johnson’s history of national security drawing parallels between the McCarthyism of the postwar security state and more recent forms of McCarthyism being finessed in the War on Terror, called The Age of Anxiety.

This huge intellectual production parallels developments in the psychiatric field. In 2013 a publication is due to appear called DSM-V. DSM stands for the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, and is the American Psychiatric Association’s list of mental disorders and how to diagnose them. It is the essential text for mainstream medicine, psychiatric practice and medical education across the globe. This one is called DSM-V because it’s the fifth edition. The first edition in 1952 ran to 129 pages and contained just 106 diagnostic ‘disorders’. Note: 129 pages, with 106 diagnostic categories. The second edition was published in 1968, with 134 pages and 182 categories. DSM-III, in 1980 was 494 pages long and contained 265 categories. DSM-IV, from 1994, had 886 pages and 297 diagnostic categories. DSM-V will be even larger and more substantial. Part of the increase in size and proliferation of categories has been because disorder has been defined according to forms of behaviour, so that aspects of our behaviour are used to define clinical categories. So, for example, being a bit nervous or shy is a symptom of an underlying condition, which then becomes a clinical category, such as social phobia, which is the term used as an explanation of what the manual calls ‘social anxiety disorder’ (SAD). Some of what it says about social anxiety concerns specific conditions, such as Parkinson’s disease or disfigurement, but the term is also intended to capture fear or anxiety about one or more social situations in which the person is exposed to scrutiny by others, such as having a conversation, being observed, performing; fear that one will act in a way that will be negatively evaluated; and fear of social situations which might provoke anxiety, and which are thus either avoided or endured with intense anxiety. DSM-IV then adds further detail on what it calls ‘Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD)’, which includes excessive anxiety and worry about two or more domains of activities or events such as family, health, finances, and school/work difficulties; excessive anxiety on more days than not and for three months or more; anxiety showing symptoms such as restlessness, edginess, muscle tension; anxiety associated with behaviours such as avoidance of situations in which a negative outcome could occur, or marked time and effort preparing for situations in which a negative outcome could occur, or procrastination due to worries, or seeking reassurance due to worries. And on it goes.

Image: Mark Stivers, Performance Anxiety, 2004

Note that the main way most of us would find ourselves in the pages of DSM – aside that is from sex (since although homosexuality has been removed from the Manual the inclusion of sex-related diagnoses of all manner of desires to even having a low sex drive means that it would not be difficult to find most of us in there somewhere) – is through the category of anxiety. If one takes ‘excessive anxiety’ concerning two or more domains of activities or events, such as family, health, finances and work, and one throws in some ‘muscle tension’ for good measure, it would be hard to find people who did not fit the category. On the basis of the DSM it might actually be impossible to be human and avoid being diagnosed with a treatable mental disorder connected with anxiety.

This would be consistent with the fact that, according to the World Health Organization, anxiety has emerged as the most prevalent mental health problem across the globe (a process encouraged by the drugs industry, helping to generate an ‘anxiety market’ for drugs such as Paxil and Prozac, and extensive media coverage of the most recent ‘anxiety’ over anything from terrorism and social status down to cancer-causing vegetables).ii Thus one finds anxiety articulated everywhere. The Agoraphobia Society started life in the UK over 30 years ago with a fairly specific remit. It later became the National Phobics Society, with the remit extended along the lines of its change of name. It has recently renamed itself Anxiety UK. Perhaps symptomatically, what used to be called hypochondria is now officially ‘health anxiety’. Freud, in his 1917 Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, makes the point that anxiety is the thing about which neurotics complain most.iii In the light of the definition of more or less all of us as anxious, to be a neurotic citizen now seems to be a civic requirement.iv

In this regard we might pay heed to Franz Neumann’s comment on the role of anxiety as one of the cornerstones of the political mobilisation of fear under fascism.v But Neumann was also sensitive to the ways in which anxiety could play a similar role in the formation of liberal political subjectivity, one which opened the door to authoritarian mobilisations and maneuvers. Might not that be especially the case in an ‘age of anxiety’ which is also an age of neoliberal authoritarianism? And how might that be connected to the fact that the age is also, if anything, an ‘age of security’?

It is no exaggeration to say that the political production of subjectivity is now centrally driven by a security-anxiety field. A cursory glance at any security text, from the most mundane government pronouncement to the most sophisticated literature within ‘security studies’, reveals that through the politics of security runs a political imagination of fear and anxiety. I want to suggest that the management of anxiety has become a way of mediating the demands of security. It has done so within a broader logic of endless war. We have been told time and again that the War on Terror is a war like no other: this is a war without end, a permanent state of emergency, a peace which is also war. Because of this, the ideas of war and peace have been increasingly subsumed under the logic of police and security. Might we not think of the age of anxiety as a form of police power deployed for the security crisis of endless war?

One way to consider this is through the prediction of catastrophe and the anticipation of disaster that has come to the fore. A notable feature of political discourse has been the proliferation of ideas and categories centered on the idea that there is a disaster about to happen. Preparedness, prevention, planning and pre-emption have therefore become core ideas: everywhere one looks one finds emergency preparedness, contingency planning and pre-emptive action being addressed. Each of these is a concept with some scope, extending to war preparedness, disaster planning and terror attacks; and each of them resonates with and reinforces a whole gamut of associated security measures. They play heavily on the idea of potential ‘natural disasters’, but their real power lies in the presentation of endless war in terms of the coming political disaster. They are intensely future-oriented, in that they seek to shape behaviour towards a future event beyond our control but which we must be prepared to take under our control. The worst-case scenario must be prepared for, even though we don’t know what it is yet and never can know what it is, and the preparations in question are a means of accommodating us to the security measures constantly established to deal with the catastrophe and disaster. Or, put differently: the security measures help us deal with the anxiety over the catastrophe to come. Anxiety has become a means of preparing us for the next attack in the permanent War on Terror. The attack we are told time and again is bound to come – how many times does a politician, police chief or security intellectual tell us that ‘an attack is highly likely’? How many times are we told this even after a supposed victory in the war?vi One which could be, and probably will be, worse than the last attack and might even be worse than anything we can imagine, all of which enables an acceptance of the ubiquity of the war, its claimed endlessness and the permanence of the security preparations carried out in its name.

Central to this process is the rise to prominence of the concept of ‘resilience’. In the aftermath of the bombs in London in July 2005 Tony Blair spoke of ‘the stoicism and resilience of the people of London’, and Brian Paddick, then Deputy Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, assured viewers that the emergency services ‘had sufficient resilience to cope’. Their use of the term was significant. ‘In the past few years’, noted James Harkin in The Times in the aftermath of the bombing, ‘the idea of resilience has been elevated to the most important buzzword in defence policy-making circles. Since September 11, 2001, the Ministry of Defence has been busy commissioning all manner of research into the resilience of our big cities in the event of terrorist attack. Boffins in the Strategy Unit of No 10 have written countless turgid reports about what resilience means. Universities have set up whole departments, such as Cranfield University’s Resilience Centre, to teach and study it’.vii

Resilience stems from the idea of a system (the term originates in ecological thought), and the official documentation on the term, of which there is now an enormous amount, plays on this: the 2008 OECD document on state-building, styled ‘from fragility to resilience’, defines the latter as ‘the ability to cope with changes in capacity, effectiveness or legitimacy. These changes can be driven by shocks… or through long-term erosions (or increases) in capacity, effectiveness or legitimacy’.viii A key United Nations document on disaster management suggests that resilience requires ‘a consideration of almost every physical phenomenon on the planet’.ix Note: almost every physical phenomenon on the planet. Although the overall argument is couched in terms of physical risks, the UN links it explicitly to the wider security agenda in a way which connects it intellectually and politically to domestic legislation such as the UK’s Civil Contingencies Act 2004, which involves contingency plans for anything which might be said to affect the ‘welfare’ of the UK. The extent to which ‘resilience’ has come to the fore in the politics of planning is witnessed by the London Resilience Team set up to ‘deliver Olympic Resilience in London’, and the extent to which it is designed to connect emergency planning to the logic of security is evidenced in the fact that the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games has a ‘Security and Resilience’ section.

As these examples suggest, in terms of state power huge resources are now expended mapping out potential disasters and in the apprehension of a disaster-to-come. Playing on the origins of resilience in systems thinking, the idea of planning out organisational and institutional resilience has become a central plank of action across central state agencies, local governments, emergency services and health authorities. In the UK, for example, this would stretch from the creation of ‘UK Resilience’ based in the Cabinet Office right down to the fact that sniffer dogs, like their handlers, now ‘have to be resilient’.x There has also developed a commercial rhetoric of ‘organisational resilience’ for corporations.

This rise of ‘resilience’ during the rise of neoliberalism is significant. Although this connection might seem odd given that more than anything resilience assumes a massive state role in planning for the future, the point of this future is that it is unknown and uncertain. Thus as a political category resilience relies fundamentally on an anxious political psyche engaged in an endless war and preparing for the coming attack. Such a strategy foregrounds a politics of anticipation, in which the anticipation itself becomes both an exercise and a source of anxiety. But the term has been expanded to straddle the private as well as the public, the personal as well as the political, the subjective as well as the objective, and so organisational resilience is connected to personal resilience in such a way that contemporary citizenship now has to be thought through ‘the power of resilience’. Thus one finds a set of texts on personal resilience which would not be out of place were they situated on the same bookshelves as the works on anxiety cited above: texts about resilience as a personal attribute in which citizen-subjects are trained to ‘achieve balance, confidence and personal strength’, or, in the subtitle of another, ‘find inner strength and overcome life’s hurdles’, or better still, just ‘bounce back from whatever life throws at us’.xi The anxious citizen is acknowledged as the resilient citizen and championed.

Image: George Grosz, Fit for Duty, 1918

It is here that one finds the relationship between the economic development of neoliberal subjectivity and the political development of resilient citizenship. Marx long ago spelt out the ways in which capital, as a system rooted objectively in uncertainty, instability, restlessness, agitation and change, generates the very same subjective feelings in the workers it uses; capital thrives on anxiety. The neoliberal intensification of this process, repackaged by politicians and employers as an inevitable fact of contemporary labour and exacerbated by the anxiety associated with the rise of consumerism, a decline of trust in public institutions and private corporations, and a collapse in pension schemes, has been compounded by this articulation of resilience as personal as well as systemic. Resilience is thus presented as a key way of subjectively working through the uncertainty and instability of contemporary capital. The neoliberal subject can ‘achieve balance’ across the several insecure and part-time jobs they have, can ‘overcome life’s hurdles’ such as facing retirement without a pension to speak of, and just ‘bounce back from whatever life throws at us’ whether it be the collapse of welfare systems or global economic meltdown. The policing of the resilient citizen coincides with the socio-economic fabrication of resilient yet flexible labour. Neoliberal citizenship is nothing if not a training in resilience.

All of which is to say that anxiety and resilience are now core to the jargon of neoliberal authenticity.xii Superficially, such jargon is full of ‘recognition’ for the complexities of human experience (‘of course you are anxious’; ‘we all share the same fears’; it’s only natural to be anxious’), but this merely encourages the naturalisation of a neoliberal subjectivity mobilised for security and capital: the jargon of neoliberal authenticity is the jargon of neoliberal authoritarianism. This is police power at its most profound, shaping subjectivity and fabricating order through counselors within police departments, therapists within the community, psychologists in the media, and experts working in the cultural field, all offering advice on our anxieties and coaching us in our resilience. And it is a police power par excellence in closing down alternate possibilities: we can be anxious about what might happen, but our response must be resilience-training, not political struggle. We can be collectively anxious and structurally resilient, but not mobilised politically.

Mark Neocleous <mark.neocleous AT brunel.ac.uk> is Professor of the Critique of Political Economy at Brunel University, UK, and on the editorial collective of the journal Radical Philosophy. He is author of Critique of Security (2008), The Fabrication of Social Order: A Critical Theory of Police Power (2000), and a range of other books and articles. He has a co-edited book forthcoming called Anti-Security (2011). His current project is a work of counter-strategic theory organised around the concept of pacification.

Footnotes

If Westerns allegorise a mythical space of gradual resolution and order, the western all'italiana explodes the American dream of stabilising prosperity with excessive violence and explicit anti-colonial themes. Benjamin Noys argues for a deeper analysis of intensely political genre cinema

Gilberto Perez remarks that ‘the Western doesn't just tell violent stories, it tells stories about the meaning, the management of violence, the establishment of social order and political authority'.ⁱ Perez elsewhere concedes that the Western runs ‘a gamut of political persuasions',ⁱⁱ but is keen to emphasise that in the classical American Western this ‘management of violence' takes the form of a ‘vital dialectic'ⁱⁱⁱ in which is synthesised a ‘civilized violence'.^iv Serving his deliberately provocative re-imagination of the ‘frontier' as equivocal site of liberty, Perez regards the Western as the romance of the birth of a new political order through the, often literal, marriage of East and West, in which violence plays the role of a ‘vanishing mediator'. Such an argument hardly seems to hold for the Italian Western of the 1960s and 1970s, often known affectionately or derogatorily as ‘Spaghetti Westerns', in which the excessive hyper-violence associated with the form makes it difficult to see how it might be pressed into service for a ‘vital dialectic' of ‘civilised violence'. The very excess of the violence on display, as well as its displacement from the ‘mythological' place of America, fragments any dialectical sublation of violence within a national or political order.

This suggests a very different ‘political persuasion', and very different questions concerning the ‘management of violence'. In fact, objections to Spaghetti Westerns, often by critics enamoured of classic American Westerns (or ‘hamburger Westerns', in Christopher Frayling's mischievous suggestion^v), were usually founded on their ‘excess' of violence. Philip French, writing in 1972, describes a filmography of Continental Westerns as ‘to me read[ing] like a brochure for a season in hell.'^vi A surprisingly apposite comment as we will see. Spaghetti Westerns, in fact, constructed a form of violence that carried a rather different and more intense charge. Franco Nero, who played the eponymous ‘Django' in the seminal Spaghetti Western, remarked:

A rather extreme example of the refusal of work, although if one considers the strategies and intensity of conflict in Italy between 1968-1977 - ‘Our Comrade P.38' as one anonymous tract had it^viii - ‘clean[ing] up the whole world', gains a prescient resonance.

This is reinforced by Johanna Isaacson's argument that the genre films of the late '60s and '70s belong to a ‘moment when it was taken for granted that genre film was political to the bone, reflecting the subjectivity, anger and tastes of a radicalized proletarian sensibility.'^ix The question of violence, in terms of audience, turns here on sensibility: bourgeois or proletarian? The Spaghetti Western is, I would argue, exactly the archetypal film form of this moment, to quote Isaacson again, ‘appealing to both [the] proletarian desire for spectacle and for representations of political repression.'^x Although this schema of divided sensibility is too simplistic, not least in its supposition of a unified ‘proletarian sensibility', it draws attention to the ‘class' charge of violence emergent in these films. While this often takes overtly and unequivocally political forms, as we will see, what I want to focus on here are a small number of films that take their ‘representations of political repression' into the realms of what Gail Day, in a very different context, has identified as a ‘left-oriented nihilism'.^xi These are Sergio Corbucci's Django (1966) and The Big Silence (1969) (also known as The Great Silence), and Guilio Questi's gothic horror Spaghetti Western Django Kill! / If You Live Shoot (1967). Produced and shown on the cusp of the eruption of the most militant workers' movement in Europe these films display a striking nihilist politics that internalises and prefigures the experience of defeat.

II - Popular Excessive Violence

First some context: between four hundred and four hundred and fifty Italian westerns were made, according to Christopher Frayling,^xii in the period between from 1963 to the mid-1970s. The most familiar are obviously the work of Sergio Leone, who broke out from the ‘ghetto' of popular filmmaking into the category of auteur. The ‘other Sergio' - Sergio Corbucci (1927-1990) - is perhaps a more representative figure of the cycle, especially with his work Django. It should be noted that although Spaghetti Westerns are often regarded as hyper-violent works, a large number were ‘guns and gadgets' Westerns, heavily indebted to the Bond movies and with a comic streak, such as the charming Sabata (1969), starring Lee Van Cleef complete with four-barrelled derringer.

To broadly characterise the whole ‘cycle' of Italian Westerns we can borrow Philip French's comment on post-Wild Bunch American Westerns:

At a social level the movies are reflecting current concerns and anxieties; from a commercial point of view a profitable subject is being exploited that seems to go down well at the box office; viewed aesthetically, the cycle of movies is offering a cumulative series of variations upon an established theme.^xiii

 

In terms of the aesthetic ‘variations' it is worth noting that many of the instances that seem most singular to the Italian Western, especially of masochistic violence, in fact occurred previously in American Westerns or in the immediate source material for Spaghetti Westerns: Kurosawa's Yojimbo (1961). Yojimbo, its plot almost certainly derived from Dashiell Hammett's novels The Glass Key (1931) and Red Harvest (1929) (and Hammett was an anti-fascist who joined the American communist party in 1937, pled the fifth in a case linked to the Communist witch hunts in 1951, served time in prison for contempt of court, and was later blacklisted), literally set the pattern of the lone hero playing off two gangs against each other to their mutual destruction, and also the tendency to quasi-homosocial or homoerotic torture scenes.

Image: Still from Kurosawa's Yojimbo, 1961

So, we are talking here of what Christopher Frayling calls ‘formula cinema',^xiv but at the same time we have to recognise that this was an intensely political genre cinema. Obviously, as I've just noted, its source material is broadly left-wing, with Hammett's account of corruption and collusion linking to the general ‘populist' politics of the Western (although we should well note, as Philip French does, the limits of that ‘politics': ‘the Western is ill-equipped to confront complex political issues in a direct fashion. The genre belongs to the American populist tradition which sees all politics and politicians as corrupt and fraudulent'.^xv) Also, to court the ‘intentional fallacy', many of the directors and writers of these films were men, and yes men, of the left; either communists or sympathisers often energised by the emergent struggles of the 1960s, especially the Cuban revolution and the struggle of the Vietnamese against the Americans.

In the extensive debate on the politics of the possibilities of ‘popular' film versus more Brechtian and modernist strategies of alienation that took place in the late 1960s and early 1970s, it may be surprising now to realise that Spaghetti Westerns played a key role. Pierre Baudry, writing in Cahiers du Cinema during its most haut-Marxist period, noted, in 1971, the shifting and recurring patterns of these genre films, especially in their exploration of the dynamics of colonialism and revolution through moving from the ‘Gringo'/Bandit pairing to the ‘Gringo'/Mexican revolutionary pairing. Ultimately he found wanting this ‘commercial' cinema, preferring the austere path that was to be taken by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin's Brechtian critique of the Western Vent D'Est (1970).

Image: Still from Vent D'Est, 1970

In fact, much of the political discussion of the Spaghetti Western has focused on these ‘pairing' films, which contain obvious reflections on Vietnam, as well as Italy's own situation. The best of these is probably A Bullet for the General (1967), which was scripted partly by Franco Solinas, who was also responsible for writing Battle for Algiers (1966) and for the script for what we could consider as the finest film on this theme of coloniser/colonised pairings: Queimada / Burn! (1969), which were both directed by Gillo Pontecorvo. Solinas's impeccable political credentials, his deliberate decision to work in the popular medium of the Western as a political act, and his sophisticated inclusion of Fanonian themes, all make the politics of these films striking and evident. What I am concerned with are films with a rather less direct politics, a politics in which the excess of violence is not placed in a ‘revolutionary' or anti-colonial context, but operates in a more ‘free-floating' and ambiguous form.

III - Epic Nihilism

Key to my analysis is the conjugation of ‘epic nihilism', derived from Badiou's analysis in The Century where he remarks: ‘may your force be nihilistic, but your form epic.'^xvi We can find this conjunction already encoded in the Ur-work of the Spaghetti Western genre: Sergio Corbucci's Django. Here the epic form of the Western is, literally, dragged through the mud - in its striking opening sequence in which Django drags a coffin through the mud, a coffin, as we later find out, that contains the machine gun with which he will exterminate his adversaries. The town at the centre of the usual plot of playing off rival gangs is bathed in mud, and the film ends in a gunfight in a cemetery in which Django, with smashed hands, painfully and finally manages to shoot his chief tormentors after propping his gun on a grave cross.  It is not difficult to identify the mud as an allegory of the practico-inert,xvii with Django becoming mired in the inertia that seems to afflict the supposedly decisive spaghetti western hero. 

Image: Still from Sergio Corbucci's Django, 1966

This is reflected in the constant delay of revenge which affects Django, and many of the other heroes of these films. Once they become involved in double-crossing the competing gangs these heroes persistently fail to act, and as a result are usually tortured before exacting ‘final' revenge. The films themselves, despite their bursts of hyper-violent action, are also tortured in their following of this repetitive path of delay and finally action. Of course, we could make the usual references to Hamlet, or to psychoanalytic explanations based on the displacement of murderous desires, but it strikes me how these films also mimic the affective texture of the working day. Django's own ‘mechanical' killing, carried out with the Gatling gun, is over promptly, but seems to leave him as mere ‘appendage' of the machine (to use Marx's phrase). The freelance ‘labour' of the gunfighter is filled with longueurs, in the state of a kind of proto-precarity awaiting a new contract, or failing to execute a supposedly personal and pressing desire. What we have here is a strange tempo of labour that retards and confines action to sporadic outbursts of ‘acting out', which appears to require the extremities of torture to ‘activate'. Even the recurrent trope of the usually deliberately inflicted injury to the hero's gun hand, which can be found in Django and other films, seems to have the echo of the industrial accident. Despite the ‘hopeful' ending of Django, in which the hero escapes with his life, his time as a gunslinger is presumably over.

In fact I wonder if these films do not take place in the ‘factory-universe' described by Maurice Blanchot.^xviii This is a space of infinite repetition, excess, and the vacancy of Being. The deliberately hellish towns which our heroes tarry in figure this space. As Blanchot puts it, of the factory:

There is no more outside - you think you're getting out? You're not getting out. Night, day, there's no difference, and you have to know that retirement at sixty and death at seventy will not liberate you. Great lengths of time, the flash of an instant - both are equally lost.^xix

The factory is the space of infinite excess, of ‘the infinite in pieces',^xx figured in the broken and ruptural spaces through which the Spaghetti Western hero drifts, or becomes mired. These enclosed towns are not the wide-open plains or vistas of monument valley, or even Almería, but have no more outside, are circles of hell (a metaphor literalised by Clint Eastwood in his post-Spaghetti Western High Plains Drifter (1973), as his hero has the town road sign painted red and renamed ‘Hell').

Image: Still from Clint Eastwood's High Plains Drifter, 1973

IV - Interminable Inertia

In Corbucci's later The Big Silence it will be snow that performs a similar function of signifying this inertial time. These two films by Corbucci are, to borrow Maurice Blanchot's phrase, ‘condensed around thick living substances, which are at once over-abundantly active and of an interminable inertia.'^xxi We can take this as a certain coagulation of living labour in dead labour, and dead time, in which the performance of virtuosity is only ever fleeting, and forever punished. The ‘production line' of killing runs on receding amounts of living labour, as value production is mechanised into the machine gun. Taking this motif of inertia to the extreme The Big Silence also takes the usual taciturn Western hero to the limit, with the character of ‘Silence' (played by Jean-Louis Trintignant), who is mute due to mutilation by bounty hunters (or ‘bounty killers' as the film usually prefers) when he was a child. Again we have the tempo of freelance labour, as Silence intervenes in a small-scale war between the ‘bounty killers', who ‘operate according to the law', in pursuing the former townspeople and farmers who have been driven into banditry by the actions of Pollicutt, the banker and Justice of the Peace.

This political fable, which follows closely the usual script of political populism - good people driven to ‘social banditry' by a corrupt law - is complicated by the film's own seeming lack of faith in this story. Silence works for money, but works, again, in a lackadaisical and intermittent fashion. In contrast, the leading bounty killer Tigrero (an excellent performance by Klaus Kinski), is a model of sadistic efficiency: killing in the most expedient fashion, loading his dead victims onto the stage, and assiduously collecting his ‘reward' (with a cut going to the banker Pollicutt). Upbraided by the new sheriff, Tigrero remarks: ‘Every business has its own risks and rules'. Later, after having got the drop on the sheriff, who has lectured him on justice replacing violence, Tigrero kills him and remarks the only law is ‘survival of the fittest': Homo homini lupus, although as Tigrero notes to his friends ‘when are wolves afraid of wolves?'

Image: Still from Sergio Corbucci's The Big Silence, 1968

Of course the true destruction of this fable of populism, and proof of the power of the ‘representation of political repression', is the film's ending. The comedic sheriff character is drowned in a frozen river when Tigrero shoots out the ice from under him to ensure an ‘accidental' death. The town's prostitute matron, who had a touchingly comic and halting relationship with the sheriff, is shot by Tigrero after he has baited her with news of the sheriff's death. Although the sheriff had planned to feed the ‘bandits' pending an amnesty this plan now turns into a fatal trap as Tigrero's men capture them when they come for the food. Silence, his hands ruined in a fight, and his female companion, wife of one of the men he is avenging, are gunned down by Tigrero after Silence refuses to flee and chooses instead to fight. As a result the ‘bandits', tied-up in the saloon, are massacred. The ‘civilising vital dialectic' of violence is broken, but as Tigrero says, ‘all according to the law'. He and the bounty killers plan to return to collect their now considerable bounties, as the distinction of law-making and law-preserving violence is broken through the ‘law' of original accumulation that pays for the necessary violence required at all points.

V - Foul Gold

These thematics reach their baroque extreme in Guilio Questi's Django Kill!. Questi was not interested in making a Western. Instead, when offered such a project he took the opportunity to make a more personal film that dealt with his experiences as an anti-fascist partisan: ‘I wanted to recount all of the things, the cruelty, the comradeship with friends, the death, all the experiences I had of war, in combat, in the mountains.'^xxii The result is a work of convulsive and violent beauty. If Jansco's The Round-Up (1965) is a film of the balletic choreography of physical repression Django Kill! is a film of violence, sexual and physical, as carnivalesque, and the non-sequiturs of repressive desublimation.

It begins with the hand of the central character, the stranger (played by Tomas Milian), emerging from a grave to a surprisingly jaunty Western tune. In a series of bizarrely edited flashbacks (at one point a body appears to roll uphill in a reverse of the actual shot) we learn he was betrayed by a gang of outlaws led by the racist Oaks after their successful robbery of a gold shipment. Rescued by highly-unlikely mystical-hippy ‘Indians', who smelt his share of the gold into bullets, the stranger determines to take revenge on the gang.

The outlaws, meanwhile, have arrived in quite the most disturbing town, which makes Dogville look like a good choice for a holiday, and is known by the Indians as ‘the unhappy place'. Riding in they see a naked boy playing with himself, a girl twisting hair of a playmate, a man retching, a young girl under the boot of ‘uncle Max', a woman threatening to bite her husband, and a crippled hedgehog (!). Soon recognised by the townspeople the outlaws are killed in a carnivalesque episode of ‘civilising' violence: complete with beatings, hangings, stringing-up bodies, drowning, and close-up head shot executions. Arriving in time to find Oaks holed-up in a store and fighting for his life the stranger agrees to take $500 for killing him. Confronting Oaks, who remarks, ‘you've come back from hell', they engage in a quasi-comedic shoot out. Oaks is left bullet ridden but still alive. A local criminal boss Zorro (or Sorro - the dubbing is unclear) realises gold is at stake and wants Oaks alive for interrogation. Digging the bullets out of him (the ‘doctor' remarks ‘you won't feel a thing', to the groaning and screaming of Oaks), ‘honest citizens' tear him apart when they realise these are gold bullets.

Structured by the ‘factional' pattern, with the hero moving between them, we have three ‘groups' in the town. The barman Tembler, initially in alliance with the Alderman, but who later split over the gold, creating the ‘faction' of Alderman and his mad wife, and finally Zorro, with his black-clad and often open-shirted gang, which Questi points out, somewhat redundantly, as fascisti. The stranger stays with each of these groupings in the course of the film, moving from Tembler's saloon to Zorro's hacienda, then to Alderman's domestic gothic. In each case these surrogate families are constructed through an hysterical and excessive sexuality: at Tembler's, his son Evan's violent rejection/desire for his father's mistress Flory is expressed by his slashing her clothes; at Zorro's, a now kidnapped Evan, being used to extract the gold from Tembler, is sexually-abused, off screen, by Zorro's gang, who have been taught by Zorro to ‘enjoy good things'. Evan commits suicide in the morning and, in one of the more sinister remarks in a remarkably sinister film, Zorro says ‘He didn't want to be a man, ... a man who can take on responsibilities, a man who does what he must and accepts it'. Finally, at the Alderman's house the stranger is seduced by the Alderman's deranged wife who, in full Bertha Mason mode, will later burn the house down.

These ‘sexual' exchanges are mirrored in the film's use of the stolen gold as the ‘object' that inscribes a lack and excess, equivalent to the structuralist mana, the dummy hand, Othello's handkerchief, Poe's purloined letter: the empty object that ‘circulates' in the structure, and everywhere brings death and passes through death and corpses. Seized in the massacre of the soldiers guarding the shipment, then the execution of the ‘disposable' members of the gang, the smelting of the gold bullets from the share interned with the stranger, the ‘liberation' of the rest of the shipment through the killing of the bandits, the literal extraction of the gold torn from the still-living flesh of Oaks, the gold which then leads to Evan's sexual abuse and suicide, which is stashed in his coffin, and finally the half share that melts in the fire set by Alderman's mad wife and encases him as a living gold corpse.

Image: Still from Giulio Questi's Django Kill!, 1967

The gold has the function of motivational value but, if not quite converted into the Freudian equivalent of excrement, has the levelling, if not nihilist, function of equivalence through death and the ‘abusability' of bodies. To use one of Marx's favourite quotes from Shakespeare's Timon of Athens:

Gold? Yellow, glittering, precious gold? No, gods,

I am no idle votarist: roots, you clear heavens!

Thus much of this will make black white; foul, fair;

Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant.

 

The ‘common whore of mankind' is, precisely, the ‘quilting point' (le point de capiton) of sexual and social violence, to use the Lacanian term.^xxiii Gold functions in Django Kill! as the ‘floating signifier' par excellence, it is the term that unifies the ideological field and texture of the film's universe. At the same, within that universe, we see demonstrated the excess violence implicit in this ideological structure that is usually concealed by the seeming ‘neutrality' of money as ‘general equivalent'. In Marx's terms gold is rendered as the ‘visible God', but the ‘alienated capacity of mankind', in Marx's words, has no possibility of return or recovery.^xxiv

VI - Unbroken Inward Rebellion

What we have in these works is the displacement of the epic towards Badiou's inscription of an ‘epic nihilism' that is inflected by the passion for the real. That ‘passion' is not simply the revolutionary passion, but rather the ‘passion' of the everyday brutality and enmity of capitalism. In Engels's memorable characterisation, from the Condition of the Working Class in England:

When one individual inflicts bodily injury upon another, such injury that death results, we call the deed manslaughter; when the assailant knew in advance that the injury would be fatal, we call his deed murder. But when society places hundreds of proletarians in such a position that they inevitably meet a too early and an unnatural death, one which is quite as much a death by violence as that by the sword or bullet; when it deprives thousands of the necessaries of life, places them under conditions in which they cannot live - forces them, through the strong arm of the law, to remain in such conditions until that death ensues which is the inevitable consequence - knows that these thousands of victims must perish, and yet permits these conditions to remain, its deed is murder just as surely as the deed of the single individual; disguised, malicious murder, murder against which none can defend himself, which does not seem what it is, because no man sees the murderer, because the death of the victim seems a natural one, since the offence is more one of omission than of commission. But murder it remains.^xxv

 

The Spaghetti Western, in its political guise, gives form to this violence as literal murder - deriving from the explicit violence of original accumulation a figuration of inexplicit everyday violence.

This experience was raw in an Italy that had witnessed large-scale internal migration from the rural South to the newly-industrialising North during the 1950s and 1960s. The influx of young male workers, no doubt the viewers Franco Nero had in mind, experienced both a ‘late' form of ‘primitive' or better ‘original accumulation', and the immersion in the new inertial world of factory labour. The Spaghetti Western, probably inadvertently, mediates this experience that binds together these experiences - displacement, the rural, inertial labour, and the precarious violence that composes the ‘rule of (capitalist) law'.

The excess of the Spaghetti Western's violence reveals the violence encrypted in labour: in the subsumption of living labour, the pumping out of value, and the replacement of living labour with dead labour. This ‘epic' takes a tragic form: Marx remarks in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts: ‘Wages are determined by the fierce struggle between capitalist and worker. The capitalist inevitably wins.'^xxvi The Spaghetti Western is the film of defiance in the face of an awareness of the experience of defeat unfolding through militancy and the acceleration of armed struggle.^xxvii This is a radicalised proletarian sensibility that is not simply a joyous celebration of violence against the bosses, though it is that, but also awareness of the logic of repression, and resistance to the epic tone of prophesying or fantasising victory, and denying defeat, that took hold in certain factions of the movement, armed and otherwise, of the 1970s.

This epic nihilism, given a more elegiac tone in Peckinpah's work, now seems to figure the crisis of a figure of labour, a long drawn-out defeat, the de-energising of nihilism into the superfluity of labour. In fact we might revise or question the projective fantasies that could attach to such a sensibility, and see instead something more austere in that excess, a registration of historical defeat in advance that depends on the incorporation of such defeats at the bodily level.

Engels recognised that the violence of the capitalist class resulted in a counter violence:

There is, therefore, no cause for surprise if the workers, treated as brutes, actually become such; or if they can maintain their consciousness of manhood only by cherishing the most glowing hatred, the most unbroken inward rebellion against the bourgeoisie in power.^xxviii

His prophesy was that communism would mitigate and civilise this violence, providing it with its dialectic. The communist aim to do away with class antagonisms displaced it from embracing a bloody war of classes: ‘In proportion, as the proletariat absorbs socialistic and communistic elements, will the revolution diminish in bloodshed, revenge, and savagery.'^xxix

The Spaghetti Western, in the instances I've traced, does not seem so sanguine about this dialectic, and in fact aligns the experience of hatred and nihilism in the experience of defeat that is everyday experience. Lacking faith in the victory of proletarian violence over the technological and politically inflated violence of the capitalist state and capitalist economy it resonates in registering an antagonism, but is less hopeful that the solution to the riddle of history can be achieved.

Benjamin Noys <b.noys AT chi.ac.uk> is a theorist living in Bognor Regis. His most recent book is The Persistence of the Negative: A Critique of Contemporary Continental Theory, Edinburg: Edinburgh University Press, 2010. His blog is http://leniency.blogspot.com

Footnotes

i Gilberto Perez, ‘House of Miscegenation', Review of Hollywood Westerns and American Myth, by Robert Pippin, London Review of Books 32 no. 22, 2010, pp.23-26, http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n22/gilberto-perez/house-of-miscegenation.

ii Gilberto Perez, The Material Ghost: Films and their Medium, Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998, p.241.

iii Ibid., p.247.

iv Ibid., p.234.

v Christopher Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns: Cowboys and Europeans from Karl May to Sergio Leone, London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 1998, p.xix.

vi Philip French, Westerns (London: Secker & Warburg/The British Film Institute, 1977), p.9.

vii In Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p.xi.

viii Anon., ‘Let's Do Justice to Our Comrade P.38', ‘Italy: Autonomia, Post-Political Politics', ed. Sylvere Lotringer and Christian Marazzi, Semiotext(e) III.3, 1980, pp.120-121.

ix Johanna Isaacson, ‘You Just Tarried with the Wrong Mexican: Machete and the Aesthetic Politics of Negation', Lana Turner Journal Blog, 2010, http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/online/49-film/135-you-just-tarried-with-the-wrong-mexican-machete-and-the-aesthetic-politics-of-negation

x Isaacson, 'You Just Tarried...'.

xi Gail Day, Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory, New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), p.3.

xii Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p.x.

xiii French, Westerns, p.43.

xiv Frayling, Spaghetti Westerns, p.xxi-xxii.

xv French, Westerns, p.43.

xvi Alain Badiou, The Century, trans., with commentary and notes, Alberto Toscano, Cambridge, UK, and Malden, MA: Polity, 2007, p.85.

xviii Maurice Blanchot, ‘"Factory-Excess," or Infinity in Pieces', in Political Writings, 1953-1993, trans. and intro. Zakir Paul, foreword Kevin Hart, New York: Fordham University Press, 2010, pp.131-132.

xix Blanchot, ‘"Factory-Excess"', p.131.

xx Blanchot, ‘"Factory-Excess"', p.132.

xxi Maurice Blanchot, Lautréamont and Sade, trans. Stuart Kendall and Michele Kendall, Stanford, CA.: Stanford University Press, 2004, p.68.

xxii In Alex Cox, 10,000 Ways to Die, p.143.

xxiii Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, London: Verso, 1989, p.87.

xxiv Karl Marx, Early Writings, intro. Lucio Colletti, trans. Rodney Livingstone and Gregor Benton, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975, p.377.

xxv Friedrich Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844, Chp.7, Marxists Internet Archive, http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1845/condition-working-class/ch07.htm.

xxvi Karl Marx, Early Writings, p.282.

xxvii I owe this point to Giovanni Tiso.

xxviii Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844, Chp.7.

xxix Engels, Condition of the Working Class in England, 1844, Chp.13.

As the image of Margaret Thatcher circulates through the media ecology, John Russell's public art work in Southend-on-Sea works to redirect its affective charge. The Iron Lady, stable signifier for straight-jacketed social relations, becomes a fecund sump in which to grow new forms-of-life. Here he discusses his latest work while delectating Maggie's corpse

Dear Living Person,

I am a fly, laying my eggs on the dead body of Margaret Thatcher. Emerging from her nose, after squeezing out 150-ish white-tube eggs, in two batches of 75, inside the nasal cavity and on the eyes. Silence except for the counting down of the clock as I run my foreleg over my antennae, suppurating this somewhat dubious, schlocked-up cliché of an ‘author position' as a fiction pro-/receding from my previous experiences as a decomposing corpse.¹ As a recession to the condition of a common housefly. The shackles of this necrotic voice twist around me like a swirling whirlpool of shit - after all you can't write a suicide note if you are already dead (or if you are a fly). I pitch around in search of some credible starting point. And in a desperate measure to spice up the stinking stew, gesture to Nick Land's sparkling preface to The Thirst for Annihilation, as an example of a starting point that operates as a prophesy - as a call to the virtual power and force of ideas. As I walk across her face, an historical fly. Land writes:

The corpse not only dissolves into noxious base matter analogous to excrement, it is also in fact defecated by the life of the species. For the corpse is the truth of the biological individual, its consummate superfluity. It is only through the passage into irredeemable waste that the individual is marked with the delible trace of its excess.

 

 

And later on he writes how the child (of ‘Rire') ‘transfixed by the stinking ruins of his father - is gripped by convulsions of horror that explode into pearls of mirth.'² And so with the song of police sirens still fresh in our ears, and the images of riots running across our screens, as financial markets crash across the world, let us laugh the ‘Laughter of Nietzsche'. As Bataille puts it ‘what does the divine attained in laughter mean if not the absence of God?'3

1. Some thoughts regarding ‘the gaze' of someone looking at their body while they are being tortured/dismembered. At the beginning of Discipline and Punish Foucault famously describes the public torture of Robert-François Damiens. In line with his intentions it is the visual affect/impact of the passage which lingers in the mind. A particularly startling detail of the scene - notwithstanding the drama of the description of the various procedures involved - is the image of Damiens craning his neck like a turtle to observe his body being turned into object(s). The description of him watching his own torture is repeated on several occasions. So for instance, after having had his hands burned by sulphur and after the executioner has attempted to tear off chunks of flesh with a pair of steel pincers from ‘the calf of the right leg, then at the thigh, and from there at the two fleshy parts of the right arm; then at the breasts'. After these tearings with the pincers, Damiens, ‘who cried out profusely, though without swearing, raised his head and looked at himself'. Then after the executioner had poured boiling oil over each wound, attached ropes to his legs and arms, harnessed them each to a horse, and after each horse had pulled hard on a limb: ‘despite all this pain, he raised his head from time to time and looked at himself boldly'. And then after this when it is described how the direction of the horses is changed and each horse pulls against the joint and breaks them, even then ‘he raised his head and looked at himself'.⁴

Fig 1. John Russell, Angel of History/I can see for miles, Southend-on-Sea, UK, 2011

It is not mentioned if he still looks at himself later on, after the executioners have used a knife to ‘cut the body at the thighs instead of severing the legs at the joints' and the four horses carried off the two thighs. And after that when the same was done to the arms, the shoulders, the arm-pits and the four limbs: ‘the flesh had to be cut almost to the bone, the horses pulling hard carried off the right arm first and the other afterwards'. But it seems Damiens is fascinated by (if not necessarily enthusiastic about) the transformation of his body into objects. Conventionally a connection might be drawn here between death and objects; of the death drive as the idea of a becoming-inorganic, about turning into object(s) and watching yourself turning into object(s).

2. Stretched across one face of the railway bridge that spans Southend's pedestrianised high street, is the art work ‘Angel of History. I can see for miles': a pair of eyes, looking away from the sea front. Margaret Thatcher's eyes in the style of Walter Benjamin's ‘Angel of History' (Fig. 1).

3. The forthcoming film The Iron Lady (released December 2011) stars Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher and is, according to the press release, the portrait of ‘a woman who smashed through the barriers of gender and class to be heard in a male-dominated world.'⁵ The story concerns ‘power and the price that is paid for power', and the perspective of the film is constructed around the idea of Margaret Thatcher ‘looking back'. As Cameron McCracken, the managing director of Pathé UK, confirms: ‘the film is set in the recent past and [...] Baroness Thatcher [looks] back on both the triumphs and the lows of her extraordinary career.'⁶ In fact, according to The Daily Telegraph the screenplay of The Iron Lady depicts Baroness Thatcher as an elderly dementia-sufferer looking back on her career with sadness. She is shown talking to herself and unaware that her husband Denis has died.⁷

Margaret Thatcher's political success was built around a performance of looking back. Looking back and reflecting back to sections of the community she didn't give a shit about (working classes, lower-middle classes) a new/old way of looking at ourselves/themselves/herself constructed around images of Victorian values and ‘Great' Britain.

4. The angel in Walter Benjamin's ‘well known and quite over-quoted'Angel of History passage also looks back.⁸

A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like him to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.⁹

In various texts, but most specifically his essay ‘On the Concept of History' (1940), Benjamin distinguishes between two different approaches or performances of history (ways of ‘doing' history). The first, an historical formulation whose ‘procedure is additive: it musters a mass of data to fill the homogeneous, empty time.'¹⁰ This is a philosophy of history that refers to historicism, continuity and progress: ‘it may be that the continuity of tradition is mere semblance. But then precisely the persistence of this semblance provides it with continuity.'¹¹ The second, an ‘interruptive' philosophy of history, where history is constructed in a politically explosive ‘constellation of past and present', as a ‘lightning flash' of truth:

The past does not throw its light onto the present, nor does the present illuminate the past, but the image is formed when that which has been and the Now come together in a flash as a constellation'.¹²

Drawing on his writing about surrealist strategies of rupture and montage - this lightning flash is configured as a ‘dialectical image' which occurs in the Now of its recognisability - a suddenness which precludes its re-assimilation into the structures of continuity, but is animated as the potential for immediate action (in this suddenness). The present recognises itself as ‘intended in that image' as it ‘flits by'.¹³ Hope is now historically ‘actual' in the sense that it is realisable: ‘time filled full by now-time (Jetztzeit).'¹⁴ Past and present overlap in a political possibility, ‘a secret agreement between past generations and the present one.'¹⁵ So, for instance, Benjamin describes Robespierre as a model for the ‘materialist historian', because he ‘blasted' ancient Rome ‘out of the continuum of history' to have it serve as an ideological precedent for the French Revolution.¹⁶ The dialectical image is therefore pitched against historicism, against continuity, transition and conformism and its images.¹⁷

5. After this, when the four limbs had been carried away:

the confessors came to speak to him; but his executioner told them that he was dead, though the truth was that I saw the man move, his lower jaw moving from side to side as if he were talking. One of the executioners even said shortly afterwards that when they had lifted the trunk to throw it on the stake, he was still alive.¹⁸

My palpi tremble as a slight breeze indicates a door has opened somewhere in the building. If you can imagine me here, walking across the cold surface of the window pane.

6. What we are talking about, extrapolating from Benjamin's ideas, is a war of images. Not a bloodless ‘politics of representation/representation of politics' - decoding and recoding - not mainly this anyway, but rather a concern with the force of images in and as themselves. Not in terms of how they can be interpreted, but in terms of what they do. Acting with force. The way images might return performatively, with illocutional force.¹⁹ To be acted upon. To use an example from Deleuze and Guattari, what transforms the accused into a convict is the incorporeal attribute that is the expressed in or of the judge's sentence; the expressed cannot be separated from its expression, and neither can the attribute be located in the body of the convict to account for this transformation in sense.²⁰ Saying-doing him/her into a convict. A fictioning where fiction EXPRESSES the force of language, and the articulatory force of images and/as objects, and/as fantasies, and/as language, and/as the real. This is the power of Benjamin's ideas.

Margaret Thatcher understood this - the affective, political power of big, dumb, familiar, dead images. Like the Monarchy, the Queen, private schools, Winston Churchill, the village green, the corner shop. Images which recur and police our potentials and abilities to act and perform. Images which bind us in, set parameters, inscribe what is sensible, what is civilised, what is unacceptable, what can sensibly be spoken of, and who can speak ‘sensibly'. As William Burroughs writes:

What hope for a country where people will camp out for three days to glimpse the Royal Couple? Where one store clerk refers to another as his 'colleague'? [...] God save the Queen and a fascist regime [...] The Queen stabilizes the whole stinking shithouse and keeps a small elite of wealth and privilege on top ....The English have gone soft in the outhouse. England is like some stricken beast too stupid to know it is dead. Ingloriously foundering in its own waste products, the backlash and bad karma of empire. ²¹

And the current crop of ‘Thatcher's children' with their Big Society, Small Government, Sick Society clichés and immediate, violent attack on the public sector: ‘the slow bleeding, coupled with a recent gutting unprecedented in its severity and rapidity, of the carcass of the welfare state, through attacks on social programs, housing, and pensions.'²² Or for example, the seemingly irrelevant Countryside Alliance who are only interested in images, in the image of themselves or other people like them sitting on horses wearing their red jackets, because this is an historical image. And they are only interested in preserving rural life as a preservation of (the images of) conventional power relations.²³

But we are also talking here of morphogenesis. Or the movement between/through/across images and things: image to image, image to object, fantasy to matter, ideology to things, virtual to actual. The persistence and continuity of history (as historicism) is tied to the persistence and continuity of these relationships, both in terms of the real and/or fantasy, or as phenomena and/or noumena, and/or morphing between the two. Images are also objects are also bodies.

7. As my prostomal teeth scrape at the surface of a fragment of meat lodged between her teeth, my mind turns to more philosophical contexts. In his essay ‘The Pineal Eye', Bataille writes:

I represented the eye at the summit of the skull to myself as a horrible volcano in eruption, with exactly the murky and comic character which attaches to the rear and its excretions. But the eye is without doubt the symbol of the dazzling sun, and the one I imagined at the summit of my skull was necessarily inflamed, being dedicated to the contemplation of the sun at its maximum burst (éclat).²⁴

And later on in the same text: ‘The fecal eye of the sun is also torn from its volcanic entrails and the pain of a man who tears out his own eyes with his fingers is no more absurd than the anal setting of the sun.'²⁵

In his essay ‘Metaphor of the Eye' Barthes identifies a number of objects in Bataille's novel Story of the Eye that are associated with the Eye. Objects that are similar in whiteness and/or roundness, but also dissimilar (in different ways). The Eye as a saucer of milk in which Simone, the main female character squats: ‘"Milk is for the pussy, isn't it?" says Simone'; the wheel of a bicycle; eggs, particularly yolks; bulls' testicles; the eyes of the matador; the eyes of the priest; the sun; the blind eyes of the father.²⁶ The narrative trajectory of Story of the Eye slides across these different combinations of intertwining metaphorical series. As an endless exchange of meanings and usages, in the move from the paradigmatic to the syntagmatic, from metaphor to metonym: ‘...to break an egg, to poke out an eye'/' ...to break an eye and to poke out an egg'²⁷. And in other contexts blow_fly girl describes finding a dead reindeer by the highway:

The open belly of the deer was a huge mass of maggots. There had to be thousands of them, greyish-brown maggots writhing and churning and filling every part of the open belly. [...] Little black beetles crawled among the maggots and dozens of flies buzzed around the carcass.

And then goes on to describe how she pushes a section of the maggot-covered reindeer meat into her vagina, and how she orgasms: ‘drunk with arousal'.²⁸ Blow_fly girl's brutal reworking of something like Marvell's ‘To His Coy Mistress' engages with the erotic potential of decomposition and multiplicity, and points to Bataille's heterology which proposes a radical reconfiguration or realignment of the body, its organs and its drives. The transformation of the mouth from an organ of consumption to one of excretion. Transforming an eye into a mouth or anus; transformed as a dragging/eating inwards or as shitting outwards. As in the film The Human Centipede, 2009, where the surgeon, after a botched escape by one of his victims, declares: ‘I have decided now who will be the middle section' stitching together three people, mouth to anus, mouth to anus. Transformed by connecting their openings into a tube, a section of the digestive system. If Thatcher's eye/eyes are configured as an intestine-eye, there is no longer an end-point, it is part of a tube - an optical-throat or anus. Like the Marquis de Sade, using the wooden funnel he used to shit into as an impromptu megaphone to scream from his prison cell inside the Bastille: ‘They are killing us in here. They are killing the prisoners', inciting the proletariat outside to riot.

Fig 2. Margaret Thatcher House

8. Why have the British Labour party not sought to eradicate these images at some time in the last 30 years. Shame on them that they never seriously attempted to dismantle private education, private health, the Monarchy and fox hunting.29 As an eradication of images, as a dialectic of images. As Head Gallery write

you have to destroy the representations of class domination before you bother with re-orienting the heavy metal of material culture because otherwise, like ghosts, these representations will reappear and re-orientate things themselves. Reappear and reform objects in their own image. Image comes first. Image comes first. Always image.³⁰

Less than a quarter of a mile away from the bridge in Southend, there is a council property named ‘Margaret Thatcher House'. Until recently this building had a sign attached to the exterior with the words ‘Margaret Thatcher' printed on it. It was recently taken down and only the bolt holes remain, like bleeding stigmata (fig. 2).

9. Objects have trouble persisting. Human objects, or cultural objects. Any sort of object is under threat in the medium to long term of being turned into something else. The human body decomposes and animal's carcasses are injected with an ‘alternating current' to prevent this from happening, thus preserving the quality of the meat. Due to their robustness cancer cells are being used in bio-nanotechnology. We will soon be supplementing our thinking processes by the use of cancer computers. It is difficult to maintain anything after your death. Graves are leased for 10, 20, 30 years. The objects which record our existence breakdown and people who have memories of you disappear. And there are very few ways of preventing this unless you are rich and your objects are valuable. The standard shit of people's lives - TV, 3-piece suite, ornaments, photographs - will not persist.

One way to ensure the persistence of objects is to successfully enter them into the correct cultural circuits - and here I am talking about ART OBJECTS. Art as collector/collection-based. A finely tuned system to ensure the persistence of objects. And since Duchamp and beyond, it is clear that any object can persist as long as it is correctly articulated as art. Correctly articulated by the correct languages. Entered into the correct circuits of distribution in the correct way. With the correct type of visibility and so on. This discursive structuring is entwined with, and is part of, the investment structures in/of the art world. Necessarily, ‘investment' requires some level of persistence to enable investment. Art offers increased and unusual possibilities of persistence (art-object-as-investment) in a way that is unusual in our society because anything can be art.³¹ This is a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy: buying into the potential of art's persistence, as a form of persistence (investment), which guarantees the persistence of the art object.

This type of reciprocity echoes Pierre Bourdieu's analysis of the ‘love of art' which marks out class status and guarantees cultural capital. An act which guarantees the system/structure/discourse which allows that act of guaranteeing, and which allows for the marking out of ‘the chosen who are themselves chosen by their ability to respond to its call.'³² Or as Brian O'Doherty and Thomas McEvilley describe it,

The outside world must not come in, so windows are usually sealed off. Walls are painted white. [...] The condition of appearing out of time, or beyond time, implies a claim that the work already belongs to posterity - that is, it is an assurance of good investment. [...] the endurance of a certain power structure is the end for which the sympathetic magic of the white cube is devised.³³

Therefore, the value and collectability of an art object is tied to its perceived significance (in and as its articulation as an art work) and therefore its ability to persist (within those systems in which it is successfully articulated and therefore inevitably persists within). And validates. And persists. And validates. And so on.

10. In the publicity for The Iron Lady, 2011, if not in the film itself (yet to be seen), there is a particular focus upon Margaret Thatcher's sex appeal. As Stuart Jeffries writes in The Guardian, Tuesday 8 February 2011: ‘Ever since French president François Mitterrand suggested that Margaret Thatcher had "the eyes of Caligula, the mouth of Marilyn Monroe", we've had to get used to the unbelievable truth that Margaret Thatcher was made of more than iron.' He suggests that the publicity still of Meryl Streep, released to promote her performance in the film The Iron Lady, continues

that counter-intuitive narrative. Not Thatcher, Milk Snatcher. But Thatcher, Seducer. The image ideally realises what Tory makeover people wanted Thatcher to be - not just the hard-as-nails Conservative who destroyed a nation's industrial base, but a woman capable of deploying sexual allure politically.³⁴

 
 
When/if Margaret Thatcher watches the film she will see an image of herself portrayed by Meryl Streep perhaps in the style of the all powerful fashion boss she plays in The Devil Wears Prada (2006), with that trademark sexy-sideways-power-glance she does.

It is claimed that Margaret Thatcher's

contrived posh accent [...] had a husky style that male politicians of her generation (Labour included) found sexy, especially if she had Scotch on her breath. Even Alan Clark, the old rogue, was excited by her, though not even he would have chanced his arm.³⁵

A new ‘sexy' Margaret Thatcher is giving us the eye. But this is also to bear in mind that there is a multitude of images of eyes/looking. This meshwork of images refers back to our previous discussion of the interchangeability of the Eye with eggs, bulls' testicles and other ovular objects. And liquid metaphors such as tears, cat's milk, egg yolks and semen. And also to note that Margaret Thatcher was often depicted as an ‘embodiment of phallic power'.³⁷

11. The idea of object-ness has obviously been important in the articulation of art. In a conventional sense, (good) art has very often been associated with an escape from object-ness (ideal, sublime, abstract, spiritual, poetic). And bad art/poetry as a return to objects. Good poetry flies above (transcends) language and the objects that language is inscribed upon. Good poetry gives language wings, whereas bad poetry returns it to the grunting and squeaking of sound, its materiality. A dissembling of the divine dream and return to the dull materiality of existence/reality. This is one way of looking at it.

To reverse this, bad art might bring us back to the object in more positive ways. Margaret Thatcher's friend and ally, the former B-movie actor Ronald Reagan, has recently been transformed into an object. Not only by dying (in 2004) but also more recently through the erection of his likeness as a public sculpture in London, in front of the American Embassy. There are numerous three-dimensional representations of him in the US, and at least four public sculptures of Margaret Thatcher. On the same track, the otherwise useless painter Lucien Freud turned the Queen into an object with his brilliant Portrait of Queen Elizabeth II (2001). Or Antony Gormley turned both participants and audience into objects with his Fourth Plinth installation One and Other (2009) where he created one of the greatest art works of the last 20 years. For each hour of every day, a different person dicked around on top of Trafalgar Square's ‘fourth plinth'. Every second was filmed and web-cammed around the world with surrounding TV and video archives inventoried by Sky. The technology was impressive. The art work was a monument to the banality and triviality of human kind. To the abject shitness of human life. To our existence as dumb objects. Gormley as the absent artist sits like a black greasy cat sat up in the ramparts of the buildings surrounding the square, licking the fat off his lips as he looks down at the vermin clocking in and clocking out like flies slipping around inside a decaying corpse.

12. Meryl Streep looks out of the film Iron Lady at Margaret Thatcher who has died while watching the film. Margaret Thatcher has turned into her own private ‘crystal image'. As the light plays across her prone body, alone in her room she has now become a kind of object, an art work. This might fulfil the criteria for an installation.

Fig 3. Meryl Streep. Margaret Thatcher

13. In her essay ‘Digital debris: Spam and Scam' Hito Steyerl describes how there is something overlooked in Benjamin's text

if we take its spatial arrangement seriously [...] there is no rubble depicted on the drawing whatsoever [...] Since the angel faces us as spectators, and - according to Benjamin - also faces the rubble, the wreckage must be located in the hors-champ of the drawing. This means that the rubble is where we are. Or to take it one step further: we, the spectators, might actually be the rubble [...] we have become discarded objects and useless commodities caught in the gaze of a shell-shocked angel who drags us along as it is blown away into uncertitude.³⁸

14. Huge wings arched outwards and backwards, legs sucked/stretched forwards to the viewer - as the angel is blown backwards, forced into the future. Her bony, serrated vertebrae scoring a trench down the street. History pushing her bony carcass down the arcades, flanked by shops: River Island, BHS, JD Sports, HMV. Smearing across the frontage. Routing out through the precinct, dragging behind her ... intestines ... trailing backwards a stream of shit and viscera coating the rubble. Two anus-eyes.

15. The thing about diseases of the eye - of your own eye - is that you look at them (in the mirror) with the same thing you are looking at. You are watching the disease taking over your eye and turning it into an object with your eye itself (the organ of this perception). The horror of this situation is the horror of seeing yourself seeing-yourself-seeing-yourself-becoming-an-object. Something of this horror is present in the image of the eye infected with Lamprey's disease (Fig 3.) This image was circulating on the internet a few years ago. It is a spoofed image - there is no Lamprey's disease. A lamprey is a water-bound parasite that latches onto fish. The picture on the internet is actually just a lamprey's mouth Photoshopped onto an eye socket - not a real disease, but horrific nonetheless. What we are experiencing here is the terror of the move towards the condition of an object. Becoming a corpse or block of meat (as opposed to flesh). These might be instances of humour noir working as a kind of defence mechanism. This could be described with reference to Freud's essay ‘Humour' of 1928, that formed the basis of Breton's essay on the grotesque/comic.³⁹ These are instances of the splitting of ego, in which the super ego is able to look down upon 'one's' body as abject object. A defence mechanism of counter-narcissistic detachment from imaginary misrecognition of self as imago and sublime descent to finite, mortal bodily self. This is the way much contemporary theory would reconstruct this type of imagery. For instance Simon Critchley writes a lot about the mechanics of this.⁴⁰

Fig 4. Lamprey’s disease 

17. But this is not what I'm arguing here. And this is not to suggest that our vision/ gaze is diseased, or that society's vision is diseased (in the ‘sick society' sense) but rather to point to the radical forces of experimentation of life which include our own extinction/destruction as part of this experimentation. For instance, the Death of Margaret Thatcher might not involve a simple negation: Thatcher/non-Thatcher, but also experimentation on both a microbiological level (vermicular/ burrowing of worms/maggots, breakdown to chemical components) as well as experimentation on political, philosophical and artistic levels. As tunnel or viscera. Patricia McCormack in her discussion of ‘becoming-cunt' depicts/describes, viscera as a ‘frontier of excess'; as ‘safe' only when concealed, and offering ‘a materiality beyond that known through the traditional hierarchy of the body'. Like the cunt as ‘a volitional hole, that which is both penetrable and ingurgitant.' As an opening out: ‘the indiscernibility between what constitutes the cunt (not the thigh) and what constitutes the surrounds (not cunt).' And a becoming-cunt as a transgression and traversing of dominant (and dull) phallic paradigms ‘both prohibited and revolt-ing (in both senses of the word). The cunt, as opposed to the obedient vagina, will not be defined by production (family), chastity (Church) or an acceptance of subjugation (state).'⁴¹ Redetermining ‘how cunt is seen and how it may be used to see.'⁴²

Whether or not you like Land's hypothesis that: ‘to produce is to partially manage the release of energy into its loss, and nothing more' or his ideas of ‘accelerationism', his assessment of Nietzsche's Death of God is acute:

To say ‘there is no God' is not to express a proposition in a pre established logical syntax, but to begin thinking again, in a way that is radically new, and therefore utterly experimental...⁴³

 
In the same way we might engage experimentally with the idea of the Death of the Monarchy, Death of private education, Death of private health, Death of fox hunting or the Death of Margaret Thatcher. These might allow for something ‘radically new', rather than being ‘bilateralised' into docility' and falling back on procedures of ‘systematic closure of the negative within its logico-structural sense'. Where all ‘uses, references, connotations of the negative are referred back to a bilateral opposition as if to an inescapable destination, so that every ‘de-‘, 'un-‘, ‘dis-‘, or ‘anti-‘ is speculatively imprisoned within the mirror space of the concept.' ⁴⁴

18. As she leaves her meat behind and moves off to become an image - an image which people will try to use to shape future meat, it is clear that this is what the rubble partly is: the Angel's entrails and viscera. So fill your glass and join me in a celebratory toast. I have now laid my eggs on Margaret Thatcher's body. On a sump of matter and psychic gloop. Benjamin's Angel's eye, mixed with Thatcher's eye, mixed with Bataille's pineal eye and solar anus and McCormack's becoming-cunt. These eyes look back at us, seeping as a materialisation and solid fleshy rotting together of ideas like a toffee apple dripping flesh. My gaze wanders away from this scene across the sea as it ‘continuously jerks off' to a sunset transformed with dynamic potential. ⁴⁵

Anyway. Nice talking to you.

Best,

A Fly

John Russell <john.a.russell AT btinternet.com> is an artist living and working in London,  http://www.john-russell.com

Info

This text was written to coincide with the launch of the public art work Angel of History. I can see for miles in Southend, Essex, UK. Commissioned by Focal Point Gallery. 12 September to 22 October 2011, http://www.focalpoint.org.uk/offsite/current/9/

Footnotes

1 John Russell, ‘Dear living Person' Mute Vol 3 #1, Spring/Summer 2011, http://www.metamute.org/en/articles/dear_living_person

2 Nick Land, The Thirst for Annihilation. Georges Bataille and Virulent Nihilism (an Essay in Aesthetic Religion), London & New York: Routledge, 1992: xvii.

3Georges Bataille, ‘Nietzsche's Laughter' in The Unfinished System of Nonknowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001, p.23.

4 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books, 1995, pp.3-6.

5 This is reminiscent of the ‘Comic Strip' film The Strike, 1988: a parody of a Hollywood depiction of the Miner's Strike in the UK, (1984-85) with Peter Richardson as Al Pacino as Arthur Scargill and Jennifer Saunders as Meryl Streep.

6 Tim Walker, ‘Margaret Thatcher's family are "appalled" at Meryl Streep film', The Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2010.

7 Ibid.

8 Hito Steyerl, ‘Digital Debris: Spam and Scam' from a lecture given at Universität der Künste Berlin, July 2011.

9 Walter Benjamin, ‘On a Concept of History' (1940), in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Volume 4, 1938-1940, Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003, p.392.

10 Ibid, p.396

11 Quote attributed to Walter Benjamin,The Arcades Project, Cambridge, Massachusetts & London: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999, p.486.

12 Ibid., p.462.

13 Ibid., p.390.

14 Ibid., p.395.

15 Ibid., p.390.

16 Ibid., p.395.

17 The structure of Benjamin's ideas is reminiscent of Deleuze's description of virtual/actual (and the operation of memory) and teriitorialisation/deterritorialisation. Even if Deleuze refuses the possibility of dialectics.

18 Michel Foucault, op. cit., p.5.

19 The illocutionary act is the act we perform when speaking a sentence. See the discussion of performativity in J.L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1962: 95-107.

20 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, London & New York: Continuum, 2004, p.89.

21 William Burroughs, The Place of Dead Roads, London: Fourth Estate, 2010, p.175.

22 Evan Calder Williams, ‘An Open Letter to Those Who Condemn Looting (In Two Parts)', 11 August, 2011, Co-published by Mute, http://www.metamute.org/en/news_and_analysis/an_open_letter_to_those_who_condemn_looting_in_two_parts, and http://socialismandorbarbarism.blogspot.com/

23 As Naomi Klein describes it: ‘really what we have been living is a liberation movement, indeed the most successful liberation movement of our time: the movement by capital to liberate itself from all constraints on its accumulation. For those who say this ideology's failing, I beg to differ. [...] I think this has been a class war waged by the rich against the poor, and I think that they won. And I think the poor are fighting back.' Naomi Klein: ‘Wall St. Crisis Should Be for Neoliberalism What Fall of Berlin Wall Was for Communism', Democracy Now, October 6th 2008, cited in John Beagles ‘In a Class All of Their Own: The Incomprehensiveness of Art Education', Variant issue 39/40, Winter 2010, http://www.variant.org.uk/39_40texts/comp39_40.html

24 Georges Bataille, ‘The Jesuve' in Visions of Excess: Selected writings, 1927-1939, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1985, p.74. Quoted here from Land, Thirst for Annihilation, p.31.

25 Bataille. ‘The Pineal Eye', Visions of Excess, p.85.

26 Bataille, Story of the Eye, p.4.

27 Roland Barthes, ‘Metaphor of the Eye,' in Critical Essays, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2000, p. 244.

28 Blowfly Girl, ‘Dead Deer - Second Maggot Story', http://blowflygirl.blogspot.com/

29 I am not referring to the act of killing foxes but the performance of ‘Fox Hunting'.

30Head Gallery, http://headgallery.org/orbitecture5.html

31 Even an idea or a performance can be art. Nevertheless, the object always remains. As Benjamin Buchloh argues, the move to ‘dematerialisation' in conceptual art was followed by the rematerialisation of the artist and the infinite expansion of the art object as commodity.' See, Benjamin Buchloh, ‘Conceptual Art 1962-69: From the Aesthetics of the Critique of Institutions', October, 55, Winter 1990, pp.136-43. And this ongoing discourse of institutionalisation, commodification and capitalisation continues on through the objects of institutional critique, critical art, the dematerialisation of the artist, culturepreneur, cultural producer, nomad and so on.

32Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel with Dominique Schnapper, from 'Conclusion' in The Love of Art: European Art Museums and their Public, Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman (trans.), Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991, p.173.

33 Thomas McEvilly/Brian O'Doherty, in the Introduction to Inside the White Cube: The Ideology of the Gallery Space, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1986, p.7.

34 Stuart Jeffries, ‘Meryl Streep playing Margaret Thatcher: What's not to like?' The Guardian, Tuesday 8 February 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2011/feb/08/meryl-streep-margaret-thatcher

35 Michael White, ‘Does Meryl Streep shine as the Iron Lady?', Film Blog, http://www.guardian.co.uk , Thursday 7 July 2011

36 Ibid.

37 Jacqueline Rose, ‘Margaret Thatcher and Ruth Ellis', New Formations, Winter 1988, p.9.

38 Hito Steyerl, ‘Digital Debris: Spam and Scam,' from a lecture given at Universität der Künste Berlin, July 2011.

39 André Breton, Anthology of Black Humour, Paris: Éditions du Sagittaire, 1940.

40 Simon Critchley, On Humour, London & New York: Routledge, 2002.

41 Patricia McCormack, ‘Becomings-Cunt: Flesh, Fold and Infinity', Frozen Tears III, 2007, pp.800-838.

42 Maria Fusco. ‘Review: Frozen Tears III', Art Monthly, February 2008.

43 Nick Land, ‘The Thirst for Annihilation', London: Routledge, 1992, pp.18-19.

44 Nick Land, Ibid., p.19.

45 Bataille. ‘The Pineal Eye', Visions of Excess, op. cit., p.8.

In the slipstream of a media campaign Tories are quickly gaining momentum for a new initiative to criminalise squatting in England and Wales. Andrea Tocchini sizes up the homelessness innovators and their opposition

Before working on this article, I thought that I was far too lazy to ever be a squatter. The amount of scoping out, teamwork and attention required to pick the right place and make it home for a reasonable amount of time would require a set of skills that are uncommon to most. On the other hand squatting also conjured a range of stereotypes that circulate unimpeded in mainstream culture. My general impression was that while in the rest of Europe squatting is mainly about political activism, in the UK it is largely comprised of people who don't want to pay rent. Squatters, I thought, were people who chose to live this way for lifestyle reasons associated with being artists, hippies, or radically chic. But, as I learned, the story is far more complex than that.

The proliferation of squatter stereotypes is partly due to its relative detachment from mainstream culture. This makes squatters an easy target for the right wing press and politicians alike. The media stereotyping and biased reporting of squatters seems to have escalated recently in curious synchronicity with the government's launch of a consultation on the criminalisation of squatting in England and Wales.

Consultation

It all started on 21 March 2011, with Housing Minister Grant Shapps declaring the government's intention to make squatting a criminal offence by early 2012. Announcing the consultation, the Minister also put forward a document produced in collaboration with the Ministry of Justice providing anti-squatting tips for home- and landowners, and comparing squatters, quite blatantly, with burglars.

Image: All images by Victoria Blitz

Shapps justified the call for a consultation by claiming that there had been an increase in ‘public concern' over squatting, citing articles in The Daily Mail, The Sun and The Evening Standard as evidence. And in fact, in recent months the press has devoted a lot of space to condemning squatting as an anti-social and criminal practice, and to portraying squatters as binge-drinking, drug-taking yobs looking for expensive places to trash. This included an article series published by The Telegraph and The Daily Mail on a group of Latvian 20-somethings squatting a multi-million pound mansion in posh Highgate – note their suspicious eagerness to talk to the press about how soft the British legislation is on squatting, how much they love their respectable neighbourhood and enjoy their luxurious and free lifestyle. The Standard has also been quick to point out how the amendments to the current regulations are all part of Cameron's plan to tackle Broken Britain's crime problem. Squatting features alongside knife crime and gang culture in the list of antisocial behaviours the coalition wants to eradicate from society for all our benefit.

The criminalisation of squatting is an old Conservative objective (the last attempt was made in 1990, at the end of Thatcher's government), but this time it seems an untimely call at the very least. As cuts to welfare and social spending have proved an unpopular measure to counter a financial crisis caused by bankers, and social tensions loom in different parts of the country, such a reactionary programme could be quite dangerous.

With their rights being threatened, squatters decided to regroup and form their own clusters of resistance. The most active of these groups is the resurrected SQUASH (Squatters Actions for Secure Homes) campaign. They are preparing research material for the forthcoming parliamentary debate, and liaising with the media, politicians and homeless and housing charities to raise awareness and promote new collaborations.

‘It wouldn't make sense to organise all squatters,' says Paul Reynolds, a representative of SQUASH ‘as we're all so diverse, it'd take forever to agree on anything. Our aim is to carry on with our work, getting our arguments out to mainstream culture, and inspiring other groups to take action as well.'

Key to the success of the campaign is, according to SQUASH campaigners, a new media approach which hopes to change common perceptions of squatters in mainstream culture. Targeting such stereotyping, a territory previously left unchallenged, could present an opportunity to deconstruct bias and inject some new ideas about the perception of squatters.

Current Legislation

The SQUASH campaign has counter-arguments for all the main justifications of the government's plan. According to the campaigners, squatting does not constitute a threat to private properties because occupying a place that is not abandoned is already a criminal offence. Since immediate eviction is not really something they look forward to, the usual tactic is to find a property that is verifiably empty and abandoned. That does not include – as the Advisory Service for Squatters (ASS, a voluntary organisation providing support and legal aid for squatters) points out – houses left vacant for holidays, work related reasons, or second homes/holiday homes. As the ASS puts it:

Most of the media attacks have been based on a few cases where the owner of the property squatted claimed to have been living there before it was squatted. These claims appear to be untrue, though we don't have the resources to prove this, and have been used to create (once again) a myth of people's homes being threatened by squatters. ASS attempts to point out that squatters tend, sensibly, to go for properties where they can live for a reasonable amount of time, have fallen on deaf media ears.

In most cases the properties that are occupied do not belong to an individual, but rather to an organisation waiting for something to do with them, thus the suspicion that a tougher law will simply end up helping speculators rather than legitimate owners. The scaremongering here mainly serves the purpose of gaining consensus over a subject most people doesn't really worry about, or hardly have an opinion on. It is also a very British tradition, the first examples of which date back to as early as the 17th century, and whose protagonists ranged from artists to soldiers, political activists to miners.

Squatting is currently not illegal because, under English and Welsh law, unopposed trespassing is not a crime but a civil matter. And section six of the Criminal Justice Act, 1977, protects squatters from immediate eviction stating that it is illegal to break into a place when people within are opposing it. That includes landlords and police alike. As it stands right now, disputes of this kind have to be resolved in a civil court.

Campaign

The SQUASH campaign articulates a set of arguments which could potentially appeal to the wider political spectrum. It involves two lines of argument, one formulated to appeal to a more conservative audience, and the other with a distinctly more liberal touch. An important first point is the long-term effect the criminalisation of squatting will have on homeless people. Mainstream homeless charities such as Crisis and The Big Issue joined forces with SQUASH to argue that amendments to the law would place some of the most vulnerable people in even greater jeopardy. According to research published by Crisis, almost 40 percent of homeless people in the UK live in squats or have resorted to squatting to improve their situation. At a time in which jobs and benefits are disappearing, with councils cutting housing benefits and a lack of funding (and investment) for social housing, squatting could provide a popular solution for many. As ASS members point out:

People take over unused (sometimes misused) buildings and land, and house themselves, together. This would be resolving the (housing) crisis from our perspective; the other side seems to have their idea of resolving it, which isn't so person-friendly.

The government ‘solution' is also short on practicalities. To criminalise squatting without proposing an alternative affordable solution, it is to risk a surge of homeless people, or – should the consultation translate into law – an increase in ‘criminality'.

Which leads us to the deterrent functionality of criminalisation. Since people desperately need affordable housing and given that there are over a million vacant properties in England and Wales, people will either try to squat anyway, or will have to find alternative solutions on the cheap. SQUASH warns against what has been seen by many commentators as the primary alternative to squatting: the so called ‘guardian agencies' such as Camelot. Popular in the Netherlands, in some cases these agencies offer selected individuals the possibility of living without paying rent in vacant properties waiting for development. The norm however is payment of a monthly license fee consisting of low (but now rising) rent. The occupiers are not tenants, but guardians, which means they might have to abide by a series of rules which vary with each company. These rules include providing a guarantee of presence at certain times, not leaving the premises for more than three days at a time, not having tenancy rights such as privacy – anyone the guardian agency or the landlord permits can walk in at any time – or security, for the length of the agreement.

With funding for social housing further reduced and squatters facing criminalisation, it seems that there is something missing from the possible alternatives already at work. ‘The risk is a two-way system, in which those who can afford to rent a house will have tenancy rights, and those who can't, ending up with no rights at all', says SQUASH's Paul Reynolds.

Similarly, a second argument of the campaign is that the criminalisation will effectively empower and prioritise landlords and speculators over tenants. As squatters' rights are based on tenants' rights, eviction of vulnerable tenants (i.e. paying tenants without a contract) could become easier for dubious landlords. Say you pay rent but don't hold a regular tenancy agreement, the landlord would only have to claim that you are squatting the property to force your immediate eviction – a possible criminal court case might follow.

Thirdly, the cost of law enforcement – policing, evictions, court cases – will be substantial, and have an effect on social housing and local authorities as well, which makes it at the very least impractical. At a time in which police forces are being shrunk, services reduced and local councils are unable to afford investments in social housing or care, a more or less functioning micro-system is being shifted into the realm of illegality, with the subsequent consequences for law enforcement and provision of alternative accommodation. All this can only serve to increase public spending. From a purely economic viewpoint, squatting is much more sustainable than what it will cost to get rid of it.

Aimed towards the other end of the political spectrum, the fourth argument that SQUASH puts forward is that the new legislation will have an impact on the right to protest. If trespassing is made a criminal offence, the occupation of buildings for the purpose of protest and dissent – as with recent demonstrations against tuition fees increases and welfare cuts – might incur a criminal record. Government statements seem to indicate that the path they are pursuing is one of creating closer association between trespassing and squatting with the criminal offences of criminal damage and burglary.

Ultimately, SQUASH is keen to point out the pivotal role of squatting in the development of art and culture in the UK, given the number of artists, musicians, writers and whoever else chooses this particular lifestyle as a way of sustaining their activity.

Squatters

Squatters make up a diverse community. There is no homogeneous agenda behind someone's decision to squat, and as ASS reports from their experience as an advisory service, all sorts of backgrounds and experiences are represented within this particular group. Whilst some are keen to associate themselves with a lifestyle choice, or rather consider squatting on element in making a particular lifestyle sustainable, for others it is a matter of economic necessity. The biased language with which the government (and even the sympathetic press) assess the issues misses the diverse composition of squatting communities, in its haste to annexe the latter to the boiling pot of hooded crooks being readied for sacrifice in order to rectify Broken Britain.

As ASS members point out,

few squatters are explicitly making a statement against private property and those who are will probably be involved in political and social projects as well as squatting for their own living space. But implicitly, squatting is a practical statement against private property, at least against its ‘abuses': properties left empty, extortionate rents, and insecure tenancies.

Futures

But at a time when the dismantling of the welfare system and the high rates of unemployment are putting livelihoods in jeopardy throughout the country, squatting is also a statement against a politics that seems to endorse a two speed society. With the gap between rich and poor widening, the criminalisation of squatting contributes to a general regulation of the boundaries of poverty, with armed guards patrolling its gates. It is the ideological side of the government's agenda that seemingly wants to affect the personal freedom of individuals, whom, in order to survive on the rightful side of the law, are meant to take any job that is available – never mind vocation, aspirations – in order to afford to live in an overpriced hutch.

The bulldozing through of such legislation at a time in which the streets of the UK have been rocked by social unrest – sometimes organised, as with many of the anti-cuts protests, and sometimes as an explosion of uncontrolled violence such as the often individualistic kung-fu shopping of last month's riots – can only worsen the situation. At a time in which the State is not able to afford the services it is expected to provide, to be investing in the toughening up of policies whose value could only be sensationalist at best sounds about as reasonable as the repossession of council houses and benefits cuts for those directly involved in the riots, or even those related to them.

The funniest bit of the story is, it is probable that not even the government itself believes all of this is actually worth going through with. With no alternative solutions provided and the likely increase of homelessness and, most crucially, vulnerable tenancies, ‘people will just squat, anyway', as a mature squatter put it. And with the practicalities of law enforcement in question – the lack of resources for policing, the housing crisis, the lack of information on the number of squatters and where they live, and the actual difficulty of retrieving this data – the project seems to have an extremely short shelf-life. What it does do though is signal the direction the government is taking in response to the crisis. Now we're in trouble – they seem to be telling us – people who aren't rich and able to sort themselves out shouldn't expect much sympathy. They should take any basic job that will allow them (only just) to rent a flat at a questionable price, and go on with their lives without causing ‘us' any trouble. That is market economy. Short-minded as this might be, the side-effects (read infringements on civil liberties) are potentially overwhelming. Life under the Tories... Bit scary.

Andrea Tocchini <andrea.tocchini AT yahoo.co.uk> is a freelance writer. He is seriously considering taking up squatting

Info

Ministry of Justice, Options for dealing with squatters, (Closing date: 05 October 2011)

http://www.justice.gov.uk/consultations/dealing-with-squatters.htm

SQUASH (Squatters Actions for Secure Homes) campaign

http://www.squashcampaign.org/

ASS (Advisory Service for Squatters)

http://www.squatter.org.uk/

Twittering teens or absolutist ayatollahs, men we can do business with or loony autocrats? The media's proliferation of polarities is a strategy to fragment the connectedness of events and disavow western Realpolitik. Here Anustup Basu reveals the transnational composition of a Spring that is now an Autumn

In a column published on 25 May, 2011, The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman issued a pious call to Palestinians. In the wake of the Arab Spring, he invited them to learn from the Egyptian insurrection and adopt the ‘Tahrir Square Alternative' (TSA). That is, to announce every Friday a ‘Peace Day' and march, in thousands, to Jerusalem, holding an olive branch and a plea for Palestinian statehood, written in Arabic as well as Hebrew, just to avoid any tragic misunderstanding. Implicit in Friedman's conscientious liberalism is a desire for a game-changing symbolic event, one that would insert itself into the sea of information about the uprisings and bring to the fore the image of the peace-loving Palestinian, finally cleansed of the stigma of pathological fundamentalism attributed to formations like Hamas. The TSA would thus be a transformational strategy that would not just win the hearts and minds of Israel and the world at large, but also ‘surprise' Benjamin Netanyahu, who, in Friedman's self-admittedly ‘crazy' universe, sits in some future anterior moment, reading the column and laughing with characteristic cynicism: ‘The Palestinians will never do that. They could never get Hamas to adopt nonviolence. It's not who the Palestinians are.'ⁱ Friedman of course did not clarify whether the ‘surprise,' for ‘Bibi,' would be a pleasant or an unpleasant one.

Secondly, Friedman, in his ardent paternalism, assumes or gratuitously pretends that the said strategy has not been already thought of and tried by the Palestinians themselves, including those in Gaza who currently reside in what could well be the largest open air prison in human history. Peter Hart, writing for FAIR (Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting), has pointed out to Friedman that as a matter of fact Palestinians have, and have for a long time, relentlessly practised the non-violent option without managing to ‘surprise' Netanyahu. Such efforts have largely been met with swift and uncompromising repression; they have been responded to with tough love, in the form of arrests and detentions, stun grenades, tear gas, and gunfireⁱⁱ. As a 2005 study by Patrick O'Connor established, Palestinian non-violent movements have been overwhelmingly ignored by the free press of the western world.ⁱⁱⁱ The onus is thus perpetually on the Palestinians, no matter what they do, to emerge - with agon, sacrifice, and endurance beyond human finitudes - as a people capable of some form of newsworthiness that has nothing to do with suicide bombings or crude Qassam rockets.^iv Friedman's invitation towards peace and non-violence emerges from a powerful theme of mainstream American and Zionist commonsense that is already weaponised: that Palestinians specifically, and Arabs in general, by virtue of their existence, pose an existentialist threat to Israel and that all their actions hitherto have been met by Israel with the solemn purpose of defending itself, no matter what the undertaker says.

The current scenario in Gaza is one of a grotesque human catastrophe perpetrated in slow motion.^v It is the outcome of a half a decade long vice-like embargo and mayhems like the IDF's Operation Cast Lead that, between 27 December 2008, and 21 January 2009, left about 1,400 Palestinians dead and countless injured. And yet, it is this beleaguered 1.5 million strong slice of humanity - plagued by crippling poverty, disease, toxic water, shortage of food and medicine, absence of basic infrastructure, and acute unemployment - that seems to relentlessly threaten, not just border security, but the very existence of Israel itself. There can therefore be no authentic freedom or exercise of democracy for them without that either bolstering American-Israeli interests or keeping the existent status-quo.^vi As a matter of fact it seems that there can actually be no recognisable ‘people' or territorial notion of ‘home' unless these conditions are met. The Death Laboratory of Gaza was a geo-political creation of Israel itself, when Ariel Sharon ‘disengaged', removing Israeli citizens and settlements from that space in 2005. With it left the last vestiges of imperially recognised ‘peopleness' from that space, one that could be attached to humane concerns about peace, neighbourliness or hospitality. It was that strategic withdrawal that created the possibility of reinventing Gaza as a pure ground zero of ‘bare life' as Georgio Agamben would say, where, following a long standing Zionist theme articulated by Golda Meir and many others, the Palestinian people (or for that matter any people) do not exist. What exists is a pathological biomass, an absolute spectre of Islamic terror that needs to be defended against, with the old, infirm, and infantile to be dubbed ‘human shields.' It is this weaponised and mediatised defensive redoubt that holds paramount status, especially when it comes to territories illegally occupied by Israel, from the West Bank to the Golan Heights.^vii

The Spring of the Present and the Long Hot Summer Otherwise

I have begun this essay with this grotesque picture from the recent past for three primary reasons. The first one should be fairly evident - that American mainstream media responses (which I will largely focus on) to events like the Arab Spring are guided by a curious mixture of an almost onto-theological commitment to abstract, totemic ideals like ‘freedom' and ‘democracy' and a Realpolitik one to American strategic, monetarist, and security interests in the Middle-East. In the overall flow of informatised commonsense, the two lines of reckoning are rendered inseparable. Democratic structures of representation anywhere in the world cannot be disruptive in relation to networks of governance and financialisation stipulated by the Washington Consensus. Democracy must yield ‘liberalism' in its neo-incarnation; it cannot give us Hamas or the Muslim Brotherhood instead. My second reason is that the ‘Arab Spring' is still unfolding in front of us with a long rumble. It is always difficult and dangerous to ‘read' the present, for any understanding of it is already belated. The present has to be grasped in a manner that is open to the many imaginative and political possibilities - of self-making, sovereignty, or antagonism - that it brings. My invocation of the Israeli-Palestinian situation has been intended to illustrate a habit of neoliberal statist thinking that, in the name of security, stability and combatting terror, threatens to kill us anyway. It is this murderous habit of thinking that imperils, more than anything else, the exhilarating possibilities of the Arab Spring.

All images: from the Anonymous pamphlet How to Protest Intelligently, c.2010-2011

The third reason pertains to an obvious paradox: unlike the Egyptian or Iranian youngster who apparently just wants to be an American teenager and tweet in peace (much like the American who waited to jump out of every Gook in Vietnam, according to the emphatic Colonel in Kubrick's Full Metal Jacket), non-violent democratic activists in Gaza somehow have not been able to twitter themselves into the spotlight. Curiously, neither have democratic activists brutalised and jailed in countries occupied by the United States or its allies: Yemen, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Sulemaniyah Iraq, Afghanistan, or the United Arab Emirates. Media focus on popular outrage expressed on Twitter or Facebook seem to be disproportionately trained on enemies of the West, like Iran, Syria, or Libya. It is not that there were simply no tweets from Bahrain when Saudi and UAE forces, armed with their latest military acquisitions from America, marched in to crush the insurrection; it is just that such voices were not deemed ‘newsworthy'. That is, they were evaluated as such when ‘news' itself in our informational world, as the late Derrida astutely observed, is that in which ‘actuality' tends to be ‘spontaneously ethnocentric.'^viii It is this instantly consumable, informatic and industrialised ethnocentrism that encompasses not just state policy, but also a media space dominated overwhelmingly by about half a dozen giant conglomerates devoted to global metropolitan interests.

This is not to say that in a world of horizontal connectivities other voices, evocative images of alterity, or testimonies of anguish or pain are not registered and shared across the world. The point however is that increasingly, in our occasion, statist dominance over the media ecology is exercised not so much in axiomatic, top-down ways through censorship and elimination (although some such efforts exist: George Bush bombed the Al Jazeera offices in Afghanistan in 2001; Ben Ali banned YouTube, dailymotion and Takriz; Mubarak shut off the internet and cell phones; China, at one point, prevented recent images of insurrection entering its media space). Instead, dominance is achieved by absorbing errant images and sounds to already there, massified structures of feeling and perception: orientalism, race, terror, security, stability, Islamophobia, pious concerns of Clintonian multiculturalism, or anxieties about immigrants. The point therefore is not to shut out, in a total manner, images of disturbance, but to absorb them as fresh noises into an overall clamour already enveloped and dominated by axiomatic myths about free market and freedom, and about America being the reluctant behemoth of good in a dangerous world. This is how questions of human dignity and liberty become tied to a presiding onto-theology of capital. This is also how relations about Egyptian youth protests are enframed and tempered by the Realpolitik fear and loathing of insidious energies hailing from that nebulous thing called the ‘Arab Street'. Ergo, it is to be lauded that the former want democracy, but with the latter around, perhaps that might be too soon.

It is this already techno-deterministic template of information culture that encourages one to unquestioningly distinguish between greater evils and ‘practical', ‘indispensable' ones, between rhetoric of necessary change and a metropolitan strategic silence in which all of us are invited to be complicit. Bahrain has been ruled by the Sunni Khalifa dynasty for well more than two centuries now. If the world was to turn upside-down and the hitherto repressed Shia majority was to gain political prominence, Bahrain, as per a realist-statist world-view, would inevitably tilt in the direction of Iran. That would not bode well for the greater cause of freedom in the world since Bahrain houses the US navy's fifth fleet and is strategically important for the control of the Suez Canal and the Straits of Hormuz through which almost a quarter of the oil supply passes. Similarly, despite the fact that President Ali Abdullah Saleh has ruled Yemen for 33 years and has had untrustworthy flirtations and friendships with Russia, Iran and Saddam's Iraq, his brutal efforts to strike down dissent in his country did not attract as strong condemnations as did Assad's in Syria. While the Obama administration and the Gulf Cooperation Council Bloc has pressurised Saleh - presently convalescing in Saudi Arabia after an assassination attempt in early June - to step down and allow the Yemeni people to fulfill their ‘aspirations', it remains amply clear that the broader template of regional ‘cooperation' cannot allow such aspirations to disturb American military interests in this impoverished Arab country due to its location near the major waterways and Somalia. Saleh has been a faithful soldier in the ‘War on Terror', he has allowed the Obama administration to open - along with Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Libya - a fifth theatre of conflict in Yemen, in which there have been repeated drone attacks to kill the few hundred members the Al Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) supposedly has.

In contrast, the ‘Arab Spring' has provided a wonderful opportunity for the West to topple Muammar Gaddafi in Libya; until recently this eccentric tyrant must have been envisioned as a sobered-up version of his cold-war self, for he was deemed trustworthy enough to be granted weapons worth $470 million by the European powers in 2009 alone. For its part, before the calls for change became strident, the US government was working on a weapons deal worth $77 million, just to top off the $17 million it provided in 2009 and the $46 million it supplied in 2008.^ix Perhaps too much eccentricity or too much tyranny is not how Gaddafi overplayed his cards. Perhaps he has come to regret the statement he made in January 2009, expressing a desire to nationalise the Libyan oil industry.^x

Friedman's pious articulation of the TSA of course does not take into account either the fact that the United States and North Atlantic powers have been supporting dictatorial or authoritarian regimes in Cameroon (Paul Biya), Turkmenistan (Berdimuhamedow), Equatorial Guinea (Nguema), Chad (Idriss Deby), Uzbekistan (Karimov), or Ethiopia (Zenawi) apart from the usual suspects in the Gulf, or that it has also been providing many of these regimes the arsenal to prevent or exterminate the TSA. Perhaps it slipped Friedman's mind that the Arms Industries of the West (dominated overwhelmingly by the United States) have been consistently supplying these regimes with weaponry that have been used not against foreign threats, but almost totally to keep domestic populations in check. It is the West that has been giving them ‘deep packet inspection' technologies through firms like Narus, Ixia or Sandvine to police the airwaves and throttle dissent and subversion. Hence it was not just the ‘Made in USA' tear gas canisters used in Tahrir, and dolefully pondered over by talking heads in mainstream American media, but also the live ammunition, armoured cars, helicopters, and tanks used to crush the TSA in the Pearl Square in Manama, Bahrain. In this case, it was not just the people gathered to protest, but the Square itself that was eliminated.

The Logic of Telelocalisation: What is so ‘Arab' about the Spring?

From discourses of governance that abound in print and electronic media, it has become apparent that a new Egyptian dispensation has to prove that it is capable of handling ‘freedom' and ‘democracy' responsibly by sticking to some essential things: continuing to be a client state of American-Israeli interests, maintaining the Camp David accords and aiding in the blockade of Gaza^xi; keeping the Suez Canal accessible to western powers and closed to Iran; securing the crucial pipeline that supplies natural gas to Israel and other Arab nations. When Mubarak closed the Rafah Crossing more than three years ago to strengthen the deadly embargo on Gaza, it was a deeply unpopular move in Egypt. It is expected that his successor will continue to do such things no matter what the ‘people' say. The ‘revolution' is thus expected to shrink and step back into an already awaiting straitjacket of ‘responsible reform', one that will keep certain planetary structures of financialisation and war in place. It is therefore ‘telelocalised' from the onset, as a local rumble that must eventually be diagnosed, bracketed off and absorbed into the great administration of things. The Egyptians, for instance, could warily look southwards and recall the grotesque overwriting of Nelson Mandela and the African National Congress' Freedom Charter by powerful western financial institutions after the end of apartheid.^xii They could also remind themselves that fresh, updated versions of the neoliberal ‘shock doctrines' are usually tried out first in the peripheries rather than in the metropolitan centres. Statist neoliberalism, as a matter of fact, was first tried out in Pinochet's Chile after the coup d'état in 1973, more than half a decade before it became the template in Thatcher's England or Reagan's America.^xiii There are strong indications that something similar is presently being attempted in Iraq.

As per a panoptic point-of-view of neoliberal governance, all forms of self-making, desire and hurly-burly of protest must finally yield to the civic religiosity of North Atlantic market structures. Ronald Judy has identified this planetary form of sovereignty as that which is ‘the realization of perpetual change and a preemption of change at the same time.'^xiv The only firmament of transformation that is thereby allowed is that of the ‘free market'. Apart from American-Israeli geo-political interests (and its bywords like ‘security,' ‘stability' etc.), ‘responsible freedom' also means following some already awaiting imperatives of military-industrial finance: the proper handling of the annual three billion dollar US military aid to Egypt and continued issuance of lucrative arms contracts to Lockheed-Martin, Boeing, General Dynamics or Raytheon.

It was in this spirit that the western powers, encouraged by Mossad, first called upon Hoshni Mubarak himself to be the midwife of ‘change' and failing that, attempted to put Omar Suleiman in his place. Having headed the Egyptian General Intelligence Service (EGIS) since 1993, Suleiman was not just instrumental in chocking dissent among his own countrymen, but also the chief supervisor of ‘extraordinary rendition' programmes that the CIA delegated to him.^xv That too failed and the scenario, under military control, is still an unfolding one. However, it can safely be said that the Egyptian people can expect many such a tip of the hat. Quite a few of them, as Karl Marx observed in a different, but exemplary context more than 160 years ago, will be that of the Napoleonic three-cornered one.^xvi For the moment, apart from the geo-strategic concerns already mentioned, the West will be watching with avid interest how, in the new dispensation, the Egyptian economy will be structured, given that the entity in power, the Egyptian armed forces - the beneficiary of more than 40 billion dollars from Washington since 1979 - virtually dominates all its sectors.^xvii The International Monetary Fund has already granted a loan of $3 billion to the interim government, after consistently praising the elite kleptocracy headed by Mubarak over the years for pushing through neoliberal measures and devastating the Egyptian population.^xviii There are also growing concerns about the future of labour rights, press freedom, and the rights of women and minorities in the new dispensation of ‘stabilisation' and ‘modernisation' that is coming into being.

We have long since pondered whether the revolution will be televised; it is only lately we have started wondering about what it means for a revolution to be ‘informatised'. The latter is a relatively new architecture of power in our times; it entails a managing of popular energies and worldly humanitarian and political concerns by ascribing a human face to ‘change', giving a proper name to Mephistopheles (Ben Ali, Mubarak, Saleh, or Assad) as well as the Messiah (Mohammad ElBaradei or perhaps Google's Wael Ghonim) and then restoring the catastrophic balance of imperial interests. Cranky old patriarchs can have their autumns; people can have their springs; iron death masks of power are eminently expendable or changeable beyond a point; but the planetary military-industrial-techno-financial assemblage is not. The power of informatisation seeks to ‘telelocalise' a milieu of unrest from an almighty metropolitan perspective; it seeks to invent the ‘people' as well as manage, dictate and name its ‘aspirations'.^xix This it does by polarising themes (Egypt contra Iran, twittering teens contra absolutist ayatollahs) or collapsing them together (Muslim Brotherhood plus Al-Qaida plus Taliban); making instant and vulgar comparativist evaluations (a ‘secular' tyranny is a lesser evil than Islam/Terror); and curtailing the historical horizons of possibility by drumming transcendent abstractions like ‘security,' ‘order' and ‘stability'.

The social power of informatisation draws its powers from a mythical, cosmic perspective it has claimed for itself. It is from these commanding heights that it ‘invents' and represents a ‘locale'. It is necessary to ‘represent' something, because unless something is represented, it cannot be governed. Consider the statement made by Lord Tony Blair in January, 2011 on BBC Radio 4, distinguishing between Mubarak and Saddam Hussein: he said that the two cannot be called comparable dictators because Mubarak has presided over an ‘Egyptian economy' that has doubled in the last decade or so. ^xx That factor, along with Mubarak's strong military support for western interests beginning with the first Gulf War, therefore makes Egypt a theatre in which only the logic of economism and that of the war against terror need apply. In this majestic abstraction of Egypt in relation to world affairs, it becomes a matter of very small print that officially more than 22 percent of the population live in abject poverty (less than $2 a day), with an equal number very close to it; that the rate of unemployment is close to 10 percent and more than double that amongst the youth; and that common people, in recent years, have been hit by an inflation in consumer prices that perpetually hovers close to 12 percent.^xxi Like in many similar scenarios, these official statistics do not account for the current global malaise of underemployment. Shortly before the eruption of the ‘Spring', there were demonstrations in Egypt calling for a monthly minimum wage of 1,200 Egyptian pounds; the kleptocratic government full of businessmen could promise only 400 LE, which amounts to about $67.^xxii Blair's sweeping statement, in a figurative sense, comes from the same telelocalising heights of American drones in Yemen or Pakistan, whose operators sit in the Creech Naval Base in Nevada or Langley, Virginia and bomb populations after abstracting pictures of ‘terror' through what is known as ‘pattern of life analysis.'^xxiii

Telelocalising a milieu also means to provincialise its narrative; to make Egypt's story absolutely its own. It is to enwrap the milieu of unrest into cocoons of national, regional or ethnic scenarios and not extend it to a world swept by uprisings and demonstrations from Mexico, Haiti and Honduras, to Madison and California in the United States, to Spain, Britain, France, Italy, France, Portugal or Greece in Europe. Why is it that the protests in Cairo or Alexandria have to be categorically isolated from the Tent City movements in Israel, tribal assertions against the government and mining multi-nationals in India, or the thousands who marched along the Des Voux Road in Hong Kong? Why is it that Friedman's TSA can advance bravely along the Arab Street, but the street itself has to end as soon as it approaches absolutist oil rich allies like Saudi Arabia, Bahrain or the UAE? The primary impulse of informational news is to promote parceled accounts of such eruptive events based on ethnographic, already existing diagnoses about which societies are mature enough to make an ‘orderly transition' from authoritarianism to democracy (Iranians, perhaps Egyptians) and which people are clearly not (the Saudis). It is to engraft them agonistically into a singular unfolding narrative of capital in the world and foreclose a possibility of them merging with stories and histories that are different. The logic of ‘information', taken in this special sense, is to present things as ‘already shot through with explanation', as Walter Benjamin once said.^xxiv This it does by nulling historical complexity, abolishing critical memory and reducing language to a set of linguistic functionalisms. When was the last time that viewers of Murdoch's Fox News Channel, or even the more ‘liberal' CNN, were reminded that it was only in 1953 that Iran had a democratically elected socialist Prime Minister?

So what is so essentially Arab about the Arab Spring? Why are the rumbles in the Arab world and distant thunders elsewhere symptomatic of not just this or that regime's long pending disintegration, but of the planetary narrative of the Washington Consensus itself coming apart in the seams? Is the story simply a vulgar Freudian psychodrama of hitherto infantile but now slightly mature populations killing inclement fathers or demanding dignity or recognition from them? Why are the recent events in London to be deemed absolutely distant from the 60-odd food riots that, according to the US State Department, took place across the world in the last two years alone? In the month of April, 2011, the World Bank president Robert Zoellick said that the global economy is ‘one shock away' from a catastrophic crisis in food supplies, estimating that in the last two years 44 million people had fallen into poverty in the last two years alone due to rising prices'.^xxv The United Nations' FAO Food Price Index (FFPI) averaged 234 points in June 2011, 1 percent higher than in May and 39 percent higher than in June 2010.^xxvi It had reached its peak at 238 points in February. This scenario of devastation is as much the outcome of expanding deserts, falling water tables, droughts and famines, or increasingly hotter summers as it is of deregulated speculation on commodity futures and oil prices.^xxvii It stretches from Haiti to Algeria, to India and across up to the Philippines. It is tragically compounded by the fact that while the techno-financial elites of Wall Street and its satellite formations across the world have long since recovered their fortunes lost in the downturn of 2007, according to the International Labor Organization's 2010/11 Report, growth in global wages slowed from 2.8 percent in the beginning of the crisis to 1.5 percent in 2008 and 1.6 percent in 2009; if China is taken away from the picture, the figures come further down to 0.8 percent in 2008 and 0.7 percent in 2009^xxviii.

How indeed can movements in London be insulated from the hot winds blowing in from Cairo? Perhaps the Egyptians may take heart in the fact that despite their tribulations, according to the CIA's World Fact Book, they, in being placed at 90^th, rank much lower than the US (39^th) and are almost at par with Lord Blair's England (92^nd) as far as income inequality is concerned.^xxix

Conclusion

There has to be other forms of reckoning with such world-wide eruptions of antagonistic energy and affect. The global landscape of violence has to be mapped in coincidence with an equally expansive map of North Atlantic financial elites, their constable states, satellite plutocracies and techno-managerial oligarchies across the world. This is not just a landscape of gross class exploitation and debt enslavement, but also one in which not just populations, but entire forms of life can be systematically rendered ‘disposable' in an instant, by long-distance speculations, remotely controlled ‘structural adjustments' or, in a more elementary manner, by predator drones. The rice farmers in Philippines perhaps know that instinctively without tracking the intricacies of tariff walls, as do tribal folks in Central India who have been asked to vacate their habitats and the bauxite-rich mountains they have been worshipping as gods for centuries; hungry populations in Ethiopia or Sudan discern that something is rotten when their governments sign surreptitious deals, leasing arable land to distant powers like South Korea or China; the rural people of the Qandahar and Helmand provinces in Afghanistan create their own cosmologies of meaning and affect given the fact that according to a recent poll conducted by the International Council on Security and Development, 92 percent of males (women were not polled) do not know anything about 9/11 and 40 percent believe that the war was on Islam, with the rest concluding that it was on Afghanistan.^xxx

Arjun Appadurai has talked about a global intuition of poor people.^xxxi According to him, the cellular, osmotic powers of the financialisation of the planet operate insidiously, often minus the sound and fury of the clear and present nation state and its vertical instruments of welfare and repression. However, perhaps, at an affective-popular level, the processes and outcomes of neoliberal globalisation are being questioned in myriad ways, bringing them into critical proximity with past horrors of colonial genocide, enslavement, exploitation and development of underdevelopment by the rapid devaluation of local modes of production. I call these formations intense localisms, keeping in mind the etymological variant intendere, which means to intend. Intense localisms therefore, are local cosmologies of justice that emerge from clashes between alien inflictions coming from a distance and rooted customs, juridical and theological perspectives, stories, world-views, solidarities, and affectations.^xxxii These determinations of justice are, in most cases, intended, despite the fact that planetary metropolitan narratives of governance, security and news (the powers behind which flout international law with impunity) attempt to overwrite them as directionless, chaotic, or pathologically beholden to ‘terror'. Intense localisms come to the fore in a world in which desire is democratised, but the means to it are acutely monopolised; in which the mobility and bargaining power of labour is brutally restricted, but the movement and reach of capital is extended to the production of social life in and of itself. Intense localisms have thus emerged in an hour of the abject dismantling of the postwar welfare state, the financial subversion of the postcolonial state through comprador elites, withdrawal of social security programs, rampant privatisation of all sectors including health, education and natural resources, the planetary technologisation of agriculture, extermination of the commons, abject formalisations of the very concept of citizenship, and summary destructions of ecological habitats and scenes of nativity. Each of these cosmologies of justice are unique in some way, yet they are also contiguous to each other. In their separate ways, they have called the new world order to judgement.

This planetary swell of antagonistic energy undoubtedly takes both good and bad forms. Some of them merge with movements attempting to forge a politics of the new (from vital student mobilisations in Chile to the Indignados in Spain, to youth agitators in Tel Aviv or Hong Kong); others are captured by state machines. Examples of the latter would be the folksy righteousness and suicidal statism of the recently minted American Tea Party, the swarm of ultra-right, racist and anti-immigrant populisms in Europe (the BNP and the English Defence League in Britain, Le Pen's Front National in France, Geert Wilders and the Party for Freedom in Holland, the Jobbik in Hungary, Jörg Haider in Austria, or the best-selling neo-fascism of Thilo Sarrazin in Germany), or even, in a different sense, the current undemocratic agitation in India led by Anna Hazare that calls for combatting corruption by the setting up of an absolutist extra-judicial paternalistic authority called the Lokpal.

Similarly, it must be said that good and bad impulses of a many-armed, billion strong Islamic faith in the world will indeed intensely shape and influence such local cosmologies and moral economies. How can one justify cynical calls to control transformational possibilities in Egypt or Gaza because of the spectral Muslim Brotherhood or Hamas (which also happens to be the largest and most efficient humanitarian organisation in Palestine) when the American and Israeli democracies continue to be strongly impelled by hard-right Christian groups and Zionist parties like Likud? Affirming the historical and political valence of Tahrir Square is to grasp it without any already-there assurances about ‘security' and ‘stability' and ready-at-hand fears about Iran; it is to be critically open to its possibilities both good and bad. It is, as Alain Badiou recently reminded us, also to approach it like a student and not some stupid pontificating professor, precisely in order to freshly learn the very ways of distinguishing the good from the bad.^xxxiii All parties in Tahrir Square - the students, the Marxists, the Nasserites, the incredibly brave women, and indeed the Muslim Brotherhood - have been and will continue to make history. And yet, as Marx observed in relation to a different scenario in the past, perhaps none of them will make it of their ‘own free will; not under circumstances they themselves have chosen.'^xxxiv Some such efforts will be tragic, some farcical and some victorious, but if there is indeed hope in the Arab Spring, it is that there will be collective energies that will keep renewing themselves and returning to break the dead calm of things.

Making a distinction between good and bad, as Deleuze often reminded us, is not the same as making an onto-theological one between good and evil. The latter is what the techno-determinism of the western informational world does, fragmenting the event into neatly packaged but eminently consumable isomorphic spectacles of twittering teens and shady Salafists; those that were joyous around Anderson Cooper and those that punched him; ones that love America and ones that hate her. Techno-determined information flow is a form of power that seeks to reduce complexity into fungible data. It is there to destroy historical memory, to annihilate imaginative powers, to foreclose different emergent ways of thinking and being in the world. What it tries to abort at every step is a vision of alterity, a glimpse of a different world that is imminent.

Anustup Basu <basu1 AT illinois.edu> is Associate Professor of English, Criticism and Cinema Studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. He is the author of Bollywood in the Age of New Media: The Geotelevisual Aesthetic (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and co-editor of Figurations in Indian Film (forthcoming from Palgrave-Macmillan in 2012) and InterMedia in South Asia: The Fourth ScreenHerbert (2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005-06. (forthcoming from Routledge, 2012). He is also the executive producer of Herbert (2005), which won the Indian National Award for Best Bengali Feature Film in 2005-06

Footnotes

i Thomas L. Friedman, ‘Lessons From Tahrir Sq', The New York Times, 15 May 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/25/opinion/25friedman.html

ii See Peter Hart, ‘Friedman's Bogus Advice on Palestinian Non-Violence', 15 May 2011, http://www.fair.org/blog/2011/05/25/friedmans-bogus-advice-on-palestinian-nonviolence/, for more analyses and reportage on Palestinian non-violence, see for example Mary Elizabeth King, A Quiet Revolution: The First Palestinian Intifada and Nonviolent Resistance, New York: Nation Books, 2007, for rare journalistic reckonings see Mohammed Khatib and Jonathan Pollak, ‘Palestinian Nonviolent Movement Carries on Despite Crackdown', 21 January, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mohammed-khatib/post_1615_b_812459.html and Yousef Munayyer, ‘Palestine's Hidden History of Nonviolence', 18 May 2011, http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/05/18/palestines_hidden_history_of_nonviolence

iii See Patrick O'Connor, ‘Nonviolent Resistance in Palestine', 17 October 2005, http://www.ifamericansknew.org/media/nonviolent.html

iv I have no intention of condoning these rocket attacks or other war crimes perpetrated by Hamas (including using the Palestinian population itself as a shield), and the idea of justice should not be understood in terms of symmetric violence. However, as documented by Human Rights Watch, such attacks caused only 15 Israeli civilian fatalities in the course of the decade. Hamas has often stated that the rockets were intended to hit Israeli military installations and not civilian targets. At times it has expressed regret and ‘sorrow' for Israeli civilian deaths. See ‘Hamas "Regrets" Civilian Deaths, Israel Unmoved', Reuters, 5 February 2010, http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6143UB20100205. On other occasions it has pointed out a fundamental asymmetry in the issue itself when it came to the aggressor Israel, which has regularly bombed and shelled women, children, and the elderly in Mosques, hospitals, and even schools. In the final analysis, the crudely manufactured Qassam and Grad rockets have no guidance system and have symbolically contributed more to the myth of Israeli insecurity and the concomitant specter of Islamic ‘terror' than achieved military objectives for Hamas. Sometimes the rockets have fallen short and hit Palestinians, as it happened on 26 December, 2008 for example, when a rocket hit a house in Beit Lahiya, killing two girls.

v By December 2007 about 90 percent of factories and workshops in Gaza had closed down, primarily due to the lack of raw materials (Israel, at this point, was allowing only one-third to one-tenth of net requirements to pass through, including essential commodities like medicines, food, educational items, clothing, building and industrial supplies). Three-quarters of the Gaza's population was surviving on $2 a day and perhaps a toxic water supply. About 70 percent of agricultural fields in the narrow strip of land that is 45km long and 8km wide had been laid to waste because there was an acute shortage of pipes and pumps required for irrigation and also because Gazans were not allowed to farm in the ‘buffer zone' designated by Israel along the border which is nearly one-third of the total arable land. Fishing has been forcibly restricted to three nautical miles from the coast, even though it should be 20 as per the Oslo Accords.

vi In comparatively recent history, perhaps the greatest sin of the Palestinians has been to elect Hamas to power, with a 56 percent mandate, in the Palestinian Legislative Council, on 26 January, 2006.

vii Consider Benjamin Netanyahu's recent rebuke to President Obama when the latter, following a long-standing American foreign policy position, suggested that a peace settlement be reached with Palestine based on the 1967 borders. That could not be done, said Netanyahu, because those borders have been rendered ‘indefensible'. In other words, there might arise, in the future, the need for further strategic annexations in order to secure the now indefensible borders themselves. Following up on Netanyahu's assertion, Likud Party member and Deputy Speaker of the Israeli Knesset Danny Danon wrote an op-ed in The New York Times that suggested that should Palestinians press for statehood through a United Nations General Assembly vote this September, Israel should preempt this process by completely annexing the West Bank, thus fulfilling a messianic tryst with destiny in the name of Greater Israel, and laying claim to the historic heartland of Judea and Samaria. This proposed annexation would of course be done without extending citizenship rights to Arab-Muslims, who would remain a diminishing spectre of ‘terror', now acutely cramped into areas progressively smaller than the 22 percent of their historic homeland, which is what the 1967 lines would have accorded to them. See Danny Danon ‘Making the Land of Israel Whole', The New York Times, 18 May 2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/opinion/19Danon.html?_r=2&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss

viii See Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler, Echographies of Television, Cambridge, MA: Polity Press, 2002, p.4.

ix See Medea Benjamin and Charles Davis, ‘Stop Arming Dictators', http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article27753.htm

x Linh Dinh makes this astute observation in ‘Heartwarming Massacres from Iraq to Libya', 31 March 2011, http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/03/31

xi That is, without reminding the world of an essential calling of the Camp David accords, that Israel should withdraw its military presence from the West Bank. See http://www.jimmycarterlibrary.gov/documents/campdavid/accords.phtml

xiiSee for instance Naomi Klein, ‘Democracy Born in Chains: South Africa's Constricted Freedom', http://www.naomiklein.org/articles/2011/02/democracy-born-chains

xiii For an extended, insightful discussion, see chapter 1 of David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism , New York: Oxford University Press, 2007.

xiv Ronald Judy, ‘Reflections on Straussism, Anti-Modernity, and Transition in the Age of American Force', in boundary 2 33.1, Spring 2006, p.40.

xv One of the most significant cases of such ‘information' extraction through torture was of course that of Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, who, under duress, made the false confession that provided the material for Colin Powell's notorious presentation to the UN Security Council to make the case for the Iraq war.

xvi I of course allude to Marx's extraordinary tract The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte in Karl Marx, Surveys from Exile, David Fernbach ed., New York: Vintage, 1974, pp.143-149.

xvii The Egyptian military has been described as a sort of General Electric type conglomerate that "virtually owns every industry in the country." See for instance Alex Blumberg, ‘Why Egypt's Military Cares About Home Appliances', http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2011/02/10/133501837/why-egypts-military-cares-about-home-appliances?ft=1&f=2; and Tom Engelbert, ‘Egyptian Math', http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/14-2

xviii Mubarak's last Finance Minister, Youssef Boutrous-Ghali, was an IMF alumni who was chair of its policy advisory committee; he has been sentenced, in absentia, to thirty years in prison on corruption charges. Boutrous-Ghali was clever enough to leave Egypt before the heat got too much. See Wael Khalil, ‘Egypt's IMF-backed Revolution? No thanks: Year after year, the IMF praised Mubarak's ‘progress' signing up for its $ 3bn loan now hardly seems a break with the past', in The Guardian, 7 June, 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jun/07/egypt-imf-loan

xix I borrow this expression from the oeuvre of Paul Virilio.

xx See ‘Tony Blair: Mubarak is not Saddam Hussain', http://www.politicshome.com/uk/article/21498/tony_blair_change_in_egypt_inevitable.html

xxi See http://data.worldbank.org/country/egypt-arab-republic accessed 11 June, 2011 and page 13 of the ILO Report accessible at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_150440.pdf

xxii See Amira Nowaira, ‘Egypt's Day of Rage goes on: Is the World Watching?', The Guardian, 27 January 2011, http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/jan/27/egypt-protests-regime-citizens

xxiii The Pakistani newspaper The Dawn calculated in January 2010 that in 2009 alone, 44 predator drone attacks in the western tribal areas, especially North Waziristan province, killed 708 people, of which only 5 were certified terrorists. See http://archives.dawn.com/archives/144960. The going rate was thus 140 innocent civilians for every dead terrorist. The problem however is that some terrorists like Illyas Kashmiri, reportedly killed in 2009 and then again in 2011, have a vexing habit of coming back from the dead.

xxiv See Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolai Leskov', in Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt, London: Fontana, 1973, p.89.

xxv See Eric Martin, ‘World's Poor "One Shock" From Crisis as Food Prices Climb, Zoellick Says' at http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-04-16/zoellick-says-world-economy-one-shock-away-from-food-crisis-1-.html

xxvi See the World Food Situation Report at http://www.fao.org/worldfoodsituation/wfs-home/foodpricesindex/en/ 

xxvii Paul Buchheit points out that in 2008 the publication Price Perceptions said, ‘index funds alone now own about 1 billion bushels of Chicago wheat compared to annual US production of about 500 million.' See Paul Buchheit, ‘How Wall Street Greed Funded Egypt's Turmoil' in http://www.commondreams.org/view/2011/02/14-10

xxviii See the ILO report at http://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dcomm/---publ/documents/publication/wcms_149622.pdf 

xxix See https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/rankorder/2172rank.html

xxx See Farah Marie Mokhtareizadeh, ‘Over Wo(my)n's Dead Bodies: On Surviving "Liberation"' http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/12/19 accessed 21 July, 2011. See the report itself in http://www.icosgroup.net/static/reports/afghanistan_dangers_drawdown.pdf. Another report by the The International Council on Security and Development shows overwhelming antipathy towards NATO operations:  http://www.icosgroup.net/static/reports/bin-laden-local-dynamics.pdf

xxxi Arjun Appadurai, Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger, Durham: Duke University Press, 2006, p. 36.

xxxii I am grateful to a group of brilliant colleagues and friends in India (Moinak Biswas, Prasanta Chakravarty, Rajarshi Dasgupta, and Bodhisattva Kar) who, in the course of a stimulating exchange of ideas across continents through Facebook, were of immense help in clarifying and conceptually enriching this trope for me.

xxxiii See Alain Badiou, ‘The Universal Reach of Popular Uprisings', http://kasamaproject.org/2011/03/01/alan-badiou-during-arab-revolts-the-universal-reach-of-popular-uprisings/

xxxiv Karl Marx, Eighteenth Brumaire, op. cit., p.143.

Jussi Parikka's recent book Insect Media simultaneously expands the field of media theory and the purview of biopolitics by thinking about the more-than-human development of communication environments. Review by Jennifer Gabrys

Ants and bees, spiders and moths, ticks and praying mantises can be found inhabiting the pages of Jussi Parikka's Insect Media. Arthropods and other bug-like creatures crawl, flap and flutter through this text as provocations for asking how we might read entomology as media theory. On the one hand, this guiding question is informed by the ‘realisation that basically anything can become a medium'; and on the other by the suggestion that the perceptual worlds that exist beyond human sensation and human use of media may begin to influence how we understand media and media theory. We may have grown accustomed to thinking of media as tools of content generation or entertaining diversion, as questions of users and consumer-based subjectivities, but this set of media debates and concerns is sidestepped to consider an alternative view of media as a more-than-human transfer of information that contributes to intensive material and environmental changes. With this material and distributed understanding of media, insects' chemical signals and haptic alerts may be considered media, where exchange of communication and affect is not understood as visual representation (as with human media), but rather as multisensory and more-than-human exchanges. At the same time, the swarming modes of organisation or distributed transfer of messages observed and interpreted within insect worlds may begin to influence new iterations of media technologies, from software to networks - thereby making our media decidedly posthuman in its formation and operation.

Bugs of all types congregate here not as representational ciphers, but rather as assemblages of sensation, event and environment that lead us to consider: what would a thoroughly posthuman media theory involve? As this text is issued through the Posthumanities series edited by Cary Wolfe and published by the University of Minnesota Press, it is a contribution to the various and varied examinations of what posthuman scholarship entails, from the companion canines of Donna Haraway to the Animal Capital of Nicole Shukin. In this context, Parikka mobilises ‘insects-to-think-with' to map out how nonhuman forces, potentialities and modes of sensation both influence the understanding and development of media technologies, and constitute a technics that is beyond the human. Media do not organise in direct or focal relation to ‘Man', in this analysis, but rather are read through swarming, distributed and collective ‘insectlike' agencies and affects.

The scope of Parikka's analysis spans from the 19^th century to the cybernetic zoology of post-war experiments with computational organisms to software objects and clones that organise, reproduce and interact within insect-informed topologies. The book's seven chapters chart the enfolding of animality into modern technics, and make a specific case for insects as contributing to a decentred and distributed understanding of media. Parikka begins his analysis in the 19^th century with the modern and materialist rise of Darwinian biology and an interest in the coupling of organisms and environments, followed by the emergence of technical media that capture and reproduce sensations often beyond human sense, and an increasing interest in insects as creatures that inhabit distinct perceptual worlds (here informed by the work of Jacob von Uexküll). With these events in mind, Parikka describes insects as creatures that have informed modern technics. But this development has to do with more than a metaphorical inspiration, since insects can be seen as ‘carriers of affects' (a phrase drawn from Uexküll). Insects describe vectors of becoming that are bound up with distinct relations and modes of communicating within and between bodies and environments. Yet these modes of becoming are multiply located, since the swarms, distributions and machine-oriented analyses of insects as automata emerge as much through situated human observations as conjectures about the specific sensory and relational worlds of insects.

Through an analysis of Uexküll's famous ‘conceptual animal', the tick, Parikka demonstrates how the distinct couplings of animals and environments, and the specific perceptual worlds at play in these relations, reshape conventional understandings of space away from a static backdrop and toward lived material relationalities that are composed of dynamic exchanges and modes of communication.¹ Perception is not attached to fixed organs or a static reservoir of senses, but rather is a meeting of potentialities and multiple ways of communicating. Such an insight moves beyond phenomenology as a fixed process of subject-object decoding, to suggest that interactions with environments are key to the dynamic unfolding of sensation, and to the possibility for ‘an experimental empiricism'. In this analysis subjects, environments and media technologies are not characterised as fixed reference points or data-gathering centres, but rather as generative exchanges that unsettle a typical understanding of what transpires within communication.

Working across the theoretical contributions of thinkers such as Giles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, Elizabeth Grosz, Sanford Kwinter and Rosi Braidotti, Parikka draws together his insectlike insights with a body of contemporary theory that addresses the dynamic and deterritorialised possibilities for (post-)subjects. Insects, in this respect, can be read ‘as catalysts of relations', where these relations extend not just to nonhumans and their environments, but also to technics and technology, modernity and capitalism. The perceptual worlds at play in this analysis are more than sensory constructs, since they also inform the possibilities of the political and other modes of life. In this respect a biopolitical analysis of insect media is a key aspect of Parikka's project.

In his analysis of biopolitics, some poignant if unresolved questions emerge as to how this analysis of insect modalities can at once describe sites of potential becoming, while at the same time figuring within a contemporary logic of network control and capitalist economies. As Parikka asks,

Where, then, lies the potential radicality of swarms and the ‘insect model' when it has already, from the early days on, been integrated as part of the capitalist and bureaucratic models of creation, connected to Fordist models of labour, disciplinary modes of spatialisation and control, and hierarchical political structurations?

Insect logics of organisation have moved from the ant-like mechanics of the factory to the industrious cities of bees to the swarming patterns of stock markets to the distributed agencies of networks and cyborgian moths implanted with sensors as developed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) programme.² Here it is clear there is a careful traverse to be made between the problematic use of ‘biological metaphors' to ‘naturalise' economies and politics, and the incorporation of nonhuman potential as a way to encounter the potentially creative and intensive capacities of other organisms. In order to work through this prickly intersection, where creative potential may also be turned into a capitalist attribute, Parikka engages with Braidotti's suggestion that life is not just an ‘object of power' (or falling within a biopolitical realm, as conventionally understood), but is also a creative force in which technical media are involved, and which also may give rise to new ontologies of life.³ In this analysis, one is reminded of Haraway's cyborgian balancing act, where she attempts to engage at once with the military-industrial complex that was integral to the technologies she discussed, but also seeks to find other possibilities within these new bodies that could not be wholly relegated to stories of control.⁴

Image: William Grey Walter performs a cybernetic experiment with environment and perception using mechanical 'brain children'

One wonders then, how the ‘different ecological assemblages' that emerge through an insect media analysis might allow us to ‘summon a different kind of politics' as Parikka suggests, or ‘a politics aiming for the not yet existing in the sphere of bodies, sensations, and ethological relationality.' One way that Parikka approaches this question is by taking up the materiality of media as a site of further exploration. Taking a ‘milieu approach' to media, he suggests that the materiality of media should be rethought through the ‘nonhuman forces' that contribute to media assemblages, and that form distinct modes of materiality. This understanding of milieu and organism draws on Uexküll as well as the ‘cybernetic zoology that can be found in post-war experiments with automated tortoises and other ‘computational organisms' that became the basis for articulating new relations between perception and environmental stimuli, as well as new ontologies of life and information.⁵ These experiments with feedback are only part of the story, as Parikka suggests, since these insights direct us to move toward a more dynamic conception of environmental relations and, following Guattari, an ‘ecological view of subjectivity.'⁶

These environmental couplings are an interesting point of conjecture, since organisms and environments could be characterised as much by distributed responsiveness as by glitch and error. Could it be that the possible range of modes of relating could also be expanded, to incorporate not just organisation but also disorganisation and friction. While bugs in the computer-oriented sense of the word emerge in this study, another discussion of bugs can be found in Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip's recounting of the moth found by computer pioneer Grace Hopper in the Mark II electromechanical computer in 1945. A moth, lodged in the circuits of this machine, jammed a relay and was later found and saved in a log book as ‘the first actual case of a bug being found.'⁷ The moth is rendered as an intrusion into the spaces of information processing - a material body that is incompatible with the operation of this machine, and so becomes more than an entity to think with. While insects as automata may have informed the development of computational logic, here insects as creaturely bodies actually interrupt media technologies. Yet ‘bug' as a term used to describe mechanical error and glitch has been in use since the late 19^th century. Given that this term precedes computer culture, it seems such interruptions and material dislocations could be an interesting way to explore the possibilities for other orders of relationality and cross-relationality, where insects are not just rendered into medial form, but also creep into our exchanges and so become a part of their disrepair or misfiring. Insects in this regard are not necessarily carriers of affect, but rather confuse or disrupt circuits through their distinct material inhabitations, thereby circumventing some transmissions while generating possibilities for other exchanges.

In a final sense, the turn toward insect-generated sound art and field recordings is a compelling example of how new modes of listening with bugs allows us to experience these distinct media-insect-environments as more than an apparently inchoate world of sounds. Several of these insect sound projects turn up in the epilogue to Parikka's study, which considers how the recordings of crickets and the microsounds and inaudible registers of hatching larvae enter into new media technical arrangements that give rise to new bodies, materialities and ecologies. Environments are then also dynamic contributors to these alternative renderings of media. Another example of such insect sound art that tracks these changes can be found in Hugh Raffles Insectopedia, a bug compendium also released in 2010 that investigates insects from a cultural historical perspective.⁸ In the entry, ‘The Sound of Global Warming', Raffles describes an arts-sciences collaboration that has made audible and legible the sound of bark beetles in piñon pine trees. The beetles, which are captured by David Dunn in his The Sound of Light in Trees soundscape project, are recorded along with a host of other insects that make strange sounds normally outside the range of perceptibility. By listening to beetles together with pines, however, distinct changes and activities can be discerned and translated that describe altering environments. Greater drought levels contribute to water stress for the trees, which then become more susceptible to beetle infestation. The media technics of insects signalling and working through their perceptual worlds, the dynamic shifts in environments, and the recording and translating of these sounds into other registers of human sense brings to our attention the ways in which posthuman media may also raise questions about trans-species relationships, changing environments, and the emerging politics, possibilities and obligations that may emerge at these intersections.⁹

Image: From Karl von Frisch's lecture, 'Decoding the Language of the Bee', University of Munich, 1973

This different type of responsiveness, and the expanded modes of participation made possible within media are a refreshing prospect, where media are not just carriers of versions of ourselves, but are also provocations for more-than-human perceptual relationships. These relationships move beyond the dynamic if closed coupling of organism and environment detailed by Uexküll, and instead suggest possible interactions across species worlds (hinting here at the ethical spaces of posthuman encounters, which are not just or even after the human, but also signal more-than-human residencies in the world). If insect media are not representations of worlds but practices that actively set worlds into motion, then these questions about how to locate and generate more creative counterparts to biopower, which Braidotti identifies and Parikka explores, is a crucial task. In this way, an ‘ecological view of subjectivity' might not orient us toward additional appropriations of insect capacities and attributes for a renewed project of humanism. Instead, it suggests that medial transmissions are sites for forming new collective encounters across bodies and concerns. Such a posthuman view on media and technics is not just a site for articulating existing environmental relations, but also for experimenting with inventive environmental relations through more-than-human perceptual worlds. The ‘intensive capacities' of media, bodies and environments that Parikka suggests allow us to rethink ‘the history of modern media and biopower' might then be understood as offering ways to engage with more-than-human worlds in order to tune more finely our multiple cohabitations.

Jennifer Gabrys is Director of the MA Design + Environment and Senior Lecturer in Design at Goldsmiths, University of London. She recently completed a book on electronic waste, Digital Rubbish: A Natural History of Electronics , and is currently working on a study of environments and sensing technologies, Program Earth: Environment as Experiment in Sensing Technology.

Info

Jussi Parikka, Insect Media: An Archaeology of Animals and Technology, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010

Footnotes

1 Jacob von Uexküll, A Foray in the Worlds of Animals and Humans, trans. Joseph D. O'Neil, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010 [1934].

2 Sally Adee, ‘Cyborg Moth Gets a New Radio', IEEE Spectrum, February 2009, http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/military-robots/cyborg-moth-gets-a-new-radio/0

3 Rosi Braidotti, Transpositions: On Nomadic Ethics (Cambridge: Polity, 2006).

4 Donna Haraway, ‘A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century', in Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991), pp.149-181.

5 The automated or ‘robot tortoises' described here are a reference to William Grey Walter's cybernetic experiments with environment and perception through these particular computational organisms that tested his theories of brain development as a function of ‘nerve complexity'. Nerve complexity for Walter was an indication of the multiple interconnections that allowed for environmental inhabitation and exploration. The automated sensory animals that Walter developed were a way to test responsiveness to environments in order to understand communication as both embodied and embedded in environments. As Parikka writes, ‘This stance implies that communication is actually based in perception, and perception is furthermore conceptualized as an environmental being and a perceptiveness that Walter tried to hardwire into the speculating machines.' The difficulty with hardwiring perceptiveness is that it short-circuits the adaptive and learning-based modalities of environmental perception that Walter hoped to study with the tortoises.

6 Felix Guattari, Chaosmosis: An Ethico-Aesthetic Paradigm, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

7 Terry Harpold and Kavita Philip, ‘Of Bugs and Rats: Cyber-Cleanliness, Cyber-Squalor, and the Fantasy-Spaces of Informational Globalization', Postmodern Culture 11, no. 1, 2000, http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/pmc/v011/11.1harpold.html

8 Hugh Raffles, Insectopedia, New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.

9 Jennifer Gabrys, Program Earth: Environment as Experiment in Sensing Technology (in preparation)

Liverpool's recent Rewire conference looked to advance new and progressive readings of media art and theory. But, asks Lorena Rivero de Beer, who was it speaking to and in whose interest?

I can't start this review without giving you some background about how I arrived at the Rewire conference and the subjective position that it conveys. The latter feels not only important to help you make sense of what I am saying but also an ethical duty, so please, bear with me.

Rewire took place the week following the Free University of Liverpool (FUL) DIY curriculum building workshop. FUL is an initiative set up as a protest against the instrumentalisation of higher education and the rise of its fees to £9,000. The FUL meetings took place in the dungeons of Next to Nowhere, a radical social centre in the centre of Liverpool. Getting out of the dungeons to arrive at the new, shiny, aseptic, £27 million Art and Design Academy building at Liverpool John Moores University to attend a £150 fee conference, was a shock; straight back to the core of neoliberal academia and its blending of high elitism with customer service culture... Still I was excited about the opportunity to attend the conference for free, with the journalist pass, and the privileged access it gave me to a specific form of knowledge within what was announced as a critical and progressive conference.

Image: Intuitively cataloguing the Free University of Liverpool Library

In our FUL meetings in the damp dungeon, the sophistication, intensity of the interaction and level of discussion was difficult and wonderful. Within our discussions we thought about how to use new technologies ethically, questioning the effects that using them might have, thinking about how they can be useful tools for transnational encounters yet how they can also produce meaningless interactions, how, even though the web is an incredible information resource, issues of accessibility (who can access the net and how people with access to it might process the information depending on their background and skills) are still fundamental problems. So I hoped Rewire would fill me with new conceptual frameworks that we could then apply to our thinking about FUL regarding visibility, media coverage, networks, how to apply or think of new technologies in creative and subversive ways, and most importantly, how to think about accessibility.

Like most big conferences (even if there are much bigger ones out there), the amount of sessions, panels and papers was quite overwhelming. There were four sessions every day, each of them with three different panels, which had between four and five speakers. Besides this, there were also parallel talks, exhibitions and performances as part of the AND festival taking place in the evenings and following weekend. While being at the different panels listening to papers ‘til I couldn't take on anymore, I kept thinking about why a conference about media art – an art form that critically explores both the inhuman sides of the media and its modes of social engagement, as well as the creation of interfaces that open up possibilities for more sophisticated collective encounters – was carried out in such a conventional way. A way in which access to knowledge was very difficult and fully dependent on a restricted academic language; that is, a logocentric means of communication that secures and conveys hierarchical positions. Of course the different levels of experience of the speakers and some of the more creative presentations made a difference, but still the insurmountable volume of information, the cold and detached atmosphere and that specific use of language made it almost impossible to share knowledge in a progressive and meaningful way.

As an effect of this language it was very difficult to establish the conference's real nature, where the power lay and who was having an effect on the wider discourse. That information would be more or less accessible to the attendees depending on their background and their access to specific networks; so within the apparent choice, transparency and richness of multiple voices, complex forms of power distribution were operating. As a relative outsider to the field with not much to gain from it in terms of networking, I felt in a privileged position to observe its mechanisms. So I experienced the complexity and I felt lost within the seemingly diverse content of the papers that navigated through a hierarchical discourse marked mainly by institutional powers and presenters' publishing records.

To talk about content and the nature of the different papers in that context I decided to use one of the strategies we used at the Free University of Liverpool to classify the books in the library; a classification aimed at revealing the power hidden in disciplinary divisions and also to reflect upon the subjective positions through which they are made. The FUL library was catalogued as follows: Most important books; Very Important books; Not so important books; Who cares books. Everybody participating in FUL could change the order as they wished and would have to negotiate with others if there was a disagreement. To catalogue/review Rewire I changed books for papers and classified the ones I attended accordingly. Through this approach I intend to generate a space to reflect on the relationship between the discursive normativities operating at the conference and our (hopefully) slightly unruly subjectivities.

Unfortunately no paper fell into the category of Most Important Papers. This category was created for books we loved so much they deserved a new category. I think some of the papers in a different space might have provoked real love, but the context made it really difficult.

Under Very Important Papers I included some interesting papers that looked at notions of functionality and failure, desire and technology, opening up a place to consider how media art can support our understanding of notions of subjectivity, new modes of interrelations, and so on. Within them some were backed by progressive philosophies with special emphasis on thinkers such as Gilles Delueze, Jacques Derrida and Rosi Braidotti.

There were particular presentations that really put their finger on important issues. Through a clear and concise presentation Maria X asked questions about her project media@terra, interrogating what its failures might have been. While questioning the scale of her project she asked: what does it mean for a grassroots initiative to become co-opted by governmental and corporate structures? On the same panel Morten Søndergaard introduced POEX 65 – a transdisciplinary exhibition mounted in Copenhagen in 1965 by a group of 80 international artists, curated by Knud Hvidberg – that aimed at breaking the boundaries of art genres and the autonomy of the ‘work of art' through the active use of technological and mediated platforms. Søndergaard asked important questions about why such experiments faded away and failed to become part of the history of media art. That panel generated important connections between historical failure and meaningful, politically progressive initiatives.

Image: Robert Corydon's Poetry Machine contribution to the exhibition POEX 65, held at the Free Exhibition Building, Copenhagen, December 1965

The presentation by Armin Medosch was excellent. Medosch introduced the early phase of the movement New Tendencies (NT) before it was absorbed by the market. He contextualised his aims politically and defined his project as a research into politically progressive media art.

Certain papers were particularly important because they managed to reveal through their argumentation the position of power taken by other papers on the same panel. I particularly enjoyed the views of Janis Jefferies, her discussion about breakdown and the aesthetics of disappointment which gave a voice to our human fragility. On that same panel Magdalena Tyzlik-Carver introduced important and problematic questions about curatorial systems that bring contingency to the forefront and questioned the immaterial labour demanded from audiences in participatory art.

Alessandro Ludovico and Paolo Cirio described how their mass media intervention – in which they stole a million public profiles from Facebook, filtered them through a face-recognition software, and then posted a selection of 250,000 profiles onto a dating website called Lovely-Faces.com – gained huge media coverage, a massive public response and a ‘Cease and Desist' letter from Facebook's lawyers. They reflected on how the project exposed the vulnerability of our social identity. This was important as they brought the notion of cultural intervention to the fore and reflected on some strategies to destabilise media-normative social powers.

The paper by Dot Tuer tracing back alternative histories of media art to the Rosario group in Argentina, and linking them to the recent work Thirty Days of Running in Place by artist Ahmed Basiony, brought in a much needed non-Western and politicised perspective. I wish though she had reflected on the complexity of the position from which she was speaking as a western academic.

Many papers I saw were interesting, if mainly descriptive. There were some Not So Important ones, and in the worst cases I would say also ideologically dangerous, since there was a near total absence of self-reflection and self-positioning within wider social issues. They somehow managed to avoid the tensions and complexities of their different positionalities. A clear example of this was Jonathan Lessard's paper looking at the way game genre designs are adapted to technology. It was fun, interesting and well articulated; it would be a brilliant introductory talk for anyone selling games.

There were some particularly well articulated papers that could have opened a space for discussion, but fell short of approaching issues of more central concern. Saskia Korsten's paper for instance, which reflected on our relationship to digital images that hide their relationship to the analogue model, would have been a great if it had ventured a broader consideration of accessibility.

Some papers felt potentially interesting and transformative but were somehow too obscure so their point was lost in abstract theories that didn't make enough of an effort to reach others. This was the case with Emile Deveraux who introduced an interesting although intricate idea about porousness in technology.

Image: Thirty Days of Running in Place by Ahmed Basiony

Particularly lacking in the conference, I felt, were discussions about the role of new media in the creation of alternative communities from the perspective of those communities' members, rather than a detached or managerial overview. The exception (from what I saw) was Benjamin Juhani Halsal who discussed his university project in conjunction with Leeds Visual Art Forum. Through a series of conversations they set up a Yahoo! group to serve the visual arts community in Leeds. He discussed how it supported artists promoting their activities within a horizontal space while questioning the alienating effects of this mediated community. Presenting this kind of project is fundamental and empowering, but the paper didn't critically position artists or question what that horizontal space means in wider society.

Within this category I also included some papers that explored current artists projects. They were taken from different perspectives like the presentation by Sander Veenhof in which he questioned the existence of Art 2.0 and how audiences become co-producers of their work, or Heidi Tikka's description of her installation Mother, Child and discussion of the mess and failures which occur in media works.

The position of power taken by certain presenters really pushed me to think Who Cares about what you are saying! Papers such as those presented by Christiane Paul, Margriet Schavemaker or Vince Dziekan, enacted the reproduction of hierarchies in the world of media art by positioning speakers according to the scale of institutional power that backed them. The decision of one of the head figures of the Stedelijk Museum (Amsterdam), Margriet Schavemaker, to defend media art spectacles over critical content felt particularly contentious. In a world in which we are swamped by media spectacle that ensures we remain a submissive and consumerist society, isn't it fundamental that we make art spaces remain (or become) a tool for critical reflection?

Based on the approximately 40 papers I heard out of the approximately 140 papers that composed the three day conference, it's fair to say that the event opened up interesting areas of research and contributed towards the expansion of notions of media art, new technologies and science. It explored the histories of media art by tracing back its origins to interesting and obscure projects that have faded over time, it made visible the movement back and forth between the digital and the analogue, it made links with ‘Other' (non-western) cultural histories, it introduced current projects, and expanded the power of its discourse by looking at it through the lens of important progressive philosophies. I am not sure, though, if it managed to move beyond reinforcing its own canon, or if it benefitted something other than itself by the effort of securing a position for its proponents in a Western History with no sense of shame as to the colonial and neoliberal implications attached to this.

A discussion around the radical potentiality of new media art and technologies to open up space for real alternatives to exist while also closing them down because of issues of accessibility was not present. In the current historical situation, such discussion is not only central but ethically unavoidable. Judging events from that perspective, many presentations were difficult to take. With a few wonderful exceptions, most speakers talked from positions of extreme privilege, without questioning themselves, and took reductive and patronising approaches to media art audiences.

The final keynote speaker, Andrew Pickering, finished the conference with a talk that advocated humans becoming aware of their instability and a self which is caught up in the flows and transformations of becoming. Funnily enough he ended the talk with a proposal for a new University that can systematically teach how to think in a new mode of being, one in which the modern relationship between the active subject observing the passive subject is problematised so we find a way of connecting to the world, instead of dominating or framing reality. I agreed fully with that final note, and that's why I am engaged in the creation of FUL. FUL is a protest and has as its main aim the uncovering of the mechanisms through which institutional powers allow some people to develop more than others. It also aims to uncover how institutional powers prevent all of us from flowing and becoming, in order to keep social hierarchies working. To be able to even think of the structural shape of the space that will allow becoming to stay at the core of any pedagogy we desperately need to join forces and think how to create places that help us to flow while providing us with the strength to question and resist the rigid channels of institutional purpose. I wonder how that final talk affected the other people listening to it. To what extent they felt it reflected on their own research and how their research is contributing to building a world in which we, all of us, can understand that we are in the constant process of becoming?

And a final note, something I found quite paradoxical and I really liked was a sentence written on the back of a T-shirt of one of the main speakers. It said: 'Fear is not an option'.

Lorena Rivero de Beer <lorenajohanna AT hotmail.com> is an artist and producer based in Liverpool. She is the co-founder of the Free University of Liverpool and Tuebrook Transnational, a company that creates site-specific outdoor performances/interventions collectively with other residents of North Liverpool. She completed a PhD in 2009 at the Department of Sociology of the University of Essex exploring the relationship between cultural politics, representation, aesthetics and subjectivity in relation to the Chicano performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña

After August’s riots and with a student demonstration on 9 November and a national strike on 30 November planned Sarah Taylor asks, will the contradictions of last year’s student movement resolve or simply extend themselves?

Last year was so simple. The government wanted to triple fees and there was a vote coming up. Smashing Millbank made everything seem possible. Demonstrations stopped going where they were told, school students played truant to run riot in Oxford Street, occupations at universities became the norm. But the vote was lost. Tired and cold, we went home and didn’t come back.

A year later, the lectures and lessons have restarted and the student demonstrations are planned again. The first is on 9 November – a year since the occupation of Millbank. But what do we do on this anniversary? If it was all about the vote on tuition fees and keeping Educational Maintenance Allowance, then perhaps we should lay a wreath for the lost fight – for the university students filming themselves Twittering in occupations, and for the school students smashing up shops, for dance-offs in libraries and grime in kettles.1 But if it was about something more, and if all these people are still angry, what happens next?

Image: Book bloc, London, November 2010

National Campaign Against Fees and Cuts (NCAFC) and the Education Activist Network (EAN) called the 9 November protest. The National Union of Students (NUS), now apparently resigned to its insignificance, officially supports the demonstration, and has agreed to provide some resources to help publicise it, although this doesn’t seem to stretch to the use of its website, which currently headlines ‘Freshers’ advice from the cast of Hollyoaks’.2 Filling the hole left by the NUS, the new student organisations are looking a lot like the old left. EAN was never shy of being the offspring of the ageing Socialist Workers Party, and although NCAFC was originally a loose network of students, over the summer it elected itself a National Committee with 14 permanent members and now describes itself as one of the organisations that ‘led’ the student protests.3

It works both ways – the old left also wants to emulate the students. Last year, Unite’s Len McCluskey wrote in The Guardian,

Britain’s students have certainly put the trade union movement on the spot. Their mass protests against the tuition fees increase have refreshed the political parts a hundred debates, conferences and resolutions could not reach […] The magnificent students’ movement urgently needs to find a wider echo if the government is to be stopped.

But he also thinks that any ‘wider echo’ will need trade unions to give ‘guidance’ to people’s anger, to ‘put it in a manner that will hopefully make the government take a step back.’

On 30 November, public sector workers will walk out over pensions, in what is set to be the biggest strike since the 1926 general strike. Education workers are the most obvious point of contact between the strikers and the students. Most teaching unions, ranging from the large and relatively militant National Union of Teachers to the small and conservative Association of Teachers and Lecturers, will be walking out. The higher and further education union the University and College Union will also be on strike. In a show of solidarity, the NUS leader warns, ‘Any action that threatens students’ ability to progress from year to year, or graduate at all, will immediately lose student support.’⁴ Leaving the NUS to the cast of Hollyoaks, NCAFC and EAN have called for student walkouts and direct action on the day of the strike. A similar call-out for the smaller 30 June public sector strike met with little response, but away from end of term lethargy, and with more workers on strike, young people might be tempted onto the streets. 

Image: Occupy LSX, London, 2011

Yet, as the last strike indicated, the government is not really fazed by one-day strikes – far from stepping back, it steps over them and keeps on going. Even if students do decide to join in the struggle for pensions, the government is unlikely to feel threatened by 12 hours of adults and children fighting to retire.But you would be hard pushed to find a subject further from the minds of young people than pensions. Even the striking teachers will tell you that it is work and not retirement that really frightens them. The schools White Paper and the higher education White Paper map out similar plans to deepen the privatisation of the education system: both drive educational institutions into the hands of corporations; both see students and parents as consumers looking for ‘choice’ or ‘value for money’; both threaten teachers’ and lecturers’ nationally agreed pay and conditions; and both create a two-tier system in which adequately funded education is reserved for the well informed and well moneyed. 

The government has engineered the cap on university places in such a way that the Russell Group universities are allowed to siphon off more students with grades AAB and above, and other universities, having lost these students, are encouraged to drop fees below £7,500 to compete with private providers for a pool of 20 thousand extra places. Meanwhile, the government’s ‘free schools’ allow groups of middle class parents to open schools, with education corporations taking over when they find they have bitten off more than they can chew. If that wasn’t enough, Labour’s Academies, increasingly part of corporation or church run chains, have been extended to include primary schools. Senior civil servants (who, incidentally, and confusingly, might also join the strike on 30 November) showed their sense of humour by naming the schools White Paper, The Importance of Teaching and the higher education White Paper, Students at the Heart of the System.

But schools are not only subject to direct attacks – they also suffer from the removal of benefits, wages, houses and every other meagre compensation that was previously offered to children and their families. I will take a primary school and secondary school I know as examples of this, but these are by no means isolated cases – the same stories can be heard in schools across the country.

Image: Anti-Academies Alliance Bournville

The primary school, where 48 percent of the children are on free school meals, but which is located in a rich London borough, expects to lose half of its pupils once the national housing benefit cap comes into effect – no longer able to afford to rent their own homes, their families will be forced to move from the borough or face eviction. To make things worse, because only 3 percent of primary schools have taken up Education Minister Michael Gove’s generous offer for them to voluntarily become Academies, schools like this one are going to be forced to become Academies next year if they don’t fulfil certain, impossible to fulfil, criteria.

The secondary school, based in rural Wales, is facing falling student enrolment as factory after factory in the area is closed and, with dwindling funds from low intake, middle class parents exercising their ‘parental choice’ decide to send their children elsewhere. This school is likely to be one of half the schools shut down in the county under a PricewaterhouseCoopers consulted ‘modernisation’ programme, which will see the end of schools that have been the centre of villages and towns for generations, and will force children to travel for up to an hour on country roads before they get to their first lesson.

Once they’ve left school, more and more of these children won’t be able to afford to go to college, let alone university. Many of them won’t get jobs, won’t get benefits, won’t get houses. They can only dream of retirement. The government has something right – students are at the heart of the system – it beats at them from all sides.

This was clearly expressed in August when, away from the constraints of term time, articulated demands, symbolic targets and organising committees, Britain’s teenagers went rioting. The same McCluskey who heaped praise upon the student riots described the August riots as ‘the exact opposite of community spirit, collectivism and what trade unionism is all about.’⁵ While, a year on from the student riots, many of those arrested are still awaiting trial, the August riots saw courts operating throughout the night, getting people off the streets and into prison as quickly as possible. Some of those arrested during the student protests who were unfortunate enough to be tried immediately after the summer riots, found themselves with harsher sentences than students convicted of exactly the same crimes before the riots. The August riots shook the authorities in a way that the student riots did not. Anything that happens next will have to be seen through the smoke of Tottenham, Croydon, Manchester and Birmingham.

The difference between the winter’s student riots and the summer’s standard riots is something the student leaders have been keen to reinforce. NCAFC patronise the young ‘victims’, telling them their rioting ‘will not improve the situation’, and arguing that their anger ‘needs to be channelled into tackling the real causes of injustice and inequality.’⁶ By which we can only assume they mean Topshop, Camilla Parker-Bowles, an office block in Millbank, the windows of the treasury, Barclays bank, parliamentary votes and the police, rather than Footlocker, the Sony warehouse, JD Sports, Carphone Warehouse, jewellery shops, furniture chains and the police. A good riot announces itself with a protest beforehand, has a symbolic target and a view of Big Ben. A bad riot is localised, unplanned, gets you free trainers, and can even happen when politicians are away on holiday. Good riots have uncontrollable fire extinguishers, bad riots have uncontrollable fires.

The attempt to divide the good and the bad ignores the fact that the summer riots are a continuation of, rather than a break with, the winter riots. The summer riots happened because the winter riots were never going to tackle ‘the real causes of justice and inequality.’ They happened because the winter riots were survived by a lot of angry people who knew that parliamentary votes had nothing to do with them. They gave up asking for £30 a week – they took what they wanted and destroyed what they hated, and they didn’t need to go to central London for that, because it was right outside their doors.

One intrepid reporter of student protest fame spent the August riots ‘huddled’ on the unconvincing front line that is her living room – ‘where I am in Holloway, the violence is coming closer.’ ‘Shell-shocked’ she advises her readers to follow the #riotcleanup hashtag on Twitter.⁷ The divide between the university students and the school students, even if now only faintly drawn, could be a sign of worse to come. The video shot during the student protests in which university students grab hold of a boy who’d thrown something burning, and attempt to hand him over to the police, a video which was posted online and subsequently on the Metropolitan Police Wanted list, was reminiscent of those much deeper divides in Paris between the university students and those from the suburbs during the anti-CPE protests. Although NCAFC’s statement on the August rioters is more of a patronising ticking off than condemnation, it shows that the student ‘spokespeople’ fear association with a more uncontainable – unkettlable – battle. It shows the fear, perhaps, that they might be about to lose control.

But it is precisely these more complicated, uncontrollable battles that provide the possibility for something more than a nostalgic reconstruction of the good old days of 2010. As people are evicted from their homes, lose their jobs, are beaten up by police, as their schools are privatised, universities go bankrupt and libraries are destroyed, resistance will have to happen there and then – on a thousand front lines, in street battles and marches, in ongoing strikes and occupations. We will only hear the ‘wider echo’ of the student protests when anger can no longer be muffled in days out at Westminster, articulated in simple slogans, or separated into causes – when a riot can no longer be just a student riot, and a struggle can no longer be just an education struggle.

Sarah Taylor <sarah.taylor55 AT yahoo.com> has just stopped being a student. She now has nothing better to do than write about student protests

Footnotes

Howard Slater grasps the August riots as the appearance of an ‘unrecognisable demos' which challenges the very ability of capitalist democracy to include or contain the language and acts of its subjects

One carries in public affairs the spirit of the sales counter

- Pierre Leroux (1834)

 

The consonants F, T and H, in that order, form a trilateral root meaning fissure, chink, opening...

- Jean Genet (1986)

1. One thing can be said with a modicum of certainty: the recent riots of August 2011 were political. What can be meant by political in this instance? Well, maybe something as straightforward as taking action in the street, getting beyond the idea of a ‘neutrality of living'.1 It's a form of such neutrality that informs those accusations that have it that the riots were ‘apolitical'. These accusations more or less come from a political state (and those professionally invested in it) that proffers an idea of politics as the maintenance of a ‘neutrality of living', as the embodiment of rational common sense, as the legislative thrust of a protective equilibrium. If, as many of the riots' detractors maintain, these actions that overspilled the boundaries of ‘civil society' were not political then we have further reason to surmise that politics for such as these is a technical managerial affair: the management of libidinal and economic energies into a steady state; the making legible of all action into recognisable ‘civil' forms.

2. The next step, then, was to brand the rioters as criminals and to see in the rioting a mass outbreak of criminal opportunism. Such labelling brings the ‘overspill' into an understandable civil remit and makes exemplary retaliation possible. Anything else is unconscionable for those who sit comfortably upon us. So, to link the ongoing austerity cuts to the riots as some liberal politicians did, is seen as an outrage, as a breach to the morally consensual re-establishment of ‘civil peace'. This civil peace is however, informed by capitalism's ‘naturalisation' within the state as it creeps beyond a simple integration - that could be echoed by a discipline going by the name of ‘political economy' - towards a takeover of the state political realm - that could ring out in such a phrase as ‘corporate governance'. It is maybe possible, then, to consider the increasing role of the state as an indicator of a corporate takeover - ongoing welfare cuts, bank bailouts, effective corporate lobbying etc. - that makes politicians ‘instinct' with capital and dictated to, in the moments immediately preceding the riots, by the fear of ‘sovereign debt'. Thus they are dictated to by a form of corporate para-political power that wields abstract measurements of a state's wealth and economic standing over and above even these states' belief in a mythic ‘democracy'.

3. The moral outrage of the governing political administrators at this disturbance of ‘civil peace' is, then, illustrative of a kind of ‘political theology'. Their god is now capital and those blasphemers against value, property and the entrepreneurial form are sent off to a purgatory of incarceration and classification. In this theocracy it makes perfect sense to jail a youngster for nicking a bottle of water because the greater crime, beyond that of thieving the object itself, is the blatant disregard it shows for surplus value and the exchange value embodied in money. Likewise robbing for the sake of it not only shows up the worthlessness of these commodities - a disrespect for the commodity as much as an indicator of greed - but it is a kind of people's auto-reduction to the ‘naturalised' criminality of ‘markup', ‘profit margins' and welfare ‘bribes'. Of course part of the moral outrage stems from the extent and ubiquity of the looting and this outrage must, by self-preservatory necessity, be blind to the ‘oversignification' of the riots that, in their very chaos, appear as a kind of ‘deforming' mandate that, weirdly enough, complements the politicians presiding over a foreclosure of a by now financialised politics.

4. This ‘oversignifcation' is polysemic noise and it is enigmatic to the turnkeys of capital who, seeing the ‘neutrality' of their governmental and ideological forms retaliated against, are set adrift before what Miguel Abensour might call a ‘political moment': ‘the moment most liable to gain an excessive meaning, to go beyond the meaning proper to it'.² The meaning deemed ‘proper to it', as usual, is criminality, but the excess of this meaning should take in the relationship between crime and poverty, between abandonment and rage, between hope and despair (all inadmissible in a court of law). That the riots are a political moment does not mean that those who participated in them face the political state as an homogeneity; they are not consciously proletarian though a majority are working class (or even part of the ‘surplus population'); they are not all gang members or linked in varying degrees to a more organised crime set up; they have not all been stopped and searched; not all been in prison etc.³ The move to deem all who participated as ‘criminals' - as if to suggest all those who carry convictions are the same ‘type' - is just as much about the refusal to see the politics in hope and despair, in abandonment and rage as it is a refusal to see the politics in poverty. Whilst this latter has a long tradition it is a tradition that, on the whole, has, like the political state, not taken in the affective dimension which were it to do, may have led to a less meaning driven capture of the riots; to a ‘thinking emancipation otherwise'; towards a re-forming of ‘political links' as relational.⁴

5. The outrage of the political class meets the enragement of those subject to austerity, and whilst they are not an homogenous mass, could it be said that, speaking a ‘language of acts' (Pasolini), those out on the streets formed an ‘horizon' for the political state as well as for us politcos; and became a form of ‘unrecognisable demos'.⁵ No longer an ‘idea as subject' (a definable gender, class or race) these crowds, often called upon to ‘participate', return the loaded inveiglement to speak with a language (as often a blasé beat as a gestural scream) that is untranslatable into the language-norms that would seek to bestill it as ‘criminal', as ‘proletarian', as ‘underclass', as ‘materialistic'. Not fighting for a cause, but fighting against causes, against a dimly perceivable - but all the same felt - overdetermination of their lives by, well, in the immediate past, austerity measures caused by the bank bailout. Not fighting as a ‘body' but fighting for the body, fighting the pressures felt by bodies in the form of abandonment, hunger, desire, aggression, alienation and stoic hopelessness. In Tottenham, that the family and friends of a police murder victim were ignored after requesting to be heard out is an indication of a callousness that comes along with capitalist social relations: the ‘correct channels', the strict form of even a verbal exchange, could not be ‘exceeded'. So these non-relations began to be ‘exceeded' (de-linked) by an at times vicious secession from those very channels; a secession away from the ‘policed' language of politics towards appeasing the demands of instinct for which there is maybe no language except the ‘language of acts'.

Image: Trokikhouse, 'The Savage and Beyond', 1991

6. Yet instinct, such as rage, is not apolitical. The sexual instinct, the appeasement of which is often negotiatory, a form of communication, is political to the degree that this ‘negotiation' of drives and their timing, their relationality, is political. Rage, present in muted form as the aggressive component of the sexual instinct, is a similarly political moment by means of its modulation of transgression and negotiation. So, like the sexual instinct, rage doesn't just come from anywhere (again the criminality tag helps the forces of ‘civil peace' to occlude the affective dimension), but its causes are a manifold layering of experiences through which a person comes to feel affronted, neglected and unwitnessed (not negotiated with). When these forms of emotional deprivation (lack of care) meet a situation of poverty and the pressures of material survival through which living horizons and future possibilities are extremely foreshortened, then, in some circumstances, when it is felt there's nothing to lose and nothing to live for, rage can stalk the social psyche. So rage, it could be said, comes to be expressive of a lack of hope, a lack of hope that cannot be countenanced or communicated because until the circumstances provoking its enragement are met, this rage exists as immanent.

This may well go some way toward getting a handle on some of the acts of ‘concise violence' witnessed in the riots - the burning of inhabited buildings, the hit and run, the assault and subsequent death of a pensioner.⁶ Even the more embittered revolutionaries would find it hard to condone such ‘savage acts', but it is maybe that writers like Pasolini and Genet, who embrace, neigh love, the ‘savage' and the wilfully abject in its human form, maybe it is such writers as these who seek and accept something else in this rage. Both Genet and Pasolini often get impatient with knowing, as many politicos know, that rage can arise at the sight and feel of exploitation, can come from a conscious felt sense of alienation from the economic and political system, can come from the actions of the police. They sense, too, that both the enraged and the outraged can experience a ‘blackout', a short circuit as impulses takeover. Perhaps this impulsiveness is what comes over when we see footage of folk tearing at the shutters of inconspicuous shops and, as one eye witness described, scrambling in a heap fighting over a spilled tray of looted jewels. And yet, even in these moments Pasolini, for one, would spare the rioters an empathic hearing and spare us too the trap of our ideolectual urge: they ‘appear not only without any logical goal but without even the shadow of an idea: merely expressing with all its strength the general disquiet and restlessness - the anxiety, in fact'.⁷

7. Impulsive? How far does anxiety inform the impulsive? Even so, what can we possibly expect? For Bernard Stiegler, coupling the ‘structurally short term' effects of fictitious capital to the lust of the drive for appeasement of needs (instant gratification), capitalism has become drive based: ‘novelty is valorised at the expense of durability, and this organisation of detachment (unfaithfulness/infidelity) contributes [...] to the spread of drive-based behaviours'.⁸ Whilst this could possibly gloss some of the more gratuitous looting in the August streets, it also sets this looting against a backdrop of speculative greed and ‘instant returns' on investments of the glorified criminals in the banking sector. The very cuts whose blade could have been close to a riotous skin are themselves short termist and the deregulation, in a wicked inverse, was extended to the deregulation, the temporary de-forming, of the law of the land. So, was it that high streets became the site of an anxiety informed ‘language of acts'? Did they become the scene for a dissociated revenge of dissociated consumers? Was the libidinal energy so sought after by the window displays returned to them as a ‘quick fuck' minus the time of desire? Was it a political indicator that, for some bordering on many, there is no ‘neutrality of living' when life itself is no longer guaranteed and relationships are full of hard to express anxiety? Was it that the broadcast effacement of such neutrality has to be called ‘greed' in order to ground it in capitalist culture, but, at the same time, remove the desperation of poverty from purview and, furthermore, discredit any claim it may have to inhabit the political?

8. Just as capital is intermittently faithful to those who can pay, so too the semi- detached state is not faithful to all its ‘subjects'. The resultant evacuation of the political by those learning about their own abandonment is more like an enforced withdrawal. They are barricaded out by a wall of ‘political formalism', procedure and financialised jargon that excludes them. Pasolini again:

The communicativeness of the world of applied science [i.e. politics], of industrial eternity, presents itself instead as strictly practical. And therefore monstrous. No word will have a sense that is not functional [...] the autonomous expression of a ‘gratuitous' sentiment will be inconceivable.⁹

And so, maybe it could be said that many of those who were out on the street in an active anti-form way in August are amongst those who are neither admitted nor desire to be admitted into the political realm but who, speaking a ‘language of acts' respond to the ‘monstrosity' with the enaction of an ‘unrecognisable demos'. Such a demos, as Abensour would maintain in his musings about what the young Marx meant by ‘real democracy', is this fissure through which the political state is ‘reduced' from its position as ‘the moment of the political', the dominant instant of the political that keeps the ‘other realms' of life subordinate and silent; deems them apolitical.¹⁰ The riots, then, with their ‘language of acts', their amassed expression of social insecurity, posed a challenge to the authority of the political state in its mission to maintain homogeneity and police the uncontainable overspill. They posed a challenge too to those for whom a certain social opacity and indeterminacy are similarly anathema.

Such a temporary loss of civil foundations and the move into the streets of an indeterminate body of people displaying an acute restlessness, an at times ‘kamikaze' flouting of the law and a need to be heard in their painful grievance is reminiscent of Claude Lefort's ‘savage democracy'. That which, in the guise of the rageful ‘raw being' of the sans-culotte of the French Revolution, marked a founding moment of the modern western political state.¹¹ Moreover, as Abensour informs us, the ‘right to insurrection' was deemed to be a ‘democratic right' back in these days and, he adds, up to the Paris Commune. That this history, and indeed the events of the Arab Spring, are kept at an ineffectual distance from most western political states, is indicative of the reification of ‘democracy' that can admit of no further instituting ‘discrepencies'. The dream of the rational state as the ‘organising form that passes for the whole' now has capital as this organising form and as a result politics, in the form it is now practised (affectless and technocratic), seems more and more to be revealed as the language of a ‘pseudo totality'.¹² The ‘neutrality of living' becomes asphyxiated in its own forms of empiricised communication and the ‘non-totalisable' human becomes thwarted and ‘renditioned'.

9. As it could be heard from Tahrir Square so it is heard from the London prisons that ‘our voice has been heard ... we are not animals.' That voice may be indiscernible to some, to others, as a ‘criminal' voice, it should not be heard and it should be stripped of its ‘rights'. But it is a voice that, held in reflux by a structurally informed muteness, may well be speaking the ‘language of acts' and seeking to be expressive of affect rather than being ‘educated' to speak that language that Jean Genet complained about in the 1940s: a ‘language of words' that are ‘weighed down with precise ideas'.¹³ This weight of the determinate, this exchange value of expression whereby affect (a proto-meaning in itself) should be forfeited for precision with the resultant reward of entry into ‘civil society' and its politics, is in itself a bottling up of the ‘overspill' of affect and a surplus humanness that engenders the ‘savage' as a moment of the ‘species-being'. Pasolini and Genet, with their ‘telling inarticulacy', well understood this ‘language of acts' as a somatic and poetic embodiment, a flouting of the dictatorship of the ‘formal universality' of state sanctioned modes of language. Genet writing of his time spent with the Black Panthers in the early '70s says: ‘the force of what was called Panther rhetoric or word-mongering resided not in elegant discourse but in strength of affirmation (or denial), in anger of tone and timbre'.¹⁴ Such ‘word-mongering', ringfenced as ‘aggressive', and ignored as ‘rageful', may well be, in Abensour's view, an instance of an imprecise ‘savage democracy': a political moment in which we can playfully create one another and in which passion as a relational link is once more given a space in contradistinction to a reified democracy. This latter cannot countenance that its ‘subjects' are filled with the discrepencies, contradictions and discords of an uncontainable species-life that, in its ‘telling inarticulacy', seemed, in August, to bring into view an experience of the wobbling of those very institutional foundations that are charged with maintaining ‘civic peace'.

10. Despite their ‘criminal' tag, those taking part in the riots formed an opaque body that academic research will now be charged with making transparent. Is this opaqueness, infuriating to the political state, not the very auto-conflictual opaqueness of species life? How often can we be said to be transparent to ourselves? Moreover, is it not an opaqueness through which the enigma of the self and the enigma of the social can no longer be solved accept as a ‘language of acts' that entails the abandonment of forms of ‘ideality' that have blinded us to the (albeit risky) ‘instituting' power of species-being? As Abensour adds in his musing on ‘savage democracy': ‘Every social manifestation is in the same movement a threat of dissolution, an exposure to division and to the loss of self, as if every manifestation were inhabited [...] by the threat of its own dissolution'.¹⁵ The riots may well have brought into purview this threat of dissolution of the political state and its ‘precise words', they exposed us to division but in so doing they exposed us to divided selves, to a ‘self-discrepency' between, say, condoning the most savage acts whilst feeling an optimistic excitement at the breach they formed in the ‘neutrality of living'. The riots could be said to highlight such schizo states; states in which the contradictions of living become ‘felt contradications' that not so much bypass thought as bring it into relation with instinct. So, maybe the affective experience of the ‘savage' that the riots permitted could get us beyond a reified democracy whose rationalist ‘pseudo totality' demonises our ‘savage' selves and thus, in line with the myth of productive progress, removes a key facet of our indeterminate species-life and makes us, by means of such devices as guilt, ready to be produced as the financialised subjects required of the political state.¹⁶

11. This notion of the ‘production of the subject' may well figure the riots as a form of ‘human strike'. Not only in the suspension of the ‘human' in favour of the ‘savage', but as a retaliatory strike against the very apparatus of the production of the subject through such institutional dispositifs as the education system. For Pasolini, who consistently and painfully spoke of the genocide of the working class, the political state had become ‘the new production (production of human beings)'.¹⁷ Maybe this could take on an added resonance in that the increasingly noted failure of capital to reproduce the working class leads to a necessity for the subject to be produced elsewhere than the site of wage labour. This hiatus, this dissolution of the working subject and the incursion of state-led control into the ‘bodies' of its subjects, marks a further opaque void for the political state as well as the traditional left. The regulatory mechanism of wage labour is absent for many, perhaps more so for those who were out on the streets in August. Just as the looting, then, flouts the law of the wage relation, so too does the latter's absence remove a main social identifying pole. That for some this is to be welcomed (ne travaillez jamais), for others it may be an instance of the ‘loss of the self' when the ‘self', under the value-form of capital, is encouraged to identify with the various roles that wage labour allots. The ‘meaning of life' is bound up with work but its absence throws us back on a kind of ‘savage' survival and an equally savage interrogation of what it is to be human (a social individual) without the capital-imposed definition of life as a life of wage labour.¹⁸

As Abensour is quick to point out the ‘savage', as Lefort uses it, is not the return to a state of nature, but a baseline in the forecoming of ‘species existence, the advent of human existence', a socialised nature that must admit of ‘other realms', those other disavowed areas of species activity that should not be compressed out of existent expression by the political pseudo-totality of a reified and financialised democracy.¹⁹ The inadmission of the ‘savage' to the demos is of course one sided. The savagery of financial capitalism is, perhaps due to its level of abstraction and its ultra-sublimated mechanisms, admitted poll position (the mechanisms of both are a snug fit). But the ‘beyond' of such savagery is, as Pasolini mourns, nothing less than a genocide, nothing less than the sacrifice of ‘raw being'. An element of this ‘raw being' was sacrificed to the law courts in the weeks after the riots. It had no ‘idea' to defend itself with, only ‘gratuitous sentiment' and the ‘language of acts' that disqualified it from the polis and made its ‘unrecognisable demos' truly opaque. Its sudden speed of arousal left us aghast and, at times, thankfully speechless. Theory, always playing second fiddle to praxis and affect, comes in to temporarily save us: ‘The "ceremony" of the political should be converted to the species-life of the real and total being of the demos [...] that in its people-being belongs at once to the political principle and the sensualist principle'.²⁰ There is, then, some urgency in at least revealing the pseudo-totality of politics to its affectless practitioners (who, as Pasolini maintains in his intervention at the Radical Party Congress of 1975, ‘live their rhetoric with a total absence of any self-criticism').²¹ Such a pseudo-totality, the happy enterprise of unreflexive selves in an unquestioning relation to the ‘all' of their knowledge, creates a politics without the sensual and savage component of species life.²² It is a stunted totality passing for an ad hominen practice: the remainder that could well overspill the totality with its ‘savage democracy' goes by unnoticed and so too does the ‘can-be of the self-contradicting'.²³ Pasolini and Genet had already begun to speak of such an impossible being as a becoming. Beyond the love offered by them to the ‘people-being', their love of the remainder and the remaindered made them hopeful that a ‘politics of anxiety', a politics premised upon an acceptance of both the savagery of species-life and the radical surprise of indeterminancy, would go some step towards blasting up this lifeless ceremony that passes as politics.

Howard Slater <howard.slater AT googlemail.com> is a volunteer play therapist and sometime writer. His book, 

Anomie/Bonhomie and Other Writings, will be published by Mute Books in January 2012

Discography:

Tronikhouse: ‘The Savage and Beyond', Incognito Records (1991)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xkCKjEUhiAM&feature=related

The Pop Group: ‘Thief of Fire', Radar Records (1979)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p6Vvlk7UbEo

Newham Generals: ‘Things That I Do', Dirtee Stank Recordings (2009)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6AUkh-UNhFU

Footnotes

1 Miguel Abensour, Democracy Against The State, Cambridge: Polity, 2011, p.34. Much of what follows is informed by this book in which Abensour conducts an exploratory reading of Marx's Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right.

2 Ibid, p.57.

3 For a take on Marx's concept of ‘surplus population' see ‘Misery and Debt - On the Logic and History of Surplus Populations and Surplus Capital', Endnotes II, April 2010.

4 For ‘thinking emancipation otherwise' see: Abensour, op.cit., p.vii.

5 This ‘language of acts' is maybe far distant from a rhetorical and more acceptable ‘speech act', it is an embodiment, perhaps in this instance, of a spontaneity (itself conditioned by affective layering?) that subtracts from a ‘higher' yet blunted rhetorical explanatory plane and becomes expressive of a suffering (phôné) that is too ‘savage' for the demos and hence ‘unrecognisable'.

6 The phrase ‘concise violence' is Genet's, see: Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, London: Panther, 1965, p.248.

7 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Petrolio, London: Secker & Warburg, 1997, p.436.

8 Bernard Stiegler, Towards a New Critique of Political Economy, Cambridge: Polity, 2010, p.83.

9 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Heretical Empiricism, Washington: New Academia Publishing, 2005, p.34.

10 Abensour, op.cit., p.92.

11 Ibid, p.102-124.

12 Ibid, p.60. John Holloway puts it: ‘The state, by its very existence, says in effect, "I am the force of social cohesion, I am the centre of social determination."' See John Holloway, Crack Capitalism, Pluto Press, 2010, p.133.

13 Jean Genet, op.cit., p.72.

14 Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, New York Review Books, 2003, p.56.

15 Abensour, op.cit., p.104.

16 Such musings could be read as ‘primitivist' if we were to believe that our ‘indeterminant species life' is not stock-full of social determinations and conditioning that it is risky to express. The risk emanates from at least two sides: the academic left's wariness of the ‘irrational' and the political state's fear of the unraveling of our capitalist conditioning.

17 Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lutheran Letters, London: Carcanet, 1981, p.109.

18 Becoming a ‘social individual' is itself traumatic (savaging our self) when subjects are produced/taught to identify as individuals and have proprietorial conditions of worth. See for instance Lacan's formula: ‘I is a fortress' cited by Catherine Clément, Syncope: A Philosophy of Rapture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, p.122.

19 Abensour, op.cit., p.73.

20 Ibid, p.71.

21 Pasolini, op.cit., p.121.

22 In some senses the Consciousness Raising Groups of the ‘70s Women's Liberation Movement were forums for just such a critique of the pseudo-totality and for an interrogation of the place of (a remaindered) gender within capitalism.

23 Ernst Bloch, The Principle of Hope Vol.1, MIT Press, 1995, p.225.

The V&A’s Postmodernism exhibition acted like an industrial trawler, disembedding three decades of cultural artefacts from their diverse ecologies. The result, writes Gail Day, is a deeply conservative reading of this tumultuous epoch

Most people seem to like the exhibition Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990. Such, at least, was the evidence on the night I attended (and from much of the general chit-chat one picks up, and from the cheery presence of promotional leaflets spotted in fashion outlets). Admittedly, I went to the museum on a Friday late night opening when, in the V&A’s foyer, a sound system was pumping out music, cocktails were flowing and families were learning a technique for darning holes in jumpers. It was also the night when Charles Jencks was talking to Rem Koolhaas; both have work displayed in the show, so I imagine they must have been in good spirits – and the crowd spilling out from the discussion into the Postmodernism exhibition was generally enjoying the fun of it all.

Image: Buzzcocks, Orgasm Addict, 1977

As may be inferred from my tone, I didn’t. Sure, I found plenty of pleasures to revel in – vicarious and otherwise. Tapping toes to Talking Heads, snippets from Blade Runner and The Last of England, issues of The Face, a Buzzcock’s single, and reminders of the Hacienda: it was a retro fairground of an earlier life. Lots of stuff I’d thrown away. My own petty possessions and experiences of the ’80s were raised to a second power under the museological gaze named ‘postmodernism’. At least I had enjoyed using the commodities back then; with their fetish nature transmuted, they looked back at me from their cultic vitrines and display monitors. Interestingly, the temporal economies invoked by the items of popular culture (the mags, the films, the sounds, the looks) didn’t accord with those of the furniture and household objects. If coming across the former felt like rummaging at a jumble sale, the later was more like window shopping in one of today’s emporia, with their Alessi franchises, devoted to designer products. Not all commodities are equal. Of course, for anyone of my generation, the show inevitably had a melancholic underpinning. But, irrespective of when we were born, Postmodernism treated the reminder of death as a deliberate leitmotif. Jencks’ words, stencilled on the wall, set the scene from the outset: if modernism is dead, ‘we might as well enjoy picking over the corpse’. Later, Derek Jarman’s voice-over was used to echo the sense of historical caesura and closure: ‘Even our protests were hopeless’.

The V&A’s institutional form shaped the exhibition in two ways. First, the architectural spaces used for the museum’s temporary displays forced a tripartite division and, secondly, the focus of the museum’s collections gave direction to the type of materials used to typify postmodernism (jewellery, furniture, etc.) The first section largely focused on architecture, drawing on the texts written by architects and theorists who were considered to have initiated the visual and material dimensions of postmodernism: Jencks, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, and James Wines. (This was not the place to worry ourselves much over Jean-François Lyotard’s, Frederic Jameson’s or David Harvey’s accounts, never mind the arguments of postmodernism’s critics.) The second part was largely geared towards a range of design media (furniture, graphic design, etc.). The last section attempted to situate postmodernism in relation to money and the commodity and included, inter alia, jewellery, craft and examples of a peculiar high-end phenomenon where architects would be commissioned to conceive a ‘piazza’ of coffee accoutrements. This final section abandoned the lightbox signboards of the two earlier rooms (red and green respectively) in favour of an abundant use of shiny-black acrylic sheets. The coloured glow associated with commercial promotions in streets and subways was displaced by reflections that conveyed the air of an aspiring celebrity funeral. The exhibition’s parts narrated, loosely, the three-fold time frames of postmodernism: its coming to ascendancy, its high period and its collapse (‘under the weight of its own success’). As a heuristic device, this seemed remarkably conventional. Methodologically, it was something of a dinosaur, especially with the treatment of the final phase as one of internalised self-regard (remember those accounts of the renaissance giving way to mannerism, the baroque to the rococo… or, for that matter, modernism to the international movement?) This conceptual conservatism also emerged via the show’s subtitle. Accompanied by its subset of associated binaries (theatrical/theoretical, commercial/avant-garde, etc.), ‘Style and Subversion’ was posed as the overarching ‘ambiguity’ – the all round refusal to be categorised – that was (allegedly) postmodernism. Postmodernism, we were told, was ‘a new self-awareness about style itself’. But it transpired that Postmodernism, the show, reduced ‘style’ to an unreflexive, art historical category which was used to pin down a period of 20 years: strange to see because, if the debates over postmodernity did one thing, it was to distinguish ‘ism’ from ‘ity’.

One would be hard pressed to know from Postmodernism that the period under scrutiny saw a massive assault on working class communities and labour organisations; significant battles over racist and sexist discrimination, gay rights, abortion rights and anti-Nazi activism; the deregulation of the financial markets; the beginnings (in the UK) of the attacks on free university education and the dismantling of the postwar welfarist settlement. The categorial blanketing performed by ‘postmodernism’ evaded the specificity of the objects qua material objects, let alone the objects as socially situated entities or actors. To reprise the earlier conjuncture: Jarman’s angry lament, eight years into Thatcher’s term, was fundamentally at odds with Jencks’ suave ease and intellectual game playing. It is critically lazy to dub such differences ‘ambivalence’. Postmodernism-as-idea effectively bludgeoned into subjection every object presented. There was insufficient recognition that while some claimed to be postmodern, self-identifying as its promoters, others only became identified as ‘postmodern’ by dint of being turned into the tokens within the arguments of the time. For a good number of the exhibits, the label ‘postmodern’ seemed to be being freshly applied; just being a product of the ’70s or ’80s seemed sufficient. That surrealist inspired Buzzcock’s cover? It was news to find that the youth of the ’80s ‘experienced postmodernism for the first time through issues of The Face and i-D’. No! The curators’ opening statement ducked the point: ‘This era defies definition, but it is a perfect subject for an exhibition.’ Which era doesn’t ‘defy definition’? Clearly, we were meant to answer ‘modernism’. Empty truisms of this sort peppered the show – along with their associated straw target – while reheated paraphrases (‘we are all postmodern now’) fell short of carrying off pastiche.

Bricolage was a running theme. Loraine Leeson and Peter Dunn’s Big Money is Moving In, from the project ‘The Changing Picture of Docklands’ – an intervention in the radical (‘left-modernist’) montage tradition – found itself reduced to an example of ‘postmodern technique’. Working with tenants’ action groups and trade unions to oppose the gentrification and corporatisation of their neighbourhoods, the artists developed a series of large publicly sited photo-murals. Shorn of its resistive voice, its activist identification and its commitment to collective agency, the work just served to underscore the closing section’s ‘money’ theme. Earlier we were told that, while modernism created unified wholes, postmodern montage was variable, apparently ‘embracing the full diversity of the world’. The ‘modernists’ named as exemplary of the ‘synthesised’ mode were Hannah Hoch and Kurt Schwitters. Had the curators actually looked at their work? Along the same lines, we learnt that modernism equates to the grid: a bizarre statement to make when you include, as an example of postmodernism, a celebratory riff on Manhattan’s street pattern (Koolhaas’ Delirious New York). The force of the ‘postmodern’ chopper came down, conceptually cutting history into trite isms and categories. But – despite what the literature promoting postmodernism claimed – the history of montage practices does not divide itself up into an era of unities and an era of fragments; and neither does the 20th century.

Image: Charles Jencks, Garagia Rotunda, Truro, MA 1976-77

Nevertheless, it was surprisingly interesting to encounter key tokens from its discourse. Despite serving as postmodernism’s ideological juggernaut (or perhaps because of it), the architectural material proved especially fascinating. Even the reconstruction of Jencks’ Garagia Rotunda, his automotive ‘garden folly’ dressed up in stagey classicist motifs – though it did strike me all the more powerfully as boringly naff – provided a welcome opportunity to see that confirmed ‘in the flesh’. Hans Hollein’s line-up of Doric columns (his Strada Novissima, originally made for Venice’s Architecture Bienniale in 1980) left me similarly unmoved, if still glad to have registered it as a material presence. The clever ironies now all look so earnest, overweening and portentous. The claim of postmodern architecture was to recover ‘meaning’ by using historical references, but this populist move just revealed the vacuity of the gesture – its emptiness both as gesture and as historical intervention. As lived experience, so-called postmodern space is scarcely different from that of the buildings and squares it sought to trump. However, the discourse on postmodernity advanced itself not so much through its constructed realities as it did through architectural photography. Images in glossy journals like AD endowed the examples of ‘postmodern architecture’ with optical allure and faux clarity. The exhibition didn’t give us these, but quite a few architectural models, which captivated in another way, returning us to the moment of imaginative projection; to the particular totalising perspective of corporate clients and to the encounter in which the architect attempted to convince them that one grand vision could coincide with another.

Nils-Ole Lund’s The Future of Architecture (1979) was similarly intriguing. Its collagistic fracture was invariably ironed out by the mass circulation of the printed page and then hyped up further and projected by its circulation as a lecture slide. Both reproductions rendered the work into something that looked like a large photorealist painting, albeit one with some uncanny transitions on its synthesised surface. Seeing the original montage, I was struck by just how small it was, but I was mostly caught up wondering how it had even become a coin of postmodern discourse. It’s so clearly possible to have it read otherwise. Its figure of ‘modernity in ruins’ could just as easily be interpreted as picturesque, romantic or surrealist; comprehended not as modernism’s ‘death’, but as modernity itself. (These days, we might note, the figure is much favoured by polemicising pro-modernists.)

Image: Nils-ole Lund, The Future of Architecture, 1979

I came to realise that the cadaver being scavenged was not modernism’s but that of postmodernism itself. Perhaps Jencks’ opening statement approached the status of a larger curatorial conceit? In one of the show’s central rites of passage – its ‘Times Square’ – the exhibition design echoed the mediatised city of Blade Runner; we were taken into that night time world of screens and monitors conjured up so memorably by Ridley Scott, but here it was David Byrne and Annie Lennox who were the ghastly visages bearing down and cynically mocking us. We had only just passed the Blade Runner clips which, in turn, had been placed under remit of ‘Apocalypse then’; all suitably ‘intertextual’. It would be nice to acknowledge such thematic introjection as a piece of curatorial élan; a meta-joke where an object of study became the exhibition’s conceptual motor. Sadly, the pattern of auto-ingestion was too weakly drawn. Instead, what prevailed was a banal subject/object collapse that seemed not to be of anyone’s choosing or staging, but rather the result of a simple failure to maintain critical distinctions or to exercise historical caution.

Certainly, the role of publications (Domus or i-D, etc.) as disseminators of styles was grasped. But there was also too much uncritical acceptance of what had been read in the canonical books promoting postmodernism. Yet the making of ‘postmodernism’ – via this avalanche of secondary literature – is a history in its own right. It was a publishing category tied to the sale of pedagogic shorthands. (In the ’90s, it used to be said – apocryphally, no doubt – that if you wanted to get your book out, you needed the P-word in the title.) There were allusions to The Language of Postmodern Architecture and Complexity and Contradiction in Architecture (primary texts, we might say, and which played their part in the construction of the discourse), but the exhibition’s perspective seemed to have been essentially directed by the mass of generic style surveys produced to support the art and design school curriculum. These synthetic works were reliant on weakly conceived Wölfflin-type schematisations, derived from Venturi and Jencks and shored up by snippets from the heavyweights like Lyotard or Jameson. Studying 3D design? Well here’s how the story goes: Sottsass, Memphis, Studio Alchymia, etc. – irony, pastiche, bricolage, appropriation, quotation. Each segment of the university and polytechnic divisions of labour had its corresponding volumes to enforce and shore up these schema. For all the talk in Postmodernism of deconstruction and reconstruction, of irony and self-awareness, there was little sign that the archive itself had been recognised as form, as institution, as construct or as discursive production – let alone historicised or subjected to critical analysis. The annals were read straight, as direct access to an authentic voice, and then played back.

Image:  Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown in the Las Vegas Desert with the Strip in the Background, 1966

And yet even the archive was strangely limited. What, for example, happened to the central discussion of the ’80s: the distinction between conservative historicist and critical poststructuralist versions of postmodernism? It is rendered by the curators as postmodernism’s ‘theatrical’ and ‘theoretical’ characteristics, its exciting ‘ambivalence’. Yet, at the time, the differences were articulated as sharp political contestations. From Hal Foster’s essays in the ’80s to the architectural debates of the Revisions group in New York, this sense of embattled opposition was expressed explicitly and repeatedly. We can now recognise these as responses to the Reagan administration’s aggressive imposition of neoliberalism. I happen to think there were problems with these left leaning challenges to postmodernism’s mainstream, but they were certainly not just one inflection within the postmodern ambiguity.

Less visible, but implicit in the dates and places – and sometimes in the objects themselves – other stories seemed to lurk; further paths suggested themselves for historical investigation. One friend speculated on the possibility that the Milanese design objects – mostly dated immediately after the repression of the Italian left (the so-called ‘years of lead’) – were symptoms of a ‘Pastel Thermidor’, Italy’s counter-revolution exported and niche marketed. It is tempting to see the pots and kettles as direct symptoms of a new political domination – especially when, like me, you actively don’t like them, and especially when you know whose needs they were designed for – but I suspect their place may well be more complex and contradictory. One would want to consider these human products not merely as semiotic representatives of some idiot ‘ism’, but as material agents within a changing field of social and economic relations. Postmodernism’s veneer of historical analysis relied, however, on media coined buzzwords and soundbites: ‘yuppy’, ‘designer decade’, ‘boom’. History deserves better treatment; so do (at least some of) the objects. The commodities still have their stories to tell. Give the fetishes their due.

Gail Day <G.A.Day AT leeds.ac.uk> teaches in the School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds. She is author of Dialectical Passions: Negation in Postwar Art Theory (Columbia University Press, 2010), shortlisted for the 2011 Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize

With demands over the wage and welfare in austerity Greece deemed illegitimate because unaffordable, what shape can struggle take? Demetra Kotouza sees the all out attack on living standards as producing a de facto opposition that can't be cohered by ideologies of class

With austerity escalating in Greece this year, there has been a parallel effort to resist it. Several strikes in key industries such as transport and electricity have taken place, mostly in the public sector, and six general strikes, accompanied by demonstrations of growing size and intensity. The ‘indignants' direct democracy movement dominated attention in the summer, expressing parliamentary politics' legitimation crisis. In September, autoreduction practices became more frequent in response to new taxation, while universities and schools were occupied, the former against the new higher education bill and the latter triggered by delays in handing out books.¹ In October, a 48-hour general strike, with increased participation from the private sector, and accompanied by the occupation of most of the country's public services and infrastructure, brought everything to a standstill. Despite what was called by many ‘the mother of all strikes' and the largest demonstrations in decades, which many thought might topple the government, the parliament passed a bill that essentially invalidates collective bargaining agreements and opens the way for wages to fall below the minimum. This sent the message that a large 48-hour strike is not enough to win a battle, and that worse is still to come.

Image: ‘Merry Crisis and a Happy New Fear’, Exarchia, Athens 2010

This comes at a time when the struggle around the wage is becoming a matter of survival. Within a year, wages, even for those previously considered quite well off, have fallen below subsistence levels, to the point that paying bills, making rent payments and buying basics has become a widespread problem. This, combined with payment stoppages by employers, high unemployment and the decline of the petit bourgeoisie, as small businesses go bust one after another, is making survival the central question today, and the existence of the wage itself the most critical demand. However, it is not only this ruthless and abrupt attack on wages and labour rights, compounded by intensifying police repression, that makes these struggles particularly tough. Current struggles are facing a grim horizon, as the demands they voice are presented as impossible; even if small battles are won, it is unclear how winning the war would be possible when it is no longer fought at the level of a national economy, but rather in the midst of a global crisis with Greece as one of its epicentres. These battles are confronted with the risk of a default that could send shockwaves through the global financial system and bring about a wider recession and deeper impoverishment. To the extent that a default can indeed be triggered by the government's inability to implement austerity, these struggles appear to be self-destructive. But even if a default is inevitable, its prospect thwarts any hopes for a long-term victory that would make space for workers to go on the offensive. Facing this situation, it has become difficult to pose even defensive wage demands in a way that is effective and proportionate to capital's attack. The intense struggles that continue to take place have a feeling of despair, of hitting a wall.

This is not a condition that only characterises the class struggle in Greece, or even one that suddenly emerged in the current crisis. The global capitalist restructuring, which dismantles the social democratic institutions that guarantee survival for unemployed populations, began long ago. In so many ways it represents a return of the working class to its ‘proper' condition, to its ‘proper' entirely dependent relation to capital. Unemployment, both as a constant risk and a potentially long-term condition, as precarity, as integral to the condition of the working class, is becoming ever more prominent today. However, the current stage of crisis and restructuring is not a return to the situation existing prior to the birth of social democracy. The capitalist restructuring that began in the late '70s - characterised by the drive to reduce the cost of labour power through the development of advanced technology, the global zoning of production, and financialisation, with credit supplementing falling wages (up until 2007) to aid the reproduction of labour power in the western world - was a response to an earlier crisis of overaccumulation. The prospect of a renewed Keynesian ‘deal', of a realignment of consumption with the wage, to ‘productive' industrial capitalism, and the separation of national economies, is no longer possible because it is precisely what had to be done away with to overcome that crisis. Most importantly, the real subsumption of labour under capital has advanced to a level where there is no longer any possibility of a flight from capital for surplus populations as was the case with, for example, the creation of alternative, non-capitalist communes in the 19^th century and Great Depression-era America. Class struggle is forced to address the capital relation itself, at the same time as capital denies the proletariat's role as the productive class which, as Théorie Communiste rightly argue, seriously undermines its ability to affirm itself within this antagonism.

This is confounded by the fact that there is no longer a singular, unifying working class experience that would generate a common identity on one side of the class struggle. The global and local zoning of production, and increasing precarisation, has fractured working class communities pushing, in the West, a large section into chronic unemployment and to survival through informal and illegal economies. In the global South, significant populations have been forced to emigrate to the West despite brutal repression.

In this moment of global crisis, this tendency manifests itself with great intensity in the ‘second' zone of capitalist development and particularly in Greece. When even the demand for work cannot be satisfied at a broader, systemic level, let alone for the capacity of the wage to cover subsistence, even defensive wage demands appear structurally illegitimate whilst also being a matter of survival. The working class is having a hard time affirming itself as life - as labour power that needs to be reproduced - let alone as a productive force, in its relation to both capital and the state that used to guarantee its survival. The question of ‘lost unity' also emerges as a central one, as conflicts within struggles intensify.

Image: ‘Fuck May 68, Fight Now’, Exarchia, Athens

The contradiction between the necessity of the wage demand, and its lost legitimacy reappeared in the indignants' direct democracy movement. The call for ‘direct democracy now' rejected, in principle, the address of demands to a denounced political establishment and parliamentary system. It rejected dominant avenues of representation - the political parties and major unions - and put forward a call for self-organisation: ‘taking our lives into our own hands'. But, despite this language of autonomy, the movement was also driven by a single demand, namely that the Mid-Term Programme be voted down in parliament.² This suggests that building a defence within this face-off still takes precedence over any claim that it's time to self-organise and take over.

‘Burn the parliament', the crowd shouted, but that did not amount to a rejection of politics. The direct democracy movement was clearly a political one, attempting to create a new politics from below, and even a political programme. Operating primarily at the level of political discourse, the ‘direct democratic' imaginary envisioned a system of inclusive, bottom-up decision making, self-organised resistance and mutual support in neighbourhoods and workplaces. Similar to the indignants' campaigns in Spain and now the US, it was captivated by the notion that a more ‘decent' life would be possible, if only the citizens had the political power. In the Greek case, the dominant conviction was that direct democracy alone, as a form of decision making, would be able to make capitalist production commensurate with meeting human needs, or, in its rather more militant version, that the democratic self-management of production would ensure those needs were met. The discourse of self-management, coming mostly from an alternativist anarchist tendency, and the broader conception of ‘alternatives' - involving much speculation around alternative currencies and the autonomous circulation of agricultural products - sought to provide ideas for surviving the crisis or, less modestly, ways out of capitalism. However, all those ideas,beyond their historical limitations as practices, remain mostly just ideas, with the exception of creating a temporary self-organised enclave in public space. The attempt to develop immediate social relations within it (the rejection of money, a free collective kitchen, free lessons for homeless children) quickly reached the limit of an all encompassing capital relation (the return of money, closure of the kitchen because junkies and homeless ‘took advantage').

Public political debate, which the direct democracy movement saw as its major strength, was also its limitation. The movement's dominant citizenist, democratic discourse was intrinsic to its inter-class character, explainable by the austerity measures' devastating effect on the petit bourgeois. Militants' attempts to push the discourse of class conflict came up against the principle of the ‘people's' unity. In the midst of a relentless attack on the wage, debates around ‘what is to be done' were muddled, unable to refer to a common class subject, whilst sporadic calls for a long-term general strike and other direct actions remained at the level of discourse. The assembly in Syntagma as well as those in neighbourhoods and towns around the country, mostly resorted to symbolic protests, public statements and expressions of solidarity, boosting or linking up existing struggles. They laboured to initiate actions other than the occupations themselves, which soon reached their own limits.

The imagined unity of national citizens against a failed system of government and decision-making also meant that immigrants were excluded by definition, except in the token action of inviting them to speak and organise events for a single day. Despite the active expulsion of extreme fascists from the Syntagma square occupation, the movement's citizenism was aligned with a growing nationalist anti-imperialist tendency, a response to the erosion of Greece's national sovereignty under the control of the Troika.³ This provided the natural environment for a nationalist campaign against the Memorandum, the ‘300 Greeks', to set up shop, and for autonomous nationalists - who were in many respects unidentifiable so long as they kept quiet - to take part in the movement.⁴

Ridden with contradictions, the direct democracy movement experienced a fleeting moment of victory during the general strike of 15 June. That was a high point of struggle for the wider oppositional movement, with the PM almost resigning. The police repression and extensive anti-police clashes and rioting that took place during the strike, however, brought up renewed conflict within the Syntagma assembly, when the majority of its constituents rejected a motion that condemned ‘violence in all its forms'. This moment was a major turning point that brought to a head the ongoing debate around proletarian violence. The direct democracy movement's relative tolerance of intense clashes with the police is not so much indicative of an anarchist influence, as of a wider tendency towards the use of such practices. Although these practices have been associated with anarchists, a growing number of their participants are lower-class, precariously employed or unemployed youths - though the age range is broadening - who are more or less unrelated to the anarchist milieu. They accounted for a significant subsection within the direct democracy movement, to the extent that much of the assembly audience responded to conspiracy theories about ‘violent agent provocateurs' by saying that ‘the rioters are us'. After the defeat of 29 June, when the Mid-Term Austerity Programme was finally passed in parliament, rioting, as well as police repression of the demonstration, became exceptionally fierce, driving even more of those who had previously favoured ‘peaceful protest' to change their minds. However this shift could not translate into practice at that stage. With the direct democracy movement weakened by its defeat, its internal contradictions combined with zero tolerance policing, a new round of struggles was anticipated.

Image: ‘Rob Me’, written on shutters of a bank, Athens, 2011

The voting through of the Mid-Term Austerity Programme was followed by August's fast tracked vote on the new higher education bill that limits degrees to three years, flexibilises work contracts and rationalises university management, making further steps towards a business model for higher education. Importantly, it also abolishes ‘university asylum' - the law that designates university grounds as off-limits to police - which has played an important practical role in social struggles since its institution after the fall of the junta in 1974. When students responded with occupations around the country after the start of the academic year, it already seemed too late. The peak of their engagement was in September, suggesting that the long occupations of 2006-7 may not be repeated this time.

Autumn also brought the rapid and ruthless slashing of indirect and direct wages in both the public and private sectors via cuts and emergency taxes. In response, auto-reduction practices spread more widely, having started a year ago in a more limited scale with the ‘I Don't Pay' movement under the auspices of the leftist ANTARSYA party. The Public Electricity Company union refused to implement new taxation via electricity bills, bills were collectively burned outside tax offices, and there was a widespread tacit agreement that certain taxes would simply not be paid. The discussion around these actions again had, by its nature, an interclass, citizenist and legalistic character. Nevertheless, the fact that these were less symbolic political acts forming a response to governmental policy, but primarily acts of survival, as a large section of the population is unable to pay these taxes, links these campaigns directly to the crisis of the wage relation. With little room left for workers' struggles to develop around wage demands, these practices have temporarily claimed back a tiny fraction of the indirect wage, displacing the conflict outside the workplace.

Image: Anonymous, ‘We Will Eat the Bourgeoisie’, slogan written outside the luxurious hotel Grande Bretagne in Parliament Square, Athens, 2009.

The sense of despair in relation to winning demands, however, does not signal the end of wage struggles. When the government announced the impending abolition of the minimum wage and of collective contracts, as well as mass layoffs in the public sector, two general strikes were announced by the major unions in October. That provided a basis for rank and file organising in workplaces to push for participation in the strike and for occupations in the public sector, especially in cases where they were met with resistance by management or by sectoral unions. Interestingly, although the entire public sector ceased to function for over a week due to mass occupations, these actions received public support, expressed in episodes such as residents blocking the way of strike-breaking private refuse collection vehicles - so much so that their drivers eventually went on strike themselves. The massive scale of the general strike of 19-20 October, and the emergence of rank and file organising at this juncture, does suggest that the struggle around the wage is what is driving social mobilisation in Greece right now. The staying power of rank and file organising, in spite of the general strike's inability to achieve its aims, is something to pay attention to. If their struggle escalates to the point that it challenges the official unions, but strikes and occupations are still not enough to win the fight to keep wages at a liveable level, what type of practices might workers resort to?

The impasse of demands, the lack of prospects for even basic subsistence in a future of poverty level wages and high unemployment, combined with extreme police repression, does seem to coincide with increasingly forceful clashes at demonstrations, both against the police and between demonstrators. The multiplication of direct attacks on the police, private and public property, as well as attacks on exchange and the obstacles to reproduction through looting - the latter fairly limited compared to recent riots in the UK and to those in Greece of December 2008 - signal that for many there are now zero stakes in social relations. Sustained attacks on the police are not ‘missing the target'. They are in essence attacks on the enforced reproduction of social relations as they are imposed today. The fact that riots take place during national strikes suggests that they are a direct reaction to the contradiction faced by struggles around the wage. They occur at the level of reproduction because this is exactly where the tendency of the wage to disappear is experienced.

The serious clashes during the general strike of 20 October in front of the parliament, between the Communist Party union cadre (PAME) and demonstrators who had clashed with police the day before, are indicative of this tendency. On the second day of the most dynamic national strike and the most intense and populous demonstration in decades, the Communist Party played its traditional role of striving to lead workers' struggles while keeping them under control by encircling and protecting the parliament and its Mps, effectively replacing the role of the police. Other demonstrators attacked them as if they were the police, sparking a fierce street battle. This was not just a conflict about political tactics, however. As the Agents of Chaos have pointed out in a recent text, this was not a conflict between anarchism and Stalinist communism, as is often claimed.⁵ It is a fundamental conflict between proletarian practices produced by the current cycle of struggles: on one side, the persistent attempt to affirm productive labour, to win demands within the capital relation, even the dream of ‘taking over the means of production'; on the other, destructive practices without demands by living labour that can no longer affirm itself within the capital relation - a relation that no longer provides for its reproduction as labour power.

The current struggles in Greece contain within them the central contradiction continually produced in our time: the working class experiencing the limits of its struggle, which are its own intrinsic condition as living labour and the relations that constitute it as such. These struggles continue, despite the risk of a self-destructive outcome, namely a (disorderly) default. The threat of the destruction of capital, and with that the unavailability of work, does not stop struggles. This suggests that they could escalate in ways that break with the ‘reasonable options' presented to them. Meanwhile, attacks on structures of social control, property and exchange, riots without demands and the inevitable conflicts they generate inside the struggles themselves, seem likely to intensify. It is the multiplication of these sorts of conflict, and not the triumph of productive labour and working class unity, that will shape the struggles to come.

Demetra Kotouza <demetra AT inventati.org> is a contributing editor to Mute

Info

This text was written while being at a physical distance from events. Many thanks to friends involved in the journal Blaumachen for providing invaluable information, ideas and feedback.

Footnotes

1‘Autoreduction' is the act by which consumers, in the area of consumption, and workers, in the area of production, take it upon themselves to reduce the price of public services, housing, electricity, taxation; or in the factory, the rate of productivity.

2 The Mid-Term Programme outlined cuts to services, wages, pensions and (what little remained 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' was that workers and pensioners were to be charged an extra ‘solidarity tax' to pay for the one-year benefit given to the increasing numbers of the unemployed. Furthermore, it forecast that even after all these measures had been taken, by 2015 Greece's external debt would only have been reduced by a tiny fraction.

3‘The Troika' is a slang term for the three institutions which have the most power over Greece's financial future - or at least that future as it is defined within the European Union: the European Commission (EC), the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the European Central Bank (ECB).

4 The emergence of autonomous nationalism and of frequent violent attacks on migrants by mostly working class far-right groups again occurs in the context of the fragmentation of the working class. Migrants are seen as the reason for the failure of wage demands, and in an attempt to regain bargaining power, a section of the working class that has lost hope in the demand for ‘jobs for Greek workers', takes direct action to terrorise them out of the country, disregarding the laws of a sold-out government that is perceived as ‘betraying' its citizens. However, the inability to unify as ‘Greek workers' means that this tendency is very marginal despite its growth.

5 Agents of Chaos, '????? ?????, ??????? ?? ?????...' ['Without You, Not a Single Cog Turns...'], October 2011, http://libcom.org/library/without-you-not-single-cog-turns...